Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish.

I struggled for a bit to come up with a list, since lately, I don’t even really consider a book a DNF if I put it down after only a few pages. Finally, though, I came up with 10, from the last couple of years of reading:

1) Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling: DNF at approx 20%. The book was bleak and just did not grab me at all.

2) Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty: Such a disappointment! I’ve really enjoyed other books by this author. This book felt like it was trying too hard to be cute, with forced humor and inconsistent plotting. I quit after about 25%.

3) The Only Purple House in Town by Ann Aguirre: It definitely was not clear from the synopsis that this book belonged to a series, or that there was some sort of witchcraft/paranormal element. I thought I’d give it a try anyway, but I just didn’t get along with the writing and DNFd after one chapter.

4) On Rotation by Shirlene Obuobi: This book may have turned out to be fine, but there are footnotes on practically every page, and you can’t really skip them and still follow the story — which made this a nightmare to read as an eARC. DNFd after trying to stick it out, somewhere about 2 or 3 chapters along.

5) The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo: I’m not even sure that this counts as a DNF, since I dropped it almost as soon as I started it. I hadn’t known ahead of time that this would be a Gatsby retelling, and as soon as I realized that, I lost all interest.

6) For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten: I read several chapters, which was enough for me to know that I didn’t care for the story or the world-building.

7) Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman: I’ve read a couple of really good horror novels by this author, but I found the first chapter off-putting and couldn’t bring myself to continue. (Terrible ARC formatting didn’t help either.)

8) Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert: Unpopular opinion time! I know people love these books, but within the first two pages of this one, I remembered everything I didn’t like about the first book in the series and realized this just wasn’t going to be for me.

9) In the Garden of Spite by Camilla Bruce: I guess super-bleak books don’t tend to be what I feel like reading these days. I tried, but felt so unhappy every time I picked up this book to read another chapter that I had to stop.

10) The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult: I enjoy so many of Jodi Picoult’s books… and this one made no sense to me at all. DNFd after about three chapters.

What books have you DNFd recently?

If you did a TTT post this week, please share your link!

“Take a Peek” book reviews are short and (possibly) sweet, keeping the commentary brief and providing a little peek at what the book’s about and what I thought.

Synopsis:

(via Goodreads)

The Rules of Blackheath

Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m.
There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit.
We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer.
Understood? Then let’s begin…

***

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…

The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave readers guessing until the very last page.

My Thoughts:

Man, this book. I DNF’d at 40%, then read so many rave reviews that I convinced myself to soldier on. What if I’m missing out? What if there’s a huge payoff? What if it gets tremendously better in the 2nd half?

Nope, should have trusted my gut on this one. I’ve seen it described as “Agatha Christie meets Quantum Leap” — and sure, why not. There’s definitely an Agatha Christie vibe to the set-up. The Hardcastles have invited an assortment of guests to their country estate for a party. Someone will be murdered at this party, and it’s up to our main character to solve the murder. But there’s a twist! The main character doesn’t know who he is or have any memory before waking up on the morning that the book begins. And it turns out that there’s a reason for this — the main character is doomed to inhabit each of eight different people (“hosts”), all of whom have some connection to the Hardcastle family, on a repeating loop. He has basically eight chances to solve the murder as the day repeats itself over and over again, or his memory will be wiped and he’ll start all over again.

There are quite a lot of clever bits in the story, and it would take an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the timelines and all the interlocking pieces of this puzzle. Still, it’s too complicated for its own good, and the fact that the main character doesn’t know himself means that we as readers don’t get to know him either. It all feels like an elaborate charade, and I always felt like a distant observer, rather than getting absorbed by the story or the cast of characters.

On a language note, there was a writing tic that bugged the heck out of me: the constant use of phrasing such as “he is stood…” or “it is sat” (as in, the book is sat on the table, or the girl is stood outside the door). What is that? Is that a UK English vs US English thing? I haven’t come across this before, and the repitition of this phrasing throughout the book made me batty.

Long story short: Yes, I finished the book. Yes, there’s an explanation for the time loop and the set-up, kind of, although the mechanics aren’t explained and the reasoning behind the situation seems pretty flimsy to me. Having never become invested in the characters, I just couldn’t care very much. 500+ pages is a loooong book for something that didn’t grab me. I’m still not sure what all the fuss is about.

_________________________________________

The details:

Title: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Author: Stuart Turton
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Publication date: September 18, 2018
Length: 512 pages
Genre: Murder mystery
Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley

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