There’s something missing . . .

September 23, 2008by Donna Sirianni

Actually, there’s a lot missing.  Like depth, for starters.  The only positive I’ve been able to garner from this story is that it’s moving forward in a linear fashion, slowly getting from point A to wherever point B may be.  Aside from this stylistic bit, I’m having a hard time picking up anything else that was redeeming about the work.

It reads like stage direction.  Every time the scene changed the reader is told so with a line indicating whose living room or which restaurant or wherever the story might be is taking place instead of letting the scenery speak for itself.  That got annoying very quickly.  As did the as-you-know-Bob info-splurges.  And the mechanical movements of the characters.  And constant tense shifts.

There is absolutely no depth to any of the characters, their actions, their thought processes, nothing.  The story head hops from one character to the next, not bothering to actually stay for a moment on any one of them and portray what they’re thinking or how they’re feeling.  Instead that’s left to incredibly redundant telling, as often as triplicate in some places, that reinforces that this is exactly what’s going on, leaving the reader to interpret nothing.  There’s no trust there.  Because of that, I couldn’t care less what any of them were doing, where they were going, why they were speaking in such stilted dialogue and why they all sounded like the same character when it was relatively obvious they weren’t.  Out of the dozen or so characters, the reader isn’t privy to even one person’s inner workings.  Not even that.  After five installments I just couldn’t give a fig about any of them let alone be bothered to keep all of them straight.  They having absolutely no individuality (in multiple senses of the word) plays a heavy role in that.

All I saw when I read this story was a bunch of cardboard cutouts being jerked around in front of a backdrop colored in crayon.  I had no idea where the story was going, why I should care about the characters’ asinine conversations that seemed to be going nowhere except to the info-dump and why I should even attempt to read to the end.  All that was missing were camera directions and lighting cues and there’d be a script but with less substance.

I start reading a story expecting, at the very least, a lake.  All I got here was a nearly dry puddle.

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