Book Reviews: When books go wrong

I usually post reviews of books I either rate highly or think had strong points of interest even if they didn't quite stick the landing, but I thought it might be fun to look at four books I have started but not finished over the past six months because I just did like them at all. DNFs are rare for me, I tend to stubbornly hang in even if a book is meh, but these four broke me, all in very different ways.

This was a DNF at 52%. The reason I stopped: I found Langley's approach to document analysis ahistorical, naïve, and almost laughably partisan. I guess I should not have been surprised, given how strongly Langley feels about Richard, and it's not to cast any shade on her earlier massive achievement of discovering Richard's body, but this book, and the project it reports on, is seriously flawed.

Discovering new documentary references that may refer to the princes (or to the pretenders) in Europe is interesting indeed, but the interpretation she puts on these fragments is in no way supportable or supported. To give just one example - she cites a receipt for the supply of some military arms for a campaign sponsored by Margaret of Burgundy in favour of "Edward", and extrapolates that to an assertion that this proves that Edward V (the elder of the princes) must have been alive and moving around at that time. 

It doesn't take a genius to recognise that it proves absolutely nothing of the sort. At the *most*, it might suggest that Margaret (the boys' aunt) *believed* the young man fronting the campaign to be her elder nephew, but it doesn't even really prove that, as Margaret was a canny political operator who hated Henry VII and was perfectly capable of backing a pretender just for shits and giggles.

All in all, I ended up so irritated with the length of the bows being drawn that it's moved me a lot closer to thinking that Richard definitely did kill the kids (or order them to be killed). As I was ambivalent-leaning-towards-Ricardianism before reading this, thanks to Josephine Tey (if you haven't read The Daughter of Time, do so, it's fantastic), this is no mean feat. My position going in to the book was that we'll never know for sure but that it was possible that one or both of the kids might have died of natural causes (and Richard been too fearful of accusations of murder to publicise it), or even just barely possible that the younger one, Richard of Shrewsbury, might have escaped. But watching the painful straw-clutching in this book, and how little actually comes of it, I now think that Occam's Razor favours Richard-as-killer instead.

This one was a DNF at 55%.

I started this just after Christmas and I tried valiantly throughout January to get inspired to finish it. However, I finally accepted it's not going to happen, and listed it as my first DNF for 2025.

Was this book a super stinker? No. It has a lot of skill and some big ideas, but was, to me, a dense, opaque, and unengaging story with a bunch of confusing barely-written characters that were impossible to care about. It seemed to be substituting shock value in some ways for exposition, which never sits well with me as a reader, and is was significantly weak on description, which made it feel flat and lifeless.

Bottom line, this is thinky sci fi (which is generally good!) but doesn't give a lot of entry points into the story or indeed enough "story" to carry the book. It wasn't for me, but it might be for someone else.

This one was a DNF at 50% for me, and honestly I struggled to get that far. I kept waiting for it to get good, and hoo boy, *it did not*.

I know a lot of people loved this book (it won its category in the GR awards, which is astonishing to me) but I really, really disliked it. I could belabour the several points as to why, but it mostly comes down to the fact that I think the author did an awful job with her main character, and the mystery part of the plot was painfully pedestrian. 

Nita Prose was clearly writing her MC to be autistic, but I think she really missed the mark in her representation, both infantilising and reifying Molly in a way which made her alternately pitiable and unlikeable. This in itself annoyed me enough that I couldn't read around it, but not to worry, there wasn't much to read around for anyway as the plot was pretty bad.


I begrudgingly DNFed this at 58%, which irritated me as it was on last year's Booker longlist and I always try to read all the longlist books.

Here's why I couldn't get into it:

- Confused and confusing plots

- Paiiiiinfully slow

- Quasi-Victorian language without the corresponding Victorian lit energy

- Didn't care about any of the characters

- Ditto the "mystery", which was so poorly set up that I didn't even realise it was supposed to be a mystery until about the 40% mark

- The musings about life were incredibly vanilla and non-compelling 

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