I didn’t intended on making “DNF Digest” a regular thing because honestly? I always hope to finish a book! Lately, though, I’ve been more inclined to mark a book as DNF because there are just soooo many books I need to read (you’ve seen my shelves) so I just can’t afford to be pushing through books that I’m really not enjoying. If I’ve read a lot of the book I finish, it’s sort of a policy of mine to try to write a small “review” saying why it didn’t work for me, but today’s collection of DNF round-ups didn’t quite warrant reviews because I didn’t make it as far as I’d hoped.
I haven’t decided to put any books aside for a long time, and these two are actually my first DNFs of 2018! I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks so usually I’m able to push through some of those that I’m not super crazy about, they’re just not “as bad” on audio, or maybe I just haven’t been picking books that I haven’t been able to finish! These next two I just decided to scrap due to how long they were taking me to read and once I stopped, I just didn’t want to come back to them.
Title: What the Woods Keep
Author: Katya de Becerral
Format I was reading: ARC, received from the publisher at BEA 2018
Started reading: August 25, 2018
Date marked as DNF: September 1, 2018
Marked DNF at: Page 170 (43%)
Reason for marking DNF: (My mini-review from Goodreads) I started reading this book a week before and after letting it sit and trying to get back to it, I’m still just not jiving with it and I don’t have it in me to push through more than half the book to finish. If I’m not enjoying the concept and writing by now, I’m not going to enjoy the rest of the book anyway.
The writing style is hard to follow, throwing things in where they may feel appropriate but not fitting into the time and place at all. There are things the reader should pick up but it doesn’t feel like the right place to introduce a new idea. The story is just ALL over the place and there are too many shock-value suspense moments inserted into the story that feels like a silly horror movie. It doesn’t work and wasn’t creepy.
The synopsis is also fairly misleading as far as tone and content go. The synopsis on the back of the ARC makes it seem like Hayden is returning to a creepy home and woods that are characters themselves — possessive, creepy, has its own secrets, but really that’s not the case. It seems like a Fall of the House of Usher concept and instead it veered off into dwarf race and weird fantasy that I just wasn’t into.
From all of that, I just decided that I probably wasn’t going to be enjoying the rest of the book and I doubt I’d be satisfied with the ending so I’d rather move on to books I might enjoy with this little reading time that I have to be attempting print ARCs.
Title: The Casquette Girls (The Casquette Girls #1)
Author: Alys Arden
Format I was reading: Audiobook, purchased from Audible
Started reading: September 12, 2018
Date marked as DNF: September 12, 2018
Marked DNF at: 50%
Reason for marking DNF: (My mini-review from Goodreads) THE CASQUETTE GIRLS is a 500+ page book (17+ hours on audiobook) so I still had 9+ hours left when I decided not to finish it. I made it halfway and still really nothing much has happened… The intro took forever and things took so long that I just got bored. Even at 50%, I barely know what the purpose of the book was. I thought this was supposed to be witchy and Adele randomly discovers that she can move metal (how it took her that long to realize that everything she was moving was metal, and that someone else had to tell her that UGH. That was ridiculously obvious) and then that’s it for a while. Okay, she can move metal and…? That’s all we get in the first half. By now we should at least know why or what a connection is or something to keep me interested. She experiments and hides it from everyone else and that’s it.
We get more info on the vampire side of things, but nothing except for exposition and old letters until 50% in as well.
Knowing how long this book is, I think it really could have used more editing. We could have condensed a LOT in the first half because it lost my interest completely. There was a lot about the arrival back to New Orleans, the description of destruction, intro to schools, side characters, etc that could have been combined in with other dialogue or action to make it feel less like an info dump. The first few chapters were JUST about coming back to New Orleans and it had already felt like too much at that point. I wanted to keep going to see if things would pick up and it just wasn’t what I was looking for.
2 thoughts on “DNF Digest [6] – What the Woods Keep, The Casquette Girls”
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I think one of the worst things in books, for me at least, is having read quite a bit of it and still not seeing the purpose of the story at all. If there is nothing pushing it forward, whether that be the characters or the plot itself, then why am I reading it? What was the point of it? I don’t DNF books often but when I do it’s either because of this reason, or because I found them problematic.