twovictorianladies

I finished reading a book on my Kindle this morning. It was an action/adventure story, the first book by this particular author. I was a little hesitant about trying it; not because it was a debut effort but because of the story description, which just barely fell within my area of interest. The reviews were pretty good, though, even if two of them were from family or friends who had read previous drafts, and I decided to give it a try.

From a literary critic’s position, this book was a disaster. The premise had all the believability of a SyFy Original disaster flick.  The characters had the depth of poorly executed line drawing, with the exception of the hero and, to a slightly lesser degree, the heroine; they had the depth of well executed line drawings. The author used the deux ex machina device for practically every incident. One subplot proved totally unnecessary – its only purpose was to put some of the characters at one particular place at one particular time – surely this rather silly subplot could have been dropped and another method found to get them there.  And the epilogue was flat, flat, flat; I’ve seen more energy in soda bottles that have been open for three days.

So why didn’t I just click on the “Remove from Device” icon when I hit chapter 3?

Because one thing the author did right was keep that story moving. It may not have been particularly well crafted, and it certainly was not overly believable. But he knew how to keep the action going. It was a roller coaster ride that didn’t stop from page 4 (the set up pages were a bit slow) till the end of the last chapter. Which is one reason the very flat epilogue came as such a shock. I will be the first to admit that beginnings and endings are difficult, but the contrast kind of let one down.

It was clear from the way he left it that he plans to do another book with the same hero. It will be interesting to see whether his writing improves as he goes. Despite the shaky writing, I would read another book of his just because of the energetic story. I probably wouldn’t read a third unless I can see evidence of improving, but I’d at least give him one more shot.

Hopefully my future readers will be willing to give me the same chance!