“Verity,” a thriller by Colleen Hoover, tells the story of Lowen Ashleigh, a writer living in New York. The book follows Lowen as she decides to take a job finishing the novels of a writer, Verity, who was injured in a car accident. To do this, Lowen stays in Verity’s home, while Verity is unable to move because of the injury. While looking through Verity’s things, Lowen discovers an autobiography, “So Be It,” and she begins reading it. It tells the story of how Verity and her husband, Jeremy, met and their story as a couple and family. The story is darker than Lowen expected.  

Verity, the writer of it, openly admits she is the reason her daughter Harper is dead.  

With Lowen’s new living arrangement, she and Jeremy grow closer as she stays there to finish the novels. She begins to notice strange things happening. For example, Crew, one of Jermey’s sons, cuts himself with a knife. He switched the story from “Mommy said I’m not supposed to touch her knife”(130) when he talked to Lowen to “I didn’t have a knife. I just fell off my bed”(131) as he tells his dad. Unexplained discrepancies like this put Lowen on edge, and she even begins to believe that Verity, supposedly paralyzed from a car accident, is faking her injury and has been watching her around the house. 

After that, Lowen puts cameras in Verity’s room to make sure she isn’t crazy, believing Verity could be faking her horrible injury. She tries to convince Jeremy that Verity is moving when she shouldn’t be, but when he doesn’t believe Lowen, she gives him the autobiography to read. Shocked, Jeremy reaches his breaking point with Verity, flips out, and strangles her to death, showcasing his true colors. In the end, he and Lowen plan to make it look like an accident. 

An additional unexpected twist of the book is what leaves readers with unanswered questions. After, Jeremy and Lowen decide to move together to North Carolina. As they are leaving, Lowen finds a letter written by Verity, explaining her side of the story. In this letter, she reveals that the manuscript, “So Be It”, was at first a writing exercise called “antagonist journaling” to get better at writing in a villain point of view for her book, and it later helped her grieve when she wrote about the passing of her son, and later her daughter. The letter explained that all the things she wrote in her autobiography were fake, sinister versions of the real events. Additionally, it said once Jeremy found the book and thought it was really what she did, he didn’t give her a chance to explain. He drove her into a tree to make it seem like an accident. This is the complete opposite of what the readers have thought the whole time: that Verity was selfish, killed her daughter Harper, and injured herself driving. 

This book is written really strategically, and there are readers who believe both stories in the book. It doesn’t seem possible that what Verity wrote would be fake because it seems hard to believe that it was all really for an “exercise”. She would have to think all that out, the killing of her daughter especially. On the other hand, it is also hard to believe that she would do that. She was a mother who lost her son Chastin to an allergic reaction and her daughter Harper to a freak accident, it could make sense that she was just grieving and her writing was her outlet. The author of the book, Colleen Hoover, creates suspense throughout the story as the narrator, Lowen, seems to be seeing things no one else does. This creates a possibility of distrust between the reader and narrator. The readers question every new plot point as it seems only Lowen is unraveling the “true” story. She is a person who is new in the Crawford house. She is also a writer herself, which could lead to her imagination to create some of the major unclear or one-sided plot points in the book that only come together in the ending. This book has a way of grasping readers. Between unexplained events occurring through the book and the first person perspective, it’s difficult for readers to put the book down.  

This book deserves the attention it gets. The author’s methodical thriller writing sets it apart from other suspenseful books. If you like mind-twisting stories that make you question what the true story is, without losing structure to keep you interested, this is definitely a book for you.