Official Review: The Beer Bellies by Andrew Mather

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[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Beer Bellies" by Andrew Mather.]

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The short story "Beer Bellies" is about an average football fan offered the chance to manage a club team. This is the first part of what I believe is to be a mini-series. It is very short, about 14 pages, so of course it is a quick read.

I wish I could say I was able to enjoy this story, but I had a lot of trouble. For one thing, the grammar was awful.

“He states the reason why he wants the job so much; because I hate seeing them loose every f****** week!”

Lets talk about this sentence first. In this short story, every sentence is written like this. They all happen in the moment, which is not always bad. But how they are executed is bad. You cannot add a semicolon and then switch from 3rd person to 1st person. It just sounds wrong and is not grammatically correct.

In addition to this grammar problem, many punctuation marks and commas are used incorrectly. No, I am not an English teacher, but I do recognize bad English language use. Many sentences had no punctuation that was needed or excessive commas.

Yet another problem I had was the authors constant use of the word f*** in every sentence. I understand the story is about a man, maybe in his forties, and maybe that man just likes to say the word f***. But it becomes incredibly distracting when this main character uses it in every sentence he says, in addition to every descriptive sentence in the entire story. Use it once or twice? I’m cool with it. Use it 21 times in 14 double spaced pages? (Yes I did count)…. it gets old.

Besides all these problems, even the plotline is not very strong. It has the potential to be, but again, it is not executed accurately. I like the idea of an average man being offered the opportunity of his dreams to coach his favorite football team. I wish it maybe had been longer (50 or so pages) and in the past tense. That way the plot may have been able to shine over every other mistake.

Overall I give this book a 1 out of 4 stars. I really hope the author can go back and fix all the errors so people can focus more on what is going on when they read this. I really cannot recommend this short story, and I hope people understand this.

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