Unbelievably bad writing
346404
Halfway through this book, the author says that he had doubts about its quality. Dont use long words, a friend tells him. Too bad he didn't listen.

This book is written in the most unbelievable collection of long words and convoluted style. Every sentence oozes with adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, similes, together with apositional phrases. If you can say it in 10 words instead of five, Eames uses 15. If you can show off a word no one ever uses, Eames does it. He must have written this book with five thesauruses open at the same times. Some of the similes he uses are so ludicrous and involved that you have to stop and wonder what type of mind could think of them. At one point, he keeps insisting that a bus ride he took in Iraq is like the bus ride in NEMESIS. If this is what he really thinks, maybe he should re-read NEMESIS.

I can't remember reading so many pompous, precious, pretentious words in one book (or, in some cases, in one sentence). At times, you also wonder if he is just crazy. At one point, he says he got into a taxi and waited 30 seconds before he told the driver where he wanted to go. If you were the driver, what would you think?

Another curious thing about this book is the authors repeatedly sarcastic remarks about people  based on what he thinks they thought. Doesnt it seem a little mean to project your own thoughts into someone elses head, and then condemn them for what you imagined they thought?

By the way, this book supposedly relates to train and bus trips Agatha Christie took in the 1920s and 1930s. And yes, as some of the other reviewers point out, Agatha Christie does show up briefly every 40 or 50 pages. Once, Eames relates a story from a woman who actually met Christie  although he supposes that the woman did not like Christie.  But this book has no independent value except for the supposed link to Agatha Christie. Eames is supposedly a travel writer. However, no one could possibly stay awake through this book except to search for Christie anecdotes. So isn't he really cruising on Agatha Christies name and exploiting her for his own profit?

By the way, if you do read this book, please telll us whether you think he treated Jasna nicely.
3600645
Legally Bound and Legally Bound 2 are two of the worse romance books I've ever read.  Don't bother wtih them.  The writer has no skill--just throws names on paper.  I was so confused about who was who and who was in love with who or who was married to who that I actually had to re-read this bad prose.  I know the Romance novel category is not known for high writing skill, but Blue Saffire has very little skill at all.  And the poor grammar, bad diction, and bad spelling are rampant in this book to the point where you feel suckered for having paid for this.  The author can't even figure out what verb tense to use in MOST sentences--it's a very annoying, bad and boring book.  And what was up with adding Club Desire to the plot--is this a BDSM novel or not?  The author never could decide, so just threw in stuff but never followed through with it or made it a real part of the plot.  The first brother, Bobby, is ok but the second brother, Marcus, is so silly I wanted to punch him.  He's allegedly much older than his true love but boy you couldn't tell from this plot.  He acted like he was 13 and in middle school.  Best to pass this series altogether or you'll regret the money spent.
1336859
Unfortunately I bought 6 books in this series before finding out for myself that the writing skill of this so-called 'author' is amateurish at best.  He has no unexpressed thoughts and no undocumented moves by every character - of which there are entirely too many introduced at the outset.  I've been an avid reader of classical to modern literature throughout my 68 years and I've never read such trite and tedious storytelling as this.  Right from the beginning of this first book the interactions between the characters are simply implausible (e.g., the vehemently straight marine, clearly put off by the lead character being gay, puts his arm around the guy - more than once!) and the dialogue between and among the characters borders on the inane.  This writing is simply awful.  Update: After trying on 4 different days, I could not get over this elementary school writing style and have thrown this first book into the trash along with the other 5 I bought with it.  I have to seriously question the source(s) of any ratings here above 1 star, but even more seriously question how any publisher could consider such a book worth putting into print - let alone all the others that followed it.
3903663
I cannot stress what a terrible book this is.  I felt like I was reading something from a writer's workshop, where the writer was on the right track but was in dire need of a good editor and several more drafts.  Newcomb has a handful of interesting *concepts*, but they are poorly thought out and strung together in an excruciatingly immature fashion.  Everything is too convenient:  Tristan doesn't have the time to take a bath, but he can lounge around and chat while waiting in the hall, and even make a side trip?

The characters are stereotypical and weakly drawn: the amorality of the sorceresses is unintentionally comic, the sister's conversion to their ways is not even remotely believable, and the dwarf is but a poor shadow of Martin's Tyrion Lannister.

This isn't even worth a mindless read, because it's so poorly written that you'll keep smacking your head with the book.  There's so much better fiction to be had out there.  Don't waste your time with this one.
3255042
It's hard to describe how bad this book is. Where to start? The absurd, clunky dialogue? The impossible plot? The author's complete lack of knowledge of how law enforcement, government agencies, and particularly the CIA work? Or maybe with the mind-numbing exposition? Perhaps the condescending lecturing tone that the author uses to browbeat his readers? Thinking about all this gives me a headache.

Dan Brown doesn't so much write books as he flings random words on the page in hopes that some of them will stick. Which ones and in what order, he doesn't seem to care.

In the words of linguistics professor Geoffrey K. Pullum, "Brown's writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad."

How anyone -- much less 1,200 readers -- could rate this book with five stars is either an outright fraud or a testament to the concept behind the movie "Idiocracy."

While it is impossible to ignore how bad the writing is, for me bad writing alone won't sink a book to the one-star abyss; however, a badly written book combined with a ridiculous plot and lifeless characters -- which THE LOST SYMBOL has in abundance -- makes me wish for negative stars. Were it possible, I would rate this a minus two or three stars.

The word is that even Hollywood has bailed on this drivel. After wasting tons of money trying to turn this novel into a passable script, and by Hollywood standards that bar is set shockingly low, the producers gave up and decided to focus on Brown's next book, INFERNO. Good luck.
2092560
Horrible all the way through. Poorly written, and endless dialog.
4704432
Clancy must have written this with a hangover or something. The writing is just awful. "The sun rose promptly at dawn." Are you serious? This chapter opening alone should earn this novel the "Dark and Stormy Night" award for poor writing. The two brothers in the story are about as obnoxious and unlikeable as two characters can be, mostly due to the atrocious dialog between them. The plot is patently dumb and mostly predictable. The only mystery I found was wondering how, with just a few pages of the book left, Clancy was going to wrap up a story that was moving at full steam. I won't spoil it, but let's just say you if you picked the worst Clancy-fanboy ending, you'd be spot on.

Clancy's early works were masterpieces of plot and character development. The dialog in those early novels was tight and realistic and there were few, if any, implausible scenarios. Not so here. I'm finding it hard to believe Clancy actually wrote this.
3626968
I'm about 10% in and I know there is no way I can finish this book...the writing is ridiculously bad.  The author writes like a high school student.  The sentences are stilted and the characters sound stiff, overly formal and just plain dull.  No idea who is leaving the glowing reviews but there are hundreds, if not thousands of better reading options out there.
2343546
It makes me sad when an "author" ruins an okay idea with atrocious writing.  Ever Shade is a prime example.  Besides revealing key plot points and ruining the suspense, the dialogue is stilted and false. Characters' reactions don't ring true, and the vocabulary!! OMG - Ms. Purdy apparently does not know the definition of such common words as "gingerly", "heed", "burly", and misspelled words such as "franticly"?? Where's her spellcheck or thesaurus?  She claims to read all the time, but apparently none of it infiltrates.  I'm glad I didn't pay for this ebook. I'm sorry I wasted any time on it.
1664102
The prose here is increadibly choppy. It breaks and starts like a second graders first story. In many ways this is some of the worst writing that I have encountered in some time. One of the other reviewers here said that "the first nine pages were gripping and that its all down-hill from there." But I disagree. I think that from the outset, the plot is tortured in its absurdity. The death that Angela witnesses is contrived and sets up a very idiotic racism bent that seems to prevail throughout this book. I think that if you are going to touch on a subject like racism these days you are going to have to treat it with a little more respect than as a 3rd rate plot device.

Beyond the campy racisim, you have strong figures that are as 2 dimensional as can be. I mean, these figures here are straight out of every bad book you have ever read. It is like the author has combed old books and bad movies searching for the prototypical bad guy.

Avoid this book like the plauge. It is very very bad.
3399842
Not even close to the caliber of writing that went into 50 Shades! The writing is so horrendous that I won't subject myself to it any further. I'm glad it was free!!!
3863582
As an author and literature major I can confidently say this book is terrible. I was intrigued by the book because while I do not agree with homosexuality, the plot seemed interesting. Unfortunately the writing was so awful I couldn't enjoy the story. First and foremost, the author as a bad case of "tell, don't show" when it should be the other way around. Everything we get to know about the characters we find out from being explicitly told by the author. Of course, those few sentences every couple of chapters (for some reason she feels the need to discribe them over and over and over again in the first act) are all there is to the characters, period! Is it possible to be less than one-deminsional?

The pacing is utterly screwed up. The book jumps from one scene to another with very little to it. Many of the "chapters" (I hesitate to call them that because they are usually only a few pages long) have NO bearing on the plot.

The writing in and of itself is extremely simplistic. It's supposedly a book for adults (hence the nausiating sex) but it honestly wouldn't be a difficult read for a twelve year-old. Shonda (hate the ghetto pen name, by the way) throws in a couple of two-dollar words here and there, but for the most part the complexity of her prose makes Stephanie Meyer look like Stephen King. She also has a bad habit of jumping between past and present tense, an ametuer (high school) mistake that makes it clear that the book was poorly edited if it was edited at all. The dialogue is also very unrealitic with sentences like "He's trippin because I won't give up the booty." Seriously? This isn't coming from so guy who doesn't know how black people (if I were speaking I'd use the N-word) talk. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, so I'm coming from a "hood" perspective when I say people don't talk like that.

Speaking of Shonda also uses a lot of "hood" colloquialisms in her prose that would make difficult readind for anyone who didn't, figureative speaking, grow up in Detroit. Some might call this "keeping it real". I call it narrowing your audience to the few ignorant inner-city dwellers (not going to use the n-word) who are deluded enough to read this garbage.

I could go on forever. Suffice it to say this books sucks...hard.
4685454
This is an author whose horrible writing stopped me from reading his book after a few pages. I usually try to get through a chapter before I abandon a book (which is a rare thing in and of itself), but I just couldn't past the first 1%.

Like many reviewers here, I bought this in response to a news story.  I'm sorry I did.  This author *may* have a good story buried somewhere in this book - but his own words get in the way. I cannot get past his word choice (sounds like he swallowed a thesaurus), his style (he writes in third person present...and odd but valid choice...but he doesn't do it well, in my opinion), or his continued use of overpacked run-on sentences.

Here's an example - the second and third sentences of Ch. 1:
"She attempts to remain psychologically serene as she walks past the copious black body bags strewn throughout the front turf, cognisant of the reality that they enclose the the corpses of teenagers - all of whom were alive just a few short hours ago. Attempting to disregard the cadavers, Zea fixates on the building, which is equally as appalling to observe as the bodies as the occurrence of that afternoon has dispossessed the institution of every respectable attribute it once comprised."

...psychologically serene: she's a federal agent coming onto a crime scene. Putting this right up front makes me question her competence and her job choice. Her inner self can roil all it needs to - she needs to remain outwardly serene.
...bags strewn throughout: I highly doubt that body bags would be "strewn" (they would probably be laid carefully side by side, both because of efficiency and out of respect for the dead) and if they were, they'd be strewn across the turf, not throughout.
...cognisant of the reality: please don't try to impress me with big words and important-sounding phrases. Because if a federal agent isn't cognisant of the reality of the situation, I would not want them at that location.
...corpses and cadavers: cadavers is a medical term, not a "cop" term, and it's more often associated with dissection - does the author want me to think that they're being dissected right there and then?
...fixates on the building: A federal agent arriving at a crime scene would want to scan the entire scene - absorb all the data possible - and would not "fixate" on one thing, narrowing focus and therefore possibly missing evidence.
...as appalling to observe as the bodies: first, I doubt that a building's damage would be as appalling to see as that of a bullet-ridden body. Second, the character didn't observe any bodies - just body bags.
...dispossessed the institution: holy crap, get your words from reality and not from a thesaurus.

It gets worse. As I said, he may have a good book in there somewhere. I'm just not willing to slog through the miasma of his writing to get to it.
3961155
This is extraordinarily badly written juvenile fiction. I honestly was waiting for the joke to reveal itself. There are numerous misspellings and wrong word choices, and the prose is overwrought and style-less. It reads like a junior-high-school creative writing exercise. There is no point in a critical review; it is just terrible.

The book is essentially a description of the adventures of a boy detective in a futuristic technological dystopia. It reads very much as a pastiche of Sherlock Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown, set in a run-down city borrowed from William Gibson. There are no actual mysteries; the "detective" just makes fatuous pronouncements based on logical insights that make no sense; the plots are as sophisticated as the writing.

It is strongly recommended that you do not read this book or any of its sequels. I do not say that lightly. This is just horribly bad work.
4167302
This book reads as if it were written by a twelve year old. If that was the biggest issue with this book, I would have left it at that, not finished the book, and declined to even leave a review. The problem here is that the plot itself is actually incredibly promising, but the terrible writing just kills it. To begin with, the pacing is all over the place. Important plot points are rushed over, or skipped entirely, while far less important things are given far too much attention, dragging on for pages at a time. The main character, who is supposed to be nearly 30 years old, behaves like a teenager, especially her inner dialogue, which, by the way, we get far too much of. Even for an erotic novel, everything and everyone is ridiculously oversexed, as if the writer was a hormonally driven pre-teen with no actual sexual experiences of their own. The additions of highly recognized pop culture icons as fill-ins for character appearances is frankly childish, and just plain lazy. The entire "Brad and Angelina" bit should honestly just be completely taken out, as it adds absolutely nothing to the story, and just produces eye rolls at its ridiculousness. I spent the entire book re-writing it in my head so that I could enjoy the story. The worst thing, I think, is that there is so much potential here for an amazing story, if this were well written. I saw the potential for three entirely separate books in this one book, had the pacing been handled correctly, and had more attention been paid to the important plot points. I give this two stars for the plot being good, but I honestly almost dread giving it that much. I truly hope the writer buffs up her skills, gets a very good editor, and gives this the re-write it deserves.
3358382
I'm sorry, but I couldn't make it more than a few dozen pages into the story.  The writing is very poor, with too much attention paid to irrelevant details and not enough work done on sections that were obviously important.  The characters were all unlikable, and none of them seemed capable of carrying on a decent conversation.  The men are stupid, stubborn, boorish oafs or mere background noise.  The women are obnoxious jerks who can't seem to stop insulting any- and everyone, or they're cardboard cutouts.  The main character supposedly relies on being logical, yet she seems more than willing to go along with ridiculous ideas that have no evidence backing them up, because they fit her prejudices.
If this first attempt is any indication of how poor of a writer the author is, how did she end up being asked to write more of the same, eventually becoming a TV series?  The only reason I picked this book up in the first place was that I had heard about the show, and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  Since I bought the book used, I'm not giving the author more money to write more horrible stories.  I don't plan on buying another of the author's works.
1798406
It's amazing to me that people have rated this book so high. I can only assume that like myself they enjoy the tv show and are misplacing their feelings to this book. The writing is terrible I mean truly horrendous. There is way too many redundant descriptions. He uses every single cliche line he can think of. And he uses the same descriptions over and over and over (if I read "pure unadulterated hate" one more time I will scream). The character development for almost every character makes no sense.

I love the idea behind these books but the last two books in this series sucked and made the writing more obvious.