When the new year comes, Marin makes a resolution with her friends to add some excitement to her dead end life. To that end, she quits her job working for a boss she hates and decides to become the research assistant to scientist Nathaniel.
And honestly, I don’t really remember much else. It wasn’t a great story.
You know that a book has problems when you’re reading it you can’t help but notice all of the various punctuation faults, wrong words, and pedestrian language. This book needed a competent copy editor stat. While it was at it a decent line editor wouldn’t have been amiss. And since those two are coming to the table, they might as well bring a sensitivity editor with them while they’re at it. And I’m not even going to get into the pacing problems. Oh who am I kidding, I totally am. Let’s break it down, shall we? Copy editing that’s easy. The book needed it. I counted at one point multiple punctuation errors on a single page and at least five missing/wrong words in a 50 page story. While I generally allow for one error every 10 pages in an indie published book, with all of the Punctuation errors I couldn’t ignore it. The errors were distracting. So the book loses a star there.
Line editing. Honestly the prose was boring. Too many weak verbs too many adverbs modifying those weak verbs. And often times the sentences were confusing. Repetitive sentence structure. All of the characters sounded alike. The prose was pedestrian. I mean if someone is talking about the poor technical and bland prose, you know that there’s a problem. And I’m not even done.
Sensitivity editing, oh boy howdy, so much dubious consent. And the elephant in the room of the fact that the main male lead is the female lead’s boss Is never actually addressed. The author also really needed someone of Latino or Hispanic heritage to edit this work because Google translate and Wikipedia is not a viable alternative I’m just saying. Look, I used to be fluent in Spanish. I’m still decent when it comes to reading at getting the gist… and when I notice that there’s a problem. There’s a problem.
Finally the story had a pacing problem. The main male lead doesn’t show up until 18% of the way through the story. That is much too late. Especially in a 50 page story. Worse, everything that happens once he shows up moves way too quickly. Which causes a number of problems going back to the whole sensitivity issue. From the interview which is hyper unrealistic. To the fact that he’s going through her luggage and fondling her underwear in front of an airport full of people. To honestly the sex scene. To the dropped threads i.e. we never did find out what happened to her tent. It literally would have taken a line to fix and the fact that it wasn’t fixed is a problem. The ending left me feeling a giant “wait what?”
This wasn’t a good book. Worse, every single problem could have been fixed with some decent editing. Like every problem. It wouldn’t even have been that expensive to fix and for a 13 book series you want your first entry into it to be your best.
As it is, I’m going to give the rest of this a miss.
One Star
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