Utopia, Iowa by Brian Yansky

Title: Utopia, Iowa
Author: Brian Yansky
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Rating: WARTY!

I went to Iowa once. There's nothing there. Funnily enough, I had the same experience with this novel! My first mistake was in failing to notice that the main character's name was Jack. I've sworn-off reading any more novels which feature someone with that name as a main character. The name is so clichéd as to be pathetic and I denounce all writers who resort to this tired and threadbare trope.

Seriously, how many young adults do you know or have ever even heard of who are named Jack? I know there must be some out there, but nowhere near enough to merit the bizarre prevalence given to this name in stories, particularly adventure stories. Any writer who is so lazy and/or unimaginative and/or clueless enough that they employ this name deserves to be completely ignored! This novel proves it!

I read the blurb (not nearly closely enough as it happened) on my library's website, and it sounded interesting, so I clicked on the library's hold feature and eventually picked it up. That's when I discovered that it's a first person PoV story, which is another huge no-no for me.

1PoVs are routinely impractical, often nonsensical, and typically self-limiting in everything except the main character's own sense of self-importance, that they're honestly not worth reading. Once in a while a writer comes along who can make one work. Those are the very rare exceptions which test the rule.

That said, I had the book in hand and was tired of the previous volume I'd been reading, so I thought, "What the hell; let's give it a go!" I made it to the end of chapter one before I had to call the doctor for a fresh prescription of promethazine, my nausea was so high. This guy - the main character - I refuse to use his name - is supposedly a screen-writer wannabe who, I've noted in the reviews of others, shows absolutely no interest in actually writing a screenplay. Nothing new there.

The closest he gets to it is larding-up his self-obsessed memoir with brief movie references (title, writer, stars). Every. Single. Time. He. Mentions A. Movie - or part of a scene from one. Yeah, just like that. After the second one of these I'd reached my maximal satiation point and was looking for a vomitorium so I could purge. The first of these references is at the beginning of his second paragraph the last of them is on the penultimate page of the novel, so you know the whole thing is completely clogged with these pointless references.

It's a big mistake for a writer to think his readers have coincident interests with himself and/or will thank him profusely for bloating his novel with his own personal passions, pastimes and pursuits. It's because of all these things and the writing style that I cannot recommend this, but again I read only chapter one, although that was more than enough to put me off this writer permanently. You may get to chapter two or beyond and decide you love it. Good luck with that.

Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin

Title: Cycler
Author: Lauren McLaughlin
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

This is a story about Jill and Jack, and yes, I know I said I'd sworn off novels which feature a main character named Jack because it's such an abysmally clichéd name, this one was different enough that I let it under the wire.

The deal is that Jill and Jack are the same person, and no, it's not what you think. Jill McTeague isn't transgendered - not in the way you normally think of it. Whereas most females eventually begin undergoing an inconvenience, or a highly troublesome, or even a downright painful "time of the month", none of them have anything on Jill. Once a month, for four days, she literally turns into a male - who has taken the name Jack.

Yes, I hadn't read anything quite like this before, either, which is why I took it on, despite it being both first person PoV, usually a no-no for me, and had a main character named Jack, also a no-no for me.

I have to say, though, that I had some really mixed feelings about this novel, loving some of it and hating other parts. The book hasn't been a particularly big seller, but it has already been optioned for a movie, believe it or not. It just goes to show that you never really know where your novel may end up no matter how oddball or idiosyncratic you might think it is. WRITE IT ANYWAY!

Even though I didn't like Jack, I felt bad for him because he's confined to the house for the four days he shows up, and he lives in fear of being somehow erased by Jill, so his initial unsavory character softens slightly over time, especially when he realizes he's fallen for Jill's best friend. The problem is that he turns out to be precisely the kind of 'Jack' I detest in novels, particularly YA novels.

The hope I had for how this novel might play was quickly dashed. It went in a different, although initially interesting direction. On that score - on having a very rare bisexual character in a YA novel - major kudos to the author. The problem was that the author really blew it on handling how this character was dealt with - and she blew it in several different directions. More like vomited it really.

Jill and her friend Daria Benedetti, and best friend Ramie Boulieaux (yeah, I know) are working on Jill's plan to get Tommy Knutson (or Tommy Knutsack as Jack refers to him - Jack can access Jill memories, but not the other way around) to ask her to the prom. Her plan is completely stupid, so this was a bit of a downer for me. I don't like female main characters to be dumb-asses or shallow - unless, of course, they rise above it as the novel progresses. Nor do I like stories which repeatedly tell us how smart the female character is, yet consistently depict her as being boning-fido stupid! Jill obsessed more and more on the shallow as the story went along instead of wise-ing-up, unfortunately.

I really like the author's writing style, so it was hard to actually drop the novel. Usually when something starts going downhill like this, I have no problem dropping it and moving on to something else, but the more this went on, the more curious I became about where the author thought she was trying to take it. The writing itself wasn't god-awful, only the main characters, and since it was short and I could already see some changes dawning in Jack's personality, I decided to run with it, but in doing so, I really felt betrayed by the author.

My first really big problem (other than how stereotypically gross Jack was depicted as being), was when Jill and Tommy had their first real conversation. Right up front, Tommy brought up the fact that he is bi. Yes, you can argue that it's commendable he wanted her to know the truth and was being up front with her, but it was out of place and for more than one reason.

First of all, it's not like they were in imminent danger of having sex at that moment - far from it, so it didn't seem like his honesty fit the requirement. They were not even dating, nor was it certain that they would, so sexual history was hardly on the cards. Jill wasn't even looking for a date per se, only for an escort to the prom.

Let's look at it this way for a moment: suppose instead of telling her he was bisexual, he had told her that he liked girls with different colored hair from Jill. Suppose he said, "I usually like brunettes, but a lot of the time I like blondes, too!"? See how nonsensical that sounds? Who cares? And why raise this?

The way it was brought up here was that it made it sound like Tommy was going to date Jill, but he also wanted to be free to date guys at the same time. Who would countenance that? Well, some people might, but typically not. If he was going to be faithful to her during the time they dated, then who gives a shit who he liked to date before, or who he might date afterwards?

This whole thing made it sound like, yeah, I really want to go steady with you, but occasionally I plan on popping out and having a guy on the side. Seriously? It was just so badly-handled, which actually made it stand out like a sore thumb given that the rest of the writing was entertaining (if a bit dumb here and a bit gross there).

In some ways this made the whole thing homophobic: like, hey, I'm bi, so I might have aids. Well guess what, anyone might have aids, straight, gay or bi. It's irrelevant in and of itself! And it would remain irrelevant until and unless they planned on having sex, in which case their sexual history is important regardless of whether they're gay, straight, or anywhere in between.

So I did not get this approach at all. It was rendered in an especially bad light when Jill was grossed out by Tommy's revelation! If Jill had been a prudish, closed-minded person, then I could see her reacting like this, but she was not, and this Jill, recall, was someone who changed into a horny guy for four days a month - a guy for whom she had talked her mother into procuring porn. Why wouldn't she be completely thrilled to find a potential partner who was bi?! It made no sense at all.

One other issue with the writing was the aggravating over-use of two words: "deeply", and "mal". It was like at least one appeared on every page, and sometimes the same one would appear two or three times in as many lines. It was really annoying. Please don't try to be hip unless you're cool!

Jack, as I mentioned, was a disappointment. At first I thought he couldn't be as bad as Jill painted him. The novel opens as she "returns" from a four-day spell as Jack, and she makes him sound atrociously bad. He was actually worse than she makes him sound. Once he decides he has the hots for her best friend, he sneaks out of the house and stalks Ramie, spying on her in her room (from up on the roof, through her dormer window), and at one point is preparing to masturbate while spying on her, until he falls off the roof. He gets rewarded for this by Ramie inviting him into her room soon after, for a kissing and feel-up session on her bed. This was not acceptable to me. I had the hope, initially, that he would really turn himself around, but he just got worse, and he was obnoxious to begin with.

So what the heck was it that appealed to me about the writing, if I found so much to dislike? I'm glad you asked, but I'm not sure I can give you a satisfactory answer! The writing style was just my kind of style. It was a comfortable an easy read for me, with some amusing situations and some hilarious observations scattered through it, all of which really hit my funny bone, but that was canceled out, I'm sorry to say, by the extreme dumb-assery going on.

It was this, the general tone and pace, and the banter and dialog, which appealed to me and made me continue with this much longer than I would have done had this same story had a poorer way with words. Plus, as I mentioned, I was really curious to know how this author was going to handle this story, especially given where she'd taken it so far. Maybe I just wanted to know how she would dig herself out of the holes she had so blithely opened up! The problem is that the author didn't go anywhere with it. It turns out this is just the prologue. The second act comes in volume two. I felt robbed at that point.

In the end, it was the stark gender segregation and utterly insensitive stereotyping which killed this for me: that Jill is the ultimate in mindless, girlie-girl femininity, whereas Jack is the sex-crazed closet rapist, and neither has the first clue about the other despite quite literally sharing mind and body. I cannot in good conscience recommend this, and I shall not be reading the sequel, 'hilariously' titled (re) cycler.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Title: A Discovery of Witches
Author: Deborah Harkness
Publisher: Viking
Rating: WARTY!

This is volume 1 of the All Souls Trilogy, but after starting this, I was forced to conclude that it ought to be the Ass-hat Trilogy. This is a DNF review because this novel was too tedious to finish. Deborah Harkness is a professor of history at USC, and I'm guessing that she had the idea for this novel when she was researching a scholarly work she had written shortly before she wrote this novel. She starts out with Doctor Diana Bishop, a witch who has rejected her heritage which was passed on to her by her parents, two supposedly powerful witches who should never have procreated, some said. They were right. Her parents died in Africa, but we're given no details; nor are we really informed as to why Bishop has so whole-heartedly rejected witchcraft, but she stubbornly resists it and did not knowingly employ it to get herself into the position she's in; she did that entirely through her own smarts and hard work. She does allow herself an odd spell here and there in an emergency or when she's tired, but she severely restricts herself.

Note that I have no more nor less respect for Wicca than I do for any other religion - they're all nuts as far as I'm concerned, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy a good supernatural romp. It's all fiction isn't it?!

The novel begins with Diana in an Oxford university library, opening an ancient manuscript written by Elias Ashmole, who died in 1692. There's a problem in that the manuscript's title is in English, which IMO is highly unlikely given that scholarly treatises were routinely written in Latin in that day and age. For example, Isaac Newton was a contemporary of Ashmole, but his classic work wasn't called "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (as such), it was titled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. OTOH, Harkness is the scholar, not me, so maybe Ashmole did write in English.

The real problem here is with the plotting. Bishop is purportedly a PhD who is something of an expert on ancient manuscripts. So how in hell did she come to request Ashmole 782, which has long been known to be missing - for one hundred and fifty years, so Harkness tells us? Surely someone of Bishop's stature would know it was missing and that it would, therefore, be foolish to request it? This makes no sense whatsoever, and again, it's an example of a writer not thinking about what they're writing.

Bishop is immediately aware that there is magic embedded in the manuscript, but she doesn't allow herself to indulge in it, studying its condition and layout carefully in a purely scholarly manner, and returning it to the desk with undue speed without really reading it! The next day in the library, she meets a vampire, Matthew Clairmont. Yep - it didn’t take long to introduce the studly YA trope guy, even though this isn't a YA novel. He's tall and muscular, and good looking, of course - oh, and he watches her sleep. Clairmont is a professor at Oxford University, which is where Bishop is visiting. Evidently vampires are scientists in this world, and demons are the celebrities and rock stars!

Now here's a thing that I find absolutely hilarious in these vampire stories: every one of them typically has a really old vampire and contrary to human life, the oldest guy is the most powerful, and the trope is that he's tall and muscular, but the problem here is that people historically were short compared with us. This wasn't a universal rule; there were some tall people in history, but in general everyone was short. So how is it that the oldest vampires are universally tall? It's nonsense, and it is one more example of writers simply not thinking before they write. They really don't place the vampire in context. They just invent him out of nothing and never honestly consider the consequences of his origins, which is ironic, because origins is precisely what this novel is all about!

Clairmont knows who Bishop is, claiming to have read several of her works, and he invites her to dinner, She declines. That's when he watches her sleep: he's after the manuscript she had examined the previous day, and for no reason other than that it gave him a chance to watch her sleep, he convinces himself that she had this irreplaceable manuscript with her at home. He stands watching her snoring on her settee, remarking on how unusual it is for a witch to pulsate with light like she does, and he leaves when he realizes the script must be still at the library. But he never breaks into the library to try and find it! Clairmont is a moron.

I had thought I might have trouble with this novel when I began it, since it's far more of a tome than a novel - striking out strongly for six hundred pages of closely-spaced typeface, and although parts of it were interesting and easy reading, it became increasingly tedious, the deeper I went into it. I seriously have to question my unerring ability to select novels narrated in the first person present. I really don't like such volumes, and yet I seem to find myself frequently picking them up because the blurb interests me, only to later discover the tense and person - tensely and in person! It seems that the bulk of this particular tome is to be first person present, but some of it is third person, such as the part which describes Clairmont's visit to Bishop's home (actually "rooms" she's staying in at the college). Evidently vampires in this novel do not need to be invited in.

I also came across an interesting writing problem - how do you deal with words which are broken and hyphenated over two lines when the word itself contains a hyphen?! Harkness used the word 'to-dos' (as in 'to do list'), but it was broken between one line and the next, making it look like the word was 'todos' (almost the same as the Spanish for 'all' in the plural) and had merely had the hyphen show up artificially because of the line break. It was actually confusing for a second before I realized what the word was supposed to be - but how to avoid that problem? And is it a problem or am I just being anal about the English language? Hey, this is a writing blog: I’d be delivering less than I promised if I didn’t obsess over these issues, now wouldn't I?!

Bishop goes rowing to relieve stress, but she takes out a single scull which is less than 12 inches wide! It would seem that it's tailored to someone suffering from anorexia, not for a healthy and physically fit young woman. I know those boats are deliberately narrow, but the immediate impression this gave to me (rightly or wrongly, misunderstood or not) was that Bishop was unnaturally thin! This is an area where the writing might have been a little better planned IMO! But maybe it's just me?!

Back to the story! So Bishop claims she knows nothing about vampires, but she actually knows a lot, and was friendly with a vampire scientist in Geneva. She discovers that Clairmont is predictably protecting her. At that point I was reduced to hoping that this novel would not be yet another tale ostensibly about a strong female protagonist, but who in the end turns out to be nothing more than another weak women who desperately needs a powerful man to shelter her. My hopes were forlorn.

Bishop finds herself being stalked by vampires, wizards, witches and demons. Why the men are sometimes described as wizards rather than witches goes unexplained. It’s obviously the genderist Harry Potter factor leaking in. Clairmont tells her that it's because of the manuscript and Bishop's personal power that these people are drawn to her. One day when at lunch, she's visited by an Australian demon called Agatha Wilson, a woman who is supposedly a fashion designer. Then she disappears and we hear nothing from her (at least as far as I read). She bemoans the sad lot demons have to endure - unpredictably born of human parents, who often reject and abandon them. They have no heritage and no status, as witches and vampires do. She begs Bishop to share the content of the manuscript if she ever takes possession of it again, and Bishop agrees.

Clairmont invites her to a yoga class with him, and it's held in a sixteenth century manor out in the country - a manor which Bishop discovers was built by Clairmont, proving that he's at least five hundred years old (he's actually more than a thousand years old). The class is run by an Indian witch named Amira, and is, to Bishop's surprise, attended by vampires, witches and demons - and no humans. It's a pleasant change for her to be surrounded by these people and not feel under pressure or threatened as she has been when bugged by them in the library. What the point was of this is a complete mystery (as least for the first two hundred pages), since this yoga and fellowship never enters into the story.

Harkness unaccountably and repeatedly makes a distinction between "human" and witch/vampire/demon. Given that demons are born of humans, and given that vampires are fully human right up until that fatal bite, and that witches are human, period, I don’t get what she thinks she's distinguishing here. It could have been addressed with more clarity and/or better writing. Later Harkness tries to address this with allusions to mutations and chromosomal differences, but the 'explanations' are confused at best and silly at worst.

I gave Harkness the benefit of the doubt regarding whether Ashmole wrote in English or in Latin, but I guarantee you that Miryam, sister of Moshe (whom you might know as Mary, sister of Moses) did not write poetry in English! Even if we're expected to understand that the poetry was very loosely translated, Miryam did not have a modern concept of hours, and I'm guessing she had no idea what a chain was, so the poem makes no sense. As with so many Biblical characters, the name we know them by today wasn't the name they were originally given in Biblical fiction; neither Miryam nor Moshe were Hebrew names. The whole story is probably of Egyptian origin, not Hebrew. What is interesting is that Matthew has a vampire friend Miriam, who is helping him to bodyguard Bishop. Nothing is said about whether she's the Miryam who supposedly wrote that poem!

That's actually part of the problem: Nothing is said. We learn much about Bishop and Clairmont, but nothing about any other character. It’s like the rest of the cast is merely a sounding board to amplify the voice of the two main characters, which means this is a bit one-dimensional. We’ve met a witch called Gillian who seems furious with Bishop for no good reason. We meet Peter Knox, a very powerful witch who wants to get his hands on the manuscript, like everyone else. He tries to warn bishop off Clairmont.

Harkness would have us believe that Diana Bishop is a descendant of Bridget Bishop, the first so-called witch to be executed during the Salem witch trials, but Bridget was a Playfer before she was a Bishop, and she did not become a Bishop until her third marriage, which took place when she was in her mid-fifties. It was highly unlikely that there were any offspring from that marriage. If Diana is descended from one of her previous marriages (which did bear offspring), then why the fuss about her 'Bishop' name? Again, it's poor writing which makes no sense.

The love between Diana and Matthew grows predictably (no surprises there at all), but the sad thing is that once again we find ourselves in a story written by a woman, yet which revolves around a man subjugating/dominating/protecting a woman. Diana is scared and this is why she's attaching herself to him. She keeps making the claim that she can look after herself, but that claim is betrayed by her every action. And this is yet another novel where two characters need to exchange information - indeed, one of them wishes urgently to do so - yet they put off the exchange again and again! That's sad writing, but occasionally Harkness does offset this clunkiness with unintentional humor, like where she gives an initial impression that the rowing dock house is actually the striped color of the scarf which Matthew is wearing!

At about one-third the way through this novel, it became too tedious, repetitive, and boring. We continued to be treated (not really the right word, but nauseated seems cruel) to Bishop's 'dear diary' which consists of nothing more interesting than monotonous tales of her morning rowing, her pushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear (I'm not joking! The number of times this is brought up is laughable). She continues to visit the library where she tries, and fails this time, to get her hands on that manuscript. She's told that it has been missing for a century and a half, but she doesn't have the elementary smarts to have them look up her previous call slip and verify that she was delivered the manuscript! And that's it. Nothing else happens for insipid page after tiresome page after wearisome page, and I have other intriguing books waiting in the wings for this one to actually go somewhere, which it strongly promises not to do.

Matthew is cloyingly close, and other demons and witches show up at the library, vaguely threatening Bishop, and in the case of Knox, overtly so. Once again she betrays her claim to being able to take care of herself when someone leaves a plain brown envelope at the porter's lodge, evidently a joint effort between Knox and Gillian. She picks it up and opens it to find a color photograph of her parent's dead bodies, her mother broken, her father disemboweled, with his head stoved in. I guess they weren't such powerful witches after all.

Despite the fact that this occurred some two decades ago, Bishop is rendered into a jellyfish. I found that unbelievable given what we'd so far been told. It seemed to me to be yet another assault on a woman by a woman! At this point, Clairmont effectively takes Bishop hostage, refusing to take no for an answer, and eventually she lets herself be subjugated to this brute of a control freak, takes his sedative pills and passes out.

So first they decide to go to Africa where her parents were killed, then they decide to go to Paris where Clairmont has an ancient manuscript (why? who knows!); then we're treated to several tedious pages of Clairmont's ancient history extolling his virtues in 1777. Yawn. We also learn that this control maniac is not going to inform Bishop of the results of her DNA test (run to see where she stood in the hierarchy of witches). It was at that point I decided I no longer had any interest whatsoever in this tedious tale, and especially not when it more than likely involves reading another four hundred pages of dreary drivel of this nature. This is a definite warty.

Angel by Nicole Marrow and Laura Hayden

Rating: WORTHY!

I breezed through the first third of this with no effort which I took as a very positive sign! The writing is really good, and my fear that this was going to enter into a sickly embrace with instadore or paranormal trope was swept away leaving no stain on my consciousness. I still didn’t know at that point what was going on with the female protagonist, Angela, but I was on board!

It could have been a novel about an angel, exactly as its title suggests, which would be a big, fat red ink mark in this book's ledger, but it's also:

1. Not written in the first person present tense
2. Not a sad YA romance novel
3. Not a bearer of a prologue
4. Not written badly
5. Amusing
6. and supplied with at least three interesting characters

These are all big fat black ink marks in the ledger, so I'm really quite comfortable - moreso than I feared I would be when I saw this on the library shelf. Believe it or not, I was attracted by the color to begin with - a rich shiny orange which made it stand out from other books; it looked good enough to eat or drink! The title was a bit of a repulsive force-field, but after I read the blurb I was definitely interested, and after I read the first couple of pages, I decided that the writing made it worth a read, so it was not the problem I’d initially visualized.

That's not to say the writing is perfect; there's a handful of screw-ups, such as one p296: "Before Dante could Angela's denial..." which only goes to show that even an expensive production with a professional editor can fail and not end up as good a hob as a conscientious self-publisher can do., but here's the secret: if you write badly and tell and interesting story, you can get a lot further with me than if you write perfect prose, yet tell a crappy story! Marrow and Hayden do neither - they tread very well between those extremes, writing very well for the most part and telling a really engrossing (if somewhat oddball!) story.

I don’t know squat about either Marrow or Hayden, so I can’t say what the deal is with the process that put this novel together. I'm guessing that maybe Marrow had this idea for a novel and Hayden came on board to lend an experienced hand with the writing. Or maybe they're friends and cooked it up together. Whatever the deal is, it works well. Marrow is married to the rapper Ice-T and has been for some time (his real last name is Marrow). According to wikipedia, her nickname 'Coco' derives from her younger sister's inability to say the name 'Nicole' when they were kids! So it's not derived from the song by The Sweet, which they released well before they became big glam-rock stars in England with a string of hits.!

But I digress! The story starts on an airplane where a passenger wakes up and realizes she doesn't know where she is or even who she is. She hardly has time to contemplate this when the plane, which was gliding in for a landing, flips over and breaks up, cartwheeling along the Hudson River in New York City. The only survivors are the woman and the infant she saves from drowning. A news reporter for an online news magazine happens to be on a nearby ferry boat interviewing its captain when the plane crashes and he gets first-hand footage. He also leaps into the water to help this woman and the baby when he sees her swimming and no one else seems to be focusing on her. Later he's instrumental in getting her relocated - when the hospital wants to hastily discharge her - to a psychiatric facility. Her problem is that her memory isn’t coming back.

Her name is determined, by process of elimination, to be Angela, which is very close to the 'Angel of the Hudson' name she'd been dubbed with for saving the baby. Angela seems to have an extraordinarily disturbing effect on men. They seem to vacillate from feeling rather antagonistic towards her, to wanting to jump right into bed with her, no questions asked. A rep from the airline almost seduces her in her hospital room, but he has a heart-attack before anything can happen. Her doctor decides to discharge her as soon as he can because she seems to be a lawsuit waiting to happen, When Dante, the news reporter discovers (from his brother Bryant, who works at the hospital, that she's to be discharged with her memory still not intact, he publishes an article which effectively shames the airline into footing the bill for some extended psychiatric evaluation, to see if her amnesia can't be resolved.

The facility she's sent to is shabby and so it’s value to her as a remedy is highly questionable; clearly the airline hasn’t exactly splurged, but at least it's somewhere to stay! She's roomed with Gretchen, a rather valkeryan woman with serious anger control issues, but Angela, when threatened, uses some Judo move on her, which drops Gretchen to her knees and the two of them become friends after that.

There's one more thing. Angela hears voices which seem quite clearly to be the thoughts of people around her, but she doesn’t get all thoughts all the time. It seems to be a bit like Prince Po in Graceling: - she only seems to get thoughts which are directed specifically at her, although Angela is a bit of a Mary Sue about figuring this out. What transpires is that she finally realizes that it's men she can hear, not women at all, and on one of her daily constitutionals around the grounds, she "overhears" two night-shift orderlies plotting on raping her new roommate (Gretchen is by this point unceremoniously gone, for some reason). In order to defeat the evil orderlies, Angela switches meds on her roommate so she's the one who is out for the count; Angela then switches places with her. I think Marrow and Hayden need to learn a bit more about how medical facilities dispense medications and the power of what inappropriate dosages can do, but they've already established this place as sloppy at best, so I'm willing to let this one slide!

The two men come into her room at midnight and she's suddenly overcome by a desire to have sex with them, but then her previous plan breaks through her delirium, and she beats up on them instead. The next morning she "hears" one of them plotting revenge against, her so she checks herself out of the institution and calls Dante, using the number on the business card he left in her clothing when she was at the hospital. They meet at a diner (although on p170, Marrow mistakenly refers to it as a dinner!) in a bad part of New York City. I've been waiting for these two to get together, so let's see what happens now! I'm in a mood for blitzing this novel and getting it read today. That will also facilitate my starting on something new, which has become more imperative since it has relevance to a news item that's been on the airwaves over the last couple of days.

In the diner, they eat surprisingly tasty food, and Angela shares everything with Dante, including passing him a picture which she has drawn of the man who keeps on appearing in her nightmares - the man who killed her. Dante thinks she may be crazy - but she doesn't know this since he's the first man she cannot "hear". Despite his fear that he's as crazy as she is, he decides to help her. He starts by trying to get together a list of women from the local area who were murdered, and he narrows it down to a list of six he intends to investigate. Angela picks out a specific one: Chloe Mason and without seeing the photograph, identifies the perp, her husband Lars. Curiously, the drawing she did is never mentioned nor is it compared with the photograph. This appears to be an oversight on the part of the authors.

One evening very shortly thereafter, when Dante and Angela are in his cube discussing how to proceed, Dante's miserable boss Victor comes out. Angela hides and Dante talks with him briefly, but just when he thinks Victor is going to leave him in peace, Angela comes out of her hiding place and strikes up a conversation with him. It's during this and the events surrounding it that Dante discovers, as does Angela, that she can change her physical form, so she's not only reacting behaviorally towards fulfilling men's fantasies, she's now reacting physically and actually changing her appearance to match what they desire.

The reason she has done this in this case is that she caught Victor's thoughts - he only came to Dante's cube to plant some evidence which would destroy Dante's career and simultaneously free Victor from suspicion. Victor has been embezzling money from the news organization and was planning on disappearing to Brasil. Angela's transformation and mind-reading bring down Victor and get Dante a promotion: he now runs the news department and he hires Angela to work with him. When he and she are going through the resumes for the people he's considering hiring, Angela remarks that they're all women! Dante does indeed staff up his extraordinarily genderist news department with all female staff.

Three of these, Selma, Althea, and Ivy, are brought into Dante and Angela's confidence about what they're up to. The four of them go after Lars Mason under the pretense of giving him a freebie web spot advertising his sale of his magnificent mansion in the guise of an interview with this successful financier. He claims he's selling the house because it holds too many memories of his wife. Needless to say they bring him down, and that's how this story ends. But while there's no prologue, there is an epilogue which has Dante and Angela jetting off to LA to pursue what Angela was doing out there for two days before she flew back to NYC, became possessed by Chloe, and got into that crash. Clearly this novel was intended as the start of a series, and I have to say that I'd be up for reading a sequel, especially since we still don't know what Angela is or what happened when Chloe died and her "spirit" seemed to fly up and possess Angela's body right as her plane flew over the very place where Chloe was murdered.