Review: A Taster for a Novel, The Fact We're Not Told This Before Downloading, Leaves a Bit of a Bad Taste in Your Mouth
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 28, 2012
When a father takes his young son to an isolated fishing spot, the son is finding the whole fishing experience a little boring.  That will change when he realised they aren't the only ones fishing.Erik Gustafson's The Fishers is a decent taster to a full length novel, but the fact this isn't mentioned as being a taster is a bit annoying in my opinion. Some tasters are okay if they read like standalone short stories, because readers who aren't that into it still leave satisfied even though they don't plan on reading the whole novel and those who got into the characters or got hooked on the plot can buy the complete novel if they want to.  The Fishers although obviously an amateurly written story, was an okay basic plot and tale that with an editor involved down the track could be professionally published. It would have been better written through Dave the sons eyes, rather than switching between being inside his head and telling the story as third person narrator style. I found it a bit annoying that the father was referred to as Greg or Dad depending on whose eyes, Dave or the invisible narrator we were experiencing events through.The Fishers didn't actually seem like it was going to be a taster until the end when a completely new element is added in the final paragraph, especially the last sentence, which just has the reader asking themselves, what?.  Then the author tells us to read, I won't give away that title actually as it gives away the ending of this, but I just found suddenly finding out this was a taster to be a real letdown. If the story had ended moments before it did Gustafson could have left things up to the reader to imagine the aftermath to the events.  He still could have written a wider novel set in the same place and promoted in this download.