Without merit colleen hoover pdf download free

Please also drop your email id in the comments. The result will be declared on our Facebook page. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Product Description. 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.

Moby Voss is hard not to like. Four-year-old children are fairly liked across the board. I tried it when I read it this morning and I even try it again as I walk toward the double cedar front doors of our house. I can say with certainty that we live in the most unusual house in this whole town. I say house because it is certainly not a home.

And inside this house are seven of the most unusual occupants. No one would be able to determine from the outside of our house that our family of seven includes an atheist, a home wrecker, an ex-wife suffering from a severe case of agoraphobia, and a teenage girl whose weird obsession borders on necrophilia.

No one would be able to determine any of that from inside our house, either. Our house is located just off an oil top county road in a microscopic Northeast Texas town. Which explains why we have a marquee in our front yard.

No, God had no say in that matter. Wolfgang was a massive black Lab who was impressive in size and bark, but lacked a great deal of common sense. If dogs were classified into high school cliques, Wolfgang would most definitely be head of the jocks. A loud, obnoxious dog that spent at least seven of the eight precious hours of sleep my father needed each night barking incessantly.

In fact, he did the exact opposite of what anyone wanted him to do. Pastor Brian felt that a dog on the premises would deter future robberies. However, Pastor Brian knew very little in the way of training a dog, much less a dog with the intellect of a high school football jock.

Being that Wolfgang got the short end of the stick when it came to intellect and interaction, all of his boundless energy and curiosity were placed solely on the unsuspecting, and possibly undeserving, victim who occupied the property directly behind the church. My father, Barnaby Voss.

He prohibited me and my siblings from interacting with the dog, and it was not uncommon for us to overhear my father threatening to murder Wolfgang under his breath.

And at the top of his lungs. My father may not be a believer in the Lord, but he is an avid believer in karma. As much as he fantasized about murdering Wolfgang, he did not want the murder of an animal hanging over his head. Dad tried everything over the years to put an end to the incessant harassment, from earplugs, to cease and desist warnings, to barking right back at Wolfgang for three hours straight after a Friday evening of consuming three glasses more than his usual evening glass of wine.

He attempted all of these things to no avail. Nothing worked, and from the looks of it, nothing would ever work, because Pastor Brian cared for Wolfgang a significant deal more than he cared for his neighbor, Barnaby Voss. After signing the closing papers almost five years ago, my father gave Pastor Brian and Wolfgang two days to vacate the premises.

It took them three. But on the fourth night, after our family moved into the church, my father slept thirteen hours straight. Pastor Brian was forced to relocate his Sunday sermons, but with divine intervention on his side, it took no more than just one day to find an alternate venue. He reopened a week later in an upscale barn that was used by a deacon to house his collection of tractors.

For the first three months, the parishioners sat on bales of hay while Pastor Brian preached his sermon from a makeshift platform constructed out of plywood and pallets. For six solid months, Pastor Brian made it his personal mission to publicly pray for my father and his wayward soul every Sunday before dismissing church.

He certainly did not want the churchgoers praying for said soul. Approximately seven months after we turned that old church into our family dwelling, Pastor Brian was seen driving a brand-new-to-him Cadillac convertible. I was at the car lot the day my father and Pastor Brian worked out the deal.

I was significantly younger than I am now, but I remember the deal as if it were yesterday. Our family has done a great deal of remodeling inside the church, but there are still three elements that prevent the dwelling from feeling unlike the house of worship it once was.

And our last name is Voss. I wish there were a more intelligent explanation. I open the front doors and walk into Quarter One. It consists of the old- chapel-turned-living-area and a rather large kitchen, both remodeled to reflect their new uses, save the eight-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ on a cross still hanging on the east wall of the living room.

Utah and my father worked tirelessly one summer to dismount the eight-foot-tall statue, to no avail. He enjoys the outdoors, but he is a big believer that the indoors and the outdoors should remain segregated. Instead, he made the decision that the eight-foot-tall Jesus Christ would have to remain. He is an atheist, which means the wall hanging is just that and nothing more to him.

A wall hanging where an eight-foot-tall Jesus is the focal point. Nonetheless, I make it a point to ensure Jesus Christ is dressed to reflect the appropriate holiday. Which is why the eight-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ is currently covered in a white bedsheet. Quarter Two, which at one time consisted of three Sunday school classrooms, has since had walls added and is now divided into six rather small bedrooms, large enough to contain one child, one twin-sized bed, and one dresser.

My three siblings and I occupy four of the six bedrooms. Quarter Three is the old dining hall turned master bedroom. Victoria has lived in Dollar Voss for approximately four years and two months.

The last quarter of Dollar Voss, Quarter Four, is the most secluded and controversial of the four quarters. The basement. It is set up much like an efficiency apartment, consisting of a bathroom with a standing shower, a very mini-kitchen, and a small living area containing one couch, one television, and one full-sized bed.

It is unfortunate that my father divorced one Victoria, only to immediately marry another, but not nearly as unfortunate as the fact that both Victorias still live in Dollar Voss. But probably not nearly as difficult as it was for my cancer-ridden mother to find out my father was sleeping with her oncology nurse. But that was several years ago and my siblings and I have long since moved past the wrongs our father committed against our mother.

Not even slightly. Despite what is true, we, the Voss family, look very much like a normal family, and Dollar Voss looks very much like a normal house, save the stained- glass windows, the statue on our wall, and the church marquee.

Our actions only prove to reinforce those feelings. He spent two weeks putting up a cute white picket fence around our entire yard.

Now it just looks like we live in an old church surrounded by an out of place white picket fence. A-plus for effort, though. I go to my bedroom and close the door. I toss my sack on the floor by my bed and plop down onto my mattress. Then Honor and Utah. Then my father. Then family dinner. Today has already been too much.

I go to the bathroom and search the drawers for some sleep medicine. Which is precisely what I find under the sink. Left school early and going to bed.

Will probably miss dinner. I turn the sound off on my phone and slide it under my pillow. If only I had seen his face prior to the incident on the town square, that whole embarrassment could have been avoided. I would have known who he was immediately. Especially twins. But then again, I doubt he has any intentions to pursue me at all. It was an honest mistake. He thought I was Honor. Laughing about poor, pathetic Merit who thought the cute guy was actually into her.

I should have slapped him when he kissed me. Had I done that, I would be laughing about it with him. But instead, I threw myself at him and consumed as much of that kiss and him as I possibly could.

Just thinking about Sagan kissing her like he kissed me today makes me so jealous, I would bleed green if someone stabbed me. That someone would assume I was her and I would embarrass myself somehow. But we are not the same. I am nothing like my identical twin sister, who prefers cadaver hearts to fully functioning ones. I am nothing like my father, Barnaby, who has turned our entire lives upside down, simply out of spite for a canine.

I am certainly nothing like my brother Utah who spends every waking moment living an externally precise, perfect, and punctual present to make up for all the internal imperfections that live in his past.

And I am absolutely, without a doubt, a far cry from my mother, Vicky, who spends her days and nights in Quarter Four watching Netflix, licking the salt off potato chips, living off disability, refusing to vacate the house where her ex- husband and newer wife, Victoria, continue to live their lives upstairs, primarily in Quarters One and Three.

The NyQuil begins to kick in as soon as I hear the front door open. I reach to my nightstand and grab my headphones. That hope lasted twenty- four hours until it was diminished. In that two weeks, Sagan has been at our house more times than I can count.

I walked out of my bedroom, still in my pajamas, and saw him sitting at the table. As soon as we made eye contact, I spun around and opened the refrigerator. It felt like my heart was a pinball bouncing around inside my chest. I managed to make it through breakfast that morning without uttering a single word.

I heard Honor tell him goodbye. Once everyone was gone but him, I grabbed a rag to wipe down the counter. He stood up and picked up the three glasses left behind on the table. There was such a heavy silence in the room. It made the moment between us seem much more dramatic than it should have been. He opened the dishwasher like he had the right to be doing dishes in this house. He put the three glasses on the top shelf and then closed it.

He dried his hands on a towel and dropped it on the counter while he waited for a response from me. I merely shook my head, uninterested in bringing it up again. I thought you were her. I never would have kissed you had I known otherwise. And I knew the whole thing was stupid and it really was an honest mistake.

It was hard to laugh off something that affected me like it did. But I did my best to fake it. It was such an awkward kiss, anyway. I forced a smile as I turned and walked to my bedroom without looking back at him.

That was the last time we spoke. It was the thought of a stranger desiring me enough to kiss me with as much passion as he kissed me that day. The idea of it all. It has nothing to do with Sagan or who he is as a person. The very dog that terrorized my father through many of my childhood years.

What a delightful surprise. I woke up a few minutes ago after everyone else had fallen asleep. I made my way to Quarter One in search of food but before I got to the kitchen, I heard what sounded like scratching against our double front doors. Since we have no animals of the four-legged variety, one would think my first instinct would have been to notify my father of a possible intruder.

Instead, I immediately opened the door to investigate the matter myself. Wolfgang is whimpering at my feet, covered in mud, shivering from the rain, and from the looks of it, terribly lost. There were several loud claps of thunder that shook the house and woke me up a few times when the storm began to roll through earlier tonight. He probably got spooked and started running until he ended up at the only other place he knows.

I reach my hand out, but I do so with hesitancy. Our father once told us he witnessed Wolfgang eat an entire Girl Scout. Quite the contrary, in fact. He licks me. He then proceeds to paw at the back door as if he wants access to the backyard. I close the screen door and then the back door and lock the deadbolt. I decide to use my unusual burst of energy to clean my room.

I change the song every time my mind goes there in hopes it will spark an unrelated memory. I skip songs until I get to Ocean and then I grab an old T-shirt to wipe down all my trophies. Every time I buy a new one I dust them and rearrange them. The new bowling trophy I bought a couple weeks ago will go front and center.

I reach to the back of my shelf and grab the football trophy I stole from Drew Waldrup. I spend the next several hours enjoying a house of solitude while everyone sleeps. I take an uninterrupted shower. I watch the first ten minutes of eight different shows on Netflix. I might have an issue with my attention span because I can never make it through an entire show without getting bored. I do one and a half crossword puzzles before I get stumped on a four-letter word for word.

I gather all the stuff I need. Once I have the ladder set up in the living room, I climb it with my stolen football trophy in hand. I readjust the cheese-hat on top of His crown of thorns.

When I finish, I descend the ladder and stand back to admire my creation. I normally give Jesus a temporary nickname, depending on the theme of his outfit. Victoria, on the other hand, will be mad that I dressed Him at all. Unlike my father, Victoria believes in God. And Jesus. And the sanctity of religion. She hates it when I dress up Jesus. I disagree. It would be disrespectful if the actual Jesus Christ were in our living room and I forced Him to change clothes all the time.

But this Jesus is fake, made out of wood and plastic. I tried to explain that to Victoria. I told her one of the Ten Commandments is not to worship false idols. Dressing this idol of Jesus up for fun, rather than worshipping it, is actually following the commandment.

I grab the ladder and take it back to the garage. But Honor and I confuse the hell out of each other. Then when she started dating Kirk, his death put an even bigger wedge between us because up until that point, we had experienced almost everything together. Being in love, losing her virginity, experiencing grief.

We no longer felt like we were on the same level after that. Or at least she felt she was on a different level than me. And the more time that passes, the more we drift apart. I walk back into the kitchen from the garage and my steps falter at the sight of Sagan. His back is to me as he sits at our kitchen table. In our house. At a highly inappropriate time of day. Who visits their girlfriend at seven in the morning? Who in their right mind would willingly return to this house? Has he not met my family?

Is he that blinded by his unrequited love for Honor? When I realized he actually was an artist, I laughed at my luck. Moby walks into the kitchen and shuffles over to the table.

Moby is quite possibly the only part of this family that brings me joy, but four-year-olds are fairly liked across the board.

He shifts his head away and climbs into the seat next to him. He slides the piece of paper in front of Moby and plucks a crayon out of a basket in front of him, winning Moby over instantly. Which is humorous considering the morbid themes her boyfriend is always sketching.

Just yesterday I found a picture he sketched of Honor. She was sitting in an empty grave, putting on lipstick. I have several of his drawings now, wrapped in a bathrobe and stuffed in the bottom of my dresser drawer. Moby glances at me and covers his mouth with his hand, mumbling something intended for only me to hear. I wink at him and grab the box of donuts from the top of the refrigerator.

There are two left in the box, so I put one in my mouth and walk the other one to Moby. He takes the donut from my hand and immediately crawls under the table to eat it. He already knows that anything that tastes good to him is off-limits to Victoria. It would ruin my three-day streak of not speaking. But despite my lack of a rebuttal, Utah is wrong. The poor kid eats steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast every day.

Without butter or sugar. At least I sneak him sweets in moderation. Utah walks past me, heading for his smoothie. He knows not to come near me with his cheerful sibling affection.

Utah and I have nothing in common, other than being the only two people in the Voss family to know its deepest, darkest secret. And we look nothing alike. Honor and I look more like our mother. Or at least like she did when she was younger. Her hair used to be a more vibrant blonde, much like ours is now. Utah looks like our father, with sandy brown hair and pale skin.

I guess Honor and I lucked out, because we tan fairly easily in the summer. Moby is just a mix of all of us. Sometimes he looks like our father, sometimes he looks like Victoria. But most of the time he reminds me of this bird off a Dawn dish soap commercial I saw last year. It was a cute bird. Utah takes a seat and bends down to look under the table. You excited about today?

This exchange is a daily occurrence between Utah and Moby. Utah wants to be a teacher and already has his entire college schedule planned out. As soon as he graduates high school in six months, he has a two-day weekend and then begins classes at the local university the following Monday. Honor also signed up to start classes two days after graduation. My mother gave birth to Utah in August and then got pregnant with Honor and me one month later.

When it was time for Utah to start school, she and my father decided to hold him back a year so they could have us all in the same grade at the same time. No sense dealing with different schedules when you can have one schedule for all three of your children. Not that it would matter. My vote is on Utah, simply because he runs less of a risk of becoming preoccupied with the terminally ill between now and graduation.

If anything, the peace and quiet will give him even more time to study. And clean. And iron his clothes. I pour myself a cup of juice and sit at the table across from Sagan. I lean forward and try to get a better look. His eyes dart up and meet mine.

He arches an eyebrow and picks up his sketchbook as he leans back against his chair. His phone vibrates and he practically lunges for it.

He flips it over and looks at the screen but his face falls flat. He silences the call and flips his phone over. I move my attention to Moby, who is still hiding under the table. I shake my head. Victoria enters the kitchen in a rush. Victoria grabs a knife from the drawer and a banana. She wipes the blade of the knife across her pink scrubs, judging its cleanliness. Or lack thereof. We rarely do. Unless our father is in the room, Victoria is of little importance to us.

These are disgusting. She glances across the kitchen at all her stepchildren sitting around the table. She sighs and begins peeling the banana. I have no idea what my father sees in her. A good ten years younger than my mother. She takes her job as a nurse way too seriously. I think her pink scrubs annoy me more than anything else about her.

I remember the day she started wearing pink scrubs. I was twelve, sitting at this very table. She had emerged from Quarter Three, back when Quarter Three was shared by my father and ailing mother. Until that particular morning, anyway.

Not every mistake justifies a consequence. Sometimes the only thing it warrants is forgiveness. The Voss family is anything but typical. They live in a repurposed church, recently baptized Dollar Voss. The cancer survivor mother lives in the basement, the father is wedded to the mother's former nurse, the young half-brother isn't allowed to do or eat anything fun, and the eldest siblings are irritatingly perfect.

Then, there's Merit. This family is crazy and has so many secrets; their secrets have secrets. Merit Voss collects trophies she hasn't merited and secrets her family urges her to keep.

While browsing the neighborhood antique shop for her next award, she finds Sagan. His wit and unapologetic idealism disarm and spark renewed life into her until the discovery that he's unavailable. Merit retreats farther into herself, seeing her family from the sidelines when she discovers a secret that no trophy in the world can correct.

Merit decides to destroy the happy family fantasy that she's never been a part of before escaping them behind for good. When her leave plan fails, Merit is obligated to deal with the tremendous consequences of telling the truth and losing the one man she loves. This book was nothing like any other book Colleen has written.

It's unconventional, quirky, and completely relatable. This story is the first book of Colleen's that doesn't make you cry. But it still makes you feel so many emotions, just as all of her books do.

Colleen is brilliant and a pure genius. In every book she writes, she always takes a black and white situation and shows us the shades of gray. A different side of the issue. She has, more than once, it will change the way you look at many things. If she is trying to make the world a better place with her books, then she's on the right path. You are now, closer to a better world. Her mark will most definitely stay on this earth, and many people's heart. Skip to content. Without Merit. Without Merit Book Review:.

The Tyranny of Merit. Author : Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit Book Review:. Finding Perfect. Finding Perfect Book Review:. Getting to Yes. Getting to Yes Book Review:. The Meritocracy Trap. Merit retreats deeper into herself, watching her family from the sidelines, when she learns a secret that no trophy in the world can fix. 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. Signed Paperback Retailers:. US Retailers:. UK Retailers:. I love this book!

Totally not my first choice in genre of book, just one I grabbed off the library recommended shelf before going on Christmas break in a rush and I was so pleased I did! What I really liked about it, was the whole perspective angle and that it really made you kind of evaluate yourself too. Thanks for writing such a great book. I have devoured your books and Without Merit was a one sitting read for me and a favorite.