Blog Tour: Review of "The Making of A Man"

I love historical fiction and love good characters.  This is why I was eager to read Rachel Rossano's "The Making of a Man" and that is our review for today.

The stories in this anthology run from adolescence to adulthood and cover some crucial moments in any person's life:  the loss of a parent, the culmination of love, the development of leadership skills, etc.  I do like that its set against the backdrop of the 15th Earl of Dentin.  I admittedly have little experience with this overarcing storyline or time period.  As with most historical fictions, I found myself fact-checking and Googling to hmmm at things that I either didn't know or found to be anachronistic.  (No one should take this a bad sign.  I do the same thing with World-War-II sotrylines equally.)

The characters were definitely engaging in this, with some humorous but believable figures worked in.  I felt that she wrote younger characters best and my favorites were children who begged to go on a boar hunt and taunted the imaginary pig that they would have caught.  This example is given to show that while the anthology is about a specific character, the minor characters enrich the stories the most.

My only issue with it was that the editing was inconsistent.  It frustrates me when I am drawn into a story that then tends to have random misspellings or incomprehensible narrative sentences.  I always advise people to do what I do and read sentences aloud before committing them to the final draft and while they grew fewer as the anthology went on, I wished that the fine-tooth comb of proofreading had overruled the need to get the stories out there.

Thanks to Rachel for letting me read and review!  I'll be looking into other titles by her.