Review: Lost On A Page

Lost On A Page by David E. Sharp
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another in the metafictional genre pioneered by Jasper Fforde, and, like most metafiction (including Fforde's), it didn't wow me.

Especially early on, it was hard to shake the impression that the hack novels with flat characters and cliched settings were not satire, but reflected the author's actual level of ability to write. This was especially the case since there are a lot - really a lot - of basic copy editing issues. For example, the author frequently inserts a tag in the middle of a sentence of dialog, or between two sentences of dialog, but only rarely punctuates them correctly. The rule is that if the first section of dialog completes a sentence, there's a period after the "X said" tag and the new sentence starts with a capital, but if the sentence continues after the tag, there's a comma after "X said" and the second part of the sentence doesn't start with a capital. To give made-up examples: "That's what I wondered," said Joe. "How did she do that?" Or: "I've always wondered," said Joe, "how she did that."

What the author almost always does, though, is end the "X said" tag with a comma and start the next part of the dialog with a capital, which is wrong whether the second part is or is not a new sentence.

Other punctuation issues include misplaced commas (comma before the main verb, no comma before a term of address). Then there are the vocabulary issues: ally/alley, subsequent/prior, obligatorily/obligingly, rankled/wrinkled, amuck/amiss, illicit/elicit, hurtled/hurled, frontrunner/frontman, scuffle/scruff, immunity/impunity, dual/duel. The past perfect tense goes missing a few times as well. Besides these recurring issues, there were a few isolated errors with capitalization, apostrophe placement, hyphenation, use of the incorrect preposition in a phrase, and a comma splice.

I don't normally mention such issues in detail for books that I receive, as I did this one, via Netgalley, since they often have another edit to come before publication, but this has a publication date of 2018 on it, so I can only assume I have the published version.

The good news is that as the book went on, it did develop some suspense, and I did start to care about the characters succeeding, even though they didn't get any deeper. When your premise is that fictional characters from badly-written genre fiction have become real people, your writing really needs to make them feel more real, as if there's more to them than their stereotypes and their role in the plot; but I never felt that.

It did end up as a decent pulp plot with some exciting scenes and a satisfying conclusion, but for me it lacked depth, quality, and polish.

View all my reviews