Let me preface…
this by saying I am new to writing reviews and even having a blog to keep track of them. I wrote reviews in my voice, sort of, but I tried to nice them up. Then I studied what others were doing and did my best to imitate the style. In fact, the first four on this site are like that. If you know me, you know that is not how I talk, write, or think. In the future, I’m going to speak in my voice and let that be that. My writing (even reviews) won’t be honest if my voice isn’t genuine, so hitch up your panties. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
There's a book that I hated. I hated it so much that I reviewed it three places within an hour of finishing it. I hated it so damned much, I made this site so that I could again tell the world how much I hated it. Y’all, I made a WHOLE ASS WEBSITE in one day because the rage fueled me to do it. I know you’re curious about the original review, which I went back and edited into the nicey-nice one. For your reading enjoyment, here’s the review I originally wrote:
”I hated this book. Plain and simple— HATED IT.
It starts off promising—Beauty and the Beast retelling? Gothic vibes? Dual-personality MMC? Sign me up. I love me a good monsterfucker moment. But what I got was a steaming pile of self-indulgent nonsense dressed up in velvet prose and bat emojis.
The heroine? Fell in love with Jekyll at first sight. Five minutes after meeting Hyde, she’s getting finger-blasted by him against the kitchen counter like she’s in heat and forgot she has a brain. Ma’am, get a grip. If you’re gonna hoe out, do it with conviction—not confusion and “omg what is happening to me?” Please be so fucking fr. She couldn't even figure out they were the same dude. Like… girl. That’s the same dick. (Of course, she wouldn’t know it was the same dick because they both kept fingering her through the entire book. I’m all for “ladies first”, but that means someone goes second. She just kept getting fingered against a wall or a bookshelf the entire book.
The writing? Baby, it needed an exorcism and an editor. It was all "I walked to the door. I opened the door. I walked through the door." But also somehow had time for gothic, flowery descriptions of shadows on the goddamn floor. We get it. It’s atmospheric. It’s dark. It’s broody. Now do something with it.
Don’t even get me started on the dream sequences. Just when I thought the plot was doing something, boom—they’re fucking. Oh wait. No, they’re not actually fucking. It was a dream. AGAIN. I don't like being emotionally edged by a fake-out orgasm and a fake-out plot twist. Aren’t dream sequences heavily discouraged by writing teachers? I know there are no rules in writing, but dream sequences are overdone and cliché. In this instance, the reader was tricked into thinking one thing when they actually aren’t. Most of the time, dream sequences don’t even mirror real dreams.
And then—AND THEN—the ultimate disrespect: a cliffhanger. After all that nonsense, the author had the audacity to end it like that. I only finished this book because I needed closure. Now I won’t get it because there’s no way I’m reading a second book in this series. If this had been a paperback, I’d have yeeted the fucker into my front yard. What I really wanted to do was to drive to the author’s house and take a dump on her lawn. If she didn’t have a lawn, I would plant grass seed, nurture it, mow it into perfect diagonal stripes, and then hunker over like a great, hairless golden retriever and drop a hot, steaming log that was second only to this book.
The premise? A+ potential. The execution? Straight into the Suck Bucket.
One star for the idea. Another for the unintentional comedy. That’s it. That’s the review.
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So tell me dear reader. Which do you prefer? The naughty or the nice? —HM