Petty Reasons I've Given Books Low Ratings

This post contains affiliate links. I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.

I thought this would be an easy topic for a blog post. I thought I was a petty bitch! Turns out, I'm not as petty as I thought. Most of the reasons I dislike books are completely normal. Flat characters, predictable plots, saggy middles. Perfectly reasonable stuff to dislike.

After digging through tons of old reviews, I found a few petty reasons why I knocked stars off my ratings. This post was hard!

😬  Petty Reasons To Hate Books  😕

1. You don't know anything about mountain climbing! And I don't either! If you've been on this blog before, then you've seen me talk about this book. It must have traumatized me because I can't stop whining about it. (Much like my other childhood traumas.)

Here's the scene from the book so we can relive it. A man and a woman are tied together at opposite ends of a long rope. They're running along a cliffside to escape from bad guys. The man falls off the cliff. The woman stops his fall without breaking stride. She doesn't get yanked off her feet when he hits the end of the rope and starts swinging from her waist like a pendulum. She keeps running while he climbs back up the rope. The rope is only attached to her! How is this possible? How is she still running?

We love a badass female character. This one is so badass that she can break reality. She also broke my star rating for the book.

2. I regret to inform you that sled dogs are not horses. I have never seen a dog sled with reins. Not in real life. Not in historical photos. Maybe dog reins existed somewhere, but I've never seen evidence of widespread use.

Way too many fiction authors assume that dog sleds and horse sleighs are the same! They're not!

Modern dog sleds are controlled by giving the dogs commands. I've also seen humans ski or snowmobile in front of the dogs. The dogs just follow the human.

Historical dog sleds used signal whips. I've heard that whips are still used in some places, but I've never seen one in real life. Dogs don't like the loud noise the whip makes, so cracking it on the dogs' right side will cause them to move left.

I borrowed public domain photos because steering a dog sled is (apparently) important.

Here's a modern dog sled. The guy on the back is doing the steering. He's holding onto the sled and using his body weight to guide it through curves.

Dog sleds look different in different parts of the world. In places with no trees or crevasses, you'll traditionally see a fan hitch. Each dog is connected to the sled by an individual rope. The dogs can spread out or bunch together depending on the terrain. 

Here's a mail carrier in 1898 Alaska. The dogs look like they have reins, but they don't. That's how they were attached to the sled in 1898 times.

Here's a watercolor painting of a Native American dog sled in 1833 North Dakota.

Here's a picture of me and my dad in the early 2000s. I'm the 16-year-old frozen marshmallow on the back of the sled. Look mom, no reins!

No reins anywhere. I will knock stars off a book's rating for dog sleds that grow mysterious reins.

3. This book didn't change my parents. In the past few years, I've dabbled in self-help books. I read one book about how to repair damaged relationships. There was a chapter about a woman who had an argument with her father. They didn't speak to each other for years. Then the woman decided to contact him.

At first, the conversations were rocky. After months, her father slowly became more receptive to talking with her. Then he started turning off Fox News when she came over because it distracted them from their conversations.

WAIT! HOLD ON! You can't casually mention a father turning off Fox News without explaining how to achieve this witchcraft. How do you make them turn it off? My parents watch Fox News 24/7 and keep it at a volume that will make your brain hemorrhage. The TV literally cannot go louder!

When I ask them to turn it off (or turn it down), they call me a "Snowflake that can't handle the truth."

I'm docking stars from this self-help book for being helpful about all the wrong things.

4. Am I supposed to feel something? In addition to dabbling in self-help, I've also been dabbling in cozy fantasy. "Cozy" is not my reading vibe. "Death and destruction" is my reading vibe.

I haven't hated any of the cozy books I've read so far, but I do feel like I'm missing something. The characters are falling in love and having fun adventures, and I'm just sitting here like:

I suspect I'm too dead inside to fully appreciate the happiness of fictional people. I'm docking stars for too much joy.

5. I don't want to do actual work! I spent 11 years in college and then got a job where I'm constantly fixing the messes that people create. My brain is tired. It doesn't want to work anymore.

If a book is complicated and making me feel stupid, I'll give up on it. Reading should be fun. It shouldn't make me feel more exhausted. You get zero stars for trying to make me smarter.

6. The cults are wrong! If you thought my dog sled obsession was tedious, wait until you hear me talk about cults. Oh, boy. Everyone loves to screw up cults. Authors seem to think that cult members are brainless robots who do whatever they're told without asking questions.

One of the stupidest fictional cult books I've read was about a doomsday cult that built an underground bomb shelter. As soon as the shelter was finished, the leader turned off the oxygen, locked the cult members inside, and fled to avoid legal trouble. All the adults were like, "Welp, the leader tricked us. We're going to die." Then they flopped on their beds and waited to suffocate.

Instead of suffocating, a teenager walked over to the control panel on the shelter's wall and turned the air back on. Crisis averted! Everybody can breathe!

Being in a cult does not automatically mean you're suicidal and severely lacking brain activity.

I can hear authors going, "But Jonestown! People drank poison and died!" That's true, but people also tried to escape from Jonestown. Those people were shot. I know the media likes to call Jonestown a mass suicide, but if your choices are "drink poison" or "run and get shot," is that really suicide?

The stupid doomsday book got two stars because that's how many brain cells I had left after reading it. The rest of my brain cells suffocated in the bomb shelter.

7. How did you miss the point of your own story? Do you read memoirs? Have you ever read one that seems completely oblivious?

I read a memoir written by a woman whose husband was diagnosed with a rare and usually fatal medical condition. The author's parents and her in-laws teamed up and got him into the only hospital in the US that has specialists for this condition. Then they got him into the world's best rehab center. They paid for ambulance airplanes to fly him around to different doctors. They bought the author an apartment near the rehab center and hired nannies to watch her kids. The parents paid all the bills because the author was too stressed out to have a job.

The husband eventually recovered enough to leave rehab. He survived a medical problem that kills pretty much everybody who develops it.

I expected the conclusion of the book to talk about the US healthcare system and what the author learned from navigating it as a wealthy person. Instead, she talked about the importance of being a good Christian.

Okay . . . ?

I guess good Christians have wealthy parents and bad Christians die from rare medical problems?

I think the author might have missed several important points in her own story. She also missed a good review from me.

8. The spooky vampires . . . sparkle. Friends, I just can't do the paranormal romance thing. I want my monsters to be scary, not sexy! The only scary thing about Edward and Jacob in Twilight is how they treat Bella.

Sexy monsters get one star, but that's okay because the star sparkles.

Tell me your petty reasons for giving books bad ratings!