When You Had Power by Susan Kaye Quinn

Rating: WARTY!

I've had some success with this author, notably with the first daughter series, but I didn't like her Open Minds which was a lousy, trope, clichéd garbage can of a YA novel. Sadly, it turned out that this really wasn't really a novel, but a disappointingly short introduction to a series. I thought it was just about okay for what it was, but I felt cheated that I didn't get a real story out of it. I didn't get into any of the characters and I sure didn't want to get into an open-ended series about it.

The plot is set in a dystopian climate-challenged future where the power engineers are considered rather heroic in that they provide electricity to homes, the residents of which are being ravaged by rolling blackouts and regular disease outbreaks and therefore paranoid about letting strangers near them. Ironically, there's nothing in this theoretically introductory volume to explain how the world got that way. Yes, it's on the fast track to a future that could conceivably be like that, but we're already using RNA vaccines and talking of gene therapy cures for viral and bacterial diseases. Where did that go? Why did the efforts governments are starting to put into place fail to save the planet?

There seem to be unaccountable and unexplained lapses in technology. For example, homes are expected to make use of rechargeable batteries during power outages, but nowhere do we read of these same homes having any sort of solar or wind power independently of the grid. We already have that today, so what happened to it? There's no explanation to be found here. Worse, Lucia discovers that the batteries in her new home have been discharged to the point of being irreparably damaged, but apparently there was no sort of warning device built into the batteries to alert the owners of this problem! We already have warnings in our electric and hybrid vehicles, on our laptops, and even on our phones that the battery is mostly discharged so we know to recharge, so what happened to that warning on a critical home system? Again, no explanation.

We already have drones and robots, but they seem to feature poorly, too, so there are holes in the story that the author seems to have no interest in filling, which in turn makes her world-building poor and which kept jolting me out of suspension of disbelief. I didn't expect her to have detailed explanations for everything, nor would such a thing have made for good reading, but to have some sort of story that covered the obvious is expected, and she unapologetically fell short of this requirement.

The 'energy islands' seem to be in the ocean, and it's while doing a preliminary inspection of the underwater portion of her new island that Lucia discovers some weird damage. When she reports this up the chain of command, she's essentially accused of hallucinating, and the images she shot of the damage have curiously disappeared. When she returns to take more photos only a day later, there's suddenly no sign of the damage. It's all been repaired. That's a bit of a stretch

When investigating why power seems to be getting tapped from the generator, and looking for a potential target using all that power, she discovers that the area she wanted to investigate has been burned causing so much damage as to leave it unrecognizable and herself without evidence again. She tries to take more photos under the island, and she almost dies because of a sabotaged oxygen tank. The thing is that Lucia is a seasoned diver. Air has weight, especially when compressed, and you can tell the difference between an empty and a full tank, especially if it's aluminum. If her tank was seriously light on air, she would have known as soon as she picked it up regardless of what the tank gauge said, and for her to never check the gauge while she's diving is not a sign of a seasoned diver. It's the sign of a dumbass.

Clearly someone is hiding something, but even when Lucia gets photos that cannot be deleted since the next camera she uses is old tech and not hooked up to any network, she doesn't think for a minute of publishing this evidence out on the net, and thereby protecting herself and the family she has started lodging with, and this in turn makes her look like an idiot. The worst part of the story though is that there's no resolution to anything. We have no questions answered, and are expected to buy more volumes of the novel to get beyond this prologue. That doesn't work for me, not when it's so average. I don't even like prologues and normally skip them, so I can't commend this one at all, and I sure as hell don't want to read any mroe poorly-written pap like this.

Second Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

Title: Second Daughter
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
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 for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

This is the sequel to Third Daughter which I reviewed positively today. I have to say I was a bit surprised, since I'd had the impression (wrongly, it seems!) that each of the three novels in the trilogy would be told from the perspective of the particular daughter to which the title referred, but it does not seem to be that way since this novel opens not with Seledri, the second daughter to the queen, and her adventures, but with Aniri (the third daughter) focused on her imminent wedding to Prince Malik. Indeed, the second daughter plays very little part in the story although she's the trigger for some major events.

This novel takes off from pretty much where the previous one ended, and is told from Aniri's PoV (again, not first person thankfully!). At the end of the previous novel it looked like there was a second sky ship out there which could still threaten Dharia, Aniri's homeland. In addition to that, Seledri has long been married to a Samiran lord, and living in that nation. If the two countries go to war, then her life - or at least her welfare - may be at risk.

With regard to the proposed wedding, I have a hard time believing that in Victorian times, there was a 'wedding rehearsal dinner'. Yes, they had a wedding rehearsal if they were wealthy enough, but this was a very private thing, quite literally to rehearse the wedding itself. The author here has created her own world, and she can do whatever she wants, but this rehearsal with a huge number of people in attendance struck a really false note for me. Of course, if she had not written this, then it would have been impossible to interrupt it with the dramatic news of an attempt on the life of Aniri's sister, the second sister of the title, Seledri.

This is where the novel (and the series) took a downturn for me. I was already soured with all the frivolous pomp of the 'wedding rehearsal', but to have Aniri take a big step backwards in her development, and to be dithering and fretting and panicking, and then to decide to postpone the wedding (scheduled for the very next day), and thereby failing to cement the alliance with Jungali, for no reason other than to hie herself to Samir to find out what happened to her sister was just plain stupid! It was foolish in the extreme and not at all in line with what we had learned to expect from Aniri in the previous volume, so for me it was a really poor start to this novel.

Aniri was taken prisoner and her life threatened by the Samir ambassador, and now she's going to voluntarily put herself at the mercy of these people, traveling pretty much alone into the heart of the enemy territory and give them a second hostage? This behavior is moronic. Clearly it was only done to elevate the drama between herself and Malik, but it was done badly, falsely, and amateurishly, and this wasn’t to be the first time. Things seemed to go determinedly downhill with one farcical daytime TV melodrama after another cropping up.

About half-way through this I was getting ready to ditch it and down-rate it, but it turned itself around somewhat - at least sufficiently fro me not to be able to rate it badly! I have to say I was disappointed in it. Aniri was nowhere near as good as she was in the first one, and the novel quite literally went around in circles ending-up at pretty much the same point as it began. It definitely had MTV (Mid-Trilogy Vexation) syndrome.

That said, there were sufficient good parts, particularly when Aniri gets her head out of her gaand and starts trying to make good on her deficits, that I felt I could uprate it in the hope that the third volume would be truly a worthy read like the first volume was.

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

Title: Third Daughter
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
P65 ""…secret us away…" should be "…secrete us away…"
p212 "...you have been the one to secret me to the sky ship's hiding place..." makes no sense. "secrete me in"? "spirit me away to"?
P332 "She threw him and arched look..." should be "She threw him and arch look..."

Third Daughter is part of a trilogy which features the exploits of a young princess from a nation (Dharia) modeled loosely on India, but set in a purely fictional world and sprinkled lightly with elements of steam punk.

I love exotic India, so this drew me in immediately and effortlessly, but it would have just as easily kicked me out again, had the main character, Aniri, been a wet blanket or a wilting violet. She isn't! Kudos to the author for providing a non-white strong female character! These are very rare! Treasure them!

Aniri is the third daughter of the queen, so not in line for any throne, and not laden with expectations. We meet her climbing down the palace wall via a rope of knotted sheets to visit her boyfriend Devesh in the palace gardens, and she's a feisty, independent, rather love-struck young girl, but her plans this evening are thwarted by Janak, the queen's bodyguard, who is there to tell her that she must attend upon the queen.

Aniri resentfully visits with her mom only to learn that she has been put forward as a marriage candidate for Prince Malik, ruler of the rugged, northern, purportedly barbaric Jungali nation. Aniri wants no part of this, but when she realizes that her withdrawal from this pledge might mean war, she agrees to go, under the pretence that she will marry Prince Malik after a month's courtship, but really acting as a spy to discover if rumors of the Jungalis developing a flying machine are true.

Now how this works - sending a young girl with only two attendants into what’s considered to be a primitive and dangerous territory remains quietly unexplained, but Aniri doesn’t see Prince Malik as a threat. He seems reasonable, and decent, and she can get along with him. He is understanding that there is no love here, and that this relationship is purely for promotion of peace both across and within borders. He tells her outright that this will be platonic and that if she wishes to have a secret lover after they are married, she's most welcome to do so.

They board the train and begin their journey to the border. Aniri has only Priya, her young personal attendant, and Janak, the queen's most trusted bodyguard with her. Now why Janak is abandoning the queen to protect the daughter goes unexplained.

There was a really poorly written and very YA attempt to get the two of them into each other's arms by having Aniri get so close to a fire that she sets her cloak on fire, and then having Malik not even notice this until it's burning, whereupon he doesn't simply warn her that her cloak is on fire or tear it off, but grabs her and holds her to him, and then beats at the flame with his hand? Weird! And badly written! But not as bad as it might have been.

After that things really take off, with Aniri turning out to be very much the strong female character I was hoping she would be. That alone, for me, is sufficient to rate this as a worthy read. The love story ultimately turns out to be very natural and not forced or amateurish at all, and Aniri turns out to be a smart and capable lead character, and an admirable adventurer, with some foibles of youth haunting her, but not hobbling her, which is exactly how it ought to be.

One thing I did have a huge problem with is Janak. I already mentioned him as Aniri's mom's bodyguard, which makes it inexplicable how he comes to be traveling with Aniri, rather than guarding the queen, but the real problem is that his attitude sucks. "Off with his head!" I say! I don't have any respect for royalty myself in real life, but I do not go around insulting them. In a novel like this, it's inconceivable that a bodyguard would get away with being outright disrespectful to a princess as Janak does routinely.

This did not sound at all realistic to me, nor did Aniri's putting-up with his forceful, insulting, and domineering attitude towards her. I'm serious, his attitude and behavior is intolerable; I don't care what secrets he knows about Aniri's father, it's no excuse for his behavior whatsoever, yet he repeatedly gets away with it. That was bad writing and makes Aniri look weak, ineffectual, and juvenile, which is the very last thing she needed heaped on her after she'd shown herself to be a sterling main character in the previous chapter.

One thing which made no sense was this focus on the 'flying machine'. I can see how it would be considered a weapon of war, but Prince Malik's assertions that it would be a tool for trade between Dharia and Jungali made no sense given that they already have railways. It's far more economical to send goods and materials by train than ever it is by 'sky ship'. Yes, the sky ships can access the mountainous regions in Jungali where trains might not be able to reach, or where it might be difficulty or expensive to lay tracks, but in terms of trade between the two nations, I didn't see the value of it.

There were a couple of other issues where the writing was nonsensical. For example, at one point, Aniri is on an airship which is described as being thousands of feet in the air. She has already exhibited some instances of being short of breath because of the thin air in the high mountain region, yet we're expected to believe that she's clambering (yes, clambering!) around outside the airship - at thousands of feet, without even remotely becoming light-headed? Not credible!

But these are relatively minor points in comparison with how well, and how engagingly, the rest of this novel was written. The only oddball exception to this of which a mention still seems required, is that of the clothing Aniri wears. It was a really good idea to set a steam-punk novel in a place other than London, but if you're going to move it all the way to India (or more accurately, a setting rooted in India) - a move of which I approve, I have to say - then why would you drag Victorian clothing along with you? I don't get the point of having women in a nation strongly reminiscent of India dressed in corsets and stays when they could have saris and Punjabis. Why make the location exotic if you're not planning on doing anything with it? It seemed like the author was afraid to stray too far from steam-punk convention, which ironically makes her lurk rather timidly in comparison with the main character she's created!

But in conclusion, I have to say that this novel was truly remarkable and very addictive. I loved the setting, the characters in general, and specifically the main character Aniri who is a kick-ass strong female character. I loved that the love was in no way overdone and that it fit in with, but did not high-jack or derail the main story. Apart from a trope or two, it was normal, ordinary, and natural, like real love is.

So I fully recommend this novel. It has some issues, but overall the story is wonderful and refreshing. I was less thrilled with the sequel, a review of which I'm also posting today.

Open Minds by Susan Kaye Quinn

Title: Open Minds
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: All Night Reads
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.

It was interesting to see yet another in a huge line of novels begin with the very thing which literary agents freely admit to hating: the misfit kid on the first day of school. Yet this hatred on their part has failed to even begin to not only stem the rising tide of novels which begin in precisely that manner, it's also failed to prevent some of them becoming best sellers! Of course, in this era of self-publishing, we can tell the literary agents and Big Publishing to kiss it, which is exactly what Quinn has done by starting volume one of the 'Mindjack' trilogy in this trope fashion.

Surprisingly, especially given that this is a first person PoV novel, a style which I've really grown to outright detest (with few exceptions, and especially the more of them that I read) it worked ok for me. It got me interested in continuing to read, which is the first hurdle, after all. At least it did for the opening few paragraphs, but as I read deeper, I began to have some real problems with this novel.

So, 16-year-old Kira Moore gets on the school bus with great trepidation. She's is a zero in a world of mind readers. People began to develop this ability over the last few generations due to pollutants in the water until it eventually reached the point where the mind readers were in the overwhelming majority, and the people who could not do so were treated like lepers, and abused and labeled zeros.

This was my first problem with this novel - it is such a trope to have the "outcast" - especially the outcast girl - metaphorically spat upon by every one around her. It's an even worse trope to have this bullying countenanced by the school. This novel is not set in the middle ages. It's contemporary (okay, set in the not-too-distant future), and for me personally, I've read way more than enough novels where outright bullying goes unpunished. They are no longer even close to being realistic. Even when bullying was more common, there never were any schools where every single student across the board was a coldly calculating bully, for goodness sakes!

Of course, if you're creating the fiction, you can create it to be whatever you want, but then if you're really going to do that, I'm going to ask you for some rationale (within the framework of your world) as to why it's this way, and how it grew to be that way, and Quinn has offered me none, which is why this is a problem for me. I fully agree that in any society, there are going to be jerks no matter how decent and equitable a society it is, but for everyone to consistently scorn Kira, including the girl who was, just a few months before, her best friend, struck me as utter nonsense, and this really spoiled the novel for me. Instead of finding Kira pitiable as I am sure Quinn intended, I found the whole premise laughable, which I'm sure she didn't intend.

So why did I continue to read‽ Well, it's because the novel offers some interesting and intriguing possibilities, especially when it turns out that kira is not quite the zero every one of the other seven billion inhabitants of Earth quite evidently is convinced she is (of course, that was no surprise at all). Kira is a 'mind jacker', meaning that while she cannot receive thoughts which are transmitted to her, she can invade the minds of others, including more than one person at once, read their thoughts, and control their behavior.

Here was my second problem. How, exactly, does this work? Again, we get nothing from the author to help us out here; we're simply expected to take it that this is the way things are, for no apparent reason. I don't work well with premises like that! Logic dictates that if you can read people's thoughts by "invading their mind" then you must have a receptor for absorbing their thoughts, so how come Kira isn't a mind reader when she can clearly read minds? It makes no sense! I don't expect scientific diagrams, with charts and formulae explaining every last detail. On the contrary, I detest novels like that, but I do expect the author to make some effort to create the world they're trying to sell to us and have it make some sort of sense! I saw none of that in the early part of the novel.

Kira learns she can mind-jack from bad boy Simon, who is in her year, and who completes the requisite trope love triangle with the good guy, Raf, also in her year. Yeah, another thing to dislike in this novel, because Kira is thinking only of her own deficits, which makes her sound really whiny, and of boys the whole time, which makes her seem appallingly shallow and uninteresting. She never has any other thoughts. I think it's rather sad that a female author can write about a girl and betray her gender so badly in this fashion.

This again begs the question as to why I was still reading this! A better question is whether I could justify continuing to read this given what I've been asked to put up with so far. Quinn had me balanced on a knife-edge, part of me wanting to quit reading this out of disgust for - and fatigue with - this kind of YA novel, whilst an equal part of me wanted to stay with it to see what happened. So, even as I hated myself for putting up with tropes and clichés, and with sad female protagonists, I was still hoping that this could be written out so I didn't have to write it off! Quinn isn't a bad writer; she knows what to do, technically speaking. She's just not very inventive when it comes to writing her away around tropes instead of falling into them.

Here's another inexplicable oddity: the students at Kira's school study Latin because it’s supposed to be a universal root language, but this isn’t true. Latin itself is rooted in what’s called the Proto-Indo-European language, which some scholars have tried to reconstruct, but Latin itself isn’t a root in any really meaningful sense, and even if I granted that and agreed for the sake of argument that it were, it certainly has no application outside of the Indo-European region!

The Proto-Indo-European language itself hasn’t been spoken in over five thousand years. It makes no sense that a society which already has several very widely spoken languages, such as English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, would back-track to a dead language which no one outside of Catholic church officials and some linguistic students actually speaks today. If you're going to pick a "dead" language to promote, then why not Greek - which not only has a proud history every bit the equal of Latin, but which is actually still spoken in modern form today in one part of the world?!

Another real issue that I had was that Simon's relationship with Kira is inappropriate and Kira seems to be unaware of this, letting him touch her rather intimately when they have no relationship other than their shared facility for mind-jacking. I find it both annoying and distasteful that so many YA authors (a shamefully large number of which are female authors) seem to be obsessed with sending out this message to young women that it’s perfectly fine for someone they hardly know to manhandle them, such as by taking hold of their chin with his fingers, or by stroking their hair, as though the girl in question is some sort of a pet or a possession. Simon is completely guilty in every regard, including, at one point, grabbing Kira and kissing her right in the school hallway as though he owns her. He's already referred to her as "my girl" by that point, so I guess Kira lamely bought into his propaganda, which means I have no respect at all for her as a strong female protagonist.

Simon frequently appears as a stalker, often demanding and expecting that Kira meet him, or abruptly dragging her off with him with neither explanation nor by-your-leave, and never once does Kira honestly question the appropriateness of his behavior. There is one time when he outright threatens her, not in words, but by his demeanor and posture, and she caves in to him, dissing Raf in the process. I cannot respect a woman who behaves like that. I realize that Kira and Simon have a secret in common here, which means that they'd be inclined to take more liberties than two strangers ordinarily would, but this doesn’t excuse her limp submission to his every demand, nor does it excuse her letting his behavior continue unquestioned and unchallenged. It doesn’t excuse his abusive and threatening behavior, either. I'm not saying that guys cannot be that way. I am saying that Kira is a sad human being to knuckle under to him so easily and I don't feel any need to like or respect a character like that. Portraying her this way is not a smart move and it’s entirely the wrong message to send to female readers. I would have liked Kira better if she'd had some self-motivation and some self-respect, even if she did feel compelled towards more acquiescence than she felt comfortable with.

She does question the appropriateness of mind-jacking people, but never Simon's behavior towards her, and her guilty feelings about jacking sure don’t last long. It’s a rather hypocritical paradox that Simon is on the one hand urging her to make her choice, whilst simultaneously robbing her of any choice with his own behavior. In this same vein, her behavior towards her close friend Raf is inexplicable. Every love triangle has to have the good guy and the bad boy because it’s the tired and sad trope, and YA authors have shown themselves to be almost universally incapable of thinking outside this box in which they've so willingly rushed to incarcerate themselves. So Raf is the superficial good guy here, although he's quite capable of stalking Kira, too. Why Kira didn't have the smarts to reject Simon and accept Raf is a mystery. Indeed, why she hadn’t accepted Raf already (before she even got to know Simon) is the real mystery. Yes, she believes they're so different, but for her to honestly believe that she's so worthless that they could never have anything together doesn't fill me with a lot of admiration for her brain patterns.

This whole triangle caused me to seriously lose respect for Kira, but what really was not believable was that, for as much as she has shared with Raf, for as long as she has known him, and for as decent a human being as he is, she refused to go to him with her new-found knowledge of mind-jacking! It made no sense that she wouldn’t run this by him at least hypothetically, if not as an outright confession of what she has learned. Instead, she metaphorically kicks him in the balls, and that behavior on her part is inexcusable. She tells him their love is impossible because she's a zero and he isn’t. I know she's thinks she's trying to protect him, but that she can be such a heartless bitch in doing so turned me right off her. I honestly had to question why an author would go significantly out of her way to make me dislike her own hero.

I don’t like the way Quinn pigeonholes Raf, either. He has a "simmering Portuguese temper" - not an ordinary temper, but a Portuguese one. What kind of stereotype is that? Oh, he's 'the Latino breed' therefore he must have a fiery temper? Because we all know that no one who is Caucasian or African or Asian could possibly have a fiery temper, whereas everyone who hails from the Mediterranean environment just has to be completely fiery. I actually liked that Raf was not your typical US YA trope guy. Now I find he's your typical 'smoldering Hispanic' trope guy. Oh well there goes another review bonus point down the drain!

I started out really liking this despite the first person PoV, but I was less than one-third the way through when I started really disliking it. After further trashing Raf, Kira is stalked again by Simon, who shows up outside her house late at night telling her to sneak out. Kira limply does exactly what he orders her to do. At that point I felt like simply ditching this novel because it had now reached a nadir of asininity, and Kira had repeatedly proved herself to be nothing but Simon's toy. I don’t choose to read novels with a female protagonist only to see that woman become a man's play doll, which he can drag where he wants and pose as he wishes. I read these novels to see women break the mold. Kira isn’t breaking the mold, she's burying herself in it.

I decided to read this as far as page 122 which was exactly half-way through (yes, it’s 245 pages, but chapter one doesn't start on page one, it starts on page six, and the novel itself ends on page 238!). I decided that if I was still disgusted with it by the time I reached that point, I was outta there! In the end I read a little further because page 122 wasn't at the end of a chapter, and in reading on, the novel actually turned around a little bit, but at that point it was nowhere near enough for me to want to continue reading this.