Okay, I need to get this off my chest. I found this book in a Little Free Library in my old neighborhood years ago, looked it up on goodreads, and it had literally over a million reviews and it's average rating was like a 4.8 or or something. It sounded interesting so I took it home.
Did you despise The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah? Did you love it? This could be the thread for you! I genuinely want to discuss this with people because it still blows my mind that I keep seeing it everywhere with folks gushing about it. Did we read the same book?!
Reader, I should have stopped after the first chapter. Nay, the first page. It marketed itself as historical fiction, and I will say they took WILD liberties with the "historical" part of that descriptor.
I kept thinking it would get better. I kept going. Reader, it kept getting worse: the over-the-top adjective and adverb usage; please, put down the thesaurus. One thing that SENT me was when a character was upset that she couldn't "eat a bowl of arsenic" to kill herself (wtf??). Last, my absolute strongest, unforgivable ploy in writing is when authors use an event for shock value that adds nothing to the plot of the story and doesn't move it forward. This happened over and over again in this book (and in one case, using sexual assault for shock value). Authors: please don't do this. And it was SO LONG. So. Long. Why.
Sigh. Anyway. There's a lot more I could say about this but I'd like to hear from the gallery.
tldr; The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah was the worst thing I've read in ages and I NEED to discuss this with lovers/haters alike
by MuchasTruchas