Review: Excelent story -- poor wordcraft
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 18, 2014
Ms. Beery is in an exclusive club.  She is one of a handful of authors who, these days, can write a story that makes me want to come back to it as soon as possible, warts and all.I am a sixty year old man with strongly engrained habits.  One of those habits is reading for a short time before hitting the rack, a habit I picked up shortly after graduating from college.  In the last thirty-five years I've read a lot of SF, enough to become quite opinionated on what constitutes a good read.  And, alas, I have also come to the point where most of what I read, no matter how much the author pours his soul into the making, is merely mediocre.This book, however, was not that way.  It was fun!  Thirteen year old Rylynn plunges from one adventure to the next in a riveting story where the bad guys are after her and somehow she must evade their evil clutches to save the empire.  And what's more, she has to do this while navigating the first month at the Legion Academy and suffering the scorn of her fellow students because she is a colonist from a colonist world.  A page-turner, this book has a disaster a page, and they keep getting worse and worse, but fear not!  Our heroine, with the steadfast support of thee human friends and another five "spectrals" is up to the challenge.  And in the end, she makes the bad guys rue the day they were born.So why only four stars?  I debated a lower rating, but decided doing so would be an injustice to the roller-coaster plot line which kept me riveted to my chair despite the frequent wordcraft errors.  Well there *were* a goodly number of distractions.  First of all, for a thirteen year old, Rylynn swears *a lot.*  Oh the words aren't all that vulgar, but they are enough to off-put someone who expects children to be a bit more controlled in their language.  And I was expecting a better use of language  from an author who publicly proclaims her praise of the Creator for letting her write these stories.  (I would provide examples but these days Amazon has gotten really fussy about including them even with their middle letters substituted with underscores.)Secondly, as mentioned by others, Rylynn is just waay to young to be acting the way she is.  Comparing her to another character, Tavi, from the Chronicles of Alera by Jim Butcher, she feels older than fifteen year old Tavi (first book only), yet she kept reporting her age as a mere "thirteen cycles."And finally, though her story was fun as a rocket ride, her word craft was utterly atrocious.  Her most common mistake was using a homonym in place of the correct word, for example, "currant" designating a kind of fruit, instead of "current" designating "present event."  (Okay, okay ... not exactly a homonym, but you get my drift, I hope.) These mistakes were so common that I got to the point where it felt like I was seeing them three per page, but the real ratio was more like one per couple of pages.She also has problems with punctuation.  For example placing commas just before the quote like so:James said, "I'm going home."  (correct way)was not how she constructed her story.  I also found a number of passages where double-quote use was poor or non-existent, where ample periods were used when not needed and where plain old spelling errors jarred me out of the story for the slightest of moments.In the end I got a strong feeling that Ms. Beery is still quite a young writer--not just young in experience, but also young chronologically.  That is belied somewhat by the number of books she has written, but a writer in her early twenties might have written that quantity if she started out at age seventeen (like Christopher Paolini, though he started out at age 15).  If she can rectify her lack of professional word craft, then I fully expect maturity to make her stories even better and much more complex than her current fare.  I am really expecting a treat when that happens!So.  Will I buy the next book? You bet!  This series is just too fun to let be.  Does Ms. Beery need to improve on her word craft?  Without a doubt.  If she does, or if she finds a partner who can act as her editor, someone who really knows his or her stuff so that the silly mistakes she is making can be fixed, then these stories will very definitely hit the big time, big time!