A review by rot_swap
Verity by Colleen Hoover
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
I don't even know where to begin...But much of what I have to say has already been expressed by other reviewers so I'll keep this brief.
This book is not a thriller. The amount of detailed sex scenes was truly wild, almost comical. I ended up skipping through them as the book went on. It's fine for a book to be sexy, but it should been marketed as erotica (ie not a thriller!). But also I'm incredibly bored with, not to mention creeped out by, the "sexy thriller" genre. It usually ends up blurring the line between sex/desire and violence. Power is achieved through both sex and violence. This is rape culture!
The characters were flat and uninteresting. Jeremy was perfect to the point that it was annoyingly unrealistic. Verity was unknowable in a way that wasn't mysterious or clever, just poorly written. Lowen is also a nothing person. Nothing about the way she was written made me actually believe she herself was a writer. And her sleepwalking trauma was weird. I don't get what Hoover was trying to do there. Just felt lazy. Overall, the way trauma was written about came off as trauma porn. The characters are all defined by their trauma and Hoover revels in it.
Plot holes galore and an unsatisfying ending.
I could go on but it's all been said. This was my first and last Colleen Hoover book.
This book is not a thriller. The amount of detailed sex scenes was truly wild, almost comical. I ended up skipping through them as the book went on. It's fine for a book to be sexy, but it should been marketed as erotica (ie not a thriller!). But also I'm incredibly bored with, not to mention creeped out by, the "sexy thriller" genre. It usually ends up blurring the line between sex/desire and violence. Power is achieved through both sex and violence. This is rape culture!
The characters were flat and uninteresting. Jeremy was perfect to the point that it was annoyingly unrealistic. Verity was unknowable in a way that wasn't mysterious or clever, just poorly written. Lowen is also a nothing person. Nothing about the way she was written made me actually believe she herself was a writer. And her sleepwalking trauma was weird. I don't get what Hoover was trying to do there. Just felt lazy. Overall, the way trauma was written about came off as trauma porn. The characters are all defined by their trauma and Hoover revels in it.
Plot holes galore and an unsatisfying ending.
I could go on but it's all been said. This was my first and last Colleen Hoover book.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death and Child abuse
Moderate: Ableism and Death