This book was written by a friend of a friend of mine. I really like my friend and value her judgment in matters of literature. I think my friend must really like her friend. Her friend is in all probability a really great person. I don't know about that, but as I said, I trust my friend's judgment. Still, I do not like her friend's book.
The writing is stilted and pedantic. The characters are scarcely even two-dimensional, with not the remotest claim to three. Giving full bios on every character, however minor, does not make them well-rounded, it simply leaves the writer with nothing to reveal as the story progresses. Good writers that I know do develop quite detailed back stories on even minor characters. However, they do not clutter up the pages of their stories with them; they create them so that they will understand how these characters will behave and talk. Sometimes it seems to me that well written characters have a sort of autonomy. I have heard their creators say things like "I wanted him to ...., but he wouldn't do it." These characters seemed to be like ridiculously well-mannered puppets on strings.
I suspect that the writer finds dialogue awkward to punctuate - you know, all those quotation marks and indents and stuff - so his pasteboard characters tend to pontificate at each other rather than converse.
His teenagers sound and act like five and six-year-olds, so I suppose it isn't surprising that his seventy-year-olds sound and behave like teenagers.
In all of the "over-telling", there are odd omissions. At one point, he carries on for some time about the mother of the family having given up her legal career to be home for her children and specifically having made a commitment to provide them with a delicious breakfast to start each day right. He proceeds to discuss a particular hot breakfast and to have said children appreciate it and thank their mother for it (and these are supposed to be real kids?) - but never tells us what it is - eggs benedict? German pancakes? Crepes? This may be the only instance in which he failed to deliver far more information than was necessary.
It also seemed odd to me that although there are frequent references to the date, since this is all based on the fiftieth anniversary of an actual plane crash, he seems to have neglected the fact that the entire action took place in the middle of winter. Kids outside playing, running around on bicycles, picnics? They do have winter in Maryland, don't they?
We all know by now that I am a grammar nazi and a word nerd. Let me merely state that both of those facets of my evil side were deeply offended and appalled by grammatical errors (the comma comes BEFORE the conjunction) and word choice. "Moniker?????" I have only seen/heard that word used in parodies of hard-boiled detective fiction of the thirties. And what was that business of continually referring to the Pan Am logo or icon as "livery?" According to Google, it is technically correct when referring to the entire paint scheme, still I had never encountered that usage before - and I worked in Boeing's Commercial Airplane Division back in the day, although that particular airplane came off the line before my time.
I think perhaps the writer suffered from a version of the writer's disease that afflicted my father. My father longed to write fiction, but he always had such a clear vision of the story that he was trying to tell that he spent far too many words trying to ensure that his readers would see exactly what he saw. The stronger approach is to tell them what they need and let them build their own images.
Part of this rant is frustration. I'm not much on ghost stories, and as ghost stories go, this one had very little justification, but there was the potential for a really good story there which went almost completely unrealized.
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