September DNF

Not sure if it was my mood this month, but SO MANY DNFs. Anyway. The point of the DNF post is to give a little blurb of a review to be taken with a grain of salt, because these were books I couldn't finish. My criteria is that I have to be at least 50 pages in before I can really consider DNFing the book. If I've read less than that, I generally won't even mention it.

Title: The Cage

Author: Megan Shepherd

This was the second Megan Shepherd book I've attempted and failed to finish. I did know that I might not love this one going in- I dropped The Madman's Daughter when I was partway though as well. I found a disliked this one as well. The characters felt formulaic and I really didn't care for the narrator. There was a lot of telling and not a lot of showing in both the characters and the setting, which really only gave a shallow impression of these crucial aspects of the story. I didn't care about the plot. At all. Eventually I just found myself to bored to continue.

Title: The Creeping
Author: Alexandra Sirowy
This was mostly a case of the main character not working for me. I'm someone who has to, if not love the main character, then at least find some element of them that I understand. That just didn't happen here. The way Stella saw the world was so far from anything that I could understand. She seemed to hate her friends, though we're told she likes them. She's dating someone she doesn't seem to like. While I was interested in the thriller aspect of the story, the way it was told just didn't hold my interest, especially when the other aspects of the plot didn't seem all that cohesive with it.

Title: Falling Kingdoms
Author: Morgan Rhodes
I don't even know how to express what I thought of what little I managed to read of this book. I rarely find myself wondering what on Earth people saw in a book, but I did with this one. The characters fall flat, the writing doesn't paint a picture of the world- instead it bangs you over the head with descriptions that would be at home in a poorly written geography textbook. There is no subtly to the storytelling, and overall, this book really didn't capture my interest. I was less bored and more actively irritated when I tried to read it.