Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta

Rating: WARTY!

I think it's time to take a vow never to read another novel which has a character's name in the title, and never to read another novel with the word 'saving' in the title! This means that Saving Francesca is a double no, or a no-no for short!

Initially, I thought that all the women in Francesca's family carried the 'a' suffix to pigeon-hole them as female: her mom is Mia, her kid sister Luca. Only the male has a rugged name: Bob. I was right about that last one, but wrong about Luca. It turned out hat she was a he! The thing is though, that the alpha (there's that 'a' again) male in the family is Mia. She's evidently maintained this position until she has a break-down at the start of this story, which sets the family adrift for reason which aren't well explained.

There was nothing in this story, no in the portion that I managed to stomach, to place it time-wise. It seemed like it was from last century as judged by the attitudes and schooling system, but other than that it could have been set today. Francesca attended St. Stella's, but that school has no year eleven or twelve, so she had to transfer to St Sebastian's, and thus we have the trope of a new kid in school. The trope of her being alone is enhanced by the fact that this is a boys school which has just opened itself up to co-ed. The level of misogyny here is truly startling, and the fact that no one seems to find it appalling is what made me think that the story is historical. I'd hate to think that Australian education system is this anachronistic; then again, maybe it's a sly comment on the Catholic church, which has been misogynistic since its inception, what with Eve being the downfall of mankind, you know.

All Francesca's friends now attend a school to which Mia refused to send Francesca under the belief that the other school would limit her options. As is typical with this kind of blinkered story, not only have her friends gone to a different school, they've also apparently gone to a different planet, or been expunged from history because there seems to be no way she can maintain contact with them - neither by text nor by phone call, neither by email nor by taking a walk over to their house. This is truly a blind and pathetic way to start a story. It's not remotely realistic.

But then this novel was one of caricatures. The boys are all stereotypical obnoxious boys no matter who they are or what their age. Francesca's friends are caricatures, too; one of them, Tina, is a 'feminist' so we're told, but she sounds far more like a radical communist than ever she does a feminist, and completely anachronistic to boot. Francesca herself is so emotional that she comes across more as a twelve-year-old than ever she does as someone in the latter half of her teens. She has a male love interest who she naturally detests at first sight, which confirms with a crystal clarity that she will be in love with him in short order an that this novel would be hide-bound by cliché and trope. Barf. Trite? They name is Melina Marchetta (there are those suffixes again!).

I couldn't continue reading this and I can't recommend it based on what I did read. This novel merely conformed my growing conviction that traditional publishers (like book award committees) pin the names of novel submissions (or nominations) to a large wall, blindfold themselves, and randomly toss darts at the wall. The novel titles which managed to garner for themselves a dart which sticks are the ones which are published (or awarded a medal) and the rest are recycled as material with which to stuff dartboards.

Billy and the Devil by Dean Lilleyman

Rating: WARTY!

Set in England and making absolutely no concessions to mid-Atlanticism (be warned!), this novel begins in early April 1967 as judged by the references to Sandie Shaw winning the Eurovision Song Contest, which was held on April 8th that year, and is about a human disaster zone. The structure of the novel is rather experimental, and is odd because it has a prologue, which I skipped. I don't do prologues. To me, if it's important enough to include, it's important enough to include in chapter one (or later), and this is why it's odd, because the novel has another prologue in chapter one! I read this one; it's where teenage post-partum Jean decides she's keeping baby Billy but wants nothing to do with his father. Chapter two jumps to first person PoV which I don't like. In this case it wasn't obnoxious to begin with, but became so as the story regressed. This shifting structure of the novel served only to remind me that this was indeed a novel I was reading. It kept me from becoming truly immersed in it and that, amongst other things, became a problem for me in enjoying it.

On the positive side, chapter two is set in Chesterfield, city of the crooked spire and home of a League One soccer team. Chesterfield is only ten miles from my home town and I know it well, so this story began to resonate with me. It reminded me of my own youth and some experiences I'd had. I never was an addict, unless you count movies and books, but I knew dead-end people like this, and dead-end places like these. It's in this town where we meet the baby which Jean decided not to give up. Now he's a young boy, and the saddest thing is that he's already on a downhill ride, walled-in on one side by his past, and on the other by a largely incapable and/or uncaring present, so that when he reached his early teens, even though life had improved immeasurably, the rot had already gone too far to be remedied.

The problem was that this was the last time I felt bad for him, because the story then dropped into a numbingly repetitive rut, of which I became both increasingly aware and deadened by, as I reached the mid-point. Some of it was highly entertaining, whereas other parts - too many other parts - were truly tedious to read - so much so that I began skipping sections because it was not only boring, but consisted of whole paragraphs of poorly punctuated, block caps infested, run-on text that was hard to read and make sense of. It felt as though not only had Billy given up caring, the author had, too. The structure changed often, sometimes reading like a regular novel, other times like hastily jotted notes for a chapter which were then never followed-up on, and left as is. Some parts read like a play, such the Punch and Judy chapter, which I found cruel but funny, and very much in the vein of the real Punch and Judy puppet shows that used to be popular but are now largely forgotten, but there were far too few chapters like that.

For me, though, the biggest problem was that it felt more and more like the author was saying, "Hey, look at me! How clever and inventive, and crazy am I?" It felt less and less like there had been a real motivation to tell a coherent and engrossing story about Billy, and it was more like a leering gross-out story about Billy, and not even told, but rambled almost incoherently. One or two times reading about how drunk he got and how much he vomited and urinated and so on were fine, but when we get detailed descriptions every time, it became uninteresting - and uninventive. It was the same with his interactions with various women who seemed to be unaccountably attracted to him no matter how unappealing he was. The bottom line is that we really never got any closer to him than they did. He was all about antagonism, acting out, and obsessive self-importance, and the vaguely likable character we met at the start was drowned in alcohol. I understand that this is how it can be with addiction, but it felt to me that there are better ways of relating a tragedy like this than deliberately pushing the reader away. And there are ways to make it seem realistic. This method failed for me.

On that note, I found myself thinking, if this guy came up to me somewhere, and started telling me this story, just like it's written here, would I be interested? Would I care? Would I listen? And the answer was "No!" I'd be making excuses and leaving because there's no human interest there to hold me, and it's largely incoherent anyway! It's just a litany of villainy, so why read a book that's exactly like that? In the end, Billy is just a spoiled brat, a veneer of a human who has no redeeming, educational, or appealing value, and who offers us no access to him whatsoever. While I agree there are people like this in real life, whose stories, told less tediously in a documentary, can be compelling, to find such a character in a novel and to be forced to spend time listening to his mindless, drunken ranting, and his selfish acting-out, and to see the countless people, including family, he trashed and left in his wake like so much jetsam, was neither an endearing nor an engaging proposition.

I was actually much more interested in those other people - his family, his children, his friends, the women he felt-up and discarded - than ever I was in Billy himself! What were their lives like? How did they view him? What was their aftermath? Did the fiancée ever get back in her fiancé's good graces? We were offered no chance to learn anything of them, so not only was Billy a selfish, boorish oaf, the novel itself felt equally selfish and boorish, focusing far too much on him and the damage he did to himself, and not at all on the "collateral" damage. It was as though none of that was remotely important, and this grated on me and made me resentful towards Billy rather than try to find some way to empathize or uncover some level of understanding, and it made me cruelly wish that his story was over in one way or another.

Overall, it was like watching a really slow-motion train-wreck, and while the wreck at regular speed is dramatic and gripping, and holds a deep human interest, when you slow it way down to snail speed, so that it hardly moves, it becomes emotionally unmoving, too. No one wants to follow that because there's nothing to follow! No matter how tragic it actually is, it's meaningless at a microscopic level and pointless to try to view it through such a lens. I can't recommend this novel. based on the sixty percent or so that I managed to get through. I should advise, too, that this novel was so English - and midlands English, too - that you really have to have been there to get it, otherwise the jargon and slang will be as much over your head as a beer bottle tossed callously from a football train.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

Rating: WARTY!

Read a bit tediously by Paul Boehmer, this novel focuses on bonobos, a great ape species which is very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, very different in others. All of the major great ape species have been taught to communicate in American Sign Language, from Koko the gorilla, to Kanzi the Bonobo, to Chantek the Orangutan. Apes are not the only species with which we’ve communicated. These studies cross a wide range. There are not only chimpanzees, but also elephants, dolphins, and parrots, and dolphins. Although there is controversy around these studies, and even around the study directors, it’s definitely fair to say that animals are way more complex than most humans have typically been willing to credit, and some of them have very advanced intelligence, experiencing emotions as humans do.

In the novel, fictional character Isabel Duncan works with Bonobos and language. She becomes the subject of a newspaper story researched by John Thigpen and two other people from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who visit her one New Year's Day to discuss the Bonobos she works with: Bonzi, Jelani, Lola, Makena, Mbongo , and Sam. Boehmer reads these oddly, and I can’t be sure if this is how the author told him they were pronounced, or if he's making it up and getting it wrong. He pronounces Bonzi as Bon-Zee rather than as Bonsy, and Mbongo as Muh-bongo rather than Um-bongo.

It would be nice to know how they’re supposed to be pronounced and an audio book is the perfect way to do this. Print books and ebooks fail in this regard unless they have a pronunciation guide. It would have also been nice to know what the more obscure names meant, too. All names used to actually mean something, and we’ve lost that. Now people pick names for how they sound, or to honor a relative or a celebrity rather than for how they apply to the child and what they mean. When I come up with character names, I really give some thought to how they should portray the character, and in some books, the names are clues to the characters character or fate - if you can only figure them out! I had particular fun with this in Saurus, one of my favorites.

This story really takes off when there's an explosion at the lab, and the apes end up in a reality TV show. Isabel discovers that in order to fix this, she has to find a way to connect better with humans - something she's not very skilled at. This fictional character seems to be based loosely on the real life, controversial ape language researcher, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. One of the interesting things about these studies, and about great ape research in the wild, is that the big names associated with it always seem to be female. The three best-known names in great ape studies in the wild were women tasked by Louis Leakey to study these apes in the hope that it would throw light on early hominid development, and it has, but these women were also controversial. The best known of them is probably Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, but almost equally well known was Dian Fossey who studied gorillas and was murdered by gorilla poachers. Much less well known is Birute Galdikas who studied orangutans. The books these three wrote are well-worth reading, as is Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal if you want to learn more.

The author, Sara Gruen, studied American Sign language and the symbolic lexigram language the apes use so that she could better understand the bonobos she visited at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where Kanzi lives. Clearly the author may be writing fiction, even fanciful fiction, but it is grounded in her own personal experiences with real apes. My problem with her writing, however, had to do with how the university responded to the bombing of the lab. It was like they couldn't wash their hands of the apes and of Isabel fast enough, and this seemed completely unrealistic to me. They were, in effect, siding with the terrorists. Never once did they try to correct the insane mis-perception of the purpose of the "lab" - which was language studies, not animal experimentation.

You would think they would be very much concerned about putting their best face before the public, and they didn’t even have to lie about it, yet they failed on an epic level. Never once did they consult with Isabel about the apes' future. I get that the university effectively owned the apes and it was their decision, but I find it hard to believe that any university worth its name would behave so callously and precipitously. I also get that this is a dramatic fiction, but it seemed to me that there were better ways to set this up than to make the university leadership look like spineless jerks. Maybe the author hates universities!

The lot was plodding and predictable, but the worst fail for me, however, was the fact that The main story - about the apes - was repeatedly sidelined by a boring domestic trivia story going on between the other main character, John Thigpen, and his wife Amanda. I could see the author desperately wanted to get John and Isabel together, but why? Why not just make John single? Why include John at all, and thereby make Isabel merely another maiden-in-distress, needing to be rescued by Saint John, a knight in shining armor? It made no sense to me to take the drama away from the apes, and it was yet another insult by a female writer to a female main character.

From a purely narrative PoV, it was really annoying to have to abandon the main story to go off into this boring drama over whether this couple would stay together or over Amanda's and John's spinelessness when confronted with Amanda's domineering and interfering mother. It didn’t even instill any confidence in me that an invertebrate like John could be a heroic man of action when he was such a wallflower, or that he was even heroic at all if he was going to abandon his wife at he drop of an ape. Maybe I got his wrong - as I said, I didn't finish this novel, so maybe it panned out differently; however, it felt like the road most traveled and that's the road least interesting to me, but it was this negation of both Isabel and the apes which was what truly killed this story. I could not finish it, and I cannot recommend it based on what I heard. I haven'tread anything else by this author and now I have no intention of doing so.

Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is probably a rule of thumb: never read a book about drugs or prison written by an author whose name starts with 'Piper'. I had a negative impression of this author right from the off. The story is about her stupidity and blindness to reality when she was a spoiled-rotten college grad. She had no clue what to do with her life and evidently had no intention whatsoever of contributing anything to society, so she started living off an older woman named 'Norah'.

Norah is evidently a lesbian, but we learn virtually nothing of her, or of the nature of the author's relationship with her. Some reviewers have assumed this was a failing of the author in not fully fleshing-out the people she interacts with, but my own impression was that Kerman was so shallow that she never actually got to know these people sufficiently-well, beyond a flimsy façade of friendship that is, so she actually was incapable of fleshing them out.

One thing which does come off clear as crystal is how self-centered and callous this older woman is, yet Kerman never learns this, not even when she flies to Paris, expecting to find a ticket to Bali which was supposed to have been left for her by Norah. Kerman doesn't wise up and return to the US. Instead, she calls an acquaintance of Norah's and freeloads off him to continue on the Bali, not even thinking for a minute that Norah might not even be there. That's where I got my impression of clueless from.

So she led this highly privileged life, knowing it was financed by drug money, and never once had qualms about it or about the company she was keeping. She graduates into running drug money around herself, and then ten years pass and her past catches up with her - Norah sold her out. Even so, she gets off lightly - or whitely, might be more appropriate. She gets a mere fifteen months. This is what her life of luxury cost her - and what a bargain it was! She becomes inmate #11187-424 and apparently has a blast. Then she writes a novel about it and gets rich from it. Meanwhile all those people who didn't go the criminal route get nothing but their good name.

The blurb describes the novel as "...at times enraging..." and I can see why it would be. It also says, "Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison" but that's a lie. All it offers is a narrow blinkered view into the selfish life of a privileged upper class woman in a holiday camp of a prison, and that's it! I can't recommend this audio book based on what I listened to, which was more than enough.

The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton

Rating: WARTY!

erratum: "Young man, would you please some with us?" should read 'come' with us.

The Cracked Spine was an intriguing adult fiction story which I got for advance review purposes. I initially enjoyed it, but as it went on and on, it wore me down and I ended up not liking it, mostly because of the protagonist and the complete lack of rationale for most of her actions. The curious thing about this that there was no blurb available for this novel. It was quite literally a mystery book, and normally I wouldn't pick one up for review without having some idea of what's in it.

This one intrigued me from the cover and the title, and I thought it was a murder mystery set in a book shop. Which person who loves books doesn't like the idea of a novel involving books? Of course not every such novel ends up being even so much as readable let alone lovable. As I began reading this one, it seemed more like some sort of supernatural or sci-fi novel than a murder mystery, but then a murder occurred (and it wasn't in the book shop). In short, it was all over the place.

I failed to grasp the point of bringing the supernatural into the story considering that it played no part in the plot. Additionally, Delaney is supposed to be able to "hear" books speak, and several times we get a hint of her "hearing" a quote from a book - usually Shakespeare - but this made absolutely no sense whatsoever. It played no part in the plot or in resolving the mystery, so I simply didn’t get this at all. It just made her seem in need of some serious psychiatric attention.

So Delaney Nichols is not in Kansas anymore. She's in Edinburgh, Scotland, to take up her new job at The Cracked Spine, an old, small, dusty, disorganized book shop on a narrow street in Edinburgh, Scotland. The shop is odd, but the main character is more odd. She uproots herself from Kansas and flies to start a new job in this obscure little shop in Edinburgh. We're given absolutely no reason whatsoever to justify this flight. Delaney is decidedly odd and not in a good way.

Consider the cataloging system she apparently employs: "It was more than the fact that it might be in the P's for parody. It wouldn't have been that simple, I decided." Who catalogs books by putting them in 'P' for parody? A chain book shop might have a humor section where parody would be, but it would be alphabetized by author. In a disorganized antiquarian shop? And a specific section on parody? No. It was just weird and took me out of my suspension of disbelief for a second or two. A bookstore like this wouldn't have survived with so many employees and so little movement of books. No one actually seems to do any work there.

So ween granting that the owner is old and quirky this cataloging seemed off. It seemed even more off that Delaney would think this way - but then we never do discover why she was hired. The shop itself has too many quirks. On her first brief visit, she meets a young man dressed in Shakespearean costume, who introduces himself as Hamlet. He says he's acting in a local production of Macbeth, although he's too superstitious to use the play's name. Fie on that, say I! Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries "What if Macduff doesn't want you laying on him?" Well, the rest is silence, so let's not paint the lily.

I digress, but there's an on-line source which purports to correct misspoken Shakespeare, and one of the misquotes is from Richard 3.0, where the titular character says, "Now is the winter of our discontent...." He goes on to finish his assertion by adding, "...made glorious summer by this son of York," except that corrections page itself is incorrect in that it says, "sun of York"! I really enjoyed the irony. Shakespeare is often misunderstood because there's been many a year slipped 'twixt bard and modern lip. Even words we still use have changed meaning.

Moreover, they had a different way of speaking four hundred years ago - of pronouncing words, as the Crystals demonstrate at the Globe Theatre. It puts a whole new sense and sensibility on some of the seemingly obscure things he wrote and the rhymes he apparently didn't make. When you pronounce "Nothing" as "Noting", for example, then "Much Ado About Noting" makes sense given how often that last word is used in the introductory scenes, and how important the act of noting events accurately becomes during the rest of the play.

Do I really digress? Not so much, because part of this mystery centers on the location of a Shakespeare first folio - a new one that has been surreptitiously discovered, the existence of which known only to a local cadre of wealthy friends in Edinburgh. The fact that there are many so-called 'first' folios rather robs them of their cardinal precedence, doesn't it? I mean, only one can actually really be the first. The rest are not to be. That is their destiny.

Edwin, the owner of the book shop where Delaney now works, bought this new folio (maybe the last first folio!), and inexplicably left it in the charge of his previously ne'er do well sister, who inexplicably hides it in a place where it’s inexplicably discovered. Now she's been murdered, no one knows where the folio is, nor why she was murdered. Was it an unsavory character from her addled past, or is it someone who was looking for the folio? And why is Edwin hindering the police investigation into his sister's murder by withholding information about it from the police? Was the folio stolen and if so why would his reputation - or preserving hers - be more important than tracking down his sister's killer? None of this makes sense, nor is it explained.

I found it funny that chapter three ended with a 'five' leading into chapter four: "I didn't wake again until my alarm sounded the next morning at five." But that's just me. It felt like a countdown to something wicked this way coming. It wasn't. It would have been hilarious if it could have somehow been continued, but it was not to be. That's the question?!

As you may have gathered, I had some problems with this novel, the first of which was why the main character suddenly started acting like a detective. She knew no one here. She had nothing to prove and no vested interest in any piece of property or person, yet she immediately and suddenly started acting like a private investigator for no reason. She neglected the job she was hired to do, and pursued the case like a pit bull, yet no one says a word about her behavior! Worse than this, she's unaccountably aggressive and rude without having any reason to be so. It just felt wrong. If you're going to have a character do this, then please at least equip her with a rational motivation for out-of-character behavior! Give her something which spurs her into it - don’t just have her running all over for no reason at all!

In general, the writing was very good from a technical perspective, and for the most part it was readable, despite it being first person PoV. Some authors can do that voice without it being nauseating to read, but this created problems for the author, and it shows. When you write like this you can only tell the story from the PoV of the narrator. If something happens elsewhere, she doesn't know about it and we're set forth upon a sea of details, which by depressing, rends us. It lets slip the dogs of "Bah!" It's no better than a flashback or an info-dump which makes me want to shuffle off the awful tome. As it happens I made it to the end, and discovered it to be a total let-down. The plotting was less than satisfying.

One example was when the police came looking for Edwin, the owner of the book shop and the brother of the murder victim, Jenny. Instead of going to his home, where he might reasonably be expected to be - and in fact where he was - the police came to the book shop though there was no reason whatsoever for them to visit it. Another example is when Delaney goes with Hamlet to the police station. There's no reason for her to do this! Indeed, she's supposed to be working, yet off she goes of her own volition, accompanying one of the shop's part time employees - a teenager she barely knows - without so much as a by-your-leash. For me, her behavior turned her into an insufferable busybody, but the take-home lesson from this is that the author forced herself into adopting this unnatural and annoying behavior for her characters because of her choice of first person voice - the most limiting and restrictive voice you can choose. It felt so unnatural that it took me out of the story. Again.

The only explanation for this behavior is nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with Delaney having to witness things in order to derive something from what she sees or hears. The shop visit could have been explained by having the police say he wasn't at home which is why they were there at the shop, but this didn't happen. It was also weird in that when the two police detectives arrive, they turn out to be a chief inspector and an inspector rather than the usual Inspector and sergeant. Why did such a relatively high ranking officer show up on a murder investigation? There's no explanation offered, so what we're left with is the surmise that this is a case of special treatment because rich people were involved, which speaks very badly of the Scots police force. Did the author intend this insult? Who know - maybe they do things differently in Scotland but this seemed odd to me.

There was some genderist phrasing in the novel, too, such as when Delaney encounters the man who is quite obviously destined to be her male interest: Tom from the pub which shares Delaney's name and is across the street from the book shop. "He was beautiful, but in a manly, Scottish kind of way." What exactly does that mean?! A guy can't be beautiful without it being qualified lest it impugn his manliness or imply that he's gay? Scots manliness is different from other varieties of manliness?! I have no idea what it meant, but it felt like an insult.

Personally I'd prefer it if the character wasn't described in such shallow terms at all whether it's male or female, but if you're going to do it, don't insult people further by trying to make 'beautiful' a word inextricably tied to femininity which consequently requires qualifying if it's used elsewhere. It's like saying, "The castle was beautiful, in an impregnable, granitey kind of way...". Consider the inverse: "She was beautiful, but in a feminine, Scottish kind of way." Does that make any better sense? I think it doesn't. I think it sounds like an insult to Scots women.

A big disappointment was that chances to present Delaney as a strong female character seemed to be frittered away, as in when I read: "I'd had an issue with the warm water in my shower, but Elias said he'd fix it...". Immediately we have to go to a guy. What would be wrong with saying the same thing, but letting Delaney fix it: "I'd had an issue with the warm water in my shower, but I figured it out and fixed it." It's just as easy to write and doesn't make your main female character dependent on some guy for no good reason at all. It supports your position of having her figuring out a crime, because she's showing that she's independent and a self-starter. But Delaney really wasn't. She was never in any peril. She was totally dependent upon men throughout the story, and everything magically fell into place for her: a place for her to stay, free transportation whenever she needed it by means of the friendly cabbie trope, everyone being nice and friendly, and helpful. She wasn't quite a Mary Sue (although she was close), but the plot itself definitely was a Mary Sue.

One issue I could definitely relate to was in how much of the Scots accent a writer should convey in the writing. I wrestled with this problem in my own novel Saurus. Fortunately only one of the main characters was Scots in my case, so I didn't have to have everyone speaking like that all the time, but I can sympathize with a writer who does find themselves in such a position. Do we go full-tilt and risk readers becoming annoyed with the constant 'tae' in place of 'to' and so on? Do we start out full-tilt and slowly reduce the incidence, so the reader only has to deal with it for a short time before it becomes embedded and hopefully they won't notice as we reduce or even eliminate it? Do we only put a hint, or do we simply confine ourselves to referring to the accent once in a while, but not actually depicting it by changing spelling? This author went the 'changed spelling' rout and it became a bit tiresome. It was definitely a lesson for me.

In addition to the changed spelling, there are actual words employed, such as 'ken' which means 'knowledge'. It can be equated with 'know'. Ken is actually a verb, and it has tenses, which is what made this sentence wrong: " Edwin certainly ken what he was doing." That's like writing " Edwin certainly know what he was doing." It should have been "Edwin certainly kenned what he was doing," or "Edwin certainly kent what he was doing." These are issues that most people might not notice (or even care about!) unless they're actually Scots, but for a writer, they're worth keeping in mind. Talking of which, I didn't get this sentence: "Dinnae mynd a bit". I don't know how we're expected to pronounced 'mynd' - is it just the same as the regular spelling, 'mind' or is it supposed to be pronounced 'mean-d' or 'mein-d' or something like? If the pronunciation isn't any different, why misspell it? If it is, why not spell it phonetically?

A big concern I had with this novel was over the stereotyping of the Scots. There's a lot of talk in the novel about drinking and whisky and while, in the UK, Scotland does consume more alcohol per capita than the rest of the country, on a global scale, the Scots fare poorly when it comes to consuming whisky: they're beaten by France, Uruguay, the USA, Australia, Spain, and the UAE. In overall alcohol consumption they're eighth in the world, and when it comes to drinking Scotch, they're not even in the top ten! So the stereotype doesn't hold.

In the final analysis, I found I really didn’t like Delaney and had no desire to read more about her in a series. She’s more of an idiot than an investigator. First of all, as I mentioned, there’s no rational reason offered for why (other than being a royal mile of a busybody) she gets involved in any of this. There’s no justification for her repeatedly skipping work to investigate, and it’s completely ridiculous that she appears to be going out of her way to solve the crime on the one hand, whilst at the same time, she’s actively hampering the police investigation on the other by withholding evidence!

She finds important evidence in Jenny’s apartment in form of torn-up bits of paper with writing on it, distributed in several locations, yet she fails to inform Edwin (even though he’s in the apartment when she finds it). She also fails to inform police of this. The resolution of this is, in the end, unimportant, but when it’s explained, it's given to us wrongly! We're told that one (incomplete) section of it reads, "ut tell him I’m so", yet when it becomes clear what this is, there is no word with 'ut' in it.

Delaney outright lies to the police about the existence of the missing first folio, even though Edwin had said it was okay to tell, if the police asked. In short, she’s actively tripping-up the investigation instead of helping it. A nicer resolution to this tale would have been to have her charged with obstructing a police investigation, but she isn’t, I'm sorry to report. If this had been set-up as a situation where we knew one of the police offers was somehow involved, then her behavior would be understandable, but this is never intimated. In short, it felt to me like she’s simply going through actions by rote, adhering to a regimented sequence to which she held tightly regardless of how stupid or silly it made her appear in doing so. I don’t have time for a character like that and I can’t recommend this novel.

In the end I had too many issues with it to give it a positive review. The main character was bordering on being a Mary Sue, but the real Mary Sue, to me, was the plot. There was really nothing troublesome or problematic in it in terms of obstacles the detective had to overcome.

For example, usually in these detective stories the main protagonist has to be put in some danger, but this one never was, and it seemed like everything was falling into her lap. She got a boyfriend pretty much on the first day, although thankfully that was a very minor element. She made friends with the cab driver who picked her up from the airport, and he then not only became the trope friendly cabbie who takes her everywhere for free, but also the means by which she found housing on her second day there.

The worst thing for me, though, was how much of a busybody she was. Despite just arriving and not knowing these people, and having no vested interest in their issues, she jumped right into the case, neglecting her job, and pretty much taking over the entire investigation. She was withholding vital information from the police, and pushing herself, often rudely, into questioning people and chasing down her "leads". She even withheld information from her employer, whose sister had been murdered.

The right ending to this would have been her being charged with obstructing a police investigation! In the end, the resolution was decidedly mundane. I kept seeing references to the supernatural, mainly to ghosts haunting various places, yet never once did that enter into the actual plot or the story as a whole, so I failed to get what the significance of it was. She also claimed that books talked to her - mainly in the form of quotes from the classics, and most often, in this case, Shakespeare, but this led nowhere. I got the impression it was only in there to set up future volumes.

It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been justification offered for some of the things she did or the things we were told, but there never was. We didn't even get a valid reason for why she upped and left Kansas to fly to Edinburgh to take up this job in a pokey little private book shop in an obscure backstreet in Edinburgh. I was really disappointed. The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential. It is intended to be read only by the individual or entity to whom it is addressed or by their designee. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are on notice that any distribution of this message, in any form, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete or destroy any copy of this message!

The Mystery Woman by "Amanda Quick"

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audio book I happened upon a the library and I found this story - set in the nineteenth century - intriguing and the voice of the narrator to be extraordinarily seductive. Indeed, it as the sexual quality of the voice which made the story more appealing initially, but curiously by the halfway point, the voice had become cloying and tedious, and no longer held appeal. It was a bit of a weird experience. As for the author, her real name is Jayne Ann Krentz, and she uses the 'Quick' pseudonym for her historical dramas, of which this is one - the second in the "Ladies of Lantern Street" series. I haven't read the first.

Krentz is a prodigious writer and has a host of pseudonyms - a ridiculous number, in fact: Jayne Castle, Jayne Taylor, Jayne Bentley, Stephanie James and Amanda Glass. She sold the original name to a publisher for ten years! That strikes me as absurd, especially since 'Jayne Castle' was actually her birth name. To me it's dishonest to present yourself as someone else for the sake of selling a novel in a genre different from the one you write in under your own name. It's as dishonest as pretending your publisher is independent when it's really just another imprint upon which Big Publishing™ has firmly stamped its own imprint - not that this happened here. This is the first book I've read by any of those names, and it wasn't a positive impression. Note that I only made it through half of this novel before I gave up out of sheer boredom.

Beatrice Lockwood has some psychic power - quite strong, but limited in comparison with the powers we typically read about in paranormal stories. Why she has it goes unexplained in a story where it's never actually used for anything significant. She can sense some of the history of an object just by looking at it and opening up her sensitivity to it. She was part of an entertainment duo, but went into hiding, functioning as a paid companion. As the story begins, we discover, along with Beatrice, that her old partner, Roland Fleming, has been murdered, and some Russian-accented assassin is now looking for Beatrice. This guy evidently recovered material from the home of the victim which is now being used to blackmail a woman named Hannah, who happens to be the sister of Joshua Gage, an ex-spy for the government. Consequently, he takes an interest in Beatrice, unexpectedly helping her to save her female companion from a kidnap attempt, which was why she was hired as a companion in the first place. The two form an alliance to track down The Bone Man who is evidently behind the murder.

The story was really interesting at first, but after that initial flush of excitement, it settled into a really slow courtship, and the murder and mystery took a complete back seat. It was truly sad. I was really into it to begin with, but then there was nothing to hold my interest. It was like reading someone's diary which after the initial excitement becomes diarrhea because it turns out that their life is less interesting than your own and kind of stinks, to boot. I can't recommend this.

The Double Dabble Surprise by Beverley Lewis

Rating: WARTY!

This was on clearance and I can see why! I picked it up because it looked like an interesting way to teach children about cultural differences and acceptance, but it turned out o be exactly the opposite - it was a classic example of American imperialism at its worst, assimilating and subduing cultures, and being patronizing and condescending towards people who aren't "lucky enough" to be born American, and I refuse to recommend this or the series it begins. I had no idea that it was really a religious tract disguised as a children's story.

Abby and Cary Hunter are expecting new sisters - but their mom isn't pregnant. These sisters are coming from "Korea". Why Korea, I have no idea. Were this story written in the late fifties I could see some sort of logic to that, but it was written in the mid-nineties. I would have thought there were other nations which had more of a problem with parentless children than "Korea". And why "Korea" - as opposed to North Korea or South Korea? It's like the author didn't know the nation was split, or didn't care.

There's evidently been a mix-up, and instead of two girls showing up, two boys show up. For me this would have called into question the competence of this entire adoption operation, but Abby and Carly's parents take the boys in anyway, fully expecting to kick then out in three days when the girls arrive! Never once is any consideration given to what the boys are going through, Indeed, the boys seem neither tired nor dejected, neither sad nor nervous, and they speak pretty much fluent English. No problems here!

Except that the girls don't take to the boys, who are named Sung Jin and Joon Koo. They wanted sisters. Seong would have sounded more realistic than Sung and Joon rather than Choo, but let's not get into pronunciations - they're rather flexible anyway to we in the west. This isn't even the problem (not yet). The problem is that these boys are suddenly expected to abandon their entire heritage and become generic Americans, with no regard whatsoever for the religion they were raised in, or for their culture. Mom starts cooking barrels of rice every meal, like Koreans eat nothing but, and the boys are immediately assimilated. This struck me as odd at best, and insulting at worst.

Seriously, why even try to emulate their traditional foods, if you're going to trample all over the rest of their heritage? Their own religion never is even considered. They're immediately assimilated into sentimental Christianity and prayed over as they're preyed on. It's automatically assumed that they must be given western names. Joon Koo is shown to be fully in favor of ditching the name he's had for years, like it's a disease which can only be cured with a good dose of Americanism! He wants to be called "Jimmy".

Later the girls discuss Sung Jin, asking if he will always have two names, and Abby settles it by saying, "Only until he gets an American name" - not even a western name, but an American one! It's like their real names are an embarrassment - something only an orphan would have. When someone asks how the boys are doing, they're told that the boys are learning to pray for their food - not to thank farmers, but to thank the girls' invisible, non-interactive god for it - and that one of the boys is reminding this god that he's eating American rice now - yes, italicized American! - because "Korean" rice evidently sucks!

I couldn't believe I was reading this crap in a novel written in the mid-nineties. To me it illustrated the very worst that organized, blinkered religion has to offer, and it was nauseating to read. I flatly refuse to recommend any book like this.

Size 12 and Ready to Rock by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

This is evidently volume 4 in a series, which I once again jumped into not realizing. There was nothing on the audio case to indicate it was mid series. I'm not a fan of series unless they're well done. I liked the title of this one. The problem was in the writing. The audio CD started out with music, which I have encountered frequently on audio CDs, and which I have never understood. The author's original typescript typically contains no music in my experience so whence the impetus to lard up the CD version with it - because CDs first were produced as a vehicle for music distribution? Seriously, that's your 'irrationale'? The reading by Sandy Rustin wasn't very good either.

That was the first problem, but fortunately it was brief, since I skipped the track entirely and landed, amazingly, at chapter one. Unfortunately, then I had what I took to be poetry, but later learned were songs Meg Cabot had 'composed' larding up the start of each chapter. I skipped these. No diva in 2012 is going anywhere up the charts with lyrics like those. The story is of a size twelve young woman who is in charge of one of the residence halls at a university. It's the summer, but there are people in residence for one reason or another, and the story opens with the main character being shot - by a paintball. The author milks this for all it's worth trying to make it sound like it was a real bullet, but failing to make it convincing. No one who is shot could continue to narrate in the smart-assed and sassy fashion this narrator does, so my good will was lost right there.

The entire story quickly devolved into university administrative procedures and meetings, and I asked myself what I was doing even pretending to listen to this tedious nonsense. Maybe if you're invested in the series, you can swallow this better than I did, I who came into it in progress, and didn't even miss the previous volumes. I couldn't get into it, and I had no interest in pursuing this story. According to other reviewers, the murder mystery doesn't even begin until half the book is taken-up with filler, and having jumped to the last disk to listen to that as I was driving to return this to the library that same day I started listening to it, I realized that this was written like a bad movie horror B picture - the killer miraculously escaping, only to pop-up later and threaten the main character. The final showdown was a tour-de-force in awful and I won't recommend this kind of writing. I'm done with Meg Cabot now.

Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg

Rating: WARTY!

Normally I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own stories in audio books, because actors sure as hell are a disaster when it comes to doing this. Of course, just as some actors actually can do it, some authors cannot, and this author is one of those. The story was already maudlin to the point of being nauseous, and this author's whispery, sad, needy, whiny voice did not help one bit. I made it through only one disk (roughly one sixth the way through) so I can't speak for the whole novel, but after this one disk I was, "Check please, I'm outta here". It was obnoxious. It was nothing more than the movie Beaches over again. I actually liked that movie. This novel was an insult to it.

It looks like the main character has a child dying of cancer, but rather than focus on that, which if it had not been done tritely and predictably, might have made a story that hasn't already been done to death, the author takes us away to her main character's (yes, the kid, obnoxiously named Meggie, is dying but she's not the main character! I guess that's different!) story and delivers us to her entirely predictable friendship with a woman she initially dislikes. This woman (the narrator) is married, yet we hear this: "Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."

If your husband isn't that person, then you married the wrong man, you hockey puck.

Despite having despised this woman five minutes before, they go off to see a movie which ought to tell you everything you ever need to know about this disaster: Sophie's Choice. Seriously, it was truly tedious to listening to the mindlessly boring minutiae of this woman's life, and her friend who is also dying of cancer. Let's load up on the cancer! Maybe I misunderstood what was going on form my brief listen, but that's what it seemed like to me, and it seemed awfully selfish, to me, that this old friend would be more important than her own daughter.

The author claims this story is rooted in a personal experience of her own, but if so she leads a tedious life. She didn't make this remotely engrossing or interesting. It was rite, predictable and boring as all hell.

Death Before Decaf by Caroline Fardig

Rating: WARTY!

It’s my personal belief that first person PoV (worst person PoV!) novels ought to have a warning on them like the cigarette cartons do. Few authors can do them well, and when they’re not done well, they suck. The problem is that while you can leaf through a book in the library or in a bookstore, you can’t do that same thing with an ebook or an audio book. Sometimes you get to read a sample, but not always. All you usually have to go by is the blurb, and like The Doctor, blurbs lie! They certainly don’t warn you of voice.

That voice and a few plot problems aside, this book started out annoying me before I began warming to it. I guess means this author can carry that voice, which is amusing to me, because the story is, in part, about a character not being able to carry a voice – not in public that is. She also has an allergy, which is not nice in reality, but is a nice thing to read about in fiction, where we see so many flawless characters that it’s laughable. The problem with the main character for me, though, is that while she was commendably flawed and realistic in some respects, in others, she was also too stupid to live.

Juliet Langley has returned, almost decade later, to manage the not-exactly-originally-named coffee shop and diner that she worked in during her college years in Nashville, Tennessee. We don’t immediately learn what it was she studied in college, but if it was business management, then she evidently failed the course. The last place she managed went under after her partner/lover absconded with all the cash, and she evidently didn’t have the requisite skills to keep it afloat. Despite this disaster, her supposed best friend, who is amusingly named Peter, but behaves more like a dick, has drafted her in to help at the Java Jive after the death of his father.

I don’t get this best friend thing. This, for me, was one of the plot holes. Maybe they were besties in college, but it’s apparently been nearly a decade since they last saw each other, and Juliet evidently didn’t even attend the funeral, so the besties thing fell a bit flat for me. On top of this, Peter pretty much leaves Juliet hanging out to dry on her first day. Even though he’s around, he fails to overtly support her with the issues she has with the staff. Worse, Pete himself has apparently let this eatery go downhill as judged by the disgusting and irresponsible behavior of the day-staff, and their disrespectful attitude towards their new manager. I know he needs to let her establish her own chops, but he’s not going to do that by ostensibly distancing himself from her, and by being completely unapologetic for the awful conditions Juliet finds in the restaurant he’s supposedly been managing.

On her first day there, which is also her thirtieth birthday, Juliet finds herself administering an epi shot to a customer who is allergic to onions, who was served onion in his sandwich despite specifically requesting none. Yes, you can argue this idiot needed to check himself to be sure, but that doesn’t excuse the restaurant’s irresponsible serving of it, nor the hostility of the staff as Juliet tries to track down how this happened and prevent it happening again. Juliet definitely has her work cut out for her.

That same evening is open mike night and Pete further embarrasses Juliet, who he knows isn’t good with feeling exposed in public, by singing the first song, dedicating it to her and reminding her of her failure when she was in a band and forgot the words to a song she herself wrote. She’s never been on stage since (this is how limp she is - more on this anon) and here’s Peter, being a dick again, embarrassing her and reminding her of it. At this point I sincerely hoped she wasn't going to get involved with him. Which leads to the other plot hole – how come she never did get involved with him? These two had four years together and I'm sorry but it just beggars belief – except for Nora Ephon-style movie where this is a routine occurrence – that neither of them would have made a move on the other in that time.

Things go further downhill for Juliet when the body of the chief cook, Dave, is found in the dumpster outside the restaurant shortly after Juliet had balled him out (again) for sitting on the prep table. Now she’s a person of interest in his murder! Obviously she didn’t do it. It’s rare – and bad form - to write a first person PoV where the narrator is the murderer, but it can be done. Juliet is going to get with Peter despite his having a girlfriend, so obviously she’s not guilty. That much is a given. Personally, I think hunky customer Seth Davis did it, but since I usually get these guesses wrong, that’s not even a spoiler!

I have one question, though: why would a restaurant have voice mail? LOL!

Perhaps the biggest problem with this novel, for me, however, was complete lack of authenticity when Juliet takes up the detective baton and runs with it. She's not been accused of a thing, much less charged with anything, but she decides she's the best person to figure this out and starts taking all kinds of risky actions, and worse, forcing Peter to partner up with her in her crazy quest. There was absolutely no motivation for this. Yes, the detective had given her some straight talk and told her she was a person of interest, but she'd hardly been handcuffed and hauled in for questioning.

Worse, everything we had learned about Juliet to this point showed her to be a shy, retiring, wilting violet kind of a girl who would never do anything like this. Yes, she was a stereotypical redhead whom we're told - not shown, but told - has a fiery temper, but we had been given nowhere near enough cause to believe that this wimp would behave like she suddenly does, or that she had been given sufficient motivation to change her personality and behave like she does. To me, this abrupt switch was simply not credible.

As dissuaded as I was becoming from reading this, I was intent upon continuing, and I didn't decide enough was enough until Juliet, helping out in the kitchen, uncovered a tub hidden in the freezer that should never have been there. When she examined it, it had all kinds of odd things in it, including something she quickly learned belonged to Dave. Instead of immediately turning it over to the police, she started going through it, getting her fingerprints all over it. Never once did she think of calling the detective she'd met, and handing it over to him. Never once did Peter, who knew about all this, ever tell her she needed to turn it over to the police, either!

This is a woman who's smart enough to know you don't keep cornstarch in the freezer, yet too stupid to know that you don't conceal information from the police? I'm sorry but I don't read novels that make women look stupid unless that 'stupid women' is shown in process of wising up and getting her act together. This was just too larded-up with Le Stupide and far too far-fetched to take seriously, so I quit reading it right then and there. I guess I don't understand how a female author can write a demeaning novel about a female character like this. It's sad. I cannot rate this as a worthy read based on the portion I did read, which is about a third of the novel.

Times Tables the Fun Way! by Judy Liautaud and Dave Rodriguez

Rating: WARTY!

This was an awful book supposedly intended to teach the children to remember their times tables by concocting elaborate stories around then multiplication, such as, for example, to learn 3 x 3 = 9, you're supposed to memorize a hundred word story about triplets, if the kids even know what triplets are at that point in their lives. The mouse momma worried that her children would be born without tails, but each was born with three tails. I thought this was so ridiculous and burdensome - far more-so than simply learning the math rules to begin with - that it was nothing but a joke. I was hoping for a cat to eat them and become a cat o' nine tails as a result. Then you could really whip your math problems! LOL!

Seriously, how is it easier to learn when you make it so complex that the poor kids are swamped with asinine stories which work for only one math problem (in this case 3 x 3)? They have to learn a new and completely different story for 3 x 4, a story which has no relationship whatsoever to the 3 x 3 story? It wasn't even about mice! How is it easier to learn a hundred stories, than to learn ten simple rules for multiplying? If they could have come-up with some system of associating one animal with each set of problems, and one story for each of the ten numbers using that animal, I might have seen some benefit to that, but they didn't. The whole thing, to me, was a poorly conceived and the authors offered no evidence whatsoever that this system even worked, or if it did work, that it would be easier than merely learning the simple rules for basic math.

I can't recommend this ill-considered book which promises to complicate a subject and make it harder for children to get a good handle on it down the road, in exchange for the false promise of simplifying it now.

Drones by Chris Lewis

Rating: WARTY!

The test of whether a novel is a worthy read is what you recall of it afterwards. You don't need to recall it all in perfect detail, by any means, to know you liked it, but if you recall the overall plot and some fondly remembered details, it did its job. That's the problem I had with Drones - a few days after I read it and came to write this review, I discovered I couldn't remember a thing about it and I realized that I would have to leaf through it to refresh my memory. I do remember I didn't finish it because the story was nonsensical to me and uninteresting. Of course your mileage may differ. I hope it does, but this is my take on it.

This was supposed to be a satire on terrorism, but it fell flat for me. It was really hard to follow what was really going on, and since it mixed 'real life' (the main characters are drone pilots) with 'fiction' (they take a few days off in Vegas and stay at a "terrorism themed hotel"), it was also hard to grasp at first whether there was real terrorism was going on in Vegas, or whether it was just "play".

I know it was satirical, but after starting into this, I really began to find the theme abhorrent, and the action totally confusing. Half the time I had no idea what was going on or how we got to this page from the previous page, and it quickly became tedious to read, and not at all engaging to my mind. I quit reading at around the 75% mark because I had better things to do with my life than to sit through any more of this trying to figure out what was going on. I can't recommend it. If the art work had been brilliant, that might have made some difference, but it was merely workman-like, and while it wasn't bad, it had nothing special to recommend it.

Academy Girls by Nora Carroll

Rating: WARTY!

I ditched this book at 90% in because there was one-the-hell-way-too many stanzas of over-rated Emily Dick and some for my taste. I honestly could not stand to read one more obscure-to-the-point-of-vacuous line from her. On top of that, I felt this was a bait and switch on two levels. I requested to read an advance review copy of this novel precisely because it wasn't (according to the blurb) a teen high school melodrama. It was, so I was led to believe, about an adult!

I've sworn off reading any more YA novels with "Academy" in the title, and this promised to turn that on its head by being adult-oriented, and focusing on a teacher at the purportedly prestigious Grove Academy instead of on the bitchy, air-headed girls who usually infest such stories. It wasn't. It was the latter going under the guise of the former. Worse than this even, was that this was really nothing more than an overblown attempt at explicating Dickinson drivel in place of telling a real story. I didn't even get the obsession with that poet; any such poetry would have served the same purpose hers did in this context.

On top of that, what story there was, was all over the place. It was flashing back on several levels and with such obsessive-compulsive dedication that I was at one point considering filing a lawsuit for whiplash. Even in the sections that were not dedicated flashbacks, there was an ostensibly plagiarized novel in play which was telling exactly the same story we were also being told in the annoyingly extensive flashbacks, if you can get your mind around that, and in annoyingly extensive detail. It was tedious, and I started routinely skipping these sections.

On top of that, the supposedly mature teacher was behaving like a teen herself around a certain other teacher who I highly suspected (rightly or wrongly, I can't say) was ankle-deep in whatever it was that happened during those flashbacks - which themselves flashed back to an even earlier generation where there was yet another murder. How this Academy managed to maintain its prestigious veneer with all of this going on was really the only unexplained mystery here for me.

Jane Milton - yes, that's really her name - was a student at Grove, left without a diploma, tried writing, failed, got married, failed, and now was forced to come back to her old school, cap in hand, begging for a job as a teacher, for which she was wholly unqualified. Her story is what interested me, but we never got that story except in passing, and in a way that felt like it was completely incidental to the other story/ies. Instead, and pretty much from day one, we got the mystery of what happened when she was in high school investigating, with her two "friends", what happened when her own mother would have been in high school. Convoluted doesn't begin to describe it adequately.

I think if maybe I'd had the time and patience - and sufficient Promethazine to get me through the dick poetry which slathered these pages with all the delicacy of a bull in a book store (and was in the final analysis, utterly irrelevant to the story except in the most pretentious way imaginable), I might have made it through this in one day and been able to actually keep track of the plethora of potential villains who were randomly popping up and ducking down like whack-a-mole characters, but to try and keep a handle on the endless names over multiple readings over many days was impossible, which robbed the story of any potential it might have had to retain my attention and favor.

I quickly lost interest in Jane, since she consistently proved herself to be a spineless idiot with nothing interesting to offer me. The only thing which prevented me from wishing she would be bumped-off was the fact that she was a single mom, but she wasn't even very good at that, either! Her relationship with her son was virtually non-existent and what did exist was almost completely unrealistic. I'm tempted to say that the story was disorganized, but that would involve using the word 'organized' in connection with this novel, and that would be too generous in describing this patchy mashup. I cannot recommend this at all.

The Pistachio Prescription by Paula Danziger

Rating: WARTY!

This book went on for half its length offering nothing more than an extended pity party for main character: thirteen-year-old disaffected misfit Cassie Stephens. Then it changed and went on for the other half with an even bigger pity party for Cassie Stephens. This reads like a first draft of a Judy Blume novel before she tore it up and burned it with a large quantity of gasoline, before crushing the ashes to powder and then burying them too deeply even for utility companies to unearth them accidentally.

This might have been bearable had it not been first person PoV, which is worst person PoV, especially when the character is so completely self-absorbed in wallowing in hypochondria-inspired whining. Cassie was not likeable at all. Indeed, check that name. She has a seventeen year old sister. A seventeen year old sister who still goes by Stephie. Yes, Stephie Stephens. The author has infantilized them irreparably, so it's hardly surprising we get a lousy novel.

There was some humor and some engrossing moments, but just when it looked like the author might be getting over herself and starting to tell us an interesting story - Cassie's run for class president - along comes new boy in school, who's a hottie, and inexplicably zeroes in on Cassie as his main squeeze. This is one in a long line of school clichés in which the author indulges herself. There's the perky, devoted best friend, the mean clique, the wonderful teacher, the mean teacher, the embarrassing incident, the rough home life, and finally the guy who takes your sorry-assed weak girl’s life and turns it around because you’re too much of a weak and sorry-assed girl to do it yourself. Pul-eaze!

Curiously we get a brief explanation for why the one teacher is mean, but we get no explanation at all for why Cassie's family is as dysfunctional as you can get and still maintain a place in the family category. Her mom and dad are at each other's throats all the time, her older sister is downright mean to her, her younger brother, despite all this, is perky and positive, and charming, and not remotely affected by his disintegrating family. And he's only seven. Yeah, right.

Cassie's mom seems not to be mean at all. On the contrary, she's very supportive of Cassie, but Cassie is mean to her, rejecting her every overture, demeaning her every action, rejecting her support and friendship, and internally bad-mouthing her quite literally all the time. There is no reason for this behavior and none is offered. She has a better opinion of her dad, despite his absenteeism and self-absorption, and his routinely wandering off to play golf instead of spending time with his family.

In true trope fashion, the new boy in school this year zeroes in on Cassie for no apparent reason, and becomes her instant soul-mate, actively seeking her company, and asking her out to a movie. By the half-way point I was tired of listening to Cassie, and I certainly did not like her. I found the novel to be making no sense at all. Fortunately it was short enough that I decided to try and read it all the way through, to see if the suggestion of an improvement (as Cassie starts to run for class president) actually would turn out to be a real improvement, or if the new boy's clichéd attraction to and salvation of our main character would drag the whole story right back down into trope trash. That admittedly faint hope was dashed cruelly on the relentless rocks of Cassie non-stop whining.

Cassandra (for that simply has to be this moaning Minnie’s name) wins the school election as she loses her family through the inevitable divorce and the story suddenly stops. I can’t recommend this, not even a little bit. It's horrible. Had it been submitted to a publisher now, it would have been run out of town on a vuvuzela.

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first in a bizarre series which goes to at least volume three or four followed by two or three novellas, but there are also volumes 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.4. Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot series. This author's entire oeuvre consists of ripping-off of Franklbaum. This story sounded great from the blurb, but then don't they all? Unfortunately, as the start of a series (which I didn't realize when I picked it up from the library) it's nothing more than a prologue, and I don't do prologues (introductions, prefaces, etc.). Yiou could undoujbtedly skip this and go straight to volume two because, although I DNF'd this one in short order, I'm reliably informed that nothing happens here. Certainly nothing happened in the portion I read.

Once I got started listening to the audio, told in worst person PoV and read irritatingly by Devon Sorvari, I decided this wasn't such a good idea as the blurb suggests it is. The first few paragraphs were an exercise in how much cliché and trope an author can cram into a YA book. A main character who is a flat-chested (check!), bony (check!), disaffected teen (check!), attending a school where bullying is rife and unchecked (check!!) by a girl with breasts (check!) and a non-descript side-kick (check!)? A protagonist who has quite literally no friends (check), can get no justice (check!), whose father isn't in the picture (check!), and whose mother is not only almost permanently zoned out (check!), but who also resents her daughter for her miserable life (check!). A girl who thinks she has no chance with the cutest boy in school? Check. It's all there.

Amy Gumm (any relation to Thomas Harris's Jaime Gumb perchance?! More like it's Judy Garland's real name: Frances Ethel Gumm) is delivered to Oz by your standard tornado, but this is not your Dorothy's Oz. Or rather, it is. This Oz looks like it was hit by a tornado, but it was actually hit by Dorothy, who returned, took over, and completely lost it. Dorothy is now the paranoid dictator of Oz. Everything has changed. The one thing you might find familiar is the legendary yellow brick road, and even that's crumbling. This sounds like a great premise for a story, but if you tell it in first person, have the main character a whiny, weak-kneed trope (who fails in her objective), lard it with every YA cliché there is, you ruin your great idea and make a trailer trash of a novel. That's what happened here.

The saddest thing about Amy when we meet her is that she is entirely defined not by any noble characteristics at all, but by a boy - Dustin. So Amy isn't even a person, much less a woman. Instead, she's a male's brief afterthought as in "Yeah I'd do her if she brought her own brown paper bag." Some authors simply don't get it, and that there are still so many female authors - mostly but not exclusively in the YA genre - who still don't get it is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Creatively, they are as empty as the Tin Man, as writers, they are as full of hot air as the lion, and as for something to say? They're as stuffed with chaff as the scarecrow, with and no wheat in sight. That's them all over.

Amy's only detailed interaction with anyone at school is with Madison, the trope school bully, and their entire interaction is about Dustin, the cutest boy in school, whom Amy unaccountably lets copy her algebra homework (I guess Dustin thinks math is hard) whilst enduring relentless insults from his girlfriend Madison - none of which Dustin seeks to stop. Finally, when Amy indirectly calls the pregnant Madison fat (she evidently never thought of this before, and yes that's an unforgivably cheap shot, but entirely understandable in the circumstances) Madison actually punches Amy. Madison's friend pulls Amy by the hair. So far Amy's only 'retaliation' has been to give as good as she gets in the insult department, yet it's Amy who is immediately suspended without any sort of investigation. This is not a story. It's barely even caricature. It's a cartoon channel reject.

Let's take a minute to examine Amy's parentage and how this author evidently can't come up with a plot that doesn't insult one or other sector of society if she tries. Absentee dad? Check. Dad is dismissed completely in a few words. Judged by how bad the mom is, dad can be excused for abandoning her (but not his daughter), yet the only take we get on dad is how awful he is - nothing else. So he's gone and forgotten.

Do we then get at least a good picture of mom, winning out despite her husband leaving her with their child? Nope. Mom is just as bad, as this author's misogynistic take on single moms would have it. Mom isn't shown as taking care of her; she's shown as not working, and not even capable of maintaining a decent home - not even a rental apartment. She's depicted as work-shy and living in a trailer park. Does the author despise single moms? Evidently, as judged by this.

I'd recommend boycotting this book (as I intend to now boycott this series and everything else that comes out of FFF) based on what Wikipedia (and other sources) says about that book mill:

In 2009, Frey formed Full Fathom Five, a young adult novel publishing company that aimed to create highly commercial novels like Twilight. In November 2010, controversy arose when an MFA student who had been in talks to create content for the company released her extremely limiting contract online. The contract allows Frey license to remove an author from a project at any time, does not require him to give the author credit for their work, and only pays a standard advance of $250. A New York magazine article entitled "James Frey's Fiction Factory" gave more details about the company, including information about the highly successful "Lorien Legacies" series, a collaboration between MFA student Jobie Hughes and Frey. The article details how Frey removed Hughes from the project, allegedly during a screaming match between the two authors. In the article, Frey is accused of abusing and using MFA students as cheap labor to churn out commercial young adult books.

Based on this report (and other such details I've read from various sources), full fathom five appears to be how deeply you're buried as an author if you sign on for this. There is no reason at all for anyone to commit to the sweat shop this appears yo be - including Big Publishing&Trade; which is in many ways no better, in this age of ebooks and self-publishing. I refuse to recommend this book or anything from that stable, and I have no intention of reading anything else that has James Frey's sweat stains on it.

You Know You Love Me by Cecily von Ziegesar

Rating: WARTY!

Which imbecile decided that it would be a really great idea to lard up audio books with random jarring, too loud music? Ugh! The music has nothing to do with the story and was never in the original typescript so get your heads out of your high hats and quit it already!

I had my doubts about the blurb on this one, but it sounded like it might be interesting if written the right way. What finally tipped my choice was that it was read by Christina Ricci, but this turned out to be a bad indicator. Her reading voice wasn't that great, but the reading material was the most flaccid dreck imaginable. It's part of the gossip girls series and I seriously and honestly fear for the mental welfare of people who find this trash remotely engaging.

The best thing I can say about it is that it was commendably short, but even then I skimmed the thing. The entire short story consisted of the most boring descriptions of snotty, spoiled high-schoolers getting ready to attend college, and consisted of boring interactions, tedious shopping trips, and uninventive partying.

The entire thing was sodden with vacuous, juvenile, and clueless talk of losing virginity before college, and this is the only thing the story had going for it, which amounted to nothing at all since nothing actually happened (or if it did, it must have been a quickie which I missed when skimming from track to track). I flatly refuse to recommend this or anything like it unless you're in dire need (and I do mean dire) of sleeping draft.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Rating: WARTY!

Set during the great depression (which actually wasn't so great for most of those who lived through it), this novella is about George and Lennie, migrant workers who arrive at a farm to pick up some work. For no apparent reason at all, George deliberately delays their arrival, which means the boss is pissed off at them for being a day late. The boss's belligerent son, Curly, immediately takes a dislike to Lennie, who is a big, imposing guy, but who is mentally deficient and retiring. He also has a poor memory and impulse control. George looks after Lennie, but abuses him as much as he takes care of him and in the end proves to be a horrific and useless caretaker.

George and Lennie are hoping to make some money to buy their own farm, and a couple of the hands on the farm where they're now working see this as a great idea and want to buy into it. Curly recently married a woman who in many ways is Lennie's twin. Like Lennie she's abused and lonely, and only wants some soft company, and it's this is what leads to the trouble that you could see coming from a dust bowl away.

Lennie has a real affection for soft things which is why he wants to raise rabbits on George's farm, and when Curly's wife, an enigma who goes unnamed in the story, allows him to stroke her soft hair, he accidentally starts messing it up and this annoys her. Lennie feels compelled to mute her noisy reaction and ends up breaking her neck. This isn't the first time he's killed that day. Instead of trying to get justice for his friend, George simply shoots Lennie in the back of the head like a old dog that needs to be put down, and walks away, not even bothering to bury him. Some friend, huh? But at least Lennie bought the farm....

Steinbeck (whose name in German means stone creek) blunders through this in a rather ham-fisted and pedantic manner, setting-up what's going to happen, and telegraphing events long before they transpire. How this became a classic is a mystery. It would never have gone anywhere had it been published afresh today. There's nothing on offer here, except that this perhaps served to inspire Sam Peckinpah's 1971 movie Straw Dogs, so it wasn't a complete waste! I listened to the audio book read by Gary Sinise who played George in the 2011 movie, and was once again really impressed by how badly actors do at reading audio books - and I like Gary Sinise! I cannot recommend this.

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu

Rating: WARTY!

This was such a pathetically dull story, and read by such an awful reader that I made it through only two disks on the audio book and could stand to listen not a phoneme further. There was one part where it got really interesting, which kept me going briefly, but that was soon blown to shreds by the deadening text which followed quickly afterwards. And where in hell the author dragged that title from has to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. A novel about ice and snow, and cold and an Ice Queen is titled Breadcrumbs? Definitely a Whisky Tango Foxtrot call-sign on this one.

The basic story is about Hazel - an adoptee from India who prefers to hang out with her best friend Jack (yuk - yet another unimaginatively mundane male character named Jack. Barf, etc.) than to do "girly stuff". Hazel is evidently overweight, and the subject of bullying - from the very boys with whom Jack hangs out at school. There's an entire story there which was lost because this author evidently couldn't see it. As for Jack(-ass), he couldn't see anything wrong with his friends hazing Hazel, and basically tells her to get over it. What a jerk. The true tragedy here is that Hazel evidently has no life without Jack in it. As for the story, it had no life at all. It was pedantic and tedious, and the narrator Kirby Heythorne's reading voice was god-awfully dull.

The problem with Hazel is that she is one of the most boring characters ever, with no motivation and an obsession with Jack which is pathetic if not scary. She's not likable and she doesn't change - not in the part to which I listened anyway. She has nothing to offer to win our hearts or minds.

The interesting part for me was where Hazel met an old childhood friend whom she had not seen in four years - a lifetime for an eleven-year-old child. When Hazel arrived at her home, her friend was in the kitchen doing homework whilst her slacker uncle (supposedly a screenwriter LOL) was baking cookies. The girl's uncle told Hazel that he was encouraging his niece to invent a story which he could steal and turn into a screenplay which would make him rich.

They began to elaborate on the original idea, and the story became quite engrossing, brief and sketchy as it was. Unfortunately it was over all-too-quickly, and we went right back to the brain-deadening tedium of our regular programming, which is where I said, "Check please, I'm outta here!". I wanted to switch to the other story and pursue that instead, but of course that option wasn't available so I couldn't avail myself of it!

This is based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and things turn towards the fantastical as this novel progresses (according to the blurb), but that was nowhere near enough of an attraction to lure me any further notwithstanding that I had liked the "screenplay" they'd discussed on earlier. I cannot recommend this story based on what I suffered through, and especially not in the mind-numbing audio version.

Tin Men by Christopher Golden

Title: Tin Men
Author: Christopher Golden
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with the movie of the same name or with a score of novels of the same name, this story with a rather unoriginal and un-inventive title is about a soldier named Danny Kelso who is at the end of his tether with the relationship he's in with Nora, but he can't think about that right now because he has to get to work. Work in Danny's case is driving a robot soldier.

Set in the near future, Danny lives in Germany, but is fighting in Syria. When an EMP hits his robot, he finds himself trapped inside it. How this works - how it was even allowed to work is never explained, and that, in a tin shell, is the biggest problem with this novel. It requires far too much faith and trust without giving a thing in return. It requires your disbelief to be suspended so high and for so long that it chokes the life out of it.

The novel started out okay, but it seems a little odd that Danny was concerned about being late. He clocks in on time, and then has breakfast - something the soldiers are allowed to do - but his sergeant is immediately on his case for being late? This made no sense to me. Other than that, the story moved speedily towards the action.

This underlying idea borrows heavily from the movie Avatar and from the movie The Matrix, and from the movie Surrogates, and from the movie Robocop, but it makes none of the contextual sense that those movies make. These soldiers are not 'dressed up as robots' to look like the local natives, who are human. They're not in their cocoons so some machine race can suck up their emitted energy. They're not so attired out of vanity or playfulness or because of a money-grubbing corporation.

Instead they're merely remote soldiers, enhanced by the strength, speed and power of robotics, and the only reason offered for this is to save soldiers' lives, yet even that is a flawed premise as we shall see. These soldiers are not remotely piloting the robots - so at least that flaw is bypassed, but their consciousness is downloaded into the robot. This makes zero sense, casebook it means that their real bodies, in Germany, are now essentially vegetables, and if anything goes wrong, a soldiers' consciousness is trapped inside the robot and when it dies, they die. How is this an improvement over what they had?!

Why anyone would design a system like this is a complete mystery, but this trope is the same one we saw in The Matrix and many other such stories and it's fatally flawed because no rationale whatsoever is given for why your mind is gone from your body or even how it's gone. You know, even if you delete something from your computer hard drive, it's actually still there. You have to physically overwrite that section of the drive with something else before it's erased. So why would copying your mind to a robot erase your mind?

When you have photos in your cloud and you send one to a friend or family member, the original photo isn't erased. It remains in the cloud, What you send is a copy and it doesn't matter if you send one or you send one to every one of the seven billion people on Earth, you still have that original. So where is the precedent for voiding the mind of a human being? There is none. It makes no sense.

Quite the contrary, it would make far more sense to copy the mind and have the same person inhabiting a whole platoon of these robots, working in perfect coordination and for a fraction of the cost of hiring and training a whole bunch of soldiers. Naturally you want a variety of soldiers so people think out of the box, but you don't need the million person army the US currently has (counting the National guard and the reserve). You just need a core of excellent soldiers and a host of mechanics and fabricators. The problem then, though, is that without this old trope, an author is screwed for the drama, so this is why we're so frequently asked to just leap right over this huge pothole and hope we land in irises and daffodils, and not the muddy depths of another pothole.

When I checked some of the reviews for this novel I noticed that one reviewer had downgraded it purely for the bad language on the first page, but there really wasn't any bad language on the first page! There was one four-letter word, and not even the worst four-letter word, and that was it. The deal here, though, is that this is a novel about the military in combat. You don't get military in combat with no bad language! If you get a story like that, with soldiers saying things like "Rats!" and "Curses" then you know this story is not at all realistic! Although it would be hilarious!

If I might digress for a minute and talk about language, a crucial part of writing, I have to say that this whole thing about bad language is amusing to me because it's patently ridiculous from the ground up. Think about it. As a society, we English speakers have chosen to designate some words as "Very Naughty Indeed" (VNI). Speakers of other languages have made similar rules and regulations, but their rules are nonsensical to us because their designated words, which are appalling in their own language, are meaningless to us.

This hasn't stopped us, however! We have all of us agreed that they're "Very Naughty Indeed", and none of us really ought to be saying any of these VNI words. They're not just cuss words either. We've agreed to include some racist words and even words that insult relatives, such as "Yo' mama". We mustn't say these words, we've agreed, and we must pretend to be shocked when people use them. In fact, we've become so adept at this pretense that many people don't even need to pretend - they're genuinely shocked at hearing them.

Curiously, most of these words are related to sex organs or sexual functions, and to be good and upright citizens we mustn't ever say them and we must appear appalled when we hear them. We all agreed on this! How crazy is that? How ridiculous are we that we make up these conventions? How crazy is it that some words, even amongst the shocking ones, are more shocking than others, and some people will take offense at one and not at another?"

Oh I'm going to be hurt by that racist word, because I have a prior agreement with you, the person who is abusing me, that if you use a little six letter word to try and hurt me, I promise to you in return that I will be genuinely hurt. This is the pact made between a racist and their intended victim: that the one will say the word and the other agrees to be wounded by it!

The truly weird thing here is that these apparent antagonists are really on the same team. They're working together in this. They're playing from the same play-book. These enemies are partners! How utterly absurd is that? The only rational response to the use of such words isn't hatred or outrage or cowardice. It's to laugh - a good belly laugh at this patently ridiculous convention to which we all subscribe, whereby I agree completely to let you hurt me by using a VNI word.

Parts of this novel bothered me. The idea that only the US can save the rest of the world and that when global warming somehow turned the world into an apocalyptic wasteland, the US was the only nation willing and able to step up - the US which is the one doing a lion's share of the polluting, guzzling a lion's share of the resources, burning oil like it will never run out.

Another thing was the genderism. Even while writing a story presenting women as equals including, commendably, a handicapped woman, we still got this: "Early twenties, black, lovely in the awkward never-going-to-realize-I'm beautiful sort of way that some women had." Change 'beautiful' to 'handsome' and 'women' to 'men' and read it again. Does it sound weird? It shouldn't, but it probably does, because you never see writers write like that about men. Even female authors write like that about women though. I was rather expecting some jingo-ism, military bravado, and genderism in a story like this, I'm sorry to say, but even so it's still off-putting to read, in 2015, that a woman really isn't of any value unless she's beautiful. Otherwise why mention it? And what difference does it make that she's black?

When Kelso 'downloads' into his bot, he discovers that one of the others from the previous shift has painted a target on his chest. It seems that discipline is seriously lacking here. The bots pair off and start patrolling Damascus. Why the US is there at all is a mystery given the trouble Syria has had and the US stayed clear - at least in terms of ground deployment, but here we are. Nor do I get what resource is in Syria that needs protecting. People, yes, but the US has never been as big on protecting lives as it has on protecting non-human resources. What happened to the Syrian government such as it was? What happened to the Syrian army that the US now has free reign in this nation? None of this is explained.

It's actually when the pilots got into the bots that we started seeing some inconsistencies. First we're told that the bots have no identification markings (other than what jokers have painted on them), to insure that no enemy can identify the leaders. This makes sound military sense. Then they have Kate, one of the pilots or drivers, saluting the sergeant, thereby identifying him as the leader. This makes no sense. No one in their right mind salutes in deployment conditions for precisely that reason - so the enemy doesn't know who is in charge and are not presented an easy and perhaps critical target. But the readily identifiable markings on each robot clearly define who is who.

There's very little information given about how the download works. In a scene pretty much taken directly from the remake of Robocop, when the drivers 'wake up' inside the bots, they're evidently standing in the street where anyone who knew the shift change could have simply destroyed them before they got their new pilots! Not smart. Robots patroling a Middle East nation is how the movie began.

The robots evidently blink, too. I have no idea why they would make them blink. Also, their eyes light up! Why do they always do this? We no longer believe as the ancient Greeks (or someone) did that your eyes emit rays which allow you to see, yet they always do this with robots! These bots can also arch their eyebrows and narrow their eyes. Seriously? Why? They gave the robots eyebrows? This made no sense at all. It made as little sense as the US having this technology when it's perfectly clear at this point that the leaders in robot technology are the Japanese. What was it which made the US magically leap ahead in only a decade or so? How come no other nation has anything like this?

There's another problem, too. The bots are obviously electronic. We get no information about what protection they have from electrical overloads, yet every one of them is fully functioning after a pulse strong enough to take out satellites! Despite this, each one of them has a fatal weakness - a weak spot between two joins that no one - unaccountably - seems to be able to fix. None of this makes any sense! What, they don't have any spare patches of depleted uranium to weld over the weak spot? They can't slip a Kevlar vest over them to hide it and protect it?

We meet Alexa Day who is the daughter of the US ambassador to Syria. Her father has invited her to join him in Syria. This took me right of the realm of credibility - that is unless her father doesn't care about her and actually wants to get her killed. This is a war zone in a country where people quite literally hate the US - even more so now, we're told, yet dad invites his teen daughter to visit?

The thing which bugged me most about this story however was that these soldiers do not in any way act like soldiers. They take forever to respond to what's obviously a potential threat. When they do, they stand around in the open all in a bunch, none of them taking up defensive positions. When they're attacked by some guy they can see with a rocket launcher, not a one of them fires back. This allows the rocket man to destroy one of the bots. This is sheer incompetence!

When the EMP hits, instead of taking the fight to their enemy, they stand around gabbing about EMP pulses and whether the satellite uplink is out instead of taking out the guy with the rocket launcher. Only belatedly do they think they ought to be engaging the enemy. This is not how a soldier behaves. I don't care if they feel secure inside the bots.

It was completely unrealistic, and their support was non-existent. We have drones of all kinds flying today. Ten years from now there are none? They send bots up in a helicopter to do aerial surveillance? They have no EMP protection plan? The bots survived an EMP pulse powerful enough to knock out satellites in space?! It simply wasn't realistic.

It wasn't realistic either in that it pretty much assumed that no-one had ever heard of EMP much less done any testing of susceptibility to, or reinforcing of systems against, it, and this is simply not true. Solar flares, and even lightning generate EMP, and airplanes fly through lightning and are stuck by it fairly routinely without crashing from the sky. Critical systems, especially military ones, are routinely tested against EMP pulses emitted from a device called a Marx generator, but you would need a large number of very large devices such as these operating from orbit to affect anyone, and they would have to emit a pulse of sufficient magnitude to overcome the weakening effects of inverse-square law. And how would these ever be put into space without the US or other nations noticing?

I read about a third of this before I gave up, unable to keep the growing weight of my disbelief from coming crashing down. Maybe the pulse will knock your socks off. It didn't affect mine, which are evidently Faraday safe!