Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romance. Show all posts

Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Butch and the Beautiful by Kris Ripper


Rating: WORTHY!

This novel proved to be every bit what I'd hoped for. It was such a pleasure to read. Thanks to the publisher and author for a chance to get in on an advance review copy! That's not to say that it was all plain sailing. I had a couple of issues (when don't I?!), but overall it was fun, entertaining, well-written, and very engaging. I didn't even mind that the ending was entirely predictable, because that was kind of the point!

This novel is part of a loosely connected series known as "Queers of La Vista," and it's set in a fictional California town. I haven't read any others in the series since I was unaware the series existed until I encountered this volume. Given that we're told more than once in this novel that the gay community in La Vista is small, it's a bit of a stretch that we already have five novels in derived from it! Like Pianosa in the Joseph Heller classic Catch-22, is highly unlikely to be able to accommodate all of the activity depicted in the series, but it's no more of a stretch that a TV crime show has a murder rate that exceeds Chicago of the prohibition era, either, so I'm not going to worry about that!

All the volumes in the series twist their titles from US TV soap operas: As La Vista Turns, Gays of Our Lives, One life to Lose, The Queer and the Restless. As I said, I haven't read these, but only two of them, including the one I'm reviewing, are about female relationships if we're to judge a book by its cover (which I normally don't!). Jaq and not Jill, but Hannah, meet at a wedding and immediately get the hots for each other. Neither is looking for a deep entanglement, but they had no way of knowing where this would lead.

The fact is that they click immediately, but since Hannah is going through a divorce - and not a pretty one - the prospects for this interaction don't look too rosy. The story follows them as they navigate a slightly thorny path through the relationship, through the well-meaning intentions of close friends, and through issues which try to steal time from the relationship even though they are not a part of it: such as Jaq's teaching duties and high-school relationship issues, and Hannah and her ex's fight over selling their house.

There was a bit of a Nora Ephron vibe to this, but this isn't your parent's Nora Ephron as the next paragraph will confirm. It did have that upbeat, liberal, well-to-do aura about it, though: people who were well-off enough to not have a worry about where the next penny would come from. As I said, I've not read any other of the stories, so I can't say if they are all like this. I hope not, because it would be nice to find a story in this series about a less well-off couple, or one which doesn't have such an easy trajectory to follow. Maybe that's just me!

Issues? I mentioned them so let's look at one more (the first was the improbability that all of this was going on in such a small LGBTQ community). I was not happy with the fact that these two fell into bed after knowing each other for an hour and proceeded to have unprotected sex. Yes, reality isn't quite such a turn-on I know, but I would have expected that both of these people would have been more grown-up and responsible, and a bit more cautious than they were. They are not teenagers, after all. The problem for me was that they didn't even mention risks, let alone discuss them or take precautions! Yeah, not sexy, and sexy is what this novel aims at - and gets there, be warned. It's very graphic and explicit, and it does not pussy-foot around (so to speak). There is liberal use of four-letter words and depictions of lesbian sex, but I would have preferred a note of caution to be sounded at least, even if it wasn't satisfied.

Having just published my own LGBTQ novel, it was fun to read a different story - a contemporary one which was written so well, and with such good humor and a positive vibe. It was an easy read and a rewarding one. The characters were wonderful, and based on the overall story and the quality of the writing, I recommend this.


Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Sawbones by Melissa Lenhardt


Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"She came to sit by the bed of a dying man despite her own infirmary." ("infirmity" was needed here. The guy was already in the infirmary!)
"Is so, you give them too much credit." ("If so" was needed here)
"I hear a great many things people do not intend me to her." (intend me to "hear" was needed)

Sawbones is perhaps not surprisingly, a common title. Don't confuse this one with Sawbones by Lawrence BoarerPitchford, which has some similarities, or Sawbones by Catherine Johnson which is a rather different kind of story, but set in a similar period, or with Sawbones by Stuart MacBride, which is a completely different kind of story. Frankly, given the way the main character is treated, and in rather graphic detail, the title for this one perhaps should have been Sabines!

Set in the early 1870's (as near as I can gauge), this tells the story of Catherine Bennett, a prideful and prejudiced medical doctor who had a modest but thriving practice in New York City until she was made (by the victim's wife) the scapegoat in a murder. Fearful that she will not get a fair trial given the wife's powerful connections, she takes a rather cowardly way out and flees to Texas posing as one Laura Elliston, and making her way via Austin to a wagon train heading out to a newly-founded town in Colorado.

She never makes it out of Texas. After a savage attack by Kiowa or Comanche (it's unclear), she finds herself the sole survivor and also in charge of a wounded cavalry officer who came with his men belatedly to the rescue of the wagon train. It's rather sickeningly obvious from this point on that she has her love interest. That was one of my problems with this novel: events are telegraphed so far in advance that it's no surprise what happens to her and therefore no spoiler to give it away.

Another issue was that it's in first person which is the weakest and most irritating voice in which to write a novel, and it's completely unrealistic in this case given what brutality the author forces on this woman at the hands of men. It's simply not credible that she could tell this story the way she does. Initially, it made sense what happened to her, given her gender and the period in which she lived, and I was appreciating that this was a strong woman and looking forward to learning about her, but that rapidly fell apart after she ran away from the crime she never committed. From that point on she became not stronger, but weaker and more stupid, and the sorry plaything of a cavalry Lieutenant, subsuming her entire self to him.

Her protestations of moving on alone in her desire to be a doctor were so vacuous, especially given that you knew they were never going to happen, that I felt I was reading a young adult novel at this point. I'd have actually enjoyed the story if she had gone on alone, but we have to have all of our women validated by a guy in these tales don't we, otherwise how can she be a real woman? Her credentials as a doctor were called into question when she kept rambling on about "...trying to staunch the flow of blood" when she really meant "stanch," which is something that young adult writers of today do not know, but which a doctor would have known back then.

The male interest is Lieutenant Kindle, presumably because you could read him like an open book. He ought to have been named Lieutenant Nook (as in nookie) given his overbearing and single-mindedly physical approach to her. At one juncture, she outright tells him 'No!' (in one form or another) on four separate occasions and still he will not leave her alone. The fact that she was partly drunk and emotionally compromised offered no barrier to this guy whose name, we're told, is William, but which ought to be Dick. He sickened me with his non-stop pressing of himself upon her.

Having saved his life, you'd think this would have made him offer some respect, or show some deference, but instead he seems to have fallen victim to some early form of Stockholm Syndrome and he stalks her until 'she can't refuse him anymore', and has his way with her. The relationship at this point had become so co-dependent that it turned my stomach and I almost quit reading. But they get it on in a library, so I guess this made it okay for him to become a tenant of her Wildfell Hall. When they discuss "Laura's" previous sexcapade, Kindle actually has the hypocrisy to say, "He took advantage of you."! I am not making this up. But "Laura" is a hypocrite too. After repeatedly dissing and dismissing men, she says, “I refuse to believe men do the things they do for no reason other than they can.” Why would she say that when she's made is quite clear that she thinks they're the lowest of the low anyway?

Yes, this is the book "Laura" was reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I had to question this. The novel came out in 1848, so it seems highly unlikely that it would have found its way into a library in a remote (and new) Texas fort by 1870 or so. Who knows? Maybe it's possible. This is fiction after all, but I found it even harder to believe that the "reading room" at this remote fort would have been so well-stocked with books that "All available wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with books." While the US was quite literate (if you were white) by the 1870's, it beggars belief that a library in a remote fort in The South would be so well stocked, especially so soon after a (not so) civil war.

Purely because of her work on saving Kindle's life, "Laura" is made the acting head physician at Fort Richardson in North Texas, where Nook, er Kindle, is based. This is definitely not where she imagined her life would take her, and especially not into his own house where she lodges upstairs on the pretense that he's more safely out of the way of infection in his own room than he is in the hospital, and she can take care of him. The hell with the rest of the patients! How bizarre is that? What about their risk of infection?

Bizarre is how this novel struck me, time after time. At one point "Laura" visits the bakery in town "...where a fat woman was setting out loaves of warm bread." What? Yes, you read it right. Why was it necessary to describe this woman as fat? Well this was a first person PoV, so we can take this as "Laura's" bigoted attitude to everything and everyone, but all this served to do was to make me dislike her more. Another problem I had was with her blind hatred of American Indians. In a way, it was understandable that she should have some PTSD from her experience, but her hatred was so rife and raised so often, it became quickly obvious that the next thing which would happen would be that she has an interaction directly with the Indians, and that it would not be a pleasant one.

This marked the second point at which I felt I really needed to ditch this novel. It was only, it seemed, the unintentional humor which was what kept me going at this point. For example, "Laura" thinks this of the overly amorous Kindle: "It'll give you the big head." I'm sure what he was doing to her did give him a big head, but I really didn't need to know that! Obviously she didn't mean it that way, but this phrase was just so in the wrong place.

"Laura" simply doesn't seem to understand men. She repeatedly downgrades men to nothing save vain idiots, then she falls for Kindle! What's worse than this though, is that at one point she thinks this of another army officer: " It beggared belief Wallace Strong would prefer an ignorant dreamer like Ruth to a strong, intelligent woman like Alice." Why would she think this given how often we learn of her opinion that the men around her are exactly that shallow? It made no sense for her to have this opinion given everything else she's expressed about men, who were evidently only one step above 'them dad-blamed redskins' to hear her talk and think.

She isn't very smart either. She repeatedly fails to appreciate how precarious her position is even when someone other than Kindle is obviously stalking her. This is another episode of telegraphing exactly what's going on, but it takes "Laura" forever to figure it out. I'm usually bad at this, but even I figured out exactly who this guy was long before she did.

Our doctor isn't above slut-shaming either. Of a prostitute, she thought this: "She would lay with multiple men out of wedlock but she would not swear on the Bible. It always amazed me where people drew their moral line in the sand," and this was from a woman who wanted to be treated like a man, yet who has no problem being subsumed as " Mrs William Kindle" when discussing marriage, and who herself has already had one lover 'out of wedlock' and is about to take another? I simply did not get her character at all. It seemed like the more I read, the further she strayed from the woman she appeared to be when the novel began, and none of this straying was into interesting, engaging, or even pleasant territory.

The oddities kept on coming. At one point Kindle is teaching Laura to shoot, a sadly clichéd way for a writer to get her main male character up close and personal with her main female, but the issue here that I found interesting was the plethora of bottles which were available in the middle of nowhere for her target practice! We're told the soldiers out on this patrol are allowed a tot of whisky each day, so no doubt some bottles came from there, but unless they're getting drunk each night, I doubt there would be crates of bottles for her to shoot up. Maybe they actually were getting drunk each night. This would certainly account for their poor performance during what happened later. It would not account for how you can tie someone to a horse when you "...rode through the night without stopping." Those Indians certainly do have powerful medicine!

At this point I did quit reading. There wasn't much left to read, but to be honest I could not bear the thought of reading any more. I wish the author the best of luck, but I cannot recommend a novel like this one.


Friday, May 20, 2016

Meantime Girl by Sindhu S


Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Anjali blinked, allowing a sigh wander past her sneer" should read "...allowing a sigh to wander past..."
"The entire blame will to be on you" should lose the 'to' and read, "The entire blame will be on you"
The 'to' from the previous example belongs here between 'gotten' and 'her'!"The arrogance of Siddharth’s editor had gotten her"
"got along famously well with her son’s wife, and kids, than with her own daughter." should read "...better than she did with her own daughter."
"Her fingers, creased from the bath, slipped grandma in her musings."? "...reminded her of grandma's fingers..." maybe?
There's an odd speech quote at the end of stifling unease.” which should not be there.
There's an entire paragraph repeated. It begins, "When the first bell sounded minutes later, Anjali stood in the orientation hall..."
"Lunch chocked her" should be "Lunch choked her".

This is a novella which started life as a novel. Where the rest of it went, I don't know, but I think the author was smart to précis it. It would have been a bit of a trial to read a full-length novel in this style. Written in 2012, this novel by an Indian author and set in India, tells the story of a doomed love affair between the young, rather impetuous Anjali and the older, married Sidharth, who is frankly not worthy of her. It takes her a long time to realize it. The novel is very widely spaced between paragraphs, so it's actually even shorter than you might think from the page count.

The story read more like a poem than a prose novel and it was charming. English isn't the author's first language, and it shows in the way this is phrased, making for writing that is by turns endearing and confusing! The more I read though, the more I got into the rhyme and reason of it, and I found it to be quite exhilarating and really warmed to it, especially after I'd read the ending. I don't know if I really liked either of the main characters. Sidharth definitely not, but at least Anjali wised-up and took charge, and began to take serious responsibility for the way her life had gone, and that made it worth while for me.

In addition to the sometimes amusing phraseology, there were some intentional moments of real fun, such as this part:

"What can I do? God’s will,” the maid said picking up the laundry basket.
“Did you hear that, Anju? She just called a prick God.”
I laughed out loud at that one.

Overall I think this was a worthy read and I ended up liking the story. I have a soft spot for India though, so your mileage might well differ!


Thursday, December 31, 2015

Paulina & Fran by Rachel B Glaser


Rating: WARTY!

I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this novel wasn't at all what I'd hoped for from the blurb. OTOH, what novel is? Very few of them, to be sure. Rest assured that it's as far from "an audaciously witty debut" as it's possible to get. So Rachel B Glaser and I be unhappy with her effort. It started out interestingly enough, but there was a current underlying it which was obnoxious, and it quickly began to trudge and stumble.

I'd hoped it would get sanded down and become a lot more smooth as the story grew, but the ever-dragging story never did grow wheels, and so the rough edges prevailed. I made it literally half way through - to the end of chapter eight before I gave up on it. It was boring, repetitive and uninventive, and there were no characters in it that I liked. The most obnoxious characters were the titular ones and in that same order, too.

The story is apparently set in modern times, but there are weird anachronisms, so maybe it was set in the past and I missed something which explained this, because there were two mentions, one of a Walkman, and one of a Discman, featured in it despite the novel being published in 2015. It was very confusing. The novel does cover a decade, and of course the Walkman name is still around, but the Discman name belongs to the eighties, so while it's possible these referred to modern devices, this didn't alleviate the confusion.

The reason it didn't is that if this was indeed a modern setting (even from the last ten to fifteen years), then all of these people were complete morons in having routine, unprotected sex with multiple partners, and yet not a single one of them ever considered, not even for a second, that there was anything wrong with it or dangerous about it.

The main character, Paulina, was one of the most uninteresting, self-absorbed, bitchy, and obnoxious characters I've ever read about. She had no redeeming feature whatsoever, and was totally uninteresting to me. She and her co-dependent, Fran, were art students, and the author managed to make even that tedious to read about. Fran was a complete wallflower. Neither of them deserved any sort of decent relationship or any happiness, so it was nice to see that they were getting none. Why anyone would be remotely interested in either of them even as an acquaintance, much less a friend or a lover, was a complete mystery.

Some reviewers made mention of this as reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie - and they did not intend that in a positive light. I agree. It's like post-Annie Hall Woody Allen, when his movies were not even remotely funny, and just became a rambling, self-absorbed mess about unsurprisingly clichéd tropes. I refuse to recommend pretentious and tired drivel like this, which some Big publishing™ editor evidently and mistakenly considered to be a work of art.


Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Happy Marriage Volume Two by Maki Enjoji


Rating: WARTY!

This was volume two in a series. I noticed it in the excellent local library and decided to give it a try even though it's not my usual fare, so I picked up the first two volumes (it looks like it runs to maybe half a dozen volumes, but the volumes were not all there, so it was hard to tell. It's a Josei (mature romance) manga about an arranged marriage, but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl, Chiwa Takanashi is far too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of the characters seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work. over the course of volume one, they seemed to be growing more complex, but over volume two, it was obvious they had not grown at all. They were just as incompetent and stupid in relationships as they had been before they married. Their attitude is juvenile and rigid, especially Hakuto's, and worse, he evolved into a complete jerk and a monstrous control freak, and Chiwa became a passive, compliant lamb. This came to a head in the last chapter of the volume, where she finally decides to get out from under Hakuto's thumb and take a job at a start-up run by an old friend from college. Hakuto refuses to accept her resignation, and then browbeats her college friend into withdrawing his job offer (some friend), and Chiwa completely falls into line with this scheme of imprisonment and control. I'm sorry, but I don't want to read about a slave girl - a woman who is nothing more than a toy doll for a man. I sincerely hope that Japanese women are not like this!


Happy Marriage Volume 1 by Maki Enjoji


Rating: WORTHY!

This was volume one in a series. It's a Josei manga about an arranged marriage but it's not quite what you might think at first glance. Normally I wouldn't go in for this because I'm not a big romance reader. Unless it's done expertly, which tragically few are, it's boring to me. Also I am not a fan of this style of manga, where every character, male and female looks exactly the same and the only way you can distinguish one form another is by clothes and hairstyle. They all have insanely large eyes and ridiculously pointy chins. This one also had issues with assigning the speech balloons - sometimes it was entirely unclear about who was saying what.

Those problems aside, I enjoyed this first volume. The girl is a bit too much of a wuss for my taste, and both of them seemed to be as simplistic in their behavior as they were in their art work, but as the story played out, they started to fill out, growing some character and some foibles, which made it interesting. Each volume has four 'chapters', and the author (who is also the artist) added in some amusing comments here and there about the story and the development of it, and some things she had thought of which were left out, which made it more interesting for me.

Despite some issues, I liked this volume and I recommend it as a worthy read. I can't say the same for volume two, however!


Monday, November 2, 2015

Succubus by Richelle Mead


Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with Succubus Blues by Jim Behrle.

Georgina Kincaid is a succubus living amongst humans in a world where paranormal creatures exist side-by-side, but hidden - your standard paranovel. Though she is an immortal, Kincaid prefers to live amongst humans, dressing and behaving like them. It makes it all very convenient for the author, who clearly has to do no supernatural world building!

Kincaid is also a shapeshifter, and can appear however she wants. She can even emulate clothes, although she prefers to dress in real clothes rather than sport the appearance of them. I guess I don't know how that works exactly, because at one point when she's running late for work, she shifts into clothes in preference to actually getting dressed, yet later, a guy with whom she has casual sex is unbuttoning her shirt and fondling her breasts through her bra. How is he unbuttoning something that's technically a part of her? That would be like unbuttoning your skin! It made no sense, but I don't think this novel is intended to make any sense. It's seems like it's really just Urban Sexual Fantasy (USF). The F can also stand for 'frustration' or other things.

Moving right along, and in keeping with the 'she's really a human' theme, Kincaid works as an assistant manager at a book store in Seattle, known as Emerald City Books. She lives in an apartment, and she carries on a perfectly ordinary life , so other than being a succubus (and there are even issues with that as I shall discuss), she is in actual fact exactly like a human in every way, except that she acts like a teenager rather than her own apparent age.

Given that this is an introductory novel - the prologue to the 'chapters' which will form the volumes of the series if you will - it offered very little information (other than an annoying flash-back-story) about why she is the way she is, why she chooses to live like this, and what, exactly is expected of her by the forces of evil, so all we're left is to conclude that the author did this purely out of laziness, giving her a character - who is completely human in all regards, and whose only paranormal facet is that she can (indeed must) have endless unprotected sex with no consequences. It's not like it wasn't well thought-through, it's like it wasn't thought at all. That said, and for as exceedingly light and fluffy a read as it was, it ended up being enjoyable despite numerous plot holes and issues. It's as if Nora Ephron wrote an urban fantasy movie. Read it on that level and you'll be fine.

One problem is the same one we see in endless paranormal - particularly vampire - stories. Kincaid is a couple of thousand years old, but absurdly acts as though she's a teenager, and she's unaccountably ignorant, after two millennia, about the paranormal world in which she lives. It makes no sense. Clearly Mead had to explain her world as she went along, but to have her main character do it in a way which makes her look like a complete ditz does this story no favors at all.

I know Mead can write adult characters, so I don't know what was going on here. Maybe a paranormal rom-com is what she was aiming for. Kincaid's paranormal "job" - although she never seems to do it or get paid for it in any way, is capturing souls for Jerome, her demon boss, who's barely demonic at all. None of this is explained - it just is. Why there has to be a balance, and that the forces for good tolerate - and even pal around with - the forces for evil makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, nor does it make sense that the evil side is perfectly ordinary - there's no evil going on here at all. The closest we come to evil is the actions of this novel's villain, and his behavior makes so much sense that he's not actually a villain from what I saw. He's actually doing the work the bone-idle angel ought to be doing - in this novel's framework. The fact is, however, that angels aren't actually fighters-against-evil at all, they're merely messengers - mythological email - stolen by Bible writers from the Greek Hermes (and copied in the Roman Mercury). I liked the bad guy!

Kincaid doesn't exude any sort of evil. In theory, she has sex with people and their soul goes to hell presumably, but she also has sex with people where nothing happens to her lover. How does she differentiate? I have no idea, and Mead offers no help whatsoever. When the story begins, its framework seems to indicate that sex out of wedlock is sinful; but then that's religion for you! This is contradicted later in the text however, where Kincaid ruminates that while sex out of wedlock was sinful in the past, the world has moved on, and it's no longer considered a sin because everyone is having sex outside of marriage. This made little sense and implies that if everyone began murdering and raping, then this would no longer be considered sinful either!

From the way this novel is written, I was left with the consolation that I'm fine with the idea of going to hell - if there is such a place and I'm condemned there. Can you imagine spending eternity in heaven with the same partner? I'm not talking about a paltry sixty years of marriage. I'm not even talking about a mere lifetime. I'm talking about ETERNITY wedded to one person, and you can't even experiment sexually with that one person?! I'd rather be in hell with the raunchy crowd any day, especially if it's for eternity. But maybe that's just me!

The writing is technically fine - a minor issue or two here and there but eminently readable, despite being first person PoV, which I normally hate, but which in this case was engaging as opposed to nauseating. There are plot holes galore, but this is routine for a paranormal novel, and there were some quirks which caught my attention, such as when Kincaid remarks to us in chapter ten that some guys she introduced shook hands "guy style" and then the very next chapter she shakes hands herself. What is that? Girl style? I don't get how her shaking o' the hand was any different from the way the guys did earlier. If there is one, Mead failed to clarify exactly what it was and made her character come off as being hypocritical or clueless - and this isn't the only time that Kincaid is portrayed this way, I'm sorry to report.

Because she's a YA writer at heart, Mead had to have a love triangle. On the one breast is Roman and on the other, Kincaid's favorite writer, Seth Mortensen. Kincaid bounces between these two (not literally) and also between them and her casual (and oft frustrated) sex partner who works at the bookstore. Some negative critics have called Kincaid out on this, intimating - if not outright declaring - that she's a slut, but hello: SUCCUBUS! I think they clean forgot that this was a paranormal novel and Kincaid relies on sex for sustenance, being a vampire of the venereal. That's understandable however, because despite the novel being replete with angels, demons, vampires, imps, hybrid human-angels, and so on, there really was no paranormal stuff going on at all in this novel! I mean almost literally none at all.

The big deal here is that there's supposedly a slayer in town who's slaughtering immortals, and is apparently a threat to Kincaid herself, although neither she nor we are ever told why. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, but given that Seth is new in town and Roman is new in her life, it immediately struck me that either one of these could be the villain, and the remaining non-villainous one would become her love interest as the series progressed. And as it progressed, the relationship with Roman became about as clichéd and trope as you can get, so my money was on him being the new immortal villain in town. He was Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way! He was tall (Kincaid is evidently very short despite her shape-shifting ability), chiseled, commanding, dominating, irresistible, and a perfect lover. My question here was: how is this possible given that she's a succubus?! This loaned more support to my feeling that he was the troublemaker.

It also made me wonder what the heck the point was of making Kincaid a succubus at all if she was completely overpowered by people like Seth and Roman. At one point she is "terrified and thrilled" by how close he is, and we're constantly reminded that she's like a lovesick teenager around him. Is she not the dominant succubus she's supposed to be? How is a mere mortal able to make her feel that way? This was yet another reason to believe that Roman and/or Seth were more than human. By this point we'd learned that immortals of a certain level can mask their immortality so other immortals cannot sense them. Was Roman doing this to hide his true nature? This begs the question as to how effective a succubus can be when potentially anyone can overpower her in this way!

When they went bowling together, Mead sadly resorted to the boring trope of having Roman (who sports the boring trope of gold flecked eyes) get behind Kincaid and show her how to hold the balls, leading to an intimate level of physical proximity. It was as sickening as it was pathetic to read, precisely because this trope has been done to death. In fact I didn't read it - as soon as I saw where it was going, I skipped several paragraphs. This could have been a cheap Harlequin romance novel at this point. I would have thought someone as inventive as Mead could have come up with something original, but she struck out in the lanes.

In an amusing section where Kincaid is bantering with a couple of vamp friends, we learn that she has to use far more energy to change gender than she does to merely 'remodel' herself. We don't learn why. We also learn that she requires even more energy than that to emulate a different species. None of this is explained in any way at all. We don't know why she literally assumes the physical form of the thing she's emulating as opposed, for example, to merely mimicking the outward appearance of it. If she quite literally becomes the subject, then what happens to her own self? Does she literally lose her mind? If so, how does she get it back? If she doesn't (as she clearly doesn't) lose herself, then how is she assuming the exact form of her subject in any meaningful way? We're left in the dark. Maybe future volumes flesh this out - as it were!

The novel was very predictable and will disappointment many people from its lack of paranormal activity. Kincaid makes no sense as a succubus, and it's sad that we have to be told how funny and smart she is without seeing any evidence of either, and it's disappointing that she's so juvenile - not even acting her apparent age, much less her succubus age, but despite all of this, I actually liked the novel, and I can't tell you why. I think maybe it was because I read this as a YA novel even though it ostensibly isn't. it works better if you pretend it is. It was, as I indicated, a light, fluffy read, and maybe that's why - you can close off the analytical part of your brain, and just go with it for the light, brainless fun. Some parts were really engaging, and fun, others not so much. In short I felt the same way about his as I did about Vampire Academy - but after reading two or three volumes of that series, I gave up on it because it became too stupid, so while I'm willing to go on to volume two here, I'm not offering any guarantees about staying with the series beyond that.


Saturday, October 24, 2015

If Wishes Were Husbands by Lucy Shea


Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not one for romance novels, but this one appealed to me because of the whimsy of a fantasy coming true. I didn't even know it was set in Britain, which was a bonus to me, but which I think was a mistake to omit from the blurb. This book is written by a Brit author, and non-British readers are likely to find themselves rather lost in the lingo (and not lost in the lino as I initially typed! LOL!).

Rachel Gosling is forty and a dreaded 'spinster' - but here, spinster can mean two things - the other meaning being one who spins stories. The fantasy husband she makes up one day at the hair-dressers and elaborates upon that night when out for drinks with some acquaintances, becomes disturbingly real when she arrives home later, and finds her fantasy husband in residence. He's everything she desired, and she panics. After realizing he's not some burglar or home-invader, she decides her best friend Sheila is having her on, but Sheila denies all knowledge of Darren.

She orders the guy out of the house and then goes to bed, only to wake up the next morning, naked and lying next to naked Darren, her wished-up husband! By lunch time, she's accepted him completely and whole-heartedly bought into her own fiction. Or has she? With her whole heart? Darren has memories of their life before her wish: real memories of courting and proposing and marrying. Those are memories which Rachel doesn't share.

As this 'marriage' continues, Rachel starts to fully appreciate the relevance of admonition: "Be careful what you wish for." Clearly her wish needed to have been defined to a much finer degree than she'd ever thought it did. To be fair, though, when she made it, she didn't realize it was going to come true. Now it seems that she's stuck with it. Or is she? Can she wish it away as readily as she wished it to be? Or is something else going on here?

There are some choice comments by the author in the voice of her main character, such as this one: "I didn’t want to be the one who enabled her to open the brown cardboard box of iniquity" which struck me as hilarious, but maybe you had to be there. On the other hand, there were multiple screw-ups in the text, which would have turned me off this novel had it not been so entertaining. Examples of these are: "pair of dogs on heat" which seems to me that it ought to read in heat, but maybe they do say that in Britain. Worse examples were:
"/like déjà vu" the slash mark appears to need erasure, and the period at the end of the previous word removing
"terra firmer" should obviously be 'terra firma', although I liked the other version
"begge the receptionist" should be 'begged the receptionist'
"I maybe claiming" which should be 'may be claiming'
"two feather boars" should be 'two feather boas
"I wouldn’t need to think about." should be 'I wouldn't need to think', or 'I wouldn't need to think about it'.
"selotape" should be 'Selotape' - it's a trademark.
"The conservation was turning into the beginning of a scientific essay" should have been 'conversation'
"my brain had been effected" should be 'my brain had been affected'
The author is also a bit repetitive using "chef’s hats on toothpicks" both in chapter 8 and in chapter 17, although this is a minor issue.

Overall, though, I loved the way this went and especially the way it ended. It was an entertaining story and kept me interested and provided a satisfying read. I recommend it.


Sunday, October 18, 2015

Smoke by Catherine McKenzie


Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, which is outside of my normal range of choices in reading, is a story set in a small town in a fire-risk area where a brush fire has started which has the potential to threaten the whole town. It has a claustrophobic feel to it, with the town seemingly isolated, the fire bearing down on it, and an ongoing quest to find out how the fire started under way even as the fire is fought with increasing numbers of people and growing amounts of equipment. The two main characters are Elizabeth, a woman who, despite her youth, has a long experience of dealing with brush fires in a professional capacity, and Mindy, a slightly older woman. Mindy has suggested using the funds her group collects annually for the local ice hockey team, for the fire-victims instead, since the hockey team doesn't need it. In particular, she wants to help an old guy named John whose house has burned down completely, but before long, John becomes a suspected arsonist.

I'm sorry to say that we get the trope routine of having the main character describing themselves by looking into a mirror. In this case it's Elizabeth who is a green-eyed redhead. She speaks in first person PoV, which is actually quite palatable for once, but this is interspersed with a third person perspective from the PoV of Mindy, and later, from the PoV of another character. The writing was technically very good (especially since this was an advance review copy), with very few appreciable errors or issues,

Presumably the few that were apparent will disappear in the actual published edition. For example, I read, "...who'd read To Kill a Mockingbird one too many times..." wherein both the title of the book and the first word after the title were italicized, which made for an odd read! Another was "...with a whole in her heart" which should have read "...with a hole in her heart." A third was "He gently removed my shirt from my finger gently...." Note that this may sound weird here out of context (it sounds fine in context), but the issue is that 'gently' appears twice. It was evidently an editorial change where the original 'gently', whichever it is, failed to be erased. I do that often!

Another example was "...I'd of thought you knew that by now." I know people say this instead of saying it correctly, or at least they sound like they're saying this, but I don't think that gives a writer free reign to write it like that when it ought to be "...I'd have thought you would've known that by now." One more was " Aren't nothing you can do about it." Presumably that should be " Ain't nothing you can do about it." One last example was where the phrase, "The Daily’s offices" was used. The 'l' and the 'y' were unaccountably italicized whereas the rest of the word was not!

One problem I had was the extent of Elizabeth's involvement in the investigation. Yes, she knew her stuff when it came down to interpreting the beginning of the fire, but she was neither a professional (no longer) nor a police officer, so even though she worked for the local DA, it seemed odd that she was so involved int eh minutiae of the investigation. But that's no big deal.

On the positive side, the really nice way in which the first person PoV is done, as well as the integration of this with a third person perspective, works well and tempts me to bring this to the attention of other publishers and writers and tell them in no uncertain terms: "See? It can be done! Follow this example." In general I liked the way this story unfolded. Some might find it a little slow, at odds with the urgency of the spreading fire, but for me, it wasn't rushed and it didn't drag. It felt normal and natural and that's a really pleasant thing to encounter in a novel, especially one with drama and self-recrimination laced through it.

Elizabeth and Mindy knew each other at one point, but are no longer speaking. It takes a while for the story behind that to unfold. Mindy starts out feeling a bit unappealing and slightly useless. Elizabeth starts out in the beginning of a divorce from her husband of ten years. How much of their feelings are real and how much is smoke? That's what this novel explores, and the extent to which people's lives are tangled and twisted around one another is what's really at the heart of the story, adding to the claustrophobia and the feeling of being trapped in something you don't even understand, let alone know how to get out of. The feeling exists at so many levels in this novel it's a wonder the author managed to keep hold of all the threads! But she did.

I have to say that I didn't like the ending (one character who needed a come-uppance gets none), but it was appropriate to the way the rest of the novel was written, so even though I rather disliked it, it was what the novel demanded. I recommend this novel, It's not your usual drama. I can see it becoming a movie or a TV mini-series. Hopefully it will be a movie, because while TV can do subtlety better than a movie, it rarely gets this kind of story right!


Thursday, July 23, 2015

The Middle of Somewhere by Sonja Yoerg


Rating: WORTHY!

Liz is twenty-nine and feels that her life is somehow becoming derailed. She has long wanted to hike the two-hundred and twenty mile JMT (John Muir Trail) in California, and has never done it. After the first seven miles, the trail runs above 7,000 feet for its entire length. Now she has the chance to do this, and is looking forward to a wilderness experience to help get her mind right, but live-in boyfriend Dante, about whom Liz has mixed feelings, has talked her into bringing him along. I was interested in reading this novel having recently been in Yosemite (all too briefly!) myself.

There were some formatting issues with this book as I read it - on a smart phone in a Kindle app. For example, this sentence, at 2% in, had a line break right before the last word, which would have been fine except that the line break didn’t occur at the end of the line but in the middle of a line where it dropped to the next line and the sentence finished with the last word. It looked like this:
How could she be psyched when this wasn’t the trip she’d
planned?

There were other such issues. Some screens had the text finish about two thirds the way across the screen, like the text had been indented from the right. I suspect this was caused by hard carriage returns which didn't translate into Kindle format. In other instances, there were words run together such as 'performanceenhancing'. Any spell-checker would catch that. In at least one instances a hyphen was missed such as: 'selfrecrimination' and “Or thenot-confess-your-most-shameful-moments..." A spell-checker would catch that, too.

There were other cases where speech from two different people was run together such as: He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me.”“I’m sorry.” (the last speech was from Dante's girlfriend Liz, and should have appeared on a separate line). Another instance was: “It’s freezing. I’m hiking in my leggings until it warms up.”“I’m hiking in everything.” Again a line break was missing. Spell-checkers won't catch these problems, and maybe they were caused by the translation to kindle format rather than anything the author did. I don't know.

This was an advance review copy, so I am hopeful that the formatting issues will be resolved before it gets into its final form, but this wasn't the only such issue. This one is on the author: she wrote "wracking her brain" when it ought to be "racking her brain" There were problems with the chapter starting points, too. For example, both chapters one and two begin with a capital letter T, although this has nothing to do with the text. The first one begins "T Liz..." and the second chapter begins "T At...". I found myself wondering if this was the result of a drop-cap not being translated into the Kindle format properly. The second chapter also had a problem with the word "Chapter" rendering it as "Ch apte r Two".

Meanwhile, back at the story, Liz has issues with Dante of which he's unaware. These are not helped by his delaying her trip. She had to wait two weeks past her planned date so that Dante could also get a permit to hike, and then on the day they arrived at their starting point, she had to wait on his chatting with some people in the visitor's center before they actually began it. Having hiked up really steep and demanding slopes for half a day or so at the start of the trail, they encountered two guys, evidently brothers, who were evidently to be the bad guys here, and I found myself hoping this would not turn into a bad teen B movie!

By day two, Liz is so tired of Dante antics that she's all-but ready to ditch him and strike out on her own. This could have gone either of two ways here: she does ditch him and finds herself ready for a new life, or the trip will bond them. At that point, I was leaning towards the second even though the story looked like it was heading towards the first, but there was a third option, where he decides to turn back leaving Liz alone as she had originally wanted.

At one point in the novel, we're told that the next leg of the journey is a rise of three thousand feet over a instance of twelve miles which sounds amusing on the face of it, since it's only a one in 21 gradient, but of course, the gradient isn't that gradual. Some parts are evidently flat, or nearly so, whereas other parts are extremely steep. It just seemed to me less impressive than perhaps the author thought it was when she wrote it!

Liz, it turns out is rather like a Chinese nesting doll set, in that as we read through this, we find that what was on the outside concealed something different underneath. In some ways, it was annoying to me that I kept on thinking I knew what was going on, only to find that being undermined by another layer underneath. I don't know why it annoyed me. Clearly this was the way to do it, rather than front-load the novel with all her baggage in the same way she was loaded with baggage as she began her hike. Or worse, put a prologue in. God forbid that crappy method of writing, and kudos to the author for avoiding it.

In the end, as irritating as it was in some ways to lift the ragged jute rug of Liz's personality and find dirt swept underneath it, it was quite realistic - not so much in how she was revealing herself to us, but in how she was keeping the ragged edges of her life hidden, where she wouldn't see them for what they were. Liz is carrying far more weight on this trip than she needs to, but most of it isn't in her backpack.

My blog is about writing, and I found an example of the word 'entitled' being misused. I know this is becoming more common but that doesn't make it right - not until it's totally common! It's sad to see words being misused and losing their meaning. It's reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 where words can mean two different things - like flammable and inflammable! In this case we're told that a Georgia O'Keeffe painting was entitled "Above the Clouds I" when it was really simply titled "Above the Clouds I". It's a pretty picture and you can argue that it was entitled to be admired, but that's as far as that goes!

Without wanting to give too much away, there is one section of the book where Liz confesses something to Dante and his reaction is to hike alone the next day, leaving her behind. This behavior, to me seemed no better than Gabriel's behavior - the very thing which Liz is so obsessing over, yet she never once thinks there's anything wrong with Dante's abandoning her (on three occasions no less!) when she most needed support. For me his behavior was unforgivable.

The portion which deals with the suspension bridge over Woods Creek misled me. The story indicates that the bridge is a lot higher than it appears from images on the web, which makes the events there rather suspect! Note that Woods Creek isn't named after me even though I've reached the point where I have actually started creaking...! From the text I imagined the bridge higher and with rocky terrain on either side, whereas it is actually in a rather forested area. Note that I've never seen it, so I'm judging from images on the web, and I guess it's possible there's more than one suspension bridge over it, but it's no big deal.

What bothered me most of all was that Liz, who started out strong an independent, was disappointingly slowly morphed into a rather more childlike version of herself in the last fifteen percent of the novel, and reduced to irritating internal monologue about how sorry she was (I'm not telling what for!), and how certain she was she had lost Dante. This was way overdone. I got the message. I didn't need to be hit over the head with it every few pages! Liz is also an experienced hiker, so when I read, "...and he and Joe assisted Dante in helping Liz down tricky sections" it made her seem inept or like a maiden in distress, and I reacted badly to it. Liz deserved a lot better than that.

It was at that point that I wondered if my rating for this novel was going to end-up in the toilet, but it regrouped at the end and made for a decent ending and overall, a very worthy read, whic was a welcome and pleasant surprise for me! I recommend this one.

Monday, January 26, 2015

Dress Shop of Dreams by Menna van Praag


Title: The Dress Shop of Dreams
Author: Menna van Praag
Publisher:
Rating: WORTHY!


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

The title to this novel was what drew me in. It's so frivolous! In this story, Etta Sparks owns a rather magical dress shop which seems almost to repel many customers for no obvious reason, but once in a while, the right customer comes in, and Etta knows she can help them find that missing piece of themselves. The dresses tell her so. Plus she has a magical thread!

After we've met Etta, we're introduced to her granddaughter Cora. Almost a polar opposite, Cora leads a very mundane, if regimented life, following her mathematical mind's dictates, working at the lab, visiting the book store, counting things to an OCD level, early to bed, early to rise. Today, however, is her birthday and she's having a meal with her grandmother followed by a special cherry pie baked with love by Walt, at the nearby book store cum pie shop. Walt seems completely lost around Cora, who in turn seems completely unaware of him as a member of the opposite sex.

Here's a precious quote: "Then Walt stops pacing. He has an idea. An idea so different, so startling and wild, it makes him sneeze with shock." LOL! I loved that. The problem is that Walt's idea has nothing to do with Cora - whose name isn't really Cora....

One thing which felt a bit pretentious to me was the inclusion of a book store. Writers tend to do this as a substitute for intellect. 'Oh, she works in a book store, she must be smart!' or 'Oh, he reads books, he must be a treasure!" Book stores are wonderful, and librarians are every bit the figures which Evelyn Carnahan declares them to be in The Mummy, but it's almost a cliché now to include a book store in this kind of novel.

That said, the novel turned out to be pleasantly surprising. It was very layered and rather complex, with one new item after another being offered for consideration as each chapter flew by. Each of the main characters has a background which is carefully exposed and explored. I liked it a lot and I recommend it.


Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Season's Meetings by Amy Dunne


Title: Season's Meetings
Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is not to be confused with Season's Meetings by Catherine Winchester, which I haven't read.

Errata:
P209 "...batter an eyelid..." should be "...bat an eyelid..." unless they're really going to be coating eyelids with flour and eggs...!

P213 "...whatever funny antidote Sky was reeling off..." should be "...whatever funny anecdote Sky was reeling off..." unless relations between Cat and Holly have really become so bad that they're poisoning each other!

Author Amy Dunne (not the same one as the one in Amy Dunn Quits School) is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, so yes, I'm completely biased, but since I didn't learn this until after I'd finished this novel and concluded it an excellent and highly worthy read, I don't care about bias! I'd thought this was Amy Dunne's debut novel when I read it, but it isn't. It turns out that she has another one Secret Lies which, despite the bizarre title, I'm now looking for. Hopefully there will be more after this one, too.

This is my Xmas novel review for today (I can't promise an Xmas novel every day this month, but I will be doing more). This one is a romance, but it's a little bit different from your usual affair: it’s a lesbian romance. That helped me to forgive the author for making the beginner's mistake of having a character look in a mirror so we can get a description of them. The author also impressed me by not writing in the first person, which is a voice I typically detest. On top of all that, the novel is set in Britain, so worth a look there, too. Yes, America, there are places east of the Atlantic, and west of the Pacific, and south of Texas, and north of Minnesota. And the main character is an atheist! How often do we get that? So we're off to a good start thinks I.

Cat Birch is still stinging over the demise of her live-in relationship with a girl called Paula which ended very unhappily and she's not dealing with it very well at all. She has no interest in life save for work, which isn’t exactly going brilliantly, and she isn’t eating well. She apparently has a drinking problem as well if we’re to judge her by the fact that she pours herself the dregs of a bottle of wine and "gulps" it down, followed by opening yet another bottle and pouring herself a "large glass". On the bright side, she does volunteer work for children's literacy, so it’s not all downhill.

Cat is looking at another Xmas alone until her secretary and her close friend trick her into going to spend Xmas with a goddaughter to whom she can’t say no, but even that seems like it’s falling apart when her flight has to be canceled so Cat can get some last minute work caught up. But at least she doesn’t have to go visiting over Xmas, does she? Well, Beth took care of even that. Now Cat has to travel with someone who's driving up to Scotland. The last traveling companion she expects is Holly - young, feisty, confident, playful, and as optimistic and positive as Cat is the opposite.

The drive in the car (which has a bonnet, a boot, and tyres!) was written well and was quite entertaining. Not that it would do me any good, but I fell in love with Holly during the trip! They're not making the journey in one run because of the weather, so they stop at a hotel half-way through the journey - and the weather goes sour on them. This bit really didn't make sense! It would have been smarter to keep driving, but Holly was tired and Cat doesn't drive, so we can let that slide.

The descriptive prose went a bit sour here. Cat notes that Holly has gold flecks in her eyes. Seriously? The number of times I've read that exact description in YA literature (not that this is YA) is nauseating. It would honestly be a really nice surprise to read a story where the love interest actually doesn’t have gold flecks. Plus Cat is a bit like a cat in heat by this point, which is also not very endearing. I would have preferred it if her responsiveness was more in keeping with what we'd read about her earlier.

I have to say that there were parts of this story that came off as rather false, too. I know it's important to put some chop in the waves so the relationship isn't a plain-sailing Mary Sue boring story, but if it's not done well, then it simply takes the reader out of the story and reminds then that they are, in fact, reading a story. One such instance was Cat's intransigence over telling her friend Beth about her blossoming relationship with Holly.

Cat does have reason to avoid this revelation: long ago she and Beth had vowed to each other that they would never get involved with each other's close friends or family, so now she doesn't want to tell Beth that she fell in love with a cousin. As a result, she and Holly have a fight and it looks like everything is in trouble. Then Beth decides she should bring blind dates to dinner one each for Cat and Holly! Eek!

The thing which immediately crossed my mind was that Holly had set-up Cat, or the both of them were set up by Beth with these blind dates, both of whom seemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously. Whether this is true or not isn't something I'm going to tell you, because I've given way more spoilers than I like to for a new novel. The reason for doing that is of course that there were some issues I felt needed addressing.

The only other real problem was with the ease of travel. The two of them had been stranded in two feet of snow, with more falling. In those circumstances, I would have expected power lines to be down, and travel to be all but impossible except on major roads, yet there were no power outages, and within a day or two, travel was apparently completely unrestricted, even out in the middle of nowhere. This seemed unrealistic to me! The two travelers had no trouble getting out to Beth and Katie's completely-out-in-the-wilds residence, and there seemed to be no problem in not only finding blind dates, but also in the dates getting there too. It made little logical sense, but I was willing to forgive it because the story, overall, was really entertaining.

It also made little sense that Holly, who had presented as impressively mature, suddenly had a childish hissy fit and viciously announced that "It's over" at one point in the story. This seemed to come completely out of the blue, to say nothing about it being out of character, and turned me off her somewhat, although she won me around again later! OTOH, Holly had been given a heck of lot of provocation (and not in a good way!) by Cat's cowardice, dithering, indecision, a sorry lack of support, and general absence of backbone, but again, she had her reasons, too.

But it's time to be done with all this rambling and conclude the review. My conclusion is that this novel is excellent! It made my eyes water because of the ending. No, I wasn't crying...my eyes were just watering, okay? OKAY? It happens. Deal with it! In short I loved this novel and really became as engrossed as I was enamored by it. This is a couple I would be honored to know in real life. It's rather sad that they're only fictional. This is a wonderful Christmas read which I whole-heartedly recommend.


Thursday, November 6, 2014

Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf by Sherry Peters


Title: Mabel the Lovelorn Dwarf
Author: Sherry Peters
Publisher: Sherry Peters
Rating: WORTHY!


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

This novel had such an absurd title that I couldn't resist it and I'm happy to report that resistance would have been futile anyway. This novel is adorable. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s perfect, but it is a real charmer that won me over very quickly. Plus, if you like it, then you'll be happy to know it’s the first of a series: the Ballad of Mabel Goldenaxe. I have to say I am not a huge fan of serial novels, but this one was good enough that I'm actually tempted to follow this series!

Mabel is the youngest of a small dwarf family - and no, that's not a tautology. The family is a bunch of dwarfs, and the family size is small: there's only a dozen or so of them. She's the only daughter and it's her first day in the mines. Her family is very supportive. Her father is distinctly over-bearing, but her brothers love her and give her all kinds of encouragement, even though she feels slightly under-dwarfed: she's rather on the slender side, not stout like your ideal dwarf, and her beard is only thin, but hey, she's very young - only 75 years, so there's plenty of time for her to become a real broad and hirsute herself.

Mabel has a knack for mining (she's a dwarf, after all), and on her first day she manages to instinctively find an emerald, which is quite a novelty. Most dwarfs find them, but not on their first day on the job. Naturally she heads to the bar to celebrate with her brothers and friends after the shift is over by downing a gallon or two of good ale. Everything seems perfect, doesn't it?

It’s not.

Mabel's mom, she's long been told, stole the family fortune and fled the mountain when Mabel was but a dwarfling, bringing down disgrace upon the family which they're only just now out-growing. Mabel's so-called best friend, whom she's known since childhood, is actually subtly - and then not-so-subtly - undermining Mabel every chance she gets. Her father seems to be growing ever more obsessed with finding Mabel a mate, and Mabel - bless her little plaited beard - is developing a growing interest in axe-throwing as a sport.

Naturally her father tries to stanch this un-dwarfish activity, but he can hardly hold her back since she's really good at it, and one of her brothers was a champion who supports her ambition to compete in the dwarf games. As if that's not bad enough, Mabel starts developing an interest in another un-dwarf-like activity: going to the movies. It’s bad enough she does that, but these movies have elves in them. Her father barely tolerates this, so how can Mabel possibly tell anyone that she's fallen in love with Aramis - the star of the elver screen?

This story is an adventure story, a mystery, a coming of age, a YA romance, and a bloody good piece of fiction. It’s funny, without being farcical or a parody. It’s moving to see how badly put-upon poor Mabel is, and how resilient she is. It’s inspiring to see how dedicated and loyal she is. And it’s amazing to see such a strong female character come out of what I originally thought was going to be a rather juvenile fantasy.

I'm one hundred percent behind this novel, which was a real pleasure to read.


Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Book of Ivy by Amy Engel


Title: The Book of Ivy
Author/Editor: Amy Engel
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WORTHY!


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

I have to say, right up front, that this novel was a real roller-coaster ride, and not in a good way. I had so many issues with it, and I was thinking right up until about the half-way point that I wasn't going to finish it, let alone rate it positively, but I managed to read it all the way through to its inevitable cliff-hanger finale, and in the end I decided it was a worthy read! Weird huh?

Maybe it's my co-dependent relationship with Entangled, or maybe I was bemused by the fact that the author's name, Amy Engel is vaguely like an anagram of Entangled. Maybe it's because I have an adorable niece named Amy, or because my favorite nurse was named Amy. but there it is. And yes, though neither the front cover nor the back-cover blurb will tell you this, it's book one of a series. Judging by current YA trends, I'm guessing it's going to be a trilogy.

Here's the real mystery: why do they publish a "Praise for..." page in an ebook? In a print book I can see some theoretical merit if you lift it off the shelf at the library, or in a bookstore (are there still bookstores?), you can read what people you don't know, have never met, and have no means by which to gage their opinion, thought about this novel. It doesn't work with me, but maybe it works for others. But in an ebook? You already have the book. You already bought it based on the blurb or the recommendation of someone you do know and trust, so pray tell me what exactly is the point of a recommendation for a book you already own? I have no idea.

Here's something else I have no idea about: what's the deal with the cover image? I've now read this book, and still I have no idea what the image on the cover is supposed to represent. There is no knife involved in any way in the plot to murder Bishop Lattimer, so why the knife?! The locale in this story is a small town. There are no skyscrapers. I don't do covers because my blog is all about writing, not strutting and preening, and I understand that writers don't get any real say in their cover (unless they self-publish). Normally I pay little attention to them, but once in a while one comes along and demands a whisky-foxtrot-tango expression of complete disbelief. Such a one is this. Enjoy!

OK, enough rambling. So what's it all about, Amy? The basis of this story is the same one as is employed in employed in Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge, where Nyx has to kill her newly betrothed: a demon who rules the land. She fails to carry it out, too, but she at least tries initially. Ivy doesn't even progress that far.

The Book of Ivy is also really Matched (with which I'm familiar, but haven't read). Ivy Westfall's match is Bishop Lattimer, who is not actually a bishop, but then Ivy isn't actually a plant...! There are two sides (this is of a town, not a nation or a continent: Westfall and Eastglen), but there are two sides: the winners and the losers. The losers have to offer up their daughters to the sons of the winners for brides, and it's Ivy's turn to be offered up, but she has an agenda.

So far so good, but I kept running into minor irritations, which if they are few and far between don't bother me much. It's when there are too many of them that the novel has to really deliver to get me to keep reading it and not give up in sheer frustration. The book of Ivy came very close! I mean there are the usual irritations which I hardly even notice any more: like the use of "bicep" when it's "biceps". I don't think this author "stepped foot" into that one, but she did use "two choices" when it's really one choice between two options. One amusing issue was that the town had a summer camp! This tiny town sent kids to summer camp? Where? Round the corner? In the meadow in the back yard? This made no sense, but it was as amusing as hell.

Those were nowhere near as bad as things which made me stop and think about how "X" managed to exist in Ivy's world where 'X' represents one of a slightly bewildering variety of things. So let's talk about that. In 2022, there was a global nuclear war, where EMPs apparently rendered all electrical devices, including motor vehicles, useless. So in this novel, we're conveniently back in Victorian times, yet Ivy seems to have everything she needs: electricity, clean running water, a shower, soap, and so on. Apparently no one was left alive who could do anything to fix the cars, but they fixed everything else?

After the nuclear war, Ivy's grandfather started a new town in Missouri. Apparently there was nothing there worth bombing and nuclear fallout miraculously didn't reach there! This is the town over which the war with the Lattimer faction was fought. Why the Westfalls didn't simply leave after they lost goes unexplained. What the war was actually fought over goes largely unexplained.

What I don't get is how solar panels are working just fine, but nothing else electrical seems to be! It makes no sense. People wear jeans and t-shirts presumably made from the cotton they grow, but there's no word on who makes them or how. They have candles and meat and milk and butter (and guns), but the population is only supposed to be some 8,000 (as far as I could tell), and the entire town is ringed by a fence, so where are the crops grown, and by whom? Where are they raising the livestock? Who is making all these cool things they still have? Who generates the electricity and how? None of this is explained. The world-building in Ivy's world is awful.

Maybe this will all be explained in one of the sequels, but I didn't really get why this was set in the future instead of back in the nineteenth century. The very same story (with some minor adjustments for technology) could have been told just as well in 1880. Or 1780. It's not consistent, either, as the solar panel issue revealed. Another example of this is that there's talk of testing something for fingerprints. Now fingerprinting has been around a lot longer than modern technology (in fact a lot longer than most people would guess), and it was started down the path to modern formalization back in 1880, but in a town of some 8,000 random survivors, would there really be anyone who could read fingerprints and make comparisons competently enough to identify a perp? It's questionable at best.

It was really quite annoying that every personal color was described in terms of food: "toffee-haired" (ugh!), "brown sugar" freckles, "chocolate eyes and dark chestnut hair", "coffee-brown strands" of hair, "cocoa-colored skin". It became tedious after a while and then actually really amusing.

I also had a problem with how this society randomly married-off people. They were supposed to be "matched", but clearly the system wasn't working. Any society which pursued this bizarre scheme would be doomed to failure, which tells me right up front that these people are lead by morons. In the real world, in the past, the winners typically raped the daughters of the losers, and this isn't any different. Kings did seek to marry the daughters of their vanquished foes to 'cement an alliance', but the marriage was forgotten after a couple of generations, and the alliances died with the memory, leading to another war. It's pointless.

That's the story here, but it's only been going on for a couple of generations, and it makes no sense, because it's not a one-way street. Not only do the males from the winning side marry the females from the losing side, the same thing happens in reverse, so how is this a punishment for the losers and a benefit for the winners? I don't know, but it's what we're expected to believe!

There's no explanation, either, for how this society not only retrogressed technologically, but also socially, so that women now are now viewed, in only two generations, as nothing but baby machines, with no life of their own, nor is it explained how come there are so many sixteen-year-olds available for marrying off this year, given how hard life is and how small the town is.

As I said, Ivy's "mission" is to kill Bishop. Why, we're not immediately told, but at least a part of it is in revenge for his father's murder (so we're told) of her mother. We know that she won't do it, because this is an Entangled romance and they have to fall in love, but it's not at all clear why she doesn't simply go ahead that first night and take him out. It's not until almost page fifty that we learn that there's a three month 'window' during which this mission must be completed. Obviously the real reason for this is solely so that the two of them can fall in love so she won't kill him, but it's never satisfactorily explained why there's this delay, only that irreversible and unspecified steps are now being taken and she cannot fail.

I was thinking it would have made more sense had her mission been to kill the president, Bishop's dad, but no, it's Bishop. Evidently the president will also be 'taken care of'. This initially made even less sense when she thinks there's a problem after she discovers that they're not going to live in the presidential mansion, but in a cozy little home for just the two of them. It's not until, again, around page fifty that we learn that she needs to be in the presidential mansion because there's something there she must find. It would have been nice to have known this a little earlier so the story made more sense and flowed better. I don't like mystery for no other reason than being mysterious.

So Bishop predictably doesn't touch her that first night - he sleeps on the couch offering no explanation for his unexpected and (supposedly) out-of-keeping behavior. This seems to throw a huge wrench in the works for Ivy - again, no reason specified. Bishop is predictably and tediously the trope male lead: tall, muscled, good looking, green-eyed, and white. No problem there, is there? Inevitably there's the "awkward' scene where she espies him half naked and despite the fact that she's supposedly hates him, she's all a-flutter and having hot flashes. It's pathetic how weak Ivy truly is at this point. This was actually about the time where I almost ditched this novel and moved on to something else. Fortunately, it got a lot better after that!

I was curious as to why there was pretty much zero curiosity amongst the people of the town as to what exactly was happening outside the town walls (which are literal walls of steel designed to keep out intruders and beyond which to banish offenders from the town). In this regard, it's very much like Erin Bowman's sad trilogy starting with Taken, but at least Bowman as the townspeople take an interest in the possibility of something going on outside the walls. Nothing like that happens in this novel, which seemed highly unlikely to me. The town's kids alone would have had dares about going outside the walls, and there would be, in two generations, a hoard of people contacting them from outside. None of this is satisfactorily addressed. Again, the world-building is lacking.

I found it really disturbing that Ivy finds Barbie dolls to be the "point of perfection" when they're actually anorexic and plastic in more ways than one. That speaks volumes about how shallow she is and betrays every word she utters and every thought she supposedly harbors with regard to feminist ideals. I guess even in the future, a woman's image of herself is grotesquely annexed and distorted by capitalistic designs on what a woman should be, promulgated largely by men. It doesn't help that the society in this novel has pretty much abolished women's rights - no word on how that ever got put in place, but all of this is strongly indicative of Ivy's lack of spine.

Chapter nine makes no sense at all. Evidently we enter some kind of a time warp. Ivy and Bishop take a walk on Saturday. He's taking her for a picnic. They get up at eight and set off, and have hardly walked anywhere when we learn that the sun is "high in the sky". When they arrive at their destination after walking only for a short time, Ivy is talking about the midday sun. It took them four hours to get there??? Weird! After they jump into the pond a couple of times from a bluff, Ivy reflects that "This has been one of the most carefree afternoons of my life"! Wait, it was midday, they jump into the pond twice, and suddenly the afternoon's gone and she's reflecting upon what a fun time it's been? Where is all this time going?! Weird!

Ivy has a passion for books bestowed upon her by the author in this novel. The book trope is a really lazy method employed by an author to make a character - usually a female - seem smart and deep, but in this novel, Ivy's every action betrays that image. She isn't very smart, and she isn't very wise, and she is shallow. Fortunately, this improves, otherwise I never would have been able to complete this novel. I thoroughly detest weak female main characters if they persist in being weak throughout the story.

So what turned it around for me? Ivy changed. She behaved in a way I did not expect and showed that she had become strong and self-determined. It took way too long to get there, but it did happen! That, I admired, and it's really the sole reason I'm rating this positively despite the numerous issues I had with the story, the plot, and the sad trope YA romance. Even that worked out better than I'd feared when I reached that abysmally clichéd bare, muscled,chest scene!

So, surprisingly, and after all's griped and done, I consider this a worthy read! That doesn't mean I want to read volume two, because I can already tell exactly what's going to happen there!


Friday, October 17, 2014

Drawing Amanda by Stephanie Feuer


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

Ably illustrated by SY Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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


Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Love Match by Lily Maxton


Title: The Love Match
Author: Lily Maxton
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WORTHY!


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

I've had really mixed success with novels released by Entangled Publishing, but I keep coming back because once in a while I'm richly rewarded, and this novel was such a case, even though it was a bit of a roller-coaster ride for me.

I've seen several reviewers describe this as a novella, but it seemed to me to be much more like a short story or a novelette, not a novella. It’s all down to word-count and I don't know the word-count here, so I can't say for certain. Short stories are under 7,500 words, so this was undoubtedly longer than that even though it felt short. Novelettes are less than 17,500 words. A novella is over 17,500, but less than 40,000. Who made up these limits, I don’t know, but it seems to me that this was shorter than that latter range, but that's just a wild guess.

I started out loving this story (notice how I deftly avoided giving it a word-count label?), despite the fact that this title is way over-used. I loved it until the two main characters, Olivia Middleton (not Kate?!), and William Cross (not William of Windsor?!) actually met; then it went a bit downhill. First it became mildly annoying, migrating to outright annoying as the two became…entangled. This sounds like a weather forecast, doesn't it? It was actually more of a 'whether' forecast - whether I could finish it or not!

Frankly, I may not have been able to had it been a longer tale, so perhaps its brevity played into the author's favor here, because at that point I thought I was going to rate it poorly. The interaction between the two main characters was unrealistic, clichéd, and wildly inappropriate even for a 'scandalous' novel. It was the ending which saved it for me because it was so well done.

One thing I didn’t know when I read this was that it's the final volume in a trilogy. The Affaire, and The Wager are the first two, neither of which I've read, although I confess I'm now interested! This seems to be a determined habit with me, since I find myself stumbling into such "middle stories" almost routinely without realizing that more went before. In this case it wasn't an issue because this story blessedly wasn't dependent upon the previous two (and even more blessedly, it was not written in first person point of view! Thank you Lily Maxton!). This one is easily enjoyed as a stand-alone, but I do find myself wondering why the author didn’t simply combine the three into one story, making a complete novel out of it.

The basic story here is that is that the third and youngest daughter of the Middleton family, Olivia, is likely to be the hardest to marry off. In this regard, it reminded me of a trilogy I've been reading by Susan Kaye Quinn, the first two volumes of which I reviewed on my blog this month: Third Daughter and Second Daughter. Note that these are very different stories - young adult, with a steam-punk theme, set in an alternate world reminiscent of India. There is romance, but there's a lot more, as well, although despite the titles, all three of that trilogy seem to be primarily about the third daughter.

But I digress! Olivia's mom has successfully dispatched her two older daughters, and marrying off Olivia is her only remaining goal in life. The problem is that Olivia is considered the plainest of the three daughters and additionally, she's feisty, opinionated, cynical, and refuses to marry for money or title, only for love, which is the diametric opposite of her mother's goal, of course.

The thing which really won me over to Olivia's camp was her sense of humor. Like Cross, I have the opinion that, frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn if a girl is considered 'plain', as long as she's good company and preferably amusing to be with. Olivia could have been devoid of pretty much all of the other things for me as long as she has the sense of humor with which the author endowed her. It was delightful and refreshing, and a rarity in far too many romance and YA novels through which I've waded lately.

Who says female leads can’t be funny or have a good sense of humor? Not me, and this brings me to my first problem: Olivia's humor rather disappeared when Cross arrived on the scene. This made me cross! It was one of the things which turned me off during the middle bit of the novel. I would have really liked this a lot more if we had been allowed to enjoy more time with Olivia before Cross showed up - perhaps seeing her see-off a couple of suitors in the process, with her sharp humor.

And on that score, my other problem is with Cross himself. I've seen other reviewers describe him as a rake-in-the-making or a wannabe rake, or words to that effect, but 'rake' really doesn’t describe him accurately. He's much more of a damnable cad, or in more modern terms and as Britney Spears so admirably iterated, he's a womanizer.

But to be precisely accurate, I'd have to say that he's a coward with a really poor moral compass, and this is why I really disliked him. Because of his own broken family background, he has resolved never to fall in love, but this doesn’t mean that he also has to shed all of his integrity, and wantonly despoil one young woman after another with zero regard for consequences, yet he does, and he shows no sign of learning from his stupidity. In short, he's despicable.

The fact that he's a jerk is made abundantly clear in his interaction with Olivia. From the very beginning, all he was interested in was getting into her pants. He had no regard whatsoever for the more-than-likely irreparable damage he could do to her, or for the potential for her to contract some sort of disease from him, given his sluttish history.

He didn’t strike me as a hero at all, but in the end, he came through. For me this didn’t wipe out his appalling abuse of the much younger and rather naïve Olivia, but it did resolve the story admirably from her PoV, and this is why I was willing to accept it at that. Again here, I would have much preferred a longer story with a relationship arc which seemed realistic and not the "insta-dore" which is really what we had here. Maybe I would even have bought that it was really love if the focus had been less on her behind and more on her mind. I think this was a wasted opportunity.

As to the writing, in general it was well done. The story was very readable. The text flowed comfortably and I found no spelling errors or grammatical mistakes, so the author is evidently very competent in that department, which is really nice to know, should I read more of her work. For an American to tell such an engaging story about early nineteenth century Britain is an admirable accomplishment. Not that I'm an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but her reference to Byron was appropriate, so I'm guessing she got other parts right too.

One thing which struck me as particularly odd from a writing perspective was the genderism involved here - and it was genderism in a highly-restricted and very personal manner! Lily Maxton has no hesitation in employing a certain four-letter word to describe the male phallus, writing 'cock' at one point, but she seemed remarkably inhibited in approaching the emissions from said phallus, and also in describing the female genitalia with the same abandon! Instead, we were treated to all manner of circumlocution and euphemism. I found that peculiar, and in some ways quite endearing, but I really feel that I must insist upon equality of the sexes for genital descriptions: what’s good for the gander is good for the goose after all!

That said, I enjoyed this overall and have no problem in rating it highly since the story as a whole is a worth read it even if, I felt, some parts let it down a bit.