10-11-2011, 09:12 AM
This is another author whose name will be on my Never-To-Read-Again list.
I've often seen authors refer to their books as their babies. There's one big difference though, apart from the obvious
, in that real babies will probably be nothing like their parent. They can be smarter and have other talents. Books, on the other hand, can never be cleverer than the person who wrote them. So when I find a book where I can conclude its author isn't very intelligent, I can be sure his/her other works will be of the same intelligence level. I like reading clever stories; I want to learn something from the author and be amazed at the ingenious plot twists he/she invents. The Pretty Ones only taught me something about Dorothy Eden, see above.
For starters, an author should never tell the readers that her heroine is extremely intelligent. Please let the readers find that out for themselves; now they will only be more critical of the heroine's actions to see if the adjective is true. And no, I did not find Emma extremely intelligent. She is a junior reporter sent to interview Barnaby Court, writer of successful crime novels. She apparently didn't do any homework and knew next to nothing about him. Four weeks later she is married to him and only then discovers he has been married before and is a father to eight-year old twins.
They can't go on a honeymoon because the girls' mother hasn't collected them from boarding school, so the day after the wedding Emma, Barnaby and the twins go to the family farm to spend the holidays.
The book started with a teaser: a skeleton is dug up on a field belonging to the farm. The reader is confronted by a plethora of people right away: Willie, Emma, Dina, Maggy, Barnaby, Louisa, Rupert, Dudley, Mrs. Faithfull and Josephine. Please, next time not all at the same time without explaining who they are.
We need to wait until the second half of the book before the scene with the teaser continues.
One of the reasons why I love gothics is that lots of times they are written in first person, providing you the most intense way of identifying with the main character. Dorothy Eden tells the story in third person and often it's like we, the readers, are the audience in a play. We see from a distance and there's no room for close-ups and zooming in on details. Had we been Emma, we could have participated directly in the action. This can be done through third person viewpoint as well, of course, which will probably be more difficult and needs a clever author, which I've already concluded Ms. Eden is not.
A few more things that bothered me, like for example: If your name is Louisa Pinner and you wanted to embroider your handkerchief, would you write "L. Pinner" instead of "LP" or "Louisa"?
And this one is a spoiler: Emma deduces the first murdered person was forced to write the goodbye letter and put a practice version in her pocket. Later the murderer says "he hadn't meant to kill her, but he had been angry, and somehow, under his hands, she had died." Nobody, including the author and her editor, notices the discrepancy here.
I'd better stop harping now. Many situations seemed illogical and as I'm a stickler for logic, these might bother me more than other readers.
I'm done with Dorothy Eden and will award her, for effort, a 1 out of 10.
I've often seen authors refer to their books as their babies. There's one big difference though, apart from the obvious
, in that real babies will probably be nothing like their parent. They can be smarter and have other talents. Books, on the other hand, can never be cleverer than the person who wrote them. So when I find a book where I can conclude its author isn't very intelligent, I can be sure his/her other works will be of the same intelligence level. I like reading clever stories; I want to learn something from the author and be amazed at the ingenious plot twists he/she invents. The Pretty Ones only taught me something about Dorothy Eden, see above.For starters, an author should never tell the readers that her heroine is extremely intelligent. Please let the readers find that out for themselves; now they will only be more critical of the heroine's actions to see if the adjective is true. And no, I did not find Emma extremely intelligent. She is a junior reporter sent to interview Barnaby Court, writer of successful crime novels. She apparently didn't do any homework and knew next to nothing about him. Four weeks later she is married to him and only then discovers he has been married before and is a father to eight-year old twins.
They can't go on a honeymoon because the girls' mother hasn't collected them from boarding school, so the day after the wedding Emma, Barnaby and the twins go to the family farm to spend the holidays.
The book started with a teaser: a skeleton is dug up on a field belonging to the farm. The reader is confronted by a plethora of people right away: Willie, Emma, Dina, Maggy, Barnaby, Louisa, Rupert, Dudley, Mrs. Faithfull and Josephine. Please, next time not all at the same time without explaining who they are.
We need to wait until the second half of the book before the scene with the teaser continues.
One of the reasons why I love gothics is that lots of times they are written in first person, providing you the most intense way of identifying with the main character. Dorothy Eden tells the story in third person and often it's like we, the readers, are the audience in a play. We see from a distance and there's no room for close-ups and zooming in on details. Had we been Emma, we could have participated directly in the action. This can be done through third person viewpoint as well, of course, which will probably be more difficult and needs a clever author, which I've already concluded Ms. Eden is not.
A few more things that bothered me, like for example: If your name is Louisa Pinner and you wanted to embroider your handkerchief, would you write "L. Pinner" instead of "LP" or "Louisa"?
And this one is a spoiler: Emma deduces the first murdered person was forced to write the goodbye letter and put a practice version in her pocket. Later the murderer says "he hadn't meant to kill her, but he had been angry, and somehow, under his hands, she had died." Nobody, including the author and her editor, notices the discrepancy here.
I'd better stop harping now. Many situations seemed illogical and as I'm a stickler for logic, these might bother me more than other readers.
I'm done with Dorothy Eden and will award her, for effort, a 1 out of 10.
