The blog Booking Through Thursday asks for this:
Name a book or author that you truly wanted to love but left you disappointed. (And, of course, explain why.)
I'm going to answer this with the worst book I ever read (this was many many years ago): Flowers in the Attic.
My sister is an avid reader who can devour a book in an hour or two. Growing up I frequently read her castoffs. This was one of those. It's about kids who live in the attic and have a very mean grandmother. I remember the author V.C. Andrews used the word lugubrious a lot. The characterization of females was so horrible I assumed the author had to be a man. Instead I discovered that Andrews was a woman who grew up in a wheelchair and felt, I suppose, a lot of the isolation those darn kids in the attic felt. She just wasn't able to get it down on paper in a believable fashion. I forced myself to finish reading the book, just so I could always note it as the worst book ever.
As a writer, I hesitate to rag on on a living author, but Andrews is resting in lugubrious peace. The worst thing about Andrews? She died and yet continued to pump out books. A ghostwriter took up the franchise and channeled her lugubrious ghost.
The worst - absolute worst book - I have ever read or had read to me is Brutus the Swamp Man by Larry McCollum.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.brutusbook.com/
You should go read it. Just because you'll suddenly appreciate even the worst student writing so much better.
First line of the book:
"In the swampy backlands of Louisiana, far from the town of Baton Rouge, where the cold-blooded reptiles roamed free, lived a family known as the family who had lived off of the land and had died and left their only son to survive on his own."
It gets worse from there.