[*] ISBN: 9780679422044
If this book weren't so darn encouraging to me, as an aspiring author, I would have never finished reading it. I figure if this book can be published by a major publisher, someday, something I write can get published, too. Well, maybe I would have finished it just because it's set in approximately the same time and place (pre-Disneyland Orange County, CA) of the book I'm writing for National Novel Writing Month. This doesn't mean that I intend to steal ideas from it, just that I found some clues for coloring the world I'm creating.
What worked: the characters were sweet and kooky, some passages were pleasantly evocative of time and place, the overall idea of California as a land of dreams.
What didn't work: the author started right off throwing bits of localized jargon at the reader without explaining it and never looked back, most of the kooky characters were never really fleshed out into individuals that we actually cared about - they seemed to be just place holders and cogs in the plot - what they did never really jelled into funniness, and the plot was convoluted enough for an amazing mystery or spy novel but was not well drawn enough to overcome the other faults of the book.
As another reviewer noted, if you're a big fan of Disney or Disneyland, you might enjoy skimming through this. Otherwise, it's just another excuse for you to say to yourself, "I could write a book better than that."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment