All You Need is Kill by Nick Mamatas

Title: All You Need is Kill
Author: Nick Mamatas
Publisher: Haika Soru
Rating: worthy!

Illustrated by Lee Ferguson.
Based on the novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

This is a triple tie-in: novel, movie, and graphic novel, all reviewed on this blog. I have to ask - the title: is it a play on the old Beatles anthem, All You Need is Love? (Also note that the graphic samples shown here are not in any order - don't want to give too much away!).

This illustrated version is not the same as the movie The Edge of Tomorrow (reviewed here) which was derived from the same original novel upon which this graphic version is also based. The ending is different in the movie, and the movie version does not have quite the same basis as this one does, but nevertheless, the original tale is well-worth reading, and it's told well in this graphic version. The dialog is amusing with subtle pop-culture references here and there, and the art work is really top notch.

It begins with Keiji Kiriya, a Japanese soldier, waking in his bunk after experiencing a really weird dream. His morning training session is interrupted by a visit from the Full Metal Bitch, aka Rita Vrataski, a legendary soldier who looks like a teenager when out of uniform, but who looks deadly as a cobra in her red armor. She starts to bond with Keiji. Indeed, she has been looking for him, which is why she wears distinctive armor - she doesn't want him to miss her.

Over time (!) Keiji comes to realize that there's more to her than the more to her which meets the eye, and he realizes that she has gone through the same repetitions that he has, but she is not doing so any more. As he notches up one repetition after another, and gets better at what he does, he also comes to realize what she has long known: in order to end this horrifying rinse and repeat, one of them will have to die.

Don't think you know the ending if you've seen the movie. You don't. Not having read the novel yet, I don't even know if this ends the same way as that. I'll let you know when I review the novel! Meanwhile, I recommend this graphic version for the dialog and the art work.

Noggin by John Corey Whaley

Title: Noggin
Author: John Corey Whaley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

"Life can go straight to your head" Really? Which genius at Atheneum came up with that rhinestone - and why is he/she still employed there?

The premise for this sounds like the start of a brain-dead joke: "This guy gets his head cut off and comes back to life", so this is an out-there kind of a novel, but it just goes to prove that you can get a novel out of anything if you want to try. Whether that novel is worth anything when it's done is another matter. This one wasn't.

The author has a curious habit of titling each chapter with the last few words from the previous chapter, although he starts tripping up with this at chapter fourteen and beyond. He's written one other novel (as of this writing) which I haven't read and have no intention of doing so after this one, so I don't know if it's just here that he does this, or if it's his trademark.

Noggin is the nickname of Travis Coates, a guy who died, but who even then kept his head - in cryo on the off-chance that science had the opportunity to resurrect him with a new (and not-dying) body. Seventeen people made this same choice, but Travis is only the second one who survived the process. Now he's back from cryo space to find that no one's standing there with that sad look upon their face. I have to ask, of course, if they have the medical science to achieve this, what the hell this science was when he was sick!

So, five years have passed, which is far less than he'd imagined it would take to perfect this process. His best friend Kyle (who still hasn't come out of the closet) is now a man who looks trim and dresses well. Travis's girlfriend, Cate, has moved on, now engaged to marry someone else even though she lied that she'd wait for him, but while everyone else has gone on with their lives, Travis has to go back to school and pick-up from where he left off.

This story is odd, but believe it or not, it's not the first I've read where someone has a body transplant. A long time ago I read a similar story, but in that case narrated by a man whose wife had a body transplant. Of course, her new body was buxom and hot, whereas his wife's old body wasn't, and we were expected to believe that he had a problem with that. It really made no impression on me at all, which probably explains why I can't remember the title.

The novel is an easy read, and it starts out reasonably well, and humorously, but it rapidly goes downhill and become maudlin and repetitive, focused solely on what a whiny loser Travis is, and how he's too stupid to let his old life go. At least it has short chapters, so it's easy to end at a good point when you have to put the book down - and you might want to - a lot.

For a novel so rooted in sci-fi, it's rather ironic that the author gives the science such short shrift because at one point, when he depicts Travis and Cate on a roof watching the Leonids, Travis says, "We'd reached the age where the science behind it matters…" What a betrayal!

The author didn't think this through too well, either, because this novel takes place Kansas where the age of consent is 16, so why he depicts Travis as being concerned over 'soon he'll be seventeen' vis-a-vis Cate's five-year head-start on him is a bit of a mystery. Although given how little of this was thought through, I guess it's no surprise. I mean some things in it were well-written, but other parts just made my jaw drop as I wondered how such a blunder could have crept in. This is another example which shows that Big Publishing™ offers no guarantee that you will end up with a quality product.

Travis's pursuit of Cate is doomed from the start but he's just too stupid to get the message. There's a Nora Ephron moment in a Karaoke bar, and there's a moment when they get together and talk, briefly, but there's also a moment where she delivers him that most horrible of lines: we can be friends. In a way I can see that, but in another way I can see it as a complete betrayal of everything they had. I mean if they truly do have what it takes to be best friends, then why don't they have what it takes to spend their lives together? She has callously abandoned him, and he's not smart enough to get that, but instead of feeling sympathy for him, I felt only cringing and groaning as he continued to blindly hammer his transplanted head against a solid brick wall.

The problem is that Travis hasn't moved on and Cate is now five years older than he, is engaged to the guy with whom she's living, and has made no effort whatsoever to get in touch with him. He just doesn't want to get that message. He's completely unrealistic in his obsession with her, in his blind belief that she'll take him, a sixteen-year-old, into her 21-year-old arms and everything will be like it used to be.

He's already in pain over this, but he can't see that this will cause him more pain and worse, will cause her pain too. That pain is the difference between love and obsession. That much is fine, but the fact that this drags on and on and on is what drags this novel into the WARTY! pile for me. It's like it gets stuck in a groove and will not move on, just like Travis, and nothing really happens from that point onwards. It makes what started out great into a thoroughly unsatisfying read.

There are other problems, too. For instance, there's this one incident where Travis and Kyle go to a burger place and Travis's last memory of it is when he was undergoing chemo and threw-up right after they ate. Now he's looking forward to trying it sans chemo. This struck me as being a bit odd. If I'd associated the place and the food with violent vomiting, I sincerely doubt that I'd be anxious to get back there and try it again! That's irrational, yes, but it's realistic! The negative association would be too off-putting; then again, not everyone is the same, and I can't speak for Travis. Only Whaley can do that, 'cause Travis is his character, but this does bring me to the observation that Travis seems way too mature for his age. It's like he stayed sixteen but matured at the same rate as everyone else. There goes credibility!

One thing which this novel neglects to mention is the medical hurdles over which science would have to leap to make something like this work. There's no discussion of the problems inherent in trying to fix severed nerves, or of tissue-matching or rejection problems such as Graft Versus Host disease. Obviously this is science fiction, so there's no requirement that a writer get into deep technical detail over how or why something works. Indeed, I rather dislike it when they try, but the fact that Whaley doesn't even offer a nod and a wink to this was a serious weakness, I thought. Most transplant recipients are looking at a lifetime of anti-rejection medication, and even then can still have serious issues. It's a bit disrespectful to them to sweep all that under a rug like it was never there.

Back in high school Travis starts trying to resume the learning process, with the attention of counselors and doctors, and the fact that he's a celebrity - only the second person to come back from the dead (unless you count that myth from the Middle East 2,000 years ago, which I don't). On his first day back, he's befriended by a guy named Hatton, who takes on the role of an entertaining side-kick and who is the one who gives Travis his nickname, which is the title of the novel. He also meets Kyle's younger sister, who is now Travis's age. The fact that these two are going to end up together is telegraphed pretty loudly, even though it's played as though Travis is shocked by the idea that he could date his best friend's kid sister. Seriously?

Other than that awful cliché, this was for a while readable and entertaining. Whaley definitely has an eye (or an ear!) for dialog and for depicting relationships well, but then it's like he loses it, and it all goes to hell in a hand-basket. The way he has Travis reflect on his love affair with the younger version of Cate definitely makes it hard to accept that he's never going to end up with her, but the sweetness of this is smashed to a bloody pulp by Travis's wooden-headedness - if I can put it like that! Whaley also puts a much-appreciated fresh face on a main character's relationship with his parents. After reading so many sad YA trope novels where families are dysfunctional, or are missing one component or another, it was refreshing to read of a normal family with loving parents who are not caricatures.

But what drags it all down is that Travis cannot let go of Cate. In some ways this is understandable: she's grown up, given up (on him) and moved on. It's really no different to a common situation where someone of whom you're very fond decides they don't want to be with you. It's awful, but it's life, yet Travis can't see it that way because of how they parted, and because he's so young, and because of the commitment Cate made to him. It was one which she was clearly too young to make, but neither of them knew any better. The problem is that he still doesn't

So in conclusion: began well, started to smell; made me think, then it stinks; reached its peak, began to reek. You get the (olfactory) picture? I can't recommend this novel.

Anthem's Fall by S L Dunn

Title: Anthem's Fall
Author: S L Dunn
Publisher: Prospect Hill Press (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

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

(Note that the cover is numbered as page one in this novel, so that the novel doesn't actually starts until p5 and runs to p389). I made a good attempt at getting into this, but it just did not hold my interest, so I have to call this a DNF and not something that I can recommend.

This novel's main protagonist is Kristen, and thankfully she isn't telling it in first person, although it is initially told from her PoV. She's supposedly a genius and was signed onto an innovative project to design an artificial cell made from new proteins not found in nature (so I gathered!).

Later I learned that this is really just a regular cell, but with something added to it to make it a bit different. It wasn't very clear! Sometimes this is a good thing because it keeps the writer safe, but in this case it was so vague and fudged that it was really hard to picture exactly what this cell was supposed to be and what it wasn't!

I have to wonder about some of the biology here. Like I said, the author has fudged it enough that you can't really get sufficient purchase to argue against it! This is a smart and safe move in some regards, but it also made it really hard to see why the cell was supposed to be so ground-breaking and innovative. There was also one problem where the author suggests that cancer cells and viruses are neither alive nor dead. While I have heard that said about viruses, I've never heard it said about cancer cells, which are very much alive.

A living thing is something which intakes energy, outputs waste, respires, and reproduces. Even at the cellular level, these functions hold: they're integral parts of the cell's genetics, so I didn't get what was meant in that these scientists had created a cell if it didn't do any of these things. This is compounded by the 'revelation' on page 21, that the cell can reproduce, like this was unexpected. I'm sorry but were no genes for reproduction included in the cell's genome when it was designed? If not, then how is it reproducing now? If they were, then how is the fact that it's reproducing in any way surprising? This made no sense to me.

Kristen apparently isn't as smart as we're expected to believe here either, since she doesn't seem to grasp that the genome controls everything, but it cannot do anything for which it has no genes! If there are no cells for directing the production of higher-level structures, then the cell will not go on to develop a multi-cellular form, much less specialize such that some cells differentiate into bone, others into skin, others into neurons, etc. The cell isn't magic. It doesn't produce these things out of thin air, it produces them as directed by its genome.

So again, I don't get how these people are supposed to have created this cell from scratch, yet evidently do not have the first idea of what it can or cannot do! This makes no sense, and given how ignorant they are of what they've done or what purpose it might serve, or of what they were trying to achieve, none of the accolades they receive make any sense at all.

This cell is named the Vatruvian Cell after Professor Vatruvia, the lead scientist on the project (and cool name by the way, evoking da Vinci's Vitruvian man, of which I included a rather warped representation in my book Poem y Granite), but we're never given any indication as to what the purpose of it is: what the end result was expected to be or was hoped to be, or how this could possibly be of any use to anyone or any thing. It's considered so important that Vatruvia seems to be able to write blank checks for whatever he wants because of it, but we're never given any reason to buy that.

Scientists like genome pioneer Craig Venter are working on developing "artificial cells" so that part isn't anything new, and is certainly not Nobel prize-worthy. That was a bit off, frankly. I seriously doubt that anyone would get a Nobel prize in any of the hard sciences handed to him within a year or so of the work for which he's nominated. The prizes are usually handed-out based on the value of a new discovery, which takes some time to make itself known. Relatively few such prizes are given out purely for invention, which is really what Vatruvia did.

The idea that 'non-natural' proteins are being used seems to be what's new, but anything that can exist in nature is natural, so I didn't get in what way this was artificial (other than that humans created it). The story-telling here was far too vague. I didn't like the use of 'man' (as in 'mankind') either, on pages thirteen and nineteen. It excludes woman, and yet this novel features a woman as the main protagonist! I wish writers would use 'humankind' and 'humanity' instead, or something like that.

So this was a long-winded way to say that I was already struggling with this novel, and really not connecting with the main character. I liked even less the second main character, a know-it-all guy, who was introduced shortly after the first character and who seemed really fake to me. It seemed (and again, I didn't finish this so I can't comment on this knowledgeably, but it seemed to me that this guy's sole purpose was to provide a love interest for Kristen, which weakened her in my eyes. The hero needs some dude on hand to prop her up? She can;t go it alone? What's up with that?

Where it really went quickly downhill for me however, was in the bizarre introduction of a completely different planet, which evidently had come up with this same invention of this magical new cell, from which (I gathered) invulnerable and ruthless warriors were created. Even though the blurb had led me to expect something like this, the presentation of it in the end just struck me as bizarre and (despite the cell link) having nothing to do with the other story!

Yes, I know (or at least I guess) that these two disparate tales are going to be integrated but I just could not read any further. The second story came blundering in like a bull in a china shop, and in its frenetic thrashing around, it made little sense to me. It didn't seem to fit at all, and although I pushed on for several more chapters, I found my mind wandering and simply could not generate any honest interest whatsoever in pursuing this second story arc. Given my already waning interest in the first story, I decided to call it quits there, and start on something else instead. Life is short and novels are multitudinous! It's not worth my time to have to fight to like a story when the story itself really isn't lifting a finger to help me.

Frostbite by Richelle Mead

Title: FrostBite
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

This is the second volume in what is, so far, at least a six-volume series. I can’t promise I'll read that whole series, but as of reading this one, I'm committed to one more at least. That's an odd decision, I know, given my rating, but I explain it in the final paragraph. This volume was sadder than the first, which had issues but which was not bad. Mead needs to get her head out of her ass and write the vampire series she promised, not a cheesy rip-off of Twilight, with love-sick airhead kids running around having sorry bouts of high school angst when there's a far better story screaming to be told.

I started reading this series because I'd read somewhere that some school district had banned the series: that is, they were banning these books before some of them had even been written, which is the height of stupidity, so despite my antagonism towards vampire novels, I picked up the first one on audio CD from the library, but Stephanie Wolf's reading sucked majorly, so I ditched that and bought the paperback. I ended up liking it (with reservations!), hence my progression to volume 2. I was less satisfied with this one, and this was by many accounts supposed to be be better than the first!

One thing which not so much surprised me as intrigued me about volume one was when I was reading the insane negative reviews for it. The religious crowd was reduced to telling outright lies about that volume (which I refute in my review) and about the main character's conduct - that's how sad they are. In general I liked the story, although there were some YA issues with it - of the dumb kind you find in any YA novel. This second volume promised to be no different from my reading of the first hundred pages, but it did also draw me in a bit.

In this volume, Rose hasn’t changed at all, nor does she throughout. She's still dumb, still immature, and still thinks she's god's gift to men, and like Mary Poppins, thinks she's practically perfect in every way. She's also still obsessed with her blood-mate Lissa, for whom she is working her heart out, striving to become a guardian. Early in the novel, Rose is taken for testing by a disinterested guardian who happens to be a legend in their world, but when they arrive at the house to meet with him, they discover that the entire family, including the legendary guardian, has been slaughtered, evidently by a band of strigoi working together in a manner which has no precedent.

Here was a classic example of Rose completely ignoring an express instruction from her teacher, and going unpunished for it. This will not be the last time she does this in this novel. Her instructor should have failed her on her test right there for disobeying him and entering the house against his express order, but once again she gets away with insubordination. I don’t mind a rebel character, but please let’s not indulge this! There have to be consequences otherwise it’s just a fairy tale. There never are consequences for Rose, even when her stupidity gets someone killed.

This initial event does illustrate the problem with the sad addiction of all-too-many female YA authors to telling stories in first person PoV: you thereby restrict yourself to the handicap of being unable to have anything happen unless your character is there to witness it; otherwise it’s nothing but passive voice, with your main character sitting around having to listen to boring, second-hand stories about what happened in order to keep the story alive, which is never a good thing for an action novel. This is why Mead was forced to have Rose disobey and it’s so obvious that it immediately suspends the suspension of disbelief. I want my YA writers to be far more skilled than this. Apparently Mead isn’t.

The next thing she heaps upon us is the appearance of Rose's mom, Janine, who shows up at school to tell a tale of one of her guardian adventures. It seems that Rose's mom is as full of herself as Rose is, but Rose hates her mom, which immediately telegraphs to us that Rose and she will bond, and that mom might well die in this story. Only one of those things actually happened. The same kind of thing happened with character Mason, Rose's toy boy. Her interactions with him telegraphed that she would get jiggy with him and that he might well die in this story. Only one of those things happened.

When tough-guy guardian and Rose-object-of-addiction Dimitri is too tired (from a shopping trip - I am not kidding!) to teach her in his early-morning class, Rose's mom inappropriately steps-in instead. Now this is a parent who is not a teacher at the school, teaching her own child! Worse than this, Rose's mom fails to pick up where Dimitri left off, and instead makes Rose fight her in a boxing match, and ends up punching Rose with an illegal punch, giving her a black eye. Yet there are no consequences whatsoever for Janine's misconduct! Again, there goes suspension of disbelief.

This inappropriate behavior continues as Dimitri returns to teaching, and he and Rose kiss. If he was anything of a teacher, he would recuse himself from teaching her any further, but he is not and he does not, so yet again we have inappropriate behavior with zero consequences. At this point I would normally ditch a novel like this, but beyond all this amateur fanfic-level YA absurdity, there was a story and it started out intriguing me. Sadly, it fell apart and never went anywhere. The ending was truly pathetic.

Lissa is now on meds to prevent her healing power from erupting and affecting her mental health. She's by far the most interesting character in these novels so far, but she has no more than a cameo role in this novel. Subsequent events are within the context of the earlier massacre, which is suggestive that strigoi have changed their behavior: that they're now working together and working with humans to launch attacks upon the moroi royal families, which means Lissa is at risk. Unfortunately, none of this story is followed through. Not in this volume, anyway.

I don’t get this business of the vampires celebrating Xmas! It makes no sense to me, but because of the strigoi attack, they go for a week to a lodge in the mountains for a skiing holiday! Never mind battening-down the hatches and going after the strigoi, let's go on vacation! It made no sense.

It made less sense given that only Rose and her new boyfriend Mason seemed to actually do any skiing. Rose meets Adrian Ivashkov, and starts falling in love with him. He's the bad boy leg of the triangle to Mason's good guy leg, and Rose finds herself dreaming of Ivashkov when she's not mentally masturbating over Dim-itri, the inappropriate instructor who should be fired. Dim-itri is actually supposed to be Lissa's guardian, but he's never found anywhere near Lissa. Instead, he's a full-time Rose stalker.

This dream Rose has of Ivashkov was actually implanted in her mind by Ivashkov himself, although Rose isn't smart enough to figure that out. Mead tries to distract us from this revelation by revealing another strigoi attack. This upsets Lissa, but Rose fails to wake-up in response to Lissa's distressed state! So much for the supposed deepening of their psychic bond!

Eventually Mason, Mia and Eddie leave the ski resort to go to Spokane, Washington which is supposedly nearby, to seek out and kill the strigoi. This tells me that all three of them are morons and their schooling has been wasted, but none of them is as big a moron as Rose. She figures out what they have done, but instead of warning everyone, she takes off after them with Christian, Lissa's boyfriend and they, along with the other three, are captured and held prisoner. Never once does Christian think of using his fire magic against the strigoi and it takes Rose three days (while these guys are all very conveniently kept alive for no reason at all by the ruthless strigoi) to figure it out herself! Yep, it's that bad.

So why am I rating this warty and then thinking of trying volume 3? Well there were sufficient hints in this volume to make me think, rightly or (and more probably) wrongly, that things might turn around in volume 3 and this series could assume the promise if offered in volume 1, so I'm giving it a go and if it's as bad as, or worse than this one, I'm ditching the series. Life is too short, and at fifty percent through it, I think I will have given this more than a fair chance by then.

Close Call by Stella Rimington

Title: Close Call
Author: Stella Rimington
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!

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

This is a sad DNF for me - and another example of a novel where the author (or the publisher, which ever was responsible!) needed to survey the gazillion other novels with this same title before wisely deciding to choose a different one.

I could not get interested in this at all, and the poor writing only served to make it worse. it read like fanfic, not like a new novel from a professional, published writer. This is supposed to be another novel in the Liz Carlyle series, but in the first 21 chapters (out of ~60), she appeared in only 8, so how it's really supposed to be about her is a bit of a mystery! That's not the biggest problem, however.

You know this is no longer an era where the author hand-writes or typewrites their 'manu'-script and it has to be laboriously set in metal trays and printed by hand to provide review "galleys". This is an era of word processing, and spell-checkers and even grammar checkers (although Microsoft's grammar checker isn't worth spit). But there is no absolutely excuse for putting out a novel of the atrocious quality I found in the Kindle version, not even as an advance review copy, and trying to pretend that it's ready for review. It wasn't. I had more success in the Adobe reader version, but not everyone has that available to them.

I've reviewed well over a hundred 'galley' copies, and this novel was without question the worst I've ever seen in the Kindle format. There were multiple problems in the first few screens, and these were not oddball problems which are difficult to find, but gross spelling errors which any spell-checker would have caught, and sloppy errors which all but the most incompetent of beta readers or book editors would have caught, and yet here we are, expected to try and read this novel and review it?!

In the Adobe version, the first letter of each chapter was set as a drop-cap, an antiquated and nonsensical affectation which needs to be banned. That's the only reason I can think of as to why, in the Kindle, chapter one begins with the capital letter 'T' on line one, and then the rest of the word on line 2: 'he' when all of it should read: 'The' on the first line.

Beginning in paragraph two we had pairs of words running together ("shawarmaof" in place of 'shawarma of' for example, and this was obviously the start of a trend, because it continued to happen from then onwards The fifth sentence in that paragraph began with 'ere' in place of, presumably, 'There' or 'Here'. The last sentence of that paragraph has this phrase: "...of meat o the shawarmalike..." when it clearly should have been 'of meat of the shawarma like'.

There is a character named 'Az' introduced here, but apart from that first time, his name is rendered with a space between the two letters. I learned from the Adobe version that it's supposed to be Afiz. The next paragraph has "indierent" in place of 'indifferent', and on and on it goes. This is nothing but gross incompetence and is insulting to readers, whether they be beta or review. I quit reading this at that point and resolved to try and get through it in the Adobe Reader version, determining that if that didn't look a lot better, this was going to be one-starred after three paragraphs and done with!

So I switched to Adobe Reader and it looked technically much better. I saw none of the problems with it that I had seen in the Kindle version, so I can only assume that some automated conversion process was responsible for the problems. This means of course, that the real problem was that no one checked to make sure the conversion worked for the Kindle! But the reprieve was short-lived because switching to a readable version served only to highlight a whole new set of problems! Once I could focus on reading the novel without becoming annoyed, I could focus on the quality of the story, and it didn't start out at all well!

The first few pages are an account of this character in a souk in Syria (this novel is very tardily rooted in the so-called 'Arab Spring' which was actually over long ago), and he's attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Why this assailant would carry out this attack in public in broad daylight is unexplained, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is that the subject disarms the assailant and hurries away, finally finding himself in a different part of the souk where, we're told, no one is paying any attention to him, but immediately after that, we're told that his hand is covered in blood, and it's dripping! In fact, he's lost so much blood that he starts feeling faint and has to be bundled into a taxi to go to the hospital. So I'm thinking: no one is paying any attention to a guy who is copiously dripping blood everywhere he goes? How likely is that? It just didn't work.

There were many grammatical errors. Some of these you can accuse me of being picky about, but they're there nonetheless. On page six, I read, "...the countries who support them." when it should really read, "...the countries which support them." or "...those people who support them." Countries are not people! On page sixteen I read, "...what is the sources of those weapons..." when it really should be "...what are the sources..." or "what is the source...". So again, it's still not ready for prime time, even in the Adobe version.

We meet the main character, Liz Carlyle in chapter 2. She's just returned from vacation, but instead of catching-up with her deputy (or whatever he/she is called), who was presumably in charge of her section in her absence, she gossips instead with her "research assistant" to get up to speed! I found that to be completely absurd.

I hit a problem two chapters later, because it seems like there is a two-chapter flashback in chapters 4 & 5 or 5 & 6, but there's no indication whatsoever in the test that we're in a flashback! I found myself wondering what the heck had gone wrong with the timeline!

The fact that Liz had apparently only been working at MI5 for eighteen months and was still on probation, yet was leading a counter-terrorism section and taking three-week long vacations made zero sense! As a flashback it did make a kind of sense, but I was unaware of this while reading it! I have no idea why the flashback was even there, because it contributed nothing whatsoever to the story.

So my problem at that point was that, if she'd been working at MI5 since she graduated from university, and it's been only 18 months, then how was she ever involved in the Northern Ireland peace process which was resolved years before? If she's running a counter-terrorism section, then how is she going to find the time to go on secondment to the Merseyside (Liverpool) police for training? Worse than this, we're told she had her vacation with a French security agent and then a few pages later we're told that the last boyfriend she had was a guitar player from Bristol! So is this a flashback or not? I was forced to assume it was.

I have to add that I found the depiction of the "sexual harassment" she supposedly received at the Merseyside police department to be amateurish at best and childish at worst. I frankly cannot believe that it went immediately to the level the author portrays it any more than I could believe there was none at all. To portray it so baldly and so obviously serves no purpose other than to negate the effect the author is trying so ham-fistedly to achieve. Frankly, it read like a poor rip-off of the TV show Prime Suspect featuring Helen Mirren.

At this point I decided this novel was not worth my time. I have no idea what happened to the book editor or beta readers on this novel, so I can only assume there were none. I know this is an advance review copy, but to put one out which is so appalling is just asking for trouble, and in this electronic age there is no excuse for putting out an ARC that's as shabby as this one is.

Even had it been in pristine condition, that would not have improved the disturbingly amateur quality of the story - a story which was all over the place, had no coherence, and read like poorly-written fan-fiction. This novel was lousy and I cannot recommend it.

Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead

Title: Vampire Academy
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Here's an interesting observation: Magic or Madness (reviewed here) was published in 2005 by Justine Larbalestier. Vampire Academy, by Richelle Mead, was published two years later and both authors curiously publish with Razor Bill. It would seem that Mead ripped-off Larbalestier's idea that magic can cause madness, but fortunately, ideas cannot be copyrighted, only a specific written expression of an idea, so it would seem that Mead is safe!

I had no interest in this until I learned that some school (or schools) had taken the unprecedented and rather bizarre step of banning this entire series: not this novel per se, but the entire series, including unwritten future volumes! I thought this was so absurd as to be a joke, but then this is what organized religion does to people - it forces them to behave like morons. As for me, I was curious as to what it was that was in this series which had provoked such an extremist reaction - maybe I could get some tips from it?!

The fact is that there's nothing in it to provoke the fundamentalists. Clearly the ones who are decrying and banning this have never actually read it. Yes, it's definitely for the older half of the young-adult age range, but other than that, there is no reason it shouldn't be in a school library.

Once I decided that I would (short of a major disaster) be reviewing this novel favorably, I went out to read some negative reviews to see if I had missed anything, and I realized from reading them that I had not. I also realized that not only were some reviewers rather rabid about this novel in their negativism, some were outright lying about it. No, there is not an 'f' word in every other paragraph. In fact, there is only two instances of 'fuck' in the entire book (p31, p115), and the word 'hell' is used 21 times. Go to Google books, where you can search for yourself to find out what a liar that particular reviewer was. Organized religion actively forces people to lie; I've personally encountered that many times.

Other reviewers showed their Christian charity by slut-shaming one of the main characters, not only referring to her as a 'slut' but also as a "hoe" [sic]. Rest assured, Rose never once behaved like a gardening tool. I can guarantee you that if the main character had been portrayed in exactly the same way, but had been a guy, he would never have been referred to as a 'slut' - and this is women doing the insulting, not men. Of the two main characters, Rose is a virgin throughout this book and Lissa doesn't have sex until she meets a guy whom she loves. Not that there's anything wrong with responsible and mature teens having safe sex, but this is yet another outright lie in pursuit of a religious agenda. I guess they missed that bit in the Bible about bearing false witness, huh?!

Just in passing, I started listening to this on audio, but the reader, Stephanie Wolf (ha! A wolf reading a vampire story! Too much!) was so bad that I couldn't stand to listen any more; however, I did like the story, so I bought a paperback copy.

This novel reads like it's volume two (or later) of a series when it's actually volume one. By that I mean that it starts in the middle of the story and Mead explains next-to-nothing of what went before except in rather annoyingly sparse and brief references which really relate very little that's of utility. I freely admit that that aspect was annoying!

As I mentioned, the two main characters are Rose and Lissa, although it's Rose who tells the story and hogs the attention. Rose is a dhampir - the offspring of a vampire and a human, but there are two species of vampire - the moroi, who are vampires, but not undead, and who are the good guys (supposedly), and the strigoi, who are traditional "undead" vampires.

Mead doesn't do a very good job of explaining this - again handing-out belated and sparsely distributed information. The dhampirs guard the moroi from the strigoi, and as such, Rose is Lissa's guard - but she's still in training, so she's not official, and she's not as powerful as she might become. So here was a weakness, in that the presentation of this novel was that of an amateur without benefit of a good book editor. Once again this goes to show that Big Publishing™ does not deliver what it claims to promise.

Two years before this novel begins, Rose and Lissa went over the wall from their academy and lived on the run. How they managed this and financed it isn't detailed, nor is why they went on the lam in the first place. They're captured by other guardians, and returned to the academy almost immediately after the story begins. Rose is very nearly expelled, but in the end she gets 'house arrest'. That is, she gets to go to classes and to church, but must remain in her room the rest of the time.

Rose is an atheist, so she has no need to go to church, but she uses this time to hang out with Lissa, to whom she is unnaturally, if not supernaturally devoted. Some people who reviewed this badly also objected to the lack of respect for religion, but guess what: atheists are under no obligation to respect religious delusion!

Both of these girls quickly get back into academic life, with Rose spending extra time training physically to be a guardian. She kicks her dedication up to a higher level when Lissa finds a fox on her bed with its throat slit - something which was apparently done right before she got back to her room. Who did it is unknown at that time.

The psychic bond they share evidently works only one way. Rose can 'tap into' Lissa's emotions, but not the other way around, and Lissa does not transmit messages or speech, only emotion. This bond is not unheard of in vampire lore, but it's viewed pretty much as a legend. The way it works is that Rose picks up on Lissa's emotions, but it seems to be only when they're heightened because she's very upset or scared for example; however, this changes as time passes at the academy.

In time, Rose discovers that she can 'share' Lissa's consciousness: she feels like she's in Lissa's body, seeing and hearing what Lissa experiences as well as feeling what she feels. This power seems to increase when Lissa begins hanging with the campus bad boy, Christian, whose family is disgraced and who therefore is largely ignored, but who has the power to make someone think he (the person, not Christian) is on fire, as we see at one point. Rose eventually discovers that she can force these 'mind melds' to happen, and thereby spy on Lissa. Stalk much?!

Mead isn't exactly the best writer in the world. Most of what she writes is fine, but there were occasions when oddly composed text jumped out at me, such as on p83, where I read: "...I didn't want Lissa to have to deal with any more stress than she had to"?!!! She could have ditched the 'to have' after 'Lissa' and made it flow better. This was optional of course, but on p91 paragraph 2 (at the start of chapter 7) she refers to Lissa without referring to Lissa, using just 'her' out of the blue. That felt a bit amateur if not confusing.

Here are some other such problems:
"He burst in the door" p119 - not good English.
p142 'describrd'! Poor copy editing.
p208 "they cold do..."
p213 start of chapter 16, "The next day. It fully hit me" - what's with the period?!
There's also a problem in continuity between page 211 and 218. On 211, the narrator says it was only two days after the incident with Mrs Karp that she and Lissa fled the academy, but on 218, she says it was a month later.

Lissa's full title and name is Princess Vasilisa Dragomir, and she's the last survivor of the Dragomir clan, and one of the five ruling families. Rosemarie Hathaway is her guardian wannabe. Lissa is moroi and these vampires have magical power over one of the four tired trope elements: air, earth, fire, and water, but we learn that there's a fifth, and Lissa has it.

So the high school jinks continue, and the vampire stuff really takes a back seat, although since the two are tied together, it can't disappear entirely. Another dead animal is found - this time accompanied by a threatening note, yet no one seems smart enough to put a guard, or at least a watch, on Lissa's door. Actually I started suspecting Natalie - Lissa's cousin - or Mason, Rose's bestie! Both of them are simply too sweet to be as they appear.

The biggest problem with Rose is not that she's a slut or a bitch - she really isn't either (although Lissa does call her the latter), she's merely unafraid and assertive (the fact that she detests a classmate who is a bitch doesn't make her a bitch either) and flirtatious; no, her biggest problem is that she seems to have the mentality of a thirteen year old, and she's just as "mature" in her precipitousness - in acting without thinking through to the consequences. Fortunately, the much more mature Lissa steps up and tells Rose she's going to be proactive from now on instead of being so retiring, and she becomes as scary as Rose is reckless.

Rose really isn't a good friend to Lissa. She's loyal and very protective, but she's also weirdly jealous of Lissa's relationships with others - with those who feed her, and with Christian, the designated bad boy. Rose outright lies to him about Lissa, claiming that her friend really despises Christian, but that she's too good-natured to tell him. She effectively orders him to leave Lissa alone. Christian believes Rose rather than Lissa, which makes him stupid in my book. Rose does apologize to Christian later, for lying, but that's only because she needs for him to do her a favor

Because of Rose's personal in-fighting with Mia, the actual school bitch, stories start spreading about Rose's disgusting (in this vamp world) habit of letting Lissa feed from her. It's okay for them to feed from designated human food supply, but for a guardian to allow this is considered a perversion - dirty! Somehow Mia has coerced Jesse and Ralf to lie that Rose allowed them to feed from her during sex. As I mentioned, and contrary to the lies spread by some negative reviewers who evidently have no problem with the Christian injunction not to bear false witness, Rose is not a slut; she's a virgin.

Rose's relationship with her guardian tutor, Dmitri, oversteps a few bounds. It's obvious that they're both attracted to each other. He's 24, and she's seventeen, which some people have depicted as obscene, but this is not a normal high school, so we don't know what the rules are since Mead has never actually iterated them. Both ages are conveniently within the young adult age range (14 - 24), and in Montana, the age of consent is 16, so there's nothing wrong there from a legal PoV. What is wrong is the relationship they have: he's her teacher and therefore an authority figure in her life, so from that perspective alone, this relationship would be unethical were it to go anywhere romantically or lustfully.

Now it's time to address other negative review issues.
There isn't enough action.
I agree with this complaint - representing Rose as Lissa's bodyguard tended to offer us more than it delivered, but it was quickly explained that Rose was not actually her official bodyguard, merely a wannabe who is in training to become a bodyguard. Even so, there were several incidents where Rose's unique bond with Lissa came through and saved her from problems, and potential problems

One problem that was mentioned by more than one reviewer was to the effect that the novel is poorly written. I agree that bits of it are poorly written. A spell-checker would have helped, but in general this novel is as well-written (or as badly-written, dependent upon your perspective) as any other YA novel. YA novels in general tend to be badly written, especially the dystopian variety (not that this is in that category), and of those even more especially those written with a female main protagonist, and this is not improved upon if the author is also female. I expect better, but I rarely find it. It's sad that so many YA authors, especially female authors, have so little respect for their readers that they feel no need to work harder at their craft.

One reviewer complained that the 17 year old main character had her shirt off making out with a boy and her best friend had gone all the way. So?! The age of consent in Montana is 16. Get a life! Rose has been slut-shamed abominably by negative reviewers, but the fact is that she's a virgin at the start of the novel, and she remains so through to the end. Not that virginity is any kind of noble badge, or a particularly special quality or anything, but to outright lie about this is as pathetic as it is laughable.

Yes, Rose has flaws. No, she isn't the best character in fiction nor is she the best friend in the world, but all these traits do is make her more realistic. She's young, confused, stressed, and devoted to Lissa, her best friend since childhood. Oh, and by the way, this is fiction! Even so, there are people like this in real life. Reviewers who have problems reading about real life issues need to quit reading YA fiction, and revert to having their mommy and daddy read them the Disney princess picture books, period. Oh god, I said, "period", Now they'll be offended by that!

Some reviewers have tried to intimate that there's a lesbian relationship here, or that Rose is in the closet, but none of this is true. Whether one might develop in future volumes remains (for me, just starting this series) to be seen, but the explanation for the intensity of this relationship is made quite clear by Mead.

Some have said that Rose isn't only a slut, she's also a hypocrite by being self righteous about the sexual behavior of others. Indeed, I saw one review which shamed Rose for being a slut and then running away and crying when she was accused of the same thing, but this is dishonest. Rose did not get upset because people called her a slut. She didn't care about that. She did care that people were getting too close to the truth of what happened: that when she and Lissa were on the run, Rose, her best friend, was the one from whom Lissa fed. That was why she was so upset, because doing this was considered the lowest and dirtiest, and most shameful thing a dhampir could do amongst her community. It was not the sex, which no one cared about that much, but the feeding.

Clearly some readers were not paying anywhere near enough attention, but the real hypocrisy here is for a reviewer who claims to love 'bookie nookie' to turn around and portray Rose as a "hoe macking on every guy she crosses paths with" which is patently not true. Does this reviewer even know what 'nookie' really means?! And no, this novel isn't written for pre-teens, but aimed at older young-adult age range (16 - 24), so to blurt-out righteously that you wouldn't let a 12-year-old read it is a shameful red herring.

Here's another complaint: Rose makes out with every guy who shows her any attention? Outright lie! She makes out with one guy by choice and quickly realizes he's bad news, and she has nothing to do with him after that. As opposed to another character who sleeps with two guys purely to get them to spread lies about Rose - yet no one even mentions her behavior, not in any negative review that I read. And by making out, I mean that Rose gets her top off (not her bra) - and that's it. Nothing actually really happens beyond some kissing. The only other time she 'makes out' is when she's been deliberately put under a powerful spell for the express purpose of disabling her ability to help Lissa. She cannot control her behavior, but even so, she and her partner overcome the spell and quickly refocus on what they were supposed to be doing!

One complaint is that Lissa cuts herself when stressed! So? Mead isn't prescribing or advocating this as a viable or worthwhile activity. It's dealt with as a problem which needs attention, and it's Rose, through her bond with Lissa, who frequently detects Lissa's problems and sees threats to her, and who acts decisively to stop them. Why would it be a negative thing to depict a psychological problem in a character and depict that problem being appropriately resolved? Should YA writers not write about real world problems? LoL! Get a life, for goodness sakes!

Other complaints One was that the only character that's developed is the main one, but this is a common to nearly all YA novels. Maybe it's a problem, maybe it isn't, but it isn't unique to this novel. Some argued that Lissa had a darker side which is hinted at but never shown, but that's not true. It was shown: she was compelling all kinds of people to do her bidding. This was considered evil (if not downright impossible!) and it was frowned upon in her community.

Can you believe some people complained that the main character is defiant and troubled, and that she relates to no one but her friend? So? Even if this were true it's not a fault of the novel. There are many people like this - should YA writers not write about them? This is actually a common trait of YA novels for better or for worse: main characters in YA novels are often like this. It's not a fault of this novel per se, it's a YA trope, for better or for worse. Should women not be depicted as strong and reckless and forceful and confident and self-motivated? What an appalling thing to intimate!

One of my favorite complaints is that this is just a lame story about a really disturbed, sexually deviated young girl. Sexually deviated? Rose is a virgin. Lissa had sex with one person. Both are over the age of consent. What is sexually deviated about it? Nothing! The deviants are the ones who are slut-shaming (or more technically, non-slut-shaming since Rose isn't even a "slut") and trying to turn this into something that it isn't. In order to achieve their repressed religious agenda, they're forced bear false witness about the story, and this is truly sad.

I agree that the novel to-often goes off the rails and focuses too much on high-school drama instead of staying on the threat to Lissa. This seemed odd to me, but then a lot of the high-school drama was directly related to vampire politics, so it's not like it was so far off the rails that it was irrelevant.

The real issue in this department for me was: how there can be royal families and princesses and queens when none of these families seems ever to have been part of a monarchy! I don't get this with vampire stories (not just this one): this hierarchy of princes and queens and so on. It makes no sense at all to me. What would it even mean to say that a vampire is a princess? What gives them their rank and authority? Why would any other vampire respect it? This is such a strongly established trope, yet none of this is ever explored in these stories to my knowledge. That's the problem here.

Mead seems to be all over the place with her mythology, too. She does create a unique and interesting world, but while the overall setting has a strong Russian flavor, despite it being set in Montana, dhampir (what Rose is: a vampire-human hybrid) is a Balkan term according to wikipedia, not Russian per se. Both moroi and strigoi are Romanian terms. How Mead came to tie these up with Russia is a bit of a mystery.

Having said all of that, I still rate this novel as a worthy read, because it had an interesting story to tell and something new to offer. Whether the rest of the series is worthy remains (for me) to be seen, but I am definitely committed to reading the second volume in this series at least, and I'm not even a series kind of person!

Shattered Veil by Tracy E Banghart

Title: Shattered Veil
Author: Tracy E Banghart
Publisher: Tracy E. Banghart
Rating: WARTY!

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

'Tracy Banghart' is a really cool name. It's more like a character's name than an author's, but cool names do not a novel make. As this blog keeps harping: it's all in the writing, and this novel just didn't do it for me, for many reasons, some of which I'll detail below. The novel presents itself as sci-fi, but all it ends up being is a YA high-school romance with sci-fi plug-ins in place of the high-school.

One of the myriad tropes here is that of a woman (Aris Haan) disguising herself as a man in order to get into the military. To achieve this, she uses a holographic projection device (right out of the remake of Total Recall except that here it’s a full-body holograph) which makes her look male. I don't get the point of that, because the deception is over really quickly. Indeed, the deception is ironical because this novel reads like the author downloaded a Divergent template from somewhere online and went through it filling in the blanks and adding a skin of sci-fi in the same way that this so-called "diatous veil" covers Aris's body and makes it look like a different gender. The problem is that underneath it remains unchanged.

Of course, this "Mission Impossible" technology telegraphs half the plot, and we know exactly what's happening when the Ward of Ruslana is kidnapped - which no-one, even for a minute, seems to suspect. Incredibly, they all blindly swallow the story they're given. Clearly she's being impersonated, yet no one has the smarts to imagine that this technology might be in use? You see that wingjet heading out of the country? That's the one on which credibility is riding.

Aris is small, like Beatrice in the execrable Divergent. She has a choice of one of five factions just like Triss, and chooses the most militaristic one just like Triss does. She undergoes punishing, but thoroughly inadequate training, including hand-to-hand combat and hand-guns, just like Triss does. She gets no prior instruction in this training, but is expected to perform competently, just like Triss! There's even a character in it named Tress!

The fact that this is a series means, of course, that we already know we’re reading a novel which will have no real resolution. I find that depressing which is why, and with very few exceptions, I detest novel series. The blurb made this one at least sound interesting, but we all know how misleading blurbs are, don’t we?! I resolved to give it a try anyway, but frankly it did not get off to the best start.

In the very first chapter we're treated to what amounts to an info dump about how wonderful Aris Haan is, which struck me as odd. This novel is about the main female character, so I'm forced to assume she's worth reading about, otherwise why write the novel? There's no need for her to be pumped-up with an info-dump. Please show me how great your character is by telling her story! Don’t tell me how great she is and then undermine your own introduction by showing us, for the next eighty percent of the novel how weak, incompetent and scared she is.

As it is, Aris comes off looking like a female Luke Skywalker with nowhere near the courage: an ace pilot working on a farm, but dreaming of escape? I can think of far better ways to have done this, but isn't my novel, so let’s deal with what we have.

On the positive side, at least it wasn't in first person, so I'm grateful to the author for that. It was a very smart decision, but even so, it led to some problems, such as when the author is cussing in the narration, as though it's being told in first person when it isn't! When I say cussing, I use that term very euphemistically. The cuss-word of choice is 'blighting' which is pathetic for a military yarn. Also appearing: "sons of asses!" Yes, someone actually says that!

That latter is issued when one of the S&R ships goes down, but get this: no one on board sends out even so much as a m'aider call for assistance! You'll see shortly that this is entirely unsurprising given the thoroughly insufficient training they've had, but don't worry, this gives Aris some real quality time with the other leg of the triangle, and very conveniently this three-crew ship is, for no reason at all, carrying only two crew on that particular day.

Aris's boyfriend is Calix Pavlos, who belittles and demeans her by calling her 'Mosquito', as a pet name. Despite this, Aris's entire life revolves around him, and that's as sad as it's pathetic. She's all Calix all the time and it really drags the story down into the dumps. I remember thinking as I read this that there had better be some major character growth here or this main character is definitely going to be too much of Tris to waste my time on. There was no such character growth - not up to the point at eighty percent in where I couldn't stand to read about her OCD over Calix for even one more screen.

As to the writing in general, it's not that great: weak and boiler-plate for the most part, and really, I mean really irritating in that not one of the women depicted in it is capable of having any sort of real conversation unless it's about men. Way to pigeon-hole, cheapen, and demean women! But don't worry. This is an equal opportunity novel where men are also pigeon-holed, cheapened, and demeaned.

There isn't a huge number of technical gaffs in the writing, which made for a speedy read at least, although at one point a trio of words was repeated, which any beta reader ought to have caught. It's at the very start of a chapter and it reads, "...around a mouthful around a mouthful...". I can't tell you which chapter it is because in the Kindle version, the frilly chapter headers which contain that information are all rendered as per usual when Kindle has to render a picture: a dark gray nondescript rectangle, so the chapter number is invisible.

So when the story begins, Aris is demonstrating to herself her supposedly unparalleled flying skills in a "wingjet", and here's another problem: there's far too big of a disconnect between her skill and confidence here, and her subsequent reduction to a bag of Jell-O when she undergoes military training. It doesn't work and it makes no sense, unless Aris is also a victim of multiple personality disorder which, given that she's pretending to be a man, may well be true.

I suspect that there are many graduates of Parris Island and the San Diego Recruit Depot who would laugh their asses off at the poor excuse for military induction presented here (had their asses not been firmly attached by their exhaustive training beforehand, that is). But I digress. As the story takes off (so to speak) Aris is flying and is visited by Tress, a military official, who first tries to make her crash with his fly-bys and then, on the ground, invites her to join the military.

This offer is as bizarre to her as it was to me. It was bizarre to her because women are not allowed in the military even though they can be a president (termed a 'Ward' in this novel). It was bizarre to me because we're offered no reason whatsoever why a military pilot would fly out to the butt-crack of nowhere to try and recruit a young girl. Where was the incentive for that? Whence came the information to the military that this crack pilot lived out there and was supposedly so good? There's no rationalization ever offered for this credulity-lacking recruitment tactic!

So we're expected to believe that despite the fact that they're losing the war and desperately in need of volunteers, the nation's leaders are so stupid that they stupidly cling to a stupid rule - a rule that's completely illogical. Women are allowed to be Ward (president) and they're allowed to do potentially dangerous jobs like flying, yet they're banned from the military, even as support personnel?

So Tress offers Aris a chance, but he actually leaves her completely in the dark about what it entails, yet she takes up his offer because she's so stupid that she thinks it will enable her to be with Calix, who can't be with her now because he's just been drafted. That's how we end up with 'super-powered' main character and unnecessary mystery - and all in one chapter!

This novel is set in an unspecified future on Earth, wherein the nations are no longer known by their original names, and for no apparent reason. Earth has changed (presumably due to a global warming cliché - and the same kind of inexplicable natural catastrophes which drag down Divergent and Taken). What I assume was the USA (or maybe simply 'North America') is now called Atalanta (like the Academy in the Kiki Strike series), but it has a border with Africa (here named Safara) and Russia, here named Ruslana.

Note that it’s illegal to name a nation and not have it end in the letter 'a' in this novel! Seriously, why not just set this on another planet if you're going to change Earth around in ways which make no geological sense? I didn’t get this at all. Plate tectonics isn’t moving Africa and the Americas towards each other - it’s moving them apart. Maybe they met around the other side of the globe, in which case we're maybe 250 million years into the future? Or maybe I just didn't understand it, in which case the writing was bad. Or maybe it's actually not on Earth and it just resembles Earth in remarkably realistic ways. Who knows?

Safara is an aggressor "nation" fighting against Atalanta over water! The Ward (no presidents or kings and queens here, remember) of Atalanta, Pyralis Nekkos (again no explanation for the pretentiously exotic names other than that it's a sci-fi trope) asks the ward of Ruslana for help to fight them...and still he never thinks for a split second of recruiting women because they're needed bare-foot and pregnant! But that's actually not the worst deficit they're facing. More on this later.

Here's another trope in sci-fi: once again we have humans fighting in X-wing fighters - my bad, wingjet fighters. THIS MAKES NO SENSE! It makes even less sense to vamp-up your planet and rename the nations, and come up with 'cool' names for airplanes, like "wingjet", and even invent new and sad cuss-words like "blighting", but have nothing else change. The autumn is still called "the fall" - a very American term, for example, and still exists despite the catastrophic changes to Earth's geology! Oh,and everyone behaves as though they're in high school (YA style) in 2014.

It’s a very bad case of 'the more things change, the more they remain the same' and it's rife in this genre no matter who the author is. David Webber is a classic case in point. How I long for something truly different, and how thrilled I am when I find it. Unfortunately, I didn't find it here.

Here's another thing I have to ask, as usual in a sci-fi novel: "Where are the robots?" One of Aris's chores on her family's farm is crop-dusting. Again with the Luke Skywalker farm chores thing! That far into the future they don’t have robots which can do this? Genetic engineering hasn't advanced sufficiently that crop-dusting isn't needed?

Right now, here and now in 2014, we have robots! We have highly advanced so-called "smart" bombs, we have predator drones, and we have fighter-bomber jets being ever more automated with technology and AI assistance. Even Google is working on auto-navigation vehicles, yet a hundred, two hundred, two thousand years into the future (whenever this novel is set), there is nothing like that? I don’t buy that. I don't buy that women couldn't fight in the military and still stay home and have kids, when they could remotely pilot un-'manned' drones - drones which we already have in 2014!

This is a serious writing problem and it isn't confined to self-published authors for whom I normally have a lot of respect: it’s a trope (and a bad one) of all sci-fi. The human pilots are there because the writers can't write about robots! They have to write about humans (or aliens which are really humans in disguise), and they have to put them in danger no matter how ridiculous and unbelievable the stories are. If they even try to write about robots they just become another variety of alien: either they make them humans in disguise or they make them callous, unfeeling, dangerous sociopaths. So in the end, this means putting humans into positions which logically, for the futuristic setting, make no sense. It's sad, but it's true.

There's a Selection (hell yes, with a capital letter!), just like in Divergent, where young citizens are assigned to their career path. The initiates are selected for one of five factions, just like in Divergent. Not only this, but they get "branded" with the symbol of the faction to which they're assigned! In short, it’s exactly like the Divergent initiates getting tattoos! There's even an 'unselected' faction, just like Divergent has a factionless 'faction'. There's no self-determination here, yet no one seems to find anything wrong with that.

Calix tells Aris that because he was drafted (he's going to become a 'Mender' - they don’t have doctors here! When did that change?), they can’t be 'Promised" (hell yes, with a capital letter!), and they reminisce about their first meeting, where Aris says of her behavior, "I was a silly girl". She hasn’t changed: she still "clambers" into her wingjet, and "scrambles" down! She's still a little child. Oh, and she's a virgin, because: cliched YA! And so is he, because: cliched YA! When she wants sex he manfully refuses, because "...it would be wrong"! Ulp! Does anyone have a crocodile tissue, so I can wipe away this crocodile tear?

Yes, there is a love triangle for fans of same. I am not such a fan - especially not when this girl, who has thought of almost literally nothing but her love for, and her desire to be with, Calix now suddenly starts wanting another man for absolutely no reason whatsoever! There went credibility up in flames. Again. Now I have even less respect for this main character - or more accurately, I would have, if it were possible at this point.

Meanwhile, Ward Balias of Safara is bitching that Atalanta has solar technology and water and won't share it. Now this is a nation on a planet awash with seawater, and they don't have the technology to desalinate it? And no one even thinks of this or mentions it during their summit meeting? They don't have solar-power technology which we've had for decades - and which is already growing in Africa?

Hell, if these people simply evaporated the seawater and collected the condensate they'd have all the water they needed, but apparently they can't even think of that. Again, there goes credibility. These interspersed political chapters did not work for me, and after the first two I skipped every one of them because they were so god-awfully boring.

Aris meets up with Dianthe (yes, the goddess of war, Diana, who happens to be appallingly genderist: "Men don’t discuss their feelings"! Seriously?) This is one of many genderist slights delivered to men in this novel, such as "...too graceful to be a man" and "Men don't cry", and so on. It became nauseating to read so many blind, biased and insulting bullshit claims one after another.

Aris is told that if she wants to fly for the military, she has to be disguised as a man and complete a week's physical training. Like one week will do it! Well, if it worked in Divergent there's no reason at all why it shouldn’t work here, too! Her first task is to run one mile.

The problem Aris faces is that she's not exactly a first-class specimen. Apparently at some point in her childhood she had 'a fever' (like no child has fevers! lol!), and at present she walks with a limp. How (or even if) these are connected, or what was involved in 'the fever' is never discussed. Nor is it broached upon as to why future medicine (or is it Mending?) could not fix her up. What, they can make a perfect holograph to make a woman look like a man, but they can’t fix a limp? Schools have no physical fitness programs in the future? Or the future has no schools?

This brings me to the problem I referenced earlier: the military financed this 'diatous veil' (there's no cool, snappy name for this. It's always 'the diatous veil'), and now here they are losing a war. One thing we're expected to believe is that this war took everyone unexpectedly, but this veil proves that this is not the case. Ten years before, they were financing technology to recruit women - so if this aspect of the military budget was being attended to so diligently, where was the finance for weapons technology? Again, it makes no sense.

As far as the training and testing goes, why an active eighteen-year-old is so physically unfit that her legs are trembling and her lungs on fire after only a mile on a treadmill is a complete mystery. She's eighteen for goodness sakes, not eighty! She can flip an airplane around the sky and endure multiple g's in acceleration, yet she's struggling to jog one mile? Bye-bye credibility! Again.

We’ve been given no reason whatsoever to think that there's anything wrong with Aris (other than that she walks with a limp). Where were the beta readers and the editor here? It's never a good idea to artificially weaken your main character in order to then show how strong she is. It's unrealistic and in the end it backfires because it makes her seem far weaker than you actually intended to portray, and this in turn robs the credibility from her turn-around. It's just bad policy all-around.

For some reason it takes two weeks to set-up Aris with her holograph - using electrodes! I have no idea why this primitive approach was employed, or why it took so long, but finally she gets sent out into the military wearing this purported disguise. She gets onto the transport - a transjet, not a wingjet now! Or maybe it really is a wingjet? We have no idea what these things are other than airplanes, but if they're merely airplanes, then why give them new names as though they're something advanced?

Aris sits next to another guy, and we're told that she's "resisting the urge to cross her ankles. Men didn’t sit like that." and I'm sitting here reading this with my ankles crossed. I am not kidding you. I guess that means I'm not a man! This endless barrage of genderist slurs against men seriously began to grate after a very short while.

Here's a pet peeve of mine, and I see this happening a lot: someone with a title introduces themselves in this manner: "My name is Title Name". For example, they might say, "My name is Doctor Smith", but their name isn’t Doctor; that's their title! Actually I was once acquainted with someone who was a doctor and whose last name was also Doctor! His official title was Doctor Doctor which sounds like a Thompson Twins song. How weird is that? I also personally knew someone whose last name was Captain, so her medical orders were signed Captain MD, which was pretty cool. And funny!

But I digress! Again! In the case of this novel, it's: "My name is Commander Nyx", but it’s his title that's "Commander". His name is just "Nyx". If he were going to introduce himself properly, he should say "I'm Commander Nyx", or "I'm your commander. My name is Nyx. You may address me as 'Commander Nyx', or 'Sir'."

I just think it's an example of sloppy writing, and this blog is all over writing. Another example of this kind of inattention which caught my attention was where someone shovels "...another hunk of pie in his mouth." It should have been 'into' not 'in', unless he's already holding the pie in his mouth and shoveling it around in there for entertainment. Maybe he is. Or maybe language really is deteriorating in this era of texting, as some scholars like to claim. Who knows? Five hundred years from now, language will be as alien to us as ours would be to people living in Shakespearean times. Que sera so rant.

As an an aside, please note that commander isn’t actually a rank unless you're in the navy. The title of commander might be held by someone who is ranked as a commander or by someone of another rank (lieutenant, for example), but this person, regardless of rank, would still be the commander of the unit - in this case S&R.

I think I've ranted enough about this. I really wanted to like the novel, and I really thought I would from what I read in the blurb, but the execution of the story was really poor, and it did not hold my attention, I kept on reading and reading in the hope that it would get better, but it was a painful slog, and in the end I simply couldn't continue with do it. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb by Kirsten Miller

Title: Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb
Author: Kirsten Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WORTHY!

The title of this novel is something of a misnomer, implying that it's about Kiki Strike when it actually isn't. Yes, she appears at crucial times throughout the narrative to facilitate the action, a bit like a deus ex machina, but Kiki is side-lined by her protector Veruska's life-threatening illness, and she takes a back seat in this adventure (as indeed does most of the crew to one extent or another), leaving the stage to Oona and to Ananka, who is telling the story again. This is the second in what is a series. I already reviewed the first one. The third is now available. I suspect that there will be at least seven, because there are seven main characters in the irregulars:

Iris isn't shown here, nor is she mentioned in the irregulars group at the web site. I don't know why. The web site is worth a visit if you're into this series. It has a lot of interesting stuff.

The girls are now fourteen years old and still together as the irregulars, still righting wrongs and fighting the good fight, but there's some dissension in the ranks. Ananka is growing increasingly suspicious of Oona's behavior, thinking she's going over to the dark side. This becomes especially startling when Oona's father, the notorious Chinese gangster Lester Liu, who escaped capture in volume one, pops up again, seemingly reformed and asking Oona back into his life - the girl he tossed away at her birth like garbage because of her "useless" gender. His life now, he claims, is to be one of contrition and philanthropy.

Oona has a secret which she wants to share with the irregulars, but no one seems to have time to listen, and some are antagonistic towards her for being spoiled, snooty, rich, and unkind to their newest honorary member, Iris, who is two or three years younger than the rest of them.

So what are these distractions? Well, the first is the break-in at a pet store which occupies the ground-floor of an apartment block. The apartments are subsequently invaded by animals which were released from the store, each critter sporting a necklace which itself sports a small sign saying "I want to go home" or words to that effect. The immediate suspect is the legendary Kiki Strike, but Ananka doesn't believe it's her - it's not Kiki's style. The next thing is the new artwork appearing all over the city - a form of artistic graffiti that depicts squirrels issuing warnings about abusing animals. As if that isn't plenty to consider, large squirrels start mugging people in Central Park! And why did Phineas run away from his psychologist parents?

As if all that isn't enough on her plate, and intent upon mapping the last section of tunnel in the Shadow City, Ananka discovers a boy, and later a girl, both of whom have evidently been kidnapped from China. The two are talented artists, but why would someone want to illegally "export" artistic children? There is increasing pressure from Ananka's parents (who are suddenly a lot more hands-on than they ever were in volume 1) to wake up at school and bring her grades up, otherwise she'll be kidnapped herself, and exported to West Virginia to a farm school, which fills her with dread. But she has an ally in the principle of Atalanta school - or so she hopes.

This novel was a little bit too drawn-out for me. It could have benefited from being somewhat shorter, especially with regard to the finale. Still, it was really good - as good as the first one. It's the same kind of set-up, with Ananka's astute and often caustic observations as well as her end-of-chapter tips on topics like how to be mysterious, what to do with secrets, how to appreciate odors, and what not to put in your trash if you don't want someone to learn secrets about you.

I rate this novel a worthy read. The message here is make good friends and then trust them, and part of making good friends is to give them the benefit of the doubt, and to listen to them when they have something to say. This story is well-told and as intriguing as it is engaging. It builds on the groundwork laid in volume one, but is not so dependent upon it that you don't know where you are, even if you haven't read volume one. However, I'd recommend reading these in order. The first volume is so good and it will enrich the experience of reading this one.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M R Carey

Title: The Girl With All The Gifts
Author: M R Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This novel is the one you wait for while biding your time reading all the dreck. It grabbed me from the very start, and it kept grabbing with each chapter. This is a brilliant novel.

It begins, "Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don't get to choose." Hold on to that Pandora reference.

Melanie's story is unfolded so easily, so carefully, and so intriguingly that it takes a while to realize that this girl who appears to be having such a good time is not in a boarding school, not in a convent, not even in a psychiatric hospital. She's not even a convict. Like Johnny Test, she's a lab rat.

Slowly, but not too slowly, we discover that she's committed no crime, yet is feared by everyone around her. When she's let out of her cell, she has to be restrained as though she's Hannibal Lecter: she must be in her wheelchair, strapped-down tightly, with a muzzle on her face, because Melanie is infected with a fungus, specifically a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis which has evolved to parasitize Homo sapiens instead of its usual host, Camponotus leonardi, a species of Carpenter ant resident in South America.

Melanie is not alone in her disease. There is a dozen or so other kids, being held on a military base where the doctors are slowly cutting up these non-kids ("They're dead already!" everyone says) to find out why they are so different from the overwhelming majority of others who are infected, and who don't talk or communicate anything other than their manifest desire to literally eat you alive. There's a very good reason why they're different.

Melanie has an ally however, and it's at a doubly-crucial moment that Helen Justineau, one of the school teachers and also a psychologist, hooks up with Melanie as their joint world goes all to hell. The Hungries, as the uncontrollable wild forms are known, break into the camp for reasons unspecified - apparently working in concert with the Junkers, who are uninfected humans and even more dangerous than the Hungries. Melanie is neither of these extremes, but no one knows why, and suddenly, and for the first time in her life, she's outside. Yes, she's on the run with Justineau, the nasty Sergeant Parks, Caldwell, the cold well of a pathologist, and with a raw military recruit, but she's outside and can see the things she's only ever heard about or seen in picture books.

But how in hell are these few people going to make it?

I am not a fan of zombie apocalypse stories or movies. Indeed, had I known this was akin to those stories, I would never have picked it up, but then I would have made a huge mistake. Yes, it's akin to those stories, but it isn't one of them. In terms of Victorian England, this is the upstairs, whereas all those others are the downstairs! This novel is brilliant, and it deserves every success it has coming its way. I thoroughly recommend it. This is one of the novels which we reviewers live to find!