Without Merit

Product Information

Colleen Hoover is the New York Times bestselling author of multiple novels and novellas, specialising in young adult fiction and romance.Colleen Hoover books have massively surged in popularity recentlydue to attention from the #BookTokcommunity onTikTok. Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Este libro le hubiese servido a Colleen Hoover para escribir varios. Es la primera vez que veo que en un mismo libro se tratan tantos problemas y enfermedades psicológicas y psiquiátricas. Es demasiado. O como dice una amiga "mucho con demasiado". Merit begins drinking from a tequila bottle and writes an open letter to all inhabitants of Dollar Voss. It includes all of her family’s darkest secrets plus her darkest secret of all: Utah forced her to kiss him when she was 12. Merit then copies and distributes her letter to every member of the family to read.

Morgan is determined to prevent her daughter from making the same mistakes she did. By getting pregnant and married way too young, Morgan put her own dreams on hold. Clara doesn’t want to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Her predictable mother doesn’t have a spontaneous bone in her body. Merit Voss comes from an interesting family. The Voss family is full of dysfunctional characters, and Merit is just as dysfunctional as the rest in a lot of ways. Merit is also the keeper of secrets in her family.I like that there was a specific focus on family and mental health rather than just sex and boy-drama. It made for a nice change.

I'm not sure how to properly phrase this in a way that won't make people want to rip my head off, so I'm just going to go for it. If this paragraph doesn't make sense, you don't agree, or you think I an idiot, that's cool, please just move on. Basically, I feel a little bit cheated with this book. Everyone has genres that they like, yes? Well this is a CoHo book, who is known for her monumental, everlasting, earth shattering love stories. Without Merit is very vague, between both the cover and blurb so you don't have a good sense of what you're going in to. But between the author (come on, we all know what we're getting when you hear the name Colleen Hoover) and the opening chapter -- OMG MY HEART -- well, I expected one of those monumental, everlasting, earth shattering love stories. And I didn't get it. I feel like I was lead on or something because that seemed to be the way the book was heading, until it wasn't. I was rooting for Sagan and Merit so hard until, well, it became a story that I didn't want it to. And frankly, who cares what I want, I get that, but when you're expecting one thing, hoping for one thing, and you don't get it... Well, it's a little disappointing. Even Goodreads has Romance tagged as one of the genres but yet, here we are. Merit lives in a small Texas town and is certain her family is the most dysfunctional family ever.... and she may not be all that wrong, from the fact that they live in a renovated church with the marquee still on the lawn to the fact that both her stepmother and mother live in the same house..... Merit was such a fantastically developed character.... even if you couldn’t completely relate to her, you sure did want everything t The Voss family is quirky, flawed, and full of secrets. With everything going on at Dollar Voss, it’s easy for Merit to feel pushed to the side or completely ignored. She starts to believe that it would be no great loss to her family if one day she were gone. But before she goes, Merit decides it’s time to clear the air of her family’s darkest secrets and force them to finally face the truth about one another. When she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t want to leave after all, it’s too late. Merit and the rest of the Voss clan are forced to deal with the layers of lies that have tied their family together, and the staggering power of love and truth. This book is different from any CoHo book I’ve read before..... but definitely in a good way.... this book was about family, dysfunction, love, and secrets....This quirky, complex, and frustrating heroine will win hearts and challenge assumptions about family dysfunction and mental illness in a life-affirming story that redefines what’s normal. And while people are saying Without Merit is not really a romance, I'd actually disagree. It may have a plot outside of the romance, unlike some of Hoover's earlier books, but it is still very romantic. A lot of the story feels centred around the romantic tensions between Merit and Sagan. I didn't like either of them. Sagan mansplains everything to Merit, coddles her against her wishes by saying he won't make out with her for her own good (ugh), and then even says this which I think is supposed to be sweet:

The only person who hasn’t closed the door on her completely is Ledger Ward, a local bar owner and one of the few remaining links to Kenna’s daughter. But if anyone were to discover how Ledger is slowly becoming an important part of Kenna’s life, both would risk losing the trust of everyone important to them. To save their relationship, all Owen needs to do is confess. But in this case, the confession could be much more destructive than the actual sin. Too Late (2016) A love story between writer and muse, November 9 follows Fallon, a girl with a plan to move across the country, who meets Ben, an aspiring novelist. The pair spends Fallon’s last day in L.A. together and vow to return to each other every year on, you guessed it, November 9.This book reminded me a bit of The Addams Family. The Vosses live in a converted church, dress the statue of Jesus Christ up for holidays and special events, and have powerful unique personalities. Each individual carries so much baggage that when they are put together, the sum of the parts is much greater than the individual pieces. In terms of the characters, Sagan was too much of an angelic, can-do-no-wrong person, IMO. He was the "good one" in a field of more complex characters, and it irked me. Twenty-one-year-old Auburn Reed’s life is shattered. With a plan to rebuild from nothing, she takes a job at a Dallas art studio where she, naturally, meets a mysterious artist, Owen Gentry. The two connect and Auburn learns that Owen is hiding a secret past that threatens to destroy everything she has left, which isn’t much.