With the whirlwind that is social media, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available. When you stumble on Booktok, the name for the book recommendation section of TikTok, you will experience this phenomenon tenfold. When I first discovered Booktok, I saw some of the same titles popping up repeatedly, so I decided to give them a try. However, I found most of them disappointing and overhyped.
So which ultra-popular Booktok books do I recommend you stay away from?
(spoiler-free review)
1. Anything Colleen Hoover.
I know. Surprising, right? Colleen Hoover is the biggest of the big on Booktok, yet when you dive deeper, you’ll find that opinions on her are either love or hate. After reading my fair share of her books, I’ve decided that they aren’t worth my time. There’s plenty of potential, to be sure, but I feel like there is always some aspect missing from them.
Many of her books explore deep, sensitive topics such as murder, abusive relationships, and abandonment. Her handling of these topics seems a little strange. She tries to sugarcoat them and doesn’t treat them with the proper tone. She markets most of her books as romances when in reality, they deal with more deep undertones.
The characters have a lack of development and are usually two-dimensional, and the love interests across her books are identical and lackluster.
Her books overuse tropes to the point where it feels as though she is trying to reach a quota rather than write interesting books. Her books go exactly where you think they would go with predictable plots and a lack of intrigue, and almost all of her books are very similar to each other.
That said, there is one of her books that didn’t disappoint me afterward. If you decide to jump into the world of Colleen Hoover, I recommend you start with Verity. Verity is a murder mystery that includes the classic Colleen Hoover romance, but it was easier for me to ignore it and focus on the truly interesting plotlines.
2. Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo
Six of Crows is a popular book that I went into with incredibly high expectations. The first book in the duology was okay. I felt as though the main characters were explained well, but I would have liked more development for some of the more background characters, as they did take up a central role later on in the book. I finished the first book optimistically and was excited for the second one where I hoped the plot would pick up pace. How wrong I was.
The second book was excruciatingly slow. It was as if the author had spent less time adding in the details that had made her first book special and interesting. The characters lacked dimension and the dialogue was dry and sounded very scripted and forced. The romance, which had been nowhere to be found in the first book, became an obsession and complete devotion within the first 30% of the second book.
About halfway through the second book I had to put it down since it was so slowgoing and hard to get through. After 200 pages I had expected to find a plot, only to find none.
If the idea of Six of Crows sounds good to you, I would instead recommend This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi, with similar themes and plotlines, but with much better writing and development to the story.
3. The Book Theif – Markus Zusak
As a lover of war stories, I picked this book up. From just a glance, you can tell that this book is long. Almost 600 pages, to be exact. I expected that this meant we would get good worldbuilding, character development, and a well-explained plot. What I found instead was disappointing. This entire plotline could have easily been put into less than 200 pages. I found the main character unlikeable and dull.
Turning the pages of this book was miserable. This book had the most ups and downs of anything I’ve ever read. After about 300 pages of nothing happening, we would get a sudden burst of plot for about 20 pages, only to be let down again.
I also remember finishing this book very confused. I felt like for almost the entire book, the host mother character, Rosa, was rude and disliked by the main character, Liesel, until suddenly, one page later, they were best friends who loved each other dearly.
I thought, after reading this book that there was no way it could be popular, so imagine my surprise to see it on Booktok with glowing five-star reviews only a short while later.
If you want a better World War 2 story, I would recommend Night by Elie Wiesel. It is a true story of a boy and his experience in concentration camps during the Holocaust, which I enjoyed far more than this one.
4. The Summer I Turned Pretty – Jenny Han
This book and its sequels became ultra viral last year, even reaching the levels of fame required to get a TV adaptation. So why does this book make the list? I think if I had read this book years ago before I had begun reading more then I would have enjoyed it. As it is, I found it a bit dull. The storyline never went the way I wanted it to go, and it felt as though the author was trying to add angst when really she was just frustrating me to the point of disliking this book.
It centers around some really popular tropes, yet the way these were carried out was uninspired. She also overused phrases and descriptions such as describing one character’s ‘blue eyes’ or another’s ‘blonde hair’ in every other sentence.
This book just seemed a little childish to me with nicknames such as ‘belly bean’ that made it sound more like a parenting book than a romance.
Could this book be enjoyed? Sure. This book could be right for early middle schoolers without much reading experience, but as someone who has read books that I consider much better, this one was disappointing to me.
If you like this kind of summer vacation romance, I might recommend It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey, which has similar themes but is written for a more sophisticated audience.
5. The Atlas Six – Olivie Blake
I tried to like this book. I went into it with high hopes. I purchased this book as a summer vacation beach read and really enjoyed the beginning of it. Until nothing actually happened. I felt like I was reading what a book would look like if the author wrote down every thought in their head as they went throughout the day, it practically sounded like “ I felt a little hungry, so I grabbed an apple from the fridge. Then I ate it. Then I read a book. Then my friend came over and we argued.”
This book is written in six POVs, which I found to be a little much to balance at times. And as for those characters, I don’t think any of them are as cool as the author wanted them to be.
But the worst part of this book by FAR was the dialogue. It was so ridiculous the way these people spoke! I’ll include some quotes from the book so you can see what I mean,
“Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human.”
“A flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”
“It’s not the meaning. Everyone wants a purpose, but there is no purpose. There is only alive and not alive.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“Who?”
“Everyone.”
“Yes.”
“What are we celebrating?”
“Our fragile mortality,” Tristan said. “The inevitability that we will descend into chaos and dust.”
They talk like this the whole book! These insightful lines might be okay if they meant anything, but in the context of this book, they don’t. A character will drop a line like this and then the conversation will continue like nothing happened. If anyone said something like this in real life, I know I’d be laughing.
For another thing, none of the characters like each other. I understand the author wanting them to pursue their own ambitions and distrust the people they were working with, but it felt like half of the book was just character A telling character B that character C was using them. And half of the time, there was no point to it. I feel like half of the characters were added in this book simply because the name ‘The Atlas Six’ sounds better than ‘The Atlas Three’.
I felt like this book had potential, but it was trying to be something it just wasn’t.
If you liked the idea of this book, you might instead enjoy Caraval by Stephanie Garber, another Booktok legend. It also has magical themes as well as light romance and lots of betrayal and distrust.
So, that concludes my list of the five most overhyped Booktok books and what you should read instead. I hope this article has given you some direction on what to read next. For reviews on the books mentioned in this article, check out the other reviews on my blog!
Happy Reading,
Ashley
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