It Ends With Us Should Be the End of Colleen Hoover’s Career
By Tenzin Choyang
The #1 New York Times Bestselling Author, Colleen Hoover, is known worldwide for her romantic and steamy novels. If anyone walked into Barnes & Noble, her name would probably be one of the first things they’d see. In 2022, she outsold The Bible with over more than 20 million copies sold. Any romance section of a bookstore would most likely have an overwhelming space for her. Hoover rose to fame in 2020 for her bestselling novel, It Ends With Us, a dark romance story, and it’s what made her known all over the world.
It Ends With Us was released in 2016 and it received a lot of fame and spread rapidly over social media, especially across TikTok. The novel follows a woman, Lily Bloom, and her complicated relationships with two men, an old childhood friend named Atlas, and a man she recently met, Ryle Kincaid, on the rooftop of a random building.
Years later, Lily and Ryle meet again and fall in love then move in together until she discovers Ryle’s issues of domestic violence getting more aggressive as time goes by. She realizes they’re not in a healthy relationship and must escape before things get worse. The story uses themes of domestic violence and emotional abuse and is claimed to be inspired by a relationship that Hoover once experienced. However, instead of directly addressing the issue, she romanticizes it and has raised many red flags and concerns as an author. Hoover even marketed it as a romance book and refused to add trigger warnings at the beginning of the book because she thought it gave away the plot. This is offensive to many readers who went through domestic abuse like the protagonist, Lily, because it can trigger what they went through.
At the start of all her fame and attention, many enjoyed the book and didn’t see any problems with it. There was and still is a huge fanbase on TikTok for the particular book. Readers found TikTok as an outlet to speak their opinions on authors/books during the time of COVID-19 and this is what caused the popular hashtag “#booktok” to rave.
However, over the past year or so, she started facing waves of controversy. People even posted videos to spread the message as a sort of “warning” across social media to “not read her books for the better”. Furthermore, Hoover has also attempted to release a coloring book inspired by It Ends With Us. Yes, you heard that right, a coloring book. She is using her own novel that is meant to “spread awareness on domestic violence” to create something so immature like a coloring book just for money.
One product that she has actually released to the public is her nail polish set from her collaboration with Olive & June, also “inspired” by It Ends With Us. This reveals how insensitive Hoover is to be using her own story about important real issues as a tool to sell more products. Now, this product is probably being used by many children and teens across the world, all probably thinking of nail polish when seeing her novel.
Besides the fact that she romanticizes abuse in her books, I believe her writing is horrible. For instance, in one of her books, Ugly Love, the main protagonist, Rachel, and her boyfriend react to their newborn child, “We both laugh at our son's big balls.” This was probably the biggest joke in her whole career out of all that she’s set up for herself and she received a lot of criticism from social media for it. I and many other readers found this quote to be quite irrelevant and viewed it as her worst piece of writing ever. It truly didn’t add anything to the previous lines and was totally unnecessary to include. To be fair, most of her die-hard fans, or CoHorts as they call themselves, are blind to her acts and probably have never picked up a true and raw book that seriously gets deep into important issues.
Hoover is one of the most out-of-touch and unsophisticated authors I’ve ever known to this day. She’s illustrated domestic violence as a joke in her novels, absolutely has no empathy for victims who have experienced it, and has countlessly proven to the world how bad of a writer she is. Thus, It Ends With Us should be the end of Colleen Hoover’s career.