I hate it when books do this

[petronella23]

• start by flinging you into the middle of a conversation or action scene where you don't know who anyone is

• keep swapping between past and present

What are your pet hates?

When the book is set a real place and a character does something completely unrealistic such as driving from town A to town B for an hour's shift on minimum wage when the two towns are over 30 miles apart.

I hate most books that have a new chapter every few pages. Very often I think it show an inability to sustain anything well.

The later Agatha Raisin books were obviously thrown together with the idea of a copy editor/ whole 'nother writer going through with a "find and replace" sweep that never got done. Hence the incredibly cumbersome "expensive French perfume" throughout the text which clearly meant, "I can't be arsed to do the research, please change this to the actual name of an "expensive French perfume".

Simon Brett's characters often drink-drive but when they don't, they often leave their cars in weird places and NEVER go and pick them up again. The continuity is appalling.

If you're going to have a complicated murder mystery plot in a small villgae/ large cruise-ship for the love of MIke, PLEASE supply a map. You might know that you've based your plot and alibis on a poorly disguised Lavenham, but the reader won't know.

Crime novels where the detective discovers the murderer is actually his best mate / grandad / wife and the real target is actually the detective himself - I can forgive this once in a series of books but it gets very old in a long running series where the case becomes all about the main character every time!

When they don't describe any physical characteristics of the protagonist, or other important characters,leaving me to make it up - fine, but then suddenly it becomes important e.g. skin colour. Don't make me re-imagine the whole character half way through the book!

I really hate the whole ‘mating bond’, ‘fated lovers’ crap that you find in fairy porn new adult’ fantasy series.

especially when there a 7 books in a series and 400,000 characters who all seem to get paired up by fate as the thing progresses.

I also find that plots driven almost entirely by people just not telling each other things really frustrating. And boring.

I do read a lot of crap.

Most of the sex scenes (or ‘spice’ as people on tik tok insist on calling it 🤮) are dire too. They’re often excruciatingly bad.

Agree with the previous poster - when the protagonist 'hates' a male character then by the end of the book falls head over heels for him. It's an embarrassingly lame and predictable trope that shouldn't even show it's face in adolescent fiction.

Also, in the YA/NA fantasy genre. I hate it when there’s an ‘age gap’ relationship. Thousand year old fairy prince falls in love with 16-19 year old girl is, at best, extremely creepy and just doesn’t seem realistic in the least.

Footnotes in novels. If it’s not important enough to make the main text, it’s not important. I’m not reading it.

Novels where the author has shoehorned in every single possible contentious issue known on earth. So a trans character with lesbian parents who are of different races, has been bullied at school for being super smart while also strangely attractive and lives in a single wide trailer. With a drug problem. Their friends will be a glorious mix of white/Asian/black/Hispanic/Native American. They will never ever say what they mean. There will almost certainly be some horrible traumas involving abuse, suicide, animal cruelty, poverty, neglect. All on the one character. I’ve come across a few too many like this recently.

Speech marks, good grief. Anything by Sally Rooney is basically unreadable. Sadly this seems to be in fashion at the moment.

Endless series that should have stopped after about 5 books. If it looks like this is going to be the case, I don’t even start the first one. YA fantasy (which is problematic anyway) I’m looking at you here.

I suspect I am getting old and grumpy.

I hate male romantic lead jealousy It’s not sexy. Even if the ‘sassy’ female main character calls them names over it, because it’s always just presented as if it’s to be expected/flattering.

Books where it is incredibly obvious that the writer has very little experience of children, either as a parent or in some other capacity. I have read a few novels where a child's abilities, knowledge, way of expressing themselves etc, just didn't align with their supposed developmental stage. I have even occasionally checked to see if the author has children. I realise there are probably plenty of child free authors whose child characters are so well written that I don't think about it. It's the badly drawn ones that annoy me. I probably only started to notice this once I had children myself!

I hate it when several characters have similar names - starting with the same letter and roughly the same length. Especially if they are minor characters so you don’t get as familiar with them.

I dislike swapping perspectives every chapter. The Children Of Jocasta told two interesting stories but the endless swapping back and forth meant I never got properly into the flow of one before being yanked to the other.

Incorrect timelines - it's just lazy. Ages not lining up is particularly annoying. I think the earliest ever example was Moll Flanders by Daniel DeFoe; Moll was pregnant for about 15 months at one point, so it's not a new thing.

Impossibly beautiful female characters as written by men. For example Ken Follet's definitely a breast man, his female characters'bosoms are mentioned far, far too often.

When a character is secretly gay and that's their entire personality. It's stupid, reductive and insulting. One Of Us Is Lying does that, which seemed incredible for a book as recent as 2017.

I'm sure this is the fault of publishers who insist on starting in the middle of the action to hook the reader then going back to set up the story. It's a difficult job for a writer to start with excitement but also make it clear who is who and what the heck is going on 😂

When the blurb is something like

‘She walked through the woods near her house.

He watched.

Someone dies.

Why?

Who?’

Just tell me what the bloody book is about!

My most hated ones are -

• when the murderer has featured throughout the book but turns out to be the most unrealistic person. I read one where it was her Grandma who had been a serial killer throughout her life. That one pained me.
• yep the front prologue being one page about someone scrabbling for their life or hiding somewhere. It just happened so often!
• last one was someone trying to uncover a family secret and not. Doing. A. DNA. Test. It would have sorted the entire mystery out. Writing a book now does mean acknowledging you can find things out via Facebook etc, you can’t ignore it’s existence!

Books with "girl" in the title
Describing dreams
Pretentious wordy titles
Not understanding that life in 21st century England is not the same as in the 1970s when you left it for Canada - I'm looking at you Peter Robinson

Oooh! What really gets my goat are books with "Daughter" in the title.

You know, the ones like "The Zookeper's Daughter's War". (They almost always have "War" in the title too). "The Watchmaker's Daughter". "The Archivist's Daughter", "The Milkman's Daughter".

It's as if the female character can only be the subject of the book through the lens of her father's profession. Aaaaaaaaaargh.

ARGH I hate that too. She is a character can we not have “the watchmaker” or “the acrobat” (especially since they are often participating in their family business) rather than the X’s daughter. Think it used to be the X’s wife. What next?

I hate it when I don't know where the book is set. There is one I have read a few times, I can't remember what the book is, but every time I started to read it in an American accent, only to find in the second chapter it was set in Cornwall or somewhere like that.

Too many characters introduced at the same time (looking at you Grown Ups!)

if you can’t tell which continent a book was set in, then it must be so banal and generic that there’s no cultural specificity whatsoever. Crap writing most definitely.

last one was someone trying to uncover a family secret and not. Doing. A. DNA. Test. It would have sorted the entire mystery out.

Or the reverse - doing something which is not possible, such as looking people up in the 1951 Census.

I watched the TC series of Sharpe before I started reading the books.

I believe Bernard Cornwell stopped describing Sharpe because there is so much difference between the character and Sean Bean.

When the entire book could be solved by the two main characters just having one simple conversation,

like he wasn't kissing a random woman on the cheek it was his sister so the 20 years you spent 'if only' could have sorted

Or she didn't turn up at the station to meet you so you thought she wasn't interested but instead of finding out you get drunk then have amnesia then she marries someone else

Just talk!!!

Why I gave up 'chicklit' (I hate that term!)

@WandaWonder its not just chick lit. Although anything involving romance is probably particularly bad for it.

So many plots are entirely driven by people just not sharing simple information. It’s just annoying. Especially when it seems to be the author’s only way of having anything happen.

Sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense either. Fantasy romance is often full of heroines who are too scared to share information with their love interest in case he won’t love them any more. Which is annoying anyways, but even more so when he’s risked his own death to save her multiple times, gone to the ends of the world (literally) for her and she’s angst about disclosing something fairly pedestrian. The more YA, the worse this crap is.