Oof. Lisa Lau shreds a…

Oof. Lisa Lau shreds a new Sri Lanka novelist on the DesiLit blog. She thinks Nilani de Silva's Monsoon Dream has some...umm... issues. Or, to use Lau's own words: "Logic and good sense come seldom to trouble this novel."

I haven't read the book, but I probably will, since I'm trying to keep up with contemporary Sri Lankan literature in English...

Note: This author is not to be confused with Nihal de Silva, who Lau thinks is quite brilliant (and who I also haven't read yet because I suck). De Silva is a common enough surname in Sri Lanka that I imagine they're no relation.

3 thoughts on “Oof. Lisa Lau shreds a…”

  1. Yeesh. I went to Amazon.Com and read the first page of the book. I’m almost surprised the reviewer continued beyond that, and then bothered to write a review; it’s that bad.

  2. Shmuel’s comment led me to go look it up at Amazon; my main reaction (which matches some of Lisa Lau’s comments) was that the first page is in desperate need of a good editor. Overwritten, with tense shifts and sentences missing words and extraneous commas and such.

    So I looked up the publisher, BookSurge Publishing, which turns out to be a self-publishing outfit. Not that self-publishing is inherently bad, but it seems likely that no editor even looked at this book between author handoff and finished book, and it shows.

    …But now I’m confused, because Lisa Lau says the publisher is “Yijitha Yapa Publications.” There is a “Vijitha Yapa Publications,” which published a book by Nihal de Silva; I’m guessing there was some confusion somewhere.

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