Can We Talk 2

Book Review

         I don't usually review books . But this one is so bad, I have to get it off my chest. I met the author, at a gathering of older actors. He and his wife were both quite lovely. He had announced plans to write the book, so I promised that I would read it when it came out. I never saw any announcements, but recently tried looking up books by Don Quine. Mind you he's an extremely nice person, and I felt obligated to fulfill my promise to read it.

         It's called The Dream Virgin, and is available from Amazon. I'm not recommending you read it unless you have particular tastes. It's quite graphic from the very beginning. I barely made it through the prologue, except I remembered my promise to someone I would never see again. The characters were disgusting, ugly, abusive to children, and sick.

         The first chapter was totally different and introduced the teenager who led dream sessions that the advertisement and book cover led you to believe was the protagonist. It was hard to tell, Not a lot of time was spent on her, but I got the feeling from that chapter that this was going to be about spiritual warfare. I have read some of that before, and it did involve children, and unicorns, and dreaming. So I kept reading.

         But I was wrong. No spiritual warfare. In fact, the dreaming part wasn't well developed. There were so many characters that I felt I needed a list with names and descriptions to keep track of who was who and how they fit in. There wasn't a lot of character development, except maybe the grandfather, and unseen by the reader, he made some changes and went from almost empathetic to unlikable again. The truth is I never felt any empathy to any of the characters. Too much happened too fast and was sometimes confusing. Even if the gross stuff weren't there, it was simply poorly written.

         The gross stuff just kept coming. Cannibalism, violence, drugs, nudity, etc. If you like a series of events like that, this might be your book. There was certainly no one working for right or morality, no real heroes. There weren't any direct sex scenes, unless you call mutilating a naked body sex; it doesn't count in my book. There was lots of profanity.

         This was obviously self-published. Although four people were acknowledged as proofreaders, professional proofreaders would have known the difference between quite and quiet, which form of a pronoun to use, and the rules of objects of prepositions. They'd know how to use commas, too.

         I suppose every writer needs to read a bad book occasionally. I learned that characters need to be more in depth. There shouldn't be too many story lines to follow, unless you're doing a James Michener style epic. Regardless of the genre, this one wasn't mine, the story should be cohesive and have a satisfying ending. This one left things dangling, so another could follow in a sequel. I won't be reading it.