Tag Archives: Atria Books

Spy

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by Ted Bell
2006 Atria Books (Simon & Schuster)

First sentence: He had never expected to survive the sinking of his boat.
Favorite sentence: Food and drinks are prohibited from this section of the library.
Three pages of clichés: the river a quiet mirror, endless jungle, fallen silent, the peace was suddenly shattered, a rain of lead, engulfed in flames, sold to the highest bidder
You might also enjoy: contact sex with your cats, soccer

Other reviews: What James Reads, Large Print Reviews

Oh Atria Books, can you produce anything that isn’t shit? I’m starting to feel bad for suggesting that Atria is just a front for a meth lab, because that horribly disparages meth labs and the hardworking men and women who strive to create a pure product that brings joy to so many. Atria Books is more like a terrorist organization, which wants you to die, and is willing to sacrifice themselves to make you die.

This book begins with a prologue, which in a work of fiction is like a middle finger to the reader. Is the prologue important to the story? It wasn’t good enough to be a real chapter, so surely I can skip it… Will it contain a useless sideshow prequel that sets the mood of the main plotline? Or is it just some crap that didn’t fit anywhere so you tossed it there?

I elected to skip the prologue and start at chapter one because nothing comes before one except zero. And zero is the part where I am sleeping, which is a better use of my time than this book was.

At first it wasn’t clear if this was a shitty book or not, but then I saw this sentence, like a dead shitty giveaway:

The river was alive with death.

Oxymorons like this are tricks hacks use to make you think they are clever, but this is the most cliché-infested writing I’ve ever seen. Reading along further, Bell inserts an inexplicable vernacular apostrophe that completely stalls your thought process:

When he heard the explosion for’ard, and felt the yawl stagger and founder…

I must have glanced back at that for’ard twenty times because I couldn’t believe it was really there.

I will give Ted Bell credit, though, for packing in a lot of action in three pages. Here’s what happened in that span:

  1. a boat travelling on a river hits a mine and gets strafed by machine gun fire
  2. the survivor enters the water only to be attacked by a “water boa”
  3. he is then captured by indians and sold into slavery
  4. he fights off his captors and escapes
  5. he fakes his own death, then jumps back into the river
All that in just three pages. And yet, Ted Bell is such a shitty writer I was bored by this story.
(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)

The Dog Walker

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by Leslie Schnur
Atria Books 2004

Selection method: Went looking for the worst book title I could find. Instead got the worst author’s name I could find. Schnur is a Pokemon character. Schnur! Schnur!
First: Nina Shepard was in love with a man she’d never met.
Worst: It was funny how she could know more about a man she’d never met than all the men she had met put together.
Most profound: After thirty-five years, she liked her legs.
Misspelled word used to describe Lenny Kravitz on page two: white-bread

Leslie Schnur likes hyphens. She wants you to know. She uses them to construct witty-and-familiar-but-not-that-familiar-and-not-that-witty adjectives. They’re easy to spot, like a curly black pubic hair in a bowl of warm cream. And good thing because I was not going to read more than three pages of this shitty book. Here is a selection, which I swear I didn’t make up:

  • soon-to-be-ex
  • way-too-long life
  • only-in-New-York sight
  • lovely-to-look-at alt-lifestyle junkie
  • irony-is-dead-or-not-dead argument
  • cinematographer-libertarian-vegetarian-qigong-expert ex-husband
  • real-life-adventure-tragedy-on-Everest-in-Antarctica-in-Krakatoa-with-sharks-with-fire stuff

She also desperately wants you to know about her dog. He is the best dog in the world, and his name is Charlie and he is a mutt from the ASPCA and he apparently is great enough to be listed in her dedication right next to her flesh and blood children. Thanks, mom. Happy to know we’re as important to you as a dog from the pound.

It is also important to know that Leslie Schnur has been an editor and publisher for over twenty years, and this is her first novel. In writing this wonderful piece of shit, she gives us further evidence that editors don’t know how to read. How could she even approve her own work? Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn’t print this. Fake Chinese Teen Cosmo wouldn’t print this. And the label “chick lit” is too high a compliment, as it implies “literature” which this is not. I suggest instead the term “curdled festering placental tread marks on society’s sweaty undergarments” (which I think was also a song by Carcass).

This is a New Yorker clearly infatuated with her life and her city, which she thinks are crazy and vibrant, respectively, but which in fact are both alcohol dumpsters. I’m not saying Leslie Schnur is an alcoholic, just that there were a lot of wine stains on the cover and I got contact drunk while holding it.

The offending publisher here is Atria Books, which is where Simon & Shuster flushes everything not good enough for their flagship imprint. We last met Atria Books in Jennifer Weiner’s unputdownable (no hyphens necessary) Goodnight Nobody. We are far from surprised, then, that Jennifer Weiner lends the first puff quote to the back cover — the shitty pot calling the kettle shitty. But no less than the esteemed US Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, also claims to like this book (he’s lost his mind, and my vote….when I get my illegal absentee ballot from Minnesota). I’m looking into whether Atria Books is really a business front for a meth lab.

I would like to round up every person who read this all the way through (start with her own list of acknowledgments), put them into a rocket ship, launch them into space, and drop them all on the Moon. Then blow up the Moon, impeach Al Franken, blow up Minnesota, and finally mix the Moon debris and Minnesota debris into a giant ball and make a new Moon. Then fire this second Moon directly into the Sun using futuristic ion rockets. Then burn the factory that made the rockets and have a party.

Other reviews: The Romance Reader, Trashionista, Curled Up, The Best Reviews

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)

Goodnight Nobody

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by Jennifer Weiner
Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) 2005

Method of selection: Asked the librarian directions to the restroom. This was the book I found in the toilet.

First sentence: “Hello?” I tapped on Kitty Cavanaugh’s red front door, then lifted the brass knocker and gave it a few thumps for good measure. 
Types of diabetes I came down with trying to slog through this: Type 1 (body does not produce insulin), Type 2 (body ignores insulin produced), Type 9 (only affects people who read this book, and cannibals who eat the brains of people who read this book. I did both, so now I also have Type 12 diabetes).
You will like this book if: you’re a hospice patient with nothing to do but wait for death.

Why do authors write books about normal people doing normal things and complaining about it? I know how boring life is already. I do it every day, and complain about it. Where’s the robot fellatio? Where are the Templar Knights travelling through time to have sex with you? And how long must I wait to get to the murder parts? Nobody I ever know gets killed. Life sucks! We know!

The first three pages of this are about a suburban mom and her sad lonely life raising three kids and a husband who ignores her, and the sexy cool moms who are sexier and cooler and less Jewish than her. My hope was she would bury her three children alive in the yard and then go rape the sexy moms, but she hardly did any of those things.

The publisher’s synopsis calls this book “unputdownable”, but I didn’t have any trouble putting it down, which means either the publisher is lying, or someone drove a 1/2-inch bolt directly through her palms and into this book, and used a locknut on the other side. That story would have made for a more interesting read, as do most instructions on playing billiards.

Other reviews:  The Infinite Shelf, Tiny Little Reading Room, Capricious Reader

(Support this site by purchasing this shitty book through one of the links below.)