Monday 14 January 2013

A blurb too far?


I’ve just finished reading a novel that was on the bestseller lists not long ago. Sadly, I found the most positive thing about it was that it turned out to be a good choice for bedtime reading: two or three pages each night and I was fast asleep. The plot was predictable, the characters unremarkable, but I kept turning the pages hoping it might improve. I was disappointed.

After plodding on to the boring end I re-read the blurb on the cover that had attracted my attention to this book in the first place. It included quotes from well-known writers and critics featuring words like superb, remarkable and brilliant.

Of course all readers and reviewers have different tastes, and one person’s literary masterpiece is another’s mediocre potboiler, but I couldn’t help wondering if some of these adjectives had either been taken completely out of context or had been accidentally attributed to the wrong book.

So what words would I like to see on the jacket of my novel if it's ever published? How about superb, remarkable and brilliant? Now all I have to do is make sure the story inside the covers lives up to the hype!

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