The Anchor That Stopped the World by Agostino Scafidi
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Note: I received a copy of this text in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I was excited to start reading this book. With a title as bold and presumptuous as The Anchor that Stopped the World I thought for sure I was going to jump into a literary stunner.

I could not have been more wrong.

It is evident at the onset of the text that either Scafidi submitted his rough draft instead of final product or that he was just an awful writer. The text is plagued by tense changes, passive voice, needless character building (there’s a whole chapter dedicated to the back story of a thug who gets killed by his mob boss), and atrocious punctuation. In addition the formatting of the file I was sent (.epub) looked as if it had been some other file format originally and run through a program like Calibre. There were no paragraphs, only two lines of text followed by a blank line, repeatedly.

There is a story here but not much of one. Scafidi introduces us to a main character named Martin Rizzo but gives us no back story on him until close to the end of the book. There is no explanation as to how Martin is able to perform the physical feats he accomplishes in killing several people throughout the story. I spent most of the reading wondering when and if there was a point to any of it, as I slogged my way through poorly written internal dialog, completely unnecessary physical details, and building of characters that were short lived and entirely unimportant to the plot. There finally came a point where I believed I was reading an outline of a story, since it reads much like the notes I make for my personal work – one of a man unexpectedly drawn into mafia conspiracy. His friend is killed as part of a cover up of illicit mafia activities caught on tape and Martin decides to exact his revenge on the mafia family responsible.

Honestly, I was relieved to finish it and only did so in order to provide the requested review. If this is the author’s final edit and release, he should reconsider his chosen profession or enroll in some writing classes in order to develop and hone his suspect talent. The work I read is nowhere near novel material or worthy of the label.

I give this story a rating of 1 star as being quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever read.


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