This was a lot. A part of me is grateful this was a lot because it gave me something temporarily breeze through when I could at work. That said, what made it addictive didn't make it my cup of tea. The story is intriguing enough that it's easy to see why it makes a decent debut with her writing style that is mostly plot-focused from a first person POV. To a point, Hoover is striving to a theme of the lies one might tell themselves and others to perfect/explore a craft such as writing, but after a while, Verity's confessions are more gratuitous than anything else. Just when one chapter couldn't get any crazier, the next outdoes it and thensome. More of that would've been believer, but Hoover doesn't really draw on anything else for the lead characters - certainly not Lowen's dark history with her mom and struggles to be a writer, or who Jeremy is in contrast to the Christian Grey sex maniac yet loving father in Verity's Lifetime movie version of their life. I primarily felt like I was supposed to root for them over Verity just because they discover the truth together (or not), and not for any real basis of chemistry or actually loving each other. Most of the chaos is generally one-sided and meant to come to a SHOCKING head, but it was only 30-45 pages into the novel that the ending was guessable as to what was going to happen. The only thing that was really surprising was maybe the amount of violence Hoover thought she had to plug into the story to make the narrative more convincing than it was. As my first introduction to this author after hearing so much hype and enthusiasm for her work, I'm not entirely sure if I need to check out a different title to see what all the enthusiasm is about or just respectfully peace out of the conversation if it's just more of the same.