It’s another Monday. We publish our weekly reviews on Mondays but not today. Today, all members of our community will read is this “rant” about why we are not publishing a review today.

As I said in this post, this year hasn’t been great reading wise. We’ve read fewer books because well… life, and we’ve read even fewer good books. So we were both looking forward to this month. The books on our list looked promising.

On Tuesday, April 30, we published our May Reading and Book Reviews List. We only needed to buy the books, read and review them. Today’s post should have been Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta; an old book, published in 2005 which neither of us has read. It’s not on Kindle so our only options were Okadabooks or hardback copy.

The book came under our radar because it was advertised on Okadabooks a few months ago. So I bought a copy and started reading it. A few pages in, I realised there was something wrong with the book, it has missing words and pages and jumps from scene to scene without conclusions on each scene. The font alternates between normal and tiny sizes making it difficult to read.

I contacted Okadabooks, flagged the problem and requested a refund. Then, I ordered the hardback copy and paid for express delivery so it would arrive in time for the review. Well, I’m one half of Literary Everything, the other half is Mo. I sent her a message to explain what was happening. Mo is the opposite of me, she is the CEO of lastminutedotcom so she would not have discovered the problem until it was too late. But she was out of town for work and so could not get the hardback copy in time for the review.

We decided to swap books and move the review for Monday, May 27-When Lemons Grow on Orange Trees to Monday, May 20 and instead, review Sefi’s book on the 27^th. I already had When Lemons Grow on Orange Trees on my Okadabooks app and had read it half way last year.

It never rains, but it pours

I opened When Lemons Grow on Orange Trees to read and realised the font was too tiny to read comfortably. Okadabooks had done an app update since I bought the book and unfortunately, the update had affected the font sizes of some books on the app. I contacted Okadabooks, and the issue is still unresolved. To make matters worse, the book is not available on Kindle. Sigh.

So this Monday, May 20, instead of reading our thoughts about Everything Good Will Come or even listening to my audio review of When Lemons Grow on Orange Trees, you are reading my “rant” about how Okadabooks’ poor service derailed our schedule. We’ve had to move everything by one week so you will read our reviews on May 27 and June 3 instead, hopefully…

“Rant” over. Thank you for understanding. As you were.

Have you had incidents out of your control derail your best laid blogging plans? Let’s chat in the comments section.