November 2024
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    I’m curious about which books/scenes you found that were so poorly written that it just completely fell flat for you.

    I think the last time this happened to me was when I read **They Both Die At The End** by Adam Silvera.

    I really tried to like this book, and I do feel like I gave it a fair chance, but I just hated it so much. Instead of absorbing the intended message or feeling the feels where I was clearly supposed to, I was either rolling my eyes or actively routing for their deaths.

    I think the reason I feel this way is because the book beats it’s central theme of “just get out there and live” over your head so much and with so little subtlety that it just completly fell flat for me. I understand that this book is considered YA and subtlety isn’t the hallmark of that genre, but even still there becomes a point where a book just becomes awkward and preachy. As a result, instead of feeling inspired to change my life, I just rolled my eyes so hard that if my mother saw me she would have snapped something about my face getting stuck that way.

    As for the tragedy aspect of the story, everyone I’ve ever seen talk about this book made me believe I’d be weeping by the end, and the way it was written that was clearly the intended reaction. It just didn’t work for me. >! I cheered when Mateo died. It was just so stupid, especially considering that they just told each other that they loved each other. You guys haven’t even known each other for a whole day! I don’t care if emotions were just running high. That was some stupid bullshit. As for Rufus’s death, I still haven’t gotten over the disappointment that I felt when I didn’t get to see him get pancaked by that driver. !<

    Maybe I’m just soulless, but the writing was just too shitty for me to actually feel the intended effect. Also, I know that ‘unlikeable characters’ is one of the most mocked complaints for books, but in this case I feel like it’s valid. The point was for me to care about them and feel sad and I didn’t.

    by Big_Bag_4562

    6 Comments

    1. foolagainagain on

      Anna Karenina is reality TV before reality TV. Lauren Bobert being all over that guy in a crowded theater wasn’t exactly the same situation that happens in the book but it still feels like the same ballpark

    2. Dazzling-Ad4701 on

      I won’t die on the hill of “the kite runner sucks”, but only because it’s not worth dying over such a maudlin, manipulative piece of self-insert crap.

    3. Curiousfeline467 on

      I started laughing at *Rouge* by Mona Awad when the main character started having the stupid slips of tongue.

      Also, I laughed at/rolled my eyes at a lot of the *The Grace of Kings* by Ken Liu.

    4. I was after a really good audiobook, and I read that Roger Ebert described Sean Barrett’s reading of Patrick Suskind’s *Perfume* as [the best audio performance he’d ever heard](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/perfume-the-story-of-a-murderer-2007), so I gave it a go and absolutely loved it.

      Barrett really mines the grotesquerie of the characters and setting and he plays them all as sort of Hogarthian caricatures. The end result is that I found the book absolutely hilarious. Very dark, obviously, and *beautifully* written, but genuinely really funny. To me, it played out like a dark picaresque comedy. Admittedly one about a serial killer, but there were so many obviously fantastical elements that that inherent darkness didn’t really connect.

      Imagine my susprise to read reviews and realise that I was meant to have found it chilling. A horrifying descent into the mind of a madman, apparently.

      Obviously, we have no way of knowing what an author’s true intent was, and even though Suskind is alive still he’s apparently a bit of a recluse, but I’d really like to know whether he intended it to be funny in that way, or if it was mainly Barratt’s interpretation of the text that brought those elements out for me.

      Either way, really reccomend that audiobook. One of my all-time favourites.

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