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idlesilver 's review for:
The Couple Next Door
by Shari Lapena
Redeeming features: a quick read, and a well-constructed plot.
Unfortunately, the non-redeeming features outweigh those significantly. The writing was horridly amateurish, including choppy sentences, unnecessary repetition of the relevant character's name (in every. flipping. sentence), lots of telling-not-showing and many, many random POV shifts.
The POV thing puzzles me. I am noticing it increasingly in books (The Essex Serpent, I'm looking at you), and it just strikes me as lazy. When I wrote my beta-readers used to drum into me endlessly: POV shifts are a complete cop-out. Pick a POV and stick to it. Write round it if you need to; be clever, not lazy.
I can deal with it changing from one chapter to the next, but when it shifts mid-paragraph because the author can find no other way to let the reader know what both character A and character B are thinking, the story becomes messy and unsophisticated.
It's such a shame the writing let this book down so much; in accomplished hands this could have been so much more.
Unfortunately, the non-redeeming features outweigh those significantly. The writing was horridly amateurish, including choppy sentences, unnecessary repetition of the relevant character's name (in every. flipping. sentence), lots of telling-not-showing and many, many random POV shifts.
The POV thing puzzles me. I am noticing it increasingly in books (The Essex Serpent, I'm looking at you), and it just strikes me as lazy. When I wrote my beta-readers used to drum into me endlessly: POV shifts are a complete cop-out. Pick a POV and stick to it. Write round it if you need to; be clever, not lazy.
I can deal with it changing from one chapter to the next, but when it shifts mid-paragraph because the author can find no other way to let the reader know what both character A and character B are thinking, the story becomes messy and unsophisticated.
It's such a shame the writing let this book down so much; in accomplished hands this could have been so much more.