Showing posts with label young-adult fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label young-adult fiction. Show all posts

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Trust by Jodi Baker


Title: Trust (Could not find this novel on B&N or Amazon)
Author: Jodi Baker
Publisher: Between Lions Press (website not found)
Rating: WORTHY!


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

This is book one of the 'Between the Lions' series. I have to say up front that this is a first person PoV novel, a voice I detest because so few writers can carry it off, and it ends up being arrogant, self-absorbed and self-obsessed. In this case it wasn't too bad, but it was rather annoying. Why is it that young adult authors in particular seem utterly incapable of writing in third person?

One of the biggest problems with 1PoV is that it doesn’t work suspense-wise, because you know the story gets finished – so there's zero drama over whether the narrator will survive! For example when main character (and narrator) Anna gets imprisoned somewhere during this novel, it doesn't make for a chapter-ending cliff-hanger because there is no question of the outcome. We know she's going to escape and in this case the manner of her escape was so convenient that it was really rather sad.

Another problem with 1PoV is, of course, that you're stuck with you! The narrator can't relate anything that they don't experience personally, or the reader ends up with long info-dumps, or boring conversations where the reader has to sit and wait while someone relays what happened elsewhere. It's completely unnatural. Maybe some readers (and far too many writers, particularly those of the YA persuasion as I mentioned!) feel it brings more immediacy, but to me it brings irritation and annoyance. I routinely put books back on the shelf at the library or the book-store as soon as I discover that they're 1PoV, but it's a lot harder to do that with ebooks - and no book blurb ever gives you the PoV!

That aside, I was pleasantly impressed with this novel for the most part - the most part being the first 75% or so of it. After that it went somewhat downhill, but it still managed to stay this side of readable. It was a new and fresh story with some good ideas, and best of all, the main female character wasn't a complete loser who needed a guy to validate her which is another typically ailing of YA stories, so kudos to the author for that. There was a really nice (and slightly creepy) surprise in chapter two, which was most welcome.

Anna lives with an abusive mom - mentally abusive that is - who home-schools her and keeps her from the spotlight, drilling her mercilessly on the need to keep not so much a low profile, as a no-profile. It's obvious that Anna's being shielded for some reason, but she's never told why. This annoyed me somewhat because it's yet another example of the trope of a teen having special powers (of one kind or another) and being kept in the dark, and having no family, or one parent, or being raised by relatives, etc.

Frankly that was irritating, but the way it was done here as fresh enough that I got through it without developing hives. Unfortunately, this business of 'keep the orphan teen in the dark' was rather overdone, I'm sorry to say. Parts of it were good, but I really did become annoyed with it when it went on and on and on.

There were other minor issues. The author is one of those YA authors who thinks it's "bicep" and not "biceps" (Page 19). She disses nurses on page 48 by describing one running out of a hospital room "like a terrified kitten". I've worked in hospitals and it doesn't describe any nurse I've ever met. I know there must be some like that, they're only human after all, but when it comes to children in their care, nurses are as fierce and protective as a parent is, so I felt that slur was uncalled for.

There's also the sorry description that I've read in more than one YA novel: 'skin so black it was almost blue' (Page 135). I've read this in The Walled City by Ryan Graudin and the awful Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo. In The Midnight Dress, Karen Foxlee takes in in the opposite direction: "…so blue it was almost black...".

This phrase makes absolutely no sense. The author is conflating hue, chroma, and brightness, which isn't a smart thing for a writer to do. There are very subtle ways like this in which we, as writers, can educate readers and bring them up with us instead of talking down to them. Cat Winters knows how to write this in In the Shadow of Blackbirds: "...navy blue so dark it was almost black.".

Anna finds she has a long, long family history (to a wonderful place as it happens - something which I loved and approved of), but her mom has sought to protect her from this history - foolishly as it always turns out in these novels. Now Anna's mom has disappeared, and she feels threatened, and suddenly a grandmother whom she thought had died turns out to be alive, and Anna is meeting strange people with curiously mythological names. And is she hearing voices?

So the story is for the most part quite gripping, and those quibbles I mentioned aside (and despite a bit of a falling-off of quality in the last quarter of the novel), I was impressed enough with this debut that I'm rating it as a worthy read.

All books to me are either worthy or unworthy of reading. It's a binary thing, not a one, two, three, four, or five star thing! Having said that I'm not a series fan, so I doubt I will pursue this series. It has to be a series of truly octopodally gripping power to get me to follow it! Otherwise it's just a prologue to a series of really long and repetitive chapters, and I don't do prologues! It's hard to see where this can actually go in a series and maintain my interest, but this one volume is worth a read and maybe you'll become addicted where I wasn't.


Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos


Title: Material Girls
Author: Elaine Dimopoulos
Publisher: Houghton Miflin Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!


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

Normally I rail against, indeed, refuse to read, novels which are little more than a shopping list of the author’s favorite fashion items. Such snotty books deserve contempt, as does the fashion industry itself. What could be more arrogant and flatulent than an industry devoted to dictating to you that you must change your clothing styles with great frequency, or there’s something wrong with you? What could be more unjust than an industry which effectively tells you that if you’re rich, you’re fashionable and if you’re poor you’re tasteless? And what could be more appalling than an industry built upon the backs of slavishly laboring Asian women and children?

This novel is exceptional, in more ways than one. In the do or Dior world in this story, youth rules comprehensively. At thirteen, children are “tapped” for the success spotlight. If they have spent their school year doing the right thing on their websites, they could become the next pop sensation, the next fashion icon, or the next box-office dream. If they fail, they’re doomed to a life as “adequates” – in short, they’re just like you and me, but in this story, adequate is really understood to mean failure.

This story concerns two successes. One of these is Marla Klein, who hit the big time in the fashion industry, being quickly promoted to the superior court – a handful of teens who declare what’s fashion and what’s fashi-off for one of the five big design houses, Torro-LeBlanc. Marla’s problem is that she’s been disagreeing with the rest of her court appointees, and before she can say “tummy ill figure”, she’s been jettisoned to the basement, where a hoard of designers deemed not good enough for the fashion courts are desperately trying to come up with fashion ideas which will impress the junior courts and get them a shot at displaying their design before the superior court.

Meanwhile, Evangeline Vassiliotis, now reincarnated as ivy Wilde, the current rebel diva superstar, is seeing her position threatened by an upstart Tap. Worse, she’s forced to wear the newest fashion: torture (which features chains, fake blood, and points on the soles of your shoes – on the inside). Of course, these “fashions” are scarcely any more torturous than those which women have felt compelled to wear for centuries, but they’re new and different, of course, so don’t you dare criticize them. Valenteenhold and Shamel certainly wouldn't! Women have fashion guns with which they can scan their clothing labels. If the light stays green, the trend is still good. If it’s red, you’re dead - fashionably speaking, of course - and it’s time to buy a new wardrobe.

Marla finds herself on the “obsoloser” table in the basement – as debased as it gets, in fact. She’s almost “crustaceous” for goodness sakes, but slowly, she and her cohorts hatch a scheme to subvert this system which considers people antiquated by the time they turn twenty. It all goes horribly wrong, and Marla finds herself under the icy glare of Ivy Wilde’s entourage – with the emphasis on the ‘rage’ part. It’s then that things really begin to change. Quick! Alert the media. I'm sure Vain Infamy, Cosplaypolitan, Fugue, or Helle fashion magazines would be interested!

This author could have read my mind – or snuck a peak at chapter zero of my novel Baker Street, but I doubt it! I honestly doubt that she and I are the only ones who have had thoughts like this about the fashion business. It’s what this author does with this story though, and where she takes it, which is what makes this novel “prime” (in my lingo: worthy!). No, in this novel she runs with it and makes an engrossing story full of interesting characters and even more interesting motivations.

I have to say that in many ways, characters Marla and Ivy are very much alike. There’s not a lot to separate them into individual characters, but this is only to be expected from a system which pre-processes children and manufactures a salable product out of them. But if you think that, then read on. They're not!

This story – speculative, dystopian, both - is set in the future, but it’s not a future that’s so far off it can’t be seen. No, the seeds of that future have been enthusiastically sown by vested interests since the 1950s, especially in the USA. A conspicuous consumer/planned obsolescence machine has been working on hearts and minds for decades. We’re all fashion victims. The question is: Is there a cure?


Monday, March 2, 2015

The Many Lives of Ruby Iyer by Laxmi Hariharan


Title: The Many Lives of Ruby Iyer
Author: Laxmi Hariharan
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!


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

Errata:
Page 30 "Once upon at time it was amongst set many similar..." should be "Once upon at time it was set amongst many similar..."
Page 36 "...it's both Panky and my choice..." should be "...it's both Panky's and my choice..."
Page 88 "...Vikram is turns around..." should be "...Vikram turns around..."
Page 133 "reincarnate" should be either "incarnate" or "reincarnated"

Ruby Is an Indian woman living in Mumbai (which the author insists upon naming Bombay in this story). Mumbai is the biggest city in India (and eighth in the world) in terms of population, and its average temperature year round, runs between 70 and 90 (21 and 33) degrees. It's hot in many ways, including being a boomtown and business center, as well as having a great deep-water port.

Ruby Iyer is a young professional who lives in a bungalow which she shares with a guy named Pankaj ("Panky"), her best friend. One day when heading in to work, Ruby is knocked off the platform onto the electric train tracks and has 10,000 volts run through her, which she survives with no more than a Lichtenburg tree (an electrical branching pattern, rather like a tattoo) on her shoulder to show for it - at least externally. Inside, it's a different matter. Inside, Ruby feels the power of electricity and anger which she can barely control at times.

Note in passing that people tend to confuse volts with amps. 10,000 volts all by itself means little without knowing the amperage and the resistance. Humans can survive high voltage, but anything above a few milliamps for very long, and you're doomed! But that's by-the-by. Ruby tries to go to work the next day (this is after three days had gone by when she was unconscious in the hospital), and she fails spectacularly.

At the station, waiting on the morning train, standing alongside a guy she shared an autocab with, she sees the same guy who pushed her onto the tracks pushing another young woman in the same way. Ruby saves her life and then not wanting to deal with the publicity (or the police officer heading her way), she runs - stealing someone's motorbike.

She gets an anonymous text message to go to the Sea Link ferry and against her better judgment, finds herself driving down there. She finds a guy high-up off the ground, looking like he's going to jump. Next thing she knows, she's climbing up there trying to talk him down, and then diving into the water after him when he slips and falls. Suddenly she's being pulled from the water by the same guy she shared the cab with. What's going on here?

I admit after some seventy pages of this I was intrigued - drawn in by the oddity of events and by the sheer feistiness of Ruby's character. Now here's a great potential for a strong female protagonist thinks I, but there's also a male interest. Is this going to continue to show her as a strong independent woman, or is it going to go right down hill faster than Ruby plummeted into the ocean? Are we going to see her buried under the protective mantle of a validating guy just as the ocean covered her? I hoped not, but unfortunately soon, there soon came signs of plot failings.

Here's a writing issues to consider; how do you approach pet names when writing a story set in a foreign culture? Can you just employ Americanisms and have it work? Or is that going to rudely throw people out of suspension of disbelief? I ask because this author had Ruby refer to her pal Panky as "Pankster" from time to time. In the US, we understand that, because it's a very American thing to do, but unless she's really saying "Pankster" in her own tongue along with whatever else she's saying, what does Pankster mean? It would sound exactly the same in Bambaiya, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, or whatever language she's speaking, but would it mean the same thing it means in the US?

Is there a local language equivalent, and if so, why didn't the author use that - because we wouldn't understand it? I don't buy that. In the first hundred pages or so, the author does a great job of bringing us into the culture without making it sound like a guidebook or a lecture, so why this? I don't know. English is widely spoken amongst professionals in Mumbai, so maybe they speak English to each other and there's no problem here?

Having said that, there were quite a few technical problems with the text, including instances of two words run together, such as at the bottom of page 91 where it says "Handis" rather than "Hand is". A run-through with a decent spell-checker would catch many of those errors. There are other errors a spell-checker won't catch, such as when an AK-47 is identified on page 108 as a machine gun it's not. It's an assault rifle.

What about those plot failings I mentioned? Well, without wanting to give too much away, the most outrageous one was an incident in a train station where Ruby had the opportunity to take down or even take out the bad guy and she failed to act. I have no idea what that was all about except, of course, that it permitted the bad guy to escape and the story to continue for another 150 pages!

Things went significantly downhill after that for me, though, and I couldn't finish this novel. It became far too cartoonish. Some random guy launches an attack on Ruby in her home, and immediately afterwards, she's invited to visit the bad guy at a nearby hotel. Now maybe the guy with the gun was merely going to escort her to the hotel, maybe not, but either way it made no sense. He never said he only wanted to take her there, and she went anyway. The only thing this accomplished was a bout of blood and gore.

Ruby arms herself with a machete, which she pretty much consistently refers to as a sword, from that point onwards. It made no sense, especially since Vikram the cop said he was going to stay with her so he could get the bad guy, and as soon as his back is turned she runs off alone, no back-up, to try and rescue Panky.

It's at this point that we're expected to believe that simultaneously with the city all-but shutting down from multiple bombings, and with the power out, there's a fashion show going on at the Hyatt??? People are packing into one of the stations which was blown up just a day or two before - to go to work?!! There's this chaos going on and the army isn't called in? There's no curfew imposed? It's like all this is going on, and yet life continues in the city unaffected. It made no sense.

The story was told in first person PoV which usually doesn't work. In this case it wasn't too bad to begin with but it did begin to grate on the nerves after a while, especially since Ruby was hardly a nice person. I wasn't rooting for her. I actually liked the bad guy better.

If Ruby had shown some smarts instead of being a dick who routinely steals other people's property (mostly transportation) and who has no idea how to call for or rely on back-up, and shows no evidence that she even understands what cooperation is, let alone how to engage in it, with the cop who saved her life more than once. She's just not a likable protagonist, and that coupled with the absurd events the further I read into this story, was enough to convince me that I cannot rate this as a worthy read.

It's very depressing, actually, because the author shows signs of a real writing ability, yet she has a character like this in a setting that is, for once, in some place other than the USA, and it just gets wasted and squandered. I felt very sad and disappointed in what seemed to me to be a badly wasted opportunity.


Friday, February 27, 2015

Cleo by Lucy Coats


Title: Cleo (no online outlet found)
Author: Lucy Coats
Publisher: Hachette
Rating: WARTY!


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

One huge kudos up front: this book uses paper from responsible sources! You go Hachette/Orchard! Maybe all publishers do this these days, and this one's the only one smart enough to trumpet it? I don't know, but credit where it's due!

The title for chapter one is very dramatic : Death comes to Alexandria - but then a brief description tells us we're in Alexandria, four years earlier - earlier than what? I don't know! There was no prologue, for which I am deeply grateful to the author! She puts it in chapter one, where it belongs, so this book got off to a good start for me, but then it rather went downhill I'm afraid.

Cleo's mother is dying. Cleo's father, one of the Ptolemys, has run away to Rome not long before, taking the entire family with him except for Cleo and her mom. Cleo has never felt so alone and was trying her best not to cry - not to show weakness - as she begged the god Isis to spare her mom. Isis, like every god, has a an un-amusing habit of simply not listening.

So yes, it's the story of Cleopatra, told for a middle grade audience. Cleo starts out at twelve years old, then jumps to sixteen, but the story-telling remained middle-grade, which was one of my problems with it. Cleopatra's name means 'father's glory', but this isn't her real glory or story - which was another of my problems with it. Cleopatra's real story is completely twisted around here, so please don't think you're learning any history. I don't understand why writers do this. If you're going to make up literally everything as was done here, then why use a real historical person? if you're going to write about a real person, why make it so fanciful that it bears no relation to her real life?

To be honest, the story is a complete mess. Cleo did have to flee from Alexandria, but it wasn't like Cinderella fleeing from her two evil stepsisters as is portrayed here. She had actually been ruling - at first along with her father, and then with her brothers, Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV, to each of which brothers she was married. When she fled, it was not after her mother's death, but after her father's (Ptolemy XII's) death. Her brother was the evil sibling, refusing to share power with his sister. Both Cleo and her younger sister Arsinoë (named after the mother of the first Ptolemy) - a sister Cleo later had assassinated - fled, and it was Arsinoë who went into a temple, not of Isis but of Artemis.

Arsinoë's story would have actually been more interesting. Tryphaena was not an evil stepsister but was actually Cleopatra's mother (as is thought - no one knows for sure), aka Cleopatra V. There was no Bere -nice or -nasty - not as a sister. There was a Cleopatra Berenice III, who was an aunt or possibly Cleo's mom (the Ptolemy family tree was as incestuous as you can get). In real life, Cleo was never the girl portrayed here!

At one point Cleo describes a scorpion as an insect. It’s not. It’s an arachnid, related to spiders. The ancient Egyptians wouldn’t necessarily make this distinction, but I think it’s misleading and unnecessary – and it makes her look dumb. The real Cleopatra made some bad decisions, but she was anything but dumb. At another point, Cleo refers to the Ptolemy side of her ancestry, which is amusing because there was really only a Ptolemy side to her ancestry! Her entire family was descended from two people and the bothers uncles, etc. intermarried repeatedly. As I mentioned, this was one of the most incestuous lineages ever!

So in a novel like this you have to decide how much you want it to represent history and/or how much you're willing to let it be fanciful. For a good story I could accept either route, so for me, it all comes down to how engrossing and intelligent the story ends up being, and there it failed for me because it was way too young for the intended audience, and apart from it not being accurate, it wasn't very engaging. Cleo wasn't likable. She was far too self-obsessed and self-absorbed. She cared nothing for anyone but herself and her slave-girl who was named Charm even though the actual slave who died with Cleo was named Charmion.

The supernatural elements might have made for an interesting story but were skimped on to the point where I wondered why they had even been included. To cut a (too) long story short, I gave up reading this one at about fifty percent in and I can't recommend it based on what I read.


Sunday, February 22, 2015

The Secret Sky by Atia Abawi


Title: The Secret Sky
Author: Atia Abawi
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

I picked this up at the library because it looked like it would be really interesting - and really different. It's set in Afghanistan and is a story of forbidden love between Fatima (of one tribe), and Samiullah (of another tribe) living under a brutal religious regime. The author has actually lived in Afghanistan, so I was hoping for a lot of local color and insights, but in the end all I got was a bog-standard American-style YA novel and I really didn't appreciate that.

We still hear much about Afghanistan - it seems like every alpha male in every TV show, movie, and novel is boringly a special forces soldier who did at least one or two tours in Afghanistan. I know it's awful there, particularly for women, which is why I thought that this story - written by an honorary Afghani woman who has lived in Kabul, would have something new and different to say, but the story was exactly the same as your typical trope story of this nature written by any other author. The big question for me was: why? This could have been so much more.

Rather than being tied to a time and place, It could have been set anywhere at any time (and I don't mean that as a compliment). It could have been written by anyone. Other than a reference here and there to a tandoor (oven), or a payron (smock), or some other such object, or an Afghani phrase dropped here and there, there was no reason for it to be set in Afghanistan. The setting was rendered into a mere gimmick instead of being an integral and enthralling part of the story. Worse than this, the author shows nothing, tells all.

I found it odd that every time mom or dad was referred to in this novel, we got the Afghani term of endearment for it, but when an aunt shows up, she's consistently referred to as 'Aunt'! Weird. Unless, of course, the Afghani word for aunt is aunt, which I somehow doubt. I'm not a fan of novels set in foreign places where the author's sole idea of creating a foreign atmosphere is merely to drop a local language word or phrase into the narrative and immediately afterwards translate it for us. It becomes irritating and metronomic, and it's a constant reminder that we're reading a story by someone who is hoping desperately to convince us that this is really taking place amidst a foreign culture whilst employing the laziest method of doing so.

We get the same fluttering heart (yawn), electric shocks from merely brushing against the object of your desire (yawn, yawn), square jaw (yawn), muscled chest (yawn, yawn) and so on, that we get in a really badly written YA novel from the US. I know that love has common elements no matter in which culture it arises, but can we not think of something new to describe attraction? Can we not get away from tired cliché and trope even in a novel set halfway around the world? Evidently not.

The villain (named Rashid, of course) is a laughable cardboard cut-out, an uncompromising fundamentalist who festers and fumes, and schemes and waits patiently to unleash his wrath, and chews-up the scenery every time we get the story told from his PoV, which was blessedly rare.

Yes, there are three PoVs in what amounts to a sort of warped love triangle. Each chapter is headed with the name of the character so we can't mistake one for another lol! Rashid is far more of a joke than ever he is a threat. Samiullah is such a Mary Sue that this is almost a lesbian affair. Given the upbringing of these three children, it makes no sense that two of them would suddenly abandon all rules and propriety and start meeting secretly. It makes no sense that Samiullah (we're told) loves and respects Fatima, yet puts her very life at risk every day by meeting with her unchaperoned. Yes, it's necessary for this sad effort at writing a "love" story, but please, do the work to make it seem possible that they would behave like this! Don't simply tell us this is the way it is merely because I want to tell a forbidden love story and can't be bothered to work at it.

I was hoping for a lot more, and got a lot less. I couldn't finish this novel, and I cannot recommend it based on what I read. Life is far too short to waste it reading ordinary stories.


Friday, February 20, 2015

Bleeding Earth by Kaitlin Ward


Title: Bleeding Earth
Author: Kaitlin Ward
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WARTY!


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

I had problems with this novel right from the off. There were so many of them that it's hard to know where to start. It’s written in first person PoV which I detest because few writers can do it and make it readable without inducing nausea. There’s nothing more fingernails-on-a-chalk-board than someone constantly admonishing a reader to “Lookit ME! Lissen to ME! Nothing’s more important than what’s happening to MEEEEE!” Why so many writers choose this form is a mystery. I generally adore writers who do not and it seems so much more annoying in YA novels, probably because YA stories are all-too-often far more petty and frivolous than is literature aimed at a more mature readership, for reasons unknown.

This one begins with the narrator, Lea, trying to induce her friend Hillary to come into the graveyard with her, when it’s Hillary’s idea to go there in the first place! Hillary evidently has an irrational fear of graveyards which makes it problematic for her to do tracings of the gravestones for her family history project. Why she chose to trace rather than simply photograph was unexplained. Maybe her fear has grown because she’s lived directly across the street from the graveyard all her life? Familiarity breeds terror?

Lea sounds like a really needy person. She was responsible for Hillary’s breaking-up with her boyfriend because of this sorry neediness. What if Hillary’s boyfriend’s name had been Bill? Maybe history would be different?!

Anyway, as they’re leaving the cemetery, they walk right over a grave which is leaking blood – that’s how oblivious they are of their surroundings – and this is despite Lea’s ragging on Hillary, and despite Hillary’s supposed phobia. Neither of them notices until they step in it. Worse than this, they’re too stupid to grasp that a corpse isn’t going to leak blood, and even if it did, the blood isn’t going to come flooding up to the surface of the grave from six feet below. This creeping 'dumb-assery' problem becomes worse as the story goes on.

On the positive side, this isn’t your usual trope YA – Lea is lesbian, so there’s no bad-boy boyfriend around, and fortunately, Aracely (Lea’s girlfriend whose parents are French) isn't a “bad boy” who has hair falling into her eyes, and has gold flecks in her eyes, and is ripped, so it's not all bad! Lea is ‘out’ at school and at home, yet her best friend’s mother doesn’t know and apparently wouldn’t approve, so they keep her in the dark. Hmm! I wonder what the future of this relationship is going to be?

Well, on top of all that, Aracely isn’t out yet which is another inexplicable issue since…FRENCH! I know all French aren’t alike, but it seems to me there’d be a lot less judgment and opposition in French parents (actually one parent – her dad. Mom is not in the picture) than ever there would be with US parents, who tend to be much more conservative than Europeans.

The problem with Aracely is that Lea’s only attraction to her is that “She’s so, so pretty.” Seriously? Can you not think of a single thing to recommend her other than her skin? I don’t get why female writers so persistently do this to female characters. I don’t get why they don’t get that regardless of how the rest of the world objectively sees a person, they’re always beautiful to the person who loves them.

Hillary’s boyfriend is named after a brand of jeans and has “…the standard blond-haired, blue-eyed thing going on…”? What on Earth does that mean? That only Aryans are acceptable or that this is a standard because it’s the most common appearance? Both are so wrong that they couldn’t be more wrong without going around the other side and starting back towards right again. I don’t know what that phrase means, but blue-eyed boys are a common trope in YA written by white authors.

As she walks home, Lea passes “…an LED display with bright pink bulbs.” LEDs are not bulbs, so I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but we're conveniently distracted from that conundrum, because it’s right at that point that the earth starts bleeding – there is blood coming up from the side-walk, and for some reason this causes mass hysteria! Lea just goes home and watches TV like it’s any other day. Apparently the event is world-wide.

This blood “…doesn’t just drown the grass - it suffocates it.” I fail to see any real distinction here, but we can put that down to artistic license! The problem with the blood is that it’s rising everywhere and we’re told that it’s causing floods. It’s supposedly running down the streets like rain in a heavy rainstorm, but it’s not draining away, either, so it makes no sense.

Although it appears exactly like blood right down to the smell, apparently it’s not congealing like blood! How this welling of blood is causing society to break down is unexplained. We’re told that places like NYC have power outages, and that coastal areas are flooding, but there’s nothing offered to explain how, exactly, these things are actually occurring.

There seems to be this big deal about scientists not knowing whether it’s blood! Seriously? It would be the easiest thing in the world to identify whether it is or not, yet this is like a big mystery? It made no sense. Worse than this, after Lea informs us that Aracely wants to be a scientist, the latter remarks (after it starts raining blood) that blood is too thick to evaporate! Nonsense. The solid particles in blood won’t evaporate, of course, but the liquid – which is water (duhh!) will. But that’s not how it’s raining blood – it’s not like the blood is developing its own hydro-cycle! Once you have a story where blood is unaccountably welling-up from the earth itself, there’s no reason why it can’t magically precipitate from the sky, too.

At one point Aracely indicates that no one has yet determined what this red substance truly is, but only two pages later (and in the same time frame), Lea is saying that it’s been specifically identified as human blood, so there’s a big disconnect there (and Aracely’s scientific credentials take another hit!).

We read at one point: “…she smiles at me - I can tell by the crinkles at the corner of her eyes.” That's the only way to tall that someone is smiling?! I guess Aracely's so, so pretty lips don't do the trick? Or maybe the narrator, Lea, isn't very smart? There's a good case to be made for that. At one point, these idiot girls go out for a drive – in blood that’s a foot deep! Of course the car breaks down.

This blood flood is completely unrealistic - even within its own fictional framework. Despite this up-welling and raining of blood, life goes on pretty much as normal: everyone goes off to work, kids go off to school. What? There’s absolutely zero police presence. There is no national guard. There is no fire department. There's apparently no emergency! Worse than this, there's no fly problem! Flies swarm all over a bloody road-kill corpse yet here, when the entire world is covered in blood, there are no flies?

Lea’s mom is described as “firmly atheist”, but she’s later described as avidly reading the Bible? No, it's not going to happen! Not if she's an actual atheist as opposed to a fence sitter.<.p>

The blood is the only character that changes in this story! Or at least, it changes its character. First it’s not toxic, then it is, but only if drunk. It’s not airborne, then respirators are being handed out, but you have to go out in the blood to the courthouse to pick up your respirator? Despite there being shuttle buses to transport people around, Lea and Aracely choose to walk back home! In blood. A foot deep. That’s now supposedly toxic.

Later they go to a party in the park, in the toxic blood. That's a foot deep. That’s when I quit reading this nonsense. I will not recommend something as juvenile as this, not even to an undiscriminating YA audience.


Wednesday, February 18, 2015

The Executioner's Daughter by Jane Hardstaff


Title: The Executioner's Daughter
Author: Jane Hardstaff (no website found)
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WORTHY!


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

Note: Not to be confused with The Executioner's Daughter by Laura E Williams (which I haven't read), not with The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter by Angela Carter (which I also haven't read), nor with The Executioner's Daughter by Miguel Conner (which I also haven't read). Note also that this novel has a sequel, River Daughter, which I haven't read either. Shame on me! What's wrong with me - all these novels I haven't read?!

This story is quite a bit different from a lot of what I've been reading lately, and it was as welcome as it was a charming read. It's 1532 (that's just after three-thirty for those of you not familiar with military time), and Henry 8.0 is on the throne of England. Young Moss is the daughter of the executioner at the Tower of London. Moss's job is to catch the heads of the beheaded in her little wicker basket when they fall off. She quite good at it, but she hates her life, and her father's job.

One day she learns from him that he's been lying to her about why they never leave the Tower! Moss is furious at this revelation. She's been held prisoner just as effectively as enemies of the state, and none of it was necessary. It turns out that her dad is hiding her from someone who is apparently coming to claim her on her upcoming birthday. The Tower, he believes, despite the fact that it's right on the banks of the Thames, is the only safe place safe for her. Yeah, that plot-point is a bit thin, but the story-telling was so good that I was willing to forgive the author this - and her portrayal of the Thames freezing over that winter (it didn't!). The Thames froze - or partially froze - in 1514 and 1537, but not 1532-3.

Moss, in her wanderings around her 'home' has found a secret route that leads outside, away from the eyes of the Tower guards. Now she takes to it with a vengeance, abandoning her father and eventually ending up with a guy who ferries people across the Thames for a coin here and there. He's also a scam artist who puts himself first and foremost, and Moss becomes very disillusioned with him. She strikes out on her own one frozen night determined to find the place where her mother gave birth to her.

Is the inexperienced Moss going to survive alone on one of the coldest nights of the winter? Will she find what she seeks? And what, exactly, is it she thinks she's been seeing following her around, but forever staying below the unforgiving waters of the great river, and snaking beneath the impassive ice? I'm not going to tell you!

This novel was very well written, original, entertaining and engrossing. I kept getting back to it every chance I got and it was a fast read. Most enjoyable. The only problem I had with it was in the Kindle, where every instance of "fi" was replaced by the letter À and every instance of "fl" was replaced by the letter Á. You can see an example of it in the illustration on my blog, where the offenders have been underlined in red. I did not have this same problem in Adobe Digital Editions or in Bluefire Reader on the iPad.

Despite that annoyance, I was able to read and enjoy it without any real problems (please note that this was an advance review copy and not a regularly purchased copy, so the problem may well have been fixed in the commercial version). I recommend this novel, and I am definitely interested in reading more by this author.


Saturday, February 14, 2015

Spying in High Heels by Gemma Halliday


Title: Spying in High Heels
Author: Gemma Halliday
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Hopefully this isn't book one in the "Spying in High Heels" series, because why write one novel when you can milk the same story for several? Once in a while, a writer makes it work, but more often than not, not. Hopefully this is a one-off (I was wrong - this is one of a series, unfortunately).

The ebook for this has a page listing reviews complimentary of the book. I don't get this. If it's an ebook, you're not perusing it in the library or the bookstore, considering purchasing it, you already have it. What is the point of trying to sell you a book which you already have? Seriously, how dumb is that? And how dumb do they publishers think we are to be swayed by the opinion of someone we don't even know? I often find I do not enjoy a book which was recommended to me by someone I know and whose opinion I typically value, so what makes these people think I'll be blindly swayed by an opinion of someone who I have no reason to rely on?! I've never understood that mentality. It's cynical at best and moronic at worst.

That gripe aside, this novel sounded tempting from the blurb, but his means the commercial did its job - it lured me in. I have always felt there's a place for a 'girlie' spy or detective novel - where the superficially highly feminine main character turns out to be tough and smart underneath her misleading exterior. I have yet to find such a novel. I'm actually in process of planning my own to fill that void.

In this case, the woman, Maddie Springer isn't even a detective. She's a brand-name obsessed children's shoe designer who's dating a high-priced lawyer, Richard Howe, who evidently finds himself on the wrong side of the law and disappears without warning or trace. His girlfriend (Maddie) - for reasons unexplained and sans motive - starts to get involved in finding out what happened instead of leaving it to the police and the FBI.

There is neither valid nor credible reason given for her obsessive involvement. Yes, on the one hand, it's great to have a proactive female character instead of one who sits and weeps inconsolably for her lost love, but no, it fails when you make your character do dumb stuff which serves no apparent purpose other than to throw her into the arms of her designated beau, and in the process makes her look like a busy-body at best, and a moron at worst.

This is supposed to be a mystery, but all mystery fled the premises when her love interest showed up. No, Richard is not her love interest. That's a lie. Her love interest is Los Angeles Police Detective Jack Ramirez, who appears (and transparently so) to be a bad guy at first blush. From the very first page he appeared on, it was glaringly obvious that she was going to ditch yesterday's love of her life and end up in bed with this rough-looking, tanned, muscled, tall and handsome guy, who merely looked like a villain. It was so obvious that it was as painful as it was pathetic and predictable.

Gone from that point onwards was any motivation on her part for becoming involved in finding out about Richard, because it was so glaringly obvious that he would be a bad guy or dead, or on the out for some other reason before this novel was over and she would be done with him. It was starkly apparent that she would be deeply enveloped in the strong, protective arms of this new guy. Kiss-off any idea or hope of her proving to be a tough, smart, independent operator. Nope, she was immediately transmogrified, from that very page, into a maiden in distress, and this novel lost all allure for me. I refuse to recommend it.


Thursday, February 12, 2015

The Academy: Introductions by CL Stone


Title: The Academy: Introductions
Author: CL Stone
Publisher: Arcato Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

I recently took a decision to read no more YA novels with the word 'Academy' in the title and this book is the reason why - this and a score of other books with that word in the title which turned out to be truly, nay stupendously, bad. I except Vampire Academy from this list - I reviewed it favorably back in May of 2014 - but few if any others are worth my time!

This novel dived deeply into YA trope and cliché from the off, and it turned my stomach. The two main characters have ridiculous names to begin with: Kota (the guy!) and Sang (the girl). Sang runs away from home one dark and stormy night because her mother cares for her too much. I kind you not. Her mom keeps telling her stories of girls who were killed, or raped, or abducted because they were incautious, and so Sang impetuously and incautiously runs out late one evening to spend the night in a nearby empty house in the newly-built neighborhood they've moved to, just to prove she can do it.

She is knocked over be the neighbor's dog, and the neighbor - a nicely-muscled tall guy, of course - takes her not only into his house, but upstairs into his bedroom, has her put on his clothes because her own are wet, and then bathes her minuscule 'wounds'. Meanwhile, this supposedly tough, independent girl is having the wilts and the vapors just because his knee is close to her on the bed. I kid you not.

This novel is the very worst kind of YA trash and I ditched it at 9 percent in when this guy, who's pretty much man-handled her so far, puts his finger on her lips to shut her up. This is so trope-ridden as to be thoroughly disgusting and it's an insult to women everywhere. I recommend for anyone who's into binging and purging, because this garbage will make you throw up without question.


Saturday, February 7, 2015

Take the Dog Out! by Lynne Dempsey

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Illustrated by Mandy Newham-Cobb.

No, this is not an order by a mob boss to assassinate a puppy! It's actually quite a charmer. Amusingly illustrated and playfully put together, this story could even classify as educational because if there's one thing dogs love to do, it’s let out their inner wolf - that's why they make that sound when they bark: "Wolf! Wolf!" They love to get out and play, and this author's story shows the dire consequences of not taking care of your young dog properly and seeing that she gets adequate exercise.

She's first rejected by mom who, I'm sorry to say is stereotypically depicted in the kitchen while dad sits on his lazy butt reading the newspaper. This would be the one complaint I had about this particular book. It's never too early to start showing children that they need not be hide-bound by traditional and misguided gender roles.

Dad also seems to think that it's more important to read the newspaper than to exercise the family pet. The dog of course has other ideas, and she demonstrates them to each family member in turn with great gusto, including grandma and the two young children.

Was that a whirlwind in the bathroom? Nope, just a dog who needs to run off some high spirits and can’t find an outlet! The story ends up happily, I'm pleased to report, as the family realizes that nature just begs to be explored, and you can’t do that stuck in the house on a beautiful day.

You might want to read the back of the book first because that's where the secrets are hidden! Each picture (I'm told) sports a sneakily-hidden dog bone. I confess I could not find them all! My excuse is that I was bone-tired.... In addition to finding these, young readers are encouraged to count - specifically the number of barks the puppy lets out in her wild enthusiasm.

So, in short, a couple of issues with this, but overall, a wonderfully illustrated story that will teach kids a thing or two about pet ownership as well as provide a fun story that I'm sure young readers will employ to exercise you (or at least your patience!) with demands to read it again and again.

Dying to Forget by Trish Marie Dawson


Title: Dying to Forget
Author: Trish Marie Dawson
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
p24 "A chance to pick a part the choice me made which ended us all here"? Seriously?!!
p35 "borage"? Should be "barrage" unless you're talking about a hairy plant found in southern Europe…!

I don't normally do book covers because this blog is about writing, not window-dressing, but I have to remark that this cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the story!

This is yet another in a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of first person PoV young adult female narrated novels. In the library or the book store you can stuff these back onto the shelf, but you can’t do that with ebooks! Fortunately not all of them are awful and I include this one in that select group. This novel had a prologue. I don’t do prologues. If the writer doesn’t think that the text is important enough to include in chapter one or later, then I don’t think it’s worth my time to read it! I didn’t miss it.

This one - book one in a series, note - starts out with high school friends Piper Willow, the narrator, and best friend Bree traveling to a roller rink. It’s their last day of high school, and there's a party ahead which Piper is not planning on attending. Something really bad has happened between her and Ryan Burke (who is evidently appropriately named) and she's not in a boy-friendly mood any more. So who should show up at the roller rink where Piper is sitting out and watching Bree and her boyfriend Preston, circle round and round? Whatever happened was so bad that Piper has become a cutter.

Piper has a bigger problem - she's a really bad driver, and when Bree calls her in tears (Preston's being a jerk) to pick her up from the very party which Piper didn’t wish to attend, Piper obliges, and promptly crashes the car on the way home. Apparently Bree is too dumb to wear a seatbelt and the last view of her which Piper gets is her best friend's head disappearing through the windshield. The tragedy doesn't end there. Piper can’t deal any more and takes a bottle of her father's Diazepam pills.

Next she's waking up in a "station" and filling out paperwork, and discovering that she has an afterlife choice: she can spend eternity alone with her misery, or she can volunteer to "go back" and help someone else who is in her position - but still alive as of yet. Piper chooses the latter. In some ways, this story feels a bit like a cross between the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, and the Warren Beatty movie Heaven can Wait, which is a move I really adore.

I found it a bit disturbing that Piper's therapy sessions so quickly and easily - indeed, almost magically - wipe away all her issues with cutting, and The Burke, and with her being the instrument of her best friend's untimely and precipitous death (she now dismisses this as "carelessness"! No, it was (wo)manslaughter for goodness sakes!). I found that a bit hard to put up with, but I was at this point intrigued enough by the story to keep on reading.

The story goes downhill rather in chapter eight. Piper gets her first assignment, and suddenly it appears that she's had absolutely no training or practice whatsoever. I know the author's intent is to make it all new, nerve-rending, and interesting to us, but it just made me feel like Piper had simply been thrown to the wolves, or was painfully stupid which detracted sharply from the really gentle treatment she'd been enjoying to this point. She also has a rather rude awakening when she finally gets inside the body of her first 'client'!

Is anyone else slightly disturbed at the excessive use of last names as first names in this story? We have Piper, Preston, and Sloan. This became rather farcical after a very short time, like it was a parody I was reading. On the brighter side of things, I liked her first assignment and how she handled it. I did start to get annoyed with her when she was trying to tell her host who he could date!

There was a really bizarre occurrence three-quarters of the way through, which made little sense - and it especially made little sense in light of the reason for the occurrence, but I can’t go into detail without posting unacceptable spoilers. Despite the issues I described above, I ended-up liking this story, although the second trip Piper made was nowhere near as good as the first; however, the cliff-hanger ending is a killer, so be warned!


Friday, February 6, 2015

The Lost Souls Dating Agency by Suneeti Rekhari


Title: The Lost Souls Dating Agency
Author: Suneeti Rekhari
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

There is a tiny prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn’t think it worth putting into chapter one or later, I don’t think it’s worth reading. This is also a first person PoV novel which I normally detest because it’s all "Me!" all the time which is irritating at best. Some authors can make it work, but for most authors, it’s best avoided like the plague. This author makes it work. The story is short - only a hundred-fifty pages or so - divided into forty chapters, yet! The text is pretty densely packed, but it's a fast read.

What drew me to this novel was that the author was not another in a long line of US authors who think the US is the only place worth writing about! She's not US at all, but is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia. The main character, Shalini Gupta, is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia.... The novel flits very briefly from India to Dubai, and then on to Melbourne where Shalini now lives, attending college, while her uncle (not really - he adopted her and told her he was her uncle) remains in Dubai; then he goes missing!

My attraction to the novel in this case didn’t fail me. I loved the simple, matter-of-fact way it was written, and the perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek acceptance of the paranormal by Shalini and her two friends Neha and Megan. Not only has Shalini inherited some money from her uncle, she has also inherited a mysterious empty warehouse which actually isn't far from her apartment. The warehouse is old and run-down, but she feels compelled to clean it up. The only thing in there is a weird clock which is immovably attached to one of the walls. And the time is wrong.

As she's trying to figure out what to do with the place, a newspaper begins mysteriously appearing in he building each Saturday. Shalini quickly realizes that this is a supernatural newspaper, and she posts an ad in it advertising the warehouse as a dating agency for supernatural beings! Her first client soon shows up: Victor the cranky vampire. This part was hilarious. In fact the whole Victor thing is really amusing. Get this, for example (and keep in mind that Victor's a vampire):

'Bloody hell, Victor, you scared me! It’s daytime! How are you here?'
'I drove.'

I laughed out loud at that. Note the single quotes which Brit and Aussie novels tend to sport to demarcate speech. They look weird to me, and I grew up in Britain! Anyway, no more spoilers. Shalini takes on three cases, and gets deeper into the supernatural than ever she feels safe doing, but she meets some startling and interesting people along the way.

Be warned that this has a cliffhanger ending - it's obviously the start of a series, and I'm typically not a fan of series, but I'm not averse to reading more of this one!


Friday, January 30, 2015

Charmed Deception by Eilis O'Neal


Title: Charmed Deception
Author: Eilis O'Neal
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WARTY!


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

I started this one thinking I wouldn't be able to finish it - it seemed far too larded with trope and cliché to be appealing to a reader like me, but as I read on and despite the presence of rather too much cliché for my taste, I found myself initially warming to the story. Sadly, it was not to last. I was able to stomach only about half of this novel, and I'll tell you why.

The main character is young woman by the highly unlikely name of Sable Wildcross who lives a very pampered existence and sees nothing amiss with it. Her only problem is that in her world (actually in her country), only men are allowed to practice magic. Women used to be killed if they developed the 'resonance' and were caught employing it. As it is, now they're "only" imprisoned for life, but not many women seem to have this resonance - which is what they would feel were they men, and were in close proximity to their favored 'element'.

Yes, this is another novel where compounds and substances are mislabeled 'elements', and of course they're the standard clichéd four: earth, wind, fire, and water, with an added bonus of animals! How animals class as elements is unexplained - or at least it was as far as I read. There is one more resonance, however, and it's no spoiler that this is the one which Sable has. It wouldn't be a YA novel were it otherwise! Her resonance is that she can 'siphon-off' the magic of others and use it for whatever - in other words, if she siphons fire magic, she doesn't have to use it to control fire, she can instead control water with it.

Sable first learns she's special from Never - a girl who appears to her one night in her library and looks like a ghost, but who turns out to be a remote presence projected by a woman of Sable's age who is very much the same as Sable - having magic as her resonance. Sable first contacts her when she accidentally breaks her heart charm - a necklace she's worn for years, which supposedly gives her magic protection for her weak heart.

Given that this necklace was given to her by a magician from one of the lands where magic is freely practiced by both genders, it's no surprise to anyone but Sable that the guy who gave it to her knew of her condition, and supplied her with the necklace purely to protect her and keep her power hidden.

Every chapter ends in a bit of a cliff-hanger here, which is kind of fun, although some of them fall a bit flat. Despite the fact that it's a lengthy book (almost 450 pages) it's a very fast read. Sable has a best friend, Laurel, who doesn't know about her resonance, a nice guy named Mason who is her life-long friend - the resident good guy, and Lord Lockton, the resident bad guy, forming a nice trope triangle.

My immediate feeling - having read this far (~25%) - was that maybe Lockton was a good guy in disguise, and that the ghostly Never was actually a trap set up by the wizards who were supposedly holding her prisoner for a scheme of their own. I suspected that it’s Sable they want, and Never is a fiction used as bait. I'm not going to tell you if I was right about that, only that I'm usually wrong in my wild guesses - but not always!

Lockton didn't assume quite the role of 'bad boy' I'd initially thought. The 'bad boy', it turns out, is Reason Midnight. Yes, the names are profoundly stupid. Sable's dad's first name is "Venerable"! I am not making this up - the author is! The king's name is Dauntless, and no doubt there's a Prince Amity, a Princess Candor, and a Queen Abnegation.... Reason, as it happens, is the third leg of the inevitable YA trope love triangle

We're told that there's a level of excitement in the house at Reason's arrival, but this makes no sense. The character is merely the son of one of the guests at the house, and he's not considered a paragon of anything. He's juvenile, and he has neither accomplishments nor anything to recommend him, so there's no reason at all for anyone to be excited that he's coming.

The fact that the author, and through her, the main character, who is laughably babbling on about him in first person PoV, makes such a huge deal out of his visit tells me the character, if not the author, is way overdoing this visit, and therefore is a completely unreliable narrator, which in turn calls into question everything we've read so far. This is an example of rather short-sighted writing and poor editing.

The author has evidently forgotten that all of this isn't taking place in the Midnight household, but at the Wildcross home! There's no reason at all why that family should celebrate Reason's arrival as though someone of nobility or royalty is coming. If it were in the Midnight household, it would be rather different - although still excessive given how Lady Crescent speaks about him, but to have this non-event supposedly taking control of Sable's home and everyone in it is patently ridiculous and purest bullshit. The novel, which I'd been largely enjoying up to this point, took a serious hit because of this and made me wonder if this was the start of a lamentable downhill slide.

And downward slide it did. It was inevitable, when Sable decided to take a walk by herself rather than take a mid-day nap with everyone else, that she would go out into the grounds to walk, that she would go to the wildest most untamed part of the grounds, that she would run into Reason there, that Reason would be the trope YA male - with a woman's eyes (startlingly blue in this case, but with the clichéd super-thick lashes), a woman's full red lips, and that he would be well-dressed, and muscular.

I'm surprised his name wasn't Androgyne Midnight instead of 'Reason', because there wasn't any reason for him to be the way he was except that this is YA fiction and the author is cynically taking it the road most trampled by the herding instincts of desperate YA writers. I managed to refrain from vomiting only with extreme fortitude, but Sable's heart was less restrained: it began thudding at sad things like the proximity of Reason's magnificent knee. Pathetic.

Next out comes some appalling grammar: "You've air resonance aren't you?" she asks. What does that mean exactly? It means that author screwed up. It should be "You have air resonance, haven't you?" or "You're air resonant, aren't you?", but not a mix of both! Right after they've introduced themselves, part one ends. What this tells me is that this novel isn't about Sable at all, but about a magical super-hero, the manly man Reason Midnight. What a thorough and complete betrayal of the main character - and once again by a female author, too! Now, instead of being a strong woman, a rebel, and someone worth reading about, Sable is nothing more than an irritatingly swooning appendage of a male character, and I've lost all interest in this novel.

Reason turned out to be about as shallow as they come. These people have magic at their disposal, and yet Reason's only interests, in his own words, are: music, art, riding, picnics, the time to visit as many shops and tailors as he wishes, travel, dances, and young ladies. Not a single word about improving the quality of life for anyone. What a complete and total jerk.

Right after that we got the inevitable clichéd horse race between Sable and Reason which took place "scandalously" as the family went riding the next day. Yet no matter what Sable does, no matter how indiscreet, no matter how inappropriate, no matter how shameful in such a society, she's never censured, and she pays no penalty for her behavior no matter what it is! Meanwhile, Reason is snooping around Sable's home at night, but she doesn't have the guts to challenge him and when finally, accidentally, they encounter each other, Reason, and not Sable, takes charge and demands she tell him everything before he utters a word to her. Naturally this wilting violet acquiesces.

This was roughly half-way though this story, and by this time I'd had quite enough nonsense for one novel. I don't normally say anything about the cover of the books I review because this blog is about writing, not about cynically garnering sales, and the author typically has nothing to do with the cover unless they're smart enough to self publish, but in this case the cover was - accidentally, I'm sure - spot on. The novel and the cover are in sync in that they both advise us to pay no attention to this girl's mind - it's not important at all. Pay attention instead, we're obviously being told, only to her body because that's clearly all any woman has to offer.

There had been the makings of a great story here, but it was amateurishly, if not downright foolishly, frittered away on trashy YA clichés. I can't in all decency and honesty recommend this novel.


Sunday, January 25, 2015

Insanity by Cameron Jace


Title: Insanity
Author: Cameron Jace
Publisher: Cameron Jace
Rating: WARTY!

This novel, which has an astounding 72 chapters (they're quite short), is an oddity in that it's credited on the cover to Cameron Jace, but is actually copyrighted to Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl. I know! Weird, huh? It's yet another YA novel rooted in fairy tales, but this one also seems to draw at least part if its inspiration from ABC's Once Upon a Time in Wonderland itself a spin-off from Once Upon a Time, a short-lived show featuring Alice as a young woman who spent a large part of her childhood in an institution for the reality-challenged. In that series, Alice is a strong-willed and self-possessed female character who can take care of herself, so naturally the old white men who run things are not going to let something like that flourish. But I digress.

This is also another YA novel told in first person PoV because you know it's not legal to tell YA stories any other person, don't you?! The limitation of this person becomes crystally clear when the author is periodically forced to switch to third person to relate events elsewhere in the hospital. Why this was schizophrenic person-switching was done is as much a mystery as it is irritating. Perhaps to try and convey a sense of insanity? It does achieve that rather spectacularly, but it;s irritating as hell, which is why I didn't finish this drivel.

This novel begins very much the same way as the TV show, with Alice Pleasance Wonder, patient number 1832 (which is the year in which Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born), trying to break out of the institution, and failing as she becomes paralyzed by her fear of mirrors and by her Tiger Lily plant (which is her only companion) abruptly telling her that she's insane.

In that same institution, is held a patient known as Carter Pillar. Evidently some sort of homage to Hannibal Lecter, Carter is a serial killer, who escaped justice by pretending to be insane. Now he's evidently escaped this place, too - but he's done it before and he always returns.

This novel is replete with such sly references to Alice in Wonderland, but some bits and pieces made me wonder, such as, on page 17, "...cold-blooded serial killer disguising as an insane man." I would question the use of 'disguising' in place of disguised'. On that same page we encounter "...because neither the Interpol nor FBI..." which would have read better had it read, "...because neither Interpol nor the FBI...", and then there's "A series of uninterrupted laughter..." which makes no sense at all. This was an added irritant in an already irritating book.

Alice apparently killed all her classmates and her boyfriend on a school bus somehow, and blamed it upon creatures from Wonderland. Is she telling the truth or is she really insane? In the end, I didn't care. It's sad to see such a good idea (even if unoriginal) wasted so badly.


Sunday, January 11, 2015

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray


Title: Beauty Queens
Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

I've been somewhat of a fan of this author since I read the A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy - a trilogy that made sense, was well-written, and enjoyable. I looked at other titles by Bray, of course, but I've never found one which appealed as much as that did. Until now!

Beauty Queens is one of the funniest and best-written novels that I've ever not read. I say that because I didn't read this - I listened to the audio book read by Libba Bray herself, and she does a damned fine job of it. I recommend getting the audio book over the print or ebook because she reads it perfectly.

This just goes to show how brain-dead it truly is to insist upon actors for reading the audio versions of published books. Actors may be fine at acting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're any good at all at reading novels for an audience, and audio book publishers simply don't get that for some reason. Another book I enjoyed in the audio book version was The Golden Compass narrated by Philip Pullman and read by an ensemble cast. The Subtle Knife was just as enjoyable in the same format. I haven't got to the third in that audio trilogy yet.

The big problem with audio books is the expense, of course: the CD versions are way expensive, but with the advent of audio ebooks, perhaps this will change - although with Big Publishing™, I wouldn't hold out much hope. I got mine from the Libba-rary(!), and once I knew how good it was, I went out and bought the hardback - which I got at a nice discount - just to have it on my shelf.

This novel gripped me from the start and made me laugh out loud repeatedly. I routinely by-pass introductions and prologues in books, but this is hard to do with audio-books, so I just let this play. I enjoyed every bit of it right from the start, fortunately.

The story begins with fifty teen beauty queens, one from each US state, surviving a plane crash on a remote island, and their dealing with the aftermath. The first couple of chapters were so hilarious that I was pretty much ready to give this a 'worthy read' rating even if the rest of it was crappy!

Fortunately, it wasn't. The author creates a whole set of characters (not all fifty get a significant part, but a bunch of them do), and each has a distinct personality and behavior - and they all have interesting back-stories. There was some serious work went into this one. The sly, anarchic humor runs rampant through every chapter.

It's not simply stranded beauty queens, which is hilarious enough in itself, especially with the author's writing subtly undermining the whole concept of beauty pageants. It's also the behind-the-scenes machinations by the pageant organizers and, believe it or not, arms running! I fully and highly recommend this one - the audio version in particular.


Henshin by Ken Niimura


Title: Henshin
Author: Ken Niimura
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!


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

I think this is the last of three manga I'll be reading for a while (I say that because I still have two more to get through and now, I'm not looking forward to those! I don't know what it is, but the Japanese graphic novels seem way too juvenile for my taste. This one in particular seemed like it was aimed at middle-graders (and maybe it was) but that said, there was really nothing in it at all to entertain a more mature taste. Note that I read this with my middle-grade son, and he got just as little out of it as I did.

This novel consists of thirteen "chapters" most of which have little, if anything, to do with one another, although there is a thread here and there which is shared. The stories are very short, and really have no ending. Indeed, they were so abrupt in some cases that I seriously wondered if pages were missing.

The stories themselves weren't interesting. Yes, a bit here and there was entertaining, a couple of bits made me laugh, and some of the art work was nice, but overall I was bored to tears reading this. I use the term 'reading' very loosely because there isn't very much to read. A whole bunch of frames and even panels have no text, which is fine if the images convey the story, but most of the time I was scratching my head wondering what the heck was happening.

This book also annoyed me through it's poor use of white space. It was a standard comic book format, but the images left huge margins (at least in the iPad, on the Bluefire Reader). With an ebook, this isn't a problem, but I feel for the wasted trees if this goes into a print run, with all that white space wrenched from some poor tree and then going unused.

I can't recommend this graphic novel.


Saturday, January 10, 2015

Fox Forever by Mary E. Pearson


Title: Fox Forever
Author: Mary E. Pearson
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!

This is the third sequel to The Adoration of Jenna Fox which I read a long time ago and found it entertaining but nothing that made me want to read a sequel. Pave me over, break the flagstones, and call me crazy, I didn’t realize that this was even a sequel, much less the second one in this series. I soon grasped that as I listened to the audio of course, but I found myself skipping tracks on the very first disk. It was completely un-entertaining and I neither had nor could generate any interest in listening to it. I gave up after the first disk and returned it to the library, thankful that I hadn't bought this one!


Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop by Julia Park Tracey


Title: Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop
Author: Julia Park Tracey
Publisher: Libertary Co
Rating: WORTHY!

(I initially believed that Julia Park Tracey didn't know how to spell gravy (she adds an unfortunate penultimate 'e'), and that's how I opened this review, but I'm told by two people - neither of which appears to be the author! - that this was deliberate, so evidently I missed something! Believe it or not, that happens, so strike that one!). Thanks Betsy and Tuscany for keeping me honest!)

I'm not sure if main character Veronika is my kind of person, though. She abuses alcohol to a horrifying degree, and was liberally sprinkled with tats (of which I'm not a fan), which amusingly seemed to be all along a Little Mermaid theme, but that said, she was strong, diligent, smart (for the most part!), inventive, industrious, and really interesting, so she had a heck of a lot going for her which is why I liked her as a character. It was like the author had read my playbook before endowing her character with some of her traits, in particular, her environmental views. A lot of the time, she sounds exactly like me in her thinking and her rather caustic or humorous observations of life around her. It felt a bit weird!

Here's another way this got me: I'm not a fan of first person PoV, but in this case, it was done in a non-nauseating way, so even that wasn't an issue. It never felt like I was reading, "Hey look at MEEEEEE! How important am IIIIIII?", so I'm eternally grateful to the author for that! I'm not a fan of series, either, unless they're well done. All too often, they're merely a cynical and lazy way of making a buck by substituting tired templates for actual creative work, repeating the same story with only a twist or two here and there to try and warm it over, so it is indeed a compliment that I'm interested in reading future volumes in the "Hot Off the Press" series, of which this is volume 1.

As much as I loved this novel, I had, as you know if you read my blog, one or two inevitable issues. The only serious one of these was when Veronika bikes down to the building site one Saturday morning and sees the bulldozers churning-up what look like Native American shell burial mounds, and what look (to her) like bones. Instead of using her camera to take pictures, she panics and causes a scene, and then has to call in a man to man-handle her vaporous womanly ways - or her frantic teenage ways, however you wish to categorize it. I was a bit saddened by that, but willing to forgive it since it was that one time - and no character should be perfect since no person is. Besides, what are friends for?

There's another issue directly related to that one, which is that Veronika seems to have Eona syndrome, whereby (as in the dilogy of the same name), she has all the facts, but can't arrive at an intelligent and logical deduction from them. She ought to know exactly how long-time friend Aiden feels about her, but she's completely blind to it. This was the sole example of a trope or cliché which registered with me in this novel. Other than that, the novel as brilliantly written, studiously avoiding the common pitfalls, and being all the better for it. I salute the author for providing an object lesson to clueless YA and adult writers how to actually tell a good, original, and engrossing story.

Veronika's alcohol abuse was an issue because first of all it's always an issue and secondly, and more importantly in the context of the writing, it seemed out of keeping with her health-minded attitude to what she puts into her body, and in particular with her vegan mind-set. Veronika is a latter-day hippie, truth be told, with the tats, the body-piercings, and her dress sense and diet, but she drinks strong coffee and also alcohol to a disturbing degree.

Not that vegans can't do such things by any means, but it seemed to be too far out of her character zone to me. Maybe I misread her character! But again, these things happen in real life, so it wasn't a death-blow to my enjoyment of the novel. I just felt that if you were going to imbue her with some necessary flaws, there were better ones to give her than these. OTOH, she's not that long out of college, so maybe there's some maturing lying-in-wait for her there?

Veronika's sex life was a curious one, because it was conducted entirely in her mind, yet there was nothing in the text to indicate that she was fantasizing. I learned great caution after that first time, and so I almost didn't believe it was happening for real when it actually did. I was amused by that one - the sexual escapade described at the end of chapter 25, between Veronika and one of the other main characters. It was written as poetically as it was perversely, so I couldn't tell if the author had deliberately (and I do mean with deliberation) chosen to be lyrical and playful, or if she was just really shy about writing about that particular kind of sexual encounter. Or maybe I completely misunderstood what she was describing? Ha!

If that doesn't make you want to read this novel, then nothing will!

I'd say something about he cover: how its exploitative and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story or the main character, but the cover is rarely in the hands of the writer unless they self-publish, so let's leave that alone, shall we?! But on the other side of this coin, I've had good success with Libertary Co. They published The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan which I favorably reviewed last month.

So, overall, 100 thumbs up for this one. This novel and the precious few others like it are what makes it worth going through a dozen or two other annoying and predictable novels, because it's this one - this kind of story, the one the author really nailed, that I'm looking for.

It was beautiful, gorgeously written, with great characters and, amazingly, a wonderful plot! It was told well, in great English, and had just enough extraneous detail to make it feel realistic, without getting bogged down in reams of pretty prose which take the story nowhere.

I thoroughly recommend this one and if the author is seeking beta readers for the next volume, I'm in!