Margo read and liked Mo's review of Dying to Live:

"I went into this book extremely excited because I'd read lots of good things about it and it had been recommended to be several times. Honestly, the book had potential that it didn't live up to because it wasted a lot of time with juvenile writing. I...more I went into this book extremely excited because I'd read lots of good things about it and it had been recommended to be several times. Honestly, the book had potential that it didn't live up to because it wasted a lot of time with juvenile writing. I honestly believe that, if the author had stepped away from the first person narrative (first person perspective often kills a good idea, unfortunately), and hacked out a lot of the unnecessary exposition, this could have been a five-star book. The story is more focused on the characters than a lot of other post-zompocalypse books I've read, and this could have been more interesting had the author not trapped himself in the head of the main character.

I found there were too many times where something interesting would be going on around the main character, but it was lost to him musing on past experiences, or even going into too much detail about his opinion of the action. This lost my interest very quickly and I ended up skimming through pages and pages trying to find the meat of the story. Unfortunately, because this author had so many ideas and so much he wanted to get out, he had to resort to clumsy dialogue to get what he wanted out of other characters; this is often a problem with first person perspective. Characters give too much away and speak very unrealistically because that's the only way the main character- and therefore the audience- can learn necessary plot point information.

All in all, I'm not going to write the author off, and I plan to give him a try later down the line. It really seemed to me like this, as a first book effort, had promise, but the author needs to hone his craft and try again, maybe with a less forgiving editor.
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