Review: It's called E-D-I-T-O-R
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 27, 2013
It started with a noticeable level of wit, punchiness, and flair. It moved quickly. I wanted to know how it finished.But after a few chapters I had to close the book and walk away. It is the bane of free, downloadable books that writers are convinced that their personal reserve of literary acumen is enough to carry them. They are wrong. Their prose may ooze with cleverness and their story may be solid, but typos, misspellings, empty nouns, excessive modifiers, misplaced prepositions, missing punctuation, and weirdisms on every page trip them up repeatedly. It's irritating to readers. We know we've been offered a draft manuscript, not a book.I will put up with this to a point. I choose to overlook small infractions--I overlook them all the time. But Ms. Prentice's book is littered with this stuff, so much so that it gets in the way of what promised to be a good story. Examples:"I wondered again why I hadn't bought a bran new house."(Should be "brand.")"It looks far to lazy to actually catch anything."(The word is "too.")"Jumping up out of bed and shaking myself off I looked back at Cat fighting the shaking that was threatening to take over my body."The cat is fighting the shaking that is threatening to take over the heroine's body? Not so. Where's the comma to separate the heroine/speaker from her cat? And why do we need to hear, twice in one sentence, that the speaker is shaking?"Of course she would, she loved spending other peoples money."It's called an apostrophe.She switches, all in the same sentence, from past tense to present tense (lack of discipline).It's a shame. This promised to be a good read. I feel cheated. You could say that I got what I paid for. But the fact is that some of my newest favorite authors I learned about by downloading their free books--people whose work I would pay for in the future because they brought me so much pleasure.Ms. Prentice's work shows promise, but she absolutely must have her work edited before presenting it to the world.