It Ends With Us

Лидия Пинчук

Have you ever cried while reading a book? Have you ever compared yourself with the main character? If only it was a comparison with a flukey story and a happy girl, if only women cried from happiness... The book "It ends with us" is a massive workpiece based on real-life events. The author, Colleen Hoover, explains the purpose of this confession, and she gets the truth off her chest by telling that she suffered from an abusive relationship in her own family. It is a love story about choosing oneself over someone they love deeply. It is a story of a young girl Lily Bloom who found herself in a circle of violence and realised domestic abuse must never happen to her again. A 23-year-old college graduate comes back to Boston from her father's funeral. She meets a handsome man and eventually falls in love. Bloom’s relationship with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid gets complicated as he becomes jealous after learning that Lily's first love gets in touch with her. The author keeps readers hooked the entire time, and the reader can hear some whisperings: "Lily, do not do that! You should never see him again! You have to leave him"! How many times do good advice work for others? The thing is that nobody can feel the pain the same way while reading the book and nobody can be sure how to react or what to do. I was crying over and over as I know how hard it is, to be honest with others and especially to face the problem yourself by telling everything out loud. "If you were in Lily's position what would you have done?" - this confusing question appears at the end of the book but nobody wants to be or even imagine herself in that position. Nobody can say the decision another person makes is right or wrong and we can't judge anyone who could not "just leave this person". An abusive relationship is hard to be admitted and from the first chapters I realised Colleen couldn't make it up. It doesn't change the perspective of the book, but it does help those who are suffering from domestic violence right now. The astronomical amount of pain and courage of the story reflects a heartbreakingly necessary ending. 376 page - that’s all it takes to completely change a familiar pattern. 35 chapters - that's all it takes to disrupt a victim's behavior.