There are two reasons I opted to spend a few hours of my one precious life reading a Colleen Hoover novel. The first is the upcoming film adaptation starring Dakota Johnson and, more importantly, Anne Hathaway. (I am violating my longstanding ban on “Now a Major Motion Picture” cover for Hathaway.) The second reason is that I have heard from a few different people that Verity is the Colleen Hoover novel that even people who hate Colleen Hoover think is good. That intrigued me.
I checked the book out from the library with no actual idea what it was about. (I thought it was about WWII, apparently confusing it with the novel Code Name Verity.) In actually, Colleen Hoover’s Verity is about Lowen Ashleigh, an author whose life and career are in shambles after the prolonged death of her mother sapped both their savings and delayed the writing of her next book. Never a big seller anyways, she is shocked when a dream offer appears out of the blue. Verity Crawford, author of a hit series planned for nine novels, has been incapacitated by a car accident with three books left to go. Her publisher and her husband Jeremy are asking Lowen to finish the series, apparently because Verity had read and enjoyed Lowen’s books. Lowen is reluctant due to her dislike for public attention, but her financial straits leave her with no choice but to accept.
The first step is to sort through Verity’s papers to get a sense for her plan for the remaining novels. The job is so massive that Jeremy Crawford offers to let her stay as a guest in the family’s home in Vermont. There, Lowen spends most of her time in Verity’s office, while Jeremy takes care of his and Verity’s son Crew, and a nurse attends to Verity’s care. While digging through Verity’s papers, Lowen doesn’t find any outline or notes for a new story, but she does find Verity’s autobiography, which Lowen can’t help reading despite herself. The writing is shockingly forthcoming, and Lowen learns all about Verity’s apparently intense sex life with Jeremy. The passionate descriptions of their lovemaking aren’t doing anything to help Lowen get past her burgeoning crush on him.
As Lowen continues reading, she also learns the details of the Crawford family’s horrible run of tragedies. In the year before Verity’s accident, both of her and Jeremy’s daughters died tragically, one thanks to a peanut allergy and the other drowning in the lake by the family home. The close proximity of these deaths to Verity’s car crash has lead to speculation that her driving into a tree was no accident.
The more time Lowen spends in the family home, the more she feels herself desirous of Jeremy. She also finds herself increasingly disturbed by Verity’s autobiography, where the author confesses to horrifying thoughts and actions unthinkable to most. Upsetting things also begin happening in the house, including Lowen seeing things that shouldn’t be possible. Is she cracking up under the strain, or is something deeply unnatural occurring in Jeremy’s house?
My only previous encounter with Colleen Hoover was a comically brief attempt at reading It Ends With Us around the time of that book’s movie adaptation’s release. In that novel, her prose and dialogue really bugged me and made it impossible to continue. Verity‘s prose is mostly fairly compelling, moving the story along at breakneck speed. The issue is more with the plotting. Verity rests on some absurd contrivances and coincidences, which I suppose could be forgiven as hallmarks of the genre, but there is at least one major plot hole I found harder and harder to take as the story goes on. It hold a key to the book’s big reveal, and is thus a little too crucial to be overlooked.
While I can understand how people, even Collen Hoover skeptics, could be entertained by Verity, and even think it could quite plausibly be turned into a pretty good movie, I can’t quite see fit to embrace it myself. Perhaps the title of “Best Colleen Hoover Novel” isn’t that meaningful an achievement.
