In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters

Title: In the Shadow of Blackbirds
Author: Cat Winters (aka Catherine Karp)
Publisher: Abrams
Rating: WORTHY!

Set in the last year of World War One, and during the deadliest pandemic the world has ever seen, In the Shadow of Blackbirds is an atmospheric, rather claustrophobic and unnerving novel about 16-year-old Mary Shelley (not that Mary Shelley, merely a namesake!) and her interesting adventures in San Diego.

Mary is forced to move there after her parents are arrested as German spies. By this neat literary device the author is free to allow Mary to exhibit her (for the time) somewhat scandalous attitudes and even behaviors which her parents would no doubt never countenance.

Mary, who for some reason is always referred to as Mary Shelley, but rarely in full as Mary Shelley Black, stays with her aunt, who happens to be only a decade older than Mary. In some ways Mary is happy to be there because it's the city in which she knew Stephen - a childhood friend who is now fighting in Europe. Stephen writes beautifully and he takes haunting photographs which he titles with anagrams so his older brother Julius will not figure out what the title is. I have no idea why he thinks this was necessary. Two of these pictures he has given to Mary. One is of a butterfly, and its title 'Mr Muse', Mary quickly resolves as 'Summer'. The other is of lightning striking water, and it's titled 'I Do Lose Ink'

Julius is a "spirit photographer" evidently of the kind who double-exposes photographic plates to make it appear to the photographic subject that the spirit of a loved one has appeared in the image with them (in exactly the way this novel's cover was made, of course!). Julius once caught Stephen and Mary in a somewhat compromising position and then exaggerated what he saw to cause problems for the two of them. Now Mary is to sit for him for another spirit photograph, and the only reason she agrees to this is to get Julius to confess his embarrassing and incriminating exaggeration about herself and Stephen to her aunt, and to give her the package Stephen left for her before he went to the front.

1918 was the year that composer Claude Debussy died, and Marie Stopes published Married Love, Manfred von Richthofen was killed in a dogfight, General Motors bought Chevrolet, 20,000 British soldiers died in one day fighting the Kaiser's army, Britain laid the keel of the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, and Italy and Japan fought on the side of the allies.

It was in January of 1918 that the Spanish flu (so called) was first noted in Kansas in the US (although it had already reared its ugly head elsewhere), and it spread rapidly, causing people to begin routinely wearing surgical masks and carrying posies and other pungent materials with them in a futile attempt to ward off what was actually an airborne virus.

It's hard now to imagine how virulent this plague was, when we're hearing almost daily of the deadly effects of the spread of Ebola in Africa, but that's a sniffle when compared with what this flu did. It struck world-wide and it killed millions upon millions, and the author does a rather scary job of conveying the fear and suspicion this disease engendered in people. I read Gina Kolata's book Flu on this pandemic, and I highly recommend it if you're interested in learning more.

Overall I was impressed by Cat Winters's writing. It was very atmospheric, realistic, and engaging. She's an author, for example, who knows that you can't (not intelligently, anyway!) say something like "So blue it was almost black." Instead, she correctly says, "...navy blue so dark it was almost black."

I've seen writers (so-called!) make the mistake with other colors. Blue, for example, is a noun which describes a color, and which describes no quality of the color other than that it's blue, so it makes no sense to say that something is so blue that it's almost black. That's the same as saying it's so blue that it's not really blue. Patent nonsense! Simply amplifying how 'blue' something is relates nothing of its lightness or darkness. This isn't a matter of opinion; it's a fact which isn't rendered any less factual simply because more than one writer makes this same mistake.

Confusing the quality of brightness with the quality of hue isn't a smart thing to do, and there are very subtle ways like this in which we, as writers, can educate readers and bring them up with us instead of talking down to them. It was really nice to see a writer who gets this. There's hope that our YA writers will get there! Many of them already have.

The story draws us ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Mary, and the fate of her friend Stephen. Someone isn't telling the truth about what happened to him, and Mary, determined to discover and uncover what happened to him, becomes quite the detective.

I liked this novel in general. It wasn't the most thrilling thing I've ever read, but it drew me in and made me care about the main character, and it was well-written, and sometimes that's enough. The ending was a little bit dissatisfying, but given how strong it was overall, I'm not going to down-grade the novel for that. Mary isn't one of my great heroes, but she is a strong character who takes charge of her life and acts positively, and we need all of those females that we can get in YA literature!

The Revenant by Sonia Gensler

Title: The Revenant
Author: Sonia Gensler
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

This novel is about Willie Hammond, hiding under the name of Angeline McClure, posing as a teacher at a 19th century seminary which caters to girls descended from Cherokee native Americans. Why, exactly, she's doing this is never really revealed to the reader (at least in the majority of this novel. I didn't read it all but I read most of it). This is annoying at best.

The first problem is that the natives don't call themselves 'Cherokee' - which is yet another example of an ignorant English word replacing the original. They refer to themselves as Tsalagi, or Aniyunwiya as far as I know. If Gensler could not bring herself to call them what they call themselves, could she not have at least mentioned it in passing? And why did no-one have a Tsalagi name? Everyone had English names or Biblical names. The closest we got to a native American name was the trope love interest's last name. That was it! One name!

The method by which the main character, Willie, presents herself as Angeline - a new teacher at the school - is well done, but you know that one of the girls is going to betray her, and you soon discover who this person is. This was the first of many non-surprises. In addition to being predictable, there were other ways in which this novel made for uncomfortable reading. One was that it was too easy to forget that Willie is only seventeen and is merely posing as a teacher rather than actually being one.

She's not actually a mature graduate, so her behavior was irresponsible and childish on far too many occasions, but even as I kept on reminding myself that she was a poseur, I still could not escape feeling how dumb and irresponsible this main character was. Her whole life was dependent upon her carrying off this deception, and it was sad that she wasn't smart enough to realize how much she needed to do, and to make the required effort to get it done. I prefer my main characters smarter than this, but keeping her wits about her was not Willie's forte. There are different ways of being smart and Willie truly failed to embrace any of them.

This story had a Harry Potter time-lapse feel to it, I have to say. JK Rowling was obsessed with making every story last for exactly one school year regardless of what she had to sacrifice or puff-up to achieve that end. This resulted in some sad artificiality to that series as characters struggled pointlessly with problems which would have been resolved in short order by normal people. It was patently obvious that this happened for no other reason than to stretch the story across the school year.

In the same way, Gensler artificially delays things, or brings them to an abrupt and premature conclusion in order to create fake suspense and to stretch this story out over the school year. So while the novel begins in August of 1896, it takes a giant leap to Xmas of that year for no apparent reason other than the one which I just mentioned. Willie suffers grotesquely from this kind of writing by being repeatedly presented as incompetent, slow, stupid, and utterly incapable of getting herself organized no matter how many endless hours she has at her disposal.

Willie teaches English and has student compositions to grade, yet she puts these off day after day for no good reason. She's very much alone at the school, having only one 'friend', and she confines herself to her room often, yet she's always complaining that she has no time to do things. What? What exactly is she doing with her time that she has so little to spare? Is she surfing the web? Texting her friends? Watching TV? Listening to her iPod? Updating her status? Not in 1896 she isn't! She has only her school work to occupy her and she isn't even doing that!

The other inexplicable procrastination is in holding a second séance. Again what is she doing with her time that she can't facilitate this with many weeks to spare?! The problem with this school is that it's purportedly haunted by the ghost of a student who recently drowned herself (but she was actually murdered to protect a man's reputation, and this was so obvious as to be pathetic). It quickly becomes clear that there was far more going on here than Willie can evidently handle, which bespeaks badly of her.

The initials "e.s." (over which we're deliberately misled by the author: it's actually c.s. not e.s.), which Willie finds appended to a love poem secreted in her room, could apply to more than one person yet Willie never even considers this. One of the two primary candidates is a student. He's Willie's sad, sad, trope, inappropriate, clichéd, tedious, sad, trope, clichéd, (and did I mention sad, clichéd, and trope?) love interest from the nearby boys' seminary. In any self-respecting YA novel, he would have been the villain, but tiredly and predictably, he's not because there are so few self-respecting YA novels, and those are to be treasured when found. The other candidate is a mature male who frequents the school with good reason, and it quickly becomes obvious to readers (but not to Willie) that he's the perp.

While I flatly don't believe in ghosts and gods, demons and angels, spirits and witchcraft, etc., etc., because there's no good evidence for any of them, I do love a good story featuring these things. What spoils a good story about them is the inevitably prolonged build-up to a crescendo. What? The poltergeist can only make little scratching sounds at night? It takes a few weeks or months for it to be able to manifest and overturn tables and bring your home crashing down? Why?

What, the Ghost of Person Past can only tap, tap, tap at your window to begin with? They can make the room feel warm or cold, they can completely trash the chapel decor, but they can't come to you in broad daylight and simply say, "Hey, So-And-So murdered me!"? Bullshit! I know the suspense is needed to make a good novel, but it's ruined when this evidently powerful ghost has such artificial and transparent 'hurdles' placed so that it can't come right out and say what the issue is. It was obvious the ghost wasn't the dead girl, but I confess I got it wrong as to the ghost actually was, even though it was obvious that this character was also dead, and not simply missing.

The William Blatty novel The Exorcist, for example, transcended this 'slow build-up' problem because the demon had an agenda - this is why it lured people in very slowly, and that's why that novel worked so well even with a leisurely build-up of tension. There's no explanation given in this novel for this same thing.

While I was excited to read this novel and while I became quickly drawn-in initially, it turned to tedious and uninteresting with startling rapidity. In the end, I was skipping and skimming - especially those pages where Willie and Eli were together because it was so trashy and boring. I pretty-much skipped the last 25% and just skimmed pages to see if my guesses had been right. All but one of them was, and for as bad as I am at figuring out plots ahead of time, that ought to tell you something!

So I guess I'm done with Sonia Gensler. I loved her first novel, The Dark Between, which I reviewed the same day as this one on my blog, but I can't countenance, much less recommend, the poor writing which the main feature in this one.

The Dark between by Sonia Gensler

Title: The Dark Between
Author: Sonia Gensler
Publisher: Alfred Knopf
Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first of a pair of reviews on Sonia Gensler's work, the first two of her novels that I've ever read, and it speaks highly of her writing that after I'd read this one, I immediately started tracking down other books by this writer. She seems to have made this genre her specialty, but unfortunately, the second one I read, The Revenant was far less satisfying.

This novel reminds me a lot of Haunting violet by Alyxandra Harvey which I favorably reviewed back in May 2013. It has that same 'medium working with a younger female assistant who helps perpetrate fraud, and the subsequent exposure and consequences' as this one does, although the two are different stories.

Kate Pool is a fourteen-year-old whose entire existence is dependent upon aiding Mrs Martineau, a spirit medium (I don't say fraudulent medium because the two are synonymous in my experience) to rob mourners of their money. When the medium is exposed and seeks to devolve all the blame upon poor Kate, the latter throws herself on the mercy of one of the men who exposed her - Oliver Thompson, who is employed at nearby Summerfield College in Cambridge, and who has a connection with the man Kate believes is her father.

To his credit, Thompson steps up, and it's through this association with the college that Kate meets Elsie Atherton, a true clairvoyant (not that such a thing exists in real life, mind!) who believes she's ill and is required to take an addictive drug to combat this "mental illness" she supposedly has, and Asher Beale, a young American who is traveling in England. It turns out that Elsie, Kate, and Asher are all indirectly connected because of a rather evil and highly abusive scheme the three of them begin to uncover as Kate takes-up residence in the college and they start to interact on a regular basis. Soon the three are investigating unusual murders which begin to crop-up in town

Kate really is the unwanted child of Frederic Stanton (a man with whom Thompson is very closely associated through psychical research), who died in strange circumstances, the interpretation and understanding of which is one of the drivers of this novel. While Kate is the proactive, practical planner of the trio and Asher is a strong, protective, capable but not invincible resource, Elsie is at first a rather drug-addicted dreamer and romantic who puts herself in difficult situations because of her infatuation with an art teacher she once studied under. Not surprisingly, she's the one who makes the most growth, but her romanticism somehow fails to clue her in to the fact that Asher has fallen for her.

I was impressed with the realistic way this novel was written, and with the inventive and intriguing characters. It was based in some real history (the psychic research society coming out of Cambridge, for example) but wove that into the credible fiction which kept me turning pages despite my total disbelief in such things in real life. It's nicely-plotted and makes for a quick and comfortable read.

The Archived by Victoria Schwab

Title: The Archived
Author: Victoria Schwab
Publisher: Disney
Rating: WARTY!

I can see why Disney-Hyperion wouldn't want a reviewer like me posting an advance review for a novel like this - a living dead version of Blade Runner, but guess what? They can't stop me reviewing it - they can only delay it, and hope I don't count. Newsflash: I do count! Everyone does! Deal with it Disney!

This novel begins in a really confusing manner. Once again it's a YA told in first person PoV because you know it's quite illegal in the USA to write a novel for teens that's not in first person. I once examined a library shelf holding 29 novels, and only six of them were not written in 1PoV, which I confess surprised me a little bit. I thought the percentage of 3PoVs would be lower, so maybe there is hope; maybe writers are becoming smarter? We'll see.

I digress. My confusion came from the author's assurance, right there on the first page of chapter one, that "There should be four of us. Mom, Dad, Ben, me. But there's not. Da's been dead for four years." I guess Schwab isn't familiar with punctuation. I note: a colonectomy after "us", the substitution of a period for a comma before "But", perhaps a semi-colonectomy after "not", but that's not what's confusing. My confusion can be reasonably politely expressed as: "Who the hell is Da?".

At first I thought it was her dad. I thought that her biological father was dead, and this "Dad" was her stepfather, but the more she rattles on about "Dad" the more he seems to be her actual father as opposed to a stiefvater - which is the German for stepfather don't you know - and isn't Schwab a name of German origin even if she isn't?

If you're confused by that last paragraph, you know how I felt at this point in reading this novel.

Perhaps Mackenzie - the main character with a Scots family name for a first name shades of Gabaldon - is speaking loosely, I thought, confused. I didn't know until later that "Da" referred to her grandfather. Who in hell calls their grandfather "Da"? Schwab appears not to get that there's a significant difference between creating mystery to intrigue your readers, and simply obfuscating for the sake of being obscure.

She uses the term "My parents" just a couple of paragraphs later, and the term "Da" disappears, replaced by "Dad" as though there is only one - the original one. Oh, except for this, on page five: "I try to picture a wall between Dad's hand and my shoulder, like Da taught me". Confusing your readers isn't a smart move unless you have a really good 'get out of confusion free' card in hand for later, but not too much later. Schwab didn't. Just out of curiosity, why would she picture a wall...on her shoulder - as opposed to say, a shoulder pad, or a Kevlar jacket, or a suit of armor, or a force-field? I have no idea.

I guess Schwab really wanted to ramp-up the confusion because also on page five we get inset bolded text that runs to page seven which appears to be some sort of flashback and it's not the last of these tricks, either. These things very gradually come into better focus for the reader, but by that time, the irritation level with this has risen significantly. The first of them was simply annoying.

The Bishop family is moving into an aged hotel which has now been converted to apartments. The reason for the move is so that a very selfish Mom can indulge herself in yet another of her whims: to run a coffee shop. The rest of the family (minus Da and Ben, of course) falls into line once more, but Mackenzie, aka Mac, is receiving messages from somewhere.

It turns out that Mackenzie works for the DEA: the Death Enforcement Authority! Instead of hunting down rogue androids, she hunts escaped...what? I have no idea. Let me backtrack. In this world, the dead are never really dead. Instead, their bodies are squirreled away in an archive for no reason at all, where they're kept with their bodies and memories intact in some sort of suspended animation, which begs the question as to what it means to claim that they're dead in the first place - because they're not. They can get up and get down.

When this happens, and apparently when it's in McKenzie's age range, she gets tickled in her pocket where some magic paper reveals the name and age of the animated corpse. She has to use her magic key to pass through a wall at a specific point she can detect. Inside is a corridor known as the narrows, which branches in multiple directions, and is lined with doors. She has to identify an escape door - usually the one through which she entered, and a return door through which she can slip the runner.

This novel was completely nonsensical. Nothing made a lick of sense, nothing was explained so that it might make some sense, and it was tedious and boring as all hell. I simply ditched it unfinished on the principle that life's too short to waste on a sad sack of meaningless and obfuscatory trash like this.

Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow

Title: Sorrow's Knot
Author: Erin Bow
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

How could anyone not want to read a novel written by someone named Bow, which has 'knot' in the title? It’s too precious - especially since this story has roots in native American culture with which the bow is also associated. Fortunately, the blurb made this sound worth reading, and even more fortunately, here is a novel written by a woman about a girl, and it isn't in first person PoV - see, YA authors? It can be done. You don’t need to be hide-bound by trope!

I'm not one of these people who worships native American culture as something magical. To me they are and were no different from any other culture: neither more nor less in tune with nature, neither more nor less "savage", noble or otherwise, than any people living in the same conditions. I don't believe they lived in harmony with nature in any way different from any other, similar culture. They would have exploited it just as much as any other culture had their numbers compelled them to. They were neither wiser, nor dumber than other cultures, and they fell pray to brutality and inter-tribal warfare, and to disease, just as other peoples did. This is not to say it wasn't evil, and a shameful tragedy, the way western Christians moved in on the land, and abused the natives chronically, but that's organized religion for you.

This is the first Bow novel I've read, and from what I read in the first 100 pages or so, I really felt that it was definitely not going to be the last. This is how to write a novel. Bow knows what to do and how to do it, and she has no qualms about getting to it. She has a previous novel titled Plain Kate which is now on my list to read and will probably be reviewed next month. That one is set in Europe.

I don’t know where Bow got her chops, and I'm about as far from an expert on native American culture as you can get, but every paragraph in this novel made me believe this was real; that this is how the people in the novel lived their lives day to day. She made me feel that this is how they thought and how they felt, but Bow doesn’t lecture or sermonize. She starts off with an almost unnoticeable prologue, but wisely, she includes it in chapter one as any decent author ought. This briefly describes the arrival of Otter into the world - not the animal, but Otter the daughter of Willow, the Binder-in-training of the tribe of Shadow people, who live in the village of Westmost, in Earthen dwellings right on the edge of the forest which harbors the shades of the not-so-benign dead.

And therein lies the story. Otter loves to hang out with Kestrel and Cricket, and girl and a boy her own age who are assigned to undertake various tasks in the village. One day, hauling up the decapitated corn stalks from the muddy ground in preparation for the next planting, the three of them encounter one of the shadows of the dead lurking in the dark in the corn roots. It enters Cricket's body and it’s only Otter's binding skills - advanced for someone her age - which draw out the shade and save Cricket's life. Her mother arrives very quickly, alerted by Kestrel's warning, and the shade is dispatched.

Cricket is very weak and is observed closely. If it was a white-hand shade, Cricket will be killed, because there is no cure for it (unless you count madness as a cure), but he's fortunate again: it wasn't. The real problem is that when the village binder dies and Willow, no longer the apprentice, takes over, Otter expects to become her apprentice in turn, but her mother rejects her own daughter. Otter has to go and live now in her own lodge, a dismal construction of wattle and earth, which has been empty for too long. As she's beginning to bemoan her unexpected and unwelcome fate, Kestrel and Cricket move in with her, and soon announce to Otter their own intention to become bound to each other, becoming Okishae, which is rare in this village of mostly women.

Their ceremony takes place after the water walkers - a tribe of mostly men - has made its annual visit to exchange children, the men giving up most of their young girls, the Shadow people giving up most of their boys in exchange. Amongst the new girls is Fawn, a binder who Willow adopts quickly as her apprentice, offering a further slap in the face to Otter.

In time Otter comes to accept Fawn, and Fawn Otter, yet even though they share some secrets, Otter still understands that she is effectively a nobody, with no skills to offer her village. That is until the night that the White Hand shows up at the village and manages to touch Willow. To protect the children sheltering in Willow's lodge - the best warded lodge in the village - Otter creates a binding on the lodge door, but she cannot undo it. Fawn attempts to do so, but she's tired after the night-long battle against the White Hand, and doesn't have the power to undo Otter's work. Despite Otter's help and warnings, the ward costs Fawn her life, and with Willow bearing the shape of a white hand over her heart and having only nine days to live, the only person in the village who can assume the task of being the Binder is Otter herself.

Sorrow's Knot is not only about a knotty problem, it’s about a world where people are tied in knots: they're bound, and constrained, and pinched, and restricted, and confined and pigeon-holed, so you may end up feeling some claustrophobia in reading this. I know I did, and that actually does contribute to the atmosphere of discomfort and unease which also pervades the novel - and not because it’s poorly written. Quite the contrary: it's beautifully written, and that's precisely why we feel uncomfortable: because the characters feel that way. Their whole life is lived in fear of the shadows which surround their village. This is why it's so ironical that these people are referred to as free women when they're anything but.

The village is called Westmost because it's the west-most village known - on the edge of the world so it seems, but the area it occupies is referred to as The Pinch - a suitably constrictive term for the life they lead. The village is encircled and circumscribed by slips and gasts and the White Hand, each form of spirit more dangerous than the last. These are malevolent shades of the dead who have not moved on, but which remain in the shadows, seeking to invade the body of anyone who is insufficiently aware and sufficiently right there. It’s funny because the shadows are constrained with colored yarn and this novel is a colorful yarn about rigid constraint.

The women are bound by tradition and are cruelly restricted in their choice of "profession"; for example it seems that Otter can only be a binder and if not that, then nothing. Kestrel can only be a ranger, never a binder. Cricket can only be a story-teller, and in the end is robbed even of that. No one can leave the village in safety because of the spirits, so they're confined to The Pinch and even there they feel unsafe at times. They're restricted to living in dark, dusty, or dank earth lodges, almost like they're living underground. The lodge can only be entered through a tunnel, curtained at either end. When Otter is rejected by her mother, she's forced to make her own home in a lodge which has been abandoned by someone else in this purportedly shrinking village. And she's one of the fortunate ones.

The only people who have any power over these haunting, tragic, creeping, heart-stopping shadows are the Binders - women of the tribe who are specially gifted and trained, and who can ward off the shadows by creating complex knots in leather cords. These knots can both repel and dispel the shadows, as well as harm the living. Even the dead are bound. A dangerous ceremony is conducted - only during the day - when a villager dies. The body is carried down the river (the spirits cannot cross running water) to the burial ground, but the body is not lowered into the earth; it is elevated into the trees, having been tightly bound hand and foot to prevent the spirit from haunting the village. But apparently this system is not working, and Otter slowly begins to realize why this is.

This is unquestionably a female-centric world, with strong women and very few males involved or even required (for the most part), but one problem I had with this was that even presented as such, there was a powerfully masculine ethos pervading the story. We're taught - for those of us who are willing to listen and learn - that women have a tendency to be better at cooperation than men typically are. That doesn’t mean, of course, that women cannot lead and that men cannot cooperate; it’s a tendency, not a law of nature! The problem then with this novel was that we saw so little of that; instead, we found that the powerful women were contentious and almost tyrannical in their behavior. A nauseating example of this is when a major character is expelled from the village, at the risk of his very life. This represents appallingly callous treatment for a compatriot - treatment that smacks more of masculine than of feminine behavior.

There are some problems with this novel. It’s never really explained how this rather Amazonian world endures. Marriage is almost non-existent. If there are so few men, how are the children born? Do a handful of village men service all the women, or when the mostly male traveler tribe comes up the river to visit once a year is there an orgy?! We don’t know. We do know there are a lot of children, but we're never advised or even offered hints as to how this circumstance came to be, and given what we are offered, how it can be said that the village is dying or shrinking!

Despite this novel being largely female-centric, there are two males who play a huge role, yet the two are essentially interchangeable, and it seems to me that the two main female characters are diminished by this, because they're so dependent upon, and moved by these men. This, for me, rather undermined the strong female presence with which we’re presented at the beginning. Having the one, I can understand, and it works well, but there comes a disturbing and thoroughly unexpected part where one character is effectively is switched out for another one who was just the same, like changing a light bulb, and I saw no sense in this. It was very effectively a betrayal of both the girls at the same time, especially since it effectively weakened the one, although the other continued strongly.

That said I liked this novel, and I consider it a worthy read.

The Midnight Side by Natasha Mostert

Title: The Midnight Side
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
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) any other remuneration for this review.

Not to be confused with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight or with Terri Marie's The Wrong Side of Midnight, or with Mia Zachary's Another Side of Midnight, or M D Nygaard's The Other Side of Midnight, or Patrick DiCiccio's The Jagged Side of Midnight...do you see where I'm going with this? Pick a more distinctive title please? My new title is going to be The Clichéd Side of Midnight, or An Order of 11:59pm, with Midnight on the Side or maybe, yeah: The Half-Assed Side of Midnight....

I'm brand new to Natasha Mostert and I've brashly taken on three of her novels so I sincerely hope she doesn’t let me down! This one is Mostert's debut novel, first published in 1999, but republished with some serious editing last year. Let me offer a full disclosure up front, that I do not believe in any supernatural crap and the reason for this is reason itself! I've seen no valid or even useful evidence for the existence of any of it: gods, devils, demons, magic (black, white, or grey), witchcraft (as opposed to Wicca, which does exist, but is nothing more than a harmless belief, unlike major religions), ESP, clairvoyance, astrology, telekinesis, ghosts, etc., etc., etc. Neither do I believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster (although I did write a novel about it!) and so on. I do, however, love a really good story about any of these topics on the rare occasion I can find one. I'm hoping this is a rare occasion!

First impressions were good. Mostert is a descriptive writer with an eye for a turn of phrase, although she's a bit too fond of 'vertiginous' and I'm not convinced she's using it correctly, but I’ll give her the benefit on that score! Having said that, she doesn’t dally too much, moving the story along with a playful tease here, some disturbing suspense there, just to keep your imagination tickled. There are some bits here and there which become bogged down in memory/flashback, and a bit too much detail for the minor characters, but not enough to tick me off. I do confess to disappointment in her female protagonist. I prefer a good strong female character, and Isabelle is a bit of a wuss, but I am trying to overlook that and some of her sorry behaviors (more anon) as I read this. Or should I say behaviours, since this is set in Britain?

With regard to the setting, kudos! It begins in South Africa, which is where Isabelle is resident, but she's called to Britain by the death of her best friend Alette. A death I immediately suspected as being rather more than accidental, suspicious old me. This actually distracted me because it reminded me of a short story I wrote, but let’s not dwell on that. What I want to mention is how thoroughly Americanized the writing world is - at least the one in which I've been immersed for evidently too long. When this novel mentioned flying from South Africa to the UK, I was lost for a minute. I had assumed this was set in the US, so this itinerary thoroughly confused me! How god-awfully sad is that?! I was thrilled to be proven wrong.

Anyway, enough rambling. So Isabelle is awakened early one morning by a phone-call from Alette, on a really bad line, asking fro Isabelle's help, and implying serious problems. When she receives another call later that morning from Alette's lawyer, informing her of Alette's death in a car accident, Isabelle is shocked, but nowhere near as shocked as she is to discover that this death occurred two days prior to Alette's phone call!

Isabelle learns that not only is she Alette's sole beneficiary, she's also tasked by Alette with something which the lawyer says he needs to discuss with her in person. This is the first of my annoyances with Isabelle's personality - rather than rail against this, or at least object, she meekly complies, traveling to London. She learns that Alette left her three letters, each one to be dispensed to Isabelle on a weekly basis. The first of reveals how awful her originally ideal marriage to Justin was. It began perfectly, but, Alette reveals, it rapidly descended into Justin becoming a control freak in the most extreme ways possible short of physically imprisoning Alette. Even after she divorced him, he continued to stalk her, begging her to return to him, almost literally showering her with flowers and cards. The night she died, she had gone to have it out with him and get him off her back once and for all, and she was in the accident on her way home.

Justin isn't the only guy involved with Alette. Michael lives in a flat (apartment) across the street from Alette's house, and he has a habit of entering the house uninvited, of which Isabelle is unaware to begin with. The first time she meets Justin on this trip is also when he lets himself into the house, but she never tackles him on the matter, and never considers changing the locks! I must admit it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't Justin who stalked Alette after the divorce, but Michael, pretending to be Justin? Or is there something else entirely going on?

Alette's request in the first envelope is that Isabelle help her get revenge upon Justin by bringing down his pharmaceutical company, and she details her plan for doing this with which, again annoyingly, Isabelle complies, since it involves "only" making three phone calls to stock-brokers, questioning the company's viability regarding manufacturing supplies, and mailing two letters (which Isabelle doesn't read). Isabelle, at this point, is a puppet whose strings are caught upon whomever happens to be closest. This isn’t a surprise given the flashbacks we get, disruptive to the story as they are. She accepts an invitation to dinner with Justin despite all she has read about him from Alette. The question is (for me anyway at this point): is she smart to do so - will this begin a friendship to show that Justin isn't quite as bad as he's painted, and it's Michael who's the bad guy, or is she sliding blindly down the same slippery road upon which Alette slid, and only Michael can save her? Interesting, huh? Except that it looks like Isabelle is going to need saving by one or other of these two guys, which doesn’t work well for me! Maybe I'm wrong!

The more I read of this, the more convinced I became that things might be backwards: that Alette is the villain, and Justin the wronged party, and that the lawyer, Lionel Darling is also a villain (especially given the reveal about his troubled childhood), and Michael, the too-friendly neighbor, merely a red-herring. I suspect both Michale and Lionel because Mostert has them both out of town - obviously in the hoe that when she writes more of her anonymous stalker's activities I will think it cannot be either of those guys. Hah! In short, Mostert was doing a wonderful job of screwing with my mind! It has also occurred to me that Alette is still alive, and/or that Darling was orchestrating the whole thing using Alette as a ruse, using Isabelle to pose as The Wisdom and undermine Justin's corporation with her phone-calls for Darling's own purposes. One after another, new theories arose to explain the new information that Mostert leaked with cruelly metronomic ruthlessness, and even more cruel thrift.

I don't get the point of a weak character being the main protagonist in a novel unless they learn how to become strong over the course of the story. I can see how you could work it with a weak character depending upon the story you're telling, but in this one, it’s not working well for someone like me, who adores strong female characters. Well over half-way through, Isabelle shows no sign of taking charge of her life, constantly allowing herself to be led by the nose by various men, including Justin and Michael. Of course, she has a history of this. Alette did this to her throughout their childhood together, and even now is doing it from the grave. Isabelle also allowed a married man to do this to her back in South Africa. With Justin, even after she swore to herself that she wouldn't see him again, she lets him drag her out of the house (metaphorically speaking!) to go on a picnic on a day which is really too cold, and then take her on a tour of some of London's tourist spots.

I'm not going to reveal any more of this. I finished it (it's an easy read) and though the ending was a bit flat, I consider this to be a worthy novel. That's fortunate for me, since I have two more Mosterts to get through! Let me just conclude by saying that one of my guesses was, amazingly, spot on, but you're gonna have to read it find out which one (like you care!). That's the joy of making a sesquicentillion guesses - at least one of them is likely to be close! I don't know what this was like before she got in there and polished it up for re-release, but whatever she did was worth her efforts. I recommend this one.

The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg

Title: The Catastrophic History of You and Me
Author: Jess Rothenberg
Publisher: Dial Books
Rating: WARTY

Ooookay! This review is a lot longer than I intended (it's close to 4,000 words!), but this is a writing blog as well as a reading one, so there's lots to discuss here. Believe it or not, I was attracted to this novel purely because of the title, and then the blurb got me interested more, so here we are! It didn't turn out, exactly, to be a catastrophic history, but it came frighteningly close. And it's certainly not even in the ballpark of Emily Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks for entertainment value.

Let me begin with a word about covers. A lot of authors love to panegyrize book covers. They get excited by them and the gushing writers have a cover reveal party or event, and the reviewers sycophantically acclaim the artwork. How pathetic is that? I don’t deal with covers for the most part because of this crap and because the cover has nothing to do with the author, and all too-often, nothing to do with the story, either. Do cover artists even read the novel before they illustrate it? Perhaps at best the author might be allowed to choose one cover from a selection offered to them by their publisher, but unless they self-publish, that's the most they can hope for. What the hell is up with that business plan?!

But there's a far more serious angle to this, and so I have to comment on how anorexic the girl on this cover looks. She looks like she needs to be on an IV in intensive care until she grows some meat on that skeletal figure. I sincerely hope our fifteen-year-olds in general are not all like her, and I hope even more that our teens do not wish they looked like her. She doesn’t remotely look like someone who excels in aquatic sports, not even if it’s "just diving", as Brie does. I hope even more passionately that this culture - the one which browbeats young girls into believing that unless they look like this girl on the cover, then they’re nothing but worthless, ugly, obese losers who deserve to go nowhere in life - dies the death it richly deserves.

But my real beef here is with the young adult authors - especially the female ones. My question to them - to the ones who allow their work to be degraded by abusive and/or misleading covers - is: how long are you going to tolerate having girls assaulted and insulted by covers which project an image that cannot do anything other than convey a message to your young female readers that they’re substandard if they don’t conform to the image you're profiting from selling to them?

To all YA writers: your novel is fiction. It doesn’t demand that readers do anything other than enjoy it. The cover is a different business altogether. The cover is nothing but a commercial, and whatever is on that cover is what you're expecting your readers to buy. Think about that. I know you're thrilled to have your first novel published (anyone would be) and in that case, you'll pretty much do anything to please the editor and publisher, and go along with whatever demands they have, but to all those writers who have made it, and are selling, surely you can change this dynamic? Or do you not care what messages you're purveying to impressionable teen girls as long as the profits continue to roll?

Aubrie (Brie) Eagan is dead - died, quite literally, of a broken heart (broken into two equal halves when her boyfriend told her he didn’t love her). So you know from the off that this is a flashback book. The question is, can Rothenberg provide three hundred and twenty five pages of good flashbacks to supplement the reasonably decent first fifty pages? The answer to that was 'No', in brief, and this appalling weakness on Brie's heart's part was indeed portentous of her character in the rest of the novel, I'm sorry to report.

Brie is soon portrayed as a ghost watching her autopsy, memorial service and funeral, and having occasional thoughts about her life or her family or friends, or her boyfriend who supposedly precipitated her death. I liked the concept. The execution? Not so much. Which writer hasn’t thought of starting a story at the end? I know I have. The weird thing was that in this novel I couldn’t escape the intense feeling that those memories to which we're party in those first fifty pages aren't Brie's flashbacks, but Jess Rothenberg's. That felt a bit creepy to me. I know they say write what you know, but there's such a thing as being too knowledgeable in fiction!

This novel was published 2012 when Brie was fifteen, which means she wasn't even born in the 80's, yet she likes 80's music. The chapter titles are lines from assorted old songs. She also apparently liked the TV show Friends (which I detest, and) which quit transmission when Brie was a bit too young to be able to properly get into the show. But I liked Rothenberg's writing in general. She writes technically well, and there's some mild humor tossed in, but the writing didn't make up for the plotting, and the humor went sour pretty quickly. Brie's perfection is a bit cloying; then we got to the 'heaven is a pizza place' portion of the text, and I started to realize that I probably going to like this novel after all, especially if it insisted on traveling the road less forsaken.

I am definitely not a fan of these movies where 'Heaven' is shown to be this every-day place where everyone is friendly and familiar - and god is a good ol' boy - you know like George Burns or Morgan Freeman making wise-ass remarks served up as folk wisdom. I'm sorry but that's not the heaven/hell we read of in the Bible. Not even close! That’s a heaven which Christians are forced to cook-up because the reality of their belief system is, in the end, completely unpalatable to them in this day and age. But all religions are cooked-up anyway, so this really isn’t any different from the other inventions.

Rothenberg has Brie finding herself, immediately after the funeral, on a bus heading to a place she knows. She's not far from her house but the driver won't let her out until the stop, which is in a parking lot where her favorite pizza parlor happens to be. Rather than go home (her stomach is rumbling), she goes into the pizza place. Inside is a bunch of other youngsters all around her age or younger, no older folk except for the Asian woman behind the counter who insists that Brie fills out a form before she can get pizza. Seriously? This made my stomach start to turn. Rothenberg had some credit with me for a decently written first fifty, but I had sincerely hoped that she had better material than this in store, if she wanted to stay in my good graces, and she failed dismally on the final lap.

Brie ends up waiting a week in the pizza parlor for the paperwork to go through. Any teen who could sit in one place for that long without wanting to explore or investigate or ask questions is a complete loser in my book, to say nothing of being totally unrealistic. Brie is rendered worse than this by Rothenberg's attaching her to a cocky, smart-mouthed guy, who animates Brie like a puppeteer, so yes, I'm a tad bit pissed off to discover another female YA author who abuses her female characters by creates an interesting (if rather whiny) female teen, and then sells her down the river by making her an adjunct of some dude who is far too fictional for his own believability.

This guy, Patrick in a bomber jacket, takes over Brie's afterlife. He has an immense secret which would definitely have benefited her, but he denies her this knowledge, keeping her dangling on a string, playing with her, and all the while calling her the most abysmal cheese names (based on Brie, duhh). That motif is way-the-hell overdone and made me sick whenever Rothenberg trotted it out yet again like an aging and decrepit sports figure who didn't know when to retire. It was like Rocky IV, Roquefort, you know? Anyway, I'm getting side-tracked. Patrick at one point writes down the supposed five stages of grieving, checking them off as Brie purportedly passes through them. Wrong!

Rothenberg evidently doesn’t fully comprehend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's position on grieving! It was only put forward by her as a model (five stages of grief when confronting one's own death) so not only was it not intended for anyone in Brie's position (since her grief isn’t over her own impending death but over her loss of Jacob). The stages were originally listed as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but this isn’t a complete list, and these "stages" can occur in any order and may arrive simultaneously or not at all, which makes Patrick's list look a bit moronic, but that's Patrick all over, isn't it?

Plus, Rothenberg has Brie so whiny about wanting to visit her own home where her parents are, and then she blows that off completely to go riding around with Bomber-jacket Boi on his Bike. That lost believability too, for me. Fortunately for both myself and Rothenberg's self, she kinda turned it around and put in sufficient twists to keep me interested, even while I chafed at the poor plotting - such as allowing her to physically contact her supposedly mean old ex-boyfriend, Jacob, but unable to pull that same stunt when she finally gets to visit with her parents and her kid brother. So yeah, there's a lot of unexplained inconsistency which did nothing endear this tale to me, either. Since Jacob turned out to be gay, if she'd trotted out someone called Edward as his boyfriend, that would have put some leavening into the mix, but it wasn't to be. It was more like 4F.

It was at this point, when Brie visits her family and her three best friends, that Rothenberg starts tossing in the twists, which was appreciated, otherwise I might have had a DNF on my hands by this point, but while I had to say that the story held some twists that kept my interest stirred somewhat, at the same time it was really annoying me with inconsistent writing - or more accurately, inconsistent world-building. But this isn’t confined to Rothenberg's writing. I see it all the time in this kind of story: for example, in the movie Ghost which I reviewed elsewhere in this blog. There is a massive inconsistency, to which writers seem blind (or are only too well aware but are too lazy to tackle it), in a story which has a ghost walking around making solid contact with the ground, or sitting and making ready contact with a seat, but then they can’t open a door, or touch a person, or lift an object! This is pure, unadulterated bullshit! What's up with that trope? Where did that mindlessness come from?

We find the same thing in this novel. Brie has the hardest time picking up a rock, but she can climb a tree without even thinking about it, and she has no problem interacting with the family dog as though she were completely corporeal. Thinking is evidently something in which Rothenberg didn’t indulge herself sufficiently when building this world, but in that she was no different from a score of other writers who share this disability in this kind of story, and if that's an insult, then I'm sorry, but I call it like I see it.

Rothenberg is inconsistent in other regards, too, as I've mentioned before. In one part of the story she has Brie experience no problem in directly influencing Jacob, and in directly damaging Sadie's car, but later, when Brie is highly motivated to influence Jacob for a good purpose rather than to harm him, Rothenberg has her character inexplicably fail and then completely give-up because she can't 'make a difference'. This is really bad writing. It makes no sense for her to simply abandon Jacob without even trying (worse, she gets completely distracted from her cause - again!), and then to fret about it insanely later. I have to wonder what went on in Rothenberg's mind when she made heaven (or purgatory, or a way-station - whatever this place is) so remarkably life-like without offering any explanation as to why, but then adorned the ghosts with a spotty lack of life-like ability.

Why, for example, does she have Brie constantly in fear of falling even after ghost Brie has deliberately jumped from the top of the Golden Gate bridge and come to no harm? Another mystery. This is inconsistent and poor writing. On this topic, how does the falling work exactly? Why does gravity work on ghosts, all the way to the ground, but not right through to the actual impact with the ground?! Why does her dress get soaked? Why do they need to eat and drink, but never need the bathroom? Why do they not feel heat and cold? If they're really ghosts, why are they pretty much indistinguishable from living people except in some key ways which benefit the story but for which we’re given no intelligent explanation? A lot of this makes no sense, and it saddens me that Rothenberg doesn't appear to care that it makes no sense.

Brie is annoying, and is such a gadfly, too. I know that teens can be disturbingly flighty, especially the younger ones, but I find it hard to believe that someone as decent and disciplined as Brie was in life, could be such a capricious Will o' the Wisp in the afterlife when everything else about her seems to remain pretty much the same. She has the big ideas and urges, but then she seems to immediately forget it all and go off at a tangent. If Rothenberg had written this into the story - explained why she was like this, or revealed that she had been this way when alive - it would have made this behavior believable, but she doesn’t give us that; she just has Brie going in all directions for no good reason - indeed, for bad reasons.

Worse than this though: she has this Patrick character - the Bomber jacket dude - show up without the character offering any explanation for who he is or what he wants or what he thinks he's doing. Why is he with her and why does she blithely accept his presence twenty-four seven without question or introspection? The fact that Brie never pursues this until the pell-mell mess of an ending renders her a sorry-assed and unmotivated Mary Sue. You seriously do not want to do that to the protagonist of your story unless you have a really good explanation for it in hand!

Patrick was nothing but an annoyance to me, even moreso than Brie, because he brought nothing to the story. The only thing he contributed was to highlight how lame and helpless Brie was, and how much she desperately needed a man to make her complete - or in this case to make her even functional. What an insult to women!

Later Rothenberg brings in another character, this one from Brie's past, with the unlikely name of Larkin. Honestly? But despite her idiotic name, I dearly wish she had shown up earlier because she's the most interesting character in the entire novel. Maybe that's why Rothenberg kills her off? Yep - the dead can die. Until then they're very much alive for all practical purposes in this dumb-ass world!

Larkin also offers things (which seem much more honest and decent than those which Patrick brought to the table), but Rothenberg snatches both characters away from Brie, leaving her all alone. Larkin (who is tragically unexplored in this novel) may have been misrepresenting things to Brie, but she was doing neither more nor less than Patrick was. He was lying when he told Brie that this was her afterlife and the choices were hers, because right after that, he spends his time luring her into doing pretty much whatever he wants without regard to her wishes or even her best interests, including leading her down an unpleasant path at one point, and then trying to talk her out of following that path as though she had made a mistake, not him! Worse than this, he keeps key facts from her in an unbelievably cruel, even brutal, way.

So Patrick is a major jerk, and the more I think about bad characters, and poor plotting, and inconsistency, and lame world-building, the more I realize that I'm now in a position where I have to try to find a good reason to rate this novel as a worthy read! In that, I failed! That's rather ironic given that I actually like the story in very broad and general terms! What’s a guy to do?! I found that reading some positive and some negative reviews helped to clarify my position for me!

I do not seek out reviews for a novel before I read it, but sometimes reading the perspective of others once I already have my own largely in place really helps to clarify some issues about which I haven’t completely made up my own mind yet. This wouldn’t work before I read the novel because other reviewers can be so inconsistent for this purpose. I might find myself agreeing with them on novel A, and then in complete opposition on novel B even if it’s by the same author. That's why I don’t have a 'blogroll' over there, because I don’t have any blog which I know I can go to and get a take on a novel which is meaningful to me personally.

I choose the novels I will read based on things I've read, including some review references, not so much to novel content, but to authors they thought wrote like this or not like that. Reviews in general tell me nothing useful because they're not really reviews. That's why I started this blog: to offer people something more than "Hey I loved this, you gotta read it!", because unless I know that reviewer intimately, their recommendation (and that's exactly what it is, a recommendation, not a review), tells me nothing of value. Even when I do know them intimately, a recommendation or a comment can be completely useless, as I discovered with the fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel, may it rest in hell!

So when I'm going out there to familiarize myself with the buzz, I'll read some one-star reviews and some five-star and see how I feel about what the extremes have said in comparison with my own feelings. It’s because of this that I noted that some people have described what a great character the dog was! I disagree. The dog was entirely in keeping with the Disney theme with which Rothenberg inextricably and inexplicably imbued this novel, but that merely served to provide a theme which nauseated me. I'm guessing here that Rothenberg once knew an animal like this when she was a child, because it seems to me that only such an experience could make a person write that way about the freak of nature and genetic disaster that Basset hounds actually are. If she'd employed a border collie in this role, or even a beagle, it would have made it slightly more palatable for me, but I still would have had a problem with how the dog seems to completely understand everything Brie says including her references to third parties. Puleeze! Disney-fy much?

Brie seems to be entirely too old for such an addiction to Disney as she exhibits, too. Indeed, she behaves throughout more like a pre-teen than someone who is almost sixteen. She's not a good person, which betrays everything Rothenberg tells us about her from her previous life. It’s all about her, and I don’t care if she's supposed to be grieving because she doesn't remotely behave as though she is, especially given that there is a much bigger context to this story than her own personal pity-party, and this behavior in which Rothenberg indulges her character completely undermines that bigger picture.

The truth is that Brie is a selfish, whiny, and vindictive stalker, bordering on psychotic in her behavior and then it all suddenly turns around for no good reason (at least not that we’re party to!). It’s after this point that she discovers the truth she was too blind to see about Jacob (and by extension about his relationship with Sadie), but even this part of the novel is badly done. Given how Jacob was when Brie was alive (from her frequent flashback mileage), I simply cannot believe that he would have behaved the way he did towards her. The way he behaved was to dump Brie and tell her he didn’t love her. The true reason for his breaking things off with her is that he is gay. Given how decently he treated her prior to this, I just cannot buy at all that he would cut her off like that, or that he would not have told her this fact about himself, especially with what we’re told about how long they'd known each other.

The other side of this coin is that I cannot buy that he even started dating her and became so attached to and so enamored of her when he knew he was gay. Nor can I believe that not a single one of the four girls (Brie and her three close friends) had any inkling whatsoever of his real nature given how long at least two of them had known him. His character makes no sense and this cheapens the story as well as Brie's mental state.

So then we fall into the dénouement of this novel, which is that Patrick's raison d'être is that he's Brie's boyfriend from a previous life when her name was Lily. Patrick was a moron then, too, and Lily died when he crashed his motorbike because he wouldn’t listen to Lily telling him to slow down in the approaching bad weather. He proved himself to be an even greater loser when he killed himself. Now why Lily evidently became immediately reincarnated as Brie, and Patrick sat on his ass for seventeen years in a pizza shop I guess we’ll never know, but Patrick is now forty five, and Brie is still sixteen, or at best, 2 times 16, which I'm sorry, but in this case doesn’t make 32. How this is going to work or even why it should is also a mystery.

Mysteries seem to abound at the end of this novel. I don’t know what happened, but the sedate, some might say sluggish, pace is sped up dramatically, yet with sadly little drama. It wasn't until this point that I fully resolved that I was going to rate this as a 'warty'. Had the ending not been such a godawful mess, I might not have done so despite the large number of issues I took with this.

Brie becomes reincarnated in her own body on the night that Jacob broke up with her (where is the original Brie?!), and now of course, she's able to comfort him instead of going psycho on him. She learns that he discussed his sexual orientation with Sadie, but Sadie never had the decency to be a real friend to Brie and at the very least hint at this. Immediately following this, Brie is reincarnated as Lily on that fateful night, too. In the first instance, she has some significant time before she dies, but not in the second instance which was really the first instance chronologically. Are you following this? Again, randomness pervades the story for no good reason.

In the end, the story simply fell apart. The ending made very little sense given the context, but everyone lived happily ever after. I'm sorry but no. This is drivel. It started out with so much potential, but then went into the toilet and liked it there. I have no choice but to call this WARTY!

Unraveling Isobel by Eileen Cook

Title: Unraveling Isobel
Author: Eileen Cook
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: worthy!

I'm starting in on Unraveling Isobel which has a purple cover, whilst drinking Darjeeling tea which comes in a purple pack! What could be more purple-fect? Gee darling, it's Darjeeling….

Reading another first person PoV novel is not exactly thrilling me, since I am already in process of reading two others; Living Dead in Dallas and Over the Rainbow! I'm really down on 1st person PoVs, but there are so many of them out there! What gives with that? None of them are detective stories! Well, maybe this one is - kinda. I began this novel feeling the same thrill I enjoyed when I started reading Sea of Tranquility. I can only hope this turns out as well as that did, but there are too many tropes in this novel so far to give me that kind of confidence. How shall I trope thee? Let me count the ways:

1. The girl is seventeen
2. She arrives at a new school
3. At least one of her parents is not in the picture
4. The guy is roughly the same age
5. At least one of his parents is not in the picture
6. There's an electric current that runs between them when they touch
7. The guy is brooding (no word on when the eggs will hatch….)
8. The girl sees the guy without his shirt on fairly soon in their relationship
9. The guy is muscular
10. The guy is troubled
11. The girl and the guy hate each other on sight but the hatred all-too-rapidly turns into instadore
12. The girl ends up in the guy's arms because of some happenstance which literally throws them together
13. The girl is injured in a small way; the guy takes care of her even when her parent would be more appropriate to the task
14. The guy's eyes are Aryan blue
15. The guy has hair falling into said eyes
16. There are bitchy girls in school
17. The school lunches are nasty
18. The guy catches her doing something embarrassing
19. The girl suspects the guy of perpetrating some evil act
20. The couple is caught in flagrante delicto by the bitchiest girl in the school

This novel starts out with Isobel traveling on the ferry to the island where she will live with her mother and her mother's new husband. It’s her last year of high school and she has to spend it at a new school away from her friends and everything that's familiar. Not only is her stepfather's name Richard, he really is a dick. Think of him as Richard the Turd. His son Nathaniel is your standard trope and completely uninteresting except, of course, to Isobel.

Given the chance to choose her own bedroom, Isobel snoops in Nathaniel's room and then finds her way up to the attic level where there's a room which is the only one she likes. Nathaniel throws a hissy fit when he discovers this, because this is dead sister Evelyn's dorm! No one can understand how Isobel managed to get up there because the door to the upper stairs is supposedly always kept locked. Nathaniel's mother and his mentally challenged kid sister died a few months back in a boating accident. That night Isobel, a budding artist, sketches the room but falls asleep in the middle of it.

She wakes up to a banging sound: the standard loose window trope, and she sees a young girl in her room, dripping water, with a piece of seaweed stuck to her face. Isobel screams. Everyone rushes into the room, and they all think she's had a nightmare. When Dick seizes her sketch pad and, uninvited, looks through her drawings, he freaks at the one she drew of the room - which is now different from what she drew: the sketch portrays the room as it was when the girl slept there, not as it is now. Dick tears up the drawing. When everyone has left, Isobel discovers a patch of fluid on the floor which she immediately tastes. It’s salt water and there's a piece of seaweed in it. Funny how not a single one of four people noticed that when the lights were on and they were all purposefully looking around for signs of an intrusion...! Isobel recovers the torn pieces of the picture. I'm guessing there's a clue in there somewhere.

But there are bigger issues here! Who in their right mind would blindly taste a patch of anonymous liquid they discovered on a dirty floor? And worse, who would do that, and then dismiss it all as imagination the every next day? How would I have written this? I would have had Isobel step in the liquid, which was hidden under the curtain, which is why it wasn't seen before. When she looks down, she sees the seaweed; then curiosity overcomes caution, and she tastes the water. That way it would seem far more natural (if still icky!). So yes, there are some serious problems with this novel. As another example: the first time Isobel explores the kitchen she notes that "There wasn't even a dishwasher...", but later, after Nathaniel improbably comes out of the kitchen carrying a very sharp knife for no other reason than to artificially scare Isobel (he was supposedly using the very sharp knife to spread cream cheese onto a bagel) she goes back into the kitchen with him, and he's unloading the dishwasher. Hmm! The case of the phantom dishwasher! Maybe it died and came back as a ghost, too? I'm sorry, but that just doesn’t wash!

At one point, Cook starts a list that begins with 'either', but it lists more than two options. Just saying...! But at least she knows to write chaise longue instead of chaise lounge! Props to her for that. So yes, problems and I'm trying to stem my nausea at the trope guy, but overall, I'm enjoying the story. Cook knows how to hook, but she also frequently kicks me out of my enjoyment of the story by the awful instadore. The problem for me is really not so much that it's not likable, but that the potential for it to go south with the birds is high, and I don’t like that! I'm stepping out with a new story here, and it’s full of promise and potential. What in life is greater than exploring something new: a new novel, a new place, a new movie, a new song, a new relationship? But the joy of exploration of a new home with fine wooden floors is considerably lessened when there are so many loose rugs underfoot. I am hoping this Cook won’t spoil the broth she's creating for me.

She brings in the sad trope of the Ouija board (French-German for 'yes', of course) when three girls come over to Isobel's for a sleep-over. Like I said in another review, Yes-Yes boards are nonsense and not a single one of them has ever spelled out any message from the great beyond, so it’s a pity Cook couldn’t find something better; however, having said that, she handles it quite well, at one point turning it into a finger-wrestling match between Isobel and Nicole when Nicole tries to take over the planchette and answer her own question with Nathaniel's name! That was amusing. Then a mirror shatters and the part which sticks in Isobel's foot seems to carry a portion of the black and white image of Evelyn which Isobel saw in the mirror before it shattered.

So the story continues to lure despite some YA clichés and it’s an easy read. I'm interested in finishing it and I hope the reward is worth putting up with Nathaniel's comic book studly magnetism. At least Isobel isn’t quite the wilting violet I feared she'd become, and Cook keeps the Mary Sue factor under reasonable control. She does let loose a huge plot fart when she has Nathaniel take Isobel down to the beach by the secret library exit, and Isobel almost falls down a well. Nathaniel reveals to her that the well had a very poor top, but her father covered it over and sealed it some time before. Hmm! Daughter and mother mysteriously drowned. Daughter's body never found. Well on property. Father covered over the well. Anyone here read the Telegraph? I wonder if there's a skeleton in the well.

After a bizarre incident when sea-shells are found all over the house - Dick nearly stepped on one, horror of horrors! - it's deemed that Isobel is cracking up and needs therapy. Seriously? This one was too much to take, especially when her mother gave Isobel no support whatsoever. It's just not realistic, not even close, so at that point I wasn't liking the novel at all. But Isobel goes to see Doctor Mike, which is an entertaining scene, and it helped recover the story for me a bit - that and the really cool revelation on p271 which I never saw coming. Isobel later learns that her therapist is Nicole's father. Worse than this, Nicole reveals to Isobel and Nathan, after she catches them kissing, that she can hear everything going on in her father's doctor's office because of a shared air-vent with her room: Mike's office is in his house. At this point Isobel has a case for a huge malpractice suit, yet neither she nor Nathaniel has that thought even cross their mind. Nor does Isobel, idiot that she is, consider taking that particular issue to her mother. So now we have child abuse going on.

There are also some weird typos in the half of the novel. For example, on p136 we find, "The past two weeks had done nothing but convince me I was cheer leader material." I think the word 'but' in that sentence was intended to be the word 'to' instead, given the context. I guess it could be sarcasm, but it doesn't read like that to me, in context. On p154 we find, "Gams of steal" when Isobel is joking about her legs. That should have been "Gams of steel," but I don't see how Isobel would use the term 'gams' for legs. I think Cook was trying to be clever and use it because it echoes "Buns of Steel", but it fell flat for me because it didn't seem like something Isobel would think of to say. On p205, Cook writes, "You dad does like you" instead of "Your dad...". I tell you, these writers should hire me to proof read their material! On another subject, we're repeatedly reminded that Isobel isn't athletic, yet she mentions an old sports bra at one point! I guess I don't see how she would even own a sports bra, much less an old one, if she doesn't do sports.

Nowhere does Cook ever reveal exactly how big the island is, but given what limited resources it has, and how small the town is, I fail to see how it could have a full-sized high school. I also can't credit Nicole with having such influence over the school so that everyone is essentially a slave to her whims. It's not realistic. Neither is it realistic that everyone would have exactly the same reaction towards Isobel after Nicole spreads the word that she caught her kissing Nathaniel in the school parking lot. Everyone shuns Isobel and that's pure bullshit.

But in the end, I am going to rate this as a worthy read, because the ending isn't bad at all, apart from the improbable behavior of Isobel's mother, but then she's been improbable all the way through the tale! So yes, a worthy, and a plan to read at least one more of Cook's novels. She has at least three others out there, but no entry in wikipedia, so I have no idea at this point in what order they were published.

Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey

Title: Haunting Violet
Author: Alyxandra Harvey
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WORTHY!

I have no belief in any of the paranormal or fringe nonsense: ghosts, vampires, UFOs, angels, demons, etc. I do not believe because there is no evidence that any of that is real, and there's much to argue rather strongly against it. What is a well-known fact is that people have very over-active and self-delusive imaginations. Having said that, I do enjoy science-fiction, or a good paranormal story, although it’s hard to find the latter! That's why I was thrilled to discover Haunting Violet.

I've just started this one and while I found it a bit pretentious of Harvey to change her name (Alexandra) to Alyxandra for the book covers, she can call herself whatever she wants if she writes like this. I wish I knew what it was that draws me in to one book after barely a sniff of chapter one, and yet another book repels me after only one paragraph, but whatever it is, if you bottle it, it was my idea! I hope that Harvey ensures that the thrill from the first page is maintained.

The female protagonist in this novel reminds me a lot of Gwen in Ruby Red, although the novels cover very different subject matter; however, if you liked that one and its sequel, Sapphire Blue, you'll very likely enjoy this one, too, but note that this is early days!

Violet Willoughby (last name straight out of Sense & Sensibility!) and her mother are socially-climbing frauds. Violet's mother (her father is nowhere in sight - she doesn’t even know who he is) defrauds people by posing as a medium and preying cruelly on the emotions of the bereaved. In appealing to the aristocracy with her shams, Violet's mother hopes to garner social rewards for herself and a beneficial match for her daughter. Violet, OTOH, is much more sanguine about these things, and has a great sense of humor.

They travel to the estate of Lord Jasper (seriously? Jasper?) with their maid, Marji and their 'manservant' Colin, an old childhood friend of Violet's from when their circumstances were a lot less elevated. Violet and Colin sneak down to the parlour late at night, and prep the room for their séance the next day. The only problem is that of the bellows, which they employ to send "spirit" drafts of cool air across the room. Violet ends up with them strapped to her leg! As the affair is about to begin, she hobbles cautiously over to take her seat at the table, but finds no empty chair. The one her mother has indicated is occupied by a dripping wet girl.

It turns out that this girl is a ghost, and for the first time, Violet, who doesn’t believe in ghosts either, is forced to accept that they believe in her, she can see and smell them. She later shocks that particular ghost's twin by revealing that she knows of her twin's murder, which was by drowning in a pond. It’s strongly hinted that the living twin stood to gain rather significantly from her sister's death, but whether this is merely a red herring remains to be seen.

So how amusing is it that I'm blogging this story featuring the drowned Rowena, and outside we're having a huge deluge (which is most welcome)?

Harvey has made a brave attempt to write a Victorian ghost story in an English setting, but I have to say she slips up here and there with terminology. There's also the occasional clunky statement such as: "...have tread the boards..." when it should be "...have trod the boards..." and even then I doubt that's a phrase which would have been used. OTOH, Violet is from a rather different culture from that of the people with whom she typically spends her time, so perhaps there's some wiggle room there!

Britain does have hornets, but I've never seen one there, nor heard the term used there. It’s always 'wasp', not 'hornet', and I've never heard crickets chirping in England. That's not to say they don’t, but I grew up in a relatively rural setting and I cannot recall ever hearing them at night. It always made me wonder what the heck that ubiquitous nocturnal chirping was in American films and TV shows precisely because I was unfamiliar with it! Oh, and we don't have 'stoops' in England (except as in She stoops to Conquer. That's an Americanism. But who knows, maybe in Victorian times that was the term they used? I find that hard to swallow though, because it comes from a Dutch term as I recall, so there was no reason for it to enter England in the way it entered the USA.

Violet is determined to find out what happened to the drowned girl, Rowena despite opposition, if only to get Rowena out of her life. She considers pretty much everyone a suspect, and is frustrated that Rowena doesn’t deign to point out who amongst the guests the murderer is, but one thing Violet fails to consider is that another ghost might be behind the large urn which nearly fell on her, and the chandelier which she avoids because Rowena got in her face. It doesn't help that Rowena seems unable to speak, but perhaps she doesn't speak because the guilty party isn’t present amongst the living?

Violet is preparing for her mother's next séance, so it would seem that a show-down is in the offing, and I have a three-day weekend coming up! And it's a rainy one! We've had a really unusual 4.4" of rain, almost all of it in the last 24 hours! Really weird, but highly appropriate to this novel!

You know, there's a lot to be said for the portability of ebooks and for the convenience of having a search function, but I could never write 'Ode to a Kindle' or 'Elegy in a Nook' because nothing kindles the urge to find a comfortable reading nook than does a hardback book. Haunting Violet is such a book, not only because it tells a great story (at least so far!), but also because it has a smell, and a feel, and a look, and a heft to it which ebook readers do not. By that, I mean that once you have your iPad or your Nook, you're stuck with the same thing no matter what book you read on it. It feels the same and it smells the same, and that will never change until you buy a new one, no matter which novel you're reading on it. And who really wants to be glued to a screen-swiper? Wouldn't you much rather be addicted to a great page-turner?!

Haunting Violet has a different look and feel to any previous book I've read. And it has added qualities that are impossible to get in an ebook. It has one of those weird and wonderful new covers that has a cool, slightly matte feeling to it, which imbues me with a compulsion to buy a book even when the book is utterly repugnant to me! Fortunately, I resist those impulses fiercely! When this book is opened, and I press my fingers to the cover and my thumb to the pages and spread the book a little more, it has an oddly addictive noise which results from the friction of the pages rubbing against one another. No ebook can do offer you this. And no ebook can give me the thrill that I felt when each of my own novels arrived in the mail, and I had a real physical thing to hold and examine, and which now accumulate side-by-side in shameless familiarity on one of my many book shelves. Yes, I'm a dinosaur, but dinosaurs are cool!

Anyway, on to Violet. The séance was quite a show-down, but I didn't guess what Harvey was going to do. What happened is that Violet's mother was exposed as a charlatan by the evil Caroline, governess of Tabitha, sister of the drowned Rowena. Whatever Carline's plan was, it worked, because Violet's mother insisted that they all leave in the middle of the night, returning home to London. Here's where the story lost suspension of disbelief (the SoD!) for me, because Harvey has the locals throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at the Willoughby's front door. I honestly could not believe that this would realistically happen. I honestly couldn't credit that this news could have spread so rapidly that it reached "the commoners" the very next day, or that people would even care that much.

But I was willing to let that pass because Harvey's writing has built up a significant level of goodwill within me, and indeed, it's fortunate for her that she has, because the relationship between Violet and Colin is taking off, and it has far too much YA cliché for my taste, including the 'hair falling into eyes' bullshit which frankly makes my stomach turn. There's many a slip twixt trope and trick, but to her credit, at least Harvey doesn't harp on the romance to an appalling level.

Xavier, Violet's putative fiancé, shows up to tell her that it's all off on account of his mother, but really on his own account, snotty spineless trash that they are. But this comes as a relief to Violet, although Violet's mother gives her a black eye over it, abusive bitch that she is. I don't think I've mentioned Xavier in this review because it was obvious that he was a nonentity in the grand scheme. Lord Thornhill, whom Violet discovered (on the night of her mother's ignominy) is actually her father, comes to visit, but only to tell her she's not wanted.

Violet finds that she is now seeing spirits regularly, including a charming schnauzer ghost dog which adopts her and hangs with her wherever she goes. That might prove significant for later plotting. Violet eventually and angrily reveals to her mother that she really can see spirits, and her mom then trapes her around town buying stuff and having a 'spirit photograph' taken which shows Violet surround by fuzzy spirits (and her little dog, too!), but in the background, clearly showing, is Rowena. Violet's mom sends a copy of the photo to Lord Jasper, and Violet is invited back to his estate - without her disgraced mother.

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway, Violet returns in triumph and despite meanness, succeeds in convincing everyone that she is truly a medium. Not that this puts an end to the meanness and rejection, unaccountably. I have to say that some of this story borders on the ridiculous, especially the things which Violet gets away with and which are done to her given her position and circumstances, and the time-period in which this is set. For example, she's frequently left in a room with a guy and no one to chaperon her, as happens after the séance, when Peter (yes: the male organ of generation) is mean to her. It makes me wonder why Harvey chose the later nineteenth (or is that nine teeth?) century rather than today. There's a huge difference between having someone be a rebel in Victorian times and completely dispensing with suspension of disbelief.

But Violet finds out - more through luck than judgment - who the villain is. It wasn't one I'd overtly suspected, but it was a fairly obvious one. There were too many read herrings for my taste, and I found it inexplicable that Rowena became so powerful at the end of the novel but couldn't even tell Violet who the villain was when they first met?! There was no explanation offered for this, which means, of course, that it was pure desus ex machina rather than an integral part of a better plot. Harvey could have done a lot better there, but having said all that, I still really liked this story and I saw Violet especially as a worthy female protagonist, so I recommend this one.