The Devil's Concubine by Jill Braden

Title: The Devil's Concubine
Author: Jill Braden
Publisher: Wayzgoose 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 Devil's Concubine is another exercise in making sure you choose a unique title for your novel. Barnes & Noble lists six titles with this name and that doesn't even include Palle Schmidt's graphic novel with this same title. The cover art is exquisite, although I don't normally address covers because the author typically has little or nothing to do with them. This blog is about writing! This novel is evidently the first in a series. The sequel, The Devil Incarnate is already available and the author is working on the third in this unique series.

Jill Braden is a fellow blogspotter, although I don't know her. From her blog (link above) it sounds like she writes pretty much like I do (in terms of basic approach) which is a bit nice to know, and it looks like she blogs about her writing as she goes. I've never recommended a writer's blog before, although I always link to it if I can find a link, but in this case I will make an exception because it looks like she's all about writing too, something which I have to say I admire and in which I find a lot of comfort! Her blog is not one of those nothing-but-promote-myself blogs like all-too-many writer's blogs seem to be to me. Please go take a look.

Braden's is actually a dynamic blog. I love, for example, that she's a Doctor Who fan, and that she gets so passionate about Irene Adler from the British series revived by Doctor Who head writer Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss: Sherlock You can find my refutation of the standard criticisms of the Lara Pulver episode here. I think too many people, several of whom are purportedly feminists, sadly got this wrong in their quite evidently undue haste to condemn Moffat's Adler, and I think they will realize how wrong they got it when Irene Adler returns. Of course, I could be wrong (I often am!), but we'll see.

The critics' main problem, in my opinion, is in first of all misunderstanding Adler in the original Doyle version, and thereby pumping her up into something she was actually not and second, in misunderstanding Moffat's version even more than they have misunderstood Doyle's. That's not to say that their criticism is entirely without foundation, but I think such criticism needs to be much more realistic than it has hitherto shown itself to be.

What bothers me about Braden's criticism is that she's a writer herself! If she's so outraged by it, why doesn't she take up the challenge and write her own Adler story? That I'd like to see, especially since she appears (from what I've read of her blog so far) to share many of my own views on strong female characters! Indeed, I had several fleeting ideas for my own Adler story once I'd caught up with all the jetsam in the wake of Moffat's juggernaut version of the tale. I volunteer to co-write it with her to make sure both male and female perspectives are adequately represented; then let people come and criticize our effort! Bring it on!

But I digress! In several ways, this novel reminds me of Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey, which I also reviewed, although it's a very different story. It does have a similar vibe in that, for example, the main protagonist is a woman of pleasure who is subjected to some pain (not willingly, and nowhere near as much in this novel as in the other), and who is in a position of some power which she can wield only in secret or indirectly. Like Kushiel's Dart, it's also well-written: beautifully expressive and evocative. Some might find the story a little slow-moving to begin with (I did not), but that makes it only more suggestive of the roller-coaster that it is, and once it gets going, there's no stopping it. You will want to ride it to the end, and then get on again (in volume 2!).

The name, QuiTai sounds remarkably like the name of my favorite female character of all time: Kitai from the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher. Talk about strong females! Of course, that does depend upon how the name is supposed to be pronounced, but there's no guide offered to that end, so I'll pronounce it how I choose, thank you very much! This QuiTai is nowhere near in that Kitai's league, but she's definitely worth following.

In this novel, too, the main character is an alien, but in this case, a humanoid with some snake traits. I'd gage her to be the first cousin to the snake on the tree in Eden if I believed in fairy tales: she definitely has the same skill set! Like some snakes, QuiTai has collapsible venomous fangs in her sweet mouth, and the venom can be used, in moderation, to summon her oracle god, into the mouth of those she injects, enabling them to foretell future events for QuiTai, although as usual with this kind of thing, it doesn't seem to do her much good, or to keep her out of trouble!

The Devil in this story, is a werewolf pack-leader named Petrof; a disgusting animal of a man, who nevertheless somehow manages to evoke passion (either in the form of anger or of pure lust) within QuiTai. She's the concubine to this werewolf, but given that he has no wife, I'm not convinced that 'concubine' is technically the correct term. I freely grant that it makes for a much more intriguing title, however. Be advised that I am not a fan of werewolf stories, so I launched into this with some trepidation, although by the halfway point, I'd decided that this was not a drawback for me, and I was quite happy with where this novel went and how it turned out. This is not your grandmother's werewolf story! Indeed, it isn't a werewolf story at all, not in the big picture.

QuiTai lives on a island - an occupied island where the colonists rule everything, and where exotic beings of several hues and varieties coexist. It's rather reminiscent of North America in the mid-eighteenth century, ruled from afar and bearing a heavy tax burden, but the characters which populate this tale make the colonists and their overlords look like characters out of a children's story book! Just as QuiTai is being picked-up to visit her master to serve his animal needs, she receives a secret note from someone she considers to be her arch enemy: an artist named Kyam Kul. He's of the same race as that which is occupying the island, and he hails from a wealthy family from which he's apparently all but exiled in disgrace. And he's also not an artist. Not in his soul, at any rate.

What he wants from her she does not know, but she finds it intriguing that right at the point where she has been having indefinable feelings that something is seriously amiss on the island somehow, somewhere, her enemy has reached out to her. She has to talk The Devil into letting her pose for a portrait in order to get time with Kyam to find out what he wants - and whether what he wants will serve her interests adequately. I confess I was a bit disappointed that more was not made of the scene where he starts to draw her. I saw a potential for some very subtle eroticism there, which failed to materialize, but it's rather hard to be so sensual when there's sand blowing into every crevice...!

From that point onwards, the story is one of intrigue, adventure, danger, and death, and I loved every minute of it. It's a very original tale with some unexpected story devices to keep the interest boiling and move the plot along organically, not artificially. Everything fits and everything works. It did slow down for me in the second half, a little bit, but by then I had enough investment in it that I wasn't going to let that get in my way. Overall, it's professionally written and very entrancing. This is a story that makes all the poor ones worth wading through just to find something as seductive as this. I recommend it highly.

Ghost Huntress: The Awakening by Marley Gibson

Rating: WORTHY!

So I'm done with ITYILY and now I'm on to the last of the Magnificent Seven YA novels. After this I hope to read some more adult-oriented material and blog that. Although after reading these seven, I'm no longer sure there really is a difference between these two categories!

Full disclosure up front: I have no beliefs whatsoever in psychic powers (or ghosts, space aliens, gods, demons, angels, vampires, werewolves, magic, etc., etc.!). I'm not necessarily antagonistic towards these things- if I were, I wouldn't be reading these novels! Some of them would be fun and cool if they were real, but there is simply no evidence for them - and I'm talking about real evidence: verifiable scientific evidence. That's the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.

And no, I don't buy the excuse that you can't scientifically test the supernatural. Yes, you can! If the supernatural has an effect on the real world, that effect can be measured, and if all natural explanations for the effect are ruled out, then you have prima facie evidence supporting your case. That kind of evidence has never shown up. And that kind of evidence isn't proof! It would still require much more testing and evaluation. But I don't buy this assertion usually attributed to Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Bullshit, Carl! Any claim, extraordinary or not, requires sufficient evidence, no more, no less. And remember that science isn't about proof because everything we think we know, even those things about which we're pretty darned certain, are always open to the possibility that they could be modified or even overturned by new evidence

So, I have to say after reading chapter one that I'm not exactly swept away by this novel! It's your basic Karate Kid premise - disaffected kid taken from big city to small town, starting new school. The only real difference so far is that the disaffected teen has both parents, and can't sleep, so her father buys her a white noise machine (think of waves breaking on the shore; there's also pink noise but let's not get into that here!). The idea is that it will help her to sleep, and it seems to be working, until she hears voices coming out of the machine and then she's wide awake! It's pretty much a rip-off of the movie White noise which itself was a bit of a rip-off of the Poltergeist movies.

So Kendall (pronounced Ken doll? That's funny because she's described as a 'Barbie' later in the novel!) Moorehead finally heads in to school and the day doesn't turn out too badly. She arrives at an interesting and curious conclusion though: after having felt nauseous in the bathroom (when someone was throwing up in there), and then feeling a sudden sharp pain in her leg (right before a guy arrives in her classroom with a patched-up broken leg she has to wonder if she's empathic to other people's injuries. But why would this start now? There's no answer to that yet.

She heads home at the end of the day and having discovered that her iPod is dead despite it having charged all day, she resolves to hell with it and sits out in the back yard and eating Cheetos™, when a girl she met that morning at school shows up, and so of course the very first thing they get into discussing is... ghosts and spirits.

That's the first three chapters and I'm starting to get the slightly depressing feeling that I'm reading someone's sixth grade essay. But I'm interested enough that I think, if I can manage to move carefully through this fiction so I don't step in too many name-brand droppings, I might come out of it not smelling too badly. We'll see!

I should probably tell you at this point that Kendall is having persistent dreams about a guy she describes as 'Dasani blue-eyed boy' because you and I both know she'll be meeting him before long. She has learned from friend Celia that the previous resident in her new home had a lot of cats because of their psychic abilities(!), and some of those cats remain at the house (as real cats, not as ghosts!), including one which can apparently presage a psychic event and warn its owner by thumping its tail on the ground.

Kendall's friend Celia is science and parapsychology geek who dreams of going to Edinburgh University to get a degree in parapsychology, Good luck with finding a career with that, but Edinburgh, incredibly enough, does offer such courses!

Kendall has a psychic spasm and ends up in a store owned by Loreen (seriously? What’s with that name?!) is new-agey-psychic type, who gifts her a pendant made of magic crystals and also agrees to be Kendall's mentor. On her way back home, Kendall starts feeling spams again by a cemetery and voluntarily enters it to find her vision proves true as she sees the very grave of the very man she was thinking of: a soldier from the civil war. This novel's author is obsessed with the US civil war! As she sits in the cemetery, she sees a civil war army march though it. Did I mention that Gibson is obsessed with the US civil war?

Having got to know Celia, her rich neighbor, Kendall is as buoyed as she's bemused by the fact that Celia really really wants to start a ghost-hunting club. She loans Kendall a device upon which, that very night, she records a ghost of a woman in her room. They decide they need to recruit some help for their ghost-hunting team: a photographer and a skeptic! They get a girl called Taylor to photograph stuff, and then her brother comes over to talk Taylor out of it and he turns out to be the blue-eyed boy of Kendall's dreams! He's also a skeptic! How convenient. There's definitely room for future fireworks there.

Kendall revisits Loreen, who tells her not to use her powers for selfish reasons - like winning the lottery. Okay, I have a question: suppose you win the lottery and use the money to help far more people than you could when you had no money. Is that selfish? There's no word on what punishment might await you if you act selfishly, if any. Kendall gets a boring (to me) lecture on the different types of psychic powers people may have. It turns out that Kendall has most of them, of course! Loreen references her god several times. She shows Kendall how to make her dowsing magic crystal work.

I detected no skepticism here! The reason your pendulum, or dowsing rod or whatever, appears to move of its own volition is because your hand is moving. No one, not even Kendall, can hold her hand perfectly still. Even when you think it's still, there are very tiny muscle twitches, and there's blood pulsing through the veins. That's why the pendulum swings, not because of psychic energy! But let's pretend that's not the case for the sake of enjoying this novel.

And let's pretend we heard none of Loreen's 'sixth sense' bullshit! You have no sixth sense. What's considered by the uninitiated to be a sixth sense is actually just the other five senses inputting data, most of which we ignore, otherwise we'd be overwhelmed by it. When you pay attention to the right parts of it, either consciously or subconsciously, that's when you get what's known as intuition (which may or may not be correct), but it's from your normal natural pathways, not from anything supernatural. And no, you don't use only 10% of your brain, you use all of it pretty much all the time. Let's move on!

So Kendall gets in trouble with her mom one night, right when she's finally succeeding in communicating with this ghost in the machine. Her mom busts in on her, disturbed by all the noise (but curiously never asks her who she's talking to!). The noise actually didn’t seem that profuse to me. Her mom relates how worried she is about Kendall's insomnia, and she tells Kendall that her daughter can tell her anything, but when Kendall actually does tell her the truth, her mom, religious nut job, freaks out.

It's refreshing to have a novel where people actually communicate - where they talk to their parents or call the cops or whatever. All-too-often we see this avoided with little or no excuse in novels (the Harry Potter series is a classic example of epic communications failure). Gibson got this one right and created more conflict in the process, which is always a good thing in novels!

The next morning, Kendal's mom lectures her about it, but her father is a lot more sanguine. One thing Kendall doesn’t notice relates to something I haven't told you yet! Naughty me! During a visit with Loreen, Kendall is told that she is adopted. Loreen tries to brush this off as 'crossed psychic wires', but when Kendall employs the word 'hereditary' that morning in her conversation, she fails to notice that her parents' complexions turn white as sheets. Hm! More to come on that score no doubt! If she truly is adopted and she's sixteen and her parents haven't even mentioned it, this is another epic fail and another delicious source of conflict!

Kendall tries to play down her 'weirdness' by relating that she has two friends coming for a sleep-over. This is only Celia and Taylor coming for a ghost-hunting session, but it helps Kendall's case, and Mom is excited that Kendall has normal girlfriends coming over! Lol!

That night they encounter the ghostly femme who's been visiting Kendall, and they get her ghostly picture. That is to say, they don't get a photo of a woman as such, but get a white blob over Kendall's shoulder, and then a white arm and fingers reaching down to her, followed by a lightning bolt zooming up into the ceiling right when Kendall had felt herself about to leave her body. She fought it and stayed grounded, but all three of them are really excited now.

Being me, I have to take a minute to analyze this (or anal-yze it if you prefer!). There are two outcomes here: one where you see something, but fail to capture it on camera; the other (the inverse of that, which is what happened here) where you see nothing, but the camera records an image. You can argue in the first case that the image was entirely psychic, and therefore there was no light to be captured by the camera, but how do you argue the second case? Clearly there was light being emitted because that was what triggered the camera's photo sensors, so why did it not act on the retinal photo sensors of those people present?

Admittedly, cameras these days are far better designed than the eye is (which is why the creationists don’t have a leg to stand on!), but this eventuality makes no sense. Hey, we’re into the ghost thing anyway here, so to expect any of this story to make sense is a bit of a stretch, so here's my deal: as long as it's reasonably internally consistent, Gibson has my interest and I'm just happy to be along for the ride: always assuming that it's an acceptably comfortable ride, and that's what she's provided me with so far.

In school one lunch time, discussing all this stuff, they decide they need to have a sound expert on the team, and wouldn’t you know, but the school actually has a DJ playing music in the cafeteria on the lunch break (go figure!), so they approach her. She's something of a punk, heavily made up and rebellious, which is why I'm pretty sure she will join them eventually, even though she rejects them out of hand at this point. Her rejection, however, is accompanied by her middle finger, and this attracts the attention of Jason, Taylor's skeptic brother and Kendall's blue-eyed dreamboat!

OK, I've finished this (I kinda zipped thru the last few pages because it started going downhill!) and I had to wrestle a bit. I didn't want to give it a poor rating because I kinda liked it, but I felt a bit uncomfortable - that 12-year-old essayist came back with a vengeance in the end! But I decided not to be mean. Except that what's this with the mom calling her daughter kiddo? I had that all thru ITYILY and now in this one as well? If I were a fifteen-year-old kid and my mom called me 'kiddo' I'd have to slap her upside the head until her brain fell back into its slot and made contact again. And while we're on it, one more thing! Your average nurse (which would be Kendall's mom) doesn't meet with the drug reps and buy drugs. That's the doctor's purview. Unless, of course, you're talking about ICU nurses who pretty much run everything, and tell the newbie doctors what to do.

So Kendall's crew decide the visit the cemetery on a whim one night (why at night? It makes no sense!) and Kendall is overcome by the huge number of ghosts. Loreen rushes to the rescue having been psychically called to Kendall, and Jason rushes there having been actually called by Taylor. He's pissed, and Kendall's mom is pissed. She's banned from everything! Of course, this doesn't stop her and her crew from setting up an investigation at her dad's place of employment after she comes home from school to find her dad having been knocked down the stairs and injured, just as she foresaw.

In process of setting up for the night's ghostly activities (they're not staying there, just recording stuff) Kendall is knocked over by the restless spirit which lurks there, is caught by Jason, and then they're kissing. If I have to read of one more incidence of electric currents passing thru her, I won't! That's why I'm not going to read any more of this series as far as I can tell right now. It's too sappy for me, too juvenile, and it gets worse! All the crew are thrilled, having seen real evince, and are planning to follow up the next night. They review the tapes and see all the evince they captured, but they also captured Jason kissing Kendall!

For some reason this means that she's a fraud just trying to get a date with Jason, everyone has been lying and the whole group disintegrates! I'm sorry but no, this is utter bullshit! Unless, of course, you're a love-sick twelve-year-old writing this. Needless to say, the story almost immediately turns right around after this crisis: they contact the ghost, they resolve his issue, which is pretty unbelievable, and everyone gets a boyfriend!

Sorry, but no. I honestly cannot see me reading any more of these, but since the story was at least passable until those last few pages, I'm willing to let it go. Obviously the series has legs since there are several other volumes out there, but this is most definitely for very, very young adults. Or completely undiscriminating adults. It's not for me, but it must be for others, so have at it and enjoy. I'm sorry I can't join you further!