We’re excited for out second unpopular book opinions post. In 2021 we wrote Unpopular Opinions: YA Ships, where we discussed couples we didn’t like and couples we believe should have been endgame.
In this post, we’re discussing popular YA books that we DNF’d. Just to be clear, we don’t DNF very often, it usually happens no more than two to three times a year. Let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you DNF’s any of the books we did.
1. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a super popular YA book with of over a million ratings on Goodreads. The premise originally sounded interesting to us because we liked the idea of the MC visiting a creepy island full of secrets. We just found the writing to be dull and we didn’t connect with any of the characters. Unfortunately, this book was over-hyped and we couldn’t get through it.
2. Did I Mention I Love You? by Estelle Maskame
Did I Mention I Love You is a YA romance trilogy about Eden Munro, who goes to live with her father, step-mother and three step-brothers. We found the step-brother and step-sister romance to be completely creepy. We usually love hate to love romances in YA, but found this one impossible to get into.
3. The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White
The Guinevere Deception is a re-imagination of the Arthurian legend. When Princess Guinevere arrives in Camelot to marry the illusive King Arthur, she must adapt to life at court. We were super excited to read this book, but sadly have to mark this one as DNF. The plot was promising, and we love when authors put their own spin on classic stories, but this book fell flat. The main character, Guinevere, was boring and lacked personality. Moreover, the narrative was bland and, while we enjoyed learning about the Arthurian legend, the actual characters were lackluster. We will be honest: we only made it about 100 pages into this YA fantasy book.
4. More Than Just a Pretty Face by Syed M. Masood
More Than Just a Pretty Face was one of our only DNFs of 2021. We couldn’t get into it at all because of the MC’s character. Not only could we not connect with him at all, a big part of his personality is being both dumb a obsessed with getting girls.
5. My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham
My Dearest Darkest is our first and only (so far) DNF of 2022. We had high hopes for this YA horror set at a boarding school, but we quickly realized it wasn’t for us. First of all, so many characters are introduced at once that we didn’t know anyone. Also, since the story was told in third person, we had trouble following the main character. We don’t mind books in third person, just make them easy to follow.
6. Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins
We’ve complained about Lola and the Boy Next Door many times, considering we love Perkins’s other YA romances. The only redeeming qualities of the book were the San Francisco setting and being able to see Anna and Etienne. Lola was bratty and treated the people in her life terribly. She also felt very unrealistic to us because her whole personality “I’m the quirkiest person ever.” She’s a definite manic pixie dream girl.
7. The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols
The Boys Next Door came out back in 2007 and we attempted to read it in 2015. Think of it as a bad version of The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han. Like Han’s book, the main character Lori is torn between two brothers, who she spends the summer with. Except unlike Han’s version, the characters are all super annoying. We found the book boring and predictable.
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I love this series of unpopular book opinions! I agree about Lola but I made myself finish it even though it lacked everything the other books in the series had
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We’re impressed that you finished it! It was very surprising to us when the other two were so great.
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I really enjoyed reading this post. I had a few on my TBR list and it’s a great heads up to hear your opinion. Especially on My Dearest Darkest. I don’t normally like books that contain a ton of characters in a way that’s hard to follow. Thank you for sharing!
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Thanks for reading! Yeah, that’s the main thing we struggled with. It got to a pint where we barely knew the main character.
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This is a really interesting idea for a post! I haven’t read any of these but I’d heard lots of great things about Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children but I think I’ll give it a miss now. I enjoyed The Summer I Turned Pretty so I definitely won’t be reading The Boys Next Door either! Thanks for sharing.
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Thank you!! Miss Peregrine is so over hyped and The Boys Next Door didn’t have much of a plot.
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This is a great post! Unpopular book opinions are so fun and interesting. Thank you for sharing this excellent post!
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We think so too! We like seeing what other people didn’t like.
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I also didn’t care for ‘Lola and the Boy Next Door’ or ‘Isla and the Happily Ever After’. I completely forgot about ‘The Guinevere Deception’. I’m kind of scared to read it after hearing your thoughts. I did read one book by Kiersten White that a lot of people didn’t like and I really enjoyed it so hopefully I will like this one too.
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We hope you like Guinevere. It’s the only book from White we’ve read so we can’t compare. Lola was so sad because we liked Anna so much.
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I haven’t read any of these, but I do often find that hyped-up books don’t turn out to be as good!
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We tend to find that to be true too, so we try to go in knowing that lol!
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Call me crazy, but I enjoy hearing about books people didn’t love or finish just as much as hearing about the ones that they did enjoy. I’m clearly a fan of unpopular opinions. I can’t say that I have read any of these, but a number of them I have heard plenty of and I admittedly felt they were too hyped for their own good and now I see that seems to be the case.
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Thank you for reading! We like reading unpopular opinions too. We want our readers to see what we enjoyed and what we didn’t enjoy!
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I wasn’t a huge fan of the DIMLY series, either. 😉
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It just felt so wrong!
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Love the idea of unpopular opinions, we always hear of what people love and never enough of what didn’t work with them. I completely agree with Miss Peregrine, couldn’t get into it at all!
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We like sharing our unpopular opinions! Miss Peregrine just felt so dull to us and we saw reviews about it’s excitement.
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What a fun post, I always enjoy reading unpopular opinions. I haven’t read any of these actually, but its always interesting to read why it didn’t work out for other readers.
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Aww that’s a shame to hear you DNF Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The series is one of my favorite YA series!
I can understand not finishing Did I Mention I Love You because of the creepy romance & the plot of My Dearest Darkest does sound intriguing, but yea I don’t like books that have way too many characters that make it hard to follow.
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