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thistlechaser
The Next Passage (Animorphs, Alternamorphs #2) by K.A. Applegate.
Quick synopsis: The second choose your own adventure Animorphs book. It's just too bad you can't choose an original story.
Brief opinion: Can a book series plagiarize itself? Not only did this book use the direct plot from two previous books, it used exact chunks of text.
Plot: Take the plot from the David trilogy and add whatever book the Howler aliens were from and you have this plot. Seriously. That's all the plot this book has.
Editing: The usual: Not great, not awful. Multiple scanning errors. At least one actual editing issue.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: I liked nothing at all about this book. It has "you" in the role of David from that trilogy, and you think/act like just like he does (and in one branch you actually die the same way he does). You mostly follow that plot, other than when you end up in the Howlers book plot. What a complete waste.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️ - Hated. There was nothing redeeming about this book. The first CYA book was bad but at least fun, this one wasn't even fun. I read all the story branches, but it felt like a chore.
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Oathbound Healer by Selkie Myth.
Quick synopsis: If you can wade through the endless typos, editing issues, and the most unprofessional writing on the planet, you'll find an enjoyable LitRPG story that avoids all the usual issues of that genre.
Brief opinion: Holy crap, this book had the worst editing of perhaps any of the thousands of books I've read in my life. So endlessly bad in so very many ways... yet I still enjoyed the story enough to finish the book and pick up the next one.
Plot: A 20 year old woman on Earth dies, meets a god, and ends up reborn on a planet that uses D&D-ish stats, classes, etc. (It's LitRPG, you never question the setup.)
She's reborn as a baby, and the story picks up when she's eight years old. The death of a friend prompts her to take a healing class. From there she escapes an arranged marriage and joins up with a group of Rangers (Rangers are sort of half adventurers, half cops).
Editing: I do not believe that Selkie Myth knows the meaning of the word editing. So bad, so unprofessional. I saved so many examples. Just a few:
So many exclamation points: "A typo!!" (seriously, that was a line of dialogue), "DUH mages had mana!!", "ride a bloody (mini) T-Rex!!!!"
Kindle notes don't preserve character formatting, but the use of italics was just as bad as the exclamation point issue. Like: I FINALLY saw what I had to do and now I just had to DO IT!!!
Such casual writing: "misc. plants", dialogue: "we'll work on finishing your armor, k?" 6th, 7th, "I can't wa-" *GURGLEGURGLEGURGLE*, "literally twice as long as the normal person, thankyouverymuch".
There was no reason for her to hold back anym- (the chapter ended there, the word not even completed)
The sections have a small graphic between them, but they're annoyingly off-centered.
On top of all those issues was the usual bad editing: Tons of misspelled or otherwise incorrect words, missing/incorrect punctuation, sentence fragments, everything.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Since I covered the editing issues, the only other big issue was the naming system. Why did everyone on this alien planet have a Roman name? Not only that, but stupid ones. Like the doctor was named Medicus -- none of them even slightly subtle at all.
Apparently this book started out on Royal Road, which explains why the editing got slightly better by the end of the book. It was still unacceptably poorly edited (not edited at all), but it wasn't as bad as the earliest chapters.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: Editing would get one star/hated, story would get four stars/liked, so sort of averaging it to: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Okay
Somehow there are 17 more books in the series (all of them published in the last six years). I'm going to try the next one and see how it is.
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DNF #27: Magic Has No Borders: A Young Adult Fantasy Anthology Reimagining South Asian Legends and Epics by various. I HATED the first story (a goddess who has reincarnated 3,000 times used slang like "hella", and the rest of the writing was so so so bad. Stereotypical teenage romance stuff.) so I DNFed it. The writing in the second story was better, but the plot didn't interest me at all. The third one didn't work for me either, so instead of forcing myself to continue and try every story, I DNFed the whole thing. One day all the anthologies will be off my Kindle. One day...
DNF #27: To Turn the Tide by S.M. Stirling. While this story seemed like it would work for me (end of the world, a professor and his graduate students go back in time to Rome), it really really did not. The main character (who was not just a professor, but he had been a member of the special forces) was too perfect. But more than that, this book seemed to exist more for the author to show off how much he knew about Rome than the story. Talk about getting bogged down in facts! DNFed pretty early on.
