Review: Not Peter Pan
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 9, 2012
Despite the fact that the heroine's nickname is Tinker and her family name is Bell (therefore a good excuse for calling her Tinker Bell), this bears no resemblance to Peter Pan.  Yes, I can hear the drumroll at the wah wah now.  Since I like to start with a positive, let me start on an upbeat note.THE GOOD:  Other readers have said the premise and story show promise.  I agree.  The imaginative world building is excellent.  The characters, both primary and secondary/tertiary characters are likeable and mostly believable.  Ms. Smith did a good job of working humor into the story without taking away from the story.  The futuristic elements are pretty believable despite the scientific errors.  To be honest, it irks me more to see a writer call the computer system unit (the box that fits on or under the desk) as a "hard drive" than do glaring scientific and various engineering  misapprehensions.  Still... When you mentally go WTF at an important plot element, it does reduce the impact of the great world building and elements.  The youngest (and apparently teenaged) brother is a horndog.  That's not only believable, it is a great plot device that helps inject humor.  I like that the aliens are not used to active participation by the female in sexual acts but that they quickly adapt and do not judge Earth women negatively.  This isn't "Earth Girls Are Easy".Now for the bad.EDITING:  I agree with gleepchan that the editing is abysmal.  The writer should sell the story to McGraw-Hill so that they can make it available for high school and college writing/composition classes as an example of how many types of grammatical and sentence-level errors can be put into a story or essay without completely destroying understandability.  There are person, tense, gender, word form, choice of word among similar words, and number/possessive errors among others.  "My dad" is quite a bit different from "your dad".  Pronouns are often pretty important.  A book isn't like a movie where we can usually tell the who is saying what.  Despite this, most paragraphs were understandable and even most sentences were capable of being understood.  I say MOST because there was at least one sentence that, even after reading and re-reading multiple times I could not get even the gist of.  What does "...Tink moved one of her hands gripping, if you could call not even being able to wrap her hand around one of his wrists but two..." mean?  The use of incorrect word form is so common in this story that it eventually stops being confusing.  Some incorrect word forms are used rather than the correct form in a consistent manner.  "I must exam you" (sic) is not a big thing, but it is used instead of "examine" every time it's necessary to look closely at something for at least several paragraphs.  I think the author knew how to use to/too/two correctly, but she used it incorrectly so often that it seems like she doesn't.  "Preformed" rather than "performed" could be a typo, but a cursory editing would probably have found (and corrected) many, if not most, of these errors.  If the lack of editing is the publisher's fault, then shame on them!  If the author just didn't bother to re-read the story even once, then shame on HER.  If a student turned in something like this and called it a final draft, the teacher would probably flunk them.  If you don't care about your work why should we, your readers?BAD SCIENCE, BAD BIOLOGY:  gleepchan mentioned several so I won't repeat theirs.  As far as unfamiliarity of particular fields necessary to the plot is concerned, Ms. Smith is a piker.  Nevertheless, it's a good idea to put in the due diligence if it's necessary to the plot.  You can't have a mechanic (who is apparently also an electrical and mechanical engineer as well as a programmer) cum musician upgrade a generator if she doesn't know what one is.  I'm also pretty unsure how using the camera on a phone can sync a bluetooth or wireless connection across light years of space (without an open portal) that allowed an AI to upload (NOT download, darnit!) a part of her program/data.  I was able to go ahead and ignore that one and continue reading, but it meant that part of the plot was sour for me.  Biological imperatives programmed into the DNA usually don't come and go when convenient to the plot.  Yes, homo sapiens males can and often do practice monogamy--against a biological imperative.  But it took more than a week or two for that to be true--it's probably another sort of biological imperative by now.  The hero is genetically predisposed to be overprotective.  The heroine needs to just deal with it rather than whining about him getting in the way of her doing what she wants to do regardless of what anyone else thinks or needs.BOTTOM LINE:  I'd say it's still worth reading.  It's a good read and the bad editing and research as well as scientific fallacies don't significantly interfere with enjoyment of the story.  I'd buy it again, partially since I read other reviews and expected the problems I encountered.  I'm glad I read the third book of the series first since I'd probably have been less forgiving if this were my first exposure to the author.  It's a good rainy afternoon or relaxing bedtime read.  Fans of hard science fiction will probably give birth to a bovine while reading this, so if this is you, steer clear!  If you want an interesting and romantic story with characters you can love (and heroes you want to take home with you), then this is for you.