Bumbling Into Body Hair by Everett Maroon

Title: Bumbling Into Body Hair
Author: Everett Maroon (no dedicated website found)
Publisher: Libertary Co.
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 novel is reward aplenty!

This is a review that is, in some ways, tied in with another book I read during this time. The two are not related except in that they're about gender identification. I thought it would be fun to review them both together (but separately!), so while the reviews cross-reference a bit, they're different (although both books are worthy reads), and I invite you to read both. On my blog, the reviews were both posted next to each other on the same day, but if you're reading this at some other venue you may have to dig around to find the other review.

So this is a book which I decided would be fun to blog along with Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky. The two stories, one factual (this one) and one fictional, are like bookends to the entire spectrum of gender identity, which is a lot more complex than most people realize. Unlike the novel, which is middle-grade, this book deals with mature adults (or not so mature in some cases as the author testifies!), and additionally, carries the messy complexity of real life.

While Gracefully Grayson was fictional, it was the opposite of this story in many ways: it was about a young boy who identified more as a female than ever he did as a male whereas this one is of a very real journey from female to male. Indeed, this is almost a guidebook on what to do and not to do to make that journey successful and as painless as possible. For that alone, it's important and well worth the reading.

I have to say up front that I would have liked the author to have said a word or two (okay, Picky-Picky, some paragraphs!) about how this novel came to be - particularly about how it came to be so detailed. No one short of those with eidetic memories (and their attendant problems) can remember exact conversations and sequences of events, especially from several years ago, yet we read them detailed here, so clearly there is some sort of creative writing going on, even though the events and conversations depicted are, I have no doubt, real ones. I would have liked to have learned how this was done - how the author filled in the gaps (and the gaps in memory) since there's no mention of a detailed diary being kept.

Bumbling Into Body Hair is a true story about a man who was born in a woman's body and underwent a painful, amusing, rewarding, and educational transition to 'normalize' himself. The blurb for this book exaggerates the humor somewhat, and sadly underplays the trauma, but both are included in the story and are equally engaging. This story is very well written and very poignant. Sometimes it made me angry (ditch Pat already!), and sometimes it made me laugh, but mostly it made me feel for what Everett had to go through, and the fortitude and good humor with which he girded (yes, girded, I shall have it no other way) his, er loins!

Everett began life as Jenifer (one n), growing-up with a sister in a loving family home, and ending-up in a decent, although perhaps a somewhat monotonous job, but with great co-workers. Some might call it a comfortable rut. That's pretty much when the story begins for us, the readers, although of course it began long before this for Everett, trapped inside Jenifer and not even fully cognizant that there was indeed an escape route that didn't involve lying in a bath of warm water with a sharp knife.

Everett, as Jenifer, had long been identified as a lesbian, and I was intrigued that this author seemed to accept this label. I've read other accounts where a significant distinction is drawn between an XX person who identifies as a heterosexual male, and one who identifies as a gay female. I guess there's some dissent even among those who are more intimately familiar with all of this than am I!

The real hero of this story is the woman who plays a somewhat secondary role to us as readers, but who no doubt fulfilled a very primary role to the author: Susanne, who met Everett when he was very much an overt female, still struggling over what to do about his feelings, and who fell in love with him and stayed with him all the way through surgery and on into a marriage. That takes love, dedication, and courage, and I salute her.

It's actually because of Susanne that I had another - not so much 'issue', as 'bout of sheer curiosity' - over why so much painful detail was relayed about everything in Everett's life - which takes guts and a commendable commitment towards bravely informing others of what's truly involved in a literal life-changing pursuit such as this - and yet we're robbed of a lot of the intimacy of this remarkable relationship between his self and Susanne.

I don't know if this is because of personal privacy concerns, and I certainly wouldn't want an important story like this to spill over into pandering to salacious or prurient interests, but it struck me that a really critical part of this transition was the love and affection between these two, and yet we get not a hint of any joys or problems experienced as the two of them interacted physically, one very much a woman, the other transitioning from a woman to a man.

I would have liked to have read something about how they felt, how they perceived it, how their physical intimacy changed (or didn't) as this transition took place - or at least a word or two as to why Everett (and perhaps Susanne) chose not to share this! Yes, of course it's their life and they're entitled to share as little or as much as they wish, but given that he's already sharing such intimate details, a word or two about the nature of the relationship and how it grew and changed would not have been out of place, and would have been appreciated by me, at least.

In short, I recommend this story. I loved the detail, and the endless parade of things which cropped up - surprising things which might never occur to someone who had not undergone this change no matter how deeply they might have gone into it as a thought exercise. I loved the humor and the endless battle with bureaucracy as Everett gamely began to solidify these changes in terms of endless paperwork. It was all the more funny, I felt, because he worked in government, so in some ways he was getting a taste of his own medicine!

Most of all I loved this for the courage, honesty, and equanimity with which he pursued this dream, this need, and his sharing of this necessary course correction in his life. It's a warming message to us all, no matter what our own circumstances are - a heartening siren song telling us all that we can get there if we're willing to make the journey, no matter what our own personal journey is.

Note that Everett Maroon also has a novel out: The Unintentional Time Traveler. Note also that if you liked this story or Gracefully Grayson you might also like to read The Greatest Boy Ever Made a work of fiction which curiously has a lot in common with both of these books, and which I reviewed back in September.

Second Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

Title: Second Daughter
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
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 novel is reward aplenty!

This is the sequel to Third Daughter which I reviewed positively today. I have to say I was a bit surprised, since I'd had the impression (wrongly, it seems!) that each of the three novels in the trilogy would be told from the perspective of the particular daughter to which the title referred, but it does not seem to be that way since this novel opens not with Seledri, the second daughter to the queen, and her adventures, but with Aniri (the third daughter) focused on her imminent wedding to Prince Malik. Indeed, the second daughter plays very little part in the story although she's the trigger for some major events.

This novel takes off from pretty much where the previous one ended, and is told from Aniri's PoV (again, not first person thankfully!). At the end of the previous novel it looked like there was a second sky ship out there which could still threaten Dharia, Aniri's homeland. In addition to that, Seledri has long been married to a Samiran lord, and living in that nation. If the two countries go to war, then her life - or at least her welfare - may be at risk.

With regard to the proposed wedding, I have a hard time believing that in Victorian times, there was a 'wedding rehearsal dinner'. Yes, they had a wedding rehearsal if they were wealthy enough, but this was a very private thing, quite literally to rehearse the wedding itself. The author here has created her own world, and she can do whatever she wants, but this rehearsal with a huge number of people in attendance struck a really false note for me. Of course, if she had not written this, then it would have been impossible to interrupt it with the dramatic news of an attempt on the life of Aniri's sister, the second sister of the title, Seledri.

This is where the novel (and the series) took a downturn for me. I was already soured with all the frivolous pomp of the 'wedding rehearsal', but to have Aniri take a big step backwards in her development, and to be dithering and fretting and panicking, and then to decide to postpone the wedding (scheduled for the very next day), and thereby failing to cement the alliance with Jungali, for no reason other than to hie herself to Samir to find out what happened to her sister was just plain stupid! It was foolish in the extreme and not at all in line with what we had learned to expect from Aniri in the previous volume, so for me it was a really poor start to this novel.

Aniri was taken prisoner and her life threatened by the Samir ambassador, and now she's going to voluntarily put herself at the mercy of these people, traveling pretty much alone into the heart of the enemy territory and give them a second hostage? This behavior is moronic. Clearly it was only done to elevate the drama between herself and Malik, but it was done badly, falsely, and amateurishly, and this wasn’t to be the first time. Things seemed to go determinedly downhill with one farcical daytime TV melodrama after another cropping up.

About half-way through this I was getting ready to ditch it and down-rate it, but it turned itself around somewhat - at least sufficiently fro me not to be able to rate it badly! I have to say I was disappointed in it. Aniri was nowhere near as good as she was in the first one, and the novel quite literally went around in circles ending-up at pretty much the same point as it began. It definitely had MTV (Mid-Trilogy Vexation) syndrome.

That said, there were sufficient good parts, particularly when Aniri gets her head out of her gaand and starts trying to make good on her deficits, that I felt I could uprate it in the hope that the third volume would be truly a worthy read like the first volume was.

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn

Title: Third Daughter
Author: Susan Kaye Quinn
Publisher: Susan Kaye Quinn
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
P65 ""…secret us away…" should be "…secrete us away…"
p212 "...you have been the one to secret me to the sky ship's hiding place..." makes no sense. "secrete me in"? "spirit me away to"?
P332 "She threw him and arched look..." should be "She threw him and arch look..."

Third Daughter is part of a trilogy which features the exploits of a young princess from a nation (Dharia) modeled loosely on India, but set in a purely fictional world and sprinkled lightly with elements of steam punk.

I love exotic India, so this drew me in immediately and effortlessly, but it would have just as easily kicked me out again, had the main character, Aniri, been a wet blanket or a wilting violet. She isn't! Kudos to the author for providing a non-white strong female character! These are very rare! Treasure them!

Aniri is the third daughter of the queen, so not in line for any throne, and not laden with expectations. We meet her climbing down the palace wall via a rope of knotted sheets to visit her boyfriend Devesh in the palace gardens, and she's a feisty, independent, rather love-struck young girl, but her plans this evening are thwarted by Janak, the queen's bodyguard, who is there to tell her that she must attend upon the queen.

Aniri resentfully visits with her mom only to learn that she has been put forward as a marriage candidate for Prince Malik, ruler of the rugged, northern, purportedly barbaric Jungali nation. Aniri wants no part of this, but when she realizes that her withdrawal from this pledge might mean war, she agrees to go, under the pretence that she will marry Prince Malik after a month's courtship, but really acting as a spy to discover if rumors of the Jungalis developing a flying machine are true.

Now how this works - sending a young girl with only two attendants into what’s considered to be a primitive and dangerous territory remains quietly unexplained, but Aniri doesn’t see Prince Malik as a threat. He seems reasonable, and decent, and she can get along with him. He is understanding that there is no love here, and that this relationship is purely for promotion of peace both across and within borders. He tells her outright that this will be platonic and that if she wishes to have a secret lover after they are married, she's most welcome to do so.

They board the train and begin their journey to the border. Aniri has only Priya, her young personal attendant, and Janak, the queen's most trusted bodyguard with her. Now why Janak is abandoning the queen to protect the daughter goes unexplained.

There was a really poorly written and very YA attempt to get the two of them into each other's arms by having Aniri get so close to a fire that she sets her cloak on fire, and then having Malik not even notice this until it's burning, whereupon he doesn't simply warn her that her cloak is on fire or tear it off, but grabs her and holds her to him, and then beats at the flame with his hand? Weird! And badly written! But not as bad as it might have been.

After that things really take off, with Aniri turning out to be very much the strong female character I was hoping she would be. That alone, for me, is sufficient to rate this as a worthy read. The love story ultimately turns out to be very natural and not forced or amateurish at all, and Aniri turns out to be a smart and capable lead character, and an admirable adventurer, with some foibles of youth haunting her, but not hobbling her, which is exactly how it ought to be.

One thing I did have a huge problem with is Janak. I already mentioned him as Aniri's mom's bodyguard, which makes it inexplicable how he comes to be traveling with Aniri, rather than guarding the queen, but the real problem is that his attitude sucks. "Off with his head!" I say! I don't have any respect for royalty myself in real life, but I do not go around insulting them. In a novel like this, it's inconceivable that a bodyguard would get away with being outright disrespectful to a princess as Janak does routinely.

This did not sound at all realistic to me, nor did Aniri's putting-up with his forceful, insulting, and domineering attitude towards her. I'm serious, his attitude and behavior is intolerable; I don't care what secrets he knows about Aniri's father, it's no excuse for his behavior whatsoever, yet he repeatedly gets away with it. That was bad writing and makes Aniri look weak, ineffectual, and juvenile, which is the very last thing she needed heaped on her after she'd shown herself to be a sterling main character in the previous chapter.

One thing which made no sense was this focus on the 'flying machine'. I can see how it would be considered a weapon of war, but Prince Malik's assertions that it would be a tool for trade between Dharia and Jungali made no sense given that they already have railways. It's far more economical to send goods and materials by train than ever it is by 'sky ship'. Yes, the sky ships can access the mountainous regions in Jungali where trains might not be able to reach, or where it might be difficulty or expensive to lay tracks, but in terms of trade between the two nations, I didn't see the value of it.

There were a couple of other issues where the writing was nonsensical. For example, at one point, Aniri is on an airship which is described as being thousands of feet in the air. She has already exhibited some instances of being short of breath because of the thin air in the high mountain region, yet we're expected to believe that she's clambering (yes, clambering!) around outside the airship - at thousands of feet, without even remotely becoming light-headed? Not credible!

But these are relatively minor points in comparison with how well, and how engagingly, the rest of this novel was written. The only oddball exception to this of which a mention still seems required, is that of the clothing Aniri wears. It was a really good idea to set a steam-punk novel in a place other than London, but if you're going to move it all the way to India (or more accurately, a setting rooted in India) - a move of which I approve, I have to say - then why would you drag Victorian clothing along with you? I don't get the point of having women in a nation strongly reminiscent of India dressed in corsets and stays when they could have saris and Punjabis. Why make the location exotic if you're not planning on doing anything with it? It seemed like the author was afraid to stray too far from steam-punk convention, which ironically makes her lurk rather timidly in comparison with the main character she's created!

But in conclusion, I have to say that this novel was truly remarkable and very addictive. I loved the setting, the characters in general, and specifically the main character Aniri who is a kick-ass strong female character. I loved that the love was in no way overdone and that it fit in with, but did not high-jack or derail the main story. Apart from a trope or two, it was normal, ordinary, and natural, like real love is.

So I fully recommend this novel. It has some issues, but overall the story is wonderful and refreshing. I was less thrilled with the sequel, a review of which I'm also posting today.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence

Title: Lady Chatterley's Lover
Author: DH Lawrence
Publisher: Tipografia Giuntina
Rating: WORTHY!

Read impeccably by Margaret Hilton.

This novel was surprising. Coming into it knowing nothing more about it than what gossip, reputation, and rumor would have you believe, it was quite an eye-opener, but not in the way you might think! The setting is pretty much where I grew up, in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, so in some ways it felt very familiar to me (my home town, Matlock, is mentioned!). Of course, I wasn't around when this novel was written - not even as a twinkle in someone's eye!

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a study in duality: upper class versus lower, human society vs. nature, healthy v. sick, decency v. vulgarity, mind v. body, male v. female, Clifford's wealth v. his impotence, Lady Chatterley's in-two-minds view of life, the gamekeeper's apparent inability to decide which language dialect he wants to speak, but it’s also about similarity. Both of the main protagonists, Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, are married unhappily, although it takes Connie a lot longer to figure this out, and both want the same thing.

While being mindful that it was written and published in the 1920's, in a different era, the story is very ordinary and conventional, particularly by modern standards. It’s about a real love affair between a woman and a man who is of what was then considered a markedly lower social class, but it’s not rife with debauchery and carnality. Far from it. Most of it is ordinary social interaction - which is of course the problem for Lady Constance Chatterley.

And most of it has not seen the sight of four-letter words. On the contrary: it's beautifully written, even in the parts which do contain such words. I honestly don’t care if bad language is used in a novel, if it fits with the story and the characters. Bad things, bad language, bad events, and bad people occur in real life so there's no reason at all why they cannot be realistically depicted in fiction if you have a good story to tell about them.

My biggest problem with this novel was that parts of it were downright boring! It was too long. A good editor would have seriously cropped the sections where Lawrence rambles pointlessly on about social mores and philosophical issues. They don't move the story nor do they contribute to it. The sexual parts of the novel were few and far between, and very tame, especially by modern standards. The philosophical parts were at best mildly interesting, at worse, tedious. On the other hand, there was a lot of humor in the novel, which quite surprised me.

The story itself is about Constance Reid who marries Clifford Chatterley, a man who is a rung or two above her on the social ladder. He is soon called to war (1914-18) and comes back paralyzed from the waist down, having to move himself around in a motorized wheelchair, and needing his wife's assistance with dressing and some other activities.

Connie frequently has contradictory views of her life: feeling that she's in the right place and the wrong place, feeling that things are comfortable and that they're ridiculous, feeling at ease and on edge, feeling that she's happy with her husband, and that she's not. She takes a lover but is ultimately dissatisfied with him. At one point, Clifford suggests that it would be fine with him if she became pregnant by another man, and then the two of them would raise the child as their own, giving Clifford an heir, but Connie cannot think of anyone in their social circle with whom she would wish to make a baby.

The last thing Mrs Chatterley expects is to fall in love with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. He's also a war veteran, having risen above his own class status to the rank of lieutenant. Separated from his wayward wife, he's hired as a gamekeeper for Clifford's estate - one through which Connie is in the habit of walking daily. It’s many months before she first encounters him, and a while longer before they end up in bed together. When it does happen it’s almost like a rape. There is no violence or force involved, and Connie does not refuse or struggle, but neither does she enter into it with any animation at all - she simply lies there, almost in a state of catatonia letting it happen to her. Later though, she determines that she wants more, and becomes a very willing, even proactive participant.

Connie comes to fully realize that there are two sides to her life - the mental and the physical, and the latter has withered, bringing down the mental along with it. She realizes that she needs the physical even as she acknowledges the ridiculousness of the act of physical love. Indeed, her observations on it, both as it happens and in retrospect, are quite entertaining.

It’s the physical which she gets from Mellors, becoming slowly appreciative and then addicted to it after starting out indifferently. Eventually, when she's on vacation with her close and supportive older sister, Hilda, and her father, she realizes two things: that she is in love with Oliver, and that she is pregnant by him. It’s their attempts to find out how they can be together and how they can navigate society's hypocritical and contradictory perspectives on their situation which drives the closing act.

This novel is far from perfect (then which novel is?!), but overall I enjoyed it a lot, found it entertaining and rewarding, and was glad (for once!) that I chose to add this to my reviews of classics. It helped significantly that Margaret Hilton the reader of the audio book version, seemed perfectly suited to reading this. I recommend it.

Froggy Dearest by Scott Gordon

Title: Froggy Dearest
Author: Scott Gordon
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WORTHY!

Delightfully illustrated by Sebastien Kaulitzki.

If ever a playful book was written for Valentine's day, this is it. The author has taken a fairy tale and then ran with it to places you probably never thought it could - or even should, go! The result is an amusing series of really attractive images and humorous captions.

Obviously the deal is that you're supposed to kiss the frog, but really, who would? What on Earth possessed a writer to have the princess kiss the frog in the first place - the first place you might even think of kissing it?

A grim and bear it fairy tale indeed, but that wasn't even in the original story. The original had the princess toss the poor frog into a wall in disgust, whereupon he transformed! Quite evidently she hadn't the froggiest idea what to do with it....

But this story is a lot more palatable - and relatable - than the original, and I enjoyed it immensely.

The Best Boy Ever Made by Rachel Eliason

Title: The Best Boy Ever Made
Author: Rachel Eliason
Publisher: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
71% in "Sam meets every single criteria..." should be "Sam meets every single criterion..." to be technically correct. Of course, a social worker might not know that.
"Who'd of thought" in Brittney's speech should be "Who'd have thought?" (sorry, I didn't note the position in the book)
85% "...using there proximity..." should be "...using their proximity..."
"...down right..." should be "...downright ..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
"...everyday..." should be "...every day..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
92% "...catching site..." should be "...catching sight..." (it's rendered correctly further along on that same line).

This is a novel about a trans-gender person, Sam, who was born technically a girl, but who is actually a boy for all practical purposes. Rachel Eliason is herself trans-gendered (mtf), so she knows what she's writing about. The novel is told in first person by Sam's best friend Alecia.

I don't normally do book covers because my blog is all about writing, not selling, and unless they self publish, the writer really has no choice in their cover: they get whatever cover Big Publishing™ deems fit - which is all-too-often an ill-fit at best. In this case (which isn't Big Publishing™), I have to raise an issue that involves some fence-sitting, and it ain't comfortable, let me tell you, but it is country! Maybe this discomfort is appropriate, too, because for far too many people transgendering is an uncomfortable issue, so perhaps the cover artist is smarter than your typical cover designer?

Here's the rub: the arm on the left looks very masculine, yet we know that it's supposed to represent a transgender male. It's not that trans (ftm) males can't look masculine for goodness sakes, that's what they are, after all, but the question I have is more subtle than that: is this the best cover design? Do we want to use an actual male, which really betrays the story, because the subject of the story isn't a biological male, but an XX who identifies as a male. Do we want to use a female so the arm looks feminine - which to me betrays the story even more than using a male arm, because the trans character isn't feminine except in a birth sense? Do we try to find a real ftm transgender person to pose?

To me, that would have been ideal, and perhaps that was what was actually done here - I don't know - but this cover made me ask questions, so maybe it's not a bad thing the way it is. Maybe the masculine arm is a statement, and not simply eye candy. I do think it's worth some serious thought though, especially in a novel dealing with a topic as important and as misunderstood as this one is.

The story takes place in Iowa, where I've actually lived and have never ever felt the need to go back there again! Iowa winters will do that to a person. Here's a song which I dedicated to Iowa, sung to the tune of Do They Know It's Christmas?:

It's winter time, and there's some need to be afraid.
In Iowa, where ice storms break and blizzards rage,
And in this cold and darkness, you can warm a heart with joy:
As the topside freezes-up this winter time!

But say a prayer: pray for the Iowans
At winter time, it's hard, but when you're having sun
There's a world outside your window and it's a world of frozen feet
Where the heat bills reach a total that's impossible to meet
And the only bells that ring there are the icicles of doom
Well tonight thank god it's us instead of you!

Oh there won't be cold in Africa this winter time
That's the greatest gift they'll get: to stay so warm
oh-oh where nothing ever snows
No blizzards, no ice floes
Do they know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Here's to you staying warm in Africa
Fresh from those freezing tail in Iowa
Do you know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Heat the world!
Heat the world!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
(Original music and words to Do They Know It's Christmas? by Bob Geldof & Midge Ure, released on Phonogram and Columbia. New words by Ian Wood)

If you liked this parody, please consider a donation to http://www.aidforafrica.org/Donate OR http://www.savethechildren.org OR to whichever charity you think can do most good, including your local food bank. There are hungry children everywhere.

But I digress! The novel is narrated by Alecia, a very sheltered young woman of seventeen, who often comes off as younger than she really is. You can blame this on her life under the iron-yoke of her Catholic parents. They're a pair of the most blinkered people imaginable, but organized religion often does that. By its very nature religion is divisive and intolerant, bifurcating populations into us (the saved, good, people), and them (the sinners who will go to hell). Bring it on, I say. I'd rather be in hell than spend eternity with bigots and pompous holier-than-thou blow-hards, quite frankly. Can you imagine spending eternity with those guys?!

Alecia's best friend since forever is Samantha, who insists on "Sam" and no substitutes, and who is a tomboy - pretty much since Alecia has known her. Alecia 'gets' Sam, but she cannot understand what it is which has made Sam so distant over the last few months, until Sam finally comes clean with her and tells Alecia that she's not truly a female. She's a male who happens to have been born, unfortunately, in a female body - and she wants to correct that post-haste. This feeling isn't a rarity in nature as Joan Roughgarden reveals in her book Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, which I highly recommend.

Sheltered as she is, Alecia struggles with all of this because she doesn't quite get that there's a big difference between a tomboy, a lesbian, and an XX female who feels in her every cell and neuron that she's an XY boy, has done so for years, and now wants the world to accept it the same way she has done. Alecia is a trooper though, and never once does she lose sight of the importance of friendship and loyalty, a commitment which means supporting her friend in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, as long as they both shall live.

Together, they embark upon this journey, and damn the warped parents. Actually damn Alecia's parents, who are completely negative about Sam - quite the opposite of Sam's own parents. In this spirit (the only spirit which matters), Alecia accompanies Sam to a gay bar on teen night. Sam has to go there to satisfy her social worker that she's not merely a confused lesbian - that she really doesn't want to be a girl who loves girls, but a male who loves females. Alecia goes along with her and finds herself - what is that feeling? Jealous? - of the attention Sam gets from out lesbian Emma, who is very much a girl.

Alecia has a father and a brother, but these males figure very little into the story. More involved is her mom, and younger sister Brittney, who isn't quite the good Catholic girl that Alecia is. I have to ask, since this family is so Catholic, how come the girls ended-up with names like Alecia and Brittney rather than, say, Esther and Ruth or something Biblical like that. Obviously not all such parents go that route, but it seemed to me that if Mom & dad were so rigid and devout they would be far more likely to chose Biblical names for their children than to choose the ones we get. Maybe that's just me.

One thing which seemed weird in this novel, to me, was the use of "I am". Despite employing all kinds of other contractions, such as "I'd", and "we've", there was never an "I'm" that I noticed. It struck me as odd, and it made for rather stilted conversation. Other than that, I enjoyed the way this was written. It was perhaps a bit simplistic in places, with very little descriptive prose, but for me it was an easy, comfortable, and compelling read. Once I began, I did not want to put it down, and I want to read more by this writer - perhaps even more about these two characters if a good sequel suggests itself.

I normally detest first person PoV novels, but this one seemed perfectly fine. Some writers, a few, a happy few, a band of brothers and sisters, can carry it off, and Rachel Eliason is quite obviously one of these. I think it helped that she had Alecia come right out and embrace this format from the off, introducing herself like we'd just met and she was about to answer some questions for me to clear up some lack of understanding I had! That approach worked for me, and from that point on it seemed normal and ordinary, rather than artifice, so kudos and gratitude for that!

I'm not sure that Sam's social worker was entirely appropriate in answering Alecia's questions to the extent that she did, but this was a minor issue. A bigger issue was whether or not Sam would be seeing a social worker or seeing some kind of psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know, I've never been there, but it seems to me that she would need someone with a bit more academic and medical muscle behind them if she were going to start gender reassignment as a minor. OTOH, as I mentioned, the author is transgendered herself, so I bow to her greater expertise on this topic. Sam had evidently talked a lot about Alecia, and the social worker wasn't exactly blabbing all her secrets. Plus Alecia's motives were pure - she wanted to put herself in the best possible position to support Sam - and perhaps get some reassurance herself.

If I had a complaint or two, what would they be? I guess the first would be that while the novel talks a heck of a lot about the significant difference between a lesbian and a transgendered female to male, it never really went into what those differences were. I think it would have benefited from including that as a discussion between Sam and Alecia. And no, that doesn't mean one of them yelling "Penis!" and running!

I actually worked in the burn center in a hospital where female to male transgendering was performed. It was done in the burn center because they were the experts on cosmetic surgery (in a medical, rather than a purely cosmetic) sense and they had some very skilled doctors and nurses working there, and yes, a penis is an option.

Another complaint would be about raising the issue of prejudice against gays and transgendered people while rather hypocritically exhibiting prejudice in other areas! Alecia frequently chanted a refrain championing "country folk" over "city slickers" - like country was somehow more wholesome and smarter than city folks, who were somehow backward for never having seen a tree or touched a goat. This merely made Alecia seem backward, shallow, bigoted and hypocritical to me.

Besides, it isn't the black and white issue Alecia blindly pretends it is. Not everyone lives either deep in the city or way out in the back of beyond. There are very many people (I am one) who live on the fringe between the two. Besides, who would pay the farm subsidies if it were not for the urban taxpayers? Alecia's attitude and her strident spouting of this supposed dichotomy was annoying and uncalled for, and was the most obnoxious thing about her for me.

About 42% in, Alecia makes what could be taken as a derogatory comment about vegetarians, too. This was in context of her being country and therefore loving nature and animals - yet she has no problem slaughtering them and eating them wholesale. She doesn't seem to grasp that it consumes massive quantities of grain to feed cattle so people can, in turn, eat the meat. She doesn't know that if meat eaters of the western 'civilized' world gave up maybe a twentieth of their meat consumption it would release enough grain to feed the world's starving populations. To me this made Alecia seem ignorant instead of wise about the world. It made her provincial and way younger than her seventeen years.

There were some technical issues with the novel, too, that some serious editing would have cured. One thing which really jumps out is the scarcity of chaptering. Text runs on from one unrelated event to another with little more than a sharp sign (#) to indicate a break, and sometimes not even that. This makes for crude interruptions in reading while the reader tries to figure out if they turned more than one page/swiped more than one screen. A few more chapter breaks to divide-up the narrative would have improved reading flow for me.

Having said all of that, this novel was definitely worth reading. Aside from the issues I've raised, it was well-written in a very engaging style, it fearlessly broached sensitive and important topics, and I was one hundred percent on-board with it.

If Rachel Eliason is looking for beta readers for future projects, I volunteer right now!

Selume Proferre by EE Ottoman

Title: Selume Proferre
Author: EE Ottoman
Publisher: Less Than Three Press
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 novel is reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p16 "...t-shirt with a button-up shirt open over it a much-worn leather jacket over that and her black cowboy hat firmly on her head." was really hard to read on first pass. It needs some commas. I'd have written it: "...t-shirt with a button-up shirt open over it, a much-worn leather jacket over that, and her black cowboy hat firmly on her head."
p23 "I think you're logic is faulty." should be "I think your logic is faulty."
p23 "While some geeks wear sweater vest..." should be "While some geeks wear sweater vests..."
p40 "The house they finally pulled up to was huge, white, and new-looking, surrounded by a gate." doesn't sound right. Maybe, "The house they finally pulled up to was huge, white, and new-looking, surrounded by a gate and a fence." or "...a gated fence"?
p41 "...as if for conformation..." should be "...as if for confirmation..."
(EE ottoman, I volunteer to be a beta reader any time you need one!)

I am not a Latin student by any means although I did do a couple of years of it in high school. The title, if it's intended to be a Latin phrase, is wrong. I think it should be Se Lumen Proferre which means roughly, "Allow illumination to prevail" or "to be brought out" - or tritely, "Let there be light" (although the Biblical version of that is actually Fiat lux).

And now to the novel itself! An-An Li-Johnson is not only a mouthful of a name, it's an intriguing character which may or may not be modeled on the author, who if anyone does, has the proverbial 300 watt smile. An-An is a lesbian who works part time at a book store (cool name of 'Bookfall', and who also temps as a scribe at a spell-craft firm called Simon and Davidson which is about to embark upon an exorcism. If that doesn't grab you for a starter, nothing will!

I should say right up front (if you can call four paragraphs in "right up front"!) that I flatly do not believe in demons and angels, gods and devils, etc (and you can include ghosts, flying saucers, and the Loch Ness monster in there, too! I wrote a novel about the Loch Ness "monster" myself, so I can't pretend to be completely disgusted with this!).

I can't get with the ludicrous ritual - the power of chalk? The so-called 'holy' water, the Latin incantations! Why is Latin supposedly a language of power - really?! I do, however, recognize that these tropes are required in this kind of a novel, and I do love a good story about these things: and this one was definitely a good story.

An-An is called in to work with MC Anderson (no, that's not a DJ!), a senior employee at S&D, who's in charge of the upcoming exorcism. She's supposedly difficult to work with, which is how An-An ended up hired for the job, but An-An doesn't view MC that way. And so it begins, both the exorcism and the wonderful, dancing interplay between 'acolyte' and 'master'....

I have to say I fell in love (in a nice, manly, platonic way, of course!) with MC as soon as I learned that she watches Doctor Who and Mythbusters! Hopefully she's a bit more satisfied with this season's Doctor Who than I've been (although it did pick up commendably in episode three). I loved An-An, too, although I found her name a bit annoying. Sorry! But kudos to the author for stepping well outside pathetic YA socio-normative tedium to deliver something very different and powerful. I loved this novel!

I also have to say I had a concern about the guns which the security guards were so readily brandishing - did they really think they could shoot a demon? From a writing perspective, the guns themselves weren't the issue; that MC said nothing about them was what bothered me. A word would have been nice.

Note that this novel/novella/novelette/short story (I didn't count the words, I just read them as they went by!) is really, really short - fifty pages or so, so it's a very fast and engaging read. In fact, go read it now. I'll wait. Take your time.

Replay by Ken Grimwood

Title: Replay
Author: Ken Grimwood
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

Set in 1987 (and other years!) Jeff Winston, a tired and disaffected radio journalist with an unhappy marriage is talking with his wife on the phone. Just as she's telling him, "We need...", he has what feels like a heart attack and he agonizes not only over the intense pain, but also over the feeling that he will never know what his wife was about to tell him they need. A divorce? A gallon of milk?

When Jeff comes round, he's not in a hospital, he's in his bed in his college dorm at Emory University, and it's in 1963! He's somehow materialized inside his own youthful body, but with all his memories for the next quarter century still in his brain.

Jeff tries to pick up his life there, while also trying to figure out what the heck happened. He decides he cannot stand the thought of being a student all over again, and realizes he can make some money by betting on games and horses (for which he needs a legal age fellow-student to help). He already knows the outcome - or at least hopes he does, and it turns out he's not wrong. He becomes a millionaire and tries to track down his wife as she was then, but when he finds her, she doesn't appreciate this teenager claiming to be rich trying to pick her up on the beach!

He eventually settles in his new life with no answers, but with a wife and a child, and enjoys his life and his daughter. He takes especial care of his health, particularly as he starts to approach the date when he had his 'heart attack' in his 'previous life', but despite being in excellent health, he still goes through exactly the same pain, and the same 'rebirth' - back as a student - and it keeps repeating!

No matter what he does, he discovers over time, he can neither explain nor break this cycle. The only thing which seems to him to change is the point at which he replays his life: the starting point seems to be later each time he returns, and the period of the delay is growing larger with each replay.

He despairs of getting out of this cycle, and he eventually reaches a point where he simply doesn't care any more. Each time he comes back, he makes money as fast as he can at the start; then he launches upon a life of dissipation, drugs, free love (it's the sixties!) and on and on, until one point where he almost dies in an air-crash, at which point he starts memorizing all natural and man-made disasters.

Eventually living a public life is of no interest and he retreats to the mountains, but on a visit back to civilization to pick up supplies one day, he encounters a poster for a blockbuster movie which he's neither seen nor heard of before - not in any life. Not understanding how such a blockbuster of a movie could have escaped his attention, he goes to see it and is so moved by it that he has to meet the writer-director - which he can given how rich he is.

The meeting doesn't go well, it turns out that the woman, Pamela Phillips, is a replayer, too, and they do not get along at first. Eventually they do hook up and they begin an effort to locate other replayers. They have limited success, finding only a guy who is a replayer but who is confined to an institution because he's become psychotic.

Jeff and Pamela begin planning and meeting each other on subsequent replays, which proves to be a significant problem at first, since she is several years younger than he is, and her father doesn't appreciate an adult man visiting his fourteen year old daughter no matter how well they seem to know each other! They work this out eventually, and it's over this period that they really appreciate that their replays are starting with significantly increasing delays.

At one point they make the mistake of publishing predictions in an effort to try to find out what's going on. When their predictions prove amazingly accurate, the government becomes involved and the two of them end up as virtual prisoners in a world going to hell because of the government second-guessing their predictions and trying to capitalize on their knowledge of the future. The world quickly changes so much that they can no longer predict anything.

With their replays becoming increasingly shorter, and Pamela's returns appearing dramatically later than Jeff's things eventually come to a head when Jeff meets her before she has returned, when she is married to someone else. He maneuvers her into having an affair with him, which succeeds because he knows exactly how to ingratiate himself with her by then. When she suddenly replays in the middle of one of their clandestine dates, she's really angry with him taking advantage of her, and she quits seeing him altogether.

The repeat replays become faster and faster, and the delay times shorter and shorter until it's like one constant replay after another and suddenly, he's back at his desk, with his wife saying "We need..." but this time he doesn't 'die', the moment passes and he's still there on the phone. His wife finishes her sentence at last "...to talk" and he agrees.

This novel is one of my all time favorites. It takes great skill (and a heck of a lot of work!) to write 'the same story' over and over again, yet make it so different each time that it still makes for a fresh read. I'm in awe of Grimwood's skill in writing this so well, and selfishly saddened that his loss meant that the sequel he was beginning work on would never get completed. According to wikipedia, there's talk of a movie from the novel, but nothing is up on the web yet.

The Pleasure Dial by Jeremy Edwards

Title: The Pleasure Dial
Author: Jeremy Edwards
Publisher: 1001 Nights Press
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.

Erratum:
p118 "bicep" - it's biceps. And triceps.

I'm not a big fan of erotic literature per se. I'd much rather indulge in it than sit and read about it, but done the right way, in the right context - that of a real story rather than inauthentic titillation for mere titillation's sake - I'm perfectly happy with it. What I find truly sad is that we live in a very effective theocracy under the dictates of which, children are at liberty to read or to watch endless scenes of people being mean and brutal towards one another, but must be "protected" fiercely from anything which depicts people enjoying and loving one another in physical ways.

How sad is it that the church, an 'authority' which is itself rooted in the absurdest of fictions, insists that intimacy is so evil, even in fiction, that not even adults ought to be exposed to it no matter how educationally, fleetingly, cursorily, or tangentially. The United States of America is one of the most fundamentalist societies on the planet, giving feared places like Iran a run for its mullah. Is it any surprise that in such a closeted society, people end-up hobbled by the worst sex-education it's possible to get?

Is it any surprise that in such a society people who 'deviate' from "the norm" however slightly, however naturally, however much in the privacy of their own homes still run a grave risk of being (metaphorically if not literally) pilloried? Is it any surprise that as a direct result of allowing such a blinkered society to propagate and fester, that same society then pays a hefty price in unwanted pregnancy and sexual inappropriateness which runs the huge gamut from annoying, through abusive, to outright criminal? Not to me it isn't.

I do enjoy a well-written comedy, which explains why I was actually interested in this novel: it's a humorous story which neither flinches nor baulks at following people into the bedroom (or wherever!) rather than shyly panning over to a roaring fire which ineffectually seeks to simulate sexual passion whilst stimulating nothing but laughter.

This story is set in the 1930's when radio listener-ship more than doubled to almost 30 million people in the US. Radio shows were for several decades directly sponsored - indeed, effectively owned - by corporations which advertised freely throughout the show, and for which the show's stars became spokes-people. This comedy of erogenous follows the machinations and lubrications of various characters as they duel and fool with each other to reach their assorted and diverse goals.

Artie Plask is a comedy writer, newly arrived in LA to join the team for Sydney Heffernan's radio show. Under the name Syd Heffy, this guy acts himself: a buffoon who barely has a competent grasp of the nuances of the English language, but who is nonetheless considered to be one of the best and biggest comedians in the country. Artie's immediate problem is that after one day on the job he discovers that the entire writing team has been fired as 'Syd Heffy' decides to abandon comedy, and relaunch himself in serious drama show.

This writing team is exclusively white of course, because writers nearly always were back then, and it's almost exclusively male for the same reason, but it's actually headed by a woman, Mariel Fenton, who also writes for the show. Here's where I first became honestly impressed. Jeremy Edwards knows how to write strong female characters, and this one saves the show - literally.

Mariel is a self-possessed, self-made woman, who holds her own (in whatever way she feels like) quite effortlessly in a man's world, and who is not only a genuinely funny person, which makes her perfect for this gig, but who is also extremely smart and astute. And of course, as required by the novel's very tone, gorgeous. Indeed, she's the real mover and shaker here, with Artie really just along for the ride (whether the ride be sexual or not!).

I have no idea who the girl on the cover of this novel is, either in real life or as representative of a character. She could be generic or she could be intended as Elyse Heffernan, Syd Heffy's pan-sexual and nympho-maniacal daughter. She certainly isn't Mariel, and she really doesn't appear to be Elyse, either, but the photograph is undeniably erotic. The feet seem a little bit large for the image to be perfect, but that may just be a perspective distortion (or my bias towards smaller feet!).

That said, I have to admit that this near-perfect picture is what initially caught my eye with this novel. I would never have launched into reading it on that cover image though, no matter how exciting it may be. The novel could have actually had any cover, because it was the novel's premise which sold it to me, recalling screwball comedies of the forties, and madcap comedies of the fifties. But kudos to the cover designer and photographer(s). For once in a blue moon, they really, er, nailed it.

If you think the cover model is Elyse, then you really need to read the novel, because you simply don't get her at all. Elyse is the second powerful female character in this novel. Her liberal sexuality is misleading, for there's a strength to this young woman which far-too-many young-adult writers, for example - even female ones - fail to understand, much less employ in a world where the main female lead, after being sold to us as strong, independent, and capable, is all-too-often immediately subjugated to an even stronger male.

Neither of these women is subject to anyone. Artie's first introduction to Elyse is when he sees her naked at the swimming pool at her father's house (what daddy doesn't know...well, she can get away with, including having sex with every one of the writers except the gay one). The patio is where all the writing gets done, and Elyse gets wet from just being around these creative, smart, and funny people before she ever enters the pool. His second introduction to her is in bed shortly afterwards, but it's just that one time, because once Artie and Mariel start becoming better acquainted, they become much better acquainted and indeed, inseparable - often quite literally.

The thing which really turns Artie on most about Mariel is, quite appropriately, a woman's most overwhelming sex organ: her mind. He gets off on her thoughts, and she returns the appreciation in equal measure. This is what makes this organ of entertainment, as the rabbi said after the circumcision, a cut above the rest. I just wish more female writers - especially writers of so-called romance novels and YA novels - would get this fact as well as Jeremy Edwards does in his own genre.

This novel follows a host of amusing twists, turns, and delectable diversions. The dialog is snappy, entertaining, and more often than not, rib-ticklingly funny. I'd love to meet someone like Mariel just to have that kind of mind to interact with, or better yet to co-write with - and the hell with the sex! It wasn't all smooth surfing for me, but the only real issue I had with this is the author's descriptions of the many supposedly erotic encounters. To me there's a marked difference between eroticism and crudity, and this novel strayed over the line once in a while.

Note that the language is ribald at best and in the gutter at worst when it comes to depicting the intimate encounters here, so please do not venture into this if you're readily offended. Personally I don't care what language is used as long as it's appropriate to the story or to the character, and there's the, er, rub! Edwards was a bit too fond of using a certain four-letter word to describe a certain defining part of the feminine anatomy, but in this context - one of eroticism - it seemed too abusive to me to find a home here.

I can see it showing up in a novel about abuse or in one relating a story of BDSM even, but in erotica? To me erotica tells a different and very special story, and this jarred too much. Usually, the erotic scenes were deliciously erotic, but unfortunately often they kicked me out of suspension of disbelief because it felt like the author was trying much too hard to use every word he could conjure up to describe events and anatomy. You may have a different crudity scale from me, of course, and consequently your denier may differ.

That aside, I loved this novel and I recommend it erotically! Personally I'm going ot be looking for more by this author.

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 Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Title: The Great Gatsby
Author: F Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Rating: WARTY!

Fitzgerald write this in 1925, but it's set three years earlier in the summer of 1922, and tells a story of some wealthy characters observed and narrated by a not-so-wealthy character, Nick Carraway, during their time in the fictional resort location of West Egg on Long Island sound.

Carraway is a prospective bond salesman new to the area, and he rents a place which happens to be next door to the magnificent residence owned by Jay Gatsby (whose real name is James Gatz, Jimmy to his father). Nick has dinner one evening with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, the burly Tom, an old acquaintance from college, and meets intriguing Jordan Baker, with whom he begins an affair.

It's through her that Nick learns that his cousin's husband is having an affair with one Myrtle Wilson, but he appears to have no problem with that because he attends a raunchy party with Tom and Myrtle where, as it happens, Tom punches her and breaks her nose.

One day Nick receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's famous parties which he;s seen but never attended. He's intrigued by the invitation brought over by Gatsby's chauffeur, so he attends and finds himself invited to an audience with Gatsby himself - a curious man who never attends his own parties, seems constantly busy with business schemes, and for some reason appears to take a shine to Nick.

It turns out that his interest in Nick is actually an interest in Nicks's cousin, Daisy, with whom Gatsby was in a relationship many years before, but which couldn't be pursued due to Nick's poverty. After they separated, Gatsby inherited some money and parlayed that into an empire, and now he wants to get back with Daisy, but Daisy has married - something he had not expected her to do.

He persuades Nick to invite Daisy - alone - to tea one day, and the two begin bonding again, and spending more and more time together. Despite his own affair, Tom begins to grow concerned about where his wife is spending her free time. A showdown comes in New York at an hotel which Daisy, Gatsby, Jordan, Nick, and Tom visit one really hot day. Gatsby outright announces Daisy's love for him, although Daisy protests and gives Gatsby a surprise by announcing her love for Tom, who in turn, denounces Gatsby as a criminal.

The gathering breaks up and Tom allows Gatsby and Daisy to travel together back to the Egg to demonstrate how little concerned he is, but Daisy drives and accidentally kills Tom's mistress Myrtle somehow. The latter's husband, who has come to the conclusion that Gatsby is the lover he's begun to suspect his wife has taken, tracks down this yellow car which killed his wife, and he fatally shoots Gatsby and then himself. Nick, disillusioned with this life on the eastern shores, moves back to the mid-west.

Throughout listening to this on audio, I wavered between liking it and then disliking it. In the end I cannot recommend it because the dislikes far outweighed the likes in the final analysis. Fitzgerald does have an interesting turn of phrase here and there, but his writing tended far too often, when it wasn't merely mundane, to descend into endless lists of things which I found irritating as hell.

The story is ok, but it's not particularly brilliant or inventive and I really don't think it merits of the acclaim it seems to have today. I'd recommend reading the wikipedia entry on it, however, which is quite interesting. This novel is based on real people whom Fitzgerald himself knew.

His Secret Superheroine by Patricia Eimer

Title: His Secret Superheroine
Author: Patricia Eimer
Publisher: Entangled
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 Entangled Publishing. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. I really appreciate the opportunity to review this novel, so thank you, Entangled!

ErratARC:
p71 "You're kind are what-" should be "Your kind are what-"
p83 "...effect Liza." should be "...affect Liza"

p125 "Flittering..." should be "Flitting..."
p196 "...his bicep..." should be "his biceps..." It's not singular.
p200 "...letting Liza slid out of her seat..." should be "...letting Liza slide out of her seat..."

Patricia Eimer, you had me at "TARDIS". That's an automatic five stars as far as I'm concerned. Just kidding. I'd really love to do that, but I have to rate the book, not her Doctor Who references! Sorry! But I knew then that I'd feel wretched if I didn't like this novel. Fortunately for all concerned, I loved it.

I have to confess right up front that I'm not a fan of sappy romance novels, so it was with some trepidation that I asked to read this one. The problem is that I couldn't not request it once I saw this scenario. How cool a premise is it?! If handled right, a story like this has the potential to be really entertaining and amusing. And in the end I can't begin to tell you how pleasantly surprised and really thrilled I was with this story. Okay, I lied; I can tell you, so here goes!

This is St. Louis Superheroes #1, and the story is about Peyton Pearson née Hughes, a woman who develops super powers after her (now ex-)husband (also a superhero) tampered with her birth-control pills. So she fights crime in St. Louis. When she's evicted from her house (denounced as a super hero sympathizer) through the the machinations of the very powerful 'Safer America Party', Dylan Wilson, a neighbor who lives directly across the street, offers her his spare room to live in while she gets back on her feet.

This offer will help her, and it will also help him because she has a really good relationship with his young daughter Liza, and it will give him some ammunition in his fight against Liza's drunk mother Aria, who is a total jerk and who wants full custody (although I have to confess that I strongly suspected it might not look quite as good as that when presented in some lights as it does in others!).

The problem is that Peyton has the hots for Dylan, but he's a police officer who's dead-set against super heroes getting involved where he doesn't think they belong. Worse, St. Louis is a breeding ground for an anti-superhero movement of which Dylan is a member. She doesn't know that Dylan also has the hots for her, being cursed, as usual, with a poor self-image dumped on her (as it is on every woman) by the abusive fashion and cosmetics industries. No wonder she doesn't trust men!

The author writes remarkably well, with a good eye for dialog and some really amusing asides, so despite my reservations, I was quickly drawn into this story - which also has a really good plot. Finally - a romance story that makes sense! It's told in third person, too, so I was seriously on-board with that.

The chapters alternate somewhat in perspective, some being told from Dylan's viewpoint, others from Peyton's. And the author doesn't shy away from plain English description either. If you're offended by bare-bones references to human anatomy, this might not be for you! In short, this isn't your usual romance novel. Either that or I've read some disturbingly perverse ones in my time....

The characters are intelligent, varied, and interesting, and the story keeps moving. Even relatively minor characters such as Dylan's daughter Liza, his younger sister Laura, and Peyton's friend (and side-kick) Shea stood out as having real personality and presence. I adored the interactions between Peyton and Shea. I also loved the name of Peyton's cat, but despite intense pressure from the Safer America Party I am not going to out this poor cat in public....

If I have a complaint it's that there's too much emphasis on lustful glances and lascivious thoughts on the part of the two main protagonists, and not enough on other qualities which might attract them to each other - such as personality, sense of humor, decency, integrity, empathy, and so on. I would have liked to have seen far more of that, but I guess that's par for the course for a novel in this genre. Fortunately, even this aspect is significantly toned-down as the novel progresses and the tension heightens. So I began enjoying it as I would any decent novel (and to hell with the genre!).

Peyton is no wilting violet. She has a presence and a personality (and a temper!). She has real problems and real feelings about them, and she has no problem in standing-up for her principles, especially against her super hero ex, who is actually stalking her. And there's no sad little love triangle here either, thank goodness.

If I have another complaint it's about the use of the word 'superheroine'. I know reasonable people can disagree, and I am not female, believe it or not, so perhaps my opinion carries less weight in this matter, but it bothers me, in the arena of female equality, that we're still saddling women with the '-ine' and the '-ienne', and the '-ess' (and even the '-ix') suffixes.

Why superheroine, and not simply superhero? I would ask this same question in other areas, too. For example, why actress and not actor? Why comedienne? Does a woman deserve less than a man? Or is there a problem that 'actor' and 'comedian' have been traditionally male, and women don't want to be saddled with that?

If that's the case, then why do we not still have murderesses? We have female murderers, but no murderesses any more! That gender-specific term (along with some others) has already fallen into disuse, and I don't see any movement afoot to resurrect it. Can we not allow - and even encourage - other specifically-female descriptive forms to lapse likewise? It just bothers me that there has to be a separate name if you're female. Okay, maybe 'mistress' and 'dominatrix' might be hard to get rid of, I admit! But waiter seems to me to be significantly better than wait-person...!

On a small point of order - especially since this is a super hero novel, I have to take issue with one of Peyton's epithets: "For Spiderman's sake...." It's actually Spider-Man. For some reason, while DC tends to run the "man" right into the superhero name, Marvel tends to hyphenate; Ant-man, Giant-man, Psycho-Man, Spider-Man, Stilt-Man, X-Men. The exception to this 'rule' seems to be Iron Man for some reason. DC comics goes the opposite way, as in Superman and Batman, although Bat-Man is also used. I'm just saying!

I have to ask about "Klangon" on page 53, the start of chapter six. Is it supposed to be klaxon? Or is it a humorous play on clanging and klaxon? Either way it's funny. The humor is one thing which impressed me repeatedly. I don't know what it is, but the author is on my wavelength (or I on hers), and she just keeps coming out with turns of phrase that tickle my funny bone, such as when she says, on page 57, regarding Peyton's chest showing through her accidentally soaked T-shirt "...both the girls were completely visible." That just got me right in the mammary glands. Yes, I know that situations such as these, apparently requisite in romance novels, are sadly contrived, but there's a readable way to do it and a sickly saccharine way to do it, and Patricia Eimer evidently doesn't do sickly saccharine.

Inevitably in this kind of romance there's a fight, a misunderstanding, a cross-purposes situation. I felt that the one in this novel was weak. Dylan didn't have a leg to stand on so his arguments were forced and empty, but what are you going to do? It was a small price to pay for the quality of the rest of the novel. Overall, this was so well done that it really felt a lot less like a romance-genre novel than it did just a regular novel of some other genre.

So in the end, only one question remains: Patricia Eimer, when is the next novel in this series coming out, and can I be a beta reader?! I guess that's two questions. Okay, I'm going to go off quietly by myself and look for other novels by this same author....

A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot

Title: A Very Long Engagement
Author: Sébastien Japrisot
Publisher: Simply Audio Books
Rating: WARTY!

This review is one of a brace of forays into World War fiction which I undertook this month. The other is Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex which I have to say right now blew this one completely away. Anne Frank can write. This guy cannot, but I'll bet he's won more pretentious and snotty medals and acclaim than Anne ever will. Sébastien Japrisot is an anagram of the author's real name: Jean-Baptiste Rossi. I don't know why, but there it is. Consequently, all of my future novels will be penned by Waid Ono. Look for them on a loose bookshelf near you!

This novel is about a woman who wastes a significant portion of her life chasing a guy who isn't to be found because he's someone else and too stupid to grasp it. It's one of the most tediously pedantic novels I have ever not read. It should be neither seen nor heard. I picked it up thinking it looked really interesting. It isn't. Not even a little bit. It's tiresome and plodding, and as dense as a plate of day-old spaghetti. Don't start this novel unless you have a toolkit to hand for extricating deeply-embedded components, and preferably one of those fire department jaws-of-life devices for prying open the impacted and inscrutable.

The premise is that of a World War 1 widow/fiancée named Mathilde (aka Mary Sue) Donnay, disbelieving that her husband/fiancé, Jean Etchevery, aka Manech, is dead, and tracking him down after the war. She can afford this as a war widow/fiancée in 1919 because she is the spoiled brat of rich family. No word on how she ended up with that particular husband or why her family didn't cut her off because of him! No word either on Spanish flu, which was rampaging across Europe back then, but which didn't exist according to Sébastien Jean-Baptiste Rossi-Japrisot.

A lot of the novel's tediousness comes from two sources, both of which happen to be the author. The first of these is his verbal diarrhea in compulsively describing every last detail of everybody who is even tangentially involved in the story whether those details have any bearing on the plot or not. Stephen King would be proud of this writer. The other is in the abysmally artificial use of correspondence.

You that know that when novelist falls back upon quoting letters (or diary entries, for that matter, or newspaper articles) in the novel they're there for two reasons: first of all the novelist is just plain lazy; secondly, they're stupid if they imagine for a minute that they will fool us by adding a letter that miraculously (and in detail, yet!) moves the plot precisely to where it needs to go next. No one writes letters (or diaries or newspaper articles) like that, not even in 1919.

After the first disk on this audio CD, I had no interest at all in the five men who disappeared, one of whom was the woman's paramour. First it became immaterial to me whether they were ever found, and then I actively began wishing that they would be gone forever. Please interpret that how you wish. Mathilde does find pain-in-the-Manech in the end: he's lost his memory and the jerk-off was too incurious about his past to go looking, so she wisely ditches him and heads home. The end.

I rate this novel trench-mouth warty.

La Princesse de Clèves by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne

Title: La Princesse de Clèves
Author: Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne aka Madame de Lafayette
Publisher: Read a Classic
Rating: WORTHY!

I feel like I should write this in French, mais mon français aspire! (See what I mean?) Originally published in March 1678, in France as La Princesse de Clèves, and possibly written by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, aka Madame de La Fayette, this novel was a huge success in its day. And it had a less nonsensical cover than this modern edition does. Seriously - the title in half English and half French, the accent which should be on 'Clèves' is missing, but the dot over the 'i' in 'Princesse' is warped so much that it looks like an accent? What was the cover designer smoking that day? Old book covers?

The novel's main protagonist is 16-year-old Mademoiselle de Chartres, who is maneuvered by her mom into marriage at the court of Henri 2nd, to La Prince de Clèves. This is her best prospect financially and socially, but it isn't, of course, the one she would choose for herself. Had she that choice, she would have aligned herself with the Duke de Nemours, a dashing young man with whom she falls in love and he, it seems, with she. They do not pursue this affair physically, but instead meet irregularly, when he attends her "salon" - regular social gatherings which she holds in her new position as La Princesse de Clèves.

The duke falls afoul of a scandal for which he is blameless, but for which he assumes responsibility in order to protect another. The princess at first believes him to be guilty, but learns later that he isn't. It's also at this time that her husband, who loves her dearly, realizes that she's actually in love with someone else, and she admits as much to him.

This causes an onset of the wilts and the vapors for the Prince, who takes to his bed and dies, but not before extracting an evil promise from his wife that she will not pursue any relationship with the duke. The latter pursues the princess even more ardently now that she's a widow, but she rejects him and enters a convent.

I like this novel not because it's a great novel. Far from it: it's the worst kind of chick-lit, but it's ancient chick-lit and that's what makes it interesting to me. It enables us to get inside the mind of a woman from well-over three hundred years ago. We're treated to few such insights and that's what makes this fascinating as far as I'm concerned.