Was the authors style distracting from the plot?

Use this forum to discuss the March 2018 Book of the Month, "Final Notice" by Van Fleisher.
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Mallory Porshnev
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Re: Was the authors style distracting from the plot?

Post by Mallory Porshnev »

I didn't find any of these things distracting. I thought the book flowed nicely and was easy to read. I just found the dialogue a bit dull at times.
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Post by Mindy Conahye »

All of the back and forth has made it hard for me to truly get into the book. I'm following along better now, but in the beginning it was so hard to stay focused and in the book. I'd come into another character and need to try and remember who this character is as I'm reading along and question if I had already been introduced or not.
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Post by Alicia09 »

I found the chapters to be the most distracting, because in the first half of the story, every chapter focused on a different person. Then in the last half of the book I found chapters that tried to include three different peoples lives in the same chapter. This was distracting because I was expecting only one persons perspective per chapter.
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Post by FictionLover »

britt13 wrote: 09 Mar 2018, 15:51 I found many instances where the Fleisher's style of writing was incredibly distracting to me. It was hard for me to stay engaged with the book and/or plot because of this. Examples are excessive use of ellipses and parenthesis, choppy chapters, technical jargon, and changing names of things to something similar (obviously so he does not get sued, I understand why it was just annoying to me personally). Did this affect anyone the same way? Did you notice these elements and like them? Did you not even notice some or all of these? I am very curious to know how others felt about this.
Absolutely hated his style and his lack of skill. The dialog was the worst, especially in the corporate offices of Vijay. How many different times did he think we needed to read a list of the employees he wanted at a meeting?

And then adding in lines about how the secretary is calling them and who is coming to the meeting. What the heck??.

By the end, I vowed never to recommend this book to anyone. So I gave it one star.

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Post by FictionLover »

KLafser wrote: 19 Mar 2018, 10:01 I am so on the same page with you! In some places, he was telling a story, in others, it felt like a screenplay with a whole bunch of unnecessary dialog. Still other places, it felt preachy. When he started speaking directly to the reader about 2/3 in ... sigh, I found it very disruptive.
Lots of unnecessary dialog and overly preachy.
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Post by sarahmarlowe »

Yes! Thank you for bringing this up. I felt that the sentence structure was often confusing. I found myself having to re-read long meandering sentences to grasp what he was trying to tell us as readers.
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Post by Theresa Moffitt »

I found it distracting a few times but for the most part, once I got into the story, it wasn’t distracting. It is a different style but I enjoyed the book and thought it was very creative
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Post by Jessacardinal »

I have not been overly distracted by the style of writing in this book. I do prefer to read about Vince and Trudi more than any other part of the story though.
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Post by Renu G »

Yes, the author's style was somewhat distracting, especially when he used profane terms. Otherwise it was interesting to read.
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Post by KCWolf »

I found the quick changes in POV to be a little distracting, but other than that the only really jarring scene was the love scene between Jennifer and Vijay. It seemed rather pointless.
I guess you could look at it as an example of how some business people get caught up in personal relationships with each other, but that still seems unnecessary to the plot as a whole.
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Post by KCWolf »

There was also more telling and not enough showing in my opinion.
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Post by Atara Miles »

I wasn't so much confused with the technical jargon as with the elaborate spacing. Some of it seemed abnormal to me and didn't help the story to flow at all. I kind of overlooked it a little ways into the book, when I realized that was how it would continue and didn't want that to affect how I received the message it was trying to transmit.
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Post by Namaste23 »

I didn’t notice this. I will have to go back and look for these issues. I did enjoy reading this book.
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Post by koffi Malay »

I agree that the author's vocabulary or punctuation choices weren't nearly as annoying as the side remarks you mentioned.
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Post by Ngozi mouau »

I believe the the author seems to rely on creating distractions throughout the story. However, I noticed that there were instances where the plot should have seamlessly progressed to the next paragraph, but instead, it felt like a stumble or interruption. This made me question whether certain parts of the story would have been better placed elsewhere. Overall, I think the story could benefit from making more sense and ensuring a smoother flow of events.
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