Review: Badly written, grammar errors, unrealistic characters, ridiculous plot.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 9, 2012
I think this might actually be the worst book I've read on my Kindle, and that's saying something. I did actually finish it (it's not very long), but not because I was enjoying it... I was gripped with a kind of horrified fascination at just how terrible it was.There were things that were immediately irritating. Chief among these were the grammar, formatting and layout issues. Apostrophes appear as speech marks pretty much every time, for example, don"t, can"t, couldn"t.Several times two lines seemed to have become mixed and mangled together; it seems likely this was a formatting error, as some of the sentences made so little sense I struggle to believe even a writer as poor as this could write such convoluted sentences.Alongside this there are a lot of errors that seem common to Kindle authors who haven't realised they need to proofread their books before they publish: misused or omitted apostrophes, misuse of homophones such as hear/here, there/their, incorrectly used speech tags, etc. Speech marks are also very hit and miss, inconsistent types of speech marks, missing speech marks, etc. The author also uses way too many exclamation marks, and also !? combinations. Some passages, with this over the top punctuation, read like a teenager's diary where everything is SO EXCITING?!? rather than like a novel.And lastly, on the format side, the breaking of paragraphs is inconsistent and often confusing. New speakers often don't have a new paragraph, so dialogue is squashed into one confusing paragraph, and on the other hand, occasionally new scenes and different sets of characters appear in a paragraph with no extra line breaks. Several times I was halfway through a new paragraph and totally lost before I realised that the scene had changed. There aren't even extra paragraph breaks, never mind page breaks, for new chapters.All these errors, while annoying, could be easily fixed, but there are more serious underlying issues. The characters are larger than life stereotypes - not one character felt like a real person, or even just reasonably believable. At one point one of the characters "feels like a thirteen year old", and I couldn't help but think she read like one too.Situations also lack realism: for example, one of the characters goes into labour and through to giving birth in the space of a page, with no time passing in the text to account for the sheer speed.The plot overall is simply ridiculous and over the top, with unlikely situation piled onto weird coincidence with wild abandon.As a person who appreciates quality writing, though, one of the things that most amused/horrified me was the comically bad writing. The following was the first sentence (though not the last!) that simply made me laugh out loud because it was so awful."Of course it wasn"t always easy due to the fact that he still harvested a lot of angry feelings toward her."Also:"Jazmine stared shockingly at the phone.""Tessa's blood began boiling and her eyes became fiery red."- all copied verbatim from the text.I could provide more examples, but those who are pretty classic.There's so much that's awful about this that I hardly know how to choose. Backstory is crowbarred in without any thought to how useful the information is or how appropriate it is to give it to the reader; confusion in use of tenses, sometimes even within a single sentence; at least one character (Jazmine) who suddenly changes entirely with no satisfactory explanation for the change of heartOne last thing that was a problem to me, though comes under the category of 'your mileage may vary', is that the author appears to be trying to write about Christians, but manages to do it in such a way that it is more insulting than anything. I didn't get the impression this was on purpose, just shoddy writing.Just a few examples: all the characters seem much more worried about 'keeping up appearances' than about true character or lasting change; there seems to be little respect for marriage even from the characters who are supposed to be married or even pastors; they all seem much more concerned about losing members from their church than anything else; most of the characters pray as a last resort or as a fleeting nod towards God, and no one seems to care about what God's will might be in any given situation.I know for some people that would not be a big issue, but it bothered me that the author showed them in such an incredibly poor light whilst seeming to endorse their behaviour. It didn't seem, as I say, that the author intended his characters to be portraying his faith in such a poor light, but poor writing has lead to a book which seems to show the absolute worst of the kind of hypocritical 'Christians' as being typical.I read in the notes at the back that the author is fifteen: sadly, it really, really shows. I'm sure most of us who wrote stories in our teens were not up to much at that age, but it does become a problem when those stories are actually being sold.I'd say to anyone in this position, by all means, keep writing, but get through your "one million words of crap" before you start publishing. A book in this state will do you no favours. I think all writers need to remember that just because you can self-publish, doesn't mean you should.