Ī year ago, I was mindlessly strolling through my local bookstore with my best friend on our monthly visit to our favorite spot. Managing Arts Editor Lillian Pearce can be reached at. So, no, I won’t be finishing the “Locked Tomb” series, but I won’t stop reblogging fanart of Gideon, either.

Alas, it’s not enough to make me sludge through plotlessness and lazy writing. It also quickly becomes clear that the Locked Tomb series is nothing without Gideon, and yes, I read the spoilers, OK? I know Gideon makes a re-appearance to some poor, efficacious extent. Muir simply lacks the writing prowess to execute these choices successfully, both in terms of their logic and their intrigue. So, although I approached “Harrow the Ninth” with a chip on my shoulder, I was willing to go all in if Muir hadn’t made the heinous decision to alternate between two perspectives, one of which is written in the second person. Unfortunately for Tamsyn Muir (and for me), the (SPOILER ALERT) second book does not include Gideon, the protagonist of the first book, and perhaps one of the most entertaining characters ever written. It pains me to say that I did not finish “Harrow the Ninth.” I was enamored with its predecessor, “Gideon the Ninth” - I laughed, I screamed, I cried - and safe to say, it was a tremendous letdown to open up this sequel. Here are some books we hope to finish, and some we hope to never read again. In either case, it haunts us readers long after we’ve cast it aside. The corner of the bookmark pokes out from between the pages like a forlorn wave goodbye. Sometimes it’s just not meant to be, but we still feel an odd guilt every time we return a book to the shelf without finishing it.

Why do some books resist our attention? Maybe the issue comes somewhere in the middle, in the relationship between reader and novel.

Books like a court of wings and ruin