Red Tooth by Brian Rathbone

Rating: WARTY!

This is a short story that I didn't like. It was too ridiculous for my taste.

Bob Hanks is a traditionalist, who hates to get rid of a piece of technology if it works and does the job he needs it to do. That much I can get with, but Bob overdoes it - fixing up his antique Bluetooth device with duct tape rather than get a new one. He's had it for so long that it's been replaced by 'greentooth'. I'm not sure the author quite gets what Bluetooth stands for, but maybe he does and doesn't care. Bob's wife has a greentooth and thinks her husband is crazy for not upgrading. She informs him as she leaves the house that morning, that they need to go shopping.

To pre-empt his wife and show her he's not as out of touch as she thinks he is, he resolves to go buy himself some stuff as soon as she's gone, and for inexplicable reasons, he heads for the pawn shop where he's on really good terms with the owner. But the owner isn't there. Instead some other guy is behind the counter and he destroys Bob's Bluetooth and insists he try the latest - redtooth, which bites into Bob's ear and uses his blood to power itself. He insists that it be removed at once, but is informed that's impossible since it's an explosive device that will take off his head if he tries to remove it.

For me that's where I would have ditched this if it were not a short story, but by this point I decided I could finish it without wasting too much time. That was a mistake because it was all downhill into crazy town from there on out. I lost track of who was who and what was what, and the story made no sense, not even within its own idiotic parameters. I thought it was dumb and beyond ridiculous and I rate it warty!

November Fox by Esther Bertram

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had to DNF this novel because it made no sense and was not well-written in my judgment. It employs two voices, one of which was first person which I typically detest. Why authors do this I do not know, because very few of them do it well. I can see no rational for it here, when two third person voices would have been better. The ending (which I skipped to in order to confirm I had correctly divined it) isn't original and is telegraphed pretty well from very early in the novel so it comes as no surprise. When the ending is known, there needs to be an interesting journey toward it, but here there was not. I was bored and found myself skipping sections in order to find an interesting bit. The problem was that those became increasingly scarce the further I progressed.

The story felt like it was being told by a stalker in some regards which did not sit well with me. Erica, the narrator, is watching November Fox, a pop diva, on what appear to be TV monitors spread across a city. This was another annoyance to me, because there was zero world-building here, so I found myself very confused most of the time about what exactly, was happening, and where, and how! I started losing interest and lost it altogether when a talking elephant arrived in the cast. The elephant spoke German, so we got bits and pieces of German which was then tediously translated for us. I hate that in novels. I think if you're going to have a character speak a foreign language you need to have the character speak English and indicate the foreign nature of the tongue with a brief description up front and then an occasional reminder through the rest of the text in some form or another.

The way it was done here made it seem like we had a condescending Disney character, and it was truly annoying and felt insulting to Germans. German is an intriguing language with a fascinating (at least to me) mix of harshly masculine and endearingly feminine tones to it, and it can be beautiful to hear, but that's not how it came across in this novel. I didn't get at all why German was its language! Elephants do not hail from Germany. If it had spoken some Indian or African dialect, it would have made more sense to me.

I concede that it's certainly possible for an elephant to be born in Germany, but to have one simply show up speaking German with no explanation for it was far more of an annoyance than ever it was of interest to me. Its frequent spitting out of "Ja ja!" actually did jar and made it sound like a yahoo in terms of how brutal it was on the senses. I felt it demeaned the language, and I really didn't like this character. It was this that constituted the final straw for me, and I quickly lost all interest in trying to plod on through this book.

I wish the author, who is evidently a composer, a musician, and a producer as well as a novelist, all the best in her endeavors, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one at all based on what I read of it.