Dan Brown Break

I'm determinedly plowing through The Lost Symbol despite eye-rolls every few paragraphs and numerous sighs in between. I'm a fifth of the way through and struggle isn't getting the pay-off.

If historical romances were written with such obvious historical errors and one-dimensional characters, editors and agents would toss is away as unpublishable. Even if someone somewhere made the mistake of publishing it, the author would get reamed by the readers for horrible character and my historians and other historical writers for all the errors that are so obviously the sign of lazy research.

I lay the blame for this wooden and highly inaccurate story squarely on the shoulders of the editor and copyeditors. They should've hired a research intern. They knew it was bad. They should've fixed it.

But despite it all, I'm doggone persistent in seeing this book through all its 507 pages. The saints of all religions preserve me and my family so that we may emerge from this unscathed and unscarred.