In an author’s note at the end of the book, Huber says he likens Lily to his own mother, who left Huber’s abusive father just before he was three. Huber didn’t need to research this subject: Her mother had been there, and as Huber is at pains to point out at the end of the book, “She wasn’t saved by another man, a knight in shining armor. She left her father of her own accord.”
As a teenager, Lily watched her mother being abused by her father. Her mother was unable to escape the situation, and the abuse stopped when her father died. As an adult, Lily, empathetic but insecure, is drawn to Lyle, who is bursting with love and unable to contain his emotions. After three months of dating, he becomes physically abusive towards her, recreating a scenario that had happened to Hoover’s mother. Lily soon comes to wonder, “People spend so much time wondering why women don’t leave. Where is the man who wonders why men abuse?” It is crucial to the effectiveness of this book that the self-deluded Lyle is painfully human and in many ways sympathetic. You don’t want Lily to stay with Lyle. Each abusive scene is more harrowing than the last. At the same time, you understand why it is emotionally and financially difficult for her to get out of his life.
‘Textbook delinquent boy‘
So why did Hoover Criticized Whitewashing abuse? That’s what many of the heroes in her work do. other The bad boys in the novels are textbook bad boys: sexy, messy loners who put their heroines through hell before offering them a happy-ever-after. In 2014’s Ugly Love, the traumatized pilot Miles is sometimes sensitive but mostly angry and bossy, a combination the heroine, Tate, can’t resist. In Hoover’s 2015 novel, The 9th of November, an aspiring writer, Ben, lights a car on fire, tails Fallon (the fire’s victim), and fantasizes about physically assaulting her. In 2018’s Verity, we learn that the handsome, married protagonist, Jeremy, once tried to kill his wife; he does so at the end of the book.
Indeed, in 2022, Huber wrote a bonus epilogue chapter for Verity (published only in the collector’s edition, but also available online), in which she portrays both Jeremy and the young narrator, Rowen, with whom she falls in love, as crazy characters. But feminist film critic Linda Malick isn’t sold on that. “Colleen Huber has made a name for herself by fetishizing toxic relationships,” Malick told the BBC. “Her very young readers are growing up believing that unacceptable male behavior is normal.” (The BBC has reached out to Huber’s representatives for comment.)
