Official Review: Song of the Mokihana by TD Matzenik

[KattPascale]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Song of the Mokihana" by TD Matzenik.]

This 385 page book is a work of fiction. The story is developed around a historical timeframe around a life at sea. Like the movie Titanic, there is a love story going on within a bigger background.

This book has its good points. There is drama and explicit content. There were some pages where the book was practically glued to my face. The love conflict was gripping because it was frowned upon in those times. There was also the interesting parts of living at sea that most readers would probably not understand but would like to learn about while reading a story (instead of being bored in a classroom).

However, the book also has some issues. It is a long book with a lot of unnecessary detail. At some points, I felt like I was reading a diary of random information that wasn’t in any way important to the overall story. As I said earlier, there were some points of the story where my face was glued to the book. There were also some points where I had to keep re-reading the pages because I was so bored with unnecessary details.

Now for the technical review tidbits: Formatting was really great. I have to say with reviewing indie books, there can be a lot of font and formatting issues. But this book was formatted very well.

This book was also written pretty well especially for the time period that the story was written in. I appreciated the appendices that explained the history and cultures that spanned throughout the dialogue in the book. It all made sense.

It may have helped to put more effort into naming the dialogue lines a little bit better. Because there was a lot of quoted conversation, sometimes I did get confused as to who was saying which line because it wasn’t always labeled. eg. There would be quoted lines without a name for who said the quoted line.

I rated this book 2 out of 4 stars because it is for all intensive purposes a “Fair” rating. The book was technically put together well, had very little technical issues, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to my friends or family. It has a good story line, nice history, but again, it felt like there was a lot of excess material that could bore the reader. This book could have probably been completed in 200 pages and been a lot easier to read instead of the 385 pages with excess detail that almost lost the sense of the main story.

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