Comments | bookfails: A Discovery of Fails

alicetheowl in bookfails

A Discovery of Fails

Apr 13, 2011 22:28

You may have heard the hype about A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. If you did, I hope you also heard it's "a grown-up Twilight," and run screaming already. I was not smart enough to read the reviews before I picked it up, and so I have suffered, that you may avoid it like the plague.

( I wound up swearing at my car speakers as the audio book played. )

i think this author is overrated!!!, at least the cover is cool, character development fail, nonsparkly vampire fails, author last names g-l, like watching paint dry, there is a plot where somewhere

Comments 29

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF THIS BOOOOOOOOK premium_shaday April 14 2011, 05:25:03 UTC

YOU FORGOT THAT SHE'S A HERMAPHRODITE ( ... )

Re: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF THIS BOOOOOOOOK premium_shaday April 14 2011, 05:25:18 UTC

AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT HER AMBIGUOUS(?) GENDER: That's bullshit too. I BET YOU'RE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT. She's not actually a hermaphrodite, she's a chimera. She absorbed a male twin in utero and now has two sets of DNA fucking around in her. That doesn't amount to shit in terms of sex or gender. If her junk cells are made entirely out of lady DNA, her body will produce lady hormones and play the lady parts in reproduction without any DNA interference from her MANLY DNA, even in terms of what genes she passes on ( ... )

Re: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF THIS BOOOOOOOOK premium_shaday April 14 2011, 05:29:16 UTC

I almost put it down a third of the way in, but I have massive Train-Wreck syndrome. I got five pages away from the end before I realized it was a trilogy and then I was like "FUCK IT."

Why did I read that. WHY.

AAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

Re: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF THIS BOOOOOOOOK alicetheowl April 14 2011, 20:27:43 UTC

Yeah. The chimera thing slipped my mind because it was just a random plot point thrown in around chapter 38 or 39. I had a brief moment of "WTF?", then the characters were back to playing scrabble and taking long walks and being generally boring.

Thread 5

akcipitrokulo April 14 2011, 11:28:19 UTC

You know, I do like stories by kids that are "and then there was a dinosaur! In the fire engine!" but not so much when written by adults.

alicetheowl April 14 2011, 20:40:43 UTC

They're amusing when they're told my anyone younger than 12, I think. Past that age, and I get pretty impatient pretty fast.

atticlibrarian April 14 2011, 15:39:54 UTC

As soon as I saw vampires in the description I hastily put this one back on the shelf. It's nice to see I made the right decision.

alicetheowl April 14 2011, 20:43:52 UTC

Yeah. Good choice.

alienfish April 14 2011, 17:07:03 UTC

Ah, it seems the friggin' idea to sell the story is to invoke Twilight and claim it's for adults. Thus perhaps people will overlook the stupidity.

alicetheowl April 14 2011, 20:42:49 UTC

Yeah. It seems to be doing well for itself. When I posted my review, the average star rating was 3.85, and the NYT bestseller list had it at #2.

And there goes my faith in humanity. Again.

spessartine April 14 2011, 20:27:25 UTC

he has a signed copy of On the Origin of Species with a personal note of thanks for believing in him from Mr. Darwin

I just about lost it there. Oh my gosh.

alicetheowl April 14 2011, 20:46:08 UTC

I so wish I had made that up. Truly, the mind boggles. How does this stuff get past an editor?

rainbow_goddess April 15 2011, 02:58:21 UTC

As an editor, I think I can say with some certainty that no one uses editors anymore. It's all MS Word spellcheck and that's it. It would explain why I was reading a professionally published book and came across the line: "You're door was open."

No editor worth his or her salt would have missed that.

alicetheowl April 15 2011, 16:33:26 UTC

Eeesh. That's discouraging.