Review – The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 17, 2014.

The Anatomy lesson is a poorly-written and bloated novel, nothing but a slog of a let-down.

Its pedigree is promising: six years spent in Amsterdam, a former New York Times writer, rave reviews from fellow authors and an MFA. Pedigree, in this instance, has no claim on the quality of the novel, of the writing, of the novel’s coherence or anything else.

Whole sections of the book are nothing but useless bloat and should have been cut.

“Most excellent and ornate men of Amsterdam: Honorable Burgomaster Bicker, Amsterdam burghers, gentlemen of the Stadtholder’s court, magistrates, inspectors Collegii Medici, physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, apprentices, and public visitors to our chamber, on behalf of the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild, it is my greatest honor to welcome you all to the Amsterdam theatrum anatomicum on this, the opening night of the winter festival 1632.”

That claptrap goes on and on and on. For 13 pages. Thirteen pages of pure, pointless claptrap.

The plot

The plot is, the lead up to Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson. That’s it. So, really, there is no plot. There is no middle and there is no end. There is no conclusion to most of the story lines.

The publishers touts at least seven narrators, none of whom are given enough time to develop into characters. It is unclear at best, purely bad writing at worst, whom the narrators are speaking to, especially as the narration goes from first to third persons. Then the narration goes from past tense to present tense to past tense. Then one of the characters is flying over the city, trying to atone for his minor sins. Because that belongs in a historical fiction novel.

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Review – Professor Kompressor by Nils Andersson

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 1, 2014.

Professor Kompressor gets visited by agents with an agency so secret, they refuse to name it. He makes a series of inventions, visits a foreign country, flies over a bunch of others, and makes a bunch of inventions.

Professor Kompressor under cover (sic) certainly has a little charm, but glaring errors take away from that charm. In short, the book either needed an editor or, a much better one. And a couple of proof-reads. (For the record, the professor is not under the covers, rather, he is undercover.)

The biggest issue is the use of direct quotes. Most style books, and readers’ sanity, dictate the following: If a quote goes over a single paragraph, the end of the first paragraph, and all subsequent ones except for the last, do not have an ending quotation marks. Each quote encapsulated on both ends by quotation marks is supposed to mean the end of the quote: the next should be a different person’s quote.

Example, page 121:

“What are you doing with this battered old car, though?”
“Are you training to become a mechanic?”
“Doesn’t quite match your usual invention, does it? A bit too down to earth”

Because all this dialogue, in a row, is said by the same person, the quotation marks at the end of “though” and “mechanic should be left off, to mark it’s the same speaker. This lack style adherence makes the book much harder to read than it should be.

As a person who works in print, spacing issues equally struck me with chagrin. Indent-long spaces between words in the same sentence seemed like the paginator feel asleep at the keyboard.

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Review – Dr. Vigilante by Alberto Hazan

This review was originally posted on Goodreads.com and reviews.wheelerc.org on March 1, 2015.

The concept is ripe for a novel: doctor uses his access to patients, and trends, in the emergency room to carry out a war on the male criminal elements in the big apple.

The inherent tension in the idea would, seemingly, be enough fodder for a brilliant story. After all, it’s about a doctor who hurts people, and then proceeds to treat the people he’s intentionally harmed. A doctor violating his oath.

Dr. Vigilante does not live up to the lofty concept. It lives up to the pretension of a rich, hunky doctor living in New York City, who is written as a toned-down version of Batman.

The pretension, along with the terrible stereotypes and blatant sexism built into the plot, into the characters, even into the setting, helps drive this book down, down, down.

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