Frustrating plot devices and cliches! Grr

[Kayano]

I am 2 pages into a 'teenage' book...

The main character is a girl who is looking in a mirror to describe her appearance...
AIBU to throw it out the window already or keep on reading? WWYU?

Btw it is a book called Divergent by Veronica Roth. Bought on an amazon whim :D

Any other frustrating examples of this?

why are you reading a teens book though? if it's just for an easy read then you can't complain!

I read anything and everything. I wrote my English dissertation on Philip Pullman and George MacDonald

It just annoyed me so much!

I googled it and found a site which had the first 100 pages to read...I thought it wasn't as bad as you made out! The mirror thing was surely a device to show the audience, early on, how the faction aren't allowed to be vain or indulgent. It showed the relationship between her and her Mother too.

Tbh, that wouldn't bother me so much. What does frustrate me are errors in the plot, which careful proofreading would've picked up on, or lazy writing. A good example are the Twilight books [hgrin]

The most frustrating and annoying plot device for me is when a simple misunderstanding occurs, which leads to tedious and tenuous tangents, especially when it could all be solved quite easily by two people actually having a brief and honest discussion.

To be fair this occurs more in TV land than in books but still, in a similar vein that whole meant to be together shtick, where they miss each other by mere seconds at several points, snore.

I am going to carry on with it but I was like 'really?! A mirror?!'

The plot does seem interesting I hope it improves

Livingdead, I know exactly what you mean. Very similar to when one (usually the man) feels he can't tell the other something for some stupid reason. So he keeps this small secret but it leads to loads of misunderstanding

I love crime fiction so the one I hate is, when the serial killer is targeting the main detective. That will be every book Patricia Cornwell has ever written. [hhmm]

This is the closest I could find but I bet you'll like Tv Tropes.

Livingdead, surely that would destroy 90% of fiction?!

Robert Jordan and his Wheel of Time series. Stuffed to the max with Deus ex machinae.

Shame RJ himself didn't get a machina of some kind though.

Indeed.

Trills I love Tv Tropes - I could waste days on that website! :)

I read a book recently where at least four times a character was ( supposedly ) killed only to pop back up a few pages later having narrowly escaped in some bizarre way. It happened so many times that it completely lost any shock value it may have had.

My pet hate is when characters talk in brackets - yes Jilly Cooper I do mean you!