It turns out that one bad apple just may spoil the whole bunch. I'll tell you my story and let you decide.
I am trying to read a book by J. C. Sasser titled "Gradle Bird". It's about a 16-year-old girl who has lived with her grandfather her whole life, who moves her to a haunted family home at the book's beginning. I have read 106 pages and am seriously thinking of invoking the "100-page rule" and putting it down. It's not really a stinker, but I am totally uninvested and have a TBR a mile long. I looked up the book and read some reviews on Goodreads, which left me still undecided. Upon googling, I found a review that caught my eye. One of the first sentences:
I struck up a conversation with a lovely woman who turned out to be the literary agent for J.C. Sasser and she peaked my interest in the book.
Sigh.
I know that English a tough language, but a reader should not make this mistake. It's akin, at least to me, of mixing up "then" and "than", "seen" and "saw", and borders on the heinousness that is apostrophe abuse.
I know that I occasionally post in a hurry and fail to catch little errors in my typing. But this is not a little error. This is a lack of understanding. A lack of knowledge. A lack of proper usage. And when I see it, I am at an ALL-STOP. I can't read anymore of the review. I will never know what this person thinks of the book, the writing, the characters, the storyline. All credibility has been lost in the writer's opinion, at least for me.
The review is on WordPress, and I would think that the grammatical check must be turned off in the settings because I have two underlines in the misusage above. I don't even have to know that it's the incorrect word because the program knows and tells me. Yet another reason to sigh.
And now, I am moving to my bookcase for my next read. I am putting down "Gradle Bird", but I won't purge it from the library just yet. I will wait for a while and see if it speaks to me to pick back up and give it another try.
Meanwhile, the question for you: Does a misuse like the one above ruin the rest for you, or is it just me?
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