The Pleasure Dial by Jeremy Edwards

Title: The Pleasure Dial
Author: Jeremy Edwards
Publisher: 1001 Nights Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Erratum:
p118 "bicep" - it's biceps. And triceps.

I'm not a big fan of erotic literature per se. I'd much rather indulge in it than sit and read about it, but done the right way, in the right context - that of a real story rather than inauthentic titillation for mere titillation's sake - I'm perfectly happy with it. What I find truly sad is that we live in a very effective theocracy under the dictates of which, children are at liberty to read or to watch endless scenes of people being mean and brutal towards one another, but must be "protected" fiercely from anything which depicts people enjoying and loving one another in physical ways.

How sad is it that the church, an 'authority' which is itself rooted in the absurdest of fictions, insists that intimacy is so evil, even in fiction, that not even adults ought to be exposed to it no matter how educationally, fleetingly, cursorily, or tangentially. The United States of America is one of the most fundamentalist societies on the planet, giving feared places like Iran a run for its mullah. Is it any surprise that in such a closeted society, people end-up hobbled by the worst sex-education it's possible to get?

Is it any surprise that in such a society people who 'deviate' from "the norm" however slightly, however naturally, however much in the privacy of their own homes still run a grave risk of being (metaphorically if not literally) pilloried? Is it any surprise that as a direct result of allowing such a blinkered society to propagate and fester, that same society then pays a hefty price in unwanted pregnancy and sexual inappropriateness which runs the huge gamut from annoying, through abusive, to outright criminal? Not to me it isn't.

I do enjoy a well-written comedy, which explains why I was actually interested in this novel: it's a humorous story which neither flinches nor baulks at following people into the bedroom (or wherever!) rather than shyly panning over to a roaring fire which ineffectually seeks to simulate sexual passion whilst stimulating nothing but laughter.

This story is set in the 1930's when radio listener-ship more than doubled to almost 30 million people in the US. Radio shows were for several decades directly sponsored - indeed, effectively owned - by corporations which advertised freely throughout the show, and for which the show's stars became spokes-people. This comedy of erogenous follows the machinations and lubrications of various characters as they duel and fool with each other to reach their assorted and diverse goals.

Artie Plask is a comedy writer, newly arrived in LA to join the team for Sydney Heffernan's radio show. Under the name Syd Heffy, this guy acts himself: a buffoon who barely has a competent grasp of the nuances of the English language, but who is nonetheless considered to be one of the best and biggest comedians in the country. Artie's immediate problem is that after one day on the job he discovers that the entire writing team has been fired as 'Syd Heffy' decides to abandon comedy, and relaunch himself in serious drama show.

This writing team is exclusively white of course, because writers nearly always were back then, and it's almost exclusively male for the same reason, but it's actually headed by a woman, Mariel Fenton, who also writes for the show. Here's where I first became honestly impressed. Jeremy Edwards knows how to write strong female characters, and this one saves the show - literally.

Mariel is a self-possessed, self-made woman, who holds her own (in whatever way she feels like) quite effortlessly in a man's world, and who is not only a genuinely funny person, which makes her perfect for this gig, but who is also extremely smart and astute. And of course, as required by the novel's very tone, gorgeous. Indeed, she's the real mover and shaker here, with Artie really just along for the ride (whether the ride be sexual or not!).

I have no idea who the girl on the cover of this novel is, either in real life or as representative of a character. She could be generic or she could be intended as Elyse Heffernan, Syd Heffy's pan-sexual and nympho-maniacal daughter. She certainly isn't Mariel, and she really doesn't appear to be Elyse, either, but the photograph is undeniably erotic. The feet seem a little bit large for the image to be perfect, but that may just be a perspective distortion (or my bias towards smaller feet!).

That said, I have to admit that this near-perfect picture is what initially caught my eye with this novel. I would never have launched into reading it on that cover image though, no matter how exciting it may be. The novel could have actually had any cover, because it was the novel's premise which sold it to me, recalling screwball comedies of the forties, and madcap comedies of the fifties. But kudos to the cover designer and photographer(s). For once in a blue moon, they really, er, nailed it.

If you think the cover model is Elyse, then you really need to read the novel, because you simply don't get her at all. Elyse is the second powerful female character in this novel. Her liberal sexuality is misleading, for there's a strength to this young woman which far-too-many young-adult writers, for example - even female ones - fail to understand, much less employ in a world where the main female lead, after being sold to us as strong, independent, and capable, is all-too-often immediately subjugated to an even stronger male.

Neither of these women is subject to anyone. Artie's first introduction to Elyse is when he sees her naked at the swimming pool at her father's house (what daddy doesn't know...well, she can get away with, including having sex with every one of the writers except the gay one). The patio is where all the writing gets done, and Elyse gets wet from just being around these creative, smart, and funny people before she ever enters the pool. His second introduction to her is in bed shortly afterwards, but it's just that one time, because once Artie and Mariel start becoming better acquainted, they become much better acquainted and indeed, inseparable - often quite literally.

The thing which really turns Artie on most about Mariel is, quite appropriately, a woman's most overwhelming sex organ: her mind. He gets off on her thoughts, and she returns the appreciation in equal measure. This is what makes this organ of entertainment, as the rabbi said after the circumcision, a cut above the rest. I just wish more female writers - especially writers of so-called romance novels and YA novels - would get this fact as well as Jeremy Edwards does in his own genre.

This novel follows a host of amusing twists, turns, and delectable diversions. The dialog is snappy, entertaining, and more often than not, rib-ticklingly funny. I'd love to meet someone like Mariel just to have that kind of mind to interact with, or better yet to co-write with - and the hell with the sex! It wasn't all smooth surfing for me, but the only real issue I had with this is the author's descriptions of the many supposedly erotic encounters. To me there's a marked difference between eroticism and crudity, and this novel strayed over the line once in a while.

Note that the language is ribald at best and in the gutter at worst when it comes to depicting the intimate encounters here, so please do not venture into this if you're readily offended. Personally I don't care what language is used as long as it's appropriate to the story or to the character, and there's the, er, rub! Edwards was a bit too fond of using a certain four-letter word to describe a certain defining part of the feminine anatomy, but in this context - one of eroticism - it seemed too abusive to me to find a home here.

I can see it showing up in a novel about abuse or in one relating a story of BDSM even, but in erotica? To me erotica tells a different and very special story, and this jarred too much. Usually, the erotic scenes were deliciously erotic, but unfortunately often they kicked me out of suspension of disbelief because it felt like the author was trying much too hard to use every word he could conjure up to describe events and anatomy. You may have a different crudity scale from me, of course, and consequently your denier may differ.

That aside, I loved this novel and I recommend it erotically! Personally I'm going ot be looking for more by this author.

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

Title: The Secret Supper
Author: Javier Sierra
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Originally published as La Cena Secreta, I read the English translation of this novel some time ago, before I began blogging. I came across the audio book version of it in the library, so I decided to give it a listen so I could blog it here. The problem was that once I started listening, I also started wondering how in hell I'd managed to not only read this book, but also think it was worth retaining the book in my collection with a view to possibly re-reading it at some point down the road.

Clearly I'd found something in it the first time around that was just as clearly absent this time. Has my perspective on novels changed so much? It wasn't that long ago that I read this - maybe two years? Have I become so much more critical - so much less forgiving? I guess!

The novel is set around 1520 when Leonardo da Vinci was painting The Last Supper fresco. The conceit here is that it's the recorded words of Agostino Leyre, a chief inquisitor in the Catholic church. He's supposed to be putting this story on paper (or parchment or whatever) in his old age while living as a hermit, but no one actually writes like that in those circumstances! That struck me as false.

If you are writing a diary, you might record a conversation, but even then you wouldn't record it like you do in a novel. If your conversation went like this, for example:

Jane entered the room with an aura of frustrated anger covering her imposing form.

"That's it!" she said with an explosion of air that had evidently been tightly constrained by her lungs for far too long.

Mesmerized slightly by the rain of dust motes caught in the brilliant afternoon sunshine filtered by the trees outside and by the dirty windows of her apartment, it took me a minute to register the full force of her presence and her declaration, let alone figure out what was upsetting her.

Is something wrong?" I asked superfluously, trying to gain myself some time and perhaps elicit further information before I was forced to commit to a response and perhaps to yet another exercise in frustration with her.

"Have you not been listening?" she asked in sheer disbelief.

This engendered in me a sour feeling of further reduced assurance than I was already harboring. What was I, some sort of NSA operation that I listened in on her every communication?! "I try not to listen to people on the phone," I said, slightly nervously. The truth was that I'd tuned her out completely, and dissolved into a rather soporific day-dream, the memory of lunch still heavy on my stomach as it was.

Jane gave me one of her 'what do I have to do with you' looks and took a deep breath. "Dick no longer wants to run with me. He says I'm too slow for his pace and he's found a new partner. This is the guy I got back on his feet, and now I'm back to running alone. In these streets." She paused and I suddenly got the feeling that this was all about to come back on me. It always does. I hadn't even begun to get my head-shake in motion before her face took on a look like it was the dawn of a new age and she asked, "Why the hell don't you go running?"

Seeing that look on her face, I must admit I suddenly felt like it.

©Ian Wood 2014

Now let's consider that same event as written in the 'victim's' diary:

So I had lunch with Jane this afternoon, and we ended up back at her place, which is still a mess, and Dick the dick calls her out of the blue to say he's ditching her as a running partner. Now she expects me to saddle up. That ain't gonna happen. OTOH, I'm not about to let her start running these streets again on her own.
©Ian Wood 2014

See the difference? Obviously no one writes a diary the same way as everyone else, so your idea of a diary entry will differ from mine, but I guarantee you no one writes a diary like the first example, either; that's how it's written when it's not actually a diary but is actually a novel outright lying that it's a diary. In the same vein, no one writing a real reminiscence writes like Agostino Leyre is supposed to be doing here, so from the off, this thing shouted fake to me (but this kind of falsehood will win you medals and 'literary' prizes!). How did I get past that last time? I honestly don't know.

One thing I became really tired of hearing was multiple repetitions of "Santa Maria delle Grazie". This is simply a church name: Holy Mary of Grace. What I didn't get is why these names are never translated in novels? Why is everything else translated (for example, we might get Rome, not Roma in a novel or Florence in place of Firenze), but then we get Santa Maria delle Grazie? It makes no sense. Nor did it make sense to keep repeating this instead of simply referring to it as "the church" or "the cathedral" or some other variation. Just a pet peeve!

So the story is about Da Vinci hiding secrets in his paintings, and an anonymous "Soothsayer" making prophecies, and Leyre's investigation into this. I honestly don't recall the ending (or most of the plot). I just remember that I once liked this, but now apparently don't! So I can't recommend it!

A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot

Title: A Very Long Engagement
Author: Sébastien Japrisot
Publisher: Simply Audio Books
Rating: WARTY!

This review is one of a brace of forays into World War fiction which I undertook this month. The other is Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex which I have to say right now blew this one completely away. Anne Frank can write. This guy cannot, but I'll bet he's won more pretentious and snotty medals and acclaim than Anne ever will. Sébastien Japrisot is an anagram of the author's real name: Jean-Baptiste Rossi. I don't know why, but there it is. Consequently, all of my future novels will be penned by Waid Ono. Look for them on a loose bookshelf near you!

This novel is about a woman who wastes a significant portion of her life chasing a guy who isn't to be found because he's someone else and too stupid to grasp it. It's one of the most tediously pedantic novels I have ever not read. It should be neither seen nor heard. I picked it up thinking it looked really interesting. It isn't. Not even a little bit. It's tiresome and plodding, and as dense as a plate of day-old spaghetti. Don't start this novel unless you have a toolkit to hand for extricating deeply-embedded components, and preferably one of those fire department jaws-of-life devices for prying open the impacted and inscrutable.

The premise is that of a World War 1 widow/fiancée named Mathilde (aka Mary Sue) Donnay, disbelieving that her husband/fiancé, Jean Etchevery, aka Manech, is dead, and tracking him down after the war. She can afford this as a war widow/fiancée in 1919 because she is the spoiled brat of rich family. No word on how she ended up with that particular husband or why her family didn't cut her off because of him! No word either on Spanish flu, which was rampaging across Europe back then, but which didn't exist according to Sébastien Jean-Baptiste Rossi-Japrisot.

A lot of the novel's tediousness comes from two sources, both of which happen to be the author. The first of these is his verbal diarrhea in compulsively describing every last detail of everybody who is even tangentially involved in the story whether those details have any bearing on the plot or not. Stephen King would be proud of this writer. The other is in the abysmally artificial use of correspondence.

You that know that when novelist falls back upon quoting letters (or diary entries, for that matter, or newspaper articles) in the novel they're there for two reasons: first of all the novelist is just plain lazy; secondly, they're stupid if they imagine for a minute that they will fool us by adding a letter that miraculously (and in detail, yet!) moves the plot precisely to where it needs to go next. No one writes letters (or diaries or newspaper articles) like that, not even in 1919.

After the first disk on this audio CD, I had no interest at all in the five men who disappeared, one of whom was the woman's paramour. First it became immaterial to me whether they were ever found, and then I actively began wishing that they would be gone forever. Please interpret that how you wish. Mathilde does find pain-in-the-Manech in the end: he's lost his memory and the jerk-off was too incurious about his past to go looking, so she wisely ditches him and heads home. The end.

I rate this novel trench-mouth warty.

Pride and Prejudice (manga) by Jane Austen

Rating: WORTHY!

Edited by Stacy King
Illustrated by Po Tse

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

erratum:
p232 "...so what's the different?" should be "...so what's the difference?"
p369 'devaintArt' should be 'DeviantArt'

Since I adore Pride and Prejudice, this is really just a review of this manga presentation of it, not of the novel itself (which I also reviewed on this blog), and as far as that went, it went very far.

I confess that I was rather surprised that I got this opportunity to review another volume from UDON Entertainment after I didn't like their classic manga Les Misérables earlier this month, but I'm glad they took a chance on me again so I can offer the other side of the coin in this case. Hopefully this will serve as a thank you! And kudos to UDON!

Perhaps this is my shameless bias showing through, but I loved this one from the start (or the end - yes, I still have issues with reading backwards in an English language graphic novel!). The text was very well written, expertly précis'd down from Austen's original, but not losing an iota of meaning or import. Stacy King did a magnificent job with that, and Po Tse was every bit her equal in conveying the images to compliment and augment the text.

The novel had a light, airy feel to it, yet it didn't fail to tell the story with power and gravity (and some laughs). I particularly enjoyed the scene where Elizabeth refuses Darcy's proposal.

Of course, in my terribly biased book, nothing can supersede the performances of Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the BBC's 1995 TV series, but this manga I would rank second only to that - it's that good.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Title: Ink Exchange
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Publisher: Recorded books
Rating: WARTY!

I didn't have to read this - I had it read to me by Flo Gibson on CD. Flo reads it appropriately. For a while, I thought it was Prynne, in her old age, recording her true confession, but it isn't. It's really Flo.

Nathanial Hathorne was born July 4th. He later changed his name to the commonly used spelling, because he didn't want to be associated with John Hathorne, a relative who was the only judge at the Salem witch trials to never acknowledge his murderous guilt in condemning so many innocent women to death in the name of the supposedly Holy Bible. The novel is an historical romance by two means: it was written going on for two hundred years ago, but it's set some two hundred years prior to that, in Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Most people think of The Scarlet Letter as being a novel about one woman's dignity in the aftermath of what was then (and still is by all-too-many) believed to be a grave sin: adultery (by extension, sex between two children is infantry…). This novel isn’t about that at all. It’s about the complete and utter failure of organized religion. This novel is fiction, but it illustrates all-too-starkly how religion has failed: failed in and of itself, and predictably failed the people who invented it out of their blind ignorance and weak desperation.

It shows how Christians are hypocritical to their roots, and while you may rail at that, claiming that this is fiction, not a documentary, the fact remains that there isn’t a single thing depicted in this novel which has not actually happened in real life - and which continues to happen even today. Indeed, Hawthorne based this story on what he knew of several people from the era in which his novel is set. Prynne seems to have been named after Hester Craford and William Prynne.

Salem resident Hester Craford was convicted of adultery in 1668 by Judge William Hathorne, who was the very ancestor from whom Hawthorne sought to distance himself by adding a 'w' to his name! Another source for Hawthorne was undoubtedly Boston resident Elizabeth_Pain, who was buried in the same graveyard in which Hawthorne depicts Prynne being buried. All three of these people lived during the same period (early to mid-17th century) in New England.

One of the central tenets of Christianity is forgiveness, yet we rarely see it, so it's hardly surprising that no one was willing to forgive or forget in this novel! Why is Christianity so lasciviously in bed with hypocrisy? This is a religion which claims to follow Jesus Christ. Not that Jesus or Christ were ever his name. There's no evidence that there ever really was such as person as is depicted in the New Testament: a miracle-working son of a god. But Yeshua (Joshua - the real name we should be dealing with), was a very common name at that time (as were Mary - Miriam - and Joseph - Yusef), and it would be foolish to assert that there were no rabbis ever carrying that name. But while one or more such rabbis may have had an influence upon their followers and kick-started the delusion, I promise you that not a one of them was crucified, died and then came back from the dead two or three days later.

But even if we grant the Christians all of that: everything they claim for their founder, they're still hypocrites, because their founder was not a Christian! He was a Jew who practiced Judaism, not Christianity. Any so-called Christian who is not practicing Judaism is not a follower of this Yeshua, and even those westerners (or easterners) who might be such practitioners are still clueless, because the 'Jesus' they worship specifically stated that he had not come for the Gentiles, but only for the 'House of Israel' - so if your mother isn’t Jewish, you're not eligible! Modern Christians are not followers of Jesus anyway; they're followers of Saul, the snake in the tree who very effectively derailed this fledgling religion (as was his purpose all along!). Jesus lost, Paul won, and all his followers are hypocrites. Those self-same "puritans" who fled persecution in England, then turned right around and persecuted others!

The novel begins in 1642 when Hester Prynne is publicly condemned and humiliated as one of the original scarlet woman, for an adulterous relationship she had after her husband, who intended upon following her to Boston, was lost at sea, and presumed dead. In reality he was living amongst the natives where he no doubt learned his alternative medicine. Why Prynne was condemned so strenuously whilst no effort at all was expended upon seeking out her deflowerer is at the feet, again, of the Christian church, which has been down on women ever since Miriam the Magdalene was fictitiously turned into a prostitute at the behest of a dumb-ass pope (and you know the Pope is infallible right? Ri-ight!

Prynne is condemned to wear a scarlet letter 'A' visible on her person at all times. Any woman with the virtues with which Prynne is typically invested would have worn it on her ass. Prynne wears it on her breast as if to say, "Thanks for the mammaries". For reasons which are never revealed, she refuses to name her despoiler. It turns out, no surprises here, to be one of the local clergy, Arthur Dimmesdale, who only 'fesses up when he's dying.

By amazing coincidence, when Prynne is up on the scaffold, doing the first part of her penance, her husband shows up, but such a lowlife is he that he pretends to be an itinerant physician, takes the name of Roger Chillingworth, and never acknowledges that Prynne is his wife. He takes up residence in the town, obsessed in finding out who the father of Prynne's child is, rather than striving to support his wife.

At one point, the local governor tells Prynne that he's considering taking her child away from her to have young Pearl raised in a home which has a mom who is not a 'loose woman', but Prynne swears that she will never give up her child. Dimmesdale at least, sides with her on this and talks the governor out of taking Pearl away; then he toddles off home to flagellate himself and re-ink the scarlet 'A' which he has tattooed secretly on his own chest. Way to man up!

Prynne settles in a cottage upon her release from jail, although how she affords it, and even makes a living selling her needle-point is a mystery. At that time, the population of Boston was minuscule. The city had been founded only a decade before this novel is set. It's a bigger mystery why no god came through for her with his long-suffering forgiveness and helped her out by asking everyone "Who wants to throw the first stone?" So now Prynne has paid three penalties for this same 'crime': confessing and standing for three hours on the town scaffold, time in jail, and the permanent wearing o' the A. Wanna go for triple jeopardy?!

Eventually, Dimmesdale (no explanation is offered as to why he never married Prynne) dies in her arms after finally 'fessing up; then Chillingworth magically dies. Prynne and Pearl travel to Europe, where Pearl stays and marries, but Prynne for reasons unknown, returns to her cottage in Boston and lives out her years still wearing the 'A' instead of creating a new life for herself in Europe. What a moron!

I honestly can't recommend this novel at all. The first part (the 'Introductory') is the most tedious, monotonously dissipated pile of crap you will ever hear (or read). Some parts of what followed got almost interesting, but there was way too much of Hawthorne's endless rambling, self-congratulatory diversions to hold actual interest. I can, however, see why this is considered a classic: it's a classic pile of crap and is one of the very few books that I would actually support being banned from schools! Reading this did, however, give me an idea for a novel of my own, so it wasn't a complete loss for me!

Ki'ti's Story 75000BC by Bonnye Matthews

Title: Ki'ti's Story, 75,000BC
Author: Bonnye Matthews
Publisher: Publication Consultants
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a Clan of the Cave Bear kind of a story, about primitive people in prehistory, based almost entirely on speculation. It sounded interesting initially, although I've actually never read any such stories before, but unfortunately I started having grave doubts about it right from page one (or in this case, page nine). The writing was awful, and offered nothing to hold my interest. Worse than this, nothing noteworthy happened in the entire first chapter, which I had to struggle to finish. The dialog was just ridiculous.

As I indicated, the page numbering is non-standard in this novel, with the cover actually being labeled as page one, so the novel itself doesn't begin until page nine, and the first ten pages or so consists of a huge info-dump with character after character not so much introduced as listed. It was way too much. There was no reason to get interested in any character because I had no chance to get to know them before the next character in line - quite literally in this case - was dumped on me.

This info-dump relates that the tribe, known as the People, was migrating from the threat of an erupting volcano towards a large cave where they figured they would be safe. The author seems unduly obsessed with describing every single person's hair. I have no idea why, because it contributed nothing to the story. The only real point of interest is that one of the tribe members (not Ki'ti) is a girl who looks unlike the others. Clearly the tribe is supposed to be Neanderthal, whereas she's supposedly Cro-Magnon, but how she came to be with them isn’t explored at that point. Nor is there any explanation offered as to why the Neanderthals are apparently peopling the US, when no Neanderthal fossils have ever been found in the Americas! Or maybe that's not the case. As I said, I quit after the first chapter because I couldn't stand to read any more of this.

The biggest problem was the language used, particularly in dialog. It's completely modern, with no attempt to try and evoke prehistory. While I appreciate an approach which doesn’t involve people burbling words like "Ugh", or speaking pigeon English, I also felt a loss of credibility when reading of Neanderthals chatting like two business people on the subway. For example, at one point (p19), one of the characters says, "I worry about our long-term survival" which just seemed downright weird to me.

The sentences employed too many modern terms, and seemed way too wordy and way too sophisticated for 75,000 or so years ago. This seemed particularly absurd given that these same people had no words for numbers, being forced to show one or more fingers to indicate quantities. I didn’t get the rationale behind that at all because there seemed to be none. You can't have these people presented as having this level of sophistication, yet remaining beyond primitive in such a crucial matter as enumeration.

In the introduction, which I wouldn't normally read, but which I did on this occasion, there appears the phrase: "…hundreds of thousands of geologic years…." This makes no sense! A year is a year. It isn't any longer in geology than it is in every day life. Neither did this term make any sense: "…digit of his forefinger…" Your forefinger is a digit. I think what the author meant was something like "to the depth of the first knuckle of his forefinger" so it didn't help my confidence in this novel to be hit with so many issues in so few pages.

The basic story is that of the peopling of the Americas, and this is intended to be a series (the second volume is already out). The author's premise is that this took place not by the recognized route of a northern land bridge opening up between Russia and the USA as the ocean levels dipped during an ice age, but by some other means and at a much earlier date. There's little undisputed supportive evidence for this. The best understanding - although it is disputed by some - is that the Clovis people were the first colonizers, and indeed, 80% of native Americans are descended from the Clovis people. The rest are a mixture of later immigrants, so 75,000BC as a time of colonization isn't looking good right now!

But the bottom line is that the story was beyond boring, the dialog was sorry, and the events non-eventful. I struggled even to finish chapter one and I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.

Marta Oulie by Sigrid Undset

Title: Marta Oulie
Author: Sigrid Undset
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: worthy!

Translated from Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

The novel covers much more than the lone topic of Marta's marital infidelity. It ventures deeply into feminism, it looks at morality, and it discusses the validity of religion, all in the context of what Marta and her husband are doing, how they're interacting, and how she's feeling towards him. Interestingly, Marta's lover, if he can be described as such, who is also Otto's business partner, hardly gets a look in. I found that rather intriguing.

This is very much a novel from Marta's perspective, told in first person PoV, which I normally detest, but which is not obnoxious here. That alone is commendable. It's annoying to have to pick novels without knowing from whose perspective they will be told (the blurbs almost never say - and I'm as guilty of this as anyone), so I always appreciate it when I inadvertently select one and discover that it's not nauseating!

On a technical matter, I have to say that while the Adobe Reader version of this is good, the kindle version is seriously hobbled by really annoying formatting issues. It looks like they simply took the PDF and dumped it unadjusted straight into Kindle format. Now you can argue that this is a "galley proof", and therefore we should not expect it to be perfect, but if you argue that, then I'm going to argue right back that while this novel is set in 1902, we are not! We're no longer living in 1907, when this was written, and novels had to be typeset using trays of metal characters laboriously put in place one-by-one line-by-line by hand! There is no excuse for sloppy proofs in this day and age!

Even rank amateurs have professional quality word processors, spell-checkers and formatting styles available to us! So no, there is no excuse for "galleys" that have line breaks in the middle of sentences or that have words like "UNCORRECTED" and "SALE" randomly mixed in with the text (the Adobe Reader version has "UNCORRECTED PROOF NOT FOR SALE" appearing on every page), or having one person's speech end and the next's take off with only a space (as opposed to a paragraph space) between the two separate quotations. If it had been corrected, though, I would never have enjoyed such amusing sentences as, "And I, the proper little merchant's wife who went around so nice and quiet, tending to my house, UNCORRECTED..."! Yes, this woman needs to be - as the butler put it in Stephen King's The Shining - CORRECTED! Or, "...my heart began to pound as a UNCORRECTED clammy sweat began to pour from my body..."! Correct that sweating, sister! Or how about this one: "It was a natural instinct that broke open inside me, raw SALE and insatiable." Yes, Marta Oulie sold out!

Known as Fru Marta Oulie in the original Norwegian, Undset wrote this in 1907 about a woman who was unfaithful to her husband, but it's not quite as simple a premise as it sounds. This was Sigrid Undset's first novel, but it was not her last. She enjoyed sufficient success to make a career out of writing, including a well-regarded trilogy which might be considered a fantasy story by modern audiences. Some of her life oddly paralleled Marta's. This novel is relevant today even as it seems understandably dated in some regards. It's relevant because there are still double-standards today, over a century later, in how women are perceived and treated in comparison with men. It's relevant in that feminism is just as much an issue today, when it shouldn't be, as it was back then when it was considered to be revolutionary.

You would think that over the course of a century these issues would have been long-ago resolved, and women would truly be equal, but it has not yet happened. It is easier to give voice to inequalities now than it was then, but it's also harder to be heard because ears have become lamentably inured to these issues over such a prolonged exposure. Feminism is no longer fresh in a culture which gobbles down fresh with an astounding voracity, and because it's not fresh any more, women have had to reach towards increasing extremes to get the message out. Consequently, feminists are now in danger of being mistakenly considered extremists instead of being correctly considered to be justified.

The novel starts out rather sensationally with the sentence "I have been unfaithful to my husband", which must have been far more shocking in 1907 than ever it is today. Had this been a modern novel, or even a modern historical novel, I would downgrade it for that. I think it has value in a 1907 novel; however, this did force me into a consideration of how this novel needs to be reviewed. Is it fair to review a 1907 novel by today's standards? There are arguments to be heard for either side. I asked this same question when I reviewed novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, and Pride and Prejudice. This is not a modern novel written in an historical setting, it's truly an historical novel translated into modern idiom. I think that latter fact is relevant: clearly those who brought this translation to published fruition think that this novel is relevant to our times, so reviewing it by the standards of our times isn't inappropriate.

In 1902 Norway, Marta is courted by and marries Otto. She tells us she loves him dearly. The two of them travel in Europe together (whilst Marta is a school teacher with commensurate salary, Otto is a partner in a business which is evidently doing well). They start a large family (by modern western standards), having two boys (Einar and Halfred) and then a girl (Ingrid), and it's with the arrival of the girl and the necessary simultaneous switch to larger accommodations that things begin to sour for Marta. It's not so much that Otto changes as it is that more of who he is starts seeping through un-modulated.

I don't know if Undset did this on purpose - juxtaposing the arrival of a girl (Ingrid, Otto's daughter) in the family with the attendant turmoil of lives being uprooted and moved around. If she did (and I am tempted to think she did), then that's pretty cool and smart on her part. Undset (which is reminiscent of 'upset' or 'unsettle' which is what this novel does) is a capable writer, but since this is a translation, it's really hard to know how much of the technical quality of the writing is due to Undset, and how much is due to her translator, Nunnally. Since I don't read Norwegian, I'll never know! However I take heart in the knowledge that even a bad translation cannot hide a decent plot! And no, this is not a comment on Nunnally's translation. Undset earned herself the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 - the last Norwegian woman to do so to date. I'm not a big fan of "literary" novels or of stories written by Nobel laureates, but I would have to assume she's a capable writer even were I lacking other indicators (which I'm not!).

The stakes ratchet up as Marta starts an affair almost accidentally with Henrik, and he starts to feature more in her life until Otto contracts TB, whereupon she feels such guilt that she ends the affair, but continues with the pregnancy. Is it Henrik's or Otto's? The only way to tell back then was by recalling with whom one had enjoyed sex at the right (or the wrong!) time, and since Otto became sick, there has been none with him, so Åse has to be Henrik's. This comes in intriguing counterpoint to the birth of Ingrid: whereas Otto's daughter stirred-up things uncomfortably and was a contributing factor in Marta's falling into an affair, Henrik's daughter has the opposite effect - bringing the affair to a precipitous termination, and sending Marta back to her husband emotionally.

In the end, I don't like Marta Oulie (although I do like the novel), and the reason I don't like her is not because she betrayed her husband, but because she betrayed everyone, including herself, and cruelly so in Henrik's case, who has a daughter with Marta, a child who he will never be allowed to know. I hope this isn't 'the moral of this story': that if you betray your husband you will become lonely and miserable, indecisive and inert for the rest of your life, because that runs completely contrary to the feminist portrayal of Marta which colors the earlier portion of this novel!

Again, there are formatting issues at the end, with the story ending seemingly unfinished and very abruptly, and being followed without a break by some notes on Undset's life, yet the author's name is spelled with all lower case characters, which is not only inexplicable, it also seemed rather an insult. I mean why make a big deal about bringing this woman's writing to a modern audience if you're going to slight her in this way?! She's not edward estlin cummings after all.... The name of Marta's lover appears on more than one occasion spelled with a lower case 'h', which is hard enough to explain since it's something which is easily fixed with search & replace, but to trot out the author's name like that is downright weird! However, I am willing to rate this novel as a worthy read, in the hope that the final version will have these formatting and case issues resolved.

The Tyrant's Daughter by JC Carleson

Title: The Tyrant's Daughter
Author: JC Carleson
Publisher: Random House Children's
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a first person PoV story of Laila, a 15-year-old girl from what we learn is a Muslim nation. Her father was deposed from his dictatorial rôle and killed, leaving Laila, her mother, and her six-year-old brother to escape, courtesy of the CIA. They are now resident in a nondescript apartment outside of Washington DC in the USA, trying to cope with the massive shift in their circumstances and perspective.

Laila mulls over her feelings daily. Her disturbing discovery of what a brute her father was is one thing which hits her rather quickly. Information is much more freely available in the USA, notwithstanding the ignorant whining of conspiracy theorists. There is a problem here though, and it centers upon the question of whether Laila is ignorant or simply dumb. Yes, she's only fifteen, but for her to have grown up in the palace and not even happened upon so much as a whiff of a rumor about the true nature of her father's regime is simply not credible, especially not given her personality. But then Carleson gave her an inconsistent personality which cannot be explained away solely by her being a fifteen-year-old Muslim girl.

Laila has problems adjusting to life in the west, including getting a good handle on what it's like to live in a society where overkill is the norm (with store shelves flooded with endless variations on a single product, for example), and where women dress like "whores" (so her countrymen would say). Normally I'm not a fan of 1PoV stories, but in this one, it actually works. Laila's narration keeps the story moving and it isn't done in the most fake way possible by pretending it's a diary or letters; it's simply told like she's talking on the phone to a friend, and it's told in short bursts each centered around one theme. It unnerves us as much as she is unnerved because there is always something happening. Reminiscent of her home nation perhaps, Laila does not stand on cement or asphalt here, but upon shifting sand.

Laila is constantly taken by surprise by events: by for example, being unexpectedly introduced to a guy at school who was staring at her. His name, is Ian! Her discomfort with him reminds me of a time I went over to a friend's house and sat on the floor by another girl (since the room was crowded and there was nowhere else to sit). This girl, who was American, got into trouble with her Middle Eastern boyfriend because she remained sitting there, and did not move away from me! Yes, he thought he owned her! I cannot understand why girls tolerate, much less date boys like that. Not all boys and men who behave in so possessive a fashion come from the Middle East of course, and while in that area of the world, the girls may have little recourse against this behavior, in the USA, they do. They have every choice, not least of which is because not everyone who moves here from the Middle East is like that, so there is no reason not to make a wiser choice and still get what you want.

The problem for Laila is that the US government isn't getting what it wants, and an unscrupulous man named Gansler (maybe that's his name, maybe it isn't!) puts pressure on Laila rather than on her willful mother, Yasmin. Her mother is talking with people upon whom she would have spit just a few months before, had she met them in her own country. Perhaps she has a plan, but she hasn’t shared it with Laila. She's also pressuring Laila to make nice with the young boy who visits with these men, because he seems to be trying to derail whatever plans Laila's mother is trying to make, out of purest animosity. The simple solution would be to un-invite him from these meetings, but once again the pressure is on Laila to distract a boy who evidently hates her!

Here's where this novel goes off the rails rather too much for me. This is one of those absurd issues where there is hatred and suddenly there is no hatred in its place with no noticeable transition or rationale for such a transition. I can't believe that a young, headstrong male like Amir, with that much hatred in his eyes, would suddenly start talking to a young female like Laila for no reason whatsoever, and especially not when they're alone and unsupervised.

I started losing faith in the "reality" of this novel when Laila is talked into going to a dance with three girls from her school. Beforehand, they play dress-up with Laila ending-up in somewhat skimpy clothing which was entirely in keeping with fashion for an American teen girl, but entirely inappropriate for her, yet she plays along with this, pretending that she's acting - that she's really someone else in costume, not herself. I can see how a slightly rebellious teen like Laila, especially one who is displaced and is almost mesmerized by what she finds around her, would go for this, but it seemed far too easy. It seemed that she gave in to this far more readily than seemed in character for her, given what we’ve been told about her, and her internal monologue, but that wasn't the worst part. The worst was that Amir was also at the dance. Given what we’ve been shown of his character, I can’t believe that he'd go, especially since he wouldn’t believe that Laila would be there. I can believe he would react as he did, but for him to then inexplicably relinquish his anger seemed highly unlikely to me.

I liked that Laila thought that the girls wore too much make-up (she was probably right!) and I liked that she was unwilling to cede dominance to Amir, but this scene didn’t play well for me. It also betrayed Amir's sensibilities, too. If he feels it’s wrong for Laila to dance so lasciviously and so familiarly with others, then why doesn't he also feel it’s entirely inappropriate for him to be alone in the darkness with Laila, when he drags her outside? This seemed too contradictory and made little sense. It felt like Carleson was forcing her characters into behaviors which they wouldn’t naturally exhibit given what she's shared with us about them. It makes as little sense as it does later when Laila calls Amir to ask for money and he invites her to come over unescorted to his house full of men, not one of which is a relative of Laila's!

Her young brother Bastien is technically the king of his homeland since his father was murdered on orders from his religious zealot uncle, but he's a long way from that rôle now, and he doesn’t seem to care that much. Of the three of them, his mother Yasmin, his sister, and himself, he's the most at ease in his new home, but also the most spoiled. This is the next problem I had with this story. Bastien always seems to have what he wants: toys, comic books, a birthday party, but Laila's mother never has any money. Yet these are people are supposed to be crucial elements in some plan of the US government's, the very nation which spirited them out of their homeland and put them up in the USA. It makes no sense that these refugees, under the CIA's wing, would come home to find a rent overdue notice stuck on their door. It makes no sense that they're always completely penniless yet always seem have sufficient money to the day. It makes no sense that they're housed in some project instead of in some protected government location. It makes no sense that the newspapers would not be hounding them for their story. It makes no sense that they would be wandering around in public unescorted. Bastien could be assassinated, thereby removing any potential threat to the new leadership of his "kingdom". All of this let the novel down.

I found the section where Laila compares and contrasts her country (which goes unnamed) with the USA. This comes right after the section where she talks about meeting boys with two of her new girlfriends, and how segregated men and women are in her country, and then she goes right on to talk about PE being mixed, but the fact is that it’s not mixed in the US: not at her age. It’s highly segregated. The boys have their teams, the girls theirs, and they do not mix nor even play against each other. Sports in the USA is exactly like life in the more restrictive Muslim countries! The segregation of men and women is de rigeur in professional sport, but it begins long before that, in universities and colleges, and before that in high schools. What hypocrites we are! I wrote my novel Seasoning precisely out of disgust with this segregation.

The story is a bit confused and a bit confusing, but it’s worth reading for the PoV and for the twists and turns it takes, with both Laila and her mother vying for who does the best Niccolò Machiavelli impersonation. The ending is upbeat and intriguing, but the biggest prize-winner for me in this novel is Carleson's recognition that the USA isn't the only country in the world, nor is it the most important one for the overwhelming bulk of the world's population. This novel, though set in the USA, isn't at all about the USA. The author's note at the end, and the article about Benazir Bhutto after that, are both well worth reading, too. I rate this a worthy novel.