Leah
Written on Dec 10, 2010
Earlier this year I received Excess All Areas by Mandy herself to review for the site, but I never found the time to read it. Not to mention, the cover was a bit bland and I’m not the biggest fan of self-published novels. However, when I received a copy of Mandy’s newest book Breaking The Ice, I read the first couple of pages and it interested me so because I had nothing else to read, I decided to give it a go. It wasn’t the best book I’ve ever read, but at no point did it make me want to give up!
Breaking The Ice isn’t a particularly unique Chick Lit novel but it is a book you can easily get lost in. It has some lovely characters, characters you really feel for, and the story line doesn’t feel contrived despite the fact that I found Samantha’s panic attacks a bit much sometimes. It’s a tale oft-told: girl meets (famous) boy, she feels he’s out of her league, she barely has a life and lives for her work and ends up having to save her job or something similar and that is Breaking The Ice in a nutshell. It does exactly what it says on the tin and it was all I wanted at that moment in my reading time!
But, it has to be said, it is fairly obvious the book is self-published. It seemed a bit long and it could have done with being sent to a freelance copy-editor as words were mis-spelled (yeh instead of yeah, nan instead of naan etc), every single spoken sentence ended in a full stop rather than a comma (for example: ‘”I love you.” Samantha said’ rather than ‘”I love you,” Samantha said’) and I did find that insanely annoying. Surely, every writer knows to put a comma after a quotation marks when adding “xx said” to a sentence. Whenever a time was mentioned, there was no AM or PM which is again another easy error that should have been corrected.
I would have liked to have seen more characterisation too, as I found Samantha and Jimmy were a little 2D and although I liked the developing relationship between the two, I did wonder why Jimmy would be interested in someone who was, to be honest, a bit of a wimp. Yet for all of the bad things I’ve said I can see potential in the book, it just needed streamlining and it needed to be looked over by a copy-editor. If you’re going to self-published then you do actually have to invest in your book if you want it to stand out because otherwise people will think it’s a pile of trash that was only published because the author wanted the glory of seeing a finished copy of her book. So yes, I did enjoy Breaking The Ice but it could have been a much better novel with a little bit of TLC before it became an actual book.