From: Deborah Hopkinson <hopkinda>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 09:56:17 -0700

Thanks to Robin for managing to say a lot without spoiling anything. I had to stop at 2am on page 500 to get up for work. But my comment is about style and editing. I felt last night as if I were reading two different books, or, more likely, two sections of a book in different stages of editing. The first section, before they get on the train, seemed to me like a draft that definitely needed (and still needs!) another editing pass. The run-on sentences and several obvious grammatical errors were, frankly, driving me nutso. (No doubt, as a writer, I was finding this particularly annoying because I'd spent most of my weekend laboring, sentence by sentence, over a measly 1,500 word magazine piece, and reading HP was supposed to be my reward!) Thankfully, though, once the characters boarded the train, the prose cleared up and things started to click. I don't know if this is the case with the other books, as mostly I've listened to, and enmjoyed them, on tape.

Deborah Hopkinson Whitman College hopkinda at whitman.edu
Received on Mon 23 Jun 2003 11:56:17 AM CDT