The Fragile Ordinary by Samantha Young

Rating: WARTY!

The fact that Kirkus Reviews claims this is a "powerful roller-coaster ride" tells me I should avoid it like the plague, since Kirkus is utterly clueless. The book description does nothing save confirm it. The main character's name is the barf-worthy Comet Caldwell, which is a definite 'no' from me, and it's an unimaginative chalk and cheese story that's already been done to death ad neauseam. She's a "painfully shy bookworm" who "meets Tobias King, a new student with a bad reputation." In short it's YA garbage that's been retreaded and recycled far too many times to count and the author should be ashamed of herself for even thinking of writing it. A definite warty on this one.

Starshine by GS Jennson

Rating: WARTY!

Read disappointingly by someone with the highly improbable name of Pyper Down, this book was already displeasing me to an extent, with its sluggish, meandering pace, endless introduction of minor characters, and my difficulty of tracking exactly what was going on while driving, with its metronomic switching between scenes and characters, and with unwanted flashbacks, but it really turned me off when I got about a third of the way in and the two main characters, female Alexis, and male Caleb met for the first time in a trope antagonistic encounter which resulted in the guy ending up physically restrained on a chair.

The restraints were DNA coded and idiot Alexis managed to drop a single strand of hair onto her prisoner, so he escaped. There was a half-hearted fight and Alexis ended up pinned with her back against Caleb, him holding her own gun to her head, and all she could think about was how hot he was. Seriously? What's the next volume going to feature? Alexis gets raped and enjoys it? I honestly don't get how female authors can so disrespect their characters (and by extension women in general), and be so pathetically tied to cliché and trope.

That wasn't the only problem. Even were that scene excluded, I doubt I would have traveled much further with this author. There was far too much going on swapping in and out characters who were often indistiguishable, making it hard to track, especially when driving, and there were flashbacks, too, which might well have been set-off in a print or ebook with a silcrow, or highlighted with italics or indentation, but in an audiobook you don't see that. It's all down to the reader and I was already far from thrilled with with her performance.

The voice and main character were at odds and this distracted from the narration. Thankfully this was not a first eprson PoV story so it did have that going for it. Technically it could have had either a male or female reader; it could anyway even if it were told from Alexis's PoV, but I prefer it if the narration voice matches the main character's voice, even if it's third person. The problem is that Pyper Down didn't match the Alexis character at all, not remotely.

Down's voice is more like a society lady or a spoiled rich woman's tone and it had, for me, a really annoying and somewhat tedious cadence. Again, this was not first person, but for me the voice didn't fit a rough-and ready-rebel pilot and mechanic that was Alexis - supposedly. it did not fit her at all, and it sure as hell didn't fit a Caleba, whose name was all wrong. He should really have been called Mary Sue.

The story is set in 2322 when humans have somehow managed to spread to "over 100 worlds across a third of the galaxy." It's unclear how they did this. The author talks about going at many times the speed of light, but this is impossible and it will still be impossible even in 2322. The reason for this is that the closer something approaches the speed of light, the more mass it takes on, and therefore the more energy it takes to accelerate that mass. At the speed of light mass becomes infinite and the only way to move that is with an infinite amount of energy: ergo: ain't gonna happen.

Later, the author talks about warping space, which is a totally different thing, but which also takes an enormous amount of energy and has nothing to do with foolhardy and pointless attempts to exceed the speed of light. It's like having adjoining hotel rooms. In order to move from one to the other, you have to exit the first room, go down the hallway, and enter the second room. However, if you have a connecting door between the rooms, you can simply step directly through. You can say, "I ran at ten miles an hour from this room to the next," but no matter what your speed, you will never beat someone who uses that connecting door! That, much simplified as it is, is the difference between traveling at hyper speeds and warping space.

Another issue was that this author seems more intent on telling than showing, especially when the two main charcters finally meet up and start entertaining thoughts like they're fifteen year old boys rather than a mature man and woman. I don't mind an occasional stray thought of that nature - all people have them - but it was like these were the only thoughts either of them had after they met, and it was pathetic. It was like reading a badly-written YA novel. But I repeat myself.

So I ditched this after the 'Alex with a gun to her head' scene and I am done with this author. I cannot commend this except to the trash bin.

Bright Ruined Things by Samantha Cohoe

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata "...and Lord Prosper like to make a good impression on First Night." Verb is wrong tense. "The last time I had seen Coco, she didn’t know how to fly. She couldn’t have gained very much experience landing one since then." This appears to be missing the words, 'a plane' in place of 'one' above.

I can understand people wanting to rip-off Shakespeare. He ripped off enough people himself, let's face it! Let me also say up front that I'm no big fan of his. I think he was derivative, plodding, and primitive in many ways, but he did have a flair for the dramatic and he did have a nice turn of phrase here and there. I have a personal ambition to see all of his plays either live or via the silver screen just because, and I'm not there yet, but I've hardly been pursuing this goal avidly. I do think though, that if you're going to attempt something like this, you owe a bit more to your reader than your average YA novel, and that was the problem here. It's very much your average YA novel which is to say, not good.

The first problem is first person which with very few exceptions, I typically detest because it's all 'me, me, me' all the time. It's limiting. It's unimaginative (especially since most every YA writer uses it), and it's tedious to read; far too self-important, and so inauthentic. I quickly grew bored with the narrator.

Loosely (very loosely) based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, which was produced over four hundred years ago, this story - which is not set in that same time period - has more in common with Cinderella than ever it does with Shakespeare! It tells the tale of Mae, the daughter of a late steward of Lord Prosper, so we're told, who is the patriarch of a magical island that produces 'aether' - an energy source that's sold on to others elsewhere. So essentially, Prosper is a sort of oil baron, but his golden goose seems to be failing and Mae, who is pretty much an outcast from the Prosper family, especially now she's turned eighteen and expects to have to leave the island, is determined to find out why.

The most annoying thing about Mae is that she's such a limp character. She has no internal engine herself and seems quite willing to be buffeted along by everyone else's energy rather than her own. We're told she longs to remain on the island and fears being expelled because she isn't family, but we're given no reason whatsoever why she should have no interest in exploring the world, or why she should have any loyalty to the family that treats her so shabbily. It makes her seem boring and one-dimensional. Also, she's so changeable as to be a blur rather than a well-defined and strong female character. I didn't like her at all. As I find quite often these novels, I much preferred one of the other characters - a woman named Coco.

Worse, we're immediately plunged into a tediously trope YA love triangle involving Mae and two grandsons of Prosper: Ivo, the clichéd bad boy, and Miles, the clichéd sweet guy. That made me yawn the instant it was presented, because it is so unimaginative and it has been done to death in countless YA stories before this one. I guess I should be thankful I didn't have to read about anyone's "bicep" (yes in the singular - this is YA after all!), or about gold flecks in one of the guys' eyes. But then I DNF'd this at 25%, so maybe those 'classic' descriptions came later.

I didn't finish this, but it seemed to me that Miles could well turn out to be the bad guy and Ivo the good one in the end. I could quite easily be completely wrong about that. It also occurred to me that Mae could well be one of the Prosper family herself when all's said and done, through some shenanigans in the past. Miranda, in the original, was Prospero's daughter after all, in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte. It was that kind of a YA novel anyway, but I had so lost interest in any of these characters that I couldn't even be bothered to skip to the end to find out!

All this despite being initially intrigued by the book description. Taking a page from the excellent 1995 movie Richard III, this novel is set in the twenties, although apart from a airplane flying to the island at one point, it could have been set at any time. There was no twenties vibe to it at all, and the only reason I really 'got' that it was the twenties was through a gratuitous mention of Bessie Coleman (misspelled as 'Bessy' in this novel), who was a black pilot in the early twenties, before she died, of course in a plane crash.

Going with The Tempest was an interesting and ambitious aim, but it was sadly let down by the YA writing. I read things like, "Coco would help me get out of marrying Ivo, but not because the idea was unthinkable, or awful, or absurd. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. And that wasn’t good enough at all." I'm sorry, but from what Mae has said earlier, that was exactly it! And these sentences would read better were they conjoined with some punctuation, such as a semi-colon and a comma.

I didn't get the point of the author using correct grammar in some places and poor punctuation in others, but this was an advance review copy so hopefully the errors and nonsensical writing will be corrected before the final version gets loose. I also encountered some other examples of problematic writing, such as:

"I suppose she has her reasons," I said. "He runs the second-biggest island. Rex is his family’s only magician. It’s what everyone wants her to do."

And yet Mae has a problem with what others want her to do? How hypocritical.

I read, "If the solution were as simple as telling Grandfather, don’t you think Apollonia would have done it already?" No, I don't, because this is a YA novel and rather than do the sensible, obvious thing and tell important things to people who need to know them, which is what real people do, everyone is hoarding secrets here, which is what fictional YA people routinely do. Again, it's unrealistic, and it creates palpably fake tension. A wiser writer would have found ways to add mystery and intrigue without having the main characters do such patently dumb things, and make such juvenile and brain-dead decisions.

Typically for YA, this novel is obsessed with looks: "There were some people who said Apollonia wasn’t beautiful." Who cares if the 'wicked step-sister' is beautiful or not? It has no bearing on the story, but it does reveal volumes about Mae's shallow and nauseating character. It's really rather pathetic. Also, it demeans Mae to have her so focused on such shallow traits, without at the very least augmenting them with something deeper and more meaningful. It betrays the main character and makes her just as vacuous, and lacking in smarts and integrity. It gives her just as little appeal as everyone else who she herself criticizes!

All in all I cannot commend this as a worthy read because it has far too much trope, and far too many faults.

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Rating: WARTY!

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

I really need to quit reading stories where the description has it that this novel is "Story X meets Story Y," where X and Y are well-known novels or movies. Rather than represent the best of the referenced stories they're supposed to mash-up, such books as this always seem to exemplify the worst of them.

Unfortunately this one is in first person which is worst person for the most part. I do not like first person stories because they're far too "me me me." If you get a good author and a decent main character narrating, it can work, but this main character, Delphine, was not a nice person and she was completely unlikeable. It became ever harder to listen to her whiny voice and endless self-absorption which is only one reason why I DNF'd this.

The fact that Delphine smoked didn't help. I have an aversion to characters who smoke, and it seems like a bad idea to have your character be a ballet dancer and smoke. That's not to say that no ballet dancer ever smoked (or had any other bad habits), but I think an author needs to ask questions like: "what are we promoting here?" and "do I really want my readers to detest her?" I'm not sure the author considered those questions in imbuing Delphine with the traits she has, while simultaneously trying to have it that she was who she was.

Quite honestly, I don't really like to watch ballet performances, but I do appreciate the work the dancers do and the sacrifices they make, so maybe that's why I like a good ballet story, or documentary of which I have read and seen many. This one isn't such a story.

On a point of order (or maybe en pointe of order!) let's take that term - dancers - for example. Despite the novel's title, the term 'ballerina' is traditionally one that is reserved, in ballet, for exceptional performers, and the title étoile for a real star. None of the three main characters in this novel, Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux (who may as well not be in it for all she contributes) is a ballerina much less an étoile. They are danseuses, which admittedly would not make for such an appealing title.

These three dancers are at the Paris Opera Ballet School, although for all that counts in the story, they could be ballet dancers anywhere, really. This never really felt like a French novel, and I was kicked out of suspension of disbelief more than once, for example when at one point the author tells us "There's no real word for creepy in French" (try glauque).

This kind of thing wasn't helped by the body-shaming employed at least at one place (I DNF'd this novel so I can't speak for all of it) when I read, "A ballerina is a perfect woman. Thin. Beautiful. Invisibly strong." I agree with the third item, but thin and beautiful are abusive and were completely unnecessary. Again, this story is in first person, so this was Delphine making this observation, but it spoke badly of her as a person and turned me off her even more than I already was. Yes, there are thin ballet dancers, but how they get that way is a whole other story that's barely touched on here, where all danseuses seem to be cookie-cutter clones of one another with no room for personality or individuality.

There was also a confused section which read "This one looked like it was from the early 19'60s:" where it seems like the author had written '60's and then added the century and forgot to remove the apostrophe. A minute problem, but still one more problem. Maybe that will be fixed in the final copy.

On top of all of this were the endless flashbacks in the story. I'm not a fan of flashbacks, especially not extensive ones, and even more especially not when these diversions didn't really have divisions from the current story - certainly not by chapter - nor were they truly separate as entities since the flashbacks were imbued with the present day perspective, and the present day sometimes had Delphine recalling significant things from the past. It became, at times, hard to remember where we were in time, and this only served to dissolve the story into an ungodly and tiresome mess.

It's one thing to tease a mystery from the past, but when it's teased out over scores of muddled pages of sometimes tedious text, that's just irritating to a reader. I made it through fifty percent of this and we were no nearer at all to getting even an inkling of what this big faux pas was. That's when I gave up, during yet another uninformative story-halting flashback, and I said the hell with it! At that point, I was so frustrated with the story that I really didn't care anymore what happened or who it happened to, or how much it hurt. I'm done with this! It was that bad.

If this novel had been more concise, had focused more on ballet and less on trivial drama, and had told a better story instead of mindlessly meandering and holding up a tease that was probably only going to be a disappointing letdown anyway, I would have been onboard with it, but as it is, I can't commend it as a worthy read. It was time to jeté-son it and move allongé to something more divertissement.

Ouroboros by Odette C Bell

Rating: WARTY!

This book is a dumb - and I might add highly inapropriate - so-called romance between Nida Harper, who is a cadet at the United Galactic Coalition Academy (which is way more of a mouthful than it needs to be) and a superior officer.

Any book (or movie or TV show) that blabbers about some galactic-wide entity good or bad, or about a coalition, or about saving the galaxy, is full of shit. All it tells me is that the author doesn't have the first clue how huge and sparsely-populated the galaxy is - and I'm talking habitable planets, not even actual populations. What it does tell me is how narrow the mind is and how limited the imagination is of the author.

This novel sounded like it might be interesting, but in the end it was a joke. Harper comes off like that sad and pathetic Jar Jar Binks in the risible Star Wars 'return of the endlessly recycled movie plot' trilogy of trilogies. Her superior officer ought to be drummed out of the regiment for his inappropriate interest in someone under his command. Harper is the worst candidate at the school and would have been herself drummed out in any real world scenario.

On an evidently poorly-supervised trip to an alien world, Harper is exposed to a source of energy. Why this energy takes over her body and then ridiculously and desperately wants to return to the world where she picked it up is a complete mystery that's not explored - at least in this first volume I read. Why, when a cadet is found inexplicably unconscious and injured on an alien planet surface during what ought to have been a routine exploration, she's not hospitalized and a full inquiry conducted is another mystery. The author either doesn't understand the military, or military standards have plummeted precipitously between now and whenever this story is set.

The interest Lieutenant Carson Blake shows in her is not only inappropriate since he's an authority figure with power over her, it's inexplicable since the two are falling for each other without having spent any significant time together. So: the story is badly-plotted and badly-written.

I know authors do not have control over the book description or the cover when they essentially give up their rights as Big Publishing™ takes over their novel, but to read that Nida has "matted, black, compact curls" and then look at the cover image where she has long, flowing, straight hair tells me once again that the ignoramus who designed the cover never even so much as looked at the text underneath it. This is why I normally pay zero attention to book covers because they're typically so pathetic and misleading and aimed at the lowest common denominator - which often is the crotch, hence the cover image's tight, clinging leather, with the lowered zipper over the bulging chest. Pathetic. The cover designer ought to be chemically neutered.

I have a hard time with sci-fi characters who have ridiculous apostrophes in their name. Nida's best friend sounds like she comes from Vulcan: "J'Etem" who is Nida's token black friend, and who is, of course an alien. The first thing these two females talk about in worshipful tones is a guy, so I guess Odette Bell never heard of the Bechdel-Wallace test. J'Etem was supposed to be Nida's best friend, but after that initial introductory mention, she virtually disappeared from this story, like the author had forgotten who her best friend was. No matter what bad things happened to Nida, J'Etem didn't give a shit, apparently.

Given the image on the front cover I kept expecting Nida to grow a pair (of breasts) but she never did - always taking a back seat to the lieutenant or to the energy that raped her. I was as disappointed in that as I was in the poor biology on display here. Like in the dumb-ass Star Trek episodes, there was inter-species reproduction, which is nonsensical. I read that one alien was "An enormous man of half-human half-Yara build." No! Not going to happen! The closest species to humans on Earth is the chimpanzee with which we share a common ancestor and it's not remotely possible to hybridize those two species, so there's no way in hell a human is ever going to produce offspring, viable or otherwise by mating with an alien - unless it was through some bizarre Frankensteinian experiment in a lab.

Thoughtless writing didn't help. With a few pages I read these thing of the same charcter: "Now he had nothing to do." "He had things to do, and it was time to stop wasting the day." "Blake admitted he wasn’t busy." One could get whiplash reading a collection of stupidly contradictory claims in such close proximity to one another.

As usual there was far too much emphasis on shallow physical details and little to none of the important traits a being might have. I read, "J'Etem was stunning. She was Barkarian, and she was beautiful from her lustrous hair to her plush purple lips." Seriously? No. Just no. This novel is one of the most egregious examples of poor YA writing and it sucked.

Damaged by Becca Vincenza

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't realize this was a werewolf story or I would have avoided it like the plague. Werewolf stories are marginally more stupid than vampire stories, and I gave up on this one in short order. Once in a while there's a truly rare one that's worth reading, but those are so scarce that I wonder sometimes if it's just a folktale. This had initially sounded interesting from the blurb, but we all know how misleading those are, don't we? (For detials see my 'non-review' reviews!)

The quality of the writing did not help. I read things like, "looked like she sleeping." I read, "released my grip on her bicep." This is a common failing in YA novels, most of which seem these days to have been written by people for whom English is a despised second language as judged by how poorly it's used. It's biceps, moron. I read, "He didn’t say anything more as the doors opened. The doors chimed and parted as the elevator came to a halt" Twice, really? And the doors chimed? Really?

I should have listened to my gut, which was sickened by the words in the description: "Stone is determined to protect her" when juxtaposed with the cover illustration which shows him - a figure of authority and power in her life - getting jiggy with her. Yeah. How's that protection working, Stone? Or does protection to you mean wearing a condom while you take advantage of a scared and weakened woman who has been broken down into complete compliance through torture? Stone is an asshole. And this is evidently yet another female YA author who apparently detests her own gender.

This novel rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I no longer buy novels that are first person if I can avoid it, and I deliberately ditched the remainder of my first person print books unread because I am so sick of first person voice. Unfortunately I still have a few in my ebook collection acquired a while ago and which occasionally bubble to the top of my never-ending reading list. I'm trying to delete those, too. The problem with this book is that it's dual-first person, which is inevitably twice as bad, and it’s clear from the mind-numbingly telegraphed beginning that these two are an item. Because of course you cannot have a novel where a woman takes care of herself. She has to have a guy to rescue and validate her. It’s the law. Barf.

I'm not against romance in a novel, but it has to feel natural and organic to me. Any hint of artificiality or of forcing it, and I am bored and irritated simultaneously. That was the problem here as these two characters, Audrey and Stone (why does she get a first name and he a last name?!) were essentially in love from their first glance. Yuk. Audrey is an individual who is somehow enhanced and therefore, shades of X-men, a pariah. Stone is a military guy. I should have decided firmly against this as soon as I read, "There is much more to Audrey than meets the eye and Stone is determined to protect her." But like I fool I started reading anyway and got turned completely off this after only a chapter or two.

The ebook version of this has some issues. Normally I do not see such issues in the Nook version of a novel. Those are usually good and it’s the Kindle version that slices and dices any text that's not plain vanilla. I read one part where the start of the sentence is fine: "While he spoke, I felt" but then the next few words were in really small text "the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll," and the last part of the sentence was in regular-sized text again: "but I didn’t open my eyes." Weird! The writign was too.

But as far as the story is concerned, I can’t commend it based on what I read of it.

The Sorcery Trial by Claire Luana, JA Armitage

Rating: WARTY!

This was essentially another in a long line of Hunger Games rip-offs and was bizarre. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I guess I thought it might be funny, but it wasn't. It was first person, which is typically worst person to voice a story in, and that showed here. The main character who ridiculously goes by "Jacq" is a too-young gofer at a TV studio who gets zero respect and has no prospects which begs the question as to why she's working there in the first place. Clearly she has no self-respect. She wants to be a stunt woman for reasons unexplained, but this is entirely the wrong place for her to be working if she's serious about pursuing that sort of a career. Clearly shge;s not too sharp. I shall call her Jackass from this point on.

The story is set in a world where the world of the 'faerie' (another author - correction pair of authors - too chickenshit to call them fairies) which has just been exposed to the human world, yet there's zero interest in it! No documentary teams are covering it; it's not a news item, and the first time it comes to prominence is through a reality show that Jackass's boss is running? How did this happen? Why did this happen?

There is this huge leap to 'it's suddenly happening', with zero explanation as to why the fairy king would even agree to such a stupid stunt, and then suddenly it's full-on Hunger Games where contestants could die even when they're simply competing in qualifying heats, and not one person, not even Jackass, thinks there's anything wrong with this? Why would she? She's a frigging moron.

Jackass's boss, who is all about publicity, inexplicably fires Jacq rather than exploit it for the news-worthiness of it, when she saves the life of a wannabe contestant on the course - a contestant who was trapped in a bear trap and pretty much lost her foot, who was then in danger of being eaten by an actual crocodile, and who finally was also in danger of being burned alive in a forest fire. In reality she would have sued the asses off the TV company - and won - and the company would have been bankrupted.

Instead, in the story, Jacq is carrying this injured contestant, who was all but passed-out from blood loss, when I read the following, as Jacq surveyed the area with a view to escaping the fire: "A cliff - complete with waterfall - loomed before us. Climbing it while carrying this girl was going to be almost impossible, but what choice did I have?" Hello there's a fucking fire, go into the waterfall, you stupid bitch! That's when I quit reading this shit.

Jackass's supposed motivation is that her sister disappeared into the fairy world a year or so before, which begs the question as to why she's pursuing being a stunt woman and working for a TV company instead of pursuing a life of becoming a private dick and going after her sister if she truly cares so much!

But then not a single thing in this story makes any sense except the predictable YA non-romance horseshit, the flat uninteresting characters, the shitty story-telling, and the general dumbness of the plot. It's trash: utter, total, unmitigated and ridiculous trash. If it had been a parody it would have made more sense, but it wasn't, and it wasn't funny, and it made no sense. You'd have more fun slitting your own throat with a blunted razor than you would reading this pathetic shit.

Speechless by Madeline Freeman

Rating: WARTY!

This is based on the Little Mermaid, but it's more like a Disney-esque version than a Hans Christian Anderson version (which is nothing like Disney's take). I'm not a fan of Disney because they're not known for originality, and these days they're far too big and powerful. It looks like this novel isn't very original either - especially since it's based on a rip-off premise to begin with. And for the first in a series it's predictably padded.

This novel could have begun at chapter nine, which is a quarter of the way in, and lost nothing at all from deleting the first eight chapters. The ebook has all the chapters listed (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc., and if you can fit your finger on the right one (good luck with that!) it will take you to that chapter, but tapping on that chapter header will not return you to the content page. For the life of me I cannot see why the hell a content list is included in ebooks. It's stupid and pointless, and just one more indication of how clueless and robotic publishers tend to be, with sadly few exceptions.

The story is also a rip-off of another Disney property - Marvel's X-Men. It's set in a future where genetic mutation has given some people abilities that make zero sense. Main character Aria's special power is that she can breathe underwater using gills that appear when she's immersed and disappear when she's dry. There's nothing in the human genome that could do this. While we share some curious traits with fish, we haven't actually been fish in a very long time, but this author would have us believe we're just a mutation away from returning to the sea!

Fine; I'll play along. So what has this YA author got for us? Well, a lot of predictability for one thing, and sub-standard writing for another, but I shall get to that later. Predictably, and exactly like in Marvel's X-Men, Aria is an 'aberration' and aberrations are predictably pariahs. In real life they would actually be celebrities, so this rang hollow. Predictably Aria has a hot guy, Alonzo, who is her best friend, although naturally she never sees him that way because he's an adopted 'brother'. Predictably, Aria wants more than her present life and dreams of joining one of the Mars colonies which ridiculously has also become a reality TV show for those on Earth. She predictably defies her father and signs up for inductee testing where predictably she's roomed with three vicious, lying, back-stabbing bullies. Yawn.

Predictably she meets a hot guy named Declan who's a bit of a bad boy and who is predictably in a position of power. Predictably she starts falling for him despite his betrayal of her, thereby setting up the predictable YA 'love' triangle. The tests she has to go through are stupid and worthy of a badly-written middle-grade novel, but Aria is chosen as a special snowflake because the testers are wise to her aberration. She's chosen - for no good reason - to go on a special mission to retrieve some data for them, otherwise Alonzo will be hurt somehow.

Here I have to give a minor spoiler. There is no Mars colony. At least not on Mars. It's on Earth and everyone has been fooled. This is profoundly stupid because people would know. At the very least there would be conspiracy theories about it, but here everyone is completely fooled! What, no one who worked to actually build the colony ever figured out what they were building? If the colonists actually built the colony, no one ever noticed that Martian gravity - which in reality would be less than 40% what it is on Earth - is exactly like Earth gravity? People would notice! The author makes no mention of gravity, even as she talks about faking the different positions of the stars and the smaller relative size of the sun from Mars. She would have been better-off choosing Venus which is equally unlivable, but if you can terraform Mars, then why not Venus? It's much more like Earth in terms of size, gravity, and so on.

So Aria's job is to break into the Mars colony and steal data that would allow her boss to prove the colony is fake? Seriously? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Since they know where the colony is, all they needed to do was expose the location to bring the whole stupid façade tumbling down! But apparently only Aria can break-in because the route is underwater. They claim no one can use SCUBA equipment because it would be found, despite there being countless places to hide it. So instead of a specially-trained agent breaking in, Aria does it and she's hobbled by being morphed into a lookalike of one of the colony residents, despite this change hampering her mobility and losing her the ability to speak. All of this is done to conform to the fairytale, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of this story!

And who does she run into twice while on the mission? Only the guy she moons over from watching the colony reality show. I'm sorry but this is horseshit. It's thoughtlessly written, badly-written, and makes no sense overall. Badly written? Yeah. I read at one point, "and she gritted her teeth and pushed through" and then less than one screen later, I read, "She gritted her teeth as she pushed herself to her feet." There must be a lot of grit on those teeth. Hopefully she won't have to smile too much....

Aria's break-in takes place during a solar flare when the Mars satellites have to be shielded and no show is transmitted, so it's a quiet time on the colony: there's no filming, and she can sneak around. Since she's going in at night, it makes no difference because there's no filming at night so we're told! But here's what Aria says: "I thought only satellites around Mars had to go into shielded mode." She has this confirmed, but the author seems not to realize that Earth is nearer to the sun than Mars and therefore more at risk from solar flare damage, not less! If Mars satellites need to be shielded then Earth's satellites sure as hell do!

In being transported to the colony for her mission, Aria, who has this huge affinity for water, somehow fails to notice she's on a boat! There's this tunnel she has to swim through to get to the colony and we're told, "There aren't any cameras in the tunnel - for obvious reasons." What reason are those? Would one of them be so someone could swim into the easiest ingress into the facility undetected?! This is really bad writing. Yeah, they wouldn't transmit a TV show from cameras in underwater tunnels, but for security they would need them. And if they're maintenance tunnels why are they flooded?!

At another point I read, "Aria nodded, but her minds spun with terrible possibilities" Um, how many minds does Aria have? Is this another of her mutations? Or just a typo that wasn't caught? My theory? She has only one mind, but she makes up the others! LOL! A common YA author faux pas - meaning literally, a false step - is to say something like "He wanted to explore the areas of Mars that people had yet to step foot on." The phrase is actually 'set foot', not 'step foot' unless of course you're an evidently ill-educated YA author, in which case by all means step your foot in your mouth.

The author writes that for the colony, they had "genetically engineered some of the heartiest trees on Earth to thrive in the Martian environment." Heartiest really? I think she meant 'hardiest'. This is right up there with 'step foot' and 'staunch' when 'stanch' is meant. These are common, annoying and utterly predictable YA author screw-ups. I see them all the time. It's almost a hallmark of YA authorship.

The author seems not to know what a schematic is. I read that Aria had seen a "holographic schematic of the chip Declan had sent to help her identify it", but a picture of the chip isn't the same as a schematic, which is a circuit diagram! A schematic shows the wiring of the chip and it's hardly something that would help her identify it unless she saw inside the chip and was an engineer who was familiar enough with the technology to identify it from the schematic. Trust me, that's not Aria.

Another problem is when authors try to be too clever for their own good. This isn't a YA issue per se (not 'per say', which is another YA faux pas), but it is a sci-fi issue. The author has her characters on Mars referring to a day as a 'sol': "I haven't seen you in years, and now I've seen you twice in less than a sol." No one talks like that. Even Mars colonists, if there ever are any, will not talk like that, They will say 'day' since the Martian day, as the author points out correctly for once, is only about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day - The Martian year, on the other hand, is twice that of Earth, which is another reason the colonists and the viewers would know they were not on Mars.

There's no reason to use sol, just like there's no reason to refer to humans as 'Terans' as is done in every freaking stupid space travel story ever told. No one uses that word. Why would it suddenly become universal in the future? The planet is Earth, not Tera. It never has been called Tera. It's Earth and we're humans, Why would that change? And why oh, why would aliens call us Terans? It makes zero sense!

This novel doesn't make that mistake - at least as far as I read - but it does have people routinely swearing, yet using completely ridiculous cuss words - namely the names of the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. No one will ever do that! It's never been done. Why would it? People have been saying 'fuck' and 'shit' for centuries. It won't change! Why are YA authors so stupid, and pathetic and squeamish about cuss words? I guess that says a lot about who these tepid stories are aimed at, huh?

Needless to say at this point, I lost patience and DNF'd this pile of crap. The truly sad thing is that the author apparently taught high school English for ten years. Ten frigging years! That makes me truly sad and actually glad she's no longer teaching. I condemn this novel for being yet another exemplar of all that's bad with story-telling, with the English language, and with YA novels.

Beautiful Demons by Sarra Cannon

Rating: WARTY!

This is a depressingly cookie-cutter YA series starter wherein the author seems to have made a bet with herself that she could get every single YA trope into the book in the first 100 screens and I think she succeeded, so I was quickly convinced that this novel would not be occupying my 'currently reading' list for long. The book blurb insists that "Harper Madison isn't like other girls" and then the author goes on to give the lie to that by making her exactly like every other YA girl. To whit: Harper is a troubled child, who is also an orphan child, and who is starting a new school. You could switch the main character's two names and still have a trope YA main character name. Harper Madison? Madison Harper? It doesn't make any difference.

Harper has the "I like the bad boy, but I also like the hot quarterback golden boy syndrome, aka a triangle. Despite the fact that Jackson smokes, and she detests smoking, she still has the hots for him and not a single word is spoken about him smelling like an ashtray. Sorry, but no. On top of this, she quickly runs afoul of the school queen bee, who is also a cheerleader and a bully. If Harper had had some backbone on their first encounter, I'd have had more respect for her, but no. There's also the trope obsession with boys in this novel to the extent that every other conversation these girls have is about boys and no other topics seem ever to enter their heads. Seriously, who reads this stuff? It's pure garbage that's almost exactly like nearly every other YA trilogy ever written. It's pathetic.

Harper apparently has the power of telekinesis, but she's never explored it. She's so stupid that she seems at a loss to even understand it. Never once has her curiosity prodded her to experiment with it, or to examine it, or try to control it. I'm sorry but this disqualifies her as a main character for me. It's not only unnatural, it makes for a bad story. If someone has a talent, it encourages them to employ it or take advantage of it and exploit it, but not this girl.

Now admittedly Harper has apparently ended-up killing her adoptive father because of this, so perhaps she's afraid, but this still doesn't explain why she's never played with the phenomenon prior to that. And if she felt bad about that accidental (or was it?!) death, then why hasn't she tried to control it since then? This death is also a problem: if she's guilty of manslaughter, then why hasn't she spent time in Juvie? They considered that she was guilty of starting a fire in which someone died - and she got away with it?

Given the title of the book, it was tempting to assume that those cheerleaders were all demons, or had sold their soul to a demon or something like, which might account for their extreme beauty and attitude, but I also wondered if the title was just misleading and these girls were not demons at all, but merely witches or magicians. Our lead girl, who is I assume going to come out in opposition to these people, hasn't yet figured this out. She's also lost her treasured pendant - the only thing she had left of her mom - which she obsesses upon in a deranged manner despite not even knowing this mom who gave away her daughter. I assume the pendant has been purloined by the demon girls in order to employ it to try to wreak havoc in Harper's life, but Harper isn't smart enough to figure that out. Her inexplicable focus on this, given that her mom ditched her, leads her to break out of the last chance girl's home she's been deposited in.

Her idiot idea is all about going her to find this pendant, when she hasn't even considered that she may have left it at home, or dropped it in the van on the journey to the game. So she steals a bike and rides to the stadium - which isn't in darkness, inexplicably, but is lit well enough for her to spy on one of the cheerleaders. The thing is that Harper is on her hands and knees under the bleachers and waiting for a chance to sneak out, when she loses her balance and falls over backwards with a whoop. What? How can you fall over backwards when you're on your hands and knees? And knowing she needs to be silent, she still lets out a whoop? This was ridiculous.

Harper nearly gets caught after the older guy who's with this cheerleader, Tori, upon whom she's spied, comes after her. Despite the fact that it's too dark for Harper to see him clearly, they can see her hidden under the bleachers! She miraculously gets away and of course, coincidence upon coincidence, Jackson is waiting in the barn when she returns the bike. She's all hot for him and his "rippling muscles." Barf. The next day, Tori turns up dead and Harper is the prime suspect for no apparent reason. She's hauled in for questioning from school in the middle of the day for no apparent reason and despite being able to move things with her mind, she ponders being trapped inescapably in the back of the police car. How dumb is Harper? This is seriously bad writing.

It gets worse. Without being read her rights and without being allowed to have an adult present, sixteen year old Harper is grilled by the sheriff who knows of her Jedi mind-tricks. You'd think with her history of multiple foster homes, Harper would have grown a pair, but instead of being badass and resisting the sheriff, she caves completely. Pathetic. It got worse though. I read this bit which finally decided me on giving up this trash. This is when the golden boy who's treated her like shit suddenly has a volte face and Harper isn't even really suspicious!

He put his palm on my cheek. I backed away, surprised, but he stepped forward and ran his fingertip along my chin line. "I was a real jerk to treat you like that," he said softly. "I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but I'm willing to do anything it takes to convince you that I'm sincere." I swallowed hard. Was I overreacting? "That first day we met in my sister's store, I thought you were beautiful," he said. He took my hand in his and caressed the side of my index finger...

So once again a guy thinks he can do whatever he wants to a girl he was downright mean to earlier, and what does this female author tell us? That it's okay. That the girl will let you - will accept your manhandling of her regardless of how you treated her in the past. That your only worth is your beauty. Nothing else matters. This is pure shit and any author, female or not, ought to be thoroughly ashamed of this kind of writing and reject it out of hand. Shame on you Sarra Cannon.

It's worse than that, though because this author evidently also thinks it's fine to have a weak female character who has no integrity, so self-respect, no spine, no moral core, and who, most despicably, instinctively thinks she's weaker than any male. I don't care about female characters like that. I have no interest in reading about them. I also think this turn the novel takes here proves how pathetic first person voice is, and what a seriously brain-dead choice it is for most novels, because in addition to the above, we also have Harper forgetting what happened - forgetting she was making out with Jackson not long before.

Now this is because, obviously, some sort of a spell has been put on her, but the fact is that Harper is the one relating this story word for word, conversation for conversation. How is it possible given that she's already recorded what happened, that she forgot it? Can she not go back and see what's she's written? If she's writing this later, then what accounts for her perfect memory of events - and if she has a perfect memory why is she forgetting stuff? If she forgot it, how could she have recorded the earlier part of the story? None of this makes a lick of sense! This is why first person is dumb as fuck. Once in a while it works, but usually no. Just no.

This story was too stupid to live and I ditched it at around 20% which was way more than it deserved. I ought to bill the author for wasting my valuable time!

Shades of Treason by Sandy Williams

Rating: WARTY!

The most memorable thing in this novel was the short sentence, “You burn, I burn, Ash.” Ash is the abbreviated last name of the main female character. I don't think the author realized there was unintended humor in writing that. Or maybe she did. But it seemed emblematic of this novel: one I had begun to like, but which by fifty percent of the way through had devolved into such a dumb-ass romance that I couldn't stand to read it anymore.

Thoughtless phrases like the one mentioned above littered this novel, so even as I started to like the main character and started to get into the story, these still brought me up with a short sharp stop every now and then. At one point, I read, "The second grabbed her arm, the arm connected to her dislocated shoulder." If it’s dislocated, it’s not connected, and vice-versa. I know what she's trying to say, but there are much better ways of saying it that evidently went unexplored there.

Another laughable line was: "She kept navigation on manual, took the controls, and banked away from the Obsidian." Spacecraft don't bank. Aircraft bank because they have to. Spacecraft don’t. Again, thoughtless writing. Another was a Star-Trek-ism: "She was as still as a Caruthian deer." On Star Trek (I don't even watch it any more, but unfortunately the memory refuses to fade) they were always talking about 'planet of origin-Item' as an indivisible pair. It was laughable. Same here. Why a Caruthian deer? Why not just a deer? Do Caruthian deer turn to stone when they become still - à la a weeping angels from Doctor Who? I doubt it. Just 'a deer' would have been fine. You don't need to specify the planet it came from because such a reference is both pretentious and meaningless. And poor writing. One last one: "You’re anomaly is unresponsive, Commander." She doesn't mean 'you are anomaly'; she means 'your anomaly'. Again, inattentive writing. As writers, we’ve all been there, and one of these once in a while is forgivable, but so many of them were too many.

In terms of the story itself, the anomaly is Lieutenant Ramie Ashdyn, or Ash for short. Nowhere in the 50% I read is an anomaly actually explained. It references a certain type of person, but how or why they're considered anomalies I cannot tell you because the author couldn't tell me. This genetic condition (or whatever it's supposed to be) appears to render them into a super soldier or spy or whatever is it they choose to do. Why does this happen? I don't know.

So anyway, Ashdyn is an anomaly and of course even more anomalous than others because of her attitude. I enjoyed this to begin with because it made her badass - that is until fifty percent into this story, when the romantic bullshit between her and her commanding officer became far too big a part of the story and entirely inappropriate for three major reasons. The first of these was that he was her commanding officer - her superior, her authority figure, and therefore this was entirely wrong. The second is worse, believe it or not. This superior officer - who she referred to as 'Rip' - were given unnatural mental control over their subordinates through the use of some sort of compulsion brainwashing, which meant these subordinates were unable to refuse a special type of command the officer could issue. The command could be anything, but when issued in the right way, they had no choice but to obey it. In short, they were slaves. Again, having sex with someone under that kind of control is entirely inappropriate.

The third reason was simply ridiculous, and I guess I should have paid more attention to the 'Shades of' portion of the title here. While it's a gray area, I do take full responsibility for my lack of focus here. Ashdyn has been off these special meds she takes and so is extraordinarily weakened (because she's an anomaly). On top of that, she'd been tortured for an hour, including having too-tight manacles on her limbs, and having at least one finger deliberately broken as well as having some device that causes extreme pain, but not damage, applied to her head several times. She'd been in a fight - both physical and using weapons - had stolen a space transport and crash-landed on the nearby planet, hiked in her increasingly weakening state through a forest, and then been forced to roll down the side of a canyon in order to escape being shot. In other words, she wasn't beaten, but she was battered and bruised, cut and damaged, with lord knows how many broken ribs and pulled muscles, and at the end of her string.

After all of this, and while washing off in a river - during which of course she has to get naked in order to get 'properly clean', as does her finely-chiseled and muscular superior officer - she's entertaining sexual thoughts about him - all her injuries and pain completely forgotten. This is the woman whose fiancé betrayed her, yet she has zero thoughts about that guy: not a sliver of a longing, or a regret or anything, and yet now she's suddenly lusting after this rugged commander for whom she's had zero feelings until he all-but beats up on her while she's manacled. I understand that later she has sex with him. But thankfully, I didn't read that far. I'd like to invite the author to abuse herself to the same extent she dictates that her female character gets abused and then see how sexual she feels after it. My guess is that her answer will be 'not bloody much'.

I can see a guy writing bullshit like this, but a female author? I don't get it at all. It’s entirely inappropriate and all it achieves is to turn what was shaping up to be a fine and strong female character into the wilting violet star of a cheesy Harlequin southern romance. It’s barf-worthy. This novel is warty to the max and I don't see where it can possibly go that's intelligent after this. Wherever that turns out to be, I don't want to go there with it. Half of this was too much by half.

Super Humans by TM Franklin

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another firstie in a series, which I doubt I'll be reading since I'm not a series fan and this novel turned me off not because of the 'super powers' (read: psychic powers - there's no Captain Marvel or Superman here!), but because there was far too much YA girl with stars in her eyes for my taste. Had that been excluded, this would have been a better book, but when you have a nineteen or twenty year old behaving like a thirteen year old in front of a guy, I'm yelling, "Check please, I need to leave!"

It's not that I'm claiming there are no females (or males for that matter) who behave or react like this, but does it have to be de rigeur in most every YA novel? It's pathetic, and the worst part about it is that it robs your main charcter of her agency.

I completely lost faith in Chloe's ability to "man" up when the big danger arrives because she'd proven herself unyieldingly, perennially, and totally inept, immature, juvenile, weak and pathetic in every scene, and in most of those scenes, she's not concerned about her "super power" - which is just a form of clairvoyance, not what you'd normally consider a super power. Her obsession with Ethan seriously derails the story and robs it of it;s power.

This was supposed to be a story of two young women joining forces to defeat an evil, and that prospect is what really lured me in, but one of the womn doesn't even show up until midway through the novel - right at the point where I lost patince with it, tiring of this assinine and badly-written 'romance" between Chloe and Ethan.

What the story should have been about is Chloe learning to control her power with Etha thrown-in if you must, but once he showed up, the story became completely derailed and was no longer a slightly problematic but nonetheless interesting story. Instead it was almost entirely about the dumbass romance. This is really a Harlequin romance novel, not a sci-fi or super powers book.

The book is also a cheat because it does not have an ending. Being part of a series, it can only ever be a prologue and you have to buy more books to actually get a story. I don't do prologues, especially not rip-off ones like this one is, so I've been given to understand. The grand finale - the battle agaisnt the evil doesn't evne happen here. There have to be more books before you get to the end. To me this is a form of bait and switch. It's inexcusable and mercenary. It's really blackmail. "Hey, you took my book for free! In return I've kidnapped your finale. I won't release it until you buy more books!" I won't do that to my readers and I don't have much time for authors who do, which is why I get behind very very few series and almost no trilogies - especially YA trilogies.

This is also a story where for no rational reason, Chloe's powers start appearing more routinely the further we get into the novel. They grow, and the owner has to try and control them, but this came without any validity, and far too late. We're told that Chloe has had these powers all her life and they're just now sprouting big time and she's just now learning to handle them? It made no sense. It's liek those dumb-ass poltergeist stories where the evil spirit very kindly starts out treating vistors gently, playing with them, making them think they're imagining things, and slowly ramping up the ante until the finale. Why? Why would a demon or a poltergeist do this? Authors rarely offer any rationale for writing like this, and it makes no sense, which is one major reason why I have little time for horror stories.

The final problem here was that the writing itself writing wasn't always great. I read one review where the reviewer praised the quality of the writing and copy-editing, but I don't think he read very carefully. Either that or he knows not of what he speaks, because I found problems. I read at one point: "A font of true knowledge." Um, that should be 'fount'. I guess one could have a font, but it really doesn't work.

In another part, I read, "The more we listen to our intuition, the stronger it becomes. Trust in your power, act on it, and it will grow stronger" I doubt that the hard-working contributors to Wikipedia would appreciate that, which is claimed as a quote but is apparently an outright lie. The author claims it's taken from wikipedia (or more accurately has a character make that claim), but not only does it not sound like something the overseers there would allow an entry to get away with, it doesn't appear anywhere on the Wilkipedia entry for Intuition. I checked.

At another point I was surprised to learn from this author that English is not a language! I read:

Classes dragged interminably on Friday. Chloe struggled to pay attention during the review lecture in her English class, determined to do well on her test the following week. Spanish was easy, at least. Languages had always come easy for her.

All languages save for her native one apparently! Or maybe you think that her English class isn't really, at a fundamental level, teaching her to speak, understand, and appreciate good English?

I read later, "She'd yet to declare a major and her advisor was losing patience with her" Seriously? Because that always happens. Advisors hound and terrorize students. Yeah! A bit further on, I read in reference to Ethan, "Every time she looked at him now, flashes of the vision came to mind. It wasn't a good thing. Her heart pounded. Her palms sweated." What, is Chloe thirteen?

I'm sorry but the less-than-readable writing style, the goofs, and the fact that this isn't a complete story, all turned me off something I had initially looked forward to reading. I can't commend this. Instead, I condemn the poor writing and poor charcterizations as well as the bait and switch.

The Influencer by RTW Lipkin

Rating: WARTY!

This was one that was of interest to me because I'm currently working on a middle-grade novel about the evils of social media, but this book which thankfully has nothing to do with anything I'm writing was completely useless as either an inspiration or a caution, and it sadly was not even a form of entertainment, because it was so badly written as I realized when I read, early on, "After a few weeks I got more very used to other things too."

The author uses some nonstandard contractions like "to've" to represent 'to have' and it was just silly, and it felt amateur and and annoying, but that wasn't even the worst part. First person voice, for me, is the most worthless and inauthentic voice you can write in. It rarely works and it's usually annoying. This one was worse because the two characters were so clueless, and unrealistic, and both of them were using their own first person, meaning that the author had to prefix each chapter with the name of the person writing it, which is clunky at best.

I'm like, what, did these two unequal and antagonistic persons collaborate to write this story? How did that ever come to pass? Seriously, I thoroughly detest novels of this type because they are as fake as it's possible to get and when I read, I want to get lost in the author's world, not keep being reminded of how shallow and threadbare it is. I want to buy into it and get lost in it, and this author denies a reader that opportunity.

The story is of Claude, a computer programmer, and Ash, his creation, which is (we're told) an AI designed to pose as an Internet influencer pushing fashion and make-up. What Claude knows about fashion and make-up, and how he knows it is a complete mystery since we're never told (not in the seventy pages I read anyway), but what the author knows about AI's (artificial intelligence) is starkly apparent: very little, if anything.

There were two problems here, the first being, why would the programmer need an AI to do what he wanted to do? He doesm't. He just needs a computer representation of an attractive woman, since he's doing all the controlling and not letting the AI develop on its own. That story was already done in the 2002 movie Simone which was written, produced, and directed by Andrew Niccol abs starred Al Pacino. Unlike that movie, this story makes no sense and screams that the programmer is an idiot. That diagnosis is further confirmed by Claude being constantly baffled by how his AI manages to learn things. What? Sorry but no, this sucks.

I found myself skimming from very early on because the story, particularly the Claude parts, were so boring and whiny. The Ash parts were hardly better, so it's rather generous for me to claim I 'read' seventy pages, and frankly that was too many. I ditched this DNF and I'm done with this author.

Alabaster Island by MS Kaminsky

Rating: WARTY!

Errata: "she was pretty with her long trusses of wavy auburn hair" - I think the author meant 'tresses'! Trusses would be rather weird. He also had post-pone at one point but I don't know if it was written that way with the hyphen, or if it was an artifact of the word processor or the ebook conversion process.

I'm not sure why I began reading this story. It's not very long, but even so, I made it only halfway through before giving up in disgust and in resentment at the time I'd wasted on it. The biggest problem with it was that literally nothing happened in it. I thought that the main character, Marei, would find out she's a mermaid, and maybe she did, but not on the first half of the novel where she found out nothing, did nothing, learned nothing, changed not so much as a millimeter and was one of the most boring characters I've ever read about. Marei isn't very smart and has no imagination, which is hardly surprising since there seems to be zero schooling on the island.

The premise is stupid. Apparently a very limited number of people live on the island and the mayor - a man who lives alone, decides who gets to pair off with who. Why? I don't know. The story is that no one can get pregnant on the island and they have to go off to another tiny island to get pregnant. Why? Who the hell knows? The author isn't telling and no one on the island finds this even remotely strange. The fact is that the reader doesn't know squat about this community because there is zero world-building and not a single person on the island, not even the younger ones, have an iota of curiosity about their life, why they are there, why they have so little freedom, what's elsewhere, off the island, or anything!

At a certain age, they're supposed to note down on a scrap of paper the name of the person they want to 'bind' with, but options are severely limited and the mayor makes the final decision. Everyone is apparently fine with this ridiculous arrangement. Marei encounters a mermaid one day, and isn't even remotely surprised despite mermaids supposedly being extinct. She has no curiosity about this alien being, and the mermaid is one of the most petulant characters worthy of the Tinker Bell Award. There is only the one encounter with this mermaid - at least in what I could stand to read and we learn nothing from it. There are occasional ships that pass the island, but which never interact with it. Why? Who knows. The reader certainly doesn't because the author tells us squat and no one ever questions anything.

The whole story was nonsensical and a waste of my time.

Lost Library by Kate Baray

Rating: WARTY!

My mistake with this book - yet another dumb-ass YA series starter - was to fail to pay attention to the word 'quirky' in the book description. That word is almost always a warning that the novel will be garbage. So, my bad.

The next problem is that the main male character is called 'John'. This is almost as bad as 'Jack', the most over-used action character name ever - and is a sure sign that this book is to be avoided. I don't even recall how this came into my collection. It was just there and I'd evidently begun to read it some time ago, but when I dug back into it I realized why I hadn't continued past chapter six: it was so bad.

Another problem is that this is a shifter book, and with one or two very rare exceptions, I'm not really a fan of those at all. Contingent with this problem is that he's not called a werewolf, but a lycan. This is the same chickenshit approach that you see in fantasy books where the fairies are called fae because the author is too big of a coward to call them what they are. "It might lose me some sales!" Fuck the sales. Tell a story! Write a good novel, for pete's sake!

I read only enough to know this was bad and not worth my time. Other negative reviewers I subsequently discovered have derided the novel as boring, with which I agree, derivative, with which I also agree, and formulaic, with which I also agree! Most shifter books are though, so this is nothing new; the authors of these novels are a very incestuous community. One reviewer mentioned that the main charcter, Lizzie Smith, is a Mary Sue, which is never good.

One reviewer mentioned that the central premise of the novel - which from the description, is that John arrives at Lizzie's house looking for a magical book of power - is quickly shelved in favor of the main female fan-girling over the werewolf. I encountered this as soon as I began re-reading in chapter six, and read: "why was she acting like a crushing teen." Well, it's because the idiot author wrote her that way, duhh!

I about barfed at that and quit reading right there because I could see precisely where this story was going - into the garbage as most of these werewolf stories, all of which are evidently about women who are ovulating - do. There's nothing worse than reading about an alpha male and a bitch in heat, which is typically all that these stories are. Wish-fulfilment much? I'm done with this book and this author. Next please, right this way.

The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason

Rating: WARTY!

This was the last of those seven stories in the Seven Against the Dark introductory first chapter collection I've been reviewing. I ended up not liking a single one of them although the first and the last both captured my imagination for a short time.

The first was about shifters, this last was about vampires. Neither of those are my favorite fictional topics, so it was a long shot anyway, but I really thought this last one might make it until it turned into a pathetic little YA love triangle. This things are so overdone, so tedious, so unimaginative and soooo boring that it almost makes me physically ill when I encounter one of them.

The problem is that all a love triangle like this does is to render the leading female into a spineless and vasillating flibbertigibbet who has no real mind of her own, cares nothing for either guy, in that she's quite happy to keep both of them on a string, or alternately and equally unsavory, she's merely a pawn in the hands of not one, but two men. I can't stand female characters like that and I am no fan of female authors who create such an appaling waste of a female character.

Set in London in the Regency period, which was very roughly the first twenty years of the eighteenth century, the book description has it that "vampires have always lived among them, quietly attacking unsuspecting debutantes and dandified lords as well as hackney drivers and Bond Street milliners. If not for the vampire slayers of the Gardella family, these immortal creatures would have long taken over the world." Really? The world? There are no other vampire slayers on planet Earth, and the secret has been so well-kept that there's not a single person outside of the family and their closest confidants who's aware of the problem, let alone doing something about it? I'm sorry but that is as pathetic as it is irresponsible, and it assumes everybody is stupid.

It's like Trump knowing full-well how dangerous Coronavirus was and doing nothing about it not even when literally hundreds of thousands of people have died. It's also a losing proposition given - from the 60% of this that I read - that vampires are positively rampaging across London. They would need droves of full-time vampire slayers to keep this infestation under control, not one YA chick. None of the premise made any sense.

So anyway, Victoria Gardella Grantworth is the new Buffy. The author freely acknowledges the inspiration, but unfortunately she picks the most idiotic parts of the Buffy story to lay upon her new hero. Although she starts out in fine style and there was even a bit of choice humor (but not enough), the story quickly devolved into every YA cliché imaginable and started going downhill for me. The worst part was when Victoria meets the bad boy, Sebastian Vioget.

This guy is a complete jerk, and a pervert, and yet Victoria lets him get away with pawing her and doing whatever he wants. He has more hypnotic control over her than do the vampires and yet she sees nothing wrong with his constant pawing of her, his demand to see her belly-button, his uninvited touching of her and his stealing one of her gloves. The first time the two encountered each other, I was about ready to ditch this story because I could see exactly where it was going, but foolishly, I decided to give the author a fair chance and I read on only to have my worst fears confirmed.

The second encounter between these two was even mnore ridiculous than the first. This is Victoria, supposedly the champion, and a woman who is raised to interact with the highest of society and behave properly at all times, but who for reason unexplained allows herself to be alone with this stranger, and takes zero offense as this asshole of a letch essentially feels her up? She's a trained vampire slayer who gets an icy chill on her neck when a vampire is close, and has no compunction and very little ineptitude in killiong them, yet she countenances this jerk and his boorish behavior, a man who is the sleazy manager of a club that openly accommodates vampires over which he has no control? It made zero sense.

There was a discrepancy between the freebie version of this book which was offered as part of the 7 volume introductory book that I began reading, and the first volume of this individual novel which I picked up (it's a freebie) when I had thought initially that I might be desatined to enjoy it. In the standalone novel, I read (or more accurately, tried to read!) the following:

"Why do you think it was a vampire attack?" Melly qíììH rniiino hpr pvp<¿ "T nrH Tmsrntt likely got too familiar with Miss Colton"

What it should have read was:

"Why do you think it was a vampire attack?" Melly said, rolling her eyes. "Lord Truscott likely got too familiar with Miss Colton."

The reason I know that is that the compendium version had been corrected whereas the standalone has not.

But I gave up on this in disappointment over the cheesy triangle and the appalling lack of self-respect Victoria has. I thought she was someone I could grow to appreciate as a strong female character, but she is certainly not. She's nothing more than yet another weak and limp YA female produced by yet another female author who should be ashamed of herself for doing this to women. This is garbage, period.

Beast by Christine Pope

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "that field of expertise was much more nuanced and difficuLieutenant Yes, miracles were still possible, but in order to rebuild, there had to be something left to build upon." Note that the previous sentence is an exact copy of the text from the novella. The word 'difficult' is truncated and mashed into the word 'Lieutenant' and some text is obviously missing here.

This was a really short story, barely a novella. Even so, I made it only about two-thirds the way through, because it was so unrealistic and so poorly-written. It's supposed to be volume zero of some series which I definitely have zero intention of reading after this nonsense.

When I say it lacks realism, I'm not talking about when the female main character Nora Whitaker "retraced her steps, went through the clean room and back out into the main hallway" because that's not how a clean room works. You don’t go through a clean room in your 'street' clothes. You gown, mask, and wear bootees to enter!

This so-called 'clean' room is located in a lab on Neptune's moon Triton. I don't even know why they were on Triton. It made no sense unless the doctor, Raymond Killian, was hoping to escape the 'Copehagen Protocols' by doing his work some three billion miles from Copenhagen, but the author herself tripped up that idea by having Nora raise the matter, implying that the protocols still applied even out there around the most distant planet in our solar system (not counting the several dwarf planets).

Killian was disfigured in an accident and wears extensive prosthetics, including a mask. Whittaker is thrilled to work with him because he's so brilliant, supposedly. She's able to solve a problem for him, but despite months quickly passing by, with the two working together, the author fails to do any work to show that they're becoming closer emotionally. She expects us to take it on faith while the whole time when this happens is essentially skipped-over, which for me was a fail when it comes to making a connection between them. It betrays the events the author goes on to describe later. That was a big part of the inauthenticity problem for me.

At first I thought Killian was actually a robot or a mechanical avatar controlled by Killian while his real body was hidden away behind the locked door to the private part of his lab where Nora never gets to go, but my idea was wrong. Honestly I wish I had been right because it might have made for a better story. At least I have some ideas of my own for a sci-fi novel based on Beauty and the Beast now, right?! LOL!

The lab was a bad venue for any romance because it was so sterile, by which I do not mean clinically (we know it was not, based on Killian's totally inadequate 'clean room' protocols!), I mean it lacked any other people, which rendered it a bit of a stretch that one guy had accomplished all he had with no assistants or assistance. Adding the idiot Trumpian Lieutenant just made things worse, because it rendered Whittaker the helpless maiden in distress and Killian her rescuer, which never goes down well for me, and is insulting to women in general. And why were those people military guys and not just security?

What the author ought to have done is have a couple of lab assistants, including a rival female instead of the lieutenant. That would have made for a better story. Consider this: given that Killian was severly disfigured, where were the people who designed and applied the prosthetics he wore? They already knew everything about his condition; why were one or two of them not working for him at the lab?

It made Whittaker look shallow and clueless that she didn't consider this and wonder about it, and it would have been easy for the author to make up excuses for why others were not there if she truly had wanted this complex lab to unrealistically have only Killian working in it: "Oh the doctor wanted to remain on Earth so he could continue his work in advanced prosthetics." "Oh my previous lab assistants didn't want to move to Triton," and so on. If the author didn't want any humans there, why not mention that he used robots for the work? That would have given Whittaker an opening to deepen the story by having her wonder if Killian himself was a robot.

So in short this is a big fail, an unworthy read and I cannot commend it. Please read on if you don't mind a big spoiler.

One of the biggest problems for me, was when Killian invited Whittaker to dinner in his private quarters with the teasing promise that he had something to show her. The something he wanted to share was a new body, which he had somehow created - built, grown, whatever (the author's a bit vague about it, at least as far as I read this story). Apparently it's a sort of cyborg - rather like the original terminator character from the first of the James Cameron movies. It's not actually a clone of him, so why is there a problem with the Copenhagen protocols (whatever those are supposed to be)?!

His plan is to transfer his consciousness into this new body. Rather than be thrilled for him, and marvel at his brilliance and at this opportunity to help countless others who have a disfigurement or otherwise problematic bodies. All Whittaker does is whine about the Copenhagen protocol and about how he's just fine the way he is - when he clearly isn't. Obviously the author is just doing this so she can maintain the 'beauty and the beast' fiction, but the writing is so poorly done that I just didn't buy it.

There's no problem with someone falling for a person with a handicap or a disfigurement by any means; the problem is that this author didn't do the work to get us there, and when Whittaker, out of the blue, just kisses his crispy lips it felt icky rather than romantic precisely because it felt more like she was doing it for the kick of seeing what it was like, rather than because she had genuine and strong feelings for him. This says nothing of the inappropriate relationship which Whittaker never once questions. Killian is her boss, so it's ethically wrong for him to be involved with her, he being the authority figure and her employer. To have neither Whittaker nor Killian even - at least fleetingly - mention this was bad writing, especially when Whittaker had baulked so strongly at his new body, because it contrevened some vague cloning protcol in her mind.

What did get mentioned was what a scandal it would be if anyone found out they were invovled. Not if they found out about his new body. Oh no - but if they thought she and he were having an affair! Seriously? The lab is sealed - no one gets in or out except Whittaker and Killian, and they always work long hours so why would anyone think there was anything going on - or conversely why would there not be an assumption that something was going on? It made no sense to suddenly, at that moment begin to doubt and quesiton. Again, badly-written, Ms Pope.

Plus it made no sense! If he could grow flesh like this, when why not grow it directly over his existing body? Maybe his body was badly damaged, but clearly it still functioned perfectly underneath the scarring, so it woudl seem that the scarring was, despite being very bad, superficial in important regards. You would think he could have added this new flesh, slowly replacing the scarred portions. We're already doing face transplants. I think it would have made for a better story too - especially if the replacement had gone wrong and this was why he was a 'beast'. But as I said, I didn't buy this. The writing felt lazy and ill-considered, and even as a work of fiction, it felt unreal and ridiculous and I cannot commend it for those reasons.

The World Is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins

Rating: WARTY!

I can't close out the dumb-ass romance reviews without including the queen od them: Jackie Collins. She wasn't in that volume of introductory chapters, but I got hold of one of her novels and was not impressed.

This is the author's controversial debut novel, which was published in 1968, and was made into a move a decade later. Unlike Jackie herself and her sister Joan, for that matter, this aged badly. The movie bore little resemblance to the novel. Neither of them was very good, being one-dimensional and very flat, but the novel benefited from being banned in a couple of countries in the southern hemisphere, so there you go. If it were submitted for publication today, no one would be interested in it.

The story is of advertising executive David Cooper, who is tired of his wife Linda, but unwilling to divorce her, so he cheats on her, most recently with a juvenile spoiled-brat Claudia Parker. He's talking crazy about marriage while she's talking of a career in modeling or acting or both. Linda inevitably discovers the affair and sues for divorce. David ends up living with Claudia and predictably realizing what a serious mistake he's made. By then it's too late because Linda is dating Jay Grossman, who is a Hollywood film producer. David ends up impregnating his secretary. That's it! That's the whole story!

Rest assured, I didn't make it that far; I made it as far as chapter four, where a drunk Linda is raped by this random guy Paul that she hooked-up with, and I quit right there. Hollywood was apparently unable to make anything out of it either, so they spiced it up a bit at the same time as they toned it down. In the movie, Linda's affair is with hot young divo (a male diva) with the ridiculous name of Gem Gemini, and her husband ends up shooting him if I recall. Equally predictable and uninspiring. I cannot commend this for anything except being a doorstop. Another author I can strike off my list - permanently.

Out of the storm by Avery Gale

Rating: WARTY!

This author's name sounds equally improbable, but at least the title doesn't suck. My first observation, taken from reading only four sentences is that the main guy, Kyle West, is a complete dumb-ass. He's out driving in a storm and is seeing horizontal rain. If there's a worse sign of a nearby tornado at night than that, I don't know one. Get the hell to shelter NOW, moron! The next sentence tells us the road is so wet that he's in danger of hysroplaning. Then slow down dipshit!

As soon as I learned Kyle is also an ex-Navy SEAL and this is another dom story, then I'm out. Sorry but the ex-Navy SEAL motif in novels is so overdone that it has charred, blackened, solidified, and welded itself to the oven, and the oven has caught fire from it and burned down the neighborhood. Get a new shtick. Please. This author has three stories in here, but one was way-the-hell more than enough to put me off her for life. A veritable gale she is not.

The Reluctant Dom by Tymber Dalton

Rating: WARTY!

I flatly refuse to read this one on account of two things: 1. the ridiculous title and 2. the absurd name of the author. I can't commend it on either of those grounds. The author has four more stories in this volume. Desperate much? I refuse to read those. And yes, I'm being unreasonable, but I'm taking my cue from these dumb-ass stories!