I’m convinced that every author, from the prodigiously talented to the mediocre, works their heart out to finish their stories. For that reason, I give bad reviews with pause. I’m not sure there even are bad books so much as there are bad matches between the writer and reader. AS Byatt wrote, “Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.” Alas, this intimacy can be awkward sometimes. Here is my list of three books that gave me the blahs in 2023.
- Daisy Darker
I’ll start with the most surprising title: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney. If you look back a bit on this blog, you will see that in the not-so-distant past, Rock Paper Scissors by the same author was my very favorite title of the year. I’m sorry to report that I just did not care for this one. It has a particularly ghoulish plot, with adult family members meeting for a birthday party at a remote island estate and dying off one by one. Throughout the evening, on the hour, a body is discovered, their deaths seemingly forecast in a lengthy poem that appears written on the walls. The characters are poorly drawn (one is memorable only because she dresses like Audrey Hepburn) and it’s not clear why they hate each other so much. The twist ending is highly derivative, and given the movies it copies from, it will be easy to spot for a lot of suspense movie viewers. About the only thing I liked about it was the setting: a Cornish island which is accessible only during low tide. The rest of it was tedious.
2. Left On Tenth
Another unlikely disappointment is Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth. After losing her husband to cancer, the author finds love again after writing a New York Times op-ed about her frustrations with Verizon. A kindly man from the Bay Area writes her an engaging and flirtatious email about his own experiences, and soon they fall in love and marry, dividing their time between the coasts. Then the unthinkable happens: Delia is diagnosed with incurable cancer.
The set-up to this memoir is excellent, but after she gets sick (and, miraculously, cured) it becomes a curiously listless story about facing death and having extraordinary good luck in remission. I don’t know why it left me cold, but I didn’t enjoy it. I think the author was trying to do two things here: write an engaging senior romance and a gutting story about death, but the combination simply didn’t work for me.
3. The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes
This was another one I expected to enjoy but ended up slogging through. Cassidy Holmes falls for a male boy-band singer when they compete against each other in a competitive reality show similar to American Idol. After he assaults her, Cassidy bears the brunt of the bad publicity that follows. It all feels very relevant in the #metoo era. The problem is that it start off darkly in a way that leaves no room for triumph. And, more frustratingly, it actually becomes boring, after Cassidy goes home to her mother’s house.
Books Smitten 