Hello everyone. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be giving a list of my most disappointing reads of 2022. I do not mean to say, however, that these books are bad. Some are very popular and much loved by other readers, and I think that’s awesome. But, for some reason, I could not love these books as much as they did, even though I tried and wanted to. Here is the list. Again, these books are in no particular order and some I no longer own. So some of the pictures shown here are not mine.
1. The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez
This is the second book in The Friend Zone series by this author, and I went into it wanting to know how the author was going to handle the topic of grief. I had just finished reading Book 1, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. So I decided to continue on with Book 2. Ultimately, I know that this series is about the romances (and that’s ok) but I liked how the author wasn’t afraid to touch upon difficult subjects such as infertility (book 1), grief (book 2) and death of a loved one caused by disease, specifically ALS (book 3). I have not read Book 4. This book started out very well. I liked the initial banter and playfulness in the messages between Sloane and Jason when they started talking to each other over the phone at the beginning of the book, but the story takes a completely different turn once these two actually meet in person.
After that, the book focuses too much on Jason’s music career and the romance pushed to the background. All of a sudden Sloane and Jason were together, trying to make it work around his demanding career and Sloane’s story (and grief from losing her fiancé two years earlier) were all but forgotten. She becomes this Mary Sue whose career also takes off and is now one of the most coveted artists in the city. I did not pick this book up to read about how the protagonists focus on their careers (and become successful). In my opinion, this was a detriment to the story.
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
I picked this book up because I wanted to start reading more classics this year again and decided to give American literature a try. I have read little to no American literature thus far, and I decided to start here. This book is the most shelved book on my Goodreads list, and some people really love it; others, really hate it. Had I picked this book up earlier in my life, I probably would have liked it more than I did now honestly. The book is about a teenage boy who doesn’t want to grow up and is feeling all this angst because he doesn’t want to lose his childhood innocence. And I get why this book is so popular. We all go through this period in our lives that it’s very easy to see ourselves in Holden. But as a grown woman now, Holden just came across as a very immature teenage boy and I did not like him. Sorry, but true.
3. The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant by Kayte Nunn
I think this book could’ve been better, and I was expecting it to be but sadly it wasn’t. The book is told in two different timelines, one in 1951 and another in 2018. But the story in 2018 takes precedence over that in 1951 and honestly I thought that the story in 1951 was better. Maybe it’s because I didn’t care for the protagonist of the 2018 storyline. I just couldn’t connect with her. Yes, she’s free-spirited but there’s just nothing about her that I care for. She was boring. I also think that the author didn’t use the letters to connect both storylines very well either. Rachel finds them too late in book (in 2018) for it to really matter, and by that point I had already guessed all the major plot twists. Yes, the book is very predictable as well.
4. The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. Jones
This is another book told in two different timelines, a signature of this author, and when it first came out in 2020 I saw it everywhere. I picked it up though because I had previously read another one of this author’s books and really liked it. But I do not think this book was worth all the hype. Hugely popular, this book is about a young woman trying to figure out what happened to her aunt Viv when she disappears one night in 1982 during her night shift at The Sun Down Motel.
I’ve come to realize that I don’t like books about young women playing detective. It’s just not credible to me, and I had that problem here. I also did not like the protagonist. I don’t know why, and that affected my experience reading this book. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll pick up any of this author’s books again. Although I do recommend Lost Among The Living by this author and will likely read that book again in the future.
5. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
I had all sorts of issues with this book (read my full review here), but the biggest one (or two) is that the romance is not credible and that the contrast between the two protagonists is highlighted and shoved down our faces throughout the entire book; for example, how she stuffs her face with unhealthy coffees (pumpkin spice latte, oh, heaven forbid) all the time while he only drinks tea or how he is so tall while she is so short and petite. This got exhausting very quick.
6. A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham
This is another book I saw everywhere when it came out at the beginning of the year and decided to give it a try. It’s a thriller, and I admit I don’t read that very many of those. But I thought I’d give this one a try. I will say that I did not know who the real killer was until the very end, when it was revealed. I probably would have figured it out beforehand had I read more thrillers like this one before (I doubt people didn’t see it coming), but I didn’t and never suspected the actual culprit. It seems so obvious now though. What I didn’t like about this book however was the protagonist, specifically her codependency on medication and unreliability. Don’t get me wrong, I know that this is a very real thing. I won’t deny it and I don’t pretend to reduce its importance, but I think that this could have been written better. I also did not like that the protagonist ended up playing detective. Like I said before, this is a trope that I do not like.
7. Defy The Night by Brigid Kemmerer
This is a YA retelling of Robin Hood, and my main problem with it was that the protagonists were already head over heals in love with one another at the beginning of the book (and by that I mean chapter 1, page 1). I was not expecting this. I mean, yes, I knew they were going to fall for one another but not that early in the book. Instead, the author goes in a completely different direction, and that is fine; I enjoyed the political aspect of the story but I wanted to see Tessa and Corrick fall in love, and we don’t get that. So I felt a little cheated by this. I really liked Letters to the Lost by this author though.
8. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
This book is literary fiction with a touch of magical realism about lost memories. It’s not a bad book but is not what I expected and it does have some boring parts in the middle. I don’t think I’ll pick up any more books by this author.
9. Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers
What disappointed me the most about this book was the execution. The premise was really interesting but the convent and the nuns themselves (as well as those they train to become assassins) take a seat in the back pretty early on when the protagonist is sent to the Breton court and Ismae has to learn how to maneuver the political intrigue taking place in order to protect and guard the Duchess’s life. And all this is very well written, however the romance feels a bit flat in the end and I could not feel the attraction between Ismae and Duval through the page at all. And then, they’re professing their love to one another the next page. It all felt rather sudden honestly, and I am not a big fan of insta-love.
10. Mortal Heart by Robin LaFevers
I really wanted to see who Annith was going to fall in love with, and I admit I was a little disappointed it turned out to be Death himself. Considering that she’s supposed to be his daughter, albeit an adopted daughter, this felt a little weird. I would have liked the romance a lot more if Death had actually stayed a dead horseman, though I am curious why Death was riding with the hellequin in the first place. They were my favorite characters in the third book but once it was revealed that their leader was Death, I became rather disenchanted with the story (and romance). Though it had potential and it was almost my favorite of the three, it was not meant to be.
11. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
This is another one of those books that started out very well, and then just went downhill. For starters, I hated the narrator and the protagonist wasn’t any better. There’s a lot going on in the background and the author focuses a lot on that, to the point where we go through pages and pages without even seeing the protagonist. So I never got to see why his life was so wonderous, and why his death made it even more so (Oscar’s death is implied in the title so it’s not a spoiler.)
Those are my most disappointing books for 2022. In my next post, I will do my December reading wrap up. I will continue my End of the Year Series after that, with the second part of my most disappointing reads of the year. See you then!
