I have to admit that I am simultaneously envious and kind of annoyed,
Yeah, exactly. I'll admit, too, I'm feeling overly sensitive because I also received my first DNF review yesterday, although to the reader's credit, she said it was more because it wasn't her kind of book and she would have known that had she read the back cover (?!?) and at least she didn't ding me with a single star review or anything.
Still, rational as one can be about these things, it still stings.
But, on the upside, yay for buying Stars and I hope your niece likes it as much as the first two!
But I wish to jebuslug I knew how to write something that people would just not put down.
End each chapter on OMGWTF, for one thing! That always pisses me off, because it means I can never go to bed.
Hunger Games was unparalleled for me in my recent reading. I haven't had anything that hard to put down for a while. Easy to read, emotionally affecting, and I read Mockingjay on a bad few days and wept like a baby. I'm so impressed. Not in a Harry Potter-brings-reading-to-the-masses way. She just broke through my jaded cynicism and hooked me right in.
Which is a talent I value more than worldbuilding, honestly, although I always prefer them to go hand in hand.
Did not finish, I'm guessing?
What is a DNF review?
Did Not Finish.
Reader said the book bored her to death.
Ah. I'd never heard that.
Easy to read
I think this is a big thing. It reads very easily, which makes it easy to get into, and then once you're into it, fuck, you can't get out because OMGWTF.
her world-building kind of crappy
I don't have problems with her general dystopian world-building, but I still don't understand how
they design/build/control these arenas.
I don't really need to know that, though, P-C. Personally, I mean, because the Capitol is portrayed as so powerful and so unknowable, I can be with Kat in not understanding how it's done, but having to roll with it.
And she shows a lot of their tech in little ways with the body mods that people in the Capitol get, so.
I am also very much not a hard sci-fi reader, though.
Yeah, P-C. That, and there's a whole set-piece in Mockingjay that just threw me right out of the story because it made NO SENSE AT ALL. For those who read Mockingjay:
the bit where the "pods" are in the streets of the Capitol, which means the authorities set boobytraps all over the area inhabited by their own civilian population. Totally nonsensical.
