“With or without Merit?”
Author: Colleen Hoover
Narrated By: Candace Thaxton
Genre: Romance, Young Adult Fiction
Actual Rating: 2.5 stars
Spicy Meter: N/A, it’s clean (although lots of talk about spicy stuff)
Narration: 4 mikes
Content Warning: Describes a suicide attempt, depression, sexual assault, accidents, hypochondria, terminal illness, and very very toxic family relationships.
“Without Merit” follows the Voss family, a dysfunctional family living in a repurposed church out of spite, but it specifically follows Merit Voss, as she deals with being a teenager in love dealing with depression and a lowkey estranged twin. In this coming-of-age novel, you’ll get to live through adolescence over again—with its ups and downs and its indecisiveness and struggles.
I… kinda hated this book? It’s weird because I loved the audiobook narration and I love Colleen Hoover as a writer and I like YA clean romance novels once in a while—but this was something else entirely. I am part of a dysfunctional family and love reading about them as much as the next guy but, damn, was the Voss family above all that. There is dysfunctional and then there is that family, holy. It was all so weird it was distracting. This is as fiction as fiction can get. In no way could this family exist in real life, I swear.
Anyways, I would not recommend this book as your first or even fifth Colleen Hoover read, but if you’ve got nothing else to do and are looking for a filler novel then you could hypothetically grab “Without Merit”, I guess.
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“I used to feel like I was on the top of the world. Then one day, I noticed that it felt like I was no longer on the top of the world. I was just floating around inside of it. And then eventually, it felt like the world was on top of me.”
That’s what depression is.
andrea's galley 