Black Annis: Demon Hunter by Aubrey Law

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series (Revenge of the Witch) and I'm not typically a series fan, but this short novel did have some interesting aspects, and I am a fan of going off the beaten track, so this appealed to me. That said, I have mixed feelings about whether I'll pursue it beyond this story, which is in effect (as are all first volumes) just a prologue. I'm not a fan of prologues either, and I typically skip them!

The story is a bit of a rip-off of an English legend so why it's set in the US is a mystery. Apparently no novel is worth reading unless it's US-based! I don't subscribe to that, but the premise for this one intrigued me. Rather than go out snatching babies from their homes and eating them as the legendary Black Annis does, this Black Annis is a demon-destroyer. She doesn't do this out of any sort of altruism however, but through a desire for vengeance on her tormentors and captors after having been kept in hell for four hundred years.

How she survived compos mentis during that time is rather skipped over, but Annis's survival trick in the carnal world is to take over a new body whenever she's done with the old one. She does this by finding someone who is evil and simply inhabiting their body, thereby putting an end to their evil reign. There's no clear word on what happens to the old bodies which Annis discards. How this behavior got her into hell is also rather danced around. After her break from hell though, and through a misunderstanding, she inhabits the wrong woman (that is, an innocent rather than a guilty one) and she manages to escape from a sex-slavery den with that woman's lover. Their new relationship isn't carnal; it's fraught with danger since demons do not stop hunting her.

This was one thing which made me hesitant about reading another volume. Do I really want to read another book about violent slaughtering of disgusting demons? One volume is usually more than enough of that sort of thing, and the problem with series is that by their very nature they're derivative, repetitive, unimaginative, and therefore boring, if not sickening. My jury is still out on whether or when "I'll be back!" Part of the problem with series and one which was exhibited here quite strongly, is that the first volume is all-too-often mistakenly used as the workhorse in building the world in which the series will take place.

I got the feeling that this was like the opening stage of a chess game, with key pieces being moved into place. The problem as that I was hoping for an actual game, and I never really got one. The story never got past the opening gambit. This is a problem. I wish more writers of series would actually give you a novel to read and enjoy, and they would worry about filling out their world in subsequent volume rather than try cramming their entire set-up into the first volume so all you get is world building instead of a satisfying story. This story was okay, but it wasn't as rewarding as it could have been had the author put more into it. It wasn't really a whole story, so that was a downer for me.

The writing in general was good. There was only one real writing issue I can recall, and it was where Annis and her friend were breaking into a vampire residence which had armed human guards, and one of the guards had instructed another guard to kill Annis and her friend. In the end, it was the guard who got shot, and I read, "Hey, aren't they gonna know you just killed that guard?" Well yeah! The guard had been instructed to shoot them , so the other guard was expecting to hear two shots, not one! Why they would think the shot would give anything away was a mystery. The question that was asked ought to have been "Hey, aren't they expecting two shots?" So, it could have been better thought-through, but it wasn't a disaster.

Be warned that the descriptions are quite graphic and the language isn't restrained at all. That's what gave the book authenticity for me, because it if had gone with a PG-13 take, it would have sucked, and sounded so hollow and pathetic. But there are only so many descriptions of vile demons, and only so many ways of killing them that I can stand to read before tedium sets in. This is why it was hard to see where this book would go from here and still manage to keep things fresh and entertaining - and interesting. There was nothing in this set-up which made me desperate to read on and find out what happened to character X or situation Y, although I did like the general tone of the story.

So overall, I consider this a worthy read, but I'm skeptical about future installments.

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Rating: WARTY!

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

I really need to quit reading stories where the description has it that this novel is "Story X meets Story Y," where X and Y are well-known novels or movies. Rather than represent the best of the referenced stories they're supposed to mash-up, such books as this always seem to exemplify the worst of them.

Unfortunately this one is in first person which is worst person for the most part. I do not like first person stories because they're far too "me me me." If you get a good author and a decent main character narrating, it can work, but this main character, Delphine, was not a nice person and she was completely unlikeable. It became ever harder to listen to her whiny voice and endless self-absorption which is only one reason why I DNF'd this.

The fact that Delphine smoked didn't help. I have an aversion to characters who smoke, and it seems like a bad idea to have your character be a ballet dancer and smoke. That's not to say that no ballet dancer ever smoked (or had any other bad habits), but I think an author needs to ask questions like: "what are we promoting here?" and "do I really want my readers to detest her?" I'm not sure the author considered those questions in imbuing Delphine with the traits she has, while simultaneously trying to have it that she was who she was.

Quite honestly, I don't really like to watch ballet performances, but I do appreciate the work the dancers do and the sacrifices they make, so maybe that's why I like a good ballet story, or documentary of which I have read and seen many. This one isn't such a story.

On a point of order (or maybe en pointe of order!) let's take that term - dancers - for example. Despite the novel's title, the term 'ballerina' is traditionally one that is reserved, in ballet, for exceptional performers, and the title étoile for a real star. None of the three main characters in this novel, Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux (who may as well not be in it for all she contributes) is a ballerina much less an étoile. They are danseuses, which admittedly would not make for such an appealing title.

These three dancers are at the Paris Opera Ballet School, although for all that counts in the story, they could be ballet dancers anywhere, really. This never really felt like a French novel, and I was kicked out of suspension of disbelief more than once, for example when at one point the author tells us "There's no real word for creepy in French" (try glauque).

This kind of thing wasn't helped by the body-shaming employed at least at one place (I DNF'd this novel so I can't speak for all of it) when I read, "A ballerina is a perfect woman. Thin. Beautiful. Invisibly strong." I agree with the third item, but thin and beautiful are abusive and were completely unnecessary. Again, this story is in first person, so this was Delphine making this observation, but it spoke badly of her as a person and turned me off her even more than I already was. Yes, there are thin ballet dancers, but how they get that way is a whole other story that's barely touched on here, where all danseuses seem to be cookie-cutter clones of one another with no room for personality or individuality.

There was also a confused section which read "This one looked like it was from the early 19'60s:" where it seems like the author had written '60's and then added the century and forgot to remove the apostrophe. A minute problem, but still one more problem. Maybe that will be fixed in the final copy.

On top of all of this were the endless flashbacks in the story. I'm not a fan of flashbacks, especially not extensive ones, and even more especially not when these diversions didn't really have divisions from the current story - certainly not by chapter - nor were they truly separate as entities since the flashbacks were imbued with the present day perspective, and the present day sometimes had Delphine recalling significant things from the past. It became, at times, hard to remember where we were in time, and this only served to dissolve the story into an ungodly and tiresome mess.

It's one thing to tease a mystery from the past, but when it's teased out over scores of muddled pages of sometimes tedious text, that's just irritating to a reader. I made it through fifty percent of this and we were no nearer at all to getting even an inkling of what this big faux pas was. That's when I gave up, during yet another uninformative story-halting flashback, and I said the hell with it! At that point, I was so frustrated with the story that I really didn't care anymore what happened or who it happened to, or how much it hurt. I'm done with this! It was that bad.

If this novel had been more concise, had focused more on ballet and less on trivial drama, and had told a better story instead of mindlessly meandering and holding up a tease that was probably only going to be a disappointing letdown anyway, I would have been onboard with it, but as it is, I can't commend it as a worthy read. It was time to jeté-son it and move allongé to something more divertissement.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Rating: WARTY!

I DNF'd this about halfway through, annoyed by how cavalierly this author treats a young woman she is supposed to be extolling. She does just as bad a job at telling Mary's story in the written word as the movie Ammonite does with motion picture. Ammonite is rooted in this same novel, but tells a completely different story. Neither story is true. The first problem with the novel is first person, worsened by having two different first person voices. First person is a bad choice for the most part; it makes for very limited, very selfish writing, and having two such voices made it twice as bad. Since this was an audio book, I should however commend the readers, Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons who did a decent job with this fiction.

Mary Anning lived less than fifty years, between the turn and the middle of the nineteenth century. It was her older brother Joe who discovered the ichthyosaurus skull, not Mary, but she did uncover the rest of that fossil skeleton, and later she herself discovered a plesiosaur skeleton, along with a host of other fossils, including a pterosaur at places in and around Lyme Regis and Charmouth.

Contrary to the the book description's claim that Mary had "a talent for finding fossils" which makes it seem like she had some sort of magical ability, she had trained herself (under her father and older brother's guidance) from childhood to find these things out of sheer interest and also of desperation to support her family, especially after her father died prematurely. She was good at what she did because she was dedicated and yes, remarkable. Let's not demean her ability by suggesting it involved no work or effort.

William Buckland, a geology professor at the University of Oxford is completely misrepresented in this novel. Many people are. Elizabeth Philpot is likewise misrepresented, but not in that she was friends with Mary Anning - she was. They did collect fossils togther, but Elizabeth's two sisters also collected and were not quite the dilletantes which this work suggests.

The author is so obsessed with setting up a fake competition and antagonism between Philpot and Anning that she makes the same mistake that the Ammonite movie makers did: imbuing charcters with motives and behaviors that were simpy not merited from the facts. Charlotte Murchison, for example was more on par with Elizabeth Philpot's age, not with Mary's, who was barely more than a child (although a necessarily mature one) when they first met. In their desperation to validate this poor girl with a man - or a woman - both story creators neglect to find the real Anning. Perhaps she was a woman who was simply asexual, or more likely, so in need of supporting herself and her family that she didn't even dream of a relationship - hetero or otherwise. She was already and had long been married to her important work. Why deny a woman this?

Another dishonest portrayal in this work of fiction falls with all the delicacy of a landslide. While Mary did indeed survive a lightning strike as a baby, she did not get buried under a landslide like this novel dishonestly depicts. It was her dog which died in the landslide, and this author robs Mary of that grief. Ironically, landslides were Mary's stock in trade for it was the winter weather and the subsequent rockslides on the cliff faces that literally unearthed fossils for Mary's keenly-trained eyes to find.

The author appears to be sadly limited by her lack of imagination in how to approach this and even more constrainted by her refusal to tell the truth, and to fictionalize virtually the whole thing like Mary Anning's reality simply wasn't good enough for the almighty Tracy Chevalier. There is barely a handful of actual events from Mary's depicted life here, and even those are overly-dramatized or otherwise distorted. The rest appears to be the result of a rather despearate and overactive imagination. Instead of venerating a real and heroic historical person who was indeed a remarkable woman, the author cheapens Mary Anning's legacy appallingly. I cannot commend such a hack job and I intend to boycot the movie.

Post-Human Omnibus Edition by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a collection of four books in what the author calls the 'Post Human Series' which runs to over a thousand pages in the print edition. I gave up after reading only a hundred or so. It was boring and ponderous, with thoroughly unappealing characters.

It started out bad, with a doctor, married to a woman with whom he has a somewhat awkward relationship, getting fitted with some sort of nanotechnology that enables him to hold his breath underwater for considerably longer than is practical for the rest of us. Why he got this is not explained, and how it works is glossed over, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the doctor who had given him this treatment started hitting on him! Talk about unprofessional. It just felt wrong, and I hoped this was not the tone for the whole novel.

The good news is that it wasn't. The bad news is that it got worse, but in a different way. This nano'd doctor gets put onto a special forces mission to go investigate a Chinese AI that has been nuked. Why people go there rather than robots I do not know. I mean aren't robots the ultimate post human? LOL! And are they not much better situated to explore a radioactive area than people? And if the technology is at such a level that they have nanos that can aid breathing, why not nanos that can fight radioactivity? Wouldn't that have been a wiser upgrade?! I got the impression that this novel had not really been thought through.

There are robots and drones in existence now. They've been around for a while, so why do so many sci-fi writers pretend they don't exist in the future? It's a genuine mystery to me. And yeah, I get that they're trying to include the human connection, but to me it just says that they're poor writers if they can't include robots and still have a human connection. Hell if even those wooden assholes at Disney can do it with Wall-E, and if by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples can do it with their movie script for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, your average sci-fi writer ought to be able to manage it.

There's actually a robot that goes with them, but it seems that was for no other purpose other than to go rogue and wipe out the entire team except of course for this one doctor, who is apparently put into hibernation because of his injuries and during the ensuing years, his wife marries this guy's rival. How that works given that he's still alive and they both know it is rather glossed over, too, yet this guy never once thinks what a callous bitch she was. Instead, he pines for her and wants to kill the other guy.

Consequently they put him back into hibernation and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with him being treated like that. He wakes up later right before the facility he's in is attacked by the powers that be, because it's deemed to be an illegal technology center. This guy, having had all these enhancements against his express consent, is now shipped-off to a parallel universe where he can fly like superman. I'm sorry, but I gave up right there because this was too stupid for words, and so boring as to be sleep-inducing. I cannot commend this trash which is wrong in so many ways, and so poorly-written.

The Witch Hunter by Nicole R Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

It occurs to me that every novel is really a two-in-one. There's the novel the title suggests to a potential reader, and there's the actual content of the novel which the reader ends up wading through or swimming in as the case may be. When I see a novel titled "The Witch Hunter" I expect it to be about witches. I don't automatically think, 'Oh, this novel is about vampires'. But believe it or not, this one is. Hence my distaste for it. Vampire novels suck, and not in a nice way.

I blame myself entirely for this. The novel has the word 'saga' on the front cover, which is a huge no-no to me, but nevertheless there are doubtlessly some older books I have in my collection that may sport this logo, or even a newer book or two that may have bypassed my admittedly lax screening process and made it into the collection without my properly registering it. This is one of those books, quite evidently. And it predictably sucks.

The first problem is that we have vampires who are decades old, yet who do not remotely behave like they've lived that many years. I have yet to encounter a vampire who does. Vampire stories are completely unrealistic to begin with, but even setting that aside and buying into this world for the sake of a good story doesn't actually get you a good story. Who knew? All it gets you is one that's entirely, ridiculously, unrealistic even within its own framework. This, in a nut sack, is my problem with vampire stories.

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The second problem is the vampire tropes. No one is willing to try anything new so all vampire stories, including this one, end up sounding the same. Boring. This is my other problem with this particular one: it was boring from the off, and I quit after only five percent. I confess it's all my fault for even starting to read a novel with the word 'saga' on the cover, but based on my small sampling, this is warty.

Cold Press by David Bradwell

Rating: WARTY!

This backlog of reviews is defintiely more nagative than positive, I'm sorry to say! I've been away from Britain for so long now that I like to read a good Brit novel from time to time, to reconnect in a relaxing way that doesn't involve airports and rental cars, but this really wasn't the escape I'd been hoping for. I think any novel that has to announce itself on the cover as "A Gripping British Mystery Thriller" has some sort of an identity crisis. It's also listed as "Anna Burgin book one" which means a series, and so I'm usually not interested, but I started reading anyway and I got what I deserved.

For reasons unknown, it's set in London in 1993. London I can understand. 1993 not so much. I'm not a fan of novels set in the past, but I let that slide. Investigative journalist Clare Woodbrook is working on an exposé of police corruption, specifically of Detective Chief Inspector Graham March. Now you know from this that when Clare goes missing it's March who's going to be looking for her, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Predictable.

Clare of course took off one afternoon for a secret meeting and despite Danny being her investigative assistant, she tells him nothing about this 'risky venture' she's embarking on, Clare's a moron. Her behavior is predictable in a story like this, and realistically, it makes no sense. Danny has a 'flat mate' - someone who shares an apartment (called a flat in Britain) with him - who is a " feisty fashion photographer" named Anna Burgin - the one of the series title. She doesn't appear until chapter five and when she does, there's an abrupt shift to first person - a voice I typically detest and a shift in voice I abhor.

That was when I quit reading because I was already sick of this dumb book by that point and first person voice just made it ten times worse. It's like shifting down from third gear to first. Obviously there's no reason to ever do that, and it turned this novel into a grind for me. I can't commend this based on what I read of it. I sure wasn't about to read some 300 pages, let alone a whole series of it.

Never Say Spy by Diane Henders

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a series. It’s one of those annoying series where every single title has a keyword in it. Often the keyword is the improbable name of the main character, but in this case it’s 'spy'. Tedious. What's the fear here - that readers are so shallow or so stupid, or both, that they can't recognize this book is by the same author as that book? Personally, I don't write for people that stupid. Even my children's books aren't aimed at adults who are so lacking in basic mental wherewithal. You don't have to be particularly smart or highly literate to read my books, but you do have to have a functional cortex.

The plot is that "middle-aged Aydan Kelly" is mistaken for a spy and then evidently becomes one since this series runs to another dozen novels at least. It's one of those wishful thinking deals, especially when the main character is pretty much (give or take a few) the same age as the author. But note that age: the main character is 46. There's nothing wrong with that until something happens in the first chapter which I shall shortly get to.

I actually applaud the desire for an author to promote an older woman as a main character in something that's not a pure romance story or one of those tedious multi-generational stories, or the even more tedious 'old friends reunion' stories where a tragic or dangerous secret is unleashed! The problem is that this is a series starter and a first person novel, which sets it up to fail in my long and bitter experience with these things, because a series is essentially the same story told over and over again with a few tweaks. I know it's beloved by authors, because they can lazily recycle the same characters and plots, and by publishers who can vacuum up the profits from their hopefully addicted 'users', but first person is worst person for me, and I have a problem with series unless they're really well done.

Case in point: the story begins with Aydan waking up from some sort of unconscious state to find herself with a paramedic standing over her. Yet her first person voice description is perfectly fluent and natural with no memory gaps or confusion. This is why first person truly sucks as a descriptive voice for a novel. It’s completely unrealistic and nauseatingly self-centered. I began skipping sections of this from almost the first page because of the tedious predictability, although kudos to the author for having a doctor introduce himself with "I'm Doctor Ross" rather than the absurd, "My name is Doctor Roth." No, dipshit, your name is Roth. Your title is Doctor. No, I don't cut slack for crappy writing, especially when I'm already annoyed by the first person voice. Recently I went through my unread print book collection and summarily tossed out everything that was in first person even though I hadn't read it because I was so profoundly sick of this voice!

The book description isn't typically written by the author, but it's often written, it would seem, by some moron who hasn't even read the novel. That has to be why this one claims that Aydan is a bad-ass, yet she's still wearing her wedding ring despite her husband having gone two years before. That doesn't translate to 'bad-ass' to me. Where I quit reading this was in the first chapter when - seeing a guy who is described insultingly as 'beefcake' come out of her trunk and into the car, bearing a gun - Aydan slams on the brakes and dives out of the car, which has already begun moving again, and rolls away as the car continues on downhill. No. Just no. This woman is 46, remember? She's not an athlete. She's a bookkeeper. This is not to say that no bookkeeper is fit, but this one 'flung' herself out of the car as it was 'picking up speed'? Was she on some of that speed I wonder? It was far too improbable. No. A bad ass would have disarmed the guy and demanded an explanation from him. This woman is not a badass. She's an idiot.

The stupid book description also has it that this woman has a penchant for profanity, but a search of the book, out of curiosity, revealed no use of any four-letter words other than 'shit'. So profanity is a lie. Maybe the text claimed she used profanity such as where it read, 'after a few moments of heartfelt profanity", but there isn't actually any, other than that one word which is used many times. So again, book description misleading. Which I resent. I gave up on this because it’s not up to my standards for a good read, and I will not commend it based on my introduction to it. I'm done with this author.

Shades of Treason by Sandy Williams

Rating: WARTY!

The most memorable thing in this novel was the short sentence, “You burn, I burn, Ash.” Ash is the abbreviated last name of the main female character. I don't think the author realized there was unintended humor in writing that. Or maybe she did. But it seemed emblematic of this novel: one I had begun to like, but which by fifty percent of the way through had devolved into such a dumb-ass romance that I couldn't stand to read it anymore.

Thoughtless phrases like the one mentioned above littered this novel, so even as I started to like the main character and started to get into the story, these still brought me up with a short sharp stop every now and then. At one point, I read, "The second grabbed her arm, the arm connected to her dislocated shoulder." If it’s dislocated, it’s not connected, and vice-versa. I know what she's trying to say, but there are much better ways of saying it that evidently went unexplored there.

Another laughable line was: "She kept navigation on manual, took the controls, and banked away from the Obsidian." Spacecraft don't bank. Aircraft bank because they have to. Spacecraft don’t. Again, thoughtless writing. Another was a Star-Trek-ism: "She was as still as a Caruthian deer." On Star Trek (I don't even watch it any more, but unfortunately the memory refuses to fade) they were always talking about 'planet of origin-Item' as an indivisible pair. It was laughable. Same here. Why a Caruthian deer? Why not just a deer? Do Caruthian deer turn to stone when they become still - à la a weeping angels from Doctor Who? I doubt it. Just 'a deer' would have been fine. You don't need to specify the planet it came from because such a reference is both pretentious and meaningless. And poor writing. One last one: "You’re anomaly is unresponsive, Commander." She doesn't mean 'you are anomaly'; she means 'your anomaly'. Again, inattentive writing. As writers, we’ve all been there, and one of these once in a while is forgivable, but so many of them were too many.

In terms of the story itself, the anomaly is Lieutenant Ramie Ashdyn, or Ash for short. Nowhere in the 50% I read is an anomaly actually explained. It references a certain type of person, but how or why they're considered anomalies I cannot tell you because the author couldn't tell me. This genetic condition (or whatever it's supposed to be) appears to render them into a super soldier or spy or whatever is it they choose to do. Why does this happen? I don't know.

So anyway, Ashdyn is an anomaly and of course even more anomalous than others because of her attitude. I enjoyed this to begin with because it made her badass - that is until fifty percent into this story, when the romantic bullshit between her and her commanding officer became far too big a part of the story and entirely inappropriate for three major reasons. The first of these was that he was her commanding officer - her superior, her authority figure, and therefore this was entirely wrong. The second is worse, believe it or not. This superior officer - who she referred to as 'Rip' - were given unnatural mental control over their subordinates through the use of some sort of compulsion brainwashing, which meant these subordinates were unable to refuse a special type of command the officer could issue. The command could be anything, but when issued in the right way, they had no choice but to obey it. In short, they were slaves. Again, having sex with someone under that kind of control is entirely inappropriate.

The third reason was simply ridiculous, and I guess I should have paid more attention to the 'Shades of' portion of the title here. While it's a gray area, I do take full responsibility for my lack of focus here. Ashdyn has been off these special meds she takes and so is extraordinarily weakened (because she's an anomaly). On top of that, she'd been tortured for an hour, including having too-tight manacles on her limbs, and having at least one finger deliberately broken as well as having some device that causes extreme pain, but not damage, applied to her head several times. She'd been in a fight - both physical and using weapons - had stolen a space transport and crash-landed on the nearby planet, hiked in her increasingly weakening state through a forest, and then been forced to roll down the side of a canyon in order to escape being shot. In other words, she wasn't beaten, but she was battered and bruised, cut and damaged, with lord knows how many broken ribs and pulled muscles, and at the end of her string.

After all of this, and while washing off in a river - during which of course she has to get naked in order to get 'properly clean', as does her finely-chiseled and muscular superior officer - she's entertaining sexual thoughts about him - all her injuries and pain completely forgotten. This is the woman whose fiancé betrayed her, yet she has zero thoughts about that guy: not a sliver of a longing, or a regret or anything, and yet now she's suddenly lusting after this rugged commander for whom she's had zero feelings until he all-but beats up on her while she's manacled. I understand that later she has sex with him. But thankfully, I didn't read that far. I'd like to invite the author to abuse herself to the same extent she dictates that her female character gets abused and then see how sexual she feels after it. My guess is that her answer will be 'not bloody much'.

I can see a guy writing bullshit like this, but a female author? I don't get it at all. It’s entirely inappropriate and all it achieves is to turn what was shaping up to be a fine and strong female character into the wilting violet star of a cheesy Harlequin southern romance. It’s barf-worthy. This novel is warty to the max and I don't see where it can possibly go that's intelligent after this. Wherever that turns out to be, I don't want to go there with it. Half of this was too much by half.

A Christmas Cruise Murder by Dawn Brookes

Rating: WARTY!

Read by Alex Lee, this audiobook interested me because I published a cruise ship murder mystery myself some months ago and I was curious to know what another author would do with one. This one with a Christmas theme sounded like it might be fun, but I was wrong! My bad! I could not stand this novel and I ran from it after about five chapters. There were two problems. One was the reading voice of Alex Lee which I did not like at all, but even had the voice been magic in my ears, I still would have given up on this because of the writing style.

This is the first book in a series and I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of series as a general rule, but the first problem here for me is the absurdity of the premise - that a female police constable (later a detective constable and presumably later a sergeant and so on) goes on seven cruises and on every one there is a murder! I'm sorry but no. This is just as stupid as the woman who retreats in disarray to her ancestral home, opens a cupcake shop in this tiny village, and then finds it's the murder capital of the world. No! By far the most common crime on cruise ships is sexual assault, and even that is rare. The truth is that there are 25 times fewer crimes on a cruise ship than in your typcial city - at least as far as an American survey indicated. Maybe Britain is just the opposite....

So this Brit police officer, Rachel is looking forward to this cruise to the Canary Islands with her new fiancé. Her old fiancé is long gone, but evidently makes an appearance in a later book. I guess Rachel's life is just improbably brimming with coincidences. Her plans are scuppered when her new fiancé is called away to Italy to solve a hotel crime. I guess the Carabinieri are completely incompetent.

Another improbable coincidence is that, on the bus journey to the dock at Southampton to get on board, Rachel ends up not only speaking with the murder victim (the ship's Maître D) before he's murdered, but also gets her hands on his wallet which he conveniently leaves behind him on the bus, and which, unless I missed it (I listened to this while driving so my attention wasn't always focused on the story), Rachel never turns in and the Maître D never misses!

Another annoyance was the obsession the author seems to have with people's hair. We always get a hair description no matter how irrelevant it is. To me, unless the person's papeparance is critical to furthering the story it really doesn't matter what they look like and a brief sketch is plenty for me. To go into too much detail or worse, to do a Stephen King and deliver a not-so-potted history of the person's life is an annoyance because it brings the story to a screeching halt for no reason at all. I do not like that kind of writing.

The book description itself tells us what's wrong with this: "Rachel can't resist snooping once she suspects an element of foul play" Snooping. That's the operative word, including breaking into a crime scene with no authorization whatsoever. If the cruise people had asked for Rachel's help, that's one thing, but it's not her jurisdiction. It's the jurisdiction of the Hampshire Constabulary, since the murder took place while the ship was docked and is, as far as I could tell, discovered before the ship has even left British territorial waters.

I thought this might be different from your typical 'cozy mystery', which I avoid like SARS-CoV-2, but no! Even though the main character is a police officer, it turns out that she's still an interfering person who withholds evidence and breaks the law in her selfish and crazed pursuit of a murderer. In fact, one could argue here that so many murders take place around her that she's somehow a trigger for them, and in light of this, ought to be banned from cruise ships altogether. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Rating: WARTY!

This was another waste of money from Chirp with whom I've had some success in garnering audiobooks for my collection. Read less than satisfactorily by Graham Halstead, the book is ostensibly an autiobiographical novel. I'm not sure if that's supposed to reference something Biblical - with the author's name being a twice told 'rock' set in stormy waters - and I really don't care anymore. This is the second novel by this author that I've tried to read and I didn't like the previous one (The Shelter Cycle) either! That novel also contained a creepy character. That was two years ago and unfortunately I'd forgotten I'd disliked his previous effort so much, otherwise I could have saved my money in not buying this one!

The story was set in a wooded area, with cabins, bordering Lake Michigan, but despite that, to me it was boring as hell with the author rambling endlessly into descriptive writing much as he rambled through the woods, but without moving the story forward in inch. He seems obsessed with the word 'shadow', or shadows', or 'shadowy' and after a handful of chapters I gave up on it because I lost all interest in what had sounded, potentially, like an interesting story, but which became an author's obsession with his own love of his own voice. None of the writing interested me in either the characters or the surroundings. It did give me an idea for a story so it was not a total loss, but whether or when that might get written is unclear at this point!

The author tells a story of his stay at the cabins and his other obsession, which was a young widow by the provocative name of Mrs Abel. I immediately suspected her of having murdered her husband (note the name, 'Abel' - another Biblical reference?!), but I lost interest in pursuing the story for the purpose of discovering what actually was going on. Frankly, the way this was written, the narrator (the author if this was indeed autobiographical) comes off as a creep and a stalker. I cannot commend this at all based on what I heard of it.

Belle Manor Haunting by Cheryl Bradshaw

Rating: WARTY!

I made it only 50% through this because it just wasn't going anywhere and I grew tired of the flat characters, the bizarre changes in genre and the tedious story-telling. I kept hoping it would take off, but it never did and in the end I resented spending so much of my time on this when I could have been doing other things.

The main character is Addison - she's married to a guy named Luke Flynn and apparently has taken his last name, yet she's referred to frequently as 'Lockhart' rather than 'Flynn' which is weird, except it sort of makes sense given how short shrift her husband is shown here. He's hardly in it, contributes nothing when he is, and seems more like scenery than a character, as does Addison's child for that matter. I don't get the feeling that Addison is actually a married woman and a mother - not from reading the story. It's like we're told this of her, but nowhere is it really shown in the story-telling.

Addison supposedly has had this power to see and interact with the spirits of the deceased since childhood, but now she's a mature woman and she seems like she's only just beginning to deal with it, and is constantly surprised when it happens, which made little sense to me. What has she been doing all these years? Why hasn't she pursued it and learned more? Doesn't she feel bad for all the people she could have helped and yet failed to do so because she's completely incurious about her world? The author makes her look like a shallow and self-centered idiot.

Worse even than this though, was the fact that there was nothing mentioned in the book description about witchcraft, wizardry, or shapeshifting, yet at one point Addison, completely out of nowhere, transforms into an owl and gets into a house to visit this woman who lives there, and then accidentally changes back to herself - sans any clothes. This made zero sense to me because there had been not a whisper about any other powers until this point.

I understand that there have been three previous novels in this series - something I did not know to begin with. Though it offered a somewhat cryptic 'An Addison Lockhart Ghost Mystery' on the cover, there was nothing to indicate where this was in the series. Maybe there were such powers mentioned in earlier books, but there was nothing to indicate it here. The series has four books (as of this volume) and all of them have the same tedious title format: (insert pretentious name here) Manor Haunting. Yawn. I think it's bad manners to have so many haunted manors.

But seriously? Addison is presented very much as an amateur just dipping her toes into the supernatural world, yet she chants a few ridiculous rhyming words and suddenly she's an owl? I've never respected the sort of magic or witchcraft that has a rhyme that makes magic happen any more than I respected the Harry Potter nonsense that one or two words in Latin made magic happen. The short-sightedness in writers who take these simplistic approaches is disturbing, because it destroys their world.

I mean, if you have to use Latin to make magic happen, what does that mean? That magic began with the Roman empire? There was none before then, and no one else outside that world had magic or could do it because they'd never heard of Latin? Or that English rhymes make magic happen so no one who doesn't speak English can be a magician - and there was no magic before English was spoken? I'm sorry, but it's shallow, unimaginative bullshit, and not even fit for middle-grade stories let alone mature ones. Writers need to do better than that.

Addison showed how dumb she was in other ways too. For example, she demonstrates at one point that she can pull this young child who died in a car accident into her presence just by calling her name, yet the real mystery she's trying to solve involves a different girl whose name she also knows. What she doesn't know is the name of the guy who murdered her. So why not call that girl's name out and pull her into the sight and simply ask her who murdered her? Apparently Addison is far too stupid to think of that. This is why these witch detective stories are non-starters for me. If you have magic, you can solve any crime, period. Either that or your magic is garbage and not worth having if you can't simply whip-up a spell to identify the culprit. If you can do so, of course, then there's no mystery so you're beaten either way.

This leads to the same sorts of ridiculous and arbitrary excuses that bad writers make in time travel stories and movies: you can't go back and undo something that went wrong because there are "rules" that prevent you! LOL! They had a time-turner in Harry Potter for example, yet no one ever thought of going back to ambush Voldemort right before his reign of terror began? Another time-travel joke is that you can't let yourself be seen by yourself, yet in the same movie, Harry does indeed see himself and nothing bad happens. Another is that you can't go back over your own timeline because it will mess things up. Why? It's absurd. The same thing applies here in this story although there are no explicit rules laid down - just absurdities caused by poor and lazy writing and with very little forethought employed. I can't commend this shoddy work.

The Ladies Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a story I normally wouldn't read. The fact that the book description contains the tedious and worn-out phrase 'star-crossed lovers' is nauseating. Just as bad, the cover of a novel once again does not reflect the characters who actually appear in the story - it even has the hair color wrong. Did the photographer not care? Did the author not notice? Or was some random stock cover selected without a second thought because no one really cared? Fortunately the last thing I do is judge a book by its cover.

Anyway, this story is of two women. The first is a wannabe astronmer named Lucy Muchelney, a lesbian at a time (1816) when modern readers believe that such proclivities were, if not exactly banned, denied and frowned upon. I think that's nonsense. No one back then cared enough about women to worry over what they were doing when alone together! Too many people believe that Queen Victoria said lesbianism never happened. Victoria said nothing of the sort and she had nothing to do with the religiously-obsessed British law banning homsexuality (between men) in 1885 - the penalty for which was to be locked-up with a bunch of men. Go figure. The fact is that Victoria was far from Victorian. She loved getting it on with her hubby, and lesbianism probably never crossed her mind.

In the story, Lucy's father has died and she's looking for an occupation. Her overly-protective brother is a nuisance, and her dearest love Priscilla has opted for respectable marriage, in which there is no room for dalliances with her female interest. Distraught and looking for escape, Lucy wangles her way into the Countess of Moth's patronage to engage herself in translating a French author's respected and voluminous treatise on Astronomy. She has the experience from working regularly with her father, himself a well-regarded astronomer, and her skill at math - and she speaks French well. The countess takes a chance on her, and as Lucy works on this project, and has daily encounters with Lady Moth, an attraction grows between them.

The novel is set in a very fictional milieu. Superficially it's regency England, but none of the people or societies mentioned in the novel really existed - to my knowledge. Some people who did exist and who ought to have merited a mention, do not appear. Newton seems to be the only historical person of any note mentioned for example. A less well-known but also noted scientist who was a woman, Caroline Herschel, goes unheralded. Although her star burned brightest before Lucy was born, you would think someone as erudite and up on the sciences as Lucy is portrayed, would have heard of her.

I guess the author didn't want to deal with all that, or risk maligning someone for no good reason, and this was fine with me in general, but for a novel that's trying to represent women, this seemed like a curious omissiol. I know the novel is ficiton, and generally I do not care if it's somewhat historically-inaccurate unless there are glaring errors. I detected none of those, but the lack of a shout-out for someone as accomplished as Ms Herschel seemed cruel.

I loved this book: the writing, the story, the whole idea of a woman scientist back then, and I loved how science and art were integrated, so I breezed through it - that is until the last few chapters, where apparently the author decided she had to toss a wrench - or in this case a spanner, since this is Britain after all! Or if I might make a play on words and deliver a little spoiler, a wench - into the works. To me this part was poorly-written. The only feeling of problematic writing I'd had prior to this was that at times the novel seemed to drag a little when it ought to have been striding forward, but that was a minor thing for me. Life did flow at a slower pace back then anyway!

This artificial crisis though was very badly-done and for a couple of chapters I was going to turn my view around and not rate this as a worthy read, but the author picked-up her frayed edges and stitched them into a decent seam before the end, so I decided not to cuff her. Yes, I made a pun. So sew me.... I can't let this go though without making a mention of this nonsensical hiccup to their relationship. It felt compeltely fake and so artificial that it seemed like a joke.

I don't know if it was the author's idea to add a 'ruffled feathers' bit, or if the publisher had demanded she toss in a problem so their life together wouldn't be quite so smooth, but for me there was no need for it. If she or the publisher honestly thought there was such a need, it ought to have been much better done: something more organic and not fake like this was. It needed to be tied to their homosexuality, not to some poorly-conceived misunderstanding that for me made the book seem like a poor Harlequin romance.

For me, the way it was done here made the two women look like shallow idiots who had no history together, and it spoiled that part of the story since it blew up from nowhere. It suggested that neither woman had any invesment in the other and was ready to ignore everything that had passed between them prior to this point. It made, as I said, no sense.

But the writing improved after that, and for me it turned the story around quite handsomely, so overall I feel like I can commend this as a worthy read.

The Forgotten Engineer by TS Paul

Rating: WARTY!

My first mistake with this book was not realizing initially that it had the word 'chronicles' in the book description. I have a policy never to read any such books along with any which have the word 'saga' or 'cycle' in a similar vein. Since this is the first book in the Athena Lee Chronicles, the smart move would have been to have skipped it. My bad! The fact that ten sequels appeared to this opener in 2016 alone ought to be informative. But this was a story I picked up to read some time ago, so what the hell.

I started reading it and made it a ways through surprisingly, but it's a very short book - a novella so the author or publisher claims, but it's too short for a novella. I'm not even sure it's a novelette. And there's a hardback version fo it??! So the fact that I made it three-quarters of the way through is not quite the feat it may seem. Unsurprisngly, it failed to hold my interest. This is almost inevitable in a series because the first book is a prologue, and I don't do prologues either. They're tedious and pointless. I think there's been only one time I've ever had to go back and read a prologue in a novel - and that wasn't because I wanted to!

The premise was initially entertaining: that a female engineer, of which there are far too few, is stranded a long way from home and has to 'engineer' her way back was appealing to me, but the poor writing drove the appeal out of it for me. There were multiple problems with the book, the first of which was that it's in first person, the most self-obsessed and tedious voice there is. It was this which largely turned me off the story. It was not believable given the things which happened to her in the first few pages, including a head injury. The second is that it has problems with the plot, the text, and the story, including the guy who shows up early and who is described literally, as 'beefcake'.

Normally a writer who uses initials for a first name is a female, but in this case, the 'beefcake' suggests a male writer and it is. No one uses 'beefcake' any more, expecially not an alien female. So this story is really not believable, and it made me want to avoid the actual series, not read on. The fact that it's billed as a space opera is another turn off for me. The fact that it talks about a 'cabal' trying to somehow take over 'the galaxy' is a serious issue. Clearly the author has no clue how big a galaxy is or how ridiculous and pointless is the notion that one can be owned or controlled. Sorry, but no. I can't commend it based on my experience.

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Rating: WARTY!

Written in the baker's dozen years that came at the end of the fifteenth century, Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's unfinished epic the has long outlived him. Unfinished (it's rumored to have been planned as several tales each form some thirty travelers - but it ended up with only about a third of that before he died), it is widely viewed as his greatest work. If this is the greatest, I fele sorry for the rest of his output, because to me this was boring and tedious nonsense.

The tales are as follows. I made it only to The Miller's tale, and then I skipped to the last one which was the most tedious of all, before giving up on this!

• The Knight's Tale - a chivalric romance ripped off from Giovanni Boccaccio.
• The Miller's Tale - the rape of the Miller's wife.
• The Reeve's Tale - the continued rape of the Miller's wife.
• The Cook's Tale - cooking up another story.
• The Man of Law's Tale - a rip-off of John Gower's Tale of Constance which is anti-Islam propaganda.
• The Wife of Bath's Tale - Another tale of rape.
• The Friar's Tale - More advantage taken of women.
• The Summoner's Tale - a gross tale.
• The Clerk's Tale - The evil bastard Marquis of Saluzzo employs appalling and unforgivable cruelty to his wife.
• The Merchant's Tale - Another tale insisting that women are fundamentally evil.
• The Squire's Tale - a rambling, meaningless story.
• The Franklin's Tale - a woman is once more a possession.
• The Physician's Tale - a rip-off of a story by the Roman historian Livy wherein a girl is a possession again.
• The Pardoner's Tale - age old tale of three men and death.
• The Shipman's Tale - deceitful woman.
• The Prioress's Tale - a racist story about 'Jewes'.
• Sir Thopas' Tale - a story of a man's designs upon a woman.
• The Tale of Melibee - an insane debate on what should be the retribution for two men who broke in and badly beat his wife and daughter.
• The Monk's Tale - a collection of tragic stroies about historical figures. Yawn.
• The Nun's Priest's Tale - more rambling.
• The Second Nun's Tale - rambling about faith.
• The Canon's Yeoman's Tale - whining.
• The Manciple's Tale - untrustorthy women - again.
• The Parson's Tale - painful penitence.

Based on what little I could stand to listen to, I can't commend this as a worthy read at all. It's warty. It's one of the, if not the most disgusting, puerile and ridiculous collections I've ever encoutnered. It's a disgrace and not worh a minute of my time, much less what time I did spend on it.

Lightwave Clocker by AM Scott

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
“None of his questions did anything bur raise more questions” - 'but raise'

This is one of those dumb-ass sci-fi slash fantasy novels where every other character has an apostrophe in their name. Well it's not quite that bad, but near enough! That was the first problem with it. The second was that it moved too slowly, and the third that Saree, the main character, immediately fell for the ship's captain (cliché much?) who was the usual trope chiseled bad boy. Barf.

That was enough to turn me off this. I sure as hell have no intention of reading a series where the main character weakly fan-girls the chiseled dude ad nauseam. It's such an overdone trope I'm surprised his name wasn't Jack. Jack Hoff. That and the annoying computer "Hal" who insisted on using Saree's name every. Single. Time. It. Spoke. To. Her. That's how annoying it was. In a way I could understand her using its name so the computer knew she was addressing it rather than simply talking to herself, but it really didn't need to use hers when responding. Yawn.

Saree is a clocker. Somehow - it's not made clear how, at least not in the portion I read - she has an ability that a secretive alien race has to keep exact time. This race is responsible for maintaining the 'fold clocks' which allow everyone to sync to the same time when 'folding' or warp traveling. Why that's important isn't made clear, or if it is, I missed it. She maintains some of the clocks on behalf of this race with which she grew up (again no idea how or why). This makes her somehow a savior to trillions, but also a target for kidnappers, although why anyone woudl want to disrupt what she does is again unclear.

So not too-well thought out and far too vague for me. The most interesting character was Loreli, but she gets only a walk on part here and there. Given how vague and slow-moving this story was, and how pathetic the main character was, I can't commend this, I guess it was slow because it's a series and the author and publisher want to drag it out so they can keep suckers hooked for as long as possible, but it doesn't work on me and is one of the several reasons why I'm not much of a fan of series.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Rating: WARTY!

My evidently ill-fated quest to read some of the classics continues! For the life of me I cannot see how this won a Pulitzer Prize. Set in the late nineteenth century, the novel was published in 1920, and was about an era during which the author grew up, so at least it has an authenticity which modern historical novels of this era cannot pretend to. That said, the main characters were two of the most stupid people I've read about, so for me, while the novel wasn't exactly awful, it ended-up being thoroughly unsatisfying.

The idiots are Newland Archer and Countess Elena Olenska, who used to be one of the locals - a Mingott, who married a Polish count and then realized it was a mistake. Evidently having learned nothing from that, she screws up any hope of a love with Newland because she's an idiot, I guess, aka a hopeless romantic. Had the novel been about her and she not rendered quite so idiotically, the story might have been worth reading.

Newland, meanwhile is a lawyer, so it's rather nice to see him get done over! He's engaged to May Welland, and it seems to be a perfect match, but obviously it isn't that way from his perspective because he wants out of it! Failing to find the courage to withdraw, he spends his life in smoldering resentment it when he could so easily have called it off. May even accepted the possibility that he might and encouraged him to do so if he could not bear to marry her, but he refused. Moron. The manipulative May then decides she will spend the rest of the novel denying him any opportunity to renege on his choice and she succeeds admirably, so despite how little she appears in the novel she's also an interesting character.

Character names are important to me and I choose the names of my own main characters with some thought. I have no idea how Wharton chose her character names, but 'new land' for a guy who is too chicken-shit or stupid to explore the terra nova of an unconventional woman is a joke, although it does pair with May's name, 'well land' quite comfortably, I suppose. May Safeland would have been a better name! Archer is certainly a major fail for someone who is so comprehensively unable to make himself the target of Cupid's aim. I don't know what Olenski means in Polish, but in Bulgarian it means reindeer! Maybe instead of 'Age of Innocence' the novel ought to have been titled "Reindeer Games?!

So Newland leads his boring life, has children with May and gets old, until May dies. Instead of pursuing the countess at that point, when he was free to do so, he deliberately walks away from her without even offering her a choice in the matter, thereby proving his love was hollow, or he's a complete imbecile. Either one made this book a severe disappointment. I can't commend this particular novel as a worthy read, but I would consider reading other material by this author.

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Rating: WARTY!

In which my sorry attempt to embrace the classics continues rather unsuccessfully.

This was published in 1851 and was based in small part on a real house of seven gables where lived Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll. The story supposedly has some supernatural and witchery elements to it, but I never made it that far. The novel has its moments and offers some sweet turns of phrase here and there (or should I say hither and thither?), but for the most part it was tediously rambling and just when I thought it might get interesting, when a new broom in the form of the main character's younger cousin showed up, it almost immediately went back to rambling on and on, and it bored the pants off me. I never did find out what happened to those pants.

A somewhat old maid, Hepzibah Pyncheon lives in the house and decides to open a little store in one part of the building, but she really has no idea how to go about it. Her cousin Phoebe shows up unexpectedly from out of town, and starts turning things around in the store while falling for another cousin named Clifford. The rather sleazy Judge Pyncheon sticks his nose in where it's unwanted, and that's about it for the first portion of the book. It wasn't holding my attention at all, and so based on what I read I cannot commend it.

Red Tooth by Brian Rathbone

Rating: WARTY!

This is a short story that I didn't like. It was too ridiculous for my taste.

Bob Hanks is a traditionalist, who hates to get rid of a piece of technology if it works and does the job he needs it to do. That much I can get with, but Bob overdoes it - fixing up his antique Bluetooth device with duct tape rather than get a new one. He's had it for so long that it's been replaced by 'greentooth'. I'm not sure the author quite gets what Bluetooth stands for, but maybe he does and doesn't care. Bob's wife has a greentooth and thinks her husband is crazy for not upgrading. She informs him as she leaves the house that morning, that they need to go shopping.

To pre-empt his wife and show her he's not as out of touch as she thinks he is, he resolves to go buy himself some stuff as soon as she's gone, and for inexplicable reasons, he heads for the pawn shop where he's on really good terms with the owner. But the owner isn't there. Instead some other guy is behind the counter and he destroys Bob's Bluetooth and insists he try the latest - redtooth, which bites into Bob's ear and uses his blood to power itself. He insists that it be removed at once, but is informed that's impossible since it's an explosive device that will take off his head if he tries to remove it.

For me that's where I would have ditched this if it were not a short story, but by this point I decided I could finish it without wasting too much time. That was a mistake because it was all downhill into crazy town from there on out. I lost track of who was who and what was what, and the story made no sense, not even within its own idiotic parameters. I thought it was dumb and beyond ridiculous and I rate it warty!

Orphan Black by Malka Older

Rating: WARTY!

I loved the TV series, and was sorry to see it end, but it did end, and in a good place. That's why, while I did hope for something interesting or exciting, or preferably both, from this short story - a prologue to an intended series no doubt - I think this was a mistake. It's the mistake commonly made in writing a series. Once the story had been told, where was there to go, but downhill? Where was there to go, but to retell it with a few scrappy changes?

That's exactly what happened here, In this brief story which was essentially a prologue and therefore offered nothing to bite into, there was nothing but tedium. It's just a new clone showing up - named Vivi. It was obvious from the off that this was who this woman was, so there was no sense of surprise, and what was she supposed to do? What could she contribute? The answer was 27 pages of nothing, so I can't commend this at all and certainly I have no intention of wasting any more of my time on this.

Her Perfect Life by Rebecca Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

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

I made it about a third of the way through this book before I gave up on it. The story is about a wealthy author who apparently commits suicide on a beach right as her latest novel is hitting the public eye. It's also about her sister who lives a rather more impoverished life, apparently receiving no assistance from her rich sister, and who gets an unexpected call from her distraught brother-in-law. I immediately suspected that guy rather than suicide, but since I didn't finish this novel, I have no idea if I'm right.

Eileen flies to her sister's home, and that's where I gave up on it. The story did nothing to move me at all. In fact it felt like a depressing and dreary read, but two things really turned me off it. The first was the screeching halt to which the story was brought to by flashbacks. I cannot stand flashbacks. I can't think of a better way to annoy your reader than interrupt what had begun as an interesting story to explore tedious family history. When I read a story I want to get on with the story. I do not want to be constantly and irritatingly interrupted by the author forcing me to go back in time, giving me whiplash by suddenly - in Chapter three, for example, forcing me back two years ago. Tell the story now for goodness sake!

Neither did it help by the tennis-play chapters - now we're with Eileen, Now we're with Simon. No, it's back to Eileen. Wait a sec! Now Simon has it. Slap! Look left. Slap! Look right! Sorry, but no. No. NO! I was initially attracted and intrigued by the idea of Eileen reading Clare's latest novel and finding clues in the writing as to what happened, but he author seemed defiantly intent upon putting me off that story altogether by screwing around instead of getting on with it. The more I read, the less I felt that the payoff would be worth the work of reading this, and work it was.

One of the most obnoxious parts of the book was that I once again had to read a female author describing a woman and putting beauty first in the list, like no woman has any higher calling or more important trait than being beautiful. I have seen this time and time again in reading books by female authors and I find it sickening that they cannot value their fellow women - not even fictional ones - for anything apart from beauty first.

I read, at only 6% in, "Clare Collins was beautiful...." Yes, it went on to describe other qualities, but beauty was always foremost. 28% in: "...beautiful, talented, and simply awe-inspiring sister...." Yep. Beauty first. Again. How beastly. 37% in "...her beautiful face...." 40% in: "...her beautiful surface...." 41% in: "Clare was beautiful...." Oh wait! at 51% in we get a change! Clare is "...vivacious and..." on no! "Vivacious and beautiful...." There it goes again. 61%: "...beautiful and talented...." It was tediously repetitive.

This is tiresome, obnoxious, and awful writing. People who write about women like this are a part of the problem and I cannot commend a book that persistently devalues women to a skin depth and little more. The book description has it that this is "a page-turning debut" but for me it was a stomach-turning one, and a cover-closing one so I could move on to the next read on my list which hopefully will feature characters who are not valued only for skin which is 'bright and clear' which is what the name Clare means. I can't commend this based on the layout of the book, the demeaning of a female character, and the content of the third of it that I managed to stomach.