Review of A Bloody Book
-
Gabbi29
- Posts: 1
- Joined: 25 Nov 2019, 22:30
- Currently Reading:
- Bookshelf Size: 4
- Reviewer Page: onlinebookclub.org/reviews/by-gabbi29.html
- Latest Review: A Bloody Book by Chris Bowen
Review of A Bloody Book
[Following is a volunteer review of "A Bloody Book" by Chris Bowen.]
I am rating A Bloody Book by Christ Bowen 3 out of 4 stars because it was good, but it had a lot of grammar and typo errors. Despite that though, the story is gripping in all the right ways. It had a very relatable main character, the right number of funny moments, the foreshadowing required to string you along, and a lot of truth, but it has a lot of errors and mistakes as well.
The book is about a boy named Maxx who is your seemingly regular kid. He hates adults, makes fun of them, and is very aware of peer pressure. What makes him stand out is that he’s a problem student and this story shows why he is one. It shows his point of view of those reasons as well and makes it all the starker for it. In fact, the story ends with him telling the readers what he’d learned from his short life and it nearly made me cry.
This story was more gripping than I thought a book for younger teens had any right to be for someone my age. In fact, I might even give this as a gift to my younger relatives. What I loved about the book was that you could see by the choice of wording that the one “talking” was a kid, especially in the attitude department. Examples of this abound like how he would judge adults and how he was super conscious about peer pressure. Basically, it feels well-suited for the audience Chris Bowen is trying to reach and seems like something that would resonate with them.
Other things I found liking were how forthright about the problems with current school systems and the world he was when he wrote, the way he slipped in just the right amount of levity, and how good the action scenes were. The whole story pointed things out without having to leave Maxx’s point of view at any point and makes it all the starker for it. While funny parts in the book like Mrs. Spencer’s wig story and Mr. Foxx’s classes as well as his weird mind games had me smiling to myself. Last, but certainly not least, the chapters after Uncle Johnny came until the end were excellent. I actually got absorbed reading it and nothing could kick me out of the story at that point.
What did kick me out of the story multiple times was the incomplete sentences and I get that when it’s first-person POV the fragments help convey a character’s thought process, but in this book, it felt like there were too many. On the opposite of the spectrum, there were also a lot of run-on sentences that could have been halved in two too. The same could be said for a lot of the paragraphs. It was especially annoying when the paragraph went into another topic before returning to the main topic. A good example is a paragraph on pages 19-20 that starts talking about his classmate Bach, but somehow ends up in the middle talking about his uncle, his apartment and then going back to Bach as if he only remembered his home wasn’t the main topic of the paragraph then. It basically felt like the author tried to make the book shorter looking by squishing things in one paragraph when they could have just made separate paragraphs. I mean the moment a paragraph has more than 12 sentences I think it should have been halved into two or more paragraphs already. Those kicked me right out of the story.
The worst though were the misspellings that just kept jumping out at me. An example of this was when I was vibing with the story, going with the flow and bam! There was a misspelling that knocked me right out. Things like “their” when it should have been “there”, those types of mistakes ruin the flow for me.
******
A Bloody Book
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
I am rating A Bloody Book by Christ Bowen 3 out of 4 stars because it was good, but it had a lot of grammar and typo errors. Despite that though, the story is gripping in all the right ways. It had a very relatable main character, the right number of funny moments, the foreshadowing required to string you along, and a lot of truth, but it has a lot of errors and mistakes as well.
The book is about a boy named Maxx who is your seemingly regular kid. He hates adults, makes fun of them, and is very aware of peer pressure. What makes him stand out is that he’s a problem student and this story shows why he is one. It shows his point of view of those reasons as well and makes it all the starker for it. In fact, the story ends with him telling the readers what he’d learned from his short life and it nearly made me cry.
This story was more gripping than I thought a book for younger teens had any right to be for someone my age. In fact, I might even give this as a gift to my younger relatives. What I loved about the book was that you could see by the choice of wording that the one “talking” was a kid, especially in the attitude department. Examples of this abound like how he would judge adults and how he was super conscious about peer pressure. Basically, it feels well-suited for the audience Chris Bowen is trying to reach and seems like something that would resonate with them.
Other things I found liking were how forthright about the problems with current school systems and the world he was when he wrote, the way he slipped in just the right amount of levity, and how good the action scenes were. The whole story pointed things out without having to leave Maxx’s point of view at any point and makes it all the starker for it. While funny parts in the book like Mrs. Spencer’s wig story and Mr. Foxx’s classes as well as his weird mind games had me smiling to myself. Last, but certainly not least, the chapters after Uncle Johnny came until the end were excellent. I actually got absorbed reading it and nothing could kick me out of the story at that point.
What did kick me out of the story multiple times was the incomplete sentences and I get that when it’s first-person POV the fragments help convey a character’s thought process, but in this book, it felt like there were too many. On the opposite of the spectrum, there were also a lot of run-on sentences that could have been halved in two too. The same could be said for a lot of the paragraphs. It was especially annoying when the paragraph went into another topic before returning to the main topic. A good example is a paragraph on pages 19-20 that starts talking about his classmate Bach, but somehow ends up in the middle talking about his uncle, his apartment and then going back to Bach as if he only remembered his home wasn’t the main topic of the paragraph then. It basically felt like the author tried to make the book shorter looking by squishing things in one paragraph when they could have just made separate paragraphs. I mean the moment a paragraph has more than 12 sentences I think it should have been halved into two or more paragraphs already. Those kicked me right out of the story.
The worst though were the misspellings that just kept jumping out at me. An example of this was when I was vibing with the story, going with the flow and bam! There was a misspelling that knocked me right out. Things like “their” when it should have been “there”, those types of mistakes ruin the flow for me.
******
A Bloody Book
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
Latest Review: A Bloody Book by Chris Bowen
