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I just want to point out that all of her book covers look exactly like that. YOU might think it's boring, but I think that her appreciation for pastel nature scenes and Victorian narration styles are really9238fu
Sorry I passed out on my keyboard.
Here's a description:
"A chance meeting brings new hope to a beloved character trapped in a literary classic."
Fair enough. I am a fan of the short and sweet description. I mean, it's a short story, just freaking buy it and you'll find out what it's about! But that doesn't give me much to make fun of.
I was trying to figure out what the literary classic was, until I realized her description is backwards. Way to go, you had ONE sentence and you messed it up! Actually if you take this description literally it should mean like a beloved character, let's take Homer Simpson for our example, is trapped in a literary classic, like say Jane Eyre.
But what it really means is one of those short stories where a literary character is put in. Except, instead of putting Spock in the present day or something, this story is just in the same setting as the character was in before with the same plot as before and it's not stealing because...
It took me a couple of seconds to guess it was Quasimodo, and the annoyingly formal main character and her daughter see past his ugliness to the kindhearted and intelligent man inside and befriend him. Which is different from the theme of the original Hunchback because...
The story really points out that most people are shallow and, uh, I'm having trouble putting this into words because it's such a rare theme. If only there was a common saying or comparison I could apply in this situation, but I'll just have to settle for making my own, so here goes: It's like, you can't decide whether a movie is good or not just from its poster, you know?
Anyway, Quasimodo makes friends with these people and they make a picnic date for the next day and we all learn a lesson about acceptance of other races and his whole life is solved (except he's still horribly deformed), the end.
Seriously I got nothing else to say because this story is as utterly unsurprising and bland as tofu that has been boiled for far too long by a British chef who was blinded in a terrible accident involving a spice-throwing ninja in a salt mine. Oh yes, I will torture the hell out of that simile and force it to happen sooner or later and you will take it!
Ratings:
Annoyingly Good Grammar: 5 out of 5. The whole experience was horrible because I felt like I was reading something from the early 1900s but with far more stick-up-the-assery, like if H.P. Lovecraft was forced to edit out all the jokes in The Importance of Being Ernest while Nobokov whipped him every time he used a word that sounded too relaxed, like "amidst."
Lessons Learned: 0 out of 5. There was literally no conflict in this story. Both the lady and her daughter were immediately like, "We accept you for who you are," and were not at all scared by the hunchback's ugliness. Not only that, but he also wasn't described at all and it was impossible for the reader to be startled by him because it is taken for granted that we'll be like, "Oh yeah, Quasimodo. I saw that Disney movie." The themes and metaphors that could be drawn out of his ugly ass are all ignored too. The Goonies did a far better job with the befriending a freak thing. There was also no internal conflict in any of the three characters, despite the author setting up the mother as the clear narrator, then skipping to the little girl for a second before ending with Quasimodo randomly thinking, "F-friends?" Yeah, way to make him smarter than he looks, better leave that to your summarize-someone-else's-story style descriptions next time.
Stealing Someone's Story: 1 out of 5. I would give it more, but the key here is she didn't successfully steal someone's story, I was onto that shit like immediately. She could have changed his name and gotten more points here, but she took some creative writing class where the teacher was like, "Take a favorite fictional character and juxtapose them into your story, and let's try to stay away from, uh, weird narrative styles from the turn of last century *cough*Rebecca*cough*," and she completely missed the point. What she heard was, "You can just steal other peoples' shit, plot, characters, and all and if you put your name on it, it counts as a different story." Even fan-fiction is a step above this because the characters are put into different situations, dumbass!
Overall: 2 out of 5. The writing was very coherent and it had a sensible, chronological progression. The only things this story lacks are plot, voice, logical narration, original characters, original themes, conflict, character arcs, and any entertainment value whatsoever. Small fixes, really.
If you want to read something with characters that aren't necessarily original, but are at least have names that are changed to things like Parry Hotter, go to amazon.com/author/a.c.blackhall
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