Tag Archives: DNF

Extasia by Claire Legrand

Stars: 1 out of 5.

DNF at 35%.

This is definitely not for me. I don’t deal well with religious drama, cults, and religious zealots, and while I was told that the book eventually moves past that, I just didn’t feel the strength to slog through that part of the story to get to the interesting bits. I put this book away and picked it up so many times, I finished 3 other books in the meantime. And I had to force myself to pick it back up every time. The only reason I stuck with it so long is because it’s an advanced copy. I usually feel obligated to at least make it through a quarter of a book I received for review before I call it quits.

Religious oppression and violence is not the only reason I couldn’t finish this book. I can’t stand the main protagonist. I also don’t understand her motivations. The choices she makes don’t makes sense. She is so pious and ready to become a saint, and judgmental of anyone she considers not pious enough, especially her mother… then she decides that she wants to find the Devil? Hmmm, why exactly? How a barely remembered story (that ended badly, by the way) would make her think that confronting the Devil would save her village? Why is she willing to commit theft and perjury for that?

There are a lot of her other choices and behaviors that made me shake me head in dismay. And they made me like her even less. For someone who sees herself as a sort of paragon of piety and virtue, she is extremely judgmental and unkind to everyone who she sees inferior to her. That’s especially glaring towards her fellow saints and her sister. I’m sorry, but I can’t possibly root for someone this unlikeable.

The worldbuilding is wobbly at best. I can’t even picture how this village lives. What kind of technology do they have? How do they feed themselves? What do they wear? How do they craft their tools? Nothing. The explanation about Extasia is also rather unsatisfying. 

I’ve seen a lot of raving reviews for this book on Goodreads, but for me, it was a disappointment.

PS: I received an advanced copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The First Days (As the World Dies 1) by Rhiannon Frater

Stars: 2 out of 5

This was rather disappointing. I’m always on the lookout for a good zombie story, and this one had promise. The first chapter sure packed an emotional punch. Two women thrown together by circumstances and desperately trying to survive in a world gone mad overnight. It looked like it would be a bloody and scary romp through rural Texas fighting zombies and finding strength and friendship in each other. And it was just that for the first 100 pages or so. But once they rescue Jenni’s stepson and join the other survivors, thigs quickly degenerate.

All of a sudden, instead of being decisive, smart and brave, these girls just give up all of their initiative to the first male figure they encounter. It’s like they switch off their brains and switch on their hormones. Big man will protect me! I don’t have to think anymore. I just have to spread my legs! Jenni is the biggest offender on that front. And the whole story becomes this weird love square between Katie, Jenni, Travis and Juan. Did we really need that? The world is literally ending around them, why do I have to read about who hooks up with whom?

Not to mention how false that reads. I mean Katie just witnessed her beloved wife, the one she literally describes as her whole world, become a zombie and try to eat her face off. That was not even a week ago. And suddenly she has strange feelings for Travis and is doubting her sexuality? What happened to loss and grief and time to process the enormity of what happened? Jenni witnessed her abusive husband kill and eat both her children and barely escaped with her life. Yet as soon as she sees an attractive man, she switches off her brain and starts thinking only with her nether parts. But the least said about Jenni the better. Her characterization is problematic at best.

That’s another issue with this book – characterization. It’s inconsistent.  Characters do and say things that sometimes wildly clash with how they behaved before and what they were said to believe in. Some plot points and arcs don’t do anything to advance the plot and are there only either for shock value or to add some zombie gore. Like that whole adventure to rescue Jenni’s stepson, what was that about exactly? He fades into the background almost as soon as they reach the refugee camp and has no further role to play in the story. Heck, the dog has more page time than the kid, and more personality.

And it feels like the characters worry more about who will sleep with whom than the more pressing matters, like how to secure food and other supplies. What will happen when electricity goes down and running water dries out. They should be planning raids on nearby stores and pharmacies, and securing a source of running water. They should be thinking about hygiene and how to prevent the spread of diseases that will inevitably follow. Even the common flu can kill. Not to mention dysentery, which they are all likely to get if they don’t figure out a safe way to preserve food and boil the water they drink. I know, I know, I’m asking too much, but I was looking forward to a good zombie survival book, and instead I got this…

At least I crossed another book off my TBR list, I guess. And this one has been sitting on it since 2018.

Souldier (In the Shadows of Eternity 1) by Andrew Dahms

Stars: 2 out of 5

DNF at 50%

I am honestly amazed at all the 5 stars reviews on Goodreads. Have I read a different book than everyone else? They talk about a good story and gripping action… Well, I had to force myself to read to halfway point, and I honestly saw neither. Maybe things get better in the second half of the book, but if I have to wait until then for the story to get interesting, something is wrong. Plus, I don’t have that much patience. 

I think the biggest problem is that the author doesn’t know how to show anything. All he does is tell. We have paragraphs upon paragraphs of descriptions of everything from buildings to uniforms, to what is happening to the character. But it’s all tell, tell, tell… I mean, he even managed to make the basic training sequence boring as fish. And it lasted way too long, by the way. I mean we are barely out of basic training and actually on the Line by the halfway mark. 

It doesn’t help that Vivian’s character is a non-entity. Because the author tells us everything instead of showing, we are never privy to her inner thoughts or find out how she actually feels about the things that are happening to her. I mean we have several chapters describing how grueling her basic training was, and how the drill sergeant did everything he could to break her… but that’s just words. I have no clue how she felt about it. I don’t see her exhaustion, her frustration, her determination to continue. None of that is there.

And why is she here anyway? Yes, she wants to find out what happened to Sally, but again, apart from what the author tells us, nothing shows us just how much she meant to the protagonist. Show us some flashbacks. Show us their interactions when they were friends. Show us how Vivian felt when Sally left to join souldier, or how she felt when she received the news of her friend’s death… then I will believe that she could drop everything and travel half the world away to seek some answers. As it stands, I don’t care.

And that’s the trend in this book. We are told that the characters are doing something or reacting to something, but we aren’t shown that. And often, we aren’t shown any reactions at all where there should be something. 

For example, when Vivian and her fellow enlistees are sent to help load and unload planes during the new wave, the pilot of one of them has a mental breakdown, literally saying that he brought his squad back in boxes. They were unloading coffins. Surely, there would be a reaction to that? We get nothing. No horror at the realization, no desperation, no fear even. Nothing but the description of how grueling it was to work for such long hours for several days. NOT the thing you want to put the accent on in this kind of story. That was a lost opportunity to immerse the reader in the world and show just how bleak the situation is. 

When I realized that at halfway mark the book wasn’t getting any better, and that I was just getting more and more frustrated with the writing, I gave up.

PS: I received an advanced copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Murder Under Another Sun by Colin Alexander

DNF at 25%.

I expected a tight thriller and murder mystery in space. Instead I got a high school trip vs junkies story on a new space colony.

And the premise itself is so stupid that I simply can’t suspend my disbelief that much.

Instead of sending conducting an extensive geological, meteorological, and biological survey of the newly discovered planet, we will just throw a bunch of settlers on it and expect them to start a fully self-sustaining colony.

Oh and the first colonists will all be criminals with not many useful skills between them… and the second wave will be a group of boy and girl scouts barely out of high school. Surely they at least know how to operate the machines that will keep them alive and help build said colony? No? Cool, that’s cool.

That’s the perfect recipe for a successful colony! What can go wrong? Seriously, the person who came up with that mission plan on earth must have been high as a kite. End sarcasm.

Oh, and at a quarter of the book in, still no sign of the murder that is supposed to be at the center of this story. Sorry, I’m out.

PS: I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Bona Fides (MI-X Series 1) by Ash B. Whitley

Stars: 2 out of 5.

DNF at 50%.

The blurb for this book sounded very interesting: a child prodigy stuck in a sort of parallel dimension where she can see and hear what’s going on on our plane of existence, but not interact with anything. Her fight to get back into our world and prove that her father is innocent of her murder. Sounds like a wonderful story, doesn’t it? That’s why I picked that book up. 

Unfortunately, the blurb is misleading. Oh, Rowyn is stuck in a parallel dimension, alright, watching helplessly as her father is convicted of her murder. However, this situation is resolved within the first four chapters of the book, and without much effort on her part, I must add. What happens after that is a story about a group of super-powered young adults who are trying to save the world against a big bad with super powers. Some reviewers drew a parallel with X-Men, and I can see where they come from. 

And I would have stayed for this X-Men like adventure, even if that was not what I was expecting when I picked up the book, but the characters were simply not interesting enough. Their POVs feel “rough”, like the author tried too hard to give them distinctive quirks to make them more memorable. Well, their “voices” sound stilled and unnatural instead. I saw their individual powers, but I never saw the actuals individuals behind those powers.  I think it was also party because the author chose to tell us a lot of things instead of showing them. So we are told that Alexia hates her powers and that they make her toxic to everyone around them, but I don’t see that turmoil in her POVs. 

The problem also lies in the story itself, or, more precisely, it’s execution. There are way to many plot holes and deus ex machina moments. The whole team seems rather ineffective and bumbling through their missions on sheer luck and because the author needs them to succeed. I mean, just because Hakim has a brain that is better than a super computer, it doesn’t make him a good leader. There is a lot more to leading a team of troubled super-powered people than smarts. Empathy goes a long way as well. 

And that’s what this book lacks – empathy. Horrible things happen to characters, but it’s never addressed afterwards. We never see the emotional fallout of Rowyn’s father suicide, for example. It’s just assumed that these people will brush this off an continue like nothing happened. As if having a super power makes them immune to psychological trauma. 

So I left this book disappointed, even though I might have enjoyed it better if the blurb had prepared me for what it really was – a thriller with superheroes, instead of a mystery about a girl stuck out of sync with our plane of existence and desperately trying to get back to it.

PS: I received and advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 

The Bladed Faith (The Vagrant Gods 1) by David Dalglish

Stars: 2 out of 5

DNF at 45%.

There are the makings of a good book in there, that’s why I am not giving it a one star review, but the execution was sorely lacking, at least for my taste.

First of all, it drags. Even the battles move slowly and the narrative parts between them are never-ending. We get a long training montage at the beginning of the book that was interesting for the first 10 pages, but rapidly lost my goodwill after it dragged and dragged. 

I think the reason for that is because even though the characters acquire new skills and evolve physically, they never grow mentally. I found that the character development is next to null in this book. I never got to bond with the characters because I was never allowed in their heads. What drives them? 

Why does Cyrus decide to endure this harsh training? Just because he was told that he could become the avenger of his people? He didn’t strike me as someone that selfless and patriotic at the beginning of the book. I would understand this better is I was privy to his inner thoughts and doubts instead of just his relentless training. 

Same goes for all the other characters. They are kind of there and going through the motions, but I can’t picture them in my head. They are not “alive” to me. I am a character-driven reader, I don’t do well with books that lack those. I can forgive a lot of flaws and plot-holes as long as I’m invested in the characters. Here, I wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some interesting ideas in this book. The whole idea of the origin of divinity is one I would have loved to know more about. This is one of the reasons I kept reading for as long as I did. But then I caught myself skipping pages upon pages and stopping just to read the major plot points. That’s when I knew that it was time to abandon ship. 

PS: I received an advanced copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Flotsam (Peridot Shift 1) by R J Theodore

Stars: 2 out of 5

DNF at 45%.

There is a good book hidden somewhere in there. Unfortunately, it’s buried under tons of overwritten plot and bad characterization. It feels like this story isn’t quite done yet. It need more time to “cook” in the author’s head, or maybe a strong developmental edit.

The premise is fascinating: a whole planet shattered by a cataclysm that left it in chunks. Yet somehow life still exists there. There is atmosphere and gravity even if that revolves around the “islands” – floating bits of planet. There are five “gods” that remade their respective people in some ways to facilitate their adaptation to this new environment. And these deities are not fictional. They exist, they interact with others sometimes. There is a mysterious ring and some even more mysterious aliens. And the crew of a smuggler’s ship caught in the middle of all of that. Sounds interesting? Sounds like lots of fun and action, doesn’t it?

That promise kept me going for almost half the book. That’s when I realized that the flaws of the book made it almost impossible to enjoy the story. I was skimming most of the chapters just to get to the juicy bits, but even those weren’t enough to keep me interested.

This book is horribly overwritten – I don’t need descriptions of what every character is wearing and all the weapons they have unless it’s relevant to the story. And while yes, I’m interested about how Sub Rosa was founded, I don’t need 6 pages of exposition about it. This kills the momentum and makes the book a chore to read.

The other problem is the extremely stilled and unnatural dialogue. The characters don’t talk like people. In fact, most of the time, the characters barely talk. The protagonist talks and assumes what her crew is about to say from their posture or the look in their eyes, when they barely said a word or two before she interrupts them. This is extremely irritating and makes the protagonist look unstable, even unhinged sometimes. Prone to mood swings and quick to lash out… without any provocation. 

This impression comes from the fact that the author tells us everything, but is very bad at showing it. So the author tells us that the crew is being insubordinate and even disrespectful, but nothing in the scene actually “shows” us that. Half the time, when I read those scenes, I came away confused – exactly why did the protagonist lash out? Nothing in the dialogue provoked that response. I don’t really want to follow a character I don’t like and can’t understand.

All of these flaws just kept adding up and by the time I decided to say goodbye to the book, I was just not getting any enjoyment out of the experience.

PS: I received a free copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Book of Sand by Theo Clare

Stars: 2 out of 5.

DNF at 60%

I tried so hard to like this book, or baring that at least finish it before I reviewed. I struggled for the last 10-15% of the story, hoping to get some answer or that the story would get more interesting. Unfortunately, it didn’t, so I am calling it quits.

The beginning was really promising, though I wasn’t a fan of the dual storylines. McKenzie’s story in particular was a little bit too YA for me. I am not a fan of YA, so getting through her parts was a struggle. It was especially hard and off-putting because of how intermingled these parts are – you have several paragraphs with Spider and the family in the Cirque, then we jump to McKenzie for a paragraph, then back again with no warning, no rhyme or reason. 

The desert storyline was intriguing enough to keep me going though. And I wanted to know how the two stories tied together. Unfortunately,  the answer to that question was rather blah. Also, the book went downhill once the two stories merged. There were too many questions left unanswered and too many deus ex machina moments. Also, nobody communicates in this family. Everyone withholds information for no other reason but to keep the mystery of the story. It’s infuriating. 

These people are supposed to be a family, and the author mentions several times how much they love each other. Yet for some reason they all despise Hugo because he is “entitled”. Well, I’m sorry, but I haven’t seen anything entitled about him in this book. He’s been nothing but helpful and self-sacrificing throughout the story. The reaction of the other family members makes no sense. Same with Spider’s constant suspicion towards Noor. Like dude, why don’t you two talk it out, like normal human being would? And why are your so-called Elders speak in riddles and never answer any questions? And why do you constantly just let it go? It’s a life and death situation you guys are in, but Spider would be just like, “cool, you won’t answer me about why I should explore this city, so I will just go away and do something else.” Really?

Also, with such a big cast of characters, it’s sad when the only well-defined and interesting one is a camel. 

And this book is way too long. It sits at a hefty 600 pages. So I made it to about 350 by the time I called it quits, and the story hadn’t given me any satisfying answers yet. Nope, I’m out.

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Hollows by Daniel Church

DNF at 50 %.

This had so much promise! A small town cut off from the rest of the world by a snow storm. Mysterious creatures attacking its inhabitants. A lone policewoman trying to keep order and make sure as many people survive this as possible… Yup, the description was right up my alley, so I went into this book with a certain amount of excitement.

And the beginning was good. Ellie discovers a body and realizes it’s one of the residents. Apparently he froze to death and there are strange markings next to his body. That’s creepy. The introduction to the monsters was also creepy and frankly terrifying. Those are the stuff of nightmares, alright. I wouldn’t want to see one of them outside my window at night.

But that’s about where the positives end for me. The book is way too long for its own good. It drags. The story meanders at a leisury pace when it should be rushing along revving up the suspense. I mean I quit reading right after our first real glimpse of the Tatterskins, and that was at 50% if the book. And I would have tried to stay with the story if the constant distractions were useful to deepen the character relationships or tell us more about the town. But it really doesn’t. 

My second problem, and the one that ultimately made me call it quits, is the fact that all characters are caricatures of themselves. The bad people are so villainous, they don’t even feel like real people, like that one inbred family at the farm. The good ones are good, but one-dimensional. I couldn’t tell you what Ellie looks like or what her story is. Yes, there is mentions of her loosing her son, but never in much detail. Other villagers just blend into one indistinctive mass of people.

But what made me throw the towel was how the wife of the second cop was portrayed. I understand that we aren’t supposed to empathize with her. I understand that the protagonist doesn’t like her. But why did she have to be portrayed as an arrogant screeching harrigan who cares more about her car being totaled and tearing Ellie a new one than the fact that her husband is missing and presumed dead? Unless she is so heartless that she was planning her husband’s murder and the monsters just happened to hasten things, this is an extremely unnatural reaction. That was so jarring to me that I closed the book and never looked back.

There is a good story somewhere in there, it’s just buried under excessive wordcount and poor characterization.

PS: I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Engines of Empire (The Age of Uprising 1) by Richard S. Ford

Stars: 1 out of 5.

DNF at 30%.

The description of this book sounded so promising, and I was really excited to start it… Unfortunately, my excitement quickly turned into puzzlement, then annoyance, then simply boredom.

This story feels so… disjointed. First we have a prologue that has almost nothing to do with the story itself – we are introduced to characters that never appear in the book again (at least in the part I read before I called it quits), in a location that is barely mentioned again, only because one of the protagonists is sent there. But then again, that particular protagonist has the least page time, so I maybe got to read his POV twice before I dropped the book.

Then we are briefly introduced to our protagonists who are promptly sent their separate ways, so we don’t really get a feel for their family dynamics or feelings. They are together for maybe a couple pages and manage to squabble like kindergarteners for that whole duration. There is no sense of familial ties or history there. Then they leave to their specified locations… and that’s it for the ties between them.

I understand that that the author wanted to show different parts of this seemingly vast empire through the eyes of the protagonists. Unfortunately, that didn’t work for me. There isn’t enough meat in the worldbuilding to visualize the actual world. We have this Empire that is seemingly ruled by industrial Guilds. And the Emperor is the head of the most powerful Guild… Okay, how does this work? Apart from a brief reception for a foreign dignitary (during which the emperor behaved like a simpleton), and a sham of a trial in front of the Guild council, we get nothing about what makes this empire tick – what about the non-guild citizens? Army? Militia? Judiciary system? Anything? Same for the “Demon empire” that supposedly was their enemy for a thousand years. We get disjointed glimpses of things but they don’t make a clear picture.

It didn’t help that I couldn’t like any of the protagonist enough to care about them. Especially Tyreta, who behaves like an entitled brat with no self-control for most of the story I managed to get through. And while that could have been excused for a teenager, her mother, who is supposedly in her 40s, isn’t much better. This book suffers from a distinct lack of good characterization.

Finally, the fight scenes are… uninspired to say the least. Who could imagine that a fight scene can be boring? Well, they are in this book. They last for pages at a time but aren’t dynamic or suspenseful. They are just boring. I found myself skipping paragraphs during the fights.

Maybe I am just spoiled by other great epic fantasy books I read this year, since a lot of people seemed to have loved this one and left me cold.

PS: I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.