On Critiquing Other People's Novels

I had to come clean on a fellow classmate's novel. I find it tedious.

Now it's not because the person can't write. I've read a few chunks of his work where he writes in scenes and brings characters to life, but....

Most of what I've read isn't written this way. At first, I tried to make suggestions on improving it, then I tried to figure out what I was missing that other people seemed to get. But the fact was, if my goals weren’t to provide an aspiring novelist with honest feedback to help improve the book, I wouldn't have had the guts to say what I did.

His idea is that if someone reads the entire book, it will all make sense. Well, the bad news is I would never keep reading because the third paragraph on page five doesn't have any connection I can ascertain with the second paragraph on page six and so it goes.

Now I have to wait to see how our instructor and the author react. I hope I can sleep tonight. The only justification I have is that nothing I wrote was done from a point of malice - just this humble novelist wanna be's attempt at providing some thoughtful comment on omissions, fallacies and paragraphs guaranteed to put me to sleep.