Review of Descendant Deception

[QueenCaesar]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Descendant Deception" by Kimi Baibre Jackson.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Descendant Deception by Kimi Baibre-Jackson is a memoir detailing a shocking discovery regarding the author’s genealogical past. When the author, now an adult with children of her own, receives a call from an unknown half-sister telling the dad she grew up with isn’t actually her biological father her whole life as she knows it is turned upside down. The author details this experience, as well as the aftermath, through conversations she had with her husband.

What I enjoyed most about this book is the raw honesty the author displays in her account of learning about her biological father. I feel for the author. I cannot imagine how I would react if I were in her shoes, but I appreciate her for taking the time to share her story even though I’m sure it was quite difficult and took much courage to do so. Though her story is different from my own, I feel that this scenario happens more often than we think, and there will be readers out there in a similar situation that may find this book quite comforting.

What I found troubling about this book are the grammatical errors present, the ebook formatting, and sentence structures. Though the grammatical errors were in large part tense issues and were fairly easy to decipher, they were distracting at times. What I found most difficult about the book is that the ebook formatting resulted in words being aligned to the right rather than the left randomly throughout, and some pages contained only a half-page of words as if it were the end of a chapter, but that was not the case. Also, the author’s sentence structure/style was hard to follow at times, such as choppy sentences and paragraphs that jumped from thought to thought. Because of these items mentioned, I don’t believe this book has been professionally edited.

The intended audience for this book is any adult reader, and perhaps even teens/young adults as well. There is some brief mentioning of affairs / intimate relationships but no adult language. The specific intended audience is anyone who enjoys reading memoirs/autobiographies and perhaps someone who has shared a common experience in their own family.

Overall, the story the author told of her life is heartbreaking and breaches a subject that is often hard to talk about. I found the author’s courage to give a raw account of her experience with finding out about her biological father inspiring. That being said, I do believe the writing was a bit choppy at times, making it hard to follow, and the book did contain a good number of grammatical errors, leading me to believe it has not been professionally edited. Because of this, I give this book a rating of 2 out of 4 stars.

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Descendant Deception
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[MsH2k]

I hope sharing her story has helped the author heal from this experience. It's too bad that the formatting problems made the issues with the writing style and editing even more disrupting. Hopefully, they will all be corrected soon.
Thank you for your thorough review!