I've been trying to figure out why Mas's writing always feels grating and frustrating to read, and I think I've figured out two main reasons: 1) her writing style is incredibly simplistic at points with odd phrasing and 2) She does not seen to take character or story development seriously which makes her writing come off as half-hearted and slightly mocking.

Let's dive a bit deeper into reason one. We'll come back to reason two once we're a bit more into the book.

Preface: I'm a native English speaker (southeastern American dialect) and my background is in teaching English as a second language and linguistics. Language is kind of my thing and pay close attention to details most people don't consciously notice. I'm also assuming Jasmine Mas is a native English speaker, and framing my criticism from that perspective.

What in the world sentence structure?

In English, there are several components that can make up a sentence:

• Independent Clauses: must contain a subject and an action the subject performs (aka verb); it must be able to make a complete thought For example, in "I run", "I" is the subject and "run" is the verb and it is a complete thought
• Dependent Clauses: a phrase that contains a subject and/or verb but IS NOT a complete thought and cannot stand alone. For example: "Since I went to the store". There are many different types of dependent clauses, but I won't bore you with the details.

A sign of advanced language development and knowledge is the ability to combine different clauses together to form more linguistically complex sentences. This is where your compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences that you learned about in grammar come to play.

That's great and all, but why does that matter?

Varying sentence structures is what helps writing flow, set a tone, create a style, and so much more. You can utilize it to express narrative distance and influence how your reader interprets/"sees" scenes unfold. Long, flowing sentences can create a sense of languid and smooth actions. Short simple sentences can create a sense of quick and sharp movement. Sentence structure is such an amazing and multi-faceted tool for writers.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Jasmine Mas's writing in Blood of Hercules?

In short, her use of sentence structure is absolutely atrocious in this book. There is no evidence of care or finesse in the craft. She overly relies on consecutive simple sentences to emphasize certain points and often phrases her more complex sentences in convoluted ways.

Take this sentence:

"In this universe, I silently shoved past him and ran into my sanctuary, chest heaving."

Normally I would provide a broader context for this statement, but there isn't one. The addition of the prepositional phrase "in this universe" seems to come out of nowhere and feels unnecessary. Its placement at the beginning of the sentence would imply that there are multiple universes, or that there was previous mention of differing universes, points of view, etc. That is not the case. This bizarre placement makes the overall message of the sentence unclear. Are there other universes out there? Is the main character implying that what she only shoved past the man in her own mind and not in reality? Is she a dimension hopper and in a previous dimension she didn't shove past the man?

I won't even get started on the egregious use of sentence fragments like "chest heaving" that are tacked onto the end of sentences with a comma. I have come to realize that is now a standard style in publishing and am doing my best to get over it (it hasn't been going well).

We get it. You hate her writing style. How does that affect your reading experience?

Limited diversity in sentence structures and odd phrasing can make writing feel clunky, juvenile, and confusing - all traits that Mas's writing has in abundance. Does that mean everyone will hate reading it? No. I'm fully aware that most people don't care about rhythm or flow in writing and are able to ignore those aspects in favor of enjoying the overarching story. I however am not one of those people. And if I'm going to be a hater, I'm going to be an informed hater with solid reasoning. Thus the long rant about sentence structure.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.