Pentecost by JF Penn

Title: Pentecost
Author: JF Penn
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

You'd think a novel with 'Pen' in the title penned by a writer whose last name is Penn would be a novel made in heaven, especially if it's about religious nut-jobs, but it wasn't to be. More like 4F.

This novel is about Morgan Sierra who is a psychologist resident in Oxford, England. She was, at one time, a soldier in the IDF - the Israeli Defence Force. When a stone is stolen from a nun who is murdered in Varanasi (aka Benares or Kashi) in India (I am not making this up!), this somehow connects to Morgan, and she becomes the target of Thanatos - a cult of the deludedly religious (OTOH, what religion isn't?!) who are evidently chasing after the 'stones of power'. Her involvement also brings in her sister and niece, who are kidnapped. Fortunately, this weak woman is saved by a trope macho military guy who happens to be a member of a secret society named 'ARKANE', especially not when his name is, absurdly, Jake Timber! Really?

I can't even remember how I got hold of this novel and it sat there for ages without me feeling any great urge to pick it up. I started it more than once, but I absolutely could not get into it. I don't like stories where the main female character is presented as tough and independent, but immediately needs a guy to rescue and validate her. I didn't read all of this by any means, so I can't speak for how it all panned out. Maybe things turned around, but I simply could not get into the novel at all, so I can't offer any sort of recommendation.

I don't see how a huge secret of 'power stones' (seriously?) would lay dormant for 2,000 years, so the underlying plot was farcical to me to begin with. Worse than that, there seemed to me to be nothing here but trope - the tough female, but motivated solely by 'female motivations' - her sister, her niece - her mothering instincts.

Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but why is it that when a male hero is in play, his motivation is typically patriotism, duty, military loyalty, training, and bromance, but when a female becomes the main character, the criteria change completely? Can a woman not be patriotic? Can she not feel comradeship with her fellow men/women? Can she not be motivated by duty? Does it always have to be rescuing her mom/sister/niece/nephew/child? And vice-versa for the guy.

I think this is one of the strongest reasons why this was so tedious to me, and why it didn't pull me in or invest me with any interest in these people. They were, essentially, non-entities. It seems like the plot had a life of its own, and any random characters could have been plugged in to fill the character slots, so there was nothing special about the characters who happened to be attached. There really was nothing really new or notably original in the part that I read, and since the characters were unappealing, I found no point in continuing to read this and certainly no need to pursue an entire series about such pointless and uninteresting people.

Unilateral by Chris Katsaropoulos

Title: Unilateral
Author: Chris Katsaropoulos
Publisher: Waterside Productions
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is an odd little story, only some ninety pages and written in a quite large and double-spaced font, so it’s more like 45 pages. The front cover describes it as "a novel" but it's actually closer to a novelette.

The story features two main characters: Amel, a young Palestinian girl who lives in the beleaguered Gaza strip, and Ra'anan Cohen, a fighter-bomber pilot who lives in Israel and who is filled with disgust with - and hatred for - the Arabs.

Amel's only dream is getting out of her tiny wreck of a village where's she's perennially hidden under a burqa, and is a victim of the lustful gazes of men wherever she goes. She wants to be her own "master" and free to live a better life.

Ra'anan dreams of the cease-fire being over so he can get back to bombing terrorists. Finally it is, but as he slows his speed and levels off his jet for his smart bomb run, targeting a tunnel system which Amel's brother is secretively helping to build, something changes dramatically.

It's not what I was considering might happen: that Amel and Ra'anan would somehow end up together wondering at how they could have been such 'enemies'. It’s more of a rationalization - some might argue a spiritual awakening - that brings about a change in Ra'anan's thinking.

I wasn't a huge fan of the ending. It seemed too much to arise from what little had come before, but it’s really not that significantly different from the kind of ending I wrote for an entirely different short story I published in Poem y Granite, so it would be hypocritical of me to down-grade it for that! Hah! Hoist by my own petard!/p>

Seriously, what impressed me in this story wasn't the ending, but the writing. It was really well done, very evocative, with really excellent world-building from so few words. The writing takes you right to the location, and has you walking by the side of the characters, hearing what they heard, seeing what they saw, feeling what they felt. It was all of that which made me consider this to be a worthy read.

Bond & Benevolence: Good Samaritan by JC Johnston

Title: Bond & Benevolence: Good Samaritan
Author/Editor: JC Johnstonn
Publisher: Delegate Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

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

This is an utterly bizarre story that's like a weird fairytale. It’s also told in first person omniscient, which is totally out there. It’s even more off-the-wall in that the story is all about Sam, not about the 1PoV narrator, who is telling Sam's story and relating events in detail for which she was never present! It’s actually not a novel at all in any meaningful sense, but a Bible tract telling you how to live your life, with no attempt made to even try to disguise its nature, but it's far more out in left field than that because it has some extreme violence and some bad language in it, too.

The tale is almost all conversation. There's no descriptive writing, no setting of place or atmosphere, except in the briefest and sketchiest of manners. The story is seemingly aimed at relatively mature young-adult readers, but it’s written in a voice that seems more appropriately aimed at very young children. This makes the violent themes more inexplicable. It begins with the story of Sam Raider's dad, who likes to give away a lot of stuff, and some of this stuff is Sam's: things she had when younger but now no longer uses.

At first she doesn't want to part with her things, but slowly she adopts her dad's attitude. One of these things is a violin, and Sam decides to give it away for free, and then volunteers to give lessons to the impoverished young girl of color who gets it. This entails traveling to a really bad neighborhood, with her dad, who is rightly nervous for her safety, and won't let her go alone. Why he doesn't insist that they simply pick up the girl for tutoring is left unaddressed.

Next Samantha visits the somewhat oddball Mrs Doyle. This is the Mrs Doyle of whom Sam later decides she going to un-clutter her house and get her mind right, because clearly Sam is the only person on the planet who knows what’s good for anyone and everyone. After she leaves Mrs Doyle's house, a boy she knows runs out of a nearby house to marvel that she visited the weird Mrs Doyle.

He thinks Mrs Doyle poisoned his dog because it was known to soil her lawn, but Sam's view is that Justin's girlfriend poisoned his dog after he arranged to go to the prom with her and then turned up with a different girl. Sam's vicious and nasty retort is that she, too, would have poisoned his dog if he had done that to her.

WHAT?

Is this supposed to endear me to Sam? Make me think what a wonderful, generous person she is? It doesn't. It makes me think she's a psycho and a jerk. The narrator goes on about how having his dog poisoned had made Justin a better person (but it didn’t). She says nothing whatsoever about how evil someone would have to be to poison a dog because she was jilted for another girl by its owner. That just slides right on by! How sick is that? These people are sick and warped.

When she's not sitting in front of the mirror reflecting upon how truly beautiful she is, Sam's full-time job is messing in the affairs of her acquaintances, and lecturing them on how to live their lives. For example, when Justin dropped out of school, Sam, interfering busy-body that she is, felt compelled to visit him and read him the riot-act about not living off his parents! She says nothing about how much she enjoys living off the largess of her own very wealthy father. Sam is a hypocrite. When Justin reveals to her that his girlfriend, Molly, is pregnant, Sam starts interfering in her life, too, declaring what a huge sin it is to even think about an abortion! She starts ordering Molly around and telling her what she must do.

I find it odd that Sam, supposedly so religious, never ever goes to church or prays. Weird. Perhaps it’s because Sam is the biggest jerk, know-it-all, and interfering busy-body I've ever encountered in a story. I have no idea what color, race or ethnicity Sam is, but all of her advice seems to be doled out to persons of color, like she's the big white empress coming to tell the "colored folks" how to live their lives better! What arrogance!

One particularly striking example of interference, and strutting around over the less fortunate, occurs when they visit Ophelia again to teach her some more violin. Mr Raider suggests they all go out to eat, but Ophelia's mom demurs, saying that her family has nothing decent to wear (yep, that's how impoverished they are!), so Mr Raider takes them all to the store to buy clothes for them! Is this what Jesus would do?! Subsequently he lavishes them with presents and starts hitting on Ophelia's mom.

The next time they visit Mrs Doyle, Sam orders her to go take a shower! Lol! What a rude, interfering little jack-ass Sam truly is. Sam then went to work exfoliating Mrs Doyle! I am not making this up. Sam clearly has learned nothing from the Bible - assuming she ever read it. Under any other circumstances, I’d say was a positive thing, but this girl is supposed to be religious. She's all about pretty, about skin-deep, not about being who you are.

By chapter nine, "Sam felt she could do no wrong". Isn't that how all religious fanatics feel? It’s hilarious that all these things for which they're thanking a god are actually coming not from any gods, but directly from Mr Raider's fat wallet. There would be nothing were it not for that, including the $30,000 he wires to Ophelia's grandmother for the wedding. It’s easy to be grateful to a god when you have boundless wealth, isn’t it?

The story takes an utterly bizarre Kill Bill turn at the wedding of Sam's dad and Ophelia's mom. Evidently her father had a secret past which catches violently up with him, and Sam ends up showing her true colors: refusing to forgive him, refusing to help him, and instead, burning down his house in retribution! That's what a fine Christian she is. What a charmer. I'm sorry, but this novel is total trash and it sucked beyond anything I've read in a long, long time.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Title: The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book sadly read by Betty Harris.

This is, according to Atwood, speculative fiction, but I don't think she knows the difference between dystopian, speculative, and sci-fi. Either that or I don't! It's about a future USA where life has changed dramatically after a terrorist attack which kills the president and congress. The attack is carried out by a group of religious nut-jobs which then allows another group of religious nut-jobs, calling themselves 'the Sons of Jacob' to take over. This of course would never happen, not even in the USA, but that's the premise we're dealing with here.

The SoJ quickly takes over, suspending the constitution, and removing all women's rights by confiscating their financial records. This is the part that couldn't happen. Most women would never let this happen, and neither would most men.

The biggest problem I had was with how very quickly this occurs. The narrator, the main character, is a woman in her early thirties, and she remembers very well what things were like before, which means she must have been in high school (or older), which in turn means that this all not only took place, but became solidly cemented in place, in twenty years or less, which isn't feasible.

Yes, Atwood does represent life as an ongoing war between the Republic of Gilead (how did that name change ever come about and why?) and 'the rebels', but we're never really told anything about the rebels, nor is the complete absence of Islamic forces addressed. If the Islamic terrorists conducted this hugely successful attack in the first place, then why are there not insurgents flocking to the USA as they did to Iraq? Why aren't they flocking there anyway? The secret is that this novel was written and published thirty years ago, so a lot gets lost in the translation of the years.

So the premise of the story is weak, but if you're willing to let that go, it becomes a bit more interesting, and some of the things she writes are prescient. She doesn't include anything that isn't happening, or that hasn't happened as a result of ridiculous religion.

That said, I felt that Atwood rambled far too much about unimportant details at the beginning, larding the novel with a rather amateurish info-dump, which keeps on giving. There is far too much tedious detail. I read this some time back and decided to give it another try for a review, but I simply could not stay with it the second time around, and the mediocre reading of Betty Harris didn't help at all.

On top of that, I've never been a fan of first-person PoV novels, as this one is. Some are enjoyable, but most of them, for me, kick me right out of suspension of disbelief because it's far too absurd to me to credit that a narrator can tell a story in such detail, especially if they're supposedly telling it as it happens. It's ridiculous and unnatural. It's also extraordinarily limiting on the writer, but that's not even the worst problem here.

The conceit of this novel is that this story was recovered from audio tape after the Republic of Gilead had been overturned. What better opportunity could there have been than to make this dramatic as though it was really and truly the actual audio tape we were listening to? But no - it was wasted, which I think is a crying shame and a huge black mark against this audio version for me.

The main character is Offred (Of Fred - meaning owned by Fred). While I thought this was a cool name, I did wonder, if the commander had two such handmaidens, what the second one would be called. Perhaps they're permitted only one at a time. She's kept only for two years, and solely for reproductive purposes, and as such is in some ways privileged, but in other ways is disparaged as little more than a prostitute.

Offred is in the unenviable position of wishing that she will become impregnated by her rapist quickly because this will in effect maintain her 'market price' by demonstrating that she's fertile. If she fails, she could lose her 'privileged' position. I mean: what use could a woman possibly be, if she cannot have children, we're asked to accept here, and indeed, this has been a fundamental motivation of fundamentalism ever since religion began. This is one of those cases where humanity is supposedly largely sterile - in this case due to pollution and STDs, which is not really credible either, but that's what we have.

This is Offred's third such two-year 'assignment'. If she fails to become pregnant this time, then she will be classed as an 'unwoman' and be forced to the colonies to clean up nuclear pollution and die an early death. This time, her experience is different in that while The Commander is supposed only to have sex with her during The Ceremony (with his own wife present as a witness (lying underneath the handmaiden as the commander labors over her to try and bring on labor nine months hence), he wants Offred much more than this, and bribes her with illicit materials such as magazines, cosmetics, and the chance to read.

The bizarre thing is that The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is also plying Offred with inducements to get pregnant by encouraging her to have sex with The Commander's driver, Nick - so yes, it's quite literally a cluster-fuck, especially when The Commander's wife discovers Offred's extended relationship with The Commander, and Nick tells Offred that he can facilitate her escape - if she trusts him.

So it could have been a really great novel, but it failed because there was too much tedium between the interesting bits (and limited bits they were). Atwood is a great fan of telling; not so much with the showing. I can't recommend this. Go read Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman if you want a truly feminist PoV.

Contemporary Passion by RM Romarney

Title: Contemporary Passion
Author: RM Romarney
Publisher: Vivid Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

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

I don't usually review poetry because I tend to find very little that speaks to me or impresses me in any relatable way, but I have to admit that this one has what it takes and turned out to be entertaining. It's a 38-page poem (in my ebook ARC) set in modern times, but played out as religious passion play. Actually, to me, it seemed more like a musical, or like that old Queen song, Bohemian Rhapsody, and I enjoyed it a lot despite its religious theme.

It features a group of young, passionate, and virile artists in process of recording an album of music, and having some serious relationship issues along the way - and I mean serious! And for once, I get a book with a truly appropriate cover! Yeay!

I think this poem made an impression on me because in some ways it reminds me of some of my own, such as published in Poem y Granite, but I've never written one as long as his! To reference my own work might seem self-serving or self-absorbed, but isn't that how we all are with poetry? It has to reach us, doesn't it? It has to say something to each of us personally, and speak in a voice we understand - one to which we can easily relate, otherwise it's meaningless, obscure, pointless, and boring. Contemporary Passion was none of the above, which is why it appealed to me. It was joyful and passionate, and had a life of its own, and I salute the author of it.

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

Title: The Secret Supper
Author: Javier Sierra
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Originally published as La Cena Secreta, I read the English translation of this novel some time ago, before I began blogging. I came across the audio book version of it in the library, so I decided to give it a listen so I could blog it here. The problem was that once I started listening, I also started wondering how in hell I'd managed to not only read this book, but also think it was worth retaining the book in my collection with a view to possibly re-reading it at some point down the road.

Clearly I'd found something in it the first time around that was just as clearly absent this time. Has my perspective on novels changed so much? It wasn't that long ago that I read this - maybe two years? Have I become so much more critical - so much less forgiving? I guess!

The novel is set around 1520 when Leonardo da Vinci was painting The Last Supper fresco. The conceit here is that it's the recorded words of Agostino Leyre, a chief inquisitor in the Catholic church. He's supposed to be putting this story on paper (or parchment or whatever) in his old age while living as a hermit, but no one actually writes like that in those circumstances! That struck me as false.

If you are writing a diary, you might record a conversation, but even then you wouldn't record it like you do in a novel. If your conversation went like this, for example:

Jane entered the room with an aura of frustrated anger covering her imposing form.

"That's it!" she said with an explosion of air that had evidently been tightly constrained by her lungs for far too long.

Mesmerized slightly by the rain of dust motes caught in the brilliant afternoon sunshine filtered by the trees outside and by the dirty windows of her apartment, it took me a minute to register the full force of her presence and her declaration, let alone figure out what was upsetting her.

Is something wrong?" I asked superfluously, trying to gain myself some time and perhaps elicit further information before I was forced to commit to a response and perhaps to yet another exercise in frustration with her.

"Have you not been listening?" she asked in sheer disbelief.

This engendered in me a sour feeling of further reduced assurance than I was already harboring. What was I, some sort of NSA operation that I listened in on her every communication?! "I try not to listen to people on the phone," I said, slightly nervously. The truth was that I'd tuned her out completely, and dissolved into a rather soporific day-dream, the memory of lunch still heavy on my stomach as it was.

Jane gave me one of her 'what do I have to do with you' looks and took a deep breath. "Dick no longer wants to run with me. He says I'm too slow for his pace and he's found a new partner. This is the guy I got back on his feet, and now I'm back to running alone. In these streets." She paused and I suddenly got the feeling that this was all about to come back on me. It always does. I hadn't even begun to get my head-shake in motion before her face took on a look like it was the dawn of a new age and she asked, "Why the hell don't you go running?"

Seeing that look on her face, I must admit I suddenly felt like it.

©Ian Wood 2014

Now let's consider that same event as written in the 'victim's' diary:

So I had lunch with Jane this afternoon, and we ended up back at her place, which is still a mess, and Dick the dick calls her out of the blue to say he's ditching her as a running partner. Now she expects me to saddle up. That ain't gonna happen. OTOH, I'm not about to let her start running these streets again on her own.
©Ian Wood 2014

See the difference? Obviously no one writes a diary the same way as everyone else, so your idea of a diary entry will differ from mine, but I guarantee you no one writes a diary like the first example, either; that's how it's written when it's not actually a diary but is actually a novel outright lying that it's a diary. In the same vein, no one writing a real reminiscence writes like Agostino Leyre is supposed to be doing here, so from the off, this thing shouted fake to me (but this kind of falsehood will win you medals and 'literary' prizes!). How did I get past that last time? I honestly don't know.

One thing I became really tired of hearing was multiple repetitions of "Santa Maria delle Grazie". This is simply a church name: Holy Mary of Grace. What I didn't get is why these names are never translated in novels? Why is everything else translated (for example, we might get Rome, not Roma in a novel or Florence in place of Firenze), but then we get Santa Maria delle Grazie? It makes no sense. Nor did it make sense to keep repeating this instead of simply referring to it as "the church" or "the cathedral" or some other variation. Just a pet peeve!

So the story is about Da Vinci hiding secrets in his paintings, and an anonymous "Soothsayer" making prophecies, and Leyre's investigation into this. I honestly don't recall the ending (or most of the plot). I just remember that I once liked this, but now apparently don't! So I can't recommend it!

H2O by Austin Boyd and Brannon Hollingsworth

Title: H2O
Author: Austin Boyd and Brannon Hollingsworth
Publisher: AMG Publishers
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a 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 authors of their story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

It's funny I should start reviewing this tonight when it's pouring down with rain outside as a humongous and adorable thunderstorm comes rolling through!

After reading only only a couple of sentences of H2O I thought I would dislike it. The florid language just turned my stomach, but I pressed on and was rewarded with a story which grew more fascinating as I progressed, but as I progressed it became obvious this was Christian fiction and there was no mystery over what the protagonist was experiencing. I was interested to note that it takes two guys to write a novel from the female perspective! lol! I'm an atheist, but I have no objection to religious fiction as long as the author(s) don't try to make too much sense out of it or take it too seriously, so I began in a state of curiosity as to where they would take this.

The main protagonist is Kate Pepper, a senior (rank, not age!) employee of an aerospace software corporation who is flying high in her world. She's also well-known for her sashimi and for the charity affairs she puts on with her boyrfriend Xavier. I love Kate Pepper. I know someone whom I really respect and whose maiden name is Pepper, and I used to date someone whose nickname was Pepper, and I love the Pepper Potts character in Ironman, so this effect hardly comes as a surprise to me, but the character is written well, even though she's sometimes infuriating to me. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to pan out too well!

I don’t know what it is about women with a soft belly, but Kate has one, amd I would take one of those over one with a washboard stomach - all other things being equal - any time, anywhere! OTOH, I'd take the washboard if she had a mind behind it, and the soft belly didn’t (and I had a choice!). But that's just me. Where this soft spot for a soft spot came from, I have no idea, but it’s a part of me and I don’t care to discard or abuse it.

Kate Pepper is an over-achiever, which didn’t win any points with me. Much worse than that, though, is that she's in an abusive relationship - of the mental, not the physical kind, but the physical kind is more than taken care of by Kate herself! She slices her hand making sashimi. She flies off her motorbike and is hospitalized because she's going way-the-hell too fast in the rain. She passes out in the shower, and goes temporarily blind making rice balls!

The one thing all of these events have in common, which Kate is evidently too slow to figure out, is water. There is something about water on her skin which transports her - and as the story progresses evidently does so quite literally - to another world - or more accurately to another time: Biblical times. This world is hard to understand and very scary and hallucinatory as far as Kate is concerned. I'm bothered by the fact that if water has so dramtatic an effect on her, then why doesn't the water - which is some 70% of her body! - have a huge effect? Why doesn't the water in the coffee in which she over-indulges, have an effect? There is a lame attmept to explain this away by saying the water needs to be in a pure form to have this effect on her, but that's just nonsense! No water is truly pure - even fresh water from your faucet or from a store bought bottle has some contaminants in it; that is not necessarily to say these contaminants are harmful, just to say that there's really no such thing as pure H2O.

When I got to a point which was some 30 pages shy of finishing this novel, I was seriously done with it! If this is Christian religious fiction, it falls far short of the glory of god! H2O has gone downhill fast and I find that hard to believe given how interested I was in it at the start, but I've read children's stories that are more intelligent, sophisticated, and believable than this one is. It’s painfully obvious what this is all about and has been since the first couple of visions which Kate has had. The only mystery in this novel is why Kate is so retarded in figuring out what’s going on. She was raised a Catholic and yet is completely brain-dead as to the religious nature of the visions!

I'm sorry, but I don’t want to read stories about people who are that irremediably and unrepentantly (yes, I use that word advisedly!) stupid. This Kate, the dumb as a brick Kate, is not the Kate I was led to believe this story was about in the beginning. That Kate - the one I loved, has left the building. I don’t know this substitute Kate and I don’t want to. This Kate is a weak woman who needs a guy to rescue her. But then the church has never been very kind to women, has it? Not since Eve at any rate! But that's not the worst sin in which Boyd and Hollingsworth indulge themselves!

Her "savior" has the initials JC. Why isn't that a surprise? But get this: his name is John Connor. Yes, he's the guy who fights the terminator machines! Not really, but did Boyd and Hollingsworth not see a Terminator movie? That's actually not the great sin; the great sin is that these visions appear to be nothing more than Jesus trying ineffectually to get Kate back into the fold. Jesus evidently is learning nothing from his consistent failures, but like an idiot, he continues repeating these same actions over and over again regardless of the cost to Kate, in the absurd hope of a different outcome! Seriously? Isn't that the definition of insanity?! He's putting her through this endless torment in order to say "Hi!"? I thought that was supposed to be Satan's job?!

Let me make this comparison: If someone you hadn't seen in a long while wanted to renew your acquaintanceship, but instead of simply coming right up to you and saying "Hi!", deliberately avoided meeting you face to face, and instead tried to force you back into a relationship by slipping you a drug which caused you to have bizarre and scary hallucinations, and caused you to injure yourself because of those hallucinations, making you think you were ill, delusional, and mentally deranged, would that be someone you actually wanted to be acquainted with? Excuse me, but you are a bona fides nut-job if your answer to that question is "Yes."

We're talking here about a character which I consider to be fictional, but which 90% of the US population accepts as real. He's claimed to be not only the most powerful being there is, but also supposed to be love itself, and yet the only way he can think of to get you to pay attention to him is quite literally to hit you upside the head? No! No one who loves you does that to you, not even when that person is human. For a god of love to do that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This is an abusive relationship!

The irony here is that we’re shown Kate in an abusive relationship at the start of this story and she's back in one at the end! Just when we see her start to drag herself out of the previous one, we see her being told by more than one person that she needs to get into another one, where an even more powerful alpha-male figure wants to literally take over her life and do it not with love, but with violence, abuse, and threats? The biggest one of those threats is of course, that she either bows to him and quite literally worships him for eternity (how boring is that?), or she must literally rot in hell? How is this a step up for her?

I'm sorry but I can't read any more of this story! It's simplistic, juvenile opiate for the masses, and it makes zero sense even within its own religious framework. This story began great, and I was willing to go with it despite my misgivings that it would go exactly where in fact it actually did go, but though it started so well, it rapidly went to hell in a hand-basket. I cannot recommend this story to anyone who has any integrity and self-respect, and I especially cannot recommend it to women.

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.