Plain Bad Heroines

3 stars, originally, because I did not have the urge to DNF (not wanting to DNF a book automatically gets it a 3 star rating in my brain.) But I also wasn’t captivated- it was a rare book that I could put down in the middle of a chapter, which I can almost never do. The story was interesting enough, mostly but then it just got bizarre. Not even creepy horror bizarre, just... bizarre. What the hell was up with the yellow jackets? Also, Merritt was a total Karen and I didn’t like reading about her at all. I looked forward to finishing this book so I could go on to the next.

So why 2 stars? Because I read the digital book. Why does that matter? Because the narrator used the most ANNOYING footnotes in the history of footnotes. She used footnotes where most authors would use parenthesis. But that’s not the bad of it. The bad part was every damn footnote required me to click a little tiny asterisk to take me to the footnote, which was on its own page. Literally pages 541-659 of this book are individual footnotes on individual pages. And because, on the footnotes, the asterisks were in the upper left portion of the page, 9 out of 10 times clicking the damned footnote simply turned the page back to the previous footnote. So imagine reading a book and finding your groove, only to click the damn footnote, find it to be a freaking 2 word snark fest and then spend 5 damned minutes trying to click back to the story but only paging back and forth between two footnotes. Worse still, maybe 1 in 10 footnotes contained actual, useful information. The rest were useless (failed) attempts at witty comments. Add to that my e-device of choice is an original iPad mini, which is 8 years old, so the constant flipping frequently made my iPad crash ... So these damned footnotes probably added about 4 hours to my reading time.

I will never pick this book up again, nor will I recommend anyone purchase the digital version. If you must read this weird, bizarre book, buy a paper copy. You’ve been warned.