Where it all began...

A few years ago, while clicking around Amazon, I began noticing a repetition of one title among the recommendations. Indeed, this book, said the author was a magical "everybook", one of those rare titles that manages to be all books for all people. Need the perfect book for a girl fantasy lover? This book fit the bill. Boy sports fans... ummm, yep. Read-aloud for the middle-grade? Check. Teen realism lovers? Oh, them too. Looking for ideas on creating the perfect birthday party or how to talk to children about dead pets? Well apparently, this book was ideal even for that. I was intrigued. This was the first time I had seen an author so relentlessly pursue the Customer Recommendation Forums, and I was either impressed by her marketing tenacity or horrified by what was essentially the spamming of a major business. I had to check it out.

When I got to her page and checked out the book, I was stunned. The book was bad. No, BAD, bad. So bad that it was alternately horrifying (what if a child actually got their hands on and read this crap? It could set their education back years!) to laughable (I spent an entire evening reading this aloud to my friend Rachel, both of us screeching with pained laughter).

 The book was written by Larry Ellis and Denise Brown Ellis and was called "Antigua: The Land of Fairies Wizards and Heroes," and I can't tell you how much it pains me not to insert those commas in there. I'm telling you, if you can't get your title right, there's no much sense going on. The book was an odd mash up of the high fantasy genre - a little Hobbit, a bit of King Arthur, and a whole lot of Robin McKinley and Tamora Pierce. Still, high fantasy is a genre that can't help but borrow from each other and I can forgive that. But the writing. Oh, the writing. Here's a little taste:

The villagers were extremely upset and heartbroken when they saw that their village had been charred and burnt down to the ground by the gigantic monster. Everything that the villagers had worked for and all their worldly possessions were gone in an instant! They had nothing left! The villagers couldn't believe what they were seeing. They couldn't believe that the Sorceress Gwendeviere could be so heartless and treacherous! She had destroyed everything! There was absolutely nothing left! The villagers had lot everything that meant anything to them.  There homes and their lives were gone! There was nothing left to rebuild and besides none of the the people felt safe there anymore.

What does it all mean? Doesn't this read like a trippy stream of consciousness narration? Is anyone else troubled by the odd changes in tone? Or the inconsistent uses of their/there? Heck, the grammar in general? Plus, these people had a problem with names. Didn't they know about the magical Caribbean island Antigua? Or figure out how to arrive at less contrived sounding names than "Aurthorr" or "Arlexjandrio"? Yes, I know... it's fantasy, but really? How about the weird repetitions in information that take the reader... nowhere? Or my personal favorite, the use of the exclamation point. The exclamation point key may have been stuck on their keyboard, as I counted that it was used 20 times on that single page. I can't tell you how disturbing I find this. Really.

Equally disturbing was her five star review of her own book. Keep it classy, self-publishing folk. After several flame wars defending her books, she promised that she was returning to the book to weed out unnecessary exclamation points, but gosh darn it, I thought you edited a book before you printed? Most disturbingly of all, Ellis promises that this is only the first in series. Ominous news.

Thankfully, after about a month, what the Amazon community referred to as the "hit squad" finally stopped this nonsense and removed all of Denise Brown's posts. Thus ended her reign of persistent annoyance and bad taste, but it had opened up the floodgates for more bad self-published taste to come.

Oh, and FYI.  They want 28.49 for this piece of literature.