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This blog was started as a place to post book reviews. The books reviewed here will be mixed. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, General Fiction, NonFiction and more. Both positve and negative reviews will be posted, as well as reviews for books written for all ages and all reading levels.

Many of the books reviewed here are ones that I have purchased for my own reading pleasure. Some, I receive free in exchange for reviews. Beginning in December, 2009 you will know which are the free ones if you read the final paragraph of my reviews.

Also of note: I choose what I will read, attempting to avoid the books on which I would end up writing a negative review... but I have been known to make mistakes. Thus you see some one and two star reviews here. Since I don't enjoy writing negative reviews, I only write them if the review was promised, or if the book was so exceedingly bad, I just had to say so. Regardless of the percentage of positive to negative reviews on this blog, I give my honest opinion each and every time, and have never received financial compensation for posting my reviews.

Note that, except for fair use portions quoted from some of the books reviewed, all copyright in the content of the reviews belongs to Lady Dragoness.


Friday, August 20, 2010

Varied But Senseless

Porcelain
Jess C Scott
Jess C. Scott, (July 2010)
Pdf e-Book
Rated 3 stars of 5 possible


Porcelain is a "bits and pieces" collection of various types of writing. Short stories, poetry, essays... However, there's no central theme to mold this collection into a whole, so it remains nothing more than pages upon pages of miscellaneous pieces that really have no relationship to each other, aside from the fact that they are all the work of one author. Some are bad, some are mediocre, some are better than others; but none of the pieces in this collection are great. Taken as a whole, these pieces do show the growth of the writer... but she has a long way to go if being a professional writer is her goal.

Additionally, this PDF file included far too many pieces for me to offer individual critiques of each piece as I normally like to do with anthologies. The large file should be broken up into at least three smaller files, one each for fiction, poetry and essays. This would enable reviewers to do a better job because they could more likely critique individual pieces.

On the whole, many pieces included in this collection could stand some editing, some of the stories could stand a full re-write as they don't make much sense in their current state. There's an old adage that goes something like this: "Write what you know". This author seems to know poetry best so perhaps she should stick with that.

Not recommended for the average reader.
A PDF file was provided to me by the author free in exchange for this review. This review has been simultaneously published on Dragon Views, LibraryThing and Amazon.com

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