Defiance by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

"Werewolves are bound to protect their vampire masters...." Seriously? This obsessive-compulsive linking of werewolves and vampires is so tired it's way beyond fatigued. If the plot had had it the other way around that would be something approaching new, but this retreaded cookie-cutter clone bullshit is tedious. Yawn. This author seems sadly dedicated to writing clunkers.

Daybreak by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

"Held as a prisoner because of her heritage, half-human Liora" What's her other half? Is that human too? She can't be half human. By definition, if one organism can successfully breed with another, they are the same species. You can't be half human. "...doesn't trust anyone. But when she's freed by starship captain Devren," she miraculously trusts him and they make beautiful music together because she's yet another worthless woman who needs a man to pull her strings? Barf. "...experiences the adventure of a lifetime." I'll bet she does, but I won't be joining her. I wasted enough time in trying to stomach two other of this author's novels.

Rise of the Gladiator: Forbidden Planet by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Forbidden planet is way over-used, but get this: "Embarking on a dangerous rescue mission, Captain Nova Ardis takes a risk in bringing along a gladiator as her bodyguard." Why? And why would she want a guy half-dressed in leathers, and carrying a sword and shield when a ray gun can drop this asshole in a heartbeat? Bodyguard? Horseshit. I've had issues before with Alsop's books and this does nothing to earn any faith whatsoever in her ability as a writer. This marks three strikes against her.

Strays by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "...giving the merest wave of his fingers to thwart off his angry daughter" Thwart off?! No. Find the right word, please!

"I’ll turn the time over to Professor Kaynan" Kaynan? Seriously? Why not just call him Canine? If you're writing a parody, by all means go for the dumb-as snames.

This is Werewolf Academy, book one, and so it's yet another series I won't be reading. Normally I avoid werewolf stories like I do mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, but I like to keep in touch with the various genres, so once in a while I 'make the sacrifice' and read something outside of my comfort zone. Oh how we artistic types pay for our art, don't we? LOL! This one sounded not too awful, which means the book description never ended-up being the subject of one of my 'non-reviews', but even so, I had serious issues with it from the off.

I've never been a fan of vampire and werewolf stories because in general, they're so trope and clichéd, and profoundly stupid, but I've read one or two here and there. Or tried to. The thing about this one that bothered me is that it's set in an academy - a high school for werewolves - and it makes me wonder why writers of these novels are so uninventive and so bound by convention.

The problem with this kind of a story as I see it, is that it's supposed to be about an alien lifeform in effect: a werewolf, yet the story is exactly the same as it would have been had it been about a regular academy, and regular humans, with no supernatural input whatsoever. You could have removed the werewolf element and told the exact same story. So why even introduce werewolves if you're not really going to go there?

It's the same characters who think and talk just like regular high-schoolers, never mind that they're all werewolves. There are the same conventions and the same high school tropes. Obviously you can't make it so alien that a reader can't begin relate to the characters, but you'd think that somewhere along the way, the author might want to stretch and put in something a bit alien, a bit supernatural, yet they never do. Particularly not this one.

There's no 'wolf' in this story at all. It's all human all the way. Oh yes, there's a token nod and a wink to 'wolf cutlure' but that's entirely confined to pack mentality, as though werewolves are exactly like wolves, and not some alien form or some combo of human and wolf. The school, contrary to what the story yaps on about family, isn't the pack.

Instead there are twelve packs in the school, and rather than follow the school teachings about all working together for the good of werewolves, there's an appalling rivalry between them, along with cliché bullying, none of which is restrained by the teaching staff. In short it's pathetic and right down there with the worst examples of a typically bad high-school story. At one point, there's a fight scene stolen straight out of that execrable Divergent garbage, again with the flimsiest of justification. It's really atrocious.

The characters are exactly like regular humans at all times, even when hunting down a slightly lame deer and brutally slaughtering it, and then trying to justify this appalling cruelty by claiming the deer would never have survived the winter. What? Why? becuase it coudlntl hunt game? Deer dontl hunt, moron! They eat bark and whatever else they can find. A slight lameness isn't a problem. And who are they to judge that? Maybe it was a weredeer! LOL! The fuckwit 'justifcation' was laughable, and that's when I quit reading this rancid pile of entrails because it was so badly-written.

This story failed in many ways, but primarily because it's eactly like all other such stories. There's nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing even remotely different to every other werewolf story ever told. So why read it?! In other genres, we have vampires that behave exactly like humans, or in another, we have ghosts that behave just like regular people. I even read a plot for one ghost story that was a murder mystery where someone was going around killing ghosts. I'm like, wait a minute, aren't ghosts already dead? What's that all about? LOL!

It's a bit ridiculous. As I said, there's nothing alien or supernatural about the people on this story, so why even make the characters werewolves at all? It wasn't worth any more of my time, especially since I was then able to quickly move on and find two books in succession that truly were worth reading. I would not have done this had I forced myself to continue reading something that was boring and cringe-worthy.

Small Town Superhero by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Thus was a non-starter for me. Well, not quite, since I did start it, but I also soon stopped it because I quickly became bored with the unoriginal story-telling, the abundant clichés, and the lack of intelligence in the telling.

Kelson is a high school senior who, for reasons unspecified in the portion I read, has to go live with relatives. He's a city boy who is on a farm, and the complete lack of originality was laughable. This was far more of a red-herring-out of water story than ever it was a fish-out-of-water in the claim that this city boy can't handle country life, and he quite literally spills the milk. Seriously?

This doesn't make me laugh. Instead it makes me cringe, because it tells me that purported hero Kelson is a complete moron who has no clue about anything. Any kid with even modest intelligence can handle a switch from city to country or vice-versa, especially in this day and age when no one's lifestyle is much of a mystery anymore. Yeah, there will be a learning curve and mistakes, but for the author to try and push the unimaginative and lackluster narrative that Kelson is utterly clueless and totally unprepared is farcical and amateur and makes him look like a complete moron.

That was bad enough, but to deal with that after an appalling and brutal bullying incident in school, in full view of everyone, and where no one reacted or helped, not even the teacher who witnessed it, is beyond ridiculous. No kid reacted? No teacher? No parent? When a gang of bullies picks on the new boy? Horse shit. I guess this author really hates teachers to portray them such a cynical and callous way.

Any writer who writes like this should be ashamed of their cluelessness and stupidity. This is not to say that there is no bullying in schools. Of course there is, but for it to be so brazen, violent, and unopposed is nonsensical, and it turned me off the story even before the fish-out-of-water garbage, which turned out to be the final straw that broke this book's back. I lost all interest in pursuing this story - or anything else by this author.

This is also in first person which is another problem. Some authors know how to do this, but I got the impression that this author was doing it simply because everyone else is - or so she thinks. It felt so inauthentic and ridiculous that Kelson steadily narrates his own experience of being beaten up, and for him to let it happen when he could apparently and readily defend himself, just because his cousin shakes her head? WTF?! No. No. No! Who calmly narrates being punched? No one! Get a clue authors!

The first person brought another problem, too. If the novel is in third person and the narrative objectifies a female, that's a problem. If this objectification is put into the mouth of a character, it’s not so much a problem because there are people who think like that, but when your main character, the one you're trying to turn into a hero, has these thoughts: "She wasn’t pretty, per se, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her clothes a mismatch of obvious hand-me-downs, but there was something intriguing about her." That makes me wonder about Kelson's character. At least this author didn't write it as 'per say' which I have read before in a published novel!

A better way to have written this - had it to be written at all - would have been for someone else to have made the comment that she wasn't pretty and for Kelson to have overheard it and then to have those thoughts that she had something intriguing about her. To write it the way it was written makes him sound judgmental. Or maybe just mental. Judgmental isn’t likeable. It makes him a jerk. Just a free bit of advice on character creation

But this book was a fail and I condemn it, not commend it.