Another Review, this time from Review Haven in the U.K. Adam, the site owner/reviewer was unfailingly polite in his emails, to the point where he inquired whether or not I wanted him to cross post to other venues in light of the negative rating. I thought that quite decent of him. His assessment is below. Apparently, Running Black didn’t engage him and I’m sorry to disappoint. I certainly understand some folks aren’t going to like it, for whatever reasons. It’s just that after a third reading, I’m still not sure what his were. Oh well.
The story started promisingly. I liked chapter one quite a lot. But it turns out that it’s not representative of the rest of the story. In fact, It’s more of a prologue. Which is unfortunate.
While I liked the story, and the idea of clones – if not the names of the first three – I found that the narrative was extremely difficult to read. And I’m not really sure why, if I’m honest. There is one thing that contributed I’ll discuss in a moment, but other than that… I don’t know. Maybe it was too jargon-y or something. I just found myself not actually understanding what was going on quite often.
The one thing I COULD put a finger on was the random Spanish. Multiple-language narrative is one of the things I hate most in books. So that really didn’t help. I just don’t see the point in having random Spanish words in the middle of a sentence. It’s not quite as bad in the dialogue – but given that I don’t understand Spanish, it means I don’t actually know what they are saying then!
A couple of little positives – I quite liked the idea that Britain is a leading technology country – and that flopsy, mopsy & cottontail haven’t entirely disappeared from culture by 2059. More importantly I liked most of the characters – particularly Gibson, who I felt had a really good storyline. I also liked the character from chapter one, who keeps thinking of his family.
But I’m going to keep this a fairly short review – because I don’t know really know what it is that went wrong. I enjoyed the story, but found it really quite difficult to read. Unfortunately, I’m not going to read the next one.
Hot Space Station Justice 
Ouch. I can see why you are a bit puzzled. (I like your blog image too.) It’s weird how one person can love a story and another can have a strong negative reaction. We can’t please everybody. Although it’s tempting to try.
Sympathies and all that. Reviewers are unique individuals. Some are honest and fair while others … Same applies to editors.
I sent off my short story ‘Waif’ to an on-line magazine and received a totally scathing response. ‘Lacks pace’ and ‘boring’ were the best bits. Since then the tale has been published as an e-book by Greyhart Press and reviews by readers (who are the ones that count most in my book) have been wholly positive and encouraging.
So just because your work doesn’t hit the G-spot of one reviewer/editor/agency/publisher (polite or otherwise) doesn’t mean anything. As long as YOU are happy with what you’ve written, then you’ve achieved the number 1 requirement: writing it as well as you can. Get the tale out there and let the buying public vote with their feet.