Buckle Up For It Ends With Us, by Colleen Hoover
by Tania Runyan
I’m not the target audience for a romance novel with a pink flower on the cover, but then again, It Ends With Us is not typical.
The fact that the aforementioned pink flower is shattered to bits should be the first sign that something pretty intense is going on behind the cover. The second sign is that people all over BookTok have become sobbing, book-throwing wrecks over this novel. After watching those pink petals flash through my feed for months, emotional music soaring, my curiosity couldn’t take it any longer.
In It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover (known niftily by her fans as CoHo) ventures into dark territory that I will admit I wasn’t prepared to explore. However, this caught-off-guardness turned out to be the most important part of my reading experience, paralleling protagonist Lily Bloom’s foray into relationships and memories that spin her into a whirlwind of physical and emotional chaos: How did I get here? What do I do now? (And now is NOW!) Is there any hope? It’s nearly impossible to provide a summary of this novel without infringing upon that process of discovery, and most reviewers agree that it’s best to go into this one cold. That said, you may want to google, “it ends with us trigger warnings” if you have any concerns about content. In case I haven’t made it clear, this book is intense.
Earlier this fall I wrote a post in which I attempted to capture the moods of Maria Semple’s novels with a collection of sensory details. I also reviewed Robert Olen Butler’s book on fiction writing, From Where You Dream, which points toward “dreamstorming” a character’s “moment-to-moment sensual experience” as an entry into the story. Did CoHo plot out Lily’s story then fill in the stops with essential details? Or did the details drive the plot to begin with? Like many novelists, Hoover most likely executed a plotting-pantsing (pantsing = “writing by the seat of one’s pants”) combo, but stark, concrete memories from her own past are a driving force. She details her heart-wrenching personal investment in the book in her “Note From the Author,” which you should read when you finish the novel if, you know, things aren’t already intense enough.
Not sure if you want to read It Ends With Us but are afraid of running into spoilers? These details and phrases will get your big toe wet for the swim. In fact, the phrase “keep swimming,” a la Finding Nemo, laps up against the pages of this book in a way I desperately needed as I followed Lily’s journey to the end. Or beginning.
- Gorgeous neurosurgeons on rooftops.
- Naked truths.
- Ellen DeGeneres diaries.
- Cookie dough kisses.
- Steampunk flowers.
- Boston magnets.
- There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.
- I am my mother.
- If by some miracle you ever find yourself to fall in love again . . . fall in love with me.
- We finally reached the shore.
