I just read a terrible book

[Orangeis]

Bring me back, B A Paris.

What a load of absolute tosh. A man's partner dissapears, 6 years later he gets with her sister and lives with her. The big twist is.....the new girlfriend is actually the missing sister. He didn't realise this as she had a different hair do.
That's hours of my life I'll never get back. I feel like taking the book in to the back garden and burning the bugger.
What's your worst book and why?

Oh I can't fucking stand Jodi Picoult. What was the one that had highlighted words throughout that spelled out something pretentious, amd a character whose signature dish was called Sorrow Pie and you literally had to cry into it so it contained your tears? Yeah, don't think I'll be joining that dinner party.

@BeesAndCrumpets I reckon it's the Audible narrator too - looks like everyone who's confessed to enjoying the Thursday Murder club so far has had the audiobook!

Yes he can!

I wonder if listening to these books, specifically Thursday Murder Club, is better on Audible or similar. I absolutely loved listening to them!

I'd probably watch a TV adaptation of the books. Just won't be reading any more of them.

Yes! Now, I LOVE Sophie Hannah. But The Orphan Choir and more recently The Couple at the Next Table were disappointing.

I made it about 100 pages in to the first Elena Ferrante and just thought, fuck THAT.

I am always confused about why other women like the story about the friends who don't seem to actually like each other much - is this what people's lives are like??

Was a while since I read Thursday Murder Club... am I remembering correctly {{{SPOILER}}}, quite a few elderly characters just dutifully die to help their friends/help the plot along?

You're my book soul sister. I almost lost a friend when I made the same remarks about Jodi Piccoult. She's rather insufferable.

The Perfect Wife by JP Delaney. A man loses his wife, so he recreates her with an AI robot. DH bought it for me without reading the back cover.

I used to force myself to read a book I had started but don't bother anymore.

One that particularly jumps out at me that everyone said was very good was 'The Slap'. It really irritated me and I don't think I finished it.

Snap. I could not understand all the rave reviews. It reminded me of reading kids creative writing at school.

I loved Piranesi, but I have read a BA Paris book and the twist was similarly .........implausible so thanks for the headsup. I also tried twice with the alchemist and it's supposed to be so life changing and deep. I couldn't concentrate on it at all. My mind wandered because is it was so boring I think

It's funny, I picked that up in easons, read the back of it and felt instantly weary like i'd been pulled in to some drama that had nothing to do with me and that I really hadn't the energy for. put it back down!

This is SO accurate.

At least mine was a free Prime e-book. Women are being strangled every other day in the neighbourhood. Nobody seems right bothered apart from the horrible, whiny main character, who cleverly spots from all the news reports that they all look identical, and just like her. She points this out to the one police officer investigating the murders. He's impressed. She has a torrid affair with him, then he dies. Her employer, best friend and ex-boyfriend die mysteriously. We still don't know who the killer is, but it's okay because it's probably one of the people who died. The end.

A Fatal Crossing, heavily hyped murder mystery. Dreadful. Plot holes a mile wide. Terrible writing. Published by Penguin - Allen Lane must be spinning in his grave.

Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben. Utter rubbish, the ending just seemed tacked on, making the rest of the story totally irrelevant.

As an author myself, I try to avoid saying negative things online about other authors' books, as I know how much writers tend to take the unpleasant reviews/comments to heart. But I do make an exception for B A Paris's Behind Closed Doors. It was the most ridiculously over-the-top, implausible, melodramatic portrayal of domestic abuse I've ever read, and probably did a fair bit of damage to people's idea of what domestic abuse actually looks like.

I stopped reading when the police forced the main character back to her evil husband after she'd told them she was being kept prisoner. And the husband's motivation for trapping her and abusing her was just ridiculous - it was about wanting to get control of her sister with learning disabilities because he thought she would be the perfect victim, if I remember rightly. There were so many opportunities for the main character to get away, and she was desperate to do so, but it was as though she was living in a part of the world where she didn't have the right to leave a relationship for any reason whatsoever. It all centred on the flawed premise that she couldn't make people believe she was being abused. This was an intelligent, successful businesswoman who was the legal guardian of her sister, and who had interacted with all sorts of authorities for years, with no history of mental illness, and yet somehow she kept being thrust back into the clutches of her evil, charismatic husband by the police, who were so much in his thrall that they would ignore an allegation of a serious offence and forcibly return a protesting woman to her abuser.

Someone ,mentioned the Foundling by Stacey Halls earlier. I read that recently, disappointing would be my verdict. I worked in the archive that holds the Foudling Museum admission books and this novel read like the author had been captivated by those and tried very hard to construct a story around them. I can see why, they are heartbreaking items. However it wasn't a very good book.

Ordinary People - it may remind some people of their school/university experience, but all I can say is that what I was not doing at uni was dinner parties and holidays in the south of France. And it was so boring.

That Colleen Hoover book - It Ends With Us? The first one, anyway. It was a book club book, and everyone else raved about it. I got about a third of the way in, on a very long delayed train journey with nothing else to do, and still couldn't keep going. Never mind the relationship issues - I couldn't get past the bits about "I will start a flower shop! Oh look, a millionaire girl just walked in off the street and offered to do my flower shop up for me. Our USP for our flowers will be that they will be wrapped in leather and chains..." WTAF. When you add that to the fact that the first thing the love interest guy does is ask her for a blow job, it was so dire. I get that the point is that he's supposed to be a portrait of an abuser, but the rest of the book was so bad I didn't get that far. Oh, but I did encounter the gay best friend who only existed to find a nice dress and do the heroine's hair.

I so totally agree. It was very opaque and devoid of any warmth. I wonder if this is because it was a bad translation. All my friends love Ferrante though, so I have always wondered if I am wrong.

I meant to say I did love some of the books mentioned on here, including The Paper Palace and Piranesi.

I liked it but I thought the ending was a real disservice to women's real experiences in Ireland over the last .. century. I suppose there are exceptions to all rules and his book focused more on the experience of growing up gay decades ago but honestly (sorry for spoiler) what young irish girl a virgin of 16 seduces her brother in law. Completely stupid and it made me angry.

This is a lovely refreshing thread - thank you all! I also hated Crawdads, Birdsong and Grown Ups and loads of others. Sally Rooney!! As soon as a book gets some hype around it, I try and avoid it as it won't be for me, but so often I get drawn into reading them...

@PollyAmour I developed a bit of an obsession in locldown with those terrible Netflkix adaptions of Harlan Coben nivles where they made the strange decision to transpose the action to Norther England, France or Southern Spain but not iron out any of the resulting cultural oddness (eg people driving around Nice in massive cars toting guns or state school teachers in small Northern towns living in a huge private gated developments)