The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George

Rating: WARTY!

This audio book came as one of a pair I picked up at the local library. Of course the blurbs made them sound interesting, so I figured if I like this, one will get me two. Naturally I began listening to the wrong one first, so the next day I started on the other one. The first had not been very impressive to start with, but it began to grow on me as I continued to listen. The second, which was actually the first volume of the pair, I liked right away, but then it began to grow off me, I'm sad to say. I think it's always sad when a book lets a reader down.

The main character, Becca, has the ability to catch people's thoughts, but in just the same way that mediums cannot ever give you anything concrete (because they're freaking frauds, of course!), Becca's thought-capture utility gives her only vague, fragmented snatches which made little sense. It did, however, drive her nuts when so many random thoughts invaded her mind, so her mom got her this thing which at first I thought was called the 'odd box', but which was actually called the "aud" box. I was saddened when I learned that, because I really liked the idea of them calling it an odd box. This is the price of audio books: no way to know the spelling of an odd word or a name, no ability to skip prologues reliably, and god-awful trashy music beginning and ending every disk.

What in the name of all that's inscribed is going through the mind of the audio book publishers that they feel they have lard-up the written word with mindless snatches of music that don't even disappear when the reader starts in on the text, but instead slowly fade away? I have no idea. Did the author write the music. NO! The music is entirely, completely, absolutely, fundamentally, and in every other way nothing to do with the story! It was absent from the novel as written by the author (which is all I care about), so what in the entire universe possessed these delusional deviants to add it? Are they so anal that they cannot get past the illusion that if it's a CD it has to have music? If it's audio it must have power chords and thrashing drums? These people are morons.

But I digress. The story begins interestingly enough when Becca catches thoughts from her stepdad that show he has murdered his business partner. Her dad, aware she can catch thoughts, knows that she knows, and this, finally, is evidently enough to motivate her mother to leave this jerk. Somehow Laurel, the mom, magically has the wherewithal to conjure up false identities for Becca and herself, and with hair color and makeup disguises, the two flee - to Whidbey island. Mom evidently has an old friend from high school who lives on the island, and who has agreed to take care of Becca. Mom herself, for reasons unexplained, does not stay with Becca, but disappears off somewhere else, leaving her daughter entirely alone.

The woman Becca is supposed to stay with dies before Becca gets to the house, and she has evidently told no one else that Becca is coming, so Becca is not only alone, she is without substantial money and has nowhere to stay. Then magic happens. Again. Becca gets a ride from a nice woman; she meets a nice young guy who directs her to another gruff but nice older woman, who magically runs a motel where Becca can stay for free in return for helping out around the place. You know this is what happens to all runaways right? They get everything on a plate and never have any difficulties. Happy, happy, joy, joy. This novel is Newbery material right there.

So this story that began with a great premise now descends rapidly into nothing more than high school rivalry and love triangles. The perky rockin' music was appropriate after all! Who knew?! Becca meets Derek, a slightly older student who is sweetness personified. She also meets Jen, one of the most obnoxious people it's possible to not avoid meeting. She immediately hates Becca and misses no opportunity to trash her in public and in front of Derek. Never once does Derek call Jen on it, or try to stop the insults flowing. Yet he's a nice guy, because we're told he is. He has a nice opinion of Jen, too, notwithstanding her disgraceful attitude and criminal behavior. (Note that I managed to stomach only about 30% of this novel, so when I say "never once" it refers only to that portion)

That's all the story offered at this point, and it was nowhere near enough. That and some vague mystery from the past which was so heavily and repeatedly foreshadowed that it became tedious to listen to. The reader, Amy McFadden, was way too perky and while not god-awfully bad, could not do a decent male voice to save her life, so that became a joke. Becca isn't very smart, either, which is another no-no in stories for me. When she gets a lift to go meet Derek, the driver sees him, and Becca catches certain foreboding thoughts. When she gets to Derek's side, she catches the other side of those thoughts, but never once does she suspect there's anything going on here. She's an idiot.

I was thoroughly disappointed in Becca that she had this ability to catch thoughts, yet did nothing with it: she did not practice, she tried no training of her ability, there was no exploration, no testing, no spying, nothing. Instead, she treated it like a mental illness, which was disappointing and short-sighted. I don't care if a girl starts out dumb and wises up, but I don't really want to read about female characters who have no sense of curiosity or ambition and never develop one.

There wasn't even any internal logic to the thought capture. She couldn't pick up thoughts from sentient animals such as dogs for example, and couldn't pick them up from an unconscious boy who'd had an accident, so it made no sense (unless maybe he was brain dead - I didn't read that far). She picked up no images, sounds, or smells, only words, and never once did she get a full sentence, again with no explanation as to why. In the case of the boy, Becca calls for an ambulance, and then refuses to give her name and hides her phone. What? I know she's trying to stay below the radar, but seriously is that the smartest way to do it?

My plan is, despite the disappointment here, to at least give volume two a shot, and see if it's any better, especially since I already started it. The problem with this plan is that the main character here appears to be Jen - at least in the beginning - and she was so nauseating in volume one that unless she underwent a marked improvement somewhere in volume one, then volume two isn't going to be enjoyable either! We'll see. As for this volume, I can't recommend it.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Rating: WARTY!

This advance review copy of an English translation from Korean ought, as other reviewers have pointed out, to have been titled "The Vegan" rather than The Vegetarian, but 'vegetarian' is a widely recognized word, and 'vegan' not so much, so I can see why a writer might make a technically incorrect choice of title. The bottom line is that it's a misnomer either way because it really has nothing to do with vegetarianism or veganism. The central character's act of choosing a new diet is really a symptom, and not even a symptom of her own problem, but a symptom of what really is a mentally-ill family circle.

Other reviewers defined it as being about the main character's mental health problem, and the question of Yeong-hye's sanity is one I wrestled with for the first two parts (of this three-part) novella. The bottom line is that I have no idea whether the author intended this to be unclear, or was commenting that the people outside the psychiatric institution were insane and those inside sane, or whether we were to understand that Yeong-hye's behavior was merely a reaction to the appallingly brutal treatment she received, and wasn't intended to signify insanity at all, or whether this really was nothing more than a savage depiction of a slow descent into insanity

In the first two parts, I was less ready to blame Yeong-hye's behavior on psychiatric causes. To me it seemed much more like a rebellion against oppression by a woman who had reached the end of her tether, and with very good reason. Her behavior there found its best parallel in the changes Yossarian underwent in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Only later, in part three, did she descend into readily identifiable mental illness, and by this time it was arguable that she'd been driven there by members of her own family and her husband, each of whom were quite frankly deranged. So maybe it was a comment that some people can get away with being mentally unstable, or at least exhibit it in a form which is socially acceptable.

The truly warped thing was not so much that these people were insane, but that the medical profession was in the beginning, all-too-ready to look the other way and later, chomping at the bit to condemn people to asylums with absolutely no grounds whatsoever. I've never lived in Korea and know little about how society functions there, but I dearly hope it is nowhere near as dire as it's depicted in this story.

One of the doctors actually said, "Today we'll try feeding her some gruel intravenously"! Seriously? Way to kill a patient! Inject gruel into their veins! It made me wonder wonder what the author actually said in Korean, and if it didn't say this, then why the translation was so bad. The doctor struck me as grossly incompetent anyway, so maybe the translation was accurate. The text actually said, "In fact, the doctor doubted whether Yeong-hye had been taking her medication at all." This is a patient in this doctor's own hospital, and he has no idea whether his orders are being carried out properly?! This is a psychiatric institution. Do they simply hand out the pills and leave the patient to determine what's best for themselves?

Just as bad was the willingness of the medical profession to commit two people to psychiatric institution when all they did was paint flowers on their skin and make love. This makes me never want to visit Korea. I thought South Korea was relatively enlightened, but this author paints a chronic picture of that nation. The entire youth of North America and Europe all would have been committed under these rules had they been applied in the sixties summer of love! LOL!

Vegetarianism is insulted rather gratuitously and ignorantly by the characters depicted here. It's widely derided as an unfortunate aberration or a disease rather than a conscious choice to live a better life, and to me this seemed to be one more way in which the author was showing how barbaric these people were, they who surround and seek to control the main character. I'm not going to pontificate about vegetarianism here except to say that there would be far fewer hungry people on the planet if the west quit this habit of dedicatedly feeding tons grain to artificial herds of animals, and instead fed it to those who are in far greater need of the sustenance. But if this is how Koreans feel about vegetarians in general, I definitely have no intention of ever going there.

Although the story is superficially about Yeong-hye, it felt much more like it was a commentary on societal attitudes towards women in Korea, and it was truly disturbing to read it, especially in part one. I sincerely hope the Korean people in general do not hold these attitudes, but I have no experience of Korea, so I can't comment. Yeong-hye suddenly decides, after an awful dream of bloody, raw meat and carnivorous behaviors, to give up eating dead animals and animal products (such as milk and eggs). She also quits wearing clothing derived from animal carcasses. In short, she becomes a full-frontal vegan. She does this 'cold turkey' as it were, and without trying to read-up anything about it to prepare herself for the change in lifestyle. Because of this, she starts to lose weight rather alarmingly.

She's not very communicative by nature, and her husband is disturbed by her behavior, but she seems perfectly rational as she explains to him that it will affect only his breakfast, since he eats other meals at work and can therefore choose to eat whatever he wants. In her sudden change, brought about without any preamble, she seems rather selfish, but she's nowhere near as selfish as her husband is in his behavior towards her. Initially he's tolerant, but his and her own family's treatment of Yeong-hye in the long run is nothing short of brutal, be warned.

Depending on your own sensitivities, the first part of this novel may nauseate you or make you want to drop it and read no further. I had a hard time with it, but I hoped this was going somewhere, so I could stand to read it in that hope and in the knowledge that there are, unfortunately, people like this in real life. It's not like the author is pulling these behaviors out of nowhere, and the story was short, but in the end, literally int he end, I had a hard time reading it because i could make no sense of it, and I took to skimming passages just to get it over with. But there is rape, more than once, and there are other forms of brutality directed at more than one female character.

Initially I'd thought this was actually three short stories, and I was ready to quit, so dissatisfied was I with the "ending" of the first part, but I realized that the second part was a continuation, so I continued, looking for some sort of resolution. It didn't come. I felt it would have been wiser had the author omitted the partitioning and simply told it as one continuous story, but this is the mess you get into when you start out in first person. You almost inevitably have to go to third person to convey some information, and your voice is lost.

It was lost again in part three where the voice changed once more to yet another third person perspective and suddenly the narrative was all over the place. We never do get Yeong-hye's perspective, and in many ways, I think this was the point of the novel. She's treated as a nonentity: an object or a problem rather than a person. It's hardly surprising, then, to see her react so negatively towards them and towards the life she had been forced to lead. Unfortunately, by that point, the story had been bouncing around like a pinball, and I cared no more about Yeong-hye than her family and husband did.

Yeong-hye's behavior leads to a complete alienation from those close to her. Her husband rapes her at one point, and her father hits her and tries to force-feed her at another. One of the worst acts of violence is committed by Yeong-hye upon herself in a dramatic and scarily defiant reaction to her father's brutality. At this point she appears to have divorced herself from all society, having no modesty, baring her body in public, and seemingly drifting through life with her eyes open but seeing nothing of interest.

The truly scary part, however, is that her husband and family are so callous that at no point does any one of them consider getting Yeong-hye the psychiatric medical treatment she appears to need right then. Even when she's temporarily in the hospital, there seems to be no health-care giver who's interested in her mental welfare. This is perhaps the most shocking part of the entire novel, and it's admirable how Yeong-hye bounces back despite the neglect of those who supposedly love her, but her reprieve is short-lived.

As I mentioned, the novella is translated from Korean, so I can't speak to the quality of the original. It's Brit English rather than American English too, but it's not unintelligible as long as you remember that a jumper is a sweater and training shoes (or trainers), are not for children but for athletes! There is a Korean measurement, the p-yong or pyeong, which is for reasons unknown, not translated. Nor is there a definition of it in the book. The p'yong appears to be a measure of internal space, such as in residences and offices, and it's about 35 square feet.

Overall, I was not impressed. The brutality and abuse depicted here demands some sort of explanation or preferably a resolution given how gratuitous and misogynistic it is, but the book offers none, and the third section is largely unintelligible due to the random jumping around of the voice, perspective, and story. I had a hard time following it, so for me the only really readable part, for one reason or another, was the middle section. This was supposed to be erotic and artistic, but it could not avoid rape and abuse either, so overall, what can this novel offer? For me it was nothing, and I cannot recommend it. I wish the author all the best in future endeavors, which I hope will be more harmonious than this was.

Parallel by Lauren Miller

Rating: WARTY!

Parallel is a young adult novel about a girl who is trapped between two parallel worlds, each containing a slightly different version of her life. This happened when these two world somehow came into contact, resulting in an earthquake in the one version, and inexplicable dull headache in the other. I'm not sure that the author really understands what a parallel universe means, although the science is not fringe, by any means. Parallel universes are the inevitable outcome of the physics we have which gives us our best understanding of how the universe came to be - to date! It's always 'to date' in the world of science because understanding can change with new information. The problem is that if two of these universes collided, you'd be probably more likely to end up with a brand new Big Bang and a third universe created than you would be to get an earthquake and a headache, but this is fiction, so go with it, right?

I don't mind it when authors play fast and loose with science if they can give me a good story, but for an author to shrink an event of this magnitude down to a teenage girl's love triangle is taking things way too far for my taste, and doing real science a disservice. The story is written like the only important thing this massive event affected is Abby Barnes's career plans, and no one else noticed! Say what?! In the entire universe, the only sentient being who is aware of what's going on is Abby? Doesn't that make her special! And rest assured she is very special. She has the perfect life and the perfect career path and the perfect friend and the perfect family and everything is laid out perfectly to perfection. Yep, this isn't Abby Barnes, it's Mary Sue!

I enjoyed the opening chapter, but by chapter two I was already having issues with this, and by a quarter the way through I was really feeling like this was going nowhere that had not been gone before by a thousand crappy YA novels replete with high school melodrama and love triangles. I mean, seriously, this girl is aware of an Earth shattering event (almost literally!), where two parallel universes have collided, and yet rather than focus on that, she's much more interested - forget that, she's much more obsessed - with some random guy she met that she's inexplicably head-over-heels in love with after one drunken date than ever she is with this incredible event! I lost all respect for her when she became a jellyfish if he so much as breathed in her direction (this spinelessness actually happened on one occasion, I kid you not).

Her behavior is that of a fourteen year old freaking over the latest music star than ever it is the behavior of a supposedly smart and together career path student in her late teens. I get that even though this has happened, she has to get on with her life, and that her life is rather more difficult to get on with than most, but seriously? It was laughable how shallow she was. Worse than that, she was not likable, nor was her snotty friend Caitlin who was not only runway model gorgeous (so-called), but has the brains of Einstein. Not that that can't happen (Marilyn vos Savant I'm looking at you!), but question here was: is there anywhere in this cozy little universe that perfection has not pervaded?

Abby's original plan had been to go to journalism school at Northwestern after which she would then get a job at a newspaper. This was set in 2009, admittedly, but newspapers were going down the toilet even then, and this is her career plan? Yes, they moved online, but who at Abby's age, even considers newspaper, print or online, a source of news these days? I don't doubt that some do, and that Abby should, but she never even talks about newspapers, keeping up with the news, reading web news sites or anything. She doesn't even blog! It's a total disconnect, but then this was written by a lawyer, so maybe that explains something.

The only fly in Abby's luxuriously creamy ointment isn't even technically in her ointment so why it's such a bother to her is a mystery. This fly is named Ilana (and I had the hardest time, because of the typeface used in the hardback, figuring out what the heck her name was. Was it LIANA? LLANA? ILANA?! Ilana (the latter version) was the most abused character in this universe, and for no good reason except that Caitlin and Abby simply spewed vitriol at her with far more dedication than even the most rabid skunk will try to get you.

They didn't even care that their purported best friend Tyler (can we get names any more down-home than these three: Abby, Caitlin, Tyler? really?) likes her and hangs with her. They abuse her anyway and Tyler never even gets pissed off with their attitude! Not that Ilana was exactly the most pleasant person on the planet, but it occurred to me that the reason she was that way, was because of the endless hate rays being beamed at her by the truculent twins. The only difference between these girls, as far as I could tell, was that the one actually had sex, while the other two were all but virginal, so obviously they had the moral high ground and Ilana was lower than snake vomit. Ri-ight! Got it. Is that the legal view? No wonder rape victims get nervous about reporting such crimes.

I honestly don't get why you would want to introduce a fascinating and cutting-edge sci-fi element into your YA novel, if all you're going to do then is tell a trope YA love triangle/high school melodrama story with it? What a chronic waste! The weird thing about it was that these two worlds which merged were not even at the same date. One was exactly a year out from the other, for no apparent reason. In what way was it parallel again? As the story bounced inexplicably back and forth between them, the younger Abby was seeing her carefully constructed baby blanket unravel in the present, and finding her life completely different from what she had planned.

We're told that the two worlds she is shown in are supposedly merging slowly, and she's afraid of losing herself, but she's losing herself in herself, so it's a bit weird and intriguing on that score. It's a bit like having schizophrenia, I suppose. In the future she can recall what happened in the past, but only bit by bit, just like she can only "recall" the new skills she has developed when it comes down to the wire. This made no sense to me, and it quickly became tedious, because Abby's perfect life only had the most minuscule of problems: like she didn't want to coxswain the boat for the rowing team.

Frankly she was pathetic, and not worth reading about.

Hawksong by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Rating: WARTY!

Two households, both alike in dipshits,
In fair bird droppings, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break two new misfits,
Where uncivil blood makes love demeaned.
From forth the fatal wash of mortal enemas
A pair of snake-cross'd birders take their life;
One Zane Cobriana, in heart and soul an ass
Talks Danica Shardae into becoming his wife.
The fearful passage of their asinine love,
And the continuance of their friends' rage,
Which, buttheads that they were, naught could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
Shall wish your very own life to end.

This was one of the sorriest novels I've ever not read. Nope, I listened to it, and the reader's voice was barely tolerable. It's a Romeo and Juliet redux, but instead of the couple dying, the story died.

The blurb, of course, made it sound like it might be interesting and there was a sequel, both of which I happily borrowed from the local library hoping for a treat. That hope died. I returned the second volume unheard. I got through fifty percent of the first volume before I could stand it no more. There was no performance, unless that word is a contraction of 'perfunctory dormancy', and if I had to listen to the reader Jennifer Ikeda say "Donnika" just one more time I would have lost it. Dahknicker Shardead and inZane Cobrie-cheese. he;s so inzane that he crawls out of his skin every year. Literally.

I've seen some reviewers, even negative ones, praise the world building, and I have to ask, what world-building? There was ZERO world building here! What 'story' we got made no sense. These two races, the Avians and the reptilians - no - they were not even reptilians, they were serpient! What is that? It's not the equivalent of a class like avian. It's a sub-order, serpentes, which I guess is what those people were, so maybe it's right after all, if their race is judged by the behavior of the leader, Zane, who happily skins people who piss him off, and evidently carpets the floor of his room with the skins. This is a civilized person? This is someone to fall in love with? He's a snake in the grass. A man who suggests that his intended bride wasn't been beaten too much? How much beating would be just enough, Zane? This is a man who cam make peace? No, it isn't. Snakes are not very much into making peace with birds. They'd rather eat them.

There was no real description of the world in which these people lived, or even how they came to be (= no world-building). They were supposed to be birds and snakes, yet they maintained human form most of the time. Why? No explanation. Apparently there were humans on this planet, but they played no role whatsoever in the events - not in the portion to which I listened, anyway - so why were these races mimicking humans? No explanation. Why were there humans at all? No explanation.

The races were supposed to have been at war for a thousand years or more, and no one had any idea why they were fighting, yet they continued. Not once during this millennium of mêlée was any technology developed. Why not? War produces huge and lethal advances in technology, yet neither of these two races achieved anything. Why not? How the birds had failed to beat the earth-bound snakes escapes me. The two races supposedly detested each other, yet completely out of the blue, two of them magically started to trust each other. Two alien races, neither of which could have had any attraction to the other, yet they agree to marry, believing, for no reason at all, that this would end the war. Seriously? Why would it? Why would they think it would?

Dah-knicker became Zane's "Naga" - yet another snake word which made me laugh because it sounded so much like "nagger". Donni-kuh was his nagger. We had the Cobriana family, the Cobra race, the serpient people, the serpents? There was no logic to any of these amateur naming conventions, including the main character's names. The bird was named Danica Shardae, the guy Zane Cobriana? Seriously? So that's why he couldn't get into the dance club - it was mambas only! He drove an old battered car. It was a real rattler! He's so tired of people that he dreams of living alone on a coral island, watching Monty Python. And wearing a boa....

These critters were not human, yet they mimicked humans and took very pretentious human names. Why? No doubt for the same reason that they inhabited very human palaces, where they had servants, and where despite being at war for a thousand years, they Avians still haven't thought that it might be a good idea to guard the servants' stairs which lead directly to the princess's bedroom. These people are morons. No wonder they can't win. Again, zero world-building.

Danica was supposed to be a hawk, yet she possessed not a single hawk-like trait. She was more like a Dodo. Danica laid an egg. The same goes for Zane and his purported cobra-esque personality. The snakes could hypnotize people with a glance? Honestly? Could we not get a modicum of originality here? This story was sad, sad, sad. Yeah, it gave me a belly-laugh, but I give it the bird.

Paulina & Fran by Rachel B Glaser

Rating: WARTY!

I hate to end my 2015 reviews on a negative note, but this novel wasn't at all what I'd hoped for from the blurb. OTOH, what novel is? Very few of them, to be sure. Rest assured that it's as far from "an audaciously witty debut" as it's possible to get. So Rachel B Glaser and I be unhappy with her effort. It started out interestingly enough, but there was a current underlying it which was obnoxious, and it quickly began to trudge and stumble.

I'd hoped it would get sanded down and become a lot more smooth as the story grew, but the ever-dragging story never did grow wheels, and so the rough edges prevailed. I made it literally half way through - to the end of chapter eight before I gave up on it. It was boring, repetitive and uninventive, and there were no characters in it that I liked. The most obnoxious characters were the titular ones and in that same order, too.

The story is apparently set in modern times, but there are weird anachronisms, so maybe it was set in the past and I missed something which explained this, because there were two mentions, one of a Walkman, and one of a Discman, featured in it despite the novel being published in 2015. It was very confusing. The novel does cover a decade, and of course the Walkman name is still around, but the Discman name belongs to the eighties, so while it's possible these referred to modern devices, this didn't alleviate the confusion.

The reason it didn't is that if this was indeed a modern setting (even from the last ten to fifteen years), then all of these people were complete morons in having routine, unprotected sex with multiple partners, and yet not a single one of them ever considered, not even for a second, that there was anything wrong with it or dangerous about it.

The main character, Paulina, was one of the most uninteresting, self-absorbed, bitchy, and obnoxious characters I've ever read about. She had no redeeming feature whatsoever, and was totally uninteresting to me. She and her co-dependent, Fran, were art students, and the author managed to make even that tedious to read about. Fran was a complete wallflower. Neither of them deserved any sort of decent relationship or any happiness, so it was nice to see that they were getting none. Why anyone would be remotely interested in either of them even as an acquaintance, much less a friend or a lover, was a complete mystery.

Some reviewers made mention of this as reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie - and they did not intend that in a positive light. I agree. It's like post-Annie Hall Woody Allen, when his movies were not even remotely funny, and just became a rambling, self-absorbed mess about unsurprisingly clichéd tropes. I refuse to recommend pretentious and tired drivel like this, which some Big publishing™ editor evidently and mistakenly considered to be a work of art.

Infinity Ring a Mutiny in Time by James Dashner

Rating: WARTY!

The author of The Maze Runner fouls up again with this series aimed at middle graders. Not that I've actually read The Maze Runner series. I was interested after seeing the first movie, but then lost all interest after the disastrous second movie which was profoundly dumb and tedious. If it's anything like the novel I've lost all desire to read any of those books. I was curious to see if he might do better with something aimed at a younger audience. He didn't.

The cover designers showed their legendary ineptitude again by putting a compass on the front cover instead of the actual infinity ring. This is about time travel not geographic travel per se, so what's with the compass? I swear I get more laughs out of Big Publishing™ cover designers than I do from books which are actually intended to be humorous!

This is your standard middle-grade time travel novel where young kids save the world by visiting extremely famous points and/or people, and/or landmarks in history. I'm sure there's a novel (or maybe even a series) which gets it right, but this one isn't it. Set in an alternate reality (where the US capital is Philadelphia and Columbus didn't discover Cuba) - which we learn is really our reality gone awry, we soon discover that there are breaks in history, starting in Aristotle's time, which must be set right to put reality back on track. Who determined where these were, and how they figured out there were breaks in the first place is left unexplained.

That's just the problem with this novel: there's far too much unexplained. Why they cannot go back and fix the first (in Alexander and Aristotle's time) and have all the other breaks fall into place goes just as unexplained as why they start with Columbus instead of starting with the first, or even with the last and work backwards. My guess is that no matter how many they fix, and no matter where they start, every single volume in this series will be exactly the same - with Time Wardens seeking to thwart or to capture them no matter how much history they change, which makes zero sense, and it's why I didn't bother finishing this novel once I saw where it was stupidly determined to go. Worse than this, the two kids have a pad computer with them, yet instead of information, it delivers clues in cheap rhymes and in absurdly simple visual puzzles! Why? No reason at all! God forbid we should make our young readers actually think when we can serve everything up like it's fast food!

The idea is that there are good guys and bad guys (the Time Wardens) stationed throughout history. How that works goes unexplained, because they would either already have to know where the breaks were, in order to station guards there, or they would have to station people all over the entire planet throughout time, which is absurd. That was the major problem with this story: the sheer absurdity of it. I couldn't stand to finish it, especially since it was puffed up with so much fluff. The novel could have comfortably begun on page 80 or thereabouts, at the end of chapter twelve, about two fifths of the way into the story, and lost nothing in the telling!

Had anyone but an established author submitted this trash, any respectable publisher would have rejected it. This novel seemed to me to be nothing short of a cynical attempt to bilk the rubes (aka middle-graders) out of money by running a cheap series which retells the same story over and over with a few details changed here and there to make them superficially different. I mean why tell an intelligent and original story in one concise volume when you can stretch it to a dozen? I can't support that and I can't recommend this.

Bob's Burgers by assorted writers and artists

Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel combines issues one and two and is evidently based on a TV show which I have never seen. It looked interesting from the blurb, but failed dismally in the execution. The art work was cartoon-ish, which perhaps fits the TV show, but which wasn't very interesting to me. The main character, Tina, looked like she sported a mustache, which was interesting to me (how often do we get a female character with a mustache, even in cartoons?!) - interesting that is, until I discovered that there is no mustache - it's just the way her mouth is poorly drawn!

Tina herself proved to be a rather one-note and uninteresting. There were times when the humor was moderately amusing, and there were some interesting concepts which I felt deserved better treatment than they got, but for the most part the stories were boring and did not entertain me. There is, periodically, a story told in rhyme, but I took to skipping these after I'd read the first two because they were even more boring.

Note that this was an advance review copy so some of my comments here may be irrelevant depending upon what's done with the actual published version. That said, I do not recommend reading this on an iPad because the art work was a bit scrappy-looking. This is, perhaps, because of reduced image quality for the e-version, but this doesn't say much or the e-version, does it?! Worse than this, though, was the fact that the text was too small to read comfortably in some panels because it was so tiny. I don't think comic book creators should issue ebook versions of their comics unless the comic has been specifically designed as an ebook and the comic is written specifically for the ebook format. It simply doesn't work otherwise and exhibits a certain disrespect for e-formats.

In terms of the print version I was a bit shocked at the profligacy with which paper was wasted. Perhaps fans of the show might not consider it a waste, but even were I a fan I would still consider it wasteful when a comic book arrives with twenty or thirty pages of variant covers and so-called "pin-up" images. I have to wonder why the creators hate trees so much! Maybe this is intended to be printed on recycled paper? I would hope so.

As it is I cannot in good faith recommend this one for the reasons I've discussed: hum-drum stories, mediocre art work, and shameful waste of trees.

Rats by Paul Zindel

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb made this novel sound like it was a young adult story but it really isn't. There's a level of gore in it which is obnoxious. I got the impression that the author was disturbingly in love with describing the demise of people rodently chewed, mouse-masticated, in a word: eaten by rats. And he wasn't anywhere near as entertaining as Eric Idle. After only one disk in this audio book on CD, I couldn't stand to listen to any more, and I refuse to recommend something this obsessive. The author knows quite literally nothing about rats and worse, he ascribes to them superhuman powers. His descriptions are not even consistent.

The plot begins around a landfill which is being paved-over to make way for development. Something - which may well be explained later in the novel, but which wasn't at the point I quit, makes the rats grow, swarm, and essentially turn into zombies. They immediately start attacking the residents of the nearby residential neighborhood. This story read like bad fanfic and it was laughable - and not in a good way.

The Last Fall by Tom Waltz

Rating: WARTY!

I wasn't impressed by this rather gory graphic novel which really brought nothing new to the table. It was a mishmash of other sci-fi stories including a dash of Avatar wherein the brash rebel soldier falls in love with one of the enemy. Here it made no sense whatsoever. This young man, Sergeant Marcus Fall, was so filled with blind hatred of the Krovinites that his transition to pacifism made absolutely no sense whatsoever, much less his falling for one of them.

I read this advance review copy in electronic form on a decent desktop monitor, and the text was too small to read comfortably. I can't speak for the print version, but I wouldn't recommend reading this on an iPad, unless the text is improved considerably in the published edition. It was complete gibberish on that first page. Some of the text was humorously compressed. When I read, "What is he doing?" it looked like it read, "What is he dong." Another section read like it was "No talking, only dong" which is unfortunate at best! I skipped the introductory page because it was far too small to read the labeling on the solar system map, and the white on black text was just annoying. Maybe the final version is better.

The story is your standard fighting over a resource. This takes place outside of our solar system but is still fought largely between white guys. There is only a token few people of color despite people of color being in the huge majority on Earth. The soldiers on Fall's squad are clad in bulky suits of space-age armor and the carry swords and battle axes for no apparent reason other than gore. They look like a space-age A team. Fall's CO, Lieutenant Cole, looks Like a clown version of Mr T. He and a soldier named Lockwood are coincidentally about the only people of color on their side. Sgt Fall looks like he's ten years old, and he's a good Aryan soldier with yellow blonde hair and blue eyes. No wonder he wants to wipe out the other side and is constantly at odds with his darker shaded CO.

There are no robots here, for reasons unexplained. Yeah - the explanation is that writers can't get any emotional resonance out of an army of robots, although in this case the characters may as well have been robots being programmed and reprogrammed and on one note only. It was therefore amusing to me that the military was religious! Evidently the writers are fans of the Doctor Who episode Time of the Angels and its sequel, which, if true, is commendable, but this story didn't bring anything new. It never felt like any of these characters really believed what they were saying, not even the most dedicated religious devotees. Overall, the story made no sense, was constantly interrupted by boring flashbacks, and failed to really engage me at all. I only finished it because it was quite short. I can't recommend it.

Boy-1 by HS Tak

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"descision" on p98 should be "decision"

Boy-1 has a lot in common with the rebooted planet of the apes - genetic manipulation. They have super-intelligent chimpanzees, but the real focus, for reasons unexplained, is on producing genetically superior humans. Their DNA donor is code-named Clark Kent, for example. Jadas Riezner is a pill-popping young man with predictable issues, who is inexplicably in charge of the lab where the genetic manipulation is going on. He has, of course, the requisite "hot" girlfriend, who is evidently both very willing and long-suffering, and he has a 'Jarvis' in the form of a pale blue holographic face which somehow is supposed to help him with the experiments, and which magically hovers in the air in his lab. Jarvis here is named Victor, and "he" speaks in matching pale blue text which was actually hard to read.

Victor tells us he has already started on the experiment by tweaking chromosomes for disease resistance, and for "prolonged lung capacity". I have no idea what that is. We all have prolonged lung capacity - some people can reach a century or more on one pair of lungs. How much more prolonged do you need? I suspect what was meant here was increased lung capacity, but that would do no good without corresponding changes to the rest of the respiratory system, so the science here is a bit shaky, but not abysmally bad.

There was an unfortunate amount of active genderism and passive racism in this, which in some ways isn't surprising - it's a comic book and those features seem to go hand-in-glove. In any rational way it's disturbing that the girlfriend - and very nearly all other females featured here - are included purely as sex objects (with the naughty bits excluded, of course!). All the lab people are white males. Even Victor is really a white male notwithstanding his blue tinge. Victor utters genderist pronouncements like "...man discovered genetic superiority 700 years ago...." I suspect it was a lot earlier that that, and whoever was the first to have these ideas, who is to say it was not a woman? It would not have hurt to have phrased that as "...humans discovered genetic superiority many years ago...."

Jadas's issue is his dad, who evidently has disappeared and of course, Jadas knows squat about him. His dad was a scientist, so you know there's something going on with Jadas. The latter asks Victor, an AI which has been around in one form or another for a long time, for his help, but Victor can't remember! Jadas magically ditches his prescription pill addiction and starts investigating. Down in the computer area, the IT guy evidently knows squat. He opens a drive door and the drive slides out like it's a CD. No. These drives are sealed to keep out air and dust (and yes, this applied even in the nineties). You can't slide one open like that. Worse, the IT guy says he "wiped the drive to see what's left" I dunno. Maybe he means he wiped it with an oily rag, because if you actually wipe a drive then there's nothing left because it means you erased it all! LOL! It's highly unlikely that old data from the nineties would be on drives. It'd be more likely on digital back-up tapes stored off-site.

I would have been happy with the story as it was at this point, but there was a rather predictable back-story to it. There's a secret about Jadas. It's not just that he can ride the subway without having a penny on him! Nor is it that he's questioned by someone who thinks her name (rather than her title and name) is Dr Martinez! She was one of the few women in this story who was not a prostitute, a bad guy, or a submissive mating partner. So she was in it for only a few panels, of course. But there's a disease spreading out of Nigeria, and apparently Jadas's history and this disease are connected. Suddenly Jadas is on the run, and everyone wants to find him.

Like I said, I had some issues with the science, and with the author's idea of how evolution works. You can't create a 'superman' by genetic manipulation, because genes mutate, not only in your super-race, but also in diseases. This is how evolution works. Even if you created someone with powerful genetic resistance to disease, disease would evolve to combat your improvements and over time, down the generations, humans would succumb again, even had they been bred from 'super parents'. The fact is though, that we already are super people in a sense. We're the ones endowed with genes which have survived endless onslaught from disease and parasites. Our genes are super genes, having proven themselves for literally thousands of years, but as you can see from disease outbreaks all over the world, they will never be super enough to do what this story argues has been done.

If you're willing to overlook that, then this graphic novel may well do the trick for you, and be a worthy read. For me, the story wasn't that compelling, and it was far too white and genderist for my taste. For all the talk about global communities, almost the entire 'cast' of this novel was white. Even the Chinese people looked Caucasian. The two black guys featured were both shown in subservient roles. The fact is that although humans, having been through a bottleneck, are genetically homogenous, the greatest genetic diversity is found in Africans. I would have made more sense if Jadas had been a black child, and even more sense if he had been a she, since female infants tend to be much more hardy than males.

It's for these reasons that I'm not willing to rate this as a worthy read. Comic books are never going to shed their juvenile baggage if they continue to approach stories from an immature perspective.

See You at Harry's by Jo Knowles

Rating: WARTY!

Read acceptably by Kate Rudd, this audiobook version is about middle-grader Fern. She's the youngest child in the family apart from so-called "surprise baby" which is actually a toddler named Charlie, who's a bit like the Tiny Tim of this family, although he has no physical condition other than general snottiness and stickiness common to all such children. He's not really that much of a surprise given how wide-spread in age this family is. Fern is, quite frankly, a bit self-centered, spoiled, and whiney.

Her older sister Sarah might have been a more interesting subject. She's taking a gap year after high school, although she appears to be doing nothing with it since she's staying at home and working part time in the family restaurant, Harry's. The family is rounded out with Holden, who is gay and thinks no one knows it, and mom and dad, but dad is a jerk who is completely out in left field, and mom has to literally bribe the kids to get them to go along with his weird ideas about how to advertise his restaurant. His name isn't even Harry.

Despite his devotion to her, Fern is mean to Charlie, which is what made me think that when " tragedy strikes" and Fern is at fault, as the blurb tells us, the tragedy afflicts Charlie. It;s absolutely no spoiler whatsoever to reveal that Charlie dies and Fern feels responsible. Unoriginal and cynically, manipulatively pulling heart strings? Yes. Trite and pathetic? Definitely. It's another story written by a woman where the main female character has to have a guy come rescue her because she's nothing but a maiden in distress waiting for exactly that event for her life to be complete. Stick a Newbery in it. It's done to death.

A Snicker of Magic by Natalie Lloyd

Rating: WARTY!

Read hick-ily by Cassandra Morris, this is a children's novel which at first irked me somewhat, but which then began to grow on me, before really irking me so I quit listening to it (it was an audio book). The irking part was the 'southern bumpkin' accent of the reader. I don't know if she really speaks like that, or if she just adopted the voice for this novel, but it wasn't an easy voice to warm to because it sounded so annoyingly vacant. The text of the novel was what kept me listening for a while. Initially, I liked the way it was written and the kid's philosophy despite it being first person PoV, but the kid was too country hayseed for my taste, and the endless rambling really ticked me off. She used phrases like, "What the hayseed is going on here?" and she used made up words such as "spin-diddly" to signify something wonderful.

If it had been just once or twice, I think I could have withstood it, but when it's every chapter, it's offensive, especially when the story is quite literally going nowhere. I'm not one of these people who likes to read stories about people who are quirky just because it's about people who are quirky. I need for the story to go somewhere or do something. This one didn't. The blurb lied that it was about a magical town that had lost its magic and implied that this country bumpkin would bring it back. She did absolutely nothing - not as far as I listened, which about 75%.

Her friend was 'The Beedle' who was a character who did good deeds for people anonymously. She learned who he really was, but I honestly could not tell if the reader was saying 'Beetle' or Beedle'. I decided it had to be 'Beedle' eventually, but I wasn't sure. Not that it mattered because he did nothing either.

I assume something in the way of fixin' the magic happened at some point before 'THE END', but I sure as heck isn't hell had no interest in traveling all the way through the great state of tedium to get there. It was nothing save endless rambling about day-to-day life, with a mind-numbing amount of tedious detail. I really, honestly don't need to know exactly how she dries dishes. I'd rather watch paint drying than hear that, especially when what I wanted to hear was what they were talking about while they dried the dishes. Her unremarkable experiences in school were equally uninteresting as were her trips to the ice cream parlor. Yes, this is the kind of story where they have an ice cream parlor even if they don't call it that. If you know what I mean.

I can't recommend this one. Stick a Newbery in it and move on.

The Christmas Secret by Donna van Liere

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first of a few seasonal stories I'm reviewing this year, and I wasn't impressed. It's really nothing more than a Disney princess fairy tale gussied-up for adults (and not well gussied, either), and the plot is more black and white than the ink on the page. This woman whose name I readily forgot, is a single mom. her husband is a complete villain, so we're given to understand, who has her neighbor spy on her and report back so he can call in frivolous complaints to child services. The worst one seems to be that there are children's toys all over the house, and this woman is unable to cope with that by offering simple instruction to her kids about cleaning up after themselves. She isn't poor. She lives in the family house. She and her kid are well fed and clothed. they're having no issues with payments on anything. Her biggest problem seems to be that she's completely inept when it comes to hiring a babysitter so she can work her job at a restaurant, because this is evidently the only kind of work she's capable of performing for reasons unspecified.

Enter her prince - the son of a wealthy business woman who passes out in her car at the end of the main character's driveway. It was crystal clear from that point onwards what was going to go down, so no mysteries to come. It's kind of pathetic really, but well representative of the kind of sap that seems to clog up Christmas like a lethal case of atherosclerosis. The novel was all over the place in terms of person, which didn't help it one bit. Why authors, who plainly admit that first person isn't up to it by the very nature of how they write, still insist upon using it and then clutzily switch back and forth is a mystery. This one jumped between first person PoV and third person omniscient, and it was right in the middle of chapters, which made it all the more clutzy and annoying, as well as a jolt every time it switched, This was really bad writing. First person doesn't make the character more immediate to me, and I certainly don't want to identify with someone as inept as this character was, nor do I want to read yet another story about yet another woman who can't make it without a man coming to her rescue. especially not at Christmas!

There seems to be a thriving trade in this kind of Christmas story, and even in this very title! Don't confuse this one with The Christmas Secret by George C. Bulpitt, The Christmas Secret by Wanda E. Brunstetter , The Christmas Secret by David Delamare, The Christmas Secret by Tesia Johansen, The Christmas Secret by Joan M. Lexau, The Christmas Secret by Jim Struzzi II, The Christmas Secret by Jeannie Watt, The Christmas Secret by Virginia Wright, to say nothing of variations like A Christmas Secret by Jim Cook, A Christmas Secret by Candace Hall, Christmas Secrets by Bayard Hooper, Christmas Secrets by Susanne McCarthy, Christmas Secrets by Ann Schweninger, Her Christmas Secrets by Breena Wilde, A Christmas Secret by Kurt Zimmerman, or even The Cowboy's Christmas Secret by Veda Boyd Jones. But you can't beat Noël's Christmas Secret by Grégoire Solotareff! Not that I've read it, but that title has it all, so it's the winner for me, only just beating out SANTA'S CHRISTMAS SECRET by John Kleiman!

Sheesh guys, get a friggin' original title for goodness sakes! You can see just from this what we're up against in trying to find a worthy Christmas-themed read. Not me. No more stories about Christmas secrets. I'm done!

Matched by Ally Condie

Rating: WARTY!

I started listening to Matched by Ally Contrick (I may have mispelled that name) on the way to work yesterday morning and I quickly wanted to put a match to it. It's your standard dystopian trilogy and believe it or not, it's actually worse than Divergent. When I say that, I say it in Malfoy's voice from Harry Potter, when Harry and Ron are impersonating his two henchboys, and Malfoy insults Dumbledore, and Harry, forgetting who he's impersonating, objects. Malfoy says, "You mean there's someone who's worse than Dumbledore?" And Harry responds, "Harry Potter!" In my version, Malfoys says, "You mean there's a novel that's worse than Divergent?" and I say, "Matched!" and Malfoy responds, "Good one!" and then starts poking around in the little gift box he stole.

If there's one nice thing about a commute to work, it's that it's captive time. You have nothing to do for a fixed period of time twice a day, and so you fill it with thoughts, or study, or writing, or music. I fill mine with audio books. The view is boring after making the trip several hundred times, especially in the morning when it's dark, so this seems to me to be a good time to get caught up on my backlog of books, and also to try some experimental reading. Matched was one such book. I honestly didn't expect to like it, but I've long been curious about it. I'm curious no more. The writing is lousy and the reading is equally bad. The reader of this book sounds like she's about thirteen, and her voice is hard to listen to. She makes the main character (oh, yeah, it's a first person PoV novel and not well-written) come off as a thoroughly immature ditz.

The character is supposed to be seventeen, yet she holds her mom's hand to the matching ceremony. She says utterly bizarre things like "There's a girl in a green dress. Me." Yes, it was that bad. She sounds like the 'Me' Carebear, who I actually think is hilarious, and this didn't help. Not that I've had much exposure to any of the Carebears but Me was definitely my second favorite 'Me', after the Doctor Who character from series nine, who is otherwise known as Ashildr. But I digress! This character is completely self-absorbed, and is obsessed with boys, clothes, and make-up, and she thinks of nothing else. This is no heroic figure. It's not someone I want to even listen to, let alone follow into action.

The basic plot is that this is an ultra-controlled society. And we're expected to take that on faith. Admittedly I didn't read much of this novel, but there was nothing offered (and nothing given later from what I've learned reading other reviews) to explain how society ever got into this position (in the not-too-distant future) from what we have today. Everything is controlled. All but one hundred works of art in various fields have been destroyed, so now there is only one hundred paintings, there is only one hundred novels, one hundred poems, etc. It's utterly ridiculous, nonsensical and profoundly stupid. Obviously this is set in the USA, because only a YA author from the US could come up with such a patently ridiculous idea for a story and get it published. Yes, Veronica Roth, Stephanie Meyer, I'm looking at you. In reality, no one would ever let this happen, least of all self-respecting and rebellious young men and women. The very premise of the novel fails completely - and that's before Cassia Maria Reyes starts acting like a professional moron.

The matching ceremony is pretty much a rip-off of the "matching" ceremony in Divergent where you're matched to your faction, except here you can't choose. Cassia's man turns out to be Xander (yeah, about those names) who has been her friend from childhood and with whom she's delighted in every way - until there's a glitch in the system and she's briefly shown another guy, absurdly named Ky - a character who's never been in the story - much less in her thoughts - until now. He's the bad boy of this ridiculous instadore triangle, and of course, Cassia, who was totally thrilled with Xander is now humping Ky's leg - metaphorically. It's moronic. Ky - who makes her turn to jelly - is the designated bad boy and Xander is the good boy, so it's your tedious trope triangle all the way down.

We're told it's exceedingly rare to get matched as Cassia has been, yet we're told that cities are huge, so how rare can it be to end-up matched to a person you know? Someone didn't pay attention during statistics 101. Not that I blame the author for that! It's obvious from the start where this pointless trilogy is going, so there's really nothing to surprise the reader, and there's really no reveal to come. It turned out to be exactly what I expected for at least as far as I could stand to listen. I was honestly hoping to be wrong, and to find an author who can write original YA and bring something new and exciting to the table, but Ally Condie isn't that author, which is sad, because it argues strongly that English teachers can't write! LOL! I hope that's not true!

Instead of new and different, I got warmed-over Divergent, by way of the movie Logan's Run. Others have accused this of ripping off "The Giver" - with which I'm not familiar, so I can't comment there, but it's definitely a rip-off. And yes, I know that all novels are rip-offs to some extent, but really? At least try to make it different. I can't recommend this based on the portion I was subject to. At the end of the first disk, there's a clunkily foreshadowing line to the effect that Cassia won't be able to look at Ky the same way again. Here's my version: I won't be able to ready any books by Ally Condie again, now that I've read too much of this one.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Rating: WARTY!

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency! How can you not love a title like that? Well, I learned. I love several of the titles of this series, but when I came to read the first one (or rather, to listen to the audio book), my experience was singularly less than satisfactory. The absurdity of series is sweetly highlighted here since this novel is known as The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #1). How bizarre is that?!

This fiction is supposedly Rooted on the real life ritual murder of Segametsi Mogomotsi a couple of years ago. This was a religious murder which was perpetrated purely for deluded business purposes. That story shows up about halfway through, but here it's a boy rather than a girl who is the victim. The novel is set in Gaborone, Botswana, and it takes too long to get down to business. It features a Motswana character named Precious Ramotswe. Curiously enough, 'Motswana' is the singular form of 'Tswana' which is a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa.

I know nothing of Bantu, so I have to bow to the reader of this novel, a woman with the awesomely kick-ass name of Lisette Lecat, who is actually from southern Africa. Her voice is sweet and melodic as are all of those voices down there, it seems to me, but it drove me nuts when listening to her pronouncing 'Mma Ramotswe' with an exaggeratedly long Mmmmm, rolling into the 'r' of the name. I think she was overdoing it, frankly! This was exacerbated by the author's inane insistence upon using everyone's full name every time they're referred to, even when it's entirely unnecessary. There's no 'she' or 'he' here, only full names or titled names, such as Ummmmm-aaaaah Rrramotswe. Yes, it's that annoying. Maybe it won't bother other readers, but it did me. I’d recommend avoiding the audiobook unless you're really into that kind of thing!

As for the novel itself, I was really disappointed. I was hoping for some interesting African detective work, but it took forever to get going. There was a case right a the start, but then the story gets bogged down with some three chapters of info dump on not only the main character, but also her father. What the heck does that have to do with the story? Nothing! Yes, she got the money for her agency after her father died from miner's lung, and left her his house, but seriously?

The worst part about this novel was that the cases themselves were worthy of a children's book, not an adult story. One woman took in a strange guy who said he was her long lost father. This is a commendable tradition in Botswana, but she became suspicious of his free-loading, and brought the case to Ramotswe. She solves it by using a principal based on the Biblical story of Solomon, where he threatened to cut up a child in order to determine which of two competing women was the actual mother. Why, when he purportedly had a god on his side, he had to resort to such barbaric measures went unexplained.

Fortunately, Ummmmm-aaaaah Rrramotswe proves to be wiser than Solomon in her execution of the principal. Another case was self-evident - a guy disappeared and was quite obviously taken by a crocodile, although how he disappeared so completely silently when standing next to five other people who were waiting with him to be baptized is as much of a mystery as it is a joke. Why no body parts were found when the crocodile was cut open was an even bigger mystery. After that story, I could no longer take any of this seriously and decided to quit listening and move onto something more grown up.

It's nice to read about Africa, the cradle of humanity, and those parts of the novel were, for the most part, interesting, but nothing truly special. The novel is more like a series of short stories than a novel, with no overall arc and no over-arching plot, and what bit of a story that was there, wasn't exactly enthralling. Another factor that turned me off it was the hatred of men which pervaded the entire story (at least as far as I listened). Violence against women in domestic relationships is high in Botswana, so this might account for that approach, but I thought this could have been better handled. it was simply annoying to hear pretty much everyone insulting men pretty much every time they spoke. Maybe in Botswana, they deserve it, but that doesn't mean we have to hear it like a ritualistic mantra every time a man is mentioned! Overall, I can’t recommend this story.

Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark

Rating: WARTY!

Read somewhat annoyingly by Carol Higgins Clark, this novel failed to launch, which is sad because it's the first of about four Christmas novels I intend to review this month. I hope the others are better!

Apparently it's something of a tradition for this pair of family members to write a Xmas novel together, and after this I'm thinking that tradition ought to die a natural death under the snow, allowing something fresh and different to spring up next year in its place. This is the second novel I've read that the mom had a hand in, and I'm done with Higgins Clark stories at this point.

This one featured two kidnappers - whose names we knew from the off, so no mystery there - who kidnap the husband of a successful novelist, knowing she can well afford the million dollar ransom. One of the kidnappers is so puerile as to be a joke. It's not remotely possible to imagine that the other guy would ever trust him with something like this - and of course he screws up royally. The kidnappers are so dumb that they follow the plot of one of the writer's novels exactly, yet the police are too stupid to predict what will happen next despite this.

Not that any of the other characters are any more realistic. They're flimsy caricatures, every bit as cheap and nasty as the tinsel and baubles which bedeck a evergreen fir tree at this time of year. They undergo no development. Any one of them could be substituted with a different character and the story would have worked just as badly. The story is larded and puffed up with tedious extraneous detail. These two writers can't introduce a character without describing their hair and age - nothing else, just hair and age! How and why is that ever relevant?! Talking of which, the title of this novel bears no relation whatsoever to the story, which could have been set at any time of the year. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Xmas. The overall impression I got was that this was essentially nothing more than a mercenary attempt to cash in on seasonal excesses, and I can't recommend it.

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!