October 24, 2014

DNF: Adventures of a Graveyard Girl by Milda Harris




Adventures of a Graveyard Girl by Milda Harris
Series: Funeral Crushing #2
Source: Bought kindle copy
Publisher: indie
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2012
Age Group: Young Adult
Kait Lenox is back! It's Homecoming Dance time and Kait is excited. It's her first dance with a date and that date is none other than one of the hottest, most popular guys in her school, Ethan Ripley! For once Kait doesn't feel like a funeral crashing weird girl and it's the most perfect romantic evening ever...at least until a girl gets murdered in the high school bathroom. Rumors fly, panic ensues, and Kait can't help herself, she assigns herself to the case!




DNF
Wow, a third DNF review in so many weeks. I know this makes me look bad, I do, but I swear things are not as bad as they seem. I only have thirteen books marked a DNF on Goodreads. I probably have a few more I didn't mark, but no more than twenty, twenty five - in three years of over 470 books. That's a pretty good percentile, don't you think? I don't DNF that often, or that willingly. At least, I didn't use to.

But I think I've also reached the point where I treasure the enjoyment I get from every book, and if I don't really enjoy it... well, there isn't much point in reading it, is there?
Still, I don't always review DNF books... Only if I can explain exactly why I didn't finish it, and I'd like to share that.

I picked up this book because a while back (like, two years ago), I read the first book and enjoyed it. It wasn't A-mazing, but it was cute and fun and I decided I wanted to continue with the series. But then I couldn't. At 48% of the book, I called it quits. My heart just wasn't in it. I kept looking at reading the book as a chore, which is never encouraging.

I had three big issues with Adventures of a Graveyard Girl.

1. It was way too... dare I say it?... childish to me. I don't need characters to be my age to enjoy them, but here they just read like immature 12 year olds, and not teenagers. And I've read and enjoyed books with twelve year old more than this. It was just... too exaggeratedly childish. Teenagers are allowed to have their immature moments, for sure, but not 100% of the time.

2. Then there was the poorly edited text. There were a lot of missing punctuation marks, or places where I felt a dot should've been but weren't. There were a lot of duplicated words in a way that made no sense. A lot of describing sentences that lacked finesse. It felt like... well, like an amateur job. Like no one actually read over the book and corrected all of these. It was like reading a draft, and not a finished product. And I don't know about you, but that bothers me.

3. And finally, the repetition. How many times can you say the same thing on one page? apparently, a lot. Enough that I totally lost count. It was like Harris didn't trust we got the information the first time, so she mentioned it 50 times more just to be sure. In very similar wording. That's one of my major writing pet-peeves.

So in the end, despite enjoying the first book, I decided this is as far as I and this series go. It's just not for me, really.

  Nitzan

7 comments:

  1. You must feel like a YA heroine with all those adventures, huh?:) I hope you'll get used to it soon.

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  2. Woah, I can feel your hate for this book all the way from Sri Lanka, Nitzan:)
    I don't know what it says about me, but I love reading DNF and negative reviews. They're so funny and sometimes well written than the book itself.Loved your review, yours is probably one of the best I've read in that category.
    The whole talk of sex weirded me out too.Anna was the same age as me, but she was ready to have sex with a guy she's known for a week.Seriously?

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  3. I don't know if a YA heroine... usually, YA heroines find a boy somewhere that makes it all easier and stuff. But I do feel more accomplished. Less afraid of the world. More capable. Stuff like that.
    I'm getting used to it. I'm actually pretty used to it after 3 days. Like, it's kind of weird being home in comparison.

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  4. Haha. Well. There's a lot of hate, so I guess that's not surprising.
    I love reading those too, so whatever it says about you, it says about me too. And I don't know about you, but I think I'm in good company if that's the case *wink*
    Really? I think my best DNF review is actually Hush, Hush. It's on Drugs Called Books, but I plan to move it one day.
    Yes, exactly! But say, find, she's ready. Why do you have to talk about sex all the time? Like, don't you have better things to worry about? like being half demon!?

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  5. Oh well... It's always sad when DNFing a book, isn't it? Nice review, Nitz! :)
    Book Maniac Reviews

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  6. Yes, it is :/
    OMG, you just called me the way all my friends at home do and that made me smile, K! :D

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  7. Glad to hear it! From now on I'll just call you Nitz :)
    Book Maniac Reviews

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