Disappointing Bestsellers

[LittlleMy]

Hello everyone 🙂

I just wondered if anyone else has bought a ‘bestseller’ that otherwise wouldn’t have appealed without that status only to be hugely disappointed?

So I realise I’m slightly late to the party but I just finished ‘The Housemaid’ by Freida McFadden and it was such a struggle to get through! It felt more like it was written for the Young Adult market. Barely any descriptive text, always telling rather than showing, ridiculous coincidences, underdeveloped characters, juvenile writing especially sentences like ‘’there was something about that room that was very scary” “his expression sent a chill down my spine”. Highly predictable in parts, silly in others and just so very average!

Don’t come after me if you loved it, this is just my opinion of a recent book that really shocked me that it was able to reach the dizzying heights of becoming a bestseller.

I thought it might be fun to hear from any fellow disgruntled readers if they’ve had similar experiences! With Autumn just round the corner, and me needing a new list of books to read, this post may help some of us avoid similar disappointments!

Again, I liked Girl on a train , but the film wasn’t great.

It's essentially the literary equivalent of the music industry isn't it?

Low quality and mass produced crap.

People who have honed their craft over the years overlooked in favour of people who tick very simplistic boxes.

Like you say designed to appeal to the 'lowest common denominator'.

Yellowface
The Silent Patient - guessed the twist early on
We Used to Live Here - absolute shite
The Thursday Murder Club
50 Shades was so bad it was hilarious!
What Alice Forgot - so sloooooooooow

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - great premise, so slow

Yes exactly. Same sort of characters. One arrogant public school boy, one village idiot who comes good etc.

The Salt Path , obviously. Ridiculous book, I can't believe so many people fell for it, it had such major flaws even before all the hoo ha came out about it. It got 4/10 at our bookclub.

I loved The Beach but not the film. I just remember everyone reading it on trains and tubes back when people read books on public transport.

The Housemaid I just found too graphically violent. I read it ages ago, didn't realise it was a bestseller.

Taking the phrase “disappointing” a bit more literally, as opposed to something terrible or unreadable:

Angela's Ashes. Not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination - but it had been given SUCH a hard sell, both in the press and from people recommending it to me - that it fell a bit flat for me. I was expecting brilliance. If it was just something I’d picked up in a charity shop because I liked the cover, I’d have thought “not bad” and forgotten it.

The God of Small Things. Again, not a bad book at all, from an obviously talented writer, but the fact that it won the Booker Prize? Very overrated in my view. It really drags - every time something you’d been waiting to happen finally happens, you have to wait a very long time for the next thing to happen. I’ve tried to finish it twice and still haven’t.

50 shades of Grey. Lasted less than 2 chapters. Utterly dismal, teenage standard.
Jackie Collins put her to shame 30 years previously.
Also, watched the recent film version of 'Crawdads' as hadn't read the book. Utter rubbish! Meandered on and on and on for the trial, then tied up the next 40 or 50 years in a flash scene 🤨

Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Conversations with Friends, Intermezzo (her latest).
Just couldn’t see what the fuss was about.
I still haven’t finished Intemezzo despite it being our March 2025 Book club book 🙄
Now the very slight novels by Claire Keegan I love. So thought provoking.

ah yes I felt that the writer had recently read to kill a mocking bird before she started writing crawdads
it was going well and then it went nuts :-S I still liked it but only because I decided a few chapters didn't count! haha

Normal People.

Looked to me like she never really got the hang of weaving dialogue and description together and using dialogue tags organically so thought "i know, I'll try and pass it off as a stylistic thing"

Fifty Shades of Grey went mega because it was a book for people who hadn't read a book since school. Suddenly they were being told that there was a book which had sex in it, and they all flocked to read it as though books with sex in were a completely new invention that nobody had ever thought of before.

Sigh.

I wasn't drawn to the book, but did listen to the BBC Sounds abridged version and really enjoyed it. It's over 10 episodes.

I loved The Beach. I read it just before I was about to go to Thailand (second time) and had been to all the places and it terrified me I didn’t want to return (there is an edgy feeling to parts of Thailand anyway this just made it feel worse) I re read it again recently and really enjoyed it. The film was visually stunning but of course had to change the plot which spoilt it for me

I also loved the Di Vinci Code and The Lovely Bones. I felt so sad for a few days after I finished it

hated We Need To Talk About Kevin and The Time Travellers Wife

I wasn’t expecting to love Liane Moriarty books as much as I do, especially her earlier books

agree with pp’s you can often tell who is behind the marketing of some books and there are far too many celeb writers it’s really not fair on upcoming writers who do not get all the exposure needed now to be successful and I decided a while ago not to not read any more celeb books (Thursday was ok, film will be a nice easy watch) as all have been well over hyped unless a biography of some type

Me too!

Agree. I thought it was very easy to read and liked the twist, but it wasn’t very sophisticated! The writing is pretty poor.

In the minority here but Names by Florence Knapp.

Same! I really wanted to like this one because I loved the premise, but was very meh.

AI says "speech marks are omitted as a stylistic choice to enhance the stream of consciousness and intimacy of the narrative, creating a seamless flow between the characters' thoughts and spoken words. This lack of punctuation can make dialogue harder to discern initially but ultimately immerses the reader deeper into the characters' emotional world, highlighting themes of miscommunication and complex relationships."

limescale says "oh bore off....it just made it really hard to read. There is a reason we use grammar".

Well, I think your first point is true of an awful lot of bestsellers. Almost by definition, they're books for people who don't read, unchallenging, unambiguous, can be read by people who struggle to 'get into' a book that makes demands of them, and that they will have heard of via word of mouth, a big marketing campaign, or seen piled high in an airport or supermarket, rather than had to read a review of in a newspaper or find in a bookshop. (Hello from the TSP threads... )

Haha I do this too 😅. Mentally ‘rewrite’ segments or think to myself ‘let’s pretend these bits didn’t happen shall we’ in an otherwise promising book so it’s not been a complete waste of my precious reading time!

Butter - Asako Yuzuki

I love Japanese literature, food & crime novels, so this one should work for me, but it was just tedious.

Pre 50 shades ( which is an awful book I gave up on too ) I used to have a look through most ‘ Harold Robbins’ books or Jackie Collins for the sexy chapters!
At least they could write a decent story ( around the sec scenes )
‘Bonk busters’ , the sun came out with that one I think!
( probably)

I never buy any book without reading reviews and checking out Amazon feedback. It's not the money, it's the time invested in reading the book that I want to make sure it's worthwhile.

Oh no far too confusing an approach for my little brain!

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow for me. I listened to it, and just got bored half way through! I always finish things but couldn’t bear to listen to any more.
Butter - did finish but I felt like nothing happened.