Holiday Break Reading Challenge - Day 8

Today's challenge:
Sometimes books can surprise us in a good way and sometimes they can surprise us in a bad way.  A book you might have been waiting to come out for a year could be a total bomb once you finally get to read it and a book you drag your feet about reading can turn out to be the best book ever. Today let's explore those books. Create a blog post featuring a HIT and a MISS.  Come back and link it using the Simply Linked.

My Submission:

Thankfully, I have had more hits than misses this year.  I always enjoy a good book, and some people would say that I never read a bad book.  I can almost always find something redeeming about a book.  If I can't, then the book is truly awful.  I can't say that about my submissions today.  I thought it would be fun to add a couple of hits and misses, and I also thought it would be fun to look at a hit and a miss by the same author.

Hit:

Going Bovine totally surprised me as a hit.  It sounded like an interesting premise, but it was a very thick book, and I wondered if the author could keep my attention for that length of time, especially after reading another book by this author that didn't really measure up (see below).  For my full review of this book click here.

Another hit for me this year was Twenty Boy Summer, which was a shock to me, to say the least.  I fully expected to dislike this book.  I only read it for my Young Adult Literature class.  I thought it was going to be a superficial teenage novel with no depth.  I was shocked to find that the book did have depth and that the characters were three dimensional.  I sympathized with them and loved to see them mature and change over the course of the story. 

Miss:

A Great and Terrible Beauty, also by Libba Bray, was a book that I thought I would enjoy.  However, I found it to be lacking.  It has none of the wit and humor of Going Bovine and the storyline drags on in places. I do know people who enjoyed this book, but it just wasn't interesting enough for me to continue on with this series.

Shiver is another book that I looked forward to reading.  It is also a book that I felt was lacking.  I am very skilled at letting my imagination slip into a book, but this book was just too out there for me.  No, it wasn't the premise of the book that was hard for me to buy; the premise intrigued me and caused me to pick the book up in the first place.  It was the characters that were hard for me to believe.  The dialogue seemed so unreal, and the characters did not seem like real people to me at all.  I can enjoy any fantasy book, as long as I can relate to the characters and see them live and breathe.  These characters seemed like shadows on the wall.