The Magician's Doll by M L Roble

Title: The Magician's Doll
Author: M L Roble
Publisher: Harper
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
p10 "So you think you're mother's a freak too?" should be "So you think your mother's a freak too?"

This is the story of Natalie Bristol desperately hurrying home from school to try and hide the 'Psychic' sign her mother has put up in the front yard, before her school 'friends' see it and make fun of her. She fails. It's the story of Natalie, who has unpredictable blackouts, during one of which a mysterious voice warns her that, "They are stronger. They are coming. They will arrive." She desperately wants to control these episodes, but she cannot.

It's the story of a young girl who has a thrill-a-minute day at the circus until the magician's show, where the great Beausoleil brings a doll onto the stage, and invites Natalie to prove to herself that it's just a doll. After she does so, the doll appears to come to life and when it touches Natalie's hand, she feels her life energy leaving her and entering the doll, summoning yet another blackout.

When she awakens, her mother is talking to Beausoleil, and the two obviously know each other. He's desperately trying to persuade her to help him, and warning her as a friend that she isn't safe no matter how well she tries to hide herself and her daughter. But no one is telling Natalie what the heck is going on, and her friend Phillip is behaving more and more like he will do something rash in pursuit of his quest to discover what really happened to his father.

I have to say that page 72 is hilarious. I don't know what it was exactly, but I laughed out loud at that. Maybe I was recovering after a stressful day at work, but I could imagine exactly how that incident went down and how it looked. Louisa's comments slayed me! But then Louisa is a rather special girl in an unexpected way, now, isn't she?

The next page, unfortunately, was much less thrilling. It employed the tired old trope of the young protagonist not being told anything. There is no excuse for this, and I know it's a standard trope in YA fiction: the youthful hero-to-be growing up in ignorance, but when your writing demonstrates that the only tool you have to build up tension is to have your characters retreat into irrational, nonsensical, or even dangerous behaviors, it simply doesn't work. It only annoys readers, and it makes me personally reach a point where I am thinking that this had better be dealt with soon or I'm outta here! I'm all for a bit of mystery and intrigue, but when it's so artificial as to drop you right out of suspension of disbelief and into ascension of annoyance, it's nothing more than bad writing.

Chapter twelve doesn't get any better either as it progresses (or rather regresses), because even now the three kids have seen a part of what they're up against, Natalie's mom is all, "We'll talk tomorrow'. I frankly want to kick her in her obsessive, secretive, lethargic, lousy-parenting ass at that point. Yes, I know this is written for a younger age range than mine, but children are only dumb if they're persistently treated that way. They will see through this.

It was parental stupidity which precipitated the sorry events of chapter twelve, and still they seem blindly incapable of learning from it. I know there really are people who are dumb and thoughtless, and who are poor parents, but this seems to be a raging pandemic in YA literature and it needs to stop, because in the end it reflects very badly on the writer and offers a grave disservice to the reader.

Unfortunately things did not pick up from there either, because even as events actually became more exciting (as I learned more about Natalie and Phillip's "gifts"), I also became more irritated. Natalie's grandmother's habit of endlessly saying "my dear" really got my skin crawling after a while, and then the school bully problem cropped up again and Natalie's friend Phillip comes out with this appallingly genderist comment: "...three against two and one is a girl...".

Excuse me? She's a girl and therefore she's somehow not a full person? I decided right there that point that this novel now had five chapters to turn itself around otherwise I was ditching it. There is no excuse for dissing girls in YA stories. Women have enough crap to deal with without them being demeaned and down-graded at such a young age for no other reason than that they're "a girl". I can't believe that a writer who is of the same gender would demean her major character like this. It's inexcusable. What kind of a message is she sending to young girls?

This genderism is further amplified later when Phillip's mom sews together a jacket for Phillip and for Natalie. Phillip gets something that looks like an army jacket, with lots of pockets, whereas Natalie gets one with ruffles down the front and on the sleeves? Why? Because she's a girl and doesn't deserve to be treated the same and given the same options as a boy? Of course, Natalie loves her jacket because she's a girl and it's "dainty"! If only she'd go sit in the corner and be quiet until she's old enough to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, everything would be fine, wouldn't it? Then we could have a story about manly Phillip and we wouldn't have to bother ourselves any more with The Nat, that useless girl.

This took place as Natalie and Phillip were coming into their "gifts", and undergoing training to learn how to use the gifts, yet neither one of them thinks of employing those powers to fend off the three bullies. This is a betrayal of the characters and is bad writing. For two or three days, these two have had it drilled into them that they must practice and use their powers, and control them and take charge of them, yet the last thing either of them thinks of is using a power and taking charge of this situation and controlling it? Yes, eventually, Natalie realizes this, but it just makes your characters look dumb and slow when you do this.

This situation is actually even worse because it portrays Natalie and Phillip running around in the open, unprotected, right after their parents have effectively grounded them, telling them that they cannot be running round out in the open and unprotected because they're in grave danger! The plotting here makes no logical sense at all.

So I read five chapters more and things did not improve and I called this one off. There were multiple problems with it. In addition to the one grammatical error I mentioned in the erratum, there were several issues of really awkward sentences. For example, on page 151 I read: "It's going to start to get dark soon." which is not really an error as such, but it's definitely an awkward sentence. Page 156 had another one in this vein: "A footfall tapped on the wood of the tree." It just sounds weird, is all. This novel fails the so-called Bechdel test, too. The first time that Louisa and Natalie talk to each other with no one else present, the only thing they can find to talk about is Phillip! It's sad but true!

So while this novel might appeal to undiscriminating children at the younger end of the YA scale and to pre-young adults, it doesn't have what it takes to pass my muster. It's poorly written, it's genderist, and there are plot holes galore, all of which could have been avoided. Once again this is proof that going the Big Publishing™ route is no guarantee that you'll get a decent editor.

Sorrow's Knot by Erin Bow

Title: Sorrow's Knot
Author: Erin Bow
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

How could anyone not want to read a novel written by someone named Bow, which has 'knot' in the title? It’s too precious - especially since this story has roots in native American culture with which the bow is also associated. Fortunately, the blurb made this sound worth reading, and even more fortunately, here is a novel written by a woman about a girl, and it isn't in first person PoV - see, YA authors? It can be done. You don’t need to be hide-bound by trope!

I'm not one of these people who worships native American culture as something magical. To me they are and were no different from any other culture: neither more nor less in tune with nature, neither more nor less "savage", noble or otherwise, than any people living in the same conditions. I don't believe they lived in harmony with nature in any way different from any other, similar culture. They would have exploited it just as much as any other culture had their numbers compelled them to. They were neither wiser, nor dumber than other cultures, and they fell pray to brutality and inter-tribal warfare, and to disease, just as other peoples did. This is not to say it wasn't evil, and a shameful tragedy, the way western Christians moved in on the land, and abused the natives chronically, but that's organized religion for you.

This is the first Bow novel I've read, and from what I read in the first 100 pages or so, I really felt that it was definitely not going to be the last. This is how to write a novel. Bow knows what to do and how to do it, and she has no qualms about getting to it. She has a previous novel titled Plain Kate which is now on my list to read and will probably be reviewed next month. That one is set in Europe.

I don’t know where Bow got her chops, and I'm about as far from an expert on native American culture as you can get, but every paragraph in this novel made me believe this was real; that this is how the people in the novel lived their lives day to day. She made me feel that this is how they thought and how they felt, but Bow doesn’t lecture or sermonize. She starts off with an almost unnoticeable prologue, but wisely, she includes it in chapter one as any decent author ought. This briefly describes the arrival of Otter into the world - not the animal, but Otter the daughter of Willow, the Binder-in-training of the tribe of Shadow people, who live in the village of Westmost, in Earthen dwellings right on the edge of the forest which harbors the shades of the not-so-benign dead.

And therein lies the story. Otter loves to hang out with Kestrel and Cricket, and girl and a boy her own age who are assigned to undertake various tasks in the village. One day, hauling up the decapitated corn stalks from the muddy ground in preparation for the next planting, the three of them encounter one of the shadows of the dead lurking in the dark in the corn roots. It enters Cricket's body and it’s only Otter's binding skills - advanced for someone her age - which draw out the shade and save Cricket's life. Her mother arrives very quickly, alerted by Kestrel's warning, and the shade is dispatched.

Cricket is very weak and is observed closely. If it was a white-hand shade, Cricket will be killed, because there is no cure for it (unless you count madness as a cure), but he's fortunate again: it wasn't. The real problem is that when the village binder dies and Willow, no longer the apprentice, takes over, Otter expects to become her apprentice in turn, but her mother rejects her own daughter. Otter has to go and live now in her own lodge, a dismal construction of wattle and earth, which has been empty for too long. As she's beginning to bemoan her unexpected and unwelcome fate, Kestrel and Cricket move in with her, and soon announce to Otter their own intention to become bound to each other, becoming Okishae, which is rare in this village of mostly women.

Their ceremony takes place after the water walkers - a tribe of mostly men - has made its annual visit to exchange children, the men giving up most of their young girls, the Shadow people giving up most of their boys in exchange. Amongst the new girls is Fawn, a binder who Willow adopts quickly as her apprentice, offering a further slap in the face to Otter.

In time Otter comes to accept Fawn, and Fawn Otter, yet even though they share some secrets, Otter still understands that she is effectively a nobody, with no skills to offer her village. That is until the night that the White Hand shows up at the village and manages to touch Willow. To protect the children sheltering in Willow's lodge - the best warded lodge in the village - Otter creates a binding on the lodge door, but she cannot undo it. Fawn attempts to do so, but she's tired after the night-long battle against the White Hand, and doesn't have the power to undo Otter's work. Despite Otter's help and warnings, the ward costs Fawn her life, and with Willow bearing the shape of a white hand over her heart and having only nine days to live, the only person in the village who can assume the task of being the Binder is Otter herself.

Sorrow's Knot is not only about a knotty problem, it’s about a world where people are tied in knots: they're bound, and constrained, and pinched, and restricted, and confined and pigeon-holed, so you may end up feeling some claustrophobia in reading this. I know I did, and that actually does contribute to the atmosphere of discomfort and unease which also pervades the novel - and not because it’s poorly written. Quite the contrary: it's beautifully written, and that's precisely why we feel uncomfortable: because the characters feel that way. Their whole life is lived in fear of the shadows which surround their village. This is why it's so ironical that these people are referred to as free women when they're anything but.

The village is called Westmost because it's the west-most village known - on the edge of the world so it seems, but the area it occupies is referred to as The Pinch - a suitably constrictive term for the life they lead. The village is encircled and circumscribed by slips and gasts and the White Hand, each form of spirit more dangerous than the last. These are malevolent shades of the dead who have not moved on, but which remain in the shadows, seeking to invade the body of anyone who is insufficiently aware and sufficiently right there. It’s funny because the shadows are constrained with colored yarn and this novel is a colorful yarn about rigid constraint.

The women are bound by tradition and are cruelly restricted in their choice of "profession"; for example it seems that Otter can only be a binder and if not that, then nothing. Kestrel can only be a ranger, never a binder. Cricket can only be a story-teller, and in the end is robbed even of that. No one can leave the village in safety because of the spirits, so they're confined to The Pinch and even there they feel unsafe at times. They're restricted to living in dark, dusty, or dank earth lodges, almost like they're living underground. The lodge can only be entered through a tunnel, curtained at either end. When Otter is rejected by her mother, she's forced to make her own home in a lodge which has been abandoned by someone else in this purportedly shrinking village. And she's one of the fortunate ones.

The only people who have any power over these haunting, tragic, creeping, heart-stopping shadows are the Binders - women of the tribe who are specially gifted and trained, and who can ward off the shadows by creating complex knots in leather cords. These knots can both repel and dispel the shadows, as well as harm the living. Even the dead are bound. A dangerous ceremony is conducted - only during the day - when a villager dies. The body is carried down the river (the spirits cannot cross running water) to the burial ground, but the body is not lowered into the earth; it is elevated into the trees, having been tightly bound hand and foot to prevent the spirit from haunting the village. But apparently this system is not working, and Otter slowly begins to realize why this is.

This is unquestionably a female-centric world, with strong women and very few males involved or even required (for the most part), but one problem I had with this was that even presented as such, there was a powerfully masculine ethos pervading the story. We're taught - for those of us who are willing to listen and learn - that women have a tendency to be better at cooperation than men typically are. That doesn’t mean, of course, that women cannot lead and that men cannot cooperate; it’s a tendency, not a law of nature! The problem then with this novel was that we saw so little of that; instead, we found that the powerful women were contentious and almost tyrannical in their behavior. A nauseating example of this is when a major character is expelled from the village, at the risk of his very life. This represents appallingly callous treatment for a compatriot - treatment that smacks more of masculine than of feminine behavior.

There are some problems with this novel. It’s never really explained how this rather Amazonian world endures. Marriage is almost non-existent. If there are so few men, how are the children born? Do a handful of village men service all the women, or when the mostly male traveler tribe comes up the river to visit once a year is there an orgy?! We don’t know. We do know there are a lot of children, but we're never advised or even offered hints as to how this circumstance came to be, and given what we are offered, how it can be said that the village is dying or shrinking!

Despite this novel being largely female-centric, there are two males who play a huge role, yet the two are essentially interchangeable, and it seems to me that the two main female characters are diminished by this, because they're so dependent upon, and moved by these men. This, for me, rather undermined the strong female presence with which we’re presented at the beginning. Having the one, I can understand, and it works well, but there comes a disturbing and thoroughly unexpected part where one character is effectively is switched out for another one who was just the same, like changing a light bulb, and I saw no sense in this. It was very effectively a betrayal of both the girls at the same time, especially since it effectively weakened the one, although the other continued strongly.

That said I liked this novel, and I consider it a worthy read.

Marcus Mender by DD Roy

Title: Marcus Mender
Author: DD Roy
Publisher: Casey Shay press
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.

Please note that this review is going to have a few more spoilers than I like to post in a Net Galley review, because there are some issues I need to address with this novel!

This is Book 2 of the Troubled Tweens series (aka the Magic Mayhem series, in what so far is a trilogy: Jinnie Wishmaker, Marcus Mender, Elektra Chaos), but note that this is the first I have read, so this review may be skewed for better or for worse by my not having that history. DD Roy is a fellow Austinite, so I have to give her a good review or she'll hunt me down and do some heavy Loki magic on me!

Seriously, I have to confess to mixed feelings about this novel. I started out liking it, and then started having issues with it, but then I'm stuck with the problem that I'm not the intended age range for this series. So who am I reviewing it for - me, or my kids? If you hate a novel then there's no problem. If you fall in love with it, the same: no problem; you know exactly how your review will turn out, and it doesn't matter what age range it's aimed at. The problem is that huge area in the middle! So let me play out the review for you and then I'll tell you my evil plan!

'Most magical kids get their power by the end of fifth grade," at St. Martin's Academy (so we're advised), and Marcus, the main focus of this novel, squeaked in with a week to go. He's not the only kid to have such powers. His close friends Jinnie (who can grant wishes), and the twins: Maddy (who makes people angry) and Grace (who apparently has the opposite power to Maddy's and also seems to be able to block the use of magic by others) are also empowered, but for some reason none of these kids are telling their parents anything. I'm not sure how wise it is to portray kids as purposefully keeping momentous secrets from their folks, but all kids do keep secrets, of course.

Marcus discovers that he can't turn off his power, which is that of fixing things. Everything he touches reverts to its original unblemished state. I loved the way, once home that Friday afternoon, he experimented to discover what the limitations of his power were. You usually don’t get the scientific approach in a novel of this nature. He found that everything he touched reverted to a pristine state - his shirt looked new and clean, a draw with a broken-off handle reverted to a clear, smooth stretch of unblemished wood without even a screw hole in it. The drill he picked up to re-drill the hole reverted to new!

Marcus has a dietary problem he evidently discovered (or gained) during volume 1, when his friend Jinnie got her wish-granting power (she can only grant one wish per person apparently). Marcus can't eat dairy or gluten. Neither can he "fix" himself with his power, but he can fix others. You might be surprised at how common this lactose intolerance is. The ability to digest dairy products isn’t the norm amongst humans; humans are 'supposed' to lose their ability to consume milk as we age, because this is how we evolved. We mammals are supposed to grow up and lose dependency on mother's milk, but many in the western world have retained the ability, and evolution supported this because it enabled us to take advantage of domesticated cows, sheep, and goats.

There are two kinds of kids in this magical world, the Loki who are led by coach Snicker (no kidding), and who are "evil", and the Vor (lead by a teacher named Kent), who are "good". Marcus and his friends are, of course, Vor, and they're supposed to help keep the balance in the world between good and evil. There's no explanation as to why there has to be a balance, and this was one of my problems with the writing: there's really no explanation for anything! We don't get to learn where these powers ultimately come from or how a certain kid gets a certain power (or fails to get a power), nor do we learn how these children are able to wield their power at no cost to anyone.

This flies in the face of everything else I've learned in this novel! If good has to balance evil, then what balances the use of a magical power? Who pays the cost for its use? Apparently it's free energy, and for me this undermines everything in the novel where someone speaks about balance and misuse of power. Once again, please note that I'm speaking only for this volume, as I said. If some explanation was offered in volume 1, then that might resolve these issues. Perhaps, for example, the cost of a positive use of the power is the negative use of power by someone else. This is suggested, but never follow-through in volume 2, and it's hard to see how that could work in practice, but at least it prevents the problem of getting something for nothing!

Each team has a bird for some reason. Team Loki has a Grackle which spies on the Vor. No word on exactly what species of Grackle it is (there are eleven, at least two of which are common in Austin. The Common Grackle is gorgeous. The Great-Tailed is seriously noisy). As much as I love Grackles, I have to say that the tired cliché of a black bird siding with evil needs to be slaughtered mercilessly! It's way overdone. Team Vor, of course, has a Cardinal (which is of the same order of birds as are the Grackles,so not a unbridgeable deal of difference there!). The Cardinal is female and can apparently talk in one way or another.

The Loki recruits are developing magical powers in tandem with the Vor. One of Team Loki, named Silver, stole a wish from Jinnie in volume 1, apparently. In relating this, Roy appears to miss out a key word: "…Silver Wiggins, had used the bird to help her steal a wish from Jinnie, one that Silver could grant for herself without Jinnie's help." That's ambiguous enough that I couldn't be sure if it was to be taken as is, or if the word "not" had been missed from between 'could' and 'grant'. It could work either way and it was a bit annoying not to know, but given that the text seems to be technically well-written in general, I'll give Roy the benefit of the doubt here!

There were only a couple of minor such issues that I noticed in this novel, such as the one where "...he glanced down a the gauze..." (I suspect he glanced at the gauze), and where "Mr. Santos topped spinning" (I suspect he stopped spinning). These were both on the same page about two-thirds the way through. And one more: "I'm back" says Jax, at one point, but he wasn’t actually away immediately before he said that, so I did have a few issues in figuring out the dialog here and there.

Clearly this novel is intended for a juvenile audience because it seems to have a few too many plot issues for a mature or discerning reader to countenance without frowning. For example, this Grackle is a spy and a nuisance, but nowhere do we see Jinnie wishing it away, or failing that, anyone trying to capture or kill it. They seem completely unable to cope with it, which is really sad. This is a problem with coming into a series without having had the benefit of the introductory novel(s). Maybe they tried this in Volume 1, and for some reason it wasn't possible.

The Loki consist of Bruscilla (who apparently has no power), Silver, Elektra (who can scramble thoughts), and Jax (as in 'jumping Jax' because he can jump instantly to another location. Sheesh.), so I guess it’s not hard to discern one's enemies in this world: if they have a weird or evil-sounding name, they're Loki, whereas those with a normal name are Vor!

I can see how this could be a fun series for younger people, but I have my doubts as to how well it will appeal to people who are the same age group as the kids featured in the story, and it’s unlikely to appeal to very many more mature readers, because the story is just too loosely-wrapped. For example, on page thirty-seven there's a declaration which makes little sense. Maddy and Marcus are trying to figure out how to control his run-away magic until they can speak to the temporarily unavailable Mr Kent. They decide to cut class and they sit in a darkened space, hiding and talking.

Maddy informs Marcus that there has to be a balance in the universe, such that if a Loki does a bad thing, then a Vor must a good thing. This actually means that, in effect, the Vor are very effectively under the control of the Loki! So whence the balance?! As Maddy rambles on, what she's saying sounds more ridiculous. She expresses a fear that there's no telling what Marcus is doing to the universe with his magic not being under control. Again this implies that there's no law of balance, which flatly contradicts what she's just said is a rule! Worse than this, she then calls into play one of Newton's laws of motion, specifically the one relating to inertia. Maddy quite evidently doesn’t understand the first thing about inertia.

In popular parlance, inertia tends to suggest idleness on someone's part: that they can neither be moved nor enjoined to move of their own volition. In science inertia means unchanging: that something which is moving will continue to move at a constant speed, and that something which is at rest (not that anything actually is at rest in this universe!) will remain at rest, until and unless either situation is acted upon by a force. Maddy claims that things must move forwards, although how this works when she's already declared that the Vor and the Loki quite effectively negate each other is another unexplained mystery. You can't have perfect balance and forward motion at the same time. For example, when a human walks, they are effectively out of balance the entire time. If they were balanced, they wouldn't be moving, which is quite the opposite of the proposition Maddy is nattering on about.

I'm very much rooted in science, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a good fantasy, or a supernatural or magical story as long as it's told well, but even in the most fantastical of worlds, there have to be rules, otherwise the story risks degenerating into the completely nonsensical. I have yet to discern any logical rules at all in this world. Everything we’re told seems to be completely arbitrary, made-up by the author on the spot for no discernible reason. This made this novel a frustrating read for me.

Clearly a writer has no compulsion to write a children's novel and make it appeal to an adult, but I do think writers have, or at least ought to have, a compulsion not to talk down to children, and not to dumb-down stories just because they're writing for a younger audience. Even a magical story requires a sound framework within which to relate it, and if you don't have that in place, then literally anything becomes possible and your plotting goes down the drain.

On this topic there's a major issue I had with the main plot point, which I admit is an intriguing reversal of intent. I don’t want to give too much away, but something happens that initiates the Vor behaving like Loki and vice-versa. This is a cool idea, but the cause of this ultimately makes no sense. The Vor group go haring off to South America to prevent the Loki from hauling an object southwards. The very act of doing this grants them increased power, thereby rendering the whole system off-balance, which is why it must be stopped. So far so good; however, given that Jinnie can grant any wish (even if only once per person), I honestly don’t get why any of this took place at all. She could simply have had someone wish that everything was back to the way it was before the trigger-event occurred, thereby preventing team Loki from achieving their aim. There was no need at all for the trip to South America, much less the shenanigans which take place in the Atacama desert there! That wasn't the only plotting problem with this scenario, but I'll leave it at that.

There was nothing to stop the author from writing these scenes if they'd been prefaced by some logical explanation as to why this whole thing had to go down the way it did, but there was nothing offered, so it all seemed pointless to me and made the whole Vor team seem stupid. I'm sure that wasn't the author's intention! Maybe the majority of those in the intended age range for this novel won't notice things like this, but my kids actually are in that age range, and I know that they would definitely have questioned this kind of "logic"!

So here's my dirty little secret: I have to confess that the more I read of this volume 2, the more I wanted to read the original, Jinnie Wishmaker (I keep wanting to call it 'Wishbringer' for some reason!). That initial volume does sounds like it might appeal to me more than this one did. I also became rather enamored of Elektra, so I am now tempted to go get the third volume in the series, Elektra Chaos! So how am I to deal with that? I can't rate the middle one badly, and then go out and buy other two volumes to read: I'll be a hypocrite! Curse my fondness for kick-A female characters! So here's my deal: I'll rate this one a cautious (and slightly cantankerous) 'worthy' and then Roy had better come through on the other two novels and make them seriously good, otherwise I'll have to visit some Loki magic on her!

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!