Gotham Academy Volume 1 by Becky Cloonan

Title: Gotham Academy Volume 1
Author: Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher
Publisher: Time Warner
Rating: WARTY!

Illustrated by Karl Kerschel

This is an advance review copy ARC), which despite this age of instant electronics, we're cautioned to consider uncorrected and to not treat as final, but with a nod and a wink to that, I have to say that the reading experience in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) was odd to say the least. It reminded me of that old Monty Python vinyl record (I think it was the Matching Tie and Handkerchief) which you can't really reproduce in any other medium. The record actually had two spiral tracks on one side instead of the usual one, and what this meant was that whenever you played it, you would randomly get one version or the other dependent upon where the stylus set down when you played it. It was confusing - even creepy - until you realized what they'd done, and this comic felt like that because of the way the pages presented themselves.

On the iPad, it was fine, but in ADE, the numbering on the bottom of the ADE app would sometimes jump two pages instead of one when you click to the "next page". I've seen this before and never noticed anything odd about it (other than the apparent jumping of a page), but in this particular case, the comic actually was jumping two pages, because if you click back having moved two pages forwards, you would not return to the page you just left, but to an intermediate page which you had skipped right over when you clicked forwards the first time! It was like the pages were almost randomly choosing to appear. Had this been a supernatural comic, that would have been really cool, but it's a super hero comic, so, not so appropriate!

In the opening pages, which were rather self-indulgent (the same image was repeated once in color and once in gray-scale for example, and there were several other random pages like this) and a grotesque waste of a good tree, this didn't matter from purely a reading perspective, but it made me wonder how many panels I would be missing reading the story if the comic was going to be randomly jumping pages like this.

Another issue was that if I slid the bar to return the comic to the first page (an orange-toned image of a startled-looking girl with a shaded bar down the right side proclaiming a welcome to Gotham Academy) and then closed the comic, it would open at a different "first page" - one which showed the current choice for cover as of this version! That image has a green-toned background and depicts two girls in plaid school uniform skirts descending a rope with an ominous shadow of batman behind them.

Starting from the opening cover, one page click shows the same cover (but now as page two), from which a click-back shows the "original" orange-toned cover described above. Clicking forward from the cover takes us to half of a "rogues gallery" image showing (presumably) a handful of academy students. Another click shows us the second half of this same picture. Another click shows us the green cover again, but with no text. Another click shows us the cover yet again, but in gray-scale, no text). The publisher and writers/artists must really hate trees! A click to page eight shows this same image, but a click back shows us what I took to be the first page of the actual story - a full-page image of a clock tower, showing, at five minutes to seven, a lightning strike on the tower. Maybe Marty McFly is parked nearby?

A click forward shows us the same gray-scale image of the two girls, descending via a rope from the top of the tower - but inside the tower, rather than on the walls outside. At this point I gave up on the clicking back and forth experiment and tried to enjoy the story, hoping I was missing no pages in the process! I didn't seem to be until we got the skip-page routine again around page thirty, where it was definitely jumping over a story page that you could only find by clicking back. Clicking forwards missed it every time. But let's move on.

The art work was good - moodily colored and very appropriate to the creepiness of the text, but the artist really needs to learn what a sabre (saber) is. It typically sports a curved blade, and has a hand guard. A regular sword does not. The lettering once again was way too small to read comfortably. Naturally you don't want it so large it obscures the images, but the story is just as important as the art - at least for me it is - and I certainly don't want to be rewarded with eye-strain for simply trying to follow the story!

So what was the story? It's Gotham Academy, an ordinary high school with nothing special about it except that it's housed in a creepy old building which was built from stones even older than the academy, which I thought was a rather evocative thought. Every stone, we're told, has a story. It's almost a Gothic tale, except that it's set in contemporary times.

My problem immediately was that the story we're being told here was scattershot. It seemed like it had a portion missing, and we were coming into it a few minutes late - like the movie had already started and I'd missed the opening couple of scenes. It was annoying, but it slowly came into focus after being all over the place.

One problem was that I didn't get the relationship between the girl named Mia "Maps" Mizoguchi and the other main character, Olive Silverlock. Olive is supposed to be showing Maps around the academy - like this is her first year, but it's clear that they knew each other from the previous year, so this made little sense. Maps is the younger sister of Kyle, the guy with whom Olive just broke up, so it's possible the reference is to them knowing each other outside of school, but it's not depicted that way.

Olive's idea of showing the "new student" around is to take her into the most dangerous parts of the school and almost get her killed. The weird thing is that big brother Kyle has absolutely no issues with this at all, but later, when Olive takes Mia into the North Hall, a trip which is a lot safer than what they went through with the fall from the tower, Kyle gets all bent out of shape. This tells me that at best he's a complete jerk, and at worst, an absolute moron.

There's a ban on students going into the North hall and there's a creepy eye - of which Olive is unaware - peering into her room from a tiny crack in the wall. A student with the highly unlikely name of Pomeline Fritch is playing Malfoy to Olive's Harry Potter, although to be fair, it's much more complex than that, and doesn't go the same way. There's even a character named Heathcliff. There's also, supposedly, a ghost in the North Hall, and Mia, Olive, Pomeline, and a guy named Colton Rivera, decide to break into the hall one night to investigate, and find something way more disturbing than a ghost.

I have to say that the story (even without the oddball hidden pages) was far too choppy. The cutting from one scene to another was startlingly abrupt making me think I'd skipped a page. An example of this is around page 80 where we go from the idiot thespian misidentifying his sword as a sabre to what feels like the middle of an interrogation of one of the students about a symbol he'd drawn in his notebook. It's obvious what the symbol is right from the start, so no mystery there. The scene with the actors could have been skipped and the pages devoted to a softer segue to the interrogation instead of the breakneck switch we got.

Overall I can see how the story might appeal to young, desperate, indiscriminate readers, but then the imagery is a bit scary for really young ones. Older children who can handle the story might well have a problem with it being less than thrilling. Neither of my kids showed any interest in it! It's for these reasons that I can't recommend this graphic novel.

Barry vs the Apocalypse by Ross Cavins

Title: Barry vs the Apocalypse
Author: Ross Cavins
Publisher: RCG Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
Kazakhstan not Kazikstan p54
"I decided to take another tactic." should be "I decided to take another tack." p160
"There's nothing like a sunset over a mountain lake, is it?" makes no sense - unless Barry is Welsh.

Since I'm on a superhero kick lately, here's a third one for consideration. It's very much in the mold of the other two I've been reading in that it takes the road far less traveled. One of the other super hero stories was a novel like this one (Normalized), and the other was a graphic novel (Jupiter's legacy). I very much liked all three of them. It was really nice to get three in a row. It's a rare delight and one which makes it worth plowing through the bad stuff to get really enjoyable ones like these. I think the reason I liked them was that they all of them eschewed trope like it was a bad cliché. Oh, wait, it is!

So this one is about Barry Glick, a super hero who keeps claiming he's retired, but who still uses his powers from time to time for his own purposes (he's not above 'x-ray' scanning the lottery scratch-off tickets for a winner he can buy or for a glimpse at a woman sans clothing), and on occasion for the public good, as in when he foils a liquor store hold up - but only because he happens to be in the store at the time buying beer.

Barry is pretty much an alcoholic, and even when completely sober he has very few social graces, and no illusions about himself. He eats bad food and sports a lot of red-neck traits, the least of which is his mullet. He's a regular down-to-Earth guy except for his super powers, and therein lay a problem. The author simultaneously is telling us that he got his super powers with puberty, but he also got them at fifteen, which is really late for puberty to begin - but not out of the question. I felt that this could have been written a bit more clearly. The question of how and from where these powers came is unexplored to begin with, building something of a mystery which later necessitates a rapprochement with his estranged and abusive father and another relative he didn't even know he had, to resolve.

Barry did his public duty - and not always in an exemplary fashion - until two decades ago, but he got into so much trouble doing it (he's a bit like Hancock) that he thinks he's earned a rest now he;s ion his forties and sporting a growing beer-belly. Super heroes are never paid, recall. They only exist by having a regular job under the guise of an alter-ego, or by being a billionaire. Barry lives alone and makes his living from lottery tickets. He's and is going to seed, his sole hobbies being drinking beer and watching crass TV shows every evening.

On that topic, here's a writing issue for you: is it correct to say "...he's always drank, as the author does on page 229, or "...he's always drunk"? Note that we're talking about the act of drinking, not the state of having drunk too much alcohol. I think the author got it right, but I confess that I had to really think about it and consult a couple of on-line sources before I made up my mind, and even now I'm not sure. I mean, is it correct to say "he's always ran"? or should it be "he's always run"?! I think I'd reword it; then I don't have to risk a headache making a painful and possibly wrong decision! The author gets it right again (I think!) on page 282 where he writes "I laid there for a few minutes." Lay and Lie really are a pain for writers.

Barry thinks he's one of a kind, and he's honest enough (sometimes) to realize that's not necessarily a positive thing, but he's about to get an awakening. His life takes a turn for the interesting when his friend Gordon Moser and Gordon's sister Kimberly show up. Kimmy is an analyst for Homeland Security, but she's always (amusingly in my opinion) impersonating an FBI agent, and she begins wailing on Barry to help find her partner, who's gone missing. How she has a partner when she actually isn't a field agent is a bit of a mystery, but there it is. Andrew unfortunately hasn't been missing long enough for HS to feel that there's a need to start looking for him, but Kimmy has a gut instinct, which is gut enough for Barry, who also has a gut, and a lot of instinct for self-preservation.

This novel is told in first person PoV which I normally detest, but some writers can make it work, and this is one good example of that. Barry is about as politically as incorrect as you can get, and still remain outside of jail and retain a friend, so it's not unusual to hear lines from him like the following one, but this one was also unintentionally amusing. At the start of chapter 20 we read: "She declined my offer to walk around in her underwear eating ice cream." I know what the writer meant, but this makes it sound like Barry is offering to walk around wearing Kimmy's underwear! Just a warning to be careful what you write and how you write it!

Barry is by turns endearing and gross-out nasty, so the author was walking a fine line with me between turning me off this character and making me want to follow his antics. There was a time or two when he ran over the line but he always veered back towards the straight and narrow just in time to keep me reading. Having said that I have to add that chapter thirty six was a disaster. This is where we get a visit from someone in the know and we get Barry's back-story and learn who his mom really was. I'm sorry but I can't take any of that seriously. I felt it was unnecessary, and it really bogged the story down without contributing anything useful to it.

I suppose it was intended to soften us up for a rapprochement between Barry and his dad, but it failed for me - I couldn't realistically see that happening given what we'd been told already. And why was this even deemed necessary? Does every story like this have to end with a kid getting all lovey-dovey with their estranged parent(s) again? Barf. But whatever.

This isn't a graphic novel but there are some pictures in it - at the end of every chapter. They look like first draft pencil sketches of characters, but they have nothing to do with what's been going on in the chapter or with what happens in the next chapter. A significant number of them feature a woman holding a camera, and it's not always the same camera. There's a newspaper reporter in the story but she's never described as holding a camera although she does come armed with pictures the first time she accosts Barry. I was wondering at one point if there was more to her than met the eye, but there really wasn't. The sketches were good but felt weirdly out of place.

I liked that Barry has a beard (after a fashion). That's something you never see on super heroes (except in Mark Millar's Jupiter's Legacy! which I reviewed yesterday). I mean come on - Superman cannot shave - he can't find a razor that won't break on contact, yet he's always as clean and smooth as a baby's patoot? I call super-bullshit on that one! I rather suspect, though, that Barry was perhaps modeled on the author in some respects! They do say write what you know - although in my opinion that's bullshit too. It's termed 'fiction' for good reason!

So, final analysis, and although it did come close a couple of times to failing for me, I recommend this one as a worthy read, with the caveats I've mentioned about Barry and his non-pc attitude and behavior. If you've read Normalized which I'm also reviewing today, you will more than likely enjoy this one and vice-versa.

Normalized by David Bussell

Title: Normalized
Author: David Bussell
Publisher: David Bussell
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
Footnote 28 on page 67 has "... who' d returned come back to life...". It can be 'returned' or 'come back', but it can't be both!
Page 77 "I guess it was the third wall he knocked me through that I realized something was off." Isn't quite right. Maybe, "I guess it was the third wall he knocked me through that made me realize something was off."?

"...pronto like tonto..." Tonto is a name - it needs to be capitalized - something Cap Might ought to know! (page 198)
Daphne from Frasier Benny Hill (which is true) p141, p221 (repetition).
"...Men's Warehouse..." should be " Men's Wearhouse" p259. Same letters, different order.
"...which would of course by quite small)..." should be "...which would of course be quite small)..."p266.
"...part of the Heroes Code..." is missing an apostrophe: "... part of the Heroes' Code..." p314.
"...klieg lights..." should be "Klieg lights" since the Kleig part (actually Kleigl) is someone's name. p350.
"Now there was a plan I could hang my coat off." Hang my coat off?! p357.
"... into Miss Transit, kiping her teleportation power" is nonsensical (kiping isn't a word. Should it be 'keeping'? 'crippling'? p396

This is the second of three super hero novels I'm reviewing one after another. The review of the other novel, Barry Vs The Apocalypse is here. Note that unlike yesterday's Jupiter's legacy this is not a graphic novel.

I really liked this story but it took some getting used to! Note that the version I read of this combined all four original parts into one story. It's written in first person PoV, which is far from my favorite voice, but here it works. Also note that this is not a story for the faint-hearted, and I say that not because it's scary or anything, but because it's a very adult story where both strong language and graphic sexual imagery as well as a plethora of gross-out comments are gainfully employed, but there's an odd fastidiousness to the bad language.

The narrator, Captain Might, has no problem with typing "goddamned" but refuses to type "shit" or "fuck" without replacing the vowel with a symbol - a skull and crossbones for the 'i' and a lightning bolt for the 'u'. I didn't get the logic there; the author seems at times to be quite religious (although I may have that wrong!), but if that's the case, why baulk at the F and the S words, but write 'goddamned' without hesitation? I don't know! I didn't get the mentality there, but in the end, it's not that important.

I used the word "typing" back there because that's exactly what the font looks like: thirteen point Courier with a ragged right edge, too, like this was actually typed on a typewriter, which I also didn't get. It wasn't an appealing font, and that can make a difference to a reader. Plus it was large - The conceit is that the super hero is typing this out himself, which (given how he spends his time fantasizing about fighting super villains) doesn't seem to fit - why would he waste time typing? Why not dictate or have a ghost writer? Who knows?

That said, my last comment about the presentation also extends to the extensive footnotes: they felt out of place in the type-written scenario which had been created here, especially since they were in a different font. They were often funny, but I wasn't keen on the one which ran to a second page, where it was the only thing on page 34 and occupied only two lines at the bottom of it. This happened several times.

Those gripes aside, I did like the tone and voice despite it being the detested first person, but I did find myself hoping, knowing from the author what was coming, that this pugnacious braggart would find some humility. Here's one example of a Captain Might sarcastic comment:

I watched Mimix through the interview room's one-way mirror (and it is one-way, guys, a two-way mirror would be glass).

That puncturing of misguided convention definitely hit my funny bone. One of the most amusing things in the early pages is the plethora of ridiculous super-hero names (and let's face it, other than the true comic book addicts, who really can take super-hero names seriously?).

Here we're treated to hilarious ones (at least they seemed hilarious to me) such as The Caped Crouton, Executie, Hot Flash: America's Only Menopausal Superhero, Mother Load, Nocturnal Emission, Polterguy: The World's Strongest Ghost, and Vaginamite among others. One of the funniest parts was where the narrator, flying overhead, points out five superheroes at a donut shop, lined up so their chest logos spelled "DICKS". These heroes had perfectly ordinary super-hero style names, which is why it was funny: Dynamo, Impervious, Cascade, Kilowatt and Switchback. And that's not to mention an LGBT team named Homo Superior....

So yes, loved the humor. Not too keen on the hero to begin with, but despite his obnoxiousness, he did kind of grow on me the more I read. He was an arrogant braggart, very full of himself and dismissive towards others. He reminded me of the guy in this one poem I wrote which I published in Poem y Granite.

So let's cut to the chase: Captain Might squares off against Professor D'eath, his nemesis, and the Professor has some serious new tricks up his sleeve, one of which is the ability to strip Captain Might of his super powers. What's he gonna do without them, and more importantly, what will happen to his ego?

Note in passing that Abe Lincoln never said, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I'll spend the first four sharpening the axe" - not according to a search of the complete works of Lincoln here. I think it's simply a folk tale as are many of the things attributed to Lincoln in the hope that people will much more readily take to heart something which Lincoln reputedly said than anything the author who "quotes" Lincoln is saying. This is a huge problem with hero worship. It's delusional! Besides, I seriously doubt that someone as able as Abe was with his hands, would take four hours to sharpen an ax.

Of course, this story is being told in first person, so the author can get away with mis-quotes and bad quotes, and even non-existent quotes - depending on how said author wants his character to appear. If he wants him well-read and smart, then he'll get his quotes right, otherwise, the character will get them wrong and look dumb, arrogant ill-educated, or up to something! This is important to keep in mind when writing in first person. Your character is only as educated as your writing and research!

Describing the Mandroids' armament as Gatling guns makes them seem a bit out-dated. Maybe that was intended. But the Gatling gun was a hand-cranked rapid fire gun. If the gun is something that's automated, it really needs to be a Maxim gun, or more modernly, a Vulcan or a minigun. Again minor matter of taste and of course, of the writer's intended aim - especially if it's a gun we're dealing with!

I cheered when I read this footnote, however: "...That said, I do believe there are some people who deserve to be rounded up and caged off from the rest of us, namely Creationists, people who use the word 'methinks', and whoever it is watching 2 Broke Girls...". Methinks I agree with only one of the three for sure, since I've never seen 2 Broke Girls, but if it's anything remotely like your typical American sitcom, it probably sucks like a starving fly on the Inevitable Bulk's last will and excrement.

So yes, super and heroic this story was, and I recommend it for readers with a strong stomach!

Jupiter’s Legacy by Mark Millar

Title: Jupiter’s Legacy
Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Art: Frank Quitely
Colors / Letters: Peter Doherty

This is an amazing story by the creator of Kick-Ass and marks three reviews in a row I will do, starting with this one, of novels about super heroes. Funnily enough, this is the only one which is a graphic novel! It takes as its premise a question that really isn’t explored in comic books – not in any I’ve read anyway. The best known comic books tend to be about super heroes and super villains. They’re really never about family since the heroes tend not to have family. Batman lost his parents. Superman lost his. Spider-Man lost his parents and his uncle. Iron man thought only of himself – to begin with. Super heroes aren’t generally known for family life or family ties – or indeed for any real altruism when you get right down to it. Nor are they known for growing old.

This novel asks what super hero life would be like if those family ties were firmly in place, and if those families had issues just like everyday families, and it does a pretty darned good job of it, too. Some time ago, The Utopian and several of his friends gained super powers from a little trip to an island. How or why this happened isn’t explained in volume one. Now time has passed and the heroes have grown old – gray haired, a bit tired – and they have families. Some of them are not very happy with how things are, and their kids are even more disenchanted than their parents are.

Set in the USA (that hasn’t changed) during the recent economic downturn (and at other times) this story asks another question that super hero stories tend to fail at: why don’t the super heroes do more than simply punch out the villains and luxuriate in the subsequent acclaim? For example, with the genius that Batman and Superman have between them, they could revolutionize crime-fighting by helping law enforcement organizations with technology and advice, but they never stoop that low, do they? They selfishly keep all that finery for themselves.

The Utopian’s brother does ask these questions, and he’s thoroughly unsatisfied by the answers he gets. He’s even more incensed by The Utopian’s domineering attitude and old-fashioned view of the way things should be, but he can’t usurp his brother’s throne on his own. He does know that the hero’s own son is thoroughly disaffected and resentful of his father’s treatment, however. Maybe the two of them together might effect some change in leadership – of both the super heroes and the US government?

I highly recommend this graphic novel. It’s beautifully put together, richly worded, smartly conceived, and gorgeously illustrated and colored.

Talented by Sophie Davis

Title: Talented
Author: Sophie Davis
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in the "Talented saga", which runs to at least four books, because why write one novel when you can milk the same story for several? Once in a while, a writer makes it work, but this once was not that once, unfortunately. Normally I make it a point to avoid like the plague any book series which contains the word 'chronicles', or 'cycle', or 'saga' in its series title. In this case I made an exception because the blurb did its job - it lured me in. I sincerely hoped I wouldn't read to regret it, but I did!

The book, yet another in an annoyingly endless series of YA novels which for reasons unknown insist upon first person PoV, opens in a village known as Hunters Village where sleeps Natalia (Talia, Tal) in the pretentiously named 'Elite Headquarters' - yes with initial caps! I sincerely hope she doesn't really look like the anorexic girl preening herself on the cover....

Despite supposedly having to be ready on a moment's notice in case of attack, Talia sleeps in her PJs, bless her little cotton socks. She apparently has serious trouble breathing too, because when the attack siren goes off in the middle of the night, all she can do is stand around in her PJs telling herself repeatedly to breathe (yes in italics!). Funny, I thought breathing was an autonomous function....

Apparently the juvenile powers that be-otch have the idea that training consists of failing to train, and then scaring people out of bed with false alarms while they themselves sit around and laugh at the ensuing antics. Yep, adolescent juvenile dick-heads are the ones I'd trust to protect and serve. Talking of which, where are the adult operatives? I know this is a YA novel, but one of the things not explained here is why children are called upon to run these operations when there have to be trained and seasoned grown-ups available. It was one more unexplained mystery (at least in the portion I read).

Talia has psychic powers consisting of, we immediately learn, mind reading and telekinetics. She can suspend the "bombs" (in this case nothing more than neon tinted water in balloons), but she fails to do this successfully. She gets distracted by reading the mind of one of the organizers of this laugh-a-thon, and discovers from boyfriend Donavon that it's all a big joke. Such a joke is it that he and two male friends then come and physically haul Talia out of bed where she retreated in anger, welcoming her to Hunters Pledging (yes, 'pledging' with initial caps). I guess puerile moronic college bullshit hasn't changed in two hundred years.

It's obvious as soon as his name is mentioned that Donavon and Talia are an item, but it's also transparent that there's heaps of room for a triangle here. Donovan is the loyal good guy so let's kick him in the teeth by having Talia fall in love with one of the enemy, who is a bad boy with hair falling in his eyes. I have no way of knowing if that actually happened, but I would have put money on it based on this clichéd writing.

Frankly, though, rather than learn about how tall the boys are, and what color their eyes are, and what length their hair is, and how much they weigh, I'd much rather have been told what the heck is going on, who the hunters actually are (we learn in chapter four that they're 'spies'), what they do (gather information and "neutralize" threats), and who might be bombing them (rebels). Alas, the author doesn't want us to know, because that's not what this grade-school level novel was interested in conveying at this point. I don't know the precise age of the characters, but trust me, middle-grade is what they are, regardless of their actual ages.

One thing I don't get was Talia's whining, needy attitude towards Donovan. They'd had to spend a year apart, but these two can read each other's mind. That's far more intimacy than any of us ordinary humans get, yet she's whining about how hard it was to spend a year apart from him, only able to visit on holidays and special weekends! Since everything, even physical touch, is ultimately experienced in the mind, how did their separation constitute being deprived pray tell?!

I guess I should be careful what I wish for because chapter two brought a huge info-dump which actually conveyed very little. Apparently, a century before, for reasons unspecified, Earth went just plain nuts. There were earthquakes and tsunamis, hurricanes and tornadoes, cities were destroyed, and coastal villages washed away. That wasn't even the worst of it. Nuclear reactors "buried deep in the Earth's surface" also went nuts and contaminated the oceans. Exactly how that happened is not specified. What the reactors were for isn't specified. Why they were buried isn't specified. Why we had reactors when current move is away from that kind of thing and towards solar, wind, and hydro-power isn't specified.

We're told that Margaret McDonough, the founder of the school for the talented, which Talia attended, was the 75th US president, and that we are at least three to five generations along from her presidency, which means that the time-line of this story is completely screwed up! She founded her school for the "talented" before there actually were any talented! She must have been a visionary!

This story is taking place somewhere between roughly around 2200AD and 2300AD, depending upon how long each president's term was between Obama, the 44th president, and McDonough, and how long you allow for a generation, so the buried nuclear power plants makes very little sense.

From the highly improbable the info-dump went directly into the ludicrous as we were told that animal mutations arose, such as horses growing horns and dogs growing feathers. No word on whether pigs could fly. Trees grew stinging bark, and plants glowed at night! I laughed out loud at that stupidity. Evidently she wasn't kept in the dark but she was barking up the wrong tree. This is yet another example of an author who evidently didn't pay anywhere near enough attention in high school biology class, particularly in the portions discussing evolution and genetics, and it shows in this lousy writing.

These descriptions are only made worse as we learn in this info-dump that as contamination was fought, these 'talents' began to disappear. So how were these talents manifested if not genetically, and if they were genetic, then how come they were not passed on to offspring? Were all mutations beneficial? Were there no horrible death tolls as children were born with life-threatening mutations? None of this made any sense.

It would have been better had the author only vaguely alluded to a horrible, dim, distant, and largely obscured past without trying to actually explain it, especially since we're told that scientists couldn't figure out what it was which made some children different, but all were agreed that it was because of nuclear contamination? I'm sorry, but this is fanfic-level bullshit.

Right out of the X-Men play-book, we're told that children developed in a way very different from animals for no apparent reason. Unlike those feathered dogs and stinging trees, human children developed X-Men talents such as the ability to morph into an animal shape. We're told they developed other talents, too, such as telekinesis, but also "viewing" and "higher reasoning". Don't nearly all humans have higher reasoning? I know for a fact that most of us can see! Can the author not at least look-up the correct words for these things so we know what it actually is that she means?!

These kinds of talents make no sense, when you get right down to it. Or alternately, this kind of story featuring talents like these makes no sense. If you have people who can read minds, why would you need a spy agency and an information recovery team? More importantly, if the world, as we've been told, has been quite literally devastated, then what threats are there to worry about other than the ones nature itself presents? Is there still a low-level cold war, with the communist nations at odds with the non-communist? I don't see how that would work after all this devastation. Is there still a terrorist threat? I don't think so! So what threats are there? This story just didn't seem like it had been at all well thought-through - or actually thought through at all.

We're expected to buy in 'explanation' that the US has split: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas, we're told, seceded to form the Coalition of Rebel States. How, exactly, this happened in a functioning democracy, isn't explained. Why those particular states, isn't explained. How the states managed to do this, and conduct terrorist raids, slaughtering people over the border (including Talia's parents) isn't explained. Why the rest of the states didn't simply invade the rebel states isn't explained.

Back to the story in regress: after a night spent sleeping under the stars, Donavon wakes Talia up for a late breakfast before training resumes later than day. He pulls a Thermos out of a cooler, and then warms it in a fire. Honestly? What is this guy - brain-dead? A Thermos means you intend to keep the contents either hot or cold. If you need it cold, as its being in the cooler indicates, why would you take it out and warm it? If you need it warm, why was it in the cooler? If you put a Thermos in a fire, it's going to explode. Maybe Donavon was conducting an impromptu IED class?

This novel is technically passably written - nothing brilliant but not disastrous either, yet there are some instances where the writing is highly questionable, such as around 22% - 23% in where we read, "The water run for several seconds…" which should have been, "The water ran for several seconds…". On the next screen we read, "...paying the consequences...". I don’t think anyone pays the consequences. I do think people face the consequences!

That whole section is where Talia wakes up after getting drunk the night before. Maybe the author was too? I have several issues with this hang-over, though. First of all, this is supposed to be an Elite (with initial cap!) group, yet they’re out partying and getting drunk? There's no problem with soldiers unwinding and having some R&R, but getting drunk? Note that this was shortly after they'd had the alarm at the start of this novel because they might be (I assume) attacked at any time? How are these people supposed to defend themselves if they’re drunk? How are they supposed to be combat-ready if they have a hangover?

This is made worse when Erik (yes with the official Divergent 'K') insists upon Talia coming with him to the med tent to get rehydrated, because Talia is merely a helpless and directionless girl who needs to be managed at all times by men. The problem is that when they get there, all she gets is a shot. That's not rehydration, that's a shot. Rehydration would mean an IV bag and laying on a cot for as long as it takes for the fluid to get into your system. So yeah, some of the writing was downright thoughtless or ill-informed.

Worse than this, though, was the diminishing of Talia at every turn. The above-related incident is only one example, but the very use of her name is another. Originally, her name was Natalia. It’s shortened to Talia which is kind of a cool name, but then her colleagues shorten it to Tal, and Erik (in the section discussed above) employs that in the form of "Tals". What are these people, thirteen years old? Every time they do this, they diminish the character. Instead of being a promising young woman, she's rendered into a child, to be managed and baby-talked, and this is not a good thing to do to your main character!

At one point Talia suggests that her new friend Penny message her so they can get together later. It’s written like this:

"Um sure. Why don't you send me a comm," I replied, referring to the messages we sent to each other using our communicators.

No, really? 'Send me a comm' means send me a message on the communicator? I'd never, ever, have figured that one out. See what I mean about it being written at a middle-grade level? It was actually at this point, where Donavon shows up again and acts like a complete jerk for no reason other than that the author wanted a rift so she could toss Erik and Tal together and generate a completely artificial triangle, that I gave up due to extreme nausea. I'm actually surprised I made it this far, but at 25% in, I decided that this novel was unreadable because it was so juvenile and so amateurishly written. I cannot recommend it.

The Hero Chronicles: Secrets by Tim Mettey

Title: The Hero Chronicles: Secrets
Author: Tim Mettey
Publisher: Tim Mettey
Rating: WARTY!

This novel I've had in my reader for a while, putting it off for items more urgent, but it’s time to get this read. Another reason for putting it off is that this novel violates several of my conditions for reading a novel (most of which materialized after I'd added this one to my list!). First of all the title incorporates not only the word "chronicles", but also the word "hero", both of which I've sworn-off in novel titles (along with 'cycle' and 'saga'!). Secondly it’s first person PoV, which is a big no-no for me since it’s all "Me!" all the time: "Hey lookit me!" "Hey forget that, pay attention to what I'M doing!" and "No one is more important than Meeeee!"

It’s so self-indulgent and irritating, and it’s a rarity in my experience to find such a novel that's written well enough to be worth expending my time on - not when there are so many other novels and life is short! I'd much rather read something easy on the mind than something which requires fortitude and gritted teeth just to scan the text!

This novel also has sound effects incorporated into the text. Even for a middle to upper grade novel it’s a no-no. The school bell doesn’t ring, it goes "DING!DING!DING!DING!" without any spaces in between. How annoying! The the main character is equally annoying. When the bell rings for recess, he doesn’t take his turn, but hurries to the front of the line. And this is just on the second page of this thing. The school apparently experiences an earthquake, and suddenly it’s five years later and we’re in chapter two. Kudos to the author for actually putting the prologue into the body of the novel. It’s the only way you'll get me to read a prologue! I'm guessing some super villain or other comes out of the earthquake, but I haven’t read that far, so it’s only a guess.

Nick the hero is now living with his aunt Cora. Cora's only defining qualities are that she's slim and beautiful, because who wants a smart woman who might be overweight? Let’s not ever tell young children that smarts are more important than looks. And while we’re at it, who wants a woman with integrity and good humor? No one. Don’t ever tell young kids that. The hell with integrity, industry and accomplishments! Let’s not have kids growing up thinking those things are of value. Nope! Keep it superficial!

This author evidently thinks that all young kids need to know is that women should be slim and beautiful - like a magazine model - because no other woman is worth anything, let's face it. That's what all-too-many writers want us to believe, sadly enough, and that's evidently what this writer apparently wants young kids to grow-up learning. Personally, I don’t buy it, but that's the way it is. Maybe I should start keeping a tally, as I read, of how many strikes this novel garners for itself? Naw! I never read that far.

Cora and nephew are moving to a new home. I like the way Cora specifies that they'll be leaving at 5am sharp in the morning, so that he doesn’t get any ideas that they'll be moving out at 5am sharp in the afternoon…. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that he's a superhero and this could well be why they're moving so frequently. The how and why of this isn't immediately explained, but he at least has super speed, so here comes the next trip-up.

Alex and Nick decorate an older guy's car with bologna, because that's unquestionably the best way to have a really fun night, and when the older guy starts looking for the culprits, Alex proves that he can run faster than a Mustang - which in the end crashes injuring the guys. How christian is that?! He runs right into the kid he's rescuing - at speed - and takes him along so they won't be caught, but the writer is in dire need of a lesson in physics and biology, because he simply doesn’t get it (that's what too much religion will do for you!). Don’t worry, the writers in The Flash TV show don't get it either.

It doesn't matter how much of a super hero you are, the laws of physics still apply, and ordinary people still have the same biology. If you run at sixty miles an hour and pick-up a by-stander in order to rescue them, then their body is going to go from zero to sixty instantly, and you're going to break their neck or give them some serious whiplash and compression injuries at least. That's not much of a rescue.

This novel started out middle grade and moved to young adult, but the tone never changed from middle-grade. Worse than this, instead of telling us a story about the super hero powers, we got a story of the main character playing football - in tedious detail. What happened to the super hero? I guess football is more important. This story felt far more like author wish-fulfillment than ever it did a real story, and I cannot in good faith recommend it.

Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields

Title: Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields
Author: Karl Fields (no website found)
Publisher: Pleated Press (no website found)
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 enough reward aplenty!

Here's a novel which gets right to the point - a cover, a title page, and then chapter one! Screw antiquated Library of Congress rules and antique publishing methods! You've got to admire that. This is the world of ebooks, not of trays of lead characters pressed together rank and file waiting to be slathered with sticky ink and squished onto a galley page. So off we go!

The world in this novel is one of people who have special powers - not supernatural powers, but enhanced human powers. Devin Chambers, the main character narrates this story, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, because it's a first person PoV format - something which I normally rail against. As it happens, it was done well on this occasion, and didn't feel to me like someone was scraping their fingernails down a chalkboard as I read it! That was a major relief.

Devin is known as a 'steth' - short for stethoscope, presumably - because he can detect, at a distance, the faintest sounds of someone's heartbeat which allows him not only to know if they're alive, but to some degree, what they're feeling and whether they're lying. How that works, exactly, goes unexplained. Yes, you can detect a change in heart-beat, or a particular rhythm, but what does that really tell you, and in how much detail? He cannot, however, detect the heartbeat of another steth - and certain other people as will become clear to readers.

He first begins to feel he's really different from others (even other steths) when his school class attends a trial and he's the only one who thinks the defendant isn't guilty. Shortly after this he's visited by a guy, Mickey, who offers him a place at the prestigious Faulkner Academy. His good friend Travis, who's also invited, is pumped about it, but Devin has doubts because the Academy has no athletic program (no, honestly!).

Devin is also obsessed with the innocent guy saddled with a guilty verdict and one day when he goes to the jail to visit him, he encounters a girl, Sarah Shaw, who was already visiting this same guy. He follows the girl, only to discover she's a special, too - but a 'bouncer' who, he learns, is supposedly his mortal enemy. Is this be the clichéd love-hate relationship whereby these two are destined to fall in love? I can't tell you!

The writing in general is very good, with only one or two questionable areas, such as on page 17 where we read: "Shaw, the defendant, who sat beside his attorney in a white jumpsuit..." Who was wearing the white jump suit?! How about, "Shaw, the defendant who was wearing a white jump suit, sat beside his attorney..."? Just a suggestion! Apart from rare happenstances like that, it was well-written, entertaining, and engrossing.

I have to say (and without confirming if I was right or wrong - I'm usually wrong on these things!) I didn't trust Carissa Watson, a fellow student at Faulkner who became involved with Devin. She seemed a little too convenient for me. I much preferred Sarah! I also liked Travis, although he initially seemed to me to be like a victim waiting to happen. Whether that does happen I'm not going to tell you!

It struck me as odd that Devin tells us he couldn't talk about movies with Carissa on their first date because there was no movie theater in town. What, they never saw one on TV or rented a video?! That struck me as strange, but that and some misspellings, such as "planed" in placed of "planned" (which a spell-checker won't find!) were about the worst issues I had with the technical aspects of this story, apart from the one I'll discuss next, which needs its own paragraph!

At one point, about halfway through this novel (which is a surprisingly fast read) there was a really improbable situation where Devin, obsessing way more on a missing photograph than ever he had any reason to, went on a highly unlikely "expedition" to a place he thought it might be. This made no sense whatsoever - first that the photograph would be hidden (and hidden there of all places) rather than simply destroyed, and second that Devin would ever become so focused on it, let alone dedicated to finding it. There was no rationale for it.

Devin had what was termed in the book, Hypersensitive Tympanic Syndrome. This isn't a real disorder as far as I know, but it is the condition which steths are supposed to have. What bugged me about that was that if steths's hearing is so sensitive that they can clearly detect a heartbeat (and from a distance, yet!), then how come every noise out there doesn't drive them crazy or deafen them? This issue is never even discussed, much less explained!

Those things aside, I really liked the characters and the story. It was well-thought out (for the most part!) and interesting. Devin was a really likable character and, again for the most part, the story was believable and made sense. This was a refreshing change from way too much YA 'literature' that I've had to read. Also kudos for having a believable guy as the main character. Devin was an African American, but one who isn't somehow tied-in to gangs or rap! It was such a relief to find stereotyping was absent here: Devin was just an ordinary everyday guy, and I appreciated that. I'm looking forward to the sequel to this novel.

Ange'El by Jamie Le Fay

Title: Ange'El
Author: Jamie Le Fay
Publisher: CreateSpace 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 often enough reward aplenty!

This story focuses on Morgan, a Brit feminist writer who's visiting New York City in support of her her Hope foundation. She gets to know a security guard who's assigned for her protection, but there are things about him which seem weird. Naturally she falls for him because why wouldn't a feminist woman in a romance novel betray everything she stands for by becoming totally dependent upon a guy for her slavation - or is that salvation?!

Seriously, that's what I didn't get about this novel. Morgan is supposed to be this strong female character, but she ends up being nothing more than a damsel in distress, totally owned by - who else, of course - angel Gabriel. He's not really an angel, just part of a bizarre cult of genetically superior beings.

Morgan then starts behaving like an idiot, so he has to save her even more. It was at this point that I said, "Enough already! If I want to see a woman this completely owned, I'll watch a 1950's TV family sit-com". At least I can count on a laugh or two that way.

Instead of showing a woman with a sword in a superior position to a man, this novel's cover should have depicted her cowering under his security-blanket angel's wings. At least that would have been a realistic representation of what's inside the novel (not that anyone actually has wings in this novel - not in the part I read, anyway). Your mileage may differ, but I cannot get with this kind of story at all. If you do like it, then you're in for a treat, because it's the start of the inevitable series. For me, a series needs to be a lot hotter than run-of-the-mill and warmed-over if it wants me on-board, so I will not be following Morgan.

Zodiac Legacy by Stan Lee

Title: Zodiac Legacy
Author: Stan Lee
Publisher: Disney Press
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Andie Tong

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 enough reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p51 "He's one of us know..." should be "He's one of us now..."
p51 "We keep tabs of Maxwell..." should be "We keep tabs on Maxwell..."

Today is the last day of my alphabet December reviews, with a double 'Z' brace of books. I'm done! Never again!

This novel (not a graphic novel, but a novel with some graphics) was available for both Adobe Digital Editions and the Kindle and I looked at it in both. The Kindle edition was problematical because the first part of each chapter had text which was grayed out and difficult to read as Kindle grey scale text. In the ADE version, I could see why - that text is on a red background. Also what are full-page illustrations in the ADE are very small images in the Kindle and so lose a lot of their impact. Other than that, both editions looked fine.

The story - which is evidently book one in the inevitable series - begins with Steven Lee, who is on a tour of a museum in China. Steven is Chinese-American and he's thinking that the tour guide is at best distracted, and at worst out of her league, when strange things begin happening. He and the tour guide, Jumanne (not her real name!), are the last to leave the room they're currently in, but as he is leaving, he hears a scream. The tour guide seems to become a different person at this point: focused and purposeful as she disappears through a hidden door. Asking himself, "What would a superhero do?" Steven follows.

He's rather surprised to find the Jumanne's clothes at the foot of a long flight of stairs, but not as surprised as he is to discover, when he reaches a balcony down there, a guy down below who is apparently being imbued, one-by-one, with the powers associated with the twelve signs of the Chinese zodiac: Dog, Dragon, Goat, Horse, Monkey, Ox, Pig, Rabbit, Rat, Rooster, Snake, and Tiger.

The guy's name is Maxwell, and he's the bad guy and so is of course, a dragon. It turns out that Jumanne and Maxwell's assistant, Carlos, are both aligned against Maxwell, and Steven is actually a candidate for taking on zodiacal powers himself! He's a tiger. Carlos has no such affinity, but is an excellent side-kick. Jumanne, whose real name, it turns out, is Jasmine, also happens to be a dragon.

There are two free mini-books on BN & Amazon, each of which offers some details of the characters (six on each side), and offers about six chapters of the Zodiac novel as well. It's the same six chapters in each book, but one book details the good guys: Dragon (Jasmine), Goat, Pig, Rabbit, Rooster (Roxanne), Tiger (Steven), the other the bad guys: dog, horse (Josie), monkey, ox, rat, snake, plus Maxwell on the dragon). Maxwell wanted to absorb all the powers - something which is supposed to be impossible- and then dole them out to minions whom he could control. He claims he wants to make the world a better place, but Jasmine's crew doesn't believe him.

Once the initial confrontation is over and the zodiac device has been split, Jasmine, Carlos, and Steven take off across the world tracking down the young people who have somehow managed to pull down the various spare zodiac powers that Maxwell hadn't yet claimed for himself. Given that they're complaining they don't have large financial backing like Maxwell does, how they manage to commandeer passage on a container ship and then flights to Paris and other places, I have no idea!

'This is very much a middle grade story. It isn't aimed at adults. As such it wasn't that entertaining for me, but it wasn't bad, and I can see how young kids would find it engrossing, so I'm going to rate it positively. The art-work by Andie Tong, which served more as dividers between chapters than anything else, was very good, so all-in-all, not too bad of an effort, but not very demanding or engaging for more mature readers.

It Falls to Us by Tim Nolen

Title: It Falls to Us
Author: Tim Nolen
Publisher: Tim Nolen
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 often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
P13 "Yeah, we'll you'll need…" should be "Yeah, well you'll need…"

I don’t do covers because this blog is about writing and writers have little or nothing to do with the cover (unless they self-publish). Covers are all about misdirection, fluff, and advertising and generally have nothing to do with the story. In this case, the only reason I found the cover interesting was that the design of the silhouetted superhero's chest looks like a face - the two white roundels on the upper pectorals look like eyes, the straight vertical line dividing the pecs looks like a nose, the rounded lower portions of the pecs look like cheeks or jowls, and the cape billowing away to the right (as we look at the image) looks like long, flowing hair! Fluff.

This novel is 47 chapters in 114 pages which means really short chapters, especially since the text is pretty much double-spaced. It's a very short novel - perhaps even a novella (I don’t know the word count) - but then it’s part of the inevitable series, the whole point of which is to keep spinning the story out as long as possible. I should say up front that I don’t do series unless they're exceptional, and few are. I am not planning on following this one.

The novel doesn’t have a prologue - which I never read anyway. Instead, the author wisely put the prologue - where the old guard superheroes meet their come-uppance - into chapter one. See? It can be done, folks! Tim Nolen proved it!

This first chapter is trope and clichéd superhero stuff, which I was willing to put up with in the hope that the new generation in the following chapters would have something different and original to offer. They didn’t. It was just more of the same. I ran into a small problem on page three where I read, "…rabbit punched her in the face…" A 'rabbit punch' is a blow to the neck - so it’s impossible by definition to rabbit punch someone in the face! Oh well….

In the very next paragraph the author confuses smoke with darkness - either that or the properties of a typical night vision image intensifier with the properties of a thermal imaging camera, by having someone with "night vision goggles" able to see through smoke, but let's let that slide by in its sentence fragment, because, in general, the writing wasn't too bad. There were however some real clunkers such as that on page 11, where I found this odd phrase describing part of a fight between younger generation hero 'Defiant' and super-villain 'The Wrecking Crew': "…sending Defiant sailing down the block, taking an enclosed bus stop with him. Defiant landed out into an intersection..." 'landed out into'? Fortunately most of it was good English.

One of the major problems with this for me was that it’s not a graphic novel, but it read like one. I didn’t see that as a point in its favor. Had it been accompanied by panels of images on each page, then it would have felt like it was much more in its element. It just felt wrong for a text novel because there's no real attempt at descriptive or detail writing here, nor is there any attempt at creating atmosphere. It’s all straight-forward depiction of fights between heroes and villains, conversations, and preparations for the next fight. There's no world-building going on here - no deeper context.

After Defiant comes up with a smart decision on how to take down Wrecking Crew, he carts him off to jail, where we learn that the jail has a nullifier device which cancels the villains' powers. I was immediately thinking: if this is the case, how come the cops don't simply use one out in the field to nullify the villains' powers and arrest them? Why do we need superheroes? How come the villains don’t have one to use against the superheroes? Apparently the reason for this is that there is only the one and it’s huge - buried in the ground under the six cells it powers.

There was one incident which I felt was rather racist, which is where some thugs threaten a character named Veronica, and Defiant comes to her rescue. This is yet another instance of a girl needing rescue by a guy, but that wasn't even the worst part of it. The thugs were given dialog that sounded like a white person's ill-considered attempt at 'Ebonics' - thereby identifying the thugs as black. I don't know if this was the intention or not, but the implied association of 'black' with 'thug' wasn't appreciated. I can't speak to whether the entire cast of this story (apart from aforementioned thugs) was white, because there really was very little description of anything.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the major villain's name was Blackheart! He is the one who negates the four main superheroes at the start, but he reminded me of Doctor Evil in the Austin Powers movies! He just didn’t seem like a real villain - more like a caricature. I made it to fifty percent of the way through this book before I ditched it. It just wasn't interesting enough to keep pushing on, not when there are so many other books out there which I know will pull me in and hold my attention. I can’t rate this as a worthy read.

The Siren and the Sword by Cecilia Tan

Title: The Siren and the Sword
Author: Cecilia Tan
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
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!

Erratum:
p47 "…then la down…" should be "…then lay down.."

This novel is a huge rip-off of the Harry Potter stories (and the author admits it - kinda!). It's book one of the Magic University series, because one novel is never enough any more in the YA world. There was a prologue which I skipped as I always do. If the writer doesn’t consider it important enough to put into chapter one or later, then it’s not important enough for me to waste my time reading it. I've followed this philosophy consistently and I've never come across a novel (including this one) where I've had to go back and read the prologue because I felt I missed something. QED.

The novel is about main character Kyle's integration into magic college, his making of friends, and his resolving the issue of who is the siren who haunts the college library, but I use the word "story" very loosely because there really isn't one. What there is, is really thin and not nourishing at all. There's nothing new, original, or even interesting here, unless all you want is a cheap non-romance and some raunchy sex (Celia Tan is primarily a writer of erotica). That isn't enough for me.

There are no interesting characters here: no one who stands out, or who registers as engaging or fun, or admirable. There's no villain as such, and there's really no attempt whatsoever at world-building, so we're treated to a tale that's essentially just a series of sketches or vignettes rather than a real story.

The best thing about his novel is that it’s not told in first person PoV - the most self-centered, pretentious, and inauthentic of writing styles. I commend the author for that, but the rest is pretty much boiler-plate Harry Potter. Kyle Wadsworth is in the trope position of starting his first day at a new and surprisingly unexpected school. He's an orphan boy who isn’t wanted at home, who suddenly finds out that he's magical, and sees 'new school' as synonymous with 'new home'.

The only real difference is that Kyle is eighteen and starting college instead of just launching into a middle and high school education. You might want to make a note that there's a strong and very prevalent sexual content in this novel - which definitely wasn't in Harry Potter and which is much more graphic than you usually find in YA stories. That didn't bother me, and in some ways it was quite well done, but I never trusted it for some reason, and given how the story turned out in the end, it made everything that went before seem farcical and inauthentic.

We're quickly introduced to Jess, who's a stand-in for Ginny Weasley (after a fashion), but who has nowhere near the power which Ginny had. Next we meet Alex, who is pretty much Ron Weasley, and we meet Lindy, who is a clone of Hermione Granger, right down to her being born of non-magical parents and having wild hair. Not only is Kyle magical, but he's a special magical person - just like Harry Potter - and there's a prophecy about him. And just like Hogwarts, there are four school houses which follow the four suits of (tarot) cards:

• Camella (Latin for a bowl or a cup
• Gladius (Latin for a short sword - the primary fighting instrument of the Roman legions)
• Nummus (the Latin term for copper coins)
• Scipionis means that which belongs to Scipio (who was a Roman general), but it also means a rod or a staff

Just like Harry, Kyle is placed into one of these houses by magical means. Unlike Harry, he gets Gladius, which isn't the one he wanted. Like Harry, his dorm room is way up in the top of a tower above the common room. Oh! And there's even an underground chamber. This one isn't hidden, although it probably contains secrets.

Unlike Harry, Kyle has no problem whatsoever completely swallowing everything he's told - including, of course, the revelation that there are magical and non-magical people. None of this freaks him out, or even imbues him with a modicum of skepticism. He immediately and completely believes it all. I didn't like Kyle.

There's a really funny instance of cluelessness from Jess when the two of them 'magically' hook up and go out to eat. Jess claims she had a prophetic dream of meeting a man at a carnavale. That dream has never come true, so why on Earth is she claiming it was prophetic? Just because she remembers it? Lol! This struck me as completely nonsensical. I didn't like Jess.

Suddenly on their way to get pizza, her eyes look like deep pools to Kyle, and now the two of them are no longer hungry but horny! Once again we have a relationship in a YA novel which is all about looks, skin deep, carnality - and nothing to do with actually getting to know and value - or even like - a person. It's sad that this was written by a woman.

The classes Kyle is assigned make no sense. He's assigned a class on poetry! Why? Isn’t he supposed to be training to be some kind of a magician? He's a late starter (how that's so when he's just applying to the college is a complete mystery - students don’t normally apply to start when it's already two weeks after the semester begins) - but if he's late as we're told, and magically clueless, as we're told, then why isn't he being assigned some intensive introductory courses? There's no explanation for this.

At one point, we meet Kyle sitting outside a building with gryphons at the door (gryphon-door get it?!) and our hero is so clueless that he can’t think of a single thing to say about a TS Eliot poem. He's not the sharpest sword in the house is he? Fortunately this is where his magical powers come in, and he breezes the class. Apparent his magical power is understanding poetry.... Excuse me?

Next we're having broomstick races and someone is injured. I wonder where I read that before? Keep an eye on the person who gets injured - he fades from view in the story, and then comes roaring back completely out of the blue (and making no sense whatsoever plot-wise) towards the end.

Once again on page 69 (how appropriate) we get prettiness specified as the most important trait in a woman. Shame on Celia Tan. She also writes a conversation in which a nineteen-year-old uses the word "honey" as an endearment. Really? That struck me as highly unlikely. Which teens use that word any more? The author has Kyle talking about being in love with Jess when they hardly know each other, and when the only thing they evidently have in common is sex. It made me lose respect for Kyle that he "fell in love" with someone as shallow, one-dimensional, and cardboard as Jess.

The author does make an effort to pull it out of the fire in the second half, and things began to get a bit more readable with some unexpected twists and turns, but in the end, this wasn't a good story. It was too flimsy and lacking in any real substance. The characters were readily forgettable. The novel had far too little to offer. it had nothing new, and I can't generate any enthusiasm for reading a whole series like this. I barely managed to talk myself into finishing this and would not have done so were it not so short.

Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan

Title: Strong Female Protagonist
Author: Brennan Lee Mulligan
Publisher: Top Shelf
Rating: WORTHY!

Gorgeously illustrated by Molly Ostertag.

With all I've been saying about strong female protagonists, how could I not want to read this?! It turned out to be everything I hoped for. This is what I'm talking about when I say I want a strong female protagonist. Alison is freaking awesome and it has nothing to do with the fact that she can pretty much kick anyone's ass whom she wants to. Here we have a superhero comic that simultaneously parodies superhero comics and tells an amazingly good superhero story of its own.

Alison Elizabeth Green is MegaGirl in a world where young teens have become superheroes and supervillains. Alison's power is super strength and invulnerability, but she's not even remotely invulnerable to self-doubt and to questioning the whole superhero-supervillain trope, and fretting over her place and power in such a world, nor is she to questioning whether, in the final analysis she, as a hero is really any better or even any different to a villain.

The satire and comedy meld perfectly with the harsh reality of the story told here, and it all combines to make a remarkably good superhero story. I particularly liked the sly comments at bottom of each page which have some trenchant or amusing observation to impart. It’s like the writer is reviewing his own work! On page 52, for example, there's an amusing aside about trashcans. On page 111, there's one about two side characters who appear in just the one panel. Later there's a bizarre one about a soldier trying to get his commanding officer to read his poetry. It goes on for every page and they're hilarious.

We follow Alison through her life - mostly her regular life, but with heroic interludes sprinkled in. Alison came out as a super hero, so she has no secret identity. Everything is out in the open, even her past, which frequently comes back to haunt her. Her relationship with the villains is unusual, too. She's actually friends with one who has given-up his villainy, and with another who has found a rather scary way to make up for her past. That character is known as Feral, and I loved her almost as much as I loved Ali.

I was a bit sorry that they didn’t develop an intimate relationship, but that was another strong point of this novel: she didn't need a relationship precisely because she was a strong character who didn't have to have some partner around to validate her.

And that was another amazing thing about his comic: it didn’t present women as objects to be ogled. All of the characters were ordinary people. There were no pneumatic breasts, no improbably toy-like legs. There was no ridiculously juvenile smart-mouthing and clunky one-liners during fights. The whole thing seemed perfectly real, even as it was obviously fictional.

Little bits here and there didn’t work. For example, the reversed text (white lettering on black background on page 127) doesn't function at all well. It's all but illegible. Curiously, the comment typeface used in this way on page 142 works fine. I think it’s that the 'hand-written' font used for the panels just doesn’t work well in the negative.

Also I don’t get that the coach is talking about a 4th quarter in a soccer game on page 181. Soccer doesn't have quarters unless they really wimp out in high school girls soccer. Who knows, maybe they do. I never played high school girls soccer. I found this - if true - to be a truly sad commentary, though. Here I'm reading about a strong female protagonist and learning that girls might be considered such wimps that they can’t play for 30 or even the regular 45 minutes of soccer each half without taking a break! How ironic is that?

I've recently begin reading a sci-fi novel which features, at one point, a planet which is still undergoing a meteorite bombardment similar to that which Earth underwent in its early history (known as the late heavy bombardment - something for which the young-Earth creationists cannot account!). This is why I think that when I read on page 198 of a meteorological forecast, my brain immediately went to meteors instead of weather! That was a weird moment. I began wondering if the meteor bombardment was what caused the superpowers. Very confusing - and totally wrong!

That weirdness aside, I loved this comic from start to finish in its entirety. It was beautifully written, refreshingly illustrated (props to Molly Ostertag), it was realistic within its framework, even as it poked fun at not only superhero conventions, but also at itself. I highly recommend this comic. You can get a look at some of this story on the website: strongfemaleprotagonist.com.

Outshine by Nola Decker

Title: Outshine
Author: Nola Decker
Publisher: 7 Sparks Press (no website found)
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: p50 "Last night she stayed wake watching..." "stayed awake" maybe?

Oh, what do we do about a novel which gets 85% of it right, but in the last fifteen percent, really goes seriously down hill? I was all ready to rate this as a worthy read. I'd even put up the first draft of this review and had it set-up that way, but I hadn't finished the novel! Let this be a lesson to all we who review! Now I have to seriously think about how much this last fifteen percent undermines every good thought I'd had in reading the first 85%!

This novel began very strongly. It felt to me like the one which makes it worth wading through a dozen other average or even crappy novels in order to reach such a novel. I don't know where Nola Decker came from; I'd never heard of her, but she is without doubt a writer to watch. No, strike that! The heck with watching: Nola Decker is a writer to read! This story really grabbed my imagination from page one, and it refused to let go. I love stories like this! At least I did for some four-fifths of it!

Unfortunately, that's not to say it was perfect, but which novels are? There are some flaws in it, but that there are flaws is not the issue. The issue is whether the story is a good and engaging one 9in general it was), whether it's original (it is), whether it has something to say (it does, particularly if you want to know how to really write a YA 'romance'. No writer is perfect, and this novel comes close to delivering perfection from its originality to its well-drawn characters. Is that enough to rate it a worthy read?

Gabe and Jessa have known each other since childhood, but they're not friends. In fact, Gabe isn't friends with anyone, and especially not his spoiled-rotten kid brother Watson, because it's too painful. Gabe's problem is that he knows, just knows when you're lying. It makes him so ill that he refers to it as his 'allergy'.

He can't stand to be around people, since people tend to lie to a greater or lesser degree all the time, and even 'harmless' white lies aren't harmless to Gabe. He has it so bad that he can't even lie to himself, and sometimes he can't keep his mouth shut when he feels a lie - feels it like rusty stakes in his mouth or needles under his skin - being told by someone else, and this has caused disruption and embarrassment on more than one occasion.

Jessa is one of the hot girls in school: immaculately dressed in designer clothes and heels, perfectly manicured and made-up, but she's a complete lie. Inside, Jessa is the tomboy of all tomboys, and turbo-charged at that. One day, skipping class to go for a nail-job down-town, she was cutting through an alley when four guys who evidently knew about her 'power', showed up to abduct her. She almost literally kicked the crap out of them. It felt good to her, too, after hiding her skills for so long under a "girlie" exterior. Now she's looking forward to finally getting a date with Watson (even without her nails having been done!), but Watts has suddenly, with neither warning nor explanation, disappeared.

Jessa sees a connection between the disappearance and her own experience, and she realizes that, unfortunately, she needs Gabe's help to find out what's going on with Watts going off. She thinks he was abducted by the same guys who made the mistake of trying to tackle her, and the more the two of them look into it, the more it looks like she was right.

Here's an observation which has nothing to do with the actual writing itself; it's more to do with the mechanics of presenting what's written via various media. I started reading this on Adobe Reader, where it looked fine, and then I tried it on my antique Kindle (since Adobe Reader isn't portable - not for me anyway!), where it also looked fine for the most part until I reached the end of chapter 11; that's when my Kindle went bankrupt!

The Kindle is rather small, and doesn't make for a great reading experience (I'm very much a print book guy. Sorry, trees!). In order to make it more like reading a book, I keep the text sized quite small and read it in landscape mode. When I reached the end of chapter 11, I swiped to the last screen and the text size was suddenly in a font three times larger than the text on the previous screen or on the next screen! Weird!

This same thing happened in chapter 23, where the whole last paragraph was three times larger on that last screen of the chapter! I have no idea why it did this, or whether or not it's tied to how this novel was formatted, or to some kink in the Kindle, but while it is odd and a bit annoying, it's nothing to do with the story-telling itself, so it's not an issue there. I'm just passing it on FYI.

I don't want to give away any big spoilers since this is a brand-new novel, but in order to review this and describe some problems I had with the plotting, I have to reveals a few details. There were two parts of this novel where credibility really went right out the window. The first was relatively minor, but there were issues in the last fifteen percent that were major. It turns out that Gabe and Jessa are not the way they are by pure chance - there's a lot more going on here, and to her credit, the author skilfully un-peels this story like an onion. Despite that, some of the upcoming plot points are telegraphed rather loudly, so that even I figured it out beforehand. Other parts are much more subtle.

Anyway, in process of unfolding this tale, there's a point at which someone supposedly calls the police, and this someone later turns out to be working for the bad guys, yet both main characters continue to trust that this traitor actually called the police! This issue becomes even worse later, because it's referenced by one of the police officers. This made even less sense to me, unless this university town quite literally has only two police officers. The problem with this whole thing is that it suggests that the two main characters don't have a whole heck of a lot going on behind their forehead, which isn't the best way to depict them! So I was disappointed there.

Aside from a weakness here and there, and the plot holes I mentioned, the story was solid and well-written - very well written. I was impressed, for example, by the relationship between Gabe and Jessa. It was done better than about 70% of YA romances where it's all, "Hi, nice to meet you! Oh God I am so in love with you already!", which is shamefully pathetic and speaks really badly of far too many YA novelists.

Nola Decker isn't one of those people. She knows how to write believable characters, and how to issue them with credible behaviors and motivate them rationally based on their back-story. This novel, as fantastical as it is, is for the most part very credible within its own framework. Yes, occasionally the dialog (in particular, where the bad guys monologue about their world domination plans like evil super-villains!) is a bit eye-roll-inducing, but overall there isn't anything which outright condemns the novel, and there is so very much to recommend it.

Jessa in particular has become one of my favorite kick-ass female heroes. She's actually a bit reminiscent of Spider-Man in some ways, particularly the symbiont-infected one in Spider-Man 3, because she not only has incredible power, and essentially wants to do the right thing, she also has some serious issues to contend with in the form of her own genetic urge to hurt people, and also in the form of her impossible relationships with Gabe and Watts. I felt so bad for her.

There was a weakness which is common to all YA novels in that the authors for some reason will have their characters display all manner of questionable behaviors, but they will never have them kill anyone! This particular flaw occurs several times in this novel, where Gabe and Jessa have the leader of the bad guys (or some of his minions at one point) at their mercy, and yet they let them live, and worse, in effect let them go free, meaning that these people are now free to do as they please,including continuing causing trouble, and even killing other young people!

That was insane in my opinion. Of course, if she'd done that, this would never have been able to run to a series, now would it? Since this blog is primarily about writing, here's a question for writers to consider: how much are you willing betray the quality of your writing for the sake of stretching a one-volume story into a trilogy? The answer should be: "Not at all". Jessa has two golden chances to kill the leader of the bad guys and she fails both times. hence volume two.

What bothered me about this is that we're not talking here about wanton killing or gratuitous violence. We're talking about stopping the bad guys, something which Jessa harps on repeatedly, yet when she had the chance to quite literally stop him cold, she turned her back on it. These are guys who have repeatedly shown themselves to be merciless killers, and to be controllers and manipulators. They plan on continuing abducting or executing other teens dependent upon their value to 'the cause', yet when Gabe says "No, don't kill him!" Jessa loses all her independence and self-motivation, and falls completely into line. This does nothing but cause them ever more grief down the line. For me this was a betrayal of Jessa as a character. Neither did it make any sense in context.

I wouldn't advocate novels where the 'good guys' are shown mercilessly killing others for no good or valid reason, but I honestly cannot get on board with this pussy-footing around dispatching bad guys who are downright evil, and who are clearly never going to change their minds, and never reform their behaviors.

I can see why not having your main characters kill someone in a young teens novel might make sense, but this novel is clearly for older teens and young adults, and this limp attitude which Gabe and Jessa repeatedly exhibit towards some very dangerous and downright evil people seriously undermined the import of the story and the integrity of the two main characters for me. We have PG-13 movies where death is depicted without sentimentality, so what's up with novels aimed at an age-range which is more mature than that?!

Here's another plot hole, as long as we're on that topic: there's a point where Jessa and Gabe have escaped the bad guys (and failed to kill them!) and they're driving back and forth on this one stretch of road because they can't agree on whether they should get back to their home town asap, or go and recover Jessa's car. In the end they decide to recover the car. The sole reason for finally choosing this action is because there's medication in the car which they can use to keep their prisoner under control, so this they do - but then they fail to administer the med and the prisoner busts loose!

This was a real clunker for me. I can see how people, young adults or otherwise, might make bad decisions if they're tired, or strung-out, or scared, but when they make a U-turn for a specific purpose, and then neglect to fulfill that purpose, and we're given no explanation for it, and no good reason (other than that the plot demands it!), then it really drops me out of suspension of disbelief.

But this was very tame when we compare it with the biggest clunker. This is the one which occurred in the last fifteen percent of this novel and which made me seriously reconsider if I still wanted to rate this the way I'd been thinking I would. This is where Gabe gets into a fight with his brother. Normally Gabe is as placid as they come, and it's Watts who has the violence and meanness genes, but Gabe has been pushed and pushed and pushed, and there is so much on the line that when Watts starts beating him up, and really punishing him, Gabe fights back and gives as good as he gets.

There are no adults around: no one to stop the fight (which struck me as odd), but someone calls the police, and when they arrive, they take Watts, who is hardly injured, to the ambulance to treat his "wounds" and they immediately arrest Gabe. All of this is done without the officers asking anyone - anyone at all - what happened here! They just blindly arrest Gabe, the acknowledged weakling of the family, as though he's the brute and the bully and Watts is his innocent victim! That made my jaw drop to the floor because it is absolutely nonsensical, and it carries zero credibility. How did this ever get past the beta readers and the editor? Nola Decker should ask me to be a beta reader, because these plot holes would never have got past me without a red flag being raised! Gabe, a minor, is hauled off to jail without his mother being notified, and without his injuries being treated.

I have to note that the final 15% of this novel is really badly written. And I know exactly what's going to happen in the sequel: they who are dead aren't really dead, and they who were enemies are now friends again. Make of that what you will! My problem is how to rate this. I can't rate it 'warty' because so much of it is so very good. In the end, it's for that reason: for the fact that most of it is really good when compared with the lousy standards of all-too-many YA novels, that I'm going to rate this a worthy read, in the hope (and the faith!) that an author with Nola Decker's very evident chops will get it right in the sequel. So let's look forward to that.