Good stories, weak editing

The second Junk Force novel brings us back into the world of post-apocalyptic Earth, where water is the most precious thing one can possess. Liza, Wooty, Louis, Mill and Mamet continue their trek to find the ZPT across six loosely-connected stories.

This novel suffers from the same problems as its predecessor: sloppy writing and editing. It's clear author Hideki Kakinuma is more comfortable as a scriptwriter for anime and manga than he is as a literary writer. He seldom goes into great detail on anything other than technology and has a narrative style that is rather unsophisticated and under-developed. It doesn't help that the editing team at Dr. Master Publications didn't seem very interested in much other than the task of translating the text; scattered punctuation errors and sentences that begin without capital letters are distracting at best, made all the worse by formatting problems and no effort in the English-language sentence structure. Instead of taking the time to make the stories easier to read so they might flow more smoothly, the editors left them as is, creating the wrong sort of challenge for the reader. Lack of attention creates moments of unintended hilarity, such as this gem:

"Owww! I think I threw out my back!" Louis writhed on the floor looking very much like he had thrown out his back.

It's a shame more care wasn't put into this book, as the stories it tells are a lot of fun, and the illustrations accompanying them are high-quality and fun to look at. The strength of the stories themselves (particularly "The Old Castle" and "The Lakeside Town") and the illustrations are what earn this book three out of five stars. If the text quality and narrative structure were on par with those things, this book would be a perfect five. The casual reader isn't really going to be drawn into this book, but Junk Force fans will at least appreciate the illustrations and the scant fan service they offer if nothing else.

It makes me wish I could re-edit and re-release these novels; with the right care, they would be worth reading by anyone looking for a good story.

6/10