Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

(Edit: EEK I'm under 200 books on my Kindle. 191. I was over 400 just two years back! 191 is technically still a lot, but at the rate I'm DNFing them...)

DNF 74: Flying in Place by Susan Palwick. While this is a book I wouldn't usually read, at least (for once) I know why I have it: I loved the author's book The Fate of Mice (my review here), so I got this one to try it out.

Flying is about a young girl who is sexually abused by her father and how she deals with it. The abuse takes place through the story, not before it, so it was just uncomfortable to read and not my type of book at all. But now I want to read Fate of Mice again!

DNF 75: Dead Sea by Tim Curran. Wow this book could not be less of a good match for me. Lovecraftian horror. I have no idea at all why I have a copy of it. If the writing were less purple, I might have stuck with it longer to see if the story hooked me, but it was just unpleasant to read. Which apparently was on purpose. From another review:

"The main flaw of the novel is a certain tendency towards overwriting. Nowhere near enough for me to sneer at, and a lot of it is clearly in homage to Lovecraft's signature purple prose."

DNF 76: Critically Endangered (Endangered Series Book 1) by NS Austin. Oh this book. The story had such potential. End of the world (blah blah blah, nearly everyone dead except a handful of humans, all animals fine), a 60+ year old woman survives and adopts a pack of dogs for company and to help keep her safe. Great idea for a story!

Two issues:

1) Somehow the virus that killed off everyone else turned the survivors young and beautiful. The woman de-aged. Grew inches taller. Her eyes and hair changed colors. She became young and strong. This happened to all the characters, another 98 year old woman became young and sexy. Why? An end of the world story with an older woman main character would be interesting, why make it a generic "everyone must be young and beautiful" thing?

2) Sigh. As way too many self-published books do, the author only paid to have the first 15% of her book edited. It was well edited up until that point, then suddenly there was an error per page. These "authors" seem to think if they hook you, you'll keep reading once their writing turns to crap. Nope, sorry, NS Austin, I won't be buying any of your books.