Another Book Rant

The first clue? The fact that the book was sitting on the library shelf. New books in demand circulate off of a waiting list and don't make it to the stacks.

The next clue? I'm the third person to check out the book. Not exactly getting worn out with reading.

Hyperion/Voice was twittering all kinds of hype, giving away free copies of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane to anyone quick enough to twitter back. When I saw the book at the library, I thought I might see what the hype was all about.

After twenty pages, I was angry and depressed. How does this sort of thing get an agent's attention, let alone a publishing contract, while my manuscripts are ignored?

Katherine Howe is working on her doctorate, specializing in the very era that is used as the book's setting. She can trace her ancestry back to a couple of women touched by the Salem witch trials, which figure prominently in the novel.

The characters don't just speak, they grunt, they point out, they demur, they sigh, they prompt. It's with good reason that writers are told to avoid the dialog tags. It really is annoying. The same goes for dialect. I get it that the characters would speak with a New England accent. Please don't spell it out in every line of dialog. It's nearly impossible to decipher.

There's so much description, an abundance of adjectives and adverbs that had me skimming over the pages in short order, in search of a story line. Who needs Noah Lukeman's advice on writing? Literary agent Suzanne Gluck didn't seem to mind, since she agreed to represent Ms. Howe.

The writing style was academic and a bit dry, with the author's copious knowledge of the time period dumped in chunks that again were skimmed over.

In the end, I simply didn't care about the characters. I didn't care if Deliverance Dane's physick book was ever found. I didn't care if the protagonist found love, and I didn't care if the evil college professor got his comeuppance.

After fifty pages, I closed the book and today it's going back to the library, for someone else to tackle.

Little wonder, I suppose, that someone at Hyperion/Voice was busy at their computer, sending off tweets to the world. Buzz has to be generated to promote sales when word of mouth is heading in the opposite direction.