Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor by Julie Anne Grasso

Title: Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor
Author: Julie Anne Grasso
Publisher: Julie Anne Grasso
Rating: WORTHY!

This is an hilarious middle-grade novel which starts out with gusto and a great sense of humor. Frankie is a wannabe detective. Yes, he's only 10 3/4 years old, but hey - that three-quarters is crucial! His friend and cousin Kat - who even Frankie thinks is kinda cool - has disappeared. She was last seen at Enderby Manor. Frankie's detective dad is busy on a case. Can Frankie himself find his missing cousin?

This is beautifully written, completely captivating, and gorgeously depicted chapter book, with a neat little world created for Frankie and for the weird and wonderful people he meets. He pursues his detective occupation with dedication and smarts. He doesn’t get everything right first time, but he never gives up, keeps his grey-matter steaming with thought, and he slowly but surely zeroes in on the truth - which is rather more mysterious than mysteries usually are.

When I say 'slowly, but surely', that doesn't mean that the story is slow. No - it moves at a cracking pace, with something new popping up every page for Frankie to assess and deal with. I loved this story - which at first (judged by certain words which cropped up, such as 'tyres' for 'tires', 'dosh' for 'money', for example) I thought was British, but it’s actually Australian - another good reason to read it. It's not YASSITU (yet another story set in the USA)! It has a sense of humor, a warm and fresh playfulness, and a sterling protagonist in Frankie. I recommend it.

The Genome by Sergey Lukianenko

Title: The Genome
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko / Sergey Lukianenko / Сергей Лукьяненко
Publisher: Open Road Integrated 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 for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p77 "synoptic" should by "synaptic"

This is a novel written by Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko, the author of the Night Watch pentalogy, at least two of which have been made into English language movies. I had some issues with this novel even as I grew to like it as I began reading it - but then which novel don't I have issues with?! In this case, it began with the author's dedication, which is interesting in that it seems like an apology for a book which the author thinks some might deem to be "cynical and immoral". This struck me as odd. Authors can write whatever they want, so why apologize for it in advance?

I ask this because I also found myself asking: is it cynical or immoral to consistently describe women as "girls" as this author does? Is it cynical or immoral to write sentences like "If only she would change the hair, visit a cosmetologist, and replace her work overalls with a dress..." (page 37)? Or to write "Had Janet been a feminist, no one could have gotten her into a kitchen..." (page 98).

Those sentences struck me as genderist and abusive - like women don't have a place unless they're pretty and wearing make up and skirts? Like no feminist ever goes into a kitchen? What? There's also this one from page 163: "...or perhaps she did it simply out of every woman's ineradicable need to look as seductive as possible." SERIOUSLY? In the end, and especially given how poorly this novel ends, it was comments like this - not part of some lowlife character's's speech, but integral to the very fabric of the novel itself, which tipped the balance and made me rate this negatively.

I would have done so even had the story been really good otherwise, because the problem was that this kind of thing ran through the whole novel. Like when main characters Alex and Kim inevitably have sex, we read, "Alex took her four times in a row." They don't 'make love' - he takes her. That makes it sound like rape, even though at that point she's coming on to him and they're technically married. It's intended to read like he's the masterful stud and she's his toy, or his possession or sex slave. The character himself confirms this by repeatedly referring to her as "baby".

It's one thing to write a first person novel where your main character thinks like this, or having a third person novel where a specific character espouses attitudes of this nature. There are people like that in real life and it's foolish and unrealistic to pretend that there are not, but it's another thing entirely to create something which has this attitude woven into the very fabric of the novel itself I did not like that at all, and it made the novel hard to read at times.

This wasn't the only such irritation. It seemed even more weird at one point when he wrote "The black woman" (page 67) and "The black woman smiled" (page 101). We already knew that Janet was black at that point, so why raise it again when it serves no purpose? These things struck me as weird, and they interfered with my enjoyment of what was, for the most part quite an engrossing and entertaining novel. Maybe other people don't find these things odd or distracting, but I did and it spoiled the story for me.

These were not the only writing quirks. At one point, the main character uses "whom" in speech (page 65). Almost no one talks like that any more, and the main character wasn't presented as someone who did. I know it's grammatically correct in specific instances to employ 'whom', but these days it seems pretentious. It's even more pretentious to depict a character actually saying it. In some cases, it would be appropriate - for example, if the character himself was pretentious, but in this case he isn't. He's just a regular guy (with some exceptions!), and unlikely to use that form of speech, it seemed to me. I know it's hard to break what are seen as rules, but as writers we need to present our stories realistically, not write by rote.

In other news, on page 77, we once again encounter the "one gene equals one physical trait" fallacy. Yes, sometimes a single gene can influence a single trait, but more often, it's a group or network of genes which make us who we are with the specific traits that we have. This business of (in this case, for example) having a gene for speed, is nonsensical.

That rather kicked me out of suspension of disbelief for the sci-fi part of this novel, and it's really sad, because to begin with, I started liking this story almost at once, and it grew on me as I read it. In general terms it was well-written in that it drew me in, offered interesting situations and characters, and was inventive. It also had an intriguing and kick-ass female character which I always appreciate. By 'kick-ass' I don't necessarily mean literally capable of kicking-ass, but in this case she actually was, but all of this was undermined by the issues I already mentioned.

The story begins with Alexander Romanov getting out of hospital after what was apparently a near-fatal crash of the spacecraft he was piloting. Now five months on, he's been rebuilt and has recovered, and is now looking to find work. On his way from the hospital into the city, he encounters Kim O'Hara, a fourteen-year-old girl who is a "spesh" just like Alex is; they just have different specialties.

In this world, children can be genetically programmed at an early age, to specialize for a future career. How exactly this works isn't specified, but it involves the child going through a metamorphosis in their early teens, rather like a caterpillar changes into a moth or a butterfly. Kim has not been through hers yet. She's very late which means possible trouble. She finally does so after she hooks up with Alex when he encounters her on a monorail as he leaves the hospital.

Having been through his own metamorphosis, he helps Kim through hers successfully. Without his help she might have died. Whereas Alex's specialty was a ship pilot, Kim's is evidently a fighter, but after her transformation, she looks like a mature woman - which is not exactly how fighter specialists should look. They can be male or female of course, but they look like brutes, since part of their specialization is intimidation. Kim doesn't look like that, but she is without question a fighter specialist. Alex concludes that she has some other specialties built-in as well, and he's right.

Meanwhile, Alex has been job hunting and has found what seems to be a too-good-to-be-true job piloting a slick and souped-up craft. The anonymous owner requests that he has a full compliment of crew, which for this ship is six people, including a fighter and a doctor. Alex is given free reign to pick his crew - so there are oddities continuously cropping up in everything that's going on here, yet Alex, Mary Sue that he is, never seriously starts to worry that he's being set up for something. Yes, he's a bit suspicious from time to time, and he has a question or two about events, but it would seem obvious that there's something seriously adrift here, and he never really seems to get that. That was annoying.

Part of Alex's 'spesh' in being a pilot is that he is incapable of loving someone. We're given no explanation for this, and it makes no sense, because when he takes over his new craft, he emotionally bonds with it and it's all about love and appreciation. If he's incapable of love, then he can't love his ship and form that bond. If he can do that after all - and we see that he can when he first boards his craft - then he's capable of love, period. Whether there is something about the spacecraft and his specialty that brings out love which is unavailable anywhere else isn't specified in this novel, but to simply say he can't love and then have him and his ship "fall in love" makes no sense.

This novel was entertaining, but I kept tripping up over it for reasons already mentioned. What pushed this story further into the crapper for me was the ending. There is cloning in this world, and when there's a murder on the ship, a character named Sherlock Holmes comes aboard with Jenny Watson. Holmes is a clone of a man who was a detective "spesh" who modeled himself on Arthur Doyle's famous character. At this point we leave sci-fi and move to a simple murder mystery which read like the ending to an Agatha Christie novel - with all the suspects gathered into a room and the detective rambling on pretentiously eliminating all the suspects until he arrives at the killer. It was incredibly boring, and a sad end to what had otherwise (apart from the crass genderism) been a decent read.

I can't rate this as a worthy read after all that!

Crown of Serpents by Michael Karpovage

Title: Crown of Serpents
Author: Michael Karpovage
Publisher: Karpovage Creative Inc.
Rating: WORTHY!

Oddities:
Page 129 had some gratuitous and unnecessary objectification: "…tight black slacks and an open black overcoat revealing her service pistol holstered at her shapely waist." Seriously?
Page 265 carries the assumption that older woman not attractive! Seriously?
Yet another author doesn't get that it's 'biceps' not 'bicep'.

Jake Tununda is a Native American who is a soldier and a war hero, but he's had enough. Now he wants a quieter life and while he is still in the army, he's now working for the Military History Institute, collecting historical artifacts and oral histories, and investigating battle sites, which actually sounds like a really cool job. On his way to give a lecture and collect more information for the institute, he accidentally intercepts a call for help, and tracks down the caller to a previously unknown native American burial site which happens to be right next to limestone fissure, into which the victim has fallen.

Jake tries to rescue him, but discovers, once he gets down in there, that the vic died from his injuries. Jake thinks he's all done here once the authorities have taken over and he's given his statement, but his next port of call - to a museum to investigate a newly-discovered and major historical artifact from the revolutionary war, brings him into conflict with a powerful and dangerous native American known as Alex Nero - a man who started out gun-running, but now has built a huge 'respectable' fortune from running an exclusive casino on a reservation.

Jake doesn’t want to get involved in his own tribal politics and ritual history, but the more he tries to avoid it, the more he gets pulled in, and soon he's running after clues and treasure, trying to stay one step ahead of the extremely aggressive Nero, whose thugs know no restraint and no limits.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I had some reservations (pun intended!) about yet another novel extolling native American tribal lore and spirits guides and what-not, for which I have no time, but this novel doesn't over do it. It treads carefully between a respectful view of the people, and avoiding completely dissing traditions, which I respected, so I was impressed and thrilled to finally find a novel which, although it wasn't perfect, handled the story and native American traditions without being sycophantic or maudlin.

The plot is believable and tight, and the action and adventure coming thick and fast. The book is written well for the most part, although the scenes involving Jake's growing lust for police investigator Rae were rather objectifying, but even as I started to get irritated over those, the story looped away from physical involvement and back into the action, so that was pretty much acceptable, too.

One problem with the ebook I read is that it was far too small to show the images and maps that are included in the text, so I got nothing out of those. How they would appear in a print book or on a larger format reader than my phone is an open question!

There are always some issues. In this case, for example, it made no sense that all the doors would be locked down in an abandoned army underground bunker, nor that they would contain any army materiel. The army has abandoned the base, the new owner literally just took over that same day. Why are they locked?!!!

At one point we read of a blood stain from the revolutionary war - but it certainly wouldn't be red, it would be brown! At a later point, it makes no sense that Rae wouldn't use the fact that her captors were reduced to crawling to get through a cave in pursuit of her, to disable one or more of them or to escape. When she 'accidentally' escapes, she fails to take out her opponents even when they're shooting at her and she has the advantage; then of course, it's Jake to the rescue, so it ends up making yet another woman seem like a damsel in distress who can only be helped by a guy. I didn't like that part.

For a historian, Jake has a lousy sense of how to handle historical sites and documents. He blunders in tampering with things, moving things, making no attempt whatsoever to preserve or document anything. I know he's not an archaeologist, but that's no reason for him to be an out-and-out disaster, especially given his credentials and background, so that seemed unrealistic to me.

Having said that, overall this novel was a really engrossing and entertaining story, so I consider this a worthy read.

Model Undercover: New York by Carina Axelsson

Title: Model Undercover: New York
Author: Carina Axelsson
Publisher: Sourcebooks
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of fashion stories or modeling stories because I detest the fashion and modeling world. Never has there been - not even including Hollywood and TV, a more self-centered, self-obsessed, pretentious and shallow enterprise as these. I despise those who spend thousands upon clothes and accessories when there are sick and starving children throughout the world, but fiction is not the same as the real world, and once in a while I've found a story that's interesting, and which doesn't take itself too seriously. It's those rare few which keep me cautiously coming back looking for another one! This novel turned out to be such a one.

The premise here is that Axelle, a sixteen-year-old girl, is both a model and a "sleuth" - but primarily (so she keeps limply protesting) the latter. Why anyone thinks grown-ups will respond positively - or even politely - to a relentlessly inquisitive sixteen-year-old goes completely unexplained, but let's let that slide right on by: this is fiction, after all!

Having solved a puzzle in Paris (presumably in an earlier volume which I have not read), Axelle now believes she's a brilliant detective and can solve anything, which is why she's just arrived in New York City. An extremely valuable black diamond has been stolen during a modeling shoot, and she's supposed to discover who took it. Carbonado diamonds are rare, and are thought to be formed - unlike other diamonds - in stellar explosions, so they are really intriguing - to me at least.

In amongst slurs aimed at London (referenced constantly in a rather snobbish way, but paradoxically run-down in comparisons with NYC) and at vegan cuisine, we discover that Carbonado (black) diamonds (which do actually exist)are supposedly almost impossible to cut without incurring serious damage. They are harder than other diamonds, but this doesn't necessarily mean they will shatter if you cut them. Since this particular one - the Black Amelia (named after one of its owners, who was Amelia - not black!) - is so very distinctive, the thief is going to have a hard time getting rid of it, so perhaps the theft wasn't because of the value per se of the diamond, but because the thief had a grudge against the owner, or was intent upon blackmail.

There were no security guards at the shoot (idiots!) because the owner is a friend of the editor of the fashion magazine, and the editor is evidently too stupid to hire her own security. The shoot was closed and limited to only a handful of people, all of whom were really successful in their fields, so the motive looks a lot less like petty theft, as it were, and a lot more like revenge or blackmail. Cassandra, aka Cazzie, the British editor of Chic fashion magazine, idiotically fails to notify the police (they don't want bad publicity!) and she's the only one who knows that Axelle is here primarily as a detective, not as a model.

So the author seems to have everything locked-up to explain these oddball circumstances, but there's one problem: Cassandra, aka Cazzie, is receiving texts from someone who appears to have the diamond. So why all the cogitating on Axelle's part about motive? Clearly this is the motive - to taunt and embarrass Cazzie for some reason. What makes less sense right here is that they now have someone the police could conceivably track down yet not once do they consider bringing them in. This made no sense to me. It's also weird that the texts don't start rolling in until Axelle is on the scene, isn't it?

The text-taunter tells Cazzie that there will be three riddles which she must solve or she won't see the diamond again. Interestingly, Cazzie is able to respond this time - she wasn't before - and the taunter tells her that she's pissed him/her off, so the first riddle will be delayed. The taunter never used the word 'diamond' to begin with, instead talking about 'treasure', so I began to suspect that it was entirely possible that this was unconnected with the theft of the diamond. That would have been a nice red-herring, but no - the text-taunter uses it later - after Cazzie has used it. It was at that point that I wondered: is Cazzie doing this all by herself?

Axelle gets an email which she thinks is from the same source as the texting - this warns her to butt out. I suspected that this came from Sebastian, an insufferably over-protective out-of-favor boyfriend of Axelle's, but that was just a wild guess, and it was wrong. Sebastian is a jerk and I didn't like him, even given that Axelle is flying-off-the-handle over him. The fact that she's cluelessly wrong about him is another irony. The detective - clueless?!

I have to say I find all foreign characters annoying when they're depicted as speaking perfect English yet nonetheless are reduced to interspersing it with words or phrases from their native tongue. Thus we get Miriam the maid peppering her dialog with French, which is not only pretentious, it was really annoying. If you can't depict a foreign character without being forced to make them spew a brew of Franglish or whatever language combo, then make your character English. Otherwise find a way to depict their foreign nature by doing work on the character-building instead of taking the lazy way out. Please? Just a thought.

The weird thing is that while Axelle wisely tries to get Cazzie to stir-up the text-taunter in an effort to have him/her to give themselves away, when this is going on, Axelle fails completely to station herself next to one of the suspects to see if they're texting when the taunter responds. That's just plainly stupid. If she thinks it's one of a small group, then all she has to do is be close to each one in turn during one of these exchanges. In this manner, she could at least eliminate some - those who were not texting - even if she can't necessarily zero in on the actual perp right away. This doesn't speak strongly to her smarts, but then Axelle is only sixteen and not the most worldly of people despite all her claims to being widely traveled.

Without wanting to give anything away, I chose two people as the prime suspects quite early on in this story, and one of them soon seemed unlikely. The other one, it turned out, actually was the thief! If I can get it right when I'm typically lousy at that kind of thing, I suspect the villain was way too obvious!

Aside from that, the writing in general was not bad. There were one or two exceptions, such as where I read, "...the studio was shaped like an L. A curtain..." which was misleading, because it initially read - to me - like "LA curtain - as in Los Angeles curtain! It took me a second to realize what it actually was. It would have been nice had the author put the 'L' in single quotes, like I did just then, to clarify this.

The novel moved at a decent pace and was - refreshingly - very light on fashion and make-up, which I really appreciated! It was also pretty decently plotted (in general) with a nice twist here and there. It had rather shallow, but otherwise reasonably realistic characters, so despite some early misgivings about this I was, by the end, convinced that it was a worthy read. I can't pretend that I'm waiting breathlessly for a sequel, but you might be after you've read this one!

Thirteen At Dinner by Agatha Christie

Title: Thirteen At Dinner
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: AudioGO
Rating: WORTHY!

Published as Lord Edgware Dies in Britain in 1933, it appeared in the US under the title Thirteen at Dinner. Boring as the Brit title is, it's a far more accurate representation of events than is the US title. Thirteen at dinner might have been so, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual murder and story, which is that of Hercule Poirot in pursuit of solving Lord Edgware's mysterious and confusing murder.

I was first introduced to Agatha Christie around the age of fourteen, when I was off school for the better part of a week, sick and in bed, and desperately looking for new books to read. The only ones available at the time were in the limited library of an older bother, so I got an early introduction to Ian Fleming's James Bond, and to Agatha Christie. It was an Hercule Poirot story that I read then, but I can't for the life of me recall which story it was. I don't think it was this one, but it could have been.

Note that Poirot is very much a rip-off of Sherlock Holmes, and he has a foil, Captain Hastings, who stands in for John Watson, and a less than excellent police inspector, Japp, who stands in for Inspector

I found this novel charming, a bit confusing, and entertaining, but I suspect that the bulk of the charm and entertainment came from Hugh Fraser's excellent performance in the audio book which I listened to. Normally I rail against the absurd pretension and affectation of publisher's claims that a reader is "performing" an audio book when all they're typically doing is simply reading it. Sometimes it actually is a performance, but such things are rare indeed. In this case, Fraser really turned in a confoundedly spiffing performance, what?!

This story doesn't begin with a murder, but with a request from the self-centered and self-absorbed actor Jane Wilkinson, also known as Lady Edgware, who asks Poirot to speak on her behalf to her husband and try and persuade him to grant her a divorce. Poirot does so and discovers, to his surprise, that Lord Edgware acceded to her request six months previously in a letter - a letter which Wilkinson later claims she never received.

Then comes the murder. Lord Edgware is found dead in his library with a knife wound to a critical position at the base of his skull. Naturally Wilkinson is the suspect, especially since she was seen entering Edgware's house by two people on the night of the murder - at around the murder time. The problem is that Jane was at a dinner party that night and has multiple witnesses to testify to this. It would seem clear that someone impersonated her.

It so happens that Poirot very recently saw another actor, Carlotta Adams, impersonating Jane Wilkinson on stage, and later attended a dinner party at Wilkinson's home to which Adams was also invited. Later, Adams is found dead of an overdose of a sleeping potion. There's also one more mystery: before the murder, Bryan Martin, an American actor, consults Poirot on the matter of his being followed by a mysterious man with a gold tooth. He also advises Poirot that Wilkinson is dangerous and might well carry out her publicly-voiced assertion that her husband has to die.

There are so many red herrings in this novel that I completely lost track of who was supposed to be the prime suspect at any one time. In the end, I could not figure out who dunnit and was a bit surprised to learn the answer! I also watched the Peter Ustinov movie based on this novel. It had been updated to contemporary times (for when the movie was made), and it really didn't work. I did not like Ustinov as Poirot, which is why this isn't a movie/novel review - I only review movies that I like!). Curiously, David Suchet was in that same movie playing the part of Inspector Japp to Ustinov's Poirot. Later Suchet went on to play Poirot in a lengthy TV series, and he was perfect for the role. Much better than Ustinov.

I recommend this audiobook.

In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters

Title: In the Shadow of Blackbirds
Author: Cat Winters (aka Catherine Karp)
Publisher: Abrams
Rating: WORTHY!

Set in the last year of World War One, and during the deadliest pandemic the world has ever seen, In the Shadow of Blackbirds is an atmospheric, rather claustrophobic and unnerving novel about 16-year-old Mary Shelley (not that Mary Shelley, merely a namesake!) and her interesting adventures in San Diego.

Mary is forced to move there after her parents are arrested as German spies. By this neat literary device the author is free to allow Mary to exhibit her (for the time) somewhat scandalous attitudes and even behaviors which her parents would no doubt never countenance.

Mary, who for some reason is always referred to as Mary Shelley, but rarely in full as Mary Shelley Black, stays with her aunt, who happens to be only a decade older than Mary. In some ways Mary is happy to be there because it's the city in which she knew Stephen - a childhood friend who is now fighting in Europe. Stephen writes beautifully and he takes haunting photographs which he titles with anagrams so his older brother Julius will not figure out what the title is. I have no idea why he thinks this was necessary. Two of these pictures he has given to Mary. One is of a butterfly, and its title 'Mr Muse', Mary quickly resolves as 'Summer'. The other is of lightning striking water, and it's titled 'I Do Lose Ink'

Julius is a "spirit photographer" evidently of the kind who double-exposes photographic plates to make it appear to the photographic subject that the spirit of a loved one has appeared in the image with them (in exactly the way this novel's cover was made, of course!). Julius once caught Stephen and Mary in a somewhat compromising position and then exaggerated what he saw to cause problems for the two of them. Now Mary is to sit for him for another spirit photograph, and the only reason she agrees to this is to get Julius to confess his embarrassing and incriminating exaggeration about herself and Stephen to her aunt, and to give her the package Stephen left for her before he went to the front.

1918 was the year that composer Claude Debussy died, and Marie Stopes published Married Love, Manfred von Richthofen was killed in a dogfight, General Motors bought Chevrolet, 20,000 British soldiers died in one day fighting the Kaiser's army, Britain laid the keel of the world's first purpose-built aircraft carrier, and Italy and Japan fought on the side of the allies.

It was in January of 1918 that the Spanish flu (so called) was first noted in Kansas in the US (although it had already reared its ugly head elsewhere), and it spread rapidly, causing people to begin routinely wearing surgical masks and carrying posies and other pungent materials with them in a futile attempt to ward off what was actually an airborne virus.

It's hard now to imagine how virulent this plague was, when we're hearing almost daily of the deadly effects of the spread of Ebola in Africa, but that's a sniffle when compared with what this flu did. It struck world-wide and it killed millions upon millions, and the author does a rather scary job of conveying the fear and suspicion this disease engendered in people. I read Gina Kolata's book Flu on this pandemic, and I highly recommend it if you're interested in learning more.

Overall I was impressed by Cat Winters's writing. It was very atmospheric, realistic, and engaging. She's an author, for example, who knows that you can't (not intelligently, anyway!) say something like "So blue it was almost black." Instead, she correctly says, "...navy blue so dark it was almost black."

I've seen writers (so-called!) make the mistake with other colors. Blue, for example, is a noun which describes a color, and which describes no quality of the color other than that it's blue, so it makes no sense to say that something is so blue that it's almost black. That's the same as saying it's so blue that it's not really blue. Patent nonsense! Simply amplifying how 'blue' something is relates nothing of its lightness or darkness. This isn't a matter of opinion; it's a fact which isn't rendered any less factual simply because more than one writer makes this same mistake.

Confusing the quality of brightness with the quality of hue isn't a smart thing to do, and there are very subtle ways like this in which we, as writers, can educate readers and bring them up with us instead of talking down to them. It was really nice to see a writer who gets this. There's hope that our YA writers will get there! Many of them already have.

The story draws us ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Mary, and the fate of her friend Stephen. Someone isn't telling the truth about what happened to him, and Mary, determined to discover and uncover what happened to him, becomes quite the detective.

I liked this novel in general. It wasn't the most thrilling thing I've ever read, but it drew me in and made me care about the main character, and it was well-written, and sometimes that's enough. The ending was a little bit dissatisfying, but given how strong it was overall, I'm not going to down-grade the novel for that. Mary isn't one of my great heroes, but she is a strong character who takes charge of her life and acts positively, and we need all of those females that we can get in YA literature!

So B. It by Sarah Weeks

Title: So B. It
Author: Sarah Weeks
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

Audio book beautifully read by Cherry Jones.

This was an audio book version of a story about Heidi Demuth's desire to learn the truth of her own origins - an origin which isn't so mysterious because it rapidly becomes obvious from whence she hails once she starts to dig into it. What's not so obvious is the reason for the secrecy and the reason she was kept from that knowledge, and it's a sad truth that she learns. It all begins with her mom's uttering of the nonsense word "Soof". Mom doesn't have a very large vocab. Heidi knows all of the words and what they mean; however, Soof is unique and necessitates an investigation.

The story is beautifully told and beautifully read. Heidi is 12 and lives with her mentally disabled mother. She and her mom are helped in her day-to-day life by her next door neighbor, Bernadette, who Heidi calls Bernie. Bernie can only help because she can get into their apartment through on old and previously disused connecting door. If she tries to go out into the hallway in their apartment block to walk next door that way, she freezes up and collapses, becoming all-but catatonic. Heidi thinks this problem is named angora phobia which causes her some confusion...!

One day, playing a memory card game, Bernie discovers that Heidi is astoundingly lucky. She can match every pair in the face-down cards, first time, every time. She can also win money on the slot machines, which is how she purchases the ticket to travel from Reno, in Nevada, where she lives, to Liberty, in New York state, where she believes her mother was once resident in the Hilltop Home for the mentally challenged.

Using her luck, Heidi is able to casually 'partner' herself up with various people on the three-day trip so that she always looked like she was traveling with someone, such as Georgia Sweet or Alice Willinsky. When she arrives at hilltop, she meets a guy named Elliot, who says to her, "Soof". It's not long before Heidi discovers her true relationship to Thurman Hill, the irascible and unhelpful proprietor of the Hilltop home, and to Elliot himself.

This quite short story, and though very sad in some ways, is charming, and warmly told, especially in audio book format. I recommend it. And no, the cover has zero to do with the story. It's just another example of Big Publishing™ being completely clueless when it comes to dealing decently with authors.

Picture Me Gone by Meg Rosoff

Title: Picture Me Gone
Author: Meg Rosoff
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I detest first person PoV, especially the dystopian ones written by female writers because they seem almost uniformly lame. It’s like no female YA author has any clue how to write in third person or how to create a strong female lead, but once in a while you find a gem (even amongst the dystopian ones) which makes all the disappointing ones worth slogging through. This particular novel is worth every letter on every page. You know you have a winner when you become addicted from page one, when you glue yourself to page after page and don’t care what you blow-off in exchange for a few more minutes with this read, and when you want to go buy the hardback version and read that instead of the library copy you have in your hands.

This novel is far from dystopian in the traditional sense, but in some ways it does carry that air. It's told from the PoV of Mila, daughter of Gil and Marieka. Mila lives in London, and is all set to visit the USA with her dad. They're going to visit her dad's oldest friend, someone who once saved his life by hauling him down from a mountain when he was suffering from exposure and altitude sickness. The problem is that Matthew has disappeared, leaving behind him a wife, a young child, and a dog, as well as a notable one-of-a-kind (almost!) home. Apparently all wasn't well at home.

Mila's special skill is that she's really Sherlock Holmes. Not really, but she does have his remarkable ability to deduce whole images from the sparsest set of clues. When they arrive in New York state, and are driven (by Matthew's wife, Suzanne) to the gorgeous house in the woods, Mila immediately starts forming solid, reliable impressions based on everything and anything she observes around her - and there's a lot to see for someone who’s eyes are truly open. Mila falls in love with the baby, and with Matthew's dog. She makes very astute deductions (including at one point, that their waitress is pregnant), yet she seems completely blind to what actually happened with Matthew. Either that or Meg Rosoff is so skilled a writer that she lays down a red herring of such admirable quality that it not only seems completely edible, but looks like it's cooked to perfection, too.

Not that it’s hard to fool me (which, delightfully, is why I get so much out of so many novels!), but here's an assortment of what I thought was going on (and note that these may or may not be spoilers - I'm not telling!). At one point, I got the impression that Mila might actually not be Gil's and/or Marieka's daughter. The two are not married and she doesn’t quite feel like she fits perfectly, even though the three of them seem very happy with each other. I wasn't completely convinced that I had that right. Gabriel - the baby - seems like he may well not be Matthew's child; Suzanne appears to be having an affair. But as I said, maybe Rosoff is truly evil and is cackling to herself even now over how many readers she's gleefully led up the garden path with her 'clues'. Maybe it's Matthew who's having an affair; maybe no one is.

I'm totally in love with both Mila and her best friend Catlin - which is something of a miracle, because often in these stories I find myself liking the side-kick better than I like the main character. Mila's reminiscences of their friendship (which I don’t normally like very much in this kind of a novel) were so real and so vivid that I found myself wanting to read another novel solely about that era, not as a reminiscence, but as it was actually happening. Catlin is a Kick-A character and an amazing (if unpredictable) friend to Mila, and the two of them are completely addictive.

Rosoff has an interesting style. This is the first of hers that I've read, so I can't say if it’s typical of her, but she doesn't use quotes around speech, which is actually fine because most of the time I really didn’t notice it, but sometimes it really hit me precisely because this novel is told 1PoV, so it can lead to problems in figuring out who said what, or even if something was said as opposed to merely thought.

Though she's American-born, Rosoff lives in London, and for the most part she uses English phrases correctly, but when it came to describing an important accident, she used the term 'tractor-trailer' which is an American term. In Britain it would be known as an 'articulated lorry', or just an 'artic' for short. Unless things have changed since I lived there (which they may well have since American influences are pervasive) this jumped out at me as inauthentic.

The accident in question is the one which killed Owen, Matthew and Suzanne's son. He was sitting in the back seat, with Matthew in the front. When the lorry somehow overturned onto the car, or hit it in the rear, Owen was killed. There is a question as to why he was in the back. Was Matthew actually having an affair and his paramour was in the front of the car? There were supposedly only two people in the car, and Matthew was found blameless, but I started wondering if his girlfriend was with them that night, and if she left the scene to avoid a scandal? You'll have to read this to find out.

Mila and Gil head off northwards, to see if Matthew has retreated to his cabin up there near Lake Placid, close to the Canadian border. Why Suzanne hasn’t already checked this - or the police did on her behalf - is left unexplained. Mila is texting her mom (who is in Holland playing violin), Catlin, and also Matthew. Matthew doesn’t respond. Not at first. Then comes back the response to "Where are you?" and it’s "I'm nowhere"

And that's all you're getting! I loved this novel, and highly recommend it as a worthy read.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

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

Audio novel almost acceptably read by Jeff Woodman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lewton Experiment by Rachel Sa

Title: The Lewton Experiment
Author: Rachel Sa
Publisher: Tradewind Books
Rating: WARTY!

I don’t agree with publishers that reporters are the best people from whom to accept book proposals. Yeah, if it’s a non-fiction book, maybe you're onto something, maybe, but if it’s fiction, nope, you’re on something. A reporter is no better qualified to write fiction than is a janitor, a sports personality, an actor, a machinist, or a trash collector; that is to say that every one of them might be able to tell a story, but none of them has a built-in advantage over any of the others.

In this case, Sa pretty much telegraphs her entire plot on page 14 like this is a newspaper story. The only thing left after that is to see how she tells it, and that didn't turn out at all well. The improbable plot is designed at a level which would be more appropriate for ten- to twelve-year-olds rather than for the age it's aimed at which, judged by the age of its main character, is late teens.

In a sense this is a newspaper story, because it's a novel about 17-year-old Sherri Richmond, who is a newspaper reporter, if only for a summer internship at the Lewton Leader-Post (about that name…), so rather than have the new girl arrive at a new high school or prep academy, she arrives at a new town to start a new summer job. She stays at her Aunt Gillian's hotel, which is, she discovers, run down and looking like it's going out of business - as indeed is everything else in Lewton. The only business that's doing well is Shopwells, the mega-store that opened its doors a year or so before.

Sa hits us over the head with this dichotomy repeatedly. What she doesn’t explain, is how it is that Lewton has parking meters in a town we’ve already been told is not only tiny, but practically dead. She does however loudly announce the not-so-devious means by which Shopwells is doing so well on page 30. The problem is that none of her plot makes sense, and the story simply doesn't work even within it's own framework. The town seems to be simultaneously both large and small so that it can accommodate her widely disparate views on what kind of a town it actually is!

The newspaper 'organization' makes no sense especially given the size of the town. The paper employs only five staff including the editor and the receptionist, but the three reporters are given "beats": sports, covered by Bill, a municipal beat covered by Krystal; Sherri gets the social (sherry, social, get it? lol!) beat which was previously held by Krystal. Mac (what else would his name be?) the editor, warns Sherri that there is to be no cross-over reporting. Apparently Mac lost his nose for news in some sort of catastrophic amputation, if we're to judge from his complete docility and lack of interest in what’s been hard-hammered into our skulls since page 14. OTOH, Shopwells is a big advertiser in the paper. OTO,OH, if everyone in town is losing their business and their jobs, and/or spending their money at Shopwells, who has any change left to buy a newspaper? Again, it makes no sense.

Very little makes sense, much less economic sense in this novel. There is no way that Shopwells could be putting everyone out of business and then doing a roaring trade with hoards of customers. Where are those customers earning the money to buy all the crap they're brainwashed into buying at Shopwells? Yeah, some of the mega-store's employees are those who went out of business in town, but seriously? The economics simply doesn't work. This same story was told in the movie You Got Mail and it was better done notwithstanding the fact that it was another Nora Ephron extravaganza in Trite Brand™ sugar.

Sherri's instalove was announced loudly on p48. We've been prepped for this by her 'difficulties' with her current boyfriend, Michael, which amount to nothing more than a mild tiff; however, that seems to be more that enough for Sherri to treat him like dirt, to ignore his calls, texts, and emails, and to rudely rebuff his every attempt at apology and reconciliation. You know, if Sa wanted her main character to get a new love interest, she could have dispensed with Michael altogether and just had Sherri be unattached. I don't get what the point was of even having Michael as a character, unless it was to do precisely what Sa achieved as far as I was concerned, which was to convince me that Sherri is a heartless bitch, and certainly not someone I'd want to know even casually, let alone someone with whom I'd want to become involved.

Just six pages later we're shown how petty both Sherri and Krystal (a rival reporter) are as we see their first encounter, and then watch Sherri type a "story" about her. Krystal is the one who has the beat which Sherri covets. The whiny fake story which Sherri types has nothing whatsoever to do with Krystal's attitude; it’s devoted entirely to how Krystal dresses, which confirmed for me that Sherri is indeed a bitch, and actually a bigger one than is Krystal.

This trend was to continue over the next few pages. By the time I’d reached page 100 or so, all there was left for me to conclude about Sherri is that she's a juvenile, petulant, moody, vindictive, and petty person who probably needs to get on some medication for being a manic depressive. She's all but flirting with new interest Ben, while she's simultaneously angry with her boyfriend Michael for going out to dinner with an old friend, accusing him of sleeping with her! What a hypocrite! If her so-called "love" story with Ben was handled better, it might have helped OT ameliorate this situation, but all that was on offer for us there was your standard, pathetic, juvenile, YA clichéd crap.

Sherri decides to visit the mega-store, to meet with Rebecca Scott, the reporter who quit her job to go work at Shopwells. This is where we realize that Sherri is utterly clueless and oblivious to what’s going on around her - that's hardly a great recommendation for a reporter. She doesn’t suspect a single thing, even though she's being manipulated up the wazoo. I mean, they don't give every staff member that flu shot for nothing you know. And…wait a minute - a flu shot when it’s not even flu season? Sherri is so bad a reporter that she doesn't become even remotely suspicious.

She gets into trouble when she returns to the newspaper office, for going off topic and wasting the newspaper's time with her visit to the store. She never once thinks of going online with her reporting. Fortunately for Sa, this novel is really short (180 pages or so), so I was able to finish it, otherwise I would have ditched it precipitously. The over-arching problem with this novel is that it’s so simplistic and juvenile that I just don't understand how this could have got past a literary agent or a book editor in its published form. And Sa doesn;t understand the difference between 'bunting' and 'punting' on page 139!

In short, this novel is warty. Maybe Sa has a novel in her, but it's not this one. This is Ian Wood reporting for Ian Wood's Novellum. Good Night and Good luck!

Secret Agent Moscow by Jennifer Jigour

Title: Secret Agent Moscow: Part One - Goodbye, Natasha
Author/Illustrator: Jennifer Jigour
Publisher: Smith Publicity - Walkabout Designs
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I have to confess to having a hard time in deciding how to rate this graphic novel, and the primary reason for my discomfort is that I simply didn't understand it. I mean, yeah, I got what it was about in very general terms (at least I think I did!): a rather conflicted young woman who flew airplanes for the US military in World War Two is blackmailed by the very government she aided when she's discovered in a gay club. She's threatened with exposure if she doesn’t work for the government in the form of taking a trip to Moscow to track down an agent of theirs who has gone missing. Homosexuality was considered a crime in 1949, of course, although I imagine it was far worse for men than ever it was for women. The "punishment" for it was to be confined for a time in close quarters with people of your own gender. How that really constitutes a punishment is somewhat of a mystery, but let’s move right along...!

Jigour does an amazing amount of work in illustrating some two hundred pages, but very little work in writing a story! I found myself wondering, time after time, what the heck was supposed to be happening. The drawing is competent if very simplistic, and the coloring is really superb (to my amateur eye, of course!), but there was frame after frame after frame where I could find no indication of a story, or a plot or even forward motion. I really got lost in all of that, and sometimes that was in a good way, but more often it was in confusion. I tried to catch up on what I was supposed to be experiencing when the minimalist text returned.

The novel has a surrealist feel to it, like it's a trip through someone's dream rather than something which is really happening, and indeed, I'm sure most of it was memory, dream and hope, but not all of it, and sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the one and the other. This was annoying to me, because I had gone into this expecting one kind of a story and I felt, at times, like I was being force-fed another!

However, overall I'm feeling positive about it, especially given how intriguing volume two looked. OTOH I was intrigued by volume one and look where that got me! I honestly think that Jigour (great name BTW) has some good stories in her, I'm just not sure this is one of them! I do want to encourage this kind of graphic novel to go right ahead confusing me, however, so I am going to rate this one worthy with the above caveat, and leave it up to you guys out there to decide for yourselves whether there needs to be an emptor added somewhere in there!

Samantha Sanderson On The Scene by Robin Carroll Miller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Windwalker by Natasha Mostert

Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!