It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This entire book felt like mindless drivel, and I do not throw around that accusation lightly. I unashamedly enjoy a lot of frivolous nonsense. But even the most outlandish, melodramatic, eye-roll-inducing bodice rippers have more eventful plots than this boring, redundant rubbish.

Hoover wrote in a note at the end that she never intended to make a sequel to It Ends with Us . It Starts with Us was ultimately written as a gift to her fans, and it shows. It reads like a subpar fanfiction of its predecessor rather than a standalone, story-driven, published novel. I think you would have to be obsessed with the first book and its characters to power through the mind-numbing inanity of a paragraph like this:

“I can barely work social media, much less keep up with slang. I swear, I’m the most out-of-touch millennial I know. It’s as if I skipped right over Gen X and into Boomer territory. I’m a Boomer millennial. A boolennnial. Hell, my mother is a Boomer and probably knows more about these things than I do. She’s the one with a new boyfriend. I should call her and ask for pointers.”

I felt like I had to trudge through a billion vapid passages like this before I finally made it to the finish line. Not to mention the seemingly endless repetitive thoughts... “I don’t care what Ryle thinks even though I waste all my time caring about what Ryle thinks. Yada yada yada. All I want is for Atlas to @#&* me right now. Yada yada yada. The only thing I care about is my daughter even though it feels like I spend all my time caring about everybody except my daughter. Yada yada yada.”

In addition to the monotonous repetition, a few derisive contradictions were sprinkled throughout It Starts with Us. I kid you not, these three sentences were written back-to-back:

“There’s no excuse good enough to walk away from your son. There’s this toxic belief that family should stick together simply because they’re family. But the best thing I ever did for myself was walk away from them.”

I understand that parent-to-child and child-to-parent relationships are vastly different things. But it’s laughable idiocy to basically write, “There’s no excuse to leave your family. Leaving my family was the best thing I ever did.”

To be clear, while I did not absolutely love It Ends with Us, I did enjoy it overall. I liked (emphasis on the past tense) Lily and Atlas as characters. Although I thought—and think more so now—Atlas only existed as a one-dimensional stock male character to serve as the antithesis of Ryle. I didn’t like either Lily or Atlas enough to appreciate a separate book about nothing other than their unrealistic idolization of each other. Their constant gushing nauseated me. And that is from someone who has read a fair share of cheesy, smutty romance books, so I can assure you that the gushiness levels are exponential.

There were no stakes in It Starts with Us. It was just a book of asinine balderdash.

If you adore the first book beyond all reason, you might like this one. If not, learn from my mistake instead of wasting your time.

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.