I’d like to start off this review with this disaster from Colleen Hoover’s acknowledgements: “I’m sorry the ARCs for this particular book were such a hot mess. That happens when you don’t finish the book until four days before release. I will do better next time, I promise.”

To see that this book was not finished until four days before the release makes a lot of sense (more commentary on that later). I will not be criticizing CH’s writing, mostly because I have nothing nice to say.

VERITY is rife with bland characters and plot holes while having plot points that make NO sense. Seriously - the story opens with Lowen witnessing a man get run over by a car in the streets, and THAT is the story’s meet-cute. Which, by the way, has NO plot significance other than being NoT LiKe OtHeR MeEt CuTeS. Seriously. I thought this would wind up being an oh, shit! Jeremy’s the one who killed him to get Lowen’s attention! But no. It opens with a head exploding onto Lowen’s shirt for no reason other than “why not.” It doesn’t even impact her emotionally, not really, other than being a bit frazzled. WTF.

Here’s where I want to pause about what I wanted this to be about instead. I walked into VERITY hoping for GONE GIRL meets MISERY. I’m a sucker for psychological thrillers, unreliable narrators, and complex and unlikeable women. Based on the summary, I figured this would be about a woman who’s grappling with her own baggage and not-so-stellar writing career. I expected it would be about a woman taking over the manuscript of another writer’s novel, a writer who was driven mad by the dark contents of her stories about “villains”, who would slowly slip into insanity/evilness over the course of finishing this writer’s manuscript. As Verity’s complicated identity with being a mother starts to surface, I figured PPD and the difficulties of moving around your whole life for children would be the contributing factor.

Yeah, this book isn’t about that at all.

Lowen is your quintessential Mary Sue who has no personality aside from thirsting over Jeremy and being nosy. She has no emotional depth and thinks about Verity’s book and sex and Verity and Jeremy having sex and also having sex with Jeremy. Her stream of consciousness is so abysmal that I wouldn’t be surprised if CH keyboard smashed the entire draft to submit it four (4) days before the release date with zero developmental editing.

For a book about a writer who’s supposed to write a book, there is, like, NO WRITING actually happening. In fact, Lowen spends the entire book NOT writing (she puts together an outline and submits it at one point) and instead reading Verity’s titled autobiography (extremely slowly, I might add). NONE OF US EVEN KNOW WHAT VERITY’S BOOKS ARE ABOUT. We are told her writing is “GOOD. REALLY GOOD” (paraphrased) and that Verity is SUPER SUCCESSFUL and writes about “villains.” THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE ABOUT VERITY’S WRITING. She’s just Good. REALLY GOOD. So you should also think that she is VERY GOOD.

The huge irony is that we actually get to read Verity’s writing through her autobiography and let me tell you: Verity is NOT really good. I guess that makes Lowen an unreliable narrator? But not because she’s actually unreliable. I think she just has bad taste.

Jeremy is no better. If Lowen is a Mary Sue, Jeremy is Martin Steve. He is depicted as being a hot and incredibly caring father when in reality he’s doing the bare fucking minimum????? Men shouldn’t be praised for taking their kid to the hospital when they’re hurt or getting them ready for bed. THAT’S WHEN THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO. His only personality is he’s a good dad! He’s a good man! He’s hot! Oh and BTW he’s SUCH a caring husband for hiring a nurse to take care of his catatonic wife and taking over a few hours a day.

Anyone who found Jeremy to be a heartthrob….love urself. You deserve to have higher expectations for men.

The plot also made NO SENSE. It’s like CH used a random prompt generator or typed into ChatGPT “give me a random plot point to add into my thriller novel”. Lowen basically spends her time reading, bonding (thirsting) (fucking) with Jeremy, and being suspicious of Verity. She’s also supposed to be a chronic sleepwalker but the only way this contributes to the plot is that Jeremy installs a lock on the OUTSIDE of her door????? There are some eerie moments with Verity but TBH I found them far and few between! And Jeremy and Lowen’s bland personalities washed out just how eerie they’re supposed to be! I’m trying to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible, but holy mother freaking shit. I’m inclined to believe that CH simply does not understand the human psyche. Or, like, how humans function. Because some of these plot twists could work if you explore the emotional repercussions of them. But there ISN’T any. The story is told to us with the emotional inflection of someone reading an IKEA instruction manual. To name the very first instance that isn’t too spoiler-y: Crew (five-year-old son) talks about how Verity tells him things. You mean to tell me this ENTIRE TIME, he doesn’t mention this to Jeremy AT ALL, and Jeremy CONTINUES TO BELIEVE VERITY IS ACTUALLY A VEGETABLE??? Jesus Christ. The plot is not, in fact, plotting.

And, my final commentary: the letter is a fucking cop out.

0.5/5 stars