Brian S

I find all the 5-star reviews for The Artifact to be highly suspect. This is, quite simply, the most poorly written novel I have ever read.

How bad is the writing? Think of as many examples of poor writing as you can. I'll wait.

That's not enough. Think of more.

The author has exhibited every one of those. Repeatedly.

An example:
Most of the book is written in the first-person. At one point, the author forgot that they were writing from that perspective, between sentences in a conversation, making it appear as though the protagonist is talking to himself.

There are so many instances of near non-sequitors driving the plot. Middle of a conversation, suddenly they're talking about and doing something else.

The characters are paper-thin. There is no conflict. Even during potential genocide, they just go with the flow. Stuff happens, and they just move on to the next conversation.

I have to imagine the protagonist is an avatar of the author. If I had to guess, judging by the protagonist's interaction and the author's use of female characters, the author had never had a girlfriend, or even a close female friend. The author has probably never had a job. The author has probably never met anyone in the government or military.

Simply put, it just seems like the author has no life experience, no ability to imagine it, and has done no research to fill in any knowledge gaps.

There's an idea for a fun story. But the author doesn't have the chops to tell it.

You can skip just about 80% of the written words in this novel, and still follow the story. The author uses far far far too much descriptive text, and annoyingly long and repetitive introspective passages.

The plot, when you get to it, is a good one. But most authors would have condensed this entire novel into a handful of chapters.

Far too much navel-gazing. I honestly skipped full pages at a time, when the main character was simply spinning his wheels in the “woe-is-me” morass. The main character wasn't interesting. A simple people-pleaser tied to a narcissistic boss.

I don't care about either of them. I could not be bothered to like either of them. The motives of the boss are at least understandable, if cookie-cutter. The main character... well, so wishy-washy as to be pointless. And by the end of the book, he hadn't changed or grown, even a little bit.

The kernel of an interesting story surrounded by far too much navel-gazing.

Good story. Needs professional editor.

As always, the story is entertaining. Unfortunately, the sheer quantity of grammatical, spelling, and editing errors drag it down. Nearly every page of this book is littered with at least one error. Sometimes a character has their name spelled differently. Often the author confuses “there” and “their”, “too”, “to”, and “two”. Sentence structures often break, leaving the reader to backtrack to understand what the author was trying to say. Missing words, or words entirely wrong for a particular turn of phrase, confuse the reader.

Simply put, if just one experienced editor took a pass at this book, it would be significantly (and easily) improved.

The only thing keeping this from being 5-stars is the fact that Twain positioned all people from the past as being naïve rubes, with no fundamental grasp of human nature (such as the basic act of recognizing a lie when told).

It's interesting in the way that some history books are. It's written like a history book. There's not so much a story here as a retrospective of events that never really happened.

Really, just too much time spent world building.

Decent story. Nothing revolutionary.

If you've read any other alt-history in the WWII era, this won't show you much that you haven't already seen. Aliens don't play much of a role, other than prompting the story and slightly advancing some tech. There are a ton of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. So if that is something that triggers you, be warned.

Great as always

I've read every book in the series, and Taylor Anderson has stayed true to form with River of Bones. It's a great read.

A good story in the hands of a poor writer

The story was good. It had an excellent premise and enough action to keep it moving. But the writing itself is error prone, repetitive, and badly in need of an editor. It would also help if the author learned the difference between “to,” “too,” and “two.”

A good premise and a plot that moves

The premise was interesting and the story was written well, keeping the plot moving at all times. I recommend it.

A bit slow to start

The story was a bit of a slow starter, but picked up its pace. Seems to have set up an interesting premise to build on.

Slow start, decent read

The pace was too slow at the beginning, causing me to not really be interested in the story. But once the hook was set, it sped up quite well.

A Promising Start

The Alexander Inheritance seems to be a promising start to a new series about refugees in time. It would be nice if there was more “show” instead of “tell” in future entries.

As good as ever

Anderson's latest in the Destroyermen series is s good as ever. While some may want more detail about the entire scope of the war, the focus on a single theater lent itself well to a tightly packed story.

As good as the first.

As good as the first. I hope the author keeps it up on the next in the series. I'll be buying it.

Funny

It's funny, and it moves quickly. Never mind what the hard core Sci-Fi purists say. It's a good story with a Sci-Fi outer coating.

I hope there's more

While this would be a suitable series end, I hope it's not. Even if it's a sort of spinoff, I'd like more.

Topical. I wonder if the political stuff will go over some folks' heads, or if it will cause a ruckus among a certain subset of the population. Hopefully Locke doesn't receive any backlash.

The weakest of the Quinn Colson series to date. Just plain uninteresting characters and a mystery villain that had no mystery at all.

I can't put my finger on why, but this was not quite as filling as others in the series. As I read it on an e-reader, I did not know how far along in the book I was. So the end came as quite the unpleasant surprise. It ended... without much happening.

This series seems to be getting less and less interesting and more and more far-fetched.

Not as entertaining as the first book.

Wondered which brand of Feminism this story would focus on. Fortunately, it wasn't the militant variety, though it was radical feminism.

It was interesting to see the radical male feminist struggle over his very unfeminine urges. Such as his desire to look at beautiful women, or his urge to protect the “damsel in distress.” Unfortunately, neither were really addressed. They were brought up as “issues” the character struggled with and left hanging.

The main character never seemed to grow comfortable with the fact that he was a male feminist.