Title: The Jacobite Rebellion
Author: Paul Adams
Publisher: The Book Guild Publishing
Pp: 227
Price: £7.99
ISBN: 978-1-912362-55-4
I asked for a review copy of this book because I liked the sound of the basic premise. Charles Edward Stuart is arrested and held by the police on suspicion of terrorism, specifically a threat to overthrow the monarchy and replace the Queen with the real Charles Stuart, a modern day Bonnie Prince Charlie. As a Scot who has lived in England for nearly 40 years, that piqued my interest.
Paul Adams can certainly write light humour, of that there is no doubt, and I say that as someone whose own professional writing life started with gags and sketches for BBC radio and TV. In fact, as I said to the publisher, his style sounds very much in tone like the satire I deployed in my own (so far unpublished) comic novels with an Emergency Holographic Detective (EHD-1) at their core.
I have enjoyed the 50 pages I read yesterday after the book arrived in the morning post and I am looking forward to reading more today, but the half a dozen minor typoes and grammatical errors are irritating and interrupt the reading flow for this linguistic pedant.
As a full-time writer and editor I know how easy it can be for this to happen but if the 1100 or so pages that make up The Lord of the Rings can be proofread properly, so surely can The Jacobite Rebellion.
But that is a quibble; I am enjoying the story and want to read more. That almost literally speaks volumes...
15.27h, July 1 2018...Just finished reading the book. The typoes and grammatical errors irked me to the end, and the humour began to grate about half way through. But I did want to see how it finished, despite the sloppy editing and the contrived jokes. It made a big difference from all the biographies, autobiographies and World War II escape books I've read recently.
