Upside Down magic by Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle, Emily Jenkins

Rating: WARTY!

Prior to this novel, Sarah Mlynowski was batting a thousand with me after two novels. Emily Jenkins, aka E Lockhart, was batting five hundred after six books, and I'd never read anything by Lauren Myracle. This one has besmirched each of their escutcheons.

To be fair, it's not aimed at me, but it was written so badly I have to say you would have to be a kid with truly low standards to find this limp and frivolous effort entertaining. The main character is simply stupid, and this turned me off her right away. I don't mind a character who starts out stupid and wises up, but when the character remains dumb, and especially if it's a female character, I find the book irksome and want to remove its spine, to put it into 'Drax the Destroyer' terminology.

This is the story of three young kids who fail to get into a prestigious magic academy which is run by the father of one of the characters. Instead they go to the Upside Down magic school and they don't like it. They're incompetent, and it takes them forever to figure out what's wrong. This means that the school has failed them badly and is obviously really, really awful at teaching, but this disturbing proposition is never addressed in the writing.

This novel is a clear case of too many cooks spoiling the broth and I do not recommend it.

Genuine Fraud by E Lockhart

Rating: WARTY!

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

I was thrilled to get a chance to read this because I've been a fan of this author (Emily Jenkins writing as E Lockhart) ever since I read The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks which I really loved. That bought her a lot of good grace from me, but my results with her after that haven't been wholly positive. I did not like The Boyfriend List, and I detested We were Liars so much that I was moved to write a parody song about it as part of my review. It was titled "Purple Prose" and was based on the Prince song, Purple Rain! On the other hand, I really liked Dramarama so she was batting a .500 going into this.

This novel started out great and had me really hooked on this intriguing young woman who was strong, wealthy, and evidently hiding out from someone. When she fears she's been discovered, she acts decisively and leaves town, ruthlessly dealing with a guy from the hotel who is trying to extort money from her. The problem is that then it went into what appeared to be terminal flashback mode which frankly pissed me off. I detest flashbacks because they bring the story to a screeching halt while we get an info-dump. Not a good writing plan.

All I was getting was this boring history, which seemed irrelevant to the story I'd been reading - like it was a completely different novel. It was intended to explicate the beginning of the novel, but all it did was spoil it, and it was really confusing to me until I read some other reviews of the story and then it became clear that the tale was being told backwards! Sorry, but no.

Not only was it backwards, it was tediously mundane, and it felt like the Chinese water torture: this story was determined to punish me and it was going to take a mind-numbingly long time to do it. If the flashback material had been as gripping a the first chapter, that would have at least been something but the canvas this author was painting here wasn't a picture - it was merely a coat of gesso aimed at priming the surface, and I was not prepared to watch this pallid coat of paint dry.

Worse, I thought I knew already what was going on. I'm usually hopeless at figuring that out in a mystery novel, but in this case it seemed so obvious even to me. The main character is this girl named Jule, and she had a friend named Imogen who appeared to have killed herself, but no body was found which as you know means that the person ain't dead - or someone switched places with the victim. I left it to other readers to figure out which case this was. As for me, I couldn't have cared less by this point, which was about 60% in. The story was very short, but I have better things to do with my time than put myself through this kind of writing.

From some of those reviews I read, I also discovered that this was essentially the same story as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. I haven't read that novel, so i can;t comment, and it's not relevant to me because I was judging this on its own merits - or in this case lack of same, but other reviewers seemed pretty adamant that if you've read Highsmith's novel, you really don't need to read this one.

What's relevant to me is whether a story moves me and keeps me interested, and this one failed. Like I said, I loved the opening chapter but after that, as soon as we began exploring the past, I lost interest because there was nothing in it to interest me that could remotely compare with the quality of the writing in that first chapter.

If the past had been at all revelatory or exciting, it might have been different, but it really was not. It was so predictable that it was tedious to read. There were no surprises. Worse, I went from liking the main character and admiring her smarts and pluck to detesting her as a complete idiot. I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend this one.

The Boyfriend List by E Lockhart

Title: The Boyfriend List
Author: E Lockhart
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!

When I first looked at this, I decided that I sincerely hoped the female depicted on the cover was the therapist because she looks way too old to be the subject of the novel. If she is the subject of the novel, Ruby Oliver, then the therapist has way more serious issues to address than a list of people who aren't even boyfriends. I can't think of a worse or a more inauthentic approach to a novel than the one taken here. Or more accurately, I probably can. but I can't imagine one which would have a chance of becoming published. I can't believe this one was.

It took only the first disk of this audio book turn my stomach. The reading by Mandy Siegfried was acceptable, but the content was not. This was the most tedious and boring of characters, completely self-obsessed, blind to reality, effectively abused by her parents (sent for medical care for one panic attack? Seriously? Way to screw-up your daughter, numb-nuts. If you'd raised her properly she wouldn't be having these attacks to begin with - and I'll bet if she'd been a boy she wouldn't have been raised that way, either! If she's having a full-blown panic attack now, then she needed help long before this.

But given how appallingly lousy her parents are, a psychiatrist, child psychologist, or some other sort of therapist might be what's called for, but if that's the case, and all she's focused on is a list of fictional boyfriends, the the medical practitioner needs to be struck off (or bumped off) for malpractice! So no matter how you come into this novel it's just wrong, wrong, wrong, and one more time, WRONG!

Supposedly her psychiatrist/therapist/whatever told her to create a list of her "boyfriends" which includes people who she never even dated - so that they can be discussed at the next session. To what end? The problem isn't boyfriends, fictitious or otherwise! It's her lack of self confidence caused by the fact that she's been raised like far too many girls: taught that she needs validation and that beauty is everything, by her lousy parents who are actually the real problem here.

It took hardly any time at all to decide that I had much better things to do with my time than to listen to a spoiled-rotten fifteen-year-old self-obsess about boyfriends she never even had, as though without a boy in her life she's completely worthless, useless, hopeless and incomplete at best. Why do female YA authors treat females so appallingly badly?

I fell in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, and I adored Sadye, but after dealing with We Were Liars and now this mess, I'mm done with E Lockhart/Emily Jenkins (now there's a case of schizophrenia waiting to be diagnosed: adopt a new persona so you can deceive readers by writing books under a false name? Whoa!). Check please! I'm outta here. Clear the pilates from the table and next time bring me a bigger cup size for my coffee. I'm done.

We were Liars by E Lockhart

Title: We were Liars
Author: E Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

I never meant to write y'all any sorrow.
I never meant to write y'all any pain.
I only wanted one time t' see y'all reading.
I only want to see you reading all my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted dramarama from my purple prose.

I never wanted to be your weekend novel.
I only wanted to start a sales trend.
Baby I could never be your baby beach book.
It's such a shame my readership has to end.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted to see you reading all my purple prose.

Honey I know, I know, I know books are changing.
It's time we all learn how to be bad,
That means you too.
You say you want a reader,
But you can't seem to make up your mind.
Kindle, Nook, or iPad doesn't matter,
Just let me guide you to my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
If you know what I'm prosing about up here.
C'mon raise your ebook.

Purple prose, purple prose.
We were liars, just a fly on the wall.
(adapted from 'Purple Brain' a parody song from Dire Virgins by Ian Wood)

When I knew
beforehand
that this
novel
had been
recommended by John
Green,
I hawked voluminous gobs of
green
slimy
spittle upon it
in the library.
It ran down the cover
and along the shelves
spurting from between
the neatly lined books
and all over the floor
soaking the carpet as I
walked
on
by.

That was an E. Lockhart metaphor for an emotion. In other words, none of it really happened at all, which explains why I ended-up with this in my CD player in the car, trapped helplessly listening to one of the worst novels I've ever not read as I drove home from the library. The last time I came away from such a novel, I was bearing such a nauseated feeling like I needed to somehow get even with the author, that I went on and wrote an entire parody of Divergent.

I'm not going to spend any of my time doing that over this squib when I have more important projects begging for completion. Plus Jenkins/Lockhart actually has credit in her account with me for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Dramarama.

Emily Jenkins can do far, far better than this, I know she can. I fell in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, and I liked and respected Sadye aka Sarah, but I didn't like anything about this book, which means that the author failed, because if I was supposed to care about these people and be moved by the tragedy which befell them, that aim was tragically befouled by the writing. Frankie my dramarama, I didn't give a damn.

When main character and narrator Cadence (really?!) told me she got shot and it turned out to be a well disguised metaphor, I later found myself wishing she actually had been shot, she was so annoying. Indeed, if she'd really been shot in the chest by her departing father, that would have made for a really intriguing story.

Intriguing this was not. The ending was not a surprise (even though I skimmed and didn't finish this, it became pretty obvious what was going on). It was more twisted than twist, and it has been done before and done better. The problem here was that the characters were intrinsically boring. They had nothing to recommend them.

p>
You know if you read "how to's" about successful novel writing, one of the things they insist you absolutely do not do is make your narrator the villain and keep this from your reader. This just goes to prove how easily the "rules" are bent or discarded once you have your foot in the door of the same Big Publishing™ conglomerate which routinely disses you when you try to do the same things established writers get away with every day. If this same novel had been submitted by an unknown writer, it would never have been published. This is also why I'm so glad that none of us is dependent any more upon going cap-in-hand to the big five corporate behemoths begging them on our knees to take a look at our lowly amateur efforts.

It was really quite bizarre to read a novel about filthy rich people who lead a notably less interesting life than I do! They evidently had nothing better to do with their endless time than to play interminable games of Scrabble and wander around from one house to another in their 'compound' looking for each other so they could have pointless pseudo-intellectual non-conversations with each other, essentially about how little they know and care about anyone who exists outside their own skin.

Most of these set pieces (in the parts I managed to force myself to listen to) revolved solely around Gat's righteous indignation that the other three didn't care about anyone who wasn't them. So why on Earth did he keep on coming back and hanging out with them each summer? There was no more an answer for that than there was for the existence of this novel in the first place, and it was one more example of how caricatured and cardboard these characters were.

I cannot recommend this, not even remotely. The audio version was particularly annoying because the narrator didn't sound anything like she was in her mid-teens. In fact, to suggest that maybe she was the mother of someone in their mid-teens was stretching it. I don't necessarily advocate getting, say, a fourteen-year-old to read a story told by a fourteen-year-old, although it's certainly worth considering if someone that age can carry it. I don't demand that an actor be hired for reading a novel. In fact I see that as an appallingly exclusive habit when others can read just as well. All I require is someone who can read pleasantly, but for first person PoV novels, please do let us get someone who sounds at least a bit like the narrating character is supposed to sound!

In closing, allow me to suggest some new and improved titles for this novel: 'We Were Outliers', 'We Were Boring', 'We Weren't', 'Weedy'.