By patgalca
Canada
@patgalca (9433)
June 18, 2012 2:53pm CST
I am a member of goodreads.com where they have a lot of book giveaways. I go through the new entries every day and submit my name for those books I think I will like. In some cases the author will send you the book even if you didn't win it. This has happened to me a couple of times. I received a book a couple of weeks ago and started to read it last night. I was appalled. The publisher is an independent publisher in India who claim to have published hundreds of books in English. The author was born in India but raised in Thailand. She teaches ESL (English as a Second Language). I don't know if this book was written in a different language and translated to English by the publisher, or whether English is the original language the book was written in, but it is terribly written. The English is definitely broken. I checked the publisher online and though the website exists, when I tried to send them a comment or look further into the website I got no where. The site says they have a Twitter page and a Facebook page, but I couldn't find it.
The author is expecting me to review this book. That's the deal with Goodreads: You get the book, you post a review. I'm not sure I can even READ this book, let alone post a review. I don't even want to mention the title, author or even publisher for fear of offending the author.
So what would you do? Would you read the book, struggling all the way through, and write an honest review? Or just put it aside and forget about it?