Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

DNF #58: Augmented Creatura by Milly McAdams and JH Woods. Gamelit. Usually that means "people sucked into a videogame" but in this case the game elements moved into the real world instead. Spellchecked but not edited, it had quite a few misspellings (things spellcheck wouldn't catch). It actually wasn't poorly written other than that, but I've been so burnt on Gamelit/litRPG stuff, I just don't give it much of a chance anymore.

DNF #59: The Quest of the Cubs (Bears of the Ice #1) by Kathryn Lasky. This is the second book I've tried from this author (same one who wrote the Ga'Hoole series), and this one really, really, really did not work for me. Though the main characters were polar bears, this book did the biggest "talking animal story" sin there is: The bears were just human. They could read/write, they used days of the week (something bad was happening on Tuesday), they cried, they had knees... What is even the point of making a talking animal story if they're just going to be human?

DNF #60: Flight of the Fantail by Steph Matuku. I feel a little bad for DNFing this one. I made it almost to the halfway point, but I just didn't believe the plot and wasn't enjoying it. The story followed a bus full of teenagers after it rolled off a mountain and crashed into a river.

It might have stuck with it, other than two things:

One of the teenage girls was a literal psychopath (she watched another of the kids die and wished she could watch it again, then she killed one of the other students), but I didn't buy her as a character; high school is hell, yeah, but a literal psychopath?

The other issue is that the story is set in New Zealand and uses a ton of first-nation words and local slang. Kindle has a feature where you can tap a word to get a definition, and I had to use it multiple times a page (usually I might use it once in a whole book, usually less). Worse, the majority of the time, the word wasn't in the dictionary or Wikipedia. It really took me out of the story.

Reviews say it's a horror story, so I guess it's good I tapped out.

DNF #61: How to Find Peace at the End of the World by Saro Yen. Ever get the feeling a book isn't meant for you? The author spent way too long describing how a car's vibration went right to the male main character's dick. Plus the plot just made no sense: Guy wakes up and everyone in the world has vanished (not a new idea at all...). He's totally clueless as to what happened. He "steals" his boss's car (cue the vibrations scene). Can only think about finding his girlfriend.

It turns out that the rapture had happened. Really. I just boggled so hard. Assuming such things were real and could happen, how would "all Christian believers" vanishing make the world empty? (Also, now that I google the rapture, why isn't it all good Christians? So you could be the worst Christian on Earth, murder people, hurt children, and you'd still rise "rise in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air"?.)

Anyway, bad book. Bad book.