Scholarship Girl by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

This turned out to be another dumbass high-school series starter. The plot had sounded interesting, but the trope and cliché was a death knell for this as far as I'm concerned. Yet again we have the girl with an old and trusted friend as one corner of the inevitable triangle, and the rich bad boy of the school, who she hates, as the other corner. Why do so few female authors have anything original to say in YA? I know there are some because I've read and enjoyed them, but why are there so few and why are so many female authors dedicated to reproducing cloned pap? Are the authors or blame or the readers? Or the publishers? Thinking people want to know!

So this girl is a scholarship student at an academy that has fantasy characters: elves, fae (the author is too chickenshit to call them fairies), demons, etc., as students. So it's the uninventive usual. Naturally she's forced into being a bodyguard to the rich, spoiled, cruel brat of a student that she supposedly hates, but will inevitably, predictably, unimaginatively fall for. Wait, what? Bodyguard? This is a rich student school and they can't hire regular competent, professionally-trained adults as bodyguards? They have to bribe the bullied and impoverished scholarship students to do it? WTF!

I quit reading right there because I was almost literally nauseated by how bad this was and what a shameless rip-off it was of every other YA high school story. Despite the fact that these students are magical beings, they were all portrayed as exactly like regular high school characters. There was literally no difference other than their species name!

It was so pathetic that hoenstly, I was cringing for the author while reading it. Do none of these authors turn on their brain before starting to write? Do they not think outside of the box? Do they never put themselves into another's shoes or hooves? I honestly do not know how anyone can be so wooden as to write like this. I really don't. Yeah, I did expect this, but as always, I hoped for better. I was genuinely sorry to be once again disappointed. This was an early DNF, and I'mm done with reading anything else by this author.

Demon Child by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "I'd given up hope of getting those big, fat kudos" - except that kudos is not a plural! Not all words that end in 'S' are plurals!

This is yet another of those idiotic supernatural books that simply embarrasses the author and not least because it's such a clone of every other such novel out there that it's pathetic and tedious to read. I always hope there will be something new, something likeable in stories like this, something different for a change, but there almost never is and it's really rather depressing. I detest novels where the main character is named Kat because that's almost as bad as using 'Jack' in a novel about a male main character, but authors named Kat? I don't have a problem with that! I did have a problem with the predictable, self-obsessed, and ultimately unrealistic and tedious first person voice.

Another problem with this novel was that the author so obviously and desperately wanted her main character (who is uninventively named Clem Star) to be such a badass and a sexual powerhouse that she was turned into a caricature rather than a character. In cases like this one, I honestly have to wonder how much of this is really about the character and how much of it is authorial wish-fulfillment or attempts to address feelings of insecurity or inadequacy when and author creates a super-heroic character like this one, who is supposed to be tough, sexual and the best there is, but ends up looking more like some silly and trashy superhero character from a badly-written comic book.

The saddest thing about Clem was that she brought nothing new to the table. She was exactly like every other urban fantasy character in stories of this nature. The 'brilliantly effective but down on her luck' character has been done to death. And it makes no sense. If she's so good, why is she out of work? And if demons are such a known problem in this city, why isn't there an official force created to deal with them - why is it left in private hands? But authors? Find a new shtick, please, because there's nothing original here. Worse than this, though, Clem was nasty and disgusting, lived like a pig and had no redeeming qualities. There was literally nothing about her that made me empathize, or want to like her even remotely.

She kills demons and evidently uses this 'power' she calls her 'sex thrall' to lure them in. Yawn. Once again we have a female author who is saying her character is nothing more than a sex doll, in effect. Sex is actuakly mentioned to a nauseating level in this novel. Why female writers so persistently and consistently do this to their female leads continues to defeat my understanding. By all means let her be sexual if you like. I have no problem with that; the problem arises when sexuality or beauty is all an author invests her with. Can we not have a smart main female character? I don't mean you endlessly describe her as smart and then have her do consistently dumb shit; I mean you show her as smart without ever having to tell us she is. I guess I'll have to keep looking for writers who offer such characters. Or just keep writing them myself and hope there are readers out here who get it.

So the problem for one-dimensional Clem, we're told, is that this new bad guy is a demon child so she can't use her sex thrall. Why not? I guess because the author is squeamish about a child and sex, but this isn't a human boy we're talking about. It's a murderous demon who is killing wantonly and en masse, yet all the while it's treated like a child. Apparently this demon was defeated once, but inexplicably not killed! Now it's loose again.

Nowhere - not in the bit I read before giving up because I didn't want to risk vomiting from reading more - was there any definition of exactly what a demon is and why fighting it is left to humans rather than ceded to angels or some other supernatural power. Again that's par for the course for dumb-ass stories like this, but it's still stupid. The main character tells us that "working for a vampire is strictly taboo" and disses vampires, saying they stink and are animals, and then immediately gets the hots for a vampire who comes to hire her to take on the demon child - the same vampire who attacked her not long before in a dark alley!

We were told the alley was dark, and she couldn't see the vamp, yet still she still chose to walk down it and apparently the light she was heading toward at the end of the alley actually lit nothing. This entire section about this attack made zero sense, and why on Earth would she melt for this vampire who had literally attacked and tried to abduct her? Why the vamps even need help form this woman goes unexplored and unexplained, of course. It was at that point that I quit because after all the dissing of vampires, like this author was finally going in a new and different direction, she swerved wright back to type by spewing out how sexual and beautiful this violent visitor was, that was it for me. Check please! I'm done!

This story was garbage which is sad because it was recycled. But then recycling only works for waste, not for writing novels.