Will I regret this, quite possibly yes, but I am going to do it anyway. Sometimes you pick up your first book from an author and it doesn't go the way you wanted it to. Oftentimes it's easier to just give up reading anything else by the author, but sometimes the author deserves a second shot.
I have my fair share of authors whose work completely missed the mark for me, and I am even doing a seperate post to talk about them. But, in this post, I am going to be giving four authors a second chance to see if the book I read by them was just a one-off, or maybe the author really isn't for me.
This is going to be the start of a new segment on my channel where I challenge myself to read books under a given theme. Not only does this help me curator a TBR, but I hope that this will be fun to do. I also hope that this will be interesting for you or maybe even give you some motivation to try something like this as well.
Without further ado, here are all the books I read for this challenge and whether or not they rekindled the flame for the author. Also, if you want to check out my full reviews, just click on the pink hyperlink when prompted!
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I previously read Mexican Gothic and didn't really enjoy it, but I am open to reading another novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia to see if the novel was just a one-off or if her books just aren't for me. Rather than reading Gods of Jade and Shadow, I thought that her upcoming release Certain Dark Things seemed more interesting because it has vampires in it. I love vampires. Luckily for me, I managed to get an ARC of the re-published version. Unluckily for me, I DNFed this pretty easily...
I had some major gripes with the story such as the writing style and the plot set-up, and some minor ones as well. The writing style didn't feel like a well-executed story, it felt more like a stream of thoughts. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, it makes the writing rather choppy and hard to read. This was made worse by the fact that there were short sentences one after another. Regarding the set-up for the story, I felt like it just jumped right in there with really no preamble. And, as for me being picky, I found it hard to get past the character's name as Domingo just sounds like a game to me.
Sorry Silvia Moreno-Garcia, but I think you and I are just not meant to be.
Stephen King
I have only read one novel by the king of horror, and I didn't have a good time while reading it. I picked up 'Salem's Lot as my first King novel (because vampires), but I was extremely disappointed and bored by what I read. I am hesitant to pick up another book, but against my better judgement, I am going to dive back in. This time, I am going to pick up the absolute behemoth that is It. Boy is it ever a chunky one. The length of it and the questionable content intimated me, but I am familiar with the story so this was the chosen one.
While I did enjoy this better than 'Salem's Lot, I did find some recurring issues such as the lack of presence of the main antagonist. This was also straight up just hard to get through because of the graphic content (so many trigger warnings, so many). As to whether or not this has confirmed my feelings towards King's books, while I won't write him off completely, I don't see myself picking up any of his other books anytime soon.
T. Kingfisher
I read The Twisted Ones and found the story to be weird and underwhelming. I did put The Hollow Places on my TBR though so I thought that this would be the opportune time to read it. Unfortunately for me, this went exactly as I expected it to.
This just did nothing for me. I find that while the concept is good, the execution isn't. A lot of the time when I am reading one of their books I end up thinking to myself, 'this is the direction you wanted to go in?' I found the story barley interesting at all and I will probably forget it real quick. It is safe to say that I should probably give up on picking anything else up by T.Kingfisher.
Patrick Ness
I read Burn, and really did not like what I read and was confused because Ness is a pretty well-liked author. I am going to go for one of their most famous releases, even though it probably will be hard to read. Going into this I knew that this was supposed to be an emotional and maybe relatable book that made a lot of people cry...I, however, was not one of those peoples. As I said in my review, I just didn't connect with the main character on a personal level as I have not gone through the things he has. While that doesn't mean I can't sympathize with him and enjoy the book, it kind of ruined the experience for me because of the disconnect.
This was more of a middling experience for me, so I can't say for sure whether or not this was successful. But for now, while I can't say I will never pick up his books again, I probably won't gravitate towards them either.
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