You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
withlovearin 's review for:
Where the Light No Longer Follows
by Wendy Heiss
Do I recommend: 👎🏻
Summary: this one made me sad because it had potential
Wow, okay, holy crap, um—grammar? Punctuation?? I swear at one point I read a run-on sentence the length of an entire paragraph with nary a comma in sight when that entire sentence should’ve had at least 5 of them. The sentence was also so grammatically incorrect, I had to read it thrice to make any sense of it. 😐
The writing, it honestly reads like an unedited first draft. I feel really bad saying that, but it’s true. At one point the author literally forgot that she was writing from 3rd person perspective and ended up using “me” instead of “him”. I kept reading, though, because the concept was genuinely that interesting to me and I wanted it to be good. But frankly I’m not even sure I understand the story? The writing is so unnecessarily convoluted—and incorrect—and it makes it genuinely difficult to keep up. Like the author tried to force poetic and lyrical prose, but all it did was make it so confusing that the meaning got completely lost?
An example, about 20 pages in (skip the next 2 paragraphs if you want absolutely no spoilers, even minor ones):
”She couldn’t have left her brother behind, alone, afraid, in pain. So she had tried to take him with her, only to fail, for there was no fairness in death either, and her love turned into a curse. A curse she had lived through the past five hundred years for she had taken what was not hers to take—two lives.”
Silene didn’t want to leave her brother behind when she died, so she tried to take him with her, but she failed to do so. It literally says “only to fail.” So she didn’t succeed in taking her brother’s life. And somehow, that attempt “turned into a curse”. And it specifically says “for she had taken what was not hers to take—two lives.” What??? I thought she didn’t succeed in taking her brother with her when she died? She failed to do so. So which one is it? Also, what do you mean with that last sentence? It implies that no one before or after Silene has ever tried to unalive another person, which is ridiculous. So unalivers, attempted or otherwise, turn into reapers when they pass? But that can’t be true, because the text implies that this has never happened before. The only way I can make sense of that paragraph is if Silene did succeed in unaliving her brother, but then failed to take his soul with her to the realm of the dead, which then cursed her somehow and turned her into a reaper. But even that explanation doesn’t make sense. I finished the book and yet I still don’t know what that meant.
Honestly, I tried really, really hard, but I just can’t say this is worth anyone’s time or money. It’s impossible to read with how horribly it’s written. Such an intriguing concept, and I was genuinely excited to read all of the novellas in this series, but this is just unreadable. I just wish anyone other than the author herself actually proof-read this. It could’ve been really good. 😕
Summary: this one made me sad because it had potential
Wow, okay, holy crap, um—grammar? Punctuation?? I swear at one point I read a run-on sentence the length of an entire paragraph with nary a comma in sight when that entire sentence should’ve had at least 5 of them. The sentence was also so grammatically incorrect, I had to read it thrice to make any sense of it. 😐
The writing, it honestly reads like an unedited first draft. I feel really bad saying that, but it’s true. At one point the author literally forgot that she was writing from 3rd person perspective and ended up using “me” instead of “him”. I kept reading, though, because the concept was genuinely that interesting to me and I wanted it to be good. But frankly I’m not even sure I understand the story? The writing is so unnecessarily convoluted—and incorrect—and it makes it genuinely difficult to keep up. Like the author tried to force poetic and lyrical prose, but all it did was make it so confusing that the meaning got completely lost?
An example, about 20 pages in (skip the next 2 paragraphs if you want absolutely no spoilers, even minor ones):
”She couldn’t have left her brother behind, alone, afraid, in pain. So she had tried to take him with her, only to fail, for there was no fairness in death either, and her love turned into a curse. A curse she had lived through the past five hundred years for she had taken what was not hers to take—two lives.”
Silene didn’t want to leave her brother behind when she died, so she tried to take him with her, but she failed to do so. It literally says “only to fail.” So she didn’t succeed in taking her brother’s life. And somehow, that attempt “turned into a curse”. And it specifically says “for she had taken what was not hers to take—two lives.” What??? I thought she didn’t succeed in taking her brother with her when she died? She failed to do so. So which one is it? Also, what do you mean with that last sentence? It implies that no one before or after Silene has ever tried to unalive another person, which is ridiculous. So unalivers, attempted or otherwise, turn into reapers when they pass? But that can’t be true, because the text implies that this has never happened before. The only way I can make sense of that paragraph is if Silene did succeed in unaliving her brother, but then failed to take his soul with her to the realm of the dead, which then cursed her somehow and turned her into a reaper. But even that explanation doesn’t make sense. I finished the book and yet I still don’t know what that meant.
Honestly, I tried really, really hard, but I just can’t say this is worth anyone’s time or money. It’s impossible to read with how horribly it’s written. Such an intriguing concept, and I was genuinely excited to read all of the novellas in this series, but this is just unreadable. I just wish anyone other than the author herself actually proof-read this. It could’ve been really good. 😕