Editors Reads Verdict
Without Merit is Hoover's most overtly comedic and structurally eccentric novel, built around an intentionally bizarre family situation. Its frank treatment of depression is handled with genuine sensitivity, even as the surrounding plot veers into absurdist territory that won't suit every reader.
What We Loved
- The converted-church family home is an inspired and genuinely memorable setting
- Depression is treated with real empathy and without melodrama
- Hoover's darkest humor is on full display here
- Merit's voice is distinctive and consistently engaging
Minor Drawbacks
- The family dysfunction occasionally tips from quirky into unbelievable
- The romantic resolution feels rushed given the emotional weight of the mental health arc
- Some readers find the tonal shifts between comedy and serious mental health content jarring
Key Takeaways
- → Depression can coexist with humor and a keen observational eye
- → Dysfunctional families often become so normalized to themselves that the dysfunction becomes invisible
- → Secrets kept within families tend to grow rather than disappear
- → Helping others is not a substitute for addressing one's own mental health needs
- → Unusual circumstances don't prevent ordinary human experiences of love and confusion
| Author | Colleen Hoover |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Atria Books |
| Pages | 368 |
| Published | October 3, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Contemporary Fiction, Romance, Young Adult |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Fans of Hoover's quirkier work; readers interested in mental health narratives told with humor and empathy rather than relentless darkness. |
Eccentric by Design
Without Merit is the outlier in Colleen Hoover’s catalog — a novel that leans deliberately into absurdist family comedy while simultaneously addressing depression with genuine seriousness. The tension between these modes is the book’s defining quality and, depending on your tolerance for tonal whiplash, either its greatest strength or its most significant flaw.
Merit Voss lives in a converted church with a family that would test anyone’s grip on normalcy: her father and his affair-turned-second-wife under the same roof as her mother, a set of mismatched siblings, and a household that has made a kind of peace with its own chaos. Into this environment arrives Sagan, a young man whose presence forces Merit to confront both her feelings and the depression she has been quietly managing alone.
The Mental Health Narrative
Hoover handles Merit’s depression with her characteristic directness. Rather than treating it as a romantic complication or a dramatic revelation, she grounds it in the mundane persistence of living with an illness that doesn’t always announce itself dramatically — it simply makes everything incrementally harder. Merit’s coping mechanisms (or lack thereof) feel authentic, and the book’s refusal to offer mental health as a quick-fix romance subplot is admirable.
The relationship between Merit and her family’s collective dysfunction functions as social context for her depression without reducing the illness to circumstantial causation. Hoover understands that depression doesn’t require explanation.
Where the Tones Clash
The novel’s challenge is asking readers to hold two modes simultaneously: the darkly comic absurdism of the Voss family and the earnest emotional weight of Merit’s mental health journey. For readers who can make that shift fluidly, Without Merit rewards engagement. For those who find the tonal inconsistency disorienting, the romantic resolution — which arrives somewhat abruptly — may not justify the journey.
It is, in any case, unlike anything else in Hoover’s catalog, and that distinctiveness has value.
Our rating: 3.9/5 — An entertainingly odd and emotionally sincere novel that handles depression with more care than its comic premise might suggest, even if the tonal blend doesn’t always work.
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