Tib Street Ballroom - Keira Willis

43%

26.05.26

This was... exuberant, with strong sense of place (Manchester) and time (the 1980s), although the pop culture references were rather shoehorned in. And that was the problem - a better edit would have sorted the awkwardness, poor pacing and repetition. In particular, characters rolled their eyes on almost every page, which must be as tiring for them as it is for the reader.

The Testament - John Grisham

43%

23.05.26

My verdict on Grisham's novels is either great or guilty of being poor - the best thing about this one is the marketing strapline on the cover. The interesting idea was badly paced and even more badly written, with cardboard characters and details that have horribly (and fascinatingly) dated over the thirty years since it was written. 

The Moonlight Market - Joanne Harris

43%

22.04.26

I've finally managed to finish a Joanne Harris book, but it was still underwhelming. She's a poetic writer, in many genres, but, like the works of Neil Gaiman, this fantasy, though vivid, was emotionally unengaging. And the main character was such an idiot that when he seemed to die near the end I really hoped that was it.

What Happened That Summer - Laura Pearson

43%

15.04.26

I didn't hate this but it didn't work for me. The podcast-transcript format can work well but here it seemed like a gimmick instead of the standard third-person narrative it should have been. Factual errors spoilt the immersion (when it is 9am in the UK, it is not, and never has been, 5pm in LA). The '90s setting was not convincing. The romance was hard to take seriously. The 'twist' was obvious from early on but was still never properly explained. All these things, as I say too often, could have been solved with a proper edit.

The Golden Age of Magic - Luanne G. Smith

43% 

29.12.25

The author tried hard with the worldbuilding but maybe should have spent more time thinking about plot, pace and clarity.

Grave Birds - Dana Elmendorf

43%

19.10.25

There was an atmospheric Southern Gothic thriller fighting to free itself from this poorly paced, poorly edited book. I'm all for genre fluidity but it didn't know what it was (Romance? Apocalyptic horror? Murder mystery? Not enough of any of those) and so ended up as an unfocused muddle.

Birding - Rose Ruane

43%

08.06.25

This was longlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction but read like a collection of writing exercises that tried to cram in as many metaphors as possible about pathetic women, horrible men and depressing seaside towns. It started out pretentious and ended up trite, thus losing any insights into (some specific) female experiences.

A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J Maas

43%

29.04.25

So this is the book that spawned a thousand romantasies. Why? How, when it's so laughably badly written, poorly paced and dull? (And that hilarious map!) Worse, the romance part, such as it was, promoted that trendy misogynist trope of dominant 'alpha' male power dynamics that rendered all the (unsympathetic) female protagonist's relationships frankly abusive. It's concerning that this is the message that young women are being fed.

Apprentice to the Villain - Hannah Nicole Maehrer

43%

13.11.24

I was really looking forward to reading this sequel but it started out muddled and confusing and didn't stop being muddled and confusing. The annoying characters, boring romance and lack of explanation of what on earth was going on didn't help. And so much more could have been made of the 'villain' idea. How disappointing.

A Murder of Crows - Sarah Yarwood-Lovett

 43%

10.01.24

If The Daily Telegraph wrote a novel, this would be it. It was fairly well written but the ideology was cringeworthy and the characters, police procedural and little England setting were all unconvincing. Of the many other elements that annoyed me, I'll pick out the assumption that the reader will sympathise with the 'plight' of modern aristocrats, and the patronising treatment of all women characters under 30. At least it was free.

Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell

 43%

03.07.23

I'm not sure why I persevered with all 561 pages of this when many more tempting books are literally piling up. For a story about a trendy band enjoying all the subversive aspects of the exciting 1960s, it was incredibly dull. Mitchell can't write convincingly about music - or fame - or women - or mental health issues - and I really dislike fictional characters meeting real people (most of whom are now dead, presumably included to avoid lawsuits). Daisy Jones and the Six was better  - hell, even Songs in Ursa Major was better - and the 'other' David Mitchell is more fun.

Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens

 

43%

13.07.21

I can't see the appeal of this much-hyped novel. I think what irritated me most was the fact it was all so unlikely. Unrealistic I can handle - if the world building and characters are strong enough you can happily suspend your disbelief - but this was just silly because it didn't ring true on any level.
And the poetry! Dear God, the awful poetry, which even one of the characters thought was bad. So why include it? This book just didn't know what it was or where it was going.

The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton - Anstey Harris

43%
16.01.20

If you want to annoy a copy editor (like me), assert in the very first sentence of your novel that putting an apostrophe before the word cello is correct and then use that distracting and archaic form throughout the book. Why not add to the irritation by throwing in a load of continuity errors and failing to fact check? And, if you want to annoy any reader, have a breathtakingly unsympathetic self-absorbed yet (oddly) not self-aware 'heroine' pining after a clearly useless lover for 250 pages. A triumph indeed.

The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins

43%
29.07.15

Ugh. It's a basic flaw when every character is too horrible to care about what happens to them. Too much hype and not enough editing.

Podwitch - Nick Poulton

43%
20.09.14

Self-published authors complain that traditional publishers are arrogant gatekeepers preventing literary gems from being published. Well, there's a reason for that. This would be promising if it was submitted as a first draft manuscript but it now needs a structural edit to make the plot less derivative and more coherent, and a copy edit to remove the many cliches. And why are so many fantasy books set in London?

The House at Riverton - Kate Morton

43%
05.01.08



Extensively researched, but so shockingly badly written that I have to wonder if Morton is literate. It's also dull and fairly predictable. Another R&J choice, it goes without saying. No more, no more, I can't take it!

The Savage Garden - Mark Mills

43%
05.12.07



This was as bad as 'Arlington Park' but in a different way. No pretentions to high literature; just lazy, cliched writing that made me suck my teeth when the phrasing jarred. The plot, what there was of it, was also lazy and cliched, with the author heavily leaning instead  on his research into Italy and mythology. What do you know? Another Richard and Judy choice. It scares me, it really does.

Arlington Park - Rachel Cusk

43%
19.11.07



I was so bewildered by this that I checked its reviews on Amazon, which were equally split between one and five star opinions. I'd tend towards the one star. On the plus side, it's unusually feminist and has some amusing turns of phrase, but otherwise it's a collection of vignettes about a group of middle-class women with no discernable differences in personality, all hating their husbands and children. Enormously overwritten, with metaphors that didn't make sense, and two or three words that I had to look up in the dictionary. What is the author trying to prove?