The Woman In the Mirror by Cathryn Grant

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

I'm not sure I agree with the blurb's premise that "Everyone knows someone who deserves to die." I personally don't, although I would argue that there are asses which need kicking from time to time! I won't hold it against the author, because unless they self-publish, authors have little to do with the blurb or the cover. That's why on my blog I talk very little about covers, and I don't even show them any more in the reviews. It's the plot and the story-telling that's the only important part of a book. Covers are window-dressing at best, and honestly irrelevant unless you're not really a serious reader.

While vigilante "justice" is clearly wrong-headed in reality, it does make for some interesting stories, which is why the last sentence of the blurb intrigued me: "Alexandra Mallory isn't like other women - she gets rid of people who make the world a dangerous place." I was far less curious to know exactly how she dealt with her dangerous people than in how she determined who they were and which ones deserved dispatching. The problem I had was that this novel seemed far more interested in diverting into endless, tedious flashbacks and info-dumping histories than ever it was in propelling the story forward. It lost my interest short-order, and I gave up on this without finishing it, so keep that in mind with regard to this review.

That wasn't the only problem. I shall lightly step-over the fact that this title (girl/woman in mirror) is way over-used, and move on to the voice I most detest in story-telling: first person. Countless authors seem obsessively-compulsively addicted to it even when it harms their story. One of the many major problems with 1PoV is that it severely limits the ability to tell a good story, and this author admits this after the very first chapter by abruptly vaulting from first to third, which would be impressive were this a baseball game; not so much in literature, though. The story bounces back and forth between perspectives, but the second chapter is from the guy's perspective, and for some reason the author deems him unworthy of 1PoV! He merits only third place. Why, I don't know, but it seemed genderist at best. I mention that particular aspect because the guy has a decidedly warped perspective on the worth and valuation of women, and telling it in third person made it even worse than if it had been delivered in first.

His first take on Alexandra, the protagonist, is all about her "beauty" and physical qualities. Clearly if you've just encountered someone, the only knowledge you have of them is how they appear, but Jared's super power is quite evidently sex-ray vision: he can see only skin deep and immediately objectifies Alex without a second thought. I find it obnoxious that so many authors, especially female ones, are so addicted to this approach to describing their female characters. I mean, you can say a guy found a woman attractive without belaboring physical attributes to excess, and risking making other women feel like crap if they don't measure-up, just as you can describe a male character without making guys feel inadequate. Frankly, I wanted to ditch this novel right there, and never pick it up again, it was so shallow, but this was at about 2% in, and I felt compelled, against my better judgment, to press on at least a little further. It wasn't a charmed plan, as I discovered when it became bogged-down in flashbacks.

Alex is thrown together with professional liar Noreen, and "studly" Jared (see? That's how it's done! LOL!), all three living under one roof when Noreen sublets her rather precarious cliff-top house to them. It seemed pretty obvious where this was going, and it was all downhill from the top of the cliff. This was the beginning of yet another series, and I am rarely a fan of series. They tend to be repetitive, lazy, derivative, and unimaginative. I can't get on board with this one, which was far too wordy for my taste when the words conveyed so little and did nothing to move the story along. I wish the author all the best with her series, but I cannot recommend this based on what I read of it, which was more than I honestly wanted to.

The Girl from the Sea by Shalini Boland

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"Prising my fingers off the edge of the boat" should be "prying"!

This was an advance review copy from Net Galley for which I thank the publisher.

Mia comes to consciousness lying literally in the littoral on the south coast of England, cold, wet with saltwater, and with a woman and a dog peering at her. Soon there are police and an ambulance, and Mia is in hospital. She remembers nothing about herself, not even her name. She doesn't recognize herself in the mirror, nor does she recognize her boyfriend when he comes to pick her up. Later she doesn't recognize her mother or younger sister. She remembers other things, such as how to row (she was passionate about rowing on the river by her house), and she remembers how to drive, how to use a computer, and so on, but anything personal has gone.

It's counter intuitive, I know, but the author gets it right. You'd think you would recall things which were very personal to you or which were lifelong - such as your family and your name - but retrograde amnesia really can do this to a person. Retrograde refers to memory loss of things past - memories which are there, but which you cannot access. Anterograde, in my view the worst kind, refers to new memories - you can't move new memories into long-term memory and so each day begins anew for you, with precisely the same memories you had the day before - rather like Drew Barrymore's character in the movie 50 First Dates

My problem with this novel wasn't with the medical aspects of it, but with the fact that to me, this was another case of a female author doing serious disservice to her main female character. I don't mind stories where the main character starts out weak, and/or stupid, and grows stronger and smarter. Unlike many reviewers I don't even mind stories where the main character doesn't change or grow. There is story-telling to be had there.

What I don't like at all is a story where the main character becomes weaker or more stupid as the story goes on, and this story was one of those. I don't like stories where the character isn't true to herself, and so acts out of character for no reason. This story was one of those. I like even less stories where the main character is female and becomes totally dependent upon a man to validate and save her. I can't understand why so many female writers do this to their characters. What this meant was that while this story started out as an intriguing mystery - what had happened to this woman - it quickly deteriorated into a bog-standard harlequin romance, in which I have zero interest. The only thing missing was the bare-chested man on the cover.

The story quickly deteriorated into a romance, leaving the mystery in the back seat, and Mia began behaving more and more stupidly, and it was out of character. She was supposed to have been a teacher not long before, which is an admirable thing to make your character, but nowhere did we see her teaching skills come to the fore, which begged the question, why make her a teacher if you're not going to use it? She could have been a wait-person, or middle management, or a car mechanic and the story would have remained exactly the same.

The second problem was Mia's stupidity. Her memory wasn't the only thing she lost. She also lost her wallet and her house keys, but despite being in some fear,she never once (not in the 80% of this I read) considered cancelling her credit cards and changing the locks on her house. Stupid. yes, she was undergoing something horrible, but she had every motive to act and she failed. Worse, the police failed to advise her to do this.

Obviously what she went through was horrible - and hard to imagine (which I suspect is part of the problem with the writing here). I mean it's easy to say now what I would do in those circumstances, but if I lost my memory, how would I recall what I'd decided I would do?! LOL! That said, Mia could have been presented in a lot better light than a wheedling, tearful and tediously weak character who has impulsive sex a fails to consider whether she might become pregnant from it.

Worse than that, she acts stupidly on many occasions, way beyond what you might expect from someone who had been through what she went through. She acts with the impulsiveness of a child, without forethought, despite living in a certain amount of fear which is very understandable and which you'd think would compel her to act more cautiously and sensibly. She proves herself to be consistently weak and easily-manipulated even as she's purportedly asserting her independence and self control. Clearly what we're shown is at odds with what we're told.

As soon as Mia appears to be growing out of this dreary inertial lethargy, she immediately submerges herself back into it at the mercy of Jack - a complete stranger - someone she barely knew when she had her memories and now literally doesn't know at all. Despite being screwed-over by her boyfriend and by her family, she inexplicably and inexcusably trusts Jack. What this means to the reader is that just as Mia is beginning to find herself, she completely loses herself again! The blurb for this novel asks, "When you don't even know who you are, how do you know who to trust?" yet Mia seems to have no problem falling all over Jack, and he comes to tiresomely dominate her thoughts pretty much to the exclusion of her real troubles.

I detest the name Jack as a character in novels because it's WAY-THE HELL over used as your heroic bad-boy type, and its time authors started to use their imagination and come up with a new name instead of jack-ing off every time. I flatly refuse to read any novel where the main character is named Jack and I'm moving speedily towards avoiding novels which have any character named Jack unless it's a very minor one.

Despite having some seriously harrowing episodes, Mia fails to visit the amiable doctor who saw her in the hospital. She fails to report things to the police until she's pretty much forced to. She fails to see what a complete dick her boyfriend Piers is, until he forces her to see it. When she reviews her financial records, Mia discovers she's fabulously wealthy, yet never once do we see any indication that she gave anything to charity, not even simply for tax purposes. Instead she's evidently squandered the money on clothes. This tells me only how disgustingly shallow and selfish she is, which actually explains a lot about her behavior after her accident. The truth is that Mia never left the sea. She's still metaphorically being buffeted around, just as she was before she beached! It's sad.

In short I came to really dislike and then quickly to detest Mia, and I lost all empathy with, and sympathy for her as her behavior continued to descend into the moronic. I gave up on this at about eighty percent in because I couldn't stand to read any more of this woman careering down the track towards a train wreck. I wish the author all the best with her writing career, but based on this, I cannot in good faith say it's one I want to follow.

Who is AC? by Hope Larson, Tintin Pantoja

Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I avoid like the plague any novel which has been praised by Kirkus for no other reason than that Kirkus pretty much never met a novel they didn't like, so their reviews are completely worthless and I don't trust 'em! I also liked this novel despite the fact that the author is an I sneer (or is that Eisner?) award winner. Another group of novels I avoid are those which have won awards and especially those which have won Newberys, so I was good there because this one hasn't won such an award - or if it has, I'm unaware of it at this time! Fortunately, this enabled me to read this and I did not regret it.

We know who AC is before she does! AC is a kick-ass, young black female who somehow has super powers transferred to her via her phone while flying to her new home - but the charming thing about her is that she was kick-ass before she ever got her powers. Disgusting and inappropriate as this is given our age difference, I fell in love with Rhea (huge spoiler, that's her real name!!) pretty much from flicking through a few of the pages in the library, and I fell hopelessly in love when I finally got home and read it.

Rhea has a slightly unstable life, but she knows what she wants. She writes fiction and sells it through her friend who owns a small local bookstore. She copies these at a copy shop and binds and pays for them with her own hard-saved cash. Unfortunately, one night she leaves something behind and when she returns to get it, she discovers that the shop is being held up! She plucks up the courage to act, and finds herself transformed into a super hero who would give Hit Girl a run for her money. But this action creates its own problems which AC aka Rhea has to face.

I loved the illustration by Tintin Pantoja, and the writing by Hope Larson was tight and funny, and realistic. I definitely want to read more about this character, and I recommend this as a worthy read.

The Wishing World by Todd Fahnestock

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

This is an amazingly good middle-grade fantasy novel about eleven-year-old Lorelei (or is she really Loremaster?), a young girl who lost her brother and parents, all of whom she loved very much - yes, even her brother - and not only did no one believe her story of what happened, no one was able to find her family. She was considered delusional for merely telling the truth about what happened, and was referred to a rather sinister psychiatrist.

This explains why, as we begin the story, she's climbing up onto the roof of her old home to try to get inside to find the 'comet stone' which she believes will deliver answers. Instead, she discovers that she's somehow called a griffon out of the peculiar world of Veloran, and he refers to her as Doolivanti. Before long, she's inside the fantasy land, and searching for a princess who can help her defeat the Ink King and return her family to her!

I loved how fast those story moved. It was perfect in that regard, but it wasn't all plain sailing. Pip, the toucan was annoying because he insisted upon duplicating every sentence he spoke! Other than that I had no problem with, and took every joy in the writing until the princess showed up. The attempt to make her speak in a pseudo medieval language didn't work. Maybe middle-graders won't notice or be bothered by this, but it felt fake to me, especially when she said "Prithee, to whence have I come?"!

Whence is a 'from' word, and it incorporates 'from', so you can't use it with 'to'. It's used in the form: "Whence this bounty?" if you should happen across an unexpected pile of gold for example, or a table laden with food. "Whence do you hail?" might be used to ask where someone came from. It's one of those antique words like 'wherefore', which doesn't mean 'where'. It means 'why?' When Juliet says, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", she's asking why is he a Montague - the family so at odds with her own Capulet family? If he went by any other name, they would not be enemies. But what's in a name? As I said, the rest of the novel was so good that these things became minor considerations.

Kindle isn't known for being a solid app, and often Amazon's process for converting a novel to Kindle format merely mangles it instead. This one wasn't awful, but the Kindle formatting resulted in random lines being truncated half way across the screen, only to resume on the next line down. Also, and quite frequently, the Kindle version took the last line of a page and encased it in a number one at the beginning and a zero at the end, like this:--1 King in the dark. -0. I think perhaps the Kindle conversion process got confused with what was a page number and what was the last line on the page. Hopefully that will be resolved when the final release is published. On my iPad, in Bluefire Reader, the book looked perfect.

Kindle also loves to mangle images, and it did so with gay abandon in this case. The images are at the start of each chapter, and in the Adobe Digital Editions reader on my desktop, the entire book was formatted perfectly. On my phone though, Amazon sliced and diced, and even Julienned the images. I've seen this in many ebooks, and it was the reason I abandoned all hope of migrating images and special text formatting from my book Poem y Granite. I stripped all of the images out and formatted all of the text with the same font for the Kindle version.

One thing I found my imagination running away with in this novel was how Christmas carols seemed to be woven into the story. I'm reasonably sure the author never planned it that way and this is just my over-active imagination at work, but this is the kind of story, like Neale Osbourne's Lydia's Enchanted Toffee which I praised back in November 2015, that stimulates imagination and is the major reason why I'm rating this one a worthy read.

Humans (and many animals, are predisposed to see patterns in things. It's what keeps us alive if we're paying attention, and is part of what law enforcement and the military call "situational awareness." The downside is that it's the kind of thing which also fuels conspiracy theories and inane beliefs in UFOs, the Loch Ness "monster" and sasquatch. On the other side of that coincidence, if people didn't hold such beliefs, I'd never have been able to get away with Saurus, so I can't complain!

But I digress. I was impressed by the mysterious Silent Knight in this novel, and this got me on the Christmas carol track. Silent Knight? So, were the three characters Lorelei first meets, the three ships that came sailing in, or the three kings of orient (it's always three, isn't it?!). When I started thinking of Lorelei and Ripple, the aqueous-addicted princess of the antique language, as the Holly and the Ivy, I realized my imagination was indeed running away! You can warp anything to fit your "conspiracy" if you're willing to shed rationale and logic and let your imagination run riot!

So, before I let my imagination run away any more, let me say that I loved this novel, despite a minor issue here and there, and I recommend it highly. It's fun, it's fast-paced, it's inventive, it's amusing, and it's well worth reading even if you're not middle-grade! I look forward to Todd Fahnestock's next work with warm anticipation!

Doing It by Melvin Burgess

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook sounded triply appealing. The blurb made it sound interesting, which from a practical PoV means nothing more than that it did its job and suckered me in. But I was suckered without being succored! The story was read by Jason Flemyng, who I like as an actor, and his reading was excellent. The material was really funny in some parts, too, but I suspect you'd have to be an Anglophile to get it all. That was the third point of interest for me: it was something which wasn't set in the USA, like the USA is the only place in the world where anything interesting happens! It's nice to get out of the "house" once in a while, you know, and stretch your legs!

So while the story seems, superficially, to be a worthy read, it really bothered me that it was all sex and nothing else - like this is the sole subject of interest among anyone and everyone. It's not, and I resent stories that one, make it so, and two, never discuss the myriad problems with having casual and/or unprotected sex. I get that people are like this in real life, morons that they are, and I don't have a problem with reading about such people, but to consistently present sex as consequence-free and even romantic (which wasn't the case here, but is the case in many other stories), or as a worthy pursuit to the exclusion of all else among young people, without offering at least a note of caution here and there, is wrong-headed in my opinion.

The biggest problem though, was right there in the blurb on Goodreads: "It introduces us to Dino, Jon, and Ben, three teenage best friends who can't stop thinking about, and talking about (and hoping to experience), sex." Note that there isn't a single female mentioned by name anywhere in this blurb. It's all about the Benjamins - and the Jonathans, and the Dinos. Girls are just objects in which to masturbate. I know authors don't write book blurbs unless they self-publish, but seriously? Which moron wrote that one and what age was he - mentally?

Just for the record, the girls are Jackie, the object of Dino's undying lust, Deborah, the "fat" girl who Jonathan doesn't have the courage to respect, and Alison Young (yeah, really!) the schoolteacher with whom Ben is having a secret and ongoing affair. We get to meet Jackie in a meaningful way, albeit too briefly. We never honestly get to know Alison, who is disturbed and never given a fair hearing, and we never get a physical description of Deborah other than "fat", which means we really learn nothing practical about her body that isn't passed through the extremely warped adolescent filter of these dicks: Ben, Dino, Jon, et al.

We're told a lot about Deborah's personality, but we never actually and honestly experience it for ourselves. This is because the author is utterly clueless about voice. He tells the story from different perspectives and changes voice in a flagrant admission by the author that first person PoV is unarguably worst person PoV if you want an honest picture, and is nearly always a poor choice. This novella is quite simply badly written, and annoying, and far too focused on the guys, as the blurb indicates. It suffers because of that. The author and the blurb writer between them make it perfectly clear who the intended audience is for this: girls are not worth talking to.

Having said that, this story is less about lust than it is about poison. It's not really about lustful high-schoolers; it's about poisoned relationships, and poisonous behavior. The sexually transmitted disease here is lack of respect for the female gender. Dino is superficially the school Lothario, but he's a bit more complex than that, supposedly. He's saving himself for Jackie, the one girl who isn't interested in him - that is until his about-to-be-separated parents go away for the weekend and he opens his home to a party and hooks up with her. Even so he has failed to develop the tools to construct a decent personality, and he ends-up quite simply being a tool himself. And he gets away with it.

Jackie has promised herself to him that night after the party, like her only worth is her ability to accommodate him sexually, but because someone threw-up in the bed they were planning on using, she abruptly changes her mind and leaves without telling Dino, and he hooks up with Siobhan. Or is it Zoe? Or Violet? This girl has more names than guys have for their penis. But really she's a vixen - and wreaks havoc upon Dino when she learns he's also involved with Jackie.

I had liked Jackie most out of all the characters until this event. Her flaky behavior turned me off her. Not that she's required to have sex with Dino just because she said she would, but that she left without telling him she was going or why, and then she has the cluelessness to make Dino the villain because he chose to hook up with someone else, having both been ditched by Jackie and also become tired of being led on by her.

When Ben decides he's had enough of Alison and she decides she loves him, that one goes south even more than it was already south. Jonathan and Deborah seem like the most sensible of the group, which frankly isn't saying much, but the way everything turns around into a "happy" ending at the end seemed way false to me. Did someone from Disney write the ending? Given what had preceded it, the only future I could see for any of these imbeciles was that they'd continue making the same mistakes probably throughout life because they had "got away with it" and paid very little in the way of a price for their behavior, so where was their incentive to learn and improve? I can't recommend this ignorant, testosterone-soaked nonsense.

Haunted by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

Read really annoyingly by Alanna Ubach, this novellette sounded interesting from the blurb, but it turned out to be yet another irritating first person PoV, which is worst person in practice, and it honestly had nothing to do with ghosts, not really. You could have taken the minimal presence of ghosts completely out of the picture and had very nearly the same story: a sixteen year old has literally nothing on her mind than boys.

Tiresomely, there's the trope bad boy that the mc falls for, and the standard issue best friend. Often I find I like the best friend better than the main character, but such was not the case here, so this story didn't even have that going for it. I actually didn't like anyone. I know this is a part of a larger world, none of which I'm familiar with, but that doesn't alter the fact that we had a weak and uninteresting main character, and a story which had nothing new to offer and not a thing to recommend it. I have no need now to read anything else in this world, nor anything else by Meg Cabot (and yes, it's ca-bot, not cab-oh, so there isn't even anything unexpected there).

Susannah Simon, the protagonist, is dating a ghost - she and other special snowflakes like her can physically interact with ghosts - but like I said, the ghosts may as well have been ordinary and very retiring people for all they contributed to the story. All that was left was your stereotypical and clueless high school girl in love, which is tedious, uninventive and done to death. Meg Cabot needs a new shtick, and she's not alone amongst YA authors in that respect.

IQ by Joe Ide

Rating: WARTY!

This was an advance review copy from Net Galley. I thank the publisher for a chance at an early read of this novel.

This is a long book and was a bit of a roller-caster ride for me, but unfortunately, not in a good way. I started out disliking it, yet pressed on and found it more to my liking, but in the end I made it only fifty percent of the way through it, and the reason for that was the endless flashbacks containing info-dumps about the history of one character or another. It felt like padding which, given that this novel is over three hundred pages long, was entirely unnecessary. Not that padding is ever a good idea. I get that authors like to do mini-bios on their characters, to flesh them out and make them 3D, but to incorporate all of this into the story, Stephen King style is definitely not to my taste, and is a major reason why I quit reading Stephen King novels for that matter.

When I read a detective story, which is what this is, I want to be on the job pursuing clues. I don't want to take regimented breaks to catch-up on character history. By all means weave it into the story if you think it's really necessary, but don't bring your story to a screeching halt every other chapter with an episode of This is Your Life. The feeling I got by the time I quit - in the middle of yet another character history - was that the plot was thin and this padding was felt necessary to plump it up and make a real novel out of it, but it didn't, because it simply wasn't appealing.

The other major problem was with the main character. He's presented as some kind of prodigy or genius, or Sherlock Holmesian detective, but I saw nothing in the first fifty percent of this book to indicate he was anything out of the ordinary. He wasn't very interesting to me except when he was working he case, and it seemed like this activity was low on the author's list of priorities. He also took so much crap the first day on the job, from the entourage of the guy he was trying to help (yet another rapper) that it made no sense to me that he'd suck-up gratuitous insult after abusive insult without turning around and walking out on their mouthy asses. It made him look weak and beggarly.

Worse than this, at one point, Isaiah (the IQ of the title) has identified the perp, yet rather than draw the attention of the police to him, he simply drives away. This was criminally negligent given that this guy is in active pursuit of an assassination. I get that maybe the police don't have enough to arrest him right there and then, but I sure wouldn't want it on my conscience if I didn't say anything, and this assassin ends up succeeding in his plan. It was irresponsible and finished the job of turning me off the guy, which is a sorry thing to do when it comes to your main character!

As always, I wish the author all the best in his endeavors, but this book was not for me and I can't in good faith recommend it.

Bellwether by Connie Willis

Rating: WORTHY!

I was all excited that the narrator of this book was named Kate Reading until a friend informed me that her real name is Jennifer Mendenhall. That sucks! I know the alternate name is funny, but what's the point?! Well, I guess it's none of my business. Her reading voice is fine, to get back on track. She tells a good story and this was a good story to tell, full of understated snark and humorous observation.

The main character, Sandra Foster is conducting a scientific study of fads - that is, if she can figure out the darned grant application forms which are obscure to the point of being candidates for admission to the Parisian Incoherent movement in the 1880's. Sandra works for the HiTek Corporation where two characters fascinate her. Bennet O'Reilly is intriguing because he seems completely immune to fads, and she comes up with a plan to study him and to use methods inspired by watching a child crayon as a means to chart her discoveries! The other person, Flip, is obnoxious beyond repair. Sandra and Bennet find themselves in charge of a flock of sheep where they hope to learn something both about fads and about chaos theory. Will baa charts help ewe? It seems to me they should have simply studied Flip, but what do I know? I'm not a scientist! I have been known to think of really good uses for sheaves of soft white grant application forms, but that's all behind me now....

I loved the sense of humor in this novel and intend to look for more books by this author, despite the fact that she's an award winner. Normally I steer clear of award winning authors, and indeed in this case, had I stuck to that plan, I might have missed this book, because I negatively reviewed another novel by this author back in March of 2015. However, after this one, I might change my vector and chart a new course towards looking for more of her novels that might be like this one!

Life's a Witch by Brittany Geragotelis

Rating: WARTY!

This one sounded interesting, and the author's name sounded amazingly interesting, but it (the novel not the name!) rather quickly proved to be unimaginative. Indeed, it felt most like a rip-off of early Harry Potter, inexplicably aimed at YA readership. Weird! I guess the author thinks her audience is deficient in reading skills or something. The witches were in school - seventeen or younger - and part of a coven which their parents ran. When the parents were wiped out by a group of evil witches, the kids go on the run. Their leader, Hadley (no I didn't make that up, although I can't vouch for the spelling being spot-on), is supposed to be the special snowflake Harry Potter-style liberator, but in actual fact she comes off as a spoiled, privileged brat who is irresponsible and clueless. That was how she was in the first three-eighths of this novel, after which I gave up.

There's nothing new here at all (including, boringly, that this is book one of the inevitable series, because why come up with something original each time you write when you can keep spewing out the same tired old stuff every time, with a minor tweak or two and call it a new volume?). There are direct rip-offs from TV series like Charmed (speaking spells in Hallmark-style rhyming English and using antiquated words like 'thou', and also from Harry Potter, where two words in Latin and a swish of a wand or the fingers can deliver an immoblizing spell. The evil witches are exactly like the ones in Harry Potter: attacking by tossing out minor injuries and jinxes instead of delivering a death-blow. Another rip-off from Potter: the house that can only be visited by people who already know where it is.

It's told in worst person voice which is almost an automatic fail for me these days, and the woman who read this (Joy Osmanski), didn't sound too bad to begin with but after a while her delivery really began to irritate, I'm sorry to report. Even had it not, I would still have been put off by the amateur, fan-fic level of the writing. It was all tell and no show, and was especially no-show in the inventiveness department. Witches in covens? Thoroughly evil villains who do't do anything transcendingly evil except bully the kids? The prima donna descended from one of the Salem Witches? Spells are aimed and sometimes miss? Despite having enormous magic power, all the characters typically do everything in exactly the way we non-magical people do it? When someone gets injured, not a single person knows a single thing about magically stopping bleeding or healing bruises? Seriously? That's probably a good thing because this author would probably think you 'staunch' bleeding, not stanch it!

I almost quit reading this after the prologue - which I normally wouldn't read anyway, but it's hard to know what you're getting into in a audio book. Rest assured it confirmed what I've said all along: prologues, introductions, prefaces, and forewords are a waste of time. And can we not find an author who is imaginative enough to get away from that appalling abuse of women in Salem and come up with something new for once? And what about the un-original idea that a table (or some other such object) can block a magic spell? if that's the case, how come all the witches are not wearing some sort of body armor to prevent themselves being hit by spells? See what I mean? It's thoroughly unimaginative, and I can't recommend it.

Becoming Zara by Lillianna Blake, P Seymour

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is about a purportedly overweight woman and her life, one which frankly seems rather privileged to me. There's a whole series: Single Wide Female, which I admit is a cool title, but I'm not a series fan, and after reading about half of this volume, I'm not at all inspired to read on. The first problem is first person. This is supposed to be a novel which, I assume, character Lilliana Blake wrote to fulfill one of the items on her bucket list (write a novel), but it's not well told and I found I wasn't really liking the character because she felt very fake to me.

She was born Catherine - or rather not - she was born with no name and named Catherine by her parents, but she rejects that name and calls herself Zara (with 'Warrior Princess' added sotto voce). Why she needs a title, I don't know. Why she changed her name at all, I don't know. She never really explained that to my satisfaction. She's constantly going on about accepting herself, yet the first thing she rejects is something which is very basic and central to herself: her name! It wasn't logical, and this seems to be a character flaw of Zara's. But she;s maybe not as flawed as her "Love doctor" who is talking about about Zara projecting sexual energy on first date? How about projecting being a warm and interesting person that some guy would want to hang out with and see again, instead of selling her out as a slut on day one?

She has a well-paid job in a bank, owns her own condo, buys new clothes often, and eats out routinely, so she's hardly strapped for cash, yet she never considers this to be an advantage, or seems grateful that she's so much better off than many other people, overweight or not, who have less than she does. She's been working on fitness and getting along famously with the hot personal trainer, and of course she's oblivious to his attentions, which tells me she's not very smart. Here's an example: "For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I was always a little too happy when Braden told me about his non-love connections." Duhh! Personally I care a lot less about how much a woman weighs than I do about other factors such as how easy-to-get-along-with they are, how good of a sense of humor they have, how trustworthy they are, how intelligent they are (which I don't equate with academic achievements necessarily), and so on.

One thing which struck me about Zara is that she doesn't seem to have a whole heck of a lot of friends and spends a lot of time alone. Her one date with a female friend gets canceled because the friend's fiancée's back in town. Her sister, who once matched Zara's weight, is constantly on her case about how much weight Zara has(n't) lost. It's like the only thing they have in common, which is pretty sad! Her best friend seems to be Bernard, who is her fitness trainer, and it's clear there is something there, yet Zara is oblivious to it or in denial about it.

At the same time, Zara is focused almost solely on dressing-up and thinking about Bernard. She seems to have no thought processes other than these! She and her sister failed the Bechdel test - that is when they got together, all they could talk about is men. The clothes seem to be comfort 'food' for Zara, because if she really is losing weight, they're not going to fit her for long. Oh, and Zara never seems to go to work. She talks about her job quite often but never shows up for it. I'm serious. In the half of this novel I read, never once was she at work. I guess she's too much of a princess - or a warrior - for that.

The curious thing to me about this Zara character is that I never was convinced that she was overweight, or 'fat' or 'obese' as she herself alternately terms it. I don't think she really understands what 'overweight' actually means - and even then it has nothing directly to do with body mass index, which is a better scale of your health For this, I don't blame Zara given that she grew up in the US which is simultaneously one of the most overweight, yet poorly fed (nutritionally speaking) nations on the planet on the one hand, and on the other, which worships impossible 'ideals' of what a woman should be - basically a Barbie figure in real life. Yawn.

The problem here was that it was hard to get intelligent numbers from this novel. From what I can tell, Zara is five feet seven and two hundred pounds, which to me isn't 'fat'. I guess some might call it chubby, or big-boned, or give it some other such euphemism, but to me Zara, were she a real person, would look fine at that, not unhealthy (assuming she ate intelligently and exercised, which she does). Certainly it's a lot more healthy-looking than some anorexic runway model, all of whom look underfed if not diseased to me. What is unhealthy in Zara's life is her super-tight focus on her master plan and her weight (regardless of whether she feels positively or negatively about it), to the exclusion of pretty much everything else.

I get that she's (or the author is) trying to make it clear that while being notably overweight is unhealthy, it's also unhealthy to worry yourself to death if you're not significantly overweight and if you don't have weight-associated health issues going on, which Zara doesn't appear to suffer. It's just that I'm not convinced she's going about this the right way! The character is going on and on about a positive body image, and staying healthy and strong, but she seems to have no interest in anything other than her visits to the gym, and her work-outs with this trainer, and occasionally buying clothes. In short, she's really not very interesting, and comes off as shallow, and that, for me, was the worst problem she exhibited. Consequently I couldn't continue reading, and I can't recommend this novel.

Write To Die Charles Rosenberg

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with several other novels which have this same title! Let this be a warning to writers! Make it unique!

I have to confess I had some really mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand the 470-some pages flew by, which is a good thing and overall, the writing in general was quite good. The story-telling also made me want to keep turning pages. On the downside, however, I had some real problems with some parts of the plot which lacked credibility, and with some of the writing which essentially reduced women to skin-depth, strongly implying that a woman who isn't beautiful, pretty much doesn't merit consideration.

I can't tolerate that kind of writing and I'm starting to think I need to give an automatic fail to any novel which takes that approach regardless of how good it is otherwise. Plus this is episode one of a series, and I typically have no time for series. I was not informed of this when I requested this advance review copy! While I do appreciate the opportunity to read and review this novel, it would be much more preferable to have known more about what's going on with it up front.

I want to say a few words about this beauty issue to make it crystal-clear what I mean here. If this had been a novel about the modeling industry, for example, where anorexic women routinely present themselves as a disturbingly perverse norm, quite literally offering themselves as nothing more than "pretty" clothes-hangers, then I can seen how beauty would be a factor in the writing, even if it's still wrong-headed. If the novel had been about competition between actors for a movie role, then looks (wrong as it still is), might a valid topic for the author's pen. I have to add that it would be a more valid topic if the issue of looks was an internal conflict in one or more of the actors or a story based on how unjust the move business is in this regard.

If the novel were in first person and the narrator was commenting on people's attractiveness I wouldn't like that. It would be valid however, because people do see others that way, but I would downgrade such a novel for being first person - and for being about a shallow character! If the novel is third person (for which I would commend it) and had various characters make comments about looks, that would be valid because people are like that even if we don't like them. And finally, to have two people who are in love comment about how beautiful they find each other (regardless of how third-parties view them) is not a problem either, because love does foster the discovery or uncovering of beauty in people.

But to have a third person novel, as this commendably was, yet have the author write the narration and repeatedly make it about looks, is not acceptable to me. It's not acceptable to foster this ridiculous view we have today that you have to be thin as a rake and have Hollywood looks ("beautiful" if you're female, and "buff" - or whatever word you like - if you're male) or to have an hourglass figure to be attractive. It's dangerous and damaging. I don't think it serves society and I don't think authors should contribute to it; quite the contrary: they're in a very powerful position to counter it.

It saddens me when I see so many novels, particularly in the young-adult world, facilitating this evil fiction that beauty is everything and women who don't (according to the author's lights) have it need not apply. It's even sadder that all-too-many female authors aid and abet this nonsense. Countering this isn't the same as saying we should have all our female characters described as 'ugly' or 'homely', or our male characters described as 'skinny weaklings'. That isn't accurate either. To me, countering this is not to swing the pendulum the opposite way, but to stop it dead in the middle by writing stories which do not address looks at all. Leave that to your reader. Offer a vague description if necessary, but make it neutral. There are better ways to convey real beauty than by rendering character as caricature.

It would be rather hard to put out a police description in your novel without mentioning eye and hair color of course, but for the most part, if looks are not actually relevant to what's happening or necessary (for whatever reason) to further your story or make a specific point about a character, why mention them at all? I feel you should offer a vague sketch if you must, but trust your reader fill in the details as they see fit. Focus your description on other qualities to emphasize that real people are much more than looks. If you sketch your character by their (non-physical) attributes, their skills, and their personality, then you reader will have no trouble picturing them. Trust me on this. Better yet, trust your readers on this. 'Show, don't tell' isn't restricted merely to dissuading info-dumping!

Although this novel is indeed about the movie industry in a way, it's also about a law firm and two lawsuits, and looks have nothing whatsoever to do with anything which takes place in this novel, yet when major character Sarah Gold is described, the description cannot help but launch into a rapture about about how "beautiful" she is! Here's how we first meet her:

When Rory entered his office, a young woman was standing there...She wasn’t just pretty but beautiful—high cheekbones, lovely nose, alabaster skin and the figure of a model back when models were allowed to have hips and breasts. Her eyes were green and wide, without a trace of makeup around them, and the thick hair cascading to the middle of her back was the color of spun gold.

Spun gold? Not just pretty but beautiful? Figure of a model? She'a a law-firm associate. Why does she even need this description? I don't doubt that there are such law associates, but must every one we read about in fiction be those few? Are we that addicted to trope and cliché?

The author would no doubt argue that she has other qualities that we learn of, and I agree, but we learn of those as secondary qualities over the course of the story. The very first, and evidently the most important thing we learn about her is right there up front: it's her beauty that's clearly the most defining characteristic of this woman. And it's completely unnecessary. Had her beauty (or even her looks) not been mentioned in any way shape or form in this novel, she would still have been the same character, so please don't ask quo vadis ask, quid pulchra?

If that description had been Rory's view, that would be one thing, but it wasn't. It was given as an objective view. We know this because later, we read, "Maybe he was attracted to her and didn’t know it." If it had been just that one instance, that would have been bad enough, but this view is repeated, and not just about Sarah. Here's another line from the novel:
"He was naked and there was a naked female leg draped across his. It wasn’t exactly a movie-star-quality leg, but it was a very nice leg nonetheless." How generous of him. She's not movie star quality but she'll do?

This is not about Sarah Gold, but about a different woman with whom Rory has sex and it was disgusting. About which encounter, I read in a depiction of the next morning: She giggled. “Which reminds me. Did you use protection last night?" Seriously? She has to ask? The funny thing is that Dana completely disappears from the novel never to be heard from again at about the halfway or two-thirds stage. Disposable women! How beautifully convenient!

Other occasions I read things like, "An attractive woman in her midthirties." Why is this relevant? Age or looks? Here's the second worst one: "Sarah walked into Rory’s office, still beautiful..." Thank the Hollywood Stars for that! I was afraid she'd got ugly in the intervening period since Rory last saw her! That would have ruined the story! Aphrodite forbid that we have a character who is less than beautiful! What possible use would she be in a novel?

There were few other writing issues I'm happy to report, but they were interesting ones. One of them was this weird one:

I hope you can see my point about Dana Barbour.”
“It’s Barbour...."

There's a whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment. I can see what the author had in mind, but since he uses the same spelling in both sentences, it's completely meaningless. I assume it's the English versus the French pronunciation, perhaps something like Barber v. Barbour, but by using the same spelling twice he makes it unintelligible to the reader no matter how clear it might have been in his own mind when he wrote it. Given how many people are credited with helping out here, I'm surprised something like this slipped through, but we've all been there, I know!

Another plot problem was that the author confuses two consecutive weeks, the first as the novel begins, with the second week. Very early in the novel we learn of a script which has just been discovered, and which has the potential to lose Rory his previous cut-and-dried case. A week later, we're told the same thing: the script was discovered a couple of days ago, which is why he hasn't been supplied a copy of it. It cannot have been 'just discovered' on two different Mondays! Again it's an easy mistake to make, but it needs to be fixed.

This same script causes problems later when we learn that Sarah electronically compares two scripts. The problem is that they didn't have an electronic copy of the script they'd just been handed, so how did she compare it? If she was comparing two other electronic scripts (and not the printed copy they had literally just been given), then what was the point? It told them nothing about the new script. If the script they compared was with an e-copy they already had, then why had they not run the comparison before? What we needed to have been told was that the e-copy they already had possession of (by other means) was the same as the printed one they'd just been given. That would have validated the comparison.

Aside from that, it was pretty decent - if confusing at times! Its like the author occasionally lost track of what he was writing, and we've all been there, too! This sentence, for example, could have used improvement: "It didn’t pass Sarah by that Gladys had just referred to Sylvie in the past tense, but she let it pass." There's too much pass, past, pass! In another case, I read, “I’m going to go see Quentin Zavallo and get debriefed." No, Zavallo is going to get debriefed. Rory is going to get briefed! Legal terms, not military! In another instance, Rory was pacing around a table, then he sat, and evidently the author forgot, because Sarah says, "You're not sitting. You’re walking around the conference table, remember?” No, Sarah, he was sitting right there!

There were other issues I had which, when looked at overall, were what contributed to my rating this as a less-than-worthy read. Looking back on the story, I find that I really didn't like either of the two main characters, Rory, and Sarah. What kept me reading was the story in general, but in retrospect, I would have liked it a lot better had those two characters been switched out for more savory and entertaining ones. I certainly wouldn't want to read a series about these two people. Rory came across as a sleaze and a bully, and Sarah was simply annoying, like some kid sister from a middle-grade novel might be deemed by her older brother. She was insubordinate and undisciplined, and either outright broke the law or skirted with breaking it on several occasions. She went off on tangents without keeping her boss in the loop. This was passed off (or attempted anyway) as some sort of psychological disorder, but I found that patronizing and insulting. There was also an association made regarding Sarah as part of a governmental organization at one point which was then never mentioned again - like it had been added as a plot point and then forgotten about! It made no sense.

The ending was messy and all-too-convenient with a guy showing up to rescue a girl, which completely betrayed her self-sufficiency, so yes, in the end, she was nothing more than the maiden in distress, which was frankly pathetic. The rescue was highly improbable, and a supposed assassin who was "on his way" completely disappeared from the narrative. So the ending was entirely unsatisfying, which for me was the last straw.

The book blurb (which I know is not on an author unless they self-publish) didn't help! It tells us that "Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is all set to premiere", yet the plot for this movie isn't the kind of plot that makes for a blockbuster. People can, of course, disagree on something like this which isn't well-defined, but although such a movie might be critically acclaimed, and make some money, but it simply wasn't credible to me that this movie (the plot of which we do learn) would even make the hundred-million dollars that's predicted for it and even if it did, it's not really a blockbuster - not by box office receipts these days. A movie like that could just as likely be deemed a failure depending on production and advertising costs.

There's one more thing I should (belatedly!) add to this, and it's something I've been paying more attention to lately, which is how much paper a novel would use were it to go to a print run as opposed to being distributed as an ebook, and therefore how many trees would have to die for you. This novel ran to 477 pages, but the line spacing was about 1.5. Note that this was in the iPad Bluefire Reader version, which is, I believe, how it would look in print (in the Kindle version, where formatting all too often sucks, it appeared to be single-space lines). This author seemed to be rather proud of how the "great-looking and feeling" print version, but in my opinion, it could have been improved in an area that's far too often overlooked.

If the spacing had been 1 in the print version as opposed to 1.5, then this novel could have been slimmed down to some 320 pages. We can round that up to 350 in case I errored in this calculation. In addition to this, every one of the chapters had a blank page preceding it. It had 62 chapters, which meant sixty two blank pages, or 31 blank sheets in total. If these had also been eliminated, the entire book could have shrunk to little more than 300 pages from this alone, regardless of typeface or font. Even if we couldn't get below 350 pages, this would still be 25% fewer trees killed to produce a print run. It's worth thinking about this unless your novel is only going to be issued as an ebook, because even if you employ recycled paper, it still uses energy to produce.

Even if your novel is an ebook, the larger it is, the more energy it requires to move across the Internet, and it's a lot harder to recycle ebooks (in terms or passing them on to other people or turning them over to Goodwill or a used book store) than it is print books, which require no energy at all once they're produced - no reading device (except maybe a light from time to time!). No batteries. No electricity. No electronic storage space which requires power to retrieve from. Personally I think this is is all worth consideration if you're a writer, and especially if you self publish. Admittedly, if you go with Big Publishing, you really don't have any say in how they turn out your novel, so that's worth considering too, but you can determine how wordy it will be. Just a thought!

So overall, given the machismo and genderism on display and the problems with the plot and the ending, and while I appreciate the chance to read this from the publisher, and wish the author all the best in his future endeavors, I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston

Rating: WARTY!

This one had a great opening chapter about some apparent entity appearing in a black hole created by a particle collider, and then for the NEXT FIFTEEN CHAPTERS it completely abandoned that and went meandering everywhere but in pursuit of this beginning. It was so tedious it made my eyes water. Either that or I was crying over the loss of my time in listening to this garbage. We were slammed with one new character after another, NONE OF WHOM DID A DAMNED THING, and all of whom were the most simplistic trope cardboard cut-outs imaginable. This novel sucked green wieners big time. I am done with this author. But I do appreciate his putting "A Novel" on the cover because I was so convinced that this was a learned treatise on a victimless crimes that I was ready to send him money finance his campaign! Waste. Of. Aluminum and petroleum byproducts.

Salem's Cipher by Jess Lourey

Rating: WARTY!

Be warned there are spoilers in this, I've kept descriptions as vague as I can and also somewhat out of order - in order to minmize spoilers, but I can't address specific problems with a narrative unless I talk about what those problems are, otherwise it's simply a vague list of complaints without any supporting evidence, and I'm not that kind of reviewer. It's of even less help to a writer if I don't explain what the problems are, but I shall try not to go into more detail than I have to, to make a point.

I struggled with this one in consideration of whether it was a truly worthy read or not, but when I went back and analyzed my notes afterwards, I had no problem downgrading this. In some ways, it had a lot going for it, but in the end, the highly improbable plotting, the literally incredible coincidences, and some really poor and/or thoughtless writing made my mind up for me. The ending did not help the case at all, so I can't recommend this novel. Plus it was way too long for what it offered, and as if that isn't bad enough, it's the first of a series where even though the bad guys are soundly beaten in this volume, we find they're not really beaten at all in volume two. What?! Yeah, that's what I mean about improbable.

I am not a fan of inane story arcs like this any more than I'm a fan of the 'girls in peril' genre of horror movie where the psycho is killed two or three times but always gets resurrected and comes after the girl(s) again just when they think it's safe - and this is all in the first movie! As if that wasn't bad enough, we get not one, not two, but three villainous assassins, two of which are straight out of horror movies. Their behaviors make little sense. One of them is supposed to be so strong and muscular that he can dislocate your shoulder by a simple squeeze of his fingers - and this guy travels around under the radar? No! Another of the villains can literally rearrange his face so his appearance changes. He can even pass for a woman. What? No! Just no! This isn't a Marvel comic book!

Written very much in the Dan Brown mold of "impossible to solve" puzzles which are really rather juvenile, and in the National Treasure mold of hidden booty and arcane clues which are so old they don't even matter any more, this one featured a female protagonist by the name of Salem Wiley, who we're told is a 'genius cryptanalyst', but we see very little of that (although she is smart enough to know that lightning does strike twice in the same place!). She's partnered with a Chicago cop named Isabel who was a lot more interesting, but who got second-billing and relatively little air time. There never was any good reason why these two resisted going to the police or the press, or the Internet with what they knew at any given point in the story. In fact, most of the time it would have made far more sense if they had. I don't mind stories where they go it alone or avoid the police, but there has to be a good reason for that. Here, and for the most part, there was not.

After every few chapters there was a huge info-dump on Salem's past which I took to skipping after perusing the first one. They were boring and unimportant and they brought the story to a screeching halt if you stopped to read them, as did the chapters which pursued the campaign of the "first viable candidate for election as a female president," which were irrelevant to the main thrust of the story and should have been omitted. Oh, and excuse me, what is Hilary Clinton - chopped liver? Well, only if you're a Republican!

Worse than this, the extra pages bulked-up the novel embarrassingly and were, frankly, a potential waste of trees, as was the formatting of this book with blank pages all over the place. In this era of ebooks, trees are not so raped and pillaged as they used to be, but if this novel ever went to a significant print-run, I would fear for the forests to the tune of a hundred or a hundred-fifty or so superfluous pages.

The story's central premise is the most ridiculous of all: that there's a secret society of men which is dedicated to keeping women out of power (and it's not even the Republicans! LOL!) - to the point of assassinating them if necessary. Excuse me? Since when have men ever needed a secret society to step on women? The whole thing is utterly absurd, as are the links the author makes, calling in Emily Dickinson to offer clues to Thomas Beale's treasure via absurdist non-puzzles hidden in even more silly, improbable, and risky locations offering an inanely ancient, but still extant trail of clues which any middle-grader worth her salt could uncover, and at the end of this trial is a list of the members of this society - which itself is really irrelevant given how much families have intermarried in the intervening century and a half?

The list is supposed to be still relevant because it travels in bloodlines, so we're expected to believe that in a republic which came together to overthrow a monarchy, power is passed down like royalty from mother to daughter to combat the status quo which is power passed down like royalty from father to son? How is that even an improvement?!

My question here is why would any secret society keep a list of their members hidden by simplistic clues so that their enemies could find it? If it's passed from mother to daughter, why would they even need such a list? Why would anyone care about such a list if all they wanted to do is keep women down, for which they're already doing a fine job by sabotaging "uppity women", and undermining them, and assassinating them if necessary? Why would they even be considered a threat (or conversely, a success) if they're doing such a lousy job that women have sprung-up everywhere around the world into positions of power and influence despite all this?! The premises of this establishment were vacant!

In general, the writing was technically good, which you would (hopefully!) expect in an author's thirteenth novel, but the plotting too often felt like it came from an author's debut novel, with far too many convenient coincidences and overly dramatic characters. Some of the writing left something to be desired ranging from the minor to the major (as I've already explored). There were instances like, for example where I read, "Cards and gifts at all the appropriate holidays" which would have made more sense if it had read, "Appropriate cards and gifts at the holidays." Is there an inappropriate holiday to send cards?! But then I wondered: is it cipher?!

Once again I was sorry to see that I had run into yet another female author who was practically labeling women as worthless unless they were physically attractive. At one point I read, "Pretty flight attendant" and at another, "Catherine wasn't beautiful, but she was smart." Excuse me? Beauty comes first, but since she's ugly at least she has the consolation prize of being smart? It's not as good as beautiful, but being smart is the best she can do? It's sad, but it's all she has to offer? In a novel about a "genius cryptanalyst," smarts is on the back burner? That's frankly a disgraceful insult to women. I didn't get why the flight attendant's looks were remotely relevant, unless we're to understand that her death would have been somehow less tragic had she been 'homely'. That kind of writing is nauseating and obnoxious - and it's unacceptable.

There were unintentionally amusing portions where for example, I learned that Emily Dickinson lived behind the green door. No wonder she was depressed! I'm guessing the door wasn't green when she lived there, but who knows? Maybe it was! There were some instances of intentional humor, but not many. Unfortunately, there were lots of minor hiccups such as when a guy comes in dressed for Halloween and has five-cent pieces taped to the back of his T-shit. How did Salem see them when he never turned around? Nickelback never sounded so bad. On another topic, I think by "200 convening years" the author actually meant "200 intervening years."

There were larger issues, though. One of the most glaring was when they were supposed to get rid of their phones and one of them doesn't. The other knows she has not done so because she's shown the phone with her phone number in the case, yet later the other one is supposed to be pissed-off upon just discovering that her trusted friend lied about ditching the phone? In movies this is known as poor continuity, and the sad thing was this part (showing her phone number in the case) could have been completely excised! It wasn't necessary to the story. This is the problem with long novels: you grow tired of reading through them to catch errors like this and inevitably some get missed! We've all been there. This is why I don't write long novels!

At one point Salem and Isabel take a trip to Massachusetts, and the timing for the various stages of their journey is completely amiss throughout the trip, with hours disappearing unaccounted-for so we have sunset and sunrise popping with undue haste or undue tardiness. Also on this trip we have an assassin who is itching to kill these two women, and yet when he has his best opportunity - when they're sleeping in the car on the side of a deserted road at night, he has six hours in which to kill them, yet he fails to act despite previously vowing he will get them asap? There was no explanation for this, except of course that these two are our heroes so we can't kill them off - and this assassin is quite literally the most inept assassin ever.

That makes my case for not viewing this novel as a worthy read so I'l leave it there. This author can write, for the most part, and I wish her luck with her career, but this novel fell flat for me despite the appealing premise of two women taking care of business without needing men to save them. I'm sorry I could rate it better.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu

Rating: WORTHY!

After someone whose reviews I follow mentioned this, I requested it from the library thinking initially that it was a woman's account of being in the IDF, but while the author has indeed been in the IDF, this is a fictional work about three other women in the IDF. As such, I'm sure that it does contain biographical elements, but it is not a biography. That clarified, I found it an eminently worthy read. It was fascinating, funny a hell in parts, and engrossing. A couple of pieces fell completely flat for me, and the penultimate chapter was completely bizarre, but overall I loved it. The closest thing I've read to this was Joseph Heller's Catch-22 which I favorably reviewed back in February 2014. If you liked that, you'll probably like this, and vice-worsted.

This fictional work follows three Israeli women (Avishag, Lea, and Yael) from their last months in high school in an isolated north Israel village, to enlistment the Tsva ha-Hagana le-Yisra'el (known in the west as the IDF or Israeli Defence Force), and beyond. It's written by a Harvard graduate who grew up in Israel in a location similar to the one where the novel begins. All Israelis, male or female, are required to enlist at age eighteen, for two years. There is no distinction between genders. That's what makes the IDF so amazing. The rest of the world is scrambling to catch up to this obviously optimal state of affairs.

The story isn't exactly linear, nor does it follow the usual story flow. Normally this would annoy me, but once in a while it works, and it works here. I lived in Israel for a short period of time (a while ago!), and this story came across as authentic through and through. The layout is a series of slightly disconnected vignettes or impressions - almost still life's - of these three girls as they travel through the next two or three years, and it is by turns disturbing, frightening, saddening, hilarious, and heart-warming. The way the story is laid out makes the reader feel disconnected, too, and makes nonsensical stories make sense in this context. It also serves to give the reader a good idea of what it's like to live in a nation which feels itself constantly at war even when no overt war is going on.

'
For me, Lea was the most fascinating character, especially after her experience with a man who slashed the throat of her fellow guard on the border-guard duty they were engaged in. How Lea reacts to this - the slow burn she undergoes - is disturbing and deeply unnerving. Avishag is the most amusing character. Her entire life seems almost like a Monty Python sketch and her name seems particularly à propos. At one point she completely loses it while on guard duty in a tower across from the Egyptian border. They are so bored with nothing happening day after day after day that when she takes off all of her clothes and lays down in a fetal position on the floor of her tower, the Egyptians don't even notice for some time.

Eventually one of the Egyptians is so bored that he decides to actually do his job as a break from the monotony, and when he aims his binocs at the Israeli side, there are two female border guards lying naked on the floor of their watch tower. The Egyptians think it's some sort of trick or insult, and a report travels up the Egyptian chain of command to the top, crosses the border, and travels down the Israeli chain of command. The girls get eight weeks in the brig for being improperly dressed on duty or something. Yael, for me wasn't quite so interesting, and some of the snapshots in general were boring to me, but overall, the novel was quite stunning and I fully recommend it.

The Bitches of Everafter by Barbra Annino

Rating: WORTHY!

This is without a doubt the most hilarious and best-written (with a couple of amusing exceptions I shall point out) novel I've read in a long time. It's humbling to read something like this and distressing to think I might never write one this good, although Femarine, which came out this month, would give it a good run for its money on a level field, I'll warrant!

In a lot of ways, it's like the TV show, Once Upon a Time, which I used to watch, but gave up on because it became boring and repetitive. There were no worries about that here until I discovered that the ending wasn't. There are two more planned volumes. This annoys me, and it means I did have a problem because I am not a fan of series. They rarely end well. Having said that, there are some series I've read and enjoyed throughout. The horns of this dilemma are: dare I pursue this one and risk disappointment or should I quit while I'm ahead?

This novel also got away with breaking a rule which I normally like to see enforced: don't start chapter one in the future and then flashback in the rest of the book. In this case it was done perfectly, which just goes to show that some authors can write and others can't. We quickly meet the main characters, which is another good thing about this since they're far too good to keep them waiting in the wings. A third wonder about it is that it's written in third person. Far too many stories of this nature are in first person, and I am ever after grateful to the amazingly-named Barbra Annino for giving that route the derision and disdain it so richly deserves. Twit to all YA authors: you can write a brilliant novel in 3PoV! Rilly! Wed this and Reap!

We do get the story mainly from the perspective of Snow White, who has committed some crime over which she holds no regret, but for which she has a ninety-day psych eval to endure. She's not confined to a hospital ward, but is living in Granny's Home for Girls, along with Aura Rose, an ex-car-thief and burglar, Cindy Glass, a non-recovering drunk, and Punzie Hightower, who can currently be seen stripping at the Fairest of Them All club downtown. All of whom are corralled and controlled by the estimable Bella Bookless, whose dog is named 'Beast'.

These girls were all put there by Judge Redhood, aided by the surprisingly deep and self-motivated Tink, and these villainous vamps are watched over by parole officer Robin Hood and psychiatrist Jack Bean. So far so good, but what is happening in this house when Snow finally gets settled in? What are the odd lights she sees? Do patterns on the walls really move? What's behind the forbidden doors? Why is the fearless Aura suddenly and inexplicably terrified of a spinning wheel?

I devoured this and loved it until the last page when I was a bit disappointed to see that it ended on a cliff-hanger because it was part of yet another trilogy. I know trilogies and series are very lucrative, but how about doing we readers a favor now and then and fitting it all into one volume? I was tempted not to pursue this purely out of spite, despite enjoying volume one, but having thought that, I can’t deny that for as much pressure as Amazon megacorp is putting on book prices to squash them down to next-to-nothing, maybe the only option we authors have anymore, is to revert to the way novels used to be published: in installments.

The unintentionally amusing portions of this book were few. There was the common one of thinking biceps has a singular form: "spearing through his bicep." I had an online discussion with a friend about this, and yes, technically you can use 'bicep', but my point is that does anyone honestly think that your typical author knows anatomy well-enough to specify that one muscle? I'd have a hard time believing that! No one uses the singular form - unless it's an anatomist!

I've never seen a novel where someone was wounded through the triceps, so I'm guessing authors who do this are not actually being anatomically precise but simply don't know the difference between bicep and biceps any more than they know the difference between stanch and staunch. My guess is that they think 'biceps' refers to the muscles of both upper arms, so the muscles of one upper arm must be 'bicep'! Who knows? OTOH, Barbra Annino isn't just any author as her writing chops demonstrate, so maybe I'll give her the benediction of the doubt here and dedicate a song to her (not original with my I hasten to add):

My analyse over the ocean
My analyse over the sea
My analyse over the ocean
So bring back my anatomy....

The other mistake was one that I personally have never seen before in a novel as far as I can recall, and for which even I can offer no excuse: "Not that she was opposed to murder, per say." The Latin is per se, FYI! Some of us writers fear for the English language the way it's going with all this self-publishing, texting, and tweeting. OTOH, language isn't what you see in a dictionary - it’s a living, morphing, growing thing, so we can only guess at what we'll be reading in fifty years, but with this kind of thing getting loose, I fear for the language Dear Hearts! Fear for it I tell you! It's enough to make my tricep twitch....

Anyway, that aside, I recommend this as a worthy read.

Marvel's Captain America: Sub Rosa by David McDonald

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this novel under false pretenses. I don't know who decides how to categorize these novels when they're put up on Net Galley as advance review copies. I suspect it's the publisher, but whoever it was misrepresented this one. It was categorized under graphic novels, but it's no such thing! There are no graphics in sight - in this case not even a cover, so I was disappointed before I began this. My advice to publishers is not to put your text novels under the graphic novel header. It's misleading at best and dishonest at worst. Nevertheless I gave it the old college try, and I have to report that it was not a beautiful day in the neighborhood for Mr Rogers, aka Captain America. I really could not get into this. I made it to just beyond the half-way point, and when it didn't remotely look like it was getting any better (indeed it got worse, descending into monologues and pages of exposition), I gave up on it.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, but then this was not a comic book, as I was sorry to discover. My experience of Captain America is all from the Marvel movies which have been hitting the screens with a routine and regularity, and a runaway success that's nothing short of breathtaking, and every one of those movies has been funny, amazing, action-packed, intelligent (for Hollywood!), fast-paced, and thoroughly entertaining. This novel was none of that. Instead, it was a series of uninspired fights followed by uninspired dialog, followed by more fighting. And there was neither anything super nor heroic about it. You could have taken out the Cap, and substituted one of the GI Joes, or one of Schwarzeneggar's older characters, like the one from Commando, or tossed in a Jason Bourne or James Bond, or any such macho action dude, and it could have been exactly the same story. There was no reason for the Cap to be here.

The story began with Commander Maria Hill contacting Cap to ask him to take care of her niece, Katherine, who plays the standard maiden in distress, despite the fact that she can handle herself and gets the Cap out of more than one scrape, yet she never gets any respect. I think this story would have been a much better adventure if Commander Hill had taken charge and cap had not been involved, but it is what it never was, and that's what I have to review.

The dialog was uninspired and not amusing, except unintentionally, such as at one point when the Cap is fighting a character named Taskmaster, who has "photographic reflexes" (what's really meant is cinematographic reflexes - any move she sees he can emulate). At one point, while fighting Taskmaster and attempting a futile distraction, Cap asks, "So who's paying you, Taskmaster, and how much?" Was Cap not paying attention two minutes before when Taskmaster came flying through a window and announced, as an introduction, "...she's worth a lot to me. Two million dollars to be exact."? I guess not. His motive is to collect a bounty. he's being paid two million dollars to be exact! Cap doesn't come off as very smart in this story, which is another problem. Of course that doesn't explain who's offering the bounty, but that's not exactly what Cap asks, is it?

The writing is a bit clunky, too. Workman-like for the most part, but not inspired. At one point, in the same paragraph we got "Then it came to him...then with a jolt it came to him..." which made for jarring reading. I guess the first time it came to him it didn't jolt him enough? Or maybe he needed to drink a Jolt cola before it came to him? Character descriptions were boilerplate, along the lines of "a lion's mane of hair" and "a curved beak of a nose." Not very inspired or inspiring. It felt like the author had cut & pasted these from other tepid random novels.

It was hard to find this on Goodreads because the title there is different. In fact the title seems very fluid. It's listed as Marvel's Captain America, but the novel itself is titled Marvel Captain America Sub Rosa. That latter Latin means literally beneath the rose or by way of translation, in secret. But it can be no secret that the Cap deserved a lot better than he got here. I can't recommend this based on what I read, which was more than enough for me when there are other novels out there which are desperate to be read and enjoyed and promise to be more rewarding.

The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan

Rating: WARTY!

I made it through 43% of this advance review copy, which I honestly felt was way more than it deserved. The blurb leads in with a virtually breathless rant about climate change and freezing winters (Note to blurb writer: snow in Israel isn't uncommon as it happens!), but climate change was irrelevant to this novel. The same novel could have been written about survivors of a plane crash in the desert, scientists cut off in in Antarctica, shipwreck survivors on an island, or people living in a Biosphere 2 type of environment. It would have made no difference to the story, so I didn't get the deal with the climate change at all. Maybe in the second half of the novel things happened to make it more relevant, but I was so bored with it that I could not bear the thought of reading any more to find out.

There was no indication given (not in the half I read) as to how things got so bad so quickly. This novel is set just three or four years from now, and while climate change has indeed reached a point of no easy or sure return, and governments are still doing diddly about it there's no indication it's going to go south (or in this case north) so quickly.

One of the characters was gender queer and I didn't get her purpose either. I mean it's great that we're seeing this kind of diversity in a novel, but if all we're seeing it for is its novelty, then it really contributes very little. Admittedly, this could have turned around and become a truly dramatic pivot point at 44% in, but from what I read, this was seen as a handicap and treated like one, and it seems to me that it would have made no significant difference - actually it might have made for a better read now I think about it - if this same character had had an actual handicap, such as a mobility issue (being confined to a wheelchair for example and dealing with slippery ice and slushy snow) instead of simply a gender trait, so I really didn't see what this brought to the story that was supposedly so vital.

The two main female characters in the novel were actually offered-up not as strong women, but as maidens in distress, held hostage and threatened by the ice dragon, and the guy shows up like a latter day St George to slay the beast and rescue them from its evil clutches. It was rather disgusting, and none of these characters was particularly interesting to me. It felt like the author had created a bunch of quirky characters and tossed them together expecting them to cook up a story. They didn't. It doesn't work like that. You have to have a story too, not just quirks on legs, and the story actually has to go somewhere.

As stories do go, this one does not go well. There was screen after screen of largely unattributed speech followed by long paragraphs of description, followed by more lines of largely unattributed speech which made for tedious reading. A better balance would have made for a better read. The speech was odd, too. Brits tend to denote speech with single quotes at the start and the finish, but this novel had only an em-dash to mark the start, and no indication of when it ended. Most of the time you could guess that it had ended when a new line was begun, especially if that had an em-dash at the start, too, but sometimes it would end with a period and on the same line we would get "she said" or something tacked on the end. It was just irritating trying to read that, because it looked at first glance like that was a continuation of the character's speech rather than, as it did at forced glance, an attribution.

So, while I wish the author well as always, I can't recommend this based on what I read. It didn't hang together well, and it didn't inspire interest. I mention the 43% because I typically quit a novel like this at around 25%, but then people complain and say, oh you should have read on, it gets better. I have two responses to this, neither of which are rude! First of all, if it doesn't get better until 26%, then make whatever you have at 26% be the start of the story for goodness sake! Secondly, in this case I did read past 25% - I read another twenty percent past it, and nothing changed. I rest my case!

On that topic, this novel has a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues (maybe that's where it gets explained how things went north so quickly? In that case it's an info dump and just as unwelcome as a prologue). The funny thing is that I advise writers that if it's worth telling, it's worth putting into chapter one instead of a pretentious prologue, but in this case, chapters one and two, and maybe three and four (I forget) were also prologue. I think the story could have started significantly later than it did and not have missed out on a single thing. That's never a good sign. I hope your mileage is better, but I'd rather chill out with a nice read rather than an ice read.

Princes of War by Claude Schmid

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this at one third the way through it. I know they say war is a lot of sitting around waiting, punctuated by intense action, but this novel - in the third of I could stand to read - consisted of nothing but sitting around and no action at all. All there was, was soldiers introspectively hashing endlessly over and over what they're doing there, what the political purpose is, what the stressors are, and it goes round and round. Nothing came out of any of this, and there was literally nothing else on offer here. That was fine for the first few pages, but every single page was the same, relentlessly and without end for page after page. It was boring. How you can make a story about the Iraq 'conflict' boring is a mystery to me, but this author achieved it.

I don't expect a novel like this to be endless action either. That would be boring, too, and amateurish, but I do expect, in a war zone, some warlike activity to be taking place, and there was none in sight here. It was so tedious that I was simply not prepared to suck it up for however many more pages it took to get there (assuming we ever got anywhere other than here).

The sad thing is that this was written by someone who has been there and done that, so I thought at the very least it would offer some interesting insights into life over there, but it really didn't, unless life over there was one long nonstop run of boredom from start to finish, which is not my experience form other things I've read about it. I honestly believe that a true biography of this author's time there would have been more entertaining than this novel. It certainly could not have been less so. Even if life was boring, there's no need whatsoever, in a work of fiction, to transmit that to the reader.

For a novel set in such an exotic location, there was nothing to excite the senses here, nothing revelatory, nothing humorous, and nothing to engage the mind, unless you happen to be one of the probably very rare people who is quite literally clueless about Iraq and what went on there. That aside, there was nothing here that you would not have gleaned from watching the nightly news in 2004 (when this novel is set). In fact you would likely have gained more, because this gave me no insights and very little by way of explanation of the whys and wherefores of the activity the soldiers were engaged in. For example, one day they go out to conduct a census in a street somewhere, and never is the purpose of the survey explained. Yes, of course it's to discover who lives where and how many there are, but to what ultimate end? I got no idea from this novel.

One big problem was the endless meandering back and forth with constant flashbacks without any good reason. They contributed nothing to the story for me, and worse, they did nothing save add to the tedium. I took to skimming these in short order. This addiction to flashback-ing ill-served the story too, as I shall explain here! The author gives times in military time of course, but there is no punctuation, so instead of 20:35, we got 2035. This was the first time I saw a time in numeric form in this novel, and I thought it was a date. It honestly looked like, in context, one of the soldiers was flash-forwarding, fantasizing or looking forward to a date thirty years into the future where he would be retired from the military and hanging with his friend having survived and lived to a ripe(r) old age, but he was actually just talking about eight thirty-five that evening! It was confusing for a second or two and then provided the only laugh I got from this novel!

I like a good military read with something to say, but this wasn't it, and I cannot recommend it based on the portion I read.