Worst Books of 2022

[penwalla]

Ah, it's that time again. Time for me to be a hater.

Last year I could not fill out my top ten list. This year that was not the case.

In no particular order...no, that's a lie. The first book on this list is the worst one. The rest are also bad.

1. Reincarnation: A Xianxia Cultivation Series (Threads of Fate 1) by Michael Head

• Amazon recommended this to me repeatedly, presumably because I bought so many MXTX novels. Amazon, your recommendations are always garbage, please just stop.
• I will offer this caveat: I am not a xianxia expert and am not well positioned to critique the accuracy of this book to that genre. That said, this book sucks in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, so there's lots for me to hate on!
• To start with, the protagonist, a man in fantasy China, is named JIM. His band of comrades include characters named shit like Valerie and Donny.
• For some reason, having light-colored hair and eyes is explicitly associated with higher social status. HMMM.
• Interesting that the protag and his crew have names that are NOT CHINESE. But none of the villains due. INTERESTING.
• The worldbuilding includes the seven deadly sins and Latin words. Like, I am not a xianxia expert? But none of that shit is Chinese? And this is explicitly being sold as xianxia?
• Oh, it's also a very badly written book. Rife with infodumps, the fight scenes--supposedly a selling point because the author was in the (US?) armed forces--could cure insomnia, and the protagonist is an insufferable little twerp who is constantly having shit handed to him, never struggles for even a moment, and keeps explaining away his attraction to women as "puberty!" despite being mentally like 800 years old and also in the body of a ten year old. WHAT PUBERTY YOU ARE TEN.
• I cannot recommend this even if like me you love hating on things. There are better hatereads out there.

2. A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows

• The tl;dr is that if you want an mlm fantasy romance, this exists, but so do a bunch of better books that do the same thing.
• As I read this, I kept thinking "this is a poor man's Winter's Orbit" and I am not accusing anyone of plagiarism or unoriginality. But these books have some similar elements and WInter's Orbit does every one of them better.
• The romance: underbaked. Cae is very flat as a character, and they have no believable chemistry at all.
• The plot: nonsensical and pointless. Stuff happens, there's some half-assed investigation, and then at the end the villain monologues her entire plan without the characters having to do anything at all. It's not a mystery that we're solving; it's just some stuff happening in between bland romantic moments. Like, I think it's fine if the plots of spec romances aren't deep and intricate, but either it needs to be compelling or it needs to provide a lot of romance fodder, and the plot of this book does neither of those.
• The worldbuilding: one country is prejudiced and evil, one is a progressive utopia. Extremely tedious tbh.
• Overall it's very mid. Wouldn't recommend it.

3. Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood

• This is on this list solely because it was marketed as a Jane Eyre retelling, which it is assuredly not. It has no thematic relation, it has not real plot relation, it just has a love interest named Rochester.
• As a YA fantasy, it is very mid. The protag's complicated relationship with her father figure is the most interesting one in the book--the romance is generic and bone dry. The plot is...serviceable. The worldbuilding is good and I think the horror sections of the book are the most compelling.
• The instalove romance sections are a slog.
• This is an Ethiopian-inspired fantasy, and it's always great to see authors with non-western fantasy settings getting their books published.
• If you like YA fantasy or are looking for Ethiopian-inspired fantasy, check this out? But ignore the words 'Jane Eyre" on the cover, this has no relation to Jane Eyre in any way.

4.The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

• Tiktok must be destroyed.
• The hype around this book is a fucking lie and I am baffled at its popularity, because it is one of the worst books I've ever read and it is incredibly unreadable. Usually really popular bad books are very readable!
• First off, Blake's uber-pretentious writing style does a great job of conveying absolutely nothing of substance. No one in this book ever experiences a normal human emotion, no conversation sounds like it could ever happen, and all the "deep passages" you are seeing quoted are fucking meaningless drivel. If an AI was assigned to write quote for one of those twitter quote bot accounts, this is what would come out.
• But don't worry! The plot ALSO sucks ass! What little plot there is, anyway. This book starts with a secret society inviting six people and telling them only five can progress and treats "one of them will die" like a PLOT TWIST. That's the level of plot we're dealing with here. These characters are supposed to be intelligent. Nothing happens for the majority of the book and then we get a completely new plot infodumped in the last few chapters.
• Oh, speaking of the characters? Some of the worst people I have ever read about. Parisa and Callum, the author's favorites, are so awful that i genuinely was hoping they'd be murdered. Parisa in particular you can tell Blake thinks is so cool. Reina on the other hand is barely a presence, and the author clearly doesn't like Libby, so I don't know why she even exists.
• This book made me realize dark academia was a mistake.
• All aesthetic, no substance, read this if you enjoy having a migraine.

5. Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto

• This is a sequel to Dial A for Aunties, which was a fun comedy-romance I read last year and quite enjoyed.
• Unfortunately, this sequel wears out its welcome very quickly.
• None of the character development of the last book has stuck, and there's no new character development at all, so it's just a lot of hijinks with no emotional arc to anchor them.
• The aunties feel like flanderized versions of themselves.
• Honestly, I don't understand what the point of this book is, what about it the reader is supposed to find satisfying. Read the first one and stop there.

6. The Lady or the Lion by Aamna Qureshi

• Oh, it hurts to have to put this book on my list, because it's a Pakistani-inspired YA fantasy and I wanted to love it so badly.
• Alas, this is a typical bad YA read.
• The writing is readable but not particularly good.
• But it's the characters and plot that really make this awful. Our protagonist is a cringeworthy spoiled princess (the narrative never lets you forget this and if I had to read the phrase "pretty little princess" one more time I was going to bite the book) who does not grow or change, just continues sucking the entire novel.
• The plot is typical bad YA political intrigue where it's poorly thought out and has no nuance.
• And the romance is...ugh. Very instalove. Very cringe.
• This book also deeply annoyed me because it keeps having characters speak Urdu and then immediately repeat themselves in English and I speak Urdu so it's just them repeating themselves constantly! Have the time they're just saying shit that isn't more meaningful in Urdu anyway.

7. The Justice of Kings by Richard Swan

• An adult fantasy for once! This one is an epic fantasy with a focus on law.
• This one is on the list because it's very, very boring.
• First off, despite the summary, it's actually from the POV of Helena, Konrad's clerk. There are a couple things wrong with this. A, she's by far the most boring character in the story. She has the least to do and she adds a super tedious romance subplot. And frankly, she feels like a man's idea of a young woman, not a real young woman. B, the story is told in a retrospective manner by an old Helena reflecting on the past. This adds very little to the story, as she doesn't give us interesting spoilers about the future; it's just a lot of her pontificating about her mistakes. And it undercuts any tension the story might have had.
• Second, the political intrigue of this book is so tedious. I think the problem for me is that it feels so impersonal. The book is very focused on the law. and it feels very divorced from the lived reality of people who suffer under imperialism. And I read a lot of sf/f this year that tackled imperialism in a substantive way, so this rang especially hallow.
• I bought this one and regret the 3 bucks. Get it from the library if you must read it.

8. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

• Tiktok MUST be destroyed.
• God I wanted this to be good so badly. A fanfic turned romance novel? Listen, I love fanfics and I love stupid romcoms and I love stupid romcom modern AUs of my OTPs. I think a modern romcom AU is the ideal fanfic to turn into an original story, especially when the canon is removed from the modern AU, because the author has usually already had to do so much reimagining of the canon. It's already so close to being an original novel!
• But nooo this just sucks. it's amateurish in its writing and the premise and execution are unbelievable. As in I could not suspend disbelief long enough to get through the book.
• Okay every character in this book that isn't Olive or Adam is a cardboard cutout that exists to facilitate the romance. For example, supposedly Olive's BFF is passionate about diversity in STEM, but all she does is pay lip service to the concept while putting Olive in stupid situations that are supposed to be romantic. She does not come across as a real human and it makes the supposed diversity feel real hollow.
• Adam is an asshole and never changes. It's just, oh he was in love with the protag all along! and that's it. So does he get that making grad students cry is bad??? Because it is even if he had good intentions!!!
• Of course the plot is resolved when Olive accidentally records the mustache-twirling villain and then Adam handles it offscreen. Heaven forbid women ever solve a problem in an Ali Hazelwood book. SO FEMINIST. Like it's frustrating that this book nominally about a women finding her way in a male-dominated field is like, she doesn't actually solve her own problems, the man does.
• God it's just so cringe. It's unbearable.
• I did read Love on the Brain and while it's still bad, it is an improvement, so I have hope that Ali Hazelwood will someday write a book that's good. But I probably won't bother reading it.

9. Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan

• This is supposedly not a YA novel, but like. It's a YA novel. It's a plotless fantasy with a female protag who never struggles and a stupid love triangle. It's a YA novel.
• I'm not against the episodic structure of this novel, or against structural variation in novels in general, like I'm not a three act purist or something. It just didn't work for me here. It really feels like nothing is happening most of the time, and like the things that do happen are wholly disconnected.
• The premise strains credulity--no one asks about her background? Really? Not even the evil empress? Lmao ok.
• The "lush prose" is just a lot of descriptions. So many descriptions. It becomes a book that is just lists of stuff, and that bogs it down constantly. There's no tension, there's no sense of being in the moment. These descriptions aren't adding anything to the story, they're just...there.
• Xingyin is very boring. Good at everything, never challenged, never fails, never changes. And this is a first person novel from her POV, so there's just nothing to anchor the reader.
• Chapters will just end with Xingyin having revelations that are totally pointless, because she never actually does anything wrong or changes.
• Oh and the love interests both suck. In particular the prince is sooo annoying, he refuses to marry her because he's in a political engagement--rational enough! he's a prince--but then he spends the rest of the book being possessive and jealous over Xingyin, who has explicitly said she's not down to be the other woman. Like, come on. Dump his ass.
• There are better fantasies.

10. The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He

• I gotta stop reading YA novels and I don't know why I read a second Joan He because I didn't like the other book by her I read at all.
• This is like if the Atlas Six but YA and with climate change.
• Another book that feels like it was written by a quote bot generator--lots of supposedly pretty passages that make no sense at all in context.
• The plot is...uneven. There's a couple big twists that are interesting, but huge portions of it just make no sense. In particular the Kasey sections are near-unreadable. In part because Kasey never reads like an actual human being, in part because the events of her section don't make sense if you think about them at all.
• Cee's plotline is stronger but has a shoehorned and stupid romance in it.
• But the worst thing about this book is that it has nothing to say! Not about AI, not about climate change, not about anything. I don't know what the author is trying to convey about these things! What's the point of climate fiction that's incoherent?

What have we learned from 2022? Well, I'm going to stop buying YA novels unless they're from authors whose YA work I already like or they come with a word of mouth rec from someone whose taste I trust. My expectations for Tiktok hyped books will continue to be very low. And I'm going to continue to read library books whenever possible, because 7 out of 10 of this list is stuff I borrowed and therefore got to give back without spending any money on it.