Paul Howard (7)

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest (non-reciprocal) review.
(Spoilers within)

"The Beethoven Incident" is a fairly fast-paced and light-hearted read. I didn't get the feeling that it was meant to change someone's life. It felt more like it was just meant to be a quick bit of fun.

There were parts I enjoyed, such as Mark calling Nicholas his dad and Valeria catching on quickly that it wasn't true, and seeing how different periods in the past were changed.

There were show more also major issues, though.

Here's an example of one of the paragraphs:
"Quite right." He turned to his pilot, "Well, Ernest?" Ernie punched a few keys and looked at his control panel. "In a minute, Nick" he replied. "I just gotta scan the payload for mass and volume. We'll be all set." He punched a few keys and grinned at Mark.

This was very typical of the story. Multiple people would all have speaking parts jammed into the same paragraph. Many times I wasn't sure which character was meant to be speaking. The "punched a few keys" is repeated twice. Periods instead of commas also bothers me.

Exclamation points were used too often. Random words would also get capitalized a lot.

Examples:
"I've got a Kid..."
"You are Americans, No?' The Officer asked.

Besides the writing issues, there were also parts of the story that were a huge issue for me: the biggest part probably being Valorie. There's nothing wrong with Valorie in and of herself, but it felt like she was put there to "be the girl" and her capabilities seemed unrealistic and forced.
Any time a woman appeared in the story everything seemed to revolve around how sexy she was, even if it made no sense for the characters to be attracted to her. For example, women that were from the 1800's. The story does mention how much the place smells because the people barely bathe and and feces is left everywhere and such, but when a woman comes on scene the fact that she barely bathes isn't taken into consideration. I think how dirty and smelly she is would play a large part in how much a man over a hundred years in the future would be attracted to her.

Valorie suffers this same fate. They meet her in the 1960's and the first thing to be mentioned about her is how beautiful she is.

...he thought she was just about the prettiest girl he'd ever seen.

She starts off in a very stereotypical female role - trying to heal people.
She also turns out the be smart, but as I mentioned before it felt like that was just forced onto her rather than being a natural role. The majority of the story happens within a span of about thirteen hours. In those hours she figures out how to make a program on a machine she's never seen before to reverse the polarity of time. Not even Ernie, the man who lives in the future and does this for a living, knows how to run her program. I'd like her to be smart but that's way too unrealistic. It also doesn't hold, because just a few chapters later Ernie is working out a problem with the time machine that "not even Valorie" can do. Why not? Just because. So it establishes her as being a genius who can figure out things in an impossible amount of time but then it takes it back.

The way the men treat her also feels like they come from a few centuries back. They're often patronizing and treat her like a child.

"What's this "we" stuff, honey?" he (Ernie) replied.

I don't think he would say that to another man. I would hope that in the future men would be a little more respectful of women.
That doesn't stay consistent, either. One page later Ernie has gone from being condescending about letting her participate in their mission to this:

"Let her go, Nick." Ernie suggested. "We've got a lot of work to do. Maybe she'll be of some use out there."

I felt really disappointed with Valorie's character because I ended up feeling like she existed only to be a love interest and her abilities were thrust on her to try and make her a strong character and not because it made any sense for her. Ernie even brings up that she's a virgin, which bothered me. He didn't bring up whether Mark was a virgin or not. It could have worked if he had also poked at Mark about being a virgin, but it just seemed like it was brought up so she could be 'untainted' for Mark.

Even at the end when she is running the time machine while Mark is outside and he gets attacked, she ends up hitting the attacker with a pipe. Then, of course, the attacker goes after her and she has to be saved. It made no sense at all because the reason she was running the machine was because only she understood how to use the program she made, and Nicholas and Ernie were both there. Why did she go out only to need rescuing? Why didn't either of the other two help?
The main characters often felt interchangeable, but I was most disappointed with Valorie because she had so much potential and came out flat. Her romance with Mark was strange to me as well (remember, this story happened in a very short span of time), making it seem even more like she only existed to be his love interest.

To me this is the rough draft for a book that could be really good but it needs a lot of editing. I was mulling over whether to give this two or three stars, but ended up going with three because I've certainly seen worse. (Revised to 2.5 here) show less