John Paul Bernett

Okay, the good side first: this novel contained an interesting concept, a brother and sister from 21st century Leeds swapping places through a time storm with a brother and sister from mid 19th century in the same city. Each has much to learn from the other that influences their characters and prospects for the better, especially in the case of the modern day sister who is an appallingly self-centred character, in fact taken to such extremes, she is a caricature. So far, so fair.

However, this is really is a poorly written book. I wondered what age range it was aimed at; while the overall tone and style seemed to be aimed at much younger readers, there were also a couple of sex scenes and some swearing. The dialogue was often very clunky and stilted, or downright unrealistic. There were also a huge number of typos and errors with words and sentence construction - this book was very inadequately proofread. This combined to give me a feeling of annoyance, and had this book been much longer, I doubt I would have finished it; in practice I pushed through to finish it quickly to see how the plot was resolved, which was done reasonably. Overall, a poor book.… (mehr)