You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
I quit a book 5 pages in because the author was using real life people—who lived in the 1800s—to describe what his characters looked like, and nothing more.
As in: ‘The man looked like Wilmer McLean both is size and stature.’
Then a few paragraphs down he described a woman the same way. She looked like ‘insert name of random woman who lived in the 1800 and was good as shooting a shotgun’.
‘He held a cane in his hand like one Maurice Chevalier would carry.’
This novel was published in 2019, and took place in the ‘present’ day. He offered no other descriptors except the names of the people, so I had absolutely zero clue as to what these people/objects looked like. I had to stop reading to look them up on my phone.
By the time I’d looked up the fourth person/object by page five, I was done. Book closed.