221
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #138,775 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★☆
Compelling story but REALLY needs an editor
The plot of this book grabs you right from the start. However, I found reading it unenjoyable due to grammatical errors, awkward word choices, hard-to-parse sentence structures, and ambiguous pronoun references. Ultimately I stopped reading. This book seems to have a lot of potential, but it needs a professional editor.
Update: I was drawn back into this one and am really enjoying the story. Normally (as suggested above), I don't read books that are obviously unedited and full of errors -- I find the errors to detract significantly from my reading enjoyment. This one, however, is worth it, which speaks highly of the story and the non-technical aspects of the writing. The book is obviously well-researched and the plot is neatly woven together.
But I will reiterate that this book NEEDS an editor. There are awkward phrases, misused idioms, and huge numbers of cases where the wrong homonym was used (thus passing the spell-check while still being incorrect). The author managed to get sight/site wrong in both directions! With a good editor, this would be a really excellent book.
I received a free review copy of the e-book in exchange for my unbiased review.
Edited to add: The author has commented below that the book has undergone professional editing. I haven't re-read the book so I can't vouch for the quality of the editing, but since mine is a highly ranked review, I wanted to point out that the problems I had highlighted in my review have hopefully been addressed.
June 2013 · Books