Nymphas' WorldAlthough Kay is only ten years old, she always knew that she broke away from the ordinary. However, she did not anticipate ever acquainting herself with a fairy. Kay discovers a new world of old that no other human has ever trespassed before, meeting mythical creatures, strange beings and experiencing magic!
Kay and her brother Rob explore the land of Nymphas and learn much about fairy origin. There are, however, evil Nymphas as well as virtuous. Rob is snatched by the Onyx Nymphas and Kay has no choice but to go...
Beyond the Onyx Mountains.
Nymphas' World has the most off-putting cover I've seen on a book for a long time. It's an ugly image, badly executed, without any comedic value to lessen its impact.
The back cover copy is, as you can see, confused and confusing, and can't even manage to remain in one tense. And then we get to the text inside.
It takes a lot of effort to write a novel and this one is relatively substantial, at nearly four hundred pages long: I applaud Ms Haldane’s efforts for getting so far. But I'm afraid that her writing is nowhere near good enough to be published.
She makes so many of the basic errors that I wondered at times if it was intentional: she writes in a very passive voice; she lists almost every action her characters perform, so reducing her pacing to a plodding, pedantic crawl; her sentences are so poorly constructed that it is often difficult to extract any meaning from them; and she has a tendency to sacrifice clarity in favour of big, impressive-sounding words.
These are issues that even the most skilled editor could not fix: with all due respect to Ms Haldane her writing just isn't up to a good enough standard, I'm afraid. I went out of my way to be lenient here, but even so I read just four pages out of three hundred and eighty-four. I strongly advise this writer to read more, and to learn more about the craft of writing, before she considers publishing anything else.
3 comments:
A frightening review, Jane.
(But rest assured, I'm still going to send you mine when it's printed.)
I like this website!! And you are so right on so many self-published books!! Why won't they learn how to write??
I've reviewed some good books here, but sadly they're outnumbered by the bad ones.
The problem isn't that most of the self-published writers I've reviewed here can't write (although some can't): they just seem unable to read their own work critically, or to revise or edit with any level of skill. Which means that their work is no more than a first draft, and is not likely to ever improve.
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