Review: Seeing Purple
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 09 1, 2011
If you are fond of turgid, colorful prose describing a character crawling back and forth to the bathroom to vomit for days (and chapters!), then you will probably enjoy this book. If, however, you desire tight, concise writing that moves the story forward, do not waste your money. If easy readability is important, this is not the book for you.The author appears to have sat with thesaurus in lap, dredging up as many adjectives and adverbs as possible to cram into rambling, overly-complicated sentences, and replacing the common word with the unusual. Convoluted construction combined with dangling participles, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and misused punctuation made reading this as difficult as wading through thigh-deep snow. When you first plunge in, you tell yourself it's not so bad, but after awhile your energy is sapped, your will is diminished, and you just want to find someplace to collapse and sleep it off.There is nothing engaging about the main character, Kate. She is dull as dishwater, stumbling through in air-headed ignorance, without coherent thought or plan. Chapter after chapter describes her either waking up sleepily, or curling up with a blanket sleepily, or drifting off to sleep to dream dreamily.This short excerpt sums up the first 35% of this book nicely: "For days afterwards, Kate brooded over the cockatiels, not eating or doing anything much at all. The water had stopped flowing from the taps that very day as well, which she took very hard; there were no worries of going thirsty of course, it wasn't that." [scene break]What was it? I don't know. I couldn't manage to get past the halfway point. The rambling passivity and expansive incoherence defeated me.