thistlechaser (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thistlechaser) wrote2013-05-03 05:17 pm
thistlechaser) wrote2013-05-03 05:17 pm
Entry tags:
The worst book in the history of bad books.
Okay, the subject line might be an exaggeration. A slight one. But Zoo (The Enclosure Chronicles) by Tara Elizabeth is one of the worst books I've read in years. It should surprise no one that it's self-published. I'm usually careful to check for that before buying books, but this time somehow I forgot.
I won't spend much time on her grammar. She has no idea how semicolons work. Sentences like amusingly fitting one:
And; how could they be worse than this one?
The writing was so bad, every page or so I had to reread sentences, trying to figure out what she was trying to say.
Every few pages, she seemed to pick adjectives or adverbs totally at random. I sat there, scratching my head, wondering if she knew what the word she just used meant. Like: "Poignantly he squatted down to wash the mud off his feet." (Not a quote, because I forgot to mark it, but "poignantly" was indeed used incorrectly in this way.)
Her writing was so unprofessional I was embarrassed for the author. " f**k " appeared in the book. With the asterisks.
The dialogue was so painfully bad and unrealistic. In the story, a teenage girl gets kidnapped and stuck in a holding area with another girl. Her life is over. She's ranting to the other girl:
"...My parents were paying for a kick ass trip to Paris. I was going to move away and go to college. These clothes are awful. I don't have any shoes. I have to sleep on the ground. And how am I going to lose my virginity now?"
And yet, after that, she spends the rest of the book screaming at a boy to stay away from her, calling him a stalker because he stays close to her (they're being kept in the same small room...), yet based on nothing but the boy being asleep when he's first put into the room, she calls him "cute" and "charming". Somehow she finds him charming. When he did nothing more than stay asleep.
The father hears the news about the daughter's "death" (the girl seems dead to those left behind). This is the telephone conversation. About his daughter's death. (Phil is a cop.)
"Oh, hey Phil. Accident? Where? You're there now . . . Is she okay?" he asks. "Dead at the scene. What hospital did they take her to? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks." He swallows hard and places the phone back in the cradle.
Supposedly the father loved the daughter, she was his reason for living...
What teenager talks like this? She's lusting after a captive in another cage. He probably won't even meet me, since he's got a gorgeous brunette waiting to be impregnated by him.
The author was amazingly lazy, and as I mentioned, unprofessional. She wrote "youtube" for the name of the site, lower cased and, for who knows what reason, in italics. You just need to go to the site to see the proper capitalization for the name! (Edit: I started second guessing myself on this one, so I checked Google. No where did I find reference saying a website name should be in italics, and even if it should be, it sure as heck should be capitalized correctly.)
The author has a title for every chapter. One was " :) ". There is no texting in the book. The kids have no tech at all, all they do is talk. I wanted to drive my head through a wall at that point. Are you so damned lazy you can't figure out some words you want to use as a title?
Compared to things mentioned above, errors like this seem mild. Quoting again: I enjoyed our time together. She made me laugh. I enjoyed our time together.
And the basic logic errors! Keep in mind, the author is a woman. (I assume. It's by Tara Elizabeth.)
Day one: A boy and a girl have sex. (Day and a half, technically. And evening and the next day.)
Day two: Girl is certain she's pregnant.
Day three: There's medical confirmation she's pregnant.
All this, and I'm less than a quarter way through the book. I was reading it because it was so bad that it went around the bend and became amusing, but it's just so god-awful bad. I don't even have words. (Maybe I should just put " >:( " here.)
At least I paid only $3 for it? It kills me that the Amazon page has 20 five-star ratings. Of 30 total! Six four-star and two three-star ratings! Only two one-star, mine included. I put mine up only yesterday, and it already has been down-voted.
>:(
I won't spend much time on her grammar. She has no idea how semicolons work. Sentences like amusingly fitting one:
And; how could they be worse than this one?
The writing was so bad, every page or so I had to reread sentences, trying to figure out what she was trying to say.
Every few pages, she seemed to pick adjectives or adverbs totally at random. I sat there, scratching my head, wondering if she knew what the word she just used meant. Like: "Poignantly he squatted down to wash the mud off his feet." (Not a quote, because I forgot to mark it, but "poignantly" was indeed used incorrectly in this way.)
Her writing was so unprofessional I was embarrassed for the author. " f**k " appeared in the book. With the asterisks.
The dialogue was so painfully bad and unrealistic. In the story, a teenage girl gets kidnapped and stuck in a holding area with another girl. Her life is over. She's ranting to the other girl:
"...My parents were paying for a kick ass trip to Paris. I was going to move away and go to college. These clothes are awful. I don't have any shoes. I have to sleep on the ground. And how am I going to lose my virginity now?"
And yet, after that, she spends the rest of the book screaming at a boy to stay away from her, calling him a stalker because he stays close to her (they're being kept in the same small room...), yet based on nothing but the boy being asleep when he's first put into the room, she calls him "cute" and "charming". Somehow she finds him charming. When he did nothing more than stay asleep.
The father hears the news about the daughter's "death" (the girl seems dead to those left behind). This is the telephone conversation. About his daughter's death. (Phil is a cop.)
"Oh, hey Phil. Accident? Where? You're there now . . . Is she okay?" he asks. "Dead at the scene. What hospital did they take her to? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks." He swallows hard and places the phone back in the cradle.
Supposedly the father loved the daughter, she was his reason for living...
What teenager talks like this? She's lusting after a captive in another cage. He probably won't even meet me, since he's got a gorgeous brunette waiting to be impregnated by him.
The author was amazingly lazy, and as I mentioned, unprofessional. She wrote "youtube" for the name of the site, lower cased and, for who knows what reason, in italics. You just need to go to the site to see the proper capitalization for the name! (Edit: I started second guessing myself on this one, so I checked Google. No where did I find reference saying a website name should be in italics, and even if it should be, it sure as heck should be capitalized correctly.)
The author has a title for every chapter. One was " :) ". There is no texting in the book. The kids have no tech at all, all they do is talk. I wanted to drive my head through a wall at that point. Are you so damned lazy you can't figure out some words you want to use as a title?
Compared to things mentioned above, errors like this seem mild. Quoting again: I enjoyed our time together. She made me laugh. I enjoyed our time together.
And the basic logic errors! Keep in mind, the author is a woman. (I assume. It's by Tara Elizabeth.)
Day one: A boy and a girl have sex. (Day and a half, technically. And evening and the next day.)
Day two: Girl is certain she's pregnant.
Day three: There's medical confirmation she's pregnant.
All this, and I'm less than a quarter way through the book. I was reading it because it was so bad that it went around the bend and became amusing, but it's just so god-awful bad. I don't even have words. (Maybe I should just put " >:( " here.)
At least I paid only $3 for it? It kills me that the Amazon page has 20 five-star ratings. Of 30 total! Six four-star and two three-star ratings! Only two one-star, mine included. I put mine up only yesterday, and it already has been down-voted.
>:(
no subject
Great book
Great book!
A great book!
Great read!
Great Read!
GREAT READ!!
Such a great read!
What a great read!
This was a great read
this was a great read!
I'm telling you, it's a GREAT read.
Great read Tara Elizabeth!!
Great job Tara Elizabeth!
Tara did a great job with this book
Tara Elizabeth created a great story line
Shout out to you, Tara!
I want to thank Tara Elizabeth
Thank you Tara Elizabeth
Thanks for creating such an awesome world to delve into Tara!!
Tara Elizabeth is one of my new favorite authors!
Tara Elizabeth is an emergent novelist of merit
Tara Elizabeth has created a brilliant story
Brilliantly designed by Tara Elizabeth
Elizabeth paints a masterpiece
I hope this is only the beginning of Tara Elizabeth's writing career
I look forward to many more of your thought provoking stories!
I look forward to reading many others by her
I am looking forward to reading more books from Tara Elizabeth!
I am looking forward to the next book in this series.
I'll be looking for everything from her I can get my hands on!
Can't wait to read other books by this author!
can't wait for her next book :)
I will definitely be back for the next book
I would definitely pick up the next installment
I plan on continuing this series and reading her other one.
I loved it as much as I did Tara Elizabeth's Exalted!
I already started reading another of tara elizabeths books, the exalted
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/may/03/folio-prize-self-published-authors
Perhaps this one should be a contender?
no subject
And this:
but the stigma attached to self-publishing in the eyes of the public and the media hasn't disappeared.
Until self-publishing somehow cleans up the quality of books like Zoo (and I don't see how it could), that stigma is unlikely to ever go away.
I love books. I love stories. It takes a lot for me to write off a giant section of them. I'd love to support self-published stuff, but how can I?
no subject
no subject
no subject
A chronicle of my time living in a zoo . . . I'm not really sure where to start, and you may have trouble believing me even as I tell you my story. My family did. They laughed the first time I told them, so now I just say it was all a crazy dream. You see, I died in a totally preventable car accident . . . or so I thought. When I opened my eyes, I was shocked to discover that I had been resurrected into the year 2282 and, just as unbelievably, was locked up in a zoo! A HUMAN ZOO! Oh wait, I mean the People's Past Anthropological Center. The Global Government created the Centers because all of the different cultures of the world had, over centuries of time, slowly absorbed into one uniform culture. Everything and everybody felt the same, and the world didn’t like it. So, to help the people of 2282 find cultures they thought worthy to live their lives by, they used time travel to zap the people of the past into the future. They created enclosures to house their live human exhibits. And that's what happened to me. I became a research project, a source of entertainment. I was a prisoner who was over two hundred years away from my family and friends. Most of my time in the enclosure was spent trying to escape. I also made friends, lost friends, fell in love, was betrayed, was held captive within captivity, and lots of other fun stuff. There were some shocking moments and some devastating moments . . . It’s a lot to recount, but I’ll try my best to tell you all about my time travel . . . PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE. I'm Emma, by the way.
I was immediately suspicious. That all looks like just flat-out poor writing. Obnoxious, even! I was wondering if that would carry into the book. Looks like it did!
no subject
Unrelated! Arby's housemade chips are AMAZING. I had them for the first time yesterday, and now I want MORE MORE MORE.
no subject
And knowing is half the battle!
Dude, they're addictive. So much seasoning, and a big pain in the butt to make, but overall solid. The Hawaiian roll is pretty darn good too.
no subject
I tried the Hawaiian roll sandwich at the same time as the chips, but I didn't like it much. I've never eaten a roast beef sandwich at Arby's before, but I thought they'd be hot. This one was cold (not just not-hot, but cold like from the fridge). I'm not sure how it had both melted cheese and cold meat, but somehow it did.
The chips made up for it though! I almost went back and got more today, but I had had breakfast while out, so I wasn't hungry at all.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject