1049 Club by Kim Pritekel

After enjoying Again, I thought I’d give another Pritekel story a shot. And I picked a great story. 1049 Club is about a group of 6 plane crash survivors. The crash scene is very good, very intense. The survivors are stranded on an uncharted island in the Carribean and the author does a good job of describing some of the hardships they endure. We also are witness to six strangers, six very different people from very different backgrounds, who become a family of sorts.

I thought the character development was good. I connected with the characters, particularly the two main female characters, Denny and Rachel. The first two-thirds or so of the book, I loved. The story, the characters, the emotion, all of it, loved it. Pritekel moves the reader between the crash survivors and their loved ones back home, who believe they died in the crash. There was a lot of strong emotions in this story. I cried nearly non-stop for more than an hour at one point – tears of joy and sadness – I was a wreck. But I did cuddle with my wife all night, feeling very grateful for what we have. It was touching. The book and our cuddle-fest.

The last part of the book felt like it had too much description and filler. Don’t get me wrong, it was still good but I did skim through a good number of paragraphs trying to get to the parts that mattered to me. The final part, I thought, was weak. But the worst part of the entire piece was the outrageous number of typos, misspellings, misused words, and grammar issues. Several times, I honestly felt like stopping, loading the story into my word processing program and running the grammar and spell checker, just to get rid of some of it. I tend to be easily distracted by technical issues in writing but can get through it if the story is good enough. This one was a challenge. I was too emotionally involved with the story to quit but toward the end, I certainly didn’t feel bad skimming.

I still recommend it. And I saw just before writing this review that 1049 Club is supposed to be published soon through PD Publishing. This is one book that I will absolutely buy. I read the synopsis and it seems that there may be more attention paid to the last part of the book. I can only assume, and hope, that the filler will be tightened up. And, of course, the technical issues will be remedied by a good editor.

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