First, a confession: I read them in the wrong order. Asked to review the new Colleen Hoover, It Starts With Us, I predicted, correctly, that this sequel novel would include enough back story to fill in events of the first book, the phenomenally successful It Ends With Us. But having finished It Starts With Us with little idea of why this book became one of the fastest-selling novels of all time in its first week, I decided to go back to the beginning.
It Ends With Us is the better novel: a strong opening and set-up, sharper writing, cleaner dialogue, a plot full of tension. In a nutshell, it’s a classic tale of a love triangle with a contemporary, issue-driven storyline of domestic abuse. First published in 2016, the novel gained a huge fanbase through TikTok over lockdown and hasn’t been out of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since. The credit is in part due to Hoover herself, who has steadily built up her following on social media platforms since self-publishing her debut Slammed in 2012.
To put her success in perspective, It Starts With Us is the most pre-ordered book in the history of its publisher Simon and Schuster. The original print run of 2.5 million copies for the US and 800,000 copies for the UK and other markets has already gone to reprint. It’s a lot for one book to live up to. Hoover writes in an afterword that she never envisioned a sequel because she felt she’d put her heroine Lily Bloom through enough torment: “But then #BookTok happened, and the online petition, and the messages and videos, and I realized most of you weren’t asking for me to put them through more pain.”
In a departure from It Ends With Us, where Lily was the sole narrator, the sequel alternates between both characters’ perspectives
The “them” is Lily and Atlas, two people from difficult families who help each other as teenagers and ultimately fall in love. These past sections are related through Lily’s diaries, a device that also featured in the first book. In fact, many of the diary entries are repeated verbatim in the new book, which seems blatantly cheeky, but Hoover just about gets away with it by having Atlas read the diaries for the first time, an awakening of sorts as he realises that the relationship meant as much to Lily as it did to him.
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In a departure from It Ends With Us, where Lily was the sole narrator, the sequel alternates between both characters’ perspectives. The present-day storyline (spoiler alert) picks up where the first book ended: Lily has divorced her abusive neurosurgeon husband Ryle Kincaid, with the couple trying to keep things amicable as they share custody of their infant daughter Emmy. When Atlas re-enters the picture, life becomes more complicated. Hoover sets up the story as a will-they-won’t-they for Lily and Atlas, but it is obvious from early chapters that the answer is a big fat yes, which considerably lessens the dramatic tension.
Other issues include a lack of specificity in place and character. The book is ostensibly set in Boston, but it could be any city, or town, in any part of America. Villain Ryle is less believable in this book than he was in It Ends With Us, where his violence was tempered by an awful, haunting self-awareness. Jealousy is a harder emotion to pull off, the ugly tantrums repellent and cliched. Although Ryle still has a key to Lily’s apartment (why?), the stakes are significantly lessened by the fact that Lily is no longer in a relationship with him, and crucially, no longer in thrall to him. Lily herself feels underwritten in this second book, a kind of blandness to her character, in comparison to the original, which is perhaps an issue of sequels generally: the work to establish a character has already been done.
Will any of this matter to Hoover’s huge fanbase? Not at all. The Texas author gives her readers what they want: a happy ending for her star-crossed lovers, which is commendably believable. Hoover, a former social worker, grounds her stories in reality. She is particularly good on fractured families, domestic abuse, bad parenting, on the damage that can be handed down through generations: “There’s this toxic belief that family should stick together simply because they’re family. But the best thing I ever did for myself was walk away from them.”
Like any good romance novelist, Hoover writes credible, non-cringeworthy sex scenes, with plenty of that old staple — delayed gratification — which perhaps goes some way to understanding her appeal among younger readers, a demographic not hugely familiar with the concept. Her other undeniable skill is to imbue her stories with a genuine heartwarming quality. Irrespective of what order you read the books, Atlas and Lily are characters to root for, like Dickens’s orphans, surviving adversity with hopes of better times ahead.
