Revisiting my 5-star predictions

~ Ally Writes Things

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

A while ago, I did a post where I predicted some books I thought would be 5-star reads, which you can read here and here! So today I thought I’d go over those and see how accurate I was.

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Five stars

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo – ★★★★★

This book!!! I totally understand the hype now!!! This was my first (and thus far only) 5-star read of 2019, and I really need to get Crooked Kingdom now.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng – ★★★★★

If this book gets 5 stars, every other book I’ve ever rated 5 stars gets demoted to 4.5 stars (with a few exceptions). I just loved it so much. I cannot describe with words how amazing I thought this book was.

Salt to Sea by Ruta Sepetys – ★★★★★ (4.5 stars, rounded to 5)

I loved this book! Honestly the only bad thing I have to say about this is it was a little simple. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing either.

Four stars

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch – ★★★★☆

I really enjoyed this book, it was just missing the little something to give it the full five stars. But it was so intense and action-packed and interesting.

Three stars

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman – ★★★☆☆ (3.5 stars, rounded to 3)

This book just didn’t totally click with me, you know? I really enjoyed a lot of it: the writing was fantastic, the plot was super interesting, the characters were interesting. I just felt like there was something missing.

Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman – ★★★☆☆

I really enjoyed this book, just not quite as much as I was expecting. In my original post, I said “I think this will 100% be a 5-star review,” so I was a little wrong. I mainly just didn’t understand the main character’s reactions to certain things.

milk and honey by Rupi Kaur – ★★★☆☆

I enjoyed this book, but not as much as I was expecting. There were some poems I loved and others that I thought were dumb or pretentious or I just couldn’t stand.

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Books I still need to read

  • Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard
  • Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  • 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami: but I reached the halfway point of this book, and I’m thinking it’s for sure going to be five stars!
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

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So that’s a recap of my five-star predictions. Overall, not bad, but also not great. Most of these books were “they were good books objectively, they just didn’t click with me”. However, two of the five stars made my “favourites” list, so I think that’s pretty good, tbh.

But anyway, have you read any of these? What were your thoughts? Were any of these five stars for you? Let me know!

Thanks for reading! xx

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Published by Ally Writes Things

I like books and talking about my opinions.

20 thoughts on “Revisiting my 5-star predictions”

  2. Ally, all of your 5 star reads are such favorite books of mine! Good luck with the rest of your TBR and I hope you love Crooked Kingdom! I tend to like sequels more anyway, but Crooked Kingdom was freaking amazing!

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  3. Sigh … Milk and Honey. I also expected a lot and felt really let down. There’s some good academic debate out there whether it actually counts as poetry …

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    1. I really liked a lot of it, but I was let down by some of it, too. I think the debate is interesting, but I find it tends to overlook that the craft changes? Like, poetry develops over time. Poetry in the 1600s is not the same as poetry in the 1800s, so it makes sense that poetry in the 2000s would similarly develop.

      If you haven’t read it, I thought her second collection, the sun and her flowers, was definitely stronger and highly recommend it!

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      1. I actually liked Sun and Her Flowers less lol! I think I fall on the not-poetry side of the debate as her collect feels a lot more like facts / statements / analects / proverbs rather than poetry. It’s not the structure — there’s a lot of good minimalist modern poetry out there. It’s the fact that it doesn’t leave you asking questions: all the answers are laid out bare.

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  5. I agree that milk and honey was a mixed bag. Some of the poems resonated with me, and others just didn’t.

    However, I have no problem calling it and other modern poetry volumes “poetry”. I think that Rupi Kaur and Amanda Lovelace and others *are* writing poetry, it’s just poetry for the modern era instead of classic forms. When so many people these days don’t read much of anything beyond social media (which is another topic and makes me beyond sad) the poetry is going to look different than when many more people read books as a way to pass the time.

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    1. SAME! Some were fantastic, and others fell flat.

      And I totally agree! I was just writing on another comment that poetry develops over time, and Kaur and Lovelace are just modern poetry. To overlook it is “not real poetry” seems to be pretentious.

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