Bestseller Postmortem: It Ends With Us

This go round we’re looking at a top ten bestseller It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover.

This article is about the bones of this book. I don’t do book reviews. There will be spoilers ahead.

On first glance, I didn’t want to read this book. The subject isn’t something I like to read about. I will not put a trigger warning per se, but domestic violence fingerprints are everywhere in the text. It is the story.

The book comes in at about ninety-seven thousands words. This is a standalone fiction book. Single title. There are no fancy words or things you need to look up. Plain-spoken, with an insidious rhythm that never lets you go.

The dedication of the book mentions her father and her mother. It is clear before the book starts that it revolves around stories most of us would rather hide in a box somewhere and forget about. I followed the train wreck and took a few notes regarding how she made a tough topic palatable. These are actual people dealing with real-world problems. No rainbows or unicorns.

“We are all just people who sometimes do bad things.” This quote in the beginning chapter could be the logline for the stories in the rest of the piece. The power of that one sentence will stay with me.

The emotional and often surprising major plot line moves through time. I don’t enjoy a book with time bouncing. I dislike it. I disliked it in this book as well. It’s a device I’ll probably avoid until I can get a better grip on what throws a reader out of the story. While it’s well done, I still wanted to skip those parts because flashbacks, memories and time hopping annoy the heck out of me.

The book is set up in two parts. I could’ve done without the two parts division. But when the timeline skips around, this setup can be useful. The chapters are long. The sentence structure is long. The book is long. But you won’t notice because you’re being pulled by the conflicts written on the page.

I’ll step out here and say when you get the writing advice to “Write what you know” do that. The author's trauma allowed her to write a deeply vulnerable book. So much laundry aired out. Her personal experience packs a punch.

The stench of domestic violence and its legacy in families is shown with heartbreaking clarity. Why do we make the decisions we make? How we resolve to be different and then find ourselves in the middle of what we wanted to avoid. The creeping up past your lines in the sand until you don’t recognize yourself. The little bites taken out of our soul.

This book’s feelings meter red lined so many times. I learned so much reading this one. An unexpected rollercoaster that had me staring inside myself and remembering no one is perfect. We should all stop trying and get on with the living.

If you want to see how goal, motivation and conflict can be almost entirely emotional without big outside factors, pick this one up. But I warn you, you’ll walk away from this book different from when you went in.