Blurb:
‘Not every mistake deserves a consequence. Sometimes the only thing it deserves is forgiveness.’
The Voss family is anything but normal. They live in a repurposed church, newly baptised 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.
Poignant and powerful, Without Merit explores the layers of lies that tie a family together and the power of love and truth.
Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Highly recommend for 15 year olds and up
- References to suicide, death, and mental health problems
- I overall really liked this book, as it touched on different issues such as suicide, depression, and social anxiety. While it was confronting in a way, with the issues being in a more ‘far fetched’ scenario, Hoover put feelings to issues that are very hard to describe to other people
Book Quotes:
- “Not every mistake deserves a consequence. Sometimes the only thing it deserves is forgiveness.”
- “Don’t make your presence known. Make your absence felt.”
- “It annoys me when people try to convince other people that their anger or stress isn’t warranted if someone else in the world is worse off than them. It’s bullshit. Your emotions and reactions are valid, Merit. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. You’re the only one who feels them.”
- “Tuqburni is used to describe the all-encompassing feeling of not being able to live without someone. Which is why the literal translation is, ‘You bury me.”
- “You don’t get to decide what your life means to anyone else.”
- “We’re all a degree of fucked-up.”
- “I think we all just got to a point where we were waiting for someone else to initiate it, but no one ever did. Maybe that’s the root of a lot of family issues. It isn’t actually the issues people are hung up about for so long. It’s that no one has the courage to take the first step in talking about the issues.”
- “If silence were a river, your tongue would be the boat.”
- “A lot of people who suffer from depression don’t even know they have it. It’s a gradual change. Or at least it was for me. I used to feel like i was on the top of the world. Then one day, i noticed that it felt like i was no longer on the top of the world. I was just floating around inside of it. And then eventually, it felt like the world was on top of me.”
- “I like you enough to kiss you. Believe me. But I just wish you could like yourself as much as I like you.”
- “Having depression is no more out of your control than Sagan’s intolerance to milk, or Utah’s pale skin, or Honor’s bad vision. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. But it’s not something you can ignore or correct on your own. And it doesn’t make you abnormal. It makes you just as normal as these idiots,” he says, waving toward everyone else.”
- “Stares shouldn’t have weight, but knowing his eyes are on me makes my steps feel heavier.”
- “The same two things could happen to two people, but that doesn’t mean they would experience the exact same stress over it. We all have different levels of stress that we’re accustomed to. You probably felt the same amount of stress over your family situation as I sometimes do about mine, even though they’re completely on different levels. But that doesn’t make you weaker. It doesn’t make you an asshole. We’re just two different people with two different experiences.”
- “A person can’t help their attraction to another person, but a person can help their actions toward another person.”
- “So many people dream of living in a house with a white picket fence. Little do they know, there’s no such thing as a perfect family, no matter how white the picket fence is.”
- “Maybe that’s the root of a lot of family issues. It isn’t actually the issues people are hung up about for so long. It’s that no one has the courage to take the first step in talking about the issues.”
- “Your emotions and reactions are valid, Merit. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. You’re the only one who feels them.”
- “No matter how hard you try, things don’t always turn out the way you wish they could.”
- “He takes a step closer to me and it suddenly feels like I’ve swallowed his heart because I have all these extra beats in my chest”
- “Out of all the places we could be, we’re right here. At the same time.”
- “I can’t think of a single instance where I’ve ever been looked at like he’s looking at me right now.”
- “I take in what he just said and the fact that he said those words to me right before he kissed me that day. I love that he said that, but hate that he didn’t know he was saying it to me. At the time, he thought he was saying those words to Honor. And even though he admits he was attracted to her that day because it was actually, it doesn’t explain why he didn’t just explain it to me right after it happened.”
- “It feels like my heart is swollen when I finally look at him”
- “I found out that depression doesn’t necessarily mean a person is miserable or suicidal all the time. Indifference is also a sign of depression.”
- “You need to fall in love with yourself first.”
- “Peace doesn’t come to everyone in the same form.”
- “But just because we don’t speak doesn’t mean I don’t feel it every time he looks at me.”
- “I’ve lived here less than a week and I can already tell you live in your own version of reality.”