I’ve gotten a lot better at giving up on books that just aren’t working for me, but occasionally I persevere, pushing through to the end. In the case of these two titles, I recognized that the writing was technically good and the plots were interesting to me on paper (pun intended), but I just never got sucked in the way I normally do with a great book.

The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 1: At the Edge of Empire by Daniel Kraus

This is a book in search of the right reader. It’s about seventeen year old Zebulon, and it begins with his life in the latter part of the 19th century. Raised in privilege, he rails against his absent father and his coddling mother who wants nothing for his life that he himself wants. He runs away and becomes…a gangster, in a bit of a roundabout way. It starts small, with petty theft and impersonation of members of the Black Hand, but then grows much larger, until he’s committing regular acts of violence for a living. This way of life gets him killed. Only he doesn’t die, not quite. He continues to exist, in a sort of zombie-like way, but without the need to eat brains. He doesn’t need to eat anything, actually. Or drink. Or breathe. He can’t have sex, either, which is a bit of a downer. And he can’t heal, allowing Kraus to imbue the story with a bit of a horror touch. But he continues to exist.

This makes him a curiosity, and it brings him to the attention of all sorts of unsavory people. He becomes part of a freak show, participates in experiments with a mad doctor, fights in World War I, spends time as a bootlegger, and on. He himself is an unsavory character, which makes him interesting; it’s not yet clear whether his story arc will be redemptive, but I don’t think it needs to be. Kraus gives Zebulon a distinctive voice and a vibrant personality, and his adventures should have been more interesting to me than they were. Instead, I grew tired of the episodic nature of the novel. It’s a catalog of Zebulon’s life, and that life is certainly a unique one, but I prefer my stories to go places, and to get there a little more quickly. This is a book for patient readers who like the weird and have contemplated what it would be like to live for a hundred years and never grow old.

These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

It’s possible that Jennifer Donnelly’s books just aren’t for me. I read A Northern Light, her book that garnered a Printz Honor, and was underwhelmed, contrary to the opinion of pretty much everyone else. But she writes historical fiction about girls trying live independent lives in times when it was much more difficult, and that’s always been one of my genre kryptonites. Jo Montfort is from a wealthy family and anticipates that she’ll soon be engaged to a young man from another wealthy family, a friend whom she actually does like – but doesn’t love. What she really wants, much more than getting married, is to be a journalist like Nellie Bly. When her father dies, supposedly in an accident, her life is thrown upside down. She soon discovers that it wasn’t an accident at all – he was murdered. She teams up with another journalist, Eddie, and the two grow closer as they unravel what really happened.

My main issue with this book was its length. Some books deserve to be 500 pages, but I don’t feel like this one warranted it. There was a lot of repetition as Jo fretted over the danger of what she was doing, over her new feelings for Eddie, over her desire to be a journalist versus her family’s pressure to make a good marriage, over the thought that her father could have been betrayed by someone close to her. These are all valid things to fret about, but so much time is spent on it that it slows the pace of the novel. It felt tedious instead of exciting. Additionally, I knew who the culprit was pretty soon in the novel, but it’s likely teen readers who have less experience with historical mysteries won’t. This is another novel for patient readers (perhaps I’m less patient than most?) who would love getting sucked into 19th century New York. It’s got a little bit of everything for them: murder, mystery, romance, friendship, and lots of period detail.