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 legitimately started reading Fifty Shades of Grey without knowing what it was. I’d been packing for a trip and realized at the last second that I didn’t have anything to read on the plane, so I quickly scanned the top books for sale in my Kindle and added one after about 6 seconds of research. I figured it was probably fine, maybe about some sort of grey area moral issue or whatever.
What struck me about the book was how terribly it’s written from the very start. It’s like the author didn’t know enough words to fill each page, so they just repeated the same ones over and over. Eg, the characters “murmer” to each other like 4x per scene.
How awful the writing is makes more sense when you realize that 50 Shades was originally written as a Twilight fanfic.
And the fact that the author wrote most of it on a Blackberry…
I quit after 28 pages. I was at the point where she was drunk and calling up the billionaire and I’m like, woman?! Where is your professionalism???
There was another book I DNF’d recently where the main character tries to seduce a guy relatively early on for no good reason and she’s beyond terrible at it. It was so promising before that, but that scene was cringey and awful and I just closed it down there.
I don’t like idiotic characters who are idiotic for the sake of idiocy.
I had a friend tell me the series was “light, fluffy fun fiction” so I downloaded the first one. I struggled through about 100 pages before I gave up.
Seriously, if you’re trying to write housewife porn, but your euphemism for genitalia is “down there”, maybe pick a different genre.