Review: The Outcast
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 1, 2013
The author begins with an introduction giving a broad summery of his intentions for books in this universe. It helps understand what could appear to be a lack of cohesion between the various volumes.While I did enjoy this book, I'm not sure I would place this at the top of my favorites for the series. The overall story (and tie-in) is interesting, as are a few of the characters, and I generally agree with the author's soap-box. But somewhere around 70%, I just lost interest. Hard to pin down exactly why, but I think I felt that the book was just taking too long to go somewhere. I peeked at the last few pages, which prompted me to continue on. Around 90%, my interest was piqued enough to get me going again.Editing is improved. The notes I made were mainly relegated to punctuation, and more towards things like missing or spurious quotes, commas and the like. There is a frustrating use of the construct "nothing, but", used often enough to pick up on. One example:"that nothing would be left, but a handful of low-tech worlds.  She told herself that was an exaggerated fear, but in truth she didn't know."The first "but" is a preposition, and needs no comma. It is followed by a restrictive clause, and bounded by a comma, is meaningless. The second "but" is a conjunction, which is where one normally uses commas.I'm not one of "those" who debates the proper usage of "lain vs. laid" (which is just pretentious), but neither am I picking nits; incorrect or erroneous punctuation can profoundly change the meaning of a sentence, either becoming ambiguous ("Sameena stopped, dead"; I doubt she is dead, but rather came to a dead stop) or introducing nonsensical phrases.The story ends with some interesting possibilities to develop, so I will look for another volume in the series.