As I mentioned previously, I picked up Shadow of the Sun
While I found the story interesting, I will not be one of those to pony up for the sequels. The pity is that some of the flaws in this volume could easily have been avoided. Others are more systemic.
I marked more than twenty errors of grammar or editing while I read. That’s not very good, but for very long passages that I read while working out, I was not able to mark the errors I found. It would not surprise me if there were fifty errors in this volume that a good proofreader would have found. A misspelling on the first page, for crying out loud, and the horrific offense of using setup as a verb happened somewhere in there.
The other way strong editorial guidance could have helped is with a long stretch of story that went: “I was so sad I thought I would die! Then I got SADDER and I really thought I was going to die from the sheer weight of sorrow. Then I got EVEN SADDER…”
All this piling of sadness on sadness, punctuated with backstory, got pretty old. Then the action begins! And ends! After a long action sequence earlier, this climactic one at the end of the book was over in a flash, and seemed like it was just to get us moved on past the parade of pathos and into the next book.
Ah, the next book. This volume actually did feel like something was concluded: Act One. We get a real sense that the main character is moving on (after a heartbreaking funeral scene). Considering how open-ended the ending was, It did provide some closure on what had gone before.
Meanwhile, there was an extra dude in this book, whose only purpose was to fulfill the rule that spunky female leads must have more than one alpha male hot for them. This character did absolutely zero in this book but be a nice guy who miraculously survives shit that blows away supernatural beings. In the teaser for the next book, we see he will play a much larger role. Note to Ms. Kreitzer: you could have just waited and introduced him in book two and no one would have thought twice about it. I think a good editor would have suggested that Nice Guy not be there the whole time.
Having said all that, I didn’t dislike the book. With more action (not just violence–nudge, nudge) and less moping it would have been a fun read and I might have been tempted to pony up for the next episode. As it is, there are just too many other more-tightly-written spunky heroines with multiple suitors, and some of them aren’t even Chosen Ones.
Note: if you use the above link to somehow pay for this free book (or a Kindle
“I marked more than twenty errors of grammar or editing while I read. That’s not very good, but for very long passages that I read while working out, I was not able to mark the errors I found. It would not surprise me if there were fifty errors in this volume that a good proofreader would have found. A misspelling on the first page, for crying out loud, and the horrific offense of using setup as a verb happened somewhere in there.”
I have discovered repeatedly that failure to pay attention to grammar is symptomatic of failure to pay attention to other details that are also important. And those details are not just related to writing. An electrician had moved into our neighborhood, and in an effort to drum up business, he distributed fliers in which, every place there should have been an apostrophe, there wasn’t one, and every place there was an apostrophe, there shouldn’t have been one.
Our doorbell wiring wasn’t working, and our efforts to fix it hadn’t been successful. Pat wanted to hire this electrician. I argued against hiring this electrician, on the basis that his ineptness with apostrophes indicated a lack of attention to detail. Pat hired the electrician anyway. Not only was he unable to fix the doorbell; he removed the masking-tape labels that I had carefully put onto the wires as I removed them from the ringer to show which was which, as the insulation on the wires was not anywhere near standard color codes. Thus, the electrician killed all hope of us or anyone we might hire in the future being able to fix the doorbell.
Since then, I have refused to hire any tradesperson who abuses apostrophes.