BOOK REVIEW: Expeditionary Force Series -- Books 1 thru 3 (Craig Alans)
(You're A Lie - Slash feat. Miles Kennedy)
What makes an entertaining story? This is a question with a complex, faceted answer, and it frequently falls prey to subjectivity. Most will agree that one of those facets has to do with how easy a book is to read, and how much story you get out of the other end.
Books for children tend to require little effort, and the reward for that effort is frequently just as small. As the subject material and complexity of the writing grows, the hope is that the story the book is telling will also grow. The greater the investment of effort, the more the story will hopefully pay off. This assumes, of course, that the story was worth reading in the first place.
I don't mind working a little for my story. I don't mind an author whose vocabulary is deeply nuanced, and I typically don't mind detail-oriented books that pertain to the story as long as it's subject material I'm familiar with. Where some books fall down for me is in the pages and pages of detail and vocabulary that I'm not familiar with, tied to a story element that I can't be bothered over.
A very good friend of mine poked me repeatedly to give the first book of the Expeditionary Force series, titled 'Columbus Day', a shot. Another friend of mine backed his recommendation as well, so I finally picked it up on the cheap from Amazon, and started reading.
I immediately wondered what in the hell was wrong with my friends. The story wasn't particular bad, mind you, but it was written like a high schooler's fanfic. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation use, they were all absolutely horrible. Run-on sentences and commas were present on almost every page, and the literary snob in me felt like he was crawling out of my skin with discomfort.
"Just keep reading," they urged me. "Wait for the beer can."
So I suffered through the first third of the book.
And then I found the beer can, and I got it.
'Columbus Day', and indeed books two and three of the series, are poorly written from a mechanical standpoint. They are not complex. They require no intellectual investment whatsoever. And they're laugh-out-loud funny if you enjoy books about a rag-tag bunch of people wandering around space using technology that's way, way over their heads solving problems with stupidity instead of highly evolved brilliance. That's really all I can say about the books without spoiling them, and you absolutely don't want me to spoil them. There's nothing really surprising about them. They're not that unpredictable. They're like someone recounting a funny joke that takes awhile to get to the end, but that's okay because it's full of funny parts.
'Columbus Day' costs a whopping 99 cents to buy on Amazon for your Kindle or Kindle App. In return for that dollar, you get a story that's easy to pick up, easy to put down, laughably funny because of the Every-Man nature of the main characters, and requires absolutely no commitment whatsoever from you as a reader.
Wait for the beer can. Trust me.
What makes an entertaining story? This is a question with a complex, faceted answer, and it frequently falls prey to subjectivity. Most will agree that one of those facets has to do with how easy a book is to read, and how much story you get out of the other end.
Books for children tend to require little effort, and the reward for that effort is frequently just as small. As the subject material and complexity of the writing grows, the hope is that the story the book is telling will also grow. The greater the investment of effort, the more the story will hopefully pay off. This assumes, of course, that the story was worth reading in the first place.
I don't mind working a little for my story. I don't mind an author whose vocabulary is deeply nuanced, and I typically don't mind detail-oriented books that pertain to the story as long as it's subject material I'm familiar with. Where some books fall down for me is in the pages and pages of detail and vocabulary that I'm not familiar with, tied to a story element that I can't be bothered over.
A very good friend of mine poked me repeatedly to give the first book of the Expeditionary Force series, titled 'Columbus Day', a shot. Another friend of mine backed his recommendation as well, so I finally picked it up on the cheap from Amazon, and started reading.
I immediately wondered what in the hell was wrong with my friends. The story wasn't particular bad, mind you, but it was written like a high schooler's fanfic. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation use, they were all absolutely horrible. Run-on sentences and commas were present on almost every page, and the literary snob in me felt like he was crawling out of my skin with discomfort.
"Just keep reading," they urged me. "Wait for the beer can."
So I suffered through the first third of the book.
And then I found the beer can, and I got it.
'Columbus Day', and indeed books two and three of the series, are poorly written from a mechanical standpoint. They are not complex. They require no intellectual investment whatsoever. And they're laugh-out-loud funny if you enjoy books about a rag-tag bunch of people wandering around space using technology that's way, way over their heads solving problems with stupidity instead of highly evolved brilliance. That's really all I can say about the books without spoiling them, and you absolutely don't want me to spoil them. There's nothing really surprising about them. They're not that unpredictable. They're like someone recounting a funny joke that takes awhile to get to the end, but that's okay because it's full of funny parts.
'Columbus Day' costs a whopping 99 cents to buy on Amazon for your Kindle or Kindle App. In return for that dollar, you get a story that's easy to pick up, easy to put down, laughably funny because of the Every-Man nature of the main characters, and requires absolutely no commitment whatsoever from you as a reader.
Wait for the beer can. Trust me.
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