Recent DNFs
Oct. 20th, 2025 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterI feel bad DNFing so many things in a row recently, but it's been surprisingly hard to find anything I feel like reading! This isn't a list of everything I've picked up and put down in the last few weeks, but a curated shortlist of things I disliked enough to want to gripe about.
Rose in Chains by Julie Soto is one of the three big Dramione pull-to-pubs that's getting huge hype at the moment. You guys all know about my fondness for pull-to-pub romance by this point, but this particular one turned out to be squick central for me. In a messy game of fandom telephone, the fic behind this novel was inspired by a different Dramione fic, which was inspired as much by The Handmaid's Tale as by Harry Potter, and the melding of serious feminist talking points with blatant fetish content REALLY didn't work for me. (To be honest, while acknowledging the high risk of hypocrisy here, I pretty much always feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in a fannish context than I do about rapey kinkfic published for money and for a general audience.) I can't trash this book on its merits: if you enjoy het slavefic, it will cater to you very nicely in prose that's pretty much on par with other successful romantasy. But it wasn't for me. It probably didn't help that all the stuff about crushed hearts and burnt fallopian tubes managed to trigger my first vasovagal episode since completing exposure therapy. Fellow BII-phobes, be warned.
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan sounded so good by its description, but is kind of just...meh? in execution. It's an isekai-inspired novel in which the dying protagonist gets sent to not!Westeros as a villain, but I don't know what happens beyond that because the combination of mediocre prose and unfunny tumblr references has completely put me off reading any further. Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm hungry for deconstructions of villainy as a concept, but right now there are too many other similar works on my TBR for me to feel any pressure to give this one a second chance.
What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is marketed as a thriller, presumably because the publisher took the author's word that it revolved around a dead young woman and investigated no further before pushing it to shelves. It's about the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, in which the victim and killer's families battle it out in the legal system while the true crime fans of the world look on. Or at least, that's what I gather from the summary; I didn't get far enough in to see any of that actually happen. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this book is charmless. It's too slow and boring to be a thriller, too obvious to be a mystery; the prose is too amateurishly bland for litfic and the characters are too shallow for it to pass as psychological drama. I tried twice, because the cover is appealing and it sold so well and widely that I thought surely it would at least make for easy reading, but no. No, it's an absolute slog, and I have flicked through to the final chapters just to see what happened (which was nothing I wouldn't have seen coming a mile off) and set it aside with no regrets.
Rose in Chains by Julie Soto is one of the three big Dramione pull-to-pubs that's getting huge hype at the moment. You guys all know about my fondness for pull-to-pub romance by this point, but this particular one turned out to be squick central for me. In a messy game of fandom telephone, the fic behind this novel was inspired by a different Dramione fic, which was inspired as much by The Handmaid's Tale as by Harry Potter, and the melding of serious feminist talking points with blatant fetish content REALLY didn't work for me. (To be honest, while acknowledging the high risk of hypocrisy here, I pretty much always feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in a fannish context than I do about rapey kinkfic published for money and for a general audience.) I can't trash this book on its merits: if you enjoy het slavefic, it will cater to you very nicely in prose that's pretty much on par with other successful romantasy. But it wasn't for me. It probably didn't help that all the stuff about crushed hearts and burnt fallopian tubes managed to trigger my first vasovagal episode since completing exposure therapy. Fellow BII-phobes, be warned.
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan sounded so good by its description, but is kind of just...meh? in execution. It's an isekai-inspired novel in which the dying protagonist gets sent to not!Westeros as a villain, but I don't know what happens beyond that because the combination of mediocre prose and unfunny tumblr references has completely put me off reading any further. Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm hungry for deconstructions of villainy as a concept, but right now there are too many other similar works on my TBR for me to feel any pressure to give this one a second chance.
What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is marketed as a thriller, presumably because the publisher took the author's word that it revolved around a dead young woman and investigated no further before pushing it to shelves. It's about the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, in which the victim and killer's families battle it out in the legal system while the true crime fans of the world look on. Or at least, that's what I gather from the summary; I didn't get far enough in to see any of that actually happen. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this book is charmless. It's too slow and boring to be a thriller, too obvious to be a mystery; the prose is too amateurishly bland for litfic and the characters are too shallow for it to pass as psychological drama. I tried twice, because the cover is appealing and it sold so well and widely that I thought surely it would at least make for easy reading, but no. No, it's an absolute slog, and I have flicked through to the final chapters just to see what happened (which was nothing I wouldn't have seen coming a mile off) and set it aside with no regrets.
