Negative Positive
Title: Pretentious
Review: Why is this book so badly written ? The first sentence is "The flat afternoon sky spread over the black and gray mountains like a stage backdrop, the color of a dog's pale crazy eye" and there are many more awful sentences like this one. After 20 pages I nearly threw the book away. I then started to skip pages. From about page 80 on I read the book and tried to ignore the misguided "poetic" stuff, which - mercifully - became less frequent. This would have been a good hard SF story of about 300 pages. Unfortunately the book has 538 pages. A good publisher employs people who guide authors (they are called lectors). Somebody should have told Mr. Bear to cut the unsuccessful attempts at writing "literature". They ruined the book.
Is the review positive or negative? 