If she is an published Russian author with a firm command of the language then the first file you linked is rubbish. I don't know Russian but that English is painful to read. Bear in mind I am not a romance reader so perhaps someone else will chime in and tell us some of my complaints are normal conventions for the genre.
The very first line's grammar, "Through a wide snowy meadow covered with low shrubs, stormed a white-maned mare with a girl in the saddle." made me wince. It should read without a separate leading clause, like "A white-maned mare with a girl in the saddle stormed through a wide snowy meadow covered with low shrubs." There is a minor issue of what the meadow is covered with. We usually say the snow covers a snowy meadow, not the shrubs. Are the shrubs snow-covered, sticking up through the snow, or ?
There are too many hyphens and not enough notations for dialog. Dialog should be enclosed in quotes.
I don't agree with many of the colons. Example from page one, "Radmila would do everything for her favorite: feeding Goluba first, eating herself – perhaps." Colons are for lists or examples.
There are pure translation errors. For example (top of page two), in "... a terrible drought exhausted Russian land." In English we would would write there either "the Russian land" or "Russia."
Some words may be poor choices but I don't know who to blame. On page 3, a semi-conscious dying man's hand is unlikely to "quail" at a touch, meaning an intended fearful recoil.
I have to also question the author's writing skill even in her native language because of things like jumping from Radmilla's head to Ulrich's head. Omniscient viewpoint is normally very weak, the mark of a novice.
There are too many substitutes for "said" in the dialog. The girl yelled, the midwives plead, the girl later whispers, thinks out loud, etcetera. Some of that is useful but not as much as I see. Substitutes for said should be used sparingly.
Another example is the paragraph continued at the top of the second page. It has far too much telling-not-showing all at once. You have to wake the reader up after slogging through that.
Last edited by Penforhire; 08-07-2011 at 11:11 AM.
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