Chandler Alexander

I struggled over whether or not to leave a review for this book. I have mixed feelings about it. I have issues with much of the narrative and some of the dialogue. First the good...

This is a dark, gritty, brutal story. A coming of age tale in a poverty stricken city. Amel has known nothing but hard times his whole life. His father wants nothing to do with him, his mother is abusive and too wrapped up in herself to care or notice that Amel's clothes stopped fitting him years ago. He has hopes and dreams for a better life but circumstances, poor choices and his own temper conspire against him time and time again, dragging him down into a future that looks more and more bleak. This was a good story that could have been much better if only it had just a bit of polishing up before publication. The author states that they are a writer of "realistic fiction." Now I am sure that is where much of the dialogue fits in. It is raw, gritty and I suppose realistic. I am sure there are people who speak the way the characters in the book do, with mother****** and nigg** peppering every other word. You feel me? Aight? Some may take offense to the vulgarity, obscenities or ghettosims laced through-out but "I'm not even gone go there witcha." That was not what bothered me. However the constant typos and grammatical errors did begin to get on my nerves. Yes it is "realistic" to the way some people speak. But sometimes it seems the author forgot who they were even speaking about. For example seeing a man who had "my arm" around somebody's throat instead of his own arm. Or "I smiled at my little champ standing there crying, looking passed the big not on his head" "I said with a grimmest" "I threw a red brick on his body so there wouldn't be any figure prints" Not to even mention the woman who is wearing her "night grown" or having a "meth addition" I could go on but there is no point. Suffice it to say there are typos, misspellings and/or grammatical errors on every page.

At this point I actually reached out to the publisher to ask if these had been corrected. I did not get a response so today I went to amazon and downloaded the sample of the kindle edition which is currently for sale, and am sad to say that no these have not been corrected. I probably would have rated it 4 stars if corrections had been made even though some of the "realistic" parts are pretty outlandish.

If you can overlook this, it is a book worth reading.


I received a complimentary copy for review.… (mehr)