the worst books i read in 2023 🥴

hi hello I hope you're taking care of yourself if you're new here my name is Lexi and I read a lot of books I also make a lot of pretty poor decisions in the name of my just insatiable curiosity I Venture into parts of the book world that you might not be brave enough to explore on your own and I report back from the front lines to the people and this is the result welcome to my worst books list for 2023 if you clicked on this video and you're not ready for me to be a little bit of a hater I really don't know what you expected but this just might not be the place for you compassionately with love and light if this is the kind of video that's going to make you sad or upset maybe watch one of my positive videos instead and also with that if you choose to stick around and there's a book that you absolutely love that's on this list that's great this might come as a surprise to some of you but I do in fact touch grass sometimes so my opinion of you is not going to change just because you like a book that I thought was bad I was out here reading chjo manga in dyl fanfiction in the basement of my library when I was 13 okay I'm not here to throw stones at you from this glass house I also don't think that nobody should read these books or anything like what you stuff your Kindle with is none of my business I just think they suck for various reasons that we're going to be unpacking together today I'm just a 23-year-old teenage girl okay if you choose to take me seriously that's on you I'm going to be going through these books in order from least bad to most bad and the ones that are least bad really aren't the worst thing in the world like I would even consider reading their sequels nobody knows what the future holds but the ones at the front of this list like specifically the top three I don't know about those also most of the books on this list are romance novels and there's a specific reason for that because I just read a pretty high number of viral Tik Tok books this year and the books that tend to go viral on Tik Tok are typically going to be romance novels viral Tik Tok books I'm not going to like unilaterally slander them like the song of ailles is a viral Tik Tok book that book's a banger some of them are good but a lot of them are the type of thing that goes on this list so I actually do like romance quite a bit I don't want you to take me talking negatively about a bunch of romance novels as me on the genre as a whole when that's so not true some of my favorite books of romance novels there were two on my best list this year and in fact it's because I like the romance genre that I found these books to be so insufferably bad okay so that's the Preamble but before we start I just want to talk about the sponsor for today's video which is love and pies because sometimes when you're reading a book that is just absolutely unforgivable you want to have a fun game on your phone for when your eyes just inevitably start to glaze over and this is a great app for exactly that situation love and& Pi is a baking puzzle game that you can download on your phone or on your tablet where you play as Amelia who's the single mom like Master Baker who has recently moved back home to work at her mother's Cafe except surprise the cafe has burned down to the ground and her mom is just mysteriously gone like nobody knows where she went and in the gameplay you're just like making little cakes and knick-knacks for the town's people while also investigating this overarching mystery of what happened to the cafe and your mom there's Intrigue there's Second Chance romance there's a strange potential underground criminal organization and there is just absolutely no stress at all the graphics are beautiful the plot is super compelling and if you're looking for something to just pick up and play throughout the day this game is great for that so if you want to decorate your cute little cafe just like I did you can head on right over to the iOS or Android App Store and download it today thank you to love and pies for sponsoring today's video let's get back to it all right the first book the least worst for this video in like eth place or whatever is the fine prints by Lauren Asher also just generally this video is going to be like spoiler light by my definition I'm not going like out of my way to spoil these books but I have some takes I have some points to make some sacrifices have to be made anyways the fine print this is a billionaire romance novel that essentially just reads as fanfiction about Walt Disney's alternate universe grandchildren wherein Walt Disney has just died okay like he's out of this world if you will but he's locked all of the extremely substantial inheritances of his grandsons behind the completion of a slew of arbitrary tasks and the idea is that Walt Disney kind of felt bad that all of his grandsons grew up to be such losers so he's trying to like help them self-actualize or something by giving them these tasks that are tailored to the specific personality deficiencies that he feels like they have by far the most out of pocket task in my opinion is the oldest brother he has to marry and impregnate a woman in order to get his money which is just an insane thing to request of someone in your will but whatever I didn't read that book it's a second book in the series and the first book is about one of the younger brothers I think the middle child but I don't remember for sure and this guy's name is Rowan and the task that he gets from Walt disnee is to just go in and do this big redesign of one of the parks like Magic Kingdom or something and this is the task that Walt chooses to give him because even though he was a very creative fun imaginative kid he's since grown up into being this like cold-hearted ruthless businessman and that makes Walt sad there is no more Mickey Mouse left inside of that boy we must return him to how he once was when his eyes were still full of childhood Wonder we must help him find creativity once more that's the idea here but instead of being creative himself he ends up opening this competition to all of the employees at Disney World to help him redesign some rides and the girl in this book Zara who is essentially an entry-level employee she applies to this competition and she ends up winning and she moves up and becomes like functionally in imagineer just designing rides and stuff and doing Park things and the whole thing is just stupendously Disney adults so if you're a Disney adult this might hit for you but for me I'm not sure my main beef with this book is twofold first it was way too long you're going to hear this again in this list because there are worse offenders but if your romance novel is going to be 450 Pages you need to have a reason at the very least I expect you to give me like a small handful of meaningful plot points and with this book like I remember things happening and I also remember how little I cared the entire time it was an amount of caring that even the best microscopes at CERN zoomed all the way in they would not be able to find how little I cared about anything that happened in this book but the main reason why this book just barely made the cut for this list is that the economics are just surreal levels of out of touch from reality and it's a book it's a romance novel like I don't expect it to be realistic but it would have been so much better if that subplot just didn't exist like let him just be a very rich man who buys her nice things and flies her to fun places I I can live with that it's a good time but no we can't have that because a primary part of the relationship between Rowan and Zara is that Zara was once an entry-level employee okay she's down to earth she has bills to pay and like one of her primary purposes inside of the story is to just teach this man that maybe a $7 minimum wage is kind of unethical maybe his employees can't afford external healthare maybe they have to work several other jobs to support themselves and at first this fan is seriously like but it's business but it's the bottom line babe you got to understand if it saved me money to let my employees slowly starve to death in the streets next to Disney World and they'd still pull up to work on time the next day so I wouldn't have to hire new guys I would at least make sure that they have Street lamps so don't worry like I'm ethical what do you mean genuinely this is his take he's like comically shocked that people have debt and just things that they can't afford this has never been a thought that he's had before and by the end of the book with his proposal to redo Magic Kingdom like his grandpa wanted he basically just proposes to give all of the employees benefits in a living wage which like cool woohoo I mean that's a good thing to do but there are just some things in life that I want my men to come out the box already knowing I just don't find it particularly hot to read about this very rich man who's developing human empathy for the first time like it just wasn't for me I found that entire Arc to be dumb as hell and considering the fact that almost nothing was going on besides that it was a hard book for me to get through at times compared to some of the other things on this list the writing was not awful I've considered carrying on with this series it gets a lot of hype online and I'm curious to the end of this world it's just it's who I am so we'll see but for now that was number eight the fine print next up on this list we have things we never got over by Lucy score and this book is different than the other books on this list okay because instead of featuring early 20s main characters who act like emotionally disregulated frat Stars this book features real adults in their late 30s and early 40s who also act like emotionally disregulated frat St I was really hoping for like something from this book considering that the male lead is 43 almost two of me years old this man was born in like 1980 I was hoping for him to be like mature storyed kind of Dy maybe a little bit tortured because he probably would have to be to be that old in a romance novel and I have just never been so a gast at a fictional Manchild the way that I was in this book this man should not have been allowed to reproduce in the epilog things we never got over is about this woman named Naomi who has recently just cut her losses and ran away from her entire life she's a Runway prde I think that she quit her job as well maybe or maybe it's like a leave of absence situation it doesn't really matter the point is that she's come to this town with no obligations she's gone with the wi okay nobody's looking for her and she goes to this town named I you not knock him out all one word to meet up with her EST stranged twin sister who has called her asking for help and this twin is just the worst she just does cartoonishly evil things all of the time like that's her personality and her name is Tina and she sucks and there's even a chapter called tina sucks in case you weren't sure so yeah Tina's apparently in trouble hence why she wants to meet with Naomi but instead of meeting Naomi at this coffee shop she breaks into Naomi's hotel room steals all of her and then just leaves behind this human child who's like 10 and named whay because of course she is and is just vibing on her own in this now mostly empty hotel room and so when Naomi goes back after Tina stands her up and sees that all of her stuff is gone except now there is the presence of a human child this woman looks at the scene and is like well you know I guess I have to raise this child as my own and just live in this town now there are no other alternatives to this this seems to be my only path forward so that's what she does and noox is the name of the 43-year-old man in this book he gets involved in this because he like sees her when it's happening and mistakes her for her sister and then feels bad after so Naomi and way just end up basically living in this guest house in his backyard so they spend a lot of time together things of all from there that's where the romance comes from Naomi as a character is fine she's very Millennial she's very those quote signs that say like don't talk to me unless I've had my coffee like she loves coffee and she will not let you forget about it inside of this book but she's fine like she's doing her best and the kid way is also okay I mean she's written in that kind of precocious like I don't know how 10-year-olds actually talk and think sort of style so she will just randomly drop the most unrealistic philosophical bars but like she's sweet I was reading for them I love a good like adoptive parent dynamic in a book but Knox on the other hand is just a rock bottom fictional man he is so mean to her in this book and for what like this isn't enemies to lovers they're strangers he has no reason to dislike her and yet he just will continue to do every mean thing that you can imagine because he's a loser and I don't buy that he just suddenly changes by the end of this book like this man is 43 and still acts like this don't marry him also this man goes out of his way to just pee in the garden in full view of Naomi's little hobbit house instead of inside in his functioning bathroom like I just feel like that gives you a clear picture of this man's Vibes a man like that does not deserve to be well endowed there is something karmically wrong with the universe if what Naomi is saying is true and speaking of the smut scenes this book had I think the worst mut on this entire list like it was truly something else it reminded me a lot of the roulette wheel of like once you're done reading all of the Fanfictions on A3 that have an acceptable amount of Kudos and you have to start going down into the unproven weeds like you don't know what you're going to find down there you don't know what kind of nonsense is lying in weight that is the vibe of this mud in this book and I mean that disrespectfully in this book the fun things that you're going to find are going to be quote discussions about his long thick weapon of mass destruction her tight wet Wonderland his magical wand that casts or spells and just generally a fixation on the concept of her milking this man which is perhaps the least sexy thing that I've ever read in my entire life like genuinely just the way that this mut was written in this book like I wish I could bleach my eyes but I can't and lastly my final grievance which I think you can probably expect just looking at the size of this this book is I think the longest on this list clogging in at almost 600 pages and genuinely nothing happens of importance inside of here like if you gave me a red pen I feel like I could have cut this down to being a noela that's how irrelevant it felt like this entire book was it was like slowburn in the worst way it has Hallmark movie Vibes almost except playing infuriatingly slowly at like 50% speed and also with these weird random interludes where just out of nowhere after a scene with Naomi doing some domestic thing with the child in this book suddenly the boys in this town will just be playing this like multi-million dollar poker game that has possibly violence life or death stakes and things like that are supposed to Intrigue you but then essentially nothing is ever done with them like they make no sense and have absolutely no relevance to the story at all they're just for fun they're little treats that you get as a reader and I was just mad by the end I spent so much much time reading this like I don't know what I wanted maybe the ending I wished for was just this man being hit by a car maybe then this would have been a good reading experience but obviously this did not happen like they ended up together which is a fact that just irradiates me with Fury there are two other books in this series and they only get longer because that's how you know that you've made it as an author on the self-published to Tik Tok viral pipeline it's when you no longer have any need for an editor and you can just keep releasing these 600 page tomes of nonsense and the people will be like Yas this is what I need and eat it up every time so good for Lucy I guess you're never going to hear me criticizing the way that a woman gets her back okay I'm glad that she found her audience but I was not one of them like I just flipped to a random page and the chapter title I really wish I was joking is KNX KNX who's there what things we never got over next up in sixth place is audition and this is something different this is probably the worst non-romance book that I've read this year and it's kind of obscure it's a Japanese book that was translated into English and I have less to say about it overall but I just need to get some things off my chest because this is a negative experience that has stuck with me so I have a friend who is really into like weird art films and we watch a lot of movies together it's like the core of our friendship I also like an art film sometimes as a tree I mean some of them are misses but a lot of them are hits and he invited me early last year to this like mini book club that he was doing with a couple of our friends where everybody was reading audition and then watching the film because it has a film adaptation that is more famous honestly than the book and I young naive was like sure that sounds like a really fun thing to do with my friends the book is really short like what could possibly go wrong turns out a lot audition is a Japanese horror novel that is about this lonely repressed like widower turned almost incel kind of guy who has no idea how to talk to women anymore but he wants to because at this point his wife has died like s years ago and he's really really lonely it's time and his wonderful friend hears about this struggle and is like yeah you know you're a loser but fortunately for you I have a plan that will even work for a loser like I know exactly what to do what if we pretended to be film directors and then stage tryouts for a role that can only be played by a beautiful woman and then you can watch all of these auditions and pick out which of these women you want to be your new wife and obviously obiously the movie will be canceled because we were never making a movie to begin with but you're going to have her contact information from her resume and knowing you and your just Majestic level of Riz you're going to be able to pull it off by just like stalking her until she falls in love with you or something really whatever you need to do after that point once again like see women as people challenge difficulty level impossible sometimes the things that men write Astound me but anyways even though that's an insane thing to suggest the main character agrees that it's a great plan because he's also insane and long story short I'm going to spoil this pretty completely here because it's impossible to rant about this book without spoiling it so if you care skip until the next section also a minor trigger warning for Gore just in case it'll like ruin your day or something you might also want to skip but the woman he chooses through this audition ends up being this like fem fatal serial killer type person because she was abused by her father or grandfather some important man in her life when she was growing up and as a result of that she's made this really cool fun hobby out of dating men until they lie to her upon which after she catches them in a lie she drugs them and then chops off their feet and then kills them afterwards so to punish this guy for being a creep for the first like 80% of this book this this woman kills his dog in front of him which is a choice the author really did not have to make in my opinion and then after that she cuts off one of his feet and then almost kills him but then he wins at the end he takes her out so thematically just like what are you trying to do just asking for a friend reading reviews of this I saw people be like this is a terrific feminist splatter horror novel like that was kind of a consensus opinion and just how is it feminist exactly like because the man got defo footed for lying one time he wins at the end because this woman was too bad and too crazy to defeat him and this woman has no personality other than being jealous that this guy lied about loving her when in reality he also loves both his dead wife and his living son like that's what made her mad it wasn't even finding out about the initial con like the inside of her head doesn't even pass the beal test there's just nothing deep about this story I truly saw no point to it and I really love scary movies it's probably my favorite genre of film and the movie was better than the book but just still pretty mid in my opinion there was just nothing there and so much of this book before this fight at the end is also just so mind-numbingly slow and boring it's only like 200 pages long and I still felt that way it was just not for me my friends led me astray with this one all right next up in number five we have Twisted love this was one of the first big Tik Tok books that I read this year and you know what we really started off with the bang Twisted love is a grumpy Sunshine billionaire romance novel that follows Ava who is this nice girl optimistic photography student with like a whisper of trauma in her backstory and she has this just incredibly overproductive older brother named Josh and when Josh ends up deciding to just off to Central America country unknown for an indeterminate amount of time to do this like study abroad medicine thing he ends up asking his billionaire incredibly busy and important corporate executive best friend if he will essentially just babysit Ava and like look after her while he is gone and for some reason Alex is willing to make time for this he agrees he moves into Josh's old house which is next door to where Ava lives Ava by the way is like a fully adult woman she has no say in this and the plot starts plotting from there and it's already a pretty cringe premise like you already feel kind of bad for Ava from like Ground Zero of this book but the real treat in this story lies in the absolute lengths it feels like Anna the author of this book is willing to go to Just generate as many weird plot points as she possibly can to inject into this storyline both Alex and Ava have these truly ridiculous backstories like it is so unserious and of course they end up intertwining because what else would they do the entire thing is just so convoluted for no reason there's murder there's kidnapping there's like white collar crime there's a span of about 50 pages around the middle of this book where it feels like more things happen in just those few chapters than have happened in my entire life as a human girl growing up on this planet like it is insane how quickly the plot progresses during that section and you know what because of that I actually found this book to be like deeply entertaining in comparison to some of the other books I've talked about in this video so far but on an objective level the reason why I still dislike this book just the sheer amount of ick that Alex radiated throughout this story it it was unforgivable this man is disgusting and he should be in jail for any of the many crimes that he committed throughout this book but he's too rich so I guess he won't be Alex is this like Christian gay style repressed billionaire psychopath right and he's obsessed with Ava in like all of the wrong ways does he care about her opinions on anything seemingly not does he consistently neg her throughout the book for being so young and naive and also sometimes just existing yeah he does he says that he loves her but like I'm not even convinced that this man likes her I feel like he just wants to own her because that's exactly what this is like he is obsessed with her in a I will possess you and I don't care what you think about that and also if you ever date anybody else I will kill them type of way which is just not for me like you can't only have the murder kind of chivalry you know you have to also be nice to me and like respect my boundaries because the way that the plot goes Alex essentially stalks Ava for over a year when they're broken up which by the way was sold to me on social media as him quote graveling for a year and I mean I guess that's what that was if you ignore the facts that Ava told him not to do it and in return he was like too bad you can't even report me to the cops for stalking you because I have the British government in my back pocket because I'm so rich and cool and interesting so suck it up buttercup cuz you're going to have me around and tell your stockholmes into forgiving me for being the the worst who ever do it like that's the gist of what he says in response to Ava just asking him to leave her alone so she can move on with her life and that's not exactly graveling in my opinion like at least that's not what I mean when I say that I want a man on his knees and that behavior in just Alex in general it really ruins my chances of wanting these two people to prosper together and I mean I hate this less than a lot of the other books on this list because like there was entertainment value here like I made a long video on this for a reason but I will not abide by a man who sucks the way that this guy sucks like in a legitimately dangerous in unstable way I just it gave me such a heavy ick fifth place on this list Twisted love coming up in fourth place we have Twisted games which is the second book in the Twisted series and this book beats out Twisted love despite being in many ways Superior and the reason for that is rather than just being bad and problematic in an admittedly entertaining way Twisted games committed the far more egregious offense of just being unbelievably boring this book follows Bridget who is one of Ava's best friends from book one and also is the princess of a small fictional European nation that exists for some reason in this universe and the man that she falls for is her new bodyguard reys who is also Al an ex-navy seal that her government still employs for some reason to do like one of the most important jobs that you could possibly imagine it feels slightly like that might be a conflict of interest to have a foreign National do that job but that's just me whatever moving on rea's whole thing is that he doesn't mix his job with his feelings okay except literally he does and just instantly it's obvious how into each other the both of them are and even though in Twisted love Bridget was merely the second in line to the throne of spare a princess in Twisted games very suddenly she becomes the queen or like the Regent Queen I don't exactly remember what the circumstances are and that really goes to show how much of an impression this book made on my brain but her brother who was previously the Crown Prince he got the out of there okay like he abdicated to marry his broy girlfriend who was a commoner which is something that by law you can't do so he was like guess I'll just lose my titles instead which I respect him for but then right after that basically the ruling King gets into an accident of some kind which leaves Bridget kind of suddenly potentially in charge out of nowhere except oh no she's falling for her broky commoner bodyguard and she can't also abdicate because what would that leave her kingdom with you know that's the idea of this book it's kind of forbidden love Vibes I was told that this was a slow burn but the only thing that was slowly burning inside of here was the short fuse of my patience just watching these characters smash constantly and be annoying and say dumb things and have no personalities there was no yearning there was no but we can never touch there was no secret glances caught by the tabloids there were no hugs that last too long because it's the only time that he can feel the gentle caress of her Palm on his cheek and just nothing hit it made me so sad because I was so excited to recap the rest of the Twisted series and I still might like halfway through the fourth book right now and it was Bonkers in just exactly the ways that I wanted the rest of the series to be but I went into this book expecting like a twisted love amount of ridiculousness and there was just nothing it was so normal the male lead was so boring and like good for Bridget I guess you know it probably is better that your man is Just Whipped as his only personality trait as opposed to being a literal psychopath like Alex in book one but in terms of the reading experiences I would take this any day of the week because this was just girl give us nothing this book was the equivalent of particip ating in like the saltine challenge you think that you can handle this much Bland you can this is like 130% the length of Twisted love with maybe 40% of the content the B plot of Twisted love is like murder and drowning and framing somebody for a crime and the B plot of this book is Bridget passing legislation through the Congress of her small fictional European Kingdom so that way she can marry her broy commoner mans like I cannot make this up and there is a Sprinkle of funny stuff going on inside of Reese's backgrounds but like it is a singular dog treat in comparison to the absolute Feast that was the chaos of Twisted love also one last grievance this book had the dumbest time skips like all of the time it was trying to do this thing where it was taking place kind of in sync with the first book and in order to do that it would just have like 3 months later 6 weeks later 6 months later time skips Just Happening sometimes and it felt like a way to tell the story without actually having to tell the story oh you're not convinced that they're in love and that they're kinding for each other well don't worry it all happened during the Fade to Black parts that we didn't talk about inside of this book dude just trust me like this is how they feel and I hated it it made the story feel so disjointed and yet also again nothing happens inside of this book like if you're going to throw in time skips all of the time at least fast forward to eventful parts of their lives what's even the point what's it all for God this was one of my biggest disappointments of the year like I didn't expect it to be good but I did expect it to be interesting and it was not in third place the bronze medal for the year goes to without Merit by Colleen Hoover sometimes I read Colleen Hoover books just to feel something but most of my knowledge of Colleen Hoover books are like the big very popular ones so when I got the itch the compulsion to just melt my brain on something I would probably hate I decided to pick up a book by her that I hadn't really seen covered on social media just to really go in without any preconceived notions maybe I thought maybe it won't even be bad maybe it'll even be good without Meritt is a book about a girl named Merritt who lives inside of this like gigantic former church with her massive messed up family and I just want to read you the names of the people who live in this house okay like I feel like you need to know Merritt's identical twin sister is named honor their older brother is Utah her younger half brother is Moby like Moby Dick her dad is Barnaby her mysterious step uncle is luck her stepmom is Victoria normal except also her actual mom who still lives with them after the divorce she's still living in the basement of the church her name is also Victoria there's two Barnaby has two victoras inside of this house and spoilers he's banging both of them without Meritt is the story of Meritt living inside of this house with the two victoras and everybody else in their family and just all of the conflicts that arise in this situation as a result of having a family that is so ridiculous but especially the conflicts that her after this guy who she thinks is Honor's boyfriend her twin sister's boyfriend he just moves in one day his name is Sean like Carl Sean and Merritt's in the Sean okay she likes him which as you can imagine creates problems you know there's something Charming about a Colleen Hoover book that hasn't gone viral I was a fresh-faced baby in a big world going into this book I knew not what laid ahead of me and I said this in the Vlog that I made for Tik Tok but Colleen Hoover writes the backgrounds of her characters in such a way where it feels like she's just rolling a D20 to decide whatever trauma they're going to have like you're just minding your own business reading your silly little book until boom turns out that Sean's parents are Syrian refugees and now you're just getting the Syrian refugee crisis explained to you over the course of three pages by academic masterminds Colleen Hoover and will this ever be mentioned again will this ever get substantial resolution or serve an otherwise important role inside of this story no why would it it just came up on the news that day when Colleen was like hm what should Sean's tragic backstory be oh yeah that Global humanitarian crisis that I saw in the New York Times like I should just diminish that and make it my own inside of this silly little book these have to be the thoughts inside of This Woman's head like how else do you end up with something like this there are truly so many more things that I could talk about with this book like in terms of funny haha the character Dynamics are just another level of ridiculous like spoilers I'm doing some spoiling here but Mom Victoria mom Toria if you will she is a hypochondriac or something and she had cancer apparently and it was when she had cancer that knew Victoria new Toria if you will she came into this house because she was Mom toria's oncology nurse that is how Barnaby and new Toria met and started the aair that would ultimately lead to the end of Barnaby's first marriage it was when new Toria was taking care of Mom Toria and also smashing her husband as any good oncology nurse would do except mom Toria apparently never had cancer she's a hypochondriac it's like a major twist inside of this book but that fact absolutely decimates The Fragile house of cards that is this book's lore because like did the doctors not know that Mom Toria didn't have cancer new Toria actually is an oncology nurse like she's not secretly a psychiatrist or something she was really coming over to take care of Mom torya when she apparently had cancer except like Mom Toria had no cancer she was completely healthy why were they sending over a nurse to take care of a cancer that did not exist it just makes no sense at all like nothing in the background of this book holds up to even The faintest Whisper of scrutiny and with that also Mom Toria has these like ambiguous psychiatric problems that have made her agoraphobic and very unstable but apparently whenever she has a good day and is acting like herself Barnaby will go downstairs into the basement and the two of them will smash in the basement of this church turned house that he shares with his new wife new and new toia I guess knows about this and is very sad about it but can't really do anything which is it's just it's the most baffling thing that you'll see and the resolution of this book like that is just one layer of the ridiculous character dynamics that are going on inside of here there are so many more involving different members of the family but the resolution of this book is just now everybody is going to family therapy as if that will fix the absolute disaster that they have found themselves in it is just so goofy but the main reason for me that this book cracks the top three ahead of the other competition is that in addition to being ridiculous and making no sense I also thought that the mental health representation in this book was like so atrocious out of all of the bizarre side plots the main narrative thread here is that Meritt is depressed but she doesn't really have the language to talk about her depression until she learns that that's what it is about halfway through the book it's pretty heavy in that way like there's a point in the story where she thinks that she's attempting to take her own life and I mean it ends up being completely fine irrelevant to the story it's just it's the imaginary suspense that Colin Hoover likes baking into or books but it's pretty serious throughout this book and really what makes me mad about it is is that Sean is the mans right and for the most part he says nice things throughout this book to Meritt about mental health and accepting herself and giving herself space to grieve and to grow Etc with the Empire State Building sized caveat that he consistently drives home in this book that he only likes Meritt when she's not being insufferable when she's not in the throws of her depression like he will go out of his way to tell this girl when she's having a better mental health day that she was very likable that day with the implication being that she's not likable when she's sad which he does like overtly say as well during this book and that is so infuriating to me like this concept that he only cares about her when she's easy to have around it's giving I will only love you if you cure your chronic mental illness and to anybody who has been harmed in the making of This Book or just in the making of society at large having a depressive episode does not make you Unworthy of Love or of basic human decency you still deserve those things even when you're sad I will in fact still love you if you are a worm if you have nothing of fundamental value that you can provide to me because that is what loving a whole person is it's not what ever Sean would have you believe inside of this book and and that being the dynamic of the central relationship just makes anything else that this book is trying to say about mental health really difficult to take seriously it's just a train wreck in so many capacities without Merit was in fact without Merit thank you in second on the worst list is a book I have no real reason to hate as much as I do it's really not like other girls on this list it's not problematic like arguably the relationship is actually pretty healthy but the rage I felt reading this in confronting my expectations based on how much everybody absolutely loves this book on Tik Tok to the reality of the terrible experience that I had reading it it was incandescent I was so disappointed with this one especially if you like this book if it made you feel warm and happy inside I'm not here to take that away from you okay it just it needs to be discussed this book of course is Icebreaker by Hannah Grace Icebreaker is a hockey romance in the style of el Kennedy's the deal which is a book that I gave three starts by the way I found it to be somewhat fun so it's similar to the deal except where the deal was fine and pretty entertaining this book is just so boring and Bad plot okay this book follows a girl Anastasia who goes by Stacey or Stacy nobody knows how to pronounce it but either way it's just a terrible decision and Stacey is a coup's figure skater she's very type A she's very talented very motivated very hurah skating in the Olympics soon hopefully that's her vibe and Nate meanwhile the man in this book he's the captain of the hockey team and their college is just super cracked and Rich I guess so they have separate ranks for the hockey team and for the ice skaters but for reasons that are honestly so irrelevant the hockey team's rank gets drained or something so they can't use it for like a period of several months and they have to share with the figure skating team we have a there was only one rink situation going on here and Stuy hates Nate personally just as an individual for this despite the fact that it really does not seem to have a massive impact on her skating times it seems like the mere presence of hockey skates inside of her ice rink is enough for her to see this man as the enemy and she's just so mean to him for no actual reason for the first long chunk of this book until very suddenly like turn on a switch these two kids are in love and they're smashing all of the time and they're like playing house and just doing things and we're only 50% son of the way through the book there's still so much book left at that point and yeah I mean that's really the setup like I said this about other books on this list but nowhere is it more true than here with Icebreaker truly almost nothing happens almost every single page is irrelevant it's pointless to a level that the other books on this list can only aspire to reach one day I said this during my Vlog on Tik Tok but truly it felt like the entire plot of this book could have just been an email about the entire Aaron situation Aaron is her figure skating partner and he's just kind of shady and the worst like nothing else mattered or had any substance at all for this entire book and even that conflict was stupid like you're telling me that Stacey who in this book is like a therapy goddess she's a veteran of emotional regulation and communication she has never even one time talked to her illustrious therapist about the fact that Aaron controls everything that she eats like she's never found that weird or strange like make it make sense like you can't have canonically the most emotionally mature character to ever do it also be that ignorant of her own problems it was so stupid and also I feel like I'm describing it with more credit than it deserves because the whole bad relationship with food food that Stacey develops as a result of this treatment by her skating partner just disappears like instantly as soon as Nate talks about it with her which is just not how that works and I hated it reading this book felt like watching a sitcom except not even one of the good sitcoms this was one of the sitcoms that's just designed in a lab to play in the background of every family dinner that you ever had growing up and nothing more than that because if you pay more than like 20% of attention to what is going on at any given time this book falls apart like the attempts at substance inside of here are just paper thin I think I might have enjoyed this book wine junk possibly so that's a thought if you still want to read this like this is a book for your brain stem and your brain stem alone if you just want to see some college kids smashing in a variety of locations this could be for you but if you want anything more than that I would probably avoid also this book has this absurdly big cast of characters that are all completely irrelevant to the plot they will be introduced you'll get a quick info dump you'll learn some facts about them and then 90% of these characters just like disappear into the ether never to be seen again you can just tell that Hannah Grace is trying to build out her Marvel Cinematic Universe of her romcom world and I mean it worked like this book has a massive fan base I feel like everybody loves it except for me so good for her I'm glad that she found her people I'm just not one of them other main crimes against humanity inside of this book the big one for me is that Saucy and Nate smash on Halloween when Nate is dressed up as Gru from Despicable Me like he's actively in the gr suit when they decide to hook up and I know I brought this up every single time I've talked about this book on social media but it just deserves to be known by the masses I just cannot believe that I didn't know about the Gru SMUD scene inside of this book anybody who didn't warn me about that going in we're enemies now okay watch your back you've just drained the proverbial ice rink inside of my heart also another criminal thing in this SMUD of this book is that this man also decides to hit third base in the back of an over capacity Uber with all of their friends still inside of it when they're all drunk coming back from a bar and I guess nobody notices despite Stacey apparently like yelling and having to be like clamped shut so she'll shut up and I just would never like me personally it's just not on the menu in my relationships to do that in that sort of place I feel for everybody involved in this situation except for the two of them moving on the epilog of this book was also just an alltime I already hated this I already thought it was Dumb and too long and boring but just the way that Hannah Grace decided to wrap this up it felt like she didn't understand the motivations of the characters that she wrote and she came up with like sau's a baddie she wants to skate she wants to win she doesn't want kids because it'll interfere with her ability to skate and win for the rest of her life and you choose to make her barefoot and pregnant you give this woman a pregnancy stay-at-home mom epilogue after she goes to the Olympics once and is done forever it just annoyed me so much it was truly salt on the wound but anyways other than everything that's talked about it in terms of Vibes like this book is honestly fine once again these people actually communicate you know Nate is nice they have a nice dynamic between the two of them there's really nothing wrong with it other than the fact that it was just the most mind-numbingly bored I've been reading a book all year it's just aggressively tedious and empty inside not to show my hands when it comes to what tends to piss me off in books if you can't already tell through how I've been talking for the rest of this video but it being this profoundly boring makes it single-handedly worse than everything else on this list except for one the worst book that I read this year that I actually read twice yep that's right and number one we have Credence by Penelope Douglas nobody is shocks that this book is the top of the list obviously I recently made a video about this I only posted it like two weeks ago so my opinions have not really changed from what they were during that video but let's condense just for posterity here and also so I can hopefully leave this book behind me forever and never think about it again free me from this prison okay Credence is a book about this girl named chernin who moves in with her step uncle and her two step cousins after the death of her parents and this family lives together up in the mountains of Colorado where the roads get so bad for a period of about 6 months during the winter that the cabin is completely cut off from the outside world and the family just has to be like self-sufficient during that time period until the snow melts many people in the mountains of Colorado have also said that that's just absolutely not how things work but you know what who cares not Penelope let's move move on tyan who was still in high school by the way during this entire book she uses this cool winter holiday as this opportunity to reinvent herself and also to catch feelings for and then smash her entire seep family just one by one by one by two by one in ways that are so much more problematic than the simple tooo truth of her smashing her step family like that is maybe the most basic thing about what happens inside of this book this was so bad for so many reasons I really thought that I was prepared to read a book like this I was a target audience 11/12 year-old fan of My Little Pony and I had unrestricted ACC access to the internet I saw some things before my time both there and in the other fandoms that I was in growing up and still still despite that despite what I have seen the just absolute Terror of reading this book that I felt it should have been too much for me the fact that I got through this I look back on the month of my life basically that I dedicated to creating that two-hour Odyssey and just she was a warrior I don't know if I could do that again like I'm sure I will because I know myself and I have the memory of a baby rabbit so I will be forgetting about the amount of damage that this did to my spirit but this was just a lot even for me and it's hard to capture all of my thoughts on this especially when I had so many hence the reason for the 2-hour video but the main reason why this book sucked is that it's a tboo dark romance right like oh well read what you want to read like it's none of my business but where the likes of Twisted love are contents just being ridiculous this book is like no I'm more than that I'm more than just wild and crazy and it just bafflingly tries to position itself as this super based Coming of Age story about a girl who beats her trauma and discovers her agency and becomes a better version of herself all things to the unbarred access of Smashing her creepy and predatory step relatives for an entire winter during her senior year of high school which is just a crazy direction to take a book like this to attempt to have themes such as that inside of this story it makes it so much more gross and difficult to swallow in my opinion but then in addition to that because somehow that's still not enough there's this additional layer of he who shall not be named Caleb with a K and Caleb's actions in this book and the way that they are just constantly enabled by The Narrative fundamentally contradict whatever message that Penelope appears to be trying so desperately to make you believe about this story about tyan apparently having this agency having this personal growth and like girl boss ability to make her own way in the world Caleb expressly and consistently does things without tian's consent he is this creepy slasher movie serial killer Woodsman type love interest who never listens to her when she doesn't want to do something but for some reason in this book of female empowerment in agency like he's the one that she ends up being the most into make it make sense like you can't not a one person in this book comes out unscathed everybody deserves jail life sentence no parole the only person who gets parole is meai and honestly even that is up in the air with how dirty I feel like she did me personally by the end of this book and with the premise of this like we already started out so low it feels like a miracle that this book still managed to shock and amaze me with how awful it was and if you want more information perhaps too much information on exactly how I could go on for a long time 2 hours in fact and you have that available to you if you want to watch me descend into Dante's Inferno I could go the rest of my life never reading a book like this ever again and I'm really hoping that this list is shorter next year but knowing me and my insatiable curiosity and my complete lack of self-respect I'm sure that won't be the case and why else are you even here but thank you for tuning into to this video however long it actually ends up being if you liked watching me talk about these books that I hate you should give this video an actual like and you should also comment what books you hated this year I'm always looking for more great ideas on what to read and I'm like a blood hound like truly nothing draws me to reading a book more than controversy so please do give me your hottest takes about the Zeitgeist about what has been popular this year okay I can take it if you like me if you think I'm cool I'm glad I have you tricked but you should definitely subscribe and I'm also trying to use Instagram more regularly this year and do some like audience participation type videos so I'm there as well in spirit if not in substance and also with that I just want to say that if I ever don't respond to your nice message or your comment please just assume that it's because of my crippling social anxiety in general fear of being perceived despite my very counterintuitive chosen career path because I absolutely love you guys and I always see it when you say they're really really nice things to me even if I don't always have the spoons to respond to everybody I see you and I hear you and it just makes my heart very very happy to know that I'm having even like a 1% positive impact on somebody's life out there it's just a massive privilege and it makes reading nonsense like what I read in this video feel completely worth it so thank you for all of that and thank you for a wonderful year and I'm really excited to see what we can do this year as well together yep okay that's it I love you guys I hope you have a good January and I will see you very very soon I don't have anything else to say bye

Channel: lexi aka newlynova

Views: 380,528

Keywords:

Id: xhxRhzXkNvY

Length: 40min 19sec (2419 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024