Review: Not Great
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 01 7, 2013
Summer Escape was not a terrible story, but certainly wasn't memorable or fun to read. Luckily it was short though, and light in content so it makes for a decent read in that sense.The main problem I encountered as a reader was the writing style. It always frustrates me when a first person narrative becomes tedious, even though Jayson James tried to combat this by switching around perspectives.The way he wrote was very proper, which is definitely not how a novel such as this should read. There were hardly any contractions, and it just made things incredibly dry. It also felt very choppy and somewhat disorganized. There were also numerous grammatical errors that were very basic.The plot in Summer Escape left much to be desired as well, as the characters were not incredibly well developed and there was no conflict. The two boys it focuses on are adults, but they act more like Jake's younger brother than he should. Things like friendship bracelets could be cute, but it just didn't work here. Instead, it just came off as childish.The last issue was in the imagery department. Trying to get a visual on Kendrin is incredibly difficult, because apparently his body type is somewhere between chubby and obese. He has a little extra meat on his bones, yet an XL shirt is too small? While he had a lot of potential as a character being a sweet and unique teenage boy, everything around him sort of fell apart and so he fell short too.