Russell Pond is a boy who grew up in the backwoods area of some unmentioned state, surrounded by characters who all seem as if they should be locked up (whether it be in jail or an insane asylum). He suffers from multiple personalities, which are only made worse with multiple head injuries. In Schizo; Anti Hero Nursery Rhyme, our main character struggles to make sense of his traumatic life events and thoughts, while remaining completely unaware of a sinister subplot.

“He can only get control if he uses his mind and he doesn’t have much a mind because he hit his head in the accident where his mind is. Was. The use of my own mind wore me out and I let myself fall asleep so that he couldn’t think.”

Overall, the story line and characters that Chance Raymond has created for us are very memorable, and this book has great potential. However, the reader can’t help but feel as if the execution has sullied what was otherwise a fantastic and original idea.

One of the issues is that the story starts in third person, and then randomly tapers off into first. The timeline is also inconsistent, and constantly jumps around with no clear point of reference as to when or where in the story we are.

On top of this, perhaps the most bothersome part of this book is the abundance of grammatical errors, of which there are plenty of glaringly obvious ones. To mention a few, Raymond writes about “ice sickles”, and to pull a quote from the story, “-for the boy to diagnosis a general case of madness.” “Diagnosis” is a noun, not a verb, and there are no frozen farm tools dangling from the roof.

At the end of the story, the reader feels as if they caught the gist of it, but as with the main character’s memory, there are large chunks missing. Schizo would have more success with a thoughtful rewrite and a proofread.

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