Elena Greyrock, $2.99, ISBN 978-1735495002
Fantasy Romance, 2020
Elena Greyrock’s Six Feet Apart is set in 2025, in an alternate Earth where COVID-19 has decimated about half the world population. God, at least I hope this is an alternate Earth—things seemed okay the last time I peeked my head outside the window.
Our heroine is Luna James, whom I guess is a Zumba enthusiast since she is doing that so enthusiastically that her hip sends her radio off the rooftop and almost hits playboy musician Stryker Caine in the balcony below.
Thus begins a relationship that goes up and down more often than those so-called virus experts as well as politicians declaring that this is so-and-so and then backtracking to say something else and pretending that they never said so-and-so in the first place.
This story’s biggest problems are from a technical standpoint. It’s a classic example of a super-unpolished self-published effort; if the author had a critique group that okay’ed this thing, she may want to reconsider taking that group seriously because they likely hadn’t read this thing before giving it the two thumbs up.
There are abrupt cuts from one point of view to another from one paragraph to another, and these cuts happen so quickly and abruptly that I never get to fully digest a scene before I am whisked off to another.
Character motivation can abruptly change from paragraph to paragraph, without me fully understanding the motivation behind these changes. It doesn’t help that the author only gives superficial descriptions of what the characters are feeling when they do what they do. As a result, these characters never feel like real people to me, just action figures playing out a script as fast-forward speed.
Oh, and this one is the first part of a trilogy; it ends on a “read the next story to find out what will happen next” manner. Given that I barely know or care about these characters, yeah, I’m moving more than six feet away from this series.
Oddly enough, the poems that represent the songs Stryker is making, when he’s not getting agitated with pent-up horny horns, flow much better and feel more evocative that the story itself. I can’t help but to wonder whether the whole thing would’ve fared better with me if the author had done it all in verse.
Well, what’s done is done, and this story never really comes alive to me due to its awkward, unpolished narrative. It doesn’t matter if the story had a plot so amazing that it can cure cancer, when reading it is a chore due to all its technical issues.
