Rating: 2/5

I really don’t get why people love this book. Colleen Hoover’s 2016 romance It Ends With Us is one of the most famous examples of a #BookTok book. It was propelled to newfound popularity in 2021 and is now one of the best-selling books of the century. In theory, it is a heartbreakingly bittersweet novel about cycles of violence and abuse that intimately explores the depths of human relationships.

But it reads like airplane food tastes. There’s definitely an attempt to become the witty-but-tragic, heartfelt romance BookTok seems to think it is. The book opens with the main character sitting on a roof contemplating her late father, who had abused her mother. A man storms onto the roof enraged. He is Ryle Kincaid, she is Lily Bloom, cue romance.

As Ryle and Lily’s relationship gets more serious, the book begins to grapple with its deeper issues. Lily rediscovers her diaries from high school, which recount her first love: a boy living in the abandoned house next door. To her credit, Hoover paints a compassionate and realistic picture of his homelessness, and his relationship with Lily is enjoyable in a coming-of-age, power-of-friendship sort of way. This is the best part of It Ends With Us: the characters play off each other well, the setting is important to the story, and the themes of the book are consistently present. It only goes downhill from here.

The next 300 or so pages pass quickly, which is a kindness. Hoover doesn’t let anything as silly as flavor get in the way of her plot, and it makes every event feel thin and uninspired, like an off-brand saltine. Ryle’s medical residency in England is just an excuse for him to disappear, Lily’s flower business sells flowers three entire times, exclusively to pre-existing characters (and yet it sustains her income?), and Lily’s gay co-worker cameos to make Ryle jealous once and then vaporizes.

Why BookTok likes this book is baffling to me. It is not particularly dark or “spicy”. It does not have compelling characters or an interesting setting. It has no value as so-bad-it’s-good or shocking fiction. The writing style is utterly unremarkable. Sometimes a glimmer of promise peeks through, but It Ends With Us feels like bland placeholder text for another, better book.t