Showing posts with label survival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label survival. Show all posts

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Insurgent by Veronica Roth






Title: Insurgent
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Katherine Tegan
Rating: WARTY!

Welcome to Veronica Roth's 525 page pity party for Mama Messiah and Drama Queen Beatrice, in which Tris successfully channels the depressed Katniss Everdeen! Let me begin this by announcing that I have now read enough of this volume to be able to state, without any shadow of a doubt, that in the Divergent trilogy, this novel is definitely number 2....

You may recall that I withheld my rating for Divergent (which is the first in this trilogy) until I had read Insurgent, which I now unexpectedly have from a new library which has opened relatively close to where I live, so off we go! This library copy is supposedly a collector's edition but all it evidently offers is a shiny metallic-effect cover, a ribbon book-mark glued into the spine, and some stickers. Seriously? OK. And what's with that autumnal swirly tree? Trivia Time: Do you know that the Divergent series is actually a mathematics concept?!

Insurgent also features a some forty or so pages of bonus features including "Toby-ass tells the divergent story" which has an introduction even though the story itself is only five pages long...! Veronica Roth talks about "character death" is one section along with a Veronica Roth Q&A. There are Insurgent discussion questions and tips on how to have a faction party. Seriously, I am not making this up. Nor am I going to read any of this because all that this achieved was to convince me that this novel is way below my reading level.

While I again have to give props to Roth for no prologue, introduction, foreword, preface, etc, at the start, she simply launches into the sequel without a nod or a wink to the previous volume. Even though it was not that long since I read the first volume, I confess I had to go back and read my own review just now to refresh my memory as to exactly how that panned out. I guess that's not a good sign, huh?!

You may recall that in vol 1, the world had suffered a huge war, and society had decided that unity could only be achieved by forcibly separating people into antagonistic Klans: the five families of mafia-ruled New York City, kinda, although this was set in Chicago. The five factions which resulted were the grammatically incorrect Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite. That latter faction, which is supposed to be smart, in collaboration with Dauntless, the defense force, was the one which revolted and drugged its own members, turning them into zombies which could then be easily talked into attacking other factions in order for the Dauntless-Erudite Axis (DEA) to take over as the sole dominant authority.

Triscuit (our hero) and her strong male protector Toby-ass, along with a complete Peter, and Triscuit's brother Caleb (without a 'K') managed to escape the drugged day of the dead finale of the previous book and throw themselves upon the scant mercy of the Amity faction (yeah I know that reads like a paradox, but please read on!). I found it interesting that the Amityville medical staff seem to think that treating an abrasion on Triscuit's shoulder is more important than taking care of Peter's broken arm, because they get to that only after they've found a salve for Triscuit! But that's not the weirdest thing! They offer Triscuit a sedative and despite the fact that she's just come out of a horrific battle which was aided immensely by the fact that soldiers were being drugged and forced to do the will of others, she accepts this sedative and gulps it down without a second thought or the slightest suspicion. Some soldier, huh? That just struck me as being just a bit dumb ledore, but let's see where Roth takes us on this trip.

By page 65 (out of a whopping 525!) I already do not like this tome. Roth has Toby-ass (aka Four), who is taller than Triscuit, putting his arms - not his hands, but his arms - around Triscuit's hips when they're both standing facing each other. I'd really like her to demonstrate how that's accomplished some time. Maybe she could make a book trailer (lol!) with that included? But that's not the worst bit. The worst bit is that Roth continues to make a very strong case for how small, and lost, and totally useless Triscuit is. So of course she needs a manly Toby-ass, who is, of course, taller and stronger than she is, and therefore must take care of her because she's just a weak and limp little girl really.

Yet despite all this stress, and despite how exhausted and stressed she feels (and did I mention that she's stressed?), this doesn't one bit interfere with her sneaking stealthily around and spying on people, trying to figure out what is the big nasty secret which Marcus, Toby-ass's piece of trash dad, is holding so firmly onto. Nor does it prevent anyone asking this unstable girl for advice.

Perhaps this conflict is why this spineless little tot has nightmares and goes running into Toby-ass's room at night to sneak under his protective covers. And of course, all she's wearing is a long T-shirt and literally nothing else. So Triscuit has been through a war and killed people, and proven herself through the barbaric "training" to join Dauntless, but when Toby-ass takes advantage of her fear and weakness, and starts feeling her up, rather than stress even more and recoil and berate him, she starts physically responding! But it gets worse! Before anything happens, she sobbingly reveals that she can't go through with it because it just wouldn't be right!

When she finally returns to her room, she discovers a big Peter there, stealing the hard drive which contains all the details of Erudite's drug program. I'm surprised he doesn't ask if she wants to put her software on his hard drive! When she tries to take back the stolen drive from him, they get into a fight, and Triscuit is the only one punished for it by Amity. The punishment is a drug which turns her into Barney the Dinosaur, but without the bruised coloration. Their fearless leader determines that Triscuit has been overdosed, but this is hardly surprising in a facility where healing wound is given priority over a broken arm.

The Amity faction has voted to allow these other refugee faction members to stay with them, but since the Amity people are buddies with Erudite, they declare that they will not take sides in this conflict, which in practice means that they've sided with the aggressors. This is Amity siding with people who have drugged their own faction and used the drugged soldiers to all but wipe out the Abnegation faction! This betrays every single thing Amity is supposed to be about, of course, but perhaps the fact that they drug their own people to coerce them into conformation with their idea of a norm is why they won't even so much as condemn the brutal behavior of the DEA?

The need to escape schizo-faction is brought to a head when the DEA arrives with armed soldiers to search Amity's compound. The refugees, which are offered no protection whatsoever by Amity (other than not to overtly betray them) are literally hunted down and killed in front of Amity's members, who do nothing whatsoever for them. Triscuit, Caleb, Toby-ass, and some chick called Susan (no word on whether her first name is Mary) manage to escape. Mary Susan completely disappears at this point.

They jump a train heading into the city (which curiously has no DEA guards whatsoever!) where they encounter a bunch of 'the factionless' - people this charming society has cast out because they failed to make it into one of the five families...er factions. Oh, and Triscuit's shoulder hurts. Edward (one of those cast out from Dauntless during Triscuit's training), is aboard the train. What an amazing coincidence. When Toby-ass reveals who he actually is, he's taken to meet the factionless leader - so it's not a leaderless faction, you see, even though it's fractionated. The factionless leader is Toby-ass's mother.

After hanging with the factionless for a very short time the pair of them head over to the Candor compound where they're promptly arrested as traitors. They're confined to a room - together - where Triscuit's shoulder hurts and they learn that they're going be be subjected to the truth serum at 7pm. Why the seven hour wait? Who knows? These things appear to be unabashedly random in this novel. They both come through the test ok, but Triscuit discovers that even the truth serum cannot control her completely. She's promptly adopted by the local Dauntless group (as opposed to the 50% who betrayed everyone else, known as the Dauntless traitors, and who are evidently hanging out at the Erudite building). This part is nicely written and was a pleasure to read after some 150 pages of posterior pain (and shoulder pain), but unfortunately it doesn't last long. Triscuit starts hanging out with Lynn. who is the one I want this story to be about, but unfortunately, we can't have that, we have to have Triscuit.

My problem with Triscuit throughout the first two hundred pages is that she's a complete betrayal of everything in book one. She's supposed to be Dauntless. She's supposed to have worked hard and become toughened, and fought hard to get where she is, but throughout this entire novel so far, she's a complete whiny wuss (oh and her shoulder hurts. Did I mention that?). She is scared of guns, and this caused endless trouble for others, yet despite pistóliphobia, she has no trouble knifing Eric, so she definitely doesn't have aichmophobia! How did this knifing come about?

Well, they decide to go climb the Hancock building so they can spy on Erudite, but as they get set to leave the lobby and head outdoors, they're confronted by Dauntless traitors outside. The entire Dauntless non-traitor group freezes and so the Dauntless traitors (who henceforth and herewithin will be known as the Dumb-ass Dauntless or Dumb-asses for short) are able to stun everyone with their simulation guns (no, the gun isn't simulated, it's real, but the round it fires facilitates a simulation in anyone it hits, thereby rendering them helpless). The Dumb-ass Dauntless attack is 100% successful despite there being loyal Dauntless guards always on duty in the lobby for the very purpose of repelling such an assault, so once again Roth completely betrays Dauntless - either that or the Dauntless loyals are as big a bunch of wusses as Triscuit is. From here onwards, they shall be known as Wuss-ass Dauntless, or Wuss-asses for short.

The point of the raid is to get a couple of divergents to experiment on. This completely betrays the fiction confection that the Erudite faction knows how to function. If they were smart, they would have raided the factionless to get the divergents since the factionless discard pack is composed of a wealth of them. Why would they raid a guarded Candor building instead? Hey, this is the kind of story Roth writes. Perhaps they purposefully took the road more troublesomely traveled precisely because they're Dumb-asses? But then that would be a betrayal of the strength of their coalition with Erudite, wouldn't it?

So what happens is that the divergents don't get knocked out by these simulant guns which the Dumb-ass Dauntless are using, so they're easy to pick out. Triscuit excels herself here, rising to new levels of incompetence. Since she's too chicken to carry a gun, she hides behind the other Dauntlesses, using them as a human shield. When a gas grenade lands near her, instead of tossing it out of the lobby she tosses it deeper into the lobby! Oookay! They later learn that the needle was the transmitter portion of the simulation treatment, whereas the gas grenade was the actual simulant in aerosol form, so Triscuit actually helped the Dumb-asses. They later determine that the transmitter is a long-lasting variety, so now the DEA can run a simulation and take over the other factions whenever they want.

Why the Dumb-asses don't simply grab the first two divergents they find and run with them is another mystery, Instead, they parade around the whole building herding up the divergents and this is how Triscuit the wuss is discovered: she failed to grab a gun and so was easily overcome, but when Eric starts getting in her face about whether she's a double or a triple divergent, she stabs him without reserve or hesitation. I guess the Dumb-ass Dauntless don't search their captives for weapons, and evidently Eric the Dumb-ass Dauntless was ditch-deep dumb because despite the fact that he pressed firmly up against Triscuit from behind, while restraining her, he never once detected that she had a knife in her back pocket!.

I've just finished two or so hours out in the yard and I wanted to lay down on the couch with a cup of hot tea with some honey in it and read a couple of chapters, but the next chapter in line is 17 and it's such an ungodly mess that if I don't blog it "live" as I read it, I'm going to forget all Le Stupide that I encounter (and this is after reading only three pages of it!).

Sixteen ends with Toby-ass telling Triscuit to drop the knife (because she's just a weak girl who doesn't know what she's doing and he's the strong manly man who gets to tell her what to do for her own good, you know). Seventeen begins with this sentence: "Tobias tells me this story." Roth has painted herself into a corner here because she insisted upon telling this story from Triscuit's PoV, but that means she can't tell us anything that Triscuit doesn't witness first hand. If we have to learn something that happened to someone else, they have to tell Triscuit so we can know it, but that's not what she does here. For the first time she simply tells the story from the third person, but there's only this limp line of 3 very faint asterisks (not asterixes!) which in the collector's edition appeared very faintly at the top of the right-hand page facing the one where the chapter starts. Tightly focused on the story as I was, I completely missed them! Toby-ass's story is only three paragraphs, ending at the bottom of the page containing the chapter header, but I was all the way down the next page and onto the page after that before I started thinking, "What the hell?".

What really triggered this was when I read about Triscuit removing the dart which contained the simulation drug, and it made absolutely no sense whatsoever! I was thinking that this had happened to Toby-ass, but then I started wondering if I'd missed something and we were now back in Triscuit's PoV (which we were), but it made even less sense then. I had to go back and re-read those three pages, and it was only then that I registered the three asterisks! Confusing! But all my dumb fault.

Here's the problem with the drug dart: It's a needle about the length of Triscuit's pinkie (little) finger, and at the outside end, it has a small disk about the size of her little finger nail, so the needle is like a nail. This takes place right after we read of Toby-ass telling her to drop the knife, but she's not with Toby-ass, she's in the bathroom. We've had no notification of her changing her location, nor of where she moved to. We just read of her removing this Dumb-ass Dauntless Jacket which she'd appropriated as a disguise in the previous chapter. So she has to remove this jacket to see the needle, but here's the question: given that the needle has a flange of about a quarter inch, how did it penetrate her clothing (she was wearing a zipped up jacket) to the point where it's snugly against her skin with no fabric between it and the skin? And how did it penetrate her shoulder so deeply without hitting any bone?

The needle isn't barbed, yet Triscuit cannot extract it without using her knife (the one Toby-ass made her drop!) as a lever to pull it with. If it was purely in skin and muscle, it would have been relatively simple to pull it out. If it was in bone, it would have hurt as Triscuit claims it did, but it would likely have snapped if she'd tried to lever it out as she describes. Confusing! But the only thing which really bothers Triscuit, who was raised all her life in Abnegation and was then taught how to be super tough in Dauntless, is that she absolutely must apply some salve to her jaw before it bruises! Oh my! And those fingernail marks on her skin are so disgusting. Seriously, I've come to the only logical conclusion that Triscuit isn't divergent or trivergent, but univergent, yet she isn't one of the five families, er factions; no, Triscuit is the founder member of the sixth faction, the Barbies! Yeay! She probably thinks math is hard....

A serious problem with seventeen is that it reveals with stark clarity what a bunch of little wusses the entire Dauntless faction is! First in that the Wuss-asses could not defend the Candor compound. Second in that, via Toby-ass's tale, we discover that once the Dumb-ass crew were surrounded, they ran away!. How one runs away when one is surrounded is a complete mystery which not even Roth's best miraculous (god helped her write this story according to her acknowledgment page) deus ex machina can salvage, but it completely betrays the claim that Dauntless faction members are fierce and brave, and aggressive! It deteriorates further from there, though! Triscuit spends all night pulling needles out of other people, so I guess the Dauntless crew are also wimps when it comes to needles!

Apparently the Dumb-asses were such exceptional shots that every single needle went into someone's arm (except Triscuit, of course, and that's no doubt because she's divergent!). At any rate, the arm is the only location from which Triscuit is pulling needles! Evidently none of the Wuss-ass Dauntless crew can do it for themselves or help to do it for others, and the candor people are honestly useless. It smarts too much for the erudite to do it, and the abnegation people think it would be too prideful to pretend they could do anything for themselves. Amity is into drugs so they would no doubt leave it be. So that just leaves Triscuit who - despite this swollen jaw marring her flawless beauty - nevertheless sacrifices her own personal comfort and works through the mild but persistently intrusive pain to serve others like the good little Abnegator she is.

What really confuses me is that Triscuit not only heard what Eric and some other Dumb-ass Dauntless crew-member were discussing about the purpose of this assault, she was also party to Eric's monologuing when she was captured, and yet she inexplicably starts tossing ideas back and forth about what the purpose of this assault was! She considers that the needles might be poisoned, even though she knows perfectly well they were not. She wonders why the assault was made even thought she knows perfectly well why it was made. She wonders what the Dumb-asses were after even though she knows perfectly well what they were after. She wonders what they hoped to achieve even though she knows perfectly well what they hoped to achieve! Maybe Triscuit should be on the Dumb-ass faction, too? Did I mention that her jaw is swollen?

So Triscuit finally gets a chance to go to the cafeteria despite her swollen jaw, and runs into her brother (fortunately not literally and not jaw first), who is seriously concerned about that swell jaw she's now sporting. Maybe this is her signature: from now on, she will always have an injury for us to fret over, switching them out like a chain smoker. But we have more important things to deal with now: this paragon of charm and empathy reveals that "I thought I had gotten to the point where I didn't need my brother any more..."! What?! What was her plan: was she going to trade him in for a new knife? But no, the answer is revealed! She wants him to go get her some food because she has to talk with Toby-ass and obviously has no time for pointless pursuits like grabbing something to eat before she goes to talk to Toby-ass! Erudite boy sees absolutely no problem with this and toddles off to do her bidding. I was expecting to turn the page and read him saying, "As you wish."!

She finds Toby-ass and his first concern is her jaw, which is swell, but he follows it with an inquiry into her state of mind because this fully-trained but extremely delicate Dauntless girl stabbed someone! Oh. My. God! She wants to tell him about Marcus, who she has learned escaped the Amity compound with his Peter they both made it to Gondor! Er, Candor! But despite his chewing her out earlier about not telling him anything, she refrains from telling him anything because they are in the cafeteria - or is it Kafkateria? I don't know. So many weird things are happening in here, who can tell? God only knows what would happen if she revealed the dread secret of Marcus in the... Kafkateria! Toby-ass would no doubt morph into a berserker, rampaging, and sacking, and burning people's houses, raping their womenfolk or whoever happened to be about, and carrying off treasure in his douche canoe which looks remarkably like a Viking longboat. FOR GOD'S SAKE DO NOT TELL HIM ABOUT MARCUS! Triscuit decides to start acting selfishly....

So she tells Toby-ass she needs to talk to him, but not in the Kafkateria. Unfortunately, on the way out, some people taunt Toby-ass about the return of his father, so he learns of it in the cafeteria anyway. I guess if Triscuit hadn't been so selfish she could have prepared him for this, but she decided to go all selfish and well, there you go. Despite his now knowing, they still go somewhere as though she's going to tell him this secret he now knows! So when they get there, Toby-ass asks her if this secret she would reveal was Marcus's arrival and she denies it and tries to launch into a discussion of the simulation drugs, but instead, Toby-ass chews her out for doing precisely the things the Dauntless crew have been taught to do ever since she joined them!

Later, at the Candor meeting, Jack Kang, the leader of Candor invites the divergent forward to hear their opinions and then disses every one of them. He does describe Triscuit accurately based on what we've been shown of her so far in this novel: a little girl, and he disses her and Toby-ass's suggestions despite asking for them! No one speaks up in their defense. King Kang wants to meet the leader of Erudite to talk peace despite this brutal and unprovoked attack. Jack Kang is a moron who reminds me of Neville Chamberlain, and who is doubtlessly going to die at some point.

Here are some fun exercises to help maintain your interest in this novel (believe me, you'll need something, and I don’t recommend drugs):

  1. Count the number of times where Triscuit states "I have never (insert random activity), and I never will".
  2. Count how many times Triscuit consecutively says the same thing twice.
  3. Count the number of times where Triscuit agonizes over Will's death.
  4. Count how many times Triscuit reveals that despite being a successful young Dauntless candidate, she has all the physical fitness and stamina of a debilitated retiree.
  5. Count the number of times Triscuit aches, hurts, or is sore.
  6. Keep your eyes open for fun sentences like this: "...the moon is bright enough that I can walk by it without too much trouble." (Think about it!).

Roth is obsessed with the numbers 7 and 12. 7 is the number of the divine in Judaism. Triscuit's truth serum interrogation with Candor was set for 7pm and she was told this at noon. King Kang's meeting with Jeanine's representative was at 7am, and Triscuit thought about this twelve hours before, at 7pm. Of course, Triscuit once again failed to arm herself, so she failed to shoot Jeanine even though she had quickly figured out that the Erudite leader was indeed close by, but as we shall see, the last thing anyone is really aiming to do is take out Jeanine and thereby end this mess. No, we have a trilogy to complete and we’re going full spread ahead and damn the torpedoes which are hitting us harder in the ass with very page we turn.

We learn that two spies have returned from Erudite, but they evidently learned not a thing - or if they did, we sure learned nothing of what they learned. This is an epic fail as we shall see later, but for now, let’s take a moment to mourn the sad fact that this kind of thing - story lines which go nowhere - isn't confined to this one incident. Consider for example the plan to climb the Hancock building to spy on Erudite, which was interrupted by the Dumb-ass Dauntless attack. This plan is completely forgotten and not only never carried out, but it’s never mentioned again! Some plan. This is a second epic fail tied very much to the failure of the spies, as we shall see in a little while.

But let me admit here that I was wrong about Eric the half-a-B. I thoght he'd live on, but he's dead meat, summarily shot by Toby-ass. I was surprised by that. Not by him being killed without even a pretense of a trial and not by the fact that Triscuit isn’t even remotely shocked or nauseated by this latest example of barbarity, but by him being killed off. I thought they would keep him for his bug-a-bear value (which is why he's only half a B), but since we still have the Evil Queen Jeanine in the role, I guess Eric wasn't important enough to keep around. The question is, can we be assured that they're not going to kill off Jeanine no matter how many glaring opportunities present themselves for them to do so (more on this anon), because she is now the last evil monarch remaining.

This novel seems like all we're getting is Roth's random ruminations®. Whatever wild idea crosses her "lateral prefrontal cortex" (which Roth mistakenly thinks is the brain's pleasure center) got typed right out and became integrated into the story. I'm really a bit surprised not to read 'and then' frequently in this fable: "Triscuit got depressed and then she cried and then she fantasized about Toby-ass, who is selflessly growing bangs into his eyes as fast as he can" because it’s that kind of breathless child-like relation of a tale which is what this novel feels like all too often. Hey, when Beatrice offends, is this a Prior offense...? I had to seriously wonder why Triscuit is made to appear far younger than her sixteen years, especially given how much tough training she's received at the hands of her manly tutors when she joined Dauntless just a month or so before. Even Roth is aware of this, as highlighted by her own reference to it, put into in Jeanine's mouth when Triscuit turns herself in.

The most glaring thing about this novel is that Triscuit is the diametric opposite of what she was in volume 1 and for no good reason. Rather than being toughened up, she's retrogressing into a childlike state, and the retardation evidently isn't just mental, it's apparently physical. Consider this sentence from Roth: "He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him and we're finally eye to eye." So is Triscuit a midget? Is she eight years old? Why would Roth champion her as a can-do candidate in volume one and then destroy all that by making her into the nary sue of volume 2? If the novel had been written in the third person it wouldn't have seemed quite so bad, but all this self-pity is nothing but nauseating in the first person.

The massive failure of Dauntless as an entity is another bizarre factor in this novel's failure. After volume 1, where we get slammed time after time after time with how tough Dauntless is, how supreme, how powerful, how aggressive and how fearless, time after time in this volume we discover how useless they are, how inert, how incapable, how worthless as a defensive force, and how incapable they are of formulating any kind of a strategy or battle plan! This entire novel is one of placid non-reactivity on the part of the Wuss-asses - hence their well-deserved name. What's almost equally bizarre is that Toby-ass, an instructor for Dauntless, and in this volume now a leader, constantly berates Triscuit for acting like Dauntless faction member should act! Or at least should act given what we were forced to swallow in volume 1! Go figure!

Check out this brain-dead sequence: Christina, who pretty much detests Triscuit for firing at Will, comes to get her - not one of the leaders or anyone else, but Triscuit, the person she most despises - when an Erudite initiated simulation causes some Wuss-asses to kill themselves. Christina fails to tell Triscuit what’s going on, and Triscuit robotically fails to ask, merely following her like a blind lamb to the slaughter. Triscuit exhibits this specific behavior repeatedly in this volume. Triscuit isn’t even remotely suspicious of this girl who, for all she knows, hates her and is plotting retaliation. Triscuit fails to alert anyone and follows with mute acquiescence. The astounding incompetence of these two results in two more deaths. When they get up to the roof, Triscuit discovers that her friend Marlene, Lynn's young brother Hector, and one other are being coerced (by a simulation) to throw themselves off the roof to their death. And where the heck do these names come from? Uriah? Zeke? Hector? Toby-ass? I'm forced to consider the possibility that it was God Himself gave those names to Roth with a divine edict to employ them. He did co-write this novel with her, after all.

So what happened here is that the Dumb-asses have invoked a simulation on three of the Wuss-asses, forcing them up the roof where they're about to plunge to their deaths. The Dumb-asses know what's going on because the Wuss-asses have exhibited remarkable incompetence in their failure to blind all the cameras in the Dauntless compound. Why? They chose to have a paintball fight instead! I am not making this up! Because Christina came down and got Triscuit, and Triscuit alerted no one else, there is no one to restrain two of the three subjects as they throw themselves off the roof and die. Triscuit manages to save Hector. Christina doesn’t even try to save anyone. If they had recruited just four more people, there would have been more than enough to save all three lives.

There is more incompetence here than just Triscuit's and Christina's. Why would the Dumb-asses pull this demo of their power in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, and there's no one to witness it?! Why not do it in front of everyone in the middle of the day? And why wait until Christina has got Triscuit to come along, but no one else?! The result of this could have backfired. It could have been that everyone thought Christina and Triscuit had killed those three. But then, that's why they're the Dumb-asses, isn’t it?! Naturally Triscuit blames herself for all three deaths, and heaps this on top of her already overwhelming guilt, which is fair I suppose since she could have done a lot better. Never once does she consider Christina culpable, because Triscuit is painfully stupid despite baing an Erudite candidate. Actually maybe because she's such a candidate, since the Erudites are clearly stupid too.

There is a far more serious problem here, unfortunately. Recall that in the attack on the Candor building, the Dumb-asses needed both a transmitter, and a simulant. The transmitter was injected (and not single thought has been expended on how to remove or neutralize the transmitter!) via the needles which were fired at so many people, and the simulant was administered via the gas grenades. So my question is: where is the simulant in this assault on those three roof-top flyers? None was administered. The only permanent thing is the transmitter! Roth doesn't so much as gloss over this as completely fail to explain it.

This is what I mean by Roth's behavior pattern of tossing out random and ill-conceived ideas instead of creating a coherent narrative and molding that into an engaging story. I've mentioned this before in reviews, but it’s worth bringing up again: I can forgive a lot of holes in a story if the story itself is worthy. If your fiction engages my mind and pulls me along, I'm in, but even the best written story opens itself to endless nitpicking if it fails in the critical arena of proving itself to be a gripping yarn. If it fails to provide a decent ongoing narrative and if it fails in generally maintaining a respectable level of suspension of disbelief, then it fails as a novel and all there is for the reader to do is pick at the loose threads until they unravel like a badly composed Boléro.

I don’t demand that a novel be perfect. None is. It doesn't have to be perfect. I don't ask for a flawless story, and I sure don't claim to write flawless ones myself! All I ask is that the writer tell me a good story; take me somewhere I've never been; introduce me to someone interesting and fun, someone I've never met but would like to meet. You give me that, and I'm yours, and your story will be embraced, warts and all. The problem is that Roth isn't even pretending that she needs to fabricate a decent story; she's just palming us off with a fabrication, and stringing together two dozen plot holes and telling me it's crochet is just going to get me crotchety.

So Triscuit predictably declares herself the scapegoat of Gethsemane, and offers herself like the Messiah in the park in the dark. She outright lies to Toby-ass, for which I hope he will never forgive her but for which the moron doubtlessly will forgive her, and she bows down to terrorism rather than trying to use her erudition skills to figure out a solution. Never once does the thought even cross her mind that Jeanine will not keep her word, indeed has no incentive to! Never once does she entertain the idea that her sacrifice for all humankind will actually benefit the devil and give her more power to continue to harm the Wuss-asses regardless of what happens to Triscuit. On her way out the door, she tells Christina to find out what Marcus knows, and Christina is so monumentally stupid that she doesn’t figure out that Triscuit is going to turn herself in to the Erudite.

But it gets worse. When Triscuit hikes over to the Erudite compound (complaining all the way of what a chore it is to have to actually walk several blocks), she discovers that the compound is completely unguarded and unprotected. If the Wuss-asses went over there, they could walk in and take over the entire building, but erudite candidate and Dauntless graduate Triscuit never even notices the lax security, let alone considers haring back to the Dauntless compound with this amazing piece of extremely valuable intelligence. This is a revelation which the two spies should already have conveyed but spectacularly failed to do so! It is also a revelation which, if they actually had completed their plan of scaling the Hancock building to spy on the Erudite compound, the Wuss-asses would also have discovered.

So Triscuit once more bemoans her fate and the Erudite people conduct some sims on her, all of which fail because she's quite evidently magic girl on whom no sims work. The funny thing is that Triscuit, who hates Peter, is joking and flirting with him throughout her captivity! This is Peter who put out her friend Edward's eye for no reason other than pure jealousy, in volume 1 of this trilogy. Worse than this, Triscuit at one point has the opportunity to stab Jeanine in the eye with a needle (which they stupidly give her so she can inject herself), yet she goes right ahead and injects herself. Given the revelation which comes shortly afterwards, this behavior is utterly, absolutely, completely, and in every other way inconceivably moronic. Except in a Veronica Roth novel, evidently.

So what comes later? Well Triscuit accidentally runs into Toby-ass, now a prisoner. Rather than kill him outright - a Dauntless faction leader! - the Dumb-asses let him hang around. They use Triscuit to force Toby-ass to betray the location of the factionless safe houses, and Toby-ass, a supposed Dauntless leader and instructor, spills every last detail and doesn't even feel remotely bad about it. Do they kill him then? Nope! Toby-ass even escapes at one point, takes Triscuit with him and then surrenders! Still they don’t kill him. Erudite my ass.

Instead, these geniuses decide to kill Triscuit! Now this is the one person who actually is immune to their drugs - the one who they truly need to figure out (by their estimation), but rather than pursue this course, they decide to kill her and substitute Toby-ass, who is far more troublesome, and from whom they could learn far less. I say, 'by their estimation' because all the Erudite have to do in reality (this reality, that is) is to kill all the divergent, and their problem is solved. They don't need a drug. For that matter, why even bother killing them? There are so few of them that they cannot possibly pose a threat, yet genius Jeanine is obsessing on them. Wouldn’t it be funny if she turned out to be one? And in true Star Wars tradition, also turned out to be Triscuit's real mom! Heh!

But we know Triscuit is never going to die because this is only volume 2 of a trilogy! Does Roth really think she's ramping up the stakes and making us sit on the edge of our seats? She's delusional if she does. So no, of course Triscuit doesn’t die. There's a traitor in the midst of the genius Erudite compound, and it’s Peter! Yes, he's a spy for the Wuss-asses.

So please, someone help me out here. I have two serious problems with this. Here's the first: Peter is a spy. He's working for the Wuss-asses, but he's embedded in the Erudite compound. Given that, what in god's name was the motive for Toby-ass breaking in there? And this is the same Toby-ass who was lecturing Triscuit not long before about not taking stupid risks??? His purported motive was to discover where the Erudite control rooms were. Peter couldn’t pass this information on?!! And Toby-ass was in one of these two control rooms. He had the chance to completely destroy it, but he failed to do so! This fable has now adventured well beyond Le Stupide and has spliced its drooling, slack-jawed visage deeply into the USB (unevacuated stinking butt-hole) port of the monumentally microencephalic.

Here's my second problem, and this makes the first look like a mere hiccup. You recall when Triscuit had a needle in her hand and failed to plunge it into Jeanine's eye? Guess who the only other person in the room was? Yep, it was Peter the spy. Eric and Max are already dead at this point. Triscuit and Peter could have taken out Jeanine right there and then, thereby completely chopping the head off the Erudite faction. They could have ended this whole war right there, yet both of them epically failed.

I'm sorry, but this cheap-ass excuse for an action adventure is total trash. My only purpose in finishing it now is to expose it for what it is by digging up the rest of the dirt and airing it in public. So continuing in this vein, Peter, Triscuit and Toby-ass escape down the garbage chute in true Star Wars fashion (honestly), and Triscuit decides that the best way to escape the Erudite pursuers is to be illogical because the logical Erudite people will never find them that way! Seriously? Since when did logic become the defining factor of the Erudite? It used to be smarts, not logic! But get Triscuit's brilliant idea: don't run, quietly hide instead. So they fire their gun to shatter a window to get into a building. I am not kidding you. They way to avoid the brilliant Erudite pursuers is to loudly fire a gun, smash a window, and then hide in the building which the gunshot and the shattered glass unmistakeably point out. I think even microencephalic is too generous for this level of numb-nuttery.

Well I pretty much skipped chapters 25 and 26 (or somewhere around there) because, amazingly, they were in almost exactly imitation of my joke! I expected Roth to start writing "and then she did this and then she did that" like a lower school writing assignment! These chapters spew out the most pointless and tedious details of completely uninteresting crap. But one part was actually interesting given this other joke I'd made about Triscuit being the Messiah: Toby-ass washes her feet! I am not making this stuff up. I now expect Triscuit to be transfigured and rise up to Heaven at the conclusion of this trilogy!

As if telling her chosen disciple Toby-ass one humongous lie wasn't enough, Triscuit lies again to him in a situation where she should definitely have trusted him. The Factionless and Dauntless (FAD) coalition plans on raiding the Erudite compound and destroying all their information, which is considered to be their power. But get this: the raid isn’t to take place immediately, it’s to take place three days hence (another number which has religious significance!). What in the name of ass-backwards bone-headed dim-wittedness was the "planning" behind that brain-dead decision? To give time for the Erudite goons to learn of this plan from their spies? To give them ample opportunity to shore up their defenses (which they do)? No, there is no reason for this decision aside from sheer incompetence in telling this fable. I guess we ought to be grateful that at least it’s not seven or twelve days....

Roth employs uses the verb "to inch"! That reminds me of a biography someone wrote about the creator of James Bond: Ian Fleming. I may be misremembering this (I sure don't remember who wrote the biography!), but I recall the writer mentioning that none other than Noël Coward had taken Fleming to task on his turning of the noun into a verb, and Coward declined it for him along the lines of "I inch, Thou inchest..."! I found that immensely amusing, but the fact remains that language isn't what's written in some dictionary, or in some grammar manual somewhere. Language is what's spoken the street, and I don't think it's ever been more dynamic than we find in the English language today.

It’s an exciting time, and while I often rail at misused or misspoken words, and at bad grammar, I also realize we can’t stop it, so we need to find a way, if not to embrace it then to turn this trend to our advantage as writers. In this particular case with the inch (and should we now change it to the centimeter?!), it would probably behoove a writer to employ, instead of something like "I inched my way along the ledge" to write something more like "I navigated the narrow ledge by inches". A simple dedication to subtle changes like that - a kind of retro-writing, rebelling against the new norm - might make the difference between your novel being a part of the herd, and to it standing out in an editor's - or more importantly these days of self-publishing - in your reader's mind.

Triscuit and her token black friend Christina head off over to the Amity compound with Marcus (is his last name 'Asdoomed'?!). Once again Triscuit immediately does someone else's bidding, allowing herself to be drawn into the Amity people's prayer to a god who never lifted a finger to help them, but instead, quite evidently gave this society the finger. She becomes aware of her weakness for once, but instead of simply sitting this one out, this brave Dauntless girl runs away like a child, until her lungs burn, which (given her fitness level) is probably only about ten yards or so.

Roth's stereotyping reaches hitherto unattained heights when she declares all Erudite faction members, without exception, to be wearers of eye-glasses! I guess they’re not smart enough to have come up with a fix for eye problems, or even to wear contact lenses?

Triscuit's plan is to seek the advice of the Eyeglass faction which is in hiding at Amity. This is bordering on the insanely stupid because the Eyeglass-wearers have yet to prove that they have any smarts whatsoever as judged by their behavior in this novel so far, but they're logically stupid so that's all right then! They tell Triscuit that instead of storing the information she wishes to retrieve on a disk, she should just transmit it to the other factions over the network. Cara advises them that it will then be impossible to destroy, but I guess she's not so smart because whatever can be sent over the network can also be deleted over the network! Does Roth not know this?

As they're about to enter the Erudite compound, Triscuit chooses a taser because she's still terrified of guns. Roth tells us that her heart beats so hard that it marks each second. I can only conclude that either it isn't really beating that hard, or they must have remarkably short seconds in Roth World™.

Now the Erudite compound is surrounded by guards (for no apparent reason, unless the Erudite actually do know about the FAD invasion plan)! Scores of armed Candor drones surround the building! The FAD coalition blew it by delaying their assault, but at least now the attack can get good and bloody. Triscuit has to try and sneak in by some alternate stealthy means. Of course 'stealthy', in Roth’s dictionary, means shooting off a loud gun again and thereby destroying all hope of secrecy! This marks twice that Roth has made this glaring mistake.

They climb to a floor where they have a window opposite which, when broken, will allow them direct access across the alley to the Erudite building. They decide to use a device which will break windows sonically, but even though this device can shatter all the windows on both sides of the alley, they somehow feel they have to get it across to the other window rather than simply set it off on the window ledge where they're at. Note that despite the fact that the other building is very close by, the candor drones are apparently literally surrounding the building - not just blocking off the alley but right down there in the alley!

Now please prepare yourself for Le Stupide to be ramped up higher than you or I ever thought Roth capable, because she outdoes herself in the next few scenes. They get a ladder and use it as a bridge to the other window, then they toss the disk which shatters every window in both buildings all the way down to the ground. The mindless drones fire one shot each into the air and then resume their guarding duty, and not one single Erudite person looks out to see what the hell is going on with all these windows shattering!

They crawl across the ladder and enter the building, but when Fernando, the eyeglass-wearing Erudite (because you know it’s quite illegal to be Erudite sans eye-wear), puts his eyeglasses in his pocket, they promptly fall out and drop to the ground. The candor drones do not fire at the source of the noise (the glasses impacting the ground), but fire wildly up into the air, thereby killing Fernando! (Cue ABBA). When Triscuit arrives in the bathroom across the alley, a woman comes out of one of the stalls, and this genius accepts it as perfectly normal and even logical that fellow Erudites will shatter all windows and enter the building on the fifth floor or wherever they are, rather than use elevators or stairs. She happily romps off without even dreaming of raising any alarm!

Now recall that the entire complement of windows on this entire side of the building have been literally shattered. It starts to rain, and Triscuit is momentarily freaked out by the rain "hitting the window". WHAT WINDOW??? So the crew exits the bathroom, whereupon Triscuit remembers that she left her stunner in the bathroom - this is the Dauntless girl with Erudite extensions. She simply sighs, "Oh well" and toddles off without taking five seconds to recover her only weapon, thereby once again leaving herself unarmed in a crucially important situation. She's evidently given up on wearing a knife - I think that was because the silver of the blade conflicted with her Amity dress. It turns out that the Factionless-Dauntless attack was not set for three days hence after all, because, in a miraculous coincidence, it's taking place precisely at the same time that Triscuit and crew and breaking in! How delightfully convenient.

They find the control room, but they cannot access Jeanine's super secret info stash, since it’s not on those computers. The funny thing is that (you may recall) Toby-ass was scouting out the control rooms so they could be destroyed in the attack, yet despite both Edward and Tori, a Dauntless leader, being in the vicinity, there's not one single FAD person doing anything to the control room!

So they climb the stairs to try and reach the Jeanine's private office. This is Triscuit's logic: The information is precious to Jeanine, so let's not go to the highly secure lab; it's far more likely that she keeps this vitally important info in her unlocked office! They unexpectedly run into Edward on the stairs. I guess they weren't keeping an eye out for him! Even though he's on their side and has no idea what they’re up to, he refuses to let them up the stairs. They fight and Edward gets shot. Obviously he's not a patch on them. Upstairs, Triscuit enters the lab and is hit by a simulation where she has to fight herself. Despite all these delays, she still gets to Tori before Tori kills Jeanine! What was Tori doing all this time? Chatting her up? And how come Jeanine never destroyed the information before they arrived?

Since Triscuit tried to save Jeanine just long enough to figure out how to access the info on her computer, Tori immediately brands this girl (who she knows very well), as a traitor and without further ado, Triscuit is arrested! She begs Toby-ass to listen to her, but he's pissed, as he should be, for her lying to him. At that point she tries to have the conversation with him which she should have had two days ago, but gives up almost immediately, and clams-up completely in a flood of self pity instead of trying to convey the vital importance of this information!

So how does this end? Well it doesn't - it's open to volume 3, but the link is so abysmally weak that it doesn't even merit the name. Essentially the insanely valuable, super-secret file on Jeanine's computer is some chick popping up on a video and saying that, hey, guess what, there are people outside of Chicago and only the divergents can save you now! I am not kidding you. Does she give any details? Nope. Does she say exactly why the divergents are valuable, no! That's how completely FUBAR this volume is. By all means buy it so you can immediately recycle it. We can use the toilet paper.


Thursday, May 16, 2013

Untraceable by S.R. Johannes






Title: Untraceable
Author: S.R. Johannes
Publisher: Coleman & Stott
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!


I'm ½-way through this one, which is the first volume in The Nature of Grace series, and I have to say that I'm not very impressed. The premise is a good one, but the execution leaves everything to be desired. There are related novels which I flatly refuse to entertain based on what I've read so far: Unspeakable is either another novel in this world, or it's a very à propos one-word review of Untraceable; Uncontrollable is without question a fair description of the little jerk of a protagonist in Untraceable.

Grace Wells's father has disappeared. He's a park ranger and he's been gone for three months and no one knows what happened to him. Since his radio was found in the river, the assumption is that he drowned, but there's no evidence that anyone has ever scoured the river for him! The police are telling Grace that it's the responsibility of the Park Ranger service, which is about to drop the case. Grace is scouring the woods herself using field-craft that she learned at her father's side, but everything she does is pointless because it's been three months and a few rain storms in the meantime, and any meaningful tracks or trails are long gone.

For a story that's supposed to be centered on a female protagonist, I found it inexplicable that every animal she encounters out in the forest is identified as a 'he'! A cricket, a squirrel, a snake, a rainbow trout (which is slimy by the way, in case we aren't yet girlish enough for you!) are all firmly male with not a suggestion of a female creature in sight. How do these creatures breed out here?! Or are the females of the species staying at home doing the housework? I found that level of genderism appalling in a female-centric novel, and it's an entirely predictable betrayal of the very basis of the novel. Sadly, it's not the only one.

Grace is so pathetically desperate that when she finds a Cheetos bag, she begs the police captain - an old family friend - to dust it for prints because her father ate Cheetos! This says more about how illogical the story is than it does about Grace, however, since she is now effectively telling everyone that her father the Park ranger was a complete slob, who trashed up the very park he was supposed to help maintain! Even if there were his prints on the bag, what would it prove? If this were merely a sign that her therapy isn't cuyting it, that would be one thing, but it turns out that it's not. It's actually a sign that Grace is a stupid, spoiled brat who has no clue as to the meaning of the term 'boundaries' or that of 'decent behavior'. She exhibits increasing stupidity as the story continues, starting with stealing the file on her father from the police captain's office!

On a trip into the forest, we're immediately subjected to the beginnings of a tired, tired, tired cliché of the inevitable young-adult love triangle. There's the standard bad-ass newcomer whom she meets in the forest and with whom she inescapably falls into inescapable instadore, contrasted with the faithful, devoted, good-natured moron whom she abruptly ditched, but who will do anything for her and who consequently, she abuses criminally (I use that word avisedly). Grace is a heartless user, and she deserves no consideration or respect IMO.

She happens to very conveniently overhear two guys talking like they're going bear-hunting out of season, and since we've had it bitch-slapped into our heads that Grace loves bears, she's naturally loaded for bear at hearing this! Pop quiz! So having heard this news about the hunters, Grace now decides that the best thing is to:

  1. Alert the rangers and police, OR
  2. Leave her employer in the lurch by running out on her after-lunch shift, follow these bad guys alone into the deep forest without telling anyone what she's up to, and thereby risk getting herself kidnapped and/or killed?

Which do you think she does? You got it right! And what do you think happens? Yep! Got it in one! And who do you think rescues her from these clichéd caricatures of dumb red-neck brutes into whose evil arms she falls so helplessly? Yep, it's the mysterious bad-ass guy in the forest - you got it right again! So now we learn that this young woman for whom we're supposed to root is not only wilting like an unwatered wallflower, but is also stupid squared. She has a cell phone but never once does she call in where she's going or that she might be in trouble with two poachers, or that she's escaped from two poachers and someone from the Ranger's office needs to come pick them up.

At one point, while she and her rescuer (no word yet on whether his hair falls into his eyes, but he does have recognizable muscle mass) are sheltering in a cave from the conveniently pouring rain which our field-crafter never saw coming (or if she did, she sure kept quiet about it), she actually has this thought: "Maybe it can't hurt to give this guy a chance. Drilling him is much better than being grilled about my encounter."! I did not make that up! She would rather drill him than be grilled! I'm sure that's not what the author intended me to imagine, but it is what she achieved!

Nor did I make up this one which appears a bit later: "Just as I'm about to give up, something nibbles at my fly. Breathing evenly, I do a quick jerk..." Yeah, she's talking about fishing, but there are better ways of writing these things, and if your story is in danger of going over a cliff, you definitely don't need to pile on any more baggage with sloppy syntax or idly composed prose that might tip an already precarious balance in your reader's mind! This guy Mo, the bad-ass savior of Grace, has never harmed her or even looked like he would, and now he's actually saved her life, yet she's having more qualms about him than she did about blindly following two nasty guys into the forest by herself! Honestly? Now she gets all cautious?! Maybe Grace is short for graceless?

I'm sorry, but novels like this, if this is all they have to offer, need to be sold with a free barf bag attached. I was hoping that the other half of this story would be a lot better than the first one, but it seems not. Grace is still doing monumentally dumb things. When she gets back to town, she fails to tell the police of the fact that she was held hostage by people whom she actually considers might have something to do with her dad's disappearance! Yeah, just let 'em run wild, graceless! Instead she goes directly home without even a care for whether someone might be following her. When Les the Ranger shows up, she does tell him, and he goes off after the bad guys Al and Billy, telling Grace to wait at home. Pop quiz! So having been told by a Park Ranger to stay home Grace now decides that the best thing is to:

  1. Stay home as instructed, OR
  2. Promptly heads into the forest without telling a sole where you're going?

Right again! I think Grace might actually have taken the lead from Luce (of Lauren Kate's abysmal Fallen novel) for being the dumbest cluck in the hen-house. The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that the title of this novel refers to Grace's functional neurons.

So predictably, Mo finds her again - what a stalker he must be to always be there when she is! But unlike her behavior with the bad boys Al and Billy, she takes Mo down hard before she realizes who he is. She she can put him down but no one else? Is that the basis of her attraction to him?! Or maybe the basis is the fact that Mo is creepy enough to sneak up on her after all she's been through and not even have the decency to offer a word of greeting on his approach? I skipped an entire chapter at this point because I was in danger of going into a diabetic coma from reading it. The chapters are all titled "Survival Skill #" whatever, and 18 was nothing but Grace flirting cheesily with Mo instead of searching for her dad. I guess she soon dropped that old geezer from her consciousness

"Survival Skill #19" has her unaccountably freaking out over the sound of what might have been gunfire in an area where hunting is regularly going on! Of course it might have been an engine back-firing, but she denies that with a "No way!" when she's ridden her motorbike up there frequently, and she's also followed a truck up there. This makes zero sense. Instead of fearing for the life of Les, whom she sent out here to find those guys, she goes into a panic for herself, and starts running! Mo physically restrains her and demands to know what she's hiding! This is the girl he had to rescue from two deranged guys and he's too stupid to grasp why she might have panicked? She tells him her dad has been missing for "three months, eleven days, twelve hours, and forty three minutes" even though she cannot possibly have it down to the minute or even the hour. No one can.

Brain-dead and graceless fails yet again when Les reveals he has actually brought in Al and Billy. How he managed that when both of them are violent, armed, and have no scruples, is only addressed later and obtusely, but what's a far bigger fail is that all graceless now has to do is accuse them of kidnapping her, and they're in custody for a long time, yet she fails to do so! Instead she goes haring off on some wild-ass chase based on the soda can that Les was drinking from! I want to ditch this novel and move on to something better because I'm now forced to consider that it might be a children's novel and not YA at all.

The only thing actualyl retaining my interest right now is that I'd thought Les would end up getting killed, but since he didn’t, I'm seriously considering that the real villain is Les - or maybe even Mo which would be a pleasant change, but I can't see that happening. So Grace hikes for two hours (wihout telling anyone where she's going, to get to this station based on Les's soda can, and she becomes immediately suspicious when she arrives there, but instead of using her cell phone to call for help, she takes out her knife and lies in wait. This girl is stupid, stupid, stupid, even as she tells herself that this time she needs to be smarter. Snooping around, she finds the station trashed, and a dead bear, hunted illegally, but she does not call it in and she takes zero evidence, not even photos with her phone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is definitely a children's story and was therefore pitched to me under false pretenses!

Grace goes back to town and meets with the police captain, but then spends two pages without telling him what the critical problem is, bantering with Wyn instead! When Carl the captain finally drags it out of her that there's a dead bear, he asks her "Are you sure?"! Honestly? Are you kidding me? Maybe it was a dead bee? What could you mistake a dead bear for? Maybe it was an old rug someone tossed out?! But of course since Grace is stupid, stupid, stupid, and incompetent, and didn’t call it in, nor procure evidence, nor take photos, then she has nothing to offer them, and even if she did have evidence, it's not evidence that Al or Billy, or Les had anything to do with it.

Wyn offers to help her but she lies to him, failing to mention Mo. So now Grace is a liar and a jerk, and we’re supposed to root for her? At this point I'm thinking she deserves everything she gets, including a dressing down from Carl for trying to tell him how to do his job. Wyn offers to go the station and get pictures of the dead bear (assuming it was a bear, remember, Grace might have mistaken an old discarded winter coat for a dead bear). Grace immediately forgets how upset and frustrated she is and starts shamelessly flirting with Wyn, which probably accounts for his shameless manhandling of her, with his hands all over her inappropriately and she never raises an objection.

When they arrive at the station, the place is all cleaned up, and the dead bear is gone! Clearly Al and Billy are innocent (at least of the clean-up), but this doesn’t register with Grace, who decides to Google them! She goes out to meet Mo at the river the next day -the hell with continuing her search for her lost father, over which she's been obsessing for months. Who cares about a missing dad when you can squeeze Mister Hottie in the forest with a phishing rod? Naw, it’s much more important to flirt with Mo, who is supposed to be British but uses Americanisms just like a native.

He describes her as a cute girl, and far from being insulted, she shows as little upset from this as she does when he demeans her with 'blossom'. On the contrary, her face heats up and she builds a totally unnecessary fire, apparently just from the heat of her face. When the fire gets going, sparks "twitter" from it! I did not make that up! Twitter! Yep, there's probably a hash tag floating around. Look for #St.iMental.fire. Clearly this is not instadore! This is surely an original Native American Brand True Love™! I mean, get this: "His mouth attack mine with such force that my lips forget to fight back." Yep - demeaning Native American pigeon English! I suppose it’s a typo - that the 's' was missed from the end of 'attacks' but seriously, with the way this scene is going, I wouldn’t at all have been surprised if that sentence had been followed up with something like, "Me Mo. You squaw. Me make heap big love to you in my tipi." So much for the strong female protagonist. Goodbye, graceless, hello Mary Sue! Or maybe we should use a more condescending Native American cliché like 'Dances With Dumbass"?

So Mary Sue goes to Mama Sue for advice on the photos of boot prints she has, and despite not having a single thing by which to judge the size of the prints, Mama Sue nails them down to a size 10 and a size 11. She must be a truly remarkable woman. Mary Sue makes the super-human leap to the astounding conclusion that the smaller boot is Billy's and the larger is Al's. So another day when she could be searching her grid for her dad is blown off to have fun with Mo. How easily she's distracted. Dances With Dumbass make me heap sick. She spends the night with Mo, without calling anyone to let them know where she is. She has a bad dream but eventually she can fall asleep with Mo's arms encircling her in a Mo Original Ring of Safety™. Sigh.

Her mom freaks out when she gets home the next morning and Mary Sue Grace (MSG) offers neither a word of apology nor of explanation. Far from it. She treats her own mother like crap. Her mother complains that she missed her psych session yesterday and MSG declares arrogantly that she will pay for it, since she's a working girl, but guess what? Since at this point, she's not worked throughout this entire novel except for one shift which she blew off at lunchtime, she's hardly working in any meaningful sense, now is she? So her Mom grounds her, but Wyn shows up, and this shameless 16 year old starts kissing him. It must be the power of Wyn telling her that he wants to think for both of them! I am not kidding: that's exactly what he said!

I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. This novel sucks rotten wood like a forest fire. I have better things to read with my time. This is a definite WARTY!

Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley






Title: Pretty Girl-13
Author: Liz Coley
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Rating: WORTHY!

Well I'm in love with Liz Coley, and I've only just started this one! This novel impressed me from the off, so I am thrilled to be on my third novel in a row to which I find I can warm up. I love this title which translates to PG-13(!), but this book is a disturbing book, especially after the very recent revelation (at the time I'm writing this) of the three brothers who abducted three teen-aged girls and held them for a decade. I don’t know how anyone can come back from that, but it's heartening that people do. At least those women were not tortured and left in shallow graves; that is they weren't tortured physically in the commonly understood sense. They were very much tortured emotionally and psychologically, and that's more than probably worse.

In this fictional account (perhaps rooted in fact? I don’t know, but I'm going by Coley's dedication: For J, who survived) Angela Gracie Chapman was abducted from summer camp when she was thirteen. No one ever discovered what had happened to her. Now she's sixteen and "wakes up" walking down the street towards her home. Her parents almost go into shock; they're also victims of this crime.

The detective who was on the case arrives quickly and she's subject to the indignity of having to go to the hospital for a rape examination by a male doctor. Nowhere is there a social worker, psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist of any appropriate kind available. I find that hard to believe - unless the hospital she was taken to was truly second rate. She can’t get such an appointment until the next afternoon.

Meanwhile, the nurse keeps calling her 'sweetie', which doesn’t seem to bother Angela in her 13-year-old state, but I definitely feel like I want to catch that nurse upside her condescending head for it. Angela blacks out for a few minutes when the doctor examines her vagina and no one seems to see this, not even Angela - not properly. Hopefully the psychiatrist will latch onto that. From her physical state, it's clear she has been manacled and held prisoner for the intervening three years, and from her mental state, it’s clear that she dissociated herself from what was happening and walled it off in order to try and cope with the horror of it, which accounts for the "amnesia" (yes, in quotes- more on this anon!).

She has flashbacks in a different person to things she did or things from which she was protected by dissociation. Her thirteen year old self did not know how to cook, but her sixteen year old self seems to have that knowledge hidden away somewhere. She's very strong for her size, and her hands are calloused, like she did hard work, but she cannot recall it. When she woke up that day on her own street, she carried a bag with clothes and a shiv. She recalls none of what that means.

Her immediate problem right then is that she still thinks she's thirteen and expects to be treated like that, but her dad won't even hold her hand. She can barely handle the knowledge that she's actually sixteen and the world has moved on three years while she was on hold like some kid's forgotten DVD. She can hardly stand to look at her face in the mirror which looks so different from her mental image of herself. Her favorite clothes don’t fit and her body seems like it belongs to someone else. It’s ironic that someone, someone with very piercing dark eyes, she half-recalls, "borrowed" her, and now she feels like she's borrowing someone else. Since her clothes are annoyingly useless, she goes with her mom to the mall to buy fresh, and is outraged by the prices. She buys very little, but later, she finds something in the bag that evidently her alter ego (or one of them!) lifted from the store without her (Angela's) knowledge. The fact that she lets this go without even analyzing it is portentous.

The psychologist, Lynn Grant seems very much on the ball. I was impressed with her first meeting with Angela. It was very well written. She failed to address what might happen if a media circus surrounds Angela, which I thought was an awful omission, but When Angela awakens from what she thought was a few minutes of hypnosis, she learns from Grant that she was "out" for a half hour, and Grant was talking to another personality called Girl Scout, not to Angela at all, and Girl Scout is very worried about Angela.

Angela has to fight her parents a bit to get what she feels she needs. Her father is being completely dumb about this, not understanding Angela at all, and her mother wants her to get back to normal. Her mother accidentally reveals that she's pregnant, and what with that and reading her mother's scrapbook that she started after Angela's disappearance, Angela is now half under the impression that her folks gave up on her and moved on, and that she's shortly to be replaced with the new baby. In the end, bolstered by Grant's agreement, Angela determines that she should go back to school, but start in ninth grade because she knows she has catching up to do, but not that much.

On her first day at school in her first class, she's recognized by a girl called Maggie, who takes Angela under her wing and surrounds her with supportive classmates who vow to help her catch up on school-work. That part is hilarious, and delightfully written. The potential problem starts as she's leaving at the end of the day, and she runs into her old friends from when she was thirteen: her "boyfriend" Greg, and one of her two girlfriends, Livvie. She has refrained from calling them because she felt really weird about it, and so young compared with them, given that she feels paused at thirteen.

She goes back with them to Greg's house and apparently does not realize the importance of calling her folks, who seem remarkably lax about her exposure and vulnerability in traveling to and from school given that she's an abduction victim. There seems to be no concern for her at all that her abductor might want to "re-acquire" her, or that the media might make her life hell once they learn of her return. She's reassured to see that Greg and Livvie still view her as a close friend, but she's surprised that they no longer hang out with the third of their foursome who evidently became a school pariah when she ratted them out for having a kegger. No one speaks to her any more. The immediate feeling I got after reading this was that Angela is probably going to end up seeking her out.

She seems to still have the hots for Greg, which she did at thirteen, but it does seems a bit awkward to me. It’s definitely an exceptional and forgivable case of instadore! I get the feeling that maybe all will not turn out well between them. But something goes very bad elsewhere, and unexpectedly so. Her favorite uncle comes to visit her and they go for a walk. Suddenly it's night and Angela is home and cannot recall the last several hours. Eventually she figures this out as one of her personalities surfaces for the first time - the one that took over every time she was raped by her captor.

This same personality tells her that her uncle has been abusing her for years, every since he began babysitting her. She became so agitated by it that she zoned out and this new personality, which she knows as 'The Slut' takes over. This is the personality which has been buying the exotic underwear and which puts on make up much more boldly than Angela ever would. It's also the personality that came out in the back seat of Greg's car one morning when he was supposedly giving her a ride to school. He took her for a ride sure enough.

Angela's personalities have begun frothing to the top as her therapy sessions continue, and she finally volunteers for an experimental treatment using gene therapy which is aimed at blocking the ability of specific neurons to communicate, which the doctor in charge of the study thinks will effectively kill Angela's alter egos. In order to do this, they have to map her brain using a CAT scan, while Dr. Grant brings out each personality one by one. Unfortunately, she can only bring two out, one of which is the slut

This assault, of course, causes a rebellion in her alter egos, and they become much more active. She evidently has four of them in addition to "herself". The Slut is a street-wise and very sexual being; Tattletale is a very young personality who communicates with Angela using a really old tape recorder she had as a kid. She is the one who dealt with her uncle's advances. Girl Scout is still around, but she has chosen to make herself scarce at this point. The Little Wife is the one who cooked and cleaned during Angela's captivity, and i had thought she was another personality, but Coley confused the issue. The Slut and Little Wife are both the same personality. That took some grasping. The Angel is a male personality which may well be the one who killed her captor - assuming this is what happened, and it's starting to look like that.

Angela has told Dr. Grant about all of these except for Tattletale and her knowledge of her uncle's sexual assaults. She's kept this a secret because she fears it will break up her family if it comes out that her father's younger brother has been molesting her. Her mother has already told her that her father is being so distant because he's wracked with guilt about not keeping his daughter safe. I must confess, suspicious little tike that I am, that I'm seriously wondering if her father knows more about her uncle's activities than he's willing to admit. But what bothers me more is that none of the doctors have any worries about what Angela will get up to when The Slut puts in an appearance. They're failing to adequately protect Angela from herself, and that bothers me. I don't know if it's written this way because Coley wants it like that, or if it's because she simply hasn't thought this through properly. I guess we'll find out as we go!

One thing which bothers me now is that Angela makes arrangements to babysit for a neighbor so she can pick up some cash. This bothers me because I'm now concerned about which personality is going to actually be doing the babysitting and what the consequences of that will be! As it happens that first night seems to go well. It's only after Angela gets home that the problems start. Her personalities like to come out at night and do stuff: like make diary entries, clean her room, do her math homework, etc! This means that poor Angela 'wakes up' without having had any sleep! The baby had concerned me because of Angela's personality splits, but having read a little further, it concerns me for a different reason!

Worse than this, however, is that Angela makes out (in 'The Slut' personality) again with Greg and he tells her that he's going to break up with Livvie, and start dating her again - but he never does break up with Livvie. As each day passes, he still sits with her at lunchtime at school. Angela goes shopping with Kate to get a nice dress for the upcoming formal. They run into Livvie and there's this serious bitch-fest which comes up between her and Angela out of nowhere! Livvie is obviously still planning on going to the formal with Greg. which causes Angela to pursue Greg about it and it becomes quite obvious (to us, but not to Angela, evidently) that Greg isn't going to leave Livvie. He makes out with Angela again and the next thing she knows, he's dropping her off at home with everything agreed, except that Angela can't remember the last hour. All she knows is that she has no one to go to the formal with.

I have to wonder where Livvie is during these times. If she and Greg are so close, how come he has all this time before and after school to get it on with Angela? How come neither he nor she have any concerns about STDs or pregnancy? Yes, I'm overly protective of Angela, because unlike some of the better female protagonists I've read about of late, Angela actually does need protection, and she's not getting it, not from her family, not from Greg, who supposedly is very fond of her at least, and not from her doctors! This can only end badly!

Angela has the procedure to eliminate the personalities, but they can apparently do only one at a time, and the first to go, at Angela's insistence, is The Slut/Little Wife. Before she goes, she puts in a quick appearance to tell Angela she left her a diary entry hidden in a drawer at home. When Angela reads it, she discovers that she was apparently impregnated by her "husband" during those three years. It isn't expressly stated, and Angela does not appear to read it that way, but the Little Wife's tale of growing fat and thin again?! But that's not the weirdest part - more on this in a few! Also Little Wife reveals that she conjured up The Angel to 'take care of' the husband.

Hey, for once I was right in my prediction! Yeay! Things ended way badly with Greg. But let's not jump too far ahead! So Katie has a boyfriend called Ali who has a brother called Abraim, both of whom I really like. The whole friendship with Katie is turning into something wonderful, and her interaction with Angela is precious. She isn't at all fazed by Angela's slow revelation to her (doled out carefully over their reacquaintance) that she has dissociative disorder. Katie thinks it's cool and embraces it whole-heartedly, casually bringing it into conversation without any hesitation or fear. The four of them go to the formal and have a good time, but Coley doesn't share any details. Instead, she jumps straight to where they drive up the mountain, and watch the sun come up.

WHAT? This is a sixteen year old, going on thirteen, who was abducted for three years, has some serious issues (understandably!), and her parents have no problem whatsoever with her quite literally staying out all night with a boy they've never met? (Her parents miraculously disappear from the story during that evening - nowhere in sight, which is distinctly weird!) This, I'm sorry, but this is bad writing, Coley's first real slip-up IMO. Greg chases down Angela (having been made suitably jealous at the formal!), and tells her he's dumped Livvie, and now they can be together, but Angela no longer has Little Wife the Slut on board, and she turns Greg down, so this monumental prick teams up again with Livvie and the two of them start a not-so-subtle hate-campaign at school, which no one in authority seems to have any interest in stopping! I find that a bit much. Angela is reduced to carrying around a small spray-paint can to spray over the absurdist and libelous graffiti they leave about her.

Worse than that, the evil Greg and Livvie call the press and reveal the story of the abducted girl returning home, so now the press is all over the school and all over her home. This I find unbelievable. Not that the press would behave like jerks, but that they would not have found out about Angela already. Everyone in the school knew. The students would have told all their friends and their parents. It's simply not credible that this story wouldn't have broken much sooner than this.

But let's roll with this one, because we have bigger poissons à faire frire (see how wonderful it looks in pretentious French? lol! Or should I say, Français prétentieux ?)! Anyway, Angela gets home to find not the press, but the police and the press, although why there are so many police is a mystery since they don't seem to be doing anything about the press. Detective Brogan is there, and he tells Angela that they've found the cabin where she was held, and while there was ample evidence of her being there, there was no trace of her captor anywhere to be found; the cabin looks abandoned. Did the avenging Angel kill off the criminal? It may be more complicated than that. Recall that apparent baby that seems to have disappeared? Was the baby killed? Or is the baby the selfsame one which Angela babysat?

Angela now has the opportunity to go with the police to the cabin to see if it triggers any memories, but she's not too fond of that idea. And why didn't the police, who are aware of her sessions with doctor Grant, have one of her personalities describe her captor to a police sketch artist? Angela takes this news badly and throws up. Later, sitting in the shower trying to get her other selves to reveal something Angela is convinced they're hiding from her, The Angel shows up and his hands are bloody and he begs Angela to get rid of him next so neither she nor anyone else can discover what he did. Angela doesn't want to let him go, because he protected her from Greg. She now regrets even "killing off" Little Wife/The Slut.

Then Angela comes back into herself to find the bathtub bloody. She just had her period. So this complicates things! I love this story! If this is her first period, it explains why there was no issue with pregnancy in her trysts with Greg (although STDs still remain a problem - and note that Coley makes no mention of Angela being tested for any such thing after her return, which is one thing I'm sure they would have done). However, if this is her first period, there is no way she could have become pregnant during her stay at the cabin, But I think this is a red herring on Coley's part! Shame on her trying to mislead me like that. I thought we were friends!

When Angela gets back downstairs after her shower, something truly weird happens. Her mother refers to detective Brogan by his first name. Coley has made me so suspicious now that the first thing I thought when I read that was to ask myself: "Did Angela's mom have an affair with Brogan? Is the baby she's carrying actually his? Am I evil or what? Hey, Coley did this to me, making me second-guess everything she's writing! It's not my fault!

Angela discovers that Doctor Grant cannot get her in to erase The Angel until after Thanksgiving, so she's stuck with him until then, but there's no word on whether Angela talked to her and told her anything about what has happened recently, so I'm forced to assume they didn't talk. This isn't good, because Angela is already irrationally tarring herself as a murderer, and now she has all Thanksgiving to let it eat her up. But it gets worse: Coming over for turkey is that turkey Uncle Bill who raped her repeatedly when he was supposed to be babysitting her.

He starts feeling her up in the kitchen every time they're alone until The Angel surfaces, breaks his fingers, and stabs him with a large fork. But it gets worse. Her father comes running in at this ruckus and tackles Angela to the ground claiming she's finally had the psychotic break he was expecting all along! I want to kick that son of a bitch squarely in his juvenile balls before I cut them off and feed them to the neighbor's dog. I hope Coley has some deep, penetrating revenge coming down on both these scum.

Her mother is no better - she calls for an ambulance! Now the picture is complete: Angela's abuse started long before she was abducted, long before rapist Bill started on her. It started with Angela being unfortunately born to parents who are complete dickheads. As the siren approaches (seriously - they got here that fast?) Bill the pond scum punches her in the stomach and pins her arms behind her back and the medics, brain-dead robot puppets that they are, immediately inject her with a sedative, and she blacks out.

Some one needs to fire those medics. Angela wakes up in a room, restrained on a bed, with her mom sitting by. When she reacts negatively, not violently, but merely negatively to her mother's mention that Bill (or is it Bull?) is fine and forgives Angela, her mother threatens her with another sedative! Angela (and I cheered when I read this!_) asks her mother to leave and requests doctor Grant to come in. Coley slips a bit here, too, because when Grant comes in, Angela asks her to remove the restraints (which remind her horribly of her abduction and imprisonment) and Grant acts shocked that she's even in them. This is a trained psychologist who came back from vacation to see to Angela, and who has already spend some considerable time there that day, yet she apparently didn't observe that Angela was in restraints, nor did she note it from her chart - a chart which is she was any kind of decent doctor, she would have thoroughly taken in the first chance she got!

This novel is divided into four sections, starting with You, then We, followed by Us (I think - I went thru the book several times trying to find section 3 and couldn't!), and ending with I. The end of section 3 is a bit too pat for my taste. Angela, who has discovered the The Angel was eliminated while she was sedated, miraculously integrates the other two by herself. I don't like this part because it sends a misleading message that anyone can overcome the most appalling mental trauma with barely any effort at all. But the story isn't over yet and I'm excited to read the last section to find out what's hidden behind the firmly closed door that The Angel wouldn't even let Angela's other personalities through. I think Coley wants us to believe it's the secret of Angela killing her captor, but I'm convinced, rightly or wrongly, that it has to do with babies.

Coley betrays Angela here because rapist Bill evidently gets off with a restraining order and no jail time. Now Angela's grandmother is pissed off with Angela for forcing her to choose which of her two sons she will favor. She chooses to favor the rapist. Angela makes a date with Abraim - the first upon which they will have gone without Katie and Ali along for the date, but before that, she has to babysit. There is it again. Coley has to be telegraphing this baby stuff for a reason!

Or maybe not! Angela has an uneventful babysitting, that is until she touches the baby blanket when she's checking on him, and suddenly the Harrises are back home and it's one o'clock. Now where did the two hours go? It looks like Angela actually isn't quite as integrated as she thinks she is. Did we get a trip behind that locked door which The Angel wouldn't let anyone past? Angela sleeps very late the next day and when she finally gets up, she realizes that her rocking chair has been moved. This was a regular occurrence during her split days, but it should no longer happen. Angela arrives at the disturbing conclusion that there's yet another personality which has never even surfaced, let alone become integrated with the rest of her!

I so love this novel, and that's where I'm going to leave this review. This novel made me excited, angry, emotional and anxious to read the next page. Despite some issues and flaws (which Coley commendably addresses in an afterword where she reveals that 'J' was indeed an Angela but in real life), this novel is possibly the best I've read since i started blogging this year. The ending is awesome and so well written it makes me depressed that I didn't think of it! I am definitely going to be stalking Coley's name on bookshelves in future!


Sunday, May 5, 2013

Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi






Title: Under the Never Sky
Author: Veronica Rossi
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WARTY! (to the max)
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This novel is part of the inevitable trilogy, of which two are already published, the sequel being Through the Ever Night. Whether I'll read that remains to be seen, but it's not looking great at the moment!

I can see myself wading through this novel if it doesn't sink hopelessly into Le Stupide, but it's laden with YA trope. Forget the book's cover, which features the sturdy, confident young girl striding purposefully through the wilds. That's pure, unadulterated blast-ended skrewt! And what's with that chic outfit she's wearing? It portrays nothing which even remotely resembles anything Aria wears in the novel. This is why you need to design your own cover!

Aria, (yeah, you heard me) is a weakling, living in pampered splendor, safe under a dome, enjoying virtual worlds up the wazoo, completely useless, helpless, and completely hopeless if she were ever to be stranded on the outside. Which of course she is, and let's not forget, unjustly so! So we have 'how wronged thou art' already in play. The inevitable rough-edged, wild guy (with the rather farcical name of Peregrine - Gale and Peeta, anyone?) is the tough, strong, wise, and masterful hero, who is street savvy (or in this case badlands savvy) and will sweep her off her feet. Barf.

Peeta - sorry, Perry - is on the outs with his clan because they're all macho types, and his own brother will likely kill him because, of course, there can be only one Blood Lord! Yes, you heard that right! It's always a Lord innit? never a Duke or a Baron. Plus, he loses his brother's young son (who's dying anyway) so he's doubtlessly going to be wandering the wilds trying to find the kid and he'll inevitably run into her rear, er Aria, and the two will be forced to team up because she can't survive alone in the badlands being a poor weak fair game, er sex, an' all, and he desperately needs her, because the kidnapped kid will undoubtedly be taken to the city where Aria will have to help him break in an get him back. (Note, all of that came true! Maybe my prognostication power is on the up and up after being exposed to all this urethra...er aether?)

So I guess I need to say a word about why Aria got tossed out on her, ah rear. She's the standard YA trope no parents cliché. Her father isn't even mentioned (not that I recall, but I may have blanked it out), and her mom is AWOL. Aria has the idea that one of the guys she knows in Le Dome might have some inside info on her mother's whereabouts or status, which is why she joins him on his illegal stunt which gets out of control, and for which she turns out to be the fall gal.

The dome is nothing but a huge rip-off of Logan's Run where people spend their whole time in Les Realms indulging themselves hedonistically. The Realms is just a whole bunch of virtual environments. Rossi doesn't explain how it is that these people avoid bedsores when spending all their live-long day on their asses immersed in playing what really amounts to extravagant video games with some sensory enhancements (which are totally unexplained). Nor do we learn who or what it is which powers and maintains all these free services; maybe it's magical pixies?

In order to play these games, and indeed to participate in this society, each person has an electronic monacle slapped on their face. Aria's stops working when she's outside, and once Perry tracks her down using his enhanced sense of smell, he decides that he needs to take her over the mountains and far away in order to get the monacle fixed by some buddy of his so that Aria can use it to contact her mother, so that her mother can clue them in on the latest updates regarding Talon, so that Perry can claw him out of the clutches of the Turkeys who kidnapped him. There's been no word whatsoever on why they kidnapped a seven-year-old terminally ill kid. It makes no sense whatsoever, but I'm betting Talon comes out of there cured (I got that one right, too!). Maybe they took him to lure the local outsiders into a trap, but if that's the case, then they wasted their time because Talon's dad has now abandoned his son! Only Perry-A (Peregrine and Aria) are concerned about retrieving him.

So after he saves she from an aether storm, Perry-A become an item and start their road trip together where they inevitably bond and instadore abounds. Yeah, about those aether storms! There's no word on where they came from or how they began, but they appear to be some sort of violent electromagnetic energy discharge coming down from what appears to be aurora-like activity in the atmosphere. They're a bit like lightning mated with a tornado, laying waste to swathes of land and burning people quite literally to a crisp.

Aria proves to be the most whiny-assed woman in the entire universe, but eventually she starts to suck it up. Given what Rossi does to her feet, her whining is entirely understandable, but the really weird thing is that she whines about literally everything but her feet, which is utterly unbelievable. Rossi basically has Aria's feet shredded, pierced and blistered, raw and bleeding like a little female Messiah hiking to Calvary all in the space of a few days, yet at no point do they ever hurt so badly that Aria can’t walk, which I found to be equally unbelievable. Clearly Rossi has never walked very far in difficult conditions, and if she thinks wearing high heels to the office for a day counts, then she's delusional.

Some reviews I've read make a big deal out of Aria's disobedience of Perry when he tells her to stay in the cave and she wanders off to pick berries (which - and here's the only place where this novel is like The Hunger Games - turn out to be poisonous!) But that's not the issue; the issue is that while she's out, three members of the Croven tribe come calling. They're ensconced in the cave when she returns. So here is the challenge to all those who've criticized Aria's conduct in this one scene: how, exactly would matters have been improved - or even changed - had Aria remained inside the cave? The answer is: no way no how! The truly absurd behavior here isn't Aria's but Perry's inanely macho showmanship.

The Croven take Aria captive so subtley that she doesn't realize what they're doing. She thinks they're friendly. Perry arrives and promptly dispatches all three of them. He explains this away by telling Aria that they're cannibals and they were going to eat her, but he never for a second tried to negotiate with them - for example, telling them that she's under his tribe's protection, and that if they harm her there will be war. He simply puts arrows into two of them and he decapitates a third - with a knife, shades of Middle East terrorism.

This may not seem important, but it turns out to be so because as soon as he's done that, he's in a near panic: now the rest of the Croven people will come down on him like a ton of bricks for killing their people (or so he whines). If that's so, then why didn't he try to negotiate? His actions made no sense as precipitous as they were except for Rossi's need to portray him as a brutal savage, which she will then have to undo to make him acceptable to Aria! Lol!

So now despite Aria's poor feet, they have to pick up the pace, and they detect the Croven following them in numbers, yet there is no explanation whatsoever for how that tribe got onto them so rapidly. Equally lacking and much more glaring is any explanation as to why this tribe of cannibals is operating so very far from any source of food! Shouldn't they be near a village instead of out in the wilds, miles from anyone?

Perry whines pretty near as much as Aria does. His latest spaz is about the pine forest spoiling his ability to scent-track their pursuers, although there's no explanation offered as to why pine forests do this, but no other smell has the same overwhelming effect on him, so the reader can only conclude that this was made up on the spot to add more drama to this Simpson-style low-speed pursuit through the pine forest, up hill and down dale.

Perry-A run into an old friend of Perry's called Roar (yep) who is as good at hearing as Perry is at smelling. He joins them and through him, Aria learns of Perry's ability to detect emotions through smelling. Yeah, right. The weird thing is that Aria totally freaks out about this. Shoot two guys with arrows, decapitate a third without even an overture, and she’ll bitch about it, but it’s really no big deal. Smell her feelings OTOH, and she goes completely ballistic about it. Really? That took me right out of suspension of disbelief.

They also find a 13-year-old kid tagging along, called Cinder (for good reason!) who is described as almost skeletal, yet when he gets sick and has to be carried as they escape the Croven, he's described as weighing a hundred pounds?! Honestly? Does Rossi not understand the relative weight of things? A five foot tall 13 year old would be at a healthy weight at 100 pounds. Rossi doesn’t describe how tall Cinder is, but he doesn't appear to be very imposing from the narrative, and his growth is likely to have been stunted from his life-style, so her estimate of a hundred pounds is way, way out IMO. Cinder is an orphan, and my guess is that he crisped his parents accidentally.

Anyway, after a confrontation with Perry, Cinder somehow manages to channel the aether and zap Perry's hand, turning it black and blistered! Nonetheless, they take him along with them as they flee the Croven, since his discharge appears to have left him very weak. They finally make it to the city where they've been headed all this time. It’s absurdly high tech, with a hospital facility, which of course treats Perry-A, bringing about a miraculous recovery in both cases, no doubt. But what's with the qualified medical professional handing the care of Perry's badly burned hand to Aria? That was nothing but juvenile romance pap. Rossi needs to go work a few volunteer shifts in a real hospital burn unit.

Cinder goes on the lam, heading out of the city despite the fact that the Croven have started staking it out and firing random arrows over the wall. And with these potentially deadly arrows coming in, what do the bubbly and vivacious Perry-A do? The go up on top of the 70 foot tower and sit right on the edge dangling their legs over, and making prime targets of themselves for Croven arrows! Morons. And what are the Croven eating during this time? What are they drinking? Perry and Roar combined were having a tough time finding food for just four of them. There are some sixty Croven out there. Are they fasting?! Are they eating each other? If they are, then what's the problem? Just hang out a while longer and most of them will have been eaten! lol! Other than offering a poor excuse for a pseudo-threat, I see no reason for this fake threat of the Croven.

Finally they get Aria's monacle up and running (what was with the countdown timer on that? Seriously?! How was it even possible to know to the exact second when they would break the protection? lol!). There had been two video files downloaded onto her monacle. One of these was the video she had taken during the incident which resulted in her being thrown out of the thunder dome. This is the proof she's been seeking in order to show that it was Soren, not her, who was ultimately responsible.

The other video was the one from her mom which she had really been wanting to see, and which essentially told her very little except that all the spoiled-brat-living in Le Realms had resulted in atrophy of the indwellers' limbic system because they weren't 'really experiencing it' out in the wild. Seriously? Rossi really lost it with this one. The fact is, even within Rossi's own framework, that these people were being subject to The Realms which were physically safe, but which still excited the limbic system with spills and thrills. So where did the atrophy come from? Nowhere!

It's nonsense; nothing more, apparently, than a misguided attempt to try and sell us on the ill-considered presumption that living in the wild is better for us than having decent food, quality medicine, and access to endless information and entertainment. Yeah. Right! Someone has evidently forgotten that stress is a killer. So now I'm curious as to why Rossi is selling this novel as an ebook! Isn’t that rather hypocritical? Shouldn't she ought to be writing out each copy by hand on animal skins and hawking them from a stall at the local street market?

Apparently the Dwellers were testing out their theories about this bullshit limbic collapse on people taken from the wild, so now we understand why Talon was abducted. Perry exhibits the most childish reaction to this with a fine performance art tantrum, for which the judges gave him a 9.5, and Aria learns that she is half wild (but we’re not told which area of Aria is wild and which is tame)! Her absentee father was one of the outdwellers, not an indweller like her mother. Wouldn’t it be a riot if Aria turned out to be Perry's step-sister? lol! But her absentee mother, after telling her all this distressing news, including the fact that the indwellers in her dome (Bliss) have lost it and turned overnight into psycho zombies, suddenly clams up and tells Aria no more! Deliberately keeping her child in the dark, she explains away this insane deprivation by claiming, "What I haven't shared is for your own protection, and it's always better, isn’t it, when you discover answers on your own."? I was expecting a Muah-ha-ha after that, rather like the laughter in the Austin Powers movies, but I didn’t see one.

So Veronica Rossi, are you kidding me? What does Lumina (Aria's atrociously misnamed mother, who illuminates nothing!) even mean? She's not telling her daughter what she needs to know for her own protection but she wants her to find out for herself so she'll be what - unprotected then?! So she'll be smarter when she dies horribly because she learns what she desperately needs to know too late?! I can’t get my mind around that one at all. What kind of deranged, abusive parent would keep their children blind, potentially risking their health or even their life? Rossi has two sons of her own and should know better; unless, of course, she wants us to understand that Aria's mother is a no-good, absentee, uncaring parent (don't worry, Lumina gets hers). After all, Aria's mother did abandon Aria to go to a different dome when there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for her not to take her daughter with her. Why did she even go in the first place? Could she not have learned the very same things in Aria's homedome of Reverie that she has learned in Bliss? None of this makes any sense except as a poor excuse for plotting.

Another weird thing here is that since Aria can't get into Revererie via the monacle, Perry has to wear it, and he's such a cry-baby about it. But here is the problem: Perry can't get in either, we're told, all he can do is access The Realms. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean! Does it mean any old stranger can access the Dome realms?! Does it mean that all of these environments are stored somehow in the monacle and he can play in those? If that's the case, then how does he get into the part where he meets Talon? He's able to contact Talon and talk and interact with him. How is he doing that if he has no access to Reverie? All of this is glossed over. But Perry learns that not only is Talon there, Clara and his own brother are also there. They've been captured! He also learns that Talon is doing so well that he doesn't even want to leave Reverie! lol! But that's not going to stop the heroic Perry from dragging him, kicking and screaming, out of there to his certain death on the outside. What a man! What a paragon of puerile practicality.

I'm having a hard time liking this novel (did oyu guess?). I'm having a hard time even in making sense of it at times. But onwards and upwards (or as the RAF says, per ardua ad astra, which means that commercials made by asses are really hard to stomach). So Aria decides she needs to learn how to defend herself, and Perry, who has quite literally just declared to himself that he will stay away from her, immediately jumps at the chance to engage in the tired trope of being in intimate contact while showing her how to handle this rather virile bow and its phallic arrows. I wonder if Rossi watched Avatar before writing this scene?

The sad thing is that after all this, after pushing Aria forward as a strong heroic figure, Rossi is slowly reduced to teenage T&A. Perry declares (but not in so many words) that our heroine is just a weak woman and can’t handle a manly bow such as Perry's, so Roar gets to teach her to knife-fight instead. Right, 'cos a small, relatively light indweller woman will have far greater success in a close-quarters knife fight with a strong, wiry, outdweller guy than she would shooting him with a bow before he can even get close to her, and there is no way in hell that Perry, surrounded by a forest, could ever make a suitable bow for her.

So as heir to the captured Bluhd Lawd, Perry's duty is clear: he ought to get back to his village ASAP and take charge, but in this he fails comprehensively. Instead, this irresponsible jerk resolves to stay with Aria and go joy-riding off to Bliss. So while they're waiting for a convenient aether storm to show up, so they can slip away in the dark, unseen by the Croven, they play at knife-fighting, and Aria gets her groove on with Perry.

The night they finally decide to leave is a complete and utter disaster. They incur multiple casualties and make no plans whatsoever to return immediately to the village to regroup and recuperate. They're confronted by huge numbers of Croven, and at the last minute, they're predictably saved by Cinder dispatching all of the Croven with his super-duper lightning storm, leaving Perry and Aria to continue their inane quest alone. As soon as they get on the road again - master hunter Perry completely neglecting to restock on arrows - they're forced to take to the trees, scurrying into a conveniently waiting tree-house to hide from those vicious brute beasts! Rossi has the wolves barking, even, but at least they don't have quills! Yes, Cheree Smith, I'm looking at you! Oh, wolves can bark, but it's very rare, especially when they're running down prey. So how do Perry-A get out of this one? Well, (and I am not making this up) Aria effectively sings to the wolves and they leave! lolol! I kid you not. Talk about deus ex machina, although this is more like clueless ex crement.

So after telling Aria that trees are smart enough to know when the weather is going to change, and showing her his, she shows him hers, and suddenly...it's the next morning, and they're off again on their Bliss-ful quest. Fortunately Aria didn't smell fertile, so she won't become preggers. I'll bet that's what every boy tells his girlfriend in Perry-A world...! Aria learns that it's "...the loveliest thing to be kissed for no reason, even while chewing food." and soon, they're regurgitating food to feed each other (actually I made that very last bit up, but ew!). Later, Aria slaughters a badger - while it's still underground! And here I thought they didn't need no stinking badgers!

Yep, Aria is evolving into supergirl, and all it took was her getting laid. I'm on a strict regimen of IV Compazine now, to enable me to get through these last few pages. Despite it being a six-day hike to Bliss, they get there in no time at all, no doubt borne magically on the carpet of lurv they've woven together. Bliss sneaks in there and finds her dead mother and is promptly cpatured by the Dwellers, and confonted by Soren;s dad, who conveiently happenes ot be at Bliss. he offers her a deal - find out how if there really is an aether-free place on the planet, or kiss Talon goodbye. Of course, Aria accepts this offer iwht alacrity, and toddles off into volume two.

Never in the field of human fiction has so much sucked so much with so few breaks. This novel stunk. It ought to be refiled Under the Never Stomach It. And that's it.