Let’s Talk About “Bad Books”

General Thoughts About Life and Stuff

When I was ten or eleven, I read “Little Women” and I hated it.

Spoiler alert (even though it was published in 1868 so we’re well past the statute of limitations on spoilers), one of the titular little women dies. As a child who had until that point been immersed in Magic Treehouse and YA horse books, I was shocked and devastated. I slammed the paperback shut and told my best friend it was a terrible story and together we disavowed it for a solid decade. It wasn’t until I watched the Greta Gerwig adaption in 2019 that I came back around to it, and now I recognize “Little Women” as one of the greatest, heart-wrenchingly wonderful stories ever written.

What changed? In short, I realized that just because I didn’t like what happened in the story doesn’t mean it was a bad story.

I bring this up now because last night around 1:30 a.m., I finished reading “People We Meet on Vacation” by Emily Henry. Overall I really enjoyed it, but I had a qualm with an unresolved piece of the ending and I was curious if other people felt the same, so I pulled up the book’s Goodreads page. As I scrolled through and read about 50 of the first displayed reviews– a mixed bag varying from one to five stars — I found a lot of the one-star reviews repeated the same things.

This should have been dual-POV.

There was too much writing about the travel and destinations, and not enough about their physical chemistry.

I didn’t like the main heroine.

Those are totally valid thoughts/opinions that a person can have when reading a book. But opinions about a book are not the same as a book review. Reading them reminded me of little me saying “Little Women” was a bad book because I didn’t like that a character died. Which brings me to my point:

No piece of art is designed to make everyone happy.

(And that’s okay.)

Social media algorithms feed us a steady stream of the exact content we want to look at, made by people who have similar lifestyles and opinions. The more we consume it, the easier it is to distance ourselves from anything that wasn’t made for us. It’s not just social media, either — we have more books, more news channels and more public figures than ever, so we don’t really need to engage elsewhere.

Then, when we come across something that falls outside that bubble, there are three possible reactions (see if you can rank them):

A. Huh, that’s different! I’m going to read/watch it and experience this new perspective.

B. Hm, that’s not for me, so I’ll skip over that.

C. That doesn’t align with what I think, so I’m going to tell everyone including the creator that it is bad and could be better if they had made what I wanted it to be.

(Answer Key: A wins, B is neutral, and C is where we have a problem. With the caveat that this doesn’t apply to, like, hate speech and misinformation. Please report that and scroll on.)

If you think the best book is a dual-POV book, great — write a dual-POV book! Choose to read dual-POV books! But don’t review a single-POV book poorly because it’s not dual-POV.

Similarly, I don’t eat meat but I don’t downvote non-vegan cooking videos that I stumble across. Either I’ll see if I can take what they recommend and vegan-ize it myself, or I’ll just move along.

If something wasn’t created to your specifications, you don’t have to tell the world with a one-star stamp. And if it doesn’t make you happy, that doesn’t mean it’s bad art.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a feel-good piece of escapism media. Give me fluffy, happy books all day. Life is hard and art offers a chance to live different lives and be different people. When you’re immersed in the page, you can fly with dragons, or take down the mafia, or always have a witty comeback ready in the moment your work enemy fires a snide remark. Y’know, aspirational stuff.

But art is also designed to challenge us to consider different perspectives, wrestle with new dilemmas and think beyond ourselves, and that means taking the reader to hard places. “Little Women” wouldn’t have been the book it was if [NAME REDACTED IN CASE YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW YET] hadn’t died. Same with “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Black Beauty,” etc. Loss and grief are transformative and crucial to literature as much as they are to life. We grow the most when we’re stretched beyond what we think we’re capable of handling.

In summation:

  • Just because bad things happen in the book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.
  • Just because you didn’t enjoy it doesn’t mean it was a bad book.
  • And not every thought and opinion needs to be shared with the world. (Yes I understand the irony of me writing this, but you’re literally on my blog, so.)