DNF: Did Not Finish
I haven’t posted a new book review since May, and now it’s June. But the truth is, I’ve hit a bit of a reading slump. I have posted a book review almost every month this year, but the last two books I tried to read just simply didn’t hit it for me. I am kind of a terrible completionist and I hate to leave books unread. But these two just weren’t working for me and I found myself kind of dreading going to read them, which definitely should not be how one feels about reading a book. It should be fun and you should be dying to get back between the covers.
I will add a bit of a disclaimer that this is just my opinion and I, by no means, intend to hurt the authors or narrators of these stories. I will always respect the time and effort that authors put into writing and creating these books and my reasons for not finishing them might just be a “me” thing. So, without further ado, the books I DNF’d were: The Midwife by Katja Kettu and Witchy Whiskers by Danielle Garrett.
The Midwife by Katja Kettu
Both of these books were audiobooks. I purchased The Midwife and borrowed Witchy Whiskers from my library. These two books have very different vibes, so I’ll start with The Midwife.
I’m a sucker for historical pieces about women dealing with the consequences of birth, death, and wars. I have read – or listened to/watched – many books and movies about midwives. This is the first I couldn’t get through (and not because of the detailed births.)
I was so curious about this book because I come from a very Finnish family (though I wouldn’t consider myself very Finnish) and I haven’t read many books from Finnish authors. My grandmother spoke Finnish and was one of the most intensely serious women I’ve ever met. I was not expecting to read what “Weird Eye” (the main character) had to offer.
The main character is absolutely obsessed with sex. And obsessed with a Nazi soldier whom she finds very attractive, despite feeling that she is hideous with a weird eye and odd habits. This is by no means erotica. The sexual scenes are so wildly disturbing and shocking that I couldn’t get through them. Details like licking and sniffing armpits, smelling ‘pricks’, licking belly buttons, sucking toes, and reminiscing on how she would suckle at the breasts of women when she was a child to help their milk come in (4-7 years old) and then relate that to the sexual experience she wanted to have. Most of the descriptions left my skin crawling and I actually felt ill a few times. It was like body horror more than romance. Maybe I’m just a prude, but I really didn’t expect all that.
I was holding out hope that Weird Eye would give up this fantasy and move on from him. But then they become somewhat of an item, hiding away in a remote cabin, and odd sexual experiences seemed to make up most of the pages. To make matters worse, from the Nazi soldier’s perspective, he often described Weird Eye as repulsive – making their relationship even harder to endure.
This book was also confusing in its timelines. It jumped around quite a bit and we’d read about Weird Eye torturing a man in a Nazi prison camp and then read about this girl she had saved from the prison camp, who was a teenager, who she often let smell her armpits. (Yes, again with the armpit thing.) I found it very challenging to follow where the characters were in terms of geography and also what their motivations were. None of these characters are really protagonists. In a weird way, we pity Weird Eye, but she also does horrible things to people and is not a good person. She even relishes another woman dying after attempting to have an abortion and is pleased that it happened so that she would not interfere with Weird Eye’s obsession with Johannes (the Nazi soldier.)
I had 4 hours and 40 minutes left in this book and as the amount of bizarre and sexualized scenes increased, the less I wanted to pick up the book.
My husband was also glad that I stopped reading this book because I would often repeat some of the phrases out loud, out of context, so he could understand why I was cringing and crawling out my skin. He encouraged me to just move on from the book. I really tried to read this one, but I just couldn’t sit through it. I think this was actually turned into a movie and maybe that would be easier to get through? But visualizing some of these things might also be worse than reading the descriptions.
Witchy Whiskers by Danielle Garrett
This book is much shorter than the Midwife overall and I chose it because I wanted something light and easy to read (after that hellscape of the previous book.) This is a story about a witch and her familiar, who opt to help out a mysterious man caught in the middle of a murder scandal.
I actually love a lot of things about this book. The little store where she sells her magic wares sounds absolutely dreamy, and I love the characters, and I even think the talking cat is pretty funny. However, the voice that the narrator uses for the cat is very challenging to listen to. I can’t really pinpoint why, but I found it distracted me from the story. I couldn’t keep going. The cat would have these great lines, but the voice that the narrator chose to give the cat was just … not my taste. I might actually borrow this book physically and just read it myself because I was enjoying it quite a bit.
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