the kevin's Extreme Disappointment Reads aka DNFs for July 2022
A whatever kind of reading month. Covid did not help. Less reading means less DNFs I suppose?
The good news is, unlike June, there were no one star but finished reads. A minor positive. Title links will take you to my Goodreads review.
War Games by Daniel May (Hanged Men #2) - one star
DNF at 20%
This was, quite honestly, unreadable.
Why use 3 word when 300 do the trick?
There is no tangible emotion here. Any point where there should be emotion, or might start to be emotion, is immediately drowned in flowery pointless prose. The over the top descriptors make all the feelings abstract and unreal.
Not everything needs a metaphor, but they sure do get them. There’s no sense of importance in this book, because absolutely everything is given three or more paragraphs of fanciful description. Simple scenes last for pages upon pages. A scene where Nerva walks into his room, gets a small bag, and leaves earns 3+ paragraphs of room decor description. Why? His room isn’t important at all. This interrupts any action or flow in the book.
This ruins the tension, where there might be some, as well. Like the Tense Reveal Scene - well, it should be tense, but I was distracted by a passing irrelevant freight train being described as a dragon so it was generally uninteresting.
This book desperately needs to focus. The descriptions are so long that sometimes I don’t remember what I was reading about to start with.
Who is even in this book:
The characters are strangely absent from themselves, like shells of a person. Nerva is a whiny brat who I do not at all believe can run a lemonade stand, let alone a mafia. The whole first chapter is him being self-loathing, I think. My eyes glazed over after he complained about doing coke under a stuffed cow head. It’s just a pile of words, again, that don’t evoke any actual emotions for me.
Pascal is …muscle? I don’t know. Also he has eyes. And an ominous nose.
Miscellany:
I hadn’t run into any actual mafia stuff by the time I quit, though that sometimes takes a bit to get started in mafia books so I’ll ignore that.
Stop using the word bitch/bitchy. Find a new word.
There was one paragraph of tension and interesting and it was about a horse. Immediately returned to nothing once we stopped talking about the mysterious horse.
I’ve got more in my highlights on Goodreads, but here’s two bonus quotes anyway:
He was filial enough to come pay his respects in this charnel house, but no longer stupid enough to hope.
It’s really tasteless to refer to an assisted living home as a charnel house. What the hell.
He had thick white brows, clenched together currently in a decisive consternation.
ok BQ Hanson
Overall, this is in dire need of editing. I’m not sure what happened in between Blood Sports and this, but damn, what a downgrade. The romance was weak to absent in Blood Sports, but at least the characters had a personality. This is just a mess.
The Reluctant Husband by Eliot Grayson (Goddess-Blessed #2) - one star
DNF at 75%
Wow OKAY
I didn’t really like the first book, but Tom was pretty much an irredeemable one dimensional villain in it. I was very curious how he could be made into a likable protagonist based on that. I thought it’d take the whole book and a really great second MC to pull it off.
Funny enough, he was immediately sympathetic to me. Once I learned about his history and his curse and his attempts to just be allowed to live, and even fix his mistakes for others…pls, poor baby. He deserves happiness.
And then Mal walks in. What a horrible piece of trash person. He is cruel and mean and cold and awful to Tom, despite allegedly loving him and seeing all these soft moments of Tom and knowing far more about him than anyone ever has. He knows his motivations and attempts to escape his curse, how can he not get it!! He’s so stuck on himself. Ugh. He just uses Tom as an emotional punching bag constantly - he even says that to himself! “oh look here’s tom, i can be mean to him because i am feeling bad” (paraphrased) how romantic
I rage-DNFd right after Tom makes a beautiful heartfelt happy confession of love and Mal is unbelievably cruel about it. It’s unreal. I don’t think there’s enough pages left for the amount of groveling I would need Mal to do to redeem his asshole self. I am so mad about this. Unreal. How can Mal go all “tom is so hot I’m so obsessed i love him he’s so sad and tortured so I’m gonna make it worse x10000” go fall in a mineshaft asshole
The whole goddess curse (sorry, blessing) is a choice. A real Choice. Tom has to “yield” aka bottom for another man otherwise he and anyone associated will be cursed. Wow. There’s some pieces here that separately aren’t terrible, but together is a mega yikes. It would make a fantastic setup for a dark romance/erotica, but this is definitely not it.
At least this book, unlike the first, has more goddess presence/effect? Even though it is absolute trash.
Overall, fuck this. Honestly, I want Will to heal and to run away with Tom and them be happy forever. I’m going to pretend that happened. And that a witch cursed Mal to shrivel into the raisin he has for a heart. A moldy raisin. Not even ants will touch him.
The Scot's Wager by Hannah Morse (Perdition Club multiauthor series) - one star
DNF at 29%
Characters are just dolls moved around for plot purposes:
The main characters are very flat, both of them.
Danny is a shortsighted dingdong on a revenge quest - more on that later - and cannot even manage to figure out how to act like an actual person who has a valet. How did the earl not immediately see through his facade if he can't take gloves off correctly?? He is so unreasonably naive about everything that I can't buy into him pulling any scheme whatsoever off.
Cecil is mr sometimes angry but mostly angelic giving away money and food to all street urchins ever. He has lots of angry at the earl but that's about it I guess.
Since neither of them had a developed personality, this felt more like the plot was decided and the characters moved around to suit, rather than feeling like the plot is driven by the characters and their decisions.
The apparent plot:
What a mess. For some reason I didn't reach the explanation for, the owners of the club are financing Danny's revenge quest against the earl. His stated plan to make the earl "confess" about ruining his sister....ok, then what? How is this revenge. No one cares what an earl does. How does this redress anything? It doesn't. smh.
Danny also concocted this plan by writing letters to random people in London asking them to finance it??? what. So how many people know about it now? How did he decide who to write to??
The romance factor was just instalust. Instalove almost because it was just 100% trust for no reason.
800 million side characters:
There are so many named side characters. Calm down, please. I do not need to know every servant and every carriage driver and every peer at this giant club. Contain it to a few important secondary characters.
The writing:
I can often gloss right over typos in books, but this had some at the level where the entire sentence is nonsense. Or a random floating letter in between paragraphs. They were so bad and so frequent that I wasn't willing to put up with it at all.
This also introduced randomly modern ideas and concepts for the characters to parade around, even though it was entirely meaningless to the book and character and my eyes for having to read it. Stop it. These two dudes are not going to have a magically competent and modern understanding of uteruses that still escapes morons today. This contributes nothing to the story other than to yank me out of it.
not standalone?:
Apparently in the notes of the ARC for the fourth book (which i do not have), it suggests that these be read in order. Which is noted absolutely nowhere in the blurbs for the actual books. Rude. I got suspicious after seeing the idiotic revenge plot was being financed by these mysterious club owners, but I quit reading before I found out why. I'm guessing there's some connection back in the first two books. Don't know don't care.
Overall, I was hoping for an easy no-brain read, and I got a really annoying DNF instead.
The Beauty Within by HL Day - one star
DNF at 32%
I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Somehow even the witch curse part was uninteresting. Neither character had a decent personality, and with the instalove/soulmate connection kicking in, I didn't see much hope for depth.
Comments
Post a Comment