BookTok, short for “Book Tik-Tok,” is a community of book lovers on the popular social media platform TikTok. BookTok has taken the literary world by storm. It greatly surpassed both BookTube and Bookstagram as the main media of marketing for book releases. Users create short videos or photo gallery slides recommending, reviewing and discussing the books they have recently read. These books vary from genre to genre, although the largest following lies in fantasy and romance novels.
At the time of writing, BookTok has over 61.9 billion views. Even large publishing houses like Penguin Random House and large chain bookstores like Barnes and Noble are utilizing TikTok to market their newest releases. In fact, many location-specific Barnes and Nobles bookstores will have their own accounts where they make videos marketing their store and creating publicity for the books.
Every time I walk into a Barnes and Noble, the large BookTok Recommendations table is the first thing I see. The influence has reached Target as well, who have also adopted their own section for the community. With the wide and never-ending circulation of popular books, it’s inevitable to at times encounter one that didn’t live up to your expectations or didn’t match all the praise and hype encircling it. Throughout this article, I will be acknowledging the TikTok books that ensnared me with their praise and promising plots but ultimately let me down.
1. “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” by V.E. Schwab
Starting off strong with one of my major disappointments, we have “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.” This book is so insanely hyped and praised on the app. I can’t, however, deny the intrigue the plot denotes. A woman makes a deal with death, and she can’t die, can’t age, but she can’t be remembered either. I thought I was getting a book where a woman falls in love with death. Death meaning the grim reaper himself. I thought we were getting a novel where she falls in love with the only person that can remember her and where death loves the only person really suitable for him.
I would love to say that these misconceptions are the only things that ruined it for me. That I went in with one idea, but what I got was so much better. Or even if I could say that I went into the novel and it wasn’t what I wanted, so it was hard for me to get into. Neither is true. The writing style here is beautiful. From the first page, I was hooked, and I was following no matter where it led me—until it led me nowhere.
Pages upon pages of absolutely nothing. No plot. Just Addie LaRue announcing that woe is her every 10 pages and whining non-stop. The Tedious Life of Addie LaRue is what this novel should have been called. For as long as she has lived, she doesn’t seem to mature or grow much as a person. Not to mention her horribly whiny male interest. They are insufferable. I can’t remember the last time I was so irritated by a character.
2. “The Silent Patient” by Alex Michaelides
I struggled with which to put first, this or Addie. Addie won for being thoroughly boring, but “The Silent Patient” was truly neck to neck with her. This is another book that was ridiculously hyped up. Probably even more so than “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” in fact, this one might be the most hyped book on this whole entire list. It sounded intriguing initially. I love a good mystery, and I had just finished watching the newest Enola Holmes movie when I acquired this book. It is a novel about a woman who viciously murders her husband and then never speaks a word afterward. The plot sounds amazing, and incredibly appealing, definitely not your usual mystery, but that makes it even more exciting.
The book starts off great. Cool premise, the writing is strong and succinct. It pulls you in and gets you ready to start looking for clues. This quality diminishes, however, as the book goes on, and after having finished it, I feel as though the author sacrifices other aspects of the book for the major plot twist everyone raves about. I’ll admit that it was a major plot twist, one that completely blindsided me because of the writing technique the author engages with to keep the suspense.
However, it’s hard to not acknowledge all the meandering plotlines established and then forgotten about. It’s like the author wrote the book intending to throw you off and throws all these different potential snares out to keep you off the trail until the book is ready for you to know. It’s confusing, and in the end, all these other theories and subplots never get tied up. It’s disappointing, to say the least.
3. “Truly Devious” by Maureen Johnson
“A Good Girls Guide to Murder” by Holly Jackson is everything that “Truly Devious” thinks it is. In this book, we’re meant to follow this Nancy Drew-esque teenage sleuth. She gets an invitation to an elite invitation-only boarding school for kids that show extraordinary or impressive traits. It was built years ago by a millionaire who’d be called weird if he weren’t rich, so instead, he’s called ‘eccentric.’ Soon after the school’s opening, his wife and daughter are kidnapped and murdered. Our main character wants to solve the case. Cool right? Wrong.
The plot starts off well enough, but then literally nothing happens. No new plots were uncovered. In fact, a whole new mystery unfolds throughout the course of this book, and we get no answers for the new one either. Just read the next book to find out because—yep, you guessed it—it’s a trilogy. She’s literally all talk in this book. Her love for true crime and all the knowledge she seems to acquire about police procedures is mentioned, but like, why?
Every time I closed this book, it was a genuine struggle to open it again. Simply the promise of it being one of those books that dumps the whole plot at the end of the novel kept me going, and it wasn’t even that. I went into the book with questions and left with more.
