Quite A Disappointment
597100
I saw this group on a tv special and instantly fell in love with the song That's What You Get, a funky, dirty pop, jam reminiscent of Nsync and Britney Spears.  The album starts off very well living up to expectations that this will be  fantastic dance pop album. The first three tracks Dance With me, Messed Around, and Can't Stop Loving You, anre fantastic, fun, and funky tracks that will get you movin. However, the album takes a turn for the worse after these tracks. The album then becomes quite boring, uninspired, and the group sounds vocally tired. The group have good voices but lose energyg halfway through the album. Quite a disappointment considering the strength and energy of the first few songs. All fans of Nsync and Britney Spears should get this album, especially since JC of Nsync wrote 3 of the tracks(which happen to be the best songs). On a good ending note, the album contains remixes of the the JC penned track Messed Around and That's What You Get.
2023131
absolutely loved Blood song, and therefore had very high expectations to this sequel. However, I must say I was sorely disappointed. Vaelin is reduced to a minor role, and the main role is instead given to a number of new characters In addition, the power scope is increased dramatically.
I have read Blood Song several times, and I still struggling to finish this one.
610504
Ever since I discovered Ms. Moning's early books at a library sale, I have really looked forward to each of the further adventures of the time travelling mystical hunky Highlanders and their bright, brave, modern soul mates. From the cover illustration (which for the first time featured faces) to the contemporary prose (full of allusions to 2004 pop culture) to the unsympathetic lovers, this latest book was a HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT.

This book was so inferior to the others, that I thought perhaps she had a new publisher or something, but it appears to be the same publishing house.  You'd think the publishers could have at least got it right wrt hair length and color of hair if they're going to put faces on a book cover.  Perhaps the distracting allusions to Godsmack, Buffy and the Vampire Slayer, and even her other romance novels were meant to provide humor that was otherwise lacking in the characters themselves.  But those will date this book in a flash, making it awkward rather than a pleasure to reread.  Finally, the lovers were pretty immoral and one-dimensional.  For one thing, whatshername was perfectly content to let Cian rip off hotels, airlines, and small businesses.  For another, you'd think a guy who had been imprisoned for over a thousand years and who thought he had lost his entire family might express at least a little interest in finding out what had really happened to his mum and the ensuing generations of his clan once he had got his jollies off.  And even descriptions of aforementioned jollies used words that were much cruder and far less erotic than Moning's previous couplings.  I still want to think I'm reading romance, not porn.

Like a previous reviewer, I'm hoping that it was Ms. Moning's publisher who wanted quantity rather than quality, who is to blame for this debacle.  I am still looking forward to her next book; perhaps she'll incorporate some of her newly married experiences in it.  But I am rather glad that the next publication is a less expensive paperback.
1712054
No place to find information....just never came. I purchased multiple items, got all of them but this. Quite a disappointment!
2259880
This book is little more than a slight and and exceedingly awkward version of the Silmarillion (not that I expected another version of the Silmarillion).  I have long been a huge fan of Tolkein's works but this book was an effort to extend Tolkein's Silmarilion as it was originally created from his notes and earlier writings.  The annotations and attempts to give the book body, style, background, syntax and context are distracting and add little to the ultimate aim of his products.  A huge disappointment!

One example that is at an unhelpful and incongruent variance in the text are the limitations on the actions and abilities made on the Ainur.  These beings are originally presented in the Valaquenta as almost omniscient 'angels' of Eru, the mightiest of the mightiest creations of Eru; limitations certainly but without the awkwardness, weakness, 'ditheringness' (sorry) degraded ability that we see in the Valaquenta when Eru has them make a music that is a great reflection of the creator.
2477804
I have been a fan of BBC's "What Not to Wear" and I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, but What Not to Wear for Every Occasion was a grave disappointment.  Not only did I not agree with most of the looks created, I felt that often the "don't" examples would work far better than the "do's".

I did not heed some of the negative reviews I read before purchasing this book and that has proven to be a mistake.  Don't be fooled-this is not the customary Susannah and Trinny fare and that is disappointing.
4170878
This is smaller than I imagined and the sound quality is muffled and not very clear. It's quite a disappointment.
1530733
When I settled in to read this new canonical adventure starring a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker just after the Battle of Yavin, my expectations were sky-high.  I knew up-front that this novel was written in the first person, and I didn't expect that to bother me after loving I, Jedi by Mike Stackpole a number of years back.  Unfortunately, Heir to the Jedi's problems became apparent just a few pages in.  As others have commented, the first person perspective in this novel feels like fan fiction at best and Twilight-level writing at worse.  I've never read any other works by Hearne so I can't comment on his talent as a writer, but this effort leaves a lot to be desired.  Perhaps if he had just gone with a traditional third person narration this novel wouldn't feel so poorly written.  I try to find as much good in things as possible, but the sentence structure throughout is honestly awful.

THE GOOD
- The plot itself was just entertaining enough to get me through the substandard writing
- A couple of fun new characters
- It's canon, so if you're a big fan you'll probably read it anyway

Both A New Dawn and Tarkin were very well done; I'm disappointed by this effort and hope that future canonical works adhere to a higher standard of quality.
4932734
First, I would like to preface this review by stating that I am an avid Harry Potter fan (I'm in Ravenclaw, if you must know), and maybe that was my problem -- my expectations were too high.  In HP, I genuinely cared about the characters.  I felt for them -- I felt connected or impacted in some way by each of them.  Even as an almost irrelevant character, I felt compassion and sadness for the father of Cedric Diggory when he was murdered.  Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about A Casual Vacancy.

This book details the mundane lives of several families - the Mollisons, the Walls, the Weedons, the Jawandas, the Prices, the Bawdens, and the Fairbrothers - none of whom have any real depth, except perhaps the Weedons.

The problem with this book is, Rowling didn't make me care about the characters.  I felt nothing for them, to the point that I actually started hoping she was going to kill them off one by one so I didn't have to read about them anymore.  The plot (if you can call it that) was extremely weak:

The story begins with the death of Parish Councilman Barry Fairbrother and the entire story is about who is going to take his seat on the council.  The thing is: who cares?  Without giving anything away, should you still attempt to get through this tragedy of literature, I didn't care that the council seat of this 50-person town was empty.  I didn't care that some people wanted to include the "Fields" (essentially the ghetto of the town) into another town and some didn't.  Rowling just didn't make me understand why it mattered.

Further, I was finally forced to admit something to myself that I have been avoiding for years:  at a literary level, Rowling is just not a good writer.  Her sentences are short, meaningless, and lack depth and perceptive.  I happily ignored this in HP because they are, after all, young adult books, but now that she is writing for us grown ups, her writing style needs to reflect that, and sadly, it didn't.

A Casual Vacancy just did not live up to my expectations, which admittedly, may have been too high.  I am truly disappointed.
3875373
I have read and generally thought highly of all the books in this series, but this one was a huge disappointment. Pitt is asked to investigate someone by the Queen. He can tell no one, including Charlotte. His mentor, Narraway, and his sounding board Aunt Vespasia are out of the country. The result is a very closed in, navel gazing novel where Pitt spends a lot of time lamenting that he cannot enlist Charlotte's help  and recalling past cases where she assisted. (She insinuates herself into it in a minor way, despite Pitt's misgivings) Pitt spends  even more time contemplating his own worth and whether he is up to the job of Commander of the Special Branch.

 In addition to all the internal monologues, the plot is not particularly well developed. Several suspects are introduced, but then somewhere in the last 20% of the book Pitt decides who the murderer is (with no apparent additional clues) and sets out to trap the criminal without embarrassing the royal family. I  dislike mysteries where the author puts out a thesis - this could could mean xxx or that person could be a murderer, and then in the next chapter the speculation is treated as fact even though there have been no additional discoveries to support the the new conclusion. That sort of jump occurs in this book in a rather obvious way.

In most of the series, social conventions and societal problems of Victorian England come into the sharp focus. In this book, there was very little detail about the setting or the daily lives of the characters. I found it difficult to suspend disbelief and enter into the book. Bu the end, Queen Victoria is dying and Thomas Pitt has been honored. Maybe it is time to end the series here.
2538711
Unfortunately the book was rather disappointing for two main reasons:
1. The book is very short and compared with the money payed for it I am seriously doubting that it was worth it. (I used to be a big fan of the series).
2. The absence of any action what so ever until the last 20 % of the book. The book felt that it was just stuffed with redundant information and pages of boring details.
In my opinion It failed to live up to the reputation of the previous books.
1992852
This was a disappointment. I'm a Wolfe fanatic and the author of a comprehensive webpage devoted to Wolfe, of as enormous size as Wolfe himself (see [...] ), but compared to the masterpiece published only a year earlier than _The League_, I mean the very first Wolfe novel, _Fer-de-Lance_ (1934) -- compared to that first novel _The League_ is a "wash-out", to use Archie's term: tedious, overlong, and trite. I agree with the assessment of a previous Amazon reviewer (of August 1999).
In _Fer-de-Lance_, it didn't really matter that the characters were all-new, created from scratch. You could feel the excitement of their being created, or having just been created, in Stout's prose; it was more careful and less unnecessarily verbose than in _The League_. Wolfe himself says in _The League_ that the art of writing is to leave out as much as possible without detriment to the substance: well, if _The League_ had only been 100 pages long instead of 200, it might have been entertaining!
Wolfe talks too much, and Archie describes and theorizes and worries and rejoices too much in this novel. Inspector Cramer appears for the first time in this book, but he's not really himself yet. He smokes a pipe (!) instead of chewing an unlit cigar to tatters. Neither does he talk or otherwise behave like the later Cramer we love to hate. There's no red leather chair in the office yet, neither are yellow chairs there. No one-way glass panel at the door.
As to the mystery angle in this book (a weak point in all of Rex Stout's books): the solution to the murder(s) is disappointing and can be guessed with many pages left to go. Hardly any suspense, certainly not to be compared with the likes of Agatha Christie. But, I've never cared for the mystery angle in Stout; it's the humorous interaction between Wolfe and Archie that makes Stout unique: Wolfe's and Archie's visions of life and the world. Neither Wolfe nor Archie are at their best in _The League_; the supporting cast (victims and suspects) are, equally, not nearly as interestingly portrayed as in _Fer-de-Lance_. _Fer-de-Lance_ is also much funnier to read; _The League_ leads us to smile, at most, every now and then -- but don't expect any Goodwinian belly-laughs.
For the best in Wolfe and Archie, therefore, instead of _The League_ turn to masterpieces like _Fer-de-Lance_, _The Silent Speaker_, _In the Best Families_, _Too Many Cooks_, and _Plot It Yourself_.
4914353
To begin with, I love and own a GREAT deal of JAK/AQ/JC/SJ,etc..... This book was a disappointment. The story has many idea trails begin and then seems to abandon them. (sequel set ups?)It has NO stand alone quality. The interaction between characters (primary and secondary,never mind tertiary)seems short,un-thought through and unfinished. It has a "draft" feel. If JAK needs to take more time to produce work of her usual caliber, then let it take that time! I'd rather a longer wait for a GOOD book than a short wait for a disappointing book. I'll keep my copy so I have the set, but I doubt I'll ever re-read it. There's little to no need with the book seeming to be more of a placeholder and re-cap than an integral story in itself.<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Canyons-of-Night-Book-Three-of-the-Looking-Glass-Trilogy/dp/0515149888/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Canyons of Night: Book Three of the Looking Glass Trilogy</a>
3571998
I'm with the reviewer who posted "Sheer Boredom".  I greatly enjoyed the Lytton family trilogy, but this one is a real disappointment.  In part, it may be the lack of historical trappings, along with the singularly uninteresting contemporary British political backdrop (and the author's pet peeves about socialized medicine), but I think the far more serious problem is the lack of character development.  It's simply hard to care what happens to these cardboard cut out characters.

I haven't given up totally on the author, but will be cautious going foward.
176535
When I purchased this book I didn't realize that it would be in script format or that Rowling had very little,if anything, to do with the writing.  And it really shows. The plot is thin, the characters one dimensional, and a lot is repetitious of the previous books .  I also think the book is dreadfully overpriced given the fact that it is a short read and light on plot.  This was a real disappointment for me, and as a huge Potter fan, I can't recommend it.
3958368
In waiting for this book, I had built up some high anticipation of new adventures, great battles, and further exploration into the life and times of the main character, Drizzt Do'Urden.  I was, unfortunately, quite disappointed after reading this book.  In fact, if one did not ever read this book and skipped to the next book in the series, the reader would miss very little, if anything regarding Drizzt.

This book is another example (unfortunately, there is at least one other book in the series) of what I term "literary fodder" - it has little value in progressing the main character and/or story about the main character.  It is not even a great adventure story.  Too, too many pages are devoted to tangential characters and not Drizzt.

Like many readers and fans of Drizzt, I wish again for any new stories to be great tales regarding this great character (first and foremost)!
616167
I was sorely disappointed in this book.  It lacked the action and emotion of the previous books and made short shrift of all the seasoned characters Thor has developed over the last several novels. Scot Horvath was mostly a spectator and most of the denouement was exposition. And the ending was too trite, too tidy, and not very believable - not how the plot was foiled, but how the US dealt with the PRC and DPRK.

Too pedantic.

******SPOILER ALERT*****
An EMP attack killing 90% of the population?  and then China occupying the rural US?  How as by going to get to "rural" areas without going through urbanized coastal areas?  How do they move that many people?

It's such a low probability of success plan that no military planner would rely on that alone. And DPRK would never roll over that quickly. It's just not a credible scenario.