The Witches of Cambridge by Menna van Praag

Rating: WARTY!

This book didn’t start out on its best foot with me, and it was mostly downhill from there! Be warned: if you're expecting anything like "The Witches of East End" or that kind of a witchcraft story, then you'll be as disappointed as I was. This one really isn’t a novel about witches or witchcraft; it’s about several women going through mid-life crises. Why the witchcraft was included was the real mystery for me, because it really plays very little part in the story - at least in as much of it as I managed to get through.

Told in third person which I like, it's third person present voice, which felt weird to me. The story is happening as it’s being told, so it was like sitting with a friend in a park or a mall somewhere, and the friend covering your eyes and then relating everything that happens. That's what it felt like. Why not just take your hands from my eyes so I can see it myself? But on the other hand, why would I want to see if it’s only something ordinary and boring? That's where a writer comes in - showing you the ordinary, but making it seem miraculous. I think this author failed in this case, which is ironic given that this is a book supposedly about magic. It was like the author's spell backfired and instead of the mundane becoming magical, the potentially magical was neutered and became fifty shades of mundane.

It was like the difference between being told and being shown, and this fell heavily onto the 'being told' side of that rickety fence, which is even more weird when you think of it in this context. I favorably reviewed this author's Dress Shop of Dreams back in January of 2015, but this one failed to grab me the way that one had, even though it was very similar in some ways. The present tense third-person voice was back. The fascination with math was back. The magic wasn't.

The novel features exactly what the title says (in a way!): witches who live in Cambridge (England), and I think that may have been a part of the problem - too many main characters and too little time spent getting to know them in a coherent block of text. Instead, we jumped abruptly and repeatedly from one to another, usually in the same chapter, so I had a really hard time separating one character from another. Initially, they all conflated since they really all seemed to be the same person with the same life and the same basic problem. Most of them are female, and it was depressing to read of the same (or monotonously similar) problems occurring with one witch after another.

There seemed to be no explanation as to why magical people had these problems, but perhaps that was because these so-called 'witches' were curiously hobbled in what they could do, too. They don’t have pointy hats or magic wands - for which I was grateful - but neither do they seem to be able to perform spells. They seemed far more like characters from the Heroes Reborn TV show, who have quirky powers which they can use, but which are quite restricted in many ways. Normally I like quirky; here it was uninspired.

Let me get one issue out of the way which has nothing to do with this author or this publisher. There were some formatting problems in the Kindle app version on my Android smart phone. I've seen these kinds of issues in other ebooks. At one point in this novel for example, there was a mathematical formula reproduced on the screen, but it precedes the sentence which introduces it: "Her favorite, the fundamental theorem of calculus, is framed in silver and glass above her desk:" The formula was supposed to appear (I assume!) after the colon, but it appeared before that entire sentence. I'm fairly confident that this wasn't how it appeared in the author's original. I’d be annoyed were I the author and Amazon screwed-up what I’d written and formatted, because it has a crappy ebook app.

The worst part was how slow the story seemed. It took forever to get anywhere, and I was, frankly, getting bored with the unremarkable minutiae of these people's lives and particularly irked by their self-pity and their constant, obsessive fretting over relationships, like they had no other interests in life, and nothing to offer in and of themselves. It was like they were only of any value when in the context of some partner, a partner with whom they seemed incapable of discussing problems which begs the question as to how their relationship could have been so idyllic in the first place. I know there are real life people who are as tame as these fictional people are, but I don’t like characters like that in novels, not unless they're going somewhere different, and soon, and none of these people appeared to have any direction, or any future. I especially dislike female characters like that, and it makes me wonder why so many female authors create them. I usually find them in YA novels, so it was especially sad to find them in a book which is ostensibly written for grown-ups.

Everything was tied to them having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, and without that they were evidently considered (or considered themselves) to be failures or hopeless cases. This was exacerbated by the emphasis on physical beauty - again by a female author who seems to buy into the nonsensical idea that if you're a female and you're not beautiful, you're not worth writing about. In addition to the tired 'flecks of gold in the eyes' YA trope (except here it was "vivid green with flecks of yellow", so maybe she deserves credit for that?! LOL!) there was one assertion after another that only beautiful women need apply: "...it’s not as if Kat isn’t a beautiful woman. It’s not as if she isn’t still propositioned by men, even, sometimes, by her own students." Here's another: "She was young and beautiful, with long legs and long dark hair and every boy in the math department wanted to date her."

Now this woman is supposed to be brilliant. We're told she's published scores of papers on mathematics, yet the focus isn’t on what kind of person she is, what contributions she's made, or how decent (or obnoxious, even) a human being she may be, but purely on how pretty her skin is. I can’t get interested in a story which is as shallow as that and which features characters as shallow as that. If this were some cheap erotic novel, which I don't read, then I could see physical attributes being dominant and prevalent, but this story is evidently trying to strut its stuff as literature, masquerading as a novel about female relationships. The problem is that instead of getting that - the inside track on how these people feel and what motivations they have - we’re being fed clichéd superficiality worthy of Harlequin romance fan fiction about how endlessly beautiful these women are!

I can’t take a story like this one seriously and it sure shouldn’t take itself seriously. Most especially it should not endow its female characters with absurdly pretentious names like Amandine, Cosima, Héloïse, and Noa and focus on their purported beauty to the exclusion of all else. I don't have a problem with a character thinking themselves beautiful (even if they aren’t!), or with a person perceiving their loved one(s) as beautiful. It’s fine to have a beautiful character if you're writing about a model, or an actor, where beauty is considered important by many, and which definitely opens doors. I’d prefer it if some quality other than skin was the focus, but I could see how you would be in the position of having to deal with beauty in those circumstances, but when the writer is promoting beauty as paramount in ordinary everyday people (their witchcraft notwithstanding), and talking as though it’s all a woman could possibly bring to the table, then I take issue with it because it devalues and objectifies women. The blurb for this book claims that it's about "the magic of life-changing love," but that's nonsense. There is no love on exhibit here. It’s all shallow, needy lust.

Then there's the weird pacing. Cosima is desperate for a father for her planned child(ren). She starts to consider George, (who isn’t beautiful!). We encounter the two interacting as George visits Cosima's Italian eatery, but he runs out, then there's a brief uninventive interlude with Héloïse running barefoot in the park (which apparently magically changes her life!), and suddenly we're back to George coming into the eatery. Did a day pass? Is this a flashback or a time-warp redux? Did he change his mind and come back an hour or two later? From the writing, it’s apparently at a later time, but the text isn't exactly helpful, and there are no chapter splits to break this up, only a blank line in the text. This made for a confusing read with me having to occasionally skim back a few screens to re-establish context. I admit that part of the problem was my fading ability to pay attention to the increasingly dull story, but better chaptering (if that's a word) would have made it considerably more readable.

When I got to 34% in, at the start of chapter eight, the first thing I read was “You are so beautiful, so, so beautiful,” and I just could not stand to read any more. I really couldn’t. This was an artist who was saying this, so you could argue that in one sense, his eye would be drawn to beauty and he would want to capture it, but for me it was still too shallow, especially in the simplistic way it was expressed. If this guy had had better words with which to frame his subject, I might have been able to read on a little longer at least, but this juvenile view of his made it sound like something a guy who wants to get laid would say to a naïve girl just to try and get her into bed, and it sounded truly pathetic. It didn’t sound anything at all like something a seasoned artist would say to his subject.

I’d already been increasingly turned off by it up to that point, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I no longer cared if Cosima accidentally caught George (the secret keeper) with a love potion or whether sister Kat, the master caster, could help this idiotic woman fix it. I honestly didn’t care if Amandine, the supposed empath was far too lacking in empathy to tell if her husband was really having an affair, or if psychic Héloïse ever got over her psychotic addiction to her dead husband or if Noa got rid of her obsessive-compulsive secret-spilling. I really didn’t. I can’t recommend this based on what I read.

The Kissing Booth by Beth Reekles

Rating: WARTY!

This author's story is another one like those told about Amanda Hocking. The story in the novel was begun by Beth Reeks when she was fifteen, and published on a website named Wattpad when she was seventeen, where it quickly became popular. A representative from Random House saw it there, decided it was worth publishing (that tells us a lot about standards at Random House - the publisher evidently isn't named random for nothing!), and offered her a contract, so the novel got published under her school nickname Reekles.

The problem is that the representative apparently paid attention only to the numbers of views Reeks was getting rather than the quality of the writing or the content of the novel which by all accounts sucked. I listened to the standard two disks and decided this was not only not for me, it was not for anyone in their right mind. It's essentially another Hush Hush where a girl actively seeks out and adheres herself a guy who is openly disrespectful and abusive to her.

When I picked this up and read the blurb, I wrongly got he impression that that this was set in the past and was written by a mature author (i.e. mature in the sense of being a competent writer), but it was not. The writing quality was exactly what you'd expect from a fifteen to seventeen year old writer, and the issues with it were many. There are some young writers who can do it, but most cannot, and Beth Reekles is one of those. The novel isn't set in a more innocent time, it's contemporary, which made it inexplicable. Another problem was that the novel was written as an English novel, but it's set in California, a place to which the author has never been and evidently not even researched. Consequently all the Californian high-schoolers speak as though they're in England. Nonsensical.

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Given that it's not set in the past, the whole kissing booth idea fails. Reeks explained in an interview that that she moved it to to California because they don't have kissing booths in high school carnivals in Britain. They do in the US with the rise of orally transmitted diseases such as HPV and AIDS? No!!!! The sad thing is that none of this - the risk of transmission of disease - is raised. No one objects to it, and that's another issue with the novel - the complete lack of adult or parental supervision. There is none in this novel, not in any of it that I read.

This novel failed on so many levels that it's a joke, and the fact that Random House ran with it serves only to underline the problems I have with Big Publishing. All the more power to Reeks if she can rip-off the rubes with a crappy novel, but what does it say about young readers that they consider something like this to be perfectly acceptable reading material?

The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden

Rating: WARTY!

This is going to be a wa-ay long review even by my standards, so be prepared! My blog is about more than reviewing - it's about writing and about the language, but even so, this one is longer than usual. You have been warned!

This is a young adult kitchen sink story in that there is pretty much nothing from the paranormal world that isn't in this book. There's horror and voodoo, and vampires, oh my! This was an advance review copy which sounded really intriguing when I read the blurb, but by the time I was ten percent or so into it, I started having reservations about it purely because of the YA clichés which had begun to pervade everything. More on this anon. By the time I was a quarter the way through there was so much that made no sense and so many issues that I honestly started to feel I wouldn't be able to actually finish reading it, which is truly sad, because in many ways it was interesting and from a purely technically PoV, written rather well. At the risk of giving away details, and posting spoilers, let me try to explain.

Adele Le Moyne is fresh back from a disastrous stay with her French mother in Paris. Adele doesn't like mom. Why she went so late in the year that her return would cause her to miss the start of school isn't explained. Obviously the storm had some say in the matter, but it didn't really explain it. The storm is a whole other issue which I'll get to. Adele is returning to New Orleans with her father. They're coming back to see how their home and her dad's bar fared after a truly devastating storm. Adele likes dad, even though he treats her like a child. Actually, given how immature she is, this is probably a wise move on pop's part. Note that this storm both is and isn't Katrina, which gets no mention here, though other storms do. This felt to me, initially, like it was a huge storm in the near future, but I came to understand that it was meant to be Katrina. Why the author had a problem with identifying it as such is a mystery. The problem is that we're told it was the "largest" storm ever to hit the continental USA. That's not Katrina. I'll get into this later.

The city is largely deserted, but is slowly coming back to life. Adele's biggest fear is being sent back to France because the local arts school is closed indefinitely. As she starts to settle in, she finds strange things happening to her. On her first day back in the house, a bird attacks her and scratches her face. Later, she finds a freshly dead body in a car on her way home. It seems there's a rising murder rate, especially over the last twenty four hours. Oddly enough, despite the devastation and the lack of adequate policing, there seems to be no National Guard presence in the city. This struck me as me as absurd, and was one of the things which began chipping away at the credibility of the story for me.

Adele has other things happen, too. She visits a local voodoo store which she has never been in before, and she meets some slightly eccentric people. She experiences a weird event on the way home with a banging shutter and an inexplicably shattering window at a convent, yet despite being a New Orleans resident for her entire life (apart from the last two months), and therefore obviously aware of the voodoo culture, she never once starts to wonder if there's something to it after these odd events. Of course there isn't in real life, but this is a voodoo story inter alia, so you'd think there would be something, somewhere in her mind that starts wondering. The fact that there wasn't - even after all this - made me think that Adele wasn't very bright, which is never a good trait with which to imbue your main character.

There were some odd descriptions, too, such as the non-word 'chainmaille', which should either be 'chainmail' or simply 'maille' (which by itself means the same thing). I know this was an ARC copy, but I can't see this kind of thing being fixed in the final published version unless someone highlights it. On a slightly different issue, at one point Adele almost has an accident with a large nail, which she describes as a "giant nail twice the width of my palm" which struck me as badly described. I may be wrong here, but I think what's meant was that the nail was as long as two widths of her palm, but the way it's written makes it sound like the nail's width (i.e. diameter) is two of her palm widths, which would be a truly humongous nail!

I had an issue with the multi-language use. It may not bother other readers, but for me, it was too pervasive. Indeed, it felt more like the author was showing off her faculty with languages than really contributing to building a strong story. This kind of thing is done often in novels, and unless there's really a good reason for it, it's just annoying to me. It's even more irritating when we get the foreign phrase followed immediately by the English translation, such as in "J'en doute. I seriously doubt it." Although this isn't an exact translation (it would need sérieusement added for that) it makes my point here, and this just kept kicking me out of suspension of disbelief.

I found it hilarious that phones in New Orleans can text in French! One message from "Pépé" read, "Préparer un pot frais de chicorée" Evidently when envoyer des SMS en Français (texting in French), one doesn't use abbreviations! I'm sure there are ways and even apps which allow you to enter accented letters, but why would you bother when texting to people who speak English? Why not just send "make fresh chicory" and be done with it? Rightly or wrongly, this only served to reinforce my feeling that the author had been employing French much more as a pretension than as a legitimate writing tool.

Since this is New Orleans, I could see a French word here and there showing up, but when she meets two Italians, they're doing it too, and it was too much, especially since they also have grammatically perfect English - better than your typical native English speaker! LOL! Amusingly, the first phrase either one of them uttered was, "Well, whom do we have here?" The problem is that no one speaks like that, much less a foreign speaker of English. It's much more likely for the speaker to say, "Well, who is this?" The thing is that few use correct grammar in their everyday speech, so while you can write in your narrative, 'whom', it's just wrong to write it as part of someone's speech unless that particular character actually is a stickler for grammar. Most people are not, especially if English is their second language. It's also worth remembering, in a story like this one - which is told in first person, that the narrative should reflect the speech patterns of the person. Truly correct grammar is unlikely unless the narrator is an English teacher, for example.

I know it's hard for a writer to let that go (although personally, I'd kick 'whom' out of the language altogether), but it has to be done. Some writers, including this one, apparently, can't ignore a compulsion towards good grammar, which in a way is commendable, but it doesn't contribute to a realistic story. I won't get into the employment of the French in and of itself since mine is so rusty, but I'd be curious to know if "Comment a été Paris?" is more accurate than what was used here " Comment était Paris?" for "How was Paris?" - meaning, of course, how did you like Paris - what impression did it leave you with? Everything else seemed in order to my out-of-practice eye, so I guess I'd bow to the author's evidently superior expertise in this case.

The biggest problem for me in the first ten percent though, was when Adele met those Italian twins, Gabriel and Niccolò, who I quickly found to be creepy and obnoxious. Why one had a Jewish name whereas the other had the expected Italian name went unexplained, but it did occur to me that one is the name of an angel, and the other could be the name of the devil - as in 'Old Nick', for example. Actually they were not twins, but they may as well have been. They were brothers: a dark haired leather-clad bad-boy type, and a blond-haired good-guy type. Talk about trope good and evil!

This jumped out at me as a potential beginning of your typical and tiresomely clichéd YA love triangle. I was hoping I was wrong but it had all the hallmarks, and my stomach churned from reading about this "nauseating display of high school flirtation" (you'd have to read the book - or at least 22% of it! - to feel the full weight of that sarcastic comment!). As it turned out, the triangle was not over the two Italians, but it did involve the predictable one of the two. Nothing new there. Everything about these boys was a complete cliché from their height, to their chiseled good looks, to their foreign nature and athletic build. It's truly sad to find YA author after YA author who cannot seem to develop an original character as a love interest, and persists in going down the same tired and over-used macho guy and sad love triangle circuit that's been beaten to death, and which is already way beyond tedious at this juncture.

A real problem came with Niccolò's conduct, bad boy or not. I honestly don't know how an author can write inappropriate or overly familiar contact as though it's right or normal. Yes, some people do behave that way, but let's not make those people heroic or the love interest of the main character, please? This conduct should certainly not be portrayed as something to be meekly tolerated. At one point, one of the brothers, uninvited, gets right into Adele's personal space, and starts touching her and manually examining the medallion she has hanging around her neck (a medallion which is actually there for no good reason). He doesn't even do her the courtesy of asking. It's like she's now his property, and he can do whatever he wants with her, even though they'd never met prior to that very minute. This isn't the only time he abuses her so.

Adele responded (to his effectively fondling her) not by becoming assertive, but by becoming as compliant as a whipped puppy. We read "his fingertips grazed my cheek" as though it's supposed, I assume, to be intimate and romantic, but it's not. It's creepy and overly familiar. It's presumptive and assumptive, suggesting that young women are there for the taking, and it sends entirely the wrong message to both genders. If these two had known each other for years as friends, or were lovers, or married, or even if they were young kids, then yes, this would be fine, or at least expected, but for a complete stranger to effectively own a woman of Adele's age in that manner, and for her to very effectively lie down before him like he's the alpha male and she's just part of his pride or his pack is trashy at best.

The reason I was sad was that this author had drawn me right in and was writing pretty well to this point. She had a great facility with the language and with her descriptive writing, and it was honestly a shock to find myself suddenly suffocating under this worn-out, teen-aged fabric that was being unceremoniously piled on to the pretty decent material she'd been so skillfully working to this point in the story. I don't know why authors, especially female authors, feel they have to validate their female characters with male ones (the same applies to male characters, for that matter) I really don't, but it's never a good thing. The truly odd thing about these two Italians, by the way, is that while they claim that they're here to find missing relatives, they seem to spend absolutely no time whatsoever actually looking. Of course, since this is a first person PoV story, we have no idea what's going on when Adele isn't around.

Adele wasn't very likable for a variety of reasons. One of these is my own bias against the fashion world. I think it's the shallowest, most self-indulgent and least beneficial endeavors in human history. I have no time for fashion designers, fashions or runway models, and unfortunately, Adele wants to be a fashion designer, which as you can now imagine, did nothing to endear her to me. My gut feeling was that she wouldn't end up there, given the way this story was going, but the real question here is: why is she that character - the one who wants to join the fashion world? What does it contribute to this story except to further establish how frivolous she is? Why isn't she wanting to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a software designer? She's from New Orleans, so why doesn't she want to be a chef or a musician, or an architect, or even a merhcant marine for that matter? I didn't get where the fashion thing was coming from. She could have been aiming to be a chef or an architect, and still have justified the trip to Paris, for example.

The other issue with Adele is that she's a whiney, shallow, ungrateful little tyke who behaves inappropriately for her age. What with this and her fashion 'ambition', her age seemed more like twelve then ever it did sixteen. Yeah, I get that she hates her mom, but when her father wants to discuss school with her, she becomes resentful, tearful, and childish. Someone that emotional would never survive vampires let alone be able to stand up to them! She has the option to go back to Paris, which she flatly rejects. Fine! But she also has the option to study fashion design in California at a very prestigious school, and stay with her best friend who, we're told, she misses immensely, yet she rejects all of this in favor of staying in New Orleans where there's nothing to do and her career plans are effectively on hold. This tells me that she's not only a petulant brat, and that she really doesn't care much for her friend - or for her supposed fashion ambitions for that matter, but also that she's clueless and actually has no ambition. These are hardly heroic traits! On the one hand, rejecting fashion would warm me to her somewhat, but on the other, none of this bratty behavior endeared her to me at all. It merely served to render her into someone about whom (see, I can use it!) I cared very little, and whose story I really didn't feel much like following.

You'll note that I didn't mention 'scientist' as a possible career choice above. The reason for this is that Adele doesn't seem to have an even remotely inquiring mind. Even when she finally accepts that supernatural events are taking place around her and she has some influence over them, she still fails to pursue this with any kind of intellect or determination or with any sort of spirit of adventure. Instead, she idly tinkers with it like it's an old Rubik cube she found somewhere. I honestly don't know of anyone - male or female - who would be as lackadaisical as she is over such a series of events!

Adele toys with her new power, yet shows absolutely no motivation whatsoever (and she wants to make it in the cut-throat fashion world?!) to get to its root. She doesn't even think of taking her power out for a real run, or to start seriously investigating what it is or why she has it. Most damning of all, she doesn't even begin to consider ways in which she could use this power to help in putting her supposedly beloved city back on its feet. She's not too smart, either, over figuring out what the extent and limit of the power is, when it seems patently obvious to the reader. This character began as an interesting one, but for me, she became ever more unbelievable the further the story went on. In the end, she wasn't remotely credible. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Adele was really an insult to women with her all-pervasive inertia and her shallowness and lack of any real substance.

At the front of this book is a dedication to the people of New Orleans (the author is evidently a native), but it says nothing about how strong they are. It's all about myth and magic; however, given the story we have here, it would be hypocritical for the dedication to have talked about strength and motivation. This fictional character, as a New Orleans native, was an insult to the real-life people of that city, given what they've been through, and how they rebuilt and moved on afterwards. If Adele had been portrayed as a go-getter, and an industrious young woman who refused to be beaten down, and who worked hard every day, I could have seen a reflection of New Orleans in her, but the fact remains that she isn't a shadow on the real people there, and that was the biggest disappointment in this book for me. I know that some people are actually like Adele in real life - lazy, shiftless, unwilling or incapable of doing a fair day's work, and you could probably get a really good novel about such a character, but this wasn't it, and the character that Adele actually was didn't belong in this kind of a story. Like Adele herself, it didn't work.

This same lack of motivation pervades her whole life. We've been told that she wants to be a fashion designer, but she never works on designs, neither with a sketch pad, nor with a computer. That life she supposedly wants doesn't even pervade her thoughts at all! Pretty much the only thing in her thoughts isn't even her new power! In the first quarter of the novel, her mind is most often on some dude she hung out with in Paris. This is how shallow she is. Her assessment of this guy is: "he's very hot and very French" Seriously? That's the basis of her 'rapport' with him? Pure objectification? Instead of being the heroic figure a novel like this begs for, Adele is reduced to the status of a lovesick tweenie (her actual age notwithstanding), who has an impossible crush on some older kid. Worse than this, despite her assertion that she wants to stay with her dad in New Orleans, she spends virtually no time with him. Every day he's out all hours, working on fixing up his bar (at least this is what we're told, but I didn't believe it), yet never once does she offer to go help him. She'd rather sit on her lazy ass in the coffee bar, doing nothing, evidently, save for her almost ritualistic indulgence in growing paranoia and endless self-pity. That is when she's not lusting after one or another of several boys she encounters.

It seems like she's 'employed' in this coffee bar, but there are no customers, so how are the owners even paying her - and why?! All she does is sit around. At one point she thinks some guy is sketching her, and she resents this, yet she's so inert that she can't even think of changing where she sits, or perhaps moving into the back area where he can't see her. This is how inanimate her brain is. We're told that she's supposed to be attending this exclusive school in lieu of her own school being closed indefinitely, but she hasn't been attending, even though it appears to be open and this is now mid-October! Why she's so tardy goes unexplained. She eventually does attend, but it's only part time, and her overly protective father makes no arrangements for her to be transported to and from the school even when there's a murder spree going on in the city and he's supposed to be so protective of her!

The reason I initially felt that this story was set slightly in the future was that Katrina was never mentioned by name - unless you include a reference in the acknowledgements to a person named Katrina! LOL! The hurricane was described very vaguely as the largest one to hit the US, but 'largest' can mean many different things. By what measure was it the largest? By cost, Katrina was the "largest" by some margin, but every few years the "largest" by cost changes because property values rise, and so more damage (in dollars) is done, even if the hurricane is relatively tame. The problem is that by any other measure, Katrina was not the largest, not even by death toll, by which measure it was third (so far). By largest diameter, Katrina wasn't in the top five. By 'most severe' it barely made the top five and by 'most intense' failed to get into the top five. By highest sustained winds it wasn't even in the top ten. By barometric pressure it was tenth, by most tornadoes spawned, it was sixth, and so on. I wouldn't describe it as the 'largest' and I found it objectionable that cost seemed to be the only measure deemed worthy of measure here. Surely death toll is more important than property damage?

At one point Adel goes with Isaac (the other leg of the triangle and another Biblical name) to her friend's house to find something. Although Isaac has no clue what it is that she's seeking, he says, "I'll go check out the rest of the place" - why? What's he looking for? Evidently it was to give Adele some time alone with her powers, but this part made no sense to me, especially since he was supposed to be keeping an eye on her.

Adele's hypocrisy was annoying at best. This is the girl who is lusting after every trope male she meets in this novel, yet at one point she tells us, "My eyes rolled at the ripple of testosterone" Honestly? Her other faults were numerous and never deemed to be faults by her or anyone else, but perhaps the worst was her chronic indolence. This infests her every neuron, and drags this book out to an unwarranted number of pages. It's ironically reflected in the larger story arc, and is what contributes to the ruin of this story for me. The story felt very much like New Orleans appeared after the storm: a mess, a tragedy, and leaving an all-but hopeless feeling in the gut. Whereas New Orleans had a real human story which grew and heartened, this fiction never did. I know this is the south and the cliché is that it's supposed to be laid back, but there's a huge difference between 'laid back' and 'moribund' and that latter place was where Adele resided.

This business of guys taking advantage of Adele and her having absolutely no negative feelings about this abhorrent behavior, was what finally turned me off (and my stomach over) with this novel. There was another incident where Adele was with Isaac, and she became very emotional over the damage done to her friend's home. Isaac saw her emotionally weakened, and instead of asking if she wanted to leave, or if she wanted to talk, or even just giving her a friendly hug, this jerk-off kisses her. What a louse!

It was at that point that I decided I was done with this nonsense. It wouldn't have been so bad had she pushed him away and read him the riot act about taking advantage of emotional weakness and painful upset, but she never did. This is one of the two guys who both abused her like this, and instead of being outraged and repelled, she's falling for the two of them, not even caring that someone is going to get hurt through her irresponsible ambivalent behavior. Adele is obviously also a jerk and I feel no compulsion to read any more about a person like that, who quite evidently has no redeeming value, and is as clueless as they come. So no, I never made it to sixty percent because I didn't care if it improved. There is no improvement a writer can make which can ever fill a hole that's been dug this deep!

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.