When you read as much as I do, you’re bound to come across some bad books that, for some reason, you end up finishing. Most of the time, when I’m hating a book I will just not finish it, but sometimes I will finish it out of pure spite so I know what I’m talking about when it comes to reviewing it. What follows are the five worst books I read in 2025.
A Theory of Dreaming (A Study in Drowning #2) by Ava Reid This follow up to A Study in Drowning somehow features even less plot than its predecessor. Though they wrote a book report that was meant to end misogyny for good, Effy and Preston discover that it takes more than a school paper to overcome the patriarchy. Fortunately, they decide to contact the newspaper about in the belief that this will help them defeat misogyny. This decision results in shenanigans that they don’t help each other with, nor will they ask for help from anyone else. This is quite alright, because no one is offering to help them anyway except Effy’s roommate, who goes as far as offering Effy a scarf and some sunglasses as a disguise. None of Effy or Preston’s efforts really matter in the end, because it takes a couple of adults to swoop in out of the blue and fix everything at the end. With even less of the wishy-washy world building seen in A Study in Drowning, A Theory of Dreaming fails to answer even the most basic questions about the world it’s set in, and seems to indicate that all a girl needs to recover from Depression is a cute boy and a pretty dress.
The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory Jacquetta of Luxembourg was a dynamic woman who went from being a girl sent across the sea to marry an English lord, to being widowed, marrying for love a man thought to be unworthy of her, and then going on to become of of the movers and shakers of the Wars of the Roses while her daughter grew up to be Queen of England. Despite all of that, Philippa Gregory wrote a 500 page snooze-fest that makes Jacquetta’s Wikipedia page seem like high drama in comparison. From her (possibly real) meeting with Joan of Arc as a child to watching her daughter become queen, the narrative doesn’t go far beyond “this happened and then this happened and then this happened”. One of Jacquetta’s children dies young, and though she initially says she’ll remember this child forever, that child is basically forgotten within a couple of pages. The only reason I finished this book is that it’s simply written and goes by fast, and also I was homebound while recovering from surgery.
Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1) by S.T. Gibson Billed as both a celebration of Scottish folklore and a transgressive erotic story also meant as an homage to Wuthering Heights, Savage Blooms fails to be any of that. In this book, two American twenty-somethings show up to a remote Scottish manor located a whole fifteen minutes from town. Said manor is inhabited by the female scion of Scottish nobility and her working class groundskeeper. These two are having a romantic relationship that is meant to be taboo because it crosses class boundaries, but as it’s set in the 2020s no one actually cares about said class boundaries. The American twenty-somethings get wrapped up in the Scottish pair’s sexual shenanigans and a series of tepid sex scenes ensue. They are about as erotic as a paperclip. There are faeries outside, but they don’t really matter to the story until the final few pages. The Scottish landscape and folklore don’t matter, either, thanks to generic details that make the story feel like it could happen wherever in the world there are a few hills and some rain.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab The marketing for Schwab’s latest adult novel says that the core of the story is a toxic sapphic relationship, but given that this relationship doesn’t begin until around page 320, it’s hard to say that it’s actually the story’s core as it reads like more of an afterthought. What we do get is roughly 250 pages of Vampirism 101 as two of the main characters adjust to their unlife as vampires in different centuries. If Schwab had done anything different with the vampire lore it could have been interesting, but given that there’s nothing there we the readers haven’t picked up from 150 years of vampires in popular culture, I was left wondering why I had to spend so much time watching these insufferable characters learn things I already know about vampires. The switch to the coffee shop AU fic during the modern character’s section was especially jarring. Why is there a coffee shop AU in the middle of this vampire book? The prose is meant to be lyrical but it just feels labored, and the Scottish character keeps spouting American terms like ‘parking lot’. And can we stop referring to some accents as ‘wrinkled and dirty’ and to others as ‘clean’?
Innamorata (The House of Teeth #1) by Ava Reid The actual plot of Innamorata could be summed up thusly: Two girls seek revenge for generational trauma and get distracted by a boy. Mayhem ensues twice in the five-year timeline. This is a novel that wants to be a metafictional, gothic, grimdark take on Renaissance revenge dramas, but it lands firmly in the realm of edgelord cringe with heaping doses of fatphobia and classism. The prose reads like both the following are true: 1) it feels like it should have been given the Archive of Our Own tag ‘no beta we die like men’, and 2) Ava Reid has a thesaurus and she’s not afraid to misuse it. Thanks to the excessive descriptions of everything that’s irrelevant to the story, the reader would be forgiven for thinking that the most important things in it are actually people’s clothes, how pretty the lead female character is, and the prince’s blue eyes. Truly, it’s an egregious amount of detail. It feels like there are 500 pages of description and 60 pages of plot, with dashes of “what is the most taboo thing I can mention to make things extra disgusting?”, but in a way that feels like a teenage boy was trying to gross someone out, rather than an author trying to examine the darker side of human nature. If you must read a bloated tome where very little happens and the color of the love interest’s eyes are of primary importance, just remember that Innamorata will retail for $32.99 USD, and that AO3 is free. (Innamorata will be published in March 2026. I received an advance copy for review from NetGalley and Del Rey back in November) Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
|
Wednesday, 7 January 2026
The Worst Books of 2025
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Ghost Homesteads of the Blue Ridge Mountains
What remains after the forests reclaim the homes and lives that once filled them ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ...
No comments:
Post a Comment