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

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.

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