epistler: (Default)
[personal profile] epistler posting in [community profile] antishurtugal_reborn
So, has anyone been wondering what the infamous Gloria Tesch has been up to lately? 

No? 

Me neither. 

And yet here we are. 


Date: 2021-09-16 08:48 pm (UTC)
torylltales: (Default)
From: [personal profile] torylltales
most recent review on Goodreads:


Update as of Apr 7, 2020... Glo-Glo, please stop with the sockpuppetry. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This was your new Gloria Tesch profile before you changed the name to E Hurst. This shit is fucking obvious, and you do yourself no favors by continuing the same antics that were used during the Maradonia era.

Update as of Dec 22, 2020... Another sockpuppet, perhaps... Only one single review/rating to its account, and it's set to private like the previous sockpuppet. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Just like the previous sockpuppet, this one has gone around giving all the 5-star reviews here an upvote in a desperate attempt to drive the negative - and honest - reviews to the bottom.

Nice try, Gloria's Mom!

Update as of Dec 10, 2020 - Yet another sockpuppet rears its ugly head. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Its profile is also private, I guess to try to hide the fact that it's also from Fort Lauderdale like all the other socks. I'm seriously supposed to believe that some random librarian actually recommended this for children?

Seriously, Gloria (or perhaps Gloria's Mom?) Stop this fucking bullshit. You tried to get more reviewers through the Goodreads Giveaway and got a handful of mixed reviews - 1,2,3, and 4 stars. Take these reviews, and learn from them so you can improve your writing instead of wasting your time creating sockpuppets and whining about "haters".

(Original review as of Aug 2020) Readers beware - this book is by none other than Gloria Tesch the author of the infamous, poorly-written, and much-reviled Maradonia Saga.

(Edit - After I created this review, Gloria changed the name of her old author's profile to 'Gloria Maradonia' and removed her picture from that profile in a poor attempt to fool people) This was after she'd already created another account with her old name and used that name to give this book 5 stars!) https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...

Now, I could understand the author wanting to start anew and shit because it seems that the Maradonia Saga is partly because of Gloria's parents and how they tried to pimp out the books and their daughter as some sort of writing prodigy.

We all grow up, and look back at the mistakes we've made, and move on from them. No big deal.

Except for two things (besides the very cheesy author's name Gloria chose for herself)

1. The writing still sucks. I read the free preview on Amazon, and it appears she hasn't improved much, at all. There's still the same, for lack of a better word, Tesch-isms in the writing, from actions to dialogue that don't fit/make sense and awkward descriptions. Also, I'm creeped out by the idea of a 14 year old boy and a centuries-old mermaid. Now, if the boy was 17 or 18, it wouldn't be so bad, but the boy doesn't even have his fucking driver's license yet. Or on the flip side, the mermaid could be 16 years old and that wouldn't have been so bad with a 14 year old boy.

2. It's fucking obvious that ALL of the 5-star reviews here on Goodreads are sockpuppets (as of Aug 3, 2020). None of them have any reviews besides this book, and many of them only have this book in their 'read' pile. Seriously, I checked on ALL of the profiles of the 5-star reviewers here, and all of their profiles are empty, and not only that, but all of them are in Florida, with all but one located in Fort Lauderdale! It's harder to create sockpuppets on Amazon, but still, all the reviews there come across as artificial and if not outright sockpuppets, are very clearly Gloria/Sofia's friends/family members.

Good books stand on their own merit, and however obscure they may be, will eventually earn good reviews.

Gloria Tesch/Sofia Nova has not changed at all - she's still writing badly, and she is still using sockpuppets/family members/friends to promote herself, as well as making god-awful and pretentious videos, and saying silly/stupid things that make her seem 'woke' or 'inspirational'.

Glo-Glo, please stop your 'artsy/creative' bullshit and mooching money off other people - your dad did you no favors - and support yourself on a normal job.

I wouldn't have bothered writing this review and left Gloria alone to pursue her dreams, if not for the blatant sockpuppetry and self-aggrandization. This shit is no better than Robert Stanek, who was so prolific with his sockpuppetry that it ended up backfiring spectacularly in his face, and the same WILL happen to Gloria if she continues on the same path.

More on the antics of Gloria and Team Tesch here... quite interesting reads.
http://conjugalfelicity.com/gloria-te...
https://everything2.com/title/Gloria+...
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/gloria-... (less)

Date: 2021-09-16 08:58 pm (UTC)
torylltales: (Default)
From: [personal profile] torylltales

another thoughtful review that goes into some detail:


Reviewing The Secret of Moon Lake without any further context, I would consider rating it two stars for the Goodreads default "it was OK". The Secret of Moon Lake displays basic writing competency, although with multiple amateur tells, starting on the first page with "protagonist looks at self in mirror and is physically described to the reader" . It seems to have good outlining. The story progresses smoothly, complications occur regularly; it has the bones of a standard light middle-grade story with fantasy elements. For an uncritical reader, it may be be genuinely enjoyable. It is properly punctuated. There are a bit more than an average number of typos or minor grammatical errors, but nothing to fuss over. There are more pressing compounding problems with the writing, such as in these examples:

A nauseous sweat broke out as the palm of the man’s hand held Sam’s jaw tight.

What is a nauseous sweat?

“Regardless, you shouldn’t be in this part of Moon Lake,” Chief Larson said as he peered out into the forest as if he was looking for something. “There have been too many weird instances with this forsaken forest.”

Pretty sure that should be "incidents".

Geezer, the orange cat, was laying over half the couch with his legs and arms spread out.

Cats have arms?

He waited with anticipating eyes, eager to see Aurelia.

Descriptions of eyes doing the heavy character work is unfortunately common.

There are many more examples that could be highlighted, but more significant are a number of confusing story details. First, this Moon Lake; "no one knows how it got its name"; next sentence: "it's shaped like the moon". Yes, lakes can have currents, the Great Lakes have significant ones, but Moon Lake has an incredibly strong current for its apparent size, one that quickly drags the main character Sam from one shore sraight to the other early in the book. Vikings are reported to have come to this lake 1000 years ago (which fits with actual historical viking activity) but the events in which Vikings put a mermaid in the lake happened only 300 years ago. It also seemed odd for Vikings to come up a river from the ocean to this lake (let alone travel across the entire Atlantic ocean just to carry out a misogynistic revenge scenario) because the story's location is not firmly established, but somewhere half-way into the book it is given as the state of Maine, and there is a school field trip is to Mount Desert Island (which I thought sounded dumb but it turns out to be a real place, who knew?) so it works as somewhere in the Bangor region or closer to the ocean, so I'll give it that one, but the fact that the story compels you to try and make sense of these and other odd details is a bad sign.

The whole 300/1000 year thing is only one odd time discrepancy. Another extended example is presented early; after Sam almost drowns and is dragged across the lake and dumped on the opposite shore by a water current, he is then found by the police chief and a weird scientist (who studies mermaids and magical medallions—Science!). The police chief drives him home, after which Sam watches as a moving van and family car arrive across the street, carrying that same scientist who in the same time apparently finished sciencing across the lake and met up with his whole family and drove the same distance to coincidentally meet their moving van. Sam then watches the movers carry in a whole lot of stuff in a process that must have taken quite a while, all of this before finally changing out of his dripping wet clothes even though he was chilled and told to change before the moving van ever arrived. It was sunset around this time, and his dad then made him promise never to go to the lake after sundown, which is not what he had done when he fell in and made everyone worried, so . . . it's all a bit hard to keep track of.

Sam is age fourteen but is in the seventh grade, which is odd unless he was held back a year or two (and in fairness, he doesn't seem very bright). His sister is three years older but five years ahead of him in school. He acts more like a middle-schooler than a teenager for sure, and determining an appropriate reading age for the book is similarly confusing. I would not recommend it for older than middle grade, as the language, plot and characters are too simple for older readers, but the content sometimes skews a little older, such as teen drinking and drunk driving.

And that ending . . . it's a mess. I almost stuck with my initial two-star rating for the text, but the sequences in the big show-down don't make a whole lot of sense. When your big plan to defeat a mermaid depends on it crawling out of the water and a good distance into a forest, you've got a problem. And the final, final ending, well, it has an appropriate twist but the reader is hammered with it repeatedly, where a subtle clue was all that was needed.

The illustrations and cover art, by the author's mother, are quite lovely, I thought.

So, the book needs some work. Of course it's self-published. It's honestly surprising that it's as good (although not good) as it is, given that this springs from the legacy of the Maradonia Saga, with its cringe-worthy literary and media history. The world just endured a four-year crash course in narcissistic personality disorder, including its lingering inter-generational legacy and tendency towards family clusters, and that is what I see here. I freely admit that I am not a mental health professional and this is a remote lay diagnosis, but to me it fits perfectly. I will read and review Maradonia and the Seven Bridges in the near future; if you are unfamiliar with that fiasco, a google will quickly reveal the various shenanigans surrounding that whole affair from a past decade. That all started when Gloria Tesch was only 13 years old and cannot rightfully be held against her. Now, re-branded as Sofia Nova, she is a grown-ass adult and deserves an opportunity to be evaluated from a blank slate. Unfortunately, the familial curse of NPD appears to hang heavy still. Really, it has not been nearly enough time elapsed since Maradonia, since adulthood, and since the death of her father (who appears to have been 'a' if not 'the' major narcissistic figure in the extended Maradonia affair) to overcome that curse, and that would require recognition of a problem and the will to engage in some incredibly difficult, prolonged therapy to overcome it. I have no reason to think that this has been the case. So, narcissist gonna narciss, I guess.

The Maradonia books have been largely scrubbed from retail, only available on the second-hand market, and since not all that many physical copies were ever circulated they can be hard to find. The revised edition e-books are still available somewhere (nook-nook, hint-hint). I'm not sure what the intention was when Gloria Tesch changed her name to Gloria Maradonia in her Goodreads author profile and removed her photo there. [UPDATE April 2021: the author profile is back to "Gloria Tesch"] If the idea was to disconnect Sofia Nova from Gloria Tesch, it was a poor effort, but the impulse is probably correct. Proceeding openly with, "I'd like to put Maradonia behind me and start fresh" would be a welcome approach, although a lot of people will be watching and judging in any case, which doesn't make it any easier. However, it does not appear as though the Sofia Nova persona is forging a new straight-and-narrow ethically sound path.

The reviews for The Secret of Moon Lake are rife with obvious sockpuppet accounts, a.k.a. fake positive reviews. There is a string of five-star reviews of comparable word count, all using similar generic language, and signed off with first and last name, which is extremely odd. One reviewer called them out and noted that most of the positive reviewers are in Fort Lauderdale, and "Sofia Nova" clapped back with this explanation:

These are all verified reviews from students in Fort Lauderdale. Each student is between ages 8-16 and were given a book to read, then to rate and review it on here. 

This is frankly absurd for so many reasons, not the least of which is that educators tend to provide books that have time-tested and professionally-vetted literary and educational value, and not some random recently-self-published book. Similarly, another review from a private profile that has exactly one rating and review on Goodreads states, "A local librarian actually recommended this story for my son and daughter" which no one with any experience with actual librarians would believe.

All of this, for what? A book with prominent reviews calling out the fakery, and exceedingly poor sales; Amazon sales rank info suggests at most one sale per month. Granted, this is almost 1.5 years after initial publication, but in contrast, take a superficially similar book, The Secret Lake, also self-published but ten years ago, with a current Amazon sales rank indicating hundreds of copies sold per month.

Last, I want to note that the Kindle e-book has some formatting failures, although I have seen much more onerous and that very recently; there is line spacing between paragraphs, and paragraphs will not wrap around pages, ending up with a blank space at the bottom of each page that makes it look like the chapter is ending, on virtually every page. When chapters do start they appear not at the top of a new page as is standard, but rather after a random number of blank lines from the end of the prior. These are easy visual tells that, aside from the content, mark this as an unprofessional product.

If this was a first attempt to honestly re-brand and rise above the rightfully mockable albatross that was the Maradonia Saga, it's a big ol' swing and a miss. But, it doesn't have to be the last time up at bat; this author can still make further attempts to walk a righteous path, and preferably get some professional writing instruction. At a minimum, is "don't be fake and scammy" so difficult to follow, when you've genuinely put a lot of work into a book and want it to succeed?


POST-SCRIPT: Flipping through my copy of Maradonia and the Seven Bridges, I noted that it has a hawk character named Sagitta, as does The Secret of Moon Lake! Although, the Moon Lake version doesn't talk (or does it?). This made me wonder, maybe Sagitta is like Stephen King's Randall Flagg/man in black, a character who exists in different iterations in alternate worlds? Perhaps there is a shared universe, a Maradoniverse if you will. Isn't that a frightening thought? (less)

Edited Date: 2021-09-16 08:59 pm (UTC)

Date: 2021-09-19 01:06 am (UTC)
torylltales: (Default)
From: [personal profile] torylltales

As one of the first of the anti-shurts to discover her and spork her work, I definitely agree. Her antics are far more interesting than her work.

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