WORST BOOKS OF 2022
The best books of the year will come later this week. That will be more in list format since I read so many good books this year. This post and the DNF post which will also come later will be more detailed since I read very few books I didn't like this year.
1. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (pictured above)
This book is about a girl named Mary Lennox who grew up in India and has been spoiled her whole life, but is also really lonely and craving company. After her parents die, she is sent to live with her rich Uncle Craven in the UK. There she meets a ton of new, friendly people and starts forming real human connections, and discovers a hidden garden that belonged to her late aunt that her uncle closed up after she died. Mary starts a mini project to tidy up the garden and make it look good, and forms more human connections through that, too.
Oh man, this book was a huge disappointment. I actually enjoyed the first half of the book fairly enough (unfortunately there is some racism against Indian people that obviously didn't age well), but something big happens in the second half of the book that made my rating drop. I can't say it here because it will get into spoilers, but it is a super problematic storytelling trope that I absolutely can't stand. I will tell you that the trope happens with the character Colin. I gave it 2 stars because I at least liked the first half of the book, but then that second half happened, and it made me change my mind.
2. Palace of Mirrors by Margaret Peterson Haddix
This is the sequel to Haddix's Just Ella, which I read last year and I absolutely loved. Although it follows different characters within the same world. Cecilia is the true princess of the kingdom of Suala, and she has been living her life in hiding but preparing for the day she will be able to return to the capital to reclaim her throne, which is currently being occupied by a commoner girl named Desmia. But when Cecilia and her friend Harper (he's a guy) arrives to the palace, they learn that everything is not what it seems at first.
I don't have a picture for this because I got it from the library (thank goodness). But this sequel to one of my favorite books of all time, Just Ella, was majorly disappointing! Just like The Secret Garden, I liked the first half of the book just fine, but the second half got really bad. Again, can't reveal too much because spoilers, all I remember was that second half of the book got really weird and confusing, and at the end of the book I just felt like the sequel was totally pointless.
Aside from the plot becoming a convoluted mess, I also really disliked Cecilia and Harper's relationship. They are supposed to be friends but they argue with each other so much they feel more like enemies. At the very end of the book the author seemed to be setting them up for a romantic relationship, but I though that they are so toxic as friends, they'd be terrible as a couple. This was so drastically different than Just Ella, where Ella and Jed had such a healthy, sweet relationship.
Heck, to be honest, I don't even think Mrs. Haddix herself even wrote this book! It feels like it was ghostwritten. The story feels as if the writer was making everything up as they were going along, and all of the feminism and everything that made Just Ella so good is completely thrown out the window in this book. It does not feel like a typical Haddix book. I wouldn't be surprised if this was ghostwritten.
In fact, I don't even think she ever planned on writing a sequel to Just Ella. One reason I think this is is because the time this book was released (2008). Just Ella came out in 1999. There's are 9 year gap. I don't know about you, but I noticed this phenomenon when a book's sequel comes out a long time after the first book came out, the sequel tends to be inferior. That's usually because the first book was meant to be standalone, and in the case of Just Ella, you can tell because the ending of that book was already satisfying enough. I don't know what happened behind the scenes with Mrs. Haddix, but I bet someone she worked with probably told her to write a sequel, and she probably didn't want to do it herself, and so she hired a ghostwriter to do it. That's what I think.
So I still highly recommend Just Ella, but not Palace of Mirrors! Since I didn't like Mirrors, I will not be reading the third book, Palace of Lies.
Oh, and you can look at some other negative reviews for Mirrors here on Goodreads (the link is to one star reviews but there is a filter that lets you look at other star reviews, like two stars). Funny enough, even though I didn't read Palace of Lies and never will, there this one review by one person named Annie (you'll have to scroll down a little to find them) that basically also sums up how I felt about Palace of Mirrors, you can check it out here.
Well I finally got those two books off my chest! Are there any popular books you've read that you didn't like?
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