Survivor's Guilt
Borrowed under the Kindle Unlimited program
There are five stages of grief.
Denial.
Bargaining.
Anger.
Depression.
Acceptance.
Losing the love of your life is one of the hardest things anyone would ever have to face.
Especially when your life with them was just beginning.
When tragedy strikes on what should be the happiest time of your life, how are you supposed to pick up the pieces of your life and move on without them?
Two strangers who happen to share a life changing event, come to find solace in each other to help deal with their pain.
One of them feels the guilt of being the reason that a life was lost.
The other guilty for making a last second choice.
Both of them, guilty that they survived.
But what happens when a bond that surfaces from tragedy brings these two strangers together?
Finding comfort in each other as they both deal with the same pain, was never the plan.
Can they look beyond the guilt of the past in order stop themselves dying along with their loved ones, but instead live and learn to love again?
What happens when losing your first love becomes the reason for meeting your one true love?
2 Alarms. Not for me.
**sigh** Here we go again. It seems that I am writing different variations of this same review a lot lately, and it pains me, people. I don’t wanna do it! But I feel that you, as readers, need to know. You drag your fabulous asses to my blog to get the good, the bad, and sometimes, the ugly. I’ve got to call ’em like I see ’em.
This was my first book by Cassy Roop. I had heard of her books, but hadn’t picked one up before this. The errors in the blurb alone should have been enough to ward me off, but I held out hope and downloaded the book.
The premise of the story was solid, if not a little predictable, but the execution sadly fell way flat. I was initially drawn in because Cassy Roop employed an interesting tactic at the beginning of the story, a tactic that I thought was smart and original.
Unfortunately, it all kind of fell apart. I couldn’t remain immersed in the story, I kept getting pulled out of the narrative. The culprit? Our familiar old enemy, poor editing. I know that you all have heard me rant about the pervasiveness of bad editing lately, and the plague just keeps spreading. Survivor’s Guilt had the potential to be a perfectly nice heartfelt story, but instead, all of the author’s hard work was for naught.
The storyline took a back seat to the errors. Misspellings, incorrect phrasing, punctuation used incorrectly, and the list goes on. Hell, at one point, a character’s last name changes from one line of the story to the next! How do things like this make it to the final publishing stage? If I’m being perfectly honest, it comes across as sheer laziness on the part of an author. I see that an editor was credited in this work, and I’m not sure if Roop simply ignored her advice, or should be asking for a refund. Most of the mistakes in the copy are blatant, obvious errors that any decent editor and/or proofreader should have caught a mile away.
You have a line edit done on your book? Good. A proofreader checks it out post-edit? Great. Think you’re ready to publish now? NO. It’s not enough. You need more eyes, fresh eyes, eyes attached to people that are far removed from your project. You need to scour your book time and time and time again for any errors you can find. When an untrained reader is finding multiple mistakes PER PAGE, you’ve got a problem.
I’ve asked this before, and I’ll ask it again; WHY should I be expected to give an author MY hard-earned money when it seems painfully obvious that the author has no regard for the reader experience?
It really is a shame when it comes to this novel, because like I said, the bones of this story were good. It was an emotionally charged story with a unique element to it that could have been a standout if the author could have been bothered to put a little more time and attention into this book.
**As I always do when I write a critical review, I invite the author to get in touch with me about specific issues I had with the book, in case they were not already aware of these problems.**
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