Quote:
Originally Posted by AMacD
Some books are so poorly written that it takes less than a paragraph to reject that one. ... I am not going to waste my time on a hopeless book when there are a thousand more in the queue waiting to be enjoyed.
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One book that I thoroughly enjoyed last year was
Snow Ball by April L Hamilton. I bought a Kindle edition at Amazon after April posted something about the book here at MobileRead. When I looked at the book description on Amazon.com it sounded fairly good, and there were even a couple of reviews indicating that the reviewer enjoyed the book, so I bought it. While the story is good and the dialog is superb, there are flaws in the book. This is the first paragraph:
Quote:
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Velma and Naomi sat in their usual spot, the back left-hand booth at the IHOP in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Naomi, the Canadian, was a native of Winnipeg, and the American, Velma, lived in Sheboygan Falls. Naomi was the taller of the two at 5' 7". Her long, dark brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail and secured with a white, fake fur scrunchie designed to match the fake fur trim on her sweater. Her blue eyes had a slightly bugged appearance but she had creamy white, freckled skin and very high cheekbones and so was still a fairly attractive woman. Velma stood about 5' 4" and had a tendency toward plumpness. She wore her shoulder-length, medium blonde hair cinched up in a clip. She too had enviable skin, though her almost black eyes were certainly the lovelier between the two of them. Both spoke with the nasal, vaguely Scandinavian-sounding twang and singsong cadence so common to the region. Naomi's husband Peter and Velma's husband Walt ran a business together with some other associates on both sides of the border. Peter acted as the Canadian point of contact and Walt was his counterpart in the U.S. for their particular part of the operation. Velma and Naomi met twice a month in this same restaurant to exchange pictures of their kids, to plan joint family vacations and to carry packages to one another's husbands.
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I took the time to write to April and comment that her introduction needed some work to hook the reader right off the bat because the rest of the book is so good and as I said, the dialogue is superb. She replied that she was attempting to portray the two protagonists are "just ordinary women with ordinary lives". And I agree that would be a good objective, but she missed the boat with this lack-luster approach. I think that she could have met her goal without a stiff/stilted intro. Unfortunately, if someone downloads a sample, they may give up before getting to the good stuff and miss out on a zany, madcap adventure.