Review: You've got to be kidding me
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 26, 2014
As I write this, there are 32 5-star reviews and 2 4-star reviews of this book, giving it a rating of 4.9 out of 5. I long ago lost faith in reviews on Amazon. They're gamed so often and so blatantly that they're useless more often than not.But this case is just plain ridiculous. Who's writing all those 5-star reviews, the Tooth Fairy? So I'll break my rule about not reviewing mediocre books.One 5-star reviewer wrote, "The story plot is original, the prose is well written, the dialogues are superb and I like the way the author handles the character." I'd say that 3 of those 4 claims are false.1. The plot is hardly original. The first book about an apocalyptic plague that I read was "The Andromeda Strain" and that was a few decades ago. The granddaddy of them all is probably Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year", published in 1722.In fact, Amazon sells a large number of similar books: just search for 'apocalyptic plague'.2. The prose is not well written by any stretch of the imagination. Errors in grammar, punctuation and mechanics abound. They were so common, in fact, that I started noting them while I read.-- The mother of all run-on sentences: "It was tied securely to my canoe, I hoped it would survive, but if it went under, I would be happy, but I'd have to let it go." The dependent clause has a dependent clause?I still don't know what the author meant by that sentence; I conclude that he was as confused here as I was.-- The author pretty consistently used "I" instead of "me" when he needed the accusative case in prepositional phrases. Example: "he choked out something unintelligible to Emily and I." I don't recall that he *ever* got this one right.-- Weird punctuation in dialog, like this:"So you're saying the survivors will start organizing into groups." Nick asked."Look we need to assume that everything is contaminated." Emily said with authority.Maybe the period before the closing quote is due to how the Kindle version was made? But for whatever reason, the lack of commas at the end of quotes was very consistent, with some strange results in places.Most of the book is punctuated this way. It's not hard to follow the dialog, mind you, but you need to reset your parsing frequently - and that gets a little tedious.-- Errors in tense. The protagonist is urging a course of action when he says, "We won't stand a chance unless we take some action. If there was any time to move it was now."And, dang, we've just missed it!-- Redundancy: "...Nick asked me as we walked the rocky perimeter shore of the island." Ever seen an island's shore that wasn't part of the island's perimeter?This is nit-picking, of course. But it's an example of the multitude of poor choices in wording in this story. It's as though no one ever read this book aloud.3. On to those "superb dialogues"... Here's a sample where Jack and Nick (brothers) are having a chat on an island in Lake Erie. They're talking about food supplies and about their father, who was described earlier as a life-long fisherman.J: "We're surrounded by one of the world's great freshwater fisheries. I don't claim to know all the species of fish, but suffice it to say there's a ton of them out there."N: "And Dad's the guy to talk to about that?" Nick asked, already knowing the answer.J: "You got it."N: "What about planting?" Nick asked.J: "I think Jen brought a ton of seeds. I assume Vince still has them, but's it's already July and we don't have any soil. Vince is probably the expert on on what seeds we still have time to plant this season."N: "I hope we can get something in the ground in time. I do prefer eating in the winter time."That's a pretty representative sample; it doesn't get a lot better. I'm still trying to figure out why they were talking about planting seeds when there's "no soil."4. What makes the weak dialog and the usage errors stand out so much is that the story is told in the first person by a *college professor*. I think your professor of History needs a remedial course in English, Mr. Brandon.With other characters in other stories, this type of English usage might make sense. Nobody expects good grammar from Jim & Huck in "Huckleberry Finn", for example. But for a professor, particularly a professor of history who presumably would do little else besides read and write? Bzzt! Game over.My take on this book is that I nearly gave up on it but the plot and the dialog were just tolerable enough that I finished.The plot concept wasn't bad; it could have been developed into a good story. I think Mr. Brandon has a pretty good imagination and if he writes a few more books for practice - and if he hires a proofreader - then he may come up with a good book some day. But it won't be like this book.Update, 3/9/14:--------------Well, well, well. This has been a very interesting test of Amazon reviews. Here's the story.After posting my original review, I was surprised to see it getting marked Helpful. Negative book reviews don't usually get many Helpful votes. So I started watching the reviews daily to see what would happen.On March 8, my original review had reached Most Helpful with an 8/9 rating. The second Most Helpful was FireflyJen's 2-star review with a 2/2 rating. You could have knocked me over with a feather: that's pretty unusual.On March 9, I found that our two reviews had gone from 8/9 to 8/15 and from 2/2 to 2/8 overnight. In other words, we both got 6 Unhelpful votes *in the same day*. I wondered whether all those votes had come from the same person or people. I've got $10 that says they did.And I noticed that the new Most Helpful review was a 5-star review from Jan. 21st that had reached 33 Helpful votes *overnight*. None of the reviews had anything close to 33 votes yesterday. Those book review elves sure were busy last night.Need any more proof that Amazon reviews are routinely gamed? The circumstantial evidence seems pretty clear.