OnlineBookClub.org

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Green Mountain Road" by Leif Gregersen.]

"Green Mountain Road" by Leif Gregersen tells the story of two brothers from a small town in British Columbia, Canada. The elder’s pregnant fiancé is badly beaten which triggers a chain of misfortunes for the entire family.

This book is definitely not a page turner, quite the opposite. I nearly gave up at the end of the first page. What kept me going was the hope that it would improve. It didn’t. But I am a person who likes to finish a job once started. And it was quite a struggle to finish reading this.

The writing style is flat and mediocre, best described as a teenager’s first attempt at writing. The way the story is communicated to the reader is not consistent and most of the time clumsy and childish. The voice is completely lacking unless school-homework might be considered as one. Characters are flat, not well-developed and the story line does not grab you. Definitely not “show rather than tell” but only “tell”, the story does not allow the reader to see and feel, making it uninteresting and ineffective. Useless details, awful love scenes and enough clichés only make things worse.

The initial omniscient narrative point of view is inconsistent. The story is sometimes viewed through the perspective of several characters within a chapter and sometimes by jumping from inside the heads of one character to another’s even from paragraph to paragraph. Descriptions are poor and adjectives are used in a childlike manner. Dialogue is contrived, sounds artificial and the way the setting is presented fails to convey the atmosphere it should. In the middle of the story the center character suddenly becomes the younger brother whose life is influenced by his brother’s misfortunes.

Whatever genre this book is supposed to belong to, well, it is a boring novel, if I can call it a novel. I was happy when another page was over so I could get to the finish line quicker. To sum up, this book is far from qualifying as literature. Literature is something else. I desperately tried to find anything to appreciate somewhat but failed. I would not recommend this book to anyone unless somebody wishes to also struggle through it to see if I was right. One star out of four is more than generous.

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I appreciate your honesty in your review, few people are brave enough to give me the straight truth. I want to say though that it has taken quite a while for this review to come out and it is based on a first draft of the book that is no longer available. I have had it twice professionally edited and also have cut out the part with the younger brother from the book completely. I have gone through as much as I possibly could insofar as readability and quality of the work, and with the shortened version of the Novel, now just a Novella in the thriller or spy genre, I have added in four of my best short stories. The book has also received a glowing endorsement from prominent Canadian writer Richard Van Camp, who worked on CBC's North of 60 and wrote the book (now a movie) "The Lesser Blessed". I invite more people to give the book a go, I have found there are often at least one or two people in a crowd who will find reasons not to like it, but I have sold many copies of the new version and heard some great feedback about it.