Verity

★★★★★

e imaginary version of my world to be darker than my real world. Otherwise, I would have wanted to leave them both.”*

I was given this book by a good friend of mine. I had heard of the author before and read positive things so decided to give it a read.

I want to get all the negative parts of this book out the way first before I talk about how great the ending is. Although the twisted ending makes this book worthy of more than 3 stars, I feel there are a few big floors/ peeves in this book that brought it down a couple of stars. Firstly; I felt that the writing was very jumpy. There was no continuation from the beginning, you read about Corey and how he will ‘check up on her’ but then you don’t hear about his character again.

Secondly, what happened to her flat and all her stuff? Yes, I’m aware that she lost it but what about actually moving out? And don’t get me started on how much her rental car is going to cost her when she finally returns it! Thirdly, the issue with jumpiness (and I’m not talking about the scary parts in the book) is that it makes it hard to follow. I just felt like it jumped from one big thing to the other, there was no filler to the story.

Lastly, she’s there to write a book, however, you never read about her actually sitting and writing the book. She does research by reading verity books but she never actually writes a single thing. Okay, enough moaning, I guess it wasn’t all bad.

“What you read will taste so bad at times, you’ll want to spit it out, but you’ll swallow these words and they will become part of you, part of your gut, and you will hurt because of them.” The twist in this book made my stomach turn. Throughout the book, the clips from the manuscript are spine-tingling, and it was clever having them run alongside the actual story (although there were a few times I had to make sure I knew which book I was meant to be reading). I won’t spoil the ending in this review, mainly because I think it's the only reason I finished this book and never left it half-read. Once I did get past the halfway point though it did get more addictive as I wanted to see how this was going to end. Credit to Colleen Hoover who has managed to write the most twisted yet addictive storyline I’ve ever read. To even come up with this type of story takes talent. very good. very clever.

Please don’t read this review and think I hate this book because I really didn’t, I just felt it could have done with a bit of work and it would have been great! This book had so many 5-star reviews so when I read it I was disappointed that I didn’t like it more. That being said, I’m about to give the author another shot and read another of her books.

Characters:

Lowen; I wanted to like her more as I felt sorry for her from the beginning. She started to annoy me though and I can't put my finger on why. It felt predictable with her and Jeremy, however, I didn’t hate it. I did hate some of the cheap sex scenes that made it feel like the book was trying to jump into a spicy genre. I started to feel like her character got dull and predictable towards the end.

Jeremy: when we first met Jeremy at the beginning, I got serious Fifty Shades vibes from him. That didn’t disappear throughout the whole book! I felt serious empathy for his character, with everything that he had been through, even when he started his affair with Lowen. But what confused me most and gave me mixed emotions was his character at the end. Again, I won't spoil it but reading how he cared for her after all that happened made me feel uncomfortable

Verity; WOW what a character, that ending, and her character at the end is what made this book readable. Despite the fact, she doesn’t say or do anything for 98% of the book. Very clever.