Review: The Secret Life of Grass
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2011
If there was a documentary to be made about grass, it would probably end up being more entertaining than this book.Try as I might, I could not get myself to enjoy The Arrival... and I honestly really wanted to like it. The plot sounds like something that would actually be interesting to read. Casting a spell that ends up taking four friends to another world? Okay... that sounds like fun.But right from the start I knew there was going to be a problem as the author jumps from first to third person back to first, and from one person's internal dialog to another's verbal response. Can I have a decoder ring please? What the heck's going on here?I wouldn't normally have a problem with an author jumping around like this - plenty have pulled off this feat successfully, while clearly designating who is speaking as well as being artful in it's execution. However, this author is both clumsy and remedial in conversations as well as inarticulate in who we're supposed to be following. It takes some skill to be able to juggle four main characters without losing the reader or diluting the storyline and relationships... and apparently this author just doesn't have a knack for it. Nor does the author have a knack for scene transition, startling readers at the sudden change of time and venue. Oh, and let's not forget that there are an annoying amount of grammatical errors to enrich this already confusing word stream.I also encountered something that I thought was only a myth... spontaneous chapter endings. How this author happens to make me wince at the awkward and ill-timed endings of each chapter is beyond me. I never thought that this was even possible... it's almost like she wrote the book in one lump, then just inserted chapters at random every few thousand words.This was such a boring read, that even the author's attempt at affectionate humor between the girls had no chance of livening up the tedious storyline. I didn't laugh a single time, and that's an absolute first for me - someone who laughs at just about anything. It just wasn't funny, or fun for that matter. If anything, the author's stab at humor only made things worse, rather than giving structure to the relationships between characters.Meanwhile, us readers have to suffer through a suffocating amount of filler, as we're forced to flip through pages and pages of people putting on shoes, toasting bread, and scratching their proverbial bottoms. Completely unnecessary, monotony that neither adds to the storyline nor builds upon the characters.The fact that this book is categorized as "Epic" makes me laugh... the only thing epic about it, is that it was an epic waste of my time.I'll admit that I stopped smack dab in the middle of this book. I just couldn't go any further without feeling like this was self-inflicted torture. But don't worry everyone... it's still on the ole Kindle, so maybe I'll stumble onto it at a later date and feel inspired to read the rest of it. And who knows, maybe I'll change my mind and think that the latter half is awesome - but I sincerely doubt it.Oh, and on a sidenote to the author: the question "Was this review helpful?" is meant for the customers - not for the author to assert that she doesn't agree with the review. Have a little integrity.