Quite literally the worst book I have ever read
580403
Quite literally the worst book I have ever read. It was actually so bad I felt compelled to write the review/warning.
1482618
I honestly don't understand how this book got so many positive reviews. This is probably one of the worst books I've read this year. I kept expecting this book to get better, but it never did. Horrible and a complete waste of my time. The author spends more time developing the scene (which was not that creative) than the actual characters. All of the characters are extremely one-denominational and never seem to exceed past that. I ended up skipping through most of the boring monologue to get to the end, which was predicable and felt forced. Only good thing was that i did not waste money on this book, thankfully.
3834890
If I could give a book a ZERO this would be the one...UGH!!
4840951
the worst book I have ever attempted to read, forced my way through 146 pages
4872121
I NEVER write bad reviews, I try to be fair with every book, but this is beyond bad. Did the author take an English class? Don't even get me started about the overuse of the word whilst...I had previously read Claimed, hoping that the series would improve. It doesn't. There are so many things wrong with this book it's not even funny. She doesn't explain what a circulate is and honestly I don't care. Oh, it's also totally normal to be assaulted by a guy but still kind of like him and agree to marry him. The supposed"heroine" is a half wit Mary Sue, she's so pretty and popular. What a waste of time and money, don't buy this book! Luckily I couldn't make it past the sample chapters. Interesting idea horribly executed. Anyone giving it anymore than one star is being generous. Seriously I'd have given this negative stars if I could have. This just infuriated me to see the English language butchered so horribly. So much so that I decided to write this review.
4652222
This is one of the worst books I have ever read. I only finished it (and it was a real pensum to do so!) as I think that it is not fair to review books without finishing them. The book is presented as romantic suspense and fails on all grounds:
- The suspense is completely gone after the first 5 pages as the action is incredibly predictable. In addition the police procedure description is abysmally bad
- The romance part is even worse, from the completely unrealistic falling in love of the two (traumatised and scarred!) head characters at literally first glance to the very predictable and clichd cycles of misunderstandings that follow. The last scene is so utterly ridiculous that it made me laugh aloud!
Writing style is at best mediocre. Definitively not a book to recommend!
395756
This book is definitely among the worst books I have ever read. It is blazingly unrealistic and terribly written. The excessive use of all caps and italics made this the first book to actually make me deeply angry toward the author for writing it. Anyone with a grasp of how real people converse would immediately realize that any dignified (or undignified for that matter) teenager would never be caught using words like "oogly boogly" or "goopy poop."
  Another thing that agitates me greatly is blatant stupidity of almost everyone in the story. Read the book for yourself if you really must know what I'm talking about, but I think you probably already do.

My closing thoughts:
If there really is a Hell, and I went to it, there would be no greater torture for me that for have to read this book for an eternity.
4727920
Unfortunately, there's no score less than one star.

This book is so utterly awful, it's astounding. The "story" - if there is one - involves a recovering drug addict, her mysterious savior and a vigilante priest. The stupidity of the novel can't be overstated; it's utter nonsense, badly written and terribly conceived. In the opening scene, the avenging priest is tormenting an evil politician whom he has somehow kidnapped, taken to a warehouse, strapped to a chair, and is trying to get him to confess to the murder of an inconvenient bastard fathered with his maid. The politician refuses, so the avenging priest shoots him through the head at close range. He then finds the bullet and leaves the body there. There is not the slightest explanation of where or how the priest discovered the man's secrets and his crime, how he kidnapped him, or how, for heaven's sake, he so readily found the bullet in the darkened warehouse. That's just the beginning. It degenerates from there. It's simply one of the worst written books I've ever read. Dekker is off my list forever.
921469
Easily the worst book I have ever read. I too was taken in by the allure of the cover, hoping that this brief treatise would provide a concise history of the Islamic State and offer up solutions as we now stare down this latest threat to world peace. To those ends Jay Sekulow fails in spectacular fashion, delivering a book rife with grammatical errors and full of wild claims without the benefit of citations for his more egregious "facts." Further, less than 50% of the book actually discusses ISIS in any way, with the majority of the content being devoted to railing against Hamas and that group's history of violence in Gaza and the West Bank. All around just an absolute disaster of a book.
3849009
This is possibly the worst book Ive ever read, or attempted to read. Nothing but random thoughts, musings, daydreams, and night dreams clog up the majority of the pages, so much so that I had to re-read many pages over just to discern whether I was reading about an actual scene or yet more of her rambling daydreaming. The main character, Jo Jo/Bettie Jo, is the only character that has any depth, as the remainder of the cast are shallow and one-dimensional at best. Not only does the book get lost with her constant inner thoughts, but it also jumps around chronologically as well. Present day, 10 years in the future, 10 years in the past, and everywhere in between. I had so much trouble following who, what, where, and when. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the unending streams of adjectives describing every little aspect about everything in excruciating detail. Long-winded descriptions of SO many things that were completely and totally irrelevant. I would understand if these boring monologues had something to do with the story or the situation, but they rarely (if ever) did. I finally had had enough at the 50% mark, as I really and truly tried to give it an honest chance, but it never got any better. Rambling, confusing, back-and-forth timelines, and utterly nonsensical thoughts and diatribes all contribute to a complete waste of my time. And I don't feel Im being overly critical, either...in the 400+ book reviews Ive written here on Amazon, this is only the third one-star rating Ive given.
2921579
This is most certainly the worst book I've ever read. Fortunately I didn't pay for my copy - a few years ago I was travelling on a train down to London and a woman across from me was reading it. When we arrived at the station she put it down and left, even though it didn't look like she'd finished reading it. Out of curiosity I picked it up, read the back cover blurb, was suitably impressed, and took it home.

To get the most out of this book I suggest going to your local book shop, reading the back cover and then placing the book firmly back on the shelf. The blurb is the best part of this book. In summary, it's the story of Conrad who, with his wife, buys a birthing house. He finds a 19th century picture of the house with some women standing outside it. To his great shock one of the women appears to be his wife!!

That's it - or, at least, that's it for the best bit.

If you take the unfortunate step of actually reading the book itself you'll soon find yourself bogged down in a disconnected jumble of words that pass themselves off as a "story". The part about finding the picture of his wife is towards the beginning of the book but it goes nowhere. After finding the picture he almost immediately destroys it by throwing it in a fire and we never hear about it ever again. There are various other story threads taken up and then discarded without resolution. In the end you are just left wondering what the author was taking... or drinking? Which brings us on to another subject:

Iced tea.

Conrad quaffs large quantities of iced tea throughout the book. Unhealthy quantities. What is it with the iced tea? Does the author have shares in a manufacturer of iced tea? He appears to have an obsession with it.

The author is also equally obsessed with panties.

Those two things are perhaps the clearest aspects to make their way out of the foggy incoherent mess that forms this book. I found the characters unbelievably obnoxious, the situations unrealistic, and the story (what little story there was) horribly confusing. I forced myself to read to the last page in the hopes that, by some amazing magic, the story would become clear. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I felt cheated. The back cover blurb is borderline false advertising. I should bill Christopher Ransom for the lost hours in reading his junk.

I only learnt one thing from this book: avoid this author at all costs.
1762205
Let me start by saying that I'm actually quite a fan of Philippa Gregory, and was quite excited when I found this out-of-print book in my local library.  And by the end, how happy I was that I'd not spent a penny on it.  This is, quite possibly, one of the worst books I've ever read. The protagonist is a selfish, vain, hateful girl who -- I would assume -- the reader is supposed to sympathize with.  Everything she does -- every horrible, malicious thing -- is purely for her own pleasure, and to advance her own status. Never once does she think of anybody else as anything other than a stepping stone, and abuses everybody she comes in contact with and then cries out to the universe for pity on her.
I seriously only read this book to the end in the hope that when I got there, I'd get to see the protagonist die a horrible death.
3441052
I don't even know where to start in explaining how awful this book is. There are so many punctuation errors, grammar problems, and typos that reading was painful. Homophones were mixed up throughout: soul/sole, past/passed, etc. The POV jumped around in confusing ways, so that it wasn't always possible to understand the perspective. The characters were all obnoxious and unlikable--a bunch of petty, spoiled brats.

In many places it was clear that the author had done no research about details or thought them through very clearly. The "witch's ladder" of the title is an example of this. It is a length of rope with 40 knots in it. One of the characters makes these items and hands them out to other characters, including the detective who carries it around in his pocket and unties the knots to create small windstorms. However, at one point the knots are described as each being separated by a width of about three fingers. This would be two inches, at least, which means that the overall length of rope is nearly seven feet. We're supposed to accept that he has this much rope stuck in his pocket and that others don't notice when he pulls it out and starts untying the knots? Also, the witch character is said to be making the ladder with square knots, but it is only a single piece of rope. Square knots require two ends, so not more than one can be made from a single piece of rope. She could have been using figure-eight knots to make the object described, but definitely not square knots. I realize this seems like a small detail, but the book was filled with these to the point of being sloppy and unbelievable.
3700129
This is the worst book I have ever tried to plow through.  The main characters are two of the most childish, immature, unlikable, drama queens I have ever read about.  It was like reading a book about two 8 year olds.  I couldn't believe these were adults.  They brought all of their unhappiness on themselves; it's just too bad they dragged others into their playacting and melodramas.  This would appeal to die hard members of their fan clubs I suppose, but it would have no interest for anyone looking for a well-written book to read.  A total waste of time and money.
4067970
I read a lot of books in this genre, always bought from an airport bookstore so I can be entertained on a cross-country flight home.

This is absolutely the worst I've ever read. Stupid, simplistic, and utterly unbelievable. There's just no way to "suspend my disbelief" with the way this guy writes. I'm amazed that the publisher would let him get away with it. The book reads like more of a POD/vanity press effort by a college kid who's a wanna be writer with no idea how to tell a credible story.

I read about 250 pages before I gave up in disgust. I left it in the seat back pocket for someone else. At least they won't have to pay good money to read it.

The only thing I can say for the author is that he's somehow managed to bamboozle some readers and probably make a nice tidy sum of money from it.
3786099
The Casual Vacancy had the most potential to be a great book, and if you read my review when I got this book and the future expectations I had on this book you would know that there was a lot of glaring problems I had with this book. And I would love to present my first abandoned book to everyone. I just couldn't get past the glaring problems with this book and how horrible it is. If you like slow moving dramas that really just involve a bunch of self-centered morons, this would be the perfect book for you.

  This book is just horrible. It involves an empty seat for the town council, I can only assume. But everyone seems too stupid to realize that the seat is up for reelection now. It isn't until halfway through the book that someone realizes, "HEY! we can fight over this seat and an all-out war will ensue and ..." You get the drift I image. It just moved way way too slow for me and I couldn't find a reason to pick it up anymore and finish it. Maybe later, but no.

  The characters, oh the characters are horrible. There wasn't one general character that I enjoyed of felt that I would enjoy when I put the book down. It was just a cluster of horrible and even worse they all are so self-centered and delusional it's sickening. All of the characters really just use each other to position themselves better politically or to better their standing with the community. The lot of shallow characters in this book is far from what I expected out of J.K. Rowling. C'mon you can do a lot better, than this.

  As well, this is labeled as Adult, and realistically this is no where near an adult book. Its more of a young adult book, with a few mentions of sex and condoms that look like those white grubs you can use for fishing. I hated the labeling of this book, it's not at all what I was expecting. If I could have claimed to be an adult when I was 12 by simply mentioning condoms and sex, than I believe the world would have a lot less teenagers and more immature bastard children running around. This book isn't even close to the label it had.

  The environment was confusing as well, it focuses around Pagford and some suburbs. I spent most of my time re-reading the paragraphs trying to understand what was being conveyed. I felt that I missed most of the setting or it just wasn't described in a manner that I could visualize. As well when I finally understood the setting for the character that was speaking for the moment; the character changes. There is no chapters, there is days and in one day nearly every character has a section in which they give their perspective on the days happenings. Its very disruptive to the story and I was left with a complete emptiness when the character swapped. It just isn't something I enjoy seeing in a book, there was no reason to swap that way.

  Now when I picked up this book I looked around at fellow other bloggers and reviewers to see what they thought, and generally it's a mixed review. Some love the book and some utterly hate it. I would view my stance on this book less than neutral. I don't hate this completely, it more or less just isn't my style of book and I couldn't get past those issues, and it's generally not just me who has those issues but most of those who dislike this book share the issues.
2201608
Absolutely terrible, do not waste your time..... Maybe the worst most disgustedly stuiped book ever written, didn't even finished it just skipped to the end to see what happened