Review: Shockingly bad in some ways, and astonishingly good in others.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 12, 2014
Apologies in advance: this is going to be long.I borrowed this book from Amazon's lending library, and it's a good thing I did.Not because it was horrible, but because had I simply downloaded the sample, I probably wouldn't have bought the whole thing. And had I bought it outright, I would have felt obliged to come to a quick decision (before the return window of opportunity expired) and I would have returned it.Man, it had its problems. To put it succinctly, It was not professional enough.The long answer is that it has both artistic problems - obvious questions aren't always answered, the writing could be tightened considerably, and there were sometimes better ways of accomplishing what he was trying to do - as well as a whole boatload of grammatical/syntactical errors.There were enough of those last that I finally began taking note, mostly for curiosity's sake. Now, understand, I didn't start paying real attention until well into the story, and these errors were found when I wasn't reading with the intention of finding mistakes. In other words, there are undoubtedly many more than I highlighted.Such as:-"peaked" rather than "peeked"-"frost bite" rather than "frostbite"-"Little Debby" instead of "Little Debbie" (referring to the brand)-"curve ... the crisis" rather than "curb the crisis"-"Santa Clause" instead of "Santa Claus"-"Satin" instead of "Satan"-"4o" instead of "40" (that's the letter O, in case it's not clear)-Several instances of "busses" instead of "buses"-"Slight of hand" rather than "Sleight of hand"-"Congradulations" instead of "congratulations"-"The M's" rather than "the Ms" (I'd be willing to overlook this last since it looks like Ms., as in "Ms. Lastname," but it's still incorrect; it's not a possessive.)-One of my favorites is the instance where he misspelled one of his characters' names.In the interest of remaining spoiler-free for a change, I won't detail ways I thought the plot could be tightened or made more realistic, but they're there too. There were occasions that Leito spent (too) many words on tangents that proved non-essential, even for color or character building. There were other occasions that didn't get enough play. I thought a nice touch would have been to, instead of doing a big rushed reveal at the end, disperse the revelations as cut-scene clues throughout the book. (That's 100% personal preference; I'm not rating the book down for things like that.) And more than once, I thought Asa, our protagonist, behaved in ways or reacted or made statements that were unlikely. There were times that it occurred to me that just about anyone in Asa's position would have done/said/thought "X" and then was jarred when Asa didn't do/say/think "X".I'll admit, this is a lot of complaining for a three-star book, and I don't even like myself very much right now. I'm hardly a perfect writer. (Please don't proof my review. I'm not trying to sell this, so I don't care if I use an extra comma or mix tenses or whatever.) So why am I making such a point of highlighting the negatives?Because, wow, this book has some serious potential. Potential to be so, so good! The story, for all that it's a fairly obvious grafting of The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, is creative and riveting and fantastic. I said I would have likely returned the book without giving it a real chance, and even in hindsight, I can't be apologetic about it.I mean, I'm not a writing professional in any capacity and just those problems I found were enough to appall. Some of them were probably typos, yes, which are forgivable when sparse. Goodness knows, we all go too fast sometimes. But some, I suspect, were examples of the author not knowing the right word or idiom and not even knowing enough to check his work.Now, had the author paid for a (better?) real-deal editor, and a copy editor, and a proofreader, and bribed some people with writing chops of their own to be beta readers, I wouldn't be leaving a three-star review, I'd be leaving a five-star one. And I'd be writing the author a note full of gushing and squeals about how much I loved his story. And I'd be badgering everyone I know to read it too. I loved it enough that I was even tempted to send him a come-to-Jesus letter to let him know that he's doing himself a grave disservice by putting out a product before it's polished. Because as hateful as I probably sound, I wouldn't have used this many words to complain if I didn't actually want this to be better. I'd have just rolled my eyes and moved on. As it is, I actually debated offering my own humble services as a beta reader; I would have been honored to contribute to such an exciting story.So take this all as you will. It isn't polished. It has a lot of elementary and obvious mistakes. The finished product feels amateurish. I truly don't know if I'm going to read the sequel when it comes out, because it (a) will probably drive me nuts with all the mistakes, and (b) does the author no favors to reward mediocrity.Yet despite all that, it's a helluva ride. If Leito were to clean this up, he could charge a lot more than $3 for it, and NYT, watch out!