Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Rebel Angels by Libba Bray


Rating: WORTHY!

Now we're two months along from the end of the first novel, and we learn that Kartik has been ordered by the anti-Order known as the Rakshana, to induce Gemma to perform a certain piece of magic and to then kill her. Gemma must go into the realms, and "bind" the magic therein, in the name of the "Eastern Star".

Unfortunately for Kartik's plan, it's Xmas and Gemma goes to London to finally meet her family. Her brother Tom is supposed to pick her up, but Gemma cannot find him and she believes she's being stalked by someone from the Rakshana. Rather brazenly, she accosts a nearby young man (of course), Simon Middleton, and feigns acquaintanceship with him. Middleton is from a wealthy family and is quite taken with Gemma, so he invites her family to dine with him.

It turns out that Middleton was very conveniently at Eton, a very manly college, with her brother. Moving around London, Gemma also runs into Hester Moore, who is known to Gemma because she used to teach art at Spence, and who now conveniently lives in London. Hester's replacement at Spence, Miss McCleethy, is the one who Gemma believes is really Circe.

While on the topic of complete, utter, and highly suspicious convenience, Gemma's brother works at Bethlem Royal Hospital a psychiatric institution (although that's not how it was known back then) from which we derive the word bedlam. Conveniently, one of Tom's patients is Nell Hawkins. When Gemma is conveniently with her one day, she conveniently rambles on about "The Temple" which is the very thing Kartik had requested that Gemma seek out in the realms! it turns out that Nell was once also conveniently a student at a school at which McCleethy once taught.

We learn here why Felicity requested power as her wish from the realms - when a girl called Polly comes to stay with them, Felicity warns her severely to lock her doors and not let Felicity's uncle into her room. Gemma's father is a drug addict and is not well, eventually winding up in a health facility.

In the finale to this volume, Gemma determines the real identity of Circe, and defeats her in open battle. She discovers the true meaning of the temple, which is quite messianic, and in discovering this, she finds she can distribute the magic democratically across the realms so it resides in no one person's hands.

Eminently readable and listenable, this novel was a bit too convenient in many places, but despite that, made for a worthy read. I recommend this as part of this complete series!


A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray


Rating: WORTHY!

Gemma Doyle is a girl in her mid-teens who is rather less than thrilled with her lot with life with her mother in India. She dreams of going back to her native England where her father resides, and taking up the society life to which she believes she's entitled.

Gemma should be careful what she wishes for, because when her wish comes true, it’s at the cost of the tragic death of her mother. One day, out in the hot and dusty market place in Mumbai, Gemma's mother is approached by a man accompanied by a boy who is conveniently Gemma's age. The man relates a cryptic message to Gemma's mother, and her mum then demands that Gemma return home immediately. Gemma becomes so frustrated with her mother's secrecy that she runs away, and gets herself lost. She's visited by a horrible vision of her mother committing suicide, and when she finally makes her way to where her mother is, she discovers that her vision was true: her mother is dead, and subsequently Gemma is being hastily packed off to England, to be sequestered at the elite Spence Academy.

Gemma starts out by being the lonely newbie because of her derided Indian background, but when she discovers the snottiest girl in school, Felicity, in a compromising situation, Gemma finds herself elevated to the top notch of clique-dom. Finally, she's where she wanted to be. She begins to form a close relationship with Felicity and her two friends, Pippa and Ann. Gemma also learns that Kartik, the boy she saw with the man in Mumbai, is now in England! He warns her that she is in danger, and must close herself off to what happened to her mother if she wishes to remain safe.

Gemma increasingly has visions and one of these leads her to a cave in the school grounds, where she finds a 25-year-old diary written by Mary Dowd, a girl of Gemma's age, who also was a student at Spence. Gemma identifies with Mary because May also had visions which she shared with her friend Sarah Rees-Toome.

Gemma reads the diary and discovers that Mary was associated with a society known as the Order, initiates of which were able to open a portal to other realms. They could use this power to ease the passage of souls, and the power gave them prophetic insight and the power to create illusions. The four new friends create their own "Order", meeting in the cave.

As they read more of the diary and investigate the history of Spence, they discover that the two girls from a quarter century ago died in a fire at Spence along with the principal of the school.

Finally Gemma & Co travel to the realms which are weird, beautiful and wonderful. They do not travel there bodily but spiritually, leaving their bodies behind in the real world. Gemma is able to meet with her mother there, but predictably her mother is unnecessarily mysterious. She does, however, warn Gemma not to take magic from the realms into the everyday world because it would let them fall foul of Circe, who seeks this power and wishes to take over the realms. The magic of the realms allows them to have a wish granted. Ann, who is plain, requests beauty. Felicity, who feels abused, asks for power. Gemma wants insights into her self, and finally, Pippa seeks true love.

The girls begin a routine of secret night-time meetings in the cave when they visit the realms. Gemma discovers that her mother was Mary Dowd, who obviously she did not die in the fire but escaped and changed her name. She also learns that Sarah is Circe.

Gemma is the only one who can control the portal, and during one visit, Pippa is separated from them and is left behind as the others flee an evil power seeking them in the realms. Back in the real world, Pippa is now having a seizure. Gemma returns to the realms to retrieve Pippa, but Pippa has met her true Love there and refuses to return to real life and the arranged marriage which awaits her there. When Gemma returns to her own world, Pippa is dead.

I've also listened to the audio book version of this, narrated by Jo Wyatt, and I recommend that version, too. She does a thoroughly amazing job of narration and voices. I've had good success with Libba Bray, and although this is a series (a trilogy specifically) which I usually detest, this one turned out to be eminently engaging. I recommend it.


Across the Universe by Beth Revis


Rating: WARTY!

This was yet another take-a-chance audiobook from the library. It sounded good from the blurb, but was less than satisfactory when I got into it. It's the start of a series, because why write one book when you can drag it out and bilk your readers for a trilogy or more? It was also first person voice, which is a voice I'm growing to thoroughly detest, especially in YA novels. It's so unrealistic and whiny, and self-obsessed. This was made worse by the author admitting she made a huge mistake in choosing first person, because has then has to tell it in two different first person voices, which is laughable to me. The first voice was this young girl Amy (how young wasn't specified but she seemed like she was a very juvenile sixteen maybe?). She and her parents are being cryogenically frozen for a three-hundred-year trip.

Apparently the crew which is putting them under has never heard of sedatives, so the procedure is brutal, but what really bothers Amy is that she overhears one of the crew mention that it's 301 years instead of the original 300, and Amy all but freaks out over this. She idiotically seems to think this extra year in journey time means she could have spent another year on Earth with her boyfriend. how she gets that from learning that the journey itself - not the start of the journey, but the journey itself - is being extended by a year is completely out of left field. She's quite obviously a moron, so I lost all interest in her.

This was farcical, but not as sad as the fact that the author is evidently quite clueless as to how big the universe actually is. Three hundred years, even if you could go at the speed of light, which you absolutely cannot, wouldn't even get you out of our galaxy, let alone 'across the universe'. Three hundred years gets you three-thousands of one percent the way across our galaxy. That's how huge it is. Across the universe, my asteroid.

From other reviews I've read, science is not the author's strong point. I'm not saying you have to be a scientist to write a sci-fi book! In fact I prefer it if you're not, but you can't write dumb things and not expect those with even a modicum of basic science not to be kicked out of suspension of disbelief by them.

Even my kids know that an object in space keeps moving in the same direction and at the same velocity as it began with unless it gets caught in some planet's or star's gravitational field, or hit by another object. Things don't slow down just because their engine is turned off. This author needs to learn that as much as she needs to learn that (with few exceptions) one gene doesn't equal one trait. Gene groups or networks are what give us our traits and they are often complex and interact with and affect one another, so if she's going to continue this series I recommend some basic physics and genetics courses. Or at least read a good non-fiction book on each topic.

The idea is of course that these people going out there to populate a different planet. The girl is put under and apparently doesn't lose consciousness. She spends her time dreaming of her left-behind boyfriend Justin. That's how vacuous she is. And no, if you're frozen, you don't dream, which depends on biochemical reactions in your brain, which wouldn't be happening if you're deep frozen. The other guy, known only by the absurdly juvenile title of 'Elder' is some kid who sounds like he's ten years old. He's training under Eldest (I kid you not) to run this vessel (which is of course the spacecraft that Amy is on). Obviously the two meet, save each other and fall deeply in love in record time. Barf.

The Elder portion of the novel was so ridiculous and puerile that I took to skipping it and listening only to Amy's chapters, but as I said, she's a vacuous moron and I quickly lost interest in her. It seemed obvious that this journey was going to be a complete lie, and only Elder and Amy were going to be able to save the world (or spacecraft, in this case), so where's the suspense? In the cliff-hanger ending to this first volume? I can live without it. How you're going to stretch this tedious drivel to a series is the only mystery here, but why would the author or publisher care, as long as they can find suckers tu buy it?


Goodnight Campsite by Loretta Sponsler, Olga Shevchenko


Rating: WARTY!

This little book crashed my Kindle app on my smartphone - twice! The Kindle app always was crappy, but this is a precedent. I don't know what happened. When I first read it, it was fine. It was when I was trying to leaf through it for this review that I ran into trouble. The book opened at the end, which was where I'd left it, but I couldn't summon the slide bar at the bottom of the screen to go back to the start, nor would the pages swipe. The Kindle eventually popped up a message saying the app had crashed (but not in those words! LOL!).

I removed it from the device and re-downloaded it, and instead of tapping the screen to get the slide bar, I swiped back through the pages, and it worked fine the third time. Just FYI. I know it's unlikely your kid is going to be reading from the phone, but it could happen! It seems to be connected with the slide bar. If you don't use that for navigation, you should be fine.

I also tested it on an iPad and it seemed fine there, even though I was using the same Kindle app. The book looked very different on the tablet though. How Amazon explains that, other than they they have a shoddy and inconsistent app, I don't know, but based on this experience I'm not rating this as a worthy read, because it took several attempts and forever to get it to download to the pad in the first place! I recommend assuming you insist upon reading this, the print version even though it means killing a tree or two.

The title is slightly misleading - it's not one of your usual "Goodnight..." books, and I was glad of this. Instead it begins with a map of the campsite, and then lets you follow various campers, with poetic descriptions of their activities from Loretta Sponsler, - from biking to hiking, from picnics to quick dips, from fishing to swishing golf clubs, and so on. It's very colorful and nicely drawn by Olga Shevchenko (what a pair of delicious names to pay with there, huh?).

There are "bingo" sheets at the end which you can print out and have your kids check-off items as they encounter various things reading through the book. There's also a very nosy squirrel to see if you can find in each picture. So while I thought the book was ok, the poor experience I had with the e-version makes me dis-recommend it.


King Hugo's Huge Ego by Chris van Dusen


Rating: WORTHY!

In a world where everyone is pushed to outdo everyone else and to inflate themselves to celebrity status in the most showy way imaginable, and in a student world where so many awards are given out for 'achievements' that the awards are in fact, meaningless, we need books like this.

Humility is not a negative quality, but you would never know it in a world where this popular TV show is centered around who can best run roughshod over everyone else in order to avoid hearing "You're fired!" and that TV show is all about beauty, like it's a character trait rather than a genetic trait. In a world where our president has the most over-inflated of them all, we definitely need books like this.

This is a large-format and fun picture ebook for children with some rhyming text about Hugo, who is so self-obsessed that he cares for nothing but puffing himself up with his own achievements and qualities. One day in his blinkered ignorance, he makes the mistake of insulting a witch, who casts a spell on him that makes his head actually swell in proportion to how much his head is swollen from his own self-aggrandizement. The book is beautifully illustrated with fun images of Hugo's sad decline and then wondrous recovery from his personal(ity) problem. That witch isn't done with him yet, and he's not done with her! I recommend this for a fun and easy read for young children - and for the useful lesson to be learned from it.


What Light by Jay Asher


Rating: WARTY!

This was another experimental audiobook (experimental for me, that is, probably not for the author or the audiobook reader!) about this girl who spends two months each year in California selling Christmas trees with her family, and the rest of the year growing the trees back in her home state of Oregon. That idea of a divided life intrigued me, and I was curious to know how it affected her, but the answer is not at all, because the novel had really nothing to say about living two separate lives except in a distant, tangential sort of way. It was essentially nothing more than a juvenile romance story and as I began listening to this, I found myself increasingly thinking: what a waste of a good novel idea.

The writing is so young in terms of how it describes these kids and their behavior. I know sixteen-year-olds are very young, but at first I thought this girl was something like thirteen-years-old. It turns out she's sixteen or something like that. You wouldn't know it from the writing, or from the reader's voice. Apparently all she has on her mind is guys, despite denying interest in them earlier. This makes her far too shallow and uninteresting for me to care about. Then she meets this guy and it's instadore, and I'm outta there. Check please! Gotta go! I can't recommend this based on the small amount of it that I could stomach.


Saturn Run by John Sanderson, Ctein


Rating: WARTY!

If you want to know what five hundred pages of pure crap looks like, then this is definitely the book for you. Saturn Run Off at the Mouth would have been a more apt title. Eric Conger's reading of it in the audio version also was not entertaining. As a result, I'm done reading anything by either of these authors ever again. This is my first and last.

This was a long, long novel in which literally nothing happened. If you love authors who are so obsessed with parading their technical chops - even when it's complete fictional horseshit - then you'll love this. But it was way the hell too Clancy for me. If they had cut all of that out, and reduced the length of the book to about two hundred pages - the last two hundred - then I might have merely considered it to be garbage, but I sure would have appreciated the trees they saved (or in this case petroleum products since this was on CD).

The premise is that in 2066, a spacecraft is observed (by accident) entering orbit around one of Saturn's moons, and two rival spacecraft from Earth (one Chinese, one American primitive as they are), are dispatched to rendezvous with it. It leaves before they get there, but the moon it orbited turns out to be an automated space station and a technology goldmine. This lethargic approach to the story was the problem for me. It was some fifty chapters before they ever arrived at Saturn's moon, and when they did the aliens were gone! So what, exactly, was the point of the story? That people are greedy, mercenary, and untrustworthy? We already knew that.

This was boring and I started skipping tacks very early. It got to the point of skipping whole sections just to see, out of pure curiosity, if they ever would arrive at Saturn. They did, but then the story was nothing but a Chinese stand-off, with no one apparently questioning the divine right of humans to pillage the property of others whenever they feel like it. It sucked.


Touched by Cyn Balog


Rating: WARTY!

This is the last Cyn Balog I'm ever going to read because it was sad - not a sad story, but because it was badly written and as I've lately come to expect from this author, predictable throughout. I knew on page 124 exactly how this three-hundred page novel would end, so what was the point of reading any further when the novel consisted, very much like the author's Starstruck story, of nothing more than a first person character constantly whining, whining, whining. It was nauseating.

It wouldn't have been so bad, had it been written in third person, although it would still have been obnoxious, but evidently this author cannot write in any other voice, either that or she's operating under the same absurd delusion that the majority of female YA write under: that it's illegal to write a YA novel in third person.

The main character, whose name honestly escapes me, so forgettable was he, has been 'touched' - and not in a Catholic priest way, but in a magical way. He can see the future, but predictably only in dribs and drabs. His mother has the gift (and in true YA novel and Cyn Balog novel fashion, only one parent is extant), and so does he.

In a sad and direct rip-off of the Nicolas Cage movie Next, he says he can only see a couple of minutes ahead unless he 'gets on script' when, if he follows his path to the letter, he can see a bright future far ahead. He can change his future, but if he slips from the predictive script, things can go very badly awry, as they do when the novel begins.

He's a lifeguard and a child drowns, but for some absurd reason he takes all the blame on his self, and for me this is where the novel started seriously going downhill. It was the beginning of a two-hundred page pity party, and one long, boring, endless whine of a story, as as I said, predictable as all hell. I did not like it and I do not recommend it. If this has been written by a new, first time writer, it would have rightly been rejected out of hand, but of course once you get your foot in the door with Big Publishing™ you can shovel out any trash you want it and it gets published. Yes, it's unfair but it's what we have to deal with, so deal! Keep writing, and keep indie publishing. It's the only choice we have!

As for this author, I'm done reading her oeuvre.


Starstruck by Cyn Balog


Rating: WARTY!

This one is my third Cyn Balog novel. I liked the first two, but ran into issues with this one. It's about this overweight girl, Gwendolyn Reilly, who is so limp she allows people (even her family and boyfriend) to call her 'Dough'. Her boyfriend, Philip Wishman idiotically gets to be called 'Wish'. Honestly? Gwen hasn't seen him in three or four years because his family moved away. He's about to return (why now isn't explained), but in the meantime she's put on weight, and he's grown California surfin' good looks. He's also magically a celebrity for no apparent reason because half the school goes to welcome him back at the airport. Why? No explanation. Gwen doesn't go because everyone else does.

Her behavior is inexcusable. She doesn't say a word to him in their emails or on the phone about having put on so much weight - she simply leaves it for him to find out and potentially be shocked by It, which makes her thoroughly dishonest. When he arrives and they finally meet - the next day at school - she won't even look him in the eyes and she mumbles excuses to get away from him. In short, she treats him like dirt. At this point I flatly did not like Gwen at all.

The novel would not have been so bad if it had not been so predictable. It seemed pretty obvious from the moment the oddball new guy (with the questionable past) turned-up to work in the donut shop her family owns, that Gwen would be breaking-up with her wish and falling right into the arms of her savior Christ-ian, because god forbid any woman stand on her own two feet and be without a man to validate her for any length of time. The alternative to that would be that she manages to make a go of things with Wish.

It's inevitably first person voice, which with a few rare exceptions, I hate. This voice serves here only to make Gwen's constant harping on her weight even more obnoxious than it would have been had it been third person. It's not remotely amusing to read, and it made for a trying slog. Girl, if it bothers you that much, then do something about it. Cyn Balog seems to specialize in stories about young women who are thoroughly lacking in self-confidence and motivation.

I decided I'd give this one a little longer to see if it turned around because the other two books I read by this author weren't bad at all. The problem is that this one is so (forgive me the term) larded with cliché as to be pathetic. Gwen is poor, everyone else on the island is rich. There are not overweight rich kids. There are no other "poor" kids. It's sad that the novel is this thin, but Balog's novels tend to be that way. They just not usually as bad as this one in my experience, and the experience here was a bad one. I did not like this book, and I do not recommend it.


Dead River by Cyn Balog


Rating: WORTHY!

This marks the start of three Cyn Balog books I got from the library, but it also marks the end of my interest in her, because the other two sucked. I really liked this author's Fairy Tale; it was quite different from your usual high-school romance novel and I appreciated it for that. This is the same thing - different from what you expect, and I think people will condemn it for that, which is their prerogative. For me, despite it having problems (as negative reviewers have no doubt discussed), I still like the book and consider it a worthy read.

The premise is Kiandra's visit to her cousin's family's log cabin in the woods by the river. Ki hasn't been anywhere near the river in a decade or so. Her over-protective father has kept her well away from it since her mother walked into the river and never was seen again. As soon as she arrives there with her boyfriend, Justin, her cousin, Angela, and this obnoxious guy her cousin invited along for no apparent reason, Ki starts hearing snatches of conversation when no one seems to be around.

This weekend is the weekend of the prom, and Ki really wanted to go, but Ki is about as weak as they come. Even though she's been dating Justin for three years, she couldn't put her foot down, and he's still not even remotely clued-in to the fact that she'd much rather go to the prom than go white-water rafting on Dead River.

You have to wonder what the two of them see in each other, but realistically viewed, this is how people end up. They start dating way too early in high-school before they have a clue what's what, and suddenly they're in a long-term relationship and don't know how to get out of it, or even if they want to because it's become kind of a rut and not one that's entirely unpleasant. Plus Ki has zero motivation as does Justin.

It's cold and wet and muddy out here and Ki is a bit of whiner, but she puts on a brave face and when they go out on the raft the next day she decides she's going to try and have fun, but things go wrong. She falls overboard and despite the best efforts of Justin to pull her back aboard, she's pulled under - quite literally. She comes around on a shore not too far from where they put in that morning. A guy named Trey has rescued her, and apparently healed her injured back. Suddenly she notices that he has a serious injury to his arm, which despite it bleeding out, doesn't seem to bother him. She realizes Trey is a ghost - the ghost of the very kid someone told a story about over the campfire the previous night.

From that point onwards, Ki can't not be interested in the river - or more to the point, she's obsessed with it, and with the east bank, which is where the dead supposedly live. This is nonsensical of course, because pretty much everyone lives on the east bank of some river (though it may be far away!). In Ki's case, Her mother might well be over there, waiting for her. Ki meets Jack - another ghost and he seems to have a quite different approach to death than does Trey. Who should Ki believe?

This is where the story got interesting for me, because of the way the world of the dead works in this place (unsurprisingly, given it's a water world, it relies heavily on Greek mythology as to how the dead pass over. Yes, if you look too closely, the world-building falls apart as it does in all of these horror stories, but if you're willing to overlook the fact that the fabric is rather threadbare in places, it's not too bad of a world the author creates here. It's a bit thin in some parts, and a bit repetitive in others, and it's disjointed in others. Some parts of it read like a first draft rather than a polished novel, but despite all of this, I liked the story and the atmosphere.

I think that a part of the problem was Ki's perspective. In true blind, sheep-mentality, YA fashion, it was told in first person by her and she really wasn't a very good narrator. I won't say she's unreliable because that's not the tack the author takes here, but she's very selfish, which accounts for how thinly the rest of the world is veneered when we see it from her perspective. I'm not a fan of first person at all, but in this case it was interesting to see up close her juvenile and sadly-blinkered view of the world. It makes me glad I'm not in high-school anymore dealing with people like that!

The ending reflects how very selfish and self-centered Ki is, too. She ends up with Trey. This isn't a spoiler because it's so obviously coming from the moment we first encounter him. There is no tension and no surprise here except in the fact that the author glosses over the same insurmountable problem that Stephenie Meyer cluelessly failed to address in Twilight: why would a several hundred year old vampire fall for a vacuous juvenile who must have been a baby relative to him?

Yeah, he'd no doubt want to jump her bones, but why would he have any other interest in her? Fall in love? Ain't gonna happen. The same problem arises here since Trey died in 1936, and has been living in ghost world ever since. In short, he's over eighty years old and would have zero interest in a child, yet Balog portrays him as being just like a teen. Nope. That's garbage. Yes, he's portrayed as innocent in the ways of women, but it still doesn't work because that doesn't do anything to un-age him! He'd be courting her mom (or even her grandmother) before he'd ever be interested in hitting on Ki for anything other than sex.

So that was pathetic, but that aside, I liked the way this novel flowed - like a rock-strewn river, heading for a crash down a steep waterfall. I'm not even sure why I liked it. Normally I would trash a novel like this, but something in it spoke to me, so maybe it was very personal, so I recommend it with the above-mentioned caveats.


Lost Lake by Sarah Addison Allen


Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a series, which I don't think I want to follow. It's also the last of my forays into the word of this author. She's not for me. This story isn't awfully bad, but it isn't good, either. It was almost painfully slow-moving and I never felt so drawn-in that I wanted to pursue it beyond one volume. I didn't even want to pursue it to the end of this volume so it was a DNF for me.

This for me is the problem with series: they're too drawn-out. They're derivative, and unimaginative and uninventive precisely because they're really the same story over again, or the same characters stretched too thin to have any depth to them. The first volume is always nothing more than a profoundly unsatisfying prologue. I don't do prologues (or introductions, or prefaces or author's notes). Tell it in the story, start it in chapter one, continue it in one volume until it ends - otherwise what reason is there for me to really don't care about it? LOL!

There were two major problems with this, and the first was the weak female characters. I don't mind a weak character who starts out weak and grows strong, or even a weak one who stays weak if you can tell me a good story about the reasons for it, but this one seemed to revel in weak women who desperately needed men to save them and that's never a good thing.

The story begins with Kate Pheris waking-up no worse-for-wear after a year-long sleep (yes, I know, but this is supposedly magical realism, which is a nonsensical term, but I decided to let that one slide - maybe it was just a metaphor). The sleep was brought on by the death of her husband, who seems to get not a word spoken about him after this. We learn really nothing of what happened to him, and Kate and her daughter Devin seem completely unmoved by the loss, other than the year-long sleep (or metaphor). What happened to Devin during this time, again is undetailed, but she seems to be so perfectly well-adjusted that it reads like she never knew her father or cared nothing for him. This part is what I call "magical unrealism"!

That aside, the story was, as I said, slow and ultimately uninteresting - hence my lack of any compulsion to pursue this series. For me the second biggest problem with a book like this is that something, in this case the declining Lost Lake motel, which is owned by Kate's aunt Eby Pim, is used as a clunky metaphor for a host of declining lives or relationships, and as the hotel is resurrected, as you know it inevitably will be, so are the relationships and lives. It's too trite. The Newbery people (or some other medal peddlers) might think this is wonderful, but I have zero respect for Newbery award winners, and refuse to read them. I'm at the point where I'm actually hoping to win a Newbery award just so I can turn it down!

So the story, while not bad for mindless listening, really offered nothing of substance. It's like eating a fluffy desert before your main meal and then realizing there is nothing else - that was your lunch! It's not at all filling and can only lead to dissatisfaction in the end, so I cannot recommend it.


The Witches' Guide to Cooking With Children by Keith Mcgowan


Rating: WORTHY!

This was a cute and amusing novel aimed at middle graders and younger. It's an easy and fast read, and it's very well-written. It has a layer or two in it, which is unusual for this level of writing, so I was also pleased with that. Rooted loosely in the story of Hansel and Gretel, these two young kids, 11-year-old Solomon, and 8-year-old Constance find themselves suddenly uprooted and moved to a new town for no apparent reason, but the reason does become apparent to them and quite scarily so. Their new next door neighbor is a witch - and not a pleasant one. She's known for eating kids, and their dad, who happens to be a twin, and his new wife, their stepmother, want the money that's supposed to come to the kids.

We're told that Sol is the smart one, and Connie not so much, but she's a sneaky, scheming little devil, and a mischievous one, too. I liked her! Together they decide that they must take on this witch, and when Connie is captured by her, Sol becomes frantic. Fortunately, his science smarts enable him to take a logical approach to discovering where the witch is hiding his sister.

As I said, the book is well-written, but there was one issue I encountered which is worth exploring from a writing PoV. A few days ago I reviewed a book about punctuation, and mentioned at the time that not a few professional writers might make use of it, and I read a part of one sentence in this book which revealed how important smart punctuation is: "Holaderry and Connie, tied up" was what the sentence said in part. Holaderry is the witch. She has Connie tied-up, but the placement of the comma here suggests that both were tied-up! It should have read, "Holaderry, and Connie tied up."

Just nudging that comma over to the left by two words makes a lot of difference. The classic example of how the placement of commas can change a sentence is this: "Smith says Jones is an ass" versus "Smith, says Jones, is an ass." The addition of those two tiny commas gives the whole sentence the opposite meaning! It's worth remembering as a writer.

But that was a minor issue. Overall I consider this novel to be a very worthy read and I recommend it.


The Awakening by Lisa M Lilly


Rating: WARTY!

Unfortunately, this is volume one of the inevitable "Awakening" series, which I have no intention of following, even though this volume wasn't entirely disastrous. The fact is that I'm allergic to most series! Why writers suffer this inexplicable chronic verbosity these days and cannot seem to confine themselves to the covers of one book to tell a story is a complete mystery to me. Well not quite complete. Obviously it's mercenary and driven by publishers (and writers) wanting to milk a story for all they can, even when the udder is running dry or turning out sour milk, and the hell with the readers.

I mean, why sell your readers one pair of covers when you can milk them for three or more? Three is where this series is at as of this writing, but I'm done with this one volume. Series are by definition derivative and uninventive and that's not me, especially if they're rather uninspired and a bit lackluster, as this one was. If I'd realized that it was part of a series I would probably have decided against getting this at all. As it happens, this story wasn't so bad that I immediately wanted to ditch it, but it had problems which did not inspire me to pursue it.

In some ways I can understand it, in an era where Amazon seems determined to make all writers charge the same price for a three-hundred page novel that iTunes charges for a thee minute song. Running to a series seems like the only way for most writers to make any money, but to me it's still a cheat - an easy and lazy out. I do like a well-written good v. evil story, but unfortunately they're so few in number that they're hard to find. I didn't find one here.

This story features Tara Spencer, a mature young adult, who discovers she's pregnant, yet she's never had sex. Her boyfriend. Jeremy, ditches her because 'she's been unfaithful'. Apparently he doesn't know her very well, and he's a hypocrite anyway because he's already having an affair on the side since Tara wouldn't have sex with him! I honestly don't get Tara. She was raised Catholic but it didn't take. She's at least doubting, and at best lapsed. I say at best, because I'm not a believer. I think religion is nonsensical and organized religion is predatory and coercive. It has nothing to do with the love of any god. Like a book series, organized religion is all about making money.

So Tara is evidently either the new virgin Mary or she's the mother of the antichrist, but since she's not really a Catholic any more, this business of her remaining a virgin, while there's nothing wrong with it at all, felt to me like it wasn't justified very well by the author, and especially so since her supposed forbear Miriam (commonly known as Mary in the West) was not actually a virgin. The Hebrew word used to describe her means 'young woman' - there's a separate word for virgin, but this is never used in connection with Mary. The virgin lie is nothing more than a ruse employed in a long history of Catholicism's abuse and oppression of women and the twisting of belief for its own mercenary ends.

The sad thing from Tara's PoV is that the only person who believes her is some oddball guy named Cyril Woods (I disown all relationship to this guy. I'll explain later!), who is a believer and is resolved to protect her. At first she doesn't trust him, but he proves as good as his word and Tara is left with no choice but to turn to him since she's getting zero support from anyone else, not her best friend (who happens to be Jeremy's sister) and not her parents, although her older brother is on her side, as is her doctor, Dr. Lei.

One sad thing about this story is how little the author knows about religion or about nursing - as in taking care of the ill, not feeding babies. When Tara faints and is in the hospital, we read, "Dr. Lei, white coat open over her gray pin-striped pants suit, stopped in around nine. She told Tara she was on an IV with nutrition and hydration and took Tara's pulse." No, the nurses would be doing this - orientating the patient and filling her in on her treatment plan. Doctors don't do this, and they sure don't come in and take the patient's pulse! They read the nurses notes. Often the nurses are telling the doctors what to do, if they're new interns, for example.

Dr Lei isn't an intern, of course, she's a seasoned doctor and she'd know that wandering in and taking her patient's pulse isn't going to tell her anything. She would have read the patient's 'chart' (file) before she went into the room, so this is just the kind of thing a writer puts into a story when they really have no idea what doctors and nurses do, and are too lazy to research it. It might pass by most people, but to me it was a glaring lack of fidelity, with nurses once again being criminally under-served by a writer.

My other main issue with this was the religious one. I said religion is nonsensical, but this kind of story, while fiction, is so true to life that it's laughable. The Bible predicts (and the prediction long ago ran out) the arrival of this "Antichrist" and foretells what will happen, yet every story about the Antichrist has the believers trying to short-circuit this Biblically ordained series of events in direct contradiction of their god's wishes! LOL! They're always trying to kill the mother or kill the child in direct contravention of the sixth commandment - you shall not murder.

The sad thing is that organized religion has so little control over its adherents that this is exactly what fanatical Christians would do in real life. It's not only a measure of how delusional and misguided they are, it's also one of how shockingly little faith they truly have in their god. The fact is that they're making it up as they go, as has always been done in all religions, and there are virtually no modern Christians who honestly follow Jesus. They follow Paul who has more effectively derailed the Jesus movement than anyone before or since. These people are Paulians, not Christians.

If they truly were Christians, they would follow Judaism! LOL! Jesus never was a Christian. He was a Jew. He followed the Judaic religion, and he stated quite clearly that he had not come to change one jot or tittle of the law. It was Paul, the fanatic who had some serious mental issues, who did all of that, and everyone fell for it. Jesus (if you believe he existed - I don't - not in the way Christians believe) also stated that he came only for the children of the House of Israel, so he'd have no interest whatsoever in gentiles, which makes this story false from the start: why would the Antichrist appear in the USA? And why now?

Nearly all modern writers, particularly in the US, and even more particularly in the young adult genre do this kind of thing routinely because they can't imagine any story of worth taking place outside of their own back yard, so blinkered are they. Nor do they explain why this appearance is taking place in this particular year or with this particular individual. It's a sad and provincial tunnel-vision which creates farces like this, and I have little respect for such writers even when the story isn't a disaster. No, if the Antichrist were not pure fiction, he (it's almost never a she in the three big monotheistic religions) would appear in Israel. Personally I'm rooting for the Antichrist because I detest the way organized religion is going! LOL!

The novel took a decided turn for the worst when this guy Cyril says to Tara, "...that you've had the strength of character to stay a virgin despite a sex-saturated world," like this is some sort of badge of honor. Excuse me? No, if a woman wants to have sex (and she's not dumb about it) then she's perfectly entitled to. It has nothing whatsoever to do with strength of character, because the obverse of that view is that if she had sex it would mean she was weak and easily manipulated. It offers her no voice in her own sexuality. It's her choice, dipshit, not yours!

The fact that Tara has nothing to say about this patriarchal attitude of this patronizing busybody lessened her in my view, too, especially since she's not so subtly starting to get the hots for him. It was then that I realized that if this was the way this book is going - weak woman rescued by shining knight and falling hopelessly in love with him, then I really didn't want to read any more of it because that story has been done to death, and making her pregnant with the Messiah/Antichrist doesn't accomplish a thing by way of improvement!

When are book blurb writers going to treat people with respect? The blurb for this one asks, tediously, " Will Tara find answers before it's too late?" How pathetic is that? I detest book blurbs that ask this stupid question. Of course she will! Is she going to fail to find answers? No! Is the writer going to kill off this character? I'd respect her if she did, but no, that's not going to happen - not when there's a potentially lucrative series in prospect! Quit putting dumbass questions in your blurbs, morons! And for the record, I disrecommend this novel.


Sophomore Year Is Greek to Me by Meredith Zeitlin


Rating: WARTY!

Zona Lowell is fifteen and is halfway through her second year of high-school, which in Canada and the USA is known, sophomorically as the sophomore year. It's derived from a combo of the Greek words for wise and foolish! LOL! That pretty much sums up Zona. Why it has a Greek name and the other three years have regular English names can only be put down to pretension.

I have to ask where this girl's name comes from. Maybe the author thinks it's Greek, but it's not. In Serbian and Spanish, it means 'zone', so why a girl with an American father and a Greek mother would have a name unconnected with either lineage is a mystery. In Hebrew, it's worse: it means whore. That's not a great choice for a girl's name - not when there are so many wonderful Greek names (and of other nationalities, too).

For me it didn't work, and that sentiment pretty much sums up this whole novel. I made it a third of the way through, and it was so predictable that it was tedious to read. The author quite evidently downloaded a plot-point list from Trope (tripe?) Central and stuck to it rigidly. Can YA authors not have original ideas? On the whole they seem quite incapable, but I know for a fact one or two of them do, since I recently read an excellent story set in high-school, and a romance at that, and I loved it - so it's not impossible. I can only conclude these writers are lazy and/or unimaginative.

How shall I trope thee? Let me count the ways:

  • ☑ Story is in first person because it's understood by the YA writing community that it's illegal to write a YA novel in third?
  • ☑ Mid-teen girl, parentless, or half parentless?
  • ☑ Girl has had very close female bestie for several years?
  • ☑ Girl has very close male bestie who is gay?
  • ☑ Girl has low self-esteem? (She's even named Lowell! LOL!)
  • ☑ Girl thinks breasts are too small?
  • ☑ Girl thinks she's not that great looking?
  • ☑ Author thinks 'pretty' is actually a character trait?
  • ☑ Author thinks 'pretty' is the most important character trait?
  • ☑ Girl gets to go on trip abroad so it has to be France, Greece, or Italy since there is nowhere else?
  • ☑ Story ends on positive note because you can't write a YA novel that has a tragic ending?
  • ☑ Story makes frequent comparisons between two nations, and US is made to look trashy, violent, boring, and heartless?
  • ☑ Author thinks jazzing-up the text with boring inserts is cool?
  • ☑ Author thinks Greece is way south of NYC and therefore significantly warmer?

Lowell's year is smashed in two by her father who drops the bombshell on her that he's going to Greece for six months to write a story and she's coming with him. Mom isn't in the picture having conveniently died shortly after Zona was born. The Greek half of the family washed its hands of Zona and her father since they were not even in favor of the marriage, let alone any births and deaths. Now her dad suddenly wants to reconnect. He's older than most fathers of fifteen year olds, but not at death's door, so the premise was a bit weak, especially when the Greek side had been so overwhelmingly negative, so this premise failed for me.

It failed worse in that Zona is shown to cave to her father's precipitous demands far too quickly. I lost all respect for her at that point, but I'd already lost a lot of respect for the story-telling, so it mattered little by then. One big annoyance was the absurd newspaper clipping inserts. I'm sure the author thought this was cute and inventive, but the news articles - simply reporting everyday events in Zona's life, were monotonous and I started skipping them completely after reading the first two. I didn't miss them.

They were especially poor given that they were often not contained on one page, but overlapped to the second page. The problem with that, is that in order to facilitate reading, the story ran down column one, then down two, as it should, but on the second page, the story reverted to column one again, and finished in column two. They had to do this because of poor planning in fitting the articles onto one page, but the articles were so tedious they should have just omitted them altogether.

So, the story was poor one, with nothing new to offer. Going to Greece? How original! Why not try someplace completely different for a change? Child missing a parent or two? Yawn. Child supposedly unnaturally smart (but in practice really dumb) and has low opinion of herself? Been done a trillion billion times. Token gay best friend? Seriously? I ought to be commended for even getting as far into as I did. Could the kid not have both parents? Could the girl herself not be gay? Could the trip have been to Serbia or Chile or South Africa, or something instead of (yawn) Greece?

Could the girl not have stayed at a friend's home, and we followed her adventures there? Could the girl not have precipitously followed her father and the story been about her journey there rather than the destination? Apparently not when this author is at the helm, because she had a rigid checklist to follow in order to keep her name in good standing at the YA Club, and she was in no way going to deviate from it for anything, not even for the absurd purpose of telling an interesting story which is new and different from the rest of the flock. I am never reading another of her efforts. She has Big Publishing™ behind her, so you know there's no way she's ever going to be original.


A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson, Jeff Rovin


Rating: WARTY!

If I had known this was volume one of the 'Earthend Saga', I would never have picked it up. I don't do sagas, cycles, chronicles and any other of that pretentiously-titled garbage. Jeff Rovin is supposed to be (according to the book blurb) a New York Times bestselling author, but the problem with this novel was that it was boring, and Gillian Anderson's lethargic reading of it in audiobook format made it even more mind-numbing than it already was.

I get why, in this case, they chose an actor to read it since it was written by that same actor, but in general terms in my experience actors are the worst people to read audiobooks, and Anderson's flat and dragging recital proves it here. Her voice is slow and dead, and totally unappealing.

Worse than this, the story itself plods along at a snail's pace and the "action" isn't remotely interesting. I find it hard to believe that a story with this premise, that teenagers around the world are suddenly behaving inexplicably: speaking in tongues and setting themselves on fire, for example, could be made uninteresting, but this inanimate duo managed it with this story. I got two volumes from the library hoping that it would be a worthy read (or rather, listen!), but both volumes are going right back there because this isn't engaging me at all. I do not recommend it.


Toru: Wayfarer Returns by Stephanie R Sorensen


Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy, for which I thank the publisher. It's been a while since I've fond something I really wanted to read on Net Galley and this was worth the wait in gold to coin a phrase!

It was an awesome novel - steampunk set in Japan (kinda)! But that's not why I liked it. I've read a few steampunk novels and found too many of them less than satisfactory, the author being far more in love with steampunk than ever they were in good story-telling. This is a different tack. This author clearly loves to tell a great and well-put-together story and steampunk is just an accessory.

It's not even really steampunk as such, but the story of an alternate-world Japan entering the steam age perforce to save themselves from falling under the thumb of an expansionist and capitalist USA in the form of Matthew Perry, not the actor from the Friends TV show, but a US Navy Commodore who also happened to be a belligerent bully who, in the real world, forced under threat of arms, a very feudal and unprepared Japan to sign a so-called treaty which treated the US and no-one else.

In this novel, things happen differently. Toru is the name of the mysterious "fisherman" who arrives back in Japan after two years of living in (and closely observing) the USA, and in this world the Japanese, because of Toru's efforts, are fully armed and very dangerous when Perry arrives in the last twenty percent of the novel.

So no, it's not a novel full of battles. Instead, it's a story of perseverance and bravery, and of hardship and ingenuity, where Toru has to overcome one prejudice after another in a very strict, very isolationist nation which rejects him to begin with because he's 'soiled goods' having lived outside of Japan. Rejection here, please note, means no less than ritual beheading. It's a story of codes of honor, of class separation, and of how barriers can be worn away with diligence and dedication. The story is one of change, and skin-of-the-teeth survival, and of a slow awakening (in this case militarily) of a nation which in the real world enjoyed a similar rise, but economically after World War Two.

The author quite evidently knows her stuff (or at the very least, fakes it beautifully, which is fine with me!), and while - now and then - I found the frequent use of Japanese terminology annoying, for the most part it was fine and even educational. Some readers who are seeking only a story of martial might, may find this rather restrained and slow-moving, but for me it was a comfortable, easy read which entertained, educated, and showed how non-violent change can come even to a nation as rigid as Japan was (and still is in many regards).

It's not all about the men, either. We have a strong female character who is admirably understated but very much to the fore. We also have a restrained love story which even I liked, so if you've read my reviews of not a few young adult stories, you must know that this one had to be well done to please me!

I had one or two minor issues, but nothing that put me off the story overall. For example, we're told that Toru meets Helmuth von Moltke at West Point, which is highly unlikely since he was stationed in Magdeburg in charge of the 4th army corps when Toru was supposedly in the US! Moltke is the guy who goes uncredited for saying "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy," when what he actually wrote was rather different: "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force." I honestly did not see the point of referring to him or to what he supposedly said. This guy was an appalling racist and doesn't deserve to be remembered for anything.

While the author conveys a good feel for Japan, when it comes to preparations for war - in this case a huge build-up of steam power - the idea of powering steam engines is a bit too easily accomplished. Coal was not scarce in Japan in terms of being available for mining, but in order to mine it to power the steam engines, a lot more work would have had to be done than there was time for here! Perhaps this is why it gets so little mention, but I'm not convinced that there were enough trees to do everything they did either - not to do it and sustain it! The same problem exists for mining iron to build those engines and the tracks upon which they would run.

But I wasn't about to let minor quibbles spoil what was otherwise an excellent and very much appreciated read. I fully recommend this one.


Messenger: The Legend of Joan of Arc by Tony Lee, Sam Hart


Rating: WARTY!

This was a very disappointing graphic novel which I got from my wonderful local library about the woman the French know as La Pucelle d'Orléans. I think a woman like Jeanne d'Arc deserves a better memorial than this one because, deluded as she was, she did make her mark on history. This novel doesn't. It basically tells the same tale as everyone else does, so what's the point? The illustrations are indifferent and there was really nothing there to inspire me, which is sad given that Jeanne was said to have inspired an army to win a war!

Rising from an obscure childhood to become and legend and now, one of the nine secondary saints of France is quite an achievement, although it took five hundred years, all told. The problem is that the authors don't offer anything other than what you can read in Wikipedia - which for all I know might well be where they took their 'plot'. But apart from purely fictional and very trite conversations, they offer nothing more - just a by-rote, pedantic retelling of the facts, including several information dumps and much folklore unverified as fact.

I'll give just one example of how pathetic the invented dialog is. At one point the English drop a rock on Jeanne's head. She's in process of storming their castle when it happens. This evidently was a real event and she survived it. I suspect the real rock was a lot smaller than the one depicted in this novel, but in this story, evidently rather peeved, she says, "They throw stones at a girl? Show them what you think of that! To arms!" which is as pathetic as you can get and makes her look like a moron.

She's dressed as a soldier. She has short hair and she's waging war on the English dressed as a regular male warrior, and now she thinks she should be entitled to special treatment because she's a girl? I'm sorry but that line alone makes this novel total trash. The writer should be ashamed of himself for even thinking of writing it. I seriously doubt the real Jeanne said anything like that.

Michael, who is a Jewish archangel who supposedly communicates with her, is depicted as a long-haired muscular blond with white wings! In short, not a Judaic angel, but more like a Norse god named Thor. Pathetic. For this reason and others, this story doesn't seem organic. It doesn't seem life-like. It's more like reading a history book than ever it is a work which gives us the opportunity to enjoy and celebrate a living, thriving person exhibiting bravery you can rarely find in modern YA stories, and offering inspiration, and adventure.

That said it would be hard to repeat her story in any age (or in these days nation) other than one bogged down in religious strait-jackets and blind belief in ridiculous fairy tales. Only in such a world could someone so totally fool others in to believing they had a direct line to a god!

This would have made a much better tale had it been explored with a new light - that of a young deluded girl being elevated by men into a figure of inspiration when it served them, and discarding her callously when she was no longer of use, but that tale has yet to be told in this format, to my knowledge. I think this version cruelly under-serves her.

Another approach would have been to have shown how useless God is: in that he cannot do a thing for himself, always having to rely on mere mortal, weak humans to do his work for him, and then failing them repeatedly. I mean, is he an all-powerful god or merely another insane being no better than the Devil, whispering things in people's ears to make them do his absurd and contradictory bidding purely for his own entertainment?

I'm not a believer at all, but let's just pretend there is a god who for reasons unknown, wishes half a century later to reverse Agincourt, where the English soundly beat the French on their home turf, and who now wants the French to beat the English on that same turf. There's actually a whole other story right there about a schizophrenic god who doesn't know what he wants, but I don't want to pursue that here.

Set aside any quibbles about why this god even cares who owns France, when he's always been the "God of Israel," not anywhere else, and then not even the God of all of Israel, but a mountain god - a god of the hill tribes. Instead let's pretend he actually cares. If it's that important, then why pick an obscure girl from nowheresville? Why not pick the pope?

Better yet, why not do his dirty work himself, and de-materialize the English army? Instead, we're expected to believe that this purportedly all-powerful god cannot do the job and is forced to pick an illiterate and highly superstitious child, and force her to try and change history before abandoning her to misery and suffering. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and in effect means that this god murdered that child.

And for what? The war did not end with her. France did not become whole immediately because of her. Indeed, even after it became whole, it later fell to the English after Napoleon's depredations. Where was this god then? Where was his messenger then? France again fell to the Nazis, and in the worst way. Where was this god then? Where was the messenger then? What was the point? Why only one messenger in a suspiciously superstitious and ignorant time and then no more? Does this god not take a long view?! Or is the real story not that he's so petty and short-sighted, but that there really is no god other than what we sad and ignorant humans invent to delude ourselves with, and to satisfy our own petty needs of the moment?

It makes even less sense that he would then allow his savior to be burned, but he does have a history of throwing his Messiahs to the wolves, doesn't he? Even if he is real, he's not a god I want anything to do with. There's a far better story to be told about Jeanne than ever we've been given by those blinkered people who merely retell the historical plot points without any feeling or heart and add nothing new in the telling. I can't recommend this one at all.


Battling Boy by Paul Pope


Rating: WARTY!

I'm back again after taking a couple of weeks off from blogging to pursue illustrations for the print version of Baker Street, the e-version of which is released today.

This graphic novel was a bust for me. The most amusing thing about it was that when I first saw it on the library shelf I thought the title was "Pope Battling Boy" which I thought was hilarious. But no, it's just Battling Boy - the ''Pope part came from the author's pretentious conceit of putting his name at the top and the title below it, like this is supposed to mean something to me.

I'm sorry, but no! I don't borrow - and I certainly don't buy - a book for no other reason than that the author thinks I should because it's by him - or her. I read books based on whether they sound appealing, and I often get that wrong! I don't go by the title or by the pretty cover (yes, insanely melodramatic cover reveal authors, I'm looking at you!) and I really don't care who the author is, or what they've done previously. I'd hate to think people were buying my books just because my name is on them and for no other reason. People who think like that are morons.

I sure learned my lesson here with the confused and chaotic story and the indifferent illustrations I got. The basic story is that the super hero who protects the town in this purely fictional alternate world - but which looks exactly like ours - is killed by super villains whose sole purpose in life (other than dressing like mummies) seems to be abducting children - for reasons which are unexplained. A lot of things go unfortunately unexplained in this book because it's part of a series, which is one reason I thoroughly detest most series I've ever encountered.

The super hero has the absurd name of Haggard West. His replacement is his daughter who, again for reasons unexplained, has a different name from her father. But there's a second replacement. For reasons unexplained, it's a kid whose bar mitzvah is to be dumped into this world from the heavens by his Thor rip-off dad, so he can prove himself. He's given no instructions, no tools, and no training - for reasons unexplained. He's just left there to fight the monsters which invade this city routinely...for reasons unexplained.

For reasons unexplained, he has a set of t-shirts which are imprinted each with a different animal logo - mostly real, but in one case mythical. For reasons unexplained, when he dons a Tee, it doesn't give him the powers of the animal, it makes the animal appear and talk to him offering pretty much useless advice. For reasons which ought to be clear by now, I don't recommend this book.


Sunday, March 19, 2017

First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen


Rating: WARTY!

I liked my previous foray into Sarah Addison Allen via The Peach keeper, but I literally could not get into this at all. It was an audio book and I listed to about a third of it, but it did not hold my interest. Half the time I honestly couldn't follow what was going on, and what I did manage to assimilate bored the pants off me.

Not literally, fortunately, since I was driving, and that would have been most unfortunate for all concerned, and even many who were totally unconcerned or who just worked at CERN. Seriously, I couldn't believe that this was the same author. It should have told me something that those who did not like The Peach Keeper were saying Allen's earlier work was better. I should have known I would see it the opposite way around!

It probably didn't help that this was book two in a series about the Waverley Family. Series are a no-no for me, generally speaking and this was no exception. It's a story wherein Waverley women are, the blurb tells us, rendered "restless by the whims of their mischievous apple tree." It's a magical tree, which I expected and would have had no problem with, but I honestly don't remember the tree being mentioned at all (it may have been). It seemed like every time I could stay tuned-in to the story, mom was lecturing her daughter, Bay.

Bay? Yes, Bay. Seriously? Yes, seriously. Who names their daughter Bay? What's her middle name? Watch? Does she stock only bikinis in her wardrobe? Does she have sandy hair? Can she be a beach at times? Does she run in slo-mo? Maybe her middle name is Gelding? She has a horsey laugh or a whinnying smile? I'm sorry, but no. I couldn't take that seriously, which is probably what tuned me out so much. So in short, I listened to relatively little, learned nothing, and disliked a lot. Not for me.


Fairy Tale by Cyn Balog


Rating: WORTHY!

I was so thrilled to read this book - an example of how to write a really well-done high-school romance. This book was amazing, and other writers of such works would do well to read this and learn from it. It was not perfect, by any means. I had a couple of issues with it, but those aside, the book was deep, well-written, passionate, amusing as hell, and amazing in how well the author controlled it, and brought it to closure.

Morgan Sparks is about to reach her sixteenth year and she gets to celebrate it with her lifelong partner, Cam Browne, who shares her birthday. That's the last great memory she has of the relationship, because almost from day one, things start going south. It turns out - hilariously, I thought - that macho football star Cam is a fairy. He was switched at birth with the Browne's newborn, and now he's about to turn sixteen himself, the fairies want him back. And Morgan isn't about to let that happen, but when he starts losing weight and growing wings out of his back, and Morgan is the only one who can see these changes, she starts to wonder if her dream romance is actually over for real.

A female fairy named Dawn arrives, and starts tutoring Cam in the ways of Fairy World. She's not supposed to be visible to anyone but Cam, yet Morgan can see her, which annoys Dawn. Dawn is, however, deadly. She has fairy magic and a mission not only to bring Cam back but to marry him and unite two fairy dynasties, and she is not about to let anyone get in the way of it, even if it means killing and maiming to accomplish her aim.

Morgan herself is psychic, yet she has a hard time seeing her own future, and has never seen future for herself and Cam. Her assumption has been that it will work out fine and they will always be together, but is it so? Or has she been so blind that she simply invented their future and now is about to find out the cold truth?

I loved this story and will look for more by this author. This story reminded me, a bit, of a story idea I have for a fairy tale, but fortunately this one is very different from what I had in mind, so I don't need to scrap mine! Phew! I did like this one. I liked that it was different, and that the author wasn't afraid to take a path less traveled. How sorry it is that far too many authors of this kind of story fail so dismally precisely because they're aping everyone else's stories? Kudos to Cyn Balog for blazing her own trail.

And kudos again for being unafraid to call it what it is: a fairy story. Nowhere in this book is there 'fae' or 'faerie'! It's 'fairy' all the way, and the author is proud of it; it's right there on the front cover. Good for her. If you're going to write a story like this and then let yourself be too embarrassed to use the word 'fairy' then I don't want to read your book anyway. And kudos to myself or being smart enough to recognize that this one might just be different! LOL!