"On a compelling journey searching for his family of origin, Bob Hafetz explores the emotional ride that adoptees take while searching for their birth families. His ability to express his feelings make this profound book a primer for everyone who wants to understand underlying issues for adoptees. A beautiful book that you will not want to put down."Not Remembered Never Forgotten is in desperate need of a stringent line-edit. The text is far too often vague, confusing or reliant on opinion or assumption rather than research or hard fact; a couple of sentences are so poorly-written they are nonsensical; and in one particular case it's stated that people only adopt because they can't have biological children, which simply isn't the case. A strong edit would resolve all of these problems and produce a tighter, more coherent book with greatly-improved pacing and flow.
Then there are the careless errors: there is a punctuation error in the subtitle; a spelling mistake in the quote which is used to introduce the book; and several typos which really should have been corrected before this book was published. It's a shame because despite all of the problems I've listed this is a reasonably well-written book which isn't nearly as bad as many of the others I've reviewed here. I read as far as the tenth page, and I was disappointed not to have to read further.
2 comments:
Jane, I'm disappointed, too. I'd have been interested enough to pick this one up, but given it's so full of errors, I'm afraid it would've taken a few flying lessons before I got very far into it.
My second novel is about a birthmother who searches for the child she relinquished 38 years ago, so I have a strong interest in the subject of adoption.
Maggie, I know writing is hard, and self-editing doesn't come easily to most of us: but it's an essential part of a writer's armoury, and we really mustn't ignore that side of our craft if we want to succeed.
So many of the self-published books I've seen contain careless errors which could easily have been corrected. If they had been sorted out before publication then the books would have been so much better. I don't understand why so many writers shoot themselves in their metaphorical feet in this way. It's sad.
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