Dey's reads

Hello an welcome back,

Let’s talk about expectations versus reality today! Or what I’d like to call being catfished by a book: bookfished :-p

We all know the feeling. You’re scrolling (most likely) when you stumble across the most beautiful fanart/edit. Such intriguing visuals, such beautiful quotes, the comments are all raving about it.

“This is it,” you think, “my next favorite read.”

And boy, would you be wrong!

Sometimes, the book is necessarily bad, it’s just NOT what you expected it to be. The compelling fanart/quotes that made you pick it up were actually the only good parts. It’s quite disappointing.

That was exactly my experience while reading The Song of Salt and Shadow by Seren Rose.

Mini book review:

You can read the blurb here. To sum it up; it’s a story about this siren who doesn’t look like one and the pirate who is supposed to hunt her kind. She needs to grow into her true self, and he needs to find an end to his curse. Feel free to guess the rest 🙂

I think a huge part of the issues in this came from the writing. I know how hard writing a full novel is (actually, a coherent story of any length), I’m not saying the author’s bad. The ideas behind The Song of Salt and Shadow were truly original and captivating. However, the execution fell short on many axes. The pace? meh. The main characters? skeletons of what they should be. The ending? predictable.

Speaking of characters. They were shallow/unseasoned and it felt like they were acting very hard to be relatable but fell short each time. For whenever I felt the connection bud growing, they’d do something that shredded it. Don’t get me started on their interactions with each other!

Finding good recommendations:

Anyway, this lead me to ponder upon where I get my recommendations.

I’ve found myself in this situation more times than I can count by now. So the question is how would we know good from bad in these scenarios? To stop ourselves from getting catfished by a stunning book cover? Is there even a way besides reading the books for ourselves?

The best course of action seems to choose a few people you trust, who has similar taste as you, and read what they read(?)

What do you think? How many times have you found yourself disappointed in an anticipated book rec? Where do you get your recs from? Any pieces of advice?