No Intent Reviews from Barnes & Noble
Review for Melody Reynolds “No Intent”
“No Intent” grasped in my hands, I am amazed and impressed at the style of writing that Melody Reynolds was able to pull off in this book! “No Intent” is a read for every level of audience. It can be understood in the untrained eyes of a teenager, right up to a professor picking out and analyzing the stylistic way Melody Reynolds captured in this work. In the first couple of pages, the novel lover inside of me wanted more details. More fleshing out of the scene happening amongst the words, but it was minimalistic. Minimalism in this piece worked for its advantage. Writing without excessive detail, and in a short concise series of events (compression) is extremely hard to conquer without sounding rushed and choppy. Melody wrote the beginning flawlessly, utilizing compression and minimalism. Ernest Hemmingway, one of the most profound writers known to the world of literature, wrote using minimalism in a majority of his pieces. Melody, in my opinion can be grouped into the same category as Ernest Hemmingway for her minimalistic fashion. Minimalistic nature of writing is coming back. Most people don’t want to know about the graphic details, but rather the big picture in a few sentences.Melody captured the most important features of her character, Rats, without simply saying that he was a scum bag. She showed. In writing an effective persuading piece of material, the best writers show what they are trying to portray, rather than out right telling the audience. Cutting out the detail and compressing events into a few pages not only showed the talent of the author, but also demonstrated the personality of the character. Along with minimalism, compression is another aspect of writing that is impossible to attain correctly, and she nailed it!Further into the book, I saw less minimalism and more specificity. The details were right where they needed to be. The rain cutting streaks in the window of the motel, Rat’s reflection in the mirror. At this point in “No Intent” I wanted detail, but was expecting none, but then Melody provided me with slow meticulous moments. This made me unsure of what I really wanted and expected her to write. Successful authors are not predictable. Successful books do not give the reader what they want, but instead what they need. Molding and shaping the audience’s expectations to where they think they know what is going to happen, but are wrong. I’m glad I was wrong. The way Melody seemed to switch to detail in a matter of a few pages is quite impressive. The description and the elements provided is very similar to the work of Nora Roberts. Throughout “No Intent” I found an abundance of grammatical errors. At first I thought as though the book deserved an additional proof reading before print, but quickly changed my mind. To someone unaware of the errors, this is not a problem. To someone who never experiments with a lack of punctuation or has read Shakespeare this is appalling. However, a lack of punctuation is what Shakespeare is awfully known for. By cutting out quotation marks; this makes the reader slow down and reread. Failing to italicize; makes the reader pay attention to what is happening. It takes a trained eye and a special audience to view grammatical deficiency as talent, rather than failure.Each and every character portrayed a certain piece of my life in their personalities. There was not one character that I could not to relate to. Fleshing out the characters is hard to accomplish without listing eye color, race, religion, etcetera. Instead Melody gave significant and even minor details about a character throughout the book, while continuing to paint enough description. Melody Reynolds has clearly proven herself as a phenomenal writer since the legends I have associated her work with are Ernest Hemmingway, Nora Roberts, and Shakespeare. Anyone reading “No Intent” should consider themselves privileged to be reading one of the finest and intricate works of art!
