Review: Nice cover shame about the book
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 12 19, 2012
I was actually looking forward to reading this but soon became disappointed once I'd started turning the pages. I immediately confess here that I didn't get far with it and I've given it two stars rather than one because I'm prepared to believe that it's the 'Curate's Egg' (good in places) and that it's not so bad that it deserves one.My issues are with:1. The dialogue. There are three ways of dealing with dialect. You can do it all in dialect (like the excellent 'Voices in ma heid' which I reviewed a short while back), you can do it all in 'Oxford English' or you can start off in dialect and gradually phase it out. Right of Blood jerks from dialect to OE making our clansman switch from 'Brahd, bricht moonlicht nicht' to 'I say old Bean' in the space of a paragraph.2. The interchanges. Wooden, stilted and somewhat implausible. It jarred like toothache.3. Punctuation problems. I had to read several sentences 3 or 4 times to work out what the author was trying to say.Pity. I just hope there's enough money in the kitty to fork out for an editor because I'm sure a good one could make a real difference. Credit to those who enjoyed reading the book but I felt let down and am now just about to delete it from my collection.