It Ends With Us - Colleen Hoover - 4.5 Stars

[Olivermagnus]

The novel introduces us to Lily Bloom, who is looking for true love and Ryle Kincaid, a brilliant neurosurgeon who only wants a one night stand. They meet on a rooftop of an apartment complex after Ryle loses a patient and Lily returns home from her abusive father’s funeral. They are immediately attracted to each other, despite the fact they are looking for different things. As their relationship proceeds, Lily remembers her first love, a homeless boy named Atlas. We get to relive their relationship through journal entries made by a teenage Lily.

I don’t want to reveal much more about these characters, or even the plot. I picked up the book having no idea what it was about and was totally surprised. Probably the less you know, the better the book will be. I will say this book is a highly sensitive portrayal of various complex relationships. Most of us probably think we know exactly how we would react to certain things. It’s easy to say, ‘I would never have done that’, but this book showed me that the obvious answer isn't always, well, obvious.

I liked all the characters and, despite a dark foreshadowing, was filled was lots of humor. Lily's teenage journal entries are written to Ellen Degeneres, along with critiques to make her show even better. There is a male character who wears a onesie to the bar so he can get free beers during the Boston Bruins game. It's incredibly rare for me to like every character in a book.

I didn't think I would become such a Colleen Hoover fan. My F2F book club read one of her books and it still remains the only book we all hated. I didn't expect to love this as much as I did and I'm going to find some others. I might even recommend this to my book club.........