519
people found this helpful, as of 2023
ranked #34,021 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★☆☆☆
Could Have Been Excellent
This could have been an excellent novel, telling the story of a Nazi soldier who was firm in his beliefs about his leader and country... until he wasn't. Unfortunately, the book is rife with errors of grammar, punctuation, and usage; particularly irksome was the rampant improper use of commas and the lack of understanding about compound verb phrases. (The author is British, but most grammar and punctuation rules are the same between US and UK English variants.) These issues were surprising; the book is put out by a legitimate publisher who would have had the book professionally copyedited and proofread. Perhaps those language professionals were swayed by others to overlook the many errors as the author's writing style. However, grievous language errors are not a writing style... or at least they should not be. I found myself more looking for the next error than reading the book for the story. I also found the writing style flabby, with a lot of passive sentence structures and writing no-nos like false subjects (variants of “there is”) and impersonal passive expressions (sentences with “it” when that word does not refer to a specific, previously used noun) that obscure the subject. If things like this don't bother you, you might enjoy the book better than I did.
