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The bestseller charts of the summer months were full of mysteries, as always, but the second-best novel, at least as far as July is concerned, in this case is of a different genre or colour: it’s the pink It Ends With Us by American novelist Colleen Hoover, which has sold almost a hundred thousand copies.
It was published in the United States in 2016, but in the last two years it has been bought again and read a lot thanks to the advice shared on TikTok, the social network that more than any other has managed to create a clearly recognizable and to have relevant impact on book sales: 768,700 copies of the novel were sold in 2021, 18 times more than in 2020; In total, more than 3 million copies were sold. And given that TikTok’s influence on publishing is international, the renewed success of It Ends With Us was quickly reflected in Italy, where publisher Sperling & Kupfer chose not to translate the title to ensure familiarity with TikTok users to exploit with the English.
In some ways, It Ends With Us is similar to so many other romance novels that often contain the same clichés. It tells of a love story between an intelligent but somewhat lonely young woman and a charming man with a brilliant career. It is written in a very simple style, contains didactic descriptions and numerous sex scenes – in the past it would have been called “daring”, today rose lovers and TikTok users say “hot”. To give you a rough idea, this is the first description protagonist and narrator Lily makes of Ryle, the man with whom she will start a love story:
I can’t help but notice how cute he is.
no Cute is an insult.
It is wonderful. Well-groomed hands, well-groomed air, several years older than me. She narrows the corners of her eyes as she follows me with her gaze and appears to purse her lips unknowingly. Reaching the street-facing side of the building, I lean forward and stare at the cars, showing indifference. One look at his haircut is enough to realize he’s the kind of man who loves to impress people and I refuse to feed his ego. He hasn’t actually done anything because he’s considered vain, but he’s wearing a Burberry shirt and I don’t think I’ve ever caught the eye of anyone who could afford one.
The Italian cover of “It Ends With Us” on the left, the American cover on the right: the graphics have been preserved along with the title
In other respects, It Ends With Us stands out from novels of the same genre and has some characteristics that probably help explain its success on TikTok. In short: it makes you cry.
This is in fact the main feature of all the novels that have been the most popular to date on BookTok, the informal section of the social network dedicated to books, whether they are books with a very simple and accessible style or you have literary qualities like A Life Like Many by Hanya Yanagihara, published in Italian by Sellerio.
Often the most successful content on BookTok is not reviews, but videos in which users – especially for Colleen Hoover’s novels and for their fans, the so-called “Cohorts”, the feminine plural is more precise – show their reactions during and at the end of reading: emotions are the focus of experiencing and sharing, and they seem to work more when they are strong, accompanied by tears, swollen and red eyes, or even sobs. Judging from this content, one gets the impression that young women who read a lot and like to talk about it online are mostly looking for sad books, an escape to suffering.
@ kierralewis75 #itendswithus #itendswithusmovie #colleenhooverbooks #bookrec #bookclub ♬ Original sound – Kierra Lewis
It Ends With Us – below there will be some plot spoilers essential to explain why the novel makes you cry and why it is therefore particularly appreciated on TikTok – is also a tale of domestic violence. Lily’s father was a violent man toward his wife, and by the end of the novel, Ryle, the beauty in the Burberry shirt, is revealed to be one too: but only after Lily has married him and become pregnant with him.
The really dramatic part of the novel has a particularly strong effect on the reader because it arrives after more than 200 pages: only in the last third of the book does it emerge that Ryle is violent and Lily is faced with difficult decisions of her own. There are only romantic ones Idyll and the main difficulty the protagonist faces seems to be convincing Ryle to enter into a stable relationship with her. The TikTok videos, which collect the impressions of the readers as they read on, show how these suddenly change in the last part of the book.
@ book.addicted I was totally shocked 😍 I didn’t expect to like it so much 😍 #itendswithus #leggoereagisco #fyp #perte #neiperte #booktok #booktokitalia #romancebooks #colleenhoover ♬ MAMMA MIA SCENE 5 – Owen Kelley
Hoover thought this structure strategically, you can say: he wants the readers to identify with Lily (who, like many other protagonists of Pink, has no particular depth as a character) and how she falls in love with Ryle, then share the big dilemma, that at the end of the novel she has to decide whether or not to leave her daughter’s husband and father. As the author explains in a note at the end of the book, the plot of It Ends With Us is inspired by the story of Hoover’s parents: Her mother abandoned her father when she was only three years old because he beat her.
By structuring the novel in this way, Hoover wanted to show people with no experience of domestic violence how difficult it can be to leave a loved one who has been violent. The title is actually an indication of the ending, and encapsulates the message Hoover wants to convey: a story of domestic violence ends when the woman suffering from it manages to end the relationship. The Italian subtitle “We are the ones who say enough” is a good non-literal translation; the plural refers to Lily and her daughter, not she and Ryle as one might think in the first part of the novel.
However, we must not think that It Ends With Us is a realistic depiction of domestic violence cases: Ryle only attacks Lily once, but the protagonist is enough to remove him thanks to the memory of his mother’s experience. In reality this is hardly the case. Ryle is kind of a Dr. Jekill / Mr. Hyde: He immediately realizes that he has ruined his relationship with his wife, tries to ask forgiveness and make things right, he is no longer aggressive and willingly accepts the divorce. The ending of the novel isn’t exactly a happy ending, but the characters seem to have found a balance that works.
Colleen Hoover in 2013 with some copies of her first novels: The debut novel “Slammed” was initially self-published (AP Photo / LM Otero)
According to Laura Miller, a Slate critic who analyzed the huge success of Hoover’s books in the United States and on TikTok, “A happy ending is a romance novelist’s main expectation, an expectation that reflects the fallacious romance that some women are drawn to.” abusive partners remain bound” and ‘when Lily ends her marriage, she breaks the conventions of the genre.’ Along with the presence of incredibly dramatic experiences for all the protagonists, this aspect of the unexpected is another hallmark of Hoover’s novels – and not just about It Ends With Us – that set them apart from the pinks and make them particularly exciting. Mueller writes:
I think I got the secret of Hoover’s success: his books are very effective mechanisms for getting a maximum dose of a mix of things that different people like: love stories, naughty smut, plots centered around trauma, soap tear work and narrative twists.
Other Hoover books are also selling well in the US during this period: it was 15 in the top 150 best sellers for the first week of August – Hoover has written 22 in total since 2012. In Italy in July only Alle Your Perfects, also published by Sperling & Kupfer and published in March as It Ends With Us, appeared among the hundred best-selling books. However, it is likely that Hoover will continue to see himself on the charts in the near future, also because October will see the release of the American edition of It Starts With Us, the sequel or prequel (it’s not clear) to It Ends With Us released. And sooner or later there will be a movie too.
– Also read: The fixation on the trauma in every story