Review: Pass on This Poorly Edited Time Travel Novel
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 29, 2013
Writing about time travel is difficult. The author has to juggle the inherent paradoxes and the circular reasoning without losing the reader or destroying the reader's suspension of disbelief. While I applaud Margaret Millmore for trying her hand at this difficult genre, I regret to say that the resulting effort, The Dragonfly Door, was unsuccessful.The plot was inviting; Frank Mann, living in 2013, is the only person who can use the dragonfly door to assist scientists in the future with an agricultural disease which, if left unchecked, will destroy all plant life on Earth. Unfortunately, Millmore chose to tell her story through multiple viewpoints and tenses: we first meet future scientist Clarisse in the third person, past tense; Frank relates his story in the first person, present tense; and we also look through the eyes of Selena, Dyse, and Hugo in rapid succession. By the end of the very short Chapter 6, I was already being asked to approach the plot from five different points of view; in addition, Millmore frequently changed tenses, sometimes within the same sentence. As a result, I was constantly thrown out of the story as I tried to figure out where the various characters' chapters fit on the two time-lines. For a time travel story to work for me, it has to be a rollercoaster ride, where I am so anxious to see what happens next that I don't have time to stop and try to think through the logic (or lack thereof).Millmore made some other writing choices which irritated me and detracted from my immersion in the story. "Clarisse" was an unfortunate choice for the name of the first character introduced to the reader, as it immediately brought to mind Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs. The Dragonfly Door did not benefit from the expectations this raised. Millmore also made frequent mistakes in word usage ("undisputable" for "indisputable"; "exasperated" for "exacerbated"; "commanded" for "demanded"), and I counted a whopping 47 instances of the phrase "sort of."It appears from Millmore's author profile that The Dragonfly Door is the first of her books to be self-published, and lack of an editor could certainly explain some of the problems identified above. I will not be reading any more of her self-published work.I received a free copy of The Dragonfly Door from the author in exchange for an honest review.