Battleship Destroyer

Battleship Destroyer - L.D. Roberts I have read many reviews, especially on Amazon, that have been doing nothing but harping about the poor English in the books. I have ignored them all. I am fairly resistant towards poor spelling and it has never really diminished my enjoyment of a book. That is until now. The many spelling and grammar mistakes in this book really hampers the reading. As you can see from the above even the book blurb, which I copied unedited, is just full of mistakes. The books is pretty much the same and it is not just spelling mistakes but often the wrong word with the wrong meaning is used. I am not a native English speaker so my posts are probably full of errors as well but I do believe myself being a lot better than what is shown in this book and also, I do not expect to get paid for my writing. For the first time since I started to rate books I’m reducing the rating just for the poor spelling and grammar.

Now with that over with, I quite enjoyed the actual content of the book. It borders on being a young adult category book with its rather naïve story but I did like it. It is a story of a young kid being really poorly treated by his utterly stupid parents and equally stupid but also sadistic brother who enlists in the navy and, of course, becomes a self-made hero.

It is a fairly long book and it is fairly quickly paced which means that there is a lot of things happening. The boy is pretty much a genius both in science and military tactics but scarred as well as scared from his experience as a kid which hampers him for the first half of the book. Some of the technological advancements that he produces are somewhat unbelievable. Not so much in the science itself but in the pace by which they are capable of actually implementing them. During the course of the book they literally rebuild their ship from being hundreds of years behind the enemy to being a lot more advanced than them in some aspects. Not very realistic.

The author seems to have a fixation with boobs, human as well as alien ones and in particular their size. There are several passages in the book that are downright ridiculous which is a shame because, together with the poor editing, it drags down the book. As I said, the book borders on the young adult category and it shows, for example, in the simplistic portrayal of the bad guys. We do not actually get to know much about the aliens but the human bad guys are really evil, treacherous and incredibly stupid.

Anyway, despite its faults I did enjoy the book. It has the refreshing coming-of-age-hero-beats-all-odds quality over it. It is a shame that the editing quality was so downright piss-poor. With some better editing and perhaps less ridiculously large boobs all over the place, it would easily have gotten a few more stars from me. The ending is somewhat unsatisfying though. It depends a lot on whether the author intends to continue the story with a second book. If he does I guess the ending is okay. If not the ending is not really satisfactory and pretty much leaves the story hanging in the air without any real conclusion. Personally I hope there will be a second one.