Author: Kelly Hourihan
Publisher: Lemon Sherbet Press
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
This is not a novel but one huge info dump in the form of screen transcripts from chat-rooms and the contents of emails and an online diary (read: diarrhea). It is without question the most boring novel I have ever read. I avoid like the plague this kind of person online, so why oh why would I want to read something which is nothing more than this same air-headed flatulence masquerading as a novel? If you're going to get radical in your format, then you’d better have something worth saying in the content. This didn’t. It jumped from the title page straight to the info dump - a fact that I initially missed because it initially looked like nothing more than publishing information! I had to back-track several pages to get to the start and it just wasn't worth the effort; then came the pointless, disconnected jumble of crap.
This volume doesn't tell a story (unless it’s about how easily a life can be wasted), and it offers nothing else. I have no interest in a character as shallow and vacuous as the one portrayed here, much less in someone who can fill an entire Kindle screen with "OMG", and who cannot pen an exclamation point without it becoming a parade.
At one point the character gets all excited about a short story contest, but there is nothing about this character which says short or interesting, and as long as she's wasting all her time in shallow chat and mindless self-absorption, what on Earth would make me think she'd have the discipline to put together a short story worth reading? I kept skimming through this, screen after screen, looking for something worth reading, and I failed to find it. Even when I skipped to the last few pages, I saw that nothing had changed, nothing had grown, nothing had developed, and nothing interesting ever came up. At 25% in I gave up because I'd had zero interest to begin with.
If this novel had been only 4 to 16 characters, it might have been worth reading, but even then it probably would have been "OMG!OMG!OMG!OMG!" and that's it. As it was, it's warty.
