meliemelo's review
1.0
Well, that was... bland at its best, and annoying at its worst.
The actual short story only takes up 40% of the ebook, the rest is actually an excerpt from another Douglas Kennedy book. Which is a bit dodgy in itself. Good thing the book was free (I think).
The writing style was... well, not that good, really, and even quite bad at times. A few pretty sentences here and there, perfect to be underlined as quotes. But the rest is riddled with repetitions and weird phrasing that made me wonder if this was a self-published book by someone with English as a Second Language (which would have been perfectly fine, don't have anything against either and will gladly read them, just saying that because it seemed badly edited and the phrasing looked like it was translated from another language). Imagine my surprise when I saw that Douglas Kennedy is actually a best-selling author!
However the novel excerpt wasn't too bad and I can understand the appeal. It's just not for me.
And to go back to The Mistake... Gitte's point of view would have been ten times more interesting, and I really couldn't bring myself to sympathise with the narrator. Some of Gitte's annoyance seemed perfectly justified to me (although not to the point of anger, but wouldn't it have been nicer to get clues to understand it, instead of this portrayal of "crazy womenz right"), and I didn't like that we were so obviously meant to side against her. Verbal abuse is a compelling (and important) subject, but it didn't seem framed towards an exploration of that to me.
But well, change all that, and you would get another book. Though possibly a better one.
The actual short story only takes up 40% of the ebook, the rest is actually an excerpt from another Douglas Kennedy book. Which is a bit dodgy in itself. Good thing the book was free (I think).
The writing style was... well, not that good, really, and even quite bad at times. A few pretty sentences here and there, perfect to be underlined as quotes. But the rest is riddled with repetitions and weird phrasing that made me wonder if this was a self-published book by someone with English as a Second Language (which would have been perfectly fine, don't have anything against either and will gladly read them, just saying that because it seemed badly edited and the phrasing looked like it was translated from another language). Imagine my surprise when I saw that Douglas Kennedy is actually a best-selling author!
However the novel excerpt wasn't too bad and I can understand the appeal. It's just not for me.
And to go back to The Mistake... Gitte's point of view would have been ten times more interesting, and I really couldn't bring myself to sympathise with the narrator. Some of Gitte's annoyance seemed perfectly justified to me (although not to the point of anger, but wouldn't it have been nicer to get clues to understand it, instead of this portrayal of "crazy womenz right"), and I didn't like that we were so obviously meant to side against her. Verbal abuse is a compelling (and important) subject, but it didn't seem framed towards an exploration of that to me.
But well, change all that, and you would get another book. Though possibly a better one.
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