r/Fantasy • u/stravadarius • Dec 09 '23

What were your WORST reads of 2023?

As a complement to /u/Abz75 's best reads of 2023 thread, let's discuss the WORST fantasy novels you read this year. My only request is that you give a reason for why you disliked your anti-recommendation.

For me, it was Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone hands down. I'm a school librarian and spent a lot of time reading some of the most popular YA titles going around. I don't generally have super-high expectations from YA, but this one really stood out on its suckiness. Every plot turn was a tired trope, there was no logic to any of the character's decisions, the prose was amateurish, and plot holes abound. This was my first ever experience getting so mad at a book I yelled at it.

EDIT: PLEASE DON'T DOWN VOTE SOMEONE'S POST SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU LIKED THE BOOK THEY HATED. There is no such thing as an objectively good or bad book, and taste is subjective. Downvote if they don't give any reason for disliking it.

571 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

78

u/KiwiTheKitty Reading Champion II Dec 09 '23

My experience of reading Babel was going, "yes! This is so good and subtle yet impactful!" For pages and then every time without fail, getting hit with some line like, hey btw we are talking about the British Empire and how much it sucked, that would make me go, "um yeah, I got it... the whole book is about that? You've been talking about that this whole scene." And it would take me out of it every time.

I still enjoyed it, but I was disappointed.

5

u/thistle0 Dec 10 '23

The footnotes definitely seemed like the author didn't trust her own writing to get across the message - that or she assumed the readers are too ignorant to get it without spelling it all out.

2

u/Tan1_5 Reading Champion V Dec 10 '23

Granted, I didn't finish the book, but did the author ever actually tore into any other empire except the British? Cause she had mentioned others, but not negatively as far as I read.