Publisher's Weekly review for Wrecking Civilization Before Lunch

At the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, here is the Publisher's Weekly review for my novel, Wrecking Civilization Before Lunch:

manuscript review by Publishers Weekly, an independent organization
"This entertaining story of human ingenuity and decency battling against corporate greed takes place in Brookbury, Missouri, where in inventor Mark Goggin's lab there's a floating Barbie Dream House. When creepy intelligence operative Mr. York and recruiter Jenna Telfair from mammoth tech conglomerate General Micronet (GMN) visit Goggin's lab, they take notice of the dollhouse. Meanwhile, Matthias End, recently sacked by GMN, discovers that GMN is on a covert mission to acquire Goggin's antigravity device at any cost. As he races to warn Goggin, GMN's plans--led by York and "flatulent ass" Drake Endicott--proceed. Turmoil ensues: cars crash; bullets fly; lasers blaze; boats collide; jet-skis smash. The author evens weaves romance into this terrifically paced manuscript. The characters' banter is on-target, quick-witted and hilarious."

This is really amazing. I was looking for the review from Publisher's Weekly to get an idea what works and what doesn't work. The reviews I have so far are either from friends and family who are probably not entirely objective, from fellow semi-finalists whose motives are difficult to determine (although generally well-meaning, I have found), or from strangers who are the closest thing to objectivity, I suppose. And none of them has seen more than the excerpt, 5000 words out of 95,000.

But the Publisher's Weekly reviewer has seen the entire novel. And they said nothing but positive things. I can not even INFER any criticism from it. I thought there'd be something messed up or confusing.

By contrast, here is the review from an Amazon Top Reviewer:

Amazon Top Reviewer
"I have to admit, I did not know where this was going after I read it. You have evidently a young man looking for a job, he seems to be a nerd of some type, and he's literally going to the doorstep of a mad scientist. The problem I saw with the story was that it didn't make much sense in the beginning, and other than him finding weird things in the scientist's house, there didn't seem to be much conflict there. His personality wasn't really brought to the forefront enough to make him all that interesting, and it seemed that any interesting personality traits were being submerged in the plethora of weird things that he was finding in the scientist's house. I mean, cleaning robots, spontaneous combustion, cleaning rods. It was all too much to put in at the beginning of the story. I think if there was a much longer section on what this young man was about in the first place, what was actually driving him to get a job, and a more in-depth sense of what his thoughts and feelings were when he stepped into this weird situation, I think you'd end up with a better novel."

Clearly this person has read only the 5000-word excerpt; its the only part of the book they talk about. And they have not read the blurb describing Mark Goggin as the main character. They seem to think I should be going into great swathes of prose about Mark's teenage assistant Nathan, who is in reality a minor character in the story. The only legitimate criticism I could decipher was that I don't introduce much conflict in the story. Which is true. I am introducing characters at this point, building a background around which to then introduce the conflict. This is where the limits of looking at 5,000 words comes in, in deciding whether this will be a good story or not.

Strange isn't it, that they think my novel could be better, when they've only read 5% of it. And it makes them look a little careless for going on and on about a minor character too. There's no mention at all of the humor (which the Publisher's Weekly reviewer mentioned several times), which leads me to think this top reviewer either doesn't read much humor or they just don't have a sense of humor.

It makes it very hard for me to get much out of this review to improve the story.

The top reviewer missed the whole point of reading an excerpt. You cannot expect to find out about the plot, subplots, character motivations, conflict, or resolution, by reading the first 5,000 words of a book. Unless the book is, like, 10,000-words long.

What you can expect to get from it is an idea of the tone of the story, some introduction of characters and/or setting, a pretty solid impression of the writer's voice, and something of an idea of the writer's ability to put words together grammatically and form a coherent story.

In her Crapometer, Miss Snark slammed me because I started the book by following this teenager and not saying anything about the stuff in my blurb, which she really liked. The blurb covers the entire book, for goodness sake. If she wants to read everything covered in my blurb, she needs to read the entire book. But, to be fair, she was trying to look at 600 some excerpts and was intentionally giving a flip first-impression with most of them in an attempt to simulate what an actual agent would do. And the top reviewers, too, are used to reviewing an entire book. So no big deal.

I suddenly have this strong urge to send out some query letters.

Beware O Agents of the Literary!