Vampirella Feary Tales by Nancy A Collins and Gail Simone

Rating: WARTY!

Given that this was a graphic novel with standard 'okay' art work, written and illustrated by two female artists/writers, I expected better and didn't get it. It was still women as meat, romping around in their underwear with poor dialogue and unimaginative adventures. Vampirella gets dragged magically into a fairy tale book, except that these fairy tales are horrifically twisted - hence feary tales.<./p>

There are five stories in this first volume and the series runs to at least four more volumes after this, but my interest ended with this one. I can't recommend it. I know it was supposedly a celebration of forty-five years of Vampirella, but this is 2015, and we deserve a lot better than Vampirella as vapid meat. And so does she.

The Thirteenth Princess by Diane Zahler

Rating: WORTHY!

This story is based on a Grimm fairy tale about twelve dancing princesses, but this has been augmented and otherwise beefed-up to make a longer and more engrossing story. It’s really done quite well, and although I had some minor issues with it, the way the author has taken a short fairy tale and made a whole story out of is as commendable as it is enjoyable.

Zita comes at the end of a long line of princesses: Aurelia, Alanna, Ariadne, Althea, Adena, Asenka, Amina, Alima, Akila, Allegra, Asmita, Anisa. Zita was quite literally the red-headed child of the family, and the king disowned her, cluelessly blaming her for her mother's death as she gave birth to Zita. Let's face it: the truth is that any young girl who has eight children by the time she's twenty five is probably not going to survive long - not back in those days, anyway.

This diversity of daughters (isn't that the collective noun?!) includes two sets of twins: Alanna and Ariadne, and Amina and Alima. Anisa was named after the kitchen maid’s cat (but by a very round-about way, it must be said). Zita was sent to be raised and eventually to work in the kitchen so the king would never have to look upon the visage of the child who, he believes, killed his wife.

This author is yet another one who doesn't know the difference between 'stanch' and 'staunch' as she writes, "...trying to staunch the blood...". No, a doctor might staunchly try to stanch the blood flow, but I am seeing this mistake so often now that it’s really becoming a part of the language. How sad.

Her sisters have not abandoned Zita, they are just so afraid of their father's wrath - or upset - if they hang out with her, but family will out, and slowly the sisters draw close together again and find secret ways to enjoy each other's company. That's when Zita discovers an increasing problem with her twelve sisters that seems to be killing them.

I loved this story which was well-written and told beautifully. It was inventive and engaging, and told at a good pace. I recommend it.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Title: The Velveteen Rabbit
Author: Margery Williams
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by William Nicholson.

Everything I know about one-sided relationships I learned from The Velveteen Rabbit. Not really, but some people might genuinely feel that way! This is a pretty cool short story (~4,000 words) dealing with mature themes for young children.

"...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” Doesn't that say it all? If you are at all familiar with the concept underlying the Pixar Toy Story movies, you will also understand what a complete rip-off they are of this 1922 classic. Toy Story itself was rooted in an earlier Pixar short, an Oscar winner titled Tin Toy. In some ways, this novel also foreshadows Watership Down.

Because I grew up outside of the US and because of family circumstances and income brackets, I actually had never even heard of this story until well into adulthood. I only just now read it because it was a free book from an on-line vendor, and therefore a golden opportunity to see what it was all about. You can read it for free here.

The plot is simple - a rabbit made from velveteen (an imitation of velvet) and stuffed with sawdust (as they were wont to do back when this book was written) feels rather unloved after Christmas day. It's only when the boy's primary toy goes missing (the rabbit is innocent, I swear!) that our velveteen friend is allowed to step up and become the new favorite.

From that point on there's no looking back, but even as he is loved, the rabbit still feels less than whole. In a real sense he's handicapped, and not by his being a stuffed toy, but because he's effectively a paraplegic, having no use of his back legs, which are essential to a rabbit not only for running, but for defense. He only realizes how handicapped he is when he encounters real rabbits during a trip into the forest with his owner.

The rabbit learns from a venerable toy horse that a toy can become real if he is truly loved. Until then, he is just a toy, and like women in the workplace (whose opportunities are thankfully improving these days), the chances for any given toy to move up are slight. Fortunately for this rabbit, the opportunity falls right into his lapin, and he and the boy become the closest of friends. Even this costs the rabbit. As the months go by, he starts growing old at a far faster rate than the boy does. His velveteen sheen is lost and his body parts start failing. His whiskers are whisked away. He was warned about this by the horse, but he realizes that the horse was right: he doesn't care, because to the boy, he is still beautiful and loved.

The problem arrives on hot wings: scarlet fever, a much more serious illness in 1922 than ever it is now. Make note of this all ye who think the past was somehow cleaner, better, brighter, whatever, than is today! There is no vaccine for what was once known as Scarlatina, but antibiotics currently work since it's actually a form of strep infection; however, scarlet fever caused two deaths in 2011, so it is no less deadly now than it was when this fairy tale was written, given the right circumstances.

The doctor, who is rather clueless, advises the parents to burn all the boy's toys. Unless the toys are going to be given to other kids, burning them isn't going to do a darned thing! Does the doctor somehow think that the boy will re-infect himself with his own variety of the bacterium? If no one else became sick, it's run its course in this household. However, this was 1922, and the rabbit is collected up and bagged with the rest of the toys, but there's an escape clause, and it doesn't involve rabbit claws. I'll leave the details to blossom for you as they did for me. To cut a short story shorter, the rabbit rabbits!

I don't have any emotional investment in this story, not having read it as a kid, but I do recommend it. Within its parameters, it was realistic, charming, inventive, warm, and quite remarkable for its time.

Clockwork by Philip Pullman

Title: Clockwork
Author: Philip Pullman
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

Clockwork is a very short-novel - about one hundred pages - and it's the first thing by Pullman that has interested me since I got done with his two trilogies: His Dark Materials, and The Ruby in the Smoke, both of which I loved. Unfortunately, his series seem to be the only things of his that I end-up liking, and this volume was no exception.

It's set in a previous time - a time of the of skilled craftsmen and of creation of clockwork time-pieces. One of these is a man who is on the verge of finishing his apprenticeship and becoming a master, but in order to do this, he was supposed to have created a clockwork figure that would be added to the collection of figures in the town clock. The problem is that he's done no work and has nothing to exhibit. Now on the eve of his disgrace, he's in a bar with his friend, who happens to be a story-teller.

His friend tells the weird tale of the time the Prince went hunting in the mountains one snowy night with his young brother and a certain other gentleman. On page 77 we read the confusing description where "...two nights later..." - that is, two nights after the prince left "...three nights before..." he returns! This made zero sense to me. If he left three nights before, how can he return only two nights later?

But that's a minor problem. What returns is the sled with the prince mechanically driving the exhausted horses - mechanically because it turns out he's dead, and the only thing which kept his whip hand moving was a clockwork mechanism which someone had placed in his chest.

Right at the point where the story teller is revealing that the count never returned on the sled, the count himself comes into the bar, which precipitates everyone else leaving in panic. The only ones to remain were the about-to-be-disgraced clock-maker and the count himself.

Thus begins the tale, and it wasn't disastrous, but it was a bit boring with nothing of great import and certainly nothing engrossing happening. It's a very short novel, which is the only reason I bothered to finish it, but that does nothing to improve the overall quality. I can't recommend this one.

Snow White and the 77 Dwarfs by Davide Cali

Title: Snow White and the 77 Dwarfs
Author: Davide Cali
Publisher: Tundra
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!

Entertainingly Illustrated by Raphaelle Barbanegre (no website found).

This children's book is hilarious - and a lot more realistic than Disney would have it, let's face it! Snow is on the run from the evil witch, and as in the traditional story, takes up with a bunch of dwarfs (not dwarves - perish the thought!). The problem is that there are not seven of them, but seventy-seven!

Snow is, of course happy to pitch in and do her share, but her share is way out of proportion to her keep, methinks. She has to prepare 77 breakfasts, and then and equal number of lunches for the dwarfs to take to work. She has to prepare 77 evening meals, and wash 77 platters and 77 mugs (of interesting variety) afterwards.

"So what?" you might ask, any competent kitchen employee can breeze through that! But then she has to brush 77 beards and read 77 different bedtime stories. Well Snow isn't dumb, and she is looking increasingly frazzled, so it isn't long before she decides to vacate the premises rather smartly and take her chances with the evil witch. Surely that has to be better than this, right?

There's a twist to the end of this story and it probably isn't one you think it is - not if you think like me at any rate. I loved this story. It was highly original despite it being an old, old story, and rib-ticklingly told. This is Snow White for the feminist era, a ship Disney is only just learning to climb aboard, and I recommend it.

Cinderella Fables Are Forever Volume Two by Chris Robertson

Title: Cinderella Fables Are Forever Volume Two
Author: Chris Robertson
Publisher: Warner Bros (DC Comics)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art work: Shawn McManus.
Coloring: Lee Loughridge.
Lettering: Todd Klein.

Writer Chris Robertson has apparently been fired from DC comics after he made some comments about their treatment of story creators! This is what happens when you go with Big Publishing™ This is why self-publishing is the only way to go these days. Maintain complete control over your work. Own it. Do not let it be diluted. The time when you work for the company which also owns the house you live in and the company store where you have to buy all your food and goods are long, LONG gone. So is it time to boycott DC? I think maybe it is.

That said, this comic (which I got from the library, I hasten to add!) was worth a read, but I think it's going to be the last one in this series that I do read. It bordered on being annoyingly repetitive because it was the continuing story of the battle between Cinderella and Dorothy Gale (yes, that Dorothy, who sure as heck is hell isn't in Kansas anymore), but it actually fell short of being annoying.

Evidently Cindy and Dottie have a long a checkered history, all of which is violent. Now Dottie has a powerful grudge against Cindy, and she also has those slippers - not the ruby ones, but the silver ones - which give her some rather startling powers, one of which surprised me delightfully, although when I thought about it at the end of this story, it made no sense!

So this is a story of repeated battles between the two, most of which are in flashback, but it was done well and not irritatingly, and the art work - which is old-style comic book for the nostalgic fans among us - is good and covers the page. Artist Shawn McManus evidently loves trees as much as I do. Note that there's continued violence and exploitative depictions of females throughout - in short, it's a standard comic.

The lettering once again was small, so you really need to read this in print form. In ebook form it would be illegible unless you have a really big screen, or you don't mind enlarging it and then fondling the screen repetitively to see the various blurbs. In short I recommend this, I just don't recommend the publisher which is Vertigo, which is owned by DC, which is owned by Warner Bros. Borrow it from the library like I did!

Fairest: Levanna's Story by Marissa Meyer

Title: Fairest: Levanna's Story
Author: Marissa Meyer
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
On page 89 Channery's drink is bright orange, yet on page 90 it’s poppy-colored? That doesn't mean orange to me.

This one felt to me like it was going to be one of those filler books written by authors of series, who’ve made extensive notes and didn’t want to waste them. Normally I will not read these, but I loved the first book, Cinder in this quadrilogy – which I guess is now a pentalogy. I found the next two, Scarlett, and Cress disappointing. I plan on reading the final one this fall, hoping it will be better. What I didn’t expect is how surprisingly good this was. It felt like I was back in volume one, reading a real and interesting story that made sense and had smart characters who did real things. It was not at all like the last two volumes were, and it was really quite unexpected. I am glad I took a chance on it.

The story takes off with Levana and her sister Channery “mourning” the death of their parents, although neither misses them. Levana is very spoiled, bratty and resentful. Channery, completely devoid of empathy or any sort of feeling, becomes queen, and Levana falls for the one of the palace guards. After his wife dies in childbirth, Levana uses mind-control on the guard to ‘force” him to love her, and then to force him to marry her.

The strange thing is that after three years or so, he doesn't exactly love her – but he has stayed with her. The problem is that no matter how much she gets, for Levana it's never enough, and her childhood was so rotten that she can never let down her guard, not even with her own husband. Levana has spent all her life learning to use her “glamor" to hide her true disfigured appearance from everyone, and even now she will not even trust her husband to see it.

When Channery unexpectedly dies, Levana is appointed regent until Channery’s own daughter, Selene, reaches age thirteen, when she will become queen, but Levana has other plans, and none of them involve giving-up the throne. Levana is pure evil, but the evil seems to be impulsive - so that after she's perpetrated it, she feels regret, but not enough regret to stop being evil!

This makes for a nice little story (only a couple of hundred pages), and it was a refreshing entertainment after the disappointments of the middle two children in the main quartet. I recommend it. It's taken a bit of the sour taste out of my mouth for the upcoming finale.

Fairest: Of Mice and Men by Marc Andreyko

Title: Fairest: Of Mice and Men
Author: Marc Andreyko
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely illustrated by Shawn McManus.

I picked this up in the library because it looked really interesting, and I was not disappointed. Unfortunately, this is book four in a series, which I didn’t realize until after I’d read it. It did give me the distinct impression that it was part of something ongoing, but that said, it was possible to enjoy this without having read the earlier stories – although now I really want to read those earlier ones!

I always appreciate a story with a strong female characters, and this one has them in droves. By strong female character I don’t necessarily mean one who can literally kick ass, although those are fine; I mean characters who are self-motivated, independent, and who don’t wilt away. They don’t need men, but are happy to have them around, and they can take care of business, which is actually what they’re primarily focused upon.

In this aptly-named tale, rodents (which look like rats to me, so I’m going to refer to them as rats!) are human-sized and intent upon assassinating various lead females in the series, but those females are not going down without a fight. In fact, they’re not going down at all, and the fight goes right back to the rats, which are routinely defeated. The big question is where these rats are coming from? Who is behind this bizarre rat infestation?

I don’t know how you feel about rats, but I love them. My wife has kept pairs of pet females rats for some time and I absolutely adore them. They’re lovable and hilarious, and so tame. Once you get them home and acclimatized to you and your smell, they are more than willing to climb all over you, ride around on your shoulder, climb up your pants leg, and eat out of your hand. They love to scamper around on the floor investigating everything, but will come when you call them – usually. But I digress!

One of the most interesting characters for me got short shrift here – it was one of the ‘evil step-sisters’ and she was totally kick-ass. Hopefully I can learn more about her by reading other volumes in this series. In addition to her, there were lots of other interesting characters, including a blue guy from Indian mythology (that’s India, not native American) with whom I wasn’t familiar. We met the three blind mice, and a fairy godmother.

The art work was gorgeous in this volume: colorful, well delineated, evocative, lively, and very functional. It was a real pleasure both to read and to look at. I recommend this.

Stitching Snow by RC Lewis

Title: Stitching Snow
Author: RC Lewis
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
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.

Rooted in the Snow White fairy tale, this is a first person PoV story, a format which is often irritating to me. Why YA authors seem to be in such a deep and inescapable rut in that they're forced to write 1PoV after 1PoV I know not, but I wish they would abandon it. As it happens, in this case, it was quite readable!

The first problem I did have was that this is such a sad rip-off of Marissa Meyers's Cinder that I was ducking in case there might be low-flying lawsuits zooming overhead as I read it!

• Based on an old fairy tale? Check.
• Sci-fi setting? Check.
• Space travel? Check.
• Princess in hiding? Check.
• Secret princess is mechanic? Check.
• Secret princess is not well-loved by those around her? Check.
• Secret princess has additional secret? Check.
• Secret princess has goofy droid side-kick? Check.
• Secret princess has maniacal queen seeking her death? Check.
• Secret princess has trope sappy love interest? Check.
• Yawn? Check.

It's hard to imagine a worse male "love" interest than the lackluster and ultimately useless prince in Cinder, but here I have to say that Lewis wins hands-down in her creation of a significantly more obnoxious male than Meyer did. Whereas Cinder's prince was merely flat and completely ineffectual, the male character here is a domineering stalker who refuses to let the main female character breathe. He follows her around continually, muscling in on her life and taking control of it from her, relegating her to a back seat, and owning her in a way that Meyers's limp prince couldn't begin to orchestrate.

One thing I liked up-front is that it begins at full tilt, the way a cracking good adventure story ought. Unfortunately, it trips up far too quickly. Essie is a mechanic just like Cinder, who in this case works on robotics on an icy planet named Thanda. For extra cash, she cage-fights at night, and she's very good at it despite not being the biggest and strongest. Right after her fight, as she leaves the bar to head home and sees a long-range shuttle come in too fast and crash-land nearby. Inside is a guy about her own age, of course.

This is what brought me to a screeching halt. Obviously it's the 'required' love interest (although why it's required is a really good question), but will it lead to something bearable, or to such a clichéd trope that it will make me completely nauseated? The answer to that came very quickly and it was the wrong answer for me.

When people talk about a strong female character, authors too frequently make the mistake of thinking that 'strong' equates with 'physical'. It can equate with physical, but that should never be all it equates with, and I have to ask right here: what's the point of portraying a physically imposing female character if your plan is to do no more with her than subjugate her to a man via the sad YA trope of INSTADORE!™?

It's disheartening how often writers, and disturbingly, all-too-many female writers, focus with blinkered precision solely on the physical. They either make their character 'strong' by showing that they can kick some guy's (or girl's) ass, or they make their character impossibly beautiful and that becomes, no matter how unbecoming, the entirety of how she's defined for the rest of the novel. Forget what's behind that pretty brow; it's never important, so they want us to believe! I don't play that game.

Another common mistake is the one which Lewis expertly demonstrates here: show your main character to be a mechanic for example, which is a really good move, then show her to be a cage fighter, which is a highly questionable move, but it makes her strong, right? The problem is that the author then proceeds to bring in your standard YA trope male, who from that point onwards completely overwhelms and dominates the female, thereby wiping away everything you've established for your main girl, and showing that really, she's nothing but a weak and dependent juvenile, and no "strong female" at all. Barf.

The boy is from a neighboring planet named Garam (the third habitable planet in the system is named Windsong), and his journey was not registered, which makes his appearance - a young guy flying a long-range shuttle, and coming in without any immigration data available - a mystery, but the mystery isn't sufficient.

What I found to be a bigger mystery is why Essie had no interest in stripping the shuttle for components. She's supposed to be a mechanic. She fixes robots (of which she has seven, get it?) and mining drones, and only a short time before, she'd expressed a wish to get new components. Now here was a prize in the form of an off-planet shuttle which she could have stripped for parts, and that never even crosses her mind, no matter how idly? Not likely.

The second sour note sounded as soon as the new arrival announced his name: Dane. Seriously? She has to be 'Essie' sounding like a girlie-girl chambermaid in some Brit period drama, but he gets to be manly, trope, forceful alpha-male 'Dane'? It was obvious right then how this would go down. Why do writers do this to their female characters? There definitely seems to be a self-destructive impulse in all-too-many female YA authors and it runs rife in Stitching Snow, I'm sorry to report.

Dane announces that he's on a treasure hunt, but not the kind Essie thinks he is. He's not interested in the merinium (unobtainium anyone?!) which is mined on Thanda, but he doesn't specify what he is interested in, and Essie is so inexplicably incurious that she doesn't pursue it. It's pretty obvious that the treasure he's seeking is actually Essie herself. She does have an obscure past which she seeks to hide, after all....

I have no idea what merinium is supposed to be, but this is a common problem in sci-fi - the 'sci' gets short-changed at the expense of the 'fi'. Judging by the -ium suffix, it's a metal, but often that particular suffix is used to signify a non-silicate mineral rather than an element as such, in novels and movies. The problem is that every element is known to science; even the unknown ones are at predictable places on the periodic table of the elements and the overwhelming bulk of them at the high end (those above lead) are unstable to one extent or another, some having a life of only milliseconds once artificially created. There's nothing out there that's totally brand new to physics in terms of the configuration of matter, but let's let this one go since it's actually a compound which includes the excrement from a species of rock-eating worm....

One real problem I had was Essie's motivation for helping Dane. She has none and is offered none, yet she starts going out of her way to help, and putting herself at risk in doing so. The scan-scrambler which hid Dane's movements and location should have sent up red flags, yet no one paid it any heed, not even Essie, who is evidently in hiding herself. To make things worse, Essie idiotically IDs where Dane is by doing a search on the net for schematics for the shuttle he traveled in (so she can fix it) and ordering parts for it! Why not send up a red flare into the stratosphere, Essie? Maybe she's not as smart as I'd been hoping she was.

I was only 15% in - on page 51 - before I became so thoroughly disgusted with this novel that I honestly could not continue with it. Dane turns into a stalker, but this is fine with Essie, and it actually turns out to be a good thing because she does indeed prove herself stupid and falls into an icy sinkhole, ending-up having to be rescued by manly Dane. I don't think there's quite enough Promethazine on the continental USA to fight that kind of nauseating experience.

Yeah, let's render our main female protagonist into a maiden in distress and have Sir Dane the Magnificent rescue her, why don't we - and show everyone how completely and utterly worthless, helpless, vulnerable, and useless this cage-fighter truly is? For gods' sakes! So in the space of a handful of pages, we have her stumble into his arms, get stalked by him, fall helplessly into a sink-hole on a planet where she has eight years of experience traveling, and get rescued by the guy who has none. He warns her (the local) about how cold it is out there, and then when he's drying her out, he (the visitor) takes off his coat so she can get naked under it, and he feels no cold whatsoever. Likely? Not really.

Then Dane stalks her all the way back to her shack and she rewards this by allowing him to stay the night, yet she distrusts him so much that she barricades herself into her bedroom! These are not the actions of a normal, balanced person. The next morning, a local troublemaker arrives and Dane opens the door, like he now owns her place, blocking Essie from even answering it while he mouths off to the guy!

Now if Essie has shown herself to be a limp, wilting-violet wuss of a girl, who had repeatedly demonstrated an inability to cope, I could see some merit and value in Dane's actions, but given that he had seen her, just the night before, kick the living bejesus out of this self-same guy, his actions are completely inexplicable as well as inexcusable. I don't need to see any more. This is not the strong female character I'm looking for. Time to move along.

This not only shows that Dane has zero respect for Essie, but that he also has no concept of personal space or boundaries. He evidently is convinced that Essie is no better than a little girl (as indeed her name indicates), and that she needs him to protect her. As if that's not bad enough, her totally compliant behavior and lack of any sort of objection to his running her life shows beyond any doubt that she's quite happy with his treatment of her. I'm sorry but I'm done with this jerk of a leading male, and this deranged excuse for a strong female. This novel is warty. End of story

Reckless by Cornelia Funke

Rating: WARTY!

The second volume in this series is reviewed elsewhere on my blog.

I seem to have a finely-honed skill for picking up a novel that looks interesting and getting it home only to discover that it's part of a series, and it's also not the first in the series. This seems to happen almost routinely with audio books - which are not, in my experience, known for being very forthcoming in this regard (or in any useful regard for that matter).

Anyway, that's what happened here. Fearless is volume 2 in a series referred to as 'Mirrorworld", and which begins with Reckless and ends with Heartless - which is a terribly foreboding title given the subject of volume two! The problem here is that telling me that a volume is a "Mirrorworld novel" is not the same thing as telling me that it's 'Mirrorworld #2'! Big Publishing™ doesn't seem to get simple niceties like that. As Kristen cashore showed admirably with her Graceling and Fire, and Bitterblue series, you can have three novels in the same world, none of which is necessarily or critically dependent upon the others for enjoyment. They're in the same world, and are sequential in a sense, but they're not three episodes of the same story.

All this to explain why the only reason I picked up this novel after reading its sequel, Fearless, unintentionally out of order (and disliking it), was that I very much liked the character of Fox. I wanted to learn of her origins, and of how she and Jacob got together, but after starting the second novel feeling not so much like I was stepping into the middle of things, I started the first novel feeling like this was at least the second in a series and I'd missed the previous volumes! How weird is that? And it told me squat about Fox. Thanks for wasting my precious life, mother Funke.

So yes, the biggest problem I ha with this volume was that I was really disappointed to discover that the entire Fox encounter had been completely bypassed! The first few pages deal with Jacob and Will when they were kids and Jacob first discovered the mirror through which he could pass into an alternate fairy-tale reality. Right after that, a dozen years pass in nothing more than a chapter header, and all the fun stuff has gone by. Instead of finding Jacob and Will exploring the Mirrorworld together and carrying us along with them, Will is already vicariously cursed by Bad Fairy via a Goyl, and is in process of turning into stone, and Jacob is a grown man, already partnered with Fox and searching for a cure. In short, this novel is exactly like the second one, no Wills, very little Fox, and Jacob running around like a headless chicken. I have to say I was truly disappointed.

Both novels make a big deal about Jacob entering this mirror world to track down his father, but at no point in either novel is he ever actually engaged in this pursuit! We get a plethora of references to fun fairy-tale things which Jacob has discovered in his forays, and nary a mention of his forlorn pursuit of dad. That was just dumb. For that matter, we're never treated to any stories of Jacob actually recovering any of these fun fairy-tale items we're repeatedly told he's collected. That's where Funke screws this up.

This novel was really precisely like it's successor (or that precisely like this) in that the only thing Jacob is engaged upon in both volumes is pursuit of a cure. In this volume, the cure is for his brother, and in the next volume the cure is for himself since he screwed up curing his brother and ended up being cursed himself. How many volumes of Jacob the screw-up can one person be expected to read? Well, I exceeded my limit at one and then foolishly went back for another hoping that it would entertain me and allow me to meet a really cool character. But once again I was disappointed. I'm done Funke-ing around with this author.

Fearless by Cornelia Funke

Rating: WARTY!

Audio book Read by Elliot Hill. I review volume one in this trilogy elsewhere on my blog.

You know when I see a novel on the shelf and it says "A Mirrorworld story" that doesn't automatically convey to me that it's part of a sequential series for which you'd be well-advised to track-down volume one before you embark upon any others - and especially not if that same cover doesn't say "Mirrorworld #2" or something along those lines.

What such a note implies to me is that it's set in the same world as other volumes. It implies something like Kristin Cashore's Graceling and Fire, and Bitterblue, where the stories take place in the same world, but you can read them in any order and it makes no difference to your enjoyment. That's a world. If you're going to make them sequential then you really need to put something on your cover to indicate that!

Not that it really mattered here, to any tragic extent, but the bottom line is that words do matter, and I find it as disheartening as it is mind-boggling that the very people who ought to have the best handle on this - novel writers - are so evidently blind to the power and value of words. OTOH, writers typically have nothing whatsoever to do with their covers unless they self-publish, so I guess it comes right back down to Big Publishing™ being one of the most ass-backward, clueless, restrictive, unimaginative and monumentally screwed-up rats' nests of our time.

I'm not a fan of trilogies. Authors and publishers love them of course because it's the easiest and laziest way to milk money from the public, but I think they're way overdone and merely serve to stretch out a novel which could have been related quite thrillingly (or at least satisfactorily) in one volume, into something that's unwieldy and often frustrating or even boring. Case in point, the volume under scrutiny right here.

I was rather less than impressed with this volume. Clearly there's a history that you miss when entering this without reading volume one, but I really didn't feel like it was a hindrance - like I was missing anything. There was a lot of referencing of vol 1, but there didn't seem to be any understanding of what was going on here which was stymied (yes, stymied!) by my not having been there and done that. This story could be taken as a stand-alone.

The problem I had with it was that it was overly long, and rather dense, tedious, and rambling. I didn't like the main character, Jacob at all. He seemed too preoccupied and self-centered. Yes, he had some reason to be given his condition, but even so! Jacob is obviously a Grimm who isn't called Grimm (though that's precisely what he is: grim), but who is called Reckless for reasons which go unexplained here (and in the previous volume).

Jacob's problem is that he carries a dark fairy curse in the visible form of a moth on his chest - one which is in process of eating his heart out in six bites (one for each letter of the fairy's name), after which it will fly away taking his life with it. I have no idea what this means. Clearly it isn't literally eating his heart because after a couple of bites he would bleed out and die. Nonetheless, the moth sits there looking like a tattoo, garnering for itself a new wing-spot with each slow bite it takes, and engendering ever more pain as it eats. Dark fairies love them some pain, evidently.

My problem is that I didn't care. I initially thought that maybe I would have cared had I read the first volume, but no - I went back and read the first and was just as disappointed and disillusioned with that as I was with this one. This volume is what I have to deal with. Indeed, the only character I enjoyed and cared about was Jacob's companion Celeste, referred to as Fox for most of the story. She's a human who was evidently granted the ability to become a Vixen. Jacob met her in vol 1 when she was hardly more than a child, and he rescued her from a trap when she was in her fox form. Since then they've been companions.

Fox I found really intriguing, but she gets hardly any air-time here. Instead we get all Jacob all the time, pretty much, searching fruitlessly for a solution to his problem, running out of options, and largely ignoring everyone and everything else, including Fox. He doesn't even tell her what his problem is, so how close can they be? Yet Funke expects us to buy that there's a budding romance here.

Being a Grimm, sorry, a Reckless, Jacob has a brother named Will. Will had a curse upon him that Jacob saved him from in vol 1, by speaking the dark fairy's name, hence his own curse. The fact that Will isn't even in this story (I don't count the brief encounter at the beginning), and that his brother is dying, struck me as callous at best and evil at worst on Will's part. He evidently doesn't know about Jacob's curse - I guess he's thinks he was magically saved, but how close can these brothers be if they don't share these things? How dumb is Will exactly that he thinks his salvation cost nothing?

Both novels make a big deal about Jacob entering this mirror world to track down his father, but at no point in either novel is he ever actually engaged in this pursuit! We get a plethora of references to fun fairy-tale things which Jacob has discovered in his forays, and nary a mention of his forlorn pursuit of dad. That was just dumb. For that matter, we're never treated to any stories of Jacob actually recovering any of these fun fairy-tale items we're repeatedly told he's collected. That's where Funke screws this up.

I quickly tired of Jacob's non-stop wandering, poking around, and his endless failures. I could not become enamored of the story, and I have no desire to read volume three. Curiously, however, I was impressed enough by Fox that I decided I wanted to read volume one to learn her story, but while I'm reckless enough to do so, I'm not fearless. I fear that it will not impress me any more than this volume did. Is that heartless? As it happened, volume one tells us nothing of her either, so that was a waste of time, too.

Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr

Title: Ink Exchange
Author: Melissa Marr
Publisher: Recorded books
Rating: WARTY!

Read by Nick Landrum on Recorded books, and I was not impressed by his voice. He just seemed wrong for this story.

This novel is a literal fairy tale, and I've had mixed experiences with these. The more they cling to trope - for example in using obscure Gaelic names and larding them up with Celtic or pseudo-Celtic folklore - the more I tend to dislike them. This one is the second in a series (which wasn't clear to me when I picked it up on close-out at a bookstore), but it's not a simple sequel to the first! It's implied that it can be read as a stand-alone, but it really can't because it's so dependent upon what went before that it's not really independent. The fact is that it really is a sequel: even though it focuses on other characters, there is still a host of hold-overs from the first volume popping-up here.

One of these is Aislinn, but her name is pronounced Ashlynn, except that Landrum reads it as Ashling (at least that's how it sounds to me when he says it). If this novel was set in Ireland, or if it were set a thousand years ago, I could see that working, but what are the odds of your common-or-garden American family not only naming their child Ashlynn, but also both spelling and pronouncing it the Gaelic way? Yes, it could happen, but is it likely? No. That struck a really false note for me.

As if this isn't enough annoyance, there's an all-but-literal parade of characters who pop up, one after another, quickly disappear, and then pop up again later after you've forgotten them. It's as irritating as it is confusing trying to try to remember who is whom. Maybe if you've read the previous volume it would be easier. In addition to that, we have a character called Gabriel, but Gabriel isn't his name, it's his title! And we have hounds, who are not actually hounds - they're faeries. Or is it fae? Because people who write these novels are typically (and hilariously) far too embarrassed by their chosen genre to actually call them what they are: fairies. They somehow think we'll take this more seriously if we adopt the rather biblical directive to take an 'e' for an 'i'.

That said, this novel started out not too badly. It was only after we were properly introduced to the main character, Lesley, that it started to go downhill. Lesley lives in god-awful circumstances. Her mother left the home and never came back. Her father is an alcoholic, and her brother a drug addict who once drugged Lesley and offered her body to his friends in payment for something or other. Yes, she was raped, but she seems to be 'all better' now. I say it like that, because this horrible event seems to have had little impact upon her, despite her repeatedly referencing it.

Now I'm no female, although I play one on TV (I'm kidding!), and fortunately for me, I've never been raped, so I honestly cannot (nor would I want to) pretend to know how this might feel; however, I have had times when I've been scared and made to feel badly uncomfortable, so I do have an indirect insight into this sort of emotion. Everyone is going to react differently to an experience like this, and one person will take a longer or shorter time to get to grips with it in whatever way works for them than will another.

If Lesley truly is as 'over it' (as she's portrayed here), then more power to her, but for me, her free-and-easy approach to everything, and in particular to being around strange guys just struck me as being a little bit too free-and-easy to lend her back-story much verisimilitude. It seemed unrealistic to me, and that's all I'm going to say on this topic. Hopefully others (who know more about what they're talking about here than I do!) will weigh in on this and give us a better and more rounded picture.

The thing which really seemed absurd to me about her, is her obsession with getting a tattoo, as though it would magically change her life. Yes, in this context, it does quite literally and magically change her life, but she can't have known that a priori. She wants to get away from her home and take charge of her life, which is great, but she already has a plan: to go to college, and in the near future, too. That's smart and commendable, but given that, my problem is: why then does she still feel that she needs something more? And if she does, why is it that she feels a tattoo will fix everything?

What bothered me is that we're offered no justification for this attitude. It's like she has the mentality of a thirteen-year-old or something, not a woman on the cusp of adulthood which, given her experiences and her life so far, she's been long qualified for. This just struck a false note: what, the author couldn't think of a better way to get her tattooed? This is of course, a must if the story is going anywhere, but this clunky set-up was bad and made me lose respect for the main character, which is never a good game for an author to bring to a story.

But even if I accept all of this and find nothing to criticize in it, I'm still not over the worst problem with this novel which is that it is absolutely and unquestionably boring. We get page after page - chapter after chapter - of nothing happening. Hum-drum, meaningless, boring conversation going nowhere. Non-events. Fairy meetings and plans which never go anywhere. "Bad fairy" Iriel - or whatever spelling - (who should have been named 'Irritate') ridiculously salivating over his human. It's tedious in the extreme. There is no story here.

I don't get this supernatural obsession with humans which is the hallmark of every story of this nature, and it doesn't matter if the story is about werewolves, or demons, or vampires, or fairies: every last one of 'em is obsessed with jumping humans' bones. Why is that? I don't frequent these genres, but in the ones I've read, I've ever encountered one that I recall which justifies this obsession in any way. It's just accepted. Yet these are, for example with vampires, the sleekest, sexiest, fastest, strongest, most beautiful beings there are, and they obsess over taking a human to bed (or just taking them, period)? It makes no sense. That would be like us obsessing over jumping some chimpanzee's bones. Yeah, maybe there are some people like that, but it's sure not the norm, much less an obsession. It's the same with angels. I mean what could be more angelic than an angel, and yet these creatures obsess over flawed, homely humans? It makes zero sense.

Marr does offer some justification, but it's for the wrong thing. These fairies feed on humans in some ethereal way, but this still fails to account for a fairy falling in love with one of us. I mean you can love your pet, but unless you're seriously depraved, you don't actually want to marry it and have sex. The story I would like to read is the one which accounts for these things and makes that account believable. Instead what we get are tired and tedious trope tales from YA writers about supernaturally beautiful and powerful men making young girls do their bidding.

I honestly have to ask why they're lining up to write these sick stories. More than this, though, I'd like to know what's going through the mind of a girl who buys these stories. Does she really want to be overpowered by a man who will compel her to do his will? I seriously hope not. So more than what it tells us about the authors, what does it say about the state of mind of the readership? And in the light of Lesley's experience in this novel, what message does this carry to boys - who for the most part, don't avidly read this kind of novel, but who can't be blind to the fact that girls swallow them voraciously. Are these boys getting a message that if they look appealing enough and say the right words, they can overpower a girl and bend her to their will? Shame on such authorship.

This novel is trash, period.

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Title: Ella Enchanted
Author: Gail Carson Levine who also illustrated the print book
Publisher: Listening library
Rating: WARTY!

This is another movie/book tie-in. You can read the movie review in the movie section of my blog. This audio book was read by Eden Riegel who does a completely amazing job. I don't know how old she was when she recorded this but Riegel sounds perfect for the main character who is, be warned, much younger throughout this novel than ever she was in the movie (barring the first few scenes). The voice is a little bit sugary or flowery, so it might put some people off, but I liked it.

This novel is quite different from the movie - or more accurately, they changed things a lot when they turned this novel into a movie, and they made a better job of it in my opinion. This is sad, because I really enjoyed the first disk, finding it amazingly entertaining, and feeling as though I would be giving this novel a worthy rating, but after that first disk it went down hill. Unlike the movie, the novel follows the original fairy tale quite closely in many regards, including the glass slipper finale (which probably wasn't actually glass, but fur in the original fairy tale).

The Ella in the novel is considerably younger than the one played by Anne Hathaway. The novel is also quite different from the movie in how it tells this story. Ella is friends with the young Prince Char (Charmont) from childhood - they are never 'rivals' or in contest as depicted in the movie. Ella also spends some considerable time in "Finishing School" - sent there by her father - before she finally decides she has to locate Lucinda.

She is cursed with obedience at an early age and realizes at a later age that her curse would also be a curse for Char if she were ever to marry him, allowing anyone to take advantage of him and his riches or even to assassinate him if they so chose, using her as a tool to do so. In the end, she finally finds the wherewithal to refuse to marry him in order to protect him, and thereby breaks the curse.

The problem with the story is that while it was immensely entertaining and inventive for the duration of first disk (of five), it became really tedious thereafter, with nothing of interest or of entertainment value occurring at all - not for me, anyway. That's why I can't give it a worthy rating. 20% entertainment doth not a novel make!

How to Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier

Title: How to Ditch Your Fairy
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WORTHY!

There are at least two covers for this novel. The one I depict here isn't the one on the library book that I got, but it is the best one. Finally a publisher gets it right, after totally blowing it with the other loser cover (which I now unfortunately have to carry around with me in public as I read this...!).

I got interested in Larbalestier after I'd read about the so-called YA Mafia and read the air-headed 'response' by Holly Black (fortunately for her, I've favorably reviewed three of her novels: White Cat, Red Glove, and Black Heart, so she's safe from me for now!). Larbalestier (bizarre name! It's pronounced lar-bal-est-ee-air) was mentioned in tandem with Black's and I have nothing on her, so I decided I'd better get some dirt! I'm not a fan of (literal) fairy tales, although I confess I've favorably reviewed one this year, so it's odd that I'd pick this one, but the title won me over; then the novel did, too.

This book is written in Australian, which may sound like English, but it really isn’t! Plus, Larbalestier appears to have created her own lexicon of teen terms, so it’s hard (for me at least) to know how much of this is common Australian slang and how much she just made up. Either way it’s hilarious. Here's a partial glossary:

• Dobbing - ratting out, tattle-tale-ing
• Doos - sweet, good, positive, pleasurable
• Doxy - the polar opposite of doos
• Inside her self/his self - self-obsessed, narcissistic, self-important
• On the nose - smelly
• Pulchritudinous, pulchy (and other variations) - gorgeous, adorable, desirable
• Torpid - dumb

The joke in this novel is that most everyone has an invisible undetectable fairy who gives them an edge in one thing or another, but the edge you get is random and rather whimsical. Some people, for example have a fairy which grants them luck in buying doos clothes at rock-bottom prices. Another has a fairy which attracts of around her own age. There are loose-change-finding fairies and good-hair fairies. The main character of this novel, who isn't old-enough to drive, has a fairy which can find parking spaces anywhere at any time, which means she's frequently kidnapped just so others can avail themselves of her talent. This is important for what happens later, and indeed for one of her motivations in the story. I do, however, have a theory that this fairy business is all in the mind of the befuddled, and there really are no fairies in this world, just blind, gullible belief in them. What? Me, wrong? Never!

This novel is many more things than it seems on the surface. It’s a dystopian teen novel that's rather more subtle than your typical dystopian YA story. It’s a satire on being a teen and on growing up, and it’s a satire on religion, gullibility, and other blind beliefs, with some elements of Catch-22 tossed in and mixed with Frances Hardinge. It’s also a comedy and a wry commentary on hero-worship and blind micro-patriotism, with a nod-and-a-wink to Disney's Freaky Friday tossed in for good measure, except that here it’s fairy-swapping rather than person swapping.

Charlotte Adel Donna Seto Steele is a young adult named Charlie who lives in New Avalon and attends an obsessive-compulsive sports school, where discipline is beyond strict. The children who attend the school accept the discipline because discipline (although not at this wack-a-loon level!) is an integral part of sports. There are 811 infractions, each of which merits a demerit if you're caught. If you accumulate enough demerits, you’re suspended from your next game, and further infractions could lead to expulsion from the school altogether. About a fifth of the student body has been expelled for this reason. You can get demerits for running in the hallways, for being late for class, for not being early enough for an event even if you're not late for the event, for not wearing correct attire for the sport you're doing, for not wearing clean attire, for wearing on the nose attire, for kissing, for talking, and for having your tie in disarray!

When Charlie's demerit level climbs dangerously to eight, she earns her first missed game and is effectively forced into long hours of community service (cleaning up a grave yard in her case!) in order to try and wipe out the demerits. Her two besties, Sandra Leigh Petaculo, and Rochelle, stage an "intervention"! In turn, this necessitates her visiting her arch-enemy's home to meet her fairy-wise parents. Since Charlie's ambition is to rid herself of her parking fairy (that's why she walks everywhere - she believes that if the fairy - which makes Charlie smell of gasoline - becomes bored, Charlie will be rid of her). Her arch-enemy is called Stupid-Name (but is really Fiorenze Burnham-Stone). Given Fiorenze's behavior towards Charlie, this arch-enemy stuff is entirely in Charlie's head and eventually, Charlie realizes this. Fiorenze is also on community service, but we’re not told why. She works pulling weeds and collecting trash at the graveyard with Charlie and the two of them end up having their first conversation there.

Each chapter begins with Charlie's score to date, starting out merely by detailing her days spent walking rather than riding, the number of times she's talked with Steffi, aka Stefan, who is the guy she likes in school, her demerits, and her doos clothing acquisition (which is zero). This list grows somewhat, and the reported numbers change as the story progresses. Chapter 20, for example, begins:

Days Walking: 68
Demerits: 4
Conversations with Steffi: 9
Game suspensions: 1
Public service Hours: 16
Hours spent enduring Fiorenze
   Stupid name's company: 2.75
Kidnappings thwarted: 1
Number of Steffi kisses: 2
Fights with Steffi: 1

Stefan is from a different town, and so acts as a bit of an intermediary for the reader with Charlie's life and the decidedly odd society in which she lives (and I get the impression that her city is a special case, where people are rather different from all other populations). Of course, Stefan is sucked into Fiorenze's sphere of influence because of her boy-attracting fairy, so we’re told, but the lie to this is given when he and she break-up, get together, break-up in repeated cycles.

When I'd read a third of this and had decided, barring disaster, that I would be favorably reviewing this novel, I sought out a bunch of negative reviews to see if I'd missed something, and I was rather disturbed to find that the bulk of the negative reviews - where they actually said something other than a two-sentence whine that they didn't like it - just did not appear to have paid attention to what they were reading, because their reviews were way off base, complaining about things that are not in the novel at all, or that are incidental to where this novel was going. I don’t think they grasped that this isn't a novel about fairies, it’s a novel about a young teenage girl finding her way in the world and learning to stand on her own feet.

For example, one reviewer said that Charlie had no motivation other than ridding herself of her 'fairy', when it was repeatedly made clear that her life was sports, and she wanted to be a professional - that's why she was attending the sports school. Duhh! Another complained about the 'fake teen lingo' and then used some rather bizarre lingo of their own! Another review began with a whine that this book isn’t meant for adult enjoyment! Wow! I never would have thought such a thing of a novel which is clearly identified as young-adult novel! One reviewer accused Justine Larbalestier or trying to create 'British slang'. I'm sorry but if you're too torpid to grasp that Larbalestier is Australian, and this has nothing to do with British slang, then that's an automatic eight demerits and you're on the bench for the next novel!

One reviewer claimed that academics in this story write books by hand and then keep them locked away unpublished! No! The truth is that one academic (Fiorenze's mother, Tamsin, who was explicitly described as an oddball in the novel itself) wrote one book by hand and kept that locked away. If a reviewer is going to outright lie - or at best review a novel with such a poor recollection - why in hell should I pay any attention to such a review?! Another reviewer completely went overboard, accusing Larbalestier of misleading young girls by suggesting that they could change! I am not making this up. This deluded individual went on to pretty much state outright that young girls cannot change and shouldn't even try! I guess he thinks young women must stay in traditional roles and not even, for example, aspire to doing anything we manly men do! Why even bother growing up? Stay a subservient little girl, it’s all you can do! I can't even begin to (politely) describe the wrong-headedness of a clueless opinion like that. Clearly all reviews of the nature of the ones I've mentioned above can be completely disregarded. Having thus satisfied my curiosity, I moved on!

Charlie's dream of dispatching her fairy post-haste took a hit when she visited Tamsin Burnham-Stone. My own theory seemed to take a hit too, because Tamsin surrounded Charlie with mirrors and got her to see her "aura" which was a double one. Tamsin interpreted this to mean that Charlie's original parking fairy was fading, and about to be replaced by a new "proto-fairy". She advised Charlie to continue expelling the parking fairy, but also to try encouraging the new fairy by doing things to welcome it. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer any of Charlie's questions, or tell her what the proto-fairy might be, or how it could be encouraged.

However, I stick to my theory! Even assuming that Tamsin could see auras and wasn't just delusional (and deluding Charlie into the bargain), this really means that what she was telling Charlie was that she's the master (mistress?!) of her own destiny - no one else. If Charlie encourages the right "fairy" (read: attitude), she can be whatever she wants. I suspected that Tamsin's locked-away book tells exactly this story, which is why she's afraid to publish it and rob people of their fairy-tales. Was I right? You'll have to read this novel to find out!

Although the first kidnap attempt upon Charlie is thwarted, the second assault succeeds. Danders Anders, the massive deranged jock grabs her and uses her to find an ace space right in front of an apartment block that he needs to visit. We have no idea why, and even less idea why Charlie doesn't report him. Given how pro-active she is on tackling her fairy issue, and how furious she is about being kidnapped (not because she's been kidnapped per se, but because she's been forced to ride in a car, thereby reactivating her all-but-dormant fairy), Charlie's behavior now is rather contradictory.

This is where this novel almost left the rails rather for me. At first blush, her acceptance of the kidnapping made no sense within Charlie's framework, although it did provide a powerful impetus for Charlie to take up the next offer she gets from Fiorenze, which is to to sneak in and take a look at her mother's hand-written book while Tamsin is away at a conference. When I thought about this a bit, I realized that it does fit within the framework, because Charlie knows full-well that she'd probably get a demerit for dobbing if she did report it. I mean how many times has she reported boys who are overly amorous towards her and got in trouble for excessive whining? So yes, this does make sense in that context.

What Charlie and Fiorenze learn is a trick using salt and incised thumbs, undertaken in darkness, which will result in them swapping their fairies, each one for the other's, but you know as well as I do that it's not going to be that easy! And that's enough spoilers. I recommend this novel.

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

Title: The School for Good and Evil
Author: Soman Chainani
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WORTHY!

So after all the ebook authors who have dot com websites, now I have a hardback author who has a dot net! I loved that! So I've never heard of this guy before, and I found this book purely by accident at the library, on the "New" shelf. This, of course, merely means that the novel could have been published any time in the last four freaking years (they also have Sapphire Blue on that shelf! It doesn't mean that the novel is new: just that it's new to this library!

This is one of the most charmingly-written books I've read in a long time, and it starts out perfectly. The novel is about the fortunes and misfortunes of Agatha and Sophie, two extremely disparate friends who live in the extraordinarily isolated village of Gavaldon, surrounded by an impenetrable forest - well, it’s penetrable, but everyone who has gone in there trying to find a way through it has inevitably ended-up right back at Gavaldon - assuming they made it back at all.

Life in Gavaldon would seem idyllic, but there is a shadow over it. Every four years the 'schoolmaster' arrives in the night, and takes two children who miraculously later reappear, but not as children in the village: as characters in a fairytale which anonymously arrives on the door-step of the local bookseller at random times. Now you see what I meant about it being idyllic: it has a book shop and no distractions from reading the books!

Talking of shadows, Sophie has her own: she's unhappy because she just knows she's a good and real princess who deserves much more than she can expect in this little village. Indeed, her friendship with Agatha arose only because she wanted to do a good deed, any good deed, and chose Agatha as her victim. But it became much more than that. Agatha, because of her rough appearance, is shunned by pretty-much everyone except Sophie. The entire village thinks she's a witch. Sophie's dad barricades his daughter into her room on the night the schoolmaster is expected, but she pries her way out because she wants to be taken into the fairy tale world to become a princess. Agatha doesn’t believe in this schoolmaster crap until she sees a gnarled shadow that night, heading for Sophie's house. This shadow belongs to one of the most reticent, but important characters in the whole novel.

She races after it to rescue her friend, but both are caught up and bustled off to The School for Good and Evil. Unfortunately, from both their perspectives, there seems to be a mix-up: Sophie finds herself deposited into the evil side of the school, and Agatha into the good side. They both protest vehemently, but to no avail. When they finally kick and fuss, and run and side-step, and manage to meet on the bridge over the lake (good side) / moat (bad side) which divides the two branches of the school, there's an impassable barrier which prevents Agatha from saving Sophie, or Sophie from escaping to the side she knows must be right for her. Even when by subterfuge they manage to switch sides, they suddenly find themselves magically back on their original side again. It seems there is no escape. But there is.

Everyone can plainly see that both of them are (it would seem) quite evidently out of place, but no one seems either willing or able to do anything about it, and as if that wasn't bad enough, when Sophie and Agatha finally do meet, at the welcome assembly, and the princes come prancing in, it’s Agatha, and not Sophie, who (accidentally, to boot) catches the rose which Prince Tedros (son of King Arthur) tosses! This is, of course, before she decks him and gives him a black eye when they later meet, and she sets fire to an entire school tower! Tedros is a complete loser who deserves everything he gets, and is very much the paragon of Disney animation.

There is an apparently all-important question which the schoolmaster asks the two girls to resolve in order to be free: "What's the one thing evil can never have…and the one thing good can never do without?", and the answer is rather trite and disappointing, but it's resolved in a very unexpected manner. The manner in which it's answered is perfect, and I confess I was seriously hoping it would go this way, but in all honesty doubted that Chainani would have the guts and vision to go there. He did, and I love him for it!. Actually, you'd know the answer if only you’d been foresighted enough to buy my book Poem y Granite and read the poem on page 140! Hah!

So the last thing you need to expect from this novel is the expected, and I can say that with a certainty because I've finished reading this now, and my opinion is unchanged from what it began as: this novel is simply one of the best I've ever read. I've looked at some adverse criticism of the novel to see if I missed something other critics might have spotted, and I really didn't. It's anyone's choice, of course, whether they like a novel or not, but I have to say that a lot of those who are low-rating this novel do show seriously skewed views of what it was, what it was about, and what it tried to do. One silly criticism was that the characters were shallow and black and white. I disagree with that, because the two main protagonists were about as nuanced, complex, and conflicted and you can get, but even if that were not so, this is a novel about fairy-tale characters! For goodness sakes, since when have they had any depth?

How foolish is it to whine about how the characters are playing to type when it's a fairy-tale, and the characters are in a school which has the express purpose of training them to play to the very types which the critics complain about? Honestly? Some of the critics evidently haven't even read the novel because they're banging on about how the evil witch makes all the princes disappear (which would have been a very cool ending) but that's simply not what happened. Worse than this, some are also hypocrites, complaining that the characters are shallow and then describing the two main characters as the "beautiful" princess and the "ugly" witch! Seriously?

The whiny critics are simply wrong, so there! This novel is awesome and I fully and unreservedly recommend it.

Far Far Away by Tom McNeal

Title: Far Far Away
Author: Tom McNeal
Publisher: Knopf
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

ebook galley proof errata provided in case the author hasn't caught them yet!
P118 "...because he asked me not to tell you." has the word 'he' split between two lines!
P120 "...cinnamon gun" should be "...cinnamon gum..." (presumably!).

Here's a nice song of the same title which has nothing whatsoever to do with the novel, but which might get you in the mood to be transported far away even if only from the song!

This novel is amazing. I've never read anything by Tom McNeal before but he's definitely on my radar now. I'm going to buy this book and force my kids to read it on pain of merciless tickling if they don't. The story centers on two high-school kids, Jeremy Johnson Johnson and a girl who becomes an increasingly closer friend, Ginger Boultinghouse. The story is narrated by the ghost of Jacob Grimm. The writing is outstanding - perfect in tone, measure and content.

Jeremy lives with his father in a bookstore which his grandfather opened to sell nothing but the two volumes of his grandfather's autobiography! Jeremy's father married Zyla Johnson, but Zyla left them a while after Jeremy's birth. While this seems callous and mean on the face of it, to attentive readers of the story it will be obvious that she had no choice in her action. She had no choice because choice was subtracted from her (by The Finder of Occasions, perhaps - an evil presence who does nothing but stir up trouble, and appears to be occupying the form of a police officer?) Zyla isn’t the only one who went missing - lots of children are going missing, and disturbingly, the police don't seem particularly interested in doing anything about it.

Ginger one day talks Jeremy into going to the town's fabulous bakery where "Prince Cakes" are available. They're not available often, and Jeremy can't afford one even when they are, but Ginger tells him that they might get lucky, and indeed they do. The kindly baker, Mr Blix, produces coffee and cakes in return for an IOU. Ginger and Jeremy begin spending more time together, innocently growing closer until one evening, Ginger and her two girlfriends lure Jeremy out to conduct a mild prank on the baker.

The story offers insufficient motivation for me in this instance, for Jeremy to involve himself in something like this. It’s not in his character, but I'm willing to let that slide since it's the only bump in a very smooth tale. However, the consequences of this incident run deep. Jeremy loses a shoe and his house key on the baker's property, and he's rapidly picked up by the police; however, when Blix himself insists it was not Jeremy he saw on his property that night, he's released. Jeremy's reputation is nonetheless shot; everyone in town thinks him a potential thief! They know that he and his father are on the verge of being thrown out of their property into the street because of unpaid debts. Jeremy's father is incapable of earning a living, and all the odd jobs by which Jeremy was keeping them afloat quickly dry up. Now his family has no income, but things are about to turn around. Right around.

I highly recommend this story. This is how a YA romance should be written: not in the hammering, blundering, ham-fisted way of all-too-many stories, but in this natural, warm, and easy way which McNeal reveals, and in a story which is engaging from the start and told so well that you don’t want it to end. 212 pages is way too short for a story like this. I look forward to more tales of this nature and to this story becoming a movie.

The story intensifies as a friend of Ginger's "Conk" who is the son of the mayor, offers to help Jeremy with his foreclosure problem by involving his dad. Seeing an opportunity to own the entire block in which Jeremy's store is situated, the mayor offers an interest-free loan to Jeremy, which will pay off his debt. The loan will be due in six weeks, which gives him more breathing space by pushing out his deadline.

A slight problem here is that Jeremy is clearly not in any way old enough to sign a promissory note! But moving quickly along, Ginger Boultinghouse offers an out from even this new deadline by setting Jeremy up as a contestant on his favorite show, Uncommon Knowledge wherein guests are quizzed about what they claim is their expert topic - which can be pretty much anything. Jeremy signs up as an expert on the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales; this should be a no-brainer given that he has one of the brothers advising him, but he has a weakness, which is that he's never seen any Disney movie based on those tales.

On the quiz, Jeremy does blazingly well, never putting a foot wrong, even on the $64,000 question, but he decides to try for one level higher: all or nothing on winning the jackpot. Unfortunately the last question involves what the huntsman returned to the queen in the Disney version, in place of Snow's intestines and liver (which is the request in the Grimm story), and Jeremy doesn’t know. In the sound-proofed booth, he hears a voice, not Jacob's, twice tell him to answer 'heart' but he ignores it, and consequently he loses all the money. This part didn’t work to well for me because Jeremy is already habituated to listening to, and trusting, the voice he hears from Jacob Grimm. Why would he suddenly go against all that and pick a lock of hair instead of repeating 'heart' which is what the voice advised him? I needed a bit more motivation there, but the story is so well done overall that I'm more than willing to let an occasional faux pas flow past!

And that's all the detail I'm going to offer for this story! Yes, I'm more cruel than Hansel & Gretel's witch! But I refuse to rob McNeal of any more of his amazing story by relating another single detail. To find out how this apparent disaster all plays out, you'll have to do what I now fully intend to do: buy the book, and then you read the story all the way through! You will not regret it if you're even mildly into stories of this nature. Even though at this point I haven't finished the entire story, I'm confident enough by now of McNeal's talent and skill to highly recommend this. Even if it goes downhill and ends in a miserable disaster, the first half of the book is so well done that it would still be worth the purchase just to read a half-a-story of this quality! I fully intend to get my hands on a hardback of this for my kids to read; it’s that good!

Just a quick post-script: I finished the novel and it did turn out to be excellent, so no issues there, although the villain turned out to be a wee bit obvious even to me! I loved the Ginger character immensely!