 Hey guys it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about one I've been let down by my favorite authors. So I have a stack of books right here, books that are written by some of my all-time favorite authors that let me down and then I wanted to talk about that because it's been happening to me a lot lately and it got me thinking about that just in general about honestly how much harder it is to read a book that um not just that because if a book is hyped and you expect a lot from it then it's sad when it lets you down but if it's a book by an author that you love therefore it's not just you know notoriety or hyper the word of mouth that makes you think it's going to be good it's your own experience that leads you to believe that it's good and it also means that you know that this author is capable of better it's not that you've read this thing by them and you're like oh just kidding that wasn't so good they're not such a great author you know they're a good author so you know they can do better which makes it honestly for me that much harder to read something because it feels like there's why like there's no excuse for this i know you've done better i've seen it i've loved it this is why i love your work and how did you mess up why did you mess up so unfortunately i do have a stack here of one two three six books that are by all-time favorite authors of mine that they're not like necessarily one star reads i think yeah one of them is um but they all let me down and i'm sad and we're gonna talk about how they let me down and why i think that happened because i have theories okay i started organizing the stack by size so that's also the order in which that i'm gonna talk about these because that's the easiest way to do it in my opinion so on top because it's the tiniest is Stardust by Neil Gaiman um i don't actually talk about him that often on my channel um probably just because i've already read all of his work so it's not like what i'm currently reading and he hasn't really had anything new come out since Norris mythology so i haven't had a new book by anticipate or discuss so Neil Gaiman is one of my all-time favorite authors if not my all-time favorite author i thought sometimes i say that and then i struggle with that because there's other authors i love as well but he's he's out there i adore Neil Gaiman Stardust i did not adore so when i tell people that Neil Gaiman is great and have they read anything by Neil Gaiman i have unfortunately often heard from people they're like um i read Stardust and i didn't like it and i'm like me neither you should still read Neil Gaiman because i don't feel like it is uh a good example of his is writing his style or his work um and a lot of people who love game and love Stardust so i'm not saying that it's impossible that everyone universally agrees that this isn't what you know his best work some people i don't and i don't think even people who do like it and like Gaiman in general i don't think that they would disagree um with me saying that it is very different from his other work it's not even if you like it it's not a good example of what his style is like in general so what i love about Neil Gaiman generally is his ability to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary to take like mundane objects and imbue them with mystery and meaning and significance and magic so it does stand to reason that his attempt to write something that is an entirely fairy tale where everything is magical isn't really his forte which is what happened with Stardust Stardust is basically a fairy tale as told by Neil Gaiman and you know there's a lot of magic in it and there's there's a lot of whimsical interesting things going on that it feels really cold and it feels really empty to me so while he can take you know a new york subway and turn it into the most magical thing i have ever read um a story that's entirely built on magic just suddenly lost all of its heart all of its significance all of its meaning so i don't exactly know how that happened or why that happened but i think there is something to that the fact that his the magic in his writing is often him delving beneath the surface of something and this glimpse into something larger and greater and more magical than meets the eye but when everything meeting the eye is magic it's not magical anymore i don't know how else to say it it's sort of uh the magical equivalent of the way that hitchcock viewed suspense that anything that he shows you is not going to be nearly as terrifying as whatever he's not showing you and that's sort of true of Neil Gaiman's writing the fact that he's given you enough pieces to make you wonder and make you feel like everything around you is more than it seems but Stardust is all of the more than it seems part without that surface level hiding it you are now on the magic side of things everything is magic now so there's no mystery it's not interesting anymore and i didn't really connect with the characters it was it was fine it wasn't bad but it wasn't magical for a book that's entirely about magic it wasn't at all magical to me which is a weird thing to say but i think that's why and that's why it let me down next up i have one that i have actually a lot of feelings about so this might be like the longest section of this video um and that is phoenix unbound by grace draven this book is her first traditionally published book as far as i know that's my understanding of the situation with this so i don't know how much that may or may not have played into why this failed i don't think that it has anything to do with what i didn't like um it's possible that that had some effect maybe a line editor or something that she didn't work with before i i don't think so though i doubt it so if you've never heard of grace draven i am a huge fan of her book radiance but i've also enjoyed pretty much everything in hers that i've read um i didn't love master of crows that's my least favorite but it was fine better than this and entreat me which is her beauty and the beast retelling is also very good and i enjoyed it a lot radiance i have read like four times in the last year it's not a very long book i think it's around 300 pages maybe less so it's not like i've reread a tome but i really really love it and all that to say like i adore that book specifically but her writing in general hasn't really let me down that's my favorite which is why i read it the most but i've enjoyed her writing and i fully expected to once again enjoy this and i was shocked by how lacking this was so the reason that i love grace draven's writing um she writes romantic fantasy or fantasy romance or i don't know exactly what order you're supposed to say that um which is not really something that i read very often because in my experience it's not like grace draven i really if every fantasy romance romance fantasy um author wrote like grace draven i'd read that shit out of that but i think she writes characters really beautifully really believably the relationships that she writes about they feel very human and they feel they don't feel contrived which is one of the things that i dislike or is is perhaps a misconception or an assumption that i've made wrongly but that's sort of how i my experience with romantic fantasy outside of her has been that everything feels extremely contrived petty filled with unnecessary drama a lot of stuff that i'm just like i don't i don't like this i don't like these characters i think they're being stupid and selfish or the situation is so painfully unbelievable or so insta-lovy or insta-less and i just i don't like it grace draven writes in a way that i feel like i really know these people their relationship their faith in each other their love for each other is believable the she paints a world fairly simply relative to other fantasy that i read because i like to read you know epic high and grimdark fantasy but she does world building in a very she does it really well she gives you just enough of the world to make you feel like you are in another world so she does it well so when i read it it's an immersive experience where i like the characters i like the world i believe everything that i'm reading i'm into it i like it you know it's it's good it's well done it's well constructed this enix unbound from the outset the premise of it i was told this was like her grittiest and darkest and most complex and emotionally layered and hardest to read kind of thing so i was like okay this is gonna be dark the premise would certainly make me think that it should be and it wasn't as dark as it needed to be so i don't either she should have had a different premise if she wasn't willing to delve or she should have delved so in the outset of this book we have two characters if this is a hate to love story which is already not my favorite but i was like grace draven does write well and i'm sure if anyone could write hate to love in a way that i'll buy it or love it it'll be grace draven and honestly it wasn't the hate to love aspect of it that i disliked that part of it was well it was just as uh that's everything else that happened it she wrote about two people who have extremely tortured backgrounds extremely tortured past the main character the the girl um she is imbued with the sort of magic that enables her to there's just sort of like it's like gladiator meets the dothraki is the sort of world's colliding in this book and there is these gladiatorial sort of fights and female sacrifices in the capital and the city is supposed to give you know uh i don't know she has to be a virgin but give a young woman to be sacrificed for this thing once a year but our main character or our main female character her magic enables her to step into the pyre and come away unburned and she can like change her appearance with magic so she can go over and over again every single year and be their sacrifice um so that no one actually has to die because it doesn't kill her it's rough to do that because like women who are about to be sacrificed usually get used as sex objects and being burned alive it does hurt her even though she doesn't die so it's a really rough thing for her to have to do every single year and so uh our main male character is a guy who's like an enslaved gladiator type dude and he's been that for like 10 years or something but he can see through her glamour and realizes that that's what she's doing that she's the same person coming year after year and as a gladiator he's been raped and abused physically and emotionally for like full on 10 years and we get to see that as well in the beginning him being raped and sexually abused and he basically makes a deal with her to escape and then basically kidnaps her because he needs her for uh when he goes back to his people which are sort of the dothraki style people um to convince them to take him back and like blah blah blah blah so she hates him for kidnapping her after that and then she gets to know him on the road and whatever and they fall in love as you'd expect I don't think that's a huge spoiler that's the setup and that setup is fine like that's an interesting setup and there's so much emotional depth to those situations so much to explore and to grapple with but neither of these characters acts in a way that it's believable that they are scarred and triggered so either don't give these characters these dark backstories because you're not willing to go there or you need to go there you need to show them wrestling with these inner demons which they don't they snipe at each other and hate each other but that's for the hate to love part the hate part of the hate to love and then when they start when they're into the love part of stuff there's no issues whatsoever with physical intimacy it's fine they're into each other it's insta-lovy and it's fine I'm sorry if you're going to write about a character a male character that's been raped and abused if this had been written the other way around where a female had been raped and abused her whole not her whole life but for years and years and she suddenly had no issues with physical intimacy I feel like readers would revolt it the same is true for men I can't buy that this male character who I was told by the narrative and also shown by the narrative was being raped and abused a lot for years he has no problems with physical intimacy none this isn't triggering for him it's not weird for him it's not an issue at all not even a little bit I what was the point of that dark backstory then if we're not actually going to explore that if it's not going to be something that they have to deal with and I was shocked because Grace Draven's writing in general what I've loved about her writing in the past is how much the the characters feel fully fleshed out whatever their backstories are does come and become involved in what they're dealing with how they react to things it plays a part in the foundation of their relationship in fact some of their dark backstories she's written less dark backstories and had the characters grapple with it more in her other books here these are really dark backstories and the characters are like fine with it they they play lip service to the fact that they are tortured and abused but it doesn't affect them in any real way and for that reason I found it lacking in depth and poorly done and kind of offensive it's it's like their tortured backstories are a token at that point if you're not actually going to write about a tortured couple with tortured issues then then why give them those backstories just don't you could have had a hate to love where he's just a gladiator and that's all he's been where he's been fighting a while because that's rough but if you're going to give him the backstory of the rape and abuse you need to actually explore it otherwise don't do it okay next up is one that didn't let me down nearly as much as that so calm down the next one I have is The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie this is one of the books in the first law world which I adore as you know however this book didn't have a plot there was so much about it that was the characteristic quintessential Joe Abercrombie so there was things about it that I really really loved like individual moments of brilliance and jokes that were fantastically written and like some excellent character development that he did within this story so he did a good job but like the the craft of it was still excellent but there was no plot I don't know what the point of this book was except its pointlessness this book is about a battle which um even though these I guess are meant to be stand-alones outside of the first law trilogy I don't think you'd really at all understand what's going on here if you hadn't read the first law trilogy you'd have no context for this having read the first law trilogy I knew who the players were and kind of the larger context of why this battle is happening but this is just like multiple days of battle and it's like the parts of the book are divided that way it's like day one day two um and you get multiple perspectives for different sides of the battle so you're not just following one side of it you're not rooting for either side you're familiar with the sides from the first law trilogy otherwise again I think you really wouldn't give a shit and that's it that's the whole book is that battle and all the battle decisions that are being made or not being made good decisions bad decisions political backstabbing going on and battling and then it's over it's literally that's the whole book like if this was the middle book of a trilogy I would be like that's a bit much to devote to one battle but at least I mean I guess that establishes the middle bit where like the part before was all the politics and the part after his resolution and this was the battle part but this is just sort of by itself this isn't the middle book of a trilogy it's just a book about a battle multiple days of battle so he writes the action very well he writes the reactions of people in battle and how people who've never been in battle before how they're reacting to it people who have been in battle for years and years how they're reacting to it the carnage the emotions of it the politicking he does it all really really well as he always does and the banter the snark it's fantastic it's great I just don't get the point of this book and even the ex-joe Abercrombie has a tendency to do that where like sometimes the point of something is that it's pointlessness that sometimes life doesn't have a meaning but there's usually a story something happening so yeah I just I don't get it I don't get why this was written if this was shorter and part of a trilogy or if there was more to it than just the battle something but it's literally that it's like if somebody wrote about the battle of helmsdeep but didn't write the rest of the lord of the rings like just the battle of helmsdeep and you'd be like why I really like the battle of helmsdeep but it's because that there's context and it's leading to a thing it's not just the battle I just don't get it I don't get it maybe the back of it just says three men one battle no heroes yeah that's the whole book you don't have to read it that's what happens in it a battle lots of people die that's it I don't get it the next book is city of ghosts by the e-swap or victoria swap because she writes as victoria when it's for kids this is the middle grade book and this is an arc that I received at y'all west two years ago a year well the previous y'all west not y'all west this year and I expected because it's Schwab for it to be the way the sort of Neil Gaiman writes middle grade because I don't really read middle grade very much but I do like middle grade by Neil Gaiman because he writes for children as though they were adults with just a smaller vocabulary it's still just as dark and complex it's just told in a way that is accessible for children so Schwab writes kind of in a dark way and she's friends with Neil Gaiman so I had high hopes for this this would be sort of game and ask that it's yes it's for kids but it's going to be dark and interesting and kind of creepy this is just boring it was really boring it felt like a Saturday morning show that I might have watched when I was a kid and it wouldn't have been my favorite but it comes on after my favorite so I watch it too these fellows a girl who can see ghosts and discovers that she should probably be trying to help those ghosts to sort of transition to the afterlife and like there's a lot of her running around Scotland because her parents are like their job is like a ghost hunting tv show and so while they're filming she's actually seeing ghosts they don't know she can so there's some fun antics and the ghost thing is kind of I guess kind of interesting it just didn't really feel like it had a soul or substance there's just sort of some adventures some antics some funny moments but it just just wasn't anything there and I wanted to like I was just really really bored and I wasn't bored it wasn't necessarily that it was childish it just like was nothing to it so it was it was fine but I was really for a book about a girl in Scotland with ghosts it was incredibly boring next up I have a book that y'all already know how I feel about so this is going to be quick or you can go watch the video where I talk about it at length a roaring rising I still cannot believe that they wrote this book I'm not going to go too in depth because I talked about this book for like 40 minutes in my review of it so go watch that if you're interested yeah I have read their other work and loved it I have read their other sci-fi work and loved it this book was garbage there was nothing I liked about this book literally nothing and I hated it even more for the fact that it's written by authors that I love and I know they can do better this had been written by anyone else I'd have been like yikes to that never reading anything by them again I am going to continue reading their work well not a sequel to this but they're good authors so I know they can do better than this and I was stunned appalled and mildly offended by this whole book there is something that I didn't talk about in my long review that I guess I can bring up now one of the characters in this book we are told is a sociopath and she is one of the pob characters and she's one of our heroes and the treatment of her in this book is offensive because this is the future this is set in the future and this treatment of sort of cognitive diversity of mental like I don't know what the word for it is and I probably come I'm sounding really ignorant right now but like just because somebody's like on the spectrum you know that they may or may not be autistic or something like that the fact that is she's written off as being a sociopath and that's pretty much what the characters say about her and that's how she's treated in her pob chapters are like one sentence I mean I that's I don't think we did that anymore I thought we had moved beyond just labeling people and putting them in boxes and being so offensive like I just I'm just I'm shocked there's just one more thing I hate about it if you want to see everything else I hate about it go watch that full review but and last but not least is hang of scars by Lee Bartugo I didn't hate this but I didn't love it and the more I thought about it since reading it the more I feel like it was a mistake to return to sort of the Grisha trilogy part of the Grisha verse it felt like retrogress and it felt like when Disney decided to give Jack Sparrow his own trilogy you're like no no because the Nikolai Lansov duology is that Nikolai Lansov worked as a side character he was a great side character an interesting side character and you left the audience wanting more going back and giving him his own duology feels like Jack Sparrow being the main character and you're like just kidding this does not work because part of what made him special was the fact that you had him sparingly and he was sort of enigmatic but for a book about Nikola he was not actually in it that much and seeing you know behind the curtain of his internal monologue and his feelings about things it wasn't exciting or interesting it just kind of removed the mystique the book wasn't really about him it was about Zoya and Nina and it just felt like returning to a world that like there was nothing more to tell and we were just going back there for fanservice I feel like there's so much more to the Grisha verse that Lee Bartugo could write about if she she moved on from the Grisha trilogy and went on to Ketterdam wrote Six of Crows and wrote about this whole new cast of characters in a new part of her world so I would like to have seen her continue to do that we can move now to Shu Han we can move now to Novia Zem there's other parts of her world that we can explore and Nikolai can show up again other characters can have cameos if she wanted to release maybe a novella about Nikolai that'd be fine because people love Nikolai so if you wanted to do a little bit of that sure I'm on board with that but this felt like just going back for fanservice for no reason I didn't feel like there was a story here to tell there wasn't and like forcing there to be one is what it felt like and she did a lot of things really well there was parts of this book that were five star classic Bartugo good job I cried a little bit in it like it was a lot if it was well written but I just I didn't feel like this book needed to be written I don't feel like it needed to happen and I feel like it kind of takes away from some of the magic of Nikolai I just assumed Nikolai had been left alone he can remain the enigmatic privateer prince this didn't help his story so yeah those are some of the books written by some of my favorite authors that let me down so let me know in the comments down below if your favorite authors have ever let you down when and how they did it how you felt about it how you felt about the books that I just listed if you have read them let me know all the things I post videos on Saturdays so like and subscribe and I'll see you next Saturday bye