Gentleman Takes a Chance: 09/13/10

A popular question in the book blogosphere is "do you judge a book by its cover?" Yes, I say, especially with library books. For the most part, my library book cover lust has served me well. Sometimes though, I find a book I can't finish. Gentleman Takes a Chance by Sarah A. Hoyt was one of those unfinished books.

The book is set in Colorado. It starts during a bad snow storm. Kyrie and Tom share a house. Turns out they're both shape-shifters. Tom mid shower loses control of his thoughts and takes out the bathroom in the process, taking his other form unexpectedly. Tom's problem leads to a mystery at the local aquarium. It involves dragons who are out for blood.

The book though is fraught with problems: typos, weird editing and clunky language. This is a professionally produced book, published by Baen. They did a disservice to the author.

Books like this one are what I point to when people ask me why I review self published books. I see about the same percentage of piss poor editing from the big houses as I do from the self published books. As long as that continues to be the case, I'm not going to ignore the self pubs if the books otherwise sound interesting.

Comments (0)

Comment #1: Tuesday, September, 14, 2010 at 06:19:59

Karen and Gerard

Wow, that's so sad about all the mistakes in this book that was professionally published. I did read a self-published one that had a LOT of misspelled words practically every page! It was very hard to read because of that. The only reason I read it was because it was written by someone I worked with who used the same self-publisher as I did.

Comment #2: Sunday, September 19, 2010 at 20:40:16

Pussreboots

Most of the self published books haven't been as bad as what you've described. The ones that are of course get that counted against them in the review. This book though, shouldn't have suffered from these mistakes. The idea was interesting. So was the setting. But the execution was terrible.