World After by Susan Ee

Title: World After
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Amazon - Skyscape
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. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
On page 90 there’s an editorial note at the top of the page: “JARRING TEXT OF DIFFERENT SIZES]~~Ok as set - I'm guessing this shouldn't be there!

This is book two in the ‘Penryn & The End of Days’ series. I’m not a fan of series unless they’re done especially well, but I liked the first book, Angelfall which I reviewed in June, 2014, so I was quite pleased to have an opportunity to review the second. Unfortunately this sequel volume wasn't anywhere near as appealing. It felt like it was written by a different author. I could make it only half way through before I had to give up, having run out of Promethazine.

A big part of my nausea was caused by the first person PoV voice. It's far too self-important and self-obsessed unless it's done really well, and it was not done well here, not with this character, Penryn. You should read A Girl Called Al for an exemplary story in which this voice is used. Why authors - particularly YA authors - are so irremediably addicted to it is a complete and utter mystery to me, but I sincerely wish they would grow out of it.

The biggest problem with this novel is that it was boring. It went nowhere and offered nothing new - quite the contrary in fact since we were treated to a host of flashbacks via Penryn's magical video record and playback sword. I am not kidding you. Her angelic sword is a camcorder. It was bizarre, and I took to skipping entire sections which were nothing more than a rehash of book one, but told from the angel, Raffe's PoV. I care. Another filler employed here was 'Penryn dream world'. There was chapter after chapter offering nothing more than a simple recounting of Penryn's dreams, which were tedious. I took to skipping those, also. If these two things had been omitted the novel would probably have been only seventy-five percent the size it is.

Even when we weren't watching Sword Armchair Theater re-runs, or How Dream is My Valley, there was nothing of interest happening here, not for page after page after bleak page. The first seventy pages could have been half that long and still conveyed as much while saving precious trees. Penryn has literally come back from the dead courtesy of her friendly neighborhood angel Raffe, but life goes on as usual! Huh?

She now carries an angel sword, which only she can lift, but which she has no idea how to employ as a weapon. She’s been reunited with her slightly loopy mother and her kid sister Paige, but Paige is now some sort of zombie, having been experimented upon by the angels. She’s diminutive, yet very dangerous and threatening – like an attack dog, with her razor sharp teeth. Paige used to be a vegetarian, but now she’s hungry for meat, the raw and bloody kind, yet her sister sees nothing wrong with her, being devoted – so we’re told, not shown – to her mom and sister. Keep this in mind.

If you examine this story too closely, you'll realize it makes no sense, and in that it's not alone amongst angel stories. The reason for this is that most writers of angel stories have never actually read the Bible – or they've conveniently forgotten it or chosen to remember only tiny portions of it. They know neither what it is that angels do, nor what they’re actually there for. Essentially angels are errand boys. In naval terms, they would be an XO – an executive officer, carrying out the commands of the ship’s captain.

The problem with angel stories is that these characters are consistently depicted as soldiers fighting evil, a thing which they never were. They’re also uniformly endowed with wings. Typically these are white wings like swans have, but this is also a pure invention. They’re never described as having wings in the Bible. The winged ones are cherubim (the plural of cherub), but none of these YA writers ever talk about that! Cherub just doesn't quite carry the weight does it?

Now you recall where I told you that the author tells us how devoted Penryn is to her family? Well at one point, about eighty pages in, the community she’s with is attacked by the mutant scorpion creatures, first seen at the end of the previous volume. Flying mutant scorpion creatures which evidently buzz like bees. And have shaggy hair and lion’s teeth. And which drool and growl. Is there anything else with which we can lard them? No, I guess that’s all. Why these creatures are even needed is never revealed - at least not in the portion of this book I read. Maybe it was mentioned at the end of volume one, and I forgot.

Penryn’s young sister Paige – the one who is actually best equipped to fight enemies and to protect her family - runs off into the nearby forest. Her mom chases after Paige. Penryn, instead of automatically following them actually stands and debates whether she should stay with her family – the one to which she’s supposedly devoted - or run to the safety of the community and hide there. She chooses the latter. That was pretty much it for me. Penryn is not an heroic figure, not even mildly so. Please tell me, then, why I should care about her or root for her? I can't think of a single reason.

There’s a really oddball incident around page ninety after a scorpion attack where Penryn is trying to tell a doctor that these people who have been stung might not be dead. The Doctor is assuring her that if they don’t have a pulse they’re dead. This is in a world which has been devastated by an angelic insurgency, which has demons running around, and after an attack by mutant scorpion people, and this doctor thinks the old rules still apply? This is either bad writing, or this doctor is the biggest dick-head in history. As the comedian said (I forget this name, but it was probably Steven Wright): somewhere in the world is the world’s worst doctor. And you might have an appointment with him (or her!) tomorrow! I think we just met him.

The final straw, for me, came on page 142 where I read: “…three unarmed women surrounded by monsters…”. Why does it matter that they’re women? I have a real problem with what I can only view as misogyny, especially when it;s penned by a female writer. Is this really what we want to teach our young women - that if you're a woman you're somehow more threatened by these monsters than you would be if you were a guy? Because this is no different from telling girls that women are weak, that they're helpless, that they're prey in need of a guardian angel. It's pathetic, particularly from a female author, and I refuse to subscribe to abuses like that. I will not recommend this novel.

Material Girls by Elaine Dimopoulos

Title: Material Girls
Author: Elaine Dimopoulos
Publisher: Houghton Miflin Harcourt
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. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Normally I rail against, indeed, refuse to read, novels which are little more than a shopping list of the author’s favorite fashion items. Such snotty books deserve contempt, as does the fashion industry itself. What could be more arrogant and flatulent than an industry devoted to dictating to you that you must change your clothing styles with great frequency, or there’s something wrong with you? What could be more unjust than an industry which effectively tells you that if you’re rich, you’re fashionable and if you’re poor you’re tasteless? And what could be more appalling than an industry built upon the backs of slavishly laboring Asian women and children?

This novel is exceptional, in more ways than one. In the do or Dior world in this story, youth rules comprehensively. At thirteen, children are “tapped” for the success spotlight. If they have spent their school year doing the right thing on their websites, they could become the next pop sensation, the next fashion icon, or the next box-office dream. If they fail, they’re doomed to a life as “adequates” – in short, they’re just like you and me, but in this story, adequate is really understood to mean failure.

This story concerns two successes. One of these is Marla Klein, who hit the big time in the fashion industry, being quickly promoted to the superior court – a handful of teens who declare what’s fashion and what’s fashi-off for one of the five big design houses, Torro-LeBlanc. Marla’s problem is that she’s been disagreeing with the rest of her court appointees, and before she can say “tummy ill figure”, she’s been jettisoned to the basement, where a hoard of designers deemed not good enough for the fashion courts are desperately trying to come up with fashion ideas which will impress the junior courts and get them a shot at displaying their design before the superior court.

Meanwhile, Evangeline Vassiliotis, now reincarnated as ivy Wilde, the current rebel diva superstar, is seeing her position threatened by an upstart Tap. Worse, she’s forced to wear the newest fashion: torture (which features chains, fake blood, and points on the soles of your shoes – on the inside). Of course, these “fashions” are scarcely any more torturous than those which women have felt compelled to wear for centuries, but they’re new and different, of course, so don’t you dare criticize them. Valenteenhold and Shamel certainly wouldn't! Women have fashion guns with which they can scan their clothing labels. If the light stays green, the trend is still good. If it’s red, you’re dead - fashionably speaking, of course - and it’s time to buy a new wardrobe.

Marla finds herself on the “obsoloser” table in the basement – as debased as it gets, in fact. She’s almost “crustaceous” for goodness sakes, but slowly, she and her cohorts hatch a scheme to subvert this system which considers people antiquated by the time they turn twenty. It all goes horribly wrong, and Marla finds herself under the icy glare of Ivy Wilde’s entourage – with the emphasis on the ‘rage’ part. It’s then that things really begin to change. Quick! Alert the media. I'm sure Vain Infamy, Cosplaypolitan, Fugue, or Helle fashion magazines would be interested!

This author could have read my mind – or snuck a peak at chapter zero of my novel Baker Street, but I doubt it! I honestly doubt that she and I are the only ones who have had thoughts like this about the fashion business. It’s what this author does with this story though, and where she takes it, which is what makes this novel “prime” (in my lingo: worthy!). No, in this novel she runs with it and makes an engrossing story full of interesting characters and even more interesting motivations.

I have to say that in many ways, characters Marla and Ivy are very much alike. There’s not a lot to separate them into individual characters, but this is only to be expected from a system which pre-processes children and manufactures a salable product out of them. But if you think that, then read on. They're not!

This story – speculative, dystopian, both - is set in the future, but it’s not a future that’s so far off it can’t be seen. No, the seeds of that future have been enthusiastically sown by vested interests since the 1950s, especially in the USA. A conspicuous consumer/planned obsolescence machine has been working on hearts and minds for decades. We’re all fashion victims. The question is: Is there a cure?

Global Frequency by Warren Ellis

Title: Global Frequency
Author/Editor: Warren Ellis
Publisher: WildStorm
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by an assortment of artists).

This is a story reminiscent of Thunderbirds and International Rescue, but for grown-ups! The Global Frequency consists of a network of 1001 people, ordinary citizens each with one some special skill or another, who are committed to lending an immediate hand if some huge (and typically sci-fi or dystopian) threat looms. The network is led by the mysterious Miranda Zero, evidently very rich, because she has distributed special satellite phones (which sell at around $1,000 a pop) whereby anyone can summon the GF by means of a special emergency button.

The call is answered by a mohawked girl named Aleph, who seems always to be there waiting for a call even though we see her sleeping in one obligatory and gratuitous chick's ass graphic novel panel (see image on my blog).

Aleph then launches local representatives into action, who always seem ideally suited to the task at hand. The graphic novel I read was a compendium of several stories, and the first of these was a group of cyborgs called in to tackle a cyborg who was nearly all robot and who had run amok.

I loved this story because there were some admirably kick-ass and tough female characters, and because the writer clearly understood that you cannot put a robot arm on a person (a la Steve Austin, 'The Six Million Dollar Man') and have him perform feats worthy of Superman.

The reason for this is that no matter how powerful the robot portion of your body is, it's still attached to the relatively fragile human portion, and if you try lifting a truck for example, then while the robot arm might well manage it, the rest of your body would break and tear under the stress put on it by the robot portion! It's really nice to se a sci-fi writer recognize this and address it.

The other stories were a mixed bag which were, on balance, enjoyable. I particularly liked the back-story about Miranda Zero, and the parkour story featuring a young Indian girl (Indian, not native American). It's nice to see some variety of ethnicity in these stories, unlike the almost exclusively white man's world of Marvel and DC comics. I highly recommend this series. It's very well written, beautifully illustrated (admirable use of white space - no trees wasted here), eminently readable and - within its context - realistic.

The Book of Ivy by Amy Engel

Title: The Book of Ivy
Author/Editor: Amy Engel
Publisher: Entangled
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. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!

I have to say, right up front, that this novel was a real roller-coaster ride, and not in a good way. I had so many issues with it, and I was thinking right up until about the half-way point that I wasn't going to finish it, let alone rate it positively, but I managed to read it all the way through to its inevitable cliff-hanger finale, and in the end I decided it was a worthy read! Weird huh?

Maybe it's my co-dependent relationship with Entangled, or maybe I was bemused by the fact that the author's name, Amy Engel is vaguely like an anagram of Entangled. Maybe it's because I have an adorable niece named Amy, or because my favorite nurse was named Amy. but there it is. And yes, though neither the front cover nor the back-cover blurb will tell you this, it's book one of a series. Judging by current YA trends, I'm guessing it's going to be a trilogy.

Here's the real mystery: why do they publish a "Praise for..." page in an ebook? In a print book I can see some theoretical merit if you lift it off the shelf at the library, or in a bookstore (are there still bookstores?), you can read what people you don't know, have never met, and have no means by which to gage their opinion, thought about this novel. It doesn't work with me, but maybe it works for others. But in an ebook? You already have the book. You already bought it based on the blurb or the recommendation of someone you do know and trust, so pray tell me what exactly is the point of a recommendation for a book you already own? I have no idea.

Here's something else I have no idea about: what's the deal with the cover image? I've now read this book, and still I have no idea what the image on the cover is supposed to represent. There is no knife involved in any way in the plot to murder Bishop Lattimer, so why the knife?! The locale in this story is a small town. There are no skyscrapers. I don't do covers because my blog is all about writing, not strutting and preening, and I understand that writers don't get any real say in their cover (unless they self-publish). Normally I pay little attention to them, but once in a while one comes along and demands a whisky-foxtrot-tango expression of complete disbelief. Such a one is this. Enjoy!

OK, enough rambling. So what's it all about, Amy? The basis of this story is the same one as is employed in employed in Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge, where Nyx has to kill her newly betrothed: a demon who rules the land. She fails to carry it out, too, but she at least tries initially. Ivy doesn't even progress that far.

The Book of Ivy is also really Matched (with which I'm familiar, but haven't read). Ivy Westfall's match is Bishop Lattimer, who is not actually a bishop, but then Ivy isn't actually a plant...! There are two sides (this is of a town, not a nation or a continent: Westfall and Eastglen), but there are two sides: the winners and the losers. The losers have to offer up their daughters to the sons of the winners for brides, and it's Ivy's turn to be offered up, but she has an agenda.

So far so good, but I kept running into minor irritations, which if they are few and far between don't bother me much. It's when there are too many of them that the novel has to really deliver to get me to keep reading it and not give up in sheer frustration. The book of Ivy came very close! I mean there are the usual irritations which I hardly even notice any more: like the use of "bicep" when it's "biceps". I don't think this author "stepped foot" into that one, but she did use "two choices" when it's really one choice between two options. One amusing issue was that the town had a summer camp! This tiny town sent kids to summer camp? Where? Round the corner? In the meadow in the back yard? This made no sense, but it was as amusing as hell.

Those were nowhere near as bad as things which made me stop and think about how "X" managed to exist in Ivy's world where 'X' represents one of a slightly bewildering variety of things. So let's talk about that. In 2022, there was a global nuclear war, where EMPs apparently rendered all electrical devices, including motor vehicles, useless. So in this novel, we're conveniently back in Victorian times, yet Ivy seems to have everything she needs: electricity, clean running water, a shower, soap, and so on. Apparently no one was left alive who could do anything to fix the cars, but they fixed everything else?

After the nuclear war, Ivy's grandfather started a new town in Missouri. Apparently there was nothing there worth bombing and nuclear fallout miraculously didn't reach there! This is the town over which the war with the Lattimer faction was fought. Why the Westfalls didn't simply leave after they lost goes unexplained. What the war was actually fought over goes largely unexplained.

What I don't get is how solar panels are working just fine, but nothing else electrical seems to be! It makes no sense. People wear jeans and t-shirts presumably made from the cotton they grow, but there's no word on who makes them or how. They have candles and meat and milk and butter (and guns), but the population is only supposed to be some 8,000 (as far as I could tell), and the entire town is ringed by a fence, so where are the crops grown, and by whom? Where are they raising the livestock? Who is making all these cool things they still have? Who generates the electricity and how? None of this is explained. The world-building in Ivy's world is awful.

Maybe this will all be explained in one of the sequels, but I didn't really get why this was set in the future instead of back in the nineteenth century. The very same story (with some minor adjustments for technology) could have been told just as well in 1880. Or 1780. It's not consistent, either, as the solar panel issue revealed. Another example of this is that there's talk of testing something for fingerprints. Now fingerprinting has been around a lot longer than modern technology (in fact a lot longer than most people would guess), and it was started down the path to modern formalization back in 1880, but in a town of some 8,000 random survivors, would there really be anyone who could read fingerprints and make comparisons competently enough to identify a perp? It's questionable at best.

It was really quite annoying that every personal color was described in terms of food: "toffee-haired" (ugh!), "brown sugar" freckles, "chocolate eyes and dark chestnut hair", "coffee-brown strands" of hair, "cocoa-colored skin". It became tedious after a while and then actually really amusing.

I also had a problem with how this society randomly married-off people. They were supposed to be "matched", but clearly the system wasn't working. Any society which pursued this bizarre scheme would be doomed to failure, which tells me right up front that these people are lead by morons. In the real world, in the past, the winners typically raped the daughters of the losers, and this isn't any different. Kings did seek to marry the daughters of their vanquished foes to 'cement an alliance', but the marriage was forgotten after a couple of generations, and the alliances died with the memory, leading to another war. It's pointless.

That's the story here, but it's only been going on for a couple of generations, and it makes no sense, because it's not a one-way street. Not only do the males from the winning side marry the females from the losing side, the same thing happens in reverse, so how is this a punishment for the losers and a benefit for the winners? I don't know, but it's what we're expected to believe!

There's no explanation, either, for how this society not only retrogressed technologically, but also socially, so that women now are now viewed, in only two generations, as nothing but baby machines, with no life of their own, nor is it explained how come there are so many sixteen-year-olds available for marrying off this year, given how hard life is and how small the town is.

As I said, Ivy's "mission" is to kill Bishop. Why, we're not immediately told, but at least a part of it is in revenge for his father's murder (so we're told) of her mother. We know that she won't do it, because this is an Entangled romance and they have to fall in love, but it's not at all clear why she doesn't simply go ahead that first night and take him out. It's not until almost page fifty that we learn that there's a three month 'window' during which this mission must be completed. Obviously the real reason for this is solely so that the two of them can fall in love so she won't kill him, but it's never satisfactorily explained why there's this delay, only that irreversible and unspecified steps are now being taken and she cannot fail.

I was thinking it would have made more sense had her mission been to kill the president, Bishop's dad, but no, it's Bishop. Evidently the president will also be 'taken care of'. This initially made even less sense when she thinks there's a problem after she discovers that they're not going to live in the presidential mansion, but in a cozy little home for just the two of them. It's not until, again, around page fifty that we learn that she needs to be in the presidential mansion because there's something there she must find. It would have been nice to have known this a little earlier so the story made more sense and flowed better. I don't like mystery for no other reason than being mysterious.

So Bishop predictably doesn't touch her that first night - he sleeps on the couch offering no explanation for his unexpected and (supposedly) out-of-keeping behavior. This seems to throw a huge wrench in the works for Ivy - again, no reason specified. Bishop is predictably and tediously the trope male lead: tall, muscled, good looking, green-eyed, and white. No problem there, is there? Inevitably there's the "awkward' scene where she espies him half naked and despite the fact that she's supposedly hates him, she's all a-flutter and having hot flashes. It's pathetic how weak Ivy truly is at this point. This was actually about the time where I almost ditched this novel and moved on to something else. Fortunately, it got a lot better after that!

I was curious as to why there was pretty much zero curiosity amongst the people of the town as to what exactly was happening outside the town walls (which are literal walls of steel designed to keep out intruders and beyond which to banish offenders from the town). In this regard, it's very much like Erin Bowman's sad trilogy starting with Taken, but at least Bowman as the townspeople take an interest in the possibility of something going on outside the walls. Nothing like that happens in this novel, which seemed highly unlikely to me. The town's kids alone would have had dares about going outside the walls, and there would be, in two generations, a hoard of people contacting them from outside. None of this is satisfactorily addressed. Again, the world-building is lacking.

I found it really disturbing that Ivy finds Barbie dolls to be the "point of perfection" when they're actually anorexic and plastic in more ways than one. That speaks volumes about how shallow she is and betrays every word she utters and every thought she supposedly harbors with regard to feminist ideals. I guess even in the future, a woman's image of herself is grotesquely annexed and distorted by capitalistic designs on what a woman should be, promulgated largely by men. It doesn't help that the society in this novel has pretty much abolished women's rights - no word on how that ever got put in place, but all of this is strongly indicative of Ivy's lack of spine.

Chapter nine makes no sense at all. Evidently we enter some kind of a time warp. Ivy and Bishop take a walk on Saturday. He's taking her for a picnic. They get up at eight and set off, and have hardly walked anywhere when we learn that the sun is "high in the sky". When they arrive at their destination after walking only for a short time, Ivy is talking about the midday sun. It took them four hours to get there??? Weird! After they jump into the pond a couple of times from a bluff, Ivy reflects that "This has been one of the most carefree afternoons of my life"! Wait, it was midday, they jump into the pond twice, and suddenly the afternoon's gone and she's reflecting upon what a fun time it's been? Where is all this time going?! Weird!

Ivy has a passion for books bestowed upon her by the author in this novel. The book trope is a really lazy method employed by an author to make a character - usually a female - seem smart and deep, but in this novel, Ivy's every action betrays that image. She isn't very smart, and she isn't very wise, and she is shallow. Fortunately, this improves, otherwise I never would have been able to complete this novel. I thoroughly detest weak female main characters if they persist in being weak throughout the story.

So what turned it around for me? Ivy changed. She behaved in a way I did not expect and showed that she had become strong and self-determined. It took way too long to get there, but it did happen! That, I admired, and it's really the sole reason I'm rating this positively despite the numerous issues I had with the story, the plot, and the sad trope YA romance. Even that worked out better than I'd feared when I reached that abysmally clichéd bare, muscled,chest scene!

So, surprisingly, and after all's griped and done, I consider this a worthy read! That doesn't mean I want to read volume two, because I can already tell exactly what's going to happen there!

Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott

Title: Trouble and Her Friends
Author: Melissa Scott
Publisher: Tom Doherty
Rating: WORTHY!

India Carless, who used to go by the handle of 'Trouble' in her hacking days, is now retired and running the e-network for a group of artists. She's been forcibly retired: the heat became too much with a new law (the Evans-Tindale Act) aimed directly at cyber-crime, and it just wasn't worth the risk to her anymore. The only problem is, someone has begun using her handle and her code on the Nets and it's up to Trouble to uncover who it is before she goes down for the trouble the fake Trouble is creating.

Trouble walked out on her partner and lover, and her entire cyber life, when she retired, without a word to anyone, which has left bad blood between herself and Cerise, who has since become a cyber-cop for big business. Now this new trouble has caused both of them to seek the other out, Trouble to clear her name, Cerise to find who hacked her employer. Once again, they're a team.

Trouble has an illegal 'brain worm' installed in her head which allows her a much more sensual experience of the net. How this works, Scott shrinks from attempting to describe. It's just as well, because the idea is impractical. If the net doesn't support this (which it currently doesn't), then you would need some software installed which would translate signals from the net into sensations, and which would slow the whole thing down - a big no-no for a hacker.

Even in the future, when this novel is set, retrieving and processing data in this way would still be slower than ordinary text input. Trouble isn't a very practical hacker and doesn't behave like real hackers do, unless your idea of a hacker is that depicted in the movie of the same name (which I happened to really like). Scott does anticipate The Matrix with her writing, but no one in their right mind would have a brain worm implanted that could kill its owner if things went wrong, let alone upgrade it as Trouble does by going to her wet-work friend Michelina!

Another impracticality is that Scott turns cyberspace into a shopping mall, where you walk from place to place and meet people, and explore stores, but this, again, and for a hacker in particular is entirely ridiculous. When you "move" from web site A to web site B you don't actually move - you don't "walk" anywhere. It's almost instant - although sometimes it runs very slowly. This would be entirely impractical for a hacker since you would have to actually slow down your data input rate to represent it the way Scott does.

Those impracticalities aside, and forgiving her shameless lifting of some cyber ideas and terms ( such as Intrusion Countermeasures (Electronic) - IC(E) ) from other novels in the genre, I really loved this novel because it's so solid and real and practical overall. Yes, it's very dated now, but I didn't read this for the hi-tech. I read it for the relationships, which Scott does extremely well. She's very prescient and warm in her depictions, and the interaction between Trouble and Cerise was priceless. I love the kind of person India is, and how she and Cerise slide back into a relationship together. I like their joint hacking attempt at the end, despite how impractical (and impossibly slow!) it is.

I liked that fact that Seahaven was both a fictional place on the web, and a real place by the sea, in this novel, a place where hackers and geeks hang out. By having such a place, Scott is able to have Trouble move around in both virtual and real space.

I don't claim that this novel is brilliant. I don't actually require that a novel be brilliant. I don't even care if it has flaws. All I require is that it tells a story which engages me, in a language which speaks to me, and this one did very much. I've read many of Scott's novels, but none of them carried the same power that this one did, so if you like LGBTQ novels which have somewhere to go other than (or at least in addition to) the purely carnal, then this one might just drive your bus as nicely as it did mine.

Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson

Title: Robopocalypse
Author: Daniel H Wilson
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: WARTY!

Read sadly by Mike Chamberlin.

I don't know how it's even possible to write any novel about a battle between humans and machines and make it so boring that you want to feed the disks to a machine that will shred them, but Wilson sure achieved it with this one. He supposedly has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon and it shows in his writing. Carnegie Mellon is an anagram for cage liner lemon after all.

The story is first person PoV, a format which in my experience is only very rarely readable. In this case, the appalling writing and the lackluster reading contrived to make it un-listenable. This is compounded by the fact that with audio books it isn't possible to skip prologues and chapter heading quotes like you can a print or ebook. You have to do it by guesswork or suffer through them.

The story here is that advanced machines began disrupting human life under the control of a master AI, and slowly (once humans even realized what was happening) it became all-out (or even all-in) war, so pretty much a rip-off of the terminator movies crossed with I, Robot, and a lot less engaging.

The book starts at (or near) the end, with the narrator destroying insect-like bots using a flame-thrower. Here's the dumbest bullshit of all. The bots are attracted to human body heat, and as soon as they come into contact with it, they detonate, which can cause at the very least, severe injury. So which cosmic moron came up with the idea of using heat to kill them? Oh yeah, the PhD from Mellon.

He tries to wriggle out of this numb-nuts idea by claiming that the intense heat of the flamethrower is so high that it spoils the chemicals used to create the explosion, but he seems to be completely clueless that outside of that intense zone of heat, there is a very variable surrounding zone, somewhere, which matches human body temperature perfectly, and which would cause all the bots within that zone to detonate simultaneously. Moronic!

Never once does he think of destroying them with an EMP, never once of blowing them up with electricity or grenades; never once of using radio to disrupt their internal signals. After wading through this crap, then we get a huge info-dump on how we got to this beginning ending. This was tedious in the extreme.

I made it only to disk three of a ten-disk set and gave up. And I was skimming track after track even then. Oh yeah, and the audio is produced by "Books on Tape" - seriously? They never once thought of changing their name to bring them into the 121st century? And no, it's not an old disk set - it's copyrighted 2011. BoT is owned by Random House. Quite evidently this is another cluster-book by Big Publishing™!

This novel sucks like a vacuum. And the blurb writer really needs to discover what the word 'decimates' actually means. And one final thing: once again the image on the cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the novel's content.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Cover image was evidently voted by Google Server Lagoon of mid-West (SLOW) to be too ugly to show on my blog

Title: Uglies
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book spouted pathetically by Carine Montbertrand.

Amateur. This is the one word which stood out in my mind as I began listening to this audio book. If juvenile married tedium, their spawn would be this. It didn't help that this young adult novel was so dryly narrated by a woman who sounded like she might be grandmother to one of the characters.

I don't believe a YA novel has to be narrated by a YA person - although in most cases it would probably help. I do believe the person has to sound the part, especially if it's a first person narration. Forget about hiring actors, For gods' sakes just get someone who can read decently and who doesn't sound like they got on the wrong subway train. Please. I'll wait. This narrator was beyond awful, and the voices she used for the characters were so sad as to be laughable. The one she used for character Shay was worse than nails on a chalkboard. It was so sickly that it was more like two-day old vomit on a chalkboard.

But amateur. How amateurish the plot and the writing truly are is what glared at me upon first listen. Yeah, we get that pretty equals big eyes and ugly equals squinty. You don't have to keep on relentlessly smashing us over the head with it every other sentence. Yeah, I get that Scott Westerfeld has mastered 'telling'. I eagerly await any vestige of evidence suggestive that he might, one day, seek to explore 'showing'.

Tally Youngblood (really? young blood? Really?) is an ugly. Of course this claim is rendered nonsensical by the image on the cover which once again goes to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the cover artist never reads the book. Or in this case, even the book title. If Tally is ugly, then how angelic, exactly, are the pretties - and why would they not make anyone who viewed them spontaneously comatose due to excessive sugar content?

Yes, Tally is ugly - so we're expected to swallow. Tally lives in Ugly Town. Ugly town. Her best friend is Peris. Peris is pretty. Peris lives in Pretty Town. Pretty town. And Ugly Town. Must never be mentioned. In the same sentence. They are on OPPOSITE SIDES of the river - get it? Must I paint a sign? Please, pay attention to the massive head-pounding this author is delivering desperately to your noggin. Sheesh. What's wrong with you. You're not...un-pretty are you? Cos that would be just ugly.

Romeo and Juliet much, Scott? The only difference between these two people is three months - in three months, when she's sixteen, Tally, (she's ugly, remember?) who lives in a boarding school for uglies in Ugly Town, will be able to get herself prettified, and move to Pretty Town and again be best friends with Peris (he's pretty, remember?). Seriously? This sad amateur divide is your entire plot?

Who was it that decided the change takes place at 16 and why? Why not at puberty? Why not at birth? Why not at twenty-one? No reason. How did this bizarre system even come to be the standard? No reason. Why would anyone in their right mind put up with this? No reason. How does the economy even function if everyone in Pretty Town is quite literally idling their time away and everyone in Ugliville is too young for employment? No explanation. If all the adults are in Prettiville, then who delivers the ugly babies? How are they even conceived if no one bumps ugly? Who maintains law and order? Who takes care of and supervises the children? Why do the park patrol people not resent the fact that they alone have to work whilst no one else ever does? Do the Pretties even pee and poop? Just curious. Isn't that an ugly thing? Why is it tolerated?

From whence cometh the energy budget in these two towns? Everything is hover. How that works is again unexplained. It's like the author just slammed in every pre-adolescent idea he'd ever had, and went with it. But the energy expenditure must be massive, and there is no explanation for it.

Being prettified means losing brain cells. Apparently they use brain cells to prettify you. How else can we explain that once prettified, people become cavemen-like, dumb-ass, jock frat-boy party animals - and that's all? I actually wrote that before I got to the last disk which contained NOTHING BUT a discussion of brain lesions. Oh, and guess what? Pretties get to sleep late! Yes indeed they do! They. Get. To. Sleep. Late! How pretty of them! Because getting up early is UGLY. Everyone knows that. Sheesh. Did the author write this when he was eight years old and it's just now getting published?

I can't believe that he parlayed this absurd trash into four volumes. If an unknown writer had brought this to a Big Five Publishing Ho, they would've been run out of town on a rail, and rightly so. This just goes to show that it's not what you write, but which door you can wedge your foot into that accounts for who gets published and who doesn't in Big Publishing™ world. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the intrinsic merit or otherwise of the written word. OTOH, if people are truly dumb enough to buy this and come back for more, why not milk them for all that their wallets can bear?

Tally can't wait out those short three months because she's a complete moron. She simply has to sneak over to Pretty Town (as she and Peris used to in the ugly old days) and try to visit with him. This entire trip serves no purpose other than to show how bone-headedly and dedicatedly dumb-ass-to-the-core Tally truly is. Le stupide is strong with this one. I was sure this would explain a lot of what was to be found in the oncoming pages (or in my case, disks) and I was not wrong! 'Tally' is so obviously a referent to how few functional brain cells this chick has.

So no, I can't recommend this. Indeed, I actively dis-recommend it as bone-headedly and dedicatedly stupid to the core. I found myself skipping track after track and then disk after disk because it was badly written and/or badly read, and in the end I gave up. Life is far too short to waste on ugly fiction, and this novel is pretty ugly.

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.