Review: Totally Ambivalent
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 13, 2013
First of all let me say I am as my title says really ambivalent on this book. I loved the story, There are large chunks of this book that are great. However there are issues through out the book due to lack of editing and some issues with details in the book due to the authors ignorance of some of the topics he is writing about.1. As other have said there is a huge amount of wrong phonetic spelling on some words. It really looks as in some parts of the book search and replace was used to correct a bunch of words at once and the wrong spelling was used.2. The authors knowledge of the military is pretty weak and it hurts the story for those of us that have been in the military. Spoiler alert. A very grievous episode of this was the main female character using a stun gun on a superior officer in the mess because he hit on her and everyone just looked the other way. The usage of ranks in for the admiral/captain were weird.3. The handling of relationships and sex was very stilted and maybe immature. Because he was depicting 17 to 18 year old characters you would expect them to show a little of this as characters but this felt way more like the author is in his teens and just doesn't have a lot of life experience to draw on in writing those parts of the book. There was also very wobbly characterization of some of the characters in some places. In some scenes he depicts the admiral/captain character as a get the job done and develop new officers kind of leader. In the next chapter the same character is drinking too much and tearing down the same character with the 1st officer that she had been building up the last chapter. Very inconsistent characterization. Also his treating of the main character is kinda weird in the early and middle parts of the book. Also the thing with breasts is just bizarre. You have to read it to understand.The book is fairly long and you can definitely see the author getting better/more skilled at writing through the book though a lot of the same issues still crop up.After all that criticism though I have to say I really enjoyed reading the authors story. I got the book through the free prime reading program so didn't pay to read it and am very happy I read it and am looking forward to seeing new stuff by this author, hopefully the new stuff will show improvements. If I had paid to read the book though I would be pissed. I probably would have been ok spending .99 cents on it to try a new author. I suggest the author reduces his price to that and quickly goes through and re-edits the book for at least grammatical errors. Then maybe a modest re-write would bring this up to the standard of some of the better indie publishers here that do the space opera genre.I get the feeling the author is young or was young when he wrote most of this. If that is true he has major talent and potential with a little help and polish.Scott Carle