Review: Liked the story, but it's in desperate need of a good proofreader & grammar checker
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 07 21, 2012
I would have given this book 4 or maybe even 5 stars because I thoroughly enjoyed the story.  However, I had the feeling that it was written by two different people.  One person did a lot of research on the history of the War of 1812, the flag, and life in that time.  The historical sections were well written, and had few grammatical or syntax errors.  She even did a good job with Grace's letters, showing how someone just learning how to read and write might write a letter, using the colloquilisms and grammar of an uneducated person.However, the present day story was just the opposite.  The author's constant incorrect usage of "to" and "too," "she" and "her" were extremely annoying.  In more than one instance the author correctly used "she" as the subject of the sentence, then in the next sentence, used "her" as the subject, then went back to using "she."  That shows carelessness, and it also shows that nobody really read the book before publication.She also went from past tense to present tense, and kept flip-flopping back and forth.  Sometimes the beginning of the paragraph was in the past tense, then in the middle she switches to present tense, as if she were setting the scene in a movie.  The wording was amateurish, almost juvenile in some parts.  The author needs to take a refresher course in basic grammar, usage of pronouns, sentence structure, and also focus on how, when and where to use commas - because they almost always ended up in the wrong place in the sentence.  If the author had written the book in ANY word processing software, and bothered to use the spelling and grammar checking tools, these errors would have been found and corrected.  I typed one of her incorrect sentences into Microsoft Word, and used the spelling and grammar checkers.  The tools found EVERY SINGLE error, and gave me the corrections.At the end of the Kindle edition, the author thanks a number of other authors and members of a writing group/symposium.  I can only guess that none of these people actually read this book, or if they did, never noticed the errors.  If the latter is the case, I don't think I'd be too anxious to read any of their works either.I'm constantly amazed at the number of Kindle books that have such poor usage of the English language.  If these books were submitted to any brick-and-mortar publishing house, they would be properly edited.  Although, it's also very likely that they would be rejected, and never published.I sincerely hope the author does a better job with her future efforts.