It Ends With Us
Written by Colleen Hoover
Originally published in 2016
~390 pages
Rate 5/5
The controversy!! To label this book as a romance novel gets more people to read it, might not be the most ethical way to market the book, but romance sells!
A few months ago the movie premiered and since then the story has reached an even larger audience. Since the book's original publication in 2016, it has won the Goodreads Choice Award for best romance. This book has been incredibility successful and there's a reason for it.
Hoover does an excellent job at portraying the complexities of abusive relationships. Some might deem this story as a romanticized version of domestic violence, and to that I say, everyone's story looks different. The story illustrates just how easy something so good could turn so wrong in just a matter of seconds.
I watched the movie before I read the book and both mediums portrayed the situation as gruesome and disgusting. I felt awful and covered my ears and looked away during multiple parts of the movie and rushed through certain paragraphs in the book. As a society we have normalized graphic content in the name of being explicit so there's no misinterpretation and while I do understand the need for clearly stating things, I don't want to be exposed to graphic content all the time. BUT, I do think sharing stories like these lead to important conversations to come about.
The book can be seen as a comminatory on how we view not only the victims of domestic violence, but the abusers. I have heard plenty of people blame the victim for staying after the first incident and excuse the abuser because of the context of the situation. When in relativity, it's much more complex than people outside of the relationship realize.
To conclude, I'm aware there is another book that comes after this one, but I'm not sure how soon I will end up getting around to it. So in the meantime, here's some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"Fifteen seconds. That’s all it takes to completely change everything about a person. Fifteen seconds that we’ll never get back."
"Just because someone hurts you doesn't mean you can simply stop loving them. It's not a person's actions that hurt the most. It's the love. If there was no love attached to the action, the pain would be a little easier to bear."
"In the future... if by some miracle you ever find yourself in the position to fall in love again... fall in love with me.”
"And as hard as this choice is, we break the pattern before the pattern breaks us."