Unpredictable and thin
342661
I've purchased the PET N PET waste bags with no design before and they were great. These were slightly cheaper and had a design so I decided to try it. Within my first 3 rolls, I experienced bags that were closed on both ends, bags when torn at the pre-cut line tore into the bag area, and worst of all, bags that were open at both ends. Luckily, when I was using the "open at both end" bags, I was picking up my small dog's poop and close to home, but it was unpleasant, to say the least. These are thinner than their no logo bags too. If your dog has a gooey poop, your hand will feel moist and smell like poop after picking it up. Again, unpleasant.
3832109
It was predictable and two many characters all twisted up in the same plot.  mostly the same thing over and over.
1247672
I'm trying to figure out why this short story got so many positive reviews.  I'm not saying it was terrible, but the entire plot seemed hurried and predictable.  The ending seemed obvious after just a few pages into it and left huge gaping holes into how a person managed to become imprisoned for years without someone coming to her rescue if for no other reason than compassion.  Strange.
1158902
The premise was good and it had more than a fair dose of bad guys.  I kept thinking how would I react to some of these things. The ending although predictable is sitting on the edge reading.
918486
Acacia is slow, either way too predictable or baseless in its unpredictability, and in general poorly written.

While the writer manages to create some vivid imagery he betrays the all important show don't tell rule. From the beginning there is page after page of info dumping. Way more than is reasonable, dialogue is altogether skipped, and summarized- further damning the characters to not being distinct and drawing you out of the moment.

Coinciding with this poor writing choice, is countless lazy deus ex machina's which are introduced without foreshadowing within one chapter then tend to not play a role outside of it. The most obvious is when a certain leader uses a disease introduced earlier in the chapter to ravage his opposition, then goes to narrate to the soon to be dead commander the origins of the disease and that it only works once. I'm not kidding.

The beginning is both crawling and obvious in where its going, introducing archetypal character after archetypal character- Taking hundreds of pages to get back to the first POV character- an assassin- who succeeds just as you knew he would.

Tragically, this first third of the book is actually the best. Despite the narrative being predictable the world has enough depth that one hopes it will become interesting once what you know is going to happen, happens. Instead there is a time skip of nine years where characters you hardly knew are altogether changed in conjunction with being introduced to way too many cultures at once and consequently not caring about any of them.

The final third of the book is slightly better, with stuff actually happening- Unfortunately whats happening are way too many magical elements being introduced, characters the author wants you to like dying to no effect, once interesting villains becoming complete jokes, and strangest of all- A character becoming a villain over the course of a paragraph.
2549877
The language is suberb.  Theplot twists and turns.  The last surprise is a gut wrencher...a massive change of identity for one of the major characters.  He isn't what he thought he was!
4768386
Only "predictable" if you've been paying attention the past 8-9 years, and haven't been watching MSNBC or playing Pokemon Go. If you have, it's probably too boring and doomsday like for you. Go back to sleep. Everything will be just fine.
1645727
This is a combination of:

- a biter-sweet tale of failing marriage & a tentative romance,

- a jocular political satire, and

- an evocation of the spiritual wonders of salmon-fishing and the Yemeni landscape.

It is as if Anita Brookner, Tom Sharpe and Tracy Kidder wrote random chapters of the same story. All this is presented in the form of implausible diary-entries, emails and letters, with half-a-dozen different voices, each telling parts of the same story without adding anything from their own perspective. The mixture of voices, styles, and tones was annoying, the story was thin and the characters were crudely drawn; each point was made in a leaden and obvious way. I wanted to tell the author to go away and rewrite this into one good long book, instead of trying (and failing) to cleverly merge three 'brilliant' short stories.
1004476
It's a bit lightweight.  Doubt I would read others by the same author.  The plot flip flopped character situations a bit too frequently for a good story flow.
4285369
Too predictable.  A side from a few minor twists, there are few surprises.  The author seems to lack imagination.  It mostly reads like a retelling of numerous TV who-dunnits.  It felt too familiar, like I've been through this plot thirty times.
246294
This was a somewhat clever premise. As directed, however, it was far too predictable throughout. No guesswork, no surprises. Campy and simple. My wife loves the movie and I get to watch Amanda.  Fair enough.
3835128
Predictable, poorly written plot changes that were far too perfect to be enjoyable, doesn't delve into the characters nearly as much as it should. This book gets so close to being what you want and then swings away from it to preserve a storybook feel. It's set in a perfect time for heavy emotion and tragedy, yet it skirts over conflicts very quickly. I'm glad it was free. I enjoyed it, but I probably wouldn't pay for this book.
4371179
The writer's style is engaging, but it wears thin after a while, and there isn't enough meat to the story to take up the slack.  The plotting is haphazard, with odd lapses in continuity, and an ending that comes out of nowhere. Reminiscent of Tim Powers work, but without the historical grounding that makes reading powers so rewarding.
1441344
The three stars are solely for the decent performances. Unfortunately the movie is totally predictable - anyone who has seen a revenge thriller will know exactly what is going to happen by the end of the movie almost from the very beginning. Rosamund Pike is lovely to watch and if you liked her in Gone Girl, her character is rather similar here. Even when she is being the wonderful nurse, daughter and friend, you can see a few cracks in the perfect veneer - a little OCD, a twinge of malice under the guise of friendship (she constantly urges food on a friend who is trying to lose weight) and hints of a tragic past. There is obviously a very complicated personality hidden beneath the angelic face and innocent looking sun dresses. The villain is wonderfully creepy. The real tragedy is that they couldn't be bothered to write a better script. Besides being predictable, it is so loaded with lame fat girl jokes that have no apparent purpose and only distract from the story that I had to wonder if the writer has some self loathing issues or some psychological hangups. At any rate, it seems that someone wanted to capitalize on Gone Girl and hastily wrote a vehicle for Rosamund Pike to star in without taking the time to make it better. And she is fabulous in it, so probably worth watching once just to see her performance. If I ever see it again though, I will fast forward through all the extraneous silliness that is so distracting and adds nothing to the story.
2195386
I read some reviews before purchasing this book and they seemed promising. It was actually quite the opposite. I'm not sure how other people found it to be "full of twists" as I found it to be totally predictable.
1409384
I've liked other books by this author well enough, but this one I just couldn't finish.  The plot was so thin and the characters so predictable, I quit caring about either about half way through the book.  I tried - really tried - to get to the end.  But by the 75% mark, I was done.  So I skipped to the end, and was glad I hadn't invested any more time - for it was as predictable as the rest.

I have a personal policy that for every over-priced book I buy for my Kindle, I must find a book that costs less than $5 to read.  And I've found some awesome ones.  Unfortunately, this wasn't one of them.
568287
No amount of literary styling can make a silk purse out of this sow's ear of a plot. Switching back and forth in the time of action helps hide the plot holes for much of the book but eventually it just wears thin. The direction where the solution would be found was clear early on, and I was certain about the culprit about two thirds of the way through. Despite the fact that the supposed motivation was nonsensical. Spoiler alert: to pick the culprit, just apply the Midsomer Murders rule of detection. Whovever is least suspicious is the guilty party. The heroine is comprehensively suspicious of all the males involved, except for the one who acutally did it. Despite his obvious possible connections with what has happened, it never crosses her mind that he could be dangerous. So she lets him lure her into a deadly trap. It reminds me of the Cary Grant character in Arsenic and Old Lace, poking fun at dopey murder mystery plots where the protagnonist turns their back on the unrecognised killer and blithely waits for them to bind them with a rope. The heroine in this case saves herself (another spoiler alert) by cleverly spitting out most of the sedatives she has been forced to swallow. The maniacally clever killer fails to check on this. Poor workmanship from a killer who had been executing in an exemplary manner up to this point. Find a better thriller, it should not be hard.