When Mystical Creatures Attack by Kathleen Founds

Title: When Mystical Creatures Attack
Author/Editor: Kathleen Founds
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
"dain" is mistakenly used in place of "deign" unless the author was actually talking about Norse mythology.... That's a bit sad coming from a book published by a university press!

I have to confess I'm not sure how this got published by the University Of Iowa Press when the author apparently has no connection with the U of I, but there you have it. I actually worked at U of I for a few years before the cold drove me south, not that this is really relevant..... I also have to confess that I'm not a fan of epistolary stories, which this one is. I find them to be as unrealistic as first person PoV stories in general. Having said that, this one wasn't too bad to begin with. What else do I have to confess? Okay, let's not get into that....

This story, which I was not able to finish due to boredom - is one of insanity, but whether it's of the insanity of Mrs Freedman, the high school English teacher who loses it one day, or of society itself, remains a mystery. I really loved the opening few pages where Mrs Freedman's students quite evidently did their best to free her desperately clutching fingers from the last vestige of her self-control (and succeeded with their fine, off-the-wall essays), but after that, the story went right downhill for me.

Actually, even at that point, I was cringing over the utter lack of respect these students had for her, and one or two of the appalling things they wrote. Clearly this is a classroom totally out of control, and the story seemed to be hewn from the same wood. It was a mess; it looked like it had been hewn and then tossed into a wood chipper, and I would know, because my name is Wood and I am chipper for the most part.

It was hard to know who was narrating the tale at some points. The emails and letters were, of course, easily attributed, but then random chapters would launch into a narrative and it took a moment or two to figure out who was talking and where we were at with the story after this new departure. There are even recipes at one point, with amusing titles made from plays on words, but these were let down by the boring text beneath, relating mundane stories of little interest.

In the end (not that I made it that far), the story wasn't that great, revolving as it did, around two students and a teacher, two of whom were completely irresponsible and the third of whom had lost not only her marbles, but all concept of what marbles even were.

The opening pages were hilarious, but after that, the tale became dark and sad, and very mundane, and it wasn't engaging for me. I didn't want to read more because I really didn't care what was going on, not even at those points where I fully grasped what was going on. I would have much rather read more of the student's contributions (even as I freely admit that some of them were beyond the pale).

I have to say that in a way I felt cheated, because I had honestly thought that this story was really about mystical creatures attacking a school. It wasn't at all. The mystical creatures are nothing but a metaphor and this, when pretentiously employed in the title of a book, is a sentence of death (and dearth) in my experience. Had I understood this ahead of time, I would never have asked to read this particular volume.

In pursuit of my failing aim to try and include a song in those reviews that I down-rate, here's my effort for this particular one. To the tune of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour:

Beware, beware of the mystical creature attack! Stay out of their way!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack! Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and that's a metaphor now), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (I'm feeling really floored now), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're trying to take you away,
Trying to break up your day.
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (they'll take everything you are), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (maybe you should hit the bar), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're sucking your sanity dry,
And no one will dare tell you why!
Mystical Creatures!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and you're about to lose it), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and no, you cannot choose it), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're tripping you up all the way,
Even as you're slipping away.
Mystical creatures are dying to lure you today,
Dying to lure you away, to in-sani-tay!

Alive by Hajime Taguchi

Title: Alive
Author/Editor: Hajime Taguchi
Publisher: Gen Manga
Rating: WARTY!

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

After the last Gen manga I read. I determined not to read any more because reading backwards is just annoying and not worth the effort unless the story is brilliant, and the last one I read was far from brilliant. Quite the opposite in fact. Unfortunately I forgot that I still had one more Gen manga in my reading list, so here I am a-Gen!

This one started out a lot better. The artwork is sparse and clean and looks really good. The stories, however, were a lot less than satisfactory. I quite liked the first one, although I have doubts about a high school girl going unsupervised to get new eye-wear, and then taking the first pair of glasses she's offered without even having an eye exam!

The story turned out to be allegorical - about how we see the world, and that if we want to see the beautiful, we also have to accept that we will see the ugly. It’s not either or. So it was really trite, but harmless. Unfortunately, that was the best story in the bunch.

The next was a pointless and vacuous tale about an ignorant school girl becoming frightened that she was dying because she got her first period. Okay, so two stories about high school, so maybe this is aimed at a high school audience? No! Before long, we’re getting a rather graphic story about a guy who has sex with an expensive sex doll. Seriously? Who, exactly, is this collection aimed at? And why are there so many images depicting the PoV of looking up some young school-girl's pleated skirt? The cover will amply illustrate this, but there are several more inside.

I got about three quarters through and the stories continued to be either obnoxious, or childishly simplistic with some fairy-tale moral, and I honestly couldn’t stand to read any more. I can’t recommend this one and now I really am done with Gen manga for good!

Drawing Amanda by Stephanie Feuer

Title: Drawing Amanda
Author: Stephanie Feuer
Publisher: Hipsomedia
Rating: WORTHY!

Ably illustrated by SY Lee

I like that the title of the novel has two meanings here. It reminds me of my own novel Tears in Time, which can be understood in two different ways.

Michael 'Inky' Kahn missed a chance at art school, where all his friends went, because he became a chronic slacker after his father died. Now he has a chance to sign-up with a video-game start-up and get in on the ground floor designing a new online game. The interface is creepy, but Inky is young, naïve, and foolish, and still grieving over the death of his father eighteen months before. He doesn’t think twice. He doesn’t even think once.

Inky has a best friend still remaining at the New York international school which he attends, but his friend simply doesn't work for me. "Rungs" (an abbreviation of his long Thai family name) is too much. I found myself asking why didn’t this author make the Asian the main character instead of the trope YAWASP which we get - a trope augmented by a clichéd 'foreign' and 'cool' friend? The sad attempt to have Rungs speak in hip abbreviations is a fail, too, especially since each time he uses one, it’s followed by an immediate translation which is just an admission that this isn't working. It looks stupid and amateur.

That aside, the plot was different. The online game is, of course a complete fraud. It's merely a front for a psycho to get his hands on teen-aged girls, but I don’t get why he chooses online gaming, which is typically not the purview of young girls. Yes, they do play games, but they tend not to favor the same games which boys do, and this premise is that the game is in development - it’s not actually up and running - so why would teenage girls (as opposed to boys) flock to this site? It makes no sense.

Having said that, the story and writing in general wasn't too bad at all, and the female love interest here, Amanda Valdez Bates, who is also disaffected, but for reasons different from Inky's, does show up at this site and starts interacting with the psycho guy. She also begins interacting with Inky at school, so the story was quite nicely woven at this point. Inky starts sending sketches to the guy "Woody" behind the Megaland game, and one of these is of Amanda. Inky doesn't realize that he's putting his new acquaintance directly into harm's way by using her as his muse.

That's all I'm telling you! I liked this despite those issues I described, because it was in general, well written, it contained a scattering of artwork to fit the story (this is not a graphic novel, just a novel with some graphics!), which was unusual and appreciated, and apart from the ridiculous best friend which Inky had, the characters were decently fleshed out and believable. I liked the premise and the novel overall, so I recommend this one.

Anywhere But Paradise by Anne Bustard

Title: Anywhere But Paradise
Author: Anne Bustard
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WARTY!

This novel was a complete bust for me. Set in 1960 for no apparent reason, it's the story of Peggy Sue Bennett who has moved with her family to Hawaii and now is the subject of racism from the locals since she's in the minority (about 20% of the population in her new school), and bullying by a local girl named Kiki.

Once again we have a YA novel featuring unrestrained bullying which goes so far(cicle) as to be completely unrealistic, rolling way past ridiculous and into the nearby neighborhood of complete parody. As if that wasn't bad enough, the story itself is devoid of any interest whatsoever. It's one blessedly short chapter after another of tediousness. We follow Peggy through lesson after lesson, abuse after abuse, bullying after bullying, and this complete wuss makes zero complaint, not even mentioning it to her parents.

If women had not complained and made themselves thoroughly obnoxious, they'd probably still be waiting to be granted the right to vote by old white men. Peggy Sue, aka Mary Sue, is, in her blind inertia, an insult to those women who fought for enfranchisement. If the story had seemed like it had been thinking about going somewhere, that might have made some sort of a difference, but it didn't - unless the lesson here is that bullying is best dealt with by kow-towing to it by going out of your way to please the bully.

Maybe it got better but I had better things to do with my time than stick around and read it to the end in the hope that the writing would improve. Believe me, if it hasn't shown any sign of it by 75% of the way in, which was further than it deserved to be read, it ain't gonna get better. I quit there and the only thing I regret is reading that far before I wised up and dropped it.

In closing - and this isn't a dig at this novel per se, although the ARC for this was a great illustration of the problem - I'd like to say another word or two about wasting trees!

And yes, I get that this is a non 8.5x11 format novel showing on an 8.5x11 format page, so let's take out the excess white space, and bring it down to the area within the cross-hairs - and coincidentally render it into the same dimensions as the cover illustration above:

See it now? This is yet another problem caused and sustained by Big Publishing™ because they're the ones demanding a certain layout for a novel, and part of the layout is 250 words per page. Every time we give in to this, trees are wasted. That's why I urge writers not to turn out typescripts like this one, and to buck Big Publishing™'s demands, and write more per page.

Naturally there are constraints on how much you can fit on a page. Certain amounts of white space are required for margins and for gutter (to permit binding - the thicker your book, the more gutter you need). Additionally, you don't want to cram words everywhere - for readability if not aesthetics you need to provide a decent layout of course, and in the ebook, it doesn't matter how much white space you have because it isn't wasting any trees.

I'm not telling you how to write; I'm just asking that we as writers consider what the environmental impact is of what we do. Is it necessary to write a trilogy? Can you shorten the book and make it just as good? Can you run to three hundred words per page? I'm just saying it's worth thinking about.

The Best Boy Ever Made by Rachel Eliason

Title: The Best Boy Ever Made
Author: Rachel Eliason
Publisher: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
71% in "Sam meets every single criteria..." should be "Sam meets every single criterion..." to be technically correct. Of course, a social worker might not know that.
"Who'd of thought" in Brittney's speech should be "Who'd have thought?" (sorry, I didn't note the position in the book)
85% "...using there proximity..." should be "...using their proximity..."
"...down right..." should be "...downright ..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
"...everyday..." should be "...every day..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
92% "...catching site..." should be "...catching sight..." (it's rendered correctly further along on that same line).

This is a novel about a trans-gender person, Sam, who was born technically a girl, but who is actually a boy for all practical purposes. Rachel Eliason is herself trans-gendered (mtf), so she knows what she's writing about. The novel is told in first person by Sam's best friend Alecia.

I don't normally do book covers because my blog is all about writing, not selling, and unless they self publish, the writer really has no choice in their cover: they get whatever cover Big Publishing™ deems fit - which is all-too-often an ill-fit at best. In this case (which isn't Big Publishing™), I have to raise an issue that involves some fence-sitting, and it ain't comfortable, let me tell you, but it is country! Maybe this discomfort is appropriate, too, because for far too many people transgendering is an uncomfortable issue, so perhaps the cover artist is smarter than your typical cover designer?

Here's the rub: the arm on the left looks very masculine, yet we know that it's supposed to represent a transgender male. It's not that trans (ftm) males can't look masculine for goodness sakes, that's what they are, after all, but the question I have is more subtle than that: is this the best cover design? Do we want to use an actual male, which really betrays the story, because the subject of the story isn't a biological male, but an XX who identifies as a male. Do we want to use a female so the arm looks feminine - which to me betrays the story even more than using a male arm, because the trans character isn't feminine except in a birth sense? Do we try to find a real ftm transgender person to pose?

To me, that would have been ideal, and perhaps that was what was actually done here - I don't know - but this cover made me ask questions, so maybe it's not a bad thing the way it is. Maybe the masculine arm is a statement, and not simply eye candy. I do think it's worth some serious thought though, especially in a novel dealing with a topic as important and as misunderstood as this one is.

The story takes place in Iowa, where I've actually lived and have never ever felt the need to go back there again! Iowa winters will do that to a person. Here's a song which I dedicated to Iowa, sung to the tune of Do They Know It's Christmas?:

It's winter time, and there's some need to be afraid.
In Iowa, where ice storms break and blizzards rage,
And in this cold and darkness, you can warm a heart with joy:
As the topside freezes-up this winter time!

But say a prayer: pray for the Iowans
At winter time, it's hard, but when you're having sun
There's a world outside your window and it's a world of frozen feet
Where the heat bills reach a total that's impossible to meet
And the only bells that ring there are the icicles of doom
Well tonight thank god it's us instead of you!

Oh there won't be cold in Africa this winter time
That's the greatest gift they'll get: to stay so warm
oh-oh where nothing ever snows
No blizzards, no ice floes
Do they know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Here's to you staying warm in Africa
Fresh from those freezing tail in Iowa
Do you know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Heat the world!
Heat the world!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
(Original music and words to Do They Know It's Christmas? by Bob Geldof & Midge Ure, released on Phonogram and Columbia. New words by Ian Wood)

If you liked this parody, please consider a donation to http://www.aidforafrica.org/Donate OR http://www.savethechildren.org OR to whichever charity you think can do most good, including your local food bank. There are hungry children everywhere.

But I digress! The novel is narrated by Alecia, a very sheltered young woman of seventeen, who often comes off as younger than she really is. You can blame this on her life under the iron-yoke of her Catholic parents. They're a pair of the most blinkered people imaginable, but organized religion often does that. By its very nature religion is divisive and intolerant, bifurcating populations into us (the saved, good, people), and them (the sinners who will go to hell). Bring it on, I say. I'd rather be in hell than spend eternity with bigots and pompous holier-than-thou blow-hards, quite frankly. Can you imagine spending eternity with those guys?!

Alecia's best friend since forever is Samantha, who insists on "Sam" and no substitutes, and who is a tomboy - pretty much since Alecia has known her. Alecia 'gets' Sam, but she cannot understand what it is which has made Sam so distant over the last few months, until Sam finally comes clean with her and tells Alecia that she's not truly a female. She's a male who happens to have been born, unfortunately, in a female body - and she wants to correct that post-haste. This feeling isn't a rarity in nature as Joan Roughgarden reveals in her book Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, which I highly recommend.

Sheltered as she is, Alecia struggles with all of this because she doesn't quite get that there's a big difference between a tomboy, a lesbian, and an XX female who feels in her every cell and neuron that she's an XY boy, has done so for years, and now wants the world to accept it the same way she has done. Alecia is a trooper though, and never once does she lose sight of the importance of friendship and loyalty, a commitment which means supporting her friend in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, as long as they both shall live.

Together, they embark upon this journey, and damn the warped parents. Actually damn Alecia's parents, who are completely negative about Sam - quite the opposite of Sam's own parents. In this spirit (the only spirit which matters), Alecia accompanies Sam to a gay bar on teen night. Sam has to go there to satisfy her social worker that she's not merely a confused lesbian - that she really doesn't want to be a girl who loves girls, but a male who loves females. Alecia goes along with her and finds herself - what is that feeling? Jealous? - of the attention Sam gets from out lesbian Emma, who is very much a girl.

Alecia has a father and a brother, but these males figure very little into the story. More involved is her mom, and younger sister Brittney, who isn't quite the good Catholic girl that Alecia is. I have to ask, since this family is so Catholic, how come the girls ended-up with names like Alecia and Brittney rather than, say, Esther and Ruth or something Biblical like that. Obviously not all such parents go that route, but it seemed to me that if Mom & dad were so rigid and devout they would be far more likely to chose Biblical names for their children than to choose the ones we get. Maybe that's just me.

One thing which seemed weird in this novel, to me, was the use of "I am". Despite employing all kinds of other contractions, such as "I'd", and "we've", there was never an "I'm" that I noticed. It struck me as odd, and it made for rather stilted conversation. Other than that, I enjoyed the way this was written. It was perhaps a bit simplistic in places, with very little descriptive prose, but for me it was an easy, comfortable, and compelling read. Once I began, I did not want to put it down, and I want to read more by this writer - perhaps even more about these two characters if a good sequel suggests itself.

I normally detest first person PoV novels, but this one seemed perfectly fine. Some writers, a few, a happy few, a band of brothers and sisters, can carry it off, and Rachel Eliason is quite obviously one of these. I think it helped that she had Alecia come right out and embrace this format from the off, introducing herself like we'd just met and she was about to answer some questions for me to clear up some lack of understanding I had! That approach worked for me, and from that point on it seemed normal and ordinary, rather than artifice, so kudos and gratitude for that!

I'm not sure that Sam's social worker was entirely appropriate in answering Alecia's questions to the extent that she did, but this was a minor issue. A bigger issue was whether or not Sam would be seeing a social worker or seeing some kind of psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know, I've never been there, but it seems to me that she would need someone with a bit more academic and medical muscle behind them if she were going to start gender reassignment as a minor. OTOH, as I mentioned, the author is transgendered herself, so I bow to her greater expertise on this topic. Sam had evidently talked a lot about Alecia, and the social worker wasn't exactly blabbing all her secrets. Plus Alecia's motives were pure - she wanted to put herself in the best possible position to support Sam - and perhaps get some reassurance herself.

If I had a complaint or two, what would they be? I guess the first would be that while the novel talks a heck of a lot about the significant difference between a lesbian and a transgendered female to male, it never really went into what those differences were. I think it would have benefited from including that as a discussion between Sam and Alecia. And no, that doesn't mean one of them yelling "Penis!" and running!

I actually worked in the burn center in a hospital where female to male transgendering was performed. It was done in the burn center because they were the experts on cosmetic surgery (in a medical, rather than a purely cosmetic) sense and they had some very skilled doctors and nurses working there, and yes, a penis is an option.

Another complaint would be about raising the issue of prejudice against gays and transgendered people while rather hypocritically exhibiting prejudice in other areas! Alecia frequently chanted a refrain championing "country folk" over "city slickers" - like country was somehow more wholesome and smarter than city folks, who were somehow backward for never having seen a tree or touched a goat. This merely made Alecia seem backward, shallow, bigoted and hypocritical to me.

Besides, it isn't the black and white issue Alecia blindly pretends it is. Not everyone lives either deep in the city or way out in the back of beyond. There are very many people (I am one) who live on the fringe between the two. Besides, who would pay the farm subsidies if it were not for the urban taxpayers? Alecia's attitude and her strident spouting of this supposed dichotomy was annoying and uncalled for, and was the most obnoxious thing about her for me.

About 42% in, Alecia makes what could be taken as a derogatory comment about vegetarians, too. This was in context of her being country and therefore loving nature and animals - yet she has no problem slaughtering them and eating them wholesale. She doesn't seem to grasp that it consumes massive quantities of grain to feed cattle so people can, in turn, eat the meat. She doesn't know that if meat eaters of the western 'civilized' world gave up maybe a twentieth of their meat consumption it would release enough grain to feed the world's starving populations. To me this made Alecia seem ignorant instead of wise about the world. It made her provincial and way younger than her seventeen years.

There were some technical issues with the novel, too, that some serious editing would have cured. One thing which really jumps out is the scarcity of chaptering. Text runs on from one unrelated event to another with little more than a sharp sign (#) to indicate a break, and sometimes not even that. This makes for crude interruptions in reading while the reader tries to figure out if they turned more than one page/swiped more than one screen. A few more chapter breaks to divide-up the narrative would have improved reading flow for me.

Having said all of that, this novel was definitely worth reading. Aside from the issues I've raised, it was well-written in a very engaging style, it fearlessly broached sensitive and important topics, and I was one hundred percent on-board with it.

If Rachel Eliason is looking for beta readers for future projects, I volunteer right now!

Love and Other Unknown Variables by Shannon Lee Alexander

Title: Love and Other Unknown Variables
Author: Shannon Lee Alexander
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p8 "bicep" it's actually "biceps" although with the number of authors making this mistake these days, I'm probably in the minority already when it comes to appropriate English.
p65 "grit my jaw"? I don't know what that means. 'Grit my teeth' makes sense. "Grit my jaw"? Not so much.

It took nine seconds to turn the first page! This wasn't helped by multiple endpapers. I think it's because the pages are images - or at least background images - of graph paper and it really slows the page turning in Adobe Digital Editions. I can;t vouch for it in other electronic media, but it was annoying to say the least, and there were many beginning pages:
the praise page - why in an ebook (more on this anon)?
blank page
title page
blank page
title page with author's name
publication details page
dedication page
blank page
quote from Einstein page showing his ignorance of biochemistry. Einstein was not a chemist
blank page
I wouldn't note these unremarkable pages except that every one of them took time measured in seconds to turn the page.

I know there are "rules" (so-called) about how a book should be laid out to keep Congress happy - standardization rules - but to me it makes no sense to treat an ebook as though it were a print book. And if these "rules" are so cast in iron, why are they not adhered to in audio books? Hah! So much for a publishing code. They're more like guidelines really....

It makes equally as little sense to include third-party recommendations (for the book you're already reading) in an ebook. This doesn't work on me, but in a print book, when you're looking through it in the library or in the book store, I can see that recommendations from people you've never heard of and have no reason to trust might sway some potential readers, but in an ebook? You've already bought or borrowed the ebook sight unseen. Clearly you're already about to read it. So what on Earth is the purpose of the recommendations?!

Chapter one starts on page three of all pages, and speaks of tragedy so we know that this novel isn't going to end well, and it's pretty obvious how it will end because the first person narrator isn't the one who's going to die. How could he be telling this story if he did?! The thing is that this might be all well and good if it started well, but it didn't.

We meet the first person PoV narrator. This isn't my favorite perspective by a long chalk, since it's all 'me' all the time and that's way too much "me' for me. Once in a long while an author can carry it, but unless it's done really, really well, it just smacks of undue self-importance and destroys the reading experience for me - especially if the novel has a purportedly tragic ending. Even if the first page hadn't given it away we'd know that tragedy was in her future because she's an artist.

Anyway, the protag (Chuck, as in a part of a cow or part of an electric drill) is unable to keep his hands to himself where girls are concerned and despite supposedly being MIT material is far too dumb to grasp that he can't go manhandling people without their expressed consent. This behavior is inexplicable given that his best friend is actually a girl, Greta, with whom he's been acquainted for some considerable time. I guess he has so little respect for his best friend that he's unwilling to learn a single thing from her.

Chuck attends the Brighton School of Math and Science, but it hasn't even taught him that you cannot simply move the hair of the girl in line in front of you if want to see the tattoo on her neck, and if you do inappropriately so touch her, then the way to apologize isn't to inappropriately touch her again. This is where the "bicep" enters the picture. I'm going to write a novel about "The Bicep". Yeah! Kiss my bicep, people!

Chuck's sole observation about this girl (other than the tattoo and the fact that she sports a "bicep") is that she's "too beautiful"! Not just beautiful but too beautiful. Oh, and she smells amazing, so immediately we've classified her as a species of orchid, not a person.

Yeah, I know he can't nail her on anything else since he doesn't even know her, and superficial appearance and smell are all he has to go on, but seriously? "Too beautiful"? For what? For a glamor magazine? For a beauty pageant? To live? Why doesn't he just slaughter her right there? Beautiful is her sole defining characteristic already? We know it is because he uses it on both of his first two meetings with her. Oh and she has a chip in her tooth because even they who are too beautiful need the trope "small chip on the bottom corner of her central incisor" (yes, central! Charlotte evidently has an odd number of teeth) to give them an adorable flaw.

Could we not have gone somewhere else for a change? Please? Pretty please? Or even somewhere else even if it was still in the same neighborhood? Like not beautiful but attractive? Good-looking? Appealing? Warm? Unforgettable? Anything other than the tiredest bullshit in YA fiction: beautiful? Why is it that YA writers have the hardest time thinking outside the book?

Coincidence of coincidences, Charlotte - the beautiful tattoo - is now Chuck's sister Becca's best friend. Oh and she's known as Charley because that makes her too cool as well as too beautiful. But Becca won't call her that because having two Charlies is too much even though her brother Charlie is actually known as Chuck. Wait, what? If Charlotte is now wanting to be known as Charlotte instead of the detestable 'Charley', how does Becca even know that she was referred to as Charley by her older sister? Did Charlotte blab to an almost stranger the very name by which she doesn't want to be known? Not too bright, is she?

Hmmm!

I made it only a third of the way through this and I had to push myself to get even that far. It was too cloying, too slow, too uneventful, too meaningless, too cliched, too sugary, too vacuous, with characters which were too flat and uninteresting, and quite frankly, Chuck's obsessive-compulsive addiction to Charlotte's beauty above and beyond anything else was a huge turn-off. This contest between science and art has been done to death. Oh, and yes, you can scientifically measure love and beauty! Humans are rooted in biology; biology is rooted in chemistry; chemistry is rooted in physics; physics is rooted in math.

The bottom line is that I really just did not like these characters. They were too trope and cookie-cutter-ish to stand out. There was nothing about them to make them any different from your standard geek guy and standard too beautiful to live girl. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.

The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

Title: The Beginning of Everything
Author: Robyn Schneider
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

For about 90% of this novel I was convinced I would rate it positively, but that last ten percent or so killed it for me. The ending was not only unbelievable given what we'd been told of the main two characters, it was just ridiculous.

Some people have compared this novel with the work of John Green, who I can't stand, so I am glad I didn't read any of that before I picked this up otherwise I would never have read it. This novel succeeds where the absurdly pretentious and laughably ethereal Green fails so catastrophically. Despite how bad this was in some critical parts, it still made Green's writing look like a series of bumper stickers, but in the end, the good writing wasn't nearly enough to make up for the poor plotting.

This novel began its life titled Severed Heads, Broken Hearts. I guess that's what happens when Big Publishing™ gets its grasping fingers on your title, because the original summed it up perfectly: there actually is a severed head and a (metaphorical) broken heart, but the real severing and breaking all takes place on the plot. I think a lot of people might presume that the new title refers to the main female character showing up in the main male character's life, but the beginning of the title is really where this novel ends.

I normally detest first person PoV novels, but this one was so well-written generally speaking, and so un-pretentious (aside from a paragraph here and there) that for the most part, I didn't even notice the 1PoV, much less become annoyed by it, so kudos and thanks to the author for that.

Ezra Faulkner and his best friend Toby Ellicot are on a roller-coaster ride at Disneyland when the guy in front of them stands up right before a low overhang, resulting in his head (sans his body) ending up in Toby's startled hands. The result of this - of the infamy that will not leave Toby alone - is a major cause in the two best friends drifting apart between the ages of twelve and seventeen, when another major event - this time affecting only Ezra, brings them back together.

In the intervening five years, Ezra has progressed (if you want to think of it that way) to become a jock (after a fashion) and a really popular guy, hanging out with other jocks and getting whatever dates he wants. He's dating cheerleader Charlotte, until he discovers her in flagrante de-dick-do with some random guy in a bedroom at a party. How Ezra can even give her the time of day after this is a mystery, but despite what she has done to him and the despicable way she had treated him when they had been dating, he never turns his back on her - although he is smart enough not to be seduced by her again, so I guess he isn't completely dumb.

Because he leaves the party early as a result of Charlotte's appalling betrayal of him, Ezra ends-up being in his car when a big Jeep SUV, which ran a stop sign, slams into him - although how the stop sign is relevant is a mystery. Ezra's knee is shattered, effectively terminating his budding tennis career, which he wasn't sure he really wanted anyway, but it means that he's now out of the rut he was in, and feeling at a loose end - if not several of them.

It's not only the rut, though. Ezra is out of things altogether for the entire summer, and he feels like an outsider when he returns to school. His old friends don't seem to want to exclude him because of his injury, but he feels excluded nonetheless, and since he's signed up for the debate team, he finds himself hanging with the artsy, nerdy crowd, which includes his old friend Toby. who adopts him without any problem during an hilarious scene at the school's pep rally.

As soon as we see mention of Cassidy Thorpe, the new, quirky girl in school, it's obvious that she's going to be Ezra's love interest, and it soon becomes obvious what her 'dark secret' is - its not dark, just obvious. The fact that there's no mention whatsoever of the name of the guy driving that jeep SUV ought to clue you in to what the nature of this secret is.

This was what was the least realistic and least believable for me and what began to sour the story. It makes no sense at all that Ezra wouldn't realize who Cassidy might be or how she might connect to his past, and it makes no sense that someone as smart as she supposedly is wouldn't put two and two together, so the big break-up at the end was disingenuous and way too forced for my taste.

Another issue I took was with Ezra's exalted jock status. He was on the tennis team for goodness sakes! That doesn't mean that he was a nobody, but I found it hard to believe, given the tight focus in college and high school on football and basketball (and everything else be damned), that he would be the star jock we're expected to believe he is. I detest the mentality that these two sports are everything and nothing else matters in schools. It's primitive and pathetic, so kudos to Schneider for not going the most traveled path here and making him a football or basketball star, but it didn't seem realistic to me that he would have the status he'd had when he was 'merely' a tennis player - and the team wasn't doing that great anyway.

Nor did it make any sense that Ezra would not have one friend among the entire team that he would hang with or talk to on the phone! Nor did it make any sense that none of his jock friends would visit him in the hospital after his accident. Nor, given what we learn of him in school that year after the accident, did it make any sense that he would have a whole heck of a lot in common with those jocks to begin with. So, for me there were a lot of twisted issues here which spelled bad writing - at least in terms of plotting.

on the positive side, I really, really liked the way this was written with regard to the repartee between the main characters. It played out so easily. It was literate, witty, funny, and engaging. I felt tempted to give it five stars just for its Doctor Who references alone, but of course, that would be very naughty of me. Had I not run into issues like the ones outlined above (and more below), I would definitely have rated this positively. What tipped the balance irretrievably into the negative was the trashy and unbelievable ending.

I don't believe a novel has to have a happy ending, although I would argue it has to have some sort of resolution at the end, so it wasn't that this ended the way it did which bothered me per se; it was that it ended the way it did despite this ending not even remotely jiving with what we'd been told about the characters for ninety percent of the novel.

As exhibit one, let's take the two main female characters in Ezra's life: Charlotte the ex and Cassidy the next. I submit to you, members of the jury, that there was - for all practical purposes - no difference between the two despite Schneider's ham-fisted effort to try and starkly differentiate them for us. I submit that despite being encouraged to believe that Cassidy was streets ahead of Charlotte for being smart, and deep, and caring, she actually was worse than Charlotte.

At least with Charlotte, what you saw was what you got. Cassidy, on the other hand, we're expected to believe, could be so shallow and blind as to betray Ezra, treat him like dirt, keep him in the dark, refuse to talk to him about a critical issue, and be so dumb that she could see no way out of their supposed dilemma than to break up with him and avoid him like the proverbial plague.

What a bunch of coyote shit.

We're expected to believe that the reason she keeps him out of her home is because of her brother and conflict with her parents, yet she's already doing this long before she knows for sure who Ezra is. It makes no sense.

I could not credit that she would totally cut Ezra off without explanation, and with outright lies given everything we'd been told about her up to that point, and given their feelings for each other. No, That does not work. I can't believe she was so dumb she never figured out what had happened - and no, confusing Ezra with a tree doesn't get you out of that jail free.

I can't believe he was so dumb that he believed her lie. I can't believe he was so dumb that he didn't figure out what was going on. OTOH, he did continue to date Charlotte despite her treating him like dirt - at least until that fateful party, so maybe he really was as dumb as he looks. Talking of which, I can't believe the driver would get away with a hit and run like that either. Yeah, it can happen, but no, it's not really credible.

Oh, and Schneider really needs to look up coyotes in wikipedia or somewhere before she starts trying to pretend that they're five feet long (yeah, if you include the tail, but that's dishonest in the context of this novel). Coyotes are only about three feet long in the body, and two feet tall. In short, they're the same size as a standard poodle, give or take.

She kept harping on the coyotes for no good reason, and the reason she mistakenly thought was good was pure bullshit. Coyotes do not behave like the one she depicted. They're not serial killers and they do not randomly approach humans with canicide in mind. And where were Ezra and Cassidy? They were right there and neither one lifted a finger, so their sadness afterwards is nonsensical.

I can't recommend this novel - not unless you're just going to read the first ninety percent of it and skip the lame ending, and even then you'd have to contend with Le Stupide.

Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina

Title: Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
Author: Meg Medina
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read really poorly by Roxanne Hernandez.

If I'd known that this novel had won one of those sad-sack 'literary' awards I would never have picked it up in the first place, because such an award all but guarantees that the novel which carries it will be boring and irrelevant, but I didn't and it was. I thought that a book written by a Latina about the YA Hispanic experience might have something new or different to tell me than one written for the white community or for the black community, but you know what? Every one of them is really exactly the same, so what's the point?

I don't get audio book publisher's fascination with elevator music. Seriously? There's a ten second din of it at the start of the first disk, and this is a novel set deeply in Latin territory, so why not, if you absolutely must have music, have something with a Latin flavor? Is so-called Brilliance Audio so paradoxically dumb and unimaginative? For me, ditch the frigging Muzak.

Even that aside, I took a dislike to this novel right from disk one, but since it's very short, I figured I would try to follow it through to the end. I failed. It was that irritating and shallow. It's ironic, because the reason I picked this up in the first place was the title. I thought that was hilarious. How could a book with such an amazing title fail to deliver so comprehensively - and then win an award for its mediocrity?

It would have been hilarious if it were titled merely, "John Smith Wants to Kick Your Ass", but when the name Yaqui Delgado was added to the mix, it took it over the top and gave it a life of its own. Now I find myself wanting to read about Yaqui instead of about Piddy (no kidding, that was the main character's name).

I'd never never heard the name Yaqui before, and I live in Texas so most Latin names are unsurprising or particularly exotic to me. I'm not sure why a person would name their child Yaqui, which sounds like a description of someone who likes to yak a lot, but maybe that's why it was chosen. This focus on Piddy and not on Yaqui was another failure from my perspective.

I actually looked-up Yaqui on a half-dozen baby name websites and not a one of them - not even the one which offered exotic names, not even the Hispanic ones - featured it. How sad is that? I found it one one site which gave no definition of it, but merely referenced the Yaqui Indians of Río Yaqui valley in Sonora, in northern Mexico.

You can read about them in the wikipedia link I give on my blog, but even that doesn't have a thing to say about what the name means or whence it came. Pathetic, huh? So much for wikipedia. That just goes to emphasize how great of a name it was, but it simultaneously highlights how sadly this novel let down its title.

The problem with an audio version of a novel, as convenient as they are for listening to in the car on a daily commute, is that it's one more step removed from the author, and if the novel is already irritating, adding an annoying voice on top of that is hardly a charmed idea, especially if the voice doesn't sound remotely like it belongs to a high school student.

Roxanne Hernandez's voice performance (yes, no one reads these any more, they perform! Sheesh! ) was really wrong. She sounded way too old to be in school. Once I got past that, and started to focus on the story rather than the awful voice, I found that this novel is larded with Hispanic stereotyping (which is sad, given that the author is Hispanic), and high school YA tropes and clichés.

• New girl in school? Check.
• Main character approaching but not reached eighteen? Check.
• First person narration? Check.
• Bitchy girl bully? Check.
• stereotypical school jock? Check.
• Unrestricted School bullying? Check.
• Geek with eyeglasses? Check.
• Quirky best friend? Check.

Novels like this should come with a free prescription for Promethazine, as standard, they're so nauseating. So the deal is that Yaqui Delgado simply doesn't like the way way our main character sways her hips when she walks. Yep, that's all it is. That's her entire complaint She starts her harassment campaign by tossing a container of chocolate milk at the wall during lunch, showering our main character and her nerd friends with it, yet no one rats her out for her unacceptable behavior, and the people retained because of this vandalism are the victims. No attempt is made to ferret out the perps!

Seriously? what kind of sad-sack mentality is that? The only response to bullying and vandalism is zero tolerance, period. Yet according by YA novels, every single school in the US has exactly the same problems and nothing is ever done about any of them!. That's (not coincidentally) when I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" Even this novel's warts have warts. No wonder it won a literary award.

Pinned by Sharon G Flake

Title: Pinned
Author: Sharon G Flake
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a story of a relationship between your stereotypical high school jock and the hot member of the opposite sex, but in this case, the jock is the girl, and the hot opposite sex character is a guy in a wheelchair. In significant ways, both are handicapped, but the guy isn't handicapped by his wheelchair, he's handicapped by his personality. The girl is handicapped by short-sightedness, and not of the physical kind, either.

It seems that I'm forced into commenting on a completely inappropriate cover once more. Yet again, the cover illustrator appears never to have read the novel, either that or didn't give a damn, because because if he or she had read it or cared about it, they would have noticed that Autumn is a wrestler who has muscles. She's not a muscle-bound type as such, but she does have muscles and definition, and the cover model was so not her it wasn't even funny. This is a pitfall of going with Big Publishing™: they simply do not care, unless it's about how many corners they can cut on their way to how much moo-la they can milk from your novel.

» Here's what real female athletes look like: Ashleigh Nelson, Hayley Jones, Dina Asher-Smith and Annabelle Lewis «

A brief word on genderism in track

» Why is it that men are fully covered whereas women are filly covered? Men have long shirts, and shorts down to their knees, whereas the women are wearing skimpy tank tops and what amount to swim trunks? Just asking.«

This novel is all about Autumn Knight and Adonis Einstein Anderson Miller. I am not kidding you with the names. I think there's a scientific study and an interesting paper to be published about the use of exotic names in the African American community if it's tied-in with how that particular group has been treated over the years since Africa was "discovered" by the so-called civilized world, but this is merely a book review, so names aside, let me say up front that despite some issues, I loved this novel.

I am not black, so I don't doubt for a minute that I may well be missing some insights here which color (so to speak!) my perspective, but the bottom line is that this is purely a novel about two people who have a relationship. Race, creed, ethnicity, etc., doesn't enter into it, so that should never be an issue with regard to the validity of any given reviewer's take on it. I mean a story is either worth the reading or it's not, right, regardless of the actual content or the characters? This one was worth it.

It's a really short and easy book to listen to (and presumably to read). The short chapters alternate between Autumn's PoV and Adonis's, both told in first person. My problem was that I listened to it as an audio book rather than read it, and while I felt that Autumn's voice was nailed all the way to the bone by Bahni Turpin, Adonis's voice was ruined by Dominic Hoffman. He sounded far more like a high school teacher than ever he did a high school student. This definitely shaded my view of this novel because this character had no credibility for me.

Worse than that, Adonis was presented, in the writing itself, as a snotty, superior, self-centered, and arrogant jerk. He had no redeeming qualities that I could see, and not only did I not like him, I could find no reason at all why someone like Autumn would like him, let alone claim to be in love with him and follow him around like a timid puppy. This, for me, stole ruthlessly from her role as a strong female character, and I could not for the life of me figure out why Sharon Flake would do this to her. I do, however, want to read more of this author's writing after enjoying this, which is why I moved on to The Skin I'm In. The author's name may be Flake, but she's no flake when it comes to writing chops.

I fell in love with Autumn Knight, not just the beautiful name, but also with her voice and her attitude, and with her perspective. She is a strong woman, and not just physically. She was always up (apart from one understandable instance of complete despair), positive, and confident. She's adaptable and motivated, and has plans for her future. That's why I was thoroughly intrigued by the stark contrast between this (what might be thought of as her baseline personality) and her complete lack of motivation when it came to her 'disability' - which is that she was a very poor reader.

This in itself would not be a problem if she'd maintained her usual positive attitude towards it - and towards fixing it, but with this particular issue, there was a huge disconnect. She was in sorry denial about the utility of reading, which made me even more curious to find out how this story panned out. Autumn's ambition, despite her wrestling cred (yes, I said wrestling - how cool is that?) is to open a restaurant, yet no one, not even her teachers, seem to put two and two together and seek to motivate her by reminding her that her restaurant ambitions are going to be deep fried if she doesn't learn to read a whole lot better than she can manage right now.

What bothered me about Autumn was her stalking of Adonis. If this had been reversed, with Adonis behaving as Autumn did, and vice-versa, I think a lot of people would have had issues with his stalking her, especially if she were in a wheelchair. So why wasn't this an issue presented the way it was? Gender equality cuts both ways: it's not just a benefit for women, it's also a responsibility. This 'what's sass for the goose is sauce for the gander' approach wasn't appreciated. What did shave-off the rough edges of it for me was that Autumn's personality was sweeter than honey, but make no mistake: her behavior was still stalking.

I'm not one of these reviewers who demands character growth in a story. Indeed, some of the best stories are about people who refuse to grow or to change for one reason or another. Adonis's lack of growth was as much a part of his character as was his arrogance and perfectionism. He was bound far more by that then ever he was by his wheelchair. I like to think that this story wasn't really about him, but was about Autumn, and for those who demand it, she did change admirably.

So I recommend this novel. It was fun, endearing, and enjoyable - at least the Autumn chapters were. Who cares about Adonis?!

Frostbite by Richelle Mead

Title: FrostBite
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

This is the second volume in what is, so far, at least a six-volume series. I can’t promise I'll read that whole series, but as of reading this one, I'm committed to one more at least. That's an odd decision, I know, given my rating, but I explain it in the final paragraph. This volume was sadder than the first, which had issues but which was not bad. Mead needs to get her head out of her ass and write the vampire series she promised, not a cheesy rip-off of Twilight, with love-sick airhead kids running around having sorry bouts of high school angst when there's a far better story screaming to be told.

I started reading this series because I'd read somewhere that some school district had banned the series: that is, they were banning these books before some of them had even been written, which is the height of stupidity, so despite my antagonism towards vampire novels, I picked up the first one on audio CD from the library, but Stephanie Wolf's reading sucked majorly, so I ditched that and bought the paperback. I ended up liking it (with reservations!), hence my progression to volume 2. I was less satisfied with this one, and this was by many accounts supposed to be be better than the first!

One thing which not so much surprised me as intrigued me about volume one was when I was reading the insane negative reviews for it. The religious crowd was reduced to telling outright lies about that volume (which I refute in my review) and about the main character's conduct - that's how sad they are. In general I liked the story, although there were some YA issues with it - of the dumb kind you find in any YA novel. This second volume promised to be no different from my reading of the first hundred pages, but it did also draw me in a bit.

In this volume, Rose hasn’t changed at all, nor does she throughout. She's still dumb, still immature, and still thinks she's god's gift to men, and like Mary Poppins, thinks she's practically perfect in every way. She's also still obsessed with her blood-mate Lissa, for whom she is working her heart out, striving to become a guardian. Early in the novel, Rose is taken for testing by a disinterested guardian who happens to be a legend in their world, but when they arrive at the house to meet with him, they discover that the entire family, including the legendary guardian, has been slaughtered, evidently by a band of strigoi working together in a manner which has no precedent.

Here was a classic example of Rose completely ignoring an express instruction from her teacher, and going unpunished for it. This will not be the last time she does this in this novel. Her instructor should have failed her on her test right there for disobeying him and entering the house against his express order, but once again she gets away with insubordination. I don’t mind a rebel character, but please let’s not indulge this! There have to be consequences otherwise it’s just a fairy tale. There never are consequences for Rose, even when her stupidity gets someone killed.

This initial event does illustrate the problem with the sad addiction of all-too-many female YA authors to telling stories in first person PoV: you thereby restrict yourself to the handicap of being unable to have anything happen unless your character is there to witness it; otherwise it’s nothing but passive voice, with your main character sitting around having to listen to boring, second-hand stories about what happened in order to keep the story alive, which is never a good thing for an action novel. This is why Mead was forced to have Rose disobey and it’s so obvious that it immediately suspends the suspension of disbelief. I want my YA writers to be far more skilled than this. Apparently Mead isn’t.

The next thing she heaps upon us is the appearance of Rose's mom, Janine, who shows up at school to tell a tale of one of her guardian adventures. It seems that Rose's mom is as full of herself as Rose is, but Rose hates her mom, which immediately telegraphs to us that Rose and she will bond, and that mom might well die in this story. Only one of those things actually happened. The same kind of thing happened with character Mason, Rose's toy boy. Her interactions with him telegraphed that she would get jiggy with him and that he might well die in this story. Only one of those things happened.

When tough-guy guardian and Rose-object-of-addiction Dimitri is too tired (from a shopping trip - I am not kidding!) to teach her in his early-morning class, Rose's mom inappropriately steps-in instead. Now this is a parent who is not a teacher at the school, teaching her own child! Worse than this, Rose's mom fails to pick up where Dimitri left off, and instead makes Rose fight her in a boxing match, and ends up punching Rose with an illegal punch, giving her a black eye. Yet there are no consequences whatsoever for Janine's misconduct! Again, there goes suspension of disbelief.

This inappropriate behavior continues as Dimitri returns to teaching, and he and Rose kiss. If he was anything of a teacher, he would recuse himself from teaching her any further, but he is not and he does not, so yet again we have inappropriate behavior with zero consequences. At this point I would normally ditch a novel like this, but beyond all this amateur fanfic-level YA absurdity, there was a story and it started out intriguing me. Sadly, it fell apart and never went anywhere. The ending was truly pathetic.

Lissa is now on meds to prevent her healing power from erupting and affecting her mental health. She's by far the most interesting character in these novels so far, but she has no more than a cameo role in this novel. Subsequent events are within the context of the earlier massacre, which is suggestive that strigoi have changed their behavior: that they're now working together and working with humans to launch attacks upon the moroi royal families, which means Lissa is at risk. Unfortunately, none of this story is followed through. Not in this volume, anyway.

I don’t get this business of the vampires celebrating Xmas! It makes no sense to me, but because of the strigoi attack, they go for a week to a lodge in the mountains for a skiing holiday! Never mind battening-down the hatches and going after the strigoi, let's go on vacation! It made no sense.

It made less sense given that only Rose and her new boyfriend Mason seemed to actually do any skiing. Rose meets Adrian Ivashkov, and starts falling in love with him. He's the bad boy leg of the triangle to Mason's good guy leg, and Rose finds herself dreaming of Ivashkov when she's not mentally masturbating over Dim-itri, the inappropriate instructor who should be fired. Dim-itri is actually supposed to be Lissa's guardian, but he's never found anywhere near Lissa. Instead, he's a full-time Rose stalker.

This dream Rose has of Ivashkov was actually implanted in her mind by Ivashkov himself, although Rose isn't smart enough to figure that out. Mead tries to distract us from this revelation by revealing another strigoi attack. This upsets Lissa, but Rose fails to wake-up in response to Lissa's distressed state! So much for the supposed deepening of their psychic bond!

Eventually Mason, Mia and Eddie leave the ski resort to go to Spokane, Washington which is supposedly nearby, to seek out and kill the strigoi. This tells me that all three of them are morons and their schooling has been wasted, but none of them is as big a moron as Rose. She figures out what they have done, but instead of warning everyone, she takes off after them with Christian, Lissa's boyfriend and they, along with the other three, are captured and held prisoner. Never once does Christian think of using his fire magic against the strigoi and it takes Rose three days (while these guys are all very conveniently kept alive for no reason at all by the ruthless strigoi) to figure it out herself! Yep, it's that bad.

So why am I rating this warty and then thinking of trying volume 3? Well there were sufficient hints in this volume to make me think, rightly or (and more probably) wrongly, that things might turn around in volume 3 and this series could assume the promise if offered in volume 1, so I'm giving it a go and if it's as bad as, or worse than this one, I'm ditching the series. Life is too short, and at fifty percent through it, I think I will have given this more than a fair chance by then.

The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci

Title: The Plain Janes
Author: Cecil Castellucci
Publisher: Minx
Rating: Worthy!
Illustrator: Jim Rugg
Lettering: Jared K Fletcher

The Plain Janes is not what I expected, but pleasantly so. Cecil Castellucci has created a charming story about Jane, a girl who survives what might be 9/11, but might be "just another" terrorist bombing in Metro City, and is urgently transported outside the city by her parents, who think it's safer in suburbia. I had thought that "Cecil" was a guy since you don't normally encounter that name for girls, but she's very much a girl, and I suspect that there's some autobiographical content in this novel.

Note that although the cover is in color, the novel is line drawings and gray-scale. The artwork is oddly appealing despite its initial appearance of simplicity and the rudimentary aura it gives off to begin with.

Jane is heartbroken to leave her friends and especially the John Doe patient who saved her life and now lies in a coma at the hospital. She visits him regularly and talks to him, but now she can visit no more: he's too far away. She did purloin his half-filled art sketch pad however, vowing to fill it on his behalf, which seems a bit presumptuous to me. Turning lemons into lemonade, Jane decides on a mini-make-over. She cuts her hair, dyeing it black so she can start her new school with a new perspective.

Shunning the popular girls at lunchtime, Jane sits at a table of apparent "loser" girls, who may or may not like her sitting with them, but who curiously are all named Jane. These girls are smart, talented in different fields, and poor socializers. Jane eventually gets them talking and lures them into joining her in an art project.

On am empty lot which has been set aside for a strip mall, the four girls build three quite large pyramids out of rubble one night, modeled on those a Gizeh in Egypt. They post a sign announcing that the pyramids have lasted for thousands of years, and asking how long the proposed strip mall will last. The sign is signed People Loving Art In Neighborhoods (P.L.A.I.N.), and so is born The Plain Janes.

As the PJs take on more anonymous projects, they garner for themselves a reputation, and start bonding and enjoying their lives for once. Their reputation is oddly a bad thing, seen by the school authorities as destructive and as vandalism, even though it is, er, PLAINly not. One big weakness of this novel is that Castellucci offers no reason at all as to why this should be. The PLAIN artist could be anyone or any group, yet it quickly comes down to an assumption that someone at school is doing this, and a psycho cop comes to the school and gives a lecture about this "vandalism" and vows to run down the perps. I thought that this was an unnecessary slur on the police.

There is a side story about a non-existent "romance" between Jane and a guy at school where neither side seems interested in becoming involved, and there's a weird, rather inexplicable ending, which took away from the story for me and made it rather weak in the finale, but overall this was a good story with very positive vibes and I recommend it.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

Title: Looking For Alaska
Author: John Green
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Audio novel almost acceptably read by Jeff Woodman.

I wasn't impressed by John Green's debut novel and more than I was with his novel Paper Towns. It's living testimony to the fact that people who hand out book awards, hand them out from their ass, where their head is. But take my advice: if you want to write 'great literature' and win such awards, the secret is to include multiple quotes from dead people, preferably men, and you're almost half-way there. Make them foreign dead people and you are half-way there. Include some bone-headed words about nature conjoined with spiritualism, and you're three-quarters the way there. Don’t worry at all about your writing style. That's irrelevant in great (perhaps) literature.

And Green is quite obviously trying oh-so hard to write literature, isn’t he? Given that what’s classed as such is all-too-often anachronistic, irrelevant, tedious, pedantic, and boring, Green succeeds admirably. In this one, he sets up his template for all his novels (at least the two I've suffered through). You need a smug, spoiled, self-centered, clueless, uninteresting guy, a quirky side-kick, and a female bitch, and you're there. In this case the tedious male lead is Miles Halter tells his story in first person PoV which is all-too-typically horrible in any novel, and which seems to be the trope du jour in YA fiction these days. To be fair, in this novel it’s not completely cringe-worthy, just annoyingly smug.

Halter's life is so utterly devoid of anything of utility that he spends it memorizing the last words of the rich and famous. He's never actually read anything by those purported 'greats' of literature, just their biographies, and all he remembers of those are their dying words. With this more than ample qualification, he decides he's ready to launch himself upon life, and he goes off to boarding school at the age of 16. His parents evidently have no objection to this, not even financially, yet somehow he's classed not with the well-to-do students, but with the riff-raff.

On his first day there he meets all the riff-raff he will ever need to know. No new people need apply. His roommate, Chip(!), is known as "The Colonel". Because Halter is so skinny, he's named 'Pudge'. Oh how hilarious is the irony! Halter immediately falls head-in-ass in "love" with a girl. Alaska Young isn’t; that is to say she doesn’t come across as a sixteen-year-old, but as an idealized Mary Sue, wise way-beyond her years, so you know this is going to be tragic. It couldn’t possibly be 'literature' otherwise, now could it?

Seriously, Juliet and Romeo live happily ever after? Teens who don’t stupidly kill themselves but go on to make a real contribution to life and to their society? Who wants to read that trash? So you know it's going to be tragic, and since the narrator is named Halter, and his "love" interest is young, who’s going to die? Do the math. The give-away is in the last name, and it’s not a word that's related to 'stopping', it’s a word that's too often and all-too-sadly associated with 'die'.

The problem is that Halter's infatuation is never about who Alaska is as a person, it's entirely about how hot she looks on the surface. Adolescent love, superficial is thy name. Halter's view of her never improves, nor does her behavior. She's entirely unappealing. I don’t care how beautiful a woman is supposed to be; if she smokes like a chimney (not that chimneys smoke so much these days) then she's ugly, period. She's apparently trying to smoke herself to death, how wonderfully deep and literate. I'm impressed. Impressed by how self-destructive these losers are. But of course, if she didn’t chain-smoke, then how could she possibly be an artist, sculpting Halter's rough-hewn adolescent rock into a masterpiece worthy of some dusty corner of a museum. Shall we muse?

Halter doesn’t get how pointless young Alaska is. On the contrary, like a male spider to a potential mate, he enters her web with great, perhaps, abandon, completely embracing her lifestyle of shallow rebelliousness, cutting classes, smoking, drinking, and generally wasting his time. Yes, I get that the claim is that he wants to idiotically pursue the last dying words of Rabelais (the great perhaps), as though the delusional ranting of someone at death's door is magically philosophical, deep, and sacred (but only if they're famous). You definitely have to slap a medal on that or die trying - or try dying. Moreover, if the person is foreign, then his words (no female who dies is worth remembering apparently) are to be hallowed for eternity!

But here's the rub: if that's the case, then why does Halter go to school at all? Why not drop out completely and run away from home? Great Perhaps because that's where the lie lies in his life? Halter isn't actually interested in exploring any great perhaps; he's just interested in geek mishaps. He "explores" the unknown by doing the staid, tried-and-tested, and very-well known: going to school! Yet even then, he's paradoxically not getting an education in anything that's important. Instead, he's hanging with his peers, his attention drifting even in his favorite class. Great perhaps he's learning nothing at all? He sure doesn't appear to be.

On his first night there, he's bullied, but this is never reported, because 'ratting out' the bullies would be the wrong thing to do, don't you know? The fact that he could have been killed is completely irrelevant; it's much better to let them get away with their recklessness and cruelty so they're encouraged to do it again and again until someone does die; then everyone can adopt a pained expression and whine, "How could this happen here?" The joke here is that he fails to come up with anything interesting in the way of last words.

Despite my sarcasm, I guess I really don’t get how a novel larded with trope and cliché manages to even get considered for an award, let alone win one. The Printz Award? Really? Is there an out-of-Printz award? Probably not, but I made one up and awarded it my own Dire Virgins novel! Every main character, and there are really only three, let's face it, is a trope. Chip is the 'seasoned pro' - the one who knows every trick and angle, who becomes the mentor to the new guy. His one feature is that he knows the names of capitals. Honestly? Character Tukumi's only real feature is his name.

We already met Halter, arguably the most trope-ish since he's the tediously stereotypical skinny geek - like geek and physique are inalienably alien bed-fellows, oh, and did I mention that he knows the last words of some dead dudes? Presage much, Green? Next thing you know he'll be writing a novel where he has a count-down to the tragedy to make sure that we don't miss it. Oh, wait a minute, he did count down to the tragedy in this novel!

Oh, and Halter failed to halt her. How awful for him. Boy! You gotta carry that weight, carry that weight a long time…. Maybe if Halter had actually learned about life instead of philosophically jerking-off to the 'great perhaps' he might have learned enough to see what was coming and been prepared to do something to prevent it, but from an awards PoV, it's a far, far better thing that he doesn’t than he ever did, and it’s a far, far better ending that he goes through than he's ever gone….

Even I saw that ending coming, and that was at the same moment that I saw the cover and read the title of this novel. A candle gone out? Seriously? I'll bet the cover artist got whiplash trying to pat their self on the back after that one. The Sylvia Plath Award for most tragically tragic tragedy goes, of course, to Alaska, a teenager who was in an ice-cold state even before she died.

But what really died here was a chance at a readable and entertaining novel. I rate this novel warty, but do take form it a timeless moral: never, ever read a novel with a person's name in the title - unless it's a children's novel. They don't seem to suffer from the acute lethargy and lack of inventiveness which is the stone from which John Green is hewn..

I Have to add that I can't help but wonder why Green insists upon making his female characters jerks. I've read two of his novels (all I am ever going to read, rest assured) and in both the female is a loser and a jerk. Is he a misogynist that he does this? Or is it simply that he doesn't know any better? Actually, the question which interests me more is why John Green went out of his way to call me a liar? Indeed, he called every one of us self-publishing/indie authors liars. In a speech which he made to the Association of American Booksellers in 2013 (of which I was unaware until very recently), he stated:

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature...without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent.
From Brit newspaper The Guardian

In short, John Green thinks we're liars if we say we did it all ourselves (not that your typical indie author ever does this in my experience). Guess what, Green behind the ears? I did it all myself and I know other people did too, and no, I am not lying. The question is why are you so insecure that you need an entourage to write your books? And yes, Looking for Alaska was self-indulgent so you failed. Deal with it.