An open letter to a reviewer:
Thanks, Mrs. G., for your thoughtful review of This Changes Everything, Volume I, The Spanners Series, on Amazon. I appreciate your candor, your thoroughness and your specificity of what you liked and what didn’t work for you. I wish all readers and reviewers took the time and gave the attention to their reviewed books and reviews as you have!
I am sorry the linked Table of Contents didn’t work for you. What version of ereader are you using? I haven’t heard of that problem from other readers and I wish that hadn’t happened for you.
Thanks, again, for your considered review. I would be happy to send you a copy of Volume II, This Changes My Family and My Life Forever.
Best to you,
Sally Ember, Ed.D. (author)
http://www.sallyember.com
P.S. I agree that The Spanners Series‘ stories would make an excellent T.V. series! I hope your wish comes true!
Here are her review and a link to it:
* * * of 5: Great concept–difficult translation into written form. September 6, 2014
DO NOT read this if you want a normal, linear story that makes complete sense and introduces ideas in a logical sequence.
DO read this if you want to try something very new and think about the universe in a completely different way.I’m actually not even sure how to review this in a traditional way because the book was so very bizarre in its format. Let’s go with this…
What I liked:
The aliens and the whole concept of the multiverses working together to make life better.
The characters (a lot of them) and how they felt real.
The whole idea of alternate time lines–something I’ve loved since Isaac Asimov’s “The End of Eternity”.
The enormous attention to detail in the whole world-building thing.What irked me:
The fact that shortly after meeting the aliens, we are thrust into the future (or is it a flashback–that’s how hard this is to follow) and a ton of acronyms and entities are suddenly taken for granted. There is an “appendix” with a glossary of terms. That might have worked for me except that in the ebook format at least, that meant jumping to the end and then there was no way to navigate back (no table of contents to take me back to the chapter I’d left). Perhaps in paperback form where I could dog ear the pages…?
As other reviewers have mentioned, the whole matter of tense and the writing style that makes it hard to know *when* I am. Which, yeah… Is a little moot when we’re talking about alternative timelines and the fact that time is not linear. Yeah, I get it. But the readers still are used to linear, so we need to have it explained to us in that way.I really think this would work better as a TV series where the visual clues might make it easier to tell “when” the reader is reading. It vaguely reminded me of Cloud Atlas, but harder to follow.
Sally Ember, Ed.D. 
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