Where I’m bound I can’t tell – Jeremy Lee (self-published)
Where I’m bound I can’t tell by Jeremy Lee is a self-published book through lulu.com.
The story is well told – mixing three generations, telling two stories – my interest being its mention of WW1 Africa. Lee is a young lad trying to find himself, getting into trouble through which he meets Teddy. Teddy’s lifestory is interspersed through that of Lee’s. The intermediate generation being Lee’s parents and Alice, a nurse at the care home where Terry is spending his last days.
However, this good, well-structured story is let down by the main foible of self-publishing – poor proofreading. The wrong word errors are too numerous for my liking, including wrong use of apostrophes, and while Lee talks of writing half truths, which is fine in such a book, I do feel facts like the end of the war in 1918 should be correct.
I’m assuming that Lee made use of spell check as there are no spelling errors as such, but ‘you’re’ is used instead of ‘your’, ‘due’ rather than ‘do’ and so forth.
Proofreading can be an expense an author can’t afford, and to be honest, I’ve seen numerous texts gone over by qualified/professional proofreaders which have fundamental mistakes. We’re all human and I know that some errors creep into (or stay) in TSL published books. There are also cultural differences impacting on language – USA English doesn’t like ‘which’ or ‘who’, so ‘that’ becomes over-used; where to put hyphens and commas or semi-colons, a comma after ‘and’ (the Oxford comma) and do you start a sentence with ‘but’? We were all taught different things about English at different times, so variations in accurate grammar and punctuation will differ. However, I do feel the right words should be used and basic errors kept to a minimum as it detracts, making what could have been an excellent story, a good one or worse.
I’m all for levelling the playing field – TSL plays a role in doing so – and on occasion will recommend authors self-publish (particularly on the poetry front). Yet, to protect the integrity of language and more importantly, to bridge the gap between self-publishing and mainstream publishing, authors should aim to sort this kind of gremlin out.
I’ve gone on a bit here about self-publishing and its pitfalls, I know. It’s not all directed at Jeremy Lee – I’ve read too many self-published books with such issues and worse. Rather, it’s a word of caution and hopefully a helpful nudge to improve the quality of self-published work.
Back to the book being reviewed… it’s a story that captivated me. The plot or style reminded me of that used by Lawrence Bransby in his ‘The boy who counted to a million‘. For more novels about WW1 in Africa, see the bibliography at https://gweaa.com.
Related World War 1 Africa novels by TSL authors include:
Maya Alexandri’s The Celebration Husband
John Samson’s Dancing with the Monkeys.
