From the first sentence, this book made me go into full edit mode starting with ‘slipped the letter’ followed by ‘hesitated’ in the next sentence, a contradiction easily remedied by changing ‘slipped’ to ‘went to slip’. ‘Secondclass’ (paragraph 10) should be hyphenated.
My biggest criticism is the excessive use of ‘had’ - 88 instances (in it’s various forms) in the Prologue alone: ‘had’ - 42 ‘he’d’ - 35; ‘they’d’ - 8; ‘hadn’t’ - 3, with ‘He’d had always’ (paragraph 18) being a spectacular cock-up. Constantly coming across these made reading this book so irritating and distracting that I stopped at the end of the Prologue.
It both frustrates and saddens me that so many authors don’t invest in a good, honest critique and/or strong edit. I appreciate that these are expensive, but they can prevent a lot of angst and expensive remedial work if tackled right from the start.
My biggest criticism is the excessive use of ‘had’ - 88 instances (in it’s various forms) in the Prologue alone: ‘had’ - 42 ‘he’d’ - 35; ‘they’d’ - 8; ‘hadn’t’ - 3, with ‘He’d had always’ (paragraph 18) being a spectacular cock-up. Constantly coming across these made reading this book so irritating and distracting that I stopped at the end of the Prologue.
It both frustrates and saddens me that so many authors don’t invest in a good, honest critique and/or strong edit. I appreciate that these are expensive, but they can prevent a lot of angst and expensive remedial work if tackled right from the start.