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Book Title: Fireside Chat with a Grammar Nazi Serial Killer: A psychological thriller with a female
protagonist
Author: Ryan Suvaal
Format: Ebook

Book Title:
The title of the book is very gripping and exciting. The phrase ' Grammar Nazi ' is very unique.

Book Cover:
The cover image of the book is the image of a very fierceful and dreadful woman wearing a mask and is covered with blood all over with a bloody knife in hand.

Plot:
The story is short but is written with great intentions. It's about a reader and an author where the author is the victim of reader's dreadful acts for silly mistakes the author does. What is the motive of killing? Read the book !

What I like:
1. The concept of the story
2. The emotional turmoil of a reader when the authorswriters don't consider the readers seriously.
3. The very chaotic feeling of killing an author because of something which is not accepted but not punishable.

What I didn't like:
The book is so good that there are no points to dislike.

Characters:
All the characters are very well scripted.

Narration:
A very racy and engaging narration is found in the book.

Language & Grammar:
Flawless and not so complex language and grammar are used.

My Final Verdict:
A funny yet thoughtful read!

Book Title: 3/5
Book Cover: 3/5
Plot: 3/5
Characters: 3/5
Narration: 3/5
Language & Grammar: 3/5
Final Rating: 3/5


… (lisätietoja)
 
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BookReviewsCafe | Apr 27, 2023 |
‘Seventeen gruesome murders were reported across the United States, within a span of six months. Ohio, Minnesota, Arkansas and several other states were hit. There was one clear connection among victims, they were all book authors. While media was decorating the murders with sensationalist stories, and law enforcement was playing catch-up, the homicidal maniac remained elusive and secretive. Things got very interesting, however, when one day she decided to appear on an internet talk show for an honest fireside chat. Her reason for being on this show was not a quest for fame, but something much more disturbing.’

Suvaal's Fireside Chat with a Grammar Nazi Serial Killer is a novella whose main format is a chat interview between Corrigan Dante, host of the clandestine, dark web radio show 'Fireside Chats with Corrigan Dante’, and one of his notorious guests, a serial killer dubbed the Grammar Nazi Serial Killer, whose trigger was bad writing. She gave her name as Grazine, not a real name. This was a hilarious commentary on the importance some people put on strict grammar. I agree that proofing is necessary, but there is such a thing as taking it to far, especially if the sentence structure or phrasing has passed into common usage.

This was a tongue in cheek, dark look at the inner workings of a psychotic mind. Grazine is certainly an atypical serial killer. Female serial killers are rare, and those that use more violent means than rarer still. Grazine was a very violent female killer. There are sections before and after the talk show that are focused on Grazine, sometimes with a victim, sometimes not. The ending had a twist I wasn't expecting, though I really shoulda. I spent time researching serial killers. I wish the story had been longer, to dig deeper into Grazine’s workings. It would have been interesting to read about all of her victims, and the symbolism behind them.

***Many thanks to the author for providing an ecopy in exchange for a fair and honest review.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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PardaMustang | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 27, 2019 |
*Thanks to the author for a free e-copy in exchange for an honest review.*

The premise of this short story is super interesting, so knew I had to read this! Still though, I’ve got to be extra cautious while writing this review…

There have been seventeen gruesome murders across the US; the victims are all writers. Nobody knows who the killer is, but one day she comes forward herself on an internet talk show, to tell her story…and for other reasons.

This short story had a lot of potential. And that’s kind of a sad word I don’t like to use, but it’s true. I really liked how the plot started. It was graphic and I felt like I had been thrown in the deep end of a psychological thriller that was also, I admit, kind of hilarious. To me, the book was more funny than thrilling or suspenseful.

It’s interesting that the only characters we really spend time with are the Grammar Nazi Serial Killer and Corrigan Dante, the talk show host. However, because of the parodic nature of the book, I felt like I didn’t really connect with either of them. This can also be attributed to the shortness of the story.

I would really like to see this fleshed out, and I think it would help expand the plot while providing more space for the development of scenes. Because the fireside chat was written in script form, it was a lot of “telling, not showing” (for lack of a better term). I’d love to see more narration or prose like that of Chapter 1. The ending was great, and it was actually a moment where I felt some anticipation.

Other than that, this was still a fun little read, and I’m sure anyone looking for something quick, relatable, and unique would love it.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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CatherineHsu | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Dec 21, 2018 |
I accepted this novella for review because the title draws the eye like a glint on the beach but there’s also a mild flaw in that headline because it outlines the story before you read it.

I wondered if this had been written by someone obsessed by grammar who has been annoyed to find incorrect usage in other people’s books, so I checked the writer’s Goodreads reading list for 2018, which was uninformative because they hadn’t entered anything. Then I wondered whether the angst might have come from being an author who receives reviews in which the main criticism is the grammar, completely side-lining their carefully imagined story. I can picture the author grumbling over that, rightly so. Not everyone can afford a proof reader or editor. Speculating again, it could be a work of observation, living alongside someone who moans about these points as if there is no more pressing problem facing the planet. In the final analysis, I think it may be a combination of all three but I did note that the protagonist mentions critical response. Therefore, I wonder if this could be a subtle piece of bait to draw out ‘grammar Nazi’ critics and show them for what they are. It would then, of course, provoke a grammar-domination arms race as it’s an open invitation to critics to pick up and list every instance of poor form in the book (And there is a sentence that starts with a conjunction), which can then be countered by the author pointing out every piddling error in the piece the critic has written. Cool, if you like a roasting, as Latimer said to Ridley.

The protagonist then goes on to differentiate between her right to make mistakes versus the author’s responsibility to uphold the conventions, i.e. they have accepted this profound duty by taking the step of publishing their words. Are authors and critics self-appointed custodians of the language, not readers? In which case, why is a reader enforcing it? That’s a debate in itself.

The first error is not grammar at all; it’s punctuation. That’s alright though because the alternative might be to extend the title to cover everything when it is pretty good already. A problem arises if you want to euthanize writers who haven’t got a clue how to place a comma because you would have to kill William Shakespeare too (a bastard on non-restrictive relative clauses). The logical extension is that you’d also need to expunge his inspiration, Ovid, although he wrote in poetical form and felt a pause needed to come at the end of lines, to take a breath even where the mark fell in the middle of sentences. If you were brought up to recite two thousand lines of Homer, you would appreciate pauses. Therefore, do we eliminate the poets? Rap artists are poets and some of those have developed a pattern of eliminating themselves, doing the job for us.

Split infinitives annoy me, they really do. Introspective examination is useful here as this convention did not exist before a certain point of time and even then only came to be because a vicar wrote a letter in which he contemplated whether there was any reason to do it. If the interlocutor had replied “stop being pedantic, you old fool”, we might all have gone on with our lives quite sustainably without worrying about this or remembering damning red ink at school. Ask yourself whether you could have suffered a fireside chat with that churchman for an entire evening without wrinkling up your face, leaning forward, tilting your head and staring through him to the back of his pointless skull. I obey the convention but, as someone who plays with language, I nod to other authors who understand the rules but also know when to break them (usually for emphasis).

The grammar Nazi finds long sentences a problem, then mentions clunky sentence structure. I think the former should be encouraged but the latter is ugly and un-lyrical. We disagree, which is interesting. There’s an analytics tool on Word which allows anyone to see the mean word-count in a sentence. I’ve tested this on books which I didn’t get on with (average count: 8 words) and ones I raved about (11 or higher), so do suspect there may be a direct correlation between literary quality and the number of words used in a sentence. The Little Prince may be an exception to the rule. If the writer is clunky, I concede, the number of words is a factor that won’t save it.

Returning to the story, I have intellectual sympathy with the idea that a reader who has been annoyed by poor writing might hold the author personally responsible for contaminating the idealised concept of the beauty of books with their illiterate toxin. I don’t think people who can’t do it should be prevented from writing and publishing because sometimes they improve greatly as they progress through their lives and occasionally they produce original ideas, together with the personal benefit to the author that putting thoughts on paper is good therapy. No one has to read it.

I think there is a touch of sadistic elegance in the idea that authors should be punished according to the form of their gaffe. I remember the story of an ancient Egyptian overseer who embezzled gold from a pharaoh, whose punishment was to be given gold. Specifically, they put him in a room and filled it with gold until he was crushed and suffocated under it. Fair enough, you might say.

Correct punctuation is, of course, geographical. In the US, for example, people use commas before ‘and’ when the sentence isn’t nested and it is not a list that concludes with the use of an Oxford comma. The CNN website uses sentences such as ‘The business leader went to Washington Friday’, which to the rest of the world suggests that a city exists with the name Washington Friday and perhaps there are other places named Washington Monday etc. Should you say ‘Red, White and Blue’ or ‘Red White and Blue’? In the UK, we think we are correct because the English language originated here (from Latin) but there are more speakers of the English language in the US than in Great Britain, so you could equally argue that in contemporary times we are out-voted. Right and wrong is therefore a matter of criteria and geography. I think we should accept our differences and try not to have this battle because no one will win and it’s just an exercise in spreading sulphur.

The key question for me is whether someone who corrects other people’s grammar is trying to help them and protect the treasure of language or whether they are simply doing it to make the point that they had a superior education to the writer, i.e. arrogant self-inflation.

I think I’ll add one observation, that English people take grammar as an indication of whether to trust strangers or not. The reasoning is that if someone doesn’t know the rules, they must have had an incomplete education, thus it may also follow that they do not know the difference between right and wrong, so might feel no remorse at cheating you. To counter this argument, I have noticed that simple people are generally the most honest, saying what they think and paying their taxes, so maybe this supposed clue about honesty is a complete fallacy.

Clearly, this had to be a short work because the idea can be explored fully in a few chapters. It has some originality in that it reflects a modern tension or point of angst, where we have irrational and disproportionate hatred for minor annoyances which may be misplaced apostrophes but could be mini pots of milk, how to squeeze toothpaste, erratic slabs of lemon floating in tea and little Wild Western saloon doors in trendy clothes shops. I mean, who hasn’t at least once in their life read the sign “Gifts and refreshments for visitor’s” and then gone on to burn down a major public building? I know I have. Another use of stage-craft in which the story has been brought up to date is by incorporating anonymous discussion space and dark web podcasts. I didn’t know the dark web had documentaries but that seems a reasonable extension of free speech in anonymity. If there’s a niche, life will eventually fill it, so explore.

Most people will read this book to find out if they themselves might be a grammar Nazi, measurable on the scale of whether they have sympathy for the killer’s reasoning. Most of us have a little policeman in our heads that suppresses acting on these thoughts when they pop up but it remains the fact that most people have had dark thoughts about the elegant flow of a story being ruined by shit writing. The reader breaks concentration and pops out of the daydream. If someone hasn’t got safeguards in their head and really does fight back, they could become an anti-hero icon.

Some readers will also see this as an opportunity to step into a grammar scrap with the author but that would tell us more about them than we would ever learn about the book. This is a work that forces us to examine ourselves, referring to writers and reviewers, taking our feelings to an extreme to show us how absurd we might become. Will I fall into the trap? Probably not. The idea is worth consideration because it touches a nerve and I can’t say it wasn’t entertaining.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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HavingFaith | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Dec 20, 2018 |

Tilastot

Teokset
2
Jäseniä
7
Suosituimmuussija
#1,123,407
Arvio (tähdet)
½ 3.4
Kirja-arvosteluja
4