Last month I posted my book list that recapped my top 5 Most Pleasantly Surprising Reads of 2024 in a similar format as my listing for 2023. I also posted my top 5 Most Disappointing Reads of 2023 which leads into the topic of today’s blog and book list which is my 2024 Most Disappointing Reads!
Compared to 2023, I read nearly the double the number of books in 2024 and therefore had many more options to choose from. Also unlike 2023’s list that all had very low overall ratings of around 1-star, my list for 2024 is a bit different and has a greater variety of ratings and overall impressions. To recap the intro from last year’s Disappointing Reads list, books listed here are not necessarily the worst or least favorite books I read in 2024 (that would be The Excitements by C.J. Wray), but are those that either failed to meet whatever expectation I had for them going in or had a notable flaw that unexpectedly severely impacted my enjoyment. This year’s pick also omit reads that I knew ahead of time that I probably wasn’t going to enjoy (a notable example by Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). Simply looking at the books chosen, this year’s list is far more unexpected and WILL include spoilers as several of these disappointing books made the list due to their plot or execution of the story. So with that preface aside, let’s get into it!
#5) How To Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin
If I’m being completely honest, I don’t know if this one was truly that disappointing considering I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another going in, but I feel obligated to include it as it is unfortunately one of my most-liked 1-star reviews on Goodreads. I had originally found this book from an book trade upcoming release listing for mystery novels, and it was also a finalist pick for Jimmy Fallon’s read-along bookclub (it did not win the final vote, perhaps for a good reason). With a compelling premise on paper and a pretty strong opening prologue chapter, How To Solve Your Own Murder seemed like it was off to a great start. However, almost immediately the tone, writing style, and dialogue tempered my expectations and it just kept getting worse and worse as the story progressed.
I think this novel was meant to appeal to cozy mystery readers but I’m not entirely convinced due to the presence of dead bodies, toxic relationships, and familial betrayal that can be less than cozy to read to some. But for more hardcore mystery readers, the investigation is laughably awful, entirely unrealistic, and frankly doesn’t really make sense. The characters are likewise thinly developed and far too numerous to be memorable, paired with really mediocre and repetitive dialogue. To make matters worse, this novel also utilizes the increasingly common split perspective narrative setup but the two characters quickly blend together, despite the perspective being set decades apart and its narrators having very different backgrounds and personalities. I normally try to balance out my negative criticisms with some positive highlights, but I truly felt How To Solve Your Own Murder had no redeeming qualities worth mentioning. That being said, while it certainly was one of my least favorite and most baffling reads of 2024, this one is ranked #5 because it seemed pretty questionable early-on vs becoming a later train-wreck like other books ranked below. And while I was intrigued based on Jimmy Fallon’s potential pick and industry book list reviewers promoting it, it had far less hype than some of my other picks that had a much bigger following.
#4) Happy Medium by Sarah Adler
Oh Sarah Adler, your books bring me so much grief it’s almost pretty funny. Sarah Adler’s books are primarily romcom reads that attempt to crossover into more ambitious and harder-hitting dramedy territory. On paper, they look so compelling and have genius concepts. Both of her two novels that I’ve read have such fantastic premises (Mrs. Nash’s Ashes in particular could’ve been a standout homerun), and Adler has really good comedic timing and slapstick humor in her stories. However, I’ve been so severely disappointed by her books when it comes to their more mature and ambitious character drama elements. While I technically found Mrs. Nash’s Ashes to be a more disappointing read overall due to its more nuanced and personal premise, I chose to go with Happy Medium as my Sarah Adler pick for this list due to how quickly and impressively it implodes and screws-up it’s own premise at the last minute. I found both books to have poor endings, but Mrs. Nash’s Ashes at least attempted to go with an ambitious, though ultimately misdirected conclusion. Happy Medium on the other hand, shocked me at how lazy it was with its ending.
I was actually kind of vibing and enjoying Happy Medium for most of my read. Featuring a highly comical and refreshing con artist as a main character paired off with a distrusting yet sentimental rural farmer, the romance and comedy elements were quite good! While I felt Mrs. Nash’s Ashes swung wildly back and forth in terms of quality and pacing, Happy Medium felt far more consistent, polished, and purposefully-placed, and I was preparing my book review to highlight how much Adler improved between her first and second release. And then the last fourth of the book tossed all that out the window. While I was genuinely enjoying Gretchen’s character growth and slow appreciation for a lifestyle and comradery she never had before, the book’s downfall was how it handled the farm’s resident ghost and his inability to leave the farm. Gretchen decides to sacrifice herself and her future in order to free Charlie from his supposed family curse, and while her self-reflection and internal monologues were unnecessarily over-dramatic and had some gaps in character logic, they at least had a narrative purpose. And then Happy Medium pulls the rug out from under the reader in one of the most anti-climatic, and honestly pretty insulting manner by saying the curse wasn’t really a thing and Everett was free to go without Charlie or Gretchen being trapped at the family farm. To say I was pissed when I read this concluding plot twist reveal is an understatement. I was highly interested to see how how Adler would resolve this perplexing conflict and she copped out of it in possibly the worst way possible. While I ended up rating Happy Medium 3-stars based on the rest of the book’s general entertainment value, I’m still so unimpressed with Sarah Adler’s books. They have such amazing premises but I’ve since realized that she simple does not have the finesse and ambition to actually pull them off properly. Does her upcoming 2025 novel Finders Keepers also sound like a fun read? You bet! Am I going to subject myself to another potential disappoint again and question when Sarah Adler will ever get it right? That remains to be seen-
#3) All This & More by Peng Sheperd
While the first two entries on this list had pretty clear drawbacks that I could write an essay critiquing, Peng Sheperd’s All This & More is an entirely different experience. While avoiding any obvious or major issues on paper, All This & More also doesn’t necessarily do anything particularly well and is a mostly inoffensive and bland speculative fiction story. However, this novel makes the list due to having a great premise, decent writing style, yet demonstrating that none of that matters if your main character fights the plot and is impossible to root for at every opportunity.
I love time/history-altering scifi stories and the concept of taking a reality-manipulating mechanism and putting it within the context of reality tv is an excellent premise. That this history-shifting story is also presented in a pick your own adventure format makes it even better. Yet all of that doesn’t matter when All This & More‘s main character is a stick in the mud. Now to be clear, I have no problems with books that have conservative, quiet, or shy characters. However, Sheperd makes the unfortunate mistake of having Marsh physically and audibly question the merit and choice of changing her history every single time it comes up, and then severely overreacting to quite minimal changes (despite the fact that she volunteered to be in this position in the first place). The character narration and what Marsh fixates over feels all wrong and sucks the life out of what little excitement her past events had to begin with. The potential branching storylines and options for Marsh to alter her life are also quite baffling, one of which involves Marsh agreeing to have a threesome outing, what was Marsh or by extension Sheperd thinking?! (a threesome that doesn’t even actually happen should you choose that option I might add). While the life changes should be compelling material, the actual content presented is contrived and overdone territory that just drags on and on. Worse, the pick your own adventure presentation feels like a false front as all of the options circle back to the same story with little influence on the trajectory of Marsh’s life. Additionally a prominent branch split option in the back-half of the story lead to the exact same three endings. And all three endings are brief, underwhelming, and left me questioning why I wasted my time reading nearly 500 pages of monotonous or baffling material. The story also doesn’t even answer the core premise of what chrysalis is and how the changes occur, and its two most interesting characters/storylines are both rushed and split, meaning you’ll only experience one of the two best parts of the book unless you read through each different route (I do not recommend it, it was not worth the time and effort). If all else fails, reading All This & More gave me newfound appreciation for Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library as this novel demonstrated just how underwhelming and disappointing this life-altering storyline can be when poorly executed.
#2) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Easily the most well-known book on my 2024 Most Disappointing reads list, this one I will openly admit is mostly a subjective opinion and personal reading taste. That being said, Project Hail Mary really really was not to my reading taste and I was downright baffled at the popularity it has. Nearly all of my intense criticism of this novel actually has little to do with Project Hail Mary‘s story itself, instead having everything to do with Andy Weir’s writing. While the science fiction and physics theories are well-researched and creatively implemented, almost none of that matters when the tone of the book is just a geeky scientists yelling and overreacting to just about everything for nearly 500 pages. While I found Ryland Grace’s constant nerdgasm and narration refreshing at first, it quickly wore out its welcome and just keeps going on and on. The story also utilizes a split timeline, with the past timeline recapping the events that lead up to Project Hail Mary‘s space launch.
I’m clearly in the minority based on how many raving reviews this book has and it’s impressively high 4.5 average Goodreads rating, but I was completely shocked by how poor the storytelling was for me. There isn’t much of a story in the present-tense which is mostly Ryland putting out fires and freaking out about everything, yet the events in the past somehow comes off even worse. The characters are shallow, stereotypical to the point of being mildly offensive, and the dialogue is just poor across the board. If you start looking at the story more closely, there are also numerous plot holes everywhere and the ending felt so contrived and “conveniently” happy ever after, it was almost insulting considering the pages it took to get there. The science elements and Ryland’s interactions with Rocky slightly save Project Hail Mary from being a complete disaster for me, but overall this was very disappointing and unpleasant read (it was also very difficult for me to even get a library rental copy of it, with the long lead-up further heightening the letdown). When I finished reading it, I thought for sure it would take the top spot of this list. Yet somehow there was a novel that was even more shocking to me in all the wrong ways-
#1) Never Lie by Freida McFadden
No, it was not the writing style that read like an amateur work that was the biggest issue. No, it wasn’t the poorly developed and honestly questionable character logic that plagued the story left and right. No, it wasn’t the bizarre narration that chose to focus on the characters boots, fur coat (on multiple occasions within the same chapter I might add), or the *swoons written exactly like that in the book. Never Lie is uniformly pretty mediocre across the board, yet they all pale in comparison to the biggest reason why it earns its place as the #1 Most Disappointing Read of 2024 for me.
That would be its ridiculous and wild plot twist that destroys all semblance of credibility regarding the book’s premise. Never Lie‘s setup follows a young couple who get stranded out in the middle of a snowstorm for what was supposed to be a real-estate house viewing, and is told in the first-person present tense perspective of newlywed Tricia. She repeatedly narrates how scared she is at being stranded in an unknown house with her husband, haunted by the history with the house, and the mystery involving its owner, psychiatrist Dr. Adrienne Hale. Where everything goes wrong is when the book reveals that Tricia was actually one of Dr. Adrienne Hale’s past problematic clients who helped her get rid of Hale’s problem and then proceeded to off her in the same house that she was lost in. It literally throws the entire story’s credibility out the window like a “teehee, gotcha!” moment, written exactly like that. Now this could’ve been an outstanding plot twist had the story been written in a 3rd person tense or alternatively written from the perspective of Tricia’s husband Ethan, both presentations could use the narrator’s limited knowledge to the plot twist’s advantage. However, the 1st person perspective simply does not work with the plot twist at all and outright conflicts with almost every detail up to that point. There were already countless plot holes and issues with the story up to that point, but they all pale in comparison to how utterly ridiculous that reveal is. The fact that this grievous error is also on top of objectively awful writing makes me question how Never Lie made it past the editing stage. Without question, it is my most disappointing read of 2024 and because I am a strange individual, I’m highly interested to read another one of McFadden’s novels to see if they’re all this terrible, you know, for science or something-