I enjoy disliking things, and it doesn’t bother me one bit to disapprove of something that everyone else likes. But thanks to my iron-clad 50-page rule, it’s actually fairly rare these days for me to finish a book and be deeply disappointed by it. Usually, that means a lackluster book by an author I normally like, an overhyped bestseller that fails to live up to the buzz, or a book that blew the ending so hard that it retroactively ruins the entire story. Allow me to give you a guided tour of the most notable books that I wasted my time on in 2014.

BelzharBelzhar
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Somehow, it’s even more tragic when a book starts with an interesting premise and then completely blows it with a ridiculous Big Reveal. Jam (!) Gallahue is a broken-hearted teen who gets sent to a boarding school in Vermont for emotionally fragile students. Initially apathetic, Jam gets drawn in despite herself when she’s chosen for a very special writing class. You see, the teacher gives them MAGIC DIARIES to write in, which take the kids to a dream world where they can interact, sort of, with the spirits/memories of their lost loved ones. Slowly, we learn about each character’s personal struggles with guilt, sorrow, and self-recrimination, as the kids form new bonds of friendship and trust. Finally, Jam’s big, mysterious, ominously-hinted-at secret finally comes out… and, thanks to a truly unnecessary twist, it’s so silly and overblown compared to the other characters’ actual tragedies that the whole thing collapses. Oh, and the dumb title is a play on “The Bell Jar,” for no good reason.

the bone clocksThe Bone Clocks
Author: David Mitchell
When I put this on my fall 2014 to-read list, I knew that David Mitchell’s books tend to be uneven — I loved Cloud Atlas, but The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet felt about a thousand autumns too long. The Bone Clocks mimics Cloud Atlas in that there are six sections set in different time periods (ranging from the 1980s to an apocalyptic near-future) and involving intersecting stories, but the central character, Holly Sykes, is so passive that I can hardly call her a protagonist, let alone a heroine. Holly, who has always heard strange voices that she calls “the radio people,” runs away from home as a teenager and becomes caught up in a battle between supernatural factions as to whether human souls should be gobbled up as food for immortal beings. Many readers complained that the final, apocalyptic section was one big boring denouement after all the action was over, but that was the only setting that actually grabbed me, with cascades of man-made environmental disasters leading to scarcity and the breakdown of civilization. I’ll still read whatever Mitchell writes next — or at least the first 50 pages.

Book of Strange New ThingsThe Book of Strange New Things
Author: Michel Faber
In the near future, a corporation called USIC has built a scientific colony on a distant planet, known as Oasis. Peter Leigh is sent as the latest missionary to preach to the decidedly non-human natives, who have enthusiastically embraced Christianity. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Peter’s wife Beatrice sends alarming news of disasters and a world falling apart, but Peter’s religious obsession drives a wedge into their once-strong marriage. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Too bad we’re marooned on Oasis, where nothing happens, while all the action is on Earth. Both the characters and the narrative voice seem oddly blunted and flat; people stumble around in a daze, uttering cryptic hints about their dark secrets, but it goes nowhere. I would retitle this The Book of Boring Self-obsessed People.

broken monstersBroken Monsters
Author: Lauren Beukes
Back when I reviewed the book trailer, Broken Monsters looked like a weird, delightfully creepy paranormal thriller that would be a ton of fun. Instead, it starts off as a more or less standard serial-killer police procedural before taking a sudden third-act hairpin turn into magical horror. Detective Gabriella Versado investigates a series of murders where a child’s body is sewn to an animal’s body to make a chilling chimera. Meanwhile, her irritating teen daughter Layla gets caught up in some completely implausible child-predator-unmasking scheme, and a grating self-styled new-media “journalist” does his best to obstruct the investigation and get “the scoop.” Everyone is deeply annoying, and the supernatural element is so confusing that it’s not really clear what actually happens during the climactic showdown. The end.

CaliforniaCalifornia
Author: Edan Lepucki
In a post-apocalyptic world, young married couple Cal and Frida have fled to the woods outside Los Angeles to live in an abandoned shack. They get by with occasional help from a neighboring family and a traveling peddler, but they’re all too aware of how marginal their existence is. Cal wants to avoid people and fend for themselves, but (whiny, annoying) Frida hears rumors of “Communities,” independent city-states where the wealthy still enjoy civilization. This bleak parable of class war and the 1% has some interesting world-building, but the action lags, and it relies too heavily on extremely unlikely coincidences to connect characters. For some better alternatives, try our Apocalypse 2014 reading list.

the paying guestsThe Paying Guests
Author: Sarah Waters
I thought I knew what to expect from a Sarah Waters novel: a suspenseful, twist-filled thriller with a historical setting, gay/lesbian main characters, and complex layers of double-crosses. But this one had far too much courtroom hand-wringing and not nearly enough salacious trickery for my taste. Old maid Frances Wray and her widowed mother, living in genteel poverty in post-WWI London, reluctantly decide to take in lodgers to make ends meet. Enter Leonard and Lilian Barber, a brash, working-class party couple. Despite their differing backgrounds, Frances and Lilian quickly become friends, but when their friendship deepens into romance, it seems there’s no way they can ever be truly together — unless they’re willing to risk everything. Naturally, their bold plan goes horribly wrong. The second half of the book is a drawn-out courtroom drama where nothing much happens, while the abrupt yet ambiguous ending resolved nothing and felt jarringly sudden. Overall, a big snooze and way too long for such a minimal payoff. Read our full review.

We Were LiarsWe Were Liars
Author: E. Lockhart
You know who’s a liar? Anyone who told you this was a good book that you should take time out of your life to read. All right, so Cadence Stanton is the teenage daughter of an eccentric East Coast old-money family who all gather on their PRIVATE ISLAND off Cape Cod each summer to light cigars with $100 bills. Cadence and her three young cousins are the “Liars,” an inseparable gang during the summer who somehow don’t stay in touch throughout the year. After a serious, unexplained accident when Cadence is 15, she spends the next two years in a fog of migraines, medication, and amnesia. Two years later, Cadence returns to the island, struggling to piece together what happened during that terrible summer. I would have liked this more if it didn’t attempt to pull off a bait-and-switch “twist” ending.

For books from 2014 that we actually liked:

Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014
Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2014
Top 10 YA Books of 2014

Stephanie Perry
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