Hello and welcome, we are not addressing my disappearance and I am not going to make big promises about how I’M BACK, I’m going to be posting, but my posts will be more in depth from now and may take a couple weeks to get out, but they will involve much more challenges, reading certain categories or books recommended by certain people, rather than spitting out tags left right and centre.
ANYHOO, since I last posted, BookTok has taken over the entire universe with some (questionable) recommendations. In this post, I will be talking through some of the books that I have read to give my opinion on whether or not they are worth the hype and I may at a later date read some of the recommended books that I haven’t read yet and do a post on those, but without further ado, lets get started!
This is a book that had a lot of hype in like 2014-ish, as far as I can remember, it was one of the first books Zoella picked for her bookclub. Committed as I was, I tried my best to read this but failed miserably as I was so incredibly bored. When it resurged on BookTok years later, I decided to give it another shot, and my god was it horrific.
The book follows a girl who comes from a wealthy background and goes to a private island for summer every year (but she would like us to know that she is not spoiled at all because she once gave a homeless person a toothbrush). This book was supposed to be a kind of mystery type situation, but the characters were just so so awful that I could not at all bring myself to care.
The main problem with the characters was that they were all horrible people. We follow a bunch of rich kids who claim that they are absolutely nothing like their horrible parents while at the same time show that they are exactly like their parents. For example, at the start of the book, MCs dad takes here around Europe staying in hotels and she basically spends the whole time sulking because she would rather be on her private island. As you can see, she is a very down-to-earth and in touch with reality kind of girl.
Even if I did manage to care an ounce for any character, there was also a serious lack of any cohesive plot at all. Its like the author realised in the last five pages she’d written a book of this irritating girl just mooching around for ages and didn’t actually do anything, and so threw in a twist that was literally pathetic in my opinion. I did not vibe.
I found it so strange watching this go viral on TikTok after it swept BookTube by storm a couple years ago, which is when I read this. I loved reading this book and I think it is worth hype, to some extent, but the hype this has got is astronomical.
I think the great think about Taylor Jenkins Reid is how easy her books are to read, she has a way of getting you hooked and not wanting to put the book down at all, which is a testament to how incredible her writing is. I think the only problem I have with this book, and also Daisy Jones and the Six (also by TJR) is the way that all the other characters in the book see the MC as Gods gift to earth with their heads stuck so far up the ass of a person who doesn’t really warrant it.
The characters in these books aren’t likeable, and it don’t have a problem with that as I know that people are flawed and yada yada yada, BUT, I think the skill of writing a flawed character that I am still interested in is killed when everyone else in the book seems oblivious to this.
Other than that, I do think that this book, and anything by TJR for that matter, is so incredibly written and I adore reading her books.
We all know how I feel about these books and SJM in general now, lets be real. Since writing my post on disliking SJM books, I read the ACOTAR series and the Crescent City books, and I just don’t think its healthy the amount of anger that I feel when I’m reading these books, it can’t be healthy.
I really just think these books are so so poorly written, they are messy and rambly and repetitive, the characters are so awful you end up rooting for something bad to happen to them, and there is literally nothing of any substance present in the hundreds of pages.
I can’t stand these books, I’m sorry. The male characters are all the devil incarnate and any potentially redeeming qualities in the female characters are always killed by the men.
I beg you, read literally anything else. Please.
This book was a great concept that was executed very poorly. I would have given it 2 stars BUT I did enjoy the process of reading it and I think the writing was stunning.
The focus point of this book is that nobody remembers Addie after meeting her, until one day, someone does. This someone is then very predictably a love interest and that is where we get to the downfall of this book. You cannot convince me that after 300 years of being alive, what gets Addie is a man with NO PERSONALITY. Nothing, nish, zilch, zero. The rest of the book just seemed so forced after that and I just couldn’t deal with it.
I think the message of the book truly could have been so much stronger with no romance element at all unless it was with sexy demon man who I did support.
Overall the book is incredibly well written, I just didn’t like what happened and the direction of the book.
I’m not a big Colleen Hoover reader because I don’t love books that centre only around a relationship, so when I heard about the premise of this one, I was hooked. Verity follows a writer who has been asked to come and stay at the home of a mysterious and now ill author in order to finish her book series. We then follow the reading of the diary of Verity and the revelations of all of her secrets and when I tell you I ATE THIS BOOK UP. I read it in one sitting, would not speak to anyone, did not want to move, I was so hooked. To be honest, there were probably a lot of issues about it but I did not pick up a single one because this whole book was so addictive and completely unhinged that I didn’t even think about whether there were any issues.
This is a stunning beach/flight/lonely-cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere read imo and I would 1000000% recommend.
To say that I ‘read’ this is a bit of a bold statement, a more accurate one would be that I read maybe 50 pages and wanted to pull my own eyeballs out and gave up.
At risk of sounding very judgemental, this is exactly the type of book I’d expect to go viral because there is literally nothing to it except a pretty cover. The main character managed to annoy me into hating her in the first four pages, there is no plot development at all, it is just a huge info dump at the start of the book with no context or effort to actually build any form of storyline at all.
We found it: a book worse than those by Sarah J Maas. When I tell you this book was painful, it took maybe a month and a bit for me to read it, and I hated every moment of it. This book follows the Maiden, we are never actually told what the Maiden is, her purpose, what she does; all we know is that she is a virgin. And that is literally the whole book, we just run around in circles with this mysterious virgin and there was like a vampire somewhere? But I did not understand it.
Absolutely horrific, I don’t understand how so many more of these are coming out but spare yourself the time and the pain, if you want a mediocre romance that isn’t really a romance, go to Wattpad.
Thank you so much for reading my first post back, a lot has happened in my life and in everyones lives, since I started this blog but my love for talking shit about books has never ever stopped and I’m finally going to prioritise writing my silly little blog about my silly little books for the sheer sake that it makes me happy.
I hope you have enjoyed this post, feel free to let me know what you think of some of the most hyped up books on the internet, and I will catch you all next week!
Between the pages 