Take us to a better Place Stories by Various Authors

Rating: WARTY!

I think this collection has cured me of ever wanting to read any more short story collections. It's also cured me of ever thinking maybe I should contribute a short story to a collection like this. I know authors see this as a chance to get their work out there, but if your story is toward the back of the collection and the earlier stories just bore the pants off people, then no one is going to continue reading through to your story!

I can say without fear of conniption that never was there a more misnamed collection than this one. Not one of these took me to a better place nor did it seem like anyone in the story had gone to such a place, although to be fair, maybe if I hadn't DNF'd most of them, they might have turned around, had I read to the end. The thing is though, that I just got through DNF-ing this collection and I honestly cannot remember even one of the stories I read. Admittedly I skimmed a few, but even the ones I actually read a substantial portion of, I can't recall. There was one I came close to liking and I can't even remember that one, it made so little impression on me, so I can't pretend this was a worthy read, not by a long shot.

All I can do is list the authors and maybe if you know any of them (I didn't) you might find something of interest here (I didn't!): Madeline Ashby, Hannah Lillith Assadi, Calvin Baker, Frank Bill, Selena Goulding , Yoon Ha Lee, Karen Lord, Mike McClelland, Achy Obejas, David A. Robertson, and Martha Wells. That's all folks! Moving on to something better.

Englishman in Blackpool by Jenny O'Brien

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"You're name" should have read 'your name'
"...still had the evening to look forward." Should have had a preposition ('to') on the end.

This is a very short story that overall I did not really enjoy. Hopper (that's what he goes by) is a butler to the Earl of Cosgrave, who has taken some time off to help an old friend with a ballroom dancing class, after which he intends to go fishing. Beverley is one of the women in the class, and she has a stereotypical obnoxious partner who quits, of course leaving her partner-less and so Hopper steps in and they're magical together. The problem with this story is that it was so predictable and so unimaginative, with everything falling so easily into place, no hiccups, and St George saving his maiden. It was pretty pathetic and I can't commend it at all. Even the title made little sense but was chosen not to describe the book but to categorize it as part of a series of such books all with boringly similar titles. Barf.

The Crown of Thorns by Ian CP Irvine

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

You know when a book has 'Book One' on the front cover that it's not really a story - it's merely a prologue and I don't do prologues as such. This is why I don't do series because, and with very few exceptions, they're inevitably tedious. This one - about cloning the fictional Jesus from the equally fictional crown of thorns - sounded like it might be interesting if it were done right, but the story never began.

Instead of unfolding a story, it rambled interminably, incessantly, indeterminately all over the place, going everywhere except where it was supposedly going. It began with a prologue! Then chapter one was also a prologue, and chapter two wasn't far off being one. That ought to have warned me off it right there, but foolishly, I pressed on for a little while. This is the problem with a series.

I gave up reading somewhere shortly into part two (the author seems to have confused parts with chapters and chapters with sections). I took to skimming thereafter, to see if the story ever actually got started at any point. It did not - at least not up to around the halfway point. The main character seemed far more focused on having sex with his girlfriend than ever he was in cloning anything. I cannot commend this based on my experience of it. I reviewed another Irvine novel back in March and it was equally lacking in entertainment value, so I'm not only done with this novel but with this author, too.

Ever After by Olivia Vieweg

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Strictly speaking we're not supposed to post reviews until 30 days before publication, but since this book has well over a hundred reviews up on that execrable monopolizing review site-killing Amazon-owned Goodreads venue already, I don't see that my modest one is going to make any difference.

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of zombie stories, particularly movies and TV shows, although the movie World War Z actually wasn't bad. That's about the only one I can say I liked though. Zombie stories make absolutely no sense, and even were I to give that a free pass (as I have been known to do with other genres from time to time), the ridiculous levels of violence inherent in these stories and the endless hordes of oncoming zombies are completely and utterly boring to me. There is no story there to be had. So why on Earth would I want to read a graphic novel about this very subject? Well I have a good answer to that: it wasn't about the zombies at all. I was willing to put up with the zombie story though, for the sake of enjoying a story about female friendship and bonding, and I was not at all disappointed.

The author is German (her last name is pronounced like vee-vague, with a very soft 'v', almost like an 'f') and she originally wrote this comic as part of her diploma at university (I want to go to a university where I can do a graphic novel and graduate! LOL!). Later it was expanded and changed a little bit and this is the English version. In it, Vivi is not your most capable survivor. She lives in one of the last two cities that have not been overrun. At one point early in the story, her incompetence causes her to run away and hide, and as it happens, she's hidden on the supply train, which she only fully realizes when it starts in motion, rolling along its tracks to the other city. There's no one onboard - so she believes, until she meets Eva - another stowaway.

The story really begins though when the train breaks down and their rescue team fails to materialize, throwing them upon their own skills, of which Vivi possesses few. Eva seems quite endowed with smarts and skills and the two, despite rough patches, start to bond and become loyal to one another over the course of the story. There was some zombie-killing action, of which I am not a fan at all, but it's par for the course, and in this book it's kept to a minimum, although it increases more as they journey.

In addition to the relationship between the two girls, I enjoyed the nuanced approach to zombie transformation, so even that wasn't as painful as it might have been. Overall, I really enjoyed the story. There's already a movie out about this and it's apparently being rendered into animated form (maybe?), and no doubt when Netflix gets their hands on it, I shall watch it. So why not see other zombie stories as bonding relationships? Well others that I've had any exposure to are almost unanimously ridiculous and pointless. The same story can typically be told without any zombies at all. In fact this one could have also, by having a plague (Coronavirus would be a starting point for example, but good luck getting Barnes and Noble to publish that one! LOL!), or some other apocalyptic catalyst. Zombies aren't required, but in this case they were tolerable. The real story though was Vivi and Eva and I commend this as a worthy read.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I made very little progress into this book before I gave it up as a bad job. The main female character is Catherine Ling, ridiculously recruited by the CIA at the age of 14, we're told. And no, this is not a YA novel believe it or not.

The story itself begins years along from that time, and Ling has a son who is, for reasons I never learned, under the protection of a friend of hers, Hu Chang. Threatened with 'it's either you or him who takes this mission' Ling elects to neglect her child and go herself to try to rescue a journalist from Tibet. Why this wasn't dealt with through diplomatic channels isn't mentioned in the part of the novel I managed to stomach. Why the CIA has no other agents who can do this is equally an unaddressed mystery.

I dropped it the minute this supposedly strong woman has her job "complicated" by meeting Richard Cameron. I began skimming, and these two complete strangers have unprotected sex early in the story. She's so dumb, she hadn't known people could do "that" - evidently some magical fingering technique he has that this evidently dumb broad never encountered before. or maybe there's some authorial wish-fulfilment going on here.

Later, I read, "...she had been on the defensive since the moment she had seen him and felt that first explosive bolt of sexual attraction," I knew exactly what kind of unfulfilling trashy and female-demeaning story this would be, and I was glad I was out of there. I can't commend dumb-assery like this. I'm done with this author, too.

Legion by William Peter Blatty

Rating: WARTY!

This was Blatty's attempt to get back some of his former glory after The Exorcist supernova had faded. I thought that original offering was a great novel and I really enjoyed it, but this one, which I read some time ago yet did not realize until today that I hadn't reviewed it, was a poor, poor sequel.

Often when a writer has a huge hit it's hard for them to get anywhere near that point again. We've seen it with runaway best-seller writers like JK Rowling after the Harry Potter marathon, and Suzanne Collins after The Hunger Games and its sequels. Inevitably they're drawn back to retread old tires because efforts to go in other directions are met with indifference. Typically retracing steps is a mistake and it fails.

The plot for this is very confused, resurrecting people who clearly died in the original novel and turning the demon into a limp and unoriginal serial killer, jumping from living body to body to leave trademark serial killer crimes scenes but with different fingerprints. The book was clearly very badly-written, very confused, and not worth the reading. A better take on this idea is the Denzel Washington movie Fallen which did not perform well at the box office but which I think far outstrips both this novel and the movie that was made from it. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read.

Gringo Love by Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan, William Flynn, Débora Santos

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Subtitled "Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil" this was written by William Flynn and illustrated by Débora Santos, and based on the research of Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan. Published by the University of Toronto Press, this was a look at the delicate politics of 'women of the night' in city of Natal in northeast Brazil, who interact with European tourists in interesting ways that lie all around the blurry line of outright prostitution.

The book was based on real people and interviews the researcher had done with them, and although it was a graphic novel it actually wasn't graphic in a sexual sense; it merely depicted the kind of lives these women led and their aims and dreams. Is it worth noting that this did not pass the Bechdel-Wallace test when the aim of the book was expressly to discuss sex tourism? It's hardly a surprise that it failed, but I have to say that it would have been nice to have learned more about what these women aimed to get out of these relationships. It was touched on but only, it seemed, in passing.

The story is supported by extensive notes and references and contained a glossary of the Brazilian terms used by people in this life. The author of the story visited twice, one in the mid-oughts, and then more recently about six years ago, and the changes were marked. She couldn't even find many of the women who she'd talked to originally since they'd moved on or moved away.

The relationship between the sex tourists and the local women was an intricate dance and not all women viewed it in the same way or pursued it with the same steps and rhythms. There is a constant beat though, and that is the desire and need to escape the poverty trap far too many of these women are born into. Selling sex, or more reservedly, entering into a mutually profitable relationship with the male visitors wherein the guys get sex with able and attractive women and the women receive money or gifts in return, is a way these women have of raising themselves up.

Some of them look toward marrying a visitor, others look to saving money and getting a college education, and changing their life that way. But constantly in the background was the desire of some locals - mostly the ones who live in the alto district as opposed to the girls, who live in the Ville ghettos - to stamp out the sex tourism. The problem is that the protestors seemed to pursue this not only hypocritically, but mindlessly. They had no plan as to how to help the impoverished women once their rewards from their own enterprising endeavors petered out. This is why these protests are ultimately doomed to fail in my opinion.

This was a fascinating study and a novel representation of the results, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, even while feeling depressed that once again, we're seeing economic disparity causing serious problems that are not being intelligently addressed. I commend this as a worthy read.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I simply could not get into this novel at all. I loved the title and the idea, and even the cover photograph, which was exquisite, but the actual text seemed so rambling I honestly could not follow what was going on.

It began perfectly fine and I was really getting into it as these two women, approaching middle age, were evidently conducting some sort of casual lesbian relationship even as one of them seemed to be desperately searching for a man to latch onto. The other seemed quite happy with the status quo, but evidently her friend was uncomfortable with living out the rest of her life like that, or at least felt she ought to have more, and was trying to talk her lover into finding a man herself.

From there it seemed to quickly explode into a score of different directions with characters popping up out of nowhere and I lost track of who was who and what was what. The writing style seemed like some sort of free-association, stream-of-conscious affair which completely lost me. I would have been happy to have read a whole novel about those two women and no one else, but they became quickly buried under the other characters, in whom I had zero interest, so I gave up reading it. I can't commend this based on what I read of it, even though the beginning was remarkable and quite captivating.

The Deep End by Julie Mulhern

Rating: WARTY!

This story was first person, a voice I typically detest, but even so I decided to give it a try. I ran into a major problem immediately and gave up on it at once, not wanting to tempt fate and read on in the faint hope it would improve. The story began with the main character strolling out to the backyard pool for a morning swim, and somehow she fails to notice a dead body in the water until she dives in and swims right into it? Was she blind? Did she keep her eyes closed until she dived into the water? It was, quite simply, bad writing and if I start out by reading that in the first few paragraphs I'm sure-as-hell not going to waste my time reading on under the delusion that it will get better. Certainly not in first person I'm not! I can't commend this one, nor do I believe I shall sample anything more by this writer.

Witch Hunt by Shirley Damsgaard

Rating: WARTY!

This is a 300 page novel in first person voice which is typically too much for me. This is why I ditched all my unread print books a while back, that were in first person. I guess I missed this one so I decided to give it a go and it didn't surprise me when it didn't work. It's also part of a series which doesn't help. It's one of those series where the author tries to get the one word incorporate din every title in the series. Usually it's a dumb-ass main character name. in this one, it was the word 'witch'. I'm not a fan of that peccadillo.

The problem that killed this for me though wasn't so much the first person, although that's typically hard to take. It was the idea that there's unremitting and unpunished bullying going on in school. I know there's some, but when it's conducted by girls, it tends to be a lot more subtle and devastating than the uncontrolled (and ridiculous) classroom version depicted here. I don't know where this author got her ideas from - bad YA stories I guess, but that was the end of reading this for me. . On top of that, what's the point in making your detective a witch if she refuses to employ witchcraft to solve the crime? Admittedly your story would be short-lived if it were only a matter of casting a spell or two, to solve the crime every time, but an inventive writer would find ways around this.

It wasn't just that predictable crap, though. The story was all over the place, and it kept meandering off into uninteresting diversions. I know you have to let your character grow, but if the growth pains are that bad, I'd rather have an undeveloped character and a decent story than this. I grew bored and irritated, and that classroom bullying thing was just the last straw. The bottom line is that it was just bad and lazy writing, and I can't commend this based on the small portion I managed to get through

Go On Girl by Hilary Grossman

Rating: WARTY!

I thought this might be interesting, but the main female character was so pathetic that I couldn't stand to read more than the first few chapters. It occurred to me that the title had a space too many, and should instead have been "Goon Girl"....

Sydney Clayton (and I can't for the life of me decide if that's supposed to hark back somehow to Sidney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities) is supposed to be a big and powerful executive in a corporation, but her character shows none of this, and she allows herself to be manipulated and used by the elitist women who live in the neighborhood as she tries to navigate her business life, her lackadaisical, cardboard-thin, and apparently useless husband, and her young child's schooling.

This book could have been a great story about how a caring and loving mother taught her daughter to be a strong and independent woman, but instead it takes the road most traveled and depicts her as allowing herself to be blackmailed into doing what these people want - otherwise her daughter will be punished with ostracism at school. Sydney was shamefully spineless, and completely betrayed her daughter. This was entirely out of character! How did a purportedly strong businesswoman get manipulated like this? It made no sense, was boring and poorly-written.

For example, I read at one point: "Last week, I was in the supermarket, and the woman in front of me at the deli counter had the same melody on her phone I used to." My first question immediately after reading that was "Used to...do what?" I had to read it twice more before it made sense and even than it was poorly written, and I'm not talking about ending a sentence with a preposition. I don't care about that. I'm talking about it being unclear and read one way it could be understood that this woman now owns the phone the speaker owned, or maybe should it have ended with 'too' instead of 'to'?! Oh no, I ended a sentence with 'to'! Seriously, it could have been written better and was emblematic of much of this book (at least the bit I read).

The clueless (as usual) blurb rambles, "As Sydney focuses on what is best for her daughter...." but she never does. How a female author can betray her gender like this, not only in how she depicts the mother, but in how she talks about the daughter (who really isn't allowed a voice), I can't understand. And the book assumes these children are mere robots, sent out into the world by their moms, and programmed to do whatever their moms want, like they have no independent thought or even minds at all. I can't commend this garbage.

The Genesis Code by John Case aka Jim Hougan, Carolyn Hougan

Rating: WARTY!

I guess you can call this a case study given the author's name, and it ended up in the john. Of course the name on the book isn't the author's real name. Normally I detest authors who, for want of a more circumspect term, outright lie about their identity, but I can see why these authors did it, because certainly, they wouldn't want this one on their record of publishing non-fiction books. This is a case of a professional trying to write fiction, and somehow feeling he or she has to lecture we poor readers about their professional business. No thanks. They remind me of Clive Cussler, the late unlamented author who essentially put himself into his novels, not even thinly-disguised.

These appear to be using the same tactic and so it's both the first and last book of theirs that I'll ever tried to read. I wasn't impressed. The book was all over the place and I found myself starting to skim after only a few pages asking, fruitlessly as it happened - or more accurately failed to happen - is anything actually going to happen?

It's one of those books that jumps around like a nervous and finicky flea, never quite knowing where to take a stand and get down to it, so we're all over the place with different people doing different things. One assumes this will all come together in the end, but I do not like this style of writing and quickly tired of it.

The other big problem is that of the author making dramatic claims about world-shocking revelations, and then moving right on to the next unrelated chapter without offering a word as to what this revelation is, when it's patently obvious from the blurb what's going on. Why be so ridiculously coy? It's just annoying. In the real world - which be warned this novel is patently not set, no secret like this would ever escape the attention of the press. It would be all over the place. The novel is over two decades old, so social media was not then what it is now, but certainly it would have been in social media too, even back them, such as it was back then.

The author's stand-in is named 'Joe Lassiter' in this novel. I can only assume that Joe is the middle name and the unmentioned first name is "Average." We learn that his sister and her son were killed and their home set on fire and when he learns of another such murder, he goes on to uncover a "truth that will shock him - and the world - to the very bone." Yeah, someone is trying to clone Jesus. What a bunch of horseshit!

For that to happen, there would have actually have to have been a Jesus to clone. There wasn't - not a son of god Jesus, anyway. Jesus was such a common name back then how would they even be sure they had the right one?! And what the hell difference would it have made? Is the author saying that this purported divine being can be recreated by cloning his physical body which was nothing more than the union of genetic material from his ordinary human parents? The whole idea is patently ridiculous from the outset.

The dramatic claims about this book, contained in the blurb are grotesquely overdone. This sort of a book always claims that the story is so shocking it won't be believed - well, that one I buy, because I don't believe the claim! The thing is that we've had these "shocking" claims out in public for years - for example, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, in Dan Brown's rip-off of Michael Meehan's, Richard Leigh's, and Henry Lincoln's 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail and none of that has made even the minutest impression on the church.

Why would it? Believers are those who believe not in the face of lacking evidence, but in spite of the overwhelmingly negative evidence, so nothing is going to shock them or change their mind; that's a given. Be wary of any book that makes any such claim. There's nothing new under the sun.

Also be wary of eye-disturbing book covers! Fortunately for authors, the last thing I judge a book by is the cover, because if I did, this particular one - with the glaring red background and baby-shit brown punched tape over it making the title and author's fake name almost impossible to read - would have failed while it still sat on the bookstore shelf. I can't imagine why any publisher would let a book out of its doors with a cover like this one. I guess the take home lesson here is that you should never have your book cover designed by Red Ruth Ross.

So no, this book was badly-written, and I never actually got into it far enough to see if the plot was even remotely reasonable which was why I'd decided to try reading it in the first place. So: fail! Can't commend.

Skinwalker by Faith Hunter

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb for one of the books in this series caught my attention, and even though I'm series-averse and will never write one myself, I was curious about this one, so I got the one I was interested in, plus an earlier one in the series to read as an intro. Please be informed that my curiosity didn't long survive my beginning reading of this trope-filled novel.

Jane Yellowrock looks like she's Asian on the cover, especially with that stereotype of a cue, but she's apparently American Indian. I just got through a short and sassy discussion of book covers with a long time email friend and it was her opinion that covers are all important. It's my opinion that they're shallow and misleading depictions of the content of the book created all-too-often by someone who appears to have no clue what the book is about, let alone actually read it themselves.

These covers are a case in point. I know that IRL, people do go by book covers, but I think it's stupid and shallow for anyone to judge a book by its cover. Quite obviously, it's the content that matters. I'd far rather read a good book with a shitty cover than a lousy one with an artwork for a cover (although I might buy a used copy of the artwork one for display if not to read!)

A major character in a novel I'm working on as I write this review is an American Indian, so I sure have no problem with reading about one, but to lead a reader to believe it's about an Asian main character from the cover illustration, and then have someone of different ethnicity actually be in the novel is a piss-off at best. This is my beef about misleading book covers in a nutshell.

Add to that a bunch of info-dumping in the book, some of which seems to me to stereotype the main character, and I'm going to lose interest pretty fast, I promise you. This is the same kind of problem American Dirt has from what I've read about it. Blurbs can be misleading too, but I don't think they're quite as misleading as the wrong cover no matter how many squees that cover gets at the 'unveiling' party! Seriously? I mean how freaking shallow and pompous can we get?

The next problem was the first person voice, which is unrealistic at best, and which I detest unless it's really done well. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it isn't. This book features Jane traveling to New Orleans. She's recovered from a devastating fight with vampires (so we're told) and is looking to get back into her business of bringing down the rogues, in this Trublood rip-off of a fantasy world where vampires and other paranormals are out and accepted at least in principle.

So this story's been done (to death) before, but I thought this author might bring something new based on the book blurbs. Unfortunately, those can be as misleading (or as dishonest, however you view it) as the cover can, and I felt misled by this one. I know the author typically doesn't write the blurb or illustrate the cover unless they self-publish - and perhaps not even then - but you'd think someone who's running a purportedly successful series would be able to police the appearance of her books a bit better. On the other hand, why offer discounted books if you're selling them handsomely already? Maybe the series is in trouble. I dunno.

Anyway, Yellowrock arrives in town and meets with the trope vampire monarch - in this case a queen. Before she even gets there some sleazy stalker jerk on a motorbike is already slavering and panting after Yellowrock like a dog in heat. While bugs (the spying kind, not the insect kind) on the premises of the house she's going to be staying in piss-off Yellowrock, this dick of a guy stalking her didn't bother her at all! This turned me off the whole book, so I ditched it about thirty pages in. It was too sickening to read.

I refuse to commend a book like this and I'm done with this author.

Luster by Raven Leilani

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
“...a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do enter it...” This sentence appears to be missing ‘to’.

Raven Leilani has to be one of those most charming author names I've ever encountered, but I have to say up front that I wasn't charmed by this novel. It started out well enough, but went downhill for me rather quickly.

Part of my problem with it was the disconnect between what the back-cover blurb says and where the novel actually went. I know that unless they self-publish, authors tend to have little input into the blurb and cover design, but to have a blurb promise me I'll see "a young black woman fall into art" and then read a significant portion of the story and have this woman, Edie, give only the most cursory attention to art was a real disappointment to me.

The real problem though, was that Edie didn't present as an artist to me. She had no eye for color or light, or for nature, people, or architecture - or at least if she did, none of that ever made it into her first person voice, which is yet another reason why first person is almost always the wrong choice for a novel. This story never gave even a hint about her artistic leanings or interests; yes, there were cursory mentions, but it was far too busily focusing on her social commentary which was not as amusing as the blurb-writer liked to pretend it was, and on her obsession with this guy she met online. From what I read, I remained unconvinced that she had any real interest in art because it took a very distant back seat. I didn't believe an artist would have the take on life that Edie did.

So for me, reading those first few chapters, the story wasn't about art at all. It was about a rather sordid sexual obsession, and while the blurb did suggest the sexual component of the story, it didn't hint that that would be all she wrote - so to speak! I mean Edie was literally obsessing over having sex with this guy she 'met' on line and she was doing that the whole time. It failed the Bechdel-Wallace test dismally, and this wasn't even two women talking! It was tedious to read after a short while, and it was a problem because I wasn't given any reason whatsoever as to why Edie became so obsessed with this guy. It didn't feel real to me because the reader wasn't offered anything to support this kind of intensity. If anything, it felt stalker-ish and dangerous, which is, I assume, the very opposite of what the author was intending, if the blurb is to be believed. But maybe it isn't.

Like I said, I didn't read all of this and things may have changed later in the story, bringing it more into conformance with what the blurb writer says is going on, but if that's the case, then there really needed to be more offered up front to render some sort of a reliable promise of a better future. I got nothing, and there are two solid reasons why I quit when I did.

The first, but by no means the most important reason was the severe let-down when a crucial point in the story was reached: the first encounter between Edie, the young black woman who tells this story, and the wife of the man with whom she is having an affair - of sorts. Right when that's about to open wide, the story comes to a screeching halt while we're dragged back over Edie's sexual history! What?!

I'm in no way a fan of flashbacks for this very reason, but this was one of the most irritating I've ever encountered and I had zero interest in her sexual history. I skipped that section completely, but once I finally got back to the wife versus the mistress part, it was a total let-down. Instead of something engaging: a fight, a tearful breakdown, an intelligent grown-up discussion, an unleash of female passion, something interesting and original happening, the story lost its way and meandered into a party. Of all things. I felt seriously let down, and worse than that, the events of this particular party made me serious doubt the main character's intelligence and humanity. That's never a good thing.

What happened immediately after that was worse though. The guy of her obsession drives Edie home. He's angry with her and he hits her and she takes it and almost literally begs for me. That's when I called 'Check please! I'm done here!'. I'm not about to read that. I mean that was bad enough, but let's consider this relationship overall, given the month that I read this in was black history month! I was torn between wondering if his violence was worse, or if his treatment of this young woman in general was worse, or if her mute acceptance of all this was worse.

This is a very one-sided affair wherein the guy gets everything he wants and Edie gets next-to-nothing, putting her into a very needy and subservient position. I was wondering, is this really a story that you'd really want to promote during black history month? A white guy effectively enslaving a young black woman? He makes all the rules; she whimpers and conforms? She effectively becomes a maid to this white privileged family where the guy is ruler and the women are his subjects? Maybe it's a story some people want to read, but not me. Maybe it changed later, but I'd already lost patience with it along with any interest in reading any more.

I can't commend this at all based on what I could manage to read of it. I felt cheated by the book description and even more cheated by the story itself. I lost interest, but worse, I lost faith in it. There was no artistry here - unless we were expected to accept the tortured without the artist.

Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by Marion Chesney Gibbons aka MC Beaton

Rating: WARTY!

I bought this book - which is part of a series about a British amateur detective named Agatha Raisin - based on my love of the British TV series derived from it. Normally I would not give a novel like this or a series like this the time of day and I was interested only because the TV show was so enjoyable. Sadly, the book isn't quite the same.

We expect this. You can't translate a book, no matter how loved it is, directly into a screen format without losing things and changing things, and even adding things, but the discrepancy between the delightfully lush grape of a TV detective and the sad Raisin of the book was quite startling. The Agatha of the TV show was, unfortunately, but predictably younger (by a decade) and much more pleasant. The Agatha of the novel is rather obnoxious at times. There's no reason at all why an actor of similar age could not have been hired, but TV and movies favor youth (or the appearance of it) over anything else, it seems.

I had what I call my 'robot reader' read this ebook to me. It's actually Apple's Voice Over technology, and it does a pretty decent job when you figure out how to use it wisely (the trick is never to turn it on until you are actually in the ebook, and to turn it off before you exit the ebook!), but this thing has no idea of a 'quiche' so it gets egg on its face! Naturally that word was used effusively, since someone died after eating one, but the robot reader pronounces it like it rhymes with swish, and like the word begins with 'kw'. It amused the hell out of me every time I heard it. We take our joys in life where we can, right? Otherwise it would be miserable and we'd probably all end-up being like the Agatha of the book instead of the Agatha of the TV series.

Anyways, Agatha has retired from her job running a PR firm in London, and moved to a small village named Carsley in the English Cotswolds region. Of course it's one of those tiny places where, ridiculously, the murder rate rivals Detroit or some major city. It's absurd, yes, and this is only one reason I'd never follow a series like this.

So the village has a quiche competition. Agatha cheats and buys a quiche at a store out of town and enters it as her own creation. She's miffed when she doesn't win and considers the contest rigged. She tells the organizer she doesn't want her quiche and requests they throw it away, but the organizer of the contest - the guy she doesn't like - takes it home and dies of poisoning after eating a piece. Naturally, she's a suspect and so gets dragged into the investigation.

The story kept going off at irrelevant tangents and was consequently boring, plus I didn't like Agatha at all. I gave up on it before I'd listened to very much and cannot commend it as a worthy read. I'm done with this series, and with this author.

1996 by Kirsty McManus

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This book was advertised in a daily book offer flyer I get, and it was free! The only problem was that the only outlet offering it was Amazon! I refuse to get even free books from Amazon anymore, so I emailed the author asking if there were other outlets, quite prepared to purchase it because the subject so intrigued me. I'm a sucker for a good time-travel novel! The author pointed me to a free copy for which I'm grateful, and we exchanged one or two emails, but that didn't affect my review of the book.

The premise of the novel is quirky, and this was what caught my attention. It's that this woman Anna Matthews, in her thirties and married, is a food blogger and she gets a trial dietary supplement from this business that she promotes. The literature with it says it 'rolls back the years' or something like that, so she tries it, and discovers that it's literally true: she ends up in her sixteen-year-old body in 1996. The effect lasts for 12 hours before she returns to the present in her regular mature body, and nothing she did on her trip back there seems to have affected her present, so she tries it a few more times.

I enjoyed this and read it quite avidly to begin with, but as the story went on, some issues arose. Anna is having some minor hiccups with her marriage, so on a whim, while her husband is off on a business trip, she decides to go back to see him as his 1996 self. He's apparently been a bit secretive about his past. He was eighteen back then and she finally tracks him down and goes to his house to meet him, but there's no answer when she knocks. Why she thought he'd be home on a weekday instead of in school is quietly glossed over. When she hears voices from the back yard, she walks back there to see if it's him, and she sees him sitting out in the sun with his then girlfriend, so she spies on him and she gets really jealous.

I don't want to give away spoilers, but it was necessary to tell you that much because the thing is that on her two previous trips she'd met this guy named Kurt and was warming to him. Given that, it felt really ingenuous of her to get jealous of husband several years before he ever met her, when she's already crushing like a 16-year-old on this guy Kurt, and she's actually a married woman! So now we have a triangle and she's behaving far more like she's sixteen than a mature married woman. This really bothered me because it took me out of suspension of disbelief.

I know this novel isn't aimed at a reader like me, but it all seemed off. It was made worse by this guy Kurt cropping-up improbably often. I know the author's likely plan was to get these two together, but he shows up with a disturbingly metronomic regularity. It felt more like he was stalking her than that these were happenstance encounters. It was too much too fast, and that spoiled the story for me. Anna's immature behavior didn't help. It was like she was already planning on breaking-up her marriage before she ever went back in time and Kurt just happened to be her manly savior. It was too YA for my taste.

On the other hand I have learned what a Queenslander is (it's a single-storey house with a wrap-around veranda), and what a City Cat is! I'd thought that was a bus, but it's a ferry. Also there really is a place called Shell Beach! I first heard that name in a movie called Dark City, but there's really a place called that in Brisbane. Probably lots of places called that, for that matter, but I'd never actually heard of a real place with that name until I read this novel. Since the author is Australian, she might give some thought to how non-Aussies will comprehend terms like 'Queenslander' and 'City Cat' and perhaps add a brief word or two by way of explanation.

So, there came a point where I had to put this down to read some other stuff that had a deadline attached to it, and so I did, but when it came time to resume reading it, I found I had could not raise sufficient interest to pursue it any further. It was the woman's rather juvenile behavior and Kurt's creepy stalking that turned me off, so I didn't pick it up again. Despite reading just over half of it, I really have no clue if my idea about Kurt actually took place or if she instead patched things up with her husband. If it was the former, then I have to say that she's far too shallow to be my kind of a character in a novel anyway, but frankly, by then I really didn't care enough to resume it. I wish the author all the best in her career, but based on what I read, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Dark Queen by Faith Hunter

Rating: WARTY!

If this has been Dairy Queen it would have had more appeal and more chills! This is one I got along with an earlier volume in the series because the blurb on this one interested me; then I discover it's in first person, the main character isn't Asian notwithstanding the book cover, and it's filled with trope. I made it about thirty pages and ditched it beofre I yawned myself to death. I can't commend uninventive, unoriginal, and unimaginative novels like this one, so I'm done with this series and with this author.

The Rhythm Section by Mark Burnell

Rating: WARTY!

This was a novel about a woman, named Stephanie, a college student who was supposed to travel with her family on a flight. They changed their flight to accommodate her, but she still wriggled out of going, and that plane crashed killing all onboard. Stephanie went into a downward spiral, and ended-up a prostitute in London, spending her meagre earnings on her drinking and drug habits.

One day she's visited by a low-level journalist named Procter, who tells her he believes the plane was bombed and he wants to talk to her about it, but she has him thrown out and beaten-up by the bouncer. After nearly killing a john later, she goes on the run from her pimp and ends up staying with Procter. Later, he's killed, but not before he's helped her straighten herself out. She decides to take up his quest to find justice for the victims of the downed plane.

I'd seen a preview of the movie and decided it looked good, and then had the opportunity to listen to the audiobook of the novel, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try despite it being the first book in a series. Initially, it was okay, but it was a bit plodding. I stayed with it because this would mark the first time I'd been to see the movie of a book right in the middle of reading the book the move was taken from. Usually the one comes before or after the other, so I was curious as to how it would affect my perception of the book.

In the end it didn't make much difference. The movie was okay, but a bit flat and uninspiring, so I went back to the book, which seemed pretty much the same: taking a long time to get anywhere. I decided to give it one more day of listening, but on the drive home that same afternoon, the book went into this endless, tedious, boring exposition that seemed to go on forever. For literally miles, as it happened, because I was driving, and I decided the hell with this and ditched it. I was about halfway through it, but that was too far: it was not getting it done for me.

Stephanie was improbable as a protagonist, because she was never really believable as someone who could come back from the depth she had sunk to, and actually do the job she'd set herself. Experience if fact proved that she couldn't; she was screwing-up time after time. I think even the author himself realized what a poor job he'd done of the book because he also wrote the screenplay and made a whole bunch of changes to it for no obvious reason other than to fix problems with the novel, but he ended-up making it worse! The movie was a lot more insipid than it ought to have been, with these endless maudlin flashbacks to Stephanie's memories of her family which contributed nothing to moving the story forward. On the contrary: they tripped it up frequently.

Plus Ryan Reynolds's wife Blake Lively did not live up to her name. She wasn't lively at all, not even after she'd recovered her health and was actively pursuing her targets. It just didn't work well. There was little humor, and some attempts at humor failed dismally. For example when she ran her vehicle off the road during a training exercise and Boyd, the trainer, was lecturing her. She pulled the parking brake on his transport and set it in reverse so that it ran backwards off the road into some trees. The thing is that both vehicles were four-wheel drive and so wouldn't have been stuck as they purportedly were.

But this is a review of the book, not the movie, and the book took far too long to deliver 'rewards' that were in the end too miserly to make up for the extended overture which preceded them. I can't commend it, and so it becomes another series, and another author, I shall not be revisiting.

The Last Single Girl by Bria Quinlan

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those 'Desperately Seeking Validation' kind of stories, where a woman has a deadline before which she absolutely must find a guy, or her life will be in ruins. If done right, it can be entertaining. The Norwegians demonstrated this in a Christmas TV series called Hjem til jul (Home for Christmas - English dubbed on Netflix) which was hilarious and enigmatic at the end, but in the USA land of the trope, there are far too many of these stories that make women look desperate, or stupid, or pathetic, or all three. While I am quite sure there are women (and men) like that, I don't subscribed to the cliché that a woman must have a man (or vice versa, or any mix of the idea).

It can be fun to read one if it's well done, but those are few and far between. This one started out in the fast lane on the freeway to Tropeville; then it seemed to be turning itself around a bit and rather than ditch it, I became interested. Unfortunately, it all-too-quickly took a U-Turn and continued right back to Tropeville, so I did ditch it. I am not a fan of reading novels about stupid women or patently ridiculous situations.

Sarah was purportedly hitting the point in life where all her friends were becoming involved with guys. What? Every one of them had been dedicatedly single to this point and she'd never head to deal with this before? Stupid and unrealistic. The trigger here though was that their New Year's Eve 'girls night out' was being sabotaged because the stereotypical queen bee of their group had decided everyone should bring their man on New Year's Eve, and hang those who didn't have one. Rather than ditch the bitch and find a group of female friends who were more akin to her own situation, or simply go alone and maybe meet a guy there, Sarah buys into this incarceration of a relationship, and in order to recruit a guy, she signs up to this online dating service. This is where Le Stupide began to kick in big time.

She sets up five guys to meet, and makes two dates with the first two at the same location and within a couple of hours of each other. Rather than be honest and tell the first guy that she only has an hour or so because she's meeting someone else, she lets their conversation run on and on until the second guy shows up. He happens to be best friends with the first guy and both of them ditch Sarah because they have some idiot pact never to fight over a girl. What fight? There was no fight here! Neither of them had any claim, much less 'ownership' of the woman they had both literally just met. Yet off they go! Morons.

The guy who Sarah meets in the café, the owner, starts commiserating with her about her fate. It's obvious at this point that he's going to be the one she ends up with, but Sarah is too stupid, no matter how long this goes on, to see that he's interested in her and instead keeps pursuing these rugged guys she thinks will match her. Guy number three is a single dad who forgot to mention this in his profile and shows up with three badly-behaving kids because his babysitter canceled on him. Guy number four is married and his wife shows up and blames Sarah for her own stupidity in sticking with this jerk of a guy. Actually I think that guy was the one who wrote the book blurb, because he sure can't spell 'frenemy'!

So, in short, no. Just no! This was badly-written and larded with trope and cliché, and it makes women look like losers and idiots. Why a female writer would do this kind of thing to her own gender, I do not know, but it's more insuting to woman than is porn, and it's nowhere near good enough for a 2020 vision.

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Rating: WARTY!

After a prison break in a small town, during which masses of convicts get loose and ransack the place, literally raping and pillaging, two years pass and not a single one of the dirty dozen escape planners has been caught. Abusing grant money aimed at rebuilding the town, local police detective Leah Hawkins, with the sanction of several town leaders. is commissioned to go after those men, not to bring them in, but to execute them. Therein lies the problem. Since those idiots at Kirkus called this book 'superior', I should have avoided it like the plague, but I didn't know their opinion at the time, so I gave it the old escapee try, and it fell short. There was too much luck and too many improbable in it. The more I read, the more it took my suspension of disbelieve and mangled it.

I'd been hoping for better, since the main character seemed like she might be interesting. She wasn't. Worse, she was boring. The biggest problem she had was that there was no problem that she had. Everything went her way all the time and never was she in any real danger or any kind of jeopardy. Despite the apparent dismal failure of the FBI to get a handle on even a single one of these dozen escapees in two years, Leah was able to track the first one down in no time at all - living in his mom's old house. Seriously? The FBI didn't watch the place? The same thing happened with escapees 2 and 3. They were found hanging out with friends or relatives who were known to the police. No one checked these places? The FBI didn't watch them?

One of these friends operated a fake ID factory, and Leah was lucky enough to discover a trash bin that apparently had not been emptied in two years and therefore had new names with old faces on driver's licenses and so on, leading Leah to a California location where she was able to get three of them in one fell swoop. Seriously? An illegal operation not once emptied-out incriminating trash in two years? Bullshit. Never did this executor Leah call out to these guys and offer them a chance to surrender. Never did she alert other cops or the FBI to their location si they could be brought to justice. Never once was she drawn-on first, and forced to shoot to defend herself. Time after time, she simply and cold-bloodedly murdered them, despite there being nothing in her history to suggest she would be that kind of person, nor was there any real triggering event which set her on the road to becoming a serial killer. And in the end she paid no price for her own crimes.

It was too much to take seriously. I can't commend this book at all.