The first non-fantasy book of the year has always been something I look forward to. While the previous years had seen classics in this category, this year, I picked a romance. I wouldn’t lie, I have tried to finish The Hating Game, The Spanish Love Deception and The Inheritance Game before finally picking up my first Colleen Hoover and finishing it within two days.

What brought me in was the beginning, it promised more than a meet-cute from the get go. This was my first Hoover and I had not read a review so I went in blind. Just when it was getting to the happily ever after, I noticed that I was smack in the middle of the book. The plot dealt with so many important aspects of domestic abuse at one go that it is difficult to fully realize the scope of it through one read.

Lily is turning her life around, away from t he toxicity of a family, she is building a new life for herself where she can follow her dreams when she meets this successful doctor, Ryle. He checks every box, he is perfect not only on paper but in real life as well, until he’s not. Lily has had an abusive father and lived her life watching her mother suffer quietly, she has no intention of being her mother. But she begins to excuse away the abuse and chooses the turn a blind eye to her own situation.

There is a parallel flashback from Lily’s childhood along with the parallel and the readers can guess that the past and the present are about to collide but Atlas Corrigan, her kindred spirit, is set off against the perfect Ryle, Lily comes to realize the path she has been unconsciously choosing for herself. As Hoover taps into complex emotions and explores relationship dynamics with her potent writing and characterization, you would need tissues handy as this promises to break your heart.

The brilliance of the story, in my opinion, lies in the character sketch of Ryle. The balance of the human being he is on a daily basis and his lapses which shape the biggest events of his life, and the whole fact that Hoover did not paint him as a complete villain in this story of Lily and Atlas got me to put this book on my favorite romances list. The whole point of Ryle was to invoke the what could have been a perfect life that helps the intention of the book but it just hits you really hard that people can’t really change and it’s okay to quit that dream of perfection.

This is Lily’s story, her mistakes, her realizations, her strengths and her actions. I absolutely stan the agency that Hoover gave Lily and kept Atlas on the sidelines throughout the latter part of the novel and let her take control of her life and her decisions. Every character was granted space in the framework of the novel and their backstories are thoroughly explored, while that did not excuse Ryle’s actions, it showed that Atlas is not without his flaws as well. Ryle admitting that he’s been in therapy always but had never been able to be the better man everytime the situation demanded is just so many of us but when he married Lily without disclosing so many important truths of his life, he took away the choice from her to decide if she wanted to despite the truth of the situation, and that is a deal breaker.

The final fallout is really shows the irrationality of Ryle’s love as he can’t fathom that Lily had a past which might still have remnants of it in the present, maybe because he is so tormented by it that he assumes Lily would never be free of her past as well. After all of this, one’s mind drifts to the night they met on the roof and how Hoover introduced Ryle to the readers, taking his anger out on the chair, pulping it and how we all conveniently looked away from it.

I really enjoyed reading about Alysa’s dynamic with Lily as well. Lily’s mother’s character arc provided another victim’s perspective besides Lily’s, which provided a contrast. For me, the story maintained the balance between the point it had to get across and as well as the plot, and that made it a gripping novel. The story ended in a mess, a hopeful, peaceful mess and that’s why it’s probably not the end yet.

Fans now demand a love story and there will be a sequel but the standalone “This Ends With Us” is a showstopper in itself.