Luster by Raven Leilani

Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
“...a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do enter it...” This sentence appears to be missing ‘to’.

Raven Leilani has to be one of those most charming author names I've ever encountered, but I have to say up front that I wasn't charmed by this novel. It started out well enough, but went downhill for me rather quickly.

Part of my problem with it was the disconnect between what the back-cover blurb says and where the novel actually went. I know that unless they self-publish, authors tend to have little input into the blurb and cover design, but to have a blurb promise me I'll see "a young black woman fall into art" and then read a significant portion of the story and have this woman, Edie, give only the most cursory attention to art was a real disappointment to me.

The real problem though, was that Edie didn't present as an artist to me. She had no eye for color or light, or for nature, people, or architecture - or at least if she did, none of that ever made it into her first person voice, which is yet another reason why first person is almost always the wrong choice for a novel. This story never gave even a hint about her artistic leanings or interests; yes, there were cursory mentions, but it was far too busily focusing on her social commentary which was not as amusing as the blurb-writer liked to pretend it was, and on her obsession with this guy she met online. From what I read, I remained unconvinced that she had any real interest in art because it took a very distant back seat. I didn't believe an artist would have the take on life that Edie did.

So for me, reading those first few chapters, the story wasn't about art at all. It was about a rather sordid sexual obsession, and while the blurb did suggest the sexual component of the story, it didn't hint that that would be all she wrote - so to speak! I mean Edie was literally obsessing over having sex with this guy she 'met' on line and she was doing that the whole time. It failed the Bechdel-Wallace test dismally, and this wasn't even two women talking! It was tedious to read after a short while, and it was a problem because I wasn't given any reason whatsoever as to why Edie became so obsessed with this guy. It didn't feel real to me because the reader wasn't offered anything to support this kind of intensity. If anything, it felt stalker-ish and dangerous, which is, I assume, the very opposite of what the author was intending, if the blurb is to be believed. But maybe it isn't.

Like I said, I didn't read all of this and things may have changed later in the story, bringing it more into conformance with what the blurb writer says is going on, but if that's the case, then there really needed to be more offered up front to render some sort of a reliable promise of a better future. I got nothing, and there are two solid reasons why I quit when I did.

The first, but by no means the most important reason was the severe let-down when a crucial point in the story was reached: the first encounter between Edie, the young black woman who tells this story, and the wife of the man with whom she is having an affair - of sorts. Right when that's about to open wide, the story comes to a screeching halt while we're dragged back over Edie's sexual history! What?!

I'm in no way a fan of flashbacks for this very reason, but this was one of the most irritating I've ever encountered and I had zero interest in her sexual history. I skipped that section completely, but once I finally got back to the wife versus the mistress part, it was a total let-down. Instead of something engaging: a fight, a tearful breakdown, an intelligent grown-up discussion, an unleash of female passion, something interesting and original happening, the story lost its way and meandered into a party. Of all things. I felt seriously let down, and worse than that, the events of this particular party made me serious doubt the main character's intelligence and humanity. That's never a good thing.

What happened immediately after that was worse though. The guy of her obsession drives Edie home. He's angry with her and he hits her and she takes it and almost literally begs for me. That's when I called 'Check please! I'm done here!'. I'm not about to read that. I mean that was bad enough, but let's consider this relationship overall, given the month that I read this in was black history month! I was torn between wondering if his violence was worse, or if his treatment of this young woman in general was worse, or if her mute acceptance of all this was worse.

This is a very one-sided affair wherein the guy gets everything he wants and Edie gets next-to-nothing, putting her into a very needy and subservient position. I was wondering, is this really a story that you'd really want to promote during black history month? A white guy effectively enslaving a young black woman? He makes all the rules; she whimpers and conforms? She effectively becomes a maid to this white privileged family where the guy is ruler and the women are his subjects? Maybe it's a story some people want to read, but not me. Maybe it changed later, but I'd already lost patience with it along with any interest in reading any more.

I can't commend this at all based on what I could manage to read of it. I felt cheated by the book description and even more cheated by the story itself. I lost interest, but worse, I lost faith in it. There was no artistry here - unless we were expected to accept the tortured without the artist.

The Perfect Wife by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This authors seems to skip the article (definite or indefinite, it doesn't matter!) from time to time:
“He was only one The Panel would approve in the area.” (the only)
“Admittedly, it had required opening up to man who had killed almost twenty people;” (to a man)
“Whatever the reason, she’d had to go to other” (the other)
“He still didn’t know she’s told Mel about seeing Teddy with the hostess” (she'd told)

This novel needs to be retitled "The Perfect Ass-Wipe." The book is a poor cross between Silence of the Lambs and The Stepford Wives with some Sex and the City tossed in for rude measure. The interactions with the serial killer are pretty much a direct rip-off of Silence of the Lambs ("Quid pro quo, Clarice!"), but it felt like the author couldn't figure out what kind of a novel he wanted to write.

This woman, for an FBI profiler wannabe and supposedly a promising candidate, seems remarkably stupid, and her husband is a jerk, but she can't see it. So on the one hand we're supposed to believe she's really sharp as a profiler, but on the other we're expected to swallow that she's completely dumb when it comes to profiling the motives of her friends and her husband - and his best friend.

She and hubby move to a new elite neighborhood when he's assigned to an office there, where he manages people's financial investments - so they're really well-off. He insists they join this ridiculous elite marina club (which she ought to have flatly-refused as soon as she learned that men (known as Oath Minders) often meet separately from women (known as Hearth Keepers). Seriously? She sure as hell ought to have quit when she learned that one of the activities enjoyed there is free love for husbands. I don't know of any self-respecting woman who would who doesn't vote Republican who would put up with any of that horseshit, but as with everything else, this Jessie girl mutely goes along with every single thing her husband Kyle, dumps on her. And he dumps a lot.

Things slowly deteriorate and come to a head when she catches him snorting cocaine with his friend Ted, and kicks him out. He comes back all contrite the next day promising reform, and she pretty much instantly forgives him. That night, they go to a party down at the marina. She's just learned she's pregnant, but she decides to drink some champagne anyway. My guess is that her sleaze of a husband put something in her drink, because after a couple of sips she began to feel woozy. Rather than have her husband take her home, she let him put her to bed in the cabin on the boat that belongs to Ted! Someone needs to give her a Ted talk! LOL! She has to be a moron to do that, given what she knows at this point.

I thought she'd wake up and find she'd been raped by Ted, but instead she wakes up next to the dead body of this woman she'd had an argument with earlier over flirting with her husband, and she has blood and skin under her fingernails. Instead of calling the police, this imbecile lets her husband talk her into disposing of the body, so now she's completely trapped.

She didn't agree to it outright because she felt so woozy, which ought to have told her she'd been drugged, but she was alert enough to have stopped him and she didn't. For her to even consider doing something like that given what career she was supposed to be following, is completely ridiculous, and I lost all interest in reading anything more about this bozo right then.

It was pretty obvious her husband was the murderer, and he'd bene having an affair with this woman who was going to expose him. It was obvious from the writing, but also from the fact that an author like this one is never going to let his favorite profiler get tied down with a husband and a baby at the start of a series, not when he can follow the safe road most traveled! I don't mind if a book starts out with a stupid character who wises up later, but to have an author depict a woman who he claims on the one hand is sharp and smart, yet who he depicts consistently choosing the dumbest option in any situation which faces her, is misogyny, period.

I resented the time I spent reading even half of this. If she'd been remotely as smart and sharp as was claimed, Jessie (the name says it all in this case!) would have refused to dispose of the body, called the police, and had herself drug-tested - and especially done all this given her career choice! She did the exact opposite and doesn't merit having a story told about her. Warty to the max on this one.

The Last Single Girl by Bria Quinlan

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those 'Desperately Seeking Validation' kind of stories, where a woman has a deadline before which she absolutely must find a guy, or her life will be in ruins. If done right, it can be entertaining. The Norwegians demonstrated this in a Christmas TV series called Hjem til jul (Home for Christmas - English dubbed on Netflix) which was hilarious and enigmatic at the end, but in the USA land of the trope, there are far too many of these stories that make women look desperate, or stupid, or pathetic, or all three. While I am quite sure there are women (and men) like that, I don't subscribed to the cliché that a woman must have a man (or vice versa, or any mix of the idea).

It can be fun to read one if it's well done, but those are few and far between. This one started out in the fast lane on the freeway to Tropeville; then it seemed to be turning itself around a bit and rather than ditch it, I became interested. Unfortunately, it all-too-quickly took a U-Turn and continued right back to Tropeville, so I did ditch it. I am not a fan of reading novels about stupid women or patently ridiculous situations.

Sarah was purportedly hitting the point in life where all her friends were becoming involved with guys. What? Every one of them had been dedicatedly single to this point and she'd never head to deal with this before? Stupid and unrealistic. The trigger here though was that their New Year's Eve 'girls night out' was being sabotaged because the stereotypical queen bee of their group had decided everyone should bring their man on New Year's Eve, and hang those who didn't have one. Rather than ditch the bitch and find a group of female friends who were more akin to her own situation, or simply go alone and maybe meet a guy there, Sarah buys into this incarceration of a relationship, and in order to recruit a guy, she signs up to this online dating service. This is where Le Stupide began to kick in big time.

She sets up five guys to meet, and makes two dates with the first two at the same location and within a couple of hours of each other. Rather than be honest and tell the first guy that she only has an hour or so because she's meeting someone else, she lets their conversation run on and on until the second guy shows up. He happens to be best friends with the first guy and both of them ditch Sarah because they have some idiot pact never to fight over a girl. What fight? There was no fight here! Neither of them had any claim, much less 'ownership' of the woman they had both literally just met. Yet off they go! Morons.

The guy who Sarah meets in the café, the owner, starts commiserating with her about her fate. It's obvious at this point that he's going to be the one she ends up with, but Sarah is too stupid, no matter how long this goes on, to see that he's interested in her and instead keeps pursuing these rugged guys she thinks will match her. Guy number three is a single dad who forgot to mention this in his profile and shows up with three badly-behaving kids because his babysitter canceled on him. Guy number four is married and his wife shows up and blames Sarah for her own stupidity in sticking with this jerk of a guy. Actually I think that guy was the one who wrote the book blurb, because he sure can't spell 'frenemy'!

So, in short, no. Just no! This was badly-written and larded with trope and cliché, and it makes women look like losers and idiots. Why a female writer would do this kind of thing to her own gender, I do not know, but it's more insuting to woman than is porn, and it's nowhere near good enough for a 2020 vision.

The Gifting By KE Ganshert

Rating: WARTY!

This is a supernatural story about a world where science rules and supernatural belief is frowned upon, but where, of course, this one girl has inherited from her grandmother the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally no one told her she has this power, and she thinks she's going crazy. Because this is YA, she is of course completely and unrealistically ostracized because of this one freak-out she has when she and some fellow teens are playing with a Ouija board.

I don't normally read stuff like this, but it's been a while and this one seemed quite interesting; unfortunately, it immediately seemed to be going down the same road to Tropeville that YA writers all-too-often follow like a bunch of blind sheep. This author appears no different, sporting the usual YA fear of being different, and thereby ironically becoming in a real way, the very character she writes about!

The book was a free loss-leader for a series, but I can't generate interest in a series that's written this poorly and with so many clichés in it. It's YA, and in my extensive experience is already a mark against it. Worse, it's in first person, a voice which often irritates me far more than it entertains me in stories.

It seems to be a rule of YA writing that everything is black and white: there can be no room for gray areas or nuance in these stories. Consequently, Tess is so ostracized that her family leaves the area and moves to Northern California where, her parents say, there's an institute that can help her. Her parents must be rolling in money because this whole transition takes only three weeks from Tess's incident to abandoning their old house and moving into a new one! Wow! Privilege much?

The author describes the move: "we jettisoned across the country." That makes zero sense. 'Jetted across the country' would have made sense or even, "we jettisoned ourselves across the country." Earlier she'd written something about 'Judo chopping' her brother for some remark he'd made, but Judo is not a 'chopping' sport. If she'd said 'karate chopping' that would have meant something, but not with Judo, which is a throwing sport a little bit like wrestling. It's not hard to get these things right, and you have to wonder about a writer's dedication when simple mistakes like this are so readily made.

The author makes no secret of the fact that she's something of a born-again believer and her bizarre detestation of science comes through in her writing and spoils the story which felt a bit like she was preaching a sermon rather than relating an entertaining tale of the supernatural. It's so strident at times that it's off-putting and it ruins her writing.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't so very wrong! Those who believe in these things, talk about having faith because it's not something science can measure, but this is bullshit. If the supernatural world (which I do not believe in, by the way) purportedly has any impact on the real world, then in order to do so it must cause change in the real world in order for it to act or to be detected, and that's something science can measure, quantify and study. There never has been any such evidence.

The believers themselves admit this by repeatedly - and throughout history - making excuses for their god's total absenteeism and inaction! They talk all the time about how we must act. "God helps those who help themselves," they cry, which sounds truly selfish to me, to say nothing of utterly lacking the very faith believers profess they have, but this small part is true: because we help ourselves, no god ever has to do anything! LOL!

That conveniently explains away why no god ever shows! And how we browbeat ourselves: if we succeed, then it's a god's success! If we fail, then it's our failure! How pathetic is that? The Old Testament is full of stories of the ancient Hebrews fighting foes. No god ever helped them to win. This for a supposedly peace-loving religion, but whenever the Hebrews won a victory, it was because they were the chosen people blessed by a god. Whenever they got their ass kicked it was because they were unworthy sinners and direly needed to repent. I call horse-shit on such self-serving and deluded lies.

The fact is that Bible and other religious literature throughout the world is rife with stories describing how people did the work that the god really ought to have done! They did this precisely because there was no god to do it, and this same 'epiphany' runs rampant today! If there were such a thing as gods, we would never find ourselves in the position of always having to do the work! This and the complete lack of any positive evidence for a god or an afterlife is why I do not believe. I'm sorry that writers like this one do not have a sounder scientific education; if they did, they would not make the mistakes this author has made.

But this isn't a review of the author, it's a review of the book and that is sadly lacking. As I mentioned, it's far too full of trope and follows far too many other writers telling pretty much the same story with a tweak-tweak here and a twerk-twerk there. What I long for is the story that steps off that worn-out path and dares to tread where no author has gone before. This novel wasn't anywhere close, and I could not continue reading it. I can't commend it based on the portion I did read which was a recipe for disaster: one more half-baked than well-done.

Eve by Patti Larsen

Rating: WARTY!

This was your standard uninteresting, first person voice, dumb, disaffected girl saved by a boy novel. Nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing worth reading. I was very disappointed, although I kind of half-expected that going into it, but nonetheless, I was hoping for something better. I was disappointed, but unsurprised. For the most part, YA authors are so homogenous that 'bland' is far too vivid a word to cover what they do. How this author can write so badly and yet be "a multiple award-winning author" (her own words), is a complete mystery to me. This is why I have zero trust in awards and would flatly refuse any I was offered rather than be tainted by them.

The fact that this novel was written so badly really intrigues me because I read here: https://medium.com/intellogo/award-winning-writer-patti-larsen-shares-her-experiences-using-intellogos-author-tools-c93fea28338 that the author had used some sort of software at both draft and final stage to assess her work. I'd never heard of "Intellogo" before, but it seems that it's supposed to advise an author as to whether they're hitting the standard test marks for a YA novel. How robotic is that? Seriously? The article about this was badly written too. I read at one point, "how present women are in a central role are" and later, "Was the book moving at a fast enough clip to maintain the intensity for a face-paced page turner." Yes, in this era of Facebook control of your life, you definitely need a face-paced page turner.

But this article also tells us that the author “has a degree in journalism, a background in English, history, and screen writing, and offers courses on story writing and outlining. Patti’s strengths lie not only in her mad writing process but also in her tireless work in self promotion." If she put as much effort into writing as she apparently does into self-promotion, and ditched the artificial intelligence, she might have a book that feels far less artificial and actually intelligent - and focused on telling original, imaginative, and inventive stories instead of writing by numbers and copying what everyone else is doing, which is quite clearly what this novel is.

And that tireless self-promotion really turned me off her. I am not a self-promoter which probably means I will never have a book take off, but I don't care. I'm not going to try to force myself on people. If they want to read me, they will choose to find me and do so. It’s their choice, not mine.

This story sounded like it might be interesting which is why I was foolish enough to pick it up to read, and it probably could have been engaging in more capable hands, but all this author proves is that journalists are not necessarily great novel writers. The blurb informs us that 16-year-old Eve (she should have been named Heave, she's so sickening to read about) is the unholy offspring of Death and Life, and

Her unique parentage ensures Eve isn’t like her angel siblings. She brings Death at the beginning of Life and Life to those meant to die. Her continuing failures create constant disaster for her parents and the mortals she tries so hard to serve. But when Eve accidentally interferes with the Loom of Creation, she sets off a chain of events that leads her to finally understand who she really is.

Yes, she's a special snowflake just like every other YA character in nearly every one of these dull, predictable, boring, unimaginative YA garbage novels. How special is that?! The description had one of those little clickers where you could select more of the blurb or less, but it was less of books like this which I would have truly appreciated. There is no clicker for that unfortunately. No click, only colic.

The writing was average to poor from the off. It was, as I mentioned, worst-person voice, which is the most tedious voice of all for me to read. I am so sick of it that I recently went through my shelf of unread print books and deliberately ditched every last one of them that was in first person, so sick am I of reading this tedious and nauseating voice. Now those books are in the local library, so someone else will have to suffer them, not me! Am I evil or what? Mwah-ha-ha!

Anyway, after Eve screws up yet again, by reviving an old man who was at death's door, she goes into this maudlin introspection. Eve whines that everyone hates her, and her life isn't worth living until of course she's rescued by this guy. I ditched the book right there. I am so sick of reading YA novels about some wretched girl who has to be validated and rescued by a boy. For fuck's sake YA authors, stop it with this shit already! Find something better to do with your life - something that doesn’t involve running your own gender into the ground. This book is shit and that's it.

Doomed by Tracy Deebs

Rating: WARTY!

This was another tired novel in first person. I think I'm going to systematically survey all of my books and give away or delete every last one of them that's in first person because I'am so tired of that worthless voice that it almost makes me ill when I see it in a book. Also, if I'd known that this author was a 'professor of writing' at a college, I would never have picked this one up on the first place. Such people are usually the very worst people at writing novels in my experience, but I've had it on my shelf for some considerable time, so maybe I was less picky when I picked this up!

The story launches into tropes form the outset - the disaffected teen who is parentless, the two guys, one a 'bad boy' and one a good guy for the inevitable YA lust triangle, and the ditz of a female main character who is so useless she can't possibly choose between them and leads both of them on like a cruel mistress for the entire trilogy. Get a tomb! Apparently this professor of writing teaches that it's best to rip-off every story that's ever gone before instead of writing something new and fresh. Either that or she teaches writing originally, and then hypocritically does just the opposite when it comes to her own projects. Either way this is not a person i want to learn anything from.

Main character Pandora wakes up on her birthday. Despite knowing better, she searches desperately for an email from her mom, but there is none. Yes, she's not an orphan per se, but her mother works for Big Fossil, aka Big Oil, and is often gone, and her father has been long gone, yet he's the one who sends her an email. How mom comes to leave Pandora all alone at home with no-one to keep an eye on her is a mystery. It's not like she couldn't afford a live-in caretaker for her daughter, but this lazy writer doesn't even bother to address that.

Pandora is quite obviously, it quickly comes to light, not the brightest silverware in the drawer. When she sees an email from her father, and despite being warned by her mother to delete on sight any emails he might send, she opens the lone one he does send and then clicks on the website it links to. This act unleashes something take instantly takes over the entire internet. Yes, everything, worldwide! No one is better than this hacker. No security is equal to it, so everything goes down. Then Pandora's computer lights up and she's offered the chance to play a game and save the world. Also, her two male consorts are let in on the game. How her father would even known she was hanging out with these two guys these days is one of endless questions left unanswered.

Idiot Pandora, despite the entire world being offline, decides they can go get pizza. This leads to a truck broadsiding them, and it was when Pandora, in first person, was describing in detail the accident that I decided I wither needed something to prevent severe nausea, or I needed to get the hell away from this piece of garbage. I chose to ditch the book. It's trash. I'm done with this author, too.

Mr Love by Sally Mason

Rating: WARTY!

This novel had an interesting plot and for a long while I stayed with it because it had some level of interest for me, but in the end it was so improbably wish-fulfilling that I couldn't take it seriously. It's honestly far more like a fantasy than a novel rooted in realism. Plus the main characters really were not very savory - not to my taste, and particularly not Gordon, the main male character. I can't for the life of me figure out how a romance ever happened between the main female character Jane, a literary agent, and him.

It took me a while to figure out that these characters were all in their mid- to late-thirties. The first indication of age, misleading as it was, was that Jane's favorite movie as a teenager was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I was forced to assume from this that Jane was in her seventies since that movie was released in 1961, or perhaps that she'd seen it on TV or video at a later time when she wa sin her teens, and evidently had no problem with the racism in it, but eventually the author clarified that she was only half seventy! Give or take. She actually might have been a lot more interesting had she been in her seventies.

The story starts with Gordon and is told in present tense which really doesn't work very well, but I got used to it. Gordon is a pompous jackass who wants his massive tome of pretension to be published, but is rightly getting nowhere with it. In a series of events which make zero sense, and which have no rhyme or reason, he ends up writing a romance novel about a sassy woman who is based on a young girl he knew when he was in his teens, and who died. This girl haunts him - he sees her around him all the time, now apparently grown up, commenting on his life.

Without any sort of effort or promotion, the novel becomes a runaway best-seller after he self-publishes it. That's of course when Big Publishing™ comes knocking on his door. I mean, why would they care about someone they couldn't immediately milk for a fortune? Or at least they would come knocking if they knew who he was, since he published under a pseudonym. Jane, who already had two jerks in her life - her asshole of a boss and her douche of a fiancé, figures out who he is and tracks him down, seeing this as the path to her own corner office.

Gordon denies all authorship and talks his sister into pretending to be the author all along, although Jane suspects it's really Gordon. So they immediately get eight million for the book rights and a fat movie contract. All in the space of a few days! Ri-ight! The most amusing part of the book was the completely shallow movie star who hasn't even read the book, and the complete jerk of a movie director who has read it but wants to make his own version of it. I kept wanting someone to tell him to go fuck himself, but no one ever did.

Then the story went right down the shitter. As soon as it's revealed that Gordon is the author, somehow all of this movie stuff is off! Just like that! Why? How? What the fuck difference does it make who the author is if a contract has been signed and the book is real? The novel made zero sense at this point because it then has the movie rights magically revert to Gordon, who marries Jane and they get a new movie contract and a better star. No lawsuits are involved! I'm sorry but no!

This might have been a decent novel had it been more realistic and had Gordon any redeeming features at all, but he was a lousy drunk, completely unlike anyone Jane would want anything to do with, because let's face it, she really needed yet another dick make in her life. For me that's when I gave up on it despite being so close to the end. I can't commend it because it's far too amateurish to commend even though it did have a few entertaining bits here and there.

Love Him Not by Tara K Reid

Rating: WARTY!

This was one of those do-it-yourself stories, where you would, were it a print version, be directed to turn to page X if you want to do Y or turn to page Z if you chose to do B. I was curious as to how this would work - or even if it would work - in an ebook, and the book was free, so despite the story not interesting me, I picked it up. It was aimed squarely at women, although the gay male or bisexual communitiers might find some fun here. I had to persuade this guy Nick to fall for me - so I wasn't remotely impressed by the story, which was YA pap and you pretty much - it seemed from the parts I read - had to basically lay yourself out on a plate if you wanted Nick to like you.

Well, guess what - it turns out that I'm not that kind of a girl, so no! I failed with him twice. Apparently the novel is set up that you fail most of the time, which was fine with me because Nick ought to have been named Dick, judged from his behavior, but it's interesting that the mechanics of it did in fact work. You could tap the link to go to the optional sections of the story, or to return to the previous location and make a different selection.

I had no interest in pursuing this particular story, and cannot commend this as a worthy read. Obviously others - particularly the females at whom this is aimed - and maybe a few guys too, might have a much warmer view of this one than I did, but the format itself was interesting to me, and I can see this being useful in other stories. How well a book set up like this would translate across publishing platforms such as ePub, mobi, and PDF remains to be seen. My own feeling is that it's something better-suited to a middle-grade adventure story than to a romance, but who knows?

As far as this story itself is concerned, it felt trivial and silly to say nothing of how inappropriate it seemed in and age of #MeToo, college rape issues, and workplace harassment. I can't commend it.

Sequence by Lori Andrews

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this about ten pages from the end because I was so tired of it by then, and I regretted even hoping it would improve. This is yet another novel that convinces me that if the story isn't getting you where you want to be, there is no shame involved if you abandon it, and there is every good and sane reason to drop it and move on to something more fulfilling instead of wasting your life in continuance. To do otherwise is a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy.

The main character, Alex, who is a geneticist working for the government in a military lab who gets dragged into a crime investigation since she can to DNA forensics, was profoundly dumb. There were times when she was not so stupid, and I had hoped that this would be a case where a not-so-smart character shows a steady improvement as the story goes on, but she did not. In fact she actually regressed. For example, despite being a geneticist, she couldn't see what was obvious to me from the off: that if genetic markers are close but not an exact match for a suspect, then perhaps those markers might be those of a relative of the suspect rather than the suspect himself. Once she got on that path, the crime was all-but solved.

Obvious was an issue with this novel because I was way ahead of the investigators several times and that's not often the case with me in this kind of a novel, so I know a story is poorly-written if even I can figure it out so easily. It wasn't so much the obvious as the dumb that got to me though.

Alex leaps directly into bed with someone she barely knows, but of whom she does know he's a player. She has unprotected sex with him without a thought about condoms, which immediately turns me right off a story. Yeah, if the portrayal is of a character who is profoundly stupid and is heading for the wrecker's yard, that's one thing, but for a modern professional and purportedly a smart woman who is a medical doctor to boot, it completely betrays the character. It's especially bad if that same character is pining for a lost but hopeless love, and yet she has no problem simply leaping without even looking. I almost quit reading the story right there. It turns out I should have gone with my first instinct.

So overall this was not too bad of a plot in very general terms, but the writing wasn't where it needed to be to make this a really good story, and to have a female author once again have a female character who needs some sort of validation by having a male magically come into her life and give her everything she needs is too much in this day and age - or any day and age for that matter. I cannot commend this as a worthy read and resent the time I wasted on it! I'm done with the book and the author.

Cinders by Cara Malone

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum
“She leaned against the hood and worried at a hangnail on her pointy finger”
Surely she means 'pointer finger'?! This is why I have a problem with that term. OTOH, maybe she does have a pointy finger....

Well I made it almost 60% of the way through this before I had to run from it gagging. It started out pretty decently - a female firefighter, an arsonist, a love interest who wasn't yet a love interest but was quietly in the wings. Even when Marigold and Cynthia aka Cinder, aka Cyn, start to hook up, it still made for an entertaining story, although from that point on it became much more of a YA love story than ever it was an investigation into an arsonist. That I could even handle.

The problem came for me when the story made its nod and a wink to the Cinderella story. Marigold, who always complains about the amount of work she has to do, but all she seems to do is be a socialite, invites Cyn to a social event and Cyn comes dressed up, but gets called away to a fire. She changes shoes while talking to Mari in the parking area (for no apparent reason!), and accidentally leaves one of her loafers behind, which Mari then returns to her at the station house.

That part was fine, but as soon as these two began making out and going into a full blown sex session right there in the bunk room of the station house that was too much for me. It just felt wrong and sordid, and juvenile. If the author had made the fire alarm go off so they were interrupted when they began to make out, that for me would have made for a much more entertaining story! But this author went obvious on me and rather gross and immature as well, and that was far too much for my taste. That's when the romance felt fake and forced, like the author was faking it rather than feeling it, and I lost all interest.

I can't commend this based on the 60% or so that I read.

The Time Slip Girl by Elizabeth Andre

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
“Agnes swung her legs off the bed...” - except that Agnes was sleeping in a chair!
“The clothespins were long and made from one piece of wood with a slat down the middle” - I think she meant 'slot'!

This sounded from the blurb like an interesting novel, reminiscent in some small ways of my own Tears in Time wherein a lesbian girl travels in time. This book was much more straight-forward and simple than mine was though.

Dara, a young woman from 2014, is still suffering from the loss of her Asian fiancé Jenny, who died in a car accident. With Jenny, Dara shared a bucket-list of foreign locales to visit, but she felt she could not go to the next place on the list: China, since that was Jenny's trip. Instead, she visited the next after that: London with her brother, and while touring an Edwardian house, Dara goes off piste in a big way, first entering a dark basement alone, but then falling down the steps and awakening in 1908 in that same basement.

The first person she meets is Agnes, also a lesbian, but neither girl dare reveal her sexual nature to the other for fear of recrimination, repulsion, or derision. Since Agnes lives alone in a 'flat' (apartment) and works a decent job at a local department store, she allows Dara to stay with her until she can find her feet. Agnes slowly comes to accept Dara's story that she's from the future, and is fascinated by her "Butter toffee" skin. Agnes has met no women of color before.

Over the next few weeks Dara starts to settle in, gets a job serving in a disgustingly smokey pub, and meets a man who is studying what he calls 'timeslips' - and through whom she hopes to get back to her own time. In time also, the two young women finally realize they are both the same in terms of their desire for another of their own gender, and this is where the story fell apart for me. There was too much "Darling" this and "Darling" that, and it seemed so utterly unrealistic that it completely kicked me out of suspension of disbelief. It was far too sugary and didn't even sound remotely like anything a young woman of 2014 might say, let alone a woman of 1908, and I couldn't stand to read any more. Plus it was completely inauthentic.

Now I'm not a lesbian - I don't even play one on TV, but my beef isn't with that. It's with Agnes's character. This girl has been portrayed as shy, retiring, reserved, unadventurous, and intimidated by her older, mean, racist drunk of an exploitative brother. He completely disappears from the picture, but the problem for me was that Agnes changes overnight from being this shrinking violet into a sexual tiger in bed, and it seemed so out of character that I could not take it seriously.

If we'd been given some reason to expect this - some inner monolog about how she wants to be more aggressive in bed - that would have been one thing, but this is shortly after her brother is taken out of the story, and while you might think that his absence would liberate her somewhat, it happens so close to that - while she's still in mourning for losing her only living relative, that it fails as a plot device. It comes over instead as a clunky foreshadowing - look, I have no ties left in this life therefore I can come back to the future with you! Like her brother was ever a tie.

Another issue is that Dara is supposedly a computer programmer, so not expected to be dumb, yet never once in the part I read, which was about thirty percent if I recall, did she ever consider that she could maybe find a 'timeslip' to save Jenny from the accident. Perhaps that occurs or even happens later - I can't say, and I had no interest in finding out. I'd completely lost faith in this author's ability to get anywhere interesting or imaginative with this story.

The point was that as mournful of Jenny as she is, it never even crosses her mind, and despite her computer credentials, she never once considers the possibility that she might be able to help this scientist in some way to help herself. No, they had no computers back then - not as we would recognize them anyway, but she did have a logical mindset - you have to have that to be a programmer, yet it never entered her head to see if she could help. So this was a major betrayal of the character's smarts and desires.

So overall, while I was attracted to this story because I like time-travel stories, the execution of it left too much to be desired and I lost interest and DNF'd it. I can't commend it was a worthy read.

Cinderella Screwed Me Over by Cindi Madsen

Rating: WARTY!

I'm not opposed to chick lit and I've read a bit of it myself although it's not my first choice of genre, but quite honestly this was the worst kind of chick lit - arguably anti-#MeToo. I didn't read much of it, but to me it looked like the only connection it had to Cinderella was that the girl met her tediously predictably hunky guy when her stiletto heel got stuck in a crack between floorboards in this restaurant she frequents and in which this guy is part owner.

Her shoe comes off of course and he hands it back to her, but instead of leaving it to her to put it on, he puts his hand on her hip - not her arm or shoulder, or offers her his own arm for balance, but uninvited, he puts his hand on her hip 'to steady her', and she gets the wilts and the vapors. I'm immediately thinking, "I'm outta here. This is not my literature!" so I gave up on it. At only a few pages in.

Despite having a professional job in an office, this girl did not come off as very smart to me. She automatically assumed this guy was a liar when he told her he was part owner of the restaurant, like she was an expert on the place just because she eats there often. Neither is she the impoverished stepsister, so what this had to do with Cinderella, I have no idea. All I had actually needed to know is whether it was trespassing on my Cinderella territory or I on its, and the answer to that was a resounding 'no!' The story's nothing like what I'm writing so I fortunately don't need to be concerned with it at all, which is great, because I certainly didn't want to continue reading it.

I don't get why so many female authors so frequently subject their main characters to manhandling by strange men and then instead of becoming annoyed at it, turn to Jell-O. It sucks and it needs to stop. These two 'girls' were in the restaurant at the time of the shoe incident, so it probably wouldn't have been hard for the guy to quickly grab a chair from a nearby table. If they'd done that and she'd sat down and asked him to put the shoe on for her, that might have brought it a bit more in line with Cinderella and certainly been more socially acceptable and even romantic, but this author doesn't get it, and that's a problem. It might have been better yet if the guy had been part owner of a shoe store rather than a restaurant so he'd be naturally helping her to try-on shoes.

I didn't get how being a part owner fo a restaurant made him any kind of a prince either, unless the restaurant was Burger King! LOL! But as it happens, I really don't care because this story was trashy pap and not worth anyone's time. Readers need to demand better. Much better. More original, better written, more intelligent, and with real people instead of antique Barbie and Ken dolls.

Enchanted Moments by the Disney Product Marketing Team

Rating: WARTY!

This seemed to me to be a cynical offering from Disney. I have mixed feelings about this mega-corporation. They're way too big for one thing. Worse than that, they insist on churning out Star Bores movies that are so derivative as to be pathetic, and turned me permanently off the whole space opera.

But I do like what their Marvel unit puts out. The problem with Marvel is the same as it is with the 'princess' movies: it's all about the guys even though those princess movies superficially appear to be dedicated to their respective princesses! Most of the time, the stage is occupied by the male characters at least as far as speaking roles go. Apparently the princesses have little to contribute according to Disney. This weekend Marvel makes a major move to redress its deficit. What's its parent going to do?

This book, however, was just too much. It's nothing more than an advertisement for their Disney princess product line which is a part of the three billion dollar Disney product marketing machine. I have zero respect for the princesses despite Disney's limp efforts to retcon these girls into feminine powerhouses.

These days, if not always, Disney is all about retconning, taking public domain properties and turning them into movies and products, and then incestuously and endlessly feeding off of those same products by nothing more inventive or imaginative than repackaging. There's no originality here at all. Just how many times have they remade Cinderella? And now it seems they're embarking on a massive remake of everything. The only fresh thing they've had for years is Frozen, which I had a sneak preview of and enjoyed, but now they're essentially remaking that by adding a limp sequel.

This particular book consists of five thick cardboard pages, each starring a 'princess':

• Cinderella, not really a princess, but certainly the girl with the smallest shoe size on the planet, yet whose movie stands alone in the Disney canon by actually giving her close parity with the male characters in terms of exposure, but the truth is that Cinderella really did nothing for herself. She had it all handed to her by her fairy godmother and her animal slaves.
• Ariel was disobedient from the start, putting herself first and foremost in everything, and completely disregarding her father and the rest of her family in pursuit of her own selfish ambition.
• Belle's actual name was Beauty in the original (contrary to Lady Gaga's dilemma, early Disney movies were all about the Shallow). Again, she wasn't a princess, and she curiously seemed to favor the beast in his animal form, but her worst trait is that she despises everyone else in her village!
• Snow White was demoted from princess by the queen, and I've heard that she was Hitler's favorite Disney character. Perhaps the limpest of all princesses, she needed not one guy, but seven to validate her. And all she had ambition to do was clean house.
• Aurora slept (and didn't even walk) her way through life until some dude kissed her without her permission - which admittedly would have been hard to give. She has the least to say of any major Disney character.

I find none of these inspiring and cannot rate this as a worthy read. It's really just a marketing tool

Thaw by Elyse Springer

Rating: WARTY!

This is published under the 'Season of Love' collection, so I assume there is one for each season. Maybe the author changes her name, so the next one after this would be Elyse Summerer, the next, Elyse Faller, and finally, Elyse Winterer? But it's not a series; each can be read as a standalone - at least that's my judgment from having read a goodly portion of this one; however, it did not appeal to me sufficiently. I read about a half or maybe two-thirds of it, but it wasn't anything special and wasn't holding my attention so I gave up on it.

The story is of Abigail the librarian who ends up dancing with a high profile model at a charity ball, and for some obscure reason the model is so thrilled with Abigail that she invites her on a date, and so the two begin seeing each other, but the relationship has ups and downs and is platonic until one night when Abigail pleasures Gabrielle sexually, but even then there's no flinging of the sexual.

The two seem to be settling into an asexual relationship, but this felt so wishy-washy that I gave up on it. Not that two people cannot be asexually attracted to each other to the point where they want a partnership. I wrote of one myself in my novel Bass Metal, but somehow this particular story felt disingenuous and unrealistic, as though the author had wanted to write about a full-on lesbian relationship but didn't have the courage to do so.

The book blurb definitely doesn't help. It is so shallow when it says of Abigail that "she finds herself dancing with one of the most beautiful women she's ever met" as though that alone is the basis of the relationship. I felt this betrayed the author. Authors typically don't write their own blurbs unless they self-publish, so some idiot blurb writer for the publisher is likely responsible for that. The relationship in the book wasn't that shallow at all, but it still didn't engage me, so I can't commend this.

The Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian

Rating: WARTY!

Sixteen year old Theodosia, yet another in a long line of dumb, boring, derivative and pointless YA princesses has convinced me that YA princesses are now officially overtaking Disney princesses as the most interchangeable, generic, blandest princesses of all. Disney is showing some improvement, YA writers in general are not.

I now am honestly and seriously wondering what is wrong in particular with female YA writers that they cannot get out of both this princess rut and this asinine and tedious trilogy rut they are in. I guess money is more important to them than writing a good story. They so desperately want that book contract, don't they? And Big Publishing™ so desperately wants a story it can milk no matter how many times it's been done before, doesn't it? I'd rather never be published than play that game or get stuck in that rut.

So here we have Princess Dumbass, who saw her mother the Fire Queen killed on the order of the evil invading king, and now we're conveniently ten years on so we can have a princess in her mid-teens so we can have a moronic love-triangle, we find the princess is best friends with the daughter of the man who literally killed her mother, and falling in love with the son of the evil invading king. Barf. Is it even possible to have a dumber princess than this? Is it even possible to have a story that is more mix-and-match than this, with every single element taken from other YA stories?

Why, if the land of Theodocile was so powerful with the force (magical gems or air, earth, fire, and water barf) was it even possible for the invading king and his people - who have no magic - to win this war? And having won it, why would the invading king even leave anyone alive who was remotely connected to the ruling family? IT. MAKES. NO. SENSE. But it's a YA story written by a female author featuring a cloned princess, so why would it make any sense? There are, thank goodness, female YA writers who get it, but there are so many more of them who simply do not get it and never will. This author is one of them. She has drunk the YA Kool-Aid™ and the princess Flavor Aid™

From the first chapter I could see exactly how this would all pan out. I could tell, even though the book itself gave no indication of it on the cover, that this was going to be a trilogy with a love triangle. It was so painfully obvious that this book could well be a parody of itself. Having decided this was not for me, I read a few reviews on it, and the negative ones all agreed with my assessment. Don't even think of saying you can't review a book after reading so little of it. Yes, you can, when it's patently obvious that this is a cookie-cutter, YA, troll-ogy, female lead, female-written, love-triangle, uninventive, unimaginative, paint-by-the-numbers-of-dollars-you're-aiming-at, piece of tree-wasting garbage.

Bonfire by Krysten Ritter

Rating: WARTY!

If this novel had been written by an unknown and submitted as is, it would never have got published. The only reason it did get published is because it was written by a celebrity. The author is an actor who currently plays Jessica Jones in the Marvel TV series of the same name, and in that show I adore her, but a writer she's not. Not yet. She may become one if she can quit writing YA trope and cliché and find a topic that's not been done to death. And have an editor who's not afraid to say no to a celebrity.

This follows the done-to-death trope of the prodigal son (or in this case, daughter with the unimaginatively bland name of Abby Williams) returning home to confront "demons". Barf. Yawn. Barf some more. Yawn a bit. Ho-hum. So anyway, the main character returns to her even more unimaginatively named small town of Barrens, Indiana where she grew up (or maybe not) and where a conglomerate named Optimal Plastics appears to be responsible for polluting the water and causing people to get sick. We're told the town is now booming, but we're never told why a huge corporation would put its roots down in a lifeless hick town nowhere near major artery roads or airports in the first place. At least not in the part I listened to.

Abby is an environmental lawyer living in Chicago and apparently lives a life of drunkenness and debauchery there. You would think someone with that portfolio would be able to confront the girl who bullied her in high-school and now acts like they were old friends, but this character is such a limp rag that she doesn't say squat. Let me just make it clear that I would never want Abby Williams to represent me in court!

It was when Abby discovers that the house she's renting has a neigh-bore who is a single dad with a precocious young daughter that my nausea rose far too high to continue. It didn't help that Abby had lost all interest in pursuing the chemical company even by this point, and had become instead obsessed with tracking down this girl, Kaycee Mitchell, she knew in high-school who had since gone off the grid. Abby was not a likable character, and I honestly didn't give a damn about her or anything else in this story. I could not care less what happened to the missing girl, because I've been given no reason to care more.

From reading other reviews out there I understand that the author knows nothing about Indiana, thinking it a football state when it's a basketball state (even I, who has almost zero interest in fatuous and ultimately pointless sporting events, knew that!), and she misnames the state university and invents a toll road where none exists. It's so easy these days to research a place on the Internet, in Wikipedia, and even go look at it on Google maps, that there's no excuse for getting things like this wrong. It's sloppy and lazy.

The asinine blurb (for which I don't blame the author) promised "tantalizing twists, slow-burning suspense," but the only word in that whole phrase which applies here is 'slow'. I pulled this off the library shelf solely because it was written by Krysten Ritter. I thought it would be well worth reading, or rather listening to but it wasn't, even though reader Karissa Vacker did a decent job.

The best thing that can be said about this novel is that it's short, but apparently, according to some reviews I read, it could have been shorter still if the endless repetition had been cut out, and I believe them far more than ever I'd believe a blurb writer! I cannot recommend this based on the part I could stand to listen to. A bonfire is a great place for a novel like this.

Invisibility by David Levithan, Andrea Cremer

Rating: WARTY!

I liked Levithan's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist which he co-wrote with Rachel Cohn, but I did not like his Everyday, and now I find myself parting ways from him again with this crap.

Like in Nick & Nora, each author is writing a first person perspective, the one for the guy in the story, the other for the girl. It wasn't likable. I tend to really dislike first person voice with few exceptions, and I feel that when you multiply it, it just makes it worse, but that's not the worst problem for me with this story. The worst problem is how unrealistic it is, even if I grant that a boy can be literally invisible. The problem is that this boy shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in his world and doesn't even think of getting up to the adventures and mischief any red-blooded boy would think of if he were literally invisible as this boy is. He's so profoundly and irremediably boring.

The kick to the story is of course that this girl moves into an apartment just along the hall from his, and she can see him, but when they meet, it's set up like he tiptoes past her to go to his apartment. He claims he can't get in because he has to retrieve his key and he doesn't want her to see a key floating in the air apparently, but it's already been established that when he puts his clothes on, they also become invisible, and immediately after he puts food in his mouth, it also becomes invisible, so why wouldn't the key? For that matter, why wouldn't he simply carry the key with him? The boy's an idiot.

If Levithan had said the guy couldn't enter because he didn't want her to see a door open and close by itself, that would be one thing, but he didn't! Even that could have been written-off as someone looking out of their apartment and then closing the door, and I would have bought that. I can't buy the stupid and thoughtless scenario I was presented with here.

The girl is written just as dumbly, because she drops her keys and the boy doesn't offer to help because he doesn't think she can see him, but she can, and she chews him out for not helping her instead of doing what any self-possessed person would, which is put her bags down, get the keys, open the door, pick her bags up, and go inside! In short, she's also an idiot who would rather play the helpless maiden in distress than get on with things under her own steam. What she does is the precise equivalent of the old saw of a woman dropping a handkerchief to get a guy's attention! It was pathetic. She's precisely the opposite of a strong female character and I have no time for female characters like this one.

Do I want to read a story about two idiots and instadore? Hell no. The whole story struck me as short-sighted, artificial, and poorly thought-through. It was obviously a catastrophe waiting to happen, and not in a fun way. I couldn't stand to read any more of it!

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley

Rating: WARTY!

This was a print book I picked up because the premise sounded like it might offer something different from your usual YA trash of the helpless beautiful maiden in distress rescued by a boy - as though women are utterly useless and need to be rescued all the time. In the end it turned out to be precisely that, and I had to DNF it because it was so badly written, and yet another first person voice fiasco.

Terra Cooper (yes, that's her idiotic name) has everything a YA girl could want: blond hair and an enviable body, also a jock boyfriend, but we're told she has a flawed face. Her family is, predictably in YA, also flawed. Her father refuses to pay for her to go to the small college of her choice, trying to force her to go to the overly large college which is only three hours away where he can still control her. Terra wants to be further from him than that but is apparently too stupid to understand that her father wouldn't agree, and instead, seek a student loan or a scholarship. In short, she's a moron. But none of this really matters because Terra's only real problem is her obsession with the 'port wine' stain on her face, which lasers don't seem to have been able to remove.

Naturally a woman as hopeless as this needs to be rescued by a "handsome but quirky Goth boy." Clearly the novel is supposed to teach lessons about skin-deep and self-determination, but the amount of obsessing over the port-wine in the few pages I could stand to read told me this was going nowhere interesting or good, and also that the novel was going to be completely untrue to its premise. And the cartographic references were way the hell overdone even in the short portion I read.

That wasn't even the worse part (and no, it's not that I actually paid for this with my own money, either!). The worst part was why a woman who'd had this stain on her face her whole life would be obsessed with it now rather than so used to it that she rarely gave it any thought. It was entirely unrealistic. If this obsession was indeed the case, then this girl has bigger problems than which college she goes to, or a control-freak father, and she needs serious psychiatric help. I doubt a handsome Goth boy is up to the task.

The novel was pedantic and boring, predictable and asinine. I do not recommend it.

School for Psychics by KC Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy, for which I thank the publisher.

Not to be confused with The School for Psychics by Carolyn Jourdan, this School for Psychics is volume one is a series which seems to have as its aim to be an adult version of Harry Potter, but don't let that fool you. It's really a YA novel with non-YA characters, and this made for an inauthentic, if not laughable story. I did not like it. I didn't like the main character, which was the first problem I had with this. She started out fine, but went rapidly downhill.

24-year-old Teddy Cannon owes a lot of money (like low six figures) to a Serbian crook by the name of Sergei. Her plan is to use her psychic ability (which she doesn't know she has) to win big at poker and repay the loan. How she ever got into such debt when she can win so easily at poker is a mystery. Though she doesn't realize it, she's psychic and knows exactly what the other players have in their hands.

In her ignorance of her true calling, she puts this skill down to her ability to detect their 'tells' - little peccadilloes and mannerisms which reveal what they're holding in their hands. As it happens when we meet her on her big gamble, she fails and is contacted by a mysterious man who invites her to come to the school for Psychics on an island off the coast of California. If she does, he says, all her debts will be paid. Does that sound like entrapment? It did to me, but Teddy isn't smart enough to be the least bit suspicious of how all this magically came together. I wondered if she was set up for this right from the off, but if she had been, it really would have made no sense anyway.

I also have to wonder, since she's been specially recruited - having been watched for some time - why her recruiter waited so long, and if he's so sure about her, why she has to undergo these entrance tests. As another reviewer suggested, it would have been better to test potential recruits before they arrive at this secret school, not afterwards, but none of this is gone into in the novel. It speaks very poorly of the recruiters skills that so many new entrants were kicked out so quickly. Up to the point of Teddy's arrival at the school, the story wasn't too bad at all and it held my interest, but it went downhill quickly once school began. The author needed to think this through much more than she evidently did, is what it felt like to me. It simply wasn't realistic, even within its own framework.

Teddy thought she was epileptic. She had no idea she was psychic, although how that happened went unexplained in the 25% or so of this that I could stand to read. You would think that someone introduced to a whole new world as Teddy was, would revel in it, but she acted like she didn't care much about anything - she behaved as though it was simply another day in the life, which again felt inauthentic.

In the end, my biggest problem with this was that I wanted to read "School for Psychics" not a heated Harlequin romance, but that was what I got instead. I wanted to read about a main character who was strong and independent and who relished the chance to learn to use her abilities. I did not want to read about clichéd 'bitch in heat' who really had no great interest in anything save the "hot guy" she sees on the first day, and with whom she can't wait to have unsafe sex. I don't do covers because my blog is about writing, and author's have little control over their cover unless they self-publish, but this novel's cover was actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it was wrong for the book, which ought to have had the stereotypical naked, shaven-chested guy on the front cover, standing behind a swooning Teddy.

So it's not really about psychics at all, it's about this woman's obsession with this guy and which turns into a clichéd YA triangle in short order. Yawn. I wanted something original and instead we got a boring version of X-Men crossed with Harry Potter, and this had the worst elements of both those and a poor YA novel into the bargain. There's even an guy unoriginally named Pyro. Barf. It's all adults, but it reads like a high-school romance. Sorry, not interested!

I wanted to read about the psychics, not how hot this woman thinks this guy is. If she'd just mentioned it a couple of times, that would be fine, but it's every other page and it's boring. I don't want to read about women like that. Women do not need a man to validate them and it's sad that so many female authors think they need not one, but two, including your standard trope bad-boy, to make a woman whole. I cannot recommend a novel that's as bad as this one, and is so insulting to women.

Double Exposure by Bridget Birdsall

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
This novel was as bad as it was illiterate:
p75: "She's the youngest of six boys."? She is the youngest of six boys? How about "She's the youngest of seven; the other six are boys"?
"Fifty frames a minute and the shudder speed’s unbelievable" p174 Shudder speed? Maybe fifty frames a minute is what makes the shutter shudder?
P180 use of ‘you’re’ where ‘your’ should have been employed. This author teaches writing? No, she relies on auto-correct. Creative auto-correct!
P232 “His bicep bulges” That last 's' is in the wrong place! Once again YA authors the word is biceps Unless you are specifically referring to a single one of the attachments to the upper arm, one of which is the short head, the other of which is the long head, then what you're talking about - what we normally called the muscle that bulges when the arm is flexed as in strong-man posing - is the friggin' biceps, you ill-educated morons. But maybe she was writing creatively?
"Su rounding" p243 As in Su rounded by idiots? Okay I've given up on the author, but did this book not have any editors? Bueller? Anyone? There were enough people mentioned in the acknowledgements. What the hell did any of them do? Did none of them read it? Were they all so gushing that it was a LGBTQIA story that might have a chance of selling that no one cared if it was any good or even spelled correctly? Even a piece of lard like Microsoft Word will catch many of these things. Or was it creatively-written by hand and typeset ye olde fashioned way? It's leaden enough that it could be such a piece of fool's cap sheet.
The author can't do math. We learn that the team is averaging 2 games per week, but after three weeks they’re 10-0? Does the author teach creative writing or creative math! Creative writing! LOL! All writing is creative if it's done right!

This was, thankfully a book I did not pay money for, but borrowed from my excellent library. It began well enough, but at the time I didn't realize how bad it would become because I did not know that the author taught (guffaw) creative writing. Anyone who teaches creative writing or who has passed through a college creative writing course is guaranteed to write god-awful novels in my experience.

The first cliché was the bullying. Barf. I skipped that. Notice that I didn't say 'inexcusable cliché' because bullying of LGBTQIAs is rife, and that's what's inexcusable and needs to be stamped-out ruthlessly along with all other forms of bullying. But turning it into a trope high-school bullying story is not going to help because it cheapens the problem by making it blatantly, painfully (I'm talking about the reader, not the character) obvious. Like there's no other kind. Ever. And as if once were insufficient, our main character gets bullied twice, in two different states! Two for the price of one! Limited Offal! Buy into it now! Yawn. Barf.

Next up is the inexcusably clichéd fiery green-eyed (JEALOUS, get it?) redhead. Yawn. Barf squared. Wait, what is it you teach, Bridget Birdsall? I forget - was it clichéd writing or creative writing? There is a difference, you know.

Taught writing isn't taut writing; it's trope writing, which brings me to the trope boyfriend being telegraphed from twenty-thousand light years away. Barf. Yawn. Clichéd or creative? Clichéd or creative? Anyone?

Next up is the sport, because your student has to be sports or arts. You know there's nothing else in the entire school curriculum worth writing about, in "creative" writing, right? Sports includes the clichéd dancer, and arts includes the clichéd image maker. Oh, wait, we have both! The main character is a basketball player and her love interest is a photographer! But all Alyx wants to do is be a girl.

But wait - how can she be a girl? Yeah she's quite literally intersex, having one testicle and one ovary, and one penis and one vulva, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that, never having been a girl before - always living as a boy, despite feeling like a girl, Alyx, who happens to have a magically unisex name complete with totally weird spelling (this in a family which boasts an 'uncle grizzly'), magically transforms into perfectly ordinary girl in the short space of time it takes to travel from California to Milwaukee!

I-80 sure is educational isn't it? God Bless President Eisenhowitzer! Ike 80 provided her with a cute feminine wardrobe too, so she felt completely at ease among girls from day one at her new high-school! She has no issues or problems learning to be a girl among girls. She has only issues with PTSD from the bullying in her old school. Hmm!

It might not have been so bad had Alyx been likeable, but she was so self-obsessed and so selfish that she simply wasn't likeable. She was annoying at best. At one point, at a party, her fellow newbie and possibly best friend Roslyn is so out of it that it scares Alyx, but rather than watch over her friend or take her home to make sure she's not abused, Alyx is quite ready to abandon her and run home? Friends don't let friends get friendly drunk.

At Christmas, Alyx gets gets a brand new smartphone replacing the one which was damaged when she was beaten up in Cali-floor-ya. Almost immediately, she purposefully kicks it off her bed onto the floor because she doesn't have any friends! That's what a shrewish ingrate she is. Likeable she is not. This is called creative unfriending, in case you wondered.

I don't mind a weak female character who learns to be strong, but Alyx never does. She's a weak-assed wuss to the very end, caving again even in the last few pages to make a magical ending in which her mortal enemy who treated her like shit for the entire novel, and screwed her over every chance she got, is forgiven by means of Alyx rolling over one more time for a certifiably Disney-esque ending. And I do mean certifiable. Was the author embarrassed by this ending? Is that why it was flash-Frozen-over?

I'm sorry, but this story SUCKED. It was awful and was exactly what I would expect from a creative writing pogrom. Some might argue that this is better than nothing, but the intersex community deserves so much better than this creative nothing.