Look Behind You by Sibel Hodge

Rating: WARTY!

This one is first person which I detest, and which made the story read like a parody from the start because it was combined with such overly dramatic language that it would have turned me off right away had it not made me laugh so hard. In the first few screens I got, "Hot, acidic bile burns my throat." Bile is actually alkaline. Stomach acid is acidic. "Hot stomach acid burns my throat" would have been perfect. The bile quote made me think that this author was so desperate to make this gripping that she simply went way over the top without any idea where she was going or what she was doing to her little melodrama. It doesn't work. She does it again shortly afterwards with, "heartbeat thumps wildly". No, a heart may thump wildly. Or a heart may beat wildly, but a heartbeat is already a beat. It's already a thump.

This kind of melodrama continued with lines like, "I fight the urge to vomit again. I gulp in deep breaths of stale air. In. Out. Come on; breathe. In. Out. Don't panic. Think!" and "I cram a fist in my mouth to stop from yelling out. Hot tears slide down my cheeks. I have to get out of here. Somehow. But my head . . . oh, my head", and "Fingers of dread squeeze my insides. Fear slices through me." Seriously, I was about ready to quit but then the girl escapes her confinement so I decided to stay with it a bit longer. I made it to forty percent before the bad writing and the painfully obvious plotting nauseated me so much I couldn't stand to read any more.

Check this out:

'I was kidnapped.' My eyes water as the full realization of everything that's happened sinks in.
Her mouth falls open. 'Kidnapped?'
I can only nod, tears streaming down my face. Even to my ears, I know how it sounds. Crazy. Ridiculous. Who would want to kidnap a suburban wife and teacher?
'Right. Well, I'd better add calling the police to my list then, too....'

Seriously? A bedraggled woman obviously in trouble, is picked up on the roadside by a driver - a female driver at that - and no one calls the police? Bullshit! This story was quite simply not credible, and the woman was portrayed as stupid to the core. Everything is clear to the reader before the character ever grasps it. She is pathetically dumb and slow. I'm tired of reading stupid stories written by female authors who seem intent upon making their main female characters dumb as they can. Stop it! Stop it now or quit writing, for goodness sakes! I actively dis-recommend this novel.

The Woman In the Mirror by Cathryn Grant

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy from Net Galley, for which I thank the publisher.

I'm not sure I agree with the blurb's premise that "Everyone knows someone who deserves to die." I personally don't, although I would argue that there are asses which need kicking from time to time! I won't hold it against the author, because unless they self-publish, authors have little to do with the blurb or the cover. That's why on my blog I talk very little about covers, and I don't even show them any more in the reviews. It's the plot and the story-telling that's the only important part of a book. Covers are window-dressing at best, and honestly irrelevant unless you're not really a serious reader.

While vigilante "justice" is clearly wrong-headed in reality, it does make for some interesting stories, which is why the last sentence of the blurb intrigued me: "Alexandra Mallory isn't like other women - she gets rid of people who make the world a dangerous place." I was far less curious to know exactly how she dealt with her dangerous people than in how she determined who they were and which ones deserved dispatching. The problem I had was that this novel seemed far more interested in diverting into endless, tedious flashbacks and info-dumping histories than ever it was in propelling the story forward. It lost my interest short-order, and I gave up on this without finishing it, so keep that in mind with regard to this review.

That wasn't the only problem. I shall lightly step-over the fact that this title (girl/woman in mirror) is way over-used, and move on to the voice I most detest in story-telling: first person. Countless authors seem obsessively-compulsively addicted to it even when it harms their story. One of the many major problems with 1PoV is that it severely limits the ability to tell a good story, and this author admits this after the very first chapter by abruptly vaulting from first to third, which would be impressive were this a baseball game; not so much in literature, though. The story bounces back and forth between perspectives, but the second chapter is from the guy's perspective, and for some reason the author deems him unworthy of 1PoV! He merits only third place. Why, I don't know, but it seemed genderist at best. I mention that particular aspect because the guy has a decidedly warped perspective on the worth and valuation of women, and telling it in third person made it even worse than if it had been delivered in first.

His first take on Alexandra, the protagonist, is all about her "beauty" and physical qualities. Clearly if you've just encountered someone, the only knowledge you have of them is how they appear, but Jared's super power is quite evidently sex-ray vision: he can see only skin deep and immediately objectifies Alex without a second thought. I find it obnoxious that so many authors, especially female ones, are so addicted to this approach to describing their female characters. I mean, you can say a guy found a woman attractive without belaboring physical attributes to excess, and risking making other women feel like crap if they don't measure-up, just as you can describe a male character without making guys feel inadequate. Frankly, I wanted to ditch this novel right there, and never pick it up again, it was so shallow, but this was at about 2% in, and I felt compelled, against my better judgment, to press on at least a little further. It wasn't a charmed plan, as I discovered when it became bogged-down in flashbacks.

Alex is thrown together with professional liar Noreen, and "studly" Jared (see? That's how it's done! LOL!), all three living under one roof when Noreen sublets her rather precarious cliff-top house to them. It seemed pretty obvious where this was going, and it was all downhill from the top of the cliff. This was the beginning of yet another series, and I am rarely a fan of series. They tend to be repetitive, lazy, derivative, and unimaginative. I can't get on board with this one, which was far too wordy for my taste when the words conveyed so little and did nothing to move the story along. I wish the author all the best with her series, but I cannot recommend this based on what I read of it, which was more than I honestly wanted to.

Princess: More Tears to Cry by Jean Sasson

Title: Princess: More Tears to Cry
Author: Jean Sasson
Publisher: Doubleday
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.

It's interesting to note that this is not copyrighted to Jean Sasson per se, but to the "Sasson Corporation". I think that's noteworthy. OTOH, if a corporation is like a person in the USA, and corporations get tax-breaks and low utility charges, then why don't we all incorporate ourselves? I'm for it!

This book is sold as non-fiction, but there are too many reasons - all taken from the way this is written, and the things it says and doesn't say - for me to believe that it's anything other than fiction, so from this point onwards I will refer to it as a novel until and unless I'm given good reason - in the form of independent supportive evidence - to think otherwise.

I have no smoking gun to prove that it's fiction, but neither do I have anything compelling me to believe that it isn't, so what follows is my own personal opinion derived from no other source than simply reading this book - or at least as much of it as I could stomach.

I have seen, and tried to get into reading, at least two other books in this series, and I could never take them seriously, so this was my last shot at looking at this, and I gave it the best one I could manage, but ultimately, this novel remained boring when it wasn't laughable, which is a sad thing to say about material that's supposedly true and daring as this is claimed to be. That was the first problem with it, for me: the material read too much like fiction and was far too sensationalized to be taken seriously.

This is one reason to down-grade it even if it is true, because if true, this material deserves considerably better treatment than it gets here. Written in the way it is, this book does more to sabotage the very thing it's supposedly trying to alleviate than ever it would if it were written more responsibly and a lot less like a tabloid front page in a supermarket check-out line.

One thought I had immediately was: if these things were true, and I wanted to cover them up and discredit assertions that they were true, what's the best way I could go about achieving that aim?

The obvious answer is, to write a book about it and make the book so bizarre and absurd that the book itself, claiming to be true, turns the whole thing into a joke, and then no one else is every going to make any headway because everything on this topic will forever be suspect at that point. In that direction, the author has done outstanding work for my money. For all practical purposes, it's the same tactic which Republicans use routinely to try to discredit Democrat presidential hopefuls! Throw enough volume and variety of mud (or in this case, fluff) and eventually some of it will stick.

This tale of Arabian 'mights' has all the elements of American daytime soap operas, and no one takes those seriously, so why would anyone take this seriously? That's perhaps the biggest indictment against it, but it's not the only one. The second, arguably equally large, if not larger, is: how could this even get written? If it were true, how could a woman who is now so well-known, continue to be in touch with a real princess and get this information to continue writing these books?

How could this purported 'princess' not have been identified by now? It's beyond credibility. Even if everything in her story was changed - the names, the family history, birth dates, events, to protect the source, how could people not have figured out by now who this is, and how could the source have escaped retribution if the society in which she lives is as awful as we're lectured it is here? It's not possible. It defies credibility.

I am not at all religious. While I do not care what religion people follow as long as they're not hurting others (or sacrificing animals), I do detest and despise organized religion. It is the most pernicious and corrupting influence upon people which was ever invented, and the most appalling and concerted attempt to enslave - or at the very least subjugate - women which has ever been devised by men.

Neither do I believe that any one organized religion is materially better or worse than any other. They all have their faults. They have all fallen short of the glory of the god they claim to serve. They all have blood on their hands way beyond anything which can in any way be justified, even in the wildest flights of fancy.

Yes, Christianity doesn't - normally - subjugate women in the way that Islam does, but it was not always that way. Islam is doing nothing worse today than Christianity and Judaism have done in the past, and which some sects of both continue to do today. None of them is without sin, but can you imagine the outrage if someone did this same sort of exposé on the orthodox Judaists, or on the Amish or the Mormons, or a similar sect? Put it in that perspective and stand back and breathe a little.

One of the most obnoxious things about his novel is that it vilifies all Muslims equally, and that is unacceptable. I simply do not believe that kind of assertion because it is so juvenile and so black and white as to completely lack credibility.

Yes there are awful Muslims, but there are also saintly Muslims, but the bigger truth is that the vast majority of Muslims are your regular everyday people just like you and I, who only want to have a decent life and to be allowed to get on with it in peace, just like the Judaists do, just like the Christians do, and just like those of other, rather less fraught and freighted, religions do. To tar them all uniformly with the thick indiscriminate brush with which this author writes is absurd and cannot in good conscience be viewed as anything other than fictional.

Another problem I had with this book is one that I also have with first person PoV books: no one can recall that much detail, not even when writing it later in a diary. No one can recall exact events in exact order, with every nuance, and every inflected conversation, every little detail, every utterance, every frown, every exclamation.

Even if these purported events were true at their root, there's an inescapable element of fictionalization in recalling them. The human mind works that way, and it's unavoidable. Everyone knows - or should know - that eye-witness is the most unreliable of all evidence which can be brought into a case, yet such witnesses are paradoxically the most compelling, as we see with these novels.

The big problem here is that the 'evidence' isn't corroborated by anything. All we have is the author's word, and I'm sorry, but given the poor and sensationalist quality of the writing here, that word isn't anywhere near good enough to convince me.

Yes, I know that women are abused appallingly by the crushing yoke of religion, especially in orthodox Judaism, Islam, and many sects of many other religions, including Christianity. This needs to be stopped, but guess what? The first of these 'princess' books came out well over a decade ago and I see nothing changing in Saudi Arabia. OTOH, I do see many of these books being sold. You may wish to draw your own conclusions as to who is really benefiting from them.

I cannot recommend a book this poorly written, and one which is arguably doing such a disservice to the cause of liberating those women in the Middle East who wish for it.