Anne Hathaway's 'Verity' Is a Mostly Faithful Book Adaptation That Still Plays It Too Safe | Review

Colleen Hoover has had an almost inconceivable rise to fame as an author, with most of it happening just within the last several years. After self-publishing her first novel in 2012, Hoover spent the next several years writing (and largely self-publishing) her books to acclaim and very strong sales, but she experienced her biggest surge in readership yet once her titles began making the rounds on BookTok in 2020. By 2022, she had become one of the U.S.'s bestselling novelists of all time, reportedly selling more books than James Patterson and John Grisham combined. Since Hoover is most widely known for writing contemporary romance and women's fiction, her 2018 psychological thriller Verity represents a major deviation from her work. It's a sinister, suspenseful story about undeniably messy characters — all of whom become even messier and more complicated as the tale goes on, with one twist stacked on top of another forcing the reader to grapple with the notion of truth, betrayal, and perspective.