Member Reviews

It started a little rocky for me but once I actually got into it I enjoyed it a lot. I would buy it and have actually talked about it with a friend.

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Very difficult read. Trying to put facts in to a fictional story did not work for me. Also the dialogue was very wooden and it did not flow naturally.

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The premise of this book was interesting. Especially in the recent past, there has been concerns about the security of the voting process in the United States. In this book, one political party uses all the tricks in the book to win an election for their candidate all the way from stuffing ballot boxes to murder. As a young female FBI agent Joie August and her fiancé John work against the group, the danger grows. While the information in this book was eye-opening and interesting, it was presented with weak characters and a weak storyline. At times the dialogue was stilted and uncomfortable. Another problem I had with this book is that it vilified one party and didn't even try to be coy about the author's political stance. It made for a less than realistic read.

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DNF at 11%.

I only made it through the Foreword and first two chapters, finding each of them distinctly and significantly incompatible with my reading preferences. The research that went into this book is highly evident, so it might have worked better as a nonfiction work? But that's not what this was.

Obviously, I can't comment much on the book as a whole, so instead here's why I just couldn't bring myself to keep reading. If you're not interested in the play-by-play, basically it boils down to my low threshold for infodumps and the awkward writing style.

Foreword
The book title and synopsis gave me the impression that this would be nonfiction, so I was glad to have that straightened out before I even started reading. However, the writing felt a little awkward, particularly the conclusion detailing the author's vision of election reform, and the list of voter fraud methods was more than a little off-putting.

Chapter 1
Generally I'm all for establishing the human interest element of stories, but the opening scene was one long infodump (including a paragraph on the crimes of past presidents), and John seemed like a caricature of the hot-tempered veteran. I was not a fan of the constant references to "the beast/animal within" or to the physical attractiveness that turned the heads of everyone around him. And the blink-and-you'll-miss-it cut-to-black implied sex scene made me cringe.

Chapter 2
To be quite frank, this read like one of the "educational plays" from my elementary school textbooks: alternating lines of dialogue that convey information in language that makes sense on paper but sound awkward in conversation.

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This book has a transparent political agenda. That might be fine if it was an engaging thriller. It's not. The basic premise is that the U.S. electoral system is seriously flawed in multiple ways. The result is, the author believes, the vulnerabilities are so tempting it's almost certain someone is and will be using them for nefarious purposes.
To be credible Pseudo President would have to be a nonfiction white paper with rigorous documentation. As it is, couching the message in fiction creates a crucial and worrying flaw - a critical reader can't challenge its facts because it's fiction!
As to the narrative, every other chapter is an expository presentation disguised as a conversation. The other chapters are a thriller plot that advances slowly and fails to thrill.
The book's political posturing is also problematic. It claims to be nonpartisan. It's not. The villains are not labeled as Democrats, but their descriptions will be familiar to Sean Hannity fans. In this book, they are painted as not only electoral cheaters but also conspiratorial murderers.
Surely the vulnerabilities of the electoral process need close scrutiny. But I fear the main purpose of this book is to undermine confidence in the process itself, perhaps even to attempt to refute results of the next national election.

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Wow! This story follows the real fraud that is happening in our elections that nobody wants to correct. It is an eye opener. It is set with a story about an FBI agent, Joie August and her fiance, John Jacobson who is an ex-Marine now working for Avionics Technology. There is murder, fraud, lies, and everything else that can be found in today's political system that needs to be corrected.

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