Bookworm Speaks!- The Meek by L.J. Coppola

Bookworm Speaks!

The Meek

by L.J. Coppola

****

Acquired: Free from Word Slinger Publicity in exchange for an honest review.

Series: N/A

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (September 22, 2016)

Paperback: 180 pages

Language: English

****

The Story: A baby girl, Gaia is abducted. Fifteen years later, Telepathic Bodhi has recurrent dreams of a girl he does not know. After a nuclear holocaust, the population of Earth has dwindled down practically to the point of no return. As a result, the two remaining societies which couldn’t be more different from each other, Terran, on the surface in biospheres and Alternan, sealed off from radiation underground, must find the means to replenish their populations or risk extinction. Terrans encourage their youth to “merge” young and raise children. Alternans mandate their few remaining fertile women, called breeders, to bear babies for the entire society. Both means induce harmful effects on Bodhi and Gaia, who fall in love amidst societal pressures and the struggle to resettle the entire population to a satellite orbiting Earth. The question is not whether or not the earth will survive the harm that humans have done but rather will humans survive it.

The Review: Ugh…

Let’s just get this done…

The writing in this book is so amateurish it actually causes physical pain to read it. Plot dump on top of exposition on top of more plot dumps. A cardinal rule of fiction writing ‘show don’t tell’. Science Fiction gets a small free pass given the fact that it often involves concepts that require small amounts of explanation. This tool must be used sparingly, however, as patience for exposition can be very low and the author must use a more organic method of building to world in order to make the text more compelling. In this book, the author fails in that regard…miserably. 

There are a few passages that actually are not too bad. One segment during the beginning when it tells us about a trio of friends who go dune sailing across the wasteland but if anything that actually works against the book as a whole. This is because, the passages that actually show some ernest effort (however small it may be) only exacerbates the contrasts between the semi-well written passages and the ones that hurt to read. 

An appropriate analogy for writing a story is the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. The hare seems fastest at first but ultimately falls victim to hubris and is thusly passed by the patient tortoise. Its no different when writing. Every now and then, the scrivener gets a great idea for a scene or setting and eagerly writes it out, seemingly racing ahead vis a vis the Hare. Then comes along the part of fitting the first rush into a whole story or linking them with other great scenes which quickly becomes a boring grind so the hare takes a nap.  Filling the story in with a cohesive structure is hard and requires patience, i.e. the Tortoise. This is exactly what happens here. A few good scenes and ideas that are ultimately lost among the quagmire of the writing where the author lost patience. 

Slow and Steady wins the race after all. 

The setting isn’t creative either. A nuclear holocaust? Gee, we haven’t seen that a million times over. Another one of the cardinal rules of writing good fiction is “Avoid cliches like the plague”

Another cliche is the whole superpower thing that the main characters seem to develop. It really just seems to come out of nowhere and has no real basis. A much better way to introduce this into the story is to make it a mystery. Here, it is a commonly accepted fact that humanity would develop super powers. A much more compelling read would have been to make the super power thing an unexpected revelation. It all comes back to showing not telling…the reader is supposed to figure things out alongside the protagonist not be told everything by the twelfth page. 

Final Verdict: Perhaps if the author is serious about this whole writing thing, perhaps the should stick to writing the lore entries in role-playing game guides, because talking at the reader is something that they really seem to enjoy. 

Two Fallout Symbols out of Five

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