Academy Girls by Nora Carroll

Rating: WARTY!

I ditched this book at 90% in because there was one-the-hell-way-too many stanzas of over-rated Emily Dick and some for my taste. I honestly could not stand to read one more obscure-to-the-point-of-vacuous line from her. On top of that, I felt this was a bait and switch on two levels. I requested to read an advance review copy of this novel precisely because it wasn't (according to the blurb) a teen high school melodrama. It was, so I was led to believe, about an adult!

I've sworn off reading any more YA novels with "Academy" in the title, and this promised to turn that on its head by being adult-oriented, and focusing on a teacher at the purportedly prestigious Grove Academy instead of on the bitchy, air-headed girls who usually infest such stories. It wasn't. It was the latter going under the guise of the former. Worse than this even, was that this was really nothing more than an overblown attempt at explicating Dickinson drivel in place of telling a real story. I didn't even get the obsession with that poet; any such poetry would have served the same purpose hers did in this context.

On top of that, what story there was, was all over the place. It was flashing back on several levels and with such obsessive-compulsive dedication that I was at one point considering filing a lawsuit for whiplash. Even in the sections that were not dedicated flashbacks, there was an ostensibly plagiarized novel in play which was telling exactly the same story we were also being told in the annoyingly extensive flashbacks, if you can get your mind around that, and in annoyingly extensive detail. It was tedious, and I started routinely skipping these sections.

On top of that, the supposedly mature teacher was behaving like a teen herself around a certain other teacher who I highly suspected (rightly or wrongly, I can't say) was ankle-deep in whatever it was that happened during those flashbacks - which themselves flashed back to an even earlier generation where there was yet another murder. How this Academy managed to maintain its prestigious veneer with all of this going on was really the only unexplained mystery here for me.

Jane Milton - yes, that's really her name - was a student at Grove, left without a diploma, tried writing, failed, got married, failed, and now was forced to come back to her old school, cap in hand, begging for a job as a teacher, for which she was wholly unqualified. Her story is what interested me, but we never got that story except in passing, and in a way that felt like it was completely incidental to the other story/ies. Instead, and pretty much from day one, we got the mystery of what happened when she was in high school investigating, with her two "friends", what happened when her own mother would have been in high school. Convoluted doesn't begin to describe it adequately.

I think if maybe I'd had the time and patience - and sufficient Promethazine to get me through the dick poetry which slathered these pages with all the delicacy of a bull in a book store (and was in the final analysis, utterly irrelevant to the story except in the most pretentious way imaginable), I might have made it through this in one day and been able to actually keep track of the plethora of potential villains who were randomly popping up and ducking down like whack-a-mole characters, but to try and keep a handle on the endless names over multiple readings over many days was impossible, which robbed the story of any potential it might have had to retain my attention and favor.

I quickly lost interest in Jane, since she consistently proved herself to be a spineless idiot with nothing interesting to offer me. The only thing which prevented me from wishing she would be bumped-off was the fact that she was a single mom, but she wasn't even very good at that, either! Her relationship with her son was virtually non-existent and what did exist was almost completely unrealistic. I'm tempted to say that the story was disorganized, but that would involve using the word 'organized' in connection with this novel, and that would be too generous in describing this patchy mashup. I cannot recommend this at all.

Girl Defective by Simmone Howell

Title: Girl Defective
Author: Simmone Howell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

I'm not sure why, but it always amuses me when the author (or perhaps the publisher) announces that the novel is a novel by having the words "A Novel" appear on the front cover as some editions of this one do. It's not really novel or meaningful. This is the kind of novel that tries too hard to be hip, where authors mistakenly think that if they set it in a book store or a record store it will automatically be literary and brilliant. No, Virginia, it won't. Nor will tossing in musical or literary references. For me personally I tend to despise such novels precisely because they do come with this pretension to being "literary".

Skylark and her somewhat developmentally-impaired kid bother Seagull (who goes by "Gully") live over a vinyl record store with their father. Mom isn't in the picture having ditched her family to pursue a career in music. Since dad won't have an on-line presence, nor will he countenance CDs in his store, it looks like the business is on the home straight to going out of, which begs the question as to why dad hired Luke to help in the store.

I know vinyl is making something of a comeback as a music delivery medium, but it's never actually going to come back in any meaningful sense, and for me, I'm glad because people have forgotten how bloody awful vinyl actually was and how it is an oil derivative ultimately, but that's by-the-by. But this did make me feel this novel was a bit anachronistic rather than realistic. Now if the story had been set in a place which, I dunno, runs an indy MP3 download service or something, that might have at least been a bit less pretentious and rather different. But then the author wouldn't have been able to slip in a host of pretentious references to obscure bands of yesteryear, would she?

Obviously Luke is really hired so Luke and Sky can get together, so it's a bit ham-fisted. The legend we're offered is that Luke's sister, Mia, died some time before, so maybe dad is taking pity on him, but aside from being annoyingly attracted to Luke, Sky is a rather confused young woman, confused by her flibbertigibbet of a friend, and by this Goth girl from school who she runs into at unexpected times which always looks like it might be going somewhere, but which never does. Also, what's going on with the police officer of whom Sky is suspicious, but who seems to have known dad for years? Well there's nothing going on because none of this goes nowhere - not anywhere you don't expect for this kind of a novel.

Normally I Love stories set in Australia, but this one was a complete fail with me. It started out interestingly enough, but it quickly became clear that all this author had to offer was a litany of character quirks. There was no real plot. Nothing happened unless you count Sky's incessant mooning over Luke as an event, which I sure don't. Gully was quirky for quirk's sake which was interesting for about five minutes.

It was pretty obvious who the mystery vandals were from quite early on, so there really was no mystery to solve unless it was the mystery of how this author thought that if you sprinkle enough character quirks into the mix you'll somehow magically have a plot or a story. The problem with that plan is that these characters were nowhere near interesting enough to carry a book-length story. I cannot recommend this.

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

This month's nominee for worst cover ever was originally published by Fantagraphics as twelve comic books starting in 1995. Now it's combined into one hardback published in 2005. Despite the publication dates, it's set in the 1970's and I suspect it's a lot more meaningful to the author than ever it is to any of his readers. I found it revealing that wikipedia refers to Burns as a cartoonist in its page title!

The book blurb claims that it's "...deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird." This was nonsensical to me. There was no such "moment" - except maybe in the author's own personal life!

There was nothing "hippie" and nothing "seventies" here. It was just a bunch of high-school losers who were literally being wasted - getting wasted on drugs and booze, and wasting their lives. There was no enlightenment going on here, no rebellion against the establishment - indeed, these kids were firmly entrenched in their own establishment. There was no musical revolution, nothing new. This story felt like it was really was nothing more than personal anecdotes recalling bad trips.

The whole novel reads like a bad drug trip. Maybe that's the intent, but it made no sense and wasn't entertaining for the most part. Maybe the author is trying to make sense of his youth, but the novel really didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. Parts of it were well done, other parts meaningless. The comics explore the same time-period or the same events from many perspectives, so there's a lot of overlap, which I suspect is easier to see in the compendium than it was in the separate comics.

The artwork isn't anything special. It's borderline competent, but in no way startling, and this is especially stark given the subject matter. The seventies was an extraordinarily flamboyant era. Why depict it in B&W? Some of the characters are really hard to tell apart. One pair of them - a dating couple - is really only differentiated by the fact that the guy has some peach fuzz on his chin whereas the girl doesn't. I'm not kidding!

It's hardly impressive art. It's all sharply, but thickly drawn black-and-white line and shade, but the story is anything but black and white. It's also drawn for a mature audience: though it's set in and around high school, there's a huge amount of drug use and a lot of explicit sexuality, with some violence and violent themes towards the end.

To me, that was really sad - that these kids evidently had nothing to do with their lives - indeed, no interest whatsoever in life - other than partying and smoking pot. Personally, I don't care if people spend their lives partying and smoking pot - it's no worse (and no better) than smoking tobacco, let's face it - but I don't get why I should be expected to be interested in reading a novel which offers that, and only that.

There was very little in this story to draw me in and and make me want to pursue it. I did finish it because it was short and because I really hoped there would be a pay-off at the end. There wasn't. What was it George Bush senior moment said? The nattering nabobs of negativity? Other than everything Reagan said, and Clinton's preposterous lie that he did not "have sex with that woman", that is the absolute dumbest thing any president ever said (with "mission accomplished" a close second!), but it George Herbert Walker's nonsensical blabber really does apply in the case of this comic.

The characters are two-dimensional, with nothing to recommend them. One was a replica of John Lennon in his pinched nose, granny-glasses period, so I started looking for others who might identify with recording artists, but I didn't see any others that I recognized, so maybe that was just a one-off. The situations were very ordinary for the most part with nothing special about any of it (with few exceptions). It was amusing that everyone seemed to have the same hair style.

The really weird thing is the mutation disease. Running through this youthful crowd is a body-fluid transmitted disease which causes physical mutations. Some reviewers have equated this with AIDS, but I don't think that's what Burns intended. I think the mutations caused by this "plague" were nothing more than a physical manifestation of teen fears.

One guy, for example, has a mouth at the base of his neck - one which speaks and seems to be controlled by a different part of his brain - or even a different brain - than his regular mouth. Which teen hasn't felt like they've said things they didn't mean or didn't intend? The girl who has sex with him contracts the disease, but her manifestation of it is that she periodically sheds her skin like a snake. Which teen hasn't sometimes wondered what it would be like to shed their skin and be someone else? Haven't serious drug abusers felt at times like they were crawling out of their skin? Other victims exhibit bumps or blisters on their face. One guy develops facial features that make him look reminiscent of a rabbit. I don't see that as a comment on the fact that he contracted the disease while humping like a bunny.

Actually, there's no pattern to this "disease" at all, and other than teens shunning other teens who have it, there is no reference to the disease from society at large - no attempt to fight it or contain it. There was no effort to explain where it came from, or why no one was really interested in it. It was like the disease was nothing more than an amateur attempt to graphically portray feelings of disaffection, rejection, incompetence and so on, but given that it all came from acts of love and passion, it made zero sense to me. Indeed, it very effectively countermanded the author's apparent intention.

Some portions of the story featured a cult of kids leaving home and migrating to the woods where they would camp out with others of their "kind". Again, this made more sense as a physical manifestation of feelings of alienation, but presented the way it was just made it seem silly and trivial. This is of course where it was easy for murders to be committed, but those made least sense of all. If the characters were not really physically living in the woods, and this was merely a representation of their isolation, then what were the acts of murder supposed to represent? If the murders were real, then what triggered them? None of this is addressed, much less explained.

One character, Eliza, was well-worth her own story, but she was given rather short shrift (or short shift!) here. She had a tail, but it was never clear if this came from the STD, or if she was naturally born with it. People are born with tails - a relic of evolution for which the creationists have absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Eliza was an artist and was giftedly so, but frankly, she didn't seem to belong to this story at all. I would have loved a story about her. She was the only character with anything to say or with any real story to tell.

Overall I can't recommend this novel. You know what it most reminded me of? Reefer Madness - that asinine movie which purportedly warns children against using drugs that was made in the late 1930s and was so awful, exploitative, over-the-top, and inaccurate that it's become a cult classic. Hopefully this limited tradition novel won't become that famous.

The Boyfriend List by E Lockhart

Title: The Boyfriend List
Author: E Lockhart
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!

When I first looked at this, I decided that I sincerely hoped the female depicted on the cover was the therapist because she looks way too old to be the subject of the novel. If she is the subject of the novel, Ruby Oliver, then the therapist has way more serious issues to address than a list of people who aren't even boyfriends. I can't think of a worse or a more inauthentic approach to a novel than the one taken here. Or more accurately, I probably can. but I can't imagine one which would have a chance of becoming published. I can't believe this one was.

It took only the first disk of this audio book turn my stomach. The reading by Mandy Siegfried was acceptable, but the content was not. This was the most tedious and boring of characters, completely self-obsessed, blind to reality, effectively abused by her parents (sent for medical care for one panic attack? Seriously? Way to screw-up your daughter, numb-nuts. If you'd raised her properly she wouldn't be having these attacks to begin with - and I'll bet if she'd been a boy she wouldn't have been raised that way, either! If she's having a full-blown panic attack now, then she needed help long before this.

But given how appallingly lousy her parents are, a psychiatrist, child psychologist, or some other sort of therapist might be what's called for, but if that's the case, and all she's focused on is a list of fictional boyfriends, the the medical practitioner needs to be struck off (or bumped off) for malpractice! So no matter how you come into this novel it's just wrong, wrong, wrong, and one more time, WRONG!

Supposedly her psychiatrist/therapist/whatever told her to create a list of her "boyfriends" which includes people who she never even dated - so that they can be discussed at the next session. To what end? The problem isn't boyfriends, fictitious or otherwise! It's her lack of self confidence caused by the fact that she's been raised like far too many girls: taught that she needs validation and that beauty is everything, by her lousy parents who are actually the real problem here.

It took hardly any time at all to decide that I had much better things to do with my time than to listen to a spoiled-rotten fifteen-year-old self-obsess about boyfriends she never even had, as though without a boy in her life she's completely worthless, useless, hopeless and incomplete at best. Why do female YA authors treat females so appallingly badly?

I fell in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, and I adored Sadye, but after dealing with We Were Liars and now this mess, I'mm done with E Lockhart/Emily Jenkins (now there's a case of schizophrenia waiting to be diagnosed: adopt a new persona so you can deceive readers by writing books under a false name? Whoa!). Check please! I'm outta here. Clear the pilates from the table and next time bring me a bigger cup size for my coffee. I'm done.

We were Liars by E Lockhart

Title: We were Liars
Author: E Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

I never meant to write y'all any sorrow.
I never meant to write y'all any pain.
I only wanted one time t' see y'all reading.
I only want to see you reading all my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted dramarama from my purple prose.

I never wanted to be your weekend novel.
I only wanted to start a sales trend.
Baby I could never be your baby beach book.
It's such a shame my readership has to end.

Purple prose, purple prose.
I only wanted to see you reading all my purple prose.

Honey I know, I know, I know books are changing.
It's time we all learn how to be bad,
That means you too.
You say you want a reader,
But you can't seem to make up your mind.
Kindle, Nook, or iPad doesn't matter,
Just let me guide you to my purple prose.

Purple prose, purple prose.
If you know what I'm prosing about up here.
C'mon raise your ebook.

Purple prose, purple prose.
We were liars, just a fly on the wall.
(adapted from 'Purple Brain' a parody song from Dire Virgins by Ian Wood)

When I knew
beforehand
that this
novel
had been
recommended by John
Green,
I hawked voluminous gobs of
green
slimy
spittle upon it
in the library.
It ran down the cover
and along the shelves
spurting from between
the neatly lined books
and all over the floor
soaking the carpet as I
walked
on
by.

That was an E. Lockhart metaphor for an emotion. In other words, none of it really happened at all, which explains why I ended-up with this in my CD player in the car, trapped helplessly listening to one of the worst novels I've ever not read as I drove home from the library. The last time I came away from such a novel, I was bearing such a nauseated feeling like I needed to somehow get even with the author, that I went on and wrote an entire parody of Divergent.

I'm not going to spend any of my time doing that over this squib when I have more important projects begging for completion. Plus Jenkins/Lockhart actually has credit in her account with me for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Dramarama.

Emily Jenkins can do far, far better than this, I know she can. I fell in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, and I liked and respected Sadye aka Sarah, but I didn't like anything about this book, which means that the author failed, because if I was supposed to care about these people and be moved by the tragedy which befell them, that aim was tragically befouled by the writing. Frankie my dramarama, I didn't give a damn.

When main character and narrator Cadence (really?!) told me she got shot and it turned out to be a well disguised metaphor, I later found myself wishing she actually had been shot, she was so annoying. Indeed, if she'd really been shot in the chest by her departing father, that would have made for a really intriguing story.

Intriguing this was not. The ending was not a surprise (even though I skimmed and didn't finish this, it became pretty obvious what was going on). It was more twisted than twist, and it has been done before and done better. The problem here was that the characters were intrinsically boring. They had nothing to recommend them.

p>
You know if you read "how to's" about successful novel writing, one of the things they insist you absolutely do not do is make your narrator the villain and keep this from your reader. This just goes to prove how easily the "rules" are bent or discarded once you have your foot in the door of the same Big Publishing™ conglomerate which routinely disses you when you try to do the same things established writers get away with every day. If this same novel had been submitted by an unknown writer, it would never have been published. This is also why I'm so glad that none of us is dependent any more upon going cap-in-hand to the big five corporate behemoths begging them on our knees to take a look at our lowly amateur efforts.

It was really quite bizarre to read a novel about filthy rich people who lead a notably less interesting life than I do! They evidently had nothing better to do with their endless time than to play interminable games of Scrabble and wander around from one house to another in their 'compound' looking for each other so they could have pointless pseudo-intellectual non-conversations with each other, essentially about how little they know and care about anyone who exists outside their own skin.

Most of these set pieces (in the parts I managed to force myself to listen to) revolved solely around Gat's righteous indignation that the other three didn't care about anyone who wasn't them. So why on Earth did he keep on coming back and hanging out with them each summer? There was no more an answer for that than there was for the existence of this novel in the first place, and it was one more example of how caricatured and cardboard these characters were.

I cannot recommend this, not even remotely. The audio version was particularly annoying because the narrator didn't sound anything like she was in her mid-teens. In fact, to suggest that maybe she was the mother of someone in their mid-teens was stretching it. I don't necessarily advocate getting, say, a fourteen-year-old to read a story told by a fourteen-year-old, although it's certainly worth considering if someone that age can carry it. I don't demand that an actor be hired for reading a novel. In fact I see that as an appallingly exclusive habit when others can read just as well. All I require is someone who can read pleasantly, but for first person PoV novels, please do let us get someone who sounds at least a bit like the narrating character is supposed to sound!

In closing, allow me to suggest some new and improved titles for this novel: 'We Were Outliers', 'We Were Boring', 'We Weren't', 'Weedy'.

Such a Rush by Jennifer Echols

Title: Such a Rush
Author: Jennifer Echols
Publisher: Simon & Shuster
Rating: WARTY!

Somebody needs to tell Echols to do something about that awful background on her website....

This is an absolutely classic example of how Big Publishing™ will rip up your novel. Vanesa Munoz, the photographer who took the cover picture has never read this book, and that's why she doesn't know that the main character does not have straight fly-away hair, but lush curls and hair so dark that it only looks brown in bright sunlight.

The cover designer Laywan Kwan has several book review bloggers "quoted" on the back cover. Seven out of nine of those quotes are evidently very "creative". The back cover claims that "Chick Loves Lit" says this novel is superb, but if you go to Chick loves Lit's blog and do a search for the word 'superb' in the review of this novel, it comes up with no matches found. In other words, Simon & Shuster is evidently "superb" at creating quotes. Chick Loves lit did like this novel, but 'superb' was not a word used to describe it in the review. I suppose that word could have come from somewhere else, but having struck out at the obvious source, how do we know we can rely on that?

The back cover quotes the blog 'Girls Without a Bookshelf' as saying that this novel is "Searingly sexy", but I can't even find a review of the novel on that blog - unless that blog's search engine doesn't work. The 'smart bitches trashy books' blog has no listing for anything by Echols, yet this back cover blurb claims that blog says that the novel was "edgy, tense, and seductive"! I don't have anything against this particular blog, but personally, I honestly wouldn't want a blog named (in part) "trashy books" being quoted on any of my book covers! The implication ought to explain why. It's a great name for a blog, but it gives entirely the wrong impression when tied so closely to a novel. Another blog, 'Book Loons' doesn't have this novel listed, so that quote is apparently another invention, or again, their search engine sucks.

'YA reads' supposedly said this novel is "Deeply rich", but that appears nowhere in the review. 'Confessions of a Bookaholic' supposedly said this novel was "Unique and captivating" but I can't find any review of this novel on that website either! 'A Good Addiction' purportedly said that the novel is "Emotional and expressive", but this is another quote I cannot find. This is not to say that the blogs I mentioned did not rate this novel positively - only that the back cover blurb in seven out of nine quotes has apparently pulled blog quotes out of somewhere the airplane doesn't fly.

Leah was a mid-teen girl who wanted to fly. She forged her mom's signature on a form and managed to scrabble together sufficient dollars for one lesson. She approached Mr Hall - a flier at the tin-pot little air field near the trailer park where she lives. He ran an air advertising business and gave flying lessons. After her first one, Leah was even more addicted than before, and she had really lucked-out with Hall. He taught her for free after that first lesson, and then one day she strode into the hangar to hear his teen twin sons talking about her - how she must be "doing" their dad to get her flying lessons for free. What charming children he raised.

Now, two years later, she has her license, and is trying to rack up hours so she can become an airline pilot after some flying time and some college, but her world drops into a air-pocket when Hall goes downhill after he learns that his oldest son was killed in Afghanistan. Hall himself dies a month later and Leah thinks that her high life is over. The problem is that it’s not. It’s a problem because Grayson, one of the two remaining boys in the Hall family, has discovered her forged application, and he threatens her that unless she comes to work for him, he will expose her forgery. He also wants her to date his brother.

I found this part to be completely outrageous. Not that Grayson had done it, but that she had fallen for it. Regardless of how she got there, she is now an adult and a qualified pilot, so to hold this juvie "offense" as a threat over her was a pretty weak way of forcing these two together into a farcical 3T (trope teen triangle). Yep, it is. It’s got the bad boy with the absurd name (Grayson); it’s got the clueless young girl (Leah) and it’s got the good guy (Alec).

How Leah even rates Grayson goes way beyond credibility and deeply into the public toilet at the run-down end of the block. Grayson is constantly insulting her and he's blackmailing her. He treats her like dirt. As in,for example, one time when she rolls into work one morning, and Grayson stands watching her talk to her best friend Molly who has just joined the crew. Molly is putting the letters on the banners that fly behind the planes. After a chat, Leah walks over to the hanger where Grayson is still standing watching her, and he orders her to take the truck back over to Molly with a fresh banner. What? He couldn't do it himself instead of standing around? He's a jerk, yet Leah is such a sad excuse for a protagonist that she feels 'the fever' every time he touches her. It’s so pathetic as to be YA romance. That's how bad it is.

Yes, Leah has serious issues. She's a bastard child who might even be Hall's daughter for all I know. He's separated from his wife because of infidelity. Her own mother is a no good piece of trash who dates bad boyfriends and pawns her own TV to pay off her bad boyfriend's debt. She's gone almost the entire time, leaving Leah alone in the trashy trailer where they live next to the air field. Leah can’t drive and can’t afford college, although she seems not to be making any effort to apply to pilot school, or to line-up a scholarship. And now she's dating Alec to keep Grayson happy so she can fly and he won't expose her, and Molly is kind-of dating Grayson, although not really.

So this book finally went into meltdown for me around page 200 when Alec, Grayson, Leah, and Molly went to a party, and ex-boyfriend Mark plays the Neanderthal with Leah, pulling her into his truck for a talk, which she's fine with, and then Grayson plays the Neanderthal and comes barreling in to drag her ass out of the truck. They both treat Leah like she's a possession, and she has no problem with this at all. That alone rates this novel as majorly warty.

After this treatment, Leah spends the night in a storm shelter at the airport with Grayson and is more than ready to make out with this macho man who made her his possession. In short, she's as pathetic as they come and I am done with this trash. You'd be better off listening to Jennifer Eccles by The Hollies than reading Jennifer Echols.

We Are the Goldens by Dana Reinhardt

Title: We Are the Goldens
Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Wendy Lamb
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.

Finally! Another author who has a dot net instead of a dot com. Why is that such a rare thing?! But I digress! This is an oddity of a novel. That's probably why I liked it so much, but I have to ask why I appear to be cursed with long novels which are not always a pleasant read, and then short gems like this, which are irresistible? It doesn't seem right, somehow. Can't I have longer versions of the good ones and shorter bad ones? But here’s the thing: I appreciate an author more who knows when her novel needs to end rather than one who’s dedicated to writing 400 pages no matter what state the novel ends up in!

This story is told in first person by younger sister Nell, who obsesses over her older sister Layla. Despite my antagonism towards first person stories, this one wasn't bad at all in the telling. See? Some writers can carry it, but not many. Reinhardt is one who evidently can. This is the first of hers that I've read, and I am disposed now towards reading others since this was such a good experience.

It’s a love affair after a fashion, although one in which there's nothing incestuous going on. I must confess that I don't know about this choice of names for the two sisters. Somehow 'Nell' and 'Layla' (the names) don't seem to go together, whereas Nell and Layla (the sisters) are perfect together. This (the names) bothers me a little bit because names are really important to me. In this case, it’s like the two girls are from different eras, like each name has its own un-blend-able ethos, but I digress…(again).

The novel is told as though Nell is speaking to Layla (who might be lying in a coma or in her grave for all we know to begin with) or as though Nell is writing a letter - an old fashioned hand-written one, not an email, or a dear diary to a sister who has run away or who has mysteriously disappeared. It was intriguing to say the least, and part of what drew me in to this story, because at the beginning, we have no idea how it's going to end, and I wanted to know.

Both girls play soccer which I think is hot. Yes, I know, that might seem quite disgusting to you: Nell is only fifteen and Layla hardly any older, but I'm shameless - and anyway, I'm not saying that the girls are hot, merely that their penchant for sports is hot: that they play, and play well. A sport, anyway, since the only one that they play is soccer, which is wonderful, but it seems odd that they have no other sports interests.

On that, er, score, my only real problem here was that the author completely glosses over the soccer! I know it’s not the most important thing going on here, but this sport was important to them and yet we got nothing about the first game of the season, save that City Day (their school in San Francisco) won 2-0, and this was after she had given the game a little bit of a build-up. We get precious little later, too, and I felt somewhat let-down by this, which is never a good feeling with which to imbue your readers!

It was disappointing to learn nothing of how either girl performed on the pitch, when we had been delivered pretty much a blow-by-blow account of the rest of their lives, and when the soccer was shown as an important part of their lives, being mentioned repeatedly. That struck me as an important omission, but it does let me get this in (WARNING: shameless plug coming up) for some great soccer action, you can always read my novel Seasoning, which in my totally unbiased opinion is the ultimate girls soccer novel....

The soccer, however, is a delivery vehicle - it delivers to us the first clues about what's going on here: what the underlying current is in this novel. Some might argue that there is some telegraphy at play here too, but it was never so much that you had an "A-ha!" moment where you felt you knew for a fact what was happening (or more importantly, what was going to happen), and sneakily, the tide which begins to run here serves to mask an under-current which is going to become important later. Note that neither of these affairs is anything new or avant-garde. The joy of this story does not lie in that anything happens to teens here which has not happened before; the joy lies in how these things happen, and in how they're addressed by the author and by each of the sisters. That's what makes this a worthwhile read.

Here's a pet peeve; this author doesn’t get that it’s 'biceps', not 'bicep'. I can't believe how many YA authors make that mistake! It’s becoming bizarrely common, but no, they will not convince me that they're right and that I should join them over on the dark side with this error! Other than that, the quality of the writing was excellent. It was well-done, it was intriguing, it was amusing, it was observant, and it was engrossing: in short, everything I need in a novel right there!

If I had a real complaint about it, I'd use it to question the wit and vocabulary expressed by Nell, who in her fifteen years comes off as way more mature than reasonable expectation might lead you to accept. Maybe she is. There are people like that, but Nell presents like she's an Eng. Lit. major or a book critic, or an editor, with some stand-up comedian tossed in. I would have loved to have known someone like that at that age, or better, at eighteen or twenty-one, but for a mid-teen to express herself this way strained credibility a bit for me.

Having said that, Nell, it turns out when it comes down to the bottom line, is the more mature of the two sisters who in the end does the right thing. This was an amazing novel, with twists and turns that are remarkable. It's very readable, and I enjoyed this immensely. In reading this, I found a new, strong female character to admire, and a new YA romance to champion as how it should be done. I recommend this novel very highly.

Looking For Alaska by John Green

Title: Looking For Alaska
Author: John Green
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

Audio novel almost acceptably read by Jeff Woodman.

I wasn't impressed by John Green's debut novel and more than I was with his novel Paper Towns. It's living testimony to the fact that people who hand out book awards, hand them out from their ass, where their head is. But take my advice: if you want to write 'great literature' and win such awards, the secret is to include multiple quotes from dead people, preferably men, and you're almost half-way there. Make them foreign dead people and you are half-way there. Include some bone-headed words about nature conjoined with spiritualism, and you're three-quarters the way there. Don’t worry at all about your writing style. That's irrelevant in great (perhaps) literature.

And Green is quite obviously trying oh-so hard to write literature, isn’t he? Given that what’s classed as such is all-too-often anachronistic, irrelevant, tedious, pedantic, and boring, Green succeeds admirably. In this one, he sets up his template for all his novels (at least the two I've suffered through). You need a smug, spoiled, self-centered, clueless, uninteresting guy, a quirky side-kick, and a female bitch, and you're there. In this case the tedious male lead is Miles Halter tells his story in first person PoV which is all-too-typically horrible in any novel, and which seems to be the trope du jour in YA fiction these days. To be fair, in this novel it’s not completely cringe-worthy, just annoyingly smug.

Halter's life is so utterly devoid of anything of utility that he spends it memorizing the last words of the rich and famous. He's never actually read anything by those purported 'greats' of literature, just their biographies, and all he remembers of those are their dying words. With this more than ample qualification, he decides he's ready to launch himself upon life, and he goes off to boarding school at the age of 16. His parents evidently have no objection to this, not even financially, yet somehow he's classed not with the well-to-do students, but with the riff-raff.

On his first day there he meets all the riff-raff he will ever need to know. No new people need apply. His roommate, Chip(!), is known as "The Colonel". Because Halter is so skinny, he's named 'Pudge'. Oh how hilarious is the irony! Halter immediately falls head-in-ass in "love" with a girl. Alaska Young isn’t; that is to say she doesn’t come across as a sixteen-year-old, but as an idealized Mary Sue, wise way-beyond her years, so you know this is going to be tragic. It couldn’t possibly be 'literature' otherwise, now could it?

Seriously, Juliet and Romeo live happily ever after? Teens who don’t stupidly kill themselves but go on to make a real contribution to life and to their society? Who wants to read that trash? So you know it's going to be tragic, and since the narrator is named Halter, and his "love" interest is young, who’s going to die? Do the math. The give-away is in the last name, and it’s not a word that's related to 'stopping', it’s a word that's too often and all-too-sadly associated with 'die'.

The problem is that Halter's infatuation is never about who Alaska is as a person, it's entirely about how hot she looks on the surface. Adolescent love, superficial is thy name. Halter's view of her never improves, nor does her behavior. She's entirely unappealing. I don’t care how beautiful a woman is supposed to be; if she smokes like a chimney (not that chimneys smoke so much these days) then she's ugly, period. She's apparently trying to smoke herself to death, how wonderfully deep and literate. I'm impressed. Impressed by how self-destructive these losers are. But of course, if she didn’t chain-smoke, then how could she possibly be an artist, sculpting Halter's rough-hewn adolescent rock into a masterpiece worthy of some dusty corner of a museum. Shall we muse?

Halter doesn’t get how pointless young Alaska is. On the contrary, like a male spider to a potential mate, he enters her web with great, perhaps, abandon, completely embracing her lifestyle of shallow rebelliousness, cutting classes, smoking, drinking, and generally wasting his time. Yes, I get that the claim is that he wants to idiotically pursue the last dying words of Rabelais (the great perhaps), as though the delusional ranting of someone at death's door is magically philosophical, deep, and sacred (but only if they're famous). You definitely have to slap a medal on that or die trying - or try dying. Moreover, if the person is foreign, then his words (no female who dies is worth remembering apparently) are to be hallowed for eternity!

But here's the rub: if that's the case, then why does Halter go to school at all? Why not drop out completely and run away from home? Great Perhaps because that's where the lie lies in his life? Halter isn't actually interested in exploring any great perhaps; he's just interested in geek mishaps. He "explores" the unknown by doing the staid, tried-and-tested, and very-well known: going to school! Yet even then, he's paradoxically not getting an education in anything that's important. Instead, he's hanging with his peers, his attention drifting even in his favorite class. Great perhaps he's learning nothing at all? He sure doesn't appear to be.

On his first night there, he's bullied, but this is never reported, because 'ratting out' the bullies would be the wrong thing to do, don't you know? The fact that he could have been killed is completely irrelevant; it's much better to let them get away with their recklessness and cruelty so they're encouraged to do it again and again until someone does die; then everyone can adopt a pained expression and whine, "How could this happen here?" The joke here is that he fails to come up with anything interesting in the way of last words.

Despite my sarcasm, I guess I really don’t get how a novel larded with trope and cliché manages to even get considered for an award, let alone win one. The Printz Award? Really? Is there an out-of-Printz award? Probably not, but I made one up and awarded it my own Dire Virgins novel! Every main character, and there are really only three, let's face it, is a trope. Chip is the 'seasoned pro' - the one who knows every trick and angle, who becomes the mentor to the new guy. His one feature is that he knows the names of capitals. Honestly? Character Tukumi's only real feature is his name.

We already met Halter, arguably the most trope-ish since he's the tediously stereotypical skinny geek - like geek and physique are inalienably alien bed-fellows, oh, and did I mention that he knows the last words of some dead dudes? Presage much, Green? Next thing you know he'll be writing a novel where he has a count-down to the tragedy to make sure that we don't miss it. Oh, wait a minute, he did count down to the tragedy in this novel!

Oh, and Halter failed to halt her. How awful for him. Boy! You gotta carry that weight, carry that weight a long time…. Maybe if Halter had actually learned about life instead of philosophically jerking-off to the 'great perhaps' he might have learned enough to see what was coming and been prepared to do something to prevent it, but from an awards PoV, it's a far, far better thing that he doesn’t than he ever did, and it’s a far, far better ending that he goes through than he's ever gone….

Even I saw that ending coming, and that was at the same moment that I saw the cover and read the title of this novel. A candle gone out? Seriously? I'll bet the cover artist got whiplash trying to pat their self on the back after that one. The Sylvia Plath Award for most tragically tragic tragedy goes, of course, to Alaska, a teenager who was in an ice-cold state even before she died.

But what really died here was a chance at a readable and entertaining novel. I rate this novel warty, but do take form it a timeless moral: never, ever read a novel with a person's name in the title - unless it's a children's novel. They don't seem to suffer from the acute lethargy and lack of inventiveness which is the stone from which John Green is hewn..

I Have to add that I can't help but wonder why Green insists upon making his female characters jerks. I've read two of his novels (all I am ever going to read, rest assured) and in both the female is a loser and a jerk. Is he a misogynist that he does this? Or is it simply that he doesn't know any better? Actually, the question which interests me more is why John Green went out of his way to call me a liar? Indeed, he called every one of us self-publishing/indie authors liars. In a speech which he made to the Association of American Booksellers in 2013 (of which I was unaware until very recently), he stated:

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature...without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent.
From Brit newspaper The Guardian

In short, John Green thinks we're liars if we say we did it all ourselves (not that your typical indie author ever does this in my experience). Guess what, Green behind the ears? I did it all myself and I know other people did too, and no, I am not lying. The question is why are you so insecure that you need an entourage to write your books? And yes, Looking for Alaska was self-indulgent so you failed. Deal with it.

Ready Or Not by Meg Cabot

Title: Ready Or Not
Author: Meg Cabot
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.

Ready of Not is a sequel to Meg Cabot's best selling All American Girl Samantha Madison lives in Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia). Sam's in high school and is pretty much your typical YA fictional juvenile, self-obsessed, teen girl, I'm sorry to report. I was hoping for better. The big difference here is that she's dating the president's son after having, in volume 1, saved the president's life. I haven't read volume 1, so I'm going only on this particular sequel. And yes, I'm listening to this while I wait for a more entertaining audio book read to arrive at my library, otherwise I doubt I would have picked this up at all. It did initially sound interesting though. It isn’t.

The dire lack of realism bothered me immensely. I cannot believe, given how close she is to the US "royal family" that there isn't even a hint of a Secret Service presence somewhere, somehow, in Sam's life, but apparently there isn’t. I dunno: maybe the Secret Service actually doesn’t care about who the presidential children date, but I find that hard to believe given how easy it would be to use the 'love interest' of a president's son or daughter to influence or manipulate behavior, or even to threaten the presidency.

I have to wonder seriously about people who write novels like this one, and even more so why this kind of writing is so popular. Obviously girls of a certain age really like to read this stuff, and this makes me sad, because then I have to ask: is there nothing going through young minds other than sex (if the character is a guy) or guys (if the character is a girl)? Yes, this ignores gay relationships, but then, so too does all-too-much YA fiction, except in rather insulting token form. And do YA writers never feel any need to offer alternatives, to enlighten, to inform, to encourage changed behavior, to educate? That really bothers me, because if we as writers are doing nothing beyond pandering to the lowest common denominator, then what differentiates us from parasites?

Cabot renders Sam as a gigantic fan of Gwen Stefani for reasons which seem to me to be more projection of authorial tastes than realism, but in 2005, Stefani was still a popular artist so this isn't unfeasible. Sam also works part time at a video tape rental store, which really dates this novel, but again, it’s not entirely outrageous even though VHS's death-knell had long been rung by 2005 when this novel is set.

Sam's older sister is a cheerleader and a guy magnet so, cliché to the max there. Her kid sister Rebecca, is super smart, so once again we have a special case kid in Sam, because she's so ordinary. Special because you're ordinary? Hmm. Sam is also a special case because of her action in saving the president, yet this seems not to have impacted her life. She herself claims that nothing has changed, yet everyone is paying attention to her. Is she so dumb she doesn’t notice this? For example, one time in school, she's talking on her phone to David, the president's son when there are, for unrelated reasons, cameras in the school, and suddenly everyone goes quiet, the cameras are all turned on her, and they're all listening in. This seemed ridiculous to me, especially since it didn’t seem to faze Sam at all. Yet despite this, there is not a single paparazzo chasing her around.

Sam is also a teen ambassador to the United Nations. This evidently came about in the previous novel, but if the only reason for it was her saving the president, that's pretty pathetic. So this story kicks in when David invites Sam to join him for Thanksgiving dinner at Camp David, the presidential retreat (where he goes when he's being attacked?!). For unexplained reasons (other than that she's a moron, maybe?), Sam becomes convinced that David invited her solely because he wants to have sex with her. Why only she, and not her entire family, was invited goes unexplained.

I have no idea how Sam can be so utterly air-headed, so this is where this novel really got on the skids for me. The problem was not that sons of presidents never think about, or even never have, sex, but that I honestly couldn’t believe that any presidential son could possibly have an interest in someone as boring, vacuous, and shallow as Sam. Unless, of course, the son was at odds with his president dad, and wanting to rebel. But given the options he has, could he not have chosen someone a little more substantial to employ in his rebellion? And why would he choose a girl who saved his dad's life if he was rebelling? It would make a much more interesting story if he'd taken up with the daughter of the guy who sought to assassinate his dad! Now there would have been a novel!

Worse than this is that her older sister sells herself out as the brainless cheerleader stereotype when she buys into Sam's delusion and provides her with contraception, but apparently supplies no good sex advice along with the tools. This makes no sense on several levels. Sam is ambivalent about having sex (hence the novel's title), which is smart, yet she wants to go fully prepared for sex! In a way that's smart, but in other ways it’s dumb.

I mean, if she's ambivalent, she needs to say "No!" until she's not ambivalent, and it seems to me that while effective contraception is always a good idea, her sister's choice isn’t, and Sam's taking it along anyway suggests that she's willing to be compromised even if she's not on-board with this plan. This struck me as really dumb behavior on her part; it read (listened!) as being very confused and also confusing. I can see what Cabot is trying to do here, but I'm unconvinced that this is the best way to present this situation to a young audience - especially since the most important part - discussing this frankly with her intended partner - is entirely skipped.

Once I’d decided how I would rate this novel, I went out and read some reviews (positive and negative) to see if I’d missed anything that I ought perhaps to have considered. In general there was not, but what really struck me in a few of the negative reviews was the significant amount of hypocrisy in evidence. Several of them went beyond reviewing the novel into reviewing the author, accusing Cabot of having an agenda (which was to promote teen premarital sex)! I found it hilarious that not a single one of those reviewers ever considered that they themselves had a religious agenda which they were promoting.

I don’t have time for religion, which to me is no better than a bad fantasy novel. I do agree that keeping children safe and healthy is of prime importance, but the only proven way to do this is to educate them and continue to educate them, and this means being realistic about the way things actually are. You're not going to get anywhere if you put on religious blinkers and try to pretend that things are in real life like they were in old fifties TV shows, where the family is white, and completely respectable, and irrepressibly happy, and there's one boy and one girl, and every problem is solvable in thirty minutes - and there aren't even toilets in the house! Get real!

Teenagers have sex. It’s a fact of life! They're not going to stop. Nor are they going to run-off and start having sex simply because they read a bad Meg Cabot novel. If you think otherwise, you're delusional, period. Those with a Christian religious agenda seem to have completely (or conveniently) forgotten that we ran things their way for close to two thousand years and their religious agenda failed dismally. Christian "love" failed to prevent war, and indeed promoted many. It failed to prevent pregnancies in unmarried women. It failed to prevent women being abused. It failed to prevent children being abused. It failed to prevent diseases from spreading. It failed to keep children safe from exploitation, and from having their life put at risk or prematurely terminated.

These people seem to have forgotten that it was under religious rule - indeed because of religious rule - that we had the crusades and the inquisitions, and that we hung witches and burned heretics. I flatly refuse to go back to those days.

Nor does it make sense to lecture a girl that she must never have sex until some guy puts a ring on her finger. Marriage is not a protection against a guy running out on you. It does not guarantee that a guy will be faithful to you! There are no guarantees. Even going into it with the best of intentions, a couple can fall out of love. Those pushing this agenda are deliberately ignoring divorce statistics. There is no magic solution, and it's the height of dishonesty to pretend that they have a solution in their blind belief system.

The only thing you can do with kids is to raise them in the most loving environment you can, whether you're a happy married couple, a single mom or dad, or two dads or two moms. It makes no difference. You need to keep them as healthy as you can - which includes getting them their appropriate vaccinations - and giving them the best all-around education you can. You must refuse to shy away from some difficult questions they may ask. Keeping them ignorant is not an option and offers no protection. Once you've done all of this, you need to trust them, and that's it. You cannot live their life for them.

Blaming authors like Meg Cabot for the ills of the world is brain-dead and displays ignorance of the real facts of life. Blame her for putting out a badly written novel if you must, as I do, but she's not responsible for the way in which we, as a society, raise our kids, or for the behaviors of those kids when they reach teen-hood.

Bras & Broomsticks by Sarah Mlynowski

Title: Bras & Broomsticks
Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Random House
Rating: worthy!

This audio CD is read by Ariadne Meyers and she does an acceptable job, but is occasionally annoying.

Quite frankly, this one seemed a bit young for me, but I've never shied away from a novel for fear of embarrassment from its subject matter - only from fear of detesting one because it looked like it might be so awful I’d regret it! So this looked, from the blurb, like a fun read, but we all know how thoroughly blurbs lie. The vig was that I’d already read (read: listened) and enjoyed another one by this same author (Don't Even Think About It, so I decided to give it a try.

Once again it’s an unfortunate first person PoV story. I think such novels such have a government warning attached to them:

I nevertheless plunged recklessly on, and I started listening to it when one of my sons was in the car. While I wasn't impressed by the first chapter, he was. Hopefully he's going to drag himself away from his computer enough to read the paperback version I got for him, but I offer no guarantee.

Chapter two is better. This is where the story really begins and you can quite easily skip chapter one and start right here without missing a thing - unless you like rambling intros. There is some humor in it, a few laughs, but chapter one is like a prologue, and prologues, I detest. I resented that the author cheated and dragged me into reading her prologue by disguising it thus. And yes, I know advise authors to make their prologue chapter one instead of a prologue, but that advice carries the implicit assumption they have something useful to say in the prologue!

Chapter two is where the main character discovers that her younger sister has inherited her mother's witchcraft abilities. This power apparently travels only through the female line, of course, because nothing is more genderist than witchcraft. Also, there's no guarantee you'll get it. The main character doesn't, but her younger sister does. The very existence of witchcraft is a joke to the main character to begin with, but she quickly adapts when she realizes how much this can change her life for the better, only to be disappointed when her mom declares that using it only for pretty wish-fulfillment will lead to misery. Like she knows. There's no explanation, at least to begin with, as to why this should be so.

Her sister knew there was something different about her, but until her evil mom actually deigned to tell her she was a witch, she didn’t know what was going on. How a mother could abuse her daughter like this is a mystery, and honestly didn’t ring true to me, but it’s what you have to deal with. The young sister had resurrected her pet goldfish a few times, so she knew she had powers. This led to one of the most flat-out hilarious lines in the novel for me (but then I'm really warped). The narrator reads, "death and resurrection rigmarole", but she makes rigmarole sound like rigor-marole, as in rigor mortis. I don’t know if she did it on purpose, but she made me laugh out loud at that. I also found "The STB" (the name they give to their father's fiance - mom & dad are split up) an amusing way to refer to an un-liked "relative".

Unfortunately, I could not get into this novel. It was far too much whiny "Me! Me! Me!" from the main character and given that I detest the self-indulgence of main characters narrating their own story in the first place, this did not sit at all well with me. I found her story to be tedious, lacking in anything of interest, of no educational value, and with nothing new to say or to bring to the genre. So, I would normally rate this warty, but my son assures me it has merit, so I am going, for once, to use his rating and not mine! He rates this a worthy read. Blame him if you hate it!

The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson

Title: The Impossible Knife of Memory
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Publisher: Viking
Rating: WARTY!

This novel is ostensibly about dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) but it’s really just another troubled teen romance, and I detested it for trivializing a serious and under-attended problem in such a cavalier and disrespectful fashion. As if that alone isn’t bad enough, Anderson also trivializes the rather abusive nature of the very 'romance' which the main female character gets into. As if that wasn't bad enough, Anderson seems to me to be offering us a jail-bait-and-switch deal here, where she presents us with what appears, at first glance, to be an against-trope relationship, but which upon examination turns out to be mired in the self-same clichés with which every other bad teen romance is smothered.

Hayley Kincain (not Kincaid - she's a kin of Cain) is portrayed as a rebellious seventeen-year-old in the first few pages, who is a troubled teen, and an outsider in every way. Soon after this you realize that she's no different from every other supposedly troubled teen in this kind of novel. Shortly after that, you realize that in truth, she's a bigoted, untroubled teen! She arrogantly thinks she's above everyone else in school, labeling them as either zombies or freaks. She's nasty about the retirees at the home where she 'volunteers' (she's forced to 'volunteer' because she's disruptive).

She's presented to us as being smart, yet she offers no evidence that she's any smarter than average. Indeed, she's so poor a student that she has a tutor forced on her, and the trope guy wangles himself into that position. The trope guy has a trope name: Finn. I honestly don’t get what’s heroic or attractive about a guy named after a fish appendage. He's dishonestly presented to us as being a skinny nerd, but he's not. He's a standard bad-boy" trope guy with muscles, upon which Hayley remarks more than once.

I don’t suffer PTSD (except from reading one-too-many bad YA novels), nor have I ever had to care for one who does, so I'm not speaking from experience here, but Hayley never acts like she's a girl with weighty troubles. Yeah, she cogitates a bit about her dad, but otherwise, she behaves in no different a manner than any other student in the school, and contrary to looking like someone who's living on her nerve-ends because of her father's understandably manic behavior, she looks like she's having a whale of a time most of the time. Would that be half a whale of a time - like a Fin whale of a time or something? Or maybe something much smaller, like a Beluga? No disrespect to Belugas, but they look like they could use a day at the beach, don’t they? But they probably have great skin when they get old, all that sheltering from the ultra violent rays. Not stingrays. Sun rays. But I digress.

Hayley's best friend is Grace, who is dating Topher. Seriously? Grace, who's routinely infantilized into Gracie, and Topher have about as bad a relationship as Grace's mom and dad do. On one of these occasions, Grace runs off in a huff to the bathroom like a six-year old and Hayley gets on Topher about going after her to enable her childish behavior. This is after she lectures Finn about how demeaning it is to attribute girls' emotions to being premenstrual, yet she says nothing about his use of the term "douche bag" as an insult. This was about 30% in and I was thinking at that point how trope-ish and boring this novel is. I see no evidence to justify or even rationalize the praise it’s had from less discerning reviewers. The troubled girl with a secret, the muscular guy with an utterly absurd name. "Finn"? Really? But enough wailing on him.

Finn's most noticeable attribute (ok, more wailing...) is that he persistently and consistently manipulates Hayley into doing what he wants, and she finds nothing to object to in his behavior. There's genderism in the novel too. When Grace's parents start heading down Divorce Road, it’s the guy who cheated. It’s always the guy in these novels, never the girl, never the wife. Grace's parents, stuck in a co-dependent relationship, are more juvenile than the high school kids are. Have you noticed how the parents are always engineers, architects, accountants. They're never mine workers, or farmers, or trash collectors, or car mechanics! Hayley is more upset by Grace's domestic problems than she is by her own, and she makes Grace go with her to community service at a retirement community so they can have fun with the oldies. When she gets home that evening, Hayley demands that her dad take her to the cemetery so she can visit her grandmother's grave. No waiting until a different day it has to be RIGHT NOW! Brat much, Hayley?

That was pretty much the point where I honestly ceased to care what happened to her, her relationship with Finn, or her relationship with her father. This novel (what I read of it anyway) was way too wordy and completely boring, and nothing happens in it that hasn’t happened in other novels. There's nothing special, or new, or interesting, or brilliantly written, or educational here. There is a lot of trite, trash, trope, and cliché, and I think it's warty all around.

The Truth About Alice by Jennifer Mathieu

Title: The Truth About Alice
Author: Jennifer Mathieu
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
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.

erratum:
"…like making it look like was texting Elaine about doing it with him." (p25) makes zero sense. There were also some spelling errors, but very few.

I was not at all impressed with this novel. The author's goal is admirable, but I think it achieves the very opposite of what it attempts. It's told from multiple first person PoVs. 1PoV with one narrator is usually a disaster in YA fiction, but in this case Elaine, Kelsie, Kurt, and Josh all narrate, magnifying the problem fourfold. All four are morons, and every single one of them seems to be as sexually-obsessed as they are shallow and tedious. This means that not a one of them has an engaging story to relate. Apparently no one in this small town in Texas has anything on their mind - ever - except sex, and that applies equally whether you're male or female. Even given a very liberal view of how teens are, this is completely unrealistic and not even remotely titillating (which might have offered some relief from the tedium).

The novel has no conventional chapters (1, 2, 3, etc), just a series of interleaved stories (I use that term purposefully) headed by the name of the narrator. They each tell essentially the same yarn, tarted up with pointless and yawn-worthy (not yarn-worthy) personal detail about their petty lives, so if you read it front-to-back, you'll find yourself engaged in endless re-writes of your understanding of events as new information constantly comes to light. Some readers might like that.

The final contributor is Alice herself, and she's just as bad as the others for where her mind is at, but if the very last narrative by Josh and the very last chapter itself (by Alice) are read first, the rest of the novel can be comfortably skipped without loss. Unless you enjoy rambling, juvenile, three-sheets-to-the-wind style air-headed gossip.

If this had been written by a guy I can imagine how raked over the coals he would have been for writing material like this even if he had a point to make. That's what I'd optimistically assumed: that there was some sort of point going to be made, about slut-shaming or something along those lines, but I found myself increasingly hoping it would be made quickly, because quite frankly I did not know how much of this empty-headed adolescent chit-chat I could honestly stomach. I wasn't at all intrigued, engrossed (just grossed), or entertained by it. And there was no point made at the end except that some people are sexually-obsessed and others are liars. There is no compelling truth unveiled here, nothing new, nothing unusual, nothing edifying, nothing educational, nothing entertaining, nothing which adds to the discourse, and no moral points made. It's just gossip teetering precariously upon upon innuendo, stacked dangerously upon lies, balanced on the knife edge of total inertia, and that's what I want to get into next.

I think the worst part of this novel is what is not said. Yes, people do dumb stuff, and yes people lie about what others may or may not have done, but that's life. That's a given. Yes, women are held to a different standard than are men, and as wrong as that is, as much as that must change, it's not news. The problem that this novel suffers is that it's so obsessed with making its point that it tramples that point under foot. There is no realism here, and thus the issue becomes not Alice, but where the hell were the adults during all this? I cannot honestly believe, no matter which town it happened in, that this level of scandalous behavior (not to be confused with sexual behavior) could go on unabated without someone stepping in somewhere along the line, but no one ever did. Adults were all but non-existent in this novel. They said nothing. They did nothing. They intervened in nothing.

Having said that, there was one event which necessitated police intervention, and a simple check of cell-phone calling records could have implicated or exonerated one of the parties, but that investigation was never undertaken. I find that incredible - and not in a good way. I'm guessing that the sign as you drive into this town says: Healy, Texas - where you leave reality behind.

The story is about two events (so-called - one is a non-event, the other a tragedy) connected with Alice, who is variously described up front as a slut and a skank. The non-event is that at a party, she had sex with two guys one after the other. Who cares? But it's all this town can talk about until the next event. That event was some time later, when Brandon was supposedly so bombarded with texts when he was driving, that he had lost control of the car and died. His passenger, Josh, survived since he was wearing a seat-belt.

Quite obviously, the driver is at fault here for one or more of the following:
1. drinking and driving, and/or
2. texting and driving, and/or
3. Failing to drive with due care and attention and
3. Failing to buckle-up
There is no question about this, yet this becomes an obsession in the town: Brandon is innocent, the sender of the texts effectively murdered him. Seriously? Were those texts even sent? The police quite simply don't bother to investigate. Seriously? Every single person (save one, more about him anon) in the school turns completely against Alice? Seriously? I simply cannot credit this. It's like a 1930s Frankenstein movie, with mob, but sans pitchforks. Yes, I can see how people can turn against someone for no good reason, but I cannot for the life of me see it happening as it's depicted in this fairy tale.

That's the problem, ultimately: that I could not believe this. It's simply not realistic. And I don't care if you, who is reading this review, or the author, or her literary agent. or her publicist, or her best friend can quote me an event that happened like this. That's not the issue. I'm not reading a newspaper, I'm reading a novel, and if the author of the novel cannot suspend my disbelief, then that author has failed.

Did Alice deserve the graffiti in the rest room? That's not even the question to ask here. The question is: why didn't even one single school official do anything about the graffiti, or about the behaviors being exhibited in that school? The question is: why didn't one single parent do anything about the behaviors being exhibited over this. And therein lies another problem: Alice's story is trivialized, debased, and marginalized by the complete lack of realism. I had sincerely hoped that this story would have aimed at being rather more novel than that.

So what about the one guy who didn't ostracize her? He was absolutely no better than any other character, and I'll tell you why. His entire focus throughout this novel was not on Alice, but on how much of a total babe she was, how hot she looked, how curvaceous her body was, how great her cleavage was, how her knees were like two peaches (seriously?!!!), how her neck was swan-like and what-ever! Never once, not on one single occasion did he ever express how beautiful her mind was (it wasn't, but then I'm not in love with her, he was). He never extemporized upon what a great person she was. In short, his behavior was exactly as bad as everyone else's, just in a different way. Actually you could make a sound argument that his objectification of Alice was even more grotesque than that exhibited by everyone else. At least they were out in the open with it - nothing to hide. And this guy was supposed to be her knight in shining armor (actually another YA trope with which I have issues, but enough said).

I'm sorry, but this novel failed in what it was purportedly trying to do, and in my opinion, rather than help to fix this awful problem, has simply exacerbated it. I cannot recommend it.

Paper Towns by John Green

Title: Paper Towns
Author: John Green
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD was read competently by Dan John Miller.

This novel, unfortunately told from first-person PoV, could be a lot worse, but it was getting there. Miller's narration helps, and the fact that the novel was amusing in parts also helped. The story hinges (and I use that word advisedly) entirely upon spineless Quentin Jacobsen's infatuation with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, who turns out to be a complete jerk.

Quentin is in fatuation with Margo, who shows up at his bedroom window one night demanding that he drive her around in his mom's van (he has no car) because she's had her car keys confiscated by her predictable, unadventurous, but also feisty parents, and she has eleven critical things to do that night (so she deludedly believes). The entire repertoire of criticality is inextricably entangled in Margo's juvenile need for revenge against a two-timing boyfriend, and she drags Quentin in on it with her, selfish much-adolescent-about-nothing that she is.

This plan having been more-or-less successfully executed, Quentin finds his life starting to turn around, but even as it does, Margo has disappeared. This isn't the first time she's taken off, and she's always left an impossible-to-follow clue before showing up shortly afterwards of her own accord, no less irresponsible or full of self-importance. This time, it's been six days with no word at all from her, and when Quentin discovers a whole series of cryptic clues, since he has no life and no self-respect, he obsesses on following wherever they lead, in hopes of tracking down Margo, and he starts to slowly come to the conclusion that maybe Margo has taken the biggest trip of all. Or has she?

Disk 6 wouldn't play in the car, so I skipped to disk 7 which turned out to be fine because disk 6 evidently had zero to say. Disk 5 ended with Quentin setting out to follow his last clue and disk 7 began with him arriving at his destination, which begs the question as to what value disk 6 was in the first place! Obviously none. Disk 7 was short and had a really unsatisfactory ending. I didn't like either invertebrate Quentin or Margo at all; in fact I think she's a jerk.

I can't help but wonder why Green insists upon making his female characters jerks. I've read two of his novels (all I am ever going to read, rest assured) and in both the female is a loser and a jerk. Is he a misogynist that he does this? Or is it simply that he doesn't know any better? Actually, the question which interests me more is why John Green went out of his way to call me a liar? Indeed, he called every one of us self-publishing/indie authors liars. In a speech which he made to the Association of American Booksellers in 2013 (of which I was unaware until very recently), he stated:

We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature...without an editor my first novel, Looking for Alaska, would have been unreadably self-indulgent.
From Brit newspaper The Guardian

In short, John Green thinks we're liars if we say we did it all ourselves (not that your typical indie author ever does this in my experience). Guess what, Green behind the ears? I did it all myself and I know other people did too, and no, I am not lying. The question is why are you so insecure that you need an entourage to write your books? And yes, Looking for Alaska was self-indulgent so you failed and all of your team with you. Deal with it.

Scarlett Fever by Maureen Johnson

Title: Scarlett Fever
Author: Maureen Johnson
Publisher: Point
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not sure quite how to share this with you so I'll just come right out and say it: I'm in Love with Maureen Johnson. It just happened. I didn't plan it. It crept up on me. I read both her 'Scarlett' novels back to back and they stunned me into it. Even when I was thinking "I don't like this a bit", I couldn't shed myself of my overpowering loyalty to her cause. I love these two novels and you should read them right now. I'll be checking on you to make sure that you do.

Now about these new covers.... Gone is the goofy-looking girl on the cover of book one. I guess when the publisher discovered that Johnson had more than one volume in her on this character, they decided to start a series theme cover. Sucks to be them. The original cover of volume one had much more character. Literally! Fortunately the actual novel starts out by being every bit as entertaining as the other one was. Shame it's so let down by the trashy cover. This is one very good reason why I normally treat covers as utterly irrelevant.

In this novel, the summer is winding down, the hotel production of Hamlet is over, the hotel is still largely empty (how do they manage, financially, to keep a five-storey hotel running with no guests?!), and Scarlett is still an appendage of Amy. The good news is that lame YA trope Eric is out of the picture, but the sad news is that he's far from out of Scarlett's mind.

This part I didn't really get. I get that a fifteen-year-old girl who has never had a boyfriend might fall for someone she sees as exotic and new, but I honestly felt her attachment to him in volume one was a betrayal of who Scarlett was supposed to be. In this volume it seems to me to be a further betrayal of who she is that she's so helplessly and hopelessly pining for him when their relationship had nothing going for it, and especially given that it was so short term and so sparsely furnished, and even more especially given that he betrayed her. If they'd been dating and "in love" for a couple of years, then I would have expected even Scarlett to behave the way she does in this novel, but when we're told who she is and what kind of character she is, and she behaves this way after such a reed-thin relationship, it takes a bit more believing than I have available to offer! That was one of those 'I don't like this a bit' bits I mentioned in the overture.

In other news, Scarlett's friends, we're told, have returned from their exciting and exotic summers, but we get only the briefest of glances at them. This seems to be a further false note in this novel, especially given how much we've had it blasted into us that they are so close and such good friends of Scarlett's. That was another of those 'I don't like this a bit' bits previously mentioned.

Having got the bitching and whining out of the way, let's look at what Johnson offers that's new. Here, there's plenty of fresh produce to enjoy on her stall. Amy Amberson has moved out of the hotel and found an apartment. She's opened her own acting agency, and taken on Spencer of course, as her first client. Now she's hunting down more, and one prospect, named Chelsea, who conveniently happens to be Scarlett's age, is in her sights. It's because of this new client that Scarlett ends up meeting Max, Chelsea's older bother, who is something of a social misfit. It seems obvious that something is going to blossom there, but Max is just far enough divorced from trope that he's actually an interesting and welcome character.

After the first third of the novel, Scarlett returns to school, so there was a chance to see that aspect of her character, which I was really looking forward to. Frankly, the hotel scenario was becoming decidedly claustrophobic! So Lola comes out with a huge surprise for the family. Good for her! Marlene is a delight. Spencer is charming and brings more surprises. But the real joy of this novel (apart from the perfect ending), is Scarlett's relationship with Max, and her comments. She's smart, funny, brilliant, inventive, not shy of working, and really moves this novel all over the place. I loved it, even the bits I didn't like, and as I said, the ending left me wanting a volume three, so anyone who can, pester Johnson mercilessly so that she has no choice but to turn this dilogy into a trilogy - or maybe she has?