Verity

 By Colleen Hoover

Grand Central     2021

336  pages     Thriller

Well, now I have read a Colleen Hoover book after seeing her name on the NY Times bestseller list in four slots in one week. What kind of magic is she spinning? My friend and I decided to try out one of her books to see for ourselves what was going on. So, we chose Verity. Was this choice a big mistake, or are all of her books this outrageous? Don’t know because this is the only one I have read and probably the only one I will read.

Here is a synopsis of the plot as written by a Goodreads reviewer: "Lowen Ashleigh is set free from the long tedium of her daily life when she’s employed by Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in a popular series his wife, Verity, is unable to finish due to an unfortunate accident. Lowe acquiesces in the spirit of hope: that this opportunity would help her acquire some small measure of celebrity and that celebrity would be oxygen to the fire of her career. But nothing prepares Lowen for Verity’s autobiography, which she accidentally stumbles upon one day. For the horror of it. Verity’s secrets paint a different picture of what Lowen thought she knew of Verity, Jeremy, and their lives together. But sooner or later, as these things often go, the whole truth will spill, and the fraught waiting in-between would come to an end, with havoc and screaming and loss."

Yeah, so…. I didn’t like the character of Lowen very much. I felt that her thoughts were poorly developed. She spent more time lusting after Jeremy than she did developing the books that she was hired to do. Should she tell Jeremy how evil Verity was—or was Jeremy just as evil? The chapters she read of Verity’s autobiography are just as confusing as are the actions of the supposedly comatose woman in the bed upstairs. But I kept reading!

Verity’s autobiography discovered by Lowen is horrifying. She spends more time writing about the sex she has with Jeremy than she does on the death of her daughters. I hated Verity for that. But I kept reading!

The plot is sickening, primarily because it deals with the deaths of twin sisters, one perhaps killing the other as very young girls.  Did this really happen?  But I kept reading. And why does Lowen see Verity sneaking around the house and nobody else does—including her nurse and her husband? But I kept reading until I got to the mind-bending ending.

Then once I finished the book, I discovered that Hoover had written an epilogue of sorts in the days following the publishing of Verity, which caused book lovers to have to buy another copy to read the additional chapter. Very smooth marketing move! So everyone kept reading!

I’m not sure that I will read another Colleen Hoover book. I told the friend who was reading with me that this book was f….. up, and she responded that it was ridiculous, obnoxious, and far-fetched. So why did I keep reading? It may be that this is the attraction with Colleen Hoover books—we just keep reading!

If you are trying to decide if you want to read Verity, look at the reviews in Goodreads. They are all over the place, and there are thousands of them. Wow! And therein is why she is on the bestseller list. Everyone just keeps reading!