Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke King
Xenolith actually had me hooked. I was interested. Into the story and wanting to know what would happen next. Then I got to Chapter 6 and you introduced a new point of view character. And at that point I stopped reading.
There's some "rule" about point of view characters and setting up the pattern early. If you're going to have x number of point of view characters, then they should appear early - or, alternately, you can add one relatively late into the novel (perhaps a third of the way in) when the reader is firmly hooked.
At the point where you introduced Gi, I wanted to know what was happening with Frank on the river, and what had happened to Liz. I figured Gi was some sort of Amazonian, but I'd already been taken through a frame from the present, into a backstory, the present of the novel, and then had a mystery set up - Liz disappearing, and then Frank was in the river. That was where I wanted to be.
If you had set up Gi earlier - even if we'd had a small snippet from her perspective, then I probably would have read on.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I didn't have any problem with your prose that I can remember. I thought it was quite good.
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I know exactly what you mean. My first inclination was actually to have the POV alternate much earlier in the story, but my early readers found this very confusing. They assumed that the band of warriors that assaulted Frank in Belize the first chapter is the same group that gets stuck in Connecticut later on. Separating the POVs created a distance that prevented this particular confusion from happening, at the expense of alienating readers like yourself who thought they were getting one kind of story and then are smacked over the head with something completely different in Chapter 6. Those who survive this transition generally go on to get hooked again, but I agree that the structure of Xenolith was not conducive to maximizing readership.
Thanks for the feedback. It's nice to hear how different readers have experienced the story, whether positively or negatively. As for the prose, I keep finding paragraphs that make me go, 'huh;' and I'm supposed to be the writer. I think I have them all fixed now, but who knows?