How to Get a Badreads Review from Me, Part Two

Welcome back to “How to Get a Badreads Review from Me,” where I explain why I’ve poorly reviewed certain books on Goodreads. Part one covered books from 2021–22, today I’ll cover 2023–present. Let’s return to…

 

How to Get a Badreads Review from Me, Part Two

 

Be written by Dan Brown. Why in Thomas Pynchon’s publishing industry was The da Vinci Code a bestseller?

 

Plagiarize yourself and make your earlier work worse in the process. I’m not indigenous, but I know how nebulously the atrocities committed against indigenous people have been scrubbed from American history, so I’m always down to read about the indigenous experience. I especially enjoyed reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. After finishing it, I added Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment onto my to-be-read (TBR) list.

Imagine my disappointment when I got my hands on Loaded and got deja vu once I started reading. I didn’t have AIPHotUS on me, but I remembered enough to recognize Dunbar-Ortiz dropping chunks of AIPHoTUS into Loaded, sucking everything interesting out of said chunks as she did it.

Loaded is too boring to be read for leisure, too preachy to sway ammosexuals, and too surface-level to introduce new ideas to pro-gun control people. Do better, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

 

Sideline an interesting plot in favor of a terrible romance. Imagine a remake of The Shawshank Redemption with the same runtime as the original. Now imagine the first two hours are about Andy Dufresne’s wife having an affair, and the entire plot of the original movie—Andy’s imprisonment, meeting Red, laundering money for the warden, trying to prove his innocence, and tunneling to freedom–is compressed into the last half-hour.

If watching that for eternity sounds like a punishment in the Greek Underworld, then you’ll dislike M.E. Kerr’s Gentlehands as much as I did.

Gentlehands is about Buddy, a working-class kid who starts dating the wealthy Skye. To better understand Skye’s social circle, Buddy turns to his cultured grandfather. At one of Skye’s family’s social gatherings, Buddy meets Nick De Lucca, a Jewish journalist that accuses Buddy’s grandfather of being the titular Gentlehands, an especially evil Gestapo who killed a swath of De Lucca’s family. How couldn’t that be an interesting story?

By barely having anything from “To better…” to “…family” in it, instead focusing on a relationship that stank of middle school relationship dramas, that’s how.

When I say I don’t like romance, I mean books like Gentlehands. Romance novels sell over a billion dollars’ worth of books annually, and there’s a reason for that.

But for God’s sake, don’t promise me Apt Pupil or Inglourious Basterds and then deliver The Notebook.

 

Be depressing because you can. Joss Whedon’s reputation has tanked in the last decade. Despite his faux-feminism and on-set tyranny, there’s a quote of his that’ll be true now and forever: “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things doesn’t take Whedon’s advice. If it’s traumatizing, sad, or otherwise unpleasant, The God of Small Things likely contains it, with no catharsis in sight. Children dying? Yep. Sexual abuse? Check. Police brutality? Heartbeat vital. Incest? Three guesses.

If a machine that could convert sayings into books is ever invented, The God of Small Things is what would pop out if you fed it the phrase “Life’s a b**** and then you die.”

 

Be so boring that I can’t explain why the book’s bad because I can’t remember anything in it. What You’re Really Meant to Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential by Robert Steven Kaplan.

…you thought I was kidding? That’s it. I can’t remember anything from this book.

 

Out-r/menwritingwomen r/menwritingwomen. r/menwritingwomen is a Reddit forum where users compile examples of male authors’ awful writing of female characters, oftentimes because these male authors do the written version of being horny on main. It’s not where the “she breasted boobily” meme originated, but if you knew before clicking the link what I meant by “she breasted boobily,” you might’ve browsed r/menwritingwomen before.

In the subreddit’s eyes, Gillian Flynn must be a trailblazer for gender equality, because her debut novel Sharp Objects proves female authors can equal or surpass their male counterparts in objectifying their female characters.

Sharp Objects follows Camille Preaker, a writer for a failing Chicago newspaper, as she returns to her rinky-dink Missouri hometown. One girl’s been murdered and another’s missing, and her boss wants her to break the story. Camille returns to her controlling mother and Amma, the half-sister she’s never met.

So where does the breasting boobily come in? With Amma. And why do I say Flynn’s female characters breasting boobily is worse than most male authors’ female characters breasting boobily?

Because Amma’s THIRTEEN YEARS OLD.

Criticize the dudes r/menwritingwomen catches in 4K, but at least the majority talk about women like they’re pieces of meat, not middle school-aged girls. I’ll concede Flynn isn’t doing it for shock factor. It’s a plot point that Amma’s disturbingly promiscuous so young because of her abusive upbringing. Doesn’t change that what I most remember from an otherwise well-crafted mystery novel is that I can make a drinking game from how many uncomfortably detailed descriptions of a middle school girl’s assets are within.

Gillian Flynn, why couldn’t you have debuted with Gone Girl?

 

Your translator sucks (and so does your book). I admire people who translate books.  At Calvin, I’d wear myself out translating a couple of paragraphs for Spanish assignments, so somebody who takes hundreds of pages and converts them to another language? They’re built different.

With that being said, whoever translated Arne Dahl’s Bad Blood from Swedish to English, refund that man.

Granted, this book has problems besides Dahl’s translator ripping him off. This book’s a sequel that doesn’t advertise itself as such, so there are frequent references to a book I never read. The story’s incoherent, the characterization paper-thin, and a potentially compelling mystery reaches a breathtakingly unsatisfying conclusion. All that plus an English translation that reminded me of the user’s manual for my alarm clock, which had obviously been written in another language and then ran through Google Translate.

I guess you could say I…have bad blood with Bad Blood!

Door’s that way? OK, I deserve that.

 

Be Sun of Blood and Ruin. I need a bullet point list to explain why Sun of Blood and Ruin is the worst book I read in 2024 and possibly the worst book I’ve ever read.

• This book’s description said it’s a “Zorro retelling.” Sun of Blood and Ruin is a Zorro retelling the same way a head of lettuce I stomp on until it breaks apart is a salad. A Zorro retelling would be interesting. Sun of Blood and Ruin isn’t.
• The book’s based on Mesoamerican mythology. Fine. It does nothing to introduce the mythos to any readers unfamiliar with Mesoamerican mythology (read: the majority of its audience, including me). Not fine.
• The protagonist Leonara/La Pantera barely does any vigilante-ing.
• This book has the most predictable love interest I’ve ever seen. At his introduction, I said, “This guy’s the love interest.” Unfortunately, he’s one-half of the worst romantic pairing I’ve ever seen. My finger oils and the book’s pages had more chemistry than Leonora and her love interest, whose name I can’t bother to remember.
• This book can’t pick a plot. First it’s about Leonora’s vigilante activity, then it’s about Leonora trying to help the indigenous tribes under the Spanish boot, then she’s trying to escape an arranged marriage, then the wedding’s canceled because her fiance has a mistress who threatens to expose her pregnancy to the court…continue ad infinitum.
• None of the bajillion plot threads end satisfyingly. For example, with the baby mama plot, Leonora’s fiance reveals he’s a mestizo imposter to get ahead of the scandal. What effects does an oppressed minority worming his way into Spanish aristocracy have? None. The mistress is exposed as faking her pregnancy, so what’s her comeuppance? Nothing. She runs off into the jungle and returns a few chapters later for some reason now allying with Leonora. There’s more examples, but like Shadow Scale, I’ve semi-purposely repressed the details of Sun of Blood and Ruin’s suckiness.
• Late in the book, because Leonora’s magic is failing or her soul’s imbalanced or something, Leonora starts “losing her memories.” I use quotation marks because she loses maybe three memories in a hundred pages, but acts like she’s developing full-blown dementia.
• I don’t feel bad spoiling this book because I’m doing you a favor by autopsying this crap. The book’s climax is like an Oprah giveaway episode: Leonora’s a god! Her love interest’s a god! Her mentor in magic is her father…and a god! Some random bartender in Idaho is a god! The tree stump in my backyard is a god! Make one character a god in disguise, it’s cool. Make seemingly every character gods, and there will be a choir of WTFs.
• Speaking of names, everyone has four or five, they’re used interchangeably, and every character’s so generic you’ll give up trying to remember who’s who by act two.
• Sun of Blood and Ruin joins Return of the King in the Too Many Endings Pantheon. I remember multiple points where the book would have some cohesion if Mariely Lares ended there. But she doesn’t, hence ten bullet points about why this book sucks.

The worst part is: this is what I remember was bad. I only somewhat joked when I said I’ve blocked this book out of my memory. Being a dull incoherent mess means I remember this book in fragments.

Mariely Lares, please either hire better editors or leave the mythological novels to Rick Riordan.

And the most recent infraction…

 

Make my students waste their money. I was pleasantly surprised when the Friday before Christmas break, one of my seventh grade girls gave me a gift, Near Death Experiences: The Science, Psychology and Anthropology Behind the Phenomenon by Anthony Peake. She said it seemed like a book I’d like.

I treasure the book because of course I do. A kid I’ve only known a few months spent money on me! Simultaneously, I’m ticked off Anthony Peake wrote this book for my student to spend money on.

It’s pointless. You’d think this would be a book proving something about NDEs: that they prove there’s an afterlife or that a certain religion’s true. Nope! It’s a list of NDEs. I could read the Wikipedia article on near-death experiences and learn the same information. If I had, my student would still have the fifteen dollars Barnes & Noble’s website says she spent on the purchase. Also, Anthony Peake is a crank with no scientific credentials, and the “arguments” he presents all boil down to “this guy told me he had a NDE, so they’re real. Trust me bro!”

Screw Near Death Experiences, and screw Anthony Peake for making my student fifteen bucks poorer with this schlock.

Whew. This was fun! I’d say let’s do this again, but that would require me reading more dreg books, so let’s not. Dear readers, stay safe, read a good book, and invest in a portable shredder so you can take it with you on your next Barnes and Noble trip and do everyone a favor by shredding any copies of the books I’ve mentioned that you find.

Or have a good day. Either works.