The Dark Unwinding by Sharon Cameron

Title: The Dark Unwinding
Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: worthy!

A Spark Unseen is also reviewd in this blog.

In June, 1852, Katharine Tully is traveling by carriage to visit her uncle. Her aunt Alice believes he's quite insanely frittering away the family fortune, meaning that her own spoiled son will get nothing. She dispatches Katharine to cauterize the hemorrhage before it’s too late. Aunt Alice is not well-liked by Katharine, but the latter undertakes this odious task because, as her aunt's bookkeeper, she realizes that she has much to lose if the family becomes bankrupted by an insane relative's profligacy. Katharine can see her way to enjoying a comfortable living once Alice is dead and gone, and she has only to deal with her not-too-smart cousin, whose needs are easily satisfied. I wonder if Cameron chose the name 'Katharine' spelled with that second 'a' as it is, because it’s similar to the supposedly heretical Cathars?!

But I digress! She arrives at her uncle's mansion via a mile-long tunnel lit by gas lamps - all of which she compulsively counts. Cameron says the idea for Tulman's home was given to her by the residence and activities of the 5th Duke of Portland. Katharine is deposited at the front door with her trunk and valise, but when she knocks, no one answers. The house is huge and very dusty, and no one seems to be around. She follows some footprints left in the dusty carpet, which lead from the unlocked front door, and becomes almost lost.

After being virtually deafened by the chimes at five o'clock from an incredible number of clocks in one room - all working precisely in sync - she hurries to a different room which is dark, and where she hears giggling, and then is scared by someone watching her. It turns out that the observer is nothing more than a rather lifelike model with sparkling eyes. Eventually she finds her way to the kitchen where she's greeted in a hostile manner by the servants. A young man named Lane is gruff and very protective of her uncle. Mrs Jeffries, the cook, is equally unpleasant and quite territorial in her kitchen, and Davy is just a kid who is evidently mute and who loves his large pet rabbit. Her uncle Tulman is nowhere to be found. Apparently he only visits the house on Thursdays.

After spending a disturbing night in the unkempt bedroom, where she found cut human hair matching her own color in one of the wardrobe drawers, Katharine is taken by Lane to meet Uncle Tulman, which involves a long walk across windswept countryside and through a small village. She encounters a young girl called Mary in the village who she later discovers has adopted Katharine as her own mistress, and subsequently acts as her lady-in-waiting. Katharine's uncle proves to be very much more escapement than clockwork, but he's not what you'd call insane; he's merely eccentric with a touch of autism - but that's not how they would see it in 1852. Tulman takes to her, however, and shows her some of his "toys", which include a clockwork fish, a clockwork dragon, and a clockwork boy. Katharine also discovers that he's a math savant, and that he shares her own obsessive compulsive counting disorder, and also that he upsets very easily!

Another young man whom she encounters was an earlier resident of the village who is now back for a brief visit is Ben. He's fascinated by her uncle's toys, but I have a bad feeling about him - especially since at one point young Davy seems to be deliberately trying to drag her away from him! Katharine learns that there are in fact two villages with a population of some nine hundred people, all of whom were liberated from London workhouses. If she shuts down the operation, these people will be left destitute. She talks with her uncle's lawyer, Mr Babcock, who relates to her the history of the place. Her great aunt had wanted to protect her son Tulman, and set all of this in motion to provide for him, and to eventually start showing a profit which would repay the estate everything which had been taken from it, but she died before she could bring this plan to fruition. Babcock says he is merely finishing what she had begun all those years before.

As the days slip by, Katharine is more and more torn between her growing attraction to life at Stranwyne, the estate where she is a guest, and her practical inability to do other than what her aunt Alice has demanded she do. She decides to have a birthday party, but then dithers over that decision. She goes roller-skating in the underground ballroom with Lane. But on the other side of the ledger, there are weird and scary things happening.

Twice Katharine wakes up with a hangover even though she has definitely not been drinking, and she discovers there isn't even any drink to be had in the villages. One morning she wakes up with dirty boots and no idea how they got that way. She discovers Mrs Jeffries sneaking around in Lane's room where he creates fine miniature figurines in silver. She learns from her maid that someone is sending letters écrit en français from Stranwyne, and no one knows who is sending them. One night in the hallway outside her room, she encounters someone who she follows but never catches sight of, and finds her way to a place close by the kitchen, which has been decorated with things carried from elsewhere in the house, and where both a meal and a fire was set. She finds there a book about South America, and takes it the next morning to spend time with Davy, trying to teach him to read and write, but then she discovers that he appears to be able to read perfectly well. So why won't he talk?

Well on page 183, Katharine Tulman changes her name to Mary Sue as she's heading out with a picnic basket and encounters a man in the tunnel coming the opposite direction. She hides and then follows him, discovering (as she sees him in better lighting) that it's Cook, the surgeon, who meets Jeffries, the cook, in the underground ballroom. She simply dismisses this as unimportant despite everything which has happened to her. That kicked me out of suspension of disbelief right there, because I simply don’t buy that someone who would snoop in someone's room, or go wandering the house in the middle of the night merely to satisfy her curiosity, and who lives in an environment where she's already encountered many strange and suspicious things, and who already has reason to be suspicious of Jeffries, would just let this go.

That suspicion of Jeffries should have taken root when she saw the woman leaving Lane's room and slipping something into her pocket, but Katharine never called her out on that, nor did she tell Lane about it, and he's the very guy (so Cameron expects us to believe), with whom she's supposedly falling in love! What specie of love is it which has so little confidence?

On the day of Katharine's birthday, she drinks some wine - which I thought had been drugged, but evidently it had not. Something had, however, been poisoned, so maybe the villain isn’t Ben, but Jeffries? I’d thought they were in it together. Anyway, what happens is that two men show up with a warrant to escort someone to the "lunatic asylum". Mary greets them at the door, but then takes off in a panic when she realizes who they are, and she runs to Katharine's room where the party is, to warn them. The men then find their own way to Katharine's bedroom. There went my suspension of disbelief again, right out the door. There is no way in hell that these people would do something like that. Yeah, in a children's book perhaps. In a cartoon animation, but in 1852 England? Never. In fact, impropriety is rather high in this novel for its time. I have let this slip by for the sake of the story, but while some of it can be fitted to the tale, a lot of it cannot (such as the example depicted above) and stands out like a sore thumb - or more like a sore finger pointing out how fictional this tale is!

But we discover that they aren't here for Uncle Tulman, who has been squirreled away. Now that took me by surprise! Unfortunately, before any more can transpire, Katharine passes out from the poison. When she wakes up, she finds her life was saved by the quick administration of ipecac. Carapichea ipecacuanha is native to Brazil. It's a poison which is not recommended for use in inducing vomiting any more. It was known in Europe three hundred years ago, but how well it might have been known in 1852 in rural England, I can’t say. For myself, I actually never had heard of ipecac until I came to the USA.

So it turns out I wasn't quite as far wrong in my assessment of these characters as I'd begun to think! How unusual for me! I did have some minor issues with it, but it was nice to see a YA story that didn't become lost in a YA triangle of boring adolescence. This is a smart novel, well written, with a few issues, but nothing that would prevent your thorough enjoyment of it. It also appears to be the start of a series. The ending was dramatic with some unexpected twists and turns, so while I am not sure I will read any more of the series, I have no problem rating it as a worthy tale.

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally

Title: Catching Jordan
Author: Miranda Kenneally
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Rating: worthy

Don't confuse this novel with Crossing Jordan or with Jordan's Catch!

I've been aware of this novel for a while and shied away from reading it because it's similar in some regards to my own Seasoning. So what made me take the plunge? Well I was kicked into dealing with it by the news story of Maddy Paige's appalling treatment by the delusional and clueless so-called Strong Rock Christian School. It needs to be renamed "Rocks in the Head Christian School" or "Strong Discrimination Christian School". Things desperately need to change, and reviewing this novel and others like it down the road is one albeit tiny way to get the feeling out there that gender is irrelevant to everything except procreation, and amongst some species, not even then! Since my own Seasoning novel is already published and was originally written some years ago, no one can accuse me of ripping off someone else's work!

Having completed Catching Jordan, I can say that the two novels are indeed very different. Seasoning isn't about romance or getting into college, it's about the game and about genderism, and it's about growing up, not about wallowing blindly in some adolescent fiction; it's about leading and taking charge, and it's about overcoming paralyzing fear. This isn't a comment on Catching Jordan, but it is a comment on bad YA fiction. Seasoning was never aimed at the young adult market although I'm working (on and off, mostly off!) on a partially illustrated version which will be aimed precisely at that market.

Before we get started on the review let me comment in detail on the Maddy Paige insanity. I noticed while reading the limited news items about it, that the Atlanta Phoenix is supporting Maddy, but it seems a bit sad to me that a team which is segregated from "men's" sports is supporting a woman who wants precisely the opposite: a fully-integrated team!

Maddy's case is clearly religiously motivated. This world is always sadder when religion ceases to be personal and becomes a power-play once more, but this goes beyond just religion: it's also an ingrained societal imperative, as was shown by Constanta.com's article about it, where Veronica Griffin of all people labeled Atlanta Phoenix as a "Women's Professional Football team", not simply as a "Professional Football team".

The bottom line is that if a person is good enough, that's all there is; gender (or anything else for that matter) is irrelevant. It's time to stop seeing this as inviolably delineated "men's" and "women's" and start seeing it as "people's". What, exactly, does Strong Rock's Phil Roberts mean when he talks about "girl sports" and "boy sports"? Do sports have gender now‽ Seriously? If history teaches us anything, it's that segregation has never been the answer. We're in a position where even the military is fully integrating women, so why are we deliberately segregating half of our population in sports?

If Phil Roberts was scared that "...boys were going to start lusting after her...", then what he needed to address is the abject failure of his (evidently not) Strong Rock Christian school to inculcate children in appropriate values and behaviors instead of punishing a 12-year-old girl for his school's sorry failure. Or does he want us to believe that a good Christian education necessarily turns out lustful boys? Maybe it's a case of strongly sucks, not strongly rocks?

If it's true that women cooperate better than men as some studies suggest, then including women on the team (not "the boys team", just "the team") is not only a just thing to do, it's a demonstrably smart thing to do!

So let's review! I have to say that I was turned off this novel rather quickly (by p15!) when Tyler Green ("Ty" of course) saunters onto the stage, and Jordan Woods turns almost literally to Jell-O™. Now this is the tough captain of her team, used to being in charge, used to playing rough, used to focusing, surrounded by hunks every day, getting down and dirty with them, and not a whisper of an overt attraction, but her legs literally go rubbery when Ty shows up. I'm sorry but that made me nauseous. Keneally betrayed Jordan right there and then. I found myself seriously hoping this novel was better than this, but I had little faith that it was over the next thirty pages that I read.

Jordan Woods (cool last name!) is the captain of her high school football team. She's also the quarterback. This parallels my own Janine Majeski character who is the captain of her factory soccer team and also the lead striker, and that's pretty much where the parallel ends. Jordan's dad is a major league football player (who predictably isn't supportive of her, but he is supportive of her bother, who plays college football). Her mother, predictably, is supportive, but has some weird ideas about how her daughter needs to represent herself to guys. Her idea of selling herself is to completely sell out.

When Ty, the predictable new kid in town, appears at practice hoping for a place on the team, Jordan is so predictably distracted in practicing a new snap that one of her own team, playing opposition, sacks her. For those not familiar with American football, the term 'sacking the quarterback' doesn't mean firing her, it means tackling. Why it has to be described in such dramatic terms is a mystery. Rome was sacked, a quarterback is simply knocked over - like a liquor store. Americans are probably the only nation on the planet who think along Muslim lines, but not about god: about their own nation! Whereas the Muslims assert in the Shahada that "there is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the messenger of God," Americans assert however unconsciously, there is no nation but the USA; capitalism is its profit.

So while to the rest of the world, 'football' means two teams of eleven kicking a ball around a pitch, trying to get it into opposing nets, America begs to differ. No, not even begs: demands! Contrary to real football where the hand isn't allowed to touch the ball unless you're a goalkeeper or you're throwing the ball back in after it goes out over the side line (and there are strict rules covering all that), in (American) football the foot never touches the ball! Well, yeah, there's a rare instance or two, such as kick off, for example, but this is really not football. It's Carryball or Throwball. Tarryball? Crowball?!

Anyway Jordan is fine: she's a tough player, but all of this is about to go as far south as the South Auckland Saints courtesy of super-hunk Ty. Suddenly Jordan, hitherto the consummate player, cannot think of anything else but Ty and his hunky body. Indeed, her whole life quits orbiting planet football and starts circling the drain of sinkhole Ty. I'm sorry, but I don't buy this given what we've been told about Jordan. Yes, I would buy that she's strongly attracted to a guy, but not like it's described here, and not to the virtual abandonment of everything else. That's not the Jordan I was introduced to in the first fifteen pages. I don't know why Kenneally betrays and abandons that Jordan, disrespecting her and morphing her from a worthy, even remarkable female protagonist into nothing more than a gland warmer.

Over the next thirty pages or so we reach the point where Jordan isn't sleeping because she can't stop thinking of Ty, and where she's spending hours doing her hair, shaving her legs, and picking out a wardrobe. One thought she has is "I hope Ty likes shea butter," although whether she imagines him eating her or simply fondling her skin isn't detailed. And yeah, I hope that did disgust you because it disgusted me to read what Keneally was writing here. But Keneally thinks it's okay to write this stuff as long as she has Jordan agree that "Yeah, I know. I make myself sick, too."! She tops all this with a lacy underwear set which barely covers her (and which her own mother bought for her), and incorporates a push-up bra underneath an unusually (for her) low-cut T-shirt.

What bothers me about this is that there seems to be a mindset here that Ty is somehow going to intuit exactly what Jordan is wearing and react favorably, even predictably to it! I really don't care if she falls for a guy or sleeps with him if she's thought it though some. That's her business. It's also her business what she wears, but for her to react like this when she's met Ty just once, hardly spoken to him, and doesn't know squat about him is a disgrace. Is she planning on flying into bed with him when she knows nothing about him, his habits, his attitude towards women, or most importantly, his sexual history? Remember this is a girl who, we're told, has been playing school football for many years. She's not thirteen, she's seventeen. She supposed to be on the cusp of adulthood. She's the best there is at what she does in her state. She didn't get there by failing to plan, failing to anticipate, failing to look ahead and to consider all the options, or by acting like she's brain-dead. Yet all of that training, which is ingrained if we're to believe what Kenneally has told us in the first fifteen pages, runs completely off the clock!

Keneally's genderism exposed in this novel is another disgrace, as is her appalling deprecation of "math nerds". She puts this bigotry into Jordan's mind, but that only makes it worse: if Jordan is in a position where discrimination and bigotry come into play, then where does she get off employing that same attitude towards others? This just makes Jordan look like a hypocrite or a privileged brat. Those are not qualities which will endear her to me. To her credit, Keneally does try to claw some of this back later in the novel, but whether she does enough is up to you to decide.

If some clueless guy had written this novel it wouldn't be any less excusable, but it would be more understandable. For this to come from a female writer is disturbing at best. Keneally's attitude towards Jordan's fellow football players is pretty much that they're all closet rapists. And what's with them all calling her 'Woods'? It seems all the girls and virtually none of the guys get to be called by their first name. That just struck me as weird. The two main protagonists are the exceptions to this. There is another, the third element of the almost inevitable triangle, but both his first and last names sound like first names so it doesn't really make an impact!

Jordan's attitude towards the cheerleaders is that they're all essentially ignorant, rude, cruel, and air-headed bimbos who neither know nor care about football, only about the hunks who play it. I don't doubt for a minute that there are cheerleaders like that, and high school football players like she describes and implies, but to categorize all of them in one way is bigoted nonsense. It's no better than saying something as idiotic as "all black people are drug addicts", or "gays are pedophiles". I was dearly hoping at this point that this novel improved, but I wasn't optimistic, especially when I discovered that Keneally is yet another writer who thinks in terms of 'bicep' and not 'biceps'!

Jordan gets screwed over by her coach in the first game of the season when he dumps her after the first half and puts Ty in, in her place. This is the game which has scouts from the University of Alabama watching; then Alabama seems to want her as a college player, but makes her pose in make-up and a demeaning outfit for their calendar. I have to wonder if anyone from the UoA has seen this novel and how they feel about Keneally describing their picture-taking as she does. I just Googled pictures for UoA and women's sports and saw nothing even remotely like Keneally describes! Is this a personal vendetta against Alabama?

On the emotional front, Jordan really starts screwing things up. For a seventeen-year-old she acts like a ten year old. For a team captain she's clueless in how to apply what she supposedly knows there to other parts of her life. She does precisely what we expected, and starts dating Ty, and then she discovers how utterly clueless she's been with Sam, who she's known for a decade and who is in love with her. She rides roughshod over his feelings and while she's telling him that she wants everything to remain the same between them (but really, he's not good enough for her). While she's doing this, she ignores message after message from Ty. When he finally comes over in tears through worry about her whereabouts and welfare (and yes, he does overdo it on the "I need to know where you are" power-play, but he lost his parents to a car accident and didn't know where they were, either). Jordan rightly tells him off about that, but this is after she basically told Sam how things were going to be! In short, she treats both guys like dirt.

At that point, I didn't like Jordan any more, and since this was the only character in this entire novel who had offered any hope of holding my interest, I was disappointed to say the least. The opening few pages were all about sports, but sports was quickly ditched with the arrival of Ty, and that was a mistake; the novel took a turn for the worst with that, but by the time my doubts were maximizing, I had only a hundred or so pages left to go, so I pressed on, and Keneally actually did struggle to pull this out of the fire. It's for that reason alone that I'm rating it as a cautious 'worthy'. The writing - technically speaking - isn't bad, but the events and conversation are rather tedious at times, stuck in a groove. However since I have to operate under the assumption that what might seem less than ideal to me could seem reasonable to someone who is actually the same age as Jordan. I would hope that such people have a bit more going for them and be looking out for something stronger than this, but maybe this will do for now.

Angel by Nicole Marrow and Laura Hayden

Rating: WORTHY!

I breezed through the first third of this with no effort which I took as a very positive sign! The writing is really good, and my fear that this was going to enter into a sickly embrace with instadore or paranormal trope was swept away leaving no stain on my consciousness. I still didn’t know at that point what was going on with the female protagonist, Angela, but I was on board!

It could have been a novel about an angel, exactly as its title suggests, which would be a big, fat red ink mark in this book's ledger, but it's also:

1. Not written in the first person present tense
2. Not a sad YA romance novel
3. Not a bearer of a prologue
4. Not written badly
5. Amusing
6. and supplied with at least three interesting characters

These are all big fat black ink marks in the ledger, so I'm really quite comfortable - moreso than I feared I would be when I saw this on the library shelf. Believe it or not, I was attracted by the color to begin with - a rich shiny orange which made it stand out from other books; it looked good enough to eat or drink! The title was a bit of a repulsive force-field, but after I read the blurb I was definitely interested, and after I read the first couple of pages, I decided that the writing made it worth a read, so it was not the problem I’d initially visualized.

That's not to say the writing is perfect; there's a handful of screw-ups, such as one p296: "Before Dante could Angela's denial..." which only goes to show that even an expensive production with a professional editor can fail and not end up as good a hob as a conscientious self-publisher can do., but here's the secret: if you write badly and tell and interesting story, you can get a lot further with me than if you write perfect prose, yet tell a crappy story! Marrow and Hayden do neither - they tread very well between those extremes, writing very well for the most part and telling a really engrossing (if somewhat oddball!) story.

I don’t know squat about either Marrow or Hayden, so I can’t say what the deal is with the process that put this novel together. I'm guessing that maybe Marrow had this idea for a novel and Hayden came on board to lend an experienced hand with the writing. Or maybe they're friends and cooked it up together. Whatever the deal is, it works well. Marrow is married to the rapper Ice-T and has been for some time (his real last name is Marrow). According to wikipedia, her nickname 'Coco' derives from her younger sister's inability to say the name 'Nicole' when they were kids! So it's not derived from the song by The Sweet, which they released well before they became big glam-rock stars in England with a string of hits.!

But I digress! The story starts on an airplane where a passenger wakes up and realizes she doesn't know where she is or even who she is. She hardly has time to contemplate this when the plane, which was gliding in for a landing, flips over and breaks up, cartwheeling along the Hudson River in New York City. The only survivors are the woman and the infant she saves from drowning. A news reporter for an online news magazine happens to be on a nearby ferry boat interviewing its captain when the plane crashes and he gets first-hand footage. He also leaps into the water to help this woman and the baby when he sees her swimming and no one else seems to be focusing on her. Later he's instrumental in getting her relocated - when the hospital wants to hastily discharge her - to a psychiatric facility. Her problem is that her memory isn’t coming back.

Her name is determined, by process of elimination, to be Angela, which is very close to the 'Angel of the Hudson' name she'd been dubbed with for saving the baby. Angela seems to have an extraordinarily disturbing effect on men. They seem to vacillate from feeling rather antagonistic towards her, to wanting to jump right into bed with her, no questions asked. A rep from the airline almost seduces her in her hospital room, but he has a heart-attack before anything can happen. Her doctor decides to discharge her as soon as he can because she seems to be a lawsuit waiting to happen, When Dante, the news reporter discovers (from his brother Bryant, who works at the hospital, that she's to be discharged with her memory still not intact, he publishes an article which effectively shames the airline into footing the bill for some extended psychiatric evaluation, to see if her amnesia can't be resolved.

The facility she's sent to is shabby and so it’s value to her as a remedy is highly questionable; clearly the airline hasn’t exactly splurged, but at least it's somewhere to stay! She's roomed with Gretchen, a rather valkeryan woman with serious anger control issues, but Angela, when threatened, uses some Judo move on her, which drops Gretchen to her knees and the two of them become friends after that.

There's one more thing. Angela hears voices which seem quite clearly to be the thoughts of people around her, but she doesn’t get all thoughts all the time. It seems to be a bit like Prince Po in Graceling: - she only seems to get thoughts which are directed specifically at her, although Angela is a bit of a Mary Sue about figuring this out. What transpires is that she finally realizes that it's men she can hear, not women at all, and on one of her daily constitutionals around the grounds, she "overhears" two night-shift orderlies plotting on raping her new roommate (Gretchen is by this point unceremoniously gone, for some reason). In order to defeat the evil orderlies, Angela switches meds on her roommate so she's the one who is out for the count; Angela then switches places with her. I think Marrow and Hayden need to learn a bit more about how medical facilities dispense medications and the power of what inappropriate dosages can do, but they've already established this place as sloppy at best, so I'm willing to let this one slide!

The two men come into her room at midnight and she's suddenly overcome by a desire to have sex with them, but then her previous plan breaks through her delirium, and she beats up on them instead. The next morning she "hears" one of them plotting revenge against, her so she checks herself out of the institution and calls Dante, using the number on the business card he left in her clothing when she was at the hospital. They meet at a diner (although on p170, Marrow mistakenly refers to it as a dinner!) in a bad part of New York City. I've been waiting for these two to get together, so let's see what happens now! I'm in a mood for blitzing this novel and getting it read today. That will also facilitate my starting on something new, which has become more imperative since it has relevance to a news item that's been on the airwaves over the last couple of days.

In the diner, they eat surprisingly tasty food, and Angela shares everything with Dante, including passing him a picture which she has drawn of the man who keeps on appearing in her nightmares - the man who killed her. Dante thinks she may be crazy - but she doesn't know this since he's the first man she cannot "hear". Despite his fear that he's as crazy as she is, he decides to help her. He starts by trying to get together a list of women from the local area who were murdered, and he narrows it down to a list of six he intends to investigate. Angela picks out a specific one: Chloe Mason and without seeing the photograph, identifies the perp, her husband Lars. Curiously, the drawing she did is never mentioned nor is it compared with the photograph. This appears to be an oversight on the part of the authors.

One evening very shortly thereafter, when Dante and Angela are in his cube discussing how to proceed, Dante's miserable boss Victor comes out. Angela hides and Dante talks with him briefly, but just when he thinks Victor is going to leave him in peace, Angela comes out of her hiding place and strikes up a conversation with him. It's during this and the events surrounding it that Dante discovers, as does Angela, that she can change her physical form, so she's not only reacting behaviorally towards fulfilling men's fantasies, she's now reacting physically and actually changing her appearance to match what they desire.

The reason she has done this in this case is that she caught Victor's thoughts - he only came to Dante's cube to plant some evidence which would destroy Dante's career and simultaneously free Victor from suspicion. Victor has been embezzling money from the news organization and was planning on disappearing to Brasil. Angela's transformation and mind-reading bring down Victor and get Dante a promotion: he now runs the news department and he hires Angela to work with him. When he and she are going through the resumes for the people he's considering hiring, Angela remarks that they're all women! Dante does indeed staff up his extraordinarily genderist news department with all female staff.

Three of these, Selma, Althea, and Ivy, are brought into Dante and Angela's confidence about what they're up to. The four of them go after Lars Mason under the pretense of giving him a freebie web spot advertising his sale of his magnificent mansion in the guise of an interview with this successful financier. He claims he's selling the house because it holds too many memories of his wife. Needless to say they bring him down, and that's how this story ends. But while there's no prologue, there is an epilogue which has Dante and Angela jetting off to LA to pursue what Angela was doing out there for two days before she flew back to NYC, became possessed by Chloe, and got into that crash. Clearly this novel was intended as the start of a series, and I have to say that I'd be up for reading a sequel, especially since we still don't know what Angela is or what happened when Chloe died and her "spirit" seemed to fly up and possess Angela's body right as her plane flew over the very place where Chloe was murdered.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Title: Shades of Grey
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

I've also reviewed Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and One of Our Thursdays is Missing

This is about a place called Chromatacia, a society which is left after the collapse of our own, evidently. There is a class system in place defined and controlled a person's ability to perceive colour! Most people can see only one hue, some, two. Those who cannot see colour are referred to as 'Greys', and they occupy the lowest perch in the tree. Color plays a larger part than this, however. People's names and the names of locations also derive from names of various colors, and some colors have beneficial or deleterious health effects; Lincoln Green is a powerful illegal drug, for example. People in the lower ranks are treated in some regards as servants of those who are higher.

I saw this novel on the library shelf, and smirked because of the title. I will never read 50 Shades of Gray or any of its derivatives, but this title made me want to at least read the blurb, wondering how this poor guy Jasper Fforde is coping with a novel which came out the year after his did, and has a title so similar to his. Is his novel garnering greater interest because of that or has it been lost in the shuffle? Once I'd read the blurb, however, I just could not put it back on the shelf, so here we are! If you like Douglas Adams, you will more than likely enjoy this.

Wikipedia has an article on the EM spectrum. The visible light spectrum is a tiny, tiny fraction of this. How we see light is a fascinating story in itself, and the development of receptors in the eyes of various organisms is an entrancing example of the modern synthesis of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

The story is narrated by Eddie Russett from his unfortunate position head down inside a carnivorous tree, the Yateveo, but at least it's not a carnivorous swan..... From his unenviable position, he relates events of the last four days when he travels with his father, a swatchman (a color doctor) on their way to a distant town called East Carmine - a journey upon which Eddie befriends an aging Yellow fellow. Eddie has better than average red perception, and has a good chance of an upwardly mobile marriage to Constance Oxblood, but on a visit to a town nearby while waiting for the train for East Carmine, and visiting the sights (the Badly Drawn Map, the Last Rabbit, etc - you know, the usual!), Eddie and his father come across an injured Purple (who is really a Grey masquerading as a Purple), and save his life. Indirectly because of this, Eddie meets a Grey girl named Jane who apparently has no problem treating Eddie (who with his slight color perception merits a much higher class rating than she) with no respect whatsoever. He's quite captivated by her, but has to catch his train and so is prevented from pursuing her.

But would you believe it, when he arrives at East Carmine - a lowlife of a town - the Grey maid who's assigned to work one hour per day at his house is: Jane! (Jane Grey, get it?!) Her attitude towards him hasn't improved. She pretty much threatens to break his jaw no matter what he says to her, but when he fails to turn her in, she does at least warn him not to eat the scones she just prepared - not that we find out what the heck happened to those who ate the scones. This town is even more quirky than the story has been so far. On a guided tour of the town by a lowlife Red called Tommo, who is highly entertaining, Eddie meets the town's top banana - a Yellow who isn't quite at the pinnacle, but will be once his mother is out of the picture. He tries to lure Eddie into 'bending a few rules' for him.

Eddie's father takes over as the town's swatch-meister, treating the sick. The two of them venture into the ghost city of Rusty Hill, where the mildew struck down everyone. Eddie has a list of items to recover, including a Caravaggio painting which makes him somewhat of a hero, although his heroism is somewhat undermined by the fact that Jane lured him into a Yateveo tree trap. How did this happen? He saw her in Rusty Hill - who knows how she got there? and then simpleton that he is, she lured him into the trap with the dishonest promise to tell him the truth. Oh, and he also saw a Pooka - a ghost, which seemed to be able to see him and tried to tell him something but disappeared right when she opened her mouth.

So are Eddie and all the people he knows actually ghosts - and that's why they can't see colors so well? Are they not the survivors of the Something That Happened but the victims? Is the mildew merely their passing on to the after life? Who knows! Eddie gets an offer of 100 merits to visit the newly opened derelict town of High Saffron - where 85 people have disappeared never to be seen again. They desperately need to mine the color from there. Will he go? Let's read on! Oh, in passing, let it be noted that on p111 Fforde doesn’t seem to grasp the difference between ancestor and descendant. Just saying!

Eddie continues to try to befriend Jane and she continues to sarcastically and aggressively rebuff him, although she's becoming progressively less aggressive. She challenges his ingrained dogma at every turn. His friend Tommo (his village guide) is trying to get him to marry his sister while the girl who Tommo himself likes, Lucy Ochre, appears to be a green addict. She, in turn, is convinced that there's a harmony in the Earth in E flat. Since Earth isn't flat, she's likely to be wrong! Lol! But seriously, she's smarter than she lets on. She friends Eddie, and she wants to pay him for her to practice her kissing skills on him, but she doesn’t explain why. He seems to be friending quite a few people, including the adorable Daisy Crimson, and also the Green who lost an eyebrow when he made the deadly mistake of coming-on to Jane.

Eddie makes a bit of a fool of himself trying to chase after Travis Canary - the yellow he befriended on the train - who walks off into the darkness one night to be taken by the night terrors! Although there is a certain amount of heroism involved in his action, too, so this brings him kudos. There seems to be an irrational fear of the dark amongst the citizens, not just in this village, but everywhere. Indeed, the only one who seems to have gone out into the dark and returned whole is Jane Grey.

One morning Eddie goes off with his dad to visit a nearby village of Rusty Hill. They travel along the perpetulite road - a self-repairing, self-cleaning material - in an old Ford Model T. Perpetulite seems not to recognize bronze. This might be important! The village they're visiting was wiped out by the Mildew. Eddie has a shopping list of things people have asked him to bring back for them, including spoons and sugar tongues. Yes, spoons! Even though spoons are banned as eating tools, everyone tries to own at least one during their lifetime, and if it has a post-code engraved on the handle, it’s almost invaluable.

Eddie gets a bit depressed walking among the bones of those who died. He's also startled by encountering a Pooka - a spirit like representation of a human which still appears before him when he closes his eyes. Just as the woman opens her mouth to speak, she disappears. He's even more startled by running into Jane there! This is not only because she's there, but because he has no explanation whatsoever for how she traveled there so quickly in the first place without the use of a motor vehicle. Later, Jane enigmatically explains that she knows how to use the perpetulite road.

She lures Eddie into an embarrassing trap under the carnivorous Yateveo tree, from which he is extricated by his father. Later, he learns that East Carmine has opened up the defunct seaside town of High Saffron for exploration and excavation. There is a 100 merit bonus for those who go, but no one wants to. The 85 people who have previously gone there have never returned; however, the color shortage is becoming so severe that they're willing to go to even to these extremes to mine color.

Eddie eventually speaks to the Apocryphal Man, who evidently thought no one could see him. He didn’t realize that everyone was simply ignoring him. He's a historian and he agrees to answer questions for Eddie in return for loganberry jam.

Eddie has been striking up a relationship with the Colourman whom they met at Rusty hill. He's rather a legendary figure for no other reason than that he works for National Colour. He's ostensibly in the area to conduct the Ishihara test which will determine Eddie's (and others) futures, and checking on the colour supply pipes, but as he grows closer to Eddie, he reveals on the down-low that he's actually trying to track down saboteurs, one of whom is Jane. Eddie knows this, but Matthew, the Colourman, does not. Eddie keeps his secret while trying to figure out if he should tell one or the other about the other, but in the end seems to decide to do nothing. He enters into a somewhat under-the-table relationship with Matthew, and in return gets a shot at joining National Colour, which is the ultimate dream job.

During a weekly meeting of the Colourgentsia, some interesting speculations and revelations come out of the Apocryphal Man (who has now, since he knows he can be seen, has taken to applying personal hygiene and clothes to his body) via an old granny who doesn’t seem to care that she's relating what he says. I was laughing out loud at this part of the novel. The Apocryphal Man lives on the upper floor of the house which Eddie and his dad are occupying, but he seems unaware that there is also someone else living up there with him! Eddie encounters this other person using the bathroom, but the other person secretes themselves behind the shower curtains so Eddie can’t actually see who it is. Neither does this person speak - communicating only through rapping one tap for 'yes', two for 'no'!

On border patrol (the village has signed up Eddie for everything they can get out of him: he's almost become an institution there after only a few days, and he's now teaching in the local school!) Eddie is shown the original Fallen Man (as opposed to the bar of the same name). The Fallen Man quite literally fell out of the sky. There's very little left, but it looks like he was some sort of jet pilot who ejected and landed exactly where he still lies. The village people have surrounded his chair with a cement wall and put guinea pigs inside it to keep the grass trimmed short. Eddie also finds Travis, the guy who walked out into the night. It looks like he was struck by ball lightning, his patrol partner assures Eddie, but when Eddie examines the remains of his head more closely, he finds a metal object the size of a chess piece - some sort of exploding bullet? Who knows! It's a mystery how many mysteries there are in this novel!

Unfortunately, Eddie can't keep the murder information to himself. Courtland, the second top banana or his mom are the guilty party and Courtland reacts immediately by trying to shoot Eddie with the copper spike used to defuse ball lightning. Having failed with that, he and his mum try to bustle Eddie out of the city, but he changes his mind and ends up going to High Saffron after spending the night with Violet deMauve, his new Fiancé who claims she;s pregnant by him because Eddie's own father showed her an ovulating patch guaranteed to make her ovulate and get pregnant. In the end, though, he doesn't go alone.

Violet, Tommo, and Courtland set off with him. When Violet is injured and returns to the waiting car, Tommo and Courtland lock Eddie in a room, but fortunately for him, Jane was sneakily following them, and she rescues him. Tommo is so badly injured in the fight which ensues that he returns to the vehicle where Violet awaits. The remaining three, Eddie, Courtland and Jane continue. They reach High Saffron, but Jane saves Eddie from the mildew which waits every visitor by revealing one of her many secrets. Mildew isn't caused by a fungus but by exposure to a certain color. And Jane can see in the dark. This is why no one returned from High Saffron because the plaza at the entrance to the city is that color. Courtland dies from the rot, and Eddie and Jane return - after Jane has first stuffed him under the Yateveo tree and then rescued him from it to give their cover story for Courtland's death some verisimilitude.

They pledge their selves to each other, but they never do get to marry - why? You'll have to read the ending for yourself. And it's a doozy.

I thoroughly, highly, and heartily recommend this novel.

Performance Anomalies by Victor Robert Lee

Title: Performance Anomalies
Author: Victor Robert Lee
Publisher: Perimeter Six Press
Rating: TBD

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

This novel is a story about a guy named Cono, who is of mixed ethnicity, and who has extraordinarily fast reflexes. He's a good looking guy, fit, active and healthy, who has no problem finding female company whenever he needs it, but this addiction to women is what brings him endless grief. Indeed, the entire novel, whilst superficially about him single-handedly undermining a plot to steal enriched uranium, is actually about him staging one painful rescue after another of women with whom he has become involved in various convoluted ways.

Cono has led an interesting, action-filled and varied life. He has bad memories of something which happened to his mother in the bar she tended when he was a kid. He also has uncomfortable memories of being discovered as a "anomaly" and being tested in the USA. Through this testing, he meets someone who becomes a friend and partner in developing software based on his condition, which in turn brings him financial independence. This gives him the freedom to travel and do pretty much whatever he wants. In Istanbul, he gets a call from a Chinese woman he knows well, who is in trouble in Kazakhstan, and his feelings for her compel him to make two calls - one to issue a bomb threat to the hotel in which she's staying to stir things up, and another to a corrupt government official who has the power to protect her. But that request has put Cono in Timur's debt. Timur is now going to hold Xiao Li hostage until Cono uses his skills to set up an oil deal amongst several international players. But of course this is nothing but a cover, hiding Timur's real purpose.

Cono plays out his side of the deal, finding his situation becoming ever more complex and twisted. Eventually he reaches the end of his travels and travails, but things don’t quite turn out to be what he'd hoped for. This novel was not for me, but I cannot really fault the quality of the writing, the plot in general, or the story-telling. So while it just was not the kind of story I was looking for, I don't have a problem rating it as a 'worthy' because I'm sure others will find it very entertaining.

The Red Plague Affair by Lilith Saintcrow

Title: The Red Plague Affair
Author: Lilith Saintcrow
Publisher: Crown
Rating: WARTY

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel was really hard to follow. I'm coming into this series at volume 3, and such an approach evidently doesn’t work well with these novels: it seems that you have to be there from the beginning to 'get' everything that's going on, which is a nuisance when it comes to reviewing adequately, so please keep that in mind. Having said that, the only thing I got out of the first chapter is that Saintcrow doesn't appear to have a very good handle on the difference between sewage and sewerage!

On the positive side, the reading is easy in the sense that the novel is very short and the chapters also short, but the writing style and language use is far too affected and dense, especially for an opening page. After a while it was easier to stay with it, but there wasn’t really very much happening, and I never felt drawn into the story or engaged with the main characters. They offered nothing to love or admire, nothing with which to empathize, and nothing to stir my interest or to attract me to them. There was no chemistry between the female protagonist and the male. The story is very dry and the conversation uncomfortably stilted. The intentional misspellings of certain nouns is pretentious and annoying: Yton in place of Eton, Houricane in place of hurricane, Englene for England for example. I saw no point to that at all, and found it to be irksome at best, although I have to admit that one of them: 'mentath' (evidently intended to describe someone who excels at some mental skill) isn’t too bad, if slightly awkward.

The novel is evidently intended to be an attempt at steampunk, but it never gave me that feeling. Actually, even using that term is problematic, although this has nothing to do with Saintcrow. What is it, exactly, with the appendage of 'punk' to a word in the fatuous pretense that it actually represents a genre?! We have 'steampunk', 'cyberpunk', 'splatterpunk' and others, in the same way we have terms derived from Watergate, such as 'oilgate' for example, but whereas appending 'gate' to another word does convey a certain level of scandal (to do with oil, say) what does the addition of 'punk' lend to the term? I contend that it offers nothing! It’s just as useless as a false hand; you can give a fake hand fingers, and tart it up to make it look like it's flesh, but it has no real value unless it’s a hook or a pincer, or these days, a robotic hand. So yes, we know what 'steam', 'cyber', and 'splatter' contribute, but what does punk offer in rounding-out the term? I suggest it lends nothing but an extra syllable and that's its only utility.

Anyway, pet peeve off, moving along! The characters in The Red Plague Affair get around on what are apparently clockwork horses, and they take the royal gryphons if they need to fly. The main characters are Emma Bannon, a 'prime sorceress', and Archibald Clare, a mentath. I had expected them to be working closely together as some sort of variation on Holmes and Watson, but this wasn't the case. They rarely interact, and the interactions between them are mundane and boring. Emma is some sort of James Bond character in service of the monarch, Queen "Victrix". I have no idea what Clare was supposed to be in this team. he really did very little. Not that Bannon did much more. Why a female name for a male character? Yes, it was his last name, but it just struck me as weird. Clare apparently was the (or a) subject of Bannon's investigation in the first novel in the series so that's how they hooked up.

I never was quite sure what, exactly, 'prime sorceress' meant. Perhaps if I'd read the entire series this far it would be a lot more clear, but even without that, it became quickly apparent that her sorcery is nothing more than the same ineffectual clichéd MacGuffin with which we routinely find magical people endowed in these stories. I failed to grasp what the benefit of equipping Bannon with sorcery actually was. She rarely uses it and it seems to be of very little utility when it comes to making any real headway in her assignments, yet each day she has to 'renew' her magical energy from 'Tideturn'. I have no idea how that's supposed to work. She evidently has to do this whether she's expended any magical energy or not. It's just weird. And if she is so powerful a black wizard, then why does she need a bodyguard? That makes no sense either.

There was a hard-to-follow flurry of nondescript characters, none of whom made any sort of impression on me as either interesting or dangerous, and they were popping up one after another like targets in a first-person shooter video game. The basis of the story is that someone has evidently invented some sort of poison and is using it to poison church-goers and others! I'm not sure how this constitutes a threat to the nation, although it seems to be tied int to the appalling London fogs of that era, which were actually more dangerous than the Red Plague ever threatened to be!! Indeed, given that in New Testament fiction, Jesus tells people that they should pray in secret, maybe this is the second coming and Yeshua himself is punishing those who pray in public?! Who knows?

I love that Saintcrow shamelessly invents the verb "to gentle"! Ian Fleming would approve, but not Noel Coward! As I read more and more of this, I found that I was skimming over paragraphs here and there because they offered nothing to engage me, which doubtlessly contributed to my not getting some parts of the story, but I honestly considered that I'd had so little out of it at that point that it wouldn't make a material difference anyway.

In conclusion I cannot recommend this novel. I was hoping for, and indeed expecting, a novel which offered mystery and engaging repartee, but I was denied those pleasures. It occurs to me that a good question to ask about this novel is: if this were a first novel submitted by an unknown author, would this publisher have accepted it as it stands, and I think the answer to that is a rather obvious 'no', which begs the question, "why then should I accept it?"

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, right from the off, began well by looking better than Fire and much more like a worthy successor to Graceling. Unfortunately, like Ethan Hunt's gloves in Ghost Protocol it kept slipping alarmingly.

Bitterblue is the very young queen of the kingdom of Monsea. Now why in hell Cashore chose to dump that on her female hero is as disturbing as it is mysterious. She couldn't think of the word 'queendom'? And whats with everyone referring to her as Lady Queen? Seriously? Since when has there been a Lord Queen? (In terms of noble rank, that is!) Those missteps aside, however, she started out doing a great job and winning me over to Bitterblue's side.

Bitterblue is bored and finds being a queen tedious, especially given that she's beset by four antique advisers who ply her with endless work. Why she doesn't see something wrong with this to begin with is a mystery, and how King Ror (who supposedly set her queendom on a secure and rational footing before she was installed as queen) managed to bungle this so badly is a mystery, but it does offer a ready pretext for Bitterblue's adventures. She starts sneaking out of the castle and hanging out in bars, in disguise. No, it's not like that. The bars she visits feature story tellers, and she finds herself fascinated by how these fables which are related in the taverns differ from the actual facts which she knows.

Bitterblue is an interesting character, far more so than Fire, Cashore's previous hero, who I found a bit tedious at times. No, this novel is more like Graceling and Bitterblue is a charmer - smart, funny, curious about everything, and with a seriously funny sense of humor. Unfortunately, she's capable of being really stupid! It's inevitable that her curiosity and boredom will lure her into sneaking around where she isn't supposed to be, including those trips in disguise into the town and its taverns, but that's not where her stupidity lies.

As she undertakes more of these extra-curricular excursions, she becomes acquainted with the realities of life, as well as the unrealities: the weird things which are happening all around her of which she's been unaware - like people stealing gargoyles from the castle walls. Indeed, she befriends the very people who are doing the stealing, without at first realizing it is they who are behind it; then one of them gets into a fight and is stabbed, and instead of bringing the healer they demand she brings, she fetches the castle healer.

Bitterblue's adventures start with her nocturnal wanderings in the city, but her discovery activities are by no means confined there; however, it’s there that she meets Saf and Teddy, the two thieves, and their respective sisters, Bren and Tilda who are an item. Saf seems to have no vocation other than thievery which appears to be confined to stealing and returning items which King Leck had stolen from his citizens during his despotic reign. He also evidently steals some silver once in a while from shipments coming from the mines and going to the palace. Teddy's day job is running a printing press, but no one will tell Bitterblue what it is they print. None of these people have a clue who she really is. She fobs them off with a story that she works in the bakery at the palace which is how she knew the palace healer, and how she knows something of what goes on in the palace.

Bitterblue starts to discover that Leck made many changes during his reign, including changing funeral ceremonies, kidnapping many children for experimentation, and building bridges over the Dell river (which used to be called the Silver river); bridges which went effectively nowhere (there is only swamp on the opposite side of the river). It was on one of these bridges that he supposedly burned Ashen (Bitterblue's mother) after her death, rather than bury her, as was traditional before he came along. He also wrote diaries which have all apparently been lost, and compelled his groundskeeper to create topiaries which were often transformative in nature, such as one of Bitterblue herself changing from a girl into a castle. He hired a sculptor to create statues of this same nature, too - and then had the sculptor killed.

Katsa and Po (the protagonists of Graceling) show up at the palace, Po having installed himself already in Bitterblue's rooms awaiting her return one morning from one of her nights out. She seems not to be bothered that a guy will show up in her bedroom without even asking leave. Po is becoming increasingly depressed by the secrecy around his grace, wanting to reveal it to everyone. Bitterblue advises him to take it slowly. Later Katsa arrives and Bitterblue feels a bit left out by their obvious and total engagement with each other to the exclusion of pretty much everything and everyone else. Po and Katsa play only a peripheral role in this novel, which is all about Bitterblue.

Along with Po, Lord Giddon also shows up, and Bitterblue begins to form a friendship with him even though he's some ten years her senior. She begins to confide in him and ask his advice. She's invited to a meeting of the council even though she's technically not a part of it. This meeting reintroduces her to the library, which she visited often as a child, but which she has neglected completely since she became queen. She has a desk set up under a portrait of Fire, although she has no idea who the woman is or what her relationship with Leck was. She discovers that Leck destroyed thousands of books which the librarian, graced with an eidetic memory, is slowly and painstakingly restoring. Bitterblue takes one of his rewritten manuscripts to Teddy and bids him print it so it can once again find its way into public hands, but then she loses interest in this activity.

She finds she's slowly beginning to recall things from her childhood - either triggered by one or other of her new activities - such as visiting the library or learning to sword-fight, or which comes back to her in what she first thinks is a dream but realizes is actually a memory. She sets in motion several investigations: to discover how much Leck stole so that reparations can be made, to investigate how people were buried before Leck changed things, and to learn about solstice and equinox holidays which were banned after Leck came to power, although these investigations seem to disappear from the story as soon as they're set in motion.

Bitterblue feels like she has some bizarre pieces of a complex jigsaw, but she cannot figure out how they go together, and she learns that in addition to the secret society of 'restoration thieves', of which Saf is a part, there is also a counter-society of 'leave well alone' people, who do not want anyone digging into the past and unearthing painful and horrific memories of Leck's reign. There's an attempt by one of the latter group to kidnap Bitterblue, orchestrated by Lord Danzhol, who knocks out her adviser, Thiel, and tries to haul her out of the palace with him, but Bitterblue stabs him fatally. A graced woman called Hava, whose grace is to be able to effectively disappear into the background, was apparently an unwitting co-conspirator. She's still at large, and Bitterblue wants to track her down, although that plan also effectively fails.

By accident, Bitterblue visits Saf and Teddy on one of the quarterly holidays, which are still celebrated in secret by the populace. She learns this when she enters their premises and everyone is wearing colorful make-up and everyone is kissing everyone else. When Bitterblue kisses Saf, the kiss isn't at all perfunctory or ceremonial - it goes on and on and on, and later, it goes on and one some more in a graveyard on her way back to the palace!

Cashore, who had done such a sterling job with her writing overall, really lets the door swing open to Le Stupide when we start getting into page 250 and beyond, and that door swings right into her ass. I remarked earlier that Bitterblue is very smart, but she completely betrayed my confidence in her by being so alarmingly moronic at this point, that I very nearly wanted to disown her!

Let me lead into this by relating that after her night of kissing Saf in the graveyard, Bitterblue decides for reasons unexplained that she can never ever see him again. Very shortly afterwards, and completely on impulse power, she decides to visit the courtroom once more, and who should be on trial for murder but Saf himself! I'm sorry, but his was far too coincidental to suspend my disbelief. Her presence there could have been handled far more wisely. But it gets worse.

Saf is completely flummoxed (yes, flummoxed!) to discover that the wayward girl he's known as "Sparks", is actually the queen! Bitterblue discovers that he couldn't have killed the murder victim because that was the night she was with him sitting on the roof of the printing shop gazing at the stars. They ended up there after running from a hunting party that seems to have targeted Saf for reasons as unknown as they are unreasonable. This targeting of Saf is a problem about which Bitterblue has done exactly nothing. Her ability to be both aware of appalling injustice and crime, and yet to take absolutely zero steps towards combating it is infuriating, and it’s especially irksome given that she's supposed to be developing feelings for Saf. Why has she not ordered patrols to police the city and reduce this kind of victimization and crime, thereby protecting the man with whom she's supposedly falling in love? No explanation! But it gets worse.

She can’t exactly blurt out that Saf is innocent because she was with him on the roof! She could have made up some story that he was with her on the palace grounds, but even this is apparently too much for her, so in panic, she calls on Po. He masterfully steps up to the plate, claiming that he was with Saf on the roof. This releases Saf from all charges despite the judge's bias against him.

Bitterblue invites Saf to her rooms to explain to him her masquerade as "anyone-but-the-queen" and to apologize for deceiving him, but Saf behaves like a five year old, which almost totally turned me off him. What did complete that migration away from him was that when he leaves the palace, he steals from her like the jerk that he is. I'm sorry, but Saf is now out of my regard altogether. His behavior is unforgivable. Bitterblue risked her reputation to save his life and instead of being grateful, he insults her and then steals from her, and he steals not something which is a mere trinket, but the actual royal crown! The petulant son of a bitch deserves to be hanged for treason!

Now Cashore has succeeded in making Saf abhorrent to me, when she really ought to have been trying to win me over, because I was hardly a fanboi of his in the first place. Bitterblue deserves better bootie. I much prefer Lord Giddon for her, but he's probably going to end up with someone like Fox - another of Bitterblue's graced entourage - who actually might be a better match for him anyway. Fox is a sort of palace handywoman who hangs around cleaning and doing odd jobs while training as a spy. I'm not sure I trust her, but I would love to read a story about her. She's the one who picks the locks so that Bitterblue and Helda can investigate Leck's private bedroom, which is hidden away downstairs in the midst of a maze and which also holds about forty bizarre sculptures.

All this to get you to the point where I can discuss Bitterblue's rank stupidity! So here it is: despite the fact that she knows that she's being targeted, and despite the fact that she's been viciously attacked on more than one occasion, and despite the fact that Saf & Co now know that she's the queen, she sneaks out alone yet again onto the streets to visit them and apologize yet again to this lowlife thief who has treasonously betrayed his queen. She takes no guards with her and so of course she's attacked and stabbed, and has her arm broken!

If I were not so invested in Cashore as such a noteworthy writer, I would probably have quit reading this novel at this point, because this portion of it is far too stupid to read; however, in view of how much good Cashore has done so far over three novels, I was willing to let her off with a caution for this questionable behavior, in the dearest hope that she isn't a repeat offender! She is so much better than this and I hate to see her work sagging so badly in the middle.

So now Bitterblue is in the position of having to beg an ingrate, a thief, and a traitor for the return of her crown. Saf doesn't even have it! He gave it to a "fence" to hold for him, and that fence passed it on to a relative, so now no one knows where the crown is, and Bitterblue has failed again to act because she wants to keep this crime a secret to protect a thief who does nothing but childishly taunt and insult her.

Meanwhile we have Po on more than one occasion flying paper airplanes, as though paper is the cheapest thing on the planet, which given their state of technological development, it most certainly is not, and we have Po encouraging Bitterblue to befriend Hava, the chameleon graced girl who was one of the team who was trying to kidnap her! Bitterblue meets her in the sculpture room of the palace and starts the two of them on the track to friendship. I had thought at this point that given what we'd learned of Fox and Hava, and Po's planes, we were going to see an interesting finale to this novel. That didn't happen!

I have to say in passing here that Bitterblue's comprehensive ignorance regarding palace geography and composition is an inexplicable mystery. Was she, as a child, completely and utterly incurious about her surroundings? What preteen child wouldn't run riot around such a place, exploring secret passages and out-of-the-way nooks and crannies? Bitterblue seems to have confined herself to such a limited area that it's really not credible.

My disgust with Bitterblue and Saf vis-à-vis their pathetic and abusive relationship continued to be exacerbated. Po hires Saf to "caulk the windows" - like anyone caulked anything other than boats in that era! Seriously? As soon as Bitterblue learns this she runs after him like a bitch in heat, first to espy where he is on the castle walls (caulking away with Fox on what amounts to a window washer's platform). Once she knows his location, she immediately races inside and up to that floor, where she opens the window and invites him in. She again apologizes profusely to this worthless piece of gutter effluent, so of course, he proceeds to treat her like trash! Again!

Later, Giddon catches Saf wandering around in the maze which surrounds Leck's bedroom, and when he's searched, he's found to be carrying Fox's lock-pick tools along with some keys, so this lowlife jerk-off is continuing with his thievery even though he has been hired to work at the castle. When he's brought into her presence and all of this reported, he trash-talks Bitterblue (and thankfully gets cuffed by Giddon for his mouth), and this STILL isn’t enough to get him into Bitterblue's bad graces. She even chides Giddon for hitting him!

Frankly, I was really, truly, and honestly having a bad time with this novel at that point. It had been really great up to where Le Stupide reared its ugly head, and for the most part it was pretty good even then (interspersed with the dumbassery as it was), but these behaviors really kicked my suspension of disbelief (SoD) in the grass.

There was a bright spark which kept me going, which was Katsa's return, but she really didn't have a lot to offer in this novel. She was investigating one of the mountain tunnels and discovered another tunnel which smelled interesting to her. When she investigated it, she discovered a monster rat (of the kind found in the companion novel Fire - that is not monster in size, but in traits and in pelt coloration). Katsa brings the pelt back, and Bitterblue immediately 'orders' her to return and follow the tunnel through, to see what's at the other end. Clearly, she realizes, while King Leck's reality was a horrible nightmare, his fantasies as exemplified in art and in the topiaries, was real!

Even though Bitterblue has no authority whatsoever over Katsa, the latter agrees to use up some of her valuable time to investigate this new world. Yeah, it’s incredible that neither person nor creature has ever been over the mountains in either direction, not even the vicious, ravenous raptors, but I am willing to let that slide for the sake of finding out what's going to happen with this unique culture clash. It turned out: not much.

Meanwhile all her distant friends who had come visiting are now dispersing: Katsa to the tunnel, Po and Raffin elsewhere, Madlen the healer (along with Saf the scum) to investigate all the bones which Giddon has discovered were in the river - perhaps the last remnants of Leck's insanity. Fox has owned up to finding, and then losing some keys, of which no one seems to know the origin or the purpose, but when Bitterblue wanders the castle again, she finds that the keys fit Leck's secret rooms, and within his secret rooms is a secret room containing his diaries - but they're written in "code". So despite some disappointment, there is enough to keep on going here - including more disappointment! Yes, it's the return of Le Stupide!

So it turns out that Fox is more foxy than we've hitherto been given to believe! I told you her story was worth telling, didn't I? She's the criminal who is holding the crown and a host of other royal loot. What does Bitterblue do when she learns of this? Does she send a host of her military in there to arrest and retrieve? Hell no! Why back a sure thing when you can screw up royally yet again? She lets Saf the Lowlife talk her into letting him go in alone; then he gets caught with the crown and attacked by ruffians, and ends up throwing the crown into the river!

It's hard to imagine anything worse than that, but it also turns out that all of Bitterblue's four advisers - the ones expertly chosen for her by King Ror - have betrayed her and have been covering up evidence of things they did under King Leck's influence, including killing people who got too near the truth. But Bitterblue is ready to forgive them no matter what! In the end, Thiel kills one of them and then himself, and another kills himself in prison, leaving only one of them, whom Bitterblue releases from prison and merely places him under house arrest! Seriously?

As far as the diaries go, it turns out that they were written in monster-speak, but don't worry, Thiel took care of burning most of them before he died. And then Lady Fire shows up accompanying Katsa back from the Dell-y. And from there the novel just fizzles with the usual muddy Cashore ending. But no, Bitterblue ends up neither with Saf nor Giddon, so no worries there.

Once again the ending was a bit sad - not within itself, but from my perspective of it not being as good as other parts of the novel. Kudos to Cashore for not feeling compelled to end her novels with "happily ever after", but that still doesn't mean they're satisfying: they're muddy and disappointingly dissipated. They don't feel like a climax. They feel like Cashore got bored with the writing, or got stuck for a good ending or something, and just let the threads of the story come loose in her hands. It didn't even feel like an ending and in some stories, that's a good thing, but not in this trilogy. This novel had lost too many things for me before it ended, though.

Of the trilogy, Graceling is by far the best - several levels above the other two. After that I'd place Bitterblue, despite having a few too many issues with it. I'd put Fire last, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthy read. Overall I'm disappointed in this trilogy, but I love so much of Cashore's writing in it that I'm willing to let the disappointment slide in favor of recommending all three.

The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver

Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I despise book trailers, but there's one here for this novel.

errata
P64 "...the only bus in the evening once the those ornaments were no longer." This is a small error, but even with the extra 'the' removed, it's still a big awkward sentence!
P81-82 "From whom". I know it’s grammatically correct, but does anyone really actually say this any more, let alone someone of Noa's background and character?
P105 really odd conversation. " 'There is nothing I wouldn’t do for the people I love,' he paused. 'Nothing. You know that.' He didn’t reply, instead bouncing on his toes." I have no idea what to make of that!

This novel took a bit of getting into, but it became easier as I stuck with it. It’s yet another first person narrative, unfortunately. Noa Singleton (interesting name, both first and last - we get an explanation for the first) has been on death row in the City of Brotherly Love for ten years. It’s only a few months shy of her execution date when Marlene, the mother of one of her victims (there were evidently two) shows up to announce that she's had a change of heart and is now going to petition the governor for clemency on Noa's behalf. Consequently, Noa, who is extremely skeptical and reticent, starts talking to Oliver, the lawyer who works for Marlene, in an effort to uncover information which might help the petition. Noa also starts reminiscing about her life. I get a feeling that there is far more going on here than immediately meets the eye, but it’s only a suspicion - I have nothing with which to support it.

Noa was dropped as a child - not on her head, but literally dropped by her mother - who then concocted a bizarre story of home invasion to cover up her carelessness. She also failed to adequately care for Noa afterwards. Her arm was broken and the break was not diagnosed, but as she grew, things seemed to heal reasonably well. When she was in college, she had a miscarriage because of a disease condition in her womb, and she can not now bear children. She never finished college because of this.

Her father, an alcoholic petty criminal who has been absent from her life for 23 years, reintroduces himself and she begins working on a relationship with him. Despite being an alcoholic, he came into some money (not illegally!) and opened a bar. That's where they first meet. He has a scar on his top lip which is why he cannot, apparently, grow a mustache and this, believe it or not, is evidently why her mother ditched him. She has a mustache fetish!

OK, so I admit to being intrigued! Noa visits her father late one night at the bar, and is followed by a young guy. She tells this to her father and he beats the living daylights out of the guy; then he gives Noa a .357 magnum which at first she fights against, but when he slips it into her bag as she leaves, she lets it sit.

The story really starts to drop some coin into the dirty laundry machine when Marlene, the dead Sarah's mother, contacts Noa directly by phone. Marlene knows a heck of a lot about Noa and invites her to meet in a restaurant. This is where I started to become detached from this story, because from what I've so far read about Noa, I can’t find the credit to buy that she would come to heel as Marlene commands her to do.

Marlene's daughter Sarah, the same age as Noa, was dating Noa's father, and had been since before her father contacted her. Marlene knew that if she forbade her daughter from doing this, she wouldn’t listen and perhaps would rebel by doing it more dedicatedly. Marlene evidently cast around for a means to intervene without it looking like she was intervening, and she hit upon Noa. She offered her $10,000 to somehow break-up the relationship, and Noa accepts this. I simply couldn't buy that as something she would do given what we're told about her. I couldn’t buy that she would go to a meeting with someone she didn’t know, who was demanding that she meet, or that she would sit and put up with Marlene or what she effectively orders Noa to do.

I loved chapter fifteen where trials are compared with movies. That was a really interesting observation. Chapter 16 was a classic. Those two chapters turned around my distaste for Noa's behavior vis-à-vis Marlene the dictator. After this we start learning exactly what did happen between Noa P Singleton and Sarah Dixon and Marlene Dixon.

I rarely pay attention to the cover of a novel because the author generally has little or nothing to do with it, but this one was interesting because it features only the title and author's name, but the title is changed so instead of the actual title, it reads "The Execution of a Novel" - a change which is nowhere explained. When I lost heart with this novel at the point where Silver starts rambling on about the trial, I started to think that it had indeed been executed and the sentence was just! Indeed, for a while I thought I was going to rate it 'warty', but in the end I decided to chill out and give it a 'worthy'. Overall it wasn't bad, and while the ending made little sense to me given what came before it, I hope others might find something I missed. I was hoping for a lot better, however.

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

I didn't become as hopelessly lost in this as I did in Graceling, but it's keeping my interest so far. Fire is set in the same world as Graceling, but in a different country and features different actors. It also takes place some 30 or 40 years before the events of Graceling. You'd think with a title like that, it would be a prequel to Ash lol! The female protagonist is Fire, a "monster" indeed, the last monster who appears in human form. Apparently these monsters are truly monsters, and while they look rather like creatures with which you may be familiar - wolves, birds - they're colored in amazing hues and they are extremely aggressive. I keep picturing those "wolves" in the Crematoria prison featured in the Chronicles of Riddick movie.

Fire isn't like those monsters, and she begins in this story by getting shot through the arm with an arrow. Fortunately, the hunter did not intend to hit her (she was wearing a deerskin after all!), and she is able to control his mind sufficiently to 'persuade' him to escort her back to her friend Archer, a fellow monster, who imprisons the hunter and takes care of her. Later, the hunter is killed by a skilled archer.

Fire takes a trip to visit a close friend Roen, who inhabits a castle out in the badlands where monster raptors are circling overhead and numbering in the two hundreds. At the castle they meet up with the King's army, commanded by the king's brother who detests Fire because she;s the daughter of Cansrel, who along with the previous king, ran The dells into the ground.

The army takes off on a mission. Once they reach the Mouton tunnel, they will be safe from the raptors, but as Fire sees them heading towards the tunnel, she also sees the raptors start taking an interest and she knows they will never make it there without losing some of the rearguard. At the last minute, she mounts her horse - called 'Small' because he's supposedly small-minded - and charges out of the castle gate before it can close. She heads off away from the army, and when she's in position, she takes off her headscarf, revealing her magnificent mane of monster hair, which is guaranteed to attract raptors. And they come in a swarm. Fire charges back to the castle as fast as poor Small can carry her, and they're both seriously mauled before they can get safely inside the gate, but the entire army is able to make it safely into the tunnels. Archer is pissed but they ride it out.

When the King's brother returns, he requests that Fire accompany him to the capital city where they have captured a man who was discovered spying in the King's rooms. They want Fire to use her mind-reading powers on him. She travels with the army, but is assigned her own personal guard to safeguard her against the resentment some of the army feels towards monsters, and towards her in particular, being the daughter of the man who tried to assassinate their beloved leader.

On the trip, Fire's beautiful "fiddle" is purposefully destroyed by an enraged soldier. Why Cashore terms it thus (fiddle) and then describes the beautiful music Fire plays with it is a mystery to me. If the music is so heart-rendingly wonderful, then it's a violin! If she's stirring up a hoe-down, then it's a fiddle! That just annoyed me. But when they arrive at the King's city, the king himself can't resist Fire, and attacks her. When she refuses him, he hits her. It seems that men must react either in adoration or in hatred of the monster girl. The King's brother is furious. Later, he has four violins delivered to Fire and requests that she choose one to replace what was damaged. She picks one even though she claims it's too good for her meager musical skills.

This story proved itself a lot harder to get lost in than was Graceling. I fell in love with that almost immediately, but as I've pressed on with this one, it has become more engrossing. Fire spends some considerable time at the palace and starts forming a relationship not only with the King, Nash, who is nothing but a nuisance at first, but who goes out of his way to try and block off his mind from Fire so that he does not lose control to her charms.

She slowly builds a relationship with King Nash's other brother, Garrod, who makes it explicitly clear that he does not trust Fire. Here relationship with Brigan, the commander of the army continues to soften and build, and she also becomes friends with the King's sister, Clara. She discovers that Brigan has a daughter, Hanna, with whom she becomes friends. And eventually, she agrees to do what she originally was brought to the palace to accomplish, but against which she has strenuously fought: she agrees to "interrogate" the prisoners, which is a swamp of potential missteps.

One of these interrogations indirectly reveals a traitor in their midst - a trusted captain who is evidently working for Mydogg. In a raid worthy of something the CIA might pull, this rendition is done in a way which makes it look like he was killed by bandits. His information reveals that there's a pincer-movement being planned by Mydogg and Gentian. Gentian's army is supposedly hiding in tunnels south of the royal city, whereas Mydogg's vast army is hiding to the north, but while they have a good idea of where Gentian's forces are, no one can find Mydogg's. The decision is taken to kill three key people at the upcoming royal gala: Gentian, his son Gunner, and Murgda, sister to Mydogg. The only one who can perform these assassinations is Fire, but the royal family doesn't know if it can trust her to carry it through. She could also end up being killed herself if any of the three is resistant to her mind-control and can wield a sword.

There's a really weird sentence on page 298 in the hardback edition, at the beginning of Chapter 22, fourth paragraph in, which starts: "Fire knew herself to be more experienced than anyone in this room save Archer realized." I think that 'realized' shouldn't be there. But I'm frankly a bit more intrigued with Gentian's son's name. Gunner? I wonder if Cashore intended it to be spelled thus, or if she simply doesn't know that it's actually Gunnar?

I know the trope is to 'write what you know' but if we all confined ourselves to that, then there'd be a dearth of interesting stories to be had. Most writers don't write what they know, they write what they imagine, perhaps supported or rooted in what they know. Some people way-overdo writing what they know and end up putting endless boring details into their stories for no other purpose than to show that they know what they're writing about inside out! Cashore sure doesn't know about The Dells or the seven kingdoms: not in the sense of having visited them (except in her imagination, of course), she's never encountered these monsters, yet she writes a great novel about them in this world. Suppose you dream of being a writer but you're a garbage collector or a house painter? Yeah, it's possible to create a story or two around that, but eventually you're going to run out. So what then? Give up your dream because you don't know any more?

This is why I don't subscribe to 'write what you know'; instead I subscribe to write what you love, what you care about, what you're interested in, but with the caveat that if you're going to write outside your immediate sure knowledge, at least do some looking up, or research, depending on how far out of your depth you're swimming. I don't think readers care if you're not writing what you know. They do care if you're writing something which is boring or worse, stupid!

All this really doesn't have a whole heck of a lot to do with 'Gunner' but it does highlight how a question can be raised in the mind of a reader by something which seems out of place, as that name did to me. It also highlights that travel certainly is a good experience to have under your belt as a writer, and knowledge of other cultures will probably kindle some stories which otherwise would have never set alight, and at the same time, give a flavor of authenticity to what you write. All this to say I am quite willing to let Cashore have her way with me literally with an out of place 'realize' and with apparently not knowing or not caring about the difference between Gunner and Gunnar, because even though she isn't honestly writing what she knows, she sure fakes it really well! With regard to authors in general, I have far more respect for someone who tries and fails, than I ever will for someone who doesn't even pretend to try or to care.

Fire's plan to isolate Gentian and Gunner in a room where they can be interrogated and then killed works a treat, but Fire makes a mistake. They end up in a room which is occupied (though not at that moment) by one of their own allies, and Fire is so worn out from directing these people and calming them, and communicating with those who are helping her, and misdirecting others that Brigan has to shore her up with warm feelings from himself. It gets worse as the assassination goes down, with Brigan killing both Gentian and Gunner, who has broken Fire's nose in the fracas.

But the details of the planned attack by Mydogg are out. King Nash and his family know everything, and Brigan rides headlong to join his forces at Fort Flood to taken down Gentian's men. As Fire returns to her room, she senses something very out of place. Hanna is being hurt, no doubt to lure Fire there, and she gullibly falls right in with this plan. She's evidently hit by an arrow tipped with a sleeping potion, and she loses consciousness. Thus endeth Part the Second.

I have to say I was rather disappointed in Cashore here. She's playing these two characters, Gentian and Gunner, enemies of King Nash, as being complete morons who simply blab all of their plans to Fire without any hesitation and without holding back a single thing, when not a one of the lesser players who has been interrogated would tell them anything. I can't buy that. Nor can I buy that she can only get a vague idea of something wrong when what is actually wrong is that Hanna being taken and hurt. This is bullshit which betrays everything we have learned about Fire and her feelings for Hanna. If she can keep track of scores of people who detest her, then she ought to be tightly tuned in to those whom she loves, so I think Cashore failed badly here at the end of part two.

Here's another odd sentence: "...tears seeped down Fire's face from the effort of detracting the attention..." I think Cashore means distracting! The way it's written makes no sense at all. But moving right along - I find it equally as heartening as it is disheartening that Cashore seems as unable to finish a novel as I am! I loved Graceling, but the ending seemed a bit flat. I was less thrilled with Fire, which started out really good but got rather lost in the middle and then came back strong, slipped a little, and finally simply disintegrated at the end. However, it was a decent read overall, and Cashore has enough credit with me after her debut for me to forgive quite a bit!

I had some issues with Fire's behavior and character. She's a significantly less-than-stellar hero for a novel, especially a cashore novel and especially right after Graceling. She is portrayed as stronger in the beginning than she appears to become towards the end when we find her turning into a whimpering mess of Jello, so there's no character growth there. However, overall, she is enough to maintain interest and there are some really strong parts, particularly where Fire ends up being abducted by and then escaping Leck - the guy who causes so much trouble in Graceling. So on balance I do recommend this one, but I was glad to be done with it and moving on to Bitterblue