ARC Review: It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

Title: It Ends With Us

Author: Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication date: August 2nd 2016

Buy the book: Amazon / Barnes and Noble

Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up—she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.

Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.

As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan—her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.

With this bold and deeply personal novel, Colleen Hoover delivers a heart-wrenching story that breaks exciting new ground for her as a writer. Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

(Image and summary taken from Goodreads)

My thoughts:

Colleen Hoover's books have been a hit or miss with me lately, I think the last book of hers that truly "hit" me was Hopeless so I was a bit wary diving into this one. But seeing the overwhelming response to It Ends With Us was what urged me to read it, and after reading it, I understood what all the hype was about. Before writing this review, I honestly did not know what to rate this book, there were so many incredible parts but there were moments that were just to weird for me, and I felt like those moments outweighed the special moments of the story.

If there's one widely known fact about CoHo's books, it's that there is always a twist in them. A twist that will alter the middle half of the story and either elevate the rest of the book or mess it up. And in this case, it was both. I won't go too deep into how the story went because I'll spoil it but I felt like the direction the story was suppose to go became forced and it just didn't make a lot of sense.

As a book, I didn't particularly enjoy It Ends With Us, the characters were flat and out of character at certain times, (Lily was a confusing MC and she was pretty much a reflection of all of CoHo's other MCs except with different baggage)  the pace of the story was way too fast (CoHo insta-love at its finest) and the ending was pretty self-serving and kind of a cop out. Don't get me wrong, the writing was beautiful, I found myself crying at a lot of scenes and I was a wreck throughout most of the book but if it weren't for CoHo's writing and well-written lines, I wouldn't have been able to go through the book.

That being said, I delved deeper into the surface, below the writing and the characters and the superficial stuff and it was... an interesting experience. There was a lot of meaning to this book, given the fact that It Ends With Us is such a personal story to CoHo, and I couldn't help but be affected by the message that she was trying to convey with her story. I just wish that CoHo had executed this story better. I'd still recommend people to read It Ends With Us because there is depth to this book and I'm sure an average CoHo fan would love it. It just wasn't my cup of tea, unfortunately.

Rating: