An Etiquette Guide to the End Times by Maia Sepp

Title: An Etiquette Guide to the End Times
Author: Maia Sepp
Publisher: Maia Sepp through Draft 2 Digital
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This is a charming, witty, and engaging novella. Seriously, how can you not like a story with a title like that? (Note in passing that - according to wikipedia - a novel is something using over 40,000 words, a novella uses 17,500 to 40,000, a novelette 7,500 to 17,500, and a short story under 7,500). This one has 82 pages, but page one is the cover and there is some advertising in the back, meaning that the actual story occupies only 77 pages or so.

It's set in Canada at a point in the future where even the morons who claim global warming is fiction can no longer deny it. It begins with Olive O'Malley baking under the sun in the front yard with her neighbor and enjoying some fresh water - with ice no less - when some woman, obviously a member of The Core, visits asking if she would be interested in migrating her etiquette blog to radio. Olive is disinclined to acquiesce to her request, so to say, and the woman departs, whereupon Olive discovers that the Internet has finally failed. It's yet another step in the obsolescence of technology in a disintegrating world.

Of what use is her blog if she can't blog? Why didn't the Core woman tell her that the Internet was finally going down? Judged by the veiled threats she got, and gets again from another member of the Core, Olive isn't going to be granted much choice about joining them, but her priority is recovering her grandfather, Fred. Even though she had a thorny relationship with him, he's important to her and she misses him and agonizes over his fate; then comes a risky opportunity for Olive to turn things around, to side-step the Core, bring Fred home, and garner for herself a little bit of self-determination. But what is the real cost of this going to be?

I liked this story very much, although it felt a bit too short and left things a bit loose at the end. That's not always a bad thing and I'd rather have that, than have a novel which doesn't know when to say goodnight and leave. I loved the easy relationship Olive had with her neighbor - a woman with whom a relationship would probably never have developed had it not been for the impoverished and rationed circumstances under which they're both now forced to live. I could stand to read a lot more about these two.

A remarkable story, an easy read, and an engaging tale. Some YA writers could stand to learn a bit about how women should be portrayed from reading Maia Sepp's writing. I recommend this novella unreservedly.

The Bunker by Joshua Hale Fialkov

Title: The Bunker
Author: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Publisher: Oni Press
Rating: WARTY!
Illustration, coloring, lettering by Joe Infurnari

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

I just could not get into this book despite it being a really interesting premise. The story lost me (several times) and the art work seemed more like preliminary sketches than final copy. Often the text was hard to read since it was in script form.

The story is that five college friends decide to bury a time capsule which they will meet and dig up at some point in the future. They pick a spot in the forest, and start digging only to uncover a buried bunker which has their names (that is, all but one of them) stenciled on it. They enter it and discover letters supposedly written by themselves from the future, warning each of them of the part they will play in destroying the planet.

This premise (of the destruction of most of the human population of Earth) struck me as being far-fetched even for a comic book, and the execution wasn't really well done. The dialog seemed wrong, and their actions didn't seem realistic to me given what they then knew. Either that or these five have to be the dumbest college grads ever. There was one part where a couple got totally hung up on the infidelity of one of them, and I couldn't see that being such a big deal given the earth-shattering discovery they'd just become party to! yes, I know that people do the weirdest things, but this seemed to be going down the wrong road to me, for this kind of story.

I'm normally pretty good at picking out graphic novels that I end up liking, but I can't recommend this one.

The Girl With All The Gifts by M R Carey

Title: The Girl With All The Gifts
Author: M R Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This novel is the one you wait for while biding your time reading all the dreck. It grabbed me from the very start, and it kept grabbing with each chapter. This is a brilliant novel.

It begins, "Her name is Melanie. It means 'the black girl', from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is actually very fair so she thinks maybe it's not such a good name for her. She likes the name Pandora a whole lot, but you don't get to choose." Hold on to that Pandora reference.

Melanie's story is unfolded so easily, so carefully, and so intriguingly that it takes a while to realize that this girl who appears to be having such a good time is not in a boarding school, not in a convent, not even in a psychiatric hospital. She's not even a convict. Like Johnny Test, she's a lab rat.

Slowly, but not too slowly, we discover that she's committed no crime, yet is feared by everyone around her. When she's let out of her cell, she has to be restrained as though she's Hannibal Lecter: she must be in her wheelchair, strapped-down tightly, with a muzzle on her face, because Melanie is infected with a fungus, specifically a mutated form of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis which has evolved to parasitize Homo sapiens instead of its usual host, Camponotus leonardi, a species of Carpenter ant resident in South America.

Melanie is not alone in her disease. There is a dozen or so other kids, being held on a military base where the doctors are slowly cutting up these non-kids ("They're dead already!" everyone says) to find out why they are so different from the overwhelming majority of others who are infected, and who don't talk or communicate anything other than their manifest desire to literally eat you alive. There's a very good reason why they're different.

Melanie has an ally however, and it's at a doubly-crucial moment that Helen Justineau, one of the school teachers and also a psychologist, hooks up with Melanie as their joint world goes all to hell. The Hungries, as the uncontrollable wild forms are known, break into the camp for reasons unspecified - apparently working in concert with the Junkers, who are uninfected humans and even more dangerous than the Hungries. Melanie is neither of these extremes, but no one knows why, and suddenly, and for the first time in her life, she's outside. Yes, she's on the run with Justineau, the nasty Sergeant Parks, Caldwell, the cold well of a pathologist, and with a raw military recruit, but she's outside and can see the things she's only ever heard about or seen in picture books.

But how in hell are these few people going to make it?

I am not a fan of zombie apocalypse stories or movies. Indeed, had I known this was akin to those stories, I would never have picked it up, but then I would have made a huge mistake. Yes, it's akin to those stories, but it isn't one of them. In terms of Victorian England, this is the upstairs, whereas all those others are the downstairs! This novel is brilliant, and it deserves every success it has coming its way. I thoroughly recommend it. This is one of the novels which we reviewers live to find!

Independent Study by Joelle Charbonneau

Title: Independent Study
Author: Joelle Charbonneau
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WARTY!

So after reviewing seven Net Galley novels in a row, it's time to move on to some other stuff!

This is the sequel to The Testing, The Hunger Games rip-off trilogy. Malencia Vale tells this in first person present PoV unfortunately. I guess the majority of YA writers these days simply have no idea how to write dystopian fiction in the third person. I wonder why that is? There's nothing more irking than a novel which is all me me me! Look how important I am! The world would end with out ME! Read all about me! It's the All Me, All The Time Channel!!!

That aside, who would name their heroic character with a prefix that's the French word for bad? I can see a Valencia evoking oranges: positive, bright, sweet, tangy, full of goodness, but to name her with a negative prefix just boggles the mind.

The book cover says, "Failure is not an option"! Seriously? Which genius at HMH came up with that breath-takingly original stroke of eloquence? The cover also says, "Your time is almost up", but I'll bet dollars to dung that the time won't even be close to "up" before the third volume gets published! I know writers don't have squat to do with their covers unless they self-publish but honestly?

I read the first of this sad series as a galley and it was derivative and uninventive, but not completely and nauseatingly awful. What persuaded me to give the sequel a chance was that at the end of the first volume, each candidate's memory was wiped, meaning that volume two would be a bit of a do-over. I was intrigued by this, notwithstanding the risk and stupidity in wiping the mind of someone who has proven her- or him-self to be the best of the best. I decided to give the sequel a shot. I was not impressed, but at least Charbnonneau knows to use the phrase "set foot" in place of "step foot"! Now if only she could grasp that it's "biceps" and not "bicep", my opinion of her writing might improve moderately!

The weak thing about his novel (other than its main character) is that it's all black and white. Either you succeed admirably or you're eliminated with extreme prejudice. I can't see any society getting anywhere with a policy like that. I cannot even see a society ending-up like that, not even after a disastrous world war and (un)natural catastrophes, although that kind of 'final judgment' is a very religious approach to life, and the USA is one of the most dangerously fundamentalist nations on the planet. Where is the logic in a society which purposefully kills its most promising offspring? It makes no sense at all, especially not with the population all-but annihilated to begin with.

So Mal-encia Vale is yet another of these YA female main characters who is offered to us as a hero by an author who then quietly undermines her character at every turn. She's female and in the minority at the university (no explanation is offered for why men in general are evidently smarter than women in general in this world). We're apparently expected to believe that this equals "weak". She's short of stature, so we're also expected to believe that this equals "disadvantaged". In short (forgive the pun) she's just another Beatrice Prior, which is what's truly sad.

She certainly ain't no Katniss Everdeen because she's really Mary Sue Vale - she can do no wrong, and she's always on top, always the best, always winning. She has no flaws, which ironically makes her seriously flawed as a character. She's supposed to be the strong female, but she's portrayed as being almost completely dependent upon men - men like her boyfriend Tomas, her secret adviser Michal, and so on. Whenever she has a "brilliant idea" it's inevitably based on something she remembers her father or one of her brothers saying or doing, never her mother. She's supposed to be super-smart, and yet she does one dumb thing after another, and she has no original ideas. In short, she's truly pathetic.

This novel starts out with this 'hero' planning on running away, but ending-up taking the advice of a man, and staying. She did not reason this out for herself. There goes her smarts! It's sad to say the least. Some have praised this novel for making the lead female cerebral and using math and science, but there really isn't any part of the novel where she does that. In the first set of tests where they go on this childish scavenger-hunt complete with cheesy poem-clues, she contributes nothing. In fact, in one case, while the boys work out the solution, Mal-encia is trapped in a box!

As if that isn't bad enough, Mal-encia has consistently mal-icious thoughts about, or impressions of, all other females in this novel. There isn't another decent woman anywhere to be found who can match her for how wonderfully sweet and winning she is: all the other women are portrayed negatively. That's not only completely unrealistic, it's quite simply bizarre coming from a female author and is a give-away sign of bad writing technique: the fact that that she evidently feels she has to trash all other female characters in order to make her main character look good!

If you thought the testing had stopped after The Testing (how original a title is that?!), you were wrong. It never stops, which seemed to me to be completely ridiculous. After her selection exam, Mal-encia, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, is dumped into the government program instead - one of the five factions available. Failure to succeed in a faction means dismissal. Does that sound familiar to readers of the execrable Divergent series, where faction drop-outs become factionless and have to fend for themselves? This novel, believe it or not, even has a chasm at one point, with a railing, which looks down on a river far below!

There is a host of other oddities, too. The head professor of government studies, Verna Holt comes to get Mal-encia from her dorm room on her first day! This seemed absurd to me. Seriously - the senior professor comes to each dorm room to pick up the freshmen? Maybe it's symbolic of something, because everything in this novel has a symbol: the boy's dorm is marked with a coiled spring (what's that all about?!), the girl's dorm is marked with a key (ditto!). Mal-encia herself is represented with a lightning bolt. Yeay for her. What a pity she isn't anywhere near that bright.

Each of the five factions have their symbols, too, which appear on the book's cover, because you know that it's currently illegal in the USA to publish a dystopian trilogy with a female first person main character without having some sort of circular symbol on the cover, right? People have been redirected for far less! At one point, the author writes, "Weather and animals have eaten away pieces of the dark gray walls" Really? Animals have eaten the walls? I felt like climbing the walls after reading that bizarre assertion. Are the these buildings really just grass huts?!

That's not all. Michal Gallen from volume one, the guy who keeps Mal-encia from her cowardly, knees-bent running away behavior, informs her that he will no longer be close enough to her to continue helping her. He tells her that there will be someone else, yet he fails to tell her who this is! This was about where I would have tossed the book into the paper shredder had it not been a library book. This is so moronic that it's almost unbelievable that a writer could be this bad, and that her editor could be this blind to how poor this writing is. I mean this wasn't even a plot device, it was cheap amateur theatrics and there was no reason whatsoever for it other than to struggle to artificially ramp-up some much-needed tension.

We're given some pretty ham-fisted reasons to believe that Mal-encia's new contact is Ian, a senior who is her new adviser in the government dorm (yes, just like in Divergent, the initiates have to give up their families and even their intake dorm room, and move into their new faction's 'compound'. I'm guessing that Ian is a big, fat, scaly, slippery red herring, and that the "dark-skinned girl" who seems peeved by Ian's dicking around with the intern assignments, is the one who is actually her contact, but I could be wrong.

Even after the assignment exam - the results of which determine the faction to which they will be assigned, the testing continues. They're shown to their rooms and told that they must not be late for lunch, and then the power goes out and they're expected to break out of their rooms to get downstairs for lunch. Absurd. The only thing that's notable about this is that Mal-encia fails to offer any assistance to those who are still locked in their dorm rooms. Some leader. Some hero.

The university is located in Tosu City (it may as well be named Tosser City), and the students who hail from there did not have to go through the appalling "Testing" in volume one, which the students from the 'provinces' did. This is pretty much a mirror image of the Hunger games where tributes from districts one and two were privileged by being trained from birth to fight in the games and so had the advantage, but it makes no sense here: in another piece of bad writing, no reason is given as to why the Tosu City students get a bye.

That the asinine testing continues even after the students have been through their qualifying exam and assigned to their appropriate faction is not only indicative of a lack of ideas from the author, it's open proof that this system (within this world) is flawed, yet no one remarks upon this at all. They all blindly accept it, including mega-brain Mal-encia.

Charbonneau evidently knows squat about biology. At one point, during a field test, she has a small party (led, of course, by Mal-encia) enter what used to be a zoo. There's a large snake (12 feet long) still living there, and she tries to distract it by throwing a lump of wood: the snake snaps its head around. This is after she mentions that some snakes are deaf. Technically they aren't: they hear through their jaw bones (actually in the same way we do, except that over the course of evolution, the reptile jaw mutated into our inner ear bones. So if the wood had hit the floor and the snake's head was on the floor, it would have detected it. But the snake's head is suspended in the air - it wouldn't hear a thing.

Charbonneau not only has a poor grasp of evolution, she also doesn't quite get the idea of survival. At one point, we're expected to believe that water which is "murky brown" is contaminated but probably drinkable??? She doesn't know physics, either, evidently. A stone thrown horizontally will hit the ground at the same time as one dropped straight down if both are released from the same height and at the starting same time and starting point. So in solving one of these scavenger-hunt clues, the horizontal velocity is irrelevant for the first part of the question.

The biggest problem, however, is that this entire challenge is bullshit. The clues are childish and the rules clear - although leader Mal-encia herself tries a bluff at one point, threatening to leave her team behind and they fall for it, yet it was already explained that the team ideally needs to finish together. And these are supposed to be smart people?

The illogicalities continued to mount disturbingly as this story dragged on. Mal-encia is given nine classes (50% more than anyone else), yet she believes that she's been set up for failure. When she completes the induction test in record time by defying the book cover blurb (failure is not an option), and realizing that failure is the only option for the final test, she believes professors Holt and Barnes hate her and want her to fail because she's too smart! Never has a book blurb and a book's content been so diametrically opposed! Big Publishing™, epic fail!

Finally, on page 200 or so, Mal-encia actually starts her classes! The classes make no sense to me given the state the world is in and the tragic state of the environment in her own country. We're told that she's studying: global history, advanced calculus, world languages, and United Commonwealth history and law. That last one makes some sense given the profession which has been forced upon her, but given what else has been going down over the last century, I see no point in any of the others. History is irrelevant; what they have to deal with is what's right in front of them - a polluted planet, a devastated nation, where food and shelter are paramount, and reclaiming the environment from the pollution and irradiation is all important.

I can see how these classes might be of some value if the world were normal - similar to the way ours is today, but in their world? No! History? Of what benefit could that be to what she's been assigned to do? Her school is government. Almost none of this is relevant to what she needs to know. Why, for example, is she doing calculus? How will that benefit her, much less be used in government? World languages? This story is so inextricably lodged in the USA that she will never need that! None of this makes any sense! It's like Charbonneau doesn't have sufficient imagination to invent the likely classes that would be necessary to governing a wrecked nation, and instead simply copied some existing contemporary university's curriculum! The next day's classes make even less sense. Electrical and Magnetic Physics? The Rise and fall of Technology? Art, music, literature, bioengineering? Why?

Maybe the overwhelming irrelevancy of everything is why Mal-encia always holding hands like a little kid. This is hardly the hallmark of a born leader! She's so overwhelmed that she frequently regresses to her childhood, and whenever Mary Sue Mal-encia thinks back to her good ol' down-home country upbringing for guidance on what to do next, it's always a male figure to whom she thinks back. Mom doesn't get a look in; only her dad and her brothers are good enough to provide her with useful memories. Way to insult your gender, Charbonneau!

Mal-encia at one point decides she needs to break into the airport - which is supposedly off-limits due to contamination - to find out who is living there. She wonders if it's the "redirected" people or if they're dead. It never once occurs to her that the simplest way to expose Barnes for what he's doing - if indeed he's doing anything (I was never convinced that he was) is to simply ask him for an accounting of all those who failed the testing or were redirected from the university. If they're dead, he will not be able to come-up with convincing evidence of their whereabouts, and he will be done for. If they're not, she can quit obsessing over this, and get on with her life.

Mal-encia is issued a bike! She revels in this and is grateful for the exercise to strengthen her limbs. Then she returns to the government hall and has an apple and some crackers for lunch - that's all! For dinner, she takes some bread and cheese with a bit of fruit. She's a moron. All this bullshit about "strong body, strong mind", and she's eating like an anorexic?

She obsesses over wasted paper, but this is an advanced hi-tech society, Why is an expensive and scarce resource like paper even used at all? Do they have no laptops, no pads? It makes no sense. Clearly Charbonneau did not put anywhere near enough thought into her world-building. Actually it reads more like she put none into it.

One of Mal-encia's projects for President Colander (yes, this whole thing is full of holes) is to help out with the proposed rail link to some of the colonies, but one of the problems with the rail link is the endless large chasms where earthquakes have supposedly rent the Earth asunder! Nowhere does Charbonneau, not in two novels, ever explain exactly how this happened. Why? She doesn't explain because she clearly cannot. It's just this way because it serves her so-called 'plot' for it to be so, and the hell with common sense with science, with logic, or with it fitting into her framework.

I skimmed the last portion of this novel because it was too bad and boring to be worth any more time than that. Charbonneau ought to be paying people to read this crap, not charging us for it. This novel, and this entire series, is WARTY!

Enders by Lissa Price

Title: Enders
Author: Lissa Price
Publisher: Ember
Rating: WARTY!

I wrote a positive (if weird and somewhat breathless) review of Starters which was this novel's predecessor, but I’d forgotten a lot of what happened in it, and my re-reading of my own review didn't help as much as I hoped it would to get me in the right frame of mind for this one! That review was written only a couple of months after I started this blog and it was actually quite interesting to go back and read myself writing a review back then!

Quite unlike the original, this sequel is a complete and nonsensical disaster. I mean that literally: nothing in this novel makes sense. It's like a really, and I mean really, let's hear it one more time, really bad B movie plot. I'm actually wondering if Price didn't get her ideas for this from watching daytime TV soap operas. The first issue I had with it isn't even the novel but the cover. I don't normally say anything about covers because this blog is about writing, and the writer has as little to do with their cover as the cover artist does with reading the novel, but these new covers are so bad I can't not say anything about them.

The cover not only of Enders but also of Starters has undergone a make-over for the worst. The model (or models) look like they were on Quaaludes or something. The models look like different people, and neither cover looks as good as the original Starters cover. The new covers SUCK (I show the Enders cover here which matches the original Starters cover in my earlier review). This is what happens when you let Big Publishing™ get its massive and clumsy foot in the door! Yes, the sequel is published by Ember and that's pretty much what this novel is - a dying ember after the roaring fire of volume 1.

In passing, I have to say I was not at all impressed with Lissa Price's website. Her 'About' page seems to be about nothing save making money! It quite literally tells nothing about Lissa Price except how seemingly obsessed she is with formalities and opportunities. I was quite turned-off her by reading that. Her first novel was really good, but its sequel is so appallingly amateurish as to be scary. What the hell happened? Where was her literary agent? Did they not read this and advise her against going ahead with it as it was? Where was her book editor? Did they not warn her that this novel was nowhere near ready for prime-time?

This novel begins with Callie living in the mansion vacated by Helena, her psychotic abuser from the first volume. Helena died in that story and left the mansion to Callie and to her own granddaughter, Emma. Callie was supposed to locate Emma, but she simply blows off that commitment. She still has the chip in her head which allowed people to control her body remotely, but it has been modded by a guy (Redmond) who at first she felt angry towards, but who subsequently became her friend. The chip was how she planned upon earning money to pay for her kid brother getting treatment for his medical problems. Her entire life revolved around her kid brother in volume one. He may as well not even exist in volume two!

In order to explain why this novel is so god-awful, this rest of this review is going to have some MAJOR SPOILERS, even by my standards, so do not read any further unless you want these spoilers in your head! Note that some of this is so bad that even as I try to explain it, I fear you may not follow the explanation.

The "Old Man" who had been responsible for running the organization to which Callie volunteered her youth for rent, is still free, and he's able to contact her via her chip - and to later start controlling her through it even when she was unwilling and quite conscious. He wants her chip mods for himself and is willing to kill to get it, as she discovers at the mall when he blows up that chip-carrying girl remotely, using the chip itself. How exactly a tiny chip can be made to explode with sufficient force to take out a small portion of a mall and kill people is conveniently glossed over, and Price agrees with me on that, based on what happens later to Emma, but apparently she forgot the earlier massive destructive power of her magic chip. This was the first thing I disliked about this novel, and this particular incident makes no sense in light of what happens later in the novel between Callie and Hyden.

Another problem was that everyone seems to have suddenly become scientifically stupid in Price's world - especially the scientists. They’ve all apparently forgotten something we knew back in 1836, when Michael Faraday discovered that (with few exceptions) an electromagnetic signal cannot pass into a properly protected enclosed area - hence the name Faraday cage. This is presumably where that tinfoil hat trope came from. Callie can be cut off from the unwelcome invading signals even if the chip cannot be removed. The chip could also be fried with an EMP. Price is evidently a "graduate" of the University of Iowa's summer writing workshop which may account for her apparent lack of a decent science education.

The story wasn't too bad in its early stages, but even then there were issues. As I mentioned, Callie is in a mall when she sees the head of a fellow Starter - someone she knows - explode. Her chip was detonated remotely as a demonstration by the "Old Man" of his power. The Old Man was the CEO of the corporation which abused Starters in the first novel, and which Callie brought to its knees. She's then kidnapped by Hyden, who lies that he's the son of "Old Man", and he claims that he wants to bring him down. The truth is that Hyden is the Old Man: he was apparently wearing an improbably effective disguise in the first novel! Yeah. Right.

Callie inexplicably falls immediately in love with Hyden, and he and she start kidnapping other Starters who have been chipped (and subsequently referred to as "metals"). They bring them to Hyden's lab. Hyden tells Callie he has secured her boyfriend Michael from the first novel, and her kid brother Tyler, at a safe location and Callie has no issue with this at all, although why they're not secured with Callie is blown off. Hyden lies that he wants to bring his old man (i.e. himself) down, when his real plan is to use her to capture all the "metals" and sell them off as slaves to the highest bidder. He consistently lies to Callie until he's forced to tell her the truth, and she pretty much immediately forgives him, even for the raid he conducted on his own lab to kidnap and transport the "metals" to a secret desert lab to auction them off, a raid during which Redmond is murdered. Hyden consistently lies to Callie that he doesn't know where this lab is and he leads her to believe her father is dead even though he's holding her father captive at that secret lab!

Callie inexplicably forgives Hyden for every evil act he has set in motion and romps off holding his hand at the end of the novel joyfully planning on working for the government organization which also kidnaps and abuses Callie! Her dearest lifelong friend and boyfriend from the first novel is completely sidelined here for Hyden. Her son, about whom her life revolved is completely sidelined here for Hyden. Callie is yet another main female character in a dystopian novel written by a female author who is consistently shown to be slow, boneheaded, stupid, incompetent, moronic, and a willing pawn of men.

In short, this novel was lousy, and a really poor excuse for a sequel to an original novel that was so entertaining. I rate this novel a truly warty read.

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Rating: WORTHY!

Curiously, this novel isn't copyrighted to Brandon Sanderson, but to Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC. What's up with that?!

This is the first in The Reckoners series: Steelheart, Mitosis, Firefight (due in late 2014 to be followed by Calamity). There's a huge prologue to this novel (which I naturally refused to read) that apparently details how the main protagonist's father died. In my book(!), if it’s worth telling, it’s worth labeling it 'chapter one'. Otherwise, fugeddaboudit! This review contains some big spoilers.

I’d looked at Steelheart several times on the library shelf before I decided to check it out. My problem with it was first of all, that it’s a first-person PoV novel. Nine-out-of-ten 1PoVs are detestable in my experience. The other problem was less easily definable: I just couldn’t get inspired by the idea of it, but then I decided, since I'd already read and liked The Rithmatist by this same author, what's to lose? That's the advantage of the public library: you're not out anything but a bit of time if you don’t like it, and you can always go buy the novel later if you really do like it. I had some minor issues with the story as I began reading it, but I found myself starting to become engrossed pretty quickly, which was a welcome surprise.

But be advised that this represents two negatives with which I came into this: that I was really ambivalent to begin with about this novel, and that this is a super-hero story. This may affect my take on it! This is not a comic book, but it has that graphic novel aura about it because of its subject matter. I used to like comics when I was a kid, but I grew out of them, so I never became a part of that culture. I've reviewed several comics in this blog, and actually enjoyed them for the most part, but I'm not an aficionado, and although I've been to a few comic-cons, I was neither part of, nor impressed by, the fanboi/girl culture; in fact, I'm turned off by it. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a good super-hero movie as my movie reviews page proves.

Sanderson tries to remain faithful to the comic book style, but I'm not sure this was the best way to go with a novel written entirely in words. I can see where he's coming from, but comic book fandom is most akin to a fanatical religion, and writing a novel entirely in words and putting it out there for comic fans seems to me to be rather like being a heretic. OTOH, you cannot possibly write a graphic novel and include in it as much as is included in a regular novel. Not in one volume! To me, this is a severe and debilitating limitation of comics. It's why I grew out of them. They couldn’t continue to offer me enough as I grew up.

So the story is set in a future Chicago - clunkily re-named "Newcago" - which is run by a cadre of super-villains, the leader of whom is Steelheart. Steel heart could also refer to the main protagonist, and can also refer to "Newcago" itself - the entire city was turned to steel - walls, streets, furniture, windows, doors, and so on by Steelheart. I guess he's just that kind of a guy. How the city even stayed above ground with that extremely dense tonnage of metal being tugged down by gravity remains unexplained. Society fortunately had new mobile phone technology by then, so the massive preponderance of metal conveniently doesn’t affect people's ability to communicate or navigate.

A decade before, the bad stuff happened. A weird comet or light of some kind appeared in the sky and bad people developed super powers - or more likely, ordinary people got them and became bad. These people are called Epics, and they come in various rankings, dependent upon their influence and power. Steelheart is the leader in this city and has a close group of slightly lesser super-villains who work with him. Why they do this isn’t explained. Why any super-villain would even want to be the reigning monarch over a city is also unexplained, especially given that Steelheart quite literally does nothing save eat and sleep, and occasionally display his power to keep people afraid of him.

One of these sub-villains is Nightwielder, who can be incorporeal, and who casts the city into permanent darkness for reasons unexplained. The only thing which shines through is the light in the sky, now named Calamity. No one knows what it is or how any of this came about. Nor does anyone know how people manage to find things to eat when there's nothing capable of growing under the darkened sky. The rest of the country is similarly under martial law from super-villains and suffering devastation.

A small group of anonymous people, known as The Reckoners, is trying to kill Epics. This group seems almost super-human itself in its ability to get into and out of places, and to assassinate many of the lesser Epics. David Charleston, whose father was killed in the prologue by Steelheart, has recently got out of the child-labor munitions factory which supplies weapons to Steelheart's fifty squads of enforcers.

When he became eighteen he was forced to quit and make his own way in the world, but he has savings: enough money to get his own apartment and to live independently while he plans how to exact revenge upon Steelheart for his father's death. He has a hand-written library of notes on a huge number of super-villains, and a plan to take-out Steelheart. Why hand-written is unexplained. The first step of this plan is to distract Steelheart by making him think that there's a new villain in town - Limelight - who is planning on challenging Steelheart's despotism.

One night David hears a rumor that The Reckoners are in town, and he figures that they will go after Fortuity - a villain who has precognition and consequently is extremely hard to assassinate. David ends up joining The Reckoners and seems to be accepted by them all except for his peer, Megan, who for some unexplained reason resents him, so you know they will become an item. Can you say "cliché"? David's only thoughts of her center around her physical attributes and appearance. He exhibits no apparent desire to know her mind.

The Reckoners group consists of 'The Prof' - who is so suspicious that I began thinking he was an Epic himself - along with Tia, a researcher who digs up data in an attempt to find ways to bring down the Epics, Cody, a sniper, Abraham, a weapons expert, and the aforesaid Megan, who's special talent appears to be that she's eye-candy. Sanderson has given each character an oddball quirk or two, but none of this worked for me, and in the end, simply became irritating.

The group begins planning how to bring down Steelheart, and thereby really make a statement. No one has ever taken down a prime level Epic. The goal is to get Steelheart, but in order to do that, they need to get to one of his minions, and the one they choose is the one in charge of the security forces - he apparently uses his own super-generated power to augment his paramilitary teams, and to supply the city with energy to make up a deficit. If he was taken out, it would really put a dent in Steelheart's power structure in more ways than one.

This brings me to another issue! Many villains are named and some are even associated with a power or two, but we see very little of them or what they do. Those parts are a bit like reading a phone book or a who's who. We want to get to the wikipedia entry on them (well, maybe not quite that much detail!), but we are denied.

I continued to like the novel as I quickly read through it. Indeed, I found myself wishing I had more free time so I could simply read it through without stopping, which is a good sign, and a vote for wanting to read the sequels, assuming this one didn’t go belly-up in the last half (it didn't). As a reader, we have to hope for the best while coping with the worst, and I can see how people can become addicted to a series even if it’s less than ideal. It’s not that any given series is necessarily so great, it's that it can be so hard to give that up in the hope of finding something better, and once you've read volume one, you have an investment in things which can be hard to let go. In economics, it’s known as 'commitment bias', or simply the 'sunk cost fallacy'.

Personally, I've never understood how people can dislike volume one of a series and rate it two stars or whatever, and then look forward to volume two! I guess it’s an addiction from which I'm thankfully free. In many ways a series is like having a good friend to hang out with, a partner, a spouse, or even children or a pet. As big of a pain in the ass as they can be from time to time, you really miss them when they're not around. That's why some people stay in miserable relationships which they should have long ago abandoned. It can be miserable to be alone, at least initially, but I don’t agree that this means that we should encourage bad writing by voting with our pocketbook for these pock-marked books!

The series problem is that they’re so easily written in many regards. The first novel is the hardest, of course: you have to create the characters, the world, and the plot and make it work intelligently together and bring it to a satisfying conclusion, but a series demands rebellion against this paradigm by insisting that not only the initial, but each succeeding story is actually never finished. This is unsatisfying by its very nature.

Once that first volume is out of the way, subsequent volumes are far easier because the world and the characters are already there. If the first volume was a success, you already have a fan base and can afford to relax somewhat, and even to take some liberties with your readership. This may account for the bottoming-out of so many second volumes: the author isn’t motivated to try (not like they were in volume one). This doesn’t mean that there's no work to be done, or no effort to be made in volume two and later (obviously there needs to be a new plot which ideally is at least as good as volume one), but you can take a lot of short-cuts because the world and its population is already established. I think this privilege and freedom, and even the shortcuts are all-too-often abused.

One problem I had with this story is one which I've had with far too many other stories: the relationship between the girl and the guy. The authors' preponderant need to have one male and one female, both preferably white, and to have them meet and fall in love no matter what, is a bit sad to say nothing of tiresome. David and Megan don’t have a relationship. They're thrown together artificially, and it's completely nonsensical since they're the two most junior members of the team.

As far as their relationship goes, there isn’t one. Nothing happens or develops. David's entire investment in Megan is sexual - based entirely on superficiality. Later, much later, we get a hint that there may be something more in development, but in general it’s so juvenile, and in the end it's too little too late. At least Sanderson gives a somewhat rational explanation for her hot and cold treatment of David, although even that seemed uncomfortably artificial, especially in that it was directed towards David and no one else on the team - like he was the sole offender.

I liked this novel mostly, and by that I mean that I'm ready to read a sequel to it, but I was disappointed by some of the really clunky parts. The biggest problem I had, I think, was how completely incompetent the Reckoners proved themselves to be. In the beginning, we were asked to accept that they were smart, seasoned, Epic assassins, who plan meticulously, have great success, and who leave no trail back to them. Initially, they didn’t even want David on board because he was so young and amateurish. The reality, as depicted in the novel that we get to read, is that they're idiots who couldn’t build Panama if they had a man, a plan, a canal inside out and backwards.

The first problem was David, the main character and narrator. He was a bad character and was actually at the root of many of the clunkers which irritated me. I don’t expect a perfect character. Indeed, that would be awful, but I do expect one to make sense within his framework. His deliberately lousy metaphors weren't remotely amusing and became tedious very quickly. His really weird obsession with stating, long and loud to anyone who would listen, that handguns were poor and inaccurate and his rifle was infinitely better, sounded like he was quoting the villain from the Clint Eastwood movie A Fistful of Dollars. This was clearly intended to telegraph that this was going somewhere, but it never did!

The next problem was that the two newest members of the team were consistently partnered on missions. This made no sense, and was clearly done for no reason other than to clumsily keep the two together so that romance could blossom, but even if I wanted to swallow down that sorry lump of indigestible gristle, there was no romance! All we were given was adolescent David lusting after Megan's "hot" body. Badly written. Sanderson did this in exemplary fashion in The Rithmatist so why did he perform so poorly here? I dunno.

One crucial issue, which unusually was not tied to David, was that these so-called professionals failed to change their coded frequency after Megan's cell phone was lost. That's all I'm going to say about that, but it made me wonder how people this clueless had managed to even survive, let alone have the success they'd supposedly had in the past.

The most egregious example though, was the incompetence and stupidity exhibited by the team when they tried to take out Conflux, a supposedly a key Epic who controls the security forces. Yes, their information about him is poor, but it’s solid about the route his car takes when traveling through the city. Note that at this point they have the flux gun which can vaporize a target, and they have a power cell which can power it for some twelve shots. All they had to do was wait in concealment on the route and blast Conflux's limo with the gun. They didn’t even have to know if any Epic was in the car. It didn’t matter if they failed on this occasion because they could get away and try later. They failed to do this. They had a gun in place, but it was not the flux gun.

Even when they screwed this up, David could still have salvaged something. He had the flux gun and he had a UV light which he knew would solidify Nightwielder, yet he failed to take him out when a golden opportunity presented itself! They exposed themselves when they didn’t have to and this made no sense.

So this is all I'm going to write about this volume. Let's just say that the ending wasn't god-awful and held a surprise or two, and I'll be looking for the sequels - the next one at least. After that I'll decide whether to go another step! For now I rate this particular volume a worthy read - just don't expect miracles!

Legend by Marie Lu

Title: Legend
Author: Marie Lu
Publisher: GP Putnam's Sons
Rating: WARTY

Yes, this is another nightmare. I haven't read a novel this bad since Divergent/Insurgent, and it's not just because it’s a dystopian novel set (where else? There is nowhere else, is there?) in the USA, but because it’s a young-adult first person PoV novel. Honestly? Why me? Why me - well, I've picked up this novel and put it back on the library shelf several times, put off by the 1PoV perspective and my dyspepsia with dystopia, especially of the YA strain, and actually this is worse than 1PoV: it’s 1PoV². The story begins in gold-colored type and alternates with black, each color representing one of two voices. They have to use the colored typeface because there really isn't any other difference between the two main protagonists: they're both supposed to be geniuses and they're both dumb as dirt.

Here's a funny aside: I went to an online thesaurus to look up 'dystopian' (I don't like that word and I was curious to discover if there were interesting or amusing alternatives - there aren't!). It found no matches for 'dystopian'! The thesaurus wrecks! Even the dictionary at that site (which is usually good) doesn't have it unless you remove the 'n' at the end. But that wasn't what was funny. The funny thing is the alternatives it offered to 'dystopian', one of which was 'most piano'. The page giving me the 'didn't find' notice asked me if I meant 'dustbin' (which is the British name for a trash or garbage can). I kind of like the idea that Day and June live in a dustbin world, but what I really want to do now is to write a novel set in a most piano world....

Sp what's with the gold typeface? That particular typeface would actually be nice if it were black. It sure beats the black typeface we are given, which is tired and boring. I thought that maybe Lu chose these for a real purpose, but no. The cover is grey but the fly leaves are gold. Gold leaf?! Golf lead? Geld Loaf? Glad Felo? A God Fell? I just wish we could 'defog all'.... The insignia on the cover is painfully obviously designed to emulate the burning circle on the cover of The Hunger Games, as was the design on the cover of Divergent. Seriously, is there not an original thought in the minds of any of the YA dystopia authors or publishers? Not one? Anybody?

I have to interject with an observation of the irony here of "Marie" Lu, who disguised her beautiful Chinese name - Xiwei (the name to which this novel is copyrighted) for no other reason than to conform to western standards, writing a novel about a girl who rebels! Does no one else see the hilarious hypocrisy in that? But it’s coupled with sadness, too, that we now have a veritable tsunami of tales like this: The Hunger Games, Divergent and so on, which the movie companies cannot wait to lay their green thumbs on (yeah I know I keep mentioning that one, but there are many others, too stupid to remember, much less list). You can’t really blame Lu for piling on, although she claims she got the idea for this story from reading Les Miserables, another story which I'm probably going to have to add to my reading list now! I did find it interesting that this novel came out in 2011, right along with Divergent, just three years after The Hunger Games made YA novel headlines. I'm surprised it took them that long to write drivel like this. Indeed, 'The Miserables' would be a better name for Lu's novel given how sorry her two-dimensional characters are.

Lu has alternating sections which are labeled 'Day' (in huge lettering so we don't miss it!), which is the name, supposedly, of a nightmare: he's the most wanted rebel in the country, his story told in gold. No explanation is offered for his nickname. Why this joker is so wanted by the Republic is almost as big of a mystery as why the local military has consistently failed to catch a fifteen-year-old hooligan, but neither of those is as big of a mystery as the explanation for Day's vandalism, which is never given. We're expected to believe that his sole motivation is getting supplies for his family: clothes and food. How, exactly does that translate into setting fire to a bunch of military aircraft? All this tells me is that Day is a selfish moron. Instead of keeping a low profile and helping his family, he pulls ridiculous and fruitless stunts which raise his profile, run the risk of him being caught, and do nothing at all for his family. In the other alternating sections June Iparis is the new black. This regular typeface (how clichéd! - regular v. rebel!) is standard Times New Roman or some such. Whatever happened to the old Roman? No one knows!

The supposed 'bad boy' character, Daniel Altan Wing, aka "Day" (why not Daw?) boasts at one point: "When I was seven years old, I dipped a ball of crushed ice into a can of gasoline, let the oil coat the ice in a thick layer…" So was this gasoline or oil? Neither oil nor gasoline would coat a melting ball of ice that thickly (and would probably have doused the flames upon impact! LoL!). Given that we’re preached the temperature periodically on this novel (why?! Again, no explanation!), it’s way too hot for ice. Where did an impoverished seven-year-old even get the gasoline (or oil) and the ice in the first place, and how did he fire this into a police station by means of a slingshot without being seen and caught, and more importantly, without burning his juvenile hands off? Again, no explanation is ever offered.

Once I’d decided (which didn’t take long, rest assured!) that this novel was barely a pimple on the sorry ass of Divergent, which itself is a boil on the otherwise pristine and finely sculpted ass of The Hunger Games, I looked at some other reviews, and I have to wonder if the reviewers at the New York Times and at USA Today (and on some well-followed blogs) even read the same novel that I did (or read it at all). This was a "walloping good ride" and a "fantastic read"? The description: "brilliant protagonists" quite obviously came right out of someone's constipated ass. Praises like "Lu's genius" issued forth, causing me to ask: "What were these people smoking? Burning ice balls?"

There is a war going on, of course, but this time it's not north v. south. Instead, it's east v. west, just for the hell of it (although how any war can be termed 'civil' is probably the only mystery in this entire novel). How the war began goes conveniently unexplained as does pretty much everything in this story. The nation is split by a somewhat arbitrary line from "Dakota" to "West Texas" and Day is seen as fighting for the rebel "colonies" which occupy the east, although he's really only in it for himself and his family (or vandalism). Beyond that he doesn't care. That's the kind of vacuous "hero" he is. His brother is more heroic. Some think Day is fighting for the "patriots". Who knows? This novel is so confused that we have no idea what the difference is between those two factions, or even if they are two separate factions! The truth is that Day is fighting for nothing save his own agenda.

June is a soldier in training for the Republic (of course!). Both kids are fifteen. June is a genius, which begs the question as to why she's undergoing grunt training in college. She's the only one ever to be given a maximum score of 1500 on her SATs (Sub-Adult Triteness series), but of course, she's a rebel. We meet her as she's called to the principle's office to be picked up by her older brother (YA cliché alert: her parents are dead! Secondary YA cliché alert: their deaths are not what they seem) for climbing one of the city's tall buildings in emulation, of course, of the rebel Day who supposedly climbed one in record time. Worse than that, she was off campus! Yes, she's truly a rebel - going off campus. I mean good gods how could the authorities even countenance a rebellion like that?

Day is an outcast, of course; he has no Day job.... His mom thinks he's dead, and only his older bother knows the truth, but does Day care? Day stalks his own family, apparently on a Day pass, living Day to Day. We meet him hanging-out (almost literally) in a deserted building watching the soldiers down in the street below go door-to-door, marking those doors where "plague" is found with a large red 'X' (cliché much, Lu?). I suspect the plague is something fomented by one or other of the military powers because this is YA dystopia, so why wouldn't it be? When they reach his own family's house, they spend an inordinate amount of time in it before marking it with the 'X', and then drawing another line through the X vertically. Day has no idea what that means. Day is in the dark?!

Given what we learn later, this 'X'-ing makes no sense at all. The authorities know perfectly well where the plague is, and given that the house is marked fro quarantine, how in hell is Day's brother John still allowed to keep leaving the house to go to work? Again no explanation, no sense! It's so boringly obvious what's going to happen here that there's really no mystery to this novel at all except as to how something which was written this badly ever got published in the first place. Clearly the opposing youngsters will end up allied because they find something so astounding that it can unite even bitter enemies, and then it’s them against the world, a crisis which can only be resolved by two more volumes. No doubt the astounding revelation will be that the enemy are…Americans!

The only reason I finally jumped into this comedy of eras was that I heard that it was optioned for a movie by CBS Films before it was even published. IMDB lists it as "in development" which means no one is saying nuthin', y' hear? N u t h i n'! Clearly something is going on here, but the fact that the producer was tied in with Twilight abortion ought to tell you all you need to know about what a waste of electrons this movie will be. Anyway, this was why I decided I should probably read this and find out what underlies it all. The short answer is nothing, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so here I am, stuck in the middle with Lu….

So Day's next plan is to go steal the plague cure from the local hospital for his family, even though this genius has neither a plan nor any idea whatsoever what the triple-line symbol on his family's door actually means. He covers himself in pig's blood (no word on where he actually found that in Los Angeles) as though he's been injured in a fight, and he heads into the waiting room where he sneaks through the abominably clichéd vent system to a stairwell (shades of Die Hard anyone?); then he runs (on a bad leg) up to the labs on the third floor. He discovers that they're fresh out of plague cure, so he escapes by dramatically diving through a solid plate-glass window and plummeting to the ground below, sustaining relatively minor injuries after a three-storey fall. But of course. Day is a super hero which is obviously how he survived. This boy glows Let's call him Day-Glo.

Lu needs to get real. Seriously. She's been watching way too much bad TV. While I will grant the very faint chance that Day could walk away (okay, limp away) from a three-storey plummet, bullets do not ricochet from fridge doors! Nope, they go right through the fridge door and kill you. But hey, bullets bounce off of Day-Glo. Did you know that he once scaled a four-storey building in less than five seconds? If you don't, Lu will tell you. Repeatedly. Yep. He's a super hero.

Metias is June's older brother. He's hit by a knife thrown by Day-Glo as the latter escapes from the hospital into the amazingly complex sewers. We're clearly told that the knife hits Metias in his shoulder. The next thing we know is that the military has - in just an hour or so - graduated Genius June (let's call her Junius) from college early, and assigned this untrained, inexperienced, and undisciplined (unless you count the fact that she's been disciplined eight times this semester and is currently under a school suspension) to track down her brother's killer! Commander Jameson, her brother's commanding officer, first shows Junius her brother's dead body - but miracle of miracles: the knife that Day-Glo threw which hit him in squarely in the shoulder has now transferred itself to his chest where it pierced his heart and killed him!

I guess the military no longer wears body armor? But screw that: there are magical self-motivated knives in Lu-world? Hey, she stole that idea from the movie The Shadow! No, actually there's something else going on here. Someone removed the knife from his shoulder and deliberately plunged it into his chest to insure that he died. My suspects were Thomas, Metias's second-in-command, or Commander Jameson herself, but now, genius Junius is Day-Glo's sworn enemy, so I'm even more sure that they will sack-up together. And she's placed into her brother's unit, under the command of Thomas. I was even more sure that there would be a triangle until Thomas began doing stuff that made even Junius notice, so I changed my mind on that one! More on this anon. After three days, Junius Christ resurrects herself and heads on in to work, determined to kill Day-Glo.

Lu's world makes no sense. When June needs to dig up information on Day-Glo, instead of perusing the military's intelligence files, she surfs the Internet! In a dystopian, dysfunctional, impoverished, warring USA, where even the military is short of money, where earthquakes, flooding, and war have ravaged the country, where the western USA's population has plummeted to a miserable 20 million from maybe 150 million, there's an Internet? I wonder if it has a good thesaurus? In a flashback, Lu has Day-Glo meeting Tess, and he's stealing food from a restaurant. This is in a dystopian society (ravaged by war, etc., etc.) where the poor are of Dickensian proportions, yet there's a restaurant?! Who in that neighborhood - or any neighborhood near it - can afford to go to a restaurant? I don't think Lu really grasps what 'dystopian' means, which is hardly surprising since it's not listed in the online dictionary, but couldn't she extrapolate from 'dystopia' which is listed?

Tess and Day-Glo between them have a fortune in "Republic Notes" (is that like Republican credits?! Just remember that Watto: will not accept these.) and there's never any explanation offered for how they came by this money, especially given the 'going out of style' rate at which they spend it, and their lack of success with gambling (more anon)! Day-Glo always works alone - apparently he's the only person in the entire city who cares about his family. He has neither friends nor casual acquaintances he's met in the course of his criminal dealings. Oh, and people still own cars in the poorest section of town - or at least drive through it - through a part of town with nothing to offer, and riddled with thievery and people on the make. Maybe they're going to a restaurant?

Captain Thomas kisses one of his own soldiers (who happens to be Junius, of course) on the cheek? Seriously? Can Lu say, "conduct unbecoming"?! Thomas is inappropriate all around; even though June is now under his command (ooh baby!), he still addresses her as "Ms. Iparis"! Later on he kisses her again, but this soldier's aim is so bad that he misses her lips. I definitely made a mistake in considering him for the third leg in a triangle - unless it’s a triangle of villains. Even a dunce like Junius isn't quite stupid enough to get involved with this psycho.

The problem is that Lu's writing is so flaky that it's hard to tell if she simply has no idea what she's doing (which is the direction in which all evidence seems to point), or if she's actually conforming to some sort of bizarre plot. "How smart is Junius?" is a really good question at this point, and it has nothing to do with her putting up with Thomas's inappropriate behavior, (although it should!). When she came up with her 'brilliant' plan (which took her three days) to lure Day-Glo into a trap - which was never actually organized and never sprung! - Day-Glo recognized her as a government agent from the official way she fastened her coat! Yet she's championed as a genius who is the only one in the entire Republican military who can go undercover and find him?

The ham-fisted (I use that term advisedly!) way Lu chooses to introduce Day-Glo and Junius is to have them meet at a Skiz - a street fight (not that Lu ever defines it or explains - given that it's just a street fight - why it has to have that name) - where Day-Glo sends Tess to bet pretty much their entire wad on the outcome. This is interesting, because at the start of the novel, he's told us that he has 2,500 notes - enough to feed them "for months", yet now he's betting the bulk of what’s left of that (1,000 notes - they blew off almost 50% of their stash in a handful of days!) on a Skiz fight. It makes no sense whatsoever. Why would he risk losing enough money to feed them for (50% of) "months"?!

He wins the bet on the first fight, but when Junius steps in to fight, he bets against her and loses it all. My question here is not, "How stupid is Day-Glo" (that's already been answered satisfactorily), but how all this money comes to be floating around if people are so impoverished that half of them are scouring the garbage outside all those flourishing restaurants in the impoverished neighborhoods? It makes ZERO sense. Junius didn’t even plan on getting into the fight! She steps in to help out Tess - another serious mistake on her part. How many mistakes has the brilliant, genius, military wizard made now? I've lost count.

Lu can't even remember what she wrote from one chapter to the next. In one chapter she has Day-Glo ready to go break up the fight so Tess won’t get her ass kicked, and in his next chapter he's saying that he would have let Tess fight and get beaten just so he could win his bet. Actually Lu can't even remember what she wrote at the start of a sentence by the time she finishes it (see example later, when Day-Glo is captured and chained, King Kong like, to a roof!). Oh, YA trope alert: Junius has gold flecks in her eyes! How original! I'm sure Day-Glo does too. His are probably blue, because god forbid we should have a male trope whose eyes are brown - the most common eye color on the planet. Lu has Day-Glo lusting after Junius from the off. He imagines kissing her and running his fingers through her hair. Ri-ight - because that’s what all fifteen-year-old slum-boys think about when they see a hot girl.

So inevitably, the inevitable kiss comes inevitably between the inevitable two of them, and we discover that Junius has the amazing power to determine from his lips how many other girls Day-Glo has kissed! Wow! So they have the requisite day and night (with the requisite gentle Day-Glo gently tending her requisite wounds) so we can be sure there's been more than enough time for them to inevitably fall in requisite love. Day-Glo is supposed to be not only a genius, but also to be street smart, and yet he instantly trusts Junius - the suspicious girl he's just picked up on the street, who has suspiciously shown up out of the blue right after he was suspiciously invited to get suspiciously free plague drugs that could cure his brother? Some genius. Then Junius calls in the army to pick up Day-Glo's family, and she lures Day-Glo to the scene so they can pick him up, too. What a pity they don’t just shoot him on sight on site. Instead, they shoot his mother. Now the two are matched again, both of them being fifteen-year-old, rebellious, athletic geniuses who have lost a loved one.

But that's where Lu falls on her face again. Day-Glo is sentenced to death without a trial, in front of a mass of public onlookers, but they don't shoot him then and there. Instead, the sentence is to be carried out in four days time. Why? Explanation for this is neither given nor would make any sense whatsoever, so we know that the only possible reason for the four-day stay of execution is for Junius to rescue him, or for him to escape. Instead of returning him to his cell, though, they chain Day-Glo to the roof of the building - again with no explanation except that it would be far easier for him to escape from there: recall that we've been told several times that, like Superman, he can leap tall buildings in a single bound, yet inexplicably, Junius is the one wearing the cape! But then she is Supergirl.... And despite knowing all this about her beloved Republic, genius Junius still hasn't seen the light!

I know it's hard to conceive, but if there's one thing worse than Lu's plotting, it's her writing. She actually writes this on page 190: "A bright streak of blood stains one thick strand of my hair, painting a dark red streak into it." I am not kidding you. So is this blood bright or is it dark? It can't be both. Where the hell was the editor when that asinine line was written?

So Day-Glo is up there on the roof, and he's pretty much dying after being beaten and tortured because we have to make the guy suffer so his mortal enemy can pity him, ergo instadore. You know how that goes. So he's been dehydrated and starved into delirium, but as soon as Junius appears, he magically snaps back to rationality and cold hard logic and he starts telling her of his suspicion that the government is poisoning the poor. The fact of the evil government testing strains of plague on the poor is something we average intelligence readers knew pages and pages ago, but it's just now occurring to genius Day-Glo. It hasn't even remotely crossed Junius's transom yet, but she warns Day-Glo that he's on dangerous ground speaking such treason! SERIOUSLY? He's been sentenced to death, for gawd's sake! He's actually on the verge of dying through ill-treatment, and this genius warns him that he's making treasonous statements? Excuse me whilst I go retrieve my ass. I just laughed it off. Again.

This novel is utter trash and warty and that's all there is to it.

Paradigm by Helen Stringer

Title: Paradigm
Author: Helen Stringer
Publisher: Mediadrome Press
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

Erratum:
p117 "...picked up his coat and started rummaged through the pockets." should be "...picked up his coat and started rummaging through the pockets."

Well this novel started out with two black marks Against it! The first is that it has a prologue (aka lazy and gratuitous info-dump), which I naturally skipped. Again, if it’s worth telling, it's worth putting right there in chapter one. The hell with prologues, epilogues etc, and especially the hell with a prologue which starts: "The sky was blue." Duhh! Really? The second problem was with the contents page. It has a list of 37 chapters, but there are no chapter titles and there are no page numbers indicating where the chapters start. So, since this novel looks like the final version, and there's no indication that it’s an uncorrected galley, my question is why do we even have a contents page which tells us nothing?!

I don't do covers or back-cover blurbs in my reviews since the author typically has little or nothing to do with those things, and this blog is about writing and authors, not about editors or publishers. But as long as I'm nit-picking, and since it's right there on the cover, I'm not impressed by yet another trope character with eyes of two different colors...! Finally Stringer, who uses the grammatically correct although increasingly archaic "whom", evidently doesn’t know the difference between superlative (best part) and comparative ("better part") on p30, but I'll let it go at that, because I can see where she could argue that her usage is correct in the context she intended it, and just like with "whom", correct grammar is itself becoming archaic for better or for worse. Or is it for best or for worst?!

But let’s focus on the story rather than the format quirks and nit-picks. This story seems to be heavily rooted in Supernatural by way of The Dukes of Hazzard, but given that I am not a fan of either show, that's not a recommendation. So now that we have our cute premise in place, it’s up to Stringer to show she can deliver a story which makes her choice of launching point worthwhile - and she actually does! Sam and Nathan (at least none of the main characters is called Josh, or Bo, or Cletus, or Daisy!) drive around in a 1968 GTO, rocking and jolting along what’s left of North American roads after some sort of apocalypse evidently some years from now. Given the state of the roads, why Stringer specifies a GTO (I assume it's a Pontiac GTO as opposed to a Mitsubishi or a Ferrari!) rather than a Hummer or a Jeep or some other off-road vehicle is an unexplained mystery (note that the Dukes of Hazzard used a Dodge Charger). Obviously it comes with the Sam & Nathan territory, but it's yet to be established if that is going to work!

Sam is evidently some sort of a telepath. He can hear the thoughts of others and can generate a directed EMP from his mind. Nathan is a con-artist that Sam curiously happened to take pity on, offering him a ride which evidently isn't over yet. The two of them are evidently (god only knows why) trying to make a career out of scavenging any old technology they can find (they seem to specialize in kitchen appliances) and selling it out of the trunk of the car. Unsurprisingly, they aren't faring too well in their occupation. And Stringer fails to explain, along with many other things she fails to explain, how the electrical grid system is continuing to work in this disastrous future, or if it isn't working, what they're using for power and how that's being fueled. They ran themselves, out of the last town that they visited when Sam noticed there were satellite dishes up all over the place. Quite what’s up with that isn’t exactly clear, but rest assured that Big Mother is watching. Given how bad the roads are and how thin traffic is, I'm also wondering how it is that convenient gas stations still dot the landscape.

Then there’s Alma the kick-ass biker girl, who runs into them (not literally) twice in the same day, and saves their asses when some hi-tech kidnappers, evidently intent upon procuring a Sam for themselves, try to sneak up on their camp one night. Other than being mysterious for the sake of being annoyingly mysterious, there's no word so far on why she would even want to help these guys, or why she mysteriously appears and then rides off so mysteriously, vowing they will never meet again after each time she encounters them. She's rather like the Harry Tuttle character in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil!

I was given just enough in the first couple of chapters to keep me interested, but nothing more. I do like the way Stringer wastes no time in getting the story going (prologue aside!), so she does have that in her favor. The story moves at a good pace, with the dangers of living in this world shown competently without overdoing it. I found the business with the 'paradigm box' in Century City to be rather juvenile and unnecessarily mysterious, but then this is YA fiction, so I'm willing to let that go. I liked the way the character of Alma - younger than I thought she was, it turns out - grows and develops. She's definitely worth watching, but she's featured nowhere near enough in the story for my taste!

About a third the way in, I felt like I’d read enough of this to have some really useful thoughts on it. The first of these is that this seems to be written for the younger end of the YA scale, but it’s not unreadable. Some of it is simplistic, some of it not well-written in terms of providing a good narrative which keeps the reader sufficiently clued in. OTOH, too many clues might have made it all tell and no show - which means readers tend to be no-show as well!

One thing which seems to have been completely glossed-over is why Sam was tooling around the US, much less in an old GTO (which is evidently a hundred years old when this story takes place, so rumor has it). This made no sense to me, especially not if it was indeed a hundred years into our future, because the US has already passed "peak oil", and the rest of the world is going to be joining us very shortly. Even fifty years from now oil is going to be history: so where does Sam manage to get a regular supply of gasoline? Who produces it and delivers it to the out-of-the-way roadside gas stations which he frequents? If the electronics of the cities hurt him so much, and there are people out there who are trying to hunt him down, then why doesn't he find a quiet place miles from anywhere and just settle down and be self-sufficient and have zero profile? If John Conner could do it, Sam sure can!

I liked this a lot better when Sam finally got captured (after trying to make a run for it with the Paradigm box). He gets invited to dinner with the dreaded Carolyn Bast, who is creepily delightful as she plies her guests with toxic fish which, when seasoned correctly, renders those who eat it into a very compliant frame of mind; then she issues instructions to them and they do whatever she wants!

It's increasingly apparent that it's almost the norm for me, in many YA stories, to find that it’s not the lead character who impresses me most, but their best friend or side-kick. They are, all-too-often, the ones whom I find most appealing. In this case, the one who really shines is Alma. She impresses me more every time she shows up, but she shows up far too infrequently. If the story had been about her, I think it would have been more impressive. But as it is, it's acceptable and I am enjoying it reasonably well. I do like the way Stringer brings Sam and Alma together, although I still think she deserves someone better than him, and I'm failing to see what attracts her to him. He does make me feel a bit warmer towards him when he bids her goodbye - and she's sleeping and supposedly cannot hear him!

I have to confess that in the absence of information from the author, I become increasingly speculative about "Mutha" the 'big mother is watching' system which has eyes and ears everywhere and which can give people networking fixes for a few coins deposited into street vending machines! Since Sam is your typical, parent-less YA fiction teen, and his mother died before his father, and both parents worked for the corporation from whence sprang the 'paradigm box', and since Sam seems to have a really disturbing connection with Mutha, I have to wonder if Mutha is actually Sam's mother - that is: is the AI controlling Mutha a clone of his own mother's brain patterns or something? I guess I'll find out - but I'm not going to spoil the fun by telling you!

Stringer apparently doesn’t realize that Jell-O® is a registered trade-mark on p307, but she gets away with it by genericising it (is that even a word? It is now!) to "jello". On p360, Sam claims he has tapes that play in the car, but after a hundred years, no tape is going to play - the magnetization would simply fail or become so muddy that the tape was effectively unplayable. But enough niggling! The bottom line is: do I like this or do I not? I read most of it, but have to confess that I found myself skimming the last sixty pages or so, wanting it to be over, ready to move on to another novel. It dragged on too long and wasn't interesting enough to make all those extra characters that Stringer typed worth poring over.

I think, on balance, I am going to rate this just over the worthy side of warty. There were problems with it. It was too long for its content, and there was too much disjointed stuff going on - kinda like you’d expect from a first novel. Alma becomes way too much of a deus ex machina - showing up always when she was needed and seemingly in impossible ways, and there's no rationale for why she's attracted to Sam; but then is love rational?! Alma was just too convenient, and we never got to see her really strut her stuff, so in the end I was disappointed in her, especially given the huge potential she had. Alma, BTW, is the Spanish word for soul or spirit (inter alia) so it was a good name for her in many ways. Having said all that, inside this novel there was some really good stuff, and I think this author has places - interesting places - to go, so in deference to that, I rate this a worthy read to encourage her and authors like her, to stretch themselves and take us further in the future, and I rate it worthy because, when all's said and done, it’s not too bad of a yarn.

Erasing Time by CJ Hill

Title: Erasing Time
Author: CJ Hill
Publisher: Katherine Tegen
Rating: worthy

I detest book "trailers" but there's one here if you like them. Personally I think this one's pretty sad. There's a sequel to this novel due out in December 2013.

OTOH, I love a good time-travel novel and this one starts out rather intriguingly 435 years into the future (from the publication date of the book) in 2447. The people there live in a disturbingly changed society where there is no democracy, and where every citizen is tracked by means of a data disk in their wrist. We're told that all animals have died out, but the citizens still have meat to eat because they create it with their technology. When the twins have a ham sandwich, it tastes like the real thing, so this raises the same point made in the movie The Matrix: if all animals have died out, how could they replicate the taste of various forms of meat? Or is this extinction a complete lie, and this meat actually comes from real animals?

The remaining city states, we're told, are isolated, existing under protective domes, and are at odds with one another. This particular domed city in which the twins reside, Traventon, owes a lot to the capital city depicted in The Hunger Games in terms of fashion sense. Some of its architecture is odd. None of the stores have walls, but this begs not the question the twins ask (why does no one steal?) but a different question: why do they even have stores 400-some years from now? Why, in such a controlled society is there even money?

Another big difference is that speech has changed as much between now and then as it has between Shakespeare's time and ours, so while the spoken word isn't exactly clear, it is discernible with a bit of effort, although how this difference is presented in the novel is not done very well IMO. On the good side, organized religion has been banned as being nothing but fairy tales and a nuisance at best (but that might be a very misleading situation! More anon).

Into this world are brought twin sisters from 2012. By means of a "time strainer" they were scooped out of their present, converted into an energy stream, and reassembled in the future. The scientists conclude that something went wrong: the time strainer aimed for a scientist, whose name (Tyler Sherwood) is quite similar to the combined first names of the twins; Taylor and Sheridan. Interesting, huh? Taylor is an advanced placement student and is very much into science. Sheridan is also smart - not as geeky smart as her twin, but she is in honors English. The novel is told largely from Sheridan's perspective (fortunately from my perspective, not in first person!).

How this time-travel is supposed to work is a bit of a mystery. It's supposed to key on a person's DNA, the atoms of which vibrate at a unique frequency for each individual, which is how they lock on to someone to "strain them out", but this is patent nonsense to begin with! If Hill had said the DNA had a vibration, she would have been better served with this scheme, if still adrift, but the fact is that while genes differ between people they don't differ much, and every single gene is composed of the same small set of atoms, regardless of which person it resides in!

Taylor and Sheridan are identical twins, not clones, per se, but even clones are not completely identical. There's more to DNA than simply the codons. There's epigenetic material and there's some 90% of the genome which is junk - it neither is genetic nor does it regulate the genetic material, and so it can mutate dramatically and vary wildly even between "identical" twins. All of this is ignored by Hill. So the problem is this: since the twins, while identical, are so different in their behavior, there is clearly significant difference in the make-up of their genome, so I have to wonder how the strainer managed to latch on to both of them, especially given that the scientists can have access to only a very small amount of DNA to work with when trying to specifying exactly who to strain out of the time-stream. But let's let that go before I get a headache!

There's an interesting paradox here, too, which is what really makes time-travel interesting. The way Sheridan and Taylor are scooped up is that they're both attracted to an inexplicable ball of light in one of the rooms upstairs in their home. They would not have been in that particular place had they not seen the light (so to speak!), so if they would not have been there but for the light, and the light is caused by the portal opening where the twins are known to have been, how does that work exactly?! Yet another conundrum for any time-travel writer to solve.

But anyway, the fact is that the twins do get "strained" into the future, where they meet a younger man. His name is Echo, and he warns the two of them not to reveal that they're twins. This was the first thing which really struck me as stupid. They’re identical twins and everyone there knows that they're sisters, so why they think this twinship can be kept secret is a mystery. Why they haven't even been asked if they're twins is a bigger mystery given how obsessed this culture is with avoiding twin births. Echo advises them of this because he is a twin himself: his brother died only a month before, under violent circumstances. Twins are considered excessive in this society where all birth is regulated. Young girls are nipped in the bud so to speak: they cannot have children and all births are managed and controlled (probably by men - so what’s new?!) in order that only healthy children will be born, virus-free and protected against the savage plagues which have assaulted society in the last four hundred years.

Given the level of technology these people enjoy, it’s a mystery why they seem so strapped for things in their society (especially cures for viral plagues!), and why they can't resurrect animals! Indeed one of the twins asks this very question: if they can scoop people from the past, why not animals, and repopulate their world? She gets no answer. I found that revealing: perhaps the truth is that they don't actually need to resurrect any animals. It certainly suggests that there are big fat lies being told somewhere along the line. It's also hilarious because people have pet robots in the form of all manner of animals which never would have become pets had they been real. But this also poses a writing problem: why is it that we see animal robots galore, but no utility robots anywhere? The closest thing they have to a robot is the transportation system, but these are merely small automated cars which run on fixed tracks.

Taylor and Sheridan discover that they cannot be returned to their own time. They are prisoners: the time strainer is a one-way trip. For now, their captors have to let the twins enjoy status quo in case more information is required from them in this dedicated pursuit of Tyler Sheridan. As this novel continues, the twins' situation grows steadily more precarious. The futuristic city looks ever more like a prison camp and less like a home, and word comes down that the twins are going to be given a memory-wipe to integrate them better into this society, although Echo and his father Jeth seem to think they can short-circuit this order and erase it from the computer. How they hope to get away with that without the powers-that-be knowing that they have derailed the order is a mystery, but in the end it never comes to that.

Sheridan and Taylor begin hatching a plan to escape, and turn to one of the people working with them, Elise, for assistance, since she knows The Doctors - a group of people who might be able to help. There's bad blood between Echo and Elise, which has me wondering why he would tell them that Elise is someone who can get them out of the city. Is Echo merely setting them up? In pursuit of this escape, they request a trip to see the city - and the city walls. The whole complex lies under a dome, and the 'walls' are of the 'force-field' variety, yet we're expected to believe that they need huge support beams? I don’t get that bit at all. The relationship between Echo and Sheridan heats up somewhat as he kisses her. Sheridan is confused and she vows not to let that happen again, but it's patently obvious that she's completely deluding herself in that resolve.

On a note of propriety, this kiss was actually a form of abuse, since Sheridan and Taylor are being held under the authority of people like Echo. It’s not very kosher for someone in a position of power, as Echo is, to take advantage of his charge. But this isn't the only problem with this relationship. Echo is nothing but a YA trope male as we can tell when we're notified of this standard tedious trope trash: his eyes are startling and piercing, he has "well-defined" muscles, and he's rumored to be a bad boy. Sorry, but I call nauseous maximus on that. Echo also demands to join them when they escape, and funnily enough, Elise demands this same thing! So which of these two is going to betray them?

When we, along with the twins, learned that Echo's twin brother Joseph was shot by the Dakine, a criminal organization (shortly after it became known to Elise that Allana preferred Joseph and was going to dump Echo) my mind started working overtime, which is a real time-strain, let me tell you! A video of the shooting was recorded by a security camera, and it was while I was reading about Sheridan watching this video that it occurred to me that Echo isn’t Echo at all, but Joseph. It was Echo who was killed that night of the shooting and Joseph took on his identity! Of course, this is pure supposition, and we all know where those go when they emanate from me. Having said that however, I have to add that I was very nearly exactly right about 'Tyler Sherwood' and there is some entertainingly ambiguous writing going on when Echo reminisces about his and Joseph's past!

Another interesting thing we learn during the twins' trip through the city concerns religion. At one point Echo gives Sheridan a picture of Santa Claus. He's under the impression that this is god and he was worshiped in the past! On top of this, and despite religion being supposedly banned, the twins notice that some people have their clothes, hair, and make-up so designed as to convey a religious affiliation. One woman looks like a nun, for example, and another is espied with a red spot on her forehead in the manner employed by some Indian women. Not that the bindi spot really has any religious significance per se (if it ever truly did). At one point Sheridan notices a store which is decorated with Stars of David. I got the impression, rightly or wrongly from all of this, that the real power behind the throne in this society is religion. Or perhaps, given Taylor's proselytizing, religious groups are fighting against the status quo under the guise of being 'doctors'?

Hill offers some amusing observations on 21st century society, but there are some real clunkers tossed in with them. I have to disagree with her when she says at start of chapter 22, "High heels weren't some sort of punishment inflicted by men on the female gender." Indeed they are, when you get right down to it! It's just another example of men playing with dolls, except that in their case, the dolls are real women, not toys. I rhapsodize humorously on this topic in my forthcoming Baker Street, Ace 'tec' which I hope to have out before the end of the year. But be warned: that novel will wreck your brain.

As the twins feel the net closing in on them, their fledgling plan for escape is kicked out of the nest far too early, and they find themselves hitting the ground running. Sheridan and Elie escape, and Elise puts Sheridan into a car and sends her to a misleading location from which she's supposed to walk two miles north to the real venue - but in a domed city, how do you tell which way is North?! LOL! In the end, both twins are recaptured, but Echo (or is it Joseph?!) engineers their escape by allowing the Dakine into the mix, so now the two are still prisoners, just with a different jailer. Taylor, desperate to get free of all of this, programs the Dakine door alarm so that it sounds continuously. This forces the Dakine to eventually turn off the alarm until a fix is arranged, and this, in turn, permits the twins to escape by any exit they choose, without fear of triggering an alarm! Kewl!

The twins, of course, escape and set off towards the safe city of the "Doctors", but that's all I'm going to reveal. I liked this story well enough to finish it, so I give it a worthy rating, but I honestly don't feel any compulsion to read any sequels. It's not that enthralling. You'll have to make up your own mind, of course! Hopefully this review has given you sufficient material to get your teeth into and figure out if it's worth looking at this one for yourself.