Not a book review

Reviewers hate to give a sincere effort a bad review. Sure, if the book is an obvious stinker—say, a children’s book by a so-called celebrity author—it’s easy to pull out the long knives. When the book obviously entailed a lot of effort and research, and (even worse!) the author appears to be a decent and dedicated person, it’s a lot harder.

Years ago I’d read and enjoyed the first book by she who will not be named. Recently, I even heard her speak, and she seems like a serious and thoughtful writer, my kinda girl. So I was prepared to like her book, and picked it up with great anticipation. It’s an absolute train wreck. Billed as an historical NOVEL, it is blissfully free of any semblance of plot. As one editor put it about bad historical fiction, you can almost see the index cards laid out on the dining room table. I don’t think there was a single fact about the book’s subject that wasn’t crammed in somewhere. Often, the facts were foisted upon the reader by the execrable and neophyte practice of having characters tell each other about facts that each of them had every reason to know already. I probably ground my dental work down by several millimeters while reading those sections.

On and on it goes, for 870 pages. Doesn’t anyone at her (major) publisher own a blue pencil? Is the delete key missing on their keyboard? I wasted night after night of bedtime reading, hoping against hope that somewhere in this phone book this author would eventually hit her stride and give me something to think about. Plus, her main character is such an impossible twit that by page 350 I was rooting for the bad guys to do her in, and ready to cheer when they finally did.

All serious authors by now are asking themselves how this stuff gets published. Disabuse yourself of the notion that you have to be good to get published. There’s a huge greenbacks factor here—the first book made a ton of money, and I’ll bet the presales on this one were enough (ahem) to cover the paper costs and gold foil on the cover. I can’t believe I did my small part by purchasing this brick.

Still, I’m not going to out her. She’s gone on to publish a bunch more books, so someone must like them, and she had many fans when I heard her speak. A lot of work went into this book, and I do applaud that. I’m also a chicken—if I run into her again, I don’t want to have to hide. But if it’s 870 pages long, a Literary Guild Selection, and published by St. Martin’s, don’t buy it!