more heartbreaking works of staggering disappointment

what's 6 more disappointments from 2024?

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Last week I promised you snark, and this week I deliver on that promise.

I have a few year end/year beginning rituals that usually take some time which is why this didn’t come out first thing in 2025.¹ As explained in my very first post² my husband and I spend the twelve days of christmas going through each of our last year’s photo roll month by month, then we do The Purge which is a weekend of deep cleaning, donating and reorganization and then I go through my last year’s reads. I remember which I loved, which drove me crazy³ and which I have no memory of whatsoever. I came away from this year’s ritual encouraged to cut my losses even earlier that I usually do and basically quit a book when I’m sure I’m not feeling it. Especially after The Great Letdown of The Book of Love. Got too many on my queue to waste time!

Last week it was all ‘smart’ and ‘unique’, ‘charming’ and ‘emotionally hefty’ but this week there will be none of that. Today’s shelf includes six books that really bummed me out. These are in addition to the six books from the first half of 2024 that also let me down bad as seen below.

I’m presenting these books not as bad necessarily⁴, but as books that I had high hopes for and instead of living up to my pure, sweet, open minded expectations they laughed maniacally as they ground their heel into them, pulverizing my hopes into dust. Now, of course there are other books I read in 2024 that I didn’t care for, outright hated or simply felt indifference⁵ towards but I’m focusing on the ones that aggrieved me personally. These books had premises that were especially intriguing or were written by authors I’ve enjoyed before or were sequels to a previously enjoyed work but alas, they did not live up to my perfectly reasonable expectations.⁶

Don’t spend time with these books, but if you do tell me.⁷

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Six friends meet up at a countryside manor for a birthday celebration. People start killing each other and a third of the way in the reader is told that the group decided to play Motive Method Death, basically a short story competition. A very weird party activity as it requires each person to sequester away and type up a document that will then be judged ruthlessly by their ‘friends’.

I supremely enjoyed Pavesi’s first book, Eight Detectives,⁸ so squealed⁹ when the advance copy of this became available¹⁰. Because Eight Detectives was split up into many mini-stories¹¹ I was curious to see how he’d handle a more straightforward tale within a classic murder setting: The English Manor House. Except this turns out to also be a bunch of mini-stories, though we don’t know that at first. We’re mostly just confused for a while because people keep dying and then showing up later. Once the game is introduced, then we get the format but this isn’t really a mystery novel. Its basically a writing exercise, asking the reader to guess what the ‘real’ murder is inside a bunch of ‘fictional’ murders. Inside a fiction book. I hated it.

With the same six characters confined to the same fixed space, the ‘murders’ are silly, over the top and sort of boring unlike the variety that Eight Detectives allows. The characters are also one dimensional, flat and emotionless which gives the reader very little to grab onto. They aren’t able to be explored in much detail because of the confines of the game format, so we end knowing very little about each of them and caring even less. They never once felt like real people. There are inclusions of many extraneous details that I assumed would lead to a few red herrings and twisty mysteries but they just… didn’t. They were just there for word count I guess? Even the premise of the game made no sense to me because if you spend a weekend away with friends don’t you usually spend that time like, together? Why on earth would two days be spent apart, actually physically typing out a multi-page story to read aloud together at the end of the getaway? If you want a murder-ey game then play mafia or werewolf all together?! You know, like interacting? Spending time with shared conversation and experience?! Anyway, again, this book is not really a novel, its a long form writing exercise which was not what I wanted at all.¹²

Hanna from Baby Teeth¹³ is all grown up and working as a phlebotomist so she’s got a perfectly acceptable way to be around blood and inflict pain that doesn’t involve killing her mother. Though only twenty-four, she’s married with a teenaged stepdaughter and is able to bury almost all of her sociopathic tendencies under a pretty veneer of happy domesticity. That is, until her stepdaughter’s choices begin to snowball, forcing Hanna into a life she does not want and cannot control. Encouraged by the letters from her younger brother, Hanna decides to take matters into her own hands in her own very special way.

I think this would have been fine/mediocre as a regular domestic thriller with an added twist of an unreliable narrator¹⁴ at the end. However, because I loved Baby Teeth’s child psychopath so much, it was so disappointing and boring to see her grown up and mostly tamed. The plot was pretty slow and unsatisfying and Hanna is so much less of a psycho that its not even juicy in the anti-hero character sense. Neither the story nor the tone were twisty¹⁵ or dark and Hanna has to tamp down her nature and pretend for so much of the book that we don’t get much time to revel in her shadowy psychology making her much less interesting than her child self. In Baby Teeth we get Mom’s POV to see Hanna through, upping the tension and mystery but here its all grown up Hanna with an adult voice which adds too much clarity, removing the suspense and intrigue. I guessed many of the ‘twists’ early on and the ending was anti-climactic and lackluster with very little actual consequences so it just fizzled out. Which is not what I would have predicted after the wonderful freakiness of the first one. So read Baby Teeth and pretend this sequel doesn’t exist. Like how we’ve all agreed to pretend that Indiana Jones is just a trilogy.

Because she lived in a remote English Manor House close to a picturesque hamlet, no one is surprised when Frances ends up murdered. Also, no one is surprised because a fortune teller told her she’d be murdered eventually so Frances spent her entire life on the lookout for her future murderer, poking into everyone’s business over decades.¹⁶ Luckily her great-niece Annie is in town for the murder and, for literally no logical reason, is instructed to solve the murder in one week or the sprawling estate will be given over to developers which will make the town really mad. Though Annie has no skills, brains or personality, she has a lifetime of scrupulous notes compiled by Frances so she fumbles around a lot until things are eventually ‘explained’ to the reader. The End.¹⁷

A cute cover and unique premise hid a truly nonsensical book. This has two of my biggest pet peeves¹⁸ re: the diary format. One, diary entries that are written like a novel, complete with prose, dialogue tags and setting descriptions. If using a diary format, then write in a diaristic voice!! No one journals like that! Use those confines in clever ways, don’t just ignore them and become something completely different! Just use regular flashbacks if you’re going to do that! Ugh. And two, when someone has access to the entire diary which will explain everything they need to know but they decide to read it a chapter at a time over several days when obviously they would read it all in one sitting¹⁹. THEY ARE TRYING TO SOLVE A MYSTERY FOR SHERLOCK’S SAKE. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. YOU ONLY HAVE ONE WEEK.

Anyway. This could have been twee, fun and meta but it was just mind bogglingly stupid. At first I thought it was just taking its sweet time to make sense and eventually it would all click. But no. No, it just had paper doll like characters with no consistent voice, personality or motivation who are one thing and then completely another without any reasons or build up. Both timelines were painfully slow and boring with awkward and unnatural dialogue. Details were inconsistent, wrong or plain missing while character decisions and deductions weren’t based in logic and crucial information wasn’t built up but simply dropped in without any textual support. Why did Annie need this inheritance? Why would she be trusted to solve this mystery at all and why is she only given a week and why can’t she use all the tools at her disposal (like a detective…) when its like the most important thing ever!? And why is there only a shoulder pat at the end instead of a kiss!? Wtf are we doing here.

I found the character motivations and thought processes to be the most egregious missteps here. Even a day after finishing, I found myself staring off into space thinking ‘wait… this also made no sense! No one would do that!’ One of the biggest ‘plot points’ hinges on someone taking the place of someone else who is supposed to be outside gardening in a heat wave so decides to wear a big fur coat as a disguise and hope no one notices. The real mystery here is How Did This Get Published?²⁰

Take Macbeth but make it Lady focused and add more magic. Oh, and add a shape shifting dragon and some insta love too because…²¹

This is another book that would have probably been excusable if it was its own thing instead of shoehorning it into a Macbeth retelling. Here Lady Macbeth is too young and everyone is convinced she has magic in her eyes so she’s always got to wear a veil. Instead of being nakedly ruthless and ambitious, she’s just sort of ignored or bossed around so her motivation is just to escape instead of to conquer. Instead of using wiles or clever manipulations, she just uses her eyeballs to hypnotize people like she’s that snake from The Jungle Book which gets rote after a bit and removes a lot of interest in her character. I wanted a much more powerful, conniving and dark character study about one of the greatest villains in literature. Not what’s here.

I also wanted more easter eggs of the Scottish play to sort of explain what we’re doing here at all but they were few and far between so I have no idea why this was a re-telling instead of just a typical romantasy. Yes, romantasy because for some reason a hot guy who can shape shift into a dragon²² shows up. Why oh why is there a dragon man in Macbeth!? It came completely out of left field and I never felt like it belonged in this story. It also diluted LM’s story and made her narrative too love/relationship focused instead of herself focused. This also was paced oddly, dragging at some points and then rushing at others with some funky word repetitions which felt like the line editing portion of publishing process was skipped.

I’ve enjoyed some of Reid’s books²³ and really disliked others. She is skilled at creating atmosphere, setting descriptions and writing prose and doesn’t shy away from horror which usually results in some fun, scary stories. But even well written sentences couldn’t help a watered down character and dumb plot choices. This was like an episode of Chopped where the picnic basket contained: Shakespeare + dragons + crazy eyes GO.

Shirin and Kian were best friends until the age of 16 and they got a friend divorce because events. Now in their mid 20s, they run into each other again at a friend’s London house party and wonder if they can rekindle what they had. Or perhaps even grow it into something more. Or is it gone forever?

I don’t feel my snarky self about this one, just confused and bummed. I really enjoyed the author’s first book, the romance The Mismatch, but the writing here read so juvenile that now I’m questioning my memory. I appreciated its themes of identity, friendship, dealing with micro and macro racism in the workplace and performative activism but this was sloooww, repetitive and basic. The racism examples were so overt and extreme, creating an almost cartoonish atmosphere which lacked nuance and insight. I was looking for something with more layers, shadows and subtlety to really make me think. There was also a lack of juicy present day interactions with the couple and Shirin is at an 11 with anxiety about the past while Kian is at a 0 which was baffling and removed a lot of the tension making me wonder why I should care. Lots of telling instead of showing, extra characters that should be combined and I was annoyed that they did the exact same ghosting move twice. It felt lazy rather than poetic. It’s really too bad that this was amateur, generic and fairly emotionless because her debut was terrific.

Annie is Doug’s robot girlfriend who begins to question her place in the world.

Ex Machina this is not. I really thought that a book about a sex doll who becomes sentient and fights back would be clever and interesting. Reader, I was wrong. This had so much potential but unfortunately, didn’t deliver anything.²⁴ At first I thought the simplistic writing style was sort of mimicking Annie and would evolve with her, but no. There was no nuance or creativity here at all and it was very boring and lame.

The dialogue is stilted and awkward with every single character and Doug is so typically diabolical that I couldn’t stop rolling my eyes. Like, just give him a mustache, some rope and train tracks why don’t you. Plus he had no clear motivations for his actions. We’re told he makes certain choices to get rich, but then just continues to work all the time even when he makes millions off Annie. He doesn’t ever even have ambitions for this money that he wants sooo bad. There’s a number of plot points that have little impact or lead nowhere. Annie starts out way too human so the strength of her arc is handicapped. We’re told at the beginning she’s unique and the best ever and awesome and special which made me less invested in her journey because her arc from a to z really was from like x to z. I wanted to really feel the difference between Chapter 1 Annie and The End Annie. Alas, no. Plus the entire plot and world was small and insignificant. Not a whiff of smart social commentary or clever AI insights to be found.

There’s also so many tech/mechanical things that didn’t make any sense to me. Annie is a machine so can adjust her inputs/outputs and settings right? Why would she then cover her ears when she doesn’t want to hear Doug fucking another sex robot? Why wouldn’t she just adjust her audio volume levels?? You know, robot stuff! Doug also is obsessed with her weight and at her monthly tune up appointments tells the IT guys or whatever to make her weight X amount. But she isn’t made up of organs, fat, blood and bone! Who the hell knows what her little circuits and wire weigh!? Why would it matter what she weighs instead of what she looks like!? Wouldn’t he tell them to like make her boobs bigger or waist smaller or add pretend muscle definition instead of “weigh less”? Also she doesn’t metabolize food, why is she gaining weight? Why does she need to exercise!? Her robotics were so little thought out that this should have just been about a woman escaping a toxic relationship without the sex robot element at all. And the end was just so dumb and pitiful. There was no reason why her ‘plan’ was her plan, why she wanted to go where she went, why Doug fell for it and why he wouldn’t just come and turn her off which is her huge worry the entire book. Whatever. I had so many questions that didn’t seem to matter to the author/editor²⁵ and ultimately, though its premise had potential, there’s nothing here but fluff.

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favorite books of 2024

1. i can’t understand sharing the culmination of your year’s reading before 1/1 of the next year. what if you read your favorite book on the last day of the year!?! i almost never do but i guess hope springs eternal.

2. retreat to move forward

3. in a bad way

4. though some are

5. it wasn’t love, it wasn’t hate

6. every book should be my new favorite

7. number one how dare you. and second-of-ly leave a comment here so i can commiserate when you agree or blink away dismissively if you don’t.

8. from the no shit, sherlock shelf

9. really, so much of last year taught me not to get my hopes up, maybe i’ll learn this year to have none.

10. it publishes in july 2025

11. within stories

12. i wanted a murder mystery story

13. from the villains shelf

14. a genre i rarely go for as they are never very thrilling or mysterious. they always feel like poor man’s gone girl to me.

15. the twists are easily guessed

16. a sure way to annoy someone into killing you.

17. although i guess not because there’s a sequel (!?)

18. when done poorly

19. there would need to be a very good reason not to

20. or Did An Editor Look at This?

21. i don’t know

22. what, why

23. like the wolf and the woodsman from to the wolves shelf

24. like that one time that the usps delivered an empty box without any of the books I packed into it, but included all the paper that i had wrapped the books in…

25. rude