Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label magic. Show all posts

Friday, February 5, 2016

The Magicians by Lev Grossman


Rating: WARTY!

I just began watching the TV version of this novel and I really enjoy it, so I checked with the local library and they had the audio book! Yeay! Bless that library! I began listening to that as soon as the library got it in, but unfortunately, the thrill of having the chance to hear this book was quickly replaced by deadening boredom. Mark Bramhall's dull delivery left a lot to be desired, but even had the reader been enthralling, I would still have found this novel tedious in the extreme. It was awful. This was a book about magic, and somehow Lev Grossman had contrived to remove all magic from it, and render it into one of the most pretentiously monotonous books that has ever crossed my eyesight.

I was hoping the book would be just as good as, if not better than the TV show, and perhaps with a little more substance, but there was no substance. There was no magic even when magic was being performed because the descriptions of the magic were written to tediously that all immediacy and thrill was banished. Lev Grossman seems to be the type of writer who thinks, "Why use one word where I can use a dozen?" He evidently asks himself, "Why be pithy, to the point, and gripping, when I can be rambling, dissipated, and tiresome?" It was not a pleasant experience for me.

The novel is very broadly the same as the TV show of course, but there are some significant differences which became obvious from the rambling, self-important first chapter. Indeed the first couple of chapters could have been completely dispensed with and would have actually improved this novel. I had hoped that it would improve once I got to the Breakbills magic school, but it was just as boring there as it had been in the seemingly endless run-up to that point. The TV show did a much better job of starting the story, and it made the main character, Quentin, much more appealing. Here, he was boring and I had no interest in reading about him. Even the visit from the evil wizard was uninteresting. How someone can take an event which on TV was gripping and dramatic, and make it leaden and unappealing is a mystery, but Lev Grossman managed it.

So this was a big fat DBF, but to be fair, I do owe the author for two things. One: he's convinced me that I never need to read another book by Lev Grossman, and two, he's convinced me I never need to read even one book by George RR Martin! How did that happen? Well this publisher somehow inveigled Martin to write a 'sound bite' for the cover, which ran along the lines of "The Magicians is to Harry Potter what a shot of Irish whisky is to weak tea." This phrase convinced me of two things: George Martin is utterly clueless, and so is Big Publishing™.

I think even people who hate Harry Potter would have to agree that this novel and that series have nothing on common. They are aimed at different audiences and different age ranges, so why Martin thought there was some point to comparing them is a mystery. Clearly the publisher was hoping to suck deeply on the teat of Harry Potter and draw his fans into this novel, but they have been thoroughly dishonest in comparing the two. Harry Potter had magic, to which his legions of fans and the run-away success of the movies clearly attest. The Potter books were juvenile, but they were readable, inventive, and widely appealing. This story is none of the above. Harry Potter was wordy at times, and lacked much weighty substance, but it was not leaden, and it cut to the chase on a regular basis. By contrast, there is no chase to cut to in this story. I'd say it plods, but that would imply that it was going somewhere when it was not.

I can't recommend something as stodgy and badly written as this is. Watch the TV show instead.


Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: Down Town by Jim Butcher, Mark Powers


Rating: WARTY!

I've read some of the Dresden Files graphic novels before and couldn't get into them. Unlike with his Codex Alera series, which I loved, the Dresden files never got me interested. I tried watching the short-lived TV show and that was a bust, too. So why pick this one? Well, this story gave him an assistant, which I'd never encountered before in this series, so I thought that might be interesting - adding a dynamic that was never there before.

I was particularly intrigued, given what an impoverished situation he was in (your standard clichéd, struggling private dick kind of a deal), how he had even taken on an assistant, but this was adequately explained. The problem is that this is about all I remembered of this story when I came to write this review several days after reading it. That's not always a bad sign, but it's typically not a good one!

In this story, Harry Dresden, a Chicago-based wizard-for-hire, has taken on an apprentice, Molly Carpenter. The blurb describes her as a "new" apprentice", and this is actually the case, I'm informed, because he had another assistant prior to this one, so this is indeed his new assistant. He only took her on to spare her from being slaughtered by the white council. Dresden is apparently planning on bringing down a villain described as a mad sorcerer who wants to take over the city. My question is: why not just run for mayor? Or magic himself into that job?! It made no sense!

The sorcerer is in league with gangster Johnnie Marcone. Will Harry be able to hold his own or will Molly have to hold it for him? I don't know. I got to about 80% in and lost patience with this one. The story wasn't that great to begin with, and I was finding pages missing text - they had empty speech balloons throughout. This was on Bluefire reader on the iPad. Even one such page is bad for a review copy in this day and age, but many such pages? Not acceptable. I had no idea what the characters were saying or thinking, and pretty soon I realized that I really didn't care. It was time to move on to something more engaging - and wordy! I can't recommend this.


Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho


Rating: WARTY!

This was an advance review copy, and we reviewers are always warned to keep that in mind, but what I keep in mind is that in this day and age of electronic publishing, publishers and authors have little excuse to put out a review copy that hasn't been properly vetted for errors. In this novel, some of the phrasing, granted not much, but still some sounds like it was run through Google translate, such as "Yet it sat with Zacharias ill to overturn..."

Additionally, there were also some odd words mixed in, some of which were evidently made up yet nowhere where they defined or set in a context so it was obvious what these words meant. Some parts of the novel were run together, and I suspect that this was caused by the transcription process into Kindle app format rather than anything that the author did. The following is a copy of how an example of this appeared in my smart phone Kindle app:

Damerell waved him away. “Have some sense, man!” he gasped. “Don’t interrupt!”“What can you mean?” said Rollo.
I seriously doubt that the author made the absurd line breaks, the oddball line spacing, and the random font changes that I saw in my Kindle Android app copy, but this is an issue which needs to be taken care of!

Those things aside, the story got off to a great start. It was, once again a story where magic is in decline, and once again a story where women are all but forbidden to use magic. How that works is a mystery to me. Yes, women have long been forced into second place (assuming they were granted any place at all in society), but this was in regular everyday life not in a magical world where things are very different. What we have here is such a world, yet we're expected to believe that this made no difference to how society developed. I didn't buy that, but it's that shaky premise that we have to deal with here. Other than that, it began as an engrossing story.

Set in England, during Napoleonic times, we enter a world where the new Sorcerer to the crown is a black man - a protégé of the previous magician, who was highly regarded. Popular sentiment is turning against Zacharias because he is resented for being black, but "worse" than this, he's seen as an ideal person to blame for the decline in magic in England.

In order to escape the calumny, Zach takes up an offer from an acquaintance to speak in his stead at a girls school. This will get him out of town for a few days at least. He doesn't know that there is a girl, Prunella, at the school, who is oozing with magic and who is, like Zach, not white. She has also lost her father as Zach has lost his father figure. You would think they would have a lot in common, and I was sure the author's intention as to bring these two together, but as it happened, they were as different as chalk and cheese, which would have been fine if they'd had some chemistry and had no chemistry, but they did not. None at all.

Prunella was quite impressive as a character to begin with, but then she discovered something during the visit of the Royal Sorcerer, and promptly turned profoundly stupid. She discovered something in an old bag her father left for her - something which would be of huge benefit, and she knew that she needed professional advice on how best to employ this material, but never once does she think of approaching the Royal Sorcerer!

He was right there at the school. She was in his company at the same time as she had this knowledge, yet never once did it cross her mind to approach him, and neither were we given any reason - let alone a good reason - why she failed to do so. This made no sense and for me was the first false step in this story because it made Prunella look like a moron.

Let me side-track for a minute to say that I don't get how these two characters are named, and no explanation is forthcoming from the author, not even a poor one. Prunella hails from India, where Prunella, believe it or not, is not a common name. Prunella is, in fact, Latin in derivation. Zacharias is supposedly African, where again, Zacharius was nowhere near the first name of choice. It is in fact the Greek form of the Hebrew Zechariah. Neither name was applicable. Character names are important and for me, these were failures.

Back to our regular programming. I can see how an author might want to keep their main characters apart for as long as possible, especially if there's a romance in the offing, just to increase dramatic tension, but if you're going to do this you need to offer valid reasons, not poor ones, and especially not ones which make your main female character look like an idiot. You certainly don't want to bypass that altogether in the evident hope that the reader won't see the plot hole. Trust me, there aren't many readers who are as dumb as Prunella appears to be, and it's insulting to your readers to suggest otherwise!

I don't get why Prunella was so appallingly slow to share with Zacharias her discoveries in the attic. In the end she didn't share them so much as he blundered in on them. I like that she bonded with Mak Genggang (which is an awesome name), but that relationship was short lived and never really went anywhere. It was like Mak was nothing more than a key to open a door for Prunella, and was then discarded.

I kept bouncing back and forth between delight with the obvious Asian influences the author brings to her story-telling, and being frustrated at how slowly the story progressed. Some people are never happy, huh?! LOL! A little tighter, with some more momentum would have been appreciated, but I did maintain my interest even through the frustration.

This story was different and had a freshness to it despite using a lot of tropes, and I enjoyed how fresh it was. I liked Prunella initially, even as she irritated me at times, but my appreciation of her deteriorated as the story progressed until I had no time for her. Zacharias I never did warm to. He seemed to be such a Mary Sue in that he was more like wallpaper than an app. He really wasn't a protagonist in that he was not proactive at all. Everything happened to him. He did nothing himself which made him totally boring. He seemed far too content to float down the river in a tube rather than fire up a speedboat and get where he needed to be. Given the derision in which too many people held him, and the repeated attempts on his life, his lackadaisical attitude was simply incomprehensible when it wasn't laughable.

Prunella had a lot more oomph to her, but she seemed to be marching to her own obscure drumbeat. For two characters who were supposed to be thrown together and develop a relationship (however it was intended to turn out), they were completely at odds, and not in a good way. They were not a team nor did they look like they were on their way to becoming one.

For a novel which is supposed to be about, inter alia inequality (of race, of gender, and of wealth), this novel seems still to go out of its way to segregate women in some regards, such as in how they are titled. Zacharias is a thaumaturge, yet he insists that Prunella is a thaumaturgess, and later a Magicienne. Why? Why can she not be a thaumaturge as he is or a magician? For that matter, why not a sorcerer since she has a familiar? That's sorcerer, please note, not sorceress.

I didn't get why the author went out of her way repeatedly to segregate her as a woman when the whole book was supposed to be about integration. People are welcome to disagree, but for me, it’s time we shed these gender-confining distinctions. We got rid of "miss", so why retain the idea of mistress - that is to say, why retain the -ess suffix for women? Someone who acts, for example, is an actor, not an actress. We don’t call female doctors doctresses! (and let's have no more of 'dress'! From now on it must be dror! LOL!).

Here's one reason why I ended up not liking her: "Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield." There were other times I did like her, but in the end, she was all over the place in my estimation and my liking dwindled to nothing. There were examples of her doing good and supportive and grateful things for the opportunity she'd been given, then there were other times when she would turn immediately around and act like the most stupid person in the entire Kingdom. I don't expect a character to be perfect. That would be as absurd as it would be boring. I don't mind a main character starting weak, or stupid, or clumsy if they improve, but when a protagonist like Prunella starts out likable, and then turns a reader off them, they're written poorly, period.

One classic example of her stupidity was when she attended a party and observed a magical orb sitting on a table. Later she encounters that same orb at Zach's house causing mischief and mayhem, yet never once did she share her inside knowledge with Zach. Instead she secretly snuck out, leaving an obscure and ambiguous note for Zach, to break into the house of her friend's greatest enemy for no better reason than to see if the orb she had seen earlier was still on the table in that house!

If it had not been there (no matter what other reason there might have been for its absence) she would then "know" that this orb that had delivered chaos to Zach's home was one and the same. Instead of leaving the orb behind her, she took it with her and thereby delivered it straight into the hands of her enemy, losing her evidence! Classic stupidity. I can’t go to bat for a character who is so relentlessly clueless, nor can I harbor any great wish to read more about her.

Inertia was one of the worst traits of this novel - no one did anything. Even Prunella, the most active of the protagonists, barely moved except to go to parties to try and pick up a husband, and nowhere did she count love or companionship as one of her expectations from this hoped-for betrothal. She worked for nothing yet gained everything. In another inexplicable example of inertia, I have to ask why was it, exactly, that despite the bountiful threats against his protégé from every quarter, did Sir Stephen's ghost wait to act until we were three-quarters the way through the book? And then failed to deliver anything? What was the point of this ghost? I saw none.

Deus ex machina was another issue. Prunella's stupendously growing powers were coming out of nowhere. We were offered no reason whatsoever to explain why she started out doing small but impressive low-level magic and then in a matter of a few days or weeks at best, she had grown to be the most powerful magician in England if not the world. Yes she had some training and read a couple of books, but this was, judged from the way the story has it, a limited and cursory amount of both training and reading.

Yes, she had three familiars, but nowhere are we given any indication that these three are contributing to, much less actually enhancing, her powers that she should become so strong so fast. Indeed, nowhere is it explained exactly what familiars these represent, what they are supposed to contribute, or why they are so important.

Other have reviewers, I've noted, have complained of lack of character development and world-building. I don’t worry over much about those kinds of things if the story itself is good, but what I do care about is huge gaps in the story-telling - where things happen out of the blue, with no presaging at all, or where huge changes take place with little or nothing to account for them. Too many things are completely glossed over in this story.

The sad corollary to all of that is that When we finally reach the point at which Prunella is unleashed and enters her first magical battle, it’s skipped completely - we only learn of it after the fact, and then get no details, only the result. It’s like the author was too timid or lacking confidence to write the thing, and we had all of this build-up with nothing to show for it. The ending rather fell apart. It dragged out far too long and a major character was callously killed off by Prunella which made me really actively dislike her at that point. I was very disappointed in how all this played out.

I know this was a début novel, and both the premise and the promise are great, but this was simply not ready for prime-time. The sad thing is that the novel deserved some real pre-publishing support from the publisher and it evidently got none, or at best, insufficient, which forces me to ask once again in this age of self-publishing, what exactly is the benefit and point of going the Big Publishing™ route if what could have been a masterpiece is so badly let down? I cannot recommend this novel as a worthy read, but I confess that having read this effort, I am interested in following this author's career. She has an awesome name, and I think she has places to go. I'm curious as to where she goes next!


Friday, May 15, 2015

Rat Queens The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'Rygoth by Kurtis J Weibe


Title: Rat Queens The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'Rygoth
Author: Kurtis J Wiebe
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Roc Upchurch and Stjepan Šejić.

Erratum:
"It'd still be in tact..." should be "It'd still be intact..." (page 14 Adobe Digital Edition).

I automatically feel nauseous whenever I read a fantasy story which has random apostrophes appearing in words. The last word in the title of this one sounds like Henry Goth! It's larded with stock fantasy phrases like "the Haruspex Requiem", and "the Glyph of Furlough", and "the abyssal plain". Newsflash: an abyss ain't a plain. But the blurb sounded interesting, so I thought, "Let's run it up the reader and see if it's worth saluting."

The funny thing is that it actually turned out to be the most engaging comic I've read since iZombie. Despite the trope and cliché here and there, it has such a modern feel to it without losing anything of its medieval setting. I am definitely going to buy the graphic novel series for this.

According to the images on page six, the Rat Queen team evidently conduct their work using a broadsword, a Harry Potter style wand dripping lightning, a dead squid, and some interesting looking mushrooms. They also play in a girl band according to one wild image, but I suspected that that was for sheer fun. It did endear me to the artist, however.

So this looks interesting so far, thinks I. The 'drummer", Betty, is a lesbian pixie or halfling, the "lead guitarist", Hannah, is a hetero elf, the singer, Delilah (Dee) is a lonely human witch, and god only knows what the bass-playing red-headed child Violet (Vi) is into. She's a dwarf, but she shaved her beard before it became fashionable to do so. Yes, this is fantasy, but it has a far more modern look to it than most fantasy you'll encounter involving trolls, orcs, and elves, etc.

This novel has so much attitude that it drips off the page. Immediately after we meet them, the girls are already in trouble for an unscheduled penectomy they performed on a large statue outside the town hall. But they're not dressed down for it. In fact, they dress quite well. Instead they're hired to go after some animated mushrooms. Next we're off to meet Lola and Sawyer, who are another trip. They're the local cops or whatever the equivalent was back then, and I love Lola's attitude. She has some of the best come-backs in the whole book.

"Dimensional demons that feed on the energy of displaced reality" sounds suspiciously like the MO of the weeping angels of Doctor Who fame. Except that these beasties aren't statues, they're squid - and squid out of water at that. How does that even work? And don't get me started on their mouths (please!), which look disturbingly like vulvas.

So, in short, I loved this graphic novel. The art work was really good, and the coloring was great. The images make full use of the page, so it's tree-friendly for the print version (as far as print versions can be tree friendly, that is!). I recommend it all the way.


Monday, May 11, 2015

Family Pets by Pat Shand


Title: Family Pets (no vendor found)
Author: Pat Shand
Publisher: Silver Dragon Books (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Sarah Dill.

Thomasina lost her parents at a young age and went to live with her grandmother, but soon, for financial reasons, they had to move in with Thomasina's aunt and uncle and her uncommunicative cousin. Here life is pretty average, ordinary, normal and slightly annoying to her.

One morning, Thomasina wakes up to find her pet snake missing from its tank, and when she goes upstairs from her basement room which she shares with Abuela, she discovers that her whole family, apart from grandma, has been turned into household pets such as a dog, a cat, a parakeet, and a lizard.

Meanwhile, her snake is now a rather attractive young man. Somehow the snake knows how this happened and leads Thomasina to the culprit whom she actually, kinda, knows. He confesses that it was all a magic spell gone wrong, and he takes her with him to his native magic land where they hope to get things resolved.

The gray scale art work and the story were both excellent, and I fully recommend this story for how entertaining and unique it is. The main female character, Thomasina, can certainly show a heck of a lot of young adult female leads a thing or two about being a fearless, kickass, strong female.

The only issue I had with it was the poor performance on the iPad in Bluefire reader. This is a new iPad with a lot of memory and yet sometimes a page would take six seconds to load, or the page would fail to swipe until I had swiped or tapped it two or three times. To be fair, this isn't the only comic I've had this problem with, but it is irritating.


Thursday, April 2, 2015

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.


Monday, March 16, 2015

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.


Friday, March 13, 2015

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.


Friday, March 6, 2015

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.


Friday, January 30, 2015

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.


Sunday, January 18, 2015

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.


Friday, December 5, 2014

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.


Sunday, November 30, 2014

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.


Monday, September 8, 2014

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.


Thursday, August 14, 2014

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.