I have two. The Ritual and Drowning.
The Ritual is pure smut. 61 chapters and every one contains a graphic, demeaning sex scene. I’m convinced the author was an adult film screenwriter and decided to try their hand at writing a novel. There isn’t a single likable character in this book.
Drowning isn’t a great work of literature. I felt that the characters were very two-dimensional. I hated how naive the author made the protagonist. It made me have a lack of sympathy for her. The ending was series finale of Dexter bad.
Babel because it wasn’t what I thought it was. Too much repetition, so I DNF it. I’m just pissed that I spent $30 when I could have just got it from the library. I love fantasy that involves magic and language, Babel was not what I thought. Language is barely mentioned while overshadowed by politics.
I read The Poppy War by the same author and I hated it.
I read The Poppy War based on people I knew who really liked it and said it was a very mature and complex examination of war and nationalism.
Nope! It’s YA and handles those subjects like a YA book; I would have been challenged at 16 probably. What they meant was that it’s violent and grim. Not the same thing as complex.
I was loving the first part of the book where she was just grinding to be the absolute best…then the plot wanders and I have no clue what happened afterward.
I’ve tried to get through Poppy War twice and an audiobook. I just can’t… Ugh
Same here. The first few pages are great though, it creates a super interesting base. But it was just an excuse for political talk.
Maybe I’m just tired of books telling me about racism, I’m not racist so it’s like reading a self help book that doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t know already.
Yessss it is raved about but a slog to get through I DNFed.
Yeah this basically was a twitter screed masquerading as a novel. Shame really, becuase anti-colonial fantasy is a great concept that deserves to be explored (see The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind) but this really, really wasn’t it.
I thought Babel was so close to being great. There were so many parts where I was like, “yes! We’re talking about important and interesting themes in a subtle way! I am enjoying this!” And then the next sentence would just be explicitly stating what the book was trying to get across. The overexplaining made the quality of the writing diminish, made me feel like my intelligence was being insulted (I kept thinking, yeah I know), and killed the pacing because there were so many scenes that were dragged out so we could make sure the reader knew exactly what the issues were.