Review: A published first draft
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 03 28, 2014
Full disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for a fair an honest review. The opinions below are entirely my own.First of all, some condolences to the author - severe critique of one's work can be very hard to hear. However, it is this reviewer's opinion that this book was not at all ready for publication.There are good ideas in here. A dystopian, futuristic setting where debt rules and the debtors are made to fighting for their freedom seems a compelling idea, and from what I saw of this world, it was very enticing. There was an interesting interplay between money and power - how the manager was better off financially than his gladiator, but had no power, for instance. Unfortunately, this book is all foundation. Even the sentences are bare-bones. For instance, this excerpt is one character teaching another swordplay:"They practiced swordplay with the short sword. Thrust and parry. He showed her moves."Most of the book is written like this. Regrettably, it is not at all compelling. Furthermore, though the setting is interesting, the characters are poorly fleshed-out. There are good guys and bad guys, but what drives them, what scares them, what moves them - these are all left relatively unexplored. The book is quite short in fact - my .pdf was 65 pages long, Amazon's ebook version says 75. At $2.99, they need to be 75 very well-crafted pages, and unfortunately, "The Romantic" does not deliver.