Review: It Ends With Us

'' As I stare back at him, I think about how easy it is for humans to make judgements when we're standing on the outside of a situation. ''

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

From Goodreads:
Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.

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. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. 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.

Books like this one make you truly realise how powerful words are. I could have read this in one sitting, but I needed to take breaks to breathe and cry in the middle. WARNING, minuscule spoilers ahead. 

I think I have said this before but every time I read a Colleen Hoover book, I end up being run over by an emotional truck on the other side. Usually, it's only one or two trucks, this time, it was a fleet of them carrying a cargo ship. I am in pieces, I am hurt. Maybe this one hit a little too close to home. A lot of ugly crying was practised. 

Breaking the cycle is the hardest. It doesn't matter if it's your sugar addiction or addiction to something worse. If it's abuse, self-harm, anything at all. We are creatures of habit, routines are what keeps us sane sometimes, and we are taught to love since infancy. Even realising that you are part of a repeating cycle is hard, so how are we expected to break out of it? Lily knew she was part of it, but like many going through the same experiences, she didn't want to break it. She believed that the marriage vows 'for better, for worse' would be her saviours. 

Lily wrote letters to Ellen DeGeneres in her diary for a long time. In those letters, she tells about Atlas Corrigan. A boy a few years older than her, living in the abandoned house close to hers. How she befriended him, how they spent time together in secret from her parents and the world. In the end, their secret ended like all big secrets end, by someone finding out. Atlas plays such a monumental part of Lily's youth. They were pillars of strength to each other until their forced separation.

 It Ends With Us breaks hearts because you can relate to the characters easily even if you haven't ever been in a similar situation have. You wish for the best, you root for them, you root for forgiveness, you root for happiness, you root for the happily ever after they all deserve. But in the end, Lily explains it. And clear as the summer sky, you realise it. You cry and you ache because of it but it's the right decision and deep down you know it too. And realising that hurts even more because breaking the cycle isn't easy. It isn't easy to say ''It ends with us.''