Today I see that a strong scene concept is not enough to hold me in the story if the editing gremlins gather in sufficient number.
What I gleaned about the story: A young woman, crippled and discarded by an abusive father, lives and works with the nuns, caring for the younger orphans. But now a strange infant has been given into their care, and while everyone else fears him, our heroine just knows that she was meant to protect him. And so she probably will.
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Analysis: The story opens in a rather bleak sounding orphanage, in which the babies are all strapped to chairs, and their chamber pots are emptied several times a day. Poor baby orphans! But I’m confused by the mechanics here. The soft-hearted caregiver goes into the baby room and several of the older ones wave to her from their cribs. But I thought the babies were all strapped in their chairs? And since we’ve just been told that they leave their chair-straps behind and move to the next room once they’re old enough, I don’t see who could be standing in the cribs. I’m sure I must be misreading something, but I can’t find it, and since this confusion comes on the first page, the flag goes up.
Analysis: By the third page, the headwords have begun to echo with some frequency. On this page alone, I’ve tripped over a pair of I-sentences, and then another trio of them further down, plus a pair of echoing paragraphs. And that’s after ignoring the two or three places where I felt echoes were being used on purpose, for rhetorical effect.
Analysis: For a while, I was ignoring the occasional missing comma, but then I hit this passage: “What will you do for me if I agree?” She asked, lifting her head haughtily. The problem is that I hit that capitalized “She” and took it on faith that it was correct, so I read it as the beginning of a new sentence. But when that ran headlong into a period, I realized that something had gone awry. That earlier “She” should have been lower case, because that clause concluded the previous sentence instead of starting a new one.
Note: The story itself seemed to have some strong images, so I was optimistic that it might be a good one, but these nuisance glitches came too densely for me to look past them.
To be honest the book did have a lot of misspellings and the grammar was not that good at some parts but the story is very good. I did stop at some sentences to wonder about them but it never stopped me from reading on. In the first few pages the story seems to be about Meri (the nun) but is in fact about Senya (the baby). I found the writing style different as I haven’t read a story where the events are described from the point of view of different characters rather than the hero or a narrator. All the characters had some far relation and everyone had a turn and had their own share of narration, ideas, lives, and mainly thoughts about the hero. The hero never got a turn to describe the events from his point of view and this, for me, was a hook. I longed for the hero to talk or expressed himself to other characters which happened rarely thus I was very excited about the end of the story. I do hate that fact that the story has 12 more books in order to be complete. This usually gets me to the point of boredom and eventually I drop the story and never look back. As far as I am concerned, I will be moving to the 2nd book but I am not sure if I can finish all 13 since I am inpatient at most times to know the ending of any story.
That’s an important point, Rand. If the story grabs you, you’ll be willing to look past some small problems. The question is always a trade off between how hard it grabs you and how big the issues are – both of which depend on the reader.