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Vent: Paid $40 for that buzzed about book club pick and it read like a rough first draft
I put up with clumsy writing and boring characters for 200 pages hoping it would pull together, and now I'm wondering if anyone else got tricked by the hype or if this author just isn't for me.
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price.gavin1mo ago
Page 47 has a scene where the main character burns her hand on a stove and the description of the pain actually made me wince. I thought that kind of raw physical detail was done well even if the pacing dragged in the middle. It might just be a matter of what you're looking for in a book.
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claire_hart531mo ago
Page 47 hit me different. That stove scene felt overdone to me, like the author was trying too hard to make it hurt and it just came off dramatic. The pacing dragging in the middle is a bigger problem to me rawness can't fix that.
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jennifer_jenkins1mo ago
Right, that stove scene was definitely author doing a lot of telling instead of showing. The part where she describes the sizzle and then the blister forming felt like it was pulled straight from a movie script. That kind of forced intensity actually took me out of the story because it was so on the nose. The middle drag is the real killer though, all that slow burn internal monologue about her mother's china collection could have been cut in half and the book would have flowed way better. Maybe the rawness works for some people but for me it just highlighted how the author was trying to manufacture emotion instead of letting it happen naturally.
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