I will be honest that some of the problems no doubt came from the fact that I pretty much read almost the entire series all at once over the course of about 3-4 days. There are 17 stories in the series; I lack only the last two. I have acquired them slowly over the course of a couple of years and read them originally as I acquired them, without going back to reread the series first. So things that would have been less problematic for me individually wore on me when they were coming at me en masse.
So... On Goodreads, I rated all the books at 3 stars, which is my "problematic" rating (I'm going to link back here from the first book, Coach, rather than post an individual review for each book, because I don't want to write that many reviews. We'll just consolidate All The Things right here.) "Problematic" rating, for me, means that there was enough that I loved about the book that I'm liable to want to read it again some time (in this case, it's a fluffy-light reread; they're all novella-ish/longer short story length) but it had enough issues that pulled me out of the story to keep me from being able to whole-heartedly give it a better rating. And to be clear, probably 85% of my issues were things that could've been easily cleared up by a half-way competent editor -- they were in no way related to plot/characterization/general storytelling ability. So really, I guess 85% of this is "Really? I thought this was supposed to be a Professionally Published story!"
So, let's get right to it. As I frequently do, I'm going to bullet list a lot of stuff of the "This Really Bugged Me" variety.
- A lot of the formatting was crazy-frustrating. There were times where POV or time of day or whatever would change, and there would just be no indication. No breaks, just maybe a new paragraph; meanwhile, there would be an entire blank expanse with nothing but the book title (a complete page, according to my reader) between chapters. It would definitely pull me out of the story.
- LOTS of misused apostrophes -- "the kid's are coming over," "the car's were zooming past," and the like (not actual examples, just the *kind* of misuse). Or places where they should have been but weren't -- "That is Coaches car," "the cat's drank Georges milk." (Again, not actually from the books.)
- Homophone abuse, particularly and frequently your/you're -- "Are you going to finish you're dinner? Your going to be late."
- Some more random "Spell-check Has Issues" words: shoe-in (shoo-in), shear ecstasy (sheer ecstasy), "the damn just broke" (dam), passed/past, desert/dessert, throws/throes (direct quote-ish -- several times characters were in the "throws of ecstasy." Just No.)
- File under "How long has it been since you were in college?" -- when a character who is a student is having a Final Exam during a regular class period. Not just "was lucky enough to get an exam period scheduled for the normal start time of that class," but actually a Regular Class Period. And we're talking the kind of test that should probably take a fair bit of time more than the 35 min the character took to finish -- there should have been several essay questions, at least; it's That Sort of Class. I mean, FINAL Exam. Not midterm. FINAL. There should be a LOT of ground to cover.
- Continuity Is A Thing: Char is in a car accident. Love interest witnesses; has to pry open passenger side door to get to Char b/c driver's side door is a mangled wreck. Later, at hospital, someone (who was at the scene) says something along the lines of "Well, these kinds of injuries happen when you're thrown from a vehicle."
- Continuity Is A Thing 2: in one book, a char describes his parents as "Mom is black, but Dad is white." In another book, he says "Both my parents are black." Granted, he's blind, & of mixed ethnicity, but still...Author As God needs him to think he's African-American, therefore we must ignore previous statement.
- Things I just Can't Explain: Blind character is reading brail. My spell-check doesn't even accept that as a word. It is Braille. With the capital letter. Every time. Because it is a proper noun.
- Random punctuation issues: Sentences that sound like questions punctuated with periods. (What, do you have some sort of quota you're not allowed to exceed?) Ditto with commas; they're in random places where they shouldn't be and aren't in places where they should. I'm a little extra-aware of that right now, because my kids are back in school and they're bringing home their language arts homework and the third-grader is learning all about proper sentence structure. And, frankly, most of the sentences in these books would fail ALL THE THINGS in my third-grader's text book.
- I get that the publisher (Total E-Bound) is based in the UK, but... as much as British authors (rightly) complain about having their British-set books "Americanized" in spelling/slang, the reverse holds true in some ways with this series -- words like centre, paycheque, & others litter it, throwing me off since the books are all set in freaking IDAHO.
- Lack of female characters -- to me, it seems VERY odd that a series of stories mostly set on a college campus would have only roughly a half-dozen female characters. Of those, only a handful appear actually "on-screen," as it were, and of those, one is wholly unsympathetic, one is rather disappointingly weak in her personal narcissism, one is literally not completely sane, and one is a quintessential, almost stereotypical "Mother" type.
Let's try to end this on an up note:
- Despite the shortness of these stories, they had clearly defined beginnings, middles, and ends, so that, even if a conflict wasn't completely resolved, it was clearly well on its way (although there were a couple that I felt ended prematurely in a way that felt like the author had reached Maximum Word Count and had to cram in the last little bit).
- There were some satisfyingly realistic "Life Issues" to cope with -- several characters entered into some fairly serious therapy to deal with their pasts, there's blindness, one major character has a stroke & has some fairly bad reactions to being confined to a wheelchair -- and not too much (but some) Magic Sex Cure-All.
- Characters didn't just pop up out of nowhere right before they got their story, then disappear completely afterward. There's a nice over-arcing story of a group of friends and coworkers, and they grow organically to welcome in new members, and to keep the friendships growing and developing.
- Even though many of the characters are jocks, there's a whole range of characters -- it's not just All White-Boy Football Players, All The Time. There's a certain amount of racial/ethnic diversity. Not a lot, perhaps not as much as there could have been, but there is some. There are also guys with other ambitions besides sports.
I really did, overall, enjoy the stories and the characters, enough that I may someday buy the last two books in the series. I think it's a shame that Total E-Bound didn't seem to take enough pride in their product to make sure that it would at least pass a third-grade text book test, though. However, that's a quibble against the publisher, not the author.
