Review: Mediocre Stories; Horrible Grammar
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2014
When I got my Kindle and started reading some of the free and lower priced books from unknown (to me) authors, I was leery that I would be bombarded with poorly written, amateurish junk. Fortunately, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many of these unknown authors produce material that's just as good as the better known writers. Pleasantly surprised until now, that is.T.D. Maxgrove's (the name appears as Maxgove on the Amazon page for the book) Bad Girls Revealed is a collection of five short stories about six devious, manipulative women. Although their names differ, they are all pretty much the same... beautiful, ruthless, manipulative, unfeeling, and capable of getting almost any man in the world to do what they want. The men are rich, decent, and extremely gullible. Each story (with one exception) is pretty much a retelling of the next with a slightly different ending. The exception is a retelling of the story of the biblical Lot sleeping with his daughters... in that one, the daughters' goal is to have children, not to take a rich guy to the cleaners.I have nothing against stories about clever albeit dislikable characters, but these stories are extremely barebones, with virtually no attempt at revealing character nuances or showing how these women were able to manipulate their way into wealth. According to Maxgrove, being beautiful and saying "I love you" is all it takes, and stories that have that flimsy a plot structure just aren't very interesting. The problem isn't that these women are evil; they're simply uninteresting and mapping out their life story in about ten pages doesn't give them enough space to have them do anything interesting. Each story is a dull, skeletal outline of someone who must have done a lot of juicy things to get to where she did, but we are only given the faintest hint of them.To make matters worse (to the stage of being actively annoying instead of merely boring), the grammar in these stories is terrible, the worst I've seen in Kindle books. I understand the procedure for transforming a script to Kindle format often requires authors to proof  their own work, and typos can creep in. However, this 50-page book is filled with improper tense shifts, sentences leaving out words, misused words, and other basic grammatical mistakes, so many, in fact, that some of the paragraphs are nearly impossible to decipher. Maxgrove (or his editor, if the author has one) needs a crash course in grammar.The blurb for this book sounds interesting, but the plots and characters are generic and the writing is atrocious. There are far better ways to spend your time and money on Kindle books.