It Ends With Us is among the numerous popular books written by Colleen Hoover. Colleen Hoover has become highly renowned within the reading community as an author. She typically writes young adult fiction and romance novels. Hoover has published 26 books so far but she is most famous for her works such as It Ends With Us, It Starts With Us, Ugly Love, Verity, and November 9.
It Ends With Us takes you on a rollercoaster of emotions as you follow the main character, Lily, on her journey of discovering love, loss, and strength. This story also reveals the brutal realities of domestic abuse. “I write to entertain, I don’t write to inform or to educate. But this book was a different beast,” Hoover told Teen Vogue, citing her mother’s fearless decision to end an abusive relationship with her father as the inspiration for the book. Since the book’s publishing in 2016, it has sold over 8 million copies and in January 2022 it debuted #1 on The New York Times best seller list. Its sequel, It Starts With Us was published shortly after in October of 2022. Hoover claimed that although she doesn’t particularly enjoy writing sequels, she wrote It Starts With Us in response to pressure from the media. With this novel, the emphasis was to be focused more on recovery than damage.
In July 2019, three years after the book’s release, speculation about an upcoming movie adaptation of It Ends With Us began to circulate. After a long wait, “It Ends With Us” finally came out in theaters August 9th of this year. It was directed by Justin Baldoni from a screenplay by Christy Hall based on the 2016 novel. The movie includes many prominent actors and actresses but the main cast includes Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, and Brandon Sklenar. There has been many mixed reviews with the movie’s critics score going as low as 56% while the audience score was at an astonishing 91%. This film’s budget cost $25 million to create and it ended up earning more than $24 million opening night and has recently surpassed $200 million in the Global Box Offices.
While interviewing Leila Ballard, a senior volleyball player at Saugus, she shared that she preferred the book to the movie as she could imagine her own characters. She mentioned that the film was well done but omitted parts from the novel. She loves the series and would recommend it to others. She mentioned that she planned to watch the movie again but didn’t want to reread the book because it would be time-consuming.
Recently, there has been some discrepancies between the book and the movie that has sparked controversy. The main complaints about the movie were the ages of the characters, the name of Atlas’s restaurant, and the absence of certain characters. One of the biggest controversies surrounding this movie was Lily’s interpretation of Ryle’s abuse. Given the movie’s strong themes many people were upset that there weren’t any trigger warnings issued in advance since it was presented more as a romcom than anything.
While balancing fictional and non-fictional realities, “It Ends With Us” excelled at diving deep into domestic abuse and violence in relationships when media today tends to dwell away from it. The novel and movie helps viewers and readers learn about the actuality of domestic abuse and how prevalent it is in our world today.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by calling 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), visiting www.thehotline.org or texting LOVEIS to 22522.
