Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts

Monday, July 14, 2014

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge


Title: Cruel Beauty
Author: Rosamund Hodge
Publisher: Bolinda Audio Books
Rating: WORTHY!

Seductively read by Elizabeth Knowelden

Nyx made the mistake of coming out of the womb ahead of her twin sister, Estrella, for it was because of that, she later learned, that she became betrothed to a demon, in order to extricate her oh-so-loving father from a mess of his own making.

This is the same demon which killed Nyx's mother, so she believes, and now she's his wife, and she's supposed to assassinate him and thereby free herself, her family, and even her homeland from his power. Everyone knows that a virgin knife, wielded by a virgin, can strike a demon dead. Ignifex, the name by which the demon is known (even the demon himself doesn't know his real name), appears to be afraid of her knife, but he's far more afraid of the darkness, which can at the very least make him suffer terribly, if not outright kill him.

So the compelling question here is: why didn't Nyx stab the demon when she first met him and she had a golden opportunity? And when he was apparently dying from the dark shadows that night, why did she return, having initially left him to rot, and save him? Could it be that she actually wants to be his wife? But then what would become of her relationship with the Shade, the only being she's encountered in that castle of a prison of a puzzle, who seems to have her best interests at heart? Or does he?

This is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and Hodge has entwined it inextricably with Greek mythology, so you might want some good reference materials by you as you read this, but take heart: never has there been so intriguing a beast, and never has there been such beauty: a beauty which is Hodge's writing. She writes exquisitely. The beast is the pace of the story, which even entranced as I was, I found to be rather ponderous!

I was entranced only partially by the text, but I was completely captivated by the warm, cultured, English accent and (I have to say it) amazingly sexy voice of Elizabeth Knowelden who embodied Nyx more fully than anyone else could do, I'm sure. I'm in love!


Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood


Title: Wuthering High
Author: Cara Lockwood
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Wuthering High is a paranormal novel which completes my Wuthering Heights 'Trilogy' along with Withering Tights. It's been an interesting excursion, but in the end, I was able to recommend only one of these three novels!

This entry in my blog also marks the start of Big July, where I plan to publish two reviews a day, every day, for the entire month - barring disasters. Yes, my reviews are backed-up and I need to open the floodgates before I run out of storage space!

This particular story, which is larded with what are now horribly dated pop-culture references, starts out by introducing an unlikeable main protagonist, Miranda Tate. This is yet another first person PoV female novel. I actively avoid these with few exceptions. Even if the novel sounds interesting, I routinely turn away from it once I discover that it's a first person PoV, whether male or female, because they're typically obnoxious. This particular one I decided to chance because of the title, but it turned out to be yet another in a sorry line of pretentious and lazy YA fiction wherein the author seems to think that if they offer one or two 'literary references', then they must writing great literature themselves.

Big mistake! If Wuthering Heights is a disaster (which it is), then you can't just vaguely 'reference' it and have your novel be a success. You have to actually do something with it. This novel failed rather disastrously in that regard. Indeed, it failed to do anything with the source material: it was confused and illogical, and it had some huge plot difficulties, to say nothing of the author sadly misrepresenting the Brontë family and in particular, the father.

Why female authors especially seem to think that it's illegal to write a novel about a woman and not have her tell it in first person remains a complete mystery to me. I know the delusion is that it creates more immediacy, but that's purest bullshit. What it creates in me is serious annoyance at being forced to listen to a shallow and mindlessly gossiping girl go endlessly on and on about herself as though there's nothing more important in the world than ME! Right NOW! Listen to MEEEEE!

Miranda is, to begin with, mildly amusing as she reveals why she's being shipped to the island academy for delinquent teens, but in the end she becomes just annoying in her dismal self-obsession. She charged a thousand dollars to her step mother's credit card for push-up bras (seriously?), some of which have already been purloined by her younger sister Lindsay, then she totaled her dad's BMW. If she had withdrawn the cash and stuffed it into her existing bras it probably would have been better expended. She shows zero remorse for any of this! And exactly how did she get away without incurring a single penalty for crashing a car after driving it illegally?

Her dad is effectively a deadbeat dad even though he's around, because he has no interest in his daughters. He evidently does nothing but play golf, which begs the question as to where his money comes from. Miranda has a hugely-inflated opinion of herself, convinced that she's the most popular girl in her (old) school and a fashion maven to boot (so she tells us - we get no independent supportive evidence for this, so she could be a lying toad for all we know).

The writing in parts of this novel is nothing short of atrocious. I did manage to reach page 18 though, before I tripped over this (descriptive of the antics of the weird bus driver who picks Miranda up from the ferry to take her to the school): "He grounds the gears of the bus and takes off..." Yep, those gears ain't goin' nowhere! They're grounded!

Seriously? Fire the frigging book editor and slap the author's wrist. Chalk up yet one more example of the well-established fact that getting into bed with Big Publishing™ is no guarantee that you're going anywhere - especially not if you're being ground as those gears should have been....

This wasn't the only exemplar of incompetent writing/editing. There were several others, including an inappropriate plural somewhere around pages 135 and 145 (I forget exactly where), and on page 151 "wrecking more havoc" when it should have been "wreaking more havoc". This is simply illiteracy, and to find it in a book that touts itself arrogantly as some kind of a literary novel about the classics is nothing short of shameful. Never mind haunting the "Bard academy" - the corpses of Virgina Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë would be rotating in their graves at high speed.

This is not a novel about the classics, or a homage to the classics; it's a cheap rip-off of the classics and it hardly has anything to do with them. Instead, all the author did was to simply take a random sampling of classic authors and characters and make a pastiche of them in a story which makes no sense.

For example, we're told at one point that the teachers at the academy are are all authors who committed suicide (Hemingway, Woolf), so how then do we get a head"master" in Charlotte Brontë? She did not commit suicide! And why are all these English authors in a school in the US, other than that the author is too arrogant, self-centered, ignorant, or lazy to set it in England where it belongs?

We're told frequently that Miranda's father has little or nothing to do with his daughters, so how then do we get him taking any interest at all in which school she goes to? Yes, she ran his car into a tree, but even so, why would he concern himself with getting her into a boarding school as opposed to some sort of correctional institution or a reform school? It makes no sense!

My favorite character is Blade, but she's nothing more than a caricature, and Lockwood once again displays astounding ignorance in that she clearly cannot tell the difference between satanism and Wicca! How shameful!

The author's literary ignorance is also on proud display. She has one scene in a greenhouse where there are carnivorous plants taken from The Little Shop of Horrors, but that's not a classic novel, it's a movie! Does Lockwood not know this? And why has she never heard of The Day of the Triffids?

Her attempts at romance are equally risible. She provides us with a sad trope triangle of Ryan, a guy at the academy whom Miranda knows from her old school. He's pathetic, and nothing more than your clichéd jock-style teen romantic "nice boy" interest, who is actually a complete jerk, but of course Miranda is blind to that. The bad boy leg of this wrong-angled triangle is Heathcliff himself - yes the psychotic, abusive character from Wuthering heights who here is actually nothing more than a deus ex libellus.

It turns out that all these characters are escaping from books which are stored in a secret vault in the school, let loose by Emily Brontë's evil ghost! Why not burn these particular books and secure ourselves from the end of the world? The cheap excuse for an answer is that if they did that, then the authors would die! Excuse me? The teachers (authors) are not fictional and they're dead already. What kind of a dumb-ass plot device was that?

This book sucks majorly and I rate it highly wart-infested.


Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Far Far Away by Tom McNeal






Title: Far Far Away
Author: Tom McNeal
Publisher: Knopf
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 shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!


ebook galley proof errata provided in case the author hasn't caught them yet!
P118 "...because he asked me not to tell you." has the word 'he' split between two lines!
P120 "...cinnamon gun" should be "...cinnamon gum..." (presumably!).

Here's a nice song of the same title which has nothing whatsoever to do with the novel, but which might get you in the mood to be transported far away even if only from the song!

This novel is amazing. I've never read anything by Tom McNeal before but he's definitely on my radar now. I'm going to buy this book and force my kids to read it on pain of merciless tickling if they don't. The story centers on two high-school kids, Jeremy Johnson Johnson and a girl who becomes an increasingly closer friend, Ginger Boultinghouse. The story is narrated by the ghost of Jacob Grimm. The writing is outstanding - perfect in tone, measure and content.

Jeremy lives with his father in a bookstore which his grandfather opened to sell nothing but the two volumes of his grandfather's autobiography! Jeremy's father married Zyla Johnson, but Zyla left them a while after Jeremy's birth. While this seems callous and mean on the face of it, to attentive readers of the story it will be obvious that she had no choice in her action. She had no choice because choice was subtracted from her (by The Finder of Occasions, perhaps - an evil presence who does nothing but stir up trouble, and appears to be occupying the form of a police officer?) Zyla isn’t the only one who went missing - lots of children are going missing, and disturbingly, the police don't seem particularly interested in doing anything about it.

Ginger one day talks Jeremy into going to the town's fabulous bakery where "Prince Cakes" are available. They're not available often, and Jeremy can't afford one even when they are, but Ginger tells him that they might get lucky, and indeed they do. The kindly baker, Mr Blix, produces coffee and cakes in return for an IOU. Ginger and Jeremy begin spending more time together, innocently growing closer until one evening, Ginger and her two girlfriends lure Jeremy out to conduct a mild prank on the baker.

The story offers insufficient motivation for me in this instance, for Jeremy to involve himself in something like this. It’s not in his character, but I'm willing to let that slide since it's the only bump in a very smooth tale. However, the consequences of this incident run deep. Jeremy loses a shoe and his house key on the baker's property, and he's rapidly picked up by the police; however, when Blix himself insists it was not Jeremy he saw on his property that night, he's released. Jeremy's reputation is nonetheless shot; everyone in town thinks him a potential thief! They know that he and his father are on the verge of being thrown out of their property into the street because of unpaid debts. Jeremy's father is incapable of earning a living, and all the odd jobs by which Jeremy was keeping them afloat quickly dry up. Now his family has no income, but things are about to turn around. Right around.

I highly recommend this story. This is how a YA romance should be written: not in the hammering, blundering, ham-fisted way of all-too-many stories, but in this natural, warm, and easy way which McNeal reveals, and in a story which is engaging from the start and told so well that you don’t want it to end. 212 pages is way too short for a story like this. I look forward to more tales of this nature and to this story becoming a movie.

The story intensifies as a friend of Ginger's "Conk" who is the son of the mayor, offers to help Jeremy with his foreclosure problem by involving his dad. Seeing an opportunity to own the entire block in which Jeremy's store is situated, the mayor offers an interest-free loan to Jeremy, which will pay off his debt. The loan will be due in six weeks, which gives him more breathing space by pushing out his deadline.

A slight problem here is that Jeremy is clearly not in any way old enough to sign a promissory note! But moving quickly along, Ginger Boultinghouse offers an out from even this new deadline by setting Jeremy up as a contestant on his favorite show, Uncommon Knowledge wherein guests are quizzed about what they claim is their expert topic - which can be pretty much anything. Jeremy signs up as an expert on the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tales; this should be a no-brainer given that he has one of the brothers advising him, but he has a weakness, which is that he's never seen any Disney movie based on those tales.

On the quiz, Jeremy does blazingly well, never putting a foot wrong, even on the $64,000 question, but he decides to try for one level higher: all or nothing on winning the jackpot. Unfortunately the last question involves what the huntsman returned to the queen in the Disney version, in place of Snow's intestines and liver (which is the request in the Grimm story), and Jeremy doesn’t know. In the sound-proofed booth, he hears a voice, not Jacob's, twice tell him to answer 'heart' but he ignores it, and consequently he loses all the money. This part didn’t work to well for me because Jeremy is already habituated to listening to, and trusting, the voice he hears from Jacob Grimm. Why would he suddenly go against all that and pick a lock of hair instead of repeating 'heart' which is what the voice advised him? I needed a bit more motivation there, but the story is so well done overall that I'm more than willing to let an occasional faux pas flow past!

And that's all the detail I'm going to offer for this story! Yes, I'm more cruel than Hansel & Gretel's witch! But I refuse to rob McNeal of any more of his amazing story by relating another single detail. To find out how this apparent disaster all plays out, you'll have to do what I now fully intend to do: buy the book, and then you read the story all the way through! You will not regret it if you're even mildly into stories of this nature. Even though at this point I haven't finished the entire story, I'm confident enough by now of McNeal's talent and skill to highly recommend this. Even if it goes downhill and ends in a miserable disaster, the first half of the book is so well done that it would still be worth the purchase just to read a half-a-story of this quality! I fully intend to get my hands on a hardback of this for my kids to read; it’s that good!

Just a quick post-script: I finished the novel and it did turn out to be excellent, so no issues there, although the villain turned out to be a wee bit obvious even to me! I loved the Ginger character immensely!


Monday, May 20, 2013

Impossible by Nancy Werlin






Title: Impossible
Author: Nancy Werlin
Publisher: Speak
Rating: WARTY!

This one is about a girl called Lucy (yes, another one) whose mother, Miranda (yes another one!), is a nut-job. Lucy was raised by some caring foster parents, but she occasionally sees her mother, who left Lucy only one thing (not 'thong' as I originally typoed!): new lyrics to the Yorkshire folk ballad Scarborough Fair. Yep, it's that kind of novel. Since the cover image shows a long-haired maiden by the ocean, and since Scarborough is a seaside town (which I've actually visited) in one of my favorite English counties, I'm starting to think that this is a novel about mermaids. I sincerely hope I'm wrong; or that the novel is good enough that I don't care if I'm wrong!

Lucinda Scarborough's mother appears to be insane. Given that she was impregnated evidently against her will, or at least against her better judgment, and that neither parents nor father figure were in sight, this may be understandable. Miranda had it seems, a horrible life drifting from one care system to another, one hated foster family to another, until she finally busted out on her own after she became pregnant. Lucy is the result of that pregnancy, and she was raised by Leo and Soledad. They've been the best parents Lucy could have hoped for. Soledad was the one who helped Lucy's mom get through her pregnancy, so she feels a warm bond with them, but her biological mother hasn’t disappeared. She randomly shows up at Lucy's school, tossing out meaningless comments, and singing the words to the old Yorkshire folk ballad Scarborough Fair - words which are not in the commonly known version of the song.

Fortunately for Lucy, no one at school knows this bag lady is her real mom. As Lucy's prom approaches, Miranda disappears and Lucy forgets about her, focusing on what she will wear for her date, who is absurdly called Gray, as in those characters in a color comic book who are rendered in gray scale because they're really not important. Enter the villain: a mysterious and good-looking man who has very recently charmed his way into a job with Soledad (she's a midwife) wangles himself an invitation to eat with her and her family that evening, including an old friend of Lucy's, Zach (yes, another one), who is staying with them for the summer. Zach is like a brother to Lucy, but it’s Padraig, the charmer, who plays photographer, taking pictures before she leaves. She looks beautiful, but as she walks down the path to her date's car, Miranda shows up with a shopping cart full of bottles, which she uses to pelt everyone, especially Padraig.

Miranda is arrested and removed, and after changing clothes, Lucy heads off to the prom. Her date seems really promising, and Lucy can picture herself seeing him again, but as everyone is leaving, he lures her into the rest room, and there he rapes her. As this happens, Lucy tries to fight back but despite her strength and his diminutive stature, she cannot overcome him. She notes how different he seems: when she looked into his eyes to plead with him she didn’t see him there. There was clearly someone else inside him. Afterwards, she only imagines she saw this out of her shock and distress. Her date leaves her there and later she finds that despite the fact that he'd had nothing to drink that evening, he drove straight into a tree and killed himself.

Following up on a promise to her foster parents, Zach shows up at the prom to pick up Lucy and drive her to the after party. He's the one who finds her, bleeding and distraught in the rest room. She pleads with him to tell no one, and he keeps her secret. Over the next month, she strives to bring her life back to normal. Just as she seems to be succeeding, two events occur: the first is that Zach finds her mother's diary in that shopping cart (which had been parked in the garage temporarily); much later, the second event is that Lucy discovers she's pregnant at 17. She's amazed how much her life has turned out exactly like her mother's - a life she's discovered from reading the diary. The only difference is that she has friends and supportive parents which her mother apparently did not.

At one point when talking about her pregnancy, Lucy berates Zach in a very mean manner for no good reason, and yet it's Zach apologizes. I was actually liking Lucy up to that point. I hope she doesn't deteriorate. Since her mother evidently went through exactly the same thing Miranda did, perhaps Lucy's disturbing meanness is coming from the evil which has obviously infected her. This is evidently what Miranda was trying to warn her about, although why she confined herself to the asinine singing of an obscure song, is a complete and utter mystery. Perhaps that's all her insanity allows her to do? So this story isn't about mermaids, which is in its favor, but it's still being annoyingly obscure, which I detest, so there is still lots of opportunity for it to go to hell in a hand-basket.

So the family (Leo, Lucy, Soledad, and Zach) sit down to discuss the situation so far. Lucy declares that she will have the baby and she's convinced that it's a girl. She gives no thought whatsoever to what the Elfin King wants with his continued rape, impregnation, and abuse of this endless string of teenage victims or how it could well destroy his evil plans were the fetus never to be born. Note that this isn't a real case of real life rape, where the victim is entitled to decide what she wants; this is fictional rape by an evil serial rapist who plans on continuing to rape every progeny of every daughter every time they turn 17. And Lucy has decided to let him have his way with her and her progeny after he's already had his way with her and her ancestors!

Let's take a moment here to consider the ballad as sung by Miranda, shall we? For comparison, here's Simon & Garfunkel's definitive version

Here's Werlin's rather inelegant mash-up:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Remember me to one who lives there,
She must be a true love of mine.


Tell her she'll sleep in a goose-feather bed
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Tell her I swear she'll have nothing to dread
She must be a true love of mine.


Tell her tomorrow her answer make known
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Whate'er she may say I'll not leave her alone
She must be a true love of mine.


Her answer it came in a week and a day
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
I'm sorry, good sir, I must answer thee nay
I'll not be a true love of thine.


From the sting of my curse she can never be free
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Unless she unravels my riddlings three
She will be a true love of mine.


Tell her to make me a magical shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
without any seam or needlework
Else she'll be a true love of mine.


Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Else she'll be a true love of mine.


Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
And sow it all over with one grain of corn
Else she'll be a true love of mine,
And her daughters forever possessions of mine.


Here's the original version:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Remember me to one who lives there,
For once she was a true lover of mine.

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Without a seam or needlework,
Then she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to wash it in yonder well,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Where never spring water or rain ever fell,
Ans she shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Which never bore blossom since Adam was born,
Then she shall be a true lover of mine.

Now he has asked me questions three,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
I hope he'll answer as many for me
Before he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to buy me an acre of land,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
Betwixt the salt water and the sea sand,
Then he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to plough it with a ram's horn,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
And sow it all over with one pepper corn,
And he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to sheer't with a sickle of leather,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme;
And bind it up with a peacock feather.
And he shall be a true lover of mine.

Tell him to thrash it on yonder wall,
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme,
And never let one corn of it fall,
Then he shall be a true lover of mine.

When he has done and finished his work.
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme:
Oh, tell him to come and he'll have his shirt,
And he shall be a true lover of mine.

The four of them agree that whether this is a real curse or Lucy's imagination gone wild, they will follow up in every way they can. Zach takes it upon himself to try and trace Lucy's genealogy, and he succeeds in doing so for several generations, and the pattern is consistent: each daughter becomes pregnant at 17 with another daughter. So young are the rape victims that they conclude that it isn't out of the realm of possibility that Lucy's grandmother and perhaps even great grandmother are alive somewhere.

Leo resolves to research the song and all it's variants to see if he can find clues. Basically this means he gets to hang out at home and pay his guitar all day. Soledad is trying to discover how to make a shirt which has no seam and no needlework. Easy! Grab a garbage bag and cut off the sealed end, cut out two arm holes and there you go! Failing that, buy a 3-D printer and print one up. She way over-thinks this. But she's focused on entirely the wrong thing! The problem is not creating the shirt, it's making it magical. Even in Werlin's version, the description runs, "...a magical shirt...without any seam or needlework." So where will the magic come from? I suppose we could be generous and have 'magical' mean nothing more than it would have to be magical to make the shirt thus, but even back then when the ballad originated, it would have been possible to simply use an animal skin: no seams, and the legs, cut short, would be the sleeves.

But they're more focused on the other two requirements, the first of which has been changed dramatically from the real version of the ballad: "...find me an acre of land...between the salt water and the sea strand." But even with the wording changed to make it easier to beat, Lucy is still obsessing on buying the land rather than simply finding it! The strand can have many meanings. it was the name of the magazine in which Arthur Conan Doyle first published his Sherlock Holmes stories, it's a street in London, and it's also the name of a particular type of swamp land in Florida. Strand is a word which goes back at least a thousand years, coming from a root meaning 'strew'.

The final challenge is to "...plow it with just a goat's horn...and sow it all over with one grain of corn." Why she changed the ram's horn into a goat's is a complete mystery. Both goat and ram are represented in the constellations and are related species. Lucy considers the sexual meaning of plowing and sowing, but it doesn't seem to fit the rhyme very well. It does, however, fit Lucy's early onset of not-so-cute nymphomania.

That is to say that Lucy, who has almost literally lived with Zach since she was quite young, and who, despite being a healthy, perfectly normal teenager has never given him the time of day, now suddenly cannot think of anything other than rippling Zach muscles and Zach body heat. Yep. Clearly in Werlin World™ rape is not at all a debilitating, traumatizing event, and pregnancy changes nothing, neither your hormones nor your priorities, unless those hormones are really whore moans and your number one priority is whatever organ covered with Zach-flesh looks most like the number one. In Werlin World™, the only thing rape, consequent pregnancy, and a real and present threat to the safety of your child and your own sanity result in is an obsessive-compulsive need for Zach-meat. The novel could go only downhill from this point onwards, and rest assured it did.

Now I fully understand how Lucy feels when she gets the morning sickness. I must have Impossible sickness! So Soledad gets a mannequin torso to facilitate the creation of this unseemly shirt, but Lucy pitches a fit and orders her to take the mannequin back - she declares she'd rather use Zach. Now there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for this other than the shamefully 100% transparent reason (which is why it's no reason whatsoever) of artificially putting the two of them into an intimate position, but why do it so ham-fistedly? So Lucy and Zach become almost orgasmic over this, and the shirt gets made, and they plight their troth, after Lucy is a jerk and makes him wait interminably for any kind of answer.

Later, Padraigeous breaks into the house using his Elfin magic and he finds he can't touch the shirt, but the shirt is felt! If he can't touch it how can it be felt? Just messin' with ya. But this means all felt hats are also magic by definition. Since he can't touch it, this constitutes a certification that the first of the three tasks has been achieved.

The couple marry a couple of weeks later, and Lucy has the bright idea of plowing (or is it ploughing?) the Bay of Fundy when the tide is out. This she does, and despite the Hell Fin King taunting her, she finishes it, the king is defeated, all the Scarborough girls are freed of their curse in retrospect, including her mom who gets her sanity back, and she and Zach live happily ever after, blah, blah, blah. Definite warty.


Thursday, May 2, 2013

Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor






Title: Days of Blood & Starlight
Author: Laini Taylor
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Rating: worthy

Days of Blood & Starlight starts out with Zuzana resentfully dropping a balloon filled with perfume and sodium bicarbonate onto the puffed-up head of Kaz, who is milking every ounce he can from Karou's fame. He was lucky. Zuze had wanted it to be urine, but Mik wouldn’t cooperate.

Sadly, we don’t remain with Zuze, which is a mistake on Taylor's part, because she's the best thing going for this novel so far. Instead, we move to the whiny-assed Akiva, agonizing boringly over how much he's lost, and here the novel is nothing but depressing. For some unexplained reason, he believes that Karou is dead (as does Zuzana, for that matter, but at least she doesn’t squeal like a stick piglet like Akiva does).

He returns to heaven (aka Eretz, as in Eretz Israel) which is exactly like medieval Earth and wherein the so-called angels have pretty much concluded their Nazi extermination plan with the chimera. Akiva meets with Hazael and Liraz, who fight him but don’t kill him (!), and then they welcome him (but not with open arms) back into the military. Why they still need a military if indeed the chimera are wiped out, is a mystery, but they discover that someone is very effectively killing angels. Still.

Zuze, meanwhile is sending hilarious emails to Karou and receiving no response until Mik calls her attention to a news item concerning a theft at the Field Museum in Chicago - an excellent museum which has nothing whatsoever to do with preserving the meadows of antiquity.... The thief is stealing teeth. And it’s a girl. A teeth thief. Relief! Finally Zuze gets an email from Karou quoting Monty Python ("I'm not dead yet!", "I feel happy!"), which I found hilarious. At last, in chapter 13 yet, we get back to Karou.

She evidently found Thiago, the chimera leader, still alive in the shattered ruins of Loramendi, and they now lived, she upstairs from him, in an apartment block somewhere; somewhere on Earth, where Karou now resurrects chimera using the teeth she steals. So after Karou's been ranting on about how godawful Akiva is, and how much she detests him, Taylor makes a huge mistake in giving us a flashback to the time right before Karou (in her Madrigal form) and Akiva were captured. Taking us from Karou's revulsion and rejection of Akiva for his betrayal - whereby she let him live but he destroyed her people - to a time when she was hopelessly (quite literally hopelessly) in love with him, was foolish move. It’s too much of a contradiction, of a gut-wrench, of a discontinuous illogical jump, to accept. It threw me right out of my suspension of disbelief.

It's especially apropos a little later in the story where he returns the soul of Issa, and Karou fails to kill him despite all she's vowed, despite all he's done to wipe out her people and to kill Brimstone, who she had thought of as her father. I was in fear of this relationship and now I'm further in fear of it, because it's way too much of a trope. if she goes back to Akiva after all that's gone on, I will feel that Taylor has betrayed us all.

While we’re on the topic of whining and disbelief, let me say a few words about teeth, and about angel weaponry! I was able to accept that the variety of fresh teeth were needed in vol 1, because a variety of chimera were needed, as was fresh DNA (I assumed!) although I never understood even remotely why they were created in the variations they were. Surely if they were at war, especially for so long a period, then the chimera which were created needed to be exclusively smart, strong, tough, agile, and fierce, but we didn’t see this. That made little sense to me, but I was willing to let it go for the quality of the story in general. Having said that, there was no room for a body type like Madrigal, so how did she ever become what she was? And what was she before? Was she simply vastly old, and had always been that way? We haven’t learned anything of this so far.

Next, the weapons they use. If they're at war and are fighting so ferociously, each side intent upon the complete destruction of the other, then why the medieval weapons? Seriously, how improbable is it that they use swords when they could perfectly well use a machine gun? In the human world, weaponry advanced at a rapid rate, even historically. As soon as a new weapon was discovered or invented, it spread with lightening speed, and people improved on it rapidly. The rate of weapons development accelerated geometrically with the size of the conflict. World War 1 brought tanks and advances in rapid-fire weapons. It brought chemical weapons. World War 2 saw all of these weapons advance, and it brought massive aerial warfare and the nuclear bomb. Yet these angels and chimera are stuck in the middle ages, and they've been glued there for centuries, if not for millennia. It makes no sense except as a trope for stories of angels and demons which of course brings you right out of the suspension of disbelief.

Now a word about those teeth! Like I mentioned, I’d assumed that reasonably fresh teeth were needed (why, when one cell would contain the requisite DNA?!), but vol 2 shows that's not the case, since Karou is working with museum specimens, so then why all the rigmarole of acquiring the teeth in the way they were in vol 1? Why did Brimstone not simply use a wish or magic, to bring him all the teeth from every grave across the world, including the literal billions of teeth from fossils? Talk of weapons of mass destruction! What kind of chimera could he have created using dinosaur teeth for goodness sakes?! If he'd had that many teeth and had some assistance, he could have created sufficient chimera to completely overwhelm the so-called angels!

Okay, bitch mode off, on with the tale! So Karou resurrects Issa without any authority from the White Wolf (whom Karou know knows plans to betray her). She gets away with this by telling him that now her production rate for new Chimera will double, and it does. Issa helps, as does Zuzana, who has shown up with Mik on spec. Mik also helps, so the White Wolf's plan to train his bitch called Ten - which wouldn't have worked anyway, is now scuppered, as is his plan to use Ten to replace Karou and thereby be rid of her. So he comes up with a new plan, which is that he can use Zuze and Mik as leverage against Karou, to keep her tightly under his control, but she vows she will not let this happen. But Zuze and Mik have made such a favorable impression on the chimera that my guess is that they won't have any truck with any plan which might bring harm to the two humans.

Karou also makes an ally of the only other Kirin in the encampment, and he vows to help her. Meanwhile, on the other side, Akiva has won over Hazael and Liraz to his side, but they are called into the emperors palace - which is probably a trap for Akiva (good!). However, Akiva is already aware of this possibility and he has decided he wants to kill Joram anyway, so this but might be interesting. Hazael and Liraz want the same thing, and that's why they go with him. But with Taylor juxtaposing Liraz's internal feelings of hopelessness against the story of Karou's relationship with her fellow Kirin, I'm guessing that Liraz is going to be paired off with him before this trilogy is over. OTOH, you know how lousy my guesses are, if you've been following my blog!

So it's time to wrap this up. Finally Akiva, at the mention of his mother's name, Festival, feels some weird calming power overtake him, and he comes through and does something good: he stabs his father who was ordering him to go alone to meet the Stelians - another angelic race who are as distant as they are mysterious. Every envoy so far sent to them has disappeared without a trace. Joram dies, Jael escapes to become Angelic Villain 2.0. Akiva finds he has some weird magical power which completely destroys Joram's palace, but Hazael dies. Akiva and Liraz escape.

Karou has less success in confronting Thiago. He merely turns around her revelation that there are scores upon scores of chimera waiting to be resurrected in the catacombs under Loramendi, and steals her fire. Later he kills her only three supporters, and when he demands that everyone leave himself and Karou there alone, he tries to rape her, but Karou, using only the little knife in her boot, slays him. Then she resurrects his body but with her friend Ziri the Kirin's soul. How the hell he escaped from the party of six who were going to kill him during their mission with him is really completely glossed over. Thiago's buddy Ten is also killed and her body resurrected with the soul of one of Karou's allies, so now they control the chimera without anyone knowing!

When Akiva and Liraz show up begging Karou to resurrect Hazael, they bring the body but no thurible containing his soul, so she can do nothing to help them. The two of them burn Hazael's body and they depart, intent upon closing the last two portals between the two worlds, but Jael and his five thousand Dominion angels have already come through them, and the Earthlings believe they're angels from heaven!

So we end up with an uneasy truce between the two warring sides, the chimera on the one side, and the "Misbegottens" - angels who are loyal to Akiva - as they realize they have an enemy which worse than either of them: a greater threat than either of them, to face down.

I'm rating this one as worthy because it was a good read, although it became a bit too melodramatic at the end with one switcheroo after another. It reminded me of the hilarious comedy movie Soapdish, but that one was intentionally funny. I don't think Taylor was planning on having me laugh at these switches and then become annoyed with them. But that wasn't the worst part, The worst part was seeing Karou, who was without question a super-cool and kick-ass female protagonist descend from her pedestal to become pedestrian in the sequel. Her anguishing, and her dichotomic feelings about Akiva were truly tiresome.

It's obvious (at least it seems obvious to me - but then if you've read my reviews you'll know how sucky my prognostications are) that Taylor is going to pair them off at the end of vol 3, so there goes the drama. I'll be truly impressed if she doesn't, but it's YA, after all, so why would I even imagine something like that could happen? I'll probably have to rate vol 3 as warty if it descends to those levels, but let's wait and see!


Monday, April 29, 2013

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor







Title: Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Author: Laini Taylor
Publisher: Hachette Gook Group
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel was amazing, but that doesn't mean that there weren't issues with it, as I shall describe below; however, I was sufficiently impressed with it that I wanted to launch into the sequel right away. Fortunately I had that option because I came late to this series. It would have been really annoying had I to wait a year or something like that before I could get started on volume 2.

There was a magnificent thunderstorm going on overhead as I initially wrote this, with heavy rain and even hail! It was beautiful, and amazing, and highly appropriate to this story as I sat here with a nice hot cuppa, feeling warm and dry, and reading onwards, ever onwards.

The main protagonist here is Karou, a 17-year-old art student living in Prague (a location which made an impression on the author when she was working on another project). Kudos to her for having the smarts to set her novel away from north America, which is the center of the world to far too many YA authors. Karou was raised by chimera and is taught to despise and fear angels. So immediately we know who her "other half" is going to end up being, don't we?

The saddest thing about Karou is that we meet her in this story as she feels like she desperately needs a man to complete her. That's an appalling thing to do to a character, especially if you're a female author, and it's entirely the wrong message to send to young readers. No, no girl needs a partner to complete her unless she's appallingly weak. It's not a strength to come into a relationship being needy, and it will doom the relationship eventually. Karou lost a lot of my sympathy right there, as indeed would a guy if he'd expressed the same kind of feelings.

Karou lives in a world full of the utterly amazing, and while I am sure it would feel a wee bit mundane to her, having lived with it all her life, Karou's character shows us that she's not jaded with her world by any means, yet I started out feeling that she would break into song ("Some Day My Prince Will Come...") before so very long. Fortunately, she doesn't have seven chimera doting on her, otherwise I'd really have begun to worry! I hoped, as I continued into this, that there was more to her than we learn in the first few chapters and I was, thankfully, granted that wish.

Talking of which, in addition to living amongst the amazing, Karou gets wishes granted. One of those was her "natural" azure hair. She never needs to touch up her roots. She also has some rather evil African beads which grant her very minor wishes, and which we find her employing during one of her classes, to inflict uncomfortable and embarrassing itches on the nude model, who happens to be her ex. He wants her back, but she very wisely wants nothing more to do with him. I was glad to see that resilience in her.

Karou's best friend is the petite Zuzana who knows nothing of Karou's real life and is from time-to-time annoyed by her secretiveness. Zuzana (along with all the other art students at the academy which Karou attends) think that the amazing drawings Karou does are from her crazy imagination, and that the stories she tells about the characters she draws are wild inventions, but Karou finds it easier to tell the truth about her family, all the while pretending it's oddball fiction. In that way, she's never caught in a lie. Her friends have no idea that they are real-life portraits, and real stories of her "family", which consists of the grim, dour Brimstone, who has ram's horns inter alia, the cobra-esque Issa (evidently like a mermaid but with a sea snake tail rather than a sea bass tail), Twiga, who sports a giraffe-proportioned neck; and Yasri who has a bird's beak. There's also a little messenger bird called Kishmish, who summons her to do Brimstone's bidding. And that's where the story takes off.

Brimstone's employment of Karou is an oddity in itself. She will discover his need for her services via a terse message brought to her by Kishmish always, it seems, at an inopportune time. His requirement is invariably the same: she is to go to one part of the world or another and buy teeth with the money he gives her, returning them to Brimstone's den. Karou can travel easily because the door to Brimstone's den opens into every city in the world. She can leave from it at any time and go anywhere, but in order to get back, she has to knock on a certain designated door and wait for Issa to let her in. One time she has to go to Paris to get elephant tusks, another time to Singapore to get reptile teeth. Brimstone won't tell her what he does with these teeth.

So having established all this, we next move on to Akiva, the standard trope angel of the story, whose muscles are corded on his arms. Yes, corded! Now someone needs to tell me what these angels of light are doing with their muscular bodies. Why is that muscle needed? In all this time no one ever explained this to me. They have the power of a god behind them (so we're expected to believe - the most powerful force in the universe), so why would they need muscles? Akiva can burn his hand-print on a door - as long as it's wood, I never learned what happened if the door was metal or plastic. So again, why would he need muscles? With all this angelic power and an omnipotent god, why does Akiva - or any angel - need corded muscles? And don't even get me started on his ethereal beauty and his burning eyes. Why are they so beautiful? Rest assured that he also no doubt has a smokin' bone from which you should most definitely protect your daughter....

Clearly this is nothing more than wish-fulfillment on the part of the author - the tedious trope muscular guy with hair falling into his eyes and a rebel attitude. I already thoroughly detest him and his ilk, and at that point, while I sincerely hoped that the story would improve (it did, fortunately), but I also sat in disbelief at the lack of inventiveness on the part of YA authors; at their short-sightedness and inability to create something new and original. Then I wondered, "Whose wish-fulfillment is going on here?" These YA authors are only supplying what the readership is demands, so maybe the problem isn't the authors, but the readership - the sad state of USA teen females who cannot see beyond the end of their nipples? But no, it's the writers, too. Writing is often described as a solitary, even lonely, profession, but actually it's a team sport. The writers work in tandem with the readers. The author creates the bobsled, but the readers agree to board it with them in exchange for a wild ride - or not. You can't sell what no one will buy, and you can't read what no one will write. The bottom line, however, is that writers could change this if they chose so to do, so it's more on them than on the readers.

So having established Akiva, we have to get the two of them together, and this occurs on a weird mission upon which Karou is dispatched at Brimstone's urging. He even said "please" in his note. In fact, that was all he said, which intrigued Karou. When she visited him, she learned that he feared she had chosen to leave the chimera! This was not even something she'd considered possible, let alone considered doing. She's sent to Morocco to get human teeth, and as she left, she was spotted by Akiva who was approaching it for the purpose of burning his hand-print on it. So he sees Karou leave and is sufficiently intrigued by her youth, appearance, and general demeanor that he starts following her through the city.

He watches her meet her mark and buy some teeth (not the juvenile ones - Brimstone only took the mature ones), but then the seller sees Akiva, as does the deformed angel on the seller's back, and as does Karou. Her mark warns her to run - run and warn Brimstone that the seraphim have got back in! She runs, but is intercepted by Akiva right at the door through which she's desperately seeking to make her escape. A fight ensues, but he fails to kill her and she uses her eye tattoos - the ones on the palms of her hands, to blast him. He asks her who she is before the door is finally opened and Issa lets her inside.

So now we have the male protag fascinated by the female, but we're not done with Karou yet. When she sneaks behind a door she's not supposed to go through, Brimstone himself literally throws her out! She's out in the cold, but at least she has her apartment to retreat to, half undressed as she is. Note to self: if I'm ever going to sneak through a demon door, make sure I'm fully clothed for the outdoors, and also that I have my purse and sketch pad with me. Oh, and those burned imprints on the doors? They go off like incendiary bombs and Karou discovers this when a burning Kishmish dies in her hands. He was sent to her with one thing which is tied to Brimstone: a wishbone he always had around his neck - a wishbone he absolutely forbade Karou ever to touch. And now she has it in her hands, making a wish that she can get to Brimstone and her family and nothing happens.

Well, one thing happens - her BFF Zuzana is with Karou and sees this creature burning, and after a wish demo using one of Karou's African beads, Zuzana is fully on board with the truth about her friend. Talking of wishes, Karou starts hunting down those teeth suppliers she knows of who visited the shop personally, and were paid with wish coins. There are several denominations of wish coin, and Karou needs one of a specific value to get the wish she wants - to be able to fly.

Meanwhile, Akiva has tracked down Karou and is spying on her through her bedroom window, creepily watching her sleep. That's never a good thing and if anyone tells you it's a sign of true love, just slap them upside the head, and walk away quickly. This story had been awesome so far, but I felt I was really going to start disliking it if it was to become a tired YA romance drowned in trope and cliché after having had page after page after page of refreshing, warming, interesting novel.

I think I should say a word here about instadore (my word for insta-love since it never is love - it's infatuation, or lust, or cluelessness). There's an element of it in this novel, but it's nowhere near as badly done as it is in some other stories I've read. I'd mention the execrable Felon (not its real name, but maybe what it ought to have been titled!), but then I'd have to go rinse my mouth out with carbolic. I think there's a case for distinguishing between instadore in a paranormal romance and the same thing in your common-or-garbage romance, because they aren't the same thing - hence the paranormal part!

There's a distinction to be made between a supernatural compulsion and an ordinary infatuation, so I think we need to allow a bit more leeway there, but having said that, there are limits! I don't think Taylor exceeds them, but she comes closer than I like. Yes, she reports undercurrents between the two main protagonists, and sometimes she makes me feel a tad nauseous with her excess, but in general, she does a good job of showing this powerful attraction while keeping it tamed.

Moving right along, now! It was inevitable that Karou would realize, even though she could not see him, that someone (Akiva) was tailing her, so she lay in wait for him and a fight ensued during which he parried her attack without striking out himself. Once she blasted him with those eyes on her palms, he was pretty much done, and she hesitated then, failing to deliver a death blow. We're to learn that there's a really interesting parallel to this. Eventually, Karou takes him back to her apartment where they talk and slowly, an uneasy truce is born between them.

Zuzana came over and checked him out, but as they were all making their way over the river bridge the next morning, Karou still intent upon finding that portal back to her family, Akiva's two war buddies, Hazael and his sister, the feisty Liraz, showed up demanding to know what was going on with Karou - demanding to know who she was. Yes, they had been spying on him, and brilliant warrior that he was, he hadn't even noticed. More absurd, they had watched him being beaten within a cubit of his life by Karou, and had failed to intervene! Some friends, huh? That struck me as decidedly weird and not in keeping with the intent of their kind: a disbelief no-longer-suspended moment.

So on the bridge right before this showdown, there's this weird scene where Akiva espies the wishbone which Karou wears around her neck - the one she inherited from Brimstone. The weird thing is that this literally brings Akiva to his knees, and while he's down there, his face against her legs, he next buries that same face in her hair?! How does he do that given that her hair does not come down to her knees? Does Akiva also have a giraffe neck? That just sounded really strange to me - something a decent book editor would have caught.

And then there's the Liraz insult! (I would love to read a story about Liraz!) "...Liraz was more frightening, she always had been; perhaps she'd had to be, being female." What the heck does that mean? And this is written by a female writer! But it was not about humans, it was about angels! Are we to understand that there's genderism in Heaven? Given the misogynistic tone of both the Bible and the Koran (and all too much religious literature), that wouldn't surprise me at all. I'm sure glad I'm not going to heaven.

But here's the angle on angels: if angels have no genitals, then what does it even mean that there are "males" and "females"? Yes, I understand that the eternal genitals don't define gender, it's the size of the gamete, the larger one defining the female, but this doesn't rob me of my point, which is: what would be the point? And how in hell (strike that - how in heaven!) can there be relationships with them as depicted in so many books?! How can there be half-breeds? And whence did this 'angels have no genitals' even derive? It's never mentioned in the religious primary sources (where angels are, of course, exclusively men and, as far as we can be expected to believe, must be just like men, genitals included, otherwise why specify their gender?).

Frankly, I can't get into this 'war in heaven' angels & demons crap and take it seriously, I really can't, which is why I'm probably the best placed writer to write the definitive angel story, if I could only get my act together...! But it does mean that I'm paying Taylor a really big compliment (indeed, an entire complement of compliments) when I say I have enjoyed this story more than all too many of the stories I've waded through recently.

Now would be a good time to relate Akiva's flashback if I wanted to reveal any more story, but I won't. The flashbacks did interrupt the flow of the narrative somewhat, but they didn't seem that bad to me, and they were necessary. Whether they could have been added in a different place to better effect is debatable.

I liked this novel overall. Yes, there was still too much cliché and trope, but I was willing to overlook that for the enjoyment the rest of it brought me, so I rate this a worthy read.


Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Pretty Dark Nothing by Heather L Reid





Title: Pretty Dark Nothing
Author: Heather L Reid
Publisher: Month 9 Books
Rating: Worthy

Released: 4/24/2013 ISBN-13: 9780985327811

DISCLOSURE: Unlike all the other reviews prior to this one, I have neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a pre-release "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley! I will be reviewing others of this nature in future and will note which ones those are in the review.

This is a new venture for me, but note that I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a brand new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of her story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll usually find elsewhere!


I have to say up front that I had a few issues with this story. It's a very dark tale and there's a lot of dark with very little leavening. I found this acceptable given what else it had to offer, but I have to admit there were times when I wondered if I was going to want to finish the book! I did finish it and didn't regret the reading, although the ending didn't go where I thought it might, and seemed like it might well have been the ending for a different book altogether!

Perhaps my biggest beef is that the main characters behave all-too-often like they're thirteen years old instead of seventeen. Not that seventeen year olds and adults cannot behave like juveniles, but a break from that would have been nice: a few shades of gray here and there instead of the endlessly stark black and white!

Since this was an uncorrected galley, I don't want to be overly critical of the state of the text. For the most part the actual writing was very well done; Reid can write write! But there were some items bordering on obscurity which caught my eye. For example, at one point, the male protagonist Aaron chases after the female protagonist Quinn, on his motorbike and he arrives breathless! I'm not sure why - unless he was wrasslin' the handlebars all the way! Perhaps he forget his helmet and couldn't breathe on the journey? Was he pushing the bike the whole way?! That just seemed weird. There were one or two other bits like that, but fortunately not very many.

There were some spelling or word-use errors, like 'alter' when it should have been altar (p130). 'stripped' when it seems she meant striped (p137). Then there was the use of this phrase: 'display of PDA' (p143), which decompressed would read, display of public display of affection' which is awkward at best. People seem to readily forget, once a common phrase becomes an acronym, what the original phrase was, so we have people talking about the ATM machine, and the PIN number. That's irritating to me, but it's the way people are!

I frowned slightly when Reid used the phrase 'Texas to Canada' (p246) - as though Mexico isn't a country but Texas is! Texas was a country but it ain't no more, and Reid should know this because she lives here! OTOH, maybe it's because she's a native Texan that she thinks of it this way?!

I also had a cringe-worthy moment with a passionate kiss between Quinn and Aaron right after she's vomited (p159). No, very briefly chewing some gum isn't going to get rid of that awful stench no matter how passionate you are for your loved one! Another such moment was when they had scores of lit candles during a rock concert when the night was 'cloaking the audience in dusk (p192). Seriously, candles at a concert? have we learned nothing form the fires which have killed people when pyrotechnics got out of control? I blogged about this not long ago

This was all made up for with a really weird moment I had on the way to work this morning, I listened unexpectedly to a portion of Carl Sagan's Cosmos which appeared out of the blue when I was scanning stations, and then disappeared - I guess after I got out of range or the thunderstorm messed with the atmospherics or something, and then on break at work I read this novel and the main characters mention Cosmos (p166)! That was a moment! I highly recommend Cosmos.

So onto the novel! Quinn Tailor is haunted by the darkest of dreams: shapeless shadows touch her, teasing and grasping at her with vaporous tendrils, seeking to suck her into something unspeakable. It doesn't help that her boyfriend has dumped her for the school's most vindictive cheerleader, who delights in tormenting and punishing Quinn at every opportunity, and who certainly isn't above seeking revenge for perceived slights - even for seeing nothing more than Quinn talking to her ex, Jeff, whom Kerstin is now dating.

It helps even less that Quinn's father left both her and her mother, that he's used the short time since then to start a new family with someone else, and that he now wants Quinn back in his life, like she's some sort of bronze medal. Quinn is even off the cheerleading squad because her outstanding grades are falling - and who's filling in, in her absence if not Kerstin?

She's no longer "Quinn Perfect", but at least the shadows only come to claim her at night, which is why she's a living wreck, unable to sleep, walking around like a zombie, seeing shadows move and hearing whispers. Yes, they only come at night; until they don’t, that is - until they start showing up in broad daylight, and calling her on her phone. Is this something real or is she going over the darkest edge? She's starting to lose the will to even try to fight them off, succumbing to despair, thinking self-destructive thoughts, fighting with her mother, cutting off her hair....

Aaron collier has his own set of problems. One of them is his apparently unrequited attraction to Quinn (but you and I know better, don't we?!), but that's the least of them. His father is a drunk, still unable to overcome his loss of his young daughter and his wife in a tragic car accident which left Aaron with no memories for several months, and with an unnatural fear of water. And Aaron has a brother who apparently blames him for what happened.

But perhaps the greatest of Aaron's problems is his need to make physical contact with Quinn; but not for the reason you might think: Aaron has an ability to enter another person's thoughts just by touching them. He's pondering how sick his need to touch is, with regard to Quinn, when she faints by the lockers just a few feet from him, overcome by voices and shadows.

While others stand around and stare, Aaron catches her and lowers her to the floor. Of necessity he touches her, and is instantly flooded almost overwhelmingly with her despair and fear. It’s so powerful that even after he has disciplined himself to control this, he has a hard time shutting it out. He's had this psychic ability since his near-death experience in the accident, but he's never felt it like this, and now he's even more concerned about Quinn than he was before.

One evening, he's suddenly overcome by a mental contact with Quinn - when she's not even within a mile of him, much less in physical contact! He can see her despairing, list, in a lake, but he realizes that this is a dream, not a real lake, and despite his hydrophobia, a result of the accident, he plunges in and leads her out. Neither of them is prepared for the massive burst of light and heat and which envelopes them as they hug each other

Aaron has never been able to enter someone's mind before without being in physical contact. Quinn has not had, in months, such a good night's sleep as she did after her encounter with Aaron. But why does she never overtly thank him for his aid? Is she so numbed by the bad taste of that diseased relationship with Jeff that she can't taste the tang of something healthy?

When Aaron calls her the next day, they begin very hesitantly talking about that dream, but they're cut off, and Quinn's phone starts filling with texts telling her Aaron can’t help her. She's on her own. They're coming for her.

Not to give too much away, Quinn starts spiraling down, she and Aaron are on-again-off-again, and Jeff comes back into the picture at a very inopportune time. There's a dramatic chase and a showdown by a raging river. I found it worth the read, although I spent a lot of it confused - thinking it was going one way and finding it going another only to wander back to where I thought it was going. And vice-versa! It's a confused novel, but it still held my attention because I was honestly really curious as to where Reid was going to take this - and she didn't take it where I thought it would go even after she came down on one side of the fence. Color me intrigued! Others may not find her so fascinating. Now whether what happened here is going to be explained in a future sequel, I can't say. I can say that it really does need a sequel because there are too many unanswered questions here.

It bothers me that there is no such thing as moderation in this novel - everything is black or white, everyone is always flying off the handle, everything is maximum intensity, all or nothing, turned up to 11. There's too much drama at times.

It bothers me that Quinn is so obsessed with cheerleading, especially at age 17! I would have preferred her to have a less stereotypical interest in life. It bothers me that coach White didn’t have a thing to say about Quinn's condition after the incident in the locker room where a mirror is smashed and Quinn has visible (although minor) injuries. It bothers me that no one has anything to say about the trashed up locker room! It bothers me that Quinn's father is mentioned briefly in a seemingly important way and then pretty much written completely out of the novel. maybe this is fodder for a sequel?

Quinn is too self-absorbed, although she has way more reason to be so than does Luce in the 'Fallen' disaster. Aaron nowhere near understanding enough given what he knows, and especially in the light of revelations about who he really is towards the end, revelations (I use the word advisedly!) which pop up out of nowhere. The problem is that both of them are seriously damaged people, and in such circumstances, were this reality, the chance that they would do each other far more harm than good is overwhelming. But this is fiction, so we can believe it will go the other way and be the best thing for them.

And that ending is definitely not expected! So I am going to recommend this one because it is so intriguing and offered a roller-coaster ride which I don't normally appreciate in a novel of this nature, but which in this case I was willing to ride. I'm not sure why! I can't say I'm waiting with baited breath for a sequel, but this particular volume I judge to be worth my time. Heather Reid is a writer with an interesting voice and she deserves our support to encourage her to voice some more novels our way.


Thursday, March 14, 2013

Tormented by Lauren Kate





Title: Torment
Author: Lauren Kate
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

So Luce is flown to San Francisco airport, which apparently has the absolute fastest baggage retrieval ever, because in no time Luce and Daniel - without whom she's a complete, utter, and very limp nothing evidently - are approaching Daniel's car, which is an Alfa Romeo, and which happens to be Luce's dream car. As Daniel informs her, it used to be her car in a previous life. Need we go into the Romeo Giulietta here and the fact that Kate actually used the term 'star-crossed lovers' in vol 1?!

Kate seems to have some sort of problem with plurals. She thinks biceps has a singular form! No, biceps relates to the number of skeletal attachments, not to the number of muscles! There is no 'bicep', just like there is no tricep! Sorry Laurie!

Next comes the magic - and it’s dangerous and uncalled for especially given that it's practiced by Daniel who is supposed to be keeping Luce safe: he shrinks her bag to fit into the trunk, an act of magic which apparently lights him up like a beacon to the evil powers that be. Then he spends a lot of time telling her that he can’t tell her anything. He does tell her that she's enrolled in a new school up the coast from SF, but I have to ask, what’s the point?! She's seventeen, She's in so much danger that he feels he has to hide her away in a camouflaged school (like The Evil One would have the Devil of a job trying to figure out where it is? Seriously?) But if she's going to be hiding away all her life, then what’s the point? How is she ever going to have a career? And if she isn’t, what, exactly, is she studying for? Angel University?!

When she asks him to tell her everything that he's been up to since they've been apart (for all of three days?! Just how clingy is this woman?) he babbles on about a 'Council of Angels' meeting'. Honestly? Where, exactly, is god?! I always thought he was supposed to be in charge! Is he being non-existent again? Because every time we hear of these religious stories, whether in book or film, it’s always the case that the god is useless and it’s entirely up to humans (or in this case humans, half-breeds and angels) to carry the day. God - who could protect her instantly and permanently - apparently has no interest whatsoever in this oh-so-special girl! As Al Pacino's character describes him in the excellent Devil's Advocate he's an 'absentee landlord"!

And what the hell airport did Luce land in? Kate describes the drive into the city over a roller-coaster of hills and dales, but the SF airport is right in the middle of the city on the shoreline! No hills. The city's right there; to get to Fort Bragg you drive north out of the city not into it! Was Kate doing angel dust when she wrote this?!

On the journey - however misguided it is, Daniel points out a mobile home park where Luce used to live in a two room cabin (so how in hell did she have her own room?!) long before it was a trailer park, but when she asks him about the first time they ever met, he makes like a clam again, so it isn't just Luce who's spineless. What a jerk Daniel is! Since Luce is the light and also his buddy, I think from now on I shall refer to them as Dani of El and his bud light...maybe not!

I don’t know where Kate gets this reincarnation from given her context. It’s not in the Bible. Yes, there are some delusional characters in there who question whether Jesus, for example, is the reincarnation of Elisha or Elijah or whatever, but the Bible is really one life and you're done, as unjust as that is in this context. In point of fact, it’s not until the NT that we even get an after-life! There's no such thing in the OT, and there's no mention of any scheme of reincarnation. That's not a Judaic idea at all.

As a special treat, Dani of El parks in Mendocino and literally flies Luce to Fort Bragg, or more specifically, to the protected grounds of the Shoreline school. She wakes up the next day to discover that she's sharing a room with an obnoxious 'Nephilim' (more on this anon) called Shelby who, for reasons unknown and unexplained, was evidently not told she was getting a roommate that night. Shelby wasn't actually there in the middle of the night as it happened, not arriving home until the wee hours of the morning, and then through the window!

So they go to breakfast. Luce notes that this place smells faintly of the ocean, but it’s not really like home - on the east coast? I don’t know what the deal is with that. She lived on the east coast when she was in the Dover school where her boyfriend burned, but her parents were living just a few miles from her school in Georgia, so what that's all about I have no good handle on.

As they reach the "mess hall" which is very well-appointed and suitable for rich kids, completely the opposite of Sword and Cross, Shelby reluctantly and snottily imparts that the school is home to a bunch of Nephil. On that topic, Hebrew words which end in 'im', such as Cherubim, are plurals. The singular in this case would be Cherub. Kate finally addresses the fact that Nephilim is a plural, having Shelby make cheap excuses for Kate's inappropriate use of the term. Not a bad idea - blame a character for your phobias and peccadilloes?! I must use that!

The startling thing to Luce, however, is that she's a celebrity here. She is spoken of almost reverently, and there's a certain amount of hero worship over her story: her reincarnations, her star crossed love, and her attachment to the hawt Dani of El. This, of course, begs the question that if every one of these people knows so much about her, why - in god's name! - has she been kept so resolutely in the frigging dark all this time?

Her first class is jointly conducted by a good fallen angel Jessica (isn't that a contradiction in terms?) and a bad fallen angel Steven (isn't that a tautology?) just to keep things fair! What? What's with the 'fair' crap? I thought all was fair in love and war and this is both! Oh well, go with the flow and see where we get washed up.

And the award for Best Split Word goes to Lauren Kate for her novel Torment where, on page 148, she splits 'demonstration' across two lines into demon-stration! That was hilarious! But unfortunately, Kate also gets the award for most obnoxiously and nauseatingly whiny-assed heroine ever. It’s really hard to have to keep on reading Luce's absolutely endless whining about how she can’t be with Dani of El. Who, in their right mind, would actually want to be with Luce in one lifetime, let alone across scores of them? Which decent self-respecting person would want to be with a clingy, helpless, whining, self-absorbed partner like her? Honestly? It's like every other thought that crosses her mind is about how much she wants to be with him and how unfair life is to her. It’s really hard to read those parts.

So why go on with this? Well tossed in with the tropes and pains is the occasional nice bit of writing and of plot development - and even humor1 rare, but there in tiny doses. Yes! The story itself isn’t so bad; it’s the protagonist who's a pain in the patootie. So I hope you'll forgive the occasional snark as this goes on!

So Luce starts getting to know someone called Miles (shouldn't that be Kilometers in this day and age?) and unloads a lot of her baggage onto him, but this does not a thing to improve her demeanor, not even by one iota. I'm actually suspicious of Miles, quite frankly. In one of their classes with Jessica and Steven, the two of them show the class how to unfold one of the shadows - called an 'announcer' - and see what's inside it. This makes no sense at all in context except as a ham-fisted plot device to give Luce something more to do on her own. Evidently shadows are like archived news clips from the history of the world. The one they see in class is Sodom and Gomorrah, and since these clips are from one's own life, this means that the teachers were actually at the destruction of those Biblical cities.

After that class, Luce goes to see Jessica to try and learn more about the shadows, and ends up outside her office eavesdropping on yet another partial discussion. She hides and sees Roland - of her time at Sword and Cross school - come out of the office, so she follows him and talks with him. He tells her nothing about what’s going on, and invites her to a beach party to which she goes and ends up meeting Daniel secretly. Daniel spends just a few minutes with her. He tells her nothing about what’s going on, and forbids her to leave the school under any circumstances, then he flies off. What a worthless jerk he truly is.

Arriving back in her dorm room, Luce finds an envelope under her door with a bus ticket and a typewritten note purportedly from Daniel, telling her to take the bus and meet him later than night. Not printed - typewritten! Luce, quite obviously by now the world's most monumental moron, stupidly, blindly believes it’s from Daniel, and she does exactly what she's told to do, ending up alone, near the fishing docks, in this deserted town very late at night. As she hears fishermen coming up from the docks (at that time of night?!), she backs into the shadows, and she sees Cam Briel, the bad guy from the previous novel, strolling by! He sees Luce and angrily asks her what she's doing there, then he throws her to the floor as an arrow flies over their heads. Next he's up and running to overpower the angel who tried to kill Luce, and he kills her with one of her own arrows. Then he drives Luce back to the school and tells her she cannot leave because of the extreme danger she's in! He tells her nothing about what’s going on.

So what does the biggest dipsquat in California do having been advised by both the "good' guy and by the "bad" guy to stay in school because she's in mortal danger?? She leaves the school again - twice! On the first of these occasions, she goes on a school trip on the luxury 130 foot yacht. Honestly? What 130 foot yacht isn't luxury? On this occasion it’s fortunate that she is there because Dawn, one of two ditzy friends Luce has made in addition to Shelby, is knocked overboard by a shadow, and Luce is the only one with the presence of mind to grab a life preserver and jump in after her. Something tries to pull Dawn under, but Steven comes after them in a raft and hauls her out of the water, ordering both of them to say nothing about this thing pulling them under, even as Luce watches welts rise up on Dawn's ankle, in the shape of fingers. Again, no one tells Luce (or Dawn for that matter) diddly squat about what's going on.

Next, Luce inveigles Shelby into helping her trap and look into a shadow. She's tried it before, by herself, and had no success, so this time she and Shelby do what they saw the teachers doing, stretching it out, and Luce is able to look in on one of her past lives. She sees her own picture, with Daniel, in a frame on a shelf, and notes a laptop computer and an address on an envelope. These were her parents in a very recent, previous life and she can go see them! Shelby steals her ex-boyfriend's Mercedes and they drive to Mount Shasta where they find the bungalow in which her older parents live, but while she can play peeping Tom in their window, she can't pluck up the guts to go talk with them.

So let’s review the story so far. In her entire time in Sword and Cross, which admittedly was problematical, Luce never once asked anyone to fill her in on what’s going on because she was so self-obsessed about Daniel and her so-called life. Now she's in a wonderful school, with decent, supportive people, all of whom know much more about things than she does, yet never once does she ask anyone there to fill her in on what’s going on because she's so self-obsessed about Daniel and her so-called life. Daniel, who is supposed to love her, never once fills her in on what's going on and she never asks because she's so self-obsessed about Daniel and her so-called life, preferring to act like a clueless thirteen year old, instead to taking the mature approach and taking charge of her life! And we’re supposed to what? Admire this girl? Root for her? Empathize with her? She makes me sick. She's the worst hero ever.

I'm committed to finishing this volume because as I said, the overall story itself is interesting, but the protagonist is utterly worthless. I've never quite been in this position before! I can see how people who are less discriminating and less demanding than I am might be addicted enough to plow through five volumes of this stuff, but I'm done after this vol, because I honestly don’t care what happens to Luce or to Daniel, and I think after two volumes I've given Lauren Kate more than a fair chance to win me over. I started out wanting to like it and trying to like it, but Lauren Kate has made far too hard to even want to like Loose Price! And if this is the best that 'angel stories' have to offer (at least as judged by how popular this series evidently is), then I can’t see why I should read any more of these no matter who has written them! Problematical as it was in parts, I'd recommend SJ Day's 'Eve of...' series over any series like this one. But it's not YA kosher! So maybe it’s really time to write one of my own?

Well Dani of El keeps on pumping up the jerk-o-meter. We learn that Shelby and he once had a one-nighter; and that's only the unfaithful act by him that Luce knows about Meanwhile Luce is still pursing her quest to rape the shadows for all they've got. She tries to capture a large sickly looking one, but Steve is spying on them and the shadow breaks up when she grabs it.

Right before that happened, she saw Cam in the forest, covered in blood, claiming he's just killed some of the Sophie assassins who were after her. None of that makes any sense. Sophie the Librarian had the entire book to kill her in vol one and did nothing. Now, suddenly, Luce needs to be taken out?!

Right after that incident, Luce is called into Steve and Jessica's office (where Jessica isn’t), and Steve talks to her about the shadows. He shows her a copy of a Plato book (which is illustrated! Lol!) and makes mention of Plato's remarks regarding how things look different when all you can see of them is their shadows. And people think this man was some sort of a great thinker?! But Steve's lesson is that shadows can be dangerous and she needs proper training if she's going to ignore the warnings she's been given, and go after them anyway. And we know by now that Luce is far too stupid a person to give any regard at all to warnings she receives, no matter who gives them to her and no matter how valid she knows for a fact that those warnigns are. No wonder she's always died young in her previous incarnations!

Dani of El keeps sneaking visits to his bud light, and each time he thrills her, tells her nothing, and hurries away. After being treated like dirt by him for a volume and a half, Luce is finally becoming a tad nit bit miffed. Hey, do you want to see a picture of Luce? Get a copy of the ancient and venerable Dictionary of Fallen Torment, and look up 'doormat'; there's a picture of luce right there.

So right after Luce's parents ask her if she can make it to their house for Thanksgiving that year, a hamfisted segue into an invitation from Miles drops into her lap and I'm guessing she's going to ditch her parents and take him up on it. Maybe her name should be Luce woman? We'll see.

Well I've finished this volume now and I have to say that I can't recommend this. Not only did Lauren Kate fail to pull it out of the fire, she torched it with napalm. The first volume was barely passable, but two volumes of non-stop whining by the female protagonist is two volumes way the hell too much. Two volumes of the female protagonist not being told anything by anyone and having zero spine to go find out; two volumes of failing to pursue questions (when she has prime opportunities to do so) which would help her to understand; two volumes of doing outright stupid things that put her friend's lives at risk, and two volumes of being so self-obsessed that even when she realizes what the stakes are, her every waking thought is: "What about me?" This is way too much to stomach. No one should be asked to put themselves through the torment of Luce Price's non-stop, juvenile self-pity parade.

Let's wind up the summary. So Luce starts falling for Miles. Daniel, even though he's treated Luce like crap and she should kick him in his angelic orbs and a ditch him permanently, goes into a sob-fest and a jealousy fit over it. Luce takes Shelby and Miles to Las Vegas through a shadow window even though she's been told endlessly that she cannot leave the school grounds because its dangerous and people can get hurt. Arriane rescues her from that. No one tells Luce anything and she never asks because she's so absorbed by how sad she is over Daniel, her loser boyfriend. Dawn, who looks superficially like Luce, especially after Luce becomes a peroxide blond, gets kidnapped and then returned unharmed for no reason! Luce determines she must talk with Dawn but never ever ever everjust often enough to make her feel wretched - and this jerk-off, no-good, clueless, heartless, piece-of-trash dipstick tells her nothing at all about anything.

Luce, who thinks she will not be able to leave the school grounds for Thanksgiving with her folks nevertheless lets her best friend Callie buy an airline ticket to join her with her parents! Fortunately for Callie, Luce finally gets permission to go, but has to go to Sword and Cross for them to pick her up, because she's been consistently lying to her parents - the parents she loves more than anything - about what's going on in her life. When she gets there for Thanksgiving, everyone and their uncle turns up - all the angels, including Molly who dumped meatloaf over her head in vol 1, and Cam, and several Nephilim and her best friend (to whom she's also told lies when she's actually deigned to contact her at all). The angels have a "fight" against the outcasts - basically zombie angels - and the angels win. Luce still asks no questions, and at the end, she claims she is taking charge of her life and promptly opens a shadow at random and steps blindly though it. How is this taking charge of her life by any definition?! It's casting her fortune to the wind, which is pretty much exactly what she's done since day one, only this wind is coming from the asses of angels

Seriously. That's how brain-dead stupid the ending to this novel is. The series is nothing but a massive helping of Luce sickly wallowing in how badly done to she is, in acting so stupid that she's more like an eleven year old than her age, in being told nothing and in failing to ask question which will reduce her ignorance even when she has golden opportunities to do so, and in doing illogical and pointless things which get actually her nowhere. From the reading I've done, vol 3 is nothing but Luce reliving her past lives by going through shadows. Who in their right mind wants to wallow some more with her in that? How is that going to help her address the current dangerous situation?

I don't care what happens to Luce or Daniel or any other character in this story. They can rot in hell for all I care because I have been given no reason to care and every reason to feel nauseous over the two main protagonists. What they have isn't love, it isn;t transcendent, it's a co-dependent blood letting and both of them need serious psychiatric help. This series is a mess and I refuse to waste any more time on it.