Evelyn keeps me in touch with popular literary culture by including books by zeitgeist-y authors among those she buys me for Christmas. Colleen Hoover is a hugely successful, and hugely divisive, author who gained her fame via BookTok, the literary portion of TikTok. She's best known for romance novels targeted at a young adult audience, although Verity is a psychological thriller with romance overtones.
Verity has a solid genre setup. Our heroine Lowen is a writer hired to help finish a best-selling series of books by Verity Crawford, who is unable to finish them due to a suspicious car accident. Lowen travels to Verity's estate in Vermont, where she starts falling for Verity's husband and questioning the official narrative about what happened to Verity and her family. Is Verity really as incapacitated as she appears? Did her two children die in accidents or under more nefarious circumstances? Everything is in place for a moody mystery: the big house in the woods, the suspicious nurse, sleepwalking, the dark basement, the questionable motives.
Unfortunately, Hoover is a bad writer. She seems unable to wring suspense out of the creepiest premises, and her heroine wildly overreacts to everything. The story and characters become increasingly unbelievable, leading to the twist ending that makes no sense at all. I gather that the unusual character names (Lowen, Verity, Chastin, Crew) and the obsession with oral sex are Hoover trademarks.
The title character in Verity is treated as a villain, a psychopath, when she's revealed to have suffered from postpartum depression and jealousy over her husband's attachment to their children. This callous attitude exemplifies Hoover's blunt understanding of psychology, which is probably also the source of the controversy over domestic violence in her earlier books.
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