Close Call by Stella Rimington

Title: Close Call
Author: Stella Rimington
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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.

This is a sad DNF for me - and another example of a novel where the author (or the publisher, which ever was responsible!) needed to survey the gazillion other novels with this same title before wisely deciding to choose a different one.

I could not get interested in this at all, and the poor writing only served to make it worse. it read like fanfic, not like a new novel from a professional, published writer. This is supposed to be another novel in the Liz Carlyle series, but in the first 21 chapters (out of ~60), she appeared in only 8, so how it's really supposed to be about her is a bit of a mystery! That's not the biggest problem, however.

You know this is no longer an era where the author hand-writes or typewrites their 'manu'-script and it has to be laboriously set in metal trays and printed by hand to provide review "galleys". This is an era of word processing, and spell-checkers and even grammar checkers (although Microsoft's grammar checker isn't worth spit). But there is no absolutely excuse for putting out a novel of the atrocious quality I found in the Kindle version, not even as an advance review copy, and trying to pretend that it's ready for review. It wasn't. I had more success in the Adobe reader version, but not everyone has that available to them.

I've reviewed well over a hundred 'galley' copies, and this novel was without question the worst I've ever seen in the Kindle format. There were multiple problems in the first few screens, and these were not oddball problems which are difficult to find, but gross spelling errors which any spell-checker would have caught, and sloppy errors which all but the most incompetent of beta readers or book editors would have caught, and yet here we are, expected to try and read this novel and review it?!

In the Adobe version, the first letter of each chapter was set as a drop-cap, an antiquated and nonsensical affectation which needs to be banned. That's the only reason I can think of as to why, in the Kindle, chapter one begins with the capital letter 'T' on line one, and then the rest of the word on line 2: 'he' when all of it should read: 'The' on the first line.

Beginning in paragraph two we had pairs of words running together ("shawarmaof" in place of 'shawarma of' for example, and this was obviously the start of a trend, because it continued to happen from then onwards The fifth sentence in that paragraph began with 'ere' in place of, presumably, 'There' or 'Here'. The last sentence of that paragraph has this phrase: "...of meat o the shawarmalike..." when it clearly should have been 'of meat of the shawarma like'.

There is a character named 'Az' introduced here, but apart from that first time, his name is rendered with a space between the two letters. I learned from the Adobe version that it's supposed to be Afiz. The next paragraph has "indierent" in place of 'indifferent', and on and on it goes. This is nothing but gross incompetence and is insulting to readers, whether they be beta or review. I quit reading this at that point and resolved to try and get through it in the Adobe Reader version, determining that if that didn't look a lot better, this was going to be one-starred after three paragraphs and done with!

So I switched to Adobe Reader and it looked technically much better. I saw none of the problems with it that I had seen in the Kindle version, so I can only assume that some automated conversion process was responsible for the problems. This means of course, that the real problem was that no one checked to make sure the conversion worked for the Kindle! But the reprieve was short-lived because switching to a readable version served only to highlight a whole new set of problems! Once I could focus on reading the novel without becoming annoyed, I could focus on the quality of the story, and it didn't start out at all well!

The first few pages are an account of this character in a souk in Syria (this novel is very tardily rooted in the so-called 'Arab Spring' which was actually over long ago), and he's attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Why this assailant would carry out this attack in public in broad daylight is unexplained, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is that the subject disarms the assailant and hurries away, finally finding himself in a different part of the souk where, we're told, no one is paying any attention to him, but immediately after that, we're told that his hand is covered in blood, and it's dripping! In fact, he's lost so much blood that he starts feeling faint and has to be bundled into a taxi to go to the hospital. So I'm thinking: no one is paying any attention to a guy who is copiously dripping blood everywhere he goes? How likely is that? It just didn't work.

There were many grammatical errors. Some of these you can accuse me of being picky about, but they're there nonetheless. On page six, I read, "...the countries who support them." when it should really read, "...the countries which support them." or "...those people who support them." Countries are not people! On page sixteen I read, "...what is the sources of those weapons..." when it really should be "...what are the sources..." or "what is the source...". So again, it's still not ready for prime time, even in the Adobe version.

We meet the main character, Liz Carlyle in chapter 2. She's just returned from vacation, but instead of catching-up with her deputy (or whatever he/she is called), who was presumably in charge of her section in her absence, she gossips instead with her "research assistant" to get up to speed! I found that to be completely absurd.

I hit a problem two chapters later, because it seems like there is a two-chapter flashback in chapters 4 & 5 or 5 & 6, but there's no indication whatsoever in the test that we're in a flashback! I found myself wondering what the heck had gone wrong with the timeline!

The fact that Liz had apparently only been working at MI5 for eighteen months and was still on probation, yet was leading a counter-terrorism section and taking three-week long vacations made zero sense! As a flashback it did make a kind of sense, but I was unaware of this while reading it! I have no idea why the flashback was even there, because it contributed nothing whatsoever to the story.

So my problem at that point was that, if she'd been working at MI5 since she graduated from university, and it's been only 18 months, then how was she ever involved in the Northern Ireland peace process which was resolved years before? If she's running a counter-terrorism section, then how is she going to find the time to go on secondment to the Merseyside (Liverpool) police for training? Worse than this, we're told she had her vacation with a French security agent and then a few pages later we're told that the last boyfriend she had was a guitar player from Bristol! So is this a flashback or not? I was forced to assume it was.

I have to add that I found the depiction of the "sexual harassment" she supposedly received at the Merseyside police department to be amateurish at best and childish at worst. I frankly cannot believe that it went immediately to the level the author portrays it any more than I could believe there was none at all. To portray it so baldly and so obviously serves no purpose other than to negate the effect the author is trying so ham-fistedly to achieve. Frankly, it read like a poor rip-off of the TV show Prime Suspect featuring Helen Mirren.

At this point I decided this novel was not worth my time. I have no idea what happened to the book editor or beta readers on this novel, so I can only assume there were none. I know this is an advance review copy, but to put one out which is so appalling is just asking for trouble, and in this electronic age there is no excuse for putting out an ARC that's as shabby as this one is.

Even had it been in pristine condition, that would not have improved the disturbingly amateur quality of the story - a story which was all over the place, had no coherence, and read like poorly-written fan-fiction. This novel was lousy and I cannot recommend it.

Jane's Melody by Ryan Winfield

Title: Jane's Melody
Author: Ryan Winfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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.

I was attracted to this one because the blurb made it sound like an off-the-beaten-track kind of a story, which I'm always up for after so many cookie-cutter YA novels, and the other advantage this one had was that it wasn't YA (per se - in practice it was no better). Yeah, I know that blurbs nearly always lie (except mine, of course!), but the only way to find out how good the blurb is, is to actually read the novel, so I bought into this one. It appeared to be a romance, but it's written by a guy, which further intrigued me. It’s not that guys can’t write romances, but they tend not to (at least not under their real name!). I'm always fond of going against type, but not being rubbed the wrong way as this novel was determined to do.

When I finally got into it, I found myself significantly less thrilled. I hadn't expected a modern remake of Lady Chatterley's Lover! The writing is technically good, and the novel started out well enough: it’s descriptive and easy to read, and the characters are well-drawn to begin with. So what was my problem? It was far too trope-ish for my taste, and rather quickly, the characters began breaking the rules we’d been given earlier in the novel. I guess if the writer is going for an all-out romance, then it’s fine, but I’d expected (or at least hoped for) more than that with this novel, and it wasn't delivered. Fortunately, it wasn't so bad that I felt like tossing the book after two chapters, so I stayed on-board for a while, which proved to be not worth the time.

So specifically what was my problem? Well, there were several. The first of these was that the main character (Jane) is a recovering addict who has just gone through her daughter (who happens to be named Melody) dying of an addiction not that dissimilar to the one Jane herself has fought. We're expected to believe that Jane is racked with grief over this (we're frequently reminded of it), but disturbingly quickly, she magically forgets all of this debilitating grief and instead, begins lusting after Caleb (a suitably earthy name) - a guy she almost quite literally picked up off the street.

She met him accidentally and he was not very nice to her so, of course, she sought him out! She thought he knew something about her daughter. When she finds him that second time, he's been mugged (he lives on the street) and his guitar is gone - the one on which he played a song that caught Jane's attention. She takes him home (cue tired trope of the woman ministering to her man) and employs him to tidy up her yard, then she buys a brand new guitar for him. Apparently pulling $6,600 out of savings to pay him and provide him with a gift isn’t a problem for Jane. No word on how she came by such copious, free, and easy cash.

This whole relationship completely trivialized Jane's grief over her daughter's death and rendered it into a mere annoyance, quickly dispensed with. It was entirely unrealistic to me. Caleb went out of type, too, at this point. Instead of being the very reserved, laconic drifter we initially met, he transmogrifies into a perky, playful, flirtatious toy-boy and this turned me right off of his character. I just could not see such a dramatic about-turn occurring for either of these characters without some lead-in and some strong motivation and we’ve been offered neither before this occurs. So what's left when the novel's two main adult characters turn out to juvenile propinquents? Ditch it.

Caleb is also far too much of a trope hot guy. I'm tired of authors trotting out these shirtless guys with chiseled abs and tight glutes. Is this the best their imagination can do? It's pathetic. The other side of this coin isn’t any better: she stares at his sweat-soaked T-shirt covering his 'broad shoulders' and 'narrow waist'. She wears his newly washed T-shirt to bed the night they argue. Seriously? This is nauseating. Can we not find something a bit more realistic and less cartoonish? Why invent characters which you're simply going to caricature and turn into unfunny jokes? I was led into this novel thinking that it was about damaged people feeling their way back towards a life, and perhaps even helping each other get there. Instead, we’re presented with people who are 'damaged' one minute and perfectly fine the next, with zero transition time!

Caleb's gardening job achieves two things: one is to keep the two of them in close proximity, and the other is to get his shirt off routinely or to get him soaking wet so he has to strip down to his shorts when he's been resident in the house for only a couple of days. Jane isn’t even phased by his shameless disrobing! Neither of these ruses is very inventive, and they deviate not at all from the trope norm. I wanted more story and less yawning - or more accurately, I wanted something different. If we’re going off the beaten path, can we not go a bit further off than a chiseled body, wet clothes and girls dressing in men's shirts?

Caleb is portrayed as an idiot and a jerk, too, unfortunately. Jane supplies him with gardening gloves, yet he fails to wear them while he's pulling out thorny shrubs. This doesn’t convey to me that he's manly or tough; on the contrary, it conveys that he's a moron - someone who needs his hands for his avocation towards playing guitar, yet too dumb to grasp that he needs to take care of them.

So how is he a jerk? Well when he pats the couch for Jane to sit next to him, she meekly complies, and this leads to hugging after she starts crying over her life, but when she asks him to tell her about Melody, he argues with her that it’s off limits. This doesn’t tell me that he's damaged; it tells me that he's selfish and probably hiding something (he was). His behavior isn't acceptable given what Jane has done for him. This behavior is rendered even more out of left field by a later revelation.

As if that isn't bad enough he's knocking on her bedroom door in the middle of the night and opening it without even being bid to enter. This was the place where I decided I could read no more of this crap. Belief, no longer comfortably suspended, was laying with torn skin on the unforgiving asphalt, and driving right over it was reality, heading out of town on the last bus.

If you want to write stuff like this and get away with it, you have to set it up in a way that works - that makes it appropriate for characters to behave in these ways. You can't just have a character act in a certain way because your plot suddenly demands it right there and then. You have to make it credible by putting a few things in place, first; then when it happens, it doesn't seem like something out of day-time TV, and your reader can accept it all like it's normal and fine - even hoped for and expected.

The blurb for this novel asks: "What boundaries would you cross for true love?", but there are no boundaries crossed here. It tells us: "Jane’s Melody follows a forty-year-old woman on a romantic journey of rediscovery after years of struggling alone." In what way his she struggling? She overcame her addiction with abundant help. She evidently made a wad of money selling insurance. She lives in her own house in complete comfort. She can take time off work and not miss the paychecks. Her grief over her daughter is actually self-pity because she chose not to do for her daughter what others had done for her. She gets over this self-pity in record time once Hot Hunk™ shows up. I ask again: in what way is she struggling? The blurb says, "Jane must decide if it’s too late for her to start over, or if true love really knows no limits." Seriously? There is no "True Love™ here. There's an older woman's lust for a younger guy. Love never enters into it.

This author just doesn't get it. I don't know what kind of readership (or reader's hip!) he was aiming for, but it sure as hell ain't me, and it's sure as hell not anyone I can respect! This novel is warty and certifiably so.

Far Gone by Laura Griffin

Title: Far Gone
Author: Laura Griffin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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.

Andrea Finch is a cop who, while in the middle of being dumped by boyfriend named Nick, shoots a guy in a restaurant. The guy had come into the kitchen to threaten his girlfriend with an automatic and Andrea, good cop that she is, got suspicious of his demeanor, and followed him in there. Now she's on leave pending an inquiry into the shooting, but a Senator's daughter, Julia Kirby, has been killed in a university bombing, and it looks like Andrea's going to be pulled back in, one way or another. I started liking this novel almost right away, but it slowly became bogged down by a really bad romance and by too much rambling in the text, unrelated to moving the story along. It went DNR at 63%. Yeah, I know most people call that DNF, but trust me, this wasn't going to be resuscitated.

I ran into two problems in the first twelve pages. They were relatively minor problems, but nonetheless important. The first is that the author, in her evident need to get her weapons chops down on paper asap, has the bomber check his gun right before he gets out of the van and triggers the bomb via his cell phone. I'm not sure why he even needed a gun, but the fact is that the weapon never leaves his pocket, so I'm lost as to how it was that he 'checked his weapon' in any meaningful way. He didn’t take it out to verify that it was loaded and that a round was chambered, so this struck me as the writer merely saying, "Hey, I know lots about this weapon, check out my research" without contributing anything towards moving the story along. It took me out of suspension of disbelief for a minute there.

The other problem, and this is worse in my opinion, was another instance of a female writer reducing a female character to nothing more than youth and beauty, as though nothing else matters. Julia Kirby is described as "beautiful" and "just eighteen years old". I'm sorry but who cares? What difference do her looks and age make? Would her death have been just fine if she'd been forty-five, and plain looking? What if she had been sixty, and gray haired? Would it have been okay then? I simply don't get why the writer chose to put in that particular description. It's demeaning for anyone to write it when it has nothing to do with the story at hand, and it's particularly obnoxious coming from a female author.

I can see the value of specifying that she was a Senator's daughter - not because such a child is more important than, say, the corner mechanic's daughter, but because the Senator might have a role to play in the novel by coming down on the police department to solve this crime. Her age and looks, however, contribute nothing save to tell all women that unless you're young and beautiful, you ain't nuthin'. What’s that song from the 1933 movie Roman Scandals: keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved? To see this coming from a female author's keyboard saddens me greatly.

That aside, I initially warmed to this novel quickly, and I liked the way Finch was depicted until I found out on page 233 that she's actually a complete moron. Until then, the trope romance aside, she was definitely someone I could have warmed to, and about whom I did want to read more to begin with. The problem was that I've traveled this route before only to discover that the woman morphs into a complete wuss of male appendage down the road, and you discover you're not on the highway, but in a cul-de-sac.

I got strong feelings of déjà vu when the unfortunately de rigeur male interest surfaced in the form of Jon North. He's a man whom Finch admits she would "have a hard time refusing", and who inappropriately cups her face and runs his thumb over her cut lip feigning concern before roughly kissing her as though he honestly doesn't give a damn about her lip. Barf.

I'm sorry but this is sickening, and it started going precisely the way I feared: the tough female main character turning to Jell-O® under the dominating gaze of the alpha male. It’s pathetic, and it’s what turned this novel sour when I was sincerely hoping it would grow into something sweet up until that point. It’s not like there was anything on the other side of this equation, either: North thinks of Finch in purely carnal terms, lusting after her hot bod, without giving a damn about what kind of an actual person she might or might not be. Frankly, it’s juvenile.

Whenever North thinks of Finch, it’s about her "lithe body" and "her sensual mouth", and "the way she'd tasted" like she's some kind of a burger, and he's sixteen years old. His reaction to her at one point when she visits him, is "either get her out or get her in bed". These are the only two options he can envisage. What a charmer he is. His behavior is precisely what's missing from Jeffery Deaver's James Bond reboot that I negatively reviewed. It would have been at home there (assuming Deaver was really doing what was claimed: emulating Fleming); it’s definitely not appropriate here because it renders the whole novel into a cheap and nasty florid romance.

On the positive side, there's no ridiculous pseudo-macho main male character name in evidence here. Sadly, that's all North has going for him, but even that's trampled under the repeated trope of sidelong glances and thudding hearts, with North being very quickly depicted as "impressively ripped". Finch was shown as dating a guy (for a month) who had a slight stomach paunch (this is the guy who breaks up with her at the start), yet now she's prematurely hot for a buff bod?

If the author had written this the opposite way around - being dumped by, or better yet, dumping the chiseled guy; then finding a slightly out-of-shape FBI agent appealing for reasons other than his body, it would have been new and fresh, and it would have made for a far better story, but we have to travel trope trail instead. This really disappointed me, because it took me out of the story with the distraction of wondering if there wasn't some wish-fulfillment going on here in the stead of serious story-telling. Quite clearly the non-ripped dude from the opening chapters was nothing more than a cheap throw-away to try and give Finch some undeserved cred., as though we're too dumb to see through a cheap ploy like that. Way to insult your readers!

I mentioned earlier that Finch proves herself to be a moron, so how's that, exactly? Well at the start of this one chapter she effectively breaks into North's home. Yeah, the door is unlatched, so technically it’s not breaking and entering, but she does enter when she's not expected by the host, and she enters without permission. It's in the early morning in the dark, and she blithely walks in without calling out to let North know she's there. Meanwhile, he's fast asleep with a gun by his bed. Seriously? How stupid, exactly, are these people? They don't lock and bolt their doors (the author keeps referring to doors as 'latched' or 'unlatched', like they don’t even have locks or bolts on them anyway!). These people are investigating a terrorist who has murdered people and threatened Finch's life, yet she cluelessly wanders unannounced into North's home where he could have shot her dead.

It was at this point that I decided that Le Stupide was too strong with this one, and I called, "Check please; I'm outta here!" It’s a real shame, too, because this novel had much potential to be really good. It had me hooked for a good fifty percent of the way through despite some issues (notably with the romance), but at this point it became too stupid to live. It had been on the skids since about the half-way point, forcing me to skim a page or two here and there, particularly the rambling chats between the two main protagonists where they had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot and were no more than juvenile flirting and pointless conversation unrelated to moving anything along. So at 63% in, I’d had enough of the stop-start action, and I no longer had any faith at all that the remaining third of this novel would be capable of digging itself out of the hole within which it had become so firmly entrenched.

The Burning by Jane Casey

Title: The Burning
Author: Jane Casey
Publisher: Minotaur Books
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.

This is yet another novel where the author (or the publisher - you can never tell who titles these things when Big Publishing™ effectively owns your work) should have taken a look at what's already out there before they buried this title with thirty more of the same by various authors! Ther was another more importnat issue which is that once agian we ahve a novel which is not even remotely well formatted for the Kindle. In the Kindle, when you click 'Beginning" as a location, it takes you right to the front cover or to the front endpaper, but in this novel, you get to 2% in. Yep. Not 1%. Not 3%, but precisely 2% in. I have no idea why, but it was really annoying.

This novel is about Maeve Kerrigan, a detective constable employed in London, UK. Her partner is Rob Langton and they're both assigned to the thoroughly uninventive serial killer named The Burning Man - that is a man who burns his victims, not someone like Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four. The novel isn't that interesting nor is it that engrossing. I felt no connection with any of the characters, and I had no real interest in reading about them. This made me rather sad because I really wanted to read a good novel about these London detectives. I was looking forward to it, but this police story left me feeling robbed. It's being plugged as "Mystery, Thrillers, Romance" but it's really none of the above.

The police investigation wasn't interesting or exciting. It was p-l-o-d-d-i-n-g, and that was the problem: this novel was a slog for me. I kept returning to it with little enthusiasm. When I was away from it I felt no great desire to get back into it. Kerrigan had nothing to offer me. She wasn't interesting. She wasn't kick-ass in any way. She had little self-respect. She was cluttered with cliché (lack of sleep, bad relationship, etc.). I felt tired from reading about her, and I felt like I was in a bad relationship with her as a character! She generated neither empathy nor sympathy in me.

Plus there was genderism in this novel - yet another case of it coming from a female writer, which I'm finding increasingly less palatable the more I'm forced to read it in novels like this. Check this line out: "It was a pretty nurse who showed us to Kelly Staples' room…" - because most nurses are ugly, so let’s be sure to point out the pretty ones? Seriously? Why is her prettiness (or otherwise) relevant here? Why draw attention to it when i has no bearing whatsoever on the action or events?

I'd reached less than one third the way through this - page 101 - when I decided I could not face reading it any more. That was the part where Kerrigan, having literally just showered, wrapped a towel around herself to go answer the door, when she has no idea who was there. Yes, she is expecting Langton to stop by "later", but she does not know it’s him right then. This seemed like such a pathetic cliché: the girl wrapped in a towel like some sort of present or offering for the guy's pleasure. I couldn't stand it.

What was actually worse, though, was how her partner 'managed' her. Prior to this towel encounter, he had forced her away from her desk at work and manipulated her into having him go round to her flat later, with the pizza and beer. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a woman is pushed around and manipulated by a guy who arrogantly assumes he knows what’s best for her. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a guy thinks its OK to do this. I did not appreciate seeing yet another novel in which a guy does this, and the woman sees nothing wrong with it. Is it really that hard to break the mould, and dump the trope, and come up with something original? Seriously?

I can see how there can be realistic places in a novel where your characters do things like this, but to have men and women depicted this way as though it should be the expected norm, and especially when there's no reason for it at all, is just shameful. It wasn't this one incident, either. There was a pattern of Langton treating her this way - though not always so overtly. If the novel had been really engrossing, and I'd been given some expectation of Kerrigan turning things around positively, I might have been willing to put up with this kind of writing temporarily, but I got no such expectation from this author. I know this is part of a series and I could see this author trotting out this same scenario in every volume.

You know, if you trot it out routinely enough, no matter how innocent you pretend it is in any one case, it becomes an established pattern - the behaviors become an expectation. I have no intention of subjecting myself to that when there are better novels awaiting me: novels with independent and strong women; novels with female characters I can respect and enjoy. Forget Burning! Go read Ash!

Hacked by Geri Hosier

Title: Hacked
Author: Geri Hosier
Publisher: Amazon
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.

Please note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. The formatting was better when the text was shrunk very small, but it was still a problem. For example, chapter 8 begins with the title, (which is simply 'Chapter 8') running on the same line as the last line of chapter 7, no page break, no paragraph break, not even a line break. The isn't the only example of a "run-on" chapter! And at 20% in I discovered a new make of helicopter: a Sirkovsky! Not to be confused with the much better-known Sikorsky...!

You know you don't actually have to give a brand name or a make (not for me anyway - I can do without them) - especially if you're not sure of it. You can just say 'helicopter'. I don't even care if you turn it into a verb and say that people were 'helicoptered' in. It's really not important to me as a reader what type of helicopter it was. There is no excuse in this electronic age, however, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.

The inappropriate words I can understand to some extent in a first draft, but first drafts are certainly not ready for submission as advance reading copies! Given the general sloppiness of the writing overall, I have to take all this into account in this review. If an author cannot be bothered to make the effort - even to run a spell-checker once through their novel before submitting it for review - then why should I read it through once? I sound like an agent, don't I?! I'm not! I just care about writing.

Onto the story. Liv Paxton is the head of a London homicide team which is investigating a celebrity cell phone hacking scandal and some associated deaths. I guess someone dialed M for murder! The very first problem I ran into with this novel was the info dump problem. There was too much in the first few screens, with zero action. Take this sentence as an example: "She pushed her chin-length dark brown, red-hennaed hair behind her left ear and pushed her designer off-the-right-shoulder black lace dress, which was making her feel a little over-exposed, discreetly back up onto her shoulder." And this was at one percent in!

A sentence like this is way too packed. There may be readers who care about her hair being "hennaed" or her dress being designer. I don't. On the contrary, I find that kind of writing to be pretentious. As long as sentences like that are rare, I can read the novel containing them without them becoming an issue for me, but if I'm going to be encountering that kind of sentence frequently, it does not bode well for my rating of the novel! Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to play on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold! enough!’.

I know how easy it is to miss something, or to let a grammar error or a misspelling go by. I'm trans-Atlantic myself, so I'm often finding myself in the position of wondering upon which side of "the pond" a given spelling belongs. Plus I tend to have 'dyslexic fingers' so while I know perfectly well how to spell the word, sometimes when I type fast, the letters don't always end up in the right order, which necessitates excessive editing and re-reading. I should just learn to type properly!

What all this means for those of us who have such problems, or aren't good at spelling, or grammar, or who might actually be dyslexic or something along those lines, is that we have to work that much harder! And whilst we do have spell-checkers, they can only tell us if the spelling is correct, not if it's the correct spelling for the way the word is used, and certainly not if it's the correct use of that word! Microsoft's grammar checker in Word is useless. I detest and loathe Microsoft, so I don't use their products at home. I run Ubuntu Linux on my computer, and use Soft Office, which is perfectly fine, but which offers no advantage in the areas I've mentioned. It does have a good spell-checker, however, for which I am really grateful (and definitely not 'greatful'!).

The only way to get a leg-up here is to read lots of well-written material, and as much as I disdain the so-called classics, they are well-written. That doesn't mean we should write all our novels like Jane Austen, for example, wrote hers, but we can learn some style from those people. We can learn how to tell a story, and from the really good ones, we can learn how not to jam up the first few pages with excessive description.

But back to the novel. The more I read of this, the less I felt I wanted to read of it. The story isn't outright bad, but it's not that great either, and the technical problems with the text became worse. There was an increasing number of spelling errors and typos, for example where the 's' from the start of word two is accidentally tagged onto the tail of word one instead. At one point there was the non-word Causcasians. There were variations on the word 'lairy' - which is a word, but which appears to be used in the wrong context here - and this was confusing. I'm wondering if 'hairy' was what was intended, but given the other issues with formatting and spelling, I have no idea whether it's right or wrong, whether it was intended or not, or whether it was supposed to be 'hairy' and not 'lairy'. In short, I could not trust the author here because of too many issues elsewhere! These are just a few examples.

The old excuse that this is a "galley proof" doesn't cut it today. Not for me it doesn't. There's no excuse at all for bad formatting or for spelling errors in an era where novels are written on computers and all word processors have a spell checker. Had the novel been more engrossing, I might have been distracted enough that I wouldn't get the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard feeling whenever I encountered one of these, but when the story drags, that's when you really notice the potholes in the road. I didn't like the main character Liv, or her best friend, newspaper tycoon Louise. Neither of them seemed to act their age and they were both snobs.

They also had some weird ideas about gender roles, too: for example, they're all for equality - head cop, head of newspaper, which is perfectly fine, but then Liv insists upon a guy who is 'masculine', and she defines that by a guy who opens doors for her and pulls out a chair for her when they go to dinner! Seriously? You can't have it both ways. Either the genders are equal (at least in intent) or they're not. If you're not equal, you can be treated "like a woman" (whatever antique notion that satisfies) and have your coat draped over your shoulders for you as you leave, and the door opened for you as you arrive, and your seat pulled out for you as you go to dinner. If you're equal, then you can pull out your own chair! Unless we're going to take turns pulling out chairs and opening doors. That's equality! What's Liv going to ask for next - to have her stool pulled out by a strong, masculine man?!

The biggest problem from a reading enjoyment perspective was that all this 'James Bond' style futzing around with expensive clothes, flash cars, dallying with a romance, and dog's dinners, was that it all-too-frequently put the actual story on a back burner. The reason I selected this novel was that I wanted to read the detective story. If I'd wanted a romance to dominate the story I'd have picked up a romance (which is unlikely, but it has happened!). Instead of getting on with the story here, I found it often tossed into the back seat in favor of pursuing the budding relationship between Liv and Mr Perfect, who was a decorated soldier and very much a Mary Sue. I had no interest in him or in their romance. Yes, I was interested in the potential link between him serving in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and there being two hundred million pounds' (sterling) worth of heroin going missing there, and it would have been great had it turned out that he was behind it all, but having had the thankless task of wading through the swampy waters of the first 25% of this, I really had no energy and no interest in wading any more even to get to the bottom of that mystery. I can't honestly and in good conscience rate this novel a worthy read.

Retribution by AJ Scudiere

Title: Retribution
Author: AJ Scudiere
Publisher: Griffyn Ink
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.

Note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. There is no excuse, in this electronic age, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.

Retribution is quite possibly the worst-ever title to choose for your novel. When I went to get a link to it on BN, it listed thirty four pages of novels associated with that word, and the first page showed me almost thirty novels with that actual name, or some close variation on it. C'mon authors, let's get a distinctive title for goodness sakes! Or if it's the publisher made you title it that way, shame on them! The author is listed at BN, but not this volume for some reason. Retribution is book two of the Sin trilogy, so keep in mind that I have not read book 1 (Vengeance - which I'd guess is also an over-used title!), so that may affect how I view this volume. The third volume, Justice (again overused?!) was due in 2015.

I don't normally say a lot about covers because authors (unless they self-publish) typically have no say in their cover, and the artists who do the covers typically illustrate only one thing for me: that they never read the novel they're covering. I have to say on this occasion what a pleasure it was to see a woman on the cover who isn't anorexic! It was really nice to see someone who looks like she can actually do the things we'll read about in the novel. I don't know who the cover model was, but she looks perfect for this illustration.

Having said that I have to add that as I read this, the cover became the best part of this novel. A J Scudiere was running a 'buy one, get one free' offer on her website when I visited, which isn't the best advertisement for her novels in my opinion, but it's her website. She can do whatever she wants. The trilogy is about two kids raised in the mob, who become rebels seeking vengeance for harm done to their families, and end up finding each other and working together. This volume follows up on that, with the two protagonists from the first volume, Sin (Cynthia) and Lee now living under different names as a married couple. Sin has somehow become a cop, and she hears someone say "Hello Sin" but can't pick out the speaker in a crowd. Despite having the means to quickly disappear and start a new life somewhere else, the two of them have apparently gone soft. They decide to stay and fight it out. This part I found less than credible given who these characters are supposed to be, but the story takes off from that premise.

Sin goes looking for one of the rival family Kurev brothers, whom she somehow fails to recognize when she initially picks him up in a routine drug bust. There's no reason for this other than to move the story, because she does find him by amazing coincidence and then has to kill him. For no good reason, Lee then takes off to that same place to pick up information in a nearby bar, and by another amazing coincidence happens to sit right next to two people who's conversation tells him everything he needs to know to move the story forward some more. I found this less than credible, and that's where I started deciding that I really had no interest in following this story any further. It didn't spark for me. It wasn't interesting, and I couldn't get into it with any enthusiasm. I could neither identify with either of the two main characters, nor did I find them appealing or interesting, and their relationship is as robotic as it is bizarre.

In a way I could rate this novel triple A: for Angst, Anguish, and Analysis, because the author is all about telling, not much interested in showing. Personally I don't mind that as much as other reviewers might, but even for me, screen after screen of dreary, detailed drifts down memory lane or deep into the protagonists analytical but pedantic mind is too much when it happens time after time. Yes, there's some brief action here and there, but it's perfunctory and comes in very short bursts, and even that is analyzed in detail as it happens. This kind of writing has no appeal for me, so I cannot rate this novel as a worthy read.

The Chase by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

Title: The Chase
Author: Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
Publisher: Bantam Dell
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 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!

I am not a fan of Evanovich's or Goldberg's, having read nothing by either of them before, and now I know why. This novel took me less than two chapters to decide it was awful, amateurish, condescending, and clichéd. And did I mention how amateurish it was? In the extreme? You know, I don't blame authors for writing lousy novels. I blame readers for buying them, but if there's a market to exploit, hey, go for it. I'm sure that the reading public deserve what they get. As for me, I'll go with something that reads like it was written for those who still maintain a certain level of intelligence and literary discrimination and for novels which, far from insulting women and turning them into caricatures, actually give us a smart, interesting, fun, and strong female characters, not simply men in heels.

So we begin with a bomb explosion Sunday morning in the LA financial district large enough to set off car alarms a mile away. The female protagonist, FBI agent Kate O'Hare is no more than a dozen miles away getting breakfast at MacDonald's, yet she hears nothing strange. Hmm! Maybe that's reasonable. Maybe. We're treated to a description of O'Hare's breakfast. I really needed to read that because it's so utterly crucial to the plot. This is the second in a series where the female main character, who has to be the most moronic FBI agent ever (more anon), hooks up with con man Nicholas Fox (Fox and O'Hare, get it? Ha ha! How hilarious!). From this it's painfully obvious exactly what kind of relationship they will have, exactly how this novel will go, and exactly how it will end, and that this mystery has no mystery to it whatsoever.

O'Hare's and her partner are called in to tackle the case, so she drives over to pick him up, and we're treated to a description of what he's wearing. Seriously? Who honestly gives a damn that he's wearing a dress shirt? Really? What Evanovich and Goldberg are doing here (and getting away with it) is exactly what we're warned never to do as writers, but no one cares if she does it or if he does, because they're part of the establishment now! They don't have to play by the absurd rules forced upon the rest of us. They can actually can get away with writing the very novels which would be turned down flat by Big Publishing if any of us tried to submit this same thing!

Kate drives to the site of the blast like a maniac, no lights flashing, driving on the sidewalk, swerving crazily around other vehicles, risking causing accidents. There's no emergency here, yet she drives dangerously for no reason whatsoever. If this were a first-time novel written by a sixteen-year-old I could understand the poor writing. It would never get published, but I could understand the quality of it. There is no excuse whatsoever for professional writers to not only write this detestable trash, but be allowed to get away with it by their editor and publisher.

As if that isn't bad enough, it gets worse! Here's where it really started down the toilet and into the sewerage system for me. Oh, did I mention that Evanovich (or Goldberg) claim that Kate was US special forces - which is patent nonsense? As much as I would love to see women given exactly the same opportunities as men, they do not have this yet. Women have played supporting roles in special forces, which is a good start, but to simply put this into your novel as though it's not only happening, but happened long-enough ago (well over five years ago!) that she could have served and been honorably discharged is some serious horseshit! A new writer would be pilloried for an absurd gaff like that, but this actually isn't the problem I had with chapter two. It's O'Hare's abysmal incompetence.

Once she arrives at the site of the bomb blast, she starts figuring out that the blast wasn't aimed at the building in which it was set, but at the alarms in the bank buildings all around. In short, there's a robbery going on somewhere nearby; so far so good, but it's all downhill from there. Yes, of course the robbery is being conducted by Fox, who strolls out of a bank dressed as a cop, and carrying a large bag full of loot. O'Hare challenges him - and then lets him go! Despite having her gun trained on him she fires no shots, warning or otherwise, neither to disable the car nor to make the perp think twice about fleeing. Not a single cop there draws a gun on him, because Kate fails to alert the police force to what's going down. No one but Kate gives chase, and she gives not one heads-up to any cops! She does not relay any information about the car, the license plate, or the the vehicle ID number painted on it. She simply lets him drive away!

In short, she's not only thoroughly incompetent, she's also a frigging moron. The last thing I need on my reading list is yet another story that insults women by turning them into super-heroes who are simultaneously brain-dead Mary Sues. If I want to read about a strong female character, then I'd like it to be about a female, not a guy with tits. This means you make her tough without throwing yourself on the sadly geriatric trope of claiming she was special forces. You make her smart-tough, and you do not make toughness be her defining characteristic, especially if you're going to pair it up with abysmal incompetence in that she lets this thief whom she's apparently been failing to catch for five years, get away when she has him quite literally in her gun sight. The fact that she admits that she can't decide whether to shoot Fox or to kiss him was the last straw for me. Can we pile any more clichés and tropes onto Mary Sue O'Hare's shoulders? Can we? I don't think so!

Seriously, get a clue. Get an original idea for goodness sakes, and ditch the tropes. This novel is warty in the extreme, and I'm done here.

Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach

Title: Red 1-2-3
Author: John Katzenbach
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Rating: WARTY!

This is the first Katzenbach that I've ever read, so I have nothing to go on but what's before me; that's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it! But will it be Katzenbach Falls or The Adventure of the Red Circle Down the Drain?"? Well, I had mixed feelings about this one right up to the end. It wasn't until I started editing the final version of this review that I realized that this novel did not have what it takes to be a worthy read. It wasn't atrocious: parts of it were inventive and well-written, but it wasn't worthy, either. There was just too much wrong with it.

This novel centers around a serial killer (and novelist!) coming out of retirement. How that works exactly, remains unexplained! I can see a novelist doing this, but isn't 'Serial Killer' a lifelong profession? A serial killer may be retired (in an active sense) but not through any action of his own. But this man links his killings to successful novels that he writes based upon those murders, so when he started fading from public acclaim, why did he not pull his Red Riding Hood murders out of his hat then? Why wait until now? We're given no explanation.

This man is also old for a serial killer - in his sixties - and he's married, which is rare for a serial killer. You would think that this addition of a wife would add a real twist to the story, adding complexity and a certain element of randomness, and jacking up the tension, but right when it appears to be tightening tension, it suddenly goes nowhere. The killer feels that he doesn’t have much time left because his parents died in their sixties and he expects the same fate, so he wants to commit one last murder (or rather, series of murders) and write one last novel about it, and make this all worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records.

The three victims he chooses are all redheads (hence the title, Red 1-2-3), but other than that and the fact that they're all female, they seem to have nothing at all in common. At first. Sarah Locksley (Red two) used to be a school teacher until her husband and three-year-old daughter died in a car accident. From that point on, she gave up on life. Jordan Ellis (Red three) is a 4th year college prep school student who plays basketball with a vengeance. Her parents are having a contentious divorce, leaving her in the middle, and paradoxically feeling very much alone and doing poorly in school. Karen Jayson (Red one) is a doctor of geriatrics, and an amateur comedian. It turns out that the killer's wife is a patient of hers, and she's also the principle's secretary at Jordan's school. Other than those two facts, we're given nothing to link them together. It's never revealed how the killer chose his victims or what links they had (in his mind), and since no detective is ever on this case I guess it doesn't matter, but it felt really odd.

The killer-to-be has been stalking these three women for many months and continues to stalk them. He sends "introductory" letters signed "Big Bad Wolf" to each of them. We never learn the killer's name. He's always the wolf. His wife is referred to as Mrs Big Bad Wolf throughout. We're not even allowed to read those letters, so this is yet another in a list of things I simply didn't get about this novel. Each woman gets her letter on the same day, but only one of them calls police. The detective is a complete jerk and offers no help. He doesn’t even want to see the letter. This initial lack of interest is used as a really poor excuse for the women never to go to the police again, even when they have some good solid evidence that their plight is real. I found this approach to be completely unrealistic. More on this anon.

I almost gave up on this novel in the first couple of pages because Katzenbach writes like Stephen King, and trust me, that's not a compliment when it comes from my keyboard. Katzenbach's philosophy quite evidently, is "Why write a word when you can make it into a sentence? Why write a paragraph when a page would be far better, and why write a description of anything at all unless you’re fully prepared to occupy several pages with it?" Seriously, it’s tedious to read this prose. For example, he has one recipient of the letter determined to arm herself. So far, so good. There is a gun in the house in a locked box, and Katzenbach has her go get it, but he manages to fill four whole pages with this action alone! It’s t-e-d-i-o-u-s. Naturally I've started skipping page after page of his text in search of interesting bits - of which there are, to be fair, quite a few, but curiously, very few of these involve the killer himself. I tended to skip most of the parts which were written from his perspective. It was boring. After the opening few chapters his writing seemed to improve somewhat (or maybe I grew more immune to it). The parts about the women, including the killer's wife, were much more readable than any other parts.

Note to authors: I don’t care if you've compiled an extensive biography for every last, even remotely tangential character in your entire novel. I certainly don’t want to read it. I came for the story, not for a life history of the world's population! If it doesn’t move the story forward, if it doesn't tell me something interesting, useful, or important about your character, or clue me in about events, then who cares? Really? Who cares? I don’t mind a stray snippet here and there drifting into the story even if it isn't relevant. I don’t mind that at all, but when the action is routinely hijacked by authorial pontificating or verbosity, I'm taking a cab to the next good bit, and if you keep hitting on me inappropriately like that, I'm outta there.

The first time I felt completely comfortable with this novel and actually really enjoyed the reading was when we got to experience a basketball game in which Jordan is playing. Now this was prose. It was wonderful. But this was not until chapter five, after more than forty pages had gone by! This novel should have started right there and then! It should have been told from one person's, perhaps Jordan's, perspective to begin with, allowing her to find out that she was not alone after a few more chapters had gone by. That would have been a better novel. I found myself hop-scotching over the fat of verbosity to get to the lean meat. Any way, the killer sends another letter to each girl, directing them to a You Tube video (none of which actually exist on You Tube - a mistake IMO) which shows a bit of forest (playing on the Little Red Riding Hood theme), then a long-distance shot of the intended victim. Sarah's video cruelly shows a brief shot of the graves of her husband and daughter before it abruptly ends.

Is this a mistake by the BBW? The killer listed the videos for all three women in each letter, so that they now have the knowledge that they're not alone. Perhaps he fully intended them to meet up, so he can herd them together and kill them all at the same time, flushing them like fish into a barrel before taking them out, so to speak? Jordan takes the bull shark by the horns here, and quickly comes up with a system by which they can contact each other without giving away too much about themselves. The problem with this linking of the victims is that it makes no sense from the killer's PoV, nor does it really go anywhere. For the longest time, even after they get in touch, the three women all act independently. Their introduction doesn't seem to benefit them, and it doesn't seem to make much difference to the novel! It's only towards the end that they act in concert and then Katzenbach pretty much blows that, too.

Even when they have this 'support group', the BBW still dominates their every thought and even their behavior. Jordan, the aggressive basketball player and the most belligerent of the three when they're discussing action, is the first to encounter him in person and know it, yet instead of confronting him she shrivels to jelly and runs! Maybe that was smart, maybe it wasn't. Some serial killers would react aggressively, others would run themselves if confronted. Some might use charm to try and mislead a person into thinking their apparent stalking or threatening behavior was perfectly innocent. But Jordan gives the killer exactly the thrill he seeks, and worse, she fails to use this opportunity to tail him to his car, for example, and get a license plate number, yet she's the very one who is most vociferous in advocating that they should be pro-active in dealing with this! I really didn't appreciate this scene because it isn't like Jordan had not been expecting something like this for some time. For her to go to pieces like that was a bit of a let-down! Yes, perhaps it is what we all would have done, but this is fiction, and I expected more, given what we've been led to believe about Jordan's personality.

What continued to bother me throughout this novel was that these women consistently fail to involve the police. After Karen's initial call, it's never brought up again, like it's still a pointless option, but the fact is there is now three of them, not just one who has had a concrete threat. They have two letters each, and the three videos. This has gone well beyond a prank, or a mistake, or a misunderstanding: they have real cause for concern. They just don't have a suspect, but that's the very job of the detectives, and the inaction of these three women is inexcusable and downright stupid. In addition to that, I find it really hard to believe that not a one of them would advocate or seek police involvement. It's really an insult to women and threatens suspension of disbelief. Yes, one of these three is so cowed by life that she probably would not call a cop, but the other two have been presented to us as quite the opposite of that type of person. Katzenbach has failed to honor the very parameters of the novel he wants us to buy into here.

In the end, the women do act, and in concert, but their action isn't realistic or satisfactory to me. In some ways the ending worked, but I was expecting much more than this, and I felt robbed that justice wasn't served more neatly than what we got.

Ragnarok and Roll by Keith R A DeCandido

Title: Ragnarok and Roll
Author: Keith R A DeCandido
Publisher: Plus One Press
Rating: WARTY!

I both started and finished this one today, and when I say I finished it, I didn't finish it. I read the very first chapter and decided that this was so uninventive and pedestrian that I had zero interest in reading any more (on the principle that life's way-the-hell too short).

The novel is about Cassie Zukav, a resident of Florida, who battles mythological creatures from Norse legend. It's first person PoV which I detest, so my feeling on starting it was that I wouldn't like it, and I'm sure that this contributed to my negative take on it. The first person is in the past tense, which ameliorates the style somewhat, but it's still 1PoV and it's all me, me, me, I, I , I, and that kind of self-aggrandizement sucks big ones on a cold day. It really does. Who cares how self-important Castor Zukav is?

Why did I even pick this up, knowing it was 1PoV? Well, I initially asked myself "How can I not like a novel with that title?!" and I found out pretty quickly the answer to that when I read that Cassie is a boring dive-tour guide in Florida who spends the majority of her nights drinking and listening to the same band at the same dive bar in the Keys. Why would I be even remotely interested in a completely one-dimensional character who was completely boring in three dimensions? As if that wasn't bad enough, the way Loki decides he's going to take over the world and bring on the new ice age is to form a band and play in a dinky little nowhere town in the Keys. Seriously?

The fact that, after learning all this, I still finished that one chapter is a compliment, believe me, but there was no way I was about to voluntarily read any more of this uninspiring and insipid drivel.

The Undiscovered Goddess by Michelle Colston

Title: The Undiscovered Goddess
Author: Michelle Colston
Publisher: Michelle Colston
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.

I found this novel rather disturbingly addictive when I began it, but as I continued to read it, I found myself fuming at Holly's inertia and vacuity, and at her brain-washed self-loathing induced by hideous societal pressures on women. I seriously hoped, as I got deeper and deeper into it, that Colston would pull something worthy out of this smoldering fire, otherwise, I decided, I would be really pissed at her and depressed about Holly. The worst thing that could happen with this novel, I decided, was that Colston would pull an Ephron and trivialize everything with a pat, middle-class, suburban ending. She didn't do that, but she didn't wise-up Holly, either. Holly was, at the end, even more stupid and shallow than she had been at the begining.

I'm all for discovering goddesses (although my definition of goddess differs significantly, I suspect, from that of most people), so this title intrigued me, and the blurb (which probably lied through its eye-teeth as you know they do) sounded intriguing, sucker that I am, so I took it up. I found Colston's writing style comfortable and easy to get into, although after only one page I had grave doubts about how goddess-like the main character is, or alternatively, what must be wrought upon her in the process of such a discovery, but overall, I liked the writing style even as I railed at a significant number of the things in it. Unfortunately, even this palled and became boring before I had got three-quarters into this. Holly just isn't an interesting person; she never became anyone I cared about or grew interested in knowing.

In general, in reading, it's really important to keep in mind that the characters in a novel are not the author of the novel (although that can happen), and it can be even harder to separate author from character when a novel is written in first person, so I have to fully disclose here that I had the distinct (if possibly erroneous) impression that this is much more of an autobiographical work than your typical first person perspective novel can tend to be. By the completion of the novel, Colston had done nothing to change my views whether the impression I have is erroneous or not.

The protagonist, who is initially anonymous, categorizes herself as "a wife and mother of three" which I found disturbing, especially since she seems to spend her entire time shuttling kids around and doing (or at least planning) household chores. Since she starts out as a stay-at-home wife who performs 1950's style 'wifely duties' who has a problem with alcohol, and who reads laughably shallow female abuse (read: fashion) magazines, there would seem to be ample room for a make-over of a significantly richer hue than I feared might be under consideration here! Unfortuantely, she does nto change in any of these regards. At the end, she is still pretty much the same as when she began, the major change being that she spoils herself more rotten by the end than she did at the beginning, but hey, she spoils herself in different ways so that's progress, right?!

In view of how absurdly early magazines are put out (the "January" issue descending upon us in November), I found it somewhat of a stretch that she's only getting down to reading the January Cosmo actually in January. It's possible, I suppose, but she describes it as a "brand new" edition, which is definitely not a bedfellow of reality where magazines are concerned! I sincerely hope women like this one are not the majority, but this is the impression we’re given - that your typical mid-thirties housewife (not my description!) has nothing more substantial in her head than reading horoscopes and completing shallow quizzes in a magazine pregnant with ads telling women how fat, ugly, and shabbily dressed they are, how bad their skin is ("I never use soap on my face!"), and how thoroughly "trailer-park" their home is unless they rigidly and religiously follow the advice being dispensed therein! Having said that, there is significant evidence to suggest that a disturbingly high proportion of women are raised to see themselves that way even as, paradoxically, they are not fundamentally like that. This obviously needs to be fixed, and if Colston has a solution, then she definitely deserves to be heard!

A problem hit me, curiously enough, on page 13, when someone else hijacked this novel. I was unceremoniously assaulted by someone called Devi Phoenix (honestly? I'm surprised Colston didn’t add a string of academic initials after the name!) the author of yet another pointless self-help work of fiction who comes off like an airhead (and not in a good way) and then she, in turn, is hijacked by "Holly", who is a complete cookie-cutter version of the original main character. This was confusing to me since there was nothing in the opening section to identify who the heck the introductory character was. I'd honestly wondered if it was supposed to be Michelle Colston herself, and Devi and Holly were two other people, but it took only a few pages to get that we'd reverted back to the initial character who turned out to be named Holly. Ooookay! A bit confusing, but nothing tragic.

Devi, curiously, has a bad habit of saying "BLESSED BE" (yes, in block caps), just as Colston/Holly has a habit of saying, Namaste, which is a Hindi phrase meaning roughly, "I adore you in a non sexual way"! Thirty-Four-year-old Holly has three children, is a 1950's style mom, has a serious drinking problem, and a husband who abandons his family for business reasons. She's going through a mid-life crisis and is, after a series of failures in self-help endeavors, committed for unexplained reasons, to reading and following Devi's advice on how to raise a Phoenix from ashes. I was not convinced that this would suffice given that Holly has some serious and highly clichéd issues - the kinds of issue which give me all the reason I need to avoid TV sitcoms like the ten fictional divine plagues visited on the Egyptians.

Holly starts keeping a journal which is this novel. I wonder if it was actually Colston's journal which she figured she could make a few bucks from if she "fictionalized" it, changing a name or an event here and there? This is supposed to be her private, personal journal, yet she's frequently 'bleeping out' her cussing! That defeated my suspension of disbelief more than once. It's weird because on p142, she declares that "fuck" happens to be one of her favorite words yet she's censoring it in her private journal, including on the very page where she claims it's a favorite!? This is not smart writing.

It’s funny because the entry for May 8th (p24), discussing a conversation she had with her husband while she was drunk, actually says "...did he not talk me out it?" - not "...did he not talk me out of it?"! Maybe the book editor was drunk? It would seem so, because at one point Holly talks about not being able to make something because she's out of ingredients and the weather is so bad that she can’t go out (schools are closed, etc), yet two days later, without having gone out in the intervening period, she's making pancakes and baking fudge cake! Somebody lied! I sincerely hope Holly's kids don't get food poisoning from eating the raw eggs in the cake batter, but that's another issue….

Holly both understands (so it would seem) that she has serious problems yet she continues, in the same breath (or same sentence, since she's summarizing in writing), to describe her husband as a good provider (almost in so many words!) upon whom she depends. So she simultaneously degrades herself to dependent status and fails to achieve the realization that her own husband fails to pay her anywhere near enough attention (as his blindness to her 'binge and purge era' testifies quite adequately). After all this, she rather cluelessly questions herself as to why she's not happy when she has "it all" (including "a nice car")!

I think Holly still has a lot to learn about life, including who she is and what she needs, but I guess that's what this crisis is all about! At least she understands how shallow Shawn is when he mindlessly blabbers how perfect she is, yet she's never considered talking about it with him and now, of course, his shallow 'compliments' are simply not enough for her. These thoughts are underlined dramatically when she sits down on May 16th to write a sad list of what she dreams of having, and the first two items on her list are "the perfect body" (in block caps - and not "a" perfect body but "the" perfect body - like there's only one and if she has it, then no other woman can!), and owning an immaculate wardrobe.

Now there's absolutely nothing wrong, and indeed everything right with liking who you are and enjoying your clothes (as long as you're realistic about it!), but if who you should be, what kind of bod you should have, and what you should wear are (however indirectly) defined by men, then what in hell are you thinking of‽ How can you be who you are when your full-time occupation is being someone else's idea of who they think you need to be? Holly's list is amusing in its contradictions, too. She wants to be famous, but she also 'vants to be alone'! Good luck vith that! Her desire for traveling the world, I can get with, but it’s about he only thing on her list which I would have included had I made such a list; then I appear to be a lot happier with myself than Holly is. BTW, I’d love to know how she achieved the impossible by healing diaper rash with homeopathic "remedies"! LoL!

I noted down a few impressions of Holly as I read:

• Holly must have the most irregular periods ever judged by her record of them in her journal.
• Her 'fear' journal is so 'all over the place' that it's scary! I don’t see how she resolves anything.
• Holly is something of a scatter brain.
• Holly colors her hair. It's yet another example of how dissatisfied she is with herself, yet it's one of which she seems oblivious.
• Holly places a rather racist emphasis on "BLUE eyes" (block caps hers) in her husband.
• Holly has a "my room" to which she heads for sanctuary? Does she mean the bedroom? Why does she see it as her room? Does she not routinely sleep with Shawn?
• Holly has a "my office" (for what?)
• Holly is Irish Italian. Seriously? Could she be any more generic?
• Holly's to-do list consists of eight line items, nearly every one of which is a chore. Not that she does them all, but she certainly does more than one.
• Shawn's to do list is 'mow the lawn' and he's done.
• Holly really doesn't seem to interact with Shawn or to do anything, or to go anywhere with him. Is he the problem? Really - is he preventing her from being her goddess, or is it all DIY?

There was one annoying journal entry where we learn (and in great detail) how much Holly hates the beach. She knew she would hate the beach. She hates to go to the beach. See Holly hate the beach. Hate. Hate. Hate. She gets to the beach and...she hates it. My conclusion from this is that she's not only scatter-brained, she's also clueless. She could have stayed home! She could have had the very time to herself that she claims she craves, and let Shawn deal with the kids for a day doing stuff which they all appear to love. What is wrong with her? Will she ever learn?!

And again with Shawn neglecting her in this regard! He could have suggested she stay home and take some self-time, but he insists that she come along. Why is she "carrying a thrashing toddler" and not Shawn? What’s he carrying other than self-satisfaction and a lack of respect for his partner? And why does she have to apologize to him for his complete lack of empathy for how his wife is feeling and what she's going through? Shortly after this, Holly is sitting at home, drinking beer "waiting for Shawn" (who's out mowing the lawn). What's up with that? What, exactly, is she waiting for? I remember thinking at that point that if Holly got off her waiting ass and mowed the lawn, that might take care of a pound or two for her right there. But they probably have a rider mower (which of course, only guys can ever use)….

Holly is most definitely the Beast of Burden in this marriage. Shawn isn't up making lunches and breakfasts for the kids, Holly is. Why does she see nothing wrong in this? Hey, did you know that the body works in 21 day "repair" cycles? No, I didn’t either. Nor do I believe it. Or maybe that's why Holly's periods are out of whack? I guess Holly didn’t reach the part of her self-help which asks if her partner is a dead weight! Instead, she affirms her commitment to him when one of her friends announces that she's separating from hers. This felt like some kind of con-trick to me - misdirect the mark and you get…Leverage! The distance from her husband in this story so far - they way she writes about him (or more revealingly, what she doesn’t write) reminds me of the words from REM's song, Losing My Religion "...the lengths that I will go to, the distance in your eyes...every whisper of every waking hour I'm choosing my confessions...".

Another tragically ignored issue here is still that Holly doesn't have a life. Her entire "life" is a function of the needs of others. She does nothing for herself. She has no job. She has no interests. She never reads (unless it’s psychically self-destructive glossy women's magazines - the ones which typically print the title of the magazine right over the part of the cover model's head where her brain ought to be - you know, above the part where her pores have been surgically removed?). Holly has no interests outside the home except for going on drunken binges with some girlfriends who are apparently doing worse in life than Holly herself is.

There's a third issue here which is unexplored, and which might be the most important of all. No one in the right mind would deny Holly the right to chose her path in life and do the things she feels she needs to do, but Holly isn't operating in a vacuum here either. She's a crucial and integral part of a family, and yet she's embarking upon these self-determined and rather destructive courses without discussing any of it with anyone in her family. This is really selfish of her. No, she can’t be expected to put her life on hold at the whim of others (although in many ways she's already done that), nor, as an adult, should she need to get permission to indulge herself in things which are important to her, but neither does she have the right to inflict suffering on her family on what’s really nothing more than whim and caprice, especially not with no sort of discussion at all with her husband. Are they partners or what? This is a real problem which is left unexplored in this novel. Holly isn’t guiltless here and she comes off looking rather selfish to boot.

But there are worse problems with these bullshit self-help books. They're pretty much always written by people who have no clue about biology or evolution. They're typically written by evangelicals who are self-deluded into thinking they’ve had some sort of personal epiphany which was granted to them and no one else, and they're convinced that their narrow, blinkered view of life can change the world. They also love to trail academic initials after their name. If you look at a book written by a honest-to-goodness doctor or scientist or some such, you never see them lard-up their name space with initials on the cover. Did Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, or Stephen Hawking ever trail initials after their name in any of the books they wrote? No. That's how you tell if the writer is honest or is merely a pretentious bullshit artist and poseur who's out to make a fast buck from a fast and loose book.

Yes, granted that the fictional Devi didn’t have initials after her name either, but she's committing another sin: she's presenting fiction as fact with unsupported and undocumented claims about cycles and organics. I'm not saying there isn’t a point in there; we could all lead healthier and more active lives than we do, but the one thing people who write like this persistently and advisedly avoid discussing is that people are healthier and live longer these days than ever before. Our primitive ancestors - the very ones who lived the life these neo-Neanderthals seek to drag us back into, lived short and brutal lives. Their children died by the score. Keep that in mind when planning any major lifestyle change. Having said that, then yes, eating healthier and exercising more is a good thing (as long as you don’t take it to extremes, and as long as you match it to your physical condition and age), but there's nothing evil in some occasional slacking on chores and aims, or in once-in-a-while cheating on your diet plan. The one unavoidable fact is that life is way too short to spend one minute of it being miserable.

Holly's cleansing was as amusing as it was absurd. I weep for women who are put through this by the shysters of this world, and all it would take to fix this is a good science education - the very thing we're screwing our kids out of as annual comparisons of student performance between the US and the rest of the world confirm year after year. Quite clearly the "success" of her cleanse was in that she's now done with it. But neither she nor the author of her travails can actually demonstrate that anything was cleansed - that the condition of her large intestine is any cleaner or healthier now than it was beforehand. It’s all in the head. The misery is over and it's no surprise that she feels so damned good! Duhh! Her yoga seems to server better, but even whilst she's admiring the changes she's wrought, she's still putting on "anti-aging" cream and having artificial extensions added to her eye lashes. Her inner goddess is no doubt dying of neglect at this point, starved of self-love, but maybe that bottle of champagne in mid week and drunk during the day will help? Seriously? Champagne on Tuesday morning? There will be more on her extravagances later!

It seems increasingly that Holly's problem is far less about mind than it is about body, and all of her self-image problems are really those imposed upon her by men: ass too large, breasts too small. Does that sound familiar? She pretty much abandons her budding self-sculpture in favor of once more sitting on her ass doing nothing while someone else works on her at a trip to a day spa. What a betrayal! She plans on spoiling herself rotten (if this alternate torture is your idea of being spoiled, that is) starting with a seaweed wrap (which used to be a food, now it’s a body adornment, apparently). There's absolutely no evidence that this does anything to remove 'toxins', but more to the point, didn’t she ought to be free of 'toxins' after all the 'cleansings' she's done?! Thanks, Holly, for admitting to us, if not to yourself, that those cleansings were a complete waste of time and money, and constituted nothing but a cruel and unusual punishment to yourself and your family.

A face peel is also on the agenda, which is cause for a face palm in my book. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable thought, but whenever you look at another human being, you’re looking at a dead person in the respect that the entire outer layer of skin is dead tissue! Scary thought huh: everyone's a zombie! But that skin is there for a reason as any student of evolution (which Holly definitely is not) will tell you, and if you peel it off, you're exposing the very tender skin underneath to all kinds of assault from, well, 'toxins' in the environment LOL! You're also exposing it to some serious UV irradiation from the sun. Besides, the entire 'fresh" outer layer of your skin that you just exposed will die and replace what you just peeled off. It’s a cycle, so you just wasted your money, Holly.

Hell, if you're so wealthy that you can toss money down drains, then go for it, but please do keep in mind that it isn't the toxic chemicals, or massage, or hot stones, or seaweed that's relaxing you, and making you feel better - it’s the lying around whilst someone fusses over you and makes you feel special that's doing the trick - something her partner and herself ought to be taking turns at doing for each other if he wasn't so preoccupied with his almost permanently away from home job, and she wasn't so self-absorbed twenty-four-seven. So once again we’re back to the poor quality of Holly's relationship with her husband! That's the one thing she (with very very few exceptions) is really making zero effort over. But this is before she mindlessly blabbers on about how important it is to work at a relationship, so maybe she gets it eventually? Nah!

Holly would never make a doctor or a nurse. When her son complains of stiffness in his elbow, it never once enters her head that he has a potential infection - she puts it down to "growing pains" and dismisses it without even offering so much as something to rub on it, or an aspirin, or even a hug. I know it's awful to coddle children excessively, but there are legitimate complaints which they get from time to time and she failed here. Worse, she then translates her pat non-diagnosis into fodder for her journal. I really started not liking her at this point. I’d already been turned off her for her clueless addiction to the fatuous non-science nonsense of homeopathy and to horoscopes (how many times does she claim she's a Libra?), but I never really and honestly disliked her until then. It’s all about her, which is the whole point of this novel, sure, but you know, a novel can be about someone without that person coming-off as self-centered, selfish and even stupid!

Holly needs seriously to read The Vagina Monologues or something along those lines; maybe then she wouldn’t use her remarkable and fascinating primary reproductive organ as the same sort of insult into which men turn it when using a well-known four-letter expletive in a derogatory way about women. The problem is that Holly is being equally clueless when she describes it as her "goddess center"! It’s probably a fact that women have an easier time discussing bowel functions than they do talking about, and actually looking at and appreciating, their vulva and vagina. Holly is a classic exemplar of this. She offered way TMI when discussing her urgent need to visit the bathroom when she was doing her three week cleansing, and she was hilarious when she described a person in front of her farting during her "hot yoga" (no, that's not what you think), but here, when it comes to something important, pleasant, even joyous, and rather interesting for a variety of reasons, she's all embarrassed and clams up (if I can get away with a common term which seems rather inappropriate in this context!)

It’s really sad that the fictional Holly is way too representative of way too many women. I appreciated that Colston included this section, and it actually did a lot to win this novel back into my favor after I started feeling a bit blah about it earlier, but unfortunately this good will wasn't to last.

Lindy, the yoga instructor is a wacko as the other snake oil sales women in this novel. She claims that cells hold memories which is pure, patent, undiluted, unadorned, unadulterated bullshit, and Holly of course, being who she is, swallows it whole. Yes, your cells hold DNA which can be considered 'memory' of a kind, but no, the overwhelming majority of your cells are not neurons so no, they don’t hold memories as we typically envision memories, the don't hold grudges, they don’t remember pain and suffering. But nonetheless, Holly buys this bullshit and cries all the way home thinking that suffering is her friend. In this, Colston undid all of the goodwill I had harbored for her too-hastily glossed over vagina non-monologue.

Holly's sole idea of "Goddess day" is to go blow a wad of money on products with which to pamper herself, so all I learned from this is that she's replaced one set of excesses (such as drinking an over-eating) with another set. It's all about money and this woman is spoiled rotten. How the hell would some poor working-class woman ever even begin to match what Holly takes for granted? At this point I had dropped this novel down on the scale to the level marked "DETESTATION" (yes in block caps). It's always all about Holly, which is really tedious after a while. But there is some unintentional humor in the irony of her behavior. Sometimes I wonder if Colston has written a parody here? If she had it would have been brilliant, but I fear that it's far more of an autobiography than ever it could be a parody. One big laugh was when self obsessed, looks-addicted, superficial and spoiled brat diva Holly has the gall to act in disbelief when her oldest son gets interested in a cheerleader! Honestly? Her measure in my eyes diminishes with every new page at this point, and it's about to really nose dive big time.

Well, I have read some sorry-ass reflections by Holly in this novel, but the truly saddest was on page 175. Note that this is Holly, who has never, ever, ever, EVER, EVER wanted for a dollar in this entire novel so far. Whatever she has selfishly wanted, she has gone right out and bought it without even considering asking Shawn if she can spend his money on it. She has never once hesitated. She has never once had to put something on lay-away or had to put off buying it until the next week or until the next month because of budgetary concerns. She has never once had to rent to buy a single thing. She wants a day at the spas? Call 'em up and book it for the next day, and give no thought to the cost. She wants a new guitar? Head off and spends $160 on one right there and then, and that's not including the gas to drive to a nearby town where they have a guitar shop. Guitar lessons? Go buy 'em, and spare no expense. She wants to drink champagne like it's mineral water? Go right ahead and forget all your vows on alcohol intake. She wants one product after another, she buys it. She wants designer clothes, she buys them. She wants to interrupt meditation by wondering if designer boots are on sale now it’s spring? Go for it! Never once has she thought a single thought about cost or selfishness. With that in mind, read this directly from page 175:

With a heavy heart, I thought about Africa and its many troubles. The disease, the poverty, the lack of water and sanitation, the kids who don’t get told they're loved every day. I'm no doctor or teacher. I don't know how build a school or give vaccinations. I don’t know how to design irrigation fields or harvest rice. I certainly don’t possess the spiritual savvy to tell a village who to worship or how. Nonetheless, I don't think you have to have a PhD when it comes to helping out. If I have no constructive skill to offer, I’d still love to go over there and give everyone I meet a high five.

I honestly lost count of how many shamefully clueless wrongs there are in that one paragraph, and I don’t know if Colston is really this utterly blind, unfeeling, and yes, stupid, or if this is some sort of snide commentary on how utterly blind, unfeeling, and stupid women like Holly are. Like I said, I kept wondering if I was missing a really good parody here, but it rang too true to autobiography to honestly feel like one - and having finished it, it proved to be no parody. Colston/Holly really is this clueless. Lets itemize a few issues here. Right after dissing the entire continent of Africa, she decides to scrap her "research project" and focus on having fun. I am not kidding you. Shallow much, Holly? "Kids who don’t get told they're loved every day"? And that only happens in Africa? She talks of Africa like it’s a country rather than a massive continent of hugely diverse peoples. Just how much of a train-wreck of racist, condescending, self-righteous bullshit can one women create?

She doesn't know how to build a school or give vaccinations? What, she can't learn or go volunteer as a pair of hands, and learn on the job? She doesn't possess the spiritual savvy to tell Africans who they should worship? Honestly? It's religion, for god's sake! It’s all made up by ancient dudes. What’s to know? And even if you did know, where the hell do you get off thinking that Africans need your input on that topic, you self-important bimbo? Hands that come open and ready to share the load will always achieve way-the-hell more than hands that pray tightly clasped together ever will. Yeah, give 'em all a high five, Holly, because that will fix everything and make all those poor African children feel so loved. I can't believe this paragraph. I have to go to the pharmacy and get some anti-nausea pills at this point so I can finish this novel and move on. This one paragraph may have succeeded in completely writing off this entire novel off for me. The only way Colston can save it now is to have Holly die horribly, or have her wake up from a coma.

As if that's not bad enough, Blind clueless Holly decides that the best way to deal with South America (which apparently only has one culture according to Holly's tunnel vision of the world), is to take up salsa dancing. I kid you not. Because when was it EVER about what she could do for someone else? never! It's always been about what she can do for herself. She "addresses" her ignorance of the cultural situation in Mexico by watching a soap on Telemundo which she doesn’t understand because it’s in Spanish. Eating an Indian curry (and getting diarrhea afterwards, because let's face it, turning into a an old trope is all that curry could ever be good for). Clearly spending money on feeding her face is going to have much more impact upon the world than sending that money to an Indian charity. That's her solution to the issues and political problems of the Indian continent which houses over a sixth of the world's population!

She "honors" Italy by pairing an Italian meal with a wine made from a grape originating in Croatia (Zinfandel)! I guess if she listen's to Pink Floyd's The Wall, it could probably take care of China, right? And so we'd have over a third of the world's population covered with just those two acts! She already wears a towel around her hair after a shower, so that has to have the Middle East covered, too, huh? A Popsicle now and then will take care of the Inuit. So we’re making some real progress now! Congratulations Holly. Despite her obvious wealth, Holly never does contribute anything to any charity or volunteer herself for anything that would help anyone but herself. I mean for goodness sakes, she could get books on the subject if she can't afford to go there or give to charities, or at least she could watch an educational show on TV, but now, her solution is a soap opera and really, that tells you everything you need to know about this shallow, unthinking woman.

This woman is so bizarrely bereft of any grasp of reality that she thinks nature - which has been described by others as 'red in tooth and claw' - is really much more like that depicted in a toddler's story book where all the animals get along and everyone is happy and contented. She believes there is no stress and that animals get what they need without asking. Honestly are there really people this stupid and if so how did they ever reach the age of 35? But then this is a woman who considers a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon to be "quality time".

Despite all her efforts towards fitness, when Holly decides to jog back from taking the kids to school, she can't handle it. Just how much training, exactly, has she done? Very little, it would seem. It's only five miles but it's sandy OMG! When she gets back home she complains that her legs are "less stable than a two-story Jell-O mold." What? her editor must have slept through this portion just like me. Someone needs to tell Holly (if it's supposed to be misspelled) or more likely Colston, that unless her legs were less stable than a Jell-O® mold which could tell only two tales, the word she was looking for has an e in it: 'storey'. She has the same problem with 'cut and dried' which she renders as 'cut and dry' which is close, but no cigar, even though that usage is indeed creeping into the language through people like Holly mangling the original term.

She goes on about how, in a storm, the branches of trees may thrash but the roots remain still. Clearly she wasn't in Austin a couple of months back when Onion Creek massively overflowed after torrential rain, and tore through a park wrenching up dozens of young Pecan trees. She clearly hasn’t thought anywhere near enough about Africa and its droughts - but hey, the dead roots remained in place, right? She hasn’t ever heard of a flood in Pakistan or forest fires in the US (but the roots stayed put even though the trees died, right?! She was clearly in a coma when the St Stephen's tsunami slaughtered a quarter million children, women, and men a few years back and tore up their world. Yes, sticking your head far enough into the sand that it deadens reality, and ignoring everything but the fluffy bunnies of life is the smartest way to go, and it's most definitely the lesson learned here!

On page 197 we get the most stupid question ever: is the glass half empty or is it half full? Well it depends on whether you're pouring something into it (in which case it’s half full) or whether you're drinking what you poured, in which case it’s half empty, dim wit! Duhh. But by all means, do go ahead and reduce people's psyches to dumb-ass metaphors if it makes you feel better about yourself.

BTW, there is no evidence that Einstein ever said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them" or its more rational variation: "Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them". This is a folk quote, but leave it to dumb-ass Holly to fail to actually comprehend even her own fake quote. She's trying to think of ways she can make an impact on a bigger scale than getting her face peeled, and she whines that she is the only one of her friends who recycles, and they bitch about each other in a bitchy way (because, let's face it, they're none of them nice women by Holly's own account), yet never once does Holly grasp the fact that right here is where she could make a difference: by persuading her friends to start recycling and asking them to persuade people they know in turn!

Instead of this, she resolves her global issues by deciding to be nice to a nasty-ass check girl. This is when idiot Holly has tun out of the house to get Gatorade for her sick kid who has stomach flu. Never mind that water is proven to work just fine for re-hydration, a fact which Holly ought to know from her exercising, let's give her stuff that by Holly's own admission has high fructose corn syrup in it! I guess Holly has no faith in those organic healthy foodstuffs after all. Way to go Holly. Now you have the entire globe single-handedly fixed, you can move on to the next clueless waste of time in your ridiculously shallow life. And if you say it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, bring me the candle and I'll show you where you can light it up - assuming that location isn't as shallow as Holly Goincrediblylightly is.

This novel, which started out really rather interestingly despite some immediate issues, went so slowly and steadily downhill that I reached a point where I had to ask myself why in hell I was reading it, without really understanding how I'd ever let it go so far in the first place. So kudos to Colston for deluding me so successfully, but no, this novel is really boring after about the three-quarter mark, and where it isn't boring it's just plain stupid. But at least the amusement factor helps alleviate the boredom. For example, like when she asks "What does the word 'goddess' mean to you?" - well my answer to that is obvious: anyone who is decidedly not Holly! lol!

As for the first three-quarters, there are enough issues there to make it a dodgy prospect at best. Yes, there were parts I found endearing and entertaining, but ultimately it was never enough for me because i kept on hoping that this would go somewhere and it never did. Holly wasn't anywhere near enough to occupy my mind and get me interested. She was never enough to make me remember her or even want to! If I met Holly at a party I would be making excuses to get away from her pretty much as soon as she opened her mouth. In the final analysis, I really don't care two organic figs about Holly or her life or her lifestyle because there's nothing going on in her life that's merit-worthy. Really, nothing. As I mentioned before, it's all Holly, all the time, and in the most self-obsessed, selfish, clueless way imaginable. This woman is so delusional, so ignorant of reality, and so blinded to life that this whole exercise turns out to be a really good commercial for avoiding the very thing Holly (and by extension, Colston) is selling here! This novel is WARTY!