In the past couple weeks or less I’ve read three books. I reviewed two with titles and authors, posted those to all my social media and tagged the authors to let them know I loved their books. The third one…. Yeah, no.
The third one was a great book. It was a good story, cool characters with cool powers, and a dude that could turn into A FUCKING DRAGON. I wanted to love this book; I really, really did. I couldn’t.
The writing was subpar. There were quite a few sentences that seemed jumbled. There were run on sentences that I had to skip over as I couldn’t decipher them. There were also a few ‘ifs’ and ‘ors’ used for ‘ofs’ and ‘its’. The writer also used the phrase “nose bridge’ instead of ‘bridge of my nose’. Some of this I can forgive. We all make mistakes, right? But those weren’t the worst.
The worst? The writer decided to use the word ‘humid’ instead of damp. Now, a lot of times, that’s an acceptable substitute. ‘The air felt damp,’ is a perfectly acceptable sentence. Well, try this one for size, ‘He brushed my humid hair out of my eyes.’
No, you didn’t read that wrong. That exact sentence, by the way, is not in the book, but that’s what the writer was using humid for: to describe wet hair (in a few places) and wet lawn (in a couple places).
I’ve made odd word choices before, I’m sure we all have. My most hated mistake, which I have thankfully not published, is deciding to use ‘head bow’ for a nod. Yeah, that’s terrible. I used that phrase a lot when I first started writing, and have since corrected that bad idea when I see the phrase as I’m editing. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t, but I wanted to illustrate that we all, as I said, make mistakes.
But then we get editors, and they tell us what’s what. Yes, writers can override editor suggestions, but come on. It sounds like the writer may have used a thesaurus to find better/different words and then didn’t look up the meaning of the word.
To give the writer the benefit of the doubt, I tried to find out if English wasn’t their primary language. My mom is an immigrant. Though she has lived in the States for 50+ years, she still messes up words. That happens. That’s forgivable. I have found nothing on the writer that suggests English is their secondary language.
In short, it was enough of a poor word choice to stop me from buying any more of their books. Which is sad. It was a good story.
HE TURNED INTO A DRAGON. (Insert forlorn sigh.)
Cat Stark 