#207: From Page-Turners to Passes: Eight Book Reviews

I’m sharing a no-holds-barred reading roundup: four books I couldn’t put down (even when I didn’t love them), and four that just didn’t stick. From edge-of-your-seat thrillers to impulsive library grabs that pleasantly surprised me, we dive into what made these pages fly—or flop. Spoiler: “page-turner” doesn’t always mean “masterpiece,” and sometimes the books you think you’ll love… you just can’t finish.

If you’re hunting for your next read—or avoiding a disappointment—this episode’s got you covered. I’ll spill what kept me up past bedtime, what made me gasp, and what made me slam the book shut. Plus, my thoughts are unapologetically subjective, so don’t take it personally if your favorite shows up on my DNF (Did Not Finish) list. Grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let’s talk books.

Books Discussed:
Must-Reads / Couldn’t Put Down:

1. Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
2. Prom Mom by Laura Lippman
3. Cabin Fever by Alex Dahl
4. You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson

Did Not Finish / Overrated for Me:
5. You're Safe Here by Leslie Stevens

6. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

7. I Don’t Forgive You by Aggie Blum Thompson

8. November 9 by Colleen Hoover

www.daraboxer.com

Transcript

Welcome And Reading Recap Setup

Dara Boxer 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Raw on the Cooked, a weekly podcast that provides simple routines around the home plus raw and honest book reviews. My name is Dara. I'm a Midwestern stay-at-home mom to four young kids, and I thrive on simplicity. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode. Today is going to be just one of those classic reading recaps, um, just books that I have read recently that I really enjoyed, and then a handful that were just wildly overrated for me or just ended up as a did not finish. And as always, this is not me saying that a book is objectively bad, it's just stating whether or not it worked for me, my tastes, my patience level, and tolerance for certain themes. And if one of your favorite books ends up on the did not finish list today, please don't take it personally. Reading, of course, is just subjective, and that is part of the fun. So let's start with the wins. There were four books that I had read in the last couple of weeks that were really hard to put down, even if I didn't love them, which I always find that so interesting, that you could like not really like a book, the plot, the characters, but find it just a complete page turner and unable to part with it. Like, you know, those books that keep you way past your bedtime, like these types of books. Okay, so let's start with the first one, Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson. And currently on Goodreads, it holds 4.5 stars with over 129,000 reviews. And this book was a really pleasant surprise. I was actually expecting not to like it, and I wasn't like totally into it the first like third of the book, and then something flipped for me, and I was like, oh, this is actually like getting kind of interesting. So without spoiling anything, I wanted to give you the premise of the book. So our main character, Jet, suffers a catastrophic head injury from a blow to the back of the head and somehow survives. She wakes up in the hospital like two days later and is faced with a really grim choice. She can either so she has she has this like impending aneurysm in her brain. And so the doctors can either operate now, although there's a 50-50 chance she'll she will not survive surgery, or she can just live out her days, but knowing that this aneurysm will likely blow within the next week or so. And so she chooses not to have surgery and she decides to use that week to solve her own murder. She teams up with her childhood best friend, and what ends up following is a very clever, emotional, surprisingly funny, and really genuinely well plotted. I was really impressed with the author how neatly all of the loose threads were tied up by the end. And that really doesn't happen too often in like high-concept thrillers like this. I laughed, I cried, I'm glad I went like highly recommended. It was a it was a fun uh who-done it, and it has a very satisfying ending. So the next book was a little different. Um, it was Prom Mom by Laura Lippman, and currently it holds 3.3 stars on Goodreads with 15,000 reviews. This was a complete impulse library pick, and I scanned the back of the book and I was like, okay, interesting. This is like a dead newborn baby found on the bathroom floor of a hotel room on prom night, and then the aftermath 20 years later. So it was kind of a wild ride. Uh, parts were genuinely compelling and very hard to put down. Like, I was able to read this book in like 36 hours. Yet, much of the story felt very bloated with like unnecessary commentary, and the book I this is this is a thing, you guys. It's a thing. The book was written during the height of COVID, and unfortunately, that anxiety and paranoia just bleeds all over the page. Masking, distancing, testing, lockdowns, all of it. And two characters, two of our three main characters, in fact, um, in particular, they really felt like political mouthpieces for the author, and it got old really fast. Like, she even brought in the I'm using quotes here, the insurrection, I'll just January 6th. Like, she even brought that into this. It was just like, why? Like, it was just like so unnecessary. So, anyway, um, in addition to all of that, there were also several plot threads that were never fully resolved, and it left the story feeling really messy. So, overall, was it good? No, not really. Was it hard to stop reading? Is somehow, yes. Um, I enjoyed the writing enough to finish the book, and also I like needed to know what happened, but I didn't like it enough or her writing enough to pick up another one of her books, especially given how loudly her political opinions came through. I just like just too much out there. I don't need to waste my time with this person. Okay, the third book on my list of books that were like impossible to put down is Cabin Fever by Alex Dahl. And this currently holds 3.5 stars on Goodreads with not that many reviews, actually, only 1,700 reviews. And this was another impulsive library pick. Um, so two things sold me. Number one, the fact that it was a paperback to begin with, because that obviously means that it was like so well received that the publisher then released paperbacks, right? Like it's always a good sign when you see a book in paperback. And then the other, the other aspect of this that had me immediately was that um the magic phrase that was on the cover of the book, Scandy Noir, which is like such a fun genre for me. I really like books like that, and I really wanted to like this one. I really did. Unfortunately, it was so painfully slow for most of the book. Um, like I kind of forced myself to read it because I was like, okay, like we've like we it's going somewhere, and finally it did. Once we got to the meat and the potatoes of the plot, it became it became like very hard to part with it. Um, and admittedly, like very hard to put down. But by then I felt like I had waited far too long. It was just so predictable, it was a little flat and ultimately just like not that satisfying. Not terrible, but just not memorable either. It was just kind of like okay, it's a lot of buildup for very little payoff. So that's sort of my overall view for that. And then the fourth book on my cannot put it down list is finally another good one, and it's You Deserve to Know by Aggie Blum Thompson. Um, it currently holds 3.7 stars on Goodreads with 34,000 reviews, and this one completely surprised me in the best way. I picked it on a whim because I liked the cover art, and then I found out it was set in Bethesda in the DC suburbs, and that also sold me. I ended up listening to this as an audiobook and found myself making excuses to just keep listening, like more dishes, car rides, folding laundry, like suddenly, like all that was just like really appealing. Um, was the pot the plot a little bit far-fetched? Yeah, it was. Did I care? No, not at all. It was just compulsively readable, listenable, whatever. The ending, oh my goodness, this specifically the epilogue, that was that was a twist that I was not expecting. I like genuinely like gasped and I like probably spat out my coffee. It was bingeable, it was very entertaining, and it was incredibly fun to read. Like, I love books like this. It was just like, it was just delicious. And I think it's just best if you go into this blind. So I'm not gonna say any more on that. And then my favorite part of any good book list and reviews, I have also read a handful, well, read is probably too strong of a word. There were a handful of books that I have picked up from the library in the last couple of weeks that were just overrated, did not finish for me. Like they were like classified as like immediate, like I can't finish this. So let's get started. Okay, so I have another four for you. Um, the first one is You're Safe Here by Leslie Stevens. All these are did not finish. So I've followed Leslie Stevens, the author, since her cupcakes and cashmere days back in gosh, 2016, a long time ago. I've been following her for a while, and I've always liked her voice and her perspective, even though our lives are very, very different. Um, and so she this is her first novel, and the premise of it is quite strong. It's a dystopian world set in 2060, uh, shaped by AI and technological overreach. And it felt like dangerously close to a reality in a way that like I actually really appreciated. But the execution of this book is just where it lost me. The characters were just so deeply unlikable, and I'm not really convinced that that was intentional. And after more than 150 pages in, I realized that I was like reading out of obligation rather than curiosity. Like I wasn't invested, I wasn't excited, I was so bored. So I stopped, returned it to the library. No regrets. I felt really sad about it because I really wanted to like it for several reasons, and I just couldn't get into it. I couldn't do it. Okay, this one might shock everyone because this has like glowing reviews on Goodreads. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton. That was another did not finish for me. This was just a mess. I did not like it. The first section of the book I thought was actually incredible. It was like atmospheric, it was immersive, beautifully written. I was like all in, couldn't stop turning the pages. And then the second section happened and it's it just completely lost me. Like the climate hysteria, the climate hysteria became overwhelming to the point where like it pulled me out of the story entirely. Like at one point, Florida is essentially shutting down as a state because of climate control, but yet college and student loans are still a functioning system in our society. Like just that detail alone shattered this dystopian illusion for me. And I also really struggled deeply with the main character, Wanda. I understand what the author was trying to do, but I just did not like her. And more importantly, like I just didn't care to follow her any further. I made it a few paragraphs into part three, and then I would just call the quits, just returned it to the library. I was like, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to live in this like weird climate, dystopian world where like college and whatever. Okay, so I I feel like I could go on and on about it, but I'm just gonna just it didn't work for me. So it is, it is out of my off my Kindle. Um, the third one is uh I Don't Forgive You by Aggie Blum Thompson. And so I downloaded this book immediately after Devouring You Deserve to Know because I was expecting her other books to be as fully bingeable of an experience as uh reading You Deserve to Know. So it's like, oh great. So I like you know looked her up in the library, found a bunch of her books, and downloaded this one because it was the next one with like the best ratings, whatever. And this one just felt really flat, slow, and uh very surprisingly, it was kind of dull. Like the characters didn't click for me, the plot didn't grab my attention. I just kept waiting and waiting for the tension to build, and it just never did. And so that was pretty disappointing. I probably got like maybe a quarter through the book, and I was just like, I just don't care enough to keep going. So another did not finish, another return to the library. Um, okay, and then the next one uh was November 9 by Colleen Hoover. This was like a hard pass for me. I think I made it two chapters in before I returned it to the library. The setup, oh my gosh, just like an 18-year-old aspiring actress from LA with a famous actor father and just a terrible attitude. Uh, it was just an immediate no for me. I didn't find the characters compelling, relatable, didn't care, wasn't curious enough to keep going. Like you couldn't pay me to read it. So hard pass returned immediately. Like, I think I downloaded it, read the first chapter and a half, and had returned it within like a 30-minute window. So thank God for the library. Like, if I had paid money for that book, I or any of the other books I just listed above, I'd be kind of sad. So, in closing, uh, those are just some of my recent reading highs and lows. Um, I was getting a little cocky because I feel like uh two of my books from my like bingeable, couldn't put it down, ride past my bedtime list, had come impulsively from the library, just like scanning, picking something up because like it sounded good and they were hard to put down, whether or not I like enjoyed them or not, like is a different story. But I still feel like when a book grabs your attention like that, like that's just like a fun sign. And so I got a little cocky, and then I picked up four books in a row that I ended up returning, like without making it through the halfway point. So those are uh those are you know, it's just how it goes, I guess. Um yeah, so anyway, I I hope if nothing else, it gives you a few ideas for what to pick up next or what to confidently skip. And as always, I would love to hear what you've been reading lately, what you loved, what you couldn't finish. And I as always thank you guys so much for listening, and I will catch you back here next week.