Slow Reading Week
Just one this week, and unfortunately it wasn’t to my taste. I’m now reading “Forgotten” by A Gural…which is definitely better, but still not to my taste.
And I don’t have many books in the queue, so you might be getting a ramble instead of a review. Lots of short fiction, but nothing longer.
Review: Bar Manchester by Roger C. Roberts
This could have been a good book. There’s a good book in here, but it’s more than a little bit lost in the weeds.
First of all, this needed another editing pass…typos, repeated words, and awkwardly-constructed sentences are entirely too common. Also, the book is way too long at 473 pages. I have read plenty of books that were this long and needed to be.
This one didn’t. It takes over 100 pages to realize it’s science fiction, and contains a lot of exposition and worldbuilding…about contemporary Los Angeles.
The author promises us four viewpoint characters, and the most interesting of them is the bar. That, at least, is a SF tradition. Other than that, we get two men and a woman.
All three of whom refer to women as females and one of whom is the conqueror king of an alien race in old school pulp style…and not the good part of old school pulp. The author could really use to have a woman or three beta read his next book.
Once the plot gets started, it’s interesting, but we get pages of exposition and then interesting stuff happens off camera. There are two plots, and the more interesting one doesn’t have an ending. I would honestly have preferred to read the contemporary thriller about Ghanaian intelligence agents trying to convince African-Americans to move back to Africa that was buried in the book than the SF plot.
Although I did like the ending of the latter.
My biggest issue, though, was “Us females.” No woman I know talks like that. Roberts has talent as a writer and an interesting voice, but he needs a better editor and to develop more coherence…and get some “females” to read his work.
Alas, I can’t recommend this one, but I hope the author keeps working and finds his voice.
I received a free copy of this book for review and award consideration purposes.