Deus Ex Mechanic by Ryann Fletcher

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known this book had the word 'chronicles' associated with it, I would never had considered reading it, but the interesting cover illustration distracted me and the plot sounded engaging, so I missed that somehow, and launched into it, getting to about two-turds the way through it before I fully realized it was going nowhere - precisely because it's a series. Book one is a prolog and I don't do prologs because they're boring and don't tell you shit. I wish I had back the time I wasted on this one. The book description is completely misleading.

The concept is ridiculous to begin with - steampunk in space? The spaceship has boilers which is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I even put up with that in hopes I would get a good story. More fool me. Having loved the character of Kaylee in Firefly, I was primed for the character of Alice - a mechanic. In fact this whole story is a Firefly rip-off in many ways. Violet is the captain of a pirate vessel which operates on the run from coalition vessels, raiding them and distributing food to rebel bases and selling-off what they can to make some money.

On one such raid, they kidnap Alice to get her to fix the ship's boilers(!) intending to release her later, but eventually she ends up - as we knew she would - on the ship as a crew member, and so starts the relationship with Violet. This is the dumbest relationship ever, with them getting it on and getting off and it falling off so metronomically that it became tedious to read it. They were like 13 year olds, and to pretend non-violent Violet was a pirate captain was stupid.

The story wasn't god-awful, except when I read of one character Violet met:

"Hiya. I'm Jhanvi," she said with a thick southern drawl

This is on an alien planet, and she has "a thick southern drawl"?! Ridiculous!

Of course everyone on the crew is the best there is. Alice is the best mechanic; Hyun is the best doctor; Kady is the best engineer; Violet the best captain. Barf. They should have named the spacecaft the Mary Sue. I reached a point, not quickly enough unfortuantely, where I could not stand to read any more of this, and I ditched it. Can't commend it.

New Lease Of Love by Arizona Tape

Rating: WARTY!

This was a dual first person PoV that I quickly tired of. It was so larded with cliché, and it had one of the main characters smoking, which is a huge turn-off for me. I mean it was already failing for me before then, but I was prepared to read on for a while; all that did was completely burn it for me.

It wasn't only the first person (barf) that spoiled it, either, but first person from two perspectives which is barf squared. Whenever I read that, it reminds me of two suspects being grilled by police, in different interrogation rooms, and it doesn't work. Well, it works for the police if they can catch them in a contradiction or get one to sell out the other, but it doesn't work as a tired plot device in fiction. 1PoV is bad enough and is usually horrible to read, but two of them just makes it so much worse. It's rare to find a 1PoV done well, let alone a two, and this sure wasn't one. The premise was wonderful - a March-June relationship (as opposed to a May-December or worse, a January-December which is frankly perverse), between two women, but the execution killed it.

I read at one point, "...but she had a symmetrical face. The customers would appreciate that" which strictly speaking isn't true. People like faces that are close to the average face they're used to. As far as symmetry goes, a study in 1996 discovered that children and young adults found those with slight facial asymmetry to be more attractive. It's a minor point, but let's not get hung up on perfection. Perfect faces, according to another study, might not be the signifier of good health that our long history has misled us to believe!

The story was marred by poor writing here and there. On one occasion I read, "With a sigh, I shoved my phone back in my designer purse." Really? You have to specify designer purse? That felt so pretentious that it about made me gag. I cannot read books written like that. I can't even take them seriously. Later I read, "With a sigh, I ran a hand along my head." Along? I can see ‘over’ my head or ‘down’ my face, but along? That's just weird. In and of themselves, things like this are not that important, unless there are many of them. Everyone screws up. Every author misses a grammatical or spelling problem here and there, or writes an awkward phrase now and then, but these added on top of other issues just make a novel unreadable for me.

Overall, I found this story plodding, tediously metronomic, and I did not like either character at all, so this was a DNF for sure. I can't commend it based on what I read.

By Wind by T Thorn Coyle

Rating: WARTY!

The biggest problem with this story is that the author has actually drunk the Flavor Aid, and she believes everything she writes: the magic, the aroma therapy, the healing power of crystals, and so on. That's all bullshit, and it wouldn't even be so bad if she didn't preach her religion instead of writing a novel.

Worse even than this is that the story is so tediously lethargic that it drags and drags, and drags and goes nowhere. I dropped this at 30% because literally nothing interesting had happened except for endless Cassandra-style wailing about, as John Fogerty put it, a bad moon arising. In short, up to when I quit, there was no story and what there was instead was awful.

I mean, for example, Brenda, the leader of the 'coven' has a closer-than-a-sister best friend whom she's known for years, yet not once has she confided in her over this bad feeling she's been having until she's pretty much forced into an 'intervention' of sorts! How close can they be when Brenda won't even call or drop her best friend a text? It's tell one thing, but show another all the way here.

The plot, such as it is, is that new age garbarge shop owner Brenda, 'has a bad feeling about this' but what 'this' is, she can't say. She supposed to be a witch, but none of her purported magic, nor that of her 'coven' is of any value whatsoever since no one can tell her anything useful. Plus, she's hearing voices. This woman is in dire need of lithium and psychotherapy.

The other metronomc voice in this tediously tick-tock story is of her purported lover-to-be, Caroline, who is, of course a magical crystal saleswoman. The problem is that at 30% these two had barely even said 'hello'. The blurb asked stupidly (as usual) "Who - or what - stalks Caroline?" Well that would be her control-freak husband who Caroline is apparently too stupid to ditch despite all the freedom she has. The blurb boasts, "Brenda and her coven must act swiftly, before the coming storm blows them all away." Given how ineffective those losers are, it ain't gonna happen. This story was truly bad and boring.

City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn

Rating: WARTY!

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

I had high hopes for this story which seemed to promise two strong female leads, but once again, as they so often do, the book blurb failed to give an honest description of the story, so it was more of a lose than a Winn for me. It was slow to start and seemed very repetitive. I was ready to ditch it after chapter one, and I would have, except this was a review book, so I felt I had to give it a chance. It did pick up somewhat in chapter two, but even so, it never got going. It was such a long, repetitive slog that I grew bored with it.

It was a very pedantic 2-Person PoV story tick-tocking tediously like a metronome between the two main female characters' perspectives that it was putting me to sleep. At least it wasn't first person PoV, but the tedium was strong with this one and by 52% I'd had enough of the repetitive antics of supposed hero "Riven" and her hi-tech non-love-interest "Asa" that I could stand to read no more. I cared nothing for either of the characters or for their fate, and their supposed love story was dead in the water from the very start.

Asa Almeida is the 17-year-old heir to a hi-tech empire. Riven Hawthorne - which is a thoroughly stupid name, is a lowlife street crook who talks big, but consistently achieves nothing. She's supposed to be a no-nonsense girl who is a dead-shot with her antique pistols, but despite having two clear-cut chances to kill her arch-rival (in the half that I read) she fails both times and one failure leads to another. Riven is thoroughly incompetent: all talk and no traction, and she has no spine. Asa, who is supposed to be smart, is a complete dumb-ass and she persistently proves it.

The 'winterdark' MacGuffin in the story appeared to be a direct rip-off of William Gibson's 'wintermute' which is an artificial intelligence character in his novel Neuromancer but since in this story it really is just a name without, apparently, anything behind it (not in the part I read anyway), I guess it doesn't matter what it was. The other side of this coin is tha tthe auhtor evidently hasnlt ehard of a farady cage whcih woudl ahve made her little device undetectable at dradiofrwuencies

The writing had issues, too. I read, for example, at one point: "No doubt the rumor mill would love to grate her to a pulp. A mill grinds, it doesn't grate. Unless of course it hasn't been oiled in a while.... At another point I read, "The phoenix ruffled its wings." Nah! I’m guessing it ruffled its feathers! Then again: "Riven willed herself to be impassable," was used when the author needed 'impassive'.

Some of the technology wasn't very well thought-through. For example, Asa has a suit that she can use to make herself invisible, but this author - as do many sci-fi writers, sci-fi movies, and TV shows - conflates invisible with undetectable. Visible light is only one minuscule portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and trapping that doesn't trap everything else, from gamma rays at one end to Am radio at the other. The suit wouldn't have worked, and the author even seems to admit this at one point where one of the guardbots stops and scans her. Clearly it detected something. The author also seems to forget that Asa's body is in motion, and emitting heat. Both of these things can be detected. The suit itself by its very use is emitting electronic frequencies.

A smock was actually developed that used tiny cameras to transmit an image of the scenery to the opposite side, so it made the smock close to invisible, but not quite. The thing is that even something like this is still actually there. If a bright light shone on it, it would cast a shadow of sorts, and any radar pulse aimed at it would bounce back faster and with a different 'feel' to it from her body than, say, the wall in front of which Asa was standing, so there was so much wrong with this that it was laughable. For a young kids' story it would have been fine, but not for grown-ups, not unless you're going to say it has magical powers (like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak) rather than hi-tech powers.

For me, the worst part was that the story quickly became bogged down in Riven's tedious, endless, and leaden-footed non-attempts to escape the absurdly one-dimensional criminal city, where every single thing is rotten to the core, and every single person is evil and amazingly good at finding and defeating Riven. It made this story truly boring. I can't commend this at all.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another diversion into the classics. I find the author's name amusing for some reason. In conjunction with reading this, I also watched the Disney movie John Carter which was loosely derived from the novel and was a huge loss for the studio, despite making some 300 million. That's bad business right there: your movie makes THREE HUNDRED MILLION and you still lose money on it? I am not a fan of Disney, but despite the movie being mildly entertaining and the novel being mildly readable, I have no intention of pursuing this series.

I don't know if George Lucas, in creating his Star Wars empire ever acknowledged how much he borrowed from Burroughs, but in my opinion he took a lot. Special snowflake super-powered savior guy and a princess to win? Telepathy? A desert planet? Sword fighting? Multiple alien species? Epic battles on land and in the air? Strange alien animals? Weird flying craft? It's all there. The leaders in the story are known as Jeds and Jeddaks. Is it a coincidence how close this is to Jedi?

I understand that this novel was written in a different era, and long before we knew a lot about Mars, but the story itself doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense even within its own fictional framework, and the hero of it, John Carter (it's convenient that his initials are JC, for a white savior, huh?!), really ought to have been named Mary Sue for all the luck he has going his way and the lack of effort he puts in to get the consistently sterling results he obrains. It's like everything he does, he becomes expert at, and everything that happens to him quickly facilitates his meeting whatever goal it was he had been hoping to reach.

As was the wont back then, this work was serialized in early 1912 before appearing as a 66,000 word novel. For this reason it has all of the prevailing white male privilege of that era, including all of the viewpoints that you'd expect. There is no enlightenment here, so you have to take it as you find it, or avoid it. Carter is a veteran of the US civil war (on the side of the South of course!) and shortly after that ended, he took to prospecting in the southwest USA. He gets to Mars accidentally through a portal hidden in a cave he happens upon. There is no explanation offered for the presence of this portal on Earth, much less its specific location.

Burroughs buys into the antique notion of Martian canals, born of a misunderstanding. Astronomer Schiaparelli described features (that were very likely optical artifacts) as 'channels' which in his native Italian was 'canali'. This was misunderstood as 'canals' - an artificial construction by intelligent beings on a planet that was drying-out, aimed at channeling water from the icy poles to support the rest of the planet. Burroughs uses this idea, just as did HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. Burroughs also invents a huge river - no doubt based on the River Styx, along which people at the end of their lives were borne.

Mars is known to the natives as 'Barsoom', and it's been suggested that this is based on numbering the known heavenly bodies, starting with the sun and including the moons, 'bar' being the Martian word for eight. This makes no sense within the story, but I guess it could have been Burroughs 'rationale'. The five named planets are these: Rasoom (Mercury), Cosoom (Venus), Jasoom (Earth), Barsoom (Mars), and Sasoom (Jupiter), but since the word for 'one' in Barsoomian is 'ay' and not 'ra', this numbering theory would seem to be a non-starter!

People seem to praise Burroughs for such inventive world-building, but it really isn't. In fact, it's extremely derivative, and scientifically makes little to no sense. It's just a jumble of random ideas that apparently caught his imagination. Martians are green and with six arms? The equivalent of a dog has ten legs and is super-fast? There are wonderful flying machines in one part of the planet, and wagon trains in another? Mars is dry? None of this is really very imaginative. Some of it's plain dumb.

Anyway, Carter discovers, due to the weaker gravity on Mars, that he is very strong and can leap to great heights because his bones and muscles developed under Earth's gravity. The thing is that there are humans (or very like humans) on Mars - called red humans because of their tan - and any one of them ought to have been able to develop Carter's ability if they had only worked-out, yet in thousands of years, no one ever did? There's also a race of green Martians who are fifteen feet tall and have six limbs, but Carter can easily vanquish them because of his superior strength and agility. There are other races, but none that we meet in this volume.

Carter takes up with the green Martians who hatch from eggs after a five year 'gestation' period. He rapidly rises to a position of power despite being a curiosity, a non-native, and something of a prisoner. He learns their language quickly, but here's the weird thing: we're told that they say very few words aloud, and have only the simplest of spoken languages; they communicate a lot by telepathy, so he develops his telepathic skills just like that. Yet repeatedly throughout the story, these simple people, lacking a significant language, physically speak great volumes of complex words and sentences to him and there's never any more mention of communicating telepathically! So Burroughs is inconsistent at best.

The lack of air on Mars is overcome as the author reveals that there is (one!) atmospheric generation facility to keep the oxygen levels renewed, but this is part of the problem (especially at the end of the story), since the technology levels on Mars are wildly variable, particularly between the greens and the reds, although no reason is given for this.

Development of hand weapons seem to have halted at a late medieval level with simple guns and swords, yet the red society's power is derived from nuclear sources! The divide is, admittedly, largely between the greens and the reds, but the greens pilfer hugely from red airships that they shoot down with their long range rifles, so why their technology is so backward I have no idea.

The rifles are a problem. We're told that they can theoretically hit a target three hundred miles away, and reliably nail one that's two hundred miles away, but on Mars, the horizon is only two miles away, so how that weapon is supposed to work at a hundred times that distance, I have no idea! There's a vague allusion to wireless guidance technology, but this is completely out of line with the greens technology level, so none of this made any sense. His misuse of 'staunch' perhaps did back then: "I endeavored to staunch the flow of blood" This is really supposed to be 'stanch'.

The red humans have flying machines which employ an 'eighth ray' for propulsion, which is bullshit and nonsense, but hey, this is fiction! There are supposedly nine 'rays' and the eighth and ninth are talked about in this volume, but none of the others are discussed, so I have no idea what those are supposed to be.

The problem with this is that at one point, when JC is being suitably heroic once more and Mary-Sue-ing his way into yet another plum position, he encounters another human with a flying machine that has been downed due to a mechanical problem. Again this is highly convenient because we later learn that the stranded guy is a relative of a high-level official and thus provides yet another easy access point for Carter - which he promptly wastes.

We're informed that JC can't rescue this guy on his own flyer because they're fragile, but earlier we were told the eighth ray is so powerful that it accidentally launched an unsuspecting airship crew into orbit. How is this fragile? Did Burroughs mean that the ship's construction is fragile? There was no suggestion of that earlier, and these 'single occupant' airships are sixteen feet long so there seemed to be no reason why it could not have lifted two people if they sat on it carefully. I'm just saying!

Naturally, Carter meets a princess of the red humans and they almost immediately fall in love. They always use both names, so she's always Dejah Thoris and he's always John Carter, never John or Carter, and the both speak of themselves in third person at times. It's annoying. Everyone is quite warlike - whether that's because Mars is the god of war or the author just chose to make his story that way for dramatic purposes, I don't know, but despite this belligerence, no one invented a machine gun. Go figure! Even the red humans can't get along because there's a war between different factions of those, and the princess is supposed to marry her enemy against her will in order to secure peace, but you know that ain't happening.

So Carter gets into a position of palace guard at his enemy's stronghold, giving him freedom to roam the palace and search for the princess who is conveniently being held there. He is always - I mean always - hiding in the right place at the right time to discover key pieces of information. At one point he deserts his guard post to go look for the princess, and becomes hopelessly lost. He rests his back against a wall for a minute to catch his breath since he's apparently exhausted from roaming the hallways in search of her, and this wall just happens to be the one to the princess's quarters!

Instead of biding his time and making a plan, he bursts in there and slaughters the four guards who are berthed inside her room(!) She informs him that she has to go through with this wedding and that he cannot kill her intended because it is forbidden for her to marry the murderer of her intended. Dejah Thoris isn't actually a person, she's a tool, a lure, a trophy, a possession, a MacGuffin who is constantly in need of rescue, a bargaining chip. She's never an agent of her own, and is nothing if not a perennially half-naked eye-candy prize to be bartered and won.

Carter is equally lucky in fleeing the palace. Despite there being an uproar over the four guards he slaughtered, he manages to accidentally find his way to a truly convenient escape point from the palace. Unable to jump out of a high window in daylight (people apparently look up on Mars) he chooses to hide inside an elaborate lighting fixture, which happens to be hanging above the precise point where a group of people gather to explain everything that's going on.

Again with the luck: I read later of another of his adventures, "The building was an enormous one, rearing its lofty head fully a thousand feet into the air...The fact that Barsoomian architecture is extremely ornate made...a perfect ladder for me all the way to the eaves of the building" A thousand feet up! This is the guy who is so out of shape that he gets breathless searching the palace and yet he climbs a thousand feet with no trouble?

This kind of thing happens again and again, tediously so. For example, at one point, Carter is flying one of the little aircraft to Helium, a major Martian city which is a thousand miles away (I guess fuel running out is never a problem on Mars). Now this is the single most distinctive city on Mars, but he can't find it because his speedometer and compass are damaged, and he gets lost. Despite flying over several cities where he could have stopped and asked for directions, the idiot doesn't stop until he espies a massive battle going on between green Martians. Despite knowing how deadly a shot these people are, instead of avoiding the battle, he flies right over it like a moron, and gets shot down.

Why these fighting Martians even care about shooting him down when amidst a massive battle, is left unexplained, but he happens to land, in a field of ten thousands fighting Martians, precisely at the point where his friend is engaged in combat, and ends up saving his friend's life! This results in his becoming even more highly elevated in their society. Note that since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, a compass would be useless there, but Burroughs could not have known that.

When Carter is trying to find an associate in the dark dungeons, I read, "Fortunately among the first I examined I found his jailer, and soon we had Kantos Kan with us in the throne room." Yep, he goes right to the jailer who has the very keys he needs to free the guy. He rallies a force of a hundred thousand green Martians who come with him to attack the enemy red Martian city and this takes no effort at all to talk them into joining his personal crusade. Despite needing three days to gather all the help he requires, he arrives at the enemy city right at the precise moment his precious princess is about to be wed, just in time to stop the proceedings!

There's an air battle which I imagine would have been rather thrilling to readers in 1912 when air travel was in its infancy, but the author utterly fails to think through the fight. He has the airships drawn up (like David Weber does in more modern sci-fi battles) as though the space in which they fight is two dimensional, so they're organized like ships of the line, static, and firing cannon at one another in broadsides! Eventually some ships' captains think it through and manage to rise above the others and drop bombs on them, but when it comes to taking on the million man enemy army, instead of flying over and dropping bombs on them, these idiots quit the ships and deposit their 100,000 men on the ground and fight it out with the million man enemy army - and they still win!

Carter is the most lucky klutz ever to blunder into a situation where he can't lose. So like I said, it's interesting enough to read purely from a historical perspective to see how people viewed both themselves and Mars (and non-whites and women) back in Burroughs's day. It's not something I was remotely interested in continuing on into other volumes. It is a free read - you can find it online, at places like Project Gutenberg, There might even be an audiobook version of it there - I dunno. For me though, like Carter's bride, it laid an egg.

Solatium by GS Jennsen

Rating: WARTY!

This seems to have been my month for reading novels which have a title starting with 'S'! This was your standard short teaser introduction to a series which left me unmoved and unimpressed.

The book description for this is dishonest. It says, "Though humanity conquered the very stars, it remained unable to conquer the darkness within." So we’re conquering stars, but "He’d intercepted her as she pilfered a stack of disks from a merchant kiosk" we’re still using disks?

That struck a sour note right there, but I read on because it was so short, and discovered that the next bit of the description, "a young woman who's lost everything but her soul fights to reclaim her life from a violent, sadistic criminal despot" is bullshit too. She does nothing. She's a maiden in distress rescued by a couple of white knights who want to take down her cruel overlord for their own purposes! All she does, essentially, is to get out of their way! They ostensibly use her to get the layout of the building for their assault, but what, they're conquering stars and yet they have no miniature spy drones they can send in there? The telegraphing of the relationship between the girl and one of her saviors is pathetic and I lost all interest in having anything to do with such an unimaginative and predictable series in short order.

ExtraOrdinary by Danielle K Girl

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "Jack text them around ten to say it was going to be a long night." Texted is the word!

"From above comes a drawn out scrapping sound, like someone is hauling a piece of furniture across the room." 'scraping', not 'scrapping'!

"sweeping view of the properties carefully maintained gardens." 'property's' not 'properties'

" 'You can fly.' Ryder cringes at the high pitch of her voice" This is after Ryder has already seen Olessia float down from an upper storey, clearly demonstrating that she can fly.

"I’m going to have a shower and catch an hours sleep before we start thinking about getting you into town, okay?" Hour’s sleep!

This novel was a true disappointment because it began by pressing all the right buttons for me: faking like it was a ghost story and then slyly morphing into something much more interesting, but it quickly pissed me off by having such a limp main character in Ryder, who was a squealy, idiotic, spineless, unappealing, and uninteresting little shit. On top of that, it brought in such a trope manly male character for her that I laughed out loud.

IRL, this guy would have zero interest in a little wet rag of a wuss like Ryder, but you know from the way the author describes him and Ryder's reaction to him that the telegraph message of the day is: these two will be all over each other like white on the Republican party. Barf. I quit reading at that point because I knew exactly where this novel was going and I had no intention of being its traveling companion. I knew just how it would turn out, too. It wasn't going to be sci-fi story I'd begun to root for; it was about to be taken over by a dumb-ass romance between these two jackasses. No thanks!

I found, as unfortunately happens all-too-often in these stories, that Ryder's best friend Sophie was far more enagaging and interesting than Ryder ever could be, and I knew with equal certainty that the author never would give Sophie a fair shake. When that happens in one of my own stories, the main character gets downgraded and I shift the weight of the tale over to this more interesting character from the less engaging one. I don't plan it that way, but my characters are smarter than I am, and I happen to be smart enough to know when to listen to them instead of trying to force my own original idea onto them when they're trying hard to go off in an unexpected, and much more interesting, direction.

Letting them decide how the story goes makes for a much more realistic, original, and natural story than if I'd forced anything on them, or been stubborn about clinging to my original line of thinking. In one story I released not long ago, I even killed-off the person who was to have been one of the two main characters and promoted her best friend into the role, because she was a far more appealing character. I'm sorry this author didn't have the same willingness to toss some things out of the window, but this is what happens when you're hidebound by tradition and dedicatedly writing to trope. I can't commend this at all.

Strays by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "...giving the merest wave of his fingers to thwart off his angry daughter" Thwart off?! No. Find the right word, please!

"I’ll turn the time over to Professor Kaynan" Kaynan? Seriously? Why not just call him Canine? If you're writing a parody, by all means go for the dumb-as snames.

This is Werewolf Academy, book one, and so it's yet another series I won't be reading. Normally I avoid werewolf stories like I do mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, but I like to keep in touch with the various genres, so once in a while I 'make the sacrifice' and read something outside of my comfort zone. Oh how we artistic types pay for our art, don't we? LOL! This one sounded not too awful, which means the book description never ended-up being the subject of one of my 'non-reviews', but even so, I had serious issues with it from the off.

I've never been a fan of vampire and werewolf stories because in general, they're so trope and clichéd, and profoundly stupid, but I've read one or two here and there. Or tried to. The thing about this one that bothered me is that it's set in an academy - a high school for werewolves - and it makes me wonder why writers of these novels are so uninventive and so bound by convention.

The problem with this kind of a story as I see it, is that it's supposed to be about an alien lifeform in effect: a werewolf, yet the story is exactly the same as it would have been had it been about a regular academy, and regular humans, with no supernatural input whatsoever. You could have removed the werewolf element and told the exact same story. So why even introduce werewolves if you're not really going to go there?

It's the same characters who think and talk just like regular high-schoolers, never mind that they're all werewolves. There are the same conventions and the same high school tropes. Obviously you can't make it so alien that a reader can't begin relate to the characters, but you'd think that somewhere along the way, the author might want to stretch and put in something a bit alien, a bit supernatural, yet they never do. Particularly not this one.

There's no 'wolf' in this story at all. It's all human all the way. Oh yes, there's a token nod and a wink to 'wolf cutlure' but that's entirely confined to pack mentality, as though werewolves are exactly like wolves, and not some alien form or some combo of human and wolf. The school, contrary to what the story yaps on about family, isn't the pack.

Instead there are twelve packs in the school, and rather than follow the school teachings about all working together for the good of werewolves, there's an appalling rivalry between them, along with cliché bullying, none of which is restrained by the teaching staff. In short it's pathetic and right down there with the worst examples of a typically bad high-school story. At one point, there's a fight scene stolen straight out of that execrable Divergent garbage, again with the flimsiest of justification. It's really atrocious.

The characters are exactly like regular humans at all times, even when hunting down a slightly lame deer and brutally slaughtering it, and then trying to justify this appalling cruelty by claiming the deer would never have survived the winter. What? Why? becuase it coudlntl hunt game? Deer dontl hunt, moron! They eat bark and whatever else they can find. A slight lameness isn't a problem. And who are they to judge that? Maybe it was a weredeer! LOL! The fuckwit 'justifcation' was laughable, and that's when I quit reading this rancid pile of entrails because it was so badly-written.

This story failed in many ways, but primarily because it's eactly like all other such stories. There's nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing even remotely different to every other werewolf story ever told. So why read it?! In other genres, we have vampires that behave exactly like humans, or in another, we have ghosts that behave just like regular people. I even read a plot for one ghost story that was a murder mystery where someone was going around killing ghosts. I'm like, wait a minute, aren't ghosts already dead? What's that all about? LOL!

It's a bit ridiculous. As I said, there's nothing alien or supernatural about the people on this story, so why even make the characters werewolves at all? It wasn't worth any more of my time, especially since I was then able to quickly move on and find two books in succession that truly were worth reading. I would not have done this had I forced myself to continue reading something that was boring and cringe-worthy.

The Making of Riley Paige by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This book is in three volumes, and I believe I got the first one as a freebie - the intention being to lure you into to buying the other two, but that ain't gonna happen, not given how poorly-written this first volume ("Watching") was. This marks the third Blake Pierce I've read and they've all been bad.

The story is of a serial killer on a college campus, and this girl who is not named Riley Paige, but Riley Sweeney, is having insights into the killer's mind. There is another series by the same author about this same character, but later in her life, so I'm guessing this is a prequel, and in the later series, Riley apparently married this guy she met in college, whose last name is Paige. But as I said, the problem with the book is that it's badly-written. At one point in the story, Riley is talking with her roommate who is named Trudy, about a girl named Rhea, who was murdered in the dorm, but a couple of times in that conversation, the author mistakenly calls Trudy 'Rhea' - like Riley is talking with the dead girl! There are several other such gaffes, such as where the author says "a voice for the grave" rather than 'a voice from the grave'. The quality of the editing is non-existent. I know as authors we all screw uo now and then, but this one seems like they're not even trying.

The real problem with it is that it feels so amateur in how it's written, and in order to tell the story, the author is having Riley do stuff that makes her look like a dumb-ass at times. For example, there's a killer on the loose, preying on female students. He evidently has the gift of the gab, and is suave enough for them to feel safe inviting him back to their room, but at a party, Riley invites this one guy she barely knows to her room without even thinking for a minute he might be the killer. He isn't as it turns out, but that was a stupid thing for her to do. The guy tries to rape her, but since she recently learned some self-defense moves, she magically overpowers him despite him also being trained in self-defense - he was in her class - and being bigger and stronger than her! It's badly-written.

It gets worse though! She finds this pocket knife in the guy's pants, and she doesn't think for a second about taking it out and handling it, and when she hands it to the police, they have no problem handling it either! There's no concern at all about wearing gloves, or about fingerprints or contamination, or evidence bags or chain of custody! It's amateur!

Riley takes this guy Ryan to bed with her on their first date when she barely knows him, and there's no mention of sexual history or condom use let alone any concern on her part that he might be the killer. Yes, we know she's going to marry him because this is a prequel, but she doesn't know that! More on this ridiculous relationship later.

After her own roommate is murdered, Riley is taken by this FBI guy who is now on the case down to the police station to watch an interrogation of a suspect, so she can share her insights with the FBI about whether she thinks he did it! After that, despite her being in shock earlier, and despite it being her roommate who was murdered, and despite her having no place to go since her room is a crime scene, no one offers to drive her anywhere or asks her if she'll be okay. They just let her walk out without taking a statement from her or anything! The author obviously did this so this guy Ryan could come pick her up, but it's stupid, and very poorly written.

From the start, and since we know it wasn't Ryan, it looked to me like the killer is one of two college professors. I suspected this from early on, but it makes absolutely no sense. At one point Riley has this insight that the killer was hanging out outside the bar where Rhea was partying the night she was killed, Riley felt that this guy started talking to her and Rhea invited him back to her dorm room! If it had been a fellow student, no one would have given it a second thought, but to claim that no one noticed an older man - a college professor who would have been recognized - hanging outside the bar where students gather, and walking and talking with Rhea or going back to her dorm? It made zero sense!

When Riley finally, belatedly, gets onto the idea that it was a college professor (so much for her brilliant insights), she goes to the library to check on something she read in a book that one of these two professors had written about the criminal mind, and she sees one of her professors at a computer terminal in the library. He greets her not as Riley Sweeney but as "Riley Paige!"! LOL! Badly written. After consulting this book, she decides she should call that same professor she just saw, and talk to him about her thoughts. Never once does she think to check the computer terminal where she'd just seen him! It's like she forgot she'd seen him only minutes before, and she immediately goes to a payphone to call him where she finds him in his office! Again, badly-written.

The weird thing is that when she's seeking him out, she asks herself, "But who else did she have to talk to about this?" - well duhh! The FBI agent who's all but recruited you! Again, badly written. What I suspect happened here is that the professor she saw in the library was actually the other professor, and not the one she phones and later meets, who happens to be the murderer. Again it was a writing screw up.

The saddest thing about the purported genius Riley-with-the-magical-insights is that she continually and persistently gets it wrong who the murder is! We, the readers, have known virtually from the start because the story is so badly-written, but Riley doesn't learn until she's trapped in a locked room with him. Even then she's still on the wrong track and the professor has to declare hismelf as the killer! That's how bad she is - and she has to be rescued by the FBI agent who conveniently has been tailing her all day hoping she will lead him to the killer! What?! Because that's with the FBI does - follow a flaky girl around, hoping desperately for a break in the case instead of going steadily through the evidence and eliminating or adding suspects until they finally nail the right one. Yup!

Finally: how do we know Riley has been having unprotected sex with Ryan? Well, he gets her pregnant. Yet more evidence of how profoundly stupid this woman is. But what evidence is there that there's anything else to do in this to do in this town, but party? Riley almost never goes to any classes during this story. She never studies. She has no job. She has no hobbies or pursuits. She's a senior, and she does nothing but party and agonize over who the killer is.

Oh and finding out she's pregnant long before it would show - because she has nausea. Not because she has some feminine insight, but nausea. Yeah. This novel is nauseatingly bad. So when Ryan shows up out of the blue at her graduation - where she's still wearing a neck brace because this novel is mind bogglingly telescoped - and he essentially proposes marriage, she's all on board even though she barely knows him, and the last time she was with him, things went badly and they broke up. This novel is shit. Honestly. Garbage. I condemn it. I have no interest in reading any more about Riley Sweeney-Paige or anything else from this author. Three strikes and you're out Blake Pierce!

The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

Rating: WARTY!

Another book about a bookshop. Yawn. I'd turn this down just from the title, but the plot is a definite killer of interest: "When schoolteacher Miranda inherits her late uncle's run-down bookshop, she learns he's hidden a series of clues within the store - and begins unraveling a tragic family mystery." Why does her chickenshit uncle hide the clues instead of coming out with it? So the perp can get away with whatever it was they did?

The Girl Who Came Back by Kerry Wilkinson

Rating: WARTY!

The author is described by The Sun newspaper as a "crime-writing colossus." He's so big I've never heard of him. The story is that "Six-year-old Olivia Adams vanished from her own back garden. Thirteen years later, she returns. But is this the real missing child… or an impostor?" Check her DNA. There. I solved it. You're welcome. Yawn.

Beachside Beginnings by Sheila Roberts

Rating: WARTY!

"After fleeing her abusive past, can Moira find a fresh start in Moonlight Harbor — without getting her heart broken?" My guess is yes, as another female author creates another weak and chickenshit female character. Why do women abuse women in this consistent and repugnant manner?

Knight Life by Peter David

Rating: WARTY!

Publisher's Weekly calls this reimagining of King Arthur’s story a “hilarious romp." I guess that tells me all I kneed to know about Publisher's Weekly, going forward. The story sounds stupid to me, and completely senseless. The idea is that "After disappearing from Avalon, King Arthur returns - and is running for mayor of New York City! Reuniting with his friends and trusty advisor Merlin, Arthur prepares to stand his ground as familiar dark forces threaten his campaign"

Why? Why New York and in what world would New Yorkers elect an Englishman as mayor? It's just stupid from the very concept onward, and since Merlin and Arthur were not actually contemporary (except in later fiction, the idea of them working together is nonsensical. Set in the USA, and written by an American writer, look for this to bear zero relationship whatsoever to any legend of Arthur.

Beta Bots by Ava Lock

Rating: WARTY!

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

This book represented a prime reason why I do not like series. I loved Alpha Bots - the first in this series - and quickly I glommed onto the sequel thinking it would be as much fun as the original was, but the sorry truth is that it was the polar opposite, and I DNF'd it due to the complete lack of humor and the appalling violence which hit hard and was totally unnecessary, and it came right up front. It was such a contrast to what I'd experienced in the first volume that it felt like a whole different story. I quickly decided that this was not for me. I guess I should have known that a series titled "The Womanoid Diaries" couldn't be good - not all the way through.

In the words of Chrissie Hynde, who was no pretender: don't get me wrong! One of the reasons I dislike series is that they're essentially cookie-cutter repeats of the original, which often is merely a prologue. I don't do prologues. Where is a series to go? It's the same characters often facing the same issues and it's boring, and it's lazy writing.

I like very few series and the ones I tend to like are ones that maintain a freshness throughout: enough of what I liked in volume one to keep my interest, but a different sort of story. Very few writers can nail that consistently. Thus you might think I'd go for this sequel here because it is so different from the original, but for me it was too different and not in any good way.

Yes, there was violence in the first volume too, but the story eased into it and it felt natural in the context of the fiction: the victims were 'deserving' and main character Cookie was completely adorable throughout - even heroic. I did not like her one bit in this second volume. She was a different person altogether. I decided I did not want to read any more about someone who had essentially changed from being an original, engrossing, assertive, and fun character, and morphed into a psychotic serial murder. No thanks.

The writing seemed lacking, too. It didn't have the same 'oomph' in this volume. It felt tired and clichéd and had lost its sparkle. One thing I noticed just in my relatively short read was this: "With Tabitha's knife in hand, I hid in his blind spot and waited on the gunnel for him." The author doesn't seem to grasp that the gunwale (pronounced 'gunnel') isn't the deck - it's the part of the ship's hull that surrounds the deck - the part that the passengers traditionally lean on when the ship is departing and they're waving to those on the dock. If Cookie were standing on the gunwale she'd be particularly visible, not hiding! It's not a story killer, but that wasn't the problem.

The violence in the second volume was not remotely defensible, not even in the context of this fiction. So what if these were Russian SWAT team? That makes them acceptable victims of the Mansonian violence that Cookie perpetrates, none of which was actually necessary? Cookie had been quite happily avoiding surveillance under the river, but somehow, I guess, these people had tracked her. How, I do not know, but instead of simply going back underwater and avoiding them, Cookie decides to single-handedly take out the entire squad. And not to dinner.

Where she hoped to go with that approach, I don't know. What - these were the only police in the entire city of Moscow and after she kills them she's scot-free?! It felt like the author was trying to emulate a male writer instead of being herself as she was in volume one. There's a reason I read more female writers than male and for me, this author undermined that reason with this writing. Being a strong female character doesn't mean you're a hard-bitten man with tits. I'm sorry for those who've been misinformed on this score, but it doesn't.

The other problem with this 'opening scene' was Cookie's sexual attraction to the lone woman on the boat that she eventually climbed onto, out of the river. It felt predatory - like badly-written male-authored exploitation novel. Cookie is supposedly pining for the fact that her one true love, Wayne, from the first novel, has been taken prisoner. She's mentally tired and down, and is now facing the threat posed by the encroaching SWAT team, yet Cookie is thinking only of how hot the 'chick' on the boat looks. No. Just no.

And what about that with Wayne being captured? Cookie abandoned him! Yes, he told her to go, but is Cookie no longer a strong, independent character? Has she no agency? Can she no longer make her own tactical decisions like she did in volume one? Is she now enslaved to Wayne like she had been to 'Normie' at the beginning of the original novel? This approach cheapens and demeans her. It's a backward step that undermines everything she achieved in the first volume.

The macho slant in this novel made for truly unattractive, unnecessary, and sadly unpleasant reading and seemed to me to betray the whole raison d'être of the first novel. It turned me right off Cookie and by extension, the story she was telling, and I couldn't bring myself to even finish that one part, let alone read further. I can't commend this based on what I read, because it's the very antithesis of what I expected and not in any good way.

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damaged by Becca Vincenza

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't realize this was a werewolf story or I would have avoided it like the plague. Werewolf stories are marginally more stupid than vampire stories, and I gave up on this one in short order. Once in a while there's a truly rare one that's worth reading, but those are so scarce that I wonder sometimes if it's just a folktale. This had initially sounded interesting from the blurb, but we all know how misleading those are, don't we? (For detials see my 'non-review' reviews!)

The quality of the writing did not help. I read things like, "looked like she sleeping." I read, "released my grip on her bicep." This is a common failing in YA novels, most of which seem these days to have been written by people for whom English is a despised second language as judged by how poorly it's used. It's biceps, moron. I read, "He didn’t say anything more as the doors opened. The doors chimed and parted as the elevator came to a halt" Twice, really? And the doors chimed? Really?

I should have listened to my gut, which was sickened by the words in the description: "Stone is determined to protect her" when juxtaposed with the cover illustration which shows him - a figure of authority and power in her life - getting jiggy with her. Yeah. How's that protection working, Stone? Or does protection to you mean wearing a condom while you take advantage of a scared and weakened woman who has been broken down into complete compliance through torture? Stone is an asshole. And this is evidently yet another female YA author who apparently detests her own gender.

This novel rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I no longer buy novels that are first person if I can avoid it, and I deliberately ditched the remainder of my first person print books unread because I am so sick of first person voice. Unfortunately I still have a few in my ebook collection acquired a while ago and which occasionally bubble to the top of my never-ending reading list. I'm trying to delete those, too. The problem with this book is that it's dual-first person, which is inevitably twice as bad, and it’s clear from the mind-numbingly telegraphed beginning that these two are an item. Because of course you cannot have a novel where a woman takes care of herself. She has to have a guy to rescue and validate her. It’s the law. Barf.

I'm not against romance in a novel, but it has to feel natural and organic to me. Any hint of artificiality or of forcing it, and I am bored and irritated simultaneously. That was the problem here as these two characters, Audrey and Stone (why does she get a first name and he a last name?!) were essentially in love from their first glance. Yuk. Audrey is an individual who is somehow enhanced and therefore, shades of X-men, a pariah. Stone is a military guy. I should have decided firmly against this as soon as I read, "There is much more to Audrey than meets the eye and Stone is determined to protect her." But like I fool I started reading anyway and got turned completely off this after only a chapter or two.

The ebook version of this has some issues. Normally I do not see such issues in the Nook version of a novel. Those are usually good and it’s the Kindle version that slices and dices any text that's not plain vanilla. I read one part where the start of the sentence is fine: "While he spoke, I felt" but then the next few words were in really small text "the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll," and the last part of the sentence was in regular-sized text again: "but I didn’t open my eyes." Weird! The writign was too.

But as far as the story is concerned, I can’t commend it based on what I read of it.

Luna caged: Behind the Wall by Margaret McHeyer

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this pretty quickly. I knew going in that it was first person which I typically despise, but once in a while there's a good one comes along that's intelligently written and well-told. That's not this one. This one was tedious and boring, and I ditched it pretty quickly - I think right at the point where the narrator tells us that it's believed that outside the wall it's deadly to life, and then describes a bird flying over the wall - from the outside. Clearly if birds fly in and out unharmed, the lie that it's dangerous out there is exposed, yet this narrator is too stupid to put that two and two together. Sorry, but I do not need to read about stupid people narrating their own stupid stories. We get enough of that in the federal legislature. I just need to read about some of the Republican women in Congress and the Senate to get all the stupid females I can stand.

Dumb writing did not help this story one bit, but it is what I expect from YA novels these days. At one point, I read, "...and dark, black hair void of any color" Say what?! Black is dark. It's also arguably a color. Wouldn't devoid of any color be more like gray than black? (Even though gray is also a color). There were also renderign oissues. I read:

I felt (in regular regular font) the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll, (in tiny font) but I (back to regular font)

Next came these in quick succession: "dead eye on the left side of her face," "Her vacant, scared eyes lingered on me," and "Her pupils dilated." That sounds quite contradictory to me.!

Worse, this is one of those stories where everyone inside the wall is depicted as being of one mindset. There are no dissenters, no protests, no rebellions, no conspiracy theories, because every single person believes exactly the same things. BULLSHIT. This kind of writing is amateur, pathetic, and completely inauthentic. And far too common in dystopian YA novels. That's why I gave this novel such short shrift because I've read it countless times before. The same novel. Only the names have been changed. YA means young adult - these are the very people who are supposed to rebel and hold radical ideas and to challenge authority and this almost never happens in these stories - that's how out of touch with reality their authors are and why they make their characters so uninteresting and conforming.

Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T Anderson

Rating: WARTY!

Tell me, Mr. Anderson: what good is a book if you're unable to write one?

The book description for this religious diatribe tells you all you need to know about the non-content of this LGBTQIA 'Hate-Moment'.  It begins by asking: "Can a boy be 'trapped' in a girl’s body?"  The short anser is 'yes', and vice-versa.  Gender is not binary,  it never has been.  It's a sliding scale, no matter what in-denial and i;;l-informed wannabe writers like Mr Anderson claim.

Mr Anderson, bigotry and hate speech are a disease; a cancer of this planet. LGBTQIA haters are a plague, and common-sense, science, and tolerance are the cure.

"Can modern medicine 'reassign'sex?" the description asked.  Yes it can. Hundreds of people are living proof.

I'm going to enjoy watching this book die, Mr. Anderson.

"Is our sex 'assigned' to us in the first place?"  No, it isn't.  There are chemical changes necessary in the body and these can start and stop anywhere along the scale.  The penis is nothing more than a repurposed clitoris.  A fetus is not conceived either with a penis or with a vagina.  Those organs grow, cued by genetics and hormones, and they stop when they're done regardless of whether they leave behind a perceived 'binary' female, a perceived 'binary' male, or something anywhere in between the two. if this is wrong, how does Mr Anderson account for true intersexed individuals? That's the 'I' in LGBTQIA for religious bigots.

"What is the most loving response to a person experiencing a conflicted sense of gender?" Mr Anderson may ask, and the correct answer to that is to take them at their true value, not at some arbitrary value religious zealots insist upon imposing.  Anderson fails dismally here.  He, and other religious zealots like him, would never have taken the Samaritan's route across the street.  They would never go the extra mile.  They would never give their shirt.  In short, they reject the entire New Testament and insist on the Old instead.

"What should our law say on matters of 'gender identity'?"  What does the fourth amendment say, Mr Anderson?  Let me help you out: it says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons...shall not be violated."  Why does he want to overturn that by telling people what gender they are despite all evidence to the contrary?

The description claims that the book "provides thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment."  It doesn't.  It's not a moment. It's a momentum and those who try to hamper it will be pushed aside by it.  The asshole bias in the very book description proves that this work of juvenile fiction isn't balanced.  On the contrary, it's unbalanced, and cherry-picking a scattering of instances where gender reassignment or related situations seem not to have had perfect outcomes ignores the literal thousands of such issues where the outcomes are not regretted and not in question.

"Drawing on the best insights from biology, psychology, and philosophy" it waffles. Who gives a fuck about philosphy?  And what best insights?  This biased, spittle-soaked, apoplectic rant doesn't draw on the best insights, it draws on cherry-picked blinkered claims that support nothing except the author's pre-ordained and bigotted world-view. The best insights from medical experts and from the transgender community itself are completely ingored.

"Ryan Anderson offers a nuanced view of human embodiment"  Nuanced?  Really? That sound you just heard was my ass falling off from my laughing so hard.

"Everyone has something at stake in the controversies over transgender ideology" - yeah - everyone who has a religious stake.  Which part of "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" isn't clear to the author?  He's entitled to practice his beliefs. He is not entitled to force them upon others.

I'm not a fan of Amazon; far from  it, but what these religious assholes don't seem to be able to get through their thick skulls is that Amazon is a private business.  They can choose to publish or not even on a whim, and hate speech is not a whim.

You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your inconsequence. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.

When Wishes Bleed by Casey L Bond

Rating: WARTY!

"When Sable reads Prince Tauren’s fortune, an omen reveals his deadly fate… Can she change it by joining the competition to become his queen?" Why would she care what happens to him when he treats romance with such callous indifference? He holds it in such disdain that he runs a lottery to find someone to inseminate and bear his offspring? And Sable? really? That means soft, exotic fur. Tauren probably means bull. Could an author make it any more bald than that? Or balled?

This exact story has been told a gazillion times already. There's nothing original left to say. All an author can do here is really to just retread the plots of countless others who've gone before, and this author evidently isn't even trying to be different! We're told that New York Times bestselling author Jennifer L Armentrout finds this "The perfect mix of magic, danger, death, and love." I've never heard of her. I have no idea who she is! Why would I give a shit even if she really does think this is "Bewitching"?!