| My CoHo's Journey| Without Merit

Hello book-nerds!

It finally happened. I didn’t like a Colleen Hoover’s book. It’s not that I have problems with them – which I do, a lot. – is that I actually did not enjoy reading it, did not like the characters and did not see the redemption of arc of anyone.

I’ll be honest, I started this book by pure boredom. I found it by chance and decided to give it a try. All for science, right?

Synopsis:

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.

Review:

Gods, but I really didn’t like this book. You see, normally I find her books good, nothing extraordinary but good. But this one… It didn’t even make me think about anything, it just made me cringe and want to punch someone.

Let’s start with the Voss family in general. I love families in book, but I’ve never seen a more dysfunctional in my life. I swear that there is nothing normal about them.

There’s a big secret that divides the family, or rather several big secrets, but I can’t still wrap my mind around brothers, sisters, twins!, hating each other. I can’t. I’m sorry, maybe it’s my fault, for having a relatively normal bound with my family, but I cannot comprehend how brothers can actually hate one another.

And the things that happened between them? I don’t get it. How can they be so mean to one of their sisters, exclude her so much… like they do in Without Merit.

I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s just too unrealistic for me. Brothers/sisters, no matter how different, always love each other, and that doesn’t happen in this book. They just don’t. And it makes no sense to me.

And don’t even get me started on Sagan. He’s the worst of them. I liked his story, but we didn’t go beyond on the only interesting thing in this whole damn book. Besides, he makes no sense whatsoever, or rather, the situations his involved make no sense. The fact that his living in the Voss’ house, eating with them and he barely knows them, he doesn’t pay a coin.

What?

What?

I do not understand this book.

Lets talk about Merit for example. The author tells us, after we’ve seen her family being very shitty to Merit all her life, that she has a depression. Pardon my language but, no shit Sherlock. Her whole family has been a mess whole her life, she’s been harbouring all these secrets, secrets that come from her family, and then she’s expected to be fine? To have grown like a normal person?

This book, in case you haven’t noticed, just annoyed the crap out of me. There’s so many errors, so many things wrong and poorly handled.

Let me put it this way, I didn’t even want the main couple together, and that is a very rare thing to happen.

I’m going to give this book 3 stars, just because I don’t feel like it deserves less, but I also don’t feel it quite deserves the 3 stars, but let me know in the comments what’s your opinion in this book