Sentinel Red

It's been about a month since I read Sentinel Red, but I've finally found a bit of time to give it a review. I have to be honest: my feelings about this book are complicated. It's clear that the author put a lot of love into this story and world, creating an engaging character with a fascinating backstory going on a harrowing prison-break-turned-save-the-hostages-from-a-monster adventure that hearkens almost as much back to ultra-violent vintage anime OVAs as it does to the many legendary tokusatsu series it's a love letter to, but the thing itself is absolutely BROKEN by the sheer number of errors throughout. Grammatical issues, clunky prose, find and replace errors (you see the name Esté in places you really shouldn't a whole lot, indicating that they did a Replace All without regard on how that would affect words that had "este" in them but weren't the character name), a character suddenly changing pronouns without warning (and not in a plot-driven "Surprise! They're this gender now" kinda way, but in a "the author seemed to forget" kinda way), at least one potentially huge plot hole at worst or a poorly presented plot beat at best (and I'm not a plot hole ding person by any means, but this broke the narrative for me; without spoiling anything--and I fully admit I may have misread something, but this is how it came across to me--a certain plot beat repeats itself and the MC is surprised both times, as if the second time it happened it happened for the first time to this guy; it felt less like intentional repetition and more like the author moved when they wanted the plot beat to happen while forgetting to edit the initial instance to reflect the change), you name it.Overall, this book seems like a solid first draft that they went ahead and published without any further editing work. And boy howdy, this thing needs EXTENSIVE editing work. This book should never have been published in this state. The occasional typo this is not; these issues permeate just about every page of the book.I really do hate to hate on this book. I'm a pretty big Super Sentai/Power Rangers fan, and I also love other tokusatsu series such as Kamen Rider and the occasional Ultraman and Metal Hero, so this book should be right up my alley. And like I said, I enjoy the idea behind this story! But unfortunately, the number of basic errors in this book made it hard to read. I think the author needs to take this to a proofreader and editor, work out that oddly presented plot point, and republish this book so it looks more professional. If this book was hard for a fan of this stuff to get through, I don't want to know how a non-fan would feel reading it.And it's not like I don't understand. I know writing a book of any kind, let alone one in a genre as underexplored in literature as tokusatsu, is a long, hard, unforgiving process. I just wish this author realized that Sentinel Red wasn't ready yet. It deserves the extra love and attention that a good edit and proofread would give it.I'm leaving 2/5 stars because despite how broken the prose and grammar are, this author has a fertile imagination that deserves to be recognized. I want them to keep writing and to keep improving. But next time I hope they don't publish until after a proofread at a minimum. I also hope that if the author decides to republish this book with an updated, cleaned up version, I'll gladly pay another three bucks and read it again. I'd love the opportunity to leave it a better review.