Verdict: Unfortunately, Magic in the Moonlight only serves to further the stigma that critics assign to self-published books and it’s a shame that some truly great indie titles are therefore categorized alongside this one.

It’s an amazing thing when a writer puts pen to paper and creates a book. It’s an even more amazing thing when that project is carefully honed into a rich novel that can be enjoyed by many. Unfortunately, that is not the case with Magic in the Moonlight.

The biggest obstacles that any reader will have to overcome are the grammar and writing style. The obscene amount of grammatical errors aside, the characters have no discernible voice other than that of the author. In the first few pages we read what could have been a touching conversation in which a middle school boy asks for advice from his father while they are fishing; instead, it is a mechanical back-and-forth exchange—I hesitate to call it dialog—in which the supposedly seventh grade protagonist speaks in the voice of an emotionless and detached adult instead of a mixed up teen.

What follows that opening scene is some three hundred pages of confusing and muddled info-dumping. Without any elements of suspense or rising action and after waiting through more than 200 hundred pages of back story, we are eventually told a disjointed tale of a love triangle in which all three participants have no realistic reasons for their actions. Even worse, the rest of the story unfolds with mind-boggling speed. For example, two key characters meet for the first time on page 289 and are engaged to be married literally on the following page.

While writing style might arguably vary with different authors, the massacre of grammar conventions throughout this book are nothing short of ridiculously unacceptable. Capitalization and comma errors aside, some of the key information about the characters is embarrassingly fabricated and unresearched, such as the male protagonist requiring emergency surgery on his “femoral neck.”

This book was not even proofread, let alone professionally edited. Unfortunately, Magic in the Moonlight only serves to further the stigma that critics assign to self-published books and it’s a shame that some truly great indie titles are therefore categorized alongside this one.

Reviewed by Mercy Pilkington for IndieReader