Review: Fire the "editors"!
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 12 4, 2011
I hope the author didn't pay for the services of the "editors" listed above, because no real editor would let a manuscript in this condition be published. I downloaded it due to the time period and subject matter. I'm glad it was free, because it's not worth any amount of money.  If the author thinks this will entice readers to try her other offerings, she is mistaken. Aside from the formatting errors and typographical errors (extra or misplaced punctuation, missed words, misspellings, etc.), this book is littered with sentences that simply make no sense. "Her honey touched brown hair glistened under the late winter sun and the dew from the grass also hung in the sky on her nose." What? "He drove over the roads he grew up on as a child, riding his bicycle and falling from it for the first time, over the roads he walked to school on, over the roads he had his first kiss." Good grief.I could picture the author with a well-thumbed thesaurus in her lap, searching for an unusual word to take the place of the common. It gives the book a seriously disjointed feel.The degree of detail is mind-numbing. I don't think I ever found a noun that didn't have an adjective attached to it, and many had three or four."She snipped a few deep pink roses with the pruning scissors she kept in her side skirt pocket, a pocket stitched just below a 1920's German Dresden Wire Mesh purse dangling from her left shoulder." Or, "A wood picnic table under a large cascading tree sat next to a blue green lake. Two lit candles sat in the middle of the worn wood table with two plates of delicacies... Two long elegant glasses stood next to each plate, filled to the brim with white champagne. Rebecca in gaiety scuttled to the decorated table and smelled the plate of food as she sat. She laid her Dresden Wire Mesh handbag on the chair beside her. The soft painted pink petals and pale green leaves decorating the bag were a perfect compliment to the nature encompassing them."People in this book rarely just move from one place to another. They bounce, scramble, lunge, scamper, scuttle, leap, plod, amble, or stumble, sometimes for no apparent reason."Rebecca leapt into the air, eager to enjoy the Valentine meal with the man she loved." And yeah, sometimes they just jump around for the heck of it. They rarely just speak. They bellow, interject, argue, insist, giggle, demand. And guffaw. Now, guffaw is a word one might use once in a novel with the right tone. The author used this word no less than four times in the first 35% of this novel.It seems like every new scene gets a full description of what each character is wearing. "Eli took off his long, brown coat and wrapped it around Rebecca before they sat. She snuggled with his coat pulled over her long, beige skirt, white blouse and sweater, burrowing her head into his shoulder and neck."Dangling participles and odd sentence construction ruin the flow of the writing, to the point where there is no flow at all. The author head-hops, changing POV willy-nilly. Where was the "editor"? None of this should end up in a published book.Finally, this book contains the most ludicrous "love" scene I've ever had the misfortune to read. I actually guffawed. At that point the novel turned into a parody for me. I could no longer take it seriously.I only made it to 37% and had to give up. I don't care one whit what happens to these ridiculous people.