Sibyl J. Pischke

"The Legend of Mammy Jane", written by Sibyl Jarvis Pischke, could be a good book. There's a good story hidden in this book. The problem is that it is hidden behind easily-fixed but extremely distracting writing mistakes.

Pischke's first "In Appreciation" is to her son, Bill, "who after reading my manuscript said: 'Mother it's beautiful! Don't change a word!'"

If I could speak with Ms Pischke, I'd tell her that she should not take her son quite so literally. This book needed a good editor -- someone who would fix the very broken things that appeared on every page. Ms Pischke's story was hard for me to read as I tripped over the many incomplete sentences, the extremely poor punctuation, and the other basic mistakes that an editor would have (should have!) fixed. Many times the story was lost to me as I instead thought of how I would edit the words I was reading. A reader should not be distracted by editing!

Pischke first self-published this book. A self-published book is often self-published because a publisher cannot be found. Later it was re-published by Mountain Memories Books. This company should have given the book a careful editing before republishing. Later chapters include fewer mistakes, but enough to still be a distraction to me.

Ms Pischke set out to tell the story of one of her grandmothers. The story starts before the Civil War and goes forward as historical novel. It does a fair job of telling of how life was lived in that area of the country (what later became West Virginia) at that time. The story is told at a lurching pace -- sometimes there is much detail given on a particular person or time; sometimes there are very few details included. The first many chapters of the book are more slowly paced; toward the end of the story, the author seems to be trying to cram too many years into too few pages to do them justice. In some ways the 405 pages are too many, in others, too few to aptly tell Mammy Jane's story.

The back book cover says that the story is one of "loyalty, resourcefulness, family, witchcraft, and death." I would agree will all of those except witchcraft. Though there are a very few mentions of what could be considered witchcraft toward the end of the book, the book is not "about" witchcraft any more than it is about outhouses (mentioned with about the same frequency.)

I would like to re-read this story after it has been well edited. The "bones" of the book are good; the things that are wrong with it could be and should be easily fixed. I would give this book four stars if I hadn't been so distracted by the lack of editing.… (plus d'informations)