Hey everyone! Today I’m doing a book tag—specifically, the Totally Didn’t Book Tag! Thank you to Eleisha from Literary Leisha for tagging me to do this!
1. Totally didn’t need to have a sequel/sequels.
For some of these questions, I’m probably going to have multiple answers… but this isn’t one of them. I love series, and the vast majority of the books I read are parts of series. I would almost always prefer to have more books than less, since that means I get to spend as much time as possible with the characters. Still, I do have an answer here.
Savvy by Ingrid Law. I don’t know if this really counts, because the “sequel” to this book is a companion novel, but I loved the first book so much, and then when I read the companion, I didn’t like it, and I think I might have even DNF’d it. I don’t remember enough about it to know if I even finished it or not, so clearly, I didn’t love it. (To be fair, it is middle grade, so part of the reason for that could be because I’m much older now than I was when I read Savvy.)
2. Totally didn’t need to have more than one point of view.
Allegiant by Veronica Roth.
**Mild spoiler warning if you haven’t read Allegiant.**
Honestly, I feel like the only reason Four’s POV was included in there was so that the author could get away with the ending. Other than that, his chapters were kind of…useless, and boring. In my opinion. Also, it was just weird for the first two books in the trilogy to only be from Tris’s perspective, and then, suddenly, in the last book, we have both Tris and Four. I don’t like the inconsistency there.
3. Totally didn’t need to change cover art in the middle of a series.
The Missing series by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I love the original covers to this series, but then for the second half of it, they changed the covers to these weird ones that all kind of look the same, with that weird clock contraption in the middle, and I just don’t like it.
(Here’s a comparison, for reference)
This is what my copy of the first book looks like. 
This is the new cover.
I guess the colors are nice, but it’s a little in-your-face, like, “Hey, I’m a time travel book!” I like how my version is more subtle. I also really don’t like the hollow lettering on the new covers. I guess some people might find my cover to be a bit boring, though.
Also, this might be controversial, but I really prefer the original covers for Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes series. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for more diversity on book covers, and I totally understand the reason for the change. It’s just that in general, I don’t prefer books that have faces or realistic images of people on the cover (with one notable exception being Girls of Paper and Fire because that book is gorgeous). Plus, in my opinion, the original covers—and especially the cover of the first book—give you a much better sense of the world than the newer covers do.
4. Totally didn’t need a love triangle.
I would argue that no book really needs a love triangle. The one possible exception I can think of to this rule is The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, because the love triangle in there is kind of integral to the plot. But that’s a very rare example, and even for that book, I think something could have been done to take out the love triangle and still achieve nearly the same result that the original book did.
So… I guess my answer here is, “pretty much every book that has one.” Maybe that’s an unpopular opinion? I don’t know.
5. Totally didn’t need this book to be included in this series.
Revealed by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but let’s just say that some of the… well, reveals… in this book made me mad. It’s a large part of the reason why I never ended up reading the last book in this series, and I don’t know if I ever will.
6. Totally didn’t need a cliffhanger
I have to go with the mother of all cliffhangers for this one—The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan. Everyone who has read this book knows exactly what I’m talking about—especially those of you who, like me, read it right when it came out and had to wait a year to find out what happened next. The ending hurt me.
I will admit that the cliffhanger was effective, but necessary? Well, that’s debatable.
7. Totally didn’t need to have just one point of view.
The Hybrid Chronicles by Kat Zhang. I love this series (or what I’ve read of it so far, anyway—I still haven’t gotten around to reading the last book in the trilogy), but the whole idea behind the series is that it’s set in an alternate version of Earth where each person is born with two souls who share the same body, until about age 5 or so, when one of them, the “recessive” soul, is supposed to fade, leaving the other soul behind. Except the main character(s) of this book, Addie and Eva, are what’s called hybrid. Eva, as the recessive soul, should have faded away, but she didn’t—not completely—and only Addie knows. To me, that concept just screams that this should have been a dual POV book series—one for Addie, and one for Eva. But instead we just get Eva. It’s a bit of a disappointment.
8. Totally didn’t need that much hype.
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare—and really, the Shadowhunter world in general, though I’ve only read the first two books of the Mortal Instruments so I suppose I don’t have the right to cast judgment on the entire thing. Let’s just say that I have no interest in ever reading the rest of the original series or any of the spin-offs. If you like it, that’s great, and I’m happy for you, but it’s just not for me.
9. Totally didn’t need a relative book reference. (For example: Hunger Games fans would love Divergent.)
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, and the whole rest of the Percy Jackson series. I mean, yeah, I can see the similarities to Harry Potter, but I get tired of hearing people say that Percy Jackson is like a copycat version of Harry Potter. I don’t hear it as much now, but back when the series was coming out, I heard it all the time, and it frustrated me.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m part of the generation that grew up with Percy instead of Harry, and I only started reading Harry Potter last year (I grew up watching the movies, though, if that counts for anything), but to me, the two are very different in a ton of ways.
10. Totally didn’t deserve my time.
The Poison Study series by Maria V. Snyder. I read all three books in this trilogy, and I don’t know why, because they weren’t good. Aside from the fact that I was in Europe and I was super busy, I think this series is part of the reason why I’m so behind on my Goodreads challenge. During the first three months of the year, I only read four books, and three of them were the three books in this trilogy. It literally took me almost an entire month to read each of the books, and for what? I didn’t really like them, I remember basically nothing about them, and they were pretty much just a huge waste of time.
On that low note, we’ve reached the end of this book tag. I’m not going to tag anyone specific, but if you haven’t yet been tagged and this looks like it would be fun, consider yourself tagged!
Thanks for reading, everyone!
-Ariel