Imagine reading a book in the car on a family road trip and then boom, you’re reading something unexpectedly vulgar in front of your parents.
TikTok’s “BookTok” is heavily influencing users to read books popularized by the app. By liking one video related to books, hundreds more follow after. Authors such as Colleen Hoover are gaining attention through this. Not all of it is great.
When I read Hoover’s “It Ends With Us” in 2021, I did so without prior knowledge of the book. I had seen it so much on TikTok that I assumed that it would be some groundbreaking piece of writing when in reality I could have found something better on Wattpad.
This summer, I decided to test out BookTok and read 18 books that I had seen on my “for you page” that readers had been raving about. These books fell into three tiers: deserves the hype, not as good as anticipated and shouldn’t be recommended.
Emily Henry’s “Happy Place” falls into that top tier of books that deserve the hype. It lives up to her other best-sellers like “Book Lovers” and “Beach Read.” The story follows a couple, well a recently broken up couple, on their annual summer vacation with their friends of over a decade. Henry’s storytelling capabilities exceed expectations without the story becoming repetitive or corny.
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s “The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” is another highly recommended book that met my expectations. Reid enjoys taking a journalistic aspect in writing as she tells the story of a young journalist writing a book on one of the most famous actresses of the century. Reid is the perfect example of a talented author that doesn’t make their work confusing to read.
The middle tier is an iffy area. It holds books that weren’t awful, but received more hype than deserved. One of these is Dolly Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love.”
The memoir follows Alderton through girlhood and touches on the importance of her relationships with the women in her life. While I did enjoy the read, I kept waiting for something revolutionary to appear. It never did.
The reason I’m not ranking Lucy Score’s “Things We Never Got Over” as low as I should is because I didn’t hate the story, but I disliked the writing. There were more than a handful of times where I had to close the book out of embarrassment of what Score was writing. The only reason I didn’t quit reading was because I had faith that it would get better.
Elissa Sussman’s “Funny You Should Ask” was one of the first books I read this summer and was the first to disappoint and find its place on the bottom tier. The bright pink and red cover is enticing but the rest of the book lacks a solid plot and the storyline generally uninteresting.
“I bought the second one so I am forcing myself to finish the first one,” sophomore Chloe Richmond said on “Funny You Should Ask.” “I’ve only been able to make it 40 pages in without having to stop reading.”
Now on the bottom is Hoover’s “Ugly Love.” This book was recommended on TikTok, so I thought it was worth the shot. Not only was I disappointed by the read, I was shocked by the amount of younger children reading it as it is not PG.
Sophomore Elina Vangelatos said she doesn’t even give thought to the books recommended by BookTok because she has been constantly disappointed. She is currently reading Jeffrey Eugenide’s “The Virgin Suicides.”
Book reviews are subjective and don’t let low ratings steer you away from reading a book you have been dreaming about. Just be wary of the books that TikTok is sending your way.
