Ashes of Honor by Seanan McGuire

Rating: WARTY!

I liked the previous novel I read by this author, but this was another failed audiobook which went on too long and was far too rambling to hold my interest. The title was curious. It sounds like one David Weber would have chosen for his Honor Harrington series. Maybe I missed it but I never did figure out how the hell the title fit the story.

There are parts I liked and parts which amused me, but the author got off-topic way too many times and overall, the novel was a drag which I gave up on about two-thirds the way through. She seems to keep forgetting that her detective is supposed to be hunting down a missing teenager.

The novel is also brimming with tired trope and klutzy cliché. I've mentioned oddball names for fictional detectives before, no doubt, but the one in this story almost takes it to another level. She's called October Daye and goes by Toby for short. On the other hand, this isn't your usual detective, since it's a fantasy novel, with fairy characters. Toby herself is half fairy.

But the annoying first person voice is here, which I typically detest, although some writers can make it far less nauseating than others. Here, it wasn't too bad, but I think the reason for that is that it was seriously helped along by Mary Robinette Kowal, who read this book (and who is also an author in her own right), and whose voice I could certainly listen to for a long time without growing tired of it.

That doesn't mean the story didn't drag, and I feel that if I'd been reading a print or ebook, I would have quit it a lot sooner than I did, so this author owes this reader! But Seanan McGuire definitely seems to have a knack for attracting sweet readers to her books. Amy Landon's voice in the previous novel I listened to by this author (a stand-alone titled Sparrow Hill Road, which I rated positively despite the fact that it also dragged here and there) was really easy on the ear, too.

The problem, I felt, was that the author is so enamored of this little world she's created here that she goes off on tangents talking about aspects of it, and she forgets that she's actually supposed to be telling a story and not just describing scenery and character quirks.

I am definitely not one for those kinds of stories, and this is part of a whole series of such stories. In fact, it's number six in a series of thirteen as of this writing, but there was nothing in the blurb to indicate any such thing, which is how I came to read this one first. I'm not a big fan of series, either, and this novel is a great example of why not.

It's technically not necessary to have read the other five before reading this one, since it's a self-contained story, but there's also a history that's referred to often, and there are ongoing story arcs that cover more than one volume, and which meant nothing to me since I was got in on this in the middle.

There were more issues in that Toby was a coffee addict. Barf! Can we not find some new trait to give our first person voice detective? Please? She also had an old car that got damaged, so there really was nothing new here except that it was set in a fairy world rather than the real world, and that simply was not enough to save this poorly-told tale.

Fated by Alyson Noël

Rating: WARTY!

This YA novel should have been titled Ill-fated. It was at least different in that it's about a young female who is on a film shoot in Morocco instead of your usual bratty, or ditzy or sappy high school student and her ridiculous love triangle with the sweet best friend and the new bad boy. Barf. I appreciated that, but the problem is that it soon deteriorated into a clone of every other young adult first person female character novel. Are there no female authors out there writing YA female characters that can actually think for themselves and come up with something original?

I know there are a few - people who are not mindlessly copying very other YA writer and coming out with vomit-inducing bullshit like this:

I shove through the crowd, knocking into girls and bouncing off boys, until one in particular catches me, steadies me.
I feel so secure, so at home in his arms.
I melt against his chest-lift my gaze to meet his. Gasping when I stare into a pair of icy blue eyes banded by brilliant flecks of gold

Yes, it was first person. That's a negative for me ninety nine times out of ten.

But there it is! The inevitable gold flecks in the eyes. If I've read this description of the main male character in a YA novel once, I've read it ten billion, trillion, quadrillion times. That, right there, that alone should be sufficient reason these days to negatively rate a YA novel, and I think from now on I shall make it an automatic negative review for any book I read that contains this asinine cliché of a trope.

And I haven't even started yet on the appallingly abusive habit of these female writers have of rendering their female characters as mere appendages of some manly male lead.

What is wrong with these authors? Do they not have a brain, or do they have one and simply chose to turn it off when they write? Or are they so desperate to sell a book and so lacking in standards that even though they know perfectly well how pathetic it is, they compulsively write a clone of every other YA writer's book - and make series and trilogies out of them because this is what Big Publishing™ demands these days? Just how spineless and incompetent are these YA cloning authors?

Maybe the problem isn't the writers except in that the writers are pandering to a sad readership whose standards are so low they'll read anything from the YA landfill? I read in another reviewer's assessment that at one point, "...despite Daire's protests, Dace is kissing her and has his hands up her shirt. Is this really okay?" I have to tell you that no, it is not okay. It is NEVER okay. Believe it or not, Dace is supposed to be the good guy, and it's an awful abuse of young women to write trash like this.

Alyson Noël and her publisher need to publicly apologize for putting this crap out on the market unless they can demonstrate some important and overriding purpose for it. Again, this alone is sufficient reason to rate this book as garbage - like I needed another one! What's that, four strikes against it already? Reading comments like that one in other reviews makes me glad I ditched both this book and also this author DNF. I'm done reading her inexcusable, sloppily-written, stereotypical, trope-laden, clichéd crap.

I know there are a few good YA writers because I've read the work of some of them. My question is: why are they so very hard to find? Why are so many YA writers such pathetic plagiarists that such a limited number of them can come up with original ideas and original characters and the rest have to essentially steal - or perhaps more charitably, share - their characters in a bland pool with every other female YA writer in a trashy, first-person voice, limp, clingy, female desperately in need of salvation and validation by the gold-flecked male in novels which are indistinguishable from one another because they all tell the same story with barely a twist here and there to differentiate them?

This story begins with Daire Santos. Yes, 'dare' - could it be any more pathetic? She seems to be of Latinx roots, yet exhibits little of them not only in her name but in her entire personality. She experiences a horrible vision of bad things happening. She evidently passes out from this and wakes up to find herself restrained in a bed, with mother there and a doctor on the way because they all think she's had some sort of a psychotic episode. She's quickly bundled-off to stay with her grandmother, Paloma, since Daire-to-be-the-same finds that the least objectionable alternative to being sent to a psychiatric institution, which is her mother Jennika's only other offer. Yes, Jennika - no Latin influence there either.

Here's a third reason: the idea of a modern female character - especially one who has the confidence of hanging around with actors (I had thought Daire herself was an actor originally, but apparently she was only there because her mother is a make-up artist in the movie business) - revisiting the historical but obsolete "traditional female role" of screaming and hysteria, is growing old fast, which is ironic, because the story didn't move fast at all. It's lethargic.

Almost literally nothing happens in this entire volume from what I've seen myself, and from what I've read of others' reviews. And why should it? This isn't a novel. At best it's a prologue; at worst, a preface or an author's note. I don't do prologues, prefaces, author's notes, introductions or any of that time-wasting (and tree-slaughtering) 'front-matter' crap.

If it's worth reading, then it's worth including in chapter one or later. No, this is a series, so what incentive can the author possibly have to deliver you a decent story in volume one? She can't afford to give you anything, because she has pad this to the max, and to drag it out for god only knows how many volumes before she'll quit taking your money several times over for something that she should have had the common decency to take only once.

The novel became bogged down in several ways and for many non-reasons. One was in the 'traditional native medicine' rip-off: dream catchers, native folklore, herbal remedies and so on. The reason 'alternative medicine' isn't just 'medicine' is because it doesn't work! If it's found to work, then it becomes 'medicine' and you can get it prescribed at any hospital or doctor's office if you're deemed to need it!

No, there is no conspiracy to keep these 'secret' folk remedies out of the hands of the public. The pharmaceutical corporations are far too avaricious and profit-oriented to ignore anything they can make money on, so I'm not a fan of that kind of woo, unless it really makes for a good story, and this one wasn't going anywhere on that insulting, cultural-stereotype-hobbled, tacky tack.

There seemed to be a curious obsession with naming all young male characters with four letter names (and I can see the value in that in some stories!), but here the names seemed to all have a letter 'A' as the second letter, and an 'E' as the final letter, so we met Vane, Cade, and Dace, and so on (Cade and Dace are the good-evil twins, while Vane - and to be honest, I can't speak to the spelling since this was a audiobook - was Daire's actor 'friend'). It was weird, although I do admit to finding some amusement in the fact that Vane was the star in this movie they were making. For all I know, maybe his name was actually spelled as 'Vain'!

The audiobook I listened to was read by Brittany Pressley, who was perfect for this title, but the opposite of the kind of voice I want to hear reading stories. The contrast between her nasal whine and the charmingly listenable voices of other readers I've heard lately, such as Mary Robinette Kowal, and Amy Landon is dramatic. You have to hear those voices to fully appreciate how bad this one was, and my guess is that precious few of the people who enjoy this crap would ever sully themselves with a quality reading to even grasp that there even is a difference in the first place, let alone appreciate it.

So in short? No! Just no!

Red Hill by Jamie McGuire

Once again, the blurb lied!

Recognizing they can’t outrun the danger, Scarlet, Nathan, and Miranda desperately seek shelter at the same secluded ranch, Red Hill. Emotions run high while old and new relationships are tested in the face of a terrifying enemy—an enemy who no longer remembers what it’s like to be human.

I thought this might be an interesting story about a triangle of an altogether more realistic hue than the florid overblown ones that idiot sheep-like YA authors can't seem to keep themselves from dragging the wizened, rotten corpse of into eve3ry frigging book they write. But no, it was neither! If the blurb had simply said ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE in a massive black and fluorescent yellow warning. That would have said it far more accurately and wouldn't have annoyed me by wasting my time when I could have been listening to an audiobook that, unlike this one, wasn't total and vacuous crap.

The reading voices - yes, this was yet another novel where there are multiple first person voices which in this case served only to render the story three times as annoying as a single first person voice typically does - done by Emma Galvin, January Lavoy, and Zachary Webber, were totally unappealing and made me want to quit before I'd hardly started.

As if this wasn't disastrous enough, there was music - music - at the start of disk one. Why the hell do these imbeciles in the audiobook industry feel such an irresistible urge to add music?

Was there music in the original book? HELL NO!

Was the story about a musician, a band, an orchestra or a composer? HELL NO!

Did the story have anything - anything at all - in any way - any way at all - to do with music? HELL NO!

So why the fuck do these assholes have this OCD vis-à-vis putting music on an audiobook disk? Is it because their empty heads are stuck so far up their rigid asses that they simply can't envision what is to them a music CD without inscribing music on it? They're morons.

One thing I saw no other negative reviewer mention so I have to say something about it, especially since this is a female author, is that this novel failed the Bechdel–Wallace test (which perhaps ought to be renamed the Virginia Woolf test) disastrously starting on page one. The main character could quite literally not talk to any other female character without her love life - or lack of one - being front and center. It was truly sickening and a disgrace. Jamie McGuire should be thoroughly ashamed of herself for depicting female characters especially in this case, ones working in a professional medical setting, as having not a goddamned thing on their brains but men.

And also, it's book one of a series. I do not do series unless they're very special, and I sure as hell do not want to even read one book about a zombie apocalypse, let alone a whole series about one. Did the volume in any way convey that it was book one in a series? HELL NO! Why would the publisher do that? That would show respect for the reader, so I ask you once again, why in hell would Big Publishing&trade ever do that? It would let a reader make an informed choice without having to waste their life fully-researching every book they consider reading, so clearly the Publisher who is interested in your money and nothing else has no incentive whatsoever to consider you as anything other than a mark. I think I am not only done with this author, I'm also done with this dumbass audiobook publisher.

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

Rating: WARTY!

Here's is my vow never to pick up another book which has such a pretentious title: The Sun is Also a Star? Yeah, and your ass is also a black hole. Deal with it.

These books typically win awards for which I have absolutely zero respect because the books winning those awards almost universally suck like a black hole. See how I worked a pretentious cosmic perspective into my review? Anyone can do it. 'The Sun Also Causes Causes Cancer' will be the title of my next novel, and I hope it wins one of these 'literary' awards for no other reason that then I can flatly turn it down and tell these clueless dicks what I think of these pretentious awards for pretentious novels. or maybe I'll accept it so I can give the money to a writing program that teaches prospective novelists how to avoid-like-the-plague writing trash like this?

This book was awful. I made it through only about 15 percent, it was so bad, and that was only because I was a captive audience in a car at the time. I didn't even get to the instadore. You know what I'd really like to read: a book like this, but which highlights how wrong illegal immigration is instead of very effectively brushing it under the carpet of "a better life in America" and trying to present it as some sunny, polished, life-affirming, noble existence. No, it's a crime!

Hey, guess what?! Jamaica is already a part of the Americas! Yes! They were already there and too stupid to know it! Nowhere is the criminal element (yes, it's a crime to enter a nation without proper permissions) touched on here. If it had been, I would have taken a somewhat different view, but it was not.

I get that they're hoping for a better life, all of us are, but these people in this novel were not children from some African war-torn nation. They were not some oppressed minority from China. They were not women being abused in some unenlightened Middle East nation. They were from Jamaica, mon, which has been undergoing an economic surge for over a decade. This novel was published last year, meaning the author either hasn't done her research, or she simply doesn't care to.

This doesn't mean they were comfortably-off by any means, but to write books like this is not only an insult (in this case) to Jamaica, but also an insult those who are in a country legally, having gone through the tedious processes, and filled out the endless paperwork, and been through the interviews, and become solid and productive 'citizens' even if they're technically not citizens.

Where are the award winning books about those people? Let's get away from this ennobling glamorization and mythology of the 'honorable' illegal immigrant and deal with it realistically (and I don't mean the way a certain business president thinks it should be dealt with either!).

Instead of that, what we have here is a badly-written story about immigrants who are not only illegal, but who are also living on stolen identities. And this author has them not in a holding cell, but living at home, and running around freely! The voices the story was told in were multiple, all of them badly-done by the multiple readers of the audiobook, and not a one of them sounding remotely interesting or realistic. I did not like, nor did I care for any of these characters, and like I said, that's after only fifteen percent. This book was garbage, period. I'm done with this author.

The Goodbye Witch by Heather Blake

Rating: WARTY!

I made the mistake of getting this at the same time as I got its predecessor, which I didn't like. I read the same number of pages of this as I did of that before ditching it DNF. I should have known from the blurb that this one was doomed. One of the characters is named Starla. One early dumb-ass sentence read, "I felt the warmth of his body heat."

I'm sorry but I cannot read novels that badly written. They make me physically ill. If I could stand to do it, I would write a novel composed solely and entirely of bad sentences like that from other novels, strung together. The effort would probably kill me or drive me insane, though.

Starla's evil ex, Kyle, is back in town and everyone is in a panic. The sad thing is that the main character in this novel is a witch who is a wish-granter. If someone wishes something, she can grant it. All someone had to do is wish Kyle dead - or at least in jail for life - and the problem was solved, but in the first twenty or so pages, which is all I could stand to read, no one even brings this up.

The rest of the novel hangs solely on the rank stupidity of these people in forgetting there is wish-granting witch at hand. This is the problem with writing a novel about magic. You have to think it through and the author is evidently more interested in writing nonsense than in thinking. That's when I decided this novel was far too stupid to live.

White Horses by Alice Hoffman

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had to wonder why an author of Alice Hoffman's stature found herself in the position of having to put a novel out on Net Galley to garner some reviews, and now I know - it's really not very good. I've never read anything by this author before, but I've always been curious, so I requested to review it and it was, surprisingly, granted! Now I know I don't need to read anything else by her!

The book started out intriguingly enough, went down hill a bit, came back strong, but then began a slow decline to the point where, at just past ninety percent in, I couldn't stand to read it any more because it was such an ungodly mess. I'm not going to go on about the spelling errors which were quite common, and not the kind a spell-checker would find - such as the word 'wont' (and no, it's not missing an apostrophe) where the word 'worst' was required. Only a serious read-through would find that kind of error. I just want to talk about the chaotic story and how poorly done it was.

The blurb advises dramatically (employing the tired - and way overdone - "In a world" format): "In a dangerous world, Teresa must rescue herself and rewrite her family mythology before it ruins her life." I'm sorry but Teresa is so robotic, useless, and inept that you know for a fact she's never going to get it done. She is one of the most cardboard-thin, vacuous, and utterly uninteresting characters I've ever encountered. And her world isn't dangerous. Not remotely. Her brother's is, but he was never actually in any danger!

For that matter, not one of the characters in this book was painted realistically, much less appealingly. They were all caricatures dipped in the most washed-out of watercolors, mostly in shades of gray. It's a book of stains in the place of where real characters ought to have appeared. It's like they were there, but have faded so badly, all that's left is a vague and faint imprint. Teresa, the main character, about whom the story ebbs and...ebbs, is the most gossamer and unlikable of them all. There was not a single person here that I liked in the entire book, which had people come and go as though the novel itself were just a revolving door with a neon sign flashing, 'now look at this one!'.

Note that there is an incestuous relationship running through the book which no doubt many reviewers will find disturbing - like this is something that never happens in real life so writers must never write about it! Or like this is the most reprehensible thing they can think of. Yes, it is reprehensible. It's a form of rape and abuse of authority, but there are lots of other horrible things people do to each other, and what really bothers me is that reviewers don't seem to be anywhere near as repulsed by these other crimes as they are by incest.

That's worth expending some thought on. Are we so thick-skinned now that this is the only remaining "sin" which can shock us? Personally, I don't care that authors write about incest. It's just as fair game as is rape, murder, robbery, drug abuse, road-rage or whatever you care to mention. What I care about is that there is some organic reason for it being included. Here it felt like it was only in the book because the author deemed it was necessary to give some pep to a novel that was otherwise lacking anything to recommend it. In this book, there was no motivation offered for it and ironically, the most disturbing thing about it is that the author mistakenly romanticizes it without offering any other commentary.

Unless everything was resolved in that last nine percent which I didn't read, there were plot threads set-up which went nowhere, illnesses which went unexplained, threats which were never honestly pursued, and issues which were woefully unexplored. It was like one long tease, which is a way was perfect because that described Teresa to a 'T'. The other annoying thing (aside from pointless, meandering, story-crashing flashbacks), is that the author has the story make huge leaps in time, by-passing months or even years of history and takes up the story like it's the next day, and nothing and no-one has changed. It simply was not credible.

Up to about half-way through, i had hopes for this, but after that I was wondering when something was going to happen. It felt as though there was always a possibility that something would happen, but nothing really ever did. It's like a day where dark clouds build up, the heat is weighing on you, the air gets muggier and more oppressive, but then no fresh, chill wind comes racing in, no rain pelts down, no thunder rolls and rules the heavens, and no lightning breaks. It was that dissatisfying.

In the end, this stiflingly still air was biggest failing of the whole book. Maybe it all came together in those last few pages, but I was so bored and irritated by then, that I honestly just did not care what happened next. Life is too short for novels like this, and I cannot recommend it at all.

Beautiful Blue World by Suzanne LaFleur

Rating: WARTY!

I honestly have no idea what this story was about - I mean, what was the aim here? What did the author hope to achieve? The author's name is hilarious because Suzanne means Lily, so her name is Lily The Flower! I loved that. It was the best thing about his whole book. Normally I don't talk about covers, but I have to say this is yet another example of Big Publishing™ getting its hands on your work and ruining it. The cover artist clearly had no clue what was going on in the book because the front cover represents nothing between it and the back cover.

The best thing I can say about it is that it was short, otherwise I would have ditched it as a DNF. It was aimed at middle-graders, so perhaps I'm not in the best position to judge it, but I honestly cannot see what they would get out of it that I did not. One of my kids is middle-grade, though, and the other is just out, and I can promise you that neither of them would have the slightest interest in this book, not even as short as it was.

Yes, it was another audiobook experiment, and it failed, but this is why I go out on a limb with audiobooks - for the one in a handful that really impresses me, and one which I might never have experienced had I not got the audio version of it. The one that makes it worth listening to poor ones like this. The reader didn't do an awful job exactly, but there were two issues I had with Christy Carlson Romano. The first is that she sounded way to old to be reading a first person story by a twelve-year old since she's in her mid-twenties. At the risk of being pounded for suggesting a return to child labor, is it such a bad idea to get a real twelve- (13-? 14-? 15-?) year-old to read these and let the kids earn some cash?

The second thing is that despite her her age, Romano sounded like a Disney princess and this really put me off the story. The sad thing is though, that even had I adored the reader and her treatment of it, I still would not have liked the story, because nothing happened. There was no drama, not even close, nor where there thrills, spills, chills, or excitement.

The whole plot, that we have this twelve-year-old Mathilde Joss going to war sounded interesting to me, but it was completely misleading because she joins military intelligence in one of those absolutely pointless and unsupported non-plots that far too many middle-grade novels employ - it just is. accept it we don't have to justify it. Well, guess what? You do! And Lily the Flower didn't. She didn't even try, so we had absolutely no reason whatsoever for the military hiring these kids except that this is a book aimed at middle-graders and the author says "This is the way it is!".

Mathilde lives in a fictional parallel universe in the land of Sofarende, which is under attack from Tyssia, but this world is exactly the same as ours, except that they don't have radar for reasons unexplained, so they have to use kids to magically predict where the bombers (asininely called "aerials" here for no good reason other than to make them seem alien) will come and bomb next. I kid you not.

Mathilde is yanked into this world, leaving her friend Megs behind, because megs failed the admission test and Mathilde did not, yet later, Megs shows up anyway without any explanation! None of these kids are allowed any further contact with their parents - again without any explanation or rationale.

The weird thing is that it takes twenty-five percent of the novel before Mathilde even gets to this secret base where the non-action takes place. Her task is to talk with a prisoner, but none of their conversations have any value, or bearing on the story, and none of them are remotely interesting or help advance the war effort. In short, it's a completely pointless exercise. So she learns that war is horrible and it's better not to start them, like there's a middle-grader anywhere on the planet who doesn't already know this? If this book was supposed to teach about the horrors of war, it was a major fail.

Then the novel weirdly fizzles out at the end with the kids being taken from the base, and sent abroad for no apparent reason (except maybe the area they were in, which they'd been repeatedly assured was well away from the fighting, was being invaded? How was that even possible, when areas nearer the front, where Mathilde had come from, were safe? None of this made any sense at all, and not a single one of these kids seemed at all home-sick or traumatized by what they were going through! It wasn't remotely realistic.

The story just fades away at the end, with Mathilde on a boat, alone, since she got lost (that's how intelligent she is!) and that's it. Is this the start of a series? If so the intro sucked and I don't want to follow it. Is it a stand alone? If so, it sucked, and I wasted several hours listening to it when I could have been hearing something worth listening to. That's four hours of my valuable and limited time of which this author has robbed me! But then I may well have robbed people too, with my books, so it all balances out in the end.

So the effect this book had on me was to make me laugh at how pathetic it was, not to make me consider war and suffering. It fails in everything it might be trying to do, but maybe I'm being a bit presumptuous there, because it was so wishy-washy in whatever it was trying to do was being done so badly that I can't honestly be sure it was trying to do anything.

It actually felt more like I was reading excerpts from a longer and better book, and these were the parts the author had torn out in disgust because they were so bland and uninteresting, and because they actually held up the plot of the real book, which is still out there somewhere, going unread. So no, I can't recommend it! My standards won't let me!

Hatchet Women by Nick Sconce

Rating: WARTY!

If this was an attempt to make the insurance industry exciting or edgy, it failed. For me it failed as a novel because it was far too focused on the minutiae of the insurance industry practices and hiring and firing that it forgot to actually tell an engaging story or to bring to life interesting people. I made it 40% in, to the end of chapter twelve, and I am sorry but I could not face the prospect of reading another two-hundred and thirty pages of this stuff. I really couldn't.

The basic story is that four women (who we're told in the blurb are 'brazen', but of which I saw no evidence) are the terminators - they investigate malfeasance (such as an executive reinstating lapsed insurance policies for his family members when no premiums are being paid), pull together the evidence, and pursue the firing of the employee. Maybe this is how it's done in the insurance industry, I don't know, but for women who are, it's implied, coldly callous in their pursuit of justice for the company, this process seems remarkably gentle and prolonged. In the case I mentioned, it's plainly theft, and most corporations would simply fire the employee on the spot. It made little sense to me that there would be a team of people dedicated to doing this or that they would have a hearing over it. Maybe things are different in the executive suite. I can't speak to that.

Why these four women did this rather than someone in the individual corporate offices in the three states they covered went unexplained, and it made little sense to me. It made less sense that these women would be "hidden" in the 'event planning department' and forced to dye their hair blonde so they blended in. If this was supposed to be funny, it was lost on me. Once these women fired their first executive, everyone would know who they were, so their disguise would have been meaningless at that point. Talking of corporate malfeasance, why didn't even one of these women have a problem with being required to dye their hair? I know women are expected not only to earn 20% less, but also required to dress up more than ever men are. Why was nothing mentioned about that?

The story offered here is that of unexplained deaths, perhaps murders to avoid paying out insurance, which seems like a pretty thin plot if that's all there is to it. Why would a company do this especially since the "savings" from this are likely to be little or nothing. It made no sense, but I didn't get far enough to read much about that - only the overture to it, so I can't comment on how the story dealt with it. Based on what I read though, I can't recommend this. Forty percent in is way too far for the main story not to have begun. For me the novel was not at all engrossing, and I was given no good reason to care about any of these four women or what they were doing.

Infinity's Shore by David Brin

Rating: WARTY!

This really isn't much of a review because this novel wasn't much of a novel - not the slim portion of it I could stand to listen to, anyway. I consider audio books experimental: I take more risks on them than other formats, which is why so many of them fall by the wayside. It's worth it to find a gem here and there, but this was (infinitely) far more a coal in the stocking than ever it could hope to be a diamond in the rough.

I really liked Brin's Kiln People, but this one bored the pants off me right from the start. The writing was pretentious and extravagant, Brin clearly adoring his own voice far more than ever he was interested in entertaining his readers (or listeners in my case). If this book had been submitted by an unknown writer, it would never have got published, and justly so, which only goes to show how stupid and short-sighted Big Publishing&Trade; is: it's not what you write, it's whether you already have your foot in the door.

As if the writing wasn't bad enough, the reader, George Wilson, seemed determined to give Brin's trilogy diarrhea its full due, and he ably discharged tedious torrents of it, so I flushed it. I simply could not stand to listen to him, nor could I stand the thought of getting the print or e-version to read myself after having listened to the first of twenty-two disks. No way I'm going to subject myself to that when other books are calling with sweeter voices!

Emily The Strange: Rock Issue by Rob Reger, Jessica Gruner, Kitty Remington, Brian Brooks, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not even going to dignify this drivel with a significant review because it's not worth my valuable time, and it was so awful I pretty much skimmed the whole thing. The only rock references are to antique and irrelevant musicians in this modern world and to actual rocks. I am so disappointed in this whole mini-series. It's trite, tedious, and boring beyond hellish. Skip it. Avoid this series altogether, and read instead the four novels and the newer graphic novel about Emily's band: Emily and the Strangers.

Emily The Strange: Let There Be Darkby Rob Reger, Jessica Gruner, Brian Brooks, Kitty Remington, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

This is volume three of a seriously disappointing four-comic series.

After enjoying a previous graphic novel which was my first introduction to Emily, and then all four of the novels written about her, I was really looking forward to these, but they were not at all what I had hoped for. far form it.

The problem was that this set doesn't tell a story like the others do. The title of the volume sets the theme for the content, which is a set of mini-stories which are neither entertaining nor in any way satisfying.

God made Woman in My Own Image The forerunner to Emily's duplication of herself in the Stranger and Stranger novel. Read that instead.
Emily Created Creatures of the Night Totally boring.
Scarytale theater felt staged.
Go to the Dark overshadowed by later work.
Danger in the Dark
What's Darker Than Dark? Unintellidrivel.

That was it - hardly anything and what there was of anything wasn't worth reading.

Emily The Strange: This Cover Got Lost by Jessica Gruner, Rob Reger, Buffy Visick, Brian Brooks, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

This is volume two of a disappointing four comic series I requested from the library and the only thing to distinguish it, apart from the admittedly amusing title, is the delightfully named Buffy Visick joining the writing team (along with Brian Brooks). How four writers can come up with so little in the way of entertainment is the real entertainment here.

After enjoying a previous graphic novel which was my first introduction to Emily, and then all four of the novels written about her, I was really looking forward to these, but they were not at all what I had hoped for, and nothing like the previous material I'd read in terms of quality, inventiveness, or entertainment value. I was sorry to leave this character on such a sour note, but glad I read these last, because if I'd have read these first, I would likely never have read anything else and would have been poorer for it.

For me the problem was that this set doesn't really tell a story like the others do. Instead they consist of mediocre red and black illustrations (which could be called media ocher, I guess! LOL! as long as we're about to talk of bad punning), which tell mini tales all of which seem to often revolve around poor puns which really can't be stretched into a longer story. The title of the volume sets the theme for the content, and I found it amusing on this occasion especially since graphic novel cover artist has such a big (an unwarranted) deal made over it, but a lot of the references are to the pop culture of yesteryear, many of them antiques now, so the appeal is very limited. I recognized most of the names of the rocks stars of yesteryear featured in one story, but only one of the album covers, so that entire two page spread was lost on me. Lost is what I was in this, often, so again the title works if in a way unintended by the creators.

The stories in this volume were:
The Lost Art of was an empty frame.
Lost in Vision - blind pursuit of anything like entertainment value.
Lostco This was genuinely funny and entertaining, but the sad thing is that this is the only article out of all four comics that was worth reading.
Beauty is Lost Ugly.
Lost City Should have been included in the boring first volume.
Lost in Space Too spaced out.
Scarytale Theater Bring down the curtain.
Lost my Mind Agreed. Don't write anything else until you get it back!

Emily The Strange: Chairman of the Bored by Rob Reger, Brian Brooks, Jessica Gruner, Buzz Parker

Rating: WARTY!

This is volume one of a disappointing four comic series I requested from the library. After enjoying a previous graphic novel which was my first introduction to Emily, and then all four of the novels written about her, Emily, I was really looking forward to these, but they were not at all what I had hoped for and nothing like the previous material in terms of quality, inventiveness, or entertainment value. I was sorry to leave this character on such a sour note, but glad I read these last, because if I'd have read these first, I would likely never have read anything else and would have been poorer for it.

For me the problem was that this set doesn't really tell a story like the others do. Instead they consist of mediocre red and black illustrations (which could be called media ochre, I guess! LOL!), which tell mini tales all of which seem to revolve around bad puns which really don't make the transition to a longer story. The title of the volume sets the theme for the content, but a lot of the references are to the pop culture of yesteryear, many of them antiques now, so the appeal is very limited. I recognized most of the names of the rocks stars of yester year featured in one story, but only one of the album covers, so that entire two page spread was lost on me. Bored is what I was, so the title works, if in a way unintended by the creators.

It was written by Reger, Brooks, and Gruner, and largely illustrated poorly by Parker. The main stories in this volume were:
Strange sauce, where Emily flavors cafeteria food with a concoction o her own and turns everyone into monsters. Boring.
Thirteen other uses for wire hangers Lame.
head in the clouds Thin.
Bored to death Stuffing nonsense.
Croquet with the damned Laughable, and not in a good way.
Grow'n Up vegetative.

That was pretty much it. A complete bust. I do not recommend this. By all means do read the other works on Emily, but nothing from this series is worth your time.

Genesis by Bernard Beckett

Rating: WARTY!

This was another experimental audiobook read not badly, yet not inspiringly by Becky Wright in her first audiobook reading evidently. Bernard Beckett is a New Zealander who seems to think that because he shares a famous last name, he must have writing chops somewhere in his genome. Maybe he does, but it's not evident through the lens he lends us here with which to examine it. All we get is a poor reproduction of Orwell's 1984.

This story was amateur at the level of fan fiction. It was trite, boring, and framed in the mind-numbing tedium of student defending her thesis. The title is entirely wrong. Instead of Genesis, meaning 'beginning', the author should have gone with Akharith, meaning 'ending' because the main character, in her fruitless pursuit of academic excellence here, is about to meet her mocker.

As is all-too-often the case with this kind of story, we find ourselves in a dystopia which has no logical origin, and which is hilarious when you think about it, because this society is supposedly founded on Greek principles. Many of the characters, such as the main female character, have Greek names from antiquity. Hers is Anaximander, though she goes by Anax, and it really ought to be Anthrax, so diseased is her story.

The thesis-challenge idea is a good one, but it fails in this case because all it is, in the end (and the beginning and the middle) is nothing more than a massive info-dump, which is dull in the extreme, with vacuous, cardboard-thin characters and motivations, and a transparent and done-to-death plot. All it did was make me detest Anax and her hero, Adam, about whom her thesis was written. Their fates were just deserts, appropriate rewards for vacuity.

The predictably inaccurate blurb on Goodreads claims that Anax endures a "grueling all-day Examination" but it last only five hours, with lots of breaks, and most of it is spent watching endless, tedious holographic movies, about which she occasionally is asked a question. Grueling? No! All-day? No! Unless the day on her planet is about a quarter the length of ours! I think someone is greatly exaggerating for dramatic effect.

This tired business of reviewing the video record is nonsensical because it's so unrealistic, especially when done on television or in the movies, where the actors are clearly playing to the camera rather than realistically experiencing an event. It's just as bad here. At one point towards the end, the author has a character ask, "What good are stories?" and I say that's a valid question. If they're like this story, then the answer is: no good at all.

We're offered absolutely no rationale whatsoever (not that I consider worth its salt, anyway) for why this island society should drop everything else, and turn to Greek philosophy and principles, much less why everyone suddenly adopts Greek names. Nothing is that extreme, and no group of people are that uniformly conformist. It makes as little sense as the asinine 'five factions' in the execrable Divergent series, which, after a strong start, completely tanked at the box office thereby proving it had no legs outside the YA crowd, whose tastes, let's face it, are starved for clues far more often than they are a hunger game.

It makes a little more sense that the islanders are hostile to foreigners given that there's your trope deadly plague loose in the world, but even that makes zero sense in the grand scheme of things, and for them to be so inexcusably hostile to all foreigners is ridiculous.

A " brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity"? I don't know what the writer of this blurb was on (a stipend maybe?), but I want some! The story is purported to examine what consciousness is, and what makes us human, but it really examines what stupidity is, and what a juvenile, whiney little brat Anax's hero is, and it can give us no answers.

This obsession of Anax's (with Adam Forde) is bullshit, and the fact that in a mindlessly ruthless society like this, he is apparently the only "rebel" yet gets cut so many breaks makes zero sense. If you want my opinion, then please don't waste your time on this bloated exercise in self-indulgence and pointless fawning over ancient Greek civilization. The only thing you'll find in ancient grease is ancient fries, and they're neither edible nor edifying! If you don't want my opinion, that's fine, but then why are you reading this?!

Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui

Rating: WARTY!

I can't give you a full review of this one because I grew tired of it so quickly and simply didn't want to read on when I have so many other books calling to me. I read about a tenth of it and I simply couldn't get interested in it. It moved so slowly and was so self-obsessed that it was tedious to read.

The basic plot is that psychiatrists are using a new device to invade dreams to try to help people with mental issues, but are being overtaken by the dreams and driven insane. Well yeah, since dreams are essentially meaningless drivel, it would be a nightmare for even the dreamer to try to unravel them - assuming that's even possible - let alone some stranger try to figure out what it means, so the premise wasn't exactly a charmed one and in the end, it just didn't appeal to me at all.

A Corner of the Universe by Ann M Martin

Rating: WARTY!

When I picked this off the shelf at the library, I didn't realize it was a Newbery Honor book. Had I done so, I would have put it right back on the shelf, but I missed the little sticker in the corner, focusing instead on the back cover blurb. 'Newbery' is synonymous with 'tedious drivel' in my experience, and this one was no different. The books ought to carry large, bright, garishly-colored neon warning stickers.

It was another audiobook experiment I tried, and we didn't get along with very well. The story is about this eleven-year-old Hattie, who discovers she has an uncle, Adam. Adam has been confined to a psychiatric institution for schizophrenia and autism, and is now coming home to roost, because the place is being closed down. No one has ever mentioned him to Hattie. The two of them get along like a house on fire.

My problems with this book were two-fold. Most of the text consists of Hattie talking about her life, which has to be the most mind-numbingly boring life ever lived by anyone, anywhere. It was an awful listening experience having her endlessly rambling about who did what and where, with nothing she said being in any way remotely out of the ordinary. I couldn't stand this pretty much from the off. It was tedious listening.

The other problem, and the bigger one I feel, is the reader of the book. The main character is telling this story in the worst of voices for a novel: first person, yet the book is being read by Judith Ivey, who was in her fifties when she recorded this. Hattie is eleven. I'm sorry, but it just doesn't work. It was entirely wrong, and made the book into a joke for me, having this mature woman speak for an eleven-year-old girl. I cannot recommend this one at all.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

Rating: WARTY!

This was ultimately a waste of my time. The story is old (1962), but not as old as its setting, and it's the start of a series which I have zero intention of following. It was read by the author's daughter, Lizza Aiken, which seems like a charming idea, but while her voice was pleasant enough, it really didn't engage me very much in relating a children's story. I think it would be much better employed in reading adult historical novels.

Why this is called The Wolves of Willoughby Chase I haves absolutely no idea. Clearly the author knows nothing about wolves, and while they do feature very briefly a couple of times in the story, they ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with it. I had hoped that the villain would meet her come-uppance at the hands...paws (and jaws) of the wolves, but she did not, so I was forced into contemplating that perhaps the wolves of the title were not really the four-legged variety, but the two-legged one.

The story is that Bonnie is expecting a visit from her cousin Sylvia at the same time as her very well to-do parents are planning a trip pursuing Bonnie's mom's good health. Sylvia arrives and the parents depart, and the new governess, Miss Slighcarp, a distant relative, has designs on the manor. When the news comes back that Bonnie's parents have died, Slighcarp suddenly fires all the servants, dispatches Bonnie and Sylvia to an awful workhouse posing as a school for orphans, and promptly begins changing everything around at the manor.

Of course this does not stand, and everything works out well in the end. Her parents aren't even dead, as I suspected from the beginning. The story though, wallowed in abuse of these two children without a thing to leaven it, and it was honestly boring - even the wannabe adventurous parts.

Bonnie's parents appeared to be landed-morons. There's this kid, Simon, who is homeless and when he approaches Sir what's-his-face about living in a cave on the property, he leave shim to it, not even once offering the boy the chance to come live a the house, perhaps in exchange for work. He seems equally clueless later when Bonnie asks him what's to be done about the five-score orphans at the school they've just been rescued from. I'm sorry but no.

Here's yet another story where the girls have to be rescued by the boy and it's just not good enough. I can't recommend this one.

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau

Rating: WARTY!

This was another experimental audiobook about a young kid who comes to the US from a Muslim country and enters foster care. If he had been adopted, then I could see some point to this, but he was not. It made no sense that he would be ripped from his home and sent miles from it. Maybe there was something in the middle section of this which made sense of it, but I became so bored with the first section that I skipped to the last section and returned the novel to the library the same day I started listening to it. And I know Simon Vance can do a better job of reading than he did here.

The author seemed to take a great delight in endless rambling descriptions which were far more prosaic than prose. He discoursed tediously about the most mundane things. If these had offered some real insights from the perspective of the Muslim kid, that would have been something, but they offered nothing new at all. It was just boring filler and I couldn't stand to listen to it. It would not at all surprise me if this novel had won an award, so trite was it. What haunted me long after the final page was how much time I'd wasted on this.

Fellside by MR Carey

Rating: WARTY!

I can't say a whole heck of a lot about this because I made it only through the first four chapters and had to go the the ER because I almost died of boredom. (Would I make this stuff up?)

The book is some five hundred pages long and I could not bear the thought of reading five hundred pages of something that barely moved an inch in four chapters. On top of that it was a first person voice, which to me is usually worst person. On top of that it was your usual trope, "I woke up in hospital and forgot my memory."

This girl is a drug user, and somehow her apartment set on fire and the young kid upstairs (whose mother ought to be prosecuted for leaving him home alone) died from smoke inhalation. The girl is charged with murder (I kid you not), found guilty and sent to jail at...Fellside!

Now you know everything, including the fact that she's more than likely, if trope holds, innocent and will be found so at some point in the story, so what's to surprise the reader? I don't know! Maybe something, but I lost interest in hanging around to find out. Why didn't the author simply start the story in jail and skip the first four chapters? I might have read a bit further then.

The girl was so whiny and self-pitying that I was actually glad when she got sent down. That's one less boring person for the rest of us to have to contend with. But seriously, no, I could not stand the thought of reading any more about her, not when there are so many other books waiting to thrill me and so little time that I know I will never get to them all. So based on what I did read, I can't recommend it. I couldn't commend it in the first place, so how can I re-commend it if I never commended it to begin with? No one would ask these questions if it were not for me!

I don't know if this will do you guys any good, but I can't stand the thought of saying nothing and risking having one of you become infected with this. Maybe it will warn some of you away from a book that would bore you to death, so I can feel happy that I might be saving lives with this review! Yeay me!

Young Avengers Mic-Drop at the Edge of Time and Space by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

Rating: WARTY!

Having been thrilled with Marvel's "Ms Marvel" - the teen version, not the absurdly disjointed, brutal "Civil War" version - and having really enjoyed Marvel's Runaways, I made the mistake of thinking this success could continue. I brought home the first three volumes of the Young Avengers. Was that ever a mistake! The series is boring, ridiculous, bland, and nonsensical. Fortunately, I brought them home from the library and not from the bookstore, so I didn't waste any of my money on these. See my review of volume one in this series for some background.

This series features the bizarre "Hulkling" (Theodore Altman), the childish "Kid Loki" (Loki Laufeyson), the ridiculously named "Marvel Boy" (Noh-Varr), the absurdly named "Miss America" (America Chavez), the completely pointless "Patriot" (Elijah Bradley), the only one with a decent name, "Prodigy" (David Alleyne), the unfortunately named "Speed" (Thomas Shepherd), and the inappropriately named "Wiccan" (William Kaplan) who has nothing to do with the religion of Wicca.

Volume three was pretty much a clone of volumes one and two, which featured pointless and unentertaining traipsing through other dimensions by these supposed heroes, fighting, and eating breakfast. There was no story. This was garbage. Period. The baton was dropped. Nothing else.