It Starts With Us

By Colleen Hoover

Fiction/Simon & Schuster/Paperback/336 pages/$26.95/Books Kinokuniya
2 stars

American romance author Colleen Hoover is one of the biggest authors on TikTok, with fans making videos about how much they cry after reading her books.

Her biggest claim to fame is the 2016 novel It Ends With Us, which has more than one billion tags on TikTok.

The 43-year-old has followed up the blockbuster bestseller with a sequel, It Starts With Us, that picks up immediately from the end of the first book, after florist Lily Blossom Bloom (yes, really) left her abusive husband Ryle to raise their daughter Emerson and is reunited with her first love, Atlas.

Atlas, a former Marine-turned-chef, was a battered boy from an abusive household whom Lily saved from starvation when she was a teenager, and the two reunite shortly after Lily meets Ryle.

Where the first book – based on the abusive treatment of Hoover’s mother by the author’s father – focuses on Lily’s red-flag romance with Ryle and the painful journey she undertakes before making the decision to leave him, It Starts With Us is ostensibly about the love story of Lily and Atlas.

Except it is not, or perhaps it is just a boring one.

Love stories are best when they depict people falling in love, when it shows attraction building up.

Lily and Atlas are already extremely in love from the first page. In fact, they have been in love since the first book, even though it is unclear what connects them as adults other than a formative relationship forged over shared traumas in their adolescence.

There is no journey, no excitement or anticipation in the unfolding of the main romance. At one point, Atlas even texts Lily that she is the “beacon” he needs every time he feels lost.

Such a relationship must be a dream in real life (even if Atlas’ cloying sentiment is more ick than slick to this reviewer), but it does not make for fun reading.

Juvenile writing plagues the book as well.

Alternating between Atlas and Lily, the book is narrated in the first person throughout.

Every single thought process, action and feeling that both characters have is explained in excruciating detail. It is as if Hoover was worried that without her spelling out every single emotional beat and explicitly explaining every move made, readers would be lost.

There is hence a jarring depiction of Lily, while having sex with Atlas, thinking about how she is on birth control and how she and Atlas were tested for sexually transmitted diseases.

The most affecting parts of her books is simply not the romance. It is the abusive relationship Lily shares with her ex-husband Ryle, who is violently jealous of Atlas. The scenes of Ryle getting mad are genuinely terrifying at times.

This is not inconsequential.

Given her books’ appeal and popularity among young adults and teenage girls, there is value in Hoover showcasing what an abusive dynamic looks like and shining a light on the toxicity that abusive partners can exhibit.

Similarly, there is value in Hoover’s mention of safe sex in her books. These are important messages that young people should be exposed to.

A pity they were not included in a better written, more enjoyable book.

If you like this, read: Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover (Simon & Schuster, 2014, $19.94, Books Kinokuniya). When Tate Collins meets Miles Archer, their mutual attraction has them settling for a friends-with-benefits, no-strings-attached relationship. But their arrangement is quickly complicated by feelings that grow.