The Verdict
Today it’s Verity, by Colleen Hoover, the thriller that had half of BookTok texting their friends in capital letters.
So, is it worth reading? Yes, if you can handle it. It’s fast, nasty, and almost impossible to put down, and it contains a manuscript I still think about. But the sex is extremely explicit, the content is dark, and the middle repeats itself. I give it four out of five. This whole review is spoiler free.
What It’s About
Verity came out in twenty eighteen. Our narrator is Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling suspense writer in Manhattan. In one week her mother dies, she gets an eviction notice, and she ends up covered in a stranger’s blood after watching a man die under a truck. That’s chapter one.
Then comes an offer. A publisher wants someone to finish a bestselling thriller series for its author, Verity Crawford, who was badly hurt in a car accident. The money is life changing, and Lowen can even do it under a pen name.
The catch is that she has to move into the Crawford house in Vermont, with Verity’s husband Jeremy, their little boy Crew, and Verity herself, upstairs, in bed.
The Manuscript
The hook of the whole book is what Lowen finds in the office. Buried in a box of Verity’s papers is an unfinished autobiography. It opens by telling you it will taste so bad you’ll want to spit it out, and then it keeps that promise.
Lowen can’t stop reading it, and neither can you. The book alternates between her present and chapters of that manuscript, which starts with how Verity met Jeremy at a party, and a limousine that wasn’t his. Nearly every chapter ends on a line that makes you reach for the next. It’s the best thing the book does, so I won’t say more.
Two Voices
What I admire is how different the two voices are. Lowen is dry, nervous and funny. She sympathizes with a lonely ant crawling across her toe, and she dreads every conversation. Her chapters feel like sitting next to a friend who is quietly panicking.
Verity’s manuscript is the opposite: confident, blunt and shameless, with no interest in being liked. Switching between them is the engine of the book. Every time you settle into one voice, the other pulls you away, and you start wondering which one you trust less.
The Hype
Some context on the hype. Colleen Hoover is best known for romance, and in her acknowledgments she calls Verity an indie project and a departure from her usual love stories. Reportedly it took off on BookTok in twenty twenty-one, years after it was published, and that’s what turned it into a phenomenon.
As of October twenty twenty-six, the film is in theaters, with Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett. It reportedly opened at number one, with about thirty-three million dollars at the domestic box office, though critics were harsher than audiences. I’m only reviewing the book today.
Does it live up to the noise? Mostly. It’s a better page turner than a masterpiece, but when a book is this hyped, a page turner that actually delivers is rare, and this one does.
What Works
My first strength is the voice. Hoover writes short, plain, fast sentences, and Lowen is good company. She’s awkward, funny about her own misery, and she cheers herself up by remembering her old boyfriend Amos, because at least she isn’t still with him. You’ll like her quickly, which matters, because she’s alone in a very strange house.
My second strength is the dread. The writing keeps asking you to doubt small things. A curtain moves. A television is off when it should be on. A child waves at an empty window. Hoover makes every ordinary noise at night feel like a threat, and she never explains too early.
My third strength is the payoff of the structure. The manuscript chapters are shocking on purpose, and they land hard because Lowen reacts like a real person: she feels sick, she gets angry, she tells herself she’ll stop. Because she reacts, you do too, and the whole book becomes a conversation you want to have with someone else.
The House
The house deserves its own mention. It’s dark stone with a blood red door, ivy that looks like a slow cancer, and an iron gate whose pattern reminds Lowen of spider webs. Behind it is a lake, the Green Mountains, and an office with a wall of windows and no sound at all.
That office is the best location in the book. Lowen sits in a chair that costs more than her rent, looking out at the lawn, and the windows work both ways. She can see everyone outside, and she can never be sure who is looking in. I’d happily read an entire novel in that room.
Lowen And Jeremy
Now the people. Lowen is anxious and lonely and a sleepwalker, and her fear of what she does in her sleep adds a second thread. You can never be fully sure she’s reading the house correctly, and I like a narrator who might be wrong.
Jeremy is a grieving father who is almost too kind, and the pull between them is the main romance. There’s a lovely scene where they lie on the lawn watching a meteor shower.
They even have a running joke about the word alright, which is how they say yes without saying it. It’s sweet, and it keeps the romance from feeling like pure heat. Crew, the five year old, steals every scene he’s in. The one I wanted more of was Verity, who is mostly told to us by other people.
Romance Or Thriller
So what genre is it? I’d call it a romance that has been dragged into a thriller. The attraction between Lowen and Jeremy gets as much space as the mystery, and Hoover’s romance instincts show: the slow looks, the almost kisses, the funny small talk over a plate of leftover pizza.
The thriller part works by letting those scenes build false comfort, then breaking it. If you come for a tight procedural, you’ll be disappointed. If you come for a love story with something rotten underneath it, this is exactly that.
The Spice And Content
Now the honest part. This book is very explicit. The sex scenes are frequent, graphic, and written in crude, direct language, in the manuscript and in the present. If you found Verity in the thriller section, expect more sex than most thrillers, and more than a lot of romances. It’s at the top of the scale.
Content notes: the deaths of children, harm to children and babies, grief, cancer and hospice, suicide references, infidelity, and graphic violence late in the book.
Some of the sex scenes do real work for the plot, because they show you how Verity sees her marriage. Others are just there. Most of the dark material comes through the manuscript. If any of that is a hard line for you, please skip this one, and maybe don’t read it on a train.
The Writing And Pacing
The chapters are short and the cliffhangers are constant. Lowen’s story is told in the present tense, and the manuscript in the past, so you always know which world you’re in. It’s about eighty thousand words, and most people finish it in a weekend.
The pacing is strong at the start and again in the last quarter, which is ferocious. The middle is the problem. Lowen reads, gets scared, swears she’ll stop, and reads again. By the third time I was a step ahead of her.
What Doesn’t
My first criticism is that loop in the middle. The structure promises escalation, and for a while you get repetition. My second is that some of the sex feels like button pushing rather than character. The central romance asks you to root for a woman falling for a married man whose wife is lying upstairs, and I found that hard.
Third, the side characters are thin. Corey, Lowen’s agent and ex, mostly shows up to say suspicious things and then disappears.
Fourth, Lowen stays in a house she’s terrified of for weeks, because of rent. I mostly believed it, but some readers won’t. And finally, the ending asks you to decide something for yourself. I love that. If you want a tidy answer, you’ll be annoyed.
The Scorecard
Here are my scores. The hook is five out of five, because by chapter three I was in trouble. Tension is four and a half. Characters get three, because Lowen and Crew are great and almost nobody else is.
Pacing is three and a half, held back by the middle. Impact is four. It’s a book people argue about. That gives me an average of four out of five.
Who It’s For
Verity belongs on the shelf next to Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, and Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier: nasty marriages, big houses, and narrators you can’t quite trust. If you loved either of those, you’ll probably love this.
Read Verity if you like fast thrillers with unreliable narrators, and if explicit scenes don’t bother you. It’s a great pick for a group chat, because you will immediately want to compare notes.
Skip it if you want a slow, clean mystery, if sex scenes make you close the book, or if harm to children is something you avoid. And if you need every question answered, this one won’t give you that.
Where To Get It
Links to the book and the audiobook are in the description, along with every book I mentioned. I’ve also made an ending explained video and a clues you missed video, but those are full of spoilers, so finish the book first.
Tell me in the comments: did you read it before the hype or after, and would you have stayed in that house? Thanks for watching, and subscribe if you want more honest book reviews.
