- Joined
- Dec 31, 2017
- Messages
- 95
- Reaction score
- 3
As I'm way more into MG than YA, I'm somewhat late getting started on the Michael Vey series. I enjoyed the plot and the pacing of the first book, but the writing itself was... weird. The pages are full to bursting with pointless small talk like "Hi, Michael. How are you?" "I'm fine, thanks, how are you?" "Oh, I'm pretty good."
I actually had to go check and see if it wasn't an indie work, since self-published authors tend to flout industry standards all the time. For starters, the narrative voice sounded closer to something like Percy Jackson rather than a YA story. The characters were in NINTH GRADE! Really, how often do we see characters in grade 9 or 10? It's usually either grade 6-8 for MG protags or grade 11-12 for YA. Literary agents constantly stress that the market for 14-15 yo MC's isn't as big as 12-13 or 16-17.
I also didn't appreciate the sudden shift between 1st and 3rd person POV in the middle of the story. Seemed kinda amateuristic.
Perhaps the most "is this self-published?" warning sign came from the author's apparent lack of knowledge that there are variations to verbs like "walk" and "look." Seriously, I found a page where "walk" appears five times. I wonder if the author has heard of "strode" or "strolled" or "paced?" And insead of using 3-5 "look"s per page, why couldn't he say "glance? Didn't he have someone proofread his work and point out his repetitive use of "walk" and "look?"
Can u really get away with so little verb variations? Does it make for a tighter read somehow?
I actually had to go check and see if it wasn't an indie work, since self-published authors tend to flout industry standards all the time. For starters, the narrative voice sounded closer to something like Percy Jackson rather than a YA story. The characters were in NINTH GRADE! Really, how often do we see characters in grade 9 or 10? It's usually either grade 6-8 for MG protags or grade 11-12 for YA. Literary agents constantly stress that the market for 14-15 yo MC's isn't as big as 12-13 or 16-17.
I also didn't appreciate the sudden shift between 1st and 3rd person POV in the middle of the story. Seemed kinda amateuristic.
Perhaps the most "is this self-published?" warning sign came from the author's apparent lack of knowledge that there are variations to verbs like "walk" and "look." Seriously, I found a page where "walk" appears five times. I wonder if the author has heard of "strode" or "strolled" or "paced?" And insead of using 3-5 "look"s per page, why couldn't he say "glance? Didn't he have someone proofread his work and point out his repetitive use of "walk" and "look?"
Can u really get away with so little verb variations? Does it make for a tighter read somehow?
Last edited:
