“The Miniaturist” by Jessie Burton. I didn’t finish it, I got maybe 50 pages in and gave up. I looked the plot up on Wikipedia and I’m so glad I gave up on it. The plot was so slow, and I frequently read things like historical fiction (which I’d say this tried to be) but I feel like the topics in this book were (probably) not handled well based on the plot breakdown I read.

“O, Beautiful: A Novel” by Jung Yun. I felt bad not liking this one because I can tell that the author worked so hard to make it good. I read a quote from Her talking about how much she loved the story and all the love and work she put into it, but dear lord was it repetitive! If I didn’t know it was written by a woman, I would have thought the women characters were written by a man who didn’t know any woman based on how often the main character felt like no one took her seriously because “she used to be a model and was pretty”. In the first 100 pages, I’m pretty sure it’s mentioned 30 times she used to be a model, and that’s why her life was so hard because it’s hard to be pretty AND have a normal career. And most of the time, when it was mentioned it was things like “she went to interview someone, but they didn’t acknowledge her because she was too pretty to be the reporter” or “every man she’d ever seen cat called her because she’s so pretty”. It had so many possible good plot points but went nowhere slowly.

“The Hotel New Hampshire” by John Irving. I don’t know why I finished this book, I gave up on it 5 times. So maybe points for that. This was one of the most disgusting books I’ve ever read, I kept hoping it was going to have some redeeming message or symbolism or something at the end but it was just gross and violent for the sake of being gross and violent. I showed a friend the summary and he was like “this book sounds great! Maybe you should try it instead of that [if someone tells me how to spoiler mark something so it’s grayed out, I’ll update this] book instead.” And when I told him “this is that book”, he choked on his coffee in shock. Book was just full of f-ing triggers.