Copy Editor
Colleen Hoover is a best-selling romance author who also dabbles in the thriller genre through multiple novels like “Verity” and “Without Merit,” becoming incredibly popular among teenagers.
Despite her popularity, entertainment quality of her books and vast accessibility to non-readers, there is no excuse for the clear problematic themes within her work and lack of intellectual critique from her fanbase. Beware, there will be spoilers ahead so proceed at your own caution.
One of her books that held the number one spot on the New York Times Best Seller list was “It Ends with Us.” This book centers around Lily, a girl who moves to Boston in hopes of starting a flower shop. In this book, she encounters a past love, Atlas, while simultaneously dealing with arising feelings she has toward a stranger she meets on a rooftop, Ryle.
While this initially sounds like a captivating romance, most people stop the synopsis there. This book, in fact, is not a romance. It is a story about an abuse victim who is only failing to break the cycle and puts her own daughter in danger of being a victim, too.
One major plot line in this book is the abuse that Lily experiences from Ryle. Their relationship moves very quickly and they end up flying to Las Vegas and getting married after only a few months of dating. Mind you, this is already after their first instance of domestic violence. While this could have been a story about a girl learning that it is okay to leave, it instead follows a plot line where the main female character stays with her abuser despite recognizing the patterns of the abusive relationship.
Abuse is a very sensitive subject for a lot of people, and for good reason. This novel did a great job at recognizing that abuse can start small and leaving an abusive relationship is possible. However, it doesn’t actually display this through Lily’s actions. Lily finds herself hyper-aware of Ryle’s abusive tendencies because of similar past encounters with her father, but instead of leaving him, Hoover writes a very different story that does not depict overcoming an abusive situation, but instead, romanticizes it.
Instead of taking this novel in a more romantic direction by having Lily leave Ryle and fully reconnect with Atlas (Lily’s first love), Hoover writes a narrative in which Ryle “babytraps” Lily. Once Lily finds out she is pregnant, instead of making the best decision for her future baby – leaving Ryle – she continues to co-parent with him and allows him to have contact with her child without any boundaries.
Lily allows for her daughter to frequently be in the presence of the monster that is Ryle. Initially, she does explain to him that they cannot continue their relationship, that if their daughter were to ever tell Ryle about a man treating her the same way he did to Lily, he is not the example to look to. That being said, she still often allowed Ryle to take care of their daughter alone without any clear rules or boundaries, directly putting her daughter in danger of experiencing that same abuse from her father.
This book paints abuse in a bad light, displaying victims as too weak to leave which is incredibly harmful to both survivors of abuse and those who may be experiencing it now. This novel should have never been considered a romance, as there is nothing romantic about it. While reading it, I wasn’t sad, I was very angry and confused. I had been told that this was one of Hoover’s best romances, but I had never wanted to chuck a book across my room even more than I did then.
Aside from the fact that this book is widely mistaken for a romance, Hoover’s fanbase refuses to recognize harmful themes and characters throughout the rest of her novels. By romanticizing abuse, Hoover teaches readers that abuse derives from love, which will trap them in an abusive relationship believing that it is normal. This can be incredibly dangerous for many young adults who are being introduced to romance for the first time and are entering some of their first serious relationships.
While reading can clearly be done for enjoyment and nothing more, all literature is still open to intellectual debate and critique. Many of her fans argue against this, saying that her books are simply feel-good reads. This alone shouldn’t close the door to criticizing clearly problematic themes among many of her novels.
If you truly want to read more novels in the romance genre, I recommend you stay away from Colleen Hoover and look into the Emily Henry scene. After all, I’ll take “Beach Read” over “Ugly Love” any day.