Official Review: Beast of 77 by Shawn a Jenkins

[Elysian Lilac]

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Beast of 77" by Shawn a Jenkins.]

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2 out of 4 stars

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Beast of 77 by Shawn A. Jenkins is a book that tells the story of a young man turned beast. Isaac, age 20, is the father of a 2-year-old boy, boyfriend to his son’s mother, and caring son of a religious man. Two months after a devastating event that landed him in a psychiatric hospital, Isaac was released and determined to set his life straight and make things right with the people he loved. Unfortunately, the beast inside of Isaac had very different plans.

I decided to give this book 2 out of 4 stars. I chose not to give it 1 star because I liked how the author wrapped up the story and thought the overall plot was a good idea. But I chose not to give this book 3 stars because it had quite a few errors, lacked character depth, had a couple random erotic scenes that didn’t flow into the rest of the story well, and the flow of the book felt overall choppy. This book is aiming at an older audience, as there are a few very detailed erotic scenes, that are interested in paranormal genres. I would rate the erotic scenes to be a 3 out of 5 on an intensity scale.

Many aspects of Beast of 77 were not appealing to me but one of the biggest problems I had with this book were the punctuation and grammar errors. Multiple times throughout the book, I found punctuation missing such as quotation marks around dialogue in Chapter 2: “‘Dad, it was all just for fun. Isaac respectfully chided his father.” This was one of many examples of missing punctuation that I found. Also, in Chapter 2, I found the author using the wrong form of “your”: “‘You’re recovery here has been nothing short of phenomenal.” I also discovered a few spelling errors throughout the book such this example in Chapter 25: “‘Does your mother know that you’re using that king of language, young lady?’” The amount of errors throughout the book showed me that it wasn’t very well edited and were distracting while reading.

One of my least favorite parts of this book, besides the errors, was the main character, Isaac. Most of the reason was because I felt that he wasn’t a well-developed character. While we do get a few insights into his past, he felt very one dimensional and lacked depth. We never really find much out about the beast inside of Isaac or the "man" that he occasionally sees. Everything surrounding Isaac felt elusive and unresolved. He was the main character but we hardly know him at all. Along with that, I disliked the author’s way of describing every single side character that came into the story. Even the ones that had no dialogue and no impact whatsoever had a description of at least their race, if not more. While I enjoy being able to picture the scene in my head while reading, the constant stopping of the story to describe some person that didn’t matter was deterring and I noticed it being one of the main things I focused on in the book.

Honestly, my favorite part of the book was the ending. I found that it didn’t leave me hanging and it wrapped everyone’s story very well. The resolution in the last few chapters was about the only part of the book that flowed decently and didn’t leave me confused.

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Beast of 77
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[NetMassimo]

The impressions I get is of a novel that still needs some development, particularly of its characters, besides another round of proofreading. Thank you for your honest review!

[Miraphery]

The book still needs a lot of work before it can be enjoyed by the targeted audience. Thanks for the sincere review.

[Tonika632]

I don't like poor editing job so I am passing on this one. Thank you for your review and opinion!