it was ok ( )

The story is intriguing and is a page turner. Good read.

Reminiscent of a teenager’s angst poured illicitly onto a page during school, “Mind of Angels” was a disappointment. Riddled with spelling and grammatical errors throughout; overly melodramatic on the romance and betrayal theme and from a legal standpoint the book failed on more than one issue. In an attempt to make it more appealing, visual imagery was included to support the text. There’s modern art, then there’s painful attempts. Images in “Mind of Angels” fell into the second category. Perhaps my absolute favourite was the surprised look on one character’s face which displayed an ‘O’ shaped mouth, reminiscent of a ‘blow up latex’ friend you might purchase from a questionable establishment. It did match the character’s eyes though. But the book has legs. For the author, put aside the criticism and defeat you may feel and come back to it in several years after lots of writing practice, some life experience and reading some chick lit. Think Barbara Taylor-Bradford, Mary Higgins-Clark or Danielle Steele. Their novels contain drama, love, betrayal, murder and finally resolution but on a more subtle level. Character development and research are key and of course editing. Don’t ever let poor reviews deter your love of writing. It’s a skill that can be developed and when you produce a winner you can look back at “Mind of Angels” and thank it for what you learnt. ( )

I received a copy of this book from the publisher a few months back through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, but I only requested it because it was erroneously tagged as a graphic novel, and it is not a graphic novel but rather a Young Adult novella with full page illustrations making up a third or more of its 138 pages.

This book is bad.

Well, I did spend a lot of time laughing at how bad it is, so I guess it has that going for it at least.

The plot, such as it is, has Payten Quinn James attending the funeral of her twin sister, Melissa, with the suspicion that Melissa didn't just die in a car accident but was . . . murdered! Payten sheds angst and anger in her wake as she talks to a few people until the answer to the mystery drops into her lap, lobbed there by stupid characters behaving stupidly.

The bad writing is made worse by the poor copy editing. The punctuation is lousy throughout, and there are frequent typos and misspellings that sometimes give us the homophone of the intended word, resulting in this beautiful sentence:

"Tyler jumped into action and in a matter of seconds had his arms around me smothering my whales."

Poor whales! PETA needs to get after this Tyler monster ASAP.

The art is as amateurish as the writing, making me wonder about the age(s) of the anonymous creator(s).


https://i.imgur.com/XMU2QE1.png

At least in this picture the artist put the steering wheel on the correct side of the car. A car driven by another character in a different illustration must be a British import.


https://i.imgur.com/gmurSU0.png

Love these stairs!

So, yeah, avoid this junk, unless you're the twisted sort who gets a kick out of laughing at people instead of with them. ( )

An illustrative murder mystery that is aimed at younger teenagers.
I believe there is some substance in the story, but unfortunately I could not get my head around the many mistakes throughout the book.
Firstly the poor spelling and punctuation.
Secondly, the way the narrative is written out can get quite confusing.
In all, this quick read requires a bit of proofreading and edit to make the book more clear and enjoyable. ( )