Ready Or Not by Meg Cabot

Title: Ready Or Not
Author: Meg Cabot
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.

Ready of Not is a sequel to Meg Cabot's best selling All American Girl Samantha Madison lives in Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia). Sam's in high school and is pretty much your typical YA fictional juvenile, self-obsessed, teen girl, I'm sorry to report. I was hoping for better. The big difference here is that she's dating the president's son after having, in volume 1, saved the president's life. I haven't read volume 1, so I'm going only on this particular sequel. And yes, I'm listening to this while I wait for a more entertaining audio book read to arrive at my library, otherwise I doubt I would have picked this up at all. It did initially sound interesting though. It isn’t.

The dire lack of realism bothered me immensely. I cannot believe, given how close she is to the US "royal family" that there isn't even a hint of a Secret Service presence somewhere, somehow, in Sam's life, but apparently there isn’t. I dunno: maybe the Secret Service actually doesn’t care about who the presidential children date, but I find that hard to believe given how easy it would be to use the 'love interest' of a president's son or daughter to influence or manipulate behavior, or even to threaten the presidency.

I have to wonder seriously about people who write novels like this one, and even more so why this kind of writing is so popular. Obviously girls of a certain age really like to read this stuff, and this makes me sad, because then I have to ask: is there nothing going through young minds other than sex (if the character is a guy) or guys (if the character is a girl)? Yes, this ignores gay relationships, but then, so too does all-too-much YA fiction, except in rather insulting token form. And do YA writers never feel any need to offer alternatives, to enlighten, to inform, to encourage changed behavior, to educate? That really bothers me, because if we as writers are doing nothing beyond pandering to the lowest common denominator, then what differentiates us from parasites?

Cabot renders Sam as a gigantic fan of Gwen Stefani for reasons which seem to me to be more projection of authorial tastes than realism, but in 2005, Stefani was still a popular artist so this isn't unfeasible. Sam also works part time at a video tape rental store, which really dates this novel, but again, it’s not entirely outrageous even though VHS's death-knell had long been rung by 2005 when this novel is set.

Sam's older sister is a cheerleader and a guy magnet so, cliché to the max there. Her kid sister Rebecca, is super smart, so once again we have a special case kid in Sam, because she's so ordinary. Special because you're ordinary? Hmm. Sam is also a special case because of her action in saving the president, yet this seems not to have impacted her life. She herself claims that nothing has changed, yet everyone is paying attention to her. Is she so dumb she doesn’t notice this? For example, one time in school, she's talking on her phone to David, the president's son when there are, for unrelated reasons, cameras in the school, and suddenly everyone goes quiet, the cameras are all turned on her, and they're all listening in. This seemed ridiculous to me, especially since it didn’t seem to faze Sam at all. Yet despite this, there is not a single paparazzo chasing her around.

Sam is also a teen ambassador to the United Nations. This evidently came about in the previous novel, but if the only reason for it was her saving the president, that's pretty pathetic. So this story kicks in when David invites Sam to join him for Thanksgiving dinner at Camp David, the presidential retreat (where he goes when he's being attacked?!). For unexplained reasons (other than that she's a moron, maybe?), Sam becomes convinced that David invited her solely because he wants to have sex with her. Why only she, and not her entire family, was invited goes unexplained.

I have no idea how Sam can be so utterly air-headed, so this is where this novel really got on the skids for me. The problem was not that sons of presidents never think about, or even never have, sex, but that I honestly couldn’t believe that any presidential son could possibly have an interest in someone as boring, vacuous, and shallow as Sam. Unless, of course, the son was at odds with his president dad, and wanting to rebel. But given the options he has, could he not have chosen someone a little more substantial to employ in his rebellion? And why would he choose a girl who saved his dad's life if he was rebelling? It would make a much more interesting story if he'd taken up with the daughter of the guy who sought to assassinate his dad! Now there would have been a novel!

Worse than this is that her older sister sells herself out as the brainless cheerleader stereotype when she buys into Sam's delusion and provides her with contraception, but apparently supplies no good sex advice along with the tools. This makes no sense on several levels. Sam is ambivalent about having sex (hence the novel's title), which is smart, yet she wants to go fully prepared for sex! In a way that's smart, but in other ways it’s dumb.

I mean, if she's ambivalent, she needs to say "No!" until she's not ambivalent, and it seems to me that while effective contraception is always a good idea, her sister's choice isn’t, and Sam's taking it along anyway suggests that she's willing to be compromised even if she's not on-board with this plan. This struck me as really dumb behavior on her part; it read (listened!) as being very confused and also confusing. I can see what Cabot is trying to do here, but I'm unconvinced that this is the best way to present this situation to a young audience - especially since the most important part - discussing this frankly with her intended partner - is entirely skipped.

Once I’d decided how I would rate this novel, I went out and read some reviews (positive and negative) to see if I’d missed anything that I ought perhaps to have considered. In general there was not, but what really struck me in a few of the negative reviews was the significant amount of hypocrisy in evidence. Several of them went beyond reviewing the novel into reviewing the author, accusing Cabot of having an agenda (which was to promote teen premarital sex)! I found it hilarious that not a single one of those reviewers ever considered that they themselves had a religious agenda which they were promoting.

I don’t have time for religion, which to me is no better than a bad fantasy novel. I do agree that keeping children safe and healthy is of prime importance, but the only proven way to do this is to educate them and continue to educate them, and this means being realistic about the way things actually are. You're not going to get anywhere if you put on religious blinkers and try to pretend that things are in real life like they were in old fifties TV shows, where the family is white, and completely respectable, and irrepressibly happy, and there's one boy and one girl, and every problem is solvable in thirty minutes - and there aren't even toilets in the house! Get real!

Teenagers have sex. It’s a fact of life! They're not going to stop. Nor are they going to run-off and start having sex simply because they read a bad Meg Cabot novel. If you think otherwise, you're delusional, period. Those with a Christian religious agenda seem to have completely (or conveniently) forgotten that we ran things their way for close to two thousand years and their religious agenda failed dismally. Christian "love" failed to prevent war, and indeed promoted many. It failed to prevent pregnancies in unmarried women. It failed to prevent women being abused. It failed to prevent children being abused. It failed to prevent diseases from spreading. It failed to keep children safe from exploitation, and from having their life put at risk or prematurely terminated.

These people seem to have forgotten that it was under religious rule - indeed because of religious rule - that we had the crusades and the inquisitions, and that we hung witches and burned heretics. I flatly refuse to go back to those days.

Nor does it make sense to lecture a girl that she must never have sex until some guy puts a ring on her finger. Marriage is not a protection against a guy running out on you. It does not guarantee that a guy will be faithful to you! There are no guarantees. Even going into it with the best of intentions, a couple can fall out of love. Those pushing this agenda are deliberately ignoring divorce statistics. There is no magic solution, and it's the height of dishonesty to pretend that they have a solution in their blind belief system.

The only thing you can do with kids is to raise them in the most loving environment you can, whether you're a happy married couple, a single mom or dad, or two dads or two moms. It makes no difference. You need to keep them as healthy as you can - which includes getting them their appropriate vaccinations - and giving them the best all-around education you can. You must refuse to shy away from some difficult questions they may ask. Keeping them ignorant is not an option and offers no protection. Once you've done all of this, you need to trust them, and that's it. You cannot live their life for them.

Blaming authors like Meg Cabot for the ills of the world is brain-dead and displays ignorance of the real facts of life. Blame her for putting out a badly written novel if you must, as I do, but she's not responsible for the way in which we, as a society, raise our kids, or for the behaviors of those kids when they reach teen-hood.

Bras & Broomsticks by Sarah Mlynowski

Title: Bras & Broomsticks
Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Random House
Rating: worthy!

This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.

Quite frankly, this one seemed a bit young for me, but I've never shied away from a novel for fear of embarrassment from its subject matter - only from fear of detesting one because it looked like it might be so awful I’d regret it! So this looked, from the blurb, like a fun read, but we all know how thoroughly blurbs lie. The vig was that I’d already read (read: listened) and enjoyed another one by this same author (Don't Even Think About It, so I decided to give it a try.

Once again it’s an unfortunate first person PoV story. I think such novels such have a government warning attached to them:

I nevertheless plunged recklessly on, and I started listening to it when one of my sons was in the car. While I wasn't impressed by the first chapter, he was. Hopefully he's going to drag himself away from his computer enough to read the paperback version I got for him, but I offer no guarantee.

Chapter two is better. This is where the story really begins and you can quite easily skip chapter one and start right here without missing a thing - unless you like rambling intros. There is some humor in it, a few laughs, but chapter one is like a prologue, and prologues, I detest. I resented that the author cheated and dragged me into reading her prologue by disguising it thus. And yes, I know advise authors to make their prologue chapter one instead of a prologue, but that advice carries the implicit assumption they have something useful to say in the prologue!

Chapter two is where the main character discovers that her younger sister has inherited her mother's witchcraft abilities. This power apparently travels only through the female line, of course, because nothing is more genderist than witchcraft. Also, there's no guarantee you'll get it. The main character doesn't, but her younger sister does. The very existence of witchcraft is a joke to the main character to begin with, but she quickly adapts when she realizes how much this can change her life for the better, only to be disappointed when her mom declares that using it only for pretty wish-fulfillment will lead to misery. Like she knows. There's no explanation, at least to begin with, as to why this should be so.

Her sister knew there was something different about her, but until her evil mom actually deigned to tell her she was a witch, she didn’t know what was going on. How a mother could abuse her daughter like this is a mystery, and honestly didn’t ring true to me, but it’s what you have to deal with. The young sister had resurrected her pet goldfish a few times, so she knew she had powers. This led to one of the most flat-out hilarious lines in the novel for me (but then I'm really warped). The narrator reads, "death and resurrection rigmarole", but she makes rigmarole sound like rigor-marole, as in rigor mortis. I don’t know if she did it on purpose, but she made me laugh out loud at that. I also found "The STB" (the name they give to their father's fiance - mom & dad are split up) an amusing way to refer to an un-liked "relative".

Unfortunately, I could not get into this novel. It was far too much whiny "Me! Me! Me!" from the main character and given that I detest the self-indulgence of main characters narrating their own story in the first place, this did not sit at all well with me. I found her story to be tedious, lacking in anything of interest, of no educational value, and with nothing new to say or to bring to the genre. So, I would normally rate this warty, but my son assures me it has merit, so I am going, for once, to use his rating and not mine! He rates this a worthy read. Blame him if you hate it!

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Title: Liar
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD is read by Channie Waites and it's done abominably.

I'm a fan of Larbalestier, having favorably reviewed How To Ditch Your Fairy here, and the Magic or Madness trilogy starting here, but this novel I immediately had antagonism towards. The opening few paragraphs were awful enough by themselves, but the reader was truly, truly lousy which made the words screech at me like nails on a chalk-board. I almost ditched it after skimming the first three tracks. I decided to continue once it reached chapter two, but I knew I could give up on it at any minute it was so bad. The main character, Micah (who isn't remotely represented by the cover image, as usual BTW!) is a liar. The original of her lying is so poor that it seemed to me that it had to be a joke. Now she's in high-school, and her best friend Zachary has died, so we’re dealing with the aftermath.

The problem with reading a novel titled Liar, especially when it’s written in first-person PoV, is that you can't believe a word of it. This is a really interesting premise, because what is fiction if not outright lies?! See the problem here? If all fiction is pure lies by definition, then why baulk at a novel that comes right out and announces, right up-front, that it’s lies?

That's a tough question to answer, because it seems like a lot more simple of a question than it really is. The problem I had with Larbalestier's novel went way beyond that it was lies, though. It's one thing to tell lies, but then you need to give your reader an in: a way for them to have a hope of determining what's a lie and what isn’t, or at the very least, to tell the truth at the end, but when you keep pulling the rug from under your reader, you're doing nothing but screwing them over, and teaching them not to waste their time with anything you write. Fortunately for Larbalestier, she has an in with me because I've read and liked other novels of hers. Unfortunately, she could not save this one.

The main character - indeed, arguably the only character - in this novel is a pathological liar. She admits it. She's addicted to lying. Or is she lying about that? This is how you know it’s a lie when she offers to tell you the honest truth - especially because she betrays every promise she repeatedly makes to do so. She claims utterly bizarre stuff, like that she was born with hair on her body which disappeared after a few days. This actually can happen, and anyone who knows anything about evolution knows that this kind of thing is, in general, inevitable. Doubtlessly this evolutionary left-over has played into werewolf legends, but in this novel, we can’t believe that she really was born with hair any more than we should believe that she's really a werewolf, as primitive people might have stupidly done.

Neither can we trust that her best friend, and perhaps boyfriend, Zach was murdered in the park. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. This, in turn, means that we can’t believe that the school is grieving over him, or that Micah had any kind of relationship, much less a three-some, with Zach's best friend Tayshawn, or his daytime girlfriend Sarah. We can’t even believe that Micah even knew Zach, let along hung out with him, let alone dated him in the evenings. Who even has a daytime girlfriend and an evening girlfriend anyway? Did the daytime girl never wonder why she could never see her boyfriend in the evenings? Was he even murdered? See what I mean? In order to have a liar tell the story, you have to have a base of truth somewhere, and this mess of a novel gives none. It's like putting a terrestrial animal into a tank full of water with no place for it to set foot. Eventually, your story is drowned by the endless lies.

In short, this entire novel is purest bullshit from the very first word, so what, I ask, is the point of reading it? Almost needless to say: I didn’t finish this. If the narration had not been so utterly nauseating, I might have tried to press on, but even if the narration had been angelically poetic, I still would have had trouble listening to a self-obsessed congenital liar ramble on for hours about nothing. WARTY!

The Truth About Alice by Jennifer Mathieu

Title: The Truth About Alice
Author: Jennifer Mathieu
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
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:
"…like making it look like was texting Elaine about doing it with him." (p25) makes zero sense. There were also some spelling errors, but very few.

I was not at all impressed with this novel. The author's goal is admirable, but I think it achieves the very opposite of what it attempts. It's told from multiple first person PoVs. 1PoV with one narrator is usually a disaster in YA fiction, but in this case Elaine, Kelsie, Kurt, and Josh all narrate, magnifying the problem fourfold. All four are morons, and every single one of them seems to be as sexually-obsessed as they are shallow and tedious. This means that not a one of them has an engaging story to relate. Apparently no one in this small town in Texas has anything on their mind - ever - except sex, and that applies equally whether you're male or female. Even given a very liberal view of how teens are, this is completely unrealistic and not even remotely titillating (which might have offered some relief from the tedium).

The novel has no conventional chapters (1, 2, 3, etc), just a series of interleaved stories (I use that term purposefully) headed by the name of the narrator. They each tell essentially the same yarn, tarted up with pointless and yawn-worthy (not yarn-worthy) personal detail about their petty lives, so if you read it front-to-back, you'll find yourself engaged in endless re-writes of your understanding of events as new information constantly comes to light. Some readers might like that.

The final contributor is Alice herself, and she's just as bad as the others for where her mind is at, but if the very last narrative by Josh and the very last chapter itself (by Alice) are read first, the rest of the novel can be comfortably skipped without loss. Unless you enjoy rambling, juvenile, three-sheets-to-the-wind style air-headed gossip.

If this had been written by a guy I can imagine how raked over the coals he would have been for writing material like this even if he had a point to make. That's what I'd optimistically assumed: that there was some sort of point going to be made, about slut-shaming or something along those lines, but I found myself increasingly hoping it would be made quickly, because quite frankly I did not know how much of this empty-headed adolescent chit-chat I could honestly stomach. I wasn't at all intrigued, engrossed (just grossed), or entertained by it. And there was no point made at the end except that some people are sexually-obsessed and others are liars. There is no compelling truth unveiled here, nothing new, nothing unusual, nothing edifying, nothing educational, nothing entertaining, nothing which adds to the discourse, and no moral points made. It's just gossip teetering precariously upon upon innuendo, stacked dangerously upon lies, balanced on the knife edge of total inertia, and that's what I want to get into next.

I think the worst part of this novel is what is not said. Yes, people do dumb stuff, and yes people lie about what others may or may not have done, but that's life. That's a given. Yes, women are held to a different standard than are men, and as wrong as that is, as much as that must change, it's not news. The problem that this novel suffers is that it's so obsessed with making its point that it tramples that point under foot. There is no realism here, and thus the issue becomes not Alice, but where the hell were the adults during all this? I cannot honestly believe, no matter which town it happened in, that this level of scandalous behavior (not to be confused with sexual behavior) could go on unabated without someone stepping in somewhere along the line, but no one ever did. Adults were all but non-existent in this novel. They said nothing. They did nothing. They intervened in nothing.

Having said that, there was one event which necessitated police intervention, and a simple check of cell-phone calling records could have implicated or exonerated one of the parties, but that investigation was never undertaken. I find that incredible - and not in a good way. I'm guessing that the sign as you drive into this town says: Healy, Texas - where you leave reality behind.

The story is about two events (so-called - one is a non-event, the other a tragedy) connected with Alice, who is variously described up front as a slut and a skank. The non-event is that at a party, she had sex with two guys one after the other. Who cares? But it's all this town can talk about until the next event. That event was some time later, when Brandon was supposedly so bombarded with texts when he was driving, that he had lost control of the car and died. His passenger, Josh, survived since he was wearing a seat-belt.

Quite obviously, the driver is at fault here for one or more of the following:
1. drinking and driving, and/or
2. texting and driving, and/or
3. Failing to drive with due care and attention and
3. Failing to buckle-up
There is no question about this, yet this becomes an obsession in the town: Brandon is innocent, the sender of the texts effectively murdered him. Seriously? Were those texts even sent? The police quite simply don't bother to investigate. Seriously? Every single person (save one, more about him anon) in the school turns completely against Alice? Seriously? I simply cannot credit this. It's like a 1930s Frankenstein movie, with mob, but sans pitchforks. Yes, I can see how people can turn against someone for no good reason, but I cannot for the life of me see it happening as it's depicted in this fairy tale.

That's the problem, ultimately: that I could not believe this. It's simply not realistic. And I don't care if you, who is reading this review, or the author, or her literary agent. or her publicist, or her best friend can quote me an event that happened like this. That's not the issue. I'm not reading a newspaper, I'm reading a novel, and if the author of the novel cannot suspend my disbelief, then that author has failed.

Did Alice deserve the graffiti in the rest room? That's not even the question to ask here. The question is: why didn't even one single school official do anything about the graffiti, or about the behaviors being exhibited in that school? The question is: why didn't one single parent do anything about the behaviors being exhibited over this. And therein lies another problem: Alice's story is trivialized, debased, and marginalized by the complete lack of realism. I had sincerely hoped that this story would have aimed at being rather more novel than that.

So what about the one guy who didn't ostracize her? He was absolutely no better than any other character, and I'll tell you why. His entire focus throughout this novel was not on Alice, but on how much of a total babe she was, how hot she looked, how curvaceous her body was, how great her cleavage was, how her knees were like two peaches (seriously?!!!), how her neck was swan-like and what-ever! Never once, not on one single occasion did he ever express how beautiful her mind was (it wasn't, but then I'm not in love with her, he was). He never extemporized upon what a great person she was. In short, his behavior was exactly as bad as everyone else's, just in a different way. Actually you could make a sound argument that his objectification of Alice was even more grotesque than that exhibited by everyone else. At least they were out in the open with it - nothing to hide. And this guy was supposed to be her knight in shining armor (actually another YA trope with which I have issues, but enough said).

I'm sorry, but this novel failed in what it was purportedly trying to do, and in my opinion, rather than help to fix this awful problem, has simply exacerbated it. I cannot recommend it.

Samantha Sanderson On The Scene by Robin Carroll Miller

Title: Samantha Sanderson On The Scene
Author: Robin Carroll Miller
Publisher: Zonderkidz - website unobtainable
Rating: warty

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

Errata:
p56 "...turn stall..." should be "..turn stile..." (let’s face it, that whole sentence needs a re-write!)
p81 Samantha's dad "...wouldn’t be up to ordering pizza"??? Is he that big of a deadbeat? Seriously what effort is needed, exactly, to order pizza - especially when he has a slave-girl right there in the house?! Or did Miller simply not write this properly, and meant instead that her dad wouldn't be in the mood for pizza - wouldn’t be "up for pizza", not "up to pizza"?

The advanced review copy was very badly formatted for the Kindle. I don’t know why this is. It used to be, in the old days, that books had to be laboriously type-set, and long galleys sent to the author for correction, which then had to be re-set, but this is no longer the case. In these days of WYSIWIG (What You Send Isn’t What I Get!), which is far from perfect, but which is passable, there's no excuse for poor quality review copies. In Adobe reader, my other option, the formatting was a lot better.

I adored the title of this novel - it’s so immediate and self important that it really tickled me. Unfortunately, the novel failed to live up to its title. There is a whole bunch of these novels about other characters, too. You can find out about them at www.faithgirlz.com if you're interested. 'Samantha Sanderson at the Movies' was one which intrigued me, since I'm such a movie fan. I'm not sure how you would end up with a whole novel based upon that particular title, but there you have it. I thought at first that Samantha was an amateur detective. It turns out that she isn’t - not by 'profession', but she is by ambition.

I was a little surprised to find out that this was an overtly Christian novel. That;s not made very clear in the book blurb on netgalley. I'm not a fan of Christian stories because I have no faith in faith, and such novels have consistently proved to me to be empty at their core. The real problem with faith-professing stories is that the faith itself is of zero utility in the novel. Never in these stories (unless they're of the completely absurd "I'm in love with a manly angel" type) do we ever see any kind of divine presence or any acts of any gods, not even hints of it. Indeed, if we did, readers would cry foul at the absurdity of it! Critics would cry "deus ex machina"! How paradoxical is that?

The consistent fact of faith novels is that people solve their own problems with no help needed from any gods (just as they did, in fact, in the Bible!); yet the fiction that a god is somehow behind the scenes making things happen is trumpeted loudly. It amazes me that so few people see through this sham; that so few recognize how impoverished and vacuous this paradigm really is. These novels all profess to be about faith in a divine providence which never appears. Just as in the Bible, it’s never any gods who do anything of utility, it’s always people who get it done. Gods are employed solely to justify human acts, and your god can never lose, since every success, no matter how much it is wrought by human agency alone, is attributed to the god, yet all failure is blamed completely on the human - or on "Satan"! How cool is that for a god? So these stories are fundamentally fraudulent in a very real way, but then all fiction is, isn't it?!

As I shall highlight as I review this, these novels are not remotely logical or rational in their telling o' the faithly tale, not even within their own framework; however, that doesn't mean that the story - ignoring all mention of the supernatural - cannot be entertaining, and this was my dearest hope going into this one, since I started out predisposed towards liking it from the title and the cover illustration alone. That hope remained even as I discovered where it was coming from, but that hope was thee one which failed to find itself in this story, and I'll tell you why.

Samantha Sanderson is in school, and has a strong ambition to be a reporter just like her mom - not a cop, just like her dad. We're offered no immediate explanation for this, but there seems to be a not-so-subtle vein of genderism running through this novel, inconsistent with modern values, but entirely consistent with Biblical values. I shall point those instances out as we go. Just one more thing which I find interesting is that a Christian novel has a main character sporting a 'heathen' name, Samantha. There was a time when Christians would have frowned upon naming a child with a non-Biblical name. This is important in that it indicates a needed and welcome decline from Bible standards (which are not to be confused with moral standards).

We first meet Samantha interviewing a team player who was injured in the previous week's game. Now why this interview took so long to put in place goes unexplained; I guess Samantha wasn't in the scene! This is odd, because she's a cheerleader. More in this anon. Fortunately, we soon get to the real theme here, which is bullying - in this case, a form of cyber-bullying, which visits itself upon one of Samantha's school-mates via some insulting text messages. This is an admirable topic to investigate, and my immediate suspect was the injured boy!

These messages focus on the intended victim's weight, but since the victim isn't even remotely overweight, the entire bullying premise falls completely flat before it even gets started! Indeed, the supposed "victim" weighs less than Samantha who, as you can see from the cover illustration, is anorexic to begin with; and is that her African American BFF Makayla on the cover with her? If so, then why isn't she actually African American?! Either this illustrates my point that cover illustrators never read the material for which they illustrate, or Samantha's BFF is dissed by being excluded from the cover!

I must note here that Samantha herself is exceptionally, even dangerously svelte. How easy is it then, for her to take the moral high-ground standing with 'lesser mortals' and protecting them from bullying? It would be really nice in a novel like this to have a protagonist who was less than perfect for once in a YA novel. Yes, we do see them, but nowhere near often enough. I guess Job, with his loser status and his skin complaints isn’t a very appealing muse, huh?!

Samantha discusses the bullying with her father (she's quite the gossip!) as she prepares the evening meal that day. Her mother is away on assignment, but she prepared meals for her husband and daughter before she left so Samantha could heat them up as needed. Here’s where the genderism struck me right in the face: why is a working mom expected to do the household chores too? Her husband can’t cook? He doesn’t lend a hand around the house? Why? Because he's too important? Because he's a police officer? Because he's a man in a Christian home? Here's a shocker: he does lend a hand around the house, but he takes care of manly things - like fixing a squeak in the garage door, because no woman could ever do that, just as no man could ever prepare a meal! This really irked me.

If we’re writing novels to teach young women how to handle life and fit into society effectively and comfortably, is it really the thing to teach them that they must be servile to men? Is it the thing to teach men that women should be expected to be servile? 'Servile' is merely another way of saying 'so vile'. I know that this is what the several thousand year old Bible prescribes, but we've moved way beyond Biblical dictates in 2014. I find all this to be an appalling thing to set before impressionable girls. This scene would have been better written if both had prepared the meal in concert with one another. In that way it would have shown how well men and women can work together to achieve a goal; it would have shown that nothing should be beneath either a man or a woman when it comes to home-making, and it would have sent a much more equitable message.

Samantha is a cheerleader, as I've mentioned. I detest this kind of thing in a novel. This is another trope which needs to be done away with, and this is another part of this novel which smacks of genderism. The guys take on the 'tough' he-man job of playing that hard game, but the lower-status 'weak and fair maidens' are fit only to cheer them on? And then there's this 'argument' claiming that cheerleading is on par with martial arts. Ahem! Excuse me?! Having registered that complaint, you can argue that this novel is doing no more than reporting what we see in real life, so why blame the author? I think we can blame the author for not trying to break molds and stereotypes - especially in a novel which is ostensibly aimed at moral and emotional support explicitly for girls!

Then comes the team prayer. Actually, it doesn't, not formally, but it seems to be in the air as the supporters of the one side pray to beat the opposing Christian team. I find this objectionable, not so much in this story, which to its credit, doesn’t get down and dirty with that, but in real life. Do these people who insist upon abusing the establishment clause of the US constitution really believe that the creator of the universe cares who wins a school football game or basketball game? Really? Do these people believe that he will support one team over the other? Suppose both sides pray? If all prayers are answered, does that mean both sides will win? Will they draw? Does the most sin-free side win, or is it the side which prays most fervently? Maybe it's the side which dons the most ragged sackcloth and has the most ashes in its hair? See? It’s patently absurd. Worse than that, it explicitly states that "our team is so useless that we routinely need divine intervention if we’re going to have a hope of winning"! Do coaches not grasp that praying is an insult to their team and a sad commentary upon their coaching skills?! And an insult to their god, for that matter (not that that bothers me). Fortunately we don’t have to deal with that in this particular novel, so kudos to Miller for avoiding it, but prayer does play a large part in the novel and not one of the prayers is answered!

With Samantha becoming ever more focused on the bullying, and whilst we’re on the topic of prayer, I have to ask here why doesn't Samantha pray for the bully to be exposed, or to change his or her mind about bullying? This goes right to the core of my opening remarks: why pray to win the game, but not pray to divine (literally) the bully's identity? If there's a benign god and prayers are answered, there's your solution right there. Of course, it cannot be this way because then every faith novel would be one paragraph long! It cannot be this way because even a Christian novel cannot pull a deus ex machina! It’s quite simply not credible and even faith writers know this. You see? It’s irrational even within its own framework. So art that point one has to decide to quit or to persevere, putting religion aside since it’s already proven itself to be useless here, and try to ignore it while enjoy the rest of the story.

The problem with that plan was that the rest of the story was rather less than tolerable, too. For example, on the topic of genderism: the only things of note about Samantha's mom that we're offered is that she's a journalist and she's pretty. How superficial can you get?

Samantha is supposed to be on the cusp of becoming a "young adult", around twelve or thirteen, but she behaves rather younger than that, and her parents treat her like she's eight or nine. Her dad consistently calls her 'pumpkin' (how original - and no initial cap!) and her mom calls her 'my sweet thing' which is sickly if not outright sick. I sincerely hope not all Christian families are like this one!

On the topic of the bullying, initially I'd been convinced that Nikki, the girl being bullied, was overweight, but it turns out she's not. Not even close. This makes it truly bizarre that she would be bullied in this way, and even more bizarre that someone as snotty and spoiled as Nikki would even pay attention to it. This by no means makes the insults acceptable, but it seriously cheapens the point which Miller seems to be striving to make. It would have been a much stronger novel if Nikki were actually overweight. As it is, this renders the treatment of a serious subject into something of a joke, and thereby achieves precisely the opposite of what Miller was supposedly trying to do here.

It’s disturbing in the extreme that the nominees for Homecoming queen and "court" (aka the losers) are all cheerleaders (except for two who work with Samantha on the newspaper). How misguided and sad is that: only two girls in the entire class who were not cheerleaders were considered worthy of nomination? What happened to the Biblical injunction against pride and adornment? Something about gilding the lily...? This obsession with looks isn’t confined only to the nominations, it spills over into the rest of the narrative too, with people being described as "cute" which is religio-speak for "hawt". It has nothing to do with personality, because the only worth anyone can have, apparently, in "Samantha world" resides in their looks.

Not a word is said, for example, about how decent a person Nikki Cole is (or isn’t) or how smart she is (or isn’t), because all that evidently matters is the superficial: whether she's "cute" or not. The same applies to Thomas Murphy. No word on how smart or decent he is (or isn’t), it all boils down to whether he's "cute" or not. And because he's a bit of a loaner, he's dismissed as "odd" - and by Samantha, who is supposedly a Christian. I expect this in your regular YA novel because, generally speaking, that's all that ever seems to matter in the majority of those novels (although thankfully there are some really good exceptions), but given that this is a Christian story, supposedly professing certain values and standards, I would have expected it to rise above pettiness and blinkered bigotry, and I would certainly not expect Thomas to be relegated to the same category as a school stalker, regarded with suspicion as a potential bully for no other reason than that he's looking at a "cute" girl and is a bit of a loner! Is Samantha really this short-sighted? If her Christian upbringing cannot make a better person of Samantha, then of what value is it?

Indeed, the more I read of this novel, the more Samantha seemed to be on something of a witch-hunt, which is fine, I guess: the Bible does explicitly order us to kill witches! Fortunately Christians don’t do that (except maybe in Nigeria), which only goes to prove that even Christians do not recognize the Bible as a moral authority. But Samantha rejects the Bible again here, specifically the portion which says something to the effect: "judge not, lest ye be judged", because the new girl, Felicia, immediately becomes a suspect. Samantha is as judgmental as you can get! Or maybe she's just mental? I liked Felicia, though. Felicia was apparently expelled from a Christian school for fighting! So much for "forgive those who trespass against us"; Christians obviously don’t practice what they preach! At that point, I was seriously interested in Felicia; she sounded much more intriguing than ever Samantha could be - or any other character I've so far met in this novel. Unfortunately, Felicia hardly appears in the novel - merely a brief glimpse in passing, here and there; so much for her big entrance! But here’s the rub: Felicia was a cheerleader and also on the school newspaper! What the heck is with cheerleading and newspapers in this novel? But Samantha's judgmental attitude spreads like a disease, way beyond a single fight at a school. In Samantha's condemnation-obsessed head, this one incident gets blown up into Felicia being "mad at the world"! Exactly what kind of a bigot is Samantha?

In many ways this novel cheapens bullying: by making it about a weight issue, yet dumping it into the lap of a girl who has absolutely no such issue! It evades any real bullying entirely. The bullying portrayed here, whilst technically bullying it is, or more accurately perhaps, harassment, it's barely much above the level of teasing: a handful of texts, and a couple of notes calling non-fat Nikki a "fatty". When Nikki finds a small carton of diet bars in her locker, Samantha melodramatically declares that this "ramping it up to the next level". Behavior like that is never acceptable, but I found it appalling that this weak definition of "bullying" was the best (or worst, if you like) example Miller could think up to address in her story. It just made it into a joke rather than a serious issue which needed to be nipped in the bud.

And I found it laughable when Samantha goes though her "I'm not naming my sources" phase, and her mother backs her up form a professional journalism perspective! Samantha is not a professional journalist! She's just a school kid. She does not have the protections or requirements that a real journalist has. She is, primarily, required to abide by school rules, not by the professional rules of journalism. Yes, she does have the constitutional right to remain silent, but there is another factor in play here which is that she's supposedly a Christian, and yet she refuses to render to Caesar that which is Caesar's!

So, whilst I still love the title of this novel, I was sorely disappointed that it offered so little and I cannot rate it as a worthy read. I don't get how this is sold as Christian novel, because there really isn't anything Christian going on here. If you removed all references to faith, religion, and church, you'd still have exactly the same novel, the same plot, the same story, and the same people behaving in the same way. That's what I meant when I said that faith novels are hollow at their core. They're just regular novels featuring regular people. The faith angle is nothing but a sham - a gossamer veneer which is, ultimately, entirely irrelevant.

Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD was read competently by Dan John Miller.

This novel, unfortunately told from first-person PoV, could be a lot worse, but it was getting there. Miller's narration helps, and the fact that the novel was amusing in parts also helped. The story hinges (and I use that word advisedly) entirely upon spineless Quentin Jacobsen's infatuation with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who turns out to be a complete jerk.

Quentin is in fatuation with Margo, who shows up at his bedroom window one night demanding that he drive her around in his mom's van (he has no car) because she's had her car keys confiscated by her predictable, unadventurous, but also feisty parents, and she has eleven critical things to do that night (so she deludedly believes). The entire repertoire of criticality is inextricably entangled in Margo's juvenile need for revenge against a two-timing boyfriend, and she drags Quentin in on it with her, selfish much-adolescent-about-nothing that she is.

This plan having been more-or-less successfully executed, Quentin finds his life starting to turn around, but even as it does, Margo has disappeared. This isn't the first time she's taken off, and she's always left an impossible-to-follow clue before showing up shortly afterwards of her own accord, no less irresponsible or full of self-importance. This time, it's been six days with no word at all from her, and when Quentin discovers a whole series of cryptic clues, since he has no life and no self-respect, he obsesses on following wherever they lead, in hopes of tracking down Margo, and he starts to slowly come to the conclusion that maybe Margo has taken the biggest trip of all. Or has she?

Disk 6 wouldn't play in the car, so I skipped to disk 7 which turned out to be fine because disk 6 evidently had zero to say. Disk 5 ended with Quentin setting out to follow his last clue and disk 7 began with him arriving at his destination, which begs the question as to what value disk 6 was in the first place! Obviously none. Disk 7 was short and had a really unsatisfactory ending. I didn't like either invertebrate Quentin or Margo at all; in fact I think she's a jerk.

I can't help but wonder why Green insists upon making his female characters jerks. I've read two of his novels (all I am ever going to read, rest assured) and in both the female is a loser and a jerk. Is he a misogynist that he does this? Or is it simply that he doesn't know any better? Actually, the question which interests me more is why John Green went out of his way to call me a liar? Indeed, he called every one of us self-publishing/indie authors liars. In a speech which he made to the Association of American Booksellers in 2013 (of which I was unaware until very recently), he stated:

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature...without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent.
From Brit newspaper The Guardian

In short, John Green thinks we're liars if we say we did it all ourselves (not that your typical indie author ever does this in my experience). Guess what, Green behind the ears? I did it all myself and I know other people did too, and no, I am not lying. The question is why are you so insecure that you need an entourage to write your books? And yes, Looking for Alaska was self-indulgent so you failed and all of your team with you. Deal with it.

How Not to be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler

Title: How Not to be Popular
Author: Jennifer Ziegler
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Rating: WARTY!

Here are seven words of advice to authors like Jennifer Ziegler on how not to be popular: write a novel just like this one.

This is ALAS! (A Long And Snarky review!)

Maggie Dempsey is a cool name for a character! I love it. I don’t love the character, unfortunately. She is vacuous, uninventive, spineless, clueless, and thoroughly un-entertaining and in the end, downright obnoxious. She does have minor grounds for meriting sympathy, but she wipes those out easily. The grounds are that, for no discernible reason, she's dragged around the country by her parents, being forced to start a new school every few months. At her last school in Portland (Oregon, not Maine), she fell for Trevor, who evidently has now found himself a new babe, yet Maggie is not only too dumb to grasp that he has, she's also so devoted to him that's she has the hots for two guys at her new school!

Seriously, is there ever a moment in her life when Maggie has anything else on her mind other than which guy she can sell herself out to next? Is there ever a time when she has something else to do other than contemplating her last guy or her next? Is she really that shallow? Can we never have a novel written by a female writer which doesn’t sell out her gender by openly declaring that her main character cannot exist except as some species of appendage of a trope guy?

Having got that off my chest, and that aside, the basic story started out OK, but it rapidly went to hell in a hand-basket, and that's before it started giving off the occasional anti-Semitic vibe (anti-Semitic in the truly sad clichés it calls into play). It's mildly funny and even somewhat entertaining in parts, with some interesting plot ideas, but that's not enough, in the end, to salvage this story for me. It’s written by a resident (at least a past resident!) of Austin, and it's set in Austin, but the bottom line to that is that this exact story could have been told in any western civilization city and lost nothing for the migration, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with Austin and offers not a shred of the Austin atmosphere!

Determined never to be hurt again after leaving her boyfriend behind in Portland, Maggie decides to deliberately make herself unpopular and uninteresting at her new school, so she doesn’t get involved with anyone and so is preserved from pain when she inevitably leaves. The problem is that she's so utterly clueless about how to get herself organized and live her life that she fails even in being a failure. I suspect there's a trite moral awaiting us at the end of this story, but it's going to be completely wasted because of Maggie's comprehensive bigotry whereby she joins the school "losers" because she thinks the school winners are losers! Way to insult the entire population, Ziegler! A moral is most definitely needed, but I can guarantee sight unseen that that the one we would get at the end of this novel would have nothing to do with what's actually required. I can't verify it because I quit reading when I hit the last forty pages since the novel was emitting such a god-awfully stomach-churning stench by then that I couldn't stand to be around it any longer.

Maggie's is a poor strategy for several reasons, not least of which is that she's robbed herself of any interests or diversions and so is now even more dependent upon her fantasy men than she would have been had she simply become popular. That's how stupid she is. She has some serious issues with logic, which is hardly surprising given the abuses her parents are dumping on her by dragging her around the nation unnecessarily, although of what quality her previous friendships were - given that no one from her past ever emails, writes, or calls her - is a mystery.

Her new friendships would not serve her any better given the unnecessarily large number of utterly absurd tropes with which Ziegler has larded Maggie's new school. The very fact that Maggie openly admits that she would be part of the most obnoxious group at the school were she not half-heartedly trying to go against the grain this time, is quite sufficient a reason to detest the kind of person Maggie is.

Ziegler seems to be seriously technologically challenged: no one in her world seems to use cellphones or email, much less social media. For example, when there is to be an announcement regarding an important new development in the "losers" group charity dance, Ziegler has them putting up bills around town. She's obviously never even heard of Twitter or flash-mobs! Actually I think only twits tweet, so I didn't really care that she's so challenged.

Her parents are at best an enigma, at worst, the poorest examples of parenting ever depicted in a novel. They're simply obnoxiously bad parents. They're anachronistically depicted as hippies, which is so antiquated a concept that it’s almost cute. Unless Maggie's mom and dad are in their sixties, which isn’t at all evident, the hippie thing doesn’t work for me. If they were in their sixties and had a teen daughter in high school, that would be a story worth telling, but that would not be this cheap excuse for a melodrama.

Maggie, like all too many main female characters, I'm grieved to report, isn’t the sharpest key on the keyboard, flailing around, all but falling over herself for two guys one after another at her new school after she swore to avoid them like the plague. This alone tells us how shallow she is. Her consistent failure to come up with intelligent ruses and excuses to avoid them tells us how brain-dead she is. Her lack of any sense of self-worth when the most obnoxious trope hits on her appallingly tells us how vacuous she is. Her having no evident willingness or ability to stand up for a principle (as when she cheats herself out of seeing "the latest James Bond" (Ziegler couldn’t name a James Bond movie?!) by allowing the less obnoxious trope to drag her into a movie he's going to see - a movie in which she has zero interest - tells us how spineless she is. That she accidentally (and then repeatedly) flashes her underwear at the guy she sees this movie with, and somehow thinks this will turn him off shows what a rock-bottom moron she is.

On the interesting side, Maggie accidentally falls into a friendship with Penny, an overweight girl who is entirely uncritical of Maggie (and perhaps the only student in the school who is) as well as completely accepting of the fake quirks Maggie accretes to herself in her determination to be unpopular. Maggie gets to know Penny, but we don't, and she's probably the most interesting character in the entire novel except for the fiery, petite Drip, about whom we learn less than we do Penny. If Ziegler had written the story about just those two it would have been an immeasurably better tale than the sad waste of paper she delivers. In fact, it’s these quirks and out-of-left field ideas that she has which initially kept me reading, despite my detestation (and protestation) of the truly sad male tropes.

In another classic example of how shallow she is, Maggie tries to come up with some extra-curricular activity or other in order to beef up her college application, and hits on joining the "losers" group borne of the bigoted idea that if she associates with losers no one will want her. The truth is that the only real loser in this entire novel is Maggie herself. I'd been leaning towards thinking that this story was fine but for the romance; the problem with that, is that the sad excuse for a romance starts taking over the entire story which is right where the entire story becomes completely uninteresting to me. There are fewer tropes and clichés written on bathroom walls at truck stops than appear as an excuse for romance in YA novels.

Frankly, the romance is so asinine that it's nauseating. This magical guy Jack manages to magically appear in Maggie's life magically. He's magically always there. It’s magical. Even when she joins her extra-curricular club he's magically there. She goes to a movie and he's magically there, too! She farts sweetly and he's magically there. (That last one didn’t happen yet). Could Ziegler telegraph any more loudly the inevitable trope result of the inevitable trope romance? Could Maggie be any more of a completely vapid wilting wench than she already is? Who knows? That last is rhet(Butler)orical.

Maggie is put into one situation after another from which her spinelessness prevents her from excusing herself. For example, Jack asks her out to dinner and it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to say no, but her lack of back-bone leaves her saying yes. That same evening before her date arrives, she finally learns (from one of the most contrived plot points ever) that yes, her ex is indeed dating someone else. Duhh! She could right then call up Jack and tell him no, since she's so upset and angry, but her lack of anything even resembling a notochord prevents her from canceling the date. Her parents prove predictably and tiresomely obnoxious. So Jack-off on the rocks has asked her out to dinner and therefore dominantly insists upon paying, and she dumbly knuckles under for it. And god forbid we should leave out the trope that he tips well, and therefore would absolutely make the best husband imaginable, of course.

On the date she is so vacuous and shallow that she can't even come up with one good argument against her date's republicanism. Not that he is a Republican! Maggie is too stupid to figure it out, and has blindly pigeon-holed him without it even registering! Their exchanges from this point onwards are not even fit to appear in a twelve-year-old's romantic fiction story. It would be quite easy to do the thing which Democrats have consistently and blindly failed to do, which is to call out the Republicans on their appalling hypocrisy: hypocrisy which has them on the one hand championing Jesus Christ and religion, but on the other, failing in every regard to adhere to and follow even one of the fictional principles espoused by the fictional Christ in the fictional New Testament!

Maggie is such a loser that she even sells out her vegetarianism by allowing herself to be dragged to a restaurant where meat dishes are in abundance. I don't think vegetarians can have a truly fulfilling relationship with a carnivore, but apparently Ziegler disagrees. She's entitled to, but the reason Maggie is in this position is because Ziegler has once again sold feminism down the river by chaining her "heroine" to Jack and allowing him to lead her like a prize pet on his date to his choice of venue.

I get that this is a fish-out-of-water story with a twist of lemming, but if that's what Ziegler thought she was writing, it isn’t what she delivers. She fails because Maggie isn’t really trying to do what she claims she's attempting. She's not; not even half-heartedly. Her character doesn't even make sense: that on the one hand she's so devoted to her memory of tragic Trevor that she can’t move on, but on the other, she has each of her hands on the trope rump of a trope guy - a magical trope guy with magical eyes and magical muscles - and she's moving right along. She doesn't even remotely behave as though she's being eaten up inside by her grief over her previous relationship. We're told that she is, but we're never actually shown that she is. In this, Ziegler presents us with an object (abject?!) lesson in how to spectacularly lose the case of Teller v. Shower.

Instead of trying to avoid people and relationships, which was her stated aim, Maggie is devoting all her time and energy to them, and we're given no reason why the rest of us should go along with Ziegler's follies. A simple "Leave me the hell alone" would dispose of Jack-of-all-tirades (maybe not - he's a borderline stalker), and a sharp kick to the nut-sack would run Miles, not to say ruin. So why doesn't Maggie deliver on those goods? Because Ziegler is betraying her character and refusing to let her. Ziegler's agenda here is at odds with that of her main character, and that would work fine if Ziegler had the writing chutzpah to get it done. She evidently doesn't. She is so poor at telling this story that when a golden opportunity pops up for Maggie to run Jack out of her life by going on a date with Miles, and then run him out of her life by dumping him after said date, the thought never even crosses her incredibly empty mind.

Here's a thing about his novel that I'd noticed but not noted until now: there is no bad language! This is a novel about rough-and-ready high school students and not one of them ever swears? Yes, Ziegler's writing a four-letter-word-free story, which is fine. I suspect her motive for this is religious, and my suspicion is bolstered by a lot of what she writes. I think the religious perspective ruins a good story, but sometimes it's of use and can actually add something. In this case, Ziegler doesn't have what it takes to do the addition. It’s patently obvious that she's writing reality-free fiction, so let me grant her that and drop the snark about it being unrealistic because I have a better point to make (and this even bypasses the fact that Ziegler made certain she put the word 'vaginal' in her novel to show how dangerously risqué and naughty she really honestly is!)

First, some context: on the bottom of p202 she writes, "But what really pees me off…". Seriously? The phrase is "pisses me off". Nothing else works. Urinates me off? Nope. Tinkles me off? Nope. Number ones me off? Nope. Golden rains me off? Nope. Only "pisses me off" actually works. So when Ziegler writes "pees me off" as a substitute, it does nothing save announce loudly to me that she's as clunky as she is clueless. I honestly hope she's not actually like that, because she does have a voice, and I live in hope that bad writers will get better, but just as Maggie is trying half-heartedly to convey unpopularity to Jack-off, what Ziegler is whole-heartedly conveying to me is a really bad impression of her as a writer. If she wants to avoid swearing, then why not "tees me off"? It’s only a single letter difference and it actually makes sense. How about "ticks me off"? God forbid she should actually come up with an invented phrase that's actually funny. I don't get at all why she felt the need to embarrass herself with this when she could have achieved her end with something perfectly suitable and devoid of the accompaniment of screeching fingernails on a chalk-board.

After the meal with Jack, Maggie bemoans the fact that she failed to disgust him and turn him off, but she's so abysmally dumb that she never once thinks of merely saying good night and heading home alone to kill the mood. Instead, she dumbly persists in the very behavior she has deluded herself into thinking will do the job, and it's the same behavior she's repeatedly tried and failed at. This screams to me that she's as limited of rationale as she is unimaginative. She could have killed the promise of a date by the simple act of canceling it. She could have killed the actual date by going out that evening before Jack arrived, so that when he shows up to pick her up she's simply not there. Yes, I get that Ziegler's whole purpose is to get Jack and Diane, er Maggie Mayn't, together. She's telegraphed that sad goal ever since she Jacked him into the novel in the first place, but is it also a requirement of Ziegler's that she portrays her main character as an incompetent, and as a complete moron, in order to achieve her end? I would argue not.

Frankly, the one who is doing the better job of killing the date for my money is Jack himself. He's consistently obnoxious, treating her like a second-rate citizen - a weak woman, who needs to be coddled and paid for - and protected. Earlier in the day, they'd been cleaning up a park, and after the meal they go to that same park. Maggie cluelessly thinks she'll turn Jack off if she takes a turn on the park swings! Where did a brain as limited as hers come up with that idea? It’s here that he starts up again about past history: the incident in the park that morning where Miles is Miles and Maggie stands up to him. Jack is whining that he ought to have been there to protect her. How freaking condescending can you get? If I liked him to this point, which I certainly didn't, this would have made me detest him. How can Ziegler persistently betray her gender like this? She portrays Maggie as not even remotely affronted by Jack-Ass's behavior. On the contrary, she responds warmly to a kiss that he abruptly and uninvitedly forces on her.

It was right at this point that I just wanted this novel to be over with so I could move on to something less landfill to read, but I figured that I was so close to the end that I could finish this and further deplete the ammunition stocks of those who whine about DNFs! The problem is that Ziegler was as determined to turn me off the novel as Maggie supposedly was to avoid dating. And Ziegler was doing a far more efficient job than ever was Maggie. About 40 pages from the end, Maggie openly declared herself, at the "losers" dance, to be the complete dip-shit and dirt-bag she had promised to be all along, and I honestly could not stand to deal with any more of her juvenile crap. I had hoped against hope that something different would come out of the story, but why I had this blind faith in Ziegler, given what a complete let-down she'd proven herself to be to this point, I have no idea. Call me the eternal optimist when it comes to novels; however, this novel is now determined to be of the species Wartius maximus and I'm outta here!

The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy by Kate Hattemer

Title: The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy
Author: Kate Hattemer
Publisher: Alfred A. 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.

If you liked E. Lockhart's / Emily Jenkins's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks or her Dramarama, then in all likelihood, you'll adore this one as much as I did, because it's very much written in that vein, but be prepared for a rocky start. I did not like this at all for the first few pages (especially when one of the characters suggests dog-earing the page (on an ebook!), but it was interesting enough that I stuck with it and I was well-rewarded.

The story concerns the amusing and disturbing situation which a high school (academy if you will) gets itself into, when it allows a TV station to stage a so-called 'reality' show using students as characters. Some of the school students not involved in the show, notably: Luke, Elizabeth, Jackson, and the narrator, Ethan, find it reprehensible that the show is such a farce and is detracting from academic standards, and is also imposing censorship on independence and creativity since slowly, everything in the school is becoming subjugated to the TV show's needs, and the fat bucks it generates, which are rolling into the school's coffers (supposedly). What a great premise for a story! And Hattemer doesn't let it down.

These four students decide to do something about this dismal situation, but misdirection, sadness, betrayal, and somewhat hair-raising escapades are in store for these guys as they try to rebel against it, and then start digging into the mismanagement (which they uncover) of both the show and the funds it generates. There's some sly humor and amusing situations, and a really touching romance which blossoms. Now that's the way to write a YA romance. Seriously. There are too-many ham-fisted YA writers who honestly need to read this novel just to learn how to do it.

This turned out to be yet another novel wherein I discovered a supporting character who actually interested me significantly more than the main character! I'm doomed to read novels like this - especially first person PoV novels, which is another reason to detest them! This novel curiously has three endings, none of which are very dissimilar, and none of which is the ending I was hoping for and expecting. Of this, I have to relate some disappointment. Maybe Ethan actually was as dumb as I feared he was! Actually, more accurately, maybe he just wasn't as smart as I hoped he'd be. But a worthy read and an interesting variation on the E. Lockhart novels I mentioned in that the main character is male rather than female.