The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book sadly read by Betty Harris.

This is, according to Atwood, speculative fiction, but I don't think she knows the difference between dystopian, speculative, and sci-fi. Either that or I don't! It's about a future USA where life has changed dramatically after a terrorist attack which kills the president and congress. The attack is carried out by a group of religious nut-jobs which then allows another group of religious nut-jobs, calling themselves 'the Sons of Jacob' to take over. This of course would never happen, not even in the USA, but that's the premise we're dealing with here.

The SoJ quickly takes over, suspending the constitution, and removing all women's rights by confiscating their financial records. This is the part that couldn't happen. Most women would never let this happen, and neither would most men.

The biggest problem I had was with how very quickly this occurs. The narrator, the main character, is a woman in her early thirties, and she remembers very well what things were like before, which means she must have been in high school (or older), which in turn means that this all not only took place, but became solidly cemented in place, in twenty years or less, which isn't feasible.

Yes, Atwood does represent life as an ongoing war between the Republic of Gilead (how did that name change ever come about and why?) and 'the rebels', but we're never really told anything about the rebels, nor is the complete absence of Islamic forces addressed. If the Islamic terrorists conducted this hugely successful attack in the first place, then why are there not insurgents flocking to the USA as they did to Iraq? Why aren't they flocking there anyway? The secret is that this novel was written and published thirty years ago, so a lot gets lost in the translation of the years.

So the premise of the story is weak, but if you're willing to let that go, it becomes a bit more interesting, and some of the things she writes are prescient. She doesn't include anything that isn't happening, or that hasn't happened as a result of ridiculous religion.

That said, I felt that Atwood rambled far too much about unimportant details at the beginning, larding the novel with a rather amateurish info-dump, which keeps on giving. There is far too much tedious detail. I read this some time back and decided to give it another try for a review, but I simply could not stay with it the second time around, and the mediocre reading of Betty Harris didn't help at all.

On top of that, I've never been a fan of first-person PoV novels, as this one is. Some are enjoyable, but most of them, for me, kick me right out of suspension of disbelief because it's far too absurd to me to credit that a narrator can tell a story in such detail, especially if they're supposedly telling it as it happens. It's ridiculous and unnatural. It's also extraordinarily limiting on the writer, but that's not even the worst problem here.

The conceit of this novel is that this story was recovered from audio tape after the Republic of Gilead had been overturned. What better opportunity could there have been than to make this dramatic as though it was really and truly the actual audio tape we were listening to? But no - it was wasted, which I think is a crying shame and a huge black mark against this audio version for me.

The main character is Offred (Of Fred - meaning owned by Fred). While I thought this was a cool name, I did wonder, if the commander had two such handmaidens, what the second one would be called. Perhaps they're permitted only one at a time. She's kept only for two years, and solely for reproductive purposes, and as such is in some ways privileged, but in other ways is disparaged as little more than a prostitute.

Offred is in the unenviable position of wishing that she will become impregnated by her rapist quickly because this will in effect maintain her 'market price' by demonstrating that she's fertile. If she fails, she could lose her 'privileged' position. I mean: what use could a woman possibly be, if she cannot have children, we're asked to accept here, and indeed, this has been a fundamental motivation of fundamentalism ever since religion began. This is one of those cases where humanity is supposedly largely sterile - in this case due to pollution and STDs, which is not really credible either, but that's what we have.

This is Offred's third such two-year 'assignment'. If she fails to become pregnant this time, then she will be classed as an 'unwoman' and be forced to the colonies to clean up nuclear pollution and die an early death. This time, her experience is different in that while The Commander is supposed only to have sex with her during The Ceremony (with his own wife present as a witness (lying underneath the handmaiden as the commander labors over her to try and bring on labor nine months hence), he wants Offred much more than this, and bribes her with illicit materials such as magazines, cosmetics, and the chance to read.

The bizarre thing is that The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is also plying Offred with inducements to get pregnant by encouraging her to have sex with The Commander's driver, Nick - so yes, it's quite literally a cluster-fuck, especially when The Commander's wife discovers Offred's extended relationship with The Commander, and Nick tells Offred that he can facilitate her escape - if she trusts him.

So it could have been a really great novel, but it failed because there was too much tedium between the interesting bits (and limited bits they were). Atwood is a great fan of telling; not so much with the showing. I can't recommend this. Go read Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman if you want a truly feminist PoV.

Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell

Title: Expiration Day
Author: William Campbell Powell
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!

This is a novel which needs to have its own expiration day. Just like the TV show The Lottery, the unoriginal plot is that of a population which has become largely infertile (for unknown reasons, as if we could believe that) yet despite all of our advances in genetics of the last two decades, the next thirty years is spent not in curing the infertility or in developing clones or parental hybrids, but in developing improbably advanced and prohibitively expensive robots known as teknoids, which are stand-ins for the children which parents now cannot have - robots which are forcibly removed from your life when they "turn eighteen" Insane much?

How this technology advanced so rapidly to such an amazingly high degree (while all other technology stagnated over that same time period) is a complete mystery, but this is fiction after all! Maybe I should be nicer: William Campbell Powell hails from Sheffield, England - yes, that "Sheffield steel" town - which is only some 20 miles north of where I was born. This novel is set in England.

The author projects way too much of himself into the story though, and that was one of my biggest problems with suspension of disbelief. It would have been fine if the story were about a man the same age as the author, but it's not! It's about an eleven-year-old girl who is slowly transitioning into her teens, so the 70's theme park and the constant references to bands from the sixties and seventies SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK. Period. Why would such a young girl in 2049 reference, for example, The Blues Bothers, a movie from 1980 - that is 70 years before her time?

The author tries to hide this under the weak claim that no new bands have got together in the last thirty years! Bullshit. The bands of Tania's era are all tribute bands - but none of these bands seem to reference bands from any era other than the sixties and seventies. Why? This struck me as nothing more than laziness on the part of the author: he was too lazy to research bands that an eleven-year-old might like and simply used his own favorites instead. Pathetic.

It's no spoiler to reveal that the main character is one of these teknoids. She learns that around thirty pages in (this novel starts on page nine for some reason), and that's long after we've realized it, of course. For the sake of cut-rate tension (and for no other reason) robots, which are in the majority, are treated as second class citizens - if it's known that they're robots. But how could people not know, given the world which this author creates?

Evidently no one has ever come up with a means of detecting who is and who isn't robotic in his world, despite the fact that we have electronic technology here and now which could do such a thing! Also, for no reason, there's appalling and uninterrupted bullying. The teachers at Tania's school appear unaware (or uncaring) of this, or perhaps they're just really stupid, as indeed they are in pretty much all schools in YA novels for some obscure reason.

So we have yet another dystopian YA novel featuring a girl as the main protagonist. The author apparently doesn't know that it's not illegal to tell a story in the third person, so we get the farcical suspension-of-disbelief-destroying conceit that an eleven-year-old can not only write as though she's an adult (coincidentally of the same age as the novel's author, with the same predilections), but that she can recall conversations word for word and has an almost eidetic grasp of the previous day's or week's events in order to record such details?

This problem is compounded by the fact that it's written as a diary which makes it even more unrealistic. After pooh-pooh-ing the idea of employing a Victorian "dear dairy" format, Tania then goes on to do exactly that, addressing the diary to Mister Zoe, a hypothesized alien archaeologist in the distant future. The diary format doesn't work. It's far too detailed in parts and completely missing great gaps of many months if not years in other parts. In short it's a prop, indeed, a malaprop. which stands out so garishly on this stage that it detracts from the live action going on around it.

My first guess was that this "Zoe" alien archaeologist character was actually Tania herself because in the distant future "he" (we don't know the alien's gender) is reflecting on her diary. Shades of Stephen Spielberg's movie AI with a small side of Millennium Man! This alien thinks and plans and imagines just as though he's human though, dear reader!

Other than that, and for all my complaints, the story began rather well, but it went quickly downhill as the alien showed up, interleaved with the diary chapters offering brief and ridiculous comments and observations. I quickly learned to skip those and I never missed them. That part should have been excised completely. The story progressively became worse after Tania discovered that she was a robot. It would have made a more surprising story if she were not, since it's so obvious from the start that this is the way the author was going. Indeed, not a thing in this novel is surprising or startling, including the ending.

The diary isn't the only thing in which there are large holes; the plot, too, suffers this problem. The first issue is that no one seems at all concerned that the human race is on the verge of extinction. Oh look we have humanoid robots, so no worries, mate! I couldn’t swallow that. Not a bit of it. Also we’re told nothing of the riots that took place: what started them, what, exactly, they were about, how and why they finally ended. All we get is melodramatic intimations that we don't want to see those again.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there is no explanation offered as to how this system with the robots is supposed to work. We're just expected to buy them as is (so to speak!). Yes, we're told that baby robots are available, and you get a free upgrade every two years (to a total of eight upgrades), but what's the point?

If people are largely infertile, isn't this a dead give-away?! Who would want to take care of a robot baby? Does it eat? If not, it's a robot! Does it pee and poop? If not, it's a robot! Does it get sick? If not, it's a robot! Does it suddenly go from two weeks old to two years old? If so, it's a robot! Yeah, we're told these robots process regular food, but it makes no sense. How could a real parent bond, in any meaningful way, with a baby robot? It's neither plausible nor realistic that people would simply get on with their lives, taking robot babies home, and pretending that nothing is wrong with this life.

How does a woman who has never exhibited a pregnant belly to the world magically show up with a baby? How does a woman who produces no milk breast-feed it, and why would she? It's a robot! Does this little person ever get bitten by mosquitoes? If not, it's a robot! Does it get no sicknesses whatsoever? If not it's a robot! Does it need no vaccinations for school or travel? If not, it's a robot! How is there any way that this can be kept a secret for any significant length of time from everyone?

I don't get how the aging thing works, either. We're told that the robots have to go back to the manufacturer to be aged - they come back in a slightly more mature body. How does this work with early childhood and teenage growth spurts when you get only eight renewals? Indeed, how does it work at all? The author conveniently ignores all of these problems, including the big one: This is rent-a-bot! The robots must be returned at age eighteen, we're told, although we're not told why. Why would any family want that? Why would society tolerate this destruction of these tecknoids which are for all intents and purposes, people, especially to their 'parents' (and assuming the bonding problem could have been overcome)? Why would the robots not rebel?

This part of the novel, where people have to be 'recycled' at a certain age, is nothing more than a rip-off of Logan's Run. Actually it's more like a Biblical fable in that these robots are given life for a short time; then, if they're good little robots, they die and go to robo-heaven.

What about sexuality? The robot must be made to appear perfectly human, so what's to stop pedophiles 'adopting' one? Does this happen? It's never mentioned. What if someone 'rapes' a robot - do they get the charges dropped? Given how abusive people are to robots, is it even considered rape? There is so much to explore in a world like this, but the author ignores all of that in favor of relating a tedious and petty tale of an uninteresting girl. He expects us, instead, to buy his narrow, blinkered view of this so-called world, where the author pretty much admits to having done none of the heavy lifting to make it work, or to flesh it out.

What about sexuality in general? If pretty much no one can get pregnant, wouldn't that declare open day on rampant sex? Wouldn't everyone be doing it - particularly the teens? This isn't even mentioned, let alone included as a feature worth exploring in this world. This struck me as very odd given the writer's penchant for sixties and seventies throw-backs. What, no new era of "free love" and disease-free sex dawns here?

What about puberty? There are hormonal changes in both boys and girls and which lead to significant body changes, and to mood and mentality changes. How is this handled with robots which are upgraded only at two-year intervals? Tania doesn't get an upgrade from age eleven until they suddenly, and at her own request, revamp her at age fifteen - a four year gap - and also a huge, unexplained jump in her diary. Until then, she looks exactly the same age for four straight years - and no one notices?!

How does this society cope with mechanical issues and breakdowns? It's never mentioned! How come no one ever puts two years and two years together and figures out that persons X, Y, & Z are robots because they always get 'sick' and are hospitalized at the same time every two years? How can a poor family possibly afford these expensive, sophisticated robots? None of this works and the author doesn't even mention it in passing, let alone actually explore it. What a tragically missed opportunity for some great writing!

None of the pretence (that no one can tell which people are biological and which are robotic) makes any sense. That's the real fiction we're being sold here. There is of course, a multiplicity of other issues. For example, the birth rate began its plummet in 2017, a whole generation before the story begins, but there appear to be no relatively young people around! Why is it that everyone seems really old? Why is no one starting to panic about the fate of the human race? Are we really looking at some sort of technological Soylent Green in this world?

The pure bullshit doesn't end there either. When Tania decides to look up population trends, she discovers that the data cut off at 2040, almost a decade ago (to her). When she tries to enter a more recent date for an up-to-date picture, she gets an error message telling her that she's not authorized and suddenly the police show up with blue lights flashing to lecture her about inappropriate use of the TeraNet (the "kewl' word used for the Internet here), and issue her a legal warning? Seriously?

She didn't break-in anywhere. She didn't hack into a system where she was not allowed. She accessed no forbidden data, she simply 'Googled' something and got no results. All she did was ask and was told "No," yet the police show up at her door immediately? BULLSHIT! This is amateur writing at its worst. I don't have a problem with authors who write like this if they make some sort of half-way competent attempt to explain why things are a certain way, but when you write things that way and don't even pretend that you can explain, and you write like it doesn't even matter that it isn't discussed or explained, that's a classical sign of bad writing.

It's a criminal activity to look at a government website? Why the frick and frack is the website even available on the web then? If she ever makes another mistake, she will be deactivated, she's told! Good god this is bad writing! Why not just name her 'Eve' and say she was taking bytes from an Apple computer?!

As ridiculous as this is, it wouldn't have been half so inane if she hadn't immediately got on her phone after that, and talked openly about what she did with her friend John, who openly admitted that he could hack into the system. So the powers-that-be minutely monitor the web, but not the phones?! Bye-bye credibility. Hello another lousy dystopian fiction with a young female protagonist. I guess I should just be glad it's not a trilogy, huh?

Some of this is written like it actually was an eleven-year-old who penned it. There are parts of the story where significantly new things magically appear without rhyme or reason. For example, and out of the blue, Tania decides she wants to play bass guitar, and suddenly she's an expert in all things musical, talking like a veteran musician and exhibiting detailed musical knowledge without ever having been shown to follow any learning curve to get there. Let me guess - the author plays bass?

That's a much as I want to rant about over this novel (and not in a good way), but it's not worth more of my time than this. About half-way through I gave up on it because I could not stand the boredom, so no, I cannot recommend this novel. It's warty!

The Imaginary Life by Mara Torres

Title: The Imaginary Life
Author: Mara Torres
Publisher: Grupo Planeta
Rating: WARTY!

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.

Well, I'm done with Big July, publishing two reviews a day, every day, without fail. What a stressor that was, but I did it! It cleared a lot of my backlog, too, but not all of it, so I'm going to post a few extra reviews this month, too, especially if they're ebooks. Here comes one of those.

This novel is also available in Spanish as La Vida Imaginaria.

Not to be confused with An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, this is another first person PoV novel which is written by a Spanish journalist and TV personality. I've picked up so many of these 1PoVs in bookstores and libraries, and even when the blurb looks interesting I usually put the thing back on the shelf after I've skimmed the first page and discovered it's a "me, me, ME, all the time" type of novel, but you don't get that choice when it's an audio book or an ebook. You can't skim those to get a feel for the writing, and then put it back if it turns you off.

This one turned me off: not only was it first person voice, it was first person wallowing. Fortunata "Nata" Fortuna has split up with her boyfriend, because he thinks their relationship has changed in unfortunate ways and he wants space for them to miss each other. Apparently that doesn't happen for him; then six months have gone by without a word from him. She's not dealing - unless you define dealing as "wallowing in her misery".

She's doing nothing to get on with life. She's thinking of him constantly, imagining she can fly to his apartment and slip through his window to watch him. She writes her sad, despairing thoughts about him on her computer. She apparently has no support network - either that or the network disintegrated as a result of soaking for far too long in her caustic neediness. She watches an old video of him and her at the beach. She lets her fridge run out of food and drink, yet she buys clothes. She smokes. Yuk. Maybe that's why he left? No one in their right mind wants to date an ashtray. There isn't even any humor to lighten this sodden load of worn-out dirty laundry.

Nata isn't an appealing person at all. I'm not at any loss to see why Alberto left her. I was (at only a fifth of the way through this) at a complete loss to understand why I should even care about her, much less be interested in reading her story. She fails the Bechdel-Wallace test in spades on almost every page since she's all guys all the time, which makes her completely uninteresting. She barely has a thought that's not about a guy and the ones she has about guys offer nothing new or engaging to the reader. Who would want to read about such a vacuous, shallow, and needy person like Nata? Not me.

The format of the novel is not conducive to a comfortable read, either. There are hugely long paragraphs - paragraphs that are longer than some entire chapters (some of which are only two or three sentences) - like the paragraph which begins on page 65 and doesn't break until page 68....

I reached roughly the half-way point (chapter five of part two) and couldn't stand to read any more of this wail-a-thon. I found nothing of interest in it and nothing to recommend. It's a life I certainly don't want to imagine, much less read about.

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

X-Novo by Ken Hagdal

Title: X-Novo
Author: Ken Hagdal
Publisher: Niflheimr (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

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.

Erratum:
p71 "Her Holiness' reliquary..." should be "her Holiness's reliquary..."

This novel was really hard to get into - I mean really hard. I'd gone 30 pages in and I still had no clue what was going on here which was equal parts frustrating and irritating. I had a really tough time trying to grasp where the setting was, and what the women I was introduced to were actually supposed to be doing, or even where the story was going, let alone where it came from. This removed much of my incentive to continue reading. It was at this point that I set a goal of reaching the halfway point (about 130 pages) and giving up if it didn't improve, but I was truly struggling to maintain that resolve, especially when it didn't improve.

It's evidently a story wherein the tables are turned and instead of women being typically subjugated, men are instead and decidedly so, being kept as slaves or almost as pets by the ruling females.

The sorriest thing - apart from feeling uncomfortably in the dark that is, was the unpleasant taste of misogyny I got from this. The women seemed to be rather bitchy, and focused on make-up, clothes, and men. I found that disturbing to say the least. Women are not the inverse of men - not unless your entire focus is solely on the primary sex organs.

The main character, Lisa Fenrich, who narrates this (yes it's another first person PoV unfortunately) seems to think of nothing but men in her free time. She apparently had some sort of relationship (it's not specified exactly what, except that she liked him - at least in the part I read) which was terminated by an accident, and she's not dealing well with it. Pressured by her colleagues, she decides to revisit the "Pool" where she can find a replacement man.

Now here is where it gets odd. The first guy she looks at is a bank executive, so now I'm completely confused, because clearly you cannot have a slave or a pet become a bank executive, so what, again, exactly, is going on here? I had no idea, and we're past page forty by this time.

I simply could not get what was going on, or how it was that women had apparently and rather suddenly become the dominant gender. Was there a war? Was there a vote? Did the entire male population surrender? Why were there not men who fought this - literally? Most of the military is male, sad to say, most of the business leadership is male, most of the police force, most of the government, so how was it exactly that women became so overwhelmingly dominant? None of this was explained in the pages I read to the point where Lisa video-conferenced prospective "husbands", and that was becoming a serious nuisance.

She'd narrowed her list down to three choices including one who was scowling in his photograph, and had avoided filling out as much as he could get away with on the questionnaire. So by what criteria did he show up in Lisa's narrow list? Again, it makes no sense. It's obvious from the start that he's going to be the one, yet he has no respect for her and she has none for him. She berates him for judging a woman by her appearance, yet that's precisely what she's done with these three men. Am I supposed to root for a shallow hypocrite like her? Despite their disastrous interaction, she chooses him for no reason other than it's the plot. Knowing that he will be arriving before very long, this dominant Lisa's first reaction is to clean her home. Seriously? I guess it makes as much sense as neon black for a "color"....

There's another thing I don't get here, either. The women all use the word 'goddess" - as in "Thank Goddess for that!" or "Good Goddess what's going on here?" Which goddess? I have no idea - and how did that start? The majority of women believe in a god - a male god. How did they suddenly all start believing in a female god? The even have a new Bible, with "New Genesis", which reduces the fairy-tale of Adam and Eve to a story not about the abuse and subjugation of women, but merely about sex and who gets to be on top. Seriously?

The church hierarchy is mostly male, and religion is very male-centric, especially for the big three monotheistic religions, so how did that all disappear? No explanation - no sense. There's also a female movement called the B party and even by page one hundred, I had no idea whatsoever what that was all about. Neither did I get what the deal was with cosmetics. Women are now dominant, yet for some reason they're still buying into the need to wear cosmetics the application of which has zero utility to women except in that it enables them to please men? They still dress-up for men? This made little sense to me.

When I got to pages around the mid-70's, the text became nothing but info dump/tirade and was truly boring, so I skipped several pages of that. There was another annoyance in that words describing people's occupations tended to have -ess appended to them even where it wasn't appropriate, so we had words like "scientistess" and "guardess", and "officeress". That struck me as not only silly, but also, from the female characters' perspective, as counter-productive. I just didn't buy that these women would debase their currency with that kind of thing.

So, in short, I cannot recommend this novel at all.

Frozen by Erin Bowman

Title: Frozen
Author: Erin Bowman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

Note that this novel has nothing to do with the Disney movie, Frozen, which I review here. As I mentioned in my review of the preceding volume to this one, I don't do covers because unless they self-publish, the author typically has nothing to do with the cover design, but once again I have to observe that the cover demeans the female protagonist by diminishing her with respect to the male. Respect to the male, but none to the female! The tag-line for this volume, "A world built on lies in bound to collapse" will make a great epitaph for this series.

So after I thoroughly panned the first in this trilogy, Taken, why oh why would I go back for more in volume two? Well this was a library deal. I happened upon vol 2 on the new shelves (that doesn't mean that it's actually new - as in a brand new release - just that it's a new addition to the library's collection). I wanted to read it because it was Erin Bowman and I'd enjoyed Plain Kate and Sorrow's Knot. That was my first problem! Erin Bowman did not write either of those novels, it was Erin Bow, man! Luckily (as it seemed at the time) I realized that the one I had was volume two, and not a stand-alone, so I went looking for the first volume on the regular library shelves and amazingly it was there! I was thrilled, misremembering fool that I am!

Then, of course, I actually read volume one and discovered what a god-awfully godawful piece of godawful trash it was; however, since I had number two (I use that term advisedly) available, I decided to at least skim the thing and see if matters improved. They didn't. Volume one was rubbish, but at least it had one or two points of interest along the way through the stinking landfill that was its "plot". Volume two doesn't even boast that. It's nothing but nothing - a tediously boring road-trip with absolutely no noteworthy events to break-up the monotony.

Here's how bad this is right from the off: Gray's mind (what little this loser has) is wandering as he wanders through the endlessly wandering frozen forest. He recalls those halcyon days in the village he couldn't wait to bust out of: Claysoot, where he used to drink tea. WHAT? This village was cut off - nothing ever came in, and nothing ever left, and they have tea? From where? If the author has brain cells, she clearly sent them on vacation when she wrote this.

Here's an example of this clunker-fest on page 31: Gray recalls the tracker devices implanted in his skin, when "...one was unknowingly injected...." The author is seriously in need of a good editor.

In this tale, Gray and his two love interests, Emma and Bree, are traveling with some other nondescript rebels to one of the other test villages; one which was ripped straight from district 13 in The Hunger Games. Can you say "Rip-off artist"? Plundering Collins, Rowling, and others to scrabble together this cut-rate attempt at a dys-trope-ian trilogy is as pathetic as it is depressing.

As they meander through the forest, they discover another village wherein survives a young boy. His dog growls viciously at them, but then it's suddenly scampering around like the camp pet. Huh? It gets worse. When Gray's twin bro Blaine arrives in camp, with an Order prisoner in tow, the dog suddenly gets vicious again whenever either of them is around, including biting Blaine. It's so pathetically obvious that this Blaine is a forgery that it's sad, yet no one realizes it for several more days. At this point, Gray kills forged Blaine, but they leave the other guy Jackson, alive.

That was all I could stand of this bone-headed crap. It's warty. Period.

Taken by Erin Bowman

Title: Taken
Author: Erin Bowman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

Way to go with the unoriginal title! BN.com has 410 pages with "Taken" in the title, and the first page has 24 entries exactly the same title as this one. When I picked this up and began reading it, it was because I mistook Erin Bowman for Erin Bow - a mistake for which I humbly apologize to the latter. "Has she finally sold out?" I asked myself, disbelievingly. She was never an indie author per se, but her previous novels had the feel of indie writing: they were different, interesting, if dark, and had a unique tale to tell. This new series was, to use a term from the series itself, a forgery. It was not her, and that alone should have clued me in to the fact that I'd misidentified the author! Me culpa. Mea maxima culpa! Erin Bow ne in furore tuo arguas me!

This novel was nothing like Erin Bow. This novel was poor, weak, shallow, and a fragile and pale shadow of what Erin Bow can write. It's like a self-published first draft by someone who is only just beginning to learn how to write, and it's several sorry leagues away from Bow's fables. The cover tag-line on this novel should have read, "Once you're over the hill, there's no going back." I don't do covers because authors (unless they're self-published), typically have nothing to do with them, but I did note that the cover for this (and for the sequel) is designed with the same lack of regard for women which the novel itself displays. Macho-up the guy, diminish the unimportant girl.

Taken is your standard dys-trope-ian trilogy and unsurprisingly, it suffers the same problems as other YA trilogies in this genre. I can see why Marie Lu would ask for "More, please!" on the cover: this is sorrier than even her sad-sack Legend excuse for an effort, so why wouldn't she want something worse out there to distract attention from her own garbage?

The basic story is completely nonsensical, and is your usual world gone bad (with no explanation offered as to exactly why or how). Young adults, of course, are the only ones who can fix it. Instead of north v. south this time, it's east v. west for no reason other than to try, amateurishly, to be different.

We meet character Gray in a scene ripped right out of the start of The Hunger Games: he's out hunting in the forest with a bow, and later he trades part of his catch for something at the market. He's been friends with Emma from childhood. They live in a tiny village absurdly named Claysoot, and this village is cursed by having its 18 year-old males, on the morning of their birthday anniversary, spirited up into the sky in a beam of light. Females are left behind with the younger males. Could it be any more of a rip-off of Hunger Games?

No one knows what this vanishing of men is, or why it works this way. The villagers never see the men again, and they do not know what becomes of them. These people cannot leave the village to escape this horror because it's surrounded by a huge wall, and those few who have climbed over the wall have been returned dead, their bodies nicely crisped.

By village records, this life has been going on for 47 years, and people have become conditioned like lab rats (in that ridiculously short time) to accept and even embrace this fate. Never once have they considered not having children to put an end to all this! On the contrary - the children are forced by city ordinance into random mating pairs in order to get the girls pregnant, because this is yet another YA author who thinks girls are second rate and second hand - not fit to be heisted, but fit to be bare-foot, pregnant, and in the kitchen where, according to the author, they evidently belong.

We learn later that there are five such villages, but rather than appreciate fifty percent of the population, the author further insults women by remarking that in one of these villages, the women were good enough to be heisted! Way to insult your readership! "Only one in five women is of any value" - Erin Bowman!

This particular year, when the novel begins, Gray loses his brother, Blaine, to the Heist (as it's known), and he learns from Emma that she thinks there's something odd about how this village came to be (apparently the original inhabitants had their minds wiped so they could not pass on how they got there).

From a secret diary which he conveniently happens upon, Gray learns that he isn't Blaine's younger brother, but his twin, and therefore should have been heisted with his sibling. Why did this not happen? The explanation (I use that word very loosely) as to how Gray doesn't know he's a twin is so unrealistic as to be a complete farce. It's so self-evidently bad that it's not even necessary to offer support for this assertion.

Straight out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Gray also conveniently (this novel is so jam-packed with oh-so-convenient happenstance that it's truly pathetic) discovers a letter from his mom to his brother, but with a final page missing so he can't learn what the crucial information is! The letter is reproduced in the text, in a script font, but the last line ends in the middle of the line! In other words, there's no reason at all why the revelation (that Gray is Blaine's twin) couldn't have appeared on that same line! It's so beyond nonsensical that it's way-the-hell over into deeply pathetic. So, Blaine decides to go over the wall, and for no reason at all, Emma decides to follow him.

On the other side of the wall, the two of them are conveniently picked up by some people who drive them in a car to a domed city (Taem - apparently an acronym for Totally Amateur, Excruciatingly Mediocre), where Gray learns from the city leader, Mr Frank, that the village of Claysoot is an experiment begun by 'mad scientist' Harvey Maldoon, who is now a wanted criminal. Gray also meets his brother who, it turns out, happens to be carrying the last page of the letter! How convenient! All of the men who were 'heisted' are living in this domed city.

Here's some bad writing: we're repeatedly told that the dome has a water shortage. Indeed, one guy who stole an extra jug for his sick family was summarily executed, yet these people are living in a dome. If they have the kind of technology to do mind-wipes and build city-sized domes, then why can they not desalinate seawater? Why is there no recycling? It makes NO SENSE AT ALL. It's amateur, trashy, brain-dead writing.

Here's some more bad writing: Gray is taken to the "Cleansing Room" (seriously amateur naming here - the military faction is named The Order"! lol!) where he's cleaned up and given the red pills, and has a tracker device implanted in his skin. He also has his head shaved. Emma, for reasons unexplained, gets none of this - at least, not as far as having her head shaved. Instead, she gets a make-over! This city of severe restrictions on resources offers free make-overs and high heeled shoes...?

Gray is so stupid that he doesn't even question the fact that Emma has been treated differently from him. Indeed, this unquestioning acceptance of whatever befalls him is a trait of this worthless male lead. He is so gullible that he swallows whatever anyone tells him, even if it flatly contradicts something he's already been told by someone else, which he had previously swallowed equally unquestioningly! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

Here's where the love interest fails. We're told that Emma and Gray are lifelong friends, but they've had no interest in each other as anything more than friends, yet suddenly they're in love? Yeah, the author puts in a brief description as to how Gray is inexplicably tutoring Emma in archery, and this supposedly accounts for their falling in love, but it's all bullshit. There's no reason at all for the tutoring other than to get them together, and there's no reason, even being together, why they would fall in love so fast. We've been told, for example, that Emma is an avowed bachelor who disliked Gray and preferred Blaine, so how are we expected now to swallow that suddenly, she's fifty shades of Gray? This is appallingly bad writing.

So Gray flees the city, leaves his 'ain trew love' Emma behind, and hooks-up with the rebels - yep, it was that easy. Everything conveniently fell right into line every single time he needed it to! First he stumbles upon supply trucks which are heading out to resupply a scouting party which is conveniently hunting the rebels in precisely the area to which Gray wanted to go. After Gray abandons the trucks when they stop for the night, he's conveniently captured by that very scouting party. Don't question the timeline here - not if you want to retain your sanity.

Oh, and bro Blaine happens to be conveniently there too, because he was conveniently part of the scouting party! Right at the point where Gray is about to be shot in the head as a spy, the party is conveniently attacked so he can escape, and then the attackers conveniently vanish! This is atrociously and amateurishly bad writing. Where the hell was the book editor?

Why the rebels conveniently vanish is a mystery because the next thing that happens is that Gray conveniently happens to stumble upon a female love interest who takes him prisoner. and delivers him right into the rebel camp where, conveniently, his father happens to be a captain in the rebel alliance! How convenient!

When I'd decided my rating of this novel, I looked at some reviews to see if I'd missed anything, or if there was something which might change my mind (there wasn't!), but one thing I'd neglected to comment on was when Gray gets into a fist-fight with a girl from the village named Chalice (don't get me started on the dumb-ass names here). Several people reacted with shock over this, that he punched a girl, but no one remarks upon the fact that he gets as good as he gives! These people really should not have had that reaction - not if they're honestly in favor of gender equality!

The real problem here wasn't that Gray hit a girl, but that he hit a person, period. Yes, Chalice was thoroughly obnoxious, but his response was over the top (and he was never punished for it). So our supposedly heroic lead male here has poor impulse control! Here's the thing though: I'll bet that if Chalice had been a guy and all else had remained exactly the same, then people would not have felt so compelled to remark upon it. Or how about this: what if the roles had been reversed, and Gray had been obnoxious, and Chalice had slapped him? How many people would have remarked upon that, much less had a tirade over it? That's what's really wrong here. Gender equality cuts both ways, but far too many people simply do not get that. You can't be equal if one side continues to get privileges and free passes.

But this offers us another example of how badly written this novel is. The author depicts Gray here as being reckless and aggressive, with a hair trigger temper, yet later in the novel, around page 250, when a guy punches him, Gray does not react in any way at all - he just takes it and moves on, even though the attack was completely unwarranted. This is god-awfully bad writing. And let's not get into the fact that while Gray himself has no problem with enjoying two female love interests, he gets all pissy about Emma taking a lover when she thinks Gray is dead.

The other issue here is the 'twin' trope. Gray and Blaine are identical twins, yet they're as different as chalk and cheese. I ran into this same inexplicable issue in Sea of Shadows. These differences would have been fine except that the author offers not a single thing to account for how they came to be so different. They're clones (for that's exactly what identical twins are), raised together in the same environment in the same way in a small village. They've spent their entire lives together, yet they're completely different in every way? How did this happen? The author cannot tell us, and that's bad writing.

Talking of which, around page 218 comes some of the worse writing from a professional novelist that I've ever seen. Gray is to be judged by a committee of five people, only one of which is female. They vote yea or nay (those are the exact words!) on whether Gray should live or die (and this is without a trial). As it happens, the vote is 3:2 in favor of leaving him alive (how else could it go - he's the fricking narrator of the novel! This is another example of how clueless the author is in this trilogy), but even though he demands answers, they put him off, telling him to go get cleaned up, and get some rest! But after that, his father does condescend to pass on some information in a big fat info-dump.

Gray learns of the forgeries, and this is arguably the most absurd piece of this novel of all the absurd pieces. Evidently they can create only one good forgery (apparently a clone) from each person. This is supposedly why the Claysoot and the four other communities were begun: to raise tough, independent boys (because you know girls are useless according to this author), who could then be cloned to create an army.

This is in a city where they can't even desalinate water, yet they have this amazingly advanced technology? Even with this technology, they can only clone once - repeat clones turn out to be weaklings. This is the purest of the rankest horse droppings. It makes no sense. If they have this kind of advanced technology, why not create super weapons? This crap is no way to create an army. It is a great way to create nonsense in the extreme.

Here's another complete absurdity: The 'soldiers' in The Order get zero training (Blaine is already a trusted member when Gray arrives there, and Gray is drafted on his first day) unless you consider getting a buzz cut to be the functional equivalent of six weeks at Paris island), yet the Order is feared by the rebels, who actually get a military fitness regime thrust upon them! LoL!

Here's one more clunker: these guys discover that Frank has developed an airborne virus to wipe out the rebels. They can't use it until they've captured Maldoon because they need his skills, but the concern is how they know where the rebels are. Is there a mole? Well we've just been told that these people farm crops out in the open, so by that very act they've identified their location! The rebel camp is only four days walk from the city, and they recently attacked a contingent of soldiers from the city, and now they rebels are wondering how they've been given away? They're morons!

This novel is awful. It's not only the worst kind of trash, but even as fan-fiction it would look bad when compared with other fan-fic.

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwel

Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WORTHY!
(Read by Patrick Tull on Recorded Books. Now available free online.)

I think it's an encouragement to the rest of us writer wannabes that even Orwell had trouble finding a publisher for this downer of a novel. It presages his 1984 which was published four years later and was even more depressing.

This story takes place on Manor Farm, soon to be renamed Animal Farm, and then re-renamed Manor Farm at the end. Old Major, chief pig, pontificates about how wonderful it would be if the human parasites were gone and the animals were allowed free reign - the old 'workers control the means of production' thing. After Major dies, Snowball and Napoleon take over the farm and very shortly afterwards, sooner than the animals expected, circumstances arise which result in Mr Jones, the farmer, being expelled from his own farm by these animals.

The animals celebrate the joyous day of animal liberation. They distill Major's speech into seven commandments, which are later slyly adjusted so that the pigs' behavior is never outside 'the law'. What the other animals never quite grasp is that these pigs truly are pigs in the derogatory sense. The animals are not free, not even close, because the pigs very effectively take the place of the humans, but it's done slowly and stealthily so that no one really notices it, and when some of them do notice, they think that it's their memory which is at fault, not the activities of the pigs.

There are some interesting politics going on here and some amusing and disturbing redefinitions of what things are, all ultimately benefiting the pigs, even though initially this is all supposed to benefit the animals. One of these, for example, was the act of defining wings as organs of propulsion rather than organs of manipulation as are hands, thereby classifying birds as having four legs, so that the sheep (very cleverly designated) can chant "four legs good, two legs bad" which, when the pigs themselves start walking around on two legs the better to carry lashes, morphs into "four legs good, two legs better".

The aims begin admirably, with labor being divided evenly, and animals being taught to read and write, but soon dissension occurs, and the moderate Snowball is expelled from the farm never to return. We never learn what happens to him (maybe there's a sequel there for someone to write!), but now that he's gone, Napoleon has a designated villain, and everything which goes bad or which fails is blamed on Snowball's sabotage. Everything else is credited to Napoleon's brilliance and foresight - even those things which were originally Snowball's ideas, and which Napoleon initially agitated against. Napoleon slowly becomes a cult figure as well as a fledgling dictator, protected by trained guard dogs.

Napoleon's stranglehold over the farm and the animals grows, as he becomes the sole voice of authority, and everyone keeps falling into line. It's tragic, and it's depressing to read this, because it's only too true in the real world. It's as true of communism as it is of religion. We've seen it practiced in the old Soviet Union (now defunct, but with ambitions of resurrection) as well as in China and North Korea. We've seen it in religious cults as superficially diverse as Catholicism and the Aztec religion of the old Americas.

Every one of the animals' wins from their revolution is eroded away or stolen from them until, in the end, they're far worse-off than ever they were under Mr Jones, as awful as he was. Napoleon resurrects one of Snowball's ideas - to build a windmill to generate electricity - a plan which Napoleon railed against, but which is now presented as Napoleon's own idea, which Snowball sought to veto. The windmill becomes work for work's sake, rather like the Nazi work camps, where arbeit machs frei, and the task is never done because the windmill keeps running into problems, sometimes mysteriously, sometimes due to enemy action - from real enemies in the form of human attempts to reclaim the farm.

Just like in 1984, every vice is turned into a virtue while still remaining a vice, and every lie is turned into a truth while still being a lie. There is no happy ending, but the story is a great ode to recycling: especially how evil, if left unchecked, recycles around and bites you in the rear right after you thought you'd chased it away.

I recommend this novel.

Angelfall by Susan Ee

Title: Angelfall
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Rating: worthy

p132 there's a paragraph which begins "I wonder…" and ends with "…out cringing." which appears to be printed in a different font from everything else. It may be an optical illusion, but it looks darker, and the letters appear to be jammed closer together than those in the surrounding paragraphs. It just looked odd to me!
p223 "…lingering scent of burn paper." should be "…lingering scent of burned paper." presumably

I am not an 'angel' novel fan. After reading the god-awfully atrocious Lauren Kate crap, I decided that was more than enough for a lifetime. Female authors seem handicapped, for some reason, in relating dystopian stories (with some notable and most welcome exceptions), and they're so wooden-headedly addicted to first person young-female PoV that's it’s gone beyond ridiculous into parody.

These novels robotically insult womanhood rather than portray it realistically and engagingly, by rendering their characters into weak and helpless children and pawns of the male "love interest". It’s disgusting to read, but now and then I come across a novel (and much more rarely, a series) which is an exception to the rule.

This is book one of the Penryn & the End of days series, and it wasn't even on my radar. I came across it by accident, and was glad I did. The blurb sounded interesting. We know that blurbs routinely lie, but as it turned out, and despite being a dystopian novel told in first person by a teen female character, this novel was not actually nauseating, believe it or not. Yes, it was larded with trope and cliché, but the author had put just enough alternative material into it to separate it from the pack, and this is why I rate it a worthy read.

Penryn Young lives at a time on Earth, roughly in the present, where literally out of the blue, angels have descended and wrought havoc on humanity and upon its institutions and constructs. North America lies in ruins, and society has gone to hell. The only way to survive is to live in hiding, or to join a militia or a gang. No one seems to be able to fight back, and this was the first problem I had with this novel.

Yes, I get that we’re joining a story in progress, when all the worst damage has been done, and we’re looking at survivors and the aftermath, but we get no back-story whatsoever to explain how a relative handful of angels armed only with swords(!) could have rained down so much destruction. Where were the police? Where was the military? Where was the air force to take on these flying beings? These angels are shown to be mortal and vulnerable, so how did they manage to achieve so overwhelming a victory, and in so short a time? Crickets chirping.

Penryn is moving with her schizophrenic mother, who is off her meds, and her younger sister Paige, who is wheelchair bound - a condition in which her mother, during one of her delusional episodes, may have put her. Or may not. They're heading for the hills, quite literally. They can do this only at night because the gangs and the angels rule the city during the day, although why this is, is never explained. Angels see well in the dark, we’re told, so their absence after dark makes no sense.

Anyway, as Penryn and Co travel the streets, an angel falls onto the roof of a vehicle nearby. From their hiding place, they see five other angels alight, and a fight ensues between these beings, during which the injured angel's wings are severed. When the other angels depart, leaving their victim to bleed out, they take Penryn's sister with them. I had some issues with this scene, too, but I'll let those go.

Penryn realizes that the only way she will find her sister again is if she keeps this angel alive long enough for him to tell her where her sister was taken, and so begins an uneasy alliance. Penryn's mom is now very conveniently AWOL, and although she's never far away, she's never with them in any meaningful sense either, so this bald artifice allows the rest of the novel to be pretty much just the Penryn and the angel, on a road trip. The deal is that she will help him to get his wings sewn back on, if he helps her to find her sister. Yes, sewn back on - this is how the supernaturals operate! That part made no sense either. These are supernatural beings but they have to resort to catgut, curved needles, and antibiotic shots?!

Penryn is a bit of a dumb-ass, too. It becomes patently obvious that there's something seriously wrong with the behavior of these angels, yet Penryn never figures this out. It’s obvious that there are good angels and bad ones, but Penryn blindly believes that they're all the same, and you know what? She's actually right on the money because every last one of the angels behaves like teen boys from the US!

This was probably the most serious issue I had with this novel: Penryn constantly reminds herself (and us) that this is an angel she's with. He's not human, we're told repeatedly, yet he behaves at all times exactly like a young human male, and he speaks at all times like an American teen. All the angels behave like humans. Towards the end of the novel, when Penryn visits San Francisco, the angel HQ, she finds them partying in a nightclub! This made zero sense to me, and it’s really sad, because it’s the most shallow and brain-dead part of this bizarre trope in YA supernatural fiction whereby the supernatural characters have these truly exotic traits - they're vampires, or werewolves, or angels, or demons - yet they behave EXACTLY like teen boys and girls. Barf!

In their introductory phase, her angel, with whom she is falling in love for no reason whatsoever that we’re party to, announces that his name as Raffe (Rah-fee) and it’s obvious that this is the archangel Raphael, although Penryn isn’t smart enough to figure that out for herself. It’s obvious he's not a bad guy, although his manners leave something to be desired, yet she continues to rail against him and his kind in her internal monologues.

So why did I even like this novel?! That's a very good question, and here's the answer: despite all the juvenile trope and the wrong-headedness in portraying these angels, the author does not overdo it with the romance, and she introduces some really cool ideas. She makes the relationship take time and develop organically. Yes, ultimately, it’s bizarre and too much, but it's not forced, which I appreciated. She writes a strong female character in Penryn, who is both tough and weak, both strong and flawed, and is quite endearing and interesting, if a bit stupid, but she's also wonderful in her devotion to her mother and her sister, who continue to be her main focus throughout.

In addition to this, the plot is interesting and develops in ways that were unexpected and intriguing, especially towards the end when she finally locates her sister. Ee brings some cool new ideas to the world of angels even as she portrays the angels stereotypically, and she ends the novel in a way that's satisfying for this volume whilst leaving some things sufficiently open for the next in the series. I'm particularly intrigued by what happened to her sister, and it's really for that reason that I want to read volume 2. So I recommend this one!

Feed by MT Anderson

Title: Feed
Author: MT Anderson
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WARTY!

Seriously?

The fact that this novel won a pretentious book prize should be quite sufficient to warn you away from it, safe in the knowledge that it has nothing new or interesting to relate. Indeed, it has as little to offer as the back of the guy's head on the cover: nothing engaging, no features, bland, undifferentiated. If you pronounce the author's first two initials as 'empty' this will give you a realistic picture of what this novel offers. That Anderson is now writing nondescript and cheesy children's books is quite revelatory about what he can bring to a novel.

If you like nauseating music, then by all means listen to the pretentious introductory noise at the start of this. This novel is awful. I think it would even give the most party-hearty frat boys a large headache to go. If you rub it on your skin it will give you a bad irrational, with the emphasis on rash. This is a stream of unconsciousness story, a beat poem by someone who's beat and has no poetry, a road-trip novel that's roadkill.

Titus and his friends (Link, Callista, Quendi, Unit, Marty) take a trip to the moon because they become bored with giving themselves electric shocks from some bare wires sticking out of the wall. In short, these people are morons and in the worst possible sense.

I honestly thought, for the longest time, that they were robots. At least that would have made some kind of a story, but it turns out they're human - if you can call a terminally mindless, verbal diarrhea-spewing being 'human'. Do I really need to hear a novel about complete numb-skulls that's not even remotely funny? No. That's why this was a DNF, and happily so; I couldn't even finish one CD, let alone go through five.

The author tries so, so hard to be hip and to create new lingo to portray this future he created, but he's no Anthony Burgess. The narrator doesn't help. He's perfect for the story, but that's the problem. For the one thing there is no story, and for the other, the narrator sounds like a really annoying kid who gets on a crowded train with you early in the morning after he's been out doing drugs and partying all night.

He thinks he's had the best time possible, and insists upon relating every last boring detail of it in a machine-gun monotone, blathering one mindless thing after another, none of which is remotely unusual, interesting or has any point. Meanwhile, you're desperately trying to focus on this great novel you're reading before you have to put it aside and start work when the train gets in. Yeah, it's that soul-destroyingly irritating and life-wasting.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the Feed had actually had something to say, or something new to reveal, but it doesn't. Not one thing. Its totally unoriginal premise is the exact opposite of what Timothy Leary advised. Instead of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, this novel insists that being connected to the feed (surfing the Internet) all the time is bad and you should do other stuff too. No shit?

In trying so very, very hard to be youch, Anderson's novel becomes meg null. Cut yourself off from this Feed and find something which will nourish, not numb, your mind.

Paradigm by Ceri A Lowe

Title: Paradigm
Author: Ceri A Lowe
Publisher: Bookouture
Rating: WARTY!

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.

errata:
p175 "Are your team ready?" should be 'Is your team ready?"
p180 "I'm a just a mentor..." should be "I'm just a mentor..."
p186 "As the tunnel eked out into the underbelly..." just sounds wrong. 'Eked' isn't the right word here.

This is yet another clear rip-off of The Hunger Games style dys-trope-ian ethos and the god-awfully appalling Divergent disaster. Indeed, the cover of this one is such a blatant rip-off of Divergent that I'm surprised that I haven't read of the publisher being sued! I kept looking at this thinking it had to be a parody like my own Dire virgins but it isn't! And what's with yet another novel having a title that's shared by god knows how many other novels? I counted a dozen books with exactly the same title at B&N and that was only on the first screen!

So why oh why did I request to read this? Well, there are some differences, and I'm sorely overdue for a good dystopian trilogy after reading so many awful ones, right? Yeah, dream on! I am sorry to have to report that my hope was not fulfilled in this novel. This was a DNF, although I did gamely plow on through four-fifths of it.

Unless you self publish, you really don't have any say over the cover your novel gets, so that's not usually on the author. The author does the interior, and in this one, I was delighted to discover that it's not set in the USA! This was a big plus for me - finally someone is willing to break the mold! This was one creation I decided to give this one a try. You have to respect an author who grasps that the entity "USA" does not equal the entity "The World"!

Also in its favor is that this one is about a guy, not a girl (at least the dystopian end of it is), which is another big difference. Paradigm is set in London, which is an intriguing change, and it has a dual story line - one from a woman in the (near) present, and the other from a guy in the sad, bad future, so it was because of these marked differences (at least I had hoped they were marked!) that I thought I'd give this a spin and see how it goes. There has to be someone out there who can write a decent dystopian trilogy, right?

There's a nine-page prologue which I skipped. I don't do prologues. There is absolutely no call for them. If the story is worth telling, then it's worth labeling it as chapter one and enough of this prologue crap. I've seen trilogies where the second and third volumes have a prologue. Seriously? The first volume is the prologue to the second volume, and so on, so what's with a separate prologue?! I don't get that mentality at all.

The novel begins on the day the storms started. It's in the past (our present) where things are just starting to seriously go down-hill. We're actually in that place now, in 2014, but that's in reality. This story is fictional, and Alice Davenport lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats (apartments) in London. She's playing hooky from school because of a school bully named Jake Anderson. We’re told that Jake's stories - even the fictional ones he spreads about Alice's mother - gain legs because he was in London when Hurricane Alison hit and "Big Ben had toppled". How that's supposed to lend him veracity, I don't know!

A small point of order here! Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower, not the tower itself. Most people conflate the two. It's possible that Big Ben (the bell) could topple even without the tower doing so, but I guess we're meant to understand here that the whole tower went down.

On a second point, Hurricanes are not known to strike Europe. They don't typically work that way although Coriolis "force" does tend to bend their path into a rough U shape with the curve on the USA's eastern seaboard and the open end out in the Atlantic. Some hurricanes have, albeit very rarely, reached the UK. I remember staying home from school one day as huge gale-force winds ran through my home town over there. It wasn't a hurricane, but it was extremely windy that day.

Alice and her mom sleep on a shared, stained, smelly mattress on the floor of the apartment. Alice has been told that she must never ever go into the bedroom up the stairs, but was offered no reason why. Nor do we ever get such a reason! If we did, I missed it. She's reduced to stealing from the wad of cash her mother thinks she's secreted under the mattress, in order to bring home bags of groceries. Alice is stronger than she looks. I liked Alice herself, although at one point, right before I quit reading this, I started to go off her. She would have made a great hero in a story just about her, and with a bit more going on than was going on here, but her story just became tedious and stretched out, with very little happening, and I found myself hurrying through her sections.

Alice's mom works nights, and it's easy to imagine what it is she does when she goes out and doesn't return until dawn, but the day the storms began, she went out and never came back, so Alice was alone and felt physically ill. She was nauseated and ran a fever, and was too lethargic to pay serious attention when everyone seemed to be abandoning the apartment block and rousing everyone else to go with them. Some emergency or other. Alice didn't care.

Many years into the future, Carter Warren finds himself unfrozen from some sort of cryo-sleep and expected to run for the highly important position of Controller General, which he actually wants, because he thinks he can bring a whole slew of fresh ideas to the job - and maybe even find his missing parents. Carter discovers that he has two children: twins born the year after he was frozen. How weird is that? Those children may prove to be more trouble than they're worth.

Page 75 has this odd sentence: "The room was dim and Carter just about made his way to one of the other benches that were laid out in rows running from the door through which he had entered to the other side of the room." I can see what's meant by this, but the way it's worded suggests that it's missing something: like it should have another clause explaining why he didn't finish making his way over there. "Carter had just about made his way across the room when he was interrupted...", or "Carter just about made his way over there without tripping up, but he almost fell over right before he sat down. Otherwise I don't see the point of wording it that way. Maybe it's just me!

There are two other sentences that are like this on this same page. One of them isn’t so bad, but then this appears towards the bottom of the page: "...the one that presents the most impressive and impactful will likely win the day." The most impressive and impactful what? It needs something to explain that, or it needs to be re-worded so that it reads, "...the one that presents as the most impressive and impactful...." Hopefully these issues will be ironed out of the final copy. Ceri Lowe ought to get me to volunteer as a beta reader!

Meanwhile, back in the future, Carter learns that there are two other candidates for the position of Controller General, against whom he must compete, so once again we have a situation like in The Hunger Games and in Divergent, and it seemed like it might be just as brutal, but in the four-fifths I read it was not, thankfully - otherwise I would have quit it much sooner! This is not another Divergent, which makes it even more sad that the covers look so much alike. It's supposed to be an election, yet the three of them are subject to practical and psychological testing. This made no sense. If the tests can pinpoint viable candidates, why bother with an election? If the election means anything beyond a dog and pony show, then why do we have the testing?

In fact this whole process made no sense. We learn that the three candidates are each as different as chalk and cheddar, so how can all of them be ideal for the job? And so things see-saw back and forth between Alice and Carter, each section alternately revealing more about their life and their world. The Alice side just wasn't as interesting as the Carter portions and sadly, they also began to grow tiresome about half-way through this novel.

One thing I had a problem with on the Alice side was the underground tunnels. London is entirely awash in many feet of floodwater, we're told, yet a network of tunnels underneath London is dry? How did that work, exactly?! On top of that (so to speak!), we're given no explanation regarding from whence this endless rainfall, er, hailed! Yes, it rained heavily, but the rain ultimately comes from one variety or another of groundwater so the level overall doesn't vary a whole lot, and the flooding came on far too fast to be the result of melting of ice sheets.

There's another problem, too, and this is common to all dystopian fiction, and it is that of other nations. Where are they?! People in the USA too often think of it as the only nation on the planet, or the only one worth thinking about or living in, but it's obviously not. Each nation probably feels the same way to one extent or another, including Britain, but none of these nations exists in isolation, and that's the problem. This story is told in complete isolation from the rest of the world as though Britain - indeed, London alone in this case - is the only place on Earth! It's just not credible. If you want to make it credible, you need to offer your readers some reasons why it's this way.

I can't believe that every nation would perish so completely in exactly the same way that Britain did, or that there would be nowhere left which had power, or transportation. I can't believe that no one would come from any other nation to see if there are survivors in Britain. I can't believe that the emergency services and the military, and the entire Royal Navy would simply vanish, but that's the conceit which we're expected to blindly accept in this novel. Nowhere is this addressed, and I couldn't swallow it; it's too glaring of an omission.

So to sum up, I liked the Alice character very much. I really didn't; like any of the others. And the story was far too plodding, with really not much going on for page after page after page, and it just wore me down. I could not bear to read the last fifty of so pages when there are so many other books presenting such a powerful temptation.

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.