Tag Tuesday: Top 5 Books That Weren’t What I Expected! // for better or for worse…

Hi friends! I’m here to talk about 5 books that weren’t what I expected. I can be kind of ignorant when it comes to This is hosted by Shanah @ Bionic Bookworm.

I’ve heard so much hype surrounding V.E. Schwab. I read this around the time Vengeful came out…and promptly DNF’d it. Like, 300/400 pages in. I was expecting this really cool science-fiction, action story complete with a morally grey cast. But it was more like a bunch of pretentious humans doing stuff that confused me wildly. The story was surprisingly boring in my opinion. I do plan on trying this again one day, just without expecting a lot of action and adventure.

when you hear thriller, what do you immediately think of???

If you’re anything like me, you jump and scream “INTENSE MYSTERY” and pull out a magnifying glass and a blanket*. But this isn’t quite like that. You know instantly the secret. There are no high-speed chases or dramatic shootouts. This is a story terrifying in it’s own right, because it’s quiet. Domestic. And wrong. It was the opposite of everything I expected, in a good way.

*the magnifying glass for solving mysteries, and a blanket for hiding cuz thrillers are intense

Reading the premise, this sounds like it’ll be paranormal romance with a couple of side love interests and third wheels thrown in with a dash of ghostly magic. That…is not this book. If anything this is more of a story about a paranormal romance between all-star raven boy Richard Gansey III and a dead Welsh king. Much different from what I expected.

IN MY (weak) DEFENSE, everyone talks about how Sarah Dessen used to be the “queen of contemporary” and “feel-good” novels. THIS WAS NOT FEEL-GOOD. This was shockingly dark, with themes of drug addiction and abuse. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would, to be honest.

I bought this at Barnes and Noble before I joined the book community, so I had no idea what it was about. All I knew was Marissa Meyer, queen of The Lunar Chronicles, and Wonderland. I was also kind of ignorant. So imagine my surprise when the end of the story was reached and BAM suddenly I knew what character we’d been following. There were many tears.

So that’s it! Five books that weren’t what I was expecting, for better or for worse. Tell me: what’s a book that surprised you???