The last one has overflowed the comments so let’s make another of these.
I don’t want to spend time on books people already know suck, so as a measurement let’s look to Goodreads and their four-star rating, which Unwind readily manages so we’re not exactly talking high standards here. You can recommend a book with a rating under that, but you have to make a case for why the book’s noteworthy in its failure.
Also, books that aren’t Book One of X are preferred. The current trilogy+ situation takes forever.
I’m not doing Mortal Instruments or anything else by the author because she’s a plagiarist.
I’m skipping things that have already gotten this treatment, No Twilight or Fifty Shades, Inheritance Cycle, Harry Potter, Hush, Hush or House of Night (done twice!).
Possible:
The Scorpio Races:
Apparently kids race on freaky water horses that hate them and some of them die, for some reason.
Grave Mercy:
The main character is an assassin I think.
Starters:
Stargirl:
I remember it being sort of like a deconstruction of manic pixie dreamgirl, with a guy narrator I hated.
Left Hand of Darkness:
Old and famous novel by Ursula Le Guin. Considered feminist lit.
Gone:
“Every human 15 and older vanishes, and the town and surrounding areas (later named the FAYZ) are encased within an impenetrable bubble. Many of the people and wildlife develop supernatural powers. ”
The Pledge:
Troubled Waters
Rebel Angels
Sequel to A Great and Terrible Beauty.
Sexteen/XVI:
I have heard nothing but terrible things about this.
Elantris:
The failures of this book tasted delicious.
Serpahina:
Dresden Files:
I hated the first book and not enough people agree with me.
Hollow Kingdom:
Supernatural romance with goblins.
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Witchblade:
Is not exactly a book but it sure is a something.
Sequel to Creatures and part of a four-book series, I guess the author couldn’t fit all the lack of worldbuilding into just one.Eona:
Sequel, naturally, to Eon.
Reached:
Final Matched book, apparently sucks less than the others, but that’s not necessarily saying much.
UnWholly:
Ingo
Something something mermaids?
The Culling
“it’s a teen book about a gay boy that ISNT all about his sexuality. My hopes were promptly dashed when I realized the main character is a Sparkley Sue with no real personality except Upstanding Moral Citizen, all the females were horrible, the love triangle made no sense and I STILL have no idea how big the world is because they apparently have the people to just throw them away willy nilly by the hundreds yet all the citizens fit into one stadium.”
Wool
“It’s got a strong female character, a well crafted and not overly bleak dystopian world, and the plot moves along at a good pace.
But then after that I think it completely goes off the rails- it seems like the author painted himself into a corner, plotwise, and just couldn’t get himself out of it”
Throne of Glass
“Sociopathic super assassin mary-sue main character, a nonsensical plot which is ignored half the time in favour of relationship drama, massive failures in research and basic logic.”
Legend
“In a society where you take a test at the age of ten that determines your intelligence (or something), a girl’s cop (or military-can’t really remember which) gets killed by a teen fugitive. Said girl, who’s some kind of prodigy (though it’s never really made clear), has to hunt down the teen fugitive rebel guy. And, yes, they fall in love.”
Shatter Me
Part of the beloved YA canon along with Wither, apparently?
Oh God, Shatter Me, I remember that from Figment. It was so awful I honestly don’t even think it’d be entertaining. We’re just talking really, really low-reading-level writing.
If Witchblade is on the list, I have to throw Avengelyne in there. Just look at the EscherGirls tag for it.
Really? The premise sounded original, if not something I expected to be executed well.
Witchblade was sort of interesting because they seemed to be attempting to be all girl power about it. From what I glimpsed of Avengelyne, it’s porn without even that much justification.
It’s all porn.
http://eschergirls.tumblr.com/post/14535815551/this-is-what-happens-when-the-witchblade-latches
Yes but it was porn attempting to be girl power! Watching people who have never been within fifty feet of “females” try to write something with crossover appeal was what made Witchblade stand out amid the mass of balloon boobs.
They had so much justification for why using it destroys her clothes. SO MUCH.
I’ve given the benefit of the doubt to a lot of books that the mods here don’t–but Shatter Me, Jesus Christ, that was terrible. My favorite part was when the damselly “heroine” wonders whether or not her relationship with her boyfriend is “committed” while fleeing for her life.
Beautiful Darkness, I wanna find out if the sequel is worse
Also Stargirl, yes I hate the narrator too.
The Culling, never heard of that one but it sounds interesting, and bad
I’d love to see your comments on the Eragon series, though that’s a little out of your specialty (which from what I gather is “strong” female protagonists)…but it seems almost like it would just be beating a dead horse, considering how bad I found the first book to be.
Someone else has already done a Let’s Hate of that series, so she’s in the clear.
Oh really? Mind pointing me in that direction?
http://kippurbird.livejournal.com/?skip=90&tag=eragon Here you go! It was a long time ago, and looking back on it, it’s not entirely the same thing as what Farla does – not as much of the actual text being quoted and responded to – but it’s fairly thorough.
Thanks!
The Midnighters trilogy, starting with The Secret Hour, by Scott Westerfeld.
As I remember, the books are not terrible, though I read them back when my standards were… lacking, so I may be surprised.
There are, however, some really bad world-building fails, so it should be entertaining.
Midnighters is only 3.8 on Goodreads, so below the cutoff point. If I can get the list down, I might try it out.
Shameless plug: I’m currently doing a let’s read of the dresden books on my blog ronanwills.wordpress.com
Only on the second one but they sure are awful and I do not understand why more people don’t agree with me.
As for suggestions, I am extremely curious about sexteen.
Excellent! I might still go through the first one just because I listened to the damn thing and god it was horrible. People keep telling me they get less vile as it goes on but then argue with the complaints I had with the first book so I’m thinking it’s shit all the way through.
Please do Dresden. I have had to listen to people coo about it far too long.
I’d still like to see you read Elantris, which I liked. It doesn’t have any rape in it, if that helps. Also a Strong Female Character by name of Sarene.
Seconded! I’m a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, but I recognize he was sort of finding his footing in this one. In particular, I remember cringing a little at the Mary Suetopia that was New Elantris.
Oh, I actually did read it, that’s why I want to do it.
Ooh ooh, I just remembered this awful YA dystopia that sank like a stone during the post Hunger Games boom, called The Declaration. It’s one of those really amateurishly written novels that flooded the market when publishers were accepting absolutely anything that ticked the right checkboxes.
Notable features include:
– A completely useless heroine who can’t think for herself
– A generic brooding love interest
– Hilariously over the top villains who run an Evil Orphanage
– Nonsensical world-building
Also, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called but my brother once read another YA book about digital isolation and how the internet is evil. It involves “cyber schools” or something and has a scene where the hot rebel love interest drives an underwater car.
I’m not really going after stuff everyone else has rejected already. There’s enough failures, it’s the stuff with fans that stands out.
(warning: long comment follows.)
I would absolutely love to see you tear apart the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series.
Although I enjoy the books (then again, I liked the Hunger Games before you showed me the error of my ways), mainly for being a little bit creative with the usual YA formula and being set, not only in a former communist bloc country, but in the Czech Republic, even I can see that there are some clear issues in it regarding Karou’s blatant Mary Sue-ism, the worldbuilding and especially the romance (oh god, the romance). The last half of the book went massively off the rails, so I think it would be both entertaining and educational to see you give it the farla treatment. (for some reason, I am extremely enthusiastic about seeing books I enjoy get torn to shreds – there’s probably a word for it). There’s a decent balance of fail and wasted good ideas in it to keep it interesting.
I’ve read Stargirl and Shatter Me as well, but I can’t recall the details. I found Stargirl’s narrator to be unbearable and Shatter Me’s worldbuilding to be… dubious at best. If that helps?
I enjoyed Gone as well – less as the series went on, and I found the last two instalments to be pretty much awful. Legend was the type of book that you read and forget about in short succession, IIRC. Beautiful Darkness was more of the same bland, mediocrity of the first book. And Throne of Glass was laughably awful, imho, with a protagonist more Mary Sue-ish than even Karou or Bella Swan and more unlikeable than Katniss herself.
TL;DR – I would love you forever if you did the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series.
Sounds like you should vote early and often! …that is, once the next poll opens up. I think I can get enough things crossed off by then.
I would love to see you do Elantris and/or the Dresden Files; there are things I like in both and things I have major issues with in both, so it’d be interesting to see if you’re enraged by the same things. (I’m tempted to attempt Elantris myself actually, though it probably won’t be for a year or two after I finish my current project).
Speaking of which, this is a shameless plug but if anyone here is interested in some similar things, my partner and I have recently started a blog at http://pointstick.wordpress.com/ and among other things we’re doing some literary deconstructions/mockery in the same genre. I’m currently working through Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series, and my partner’s doing Rowling’s non-Potter stuff; we’re going to start Potter soon as well, but after that it’s anyone’s guess. Drop by if it’s of interest, we’d be happy to see more people.
(I doubt you’ll know who I am, I’ve been lurking here for ages but never commented, except as an anonymous M.C.B. on Farla’s LJ about the das_sporking fiasco)
Wonderful! I don’t really want to get near OSC myself, but I’m glad someone is.
If you’re interested in OSC stuff, Will Wildman at Something Short and Snappy ( http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.ca/ ) is doing the Ender series, and I can highly recommend his posts; they were a big part of my inspiration.
Two books that tumblr was jumping all over because they had POC characters were Cold Magic and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms but I didn’t enjoy either. Cold Magic was oookay and a mildly interesting alternate history but it was totally bogged down in a forced-marriage-but-really-he-loves-her-he-just-won’t-show-it sideplot and other junk, and the sequel, Cold Fire, is even worse.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms I found really creepy and awful, there are themes of rape, incest, pedophilia, sex slavery, etc. alluded to. The heroine has rape-as-backstory. Was not impressed but people have tons of praise for the author, saying that she’d be hailed as the next JRR Tolkien if she was a white dude. I’m like, the next GRRM, maybe, but he can at least make me want to find out what happens next.
Ah, tumblr. So good at finding books about/by POC! So bad at telling anyone which ones are actually worth reading.
They’re both 3.8 on Goodreads, though. Hundred Thousand Kingdoms sounds interesting for all the wrong reasons, though, so I’ll add it.
Guardians of Ga’Hoole. Fairly standard adventure story with later fantasy elements, except everyone’s an owl. I liked it when I was a kid, but I don’t know if it’d stand up to a thorough critique. (I do remember that the plot went in really weird directions toward the end.) There is a lot of worldbuilding stuff though! Only problem is that it’s really long (15 books I think), but the individual books are fairly short if you just want to take a look at the first few.
Aren’t those actual kids books, though? It’s hard to really judge stuff like that.
Worm, the online series! About people with superpowers, basically. AMAZING! The guy is working on publishing it so your critique could actually help him out. Also, I think it’s so awesome that I’m sure some self-deception is involved.
If you do Worm, you should note that it’s 1.65 million words as a single work (split into 31 acts and a total of 304 chapters; the interludes are required reading) so you might not want to treat it like you normally do novels.
The main character controls bugs and relies on intelligence and creative uses of her power to accomplish her goals. She starts off as a bullied high schooler who wants to be a hero, ends up joining a group of teenage supervillains instead, and gets swept up in crime, politics, supervillain gang rivalries, etc., with the stakes and scope rapidly increasing with every arc. The story gets dark.
Link is http://parahumans.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
Worm? Really? She’d be at it for years.
I mean, I love Worm and all, but ‘something that takes less time than a trilogy’ was one of the requests/suggestions.
I’ve managed to get partway through. Looks like it’d be worth a review but not a chapter by chapter thing – the problems are mostly those that arise from repetition, rather than individual blip.
I’ve seen Rowling mentioned on here, and I know you’ve ruled out Harry Potter, but I would like to recommend The Casual Vacancy for a sporking.
The reason is that I did a chapter-by-chapter Let’s Read of the book back in 2012 (http://kirksbooks.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/the-casual-vacancy-sunday/), and I came off very positive in it, perhaps too much so, but I don’t consider myself nearly as critical as you are. I seek to try to improve that, so I think it would be very interesting to see how differently you’d analyze the book.
I’m also doing The Book Thief, now, and the fact that it is John Green-endorsed, makes me wonder: do you actually like the book, or not?
I’ve read a sporking of Casual Vacancy and what I cam away from it was that it’s really about the culture of a specific place I’m only passingly familiar with.
I’ve never read The Book Thief.
What about The Cuckoo’s Calling?
Also by Rowling, under a pen name of Robert Galbraith.
A murder mystery, apparently. Seems to be noir inspired.
Hm, that sounds intriguing.
My partner’s reviewing that now over at our blog: http://pointstick.wordpress.com/category/rowling/
Spoiler alert: she really didn’t like it, though she didn’t hate it as much as Casual Vacancy (which she’s also reviewed there).
Just curious, Farla: Can you link to the sporking of The Casual Vacancy you read, or do you no longer remember it?
Because excluding that book, I would have my final recommendation be Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. The book is another supremely overrated one, very poorly-written characters, bad messages, an absurd ending that does not jibe at all with the story that preceded it, and historical inaccuracies (particularly the novel hinges around the practice of redlighting, which it will be fun to deconstruct the problems with).
http://mike-smith.livejournal.com/tag/casual%20vacancy
“My Last Kiss” by Bethany Neal. From a brief glance, it looks extremely failtastic. Girl must solve her own death–which the blurb implies might have happened because she “betrayed” her boyfriend. And that’s the most important thing–to find out if she did or not.
The excerpt I read makes her sounds dumber than Bella Swan and includes phrases such as “I looked like someone had given me a reverse botox.” WTF does that even mean? She’s more expressive now? More wrinkly? Her face is looser? I don’t know!!!
Oh, and her POV also includes references to I Dream of Jeannie, because teenagers totally watch that show, right?
The excerpt is up at Tor.com. http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/05/my-last-kiss-excerpt-bethany-neal#more
Whoops, sorry to repeat.
But yes, you ever consider branching out to adult fiction?
I can’t speak for Farla, but for me it would depend on the book. What did you have in mind?
If you don’t mind me intruding…
Perumov’s works are a good choice for mocking when we are talking about adult fiction.
Here is all you need to know about him: he wrote a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He published said sequel.
Try them books about spooks. Specially them so-called award-winning spook books.
How about A Foreign Country about Charles Cumming? Won the Ian Fleming Dagger Award–however much it means.
For me to stand the plot I had to turn a blind eye on Deus Ex Machinas and Ass Pulls the story is saturated of. And don’t get me started on his characters: they’re either whiny, corrupt, or narcissists pure and simple. Or even all of those all at once.
I sort of have, in that the Exalted trilogy is your standard adult crappy D&D novel, and there’s been some few suggested that haven’t won the poll. I’ll review whatever.
So yes, try Charles Cumming’s A Foreign Country. It’s got the potential–that much I must admit–but the author wasted it seven ways from Sunday.
Take a stab at it, see how it goes.
Sandman Slim.
It’s like Dresden Files, but worse.
Also has an antagonist stuck in a body of a young girl cosplaying as Sailor Moon, with cohort of other cosplaying girls lured in with promises of magic power.
Wanna bet on odds of this character bding handled maturely?
Eh, the Dresden Files are already terrible.
Well, at least Harry doesn’t sit in a bar narrating his backstory to a random bartender whom he saved from random bandits.
As far as urban fantasy with noir elements go, Sandman Slim is pretty quintessentially terrible.
So, I’ve stumbled upon a description of Hamlet’s Father by Orson Scott Card.
It seems rather disturbing and disrespectful on a number of levels.
I would like to read your opinion.
It looks like you have more than enough to be getting on with, but I just read this (NYT bestselling) book called Poison Study by Maria V Snyder which is rated at 4.18 on Goodreads. It is the first in a series, but honestly it could stand as a one-off; there’s no overarching plot and the problems in the later books are just exaggerated versions of the first.
It’s essentially a high fantasy “love” story under a utilitarian government with an unusually sophisticated society.
It tries to deal with sexual abuse, feminism, international politics, transgender issues, psychological trauma, cultural variety and clever, sarcastic, action heroine-ism. But the star of the show is the highly glamourised Stockholm Syndrome romance between the vulnerably beautiful teenage MC and the Worlds Worst Chief Assassin whose age the author obviously went back and edited to about 20 years younger than makes sense.
If you ever get 5 minutes free time that is.
Just gonna throw this one out there:
The Maze Runner.
Basically, post-apocalyptic YA schlock in the vein of The Hunger Games and Divergent, except it’s written by a male author, and has a male protagonist.
It’s also so hilariously, stupidly bad that it almost comes out the other side as kind of stupidly awesome, kind of like Batman & Robin.
It’s also a trilogy, with two other books in the series – The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure.
There’s also a prequel book called The Kill Order, but I’ve never read it.
As it happens I read that a while ago, and it’s set to go up shortly.
Percy Jackson?
OMG do Gone! I thought I was the only one who read it and thought it sucks! It’s like what would happen if you took every stupid thing you could imagine happening in a book about superpowered teens and stuck them all in one novel. I tell people to read this when they tell me that I hate on YA too much so that they can understand the pain of what I’m reading. It has so much suck to it!
Now that Pact has ended, I feel obligated to recommend it.
Pact is a web-novel by the same guy who wrote Worm. The two work share some similarities and flaws, especially when it comes to piling up troubles on the protagonist, but it is a very different story which I do think is worthwhile to read.
It’s much shorter than Worm and it’s urban fantasy instead of superhero stuff. There are some unusual takes on standard tropes (like the explanation for why the secrecy exist and the origin of various magical creatures).
While the middle of the story suffers greatly in quality due to the real life stuff interfering with writing, overall it was a quite enjoyable read, especially the final arcs, which are awesome.
I would be interested in seeing your thoughts on Pact, especially in comparison with other urban fantasy you reviewed here.
Here’s the link: https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/table-of-contents/
Seconded. Loved the epilogue.
Since you like The Old Kingdom so much, it might be fun to look at Clariel.
The Mask of the Sorcerer by Darrel Schweitze, a classic fantasy novel about a boy trying to get out of the shadow of his father. Who happened to be a sorcerer and as such continues to live on inside protagonist’s head after the protagonist killed him after his death (it’s complicated). And all sorcerers he killed. And all sorcerers they killed. And so on.
Great imagery, great atmosphere, interesting world-building based on ancient Egypt, workable plot, interesting characters.
Any chance of you doing more Dresden Files books? I need more of it getting ripped apart.
It’s on the poll (right section at the top of the site page). DF leads right now, so it’s scheduled to be the next book done by Farla, presumably after Exalted book she started awhile back.
Oh haha I thought that poll was super out of date and not used anymore.
The Queen of the Tearling! It about a girl who inherits a kingdom brought to it’s knees by corruption among it’s nobles and forced tributes to a bordering empire. The incredibly powerful, over a century old and still powerful queen of said empire knows to fear her, their society was started by settlers from ours (are they on another planet? In another universe? Why have no more settlers arrived? Who knows!) but they have none of our technology because they’re all idiots, and, with a couple of actually pretty decent subversion’s, goodness is precisely equal to attractiveness, even when you’re a mysterious serial killer. The main character thinks at one point “wow wouldn’t it be fucked up if my mom chose the queen guard based on who was the hottest,” but no, it’s just that stunning attractiveness and being an awesome guard overlap basically perfectly.
The main character faces no opposition in her revolutionary social reforms, has seemingly no monetary problems despite being left hugely in debt, there’s random magic that is never explained at all, making fun of nice old men is okay if they’re priests, and Kelsea is never wrong about anything ever despite not knowing a number of very important things, such as say, anything to do with her mothers reign or how the huge invasion twenty years ago ended.