Rating: WORTHY!
This is a brilliant novel and well-worth reading, but it was seriously larded with spelling and grammatical issues, which is actually quite shameful given that the author is, however admirably, a librarian! It does, however, prove my point that you can give me a novel that's less than exemplary, but if it's written well-enough in terms of characterization and plot, I'll rate it worthy despite technical issues. Note that this was an advance review copy, so troubles are always possible, but a lot of these were issues which ought to have been caught during the writing and editing process. We're no longer in the era of real galleys laboriously put together with little lead characters wedged into metal trays. In the ebook era, it's less and less easy to excuse this kind of writing, but I'm placing my faith in the assumption that these issues will be cleared up long before this ever hits the stores.
I list, on my blog and in my review to the publisher, the examples I noticed, but I'm not listing them elsewhere, because they detract from what was, in the final analysis, and viewed as a whole, a really, really good story that I warmed to exceedingly quickly, and stayed with throughout. There was never a time when I felt it was slipping, or becoming repetitive or boring. This was also a first person PoV novel which I normally rail against, but even so, I do always say that some writers can carry it, and this author evidently is one such writer - at least in this case! Next time he may piss me off to no end, but it actually makes me marvel that here, he has done a better job at writing a female main character than far too many young adult authors do in far too many YA series. I mean, seriously? Why can this guy write a better girl than some female authors can?
Of course, I'm not a female (nor do I play one on TV), so I'm willing to grant that my perceptions and expectations may be rather at variance with those of readers who have a hundred percent mark-up on the number of X chromosomes I have at my disposal, but having said that, we men do have fifty percent female in our sex chromosomes, whereas females don't have any male in theirs! Actually some do - we're no more binary in our sex chromosomes than we are in our genders, but that aside, maybe guys do have an edge when writing across gender? Maybe not! I'll leave you all to argue that out amongst yourselves, while I carry on with the review over here, quietly in the corner...!
It's not that Dahlia Moss is like a kick-ass character in the comic book sense - busting into places, taking down villains, making smart remarks, zeroing in on clues. Far from it: she's really a bit on the weak and retiring side, and she's not exactly the sharpest knife in the box, yet she wins through in the end, and looks good doing it. And by looks good, I don't mean she's a beauty queen. She isn't. But she's still fine; she still manages to have appeal to spare, leaving in shadow far too many female 'heroines' of YA literature. She even has to be rescued at the end - after a fashion - yet she is still, in my estimation, a kick-ass character. Note that while I keep referencing YA literature, this is more of a YA-to-adult book in terms of the age of the characters. They're all grown-ups here; young but adult.
Dahlia is hired by rich boy Jonah to find out who stole the "Bejeweled Spear of Infinite Piercing." which is a virtual object in an online computer role-playing game. He puts Dahlia onto a member of his 'guild' in the game - a guy named Kurt, who seems completely uninterested in Dahlia or in talk of spears. By turns invested and dis-empowered, Dahlia starts investigating every member of the guild and slowly zeroes in on the thief, but what she doesn't expect is that almost immediately she begins this real life quest, Jonah is killed irl with a replica of the very spear he lost online.
Relationships which were rather complex to begin with, start to become ever more complex and obtuse now. I keep saying I'm not a fan of worst person PoV, but I keep saying once in a while there's a writer and a story which can carry it off, but it's rare that I get to say that such an exception is a great example of that incongruous confluence of possibility. This one is. I still don't like the voice, because it's so full of self-importance and limitations to your story-telling, but here it works and works well. Besides, how can you not at least start out liking a story that begins, "The only time I ever met Jonah Long he was wearing a fake beard, a blue pin-striped captain's outfit, and a toy pipe that blew soap bubbles."
And now a word - or several - about the errors. There were errors of bad grammar, spelling, and punctuation. A simple final spell-check would have caught the most egregious of the spelling issues, but actually, the bulk of these problems were subtle enough that only a good editor or beta reader would catch them. A lot of the 'misspellings' were homophones, where the word was spelled correctly, but it was the wrong word for the context. No spell-check will catch these. There were examples of a homophone and misspelling in the same sentence. As for the grammar problems, it was a mixed bag, with some bad grammar, some words missing, text oddities, and words out of order(!) or other issues which obscured the sense. There was also a slight continuity problem with the sharpness of the spear!
This things aside, I rate this a very worthy read and recommend it.
There were times when I thought maybe the author had written a given sentence that way intentionally for subtle humor or because it was some geek thing of which I was unaware, but the sheer number of these mitigated against writing them all off with those excuses. There were also times when it looked like the author had dictated the text and it had been misheard during transcription. So here they are.
Bad grammar/punctuation
"I can state these rule" (wrong number: 'these rules' or 'this rule', not a mix!)
"something ,then" (comma in wrong place)
Misspellings that a spell-checker would catch
"Ddriver"
"Gunpiont"
Spelled correctly, but wrong word(s)
"the king of thing that pisses me" (kind of thing)
"wedge the sticky T-shirt down her hallow" ('hallow' should be 'hollow')
"They'll be food, at least." (there'llbe food - might have been funny if the story had been about cannibals or zombies!)
"task now is more difficult that simply taking a boy out" (than simply taking a boy out)
"crossed-referenced a list" ('cross-referenced')
"And Nathan was back to his usual amiable self. Whatever had troubled them there had been just a momentary blip." (whatever had troubled him there...)
"it's not big deal" ('it's no big deal' or 'it's not a big deal')
"had an unreasonably head start" (unreasonable head start)
"Sylvia, it had to be said, looked remarkably like her sun." (like her son)
"probably the result of a guilty conscious crumbling at Jonah's posthumous largesse." (guilty conscience)
Misspelling and wrong word in same sentence
"given that I had planted my phone in a knoll on the murderesss." (knoll is a small hill. This word was used many times wrongly in place of hollow. Also, murderess has one 's' too many, and I have issues with the 'ess' part irrespective of spelling. Why must we specify a 'murderess rather than simply murderer? It's a form of genderism to me, but I see it frequently: actress, murderess, hostess, mattress (that last one might not be real...)
Missing word
"Why would do that?" (should have read something like "Why would she do that")
"At the risk of coming as completely callous" (coming off as....)
Obscure English
"I felt like a combination having an earworm and heartburn. My best option was to chance the subject." ("combination of an earworm..." and 'change' instead of 'chance')
"The certainty that she had put on a bug me hit all at once" (seems like words were unintentionally transposed here)
"as though it were pitched outside of the normal of range of human hearing." (too many 'of's!)
"'Ndiyo,' said Francis, which I assumed was yes for Swahili." (Swahili for 'yes'?)
Text oddities
"or for tanking aggro off a raid boss" (I have no idea what this means - maybe draining off, leaching off? Taking aggro off? )
"sort of muddled about in folding chairs" (muddled about amongst the folding chairs?)
At one point Hindi is spoken, but the text appears as minuscule black characters on a white background in a Kindle app on my phone. Note that I have the screen background black, and the text white as a battery saving measure, so the text looked like it was in the negative to me. No matter how much I enlarged the text in this kindle app on the phone, the Hindi text was never large enough to see it clearly.
"queen of England" - Elizabeth 2nd is the queen of the United Kingdom (inter alia), which includes England, but given that this was a character's speech, you can get away with it because people do speak in ignorance like that.
"dominated my life a little bit" - contradiction in terms! Again this is something you can get away with in a 1PoV novel since it's the character speaking, but it's worth keeping in mind that it makes no sense!
"...I have been out cashing favors."This was an example of "Was the author trying to be clever, or was it merely inattention?" Caching, in computer geek speak, means holding something in memory ready for immediate use, so I liked the wordplay between cashing and caching, even though it didn't make a lot of sense. When I ran into so many other such issues, I decided this was a mistake, and not a play on words.
For Charice to say that was ominous. Almost everyone seemed to owe her, somehow, and who knows what strange circumstances would occur from a cached favor?
Problems with continuity with the spear point
"The blade itself was sharp and shining,"
[It was] "Sharp enough to do the job"
"He shouldn't have made the thing so sharp in the first place"
"the spear wasn’t actually all that sharp"
Note that there was more than one copy of the spear, but the problem here was that it was not made clear until almost the end of the novel that all but the first copy - the murder weapon - were purposefully blunted, but this didn't rob me of my point, because Dahlia never had access to the murder weapon. She only ever saw copies, so from her PoV, she was talking about the same spear in effect. This was the root of the continuity problem. That said, I liked this book and would read a sequel. I'd even beta read a sequel if it would help!
