9 disappointing YA books

I’m a huge YA fan, I read anything YA, and it’s what I mostly read. Probably because of this, I come across quite bad YA books on the market. Some aren’t that bad… but others are just plain awful. These are 9 YA books I read and either disliked or hated. (This is based on my opinion, and therefore, might not agree with your taste and I completely respect that!).

Hush Hush

By Becca Fitzpatrick

This is probably the YA book I’ve most hated. For many reasons… but the worst being the female lead. I hate seeing time after time a female lead falling for a guy within two pages and then getting into trouble because of this guy. But this book… well, it was even worse than that. The male love interest, what was his name, again? Oh, yeah, Patch! Sorry, no offence but, what kind of name is that? I’m all for strange quirky names but that’s just plain stupid. That doesn’t get my hormones going… that just makes me want to laugh.

Well, this Patch is… I don’t even know what he’s supposed to be. He wants to kill the female lead for some reason, I can’t even remember why. He spends the entire book being horrible to her, making fun of her and trying to kill her. KILL HER! And that’s supposed to be hot? Oh yeah, I forgot… He’s hot, mysterious and has money so that makes it okay.

I don’t even remember what the plot was about, something to do with fallen angels, and them wanting something from the female lead. The supposed bad guys made no sense and were not developed at all and you could tell the moment they stepped on to the page that they were the bag guys. Honestly, I don’t even know why they were the bad guys ‘cos they did absolute nothing throughout the book.

This is meant to be a romance/ fantasy/ fallen angel YA. Okay… well, there was hardly any fallen angels, no explanation towards the world or anything remotely interesting. If I buy a fallen angel book I want to at least know a little about their story! And well, romance… HA! In one scene the female lead grabs a knife because she’s terrified of him and then two minutes later they’re making out. What sense does that make? And teenagers read this and think this is appropriate! This is LOVE!? Sorry, where I come from, a guy follows you around while you’re shopping and a) he either wants to steal your stuff, b)he has a mental problem or c) he wants to rape you. I wouldn’t be happy about this, and I’d either kick him where it hurts and run or call the cops!

How did this get published? And why do we keep thinking that because a guy is hot, mysterious and has money it’s okay to treat us women like crap?

Fallen

By Lauren Kate

This was a book I bought for its cover. I love angels and so I thought… why not?

Why not directly shoot me in the head and get done with it? It wasn’t one of the worst reads in my life, but… This has the same issue as with Hush Hush. The guy is horrible to our female lead, (because he wants to protect her!!!!! oh okay, that changes everything… I’ll just flip my boyfriend off in the future when he’s about to trip over a rock on the street).

It’s a thick book (I can’t remember the number of pages, but it’s long), and you spend more than half of the book following the female lead sighing and thinking about the love interest in a school. That’s all. Nothing else happens. Angels? Oh, they only appear right at the end when the female lead does something stupid and gets into trouble and nearly dies.

Though, I have to admit, there was something compelling about it because I bought book 2, read it, and then book 3, which I gave up on. But to be honest, I was like 16 at the time, so my brain wasn’t as focused as it is now.

Blue Bloods

By Melissa de la Cruz

There was nothing particularly wrong with this book… it just ended up being boring. It started well off but then… Well, I don’t actually remember anything to do with this book except there were vampires in it… So, it couldn’t have been anything that great. The thing with this one is that the author talks on and on about fashion, what the characters are wearing, what brand shoes they bought, on and on and on and on and on… Yeah, if I wanted to read about fashion and all that I would’ve bought another type of book. Not this. The other thing was that nothing really happens, nothing at all… As I mentioned above, I don’t remember anything at all.

Marked

By P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

If you’re looking for something bad to read this summer… Marked is just what you’re searching for! So, the female lead gets marked as a vampyre… yeah, not vampire, that’s way too common, no, no, she’s a vampyre. The difference? None. The author seemed to find this way of writing vampire interesting.

So she gets marked and then has to move into this Hogwarts school of vampyres, God knows why… This character spends the entire book making fun of the ‘bitches’, but then makes fun of people and is actually horrible to some. She has a boyfriend, makes out with the hottest guy at school and then with a teacher! She’s like Bella Swan all over again! Such a plain girl that for some reason is making the guys go crazy!

The teenagers in this book talk like they’re either drunk or got something stuck up their *****. What is it with saying the word poop and boobies every five seconds?

Chicagoland Vampires

By Chloe Neill

I didn’t actually hate this book or even disliked it. But there were things that didn’t make any sense. This girl who is well into her twenties, gets attacked and turned into a vampire and then spends the rest of the book crying over being a vampire. Fine, I get it, it’s traumatic… but at some point you need to get over it. Her best friend talks about how cool it is that she’s become a vampire but then freaks out when she finds out she’s a witch… Okay…

The female lead moves into a house where the vampires live. She’s just turned into a vampire and yet, for some reason, which isn’t explained, she’s more powerful than the vampire in charge. They’re all scared of her because she’s meant to be really powerful and is going to do important things in the future… why? How do they know this? Is there like a sticker on her forehead saying “LEGEND” and I didn’t see it?

Honestly, I love a female lead that can kick ass… but I want her to either become a bad ass, been born one or earn it. Not just randomly become a kick ass and not even show us why.

Delirium

By Lauren Oliver

This book… well, I’m not sure about it. I didn’t hate it… but I didn’t like it either. It was beautifully written, it’s clear Lauren Oliver knows how to write, but sometimes knowing how to write beautiful words on a page doesn’t make you a good writer.

First of all, I can deal with all kinds of weird ideas for books, that’s great, and I can even deal with the fact that people would be okay with not wanting love… (well, I can’t, but I’ll go along with it), but if you’re going to choose something like this, you need to back it up properly. So people don’t want to suffer because when you’re in love you suffer… (Stop watching Titanic, seriously, that happened once, ONCE!) Fine, whatever… But, the author doesn’t explain how anything works because of this new society. You know how much money countries make on love? Valentine’s Day? Locations such as Italy? Products? You really think corporations and all that are going to give up on all the money they make because… well, we don’t want to cry because our boyfriend dumped us?

Well, even so… I could still deal with all that if the book hadn’t been so…Too much narrative, too much description. I love description, but it reaches a point where I just end up skimming through five pages of what a window looks like. The entire book is about the female lead thinking about the boy she’s crushing on. That’s all. Nothing else. Still, it wasn’t a bad read, it really wasn’t but… I don’t know. I had to keep putting it down, not enough action, not enough of anything.

The Selection

By Kiera Cass

I loved the concept of this book and then of course… they had to ruin it to make more money. First of all, why does this book have to be dystopian? It just doesn’t fit at all. The idea of the girls living in a castle to marry the prince is crazy good, and it could’ve just been kept as a great fairytale book… but no, we have to have another dystopian on our shelf. Because we don’t have enough of that already (don’t get me wrong, I looooove dystopian!)

The other thing that bugged me about this book was that it’s actually like four books long. Four books of what!!??!!? This could’ve been kept as a great standalone novel, and I would’ve loved it, but no… I’ve only read the first book because I just got a headache by the second one. Why do publishers need to mess with good ideas? Seriously? What is wrong with you people?

Evernight

By Claudia Gray

I read this book years ago, I even got a signed copy when the author came to Madrid! It wasn’t a bad read, but it wasn’t great either. Especially that crazy twist that suddenly jumps at you and you have to lean back and attack it so it doesn’t bite you in the face? That really annoyed me, because it didn’t surprise me… it made me jump out of the story itself and return to reality to figure out what the hell was going on. A book shouldn’t do that. Yeah, I get that Claudia Gray was trying to do something unique, grab our attention and totally surprise us… Instead, I was left annoyed and wondering why the hell I should continue reading this…

If the book had been awesome from there onwards, I could’ve forgiven her, but it wasn’t. It was just another YA with the female lead blushing over an impossible love, being loved by a guy she doesn’t want but he’s such a great friend… and just going from class to class.

Haven

By Kristi Cook

I actually read the entire trilogy, but only because I bought the three books as a pack thinking I would love it. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t bad… it was just plain nothing. The female lead ends up in a school like the X-men with really cool powers (up to here, great), and then suddenly she meets the love interest and they fall for each within two pages. And then she discovers what he really is… *sigh*…. He is nothing to do with the X-men… and then she discovers that not only does she have xmen powers but she’s also different…

If you took X-men, Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and put them in a washing machine, Haven would be born.

Nothing happens throughout the entire book until the very end when suddenly the bad guys arrive, they fight in like 2 pages and then it’s over. Repeat this in book 2 and then book 3. And then the entire trilogy is finished and you don’t even know what you were meant to be reading.

Oh, and the death scene… That just pissed me off. Seriously, when someone important like that dies, I want at least a few coupe of pages of description to actually feel everything they are feeling. But now, suddenly I’m reading about a fight and the next thing I know that character is dead… And then you hear nothing about the character ever again.

These are just some of the YA books that disappointed me, what books did you dislike?