Review: a great series
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2013
A great series that is well written - this is a serious writing effort and you're getting your money's worth (as a fellow writer, I know how difficult it can be to "toss" one of these together and please most everyone).I do not hand out 5 star reviews easily - certainly not so easily as most readers in this genre (I've seen some pretty awful books that were 4-5 stars). If you like the apoco-z genre (is that what we're calling it??) then you will like this, it's impossible not to.  If this were written by just one average writer, I could well imagine this taking several years to complete.  It's rich, full of depth and no scene goes by without the full 3D/color effect - they never skip or gloss anything and yet somehow, it never plods.  Yum, that's not easy to pull off.  I can see the advantage of having three writers pour their heart and soul into something like this and who can help each other with constructive critique to get it right.  For those of you who don't write, I can assure you, this is not like falling out of bed.  I can crush 100 pages of written word in a night, but it's garbage.  It takes a well considered approach and discipline to pull this off so, well done.My only, and I mean only, critique and it's minor and frankly will not prevent me from buying more nor should it prevent you, is that for what seems to be such a serious effort, the editing is sub par.  I (we, I think) have grown to expect typos and bad grammar in this genre, it just seems to go with the territory and one or two typos per chapter is not enough to yank me out of the story but in this series, it started to get out of hand and there were 4-5 instances where I mentally popped out.  When I read the writer interviews later and learned that this had been professionally edited all I could think was "gee, next time send me a free galley and I will do a better job, no charge."Anyways, I appreciate when writers take that seriously, regardless of the cost of the books.  A great example is the WOOL series.  I think that guy is a relatively new author but I don't recall any (many) typos and this is a similar # of words.  Pretty amazing, I know, I can't self edit, there's a connection you can't shake that disallows you to see your mistakes I guess.  I can go through and edit 4-5 times and still find typos - it's maddening.  I realize some people who read this genre could care less and regard it all as fast food but you're not going to impress your contemporaries with a litany of typos.  I don't like fast food, I prefer steak, so to speak, so, clean it up boys and girls - I like mine medium well.