It Starts With Us, over its 37 chapters, follows Lily and Atlas, and how fate and circumstances ultimately worked to their advantage, bringing these two lovers back together.
This is a narrative about how Lily and Atlas finally make it through a second chance at love after leaving her former husband, Ryle, and raising their daughter, Emerson. It Starts With Us is not an end for their story, since they have still got the rest of their lives to go, even Ryle. At the center of the story is Lily Bloom, a young mother a year removed from her physical and emotional abuse in marriage with her ex-husband Ryle.
The single mom is still running a florist; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still working as a surgeon. We watch as Lily Bloom begins a new relationship with long-lost lover Atlas Corrigan, enraging her ex-husband, Ryle. A love triangle is also developed as old friend Atlas Corrigan returns to florist Lily Blooms life.
As questions over Lilys new relationships consume her, thoughts about Atlas Corrigan who is her first love, and the connection to her past that she left behind, also arise. When her first love reappears in my life, Lily’s main character Ryle begins to spiral down, leaving Lily riven with complicated circumstances and an eventual decision on whether or not to stay.
As their love grows deeper, Lily begins to question her relationship with Ryle, as well as thinking of her first love, Atlas Corrigan, the homeless guy who made her feel protected. When the single mother meets Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who is also from a violent home, she hopes that their friendship will blossom into love.
Lilly and her ex-husband, Ryle, have just settled into their normal co-parenting groove when suddenly, she runs into her first love, Atlas, once more. Even when Lilly finds out Lily is an exception to his “no dating rules,” she cannot help wondering what made him this way in the first place.
It Starts With Us is not a book about sadness. It shows more of Atlas’s background, and follows Lilly, as Lily accepts her second chance at real love, navigating a former husband, it shows No One delivers a heart-warming read quite like Colleen Hoover.
While it may sometimes be revealing and frightening, especially when we are following a character like Lily Bloom, her new book affirms the feelings and thoughts of survivors of violence all over the world, as well as praises their strength.
