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A review by paperbackwriter
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
2.0
DNF. I gamely tried, but could not finish this book. An odyssey of unconnected trial, the story simply plods along from one calamity to another with no drama. She is disoriented in the wilderness; she meets a hermit; the hermit leaves (why?); she is disoriented in the wilderness again; she meets a Native American stranger and gets shot by an arrow; the Native American delivers her to an eccentric preacher. ENOUGH!
And the over abundance of description. For example on page 151: "Mornings found the widow making the Reverend his breakfast on an old, spraddled stove that stoked hot as a forge and smoke at its poorly welded seams. It stood on pale bricks, and the sooted pipe went straight up through a hole in the celing, heading the single room above, and from there ran through the roof the end in blackened and smoky funnel. She made bread and biscuits, coffee, salt pork, oatmeal with blueberries in it."
That paragraph pushed me over the edge to DNF. Please, author, exercise a bit of restraint. I realize that the craft of writing fiction is to enter the fictional dream in your imagination and report to the reader what you see. But do you have to write absolutely everything, ad nauseum!? I am overwhelmed.
And the over abundance of description. For example on page 151: "Mornings found the widow making the Reverend his breakfast on an old, spraddled stove that stoked hot as a forge and smoke at its poorly welded seams. It stood on pale bricks, and the sooted pipe went straight up through a hole in the celing, heading the single room above, and from there ran through the roof the end in blackened and smoky funnel. She made bread and biscuits, coffee, salt pork, oatmeal with blueberries in it."
That paragraph pushed me over the edge to DNF. Please, author, exercise a bit of restraint. I realize that the craft of writing fiction is to enter the fictional dream in your imagination and report to the reader what you see. But do you have to write absolutely everything, ad nauseum!? I am overwhelmed.