Review: Gave up.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 08 7, 2012
According to my kindle, I'm about 2% into this book.  The main character's car has just broken down.Because this is a time travel story, and I have a weakness for time travel stories, I am going to soldier on and try to read this thing.  However, it has problems.For starters, I had to jack the font size on my kindle Touch all the way up just to read it.  The default font size is way too small.  I don't like justified text (especially at larger font sizes), there is nothing wrong with right ragged margins, and like several books I have encountered on the kindle, the text comes out "double spaced", which means unnecessary extra page turns.Then we get to the writing.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with one being, "you really need to reconsider your desire to be a writer", as it stands, I'd give this a four or five.  So far, there are punctuation problems, mostly missing commas.  It is also excessively wordy.  It has one of my pet peeves, excessive use of verbs ending in "ing".  If I understand correctly, the term for this is "progressive tense".  Every once in a while it's okay, and sometimes even necessary, but when it's used too much, you get a lot of awkward sentence structure, such as, "Leaning against the car <comma missing here> she flipped the cell phone open to call Triple A.  It was dead."  For the second part, we understand the phone was dead, but I think the case could be made that "It was dead" could also refer to 'Triple A'.  How about something like "When she tried to call Triple A, her phone, which had been fully charged and worked only moments ago, was dead."  Another possibility, "She tried to call Triple A, but her phone was dead.  It had been fully charged and working only moments ago."  We don't need to know she flipped the phone open, we probably don't even need to know she leaned against the car ... wordy.Is the scene with the kid and the girlfriend with the asthma attack even necessary?  Maybe something happens with this later on, but for now, it seems like just a device to get her to stop on the road. Why not just have her car break down, just suddenly lose power?  Then the cell phone doesn't work, there are no house lights on either side of the road, etc.The paragraphs describing the scene when she exits her car after the breakdown seem ... odd.  This is a route she has to have driven before, and she can't figure out where she is?  And she sees a brick house she always thought was deserted?  It would seem to me that if someone is taking the same route home from work, day after day, they would have a pretty good idea where they are, even if it is pitch dark.Her watch stops, she shakes it by her ear.  The only reason that would even remotely make sense for this would be if the watch was an old fashioned manual wind watch.  She's a nurse, she would need a reliable time piece (which a manual wind watch probably wouldn't be in her situation), so the watch would probably be electric, likely digital.  So what on earth would be the use in shaking the watch by her ear?I could probably go on, but I'll leave it at that.I plan to read further, but I don't have a lot of hope for this one....Okay, I give up.  The meter read 3% and she'd just run into the male lead (literally).  The amount of time it takes for the author to describe colliding with somebody and falling down makes it seem like it happens in slow motion.  Very wordy.From what little I read, it sounds like there's a good idea and perhaps some interesting characters in here, but you have to wade through a bunch of verbiage to get to that.  To provide an analogy, I would say this story is like a sculpture that still needs some stone chipped off it in order for it to be truly seen.  If it were my work, I would go through it almost sentence by sentence and ask myself, "How can I say the same thing, but with fewer words?"  This is particularly important with anything requiring intensity, like an action sequence, or the time travel experience prior to the above mentioned collision.