Top Ten Tuesday: Series I Have Given Up On

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking to series we've tasted and decided not to go back for a second helping of. I don't do a ton of series reading, to be honest, but here are ten books that didn't do it well enough for me to pick up sequels.

Crazy Rich Asians: This series is usually pitched as a frothy delight, and for me, it was a little too frothy. I didn't care enough about any of the characters to feel compelled to continue to follow them.

The Hangman's Daughter: I'm convinced it must have been poor translation that made this book such a dud, because it's got a bunch of sequels and there was nothing I read that made me feel like even one was necessary.

The Paper Magician: This book was fine and made good airplane reading (engaging enough to keep you reading along, but not threatening to make you actually think) but it didn't have the spark that made me want to re-immerse myself in its world.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: I read and loved the original trilogy, but I'm generally not into the idea of a new writer picking up where another left off...and nothing I've read about the quality of the continuation makes me feel any particular regret about this.

Divergent: I thought the first one was alright, but the second one was definitely not good. The final entry was widely panned, so I will be a-okay if I never read it.

The Giver: One of my favorite books as a teenager, I think it told such a good story that the idea of continuing on doesn't feel remotely necessary.

Eragon: I read and really liked the first one when it came out, and then when the second one came out I read like 100 pages and never picked it back up again and can't muster up an interest in getting back into it.

Dune: I know there are people who just can't get enough of this world since there are approximately a billion sequels, but the first one was more than enough for me.

Wicked: I've re-read this book probably a dozen times, I like it that much, and I've liked other work by Maguire, but the idea of reading the sequels has like zero appeal.

Uglies: I read the first and second one and enjoyed them both and then just lost interest entirely.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Series I Have Given Up On

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I Liked In Books I Didn't

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! Not every book is amazing, obviously, but sometimes the most frustrating books that don't really connect is that the characters in them feel like they deserve better. So here are ten characters that stole my heart, even if the rest of the book didn't.

Ma Joad (The Grapes of Wrath): I hated this book so so much after reading it in AP English in high school, but Ma Joad reminds me of Ma Ingalls...ladies who had to deal with a whole lot of bullshit and kept their families together as well as they could through it all. I found literally no one else in this book at all worth my time or attention.

Lucifer (Paradise Lost): I'm convinced that it's meant to be a joke that the devil is by far the most compelling character in this epic poem. But also proof that the villain is usually a better role than the hero.

Jakob (The Hangman's Daughter): The actual hangman's daughter, Magdalena, didn't particularly interest me, but the hangman himself, Jakob, was knowledgeable and thoughtful and enjoyable to read about in this otherwise completely unremarkable book.

Freida Mintz (Charity Girl): This book, about women who were held against their will because they contracted venereal disease, was very uneven, but I rooted for headstrong, independent Freida, who refused to just accept the circumstances that were handed to her.

Hannah Chase (The Sisters Chase): I found Mary, the older sister and the center of the narrative, boring and cliche, but Hannah, first as a sweet kid and then going through the regular rebellion of a teenage girl, was the only thing that got me through this legitimately bad book.

Florence (The Highest Tide): This book did absolutely nothing for me, but Florence, the old lady who takes an awkward, lonely preteen boy under her wing while stubbornly resisting her increasingly obvious need to leave her home, tugged at my heart strings.

Anna O'Donnell (The Wonder): I hated this book, but I loved the sweet, high-spirited girl at the center of a maybe-hoax miracle in rural Ireland in the early 20th century.

The Old Turk (Boys and Girls Together): Almost everyone in this book about five young people whose lives end up converging in New York is awful and the experience of reading it was unpleasant, but the relationship between young Rudy (who becomes such a martyr that he's boring) and his grandfather, the Old Turk, is the lone bright spot. He's so kind and warm-hearted that he seems to be from another universe entirely.

Bernadette Fox (Where'd You Go Bernadette): Bernadette was super smart and completely unwilling to go along with the bullshit in pretty much every aspect of her life. Too bad her garbage husband didn't bother to notice the way his centering of his own needs was slowly destroying her and the book made a joke out of her deterioration.

Venus Black (My Name Is Venus Black): I found Venus herself compelling, but the book as a whole fell very flat for me. Venus deserved a better book.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I Liked In Books I Didn't

Book 43: The Hangman's Daughter

 

"Drums rumbled, cymbals clanged, and somewhere a fiddle was playing. The aroma of deep-fried doughnuts and roasted meat drifted down to the foul-smelling tanners' quarter. Yes, it was going to be a lovely execution."

Dates read: April 16-18, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Whether one agrees with it or not, there's no denying that the death penalty has a long history. Modern day executioners push a vial of potassium chloride into an IV line and, if everything goes right, wait for the heart to stop. But once upon a time, a death sentence meant beheading or hanging (or worse, like drawing and quartering). The Hangman's Daughter begins with a messy execution in 1600s Bavaria (in modern day Germany): young Jakob Kuisl is supposed to be helping his father, the hangman, with a beheading that ends up terribly botched. It's a grim, moody scene that sets the stage for a dark story.

But after the opening prologue described above and the first scene of the story, in which a young boy is rescued from a raging river at great danger, only to be discovered to be already dying from a blow to the head, the plot stalls out considerably. The boy has a crude tattoo that the townspeople decide indicates witchcraft, so the local midwife is promptly accused and imprisoned awaiting torture and execution. Jakob, now himself the hangman (and torturer, and proto-pharmacist...he wears a lot of hats) is convinced of her innocence and joins forces with Simon, the town doctor's son, to figure out who actually committed these crimes (the murder of the first child is followed by the murder of two other children and some property destruction to boot). They're racing against time as hysteria and pressure to convict and burn the witch grow daily.

Where is the titular hangman's daughter in all this, you might ask? Excellent question! Magdalena is very much a secondary part of the story, and the book could easily be rewritten without her character being missed for a second. She's having a love affair with Simon, which we're continually reminded cannot end in marriage because her father's profession renders her unclean. In the scheme of things that don't quite work about this book, though, the title is small change.

While Jakob Kuisl, as a hangman who studies science and works as a healer when he's not torturing and executing, is an interesting character, no one else in the book has much depth. Simon and Magdalena are flat "young lovers", and the various townspeople are even more one-note: officious, or anachronistically fair-minded, or superstitious, no one is a whole person. And speaking of anachronisms, holy smokes is the language in this historical novel completely out of whack. Obviously as a non-German-speaker I read it in translation and I hope the issue was poor translation, otherwise there's just not even an attempt to make language the slightest bit accurate to the time. There's also a ton of repetitious phrasing, of phrases that are unusual enough that it's really noticeable. These writing/translation problems are so jarring that they take you straight out of the world of the novel. Other than that, there are about 100 more pages of the book than there is plot to fill it, so it drags on pretty badly. At the end of the day, it's just not a very good book.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think a book's title character should be a major part of the story?

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Book 43: The Hangman's Daughter