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[en] Verity, by Colleen Hoover

Verity is a thriller where a writer is put in charge of finishing a book series by another writer who suffered a car accident and finds herself debilitated. She goes to live in the same house, sees the author's point of view and lives alongside her family, and things start to go wrong from there on.

Personally, I have a negative opinion against books that end with an open ending and let the reader's creativity take over to imagine what the correct ending is and what could happen from there. A lot of people like it, I see it as laziness or difficulty on the author's part in giving an end to a story that they started telling, anyway.

I can't say, however, that I didn't like the book, but my only criticism besides the ending itself is the excess of sexual description in some scenes, which was already expected by me given that it was my wife who recommended the book. The story starts off at a good pace, develops well, and the named chapters of the manuscript "So be it", which portray Verity's thoughts, were for me the best part of the story. Following the plot through three different points of view was a very smart choice and made the actions that unfolded throughout the plot much more justifiable.

But as I said, I don't like open endings. The author could have chosen a path and followed it through to the end, but she needed the plot twist at the end to confuse the readers' minds and bring back the doubt about most of the book's plot: Did she do it or not? Was she the guilty one or him? Team letter or team manuscript? Nothing like a good duality to hide behind laziness and not finish the story.

Besides that, after I finished I also found out about an extra chapter, which I consider somewhat unnecessary. What this book, in my view, should have had was a sequel, and the extra chapter could very well have been the first one present in that sequel. But just like the ending of the book, it's evident that the author still tried to imply that Verity, in the end, was right. The three of them deserved each other in a way, and the only ones who lost in the story were the children (all of them).