Book #29 of 2023: Wayward Creatures | 4 DNF

Wayward Creatures by Dayna Lorentz. I really did not enjoy this book. I should have DNFed it, I'm not sure why I stuck with it.

Chapters alternated between the POV of a coyote and of a 12 year old boy with anger issues. Unfortunately the coyote was so anthropomorphized it was just a teenager in a fur coat.

By mistake, the boy sets a park on fire with some stolen fireworks (a lot more drama behind it than that, a ton of 12 year old boy friendship issues zzz). The book deals with the restorative justice program that some states in America have (instead of sending him into juvenile detention center, he's entered into a program that makes him help fix all the damage the fire caused).

Both the 12 year old boy and the coyote were such unpleasant characters to spend time with. I was actually angry when I finished the book.

Note I'm not the target audience for this book (it's a middle grade book), so maybe kids might like it better than I did.

DNF #66: Brinan of the Wolf Clan: An Ice Age Adventure (Children of the Wolf Clan Book 1) by L M Jack. A knock-off Clan of the Cave Bear. I would have stuck with it even if it's not original (I love these kinds of stories), but the writing/editing was just too bad. About half the commas that should have been there were missing, among other errors.

DNF #67: Lion City by Yi-Sheng Ng. A short story collection by a Singaporean writer. I think this author just isn't for me. Other reviews described the stories as "different", "weird", "bizarre", and other things like that. I read only the first story, Lion City, in which all the animals in a zoo are actually robots, all the real animals were hiding in the city as humans, and half the humans in the city were robots.

DNF #68: The End of the Sky (A Slice of the Moon) by Sandi Toksvig. Set in the very early days of America, this story followed a family that was traveling from Ireland to Oregon. Boat trip across the sea, train trip to Philadelphia, then covered wagon the rest of the way.

While the book was well written and the characters were okay, there just wasn't enough (any) plot. All the family did was travel. One of the brothers got into trouble off screen, but that's the extent of it. At the 20% or so mark I was just too bored with it to go on.

DNF #69: The Ice Moon Explorer by Navin Weeraratne. My rule is that if a book has a typo or grammar issue on the first page, I drop it. This had an error not just in the first sentence, but in the very first line of the book (in the first five words). Bad author, no biscuit.