Author: James Conner
Publisher: Sky Grove
Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
"...Captain Davis' wiry main mechanic..." should be "...Captain Davis's wiry main mechanic..." (similarly used on pps 52, 53, & 94). Davis is singular, so adding the letter 's' after the apostrophe is appropriate.
"That pulled more g forces of the most aggressive roller coaster" (p118) makes no sense as it's written. Try 'than' instead of 'of', and 'g force' (singular)?
"...entitled Dangerous Yogis..." should be "...titled Dangerous Yogis..." (p13) but so many authors conflate these two words that this point it's pretty much a waste of time objecting with a language as dynamical as English.
"I'm not saying there is any eminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." (p239) should be "I'm not saying there is any imminent danger of this mountain collapsing..." The author uses it correctly on p275.
"...I put the dresses in your closest personally" (p245) should be "...I put the dresses in your closet personally"
So, this was yet another Adobe Digital Editions book that started on page minus five. Way to give a negative impression! I don't know what does this. It isn't the author's fault. Something evidently got lost in translation between the typescript and the ADE. It's not an insurmountable problem - just annoying, but I never saw this problem until recently, and now I've seen it three times in three different books. Authors and publishers beware!
There were too many flaws in this story. On the one hand, this made it very little worse than your average super hero story, all of which are flawed in some way - notably how the hero got their powers and how those powers work. The biggest flaw was that there were pictures - in a book that's supposed to be about denying self - demonstrating how good-looking and hot these cool super-heroes were. In the ADE edition, the very first picture, of Physique, the villain, was cut off. Only the top portion of the image was visible (in the iPad edition it was all visible), so we didn't even see her face (see image on my blog). I was sorry it wasn't showing only the bottom, with the top cut off. At least then I could have maybe garnered some hits for my blog by telling everyone she appeared topless! LOL!
This story at least had the advantage of taking the road less traveled and for the most part, it's well-written apart from some rather glaring gaffs listed on my blog. I liked the way we're told that it's "A novel" on the cover - like we might mistake it for fact! In the end though, for me, it collapsed under its own weight. At times it read far more like a yoga training manual than an exciting novel, which was tedious at best, but this wasn't even the worst problem. I go into detail on my blog.
The grotesque sexual objectification of the female characters was what killed it for me. There are no everyday real females here and it was - even for a super hero story - completely unrealistic. I had initially thought that going with the yoga scenario would either be a joke or refreshingly different. The latter possibility was what made me look forward to reading it, but in the end it was just another trope super-hero story with nothing essentially different at all except for the yoga lectures.
I didn't like the genderism one bit, and adding brainy after beautiful, and mentioning (as opposed to showing) it just the once, does nothing to redress what is clearly and blatantly objectification. When we meet Agent Rollins, a guy, all we get is that he's tall, wiry, skin as black as midnight (which actually isn't very black when you're in times Square). No mention of handsome - or ugly for that matter, but this author cannot introduce a single female character (and they're all single) without larding her up with buxom, beautiful, voluptuous, or otherwise waxing gratuitously as to how thoroughly all-around hawt she is.
First we meet Physique, aka Tina Hinsdale - the villain. She seems to be the only one who doesn't come swaddled in a super-costume of sexist superlatives, although even she is described as "athletic". After that, though, all restraint fails:
- "...Surat Banal, the beautiful and brainy assistant..." (pc)
- "...instantly found her attractive..." (pc)
- "...no woman so attractive had ever..." (pc)
- "To Detective Brennan - an attractive but hardened woman..." (pc)
- "...blonde and buxom..." (p78)
- "...an attractive woman in an olive green flight suit..." (p83)
- "Samantha simply enjoyed being the beautiful translator..." (p137)
- "...accenting her voluptuous chest..." (p137)
- "...if she's going to become a beautiful slugger..." (p186)
- "Samantha looked at her beautiful, glowing body..." (p189)
- "...on the dramatic cover, a buxom brunette..." (p198)
- "...she was glowing and attractive..." - attractive to moths maybe? (201)
- "...her voluptuous figure..." (p204)
- "...a beautiful blonde woman..." (p235)
- "...their sponsor's attractive niece seemed..." (p239)
- "...spirits looked like beautiful angels..." (p261) And my personal favorite:
- Arial Davis, "...a beautiful woman who smelled like roses..." (p112) Seriously, roses? Roses don't actually smell of much any more - not like they did in Shakespeare's time. These days, they're all about looks, just like these descriptions.
So for example, when we meet female Surat Banal, the very first thing after her name is "the beautiful" with a side order of "and brainy" as a sop to try and weaken the fact that the most important thing about her is her looks. We get no indication of what Rollins is wearing, but a complete description of Banal's attire down to her pearl necklace, lustrous hair, and Bollywood smile. I am so tired of this, and was pretty much ready to ditch this novel at that point, only five pages in. I had hoped for better, but reading on and on, I quickly learned it wasn't coming. This novel doesn't take the less traveled path after all.
I know this is traditional in super-hero stories, but does that mean it's required? Does that mean we can never try a different kind of super-hero story and break this mold? The truly, truly hypocritical thing here is that Diamond Mind, aka Eric the super yogi, is constantly banging on about how important it is to shed the 'me' and broaden our 'self' to become selfless, and yet every single page, near enough, is larded with how firmly attached to the me and to the material these people truly are.
The 'enlightened one' himself tosses his hair out of his eyes with metronomic regularity. Can he not get it cut so it isn't a constant distraction to him? Do his super yogic powers not extend to holding his hair in place? This endless parade of references to physical appearance completely betrayed and obliterated everything the author was saying about higher consciousness, detachment, and all that drivel!
But on to the story. The idea here is that there are super-powered yogis. They have such control over their bodies that they can overcome the laws of physics (yeah, good luck with that!) and as we learn in the very first chapter, change their body density and crash an airplane, this we need good super yogis to beat them at their own game.
One major problem for me is that the novel had almost no humor except that which was supplied unintentionally, such as when Physique observes at one point, "One side of a mountain moved six feet, sixty years ago...this isn't earth-shattering stuff". Actually, it is! Here's another: the author describes Physique and Agnite clinging to the rail of a boat out on the ocean, fearful that if they fell into the water, no one would ever find them out there, but Physique can float and in the air, too! Why would she be scared? It makes no sense. The only intentionally amusing highlight I noticed was the use of the term "un-dynamic duo" to describe agents Rollins and Kirby investigating this truck that physique damaged. That was it for humor.
While I think it's great that an author has come up with something new to bring to the super hero story genre, taking this particular tack also brings problems along with it. The most obvious one is of course, why set it in the USA? There are shamefully obvious reasons for that of course, but it would have made a lot more sense if this had been set in a place where yoga has been practiced for centuries. The USA is hardly known for its spiritual enlightenment! But if it's super-hero, it has to be USA, right?! And USDA - certified pure beef, too!
Whole chapters of the novel are devoted to teaching yoga, which I routinely skipped because they were boring new age woo. Other readers may find this appealing, but I have no interest at all in reading a bunch of unsubstantiated religious claptrap, especially in a work of fiction. If I did, I'd get a book about the topic and read that. And no, I'm not interested in hearing arguments to the effect that the brain waves of meditating people have been measured and the brain structure of these people has been studied, and I'll tell you why.
Such claims are meaningless without controls. We don't know if those brain changes were there long before the path to meditation began. Neither have there been control studies testing other people doing other things for comparison, such as measuring the brain waves of an athlete when they're in the zone, or of a concert pianist or violinist performing, for example, or of a video-gamer, or of a fighter-jet pilot doing maneuvers.
Without a real honest-to-goodness scientific study, claims are meaningless and out of place in a work of fiction which certainly doesn't require minutiae to be highlighted, and detailed explanations provided for every little thing! Besides, even if all of this were proven, it still provides no evidence for other claims, such as yogis having super powers, or that there is any such thing as reincarnation. These things are fine for fiction. They're fun to play with, and can make for a really good story if handled well, but I can do without the lectures and training manuals in a novel.
A belief in past lives and migrating souls is nonsensical. Consider this: at a point in the not-so-distant past, there were only maybe 2,000 humans living on Earth. We almost became extinct. Now there are billions. Where did all those extra souls come from? If they already existed, what were they doing in the literal billions upon billions of years before Earth formed and life began, and finally, within the last few million years, humans appeared on the stage? Reincarnation ignores the facts of life and this is why it's nonsensical.
The author seems to know that it's the Medal of Honor and not the Congressional Medal of honor (perhaps people confuse it with the Congressional Gold Medal) on one page, but later he refers to it as Congressional Medal of Honor. He's wrong in claiming it was issued to one civilian. It's not issued to civilians per se, but it has been issued to at least seven civilians who were in the employ of the US military at the time it was earned.
"He's gonna have to learn how to lighten up. Having a sense of humor is a big part in making any spiritual progress" - this from Eric the yogi who has been telling these two women that they need to let go of the "me" and focus on others, and now they're being kitted out for super hero costumes by comic book artists - who evidently don't use pencil, ink, or paint any more but all use $2,000 Wacom graphics tablets! Neither Arial (now "Airspeed") nor Samantha (now "Samsa") raise a single objection to their being objectified. This is the point I quit feeling positive about this novel. After that I just completed it for the sake of it since I was so close to the end and hadn't yet finished counting the incidence of "beautiful," but I knew i could not rate it positively.
In a humorous book, calling in comic book artists to design the superheroes' wardrobes would have been a hilarious touch, but this was not that kind of story and it sounded completely ridiculous here. Why not get he movie costume designers? They're the real exerts, and they have been there and done that!
The genderism worked negatively in two ways with the costuming, too. The guys get full-body covering. In fact, the one who actually is impervious to bullets gets a full body suit of Kevlar. The two "girls" (as they're now referred to), are not only forced into the ignominy of wearing what is, let's face it, skimpy swim suits and thoroughly ridiculous mini-skirts, they're also the ones who have no protection against bullets, being forced to expose acres of vulnerable skin. Where is their protection?
The worst part is that neither of these women has sufficient integrity, professionalism or self-respect to raise any objections. Instead they're portrayed as lapping it up, and this wasn't the only dumb in play here. I was especially disappointed in Arial Davis, as a military officer, going along with this. It seemed completely out of character for her, but then the military isn't portrayed in a very positive light here.
At one point, after discussing a new threat from Physique, the commander of the Marine Corps supposedly says, "Then madam, it's time to deploy the Marines with some heavy weapons to defend the Capital," but the Posse Comitatus Act prevents just this kind of deployment, as a Marine commander ought to know. That's what the police forces and the National Guard are for.
So no, I cannot in good faith recommend this novel. All of this leaves only one unanswered question: If there was a naked Yogi living in Yosemite National Park - would that be a Yogi Bare? I'll let you know when I visit.
