God has numerous ways of helping us learn certain lessons. Around this time last year I downloaded a book to my Kindle that I’d been eyeing for a while. For me, each Kindle purchase is a struggle because I already have hundreds of books on my Kindle that I haven’t read. But this book looked really good and it had all these five star reviews.

Anyway, the book started off really slowly and was just all over the place but I thought ‘let’s give it a chance to get good.’ I thought I just needed some patience, but what I really needed was to just throw the book away because it got so bad I wish I could just delete it from my memory! Seriously it was that bad. The main character cheats on her husband, which I saw coming, but it was so ridiculous. They could have worked their problems out but it’s like the author had decided that she needed to cheat. The author tried to make the couple’s situation seem desperate but it just didn’t work. There was nothing desperate about their situation. The husband was unreasonable but so was the wife. And the description of the man that the wife cheated with was supposed to be oh so sexy but it was so ridiculous that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or grab a pen and scribble the words out. But I was reading on Kindle so I couldn’t scribble them out. I had to accept them and move on.

I don’t want to give too much away because I don’t want anyone to ever guess which book I’m talking about as I hate to slam a fellow author’s book. Especially a Christian book. But something terrible happens to the husband and we’re supposed to still hate him anyway because he’d been seeing a white woman. Like the fact that she was white was the unpardonable sin. Seriously, I just felt sorry for the man.

The book was just a horrid mess and had a horrid message. A year later I’m still thinking about what a horrendous experience it was to read such a horrendous mess. And guess what, God taught me so much. I used to get all sensitive about people not loving my books and giving them negative reviews, but after reading a book that angered me I understand. Seriously, if someone hates any of my books, I understand. And I now accept the negative feedback. If one of my books hurts someone the way this awful book hurt me, then the reader is sooooo entitled to their feelings and yes, rant, let it out, I understand how you feel. I’m sorry you had to endure my book if it made you feel the way this book made me feel. That’s why there are millions of writers out there. God has given so many people the ability to write so that everybody will be able to find a book that they enjoy.

I was convinced that all the five star reviews for this awful book were fake, but I felt God telling me off about that. Just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who loved it.

I’ve never disliked a book so much that I wanted to delete it from my memory, lol. I’m so glad this happened to me. It made me put myself in the shoes of my readers. And it made me mature as a writer.