1 out of 4 stars
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Alleged Affairs by Aniefiok Jackson is the tragic tale of Alexandra, a professional businesswoman who always strived for independence and success from a young age. However, she falls in love and takes the reckless decision of diving into a marriage without getting to know the man properly – consequently abandoning a huge percentage of the freedom she has worked so hard to gain. As always, life moves forward and creates obstacles along the way. Hardships begin to arise in her marriage and her family begins to slowly dissipate. Alexandra becomes a shadow of the woman she used to be and, in a moment of weakness, succumbs to her desires and needs to feel loved and worthy once again – by a man who isn't her husband. What will be the outcome of her terrible mistake?
The book covers very heavy themes such as rape, murder, depression and so on. I should also warn the readers that the author doesn’t discuss such complex topics with the sensitivity and caution needed, but rather describes them explicitly and with very little thoughtfulness – therefore, the plot could be extremely triggering for some.
I would like to start by pointing out that the book contains an immense number of grammatical mistakes, typos and misspelled words. From the very first page until the last, the author couldn’t differentiate between the past and present tense, doesn’t know how to create a grammatically correct sentence and, to add to it, clearly hasn’t invested in a professional editor to fix those major flaws. For a lot of instances, I couldn’t understand what the author was trying to explain and convey in a scene, because I couldn’t find meaning in her sentences and words. Of course, this forced me to get distracted and lost more than a couple of times, and I was left wondering what the whole chapter was talking about.
To add to it, the plot was tremendously fast-paced and disorganized, more like a mess than anything. For example, in one page we find Alexandra single and displeased with men and their antics, then in the next few pages we see her married and joyful over her first child without a proper explanation to how she reached such a stage. The unsystematic flow of the storyline left absolutely no room for answers regarding Alexandra's sudden character development, nor a moment of contemplation over a character’s actions. It almost felt like a list of bullet points was squeezed into a paragraph, and then the same technique got repeated for every single paragraph throughout the chapters until we reached the end. I couldn’t help but find myself completely disconnected from the characters' emotions and the plot as a whole – which isn’t favorable for any book.
Also, the dialogues were extremely messy and lacked the proper quotation marks, hence why I couldn’t distinguish whenever a conversation started and a paragraph ended. The discussions between the characters were very unrealistic and a bit awkward at times too, because the author attempted to add poetic words to their conversations but ended up creating stiff discussions instead. I just wish that the author used such poetic sentences during her descriptions instead of dialogues – where adding a little magic to a scene would be more favorable and even preferred.
For the reasons above, I will rate this book 1 out of 4 stars. The book should be read by ages above 18 since it contains explicit sexual content and immensely triggering scenes. Sadly, I would not recommend this book to anyone simply because it lacked a solid and gripping plot, a meaningful message that should have been associated with such a heavy storyline, and there wasn’t much thought put into the creation of the characters.
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Alleged Affairs
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