Christy

I wrote a whole review and accidentally deleted it, lol. Sorry, if you're reading this you'll have to settle for something a little haptic. Verity is not supposed to be a young adult novel, but it sure feels like one. I can't say the author has successfully transitioned from young adult to thriller, or whatever this is supposed to be. All the characters are two dimensional and feel like teenagers larping as successful adults. Jeremy is a man who likes to have sex with pretty ladies, seems to fall in love too easily, is a "great" dad (apparently being a great dad just means loving your children and being present, but really he got financially outpaced and somewhat reluctantly became a stay at home dad), Lowen almost has a personality until she moves in with a stranger and his son mainly because she didn't pay rent on her last apartment and getting a hotel nearby was a totally irrational thing to do in this universe (I'm sure the rich dad could have figured out how to pay for a hotel). She also seems to fall too easily in love because in about two weeks, she's willing to murder someone for Jeremy. Verity is a completely unbelievable character entirely and conveniently is in a "coma" so that you can project whatever outrageous characteristics you'd like onto her. The manuscript and it's coming about is so unbelievable it practically breaks the fourth wall and you're left wishing authors didn't think any kind of twist no matter how absurd automatically meant it was good writing. I nearly got completely disinterested when she tried to choke her own baby. It would have made more sense to delve into post pardon depression instead of a consistent antagonistic storyline (but I guess that was the point, silly as it may be). Every decision being made by the characters sound like the rational of a teenager. All these characters had recently experienced profound deaths of loved ones, but are we really supposed to believe that death makes you do all the dumb stuff in this book? Yeah, I sound like I hate this book, so why two stars? It was well paced and admittedly, it was quite the page turner. Unfortunately, the bad writing really made me want to walk away from the book several times even though I had just dived in for several hours into it. Some scenes were original and I appreciated that, like the abortion scene, but it was too little to save it completely. I have a feeling these will be one of the rare books where the movie is actually better.