I’ve only heard good things about this book on the lit forums of Reddit and I wanted to give it a go. I picked it up in book format as a gift for a friend and ebook format for myself. I accidentally gave it away first BEFORE reading it and now I wish I could take it back 🙂 Not because the book is bad, it’s because it’s really, really good and a wee bit explicit in points and the said friend is a bit on the conservative side. Well, I’ll know if they read it when I’m cussed on Facebook 🙂

I wrote an entire novel in the few months he was gone. When he showed up at our front door to surprise me with his return home, I had just finished editing the final page.
It was kismet.
I congratulated him with a blowjob. It was the first time I swallowed. That’s how happy I was to see him.
I acted like a lady after I swallowed, smiling up at him. He was still standing by the front door, fully clothed, other than the jeans that were now down to his knees. I stood up and kissed him on the cheek and said, “Be right back.”
When I got to the bathroom, I locked the door, turned on the water in the sink, and then puked in the toilet. When I let him come in my mouth, I had no idea how much there would be. How long I would have to continue swallowing. Keeping my composure was tough while his dick was in my throat, drowning me.
I brushed my teeth and then returned to the bedroom, where I found him sitting at my desk. He had a couple of pages of my manuscript in his hands.

All right, what was the book about? A young woman is hired to act as a ghost writer and finish a book series of a very renowned YA writer (isn’t that every fan’s dream?) and goes to her house with her husband (who hired her via an agency) so she could research and get the tone of the next books right.

During her stay at the villa, her wandering gets her to a diary-looking manuscript containing her memories from when she met her super hunky husband and how they got together and how she conceived and the first few years of their children’s lives and a tragic drowning death of her eldest.

It’s a hard read and it’s raw. I mean my eyebrows were mostly high when reading and the snippet at the post start is just one of many.

What happened with the author? She’s in a coma after a terrible accident and the family is hush-hush about it.

What makes the book good is that you feel you’re there. From the comments the ghost writer makes to her thoughts, it all seems very odd from the outside.

I don’t know why I’m surprised when I set the manuscript back in the drawer. The contents of the drawer rattle as I slam it shut angrily. Why am I angry? This isn’t my life or my family. I’d trolled Verity’s reviews before coming here, and in nine out of ten of them, the reviewer referenced wanting to throw their Kindles or books across the room.
I kind of want to do the same with her autobiography. I was hoping she’d have seen the light with the birth of the girls, but she didn’t. She only saw more darkness.
She seems so cold and hard, but I’m not a mother. Do a lot of mothers feel this way about their children at first? If so, they certainly aren’t honest about it. It’s probably similar to when a mother claims she doesn’t have a favorite child, but they probably do. It’s an unspoken thing between mothers. One I suppose you don’t become aware of until you are one.

Post partum depression is a bitch. And non-mothers cannot see how mothers feel – you can only go with what they tell you. The thing with Verity is – she is showing a really vile woman. – One that wants her husband’s complete attention, one that seems to hate her own children for making her second in his love and one that is jealous and insecure.

I understand he made vows, but at what cost? His entire life? People get married assuming they’ll live long, happy lives together. What happens when one of those is cut short, but the other is expected to live out those vows for the rest of their life?
It doesn’t seem fair. I know if I were married and my husband were in Jeremy’s predicament, I wouldn’t want my husband to feel like he could never move on.

It feels that Verity’s writing of a BIG love that she feels for her husband is so good that the ghost writer starts to catch feelings for the real thing. How many time have you read a book and fell in love with one of the characters? A good man, a wilful husband and a dedicated father. What would you do if he was real? If you knew him and he was every ounce as true to the image in the book? I totally sympathise with the ghost writer lady – I totally forgot her name by now. She could be anyone and that’s the point. She could be you and me. And she’s asking the questions – would you stay with a brain-dead spouse? What if she did something heinous?

Verity was considering the killing of one of her children. She thought about removing them from their lives and having her husband come back to her so they could grieve together and she would be his support.

I used to assume that the individual deaths of a person’s children would be equally difficult for them. Losing a second or even third child would hurt just as much as the first experience.

I loved how the author (Coleen Hover) makes you hate Verity. The ghost writer hates her by the end of the auto-biography. And she helps her husband escape her. They both kill her as she is not nearly as comatose as she let out to be. And they leave the house and go on to be together.

It’s only when the empty house gets sold, that the writer finds something hidden in the room where Verity’s hospital bed was – just under the floorboards was a letter to her husband that she wrote to justify her horrible autobiography that he found and read.

I can’t explain the mind of a writer to you, Jeremy. Especially the mind of a writer who has been through more devastation than most writers combined. We’re able to separate our reality from fiction in such a way that it feels as if we live in both worlds, but never both worlds at once. My real world had grown so dark that I didn’t want to live in it that night. It’s why I escaped from it and spent the night writing about a world darker than the one I was living in. Because every time I worked on that autobiography, I found relief in closing the laptop. I found relief in walking out of my office and being able to close the door on the evil I created.
That’s all it was. I needed for the imaginary version of my world to be darker than my real world. Otherwise, I would have wanted to leave them both.

She was deeply disturbed and the only way she could enjoy her actual life, was to write a different version of real events where everything is governed by evil and nothing is true and good. That way, by exorcising those demons, she would be free to love and be loved. It all came crashing down on her when her husband found the altered autobiography and threatened to leave her and take their only remaining child.

What was real? What wasn’t? Did she lie in the letter? Did she mean what she wrote in the manuscript? LOVE IT.

I had no answers just felt that the ghost writer and the husband did something unforgiveable due to her words. He could have divorced her, or put her in a hospice, or just anything to get away from her. They didn’t have to kill her.

But hey, love the ending. I’m still not sure my friend has read the book but I hope I’ll get a reaction from her soon. It’s visceral, it’s good, it’s amazing.