I cannot tell where this book is going. What I do know is four years ago friends got together and one friend didn’t come back. Is this friend dead are they in a hell dimension we don’t quite know. Four years later, the ex-friends all gather together even though they’re not supposed to have anything to do with each other to go to this house. They are all told to finish playing the game. They’re not sure if they understand what game is but think it has to do with a deck of cards that tell stories and they don’t have the entire deck. There is some Asian inspired mythology that part of this that is not very well laid out. And is having the story dragon makes me not want to finish. This isn’t official DNF. 

 

What is it with circuses lately. Everybody’s afraid of clowns, but everybody loves the circus. The circus just happens to be a lesbian time traveling one. Our ringmaster comes from a previous circus where things were not so good and were bad in a mythical type of way. We the reader don’t know why but honestly, I don’t care. The whole time traveling and going back-and-forth between , 1919 and just after or even during the war just was not working in audiobook format. This is a DNF. 

 

This started out interesting. Two people who are getting ready to direct a horror movie go off into the woods and meet a neighbor to warn them that the screams won’t be real. Then we switch to a former soap opera star from Ireland, who moved to LA to reinvigorate her lott childhood acting career. then we switched to three months later with a different set of movie crew doing something. This book is choppy. It might work better if I was reading it rather than listening to it, but I got to the point yeah I don’t care so this is a DNF. 

 

 

I had hopes for this book. There’s something about the fat girl, knowing she’s fat, being worried about it in high school and how she fares on rides that really gets to me. Talk about a lived experience. The idea of her and her best friend getting lost in a corn maze rather than going on the school field trip should be up my alley. However, it feels like the reader is dropped in the center of a story that’s already started. There is almost no buildup. It’s just we’re in the corn maze and there are bodies. This book has a promising premise and maybe I’d enjoy it more written rather than audio. Or maybe it’s the AI reader because it is a galley copy.  Either way this book is officially a DNF. I didn’t care about the characters once they entered the maze and now, they’re introducing clones of the characters that are the dead bodies it just it feels like a mess. 

 

This is a DNF. This book was 18 hours and it feels like it. Maybe if I was reading this book instead of listening to it as an audiobook that might’ve made a difference. I got more than four hours into it, and I don’t care about anything that’s happening. Plus, there is slippage going back-and-forth. different characters brought in, it’s sometimes confusing. There is something out there in the mountains. Two experienced climbers go to hike this peak and only one comes back. And this hiker does not come back hole. They are missing half their face due to a fall. We start the story hearing from the significant other. We hear them talk about whether they should stay with the hiker or not. How people are praised for staying when things get rough instead of parting ways. But then you also have our hiker who’s like we “weren’t alone on the mountain there was something”. I’m at the point where the hiker is reminiscing about a hike with their grandmother. There are just so many limbs to this tree that the story is all over the place. There’s not a linear story and it is so big and so much more than it needs to that it made the book boring. As a reader I didn’t care about any of the characters. What I really cared about is the entity on the mountain but there’s been nothing.  No hide nor hair, just there’s something on the mountain. This is almost like Midsummer. A great big buildup to fizzle out to nothing and has me thinking “Why does everybody love this?” That’s where I’m at in this book, which is why I am at 4 1/2 hours out of 18 and DNFing. 

 

There is nothing about this book that appeals to me. I know this book is a booktok, darling. I know librarians of TikTok who manage middle school libraries saying this book comes up for a lot of middle schoolers as their favorite book. Or as a book, they should be added to the collection. I also know that this book is not intended for middle school at all. It is a new adult steamy romcom. I know that this cover makes this book look like a closed door cutie teen romcom that may be appropriate for middle grade. It’s not it. It’s a new adult erotica style book. You have a college ice skater and a college hockey player. One of the skating rinks is vandalized so they all must share one rink.  Of course, the hockey player gets together with the ice-skater. I’m trying to figure out why so many people love this book. I find the woman annoying. I need some actual story not just sex to make a book entertaining. And if the two aren’t having sex then they’re describing it or describing the actions with the boyfriends. Or, they are being made fun of by their other friends for their sexual escapades. Seriously there’s no plot in what i have already read. I know people say page 136. I’m reading a digital e-book so my page number don’t match but I’m at page 100 and could care less. I find the female character to be a snotty perfectionist who is constantly worried about her weight and getting big which is annoying. And the jock has almost no personality, except I carry a big stick and a bang on my chest movement with thoughts of being a sex god. This is not geared towards me and it’s that belongs with Fifty Shades of Grey i.e. in the recycle bin. There is better stuff out there. This is not a book for middle school. I can see why younger teens in the fresh Bloom of puberty find this exciting and romantic but at the same time I feel bad that they’re missing out on actual good material so they can read this. If it’s not noticeable, this book was a DNF. I have no desire to finish it or pick up any others. 

 

This is a DNF at 4%. The story starts off with the father, leaving the children, the mom spaced out, lost in her own little world, and then chapter 2 has the mom telling the kids is going to be a new daddy. I’m just not in a mood for something that seems so depressing. Add to that the art style looks like something that came from a semi talented high school student before they’ve had a lot of practice. Maybe this book is amazing like the cover says it is but I have no desire to find out. 

 

This book is DNF. It talks about how a wizard made a new person from clay and then 31 years later found more clay and made another little tiny person that turns out to be Kafka. It’s a combination of what the way this story is written and the illustrations just put this reader to sleep and makes them not want to turn the pages. There is nothing redeeming in the first 20% of this book to make me want to finish. 

This book is a soft DNF. On a day when I couldn’t find an audiobook that fit this one did. This is an extremely long audiobook over 20 hours, and I did listen to approximately three. This story is about the offspring of a king, who has no chance of ever sitting on the throne and has been in isolation on the outskirts of the kingdom. They receive news that their father and all the older brothers have died which means they are now the monarch. All of that was very interesting and kept my attention. However, in listening to this audiobook the number of times they repeat the word “serenity” is annoying. I gather that this is a greeting both in welcoming and in leaving kind of like aloha, but it’s just odd.  I can’t tell if this is a mistake, or purposeful. It is done so often it could almost become a drinking game. I was at the stage of the story when the main character is told they must take a wife to keep their nephews and younger siblings from killing them to take over the throne, that I stopped the audiobook and never went back. I was thoroughly enjoying this book, that I will probably read it in print because the story was good, but the narration was annoying.

 

This book started out interesting, but it didn’t stay there. This is a family story about meeting their expectations versus your expectations for yourself. Learning about the family was interesting, but when it gets down to the main part of the book where they must get their PE credit in order to graduate on time because the teacher didn’t turn in a report. This is where I stopped caring about this book. Maybe it was the narration style, maybe it was the book, but I had no desire to find out what happened at the end. I did make it 22% of the way through.