Down the TBR Hole was originally created by Lia @ Lost in a Story
Welcome to the first of my Down the TBR Hole deadline reviews! If you’ve ever read any of my Down the TBR Hole posts, you may have noticed that I also assign myself a deadline date for those books that I do decide to keep. Although this is not a feature of the original Down the TBR Hole, I know that I would likely continue to let these books sit on my TBR shelf unless I gave myself a motivation to read them. By assigning deadlines, it was my hope that I would be giving myself an incentive to hurry up and read the books or else force myself to discard them from my TBR – holding me accountable for my keeps and motivating me to read!
Let’s see how I did for my Round One – March Deadline books:
With the exception of The Night Circus, I didn’t feel motivated to pick up any of these books so will be removing Hollow City, The Handmaid’s Tale and If We Were Villain from my TBR. The Night Circus was the second of my March deadlines that I picked up way back in February. I tried to read it on a couple of different occasions but the storyline and the characters didn’t grab me at all. I only managed to make it to about 8% before I decided to DNF it and let it go.
I did manage to read 3 books assigned to my March deadline which I was very happy about with The Snow Child being one of my longest TBR books (2012), and the other two being high priority reads. Here’s a little summary of how I felt about each, although I will hopefully be reviewing Yaqui Delgado… and More Happy Than Not soon:
- The Snow Child – A highly atmospheric read that is a perfect winter read, set in 1920’s Alaska. This is a very slow burn that is set over a long period of the main character’s lives as they fight to make a life for themselves on their Alaskan homestead and their curious relationship with a little girl who one day appears as if she has stepped out from the very snow itself. Whilst I enjoyed the book and am happy to have finally read it, it was a bit too slow and character-driven for me.
- Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass – I am truly shocked that I have not seen more of you all talking about this book because it is an incredible YA contemporary about a young Latinx girl that definitely deserves to be talked about more. The moment that Piddy Sanchez steps foot into her new high school, she’s told ‘Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass’. Who the hell Yaqui is and why she wants to kick Piddy’s ass she has no idea, but it sets into motion a series of events that forces Piddy to confront the type of person she wants to be and to make tough decisions about her body, relationships and beliefs. This is a truly wonderful book which manages to capture so much of the complexity of young adult life with great own voices rep.
- More Happy Than Not – This was an incredibly difficult book for me to read but a very healing one. Ngl, I was a little mad at first that nobody gave me a heads up for the major theme of suicide in this and it almost made me DNF it as this is something which hits very close to home. Having said that, I made the decision to carry on and am so glad that I did because I feel like Adam Silvera wrote a love letter to my younger self in so many ways. His debut novel focuses on Aaron Soto as he attempts to piece together his life after his father’s suicide and Aaron’s own attempted suicide. All seems to be going fairly okay until Thomas shows up. Smart, funny Thomas who makes Aaron’s heart race and gives Aaron feelings that feel simultaneously familiar yet alien. This book deals with so much and I am honestly just thankful to Adam for having written this.
Stats
Read: 3/7
DNF: 1/7
Didn’t get to: 3/7
Although I only got to read 3 out of 7 books that I had set myself a March deadline for, I’m happy with the books I did manage to read and don’t feel any great loss over discarding the remaining 3 that I didn’t get to from my TBR. However, this doesn’t stop me from picking them up in the future it just means that I can free up my TBR to focus on the books that I really do want to read.
Tune in for my Round Two of my next Down the TBR Hole deadline review – April 2019!
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This is a pretty good way of holding yourself accountable as far as Tbr is concerned! I should probably start doing this.
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I do hope you decide to pick up If We Were Villains!! I really enjoyed the dark writing.
I like how you hold yourself accountable with your books. How do you decide which books to buy and which ones not to? Especially when it comes to hyped up books.
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