Is It Starts With Us a Prequel, a Sequel, or a Spin-Off?
It Starts With Us is confirmed as a direct sequel to It Ends With Us, continuing Lily Bloom’s story roughly five years after the first book closes. It is not a prequel and it is not a stand-alone spin off featuring unrelated characters.
The confusion around this makes sense once you look at how the sequel is structured. It Ends With Us stays entirely in Lily’s head, but It Starts With Us splits time between Lily and Atlas Corrigan, her first love. That alternating perspective can read like the start of a brand new story, especially if you go in without knowing it’s connected. Add in a multi year time jump, and it’s easy to see why one Reddit thread had a reader asking whether the second book even came before the first.
It Ends With Us vs It Starts With Us: Key Facts Compared
The two books differ across timeline, perspective, and central focus, and laying them side by side clears up most of the confusion in one glance.
| Category | It Ends With Us (2016) | It Starts With Us (2022) |
|---|---|---|
| Point of View | Lily only | Lily and Atlas, alternating |
| Timeline | Present day, Lily’s early adulthood | Roughly five years later |
| Central Conflict | Lily’s abusive marriage to Ryle | Lily and Atlas rebuilding a relationship while Ryle remains part of her life as her ex |
| Tone | Heavy, focused on cycles of abuse | Lighter, romance-forward with lingering emotional weight |
| Genre Focus | Domestic drama with romance elements | Second-chance romance with drama elements |
What’s the Actual Plot Difference Between the Two Books?
The Spoiler-Free Version
The biggest structural change is the added point of view. Instead of experiencing everything through Lily’s eyes, the sequel gives Atlas a full voice, which reshapes how the reader understands his choices instead of only seeing him through Lily’s perspective. Combined with the multi year jump forward, the sequel functions less like a continuation of the same story and more like the second half of Lily’s life.
[SPOILERS] What Changes for Lily, Ryle, and Atlas
Ryle doesn’t disappear after the first book. He remains part of the story as Lily’s co-parent, and the sequel spends real time on how that dynamic works once the marriage is over and a child is involved. That alone shifts the emotional center of gravity away from the abuse arc that defined the first book.
Atlas’s storyline introduces a subplot involving vandalism at his restaurant, tied to unresolved history from his past. Reader reaction to how that subplot resolves has been mixed. In an April 2023 review for aahsmountainecho, writer Megan Shultz argued the subplot felt underdeveloped compared to the emotional weight of the main relationship. That’s one specific reader’s take, not a universal verdict, but it captures a real split in how the sequel’s secondary plot landed.
Why It Starts With Us Feels Like a Different Kind of Book
It Starts With Us reads differently because it is doing a different job. Where It Ends With Us centers on Lily surviving and leaving an abusive marriage, the sequel centers on whether Lily can build something healthy with Atlas after everything that happened. That’s a fundamental shift from survival narrative to second-chance romance.
This tonal pivot is also why the sequel works better as relationship psychology than as trauma narrative. If you’re the kind of reader who finished the first book thinking hard about what healthy versus unhealthy relationship dynamics actually look like, that instinct is worth following further. It’s the same instinct behind recognizing unhealthy relationship patterns long before they turn into something as dramatic as a Colleen Hoover plot.
Should You Read It Starts With Us or It Ends With Us First?
Read It Ends With Us first. There is no legitimate alternate order here, since the sequel assumes full knowledge of how the first book ends, including Lily’s marriage, her decision to leave Ryle, and the birth of her daughter.
Starting with It Starts With Us would mean walking into a story already missing its entire emotional foundation. The sequel references specific events from the first book without re-explaining them, so reading out of order isn’t a stylistic choice, it’s a comprehension problem.
Do You Need to Read It Ends With Us Before It Starts With Us?
Yes, and it’s required rather than optional. It Starts With Us leaves multiple plot threads from the first book unresolved on purpose, expecting the reader to already carry that context in.
Character relationships, especially the custody dynamic between Lily and Ryle, only make sense with the backstory the first book provides. Skipping ahead would mean missing the setup for nearly every major decision Lily makes in the sequel.
It Ends With Us and It Starts With Us Movies: What’s Confirmed vs. Rumored
The confirmed piece of information at the time of this writing is that It Ends With Us has already been adapted into a feature film. Any claims about a specific release date, cast, or production status for a follow-up film based on It Starts With Us should currently be treated as reported or unconfirmed rather than official, since studio confirmation on a sequel film had not been independently verified as of this writing.
If you’re trying to plan around a movie release, the safest move is to treat anything beyond the first film’s existence as speculation until an official studio source confirms it. This is one of those cases where a bold headline is easy to write and hard to verify.
FAQ
Should I read It Starts With Us or It Ends With Us first?
Read It Ends With Us first. It Starts With Us is a direct sequel that assumes you already know how Lily’s marriage to Ryle ends, and it references events from the first book without re-explaining them. Reading out of order will leave you missing context for nearly every major decision Lily and Atlas make in the second book.
Is It Starts With Us a sequel or a prequel?
It Starts With Us is a sequel, not a prequel. It picks up roughly five years after It Ends With Us ends and follows Lily as she manages co-parenting with Ryle and rebuilds a relationship with Atlas. It does not go backward in time to fill in earlier events.
What’s the main difference between It Ends With Us and It Starts With Us?
The biggest difference is focus and point of view. It Ends With Us centers on Lily surviving an abusive marriage, told entirely from her perspective. It Starts With Us shifts toward a second-chance romance with Atlas, told from both Lily’s and Atlas’s alternating points of view.
What’s the saddest Colleen Hoover book?
This is genuinely subjective and heavily debated among readers, so there’s no single correct answer. It Ends With Us is frequently cited as her heaviest book due to its domestic violence storyline, but readers regularly nominate other titles depending on which subplot hit them hardest. Treat any ranking here as reader opinion, not consensus.
Do I need to read the whole Colleen Hoover universe to understand It Starts With Us?
No. You only need to have read It Ends With Us, since It Starts With Us is a direct sequel to that specific book rather than a crossover tied to Hoover’s wider catalog. Other Colleen Hoover titles are stand-alone stories and won’t affect your understanding of this particular pair.
The one thing worth carrying out of this comparison is that “which book is which” was never actually the hard question. The real distinction is that these two books are doing different emotional jobs, one about surviving a relationship and one about deciding whether to try again, and that’s what makes reading them out of order feel so disorienting.
If you’ve already read both and want the full breakdown of how Lily and Atlas’s story actually wraps up, the ending explained is the natural next stop. And if you’re trying to figure out where this pair lands against the rest of her catalog, Colleen Hoover books ranked will settle that argument fast.
