The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Not to be confused with Richard Williams's The Animator's Survival Kit which is on a related topic, this is another first person PoV story. Why so many authors are so addicted to this voice, I do not know. I detest it, but it's hard to avoid as a reader unless you can get a look at the story first, which is difficult to do with ARCs. If I do know it's going to be 1PoV, I reject the story even if it sounds interesting because I am so tired of this voice. I didn't have that opportunity with this particular novel, but as it happens, this was not awful, so I could at least start to read it without a feeling of nausea. I think novels in 1PoV need to carry a warning on the cover. My one and only such novel, just published, carries such a sticker on the print version like a cigarette pack! Fair's fair!

This is also another novel where the blurb writer isn't the author's best friend. God bless Big Publishing™. You can't blame the author for the blurb unless they self-publish of course, and ironically in this case I can't really blame the blurb writer either. The blurb is predictably misleading, but it misled me into thinking this would be about artists and animators, and it really isn't. Take that away and put the two main characters into any other medium: office co-workers, police partners, stagecoach driver and shotgun, fashion models, and you can tell pretty much the same story without having to change a whole heck of a lot.

This was a big disappointment for me. I kept wondering why I'd been lured in with the talk of art and animation if it wasn't really going to be a big part of the story. Yes, it entered the story and yes, it exposed the main characters' pale underbelly to public view in many ways, but the parts of this novel which were actually focused on that subject became increasingly scarce as the story progressed, and with that came the waning of my interest in it. In the end, I reached the fifty percent point, and it felt like it had taken me forever to reach it. I decided I could not support a story which had felt more and more like bait and switch-off, and where the art and animation had become pretty much tangential to a story which really was only about sad-sack childhoods and family melodrama, and which wasn't at all interesting to me because it had nothing new or original to say on the subject.

I think the blurb was rather exaggerated too, when it suggested they became instant best friends. They quickly became friends, but it was really their college experience and the succeeding decade of working together which made them best friends. The problem is that we got none of that at all, which is a shame because for me that would have been far more interesting than what we did get.

This was another thing I resented. I had to ask why this portion was there, brief as it was. Why not simply start it that decade later and merely reference how they first met? It would have made the reading experience less sluggish and avoided the breath-taking and abrupt cut-over, and made for a much less jolting reading experience. It was like a prologue, and I don't do prologues. The truth is that I wanted to learn more about that experience: of these two 'charity case' girls in a snooty college. That, for me, is where this story lived and where it ought to have been allowed to breathe, and I felt robbed! I felt that we lost so much when we time-traveled ten years into the future. In part, this is what I mean about being denied the art and animation part of this story, which for me was badly under-served.

In that regard, the author does know her stuff. Not that I'm an expert, but she seems like she knows what she's talking about when she does reference their work, but this only made me miss it more. I'd hoped for a lot more focus on what they did, and how they worked together, yet we got only off-hand, throw-away references to that. The bulk of the story is effectively divorced from their art, even though it is linked.

Most of the story is about difficult and underprivileged childhoods, and it seemed like it took forever to tell even that. It just went on and on and on, with these women magically coming up with cash (when they were all-but claiming bankruptcy) to crisscross the country in search of answers. I felt like getting in their faces and explaining to them that most of us have childhood issues. We don't wallow in them or act out about them, or let them dominate our lives. We don't let them control or propel us, and we certainly don't helplessly allow them to push us into our friends' faces demanding explanations or exposés from them about painful childhood experiences!

That sounds cruel to write it so baldly, and if the story had moved a bit faster and focused somewhat more on their work, I would have felt more charitable, but I kept looking at the percentage meter at the bottom of the screen and it crawled as weakly as one of the characters might have at one point after a hospitalization. I kept thinking, "I can't believe how slowly this is moving!" It felt like I would never get to the halfway point and when it did, I didn't have the interest or the stamina to plow through any more stock dysfunctional family references and get-togethers or to read any more about how addicted these two characters were to smoking (pot or tobacco) or drinking. It was juvenile and boring, and for me it was the story itself which ironically became more damaged than the characters were!

The blurb tells us that "...they draw upon their own pasts to make intimate animated movies, a process that has left their personal lives-including their friendship-in tatters." This isn't actually true. It's not the first animated movie they make - one which draws on main character Mel's life - which screws with their friendship! It's Mel's inexcusable and appalling behavior caused by her disregard for the feelings of others and her lack of an internal censor augmented by her dangerous drug and alcohol abuse.

I was starting to really dislike the story and Mel herself, whom I had liked best of the two of them to that point. When she appears to turn herself around, it's not the renaissance I'd hoped for, but merely the overture to a predictable story-line which has been done over and over. It was at this point too, where I thought it might be starting to get good again, that things began to descend into the obligatory "hellish childhood issues" trope that I was so hoping would be danced over rather than slogged through.

The story is told by the improbably-named Sharon Kisses, a poor Southern Gal who gets a scholarship to a snooty art college up in New York state. She meets a girl named Mel Vaught, who has a somewhat similar background, and the two hit it off. With regard to their backgrounds, one odd thing which made me pause at the start of this novel was how a girl like Sharon would even know how much a "Coach" purse would cost. She didn't come across as a woman who particularly cared about or lusted after fashion-wear and accessories, much less could afford or had hung out with people who could afford such things, yet she remarked, "I watched a girl at a party barf into a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse." That struck a false note with me and is one of the problems with 1Pov.

If you're telling this in third person, you can readily say something like that without it being attached to a character, but when this girl is narrating it, it's she and not an omniscient author, who has to own the things she's saying. This just didn't feel right. If it had been worded along the lines of "I watched a girl at a party barf into what I was told was a five-hundred-dollar Coach purse," I think this would have made the assertion a lot less jarringly out of place, and would have fit the character much better for my money (all five hundred dollars of it!), but it's a minor writing issue and not a deal-breaker for me. On the other hand, I related to Mel. I think this is yet another case of me tending to find the 'side-kick' more interesting than the main character, or maybe it's because I knew someone who went by the name of Mel and who this character reminds me of in some ways. I could see where she was coming from to begin with, and she made sense.

It's when we meet Sharon's family that the complete lack of authenticity in Sharon's first-person voice becomes glaringly apparent. Her voice - neither her internal one nor her external one - is anything whatsoever like anyone else in her family! Frankly it would have been even more tedious to read if it had, so I can see why the author did it, but the fact that she sounded like she very much belonged in the snooty college and not even remotely related to her roots rang totally false. Nowhere in the narrative (not in the part I read, anyway) is this dissimilarity even so much as remarked upon, not even by Mel, which was a big fail for me.

Technically-speaking, this author can write, and I wish her all the best with her future endeavors, but I can't honestly and in good faith recommend a story which felt so false and had nothing new to offer, and which rather duplicitously lurked behind a veneer of art which ran no deeper than a coat of paint.

Not Quite So Stories by David S Atkinson

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
"Broderick always did that was well." Maybe "as well?" (p4)

I'm not quite sure why this author named his set of twenty-three short stories the way he did. They have no kind of relationship to the Rudyard Kipling stories which I reviewed favorably back in December 2014, but they were different and unusual, and made no attempt at being 'literary' (trust me, that's a compliment from someone like me who gets hives when in proximity to 'literary' stories!).

I'm not a fan of collections of short stories even though I have written one myself, and the author of these seems very fond of simply ending the stories without offering any sort of a dénouement. I'm definitely in favor of less is best, but some of these seemed abrupt even by my standards! However, overall, I recommend this one as a worthy read. I'm not about to review each and every one individually, but the list below consists of all of them with a one line smart-ass comment from me.

G- Men
In which the government manages to find a way to spoil the enjoyment even of skydiving. You know what officialdom is like and it’s not like fun.

Cents Of Wonder Rhymes With Orange
In which orange is the new track-star. It either has a mind of its own - or somebody juiced it up.

Domestic Ties
If they're going to dragoon private buildings into helping out the overcrowded penal system, wouldn’t bars be better than homes, Sherlock?

Home Improvement
In which a man's home leaves him in the lurch and goes off looking for a new partner. If I had a haus for the number of times I've seen this happen, well, I'd be home & drei.

A Brief Account Of The Great Toilet Paper War Of 2012
In which the domestic bliss of ablutions is obliterated in and all-out escalating war over toilet paper and toilet seats.

The Bricklayer’s Ambiguous Morality
In which Larry is a brick, Derek is dead on his feet, and no one understands the gravity of the situation.

Changes For The Château
The Castle of Hope doesn't really offer quite the economy you might have expected on the room. Unless you're American....

Form Over Substance ≈ Eggs Over Easy
When a clown won’t leave you a loan?

Last Known Sighting Of The HMS Thousand Thread Count Sheets
Lamar is rather disturbed to discover that his beautiful hardwood floor isn't all it’s washed up to be.

Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!
This is what happens when somebody monkeys with a car engine.

The Elusive Qualities Of Advanced Office Equipment
Rocking bureaucracy.

Happy Trails
Six-pack leads to six-shooter?

The Boys Of Volunteer Fire Two-Twenty-Two-Point-Five (And A Half)
This was the first really dumb story, and it annoyed rather than entertained me.

The Des Moines Kabuki Dinner Theatre
Jamón para arriba a la Castellan

Turndown Service
Grave expectations.

Dreams Of Dead Grandpa
I wonder if this title ought to have been assigned to the previous story? At any rate, I only skimmed this one because it was boring.

The Onion She Carried
Some people's lives aren’t as concentric as an onion - they have only one layer and it has only one side.

Context Driven
I think this would have been more driven had it been a time travel story!

60% Rayon And 40% Evil
Bear-Faced Liar?

An Endless Series Of Meaningless Miracles
The reach of a preacher.

The Unknowable Agenda Of Ursines
And maybe this should have been the title of a previous story, too, or would that be gambling too much?

The Headshaking Disappointment Of The Misguidedly Well- Intentioned
How to get a drug user drug out of an elevator?

Up, Up, And No Way
Overflown with weirdness.

667 Ways to F*ck Up My Life by Lucy Woodhull

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note also that this novel shouldn't be confused with EM Moon's 667. This one trolls a similar ocean in many ways, which seems peculiarly fitting for an author named Woodhull!

When I sat down and began writing this review, I was thinking it would be positive, because I'd enjoyed a lot of the novel, but I had also seen a lot of issues with it and what really changed my perspective was when I began to consider everything in total, and especially the ending. When it came down to it, I honestly could not, in good conscience recommend it, not when I've rated other novels unworthy for less. I may well be in the minority in this view, but all that matters is that I can honestly live with the views I express here.

The title was the first problem, because despite what it claims, the novel fails to actually itemize 667 ways in which main character Dagmar screwed-up her life. More on this anon. As for the wording of the title, I couldn't help but wonder why we put that asterisk in there in place of the vowel. As soon as someone sees "f*ck" they know it means "fuck" and it's that word, not 'f*ck' that pops up in their brain whether they're prone to expressing themselves in that way or not, so you still generated a four-letter word in their mind!

Maybe we like to make people swear even if they find it offensive, but it's not the word which really does the trick, is it? It's we who've secretly agreed to brand a perfectly good and venerable English word 'offensive'. Some of us agree that if we use it, we intend to sound offensive, and others agree that if they hear it, they'll be offended. It's a foolish game we play. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from a rational PoV, but since when is language rational, especially in an election year? The truth is that it's all about shock value!

In deference to those who are sensitive though, I shall refer to this in the same way that one of the characters does: as "screw-up". I think it would have been more amusing had each letter been substituted, such as "$*@&-up" but that's just me. Be warned, though, that this is very much a highly questionable behavior and bad language novel, so if my previous use offended your sense and sensibility (for which I apologize), it might take a lot of persuasion to get you to read the actual book. As for me, I don't care about bad language in books in principle since it’s the way people talk and/or think in real life, so it’s not inappropriate per se.

As for the plot, it holds no mystery at all, so there can be no spoilers in this review. This story has been drive too many times to not need new tires and brakes before it's read-worthy: the decent, innocent, straight-shooting (or some such combination) girl gets fired by her caricature of a misogynist boss, and dumped by her jerk of a boyfriend on the same day.

How a woman with her potential ever got played into that position in this day and age remains largely unexplored (and I was glad of it!), but, but evidently smarts and self-respect got no casting-call. Anyway, she decides to change her life and predictably and magically, this leads to a better life and to the man of her dreams (Yash); however, she's been lying about things (in this case, her job and her name inter alia) when she first meets the guy, and finds herself inexplicably unable to avoid her lingering lies when the relationship deepens and then inevitably fails. Predictably, they then get together "romantically" and all's swell by the end bell.

To me, this play-acting wasn't Dag's major screw-up. The screw-up was that she failed to come clean with him as soon as she realized these feelings and this relationship were the one genuine thing amidst all the lies; worse than this, the author fails to justify her behavior. The major problem with this story then, is that Dag had absolutely no reason whatsoever to continue the lie, and this is where the novel began to fail for me because it became clear that the author wasn't letting the story happen naturally. She was like a show jumper who had a fine and spirited horse, but she wouldn't give it its head and trust it to jump, so fences were coming down all over the course!

Like a piano player who's been drilled too rigidly and never allowed to breathe the music or have any fun with it, she played the notes almost exactly as they'd been played by countless other artists before her, and never dared to set the melody free or improvise. That's why it felt so disappointing and unnatural to me. We got the predictable break-up and the equally predictable reunion for no other reason than a rigid adherence to a clichéd paradigm for this genre of novel.

That's when I lost the very faith in the author that she'd patiently built earlier. She made me hope for something out of the ordinary, and then deliberately stomped on that hope and killed it. Even as I feared this would most assuredly happen, I also entertained the fantasy that that maybe it wouldn't so at least in that regard, I went through the same thing that Dag did in her break-up. I doubt this is what the author had intended!

One of the things I had to try to overlook was that the title is rather fraudulent, as I mentioned earlier. There is no tally of 667 screw-ups here. This enumerated epistle which is added-to periodically throughout the novel (and which in some instances appears in place of the novel), is much more like a reminder list, or a list of observations or one of regrets, or of cute/inane comments/non-comments (items 541 through 547 I'm looking at you!) than ever it is an exclusive itemization of ways to screw-up.

For example #331 says, "My life had a forty-two percent rotten rating at rottentomatoes.com" which is actually getting on for fifty percent better than the Suicide Squad movie had, but it isn’t a screw-up in itself! It was funny, I admit. Some of them were, and I don’t doubt that such a huge list of ways to screw-up is do-able, but would it be entertaining? Hence the wimp-out list, which sometimes succeeded admirably. Other times it was simply intrusive, annoying, and trite.

There were many instances where several successive line items said pretty much the same thing if in slightly different ways, or which amplified an original thought:

320. Maybe I could write a literary erotic novel
321. The hero threw the hussy onto the couch and grrfflsh ajdjdhdhha unnffffff-ed her

and this:

323. It was the hormones released from such good kissing
324. Such sexy, nasty, sweet kissing
325. The kind of kissing that kills everyone in a Shakespearean tragedy

These are no more screw-ups than they are unique entries in the list, and the hormones motif was overdone, especially when it appeared in the form of "it's hormones, nothing more." If a male character said the same thing of a woman he wouldn't be allowed to get away with it unless the idea is to portray him as a complete dick, so how is it any better if Dag says it? That felt gratuitously insulting to me, and out of place in the novel that this aimed to be.

Items 367 to 384 (excluding item 383) consist solely of the sentence "I was in love". Item 418 was "Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!" - hardly a screw-up unless it took place at a funeral or when being threatened by a gang member, and neither applied in this case. "474. He didn't even owe me bird shit" would have been funnier if it had read, "Unless it was bird shit". So yes, this title is dishonest, but it does have the benefit of standing out. This is an important consideration, since "One Way to F*ck Up" would never be as appealing a title despite being more accurate! But enough said on this score.

I have to confess I was concerned about Dag's drinking problem. At one point, she actually recognizes that she has a drinking problem, which is admirable, but she resolves only to give up daytime drinking and then promptly breaks that vow. She made no vows whatsoever related giving-up becoming the falling-down, vomiting, passed-out drunk (fortunately in that order), of which she was guilty. This is exactly why her drinking is a problem bordering on, if not embracing alcoholism since it's made repeatedly clear that it's alcohol, not friends, not exercise, not books (there goes literary!), not music, not crafts, not movies, not even food, but alcohol, which is her life-jacket when ineffectually opposing a sea of troubles. She actually abuses her best friend Mel, who sounded far more interesting to me than Dag became, although I was disappointed that Mel had nothing to say about Dag's drinking.

The story definitely took a serious downturn when she started stalking her ex and obsessing over him even more than she had before. That's when it was no longer romantic or a comedy for me. Had the genders been reversed and a guy was doing this, he would have been called on it by the readers if not by another character, so how is it any better that a woman is doing this to a man? It's not. It's neither entertaining nor is it funny.

Yes, Yash is being a bit of a jerk, so maybe this co-dependent couple really did deserve each other in the end, but at least he has cause for his behavior. She has no excuse whatsoever and worse, she doesn't even get that he needs to be left alone so she's compounding her main course of liar thermidor by adding a side dish of ass stalks. It made me really dislike her and negated any good feelings I'd entertained towards her from earlier.

But enough about meme; let’s talk about eupathy. The milieu of the story was a comfortably predictable one. It seems like whenever an author or screen-writer is aiming for a 'literary' story, they have their main character, who is typically a female, somehow involved with books. In this case, Dag is employed as an editor at a publishing company, but she doesn’t work on novels. No fear! She works in non-fiction - and there are no environmental dilemmas for Dag; it’s all about print, as though involvement with ebooks is slumming it.

More than this, the guy she falls for is a writer, and she predictably turns her web log into charmingly printable woodcuts. None of this is spoilers. All of it is inevitable from the premises. So well-traveled is the route that it's a rout, and more of a sow's ear than ever it was a silk road. The problem appears to be that if such stories were not so predictable, they likely wouldn’t garner for themselves such a predictable readership. Too few authors have the courage to take the road less traveled, even in an era when they do not have to beg Big Publishing™ to lend them that sow's ear.

This novel was too much an attempt at an edgy version of a Meg Ryan movie or more accurately, it felt like a remake of the Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey movie How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. I know I've read other novels which have run in a similar rut, but none of those were impressive enough for me to recall a title off-hand.

Some of it rang rather hollow or odd, such as where I read, "sew destruction upon Taylor." I honestly couldn't figure out if that was simply a case of bad spelling (that no spellchecker would catch!), or if it was actually intended as a pun - you know, sew...Taylor, but since I hadn't really seen any devotion to puns in this story, I think maybe "sow" was intended? And we're back to the pig's ear pun! Just kidding! But don't you love the English language?

Dag's approach to agents and publishing houses to sell her blog made little sense (especially when it was loudly telegraphed beforehand who would get the nod), and it made less sense given what a huge following her blog had garnered. She didn't need any help at that point, and why would she even consider it given that her plan supposedly was to screw-up? It felt like both a sell-out and a continuation of the endless Mary-Sue moments she was improbably accruing without any effort whatsoever.

The fact that this option isn’t even discussed made me realize that it must have been voted down by this 'literary' paradigm into which the author had locked herself like the clichéd emotional bride in the toilet at the wedding. Traditional publishing dominates, and the small prints dons the crown! E-books don't get a look-in! At this point the novel had become a fairy-tale lacking only Prince Chakra, and we knew for a fact that he wasn't far behind, so there was no suspense here at all.

But the bottom line for me is whether the novel is worth reading or not. It's one way or the other. I can’t tell you that two-fifths of a novel is worth reading and the other three not. It’s either worth my time or it isn’t and in the end, this one wasn't. So while I did find parts to be an entertaining read, overall it was disappointingly unoriginal. I think changing the paradigm would have made for a much better read.

A problem with stories like this is when to end them. It's always better to end sooner, even if it's too soon, than to let write be dumb. That's a territory this one danced with perilously, in tandem with me dancing with changing my mind. My mind is a lousy dance partner though: it keeps stepping on my prose. I think the story should have ended, given that it must head in this tired direction, right at the point where he texted her, and that should have been the first contact of any kind he made.

End it right there and you're doing better than you are with an ending which keeps on going right on into an epilogue. I don't read prologues or epilogues, so I never did learn what the last couple of itemized non-screw-ups were and it doesn't bother me at all. I wish the author all the best with her career, and I believe she definitely has a voice, I can't recommend this expression of it.

Oh Joy Sex Toy Vol 3 by Erika Moen, Matthew Nolan

Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
p60 "aught" means nothing! The word required is "ought" as in 'feel compelled to'!

Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan seem like a fun couple who have made an industry out of graphic - and I mean graphic! - adventures with sex toys. This is an adult publication, be warned, with no holds barred - or anything else for that matter. It's also a whopping three hundred pages, so there's a heck of a lot here.

The discussions are frank, open, amusing, and detailed, and they cover topics which are important and far too often badly served in a fundamentalist and conservative nation like the USA: sexual health (both disease-wise and exercise-wise), sex education (inlcuding book reviews), and physical/mechanical sex aids. I've never been a fan of toys myself, but this is evidently a fifteen billion dollar industry, so clearly many people are, and it was climbing out of the closet and into the mainstream, so get used to it!

I don't know anything about Matthew Nolan,but I'm vaguely familiar (in an innocent way) with Erika Moen's work. She's an artist who's been involved in comic books and other art endeavors. She's also a member of Periscope studios which has had a hand in some Wonder Woman comics, so it's good to know that super hero is in highly capable hands if that team is anything like Erika, who reminds me of one or other of the two goal keepers in my Seasoning novel. It's good to know that goal mouth is in capable hands, too!

On a point of order, I have to disagree with her assertion on page 53 that the particular item under review will open up her "world of wanking opportunities". I contend that female cannot truly 'wank' unless she is unusually well-endowed clitorally-speaking. It's just not physically possible although I don't doubt it's fun to try! Masturbate yes! Wank? Not really! LOL! However in the interests of the Equal Right-On! Amendment, women are most welcome to go for it!

I have to say that a lot of what's in here (I'm talking about sex advice and discussion of sexual disease and medical conditions, not the product reviews) is common sense and common knowledge - at least it ought to be common knowledge, but that's just the problem. Because sex has been treated as such a tabu subject, nowhere near enough people are educated on these topics. This is why knowledgeable and responsible publications like this are so important.

This kind of graphic novel isn't for me, and some parts of it felt incredibly naive and gullible (notably the two sections on porn films, where in the one they believed it wasn't staged, and in the other they seemed to be polishing the whole porn industry with a huge shine based on one particular filming session they'd witnessed).

This is aimed at sex positivity, and I can understand that, so I didn't expect anything truly negative from it, but it seems to me they're under-serving their readers if they don't look at the downside of things as well as the upside. They do review a book which touches on some of those stories but it's aimed not at how the porn business works, but at how some performers coped with balancing their professional life with their private life.

The last third of it is guest comic strips, and they cover a variety of topics all related to sex. I didn't find these as amusing as the first two hundred pages, except for Donut's Cream For You which I thought was hilarious. My biggest concern over these though, was that they were heavily biased towards trim Caucasian couples and where women were involved they seemed to be almost exclusively slim and comic-book curvy. While that's common in comic books (and on TV and in the movies and in literature), it's not right, and in a graphic novel like this, which is all about inclusivity, they seemed inappropriate in a way which had nothing to do with their subject matter!

I haven't read the previous two volumes in this series, so perhaps they have a slightly different take on things, but the feeling I have is that they would be very much like this one in tone and approach. That said, I don't doubt that these volumes will be useful and helpful to many people so I have no problem recommending this one. We don't need less of this, we need more! But we also need balance, so keep that in mind, and enjoy!

Who Killed Kurt Cobain?: The Story of Boddah by Nicolas Otéro

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy of a graphic novel for which I thank the publisher.

While I was glad to have the chance to read this, I have to confess up front that I was disappointed. The title makes no sense. We know who killed Cobain. The artwork for the most part was uninspired and even perfunctory, and the story felt too fanciful. Kurt Cobain had an imaginary childhood friend named Boddah, and he wrote a note to this character before he shot himself, leaving the note behind, along with his wife and young daughter.

I'm not someone who thinks that actors and musicians somehow get in touch with the mystical through drug use. I think they're simply juvenile, spoiled, and selfish morons who are often delusional. You can argue that as adults they're in charge of what happens to their bodies, but I don't think you can divorce the adult from the child, not when the child has experiences like Cobain did. He needed a better intervention than the one he got, for sure.

I don't think that Cobain was particularly brilliant or insightful or that his music was revolutionary or particularly special. It was just part of a genre, but in his case, it was magnified and amplified by his life, yet we see none of that here. He may as well not even have been a musician at all for as little reference as we got to his music in this story. I do see how people clambered aboard his bandwagon, because we see this routinely amongst humans. We're very much sheep who are drawn to cults and gangs, and clubs and societies, and to mindlessly jumping aboard bandwagons. Everyone wants to feel special which is paradoxically why we see this herding instinct so routinely.

While I wouldn't go as far as the blurb and claim Cobain is "modern rock's greatest icon" (Google puts him halfway down the first page of images!), it's not at issue that Cobain was talented and had something to say; the only curious thing I find was that evidently he didn't feel this way about himself. That would have been worth exploring, because there's no mystery about his suicide. It was entirely predictable and could have been prevented, but it was inevitable given his circumstances. Preventing it would have required a lot more care, love and real attention than was available to him. Given how hell-bent he was on self-destruction, it may be that no amount could have saved him, but we'll never know.

What I don't understand is the lemming-like rush to label these people heroes and spirit guides to the unknown. They're not. They're sick, troubled children who need help. In his case, heroic would have entailed his giving up drugs, getting treatment for his depression, and taking care of his daughter. The route he took was not heroic; it was cowardly, leaving the child to the single parenting of a woman who has evidenced pretty much as many issues as Cobain did. In many ways she become the hero, sadly fallible as that hero was, yet she gets nowhere near the attention Cobain did. Heroic would have been making a super-human effort to give his daughter a role model of how to cope and make a life, so that she doesn't go down the same drain he did. In that, he failed.

But this is a review of the graphic novel, not the life it depicts, and for me, that also failed. Yes, it told his story from a certain perspective, but it was scrappy and full of gratuitous flourishes. In my opinion, it focused foolishly on the destruction, not on the creation, on a person's weaknesses, not on his strengths - his music. The blurb claims the story is told from the perspective of the imaginary friend, made real here, but that's not the impression I got. Some of the drawings were great, but for the most part, they were so sloppy and indistinct that sometimes it was hard to tell if it was the imaginary friend or Cobain talking, and perhaps that was intentional, because in the end, there was no friend. There was only Cobain alone.

I can't recommend this because I don't see what this gave us that we didn't have before, other than an excessive amount of gratuitous nudity and gore, and none of that is revelatory these days, I'm sorry to observe.

Prism by Faye Kellerman, Aliza Kellerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is a case of a new writer being "grandfathered" (or perhaps more accurately in this case, "grandmothered") into the privileged position of publishing because your mom is already in the business, so this had that already against it, and the fact that it was an audiobook, which in my hands tend to garner poorer reviews by dint of the fact that I'm a captive audience driving to and from work. So I'll pretty much listen to anything that's not a ridiculously inane DJ or an even more inane commercial, and especially if it sounds like a remotely interesting story. I know, all that gasoline! Let's make a deal: you guys buy my books, and I'll buy an electric car and kiss off my indentured service to Big Oil™. Now isn't that a worthy cause? In fact, if you buy enough books I can quit driving altogether and work at home into my ever encroaching antiquity! Isn't it worth it to get me off the streets? Think about it!! LOL!

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that this one was actually to my liking - for the first twenty percent. The characters were fresh, funny, entertaining, and different from the usual YA high-school clichéd morons. Yes, so they failed Bechdel–Wallace, but only a bit and it was funny. The story turned around, but not in the way the author intended I'm sure, when there was an overnight school field trip. In the dark, and far from anywhere, the three traveling in this one van, and separated from their partner van, woke up to find they had run off the road and rolled over. They climbed out and ran from the van into the dark, ignoring the fact that their teacher was still trapped inside. A storm came up and they retreated into a nearby cave where they fell into a pothole and woke up in dumb-ass world.

The dumb-assery unfortunately, was not what the author intended. Instead, and from that from that point onward, the characters started behaving exactly like characters in every bad, trope-infested YA novel you ever read. Any relationship not only to intelligent behavior but even to realistic behavior was gone, and so was I! I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" I'm done with the Kellermans two; next author please, right this way!

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

This officially marks my flat refusal to read another thing written by Meg Cabot! I've read her Ready Or Not and found it a not ready. I read Haunted and found it more ghastly than ghostly, and I read Size 12 and Ready to Rock and found it ready to rot!

Perhaps this novel should have been titled "The Princess Diarrhea", since it both runs to more than ten volumes, and the main character, Mia, runs off at the mouth with an endless bitch and tedious moan about everything. What a nightmare she is. The novel is nothing like the movie, and bland as that is, the movie is far better. The movie has heart. All the novel has is spleen. The novel is as washed out as the Genovian flag, but it did make me want to watch the movie again.

The audio book is read by Anne Hathaway, who played the role of Mia in the movie. Her reading actually isn't too bad, but her voice tends towards mumble here and there. That's all I have to say about it, other than that I ditched it in short order, and I've now sworn off ever again reading anything by Meg Cabot!

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.