Evie’s Job


Hi guys. Tonight, I wrote a review of Evie’s Job (by Tess Mackenzie) over on The Site Which Must Not Be Named. It was promptly rejected.

So here you go. Comment if you like, share it if you like. More importantly, if you’re swayed by my opinions, why not go and read it for yourself? 🙂

Let me preface this by saying that I did get a 100% off coupon for the book from the author a while back. I’m an honest sort of guy, so I feel like I should tell you that so you can decide for yourself whether my review is biased.

The dialogue is at times short, as others have mentioned. I like it. It’s quite natural-sounding and though it may not be what you’re used to, the length of an average speech is far more believable than say, Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series, where Richard goes on for paragraphs without anyone butting in. Sorry, Mr. Goodkind, no offence but he does go on for quite a bit!

The emotional conflict between the characters (since this is a character driven story) seems plausible as well.

Meredith is quite the character in her own right – although she seems at times to be the villain of the piece, and is at odds with Evie, she simply wants what’s best for Natalie,

There are a few scenes where Evie and Natalie seem to go around and around an issue and again. Though this might not be your usual cup of tea, it strikes me as the normal thing when people argue, voices are raised and what you’re saying just doesn’t seem to sink in until they really want to listen.

The character development is quite solid for Natalie and Evie. Towards the end of the book you’ll be rooting for them as a couple and as lawyers. There is a sting in the tale, if you’ll pardon the word play, but you can rest assured that they are still together in the end.

Natalie is quite introspective, so if you like that sort of thing in stories, then you should enjoy it.

I do wish that Meredith had moved on and found someone else, but that’s really beyond the scope of the book. Please petition the author to write ‘After Natalie.’ No, I’m kidding. Tess doesn’t really do sequels!

The format is actually quite helpful. Each chapter is numbered and is followed by the viewpoint. It’s not strictly necessary, but it is helpful to indicate to the reader that we’re now seeing things from Evie’s point of view.

A little bit of criticism about the formatting, and this is mainly because of the Smashwords conversion process. There’s no paragraph spacing. In a print book, that’s fine, because new paragraphs are indented. But in an e-reader some white space between paragraphs is always helpful. Also, each chapter should start on a new page. I’m not going to fault the author for that, though! If it bugs you, take it up with Smashwords.

I think it’s a bit pedantic to criticise typos. Pick any book of some length these days, flip to a random page and likely as not you will find typos. What you could do instead is just let the author know and these things can be fixed, at least in the electronic version.

In summary, I really liked this story. It has romance, sex scenes which aren’t cringe-worthy (and not too many of them) and a bit of genuine humour. I think I could stand to read it again, or something else in the same vein! I give it five stars, and I’m quite picky about the sort of books that get into my hall of fame.

Perhaps you’re still unsure. If you want to try the story before you buy it, then you can. Look it up on Wattpad.

While some would consider offering a book on another site to read freely to be a bonehead manoeuvre, I like to think that there are honest customers out there who will like what they see and buy it for the convenience of being able to read it offline (which doesn’t always work with Wattpad, sorry to say). So perhaps in this way, the author will gain readers who are genuinely interested in her works.

 

 

Evie’s Job on Smashwords (or your favourite book store).


6 responses to “Evie’s Job”

  1. Slightly resurrecting an old thread, but I suspect it was rejected because it told people they could get it for free on Wattpad. If it’s automatic, maybe just for mentioning Wattpad & smashwords, but that may just flag it for manual check and then it was rejected for the free thing. This is pure speculation BTW, I have no special knowledge of Amz’s review filtering policy.

  2. Nice review! Spoiler for the end, but then, I suppose it’s expected and standard in the genre that the leads be together in the end anyway. So why was this review rejected? I’m a little confused about all of that.

  3. Hi, Martin. I’ve been a big fan of Tess for years. I’ve reviewed numerous of her stories on Goodreads (yeah, I know I should be reviewing on Amazon, but when I see that nearly every single book is a full point higher on Amazon than on Goodreads, well, I don’t have to finish that thought). Tess is the most thoughtful, insightful, and talented writer of erotica that I have ever encountered. If you haven’t read her other stuff, do so. You won’t regret it.