Review: Sadly flawed
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 14, 2012
Multiple, annoying typographical errors. Since "we're" and "were" are not the same word, this makes reading the story difficult. (The mistreatment of the humble apostrophe approaches outright abuse.)Also, I strongly suggest that the author learn the difference between "they're" and "their," since, again, not the same meaning. There are errors that a simple spell-check program would have fixed--the appearance of "sued" instead of "suede" for instance. Many times there are sentences where the author, probably just typing too quickly, simply left words out and the reader has to go back through the sentence a second or third time and guess what's missing.The author simply isn't a "writer" in understanding that grammar, punctuation, and tense are vitally important to the structure of a narrative. Any errors and certainly errors as frequent and severe as plague this series, interfere with the reader's ability to connect with the fictional world.Dialogue choices are odd and nonstandard. Much of the work is the main character thinking to himself--even in scenes with multiple other characters present--which is lazy and makes the story seem to move very slowly. (Dialogue is almost always the more dynamic choice.) Then again, at times, words are presented as the main character's thoughts but then another character responds to the words, showing that those "thoughts" should have been rewritten into dialogue. That's just sloppy writing.All in all, I would honestly call this a decent, half-written story. A first draft. Had the author done the necessary clean-up and rewrites (along with correcting the weaknesses in how the main character is first presented), then this could have been a good series. As it is, it's painful to read--the typographical and grammatical errors never disappear and eventually make the stories virtually unreadable for anyone accustomed to a slightly more professional approach to writing.The author had some good, original ideas and those are well-developed in the book, although I agree with other reviewers that the main character's skills and abilities grow at a ridiculous and unbelievable rate. Letting your 'hero' come up with a solution for every obstacle almost instantly robs your story of much of the potential drama.I don't really like having to write this negative of a review. The author had some good ideas and a rich backstory for their fictional universe. There's some potential here and I'll freely admit that even the infuriating weaknesses in the writing weren't quite enough to put me off of buying the second book in the series, but I did regret spending even $2.99 on such poorly written material.Update:  After purchasing and reading several books in this series, I finally got disgusted enough to give up. Not only because of the sloppy writing already discussed, but at the discovery halfway through this "fantasy" series that it was about to become science fiction. When reading in a magic & fantasy series, I do not expect to find spaceships and long-lost planets introduced abruptly and with no foreshadowing. The series continues to fail on a "professional writing" level.(Also, I'll admit, the idiocy of the main character and the way he effortlessly and instantly solved problems that everyone else on the plant found impossible became boring. After a while, I just didn't care any more.)