So B. It by Sarah Weeks

Title: So B. It
Author: Sarah Weeks
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

Audio book beautifully read by Cherry Jones.

This was an audio book version of a story about Heidi Demuth's desire to learn the truth of her own origins - an origin which isn't so mysterious because it rapidly becomes obvious from whence she hails once she starts to dig into it. What's not so obvious is the reason for the secrecy and the reason she was kept from that knowledge, and it's a sad truth that she learns. It all begins with her mom's uttering of the nonsense word "Soof". Mom doesn't have a very large vocab. Heidi knows all of the words and what they mean; however, Soof is unique and necessitates an investigation.

The story is beautifully told and beautifully read. Heidi is 12 and lives with her mentally disabled mother. She and her mom are helped in her day-to-day life by her next door neighbor, Bernadette, who Heidi calls Bernie. Bernie can only help because she can get into their apartment through on old and previously disused connecting door. If she tries to go out into the hallway in their apartment block to walk next door that way, she freezes up and collapses, becoming all-but catatonic. Heidi thinks this problem is named angora phobia which causes her some confusion...!

One day, playing a memory card game, Bernie discovers that Heidi is astoundingly lucky. She can match every pair in the face-down cards, first time, every time. She can also win money on the slot machines, which is how she purchases the ticket to travel from Reno, in Nevada, where she lives, to Liberty, in New York state, where she believes her mother was once resident in the Hilltop Home for the mentally challenged.

Using her luck, Heidi is able to casually 'partner' herself up with various people on the three-day trip so that she always looked like she was traveling with someone, such as Georgia Sweet or Alice Willinsky. When she arrives at hilltop, she meets a guy named Elliot, who says to her, "Soof". It's not long before Heidi discovers her true relationship to Thurman Hill, the irascible and unhelpful proprietor of the Hilltop home, and to Elliot himself.

This quite short story, and though very sad in some ways, is charming, and warmly told, especially in audio book format. I recommend it. And no, the cover has zero to do with the story. It's just another example of Big Publishing™ being completely clueless when it comes to dealing decently with authors.

Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff

Title: Picture Me Gone
Author: Meg Rosoff
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I detest first person PoV, especially the dystopian ones written by female writers because they seem almost uniformly lame. It’s like no female YA author has any clue how to write in third person or how to create a strong female lead, but once in a while you find a gem (even amongst the dystopian ones) which makes all the disappointing ones worth slogging through. This particular novel is worth every letter on every page. You know you have a winner when you become addicted from page one, when you glue yourself to page after page and don’t care what you blow-off in exchange for a few more minutes with this read, and when you want to go buy the hardback version and read that instead of the library copy you have in your hands.

This novel is far from dystopian in the traditional sense, but in some ways it does carry that air. It's told from the PoV of Mila, daughter of Gil and Marieka. Mila lives in London, and is all set to visit the USA with her dad. They're going to visit her dad's oldest friend, someone who once saved his life by hauling him down from a mountain when he was suffering from exposure and altitude sickness. The problem is that Matthew has disappeared, leaving behind him a wife, a young child, and a dog, as well as a notable one-of-a-kind (almost!) home. Apparently all wasn't well at home.

Mila's special skill is that she's really Sherlock Holmes. Not really, but she does have his remarkable ability to deduce whole images from the sparsest set of clues. When they arrive in New York state, and are driven (by Matthew's wife, Suzanne) to the gorgeous house in the woods, Mila immediately starts forming solid, reliable impressions based on everything and anything she observes around her - and there's a lot to see for someone who’s eyes are truly open. Mila falls in love with the baby, and with Matthew's dog. She makes very astute deductions (including at one point, that their waitress is pregnant), yet she seems completely blind to what actually happened with Matthew. Either that or Meg Rosoff is so skilled a writer that she lays down a red herring of such admirable quality that it not only seems completely edible, but looks like it's cooked to perfection, too.

Not that it’s hard to fool me (which, delightfully, is why I get so much out of so many novels!), but here's an assortment of what I thought was going on (and note that these may or may not be spoilers - I'm not telling!). At one point, I got the impression that Mila might actually not be Gil's and/or Marieka's daughter. The two are not married and she doesn’t quite feel like she fits perfectly, even though the three of them seem very happy with each other. I wasn't completely convinced that I had that right. Gabriel - the baby - seems like he may well not be Matthew's child; Suzanne appears to be having an affair. But as I said, maybe Rosoff is truly evil and is cackling to herself even now over how many readers she's gleefully led up the garden path with her 'clues'. Maybe it's Matthew who's having an affair; maybe no one is.

I'm totally in love with both Mila and her best friend Catlin - which is something of a miracle, because often in these stories I find myself liking the side-kick better than I like the main character. Mila's reminiscences of their friendship (which I don’t normally like very much in this kind of a novel) were so real and so vivid that I found myself wanting to read another novel solely about that era, not as a reminiscence, but as it was actually happening. Catlin is a Kick-A character and an amazing (if unpredictable) friend to Mila, and the two of them are completely addictive.

Rosoff has an interesting style. This is the first of hers that I've read, so I can't say if it’s typical of her, but she doesn't use quotes around speech, which is actually fine because most of the time I really didn’t notice it, but sometimes it really hit me precisely because this novel is told 1PoV, so it can lead to problems in figuring out who said what, or even if something was said as opposed to merely thought.

Though she's American-born, Rosoff lives in London, and for the most part she uses English phrases correctly, but when it came to describing an important accident, she used the term 'tractor-trailer' which is an American term. In Britain it would be known as an 'articulated lorry', or just an 'artic' for short. Unless things have changed since I lived there (which they may well have since American influences are pervasive) this jumped out at me as inauthentic.

The accident in question is the one which killed Owen, Matthew and Suzanne's son. He was sitting in the back seat, with Matthew in the front. When the lorry somehow overturned onto the car, or hit it in the rear, Owen was killed. There is a question as to why he was in the back. Was Matthew actually having an affair and his paramour was in the front of the car? There were supposedly only two people in the car, and Matthew was found blameless, but I started wondering if his girlfriend was with them that night, and if she left the scene to avoid a scandal? You'll have to read this to find out.

Mila and Gil head off northwards, to see if Matthew has retreated to his cabin up there near Lake Placid, close to the Canadian border. Why Suzanne hasn’t already checked this - or the police did on her behalf - is left unexplained. Mila is texting her mom (who is in Holland playing violin), Catlin, and also Matthew. Matthew doesn’t respond. Not at first. Then comes back the response to "Where are you?" and it’s "I'm nowhere"

And that's all you're getting! I loved this novel, and highly recommend it as a worthy read.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

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

Audio novel almost acceptably read by Jeff Woodman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lewton Experiment by Rachel Sa

Title: The Lewton Experiment
Author: Rachel Sa
Publisher: Tradewind Books
Rating: WARTY!

I don’t agree with publishers that reporters are the best people from whom to accept book proposals. Yeah, if it’s a non-fiction book, maybe you're onto something, maybe, but if it’s fiction, nope, you’re on something. A reporter is no better qualified to write fiction than is a janitor, a sports personality, an actor, a machinist, or a trash collector; that is to say that every one of them might be able to tell a story, but none of them has a built-in advantage over any of the others.

In this case, Sa pretty much telegraphs her entire plot on page 14 like this is a newspaper story. The only thing left after that is to see how she tells it, and that didn't turn out at all well. The improbable plot is designed at a level which would be more appropriate for ten- to twelve-year-olds rather than for the age it's aimed at which, judged by the age of its main character, is late teens.

In a sense this is a newspaper story, because it's a novel about 17-year-old Sherri Richmond, who is a newspaper reporter, if only for a summer internship at the Lewton Leader-Post (about that name…), so rather than have the new girl arrive at a new high school or prep academy, she arrives at a new town to start a new summer job. She stays at her Aunt Gillian's hotel, which is, she discovers, run down and looking like it's going out of business - as indeed is everything else in Lewton. The only business that's doing well is Shopwells, the mega-store that opened its doors a year or so before.

Sa hits us over the head with this dichotomy repeatedly. What she doesn’t explain, is how it is that Lewton has parking meters in a town we’ve already been told is not only tiny, but practically dead. She does however loudly announce the not-so-devious means by which Shopwells is doing so well on page 30. The problem is that none of her plot makes sense, and the story simply doesn't work even within it's own framework. The town seems to be simultaneously both large and small so that it can accommodate her widely disparate views on what kind of a town it actually is!

The newspaper 'organization' makes no sense especially given the size of the town. The paper employs only five staff including the editor and the receptionist, but the three reporters are given "beats": sports, covered by Bill, a municipal beat covered by Krystal; Sherri gets the social (sherry, social, get it? lol!) beat which was previously held by Krystal. Mac (what else would his name be?) the editor, warns Sherri that there is to be no cross-over reporting. Apparently Mac lost his nose for news in some sort of catastrophic amputation, if we're to judge from his complete docility and lack of interest in what’s been hard-hammered into our skulls since page 14. OTOH, Shopwells is a big advertiser in the paper. OTO,OH, if everyone in town is losing their business and their jobs, and/or spending their money at Shopwells, who has any change left to buy a newspaper? Again, it makes no sense.

Very little makes sense, much less economic sense in this novel. There is no way that Shopwells could be putting everyone out of business and then doing a roaring trade with hoards of customers. Where are those customers earning the money to buy all the crap they're brainwashed into buying at Shopwells? Yeah, some of the mega-store's employees are those who went out of business in town, but seriously? The economics simply doesn't work. This same story was told in the movie You Got Mail and it was better done notwithstanding the fact that it was another Nora Ephron extravaganza in Trite Brand™ sugar.

Sherri's instalove was announced loudly on p48. We've been prepped for this by her 'difficulties' with her current boyfriend, Michael, which amount to nothing more than a mild tiff; however, that seems to be more that enough for Sherri to treat him like dirt, to ignore his calls, texts, and emails, and to rudely rebuff his every attempt at apology and reconciliation. You know, if Sa wanted her main character to get a new love interest, she could have dispensed with Michael altogether and just had Sherri be unattached. I don't get what the point was of even having Michael as a character, unless it was to do precisely what Sa achieved as far as I was concerned, which was to convince me that Sherri is a heartless bitch, and certainly not someone I'd want to know even casually, let alone someone with whom I'd want to become involved.

Just six pages later we're shown how petty both Sherri and Krystal (a rival reporter) are as we see their first encounter, and then watch Sherri type a "story" about her. Krystal is the one who has the beat which Sherri covets. The whiny fake story which Sherri types has nothing whatsoever to do with Krystal's attitude; it’s devoted entirely to how Krystal dresses, which confirmed for me that Sherri is indeed a bitch, and actually a bigger one than is Krystal.

This trend was to continue over the next few pages. By the time I’d reached page 100 or so, all there was left for me to conclude about Sherri is that she's a juvenile, petulant, moody, vindictive, and petty person who probably needs to get on some medication for being a manic depressive. She's all but flirting with new interest Ben, while she's simultaneously angry with her boyfriend Michael for going out to dinner with an old friend, accusing him of sleeping with her! What a hypocrite! If her so-called "love" story with Ben was handled better, it might have helped OT ameliorate this situation, but all that was on offer for us there was your standard, pathetic, juvenile, YA clichéd crap.

Sherri decides to visit the mega-store, to meet with Rebecca Scott, the reporter who quit her job to go work at Shopwells. This is where we realize that Sherri is utterly clueless and oblivious to what’s going on around her - that's hardly a great recommendation for a reporter. She doesn’t suspect a single thing, even though she's being manipulated up the wazoo. I mean, they don't give every staff member that flu shot for nothing you know. And…wait a minute - a flu shot when it’s not even flu season? Sherri is so bad a reporter that she doesn't become even remotely suspicious.

She gets into trouble when she returns to the newspaper office, for going off topic and wasting the newspaper's time with her visit to the store. She never once thinks of going online with her reporting. Fortunately for Sa, this novel is really short (180 pages or so), so I was able to finish it, otherwise I would have ditched it precipitously. The over-arching problem with this novel is that it’s so simplistic and juvenile that I just don't understand how this could have got past a literary agent or a book editor in its published form. And Sa doesn;t understand the difference between 'bunting' and 'punting' on page 139!

In short, this novel is warty. Maybe Sa has a novel in her, but it's not this one. This is Ian Wood reporting for Ian Wood's Novellum. Good Night and Good luck!

Secret Agent Moscow by Jennifer Jigour

Title: Secret Agent Moscow: Part One - Goodbye, Natasha
Author/Illustrator: Jennifer Jigour
Publisher: Smith Publicity - Walkabout Designs
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I have to confess to having a hard time in deciding how to rate this graphic novel, and the primary reason for my discomfort is that I simply didn't understand it. I mean, yeah, I got what it was about in very general terms (at least I think I did!): a rather conflicted young woman who flew airplanes for the US military in World War Two is blackmailed by the very government she aided when she's discovered in a gay club. She's threatened with exposure if she doesn’t work for the government in the form of taking a trip to Moscow to track down an agent of theirs who has gone missing. Homosexuality was considered a crime in 1949, of course, although I imagine it was far worse for men than ever it was for women. The "punishment" for it was to be confined for a time in close quarters with people of your own gender. How that really constitutes a punishment is somewhat of a mystery, but let’s move right along...!

Jigour does an amazing amount of work in illustrating some two hundred pages, but very little work in writing a story! I found myself wondering, time after time, what the heck was supposed to be happening. The drawing is competent if very simplistic, and the coloring is really superb (to my amateur eye, of course!), but there was frame after frame after frame where I could find no indication of a story, or a plot or even forward motion. I really got lost in all of that, and sometimes that was in a good way, but more often it was in confusion. I tried to catch up on what I was supposed to be experiencing when the minimalist text returned.

The novel has a surrealist feel to it, like it's a trip through someone's dream rather than something which is really happening, and indeed, I'm sure most of it was memory, dream and hope, but not all of it, and sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the one and the other. This was annoying to me, because I had gone into this expecting one kind of a story and I felt, at times, like I was being force-fed another!

However, overall I'm feeling positive about it, especially given how intriguing volume two looked. OTOH I was intrigued by volume one and look where that got me! I honestly think that Jigour (great name BTW) has some good stories in her, I'm just not sure this is one of them! I do want to encourage this kind of graphic novel to go right ahead confusing me, however, so I am going to rate this one worthy with the above caveat, and leave it up to you guys out there to decide for yourselves whether there needs to be an emptor added somewhere in there!

Samantha Sanderson On The Scene by Robin Carroll Miller

Title: Samantha Sanderson On The Scene
Author: Robin Carroll Miller
Publisher: Zonderkidz - website unobtainable
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.

Errata:
p56 "...turn stall..." should be "..turn stile..." (let’s face it, that whole sentence needs a re-write!)
p81 Samantha's dad "...wouldn’t be up to ordering pizza"??? Is he that big of a deadbeat? Seriously what effort is needed, exactly, to order pizza - especially when he has a slave-girl right there in the house?! Or did Miller simply not write this properly, and meant instead that her dad wouldn't be in the mood for pizza - wouldn’t be "up for pizza", not "up to pizza"?

The advanced review copy was very badly formatted for the Kindle. I don’t know why this is. It used to be, in the old days, that books had to be laboriously type-set, and long galleys sent to the author for correction, which then had to be re-set, but this is no longer the case. In these days of WYSIWIG (What You Send Isn’t What I Get!), which is far from perfect, but which is passable, there's no excuse for poor quality review copies. In Adobe reader, my other option, the formatting was a lot better.

I adored the title of this novel - it’s so immediate and self important that it really tickled me. Unfortunately, the novel failed to live up to its title. There is a whole bunch of these novels about other characters, too. You can find out about them at www.faithgirlz.com if you're interested. 'Samantha Sanderson at the Movies' was one which intrigued me, since I'm such a movie fan. I'm not sure how you would end up with a whole novel based upon that particular title, but there you have it. I thought at first that Samantha was an amateur detective. It turns out that she isn’t - not by 'profession', but she is by ambition.

I was a little surprised to find out that this was an overtly Christian novel. That;s not made very clear in the book blurb on netgalley. I'm not a fan of Christian stories because I have no faith in faith, and such novels have consistently proved to me to be empty at their core. The real problem with faith-professing stories is that the faith itself is of zero utility in the novel. Never in these stories (unless they're of the completely absurd "I'm in love with a manly angel" type) do we ever see any kind of divine presence or any acts of any gods, not even hints of it. Indeed, if we did, readers would cry foul at the absurdity of it! Critics would cry "deus ex machina"! How paradoxical is that?

The consistent fact of faith novels is that people solve their own problems with no help needed from any gods (just as they did, in fact, in the Bible!); yet the fiction that a god is somehow behind the scenes making things happen is trumpeted loudly. It amazes me that so few people see through this sham; that so few recognize how impoverished and vacuous this paradigm really is. These novels all profess to be about faith in a divine providence which never appears. Just as in the Bible, it’s never any gods who do anything of utility, it’s always people who get it done. Gods are employed solely to justify human acts, and your god can never lose, since every success, no matter how much it is wrought by human agency alone, is attributed to the god, yet all failure is blamed completely on the human - or on "Satan"! How cool is that for a god? So these stories are fundamentally fraudulent in a very real way, but then all fiction is, isn't it?!

As I shall highlight as I review this, these novels are not remotely logical or rational in their telling o' the faithly tale, not even within their own framework; however, that doesn't mean that the story - ignoring all mention of the supernatural - cannot be entertaining, and this was my dearest hope going into this one, since I started out predisposed towards liking it from the title and the cover illustration alone. That hope remained even as I discovered where it was coming from, but that hope was thee one which failed to find itself in this story, and I'll tell you why.

Samantha Sanderson is in school, and has a strong ambition to be a reporter just like her mom - not a cop, just like her dad. We're offered no immediate explanation for this, but there seems to be a not-so-subtle vein of genderism running through this novel, inconsistent with modern values, but entirely consistent with Biblical values. I shall point those instances out as we go. Just one more thing which I find interesting is that a Christian novel has a main character sporting a 'heathen' name, Samantha. There was a time when Christians would have frowned upon naming a child with a non-Biblical name. This is important in that it indicates a needed and welcome decline from Bible standards (which are not to be confused with moral standards).

We first meet Samantha interviewing a team player who was injured in the previous week's game. Now why this interview took so long to put in place goes unexplained; I guess Samantha wasn't in the scene! This is odd, because she's a cheerleader. More in this anon. Fortunately, we soon get to the real theme here, which is bullying - in this case, a form of cyber-bullying, which visits itself upon one of Samantha's school-mates via some insulting text messages. This is an admirable topic to investigate, and my immediate suspect was the injured boy!

These messages focus on the intended victim's weight, but since the victim isn't even remotely overweight, the entire bullying premise falls completely flat before it even gets started! Indeed, the supposed "victim" weighs less than Samantha who, as you can see from the cover illustration, is anorexic to begin with; and is that her African American BFF Makayla on the cover with her? If so, then why isn't she actually African American?! Either this illustrates my point that cover illustrators never read the material for which they illustrate, or Samantha's BFF is dissed by being excluded from the cover!

I must note here that Samantha herself is exceptionally, even dangerously svelte. How easy is it then, for her to take the moral high-ground standing with 'lesser mortals' and protecting them from bullying? It would be really nice in a novel like this to have a protagonist who was less than perfect for once in a YA novel. Yes, we do see them, but nowhere near often enough. I guess Job, with his loser status and his skin complaints isn’t a very appealing muse, huh?!

Samantha discusses the bullying with her father (she's quite the gossip!) as she prepares the evening meal that day. Her mother is away on assignment, but she prepared meals for her husband and daughter before she left so Samantha could heat them up as needed. Here’s where the genderism struck me right in the face: why is a working mom expected to do the household chores too? Her husband can’t cook? He doesn’t lend a hand around the house? Why? Because he's too important? Because he's a police officer? Because he's a man in a Christian home? Here's a shocker: he does lend a hand around the house, but he takes care of manly things - like fixing a squeak in the garage door, because no woman could ever do that, just as no man could ever prepare a meal! This really irked me.

If we’re writing novels to teach young women how to handle life and fit into society effectively and comfortably, is it really the thing to teach them that they must be servile to men? Is it the thing to teach men that women should be expected to be servile? 'Servile' is merely another way of saying 'so vile'. I know that this is what the several thousand year old Bible prescribes, but we've moved way beyond Biblical dictates in 2014. I find all this to be an appalling thing to set before impressionable girls. This scene would have been better written if both had prepared the meal in concert with one another. In that way it would have shown how well men and women can work together to achieve a goal; it would have shown that nothing should be beneath either a man or a woman when it comes to home-making, and it would have sent a much more equitable message.

Samantha is a cheerleader, as I've mentioned. I detest this kind of thing in a novel. This is another trope which needs to be done away with, and this is another part of this novel which smacks of genderism. The guys take on the 'tough' he-man job of playing that hard game, but the lower-status 'weak and fair maidens' are fit only to cheer them on? And then there's this 'argument' claiming that cheerleading is on par with martial arts. Ahem! Excuse me?! Having registered that complaint, you can argue that this novel is doing no more than reporting what we see in real life, so why blame the author? I think we can blame the author for not trying to break molds and stereotypes - especially in a novel which is ostensibly aimed at moral and emotional support explicitly for girls!

Then comes the team prayer. Actually, it doesn't, not formally, but it seems to be in the air as the supporters of the one side pray to beat the opposing Christian team. I find this objectionable, not so much in this story, which to its credit, doesn’t get down and dirty with that, but in real life. Do these people who insist upon abusing the establishment clause of the US constitution really believe that the creator of the universe cares who wins a school football game or basketball game? Really? Do these people believe that he will support one team over the other? Suppose both sides pray? If all prayers are answered, does that mean both sides will win? Will they draw? Does the most sin-free side win, or is it the side which prays most fervently? Maybe it's the side which dons the most ragged sackcloth and has the most ashes in its hair? See? It’s patently absurd. Worse than that, it explicitly states that "our team is so useless that we routinely need divine intervention if we’re going to have a hope of winning"! Do coaches not grasp that praying is an insult to their team and a sad commentary upon their coaching skills?! And an insult to their god, for that matter (not that that bothers me). Fortunately we don’t have to deal with that in this particular novel, so kudos to Miller for avoiding it, but prayer does play a large part in the novel and not one of the prayers is answered!

With Samantha becoming ever more focused on the bullying, and whilst we’re on the topic of prayer, I have to ask here why doesn't Samantha pray for the bully to be exposed, or to change his or her mind about bullying? This goes right to the core of my opening remarks: why pray to win the game, but not pray to divine (literally) the bully's identity? If there's a benign god and prayers are answered, there's your solution right there. Of course, it cannot be this way because then every faith novel would be one paragraph long! It cannot be this way because even a Christian novel cannot pull a deus ex machina! It’s quite simply not credible and even faith writers know this. You see? It’s irrational even within its own framework. So art that point one has to decide to quit or to persevere, putting religion aside since it’s already proven itself to be useless here, and try to ignore it while enjoy the rest of the story.

The problem with that plan was that the rest of the story was rather less than tolerable, too. For example, on the topic of genderism: the only things of note about Samantha's mom that we're offered is that she's a journalist and she's pretty. How superficial can you get?

Samantha is supposed to be on the cusp of becoming a "young adult", around twelve or thirteen, but she behaves rather younger than that, and her parents treat her like she's eight or nine. Her dad consistently calls her 'pumpkin' (how original - and no initial cap!) and her mom calls her 'my sweet thing' which is sickly if not outright sick. I sincerely hope not all Christian families are like this one!

On the topic of the bullying, initially I'd been convinced that Nikki, the girl being bullied, was overweight, but it turns out she's not. Not even close. This makes it truly bizarre that she would be bullied in this way, and even more bizarre that someone as snotty and spoiled as Nikki would even pay attention to it. This by no means makes the insults acceptable, but it seriously cheapens the point which Miller seems to be striving to make. It would have been a much stronger novel if Nikki were actually overweight. As it is, this renders the treatment of a serious subject into something of a joke, and thereby achieves precisely the opposite of what Miller was supposedly trying to do here.

It’s disturbing in the extreme that the nominees for Homecoming queen and "court" (aka the losers) are all cheerleaders (except for two who work with Samantha on the newspaper). How misguided and sad is that: only two girls in the entire class who were not cheerleaders were considered worthy of nomination? What happened to the Biblical injunction against pride and adornment? Something about gilding the lily...? This obsession with looks isn’t confined only to the nominations, it spills over into the rest of the narrative too, with people being described as "cute" which is religio-speak for "hawt". It has nothing to do with personality, because the only worth anyone can have, apparently, in "Samantha world" resides in their looks.

Not a word is said, for example, about how decent a person Nikki Cole is (or isn’t) or how smart she is (or isn’t), because all that evidently matters is the superficial: whether she's "cute" or not. The same applies to Thomas Murphy. No word on how smart or decent he is (or isn’t), it all boils down to whether he's "cute" or not. And because he's a bit of a loaner, he's dismissed as "odd" - and by Samantha, who is supposedly a Christian. I expect this in your regular YA novel because, generally speaking, that's all that ever seems to matter in the majority of those novels (although thankfully there are some really good exceptions), but given that this is a Christian story, supposedly professing certain values and standards, I would have expected it to rise above pettiness and blinkered bigotry, and I would certainly not expect Thomas to be relegated to the same category as a school stalker, regarded with suspicion as a potential bully for no other reason than that he's looking at a "cute" girl and is a bit of a loner! Is Samantha really this short-sighted? If her Christian upbringing cannot make a better person of Samantha, then of what value is it?

Indeed, the more I read of this novel, the more Samantha seemed to be on something of a witch-hunt, which is fine, I guess: the Bible does explicitly order us to kill witches! Fortunately Christians don’t do that (except maybe in Nigeria), which only goes to prove that even Christians do not recognize the Bible as a moral authority. But Samantha rejects the Bible again here, specifically the portion which says something to the effect: "judge not, lest ye be judged", because the new girl, Felicia, immediately becomes a suspect. Samantha is as judgmental as you can get! Or maybe she's just mental? I liked Felicia, though. Felicia was apparently expelled from a Christian school for fighting! So much for "forgive those who trespass against us"; Christians obviously don’t practice what they preach! At that point, I was seriously interested in Felicia; she sounded much more intriguing than ever Samantha could be - or any other character I've so far met in this novel. Unfortunately, Felicia hardly appears in the novel - merely a brief glimpse in passing, here and there; so much for her big entrance! But here’s the rub: Felicia was a cheerleader and also on the school newspaper! What the heck is with cheerleading and newspapers in this novel? But Samantha's judgmental attitude spreads like a disease, way beyond a single fight at a school. In Samantha's condemnation-obsessed head, this one incident gets blown up into Felicia being "mad at the world"! Exactly what kind of a bigot is Samantha?

In many ways this novel cheapens bullying: by making it about a weight issue, yet dumping it into the lap of a girl who has absolutely no such issue! It evades any real bullying entirely. The bullying portrayed here, whilst technically bullying it is, or more accurately perhaps, harassment, it's barely much above the level of teasing: a handful of texts, and a couple of notes calling non-fat Nikki a "fatty". When Nikki finds a small carton of diet bars in her locker, Samantha melodramatically declares that this "ramping it up to the next level". Behavior like that is never acceptable, but I found it appalling that this weak definition of "bullying" was the best (or worst, if you like) example Miller could think up to address in her story. It just made it into a joke rather than a serious issue which needed to be nipped in the bud.

And I found it laughable when Samantha goes though her "I'm not naming my sources" phase, and her mother backs her up form a professional journalism perspective! Samantha is not a professional journalist! She's just a school kid. She does not have the protections or requirements that a real journalist has. She is, primarily, required to abide by school rules, not by the professional rules of journalism. Yes, she does have the constitutional right to remain silent, but there is another factor in play here which is that she's supposedly a Christian, and yet she refuses to render to Caesar that which is Caesar's!

So, whilst I still love the title of this novel, I was sorely disappointed that it offered so little and I cannot rate it as a worthy read. I don't get how this is sold as Christian novel, because there really isn't anything Christian going on here. If you removed all references to faith, religion, and church, you'd still have exactly the same novel, the same plot, the same story, and the same people behaving in the same way. That's what I meant when I said that faith novels are hollow at their core. They're just regular novels featuring regular people. The faith angle is nothing but a sham - a gossamer veneer which is, ultimately, entirely irrelevant.

Windwalker by Natasha Mostert

Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!

Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD was read competently by Dan John Miller.

This novel, unfortunately told from first-person PoV, could be a lot worse, but it was getting there. Miller's narration helps, and the fact that the novel was amusing in parts also helped. The story hinges (and I use that word advisedly) entirely upon spineless Quentin Jacobsen's infatuation with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who turns out to be a complete jerk.

Quentin is in fatuation with Margo, who shows up at his bedroom window one night demanding that he drive her around in his mom's van (he has no car) because she's had her car keys confiscated by her predictable, unadventurous, but also feisty parents, and she has eleven critical things to do that night (so she deludedly believes). The entire repertoire of criticality is inextricably entangled in Margo's juvenile need for revenge against a two-timing boyfriend, and she drags Quentin in on it with her, selfish much-adolescent-about-nothing that she is.

This plan having been more-or-less successfully executed, Quentin finds his life starting to turn around, but even as it does, Margo has disappeared. This isn't the first time she's taken off, and she's always left an impossible-to-follow clue before showing up shortly afterwards of her own accord, no less irresponsible or full of self-importance. This time, it's been six days with no word at all from her, and when Quentin discovers a whole series of cryptic clues, since he has no life and no self-respect, he obsesses on following wherever they lead, in hopes of tracking down Margo, and he starts to slowly come to the conclusion that maybe Margo has taken the biggest trip of all. Or has she?

Disk 6 wouldn't play in the car, so I skipped to disk 7 which turned out to be fine because disk 6 evidently had zero to say. Disk 5 ended with Quentin setting out to follow his last clue and disk 7 began with him arriving at his destination, which begs the question as to what value disk 6 was in the first place! Obviously none. Disk 7 was short and had a really unsatisfactory ending. I didn't like either invertebrate Quentin or Margo at all; in fact I think she's a jerk.

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

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

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

Shakespeare's Secret by Elise Broach

Title: Shakespeare's Secret
Author: Elise Broach
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: worthy

At first blush, this appears to be a Shakespeare conspiracy novel! The theory is that Shakespeare's plays were really written by Elizabethan nobleman Edward de Vere. We're offered a limp triad of evidence supposedly supporting this bizarre claim: firstly that Shakespeare wasn’t well-enough educated to have written his plays, having "only" a grammar school education; secondly that when he died he was not eulogized throughout the land as a famous playwright ought to have been, and thirdly, that Shakespeare left no collection of books and manuscripts behind when he died. I can’t believe that Broach uses the utterly absurd argument that Shakespeare used different spellings of his name! That's downright ignorant, especially when she puts it into the mouth of a purported Shakespeare scholar! I'm not a big fan of Shakespeare, so what do I care? Well, I do care about dishonesty purveyed as truth!

The fact that the Oxfordian 'theory' of Shakespeare authorship (which attributes Shakespeare's plays to contemporary Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford) was invented by a guy whose last name was "Looney" should tell you all you need to know about that. The fact that de Vere was evidently such a great author that he could compose twelve of Shakespeare's plays long after his own death in 1604 ought to tell you everything else! The spelling of words (and particularly of names) was not solidified until relatively recently, so the fact that Shakespeare (and everyone else, including de Vere) used variant spellings is meaningless. Strike one leg of this three-legged stool (with the emphasis on stool).

The fact that Shakespeare was grammar-school educated and clearly could write (if he could write his name!) means there is no issue at all with him being technically capable of writing plays. The fact that he was one of the world's best known rip-off artists, copying his plays from earlier works by others, and making a few changes here and there, removes any need for Shakespeare to have been a well-read and well-traveled man, and it also removes any basis for an argument that "a merchant" could not have dreamed up the ideas. Strike leg two. Shakespeare was revered in his own time, but not throughout the country, and not in all circles. It was only posthumously that his name has become so famous and so widely known, so it’s hardly surprising that there was no national outbreak of mourning upon his death. Thus the entire stool crashes down.

But let’s focus on the novel. Hero Netherfield and her family, including older sister Beatrice, are in Maryland - a new state, a new town, and a new school starting in the morning. Why they left their move to the last minute isn’t explained. They’ve moved into a house which supposedly has a diamond hidden somewhere on the property. Beatrice, attending as different school to hero, easily adapts to new places and new people. Hero always feels like she's the odd one out. Their parents met in an Eng. Lit. class and found a common language, and whilst each member of her family seems to have found a source of contentment, Hero has yet to find hers.

Hero is a twelve-year-old who is your standard YA (in this case pre YA, but it's all the same) female: disaffected young girl, moved to a new town, starting at a new school, doesn't fit in, she's plain yet the hottest guy in school falls for her, everyone makes fun of her, mean girls are nasty to her. On short it's the saddest collection of pathetic tropes imaginable - and it's too young for me! So why the interest? Well, I haven't reviewed anything with a Shakespeare element yet in this blog, and this novel did sound interesting. Plus, bonus: it's not first person PoV! Hurray! Elise Broach actually gets it. Also, Hero is part of an actual family! She's not all alone, or with a step parent, or from an orphanage or a broken home. And Broach can write. The intrigue and drama are a bit forced, but it's acceptable to me, and I'm sure the intended age range would have no trouble with it.

The basic plot consists of Hero's discovery that there is supposedly an old and valuable diamond hidden somewhere on the property she just moved into. Being named after a character in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is awakened to the Elizabethan era, to Shakespeare, and to King Henry's the Eight's first beheaded wife. She has to search the house for the hidden diamond, all there's the whole wondering what Miriam and her new friend Danny are up to. The ending is a bit trite and quite predictable, but for the age group, it'll do!

I had some real issues with the "Shakespeare really didn't write his works" wacko angle that Broach seems to buy into. I'll go into that soon on this blog, but be prepared for a huge amount of bias confirmation in the Broach approach, with liberal lack of any critique of the Oxfordian perspective. There are no real Shakespeare scholars who buy into alternative authorship of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, so that oughta tell ya everything you need to know about Shakespeare conspiracy theory! Broach is also seriously, indeed dishonestly, misleading about the Elizabeth 1 - Catherine Parr - Thomas Seymour scandal. Other than that, the story is a worthy read for the intended age group.

The Revenant of Thraxton Hall by Vaughn Entwistle

Title: The Revenant of Thraxton Hall
Author: Vaughn Entwistle
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of novels which take real historical characters and have their way with them. It seems disrespectful, if not misleading or downright insulting, so I must confess up front that I had a problem with that, and it was only because it was Doyle and Wilde that I found myself drawn to this one. Who wouldn't be intrigued by a pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde?! But given that Holmes is fictional and Wilde is not, then I would certainly consider the next best thing: Holmes's creator, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and Wilde. Curiously, Wilde's birth year, 1854, is the same as Holmes's fictional birth year. So this is what was offered, but it did fall a bit flat for me. Doyle seemed altogether too adolescent, and Wilde was nowhere near as entertaining as he ought to have been. It's difficult to see where this can go as a series.

I should confess also that I do not believe in any of the psychic and supernatural nonsense purveyed in this novel. There is no respectable evidence whatsoever that there is any such things as ghosts, life after death, mind-reading, levitation, teleportation, clairvoyance, or any of that flim-flam, and there is much evidence that the people claiming these abilities or experiences are at best misguided and lacking a solid scientific education, and at worst, delusional, lying, or knowingly fraudulent.

Having made that clear, I do like a good supernatural story, but have a hard time finding one. I did like this novel and enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go in terms of becoming a series, especially since there were so many "trifling annoyances" in the text, which I shall delve into shortly. This is a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it takes place immediately after he's killed off Holmes (in tandem with with his arch enemy Professor James Moriarty) at Reichenbach Falls at the end of his story: The Final Problem published in December of 1893. In this fictional account by Entwistle, Doyle wants to move on from these trifling (I love that word!) stories and create something new (in actual fact he wanted to devote more time to his historical fiction), but the reading public hates him for destroying their beloved hero to the point where they're pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables at one point (which seemed rather excessive and exaggerated to me).

It so happens that Doyle is contacted in a rather mysterious way by someone who is a medium, and who has foreseen her own destruction at a seance to take place in the near future. Doyle is angered by, and dismissive of this encounter. Later, he starts to feel that he was wrong, yet when he revisits the address where he met this woman (very mysteriously in the dark), he discovers no one is there. His friend Oscar Wilde becomes so intrigued by the story that he volunteers to accompany Doyle when he goes to the inaugural meeting of the Society for Psychical Research where this deadly seance is due to take place.

The novel is well written, if a little too modern in general style for what Entwistle seemed like he was trying to do, which is to evoke Doyle's style. Indeed, it reads more like an Agatha Christie or a Charles Dickens novel than a Holmes mystery. The Victorian influence in some areas of the novel seemed at odds with the modern influence in others. For example, with the "disguising" of names and addresses. Yes, it was done back then, but given the rather modern tone of the novel, I saw no point in doing it here. Nor did it really disguise the address: 42 _______ Crescent! Victorian London was large, but I'll warrant that there were few "crescents" in it even then, so I found that weak attempt at anonymity to be rather fatuous, and especially given that the blank line was repeated annoyingly often!

There were many other minor issues, such as the curious case of the repetitive repeating! Yes, we know that Wilde has full lips and large hands, and that he smokes Turkish cigarettes! There honestly is no need to lard the text with repeated references to these attributes.

Entwistle purposefully misspells the name of Daniel Home (a well-known "psychic" fraud) - using 'Hume' throughout this novel. The name was pronounced 'Hume', but it was spelled 'Home', and Home himself added the 'Dunglas' in the middle of his name - it was not his name from birth. Contrary to descriptions used in the novel, Home wasn't American (not by birth). He merely resided there, but he was, in fact just as Scots as Doyle. Entwistle owns up to this misspelling in the Author's end note, but I found it rather insulting that this author evidently thinks that his readers are not smart enough to grasp that Home should be pronounced 'Hume' once it's explained. Why not embrace it and have one of the characters mention this at the start? I have to say I disagree with his approach here. And contrary to Entwistle's assertion that Home was never caught faking, he was indeed caught faking on several occasions, and damning evidence of his fraud was discovered in his belongings after his death.

On the topic of names, I don’t get why Entwistle consistently refers to the main male protagonist as Conan Doyle. It’s not an hyphenated name and is the equivalent of referring to Wilde as Wills Wilde, which he does not do. It seems oddly irrational and inconsistent to me. Whilst on the topic of Doyle, I might mention that he was primarily an ophthalmologist, not a family physician as such. Although he obviously did have the training, it's a bit misleading to represent him as a general practitioner, especially since he really never practiced!

Note that contrary to Entwistle's misleading description, moths do not eat clothes or other fabrics. It is the larvae of the moths which do the eating, most specifically the larvae of Tineola bisselliella, and then they eat only natural fibers preferably containing keratin, not synthetic - which of course were in any case scarce in Doyle's era. On this same lack of understanding, Entwistle appears not to grasp that the plural of candelabrum is candelabra - as any writer of that era would have known. While candelabrums is acceptable (odd as it may appear to some of us), I doubt a writer of that era, which Entwistle is evidently trying to emulate, would employ it. He gets further into trouble with this when he employs the singular candelabrum to indicate what is clearly more than one candlestick on p131.

There are also inconsistencies in the novel. The most glaring one, to me, was that Lord Web arrived after we’d been informed that Thraxton Hall had been cut off from outside society by the flooded river, and yet not one person remarks upon this. If the Hall was cut off, then how did Webb get there?

It may seem inappropriate to involve Doyle in the supernatural, given his dedication to resolving mysteries in perfectly mundane and scientific manner through his Holmes character, but the truth is that Doyle was sadly gullible when it came to the psychic charlatans of his era. Indeed it was why Houdini, the scourge of frauds, broke off his friendship with Doyle.

Entwistle is misleading in claiming a big age difference between Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor. They were close to the same age, and both in their early to mid-fifties in 1893, so she was not the young flirt as she's rather shamefully represented here. Indeed, she was dedicated to women's issues, so I found Entwistle's depiction of her to be insulting.

But enough nit-picking. What of the story in general? I found it enjoyable and engrossing, notwithstanding the problems I had with it. I wanted to read it and was interested in what happened, so the author did his job. I was intrigued by the idea that the medium, Lady Thraxton, might have been a ghost. In order to find out, you will have to read the novel! She was definitely a charming and interesting character who was under-used in my opinion, but as appealing as she was, I found myself far more intrigued by another character who played far too small a role in the story, most of it undercover. No spoilers for you there!

So, in short, I found this novel to be a worthy read. It was very easy to get through it, but it seems to me that it will appeal more to they who enjoy Victorian supernatural tales than for they who are fans of Sherlock Holmes or of Oscar Wilde.

Dance of Shadows by Yelena Black

Rating: WARTY!

I have to announce up front that I rated this novel as 'warty'. It was a really great plot idea which was tragically let down by really lousy execution.

There's a Dance of Shadows book trailer here which is quite frankly so pathetic that it ought to be titled Dance of Sad-sack. It's largely in B&W and tells us nothing but how desperately publishers are these days to get attention! Books are not movies and this business of desperately trying to mash-up the two is doomed to failure! Unless someone comes up with something really cool...something out there...something truly adventurous.

Slightly more entertaining is that the hardback edition of this (and perhaps the paperback too, if there is one) has a "BB Live" function attached to it. You can download an app, point your phone at the book's cover, tap the screen, and see a representation of the cover come alive on your device. It's cute, and better than the book trailer, but it's not really that impressive. I have to wonder where they think they can go with this!

Anyway, let's get to the real thing here - the printed word! Red haired Vanessa Adler is a ballet dancing wannabe who has just arrived at the the New York Ballet Academy. It's her first year there, but for Vanessa this is a bittersweet venue. Her sister Margaret, a remarkable ballerina who attended this same school, disappeared without a trace several years before. I skipped the prologue as usual and went right to the first chapter which tells the story of Vanessa's arrival. Her mom is introduced as Mrs Adler, her father is introduced (if you can call it that) as "her father", and soon they're gone. That tales care of the first criterion for YA supernatural trope!

One interesting snippet that sneaks in is that Vanessa is tall like her dad, but this begs the question: tall and in ballet? Anastasia Volochkova can probably relate to that: she has not only actually danced in The Firebird, she has been fired - for heinous crime of being 169cm (5'7") tall, and weighing 50kg (110lbs)! This is yet another example of the brutal standards we set for women, and it's all-too-often criminally different than it is for men. Do men have to wear tutus? Do they have to obsess about weight and height? Do they have to be tossed around like rag dolls? Quite the contrary: ballerinos like Carlos Acosta (who is over six feet tall), and Benjamin Millepied (who is five-ten) seem to have no problem: I don't hear that they were kicked out for being too large.

I guess it's not too much of a stretch to figure out from this that I am not an aficionado of ballet, nor much of a dancing or musical fan in general for that matter. I do like a good story about such artists, however, as other reviews in this blog, such as In Mozart's Shadow, Dramarama, and Sister Mischief will demonstrate. Not that In Mozart's Shadow scored too well, but the other two did.

My first big problem with this novel was when the male lead grand plié'd his way directly into center stage. His name is Zeppelin Gray. I am not making this up; Yelena Black is! The hypocritical part of this is that we're told that he's "too tall to be a dancer" - but tall Vanessa isn’t!? IMO height has nothing to do with it, nor should it, so why mention it? We learn, inevitably, that his body is a chiseled sculpture which leaves Vanessa's lips trembling! Which lips this refers to isn't specified, so I guess Black doesn't have even Carey's embarrassed bravado in this regard, but at least Vanessa's lips aren't "heart-shaped" unlike the lips of another character in this novel. Shortly after this we meet bad boy Justin, the third apex of this infernal triangle, he of the delineated muscles and inevitable hair-in-face. I'm so nauseated by this Trope-l'œil that I wanted to toss this novel on the fire of the firebird at that point

Vanessa learns that the ballet the school will perform this year, quite coincidentally (not!) is Жарптица better known in the west as The Firebird, written by Igor Stravinsky, and curiously the story of a guy who wins a princess, the love of his life, helped by the firebird he's captured in exchange for letting L'Oiseau de Feu go free. The Firebird was Stravinsky's first project for the Ballet Russes, written when he was an unknown.

My prediction by then was easy: we know that Zeppelin will be playing the male lead in the ballet, Vanessa will be picked for the female lead (red hair - firebird, get it?!) and this will create huge resentment amongst her fellow ballerinas, the greatest nemesis of which is undoubtedly Zep's girlfriend, Anna Franko, evidently the progeny of a startling line of prima donnas, but there's far more to it than this. Vanessa's sister Margaret was picked to play the firebird rôle and she disappeared. My WAG was that Margaret quite literally became the firebird and that's how she disappeared. Consequently, the only way in which Vanessa will find out what happened to her sister is if she inhabits the same rôle herself.

This novel does have a few amusing quirks. These people are all fit young ballerinas/os in training, and yet they ride the elevator up to their floor?! The more senior students force the freshmen/women into a rather scary and then rather sick initiation, but this is nothing compared with the Nazi-like ballet classes. We do learn, from one of these, however, that Vanessa gets truly in the zone during a pirouette exercise in one of her classes. This is what sets her up for a freshman entirely predictably taking the female lead in the school's production of The Firebird.

Of course, there's always room for gross error in my predictions, but it seemed obvious that Zeppelin would really be the bad guy, that Justin is going to win fair Vanessa's hand, that Justin is there because he was Margaret's boyfriend, and that he's back for the same reason Vanessa is: to find out what happened to Margaret. This would explain his long absence from the school, and the reason he's now forced to take classes with the freshmen. But Vanessa thinks he's evil, and she goes on a date with Zep, of course. Next in tropeville comes the appallingly clunky but tropely inevitable instance of them being quite literally thrown together. This happens on a subway when the train takes a curve, and Vanessa, supposedly a brilliant ballerina, can’t keep her balance? Honestly? The plot sickens.

Zep takes her to a pizza place in the Village, and "The warmth of his fingers closing around hers made her legs go weak." Oh, and let it not be forgotten that she "melts" beneath his touch. Barf. Okay so the comment Zep makes regarding soda while they’re eating the pizza is really funny, but that was the only interesting thing about him in the entire novel. And how can we have a female lead who is so unheroic? How can we respect an invertebrate girl like Vanessa? Why do female authors so consistently trash their female main characters in this way? Does Black hate young girls, or just Vanessa? Does she have so little respect for her that she creates this girl in this way?

On page 145, Black has Vanessa saying to Zeppelin, "So now that you have me alone, what do you want to do with me? This is such an echo of Kitai's line to Tavi in Jim Butcher's Academ's Fury:

"Well," she murmured after another moment. "You have me, Aleran. Either do something with me or let me up." (p296)

I had to wonder if she had read that novel, but it's a pathetic echo compared with that entire scene in Butcher's novel. You can find the page in Google Books here.

Zep tells Vanessa that she's different from all the other girls he's taken out. What, the others had two heads? Six legs? No arms? I'm sorry but this is thoroughly flatulent. Zep is quite obviously an imbecile who ultimately treats her like dirt, and Vanessa is equally an imbecile if she swallows all this crap he's telling her, especially when he tells her that most girls wouldn’t be OK with going out for pizza? What planet is Black from? Every girl of the same personified Jell-O® hue as is Vanessa with him, would crawl through sewerage for the trope guy. I call bullshit on this whole thing. Through a megaphone. But guess what, Justin is no better. In fact, he's worse because he's supposed to be the good guy yet he flatly refuses to tell Vanessa-Sue a single thing that will help her. He's reduced to absurdly cryptic hints throughout the entire novel. What a complete and utter time-wasting loser.

This trope triangle was one of two real problems with this novel and it's not even the most important one. As I mentioned, the basic plot is great, but the biggest problem is how the story is being told. It started out as a story about Margaret Adler going missing, and Vanessa Adler's plan to try to discover the truth about her sister's disappearance, but it rapidly dissolved into a sad, boring love-triangle with two farcically cardboard guys, and a wet rag of a girl, and who cares about missing Margaret? For that matter, who cares about the dance when we can obsess on Zeppelin, the most worthless character ever created in the history of worthless characters?! I got this book because I was misled into believing it was about dancing, and about overcoming obstacles, and about the mystery, and I warmed to it when I thought there was a supernatural element being added to the mixture, but I've really been let down. I did read to the end of this novel, but I skimmed it for the last hundred pages, only truly stopping to read when it got interesting, which unfortunately wasn't often enough!

And what's with Messiah Anna Franko and her twelve princesses? They follow her around like ducklings, and it's truly pathetic. At least there is some sort of explanation put up for this, but I found it inadequate to explain all of their behavior all of the time. I cannot honestly believe that not a single one of them would harbor any regard for Vanessa and her skill. This was such a heavy-handed high-school cliché that it was to pathetic to tolerate and it was entirely without merit. Yes, I don't doubt that dancers, like anyone, can be childish and peevish at times. I don't doubt they have flaws. I do seriously doubt that they would all behave en bloc like this. This story had it within itself to be so much better.

Here's a word about the novel you write being inescapably yours: no matter how many beta readers you have, no matter who your editor is, it's all on you, and you need to factor that by a magnitude of ten if you self-publish. If we don't take this responsibility, we get lines like this on p296: "Joseph lashed at out at Zep...". No spell-checker is going to get that. Microsoft's sad sack of a grammar checker will not catch that. No last minute skim-read is going to find an error like that. It's all on you, the author.

Having said that this novel becomes less and less about the dance, to be fair I have to add that at least Black didn't completely forget that "It's the dance, stupid!". Most of the action, when it's not "Oh Zeppelin, where-the-hell art thou, Zeppelin?" is about a dance that Black invented for this novel: la danse du feu - 'the dance of fire' which is supposed to be a particularly difficult routine, but it's not part of The Firebird. Don't confuse this with the Infernal Dance as I initially did. Black's invention was added purely for the supernatural portion of this tale. As you can see, it sure doesn't look like this ballerina is having any trouble, nor this one with the actual firebird ballet! Note that I am not a ballerino, nor a musician, so this is only my amateur opinion, and this certainly isn't to belittle those who perform (either the music, or the dance, in) these pieces. None of it is "so easy anyone could do it".

On a lighter note, don't confuse feu with fou! There's this old joke about a guy who is learning French and he's staying in a cabin one cold night with a couple of acquaintances. One of them has to leave for a time, and she tells the man not to let the fire go out, but he thinks she said "Don't let the fool go out" and spends his time watching the other guy and ignoring the sputtering fire! But I digress!

So, once again when Zep abandons her, Vanessa goes to practice in the room where there is ash on the walls outlining the pale shapes of ballerinas in various poses from the dance of fire. Vanessa copies these poses one after another, and she sees the shapes come alive and start dancing with her. In time, they slowly disappear except for one, which she assumes is Margaret, and which continues to dance with her until Vanessa collapses. She finds herself, wilting willow that she is, carried back to the NYBA building by Zep, and she tells him what happened, but then get this: when she considers telling him her suspicions about ballerinas disappearing, she baulks at that in case he would think she's crazy! So telling him about live, dancing, wall shapes - absolutely fine; telling him about demonstrable ballerina disappearances - absolutely crazy. Okay! Got it!

I won't go into any more in order not to completely spoil it for anyone who is interested in reading this, but the ending is simply not good enough and is merely the introduction to volume two in what is destined, apparently, to be a series. If Black had ditched the instadore, that alone might have persuaded me to relent on the tedium and lack of dancing detail and perhaps rate this as a worthy read, but as it is, it's never going to get there for me. Definitely a warty read.