aztecladyReluctance to go back to reading after being distracted by nothing, is a reliable indicator of an impending DNF.
Dammit.
I had such high hopes.
Bold move to have your lead character dissing historical romance as "terrible", when your own book sucks hard on several levels.
Another day, another 2024 ARC without a table of contents.
why.
why make reviewers lives more difficult.
why
(never mind: the formatting is bad, so that's probably why--so many small traditional publishers just don't make an effort with their digital editions)
oh lord, third person, present tense, several points of view.
why.
"she (action)"
"she (different action"
"she (yet another action)"
oh, gee, it's two different people, but you won't know for pages on end.
why.
Every time an author states that borrowing from a library "steals" sales from them, I want to scream.
Publishers have indoctrinated authors against libraries, to authors' own detriment. Libraries buy your book, and if it gets popular, they buy more copies--but more, they introduce readers to your work, and those readers will spread the word, even if they don't buy your books themselves.
#Libraries are unpaid marketing. Be thankful.
There's an actually-really-good book buried beneath the execrable formatting; for the author's sake, I really hope the published version was fixed.
Not everyone is going to put up with that shit for over sixty pages in order to get to the easier-to-read (while still badly formatted) meatier part of the novel.
The truly execrable formatting is making the reading of a book with a non-typical structure uphill work--and since I read for pleasure and to escape the current hellscape, a book that I'm avoiding because bad formatting and difficult structure is a book I'm likely to DNF through no fault of the book.
I can only hope the released version had some work done, because ARGH!
Gog help me, it's July 2024--how in hell's name can formatting for ARCs by traditional publishing houses, however small, be so shitty--not only is there no table of contents (which makes life hell for reviewers, thank you, I hate it), but the random line breaks, with or without a random header or footer somewhere in the middle of the text?
::rage scream::
This is sabotaging the author by malpractice, for real.
#ReadingRant when you are writing in a historical period, for the love of everything, give the reader context somewhere--mentioning the year would be great, but if not, something we can use to ground your story as something other than "vaguely medieval" or "sometime in the vague past"
I beg you.
ETA: a footnote. an endnote. an author's note before or after. Just...something, pretty pretty please.
no no no nonono
No person who grew up speaking Spanish would EVER say "estupido police"--never.
a) policía is a feminine noun, so the adjective has to match, and b) words in Spanish with stress in the third-to-last syllable ALWAYS have to be accented, so they would say estúpida police.