When bestsellers fail to deliver: Don’t fall for the promises of book tok reviews

I should know better than to believe blurbs and online recommendations, but I fall for them every time

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

Every few weeks, I head on over to our local library and come back home with as many books as my backpack can carry. Where others dream of holidaying in the Bahamas (or Switzerland or Dubai or what have you), my dreams are just as ambitious: I yearn to sink into the sofa with a Really Good Book.

You would think, with all the untold promises of book tok and the liberal abundance of five-star reviews on Goodreads, that successfully nagging a Really Good Book would be as easy as buying bread. Please bury this foolish pipe dream immediately. If my library haunts have taught me anything, it is that it is easier to book and pay for that Bahamas holiday, or even a weekend away on Mars, than it is to find a good book in the league of, say, John Grisham of the late nineties. Or JK Rowling during the Harry Potter days. Or even the Hardy Boys. Or, if we are open to facing dead and buried memories, Sweet Valley High.

Which neatly segues us into our burning issue of the day: the mediocrity of modern books. Why, pray, is the psychological thriller and Sunday Times bestseller that promised me a “haunting” and “dazzling” read less interesting than the back of a cereal box? In order to answer this grave and burning question, I invite you all to dissect Exhibit A, aforementioned haunting and dazzling thriller Her Sister's Lie by Debbie Howells. I was forced to endure this book after an ill-fated library expedition comprising five other uninspiring reads, and I see no good reason you, too, should not suffer.

A quick dive into a bad book

Her Sister’s Lie has an interesting enough premise. Hannah and her sister Nina used to be close, but Hannah’s life is overturned after a phone call from the police informing her Nina has died. Hannah is now the sole carer of Nina’s fifteen-year-old son, Abe. The blurb also helpfully tells us that there is an “appalling secret that drove the two sisters apart.”

Well, I like appalling secrets and untimely deaths as much as the next thriller reader. So far, so good. The blurb continues that the son is “sullen, rude and uncooperative”, and that Hannah tries to be “understanding”, but then “sinister things begin to happen, and Hannah is forced to confront the possibility that Abe might be dangerous. How much does Abe know? And just how far is Hannah prepared to go to keep her secret?”

The book is told in first person from Hannah’s point of view, although it slips into a mysterious different narrator every few chapters just to keep us on our toes. The very first thing we learn is that both Hannah and Abe are less likeable than that immortal cockroach that keeps visiting your bathroom, so we care for neither of them losing a sister/mother. Hannah appears far more bothered by her breakup with her boyfriend (whom, incidentally, she stole from a married woman, not that this phases her in the slightest) than her sister’s apparent suicide. Which, of course, is not at all suicide, but murder. And because Hannah is one of history’s greatest unreliable narrators, the “secret” that she keeps tantalisingly alluding throughout the first nine-tenths of the novel is that she accidentally killed Nina’s daughter many moons ago. Together, she and Nina decided to bury the daughter out in the woods without telling anyone. (Yes, Nina saw the whole thing, and was happy to go along with the clandestine burial.) Sadly for Hannah, Abe the nephew knows her dirty little secret because he witnessed it as a small child. Yes, he is out for revenge. Oh, and because a twisty ending without any basis in logic is in fashion in publishing circles now, it transpires that Hannah also killed Nina at the very beginning of the book. She just never bothered to tell the reader.

As always, whenever I make it all the way to the end of a book of such breathtaking awfulness, I have many questions. The first is: how on earth did Howells persuade a literary agent to pass this along to a publisher? A literary agent is the gatekeeper between authors and publishers, and getting one who doesn’t delete your emails is like finding a blue diamond in your garden.

“Literary agents want writing that pops off the page,” writes literary agent Debbie Alsdorf. “Agents are looking for writing that is engaging, unique and memorable.”

I suppose, as an existing bestselling author, Howells already had an agent, so no one checked her book to look for engaging, unique, memorable writing that popped off the page before passing it along to a publisher. So my next question is: how many gallons of coffee did the publishing staff have to consume in order to trot out this steaming heap of dung? Are the words ‘haunting’ and ‘dazzling’ really enough to dupe people enough to buying a book? Have our attention spans shrunk so much that only cereal-box writing will sell? Are we doomed to reading unlikeable characters forever? From here on in, will humanity be force-fed a diet of might-as-well-be cardboard variety of novels being copiously vomited out of the publishing industry? Have clickbait book tok reviews ruined books for generations to come?

Don't let book tok do the thinking for you

Alas, I cannot let book tok hoard all the blame for this one. Book tok reviewers prefer flocking to the likes of Colleen Hoover and Jodi Picoult. Space does not permit me to dissect a Hoover or Picoult novel with the damnation it deserves, except to tell you that the last bestselling Picoult novel I read was Wish You Were Here, and the only good thing about it was that the Pink Floyd song kept running through my head. To give you the speediest of summaries as a public service, our fearless heroine bids her fiancé a loving farewell and visits the Galapagos Islands just before the pandemic hits. When planes stop flying, she gets trapped, falls in love with another man, goes swimming, drowns, wakes up in a hospital in New York, and is informed she never actually left. Apparently, she was a COVID patient all along and was just in a really vivid coma. However, our fearless heroine doesn’t want to believe it, and ends up leaving the loving fiancé for the man she fell for during the vivid coma.

Book tok assured me that this was a beautifully written novel with the perfect blend of romance, spice and devastation. Please reread my speedy review in case you, too, are gullible enough to fall for these lies. I have no one but myself to blame because I have read other Picoult books. But perhaps you can be spared. Until then, go back to your Grishams and Rowlings. Unless, like book tokkers, you, too, can’t get enough of cockroach characters and idiotic plotlines.

Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.