Fail

I'm going to talk about two books that I started recently and had to put down by the third chapter.

The Lifeboat
Charlotte Rogan
Fiction

This got rave reviews in several magazines I read, so I decided to pick it up. Then I read the first chapter, in which a newlywed woman discusses how she's on trial for her husband's murder. The next chapter backtracks to when this woman is on a lifeboat with other survivors of a ship crash (think Titanic) and navigating around bodies in the water and people screaming for help. I quickly decided this book was probably going to be a real downer and tossed it back on my stack. Next.

Walking on Dry Land
Denis Kehoe
Fiction

A book about a woman looking for her real mother. Sounds good, right? Well, I suppose the plot was okay, but the writing? OMG. I'd like to copy word for word a page out of this novel, but that would take way too much time so I'm just going to list the new and inventive ways the author came up with to replace the word said: Smiled (how does one "smile" something?), whistled (how can you whistle when you're talking?), interrupted, responded, replied, requested, proposed. I want to scream when I see this ish. I mean, come on, people. Just use said. What is wrong with said? After a page full of that crap, I couldn't keep going. I just couldn't.