Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina

Title: Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass
Author: Meg Medina
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read really poorly by Roxanne Hernandez.

If I'd known that this novel had won one of those sad-sack 'literary' awards I would never have picked it up in the first place, because such an award all but guarantees that the novel which carries it will be boring and irrelevant, but I didn't and it was. I thought that a book written by a Latina about the YA Hispanic experience might have something new or different to tell me than one written for the white community or for the black community, but you know what? Every one of them is really exactly the same, so what's the point?

I don't get audio book publisher's fascination with elevator music. Seriously? There's a ten second din of it at the start of the first disk, and this is a novel set deeply in Latin territory, so why not, if you absolutely must have music, have something with a Latin flavor? Is so-called Brilliance Audio so paradoxically dumb and unimaginative? For me, ditch the frigging Muzak.

Even that aside, I took a dislike to this novel right from disk one, but since it's very short, I figured I would try to follow it through to the end. I failed. It was that irritating and shallow. It's ironic, because the reason I picked this up in the first place was the title. I thought that was hilarious. How could a book with such an amazing title fail to deliver so comprehensively - and then win an award for its mediocrity?

It would have been hilarious if it were titled merely, "John Smith Wants to Kick Your Ass", but when the name Yaqui Delgado was added to the mix, it took it over the top and gave it a life of its own. Now I find myself wanting to read about Yaqui instead of about Piddy (no kidding, that was the main character's name).

I'd never never heard the name Yaqui before, and I live in Texas so most Latin names are unsurprising or particularly exotic to me. I'm not sure why a person would name their child Yaqui, which sounds like a description of someone who likes to yak a lot, but maybe that's why it was chosen. This focus on Piddy and not on Yaqui was another failure from my perspective.

I actually looked-up Yaqui on a half-dozen baby name websites and not a one of them - not even the one which offered exotic names, not even the Hispanic ones - featured it. How sad is that? I found it one one site which gave no definition of it, but merely referenced the Yaqui Indians of Río Yaqui valley in Sonora, in northern Mexico.

You can read about them in the wikipedia link I give on my blog, but even that doesn't have a thing to say about what the name means or whence it came. Pathetic, huh? So much for wikipedia. That just goes to emphasize how great of a name it was, but it simultaneously highlights how sadly this novel let down its title.

The problem with an audio version of a novel, as convenient as they are for listening to in the car on a daily commute, is that it's one more step removed from the author, and if the novel is already irritating, adding an annoying voice on top of that is hardly a charmed idea, especially if the voice doesn't sound remotely like it belongs to a high school student.

Roxanne Hernandez's voice performance (yes, no one reads these any more, they perform! Sheesh! ) was really wrong. She sounded way too old to be in school. Once I got past that, and started to focus on the story rather than the awful voice, I found that this novel is larded with Hispanic stereotyping (which is sad, given that the author is Hispanic), and high school YA tropes and clichés.

• New girl in school? Check.
• Main character approaching but not reached eighteen? Check.
• First person narration? Check.
• Bitchy girl bully? Check.
• stereotypical school jock? Check.
• Unrestricted School bullying? Check.
• Geek with eyeglasses? Check.
• Quirky best friend? Check.

Novels like this should come with a free prescription for Promethazine, as standard, they're so nauseating. So the deal is that Yaqui Delgado simply doesn't like the way way our main character sways her hips when she walks. Yep, that's all it is. That's her entire complaint She starts her harassment campaign by tossing a container of chocolate milk at the wall during lunch, showering our main character and her nerd friends with it, yet no one rats her out for her unacceptable behavior, and the people retained because of this vandalism are the victims. No attempt is made to ferret out the perps!

Seriously? what kind of sad-sack mentality is that? The only response to bullying and vandalism is zero tolerance, period. Yet according by YA novels, every single school in the US has exactly the same problems and nothing is ever done about any of them!. That's (not coincidentally) when I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" Even this novel's warts have warts. No wonder it won a literary award.

Pinned by Sharon G Flake

Title: Pinned
Author: Sharon G Flake
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a story of a relationship between your stereotypical high school jock and the hot member of the opposite sex, but in this case, the jock is the girl, and the hot opposite sex character is a guy in a wheelchair. In significant ways, both are handicapped, but the guy isn't handicapped by his wheelchair, he's handicapped by his personality. The girl is handicapped by short-sightedness, and not of the physical kind, either.

It seems that I'm forced into commenting on a completely inappropriate cover once more. Yet again, the cover illustrator appears never to have read the novel, either that or didn't give a damn, because because if he or she had read it or cared about it, they would have noticed that Autumn is a wrestler who has muscles. She's not a muscle-bound type as such, but she does have muscles and definition, and the cover model was so not her it wasn't even funny. This is a pitfall of going with Big Publishing™: they simply do not care, unless it's about how many corners they can cut on their way to how much moo-la they can milk from your novel.

» Here's what real female athletes look like: Ashleigh Nelson, Hayley Jones, Dina Asher-Smith and Annabelle Lewis «

A brief word on genderism in track

» Why is it that men are fully covered whereas women are filly covered? Men have long shirts, and shorts down to their knees, whereas the women are wearing skimpy tank tops and what amount to swim trunks? Just asking.«

This novel is all about Autumn Knight and Adonis Einstein Anderson Miller. I am not kidding you with the names. I think there's a scientific study and an interesting paper to be published about the use of exotic names in the African American community if it's tied-in with how that particular group has been treated over the years since Africa was "discovered" by the so-called civilized world, but this is merely a book review, so names aside, let me say up front that despite some issues, I loved this novel.

I am not black, so I don't doubt for a minute that I may well be missing some insights here which color (so to speak!) my perspective, but the bottom line is that this is purely a novel about two people who have a relationship. Race, creed, ethnicity, etc., doesn't enter into it, so that should never be an issue with regard to the validity of any given reviewer's take on it. I mean a story is either worth the reading or it's not, right, regardless of the actual content or the characters? This one was worth it.

It's a really short and easy book to listen to (and presumably to read). The short chapters alternate between Autumn's PoV and Adonis's, both told in first person. My problem was that I listened to it as an audio book rather than read it, and while I felt that Autumn's voice was nailed all the way to the bone by Bahni Turpin, Adonis's voice was ruined by Dominic Hoffman. He sounded far more like a high school teacher than ever he did a high school student. This definitely shaded my view of this novel because this character had no credibility for me.

Worse than that, Adonis was presented, in the writing itself, as a snotty, superior, self-centered, and arrogant jerk. He had no redeeming qualities that I could see, and not only did I not like him, I could find no reason at all why someone like Autumn would like him, let alone claim to be in love with him and follow him around like a timid puppy. This, for me, stole ruthlessly from her role as a strong female character, and I could not for the life of me figure out why Sharon Flake would do this to her. I do, however, want to read more of this author's writing after enjoying this, which is why I moved on to The Skin I'm In. The author's name may be Flake, but she's no flake when it comes to writing chops.

I fell in love with Autumn Knight, not just the beautiful name, but also with her voice and her attitude, and with her perspective. She is a strong woman, and not just physically. She was always up (apart from one understandable instance of complete despair), positive, and confident. She's adaptable and motivated, and has plans for her future. That's why I was thoroughly intrigued by the stark contrast between this (what might be thought of as her baseline personality) and her complete lack of motivation when it came to her 'disability' - which is that she was a very poor reader.

This in itself would not be a problem if she'd maintained her usual positive attitude towards it - and towards fixing it, but with this particular issue, there was a huge disconnect. She was in sorry denial about the utility of reading, which made me even more curious to find out how this story panned out. Autumn's ambition, despite her wrestling cred (yes, I said wrestling - how cool is that?) is to open a restaurant, yet no one, not even her teachers, seem to put two and two together and seek to motivate her by reminding her that her restaurant ambitions are going to be deep fried if she doesn't learn to read a whole lot better than she can manage right now.

What bothered me about Autumn was her stalking of Adonis. If this had been reversed, with Adonis behaving as Autumn did, and vice-versa, I think a lot of people would have had issues with his stalking her, especially if she were in a wheelchair. So why wasn't this an issue presented the way it was? Gender equality cuts both ways: it's not just a benefit for women, it's also a responsibility. This 'what's sass for the goose is sauce for the gander' approach wasn't appreciated. What did shave-off the rough edges of it for me was that Autumn's personality was sweeter than honey, but make no mistake: her behavior was still stalking.

I'm not one of these reviewers who demands character growth in a story. Indeed, some of the best stories are about people who refuse to grow or to change for one reason or another. Adonis's lack of growth was as much a part of his character as was his arrogance and perfectionism. He was bound far more by that then ever he was by his wheelchair. I like to think that this story wasn't really about him, but was about Autumn, and for those who demand it, she did change admirably.

So I recommend this novel. It was fun, endearing, and enjoyable - at least the Autumn chapters were. Who cares about Adonis?!

Frostbite by Richelle Mead

Title: FrostBite
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

This is the second volume in what is, so far, at least a six-volume series. I can’t promise I'll read that whole series, but as of reading this one, I'm committed to one more at least. That's an odd decision, I know, given my rating, but I explain it in the final paragraph. This volume was sadder than the first, which had issues but which was not bad. Mead needs to get her head out of her ass and write the vampire series she promised, not a cheesy rip-off of Twilight, with love-sick airhead kids running around having sorry bouts of high school angst when there's a far better story screaming to be told.

I started reading this series because I'd read somewhere that some school district had banned the series: that is, they were banning these books before some of them had even been written, which is the height of stupidity, so despite my antagonism towards vampire novels, I picked up the first one on audio CD from the library, but Stephanie Wolf's reading sucked majorly, so I ditched that and bought the paperback. I ended up liking it (with reservations!), hence my progression to volume 2. I was less satisfied with this one, and this was by many accounts supposed to be be better than the first!

One thing which not so much surprised me as intrigued me about volume one was when I was reading the insane negative reviews for it. The religious crowd was reduced to telling outright lies about that volume (which I refute in my review) and about the main character's conduct - that's how sad they are. In general I liked the story, although there were some YA issues with it - of the dumb kind you find in any YA novel. This second volume promised to be no different from my reading of the first hundred pages, but it did also draw me in a bit.

In this volume, Rose hasn’t changed at all, nor does she throughout. She's still dumb, still immature, and still thinks she's god's gift to men, and like Mary Poppins, thinks she's practically perfect in every way. She's also still obsessed with her blood-mate Lissa, for whom she is working her heart out, striving to become a guardian. Early in the novel, Rose is taken for testing by a disinterested guardian who happens to be a legend in their world, but when they arrive at the house to meet with him, they discover that the entire family, including the legendary guardian, has been slaughtered, evidently by a band of strigoi working together in a manner which has no precedent.

Here was a classic example of Rose completely ignoring an express instruction from her teacher, and going unpunished for it. This will not be the last time she does this in this novel. Her instructor should have failed her on her test right there for disobeying him and entering the house against his express order, but once again she gets away with insubordination. I don’t mind a rebel character, but please let’s not indulge this! There have to be consequences otherwise it’s just a fairy tale. There never are consequences for Rose, even when her stupidity gets someone killed.

This initial event does illustrate the problem with the sad addiction of all-too-many female YA authors to telling stories in first person PoV: you thereby restrict yourself to the handicap of being unable to have anything happen unless your character is there to witness it; otherwise it’s nothing but passive voice, with your main character sitting around having to listen to boring, second-hand stories about what happened in order to keep the story alive, which is never a good thing for an action novel. This is why Mead was forced to have Rose disobey and it’s so obvious that it immediately suspends the suspension of disbelief. I want my YA writers to be far more skilled than this. Apparently Mead isn’t.

The next thing she heaps upon us is the appearance of Rose's mom, Janine, who shows up at school to tell a tale of one of her guardian adventures. It seems that Rose's mom is as full of herself as Rose is, but Rose hates her mom, which immediately telegraphs to us that Rose and she will bond, and that mom might well die in this story. Only one of those things actually happened. The same kind of thing happened with character Mason, Rose's toy boy. Her interactions with him telegraphed that she would get jiggy with him and that he might well die in this story. Only one of those things happened.

When tough-guy guardian and Rose-object-of-addiction Dimitri is too tired (from a shopping trip - I am not kidding!) to teach her in his early-morning class, Rose's mom inappropriately steps-in instead. Now this is a parent who is not a teacher at the school, teaching her own child! Worse than this, Rose's mom fails to pick up where Dimitri left off, and instead makes Rose fight her in a boxing match, and ends up punching Rose with an illegal punch, giving her a black eye. Yet there are no consequences whatsoever for Janine's misconduct! Again, there goes suspension of disbelief.

This inappropriate behavior continues as Dimitri returns to teaching, and he and Rose kiss. If he was anything of a teacher, he would recuse himself from teaching her any further, but he is not and he does not, so yet again we have inappropriate behavior with zero consequences. At this point I would normally ditch a novel like this, but beyond all this amateur fanfic-level YA absurdity, there was a story and it started out intriguing me. Sadly, it fell apart and never went anywhere. The ending was truly pathetic.

Lissa is now on meds to prevent her healing power from erupting and affecting her mental health. She's by far the most interesting character in these novels so far, but she has no more than a cameo role in this novel. Subsequent events are within the context of the earlier massacre, which is suggestive that strigoi have changed their behavior: that they're now working together and working with humans to launch attacks upon the moroi royal families, which means Lissa is at risk. Unfortunately, none of this story is followed through. Not in this volume, anyway.

I don’t get this business of the vampires celebrating Xmas! It makes no sense to me, but because of the strigoi attack, they go for a week to a lodge in the mountains for a skiing holiday! Never mind battening-down the hatches and going after the strigoi, let's go on vacation! It made no sense.

It made less sense given that only Rose and her new boyfriend Mason seemed to actually do any skiing. Rose meets Adrian Ivashkov, and starts falling in love with him. He's the bad boy leg of the triangle to Mason's good guy leg, and Rose finds herself dreaming of Ivashkov when she's not mentally masturbating over Dim-itri, the inappropriate instructor who should be fired. Dim-itri is actually supposed to be Lissa's guardian, but he's never found anywhere near Lissa. Instead, he's a full-time Rose stalker.

This dream Rose has of Ivashkov was actually implanted in her mind by Ivashkov himself, although Rose isn't smart enough to figure that out. Mead tries to distract us from this revelation by revealing another strigoi attack. This upsets Lissa, but Rose fails to wake-up in response to Lissa's distressed state! So much for the supposed deepening of their psychic bond!

Eventually Mason, Mia and Eddie leave the ski resort to go to Spokane, Washington which is supposedly nearby, to seek out and kill the strigoi. This tells me that all three of them are morons and their schooling has been wasted, but none of them is as big a moron as Rose. She figures out what they have done, but instead of warning everyone, she takes off after them with Christian, Lissa's boyfriend and they, along with the other three, are captured and held prisoner. Never once does Christian think of using his fire magic against the strigoi and it takes Rose three days (while these guys are all very conveniently kept alive for no reason at all by the ruthless strigoi) to figure it out herself! Yep, it's that bad.

So why am I rating this warty and then thinking of trying volume 3? Well there were sufficient hints in this volume to make me think, rightly or (and more probably) wrongly, that things might turn around in volume 3 and this series could assume the promise if offered in volume 1, so I'm giving it a go and if it's as bad as, or worse than this one, I'm ditching the series. Life is too short, and at fifty percent through it, I think I will have given this more than a fair chance by then.

The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci

Title: The Plain Janes
Author: Cecil Castellucci
Publisher: Minx
Rating: Worthy!
Illustrator: Jim Rugg
Lettering: Jared K Fletcher

The Plain Janes is not what I expected, but pleasantly so. Cecil Castellucci has created a charming story about Jane, a girl who survives what might be 9/11, but might be "just another" terrorist bombing in Metro City, and is urgently transported outside the city by her parents, who think it's safer in suburbia. I had thought that "Cecil" was a guy since you don't normally encounter that name for girls, but she's very much a girl, and I suspect that there's some autobiographical content in this novel.

Note that although the cover is in color, the novel is line drawings and gray-scale. The artwork is oddly appealing despite its initial appearance of simplicity and the rudimentary aura it gives off to begin with.

Jane is heartbroken to leave her friends and especially the John Doe patient who saved her life and now lies in a coma at the hospital. She visits him regularly and talks to him, but now she can visit no more: he's too far away. She did purloin his half-filled art sketch pad however, vowing to fill it on his behalf, which seems a bit presumptuous to me. Turning lemons into lemonade, Jane decides on a mini-make-over. She cuts her hair, dyeing it black so she can start her new school with a new perspective.

Shunning the popular girls at lunchtime, Jane sits at a table of apparent "loser" girls, who may or may not like her sitting with them, but who curiously are all named Jane. These girls are smart, talented in different fields, and poor socializers. Jane eventually gets them talking and lures them into joining her in an art project.

On am empty lot which has been set aside for a strip mall, the four girls build three quite large pyramids out of rubble one night, modeled on those a Gizeh in Egypt. They post a sign announcing that the pyramids have lasted for thousands of years, and asking how long the proposed strip mall will last. The sign is signed People Loving Art In Neighborhoods (P.L.A.I.N.), and so is born The Plain Janes.

As the PJs take on more anonymous projects, they garner for themselves a reputation, and start bonding and enjoying their lives for once. Their reputation is oddly a bad thing, seen by the school authorities as destructive and as vandalism, even though it is, er, PLAINly not. One big weakness of this novel is that Castellucci offers no reason at all as to why this should be. The PLAIN artist could be anyone or any group, yet it quickly comes down to an assumption that someone at school is doing this, and a psycho cop comes to the school and gives a lecture about this "vandalism" and vows to run down the perps. I thought that this was an unnecessary slur on the police.

There is a side story about a non-existent "romance" between Jane and a guy at school where neither side seems interested in becoming involved, and there's a weird, rather inexplicable ending, which took away from the story for me and made it rather weak in the finale, but overall this was a good story with very positive vibes and I recommend it.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

Title: Looking For Alaska
Author: John Green
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Audio novel almost acceptably read by Jeff Woodman.

I wasn't impressed by John Green's debut novel and more than I was with his novel Paper Towns. It's living testimony to the fact that people who hand out book awards, hand them out from their ass, where their head is. But take my advice: if you want to write 'great literature' and win such awards, the secret is to include multiple quotes from dead people, preferably men, and you're almost half-way there. Make them foreign dead people and you are half-way there. Include some bone-headed words about nature conjoined with spiritualism, and you're three-quarters the way there. Don’t worry at all about your writing style. That's irrelevant in great (perhaps) literature.

And Green is quite obviously trying oh-so hard to write literature, isn’t he? Given that what’s classed as such is all-too-often anachronistic, irrelevant, tedious, pedantic, and boring, Green succeeds admirably. In this one, he sets up his template for all his novels (at least the two I've suffered through). You need a smug, spoiled, self-centered, clueless, uninteresting guy, a quirky side-kick, and a female bitch, and you're there. In this case the tedious male lead is Miles Halter tells his story in first person PoV which is all-too-typically horrible in any novel, and which seems to be the trope du jour in YA fiction these days. To be fair, in this novel it’s not completely cringe-worthy, just annoyingly smug.

Halter's life is so utterly devoid of anything of utility that he spends it memorizing the last words of the rich and famous. He's never actually read anything by those purported 'greats' of literature, just their biographies, and all he remembers of those are their dying words. With this more than ample qualification, he decides he's ready to launch himself upon life, and he goes off to boarding school at the age of 16. His parents evidently have no objection to this, not even financially, yet somehow he's classed not with the well-to-do students, but with the riff-raff.

On his first day there he meets all the riff-raff he will ever need to know. No new people need apply. His roommate, Chip(!), is known as "The Colonel". Because Halter is so skinny, he's named 'Pudge'. Oh how hilarious is the irony! Halter immediately falls head-in-ass in "love" with a girl. Alaska Young isn’t; that is to say she doesn’t come across as a sixteen-year-old, but as an idealized Mary Sue, wise way-beyond her years, so you know this is going to be tragic. It couldn’t possibly be 'literature' otherwise, now could it?

Seriously, Juliet and Romeo live happily ever after? Teens who don’t stupidly kill themselves but go on to make a real contribution to life and to their society? Who wants to read that trash? So you know it's going to be tragic, and since the narrator is named Halter, and his "love" interest is young, who’s going to die? Do the math. The give-away is in the last name, and it’s not a word that's related to 'stopping', it’s a word that's too often and all-too-sadly associated with 'die'.

The problem is that Halter's infatuation is never about who Alaska is as a person, it's entirely about how hot she looks on the surface. Adolescent love, superficial is thy name. Halter's view of her never improves, nor does her behavior. She's entirely unappealing. I don’t care how beautiful a woman is supposed to be; if she smokes like a chimney (not that chimneys smoke so much these days) then she's ugly, period. She's apparently trying to smoke herself to death, how wonderfully deep and literate. I'm impressed. Impressed by how self-destructive these losers are. But of course, if she didn’t chain-smoke, then how could she possibly be an artist, sculpting Halter's rough-hewn adolescent rock into a masterpiece worthy of some dusty corner of a museum. Shall we muse?

Halter doesn’t get how pointless young Alaska is. On the contrary, like a male spider to a potential mate, he enters her web with great, perhaps, abandon, completely embracing her lifestyle of shallow rebelliousness, cutting classes, smoking, drinking, and generally wasting his time. Yes, I get that the claim is that he wants to idiotically pursue the last dying words of Rabelais (the great perhaps), as though the delusional ranting of someone at death's door is magically philosophical, deep, and sacred (but only if they're famous). You definitely have to slap a medal on that or die trying - or try dying. Moreover, if the person is foreign, then his words (no female who dies is worth remembering apparently) are to be hallowed for eternity!

But here's the rub: if that's the case, then why does Halter go to school at all? Why not drop out completely and run away from home? Great Perhaps because that's where the lie lies in his life? Halter isn't actually interested in exploring any great perhaps; he's just interested in geek mishaps. He "explores" the unknown by doing the staid, tried-and-tested, and very-well known: going to school! Yet even then, he's paradoxically not getting an education in anything that's important. Instead, he's hanging with his peers, his attention drifting even in his favorite class. Great perhaps he's learning nothing at all? He sure doesn't appear to be.

On his first night there, he's bullied, but this is never reported, because 'ratting out' the bullies would be the wrong thing to do, don't you know? The fact that he could have been killed is completely irrelevant; it's much better to let them get away with their recklessness and cruelty so they're encouraged to do it again and again until someone does die; then everyone can adopt a pained expression and whine, "How could this happen here?" The joke here is that he fails to come up with anything interesting in the way of last words.

Despite my sarcasm, I guess I really don’t get how a novel larded with trope and cliché manages to even get considered for an award, let alone win one. The Printz Award? Really? Is there an out-of-Printz award? Probably not, but I made one up and awarded it my own Dire Virgins novel! Every main character, and there are really only three, let's face it, is a trope. Chip is the 'seasoned pro' - the one who knows every trick and angle, who becomes the mentor to the new guy. His one feature is that he knows the names of capitals. Honestly? Character Tukumi's only real feature is his name.

We already met Halter, arguably the most trope-ish since he's the tediously stereotypical skinny geek - like geek and physique are inalienably alien bed-fellows, oh, and did I mention that he knows the last words of some dead dudes? Presage much, Green? Next thing you know he'll be writing a novel where he has a count-down to the tragedy to make sure that we don't miss it. Oh, wait a minute, he did count down to the tragedy in this novel!

Oh, and Halter failed to halt her. How awful for him. Boy! You gotta carry that weight, carry that weight a long time…. Maybe if Halter had actually learned about life instead of philosophically jerking-off to the 'great perhaps' he might have learned enough to see what was coming and been prepared to do something to prevent it, but from an awards PoV, it's a far, far better thing that he doesn’t than he ever did, and it’s a far, far better ending that he goes through than he's ever gone….

Even I saw that ending coming, and that was at the same moment that I saw the cover and read the title of this novel. A candle gone out? Seriously? I'll bet the cover artist got whiplash trying to pat their self on the back after that one. The Sylvia Plath Award for most tragically tragic tragedy goes, of course, to Alaska, a teenager who was in an ice-cold state even before she died.

But what really died here was a chance at a readable and entertaining novel. I rate this novel warty, but do take form it a timeless moral: never, ever read a novel with a person's name in the title - unless it's a children's novel. They don't seem to suffer from the acute lethargy and lack of inventiveness which is the stone from which John Green is hewn..

I Have to add that 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. Deal with it.

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.