You know how cats have some parasite in their poo that influences their owner’s behavior? I think Jeremy’s peen has something similar going on that attracts heauxs and makes them obsessed with him.
real omg I hateeee reading sex scenes that are so explicit instead of using show don’t tell 😭 like it’s just so gross hearing ‘his dick was cumming all over my pussy’
Bro not Jeremy roasting the woman at target who was having an affair... right before having an affair 😭😭 its the double standards and bizarrely written women for me
i can't get over how empty these characters' lives feel when they're not banging and manifesting bullshit drama. it's giving "live, laugh, lick the shaft"
these characters are so empty that it seems that the book is still an unfinished version, it seems that they simply took away all the part of the story that would develop these characters
The man dying at the beginning is the most unhinged opening to a novel I’ve ever read. Especially since it has NOTHING to do with the rest of the novel.
I disagree. It's actually brilliant foreshadowing. It presages how the author can create a character and then kill it off at the end of the story and have absolutely no character development in between those two events. :P
Me: Main character checks mail. Also me: MtF goddess has her egg crack and she "comes out" to some crusy old white guy. Who promptly gets Mortal Kombat'ed and has his corpse turned into a deer mouse. He gets resurrected though.
Literally the only thing it’s meant to do is illustrate why the main character hates living in “the big city” as though that happens every day and people in cities are callous and don’t care (even though she is callous and doesn’t care).
He strangled her before he killed her, which means there would 100% be bruises on her throat. Not to mention if she struggled at all, there would be DNA under nails. Like, c'mon. That's just bad mystery writing.
girl fr these books are for the people who never grew out of their internalised misogyny from seventh grade 😭 like when we were fourteen and a girl starts having beef with you for no reason and you're just like...damn, whose dick are we fighting to jump on?????
I have been saying the same thing for forever now. This gives major vibes of the books with kinda-sorta abusive boyfriends (later husbands) and kinda-sorta misogynistic MCs that I used to read back when I was younger. But even those were more digestible than CoHo.
I was really hoping that the reveal would be that it was the husband that actually wrote the manuscript. That HE was the one that hated the kids and was jealous so he killed them. Then when verity found out, he caused the car crash and wrote the manuscript to frame her. And the main girl would believe Verity was the bad person all this time and would cover for him when he killed Verity.
im saying! i was so unsatisfied with the ending bc it was odd that jeremy picked lowen to ghostwrite for verity (but lying to lowen in the beginning saying verity liked her books, when it was him who did). and then killing his wife so easily without listening to her side of the story imagine if jeremy picked out lowen to replace his wife years before and their "chance meeting" on the street wasnt by coincidence and he was planning out making her fall in love with him all along.. and lowen realizing she helped assist killing his innocent wife and is now trapped with him. the bonus chapter villainizes jeremy more however its still mostly a mystery what is the truth
**Sobbing as a former Steak 'n Shake worker** i saw people like this, i swear, it's horrific. Please, you're drunk as hell, go home and do your nasty nasty there.
the sad thing is this could have been such a good book focusing on women's mental health during pregnancy and PPD but instead she villianizes her for feeling this way instead of promoting ways to help or bring awareness
thats like how her other book "It ends with us" was a great opportunity to address domestic violence but it turned into a very sappy thing... still romantasizing the abuser..
Yesss. I kept getting so annoyed watching this video and going off on my own tangents to myself and to my husband about exactly that. I wish someone else had written this book because it could’ve been so interesting. But no. It had to be Colleen Hoover -.-
Wait, how isn't the main character mad at Jeremy for apparently finding "I thought she was autistic" an acceptable excuse for trying to murder a child??
He was mad because he notices that she treats that kid differently and with less love and emotion, and her excuse was because autistic children don't want that kind of attention or something. If I remember correctly he didn't actually see her in the act
Because ableism lol It's hyper common IRL There's a video put out by Autism Speaks (they're an "autism awareness" organization, but the autism community sees them as a hate group) with a mom who has one autistic daughter and a non-autistic daughter. She literally says she wanted to drive off a bridge, but her having a non-autistic daughter stopped her. Only autistic people and parents of autistic children called it out for being ableist. But that's why. Cause ableism lol As a disabled person myself, I wasn't even surprised when reading this book. Just disgusted at all the ableism in it
@@alexandriak7991mg! Thank you!! I was livid, upon reading the above comment (Note: I’m not mad at the person who left the comment. I hope they are having a wonderful day or night and I wish no negativity on them.) I have autism and hope to have kids of my own one day because kids are awesome. I could never imagine hurting any child, regardless of my autism or the child having autism, and the fact the author wrote that is just absolutely ridiculous. Ignorance that isn’t by choice is fine, that means you’re learning and that’s okay. Choosing to be ignorant is not. Don’t even get me started on Autism Speaks and as for that mother, abhorrent behavior. Abhorrent.
i’ve just noticed that this supposed “autobiography” of verity’s literally begins when she meets jeremy. essentially saying she had no life before him, and he’s the centre of her world. it’s honestly disgusting how books like this and ‘the wives’ make it seem like women have no interesting stories to tell without a man to drive the plot forward. verity has no friends, no hobbies that don’t involve jeremy in some way, and no wants, needs or dreams that aren’t about jeremy. these types of “dark” novels would be fine if they were well written or diverse in their narratives, but more and more recently i see this influx of books where the woman is turned into this caricature of a person whose only purpose is catering to a man. if i wanted to see moderately attractive people fucking to the backdrop of a mediocre plot, i’d watch porn. at least it lacks the monotony of colleen’s attempts at literary prowess.
It's because it's a laughable attempt at a modern version of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, in which the narrator doesn't even have a name throughout the book to reinforce the eternal light (shadow?) of the love interest's first wife, the glorious Rebecca. But this book just executes the same ideas in such a terrible way that it just ends up making the girl seem so bland. better to just actually read Rebecca and enjoy the gothic fucked up vibes
What is it with these characters that are obsessed with their husbands to the point of being jealous of their kids?? Does this happen? People, please seek therapy.
My grandma's mom was like this, although I don't think it was bc she was obsessed with her husband but rather with her own self. My grandma was traumatized by this for her whole life. Not me psychoanalyzing my ancestor on a Colleen hoover review lol
The way people literally died bcus of Jeremy's dick and Rhysand's dick made the mountains shake, the lesson learned here is that if you write a book where dick gets people killed and/or injured then you'll become an instant bestseller
fun fact: i did a presentation on the importance of writing birth control in fiction for my wgs class, and i used colleen hoover as an example of toxic, abusive, and unhealthy relationships!
@starlitbri does it not occur that the book reflects how women really do falal for abusive assholes in reality? That perhaps she's an unreliable narrator?
Hello! Fellow autistic person, and I swear the moment I read "Asperger's" I was so done with this book (yes I did previously try reading it myself. Pray for my soul if you have spare time, please).
As a fellow psych student, & an autist myself, the reason he gave for getting rid of Aspergers is not actually accurate. It's a reason why previously diagnosed Aspies reject the term, because of Asperger himself being a eugenicist who worked for the nazis & carried out horrifying 'studies' on his group of 'little geniuses' (a.k.a autists without a delay in speech, & lacking intellectual disabilities). But the real reason is more along the lines of psychology, as a relatively new field of study, constantly developing, & psychologists coming to the conclusion that autism, aspergers, & this one other disorder (can't remember the exact name, but it was something about resistant... Uh, about refusing to follow orders basically, it's a bullshit diagnosis) are so similar as diagnoses, that it's easier to lump them all under Autism Spectrum Disorder, & simply have different 'levels' of it (which is something that still needs a lot of work. An intelligent autist like myself, who literally can't live by himself, is labeled as a level 1 autist because I'm perceived to be 'high functioning', it's absolute bullshit)
@@BooksandBuns Wait, so is labelling autistic people by levels innacurate? Because now I'm worried I've been spreading misinformation, because I always say I have "Level 3" autism because that's what they diagnosed me with
It’s so funny when there’s an in-universe book the characters are reading and then they comment on how well-written it is… like the author is literally complimenting herself iN her own book girl stfu 😭
literally same! i like to fight back against this by sneakily replacing her books on my store's tiktok table with better books that are still on our "booktok list"
The dedication to Tarryn Fisher at the start of the novel is the most ominous thing I've seen. A masterclass in foreshadowing the quality of this book, authors take notes
I’m sorry, CHARTREUSE??? Let’s ignore that nobody’s eyes are chartreuse, but that is the tackiest, most garish color I can imagine for a tie. I need to know if it’s patterned or solid, colleen. Does he moonlight as a clown?? 😭
As a middle school English teacher, the passage where it repeatedly is like “it feels good” gave me war flashbacks to when my students can’t describe things in their writing so they just say “it was fun” or “it was good” and trying to get them to describe it any other way is like pulling teeth
Okay but if manuscript was the opposite of everything then did she uh. Hate the other twin?.. did she hate every hook up they had??? Was HE the one who bit the headboard? So many questions
As for Point 2 (regarding her hating hookups), she does say in the 'redeeming' letter that all the sex they had was 'to please [Jeremy]', as part of the proof that she was actually a good woman all along. So you're bang on the money. Colleen Hoover apparently believes all one needs to be evil is to be female with a libido
i literally told my MOTHER to read this book because i had seen some positive reviews for it. When she finished it, she looked at me differently. Now I understand why
The main girl watched this man murder his wife and explicitly cover it up and she still thinks his wife was the manipulator, actually. Honey, get some therapy. Also the idea of someone not pulling out without explicit consent to begin with is HORRIFYING, why is it treated as romantic? 😨😨😨 Should have been called "Jeremy the Beekeeper" with all the honey traps he uses, yikes.
colleen hoover’s books are like her horcruxes or smth - they carry negative energy, pieces of her soul, and so long as they’re out there she’ll live forever
To be fair I also found Twilight to be a pretty decent case study of a dysfunctional relationship, with an aetiological focus on Bella. Granted I could only make it through 1.5 books.........
I've also heard before that coho is very pro life, so it tracks that she would rather have a character depict trying to give herself an abortion or kill her children, and making her the villain, instead of discussing the mental strain on people who are pregnant that don't want to be and how that impacts the relationship with their children later on.
@@qetsiyah1766 from what I've seen its just speculation, but I think she may have liked a pro life post on insta or something. Reddit would probably be a good recourse to use to see if anyone has put together evidence for lack of a better term.
It's more the equivalent of someone's Angelfire page from 1999 where they simp for Vegeta and all the fanfic archive they have contains is various OCs riding Saiyan prince D.
THE CHICKEN. the phone rang. i was washing the chicken. jeremy answered it. i was washing the chicken. he raised his voice. still washing the fucking chicken. he was in the hallway gripping the doorframe like he was going to fall to his knees if he didn’t. i was still washing the chicken. tears were streaming down my cheeks, my knees were weak. my stomach began to lurch. i vomited on the chicken. THE CHICKEN.
Everyone is saying how changing the plot will help to make this story better. But i feel even then it will not cause this is the writing style.. Like chicken bruh?
There's also a bonus epilogue, I'll spoil it here: Jeremy and the main girl (forgot her name) are off living somewhere else a few years later. They're on the beach with their children when the woman from the supermarket (the one cheating on her husband) comes up and finds them. They have a little conversation, then Jeremy proceeds to drown her in the ocean. And the main girl is like hmmmm... I was fine with him murdering one woman, but now that it's two, maybe I should consider running away... 🤔
@@enriquesanchez9016 its not a joke 😭 if you don't believe me, you can search "verity bonus epilogue" and you should be able to find somewhere to read it for free
I’m guessing CoHo saw people saying Jeremy should have been the villain and thought “fuck! They’re right!” Which I do honestly have respect for, even if adding onto it likely wasn’t the best decision
So she was supposed to use the manuscript where she describes having sex with her husband in detail multiple times to teach young authors to master writing? I'm good, thanks.
The thing I find the most irritating, is that the main character has the worst double standards. She thinks Rarity is a horrible person for her story saying she drowned her child, but as Jermey (who apparently can’t do any wrong) literally kills Rarity right infront of her she is just like “we won’t talk about this again, ANYWAYS 7 months later we are very happy together .”
LMAOO someone needs to buy Verity one of those neurodivergent chewable sensory toys, girlypop is just trying to stim each time shes biting the headboard
Okay I actually read this and the only mercy I feel is that it was pretty short. 1. Verity talking about how women aren’t actually like that with men only for Lowen to be like Omg jeremy 🥵🥵 Jeremy 🥵🥵Jeremy I need you 2. This book was so sexual. Like I’m not a puritan but I can’t get over how much they were fucking 3. She named those kids Chastin, Harper and Crew I think she hated them after all 4. The M Night Shyamalan twist at the end made an already not very good book worse. Like what was Verity’s plan? Why did she stay for so long? WHY DIDNT SHE ASK LOWEN FOR HELP? WHY WAS HER GO TO “PRETEND TO BE IN A COMA” AND HOW DID NO ONE REALIZE? HOW WAS SHE ABLE TO REPRESS REACTING TO LOUD NOISES AND PROBABLY REFLEX TESTING BUT WENT “mmm I GOTTA turn on my TV tho.” Fuck this book
mate i just have to say i hate this book because i share one of the characters names and it makes me so upset i had never met anyone with my name until i found this video
All of these problems could have been solved if Verity had just told Jeremy about the writing exercise. It ALWAYS comes down to poor communication. So many stories can be solved by just TALKING to the other person!!
Wait here’s a plot hole. If Jeremy read the end of the manuscript where Varity said “I’ll drive my car into a tree” how did he not realize that the manuscript was made up when he was the one who drove the car into the tree?! Or how did he not remember his wife not choking his own daughter out?! If the manuscript was a lie how did he not remember the real time events? Shouldn’t that have him at least raise of few questions?! This book makes no sense
it really makes you wonder if there's more to this story that was not elaborated, because the whole time I thought Jeremy was the bad guy and maybe it was 'his' autobiography in a twisted way (but told from a female perspective). Or maybe he read the end of the manuscript and got so mad and thought, yah let me manifest her wish then. Either way, if I was the main character, I wouldn't want to stick around with a guy when she herself doesn't know what's the truth and what's not.
@@JuliBom no bc with that ending it left me craving a better-written book, a thriller in which she realises the man is obviously the villain I mean driving your wife into a tree, attempting to murder her with very little proof of wrongdoing and zero attempt at communicating seems psychopathic to me. But the ending just proves coho is demented, living in a fantasy world in which the women still somehow idolize the dick of a man who is trash and a murderer. The more I think about the ending the more pissed off I get
Also if I remember correctly, he was at the dinner meeting thing where they suggest to Verity this type of writing exercise to help her write from the Villains pov...
Maybe the most irritating thing for me in this book was, that even though the main character was a writer (which I love in books), she never actually wrote a thing though out the book. 😒
Ah Coleen Hoover, she's just the gift that keeps on giving. And just like always I'm here going "Aw, you shouldn't have." Honestly, she manages to somehow suck out all logic. It's in the name, I suppose.
I knew that Colleen Hoover was a controversial writer, BUT LIKE HOLY SHIT. This book was so uncomfortable just to listen too. Thanks for warning everyone out here💀💀
90% of that manuscript was her banging Jeremy so if the whole thing was just her being topsy turvy does that mean all the sex was actually bad and she was biting the headboard to cope 🤨
@@ShadowTheCatto exactly what it sounds like; compulsion to do with sex or fixation on it, impulse with it, to an abnormal degree. usually derivative of adhd, bipolar or sex trauma or a combination of the three. "It's an intense focus on sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that can't be controlled." sometimes called "nymphomania" :D
Okay, three takeaways 1. Cindy is at her best when she is roasting the shit out of bad "sexy" books. 2. While there are probably are women who genuinely have felt resentment towards their unborn children for what they are doing to her body and the feelings they are generating in their spouse, I seriously doubt they express it in the language of a cartoon supervillain. 3. I'm starting to think Colleen Hoover and Tarryn Fisher saw Gone Girl and thought "I could write that."
Also what the FUCK no person should ever resent their fucking children, especially when they were able to choose whether they were born or not. Just have a proper fucking medical abortion if you hate them, I don’t care how uncomfortable a conversation it would be with your spouse. If you didn’t abort them (and you definitely had the ability to, which she absolutely did), I’m sorry but you are now obligated to put them before yourself and your shitty husband. Do NOT create life that you are not willing to care for. This is why we fight for abortion rights, specifically so this shit does NOT happen, especially not to those poor kids. They didn’t ask to be born for fucks sake, and I bet if they had a choice they would rather be aborted than live through this horrifying situation. I wish I could adopt every kid that gets born into shit like this. It’s just like how it’s important to spay and neuter pets-it’s wrong to create living beings that we aren’t able to give good lives to. If she genuinely couldn’t access an abortion, she still should’ve put the kids up for adoption or AT LEAST left them to be entirely cared for by their father. Yes the adoption system has some truly terrible flaws, but it’s still better than being raised by a parent who despises them.
The third point is so true! But like, Gone Girl is SO witty and descriptive that it lowered my own self-esteem when it came to writing because it was just so damn masterful. I read it and thought, “Wow. I’d be so happy if I could ever write like this someday!” not “I could top this easily.” And at the risk of sounding arrogant, my own prose definitely reads better than Hoover’s lol
@@kiera6326To be fair the author of gone girl knew what she was doing lol I believe her experience from writing perceptions and the media came from her work experience.
I feel like Colleen Hoover always chooses the weirdest names for her characters: Lowen, Chastin, Crew??? I've even heard her main character in It Ends With Us is named Lily Blossom Bloom and she owns a flower shop?? I'm baffled (also, loved the video Cindy!!).
I've heard people make jokes about Lilly Blossom Bloom or whatever her name is but I'm SCREAMING over the fact that acclaimed novelist Colleen Hoover sat down and went "hmm so I'm going to put this random woman in this target scene and name her husband William and her boytoy Sherman." Did she go to Home Depot earlier that day and see Sherwin-Williams and go "oh these are good character names let me write it on my baby's diaper or whatever" 😭😭😭😭😭 it's like one step removed from JKR's shitty on the nose character names, but at least CoHo's are so fucking random and pointless that it's just funny
what's worse is alllll the girls at my school r making the teachers read this book and writing their papers about it. before today, I had no idea how actually AWFUL this book was. thanks for making me never look at my peers the same again Cindy
@@withcindy how not to write a good thriller? Maybe an analysis on misogyny in modern romance, or the absolute state of "dark romance" as a genre. Though knowing the average Hoover fan, probably about how ✨✨devoted✨✨ the leading man is and how its the ✨height of romance✨
My toxic trait in school was writing the most dark story and then being like, “Jk it was all in the imagination. Or is it?” and the times I didn’t go “Jk!” was when it was good.
There are so many places in stories where I went "but what if, unless it's not actually" and thought I was the smartest person out there. Needless to say, there's a reason most of those stories are unpublished or just drafts (in Wattpad).
Weird thing I wanna say: I read a manga where a woman is given as a sacrifice to be the bride of a snake (an actual snake) god. This story is wild, but the friggin snake from this manga has more respect, kindness, and consent towards his wife, than all the friggin males in every Collen Hoover book. That really says something
@@withcindy It's called Daija ni Totsuida Musume or The Girl Who Married The Big Snake. I do have to warn you tho, it has explicit scenes, and she actually does "it" with the snake. But the story is strangely wholesome, and I love the characters. And there are some disturbing scenes (like mental health, s**icide, etc.)
Cindy is really out here discovering that authors who wrote books that she hated before are friends with authors who wrote books that she hates now. It happened with SJM and it's happening now again. I guess this is the actual thriller going on here
I feel like Colleen Hoover saw Gone Girl once and make that the blueprint for her entire writing career, and yet somehow still misses the point of the movie.
Jeremy is the most unsexy name ever. Like idc what the actual description of his appearance is my brain will always default to a guy like the picture you showed. Ahghhh so so many names to choose from and she went with JEREMY.
What I found interesting was that Lowen had the same characteristics she hated in Manuscript Verity. She had an unsubstantiated feeling Crew would hurt the new baby like Manuscript Verity did. She became obsessed with Jeremy & sex obsessed. she painted verity as dangerous to everyone in the house but she literally sleepwalks and could harm everyone in the house at any point. The main characters were literally the worse. Jeremy was reading lowens books but not Verity’s and after he tries to kill verity he created an elaborate scheme to get Lowen in his house. Then killed Verity as soon as he realized she could speak up. He also obviously planted the manuscript for Lowen to find since Verity left it in a box in the basement and couldn’t find it. That’s not red flags? Lowen sleeping in their bed and wearing his clothes, biting Verity’s teeth marks, specifically reading the smut scenes & reenacting the way Verity self-pleasured was all weird & unsettling. The only person who made sense & was enjoyable was the nurse who realized Jeremy and Lowen were trash
I saw a tweet saying: When y'all buy badly written white books to see how bad it is, all you're doing is telling the publisher it doesn't matter if the book is well written or badly written, they're gonna make money regardless. Therefore, they'll continue to publish badly written white books...
Having read bad harlequin books from like the 1990s when my aunt decided to share her stash with me once I turned 18, I can guarantee you that the industry of shitty romance books has been thriving for a long time, and I would even dare say that it's been around since before it was even sold and it was just freeware at ladies' tea salon book clubs hand-copied on cheap paper.
Well then, booktubers like ReadWithCindy are doing us all a favor. I won't ever have to buy or borrow or read BS like this for myself since she's doing all the work for us. I can't help my curiosity but I can help grow her channel and appreciate the work she puts into these videos!
If his eyes are "chartreuse" , he is ill or possessed. And, just for fun, did you all know CoHo and Tarryn published a book together? It's called Never Never. Guess they are Book Besties now. *shudders*
You know. There is something that could have worked. Take out the last letter and move back to the "climax". You could have Verity talking to herself when she didn't think anyone was around. Her husband who has given her the best sex of her life has just tried to kill her, and she has recovered enough to know what is going on around her. So, while talking to herself, she laments the lost of her children, her husband's misunderstanding, finally after the door is locked from the outside, she talks about the manuscript being a writing exercise. It casts legitimate doubt on if Verity was a murder or just writing away her grief. Leave it ambiguous. The main character still gets the dicking of a lifetime, the husband feels vindicated, and the reader is left with an "OR IS IT?" ending.
@@withcindy I was just thinking about an ending that fit within the messed of confines of the situation. It can make the reader feel like Verity was right in the first place and she is being gaslit(granted by her own doing) and now her husband has hired this new woman to finish her work. Or she could have done it, but the reader would know. Working on my own novels, I know how this is a bad ending. Does she have beta readers even? Or is this a lot of bad novels from well received authors and no one wants to say, this is just bad.
I saw a snippet of an interview (in Rachel Oates' 2nd video on this book) and apparently Hoover herself was confused on what the truth was. I wasn't even surprised. Later, she said she thinks that the manuscript was the truth but if so, girl, why introduce the letter? Just to confuse the reader? A plot twist for the sake of having a plot twist nobody can guess?
@@Saphia_ Yea, it's weird. There is just so many different ways to have this metaphorical cake and eat it too. Like, I get it, it's not made for me. It's supposed to "plot" around smut. I'm fine with the smut, but if you're going to do a thriller, do a better thriller. Like if you're about to publish, why are you still editing and writing four days before hand. I'm working on a YA/NA dragon rider novel and I spent two hours writing about a war in a far off kingdom that will never play a part in the main character's story. I mean, by the time you get to the end of a thriller, the author should have a definitive answer. Like I don't mind the possible "twist", its just it could have been much better with a little set up, like the MC hearing Verity questioning herself before using the baby monitor. The idea really isn't that bad, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
If you look up what the name Jeremy means, the definition is "exalted by God" and that's so funny in the context of him being worshipped as a whitebread man 💀
Hearing from people who've given birth, doctors often give the clearance for sex WAY too soon anyway. Ain't no way she gave birth to twins and immediately wanted vag action
fun fact: men usually produce about a teaspoon of semen during sex. she described it like it was a glass full. edit: has colleen hoover ever had sex? why do i, an asexual teen know more about sex than a grown woman? sex usually lasts under 10 minutes! where did she get the hour and a half from! imagine doing a workout for that long, you'd be dead!
I hate how sex is so unknown these days. All these people learn about anatomy from porn. Shame, sex ed needs to be in school. Bring back logic and education about sex. WOMEN AND MALE ANATOMY NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT!!
Listening to book reviewers make fun of smut books like these as an asexual is the funniest thing in the world. I like to imagine this is what it’s like for non-ace people, just constant 😭
