“There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things.” 

 Colleen Hoover penned this line which, out of context, seems like a fair assessment of any situation. Yet in the context of her novel, It Ends With Us, it becomes a monumentally irresponsible sentiment to disseminate among her (often young) readers. It’s a small example of her efforts to pardon the behaviour of Ryle, the love interest-turned-husband of the protagonist Lily Bloom, but his actions aren’t of the excusable variety. “What,” you may ask, “did this male lead do?” Well, if you had taken a guess, I’d bet the answer wouldn’t be graphically sexually assaulting his wife, knocking her unconscious, and repeatedly beating her to the point of her needing to go to the hospital. (Spoilers) His actions are the whole reason why the average reader cheered when she left him at the end of the book. Yet Ryle, as a violent and sexually abusive monster, is given an undeserved benefit of doubt and allowed to have custody of their daughter, and this decision is treated like it was the right thing to do. And since Lily leaves him and ends up with Atlas, her childhood crush and the most perfect man ever (minus the tiny detail that he had sex with her while she was a minor), the decision to leave Ryle is portrayed as a choice between the two men instead of her choosing to leave for herself. Hoover’s writing glorifies the abuser whilst weakening the female character’s development. 

 This isn’t uncommon in the young adult genre now. Many other authors make similar efforts to portray the toxicity of abuse and end up romanticising it instead. DomesticShelters.org has a great article going in depth into It Ends With Us and the damage of these portrayals, especially since they’re becoming more common, but what really concerns me is the impressionability of the people reading them. “Young Adult” as a genre typically aims at ages 12-18, but I’d argue that the appropriate age range for books like Hoover’s or Sarah J. Maas (whose books were and arguably still are marketed as YA, although they’ve been reclassified as New Adult), are more for the 16+ market. “New Adult” is a much more recently defined genre, so it’s often grouped in with YA, which means that the reclassification of books like Maas’s A Court Of Thorns And Roses (ACOTAR) doesn’t mean much by way of the audience exposed to it. And to be clear, I am stating that my concern is with the audience, and I’m not trying to advocate for the censorship of books like these. 

 All too frequently are authors like Hoover and Maas (and Yarros, and Mafi, etc) discounted from conversation because they’re “feminine fodder.” I despise this reasoning. I think authors in the YA genre are worthy of discussion, but that also means that they are worthy of criticism. What I mean is: I’m not saying Hoover’s books are bad because they’re pandering to women or self-indulgent; I’m saying they’re bad because they undermine every feminist point she poorly attempts to make. It leads directly into my concern with her audience, who are too typically young and lack the experience and understanding to realize how disturbing Hoover’s message is. It’s not like Hoover does anything to mitigate this either, as she’s been very open about her decision not to label her books with content warnings. To me, that’s irresponsible. Many parents buy her books for their preteen children because they’re in the YA section, and if your bookish child comes up to you in Waterstones with a flowery novel, advertised as a romance, with no content warnings in the front pages, then you couldn’t be blamed for not being suspicious of it. 

 That’s how 12 to 14-year-olds end up reading about graphic sexual assault without any critical lens through which to view it. They cannot read about Ryle’s actions and understand the horrific reality, so are more likely to believe that he should have been forgiven. Or worse, that his chilling statement about needing to do it to “prove how much I love you,” is romantic. It’s a concerning thing to see in the Goodreads reviews as I scroll through and see the arguments about why Ryle was going through a hard time, and why he’s still a good person. Or why Rhysand from ACOTAR was right not to tell his wife about the risk of her dying due to her pregnancy because he didn’t want her to terminate it despite the threat to her life. A thousand examples of the glorification of not just toxic relationships, but the romanticisation of the abusers themselves, pile up in the reviews of books in the YA genre. It worries me how many of them are attached to profile pictures of girls in school uniforms. 

Photo Credit: Unsplash