April Books That Did Not 'Make the Grade'

There were two books this month that unfortunately did not meet my expectations:

Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui: At first, the novel seemed interesting; it opens with two Japanese psychologists talking about a new way to analyze someone’s dreams.  However, the novel quickly becomes tedious and dull. All of the characters blend into one another (very few distinguishable characteristics), they talked about topics pertaining to their work that I could not follow, and the dialogue structure was a little odd, which led me to find other, more promising reads.

Ship Fever (collection of short stories) by Andrea Barrett: The first story in the collection captivated me immediately and held my interest until the very end because, as most short stories have a tendency to do, the ending was very inconclusive. It almost left me heartbroken because at the end of one page, it sounded like there would be more but when I turned the page, a new story was beginning.  That left me so irritated I put the book away.

~Shelly-Beans