Author: JL Spelbring
Publisher: Spencer Hill Press
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
Errata:
p36 "Because of her position as head of the Kripo unit held..." makes no sense. It should be "Because of the position she held..." or something like that.
p60 "bicep". Nope. It's biceps. And triceps.
p161 About two-thirds down this page, there's a transition between two completely different scenes with nothing to mark it: no chapter break, no extra space between paragraphs, no triple asterisk or something along those lines.
How freaking cool of a name is 'Spelbring'?! It's the best author name ever, and it's curiously apropos in a novel that despite its thin veneer of purported sci-fi and dystopia, is really a romance disguised as a magical fantasy novel.
Spelbring is a fellow Texan (not that I'm really a Texan, but my kids are!) and a fellow blogspotter, so I was actually biased towards her to begin with. My problem was that while I kept on really wanting to like this, and wanting to rate it highly because it did draw me in and carry me along at first, I found myself stumbling over one problem after another, each of which ruined my suspension of disbelief. It transitioned from a page-turner to a stomach-turner about two-thirds the way through, and in the end I could not finish the novel for the tired trope of a teen romance into which it morphed.
At times, it really felt like the author was deliberately trying to provoke me to see how much taunting she could get away with before I threw up my hands - or just threw up! On a positive note, this novel is blessedly free of first person PoV, which I appreciated immensely and for which I was tempted to award the author five stars right there and then, but I mustn't. I mustn't! Must. Wait. Until. I've Read it....
This is a story about Ellyssa aka subject 62, who has escaped from The Center for Genetic Research and Eugenics (such institutions are never a good thing). She was genetically engineered as a super-soldier, but that's as far as this novel went when it came to building an impressive and strong female character. From that description onwards, she's just another troubled high-school teenager with nothing to recommend her.
We begin with Ellyssa planning on taking a train from Chicago to Kansas, like Dorothy trying to escape from Oz, but here, Oz is a place where the Nazis won, and they're now endeavoring to engender a master race which embodies so-called Aryan 'perfection' - and then some. The problem I had with this scenario is that there's absolutely no history given at all - not in an info dump at the start (thankfully!), and not even as snippets passed out in bits and pieces during the rest of the tale. How the world got like this is a complete blank and the novel suffers for that.
The state of the world is just a given with no background - like the 'wizard' behind the curtain, in fact - so the world-building was a bit thin to say the least (which is exactly what was said on the topic, as it happens). The fact that the Nazis are running the USA makes zero sense. The Germans never did attack the USA per se during World War Two. The entire war was confined (apart from some sea battles) to Europe and North Africa (and apart from the Japanese conflict, of course). It never impinged upon the US mainland, so even if the Nazis had won, how did it happen that they're now occupying the USA? There's no explanation offered at all.
In World War 2, there were several 'axis' powers - the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, and a sprinkling of others, including some Arab tribes in the North Africa conflict, yet none of this is mentioned. Since Japan was the only axis power to actually attack US territory, how come it's the Nazis in control in the US and not the Japanese? Again, no explanation. This would actually have helped to explain the fact that Aryan paragons are learning Japanese martial arts rather than German fighting techniques. To my knowledge no one has ever done a 'The Japanese Won' scenario. There - a free premise for your next novel, and I won't even ask for a credit!
But I digress. Ellyssa is a paragon of this Aryan dream, not only genetically engineered, but raised under the callous, if not brutal, oversight of her own father to be an emotionless highly-skilled fighting machine, yet we see absolutely zero evidence of this when she's in 'action'! Yeah, we get a couple of roundhouse kicks, but nothing to lead us to believe that she actually is a super-soldier of any kind. Nor do we see a lack of emotion amongst her incubated siblings, for that matter.
These 'experimental children' were all created by Dr Hirch, their genetic father. He's a villain who is so awfully one-dimensional and melodramatic that I was disappointed when he didn't actually twirl his mustache in his fingertips and laugh maniacally with a "Mwa-ha-ha!" from time to time. Why such a man would raise a girl like this is left unexplained. The problem is not that girls cannot step up to be such a thing, but that it struck me as completely out of character for this dedicated Nazi to want to elevate a female to such a position. The Nazis were hardly known for their struggle for gender equality (amongst a hoard of other things for which they weren't known, either). "Good Aryan" women in Nazi Germany were a baby farm for men, not an equal of men.
Unknown to her sad dad, Ellyssa has emotional content which she has inexplicably managed to hide, but the rest of her abilities - her peak of physical perfection, her fitness, strength, skill, and smarts are very well known to him, including the fact that she can read minds. Yet even with this sterling background, even when she was on-board with her father's scheme, she discovered something which only made her want to run. Now she's fleeing The Center and heading for Kansas, a destination based solely on her reading the mind of one of her father's victims. Again, this was a bit thin to say the least.
Hot in pursuit of Ellyssa is Angela. She's not one of the elite, but she feels in her bones that she's every bit their equal, if not better. During her escape, Ellyssa had knocked her out and given her the slip, and Angela was not one to suffer such an embarrassment lightly. Despite strict orders to return Ellyssa alive, Angela got her gun, and took off after the escapee with a vengeance, yet all she's actually capable of from that point onwards, is chewing-up the scenery and growling. We really see nothing of her other than this, which was a waste of a potentially good character.
I have to say that while I was drawn-in and very much felt on Ellyssa's side to begin with, her flight to freedom wasn't very well depicted. It dragged somewhat, and the character's supposed background started showing some holes. Far from being military perfection, Ellyssa is depicted here as being weak, not too smart, prone to infection, and incapable of really busting loose and taking on the enemy.
There's no date supplied (that I noticed) to set the period for this novel. Judged by the state of genetic engineering, the use of satellites, (and the mention of a Taurus PT145 hand gun), this is a contemporary story, yet when it comes to tracking down an important escapee like Elyssa, on the run in open country, all we get is men and dogs - no drones! I found that rather hard to believe, and this lack of credibility continued to grow as I read on.
It's at this point that I have to express a huge gag reflex at the loudly trumpeted arrival of the trope male. His absurd name is Rein (which is curiously appropriate given how he tries to put reins on Ellyssa, rains on her parade, and tries to reign over her). He's so antagonistic towards Ellyssa that you know they'll be jumping each other's bones first chance they get. No surprises there.
Why does a woman have to be completely incomplete until a cliché of a male arrives on the scene with, yes, his hair in his eyes in these novels? It serves only to make the main female character weak, clingy, dependent, and deficient, which completely negates all the things we've been told about how strong and powerful Ellyssa supposedly is. I really don't get why writers - and female writers in particular - insist upon routinely hobbling their female characters like this. It's truly sickening at how frequently Ellyssa's heart quickens, or patters, or hammers. Every. Single. Time. He's. Close. What is she, thirteen?! It honestly makes me nauseous. Could you slam a reader over the head any more brutally with their instant "love"?
Can writers not see the massive paradox between the beauty of real, sweet, honest love and the violence of trying to force this trashy, amateur, young-adult-quality 'instadore' into readers' minds? I was, despite some irritations, enjoying this novel until it became clogged to the pores with this. Fortunately for my sanity and the contents of my stomach, the author managed not to go completely insane with it, but what we got was far too much, far too fast, and far, far too juvenile. These two characters had no chemistry, and no reason to fall for each other (other than Rein's naked lust for the 'hot chick', which is hardly a recommendation).
This whole situation, in fact, made no sense. When Ellyssa is inevitably captured by the rebels, their initial reaction is murderous, yet despite the fact that she violently attacks them, they nonetheless take her to their 'hospital' and fix her up for no valid reason whatsoever. Suddenly she's part of the resistance? That had no credibility at all for me.
It was like she waved a magic wand, which was curiously appropriate given how this story segues from sci-fi to fantasy. Could we not have been given some reason for this change of heart? Maybe she gasped something crucial as she passed out from blood-loss perhaps, or something to justify bringing the enemy into their secret encampment? Anything but this!
There's a really weird bit on page 102 where Ellyssa is trying to explain to Rein how she came into being. She was a product of in vitro fertilization, gestation taking place in a surrogate mother, but the way the author words it is wrong: "He then used In Vitro Fertilization to impregnate the female." I have no idea why the initial caps were employed here, but the sentence make no sense whatsoever. The whole business of fertilization outside the womb was the 'in vitro' part. Once that was over with, the rest was the impregnation. The one isn't the same as the other, and it just sounded weird, worded like that.
This is another YA novel where beauty is ranked far too highly. Yes, I get that it's an Aryan ideal in this case, so the fact that Ellyssa is attractive isn't the issue; the issue is Rein's constant use of her beauty as a referent as to how much utility she has to him. The only thing I kept thinking of, every time I read yet another of his tedious observations as to what a paragon she was in the stunning looks department, was how he was far more Aryan than ever she was in his attitude! The hell with what kind of person she was - how sweet, how personable, how easy to get along with, how decent, how much integrity she had, how loyal, how friendly, how skilled, how resourceful, how whatever, it was all about and only about sheer beauty for him. For my money, he was the real villain here.
Rein has no concept of propriety, personal space, or of boundaries. His hands are all over Ellyssa. He's holding her hand unnecessarily, like she's a child, he's squeezing her hand, he's cupping her face, he's wiping a tear with his thumb. Even when she lay on the verge of death when he found her, his only thought was not one of compassion, or of urgency in helping her, or even of finishing her off as an enemy, it was solely of how beautiful she was! How many people actually think like that? Other than poets on absinthe, how many people look at someone in pain, injured, bloody, probably dying, and think "My god she's beautiful!"?
The inappropriateness doesn't end there, either. At one point, when Rein is supposedly distraught over the loss of a parent figure, the only thing going through his mind is - yes, again - how beautiful she is! It's not how much of a comfort she is to him (or how little for that matter), nor is it of how warm of a person (or how cold) she is, but how beautiful, because you know that's the only important thing to ponder when someone you love dies. Rein is not only irrationally inconsistent, he's a complete jerk and poor, clueless Ellyssa sees nothing wrong with any of his conduct in complete disavowal of her life-long habituation.
That felt really false to me, but it wasn't as bad as when he miraculously 'comes to her rescue' when she's threatened with rape - another out-of-left-field scene. Instead of giving her room to recover, Rein starts flooding her personal space and man-handling her. What a completely jackass! I'm not a woman and I've never been raped, but that struck me as entirely the wrong behavior on his part. OTOH, he's never shown himself to be in control of his behavior around Ellyssa so I guess it was completely in character for him.
There were other irritations, too. The endless use of der vater in The Center, employed in addressing Ellyssa's father by his offspring was really annoying. It doesn't even make sense; it means, literally, 'the father', so unless they were addressing this man as god almighty (which is possible, I guess, but it was never asserted as such an appellation), they should have simply said 'vater' or 'papa'.
But that wasn't the biggest problem here. I know that we're supposed to see this as use of the 'superior' German language, but it's nearly all written in English, and der vater is always in German. It made no sense because this language switch-back was so inconsistent that it stuck out like a sore thumb. It's like Ellyssa knowing Asian martial arts with no Asians in view. I mentioned this before, but it's a good question: why would Aryans obsessed with racial purity embrace a fighting system from another race?
Again I have to risk another spoiler for the purpose of explaining what was wrong with the writing here. Let me try to keep it vague: the rifle experiment was so impractical as to be completely nuts. The muzzle velocity of any given rifle is a fixed value that's tied to the immutable laws of physics, and it can vary widely, but two or three thousand feet per second is far from uncommon.
Even an air gun fires a pellet or a BB at the speed of sound, which is over a thousand feet per second (in standard conditions). How many rooms do you know of that are over a thousand feet long? This means that even if your room is the length of three football fields and you stand at one wall and fire at the wall furthest from you, the bullet is going to reach the other wall in a second or less. The human nervous system is very fast, but your brain cannot get a signal to your foot to tell it to start running at a speed greater than 1/60th of a second. So if your room is twelve feet long or less, you're dead before the signal ever gets your first foot in motion! Mythbusters busted this myth.
No matter how finely-tuned a person is, no matter how good their genes are, there is a physical limit proscribed by these laws, which is unsurpassable. If you transcend that limit, you're no longer in the realm of sci-fi, but down the block and two streets over into pure fantasy-land. That's where this novel quickly went before it essentially dumped all of that into the back seat and simply became a couple of teens holding hands in the front seat of a 1957 Chevy at a drive-in movie.
In other news, and without wanting to give too many spoilers away, let me ask you to consider two things: the function of the human eye, and the invisible man. In order to see, our eyes have to intercept photons, thereby causing a chemical change in the retina, which is conveyed in a signal to the brain, where it's assembled into the 'picture that we see'. How can an invisible man see when he has eyes that permit light to pass completely through the retina, thereby failing to trigger any receptors? It's impossible. Any truly invisible person would be blind, because they'd be incapable of intercepting any light to see by!
But let's move on. I don't get why Rein is so angry when he learns more about Ellyssa (I do get that it's all about creating conflict between them, but it's so artificial that it's pathetic). He knew she was a danger from the start. Even though she was scared and un-trusting, she did warn them, yet he's still a jerk about it. Worse than this, he and others indulge themselves in night-time jaunts in an old truck to pick up supplies. They did this one night when they knew that people were out there searching for Ellyssa. In short, they're idiots, and they're hypocrites to talk of her 'betrayal' when they're so effectively betraying themselves!
It's this latter activity which suggest a plan to Angela to track down the rebels (and Ellyssa), yet even now, in this supposed sci-fi, technology fails to enter the picture. Instead of planting a tracker on their suspected courier's transportation, they simply put him under surveillance, and not satellite surveillance, but human surveillance. I didn't get why technology - in a novel where highly advanced technology in the form of genetic engineering, has created super-soldiers - is forced into repeatedly taking a back seat in this novel.
Here's another reason why this is more fantasy than ever it is sci-fi: when you can have someone 'reading' a blood sample and describing the 'donor' as being red haired, not very pretty, small, forthright, and angry, there's no science there. There's no sci-fi. There is only magic. And what does it matter whether she's pretty or not, for goodness sakes?! There is no gene, nor gene network, which can bestow these powers upon a person. You can't even determine if someone is angry from a blood sample using the most advanced scientific equipment in the world, under supervision by the smartest and most able scientists. It's nonsense.
The truly weird thing about the character who is doing this reading is that his name is Micah - a Judaic name. How, exactly, in this new fatherland where Aryan purity reigns supreme, did that happen?!!! It completely betrays the novel's very premise. He wasn't the only one with a non-Aryan name. There are several others in positions of power, or created as super-soldiers, who also have non-Aryan names: Aalexis (Russian origin), Ahron (Hebrew!!), Leland (English), Xaver (Latin). None of these names any sense in the context of this novel.
Despite all of this I pushed on and pushed on, but the absurd insta-romance came to dominate everything, and it was as ridiculous and unrealistic as it was boring. At that point, around chapter thirty, I honestly couldn't make myself read any more, and I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel. I don't really blame writers for writing these novels because they sell. I do fear greatly for the mentality of a readership which is willing not only to consume so much of this kind of writing, but also to pay good money for it.
I think Judy Spelbring has a future as a writer because she does have a talent for story-telling. I just wish this particular example had been 'rein'ed-in a lot more tightly than it was. It had the feeling to it that it hadn't been properly thought-out and edited, and it showed in the telling. This volume was made available for review because the second volume in the series has just been released, but given the quality of this opener, I'm certainly not interested in pursuing further installments. I would be open to reading something else by this author should she ever tire of the series and move on to something new, different, and much more mature.
