SO THERE'S THAT.... | BEFORE LONG BY AURALEE ARKINSLY

BEFORE LONG

Moving to a new home?

Contentment is a virtue, but home buying is sheer romance.

Poking fun at a young couple searching for a place to call home, BEFORE LONG teases a home buyer's angst with some broker-realtor humor in this illustrated comedy. Fictional Ernest and Esme allow you to accompany them through their buyers' remorse.

This coffee table gift book depicts a buyer's attempt to land the ideal house in the perfect community without tackling significant issues.

★☆☆☆☆

Fictional couple Ernest and Esme are first-time home buyers on the hunt for their dream residence. They search high and low, testing out homes in both urban and rural settings, finding little issues with each spot that leads them to want to move yet again each time. Through it all, readers are asked to go along with them as they navigate through the highs and lows, the numerous and varied joys and pitfalls of the house hunting experience. 

Format-wise, though this may initially look like a children's picture book, it is actually meant to be a humorous coffee table-type book for adults to gift to friends and family (or clients, I suppose, if you're a realtor).

Given all the high ratings, I was feeling pretty optimistic about my experience when this was sent to me to review. But I'm stumped as to how so many people found this story a laugh-out-loud riot? Granted, it's not terrible in concept, even cutesy with the potential for charming in the beginning. But it doesn't take long for things to turn a bit boring and repetitive. The writing itself was also pretty clunky and weird in parts --- lines like "Although there was an abundance of pollenating trees, they didn't mind now that the tribe was left behind."; "I think we should gather some courage and just tell our lovely neighbors that we have some education to consider."; "Before long, Ernest and Esme decided to buy a 5000 rpm road bike and waft in the wind."

And are these crazy kids full-on BUYING every house they move into in this story? Budget envy over here! LOL But seriously, I kinda wanted them to just be real grown-ups and accept every house is going to have its quirks and problems. Maybe work it out rather than up and leave over every little inconvenience.

But yeah, I really wasn't feeling the level of humor or satire everyone else seemed to get out of this. It all felt pretty forced IMO.

Maybe it's my past work as a graphic designer rearing up in me, but my biggest problem with this book is the shoddy job the book design / layout crew did on the overall formatting. How did this get the stamp of approval to print? There's one illustration where a checklist is laid over a scroll clip art background. Problem is, rather than sizing the scroll image to fit the page, the bottom of the scroll was just lazily continued onto the following page. All the illustrations have the look of someone just doing a stock image search and then building the story around those images, as perhaps a grade-schooler would. There's just a really noticeable lack of cohesiveness to the lot.

Some of the images are quite lovely... unfortunately, the majority of them all show varying degrees of pixelation, the graininess worsened by the fact that the whole book was printed on very low-quality paper. Again, the graphic designer in me, if you're going to have such a heavily illustrated book, you really do yourself and potential readers a disservice going cheap with the paper.

As always, I appreciate the opportunity to review, but in this case, this is not a book I could honestly see myself ever recommending to others.

FTC DISCLAIMER: Bookcrash.com and Capture Books kindly provided me with a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The opinions above are entirely my own.