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Top Ten Books I Was Excited For Then Struggled To Finish

1. Burning Glass by Kathryn Purdie

I did finish this book, but I struggled because the pacing was so slow. The main character Sonya didn’t even struggle to master her power, she simply didn’t improve and she wasn’t trying. The main plot was forgotten for half the book and the conflicts that she came up against blocked the plot which then fell back to a poorly developing romance. Because she spent most of the book being seduced by one royal brother or the other, Sonya didn’t move the plot along and she also suffered from a hubris to rival Celeana Sardothian from Throne of Glass. Although this had a great concept and borrowed worldbuilding from Slavic influences, I really struggled to finish this book.

2. Beautiful Broken Girls by Kim Savage

Having love Savage’s After the Woods, I thought Beautiful Broken Girls would be more of the same. But the narrative followed a boy named Ben who lost his love interest to a double suicide and was convinced it done due to the girls’ dad abusing them because a bunch of notes were left behind. Poorly paced and confusing, this book took me forever to finish and the payoff wasn’t worth it because the ending was so poor and strange. A pity.

3. Prom Impossible by Laura Pauling

One of the worst, stupidest, lamest, most troubled characters I’ve ever read, the girl in this whose name I can’t even remember steals cars with no consequences, steals her cousin’s dress and wears it to a dance where her cousin sees her and doesn’t respond, and worst of all, at the very beginning of the book she sabotages the prom of the senior year above her then spends the entire book trying to make her own prom perfect. Her parents ban her from eating sugar?! Poorly written and with inconsistent characters, this book’s cover and premise was so cute but not worth the time to finish.

4. A Thousand Nights by EK Johnston

I did finish this book but I didn’t enjoy it half as much as I expected to.  It just… it wasn’t a love story. It wasn’t romantic. It was billed as ‘the most dangerous love story ever told’ but really, there was very little danger and zilch romance. The nameless heroine develops no feelings for her new husband and doesn’t even plot against him even though she took her sister’s place to save her life from this supposedly wife-murdering demon husband. She didn’t even really think about how she was supposed to survive her own murder, because she was never really put in any danger. It was largely a wandering plot and then out of nowhere the heroine learns and masters magic. She just kind of existed, passively, and the world worked around her. Also, they kept referring to a wedding ceremony that never happened.

5. Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan

Supposedly a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, I gave up this book because although I was interested in the premise of a light and dark set of twins, and obviously there was going to be some kind of love triangle, I simply lost interest when the Lucie character didn’t just make thoughtless decisions, but outright made bad decisions, acknowledging they were bad. She knew perfectly well that what she was doing was illegal or stupid but she did it anyway. I likened it to poking an animal until it bit you, and not being surprised that it did because you knew that would be the result anyway.

6. White Space by Ilsa J Bick

The worldbuilding in this was so intense and confusing I just gave up rather than struggle for hundreds of pages. There was point of view jumping and no info dumping and sometimes, when the world is just so strange it needs to be explained, you need a little more information. We just moved from scenerio to scenario and I think we were expected to connect the dots but it was way too early to do that, we don’t know enough about the world.

7. A Breath of Frost by Alyxandra Harvey

I almost threw this book down when the three main characters were in an earthquake then a fire then a frost and no one mentioned it was anything out of the ordinary. One of the girls is only slightly annoyed when another character breaks the only remaining keepsake of her dead mother. The lack of emotions and reactions led me to quickly grow bored. There were too many points of view and the prose was attempting and failing to emulate Jane Austen level style of wit.

8. Mist by Susan Krinard

I was expecting an actual story about a valkyrie and it turns out she’s some kind of uber special snowflake. I read about a quarter of this book and barely remember anything except she had sex with Loki in disguise.

9. Daughters of the Storm by Kim Wilkins

I was really looking forward to a story about sister princesses and to be honest I don’t remember a single thing about this book, or when I decided to abandon it. I guess that says a lot about the book.

10. Witch Hunter by Virginia Boeker

Another case of ‘this character is the best at what they do but actually no they’re not they’re really a screw up who keeps screwing up’. Supposedly she can kill men with just her thumbs, so how was she arrested in the first place if she didn’t want to be? Also, she made really stupid decisions such as illegally buying witch herbs and then getting drunk and dropping them in front of the king’s men. If she’s so freaking awesome, why does she keep screwing up? The entire thing is just contrived and I’m not fooled into wasting my time reading it.

What about you? Have you read any of these books, and what did you think of them? Which book were you really looking forward to then let you down? Comment down below!

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