thistlechaser | A pile of DNF books (Reply)

DNF #43: River of Crows (The Arcanium Book 1) by N.P. Thompson. I read a lot of YA and MG books. The good ones can be enjoyed by adult readers as well as younger ones, but you can't blame a book when only younger readers might like it.

There was nothing wrong with this book. The writing and editing were excellent, especially for a self-published book. The story just felt like it was meant for a young reader, nothing hooked me or kept me wanting to read.

The prologue was great (set in a world with magic, an evil dictator had people killed for the most minor reasons, and the executioners were people who could shapeshift into crows). But then it moved to a normal kid in normal school on Earth. The first 10% of the book was just a young kid going to class, getting bullied, dealing with his father... yawn. Even once the kid and a friend got pulled into the magical world of the prologue, the story never caught my attention again.

DNF at 28%.

DNF #44: Paladins of the Storm Lord by Barbara Ann Wright. This was the weirdest book. First off, there was page after page of positive reviews of the book (I've never understood the point of that; I'm holding the book, I own it, why are you still trying to sell it to me?). I never read those in-book reviews, but one caught my eye so I went back and read the sentence:

I also haven't actually read a world that is entirely unfazed by homosexuality or female power before.

Has that reviewer been living under a rock? The book was published in 2016, eight years ago, but this was hardly the first book to have a setting with those things!

And the story itself was just... not good. Set in the future, a spaceship was in the middle of some kind of emergency (crashing or something). Every time the male commanding officer looked at a female crew member, his first thought was about how she looked. "The cute one, pert little bum." and "She looked a bit older than Lessan, more serious but still sensual." DNF at 1%.

DNF #45: Shielded by KayLynn Flanders. Save me from BookTok books. I've never knowingly gotten one, but whenever I get a book with a ton of good reviews but it turns out to be awful, I always discover it was a BookTok book.

Take the most generic, secretly magical, perfect princess. Stick her in a generic fantasy setting. Give her a forced marriage... that turns into insta-love, and then add a ton of flat/bad writing and you get this book.

DNF #46: Being Fiction by T G Sparrow. The idea was interesting (a kid who loves books is pulled into a fantasy world, so he recognizes right away what's going on), but wow the humor just did not work at all for me. Instead of funny, it was just painfully bad. DNF.

DNF #47: The Eternal Bridge Over the River Innocence by Aimen Dean. I would have enjoyed this one (a story of a young Muslim boy becoming radicalized, written by a man who was radicalized as a teen), but the editing was so bad. Very early on I wanted to edit it instead of continuing to read it, so I gave up and DNFed it.