Time Out of Time 2 by Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Title: Time Out of Time 2
Author: Maureen Doyle McQuerry
Publisher: Abrams Books
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 enough reward aplenty!

This novel was presented in an unusual fashion in Adobe Digital Editions - it's all double paged meaning that you need to have the app full screen in order to have the text large enough to read comfortably. There was an inexplicable prologue which I skipped. My position is that if the author doesn't think it important enough to include in the main body of the novel, then I don't think it important enough to expend time upon. I've never regretted skipping a prologue. I got about a quarter the way through the novel and had to give up on it.

The book consists of 337 pages of widely-spaced text, so it's not a long novel - nor is it very kind to trees formatted in that way. I'd recommend the ebook version if you're going to buy this. The last chapter is amusingly titled "A New Chapter". I had forgotten that the blurb I read clearly stated that this was book two, so I started this thinking it was book one. There is nothing in the book to indicate it's book two until you start reading it, when it becomes evident that the story is already well under way

This begs the question as to why a prologue was even thought necessary - wasn't book one the prologue?! There's no indication anywhere as to what book it is or even if it's part of a series, but it quite evidently is. So note that I am not a fan of series, and I am coming into this having missed book one. This obvious affects my view of the story.

That said, I found it not less confusing the more I read but more confusing! I quickly lost interest because I really didn't understand the point of people's actions. Maybe if I had read book one it might have been better, but I doubt it because if book one had been written like this, then I never would have wanted to progress to book two anyway!

We begin with Jessica, who is evidently in a magical market. She had gone there with her friend Peter, and with Sarah and Timothy Maxwell to get some special ointment for their mother. Why it took four of them goes unexplained, but they'd had a run-in with the Animal Tamer - a wizard of some sort - who had turned Sarah into a "white ermine". That's a tautology; ermines are by definition white. They're actually white stoats - stoats with a winter coat. Peter had then caused a distraction allowing Jessica to free Sarah (in her stoat form) and the Animal Tamer had reacted by turning Peter into a weasel!

How do you tell the difference between a weasel and stoat? Well here's the secret: A weasel is so weasely distinguished, and a stoat is stoatally different. Got that? Okay, let's move along. Actually, I lied. Peter was turned into a ferret, but if I'd said that, I couldn't have told that joke. I'm glad you ferreted the truth out of me though.

Now Jessica's being attacked by a goose, which gooses her from behind. It certainly isn't her day, but fortunately, her aunt Rosemary - or is it Cerridwyn? - is close at hand. Like I said, chapter one takes off like it's a sequel, but with no scene setting as it goes, so coming into it as I did, it was moderately confusing to begin with. Superficially, it felt like we were hitting the ground running, but there was more mis-hitting and stumbling than anything else.

The worst thing about the novel though was how derivative it is. When I read the blurb I thought it odd that these kids were going to Scotland to look for Irish treasures, but I love Scotland and so I thought it definitely worth a look, but it took forever to get to that point. In fact, in the portion I read, which was about the first third, it didn't happen, which was a big yawn for me.

Instead, there was a huge battle in which the very trees are being awoken just like in Lord of the Rings, and they're fighting foul creatures coming from underground - just like in Lord of the Rings, except that in this case it isn't Orcs, but a giant toad.

The characters seemed unfortunately reminiscent of Harry Potter in some regards. There was even a worm-tail character who was a rat-catcher. I don't know if that was intentionally humorous or was merely ironic. He couldn't turn himself into a rat, but he was turned into one by the Animal Tamer.

The Animal Tamer's real name is Balor, but just like with Lord Voldemort - who actually never was a lord - no one likes to use his real name. We got to spend very little time with the "ermine" and with the ferret, following them on their non-adventures. The ferret, which is held in a burlap bag, tries to escape through a hole the "size of a quarter", which would be impossible unless quarters in this land are significantly larger than American quarters, or maybe the sack stretched. Hobs - which are what male ferrets are called, are larger than jills (the female ferret) so I assumed Peter was a hob, but who knows?

After this it became really confusing with one new character after another showing up, and there was fighting and blood and gore, and it simply wasn't interesting or entertaining to me. I had no investment in any of the characters and really didn't care whether the market had a king or not. There was the recovery of a valuable piece of adornment, rather like the diadem in Harry Potter, except that this was a necklace and was not sought so it could be destroyed.

One thing that is consistent in this kind of a novel is that some ill-prepared kid is thrust into a position of crucial importance and wins out, whereas all the powerful people - the wizards or whatever, steer clear of the danger and do precious little but speak in riddles. It's nonsensical and offers no sort of decent foundation upon which to build a solid story. For me, this is why this one failed to get there, and why I can't recommend it. There is no 'there' there. Your mileage may differ.

The Doorknob Society by MJ Fletcher

Title: The Doorknob Society
Author: MJ Fletcher
Publisher: Draft2Digital
Rating: WARTY!

This is another classic example of a book cover design fail. The title is right there: the DOORKNOB Society, yet what takes center stage? Yep - the keys! Sometimes you have to wonder. Other times you have to really wonder....

This is obviously a rip-off of Harry Potter, and I know a lot of novels are these days, but usually they’re not quite so baldly derivative. When I was a kid, there was this phrase people used to indicate snobbery or something a cut above the rest, or somehow better than usual. It was rather in the mode of “dressed up like a dog’s dinner” but this merely involved adding “with knobs on” to some statement – like a drawer isn’t really useful or complete until it has the knobs fitted (kitchen storage designers I’m looking at you). I couldn’t help but think about that as I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Knobs, er, The Doorknob Society.

Sure, the author had done a reversal – making Harry into a girl (as Rowling had evidently considered, at one point, but in her case she stayed with the original gender), but she still goes to a special ed. School, and there are still four houses and on and on. Boring. That wasn’t even the worst part of this for me. The worst part was the appallingly clichéd “love” interest, in the form of a studly, muscled guy with a chiseled jaw – that’s what he was described as (the chiseled, not the studly!). It’s pathetic. Can authors not think for themselves and come up with something different?

It was at that point, right after that specific description, that I quit reading this. The novel had not been that great to begin with (and sentences like “I’m a legacy my parents went there.” didn't help, but that was the final straw for me. If a novel can't make a reasonable effort at getting away from the herd, or at the very least, at some originality, then why should I offer a reasonable attempt at reading it? Life is too short.

Adamant by Emma L Adams

Title: Adamant
Author: Emma L Adams
Publisher: <Emma L Adams
Rating: WORTHY!

This is book one of the ‘Alliance’ series. Maybe I’m just more finicky than most, but in my experience, series tend not to be that great. I see them as one really long novel, of which the first volume is the prologue (and I don’t do prologues!) and the rest of them very long and unfortunately rather repetitive chapters. It not only strikes me as tedious, but also as lazy in a way because rather than invent something new, the writer simply reuses the previous volume as a template for the next.

Of course, there are exceptions! There are some series which are wonderful, so it really depends on how the writer writes it. Having said that I further have to report that this is a first person PoV novel – my least favorite voice. I detest it because it’s very rarely done well, and it spoils the story for me. It limits what can be told, because everything has to be filtered through the mouth of the main character, for one thing. On top of that it’s become a complete and utter cliché in YA novels – particularly those featuring a female main protagonist.

I know that authors think that 1PoV gives the story immediacy, but if a writer is forced to tell it in first person merely to achieve that, then they’re doing it wrong! Besides, it actually loses immediacy because we know from the start that nothing truly bad can happen to the character because the character is telling the story! They’re obviously going to survive, and none of their pain and peril can have been very traumatic otherwise how could they recall all those details?! In fact, how do they recall them anyway?! There goes all hope for drama and peril. There goes immediacy! There goes credibility!

Having said all that, I have to report that this author impressed me on both counts. She wrote the first volume in a series and had not one, but two first person PoVs and I actually liked it! It's quite a feat for an author to get away with that in my reading experience! As a writer myself, I love words and what they can be made to do, and it's for this reason that I derived what’s probably a disproportionately large amount of amusement from an author named Adams who titles her novel Adamant. But that’s probably just me!

Down to details! This is a universe where a system of tunnels or passages connects multiple worlds. An Alliance has sprung up to police these worlds and prevent illegal transition between them, but there’s a rebel faction which smuggles people between worlds, and one of the two main characters is a part of that,having been smuggled herself a long time ago. The work is dangerous because in addition to being caught by the Alliance, there’s also the risk of running into strange alien “monsters” in the passages, as this girl does. She goes by the storied first name of Ada and the mutinous last name of Fletcher! I love an author who can put great names to their characters, and I think those two particular names were chosen wisely in Ada's case.

The chapters alternate between Ada and Kay Walker, on opposite sides of the legal fence. Ada is helping illegals to come to Earth to escape problems on their home world whereas Kay is a new graduate working for the alliance. Their first encounter is a very fleeting one as Kay sees Ada running fast from a storage area, from which Ada’s just lifted some bags of bloodstone – an alien substance useful for disguising illegals. And for other purposes as you shall discover if you read this!

Since this is a blog about writing, I love to bring up writing issues. Here’s a really good one. On page 6 Ada employs the phrase, “…ensure nobody but them…”. Now technically that should be “…ensure nobody but they…”, but since this is a first person PoV story, can we arguably ascribe this to the character’s personal vernacular? I think it depends upon what else the character’s been saying. This is only the second page of the story (it begins on page five for some reason), and the very top of the page as well, so we don’t have much to go on. While the main character’s speech patterns up until that point don’t suggest that she’d employ this particular phrase, it is a common form of speech, so it didn't jump out at me as being wrong - just as being interesting from a writer's PoV and worth keeping an eye on if you're writing yourself.

There's not only sci-fi here, but also magic. It's not supposed to work on Earth, but Ada finds that in certain circumstances, she can employ it. It's especially workable in the tunnels. Not that it's of much use against the magical creatures, which is why Ada is always well-armed. She and Kay start out as enemies, but they soon learn that in order to solve unexpected problems, they must work together. All the pieces of this story work together, believe it or not. I liked the originality, the strange new worlds, and the description of the deployment of magic. There's a heck of a lot to explore here and I'm sure the author plans on doing just that in the coming volumes.

But that's enough spoilers - except to ease you by advising you not to take anything at face value in this novel! I recommend it because it had interesting, intelligent, feisty, and motivated characters, because it did NOT have a silly love-triangle, because the relationship between the two main characters was handled responsibly and intelligently, and because it was interesting, original, and had an engrossing plot. The very minor quibbles I had were ones which other readers might well not even remark upon, such as one sentence which read: “A creeping feeling crawled up my spine…” which sounded odd and redundant to me. But those were very rare, and overall, this is a great adventure. I look forward to the next one in the series.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Title: Uprooted
Author: Naomi Novik
Publisher: Random House
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 enough reward aplenty!

This author has a string of novels with titles reminiscent of those employed by George Martin, but I haven’t read anything of hers before this one. It’s a first person PoV novel which I detest because it’s very rarely done well and it spoils the story for me. It limits what can be told, because everything has to be filtered through the mouth of the main character, for one thing.

I know that authors think it gives the story immediacy, but if they’re forced to tell it in first person merely to achieve that, then they’re doing it wrong. Besides, it actually loses immediacy because we know from the start that nothing truly bad can happen to the character because the character is telling the story. They’re obviously going to survive, and none of their pain and peril can have been very traumatic otherwise how could they recall all those details?! In fact, how do they recall them anyway?! There goes all hope for drama and peril. There goes immediacy! There goes credibility!

This one is a YA fantasy – a bit of a retelling of Beauty and the Beast - which has the narrator, Agnieszka, living in a land where every decade, the region’s ruling dragon (he’s called a dragon but he’s actually a man and a sorcerer) takes a seventeen-year-old female and keeps her for ten years before sending her on her way, with fine manners and clothing -and a handsome dowry. Why? My guess was that the dragon wasn’t interested in the females as such, but was looking for a specific female and I was right about that. We don’t have any idea why he wait until they’re almost adults before he selects them. That would seem to me to defeat his very purpose. Of course then, there could be no farcical attempt at a romance.

We do know that the selection takes place on the morrow, and that our narrator is eligible this year. There goes every element of surprise, because this means we also know that the very eligible villager known as Kasia isn’t the one going to be chosen, it’s going to be the narrator. There goes any element of surprise, but at least the author doesn’t make the eligibility based solely upon her beauty.

Predictably the narrator, who predictably is a homely bookworm, thinks that her friend Kasia will be the chosen, and puts herself last in the list because she’s a complete tomboy. How many times have novels traveled this road most traveled? (Hint: the answer is contained within the question).

The dragon is over a century old, so if this is to be a romance between the narrator and the dragon (as it is), then we have an immediate problem. It’s the same problem we have with nonsensical novels like Twilight foolishly purveying the ridiculous and absurd conceit that a decades-old vampire would not only be interested in wooing a teenager, but has the mentality of one himself. This isn’t only sick, it makes zero sense.

There is another issue here in that the dragon (so-called) has the manners of a hyena. He treats Agnieszka like dirt and she’s more than willing to put up with it. By chapter four – only some 50 pages in, I was regretting reading this. It was tedious listening to Agnieszka self-pity party page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence. I almost felt like taking the visiting Prince’s side after the incident she has with him. Almost. Even on a whiney wench like Agnieszka, I still couldn’t condone his behavior, but she’s obnoxious and so is he. There’s nothing to like in either of them. She’s sullen and self-obsessed. He’s arrogant and cruel. She has a chance to learn magic and resents it. He has no clue how to teach. She has no appealing qualities. Neither does he. I did not like her. I did not like him. She comes across as spoiled and stupid. I did not empathize with her, not even when she became somewhat smarter in her behaviors. She’d already lost me by then.

Agnieszka’s left alone when the dragon has to go off to fight a reported Chimæra, and she whines about that. She also observes that the dragon, who can evidently teleport, chooses to ride a horse to the distant place where there is something that’s quite obviously a red herring (and I don’t mean a real live fish!). She speculates that he can only teleport in his own land, but this makes no sense. If each region has its own wizard, then why is he going to deal with a problem in some other wizard’s region? If it’s his own region (his own land) then why wouldn’t he teleport? Maybe he can’t, but for Agnieszka to state it like that make it only more painfully obvious how truly clueless she is.

I made it to roughly half way through this novel and then we hit a part that was truly a god-awful attempt at “romance” – call it nomance because it’s not romance. It’s was pathetically passes for romance in bad YA novels. I couldn’t face reading any more at that point. There were some good ideas here, which could have made a good story, but it was so badly done that I not only couldn’t stand to pursue this unentertaining story any further. I honestly didn’t care what happened to any of the characters – save maybe Kasia. That’s my cross to bear – I tend to find the side-licks in YA novels far more appealing and entertaining than ever I find the main character. It’s a refreshingly rare novel indeed where the main character has what it takes to be the main one, but I do keep looking, because those rare finds are treasures.. Maybe your mileage will differ from mine with this one, but I can’t recommend this.

Charmed Deception by Eilis O'Neal

Title: Charmed Deception
Author: Eilis O'Neal
Publisher: Egmont
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 enough reward aplenty!

I started this one thinking I wouldn't be able to finish it - it seemed far too larded with trope and cliché to be appealing to a reader like me, but as I read on and despite the presence of rather too much cliché for my taste, I found myself initially warming to the story. Sadly, it was not to last. I was able to stomach only about half of this novel, and I'll tell you why.

The main character is young woman by the highly unlikely name of Sable Wildcross who lives a very pampered existence and sees nothing amiss with it. Her only problem is that in her world (actually in her country), only men are allowed to practice magic. Women used to be killed if they developed the 'resonance' and were caught employing it. As it is, now they're "only" imprisoned for life, but not many women seem to have this resonance - which is what they would feel were they men, and were in close proximity to their favored 'element'.

Yes, this is another novel where compounds and substances are mislabeled 'elements', and of course they're the standard clichéd four: earth, wind, fire, and water, with an added bonus of animals! How animals class as elements is unexplained - or at least it was as far as I read. There is one more resonance, however, and it's no spoiler that this is the one which Sable has. It wouldn't be a YA novel were it otherwise! Her resonance is that she can 'siphon-off' the magic of others and use it for whatever - in other words, if she siphons fire magic, she doesn't have to use it to control fire, she can instead control water with it.

Sable first learns she's special from Never - a girl who appears to her one night in her library and looks like a ghost, but who turns out to be a remote presence projected by a woman of Sable's age who is very much the same as Sable - having magic as her resonance. Sable first contacts her when she accidentally breaks her heart charm - a necklace she's worn for years, which supposedly gives her magic protection for her weak heart.

Given that this necklace was given to her by a magician from one of the lands where magic is freely practiced by both genders, it's no surprise to anyone but Sable that the guy who gave it to her knew of her condition, and supplied her with the necklace purely to protect her and keep her power hidden.

Every chapter ends in a bit of a cliff-hanger here, which is kind of fun, although some of them fall a bit flat. Despite the fact that it's a lengthy book (almost 450 pages) it's a very fast read. Sable has a best friend, Laurel, who doesn't know about her resonance, a nice guy named Mason who is her life-long friend - the resident good guy, and Lord Lockton, the resident bad guy, forming a nice trope triangle.

My immediate feeling - having read this far (~25%) - was that maybe Lockton was a good guy in disguise, and that the ghostly Never was actually a trap set up by the wizards who were supposedly holding her prisoner for a scheme of their own. I suspected that it’s Sable they want, and Never is a fiction used as bait. I'm not going to tell you if I was right about that, only that I'm usually wrong in my wild guesses - but not always!

Lockton didn't assume quite the role of 'bad boy' I'd initially thought. The 'bad boy', it turns out, is Reason Midnight. Yes, the names are profoundly stupid. Sable's dad's first name is "Venerable"! I am not making this up - the author is! The king's name is Dauntless, and no doubt there's a Prince Amity, a Princess Candor, and a Queen Abnegation.... Reason, as it happens, is the third leg of the inevitable YA trope love triangle

We're told that there's a level of excitement in the house at Reason's arrival, but this makes no sense. The character is merely the son of one of the guests at the house, and he's not considered a paragon of anything. He's juvenile, and he has neither accomplishments nor anything to recommend him, so there's no reason at all for anyone to be excited that he's coming.

The fact that the author, and through her, the main character, who is laughably babbling on about him in first person PoV, makes such a huge deal out of his visit tells me the character, if not the author, is way overdoing this visit, and therefore is a completely unreliable narrator, which in turn calls into question everything we've read so far. This is an example of rather short-sighted writing and poor editing.

The author has evidently forgotten that all of this isn't taking place in the Midnight household, but at the Wildcross home! There's no reason at all why that family should celebrate Reason's arrival as though someone of nobility or royalty is coming. If it were in the Midnight household, it would be rather different - although still excessive given how Lady Crescent speaks about him, but to have this non-event supposedly taking control of Sable's home and everyone in it is patently ridiculous and purest bullshit. The novel, which I'd been largely enjoying up to this point, took a serious hit because of this and made me wonder if this was the start of a lamentable downhill slide.

And downward slide it did. It was inevitable, when Sable decided to take a walk by herself rather than take a mid-day nap with everyone else, that she would go out into the grounds to walk, that she would go to the wildest most untamed part of the grounds, that she would run into Reason there, that Reason would be the trope YA male - with a woman's eyes (startlingly blue in this case, but with the clichéd super-thick lashes), a woman's full red lips, and that he would be well-dressed, and muscular.

I'm surprised his name wasn't Androgyne Midnight instead of 'Reason', because there wasn't any reason for him to be the way he was except that this is YA fiction and the author is cynically taking it the road most trampled by the herding instincts of desperate YA writers. I managed to refrain from vomiting only with extreme fortitude, but Sable's heart was less restrained: it began thudding at sad things like the proximity of Reason's magnificent knee. Pathetic.

Next out comes some appalling grammar: "You've air resonance aren't you?" she asks. What does that mean exactly? It means that author screwed up. It should be "You have air resonance, haven't you?" or "You're air resonant, aren't you?", but not a mix of both! Right after they've introduced themselves, part one ends. What this tells me is that this novel isn't about Sable at all, but about a magical super-hero, the manly man Reason Midnight. What a thorough and complete betrayal of the main character - and once again by a female author, too! Now, instead of being a strong woman, a rebel, and someone worth reading about, Sable is nothing more than an irritatingly swooning appendage of a male character, and I've lost all interest in this novel.

Reason turned out to be about as shallow as they come. These people have magic at their disposal, and yet Reason's only interests, in his own words, are: music, art, riding, picnics, the time to visit as many shops and tailors as he wishes, travel, dances, and young ladies. Not a single word about improving the quality of life for anyone. What a complete and total jerk.

Right after that we got the inevitable clichéd horse race between Sable and Reason which took place "scandalously" as the family went riding the next day. Yet no matter what Sable does, no matter how indiscreet, no matter how inappropriate, no matter how shameful in such a society, she's never censured, and she pays no penalty for her behavior no matter what it is! Meanwhile, Reason is snooping around Sable's home at night, but she doesn't have the guts to challenge him and when finally, accidentally, they encounter each other, Reason, and not Sable, takes charge and demands she tell him everything before he utters a word to her. Naturally this wilting violet acquiesces.

This was roughly half-way though this story, and by this time I'd had quite enough nonsense for one novel. I don't normally say anything about the cover of the books I review because this blog is about writing, not about cynically garnering sales, and the author typically has nothing to do with the cover unless they're smart enough to self publish, but in this case the cover was - accidentally, I'm sure - spot on. The novel and the cover are in sync in that they both advise us to pay no attention to this girl's mind - it's not important at all. Pay attention instead, we're obviously being told, only to her body because that's clearly all any woman has to offer.

There had been the makings of a great story here, but it was amateurishly, if not downright foolishly, frittered away on trashy YA clichés. I can't in all decency and honesty recommend this novel.

Counterfeit Magic by Kelly Armstrong

Title: Counterfeit Magic
Author: Kelly Armstrong
Publisher: Tantor
Rating: WARTY!

Poorly read by Laural Merlington.

I could not get into this one at all. It's only three disks but I couldn't finish it. The reading by Laural Merlington was limited at best, and the writing was somewhat south of mediocre. There was nothing of interest here.

Why do they insist upon getting actors to read audio novels? Yes, actors are great at memorizing lines and emoting on stage and film, but that's not the same as reading. Not at all. They need to get people who can read, who are not necessarily actors.

The story is set in a modern world, but with magic and sorcery added, yet the writer didn't do anything to account for that addition, or to give it an acceptable place. Nor was there any explanation as to why we have a detective agency. Why is such a thing needed when magic can uncover whatever you need to know? If we have magic and witchcraft, why do we have gambling dens and fight promotions? Can't the witches influence the fight with magic? Can't the sorcerers divine the result and bet accordingly? Can't they magic-up whatever money they need so they don't even need to bet at all?

The story made no sense whatsoever, nor did it even try to, and I sure as hex can't recommend it.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

Title: The Hero and the Crown
Author: Robin McKinley
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
P77 "...when hey made camp." should be "...when they made camp."

This is the first Robin McKinley novel I've read. I've read some good reviews about her work, so I thought maybe it was time that I jumped in and took a look. This is a fantasy story, of which I have to say that while I've read a few by various authors, I'm not really a great fan of the genre. Sorcerers, dragons, elves, and sword-fighting are not something which really trips my trigger, but they are intriguing and once in a rare while a good one comes along, so I keep mining them like a dwarf, looking for those gems.

This is a novel of just over 200 pages, although the cover is numbered as page one in the advance review copy, so the actual page count of the text is somewhat less than you might think. It's also apparently a Newbery medal winner, which experience has taught me to avoid like the plague, but I picked up this one before I knew about the medal, so I was committed to reading it, unfortunately. Maybe this will be the exception, thinks I: a medal winner which isn't pretentious garbage and which actually makes for non-cringe-worthy reading? The fact that this was available as an advance review copy was surprising, though. If this is such an old novel (it was originally published thirty years ago this year!), then why is it being offered as an ARC? Curiouser and curiouser!

The story is of princess Aerin, the feisty child of a king who has married more than once and who has daughters by more than one wife. Although Aerin appears not to have any of the witchery with which her mother was supposedly endowed, she is very self-motivated (when she's actually interested in something) and pursues a rather independent and somewhat tomboyish lifestyle in which she's aided by Tor, a cousin who gives her sword-fighting lessons, and who quite obviously (rather annoyingly so, actually) has the hots for her. He gives her a specially-manufactured sword for her eighteenth birthday, which is curiously the same time as he quits giving her lessons.

Aerin doesn't mind, as it happens because for the last few years, she's been nurturing a growing interest in dragons. The only ones known of in her time were little ones, but she reads old books and discovers that larger dragons may still be around. She also discovers a recipe for a skin cream which supposedly protects against dragon fire. After immense experimentation, she actually gets the formula to work, and as soon as an opportunity arises to go fight a dragon, she grabs it, sneaking out before the king's men can get there! I like this girl!

Having thus been successful, Aerin discovers that her father is now persuaded to let her pursue her new calling, and she embarks upon gaining invaluable dragon-fighting experience and also a reputation amongst the king's subjects for being the brave fiery-haired dragon-slayer. But can she face-down the greatest dragon of all, Maur, which is a fully-grown dragon of fearsome reputation? And if she does survive the encounter, how will she react to the knowledge that that there is something far more dangerous than Maur in her future: Agsded, and for him she will have to raise her game above and beyond everything else she's done.

This, despite being a medal winner, turned out to be a really good read, so I recommend it.

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L Jagi Lamplighter

Title: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin
Author: L Jagi Lamplighter
Publisher: Dark Quest Books
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!

This is a story which is, and I say this negatively, very much in the mold of Harry Potter - a girl (from England even!) starting her time at a school for witchcraft and wizardry, where the witches ride brooms, and can travel instantaneously, and just like in Harry Potter, Rachel loves to fly on her broomstick. And she's already a Griffin!

Of course everyone wants to write the next Harry Potter, but actually writing the next Harry Potter isn't the way to get there, because actually writing the next Harry Potter, no matter how much you try to differentiate it, is still ripping off Harry Potter - it's not really new, and that's the hole we immediately fell into with this novel.

Is this novel differentiated at all? Well, a little bit. It's not Hogwarts school to begin with. Here, it goes by the awful name of the Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts. Sorcerous sounds way too much like cancerous to me! Maybe there's a reason for that? Yes they fly on broomsticks - but the "difference" is that these brooms have no bristles so they go faster! Characters can they travel instantaneously, but here it's not by floo powder, but by mirror! And Rachel isn't an orphan - she has a mom, a dad, and an older sister - but she's miles away from them so she feels orphaned in a way.

I first started taking a dislike to this novel at only two percent in because of how Rachel's older sister Sandra is described: "Rachel hoped, when she grew up, she would look like Sandra, calm, stately, and as beautiful as a swam." Never mind courage. Never mind smarts. Never mind decency. Never mind friendliness. Never mind reliability. Never mind integrity. Never mind skills and capabilities. Never mind independence. Nope. The only important thing about a woman, once again please learn it well, is how beautiful and regal she is. This idea of wealth, privilege, and beauty so soaks this novel that it made me nauseous to read it. It was like being confined on the subway with someone who bathes in perfume or cologne rather than sports a teasing hint of it.

What is wrong with children's and young adult authors? Seriously? How many more stories written for young girls are going to persist in brutally ramming it down girls' throats that if you're not beautiful you're essentially valueless? Frankly, I am nauseated by reading this insanity. It makes me sick. People deserve better than this, especially girls who are already being beaten to death by "Big Fashion" and "Big Cosmetics". Do they not deserve something better than this?

I considered it my responsibility to give this novel a fair chance, which is why I continued to read on past this awful point, but I knew then that I would not be able to finish this novel if it continued in this vein, and continue it did. Young readers deserve a hell of a lot better than this.

It's immediately after this that we're told that poor homely Rachel is not only not beautiful like her sister, she also hasn't inherited her mother's "astoundingly shapely figure" because again, if you ain't got curves and beauty, you're an ugly witch. Don't you know that? Seriously? Rachel's "smarts" are conveyed to us not by anything she does or says, not by the approbation of others, but by the fact once again, that she's read lots of books! Because in YA and children's literature, book larnin' = smarts, dontcha know? You didn't know that? You need to read more books so everyone will know you're smart!

In this novel, just as in Harry Potter, the magical world is hidden from the muggles (the 'unwary' as they're apparently labeled here). Just as in Harry Potter, Rachel meets a blond kid (who's connected with the dark side) on her first day and makes an enemy of her - yes, its a she here, not a he.

Just like Hermione Granger, Rachel has unruly hair and is a know-it-all. She meets an orphan student with whom she becomes friends. The only real description we get of the boy is that he's handsome - again beauty trumps everything else! Rachel breaks the rules and discovers something untoward going on. She has to warn another student, Valerie Foxx (only one 'X' shy of becoming a porn star!). Valerie is pretty )of course she is!), and her friend is not only "gorgeous", but really "well-endowed" - because nothing could possibly be more important than looks. I supposed 'well-endowed' could mean she's intersexed, which at least would be something new, but I guessed not, and I was right.

Unlike Harry Potter, Rachel is rich and is actually Lady Rachel - coming from an old wealth family in Devon - the daughter of a Duke. She considers her new friend to be "low-born" because he comes from a "horrid, mundane orphanage". By this point I was thinking of calling up my Doctor for a large prescription of Promethazine to counter the extreme nausea. Also by this point I completely loathed Rachel.

Siggy, her pet orphan friend isn't actually any better. When she rudely asks him if he likes girls, his response indicates that he likes "ladies". He would never, he tells her, risk his life to slay a dragon for a "trollop". Let the trollops rot! I'm sorry, but at this point - 8 percent in - I could not stand to read even one more screen of this snotty piece of ill-conceived and appallingly abusive garbage. Call me unexpectedly enlightened.

Storm Siren by Mary Weber

Title: Storm Siren
Author: Mary Weber
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
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 novel is reward aplenty!

This is, I'm sorry to report, yet another first person PoV YA novel which has very little to distinguish it from any other YA novel in this genre. Do YA writers know that it's not actually illegal in the US to write in third person? This one is, as usual, about a young, down-trodden girl with special powers. Nothing new there. Her name is Nymia, although how it's pronounced isn't specified. She typically goes by 'Nym' so I don't know if her name is pronounced to sound like 'Nigh-me-uh' or like 'Nimm-ea', and the author doesn't help.

Nym (Nim or Nigh-m?) is a slave girl who has been through fourteen owners already and is up for auction yet again. Apparently she's a problem child. You can tell that she's been owned before by the series of brutal rings cut around her arm by each successive owner, each cut having had dye put into it while it's still raw and bleeding. Nym was orphaned when her parents died, so we're given to understand, but how that worked, exactly, isn't revealed. It seems that a lot of things aren't revealed in this novel, and I gleaned this state of affairs just from reading the first thirty pages.

The interesting thing about Nym is that she's what's known as an elemental. These are people who have magical power over an element (I guess), which I have to say, the way it's written here, seems like an idea purloined from Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy, although he certainly isn't the only one to use this trope. In this novel, there are also other varieties of power, such as a guy called Colin, who is a Terrene - meaning he can move earth and stone. Why he's not considered an elemental is yet another thing which goes unexplained here.

My problem with this is that earth, fire, water, and wind aren't actually elements. They're a mix of a number of elements, a large number in the case of earth. Of course, this is one of the things which you have to let slide if you want to enjoy fantasy novels. I typically don't have a problem with that, but I do have one with the idea, in this novel, that elementals are slaughtered at birth.

Nym got a bye on that because she's female and there are no female elementals (so everyone believes). Nym is unique. I can see how this would preserve her life since, despite her white hair (another thing in common with the Codex Alera), no one would have imagined that she was elemental; however, once she began manifesting her power, and especially after she became a slave, I see no reason why, in a savage society like this, she wasn't slaughtered long ago. This is another thing for which no explanation is offered by the author (not in the part which I read, anyway).

All that we glean is that evidently, once she does exhibit her power, she's quickly sold off to another owner, her elemental secret unrevealed. I couldn't believe that this would happen. I couldn't see how, in this world, she could go through fourteen owners with not a single one of them killing her or turning her over to the authorities. No. That doesn't work. If you want me to buy the idea that she somehow managed to survive, then you need to explain how that happened, exactly. Maybe the explanation arrived much later in the novel than I was prepared to await.

So credibility was rather low at that point, but it hadn't reached its nadir yet. When Nym's put on the auction block, she becomes pissed-off with some guy abusing a young red-haired girl who is his slave, and the thing about Nym is that you're not going to like her when she gets angry. She inadvertently summons a huge lightning storm, killing (so she's told, but I don't buy it) the little redhead as well as her owner.

Again, despite there being multiple witnesses to her display, she's not slaughtered or imprisoned, but is instead bought by Adora (no, really!), a rich and influential woman who is a senior adviser to the King. Her plan is to turn Nym into a weapon of war by having her personal trainer - Eogan (presumably pronounced like yogurt) - train Nym in controlling her power.

Nym isn't on board with the war - she's evidently allergic to killing, but she is on-board with learning control. Why elementals are born unable to control this power, and why they don't naturally learn to do so as they grow (just as we garner greater control as we learn to walk and talk, and later play sports, for example) is another unanswered question in a long line of such.

My biggest problem with Nym is that she's quite obviously a moron. The first issue is that she never questions why she should fight for a nation which literally enslaves her. I know she doesn't have a large number of options here, but to never even think that question once is too much. The second issue is, given that she's so powerful, how has she managed to remain a slave for so long? She never once escaped using her terrifying power? Again, no explanation. The world-building here - even the plot logic for that matter - left a lot to be desired.

The first time Nym is left alone for a minute in her new 'home', she wanders off through the castle because she needs to know more about Adora, Colin and Eogan, yet she's going to be working very closely with those latter two. Eogan - her trope male interest - is going to be teaching her and Colin. In short, she will find out all she needs to, and be able to ask them about Adora, yet this dip-shit cruelly gives her blind adviser the slip and wanders off! How inconsiderate can she get? Nym evidently doesn't think much of Breck, describing her at one point as "the blind servant", which is cruel at best.

This "blind servant" is Breck, who happens to be Colin's (fraternal) twin sister, and therefore a prime source of information about Colin, yet when Nym wants to find out about Colin, she thoughtlessly ditches the one person in all the world who knows most about him! Nym does this so she can blindly go herself to find out about him. Seriously?

But of course, in pursuing this dumb action, she's naturally rewarded by the oh-so-coincidental conversation on which she eavesdrops, between two men, one of whom - conveniently the more traitorous of the two - randomly draws out the 's' in some words; not all words containing or ending with 's', just random ones. I mean, yeah, we need to have a way to identify this guy later, but seriously? This is the best way you can think of to run a highlighter over him?!

Nym counts to a hundred by this method: "One, ten, twenty." Good luck with that scheme. Breck eventually tracks Nym down, claiming that she's "been lookin' all over" for her, but that's a rather cruel way to describe it. I'd have preferred "been searchin' all over", but that's just me.

Page forty has a real oddity: when Breck finds Nym, she's carrying only a plate and a jug, yet immediately afterwards, she's setting down a tray, then immediately after that she's setting down a plate? The page reads: "The plate Breck sets down clatters like she's almost tipped it off" which makes zero sense in itself. Tipped it off what? She's already set the tray down. If 'plate' was meant instead of 'tray' (which is what it ought to have been, I suspect), then she's already set that down. This isn't very good writing or editing. Why did no one catch this?

At a ball that evening, Nym tries and fails to get a look at the king and his rumored bride, Princess Rasha (I guess the king is bringing home the bacon?), who is evidently a luminescent. Really? I don't know if that's an elemental, or a separate branch of magic like a Terrene is. More confusion. Luminescents can read minds, so Nym seeks to avoid Rasha, but how she's going to manage that without knowing what Rasha looks like is another mystery. Nym is acting Rasha-ly.

As I mentioned, very little thought seems to have gone into world-building and back-story in this novel. For example, at one point, Nym rather abusively remarks that someone is so large they're like a whale cub, but she grew up in the mountains. How does she know what a whale looks like? We have no explanation because we know nothing about her.

Later she notes that Breck is eating oliphant. Now I have to ask why is 'whale' unchanged, but elephant changes to 'oliphant'? There's no consistency. At one point Nym almost has her hand bitten off by a horse which has been trained to eat meat. It's a war-horse and it's savage. If that's the case, then how do the soldiers manage to ride it safely into battle? A horse is an herbivore. It has neither the dentition nor the gut to be a meat-eater. How does it actually eat and digest the meat? No explanation. I skipped the chapter where Nym has to ride one of these carnivorous horses because it was boring.

When Nym first encounters Eogan (this is a guy who has skin which smells like sunbeams. WHAT? I'm not kidding. The author actually wrote that!), Nym rudely busts into his home uninvited, and plants herself there thinking he will have to throw her out if he wants her to leave; then she hypocritically accuses him of being rude. This was fifty pages in and was the point at which I decided I really detested Nym. I also started to seriously consider at what point I could ditch this novel without seeming rude myself. It's no small sacrifice of my time, because there were, at that point, still some 300 prospective pages through which I could wade.

Another oddity appears on page 62 where Eogan touches Nym's neck right where her "heart pulse is". Do I need to remind anyone that every pulse is a heart pulse unless you have something else pumping blood in your body? And what's with the inappropriate touching? Eogan is supposed to be sizing her up, which inexplicably involves touching her face and neck, and gazing into her eyes. I was surprised he didn't force her mouth open to check the filly's teeth. Colin is just as bad, yet Nym doesn't even see any of this as inappropriate! This means that on the one hand we're expected to see her as brash, independent, stubborn, feisty, etc., but on the other, she's very effectively depicted as slavish, submissive, passive, and so on. It doesn't work. So much for slavery being a hot-button issue in this novel.

Some reviews I read praised the fact that Eogan is black. While YA definitely needs more characters of color - and more colorful characters for that matter - this relationship struck me as standard. Yes, Eogan is black, but the main character, Nym, is still your standard WASP! Nothing has really changed. Had Nym been black (or Asian or Hispanic, or whatever), that would have been a big step, regardless of her love interest's color.

I didn't like Eogan. He's mean and cruel, and he's the one who brands Nym with her new slave ring. The only unanswered question is why they take so long to brand her, and why, when she has fourteen brands already, she even needs one more. We're not told what the purpose of multiple brands is, but that's relatively mild compared with what Eogan does to get her to manifest her power. Nym has a deformed hand and Eogan deliberately hurts her to see if he can set off a spasm, rather like Tony Stark did to Bruce Banner in The Avengers, but Eogan does it more than once and in many different ways.

On the other hand, so to speak, he's not as cruel to Nym as she is to herself. Nym is a cutter - doubtlessly to pay herself back for a death she's caused in the past - I'm guessing she killed her own parents inadvertently with her power which is why she's so dead-set against death, but I don't know that for sure, because I quit reading this. Call it a crisis of faith - I had no faith that my doctor would issue me with sufficient Promethazine to enable me to finish reading this novel.

I pretty much gave up on this in the nineties, around chapters 11 & 12, when slave girl Nym, servant girl Breck, and Colin go out for a night one the town. WHAT? Since when do slaves and servants in a cruel world like this with a villain for a mistress get a night off to go bar-hopping? I'm sorry but that right there is so far past ludicrous that it's gone plaid. I cannot recommend this novel. Not with a straight face.

Darkness by Erin Eveland

Title: Darkness
Author: Erin Eveland
Publisher: Selladore 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.

Erratum:
p99 "...normal human's did..." should be "...normal humans did..."

I made it only half-way through this novel before I had to give up. Darkness is very aptly named, and I don't mean that as a compliment. It's relentlessly miserable, and dark with horrifying things happening to the 16-year-old female protagonist, and that would be fine if the story was going anywhere, or if there was some sort of light visible, however dimly, at the end of the tunnel, but there never is - not in the part I read.

This is a dark and unnerving young-adult novel, part of a series, with a prologue that I skipped as always. My position is that if it's worth reading, it's worth putting into chapter one or later, but the employment of a prologue was particularly curious in this instance, because we then went on to have an additional three-chapter prologue! It really made me wonder what the purpose of the defined prologue actually was. The story really begins in chapter four, a decade on from the first three chapters, where we discover that Catherine is pretty much taking care of herself since her grandmother's death.

unfortunately, very little of real substance happens. We learn that Catherine has an unusual relationship with darkness. She can manipulate her own shadow - without moving her body to do it - forcing it to assume disturbing forms, and one day she sees ravenous 'shadows' on her grandmother Margaret, small ones, she says, but she knows that larger ones are coming. She says she can banish them; then Margaret awakens after a spell of unconsciousness feeling even more nervous about her granddaughter than she already did.

Catherine describes a man to Margaret - an almost formless man - who wears a hat, and who speaks to her. He claims he's Catherine's guardian, and asserts that he will become her lover and her teacher. Margaret's feeble response is to take Catherine to church - like that's ever going to help.

Catherine is the offspring of Margaret's daughter Kathy, an unruly and wild child who disappeared, only to reappear later demanding money for an abortion, which Margaret refused to grant. She did volunteer her home for Kathy to have a place and support to raise her child, hoping it would settle her down, but it failed. Kathy completely disappeared after her daughter's birth. In having this 'substitute daughter' with a similar name to her own daughter's, Margaret found that she could comfortably live with this life, but now she's old and ailing, and Catherine seems to be having a host of issues of her own. Yet despite her seeming to care for the young girl, the grandmother has taken precious few precautions to protect her from her lowlife mom.

When Margaret is taken seriously ill with a heart ailment, things begin looking darker for Catherine than ever they have. She discovers that whatever power she has can be used not only to protect her grandmother from the shadows, but also to protect herself from other people. But they cannot prevent her grandmother's death. That's when we jump to ten years later to discover that Catherine has been forced to endure her tyrant bitch mom, who crawled out from under her rock when her own mother died to pick up a meager inheritance. How she even knew about it is unexplained, and how the moronic child-care system ended up placing Catherine with her absentee lowlife mother is also unexplained, but such things do happen in real life, I'm sorry to say.

The one hope in Catherine's life (and again, I'm sorry to say because it's such a trope) is her friend Nathan, who rescued her from bullies some years before, and who now works as a dishwasher in a bar having 'graduated' high school. In a way, it's easy to see how Catherine would grasp at him as a lifeline, but even that is a stretch. He lives close by her in the same trailer park although she sees little of him now that he works evenings and she's still in school, but there is zero magic between them, not even a spark.

The problem is that neither of these two shows any real affinity for the other, even though both of them so we're told, claim to be strongly attracted to the other, so the romance was a complete non-starter for me. Nathan is also attached to the darkness via a stranger who shows up in the bar where he works, so this makes two dark strangers, neither of which seem to have anything going on. Even after reading half the novel I had no idea who they were, what they represented, what they were after, or why they took such an interest in Catherine or in Nathan. Again, Darkness is a very apt title because I felt completely in the dark.

I don't mind a plot that unfolds over the pages and chapters, but this story moved (if indeed it did move) so ponderously slowly that I couldn't detect any real movement at all. It seemed to me to be nothing more than one depressingly dark event after another with no purpose or direction and no leavening in between - or even hope of any. I started getting the feeling that the author hated Catherine and had no other purpose in mind than to punish her relentlessly. That's not a good feeling for an author to imbue in her readers. If she has no love for her character, then why on Earth should I?

I grew sincere doubts that anything would happen before the last chapter and then it would likely be no more than a cliff-hanger for volume two in this series. I ran out of interest in pursuing this story, let alone moving on to a second volume. I cannot recommend it.

The Magician's Doll by M L Roble

Title: The Magician's Doll
Author: M L Roble
Publisher: Harper
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.

erratum
p10 "So you think you're mother's a freak too?" should be "So you think your mother's a freak too?"

This is the story of Natalie Bristol desperately hurrying home from school to try and hide the 'Psychic' sign her mother has put up in the front yard, before her school 'friends' see it and make fun of her. She fails. It's the story of Natalie, who has unpredictable blackouts, during one of which a mysterious voice warns her that, "They are stronger. They are coming. They will arrive." She desperately wants to control these episodes, but she cannot.

It's the story of a young girl who has a thrill-a-minute day at the circus until the magician's show, where the great Beausoleil brings a doll onto the stage, and invites Natalie to prove to herself that it's just a doll. After she does so, the doll appears to come to life and when it touches Natalie's hand, she feels her life energy leaving her and entering the doll, summoning yet another blackout.

When she awakens, her mother is talking to Beausoleil, and the two obviously know each other. He's desperately trying to persuade her to help him, and warning her as a friend that she isn't safe no matter how well she tries to hide herself and her daughter. But no one is telling Natalie what the heck is going on, and her friend Phillip is behaving more and more like he will do something rash in pursuit of his quest to discover what really happened to his father.

I have to say that page 72 is hilarious. I don't know what it was exactly, but I laughed out loud at that. Maybe I was recovering after a stressful day at work, but I could imagine exactly how that incident went down and how it looked. Louisa's comments slayed me! But then Louisa is a rather special girl in an unexpected way, now, isn't she?

The next page, unfortunately, was much less thrilling. It employed the tired old trope of the young protagonist not being told anything. There is no excuse for this, and I know it's a standard trope in YA fiction: the youthful hero-to-be growing up in ignorance, but when your writing demonstrates that the only tool you have to build up tension is to have your characters retreat into irrational, nonsensical, or even dangerous behaviors, it simply doesn't work. It only annoys readers, and it makes me personally reach a point where I am thinking that this had better be dealt with soon or I'm outta here! I'm all for a bit of mystery and intrigue, but when it's so artificial as to drop you right out of suspension of disbelief and into ascension of annoyance, it's nothing more than bad writing.

Chapter twelve doesn't get any better either as it progresses (or rather regresses), because even now the three kids have seen a part of what they're up against, Natalie's mom is all, "We'll talk tomorrow'. I frankly want to kick her in her obsessive, secretive, lethargic, lousy-parenting ass at that point. Yes, I know this is written for a younger age range than mine, but children are only dumb if they're persistently treated that way. They will see through this.

It was parental stupidity which precipitated the sorry events of chapter twelve, and still they seem blindly incapable of learning from it. I know there really are people who are dumb and thoughtless, and who are poor parents, but this seems to be a raging pandemic in YA literature and it needs to stop, because in the end it reflects very badly on the writer and offers a grave disservice to the reader.

Unfortunately things did not pick up from there either, because even as events actually became more exciting (as I learned more about Natalie and Phillip's "gifts"), I also became more irritated. Natalie's grandmother's habit of endlessly saying "my dear" really got my skin crawling after a while, and then the school bully problem cropped up again and Natalie's friend Phillip comes out with this appallingly genderist comment: "...three against two and one is a girl...".

Excuse me? She's a girl and therefore she's somehow not a full person? I decided right there that point that this novel now had five chapters to turn itself around otherwise I was ditching it. There is no excuse for dissing girls in YA stories. Women have enough crap to deal with without them being demeaned and down-graded at such a young age for no other reason than that they're "a girl". I can't believe that a writer who is of the same gender would demean her major character like this. It's inexcusable. What kind of a message is she sending to young girls?

This genderism is further amplified later when Phillip's mom sews together a jacket for Phillip and for Natalie. Phillip gets something that looks like an army jacket, with lots of pockets, whereas Natalie gets one with ruffles down the front and on the sleeves? Why? Because she's a girl and doesn't deserve to be treated the same and given the same options as a boy? Of course, Natalie loves her jacket because she's a girl and it's "dainty"! If only she'd go sit in the corner and be quiet until she's old enough to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, everything would be fine, wouldn't it? Then we could have a story about manly Phillip and we wouldn't have to bother ourselves any more with The Nat, that useless girl.

This took place as Natalie and Phillip were coming into their "gifts", and undergoing training to learn how to use the gifts, yet neither one of them thinks of employing those powers to fend off the three bullies. This is a betrayal of the characters and is bad writing. For two or three days, these two have had it drilled into them that they must practice and use their powers, and control them and take charge of them, yet the last thing either of them thinks of is using a power and taking charge of this situation and controlling it? Yes, eventually, Natalie realizes this, but it just makes your characters look dumb and slow when you do this.

This situation is actually even worse because it portrays Natalie and Phillip running around in the open, unprotected, right after their parents have effectively grounded them, telling them that they cannot be running round out in the open and unprotected because they're in grave danger! The plotting here makes no logical sense at all.

So I read five chapters more and things did not improve and I called this one off. There were multiple problems with it. In addition to the one grammatical error I mentioned in the erratum, there were several issues of really awkward sentences. For example, on page 151 I read: "It's going to start to get dark soon." which is not really an error as such, but it's definitely an awkward sentence. Page 156 had another one in this vein: "A footfall tapped on the wood of the tree." It just sounds weird, is all. This novel fails the so-called Bechdel test, too. The first time that Louisa and Natalie talk to each other with no one else present, the only thing they can find to talk about is Phillip! It's sad but true!

So while this novel might appeal to undiscriminating children at the younger end of the YA scale and to pre-young adults, it doesn't have what it takes to pass my muster. It's poorly written, it's genderist, and there are plot holes galore, all of which could have been avoided. Once again this is proof that going the Big Publishing™ route is no guarantee that you'll get a decent editor.

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.

Marcus Mender by DD Roy

Title: Marcus Mender
Author: DD Roy
Publisher: Casey Shay press
Rating: worthy

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

Please note that this review is going to have a few more spoilers than I like to post in a Net Galley review, because there are some issues I need to address with this novel!

This is Book 2 of the Troubled Tweens series (aka the Magic Mayhem series, in what so far is a trilogy: Jinnie Wishmaker, Marcus Mender, Elektra Chaos), but note that this is the first I have read, so this review may be skewed for better or for worse by my not having that history. DD Roy is a fellow Austinite, so I have to give her a good review or she'll hunt me down and do some heavy Loki magic on me!

Seriously, I have to confess to mixed feelings about this novel. I started out liking it, and then started having issues with it, but then I'm stuck with the problem that I'm not the intended age range for this series. So who am I reviewing it for - me, or my kids? If you hate a novel then there's no problem. If you fall in love with it, the same: no problem; you know exactly how your review will turn out, and it doesn't matter what age range it's aimed at. The problem is that huge area in the middle! So let me play out the review for you and then I'll tell you my evil plan!

'Most magical kids get their power by the end of fifth grade," at St. Martin's Academy (so we're advised), and Marcus, the main focus of this novel, squeaked in with a week to go. He's not the only kid to have such powers. His close friends Jinnie (who can grant wishes), and the twins: Maddy (who makes people angry) and Grace (who apparently has the opposite power to Maddy's and also seems to be able to block the use of magic by others) are also empowered, but for some reason none of these kids are telling their parents anything. I'm not sure how wise it is to portray kids as purposefully keeping momentous secrets from their folks, but all kids do keep secrets, of course.

Marcus discovers that he can't turn off his power, which is that of fixing things. Everything he touches reverts to its original unblemished state. I loved the way, once home that Friday afternoon, he experimented to discover what the limitations of his power were. You usually don’t get the scientific approach in a novel of this nature. He found that everything he touched reverted to a pristine state - his shirt looked new and clean, a draw with a broken-off handle reverted to a clear, smooth stretch of unblemished wood without even a screw hole in it. The drill he picked up to re-drill the hole reverted to new!

Marcus has a dietary problem he evidently discovered (or gained) during volume 1, when his friend Jinnie got her wish-granting power (she can only grant one wish per person apparently). Marcus can't eat dairy or gluten. Neither can he "fix" himself with his power, but he can fix others. You might be surprised at how common this lactose intolerance is. The ability to digest dairy products isn’t the norm amongst humans; humans are 'supposed' to lose their ability to consume milk as we age, because this is how we evolved. We mammals are supposed to grow up and lose dependency on mother's milk, but many in the western world have retained the ability, and evolution supported this because it enabled us to take advantage of domesticated cows, sheep, and goats.

There are two kinds of kids in this magical world, the Loki who are led by coach Snicker (no kidding), and who are "evil", and the Vor (lead by a teacher named Kent), who are "good". Marcus and his friends are, of course, Vor, and they're supposed to help keep the balance in the world between good and evil. There's no explanation as to why there has to be a balance, and this was one of my problems with the writing: there's really no explanation for anything! We don't get to learn where these powers ultimately come from or how a certain kid gets a certain power (or fails to get a power), nor do we learn how these children are able to wield their power at no cost to anyone.

This flies in the face of everything else I've learned in this novel! If good has to balance evil, then what balances the use of a magical power? Who pays the cost for its use? Apparently it's free energy, and for me this undermines everything in the novel where someone speaks about balance and misuse of power. Once again, please note that I'm speaking only for this volume, as I said. If some explanation was offered in volume 1, then that might resolve these issues. Perhaps, for example, the cost of a positive use of the power is the negative use of power by someone else. This is suggested, but never follow-through in volume 2, and it's hard to see how that could work in practice, but at least it prevents the problem of getting something for nothing!

Each team has a bird for some reason. Team Loki has a Grackle which spies on the Vor. No word on exactly what species of Grackle it is (there are eleven, at least two of which are common in Austin. The Common Grackle is gorgeous. The Great-Tailed is seriously noisy). As much as I love Grackles, I have to say that the tired cliché of a black bird siding with evil needs to be slaughtered mercilessly! It's way overdone. Team Vor, of course, has a Cardinal (which is of the same order of birds as are the Grackles,so not a unbridgeable deal of difference there!). The Cardinal is female and can apparently talk in one way or another.

The Loki recruits are developing magical powers in tandem with the Vor. One of Team Loki, named Silver, stole a wish from Jinnie in volume 1, apparently. In relating this, Roy appears to miss out a key word: "…Silver Wiggins, had used the bird to help her steal a wish from Jinnie, one that Silver could grant for herself without Jinnie's help." That's ambiguous enough that I couldn't be sure if it was to be taken as is, or if the word "not" had been missed from between 'could' and 'grant'. It could work either way and it was a bit annoying not to know, but given that the text seems to be technically well-written in general, I'll give Roy the benefit of the doubt here!

There were only a couple of minor such issues that I noticed in this novel, such as the one where "...he glanced down a the gauze..." (I suspect he glanced at the gauze), and where "Mr. Santos topped spinning" (I suspect he stopped spinning). These were both on the same page about two-thirds the way through. And one more: "I'm back" says Jax, at one point, but he wasn’t actually away immediately before he said that, so I did have a few issues in figuring out the dialog here and there.

Clearly this novel is intended for a juvenile audience because it seems to have a few too many plot issues for a mature or discerning reader to countenance without frowning. For example, this Grackle is a spy and a nuisance, but nowhere do we see Jinnie wishing it away, or failing that, anyone trying to capture or kill it. They seem completely unable to cope with it, which is really sad. This is a problem with coming into a series without having had the benefit of the introductory novel(s). Maybe they tried this in Volume 1, and for some reason it wasn't possible.

The Loki consist of Bruscilla (who apparently has no power), Silver, Elektra (who can scramble thoughts), and Jax (as in 'jumping Jax' because he can jump instantly to another location. Sheesh.), so I guess it’s not hard to discern one's enemies in this world: if they have a weird or evil-sounding name, they're Loki, whereas those with a normal name are Vor!

I can see how this could be a fun series for younger people, but I have my doubts as to how well it will appeal to people who are the same age group as the kids featured in the story, and it’s unlikely to appeal to very many more mature readers, because the story is just too loosely-wrapped. For example, on page thirty-seven there's a declaration which makes little sense. Maddy and Marcus are trying to figure out how to control his run-away magic until they can speak to the temporarily unavailable Mr Kent. They decide to cut class and they sit in a darkened space, hiding and talking.

Maddy informs Marcus that there has to be a balance in the universe, such that if a Loki does a bad thing, then a Vor must a good thing. This actually means that, in effect, the Vor are very effectively under the control of the Loki! So whence the balance?! As Maddy rambles on, what she's saying sounds more ridiculous. She expresses a fear that there's no telling what Marcus is doing to the universe with his magic not being under control. Again this implies that there's no law of balance, which flatly contradicts what she's just said is a rule! Worse than this, she then calls into play one of Newton's laws of motion, specifically the one relating to inertia. Maddy quite evidently doesn’t understand the first thing about inertia.

In popular parlance, inertia tends to suggest idleness on someone's part: that they can neither be moved nor enjoined to move of their own volition. In science inertia means unchanging: that something which is moving will continue to move at a constant speed, and that something which is at rest (not that anything actually is at rest in this universe!) will remain at rest, until and unless either situation is acted upon by a force. Maddy claims that things must move forwards, although how this works when she's already declared that the Vor and the Loki quite effectively negate each other is another unexplained mystery. You can't have perfect balance and forward motion at the same time. For example, when a human walks, they are effectively out of balance the entire time. If they were balanced, they wouldn't be moving, which is quite the opposite of the proposition Maddy is nattering on about.

I'm very much rooted in science, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good fantasy, or a supernatural or magical story as long as it's told well, but even in the most fantastical of worlds, there have to be rules, otherwise the story risks degenerating into the completely nonsensical. I have yet to discern any logical rules at all in this world. Everything we’re told seems to be completely arbitrary, made-up by the author on the spot for no discernible reason. This made this novel a frustrating read for me.

Clearly a writer has no compulsion to write a children's novel and make it appeal to an adult, but I do think writers have, or at least ought to have, a compulsion not to talk down to children, and not to dumb-down stories just because they're writing for a younger audience. Even a magical story requires a sound framework within which to relate it, and if you don't have that in place, then literally anything becomes possible and your plotting goes down the drain.

On this topic there's a major issue I had with the main plot point, which I admit is an intriguing reversal of intent. I don’t want to give too much away, but something happens that initiates the Vor behaving like Loki and vice-versa. This is a cool idea, but the cause of this ultimately makes no sense. The Vor group go haring off to South America to prevent the Loki from hauling an object southwards. The very act of doing this grants them increased power, thereby rendering the whole system off-balance, which is why it must be stopped. So far so good; however, given that Jinnie can grant any wish (even if only once per person), I honestly don’t get why any of this took place at all. She could simply have had someone wish that everything was back to the way it was before the trigger-event occurred, thereby preventing team Loki from achieving their aim. There was no need at all for the trip to South America, much less the shenanigans which take place in the Atacama desert there! That wasn't the only plotting problem with this scenario, but I'll leave it at that.

There was nothing to stop the author from writing these scenes if they'd been prefaced by some logical explanation as to why this whole thing had to go down the way it did, but there was nothing offered, so it all seemed pointless to me and made the whole Vor team seem stupid. I'm sure that wasn't the author's intention! Maybe the majority of those in the intended age range for this novel won't notice things like this, but my kids actually are in that age range, and I know that they would definitely have questioned this kind of "logic"!

So here's my dirty little secret: I have to confess that the more I read of this volume 2, the more I wanted to read the original, Jinnie Wishmaker (I keep wanting to call it 'Wishbringer' for some reason!). That initial volume does sounds like it might appeal to me more than this one did. I also became rather enamored of Elektra, so I am now tempted to go get the third volume in the series, Elektra Chaos! So how am I to deal with that? I can't rate the middle one badly, and then go out and buy other two volumes to read: I'll be a hypocrite! Curse my fondness for kick-A female characters! So here's my deal: I'll rate this one a cautious (and slightly cantankerous) 'worthy' and then Roy had better come through on the other two novels and make them seriously good, otherwise I'll have to visit some Loki magic on her!