What will shift your view of a book from positive to negative?

[Cait]

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry took andtheIToldYouSos back to her own field hockey days. She loved it until a reveal in the last 30 pages when a coach/student relationship crossed a line. "I wanted to shout about how much I loved this story from the hilltops (in a rhyming cheer, of course) but after the above exposition I was immediately cold." (Cannonball Read 13)

[Emmalita]

My list of things gets longer every year, but it's more about how something is handled than the thing itself. For example, I'm very tired of sexual assault as a character development tool, but there are authors who I trust to handle it well. But generally, I just don't want to read it.

[Katie]

Mental health stuff. If an author puts a toe into a pond they don't have enough info on I will nope out with a quickness.

[Hudson]

For me it’s poorly written action or fight sequences. I think authors sometimes start picturing the fights themselves in their heads like a movie and forget to fill us in on those little details that make a fight make sense.

[Raven]

It depends. Usually if the book is rushed. Or there is some obvious mistake that editing could have helped. The biggest is preaching. If you are all "Sister Bertha Better Than You" I'm out.

[Amanda]

Probably the single biggest thing that turns me off of a book is - and I'm not sure if this is exactly the right way to put this, but I'm going with it - if the author's ego is too obvious, like, if their writing style seems too self-congratulatory somehow. I'm not even talking just about literary fiction, which is frequently accused of being pretentious and often is. But in the genres I read more often, usually Romance, Fantasy, and SF, I encounter a lot of characters and situations where it just seems like the moment is screaming for the reader to recognize how clever/hilarious/shocking/badass they are, and a lot of the time I'm just not as impressed with whatever has just happened as the author clearly seemed to be. Especially when the thing you're supposed to feel is explicitly signaled by other characters. All the time in Romance, one of the pair says something mildly amusing at best, and the other person's internal monologue is like "That's the funniest thing I've ever heard, you're soooooo hilarious" [telling all of their friends] "Isn't s/he hilarious?" I'm always just like, "Yes, the true sign of a good joke, that after you have written it, you need to tell me how funny it is."