Review: A waste of time
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 12 14, 2011
The premise of this story sounded interesting but with the lack of any reviews I was cautious. I should have been more cautious. By the time I was at the 10% point I knew I wouldn't give this book more than three stars but I struggled on because of the one and only saving grace of this book.The author is successful in setting up the story and mystery. I wanted to continue reading to the end (no matter how painful it was) to find out the mystery of why most of the worlds population just dropped dead. If the book had ended with a satisfactory explanation and ending I could tack on an extra 1/2 star, but sadly, while most of the questions are answered the ending is left pretty open. I'm thinking this may be for a sequel.Now onto the really bad parts. This appears to be self-published (I couldn't find a publisher listed) and like many it suffers from a lack of editing, even though an editor is listed. This book suffered the same problems as many others: misplaced commas, missing words, wrong words. Many times I had to reread a sentence to try and understand it. Written in the third person the story alternates between various viewpoints, which can be fine but their is no warning that the viewpoint is changing. Many times I had to go back and reread whole sections because of this.The author's final mistake was in telling the story and not showing it. (One character finds his deceased parents had been involved in "intense love-making" when they died and that is all the description this scene gets. "Intense" is such a variable term that as a reader you're left wondering what he saw) This lack of description happens throughout the book and leads to a lack of depth to the characters and a difficulty in caring about them. In truth they all came across as immature teenagers.There were other problems with this book but that would lead to spoilers.