Review: I read for entertainment, not a pretentious English lesson.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2012
This book had potential. The characters were developed with great imagination, and I felt as if I were reading something that favored C.S. Lewis. That being said/written... it was pretentious. After the first five or so pages, I was trying to figure out what the writer was attempting to achieve. Since I was reading it on my Kindle, I didn't want to go back to look at the author's name, as it had turned into somewhat of a profiling game for me. First, I thought it was a young female who had probably just graduated with her literary degree, and that this was her first try at writing something to "impress the world." My other idea was one of a middle-aged (50+) female author, who was probably a professor somewhere, trying to leave something in her work that might be considered a classic in a hundred years. So, imagine my surprise when I finished the book, checked out the cover and saw it was a male author. Obviously, I do not have a future in profiling. BUT, this book was quite annoying because of the language. I'm not stupid... I'm actually a little edu-ma-cated, and I found myself having to look up many words that were defined as "literary usage". I found it pretentious because I want to read something within my general scope of verbage, not a constant stop-and-look for a definition. I love learning a new word, though. Heck, there's nothing like impressing my friends at the tractor pull, but in the end it was just a distraction which took away from the real storyline. Here are some of the words that bugged me. It's not that I didn't know all of them, only that a kinder/simpler/more reader-friendly version could have been used. Decide for yourself: pellucid, servile, espy, febrile, vicissitudes, awl, saturnine, bifurcation, limned, dolorous, rubicund (just say "rosy"!), hirsute, bandied (curved so as to be wide apart at the knees... ok, I call that bow-legged), surcease, sepulchral, inviolate, crepuscular, miasma, fecund, sycophantic, wended (not even the correct usage, in this case "another term for SORB" wth?), inimical, opprobrium, viridian, penumbral, mien, quenna, transmuted, deliquesced, chthonic, saurian, serried, Amalgams, sentience, viscera, inchoate, lambent, and hummocks.Like some the other reviewers, I felt the ending was rushed. I, too, thought it was a case of a missed deadline with the author throwing in the last chapter or two willy-nilly.I'm not a big reviewer. I buy tons of the free books and have had wonderful luck in liking many of them, but this was irritating enough that I want to let others know what to expect before they might spend money on it.