Two book clubs, same novel, totally different reactions

Our group tore through 'Project Hail Mary' in two weeks, everyone loved it, talked about the science and the humor. Then my buddy's club over in Austin read the same book and half of them hated it, said it was too childish and full of tropes. It's wild how the same 476 pages can land so differently just based on who is in the room and what they're looking for. Has anyone else had a book that flopped in one group but took off in another, what was the breaking point?

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emmag229d ago

The "too childish and full of tropes" bit really got me, because I think the group vibe decides what counts as a flaw. My club read a literary fiction book once and half of us were like "beautiful and slow," the other half were practically asleep, and it came down to who had read a lot of that style before. If your Austin friends are used to harder sci-fi with grim plots, then a book that leans on friendship and simple solutions is gonna feel like a kids movie no matter how clever it is. But for us, we were just happy to have a book that made us laugh and feel smart, so we didn't care that the main character was basically a golden retriever in space. The breaking point is never the book itself, it's the unspoken rules your group has about what a good story is supposed to do for you.