Tuesday, January 4, 2011

You suck and so I cry

Ok. I don't normally slam books because, well, I'm not overly picky. I'm a pretty big reader and have a wide variety of interests when it comes to books. On top of that, I really try to get through a book that's not keeping my interest if I feel it deserves the time. For example, I read "The Host" by Stephenie Meyer and while I was bored to death for the first 350 pages, everyone kept telling me that it would be worth it in the end to finish it. (Btw, it was actually pretty good for the last 250 as everyone said).

However, that's not the case for one book in particular. For Christmas, Jordan bought me the new NookColor that just came out by Barnes & Noble. I'm IN LOVE with this thing! I was really excited that I finally finished The Host because it meant I could start a new book on my new Nook! So I turn it on and start searching for books I want to read. While making my "wishlist" (which btw is an awesome feature), I stumbled across a book called "It Sucked and Then I Cried" by Heather Armstrong.

I was wanting to read another book called "Oogie" about a pitbull who had gotten damaged in dog fights and had been taken in by a family (which btw, I'm still planning on reading because I read a sample and it was really sweet) but no. I find this other P.O.S., read a quick free sample of it (another fantastic feature of the Nook), read great reviews by consumers (who led me into the land of P.O.S.), buy it, and immediately waste $9.99. Holy moly what a piece of crap.

So the summary on the buy page said it was a light-hearted, hysterical (NOT) book written by a woman who got well-known for her funny and entertaining blogs. She gets pregnant and writes an "HONEST" account of pregnancy, child birth, and her experience as a first time mom. Sounds good, right? Right up my ally, right? I'm thinking, oh she'll say all the things I was thinking during my pregnancy but just didn't want to say outloud. Oh, she'll talk about how hard it is transitioning into motherhood.

Ya. I didn't know she was going to write like a complete moron. This chick is honestly so full of herself. Two pages deep and you can tell she's trying soooo hard to be whitty because I mean, come on, she's Heather Armstrong - the funniest woman in America! There's nothing I can't stand more than someone so obviously straining for substance and coming up with nothing but a bunch of analogies that make NO SENSE and are clearly only there for comedic affect. It gets old after a few pages of this same pattern over. And over. And over. And yet, over again. Like, "Chuck often looked at me, in between bites of a stuffed toy, like he understood, like he was sorry I had to suffer painful bloating and sore boobs - so sore that the resulting breeze from shutting the refrigerator door made me feel like a baby seal being clubbed by poachers." Honestly, ok, I get that this has comedic potential, but not when every sentence says crap like,

"I may have plucked a few staples from the wood floors here and there, and you'd never in your life have seen a more enthusiastic, pregnant, cheerleader, but 121 square feet of Smurf-blue kitchen was smitten and sent to Jesus through the hands of one very tired father-to-be. While I had prepared myself for life without a kitchen sink or stove or oven, I had no idea the actual physical toll the project would take on my already ravaged and swollen body, or that I would become so desperate as to end up on my sliver-infested knees promising the Mormon God that if he would just make it end already I would stop telling my sister's children that sacrament bread is laced with arsenic."

WHAT THE HELL DID SHE JUST SAY?!?! She said that she was tired and pregnant during a kitchen demo. Wow. Good thing it takes about 10 tries to decode all that around her attempts at comedic bull-crap. And did you notice that entire thing was only two sentences?? It never ends!! No joke, the entire book is sentence after sentence like this. After several chapters, I had no idea what I read except for bad attempts at comedy and no substance at the end.

On top of all that, she makes one mention of something and off she goes on a 3 page tangent on that topic before you get back to the original thing she is talking about. It's ridiculous. For example, she makes one slight mention that one day, she wasn't sick with nausea during her pregnancy so she decided to spend time with her dog, Chuck. This simple sentence literally catapults her into a 5 page rant about her dog, how she got him, "funny" stories about him and how she's entire incompetent as a human being taking care of a dog and therefore, should not be a mother, etc. Her BS actually finishes the chapter and never comes back to her original sentence - yes, that she was going to spend time with him the day she wasn't sick.

There's also a crap-ton of sentences that run on for like...uh...an entire page. I swear to God, if this wasn't an e-book, I would have literally thrown this thing across the room. I haven't hated a book this much in years and I mostly hate it simply because I think the writer is a pretentious moron who thinks she's hysterical and is obviously, not.

I read 46 of it's 183 pages and was done with it.

No comments:

Post a Comment