Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

Rating: WORTHY!

Dark Triumph is the second in the "His Fair Assassin" series (I reviewed the first, Grave Mercy here) and it takes off right where the first in this series ends, but it does so from the perspective of another of the assassin nuns: Sybella. In volume one, Sybella was one of the colleagues of Ismae, the main character and narrator of that volume. Sybella appeared very briefly, but on several occasions, yet she was never really graced with an introduction. Now she has her own story, and it ain't a happy one! She's resident in the castle of Count D'Albret, and living in fear of discovery. She has only one ally, Julian, and he's hardly her friend - not unless he can get something out of her in return for his "friendship". Indeed, Sybella's intimate history is rather florid, it would seem, and Julian has played an intimate part in it, although LaFevers appears too terrified of scandal to delve into it in any form other than hints and allusions.

In this novel, Sybella is pretty much under house arrest in D'Albret's purloined palace, and is watched closely. She is nominally the Count's daughter, but believes herself, like Ismae, to be actually a daughter of Mortain, the god of death. In passing, it's interesting to note that Mortain is actually the name of a city in Normandy, situated very close to the border with the region of Brittany.

Why Mortain chooses to rape women and have daughters who become assassins is left unexplained, but if there is one consistency in the history of humankind's invention of gods it is that these gods are useless, and require human intervention on a routine basis to help them out. They're also well-known for raping women, including the current popular god, Yahweh, the god of the world's three foremost monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. According to the Christians, that god raped Miriam to produce a son for slaughter. But Mortain seems to be particularly incompetent in that all he can do is mark people for death! He cannot kill them himself, but requires one of his female slaves to, er, undertake this? How ridiculous is that? What a pathetic and ineffectual god he is!

This novel starts out as though it were a fan fiction based on Graceling, the accomplished assassin traversing the castle steps. I had two immediate problems with it. The first is that this is another first person PoV tale. I have issues with that kind of story to begin with, but take a moment to think about it in this context: the narrator is a secret assassin, yet she's writing a true story about what she does, including names, places and dates?! Not a wise choice for a writer to make! OTOH, we do get (finally) a confirmation of someone's age in this novel: it's the Duchess (although she's crowned queen before we learn this) and she's thirteen. Some reviewers had assumed she was twelve from a sentence in the previous volume, but the sentence was so ambiguously worded that it was impossible to honestly assert with complete conviction any age IMO. This was another of Lafevers's writing failures.

The second problem I have with this is the blatant genderism - strike that, not genderism, as much as pure hatred of men! This new narrator says (on line six of chapter one!) in the context of learning how to kill "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a man's body...". For a moment (or a long moment as LaFevers would have it!), let us re-write the line: "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a woman's body...". Indeed, let us re-write the entire novel but reverse the gender roles. Would you be outraged at it then? I would. So why no outrage when that same line and that same tone in that same novel is written about men? We already learned from volume one in this series that women can be just as evil as men, so why this sustained campaign against men? It's a bit creepy to say the least.

Yes, back then (the first chapter is dated 1489AD) men typically did hold the reins/reigns (and unfortunately still do at a disproportionate percentage), but evil is not solely the preserve of men, and even where the evil is perpetrated by a man, there is often a woman who supports him, yet nowhere in either volume of this series so far, do we see any amelioration of this vendetta which is specifically and consistently directed towards men. As another reviewer pointed out, these femme vraiment fatale (or ninja nuns!) attack men, but they also work for a male god! Not very much in the way of logic there.

I was amused when, at one point, Sybella remarks upon Ismae's sharp wit, but I just got through reading that first volume and I recall none of that! Perhaps she's talking about the three years when they were in training, not a whit of which was shared with us in that first volume. That particular history is something which, done right, would have been really worth the telling, but it was not to be. More like 4F, in fact.

And now a word about the incessant use of 'demoiselle'! It's rife in these two novels! It's fine as far as it goes, but it really stands out because of its extreme frequency, rather like 'mayhap' and one or two other words did in volume one. If you go to dictionary.com and use the French - English translator there, the definition of this word is: unmarried lady; young lady; damsel; rammer, object or tool that rams! Hmm! The funny thing is if you split it into "de moi selle", it means "to me saddle". Hmm squared! Obviously this is just another thing to be cautious about when you're writing a novel!

So Sybella really, and I mean really, wants to murder this Count, but it seems she is to be robbed of the pleasure. Her instructions from the Abbey are instead, to free The Beast - the prisoner who was taken at the end of the last novel. This she does and this leads to arguably the best piece of action/adventure writing from LaFevers's keyboard in two novels. Of course, the massive telegraphing of the oncoming affair between Sybella and the Beast undermines the purity of the adventure with its ham-fistedness. This volume is definitely a league or two ahead of Grave Mercy. At least that's how it seemed at the half-way point! Unfortunately, then we have to deal with Ismae and Duval. Again. It's a pity that their divinity, Mortain, didn't have the god-like power to tell all these hapless Bretons that they were going to lose, that Anne would be forced to marry the French king, and that she would herself die before the age of forty (assuming that LaFevers follows the actual history of the region at all). Given how thoroughly reliably gods have proven themselves to be utterly unreliable throughout history, I don't find it the least bit surprising that they were invented by frightened, ignorant, and delusional humans!

Despite what I've said about LaFevers's writing in terms of how it reads, in terms of how she puts the words on paper, I have to say I have found no glaring errors until I reached p204 where she writes: "Provided the attack come from within." which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It should probably read "Provided the attack does not come from within." Another mistake I think she made has nothing to do with writing but with story-telling. Maybe that sounds like a tautology, but what I mean by "story-telling" is how she puts together her tale, her world, her mythology, and in this instance particularly: mythology. I guess others might call that world-building, if we take world-building to be understood in its very broadest sense. LaFevers claims in her novel that gods are real and powerful and worthy of veneration - just like the religiously inclined do in real life, in fact! But the problem LaFevers has is the same one the religious have in real life: their gods lack credibility and are actually completely powerless!

Everything the Bretons do is aimed at staying free of the French, and maintaining their independence and their old gods, so why are they worshiping these gods in secret? Why are they forced to venerate them as saints instead of as gods? Who, exactly, is it who is repressing these old gods in LaFevers's Brittany? She never explains this, but if the gods are real and powerful and Brittany so weak, then why are the gods not helping?! And on another note, how is it that some people see this as a feminist novel when the Duchess is so weak that she must marry a man to save her and her province? This isn’t a feminist novel at all, it’s quite the opposite, because not only does the Duchess need a man, so too do the assassins featured in each volume.

LaFevers uses the term "High-traffic areas" which is such an anachronism that it really jumped out and reminded me, yet again, that I was reading fiction that has high traffic in the area commonly known as 'poorly written'. LaFevers also seems to suffer from chronopsia. This is a word I've coined to described those people who are unable to gage the passage of time accurately. Here's why I think this is the case with LaFevers: Sybella goes to visit The Beast when he's recovering from injuries in a local convent. When she leaves his bedside, it’s "not quite morning". She returns to the palace and sleeps "a short while" and then has to go to a council meeting. When she leaves the council meeting very shortly afterwards and goes outside, she's in the "cool night air"! Where the hell did the entire day go? It’s not morning, it’s night because she sees downtown that the bars are open and people are reveling. She slaughters two of these revelers, who happen to be D'Albret's infiltrators and who are reveling all over a poor innocent woman. But suddenly it’s almost daybreak again! My, how the gods make the sands of time run at their bidding!

Despite all this, I do still prefer this novel to its predecessor, but LaFevers seems determined not to make it easy to like it. She has this hardened assassin (Sybella) agonizing over what people will think of her now they know she is D'Albret's daughter even though she really isn’t his daughter because she's Mortain's daughter. Are you still following this? It's seriously and amateurishly confused. She frets and worries most of all over what The Beast will think of her, and I found this to be at first annoying, followed by irritating, and finally truly nauseating. It is so out of character for Sybella. But at least she gets the goods on what Mortain really wants: she learns from Ismae that the marque does not command them to kill someone. It’s merely an indication that the person bearing it is going to die soon.

But enough of this rambling banter! In conclusion, and this might surprise you, I am in fact going to rate this as worthy if only because it was significantly better than LaFevers's previous sortie into this series. There were still many problems with it, however, which is why I have really no interest in pursuing this series any further. I committed only to the first two and that was plenty! They were worth reading but not addictively so. Hopefully, should you choose to read it, you will be able to offer it a warmer reception that was I!

The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice

Title: The Heavens Rise
Author: Christopher Rice
Publisher: Gallery Books
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.

This novel ought to be re-titled "Snakes in a Swamp", because there are, and lots of them. But despite that, something bad is happening in the swamps of Louisiana. That's all I got out of this novel in the first fifty pages. Reading it is like taking a switch-back ride and having your back switched with one belonging to the guy who previously took this same ride and had his back switched out, and not in a good way.

I read one third of the novel and could not get into it. It was not badly written per se, but it simply offered me nothing. I could not develop an interest in any of the characters. I could not care less what they did or why. There was no clear story being told. All it offered was one mystery after another with - at one third the way through - no sign of any story developing or going anywhere. I had to leave off reading it for a few days, and when I got back to it I found I could not honestly recall anything significant that I'd read up to that point. It was like starting a new novel, and despite this bonus, when I started in on it again, I found that I honestly had no interest in pursuing it, especially with other novels on my reading list tempting me. So I gave up on it! I'm really sorry because I like to do a good review, and to detail some of the things which interested me, but I can offer nothing in support of this novel, not even to sustain my own interest. Life's too short to waste it on something which simply can't make your bunny hop.

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

Rating: WORTHY!

I hate Robin LaFevers. Let me explain how this circumstance came to be…. I started reading The Rithmatist but my son wrestled that away from me (yeah, he kicked my butt; I am so abused…) so I had to resort to the next on my list until I could scheme and plot to snatch it back from that evil brute of a son when he least expects it. The next on the list would have been LaFevers's Dark Triumph, but that's number 2 in the "His Fair Assassin" inevitable trilogy. Fortunately, in a rare instance of Extreme Organization™ (a highly dangerous sport. I advise you not to practice it) I had Grave Mercy on order at the library and they, Masters and Mistresses of Literature that they are, came through for me. Of course, having been thrashed to within a hinge of my life (hey, I was at death's door), and in a state of tremens-dous delirium and self-doubt from practicing extreme sports, I was a pushover for LaFevers to take cruel advantage of my thoroughly helpless state. It’s all her fault.

Ismae Rienne is fifteen years old, and has a deep red stain across her back from her left shoulder to her right hip: a trail of ugly welts and scars left by the herb witch's potion which failed to abort her. Fourteen or so years later, her father sold her for three silver coins to Guillo the pig farmer who abused her on their "wedding night", but never consummated the marriage once he saw this scar. Locked in a root cellar as evil incarnate, she was rescued by the same hedge priest who married her. He arranged for her to be transported across Brittany (France) to the coast. Considered to be a child sired by death, Ismae is taken to an island where she will be subject to the oversight of the abbess of Saint Mortain, the patron saint of death.

The abbey proves to be a denizen of genderist wenches whose entire waking day seems to center around plotting the demise of all mankind. That's sad, because I was on board with this until I read that part! More on this anon. After being extensively trained in pretty much everything for three years, Ismae is sent upon her first assassination, and she succeeds with admirable efficiency. Disturbing huh? What LaFevers did here is to stealth-creep her prologue right into chapter one and make me read it! Pretty savvy of her to discover how to undermine my allergy to prologues. The problem is that this is sold as a YA novel and yet here she is on the cusp of adulthood already! Sneaky, huh?

Next we meet the trope du jour, who is named Gavriel Duval, of course, and inescapably, Ismae totally like hates him to the max. Yet every time he touches her she feels the penetrating heat of his hands. He has the most amazingly super-heated hands like ever! Plus, Ismae and Gavriel are inescapably thrown together because her trustily faithful horse dies and she has to ride with him. Two of them. Together. In. The. Same. Saddle.

Despite some issues, I was enjoying this until he showed up, and even his showing up wouldn't have been anywhere near so bad if this woman who had reached the age of eighteen (give or take) solely through feeding off of her extreme hatred of humankind hadn't fallen for him like a moose through mousse. Now she has to travel with him to the court of Anne, Duchess of the Duchy of Brittany, and spy. In the words of Pink:

Ever wonder 'bout what he's doing; how it all turned to lies?
The only way to be really certain is to go out there and spy
Where there is deceit there is gonna be a spy
Where there is a spy there is gonna be a counter
Where there is a counter you know someone's gonna buy,
You've gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
Gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
You gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy...

LaFevers is obsessed with long moments. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the phrase 'long moment' 37 times in 549 pages, so there's a long moment every fourteen pages or so. No wonder the book takes so long to read! LaFevers has as many as three of them in one chapter - and the chapters aren’t that long! Seriously? If it’s a 'moment' it is, by definition, short. Can writers not think of a better way to express themselves than this clunker? This is a serious writing failure, and it’s not the only one LaFevers exhibits unfortunately. Having said that, I have to confess that I finished this book and that I am looking forward to its sequel, hopefully not its equal.

This abysmal trope instalust which Rienne is sickening. Since rien, as in de rien in French, means 'nothing', then is Ismae Rienne a female nothing? Just a thought! Actually Rienne is the French word for Ecuador. At one point Duval wakes Ismae from a bad dream and she almost sticks a knife in his throat. As she is cleaning up the blood from his scratch, her wrist rests on his chest and when she removes it, it throbs. Excuse me, but no, no! No! And, er, NO! And what's up with Duval - he can’t clean his scratch himself? This man who is suspicious of her, and distrusts her and resents her, puts all of that on the back burner and lets her tend his minuscule wound? Why is it that in these stories it’s always the guy with his friggin' shirt off and the woman slavishly ministering his insignificant little scrapes and aches? Please let's stop this!

LaFevers is obsessed with Duval's body heat. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the word 'heat' only 15 times, which I confess surprised me, because it seems like it's employed with much greater frequency, especially since she uses the word 'body' over fifty times! It's not even as many times as she says 'mayhap' which really stuck out like a sore point because it's such an anachronism compared with the rest of her writing. Having suffered through endless mayhaps in Kushiel's Dart, I definitely wasn't ready to be assailed by it yet again in Grave Mercy!

Given that one of the major disagreements between Breton and France is that France is under the stranglehold of Catholicism whereas Breton is in the sway of the pagan gods (according to the gospel by LaFevers), it makes no sense whatsoever for the Duchess to chide Ismae for referring to Mortain as a god rather than a saint! This is another example of LaFevers's thoughtless writing - or her confusion about the world she has created.

Shortly after the Duc de Nemours - the Duchess's betrothed - is assassinated, Ismae visits his room on impulse and kills two men who are in there, one of whom had Mortain's "marque" (how pretentious! Why not simply 'mark'? I don’t see the point of this unless it was a ham-fisted effort to get Ismae injured so that she and Duval can be intimate, but this whole episode smacks of poor writing. When Duval learns what has happened, he sends a page to find his friend (referred to as "The Beast"). His intention is to have The Beast clean up Nemours rooms, and hide the bodies, but The Beast never meets with Duval until after the pointless intimate moment is taken care of, yet The Beast reports that the rooms are cleaned. How did he know what to do since Duval never told him? Bad, bad writing! Go stand in the corner, LaFevers.

So as I mentioned, I have finished this and I recommend it if you can stomach the sometimes really bad writing and the instadore. But on the good side, the ending is really, really good, and well-written, and I liked that very much. Even the instadore is competently muted. In the end Ismae transcends her lot in life and moves on to something with a much broader sweep, and I approved of this immensely. So I cautiously recommend this with the above-mentioned caveats, and as I said, I will review volume two in this series next, and I can do this with some real hope because it's evidently about a different Ninja Nun than the first volume was.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: worthy

For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes, see here

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Review of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

This entire trilogy should have been called simply, "The Girl Who Kicks Ass", period! Although there is none of that in this volume. This one starts off exactly where the middle book of this trilogy ended: with Lisbeth Salander being whisked off to hospital with three bullets in her, still covered in the dirt from the grave where she had been buried, and Mikael Blomkvist being arrested by the most incompetent police officer since inspector Clouseau, and that's just the first chapter....

The police finally wise-up to the possibility that maybe Lisbeth isn't the lesbian satanist serial killer she's been portrayed as in the media, and Blomkvist wants to right wrongs whilst avoiding writing wrongs. He starts work on an article to be published in the next edition of Millennium magazine, the very mag which his partner, Erica, is leaving to take up a new high-powered position at a newspaper syndicate. Meanwhile the real villain, whom Blomkvist had trussed up like a turkey for the police, has escaped and both he and Zalachenko are gunning for Salander.

Which is a tragedy since Zalachenko is a patient in the same hospital as the debilitated Salander, and he's parked only three doors away from her! The police are so profoundly stupid that not a single one of them thinks of putting a guard on the doors of either of them, nor does Blomkvist think of suggesting it despite the fact that he's supposed to care deeply for Salander.

Meanwhile, the a segment of the Swedish security police (what there is of it) aka Säpo, is plotting to cover up this mess which has been humongous newspaper-grabbing headline material for months. Good luck with that! Säpo's plan involves a 78-year-old retired agent shooting Zalachenko in the hospital, and then committing suicide. It also involves breaking into Blomkvist's apartment to steal the extant copies of the document which could incriminate Säpo. Zalachenko finally gets nailed, and Blomkvist's sister is mugged. The Man From Säpo visits the senior prosecutor in charge of the case and fills his head with a bunch of crapola about Salander and Blomkvist.

I have to confess that there is a significant amount of pointless prose in this novel just as there was in the previous volume. It's hard to imagine how Larsson even considered putting some of this stuff in there. More to the point, Salander is seriously out of the action in this one, so there is no relief offered by her activities; instead, Larsson has drafted in some utterly tedious nonsense. There's a long discussion on the price of toilets, for example (I am not kidding). Larsson seems obsessed with describing every street in Stockholm in minute detail in terms of how to get from one to the other. He also describes meals in appetite-suppressing detail, and rambles endlessly in rabid pursuit of totally irrelevant digressions.

For example, there's an entire sub-plot about one of the most idiotic women in literature: Blomkvist's married girlfriend, Erica. There's an inane tryst between Blomkvist and a security police officer (who happens to be a rather amazonian female). Blomkvist's indulgence of himself (in all three novels) in irresponsible, "care-free" sex is just downright stupid, and in no case does it contribute anything to the plot. But not one character ever raises the issue of venereal diseases or of the wisdom of jumping into bed with a slut like Blomkvist in this day and age. I really started disliking Blomkvist at the end of volume one, where he callously tears up Salander's heart with his profligate bullshit fling with Berger (I actually strongly dislike the pair of them) was what really turned me off Blomkvist, and he never did climb back into my good graces.

Any new writer who wrote like Larsson did would be (and in this case rightfully) ripped a new one by their editor (if the editor was worth anything), but as we have seen, good editors are few and far between, and evidently Larsson turned in the manuscripts for all three novels right before he died; it was almost like his heart was waiting until he had finished before it decided to stop beating, so no doubt he was given a bye for this trilogy. How wonderful would it be if all of us were given the same free pass? Well, maybe not, judged by some of the crap that's out there! It really goes to show what outrages you can get away with once you have your foot inside someone's publishing door, doesn't it though?

I should also say a word about the bizarre arrangement of the "chapters" or tracks on the audiobook disks, of which there are sixteen. The division into these chapters is completely random, with the breaks coming sometimes in the middle of a sentence! The "chapters are also very long (seven to nine minutes) when compared with those in Kushiel's Dart, which had many more disks, but had "chapter" times at about three minutes each. Just an observation.

So why am I going to rate this novel as worthy? Well, the other two were entertaining, and although this one was really annoying at times, it wraps them up perfectly well. The courtroom scene towards the end, where Blomkvist's sister represents Salander and does it masterfully, makes the rest of it worthwhile. There's a really dragged-out ending which should have been excluded or at least trimmed but that's okay. This whole trilogy is worth a read and Lisbeth Salander is one of the best characters ever to appear in any novel I've ever read.

Broken Beauty by Lizzy Ford

Title: Broken Beauty
Author: Lizzy Ford
Publisher: Indie Inked
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 less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Broken Beauty was a bad choice for the title of this novel. There are at least two other books with precisely that title, at least seven novels titled "Beautifully Broken" and one called "The Beauty of Broken...", as well as one called "A Broken Kind of Beautiful...", and so on! Let this be a lesson to authors to research not only your subject, but also your title! I have to question why the "Beauty" part was even relevant. Would this be less of a horrifying story if the woman to whom it happened had been a "plain jane"? I don't think so. The other bad news is that this isn't a complete novel. It's "Broken Beauty Novellas #1", and so is short, but not en suite. Wikipedia defines a novella as at least 17,500 words:

Novel over 40,000 words
Novella 17,500 to 40,000
Novelette 7,500 to 17,500
Short story under 7,500

I don't have a word count to see where this technically falls on that scale, but I'm fine with taking the author's word for it! This time!

This series is in a way an emulation of Stephen King's The Green Mile which was published in six installments in 1996. For me personally, I'd rather get the whole thing at once, but who knows, maybe Ford is onto something here? I mean, who knows what ebooks are going to do in the long-run? I think it's far too early to call. Maybe going backwards to go forwards is where it will lead, and we'll see more novels published like this, ultimately emulating serials like Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories which were published in installments in The Strand magazine.

There's something weird going on with the text in this egalley. There are sections of the text where it changes randomly from black to grey. I have no idea what's causing that. That is to say, it's not like it's flashing or changing as I read it, it's just that some paragraphs are dark and some not, some screens have it, some don't, and it nearly always starts at the commencement of a paragraph, very rarely in the middle of one, but it doesn't appear to be tied to anything like an internal monologue, or to where maybe there should have been italics. Weird! It's a bit annoying, but this is a short novel, so it's not a big deal. My Kindle says I have a little over 90 minutes of reading in total.

The title page and cover both list this as written by 'Lizzy Ford writing as Chloe Adams'. I do not get this 'writing as' crap. This was written by Lizzy Ford as far as I'm concerned. There's a limit to how far I'm willing to allow the fiction to extend beyond the boundaries of chapter one (going towards the front cover), and the last chapter (going towards the back)! I think it's an insult to readers for a writer to change their name in order to sell other books or write in other genres. I don't want to be a party to that, but that's not going to influence my review of the story itself.

This novel is about the aftermath of the rape of Mia Abbot-Renou, the young-adult daughter of a Southern US politician - the self-same politician who has claimed that pregnancy cannot result from rape because the woman's body shuts it down. A similar asinine and clueless claim was actually made in real life by Republican congressman Todd Akin, so kudos to Ford for slipping that in. Akin asserted "...If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down..." - implying that anyone who gets pregnant from rape really wasn't raped since they consented, even if they think they didn't! The pregnancy proves it! What an asshole. If he'd said that in front of me, he'd likely end up with a name-change to Tod Akin-Balls...!

The story begins with Mia being picked up by the cops and taken to a hospital where the relevant examinations are carried out. Mia is scared and only feels safe if she can see one of the two cops, Keisha and Dom, who initially responded to the crime report. Just in passing, do you know there apparently isn't a police 10-xx code for rape - or for assault or GBH?! Go figure. OTOH, they have at least four codes for motor vehicle issues - just in case you're not crystally clear on where our priorities lie as a society in the USA. But then car dealerships are always better lit than are residential neighborhoods, so why am I even surprised by this?! In a really disturbing WTF moment, neither Mia's mother, who is in rehab, nor her father, who is at a fundraiser, can be bothered to visit their daughter in the hospital - and her father is bothered about spinning this event?!

We learn from internal monologue that Mia was a virgin, and from her examination that she was injured rather badly physically (as well as mentally), as a result of this assault, and she's really confused, her mind wandering, flashes of the attack mingling with non-sequitur memories (triggered by the resemblance - in small ways - of one of the cops to her grandfather). Why the virginity issue is raised I do not know. Does Ford want me to believe that the rape was worse solely because the victim was a virgin as opposed to her being a hooker or a "housewife", for example? Bullshit! Rape is rape. It doesn't get any worse.

The opening sequence was in some ways annoying because it was so discontinuous, so if Ford was trying to make me uncomfortable, she succeeded, but I'm not sure she succeeded in making me discomfited about the right things or in the right way! However, it is, in general, well written and it drew me in, so despite some nit-picking issues, one of which I'm about to launch into, that was a good start.

Once Mia has had all her medical attention, it's the next day before the two cops get to sit down with her and she eventually identifies one Robert Connor and his friend as her two rapists. There's a suggestion of the possible use of Flunitrazepam or a similar substance employed in her drink to help perpetrate this rape, but before their investigation can get very far, the family lawyer (who is also Mia's uncle) and a PR guy show up trying to spin this "event" (they really don't seem to want to call it a rape, much less identify the son of one of their leading financial contributors as the rapist). They also plan to whisk her out of the hospital and put her under the care of another family friend who is a therapist. This is horrible, but it's a disturbingly fascinating story.

I had my biggest issue with this "whisking-out" of Mia. We're told she has to be sneaked out of the hospital via a side-door because the press is flocking to the front entrance. Why? Not why is she sneaked out, why is the press there? This happened just the night before, so unless the police have deliberately and purposefully broadcast the gut-churning details of this rape, including the victim's name, and also the crime-scene and hospital photographs of her battered body, how in hell did anyone find out about it? I was jerked bodily out of suspension of disbelief by that because I cannot find it even remotely plausible that this information would get out so fast, much less be deliberately released by the police or the hospital. There would be serious lawsuits flying in formation if information like this was released.

I suspect that Ford did this to further put Mia on the hot-spot, but I could not see that happening realistically. What happened was horrific enough without piling on events which stretch credibility beyond breaking point. But given that clunker, the story improves from there on out. It does lead to Mia being isolated from the police while her father's people try to spin this, which in turn leads to Mia having to read "her" prepared statement to the press where she's passing on not her own words but those of her father's lawyer.

Mia becomes completely isolated from real life as she's forced repeatedly to retreat to her bedroom closet to escape panic attacks and flashbacks as everyone tries to manage, contain, and control this "unfortunate event". Even her therapist is a distant relative. Her best friend comes over to support her and pretty much moves in. Somehow Mia is prosecuted for her unknowing use of a stolen ID, and via a plea-bargain she conveniently gets to do 100 hours of community service in a women's shelter helpfully run by the sister of the cop who, I'm guessing, is going to be the trope love interest, as disgusting as that seems at this point. It's at the shelter that Mia learns that she's pregnant (her father had denied her the morning-after pill because, you know, rape victims cannot possibly become pregnant...).

So it looks like I'm going to rate this warty, doesn't it? Actually I'm not. I had some real issues with it, but those parts which were not issue-ridden were actually engrossing, and did keep my interest. Like I said, I would prefer it if this were just one complete novel instead of installments, but that's the author's choice. Maybe I'll wait to read the rest when it all comes between one pair of covers, though? I rate this one worthy because people need to read about this, and they need to be made so uncomfortable by stories like these that something is done about this unconscionable crime and the even more horrific frequency of it.

Bounty Hunter by SJ Hollis

Title: Bounty Hunter
Author: SJ Hollis
Publisher: Uninvited Black Cat
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was an easy read. It lasts about four hours according to my Kindle's count-down which appeared from nowhere some time ago at the bottom of my screen with neither warning nor explanation. It used to tell me how many minutes to the end of the chapter; now it sullenly advises me how many hours remain until to the end of the novel, like it's annoyed with me both for taking up so much of its valuable time, and also irritated by my insistent tapping its right cheek every few seconds. Don't you just hate it when your technology branches out on its own like that, doing stuff without so much as a by-your-leave? Microsoft excels (particularly with its spreadsheets!) at that sort of thing, preventing Access, trying to have the last Word, sticking its PowerPoint sharp end first in your ass while you twiddle your thumbs (or whatever you're wont to twiddle) in Paintbrush waiting for your operating system to go 'Bing!' and let you know you can finally get something done on the device which you thought you owned, but which, according to Microsoft, you empirically don't. This is why I run Ubuntu on my computer at home. It, too, can be really irritating, but it's better than Windows. At least at home I don't to deal with patiently watching the hourglass, wondering what surreptitious machinations Microsoft is perpetrating in my face behind my back.

This is a particularly appropriate introduction to Bounty Hunter, because Kai Koson, the male protagonist, is subject to the whims of fate in much the same way as we are when our computer takes over from us. He's towed along behind his uncle Galway (who may or may not be a relative), a fierce and tough protector who has taken care of Kai ever since he was a child and his parents died. Why is he on the run? Because he's a witch in a world haunted by demons who came through a witch-initiated rip in the sky long ago, and who take an immediate and very personal dislike to him for reasons he can only bemoan and ponder.

It's during one of these encounters that Kai meets Sam, a bounty hunter with a ship of her own. He turns down her offer to join her crew, but reconsiders his refusal when his uncle takes him to meet a senior witch, and Kai overhears something which he doesn't at all like. So off he goes, leaving his uncle behind and chasing his dream into the wild black yonder, seeking bountiful bounties. Over the course of his long journey he learns who his friends are. He learns deep secrets about his uncle, and about the demons, he learns why magic is so hard to come by. He learns why he was never taught to use his own. And he ends up somewhere that he never expected to go with a huge bounty of his very own.

Talking of which, I had wondered about the wisdom of the choice of title for this novel. Bounty Hunter speaks strongly of the wild west, but it doesn't really speak sci-fi to me. I asked SJ Hollis about this, and she explained it this way:

The title was there from the very beginning. I was searching for something to write about, and Sarah Rees Brennan posted on her LiveJournal that a place to search for ideas is way outside your genre. She got her idea for Demon's Lexicon, I believe, from a documentary about wolves (her book has nothing to do with wolves). So I watched lots of TV and read lots of books constantly searching for something I could twist in a YA story. Then one day I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter and thought, hmmm, teenagers, bounty hunters. In space. WITH MAGIC! WIN!

The cover concept was a group effort between me, my sister and her partner and then my illustrator Lawrence Mann. We came up with Kai's hand holding the Earth, his blood dripping, and Lawrence, from my descriptions of Kai, the demons and Laon, put together the rest.

So I can't argue with that! Frankly, now I have to wonder about how her mind works, but then she does describe herself as "slightly odd" in her bio!

This novel has been described as influenced by "Buffy, Stargate, Firefly, House, Doctor Who, Big Bang Theory, Sherlock and Supernatural". I agree with the Buffy element, in that there's demon fighting, but this is a different kettle of fish to Buffy, a show I never watched because I detested it, so don't let that put you off! I don't recall reading anything which reminded me of Stargate, but that's another show I never watched, even though I loved the movie which spawned it. I agree with the Firefly: it's very much in the mould of a cowboy/Sci-Fi mash-up. I cannot see any comparison with House, a TV show I really loved. I agree with the Doctor Who as far as the 'bigger on the inside' goes, but that was only one instance; otherwise it has nothing in common with Britain's long-running (50th anniversary: 2013!) sci-fi series - there is no time travel involved, for example. I saw no elements of Big Bang Theory jumping out. This is a show of which I'm not particularly fond, but of which I've seen several episodes (my kids love it!). I saw nothing which jumped out at me and cried Sherlock, but kudos to Hollis for mentioning it! That's another show which is coming back in the fall for what's likely to be its last run. Supernatural is on par with Buffy as far as I am concerned - my wife loves it but I can't stand it, so don't ask me to comment on that!

I honestly think this novel is done a disservice when it's compared with TV shows, because it's strong enough to stand on its own. It's unique in my reading experience in the breadth of its constituent elements, and I was most impressed by the basic plot and by the execution of the tale. There was humor (Hollis seems to have a fondness for fish!), friendship, betrayal, forgiveness, and many twists and up-endings of status quo. It was an enjoyable read which entertained me throughout, and the satisfying ending made me glad I had read it. This is definitely a WORTHY read!

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson

Title: The Rithmatist
Author: Brandon Sanderson
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

Well I was just starting this one, but my son stole it right out from under me! Don't worry, I will steal it right back when he goes to sleep and really get started on it tomorrow! Meantime, I will just give you this much of the book blurb (which I hate to do, but blame my son! Yeah, that's it. It's all his fault!) "As the son of a lowly chalk-maker at Armedius Academy, Joel can only watch as Rithmatist students study the magical art that he would do anything to practice. Then students start disappearing — kidnapped from their rooms at night, leaving trails of blood."

This is book one in a series, and this is one heck of a weird tale, but you have to admire that Sanderson took an ostensibly limp, even stupid idea: that kids' chalkings on the sidewalk can come to life, and he ran with it and made a really awesome story out of it. This novel is part steam-punk, part dystopian future, part science, part magic, but its not like any steam-punk or dystopian, or magic or sci-fi novel I've ever read. It's set in what seems to be the future, but it's a weird and distant future where all memory of our life and times seems to have disappeared. There has apparently been some serious global warming and the USA is now a series of Islands, named vaguely after the current states, but not quite (for example there's East and West Carolina islands, not North and South Carolina states, and it's not the United States, but the United Isles (and actually would probably have been more aptly named the Confederated Isles). These isles are linked together by a monorail - but the trains run on clockwork as does everything else in this world.

The male protagonist is Joel, who dreams of being a Rithmatist - that is someone who, from an early age, was inducted into and trained for the Rithmatic religion, and can make chalk drawings come to life. But these are not just any drawings, they are defensive and offensive battle lines. There is an art and a science of drawing protective chalk circles which will defend you whilst you launch your chalk line attacks. But defend from what? Attack who? Chalklings!

In the isle of Nebrask, there are wild chalklings: two-dimensional "creatures" made entirely from chalk lines, which will swarm you and literally take you apart piece by piece if they get near you. Right now they are contained by the efforts of the valiant Rithmatists who, fighting from behind meticulously and rigorously constructed chalk line defenses, can create and launch their own "tame" chalklings which will attack the defenses of others and attack other chalklings according to your chalked, symbolic instruction set.

Joel was not accepted into the Rithmatists, and because his father, a renowned chalk maker, died in a horrible spring rail accident, he is only able to attend the most famous Rithmatist school because of his father's reputation and his mother's appallingly hard work-schedule cleaning the school. But even so he cannot attend actual Rithmatics classes, only the regular classes. During his free-time he reads everything he can about Rithmatics (even though he's not allowed to take out books from the Rithmatics library). He is dreaming of becoming something in the field of Rithmatics even though he would not be a Rithmatist per se.

To his complete delight, Joel manages to wangle himself a position helping his favorite professor - Fitch - for the summer, and despite the fact that he also has to be around Melody, a particularly ornery Rithmatics student who is having to spend the summer under Fitch practicing drawing her defensive circles. Melody is a complete novel in and of herself. I adore her. She isn't a bad Rithmatist - she can draw amazingly intricate unicorn chalklings which roam around with great animation - she's just a really sloppy defensive Rithmatist. But she and Joel together make quite a formidable team. And it's just as well because suddenly, students from the academy are showing up missing - yes indeed-y. And the person put in charge of trying to figure out what, exactly, is going here is none other than the professor under whom Joel and Melody are studying that summer....

This novel was amazing, and I highly and unreservedly recommend it. It's a brilliant idea, and it's beautifully written. It has mystery, and adventure, and Joel is a truly worthy main character. If you want to learn how to write YA "romance", then read Sanderson. He nails it completely. The relationship between Joel and Melody is a complete yet bottomless joy to watch unfold.

Palace of Spies by Sarah Zettel

Title: Palace of Spies
Author: Sarah Zettel
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!

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

Despite the unfortunate initials of this novel's title (PoS!), I loved the title page which said,

Being a true, accurate, and complete account of the scandalous and wholly remarkable adventures of Margaret Preston Fitzroy, counterfeit lady, accused thief, and confidential agent at the court of His Majesty King George 1.

My dearest hope going in was that this novel would live up to that adorable billing in every way (even though the accused thief bit isn't true!).

I'm not a fan of historical romance, which is why I found myself liking this novel. The story is a real pleasure to read. It's not only believable, but gripping, interesting, with a sharp tang of sly humor running through it, and it drew me right in. It moves very quickly, and nothing is wasted. Just when I thought a trope romance guy was going to enter the fray and drag things down into the mud, he was dispatched with admirable expediency: indeed his very fate was essential to the tale to move it along.

I had only one mild issue with it in the first one hundred pages, but with what novel are there no issues? The issue was merely the use of American spellings and idiom, and even having said that, I'm forced to wonder, with regard to idiom, whether modern American English might possess of itself more authenticity than modern English English for a tale such as this, set as it is three hundred years ago. I'll leave that to the experts to resolve because it certainly isn't worth agonizing over in a novel which is as well written as this one has proven itself to be.

Our doubty protagonist, Margaret Fitzroy ("Peggy"), born in the year 1700, is a sixteen-year-old when we meet her, a spirited woman whose father left her family half her lifetime ago, which betrayal subsequently resulted in the deterioration of her mother to the point of death (so we're told - I have some doubts, I confess!). I strongly suspect that we will revisit this incident at a later point in Peggy's history. In the meantime, she was taken in by an uncle who was resentful of it to say the least, and Peggy found herself on easy street, becoming spoiled and not entirely as appreciative of what she had as perhaps she ought to have been.

She grew to be best friends with her cousin Olivia, both girls being well-educated and having rather wild and dramatic imaginations; then it all came crashing down when Peggy was informed that she had been betrothed to Sebastien. This was immediately post-ceded by "the incident" which was beautifully written. Suddenly, Peggy finds her life in ruins. She is quite literally on the street. Fortunately for her circumstances, an unusual encounter with a rather mysterious gentleman at a ball she had attended the night before has provided the only option which remains to her. She avails herself of this opportunity, although she does not see it so at the time, and this is how she becomes a spy in the court of King George 1st under a false name, posing as the Lady Francesca.

What more do you need for me to tell you in order for you to want to go get this novel and start reading immediately?! I blew through the first one hundred pages, expending zero effort in the doing, and fully expected to see off the remaining 262 without having to get up out of my seat.

So Peggy is trained and goes to court where interesting discoveries galore lie in wait for her which I will not share, although I long to! Another rather tropish guy puts in an appearance, but until I finished the novel I chose to reserving judgment upon him. In terms of court life, we're spared too many tedious details. The only thing I found curious there (curious in a bad way) was the mention of Frideric Handel. Given the German origin of the Princess (Caroline) whom Peggy meets, why is he not referred to as Georg Friedrich Händel? Who knows?! Actually there is one other major curiosity: How does Peggy get away with posing as a completely different person? That, I felt was stretching things a bit far, so you have to agree to let that slip by if you want to really enjoy this!

Having just completed the less-than-stellar The Friday Society, I have to say that Zettel walks all over Adrienne Cress in her ability to convey a sense of period, but without using a lot of antiquated or stilted language to do it. If you want to write an historical novel, yet make it truly accessible to today's young audience, take some pages out of Zettel's novel. No, don't do that, she'll sue you for plagiarism. Instead, learn from her, and try to emulate her example with your own original material!

My first real disappointment in this novel came in chapter twelve where we're treated to a paragraph-long description of Peggy's attire. I don’t care what she's wearing unless it has some direct relevance to the plot! I'm not one who is impressed by an author who is proudly dedicated to crowing about how much period research she did. I don’t know this period, so Zettel could slip things by me which I would not catch. Unless she tossed in something really anachronistic, I woudn't notice, and there's no reason why I should. I don’t care. I'm about character and plot, not about frills. Two sentences, if you really insist, to set her attire in place and then let’s go! Please!

But while I'm on this topic, I have a question: why would a woman who lives in that era, who has been raised in that era knowing no other era, make so many remarks about her attire, and in particular, her stays? I don't buy that approach at all. Admittedly I have a really serious problem with first person PoV novels, but that's a whole other essay! Peggy's period in history may well be something new to us as twenty-first century readers of this fiction, but it was nothing to her. She was habituated to it and had no reason to constantly remark upon the peccadilloes of it. The only reason she would do so is because the author wanted to show off, and that turns me off. I found it to be nothing other than a frequent reminder that I was reading historical fiction, which in turn made it more difficult for me to become engaged by the story. Please, if you're going to write historical fiction, stay with the fiction and avoid the friction! This applies especially if you're going to write it from a contemporary perspective, and even more especially if this is a first-person perspective. Write it realistically and not as though our narrator is a twenty-first century visitor to that era! It doesn't work!

I'm not convinced that a woman living in Peggy's era would have thoughts which included phrases along the lines of 'dropped dead', but that's the kind of thing I'm personally willing to let go right on by if it's not combined with other problems in the same small section of the novel! I was rather disappointed, given Peggy's confusion during her Molly's monologue, that she did not think to ask Abbot (now posing as another maid) to explain a few things about Lady Francesca's personal history. Indeed, why were these things not shared with Peggy beforehand? Things like this are far more likely to trip her up than the other material she was taught. Fortunately, Molly seems like she's going to be an ally. This is why Peggy ought to confide in her that she's not exactly compos mentis and needs a little help, which should not come in the form of a poker she picked up as a defensive weapon in the hallway! Why would there be a poker in the hallway? There are no fireplaces in the hallway! Remember, the only water in the forest is the river, hence the River Song….

My second real disappointment also arrived with chapter twelve - that of another trope male romantic figure, Matthew Reade (yes with an 'e'!) who at first glace appeared to be some sort of an artist, but as I mentioned, I was willing to let this go and see how it played out. I was hoping that Zettel would really pull out some magic from that point onwards, otherwise I should perforce be required to dispossess this goodly novel of my favor.

Fortunately for my budding relationship with Zettel, she did pull out some magic. Matthew turned out to be no trope at all, and the story really took off. I thoroughly enjoyed this and was thrilled by how Zettel handled the romance which wasn't really any kind of romance - not yet - which was why I enjoyed it so much. I approve of Matthew. I was happy to read the novel to the end and sad that it ended, but this is to be the start of a series, and I'm definitely on board with it. Notwithstanding my criticisms above, I recommend this novel. The story was engrossing, the characters charming, and the villains realistic. Be prepared for plot twists and double-twists, for fun and durring-do (and don't), but most of all, just sit back and enjoy Peggy - an up-and-coming main character with pluck, loyalty, bravery, and a healthy dose of humor. Can't go wrong. This is a worthy novel!

The Friday Society by Adrienne Kress

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Title: The Friday Society
Author: Adrienne Kress
Publisher: Dial
Rating: WARTY!

Adrienne Kress has tried to promote this novel and rationalize her treatment of her three heroes here by claiming that she's subverting tropes, but I disagree. Yes, they are far from the worst examples of female abuse in YA writing, but they are nowhere near the paragons of feminism which she portrays them to be. You can read her version here and here.

This novel seems, at first blush, like a steam-punk novel mashed-up with a mystery, but it's really not. Not steam-punk, that is, and there is some mystery to it, but that's not necessarily what the author intended! I didn't like the very beginning; it seemed rather amateurish. Kress is not English and even though she lived in that country, she doesn’t seem to have quite mastered capturing the tone for people's thinking and modes of expression for the era. I understand that it was not her intention to be true to life (this is fiction, after all), but I'll share some thoughts on this later. What she did wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; I'm all for breaking molds (and even moulds!), but it does trip-up the reader somewhat to begin with. Again this is not necessarily a bad thing depending on where you're going and how far you take it with you! Unfortunately, Kress didn't seem to know where to go with this nor how to get there competently.

Having said that, I initially warmed up to this story rather quickly. Kress has an interesting sense of humor and made me almost laugh out loud at times, for example when another character, Nellie, sighs wistfully and her partner, The Great Raheem, asks her "Are you sighing wistfully?" For some reason, that one really tickled me.

The novel features three main characters who are introduced alphabetically (by last name), each one allowed three chapters in which to establish themselves before the story proper kicks off. I did like the way Kress did this, introducing the character in their first chapter, the male in her life in the next (not a romantic male but a guardian or partner or troublesome bully), and finally something to pique interest in the third of the character chapters. I think it was the symmetry of it all which really resonated with me. Kress seems quite playful with her chapters and chapter titles. She has chapters 10½ and 10¾ for example. I enjoyed this playfulness. The title "The Friday Society" came from the fact that each of the three girls is a "man" Friday (as in Robinson Crusoe).

Cora Bell is a London street urchin turned ward of Lord White her mentor, who is rather fond of the seven percent solution evidently, and also is a scientist/inventor. There's no word at the beginning on how these two very different people hooked-up together, which I found particularly peculiar. We first meet Cora after an explosion in Lord White's laboratory where she ends up covered in "green goo". We don't learn what this might be until later. Shortly after this, Cora has to retrieve Lord White from his opium den.

This proved to be very standard stuff, except that the opium den is in an alley, and when Cora comes back outside with Lord White in tow, she's almost blinded by with bright sunlight. That does fly in the face of the London trope (that it’s always raining or drenched in smog), but that's not what caught my attention so much as the disconnect between a narrow, dingy alley in a depressed part of town and the bright sunlight. I'm not sure how much bright sunlight you’d get in a narrow alley, so that seemed odd to me, but I guess it depends on the alley you ally yourself with....

When Cora returns him home, she heads down to the lab and confronts what she takes to be a burglar, but is actually a new lab assistant. This makes Cora feel surplussed as well as nonplussed. Andrew Harris appears to be none other than Trope Romance Guy (TRG pronounced TRRRRGGG! - yes with the exclamation point, and made to sound as rude as possible). Naturally she hates him. Yawn. Could we not have a romance novel for a change where she starts out with an attraction and ends up hating him? That would be my kind of romance novel! So, for those who are taking notes: Ian not v. impressed wrt Cora or TRG. So I have to ask, vis-à-vis Kress's claim to be subverting tropes, how the hell this tired cliché of a "romance" even remotely contributes to that goal? (Short answer: it doesn't. It merely sells out your girl in the same way every other badly written romance sells her out). Fortunately, Kress was about to make a better impression on me with the next two girls who make up this mystery-solving trio (girls, make-up, get it? No, neither did I...).

Nellie Harrison is up next (no doubt destined to be George's great-great grandmother - after her descendants move to Liverpool)…. She starts out her three-chapter introduction almost identically - with an explosion - which I honestly appreciated. Indeed, the very first line of each chapter trio is exactly the same but caused by a different kind of explosion. This time it was flash powder, as in early flash photography, but she's not a photographer's assistant, she's a magician's assistant as we discover in her second chapter. The magician is the aforementioned 'The Great Raheem', a Persian who learned street magic in what is now Iran, and managed to bring it to London where he hit the big time. There's nothing going on between Raheem and Nellie, just as there was nothing going on between Cora and Lord White, but unlike Cora, Nellie doesn’t get a lab partner, she gets a dead body! And she gets fewer pages allocated to her than does Cora. Nellie was chosen not only for her looks, but for her personality and smarts, so we're told, although she exhibits little of either.

She also has a parrot who purrs like a cat! Evidently it’s an excellent mimic, and it keeps on annoyingly reappearing throughout the story doing things which parrots do not do unless specifically and dedicatedly trained to so do. Frankly, given its coloring, this "parrot" seems much more like a macaw, and I'm not sure that Kress knows the difference. They're in the same biological grouping, but they're not interchangeable. If Kress were truly looking to add a parrot for its intelligence, then she needed to pick an African grey which has proven talents in that direction. This parrot/macaw also seems to magically appear and disappear. The parrot doesn't fly out of open windows, intriguingly, and it tends to follow Nellie - perhaps it can open doors and windows on its own? Must have a windows operating system.... We're given no reason for this parrot's attachment to Nellie and this creature seems out of place here - more like it should be in a children's story than in YA. In one incident, Nellie - the one with smarts and personality - rudely wanders off in search of food to the kitchen of someone else's home. The parrot is nowhere near her and does not follow her but when she exits the premises, the parrot is magically with her. So in short, a big 'NO' to the "parrot".

Last but far from the least character IMO, except in how she's treated by the other two, comes Michiko Takaneda, a Japanese-born samurai-trained girl who was denied her katana, sold to a bully, and brought to London. She has a history of running away (which is how she came to be a trained Samurai), and is planning on running from her bully as soon as she can save up sufficient funds from her meager (or is it meagre? This is London, after all!) paycheck. She gets a rather petty but very satisfying revenge on her bully by referring to him as Callum-kun. It is a mark of respect in Japan to suffix someone's name with -san, just as in India one might add -ji, as in Ghandiji. Michiko's use of -kun is a mark of disrespect in that it is only applied to someone who is your inferior. This gives poor Michiko a measure of satisfaction since Callum has no idea what it means, nor is he smart enough to care.

One day while out buying new swords (Callum's business is teaching people self-defense/defence), she sees a real katana - so different from the cheap junk for which Callum is paying way too much - and she touches it admiringly and longingly. It was the sword she was never awarded in Japan. The elderly Japanese gentleman who runs the stall sees her and talks with her for a few minutes. He never did this before, despite her frequent visits. So unlike Cora, who gets a guy, and Nellie, who gets a corpse, Michiko gets her dream: the Japanese guy sends her the sword as a gift. He has named it Silver Heart. Michiko breaks down in tears as I almost did! (Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but not by much!). Michiko gets more pages than Nellie - marginally, but fewer than Cora. I'm starting to really dislike Cora!

But peeves aside, how great a start is that? Aside from the rather disappointing Cora, I couldn’t ask for a better first nine than this, with only a hole in one and a fair way to go, Kress managed to stay out of the rough, and everything is green. I felt like I could get to like Kress at that point, but from this point on, she chose to let me down instead, because it was all downhill from there on out.

After she introduced her three protagonists, Kress had to get them together, and she does this after a gathering which Lord White attends with Cora in tow, and at which both Nellie and Michiko perform. It also involves a second dead body - this one actually more of a dead head, with no body in sight! Michiko discovers this walking home (having been dismissed by the callous Callum, who is now claiming to all who will listen that he taught Michiko!). She ends up in a sword-fight with a bearded man who knocks her out when she had expected to die. She lost the fight because her cheap sword - not the Silver Heart - broke. She's discovered, of course, by Nellie and Cora, who are sharing a steam cab home. The three spend the night together, which seemed to be a remarkably unlikely outcome to me, given their circumstances. I guess that's why it's fiction! These girls are supposed to be bonding (at least Kress claims they are): showing how girls can be friends and not bitches who undermine one another, yet the two white girls routinely diss the Asian. But Kress seems to miss the point that in Edwardian London, women were not USA high school cheer leaders. It was not the norm to be bitchy and to diss others. Politeness and manners were routinely exhibited, so her entire "argument" falls flat!

It was at that point in the story that I started running into issues, curiously enough, and they came thick and fast. There were far too many Americanisms popping up during this entire encounter, and every time I read one I was kicked out of this fable into the reality that it was just a novel masquerading as an Edwardian mystery, but written entirely in the good ole' US of A without even a minimal effort made to offer a nod or even a wink to Edwardian London. This is nothing but laziness and arrogance on the part of the author, and constitutes a gross insult to the rest of the world and to history. Kress is quite overtly stating here: screw London, screw the world, screw the Edwardian period! Everyone needs to be American or at least subjugated to the USA, or they're not worth writing about!"

Kress has Nellie saying "Hiya", she has Michiko thinking in American idioms, not in Japanese. How is this subverting trope? How is this championing women's rights? This is another writing quandary (yes, quandary, I shall countenance it no other way!). Sometimes it’s better to betray authenticity in favor of conveying something deeper. I'm not suggesting here that she should have Michiko thinking in pigeon English. Of course not! Perish the thought. Michiko would think as fluently in Japanese as Cora and Nellie did in English, but I feel that in this regard, it’s less important exactly how she thinks than it is how what she thinks is conveyed to the reader, and she certainly didn't think in Americanisms.

I think that it would not have hurt to play with the phrasing of Michiko's internal monologue to convey more of her eastern origins, but it’s a choice which every writer has to make. Kress has made hers, and I think she chose badly. I know that Kress wanted to write this in modern idiom, rather than try to emulate Edwardian speech patterns, but it doesn't work because of the the jarringly anachronistic Americanisms. There's one instance in particular which leaps to mind and which really glared in my eyes. Michiko has a very limited grasp of English. She's learning and she's doing well, but she's far from fluent, and often has issues with what’s said to her, but her internal monologue is so American as to be disturbing. At one point, she thinks, "For crying out loud!". This isn't Edwardian; it’s an Americanism, and it seriously grated. This kind of thing effectively turned my suspension of disbelief into a sword of Damocles!

In this same vein (or vain if you like!), there was a totally bemusing interaction on p105 where Nellie, making "a spot of tea" asks Cora if she wants sugar, and Cora responds that she takes it black? I have no idea what Kress thought she was doing there. Sugar and whether the tea is black or white have nothing to do with one another. It’s whether or not milk/cream is added which determines this, and I doubt many Edwardian Brits would actually drink it black any more than they would drink it iced!

One reference which might escape the intended audience for this novel is Kress's introduction of "cavorite" - a fictional compound (indeed, the "green goo" which Cora was experimenting at the start of this novel, evidently). This was invented by a guy named Cavor in the movie First Men in the Moon which originated in a much earlier novel by HG Wells. That movie is antique by modern CGI standards, but it is a pretty good movie. It's a seriously black mark against Kress in that I didn't see anywhere in this book, not in the narrative nor in any notes, that she had taken this from HG Wells. It's bad form to offer no acknowledgment and this contributed to how I rated this novel.

Talking of reviews, let me reiterate here that I typically don’t derive my choice of books from reading reviews. Most of the positive book reviews I've read are nothing more than a gushing recommendation, and as such they tell me nothing about the quality of the read nor of any downside to it. For those who do offer more, I say a heartfelt "Thank you!", but I don’t know of any reviewers who share my idiosyncratic taste in novels and whose reviews are in sync enough with my own perspective for me to be able to rely on them. Hence this blog! In short, I typically don’t read reviews to discover new material for me to read because they're unhelpful to me, but sometimes when I'm writing a review and I have mixed feelings about it, as I did with this one, I do take a gander at what others have said. I usually wait until I have a feel for which way I'm leaning, but not always. What I routinely look for in others' reviews is anything that I might not have addressed in my own, so I tend to read a half-dozen one-star and a half-dozen five-star (or equivalent) to get a picture of what's irking or smirking other reviewers.

In doing this for The Friday Society, I couldn't get over how many of the reviewers (positive or negative) described this novel as "Victorian". It’s not. It’s Edwardian. One reviewer even described it as "Regency" which is so far out of the ballpark as to be eight blocks down, two over, and then a sharp right behind the medical supply store. I noticed a difference between the positive reviews which described this as steam-punk and the negatives! I'm not a big steam-punk fan, but I started out deluded by Kress into thinking that this was steam-punk. The negative reviews tended to call foul on the steam-punk, and having read much of it now, I have to go with the negatives. There is a steam-punk element, but it's so very subdued and amateur that it plays no useful part in the novel. I mean a steam-powered flying ship? Airship fire "trucks"? No! Wa-ay too clunky. Learn a little physics and get back to us! You're better off thinking of The Friday Society as an Edwardian amateur detective story with some mild action thrown in, but the action isn't impressive, and the writing is definitely pitched towards the younger end of YA.

Here's a point of annoyance: Kress has Cora tell us that as a child, she went swimming in the Thames (pronounced temmz). I doubt this - not as polluted as that river was at that time, and not a street urchin who rarely strayed from her street and never from her neighborhood if she was anything like your typical street urchin. I call bullshit on that one. Admittedly the Thames was improving by this time (the worst pollution was in the mid nine-teeth(!) century) but swimming in it? Even for a street urchin, this smelled strongly of 'out of character' for me. This was one of too many annoyances, which contributed to how I rated this novel.

Another of these was when the trio removed yet one more body from a crime scene and took it to Officer Murphy, and he assured them that he would get it to the morgue. Where the hell else would he take it? Home? Would he plant it in his garden? Would they use it for an umbrella stand? Would he throw it out on the street after they left? Yet another instance was how Michiko got her Silver Heart samurai mask: it was a gift from a woman who, moments before, had been treating her like trash. This was an appalling example of non-sequitur writing and contributed to my rating of this novel.

I've mentioned that I was not exactly thrilled with Cora, and in Chapters 18 & 19 I was turned off her completely. This began when Harris manhandles her and she complies. Yes, you can argue that she has the hots for him and so she was consenting, but there's more to it than that. It’s painfully obvious that she likes Harris not in spite of, but because of her professed hatred for him, but who Kress thought she was fooling or what she thought she was doing here is a mystery, since Cora's predilection is itself neither mysterious, nor is it unpredictable. Now if Kress were planning on turning Harris into a villain, I might warm to this playing against trope, but I don’t get that feeling at all - neither from the story nor from Kress herself based on what she'd done with this tale to that point. Given the level of the writing Kress exhibits, I don’t think she has that kind of subtlety in her. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Harris is a villain, regardless of what Kress intended him to be. His behavior speaks volumes. Far from subverting tropes here, Kress plays right into one, and demeans Cora into the bargain.

What makes this part of this story so pathetic is that when Harris grabs Cora without warning or preamble and kisses her, she shows none of the propriety of an Edwardian girl, allowing him to get away with this without comment, even participating in it herself. But why not? He has shown none of the propriety of an Edwardian man, so maybe they deserve each other? Harris is interested in nothing more than laying Cora, and that's it! You'd be better off reading about my own character Cora in Saurus. She knows exactly how to deal with jerks like Harris (although she's conflicted about approaching it!).

As if Harris's effectively forcing himself upon a young, insecure, and rather impressionable girl in the complete absence of any invitation from her wasn't bad enough once, Harris promises he will not do it again and immediately does it again. Some might find this romantic. I found his repeated kiss attacks upon Cora to be as obnoxious as they were creepy. Again the writing is really clunky, and I had to ask myself, why did Kress even set this novel in the Edwardian period if she wasn't serious about setting it in that period? Why not make it a more modern novel? No explanation. And no respect for her female characters.

The novel descended further in chapter nineteen. All three girls head out into the night. How Michiko gets away with this is a mystery given how possessive and controlling Callum is. We know that Cora sneaks out, so that's no problem (except in that she's abusing her patron and being dishonest, but I've already written her off); however, for Nellie's partner Raheem to let a young girl in his care out at night alone is completely inexplicable, especially given how protective of women people from his part of the world tend to be. Yes, this "protection" runs to the criminal all too often, but we cannot judge all people of the Middle East from reports of the actions of a few extremists. Those concerns do not apply here since Raheem has already shown himself to be honorable (if not exactly completely in character for his origins), so again, this is not believable within context.

By utterly amazing coincidence (of which Kress is all-too-fond) all three meet up at the site of the headless man! This coincidence motif is overplayed by a significant margin in Kress's writing, again undermining the smarts and abilities of the women. There are far too many magical coincidences (including one where Michiko happens to be training a woman at a private residence which also happens to be the very same one into which Nellie is breaking and entering), but back to the story. This particular coincidence results in them finding a young girl whom Cora knew from back when she was ten years old and living on the street. The girl has been stabbed by the mysterious "Fog person" who beheaded the man in the first place. She dies without conveying any information of value as to why she was seeking Cora! This was a real annoyance. Enough with the ostensibly enigmatic but actually tediously truncated and obfuscated statements, and with people dying before they can tell us something. This is another trope which needs to die itself. Again, Kress fails to subvert trope here and show us that it's nothing more than a lazy way to write a 'mystery novel'. But this isn't the biggest problem here!

Rather than call the police, they girls move the body (this is a sad habit with these idiots) - taking it home to the girl's parents whom Cora knew. This is yet another example of how pathetic Cora is. She has given no mind to this girl - her best friend just six years before - or to her parents or their impoverished circumstances. She has done nothing for them in six years despite being in a position to really help them. She passed the girl on the street when she went to collect Lord White from the opium den, and didn’t even recognize her, much less give her money for flowers, yet now she feels this compulsion to return this neglected girl's body to her family (and thereby become an accessory after the fact of a murder)? I didn’t think it would be possible for my opinion of Cora to sink lower, but there it went down that drain right there at the kerb - you know the one which drains sewage directly into the river where Cora claims she swam happily as a child? Maybe she really did swim in the Thames. That might explain why she's brain-dead....

Oh slap my wrist and call me Mrs. Peevish! Moving right along now…. Did I mention the London particular (aka smog)? Yes, there was a smog problem, but no, it did not routinely occur every night without fail. I've been to London many times, and I've seen fog there only once. Indeed, the weather was bad there only once out of all the times I've been. No, I never went there during the heyday of the industrial revolution (or revulsion as I think of it!) so I can’t claim that I personally experienced any of the worst smog occurrences (although since the worst recorded instance was in 1952, there may well be people living in London who do recall it).

Having put that out there, we're typically talking fog, not smog in this novel, and Kress has it appearing on cue, every single night! Is this how Kress subverts trope, by troping fog out every time her characters are out at night in London? That's not the only stretch! If you want to learn about how prevalent and frequent fog was back then, read contemporary writers such as AC Doyle and HG Wells; they'll set ya straight! But to conclude this mini-diatribe, Kress has the three girls meet up again accidentally on another night, when the fog is yellow, which indicates a potentially dangerous level of sulphur dioxide (yes, sulphur! This is English sulphur, you abominable cad, not American sulfur!), but immediately prior to telling us the color of the fog, Kress had told us that Nellie suggested to Cora that they take a stroll to enjoy the night air! Color the fog yellow, and me confused.

Actually the confusion of that night extends beyond the quality of the night air. Nellie and Cora meet Michiko again. Isn’t it amazing how these completely accidental gatherings occur with such regularity? The trio encounters three men who are nothing more than bullies and muggers (despite her penchant for employing modern phraseology Kress doesn’t say they were muggers as such - but why would she baulk at that?). When they meet the men, Michiko is trailing behind the other two like a pet, but when the men start telling them to hand over their valuables immediately afterwards, Michiko is in front without having moved in the interim. The force is strong with that one! Michiko kneels and centers herself (like common London thugs will respect her rituals and wait!), before rising to cut each of them with her katana, as a warning. The men run away. Really? This was a truly amateurish and sadly-written scene for Michiko, and I have to down-rate this novel yet again, because of it. Tell me: how does this subvert any tropes, exactly?

In conclusion, I was on the fence on this one right up to the last fifty or sixty pages. It took one more encounter with Andrew Harris to tip the balance. Cora is a moron and Harris is a scumbag, and that's all there is to it. I couldn't, at that point, even pretend to hold out any more hope for this to improve or be rendered worth while by the finale. Consequently, I cannot honestly rate this as worthy when it's so poorly put together, and the three female leads are so badly wasted, and so completely sold out by a female writer. I just can't. It lost its Lady Sparkle, broke my Silver Heart, and really needs to go Hyde under a rock. I don't care if there's a sequel because this is WARTY!

Impulse by Steven Gould

Title: Impulse
Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
P267 "...Though I'm stronger that I look..." should be "...Though I'm stronger than I look..."
P335 "...in plain site of everyone…" should be "...in plain sight of everyone…"

I reviewed Jumper, the first in this trilogy, here.
I reviewed Reflex the first sequel to Jumper here.

The only books by a Gould I'd read up to this point were by Stephen Gould (not Steven) and were all tied to biology, so this is a new experience! However, Gould is the author of the novel that gave, er, impulse to the movie Jumpers, so I'm not completely in alien territory. I love the movie, but have never read the novel behind it. I intend to rectify that after reading this one. There is also an interim novel between Jumpers and Impulse, titled Reflex. I plan on reading that, too. At first I thought this novel was in the same universe but with different characters, but once I began reading, it rapidly became clear that this is actually the third in a trilogy, with David (the jumper from Jumpers and his wife being the parents of Cent, who is the main character in this novel.

Cent is a young woman living in hiding in the deep snows of a Canadian winter. Her parents have jumped (teleported) more times than anyone else in this world. They like to buy food in one part of the world and jump it to the needy elsewhere. One day, snow-boarding when and where she shouldn't, Cent falls victim to an avalanche, and out of fear she jumps to her bedroom. This is the first time she has ever done this, and her mother quickly divines that Cent is now a jumper (although a late developer by the rules of Jumpers), and now that Cent has a bargaining chip to work with, she brow-beats her parents into letting her attend a regular public school so she can actually, for the first time in her life, meet people of her own age.

Millicent (her mom) and David buy a house in a little backwoods town prophetically named New Prospect where they can live in moderate isolation and where Cent can attend school. It was on Cent's first day at school that I fell in love with her. I know, it's shocking. She's way too young for me, but this is a purely literary love, so it's like, you know, all right, really? It was at that point at which I became addicted to this novel, and consequently a wreck, living in daily fear that Gould was going to screw me over with some bad plotting or something equally depression-era worthy. My fears were misplaced!

As if my deep, abiding love for Cent isn't appalling enough, I also fell in love with her two "uncool" friends at school, which is scandalous, but I can't help myself! My name is Ian Wood and I'm a 'cool supporting character' addict. It's been like, thirty seconds since my last fix...! Please note that this other love was doomed to serious failure, but not through any agency of Gould's. Or actually, I guess, in one regard, entirely through the agency of Gould!

Cent's adventures really - and I mean really - take off when she's in high school. She has run-in after run-in with the school bully Carmelia - who insists upon being known as Caffeine. This antagonism starts very mildly, but deteriorates into some serious and dangerous hatred on Caffeine's part. Cent sides with the uncool and unloved in school. She joins the snowboarding team and does well even without her jumping abilities being brought into play. Much more interesting from my PoV, is that she takes the art of jumping to levels even her father never explored, and she often employs her newly-won talents to humiliate and avoid Caffeine. My only problem with this is that I simply didn't get how she was supposed to be doing what she was doing. Vertical velocity was no problem, but I guess I missed the part where she picked up how to do horizontal velocity! Either that or it really wasn't covered very well. But what a cool talent - almost more cool than her jumping from one location to another.

Cent's two friends seemed to fade into the background somewhat as the story continued, which I did not appreciate, but Cent certainly does not, and the "war" between her and the school bully explodes. It was, oddly, tied in with something her father was investigating and arose from Cent's rescuing of two dorky guys upon which Caffeine was preying.

The novel alternates between Cent's first person PoV and a third person description of what her parents, Millie and Davy, are up to - which starts out innocently enough, but then escalates, too! Their portion of the novel is rather small, and was not that interesting to me until later in the story. Cent's was much more dynamic and captivating, especially the killer climax when she excelled herself. This novel actually would have been a terrific novel had there been no sci-fi element and no school bully, and it had been written solely about Cent and her friendship with the "uncool" Jade and Tara! I highly recommend this volume of the trilogy. I'll get back to you on the other two when I've read them!