'The Last Consort: Escape'

★★

Easily 4 Stars with a Few Adjustments

The synopsis is difficult to flesh out. 

​Though there are distinct aspects of suspense and romance intertwined, I can’t really place my finger on what the book’s overall story was trying to tell the reader. We meet many characters in the story that are interwoven in some capacity with one another, the main characters being Patricia and William, who bump into one another again after meeting briefly one night as children. Their past, the dangerous aspects of it and a potential infatuation in their present, are what they are contending with.

When you first start reading this book, within the first chapter, it is blatantly obvious that a couple areas are severely lacking: dialogue and writing mechanics. 

The dialogue unfortunately is not realistic. Attempts at displaying an accent to the reader was grammatically incorrect in some cases but then when the individual spoke again, they no longer had the accent from before, at least not written in the previous manner and vice versa. This happened noticeably with 2 different characters. As well as having difficulty tracking who is speaking. These instances and others do not occur all the time, but I would say about half of the time, give or take some. Here’s a couple of small examples:
        •“Alex and I’m four years young!” (pg. 20 on Kindle/pg. 8 marked on page): children typically refer to themselves as ‘years old’ because they want to be bigger than they are and do ‘big boy/girl’ stuff like their parents, family and friends.  
      •Lack of expected dialogue by the children when they met an individual with an obvious scar, a child, especially that young, would whisper ‘mommy, what happened’ or ‘mommy, why does he/she have.’

INVERSELY – there were a couple areas where the dialogue was realistic and just so well done:
         •When Patricia says goodbye to William after their meeting as adults for the first time (pg. 45 on Kindle/pg. 33 marked on page): I even said ‘awkward!’ to myself after reading that part, but I have known of people doing exactly what Patricia did and though it is awkward, you can’t get more genuine than that from an author’s writing.

The writing mechanics unfortunately are worse than the dialogue, which most readers wouldn’t put up with. Though it gets slightly better as you continue the book, they still make the book extremely choppy, with missing or misspelled words, missing commas, odd sentence structure which makes it difficult to understand what you have just read, incorrect word usage, new paragraphs not started when they should be, lack of continuity, repetitive and sometimes droning descriptions, descriptions that didn’t make sense and the author trying way too hard to make her work sound different from other authors. Here are a few examples:
        •He rubbed his face, puling the skin forward, only to snap back into place against the muscles. (pg. 14 on Kindle/pg. 2 marked on page): this gives incorrect imagery to the reader since skin is not elastic enough to ‘snap back into place.’
        •The sound was silenced by the darkened sound of fear, so thick that it dizzied; (pg. 14 on Kindle/pg. 2 marked on page): fear itself doesn’t have a sound as it is an emotion, which typically isn’t described as dark, that is more anger. Also, dizzied is used for past tense or past participle, and does not work in the present situation being described in the scene.             •The room was filled with people of every color scheme in the rainbow of humanity (pg. 14 on Kindle/pg. 2 marked on page): I get that you want to stand out as an author, but consistently making unusual phrases like this throughout the book just makes it difficult to read, when you could say the same thing a bit different and make it flow better for the reader.
      •He wore a gray, long sleeved top beneath his blue scrubs (pg. 19 on Kindle/pg. 7 marked on page): scrubs are used during surgery or when patients are bleeding profusely in the ER, not a simple exam. This is seen any time you go in for annual exams or through a little research.

ON THE OTHER HAND – there was at least once when the author tried to write something differently than the usual line you hear and nailed it! Not every line has to be different from what other people write, sometimes just 1 line can make you stand out from the other authors. I absolutely loved reading this little line:
     •You are meeting a couple new characters and they are a little on edge, but one sentence stood out. (pg. 66 on Kindle/pg. 54 marked on page). My only suggestion would be to change ‘Satan’ to ‘the devil’ and it would help the sentence flow better.

As you continue through the book to the end, you see glimpses of what the author was attempting with the plot. A couple areas were dragged out, becoming redundant, seemingly pointless after the first interaction(s) or their behavior didn’t match the scenario they were dealing with. Unfortunately, there are a lot of places where the story doesn’t make sense as well, it was stilted and lacked flow due to what I mentioned above in the other sections and left me with a lot of questions.

For the most part the book moved at a nice pace, and I enjoyed how the relationship bloomed between the two main characters though. The author did a good job creating character depth and even made me feel for them in several circumstances, wanting to know what happened to them.

Even though I was provided an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion and had to give this book 2 stars due to lack of plot, and issues with dialogue and writing mechanics, this book could easily be a 4-star book if the author would be willing to have this book edited more thoroughly.