Wait wut

the original post was getting too long i read shit books on purpose for fun and put them on a tierlist S tier is the "world's okayest book" award only one book can achieve F tier full spoilers possible for any given title here's the list so far

and now

13. Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas

I know next to nothing about the larger Impact this book has had (i am not on tiktok.) all i know is what is on the author's website: that in the rush to go to print, the "final stage of editing" was skipped over. and how it was so poorly received that they offered refunds and are rewriting the whole thing. and the whole thing where she's been working on this story for 10 years. which does in fact make me feel like i am punching down a little bit on this one. i am going to try not to be very mean about it because the author is young and inexperienced and clearly holds this story very close to her heart.

but the fact remains that the book is very bad and it needs to go back to the drawing board.

a brief rundown.

everyone in this universe's land (Gardian [sic]) has powers of some description which are based on their zodiac sign. society is split into four "unions" (read: countries) based on the elemental affinity (fire, water, air, earth) of those signs. the signs also somewhat dictate people's personalities - or rather, the norms of what people's personalities Should be in their respective society. (which, by the way, the names of the four countries are Societal, Conviction, Assiduous, and Autarchic. tell me divergent was a formative experience for you without telling me.) it is illegal to live in a Union that does not correspond to your sign, and it is also illegal to marry across Union borders.

there are also three Forbidden powers - Spirit Walking, Libra Healing, and Zodiac Turning. spirit walking involves astral projection, talking to "divinities," and memory manipulation (this is a spoiler.) libra healing is when you are a libra and have healing powers i think. but they are super powerful healing powers. because people with other signs can also have healing powers and that's fine? also, spirit walkers' powers don't awaken until they "come into contact with" a libra healer.

zodiac turning... gives you the power to change peoples' birthday ? and also seems to come with some sort of hadouken ability that is capable of killing people. it is the rarest and Most illegal power in the land. you'll never guess which one our leading lady eventually finds out she has.

but before all that, our leading lady is also a scorpio. these are apparently the most powerful of the twelve signs, but they are forced to live by the restrictive Scorpio Code, which dictates that no scorpio can show emotion, make friends, or fall in love. breaking any one of these tenets is punishable by death. it's also illegal for scorpios to be raised by non-scorpio parents or live with non-scorpio siblings. this is enforced by the Scorpio Stellarium, the governing body of people born between october 23 and november 21. it is apparently thought that the scorpio code is immutable and has always been there as it was bestowed by some sort of divinity. mc and her family - composed of a scorpio mother, a cancer father, our scorpio mc (rieka), and her aries sister (avia) get around these laws by living in these cursed woods that are supposed to kill anyone who enters but for some reason won't kill them. but they tell the government that they actually live somewhere else and nobody interrogates that.

with me so far?

the actual forward motion of this story is very simple. girl questions the state of things. girl stumbles upon "proof" that the state of things is wrong. girl sets out on a quest to prove the state of things is wrong.

her proof? she found an old piece of paper that says some guy made up the scorpio code, rather than it being some sort of divine order. (which, if you needed to murder your own populace to enforce your divine order, why would you ever think these were inherent truths?) and that a legendary sword ("a mythical sword of immortality [which] curse[s] anyone it touch[es] with immortality") exists and is not just a story. somehow, we decide that this legendary sword (which, critically, does the opposite of killing people) must be key to overthrowing the scorpio government.

if you're wondering how revealing this magic sword to the general public will do anything to the government, so was I - until literally 95% of the way through the story when someone actually asks them what they're going to do with the sword and the characters go. well actually i'm not sure. before it is revealed that the TRUE final boss of this saga... is none other than representative democracy:

i specify that the "forward motion" of this story separately from the rest of it. this is because there is so much lore-dumping and/or exposition going on at all times that there is very little room for scene writing. every single time (every time!) rieka falls asleep during the course of the group's journey, she has a flashback to previously-suppressed memories of herself and this girl who has been trying to kill her in the present day. as it turns out, rieka has had around four years of her memories strategically erased to omit this specific girl, narah, with whom she planned to overthrow the government. long (long long long) story short, narah used to be rieka's girlfriend and fellow anarchy appreciator, but now she is under the control of the scorpio government. this is all written in such a way as to make me wonder why we needed to make all of it into flashback dream sequences. it would have had much more (read: any) impact if it were just written in chronological order.

anyway. it is eventually revealed that all the other members of reika's group ALSO have the super powerful illegal powers and at least one immortal parent (except her sister, who is actually only her half sister, and whose father is ALSO immortal but he doesn't have any special powers so she didn't get any lol sucks to suck avia). OH and btw the deadly assassin gf also turns out to be the sister of one of the party members. and they free her from her mind control and she and rieka kiss in the light of the setting sun to set us up for the sequel.

the plot twists of "secret immortal parents," "secret forbidden superpowers," and "secret sister/gf you forgot about" read like something a kid would come up with.

which is really the core issue of this book. the author emphasizes in the acknowledgements how long she has been working on this story - 10 years, which as of time of writing would have made her 12 when she started. this story very much feels like it was written by a 12 year old. the author may have aged, but the story did not grow up along with her. this book needs a lot more than a final editing pass (like, say, a first editing pass) before it's ready for prime time. it feels like she made up a lot of lore for her world over the years and felt the need to include every word of it instead of constructing an actual worthwhile plot within that world and integrating her lore subtly.

it is very, very bad.

so i'm going to need to break my own rule here.

I am opening up F tier to include this book alongside lightlark. these are the two worst books i have ever laid eyes on and i hope that stays true for a very, very long time.

Verdict: F tier.

wow.

for all the strange and bad bullshit i've read during this project, nothing has pissed me off quite like this one.

the prose is fine. the words work. but everything those words say makes me so angry. this one is personal for me - from the start i saw shades of a horrible former friend in one of the central characters and those shades only got clearer as the story went on. so while there isn't such a thing as "objective criticism" i'm not even going to pretend that's what i'm doing here.

premise: woman (harriet) and her fiance (wyndham) broke up but haven't told anyone in their lives even though it happened six months ago. they both attend an annual gathering with four other mutual friends, two of whom (sabrina and parth) announce that they will be getting married at the end of the week. harriet and wyn decide that they must pretend to still be in a relationship or else it will ruin the wedding which they did not know was happening this week. this is because sabrina and parth go out of their way to say to their faces that they had their doubts about getting married but seeing harriet and wyn make it work has inspired them to do it :)

it doesn't get less stupid from there. we spend the next 70% or so of the book not even knowing why harriet and wyn broke up, and apparently she doesn't know either. but eventually it is revealed that he dumped her because his dad died while they were long distance and he was having a hard time but also he had bad self esteem and thought she could do better than him but also he didn't even know that she Really wanted him because she didn't get mad at him whenever he was having a hard time and canceled something. so this entire issue could have been avoided if they'd just talked to each other. like adults.

and also sabrina (who has been micromanaging the group's activities the entire week and giving their friend cleo a hard time for being too busy to allow sabrina to visit) actually knew that harriet and wyn broke up but didn't tell them that she knew and instead opted to force them into proximity with each other because this is the last time the group will be able to have their annual meetup and she wants everything to be Perfect so she just acts like nobody else could possibly have anything else going on? and harriet is like oh i should have figured out that she's only being so horrible because she loves us and is afraid of losing us.

this also makes her and parth's comments about harriet and wyn's relationship at the beginning of the story even more insane. what do you mean you knew, all along, that they had broken up and were trying to avoid each other - but still decided to Tell Them you Only Decided To Get Married because they were together? you decided to trap your friends in a situation they Could Not be comfortable with because you wanted them to get back together so badly because you can't find the point in your own relationship without theirs as a blueprint? you people are insane and i cannot believe we forgave you.

the book really can't decide whether you should feel bad for not communicating with your friends or if you should feel bad for not playing five turns ahead of their personal 4d chess game because it means you don't Really Know Them. but either way, everyone ends up happily ever after and sabrina and parth get married (even after she ran off on the day of their wedding without saying a word to him because of she was soooo sad that her friends were mad at her for micromanaging them all week), cleo and kimmy (the only normal people here) have a baby, and harriet quits her job as a neurosurgeon to move to montana and marry wyn and do her true passion, pottery. all because they learned to communicate <3 but every single one of these characters is so well versed in therapy-speak that i do not believe for a second that they did not already know how

yeah this book pissed me off. we should throw sabrina to the lobsters. every conversation sounds like one that the author's very cool very quirky very fun emotionally intelligent friends might have had in real life so they went in the book. i hate everyone here

Verdict: D tier

long time no shitbook.

i actually started reading this one three months ago. i read 60% of it in one sitting and then stopped. until today, when i finished the last 40%. when i started, i thought i may have found the first S tier book of this project - which is to say the World's Okayest Book so far. but i must have been in a good mood that day because the second half has me wondering why else i would have thought that

i DO remember this one actually doing something i liked. partway through, our leading lady has to tell someone her greatest desire in order to make a magical payment. she says her greatest desire is to rescue her missing sister, whom she's built her whole life around protecting. the magic detects that she isn't being truthful, but she insists that she is. she refuses to acknowledge that there is anything she might want more than to rescue her sister, because she doesn't know who she is without her sister. That's A Character Moment! Good Job! we don't really follow up on it in this book because this is the first in a series but you could probably do something with that. i already forgot everything else about it though.

if you like ya romance which is ostensibly about girl power and independence but textually a bunch of men hold all the cards and the poor gormless woman is at the mercy of whatever they do or do not choose to tell her, this is one for you.

Verdict: C tier

this book "deals with" heavy subject matter (namely stalking, sexual assault, and human trafficking) and i'm going to be rather flippant about it. skip this post if that isn't something you need in your life.

this was the first one of these where i started to feel like i was wasting my time.

like i don't know what i expected from this one but it managed to be even worse than that

do You have a fantasy about being stalked and assaulted by a random man (who has two different colored eyes and is Thee sexiest guy youve ever seen also btw)? and also hes a super powerful nonspecific Hacker? so he bugs your house because he can hack your security cameras and then he breaks into your house and leaves roses for you and such? and he rapes you several times but you actually realize you like it sooo like was it actually rape in the end?

but maybe you have misgivings about this fantasy. maybe you're afraid it's Problematic. well never fear! our dreamboat stalker here has a day job of using his hacking skills and Very good murder skills breaking up human trafficking rings, murdering pedophiles, and saving women and girls from trauma. so it's actually a net good for society that he just be allowed to do his thing. he's noble, even, for how he does things. oh, he also knows all the good feminism words. in scenarios where one might usually say "grow some balls," THIS noble warrior might say "develop a vagina." he doesn't have time for small fry when there's Great White's [sic] in the water. because hes a fucking Megalodon.

his ocean is seattle by the way, because of course it is

never fear, readers; it may is be possible to have a Normal, Healthy, Nuclear Family relationship with YOUR unbelievably hot stalker as well. because yes actually that is his endgame as of the end of book one. he wants to get married and have children. that to me doesn't sound like it jives Super well with the whole everything about him but whatever

we spend the book flipping perspectives between our two romantic leads, and Zade here was so adamant during his sections that raping and traumatizing women was bad that i half expected the twist to be that the stalker was some secret third guy. but no, he just has the capacity for both perpetrating and stopping the bad things without a shred of dissonance. which would be, like, fine as a character choice, but the book does a lot of stopping the story to trip over itself about why it's Good or at least Okay actually the way he does things. many sections read like the author was afraid of getting yelled at online. morally gray is when you do bad thing but also do the equal and opposite good thing. like buying the harry potter video game and then donating to trans charity

anyway. structurally, the book is also not very solid for what it's trying to do. you'd think there would be a lot of suspense and creeping fear, and we tried to do that for a little while at the beginning, but once our leads actually meet, the book turns into just a series of scenes where they fuck. we'll skip days or a week at a time where our leading lady is supposed to be in grave danger from all the Other dangerous men in her orbit, but apparently nothing worth mentioning happens until Zade shows up to fuck. we might then get a little "oh three days ago X happened" throwaway line, but past a certain point every scene exists only as a vehicle to some Not Really Problematic Dont Worry It's Okay Actually Fuckin. which i guess maybe works if you're looking for some material for jorkin it but i wasn't so

didn't think my complaint would be that this book didn't go hard Enough with the stalker premise but here we are. stop moralizing at me and just do what you want to do. also hes the most annoying man i've yet read for this project. stop calling his eyes "yin-yang orbs." you're killing me

Verdict: E tier

the original post was getting too long i read shit books on purpose for fun and put them on a tierlist S tier is the "world's okayest book" award only one book can achieve F tier full spoilers possible for any given title here's the list so far

and now

13. Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas

I know next to nothing about the larger Impact this book has had (i am not on tiktok.) all i know is what is on the author's website: that in the rush to go to print, the "final stage of editing" was skipped over. and how it was so poorly received that they offered refunds and are rewriting the whole thing. and the whole thing where she's been working on this story for 10 years. which does in fact make me feel like i am punching down a little bit on this one. i am going to try not to be very mean about it because the author is young and inexperienced and clearly holds this story very close to her heart.

but the fact remains that the book is very bad and it needs to go back to the drawing board.

a brief rundown.

everyone in this universe's land (Gardian [sic]) has powers of some description which are based on their zodiac sign. society is split into four "unions" (read: countries) based on the elemental affinity (fire, water, air, earth) of those signs. the signs also somewhat dictate people's personalities - or rather, the norms of what people's personalities Should be in their respective society. (which, by the way, the names of the four countries are Societal, Conviction, Assiduous, and Autarchic. tell me divergent was a formative experience for you without telling me.) it is illegal to live in a Union that does not correspond to your sign, and it is also illegal to marry across Union borders.

there are also three Forbidden powers - Spirit Walking, Libra Healing, and Zodiac Turning. spirit walking involves astral projection, talking to "divinities," and memory manipulation (this is a spoiler.) libra healing is when you are a libra and have healing powers i think. but they are super powerful healing powers. because people with other signs can also have healing powers and that's fine? also, spirit walkers' powers don't awaken until they "come into contact with" a libra healer.

zodiac turning... gives you the power to change peoples' birthday ? and also seems to come with some sort of hadouken ability that is capable of killing people. it is the rarest and Most illegal power in the land. you'll never guess which one our leading lady eventually finds out she has.

but before all that, our leading lady is also a scorpio. these are apparently the most powerful of the twelve signs, but they are forced to live by the restrictive Scorpio Code, which dictates that no scorpio can show emotion, make friends, or fall in love. breaking any one of these tenets is punishable by death. it's also illegal for scorpios to be raised by non-scorpio parents or live with non-scorpio siblings. this is enforced by the Scorpio Stellarium, the governing body of people born between october 23 and november 21. it is apparently thought that the scorpio code is immutable and has always been there as it was bestowed by some sort of divinity. mc and her family - composed of a scorpio mother, a cancer father, our scorpio mc (rieka), and her aries sister (avia) get around these laws by living in these cursed woods that are supposed to kill anyone who enters but for some reason won't kill them. but they tell the government that they actually live somewhere else and nobody interrogates that.

with me so far?

the actual forward motion of this story is very simple. girl questions the state of things. girl stumbles upon "proof" that the state of things is wrong. girl sets out on a quest to prove the state of things is wrong.

her proof? she found an old piece of paper that says some guy made up the scorpio code, rather than it being some sort of divine order. (which, if you needed to murder your own populace to enforce your divine order, why would you ever think these were inherent truths?) and that a legendary sword ("a mythical sword of immortality [which] curse[s] anyone it touch[es] with immortality") exists and is not just a story. somehow, we decide that this legendary sword (which, critically, does the opposite of killing people) must be key to overthrowing the scorpio government.

if you're wondering how revealing this magic sword to the general public will do anything to the government, so was I - until literally 95% of the way through the story when someone actually asks them what they're going to do with the sword and the characters go. well actually i'm not sure. before it is revealed that the TRUE final boss of this saga... is none other than representative democracy:

i specify that the "forward motion" of this story separately from the rest of it. this is because there is so much lore-dumping and/or exposition going on at all times that there is very little room for scene writing. every single time (every time!) rieka falls asleep during the course of the group's journey, she has a flashback to previously-suppressed memories of herself and this girl who has been trying to kill her in the present day. as it turns out, rieka has had around four years of her memories strategically erased to omit this specific girl, narah, with whom she planned to overthrow the government. long (long long long) story short, narah used to be rieka's girlfriend and fellow anarchy appreciator, but now she is under the control of the scorpio government. this is all written in such a way as to make me wonder why we needed to make all of it into flashback dream sequences. it would have had much more (read: any) impact if it were just written in chronological order.

anyway. it is eventually revealed that all the other members of reika's group ALSO have the super powerful illegal powers and at least one immortal parent (except her sister, who is actually only her half sister, and whose father is ALSO immortal but he doesn't have any special powers so she didn't get any lol sucks to suck avia). OH and btw the deadly assassin gf also turns out to be the sister of one of the party members. and they free her from her mind control and she and rieka kiss in the light of the setting sun to set us up for the sequel.

the plot twists of "secret immortal parents," "secret forbidden superpowers," and "secret sister/gf you forgot about" read like something a kid would come up with.

which is really the core issue of this book. the author emphasizes in the acknowledgements how long she has been working on this story - 10 years, which as of time of writing would have made her 12 when she started. this story very much feels like it was written by a 12 year old. the author may have aged, but the story did not grow up along with her. this book needs a lot more than a final editing pass (like, say, a first editing pass) before it's ready for prime time. it feels like she made up a lot of lore for her world over the years and felt the need to include every word of it instead of constructing an actual worthwhile plot within that world and integrating her lore subtly.

it is very, very bad.

so i'm going to need to break my own rule here.

I am opening up F tier to include this book alongside lightlark. these are the two worst books i have ever laid eyes on and i hope that stays true for a very, very long time.

Verdict: F tier.

wow.

for all the strange and bad bullshit i've read during this project, nothing has pissed me off quite like this one.

the prose is fine. the words work. but everything those words say makes me so angry. this one is personal for me - from the start i saw shades of a horrible former friend in one of the central characters and those shades only got clearer as the story went on. so while there isn't such a thing as "objective criticism" i'm not even going to pretend that's what i'm doing here.

premise: woman (harriet) and her fiance (wyndham) broke up but haven't told anyone in their lives even though it happened six months ago. they both attend an annual gathering with four other mutual friends, two of whom (sabrina and parth) announce that they will be getting married at the end of the week. harriet and wyn decide that they must pretend to still be in a relationship or else it will ruin the wedding which they did not know was happening this week. this is because sabrina and parth go out of their way to say to their faces that they had their doubts about getting married but seeing harriet and wyn make it work has inspired them to do it :)

it doesn't get less stupid from there. we spend the next 70% or so of the book not even knowing why harriet and wyn broke up, and apparently she doesn't know either. but eventually it is revealed that he dumped her because his dad died while they were long distance and he was having a hard time but also he had bad self esteem and thought she could do better than him but also he didn't even know that she Really wanted him because she didn't get mad at him whenever he was having a hard time and canceled something. so this entire issue could have been avoided if they'd just talked to each other. like adults.

and also sabrina (who has been micromanaging the group's activities the entire week and giving their friend cleo a hard time for being too busy to allow sabrina to visit) actually knew that harriet and wyn broke up but didn't tell them that she knew and instead opted to force them into proximity with each other because this is the last time the group will be able to have their annual meetup and she wants everything to be Perfect so she just acts like nobody else could possibly have anything else going on? and harriet is like oh i should have figured out that she's only being so horrible because she loves us and is afraid of losing us.

this also makes her and parth's comments about harriet and wyn's relationship at the beginning of the story even more insane. what do you mean you knew, all along, that they had broken up and were trying to avoid each other - but still decided to Tell Them you Only Decided To Get Married because they were together? you decided to trap your friends in a situation they Could Not be comfortable with because you wanted them to get back together so badly because you can't find the point in your own relationship without theirs as a blueprint? you people are insane and i cannot believe we forgave you.

the book really can't decide whether you should feel bad for not communicating with your friends or if you should feel bad for not playing five turns ahead of their personal 4d chess game because it means you don't Really Know Them. but either way, everyone ends up happily ever after and sabrina and parth get married (even after she ran off on the day of their wedding without saying a word to him because of she was soooo sad that her friends were mad at her for micromanaging them all week), cleo and kimmy (the only normal people here) have a baby, and harriet quits her job as a neurosurgeon to move to montana and marry wyn and do her true passion, pottery. all because they learned to communicate <3 but every single one of these characters is so well versed in therapy-speak that i do not believe for a second that they did not already know how

yeah this book pissed me off. we should throw sabrina to the lobsters. every conversation sounds like one that the author's very cool very quirky very fun emotionally intelligent friends might have had in real life so they went in the book. i hate everyone here

Verdict: D tier

long time no shitbook.

i actually started reading this one three months ago. i read 60% of it in one sitting and then stopped. until today, when i finished the last 40%. when i started, i thought i may have found the first S tier book of this project - which is to say the World's Okayest Book so far. but i must have been in a good mood that day because the second half has me wondering why else i would have thought that

i DO remember this one actually doing something i liked. partway through, our leading lady has to tell someone her greatest desire in order to make a magical payment. she says her greatest desire is to rescue her missing sister, whom she's built her whole life around protecting. the magic detects that she isn't being truthful, but she insists that she is. she refuses to acknowledge that there is anything she might want more than to rescue her sister, because she doesn't know who she is without her sister. That's A Character Moment! Good Job! we don't really follow up on it in this book because this is the first in a series but you could probably do something with that. i already forgot everything else about it though.

if you like ya romance which is ostensibly about girl power and independence but textually a bunch of men hold all the cards and the poor gormless woman is at the mercy of whatever they do or do not choose to tell her, this is one for you.

Verdict: C tier

That's me in the spotlight

the waves, virginia woolf

millennium trilogy, stieg larsson

breasts and eggs, mieko kawakami

nightbitch, rachel yoder

milkfed, melissa broder

the vegetarian, han kang

detransition, baby, torrey peters

godshot, chelsea bieker

woman, eating, claire kohda

disorientation, elaine hsieh chou

the argonauts, maggie nelson

out, natsuo kirino

natural beauty, ling ling huang

being lolita, alisson wood

interesting facts about space, emily austin

careering, daisy buchanan

new animal, ella baxter

a touch of jen, beth morgan

the bandit queens, parini shroff

sedating elaine, dawn winter

post-traumatic, chantal v johnson

sorrowland, rivers solomon

what i’d rather not think about, jente posthuma

my husband, maud ventura

tell me i’m an artist, chelsea martin

the centre, ayesha manazir siddiqi

evil eye, etaf rum

white horse, erika t. wurth

love me tender, constance debre

sex and rage, eve babitz

your driver is waiting, priya guns

mona, pola oloixarao

sexing the cherry, jeanette winterson

forbidden notebook, alba de cespedes

butter, asako yuzuki

cult classic, sloane crosley

berlin, bea setton

other people’s clothes, calla henkel

they’re going to love you, meg howry

nightcrawling, leila mottley

winter in sokcho, elisa shua dusapin

acts of service, lillian fishman

a game in yellow, hailey piper

the coin, yasmin zaher

the starving saints, caitlin starling

crushing snails, emma e. murray

she’s always hungry, eliza clark

shy girl, mia ballard

fruit of the dead, rachel lyon

orlanda, jacqueline harpman

this is how you remember it, catherine prasifka

rainbow black, maggie thrash

perfume and pain, anna dorn

spoiled milk, avery curran

the scald-crow, grace daly

stop me if you’ve heard this one, kristen arnett

molka, monika kim

i love you don’t die, jade song

hooked, asako yuzuki

blowfish, kyung-ran jo

spread me, sarah gailey

here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you

They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,