it ends with us book review guardian

‘Never seen anything like it’: how Colleen Hoover’s normcore thrillers made her America’s bestselling author

‘CoHo’ began as a self-published writer. Now she’s sold 20m books worldwide – and has legions of TikTok fans

Colleen Hoover’s book titles might lack the recognizability factor enjoyed by the Harrys and Twilights of the world, but there is no escaping the reigning queen of BookTok.

CoHo, as the author is called by her legions of fans, is everywhere: in the hands of your fellow subway rider, on the tablet that the receptionist at your dentist’s office is hiding beneath the front desk. When I mentioned to a bookish colleague that I was going to be writing about the woman who has become America’s bestselling novelist, her blank expression slowly came to life. She consulted her Kindle app and confirmed that she’d inhaled one of Hoover’s books over the summer. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said.

She’d read Verity, a sexy thriller about a disabled literary superstar and the woman her handsome husband hires to complete an unfinished work. It was self-published in 2018 and later picked up by Grand Central Publishing. The title currently occupies the No 2 spot on the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list , perched one notch below Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a steamy and violent romance. There are four more books by Hoover in the top 10, and her All Your Perfects is No 11.

Four million copies of It Ends With Us have sold in the US to date, and 20m Hoover books have sold globally. (She is especially big in the Philippines and Brazil.) These would be big numbers in any industry, but are especially stunning in one where bestsellers are often counted in the tens of thousands. The literary establishment has long counted on movie tie-ins or celebrity platforms to set a blockbuster in motion, but neither factor is at play in Hoover’s case. Her Twitter bio reads: “I don’t get it either.”

Originally published in 2016, It Ends With Us became a bona fide phenomenon over the pandemic via BookTok. This subset of TikTok, where enthusiastic readers share book recommendations, is credited with making many of today’s bestsellers, from Madeline Miller’s Circe to the suddenly trendy work of Agatha Christie. #CoHo videos on TikTok are often viscerally performative, starring readers so overcome with emotion that they are gasping and screaming. In the time-lapse video that @Weebna posted of herself reading Ugly Love in one day, she can be seen burying her face in the pages to absorb the tears. The TikToker @eloisehamp uses the sleeves of her sweatshirt for the same purposes in her CoHo sob session . A synthetic female voice narrates “hehe I seriously couldn’t breathe lol” while she has her literary meltdown in her bedroom.

The mid-career success story of Colleen Hoover, a fortysomething Texas mother of three who has written more than 20 novels across multiple genres, is partly a testament to the power of social media. And yet that’s only a piece of the equation. As far as current sales go, Hoover is without rival.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ariele Fredman, deputy director of publicity and marketing at Atria Books, the publisher of It Starts With Us, the forthcoming follow-up to It Ends With Us. Fredman has been busy packing kits of temporary tattoos and murals for the midnight pajama parties scheduled to take place at bookstores across the US for the 18 October release. “I’ve seen plenty of books become smash hits,” she said. “But the extended engagement is … almost wild.”

It’s a steady burn that has mystified Angelica Manglona, the manager at Buxton Books in Charleston, South Carolina. “The longevity is what stands out the most,” she said. “We have books that fly off the shelves when they come out – like Crying at H Mart, or The Summer I Turned Pretty – but it will generally last a week, or a month, and then sales peter out. The Colleen Hoover books keep selling.”

Courtney Poullas, 36, who lives in Youngstown, Ohio, read Verity, her “gateway” Hoover book, last year, and has blown through half a dozen since. “I used to read highbrow literature,” said Poullas, an English professor who once considered William Shakespeare her favorite author. “Colleen Hoover has a way of making you relate to the characters, and her language choices tug at my heartstrings. She makes me feel so much.”

The feelings that Hoover’s works inspire aren’t pretty. It Ends With Us opens with a “meet cute” that isn’t all that cute: the kind and pretty and young Lily Bloom is taking a moment to herself on a Boston rooftop when she witnesses a gorgeous man with impressive biceps kick a patio chair. This man turns out to be Ryle Kincaid, a rich neurosurgeon. The book chronicles their relationship, rife with sexual tension and an increasing store of violent outbursts. Filled as it is with yearning and five-alarm bedroom scenes, It Ends With Us is, at its core, a tale of domestic violence. In the afterword, Hoover shares that the story was inspired by the toxic relationship of her parents. Her father was physically abusive to her mother, and the two separated when she was a young girl.

The impetus behind It Starts With Us was decidedly less grim. Hoover wrote it as a thank you to her TikTok fans, as she shares in the book’s foreword. Here, the cycle of domestic abuse gets a Disney fairytale spin. While she is still harassed and haunted by Ryle, whose jealousy and controlling nature show little signs of abating, Lily is free to pursue a relationship with her true love, another improbably named man: Atlas Corrigan, who was her first love and is now a wildly successful Boston chef.

In her past life, Hoover was a social worker. As CoHo legend has it, she had no computer of her own so she borrowed her mother’s work laptop and wrote in the middle of the night. A desire to help others shines through her work. Using plain prose that goes down as easy as value-table white wine, she embeds lines like: “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things” and “Just because someone hurts you doesn’t mean you can simply stop loving them.”

Lily is done with the “naked truths” that she and Ryle once traded in their intimate moments. In the more cheerful follow-up, Lily is dealing with some hard truths. While Hoover glosses over some of the realities that certainly affect the Lily Blooms of the real world – childcare, for one, always seems to be sorted out in this novel – there are other themes that feel refreshingly true to life: the awkwardness of starting to date as a newly single mom, and reflections on the inconvenient fact that exes don’t just evaporate.

Like many of today’s bestselling authors, Hoover doesn’t overly concern herself with character development. The people who populate her books can generally be slotted into two categories: likable heroes or monsters. In lieu of personality traits, they carry past traumas or past transgressions. And for all the plot twists and gut-punching climaxes that Hoover’s fans rave about, internal transformations are light on the ground.

As the critic Parul Segal put it in her viral New Yorker essay on the vogue for trauma fiction: “The trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future ( Will they or won’t they? ) but back into the past ( What happened to her? ).” Hoover delivers tales packed with devastating backstories and few of the challenges so common to literature: the elaborate subplots, the webs of contradictions, the sentences so dazzling that they beg for a reread. Here is the trauma story retrofitted for the Hallmark channel. Dark as Hoover’s fantasies may be, the books themselves are normcore to the bone.

Using few physical descriptions and sticking to references that most readers will have heard of (Lily carries her passion for Finding Nemo into adulthood), Hoover has created screens that readers can project themselves on to, and messed-up situations that serve as funhouse mirrors of her fans’ own pains and problems. As the critic Laura Miller put it in her Slate essay on the author’s popularity, eliding quirk and verve is the secret to her success: “The blandness of Hoover’s characters makes them easy for anyone to identify with, and the smooth, featureless quality of her prose makes her novels easy to breeze through in a day or two.”

Hoover wrote It Starts With Us with the express goal of making TikTok happy, and it will be shocking if she doesn’t do just that. “I realized most of you weren’t asking for me to put [Lily and Atlas] through more pain,” she writes in the afterword. “You simply wanted to see Lily and Atlas happy.” It Ends With Us was a tumultuous tale that made people feel alive in those numbed-out days of early lockdown. Its soft and fluffy follow-up just might be perfectly calibrated for a moment when when everybody’s meant to be rebounding but too wrung out to bother trying.

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‘It Ends With Us’ Review: Love Hurts, and Sometimes Bruises

Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a flower lover with a thorny personal garden, in this gauzy adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel.

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By Manohla Dargis

Buried under the gauzy romanticism of “It Ends With Us” — under the softly diffused visuals, the endless montage sequences, the sensitive mewling on the soundtrack and the luxuriously coifed thickets of Blake Lively ’s sunset-on-Malibu-Beach dyed-red hair — is a tough little movie about women, bad choices, worse men and decisions that doesn’t fit into a tidy box.

Lively stars as the improbably named Lily Blossom Bloom, a beauty with a traumatic history, a soulful ex and a passion for gardening. Over the course of the movie, she falls in love with a neurosurgeon who looks like he stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad. She also befriends a wisecracking sidekick, opens a whimsical floral shop, endures heartache and, after much reflection and many plot complications, finds herself. It’s hard going, but Lily takes whatever life throws at her with her meticulously styled head up and a neo-bohemian influencer vibe. She’s a dream of a woman, an aspirational ideal, an Instagram-era Mildred Pierce.

You may know Mildred from Turner Classic Movies as the pie-baking survivor played by Joan Crawford in the 1945 noir “ Mildred Pierce .” Mildred walks into that classic wearing a mink coat with linebacker shoulder-pads and the kind of stricken look that clouds a woman’s face when she discovers that her no-good second husband is sleeping with her no-good teenage daughter, and the brat has just offed the creep. It’s no wonder that when Mildred stares into the nighttime waters of the Pacific, she seems to be mulling her equally dark past and future, much as Lily does one evening on a Boston rooftop early on in “It Ends With Us.”

Lily doesn’t have long to consider her existential options because her rooftop reveries are soon interrupted by the neurosurgeon, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who directed the movie). A brooding hunk with soft eyes, hard muscles and miraculously unchanging three-day stubble, Ryle has a touch of menace and a gift for cornball lines, and before long he and Lily are flirtatiously circling each other. Love buds and, yes, blooms, and Lily settles down with Ryle. He seems like a ready-made catch (Baldoni gives himself plenty of close-ups), although anyone at all familiar with the conventions of romantic fiction will wonder about the intensity of his attentions. A picture-perfect guy doesn’t necessarily make a picture-perfect life, dig?

Adapted from Colleen Hoover ’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long. It’s visually and narratively overbusy, stuffed with flashbacks of Lily as an adolescent (Isabela Ferrer) that create two parallel lines of action. As the adult Lily moves forward with Ryle and opens her store — she gets help from a nattering assistant, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who enters with her luxury bag swinging and motormouth running — images of the past fill in Lily’s history and her high-school romance with another student, Atlas. (Alex Neustaedter plays him as a teen, while Brandon Sklenar steps into the grown-up role.)

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It Ends With Us

The #BookTok smash becomes a cathartic and nuanced abuse drama starring a bang-on-form Blake Lively

Time Out says

Fittingly for a story of fresh beginnings, Colleen Hoover’s 2016 memoir of domestic abuse and unresolved childhood trauma got a huge second lease of life when TikTok’s community of bookworms, # BookTok, seized on it five years later. By 2022, it was outselling the Bible. 

This smart and sensitive movie version will more than satisfy the millions who’ve picked it up and found a bible of sorts for abuse survivors.

It Ends With Us begins like a soapy Nicholas Sparks adaptation about teen love with homeless boys and grown-up flings with hunky ones, but rug pulls all that in a second half that lays into toxic men and the insidiousness of abusive relationships.

Blake Lively steps into Hoover’s shoes to play wannabe flower shop owner Lily Bloom, a young woman starting over in Boston in the wake of her unloved dad’s death. He used to beat her mum (a porcelain Amy Morton) and bully her. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve never written,’ she snarks of the eulogy she’s asked to deliver. 

This adaptation will more than satisfy the book’s millions of readers

Enter hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by director Justin Baldoni) to bring solace in a sexy rooftop meet cute. With that dream-guy job, sly smile and deltoids like small mountain ranges, he’s straight out of Grey’s Anatomy central casting, but the film is self-aware enough to turn its romantic tropes (and its daft character names) on their heads. Ryle is a self-confessed commitment phobe who comes waving his own red flags, and Lily’s initial wariness proves more than justified. 

It Ends With Us is great at keeping the bitter and the sweet in balance. For stretches, it plays like a pure romance, with plenty of sexual chemistry and Lively wafting around appealingly in funky dungarees. Then the weather changes and ambiguously staged domestic incidents hint at darker undercurrents at work. The ‘unreliable narrator’ device works a treat here.

Jenny Slate brings quirky warmth as Lily’s new bestie who turns out to be Ryle’s sister – yes, coincidences abound in this one – and Lively is a revelation as a strong and principled woman whose complex relationship with her mum is both a blockage and a path forward. Newcomer Isabela Ferrer is her doppelganger as the younger Lily in the film’s flashback scenes. Here, she falls hard for her high-school’s homeless outsider, Atlas, who’ll be back to complicate her life as a grown-up (Brandon Sklenar).  After the nuance of what comes before, it’s annoying that the knottiness vanishes in an ending that wraps everything up in a neat bow. But you can forgive a little catharsis after what Lily endures. For anyone who’s been trapped in an abusive relationship, it’ll be needed. Out worldwide Aug 9.

Cast and crew

• Director: Justin Baldoni
• Screenwriter: Christy Hall
• Blake Lively
• Jenny Slate
• Brandon Sklenar
• Hasan Minhaj
• Kevin McKidd
• Isabela Ferrer

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

IT ENDS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...

Hoover’s ( November 9 , 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.

At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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by Colleen Hoover

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

THE LAST LETTER

by Rebecca Yarros ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 2019

A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.

A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.

Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ ( Wilder , 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Entangled: Amara

Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

More by Rebecca Yarros

by Rebecca Yarros

MAYBE SOMEDAY

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2014

Hoover is one of the freshest voices in new-adult fiction, and her latest resonates with true emotion, unforgettable...

Sydney and Ridge make beautiful music together in a love triangle written by Hoover ( Losing Hope , 2013, etc.), with a link to a digital soundtrack by American Idol contestant Griffin Peterson. 

Hoover is a master at writing scenes from dual perspectives. While music student Sydney is watching her neighbor Ridge play guitar on his balcony across the courtyard, Ridge is watching Sydney’s boyfriend, Hunter, secretly make out with her best friend on her balcony. The two begin a songwriting partnership that grows into something more once Sydney dumps Hunter and decides to crash with Ridge and his two roommates while she gets back on her feet. She finds out after the fact that Ridge already has a long-distance girlfriend, Maggie—and that he's deaf. Ridge’s deafness doesn’t impede their relationship or their music. In fact, it creates opportunities for sexy nonverbal communication and witty text messages: Ridge tenderly washes off a message he wrote on Sydney’s hand in ink, and when Sydney adds a few too many e’s to the word “squee” in her text, Ridge replies, “If those letters really make up a sound, I am so, so glad I can’t hear it.” While they fight their mutual attraction, their hope that “maybe someday” they can be together playfully comes out in their music. Peterson’s eight original songs flesh out Sydney’s lyrics with a good mix of moody musical styles: “Living a Lie” has the drama of a Coldplay piano ballad, while the chorus of “Maybe Someday” marches to the rhythm of the Lumineers. But Ridge’s lingering feelings for Maggie cause heartache for all three of them. Independent Maggie never complains about Ridge’s friendship with Sydney, and it's hard to even want Ridge to leave Maggie when she reveals her devastating secret. But Ridge can’t hide his feelings for Sydney long—and they face their dilemma with refreshing emotional honesty. 

Pub Date: March 18, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-5316-4

Page Count: 384

Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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• What Is Cinema?

It Ends With Us: The 5 Biggest Changes From Book to Movie

After taking #BookTok by storm and reigning as the number one best-selling novel of 2022 and 2023—even outperforming the Bible — It Ends With Us has finally arrived on the big screen. Based on Colleen Hoover ’s 2016 novel, the movie follows oh-so-conveniently-named flower shop owner Lily Blossom Bloom (played by Blake Lively ) as she falls for charming but controlling neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid ( Justin Baldoni, who also directs)—just as her childhood love, Atlas Corrigan ( Brandon Sklenar ), reenters her life after years of estrangement.

Like Hoover’s book, the film version of It Ends With Us delves into how patterns of physical abuse from Lily’s childhood, when her father ( Kevin McKidd ) assaulted her mother ( Amy Morton ), get repeated in her own romantic relationships as an adult. Hoover previously told Today ’s Jenna Bush Hager that she partly based her most popular book off the violence that her mother faced. “One of my earliest memories was him throwing a TV at her,” she said of her biological father. “There were no resources for women to leave situations like that.” Hoover said that her mother divorced her father when she was two. “She was able to get out of that relationship. And then from then on, I just remember growing up with a mother who was so strong and independent.”

Despite the embrace of It Ends With Us, the book has also drawn extensive backlash from those who believe that it romanticizes domestic violence. The first portion of the narrative follows the swoony courtship of Ryle and Lily; the story also blames his abusive tendencies on his traumatic past. Others have taken issue with the way that the novel is framed, shelved in the romance section of bookstores or marketed as a love triangle story. (A hastily scrapped coloring book version of It Ends With Us didn’t help matters.)

“I don’t expect everyone to like my books, so if someone doesn’t, it isn’t my job to deal with them,” Hoover told Glamour in February 2022. “That is their right, and I respect that. I put 100% of the focus into the people who do enjoy my books, and I do my very best to make those people happy.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—the discourse, those involved with the “very faithful” adaptation of Hoover’s book relied on fan input to try to get the movie right. Screenwriter Christy Hall told Entertainment Weekly that “20 mega-fans that had to sign an NDA” were given access to an early draft of the script, where they weighed in on proposed changes—and even convinced Hall to put an iconic line back in the movie. Here, a guide to some of the most notable changes from page to screen.

In the book, Lily is 23 and Ryle is 30—significantly younger than Lively, 36, and Baldoni, 40. Hoover told Today that when she wrote the novel, the new adult genre was particularly popular. So she made her characters young—though she wishes now that she hadn’t gone quite that young. “As an author, we make mistakes,” she said. “There’s no 28-year-old neurosurgeons, you know? You go to school for 15 years. And so to make corrections to what I messed up in the book, we aged the characters up somewhat.”

In the same interview, Hoover addressed some of Lily’s more outlandish costumes, a few of which came from Lively’s own closet . “You’ve seen a couple of outfits that are completely out of context,” the author said of early set photos. “I’m not worried about it.” She continued, “When I wrote the book, it wasn’t about the age of the characters. It wasn’t about what they were wearing. I don’t even think I described any clothing in the book. It was about the message that I wanted to get across.”

After years apart, Lily reconnects with Atlas when she dines at his restaurant. In the book, the establishment is called Bib’s, an acronym for “Better in Boston.” In the film, it’s called Root—a name that, like Bib’s, pays homage to a major moment from Atlas and Lily’s adolescent romance. “It stood for something in the book that became a big thing for Lily to show how much she meant to him,” Hoover explained to E! News . “So that changed to Root in the movie, because we didn’t have as much time to put in all of the things that happened in the book”—like Atlas giving Lily a refrigerator magnet that reads “better in Boston” before he moves to the city and away from her. But according to Hoover, “changing it to Root went back to a conversation they had as kids in the film [from which] you get the same feels that you got in the book.”

“I’m an unreliable narrator,” Lily says in her rooftop meet-cute with Ryle, which Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds apparently had a hand in writing . That disclosure comes to bear once Ryle becomes violent towards Lily—first pushing her out of the way of a hot stove, then shoving her down a flight of stairs, before assaulting and attempting to rape her during another argument about Atlas. Camera angles and editing choices initially present these scenes as purposefully ambiguous—with Lily excusing the first two bouts of violence as mere accidents. It is not until later in the film, once Lily herself comes to terms with the true nature of their relationship, that the abuse is shown again in its full context.

But in the book, both readers and Lily herself acknowledge Ryle’s violence from the start. The first time Ryle physically assaults Lily in the kitchen, Hoover writes from her heroine’s POV: “So much gravity, pushing down on my emotions. Everything shatters. My tears, my heart, my laughter, my soul. Shattered like broken glass, raining down around me.”

The film adaptation of It Ends With Us scraps Lily’s flower shop employees outside of her sister-in-law, Allysa ( Jenny Slate ), including Lucy, Lily’s former roommate, and Devin, a gay character who exists solely to pose as Lily’s date to a party in order to make Ryle jealous. Another major character who is wisely cut from the movie? Ellen DeGeneres —yes, really. She is a full-fledged character in the book, at least in the eyes of SparkNotes .

In Hoover’s novel, a young Lily (played by Isabela Ferrer in the movie) and Atlas ( Alex Neustaedter ) fall in love while watching Ellen and Finding Nemo after school. DeGeneres is such a comforting figure in Lily’s life that she addresses entries in her childhood diary to the comedian, and later gives her daughter the middle name Dory, after DeGeneres’s forgetful animated fish. Atlas is equally enamored—at one point, he gives Lily a signed copy of DeGeneres’s memoir as a sign of his love and tells her upon rekindling their romance: “You can stop swimming now , Lily. We finally reached the shore.”

It was shrewd to cut this whole subplot, strange and superfluous as it is—not to mention the fact that the toxic workplace allegations that have emerged against DeGeneres since the book’s publication have chipped away at the comedian’s feel-good effect. But the movie still nods to this element of the novel: In one scene, Atlas and Lily watch Ellen together while speaking about the future, and a stuffed Finding Nemo toy can be spotted in her daughter’s nursery.

In both the novel and film, Lily tells Ryle she plans to divorce him while he cradles their newborn daughter, Emerson—named for the older brother that Ryle accidentally shot and killed while playing with a gun as children. They agree that if their daughter were ever in the same situation as Ryle has placed Lily, he would also want her to leave her partner. The movie also ends with a domestic violence resource hotline. Lily and Ryle’s rocky relationship as co-parents (an arrangement some have also criticized ) plays out in Hoover’s 2022 sequel, It Starts With Us.

But according to screenwriter Christy Hall, the moment in the hospital after Ryle leaves—when Lily tells her daughter, “It ends with us”—was originally omitted from the script. “As a screenwriter, a big no-no is you don’t want any character to ever say the title of the film,” Hall told Entertainment Weekly . ( The Idea of You would beg to differ .) “So in my initial draft…I had her say the line, ‘It stops here, between you and me,’ blah, blah, blah. I didn’t have her say, ‘It ends with us.’”

The group of fans invited to read the early draft were unanimously opposed. “That was a really funny moment,” said Hall, “because sometimes they’d be split on things, but that one was resounding, 100 percent out of 100 percent were like, ‘How dare you?!’’ and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I must be absolved of this sin.’”

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• <i>It Ends With Us</i> Can’t Quite Turn Trauma into Drama

It Ends With Us Can’t Quite Turn Trauma into Drama

A movie or book can address a serious, emotionally wrenching subject and still be a thing you can’t help snickering at, a dramatic pileup that leaves you muttering “Oh, come on!” under your breath. It Ends With Us , the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover ’s ferociously popular 2016 novel, works hard to ping all the appropriate notes. This is after all, a story of domestic abuse, a more widely shared experience in real life than most of us want to face up to. (Hoover has said that the book was inspired by her mother, who was physically abused by Hoover’s father.) And the objective reality is that we need movies like It Ends With Us . The classic genre known as the woman’s film—pictures like King Vidor’s 1937 Stella Dallas, or either version of Imitation of Life, filmed first by John Stahl in 1934 and later, in 1959, by Douglas Sirk—thrived in the ’30s, ’40s, and beyond by carving out a safe space for emotional catharsis . Women, and sometimes men, often need to cry it all out, and aren’t the movies—a refuge in the dark—the perfect place to do that?

But It Ends With Us —directed by Justin Baldoni, who also co-stars—doesn’t have the mojo to get the waterworks pumping, not even in a gentle, reserved way. Blake Lively stars as the kookily named Lily Bloom, a thoughtful young woman with a hippie-patchwork wardrobe and a guardedly bright outlook on life. She lives in Boston; she’s about to open her own flower shop, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In all ways, this is a period of transition. Her father has just died, and she’s not sure what to do with her mixed feelings; as we learn more about the way he abused Lily’s mother, and others, we understand why. Lily has just returned from the funeral, held in her Maine hometown, and with her jumbled thoughts, she has stolen away to a Boston rooftop with a dreamy view. But she doesn’t actually live in the building. And when a handsome neurosurgeon, who is a resident, blusters his way onto that rooftop, you get the sense her life will be changed forever.

His name is Ryle Kincaid—he’s played by Baldoni—and he's almost criminally handsome, with his sympathetic dark eyes and 10 o’clock shadow, even sexier than the 5 o’clock kind. He’s just got to be a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and in the first minutes of their meeting, it sure seems that way. The two find themselves engaged in the kind of disarmingly frank conversation that can often brew between strangers. He’s had a terrible day; she’s just lost her father, a man she loved despite the fact he might not have deserved it. Ryle listens to her, but he also tells her, “I want to have sex with you,” clearly taken with her haute-hippie-girl breeziness, which glows even through her conflicted grief. And though she calls him out, rightly, on his perhaps overly direct sales pitch, they almost do sleep together—until he’s called away to work. Because a handsome neurosurgeon’s work is never done.

Lily thinks that’s the end of it. A day or so later she gets the keys to her new shop and sets about sprucing it up, both hiring a helper and making a new friend on the same day: rich lady Allysa (the always-wonderful Jenny Slate , who breathes some life into the movie whenever she’s on-screen) just happens to stop in. She wants a job; trusting her instincts, Lily gives her one. The two become fast friends. And guess what? It turns out that semi-scary Dr. McDreamy, AKA Ryle, is Allysa's brother. What are the odds?

Though Allysa offers a few subtle warnings about Ryle’s romantic history , he and Lily fall in love anyway. Sure, he’s a player. But he makes it clear he wants to try for a real relationship with Lily. She goes for it—and then a love from her teenage years, whom we’ve previously met in flashbacks, unexpectedly steps into the frame. Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), is now a handsome but down-to-earth Boston restaurateur, and when Lily spots him, we can see there's still a spark between the two. But Lily has already earned Ryle’s trust; she decides to stay the course.

Until this point, It Ends With Us could be your classic but not-too-heavy romantic melodrama , replete with hot but tender sex and dashes of romantic befuddlement. But if you’ve read Hoover’s book , you’ll know what’s coming. Lily herself becomes the victim of domestic abuse, and it doesn’t arrive with loud warning bells. In fact, the first time Lily is injured, resulting in a bruised eye she attempts to conceal with makeup, the event is presented as an accident triggered by a scuffle to remove a burned frittata from the oven. It could happen to anyone. But the second incident is more clear-cut, and the third is unequivocally violent. Still, you look at Ryle, as Lily seems to, as possibly fixable. He’s suffering; his inner turmoil is causing him to act out. The movie is accurate and effective in this sense: for so many abused women, you never know how bad it can get, until it gets really bad.

Yet none of that is enough to make you fully buy what the movie’s selling. Lively has been terrific in other movies: her turn in the 2016 woman-vs.-shark thriller The Shallows was one of the great scream-queen performances of the last decade, and she showed nervy gravitas in Ben Affleck’s The Town. But It Ends With Us lets her down. The men, with their flaws—even kind, stalwart Atlas has a very short fuse, a yellow flag if not a red one—are far more interesting than Lily is. That doesn’t give them the right to inflict violence; but from a dramatic standpoint, it certainly makes them more electric. As Lively plays her, Lily is a blank, glassy surface, the better to reflect the shortcomings of the men around her; that’s not the same as being a person. Even by the movie’s end, she still feels like something of a muted stranger—it’s the men who come off as fully alive, as dangerous as one of them may be.

The problem, maybe, is that It Ends With Us is all about what it’s about, and nothing more. These characters exist to make points about the insidiousness of domestic violence, the way its effects can creep up invisibly even as those who are suffering cloak themselves in protective denial. Admittedly, that’s a lot for a movie to carry. But movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving. And despite the prettiness of its Boston setting, it isn’t as visually alluring as it should be. For one thing, this is a movie about a flower-loving florist that’s embarrassingly low on flowers, except for a few droopy, half-dead Victorian-looking things. It’s OK, even in a story addressing a traumatic subject, to dab a little color here and there. Flowers, their short-lived beauty notwithstanding, can often brighten even the bleakest day. In this movie, they're treated like something we don't deserve, a blessing closed up tight, instead of a thing worth living for.

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‘it ends with us’: what the critics are saying.

The film, directed by Justin Baldoni, who also stars opposite Blake Lively, hits theaters Friday.

By Carly Thomas

Carly Thomas

Associate Editor

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Following the New York premiere of It Ends With Us on Tuesday evening, the first reviews of the film from critics have been coming in, and they’ve been decidedly mixed.

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The film has previously faced criticism for its depiction of domestic violence, with some fans claiming it romanticizes the subject. However, a common theme among the early reviews is that while the movie adaptation manages to treat the topic of domestic violence with care, the narrative appears to suffer.

As of Wednesday evening,  It Ends With Us had a score of 60 percent from 44 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and clocked in at 52 percent on Metacritic from 21 reviews.

The film, from Sony Pictures, hits theaters Friday . It also stars Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Isabela Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter.

Read on for key excerpts from some of the most prominent early reviews following the premiere of It Ends With Us .

The Hollywood Reporter ‘s arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review , “The pat treatment of these characters ultimately does a disservice to the broader themes embedded in  It Ends With Us . Without understanding more of Lily’s broader community or getting a stronger sense of how she navigates the relationship with Ryle, the film can feel too light and wispy to support the weight of its themes.”

The Guardian ‘s Benjamin Lee wrote , “It’s a plot of hackneyed soap tropes but there’s a real maturity to how it unfolds, a story of abuse that’s far less obvious than we’ve grown accustomed to, the details far knottier than some might be comfortable with. There are expected cliches but there are also many that are mercifully avoided too, the story not always conforming to type.

“ It Ends With Us savors the trappings of a glossy love triangle: the banter, the flirting, the turbulence, the extravagant costumes,” Amy Nicholson of The Washington Post wrote. “The movie has to cheat a bit to get at the complexity of Hoover’s book. A child of domestic abuse, Hoover writes with painful intimacy about Lily’s struggle to claw free from her past. Baldoni shifts some of that turmoil to the audience, with editors Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan cutting key scenes so that, like Lily, we don’t know what to believe.”

Nicholson added that “even bouncing off male leads who are more pinball bumpers than dimensional characters,” Lively gave a “great performance as a headstrong, sensible woman who struggles to consider herself a victim.”

Critic Mark Kennedy wrote in his review for The Associated Press that “the uneven movie adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling 2016 novel” tries to “balance the realities of domestic violence inside a rom-com and a female-empowerment movie. All suffer in the process.

“It veers too close to melodrama, with suicide, homelessness, generational trauma, child murder, unintended pregnancy and never-forgotten love all touched on and only half digested,” Kennedy continued. “Set in Boston, it never even pulls from that city’s flavor.”

“The problem, maybe, is that  It Ends With Us  is all about what it’s about, and nothing more,” she added. “These characters exist to make points about the insidiousness of domestic violence, the way its effects can creep up invisibly even as those who are suffering cloak themselves in protective denial. Admittedly, that’s a lot for a movie to carry. But movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways.  It Ends With Us  makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving.”

Proma Khosla wrote for IndieWire that the film “manages to sensitively handle its delicate subject matter, though largely at the cost of a more intricate narrative.

“ It Ends With Us does what it wants to (and what made Hoover’s book such a smash hit), highlighting the patterns of abuse, trauma, and silence at play in this specific story,” Khosla added in her review. “Baldoni and Hall handle Lily and everyone around her with empathy, downplaying unpleasantness or oversimplifying story elements ultimately to mitigate risk and protect viewers — with the opportunity to dig deeper in a potential sequel.”

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It Ends With Us

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Earnestly performed if marred by clunky dialogue, It Ends With Us is surprisingly at its most graceful when handling the more provocative elements of its melodramatic source material.

A faithful and well-done adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s book, It Ends With Us is an emotional and relatable depiction of bad romance.

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Justin Baldoni

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It Ends With Us

“What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it’s okay because really it was just an accident?” Questions like this are at the heart of “It Ends with Us,” based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover . This is a message picture about what it takes to break the vicious cycle of domestic violence. It is not subtle. 

After the emotional turmoil of her estranged father’s funeral in Maine, our heroine, the impeccably fashionable Lily Bloom ( Blake Lively , the best clotheshorse movie star since Kay Francis), breaks into a rooftop to peer at the vast beauty of Boston’s skyline. Before she can do much introspection, she meets the impossibly handsome and impossibly named Ryle Kincaid ( Justin Baldoni , also the film’s director), a neurosurgeon (naturally). Baldoni comes barreling into the scene like a hurricane, hurling a pair of steel chairs across the rooftop in anger. Instead of repulsion from this violent act, Lily finds herself intrigued and drawn to his charm and megawatt smile. Their playful patter, peppered with barbs veiled as flirtation from Ryle, ramps up until the dashing surgeon is summoned back to the hospital by his beeper. 

This is of course not the last we see of Ryle. He just happens to be the brother of Allysa ( Jenny Slate ), the quirky rich and bored housewife Lily hires to help her run the Cottagecore florist shop of her dreams. Although Lily repeatedly insists that she just wants to be friends, Ryle pursues her, ignoring her many pleas just as flagrantly as she ignores all his red flags. Lust is a hell of a drug. 

Quickly, Ryle’s negs and flirtatious barbs ramp up, transforming into toxic jealousy and other forms of obsessive behavior. This includes inviting himself to dinner with her mother by dropping the L-word for the first time, one of several such instances of emotional manipulation he brandishes like a silver-tipped dagger. Before she knows it, Lily is not only in a relationship she didn’t really want, she herself becomes an outlet for Ryle’s raging temper. 

The early scenes of Lily and Ryle’s volatile courtship are interwoven with scenes in which teenage Lily ( Isabela Ferrer ) falls in love for the first time with a schoolmate named Atlas ( Alex Neustaedter ). The soulful boy is squatting in the abandoned house across the street from hers, fleeing his mother’s abusive boyfriend. The generous and nonjudgmental Lily offers both aid and friendship when Atlas needs it the most. He in turn offers her a caring shoulder and a safe place to finally express the fear she feels as she watches her father physically abuse her own mother over and over again. 

These scenes are innocent and tender, the two young actors imbuing the teenagers with just the right balance of world weariness from the violence they’ve already endured and the irrepressible hope that comes with youth. Yet, Baldoni and his team of editors ( Oona Flaherty and Robb Sullivan ) can’t quite find the right balance between these scenes and the more erotic and violent scenes featuring Baldoni and Lively. However, once Brandon Sklenar (doing his best Harry Connick, Jr. in “ Hope Floats “) enters as the grown-up Atlas, he is able to craft an effortless, natural chemistry with Lively that is nearly as strong as these early moments, although they both are far too fleeting. 

This story of love, trauma and abuse is wrapped up in the same amber-hued autumnal glow of Lively’s bestie Taylor Swift ’s short film for her autobiographical song “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which itself is about an abusive relationship. Lily even has the same tousled strawberry blonde tresses as the short film’s star Sadie Sink . So naturally, the film’s most climatic moment of domestic abuse, like the short, takes place in the couple’s kitchen. Later, the moment where Lily comes into her own power as she attempts to rebuild her life is underscored by Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” (which perhaps counts as a spoiler if you know the topic of the song. Swifties, I’m sorry.)

“It Ends with Us” is a fine-looking picture. Baldoni and cinematographer Barry Peterson know how to frame movie star faces in flattering medium close-ups, allowing every nuanced emotion, every twinkle in their eyes to transport the viewers on this emotional journey with them, even when the characters feel more like didactic cyphers than fully-realized human beings. Lily’s flower shop (which never seems to have any customers) is a Pinterest board brought to life. And Lively’s designer duds are nearly as showstopping as the ones she sports in “ A Simple Favor .”

Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her. I kept thinking of “ Alice, Darling ,” Mary Nighy’s incredible film about intimate partner violence from a few years back in which Anna Kendrick finds herself suffocating in a psychologically abusive relationship. In that film, Kendrick’s character is given a full life and a group of friends who help her overcome the codependent trap she’s been caged in. Here, the few women in Lily’s life – her so-called best friend Allysa and her mother Jenny ( Amy Morton ) – are underdeveloped, relegated to a handful of scenes that largely exist as plot points.  

The PG-13 rating keeps the violence Ryle inflicts on Lily, or her father’s violence in the flashbacks, to a minimum visually (and often seen in slow motion or in choppy montages), Christy Hall ’s script unfortunately often falls into “as the father of daughters” territory, giving more care to explaining why these men are the way they are (especially in Ryle’s case, in the film’s most cringe-worthy twist) than it does to the psychology – let alone the economics – of why women often stay with abusive partners. Instead, this subject, which should really be the key to the whole story, is covered in one very short scene between Lily and her mother. The forced love triangle once Atlas re-enters Lily’s adult life also restricts things, causing Lily’s life to once again orbit mostly around the men in it. 

“It Ends with Us” is certainly not a bad film. At times, it’s actually quite good and its central message is crafted with intention and care. I just wish it had a sharper focus on Lily’s interiority, her life beyond her trauma, and who she really is in relation to herself, and herself alone.

Marya E. Gates

Marya E. Gates is a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago. She studied Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley, and also has an overpriced and underused MFA in Film Production. Other bylines include Moviefone, The Playlist, Crooked Marquee, Nerdist, and Vulture. 

• Blake Lively as Lily Bloom
• Justin Baldoni as Ryle Kincaid
• Brandon Sklenar as Atlas Corrigan
• Jenny Slate as Allysa
• Hasan Minhaj as Marshall
• Christy Hall
• Justin Baldoni

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It Ends with Us review: This Colleen Hoover adaptation is sincere but completely ludicrous

This tale of a dramatic love triangle between characters named lily bloom, atlas corrigan and ryle kincaid can’t square its violent themes with its inherent silliness, article bookmarked.

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The issue with It Ends with Us , the big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s romance bestseller , isn’t its lack of sincerity. It’s there in the tearful exactitude of Blake Lively’s performance , as a woman whose every step is traced by memories of a childhood spent in an abusive home, and her slow-dread realisation that those familiar patterns might exist in her current partner, Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, also the film’s director). That’s a worthy subject for film – how abuse hides in plain sight, and blinds its targets with the illusion of love.

But then that tricky word, “romance”, comes skipping in from the sidelines, its arms heavy with trite sentiment. Lively’s character isn’t an everywoman, but a near-comical construct of the aspirational upper-middle-class, a walking Pinterest board. Her name is Lily Bloom. She’s about to open her own flower shop, which charges $51 (£40) for the most basic arrangement. She comes from a place called Plethora, Maine, where every house is a colonial-style fever dream. She wears a leather pantsuit to her dad’s funeral, fearless when it comes to the threat of inappropriate mid-eulogy squeaks.

Lily Bloom, in short, does not register as a real person. So, it’s odd, and a little uncomfortable, to see her burdened with such raw trauma – and then to couch that trauma within the old romance trope of battling love interests, the bread-and-butter stuff of Hoover’s literary career. Lily’s path towards healing is sidetracked by the re-emergence of Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), her first love, another kid witness to domestic violence, who now happens to own her and Ryle’s favourite new restaurant. We get multiple flashbacks of young Atlas (Alex Neustaedter) and young Lily (Isabela Ferrer, who was either perfectly cast or delivers a pitch-perfect impression of Lively), both of whom are sweet and deeply wounded.

Atlas senses something might be wrong. So he corners Lily, demands that she leaves Ryle, and then starts a fistfight in public. See, Ryle is LA-handsome with impossibly chiselled features, is able to charm the hell out of Lily’s mother (Amy Morton), and also happens to be a neurosurgeon. And Atlas is a nice, simple hometown boy with a rugged moustache, denim jacket, and the saddest puppy dog eyes you’ve ever seen.

In the romance sphere, we’ve already been trained to recognise one as false and suspicious, the other as honest and trustworthy. It feels a little queasy, then, to see Hoover’s story, which has been (largely) faithfully translated to screen by writer Christy Hall, use those presumptions to feed into the question of whether Ryle’s red flags point to real abusive behaviours. The more he and Atlas clash, the more it starts to feel like the issue of domestic violence is primarily here as a dramatic device – a way to pull its protagonist away from one man and towards another.

It Ends with Us is capable of poignancy. Yet it’s also entirely ill equipped to square such sensitive material up against scenes of diamanté boots being sensually rolled down, an out-of-place but very funny Jenny Slate rocking up in a string of Carrie Bradshaw-worthy outfits, or Lively simply revelling in that deep, half-laughing voice that made her an icon of casual cool on TV’s Gossip Girl . This film’s good intentions feel misplaced.

Dir: Justin Baldoni. Starring: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Hasan Minhaj, Brandon Sklenar. 15, 130 mins.

‘It Ends with Us’ is in cinemas from 9 August

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It Ends With Us

Special hardback edition of the global runaway bestseller. Now a major motion picture starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni

Hoover, Colleen (author)

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It ends with us.

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Common Sense Media Review

Steamy romance condemns domestic abuse; violence, language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that It Ends with Us is a romance based on Colleen Hoover's steamy, hugely popular novel. The book has been criticized for glamorizing domestic violence, but the movie makes it quite clear that abuse is always unacceptable—and that smart, confident people can find themselves in an abusive…

Why Age 14+?

Several scenes of domestic violence and injuries (mostly after the fact, some wi

Steamy scenes with sensual touching. Lots of passionate kissing. Couples (includ

Strong language includes "dumbass," "goddamn," "porno," "prostitute," "s--t," "s

Heavy drinking throughout among characters in their 30s, including shots, beer,

Positive comments about a Toyota Camry.

Any Positive Content?

Smart, confident, independent people can find themselves in abusive relationship

Lily is a smart, confident, compassionate, and grounded woman who's realizing he

Main characters are White; Lily has agency and sets boundaries. An unhoused teen

Violence & Scariness

Several scenes of domestic violence and injuries (mostly after the fact, some with blood). Visuals include hitting/beating, pushing, pinning down, biting, and behavior that indicates the intent to commit rape. Physical fight between two men over a woman. Verbal references to the tragic consequences of gun violence and gun recklessness. Verbal reference to past suicidal intention.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Steamy scenes with sensual touching. Lots of passionate kissing. Couples (including teens) clearly engage in sex, verbally consenting and discussing using condoms. Sex is depicted through close-ups of kissing and touching. Two characters strip down to their underwear. Cleavage shots. Sexually direct proposition. A woman demonstrates sexual agency, including agreeing to sex and then changing her mind, and her partner responds with a positive, respectful attitude.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes "dumbass," "goddamn," "porno," "prostitute," "s--t," "shut up," and "oh my God!" Middle-finger gesture.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Heavy drinking throughout among characters in their 30s, including shots, beer, Scotch, and a champagne tower. Doctor smokes cigarettes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

Smart, confident, independent people can find themselves in abusive relationships; abusers don't have a certain "look" or come from a certain class; and abusive relationships can be emotionally complex, so we shouldn't make blanket judgments about people who end up in one. But if you find yourself in this kind of situation, you've got to get out and end the relationship for good. When we date someone, we date all of their past pain and trauma, whether we're made aware of it or not. Life is messy, and with brave choices, it's possible to leave the difficult past behind and go on to live your best life. Also, establishing a solid relationship before physical intimacy can lead to a more satisfying outcome. Themes include compassion, empathy, and perseverance.

Positive Role Models

Lily is a smart, confident, compassionate, and grounded woman who's realizing her dream (opening a flower shop). She has agency and sets boundaries, including demonstrating that a woman can change her mind about having sex. Atlas is self-reliant and perseverant; he doesn't allow his past to define him, and he doesn't let others shame him while he's unhoused. Allyssa is a supportive friend to Lily, and she shows that you can be a great friend while still being honest.

Diverse Representations

Main characters are White; Lily has agency and sets boundaries. An unhoused teen is depicted with humanity and understanding; he's portrayed as a person of depth and intelligence. Siblings Allysa and Ryle are Jewish, but their faith doesn't play into the storyline. Allysa is married to Marshall, who's played by Indian actor Hasan Minhaj; they're well off but don't play into stereotypes of rich people. Women strike a friendship around artistic expression, and while they do talk about one character's romantic relationship, they talk about other things, too (therefore passing the Bechdel test).

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that It Ends with Us is a romance based on Colleen Hoover's steamy, hugely popular novel . The book has been criticized for glamorizing domestic violence, but the movie makes it quite clear that abuse is always unacceptable—and that smart, confident people can find themselves in an abusive relationship, and abusers don't have a certain "look" or come from a certain class. The cycle of violence depicted here—particularly recurring images of an enraged man holding down a terrified woman and hitting her—could spark feelings of trauma in abuse victims, but the film ends in a way that may be healing. Other violent scenes include pushing, beating, biting, and behavior that indicates the intent to commit rape, as well as verbal references to gun violence and past suicidal intention. While many scenes have a sexy tone, the images are mostly of passionate kisses, sensual touches, and intimate closeness versus anything explicit (though sex is clearly implied). Main character Lily ( Blake Lively ) holds off on a physical relationship with her love interest until they truly know one another. At one point, she consents to sex and then changes her mind, which he accepts easily and respectfully. An unhoused teen is depicted with humanity and understanding. A doctor smokes cigarettes, and adults drink frequently, including shots, cocktails, champagne, and cocktails. Occasional language includes "a--hole," "goddamn," "s--t," and "oh my God." Characters demonstrate empathy, compassion, and perseverance, and the ultimate takeaway is that we shouldn't make blanket judgments about people in abusive relationships—but if you find yourself in that situation, you've got to get out. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (10)
• Kids say (8)

Based on 10 parent reviews

The Romanization of Abuse

What's the story.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover's bestselling same-named novel (which gained notoriety through the subcommunity of TikTok known as BookTok ), IT ENDS WITH US follows Lily Bloom ( Blake Lively ) as she closes one painful chapter of her life—the death of her abusive father—and starts a new one. She moves to Boston, opens a flower shop, and meets attractive neurosurgeon Ryle ( Justin Baldoni , who also directs). It seems like all of her dreams are coming true. But when an important person from her past resurfaces, emotions bubble up—and boil over.

Is It Any Good?

This is the steamy romance you want your teens to see. From a parenting point of view, the romance in It Ends with Us is, in many ways, aspirational: It smolders and builds because the characters don't jump into bed together right away, first building their connection through dating and getting to know each other. The delay results in a deeper connection. Sure, the situation changes later on, but that doesn't alter the value of the message that establishing a solid relationship before physical intimacy can lead to a more satisfying outcome.

The subject matter may match that of the kind of made-for-TV movies you can see all day on streaming platforms or cable, but here, it's elevated. The messages are clear and important: Abuse is unacceptable, and when we date someone, we date all of their past pain and trauma, whether we're made aware of it or not. Also, life is messy, and, with brave choices, it's possible to move on from a difficult past and live your best life. Both Lily and Atlas ( Brandon Sklenar ), an important person from her teen years, get through the hand that life has dealt them in different ways, not letting it define them. At one point, there's even a conversation about what parents would want to tell their daughter if she was in love with a man who had violent tendencies—this movie can help you add that message to your own.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the messages in It Ends with Us about relationships. How do you determine what's acceptable behavior in a relationship, and how do you identify someone who's abusive? What should you do if you or someone you know is being abused?

The source novel has been criticized for romanticizing abuse. Did you see anything in the movie that supported that argument? If you've read the book, which do you prefer, and why?

Discuss Lily, Atlas, and Ryle's careers, and how our past can influence the kind of work we want to do. What careers interest you, and who or what in your life has made that path seem appealing?

Is substance use glamorized in It Ends with Us ? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 9, 2024
• Cast : Blake Lively , Justin Baldoni , Jenny Slate , Brandon Sklenar
• Director : Justin Baldoni
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Female writers
• Studio : Sony Pictures Releasing
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : Book Characters , Brothers and Sisters , Great Girl Role Models
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy , Perseverance
• Run time : 130 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language
• Last updated : August 21, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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What to watch next.

It Ends With Us, Book 1

It Starts With Us: It Ends With Us, Book 2

Big Little Lies

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

It Ends with Us Review: A Gut-Wrenching Portrayal of Domestic Violence

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In It Ends with Us , a woman torn between two vastly different suitors tries to break the generational cycle of domestic abuse that also afflicted her mother. Adapted from Colleen Hoover's best-selling novel , It Ends with Us packs a powerful punch in a contrived but harrowing journey of self-realization . What begins as a thrilling romance transforms into a deceptively destructive relationship with iron tentacles. How can someone who claims to be head over heels in love turn physically violent? You're shattered by a likable protagonist's heartbreak despite the film's narrative flaws.

It Ends with Us is told along two timelines. In the present, Lilly Bloom ( Blake Lively, now Lady Deadpool ) travels home to Maine for the somber funeral of her father. Jenny, her distraught mother, hopes she's penned a thoughtful eulogy for the town's widely admired mayor. Lilly goes to her old room and looks out the window. She remembers being a teenager (played by Isabela Ferrer) and seeing a homeless classmate, Atlas, sneaking out of a dilapidated building behind her house. The kind and sweet Lilly resolves to help him after school.

Adult Lilly returns to Boston to pursue her dream of opening a flower shop. A chance encounter on a luxury building's rooftop results in instant chemistry. She's smitten by the tall, handsome, and fiery Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, who also directs). He seems like a dream come true, but the successful neurosurgeon thrives on casual flings. A coy Lilly won't be easily bedded.

A Dark Romance Built on Unbelievable Random Events

It Ends With Us

Based on Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel, It Ends With Us is a drama-romance film directed by Justin Baldoni. The film follows a recent college graduate named Lily, who meets a man named Ryle and falls in love with him. However, a traumatic incident compounded with her former high-school sweetheart re-entering her life complicates her plans.

• Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni give complex, magnetic performances.
• It Ends With Us balances adult romance with a sobering lesson in abuse.
• Lazy writing relies on happenstance, and the film goes on a bit too long.

Months later, Lilly's sole employee (Jenny Slate) at her new store accidentally brings Ryle back into her life. Sparks reignite and a whirlwind of passion ensues. But Lilly gets another stunning surprise while eating with Ryle at a trendy restaurant. A grown Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) approaches to take their order. The love she felt for him as a teenager was never dormant. Ryle notices a change despite her best efforts, and reveals the hideous dark side of his personality.

Let's start with the film's biggest problem, which can't be ignored. Every consequential event is based on pure luck . Young Lilly just happens to be by her window to see Atlas. Ryle storms onto the roof at just the right time. Slate, who's great as the comic relief — drum roll please — is Ryle's younger sister. What are the odds of Lilly randomly hiring her in Boston, a city with millions of people? It also strains credulity for her to bump into Atlas after years apart.

There are two ways to look at these improbable meetings. Screenwriter Christy Hall ( Daddio , I Am Not Okay with This ) wants the audience to believe in serendipity. Fate drove Ryle and Atlas into Lilly's open arms. They were destined to battle for her heart. The skeptical response is cheap and lazy exposition. The film thrusts the characters together without establishing believable reasons . This reviewer is in the latter camp. That said, It Ends with Us gets past the boyfriend lottery with its visceral emotional impact.

The Controversy Behind It Ends with Us, Explained

It Ends with Us, the latest book-to-film adaptation, has drawn quite a bit of criticism. What's the reason for it?

Blake Lively & Justin Baldoni Are Excellent and Gorgeous

Lilly's struggle with abuse captivates on a primal level. Lively nails every facet of her complex character . Lilly's beauty, warmth, and dazzling artistry make her supremely engaging. It's understandable why hunky studs like Ryle and Atlas are champing at the bit to be with her. But Lilly's compassion and willingness for second chances leads her further down a tragic path. She's horrified at Ryle's behavior but doesn't want to believe that's really him.

It Ends with Us draws a striking parallel between Lilly and her mother. Both women are victims of cruel men who are adored by an ignorant public. They don't see monsters holding down and beating their terrified partners. Teenage Lilly could never understand why her mother didn't leave or report her father. She's disgusted and disappointed that Jenny covered for him, but sadly ends up in the same situation. It's not easy to run away or ask for help. Love becomes a chain that shackles.

Baldoni rightly appalls with a Jekyll and Hyde portrayal of Ryle. His double duty as director brilliantly lends itself to measured escalation . On the surface, Ryle is a fantasy come true for most women. His looks, wealth, intelligence, and even volatility, are charismatic and sexually intoxicating. Lilly wouldn't fall for a complete jerk. It also makes sense that Atlas would forever be enthralled by her. You never forget your first love. Hearts will melt at the unspoken longing between them.

It Ends With Us Cast & Character Guide

Rife with rich characters and a heartbreaking story, It Ends With Us stars some big Hollywood names, all capable of bringing such a story to life.

It Ends with a Sobering Lesson in Love & Domestic Abuse

It Ends with Us teaches a sobering lesson. Victims of domestic violence aren't foolish. Abusers don't easily relinquish their hold. Lilly has to muster the ability to escape. The scenes of her being hurt are absolutely gut-wrenching, but can't be glossed over . Light is the only disinfectant for the ugly and reprehensible.

It Ends with Us is a production of Columbia Pictures, Wayfarer Studios, and Saks Picture Company. It will be released theatrically on August 9th from Sony Pictures.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline is (800) 799-7233. Help is available 24/7 for anyone in need.

• Movie and TV Reviews

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, and maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily, but Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing.

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. It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

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‘It Ends with Us’ Review: Blake Lively Stars in a Romantic Soap Opera That Turns Dark and Stays Convincing

Justin Baldoni directs an affecting adaptation of Colleen Hoover's novel and also costars as a romantic suitor too aggro for comfort.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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The film’s star, Blake Lively , has not made the impact in movies that she did on television with “Gossip Girl” (though she had a hit with the shark thriller “The Shallows” and was very good in Ben Affleck’s “The Town” and Oliver Stone’s “Savages”). But in “It Ends with Us,” she has a role she can sink her acting chops into. She fills the screen with her acutely aware and slightly tremulous radiance. She plays Lily Bloom, an aspiring flower-shop entrepreneur who we meet when she returns home for the funeral of her father, who during the eulogy she can’t think of one nice thing to say about (she’s got a list numbered to 5, all left blank). So there’s a forbidding backstory there.

She has bought a beat-up old storefront in the Back Bay, which she renovates and transforms into a flower shop with a lavishly ornate shabby-chic aesthetic. She hires Allysa (played by the always-welcome Jenny Slate), and the two become best buddies. That’s when the first twist happens: Ryle wanders into the store, because it turns out that he’s Allysa’s brother. So he and Lily reconnect, and she agrees, with a great deal of caution, to give him a chance. The way the movie is set up, he’s got to prove himself to her and to the audience.

At the same time, the film flashes back to Lily in  high school (where she’s played by Isabela Ferrer, who matches up with Lively eerily well). There, we see her fall into a relationship with Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), a sensitive classmate she meets when he’s homeless, squatting in an abandoned building across the street from her family’s house. As we learn, he has a good reason to be on the street (symbolized by how he got his scarred hand), and though she helps rescue him, their connection is about something more basic: They click (despite the ridicule she gets from her classmates about it). We wonder: What’s the link between this romance and the one brewing between Lily and Ryle? Is she drawn to bad boys? Outsiders?

Love stories have more or less faded out of mainstream cinema, and it’s gratifying to see one that isn’t a rom-com, for once. As Ryle puts his player ways behind him, we want to see Lily happy, and we think: Maybe this is it. Then, one evening, at a hip eatery, the restaurant’s owner drops by the table, and Lily notices a familiar scarred hand. It is Atlas — now back from eight years in the military and other experiences. He looks…different. That’s because he’s played by a different actor, Brandon Sklenar (who suggests a baby-faced Russell Crowe), but also because he has aged into adulthood like fine wine. Aha, we think. So here’s the movie. Lily falls in love with the charismatic but questionable Ryle; sweet, chivalrous Atlas returns from her past. Who will she go with? The answer, at first, seems obvious (the blast from the past! à la “Casablanca”). But Ryle appears to be a born-again romantic. Maybe the movie is going to undercut our expectations?

It does, though not in the way we’re expecting. “It Ends with Us” is a story of how people repeat bad patterns in their lives, even (or maybe especially) when they don’t realize it. And the way this is conveyed is at once the essence of soap opera and also quite emotionally shrewd. For Lily really loves Ryle, and just like her we experience their relationship from the inside. When we see a glint of angry fire in Ryle, we want it to go away. Justin Baldoni’s performance is rivetingly layered — he makes Ryle a compartmentalized man, one who’s truly trying yet is unable to see himself.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, Aug. 5, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 130 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a Columbia Pictures, Wayfarer Studios, Saks Picture Company production. Producers: Alex Saks, Jamey Heath, Blake Lively, Christy Hall. Executive producers: Steve Sarowitz, Todd Black.
• Crew: Director: Justin Baldoni. Screenplay: Christy Hall. Camera: Barry Peterson. Editors: Oona Flaherty. Robb Sullivan. Music: Rob Simonsen, Duncan Blickenstaff.
• With: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, Isabela Ferrer, Alex Neustaedter, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton.

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It Ends With Us Review: Good Intentions And Committed Performances Can't Escape The Curse Of Colleen Hoover's Book

Justin Baldoni knows how to direct romance. His years of playing Rafael Solano on "Jane the Virgin" have equipped him with skills that give him an eye for intimacy, a full-bodied embrace of well-worn tropes guaranteed to make a Mother-Daughter movie night overflow with tears, and choosing actors who can make even the most nonsensical dialogue feel lived in . His previous films, "Five Feet Apart" and "Clouds," fall under the same teenage illness romance umbrella, but "It Ends With Us" is only arguably an adult story, as author Colleen Hoover seemingly wrote the book in the format of "YA romance, but this time they're adults!" Baldoni's biggest canvas yet gives the massive challenge of adapting one of the most popular books of the decade for a major studio , all while co-starring as the male lead and juggling the trickiest subject matter of his career.

Blake Lively stars as aspiring florist Lily Blossom Bloom, a character name that begs to be mocked but is acknowledged as being silly, providing the same meta-textual, self-deprecating humor as Lively's hubby in "Deadpool & Wolverine" but for ladies with Stanley cup collections. After a meet-cute on a rooftop with handsome neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), their romance evolves like the result of Hallmark movie Mad Libs ... until it doesn't. The seemingly perfect couple's traumatic childhoods manifest in violent outbursts from Ryle and Lily locked into a cycle of staying when she shouldn't.

The cruel twist of fate is that critiquing this movie feels simultaneously mandatory and impossibly unfair, where the slightest hint of pushback risks invalidating the survivors of abuse that connect to the material or welcoming the fierce wrath of Hoover's fanbase. But as a survivor of domestic violence myself, I'm grappling with a movie that gets so much right but is ultimately trying to grow a garden in the poisoned soil of bad source material.

Blake Lively deserves better than Lily Bloom

"It Ends With Us" is shown through the perspective and memory of Lily Bloom, with Blake Lively trying her damnedest to breathe life into a character that serves as the evolutionary next step following Bella Swan of "Twilight." She's basically a relatable, "quirky" woman with an established special interest (in this case, flowers) but without any other discernible traits, so it's easy for the audience to slip themselves into the role and feel like the main character. Lively's charm is infectious, but her performance is held back by "regular girl gets the unthinkably perfect guy" tropes embedded in the DNA of Hoover's story. Her penchant for gorgeous gowns paired with oversized, working-class men's jackets is our main indicator that she's Not Like Most Girls, so of course Ryle was going to break his "casual dates only" rule and risk it all to be with her.

Baldoni wisely lulls the audience into a false sense of security with said tropes, which makes the reveal of Ryle's behavior all the more jarring. He's handsome! He has a fancy apartment! He has a job that will impress moms! He's so secure in his masculinity that he'll wear a rainbow onesie to a bar that offers discounts for doing so! "It Ends With Us" wants the audience to fall in love with Ryle, because to do so makes it easier for people to see why it takes Lily so long to leave. It's the one strength of Hoover's book (which has the same approach) because the reality is that most abusive husbands aren't villainous monsters cloaked in shadows with accompanying swells of threatening music. They're a lot like Ryle, men who appear perfect in every way but are capable of horrific violence shrouded in apologies, promises, and psychological warfare. He's a master manipulator, further proven when her childhood love, Atlas (an underutilized Brandon Sklenar) reenters the picture and provides her an out that she doesn't take.

Romance tropes deflate the importance of the story

When I left my abusive ex and confessed the truth of what had been happening for years to our friends and loved ones, almost all of them berated themselves for not seeing the red flags. But the reality is that unless you know what to look for — and often even when you do know what to look for — it's still easy to miss.

Ryle's abuse of Lily escalates gradually over time and the constant blurring of boundaries and "understandable" justifications for his growing violations make it harder for her to see the forest for the trees. Ahead of Ryle's most violent act, he starts a game of manipulation, one that looked nearly identical, almost down to the exact phrasing, of an abusive tactic my ex had unleashed on me. All of my internal warning bells started firing off, and I was squirming in my seat watching what was, in my opinion, a very obvious sign that things were about to go very, very badly for Lily.

But the audience for my screening ... they laughed. Some were out of discomfort, I'm sure, but others were audibly laughing as if it were a funny situation. So much so that another viewer loudly let out a "BOO!" at the people who were laughing. It physically pained me to sit in that room, wanting nothing more than to crawl out of my skin — but the more I think about it, the more I can't blame the audience for their insensitivity. The bombardment of romance tropes, sex scenes shot like "50 Shades of Grey," a soundtrack tailor-made of "Songs for Empowered Women to Cry To," and melodramatic framing of Lily's deeply buried feelings for Atlas forces "It Ends With Us" into two distinct movies battling for supremacy. A weepy romance set to Taylor Swift being pulled apart is one thing, but a shockingly nuanced examination of domestic violence being diluted because of it is maddening.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

The "abusive man with a troubled past" trope is tired (and bulls**t). The "quirky girl with her own successful business who gets the guy" trope is tired. And despite the immeasurable talent of Jenny Slate, the "loud best friend who provides comedic relief" trope is tired. What makes "It Ends With Us" special is the attempt to take a more realistic approach to domestic violence, but because the non-abusive story beats are pulled from the fantastical and idealized world of romance novels, the reality of this violence is constantly being uprooted. Some of the film's most poignant moments are in the flashbacks where Isabela Ferrer plays a young Lily (and a pitch-perfect portrayal of Lively's interpretation of the character), but the impact is often immediately deflated by thrusting audiences back into yet another wistful look out into the picturesque distance of Boston's cityscapes or Lily's maximalist floral shop.

It's frustrating, because there are so many survivors of domestic violence who love this story, who felt empowered by it, and in some cases, they felt strong enough to leave their abusers because of it. I honestly hope that the movie can do the same, and I do not bemoan anyone who walks out of the theater feeling emotionally moved ... but "It Ends With Us" can't escape the curse of Colleen Hoover's book. The message of "we break the pattern before the pattern breaks us" is important, and given Hoover's personal history of growing up in an abusive household, I hope working through those emotions through these characters has been healing. But as a movie, "It Ends With Us" is an infuriating, emotionally manipulative watch and a disservice to the talents of every actor involved.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the United States national hotline is available at 1.800.799.SAFE (7233) or text "START" to 88788.

/Film Rating: 4 out of 10.

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Book Review: It Ends With Us - Colleen Hoover.

Genre: Fiction/ Romance novel/ Contemporary romance.

Rating: 5/5 stars.

DISCLAIMER :

TW: Sexual assault.

CONTAINS SPOILERS.

Finally, know that this book shouldn’t be read before going to bed, trust me it will prevent you from sleeping.

“There is no such thing as ‘bad people’. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.”

Hello everyone and welcome back! Today's book revolves around Colleen Hoover...that’s it. Hoover is known for a variety of her books, the most popular of them being this one. Now, I've never been a fan of the Romance genre but I do enjoy books that make me bawl my eyes out. This book was definitely one of them. It Ends with Us was a success both critically & in the eyes of fans, winning the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Romance.

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. 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.

I’m going to divide the review into two parts –

1-3 stars – As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a fan of Romance novels. So, my initial thoughts were that this book follows the pattern of After and 50 shades . I know they’re not the same but this is basically the storyline – A rich man and a not-so-rich woman fall in love. The woman later finds that the man has grown from a traumatic childhood that led him to be an abusive, unstable person when it comes to relationships. While reading Part One, I noticed this pattern and felt annoyed to have picked this book.

3-5 stars – It was after reading Part Two that I felt the triggers. Yet, I kept going because I had a feeling that the ending would slap my face and it did. It was the last chapter that broke me. Reading Ryle’s emotions had me *CRYING SO HARD* that I wanted Lily to take her word back. When I read “It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.”, I was done. I felt a stab in my heart. Not because of what Lily decided (she made an awesome decision) but because I saw Lily and Ryle separate. Till the epilogue, I told myself “If Lily & Atlas got back together, I'd be happy” until it actually happened, and I don’t think I was up for it. This was because the epilogue kind of left me confused. I wanted a little more about it. I wanted to know how Ryle would react to this because I cannot get over Ryle and Lily (T_T) though I know how he’d possibly react because now they are divorced.

Although the characters are fictional, they have elements of realism in them –

Lily 's was the most powerful character. Her character may not be relatable to everyone, but it still managed to reach out. She was resilient and courageous. Brave and bold , just like her mother asked her to be.

Ryle was charming. A thriving neurosurgeon who’s willing to be better for Lily? YES. I honestly felt extreme sorrow for him but there’s nothing that could be done for his behaviour.

Atlas was a sweet one. He was just the perfect guy Lily deserved.

Alyssa and Marshall – God. They helped me laugh through the overwhelming moments of the story. The friendship between Lily & Alyssa was the sweetest.

I must say, the author really poured her soul into this book. I underestimated this book to be a typical romantic story but oh no, I was so wrong. Also, the author’s note left me with another wave of shock. Overall, this novel is an emotional rollercoaster that will surely leave any reader stunned.

“Fifteen seconds. That’s all it takes to completely change everything about a person. Fifteen seconds that we’ll never get back.”

Thank you and happy reading :)

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After Some Not-Great Marketing, Here's How "It Ends With Us" Actually Depicts Abuse

When “Skinny Love” played, I thought, “God, that’s so cheesy,” — as tears simultaneously pricked at my eyes.

BuzzFeed Staff

Warning: Discussion of domestic violence and abuse.

Spoilers for it ends with us ahead., i didn’t go to it ends with us at 3 p.m. on a monday by myself to dunk on it. that being said, i certainly didn't expect to like it..

I’m no movie critic, but I had reason to be cautious. Of course, I’d heard of (but not read) the Colleen Hoover book of the same name. It follows flower shop owner Lily Bloom through her abusive relationship with Ryle Kincaid and the rekindling of her first love, Atlas Corrigan. I knew the plot’s broad strokes and that some have accused it of glorifying abuse. So I went into the movie with one question: As an audience member, does the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni adaptation depict domestic abuse well?

I'm not pretending to be an expert, but I have extensively written about domestic violence and sexual abuse in pop culture , interviewed licensed therapists on the matter, and have my own personal experiences. Part of what drew me to It Ends with Us is knowing how badly our culture understands intimate partner violence — we're still within spitting distance of the catastrophe of misinformation that was the Depp/Heard trial. Conversely, I know that meaningful depictions of trauma can literally change lives — I’ve felt it myself.

The promotional material for the movie immediately raised alarm bells. I saw advertising that stressed the friendship aspect of the movie: "Grab your friends, wear your florals," as the official TikTok account puts it. Had I not known that the novel was about abuse, I doubt I would have understood it beforehand. As someone with PTSD, I like to be warned before being exposed to content that depicts sexual or gender-based violence and make the decision that’s best for my health.

Director Justin said he made this movie for the real-life Lily Blooms. While he isn’t in charge of how the movie is marketed, is a film with no content warnings or helpline information best serving this?

The depiction of the beginning of Lily and Ryle’s relationship felt incredibly moving to me. The warning signs are there from his first appearance — he kicks over a chair in an angry outburst — but we are encouraged to look past it, given his looks, class, and charm.

Unlike her first love (more on that later), Lily is the one who is then pursued, and her boundaries are gently eroded at every step. She wants to be friends, but she suggests a kiss after much drinking and pestering. She tells him to stop multiple times before they are together. She’s even explicitly warned not to date him by his own sister, played by Jenny Slate , who tells her that “a normal person would just leave.”

These moments are played as romance, which is where I think the read of this movie as romanticizing abuse comes from. To me, it’s a surface-level interpretation of what’s happening here. While Lily, the POV character, is treating this as playful, it’s the start of the long degradation of her boundaries, which we know happens over time in abusive relationships. As an audience member, I felt wholly uncomfortable when Ryle said that he’s “not a stalker” on her roof — only to be told by Lily to stop showing up at her work a few scenes later. Another cut of this movie could easily play this for horror.

That being said, I think it’s important that we see that Ryle is charming and that the chemistry between them is palpable. The uncomfortable reality of domestic abuse is that there are moments of love and happy memories. When we miss that, we risk flattening the survivor narrative into one of, “Why didn’t she just leave?”

I was reminded of when I spoke to  Matt Lundquist , a psychotherapist and founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy , who told me, “The only responsible question to ask as a therapist, when somebody comes in and they're recently out of a bad relationship, or they've had a string of bad relationships, the relevant question is, 'What is it about these individuals that was compelling to you? How did you find yourself in these relationships?'” To me, this movie answers that question.

When it came to the actual depictions of physical abuse, I thought they were done with care and weren’t remotely gratuitous. In the first instance in particular, it is shot so quickly and confusingly that we are left with the same question Lily has: Was that on purpose? We later see just how much Lily is the unreliable narrator she says she is, but I liked that this moment used visual language to put us in her shoes. Their relationship escalates to the point where Ryle walking in with a magazine made me squirm; I gasped when I later saw bite marks.

Flashbacks are often used to contrast Lily and Ryle’s relationship with her parents’ marriage. In one pivotal scene, as I saw scenes from the two spliced together, I thought of how effectively it juxtaposes how domestic violence looks from the outside (the terrifying physicality of her father on top of her mother) versus how it feels to be in it (Ryle insisting over and over again that he loves her).

Personally, I felt that the relationship between Lily and her father needed a few extra scenes. How did she react after first seeing the violence? Did her father attempt to gaslight her about the experience, or did she just keep it to herself? I love much of the relationship between Lily and her mother, and I feel like it would have been insightful to gain more of a family picture. 

The part of Lily and Ryle’s relationship in It Ends with Us that I found to be lacking was when she is able to leave him. We know that in real life, this is when women often face the most harassment and violence, which can be lethal. Did she fear working in her flower shop? What are her lasting mental and emotional traumas? Would the Ryle we know really just agree to walk away? The way their lives are entangled is messy, and we move past her pregnancy at lightning speed. By the end of the movie, he's presumed gone. If there’s a part of this movie that can be accused of glossing over reality or overly sympathizing Ryle, I think this is it.

I also don’t like how Allysa, depicted as the ultimate BFF, threatens to "never speak" to Lily (leaving her essentially friendless) if she doesn’t cut contact with Ryle. This moment is portrayed as a great moment of friendship, but it could actually risk the victim being totally isolated.

In many ways, I wish that the movie ended with the “it ends with us” scene. Instead, we get Atlas. Let’s talk about Atlas, because I am concerned about him. I do not like that he essentially trapped Lily in a bathroom to talk about whether or not she was being abused. I do not like that he escalated things with Ryle, which would easily risk making things worse for Lily. I do not think it was appropriate that he says Lily can fall in love with him someday when her marriage is so newly in tatters. (Also, where does he go for the apparent years after that?) Without further character development, it feels mighty red flag-ish.

It’s not that I’m opposed to Atlas’s inclusion in this movie, far from it. There is something to be said about the trauma bond and friendship of two kids alone surviving through the years. I think it’s pretty obvious who Lily will end up with in the movie, and I wish the last shot had been one of her own emancipation instead. My coworker, who has read the book, told me that his depiction is more fleshed out and trustworthy there. 

Okay, so this movie is not a masterpiece; the dialogue can be clunky, and moments can be absurdly cheesy. But there is something real there, something the marketing missed. I couldn’t help but think of all the times it made me go, “That reminds me of when that happened,” or “I’ve felt like that, too.” As the movie theater lights came up and I heard the sniffs and rustle of tissues around me, I got the feeling that I wasn’t alone.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.

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Book Review: It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

By Yasi Agah Posted on 9.9.21

CW: domestic abuse

Have you ever witnessed your friend or family member in a toxic relationship? Have you yourself ever been in a toxic relationship? To an outside perspective it seems impossible why anyone would ever stay in an unhealthy relationship. But to the person inside the relationship…it’s not that easy. In this story, Lily Bloom (yes, that is her adorable name) is a free-spirited Maine native with a seemingly normal life…until she meets Ryle. 

After she graduates with a business degree from college, she moves to Boston and decides that she wants to pursue her dream of opening a flower shop (Yes. You read that correctly. Again – adorable). When she moves to Boston she meets a mysterious man, Ryle Kincaid, a smooth-talking neurosurgeon with a sprinkle of mystery. Lily and Ryle hit it off with a flirtatious rooftop encounter and have an immediate connection – Lily thinks that she’ll never see him again but she has no idea what’s in store. Ryle turns out to be the love of her life and she can see a future with him. However, a wrench gets thrown into her life when a past flame and her first true love, Atlas, comes back into her life. On the outside, Lily’s life seems amazing. She has a beautiful doctor boyfriend, has an incredible career and is living out her dreams. But on the inside, there’s much more to the story. Check out Colleen Hoover’s thrilling romance novel, It Ends With Us , for a story about how love doesn’t always turn out the way you think.

AH. This book had me on the edge of my seat the entireee time. It was a rollercoaster of emotions, going back and forth between the men in Lily’s life and constantly thinking – why doesn’t she leave if she isn’t happy? I won’t give away any spoilers but there is a heavy theme of domestic abuse throughout this book and helps show the internal debate that women have when they’re in a toxic relationship. It’s extremely easy to see someone in an abusive relationship and think “why doesn’t she leave already?” but it’s truly not that simple.

Based on true events from the author’s life, this book outlines the terrifying cycle of domestic abuse and the effects it can have on women for generations to come. It Ends With Us is an eye-opening and suspenseful story that shows how all consuming and catastrophic domestic abuse can become. This book showed me the insider’s perspective to a terrifying situation and the rationale that women use to stay in unhealthy relationships – it is never as easy as it seems. There were many moments throughout this book that left me teary eyed and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did the same for you. It’s a binge read that somehow breaks your heart and then puts it back together.  If you know someone who has experienced domestic abuse and needs help, please check out the resources at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Here is their website https://www.thehotline.org/get-help/ and you can call 800.799.SAFE (7233).

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It Ends With Us Ending, Summary & Spoilers from the Book, Explained

This is a look into the spoilers for Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us ahead of its film release starring Blake Lively.

In January 2023, Blake Lively was cast as Lily Bloom, with Justin Baldoni set to direct and Christy Hall adapting the script. Baldoni will play Ryle Kincaid and Brandon Sklenar was cast to play the role of Atlas Corrigan.

The first trailer was recently released by Sony Pictures , teasing a theatrical-exclusive release on August 9, 2024.

The first footage from the film teased Lily's journey of opening her own business, navigating an intense relationship with Ryle, and facing the return of her first love, Atlas, leading her to confront difficult choices about her future.

For those looking for a spoiler-filled summary of It Ends with Us, here's a recap and ending explanation.

It Ends with Us Book Summary

At the beginning of It Ends with Us , Lily Bloom finds herself on a Boston rooftop contemplating her father's funeral and the domestic violence that plagued her childhood. 

This is when she meets Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgery resident, and the two quickly spark a connection despite conflicting long-term goals. 

Their relationship intertwines with Lily's aspirations of opening a floral shop and her rekindled friendship with childhood friend Atlas Corrigan as they grapple with unresolved emotions.

As Lily and Ryle navigate their evolving relationship, Lily revisits her turbulent past through her childhood diaries, recounting her deepening bond with Atlas and the traumas they endured. 

Despite Lily's commitment to Ryle, their relationship faces turmoil when Ryle's violent tendencies surface, leading Lily to re-evaluate their connection and confront the cycle of abuse she endured. 

Encounters with Atlas further complicate matters, prompting Lily to reassess her feelings and confront the complexities of love and forgiveness.

In the wake of Ryle's promise to change, Lily holds her ground, ultimately deciding to divorce Ryle to protect herself and her daughter, Emmy, from the cycle of abuse. 

Who Does Lily End up With?

During the epilogue 11 months later, Lily encounters Atlas again while pushing Emmy in a stroller. They share a brief moment, but their interaction is interrupted by a text from Ryle. 

Lily clarifies to Atlas that she isn't with Ryle and they only share custody of Emmy. Lily then drops off Emmy with Ryle and runs after Atlas. 

She shares with him that Emmy's middle name is Dory (after the Finding Nemo character), symbolizing the significance of Atlas in her life, as Dory represents a source of comfort and support for both of them.

Atlas embraces Lily, expressing his readiness to be with her whenever she's ready. 

Lily reciprocates, signaling her desire to move forward with him. Atlas assures her that she can stop swimming now, indicating the end of her struggles and the beginning of a new chapter in their lives together.

By opening her heart to Atlas, Lily chooses a partner who consistently shows her kindness and respect, marking a significant step toward her healing and happiness.

In the end, Lily and Atlas end the story together, hopefully signaling a brighter future as a couple.

It Ends with Us opens in theaters on August 9.

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It Starts with Us: A Novel (It Ends with Us) Paperback – October 18, 2022

• Book 2 of 2 It Ends with Us
• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publication date October 18, 2022
• Dimensions 5.31 x 0.84 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1668001225
• ISBN-13 978-1668001226
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atria (October 18, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1668001225
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668001226
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.53 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.84 x 8.25 inches
• #3 in New Adult & College Romance (Books)
• #3 in Contemporary Women Fiction
• #7 in Contemporary Romance (Books)

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About the author

Colleen hoover.

Colleen Hoover is the #1 New York Times and International bestselling author of multiple novels and novellas. She lives in Texas with her husband and their three boys. She is the founder of The Bookworm Box, a non-profit book subscription service and bookstore in Sulphur Springs, Texas.

For more information and for a schedule of events, please visit colleenhoover.com.

To contact Colleen and her team (Her team's name is Stephanie), please email [email protected]

Customer reviews

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Customers say

Customers find the storyline good, perfect, and surreal. They also describe the book as very well written and easy to read. Customers find it heart touching, warming, and delightful. They love the character development. Readers describe the content depth as raptly told and easy for beginners. However, some find the plot unrealistic, predictable, and forced. They feel the entertainment value is terribly boring and repetitive. Customers also feel the pacing is rushed and tedious.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the storyline easy to read, true, and dedication. They also say it's a perfect follow up to the first book and a great ending to the series. Readers also say the book gives a wonderful insight into why women stay in abusive relationships. They describe the story as soothing, surreal, and perfect.

"...It was real and raw. That's what books bring to my life - a different perspective that heals sometimes...." Read more

"...This was the perfect next step for Lilly , Asher, and Emerson. I always love an HEA, but this one was especially heartwarming." Read more

"...'s books I wasn’t reading many books, however, this book was extremely interesting and after I began reading it I finished it in a few days...." Read more

"Excellent character development. The ending was surprising , quick. I look forward to reading “It Ends With Us.”..." Read more

Customers find the book well written, and easy to read. They also mention that it has a perfect complete ending.

"... Absolutely loved the writing style . Theo is a wonderful therapist and gosh, his interactions with Atlas made me laugh...." Read more

"...topics Colleen Hoover does a good job of making them lighter and more readable , unlike the first book of the series which had more graphic scenes of..." Read more

"...if you view these as contemporary fiction (which I did), they’re an okay read . Definitely check online for the TWs/CWs before starting...." Read more

"...The timeline, at times, was a little difficult to follow ...." Read more

Customers find the book heartwarming, raw, and honest. They also say it's very easy on the heart and filled with life, compassion, grace, patience, and humility. Readers also mention that the book kicks them into gear and shook them out of burnout.

"...I always love an HEA, but this one was especially heartwarming ." Read more

"...The story lines - the characters the drama. It’s unexpected, and so heart touching - warming- and delightful...." Read more

"...It’s funny, it’s touching and hopeful. It also touches other topics and self help and of course a beautiful and inspiring and hot between two people..." Read more

"Amazing book. My heart is so happy, wonderful message and love how each chapter is a different point of view...." Read more

Customers like the characters in the book. They say they love the characters and find them wonderful.

"...Absolutely loved the writing style. Theo is a wonderful therapist and gosh, his interactions with Atlas made me laugh...." Read more

" Excellent character development . The ending was surprising, quick. I look forward to reading “It Ends With Us.”..." Read more

"...As a set these books paint clear, relatable portraits of the characters they’re describing and also weave the stories of each of those characters in..." Read more

"I think the book really develops character by its halfway point. The story lines - the characters the drama...." Read more

Customers find the book's content depth to be raptly told, understanding, and considerate. They also appreciate the structure of the chapters and the author's portrayal of the messy and even ugly side of the journey. Readers also say the book is real, honest, and easy to get lost in. They mention the love is sweet and true.

"...There is no confusion. The details are perfectly written & focusing on who atlas was really just made the book for me. 10/10" Read more

"...Well written and I like the structure of chapters with each character first person, giving chapter time period of each main character." Read more

"...Now, for my sole critique… The wedding at the end deserved more ...." Read more

"...The love that is portrayed through the two characters is genuine and child-like in a way making it easy to fall in love with it...." Read more

Customers find the plot weirdly unrealistic, predictable, and boring. They also say the book doesn't live up to the first book, and feels cliche. Readers also mention that the characters seem too perfect and the narrative feels forced.

"...couple interactions between Lily and her other friends that seemed weirdly unrealistic ..." Read more

"...Although the story more predictable than the first book , I definitely recommend reading this one in order to get closure for the story...." Read more

"...The story lines - the characters the drama. It’s unexpected , and so heart touching - warming- and delightful...." Read more

"...The follow-up to the original story is predicable and maudlin. I liked the first book,the second, not so much." Read more

Customers find the book boring, unnecessary, and repetitive. They also say the story lacks action and suspense.

"...Sometimes it can feel a bit lazy/boring (which, in this case, it did).It Starts With Us was pretty average...." Read more

"...However, the beginning was such a draggg, so much repetition from the previous book to what'd the characters would say from previous chapters as well..." Read more

"...Overall, I would say this book is not necessary and to skip it if you are satisfied with the ending of the first one...." Read more

"It’s a quick easy read. But there is no climax. There isn’t anything exciting that draws you in to come to the end with a resolution...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book rushed, slow, and tedious. They also say the writing is forced and the letters are forced.

"...There wasn’t anything wrong with it, it just felt slow to me ...." Read more

"...book are, one, I didn’t want it to end, and two, how everything seemed to suddenly speed up at a certain point...." Read more

"...The second half of the book felt very rushed though, like she just wanted to end the series...." Read more

"...But everything moved slow at the beginning and then the ending felt very quick just to put every momentous happy ending in before the book ends...." Read more

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