Venus in Love by Tina Michele

Title: Venus in Love
Author: Tina Michele
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Rating: WARTY!

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

There was a prologue for this novel, which I skipped as I always do. I've never regretted not reading a prologue! If the author doesn’t deem it important enough to put right there in chapter one, it’s not important enough for me to expend time in reading it.

This novel is about Ainsley ("Lee") Rae Dencourt and Morgan Blake, and their "romance". Frankly I wasn't impressed by Lee right from the first page. At least she wasn't telling us this story in first person, for which I thank the author whole-heartedly, but the way that Lee comes off towards the bottom of the first page (which is actually page 16, not page one) of chapter one, she seems to me like she's irritatingly weak and needy.

Lee's father died eighteen months previously, so there's an understandable raw-ness to her feelings, but the way the narrative goes on about how he was always there for her, even when she rudely interrupted his meetings, and she was always seeking his advice, made her look like a really spineless, inconsiderate, and whiny brat! As I turned the page and saw that she then became angry at her father for his making her feel dependent, I sincerely I hoped she wasn't going to continue in this vain vein…! Unfortunately, she did.

When we meet her, Lee is heading to her favorite place in the world, which is the Louvre in Paris. In college, she met a girl whose name she never knew, and whom she simply thought of as Venus. This person is Morgan, and the two of them of course meet up later, but the meetings and interactions are so artificial and stilted that they were not even remotely natural and they were not entertaining, either. There's also a massive chasm between what we're told that the characters are feeling in this novel, and how they behave, and we’re offered nothing to explain why there's such a huge discrepancy.

It so happens that Lee's fantasy girl is employed at the Louvre, but instead of Lee seizing the moment and immediately going over to her to re-introduce herself as soon as she spots her, Lee hides behind a statue! It's nonsensical. Shortly after this, Lee once again proves how selfish and self-centered she is by using her privileged status as a gallery big-wig to talk a senior staff member at the museum into forcing Morgan to give her a tour.

Morgan is temporarily employed at the Louvre and is working on setting up an art exhibition, so Lee's selfishness and stupidity here drags Morgan away from something which is very important to her. That's the message I kept on getting - that it's all about Lee and her manipulative behavior, and the hell with Morgan's needs. By this point I really did not like Lee in the slightest. Morgan deserves better than someone who thinks that money can buy anyone and privilege can get you anything.

In contrast with that cynical perspective, we're also treated to the stupid perspective whereby, and despite the fact that both of them (we're repeatedly told, not shown) have flutter,s and weak knees, and throbbing hearts, they fail to pursue the relationship with any of the passion they purportedly feel! that night! We keep on having it drilled into us what passion they have for each other, but they never pursue it! Instead, they go to dinner together the next evening and though they kiss, they still take it no further.

The next night is the opening of the exhibition, and the two are supposed to attend together, but Lee finds a way to screw even that up for Morgan. Lee's mom becomes ill, and even though her mom is nowhere near at death's door, Lee immediately charters a private jet and goes home. Never once does she make any effort whatsoever to contact poor Morgan and tell her what’s happened, or to leave her a message. The two of them are also apparently phone-shy in the extreme, because they evidently don't trade phone numbers. Morgan never even got Lee's last name. This was way too artificial for me.

Once back in the US, Lee discovers that her mom has decided to retire from running the Dencourt gallery, so Lee is put in charge, and she cooks up a scheme to get Morgan working there - again manipulating her without even trying to talk to her. Their whole interaction is completely brain-dead.

This wasn't even the worst part, believe it or not. Never once during their entire interaction during the portion which I read, was there any indication of any real feeling here or the remotest hint of developing respect and consideration for one another. The entire relationship was nothing but pure, unadulterated adolescent lust. That's all we got. If the novel had been about domination, then it would have fit the bill a lot better, because nothing here spoke of love at all. It wasn't a friendship. Friends do not treat people like Lee treated Morgan. It wasn't even erotic - it was just trivial, artificial, and ultimately boring.

So after some seventy pages of this novel I couldn't help but conclude that it was thoroughly ridiculous, with patently phony scenarios set-up to create fake excuses in place of naturally developed tension. It was entirely unrealistic, and what we got wasn't at all well done. Most of the writing was conversation or long expository paragraphs. There was no real attempt to create any kind of atmosphere or warmth, or chemistry between the characters.

Neither was there any attempt to create any sense of place and life. This began in Paris, and it was centered around art, but there was no feeling of atmosphere, of an exotic locale, or of scents, or sounds or joie de vivre. Despite the art premise for the story, even the art was given short shrift. It felt far more like stage props, literally littered around the place to fake a background than ever it did real live art.

I honestly cannot recommend this novel. Morgan deserved better and so did the readers.

The Housewife Assassin's Handbook by Josie Brown

Title: The Housewife Assassin's Handbook
Author: Josie Brown
Publisher: Signal Press
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
At then end of chapter 2: "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in site." should be "Of course, there are no oven mitts anywhere in sight."

It's the eighth of the month so this must be a novel which has a title starting with 'H'!

Sometimes books like this work, and sometimes they crash and burn, but they're so appealing to me that I keep on picking them up anyway, in the hope of finding a gem. One of my issues with books like this is that there can be some subtle (and not-so-subtle!) genderism involved - yes, women can be just as genderist as men. I noticed this in this novel, but it was relatively mild, so I decided to let it slide.

The premise in this story is that Donna Stone was married, unknowingly, to a CIA field agent named Carl. Carl had infiltrated a Russian mob, and they'd discovered him. On the same day - almost a the same time - that the Stone's third child, Trisha, was born, Carl's Porsche exploded and very little was left of him. Now Donna has followed in his footsteps to revenge her beloved husband's death, and she's not at all squeamish about doing whatever it takes to achieve her aim.

I don’t buy for a minute that Carl is dead! There was no body - in any meaningful sense - to identify, but if he isn’t, he's sure taking his sweet time letting his wife know that he's fine. For over a year Donna was still maintaining the increasingly absurd fiction that her husband abroad, on an extended tour of duty for Acme corporation - for which he works/worked, and which is a CIA front.

Meanwhile she's a mom to three children, and having to deal with teen tantrums and transportation. Initially she was living off Carl's continued salary as even the CIA, for reasons of their own, maintained the fiction that he was alive and well, and living incognito. Unfortunately, after that first year, this stipend ended stupendously, hence Donna's need for employment.

It was at 25% into this novel that the real turn-off showed-up in the form of a character named Jack. I've sworn never to purchase another book with a main character named Jack because I'm nauseated beyond polite language by the fact that this is the cheesiest, most over-employed, most brain-dead, most clichéd, laziest, most stupid-ass trope character name ever. I'm serious. Are authors so utterly vacuous and so deeply entrenched in their rut that they can’t think of a different name? Must they be hide-bound by mindless tradition? I guess so.

Now, I still have some books on my reading list which no doubt have a character with this name in them - such as this one, for example - and I'm committed to at least starting them because they're on my list, but I'm by no means committed to finishing such books or to giving them a good rating. In fact, were I to rate using stars (other than the binary 'worthy' five star or a 'warty' one star ratings which I habitually use), I would drop two or three stars for this alone. I'd drop another two or three for the fact that this jack-ass, who is supposed to be undercover, is driving around the neighborhood in a Lamborghini Aventador (the same car that billionaire Bruce Wayne drove in one of the Chris Nolan Batman movies).

So I was at this point faced with a problem in that I was enjoying this novel until this character name showed up, and it’s not only the name - the circumstances of his arrival were completely implausible. That alone would merit a one or two-star drop, and a further one or two stars would disappear because he has his "broad, muscled chest" and it's bared, which is another one or two star deficit for maximum trope-age. In addition to that, he's a complete jerk, so another two for sure there. At that point, this novel has plummeted from a potential five star rating down to something in the region of a negative four stars to a negative nine stars, depending upon what mood I was in when I quit reading (which may or may not coincide with my finishing the novel)! All because of this Jack(-off). It took very little time to decide.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this woman - whom the author has gone seriously out of her way to drill into us loved her husband beyond anything, misses him tragically, and can't stop thinking about him - has no problem whatsoever in throwing herself at this guy even as she deludes her mindless self that she hates him. So we’ve gone from a delightful novel where anything could conceivably happen to a completely clichéd one where it’s is so absurdly and painfully obvious what’s going to happen that the story is no longer even remotely interesting. I rate it warty!

The Siren and the Sword by Cecilia Tan

Title: The Siren and the Sword
Author: Cecilia Tan
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
p47 "…then la down…" should be "…then lay down.."

This novel is a huge rip-off of the Harry Potter stories (and the author admits it - kinda!). It's book one of the Magic University series, because one novel is never enough any more in the YA world. There was a prologue which I skipped as I always do. If the writer doesn’t consider it important enough to put into chapter one or later, then it’s not important enough for me to waste my time reading it. I've followed this philosophy consistently and I've never come across a novel (including this one) where I've had to go back and read the prologue because I felt I missed something. QED.

The novel is about main character Kyle's integration into magic college, his making of friends, and his resolving the issue of who is the siren who haunts the college library, but I use the word "story" very loosely because there really isn't one. What there is, is really thin and not nourishing at all. There's nothing new, original, or even interesting here, unless all you want is a cheap non-romance and some raunchy sex (Celia Tan is primarily a writer of erotica). That isn't enough for me.

There are no interesting characters here: no one who stands out, or who registers as engaging or fun, or admirable. There's no villain as such, and there's really no attempt whatsoever at world-building, so we're treated to a tale that's essentially just a series of sketches or vignettes rather than a real story.

The best thing about his novel is that it’s not told in first person PoV - the most self-centered, pretentious, and inauthentic of writing styles. I commend the author for that, but the rest is pretty much boiler-plate Harry Potter. Kyle Wadsworth is in the trope position of starting his first day at a new and surprisingly unexpected school. He's an orphan boy who isn’t wanted at home, who suddenly finds out that he's magical, and sees 'new school' as synonymous with 'new home'.

The only real difference is that Kyle is eighteen and starting college instead of just launching into a middle and high school education. You might want to make a note that there's a strong and very prevalent sexual content in this novel - which definitely wasn't in Harry Potter and which is much more graphic than you usually find in YA stories. That didn't bother me, and in some ways it was quite well done, but I never trusted it for some reason, and given how the story turned out in the end, it made everything that went before seem farcical and inauthentic.

We're quickly introduced to Jess, who's a stand-in for Ginny Weasley (after a fashion), but who has nowhere near the power which Ginny had. Next we meet Alex, who is pretty much Ron Weasley, and we meet Lindy, who is a clone of Hermione Granger, right down to her being born of non-magical parents and having wild hair. Not only is Kyle magical, but he's a special magical person - just like Harry Potter - and there's a prophecy about him. And just like Hogwarts, there are four school houses which follow the four suits of (tarot) cards:

• Camella (Latin for a bowl or a cup
• Gladius (Latin for a short sword - the primary fighting instrument of the Roman legions)
• Nummus (the Latin term for copper coins)
• Scipionis means that which belongs to Scipio (who was a Roman general), but it also means a rod or a staff

Just like Harry, Kyle is placed into one of these houses by magical means. Unlike Harry, he gets Gladius, which isn't the one he wanted. Like Harry, his dorm room is way up in the top of a tower above the common room. Oh! And there's even an underground chamber. This one isn't hidden, although it probably contains secrets.

Unlike Harry, Kyle has no problem whatsoever completely swallowing everything he's told - including, of course, the revelation that there are magical and non-magical people. None of this freaks him out, or even imbues him with a modicum of skepticism. He immediately and completely believes it all. I didn't like Kyle.

There's a really funny instance of cluelessness from Jess when the two of them 'magically' hook up and go out to eat. Jess claims she had a prophetic dream of meeting a man at a carnavale. That dream has never come true, so why on Earth is she claiming it was prophetic? Just because she remembers it? Lol! This struck me as completely nonsensical. I didn't like Jess.

Suddenly on their way to get pizza, her eyes look like deep pools to Kyle, and now the two of them are no longer hungry but horny! Once again we have a relationship in a YA novel which is all about looks, skin deep, carnality - and nothing to do with actually getting to know and value - or even like - a person. It's sad that this was written by a woman.

The classes Kyle is assigned make no sense. He's assigned a class on poetry! Why? Isn’t he supposed to be training to be some kind of a magician? He's a late starter (how that's so when he's just applying to the college is a complete mystery - students don’t normally apply to start when it's already two weeks after the semester begins) - but if he's late as we're told, and magically clueless, as we're told, then why isn't he being assigned some intensive introductory courses? There's no explanation for this.

At one point, we meet Kyle sitting outside a building with gryphons at the door (gryphon-door get it?!) and our hero is so clueless that he can’t think of a single thing to say about a TS Eliot poem. He's not the sharpest sword in the house is he? Fortunately this is where his magical powers come in, and he breezes the class. Apparent his magical power is understanding poetry.... Excuse me?

Next we're having broomstick races and someone is injured. I wonder where I read that before? Keep an eye on the person who gets injured - he fades from view in the story, and then comes roaring back completely out of the blue (and making no sense whatsoever plot-wise) towards the end.

Once again on page 69 (how appropriate) we get prettiness specified as the most important trait in a woman. Shame on Celia Tan. She also writes a conversation in which a nineteen-year-old uses the word "honey" as an endearment. Really? That struck me as highly unlikely. Which teens use that word any more? The author has Kyle talking about being in love with Jess when they hardly know each other, and when the only thing they evidently have in common is sex. It made me lose respect for Kyle that he "fell in love" with someone as shallow, one-dimensional, and cardboard as Jess.

The author does make an effort to pull it out of the fire in the second half, and things began to get a bit more readable with some unexpected twists and turns, but in the end, this wasn't a good story. It was too flimsy and lacking in any real substance. The characters were readily forgettable. The novel had far too little to offer. it had nothing new, and I can't generate any enthusiasm for reading a whole series like this. I barely managed to talk myself into finishing this and would not have done so were it not so short.

The Wedding Hoax by Heather Thurmeier

Title: The Wedding Hoax
Author/Editor: Heather Thurmeier
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!

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

I've hung on with Entangled for a long time because a couple of their early reads were so good that I couldn’t help but continue hoping for more. Just recently I favorably reviewed one of their teen romances which, while problematic, at least pretended that it could break the mold, but I've reluctantly come to the conclusion after several disasters in a row, that this publisher is just not for me, not as its currently operating.

The novels which appear under its banner are far too predictable and formulaic, and perhaps there are readers who love that and live for it, but I am not one of them and I know I never will be.

I can’t tell you what this story is about (except in the vaguest of terms, all of which you know already), because I made it only to page three before nausea hit me when I read this:

"Green eyes with little flecks of gold in them, a chiseled jaw that would make a Greek God jealous, and chestnut-colored hair just long enough to drag her fingers through but not so long it was feminine."

…because god forbid there should ever be anything even remotely feminine about a guy! God forbid we should have a young-adult male romantic lead who doesn't have gold flecks in his eyes! God forbid that we should have any romance novel where the male doesn't have a chiseled jaw and a muscular torso welded to his character! Seriously? I'm still nauseous from reading that even now, several days later. That's so may kinds of trite, trope, clichéd and wrong in one sentence that I scarcely know where to start. 'Sentence fragment' doesn’t even have what it takes to make such list.

Why is it so utterly impossible for female romance writers to take even one small step for a man and make a giant leap for womankind? Why are they so immovably transfixed by trope? Why are they so cramped by cliche and thereby so entangled in this cheap formulaic fabric which they've convinced themselves they must wear to be a romance writer that they hold their readers prisoner to it to? Do they not want to liberate women from this?

Are they so financially comfortable with it that it never occurs to them that they could deliver so much more? They could do a real service for others of their gender if they were willing to stretch a bit, so why do they, in this era of so much freedom for women, labor so industriously to keep their own gender imprisoned like this?

I don't know what any one writer's individual motives are, but I do know that publishers carry the bulk of the responsibility for this situation. There are publishers who will not entertain a romance manuscript if it does not conform to a specific template. In this era of self-publishing, there's no reason why we have to bow down to their demands.

I can't recommend this novel or any other novel like it. And now, in yet another sorry attempt to perk up a negative review with a song parody, and since, on the subject of romance, I've been reading Pygmalion lately, here's my offering this time:

I have often read books like this before,
But must they always sport this self-same sorry list of bores?
All at once am I heaving heavy sighs,
Knowing I'm entangled in this blight.

Do the old growth trees need to be so cut down?
Must we read books with such a complement of clowns?
Does enchantment rage out of every page?
No, not in so clichéd books like this blight.

And oh, the horrible feeling
Just to know this book is so drear
The overpowering feeling
That every page will have a cliché that I fear.

People stop and read - they don't bother me,
They're just trapped in sorry romance reams of entropy.

Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can avoid reading more of this blight.

People stop and read - they don't bother me,
They're just trapped in sorry romance reams of entropy.

Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can avoid reading more of this blight.

(composer: Frederick Loewe, Librettist: Alan Jay Lerner, new words: Ian Wood)

Soppy by Philippa Rice

Title: Soppy
Author: Philippa Rice
Publisher: Andrews McMeel
Rating: WARTY!

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

This graphic novel was a major disappointment for me. Usually I'm good at picking ones to review that I end-up liking, but once in a while I screw up in a big way! Soppy attracted me because of the title and the bold coloring (it turns out that the coloring - black, red white - is all there is; it’s not just the cover!), and because it was a British story, so I looked forward to a bit of homeland security as it were. I was disappointed.

Alas (and a lad) it wasn’t to be. Soppy is precisely that, but a better title might have been 'Sugary' because all this is, is a tale of two people moving-in together and experiencing exactly the same things the rest of us do. Why should I care? Normally, if you're going to tell a story like this, then you add humor, or you add insight, or you add pathos, or you add a twist and a tweak to take it out of the ordinary. Even slapstick will do it, but there's none of any of that here. It takes ordinary to extremes. In fact it's extraordinary how ordinary this is.

This is just a boring story of two perfectly ordinary people doing perfectly ordinary things. They do nothing of interest, and actually their lives are quite limited. They keep on doing the same things. They appear to have no work at all (they both apparently work from home, but do almost nothing in their job, evidently). I wish I had that "job". They also sleep for an inordinate amount of time, so we have frame after frame of them completely inert, with no dialog. Seriously? There's almost no talking at all, since there's nothing to be said about ordinary. A yawn or two maybe, but otherwise nothing of note.

This is the kind of story Nora Ephron would have told in a movie starring Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal with Meg Ryan, but that would have been amusing or quirky at least. What we have here instead is the kind of vacuous story I would have written in my teens. It’s not even a British story: it could have been any well-to-do couple in any western nation and it would have been exactly the same (except that this couple has no physical relationship to speak of, if we're to believe this story!).

I honestly got nothing out of this, and I cannot recommend it.

Cupcakes and Ink by Helena Hunting

Title: Cupcakes and Ink
Author: Helena Hunting
Publisher: Simon & Schuster audio
Rating: WARTY!

Read pathetically by Elizabeth Louise and Jason Carpenter.

The author's name sounds like the title of a John Green novel, doesn't it?! This is a prequel, so we're told, but it was one disk, and that was it. Not even a short story to speak of! In other words, it's merely a trailer or a teaser, and it failed to tease, leaving with its trailer dragging between its legs. The two reader's voices were sadly inadequate, and the story itself was dumb and boring.

It's is told in two parts, once from the female PoV in first person, and once from the male in the same way. I detest 1PoV because it's so limiting, self-centered, and usually not done well, although some authors can do a decent job of it. The problem with the female half, which came first, was that she sounded like a complete ditz - a vacuous air-headed co-ed with nothing of interest to offer. She's quite obviously the cupcake in the title, and the dark thoughts of the male make him the ink, without a doubt.

I could not grasp at first why the male, whose name I forget (he was a very forgettable character), had any interest in Tenley, which is the bizarre name of the female, but soon it became clear. He is just as flat and uninteresting as she is, so they're actually perfect for each other; it's a match made in "Good heavens!"

Both are equally shallow, interested only in the pure physical appearance of the other. The guy actually plays peeping Tom, but it's really Tenley's fault since she's romping around her apartment in her skivvies, and she doesn't believe in expending valuable energy drawing her curtains. Guys will look (and so will girls), and that's all there is to it. If you don't make reasonable attempts at safeguarding your private domain, such as in the simple act of pulling the drapes, then it's curtains for your privacy, and you have only yourself to blame!

Nothing happens in this teaser except fantasy - at least, the guy fantasizes whilst he masturbates until his ink runs out, but the cupcake is obviously far too delicate for something as robust as masturbating, so she merely has a wet dream, and that's actually what this teaser was: all wet and a good story? In your dreams.

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

Title: A Certain Slant of Light
Author: Laura Whitcomb
Publisher: Listening library
Rating: WARTY!

Read endearingly (for the most part) by Lauren Molina.

Note to Laura Whitcomb: the thing which Neptune holds in his hand is a trident, not a triton - unless, that is, you're trying to suggest that Neptune sports a fellow god in his hand....

WARNING: DIABETICS SHOULD UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES PARTAKE OF THE ENDING TO THIS NOVEL - IT'S FAR TOO SUGARY!

Note right up front that this is the first of the "Light" series, yet another YA series, because we don't have anywhere near enough of those out there, do we? Just so's you know what you're letting yourself in for! This is one of at least a dozen novels with this same title - or a title very similar - so be careful what you pick off the shelf! It's also rather explicit sexually, too, so it's not necessarily for the younger end of the YA range (which inexplicably runs from 14 - 24).

The story begins with a ghost which is well over a century old, and which is always on the verge (for reasons unexplained, at least to begin with) of being dragged down into hell. The only way the ghost can avoid this is to haunt a living person (again for reasons unexplained) - and by this, I don't mean haunt in the traditional sense. The people the ghost chooses are unaware of the fact that they're being parasitized.

Once this is done, the ghost is safe from being dragged down, but the price is that it must stay within a relatively short distance of the 'host' person otherwise it hurts. This is very much appropriated from the daemon-person relationship in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, except in this case they're decidedly one-sidedly abiding by.

The ghost in this case is a young woman named Helen. What it really means to identify as female when you're not in an actual body is debatable, but no such debate is held in this novel. Indeed, the ghost is exactly like a flesh human being, except that there's no flesh, so that's weird to begin with. Having neither flesh nor skeleton, nor muscles, how it can even move is, again, unexplained. The ghost can see and hear perfectly well, but cannot taste, touch, or smell. Again, no explanation is offered for this specialization in sensory apparatus, but what this does mean is that we're not dealing with anything new or original here! It your bog standard, common-or-garden, clichéd trope ghost just like in pretty much every other ghost story you've ever read or that's ever been written.

The bottom line is that we get neither information, nor even speculation about what the ghost is: spirit, soul, energy? We don't know, and this is important for later events. We do get a summary of how the ghost spent the last century or so, but no real details. It's only at the very end of the novel that we find out how Helen ended up dying, and the ending is so sugary you will wretch as she did. The ending makes zero sense and it's quite simply stupid.

Another huge problem with this story is that Helen, the ghost in question, is pretty much exactly like a modern teenager. This is despite spending well over a century as a ghost! Helen relates that her birth predated the US Civil war, which means that she's somewhere in the vicinity of 150 years old. She didn't even die as a teen - she died at age 27, and was a married woman with a child when she died. Contrast this with her current behavior in which she acts exactly like a fifteen year old, which is convenient, because that's the age of the flesh-and-blood body which she steals. In this regard this is exactly the same kind of situation found in the ridiculous Twilight series (which I flatly refuse to read), where we have an 800-year-old (or whatever) vampire who not only looks like a high-school kid, but behaves exactly like one.

Again just like in Twilight, Helen finds a younger person with whom to fall in lust, but there's actually a bit of a twist here, because the younger person, although inhabiting the body of a teen, is (or was) a ghost just like Helen. The difference is that he has discovered that he can 'take-over' the 'vacant' body. In his case, 'vacant' is defined as a drug-addicted boy who was on the verge of dying from an overdose. The boy's 'spirit' vacated the body (why isn't explained), but the body did not die (again, why isn't explained), and James was able to 'assume ownership'!

It's this meat squat that he's occupying which allows him to see our main character. It's the first time he's ever seen another ghost. His name is James (although his body's name is Billy), and he's a century old (he was a soldier in his mid-twenties in World War One who died on the battlefield in France), so the discrepancy in ages is not as absurdly massive as in Twilight, but Helen is still half a century older than he is, by any measure. Despite this, both of them behave like, and have the libido of, the adolescent bodies they take over. It's completely unrealistic to the point of being farcical.

Typically this would turn me off the story, but I was listening to the audio book, and whether this made a difference or not, I can't say, not having read the text version. I found the reader's voice, while somewhat annoying from time to time, to be for the most part to be completely captivating. It was warm and engaging, with a nice, soft, mezzo-soprano timbre to it. The reader came off as a bit nervous here and there, and bit playful at other times, so it was really engaging for me. It was really nice to get this after so many audio books with really irritating readers.

Unfortunately, despite the pleasant voice, the story went completely off the rails. This happened when Helen wanted to get into a body to be able to interact with James just as she could with people when she was flesh-and-blood. She accomplishes this, after a false step or two, by taking over the body of a fifteen-year-old girl. Now this girl isn't dying. She's not an OD'd drug-addict like Billy was when James muscled in on his body. Jenny doesn't overdose; she doesn't get electrocuted, or drowned or anything else. Helen simply declares Jenny's body vacant and steals it for herself!

Frankly, this was nothing short of rape of the most appalling kind. It was a form of slavery an order of magnitude beyond anything which occurred during Helen's lifetime. It's an atrocious abuse (as the rest of the story reveals), yet Helen doesn't even bat an eyelid over it. Mild-mannered, shy, prudish, retiring Helen, who wouldn't say boo to a ghost, who was flesh at a time in history when gentility and deference were ingrained powerfully into young women, feels no compunction whatsoever about stealing Jenny's body from her.

Helen justifies this by declaring Jenny 'vacant' from some hollow vibe she gets from her body. She's described as 'empty'. This despite Jenny being a normal (if rather withdrawn and repressed) fifteen-year-old. She was living with her very strict religious family. They weren't fundamentalists in the derogatory sense, but they were strictly adherent, and tightly-controlling of Jenny, but not abusive (unless you count religious brain-washing as abusive, which I do, but that's not important to this story).

Now we can get back to the reference I made earlier about what the ghost actually is. In the case where James takes over Billy's body, the assumption which is thrust upon us (although the writing is so vague it's hard to be sure) is that his ghost - or his 'soul' had vacated his body, so he was effectively dead, a zombie, about to die physically as well as spiritually. Yet the body soldiered on. James was able to move in and take over, and the body recovered. Indeed, it recovered miraculously, because despite going cold turkey, this heavily-addicted long-term drug abusing body suffered absolutely no withdrawal symptoms whatsoever. I found that to be completely absurd.

That's not even the real problem from the PoV of this novel. The problem is the question of what exactly happened here. If the soul had left the body because it was dying, then how was James able to move in and set up shop? Why was he able to keep it going? If he was able to do so with zero effort on his part, then how come the original soul vacated the place? None of this is even addressed, much less explained. It's bad writing.

But it gets far worse when we compare this one to Helen/Jenny's case. Jenny wasn't even dying, so how do we explain the fact that her soul/spirit/ghost had vacated the body? If it had, then how come the body didn't die? How come Jenny was completely functional, carrying on conversations, eating meals, attending school, living, moving, and having her being? None of this made any sense whatsoever, and it's not even addressed, which is more bad writing. Helen has no qualms whatsoever about her actions, which is completely out of character for her. James's actions made some kind of sense (apart from the issues I've raised above), but Helen's did not.

But it gets worse. After Helen has robbed Jenny of her life, what's the first thing these two, one 150-some years old, the other a century old, do at their very first opportunity? They find a quiet place at school, and hop each other like bunnies. This is a girl from around 1875, and a boy from around 1915, completely shedding their origins, two people raised in eras of strict propriety completely dispensing with all propriety (and clothing)!

Now you can argue, if you like, that James was not only a guy, but also a soldier, and so probably had rather less restraint and inhibition than did Helen, but you cannot argue the same for Helen, since the author has already gone out of her way to make it abundantly clear what a prude she is, how retiring, restrained, inhibited, shy, withdrawing, and so on. Yet all of that is gone in an instant, both of them completely shedding everything, including clothes, no shyness whatsoever, no prudery in evidence, and screwing like two adolescents who had just had a radical inhibition-ectomy. It made. No. Sense. Whatsoever. This, for me, is where the story began to roll downhill under its own ponderous weight.

Since Jenny is fifteen and raised under strict religious rules, we can almost safely assume she's a virgin, but James was (as Billy) a heavy drug user, and he doesn't know squat about Billy or his past, so he cannot be sure he has no sexual diseases, yet he has no qualms about bedding this fifteen year old innocent body without even a thought, let alone a discussion, about condoms. Morons. And it's yet more bad writing that the author doesn't even think of addressing any of these issues.

The overall plot idea was really rather good. It was the execution of it which was full of holes. One major spoiler as an example: We learn early that Helen drowned, but we don't learn the details of it until near the end of the novel, and it's as dumb-ass as you can get. Helen is trapped in a flooding basement with her child. There's a window which is too small for Helen to get through, but out of which her child can scramble and walk way, yet this still sizable gap, big enough to fit a young child through, apparently doesn't let water through, because the basement continues to fill up to the ceiling and drowns Helen. Dumb. Ass. Stupid! Poorly plotted. Poorly written.

The moral of the story is trite - there is no hell: we make our own hell by worrying over the mistakes we made in life. Screw that. If there's an afterlife, then this life doesn't matter a damn, so I'm gon' party like it's 1666! And I won't spare a single thought for this saccharine attempt at a medal-winning novel.

Allegra by Anna Lisle

Title: Allegra
Author: Anna Lisle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p84 "I must try to staunch this wound." should be "I must try to stanch this wound." Any Victorian of breeding would have known this distinction.

This is supposedly an historical romance and mystery novel about Alice Clark who is (fictionally) the grown-up and 'illegitimate' daughter of Lord Byron. The actual daughter, who was initially named Alba, died at the age of five in a convent in Italy. The conceit in this novel is that Allegra did not die, but underwent yet another name change and was put into the care of an "aunt", eventually becoming married off to an abusive husband who is nothing but a cardboard caricature.

I don’t buy the premise! As beloved as Allegra was at the convent, I seriously doubt the nuns would have let her go to a bad guardian. Additionally, the Alice of the novel is nothing like the Allegra of real life, even allowing for some softening of rough edges by her upbringing in the convent, and some taming of her precocity by maturity.

Call me prideful and prejudiced, but the instadore between Allegra and the sea captain is nonsensical, and the novel's habit of switching back and forth between time periods for no good purpose and without much of an indication was annoying at best. I don’t buy the intrigue, either.

Byron died two years after Allegra, in 1824, and this novel - if it is indeed set in Victorian times (as opposed to Georgian which ended when the Victorian age began), cannot have taken place earlier than mid-1837. By that time, well over a decade had passed since Byron's death. Who would have cared if rumors began of an 'illegitimate' child, who had no rights to his estate anyway? If the child had been still alive, I think Mary Shelley would have had something to say about her welfare since she and her husband Percy took a serious interest in Allegra.

I admit I did not finish this novel because I had the hardest time even getting into it. It just did not appeal to me. Even the cover is a major fail. The cover model looks like she's about thirteen, not at all the age of the main character. Once again we see prima facie evidence that the cover designer never read the novel; either that or they simply didn't care what the novel says.

It was tedious to read of the endless and boring perambulations of Alice and her fruitless pursuit of the unnecessarily mysterious 'lady in black'. Nothing happened and then suddenly, nothing happened again, but right after that,...nothing more happened! As these nothings continued apace, I completely lost interest in it. Let me do the math here: 100 percent of nothin' is...nothin' and a nothin', carry the nothin', equals nothin'. I cannot recommend this at all.

White Lies by Emily Harper

Title: White Lies
Author: Emily Harper
Publisher: Writers To Authors (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!

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

Erratum:
10% in: "…all banned together…" should be "…all band together…"

This novel is so bad I wrote a song about it to the tune of Blurred lines:

Everybody screws up! Eew!
Everybody screws up! Uh!
Nay! nay! nay! Nay! nay! nay! Nay! nay! nay!

If you can't read what I'm trying to write,
If you can't read from almost any page,
Maybe I'm writing bad, maybe I'm going down; maybe I'm out of my mi-i-i-ind!

OK now she was dumb, tryin' to bed the captain,
But she's inanimate, baby it's not her nature, just let me educate ya
Nay! nay! nay! Shouldn't waste the pay-pa
Nay! nay! nay! That book is not your maker

And that's why I'm gon' write a one star
I know you earned it (I know you earned it), I know you earned it
It's a ba-ad bo-ok!
Can't let it get past me; it's not real hist'ry; talk about lambasted?
I hate this White Lies!
I know you wrote it; you do showboat it, but I have smote it!
But it's a ba-ad bo-ok!
It fails to grab me, it's pretty nasty; it's even trashy

What do you write this for? Why you got them reams stacked?
This book so down-grade, like a Shelley in a grave
Cover's adolescent,
Nay! nay! nay! It's really booked-up
Nay! nay! nay! What rhymes with booked-up?
Nay! nay! nay!

What an original title! B&N lists only sixteen pages of books with this title, or with titles similar to it. So why did I read it? Well, even though this novel suggested of itself that it would be a silly romance, I was tempted against my better judgment into reading it because it was set in the UK. By 10% in I'd already decided this wasn't a good novel. The main female character is so complete and shallow a ditz that she doesn’t need airbags in her car. She's already protected because she's such an airhead.

How she can be an airhead and completely vacuous at the same time, I don’t know, but trust me, she manages it and then some. She's also more than likely anorexic if we're to judge by the cover image, but then we all know covers lie just as effectively and routinely as back cover blurbs do!

Her life is so pointless that her every waking thought revolves around finding a guy to marry. We’re expected to believe this woman can’t find a guy even though she's portrayed as being hot and gorgeous. Of course these are purely skin-deep traits; why would anyone care whether someone is respectable, diligent, interesting, accomplished, smart, caring, self-possessed, supportive, fun, has strength of character, or whatever? It’s all about skin, and exposing it. The main (lack-of-) character keeps dreaming of finding a hunk regardless of personality or other traits. I keep dreaming of finding a romance story that's realistic and fun, but they're so few and far between that you may as well consider them extinct.

This novels truck me as a major example of wish-fulfillment on the part of the author, so naturally (not!), the mc meets 'the guy' accidentally in the elevator on the way up to her office (because why would she have any other kind of job?), and immediately starts hitting on him, even as we’re expected to believe she doesn’t recognize him as a potential partner. Instead she puts a want-ad in some random magazine, seeking a partner, and in time, goes on a date with a guy named Alan. Wouldn’t you know that she runs into "the guy" right there in that same restaurant? Coincidence of coincidences! How miraculous is that? HALLELUJAH! Thank you Baby Jesu!

When Alan shows up they have a perfectly fine dinner, but she obsesses over the unappetizing wine - like this one thing has really spoiled everything, and she has so little self-possession and self-respect that she doesn't even think to order something different. Meanwhile Mr Perfect, stalking jerk-off that he is, sends over a glass of wine to her table, and it’s perfect. Yeah, like he knows exactly what she wants and he's going to give it to her even when she's out on a date with another guy? Creep much?

Alan very kindly pays for the entire meal even though she is the one seeking a partner - and she doesn’t even remark upon that, let alone thank him, but as soon as they stand up to leave, she suddenly notices that he's a couple of inches shorter than she is. She didn’t notice this before? The truly sad thing is that this is all it takes for her to write him off. As if that wasn't bad enough, his hair is thinning. Never mind that losing ones hair in a male is a sign of testosterone! No! He's "short", he has thinning hair, therefore he's a no good low-life piece of trash and she’ll never see him again.

By this time I thoroughly detested the main character - and the novel. I had zero interesting on following this desperate louse-life another step. And note that I hadn't even reached the fact that she's an outright liar. White lies are nothing but lies after all. How shallow and pathetic can you be? Well read an Emily Harper 'romance' and you'll find out!

The Fire Artist by Daisy Whitney

Title: The Fire Artist
Author: Daisy Whitney
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!

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

pub. Bloomsbury
P157 "...google-eyed stare..."? Seriously? It's either 'googly-eyed', or 'goggle-eyed'. Google it!

I had to really rush this because I suddenly had an unexpected deadline imposed on me of three days - this was very shortly after I'd selected it. Usually the deadline is fifty days or so. Keep that in mind! Fortunately this turned out to be a DNF, so I was able to get it done.

Also keep in mind that this is a first person PoV novel which I detest. Very few authors can write them well, and even when they're written well, it's still always all ME! All the time - self centered, self-obsessed, which can be irritating to no end. Since 1PoV is so extraordinarily limiting, why authors insist upon writing these unlikely 'diaries' which all-too-often end up more like diarrhea is a mystery. Unfortunately, with ebooks, there's no ready way to take it off the shelf and flip through the first few pages for a quick skim read to see if you might like it before you take it on. You get it sight unseen.

For some reason, when I first began actually reading this, I was thinking that I was reading about a guy, so it became a little confusing until I realized that the main character is a girl. Normally I would have been thrilled by this, but in this case I was just annoyed. It's my fault for not paying attention to the blurb I guess, but I read the blurb some time ago - and we know blurbs always lie, right?! Anyway, once that was sorted, I started getting into it, but I think if it had been about a guy it would have made a better novel!

Aria is what's known in this alternative world as an elemental artist - that is, she's someone who can create one of the four supposed 'elements', in her case: fire. A few people have unaccountably developed these skills employing the four trope "elements": earth, fire, water, and wind - not that any one of those actually is an element.

There's no explanation offered as to how this happened, except for the trope "magic gene" which is mentioned and which is far more of an excuse than ever it is an explanation. Genes rarely do anything by themselves, and there's no way one gene could account for four unnatural and diverse traits, so this was the first problem I had with this. If you're going to attempt an explanation, at least make it sound like one. This idea of controlling the elements in this way came right out of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy (where it was better done) - or any number of fantasy stories - except that this is a contemporary novel.

Aria can spew fire from her fingers (not form her eyes as this idiot cover illustrates!), and handle hot stuff without being burned. Nothing unusual about those traits in a woman...! The problem is that Aria isn't a natural supernatural. Her power comes from some deal she made with a vudu woman in the swamps. She has to get her power recharged periodically by having her friend Elise (a wind elemental) draw down a lightning bolt into Aria's heart. This will knock her out and leave her overflowing with fire, which will then need to be bled off into water to dial Aria down from eleven to the usual ten. Why lightning, which isn't remotely like fire, can recharge her fire is yet another thing which is unexplained, so I'm already in trouble here in the first few chapters! I don't even know why she has to pay this 'price'.

While these powers can be used to help society, such as reducing the power of hurricanes, or calling down rain to douse a brush fire for example, it seems that most elementals choose to put their powers to trivial use: for entertainment. This I didn't buy because, seriously, how many times would people want to go and see someone shoot fire out of their hands? Once would be plenty for me! Yet in this novel there's supposedly a league! The "teams" compete, but how the judgment is made as to who wins is never explained.

These powers - again for no apparent reason - desert people in their twenties, and they don't arrive until puberty, (again, no explanation for these arbitrary dates) so an artist maybe has ten years of glory. Far from wanting to be of public service, Aria is selfish enough to want to 'go Hollywood', and be a big time entertainer. The only way she can achieve this realistically (I use that term loosely) is to make a deal with a Djin, known as a 'granter'. Where the heck that came from I have no idea, but that's the deal, and it's the deal she makes.

The genii is of course her love interest, but this is where the story became too juvenile, too clichéd, and far too boring for me. Suddenly her power had nothing to do with the story and it was all about adolescent love, while the fiction was maintained that she was still all about "the league", like there was nothing else in life other than showing off in front of a crowd - no social benefit, no dedication to service, no other job! You can't work in an office or on a building site, or in a convenience store, or driving a cab. It's the "leagues" or you're no one with nothing, and all Aria is interested in is herself. I really could not stand her.

There's no explanation offered as to why it's 'illegal' to fake your power in the leagues, or why there's such a concern over 'stealing' your power, as Aria has been doing. Neither are we told how this has the force of law behind it - that you go to jail for stealing powers?! Jeez why not simply arrest everyone for breathing - aren't they stealing oxygen from nature?!

It's not like the lightning was owned by some poor impoverished family, and she stole it from them and they died from the loss! For goodness sakes, it's lighting. It's free! Who cares? Not me. This story made no freaking sense whatsoever. It's like these arbitrary rules were put in place to shore-up the creaking, hole-ridden plot, but they had no foundation themselves, so they really held up nothing. They merely shone a spotlight on the fact that this tent had no poles to prop it up - all that held it up was fresh air.

Ooh! Maybe it was Elise, Aria's friend, who was still propping Aria up, along with this tent?! The funny thing is that Elise (Aria's BFF who aids and abets Aria's thievery) disappeared from the story and was never heard from again - although I confess I was lightly skimming most of the latter half of the novel so maybe I missed her. OTOH, I really didn't miss her. She was kinda creepy.

At one point (p155) we're told that if someone is caught stealing their powers, then their entire family is banned from the league, yet when Aria's brother is caught doing exactly that, and imprisoned(!), no one seems to come after her for the longest time, and then it's for her own dishonesty, not for what her bro did!

And don't even ask me about Hannibal Gator. I can't recommend this novel. It has no fire.

Witches of East End by Melissa de la Cruz

Title: Witches of East End
Author: Melissa de la Cruz
Publisher: Disney
Rating: WARTY!

In which Melissa of the Cross tries, but fails dismally, to shed her YA roots. This is the second of two reviews posted today which look at books that were turned into TV shows. In both cases, the show is much better than the book.

The last time I read a Melissa de la Cruz novel, I thought it would be the last time I read a Melissa of the Cross novel because it was awful. The novel was Frozen and so was the plot. I mean that novel was so atrociously bad that I've avoided de le Cruz and Johnston like the plague ever since.

So why did I pick this up? Well, I started watching Witches of East End on Netflix not knowing it was from a de la Cruz novel, and I loved the show. Note that it was actually written by not de la Cruz, so this probably made a difference.

The story centers on three witches: Joanna Beauchamp, the white-haired mom (her hair isn't white in the TV show), Ingrid, her twenty-something daughter, and Ingrid's slightly younger sister Freya. Joanna is ancient, although she doesn't look anywhere near the centuries old woman she is. Her daughters are reborn routinely after dying early deaths. So far the same as the TV show - minus Joanna's white hair.

All three are banned from practicing magic (for reasons unspecified) and the ban has been in place for hundreds of years, yet at about the same time, all three individually decide to flout the ban, and they start doing minor magic, which slowly comes to play a greater and greater part in their lives. Joanna's specialty power is in being able to resurrect people. Ingrid is a prophet and a healer. Freya can create love and anti-love charms.

Why this is called 'East End' and they live in North Hampton I don't know. Maybe they live in the east end of North Hampton, but that still doesn't explain why this novel went south.... It makes as much sense as the claim that North Hampton is somehow 'hidden' or 'shifted' from the rest of the world, yet is still a tourist resort. How does that work again?!

This novel is actually nothing more than the full-length novel prologue for a series, and it becomes pretty obvious that's what it is, the further you read into it. If you haven't got it by the epilogue, then rest-assured that the cliff-hanger will hit you on the head with it.

The novel and the TV show follow each other quite closely for about the first third of the novel, then the two depart rather dramatically. For example, Joanna's sister doesn't appear in the novel at all, whereas she appears in the TV show right in the first episode, but Ingrid (whose real name is Erda in the novel) does work in a library and Freya does work in a bar.

The TV show was hilarious (to begin with, and it's still amusing but not quite as funny as it used to be)) and it made sense within its context. It was inventive and entertaining, although there was some juvenile dumb-assery going on, but it was worth watching, and having gone quickly through the first season, I started watching season two which conveniently started up right after I'd finished watching all of season one!

So this is why I picked up the book - from the library. There was no way in hell I was going to lay out actual money on a de la Cruz effort, not after the execrable Frozen. I started reading it with slight misgivings, but in the end, I began to enjoy it and get into it - right up until about the last third or fifth or so of it, where it went downhill so fast I almost got whiplash.

There was some sad examples of poor writing and some predictable dumb-assery (such as the improbable encounter in the "powder room" at her engagement party which went a lot further than it did in the TV show - and went there twice! How come no one noticed?!), but I'm glad to report nowhere near the extreme level of Frozen. I was able to finish this novel, although I confess I began skimming the last five chapters or so because they were so bad. One example of how clueless the writing is, is that at one point, Killian assures Ingrid that he gave her some blueprints to the mansion in which his brother lives - not loaned, but donated. Just a page or two later he tells Freya that he lent them to Ingrid. Well-edited this novel was not.

As in the TV show, Freya and Ingrid are involved in one way or another with two brothers, Bran, who is Freya's fiancé, and Killian, who is Freya's stalker, but with whom she falls in lust anyway, because you know that the one thing young women need to get through their heads above all else is that it's not only fine to embrace someone who stalks you and wants you for your body, it's actually both expected and indeed required. Got it?

Killian is a pain in the TV series. In the novel he's worse: he's a stalker and potential rapist who outright lies to Freya, keeps crucial information from her, and ignores her wishes, so while I tolerate him in the TV show where he's still way too pushy but (just) bearable, in the novel I sincerely hoped (but was cruelly denied) that a piano would fall on him and that would be the end of this jerk. Freya is hardly any better in the novel than she is in the TV show, but since she doesn't have her own broomstick, why wouldn't she make the Balder dash?

Yes, I know the conceit here is that Killian is the 'good twin' and Bran is really the evil one, so it's really ok that he's schtupping her every chance he gets, but guess what? Low key, he's not. Killian could have come right out at Freya's engagement party and told Freya exactly who he was and who Bran was, told her what a huge mistake she was making, told her that she was being deceived, and cleared up everything right there. he fails.

Opening up to her, trusting her, and being completely honest with her would have been the decent and honorable thing to do. It would have been the thing a true friend would do. It would have been the thing that someone who loves you would do without hesitation, but no, Killian doesn't say a word about who he and Bran are. Instead he has sex with Freya, thereby dumping all kinds of guilt on her over being unfaithful to her fiancé. He's a lowlife and a jerk, end of story.

I know that Melissa of the Cross couldn't have got herself this novel by having her people behave realistically and lovingly, so in order to tell this tale, she has chosen to portray one of her characters as a bitch in heat, who lacks self-control at best and morality at worst. Why would a female author deliberately do this to a female character? It's a sign of an atrociously bad writer that she can think of no better way to tell this story than the way she did - either that or worse: that she can think of a better way to tell it but still chose to tell it in this misogynistic, abusive, and insulting manner, and it's a sign of sad, sad readership that people actually spend money on such badly-plotted trash. Do people buy this crap because they can find nothing better, or because they deserve nothing better? I'd really like to know the answer to that.

What is unintentionally funny in this novel is that the main characters, Ingrid and Freya (and also their mother, a much more minor character here than in the TV show) are witches, yet they never consider casting a spell to deal with their various troubles. Freya needs a spell to get Killian off her ass (literally), and to get her mind off him, yet never once does she consider actually casting one. Ingrid needs an anti-love potion to get her mind off the cop, yet she fails to consider that, too.

Interestingly, in the TV show, the cop is black. In the novel, he's white of Irish descent. I have to ask why someone who is quite evidently of Hispanic ethnic origin would choose to exclude non-white ethnic groups from her novel. I can't recall any character who wasn't a WASP in this novel. I know it's set in a bastion of old white money, but does that mean there can be no Asians, Hispanics, or African-Americans there? If we can't count on non-white writers to bring cultural diversity to their writing we're lost indeed, because white writers are doing a piss-poor job of it.

In the TV show, the writers wisely chose to inject humor, and to exclude the more asinine and pandering aspects of witchery - flying on broomsticks, for example, or bringing in vampires and zombies, but the novel has all of these cheap toys. Joanna flies on a broomstick, Freya turns into a cat, there are vampires, and zombies are at least mentioned. Cauldrons and wands make an appearance or get a mention. Norse mythology plays a crucial role in the plot (so-called) so it's pretty pathetic for something which began so well and avoided these pitfalls, to suddenly end-up with everything being tossed into the pot.

The writing deteriorates so badly that towards the end, Joanna, Ingrid, and Freya are brought into the police station to be questioned about their employment of witchcraft! I am serious. They're actually in danger of being charged with casting spells on people. That's how awful this is. YA disguised as adult.

I cannot recommend this god-awful trash. Watch the TV show instead. You'll get much more out of it.

Storm Siren by Mary Weber

Title: Storm Siren
Author: Mary Weber
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Rating: WARTY!

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

This is, I'm sorry to report, yet another first person PoV YA novel which has very little to distinguish it from any other YA novel in this genre. Do YA writers know that it's not actually illegal in the US to write in third person? This one is, as usual, about a young, down-trodden girl with special powers. Nothing new there. Her name is Nymia, although how it's pronounced isn't specified. She typically goes by 'Nym' so I don't know if her name is pronounced to sound like 'Nigh-me-uh' or like 'Nimm-ea', and the author doesn't help.

Nym (Nim or Nigh-m?) is a slave girl who has been through fourteen owners already and is up for auction yet again. Apparently she's a problem child. You can tell that she's been owned before by the series of brutal rings cut around her arm by each successive owner, each cut having had dye put into it while it's still raw and bleeding. Nym was orphaned when her parents died, so we're given to understand, but how that worked, exactly, isn't revealed. It seems that a lot of things aren't revealed in this novel, and I gleaned this state of affairs just from reading the first thirty pages.

The interesting thing about Nym is that she's what's known as an elemental. These are people who have magical power over an element (I guess), which I have to say, the way it's written here, seems like an idea purloined from Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy, although he certainly isn't the only one to use this trope. In this novel, there are also other varieties of power, such as a guy called Colin, who is a Terrene - meaning he can move earth and stone. Why he's not considered an elemental is yet another thing which goes unexplained here.

My problem with this is that earth, fire, water, and wind aren't actually elements. They're a mix of a number of elements, a large number in the case of earth. Of course, this is one of the things which you have to let slide if you want to enjoy fantasy novels. I typically don't have a problem with that, but I do have one with the idea, in this novel, that elementals are slaughtered at birth.

Nym got a bye on that because she's female and there are no female elementals (so everyone believes). Nym is unique. I can see how this would preserve her life since, despite her white hair (another thing in common with the Codex Alera), no one would have imagined that she was elemental; however, once she began manifesting her power, and especially after she became a slave, I see no reason why, in a savage society like this, she wasn't slaughtered long ago. This is another thing for which no explanation is offered by the author (not in the part which I read, anyway).

All that we glean is that evidently, once she does exhibit her power, she's quickly sold off to another owner, her elemental secret unrevealed. I couldn't believe that this would happen. I couldn't see how, in this world, she could go through fourteen owners with not a single one of them killing her or turning her over to the authorities. No. That doesn't work. If you want me to buy the idea that she somehow managed to survive, then you need to explain how that happened, exactly. Maybe the explanation arrived much later in the novel than I was prepared to await.

So credibility was rather low at that point, but it hadn't reached its nadir yet. When Nym's put on the auction block, she becomes pissed-off with some guy abusing a young red-haired girl who is his slave, and the thing about Nym is that you're not going to like her when she gets angry. She inadvertently summons a huge lightning storm, killing (so she's told, but I don't buy it) the little redhead as well as her owner.

Again, despite there being multiple witnesses to her display, she's not slaughtered or imprisoned, but is instead bought by Adora (no, really!), a rich and influential woman who is a senior adviser to the King. Her plan is to turn Nym into a weapon of war by having her personal trainer - Eogan (presumably pronounced like yogurt) - train Nym in controlling her power.

Nym isn't on board with the war - she's evidently allergic to killing, but she is on-board with learning control. Why elementals are born unable to control this power, and why they don't naturally learn to do so as they grow (just as we garner greater control as we learn to walk and talk, and later play sports, for example) is another unanswered question in a long line of such.

My biggest problem with Nym is that she's quite obviously a moron. The first issue is that she never questions why she should fight for a nation which literally enslaves her. I know she doesn't have a large number of options here, but to never even think that question once is too much. The second issue is, given that she's so powerful, how has she managed to remain a slave for so long? She never once escaped using her terrifying power? Again, no explanation. The world-building here - even the plot logic for that matter - left a lot to be desired.

The first time Nym is left alone for a minute in her new 'home', she wanders off through the castle because she needs to know more about Adora, Colin and Eogan, yet she's going to be working very closely with those latter two. Eogan - her trope male interest - is going to be teaching her and Colin. In short, she will find out all she needs to, and be able to ask them about Adora, yet this dip-shit cruelly gives her blind adviser the slip and wanders off! How inconsiderate can she get? Nym evidently doesn't think much of Breck, describing her at one point as "the blind servant", which is cruel at best.

This "blind servant" is Breck, who happens to be Colin's (fraternal) twin sister, and therefore a prime source of information about Colin, yet when Nym wants to find out about Colin, she thoughtlessly ditches the one person in all the world who knows most about him! Nym does this so she can blindly go herself to find out about him. Seriously?

But of course, in pursuing this dumb action, she's naturally rewarded by the oh-so-coincidental conversation on which she eavesdrops, between two men, one of whom - conveniently the more traitorous of the two - randomly draws out the 's' in some words; not all words containing or ending with 's', just random ones. I mean, yeah, we need to have a way to identify this guy later, but seriously? This is the best way you can think of to run a highlighter over him?!

Nym counts to a hundred by this method: "One, ten, twenty." Good luck with that scheme. Breck eventually tracks Nym down, claiming that she's "been lookin' all over" for her, but that's a rather cruel way to describe it. I'd have preferred "been searchin' all over", but that's just me.

Page forty has a real oddity: when Breck finds Nym, she's carrying only a plate and a jug, yet immediately afterwards, she's setting down a tray, then immediately after that she's setting down a plate? The page reads: "The plate Breck sets down clatters like she's almost tipped it off" which makes zero sense in itself. Tipped it off what? She's already set the tray down. If 'plate' was meant instead of 'tray' (which is what it ought to have been, I suspect), then she's already set that down. This isn't very good writing or editing. Why did no one catch this?

At a ball that evening, Nym tries and fails to get a look at the king and his rumored bride, Princess Rasha (I guess the king is bringing home the bacon?), who is evidently a luminescent. Really? I don't know if that's an elemental, or a separate branch of magic like a Terrene is. More confusion. Luminescents can read minds, so Nym seeks to avoid Rasha, but how she's going to manage that without knowing what Rasha looks like is another mystery. Nym is acting Rasha-ly.

As I mentioned, very little thought seems to have gone into world-building and back-story in this novel. For example, at one point, Nym rather abusively remarks that someone is so large they're like a whale cub, but she grew up in the mountains. How does she know what a whale looks like? We have no explanation because we know nothing about her.

Later she notes that Breck is eating oliphant. Now I have to ask why is 'whale' unchanged, but elephant changes to 'oliphant'? There's no consistency. At one point Nym almost has her hand bitten off by a horse which has been trained to eat meat. It's a war-horse and it's savage. If that's the case, then how do the soldiers manage to ride it safely into battle? A horse is an herbivore. It has neither the dentition nor the gut to be a meat-eater. How does it actually eat and digest the meat? No explanation. I skipped the chapter where Nym has to ride one of these carnivorous horses because it was boring.

When Nym first encounters Eogan (this is a guy who has skin which smells like sunbeams. WHAT? I'm not kidding. The author actually wrote that!), Nym rudely busts into his home uninvited, and plants herself there thinking he will have to throw her out if he wants her to leave; then she hypocritically accuses him of being rude. This was fifty pages in and was the point at which I decided I really detested Nym. I also started to seriously consider at what point I could ditch this novel without seeming rude myself. It's no small sacrifice of my time, because there were, at that point, still some 300 prospective pages through which I could wade.

Another oddity appears on page 62 where Eogan touches Nym's neck right where her "heart pulse is". Do I need to remind anyone that every pulse is a heart pulse unless you have something else pumping blood in your body? And what's with the inappropriate touching? Eogan is supposed to be sizing her up, which inexplicably involves touching her face and neck, and gazing into her eyes. I was surprised he didn't force her mouth open to check the filly's teeth. Colin is just as bad, yet Nym doesn't even see any of this as inappropriate! This means that on the one hand we're expected to see her as brash, independent, stubborn, feisty, etc., but on the other, she's very effectively depicted as slavish, submissive, passive, and so on. It doesn't work. So much for slavery being a hot-button issue in this novel.

Some reviews I read praised the fact that Eogan is black. While YA definitely needs more characters of color - and more colorful characters for that matter - this relationship struck me as standard. Yes, Eogan is black, but the main character, Nym, is still your standard WASP! Nothing has really changed. Had Nym been black (or Asian or Hispanic, or whatever), that would have been a big step, regardless of her love interest's color.

I didn't like Eogan. He's mean and cruel, and he's the one who brands Nym with her new slave ring. The only unanswered question is why they take so long to brand her, and why, when she has fourteen brands already, she even needs one more. We're not told what the purpose of multiple brands is, but that's relatively mild compared with what Eogan does to get her to manifest her power. Nym has a deformed hand and Eogan deliberately hurts her to see if he can set off a spasm, rather like Tony Stark did to Bruce Banner in The Avengers, but Eogan does it more than once and in many different ways.

On the other hand, so to speak, he's not as cruel to Nym as she is to herself. Nym is a cutter - doubtlessly to pay herself back for a death she's caused in the past - I'm guessing she killed her own parents inadvertently with her power which is why she's so dead-set against death, but I don't know that for sure, because I quit reading this. Call it a crisis of faith - I had no faith that my doctor would issue me with sufficient Promethazine to enable me to finish reading this novel.

I pretty much gave up on this in the nineties, around chapters 11 & 12, when slave girl Nym, servant girl Breck, and Colin go out for a night one the town. WHAT? Since when do slaves and servants in a cruel world like this with a villain for a mistress get a night off to go bar-hopping? I'm sorry but that right there is so far past ludicrous that it's gone plaid. I cannot recommend this novel. Not with a straight face.

Love and Other Unknown Variables by Shannon Lee Alexander

Title: Love and Other Unknown Variables
Author: Shannon Lee Alexander
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!

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

Erratum:
p8 "bicep" it's actually "biceps" although with the number of authors making this mistake these days, I'm probably in the minority already when it comes to appropriate English.
p65 "grit my jaw"? I don't know what that means. 'Grit my teeth' makes sense. "Grit my jaw"? Not so much.

It took nine seconds to turn the first page! This wasn't helped by multiple endpapers. I think it's because the pages are images - or at least background images - of graph paper and it really slows the page turning in Adobe Digital Editions. I can;t vouch for it in other electronic media, but it was annoying to say the least, and there were many beginning pages:
the praise page - why in an ebook (more on this anon)?
blank page
title page
blank page
title page with author's name
publication details page
dedication page
blank page
quote from Einstein page showing his ignorance of biochemistry. Einstein was not a chemist
blank page
I wouldn't note these unremarkable pages except that every one of them took time measured in seconds to turn the page.

I know there are "rules" (so-called) about how a book should be laid out to keep Congress happy - standardization rules - but to me it makes no sense to treat an ebook as though it were a print book. And if these "rules" are so cast in iron, why are they not adhered to in audio books? Hah! So much for a publishing code. They're more like guidelines really....

It makes equally as little sense to include third-party recommendations (for the book you're already reading) in an ebook. This doesn't work on me, but in a print book, when you're looking through it in the library or in the book store, I can see that recommendations from people you've never heard of and have no reason to trust might sway some potential readers, but in an ebook? You've already bought or borrowed the ebook sight unseen. Clearly you're already about to read it. So what on Earth is the purpose of the recommendations?!

Chapter one starts on page three of all pages, and speaks of tragedy so we know that this novel isn't going to end well, and it's pretty obvious how it will end because the first person narrator isn't the one who's going to die. How could he be telling this story if he did?! The thing is that this might be all well and good if it started well, but it didn't.

We meet the first person PoV narrator. This isn't my favorite perspective by a long chalk, since it's all 'me' all the time and that's way too much "me' for me. Once in a long while an author can carry it, but unless it's done really, really well, it just smacks of undue self-importance and destroys the reading experience for me - especially if the novel has a purportedly tragic ending. Even if the first page hadn't given it away we'd know that tragedy was in her future because she's an artist.

Anyway, the protag (Chuck, as in a part of a cow or part of an electric drill) is unable to keep his hands to himself where girls are concerned and despite supposedly being MIT material is far too dumb to grasp that he can't go manhandling people without their expressed consent. This behavior is inexplicable given that his best friend is actually a girl, Greta, with whom he's been acquainted for some considerable time. I guess he has so little respect for his best friend that he's unwilling to learn a single thing from her.

Chuck attends the Brighton School of Math and Science, but it hasn't even taught him that you cannot simply move the hair of the girl in line in front of you if want to see the tattoo on her neck, and if you do inappropriately so touch her, then the way to apologize isn't to inappropriately touch her again. This is where the "bicep" enters the picture. I'm going to write a novel about "The Bicep". Yeah! Kiss my bicep, people!

Chuck's sole observation about this girl (other than the tattoo and the fact that she sports a "bicep") is that she's "too beautiful"! Not just beautiful but too beautiful. Oh, and she smells amazing, so immediately we've classified her as a species of orchid, not a person.

Yeah, I know he can't nail her on anything else since he doesn't even know her, and superficial appearance and smell are all he has to go on, but seriously? "Too beautiful"? For what? For a glamor magazine? For a beauty pageant? To live? Why doesn't he just slaughter her right there? Beautiful is her sole defining characteristic already? We know it is because he uses it on both of his first two meetings with her. Oh and she has a chip in her tooth because even they who are too beautiful need the trope "small chip on the bottom corner of her central incisor" (yes, central! Charlotte evidently has an odd number of teeth) to give them an adorable flaw.

Could we not have gone somewhere else for a change? Please? Pretty please? Or even somewhere else even if it was still in the same neighborhood? Like not beautiful but attractive? Good-looking? Appealing? Warm? Unforgettable? Anything other than the tiredest bullshit in YA fiction: beautiful? Why is it that YA writers have the hardest time thinking outside the book?

Coincidence of coincidences, Charlotte - the beautiful tattoo - is now Chuck's sister Becca's best friend. Oh and she's known as Charley because that makes her too cool as well as too beautiful. But Becca won't call her that because having two Charlies is too much even though her brother Charlie is actually known as Chuck. Wait, what? If Charlotte is now wanting to be known as Charlotte instead of the detestable 'Charley', how does Becca even know that she was referred to as Charley by her older sister? Did Charlotte blab to an almost stranger the very name by which she doesn't want to be known? Not too bright, is she?

Hmmm!

I made it only a third of the way through this and I had to push myself to get even that far. It was too cloying, too slow, too uneventful, too meaningless, too cliched, too sugary, too vacuous, with characters which were too flat and uninteresting, and quite frankly, Chuck's obsessive-compulsive addiction to Charlotte's beauty above and beyond anything else was a huge turn-off. This contest between science and art has been done to death. Oh, and yes, you can scientifically measure love and beauty! Humans are rooted in biology; biology is rooted in chemistry; chemistry is rooted in physics; physics is rooted in math.

The bottom line is that I really just did not like these characters. They were too trope and cookie-cutter-ish to stand out. There was nothing about them to make them any different from your standard geek guy and standard too beautiful to live girl. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.