Review of Searching for Zen

[Emily Poston]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Searching for Zen" by Albert T. Franklin.]

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1 out of 5 stars

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Searching for Zen by Albert T. Franklin left a lot to be desired. The concept behind the plot itself is rather unique and had potential, however it fell FAR below my expectations. The plot gets lost in the innumerable grammatical errors and lackluster prose and gets buried under what can only be read as a teenage boys attempt at talking about sex.

I’ll admit, even in my favorite books, I have a habit of quickly identifying typos and errors, which can throw me off and affect how I view the book. In Searching for Zen though, it was extremely difficult to stay focused on what was happening in the story because of the large number of errors and typos. The structure of dialogue between characters was typically incorrect, and there were multiple instances where quotation marks weren’t even used when a character was supposedly speaking out loud. I won’t even go into how punctuation was not utilized correctly, just know that the sentences throughout the entire book did not flow well at all because of it. What also didn’t help with the flow of the story was something that took me a while to truly pick up on what was happening. At first, I thought the author just had a bad habit of using the wrong tense, seemingly writing in past tense and present tense in the same sentence. But what it really was, was the author was switching between first and third person POV at random (and I have a feeling he didn’t even know it). One sentence we’re seeing writing that indicates the reader is on the outside looking in, with the story being essentially narrated for us. Then the next sentence we’re seeing writing as if we’re supposed to be viewing everything from Zen’s eyes. It was rather confusing and distracting to say the least.

The last subject I’ll touch on is probably the most important of all – there were absolutely ZERO trigger warnings at the beginning of this book when there should have been. There are multiple chapters that explicitly state the word rape and describe it, as well as explicit descriptions of torture. To top this off, the handling of these subjects is so poorly done. The way these scenes are written can only be equated to a young boys attempt at writing out what he sees in his violent video games. The fact this book was written by an adult male is not easy to distinguish, and neither is the intended audience – purely because of these horribly written mature themes.

To keep myself from ranting on and on for pages on end, I’ll leave it at this – I’m not entirely sure Searching for Zen was edited at all. If it was, I don’t think I would have had the feeling that I was reading a teenage boys attempt at a novel.

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Searching for Zen
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