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robyurkowski@bookrastinating.com

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Lemony Snicket: The Complete Wreck (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-13) (2006, HarperCollins) 4 stars

Review of 'The Complete Wreck (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-13)' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

This took me a few goes at it to read. I'm quite interested in the genre, and there's not a lot of technically well-executed books in it, so even when I was turned off it, I wound up coming back.

The first time I read the book, I put it down somewhere after the second chapter. The protagonist is whiny and selfish in a way that had no subtlety, and the rampant tense issues just really ground me down. So I put it down for three months.

And then I returned. Listening to it through text-to-speech helped me ignore the tense issues, and was able to get more into the story, when it became enjoyable. But I did get to a point probably about 2/3rds along where I just had to set it down and walk away and resolve to DNF the book, even if I was somewhat curious about …

John Bierce: Into the Labyrinth (Paperback, 2018, Independently published) 3 stars

Review of 'Into the Labyrinth' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Disappointingly riddled with errors, but most unforgivingly there's a point early on in when the protagonist and his fellow apprentices go from frosty to monologuing their lifes' stories in the span of a second. That sort of emotional negation -- and the tendency to long-winded infodump in the face of characters whose motivations don't align with sitting still for an unanticipated story hour -- is the sort of jarring thing that yanks me right out. DNF.