Mary Heim

All right, Meredith.

So I am going to try out some TBR triage this week.

And the book on the chopping block is The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid.

So I had grabbed this one on vacation at a bookstore kind of haphazardly instead of my usual like leisurely and intentional decision making.

This one just happened to be on an end cap.

It had a pretty cover.

And I thought, oh, hey, fairy tale retelling.

And I grabbed it just because mostly we wanted to support the bookstore.

Right.

So now over three years later.

I have not even so much as glanced at it, much less consider it as an option for a next book.

When I dug further into the StoryGraph stats and the Goodreads reviews, I can see that this one unfortunately doesn't get a ton of love.

It is around a 3.5, which isn't an immediate disqualifier for me by any means, but it does make me pay attention to what is making this not work for readers, and of course what is making it work for some others.

But a lot of the kind of more

The lower reviews speak to some things that do really bother me personally.

We've got unlikable characters for no real discernible reason, a whole lot of words maybe for not a lot of plot or character development, and some meandering like off-topic stories and tales that will take a couple pages away from the main storyline.

are not necessarily advancing the story in a meaningful way.

I have no doubt.

In fact, there are some reader friends I'm connected with on the various apps who this one really worked for.

It was a great read for them, but it does not need to keep taking up space on my bookshelf.