The Rebel's Pledge by Rita Gerlach - When this book showed up as free for Kindle, it caught my eye because part of the action takes place in St Mary's City in colonial Maryland - close to home. The storyline is very interesting, with lots of action, and that kept me 'turning' pages all the way through. Matthew Hale is the main character, a young man who took part in a rebellion against King James of England. He expects to be hanged as a traitor, but is instead sentenced to transport to the colonies where he is sold as a slave. His master is a good man and treats all his workers very well. Hale soon earns a place as steward and proves to be honorable and trustworthy, so he is sent back to England with the mission of bringing the master's daughter to Maryland. Not surprisingly, Hale and the young lady, Lara, fall in love and after facing many adventures and dangers in returning to Maryland, they marry with her father's blessing. Unfortunately, Lara's former suitor in England is a powerful man with evil intent and he comes after Lara and frames Hale as a murderer. Hale and Lara are separated again and face another set of adventures and dangers before they can clear Hale's name and save both their lives.
Overall I liked the book, although the love story itself is fairly predictable and formulaic. There were a few minor holes in the plot, but that didn't bother me much. What did bother me was what looked like extremely poor editing!
I would be interested in seeing the print version of the book, because I hope that the vast majority of the errors in grammar, punctuation, and word usage were the result of formatting from print to eBook! I have no idea how the technology works, but I have noticed that eBooks do have those kinds of mistakes to a larger degree than print, so I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the author and editor. That said, the errors were abundant, and sucked quite a bit of enjoyment out of the reading. Word usage was the biggest problem. I found "barred teeth" instead of "bared" multiple times, "illusive" instead of "elusive" more than once, "vile" instead of "vial" a couple of times, and a host of other similar mistakes. Punctuation was also strange or completely wrong in many places. One of the characters was referred to interchangeably as "Teaque" or "Teague". I am willing to attribute most of these problems to formatting error, but there were also places where the sentences and wording were just downright awkward and confusing. I paid a brief visit to the author's website and found a preview chapter of a new book there and a couple of punctuation and grammatical errors stood out to me in that sample, so maybe editing is an ongoing issue.
Overall I liked the book, although the love story itself is fairly predictable and formulaic. There were a few minor holes in the plot, but that didn't bother me much. What did bother me was what looked like extremely poor editing!
I would be interested in seeing the print version of the book, because I hope that the vast majority of the errors in grammar, punctuation, and word usage were the result of formatting from print to eBook! I have no idea how the technology works, but I have noticed that eBooks do have those kinds of mistakes to a larger degree than print, so I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the author and editor. That said, the errors were abundant, and sucked quite a bit of enjoyment out of the reading. Word usage was the biggest problem. I found "barred teeth" instead of "bared" multiple times, "illusive" instead of "elusive" more than once, "vile" instead of "vial" a couple of times, and a host of other similar mistakes. Punctuation was also strange or completely wrong in many places. One of the characters was referred to interchangeably as "Teaque" or "Teague". I am willing to attribute most of these problems to formatting error, but there were also places where the sentences and wording were just downright awkward and confusing. I paid a brief visit to the author's website and found a preview chapter of a new book there and a couple of punctuation and grammatical errors stood out to me in that sample, so maybe editing is an ongoing issue.
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