Hooboy, May was a bad month for reading! I started off fairly strong with two almost-5-star reads (Fourth Wing, Starling House), and after I finished Starling House I was in such a bad slump that I could not get into ANYTHING. I ended up having to re-read the Raven Cycle via audio (Will Patton is FANTASTIC, highly recommend!) because I wasn’t in the mood for anything new.
May DNFs
Damsel
DNF @ 7%
I didn’t get very far into this one because the writing is terrible. It’s sophomoric and bland, and is the most basic writing I’ve read in as long as I can remember. “She went here. She did this. The sky was blue.” I will never make it through an entire novel that has such flat and uninteresting prose.
Seventh Raven
Welp, I never thought I’d DNF a two hour audiobook, but here we are.
The writing is jarring and so infuriatingly repetitive that I made it 15 minutes before I rage quit.
A Broken Blade
It took me exactly 30 minutes of audio to know that this book is not for me. The writing is dry and bland, and the story and characters are generic. It feels like a Throne of Glass rip off tbh.
The High Mountain Court
DNF @ 13%
Literally everything about this was generic AF and exactly like a million other High Fantasy books I’ve already read before. Also, the characters were so flat that I couldn’t tell any of them apart except the MC and love interest (whose personalities were still very one dimensional, despite being the two main characters), because they were all just cardboard cutouts with zero personality whatsoever.
Hard pass.
Dragonfall
DNF @ 10%
Oh look, yet another dragon book that let me down :(
I desperately wanted to like this one, because dragons, but I just can’t do it anymroe. I think I was expecting more out of this after finishing Fourth Wing, which is one of the few dragon books that HASN’T let me down, so maybe the timing was a little unfair. But I straight up slogged through this book for well over a week and was somehow *still* only on page 45 by the time I gave up, wtf?! The writing was really jarring to me and required excessive concentration to focus on it. I found myself re-reading the same paragraph 3 times because I couldn’t keep my attention on the story.
I already didn’t have any desire to pick it back up, then my library loan lapsed, so I saw it as a sign to just let it go.
The Kaiju Preservation Society
DNF @ 21%
This is my first experience with Scalzi, and I’m sure it won’t be my last (umm, Starter Villain has sentient cats sooo I’ll probably try again with that one), but this one wasn’t for me.
I saw a lot of people call it light and fun, and it should have been…but for me, it just wasn’t. Which is really a shame because the concept is awesome! I loved the idea of the KPS and the kaiju obviously were super cool. But other than that, it fell flat for me. I found the dialogue and humor to be forced and it was a bit too much for me. I didn’t care about any of the characters or anything that was happening – which is odd considering it’s about kaiju. Well, maybe not that odd, because at 21% there had only been two small appearances of kaiju.
I put this down for a couple of days and had zero desire to pick it back up.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
DNF @ 150 pages
Well, I said I’d give it 150 pages and that’s what I did. I wanted swashbuckling adventure, but what I got instead was a lot of waxing and waning about religion, and loads of historical information that felt like reading a textbook. There was also something about the writing that grated on my nerves. I was bored AF, and didn’t even want to read because I had no desire to continue. This book put me farther into a reading slump.
Leave a Reply