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.

Bras & Broomsticks by Sarah Mlynowski

Title: Bras & Broomsticks
Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Random House
Rating: worthy!

This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.

Quite frankly, this one seemed a bit young for me, but I've never shied away from a novel for fear of embarrassment from its subject matter - only from fear of detesting one because it looked like it might be so awful I’d regret it! So this looked, from the blurb, like a fun read, but we all know how thoroughly blurbs lie. The vig was that I’d already read (read: listened) and enjoyed another one by this same author (Don't Even Think About It, so I decided to give it a try.

Once again it’s an unfortunate first person PoV story. I think such novels such have a government warning attached to them:

I nevertheless plunged recklessly on, and I started listening to it when one of my sons was in the car. While I wasn't impressed by the first chapter, he was. Hopefully he's going to drag himself away from his computer enough to read the paperback version I got for him, but I offer no guarantee.

Chapter two is better. This is where the story really begins and you can quite easily skip chapter one and start right here without missing a thing - unless you like rambling intros. There is some humor in it, a few laughs, but chapter one is like a prologue, and prologues, I detest. I resented that the author cheated and dragged me into reading her prologue by disguising it thus. And yes, I know advise authors to make their prologue chapter one instead of a prologue, but that advice carries the implicit assumption they have something useful to say in the prologue!

Chapter two is where the main character discovers that her younger sister has inherited her mother's witchcraft abilities. This power apparently travels only through the female line, of course, because nothing is more genderist than witchcraft. Also, there's no guarantee you'll get it. The main character doesn't, but her younger sister does. The very existence of witchcraft is a joke to the main character to begin with, but she quickly adapts when she realizes how much this can change her life for the better, only to be disappointed when her mom declares that using it only for pretty wish-fulfillment will lead to misery. Like she knows. There's no explanation, at least to begin with, as to why this should be so.

Her sister knew there was something different about her, but until her evil mom actually deigned to tell her she was a witch, she didn’t know what was going on. How a mother could abuse her daughter like this is a mystery, and honestly didn’t ring true to me, but it’s what you have to deal with. The young sister had resurrected her pet goldfish a few times, so she knew she had powers. This led to one of the most flat-out hilarious lines in the novel for me (but then I'm really warped). The narrator reads, "death and resurrection rigmarole", but she makes rigmarole sound like rigor-marole, as in rigor mortis. I don’t know if she did it on purpose, but she made me laugh out loud at that. I also found "The STB" (the name they give to their father's fiance - mom & dad are split up) an amusing way to refer to an un-liked "relative".

Unfortunately, I could not get into this novel. It was far too much whiny "Me! Me! Me!" from the main character and given that I detest the self-indulgence of main characters narrating their own story in the first place, this did not sit at all well with me. I found her story to be tedious, lacking in anything of interest, of no educational value, and with nothing new to say or to bring to the genre. So, I would normally rate this warty, but my son assures me it has merit, so I am going, for once, to use his rating and not mine! He rates this a worthy read. Blame him if you hate it!

Don't Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowski

Title: Don't Even Think About It
Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Delacorte
Rating: WORTHY!

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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel, yet another unfortunately in first person PoV (I'll try to deal, but it's getting harder and harder!) begins with an introduction to a group of friends living in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, NYC, who were evidently not always freaks! They only became 'freaks' when they got their annual flu shot and developed telepathic powers. I'm not kidding. That's the premise, and you know what, I don't care how stupid it is. You can sell me the dumbest premise on the planet, if you can tell me a good story. It's that simple! So let's go with it and see what's on offer here.

Just a few thoughts on the choice of title (again!): this is yet another novel which could have used a more wisely chosen title. As appropriate as this title is, given the actual story, there are several other novels out there with this exact title. I often wonder if other authors ever even do a survey to see if someone else has used their title already. There is, of course, nothing to stop you using a title that's already out there, but you have to stack that against how deeply you want to see your novel buried when people are trying to recall the title and end up perhaps buying someone else's novel thinking it's yours?! It could happen. Then again, if you go with Big Publishing™, you may well not be given any choice over your title, and that's something I'm not willing to cede to someone who has far less interest in my success than I do.

Olivia Byrne, Cooper Miller, Mackenzie Feldman hang out together. Initially, I got the impression that someone other than one of those three was telling the story, but then I learned that all of them (and then some!) are telling it at the same time, so it's a bit confused - this 1PoV stuff - when it's multiple 1PoV all at the same time and so, in effect, is 3PoV. But as it happens, it's very readable, so this was the first pleasant surprise here. The next one was that the humor in it is really enjoyable, so the author immediately had me on board. This ESP phenomenon spreads throughout the entire class (save two), all of whom seemed to have had that flu shot.

One thing I have to ask about here what's this with giving children last names as first names. Cooper? Mackenzie? I know people do this, so it's not a problem that an author uses these names. They've just always seemed so pretentious to me and so defining of a less than brilliant YA story. But that's just me; in the end, you have to mine where the gold is I guess, and if there are kids out there with these names it would be rather odd not to include them in your novel, wouldn't it?! So like it or leave it. Again, fortunately for Mlynowski, she writes this so well that it was never a problem.

The story continues with a believable progression of discovery and fear, and of discomfort and joy, and so seemed to me to be quite a realistic portrayal of what might happen were this flu virus phenomenon real. The premise makes no sense genetically, but once you decide, as I did, to let that slide, the story is really a lot of fun. That aside, there were only a couple of real issues I had with it. One was that these teens seemed to be obsessed with who was making out with whom or who any given one of them might be making out with if they had chance! They seemed to have very little else on their minds, and I found this to be sad. I hope it's not true that teens are like this these days. I fear for our national future if they are! Perhaps a younger audience than I represent will not find this as odd or as disillusioning as I did.

The other issue was that this 'who is making out with whom and whose secrets are being spilled now' went on a bit too long to be completely enjoyable. It started out fine, but I felt that some editing between the middle and the end was merited. That said, this was a really fun novel overall and I enjoyed it. Generally speaking, the relationships were not unrealistic - which believe me was a real joy to read in a YA novel - and they showed largely intelligent behaviors amongst the main characters. It was based on a rather absurd premise, but if you're willing to put that aside, and you're willing to cope with some teen angst that, as I mentioned, drags somewhat, then this will entertain you and reward you for your patience in reading it. I very much liked the ending. It's nice to read a novel where teens make smart and independent decisions