Where to Start with Colleen Hoover: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Colleen Hoover — whether to begin with It Ends with Us, Ugly Love, or Reminders of Him. A complete reading guide to her best novels.
Colleen Hoover (born 1979) is the American romance and women’s fiction author who is among the most widely read novelists of the 2020s — her books have sold over twenty million copies and sparked the ‘BookTok’ phenomenon on TikTok. She began as a self-published author in 2012 and became a phenomenon through word of mouth, particularly among younger women readers. Her novels typically combine contemporary romance with serious emotional subject matter (domestic violence, grief, addiction, trauma), which distinguishes them from pure genre romance and accounts for their unusual crossover appeal. It Ends with Us is her most celebrated novel and the one that brought her to mainstream critical attention; she has published more than twenty novels in total.
Where to Start: It Ends with Us (2016)
The essential Colleen Hoover — and the novel that made her famous beyond the romance community. Lily Bloom has built a new life in Boston, far from the small town where she grew up watching her mother absorb her father’s cruelty and call it love. She meets Ryle Kincaid — confident, intense, beautiful — and despite his stated refusal to have relationships, they fall into each other. Then Atlas Corrigan reappears: her first love, the homeless boy she sheltered as a teenager, who has made his own life in Boston.
The novel deals directly and unflinchingly with domestic abuse: the pattern of it, the normalisation of it, the love that exists alongside it, and the decision to end it. Hoover has spoken about drawing on her own mother’s experience. The emotional seriousness with which it handles this subject — without turning the novel into a polemic — is what separates It Ends with Us from its genre and makes it the most important book in Hoover’s catalog.
Ugly Love (2014)
Hoover’s most structurally inventive novel and the most emotionally intense romance. Tate Collins, a nursing student, moves into her brother’s apartment and encounters his neighbour Miles Archer — a pilot whose physical presence overwhelms her and who offers her a clear-eyed deal: no questions about the past, no conversation about feelings, no possibility of a future. Just what they have now.
The novel alternates between Tate’s present and Miles’s past (narrated in a more fragmented, poetic voice from six years earlier), gradually revealing the loss that closed him. The two timelines converge in a revelation that recontextualises everything. If It Ends with Us is Hoover’s most morally serious novel, Ugly Love is her most emotionally devastating romance.
Reminders of Him (2022)
Hoover’s most heartbreaking novel — following Kenna Rowan as she returns to the town where she grew up after serving a prison sentence for a car accident that killed the father of her daughter. Her daughter Diem, four years old, is being raised by the father’s parents (the Landrys), who blame Kenna and will not allow her access. Kenna takes a job to stay close to her daughter, meets Ledger Ward at his bar, and tries to rebuild a life in a community that believes the worst of her.
The novel’s central situation — a mother separated from her child by grief and blame — is handled with emotional generosity on all sides: the Landrys are not villains; Kenna is not a victim; and the love story that develops is complicated by the very real competing claims of loyalty and forgiveness.
Heart Bones (2020)
Hoover’s quietest novel — a coming-of-age story about Beyah, a teenager from poverty who spends one summer at a beachside community in Texas while her father recovers from addiction. She falls for Samson, the boy next door, whose circumstances are entirely different from hers. The novel is a study in class and privilege rendered through a romance, and it is Hoover’s most restrained and most quietly moving work.
Reading Colleen Hoover
Hoover’s fiction is distinguished from pure genre romance by her willingness to use romantic plots to examine genuinely difficult emotional and social situations — abuse, grief, addiction, the aftermath of trauma — with honesty and compassion. Her prose is direct and accessible; her emotional intelligence is genuine; and her understanding of what her readers want (the intensity of romantic feeling, the satisfaction of emotional resolution) coexists with a willingness to complicate that satisfaction. Begin with It Ends with Us for the most important and the most emotionally serious; read Ugly Love for the most intense romance; approach Reminders of Him for the most purely heartbreaking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Colleen Hoover?
It Ends with Us (2016) is both the most celebrated and the most important starting point — the novel in which Lily Bloom, who has built a new life in Boston after escaping her small-town origins, falls in love with a neurosurgeon named Ryle, and must eventually face a pattern in their relationship that echoes what she witnessed between her parents growing up. It is Hoover's most emotionally serious novel, her most widely read, and the book that brought her to mainstream attention after years of self-publishing and indie success. Ugly Love is the best alternative for readers who want Hoover's most emotionally intense romance.
What is It Ends with Us about?
It Ends with Us (2016) follows Lily Bloom, a young woman from Plethora, Maine, who has moved to Boston and opened a floral shop. She meets Ryle Kincaid, a neurosurgeon — intense, confident, and seemingly perfect — and falls for him despite his stated resistance to relationships. Their relationship is complicated by the reappearance of Atlas Corrigan, Lily's first love from childhood, and by the emergence of a pattern in Ryle's behaviour that Lily has to decide what to do about. The novel deals directly with the cycle of domestic abuse and what it means to love someone who hurts you; it is more emotionally serious and more morally complex than a conventional romance.
What is Ugly Love about?
Ugly Love (2014) follows Tate Collins, a nursing student who moves in with her brother and falls into a friends-with-benefits arrangement with his neighbour Miles Archer, a pilot. Miles is clear about the terms: no feelings, no past, no future. The novel alternates between Tate's present-day narration and Miles's first-person chapters from six years earlier, which gradually reveal the event that shaped him. It is Hoover's most structurally interesting novel — the two timelines converge at an emotionally devastating point — and the most straightforwardly romantic of her major works.
What is Reminders of Him about?
Reminders of Him (2022) follows Kenna Rowan, a young woman who returns to the small town where she grew up after serving a prison sentence for a crime connected to the death of her daughter's father. She wants to reconnect with her four-year-old daughter Diem, who is being raised by the father's parents — but the town, and the family, are hostile to her presence. She meets Ledger Ward, who works at the bar he owns and who has complicated connections to the people she is trying to reach. One of Hoover's most emotionally affecting novels.
