Magic's Child by Justine Larbalestier

Title: Magic's Child
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Razor Bill
Rating: Worthy!

What better way to finish out a magical, record-setting month than by closing out the Magic or Madness trilogy?! 31 reviews in 31 days, one review per day, every single day! Take that, Bembridge scholars!

So, this novel continues and completes the Magic or Madness trilogy. Magic Or Madness is reviewed here, and Magic Lessons is reviewed here. The series follows Reason Cansino after she has 'super magic' donated to her by her ancestor Jésus Cansino. This new magic begins transforming her as it transformed him - to the point where he became effectively inhuman - not so much in his mentality or behavior, but in his very substance. Reason can now close her eyes and see the world depicted in magical form, where 'muggles' appear as black spaces and all magic appears in glorious Technicolor™, making the real world seem gray by comparison.

As if this isn't enough for a fifteen-year-old to handle, Reason is now pregnant from the one time she had sex with Danny, Jay-Tee's 18-year-old brother. Yes, he's guilty of statutory rape and no, having sex for the first time does not grant you immunity from contraception. If you are both fertile, a pregnancy can result from any sex you have, even if the guy can manage the so-called withdrawal 'method'. Trust me, there's no withdrawal that doesn’t also involve a deposit.

Given Danny's apparent womanizing, having unprotected sex was appallingly irresponsible. Reason knew no better given how naïve she is, but Danny is an irresponsible jerk, especially since he subsequently pushes Reason away (she hasn't told him he's a daddy at that point). He insists that having sex was a mistake; that this should go no further, and that they should just be friends, but that's a bit too little, and a lot too late. He evidently has no taste whatsoever in women, too boot, if he's rejecting Reason (there's a double-meaning in that!).

Talking of reason, I have to give a warm nod to Larbalestier in her putting a stress on science in this series, but she doesn’t know much about DNA, it would appear. When Reason 'fixes' Jay-Tee (as evil Jason prophesied she would), by removing her magic and thereby saving her life, she achieves this resurrection through repairing Jay-Tee's genome. It’s apparently been 'fraying', which makes no sense. All of our genomes are 'fraying' in one sense: in that the telomeres which define genes are ever shortening throughout our life, but this is normal and natural. Some scientists think that this is how we age and die, so that part made sense, but as Microsoft often claims: it’s not a defect; it's a feature. If our DNA were really fraying in the sense which Larbalestier appears to mean, we’d be pretty much dead - not just dying - or at the very least, we'd be really sick.

Larbalestier describes Jay-Tee's DNA as being based on multiples of four. Well, guess what? Everyone's DNA is based on multiples of four! Your DNA is built of, and functions via four bases: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), so this claim of Larbalestier's makes no sense. I think it's best, when writing about stuff which you try to tie to the genome, to say as little as possible about exactly how it's supposed to work! Unless you really know your topic, that is. Also: make sure you don’t claim that these powers with which you invest your characters are blossoming from a single a magic gene. One gene rarely does big things by itself.

Having said that, I really liked this novel and felt that Larbalestier has done a good job, overall, for the series. I'm not a fan of trilogies, and I admit to having some issues with this one, but sometimes an author can make them work, and make them worth pursuing, and this is such a case. Larbalestier takes full advantage of her trans-Pacific marital relationship and bounces back and forth between Sydney, Australia and New York City USA once again in this volume. This time she makes it personal as evil Jason flies to Sydney and spirits away Reason's mentally-challenged (from refusing to use her magic) mom. Why Reason, with her enhanced powers, failed to see this coming is more of a problem than figuring out how magic-empowered Jason managed to get Sarafina away from a health-care facility, but once again, the game is afoot, and Mere and Reason travel by kitchen door to NYC.

Of course, we know how this ends - happily, but it takes some interesting twists and turns to get there. I recommend this trilogy. It's not perfect by any means, but it approaches closer to perfect than far too many trilogies these days.

Magic Lessons by Justine Larbalestier

Title: Magic Lessons
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Razor Bill
Rating: Worthy!

Errata and clunkers:
p100 "They didn’t burn everything else, but. Just left a pile of ashes. I added some of the chicken bones. But it hasn’t been noisy or violent since then. Now it just ripples." Seriously?!

p118 "…every single person spoke completely different than her…" That's just clunky!

The "Golem" was originally banana yellow, then it's remembered as being red-brown, "the same color as it was originally"?!! Hmm?

Mere gets Jésus's magic and is able to fix her broken fingers, but when Tom gets a scrape she resorts to antiseptic and a Band-Aid®? Seriously? Clunky!

Yes! It's Justine Larbalestier month! You didn't know? This is volume 2 in the Magic or Madness series. Volume one is reviewed here. Reason Cansino is now living (if not completely comfortably) with her grandmother, referred to as Mere, but whether as in 'Nightmare' or as in 'grand-mère' remains to be seen! Mere lives in Sydney Australia. Reason still visits her mother in the psychiatric home, and lives somewhat in fear of her evil grandfather, "Jason" (or Alexander - Jason Alexander!) whom she met in volume one. Her grandfather is a magic leech - that is, he has magic, just as Reason does, but if he uses it, he sets himself up for an early death (as does Reason). If he doesn't use it, he'll become insane (as will Reason). The only solution, so he and others believe (Reason disagrees), is to use it, but to prolong your life by leeching magic from other magicians. One of these is Jay-Tee, whom Reason met when she accidentally ended up on New York City after going through the magic kitchen door in Mere's house. Another is Tom, a sweet guy Reason met when she went to live with Mere.

After a dangerous adventure on volume 1, Reason, Jay-Tee, and Tom are back with Mere, but Jay-Tee is dying, having been leeched almost dry by Jason. She has to take magic from Tom to give her a boost, which leaves him temporarily exhausted. Worse than this, someone is trying to force is way through the kitchen portal. At first they think it’s Reason's grandfather, but it turns out to be an ancient, all-but-inhuman ancestor of hers. This part of the novel was a really cool and interesting read, very well-written for the most part.

Eventually this ancestor succeeds in pulling Reason back through the door into NYC. He's extremely powerful, but he seems not to want to harm Reason, but to actually help her, although she seems to be rather slow on the uptake in that regard, as indeed she was from time to time in volume one. She ends up in the freezing cold again in her pajamas. The ancient won’t let her back through the magic door, so she ends up with Jay-Tee's estranged brother who she briefly met when she was here the last time. There seems to be some wish-fulfillment going on here, in that Larbalestier frees Reason from her nomadic existence in volume one in the Australian outback, where she owned nothing more than a backpack, and delivers her into the luxury of her grandmother's house. Even in NYC, Reason enjoys the sweet comfort of Jason's accommodations for Jay-Tee in volume one, and of Danny's luxurious apartment in volume two.

Reason decides to try and sniff-out the old man - since his horrible smell is easy for her to track - to see if she can discern what he's up to and why he's here. Why she didn’t simply ask him is unexplained. This part of the novel was not written at all well. I couldn’t figure out what Danny and Reason were supposed to have agreed they would do! Maybe it was just me because once I got past that confusing page, things made sense again. After being prevented yet again from going back through the kitchen portal, Reason discovers that the ancient stinky guy has put something inside her that helps her to track him without retching as the horrible nauseating stench he seems to trail behind him. It would seem he is trying to tell her something, but again why he doesn't simply speak - or put the information directly inside her head - is unexplained. She follows his path to a cemetery, which is evidently what he intended. Maybe his grave is there. This guy ultimately makes no sense in his behavior, serving only to be a deus ex machina plot-hole filler so... ok, I guess!

I have to ask why YA authors never depict people being killed off by their hero? Jason Blake is pure evil. He shows up to drain Reason of her magic and steals a boat-load of it. Danny renders him unconscious, yet Reason never pulls her magic back from Jason. She doesn’t even get her share back, much less drain him and end the problem right there. Instead, she runs away. That's not even remotely heroic. At some point the hero has to put an end to the evil, period. Anything else is cowardice and stupidity. Danny and Reason at one point have him at their mercy but instead of stopping things there and then, they encourage evil to continue by running away. Not smart, but it does net the author a third volume, which frankly is a bit pathetic.

No more spoilers! I finished this novel having had some issues with it, but overall I liked it and I do want to read volume three (which is just as well since I already have it to hand!). So what didn't I like (in addition to what I've already mentioned)? And why am I asking you? Larbalestier keeps tripping up her action by splitting the story up between Sydney where Jay-Tee, Mere, and Tom are, and NYC, where Danny and Reason are. That was annoying because it kept interrupting the action and larding-up the text with cheap and completely fake 'tragic' moments. I despise this 'cheap-thrill' kind of writing, so I was glad when it had to give way to a straight narrative

Eventually it reached a point at the end of the novel where Reason is no longer the student but the master (mistress? Gender tropes in YA fiction!), so I guess Larbalestier achieved her stated goal in the novel's title. I was less thrilled about going into volume three after I’d read two, than I was about going into volume two after I’d read one, but I was still on-board with this series. It’s original and interesting - if a bit too indulgent of Le Stupide in this volume. That said I rate this a worthy read and I think it’s worth exploring what Larbalestier has to say in volume three.

Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

Title: Magic or Madness
Author: Justine Larbalestier
Publisher: Razorbill
Rating: WORTHY!

I fell in love with this novel right from the off, which is always a good sign as long as nothing goes south later, and it did not in this case. This is the second of Larbalestier's novels that I've read. The first was How to Ditch Your Fairy, and I rated that one a worthy read also. Is this the start of a relationship?! I have to say that this one was a bit annoying at first because the author/publisher chose to start each chapter with four or five words in a different and largely unintelligible font. There's no reason to annoy your readers like that, especially when you have so many other ways available to annoy and irritate them, but that's Big Publishing™ for you: a law unto itself.

The other thing is that there's this text divider symbol - like a sun with a smiley face in its center - employed in the text which is fine, except that it seems to appear randomly. Normally you'd use something like this to separate text in the same chapter which takes place at a somewhat later time, but in this case, these things seem to appear inexplicably at some indecipherable whim of the author's. Larbalestier seems intent in this novel upon randomly split text with these symbols, and with new chapters without much regard for the flow of what she's writing. I didn't experience this in How to Ditch Your Fairy. So this is slightly odd and somewhat frustrating, but it's not a deal buster for me.

This novel, which is the first in a trilogy (Magic or Madness, Magic Lessons, Magic’s Child), is set in Australia, so some of the lingo might be obscure. If you're a Brit, especially one like me with an interest in the Land of Oz, you can understand the bulk of it, but there's a glossary at the end of the novel for anything which proves too odd to guess at. Why the glossary is there rather than at the start is a bit of a mystery, but on to the story. Reason ("Ree") is a young Caucasian/aboriginal girl who has spent nearly all her life on the run with her mother Sarafina.

This precipitates the start of this story where Ree is forced to live with her actual legal guardian (her grandmother) because Sarafina is confined to a psychiatric facility. For her entire life, Ree's had it inculcated in her that her grandmother is an evil witch (not figuratively, but quite literally) who sacrifices animals. Ree is fearful of even talking to or looking at her grandmother Esmeralda (Mere) much less accepting anything from her in the way of food or drink. I didn't buy into this characterization at all. It seemed pretty obvious from the outset that Mere is not the "bad guy" here, and that Sarafina has been less than completely honest with her daughter. Plus: nut-job! (And there's a good reason for that, as Larbalestier reveals towards the end).

As Ree is planning escape routes from the house, much in the same way her mother did at an early age many years before, she encounters her next door neighbor, Tom, who has dreams of becoming a dress designer. Kudos to Larbalestier for not only breaking molds here, but for also not making Tom gay. The two bond quickly, because much in the same way that Ree can read people and situations, and has amazing counting skills, Tom is also gifted in evaluating his surroundings and picturing where people are in them. Whereas Ree sees things in numbers, particularly the Fibonacci numbers (a sequence you may recall from its use in The Da Vinci Code) or even your math class, Tom sees them in geometric shapes, pretty much like the designers of video games do. He pretty much tracks Ree climbing his favorite tree without even opening his eyes. He's really surprised to discover that Ree is much like himself. Yes, it would seem that Tom and Ree are going to be an item, but Larbalestier is smarter than that. At least I think she is!

Larbalestier dug herself into somewhat of a slippery hole by writing this in standard trope YA girl novel format. What’s up with that? Is it illegal to write a novel about a young girl unless it's told from first person PoV? I know it pretty much is in the US, but in Australia, too, they will clap you in irons and put you in the public stocks if you try to tell your story from third person?! No wonder they exported so many convicts to Australia from England. I’ll bet every one of them was a first person perspective novelist! Seriously, because she did this, Larbalestier has to awkwardly step out from that mode of narration into third person to describe Tom's perspective.

This problem is encountered repeatedly throughout this novel, and it's both really annoying and somewhat confusing. It's testimony to how much I liked the novel and especially Ree's strong character that I was willing to put up with this really ham-fisted way of telling this story. It screeched (yes, screeched) at me that I was reading a novel. Buh-bye suspension of disbelief; I think I can see it waving to me from that last bus out of town. Why can authors not divorce themselves from 1PoV for goodness sakes? Every novel does not have to be written that way, not even if it’s a YA novel about a girl, and not even if it’s dystopian! No, honestly! Get a grip authors for goodness sakes! Having got that out of my system, Larbalestier writes pretty well in general, if you can ignore the clunky changes in voice, and there's a lot of much-appreciated humor.

Tom's observation that "Reason did not climb like a girl" is a rather insulting and condescending claim - especially coming via a female writer. I've never know girls to be any different from boys in that regard, especially when they're Ree's age and younger. OTOH, it was Tom observing this, so perhaps we can excuse Larbalestier this time. Again, this is a problem with changing the narration voice repeatedly. That aside, Ree continues to defy not only expectations, but also her grandmother by hardly saying a word to her and by refusing to eat anything in the house. She also builds on her relationship with Tom. They visit a cemetery nearby and she discovers a disturbing trend in her family - the graves are mostly for women, and nearly all of them died young. Those who didn’t die young died in their early forties. Whatever she has, magical or not, it’s apparently some sort of curse! This is important for the ending of the novel.

Ree visits her mom in the hospital, and acting on her rather drugged-addled description finds what appears to be some confirmation, under the floor in the basement, that maybe her mom wasn't telling stretchers about grandma's witching activities and her evil mien. Pursuing her plan to escape, Ree finds a strange-looking key which apparently unlocks the back door, thereby opening up alternate escape routes. Not that she's exactly a prisoner! The problem with this key is that when she finally opens the door, she's not in Kansas, er Sydney, any more. Nope. Inside, looking out the window, it’s a hot Australian day, but using the key to pass through the doorway turns that into a freezing night in New York City! Ree has never seen snow and is at first oblivious to the chilling effect, finding everything odd and fascinating, particularly the snowflakes. It's nothing like the now familiar surroundings of Sydney.

The problem is that very soon, Ree realizes that she's wandered so far from the back door that she can no longer identify her grandmother's house amongst the cookie-cutter residences here. One would think her footprints in the snow would lead her right back there, especially if she's as smart as I’d been led to hope she is, but just as she realizes she's lost, we learn that there's someone in this new world watching her. Someone who's been waiting for Ree, expecting her to show up any time now….

The new character is Julietta, who goes by Jay-Tee, and who "works for" another person with the same abilities as Esmeralda. Even though Jay-Tee isn;t honest with Ree, the two bond, and when Jay-Tee's brother Danny shows up with some interesting news, it looks like Ree has found someone else to bond with, and maybe Tom has, in Jay-Tee. Just when you think this novel is over, with Ree safely home, she discovers something in her bedroom that shakes the delicate foundation she mistakenly thought she had under her feet at last.

I loved this story. I loved finding a resourceful, realistic, interesting, and strong female main character, and especially one who wasn't restricted to being white! I loved that naiveté is not confused with stupidity here. I loved that the novel was not forcibly set in the USA, because you know we can't possibly have an entertaining novel which isn't! I recommend this novel and I look forward to reading the two sequels.

Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

Title: Born of Illusion
Author: Teri Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

The problem I had with this novel is that nothing happens in it. Nothing interesting, new, or different, anyway. It’s supposed to be a story about a mother-daughter team who have a magic/psychic show in the 1920's. The daughter, Anna van Housen, is the magician, and her rather abusive mother, Marguerite, is the fake psychic. While Anna is a capable magician (of the illusionist variety, not the really magical variety), her mother is an out-and-out fake, assisted by Anna in pulling the wool over people's eyes during their stage shows. The two of them are scam artists and conduct private seances which they use to criminally bilk the grieving out of money. Anna apparently sees nothing wrong in this.

For reasons unexplained, Marguerite treats Anna like dirt, employing her as a servant far more than she loves her as a daughter. Anna is rumored (by her mother) to be the daughter of Harry Houdini (although throughout, I suspected that this was a lie), who happens to be in New York at the same time as the van Housens. The non-twist here is that Anna actually can read minds and communicate with the dead.

In a mind-numbingly boring development, Anna acquires for herself two, and exactly two (no less, no more) men, a 'bad boy' and a 'good boy'. Yawn. The two are, for all practical purposes interchangeable, although the more serious of them, the 'good boy' who has the absurd name of Cole, is the one with this supposedly dark secret which turns out to be nothing. It became tedious beyond words to read how many times she looked into his dark eyes or had her heart skip a beat, and I habitually flipped off every single page upon which either of these two tired tropes put in an appearance, which may mean I missed a plot twist here and there, not that there was much plot; as I said, nothing happens in this novel. Oh, Anna does get kidnapped, but she's an escape artist and she almost immediately escapes. That's it for high adventure.

What about the writing? Well, it wasn't badly written in a technical sense, but I felt no compulsion driving me to read this. When I had to put it down for whatever reason, I had no thoughts along the lines of "when will I be able to get back to it?". I did not miss it when I wasn't reading it; that's how I know how thoroughly unappealing it was. Here's one line which I thought utterly absurd: It's pure magic to see the sun go down in the west..."??! Because normally, of course, it goes down in the east. Seriously, I can see what the author was attempting here, but it was written badly. She should have written, "It's pure magic to see the sun set as the city lights come on...", but she didn’t. Here's another classic when Anna is tied up: "I might be able to release myself, but in the condition I'm in, it would take far too much effort and leave me unable to defend myself..." Seriously? She can defend herself better tied-up than with hands free? Wow!

In short, I honestly cannot recommend this novel, and I certainly won't dishonestly recommend it.

The Waking Dreamer by J E Alexander

Title: The Waking Dreamer
Author: J E Alexander
Publisher: Mechanical Owl Media
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 of any kind for this review.

Alexander has deftly secreted his prologue away in chapter one. Finally! An author who gets it! I very much appreciated that. It is, however, still a prologue and by definition completely boring and typically pointless. The story actually takes off in chapter two and then it does take off, which I also very much appreciated. I loved chapter two. You could quite comfortably skip chapter one (aka prologue) and lose nothing by it. The problem is that it was all downhill after that, and I could not bring myself to continue to plod through this when there are so many other potentially great stories waiting for me to discover.

Emmett is a foundling, and he was supposed to stay with Nancy, his best friend since college, since she was his legal guardian (his guardian anyway) until his eighteenth birthday, but he did not get along with her husband, and he felt this huge need to leave Houston and go somewhere and do something. There is no good reason given for why he can't wait two more weeks, but the more I read about Emmett, the more I realized the truth about him: he's just stupid, and that explains it. The story really is no smarter than Emmett, either. It's basically your standard fight between good and evil under the ostensibly novel guise of Druids this time, but in this novel, it's nothing but fight, retreat, rinse, repeat, and it quite frankly was boring as hell.

The main character is Emmett (aka the deliberately-kept-ignorant chosen one), and he has a fascination with movies and is frequently quoting them, but instead of going to California and Hollywood, he heads to Florida in pursuit of his mother. I don't really get this, because we've been given no history of Emmett and no reason why he would do this. Chapter two is larded with movie references. I don’t get that either, and neither does any character in the novel, so I had to wonder what the point of that was, but taking that as a premise, as the author evidently wishes us to, why would he not go to California?

Chapter three begins with an unnecessarily detailed description of his route out of Texas and into Louisiana. It reminds me of the first draft of my own Saurus! I've traveled this route (both figuratively and literally!) and I can verify Alexander's descriptions, but it seems pointless, and I wanted it to be over. I'm not a fan of road trip stories, unless there's honestly something worth seeing, and in this case there really wasn't.

Emmett eventually meets Amala (aka the chosen one's babe, who is evidently a Druish Princess...), but we meet her as a child, right before he is born. She's a chestnut-haired child with a snake. She's accompanied by red-haired Rhiannon, her de facto mom (if not biological - it's a prologue, after all - why would it tell us anything useful?!), and a man named Oliver, who is possibly her father. They both disappear after the first chapter. The trio has arrived in a large city (which seems to encompass an improbably large number of abandoned buildings!), and are looking for something, searching in disregard of personal safety because the local gangs have learned the hard way to avoid this trio of Druids. Kudos to Alexander for taking this away from the usual suspects and introducing something which, while not new, is at least different, but he does nothing new with it, and worse, he lards up the story with so many other tropes and clichés that the novelty of this one aspect is sadly tarnished.

With the help of Amala's "wisdom" (the snake), they find the house they're looking for. It’s old, rotten, abandoned (of course), fetid and filthy, yet this is where the old woman they seek has chosen to meet them because she's birthing a child! Why? Why there? Again, no explanation. She's is in process of delivering Emmett - the eponymous waking dreamer - from a street woman who is evidently an addict and likely will die from this delivery. This woman disappears after the first chapter, too.

After the baby comes into the world, so does evil - "The Grinning Man" with the tired trope of red eyes, who wants to taste the child, but he's repelled into the darkness by the old woman - the Archivist, believe it or not, shades of The Matrix - because it’s not yet his time! When will soon be now? Since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, let me digress a minute and talk not so much about this novel specifically (I have read only fifty percent of it), but much more generally. I've always wondered why evil actually gets "a time". Even in the Bible, the Adversary is loosed ('cos he's a loser?!) for a spell after being bound for a thousand years. Why? Is 'Good' not strong enough to prevent evil's time? I find that sad (and in the Bible very revealing about how extraordinarily limited the god of the Israelites actually was)! I also don’t get the twin tropes of evil vs. good, and of prophecy. It's pathetic, but sometimes you can get a good story out of it despite the boring clichés; unfortunately, we don’t get that good story anywhere near often enough.

I don’t mind a story at all which has these elements if it’s well-written, but they rarely are. Instead, they regurgitate deathly-tired tropes without so much as a stab at logic, let alone justification. It would be nice to read something truly different for a change. But of course there must be the balance between good and evil, for without evil, how can we know good? You're heard that one, right? Well let me put in my too sensible no censorship two cents (my sense, too?) on that: I can tell how good a carrot cake is without having to have a large carrot forced up my ass first…. But that's just me, and I don’t like large carrots up my ass, but if you do, then by all means substitute something you really don’t like instead, even if it involves neither carrot nor ass, so you can make the same comparison.

Now, do you agree that we can tell good from evil without having to experience the evil? Do you agree that it’s possible, for example, to experience the joy of a good night's sleep without having to be forcibly kept awake for several days to contrast the evil of that with the good of peaceable rest? Of course you do. Can you experience the good of holding a baby or enjoying a young child's laughter without having to know horrid details of beaten, starving, and tortured, or murdered children? I can. I'm pretty darned sure that sure you can, too (two can?), at least if you're anywhere near "normal' (which I don’t even claim for myself!). So empirically, we appear to have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that you do not need evil to enjoy and appreciate good. Why is it that all-too-many writers cannot?

So we cannot seem to find a new angle here, and we cannot get away from mindless repetition. It's like a formulaic pop song: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, with not even a middle eight, and it's not appreciated precisely because it's always the same. Evil attacks, good retreats. Good is always limited, passive, and weak, evil is always powerful, aggressive, and sneakily unpredictable. Who wants to read something like that with no leavening at all? It;s made worse, if that's possible, by Alexander's spastic dedication to endless mystery, because no one will tell anyone anything, least of all explain what's going on to Emmett. Half-way through a novel I expect something to be revealed, but nothing is.

On page eight, "…her ophidian friend who raised its head…" struck me as a really weird sentence! You don't usually partner 'who' with 'its'! Interesting word usements he structures, as Steve Martin might phrase it. I've mentioned this before - and recently - but it bears repeating: the 'monkey' (as an insult to humans) trope has now officially been forcibly rammed tediously beyond tiresome and deeply into boring and unoriginal. Writers need to find something fresh to have spill from the mouths of their villains. For me, monkey isn’t an insult at all, actually, I'm rather proud of human genetic heritage.

Back to our story in progress: So Emmett, on his illogical and precipitous journey (we'll learn that Emmett isn't the stoutest stave in the rack), arrives in Florida late at night, running low on gas, and takes a sad-looking exit from the Interstate into the middle of nowhere to gas-up. Did I mention that this guy is pretty clueless? He's had all day to do this and he leaves it until he has no choice. Actually, I found that hard to credit and it hit me with the harsh realization that, yep, I am reading a novel. I hate it when the illusion bubble pops! Even if he were a complete moron, which he could well be, Emmett still would have stopped frequently for rest-room breaks and junk food binges. I can't credit that he would get into this situation ordinarily, so I have to conclude that he's stupid (and an ingrate it turns out). Of course, as a writer, Alexander has to get his character into some sort of position for the dramatic rescue to occur, evidently. I just think there were far better ways of doing it than the one we got! And it exposes the plot weakness: why did Amala and Kieran leave it until quite literally the last minute to rescue Emmett? Why have they been absent from his entire life until now? Again, No Explanation!

Like Batman and Robin, these two supposedly heroic figures spring from nowhere and take out Emmett's attackers. They save his life and this is where ingratitude sets in. Three days later he wakes from the attack in Oregon, diametrically opposite the corner of the country he was in, and he has not a shred of gratitude for those who helped him. Given his breezy personality from earlier chapters, I found this incredible, too, and another slap up-side the face reminding me, hey, no matter how immersed you were becoming, you're just reading a novel, just get used to it!

So what went wrong? Well, this story started coming apart big-time for me around chapters seven and eight. This is when they’re at Silvan Dea (which serves no purpose for me but to keep reminding me of Opus Dei - from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code - for some reason!). To begin with, it had made no sense that Emmett was pissed off with the people who saved his life, but it made far less sense that these people quite literally explained nothing whatsoever to him despite repeated promises that all would be explained. If he were going to get angry, it would be at his nonsensically and deliberately being kept in the dark about anything and everything. But as I said, he's not exactly the most powerful wand in Olivander's. Oh, they do keep on telling him they'll explain, but they actually explain absolutely nothing ever. I'm fond of mystery, but mystery for the sake of being mysterious is bullshit. It did not increase my anticipation or pique my interest. Instead, it made me think "amateur" and additionally, I've started to dislike Emmett, which isn't a good thing if I'm expected to keep reading this!

On some minor issues, I don’t get Mrs Carmichael at the restaurant. She sounds British but there is no other indication of her origin. If she's American, her mode of speech is way-the-hell off! Neither do I really get Emmett's obsession with movies. It's never rationalized or justified. Yeah. I get that you give your character a quirk or two to make them memorable, or interesting, or intriguing, but this doesn't seem to be working very well here, especially when he persists in movie references with people who quite clearly are not getting a thing he's saying. This tells me that Emmett is both too lacking in empathy to note that his obscure references are falling on deaf ears, and he's also too stupid to adjust his interactions based on their reaction.

So at about one third the way through this, it had become a real slog to keep reading it. Chapters nine and ten revealed two facts to me: The Waking Dreamer owes a lot to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, and Alexander is yet another writer who doesn't understand that staunch ≠ stanch. I've seen this a lot lately, and not just in self-published books. Are there really that many illiterate book editors out there? While we're on this topic, I really don't see that "undulating" is a viable partner of "startling speed"! Yes, it's not technically wrong, but doesn't 'undulating' suggest something of a more steady, measured motion to you? It was that pairing of implied leisurely motion with the definite emphasis on speed which really struck me as bizarre, and pulled me out of the story again! Yeah, I may be nit-picking, but these things are important when there are so many of them hitting you one after another. I think any reader can forgive a writer a few faux pas, especially if the story is a good one overall, but even a good story is dragged down when so many writing issues crop-up in such a short space of reading time.

I like Joss Whedon well enough, although I'm not given to building shrines to him and worshiping him as all-too-many fans evidently do, but for some reason which I can't quite define, the Buffy series was nauseating to me. I think part of the problem at least was the bullshit martial-arts fighting against all-but-overwhelming odds in every-single-episode (not that I watched it, but I've seen enough bits and pieces of it to have the heavy weight of that distinct impression pressed sorely upon me!). The Waking Dreamer seems fond of ripping-off that aspect of it very addictively, and that's what ultimately turned me off this novel, not only for the tedious metronomic, absolutely unchanging repetitiveness of it, but also, with both the inclusion of this nonsense to begin with, and in the poor writing of it. For example, at one point we're told that the Druids who are fighting are a well-honed team working fluently together in the fight ("...one pushing forward as the other guarded their rear...", but very shortly afterwards, we learn that one of them is killed precisely because no one was watching his rear (and apparently his magic wasn't either)!

These people supposedly have access to powerful magic, but when it comes down to it, they're reduced to common bar-room brawling, and Alexander seems to have no abhorrence of describing it with relish and no small amount of salivation. For me, that both betrays and cheapens the magical aspects of a story. If Alexander wants to write fantasy, then bring on the swords and dragons and go at it with all of the trope brutality that genre implies (this is why I'm not a big fan of historical fantasy: it's far, far too clichéd), but if he's writing a modern magic story, then I don't get this medieval portrayal. Nor do I get why the Druids are so weak when they're in their own grove amongst nature, surrounded by trees! It's been pushed down our throat thus far that this is their "element", yet they're still at a huge disadvantage. If they were fighting in the city, this would make at least some kind of sense. On their own turf? Not so much.

The improbable fantasy elements in play here are exposed even further when Alexander uses a phrase like "vicious attack" in the midst of a fight wherein the aggressors have proven themselves beyond vicious already, and which is being pressed with no regard whatsoever for Marquis of Queensberry rules (or any other, for that matter)! How much more vicious could that one specific attack actually be? These attackers go to eleven! Or are we to understand that the attack up to this point was quite a mild one (as mindless, brutal, overwhelming assaults go), but that the blow which struck Sophie was a particularly naughty one? Did the attacker touch the hollow of her thigh, as the omnipotent god of the Hebrews did to overcome the mere mortal, "Old Man" Jacob?! That was vicious! How dare they?

And if it's down to brute-force fighting, why are the Druids not armed with automatic weapons? I mean for goodness sakes an M2 Browning .50 cal. machine gun would readily take care of these "Revenants" no matter what their numbers, so why employ an iron stave (and never a staff!) in the defense? Do machine guns not contain iron? In the absence of good sense, the Revenants win the day, forcing the Druids to retreat, so I guess the force was not strong with these Druids after all. I read no explanation as to why evil had become so powerful, nor why the Druids were so laughably weak, or why this battle between dark and light was even taking place at all, but it wasn't as sadly laughable as the character Ellie, who appeared from nowhere with brother Troy. Is she a "baby sister" or a "woman"? The two are not the same, but she gets both descriptions. Why belittle a woman in such an insulting manner, making her whimper, to boot? There was no need for that.

We go immediately from that to the prospect of them entering icily-cold running water and the immediate concern over Sebastian's open wound - like he'll bleed to death in the water. What? They weren't concerned about this before? If they were not, then there's even less need to be concerned about it here! The icy water will stanch the flow. Sebastian ought to be more staunch!

In the bigger picture, for Amala to expect that Emmett will have waking "dreams" (she means visions), and not even have the decency and courtesy to both educate him and to warn him about them is beyond irresponsible in the context of their circumstances. It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of time for this. At that point I not only disliked Emmett, I no longer like Amala, who is way too mysterious to be even intelligible, let alone likable, but if the plan is to pair her off with Emmett, then they're made for each other, as clueless as they both are.

It was when Alexander started gearing up for version three of his titanic and brutal battle between overwhelming hoards of Revenants versus the handful of Druids that I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" I see no point in beating my head against the brick wall that this novel all-too-rapidly became, when I can instead, dive into the warm, welcoming waters of something fresh and new. Time is short, but my patience is shorter! This novel is a confirmed warty! It's going nowhere and I'm going in search of something more entertaining.

A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Ashes
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
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 of any kind for this review.

Wow! Nine ebook reviews in three weeks was the challenge and I just met it! Now I see one of Net Galley's patented 'three week deadline' notices has just popped up on this one, as well! Never again will I offer to read so many ebooks in so short a time! Fortunately some of those nine (three or four) were real clunkers, so I didn't have to read them all the way through before I knew how to rate them! The rest were acceptable enough that reading them didn't seem like a slog at all.

Anyway, this is the final review in my foray into the first three of Holloway's niece of Sherlock Holmes novels! And yes, I promise you it is the final review I shall do of any of her novels in this series. I have absolutely no desire to read any more. A Study in Ashes is a truly fitting name for a conclusion to this series since it all came to ashes in the end. I reviewed A Study in Silks at the beginning of October, and A Study in Darkness towards the end of that month. The first of these two I liked, the second I thought was awful. The third went downhill from there.

The problem with this series is that it's fundamentally fraudulent: I mean, why even mention Sherlock Holmes in your novel and book blurb, let alone boast a main character who's his niece, and then betray every single thing for which Holmes stood by rendering his supposed Protégé into a complete Mary Clueless, who actually does near to zero investigating? Why invest in a girl who has shown herself to be completely undisciplined, a non-thinker, slow, witless, shiftless, thoughtless, and boring? She's much better qualified to pursue what she does best, and incessantly: bemoaning her fate, and pining for Nick-ed the thief, aka worthless piece of trash, and when she's not suffering the wilts and the vapors over him, pining for Toby-ass the worthless piece of trash. I can't respect a character like that, much less actually root for her, or want to read about her. The idea for this series was really cool, but it was sorrowfully wasted in execution (execution is what these stories begged for!). The pseudo steam-punk was a nice touch, but it never really got off the ground in any useful sense except for sensationalism. I could have done happily without the Deva's, notwithstanding how amusing Bird and Mouse were, but even they would have been tolerable had the detective we were implicitly promised actually showed up for work. She never did.

I tried to get into this particular volume three or four times, but after wading through the first half-dozen or so chapters and skimming some of the others, I could find nothing in it to even generate my interest, let alone sustain it! The most interesting character, Imogen, was completely AWOL in the portions that I read. Evelina, supposedly the main character, did nothing but show herself to be clueless, impotent, incompetent, and morbidly self-centered. She once had a job (in volume two) where she could learn everything she wanted, but she had evidently passed that up (for whatever reason) by volume three, to go to a school where all she's allowed to learn (in that era) are 'proper lady's' topics. She's apparently content with this since she resists being thrown out of the college.

Toby-ass proves himself to be an even bigger shit in this novel than he achieved in either of the previous two, which takes some believing: now he has a wife and a son neither of whom he gives a damn about. I can see some logic to his having problems with a wife who was forced upon him, but I cannot countenance his treatment of her. She was a good, fun, and interesting person, and his behavior towards her is not only ungentlemanly, it's thoroughly unconscionable in someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys. Why would I like a jerk such as him, or be interested in what he wants does, thinks, or feels? Alice, his wife, is nowhere in sight in this novel either (not in the portion I read), which is a shame, because she was my second favorite character after Imogen.

But it's not his treatment of her which completely writes him off, since I fully expect this numb-nuts to behave badly towards women; no, the killer is his treatment of his son. That's completely unacceptable to me, and for Evelina to harbor feelings for this jerk tells me a lot about her - a lot of unpleasant things, that is. I have no interest in learning any more about any of these privileged losers, so I said, "The hell with this series!" Life is too short to waste it on pointless, uninteresting, and even downright irritating prose. I'm glad to be done with this un-nourishing stubble and moving to graze on greener pastures.

A Study in Darkness by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Darkness
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
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 of any kind for this review.

I reviewed A Study in Silks, the first novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Yes, I know I said I was just starting this one! I did start it, but I had to put it on a hasty hold when I discovered, much to my dismay, that several books I have for review for Net Galley were showing "three weeks" deadlines in the reader: read it by then or lose it forever! I've never seen that before, but then I've never had so many ebooks lined up for review before, either, so I had to go take care of some of them before I can get back to this one! Sorry! Corporate responsibility and all that jazz....

However, I find myself this weekend not in a position to read the current deadline novel. There's no kindle edition of it, the Adobe reader doesn't work on Ubuntu, and Kindle won't read the PDF which is a protected file! Yes, they have it nailed down tightly, but that means I can't do what they expect me to do: review it for them! So I'm back to reading the "Study" series, but I have to report mixed feelings about what I'm reading. On the one hand, she doesn't know the difference between a decent romance and YA crapola. On the other, and this is a very pleasant surprise, Holloway does know the difference between stanch and staunch! Kudos to her for that much at least.

Anyone following my blog will know that I've identified (if I recall) three writers of late who do not know the difference, and as a writer, I think things like this are important because they tell us something about the author, and about book editors. If you cannot trust your publisher to get the cover right, and you cannot trust the blurb writer to get the back-cover right, and you cannot trust your editor to catch things like confusion between two similar words with entirely different meanings, then where is the advantage of going the legacy publishing route? Self-publish! But only if you are strong in your written language, and confident in being able to do the job yourself. However, if you got the other route, do be prepared for serious cluelessness, blindness, and moronic publishers who do not recognize talent when they see it. Recall that the following record companies turned down The Beatles in the early 1960's: Columbia, Decca, Oriole, Philips and Pye. Decca told them that guitar groups were on the way out, and that The Beatles had no future in show business! Don't lose heart. Unless, of course, you write romances as badly as Holloway does!

I must now address a serious shortcoming which shows up disturbingly in the first ten percent of this novel, and which is the sad debasing of Evelina. You will recall if you read volume one in this series that Holloway smartly tore up her playbook at the end, and scattered her four main protagonists, which I considered a very good decision. Imogen, Evelina's best friend was separated from both Evelina (who was banished from Lord Bancroft's home), and from her beau, Bucky, who was banned from her life. Niccolo, whom I consider to be a complete loser, became a pirate. That should convey all you need to know about his worthless hide, and that's also all I need to say about him - except to add that once I discovered that he was in this novel, I decided to skip every chapter in which he plays a leading role (which meant gliding happily past all of chapters five and six, for example). My worst fear is that he will not be hunted down and hung, but will come roaring back into the story, and it seems that fear is to become a reality. Indeed, Holloway starts this story with him, which I found depressing enough as it was.

And what of Evelina? Well, we learn nothing of her summer except that she was in Devon, a county in south-west England, but is now back staying with her uncle Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, where she receives a letter from Imogen begging her to join herself and Alice Keating for a month before Tobias (or sorry-ass if you prefer - I do) marries Alice. Evelina has an attack of the wilts and the vapors over this, at which point she lost me as her champion. She's supposed to be a smart, strong, astute, incisive sleuth, but she's none of that so far in this novel, nor at all in the first novel. She displays none of her uncle's intellect whatsoever. Holloway actually uses the term "star-crossed" to describe Evelina and Tobias, which pretty much made me puke all over the Kindle (not advised).

Holloway needs to buck-up Evelina and get her mind away from that loser Tobias, who purposefully shot her uncle and would have killed him if he could. How did Che put it in Don't Cry for me Argentina: "Why all this howling hysterical sorrow?" This pathetic juvenile fainting away over him is entirely stomach-turning. Evelina needs to be given a new beau: someone worthy of what she can be, and she herself needs to become worthy to have him. Right now she's worthless as a character and as a human being. Holloway seems to have got it right with Imogen and Bucky (although there is precious little of either of them in this volume), so hopefully she'll bite the bullet and get it done for Evelina too, but I have grave doubts on that score. I think she's far too in love with her characters to ever dare kill them off, either practically or metaphorically, but maybe she'll surprise me.

Or maybe she won't. I almost tossed this novel at about 20% in, and moved on to something else. Sad-sack Tobias, of course, shows up at the hunting jamboree organized by Jasper Keating, the "Gold" King (steam-punk supremo). There was absolutely no surprise what-so-ever there. Neither was it a surprise when trollop Evelina and scum Tobias, fiancé of Alice Keating, (who happens to be a friend of Evelina's) flung themselves into each other's arms, neither of them caring two figs for Alice. So exactly how Dumb is Evelina? Don't get me started. And what kind of a lowlife jerk-off is Toby-ass? Evelina had one simple task at this hunter-gathering: to dig up useful information for her uncle and she blew it the very first chance she got, wilting like a used condom in the arms of the useless piece of trash who shot her uncle and contributed to building a bomb which blew up Holmes's home when he and Evelina were both in it. And now this faithless wench is having palpitations over this terrorist?

This novel was entirely unrealistic even within its own framework to this point. Evelina, supposedly a strong female lead, has shown herself to be completely worthless in her character's rôle, and nothing more than another air-headed appendage of a guy. And the guy is - how did Colonel Brandon put it in Sense & Sensibility? - "...expensive, dissipated, and worse than both." Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon described Toby-ass's character best in the movie version: "the worst sort of libertine". I need more than this in a main character if an author wants me to follow a series; much more. But at least we now know where the novel's title came from: it was in Keating's study, in the darkness, that they kissed, and Keating and Imogen found them in flagrante de lick spittle. Now not only is Toby-ass under Keating's thumb, so too, is Evelina. Way to go, Ms Stupid Bitch! Seriously: is it Holloway's intention to make a reader detest her characters? If so, then why?! If not, then why write this crap?

Fortunately, I didn't ditch the novel at that point. Though I was revolted by Holloway's ham-fisted handling of Evelina-Toby-ass train-wreck, I kept reading and was rewarded. So she gets kicked out of the hunter-gathering and heads back to London incognito as a spy for Keating, and she ends up working for Magnus - the guy who got blown up in volume one, but who we all of us knew for a fact would be back, because why invent a new villain when you can quite literally resurrect an old one?! Right now my favorite character in both of these volumes is Magnus. At least he has something going for him - like a spine maybe?!

Magnus is laying low, and apparently working for (or perhaps merely pretending to do so) King Coal, another of the steam barons. He runs a puppet theater, although why he does, I have no idea; there's no reason whatsoever for him to be doing this as far as I can see, especially if he has King Coal's patronage, and Holloway offers none. He is maintaining a stable of automatons, one of which is the very Serafina doll which was purportedly destroyed in volume one. No explanation there as to why she's still hale and hearty, and Serafina has a life of sorts. She's very advanced, verging on being sentient if not already there, and Magnus assures Evelina that he has killed no-one and no animal to create her as she is. OTOH, this novel is set during the era of Jack the Ripper - the very villain about whom Imogen is having very realistic dreams. I am now suspicious that Serafina is Jack the Ripper and these deaths are what animate her. But then we all know exactly how great my guesses are!

So now Holloway has married off Toby-ass to Alice Keating, the only way she can get Toby-ass and Evelina together is to kill off Alice. Will she do it? She really jumped the shark, fell short, and landed ass-first in the fish's maw with the kiss in the study in darkness, because the only witnesses to that event were Evelina, Toby-ass, Keating, and Imogen. But now Holloway expects us to believe that the story somehow magically "slipped out", and has spread so that everyone at the reception knows of it. How, exactly, did that happen? No explanation. Everyone is evidently blaming Evelina, but there's no word yet on whether Alice has even heard the tale.

Well, I got to 50% through this novel and became so ill that I could no longer continue. It sucks. There are some really brilliant pieces, but all of that is lost in a foul miasma of tedious pedantry and brain-dead story-telling. It turns out that Toby-ass seduced Alice during the summer and impregnated her, and then he doesn't have the gallantry to spend their wedding night with her or treat her like a human being. There is no way in hell this piece of human gutter-trash will ever get back into my good graces, and if Evelina ends up with him, then she's scum too as far as I'm concerned! It's that simple. Why would I care what happens to these whiny-assed losers? The sad thing is that I have a third volume of this to which I'm committed for a review. I have the horrible feeling that I may indeed end up committed - to an asylum when I start delving into that volume! But rest-assured I am going to take a serious break from this before I read episode three!

This novel is WARTY!

Cast in Sorrow by Michelle Sagara

Title: Cast in Sorrow
Author: Michelle Sagara
Publisher: Harlequin Luna
Rating: worthy

This is the Chronicles of Elantra Series #9. There are brief reviews of the entire series on my Novel Series page.

Normally I don't do covers because I don't care what a cover looks like; I care about the content, and the writer has absolutely no say (and no se) in what crap goes on there unless they self-publish, and even then many of them hire someone else to create the cover, so I have to ask on Sagara's behalf: which idiot writes book blurbs like the one on this back cover: "The end is only the beginning"? Seriously? Is that meant to be deep or something? This is the major advantage of self-publishing - it’s all your own. You get to say how it reads, how the cover looks, what the blurb says, Yours may be just as idiotic, but at least it's your idiocy, and not someone else's! Nuff said!

I can't begin to express how thrilled I was when I saw this one on the library shelf. I snatched it up in a spit second. Unfortunately, I couldn't start on it right away because I had two others to finish. But now I am into it, and it's like coming home. Michelle Sagara is a KICK-ASS writer who knows how to build a completely enthralling world, and she's created a serious contender for Hall-of-Fame All-Star All-Time female hero in Kaylin Neya. I will detail this in detail giving you the detailed details as soon as I've had a nap!

As accomplished and skillful a writer as Sagara is, there's still the odd occasion when she could use some editing! For example, on p335 we get this: "…why would be live as a pet?" which should, I'm assuming, be: "…why would he live as a pet?" Sad to say (and I don't recall this from earlier novels, but maybe those had it too), Sagara is yet another devotee of long moments, and long minutes, and even a long half hour! And the number of times she uses the phrase "like, and unlike" or a variant of it, is really, really annoying!

On the confusing front, I found this piece on p49: "The stairs that fronted it were flat and wide, the columns that held the roof almost the height of the trees that stood to the right and the left of the building." When I first read this, I was confused about what she was saying, and I had to read it again to get it. This interrupted the story for me. Leaving aside the interminable argument about the use of 'that' over 'which', it seemed to me that the sentence ought to read: "The stairs that fronted it were flat and wide, and the columns that held the roof were almost the height of the trees that stood to the right and the left of the building." Maybe the whole sentence should have been re-thought and split, perhaps? Yeah, it's a minor quibble, and it's her novel, not mine, but if writers are wanting to keep readers happy, an iota of extra attention to legibility can go a long way.

Another instance appeared shortly afterwards, on p55, where the first four paragraphs at the start of chapter 4 have a character speaking without offering any indication as to who it is. This is why it's a good idea to read what you've written - both at a later date, and out loud so you can get a feel for how others might perceive it. When you read out loud, you read a little differently than when you read inside your own head. Just a thought!

On p305 Kaylin grabs Teela's hand and pulls it down and then says "What are you doing?", but the speech isn’t included with the paragraph of the yanking o' the hand, so it made it seem like Teela had said it. This was unnecessarily confusing. Sagara needs to learn when to identify the speaker. Again this is something a writer should be able to catch if they put the writing aside for a period of time and then come back to it and read it out loud. This is also an advantage which comes en suite with the "tell the story as fast as you can" style of writing, where you write the whole thing off (so to speak!) in one and the hell with editing, but then go back, once it's finished, and read it through, editing as you go.

On p364, there is a real classic: "Which guttered the little bit better entirely". I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the heck Sagara means by this. It’s not even English in any meaningful sense! But enough of this nit-picking! Let's move on.

So this story takes off where Cast in Peril left off, kinda half-way through. None of her other volumes (at least as I recall - it's been a while!) are like this: they're complete stories even while still an integral part of the series. Oh, and yes, this is a series where you really need to start on volume one to get everything that follows. The Barrani party with whom Kaylin is traveling to a ceremony in which she is to play an important part, is under attack and threats follow them, but within the first few chapters they arrive safely in the territory known as the West March where the ceremony is to be held. Kaylin will be safe until she tells the tale, but after that, all bets, it appears, are off. This writing is some of Sagara's best in her descriptions of the bizarre things which happen in the forest right before they achieve sanctuary in the Lord of the West March's property. It's fascinating to me, but this novel wasn't all plain sailing.

Having said that, I have to also add that chapters five and six are all but unintelligible in far too many places. I don't recall having this problem with Sagara's previous volumes in this series, but I pretty much read those one after another, since I was quite late coming to this series. This not only made the read pleasurable, since I had virtually no down-time between volumes, it also made it a lot easier on me in keeping track of people and events than it must have been for those people who read one novel, and then had to wait a whole year before they were able to continue the adventure. I think I had a real advantage with this flow, and this is what enabled me to enjoy the novels far better than others who had a much more staccato experience.

I know that other reviewers have expressed complaints about her poor writing - where she has a conversation start up and it's entirely unclear who is saying what and to whom. This goes back to what I said earlier about reading out loud what you wrote, and before you do that, wait a month or so. If you can't quite grasp who is doing or saying what, or why, then you know for a fact your readers won't exactly be on top of it either, and it's your fault if they're not!

Like I said, I don't recall experiencing this difficulty before, but chapters five and six in this novel are a classic examples of this problem - of the same problem I had at the start of chapter four, which I mentioned above. These two chapters also recap (after a fashion) some previous events; the problem is that it's been so long since I read those other volumes that the recaps were useless, since they were so very sparse and mentioned names and actions which I couldn't recall well (or at all!), without giving any context for those names.

In another genre, when one reads a series, the names are much more familiar and the roles those people play, much more ordinary. But I think the writer has a real responsibility to help keep the reader enlightened when taking an excursion into a fantasy world where both names and roles are pure invention and unfamiliar to the reader. Sagara fails dismally at this in these two chapters, but then she picks it up somewhat when Kaylin has to once again heal the Barrani consort - who promptly disappears during an all-out assault on Lord Lirienne's West March central (or is it central march west? - whichever it is, they're almost given their marching orders - west, right, west right, quick march - until Kaylin comes to the rescue), and by them it's almost April....

So all is forgiven because Sagara takes off again after the, ahem, bad chapters and takes it to the next level which is the one right after the mezzanine (if you're south of the border that will be the mexanine), but before you get to the sign which says "Next Level and Then Some", okay? If you reach the sign saying, "She's all that and a bag of chips" then you've gone wa-ay too far at this point. All righty then.

So, despite all the itty-bitty annoyances, Sagara puts together a pretty engrossing tale, full of amazingly imaginative scenes, and curious events, slowly but surely adding this volume to the rest in terms of stories I can say are enjoyable and addictive. I love Kaylin and An'teela, and I love especially how Sagara brings them closer as friends in this story, having each of them open up more to the other than they ever have before - but then she threatens to seriously split them apart. I'm not going to say any more on that score, but it made my skin crawl in considering that she might really do this!

So to conclude, I recommend this!

A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Silks
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
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.

Erratum:
p262 "His mouth twitch with ire." should be "His mouth twitched with ire."

I reviewed A Study in Darkness, the second novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Evelina Cooper is a niece of Sherlock Holmes. I had thought this must be through his older brother Mycroft, but it was a case of identity: Holloway has invented a non-existent sister called Marianne, who ran away to the circus! Now Evelina is an orphan with an overbearing grandmother. I was not impressed by this. I have to ask, Holloway my dear, What's on? I chose this novel and its two sequels (so I can review all three in a row) because it sounded like a great idea for a series, and I really loved the opening few pages: it really got hold of me and pulled me in, but I was led to expect a Holmes-esque novel and did not get one.

There's a wood sprite which appeared when Evelina was escaping from an attic by climbing out of the window and into a nearby tree. Yes, I was expecting elementary and got an elemental! Clearly the publicist is the man with the twisted lip - or is he the crooked man? So I'm thinking: did I just get duped by a freight and ditch? This was not at all what I come looking for when I'm told by a book blurb that this is a novel about Sherlock Holmes's niece! So we have Holmes, magic, fantasy, paranormal, automatons, demons, detectives, and steam-punk. Hmm. Why make her a relation of Sherlock Holmes and then leave me Strand-ed, betraying everything Arthur Doyle stood for in his delivery of the Holmes adventures? This Baker Street irregular made no sense to me, especially since there's really nothing in this novel, not even the appearance of Holmes himself, which reflects anything of the Doyle novels. Should I give it the five orange pips?

After getting past the beginning with no issues, I quickly started having some really mixed feelings about it. Okay, so we finally get a murder and Evelina is really doing a cracking job of sussing-out the clues, but no sooner do we have what I actually came looking for in this novel than I get handed the second stain: Holloway tosses in a completely gratuitous and appallingly tropish love triangle between her and a high-born heir to a lordship and also a lowlife from the circus. Honestly? Why in hell do women of all genders, aspire to write novels about strong female characters, and then hobble these same women with a crippling need for, and attendant dependency upon, the validation of not one but two, count 'em, two dancing men? And iffy men at that: these men are such clichés as to be truly, seriously, painfully pathetic.

I have to confess that she does make an effort with these two - to try and give them some substance - but at that point she'd already lost my good faith and wasn't making enough of an effort to regain it! I committed to reading and reviewing three of these novels (the first three in what is evidently an ongoing series), so I found myself dearly hoping this would improve, and Holloway started to come through for me as I read on, but she was too inconsistent, making me first enjoy what I read and then making me regret it by turns! For example, she made me fall in love with her for this one sentence on p123: "Silence resounded with all the majesty of an oriental gong." I have no idea why, but that just hit me right where my pleasure nodes are. Unfortunately, she came around one hundred eighty degrees right after that and saddened me.

She has now presented Evelina as secretly wanting marriage all along, and only deflected from that course by her impoverished circumstances. That seems unnecessarily genderist even in these circumstances. I know that Victorian women were raised this way, and all-too-many girls still are today, but even in reality not all Victorian women felt that way, nor traveled that path. There is no reason at all to present a fictional woman as being brain-washed by that idea unless your plot demands it. In this case, Holloway's plot does no such thing as far as I can tell; quite the opposite in fact, so why sell her main character down this particular river? I was very disappointed with this approach. However, as much as Holloway toys with my affections, addicting me one minute, and repelling me the next, I decided it was worth it, on balance, continue to read this. I pretty much have to if I'm going to proceed to volume two, and thence to three, anyway!

Here's another reason to love Holloway: "Even a stupid servant was more versatile and cost a fraction of the price." (p153). I am so glad she's smart enough to see the impracticality of a lot of the steam-punk stuff, favoring servants over automatons (although morally, it ought to be the other way around!) - so why can't she apply those obvious smarts to relationships and love triangles?! It's a bigger mystery than was Boscombe Valley, but that's not a patch on this howler exactly one third the way in describing an interaction between Evelina and one of her two male interests, Tobias, the wealthy son of a lord: "Her palms brushed the front of his jacket, feeling the soft, expensive fabric and the swell of firm, young muscle beneath. An ache throbbed deep in her body, blotting out common sense." Seriously? Evelina loves her a firm young muscle...!

Holloway improves things as she continues the story of the relationship between Evelina and Tobias, and it starts to mature intelligently and does have a real surprise at the end, which I didn't expect, so I can tell you without giving too much away that this love triangle did not go the way I had feared it would when I first read of it. Nick OTOH, is unsavory at best and pretty much went exactly where I thought he ought to end up even as I feared he wouldn't go there! I can say that Evelina continued to impress and develop, and that was where my main interest lay. And the story did stay focused, more or less, on the thing which first attracted Evelina's attention before it side-tracked into the magical.

Page 271 was interesting from my own oddball writerly perspective. I felt I'd entered a time loop when I clicked back a page. I had clicked back because I thought I'd clicked two pages forward instead of one (I hadn't, but this is a problem with ebooks and the Kindle). This page starts with "At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." and ends with "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage." So what happened to me was that in clicking from that page to the same page, thinking it was the next, I read: "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage. At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." It flows perfectly and took me a second to realize what I’d done. Minor weirding-out there!

But that’s not an authorship problem; in my case, it was a clueless reader problem! Maybe it's also of interest to an author interested in writing one of those self-navigation stories. These used to be common at one time, but are rare now. They’re interactive in a limited way, because at each page, you choose which page to jump to next from a selection of options presented at the bottom of the page. You could have your reader weirded-out quite nicely with a page like this one!

P271 was also of interest in that it sported this sickening sentence: "His hand on her arm sent a pleasant shiver down the back of her legs." It was a bit much, especially after I'd been feeling better about the YA trope romance between Tobias and Evelina. The worst parts were offset somewhat by Holloway's detailing of how smart Evelina was, for example when she turned away from the crowd and whispered to Tobias in order to avoid being overheard or having her lips read. Some might call that paranoid, but in the context of the novel it was very smart and I loved Evelina for doing it and, in turn, Holloway for writing that bit! Yes, I'm a sap for that kind of thing and not ashamed to admit it into polite company!

But later, Holloway makes the mistake of having Tobias use this Americanism: "I've always known you came from someplace different..." No son of a British lord, and especially not one in Victorian times, would use 'someplace'. It's 'somewhere'! That's a minor faux pas, but I kept getting vertigo from getting to a high point where I really enjoyed the writing, and then having the text swoop down low for one reason or another, before climbing back up again with the next Evelina bounty. And rest assured Evelina was not the only character who was worth the reading. Her best friend Imogen was equally entertaining, and didn't get anywhere near enough air time for my money (not that I paid any actual money!). Her relationship with "Bucky" was charming and entertaining to a wonderfully high degree - but not enough!

I do not, however, love Nick. The the final problem is that he is the creeping man, and not at all the kind of person with whom I would wish for a young lady of Miss Cooper sensitivities to spend her time. Holloway needs to kill him off heroically (she doesn't!). He is nothing but a horn-dog who has little respect for Evelina, spends the bulk of his time lusting after her, and comes uncomfortably close to raping her at one point in the novel, when he's in the throes of a magical communion with her. It's actually rather sickening, and even scary given his penchant for stalking Evelina. I don't like him at all as a character or as a friend of hers, so I was glad that he went the way he did, but not at all happy to discover that he's featured in the second of this series, as, I assume, is Tobias, or Toby-ass as he now ought to be known.

So in summary, I am rating this novel a worthy read, even though I did have a few issues with it. I had hoped for no magic or steam-punk, no fantasy, and definitely no trope romance, so why Holloway went there, I don't know, and given that she obviously had decided to go there, I can't understand why she chose to have Evelina related to Sherlock Holmes, unless it was nothing more than a cheap ploy to try and pull in readers. I suspect Holmes fans will be as annoyed and resentful of this ploy as I was. It seemed underhand to me to talk the reader up one way and then pull the rug out and send them another. This is no Sherlock Holmes tale, not even in spirit (and he is the dying detective!). It is, however, an entertaining tale for the most part, and even some of the magical stuff, particularly, Evelina's robotic mouse and bird, was really entertaining. The novel would have stood by itself without the Holmes Crutch to lean on. I have to wonder why no editor advised Holloway thus. But I am still giving this the the engineer's thumb up and moving on to volume two to see what I can find there.

Bounty Hunter by SJ Hollis

Title: Bounty Hunter
Author: SJ Hollis
Publisher: Uninvited Black Cat
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was an easy read. It lasts about four hours according to my Kindle's count-down which appeared from nowhere some time ago at the bottom of my screen with neither warning nor explanation. It used to tell me how many minutes to the end of the chapter; now it sullenly advises me how many hours remain until to the end of the novel, like it's annoyed with me both for taking up so much of its valuable time, and also irritated by my insistent tapping its right cheek every few seconds. Don't you just hate it when your technology branches out on its own like that, doing stuff without so much as a by-your-leave? Microsoft excels (particularly with its spreadsheets!) at that sort of thing, preventing Access, trying to have the last Word, sticking its PowerPoint sharp end first in your ass while you twiddle your thumbs (or whatever you're wont to twiddle) in Paintbrush waiting for your operating system to go 'Bing!' and let you know you can finally get something done on the device which you thought you owned, but which, according to Microsoft, you empirically don't. This is why I run Ubuntu on my computer at home. It, too, can be really irritating, but it's better than Windows. At least at home I don't to deal with patiently watching the hourglass, wondering what surreptitious machinations Microsoft is perpetrating in my face behind my back.

This is a particularly appropriate introduction to Bounty Hunter, because Kai Koson, the male protagonist, is subject to the whims of fate in much the same way as we are when our computer takes over from us. He's towed along behind his uncle Galway (who may or may not be a relative), a fierce and tough protector who has taken care of Kai ever since he was a child and his parents died. Why is he on the run? Because he's a witch in a world haunted by demons who came through a witch-initiated rip in the sky long ago, and who take an immediate and very personal dislike to him for reasons he can only bemoan and ponder.

It's during one of these encounters that Kai meets Sam, a bounty hunter with a ship of her own. He turns down her offer to join her crew, but reconsiders his refusal when his uncle takes him to meet a senior witch, and Kai overhears something which he doesn't at all like. So off he goes, leaving his uncle behind and chasing his dream into the wild black yonder, seeking bountiful bounties. Over the course of his long journey he learns who his friends are. He learns deep secrets about his uncle, and about the demons, he learns why magic is so hard to come by. He learns why he was never taught to use his own. And he ends up somewhere that he never expected to go with a huge bounty of his very own.

Talking of which, I had wondered about the wisdom of the choice of title for this novel. Bounty Hunter speaks strongly of the wild west, but it doesn't really speak sci-fi to me. I asked SJ Hollis about this, and she explained it this way:

The title was there from the very beginning. I was searching for something to write about, and Sarah Rees Brennan posted on her LiveJournal that a place to search for ideas is way outside your genre. She got her idea for Demon's Lexicon, I believe, from a documentary about wolves (her book has nothing to do with wolves). So I watched lots of TV and read lots of books constantly searching for something I could twist in a YA story. Then one day I watched Dog the Bounty Hunter and thought, hmmm, teenagers, bounty hunters. In space. WITH MAGIC! WIN!

The cover concept was a group effort between me, my sister and her partner and then my illustrator Lawrence Mann. We came up with Kai's hand holding the Earth, his blood dripping, and Lawrence, from my descriptions of Kai, the demons and Laon, put together the rest.

So I can't argue with that! Frankly, now I have to wonder about how her mind works, but then she does describe herself as "slightly odd" in her bio!

This novel has been described as influenced by "Buffy, Stargate, Firefly, House, Doctor Who, Big Bang Theory, Sherlock and Supernatural". I agree with the Buffy element, in that there's demon fighting, but this is a different kettle of fish to Buffy, a show I never watched because I detested it, so don't let that put you off! I don't recall reading anything which reminded me of Stargate, but that's another show I never watched, even though I loved the movie which spawned it. I agree with the Firefly: it's very much in the mould of a cowboy/Sci-Fi mash-up. I cannot see any comparison with House, a TV show I really loved. I agree with the Doctor Who as far as the 'bigger on the inside' goes, but that was only one instance; otherwise it has nothing in common with Britain's long-running (50th anniversary: 2013!) sci-fi series - there is no time travel involved, for example. I saw no elements of Big Bang Theory jumping out. This is a show of which I'm not particularly fond, but of which I've seen several episodes (my kids love it!). I saw nothing which jumped out at me and cried Sherlock, but kudos to Hollis for mentioning it! That's another show which is coming back in the fall for what's likely to be its last run. Supernatural is on par with Buffy as far as I am concerned - my wife loves it but I can't stand it, so don't ask me to comment on that!

I honestly think this novel is done a disservice when it's compared with TV shows, because it's strong enough to stand on its own. It's unique in my reading experience in the breadth of its constituent elements, and I was most impressed by the basic plot and by the execution of the tale. There was humor (Hollis seems to have a fondness for fish!), friendship, betrayal, forgiveness, and many twists and up-endings of status quo. It was an enjoyable read which entertained me throughout, and the satisfying ending made me glad I had read it. This is definitely a WORTHY read!