Colleen Hoover’s Verity: Collector’s Edition Review

! SPOILERS !

Leave well enough alone, CoHo.

I would have bought the book without the extra chapter, and the inclusion of that chapter actually made me more hesitant to buy it. I love Verity. I think it is one of the best books I’ve read because of how much it leaves as subtext and in subtle questioning at the end.

All the epilogue served to do was beat us over the head with the breadcrumbs that had been laid and actually undo a lot of the carefully crafted work of the end of the book that left us questioning so strongly. It felt like fan fiction of itself, and I was immensely disappointed.

Where her worries about Crew were planted seeds that left us slightly uneasy, now Crew is leaving his baby sister outside in the cold. Where her insecurities and comparisons in herself to Verity were whispers that nagged at her, now they’re almost pathological. Where we got to wonder exactly what we and Lowen thought in the future about Jeremy and Verity, now we get Lowen’s rationalization that says, eh, it doesn’t matter what’s true — Verity was dangerous. This weird, middle ground is far less interesting than either version of what Lowen would be if she chose manuscript or letter. It felt like a hedge on the author’s part to not alienate anyone who felt a certain way.

And as for what it did to Jeremy, well, I won’t forgive it for that. Jeremy was complicated in Verity, distant and unknowable, made perfect by both Verity and Lowen. Then that’s called into question so acutely when Lowen reads the letter. Here, he’s just a serial killer. It takes away his nuance because puh-LEASE, there was no need to kill the woman. So what if she gossiped to her friends that Jeremy and Lowen have a baby? That’s not really a danger to them as Lowen makes very clear: all the evidence is gone. Maybe they would get prosecuted, but it’s an extremely small chance that it would get pursued from the whisperings of a gossip with a grudge. And even if it was a strong possibility, that Jeremy immediately jumps to murder is infuriating. Again, it takes away the nuance. What was interesting about Jeremy was that, even if he did try to kill Verity the first time, it would have been in anger over his girls, not for some weird serial killer tendencies.

But if she wanted to totally rewrite it with the end and make Jeremy the villain, I would have been there for that. Shock us all and make it some story about how we’re so quick to vilify the woman and so hesitant to call out problems in a charming, charismatic man. That seems particularly relevant today. I don’t know that I would have liked it, but I would have respected it at least.

And honestly, when I say it felt like fan fiction of itself, I meant Lowen sucking Jeremy off in the shower. I mean, my God, how many times do I have to read about this man getting blown? Lowen was even sick of it when she was reading Verity’s manuscript, and yet here we are again. I get that she’s all competitive with Verity, and I am not saying it wasn’t hot, but it was infuriating. It felt like it didn’t fully embrace the darkness of what had just happened but kind of skirted the edges. It sort of talked about Lowen turning into Verity, but I think there just wasn’t enough space to explore that.

I think a lot of the ideas that started to percolate here might have worked out if they had space to be explored, but in just the epilogue, all it ended up doing was cheapening one of the best “you’ll never see it coming” books I’ve ever read. So, that was disappointing.

Basically, I am pretending this chapter doesn’t exist and going back to the book as it was, I believe, meant to be.