The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

If this is what passes for good writing:

Perhaps the June Bug understood Dad had felt that way about all the others, but armed with three decades’ worth of Ladies Home Journal editorials, an expertise in such publications as Getting Him to the Altar (Trask, 1990) and The Chill Factor: How Not to Give a Damn (and Leave Him Wanting More) (Mars, 2000) as well as her own personal history of soured relationships, most of them believed (with the sort of unyielding insistence associated with religious fanatics) that, when under the spell of her burnt-sugar aura, Dad wouldn’t feel that way about her…

I ask, where are the editors, and where are the honest reviewers? I can’t even read that sentence, which is an excerpt from Special Topics in Calamity Physics, without getting knocked out of the narrative four or five times. The structure is all over the place! Parentheticals, commas, colons, italics: they all convolute the point the narrator’s trying to make, here. Of course, that means she’s using them incorrectly. And that, to me, means she’s not a good writer.

I’m just puzzled by the glowing reviews, by the huge advance, and by the decisions of major publishing houses.