I’m giving this book 4.5 stars. I didn’t enjoy the first few chapters of the book only because I thought their lines were so cheesy and I cringed a lot at how fast paced Lily and Ryle’s romance was. Everything was happening too fast and I didn’t have enough time to get drawn to any of the characters except maybe for Atlas - I always had a good feeling about him and knew from the start that Ryle was a bad idea. At first I thought this was going to be a cliché romance book, but now that I have read the full story, I just let out a big heavy sigh because I was so wrong! A lot of personal, familial, relational issues were tackled. It started out like a very cheesy kind of immature story, then redeemed itself in ways you would’ve never expected when you just started reading it. Seeing the bigger picture now, I love how CoHo brought light to this kind of story and added so much meaningful weight to it because this may be a work of fiction but it’s inspired by reality. Love is a real thing, but so is abuse, and I never realized the stigma that surrounds ‘the abused’ in abusive relationships until CoHo decided to break it with this book. Now more than ever, I have a deeper respect and compassion for the people who go through what Lily went through.