Review: Reading shouldn't be a painful experience
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 09 12, 2013
I was given a copy from the author in exchange for an honest review.Brief OverviewAna Sinclair is in love with her mom's new boyfriend. He's 10 years her senior with a teenage son, but that doesn't sway her feelings. Not only does she live in the same house as Jake, but also works with him. It's getting harder and harder to stay away from him.Things get interesting once they find out Ana's mom has left without any sign of ever coming back. Jake struggles to keep his distance from Ana, although he desperately wants to possess every inch of her.He becomes her "knight in shining armour" when he gains knowledge that a serial killer is obsessed with Ana, and has murdered girls who look just like her.I'm not gonna lie, I had high hopes for this book after I read the synopsis. Seems like a decent plot right? Yeah, I thought so too...However, I soon discovered that the synopsis was as good as it was going to get. So many things irritated me about this book, I had to skim over quite a bit just to get through it. Here's why.1) I don't usually base my reviews on grammatical errors/editting unless they're really, really bad. I honestly think this was the least editted book I've ever read for a few reasons:-Okay, so I know the author is from England and the main character Ana was as well, but all of the other character's dialogue was written as if they were also British... despite the fact that it takes place in the United States.-Grammatical errors GALORE!*soooooo many run on sentences* misspelled words*over used words (get a free thesaurus app)*quotes that start but don't end... I had to re read and try to guess when the person stopped talking.*punctuation. There were "?" when it wasn't even a question. Or some sentences didn't even have any punctuation at all. Others had too many commas. Ugh I hate that.-There was a scene at the bars where Ana always with her friend Jessie and she was talking to John, Jackson and Trevor. But then during the conversation Ana refers to one of them as Tom. Tom is a whole other character that wasn't even there! Did she even read this before publishing?! That's my question for the author.-WHO says "whilst" a million times in one sentence?! I lost count of how many time it said "whilst" in this book, it drove me nuts!In my opinion, even if your a self published author, you still have the responsibility to edit before submitting. I know editors are expensive and not everyone can afford them but there are alternatives. GOODREADS is full of beta readers willing to help! For free! You can also pass it along to friends and family and ask them for their opinions and see if they can catch any mistakes. A mistake here or there doesn't bother me. It's the careless mistakes that saturate the pages that bother me.2) Story wise, this was pretty lacking. I found it extremely predictable and I pretty much knew who the killer was immediately.I'm usually all for the steamy scenes, but at one point it was page after page after page of the same thing. I've never skipped over sex scenes until this book. They were pretty anticlimactic as well. He's a cave man, I get it, no need to remind me every 5 seconds..3) The ending... random. I felt like it just stopped, as if she wrote one long story and took a knife to it saying "oh, this looks about halfway" CHOP- here's two books. If you're going to have a "cliffhanger" ending with plans for a second book, make it good. I'm not going to remember your book a week from now if you don't have me on the edge of my seat. I won't be reading the next one of this series, that's for sure.4) I don't feel as though the characters were built properly. I didn't connect with any of them, I didn't feel any emotions other than irritation "whilst" I read. (See what I did there)I could probably go on but those were the main issues I had. I really don't like giving bad reviews, I don't like hurting people's feelings. But in this case there was no way I could possibly avoid it. Sometimes honesty is brutal.