Review: This took me to hyacinthine heights.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 2, 2011
The book is long. Interminable. The writing is, well, the word that came most often to mind while slogging through this book was "flatulent." As in "pompously or portentously overblown."Some sentences made me snicker: "The third Thursday in July erupted in glorious profusion -- a bright and brassy sun burning through remnants of Wednesday's petulant weather, and leaping into hyacinthine heights." My Kindle OED didn't give hyacinthine any other definition that relating to the hyacinth flower, and it was hard to imagine a brassy sun leaping (leaping!) to the height of a hyacinth. There were many, many instances where I had to stop reading and look up a word because the sentence didn't make sense unless I did. And I'm not talking about the time when two of the characters played word games -- those times, I didn't mind.Some errors of fact left me wondering if the author did not have access to Google Maps: "My maternal grandfather lived in Saskatchewan. About halfway between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay." And there is no part of Montana on the 50th parallel.I don't remember why I downloaded the sample -- probably because the premise was interesting to me. I almost didn't buy the book at all because it was so difficult to get into the sample because the writing is so amateur. But End-of-the-World stories are my addiction, and it is cheap, so I took a chance.The hero of the book was an ex special ops guy, tortured past and all. Montana rancher, widower. The heroine is an astrophysicist redheaded beauty with a small waist and big boobs and a tortured past. She can do anything: jog 500 miles, outwit a mountain lion, do math in her head, sing, dance, ride a horse, fend off attackers twice her size ... And, of course, there are all those men after her amazing bod. She's nearly a perfect ten according to some genetic formula. And all the games the hero and heroine played, games worthy of teenagers and not allegedly intelligent adults.The author is capable of making it crystal clear what causes ovulation and menstruation, but the science at the heart of the story, the astronomy, is fuzzy, which is disappointing. After wading through more than a megabyte of text, I'm still not sure what happened or why. The first 90% of the book was too much, and with one exception, the last 10% was not enough.There's a decent book in there. It's just going to take a good editor, some research, copy editing, and several rewrites to dig it out.