Review: Pollen needs polish
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 20, 2013
This book starts off strong, but it needs both content editing and proofreading. The bones are here for an excellent sci-fi novel, but it was rushed to publishing without the work of a professional editor to tighten it up and keep it from dragging at times and rushing at other times (for instance, towards the end we simply have the "bad guys" explain why they've done what they've done). There is also confusion with all the characters, sometimes it was tough to remember who was who and in many cases their motivations were never revealed. As for proofreading, it was bad enough to be distracting. I was actually wondering if it was written in another language and run through a translator. Some sentences have extra words, some are missing words, sometimes they simply aren't sentences, and sometimes a lack of correct punctuation makes it difficult to read. The author also needs to learn how to use apostrophes; luckily it wasn't the typical online use of apostrophes in plurals (had that happened I would have stopped reading), but throughout the book singular possessives are made into plural possessives due to where the apostrophe is placed and occasionally the apostrophes are just skipped entirely. I could go on and on, but I won't belabor the point. The end message is that the book is decent or I wouldn't have slogged through the errors to get to the end, unfortunately, I felt almost let down at the end since I was expecting a huge "secret" to be revealed, maybe even a paradigm shift, but it's really not too surprising of a conclusion -- or at least doesn't feel like a stunner the way it is presented. I think the help of a good editor could really polish this up and make it a winner.