Review: I Must Have Read A Different Book
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 10, 2013
I bought this book because of the five-star reviews on this page.Mistake. Perhaps I'm reading a different book than the others?To be honest, I found it difficult to read and almost returned it for a refund several times. I'm surprised I made it all the way through. This book is execrably edited. No, let me back up... perhaps the author intended to invent a whole new grammar just for this book? If so, that's so self-indulgent. If not, the credited editor should not be allowed anywhere near a book, ever again.It is incredibly distracting to have to constantly stop and figure out what the author intended to write, as opposed to what's actually on the page.At first, I thought his comma key was just broken for all the run-on sentences with no commas separating parenthetical expressions. Then I realized that someone was just having a really bad problem with commas, in general - what with extraneous commas where they don't belong and missing commas where they do."Freed up, Paavo sat by me becoming my personal assistant a job he would continue..." (missing at least 2 commas!)"I'm grateful don't get me wrong" (I almost couldn't type that without a comma!)Not to mention misspellings:One of his characters was glad he wasn't staying at a "youth hostile". Is that a youth hostel where the inhabitants are nasty?"He dosed on the plane..." Does that mean he took his medicine on the plane? If so, why does the author continue to discuss sleeping? I'm sure he meant "dozed on the plane".Or this absolutely incomprehensible statement: "Feel a bit... Replace". Was "replace" an editing suggestion that made it through to the final manuscript?But perhaps worst of all was (as another reviewer pointed out) the words that were simply missing!"As were getting into the lift". It was subjunctive, so I assume the author meant "As -we- were getting onto the lift".This type of error occurred more times than I could count, like this gem: "She tall and strong..." ( no verb at all! )There were even times when the author forgot which characters were where - he put the two lead characters alone in a room, and then stated that "they were the only ones in the room who...". Argh! They were the ONLY ones in the room - period!He also seems to hate the dash and can't seem to figure out how to combine words, such as "head strong", instead of "headstrong" and "hands on" instead of "hands-on".One of the most infuriating and consistent errors was in separating the attribution from the dialog, such as "'I don't know if I'm going'. He said." (paraphrased for a clean example).I'd find all this humorous except for the fact that I paid actual money for this book, and worse, wasted valuable hours of my life (that I'll never recover) in a futile pursuit of the great pleasure I get from reading a really good work of fiction.The plot was interesting, the combination of popular DJs and their sideline of vampire-hunting unique, and the characters, locations and action promised an exciting, if not insightful, read.Sadly, the book ended abruptly as though the author ran out of paper or disc space. Even without that, the editing was so terribly poor that it left me with a bad impression of both the book and the author.Sorry, I just can't bring myself to recommend this one.