My edition includes the opening chapters of the sequel, which looks to be just as poor. Pittacus Lore has the ability to do far better than this, but sadly probably won't, as this book has somehow managed to be successful as it is. The first two paragraphs at the beginning of chapter 22 are a delight. There are moments - unfortunately very brief - when the writing is quite wonderful.
I'm sure of this because Pittacus Lore, whoever he or she is, is clearly not a talentless writer who'd simply stumbled onto a good idea. It's the sort of book where the author uses 'astute' instead of 'smart' even though the overall style of the writing, and the fact that the narrator is a 15-year-old boy, is such that 'smart' would be the better word.Īll of this could have been fixed with help from a good editor and a bit more time and attention dedicated to the actual craft of writing. They'd be fine if the prose style itself was more sophisticated, but here they're just out of place. Plot and character are underdeveloped and the tone is uneven short, simplistic, frankly hackneyed sentences are overloaded with sophisticated adjectives. The teenage love story is unbearably cheesy. Examples include contradictory sentences within the same paragraph, incorrect words that seem to have slipped through simply because they wouldn't have triggered spellcheck ('quip' where the meaning of the sentence clearly requires 'clip' is particularly memorable), and plot developments that simply don't make sense in light of what has happened up to that point. I'm not going to go into extensive detail - life's too short and I've already spent more time on this than it deserves. It reads like a first draft, when ideas and rough dialogue are simply being dumped onto the page, not a finished product. I would almost venture to say unedited, as there are so many flaws and downright errors that you would think someone would have caught them if they had bothered to read it critically before publication (I wasn't trying to read critically, and they leapt out at me). The problem is that while there is the potential for a great story here and some of the writing is occasionally good, the book for the most part is badly written and VERY poorly edited.
I hadn't realised it was a YA (Young Adult) novel until I started it, but that in itself wouldn't have been a problem - a lot of my favourite novels are pitched at readers young enough to be my children.
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