What can you learn from a book you didn't like?

(Or even remember?)

In life, failures can teach us more than successes, and when it comes to reading, the same idea applies. Honing in on what repels, bores, or annoys can sharpen one’s craft-focused noticing. But the insights, I’ve come to realize, aren’t always instantaneous.

Why are you showing me French fries? Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Last month, I opened a paperback by an internationally bestselling author I’ve always meant to read—and no, I absolutely won’t be naming her except to say she’s prolific, incredibly consistent, and by all accounts, a very nice person. All of her books get about the same high Goodreads ratings. The paperback I pulled off the shelf was her most-liked yet.

My first impression as I sped through the first short chapters was that the premise (a murder committed by someone in a generic, bland, unidentifiable suburb) was unoriginal. The characters were uninteresting and hard to tell apart because their voices, lives, houses, and even names were so similar. They were also thinly drawn; in many cases, the women portrayed may or may not have worked jobs—I couldn’t tell. The men did all have jobs—dull, interchangeable ones. No one seemed to have much else going on—not hobbies or passions, not illnesses or lifelong regrets, not political views or problems with extended family. The characters on the page were like pieces on a game board, ready to be moved from square to square, nearing or evading jail.

To be clear, there was nothing about the prose that actively bothered me, and that’s unusual, because I am bothered easily. No rampant cliches, no grating authorial tics, no “that’s just not how it works” moments—just an absence. An absence of depth and basic realism.

I assumed the book would get better.

I’d read perhaps fifty pages when a small bookmark felt out from a later chapter. Wait. I sort of recognized that bookmark. Not only had I read this book before, I may have read all the way to the middle before abandoning it.

I kept reading. Now I was curious not only about what would happen—every character was potentially withholding truths, and every person seemed like a possible murderer—but about how I’d managed to blank out the plot so completely.

I read past the old bookmark, dread deepening—not because of the murder, but because of my own memory concerns. (Damn perimenopause.)

By now, I had only a few chapters left and I still didn’t know who had committed the crime. Not a clue! (That is one very porous memory, friends.)

I dug out an old reading log. There, in my own bad handwriting was the proof: I had read this book four years ago. Privately, I had given it a 4 on a scale of 1-10, the lowest score I gave any book that year. The score was proof I had finished.

I found a fan forum online. Commenters said “I love her books.” The same words, over and over, with no mention of why anyone loved her books. Nothing about characters, nothing even about plots. Finally, I found a few more adjectives. The author’s book were described as “easy to read” and “fast-paced.”

I DNF plenty of books. If I’d finished and disliked this paperback so much, why was I still turning the pages a second time?

You’re probably shouting that question at me right now. Go ahead, shout away!

Up to this point, I was blaming my memory blackout on the bestselling author’s poor writing.

But was this poor writing, if I still couldn’t put the book down?

If anything, this book was doing something extraordinary, if I was willing to read it a second time just to reach that final chapter when the murderer would be revealed.

We all have our own tastes. And I try not to be a book snob. If a book or author is beloved, there are reasons, including reasons that could teach the rest of us poor slobs (those of us trying to write and sell books) about how fiction works and how readers read. If I’d been reading more critically—not negatively, but critically—I would have nailed down those reasons the first time.

I’ve done it now. Here they are, with one warning.

If you already feel you know what makes a book highly “commercial”—a perfect book for the pharmacy or airport—then read no further, because the following may be obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me!

SHORT CHAPTERS

Chapters in this book are about 1500-3000 words (five to ten pages) with the most typical chapter about 2700 words. That’s close to a middle range for a novel chapter—albeit on the short side, as one would expect for a book in this genre.

I always pay attention to chapter length, but this book showed me I was honing in on the wrong structural detail.

QUICKLY ALTERNATING MULTI-POV

Less important than the chapters themselves are the frequent limited third person POV (point-of-view) shifts—separated by white space. In one typical chapter of only 2700 words (ten pages), we get five different characters telling their side of the story. The longest POV section is four pages. Several characters get only a single page of about 300 words.

I refer to books with short chapters as “potato chip books.” It’s tempting to read just one more chapter, just as it’s tempting to eat one more chip.

What I didn’t realize, until I wrote this post, was how short the sections are within the chapters. Those are some very thinly sliced chips! Last week, if you’d asked me how many POV switches this book has per chapter, I would have guessed wrong. (Uhhh, two? No! Up to five! Maybe even more but I’m not going back to check because five is already a lot!)

The constant alternation of characters is probably the most commercial thing about this book and the reason fans say the pages move quickly and are “easy” to read.

SHALLOW, OPAQUE CHARACTERS

We never spend much time with any one character and we don’t know much about them. I chalked this up as a negative—a mistake—the first time around. Now I’m recognizing this might be a crafty and purposeful authorial choice. The less we know about characters—as long as the reader doesn’t cry “foul” to such opacity—the more possible it is that we don’t know the most important things about those characters. They could be the killer. They could be having an affair. They could by lying about something else entirely. They could have nothing at all to do with the crime in question.

In many suspense novels, withholding info relies on tricky unreliable-narrator sleight of hand. If we’re in a 1^st or deep third person POV with a character for dozens or hundreds of uninterrupted pages, it’s hard to believe we don’t know what they’ve thought or done at critical junctures. The effect can be achieved, of course, with help from deep denial, traumatically impaired memory, alcoholism, or something else that explains away the gaps.

But this author has taken a different tack. One, she simply jumps to a new POV before we question why we haven’t seen or “heard” a character reveal something that gives away the plot. And two, she stays on the surface of those characters, stubbornly denying access to their inner lives except those superficial aspects that apply to all the characters in the book—worry about a loved one being arrested, for example. When we glimpse their inner lives at all, the generic nature of those lives is actually a smokescreen.

Shallow characterization is not something I look for in my reading, but I can respect any choice an author makes for a reason. Agatha Christie wrote her share of flat, opaque characters—as well as some deeper ones.

LACK OF DESCRIPTION, ETC

Some of us admire description, metaphors, and so on. But this paperback’s success proves that just as many readers are happy to skip all that stuff.

Even more intriguing, the author cuts to the chase where I’m used to a lot of basic stage-setting. Instead of meeting the detectives and learning a bit about their lives or seeing them work the case in detail, we find ourselves with them for brief moments, only long enough for a recap of the investigation delivered expositionally—maybe in a car, for example, where there is even less to show or explain.

I don’t know these cops. But maybe I don’t need to know these cops! This isn’t Dennis Lehane or Gillian Flynn country. Where another commercial author would slap a few cliches onto each cop’s personality—the saucy Latina detective, the troubled old white guy Captain sipping whiskey at the end of a long day, yadda yadda—the author skips the cliches. Should I stop thinking of this author as less competent and realize she is a shrewd minimalist?

THE FINAL TWIST OR REVEAL

This book did have a big reveal at the end. I wouldn’t call it a twist, because a twist reorganizes our expectations entirely. In this case, the reveal was simply which person did the crime. I didn’t see the reveal coming. (Well done, author!) But some readers did. And here’s the funny thing that I never would have anticipated. In reviews online, those readers didn’t seem to mind that they guessed the right answer. Some said the equivalent of, “I knew, but I kept going to see if I was right.” That works in a book that’s quick and easy to read.

I don’t eat a lot of fast food. But I don’t deny what fast food does right, not only by promising convenience and consistency, but by tapping into our deep, ancient love of salt and fat.

I like donuts. And French fries.

I don’t necessarily love commercial paperback mysteries, especially ones with generic characters, “this could be anywhere” settings and easy-to-forget plots. But I respect the authors who understand their readers’ cravings and know how to satisfy them.

It’s summer time. Pass the salt.

Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of The Deepest Lake, a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Editor’s Pick, as well as a second forthcoming suspense title coming in January 2026, What Boys Learn.

Did it make you crazy that I spent this much time analyzing a book I didn’t like? Let me know. That way we can waste spend some time together!