A review by jessamess
It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

1.0

I swore I would never read another one of her books again, but I decided to read it because I had to know what this book was actually like since it’s gotten so much praise on Booktok. Funnily enough it’s very clearly written purely because of the popularity of It Ends With Us on Tiktok. First and foremost, this book is full of regurgitated passages from It Ends With Us, and flashbacks to scenes we had in the first book. So much of this book is repeated content and that alone makes it completely unnecessary. Second, I spent so much time skimming this that I don’t even know if I can say I truly read it. It was just the same nagging storytelling of any other CoHo book. The woman is sad and damaged and a man comes along to fix her by doing the bare minimum that a partner should do. At least It Ends With Us had some kind of emotional storyline. It Starts With Us takes the same story from the first book and tries to make it a “new” perspective. I get that abuse is a cycle and I get that it’s not easy to break out of it, but if you want to write about that, do it. Don’t make these romance books about a man being the hero to the story, make them stories about the reality of living in a cycle of abuse. No part of abuse is romantic, even if a man swoops in to “save you”. 
TLDR: It Starts With Us is so much of the same story we hear in It Ends With Us that it’s not even worth opening the book. A relationship isn’t going to save you from abuse or break the cycle. Atlas is not the hero here.
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