A review by jshawreads
Closer Oceans by Jacob Hamilton

Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
This book is the first in over three years that I have not finished. Normally, I will persevere, but with this... I just couldn't bring myself to carry on.

I was initially drawn in by a cover... Yes, I know, there is literally a very common saying, "Don't judge a book by it's cover" but we all do it a little. The premise sounded interesting, so I picked it up. Only when I got home did I notice the spelling errors on the blurb, which is always a red flag for me.

Inside... This book is nonsense. The term "purple prose" doesn't even begin to cover it. This book has sentences that take up pages, yet say nothing. The language is overly pretentious and flowery and seems like an attempt by the author to flaunt vocabulary. However, sometimes I think the author doesn't really understand the words he has used, and it feels like many sentences have had every other word run through a thesaurus. Purple prose can make a book hard to follow, boring, and difficult to engage with... And that is exactly what happened.

Since DNFing, I have learnt the book was self-published, and on the authors website, he openly states that he didn't have money to pay a decent editor... I mean... That kind of says it all. 

Nonsense that is trying SO VERY HARD to be intellectual. Barely made it 50 pages in.