Task 2: Tell us: What are the tropes (up to 5) that you are not willing to live with in any book (i.e., which are absolutely beyond your capacity for tolerance) and which make that book an automatic DNF for you? (Insta-love? Love triangles? First person present narrative voice? Talking animals? The dog dies? What else?)

 

I´m not frequently DNFing books, but there are two things take really make me want to put a book down:

 

1. The special snowflake: The main character is so special, so good, so intelligent, no one is like her / him and everybody is in love with this person for no apparent reason at all and the only person on this planet, who is loathing this character with all its heart, is little me, the reader of this book. (Yes, I´m thinking of you, Cora Seaborne of The Essex Serpent.)

 

2. Taking liberties with real-life personalities: An author is allowed to take a real-life person and write a ficticious story about them. But please, dear author, don´t turn them into murderers or soppy housewifes or something else horrible just to make your own story a more interesting one. If you can´t stick with the facts and tell a compelling story, come up with characters of your own. Don´t exploit and distort the life of real people, especially if they are dead and cannot defend themselves anymore.