Top 5 Tuesday || Books I Almost DNF’d, but Now I Love!

Shanah @ Bionic Bookworm has given me a tough topic today, since I’m not one for DNFing generally. Still, I’m gonna give it a go, and share with you guys the top five books I hypothetically might have DNF’d if I was a DNF person, except I didn’t and I loved them!

Oof, that’s a mouthful. Sorry about that. I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo. I only have so much word power per day.

ANYWAY.

Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride

I started off a little skeptical of this one, mostly because the main character didn’t click with me right away. His voice just wasn’t what I was expecting going in, and he wasn’t the type of main character I’m normally rooting for. Partway through, though, I realized he was just in over his head with a lot of cool but also terrifying powers, and he was mostly winging it, which is about how my attempts at almost-free-of-college-adult-life are going. I warmed up to him after that, and now I need to get my hands on the next book to see if Sam is okay and getting used to this whole necromancy thing!

 

Strange Grace by Tessa Gratton

My frustrations with this one were one part formatting (WHY ARE E-ARCS SO ROUGH?), and one part characters. There was one character in particular who was incredibly abrasive and not in an endearing way, and I struggled to really care about him. By the end of the book, though, I found myself really appreciating the dynamics of the main trio, and I liked the atmosphere of the book so much that it helped me get past that initial hurdle!

Seriously, though, the formatting drove me nuts. I had paragraphs that would cut off mid-word and then just reappear multiple paragraphs later in a horrible Frankenstein sort of maneuver. Makes it really hard to read the book without scratching my head and going “where the hell are the right words c’mon”.

 

Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao

At first, I thought I was going to get bored. I wanted to like it (and ultimately, I really did!), but it moved a little slowly at the start, and I needed a more lively pace. Once it was actually in motion, though, I got really caught up in it. Normally, I dislike super flowery prose, but since this is retelling for the Evil Queen from Snow White, it actually felt like it was right to have that over the top language sometimes. All it took was some time for it to really click!

 

Ace of Shades by Amanda Foody

I’ll admit it: there was a hot second where I didn’t think I was going to love Ace of Shades much. Early Enne was a little tiny bit insufferable, and Levi is not so good in the open communication department, one of my big old pet peeves. But I really can’t resist a con, or found family, or both, and by the end, I think I did a 180 on how I felt about Enne, and I sympathized a little more with Levi (but kid, seriously, you’ve GOT to talk about the shit in your life, I’m begging you, quit hiding things from people you care about). Ultimately worth the read, and it’s making me suffer because the sequel isn’t out just yet. 😭

 

All the Truth That’s In Me by Julie Berry

Now here was a book I wasn’t prepared for. It left me feeling thrown for a loop at first because it’s historical fiction (which I did not get from the jacket summary), and it’s written in second person, which is ridiculously hard to pull off without straying into the realm of cheesy and/or bad. And yet the farther I got into the book, the more character development there was, and more facets of the plot revealed themselves, so that by the end, I was weirdly invested. It’s maybe not a book I love, but it left a really distinct impression on me, and I can say that I’m glad I stuck through it!

 

Wow! Definitely a harder T5T for me (I don’t like DNFing, and I don’t like to say anything bad about books if I can avoid it), but I finished it! But what’s on your list? What did you almost drop that ended up stealing your heart? Do tell!