What are the signs that a novel is bad?

-I despise a novel with grammatical errors and poor spelling. Spellcheck is actually quite lovely, and some of these writers need to come off their high horses and use some.

-God, I’d rather perish than read another ‘He looked…’ ‘She grabbed…’ ‘They ran…’. You need some variation in your writing, and you don’t need to start every sentence with a pronoun. It’s redundant.

-Practically plotless, never moves at all. I call it ‘Stationary Plot’. Or it starts in the beginning, takes a backseat all the middle, and comes back last minute. A good example for me is something like ‘Red White and Royal Blue’, by Casey McQuiston, or her similar sapphic novel, the one about the woman stuck on the metro from the 70s. The beginning is good, the ending is good, but the middle drags on because it feels like it’s all sex, all character, and no plot. And I’m sorry but the main characters aren’t all that interesting! They’re good when they’re part of the plot.