Word Freak (2001) by Stefan Fatsis
OK, it’s pretty important to say at the outset: you probably need to be at least very interested in Scrabble to enjoy this book. The more obsessed you are with the game, the better you’ll like it. So with that said, the rest of these notes are from the perspective of a semi-obsessed Scrabble fan.
The good news is that Fatsis writes well, the characters in the tournament Scrabble world are really fascinating and entertaining, and the facts, trivia and historical info Fatsis marshals are great.
For one example: anagramming is very important for extereme Scrabble skill, and there are examples all through the book. But Fatsis slyly slips this sentence in, with it’s clever anagram:
“That’s a total of fifty-one games over eight days, a They Shoot Horses Don’t They? exercise in Scrabble machismo or masochism, I’m not sure which.”
The only criticism I have is that (at least my copy) has the most incredibly inept editing that I’ve ever seen. It’s not possible that Fatsis’ manuscript looked like this when he delivered it to the publisher. I’m not some kind of fanatic about perfection, but it’s quite ironic that a book about a word game should be so rife with errors.
The most bizarre thing is repeated words with hyphens in them in the middle of sentences. It’s very jarring. The hyphenated words at the ends of sentences all seem pretty much correct.
Here are the most glaring problems I’ve noted so far.
“took over the to spot” (clearly, “top” is meant, p. 45)
“fol-lowed” (p. 46)
“You’ll be in the ex-pert ranks soon.” (p. 199)
“…con-tains boxed areas to record her score and that of her oppo-nent…” (p.2)
“res-ponds” (p. 131)
“words that no longer a ear in any readily available reference” (clearly, “appear” is meant although that’s a pretty breathtaking typo, p. 147)
There’s more but that ought to give you the idea for now.
