Quite honestly I can’t stand only a few books that I’ve read, recently The Awakening by Nora Roberts.
Holy crap, do I reallllyyyyy want my money back. I was bored. So. Bored. The magic system was subpar, the characters just….ew, everything was so, so boring. The MC is an idiot.
What book is a zero star read for you?
Years ago somebody gave me a book they thought I would like based on the cover blurb. C.A.D.S. was about elite soldiers with armed exoskeletons fighting a Soviet invasion IIRC. The writing was cartoonishly bad, the bad guys were so one-dimensional they should have been wearing T-shirts that said “EVIL” on them. Apparently the invasion was a pretext to kidnap and torture teenaged American girls.
I read another years ago about a high-tech war between the US and a newly imperialistic Japan. From what I recall it wasn’t totally awful … but this was a book based on high-tech weaponry, and the writer never described any of them. At all. Literally “the Japanese combat system crested the hill” or “the Japanese combat system dove out of the sun and began firing.” Literally zero picture in your mind.