Review - Dance of Souls by Audrey Kalman

This novel starts with the story of Amy, a sculptor and Zach, a student; a mother and son introduced to us just as the son is running away from home.  Throughout the book we are introduced to a public school science teacher whose finding of God causes drastic changes to his previously monotonous life; a documentary film maker and his assistant; a police officer; a Muslim woman; a school principal, a spoiled rich kid; and several others.  All of these characters at first appear to have lives that have no connection to each other, but as their storylines unfold all of their lives begin to weave together.  With characters of all ages and backgrounds, storylines running from the mundane to the curious and exciting, I think just about anyone could find something in this novel to touch them in some way.

It was, however, painfully obvious to me from the very first page that this is a self-published novel.  I literally lost count of all the typographical errors, grammar blunders, punctuation problems, missing words, and over-complicated, incorrectly structured sentences that riddled this novel.  All of these are issues that even a novice editor would have noticed and marked for correction prior to publication, and I couldn’t help but think that surely the author must have known someone with a love for the written word and a little remembrance of high school English class that could have reviewed this novel for her prior to submitting it to the public.

As if the editorial issues didn’t make this book hard enough to read, the author had a habit of moving back and forth in time in a manner that I found to be somewhat confusing and definitely annoying.  In addition, her attempts at foreshadowing were extremely blatant and often stated outright exactly what would happen several chapters later.    Quite a few of the many main characters in this novel were poorly defined leaving the reader confused about their actions and reactions.  The storylines, while basically very good, often lacked definition, and were not brought to enough of a close at the end of the novel for my comfort.

 All of these issues made the book a little more difficult to read than it truly needed to be.

I have, since finishing this book, discovered that this was the author’s first published work.  I think this novel could be an extremely good read and would be a great sell if it were a little “cleaner”.  It was obvious that the author has a fantastic imagination and is actually quite a skilled writer; what she desperately needs is an editor to help work out some of the kinks.