Books We Didn't Finish

Autumn's Books:  I rarely give up on books.  It makes me feel bad, like I should have tried harder or something.  I'm trying to learn to let it go, that it's ok to not finish a book. 

I gave up on Burnt Mountain.  I listened to the audiobook.  From the get go I wasn't thrilled with the reader.  I guess Anne Rivers Siddon would fall into the category of Southern Gothic and her prose purple.  The narrator seemed to really get into it with the Georgia accents straight out of Gone With the Wind. 

The time line was all over the place.  The beginning was basically an establishing of who's who in the family and it was getting confusing and I really didn't care.  The main character's mother is bitter over her lack of establishment in Atlanta's social scene and Thayer is flashing back over her mother's life in order to understand her better.   When she gets to her mother's honeymoon, I grossed out.  Thayer is narrating her MOTHER'S honeymoon with graphic detail.  EWW!!!  I listened a little beyond that, then I went to Goodreads and read the reviews and found out it doesn't get much better and decided it wasn't worth my time.


I didn't really have any issues with Crooked Letter Crooked Letter.   I just got bored with it.  It could not hold my interest and that was a big disappointment.  I had been looking forward to this book for quite awhile.  I also listened to the audiobook for CLCL and I was extremely impressed with the narrator.  He shifted voices throughout the book with great skill.  This might be a book I'll go back to sometime, but for now I'm putting it away.

The last book for me is The Mistress Contract.  I thought the premise was interesting.  It's written by two anonymous people who entered into a contract, basically she would provide him sex on demand and he would provide for her monetarily.  The book was their retelling of how they entered into it and what it entailed, etc.  I read maybe 30 or 40 pages of it and decided I didn't like it. 

My biggest issue with it was the way they talked to each other.  It didn't feel like it was real.  The book is suppposedly based off of their recorded conversations, but to me it felt like they made themselves sound way smarter than normal people.  Like they were these great intellectuals that had profound conversations all the time.  Maybe I'm just being stupid or maybe I just have a lot of really stupid conversations in my daily life.

- Autumn

Kari's Books: I, as well, hate to give up on books, but recently I gave up on 3:

I got about halfway through Snakewoman of Little Egypt when I just had to stop listening.  I found myself wanting to turn it off more than usual and actually listening the radio in the car instead of the book.  I was bored and even the narrator couldn't hold my interest enough. I just didn't like that characters or really care about them.  I had a hard time believing that Jackson would want to research Sunny's abusive soon to be ex-husband' religion. I also had a hard time believing that she would continue to sleep with him after he told her he was spending time handling snakes.  I had to give up. Sometimes I can give the characters the benefit of the doubt and believe in the author, but I just couldn't here.




I only got into disc 2 of All Cry Chaos.  I know it got rave reviews, but  I thought it was just too heavy and depressing.  I also was having a hard time keeping the characters straight. Maybe because the names sounded the same to me.  Also, the author kept calling  the main character by different names. This was confusing and I found myself rewinding the MP3 to relisten to parts.  There was too much in the way of politics. The main character wasn't interesting to me and I just didn't care about him or his family.  Personally, if I thought  hit man was after my family, I would make them move into hiding until the guy was caught.  I would not rely on the police to "guard" them in plain sight.  It wasn't hard to see where the book was heading regarding the family and I had to shut it off after that.  I read to be entertained, not depressed.

I got halfway through The Unwanteds and I just had to give up.  I really liked the beginning and was intrigued by the premise of the story, but by the middle of the book, I was so bored.  I just didn't care about any of the characters.  I felt like the story was all over the place. The dialogue for the kids was boring and felt forced.  I felt like the writing got worse as the book went along. I know this one got great reviews and many are looking for it to be a Harry Potter replacement, but I can't agree.  There are better middle grade books.

--Kari