Watching For Mermaids

Author: David Roper
Goodreads Rating: 4.33
My Rating: 1 Star
Pages: 194


I won this book as part of the Firstreads giveaways. I love mermaids so I thought this might be interesting. Well, there really aren't mermaids and this author really needed an editor. I have nothing against Selfpubs, but if you're going to do it, do yourself a favor, and have someone -multiple someones- edit your work for basics, such as quotation marks.


Goodreads Synopses:


As a young boy, rounding a bend in a remote Maine cove, Dave Roper stumbled upon two mermaids. No one believed him then. No one believes him now. But he kept watching and wondering: what is imagined and what is real? And while he watched and wondered during 50 years of waterborne life – as a boy, a teen, an adult, a father – what he pulled from the sea was not another mermaid, but the mystery, possibility, romance, joy, fear, and uncertainty that mermaids represent. Based on real experiences, these 30 stories take you on that journey. So fill your favorite mug, settle into that stuffed reading chair, poke the stove a few times, and dive into Dave Roper’s new book, Watching for Mermaids.


My review after the jump.

This is one of the rare times that I started to write my review while in the middle of reading the book. There were a lot of things that really irritated me about this book, and one of them was the lack of editing. Such simple things were over looked in the process of publishing this work. 'Now' instead of 'know' - missing quotations - and I'm only 25% done with the book. What also frustrated me was that this felt like he wanted to write a memoir but was too lazy to make it all fit together so instead he took 30 stories that involved him and sailing and just called it a collection of short stories. 


The issues with the quotation marks continued through the book and I was never sure about some parts of dialogue. There was also a serious lack of flow in this book, a lot of the paragraphs-although made sense, just didn't feel right if that makes any sense at all. Another one of my major problems was that you never knew what period in his life you were. You went from Childhood, Youth, Adulthood, Somewhere in-between, to Old Age. If he had taken the time to create a more fluid conversation with his readers rather than jumping from his son being 24 and needing surgery to the next story being about how he tried to re-connect when his son was 13, I think it would have turned out better.


The typos never got better and it was still simple things, like "Rip Can Winkle" instead of Rip Van Winkle. I actually googled it thinking "No way something like that passes a friend editing" maybe its a reference that I just didn't understand. But no such Can Winkle exists. Mind you, he spelt it right on the next page. I get that the 'C' and the 'V' are very close, and we all make mistakes, but when you publish a book? I mean come on. The more I read this book the more I wonder if he even had someone to read over the book and edit for him.


As far as things I do like, I like that he wrote this for his mom, thats super cute. Other than that, all I felt for this book was that I wasted my time. I didn't understand all of his boat references because he never actually explained them, his editing was terrible, and well, thats all I got. I have nothing against selfpubs, but if you're going to do it, do it right because otherwise you're hurting your reputation and your readers.