This marks the first of ten reviews I’ll be posting during the remainder of July. As a finale to the review-fest, I’ll be offering several services and goodies up for grabs, and a Twitter contest, as well as providing codes for you to try out services at a discounted rate. When will the contest bonanza begin? With my last review on July 31st. Stay tuned.
When I was emailed a PDF copy of Hypomanic: Mad in England by the author, Victor J. Kennedy, my brain got a bit of a boner. There’s few genres of books I’m more drawn toward than memoirs of some one’s psychological misfortune. Give me eating disorders, bipolar, schizophrenia or just general post-traumatic stress disorder and I’m enthralled.
So, when I was emailed a copy of this tome, I was excited to tear into it.
Here’s what I got out of my attempt to read the book1:
- Everyone may have a great story to tell, but not a great voice to tell it with.
- Editors are like gold bouillon, during a market when gold bouillon is like, really valuable.
- Drugs are apparently bad for you.
- If I ever write a book about my psychotic break, I’ll definitely have to remain tense-consistent and use a lot of ‘but a month before that’s, lest I completely lose the audience that I’m trying to garner the appreciation of.
- 15 years later, no one liked Mariah Carey.
- Trying to read a PDF copy of a book about some one’s hypomanic break, while you are, in fact, hypomanic yourself? FAIL. You’ll never see me with a Kindle at this rate.
- People either have completely different…standards for books than I do, or people who may have reviewed this book on a major bookseller’s website are really nice.
- Things that I write may seem completely fluid to me, but may be rife with freshman-level personalized acronyms, story dawdling, missing spots and may make readers go hmmm?
- I’m not ready to write a book and have to read a review like this one. So I won’t. Yet.
In short. I don’t support picking up this read.
I mean, come on, I read a lot, and I’d like to think that I have some sort of grasp on what a worthy tale entails. This wasn’t even up to chick-lit level. This was worse that Twilight and The Fear Street books, combined with Christopher Pike’s Cheerleader series.
It read like a diary of a bored, privileged teen brat, as far as I sifted through2 – all that was missing was graphic descriptions of the tits of the chick he nailed on vacation. Do yourself a favour and pick up Manic from the movie store or buy, beg, borrow (never steal) An Unquiet Mind or Madness.
