Incomplete – DaneCobain.com

Tupac Shakur – The Rose That Grew from Concrete | Review

Title: The Rose That Grew from Concrete

Author: Tupac Shakur

Type: Poetry

Page Count: 154

Rating: 3/5

I was quite exciting to get to this one because I’d heard someone talking about it on BookTube and I like Tupac’s music as much as the next person. Unfortunately, it got off on a bad foot to begin with thanks to four or five different introductions, each of which tried to paint Shakur’s poetry as being worthy of being included amongst the top ranks of contemporary literature.

But the poems themselves just feel like incomplete song lyrics. Half of them are just love poems for various different women, and a pretty sizeable proportion are about a god that I don’t believe in. Plus I got annoyed by him writing “2” instead of “to” and “4” instead of “for”. So yeah, only worth reading for major Tupac fans.

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Todd Wittenmyer – The Vulnerable Gods | Review

Title: The Vulnerable Gods

Author: Todd Wittenmyer

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 349

Rating: 3.5*/5

Todd Wittenmyer – The Vulnerable Gods

I have kind of mixed feelings about this book because while the story line itself is pretty gripping and keeps you turning the pages, there are so many spelling and grammar mistakes that it’s difficult to overlook them. We’re talking the wrong versions of to/too, your/you’re and its/it’s all throughout the book. And the layout is messed up as well, with double spacing, random blank pages and weird page numbers that seem to appear and disappear.

Of course, this is par for the course with an indie novel to a certain extent, and I was prepared to overlook them because Todd is a BookTube friend of mine. But at the same time, I do think that the book would be much, much better if it was copy edited and proofread and then properly typeset.

But now that we’ve got the negatives out of the way, let’s move on to the positives. One of the things that I enjoyed the most was the fact that you can see the author’s personality coming across in the book, and you can also see how he’s inspired by Stephen King. But it doesn’t feel derivative, and in fact it’s kind of difficult to actually classify the genre of this book because it takes inspiration from a bunch of different genres and brings them together into something new.

All in all then, I am glad that I read this, but it also felt incomplete. I feel as though Todd is selling himself short here, and it’s just a shame that it hasn’t been better proofed before he hit the publish button. I can’t really recommend it in its current state because of the mistakes, but I do think there’s a lot of potential there. I’d say it’s a good 80-90% of the way towards being a pretty good indie release, but without the corrections it’s a bit like going to see a decent band who are being held back by a bad sound guy.