It took me about an hour and a half to read this book. And while that may not seem like a long time, I could have spent it vacuuming my car instead.

The underline story is a good one.  A man loses his love and struggles with moving on and whether he was right in doing so.  But the author could not leave well enough alone!  Nope.  He decided to add the supernatural.  Not only did it read fake and out of context, but it wasn’t even well explored.  All of a sudden it’s thrown at you and none of the characters react to it, unless you call crying for two minutes a reaction. I love reading about the supernatural but everything has its place.  AND THIS WAS NOT IT!  Not even the priest in the story was overly concerned with lights flickering on and off and the temperature dipping more than 20 degrees in less than a minute.  There was just no tie-in between the two stories.

But let’s move on and talk about grammar and spelling.  Now I am not naive.  Spelling issues appear in every book as no one can catch everything.  But seriously, the errors that appear in this book a second grader can identify!  This is an example of an author who would prefer to say he has self-published many books rather that say he has self published 2 or 3 excellent ones. He is the reason indie authors can’t get respect.

It took me two tries to get into this book.  The first time around I only read 5 pages and then was so disgusted by the mispellings and grammatical errors, I threw it in the “yard sale” pile.

I woke up the next morning and figured I would give it another go.  I really don’t like not finishing books.  The first 5 pages were the same.  Made me upset and I had to stop all the time to figure what what he was trying to say.  However…

After those 5 pages, this book is not all that bad.  The mistakes are greatly reduced and the grammar (while still bad) was still somewhat forgivable.

This is a good story about two high-schoolers who go through finding themselves, accepting what they find, and then thrusting their find into the world.  It’s a nice quick read.  It only took me 1.5 hours to get through the book as it is easy-going and pretty free flowing.

That being said, I do have two complaints.  The first is the decisions the boys make and the reaction of their peers during the prom wasn’t very well explored.  If this book is being touted and giving a glimpse of what goes through people’s minds, the glimpse was far too narrow and brief to make its mark.   The book as it is written fails for me for that reason.  Adding more chapters and really exploring the characters hearts and soul would have made it a deeper read.

The second complaint would be the cover.  It’s horrid.  In a time where book lovers get thrown hundreds of books a week as potential reads, the covers are the only thing they have to go by.  The title is misplaced, the font is horrible, and the art looks like it was drawn by a elementary art student.

All that being said, it was a quick, easy read.  Nothing too memorable (if at all) but still passable.

I got this book after “meeting” the author on a forum.  I was excited to get this book, as the description made it seem quite interesting.

After the first two pages I was so turned off by the writing I almost didn’t continue reading the book.  There are so many “inner scene wordings” that unless you are into that scene or in that exact location you would have no idea what is being said.

The book begins by talking about “The Tara” and “The Pink Flamingo”.  I don’t know either of those places, so seeing them mentioned over and over was annoying and alienating.  I continued reading hoping there would be a reference or some history about what these places were, but got let down.  Nothing was mentioned.

Once we get past these places, we are finally brought to the house where all the action takes place.  We get an excruciatingly long description of what it looks like.  Which, according to my above complaint, I should have welcomed with open arms.  Instead this is what I got:

“This Homestead (dare we call it that) lavished guests with a huge main room, a sunken living space decked with Florentine couches and Limoges chairs over an ever changing doily of oriental carpeting.”

And that was one of the simpler put descriptions.  I still have no idea what type of couches and chairs were in that room.  It wouldn’t be so bad if after using 25 cent words he would further explain it to make sure all his readers got a mental picture. While I was reading the book I kept picturing lawn chairs with a wicker couch.  I knew that was wrong, but the author didn’t think it was important enough for me to know what the design style was, so I didn’t think it was important enough to care.

Once the book started gaining momentum, words like “‘`elan” get thrown in sentences.  All this accomplishes is to make you stop reading and wonder what the word means.  If it doesn’t add to the story…leave it out!

I found it funny that on page 22, Mort is found describing Todd as pretentious for using words such as “echelon”.  Let’s hope he never reads this book.

Also by this point, I vow never to read another book that uses italics.  It seems like every 15 words italics are being used.  Much more in the beginning of the book.  Italics are to be used to make a statement.  If they appear all over the page, they make the wrong statement.

If you can forgive all of the above (plus a multitude of misspellings) the underling story is a good one, but not unique enough to make it stand out.  The activities and occurrences in this book can be found in any scene, with any gender, and any social class.  It just wasn’t special.