I'm having to analyze fiction for one of my courses, and I seem to have brought that into the notes that I took on this excerpt, so bear with me.
-The first thing I noticed was the odd word choices. I never expected to read "goose daddy" in my life, much less in a "serious" context, i.e. outside of a children's book or some such. It's not the only weird word choice in this, but it was the first one to stand out.
-It really wasn't clear that this was set in Australia. By page 23 when she's talking about crocs in Wales, I had to do a double take because that was the first instance in which the setting was defined and all I could think was "there aren't crocs in England." A quick google search put this book's setting in Australia, which made way more sense in the context, but this still could have been conveyed better. (Possible issue because it's not the first book in the series?)
-She named the guy with issues Kevin. All I could think was, of *course* his name is Kevin - what a cop out. Immediately brought to mind the book We Need to Talk About Kevin, though wrong context for the given issues assigned to the character.
-The lack of explanation for acronyms really started to get to me. I got fed up at the point of her saying "Sydney's SCBD" <- I still have no clue what this was referring to and there were zero context clues. Google didn't help in this case. SCBD stands for a lot of different things.
-Very weird dialogue dynamics (see first comment re: goose daddy)
That's a big ole long list of issues, but in spite of all of that, it was intriguing enough to keep my attention. If I see the first book in a thrift shop or something, I'd probably grab it and then make my decision whether to continue reading the books from there.
-The first thing I noticed was the odd word choices. I never expected to read "goose daddy" in my life, much less in a "serious" context, i.e. outside of a children's book or some such. It's not the only weird word choice in this, but it was the first one to stand out.
-It really wasn't clear that this was set in Australia. By page 23 when she's talking about crocs in Wales, I had to do a double take because that was the first instance in which the setting was defined and all I could think was "there aren't crocs in England." A quick google search put this book's setting in Australia, which made way more sense in the context, but this still could have been conveyed better. (Possible issue because it's not the first book in the series?)
-She named the guy with issues Kevin. All I could think was, of *course* his name is Kevin - what a cop out. Immediately brought to mind the book We Need to Talk About Kevin, though wrong context for the given issues assigned to the character.
-The lack of explanation for acronyms really started to get to me. I got fed up at the point of her saying "Sydney's SCBD" <- I still have no clue what this was referring to and there were zero context clues. Google didn't help in this case. SCBD stands for a lot of different things.
-Very weird dialogue dynamics (see first comment re: goose daddy)
That's a big ole long list of issues, but in spite of all of that, it was intriguing enough to keep my attention. If I see the first book in a thrift shop or something, I'd probably grab it and then make my decision whether to continue reading the books from there.