I just submitted a book (Xorandor by Christine Brooke-Rose) that is (I think) intended for young teens. At least the main (human) characters are a pair of twins growing up in rural Britain that start the story about 10 years old and end about 12 years old. This is a vaguely science fiction story (really though it is mostly about the characters, the kids and how they react to the situations compared to the adults and how they react). I chose this book because it was recommended by Thomas Disch in one of the essays in another book called On SF that I proofed for bookshare.
The comment I wrote when I submitted the book to bookshare reads...I have not only stripped headers, spelling checked, checked for typical scannos, and checked page numbers, I have read through the whole book. This book has just about every thing in it that could make the book difficult. It has real foreign words, fake foreign words, dialect, conversations turned into computer programs, scientific and especially computer jargon and smart kids just playing around with the language. The raw scan was excellent. After I read through it, I can't guarantee everything is exactly as the print book, but no matter how odd it seems, most likely what you are reading is correct. I am impressed that the bookshare tool gave it an excellent rating right off, but I am pretty sure it really is excellent. On the other hand, if you find anything that you suspect is a problem, contact me at mlsestak@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
This email will probably discourage anyone from even trying to proof the book. But, what I didn't put in the submit comment is that I truly enjoyed the book. The story could have been improved by having kids other than the twins and more events from their normal daily life in rural England. Still, I'd especially recommend it to parents trying to teach critical thinking to their kids in a way that they will enjoy and to kids who may or may not be whiz kids themselves, but are sure their parents are aliens from another planet who just don't get it.
As I already typed, it should be an easy proof because whatever you come across, no matter how odd, I probably already came across it and thought "huh" checked the book and sure enough, that's how it reads. On that note, if anyone knows computer jargon and British slang well enough to figure out why these two kids would call their school vacations "eproms" I'd like to know (eproms are a kind of memory that doesn't disappear when the computer is turned off, so it is used for the first part of the operating system, before everything else is running. What that has to do with school vacations I just can't imagine).
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