2014 Look-Back: Duds

In my last post, you saw an overall picture of how my year in reading went.  In this one, I'm going to take a look at all three of the one-star books, and why they received their ratings.

Goddess Interrupted
via Goodreads
Goddess Interrupted by Aimée Carter was book two in her Goddess Test series.  Book one received two stars from me, but this one only merited one star.  I was so angry by the end of this book that I threw it across the room.  What a horrid example of relationships!  The main character spends the entire book complaining that her husband doesn't pay attention to her, and he doesn't love her, but she wants him to love her so badly, why doesn't he love her, why can't he show her affection, why why why whine whine whine.  It was awful.

On top of all of the insecure whining that goes on, there was the ridiculous mythology that was carried over from book one, that fits absolutely nothing from the original mythology.  While adaptation is not a bad thing, this one completely discards history in favor of a ridiculous romance.  Complete and utter fail.

Fractured Dream
via Goodreads
Fractured Dream by KM Randall was another failure for me.  It sounded like a somewhat interesting premise, although considering that we now have shows like Once Upon a Time exploring fairy tales from new angles, maybe it's not as original as I had thought it.  I had a hard time getting through this mostly because of the unprofessional writing, the constant use of the main character's name (Story, ugh), and melodramatic teen angst.  It turned out to be yet another one of those teen-girl-comes-of-age-and-finds-out-she's-a-savior things, but not done very well.

The odd sexual tension didn't help either.  Story and Adam, Story and Nicholas (I actually had to skim a few reviews because I couldn't remember his name), Elliot and literally every single male in the book...

Children Into Swans
via Goodreads
I received a copy of Children Into Swans by Jan Beveridge from NetGalley for the purpose of reviewing it.  However this is one I could not finish to save my life.  It read like an undergraduate academic paper, not professionally written or edited, with very strange personal interjections throughout.  It didn't help that I couldn't figure out where the related stories ended and the exposition began again.

Part of my problem was that I had gone in expecting more fairy tales to be told, but instead I was given a few snippets of fairy tales and then some regurgitated research that had already been done.  There wasn't even an original revelation on any of the stories in any of the pages I read.  I could have just read the original research, and the original stories.  This was a dud.

Stay tuned for the next post dealing with the "studs," my favorite books of the year!

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