From the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends With Us and November 9 comes a moving and haunting novel of family, love, and the power of the truth.
'Not every mistake deserves a consequence. Sometimes the only thing it deserves is forgiveness.'
The Voss family is anything but normal. They live in a repurposed church, newly baptized Dollar Voss. The once cancer-stricken mother lives in the basement, the father is married to the mother’s former nurse, the little half-brother isn’t allowed to do or eat anything fun, and the eldest siblings are irritatingly perfect. Then, there’s Merit.
Merit Voss collects trophies she hasn’t earned and secrets her family forces her to keep. While browsing the local antiques shop for her next trophy, she finds Sagan. His wit and unapologetic idealism disarm and spark renewed life into her - until she discovers that he’s completely unavailable. Merit retreats deeper into herself, watching her family from the sidelines, when she learns a secret that no trophy in the world can fix.
Fed up with the lies, Merit decides to shatter the happy family illusion that she’s never been a part of before leaving them behind for good. When her escape plan fails, Merit is forced to deal with the staggering consequences of telling the truth and losing the one boy she loves.
Poignant and powerful, Without Merit explores the layers of lies that tie a family together and the power of love and truth.
'Emotionally wrenching and utterly original, Without Merit’s characters stayed with me long after I finished' Sara Shepard, New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Little Liars
For the first time ever, I am a bit disappointed in a Colleen Hoover book. Without Merit tried to do so much in just 300 pages and it all just felt a bit flat and rushed. Merit, as the main character, was selfish to extreme points and her family weren’t much better.
What kind of person pines after someone she believes is her sisters boyfriend? For real? Regardless of how that turned out, for a time Merit believed Sagan was Honor’s boyfriend and she crossed a line.
Can we please for one second discuss the character names also? In the Voss family there is: Merit, Honor, Utah and Moby. Then there’s Sagan and Luck. How people can call Dimple or Rishi made up names when they’re actually names in that culture but not think Merit, Honor or Sagan is ridiculous is just plain bonkers. There is no explanation for why the Voss kids are called that, except Moby who is named after the whale. Luck just randomly falls into the Voss’s life without us learning a thing about his backstory, except for a throwaway paragraph or two. Sagan also has family issues and bingo, you guessed it, we don’t know why.
Hoover has even managed to bring Syria into the mix, with a long winded, two-page explanation for one of Sagan’s tattoos that was just bizarre. Like Syria was in the news so Hoover was like well, I better put that in the book also!
Without Merit was just too much. The Voss’s has way too much family drama for one family and it bordered on the ridiculous.
