Ryan's Pizza Party

Rating: WARTY!

This is a corporate book from a TV show maybe? Which evidently doesn't believe in giving credit to the actual writers and artists. Shame on them. Although it occurred to me that since the book kinda sucked, maybe the author and artist didn't wish their name associated with it?

Yeah, Pizza is fun, but this book made no attempt to talk about healthy eating - no salad with pizza was on this menu, nor did it care about gluten sensitivity or vegetarians. It was all about stuffing pizza down kids' throats and that's all she ate. There wasn't even a word about clean-up after the pizza fest. I can't commend a book like this when around two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, including our president, and those precedents are set during childhood WARTY!

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Bringing Stella Home by Joe Vasicek

Rating: WARTY!

This is a sci-fi story that started out boringly and never improved. It seemed to me to be more of a sort of weird authorial wish-fulfillment kind of a thing than ever it did a real story. It moved slowly, which is hardly surprising since it's book one of a series.

I've been actively removing all series books from my reading lists of late because I've been so universally disappointed in them. Series are not my thing for a variety of reasons, not least of which is this lethargy in pace, and also because the first book can only ever be a prologue - which holds no interest for me - and because all the other volumes are, are essentially a re-run of the first volume. It's lazy writing. Instead of coming up with something new, original, and entertaining, the author merely retreads the last volume and feeds it to the reader one more time. No thanks.

The plot here, is of the George-slaying-the-dragon kind of thing where mid-teens hero James goes on a jag to save his helpless older sister Stella, who is kidnapped by this ridiculously barbaric rag-tag conglomerate of pirate military outfits who have apparently been ignored by the authorities for long enough that they're all banded together into one big and devastating force, which no one seems to be able to stop. Except James. His plan is to hire a para-military outfit commanded by a woman, and have them rescue Stella for him. I felt like I could see where this story would go over time: James and the captain getting it on.

Meanwhile Stella is a sex slave on this other ship where the heartless leader of the rag-tag rebels is a cruel and despotic dictator and who, as soon as he finds out that seventeen-year-old Stella is a virgin, changes his entire attitude toward her and elevates her to the role of goddess or something. That was where I quit reading because the whole story at this point had turned me off. I could see where this story was going too: Beauty and the Beast anyone? It was tedious and unimaginative, unrealistic and stupid, and it was bouncing like a pinball between three perspectives, yet despite this, it seemed to be stuck in mud. I can't commend it based on what I read of it, which occupied more of my time than I ought to have expended on it. I'm done with this book and this author.

Death in the English Countryside by Sara Rosett

Rating: WARTY!

This is your standard English country murder story and it baldly states it right there in the title. I'm not a fan of this kind of story, especially not when it's in first person. I read this one only to try and see what was going on in a 'cozy mystery' story just out of sheer curiosity, and I had some issues with it pretty much from the start.

The author seems unable to write anything other than a series and I am no fan of series. At some point, you have to wonder why it is that so many murders occur around the "sleuth" who investigates them! Is she really the guilty party?!. This novel didn't have the word 'sleuth' in the book description, otherwise I would have dismissed it out of hand. I guess now I also have to dismiss it when it has the word 'cozy' in it or when the author is this one.

Talking of whom, she has four of these series out there because one is never far more than enough, and I'll bet every one is really the same and has a weak woman protagonist (and is probably in first person voice). But look on the bright side: if someone who writes so poorly and predictably can get onto a best seller list, then there's hope for all of us! For some three hundred bucks, you can take her "How to Outline a Cozy Mystery" course wherein, as judged by this outing, you can learn how to create a limp and clueless female leads who need manly validation by a studly English country guy, and who likes to meddle where she should leave things to the police. You can learn the same thing for free by reading well-plotted and well-written murder mysteries.

Her relationship with Alex (said manly man) in this story was cringe-worthy. She's supposedly a mature business woman yet she behaves like she's thirteen and just as clueless as your average thirteen-year-old, unable to process any of the sensations she gets around Alex. It was amateur, pathetic, and nauseating to read. Oh, and Alex has a bicep. Not biceps, but a bicep. I'm not kidding! You can feel it if you want; one of the female characters did. I guess he had an accident or something and lost the other bicep in that arm.

So this woman - with the highly inappropriate name of Kate Sharp (she's not remotely sharp) - works for a company that scouts locations for movies. Why a US company is being asked to scout English locations is one of the few the real mysteries in this novel. I guess the author, being American herself, has to have that American connection because god forbid a novel should be set elsewhere, or if it is, it should have no Americans in it! Maybe she shares the trump philosophy wherein only US citizens are worth anything and they sure as hell can show those bumbling British cops a few things.

Kate's boss, Kevin originally does the scouting, which constitutes another mystery since the movie he's seeking locations for is yet another remake of a Jane Austen novel (because we sure as hell don't have too many of those now), and Kate is the resident Austen buff, yet Kevin is the one who goes. Anyway, he disappears without word or trace, and Kate is dispatched to find him. He has a history of alcohol abuse so the suspicion is that he's on a bender. Kate is unable to find him until he shows up dead in the river, along with his rental car.

There's no spoiler there - it's a murder mystery after all! It is amusing how the author makes much of how rainy and cold it is in the UK, when it actually really isn't. Of course that's dependent upon when you travel there, but it has cold spells; it has warm spells. It has rainy spells; it has dry spells. It's not foggy all the time either! Has the ever been there?

I have to wonder at the value of the course the author offers. It's not a writing course; it's a plotting course, but when the author doesn't know it's 'downright' and not 'down right' and employs redundant phrases like "see if he'd reply back" one has to wonder. These were not the only issues in this style of writing. I read, "I couldn't remember the last time a man had held open a door for me." What does Kate want? To be a wilting violet? Does she want equality or pampering? We no longer live in an era where men are required to open doors for woman; even Prince William's wife doesn't expect that! Maybe instead of Kate Sharp she should be Kate Uppity?

As to her smarts, I read this: "My fingers itched to get my camera and record the quiet beauty of it, but I'd left it in my room at the inn. Apparently Ms Sharp has never heard of a cell phone camera.... Equally pertinent is this one:

“Hmm, I should have emphasized that,” Alex murmured. “Where is that business card?”
“I left the one Quimby gave me in my room. Come on, I’ll get it for you.”

Kate has Quimby's number in her phone since she called him. She could have just got it from there, but of course she has to get Alex to her room so she can sit with their thighs touching on the bed. Pathetic.

A woman who truly worked in the scouting location business would live on her phone. It would be second-nature to go to it without a moment's thought, yet Kate is completely inept at using her phone. It's just not authentic. And this is written by someone who would charge you good money to teach you how to plot?! It's obvious from halfway through the novel who the guilty party is (chercher la femme pétulante) - and I'm typically not that good at spotting the perp. The red herring is obvious too, and not remotely convincing.

This book was sad and silly, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Odyssey by Homer

Rating: WARTY!

Another classic bites the dist. This is one of the most stupid, tedious, repetitive, and pointless stories I've ever listened to. I listened to the audiobook version since originally, this was meant to be listened to, not read, but the version I had is not in poetic meter. It's told as a prose story by a narrator who was tedious to listen to, which made things worse. Despite this prose approach, the story still retains the repetitiveness of the poetry, which does not a thing to improve the situation. I grew to honestly and truly detest the phrase 'child of morn, rosy-fingered Dawn' with a passion.

Odysseus is one of the most puffed-up, self-aggrandizing, boorish braggarts I've ever encountered in literature. His son is useless and his wife Penelope is a complete jackass. Odysseus is always the best, the most virile, the strongest, the most upright, the toughest, the most skilled, etc., etc. He never loses, except in his ridiculously haphazard return from Troy after the ten year war.

It takes him another ten years to get home and all this time we're supposed to believe his wife is faithful. Odysseus is nearly always plied with riches by his hosts no matter whose island he fetches up on after another disastrous voyage in which he loses the previous treasure he was given. His various crews are always weeping, or lily-livered, or dishonest, or incompetent, or untrustworthy, while he himself is a paragon.

The thing is that it's really not that far from Troy to Ithaca! This admittedly assumes that the present day Ithaca is remotely close to where the ancient one was, but even if it wasn't, we know it was in Greece, where nowhere is very far from anywhere else. The point is that it's possible to travel the entire distance by land pretty much. He could have almost literally walked the entire distance in a couple of years, so why he repeatedly embarks on voyages given that he knows Poseidon, the fricking god of the ocean, is out to get him, is as much of a mystery as it is a testimony to one thing and one thing only: how profoundly dumb Odysseus truly is. He's a callous jerk, too! Despite his losing crew after crew, Odysseus never mourns a single one of those he traveled with or left behind.

Meanwhile back at home, we have the comedy duo of Telemachus, Odysseus's 20-year-old son, and Odysseus's wife, Penelope. His son is purportedly the head of the household, yet he has not an iota of wherewithal to throw out these suitors to his mom who number about a hundred or so. I know there was a tradition of hospitality in that era, but they're the worst guests imaginable, eating him out of house and home and he can't dispatch even one of them? How Odysseus was even supposed to have anything left of his holdings after ten years of this is a joke. Penelope, were she not such a limp rag and a waste of skin, could simply have told any number of these suitors she wasn't interested, but she keeps them hanging on: all five score of them, while making cheap excuses as to why she can't make up her mind. She's an asshole, period.

The suitors are utter morons. They're dumb-asses for hanging around for ten years when they're clearly getting clearly nowhere with Penelope. They're imbeciles in that they cannot see through her ridiculous ruse of un-weaving Laertes's burial shroud each night so she can re-weave it the next day. Despite all this, Telemachus can't seem to handle them and it takes Odysseus's heroic return of course, before they're summarily dispatched. Here's the last ridiculous thing: he arrives in disguise instead of striding proudly up to his home. Why? No good reason at all. Yet we're supposed to believe he has littered his way home with rejected lovers because he loved his wife so much? Bullshit.

This story is awful and not worth the time to read or listen to it.

Warrior Wench by Marie Andreas

Rating: WARTY!

I'm sure this sounded like a great idea for a story when it first hit the author, but the idea far outstripped her execution of it. The so-called warrior wench, who does far more wenching than warring, is Vas, who manages to get herself drugged, and when she finally comes out of it, a month has gone by and her spacecraft has been parted out and sold. She sets off on a quest to get it back.

I started reading this, got about a third of the way through it, set it down to read some more pressing books where i had a deadline for reviewing them, and then when I finally got back to it, I couldn't recall a single thing about this novel at all. After a brief refresher, I began reading it again and found that this supposedly tough woman is just another wilting violet with hots for this new guy onboard. Why female authors do this to their characters is a mystery to me. Maybe there are readers who like this sort of thing, but I can't subscribe to it.

I have no objection to a love story if it's done right, but this young-adult horseshit featuring instadore makes no sense and is poor writing. It only gets worse from there because there are, apparently, "unmarked ships blowing apart entire planets and the Commonwealth government can't, or won't, stop them." Blowing up entire planets? This is what happens when an author has no clue about physics and specifically, here, the amount of energy required to actually blow up an entire planet.

To totally disintegrate Earth, for example, you'd need something like sixty quadrillion one megaton nuclear bombs - all strategically placed and exploding simultaneously. It's hard to cost out a single nuclear weapon, but a very rough estimate is two million US dollars. Multiply that by sixty quadrillion, and you see the problem. Who has that kind of money? Even if you had some other means of destruction, it would still cost to build the weapon, and to generate the requisite amount of energy to power it, so what would be the point of doing that? What would be the value of it to the ones doing it?

If the aim is merely to wipe out the population, then why not simply drop a virus?

So the whole foundation of this book was clueless to begin with and the romance really didn't help at all. I can't commend this based on what I managed to read of it.

Find Me at Willoughby Close by Kate Hewitt

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"But even big kids don't need to rude words." - to use rude words
"friends with her just because some in girls think she's different" in-girls? It has a double meaning the other way!

This is the second - and the last! - novel by this author I will ever read. The previous one I read was reviewed in December of 2016, and titled 'A Yorkshire Christmas. I'd forgotten I'd read that because if I'd remembered, I probably wouldn't have read this one. This kind of story isn't my style, but I was curious about this genre - the wussy girl running away from a bad relationship back to her home town (or someplace different anyway) and finding the love of her life. There is a tedious number of 'weak woman' books like this, and it fascinates me as to why - and who reads these.

What this novel had going for it - or what I thought it had, was that it was a bit different. This is an older woman, Harriet, with three kids, whose husband lost his high-flying financial job and failed to tell his wife for six months. Was it purely accidental that his name was Dick?!

Harriet the spy discovers he's talking on the phone at all hours of the night with his secretary - the youthful and sexy Meghan. So a Meghan beats a Harriet, evidently! There is no excuse for his behavior and now he and his wife are in such dire financial straits that Harriet has to give up their luxury home and designer furniture and sell it all off to go live in a rental cottage some ways away. Her husband lives separately in a small apartment in London, still looking for work.

How they get by financially is a mystery because despite not even looking for a job for the longest time, Harriet still seems to be able to keep her head above water and buy whatever she needs whenever she needs it, even as she whines endlessly about her impoverished circumstances. The whining got old real fast.

Her husband is in the same position: both are supposedly looking for work, yet neither of them seems to get that they can - at least for the short term - take any job they can get just to have some income. To me they both came off as privileged and spoiled, and stupid. It was also hard to stomach the incongruity of Harriet prattling on about organic this and that while driving gas guzzling Land Rover Discovery which gets an environmentally tragic 20 mpg.

It didn't help that she said clichéd things like "Does this dress make me look fat?" at times. The message coming through loud and clear is that the only thing she thinks of is herself - eleven years of being spoiled rotten and having every single thing she ever wanted will do that to a woman, I guess. It did not make me like her at all. It helped no more that the writing was a bit lax here and there so I'd read things like: "Harriet blinked hard, but it was too late. Two slipped down and with a muttered curse she grabbed a napkin and started dabbing." The idea was that two tears slipped down, but he author had written it so poorly that the 'two slipped down' had no real connection to tears. It was just weird to read.

An amusing instance of this laxity was when I read, "Harriet sank into the armchair by the gas fire that was still in the atrocious pattern Harriet remembered of large pink cabbage roses." This implies that the gas fire had a cabbage rose pattern! I'm guessing it was actually the armchair though. The author might have re-thought that sentence.

What did genuinely impress me was how fast it's possible to get a pizza in London! While Harriet visits her husband to pick the kids up, their father orders pizza via his phone, immediately goes to get it, and very quickly returns with it, all in the brief time that Harriet is having this quite short conversation with her kids. Well, we've all been there - trying to account realistically for time passing in our writing. I didn't want to mark her down for that. But many of us might want to find out which pizza place can prepare two pizzas that fast!

Where I did draw the line though was the tired, tedious, and way overdone YA trope of "the gold flecks in his hazel eyes." That about made me throw up. I've read it far too many times and it sucks. It needs to be banned from every author's description toolbox. It was shortly after that at around 65% that I gave up because the book just kept rambling on.

The next thing up was this designer dog - actually a pedigree dog, an order for which had been placed some months before. Dogs don't arrive as fast as pizzas, but finally it was ready. Harriet had to come up with five hundred pounds for it and barely blinked at that. Then she seemed utterly clueless that the dog would be peeing and pooping everywhere if it wasn't properly trained from the outset.

I felt bad for the dog having to live with this family as well as for the vet bills they'd have to pay for a purebred (read inbred) dog. Since a single vet (named Tom of all pathetic names for manly characters) had been introduced not long before in the story, it seemed quite obvious at this point where the story would be going: new puppy > requires shots etc > nice vet with gold flecks that Harriet knows > new romance. Boring much?

I can't say if that's where it went because I didn't read on and I honestly didn't care about any of these characters. I decided enough was enough. I'd put up with this kind of rambling delivery for far too long, wasting my time when I could have been reading something truly engrossing, so I quit reading and moved on. I can't commend this book at all. Or this author. If this is even remotely representative of this genre, then it speaks volumes about those sorry volumes.

Live to See Tomorrow by Iris Johansen

Rating: WARTY!

I made very little progress into this book before I gave it up as a bad job. The main female character is Catherine Ling, ridiculously recruited by the CIA at the age of 14, we're told. And no, this is not a YA novel believe it or not.

The story itself begins years along from that time, and Ling has a son who is, for reasons I never learned, under the protection of a friend of hers, Hu Chang. Threatened with 'it's either you or him who takes this mission' Ling elects to neglect her child and go herself to try to rescue a journalist from Tibet. Why this wasn't dealt with through diplomatic channels isn't mentioned in the part of the novel I managed to stomach. Why the CIA has no other agents who can do this is equally an unaddressed mystery.

I dropped it the minute this supposedly strong woman has her job "complicated" by meeting Richard Cameron. I began skimming, and these two complete strangers have unprotected sex early in the story. She's so dumb, she hadn't known people could do "that" - evidently some magical fingering technique he has that this evidently dumb broad never encountered before. or maybe there's some authorial wish-fulfilment going on here.

Later, I read, "...she had been on the defensive since the moment she had seen him and felt that first explosive bolt of sexual attraction," I knew exactly what kind of unfulfilling trashy and female-demeaning story this would be, and I was glad I was out of there. I can't commend dumb-assery like this. I'm done with this author, too.

Her Perfect Life by Rebecca Taylor

Rating: WARTY!

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

I made it about a third of the way through this book before I gave up on it. The story is about a wealthy author who apparently commits suicide on a beach right as her latest novel is hitting the public eye. It's also about her sister who lives a rather more impoverished life, apparently receiving no assistance from her rich sister, and who gets an unexpected call from her distraught brother-in-law. I immediately suspected that guy rather than suicide, but since I didn't finish this novel, I have no idea if I'm right.

Eileen flies to her sister's home, and that's where I gave up on it. The story did nothing to move me at all. In fact it felt like a depressing and dreary read, but two things really turned me off it. The first was the screeching halt to which the story was brought to by flashbacks. I cannot stand flashbacks. I can't think of a better way to annoy your reader than interrupt what had begun as an interesting story to explore tedious family history. When I read a story I want to get on with the story. I do not want to be constantly and irritatingly interrupted by the author forcing me to go back in time, giving me whiplash by suddenly - in Chapter three, for example, forcing me back two years ago. Tell the story now for goodness sake!

Neither did it help by the tennis-play chapters - now we're with Eileen, Now we're with Simon. No, it's back to Eileen. Wait a sec! Now Simon has it. Slap! Look left. Slap! Look right! Sorry, but no. No. NO! I was initially attracted and intrigued by the idea of Eileen reading Clare's latest novel and finding clues in the writing as to what happened, but he author seemed defiantly intent upon putting me off that story altogether by screwing around instead of getting on with it. The more I read, the less I felt that the payoff would be worth the work of reading this, and work it was.

One of the most obnoxious parts of the book was that I once again had to read a female author describing a woman and putting beauty first in the list, like no woman has any higher calling or more important trait than being beautiful. I have seen this time and time again in reading books by female authors and I find it sickening that they cannot value their fellow women - not even fictional ones - for anything apart from beauty first.

I read, at only 6% in, "Clare Collins was beautiful...." Yes, it went on to describe other qualities, but beauty was always foremost. 28% in: "...beautiful, talented, and simply awe-inspiring sister...." Yep. Beauty first. Again. How beastly. 37% in "...her beautiful face...." 40% in: "...her beautiful surface...." 41% in: "Clare was beautiful...." Oh wait! at 51% in we get a change! Clare is "...vivacious and..." on no! "Vivacious and beautiful...." There it goes again. 61%: "...beautiful and talented...." It was tediously repetitive.

This is tiresome, obnoxious, and awful writing. People who write about women like this are a part of the problem and I cannot commend a book that persistently devalues women to a skin depth and little more. The book description has it that this is "a page-turning debut" but for me it was a stomach-turning one, and a cover-closing one so I could move on to the next read on my list which hopefully will feature characters who are not valued only for skin which is 'bright and clear' which is what the name Clare means. I can't commend this based on the layout of the book, the demeaning of a female character, and the content of the third of it that I managed to stomach.

Sub-Human by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a classic example of why I don't like series. The first book can only ever be a prologue and I don't do prologues, but sometimes a book description makes it sound interesting enough that I bite and taste the sour when I was expecting sweet. I have to confess to my own part in this inexcusable crime because even the description had warnings in it that I chose not to heed.

The story is about Craig Emilson who is "a young doctor" why his age is important to the blurb-writer I have no idea, but it goes on to say that he's "sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III" when in fact he volunteers. He enlisting to become a "Special Forces suborbital paratrooper", but why a doctor would do that is completely glossed over.

He's "selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history-a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong Artificial Intelligence." Why him again is glossed over. Why not drop a bomb on it? Why send a doctor when one isn't needed? Why make your main character a doctor instead of a computer scientist? The feeling I got, the further I read into this, was that it was very much fan fiction, and not well thought through - the author going for melodrama instead of realism. That's never a good thing in my book.

My first inkling that this was not for me was right at the beginning where the doctor is being injected with some sort of nano-bobs. Those are like thingumabobs, but they infest sci-fi stories. These are supposed to help maintain his respiratory system when there's no oxygen. Why this was necessary goes unexplained so obviously it was to get the main character and this nubile doctor together. Telegraph much? That wasn't the problem though. The problem was the inappropriate behavior of the young (naturally), attractive (of course) female doctor who hits on him. I'm like "What?!" Here's the exchange:

"You're married, huh?" the doctor asked, apparently rhetorically. Craig nodded anyway. "That's a shame. You're way too handsome to be married. Handsome young doctors like you should be single. Then single doctors like me could marry you instead."

From that point it was obvious that those two would end-up together, so his present wife needed to be dealt with, and that conveniently happens when she thinks he's dead after the mission (or at least brain-dead, which she got right), and so she happily married a sixty-year-old guy (ie twice her age) with whom she's been working and of whom she denies having any sort of relationship when her husband got jealous in an earlier chapter!

That phone call was a joke. At one point she warbles sickeningly, "I never miss a call when we schedule it, baby, and I never will," and then very shortly afterwards says, "Don't 'baby' me, Craig! I'm not a child!" Excuse me? Isn't that precisely the same thing that you just did to him? Like I said, the writing is amateurish and thoughtless.

Another example came in that same section. He says, "I'm not brilliant like you." And she responds, "Not brilliant? Craig, you're a doctor!" I'm sorry but that doesn't necessarily follow. There are doctors who are brilliant, but there are also doctors who are idiots. On top of that he uses stock phrases like "In this brave new world of ours..." which about made me barf, and there's a robot which is named Robbie. And not after Margot, I'm sure.

In short, this was pathetic and a waste of my time. I couldn't stand to read more than about five chapters, let alone a whole series, because it was so sickening to read. I can't commend it. It was pathetic.

Sanyare the Last Descendant by Megan Haskell

Rating: WARTY!

This was supposedly an "IAN Book of the Year Finalist" but it's not this Ian, rest assured! The last thing I'd want is a book prize named after me! I should say right up front that typically, I am not entertained by fantasy stories, but there are occasions when I see one that looks like it might be different and better than the usual unappealing cloned crowds of such books. This was one such novel, but while it started out interestingly enough, it soon sunk into a mire of trope that is the very thing which turns me off these stories in the first place.

The story begins with Rie, a messenger working for the government (the 'high Court' - this is mired in trope, as I said, so there are kings and courts and so on - nothing new or original). Rie's delivering a message to a Fairy lord. They're called 'fae' here, employing the archaic spelling because the author is apparently too much of a wuss to call them fairies, like the 'fae' spelling somehow makes them more mature, or more worthy of being taken seriously. Seriously?! But anyway, she's attacked by what the author repeatedly refers to as 'blood sidhe' - read vampires, even though sidhe - also known, and pronounced, believe it or not, as 'sith', never were vampires. They were simply fairies or muses in Gaelic - not garlic! - folklore.

So when she's sent undercover to the 'dark realm' (it's always frigging' realms in these stories isn't it?!) she immediately teams up with a handsome muscular blood sidhe despite him twice trying to take advantage of her. It was at this point that I quit reading this nonsense. I can only drink so much trope because I become thoroughly nauseated and this story was so larded with it, that it was in danger of self-induced coronary right there.

I can't commend it based on the portion I read. When is a fantasy writer going to come along and give us something truly imaginative, different, and fulfilling? Please make it soon! The blurb warns us that "war is looming in the nine faerie realms." The nine realms? Shades of Thor! Or should I say 'Sidhes of Thor'?! One can only hope that this war will arrive soon, because what is it good for? Well, it might wipe these tired nine realms out completely and clear the decks for a clean start with some new and original fantasy stories! One can hope.

Dark Queen by Faith Hunter

Rating: WARTY!

If this has been Dairy Queen it would have had more appeal and more chills! This is one I got along with an earlier volume in the series because the blurb on this one interested me; then I discover it's in first person, the main character isn't Asian notwithstanding the book cover, and it's filled with trope. I made it about thirty pages and ditched it beofre I yawned myself to death. I can't commend uninventive, unoriginal, and unimaginative novels like this one, so I'm done with this series and with this author.

The Perfect Wife by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This authors seems to skip the article (definite or indefinite, it doesn't matter!) from time to time:
“He was only one The Panel would approve in the area.” (the only)
“Admittedly, it had required opening up to man who had killed almost twenty people;” (to a man)
“Whatever the reason, she’d had to go to other” (the other)
“He still didn’t know she’s told Mel about seeing Teddy with the hostess” (she'd told)

This novel needs to be retitled "The Perfect Ass-Wipe." The book is a poor cross between Silence of the Lambs and The Stepford Wives with some Sex and the City tossed in for rude measure. The interactions with the serial killer are pretty much a direct rip-off of Silence of the Lambs ("Quid pro quo, Clarice!"), but it felt like the author couldn't figure out what kind of a novel he wanted to write.

This woman, for an FBI profiler wannabe and supposedly a promising candidate, seems remarkably stupid, and her husband is a jerk, but she can't see it. So on the one hand we're supposed to believe she's really sharp as a profiler, but on the other we're expected to swallow that she's completely dumb when it comes to profiling the motives of her friends and her husband - and his best friend.

She and hubby move to a new elite neighborhood when he's assigned to an office there, where he manages people's financial investments - so they're really well-off. He insists they join this ridiculous elite marina club (which she ought to have flatly-refused as soon as she learned that men (known as Oath Minders) often meet separately from women (known as Hearth Keepers). Seriously? She sure as hell ought to have quit when she learned that one of the activities enjoyed there is free love for husbands. I don't know of any self-respecting woman who would who doesn't vote Republican who would put up with any of that horseshit, but as with everything else, this Jessie girl mutely goes along with every single thing her husband Kyle, dumps on her. And he dumps a lot.

Things slowly deteriorate and come to a head when she catches him snorting cocaine with his friend Ted, and kicks him out. He comes back all contrite the next day promising reform, and she pretty much instantly forgives him. That night, they go to a party down at the marina. She's just learned she's pregnant, but she decides to drink some champagne anyway. My guess is that her sleaze of a husband put something in her drink, because after a couple of sips she began to feel woozy. Rather than have her husband take her home, she let him put her to bed in the cabin on the boat that belongs to Ted! Someone needs to give her a Ted talk! LOL! She has to be a moron to do that, given what she knows at this point.

I thought she'd wake up and find she'd been raped by Ted, but instead she wakes up next to the dead body of this woman she'd had an argument with earlier over flirting with her husband, and she has blood and skin under her fingernails. Instead of calling the police, this imbecile lets her husband talk her into disposing of the body, so now she's completely trapped.

She didn't agree to it outright because she felt so woozy, which ought to have told her she'd been drugged, but she was alert enough to have stopped him and she didn't. For her to even consider doing something like that given what career she was supposed to be following, is completely ridiculous, and I lost all interest in reading anything more about this bozo right then.

It was pretty obvious her husband was the murderer, and he'd bene having an affair with this woman who was going to expose him. It was obvious from the writing, but also from the fact that an author like this one is never going to let his favorite profiler get tied down with a husband and a baby at the start of a series, not when he can follow the safe road most traveled! I don't mind if a book starts out with a stupid character who wises up later, but to have an author depict a woman who he claims on the one hand is sharp and smart, yet who he depicts consistently choosing the dumbest option in any situation which faces her, is misogyny, period.

I resented the time I spent reading even half of this. If she'd been remotely as smart and sharp as was claimed, Jessie (the name says it all in this case!) would have refused to dispose of the body, called the police, and had herself drug-tested - and especially done all this given her career choice! She did the exact opposite and doesn't merit having a story told about her. Warty to the max on this one.

The Gifting By KE Ganshert

Rating: WARTY!

This is a supernatural story about a world where science rules and supernatural belief is frowned upon, but where, of course, this one girl has inherited from her grandmother the ability to see and communicate with ghosts. Naturally no one told her she has this power, and she thinks she's going crazy. Because this is YA, she is of course completely and unrealistically ostracized because of this one freak-out she has when she and some fellow teens are playing with a Ouija board.

I don't normally read stuff like this, but it's been a while and this one seemed quite interesting; unfortunately, it immediately seemed to be going down the same road to Tropeville that YA writers all-too-often follow like a bunch of blind sheep. This author appears no different, sporting the usual YA fear of being different, and thereby ironically becoming in a real way, the very character she writes about!

The book was a free loss-leader for a series, but I can't generate interest in a series that's written this poorly and with so many clichés in it. It's YA, and in my extensive experience is already a mark against it. Worse, it's in first person, a voice which often irritates me far more than it entertains me in stories.

It seems to be a rule of YA writing that everything is black and white: there can be no room for gray areas or nuance in these stories. Consequently, Tess is so ostracized that her family leaves the area and moves to Northern California where, her parents say, there's an institute that can help her. Her parents must be rolling in money because this whole transition takes only three weeks from Tess's incident to abandoning their old house and moving into a new one! Wow! Privilege much?

The author describes the move: "we jettisoned across the country." That makes zero sense. 'Jetted across the country' would have made sense or even, "we jettisoned ourselves across the country." Earlier she'd written something about 'Judo chopping' her brother for some remark he'd made, but Judo is not a 'chopping' sport. If she'd said 'karate chopping' that would have meant something, but not with Judo, which is a throwing sport a little bit like wrestling. It's not hard to get these things right, and you have to wonder about a writer's dedication when simple mistakes like this are so readily made.

The author makes no secret of the fact that she's something of a born-again believer and her bizarre detestation of science comes through in her writing and spoils the story which felt a bit like she was preaching a sermon rather than relating an entertaining tale of the supernatural. It's so strident at times that it's off-putting and it ruins her writing.

It wouldn't have been so bad if she wasn't so very wrong! Those who believe in these things, talk about having faith because it's not something science can measure, but this is bullshit. If the supernatural world (which I do not believe in, by the way) purportedly has any impact on the real world, then in order to do so it must cause change in the real world in order for it to act or to be detected, and that's something science can measure, quantify and study. There never has been any such evidence.

The believers themselves admit this by repeatedly - and throughout history - making excuses for their god's total absenteeism and inaction! They talk all the time about how we must act. "God helps those who help themselves," they cry, which sounds truly selfish to me, to say nothing of utterly lacking the very faith believers profess they have, but this small part is true: because we help ourselves, no god ever has to do anything! LOL!

That conveniently explains away why no god ever shows! And how we browbeat ourselves: if we succeed, then it's a god's success! If we fail, then it's our failure! How pathetic is that? The Old Testament is full of stories of the ancient Hebrews fighting foes. No god ever helped them to win. This for a supposedly peace-loving religion, but whenever the Hebrews won a victory, it was because they were the chosen people blessed by a god. Whenever they got their ass kicked it was because they were unworthy sinners and direly needed to repent. I call horse-shit on such self-serving and deluded lies.

The fact is that Bible and other religious literature throughout the world is rife with stories describing how people did the work that the god really ought to have done! They did this precisely because there was no god to do it, and this same 'epiphany' runs rampant today! If there were such a thing as gods, we would never find ourselves in the position of always having to do the work! This and the complete lack of any positive evidence for a god or an afterlife is why I do not believe. I'm sorry that writers like this one do not have a sounder scientific education; if they did, they would not make the mistakes this author has made.

But this isn't a review of the author, it's a review of the book and that is sadly lacking. As I mentioned, it's far too full of trope and follows far too many other writers telling pretty much the same story with a tweak-tweak here and a twerk-twerk there. What I long for is the story that steps off that worn-out path and dares to tread where no author has gone before. This novel wasn't anywhere close, and I could not continue reading it. I can't commend it based on the portion I did read which was a recipe for disaster: one more half-baked than well-done.

Eve by Patti Larsen

Rating: WARTY!

This was your standard uninteresting, first person voice, dumb, disaffected girl saved by a boy novel. Nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing worth reading. I was very disappointed, although I kind of half-expected that going into it, but nonetheless, I was hoping for something better. I was disappointed, but unsurprised. For the most part, YA authors are so homogenous that 'bland' is far too vivid a word to cover what they do. How this author can write so badly and yet be "a multiple award-winning author" (her own words), is a complete mystery to me. This is why I have zero trust in awards and would flatly refuse any I was offered rather than be tainted by them.

The fact that this novel was written so badly really intrigues me because I read here: https://medium.com/intellogo/award-winning-writer-patti-larsen-shares-her-experiences-using-intellogos-author-tools-c93fea28338 that the author had used some sort of software at both draft and final stage to assess her work. I'd never heard of "Intellogo" before, but it seems that it's supposed to advise an author as to whether they're hitting the standard test marks for a YA novel. How robotic is that? Seriously? The article about this was badly written too. I read at one point, "how present women are in a central role are" and later, "Was the book moving at a fast enough clip to maintain the intensity for a face-paced page turner." Yes, in this era of Facebook control of your life, you definitely need a face-paced page turner.

But this article also tells us that the author “has a degree in journalism, a background in English, history, and screen writing, and offers courses on story writing and outlining. Patti’s strengths lie not only in her mad writing process but also in her tireless work in self promotion." If she put as much effort into writing as she apparently does into self-promotion, and ditched the artificial intelligence, she might have a book that feels far less artificial and actually intelligent - and focused on telling original, imaginative, and inventive stories instead of writing by numbers and copying what everyone else is doing, which is quite clearly what this novel is.

And that tireless self-promotion really turned me off her. I am not a self-promoter which probably means I will never have a book take off, but I don't care. I'm not going to try to force myself on people. If they want to read me, they will choose to find me and do so. It’s their choice, not mine.

This story sounded like it might be interesting which is why I was foolish enough to pick it up to read, and it probably could have been engaging in more capable hands, but all this author proves is that journalists are not necessarily great novel writers. The blurb informs us that 16-year-old Eve (she should have been named Heave, she's so sickening to read about) is the unholy offspring of Death and Life, and

Her unique parentage ensures Eve isn’t like her angel siblings. She brings Death at the beginning of Life and Life to those meant to die. Her continuing failures create constant disaster for her parents and the mortals she tries so hard to serve. But when Eve accidentally interferes with the Loom of Creation, she sets off a chain of events that leads her to finally understand who she really is.

Yes, she's a special snowflake just like every other YA character in nearly every one of these dull, predictable, boring, unimaginative YA garbage novels. How special is that?! The description had one of those little clickers where you could select more of the blurb or less, but it was less of books like this which I would have truly appreciated. There is no clicker for that unfortunately. No click, only colic.

The writing was average to poor from the off. It was, as I mentioned, worst-person voice, which is the most tedious voice of all for me to read. I am so sick of it that I recently went through my shelf of unread print books and deliberately ditched every last one of them that was in first person, so sick am I of reading this tedious and nauseating voice. Now those books are in the local library, so someone else will have to suffer them, not me! Am I evil or what? Mwah-ha-ha!

Anyway, after Eve screws up yet again, by reviving an old man who was at death's door, she goes into this maudlin introspection. Eve whines that everyone hates her, and her life isn't worth living until of course she's rescued by this guy. I ditched the book right there. I am so sick of reading YA novels about some wretched girl who has to be validated and rescued by a boy. For fuck's sake YA authors, stop it with this shit already! Find something better to do with your life - something that doesn’t involve running your own gender into the ground. This book is shit and that's it.

Extreme Medical Services by Jamie Davis

Rating: WARTY!

This was a seriously disappointing audiobook both the story and the reading of it. I should say up front that I'm not a fan of vampire, werewolf, or other shifter stories. I have read one or two that were worthwhile, but those were few and very far between. As for the vast majority of them, they vary only between laughably unimaginative and downright brain-dead stupid, but this one seemed like it offered a new angle: that of a med tech who caters to this supernatural crowd, and I made the beyond the grave mistake of deciding to give it a try. I sure learned my lesson.

The biggest problem is that this story felt like it was written by an author who was not painting by numbers, but writing by numbers, trying to get the 'right' concepts in the publisher-approved spaces, and he became so focused on that, that he forgot he was supposed to be relating an original and engaging story. So while his writing-by-numbers was perfect, in those latter categories, this story was an abject failure. It was so unrealistic - even within its own framework - that it constantly kicked me out of any suspension of disbelief by reminding me far too often of how profoundly stupid it was.

So we start the story with the predictable in the middle of a crisis situation, then we immediately revert to flashback mode, which brings the story to a screeching, jarring halt. Even that might have been survivable had it not been for the brain-dead writing. The author expects us to believe that a med tech who graduated with a great track record in his academic life, and thereby earned himself an unexpected berth in the supernatural med-tech world, would be thrown into a service about which he was profoundly ignorant, never even heard of, let alone knows anything professionally, and in this state of dangerous ignorance, be sent out on emergency calls with absolutely zero preparation and training.

Yes, if your goal is to slaughter your patients through sheer incompetence, then by all means go right ahead and do that. If you're serious about your work though, and intent upon saving lives, then you tell your proby up-front what he's going to be doing, you'll ascertain with certitude if he's okay with that, and you'll train him as to the special needs of the supernatural clientele so he can actually be of use instead of floundering from the off! You don't toss him into it in the dark without a word that his patients will all be supernatural, and that his first call is going to be a werewolf in the middle of a diabetes-induced transition. Wait a minute, a werewolf with diabetes? No, not a werewolf - a lycan! I'm sorry, but this was all horse-shit, and did I mention stupid? As much as I would have liked to have read an intelligent take using this plot, I could not stand to read any more of this absurd garbage.

One of the warning signs, which I ought to have heeded was the EMT lecturing the new guy on the fact that werewolves prefer to be called lycans - a term shamelessly lifted straight from the Underworld movie series. Why would these alien creatures prefer to use a human-invented, if venerable, term for a disease? Like I said, the author was so intent upon conforming to established standards, that he rendered his book into a boring joke instead of an engrossing read. I ditched it very quickly. This is precisely why I don't read this genre: it's boring as hell! It would be nice to find something new and different, but in a way it's quite reassuring and even encouraging to know that nothing has changed. Now I know I don't need to waste any more of my time on this tedious crap for a couple more years at least.

Doomed by Tracy Deebs

Rating: WARTY!

This was another tired novel in first person. I think I'm going to systematically survey all of my books and give away or delete every last one of them that's in first person because I'am so tired of that worthless voice that it almost makes me ill when I see it in a book. Also, if I'd known that this author was a 'professor of writing' at a college, I would never have picked this one up on the first place. Such people are usually the very worst people at writing novels in my experience, but I've had it on my shelf for some considerable time, so maybe I was less picky when I picked this up!

The story launches into tropes form the outset - the disaffected teen who is parentless, the two guys, one a 'bad boy' and one a good guy for the inevitable YA lust triangle, and the ditz of a female main character who is so useless she can't possibly choose between them and leads both of them on like a cruel mistress for the entire trilogy. Get a tomb! Apparently this professor of writing teaches that it's best to rip-off every story that's ever gone before instead of writing something new and fresh. Either that or she teaches writing originally, and then hypocritically does just the opposite when it comes to her own projects. Either way this is not a person i want to learn anything from.

Main character Pandora wakes up on her birthday. Despite knowing better, she searches desperately for an email from her mom, but there is none. Yes, she's not an orphan per se, but her mother works for Big Fossil, aka Big Oil, and is often gone, and her father has been long gone, yet he's the one who sends her an email. How mom comes to leave Pandora all alone at home with no-one to keep an eye on her is a mystery. It's not like she couldn't afford a live-in caretaker for her daughter, but this lazy writer doesn't even bother to address that.

Pandora is quite obviously, it quickly comes to light, not the brightest silverware in the drawer. When she sees an email from her father, and despite being warned by her mother to delete on sight any emails he might send, she opens the lone one he does send and then clicks on the website it links to. This act unleashes something take instantly takes over the entire internet. Yes, everything, worldwide! No one is better than this hacker. No security is equal to it, so everything goes down. Then Pandora's computer lights up and she's offered the chance to play a game and save the world. Also, her two male consorts are let in on the game. How her father would even known she was hanging out with these two guys these days is one of endless questions left unanswered.

Idiot Pandora, despite the entire world being offline, decides they can go get pizza. This leads to a truck broadsiding them, and it was when Pandora, in first person, was describing in detail the accident that I decided I wither needed something to prevent severe nausea, or I needed to get the hell away from this piece of garbage. I chose to ditch the book. It's trash. I'm done with this author, too.

The Superhero's Test by Timothy L Cerepaka, aka Lucas Flint

Rating: WARTY!

I'm very late with this particular review because I've had the book for some time and never got around to it, so apologies for that. The author is, in my opinion, dishonestly publishing this under a fake name. I have no idea why authors do this. It's ridiculous, but there it is: new genre, new name. I'd have to have a dozen aliases if I published my work under a different name for each genre. I've never seen the point of it and it turns me off an author.

That aside, I discovered this book was only the first three chapters and then the author offered an almost blackmail-like demand at the end to go buy it at Amazon if you want to read the rest! I don't, and if I did I would never give money to Amazon, not even to get a book in return. From this point onwards I'm going to downgrade all books which offer Amazon and only Amazon as a source, like it's the only bookseller on the planet. I'm sorry if you've allowed yourself to be deluded into thinking that, but it isn't and it never will be. Bezos's terrifying and abusive Behemoth only has the power it has because a collective we have voluntarily surrendered that power to it and we can take it back any time we wake up and realize what a huge mistake that was.

As it happens it was easy to fail this particular book because the writing was atrocious, set in high-school but reading like it was written for middle-graders, the story completely unimaginative and the plot a dismal and tired, should be retired, trope. It's first person voice, so fail there. That voice is almost always a mistake and in this case it lent the main character a disturbing arrogance. It was disturbing because this child has dangerous superpowers and all we're getting is a matter-of-fact story from this same, single source! There's no awe and wonder here, just 'hey! Look how great I am'! Barf. Super? No! heroic? No.

The very first sentence ends with main character Kevin Jake Jason stating, “...at least before I punched the local school bully through the cafeteria wall with one blow after I lost my temper.” There's no sign of an apology or a regret there, and clearly the author wants to grab our attention with violence more than anything else in a so-called superhero story. Where's the super? Where's the heroic? That term is thrown into the mix far too readily these days, just like the word 'hero' is bandied-around in real life to the extent that it has become meaningless and therefore no accolade at all. Coming right after that sentence, without any evidence of remorse, we get an introduction: “My name is Kevin Jake Jason and I am seventeen-years-old and an only child.” How is any of that relevant?

Naturally, Kevin is the new boy at school (yawn), and he ends up with the misfits (yawn II) and is bullied (yawn III) all in the next few pages. The amount of rampant and unchecked school bullying going on in these books, with the victim being the one who is punished, is laughable. And a major turn-off. But just as Kevin is about to be taken to the principal's office (apparently not a single teacher was present in the dining hall in this school), he's magically rescued by his dad, who evidently is a retired "superhero" who somehow magically knew that Kevin was in trouble at school and materialized to rescue him and spread a lie about what happened. Super? No! heroic? No! Talk about helicopter parenting. How he knew Kevin was in trouble isn't explained, at least not in my three charity chapters, but evidently this is how Kevin got his powers - it's a manly thing, see?

How does Kevin get out of trouble? Well, his dad evidently is a big fan of Men in Black, because he produces a magic light that wipes the minds of everyone present, and then he tells them what they should remember. Yawn. See what I mean about tired tropes and lack of imagination? This book is a huge fail, and don't try reading it in Adobe Digital Editions because for some reason that cuts off the last few lines of every page. Don't know why. But I don't care because I'm done with this novel and this author. I'm sorry I wasted my valuable time on it.

The Glitch by Elisabeth Cohen

Rating: WARTY!

This was a book I found in the library and which sounded interesting from the blurb - a highly-driven professional woman literally meeting herself and - I was thinking - maybe learning something from a stepped-down version of herself, but it didn't turn out that way.

The book began with the family (this woman, her husband, and their daughter) on holiday. The daughter disappeared while both of them were on their phones conducting business. She apparently was taken home by some guy, who then called the parents to tell them that she was safe and sound. That just creeped me out. The book was supposed to be funny, but it wasn't, not remotely. Kirkus Reviews - clueless as they are, described it as a "painfully funny satire". The got the pain right. If I'd known beforehand that they'd recommended it, I would have fled from it like it was Ebola virus. But as it is, no, just no. The more academic the writer, the less I tend to like their pretentious pap. This novel sucks as befits a person who has a masters in writing. Now if she'd said she had a mistresses in writing, maybe that would have been funny.

The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

Rating: WARTY!

I guess I'm not an Asimov fan and this is the last of his I will review. I've tried his work before and never got along with it. This one sounded interesting, if a little dumb, premise-wise: "In the twenty-second century Earth obtains limitless, free energy from a source science little understands: an exchange between Earth and a parallel universe, using a process devised by the aliens. But even free energy has a price. The transference process itself will eventually lead to the destruction of the Earth's Sun-and of Earth itself."

The thing is that we already get free energy from the sun without any destruction of anything - if we were only smart enough to understand that and avail ourselves of it. Asimov offers no rationale for a need to try alternate energy sources. That wasn't the biggest problem here though, and I was willing to overlook his gross error for a good story, but that's not what he offered. The story starts with chapter six for no reason I could discern. At first I thought I'd missed something but no - he even has a footnote on that same page explaining that it will make sense, but it didn't!

Instead of counting down from there or whatever, he starts counting up from chapter one and then reverting back to 'chapter 6 continued' periodically. Even that I could have coped with, but the story was nonsensical and utterly boring and I gave up on it in short order. Maybe there's a good story in there somewhere, but I lost patience with it and couldn't be bothered trying to search for one when other books were calling and willing to share their story without requiring a contortionist reading position. I can't commend this one and I'm done with Asimov.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Rating: WARTY!

This began finely enough, but it really didn't show any interest in going anywhere. I suppose it's a bit autobiographical since the author admits to having two sisters and to reading a lot. I don't get this with the reading though. It's way overdone, especially in so-called 'literary books'. I read a lot myself but don't feel an urge to brag about it or write novels about it. It doesn't mean I'm deep or smart or profound! It just means I like to read. I may well even have put a book in the hands of a character here and there in my own novels, but I can recall only one specific case of doing so.

The thing is that Americans simply don't read books! Depending on where you look for survey results, the typical American has read only four books in the past 12 months, but a quarter of adults haven't read one at all in the last year. Hispanics, high salary-earners and people with most college education are least likely to read. About forty percent of people won't read ebooks and reading in general in the US has gone down close to fifty percent over the last fifteen years or so.

That's one reason why you're having such a hard time selling your self-published novel! It's not necessarily that it's bad - it's that fewer people are reading and there's far more available to them - and thanks to the assholes at Amazon who care more about what shareholders make than what creative people make, it's available for free or next-to-nothing. The USA is not even in the top twenty among nations which read. So if you're writing about Americans, don't have them reading a book unless there's a plot need for it, and sure as hell don't use reading a book as a measure of intelligence. It fails.

At least the author doesn't name-drop classic books or classic authors all over the place, but the one thing she does do which I found intensely annoying was put the father of the family in the position of quoting lines from obscure literature instead of actually answering questions. If the quote had answered the question, that would be one thing, but it never did! The guy needed to have his ass kicked sharply, but all of the girls put up with this, including the supposedly rebellious one, which made all of them lose my respect.

Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia all have issues and are gathering back together at their parent's home not because their mother has breast cancer, although that provides a convenient excuse, but because each sister has problems in her life. Rosalind's fiancé is away in England for an extended period working in a university lab and she fears she may lose him, but she doesn't have the wherewithal to either shit or get off the pot. Bianca was let go from the law firm where she worked in HR, because she was skimming from the books, and Cordelia has just discovered that she's pregnant - and broke. She had to shoplift the pregnancy test to even verify that she was expecting. So we're reading about three losers here form the off.

I don't normally read this kind of novel - although I've noticed from looking around that it's a sort of mini-genre to have women gather and air dirty laundry. Usually it's old friends from college who haven't seen each other in years who are vacationing together as a sort of reunion. In this case it's sisters. It was a curious coincidence to begin reading this right when I was also around that time watching the last few episodes of the Netflix series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. In that show, which is really quite good, there is a trio known as the weird sisters, and both that one and the one in this novel derive their name from Shakespeare, although in Shakespeare, it's 'wyrd' not weird, and it means something different.

But that was the problem here. The author was far more interested in being 'literary' whatever the hell that means, than ever she was in telling a story that moved and engaged, and I lost interest about a third of the way in and ditched it. Like I said, there are far more novels available to me, and I know one of those is going to grab me.