You wanted to read the book, you were excited to crack it open, you came into it with good faith and anticipation… but you ended up dnf-ing it. Which book and why?
Mine was The Maid by Nita Prose. It was for my book club and looked like a fun murder mystery. Instead I got instant manic-pixie-dream-neurodivergent-girl vibes, and I noped out before the crime scene was even found.
lies we sing to the sea by sarah underwood
dnf-ed at like 15% or less – would’ve dnf-ed at around 5% but it was too late to return it and so i tried so hard to push through and not waste my money.
turns out, the author admitted in an interview to doing almost no research at all towards her novel, as well as revealing that she’d read no ancient greek literature-- not even the iliad or the odyssey… and yeah, we can tell.
i am very lenient when it comes to historical fiction. i’m quite happy to willfully ignore small mistakes for the sake of a good book, but this was not a good book.
i don’t expect authors to know absolutely everything, but some of the mistakes here were laughable-- and also incredibly stupid, considering you can very easily google the answer? for instance, did coffee exist in ancient greece? no ! did ouzo exist in ancient greece ? nope, not that either !
in one part, the main character says that in the myths she grew up on, the women did nothing at all… wrong ! wrong ! and wrong ! the author is only assuming this because of the old setting, but if she had, indeed, done any research at all, she’d know this was wrong.
the writing is awful, the character is insufferable, and the dialogue is contrived and unrealistic. it reads like straight up fanfiction of ancient greece, except the author hasn’t read a single thing about ancient greece.
one of the worst books i’ve read all year. big 0/5 stars.