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A review by uutopicaa
A Life of Death by Weston Kincade
3.0
Before I go into details, I would like to say that the story is good and interesting, but I can't give it a higher rating because there're just too many small things that need to be fixed.
"What was the most important life-changing thing that ever happened to you?"
This question is the core of the entire plot.
For some of us, the answer would be a silly event or something as normal as our wedding, but for the main character of the book, this question is really hard to answer because his story is out of the ordinary.
This is a promising book, an unpolished diamond of the paranormal genre. It presents an intriguing mystery and well developed characters that can keep an average reader at the edge of their seats. Sadly, I'm not an average reader and I did find a lot of small unpleasant details that just added up.
I guess I first have to admit I'm not a native English speaker, but I've been working as an editor for a Spanish company for more than five years. With my experience, I realized there're a lot more things in common between both languages than I originally thought, specially when it comes to the quality of a narration style.
As I was reading "A Life of Death", I felt as if it was more like a manuscript than a finished and published version of the story. In my mind, it was just another manuscript sent to me for corrections and that made it hard to enjoy.
As I said earlier, the plot was great and characters had a good development BUT the text itself was filled with repetitions, redundancies, gerunds (present participle or however you call it in English) and some weird sentences that seemed to be either incomplete or out of place, as if they had nothing to do with what surrounded them.
Another negative thing is that the edition itself looks really unprofessional on the inside. It looks as if the author wrote the story on Microsoft Word and printed it as it was on his screen. There's absolutely no signs of effort on the internal design of the book. And that is important.
I know some of you might think "you are being too harsh. The story is what matters", but I disagree. It can sound silly to criticize the design of a book but we live in an era were LOOKS MATTER.
Let me put it this way, imagine the following:
I go to a bookstore, I see this book and it catches my eye because it has a pretty cover and an intriguing tittle. I pick it up, I read the back and I think "this sounds cool". Then, as I always do, I open it in a random page to see how its written.
AS SOON as I see how bad it looks inside, I will say "no, this looks like a school project" and put it back on the shelves.
I understand that most independent authors don't know much about marketing, design or how to professionally use computer programs in order to get their books to look good. I also understand that a lot of times we can't hire someone to do this kind of stuff for us, BUT I'm the kind of person who thinks "if it will look bad, just don't do it yet."
I made this same mistake myself when I was younger and I'm still paying the price with negative reviews of the first edition of my first novel because it looks unprofessional.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah. I think this book is good, but it could also be a million times better. As I said at the beginning of the review, its and unpolished diamond. It still needs some work.
On a personal note (this doesn't affect the rating) there was just ONE thing I disliked a lot about the story: the beginning. I'm TIRED of reading about the poor teenager who lives at a trailer park with a dysfunctional family (one of the parents is gone, the other one is always drunk, etc.). It might be a common ting in the US but WOW, in the last three or four years I've read SO MANY BOOKS with this same description of a main character's life that I'm tired of it.
Leaving that aside, I liked the rest of the story.
AS A SUMMARY, I would like to say that UNLESS you are as picky and obnoxious as I am, then you should read this book because the story is really interesting. The plot reminds me A LITTLE to "The Graveyard Queen" saga. This is good because I love those books and I never find similar stories, BUT the quality of the narration is not half as engaging and seducing as Amanda Steven's.
Last but not least: I hope the author soon gets the chance to find a good editor who can make this novel shine.
--I'm grateful to the author for giving me the chance to read this novel--
"What was the most important life-changing thing that ever happened to you?"
This question is the core of the entire plot.
For some of us, the answer would be a silly event or something as normal as our wedding, but for the main character of the book, this question is really hard to answer because his story is out of the ordinary.
This is a promising book, an unpolished diamond of the paranormal genre. It presents an intriguing mystery and well developed characters that can keep an average reader at the edge of their seats. Sadly, I'm not an average reader and I did find a lot of small unpleasant details that just added up.
I guess I first have to admit I'm not a native English speaker, but I've been working as an editor for a Spanish company for more than five years. With my experience, I realized there're a lot more things in common between both languages than I originally thought, specially when it comes to the quality of a narration style.
As I was reading "A Life of Death", I felt as if it was more like a manuscript than a finished and published version of the story. In my mind, it was just another manuscript sent to me for corrections and that made it hard to enjoy.
As I said earlier, the plot was great and characters had a good development BUT the text itself was filled with repetitions, redundancies, gerunds (present participle or however you call it in English) and some weird sentences that seemed to be either incomplete or out of place, as if they had nothing to do with what surrounded them.
Another negative thing is that the edition itself looks really unprofessional on the inside. It looks as if the author wrote the story on Microsoft Word and printed it as it was on his screen. There's absolutely no signs of effort on the internal design of the book. And that is important.
I know some of you might think "you are being too harsh. The story is what matters", but I disagree. It can sound silly to criticize the design of a book but we live in an era were LOOKS MATTER.
Let me put it this way, imagine the following:
I go to a bookstore, I see this book and it catches my eye because it has a pretty cover and an intriguing tittle. I pick it up, I read the back and I think "this sounds cool". Then, as I always do, I open it in a random page to see how its written.
AS SOON as I see how bad it looks inside, I will say "no, this looks like a school project" and put it back on the shelves.
I understand that most independent authors don't know much about marketing, design or how to professionally use computer programs in order to get their books to look good. I also understand that a lot of times we can't hire someone to do this kind of stuff for us, BUT I'm the kind of person who thinks "if it will look bad, just don't do it yet."
I made this same mistake myself when I was younger and I'm still paying the price with negative reviews of the first edition of my first novel because it looks unprofessional.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah. I think this book is good, but it could also be a million times better. As I said at the beginning of the review, its and unpolished diamond. It still needs some work.
On a personal note (this doesn't affect the rating) there was just ONE thing I disliked a lot about the story: the beginning. I'm TIRED of reading about the poor teenager who lives at a trailer park with a dysfunctional family (one of the parents is gone, the other one is always drunk, etc.). It might be a common ting in the US but WOW, in the last three or four years I've read SO MANY BOOKS with this same description of a main character's life that I'm tired of it.
Leaving that aside, I liked the rest of the story.
AS A SUMMARY, I would like to say that UNLESS you are as picky and obnoxious as I am, then you should read this book because the story is really interesting. The plot reminds me A LITTLE to "The Graveyard Queen" saga. This is good because I love those books and I never find similar stories, BUT the quality of the narration is not half as engaging and seducing as Amanda Steven's.
Last but not least: I hope the author soon gets the chance to find a good editor who can make this novel shine.
--I'm grateful to the author for giving me the chance to read this novel--