Verity by Colleen Hoover Book Analysis

Verity by Colleen Hoover is a romance/thriller/mystery novel that was published in 2018. The book follows Lowen, a struggling author whose mother’s slow death from cancer didn’t allow her to work: leaving her in debt. Her publishing agent calls her about a mysterious meeting that they will have to sign NDAs for. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and of course, she shows up to the meeting. Readers and Lowen find out together that a very famous author named Verity Crawford with a bestselling series has had a tragic accident and can no longer finish the two remaining books herself. Verity’s agents propose the idea of Lowen finishing the series since she writes in the same genre as Verity. Verity’s husband, who Lowen met just before coming to the meeting, tells her that she will need to go through piles of book notes in Verity’s home office. Lowen reluctantly agrees and moves in with brain-dead Verity, her husband, and son Crew. Before she packs up her things, she researches Verity and her family (like any normal person would do). Through a Google search, she finds out that both of their twin daughters have died on seperate occasions. This makes her worry, and she briefly suspects Varity’s husband Jeremy since he is the common factor. When she arrives at their enormous estate, she realizes Jeremy’s true personality--the opposite of her suspicions. What she finds next in Verity’s office will change everything.

Because Verity is in a state of unawareness after she crashed into a tree, characterization of her is left to Lowen’s interactions and opinions of her and the manuscript Varity wrote before the accident. Verity’s hit series is largely successful because of one aspect that makes the books stand out: they are all from the perspective of the villain. Once Lowen listens to the audiobook of the first book, she describes the main character as psychopathic. When Lowen finds the manuscript of Verity’s memoir in her office, curiosity takes over and she reads it. After reading the first chapters, Lowen is too horrified to continue. The memoir is a tell-all, and Verity’s mind is undeniably twisted. In the first chapters, it is revealed that she hates that she is pregnant because her husband loves the babies more than he loves her. Her memoir reads, “I had already feared becoming the mother of one baby. Being forced to love the one thing Jeremy loved more than me. But when I found out there were two, and that they were girls, I was suddenly not okay with being the third most important thing in Jeremy’s life.” (Hoover, 107) She goes into detail about her numerous self-inflicted abortion attempts as a result of this. When they are finally born, she writes that she has zero love and affection for them and her jealousy grows when she sees how happy Jeremy looks while holding them. In the next chapters of the memoir, Verity has a dream where her daughter Chastin is being smothered by her sister Harper and when she goes to pull Harper away, Chastin’s face is a smooth canvas of nothing. Verity wakes up with a newfound passion of needing to protect Chastin from the evil that is Harper. She even tries to kill baby Harper by choking her and planning to make it look like pulmonary aspiration, but stops when Jeremy almost catches her. While Lowen reads chapters of the manuscript on and off, she keeps finding evidence that Verity is very much aware of everything and is faking her illnesses. 

One theme of this book is that karma is real. The theme becomes apparent at the end of the memoir when Verity knows that she deserves what’s coming to her. The story mentions that Jeremy and Verity are “chronics” several times, referring to the fact that bad things happen again and again to them. This is symbolized mainly with the deaths of their daughters and Verity’s accident, but also at the very beginning of the novel, when it starts out with Jeremy and Lowen meeting because of a pedestrian getting run over by a truck. The author’s choice to name Varity Varity must have been calculated, because the coincidence of her name meaning “truth” in Latin is too hard to believe. Imagery is everywhere in this novel, starting on the first page, “I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me. I gasp and take a quick step back onto the sidewalk. One of my heels doesn't clear the curb, so I grip the pole of a No Parking sign to steady myself. The man was in front of me a matter of seconds ago. We were standing in a crowd of people waiting for the crosswalk light to illuminate when he stepped into the street prematurely, resulting in a run-in with a truck. I lunged forward in an attempt to stop him--grasping at nothing as he went down. I closed my eyes before his head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a champagne bottle.” (1) The author’s descriptive writing style is striking throughout, and makes the reader feel as if they were inside the pages.

All in all, I would give this book 3.5/5 stars. It was an excellent page turner, seeing as I read it all in less than five hours last night. The story had a brilliant plot twist (that I made sure not to spoil in my essay, just in case you wanted to read this book), and I thought using the memoir as a way to get to know Verity was genius. Did this book make me cry? No, so I subtracted a star accordingly. This book was not as good as the other book of her’s I’ve read, but it was still a book I enjoyed reading and would recommend. My favorite character was probably Jeremy, just because of the way he was written. He seems like the perfect father. My favorite part of this book was the last line for the sheer open-ended nature of it.