School for Psychics by KC Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy, for which I thank the publisher.

Not to be confused with The School for Psychics by Carolyn Jourdan, this School for Psychics is volume one is a series which seems to have as its aim to be an adult version of Harry Potter, but don't let that fool you. It's really a YA novel with non-YA characters, and this made for an inauthentic, if not laughable story. I did not like it. I didn't like the main character, which was the first problem I had with this. She started out fine, but went rapidly downhill.

24-year-old Teddy Cannon owes a lot of money (like low six figures) to a Serbian crook by the name of Sergei. Her plan is to use her psychic ability (which she doesn't know she has) to win big at poker and repay the loan. How she ever got into such debt when she can win so easily at poker is a mystery. Though she doesn't realize it, she's psychic and knows exactly what the other players have in their hands.

In her ignorance of her true calling, she puts this skill down to her ability to detect their 'tells' - little peccadilloes and mannerisms which reveal what they're holding in their hands. As it happens when we meet her on her big gamble, she fails and is contacted by a mysterious man who invites her to come to the school for Psychics on an island off the coast of California. If she does, he says, all her debts will be paid. Does that sound like entrapment? It did to me, but Teddy isn't smart enough to be the least bit suspicious of how all this magically came together. I wondered if she was set up for this right from the off, but if she had been, it really would have made no sense anyway.

I also have to wonder, since she's been specially recruited - having been watched for some time - why her recruiter waited so long, and if he's so sure about her, why she has to undergo these entrance tests. As another reviewer suggested, it would have been better to test potential recruits before they arrive at this secret school, not afterwards, but none of this is gone into in the novel. It speaks very poorly of the recruiters skills that so many new entrants were kicked out so quickly. Up to the point of Teddy's arrival at the school, the story wasn't too bad at all and it held my interest, but it went downhill quickly once school began. The author needed to think this through much more than she evidently did, is what it felt like to me. It simply wasn't realistic, even within its own framework.

Teddy thought she was epileptic. She had no idea she was psychic, although how that happened went unexplained in the 25% or so of this that I could stand to read. You would think that someone introduced to a whole new world as Teddy was, would revel in it, but she acted like she didn't care much about anything - she behaved as though it was simply another day in the life, which again felt inauthentic.

In the end, my biggest problem with this was that I wanted to read "School for Psychics" not a heated Harlequin romance, but that was what I got instead. I wanted to read about a main character who was strong and independent and who relished the chance to learn to use her abilities. I did not want to read about clichéd 'bitch in heat' who really had no great interest in anything save the "hot guy" she sees on the first day, and with whom she can't wait to have unsafe sex. I don't do covers because my blog is about writing, and author's have little control over their cover unless they self-publish, but this novel's cover was actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it was wrong for the book, which ought to have had the stereotypical naked, shaven-chested guy on the front cover, standing behind a swooning Teddy.

So it's not really about psychics at all, it's about this woman's obsession with this guy and which turns into a clichéd YA triangle in short order. Yawn. I wanted something original and instead we got a boring version of X-Men crossed with Harry Potter, and this had the worst elements of both those and a poor YA novel into the bargain. There's even an guy unoriginally named Pyro. Barf. It's all adults, but it reads like a high-school romance. Sorry, not interested!

I wanted to read about the psychics, not how hot this woman thinks this guy is. If she'd just mentioned it a couple of times, that would be fine, but it's every other page and it's boring. I don't want to read about women like that. Women do not need a man to validate them and it's sad that so many female authors think they need not one, but two, including your standard trope bad-boy, to make a woman whole. I cannot recommend a novel that's as bad as this one, and is so insulting to women.

Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

Title: Born of Illusion
Author: Teri Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

The problem I had with this novel is that nothing happens in it. Nothing interesting, new, or different, anyway. It’s supposed to be a story about a mother-daughter team who have a magic/psychic show in the 1920's. The daughter, Anna van Housen, is the magician, and her rather abusive mother, Marguerite, is the fake psychic. While Anna is a capable magician (of the illusionist variety, not the really magical variety), her mother is an out-and-out fake, assisted by Anna in pulling the wool over people's eyes during their stage shows. The two of them are scam artists and conduct private seances which they use to criminally bilk the grieving out of money. Anna apparently sees nothing wrong in this.

For reasons unexplained, Marguerite treats Anna like dirt, employing her as a servant far more than she loves her as a daughter. Anna is rumored (by her mother) to be the daughter of Harry Houdini (although throughout, I suspected that this was a lie), who happens to be in New York at the same time as the van Housens. The non-twist here is that Anna actually can read minds and communicate with the dead.

In a mind-numbingly boring development, Anna acquires for herself two, and exactly two (no less, no more) men, a 'bad boy' and a 'good boy'. Yawn. The two are, for all practical purposes interchangeable, although the more serious of them, the 'good boy' who has the absurd name of Cole, is the one with this supposedly dark secret which turns out to be nothing. It became tedious beyond words to read how many times she looked into his dark eyes or had her heart skip a beat, and I habitually flipped off every single page upon which either of these two tired tropes put in an appearance, which may mean I missed a plot twist here and there, not that there was much plot; as I said, nothing happens in this novel. Oh, Anna does get kidnapped, but she's an escape artist and she almost immediately escapes. That's it for high adventure.

What about the writing? Well, it wasn't badly written in a technical sense, but I felt no compulsion driving me to read this. When I had to put it down for whatever reason, I had no thoughts along the lines of "when will I be able to get back to it?". I did not miss it when I wasn't reading it; that's how I know how thoroughly unappealing it was. Here's one line which I thought utterly absurd: It's pure magic to see the sun go down in the west..."??! Because normally, of course, it goes down in the east. Seriously, I can see what the author was attempting here, but it was written badly. She should have written, "It's pure magic to see the sun set as the city lights come on...", but she didn’t. Here's another classic when Anna is tied up: "I might be able to release myself, but in the condition I'm in, it would take far too much effort and leave me unable to defend myself..." Seriously? She can defend herself better tied-up than with hands free? Wow!

In short, I honestly cannot recommend this novel, and I certainly won't dishonestly recommend it.

The Adventures of Jillian Spectre by Nic Tatano

Title: The Adventures of Jillian Spectre
Author: Nic Tatano
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

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

This is yet another novel with a YA female main character told in the first person PoV, unfortunately. Fortunately, that wasn't the bad part. Unfortunately, the first 5% of the novel made me feel like I was reading the author's private notes - the very notes he jotted down when he first had the idea for the novel. You know, a bit like this maybe:

I know, I'll write a novel about a limp rag of a girl who wilts at not one, but two boys! And let's make her whole life about boys and very little else. Even the big theme is about a man (her father). No one's ever done that before! Lemme see, we need two polar opposite guys who inexplicably appeal to her equally to show what a dithering, witless bag of schizophrenic inertia she is! That's something new to bring to the YA table! So, the first guy will have "those deep blue eyes" and make her "heart flutter"! Yeah! Now there's an original premise. He'll be named Ryan Harker, because Harker not only spookily recalls Jonathan Harker of Dracula fame, but it also subconsciously suggests he's a good listener, and don't you know that all fluttering, blue-eye addicted, wilting girls like a good listener, right? And guess what, he'll never use her name, but use a demeaning nickname for her instead, like "Sparks". Yeah, that's never been done before.

Now how else can I lard this up so it meets the standard guide lines for trope YA? I know, I'll make the second guy edgy so that, while to any intelligent girl there's no choice to be made at all, our wilting girl is torn and anguished between the obviously decent guy and the obviously worthless guy, who thinks of her as meat. We'll call the bad boy Jake Revson because that's such a bad-ass name (revved up and all, you know), and let's give him bedroom eyes and we'll make his first line to Jillian be "You look hot today" because why the hell would she care about someone who likes her for who she is when she can have an unknown "rogue" who has eyes only for her supposedly hot bod? Now that's what I call a YA novel!

Seriously? You see where the author is blundering with this? I mean why take the road less traveled when you can bleat with the rest of the flock and fill your reader's head with wool? I should have ditched this one right there and then. So why continue reading? Well the only reason for me, at that point, was that this premise (other than YA trope trash, that is) was intriguing - that people have these psychic talents and this is out in the open, not secret, and that these people live in the same neighborhood: just like there's a China town in the city, there's also a psychic town in the city.

Perhaps a few words about the talents might be in order here. Jillian can see up to five years into the future. No reason why there's a limit, there just is, okay, live with it - it's kinda like Nicholas Cage's character in Next, but he could see only two minutes - again for no reason. One time, Jillian sees a woman die and sees her afterlife, which is supposed to be impossible. This gets her under the scrutiny of "The Council" because there's a group of four old fogies who rule the psychics with an iron fist. And her dad is gone. She thought he was dead, but it turns out he's still alive and despite all these psychics running around, no one knows where he is because he's "special". So Ryan Harker is a mind reader (but is too inept to grasp that Jillian finds both himself and Jake hot), Jake is a kinetic psychic (he can move stuff, like bra fasteners for example), and Jillian's BFF Roxanne is a 'muse'. Yep. A 'muse'.

The sad thing is that this Jillian Spectre character has something that could be really great if it wasn't betrayed at every turn by making her a sad-sack YA trope female main character. So I planned on continuing to read this for a while to see where it went. I was hoping the author would dig himself out of this mud hole in which he'd been wallowing, but if he was going to try dragging me down that road-most-trampled-to-death, I would be so outta there!

Talking of drag, I seriously doubt that the >Dennis Rodman reference will get any traction given that he was retired from big time sports before most of the people in the YA age range entered kindergarten. From a writing perspective, this isn't a trivial problem given that most YA authors are significantly outside of the YA age range. The age range itself is problematical, because it suggests you can write a novel and it will likely appeal to everyone within that range, which is patent nonsense given the huge differences which exist between your average 14-year-old and your average 24-year-old. So the 'YA' thing is an artificial construct at best. Older writers are much more likely to resonate with the upper end of the range than the lower, but even 24-year-olds will be unlikely to know who Rodman is, and a seventeen-year-old girl is hardly going to use him as a reference unless she's a huge basketball afficionado.

This out-of-date reference habit is a potential problem given the target. The author references Madonna at a later point as a mono-moniker'd artist. Yes, she would have far more traction than Rodman would, even with the younger set, but is the author not aware of a score of other single-name female performers who would be more likely on the lips of a seventeen-year-old than would Madonna's? Names like Adele, Beyoncé (or Birdy if you want a little more cachet), Ciara, Duffy, etc., but given that the comparison here is with a male, there is an equal number of single-name male singers, too. But we got Madonna.

That just seemed odd to me, but it didn't seem quite as odd as the school work being done by these seventeen-year-olds. My ten-year-old is learning geometry, yet the author depicts students in Jillian's year being asked to name simple triangles (equilateral and obtuse - hardly rocket science!), and being unable to do so? Is this a school for psychics or for remedial ed. cases? Seriously? Credibility is seeping out of the seams of this story with every new screen, and I'm only 10% in. I would really like to be entertained here, but the gaffs keep getting in the way of the entertainment. So at ten percent, I was looking at reading only to 25%, and just quitting the novel at that point if it didn't improve. It didn't. It actually got worse.

Much as I'd like to get to know Jillian, and to find out what's going on in her world, there's only so much crap I'm prepared to wade through to get there, especially when I have a host of other ebooks upon which I'd love to embark. I really don't care what they're studying in class, but please at least make it seem intelligent instead of completely throwing-away the scene because you couldn't be bothered to make it a bit more realistic. Where was the editor here? What is the point of going Big Publishing™ if your editor fails you like this? Although it's really on the author to get these things right in the first place. Like I've said before, I'm quite prepared to put up with some goofy crap if the story can support it; that is, if it's entertaining enough that I'm willing to let more stuff slide by, but if there's a host of such stuff, and the story doesn't merit the slogging through it, then no, I'm not going to put up with it.

And the clunkers kept on coming! How many seventeen-year-old girls know the Chippendales well enough to make it a nickname reference? Maybe they do but it seemed a bit of a long-stretch to me. Even if I let that go, however, there's worse. Tatano seems intent upon insulting as many high school stereotypes as he can, and while I have no affection for cheerleaders (I think their "rôle" is both genderist and pointless), this does not mean that they're automatic sluts as Tatano states in pretty much so many words. As if that's not bad enough, he next goes after someone who is overweight, comparing her with the Titanic.

Now I understand that it's his character, Jillian, who is giving expression to these thoughts, not the author per se, but here's the problem: I wouldn't like a main character for being a bitch any more than I'd like an author for being a bitch. So does he want me to perceive his main character as a bigot and a bitch, because that's what I think of her right now? Why would I want to follow a character like that? It's not like she has any sort of justification for her vitriol. All of this abuse was in pursuit of setting-up Jillian with what was evidently, at seventeen, her first date - with one of the school wrestling team whose only virtue seems to be chiseled abs. Let's not mention his short stature. (I said not to mention that!) But yeah, we get that, too. I don't expect a main character to be perfect. I'd rather she wasn't, but to see Jillian like this is nauseating. I'm just glad she never encountered any people of color while I was reading. Just how shallow can we make this character and indeed, this entire novel? This was at almost 20% in and I was honestly starting to feel that I wouldn't even make 25%.

What finally made me feel like this novel should have been issued with a barf bag was actually two things. The first was Tatano's reference to "that gal in the Olympic soccer game years ago". He's referring to when Brandy Chastain, having kicked the winning penalty shot in the World Cup soccer final against China (giving the USA the world cup!), pulled off her soccer shirt in celebration of her finest moment on the field. The story was way, way overplayed by male-driven media, but it was memorable, yet Tatano can't even remember her name! He can't even tell us why it was so significant, but you know what, neither of these things is the problem! The real problem here is that he has seventeen-year-old Jillian, who was way too young to even remember this event (it was in 1999), somehow pulling it up from memory to make a comparison and referring to Chastain as "that gal". Honestly? This made no sense given her non-sporting character.

That was pretty much bad enough right there, and plenty reason to dump this novel, but the second thing showed up right on the 25% marker, and this was Jillian's mother saying that women are useless - though not in those exact words. The argument is about the risk of Jillian becoming pregnant. Jillian argues that her mother never had that problem, so why should her daughter? Her mother's response is that she had a father to look after her whereas Jillian doesn't. Seriously? How genderist can you get? If a woman is a single mom she's useless? Only if you have a guy around can you raise a decent daughter? Had this not been on my kindle, had it been a paperback, I think I would have shredded the novel in the garbage disposal at that point.

Now before you say a word, let me say that I understand the difference between an entire novel expressing genderist views and a character in a novel expressing those same views. I don't have a problem with a character being portrayed like that because there really are people like that. If Jillian's mother had been the only example of this, then I would have been fine with that, but when we have a novel which is riven with genderism (and with other issues as I've outlined here, such as bitchiness and bigotry), to the point where you really can't get away from it, then I'm not interested in reading it. You're welcome to read it and embrace it if you wish (it's a free country), but count me out. I have no interest at all in reading it, let alone in trying to dig through page after page of it in the hope that I can find some gold amongst the dross.

What I wanted here was to read a story about a girl who was remarkable in some way. What I didn't want to read about was a seventeen-year-old boy badly disguised as a girl, which is what Tatano screeched to me that Jillian was in this one segment alone. You know authors can make all the excuses they want: "Oh I never imagined any reader would take it that way", or "It's really a matter of interpretation" or "Everyone does it", or "I'm really surprised that people are viewing it like that", but you ought to know that when it's become an integral part of your novel, it's not a matter of interpretation or differing opinion, it's a matter of it being badly written, and that's it. And I'm not reviewing everyone; I'm reviewing this one novel right here, right now, and this one novel is warty! I don't need to read any more, nor do I need to be psychic to get that vibe loud and clear!