Separate Lives

Rating:
Summary: Separate Lives
Review: An enjoyable easy reading book with unexpected twists. Made me want to visit Rome!

Rating:
Summary: Separate Lives
Review: An enjoyable easy reading book with unexpected twists. Made me want to visit Rome!

Rating:
Summary: Separate Lives
Review: Enjoy the cover art on this one, then pass it by. The story starts out okay, though the characters are wooden and unbelieveable. About halfway through the book, though, something goes dreadfully amiss. There are huge gaps, confusing lapses, and errors on top of errors. Obviously there was not any attempt made to edit the story. The second half was more of a rough draft or even an outline, and I suffered through to the end, just to see if there was a point to this mess. There was not.

It is offensive to be asked to part with our $ for this kind of effort.

Rating:
Summary: Pointless, Pretentious and Unfinished
Review: Enjoy the cover art on this one, then pass it by. The story starts out okay, though the characters are wooden and unbelieveable. About halfway through the book, though, something goes dreadfully amiss. There are huge gaps, confusing lapses, and errors on top of errors. Obviously there was not any attempt made to edit the story. The second half was more of a rough draft or even an outline, and I suffered through to the end, just to see if there was a point to this mess. There was not.

It is offensive to be asked to part with our $ for this kind of effort.

Rating:
Summary: Separate Lives
Review: I liked this book. It kept my attention and was a page turner. The plot was good. What is great about Sara Hylton is the way she describes settings that are probably unfamiliar to the reader. You get so wrapped up in the text that you imagine that you are right there with the characters. The biggest downfall of the book was that there were so many typographical errors! The book needs to be re-editted.

Rating:
Summary: Slow and poorly edited
Review: I was very disappointed with this book. The premise is excellent--a young woman falling in love with her teacher and going to live with him on an unfamiliar but enchanting island. However, the story takes too long to really get moving, with too much description in some places and too much left to the imagination in others. In addition, the grammar, punctuation, and spelling are full of errors; one of the most irritating, in my opinion, was the inconsistent spelling of one of the characters' names (she was sometimes "Marian" and sometimes "Marion"). I'm glad I got this book out of the library, because buying it would have been a waste of money.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed Messages
Review: Mervyn Corwen is a mild mannered, introspective, mildly introverted painter caught in the banalities of teaching graphic arts in an all-girls private school. He is attracted by the youth, beauty and extended family closeness of one of his former students and his contradictory wishy-washness/sensitivity leads them to marriage in spite of the misgivings expressed by his cousin and friends, and his inability to acknowledge the unsuitablity of the relationship. This book begins well, the story unfolds clearly with enough background to give you a feel for the main characters, whether you empathize with their motives or not. As the story progressed, it read like a bad soap opera with a kitchen sink of cliches. Characters dying spectacularly left and right, vendettas, chronic ailments inflicted but stoically borne, and after a few trials by fire, a happy ending in the sunset with a wealthy aristocrat. Lilian Unsworth holds the copyright to this edition, and if it is not a pseudonym for Hylton, it should be as the end of the book is stylistically different from the beginning. But, the biggest insult is that the St Martin's Press edition is technically flawed. The book contained an unforgivable number grammatical and syntax errors these days of electronic spelling and grammar check tools aside. There are also confused references to characters of similar names. I read it from cover to cover expecting the book to redeem itself, but it did not happen. I am not dismissing this author, as it began with much promise, but I hope her future work gets printed with more respect.