The Elect

(Originally published at Red Adept Reviews.)

I obtained The Elect, by James Gilbert, through a copy submitted to Red Adept Reviews.

Overall: 3 Stars

Plot/Storyline: 4 1/4 Stars

The plot was great. The events were interesting and made for a good story, with plenty of twists and turns. Clearly, a lot of work went into creating a story that would keep the reader interested and wondering what would happen next. If I were to sit across from someone at dinner and tell them what happened, I believe your average person would enjoy hearing about it, even if there was a sense this all could have been streamlined and arranged better to give more bang for the buck.

Because there was so much going on, sometimes it felt like the author temporarily forgot about a character or a subplot. There was a nice ambition to this, but with that came a more difficult task to honor all the aspects of storytelling.
If you like a lot of conspiracies and an intricate web of deceit, you should be pleased with the plot. I know that, whatever issues I had with The Elect, I never stopped wanting to know what was going to happen next or how various issues were going to be resolved.

Characters: 2 1/2 Stars

The Elect featured a huge cast of characters. Heck, the plot demanded it. I found the characters to often be rather flat however, with a sameness of speech and personality. While the narrative offered a wide variety of motives and world views, when they spoke they meshed into one, with the talk show host turned candidate sounding like the new paper reporter who sounded like the college kid who sounded like the middle-aged guy. The female characters, almost without exception, felt even more similar to one another.

We're told the conservative radio host's wife was whip smart (with the looks of an aging supermodel) and other characters refer to her this way, and yet I never felt this was true. In addition, we're told that she is successful in her own right, but that didn't feel right either. Her husband is running for president, but she wants to keep her day job and, I suppose, moonlight as first lady. Does anyone anywhere find that feasible? The whip smart aging supermodel doesn't see the issue with this, and neither does her husband.

It seemed like various characters who should be politically savvy ... weren't. I suspect some of this is so that the author, by informing the characters, could explain how things worked to the reader. However, it just made it seem like politicians and insiders are, for the most part, idiots. Yes, yes, I know - insert your own quips.

I needed to believe that two of these characters were presidential material - either in the old-fashioned sense of intelligent and principled or in the new-fangled Cult of Personality sense. One of them was supposed to be a bit of a Rush Limbaugh or even Glenn Beck type, but I never got the impression this man could command the attention of a huge audience in the way that these people, rightly or wrongly, do or that he had the first idea about strategy or the workings of D.C. (I laughed when someone I wasn't supposed to like called him a “nitwit.” Come to think of it, this was the same guy who found the candidate's wife to be na??ve about what it takes to be first lady. Um, he might be my favorite character.) People in a militia group use the word “ain't” to show, I suppose, that they're uneducated and working class. I'm not a fan of these groups, and I was still vaguely insulted on their behalf.

Conversations often felt clich??d and repetitive. While characters, in theory, would be on different sides of an argument, their general sameness zapped all the electricity out of scenes. Potentially interesting conflicts were nipped in the bud in what seemed to me to be a need for the characters the author liked to like one another.

I simply didn't feel like I knew these people as well as I should, well enough to root for some, and root against others. I also felt like there were clear opportunities missed to make that happen.

For example, the author wrote several scenes leading up to a debate – and then chose to have the debate “off-screen.” I was disappointed because I thought it was going to be interesting and dynamic and really show the differences between arguably the two most important people in The Elect. While reading the book there were moments I wish he'd focused on, for the good of both plot and character, and others that I felt were needless or redundant. The debate wasn't covered, but we got a scene of the candidate's wife having an anemic argument with a news anchor in which she quotes Mommy Dearest - and not even the line you're probably all thinking about, so that she can be touted as being sassy.

Writing Style: 3 stars

Mr. Gilbert's writing often lacked vitality. He had a habit of not using active verbs, which might not register consciously, but tends to sap the energy from writing. Along with this, he often used passive voice. (Reviewers can get away with it, or so I tell myself.)

Sometimes sentences read as clunky and convoluted. (“Senator, the heliport is over here,” the nondescript young man standing alongside grabbed the senator by the elbow and gently led him past the photographers.) Other times, I felt the author was unsure or uncomfortable about dialogue tags - the “he said/she said” moments and these were occasionally handled awkwardly.

There was also a scene that is told from the point of view of a man driving home. In the midst of this we're told he's being followed. For a few paragraphs I wondered how he was going to deal with this until I realized the author had switched points of view for all of one paragraph and the man didn't know he was being followed.

The name Candace was used for two different wives, one in Boston and one in, oh, I think it was D.C. I had to take time to search the name, because I didn't know if this was the same woman, but Candace 1 was married to Mitch and Candace 2 was married to Alec. There were also two characters named Ed, but this was much less confusing.

On the other hand, there were moments that genuinely worked, and lines that were genuinely good, and the author juggled a lot of plot and storylines and had everything come together at the appropriate moment.

Editing: 2 1/4 stars

Honestly? Beneath professional standards. Missing commas, missing words, misspellings, grammar issues. One character was called by another character's name at one point.

When we meet the talk show host's wife, Sandy, we're given these contradictory descriptions within pages, “Now, at age forty three...” and “As she settled into her late forties...” As a woman who is months away from my forty-third birthday, I object. Mother Teresa is referred to as Mother Theresa, a character worries she is “titling at windmills.”

The book never became unreadable, due to the solid plot, but the errors were frequent enough that they took away from the quality of book and I, frankly, got tired of making note of them. Few of the mistakes were huge, but the steady stream of minor errors reduced the reading experience significantly. Most of this stuff, absolutely, should have been caught.