Lightwave Clocker by AM Scott

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
“None of his questions did anything bur raise more questions” - 'but raise'

This is one of those dumb-ass sci-fi slash fantasy novels where every other character has an apostrophe in their name. Well it's not quite that bad, but near enough! That was the first problem with it. The second was that it moved too slowly, and the third that Saree, the main character, immediately fell for the ship's captain (cliché much?) who was the usual trope chiseled bad boy. Barf.

That was enough to turn me off this. I sure as hell have no intention of reading a series where the main character weakly fan-girls the chiseled dude ad nauseam. It's such an overdone trope I'm surprised his name wasn't Jack. Jack Hoff. That and the annoying computer "Hal" who insisted on using Saree's name every. Single. Time. It. Spoke. To. Her. That's how annoying it was. In a way I could understand her using its name so the computer knew she was addressing it rather than simply talking to herself, but it really didn't need to use hers when responding. Yawn.

Saree is a clocker. Somehow - it's not made clear how, at least not in the portion I read - she has an ability that a secretive alien race has to keep exact time. This race is responsible for maintaining the 'fold clocks' which allow everyone to sync to the same time when 'folding' or warp traveling. Why that's important isn't made clear, or if it is, I missed it. She maintains some of the clocks on behalf of this race with which she grew up (again no idea how or why). This makes her somehow a savior to trillions, but also a target for kidnappers, although why anyone woudl want to disrupt what she does is again unclear.

So not too-well thought out and far too vague for me. The most interesting character was Loreli, but she gets only a walk on part here and there. Given how vague and slow-moving this story was, and how pathetic the main character was, I can't commend this, I guess it was slow because it's a series and the author and publisher want to drag it out so they can keep suckers hooked for as long as possible, but it doesn't work on me and is one of the several reasons why I'm not much of a fan of series.

Arsenal by Jeffery H Haskell

Rating: WARTY!

Amelia Lockheart (Earhart much?) is the Arsenal of the title, but the shorter version, Arse would have worked perfectly. The book is first person present tense which is awful. Even after I gave it a chance and let it play on it failed for me because it wasn't believable It was an audio book and the reader's voice (Emily Beresford) seemed completely wrong for the character and way immature for her age, which is 20 or so.

Amelia has only two claims to fame: she's supposedly an inventor genius, and her legs are paralyzed. She's also supposed to be on a quest to find out what happened to her parents, although she never actually pursues this despite her supposed genius. The thing is that she's a direct rip-off of Ironheart of the Marvel superhero universe with a solid dash of Iron Man. Wears a super-duper alloy mechanical suit that's highly weaponized? Check. She can modify the suit to do anything? Check! Parents not on the scene after car accident? Check (except in Ironheart, only daddy is out of the picture). She carries a nuke into the upper atmosphere to save an American city? Check. Yawn. Move along. There's nothing new to see here.

There is of course a plot against her by super-mega-hyper-corp which is what the author no doubt believes will carry this turkey through several volumes. Count me out. The problems are multiple. First person voice is too ridiculous to read unless it's done really well, and for an action story like this, the idea that the main character is narrating this through all kinds of deathly situations made it feel completely inauthentic to me. It made even less sense to start the story in the middle of a battle without any sort of a lead-in whatsoever. Were it not in first person that might have worked, but you can't have both and have me as an avid reader.

So I was turned off right from the start, but stayed with it for a while and started getting into it a bit, but the main character really wasn't interesting and was a consistent disappointment. The one thing I detested about Tony Stark was how selfish he was. Even on his best day he failed to be all he could be. I mean you heard talk about the 'Stark Foundation' or whatever it was called, but whatever it did, and however much he may have donated to it, still Tony Stark led a selfish, self-indulgent multi-billionnaire life, buying whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and squandering so much money.

That's not a quality I can admire in anyone. He had all this technology but never shared any of it. He never used his genius and technology, for example, to help people who had handicaps. Amelia has the same problem and it;s worse with her because she has one herself and knows directly what it;s like. In the story, she's often told that she could sell her technology and become rich, but with twenty million in the bank she ain't hurting. The thing is that she could have donated at ;east some of her technology to enable others to have the same mobility she enjoyed - and not to fly around bombing and sonic lancing villains, but just to be able to move and walk, and yet it never crosses her mind. How selfish is that? A real hero would have helped.

Worse, we really got nothing about the handicap she had to deal with - it was like it didn't exist except to get a mention in passing, because the suit nullified it and she was so rarely out of the suit. The worst part of this though was when she started swooning over another superhero type named Luke. He was your trope chiselled muscular type which really turned me off because it's such a cliché. Why not go the whole hog and name him Jack?!

There was a female character who got a lot of description about her looks - because as you know looks are the only important thing in the world. The way Amelia kept describing her made it sound like there was going to be a lesbian relationship in the offing and that would have been more palatable than Mr Steely Jaws, but Amelia doesn't lean that way or even question her obsession with Domino's looks, which begs the question as to why she's crushing so badly on this other character. Maybe because the author's male? It woudl be really interesting to see what a female author would have done with this story.

The worst part though was when Luke encounters Amelia out of her chair and immediately assumes she's had an accident and is helpless, which rightly pisses Amelia off, but just a few paragraphs beyond that, Luke has to carry her somewhere and she's all swooning and wilting over how strong he is. I about barfed right there and then and quit listening because it was so pathetic and hypocritical and a complete about-turn from where we;d been just a few words before. Yuk. Way to diminish your main character. I'm done with this story and this author and I will not commend it. This is about as warty as they get.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Rating: WARTY!

My evidently ill-fated quest to read some of the classics continues! For the life of me I cannot see how this won a Pulitzer Prize. Set in the late nineteenth century, the novel was published in 1920, and was about an era during which the author grew up, so at least it has an authenticity which modern historical novels of this era cannot pretend to. That said, the main characters were two of the most stupid people I've read about, so for me, while the novel wasn't exactly awful, it ended-up being thoroughly unsatisfying.

The idiots are Newland Archer and Countess Elena Olenska, who used to be one of the locals - a Mingott, who married a Polish count and then realized it was a mistake. Evidently having learned nothing from that, she screws up any hope of a love with Newland because she's an idiot, I guess, aka a hopeless romantic. Had the novel been about her and she not rendered quite so idiotically, the story might have been worth reading.

Newland, meanwhile is a lawyer, so it's rather nice to see him get done over! He's engaged to May Welland, and it seems to be a perfect match, but obviously it isn't that way from his perspective because he wants out of it! Failing to find the courage to withdraw, he spends his life in smoldering resentment it when he could so easily have called it off. May even accepted the possibility that he might and encouraged him to do so if he could not bear to marry her, but he refused. Moron. The manipulative May then decides she will spend the rest of the novel denying him any opportunity to renege on his choice and she succeeds admirably, so despite how little she appears in the novel she's also an interesting character.

Character names are important to me and I choose the names of my own main characters with some thought. I have no idea how Wharton chose her character names, but 'new land' for a guy who is too chicken-shit or stupid to explore the terra nova of an unconventional woman is a joke, although it does pair with May's name, 'well land' quite comfortably, I suppose. May Safeland would have been a better name! Archer is certainly a major fail for someone who is so comprehensively unable to make himself the target of Cupid's aim. I don't know what Olenski means in Polish, but in Bulgarian it means reindeer! Maybe instead of 'Age of Innocence' the novel ought to have been titled "Reindeer Games?!

So Newland leads his boring life, has children with May and gets old, until May dies. Instead of pursuing the countess at that point, when he was free to do so, he deliberately walks away from her without even offering her a choice in the matter, thereby proving his love was hollow, or he's a complete imbecile. Either one made this book a severe disappointment. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read, but I would consider reading other material by this author.

Dream of Me by Quinn Loftis

Rating: WARTY!

There were serious problems with this book. Naturally it's YA, and so naturally it has problems - like this is a: hot young special snowflake of a girl whose parents are not in the picture, but a much older less than savory guy is in the picture kind of a YA story.

Most YA books have problems - though thankfully not all. The biggest problem with this one was the antique Sandman, called Brudair in this novel, or Dair for short, and the eighteen-year-old he stalks, who is named Serenity. And yes, the author can joke about it and call it what she likes, but he is a stalker who spies on her in her bedroom, lusts after her, goes into shallow raptures over her beauty, talks to himself about 'making her his', and he is literally centuries old. It makes zero sense that he would be attracted to a teenager for anything other than pure carnal lust, because he really doesn't know her at all. It makes as much sense as a forty-year-old guy falling for a toddler.

His job is supposed to be bringing life-changing and guiding dreams to people on behalf of 'the creator' so yes, this is religious fiction, but it makes little sense the way it's told. It's like Serenity has no choice in how she lives her life. She wants to get out of this Podunk town and live a real life somewhere else, "But destiny has other plans, and it's the Sandman's job to make sure those plans are fulfilled."

In other words, she's screwed. She has no free will. She's being controlled by a much older guy - the "tall muscular Sandman." - like he isn't already threatening enough, dressed in black as he is and "wrapped in shadows." The unanswered question is, if the Sandman was "never meant to have a mate" how come he has such lusts? And for someone so young? How come he didn't plant these ambitions in Serenity when she was much younger? Because then it would be an even sicker story than it already is

The writing is a bit limp, not awfully bad, but hardly great. I read at one point, "Serenity had not come to the decision to leave easily," which really ought to be "Serenity had not come easily to the decision to leave," but things like this are quibbles that are easily ignored if the story is worth reading. This one isn't and I ditched it at maybe 10% in, and moved on to something much more worthy of my time. I can't commend this kind of writing as a worthy read.

The Graduate by Charles Webb

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook of the novella that gave rise to the 1967 movie of the same name starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. The novella was published in 1963, and it's very much of its time. The USA was still pretty much stuck in the fifties in the early sixties, but even so, there were problems with the writing, for me, and I would have ditched this with a hour still left to listen to if it had not been for the fact that, having seen the movie, I was curious as to how the book ended and what differences there were, so despite knowing I was going to rate this as warty, I listened to the whole thing. The movie followed the book pretty darned closely from start to finish.

The thing is that this could have been a romance or a romantic comedy, but there's too much evil behavior in it to be either. I have a feeling it might well have been rejected by publishers if it had been submitted today. It didn't even do well back when it was originally published, and it only took off at all after the movie came out.

This is the only book I've read by author Charles Webb, and I'm far from convinced he can write female characters. Elaine is so passive and compliant, and doesn't behave like she has any self-respect, so for me she was written poorly and her whole interaction with Ben was so unrealistic. But I'm getting ahead. The story is of Ben who is a college grad fresh home from school, and he's one of the most morose, petulant, moody and angry characters I've read about.

He was really annoying in his childishness and his control-freak behavior. He was letting opportunities to get on with his life slip by - for example in not taking-up this grant he was awarded for grad school. Neither is he looking for a job. At the same time he seeks to control everything around him despite what others, particularly Elaine, might want. he proves time and time again that he really doesn't care what Elaine wants as long as he gets what he wants.

Ben's parents alternately hound him cruelly and spoil him rotten, so I guess it's hardly surprising that he's turned out the way he has. At one point early in the story, Mrs Robinson, the wife of his dad's law partner, corners Ben in an upstairs bedroom and makes it plain that she's available to him sexually if and whenever he wants her. Ben rejects this at first, but soon starts an affair with her. They meet at night in the swanky Taft Hotel and spend the night together, and they do this often. Mrs R leaves early in the morning to go home to make her husband breakfast! How she gets away with this is a mystery until she explains this to Ben when he prods her about having a conversation instead of just sex.

She tells Ben that she and her husband not only do not share the same bed, they don't even share the same bedroom, and he only pays her any physical attention when he gets drunk. So the affair continues until Mrs R's daughter Elaine comes home for Thanksgiving, and Mr R and Ben's parents insist he take her out to dinner. He doesn't want to and Mrs Robinson forbids it on pain of revealing their affair to everyone, so Ben doesn't want to take her on a date, but does so under this pressure, ignoring Mrs R's ultimatum. He doesn't believe she'll carry out her threat, but clearly he doesn't know Mrs Robinson at all.

I'm actually with Mrs Robinson on this because Ben has hardly shown his character to be stellar. He's having some sort of existential crisis and he's moody and isn't remotely interested in going back to school or finding a job. He always seems to have money though, but where he gets that, I don't know. The issue isn't addressed in the story or the movie for that matter, so I can only assume his parents give it to him, but why they would do that is a mystery given how he treats them.

They whine about his going out so much, and so late at night with no explanation, but if it bothers them that much, then why facilitate it by paying for it? They gave him an Italian sports car as a graduation present, so he's spoiled rotten. Maybe they just can't say 'no'. I can't blame Elaine's mom for not wanting someone like Ben associating with her daughter, though. And why would Ben? He had no interest in Elaine before, so why now? It made zero sense that he'd suddenly obsess on her except that maybe he just wants the thing that people are trying hardest to deny him?

There is a mildly interesting idea I read online that Mrs R didn't want Ben and Elaine to get involved because they both have the same father, which indicates that Elaine's father seduced Ben's mother, but there's nothing in the book to suggest that and it would mean - in an indirect way of course - that she's having sex with her own son. She doesn't seem like the kind of person who would do something like that. She's not shown as being particularly motherly either, so maybe she was just a predator, jealously guarding her prey, Ben, from becoming someone else's catch, but since we never see Ben aiming to date a different girl and get Mrs R's reaction to that, it's hard to be sure what her motivation was. Maybe she was just horny and Ben seemed like an easy mark to her.

She apparently cares little for him; it's just about sex for her, so I don't imagine she much cares about someone stealing her prey, just about him not being fit to marry Elaine. I think if that were the case, she would have simply said that's why she objected to it, but she really doesn't want her daughter traveling the same crappy road though life that she had to follow and she can see that coming a mile away with Ben at the wheel. She sees too much of herself in Ben: someone who is going nowhere, who has a drinking problem, and who could well end-up being at best a neglectful and at worse an abusive husband later in life.

Interestingly, she's never given a first name in the movie: she's always referred to - and addressed even by Ben - as Mrs Robinson, like she's someone else's property rather than her own person. We learn that her initials are G. L. but we never find out what those letters stand for. This may be a conscious choice by the author, but even when Ben wants to have that conversation with her in the Taft, rather than just get down to the sex like they typically do, he never asks her what her first name is.

From this, it would seem that he has no real interest in her either, despite his claimed desire for a conversation. For me Mrs Robinson is without question the most interesting and strongest person in the movie. Ben is a spineless ne'er-do-well and it's hard to imagine that someone like Elaine would be attracted to him, especially after the shabby way he treats her, followed by her learning of his affair with her mom. Their relationship makes no sense except in that they're both as bad as one another in their own bumbling and insecure way.

On the date with Elaine, he tries to ruin things by treating her badly and taking her to seedy clubs, one of which features an exotic dancer. She eventually demands he take her home, but he refuses, and instead pressures her into changing her mind, offering a meek apology, and she goes right along with it. He mentions having an affair and is worried she'd think badly of him for that, but he barely addresses the elephant in the room: of how he treated her thus far that evening!

Despite all of this she lets him dominate her and she agrees to go out for a drive with him the next day. When he comes to pick her up, Mrs R confronts him and Elaine figures out that the affair he had was with her mother. She orders Ben to leave, and refuses to speak to him. So now we're expected to believe that he's in love with Elaine and in the big finale, she's somehow persuaded to return his feelings despite neither of them really knowing each other; despite their having had no contact since high school; despite his controlling behavior, and despite his neurotic demeanor and his poor treatment of her. It doesn't work.

Initially, I found this audio-book amusing, if a bit irritating here and there, but I became rather less enamored of it as I listened to more of it, and especially after that 'date'. Webb also has a truly annoying writing habit, at least in this novella. Apparently all of the main characters are hard of hearing because the sheer number of times the word 'what' is used interrogatively in conversations is phenomenally annoying. It's like every other thing any character says, the person they're talking to says, "What?" like they haven't heard, or they can't believe it, or they don't understand what was said even though it's perfectly plain, and the other character constantly has to repeat what they just said. It's really pervasive and really distracting. And thoroughly irritating.

I found myself coming into agreement with an email friend of mine whose early assessment, based on what I'd told her about Ben and Elaine, was that they deserved each other - and not in a good way. After being in another funk for several weeks post-rejection, Ben abruptly declares to his parents that he's going to marry Elaine, despite him never addressing this topic with her and despite his having been angrily barred from her life a few weeks before - and despite the fact that he barely knows her these days!

So he drives up to Berkley where she's doing her senior year and starts stalking her. He sells his car so he'll have some money to live on and starts hanging around the campus looking for her. He planned on going to her dorm, meeting her and inviting her out to dinner, but he chickened out of that. He tried composing a couple of letters, but got drunk, the letters becoming more and more incoherent as he did, and he fell asleep. Eventually he runs into her in the street and she rejects him again, but he won't take no for an answer.

Later she shows up at his rooming house and he tries talking to her, but she won't talk to him because Mrs R has told Elaine that Benjamin got her drunk and raped her. Elaine won't listen to his denials, and he's such a poor communicator that he fails dismally in explaining his side of the story - and this is the guy who was, we're told, head of the debating club in college! It just doesn't work! Elaine tells him to leave Berkley and leave her alone, but later, she shows up in his room late at night. How she even got in there without a key is a mystery. I guess no one locks any doors in Berkley. Suddenly, she's interested in listening to him. He asks her to marry him and she says she might. She is so easily influenced that she really has no personality of her own, simply going with the flow of whoever is dominating her at the time - her boyfriend Carl, her father, or Ben. Always men, and they dictate her life right to the end of the story.

None of this story makes sense, and it doesn't really offer a fulfilling tale, So, overall, I can't commend it. It has its moments, but in general it's poorly and inauthentically written and it really doesn't give us a realistic story. On reflection, I think the story would have been considerably better had it been about Mrs Robinson instead of Ben, but not if Webb wrote it! I can see no future for Ben and Elaine except one of misery as he controls her life, abuses her, maybe even beats her when he's drunk, and she eventually commits suicide. There's no romance here at all.

Dawn of Dreams by Bronwyn Leroux

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
the "-
friends" - this was how a line was split - right at the hyphen. I don't know what was doing this but it looked weird!
"Legends take place in a particular time period, and their basis comes from that actually happened" - 'from what actually happened'? or maybe 'from that which actually happened'?
"Jaden squared his shoulders when it the beast overlooked Kayla and targeted him." It the beast?!

This is the first of a series and I'm not much for series, but once in a while one comes along that looks a bit off the beaten path and I try it out to see if maybe this will be one of those rare series openers that draws me in. They are too few and far between though, so I usually don't hold out much hope. This was one of the fails. I made it almost exactly half way through and gave up on it because of the rampant sexism. It read like it was written by a man - or a romance novel writer.

Set in 2073, the story is of Jaden and Kayla, both of whom independently discover that they can see things others can't: or more accurately, one particular thing - a reptilian-looking bird with a scorpion tail which seems to be stalking them. They each of them have a medallion - identical medallions - which have each been passed down through their family. They feel drawn to it and meeting by accident, they become quickly attached to each other because of their shared experiences. Once they have the medallion on their person, the bird seems much more aggressive, yet neither of them thinks to leave the medallion behind when they go out! Not very smart!

For two people who see something no one else can, neither of them seems much interested in pondering it. They're much more interested in how attractive the other is, and this is where the book lost all authenticity for me. I don't mind a romance in books, but it has to feel real and smart in context.

The story grew worse when Jaden started this protective bullshit - like Kayla was somehow inferior to him and must be protected, and she meekly accepted his judgement. This first became apparent when I read, "She had Kayla on edge. So much so Kayla wanted to grab Jaden's hand and hold on for dear life." Seriously? I mean this wasn't even a threatening situation - the women who had Kayla 'on edge' was a librarian. This tells me that Kayla is weak and stupid, and I have no interest in reading any books about weak, stupid women - and sure as hell not a series about one!

There were issues with the quality of the novel in terms of writing gaffs, as shown in the errata, as well as dumb things like, when Kayla first finds the medallion, she thinks it was "Not a currency coin. Or rather, its octagonal shape wouldn't make that very practical." Kayla seems to have no idea that coins come in literally all shapes and sizes. The Brits have a heptagonal one, and they used to have a 12-sided one! Other countries have weird-looking coins too.

Later I read, "Kayla grinned. Only another girl would understand the need to explore new surroundings" Sexist much?! Guys don't explore? This was sheer sexist bullshit! By this point, the novel had really begun to fall apart for me and after Jaden's St-George-Rescuing-the-maiden stunt, I was so nauseated with it that I couldn't continue.

I can't commend this novel at all. It moved too slowly - a real problem with series - and seemed more interested in these two characters' fascination with each other than in dealing with a real and present other-worldly danger. It was unrealistic and it made no sense. People don't behave like that and this lack of realism overwhelmed what might otherwise have been an interesting and entertaining story.

Bringing Stella Home by Joe Vasicek

Rating: WARTY!

This is a sci-fi story that started out boringly and never improved. It seemed to me to be more of a sort of weird authorial wish-fulfillment kind of a thing than ever it did a real story. It moved slowly, which is hardly surprising since it's book one of a series.

I've been actively removing all series books from my reading lists of late because I've been so universally disappointed in them. Series are not my thing for a variety of reasons, not least of which is this lethargy in pace, and also because the first book can only ever be a prologue - which holds no interest for me - and because all the other volumes are, are essentially a re-run of the first volume. It's lazy writing. Instead of coming up with something new, original, and entertaining, the author merely retreads the last volume and feeds it to the reader one more time. No thanks.

The plot here, is of the George-slaying-the-dragon kind of thing where mid-teens hero James goes on a jag to save his helpless older sister Stella, who is kidnapped by this ridiculously barbaric rag-tag conglomerate of pirate military outfits who have apparently been ignored by the authorities for long enough that they're all banded together into one big and devastating force, which no one seems to be able to stop. Except James. His plan is to hire a para-military outfit commanded by a woman, and have them rescue Stella for him. I felt like I could see where this story would go over time: James and the captain getting it on.

Meanwhile Stella is a sex slave on this other ship where the heartless leader of the rag-tag rebels is a cruel and despotic dictator and who, as soon as he finds out that seventeen-year-old Stella is a virgin, changes his entire attitude toward her and elevates her to the role of goddess or something. That was where I quit reading because the whole story at this point had turned me off. I could see where this story was going too: Beauty and the Beast anyone? It was tedious and unimaginative, unrealistic and stupid, and it was bouncing like a pinball between three perspectives, yet despite this, it seemed to be stuck in mud. I can't commend it based on what I read of it, which occupied more of my time than I ought to have expended on it. I'm done with this book and this author.

Englishman in Blackpool by Jenny O'Brien

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"You're name" should have read 'your name'
"...still had the evening to look forward." Should have had a preposition ('to') on the end.

This is a very short story that overall I did not really enjoy. Hopper (that's what he goes by) is a butler to the Earl of Cosgrave, who has taken some time off to help an old friend with a ballroom dancing class, after which he intends to go fishing. Beverley is one of the women in the class, and she has a stereotypical obnoxious partner who quits, of course leaving her partner-less and so Hopper steps in and they're magical together. The problem with this story is that it was so predictable and so unimaginative, with everything falling so easily into place, no hiccups, and St George saving his maiden. It was pretty pathetic and I can't commend it at all. Even the title made little sense but was chosen not to describe the book but to categorize it as part of a series of such books all with boringly similar titles. Barf.

Whisper Falls by Elizabeth Langston

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is the first in the inevitable trilogy and that was the first strike against it. The second strike was the almost inevitable worst person voice - times two. Barf. I should have quit right then, but even so I tried to read it (this was before I developed my allergy to first person novels), but it was written rather amateurishly and entirely unrealistically, and worst of all, it dragged.

The plot is that Mark, while out riding his mountain bike, encounters a girl who appears to be out of time - because she is. Susanna is an indentured servant from 1796, yet never once does she think mark is a demon or a witch or something along those lines. It makes no sense that a person from that era would not at least have thoughts like that cross her mind.

So eventually it becomes the masculine rescue of the helpless maiden, and I wasn't about to read this kind of a story that far. I sure as hell wasn't going to read a frigging trilogy of this stuff. I'd had enough and I gave up on it about a fifth of the way in. I can't commend this based on the sorry portion that I endured.

Death in the English Countryside by Sara Rosett

Rating: WARTY!

This is your standard English country murder story and it baldly states it right there in the title. I'm not a fan of this kind of story, especially not when it's in first person. I read this one only to try and see what was going on in a 'cozy mystery' story just out of sheer curiosity, and I had some issues with it pretty much from the start.

The author seems unable to write anything other than a series and I am no fan of series. At some point, you have to wonder why it is that so many murders occur around the "sleuth" who investigates them! Is she really the guilty party?!. This novel didn't have the word 'sleuth' in the book description, otherwise I would have dismissed it out of hand. I guess now I also have to dismiss it when it has the word 'cozy' in it or when the author is this one.

Talking of whom, she has four of these series out there because one is never far more than enough, and I'll bet every one is really the same and has a weak woman protagonist (and is probably in first person voice). But look on the bright side: if someone who writes so poorly and predictably can get onto a best seller list, then there's hope for all of us! For some three hundred bucks, you can take her "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" course wherein, as judged by this outing, you can learn how to create a limp and clueless female leads who need manly validation by a studly English country guy, and who likes to meddle where she should leave things to the police. You can learn the same thing for free by reading well-plotted and well-written murder mysteries.

Her relationship with Alex (said manly man) in this story was cringe-worthy. She's supposedly a mature business woman yet she behaves like she's thirteen and just as clueless as your average thirteen-year-old, unable to process any of the sensations she gets around Alex. It was amateur, pathetic, and nauseating to read. Oh, and Alex has a bicep. Not biceps, but a bicep. I'm not kidding! You can feel it if you want; one of the female characters did. I guess he had an accident or something and lost the other bicep in that arm.

So this woman - with the highly inappropriate name of Kate Sharp (she's not remotely sharp) - works for a company that scouts locations for movies. Why a US company is being asked to scout English locations is one of the few the real mysteries in this novel. I guess the author, being American herself, has to have that American connection because god forbid a novel should be set elsewhere, or if it is, it should have no Americans in it! Maybe she shares the trump philosophy wherein only US citizens are worth anything and they sure as hell can show those bumbling British cops a few things.

Kate's boss, Kevin originally does the scouting, which constitutes another mystery since the movie he's seeking locations for is yet another remake of a Jane Austen novel (because we sure as hell don't have too many of those now), and Kate is the resident Austen buff, yet Kevin is the one who goes. Anyway, he disappears without word or trace, and Kate is dispatched to find him. He has a history of alcohol abuse so the suspicion is that he's on a bender. Kate is unable to find him until he shows up dead in the river, along with his rental car.

There's no spoiler there - it's a murder mystery after all! It is amusing how the author makes much of how rainy and cold it is in the UK, when it actually really isn't. Of course that's dependent upon when you travel there, but it has cold spells; it has warm spells. It has rainy spells; it has dry spells. It's not foggy all the time either! Has the ever been there?

I have to wonder at the value of the course the author offers. It's not a writing course; it's a plotting course, but when the author doesn't know it's 'downright' and not 'down right' and employs redundant phrases like "see if he'd reply back" one has to wonder. These were not the only issues in this style of writing. I read, "I couldn't remember the last time a man had held open a door for me." What does Kate want? To be a wilting violet? Does she want equality or pampering? We no longer live in an era where men are required to open doors for woman; even Prince William's wife doesn't expect that! Maybe instead of Kate Sharp she should be Kate Uppity?

As to her smarts, I read this: "My fingers itched to get my camera and record the quiet beauty of it, but I'd left it in my room at the inn. Apparently Ms Sharp has never heard of a cell phone camera.... Equally pertinent is this one:

“Hmm, I should have emphasized that,” Alex murmured. “Where is that business card?”
“I left the one Quimby gave me in my room. Come on, I’ll get it for you.”

Kate has Quimby's number in her phone since she called him. She could have just got it from there, but of course she has to get Alex to her room so she can sit with their thighs touching on the bed. Pathetic.

A woman who truly worked in the scouting location business would live on her phone. It would be second-nature to go to it without a moment's thought, yet Kate is completely inept at using her phone. It's just not authentic. And this is written by someone who would charge you good money to teach you how to plot?! It's obvious from halfway through the novel who the guilty party is (chercher la femme pétulante) - and I'm typically not that good at spotting the perp. The red herring is obvious too, and not remotely convincing.

This book was sad and silly, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Odyssey by Homer

Rating: WARTY!

Another classic bites the dist. This is one of the most stupid, tedious, repetitive, and pointless stories I've ever listened to. I listened to the audiobook version since originally, this was meant to be listened to, not read, but the version I had is not in poetic meter. It's told as a prose story by a narrator who was tedious to listen to, which made things worse. Despite this prose approach, the story still retains the repetitiveness of the poetry, which does not a thing to improve the situation. I grew to honestly and truly detest the phrase 'child of morn, rosy-fingered Dawn' with a passion.

Odysseus is one of the most puffed-up, self-aggrandizing, boorish braggarts I've ever encountered in literature. His son is useless and his wife Penelope is a complete jackass. Odysseus is always the best, the most virile, the strongest, the most upright, the toughest, the most skilled, etc., etc. He never loses, except in his ridiculously haphazard return from Troy after the ten year war.

It takes him another ten years to get home and all this time we're supposed to believe his wife is faithful. Odysseus is nearly always plied with riches by his hosts no matter whose island he fetches up on after another disastrous voyage in which he loses the previous treasure he was given. His various crews are always weeping, or lily-livered, or dishonest, or incompetent, or untrustworthy, while he himself is a paragon.

The thing is that it's really not that far from Troy to Ithaca! This admittedly assumes that the present day Ithaca is remotely close to where the ancient one was, but even if it wasn't, we know it was in Greece, where nowhere is very far from anywhere else. The point is that it's possible to travel the entire distance by land pretty much. He could have almost literally walked the entire distance in a couple of years, so why he repeatedly embarks on voyages given that he knows Poseidon, the fricking god of the ocean, is out to get him, is as much of a mystery as it is a testimony to one thing and one thing only: how profoundly dumb Odysseus truly is. He's a callous jerk, too! Despite his losing crew after crew, Odysseus never mourns a single one of those he traveled with or left behind.

Meanwhile back at home, we have the comedy duo of Telemachus, Odysseus's 20-year-old son, and Odysseus's wife, Penelope. His son is purportedly the head of the household, yet he has not an iota of wherewithal to throw out these suitors to his mom who number about a hundred or so. I know there was a tradition of hospitality in that era, but they're the worst guests imaginable, eating him out of house and home and he can't dispatch even one of them? How Odysseus was even supposed to have anything left of his holdings after ten years of this is a joke. Penelope, were she not such a limp rag and a waste of skin, could simply have told any number of these suitors she wasn't interested, but she keeps them hanging on: all five score of them, while making cheap excuses as to why she can't make up her mind. She's an asshole, period.

The suitors are utter morons. They're dumb-asses for hanging around for ten years when they're clearly getting clearly nowhere with Penelope. They're imbeciles in that they cannot see through her ridiculous ruse of un-weaving Laertes's burial shroud each night so she can re-weave it the next day. Despite all this, Telemachus can't seem to handle them and it takes Odysseus's heroic return of course, before they're summarily dispatched. Here's the last ridiculous thing: he arrives in disguise instead of striding proudly up to his home. Why? No good reason at all. Yet we're supposed to believe he has littered his way home with rejected lovers because he loved his wife so much? Bullshit.

This story is awful and not worth the time to read or listen to it.

Find Me at Willoughby Close by Kate Hewitt

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"But even big kids don't need to rude words." - to use rude words
"friends with her just because some in girls think she's different" in-girls? It has a double meaning the other way!

This is the second - and the last! - novel by this author I will ever read. The previous one I read was reviewed in December of 2016, and titled 'A Yorkshire Christmas. I'd forgotten I'd read that because if I'd remembered, I probably wouldn't have read this one. This kind of story isn't my style, but I was curious about this genre - the wussy girl running away from a bad relationship back to her home town (or someplace different anyway) and finding the love of her life. There is a tedious number of 'weak woman' books like this, and it fascinates me as to why - and who reads these.

What this novel had going for it - or what I thought it had, was that it was a bit different. This is an older woman, Harriet, with three kids, whose husband lost his high-flying financial job and failed to tell his wife for six months. Was it purely accidental that his name was Dick?!

Harriet the spy discovers he's talking on the phone at all hours of the night with his secretary - the youthful and sexy Meghan. So a Meghan beats a Harriet, evidently! There is no excuse for his behavior and now he and his wife are in such dire financial straits that Harriet has to give up their luxury home and designer furniture and sell it all off to go live in a rental cottage some ways away. Her husband lives separately in a small apartment in London, still looking for work.

How they get by financially is a mystery because despite not even looking for a job for the longest time, Harriet still seems to be able to keep her head above water and buy whatever she needs whenever she needs it, even as she whines endlessly about her impoverished circumstances. The whining got old real fast.

Her husband is in the same position: both are supposedly looking for work, yet neither of them seems to get that they can - at least for the short term - take any job they can get just to have some income. To me they both came off as privileged and spoiled, and stupid. It was also hard to stomach the incongruity of Harriet prattling on about organic this and that while driving gas guzzling Land Rover Discovery which gets an environmentally tragic 20 mpg.

It didn't help that she said clichéd things like "Does this dress make me look fat?" at times. The message coming through loud and clear is that the only thing she thinks of is herself - eleven years of being spoiled rotten and having every single thing she ever wanted will do that to a woman, I guess. It did not make me like her at all. It helped no more that the writing was a bit lax here and there so I'd read things like: "Harriet blinked hard, but it was too late. Two slipped down and with a muttered curse she grabbed a napkin and started dabbing." The idea was that two tears slipped down, but he author had written it so poorly that the 'two slipped down' had no real connection to tears. It was just weird to read.

An amusing instance of this laxity was when I read, "Harriet sank into the armchair by the gas fire that was still in the atrocious pattern Harriet remembered of large pink cabbage roses." This implies that the gas fire had a cabbage rose pattern! I'm guessing it was actually the armchair though. The author might have re-thought that sentence.

What did genuinely impress me was how fast it's possible to get a pizza in London! While Harriet visits her husband to pick the kids up, their father orders pizza via his phone, immediately goes to get it, and very quickly returns with it, all in the brief time that Harriet is having this quite short conversation with her kids. Well, we've all been there - trying to account realistically for time passing in our writing. I didn't want to mark her down for that. But many of us might want to find out which pizza place can prepare two pizzas that fast!

Where I did draw the line though was the tired, tedious, and way overdone YA trope of "the gold flecks in his hazel eyes." That about made me throw up. I've read it far too many times and it sucks. It needs to be banned from every author's description toolbox. It was shortly after that at around 65% that I gave up because the book just kept rambling on.

The next thing up was this designer dog - actually a pedigree dog, an order for which had been placed some months before. Dogs don't arrive as fast as pizzas, but finally it was ready. Harriet had to come up with five hundred pounds for it and barely blinked at that. Then she seemed utterly clueless that the dog would be peeing and pooping everywhere if it wasn't properly trained from the outset.

I felt bad for the dog having to live with this family as well as for the vet bills they'd have to pay for a purebred (read inbred) dog. Since a single vet (named Tom of all pathetic names for manly characters) had been introduced not long before in the story, it seemed quite obvious at this point where the story would be going: new puppy > requires shots etc > nice vet with gold flecks that Harriet knows > new romance. Boring much?

I can't say if that's where it went because I didn't read on and I honestly didn't care about any of these characters. I decided enough was enough. I'd put up with this kind of rambling delivery for far too long, wasting my time when I could have been reading something truly engrossing, so I quit reading and moved on. I can't commend this book at all. Or this author. If this is even remotely representative of this genre, then it speaks volumes about those sorry volumes.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I made very little progress into this book before I gave it up as a bad job. The main female character is Catherine Ling, ridiculously recruited by the CIA at the age of 14, we're told. And no, this is not a YA novel believe it or not.

The story itself begins years along from that time, and Ling has a son who is, for reasons I never learned, under the protection of a friend of hers, Hu Chang. Threatened with 'it's either you or him who takes this mission' Ling elects to neglect her child and go herself to try to rescue a journalist from Tibet. Why this wasn't dealt with through diplomatic channels isn't mentioned in the part of the novel I managed to stomach. Why the CIA has no other agents who can do this is equally an unaddressed mystery.

I dropped it the minute this supposedly strong woman has her job "complicated" by meeting Richard Cameron. I began skimming, and these two complete strangers have unprotected sex early in the story. She's so dumb, she hadn't known people could do "that" - evidently some magical fingering technique he has that this evidently dumb broad never encountered before. or maybe there's some authorial wish-fulfilment going on here.

Later, I read, "...she had been on the defensive since the moment she had seen him and felt that first explosive bolt of sexual attraction," I knew exactly what kind of unfulfilling trashy and female-demeaning story this would be, and I was glad I was out of there. I can't commend dumb-assery like this. I'm done with this author, too.

Our Lizzie by Anna Jacobs

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this in short order after I read how yet another female writer refers to her female characters. "...Lizzie was a child still, but when she grew up - ah, then he'd be waiting for her...He'd enjoy taming her, wooing her first and then mastering her, as all women loved to be mastered. Marrying her, perhaps." That was page six of this novel and it was where I and it parted. I don't care if this is supposed to be the male character's thoughts. That picture just turned my stomach and I had no desire to read any further.

<[>
I did skim through the book a little and at one point I read the unintentional humor in "I'm a rotten sewer" - where what the girl meant to convey was that she was poor at sewing. Later a character who wants to be her lover is named Peter. he;s described int eh book description as her new love - like the old one was actually a "love" as opposed to an abuser. It confirmed that I'd made the right decision to quit reading this when I did.

I can't commend this precisely because of that.

Without Hesitation by Talia Jager

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"Empress' face" - this needed an apostrophe S - 'Empress's face' since it's a possessive and empress is not a plural.
"but there were still quite a bit I didn't recognize" This needed to read either 'were still quite a few', or 'was still quite a bit'! It can't be both!

I liked this book to begin with, because it's not a bad story at all, and in some small ways it reminded me of my own Femarine. Set a millennium into the future, when Earth has been rendered uninhabitable (that part is getting here already), this sci-fi adventure tells the story of two women who encounter each other as antagonists out in the reaches of space where human colonies have been taking over habitable planets wherever they are found. Faster-than-light travel (although in reality precluded by the laws of physics!) is the means by which these far-flung societies maintain contact.

Everleigh is the captain of a mercenary outfit which has been tasked with capturing the Empress Akacia, who rules over one of the colonized planets. I'm not at all sure how she got to be an empress. She's not royalty. She rules over a relatively small and homogenous colony on one planet. It's hardly an empire! But there's no information on how this works exactly. Was she appointed? Was she elected? We don't know. It seemed a bit much to me, but I was willing to let that go for the sake of a good story.

After a failed kidnap attempt, Everleigh and Akacia were thrown together by accident, and I have to say I was surprised that Akacia trusted her so readily, but then there is that attraction between them. At times that was a bit much, like when the Empress describes her kidnapper (during the kidnap attempt!) like this: "She was beautiful" The kidnapper is likewise enthralled: "The Empress had a weapon I had never encountered before. She was beautiful." That also was a bit much. His is where the story really began to go downhill for me.

The book description assures us that "Labels and stereotypes are a thing of the past and gender and sexual identity are as fluid as love", but here we have two female characters in a book written by a female author reducing two women to the shallowness of skin depth. It was worse during a scene where one of them was injured and I read: "Did she have a head wound? Was she hurt? And how did she manage to make that look sexy? Oh, God. There I went again with the whole sexy thing." I said to myself, "Seriously?" when I read that! No labels, huh?! This really felt inappropriate to me.

I don't like that kind of writing because it isn't realistic. Maybe when she recalled the incident later she might have added that thought about how sexy she looked, but at the time, when someone is injured, you really don't think like that - not if it's someone you honestly care about. You think about what bad things could happen and what you can do to prevent those things. So to me it was not authentic. Any one or two small items, I would be willing to let go, but this book kept adding to the tally of things I wasn't willing to let go in the end.

What kept me reading for a while, was the story in general and the hope that it would flourish, but it kept failing me. In many ways it was very unsophisticated, even simplistic, like it was written for a younger audience. Part of its initial charm was the plan text, that told the story without trying to fly to any great literary heights, but after a while it seemed too simplistic. Normally I rail against first person voice, and twin first person is twice as irritating. I didn't like that approach, and it only got worse, particularly when the empress falls into the hands of those who would abduct her and she's tortured. This is written in first person voice and it seemed so completely unrealistic that I gave up on the story right there. No one realistically writes about their own torture in such a way. It felt fake and shallow, and constitutes only one of a score of reasons why first person should be avoided like the plague unless it's deemed truly and absolutely necessary to telling a story. The best plan is to not use it.

I'm not a fan of flashbacks either, which bring any story to a shuddering halt and typically make me lose interest. I read the story to find out what's happening now and every time the author defeats that desire by rambling on about some past that's typically irrelevant or contributes little, it just pisses me off, so this was another strike against it. In this case, the Empress starts her story three years earlier, when she was sixteen, but she's older when the main action takes place. I honestly could not see the point of doing that. Any such reminiscences could have been slipped lightly into the text as it flowed, without halting it.

While on the topic of the Empress's age, I have to wonder how she gauges it! We're told early in the story that her planet "had almost no axial tilt, giving it a mild, almost boring climate." No axial tilt means no real seasons. The winter/summer roundabout on Earth is caused because the globe is tipped on its axis by 23.5 degrees, making the northern hemisphere garner less sunlight for half the year, and more sunlight the other half, exactly alternating what the southern hemisphere gets. This is what delivers both hemispheres a winter and a summer every six months.

A planet with no axial tilt would be very much the same climate year round, so there would be no noticeable winter - or other seasons - at all. It would be a little bit like living on the equator for everyone, with the temperature varying only by latitude, not by season). Why then does the Empress open with this clause: "Three years ago, when I had passed my sixteenth winter..."? On a planet where winter isn't a thing, wouldn't there would really be another way of measuring age? Certainly a non-existent winter couldn't be used as any sort of measure of a year's passage! The author evidently didn't think the consequences of her (lack of) axial tilt through very much! Little things like that can matter in story-telling. For me this wasn't in itself a story-killer, but added to all the other issues it became one more thing that turned me off the story.

The same thing applies to the use of 'earthyears' as a measure of time. I don't see how that would work a thousand years from now when Earth is a distant memory for everyone. Who would care about Earth years, really? This tells me the author really didn't think this through properly. Some to the text was a bit weird to read too, such as, "From her long neck to her supple breasts" I'm by no means convinced that supple applies to a woman's breast! How exactly is a breast supple?! 'Supple' is an adjective meaning that something can bend and flex. It would seem right for an arm or a leg, or even a back, but a breast has no real muscle or bone in it. I wonder of the author maybe was looking for something like 'ample'? or maybe soft, or fulsome? I dunno. Supple just wasn't right.

I read a description of Akacia given by Everleigh, which read, "She smelled like honey and...milk" That seemed a bit off to me. Like Akacia was a baby! Another instance was when I read, "I seized her lips and deepened the kiss. When Akacia pulled away the tiniest of moans escaped my mouth. A smile played on her lips that I swear tasted like honey." I'm not sure how you would seize someone's lips when kissing! Carpe labia! But the idea of a smile tasting like honey is just off.

Like I said, I made it to the torture scene and that was just too much. I could make no more excuses to continue reading this and ditched it. I need something better than this - more depth, more realism, even if it's fiction. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Finding Tranquility by Laura Heffernan

Rating: WARTY!

This was an ebook about this married guy, Brett, who is terrified of flying, yet he's supposed to fly to LA on 9/11 to interview for a job so he and his wife Jess can move there, so she in turn can attend med school. He panics and gives his boarding pass to another person who boards the plane which ends up flying into the World Trade Center.

Realizing he's now considered dead, he revaluates his whole life and suddenly realizes he can face the truth about himself which is that he was not happy in his life, in his marriage, or in his body. He feels like his wife can do better, so he 'stays dead' and travels to Canada. How that's accomplished is a bit too convenient in that he finds a passport stuck in a pocket in an old backpack he gets when he sells his clothes and suitcase to get some cash. It's a woman's passport and the owner conveniently looks rather like him and is the same age. It's far too convenient in fact, but he dresses as a woman - something he's always secretly felt he was inside, and she starts a new life as Christa.

Over the next eighteen years, Christa completes her sex-change and then by accident runs into Brett's wife, who despite the physical changes, realizes that this woman is her supposedly-dead husband. Yeah, it was highly improbable at best, how this was set up - the passport and the accidental encounter with the ex, but to begin with, it wasn't as bad as it sounds so I stayed with it.

The thing about this gender change story is that Jess was pregnant on 9/11, but neither of them knew it when Brett disappeared, so now Christa has a son who's almost eighteen. They finally all meet up for Canadian Thanksgiving and everything seems to be going well, but you know there's going to be a fly in the ointment.

Jess rather impulsively consults an attorney - a guy she'd briefly dated, after she fled back from the hotel in Canada to the US after meeting her ex. She was confused, and angry and fearful, and she confided in the attorney about what had happened and asked about the legal implications from her being the recipient of a $250,000 insurance policy payout, plus getting some money from the 9/11 fund - money which all together, put her through med school. This attorney seemed to be highly-biased against transgender people and the meeting did not go well.

I had a brief feeling that this lawyer was dishonestly going to try to spoil this blossoming relationship by outing the husband, but that's not what the blurb says - it talks of complications after the real Christa resurfaces, and that's what happens. The real Christa turns up and starts trying to blackmail the fake Christa, so Jess invites her spouse to move back to Boston with her and her son.

They all seem to be getting along, so they sneak Christa back into the US and then Christa gets into a fight with a guy at the last football game of the season for her son, and gets arrested for no apparent reason. She gets fingerprinted and they discover she's really Brett who supposedly died twenty years ago. People who live next door and across the street sell their houses when word gets out that a resurrected guy, now a woman is living there with his wife. This went beyond improbable, yet there it was, on top of too many other improbable events. A little bit of improbable is fine, but when the whole books seems to be depending on it, it's too much for me!

On top of that, their son Ethan gets into a fight with some of the guys on his basketball team - and this is after he's specifically told Christa when they first met that there are several people at his school who have two moms or two dads. It felt like this writer was just making-up stuff as she went along, trying to lard the story up with drama without considering what she'd already written.

I know that real-life transgender people have problems and can be subject to bullying, and threats, and have even been murdered, but this story felt a bit like it was cheapening those real tragedies by tossing far too much conflict into the story and losing sight of what ought to have been a love story. Instead of that it became a soap opera, and that doesn't appeal to me.

So! There were a lot of really improbable and highly convenient happenstances and coincidences in this story that could probably have been circumvented with a little imagination, and because that wasn't done, and yet more were accumulating the further I read, I quit this story about three-quarters in. It was just too much. A far simpler story would have been better, but his writer obviously didn't know when to stop gilding her lily. I can't commend it as a worthy read.

The Dragon Choker by Stephanie Alexander

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Errata:
"...the more likely her husband would give up and returned to his own chamber." Returned need the -ed suffix removed.
"He must think thusly at times" - 'thusly' isn't really a word. The 'ly' needs to be omitted.
"...and since they both knew the way they let themselves in." - this needed a comma after 'way'.
"She lit on the muddy ground..." - unless she shone a flashlight on it or set fire to it, lit is the wrong word. It needed to be alit or alighted. Either is acceptable.

This is volume two of a series based on the Cinderella fairy-tale. There are several quite varying "Cinderella" stories though history, originating from as far and wide as Greece and China, but most people tend to think of Cinderella as the version written by Charles Perrault in 1697, titled Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre ("Cinderella or the little glass slipper"), which is where the Disney Fairytale Mining Corporation™ lifted the premise for the animated version it put out in 1950. That's the version that introduced the two evil stepsisters, the glass slipper, the pumpkin and all that, and upon which this novel is loosely-based.

I haven't read volume one of this series, and I'm far from convinced I'd like it if I did, so I wasn't about to try reading that before I started on this one. Since I'm not very much into series, whether I'd end up liking this one was the question. I started out quite happy that it wasn't written in first-person voice - which I despise, and which would have decidedly turned me off it, so I commend the author for that wise choice.

It was decently-written for the most part (subject to occasional grammatical and word-choice errors, some examples of which I'll list below. It did keep me engaged for a while, but as time passed I started losing faith in the author and consequently my interest in the story waned considerably. I also had problems with some of the plot choices and with the portrayal of Eleanor, which I think belied the book description - or more accurately the book description misrepresented the novel.

It was from that description though, that I had become intrigued by this story, being led to believe that the novel was something bit different from the usual premise. The not-so-happily-ever-after induced me to request it for review. The description began, "Eleanor Brice Desmarais, she of the cracked glass slipper and unladylike intellectual propensities" and that caught my attention. 'Desmarais' is French for 'of the swamp' so maybe there's some history related to that in volume one. Or maybe not! I can't speak to that. Character names are important to me so I tend to have them mean something which may not always be apparent to the reader, but maybe I read more into other authors' choices than I ought.

This promise of 'unladylike intellectual propensities' however, failed to materialize unless all that the person writing that description meant was that Eleanor had a sexual appetite. Oh how scandalous - a woman enjoys sex! Who knew?! Seriously? But if that's the case, then the writer of the description needs to get an education regarding the difference between intellectual and sexual.

The really sad thing about Eleanor though, and the tragic paradox of this story is that she's purported to be the people's princess, and yet she was risking bringing down shame on herself and the royal family by her uncontrolled behavior. This is hardly how a great princess behaves. She seems to have been modeled on Princess Diana, but unlike in that real life case, Eleanor starts her affair long before she's ever built-up any credibility by demonstrating a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a caring attitude that the real life Diana did before she embarked on her affair. There's a huge difference between the two.

I think intellectual is sexy, but if it was merely used as a euphemism for sexual propensities, then it was a cheap shot. If it actually meant intellectual, then it missed the mark because Eleanor did not come across as any such thing. Quite the opposite. She spent all her time pining for Dorian, the best friend of her husband, Prince Gregory. At one point Eleanor mentions Dorian's "girth" and from that I could conclude only that her 'intellect' seemed decidedly low and her interest in him had nothing to do with love since they never seemed to have any conversation that didn't revolve around their physical trysting.

The story was boring because this was all she ever did. There was one brief interlude where she was visiting the poor and talking about opening school for girls, but that was a bump in an otherwise featureless romp, or unending talk of romping, or unending wishful thinking of romping, with Dorian. She didn't even spend any significant time with her child - not according to how this was written up to the point where I quit reading it, about a quarter the way through. Maybe things changed later, but I had zero faith, given what I'd read thus far, that it would improve. Eleanor was a one-trick pony (interpret 'trick' however you like), and she wasn't remotely interesting to read about.

I can understand that a woman who is unhappy in her marriage may seek solace elsewhere. I don't have a problem with that, and missing the first volume may well skew my perception, but did Eleanor even try to resolve things with Gregory or did she just leap right onto Dorian's girth? I know Gregory could be a bit of a jerk at times, but overall he did not seem to be a bad person, yet Eleanor was willing to spend all kinds of time on sexual technique with Dorian. Could she not spend any time at all working on her marriage with Gregory?

This perception diminished her in my eyes, and led me to the conviction that she's not much deserving of sympathy or support. Like I said, without having the first volume under my belt, maybe I'm misjudging her, but frankly she seems like a bit of a sleaze here. It's not a good look on her! If once in a while she'd expressed some regret or harked back to earlier times when she'd tried to work with her husband to make their marriage a good one and been rejected by him, that would have changed my perception of her, but in this story she's all Dorian all the time and it's tedious.

This book seriously failed to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test (after a fashion) because all Eleanor could think of was how to get with her lover. She had a one-track mind. Talking of Disney, it's like she had no life that wasn't animated by Dorian. After I'd read that book description, what I'd been hoping for was someone like the princess in my own novel, Femarine which really did have a different mindset from your usual princess story.

The very reason I wrote that was to offer readers some sort of an antidote to the disturbing plethora of stories about simpering, compliant princesses and their wilting addiction to princes charming, and it seemed I was not wrong because there is a readership for the road less taken. I just wish publishers and other authors would embrace that more, but it seems all they want to do it retread this old story, and even when a slightly different direction is taken - like this one attempted, the original prince is merely replaced by a new 'prince' and off we go, stuck on the same old rutted road - or rutting road in this case!

This is why I tend not to believe book descriptions much, because I've seen so many misleading ones, and it bothers me that they often seem to have been written by people who haven't read the novel, or in the case of YA stories, by people who seem to have completely missed the point of the #MeToo movement. But moving on: Eleanor is the Cinders of this story, having the slipper and the requisite two stepsisters, although as in the Drew Barrymore Ever After movie which I enjoyed, one of the sisters is friendly toward Eleanor. The other, Sylvia, is very much antagonistic and deceitful. Fortunately, she does not know that Eleanor has the hots for her husband's best friend Dorian, for that would be a disaster she'd dearly love to exploit.

I have to say a word about poor Sylvia. I was not a fan of hers, but she's after Prince Gregory. In her pursuit, she's doing nothing worse than Eleanor is doing, and arguably better since, unlike Eleanor, Sylvia isn't married! The problem is that she's portrayed as some sort of marriage wrecker or trouble-maker! When Dorian sees what she's up to he makes a mental note to tell Eleanor. The thing is that Gregory is known for quite literally whoring around, and Eleanor is already getting down to it with Dorian, so why slut-shame Sylvia? It was inappropriate at best, and it wasn't the only case where a woman is demeaned in this book.

On another occasion I read, "Pandra was twelve years his senior, but she was amazingly well preserved for all her years of use." What? That means she was only 38, not old by any means. Saying she was amazingly well preserved is ageism without a doubt. It's one thing to have a character say something like that about another person; it's an entirely different thing to have the author say it - and that comment wasn't in a character's speech - it was in the narrative! Now you can argue that it was intended as the thought of either Prince Gregory or Dorian, but that wasn't indicated as such, and if it was indeed Dorian's thinking, what does that say about his attitude toward women?

At a ball, Eleanor is recommending Dorian ask this one girl who'd shown an interest in him, to dance with him. This was not because she wanted Dorian to, but because it would be a diversion from their mutual horniness. After that I read, again not as speech, but as narration, "In truth, Patience had been an obvious dingbat." It's like if you're not part of the small specific set of people of whom Eleanor approves, then all you merit is insult. It really turned me off her. This was not the 'intellectual propensity' girl I'd been promised - someone deep and interesting, strong and motivated, fun to read about. She was just the opposite and I didn't like her.

And 'dingbat'? The term has been around for a century, but it's hardly terminology from the Cinderella era! I know you can't write a novel in ancient English - it would be tedious to read, if not impossible! - but you can write it with a bit of an atmosphere, ans a nod and a wink to the period in which it's supposedly set. This one was written with such a modern outlook that for me, it kept tripping up the narrative, making it seem like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be ancient or modern.

In this world, it is, of course, a capital offense for the princess bride to have an affair, even with the prince's best friend, so one has to wonder about Dorian's love for Eleanor when he willingly puts her life at risk by continuing to see her for sex. She's obviously so weak-willed that she can't help herself, but you'd think he'd be strong for her, if he cared. On the other hand, he's reported as someone who's been lucky to avoid sexually-transmitted diseases since he cannot for the life of him keep his junk in his pantaloons. He's had sex with so many women, he's lost count, so maybe his integrity is as poor as hers and his backbone just as flimsy. At any rate Eleanor has no reason to believe she's not just another conquest. Not from what I read anyway.

I began reading this with interest and quickly encountered an unintentionally amusing scene which brought the novel some credit by putting me in a good mood. That was sadly dissipated with disturbing velocity by further reading, and in truth it was another writing issue. An exasperated Eleanor is mucking-out the stable where her unicorn is housed. She's not doing this because she has to, but because she needs something to take her mind off her frustrations. While she's thus engaged, her husband and Dorian come down to take out the prince's horse, Vigor, for a ride.

In what I consider to be an amusingly unfortunate juxtaposition of ideas, I read, "Gregory kissed her again. This time she felt the flick of his tongue. He mounted and she held Vigor's bridle." Now, who or what exactly is he mounting - his horse or his bride? LOL! I assume it's his horse, but it just goes to show that one needs to be careful when writing narrative! There really needed to be something between "his tongue" and "He mounted" to distance the two actions. On a more adolescent note, it also struck me that the very title of this novel is rather unfortunate. To be clear: the Dragon Choker isn't a teenage boy's slang term for masturbation. It refers to a beautiful necklace that Prince Gregory buys for Eleanor and for which she shows little gratitude. Again, unlike the necklace, she came off in a bad light.

So, in short, I did not finish this novel. I gave up on it because the more I read the more I disliked Eleanor and the more I disliked the story. It felt like there were problems with the plot that could have been avoided with more sensitive writing, and with a better portrayal of Eleanor (and maybe a somewhat worse portrayal of Gregory). Eleanor comes across not only as having no character, she doesn't even have any depth - and certainly no intellect, let alone any sort of propensity at all to growing one. She wasn't interesting and I did not want to read any more about her. I wish the author all the best in her writing career, but I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I was quickly done with this sad little thing. Iris Johansen was 76 when she wrote this in 2014 and I'm thinking she's either out of touch or perhaps becoming too long in the tooth to be writing stories of this nature. No one should write a story like this one. 2014 was three years before #MeToo became a viral movement, but she seems to have learned nothing from similar issues and movements, and consequently this book champions a codependent relationship in which no apparently means yes, in a minute.

The main character is abused from the outset when another controlling guy forces her out of her visit to her son in Hong Kong, and into an investigation of a dangerous killer because she happens to be in the right part of the world and there is a single policing agency anywhere near which can take care of it! Yeah! Right!

The writing is stilted and predictable and the story hopped around annoyingly without showing any interest in going anywhere interesting. I skimmed and skipped in the faint hope that it might improve, but it never did, which honestly didn't surprise me, and I dropped it. I can't commend it because of the appallingly poor writing to say nothing of the clueless relationships depicted here. I'm done with this author.

Bellamy and the Brute by Alicia Michaels

Rating: WARTY!

This is - quite obviously from the title, a take on the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, and it's not my usual fare, but since I'm working - on and off, and nroe off than on lately! - on my own redux of a fairytale, sometimes I take stock of what other authors are doing. I don't consider them my competition because I don't write quite like other authors, but it never hurts to look up from that keyboard once in a while and see what's going on around you. This to explain why I embarked on this, a first person voice YA novel which I normally flee from. While it wasn't completely awful, it had multiple, predictable issues, and I certainly wasn't much impressed considering this was supposed to be professionally published.

The novel is larded with YA trope and additionally, there are some curious writing peccadillos in it. Aside from the ritualistic first person PoV which I typically detest because it's tired, annoying, and derivative, but which fortunately wasn't overly nauseating in this particular story, there's the trope of the jerk of a school jock who's after this girl Bellamy. She of course has no interest in this brute because she's saving herself for a different brute!

Also, there's the predictable alienation and school bullying which is the hallmark of ninety percent of YA high-school stories. People make fun of this girl because her dad thinks he can see ghosts. How everyone else knows about this was not explained at least up to the point where I quit reading which was a little under halfway through. I'd thought about quitting before then, more than once, but I kept on going. Foolishly, it's now clear.

There is of course the single-parent family trope, but I can't really call it on that because that's part of the original story. One thing I didn't get was the choice of the name Bellamy for the main character. It know a lot of parents think it's cool to use some family's last name as their daughter's first name (Mackenzie, Madison, Reilly, etc), but while Bellamy (bel ami) is of French origin (it means good friend or nice friend), it has no direct correlation to the name Beauty; however, I was willing to let that go.

Another strange occurrence was when Bellamy visited her mother's grave late at night for no apparent reason (except of course for her to encounter a shadowy hooded figure this one night - and we all know who that is - Tate the stalker!). But in the real world, why not stop by the cemetery right after school? There's no reason to go late at night. The thing is though that the text said "I located her headstone with very little effort," and I had to wonder why was it any effort at all to find her mother's headstone if she'd been in the habit of doing this for two years? It made no sense.

Sometimes, the text itself would make no sense, as when I read, "I had my dad, which was more than most people could claim to have." What the hell does that mean? That most people have no father? Their father is dead or a deadbeat dad? That they can't connect with their father? This is patent nonsense! I have no idea what she meant by that, but clearly, whatever it was she was trying to say, it's ridiculous.

There was another part which was equally meaningless. I read the following:

"I never see her," he murmured just before I could leave.
I paused, my hand on the doorknob. "Never see who?"

This would have been perfectly fine except that it appeared very shortly after several maudlin paragraphs about it being 2 years to the day since her mom's death, so how could she not get what her father was referring to? This kind of writing makes your main character look stupid. As if that wasn't odd enough, her dad's habit of continuing to call his 17-year-old daughter 'munchkin' was truly an irritation.

It wasn't as much an irritation though as the author's fetish with starting every other sentence with a present participle, making her sound like a tiresomely passive person. Okay, so it wasn't literally every other paragraph, but even I was surprised by how common it was when it reached a point where it had become not just noticeable, but actually irritating, and I went back and checked to see if it was occurring as often as it felt like it was. I found in the first few screens the following:

• "Making my way to the front room, I..."
• "Noticing a stack of boxes near the door, I..."
• "Pointing to the paper laid on the counter, he..."
• "Standing on tiptoe, I..."
• "Pushing those depressing thoughts aside, I..."
  "Flipping it to the employment section, I..."
  "Spotting an ad requesting a summertime babysitter for two young kids, I..."
  (these were all on the same screen in three successive paragraphs)
• "Hanging up the phone, I..."
• "Edging slowly down the hall, I..."
• "Retreating to the kitchen, I.."
• "Pausing with the fork halfway to his mouth, he..."
• "Frowning, I..."
• "Hesitating for a moment, I..."
• "Raising his eyebrows, he..."

Seriously? This screams lazy author and even worse, bad editor.

I pressed on and followed the story to the point where Bellamy and Tate (the 'brute' of the title) were about to start on investigating why two ghosts haunted the Baldwin mansion where Tate lived and Bellamy was babysitting his two younger siblings for the summer. Why Tate himself, who is permanently housebound (living in the Tate Gallery! LOL!), cannot do this is left unexplained.

These ghosts were terrifying, and Bellamy first encountered Tate fleeing from them after she'd predictably gone to the forbidden third floor. I guess it's supposed to be obvious that the brutishness of Tate is a curse for the evil his family has perpetrated (and some that he himself did), but the novel makes the serious mistake of letting slide Tate's real brutishness, Tate which is that he is a manic and cruel.

He mistreats Bellamy repeatedly and she always finds an excuse for his unacceptable behavior. Just when it seems like he might be about to reform, he gets into an unnecessary fight with this tediously trope school bully who's been trying to get into Bellamy's pants for a while. She's had no problem fending him off, but Tate treats Bellamy like she's a helpless a child who can't protect herself and needs managing! He takes over control of her life at that point by going after this bully. He gets into a physical fight with him and beats him savagely, and Bellamy sees no problem with his behavior. The beaten bully leaves with the clichéd threat, "This isn't over!"

It was for me. I could not stand to read any more about this from that point and had lost all interest in learning what the deal was with these two ghosts. The ridiculous thing about that was that right when Bellamy and Tate finally decide to confront the ghosts and discover what it is that causing them to haunt the Baldwin mansion, neither Tate or Bellamy ever thinks to ask who the ghosts are or what happened to them. This proves both of these guys are morons.

This trope of the ghosts showing up and only bit by bit revealing their story is so tired, and so clichéd. The ghosts appear unable to speak, but they can write. They evidently cannot manipulate air to voice words, but they can manipulate physical objects and wreck Tate's room one evening like a pair of deranged poltergeists. It was pathetic and illogical.

So I'm done with this story and with this author. I can't commend it. It was indeed brutish and awful in the end and kept getting worse the more I read of it.