Review: Good story, pretty awful writing
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 3, 2012
I am stretching it, giving this book three stars.  Yes, I did really enjoy the story.  But the writing itself contained so many errors I lost count by the "20%" mark.This is a "Christian-based" story.  However, the author seemed not to understand that EVERY time you write about God, if you then have occasion to write "he" or "him" meaning God....it MUST be capitalized.  He  HimThere were incredible amounts of punctuation errors.  Too many commas....mis-placed commas....errors with hyphens ("we're one-step closer..."  does NOT get a hyphen.) Sentences like this one, asking about the little dog named Chester:  "Now, where's that Chester, fellow?"  (the comma does not belong at all.)The dialogue was a sloppy mess.  For the first "14%" of the Kindle book, the quotation marks were missing at the beginning of a dialogue. Quotation marks need to be both at the beginning and the end of the sentence or paragraph or thought.  Not just at the end.  This was so distracting and annoying I almost stopped reading before getting very far.Words like "Woman, Sir, Son....unless these are the beginning of a sentence, or God saying "My Son," or something like "Sir Archibold," they are NOT supposed to be capitalized.Strange errors like "....walked over to shake the Judge Parker's hand."  (THE Judge Parker?  No "the" needed.)Speaking about a mare named Melody and her foal:  ".....Melodies foal...." (Should be "Melody's foal....."  the possessive, not the plural.)Errors with "their" and "they're"....I can't stand it when writers are apparently so un-educated that they make these kinds of mistakes and do not even notice in the proof-reading (if indeed there has BEEN any proof-reading....)It is fine to write a book, put it up on Kindle for free (I have learned that I often get what I pay for in this area lol) and call yourself a writer.  But please, in future books, please proof-read.  Please understand how to write dialogue.  Please understand where to place commas, and hyphens, and apostrophes.  Please don't use "large" as a description four times in a couple of short paragraphs.  Please don't coin a silly "I love you" phrase and then totally over-use it.  You will get much higher reviews, because you probably have more really good stories in you!