verity

Don't ask me why but when Audible told me I had six unused credits on audiobooks I thought look, I had better get down to business and maybe I can use this to my own advantage. So I went searching for books 'about' (whatever that might mean, didn't care, didn't really investigate either) garden suburbs, which is something I have to make my business at the moment. Top of the list was this book called Verity which I am sure I am much more than half way through now and which is a piece of work. Nothing to do with the reason I 'bought' it, and ridiculous too. 

So it's told in the voice of a woman called I think Lowan, or Loene, or Loan - who knows! - who is a barely successful author, who is employed by the family of a successful author who's had a terrible (probably self-induced) car accident and is now more or less in a vegetative state, to complete the final three novels of a series. Not only has this author lost two children (dead within a few months of each other), leaving only one child, a boy with the impossible name Crew (perhaps Crüe - once again, I don't know) and a husband, Jeremy (Djerremeigh?). They live well but are of course sad and tragic, though Djerremeigh does get to show off his fabulous bod most of the day by doing chores around the yard that make him sweat. 

Lowan is meant to be putting together notes on how to complete these books, however, she instead gets bound up in watching Dierram-E do menial tasks and/or reading a manuscript placed within easy reach amongst the successful author (Verity)'s papers which is a sort of confessional so-called autobiography, though what no-one seems to realise is that most autobiographies do not start at the party where you meet your husband. But whatever. 

Things get slow from hereon and I am seriously considering stopping listening to this altogether as I find it so Jodie Picoult mixed with Rebecca mixed with Virginia Andrews and I suppose, yeah, I find it uncomfortable that so much of the story is about Verity's recounting of how she is constantly thinking about killing her children (which, presumably, she does at some point).

Of course, there has to be a twist here, and there are a lot of flags. Lowan constantly tells us, the reader, that she admires Verity's writing because she tells the story from the criminal's point of view. There are hints that Verity's only faking being a vegetable, but who knows. I could seriously happily stop listening to / 'reading' this book now and I probably will. 

* 7 Jan 2023 update - I did. But reading the wry synopsis above, I'm tempted to return to it.