Today we realize that relying on pronouns to orient a scene involving a dozen characters is a recipe for disaster.
What I gleaned about the story: A person of unspecified age and gender is either a check-out clerk in a retail store, a robot for sale, or possibly a customer. And there are other people of each type present. Presumably, they all buy/sell each other for fun and profit.
Find this book on Amazon.
Analysis: She waited silently as the purchaser walked down the line, stopping occasionally to look at one of her fellows. The man had irregular features… Who is “she?” The narrator? Possibly the purchaser? Who is “the man?” The purchaser or the fellow? And whose “fellows” are they? Fellow purchasers? Fellow narrators? This is not an auspicious way to start. Two sentences into the first paragraph and I’m hopelessly lost.
This strikes me as a likely case of a writer who has not left the project sitting idle for a while and come back to it later for revisions. Clearly the author knows what’s going on because she has it all organized and visualized in her head, but the actual text written does not convey enough of that imagined scene for a reader to reconstruct the scene. Or at least, not enough for me.
Analysis: I’m 5 paragraphs further in and I still have no idea who “she” is. Probably because we’ve had about 8 different people mentioned so far, and still no clear identifiers.
Analysis: To be blunt, I’m not even at the bottom of the first page and I still have no idea who is in this scene. There’s a bit of dialogue between the “purchaser” and a robot, but I have no concrete idea who the narrator is in this scene, or what’s happening. If I pushed myself to guess, I think the narrator is another robot on the shelf, or in line, but I’m far from certain. And frankly, by this point I’m already mentally exhausted, like a homicide detective trying to reconstruct the scene from three vague clues left behind at the scene.
My comment to your post about this on Google+: “Um, +Jefferson Smith, this is from the book description – hard to miss on the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Roses-Elizabeth-McCoy-ebook/dp/B007R8G4J4) and in its position before the ToC in the e-book sample itself: ‘Sarafina was content to be an accountant, insulated from the public as she kept the numbers behaving and played chess with her fellows. But when the First Daris Bank is bought out, her indenture is sold to a cruise ship and Sarafina is thrust into a job she was never meant for. Now she’s dealing with a motley crew, drunkard captain, flirtatious first officer, fire-sale equipment, and worst of all . . . Passengers.’ That’s the sketch that intrigued me enough to read the full sample, where I learned in the first paragraph who the ‘purchaser’ is, and understood from the following nine lines of dialog who – and what! – the other players were and what their relationships meant. Altogether a satisfying beginning, for me. But your mileage clearly varies, and I will defend to the death your right to feel differently about it! :-)”
And, as I wrote in a subsequent comment after you defended your position, we can agree to disagree on this one.
Yes, many readers will read the marketing blurb and gather more information from that, which might clarify things, but with IOD readings, I avoid the marketing (even if it’s included on the copyright page, as it was in this case) and go straight to the beginning of the story, after the Table of Contents. It has been my experience that many books ruin the reading experience by revealing too much in the blurb or cover commentary. So, to evaluate the story, I read nothing but the story.
Agreed about the slightly confusing start (I don’t like stories starting with ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘the boy’ etc. – why not give us a name? But this could easily be tweaked, and by the end of the first page I wanted to read on as the android and her world interested me.
I think the first paragraphs of a book can be the hardest to write, and the hardest to edit on your own.
It’s a beautiful cover, and I hope the author will make a few changes, I think it would be worth the effort.