Review: Bitten off more than they could chew
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 11 3, 2011
I wanted to like this story, but the problems with it make that nearly impossible.Ally, short for Alice, is dressing up to go out for Halloween. She's recently broken up with her boyfriend and is dressing more daring than usual. She goes to a club to meet her friends, but is mysteriously drawn to a handsome stranger, whose fangs look much better than her cheap plastic ones - wonder where he got them?First of all, this isn't a complete work by any stretch of the imagination. I've read the second installment as well, and it reads more like a serialized novel than a stand-alone work.  A cliff-hanger in a novel is bad enough, but for it to work well there has to be some sort of closure with a few dangling ends. And it really needs to be a full-length book as well. Oh my gosh! Will Ally survive or will she and her friends be forced to donate to the blood bank? Tune in next week, same bat-station, same bat-channel!!!! Oh, wait! I need another exclamatory sentence! Or more! Yes, exclamations are a problem with this work as well. Twenty-seven in the first chapter alone, seriously?! But even with the cliffhangers, no one will be waiting at the dock to find out if little Nell, er...I mean Ally, has died.Secondly, except for the love scene which is rather formulaic, the writing is juvenile at best. It feels like it was written for pre-teens, but then you have very blatant sex and it's just glaringly wrong stylistically.And then there's the grammar. Misplaced commas and other parts of speech. Wrong sentence tense used numerous times, sometimes changing twice in the same sentence. Inappropriate word usage (more creepier - really?), and the list goes on. I started highlighting mistakes just to see if it was as bad as I thought - it was.The storyline itself is okay, but just that. With a lot more work this might be ready for prime-time, but it's definitely not there yet. 1.5 stars.