Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I occasionally find comments on 1-star reviews, upbraiding the reviewer who did not finish the book. Perhaps this review will attract such comments. Nevertheless, no one is obliged to finish a work that has disappointed the reader in the first five or six thousand words. This book did. I did not finish, and what I read was sufficient to discourage me from reading any more. The prose is pretentious. My wife and I read out loud to one another, and this one fell to me. There's a LOT you can tell about a writer's style if you read his work out loud! In this case, ... well, it just does not work. But, there's more here than simply labored, slightly-less-than purple prose. The autor delivers it with the regularity of a jackhammer with its power switch stuck in the "On" position. Early in the first chapter we learn about Max's unhappy marriage. For page after page after page after page we get exposition -- great endless walls of text, unrelieved by a single paragraph -- all about how crabby, cranky, and caloused Abby is, how narcissistic she is about her needs, her, wants, her interests, her relationship. What he tells us about her in the first two paragraphs exausts this idea. Well and good. But, it goes on and on and on. I found myself skipping from one paragraph to the next, then one page to the next. Then there were the spelling errors -- "fine" for "find," for example. Lots of that kind of thing. Someone ran a spell checker on auto-pilot, not once checking the context. I don't have time for this sort of stuff, not when it's a Long, Long Book. Ain't gonna endure that. Nope. I stopped. And I ain't gonna start again.