I picked up Verity after watching the trailer for the film featuring Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway. When I googled the film, I realised it was based on a novel by Colleen Hoover.
That was enough reason for me to pick up the book.
And this is one of those rare novels that was difficult to put down once I started.
I usually take my time reading, but I finished Verity in just two days.
The pace keeps pulling you forward.
What I liked was how the book plays with vulnerability, attraction, writing and the darker sides of human behaviour.
A few lines especially caught my attention: ” I moved to the city to be invincible, but I am certainly not impenetrable.
And: “I wasn’t in the mood to be solved.”
There is also a thought about writing that particularly interested me—the idea that a writer has to strip away every layer of protection and write from a place that is ugly, honest, bloody and completely exposed.
Then there are moments that capture the strange pull between people: “I wouldn’t say I was lost before the night I met Jeremy, but I had certainly never been found until the moment he laid eyes on me.”
And then: “The good thing about sins is they don’t have to be atoned for immediately.”
I went into Verity because of a movie trailer.
I finished it because the book itself had taken over.
Dark, unsettling and extremely difficult to put down.
For someone who usually takes time to finish a book, two days is probably my biggest compliment to Verity.
