Verity

Our main character isn't used to living in the big city, nor is she used to seeing people getting their heads popped under the wheel of a truck, but that is what happens one morning and this is the establishing scene that tells us about our main character. She used to live in a small city, where there was community and people communicated with each other with regularity, but once she moved to Manhattan this sense of community disappeared, as shown by the first scene where a man is killed in a brutal fashion because he was on his phone while crossing the street and not many seem to care, as they are also on their phones too.

This tells us that in this world people's empathy goes out the window once they have lived in a big city for an extended period of time, as shown by a friendly passerby, Jeremy Crawford (although she does not know this yet), that notices all the blood on her shirt, from the man that was run over, and asks if she is okay.

As she has been looking after her cancer-ridden mother for years, she is familiar with the equipment needed, but also mentions that she, 'forgot to hide the morphine' which gives us another big insight into her character and how she acts in private. Whether she is addicted or not, we do not start out knowing, but we do know that she dabbled from time to time, even though she shouldn't have been doing it.

After being offered a deal worth around half a million to finish writing three books in a series started by Verity, his wife, she agrees and goes over to their house to check over Verity's notes. Their house is basically a typical horror movie setting. Dark grey roof, with the black stone covered outside only broken up by the vines swinging down, and climbing up the left side of the house. The comparison is to what her mother died of, cancer, and this personification of the house is only further enhanced by the blood-red door. Red doors in a lot of different cultures signify warmth, welcoming and protection, and once she enters it can be theorised that maybe she now needs that protection from the cancers (the vines) that have been spreading throughout the house up until now.

"It isn't really love at first sight until you've been with the person long enough for it to become love at first sight." - Verity

While going through notes to better understand the direction that Verity wanted to take the books in, Lowen finds an autobiography, unfinished, but with a lot of details about Verity's life. It starts with her telling the reader how she was able to meet Jeremy and lets us know more about her as a person, which is excellent because in real life at the moment she is trapped in her bed, unable to do anything but blink and barely any muscles. The first chapter of the autobiography ends with an admission that seems out of place and does look like it is going to lead to a more interesting place. That her life, might not be as closeted as her life first seemed like before Lowen found the autobiography.

Back with Lowen, Colleen excellently creates an ominous foreboding atmosphere even through scenes as simple as Lowen thinking that Verity might have moved her head to look at her while she was in Verity's office.

Between the two worlds, the world of Verity's mind within the autobiography, and the world of Lowen in the present, there are strange and weird things being displayed. Things can mostly just be chalked up to paranoia, but the more we look, the fewer sense things make. The fan is in a cold room, is something that you would assume a nurse wouldn't do for a patient who cannot move, but also something that you can chalk up to forgetfulness which is also something that you can say about the nurse saying, specifically, that she left the TV on and yet when Lowen goes up there it isn't. Always deniability.

Sometimes it is almost like Verity isn't injured at all, and that she is perfectly fine physically, only acting like she is unable physically for reasons that we do not know.

There is something very wrong with Verity's thinking and we learn that this wasn't something new and had been happening since she had first seen Jeremy. She, herself, knows that there is something wrong with her thinking, her obsession, which is why she starts writing in the first place. It is also why she tried to do almost everything possible to make sure that not only will she not give birth, Jeremy will feel sympathy for her even if she was what caused it. It didn't seem like she ever wanted kids, and once she gets pregnant it is clear that not having one would have been the right choice for her mental health and relationship with Jeremy overall.

While she did dislike the thought of the girls when she was pregnant with them, and dislike them more when they were finally born, the latter could be explained by postpartum depression. Her disdain, and lack of care towards the kids that she already had, combined with the postpartum depression could only make the emotions of hate and fear that they would take Jeremy away from her worse.

Pregnancy does a lot to people and one thing that can change in a person in a multitude of ways when pregnant are hormones. There is no telling what a pregnant person will feel from one day to another PTSD, eating disorders, bipolar disorder, panic attacks. All these can be directly caused by the hormone changes during pregnancy and if not treated and left unattended it can fester and become a lot worse. Verity's lack of ability to sleep because of the baby, her thinking that Jeremy is going to love her less once the babies come and even her trying to do what she did and scaring her baby are all things that a normal pregnant person wouldn't do. But it is something that a very small percentage are capable of doing, and considering her emotions were very all over the place before she become pregnant it is no wonder she struggled and her mood suffered even more. She wasn't okay, didn't know she wasn't okay so wasn't able to get the help that she desperately needed.

Lowen has one quirk that is presented as more than what it is, and that is her sleepwalking. She has been sleepwalking for a very long time, and normal sleepwalking wouldn't be weird, but one of the scars that she has on her hands is because of sleepwalking. The first time that she was bought a lock because it was said to be good for sleepwalkers, she woke up with a broken wrist and blood all over herself.

This starts flaring up once she starts taking Xanax again and she ends up waking up in Veriy's bed alongside Verity herself.

As we learn that Verity's hate for Chastin is dissipating it comes into her mind that Harper is going to kill her and this develops deep resentment for her as she doesn't want the kid that she just started to love wholeheartedly to be killed off by one that she actively hates.

Every moment where we think we are seeing something proving that Verity is faking her injuries or that she is completely fine it is thrown out as we start to doubt ourselves and wonder whether Lowen is actually seeing Berity or is so obsessed with her, having been researching her for weeks, that she is starting to lose her mind and see things that aren't there.

The constant tension in this book has been masterfully crafted. On every page that gets turned, I am always wondering what is going to happen next? Is something bad going to happen? Are we going to get a shocking reveal that will change everything?

The evolution of Lowen as a character leaves me unsure of what I am supposed to think of her. She seemed very normal at first, but once the story continues I feel like her true character is revealed and I don't know what to think of her. She is someone that makes me question the validity of all her claims. I never know if she is telling the truth or if she is playing everyone a fool and I think that is something that Colleen has to be heavily praised for. To be able to create this kind of lasting, thick, tension within the air is something that not every writer is capable of doing, and it seems that she is able to do it with ease.

One thing that I feared throughout this whole book was that everything we knew about Verity was false. After all, we were learning about her through something that she wrote and anyone can write anything at any time. Especially since she wrote fictional novels where her characters were villains. This was a thought that was always lingering around in my head, making me question everything I read and everything about Verity's 'autobiography'.

Was it real? Was it fake? I don't know the answer to either of these questions definitively but if I had to choose, I would say that it was fake. I believed that Verity didn't kill her children and that she wasn't as mentally ill as her autobiography made her out to be.

One thing that was mentioned multiple times throughout this book was people's inability to separate the author from their own work, which is something that Corey is there to first represent, and is something that happens to Jeremy. He reads Lowen's book and is the one who decides to pick her out to continue writing his wife's book (Additionally in this part, Jeremy's refusal to read his wife's books past the first one clouds his judgement over whether the manuscript was real or fake). Lowen also did this, as she started to properly fall for Jeremy as she started reading more and more of Verity's autobiography, which would obviously portray them as a different person to who he really is and further shows how characters in this book love falling in love with characters that aren't real, or that have been changed for the better.

There are questions that support the manuscript being real, such as why would Verity need to describe what happened during times when Jeremy was around when he was she was writing the letter, how Amanda, being the one that Verity had said was the person who told her to write like she was a real villain, they could have asked her whether she did, or didn't, (I personally think that this is debunked because Jeremy already disliked her because she was cheating on her husband, and seemed to dismiss over her worry towards his wife), or how Jeremy seemed to believe that the manuscript was real as he was the main focus in it and would've known if certain scenes were altered and changed and that is where we get onto the next part. I don't trust Jeremy as a character.

We never really saw him much in person, it felt like we were mostly seeing him through Verity's eyes instead. He had researched before meeting Lowen and obviously knew about her, and yet he acted as if it was the first time meeting her. In almost the same way that Verity started to become obsessed with Jeremy, Lowen started exhibiting the same kind of behaviour which I think further supports Jeremy not being a good character and this is because it shows a certain behaviour pattern to get women to fall for him very quickly and then tie them down to him. Not only did it happen to Verity' but he also finished inside of Lowen, and then we move over to Lowen being a villain as well.

The main thing that supports, this is the fact that when Jeremy finished inside her, even if they had only been together for a short while (and while he was still together with Verity) she made sure that she was going to get pregnant. This isn't something that a normal person does, and I think it does support the fact that she wasn't all that stable as a person.

There was also the fact that she was taking Xanax while in the mansion, and it is something that can have major side effects on the person taking it. Yes, it obviously doesn't affect most people, but it can. The most relevant side effects that it can potentially have are memory impairment/memory loss, and increased anxiety. She was always worried about Verity and wondering what is going on, she is jumpy and nervous all the time, which could be because of her heightened anxiety leading to her not remembering certain things about her life and omitting them because she does not know they exist any longer.

Another part of her character that I thought was supportive of her as a villain was her change from the start of the book. When the book first starts and she sees someone getting killed, she has a violent horrified reaction. This is the reaction that a normal person would have to see someone's head getting squashed in front of them, and she also mentions here that most of the city folk didn't respond to what was happening and kept crossing the street as if someone hadn't just died. Compare that to her reaction to Jeremy killing Verity and we can see a clear change of heart, and the callousness that she holds is on full display. She is not worried about Verity dying, no, she is more worried about Jeremy being caught for her murder which is why she tells him to kill her in a specific way, one that she learned through reading Verity's manuscript, and one that will leave no evidence that it was a murder and not just a normal accident.

Or maybe I don't actually believe any of that and just want to believe it because it makes the story a lot darker. A man and the person he was cheating on his wife with killed an innocent woman after she recently recovered from another murder attempt by her husband.

I think me asking all these questions and coming up with all these theories shows how amazing this book is. One of the best of its genre I have ever read and the favourite book I have read. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time, and I was always wondering what was going to happen next. Whether there was going to be another twist and turn, which there always was.

I would absolutely recommend anyone to read this book, whether you like the sound of it or not. It is magnificently written and in the ending, where we are left to question everything that happened within the book and wonder if everything we knew was real, if it was made up in the mind of the villain we were reading from, or whether we were reading about a villain. We can only speculate and come up with theories about what was the truth or not.

9.4/10

book: Verity

author: Colleen Hoover