485 Verbal

No, do not buy this.

I just finished the book “The Stepmother” and have two issues, which leads to two different complaints.  As noted, I am not the guy one thinks about when one thinks of “literary criticism.”  The “485 Verbal” of the title refers to my old SAT scores (barely above the minimum).  I have no real excuse except that I spent too much time on the match portion (685 score) and that just totally dogged it (pretty sure my PSAT was a lot better, but I don’t remember).  My wife and I laugh about SAT scores now because we both denied reality and obtained degrees and professions NOT in our strong suits.  I studied Communications and went into radio, while she took up accounting and became a CPA despite a low SAT score in Math (her Verbal score was 700-something).

But I digress…

Before I discuss my issues with “The Stepmother,” a brief plot summary:  Poor single mom acts as a personal trainer to a rich millionaire who falls in love with her and asks her to marry him.  She accepts, which pisses off his three adult kids (who are true leeches on the family fortune).  There is a threat to her life, but she survives and marries him, and then shortly after, HE dies in an accident which looks like was targeted for her, but instead, she winds up charged for the crime.  The rest of the book is about how she tries to figure out who really did it with the help of a friendly cop (who she falls in love with) and her attorney.  There are a couple of plot twists, but nothing too complicated and it gets predictable near the end.  That’s not my issue, although it didn’t help my “enjoyment” of the novel.

No, what grinds my gears is (a), horrible grammatical mistakes, and (b) the tendency to tell, not show, which is a cardinal sin in writing.

Now explaining the concept of “show, don’t tell” to a non-writer/reader is akin to explaining critical race theory to a Republican.  Even though we call it storytelling, one should SHOW the action, not TELL about it. 

Is Mary angry?  How angry?  Don’t tell us she’s very angry – show us?  Did she grimace?  Bite her lip?  Snarl?  Slam her hand against the window?  Throw a pot at someone?  SHOW us.  In this book, there was far too much telling when it would have been easy to show (the plot practically begs for it).  I noticed it pretty quickly and went back to read the critical reviews online, and I wish I had done so before buying the book (fortunately it was a used book, dirt cheap, but still).

And then, once you’ve shown us, don’t try to tell us what you’ve shown.  More than once, there was a line like, “Dammit,” she snapped angrily.  The “angrily” is superfluous; how else does one snap the word “Dammit?”  How about, “Dammit,” she snapped lustfully?  “Dammit,” she snapped gaily?  Nah.  It makes one wonder if the novel was edited or proofed.

Even more evidence of a lack of editing or proofing was the grammatical errors.  Desert instead of dessert (three times!), breath instead of breathe, not rather than now, draws instead of drawers, and other faux pas. Every time I came across one, I snapped, “DAMMIT,” and angrily, too.

I did so because “The Stepmother” isn’t a one-off.  It’s one of SEVEN books by this author, all with similar dreadful titles (The Babysitter, The Trophy Wife, The Daughter-in-Law, etc).  Oh, wait, there’s more – Diana Diamond is a pseudonym for New York Times best-selling author William P. Kennedy.  In other words, he should know better.

It’s also not a one-off because it’s an indictment of just how stupid we’re becoming.  This book got decent reviews.  It’s apparent to me that many readers never noticed the errors or the “telling, not showing” problems.  This is why there are lots of Facebook pages like “America's Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (ACDII)” with sign errors or other examples of our mental decline, and they never seem to run out of examples, do they?  That’s one of my complaints.

And “The Stepmother” isn’t the first book I’ve read with all these flaws.  Last month I finished “Mr. Churchill’s Secretary,” which again had an exciting-sounding plot but suffered from poor (OK, shitty) execution.  If you read the reviews you see many were hoodwinked into thinking this was a great read (enough so that the author has ground out 10 similar novels in a short time), but if you read the critical ones, you’d know better than to waste your hard-earned money.

The other complaint is more personal – how does this crap get published, while I can’t get anyone interested in any of my works?  The first novel was rejected 128 times, and only one agent/publisher asked for the entire manuscript (and then rejected it, but rightly so – eventually I will make corrections and try again).  More rejections were perfunctory; “…regrettably, your project is not a right fit for our agency,” “…it is not the type of book I am considering at this time,” “however, this project doesn’t sound right for me,” etc.  Novel #2 isn’t faring much better.  If there's anyone who wants to read it, let me know.

I guess what I need to do is write a mystery, claim I can do a series of them with pithy-sounding titles, and push like crazy.  I already have Grammarly installed, what more can I do?