Witches of East End by Melissa de la Cruz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frozen by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

Title: Frozen
Author: Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Rating: WARTY!

This is the first volume in the 'Heart of Dread' series and it sucked. I found Frozen (not to be confused with Disney's recently released animated movie of the same name, also reviewed in this blog, and favorably, too) on the library's new young-adult fiction shelves, but this did not seem at all like a YA novel (and I don't mean that in a good way). I know the characters are supposed to be teens, but I saw nothing to impress that upon me in any serious fashion.

It takes place on Earth maybe a century or more into the future. Something awful (and unspecified) happened and Earth has once again become a snowball. It was after the first snowball Earth (or something like it) that the Cambrian 'explosion' occurred and life really took off, eventually evolving into everything we see today. Unlike that first snowball Earth, which has supportive evidence, we have no explanation at all for this new snowball - at least not any which the authors are intent upon revealing.

The main characters are Natasha "Nat" Kestal and Ryan Wesson. Kestal is a dealer in a Las Vegas casino. There's no word on how it is that casinos are still even remotely functional given how dysfunctional society is, and especially given how dirt poor people are, but apparently casinos are thriving! The US is under martial law, with movement severely restricted (again, no explanation for this), which makes Nat an oddity. She should not be in Vegas and is hiding her true origins (from one of the ice reservations where the non-brown-eyed folk live) by means of some sort of eye-color disguise mechanism which has so far gone undetected by routine scans. However, she knows her safety is fleeting, and she needs to get out of the country and find safe harbor in an all-but-legendary Shangri-la-like location known as Blue. Unfortunately, she needs a map to get there, and money to hire people who can safely convey her there.

How convenient it is then that her boss at the casino has a map to Blue, and Wesson is just the man to take Kestal there! Wesson is a mercenary who will pretty much do anything to earn a buck. He leads a rag-tag team of fellow mercenaries, but they've all fallen on hard times of late, and Wesson seems to have somehow grown a conscience and turned down the most recent best offer he's had for work. He tries to run a scam on a casino at the very table where Kestal is dealing, but she spots his ruse and instead of the four valuable platinum chips ending up in Wesson's pocket, they end up in hers, with Wesson carrying the suspicion for their disappearance.

Kestal manages to do this because she has, as Dexter Morgan might say, a dark passenger riding with her. She doesn’t understand what it is, but it is inside her, it speaks to her, and it has magical powers. She can (but not at will, since she appears to have no control over it) deal a winning hand to a player at her table - which is how she makes contact with Wesson - or dematerialize the platinum chips and re-materialize them in her pocket, which is how she got rich quick and left the blame in Wesson's corner. Now she has the money, she hires Wesson and his team to escort her out of the country, across what is rumored to be a very dangerous sea, to a specific island location from which she hopes to be able to use her neck pendant map - taken from her boss through the medium of magical suggestion - to find her way, finally, to the Blue, and the freedom it promises.

While it was initially entertaining, there were some real and immediate problems with this story. The first is that everything I've related so far appears to take place in only one day, which is an indication of the bizarrely rushed feel that this novel has. No one sleeps! Maybe it's the ice? Maybe Earth slipped and it's always daylight in Vegas? At one point, Kestal talks like water is rare and expensive, and that all she can get instead of pure water is a government supplied nutrient drink! Excuse me but what is the medium those nutrients are in, if not water? The authors seem to have forgotten that the entire world outside the door is one big sheet of ice. Can they not melt it and have all the water they want, or is the ice somehow polluted? Even if it were polluted, is distillation not an option? This 'water is precious' claim made no sense at all. One more thing - just one more: if the world is in such bad shape, then where does the fuel come from to power the mercenaries' hummer? How do they afford that fuel if they can't afford food? How do they afford weapons and ammunition? This made even less sense.

On p95, there's an oddball problem. Kestal tosses at paper napkin at Wesson, but my question is, where does the paper napkin come from? Who made it, with what, and most importantly: why? The world is a frozen wasteland. There are no trees. Even if trees were being farmed indoors somewhere, why would they even grow them for the purpose of making napkins? When it comes down to thinking this story through, De la Cruz and Johnston have clearly done none.

The next thing up is zombies - roaming the wasteland - and known as 'thrillers' after the Michael Jackson extravaganza. Ri-ight, because we routinely bring pop-culture words into the language based on songs that were popular over a century ago. The zombies were supposedly the result of government testing of toxic chemicals, but what do they live on out there where there is no food and nothing but sub-zero temperatures? They would all have died! We keep getting told that there was a war, and a flood and a new ice age, but we're never told why or how this happened.

The problem with all this snow - endless snow - is that it had to come from somewhere. If it has been freezing and snowing for a century, then where is the water upon which they intend to voyage on their trip the Blue?! Wesson and his crew are talking about heading to the coast and sailing to the place Kestal wants to go, but if all the water has been evaporating (how? It’s sub zero all the time!) and coming down as snow - how is it that there would even be an ocean? And even if there were, would it not be frozen, too, by now?

It’s funny when they run the Hummer into a piece of rebar and puncture the tire. Not a single one them thinks of simply reversing the truck and pulling it free. Instead, these geniuses all get out in the freezing temperatures and wrestle with the wheel! It turns out that Wesson has a Purple Heart. Not literally (although anything seems to be possible in this insane novel). No, it's a medal awarded for those killed or wounded in action, but it doesn't make clear if Wesson is dead or only wounded, so I guess he was shot in the head to be so brain-dead. Plus, how did he get this award in a nation which has gone to hell? How was he even in the army if he's only a teen now? I have to wonder exactly how old these people are. Like I said, this is supposed to be a YA novel, but these characters talk like they've had a long history - too long to be teens. Either that or they went into military service as very young children.

Even if you drive in a perfectly straight line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, it’s 225 miles - and there is no way you would go anywhere near Phoenix on the way! Phoenix is south-east of Las Vegas, Los Angeles is south-west, so de le Cruz and Johnston are dunces when it comes to geography. But my point here is the direct distance. The crew did not drive in a straight line. If they'd followed the road, it would be nearer to 270 miles, but there were no roads where they were going. They were all over the place, dodging pursuers, dodging zombies, dodging garbage piles that hadn't yet floated out to sea (more on this anon). So their route was much longer.

So what's their fuel capacity? It depends on the vehicle. If it’s a military vehicle (the one popularly known as a Humvee), then those don’t use regular gasoline. If it’s a commercially available Hummer, then you get ten miles per gallon. Older Hummers had a capacity of 32 gallons which might have got them to LA (unless they went via Phoenix!), but if they used a more recent one, the tank was smaller and if their route was more twisting there's no way they could have made it on one tank. Nowhere does it say they stop for gas (and where would they stop anyway?!). We can assume they carry spare gas, but the story says nothing about them ever having to fill up. Just saying - about that 'not thinking the story through' malarkey....

Me, Lissadelacruz and Mi, Chaeljohnston, crank up the WTF factor to eleven in chapter 15. The Hummer gets a hole in the gas tank and for the first time they wonder if they have enough gas to complete their trip! But it gets worse. Wesson asks Kestal to read him something. Some critics have taken this section as an assertion that he can't read; I didn't read it that way, but that's not the bizarre part of this. Having asked her to read, and while she's looking up something to read to him in her ancient book of poetry, he strolls off to go help Shakes (another bland character) with the engine. That's how clueless and rude he is - or how awfully-written this novel is. Take your choice. And there was no problem with the engine - it was a hole in the gas tank that was the problem! But it gets worse.

The vehicle is "parked" at the top of a street called Mulholland Drive. They know this because they can read the street sign. Immediately after this is announced, we learn that there has been so much snow that the houses are buried to the roof line. So just how tall is that street sign, folks? As tall as a house? It would have to be if the houses are buried roof-deep but they can still read the street sign! But it gets worse.

There is a series of explosions and Kestal ducks as snow rains down from the trees. TREES? They've had a hundred years of floods and snow. The temperature is constantly around zero degrees. And there are trees? And the houses are buried to the roof line, but there are trees high enough above that to rain down snow? Just another example of stream of consciousness writing I guess, where these idiot authors simply spew out whatever ridiculous image crosses their transom without a single thought given to whether it even remotely makes any sense. But it gets worse.

The explosions continue and the crew turn to see a "long white house slide down the hillside". These are the houses which were buried to the roof line under snow. How did this one raises itself above the snow and slide down the hillside. exactly? Oh, don't worry, here's the explanation: Zedric, another bland character simply shot out the supports under the house - the house that was buried to the roof line in snow, so that the house could then raise itself up twenty feet and slide down on the snow that was up to its roof line a few seconds before.... But it gets worse.

The house which slides down the hill suddenly explodes and is 'atomized". Why? Wesson reveals all: the house was filled with pop cans, which exploded and atomized it. I am not making this garbage up, Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston are. They honestly believe that houses can be filled with soda cans which can atomize the house because they explode in unison, because they're somehow unstable, and can send signals to other houses so the whole block could go up! But it gets worse.

This crew fought its way out of Las Vegas in a Hummer, against two tanks, some hummers, and some aerial drones. Yet they screech to a halt and don't even think of fighting when the street is blocked by a couple of Hummers just like theirs; Wesson instead ends up bribing the military to get into K-Mart - er, K-Town. But it gets worse.

The only reason the went there was to hire a boat, and even though Wesson is depressed because he had to pay a fortune to bribe the military, he gets all excited because there's... gambling! What was he going to use for money to gamble with? But in the end, he doesn't do the gambling. Instead, Kestal gambols with her bling, which happens to be: a tiny pouch of table salt! Apparently salt is the rarest and most valuable thing ever these days. Why? No reason whatsoever other than the capriciousness of Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston! K-Town is right by the ocean, which isn't even frozen despite a century of zero degree weather, and the ocean is ... yes! Full of salt! But it gets worse.

Kestal is depressed because she has to part with her real salt, because the non-ocean salt (which evidently isn't rare) just isn't as good. Apparently Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston don't known diddly about chemistry either. You can make salt "artificial" salt from a metal called sodium which explodes on contact with water, and a poisonous gas called Chlorine. When chlorine literally forms a chemical salt with sodium, we get NaCl or sodium chloride, which is table salt, and you put this on your fries: a deadly metal and a deadly gas. Go figure!

Now what is the chemical formula for the table salt that, for example, Ghandi made from sea water? Well, it's NaCl, otherwise known as sodium chloride. And what's the chemical formula for "artificial" table salt? Well, it's NaCl, otherwise known as sodium chloride! Yep. It's exactly the same thing. I guess the authors once read something about Roman soldiers being paid in salt (from whence cometh word 'salary'), and just thought that was soooo cooool! But it gets worse.

I got to the end of chapter twenty five and said, "Enough!" which is why this tested warty in all demon graphic categories. It was becoming increasingly stupid the more I read of it. This utterly juvenile "romance" between Kestal and Wesson was god-awfully bad, but it wasn't even that which finally slammed the door on this cheap excuse for a story (although every little helped). As they sailed, they encountered "trashbergs". Yep. These were like icebergs, but made solely of trash - floating islands of garbage and scrap, which were a hazard to shipping. Note that these islands contained solid metal objects, but none of it sank! Apparently this ocean is so toxic that you can float scrap metal in it! But it gets worse.

The reason they encountered these trashbergs was that they 'came out of nowhere"! Yep, the ship's pilot saw nothing for miles all around, the radar was going full tilt and measured nothing, the ocean was calm, and the weather was clear, and giant trashbergs magically materialized from nothing! But it gets worse.

When it becomes clear to the crew that Kestal is "different" (yeah, she's the only woman on board!), she tells Wesson that she was once held in a camp where they tried to take advantage of her magical powers, and they tried to make her forget things they didn't think she ought to be remembering, by putting her in an ice bath to "freeze her memory"! I am not making making this up. This is the kind of pure bullshit nonsense, garbage-trash crappy, useless, brain-dead, moronic, asinine writing which ended this novel for me. This novel is lousy and it shows on almost every page. it;s some of the worst writing I've ever read.