Opinion by Audrey Elwood

I will admit, when I first read It Ends With Us when I was 15, I loved it. I read other Colleen Hoover books and liked those as well. Then, my prefrontal cortex developed more and I realized how problematic her books are and how problematic she is. 

It Ends With Us is Hoover’s most famous book by far. The story is centered around domestic abuse and the nuances within an abusive relationship. While it is an admirable cause to tell stories of domestic violence, It Ends With Us ends up doing the opposite of its intended effect. 

The story focuses on the relationship between Ryle and Lily. Ryle is well-accomplished and smart — on paper, he is the perfect “book boyfriend,” but throughout the book, we see his abusive tendencies turn into domestic violence. 

The novel leads the reader on; you don’t know it’s about abuse until it hits you around three-quarter of the way in. While this is a style of storytelling, it can be hard to discern this, especially considering the ending, which seems to excuse Ryle’s abuse. 

This is a book about domestic violence, but it is marketed as a romance novel. If you are a highly impressionable 15-year-old, as I was myself, you will believe it is a romance novel. This inherently glorifies and romanticizes domestic violence. 

Within the marketing for this book, a series of accompanying merchandise has been released. The most controversial of which is an It Ends With Us coloring book. Yes, a book about domestic violence has a coloring book made about it. It is not just the #BookTok community who are positing this as a romance novel, but also the book’s author. This eliminates any and all arguments about the nuance of the book, as the author is openly underplaying the message. It is important to note that while Hoover announced the release of the coloring book, she later canceled it after the amount of backlash she received. 

Hoover also made merch, including a $98 crew neck that says, “Naked truths aren’t always pretty,” and a $45 trucker hat, along with other items. Other than the merch being very expensive, even for merch standards, there is something deeply troubling about making merch for a book about domestic violence. It’s comparable to wearing a shirt based off of Educated or The Color Purple — it’s just weird. Even weirder because the author herself is selling this merch. 

The final horror of it all is that the books aren’t good. Every Colleen Hoover book I have ever read has a plot of the little scenarios I would make up to fall asleep when I was 12.  They all seem to have this “big twist” that is not big at all. In her novel Confess, the ending reveals that when she was sixteen, her boyfriend died in the same hospital that her current boyfriend was in when his mother and sister died. Her first boyfriend’s paint supplies were given to her current love  interest, and he painted a painting based off of the protagonist and her first boyfriend’s love, which is eventually shipped to her as a last declaration of love by her first boyfriend. 

If that sounds nonsensical, it’s because it is. Everything is just perfectly fit into the plot to make it so everything works out but remains “unpredictable,” making all of the plots boring and stale by default. Also, her writing style can only be described as a middle schooler with millennial cadence, and it is borderline impossible to read without puking in your mouth. Best exemplified by the line in Ugly Love, “We both laughed at our son’s big balls.”

Skip her books at the airport newsstand — you’re better off reading the safety guide on your plane.