Review: Too Amateur for My Tastes
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 28, 2012
I'll note up front that I've chatted online with the author of this book a couple times. He seems like a nice sort, and this review is in no way intended as a reflection on him as a person. These are my personal opinions of the novel.On the positive side, I found the Kindle formatting in the book to be some of the best I've seen, with consistent paragraph formatting and chapters starting on new "pages." I also liked the idea that space fighters didn't have shields of any kind. It made potential space battles more immediate, since damage could not be deflected.My biggest complaint with the book was the pacing. It started fairly strong, with an alien race recruiting the main character, Jenson Quest, to fight the opposing alien race (the Zyll). We got to see an important event with the Zyll, too: a coup by a ruthless and warlike dictator. After the opening scenes, however, the story hardly progressed for three quarters of the book. Jenson spent most of it in training, with minimal conflicts arising to challenge him. What conflict existed felt forced, because Jenson the amazing never had a chance of losing. On the Zyll side, the story covered a lot of internal conflict, but from so many points of view it was difficult to relate to any one individual or to see the purpose of it.The characters were hard for me to identify with. Jenson felt the most three dimensional to me, but I didn't like him at all. We are introduced to him as he complains about having to work with elderly people in a home, or "inmates" as he calls them. He's rude to his grandfather and seriously considers sending him to his certain death. On the spaceship, he meets a stereotypical "dumb jock" named Cantor, and spends at least half the book taunting him and making jokes at his expense.We know next to nothing about any of the supporting characters except as they relate to Jenson. I had hopes for Yanna, the obligatory scifi female, because she is described as being from a good warrior background. It all fell apart for me when she asks Jenson to make sure she doesn't fail during training (why? he's no more experienced than she is). She defers to Jenson for the rest of the book. Cantor also follows Jenson around, even though Jenson constantly puts him down.From a writing perspective, a number of things made it difficult for me to read the book. I had a big problem with the time and distance measurements being all made-up words, like "yrik." Jenson is wearing a disc that translates everything. Apparently, it can translate expressions of complex emotions like love and sadness, but it can't handle a basic mathematical conversion. The time and distance words were defined once (usually), but I wasn't interested in pausing in my reading to calculate the differences in my head every time they were mentioned. The narrative also had a number of comma errors: dependent clauses with commas, independent clauses without, run-on sentences, and sentence fragments. I also noticed several misplaced modifiers, like "Although looking a little over-used, Jenson recognized every control..." and "Now a little battered and bruised, the Ion Rod came next...." Italics were used in random and inappropriate places. Punctuation was piled on in places, with liberal use of the interrobang (?!) and super interrobang variants (??!!!)**********WARNING: SPOILERS FROM HERE DOWN***********The end was frustrating for me because Jenson was such a passive character. He never accomplished any of his story goals. In fact, he never really engaged in extended battle outside of training. He was recruited to fight the Zyll, but he only talked to the ones he met. Nothing he did averted the war; it was all internal Zyll decisions. Another barely known character sacrificed himself to save the planet under attack. Jenson searches for his lost father, but in the end, although he locates him, nothing comes of it. They find they can't save him and send him on to his death.The time lapse made no sense to me. Time is constant in space, unless you are traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light. If that were the case, Jenson would have lost more than two years (probably hundreds of years, the way they hopped between stars). If that weren't the case, time would have passed for Earth the same as it did for him.Finally, I couldn't believe his Aunt Maggs was a chosen warrior candidate too. The whole reason Jenson left was because the only other option was his grandfather. His grandfather states he wants Jenson to make his own choice, then forces his hand by hiding other family options from him? Not to mention, how did Aunt Maggs's disc turn black when Jenson's father died? It hadn't happened yet because of the time slip. Can his Aunt remember things that happened in the future? If so, why did she say nothing about the future death of his grandfather?I don't believe this book was ready for publication. The problems I saw would not easily be fixed by a surface edit. Not recommended.