Hello friends, welcome back to another book review! Today I am back with one of my 2024 reads, like I’ve said in my previous review, upcoming few reviews will be from my old reads so that I do not forget anything about these books and I have something to return back to when I want to. think of it as memory keeping per say. Let’s get into the review, shall we?
I loved this book. When I say that I loved it, I loved it madly. There was something about Verity that felt like it was constantly walking on the borders of sickness and complete craze, and somehow I was completely fascinated by it. I went into this expecting a thriller, but I think what I enjoyed most was how uncomfortable the whole thing made me. It wasn’t just about trying to figure out what happened, it was about slowly realizing that none of these people were really what they seemed to be, and the more I learned about them, the less I trusted anyone.
Before getting into the actual book, I do want to say something because apparently every Colleen Hoover review nowadays has to come with some sort of disclaimer. I genuinely do not care about the drama surrounding the author. I’ve mentioned this in my previous reviews of Colleen Hoover’s books as well, but there is so much BookTok drama around absolutely everything these days that I honestly just want to stay away from all of it. I am not interested in discussing the author, the internet arguments, or what people think about her outside of the books. I am here to read the story, talk about the characters, talk about the plot, and decide what I personally thought about it. That’s it.
The story follows Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer who gets offered what should be an incredible opportunity when she is asked to finish the bestselling book series of Verity Crawford, a hugely successful author who has been left unable to write after a serious accident. Lowen goes to Verity’s house to look through her notes and unfinished work so that she can continue the series, and honestly, from the moment she arrives at that house, there is something that feels wrong. Verity herself is supposedly incapable of communicating properly after her accident, Jeremy is grieving the loss of his daughters, and the entire house feels like it is carrying something rotten underneath all the normal family tragedy.
Then Lowen finds the manuscript.
And this is where the book completely changes for me. What she finds isn’t simply an unfinished autobiography or some notes for Verity’s books. It is a confession, and it is absolutely horrifying. Verity writes about her marriage to Jeremy, her pregnancies, her children, her jealousy and the resentment she feels towards her own family, and eventually she describes things surrounding the deaths of her twin daughters that are so disturbing that Lowen doesn’t even know whether she should believe what she’s reading. The problem is that she also can’t stop reading it. Neither can we. You keep thinking that surely you’ve reached the worst part, and then there is another page, another confession, another little piece of information that makes you question everything you thought you knew about this family.
What I loved most about Verity was that I never felt like there was a simple good person and a simple bad person. Every single character was twisted in some way, and that made them feel much more human to me. Verity is obviously horrifying, but then you start looking at Jeremy and wondering what exactly is going on with him too. Lowen is supposed to be the person who has stumbled into this nightmare and is slowly uncovering the truth, but she is also becoming increasingly obsessed with Jeremy and increasingly involved in a family that isn’t hers. Her decisions become more questionable as the story goes on, and I actually loved that because it meant I couldn’t sit comfortably on her side either. Nobody was completely innocent, and nobody was completely evil, which made the entire story feel much more disturbing than it would have if we had simply been given one obvious villain.
Lowen was particularly interesting to me because she isn’t just an innocent woman who finds a horrible secret and tries to expose it. She becomes emotionally involved with Jeremy, and that attraction complicates everything she discovers. Even when she finds things that should make her want to run away from the entire situation, she keeps getting pulled further into it. I think that was one of the reasons I found the book so addictive because I kept waiting for someone to make the sensible decision and leave, but of course nobody does. They all keep making increasingly questionable choices, and I was sitting there thinking, what the hell are you doing, while also desperately turning the pages because I needed to know what happened next.
And then there is Jeremy, who I could never fully decide whether I trusted. There were moments where I felt sorry for him and understood why Lowen was drawn to him, but there were also moments where I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something deeply wrong with him too. The book does such a good job of making you constantly reconsider your opinion of everyone. You think you’ve figured someone out, then another detail appears and suddenly you’re questioning the entire situation again. I genuinely love books that make me feel like I am missing something, and Verity did that constantly.
But obviously, Verity herself is the centre of all of this madness. The manuscript is what makes the entire book work because there is always that question of whether what we are reading is actually true. Is Verity really the monster she describes herself as being, or is there another explanation? Is she manipulating Lowen even from her bed? Is the manuscript a confession, or is it simply another piece of fiction written by an author who knows exactly how to make people believe a story? And then you have the letter, which completely throws another possibility into the mix.
I know the ending is probably the most fucked up part of the book, but personally, I loved it. I loved that I wasn’t handed a neat explanation at the end where everything suddenly made sense and we were told exactly what happened. The letter gives you another version of events, but that doesn’t mean you have to believe it. The manuscript says one thing, the letter says another, and we are left to decide for ourselves which version we think is closer to the truth. If the manuscript was real, then Verity is absolutely terrifying. If the letter was real, then Lowen has potentially destroyed a woman based on something she wanted to believe. And if neither version is completely true, then what the hell was actually happening in that house? I honestly don’t know, and that is exactly why I enjoyed it so much.
There were so many moments where I genuinely thought, what am I reading right now, but I couldn’t stop. The book kept pushing further and further into this strange place where obsession, grief, jealousy, love and violence all start becoming tangled together. It was disturbing, sometimes genuinely disgusting, and completely unhinged, but I never wanted it to stop. I think that is also why I enjoyed the characters so much. I didn’t necessarily like them, and I definitely didn’t agree with their choices, but I believed that they were capable of making them. They were selfish and obsessive and manipulative and sometimes absolutely horrible, but they were also grieving, desperate, jealous, afraid and in love. They were not good or bad. They were just deeply, deeply messed up people.
And honestly, that is what I loved most about this book. It wasn’t even necessarily the romance or the mystery itself, it was the feeling that I couldn’t trust anyone, including the person telling me the story. Every new piece of information changed the way I looked at the characters, and by the end I wasn’t even sure whether I wanted to know the truth anymore or whether the uncertainty was the whole point. There was something almost deliciously sick about sitting there and trying to decide which version of these people I believed.
Verity is definitely not a book I would describe as wholesome, healthy, or even remotely normal, but that is exactly why it worked for me. It walks that very thin line between psychological thriller and absolute insanity, and I loved watching it cross that line. I loved how uncomfortable it made me, I loved how twisted the characters were, and I loved that I finished the book still thinking about what actually happened. Most importantly, I loved that I couldn’t neatly put any of the characters into the category of good or evil because, somehow, every single one of them felt horribly and madly human.
Let me know your thoughts! See you in my next review, take care friends. ✨
