The Curse of the Bruel Coven by Sabrina Ramoth

Rating: WARTY!

This story comes larded with a lot of trope, but it is YA, so that's par for the course unfortunately. There's very little under the sun that's new in YA, especially when it comes to supernatural tales. The story is short and fast-paced; perhaps too fast for some readers, but I liked that it did not not ramble and meander. If it had, I probably would have DNF'd it.

While this novel avoided some of the pitfalls in the genre, it could not seem to keep itself from falling headlong into the middle of others. For those reasons - which I shall go into shortly - and for the fact that it is the start of a series, which means that at best, it's only a prologue and not an actual story, and so has no resolution, I can't commend it. It's not exactly a cliff-hanger ending, but it's close. I will not be pursuing this series.

The first cliché to curse this story is that of the orphaned teenager suddenly coming into a realization and/or suddenly coming into her powers. "Vivienne Davenport is an ordinary teenager - at least, she thinks she is. Then the untimely death of her mother reveals a family secret. She's adopted... and her real mom is a witch." Yeah. Not a story-killer of a cliché, but there's certainly not anything new or original on offer here. Someone who is the most powerful, yet least experienced is a tautology and a tired trope in this case.

On top of that, there's a curse that only the special snowflake child can lift, despite everyone telling her it's unbreakable: "Buried deep within her family’s history of magic is a deadly curse that has plagued them for generations." That's a bit much and it sure isn't resolved in volume one!

The inexplicable thing here, about the story so far, is that despite no one - but no one - wanting Vivienne to know about her family history, and despite her having been been protected from the curse Harry Potter style by living away from the magical world with relatives - her adoptive mother inexplicably left a photo of Vivienne, as a child and in the arms of her birth mother, in a family photo album. That made zero sense to me, but it was this author's rather hamfisted way of bringing realization to Vivienne and launching her into her quest.

So Vivienne travels to New Orleans (at least it's not Salem - barf! - but it's still trope as hell) with her best friend, unimaginatively named Savannah. Savannah accompanied her for one cheap and clichéd reason only, which I shall get to at the end of this review. Vivienne quickly discovers that her birth mother has been kidnapped.

The idiot blurb writer gets frantic at this point and tosses the usual dumb-ass questions at the potential reader: "Can Vivienne become the witch she needs to be? Or will her newfound powers prove too much for her to handle?" We know they won't otherwise how is the author going to pad this out into a series?

Then the blurb writer lies, as usual: "She will soon learn that all magic comes at a price." No, it doesn't. It even tells us in the novel itself that spells cost something, but what it shows us is that just like in the Harry Potter stories, no matter what spell is cast, it costs nothing to the caster. The magic is tediously trope. There's nothing new or inventive. It's all about the four (non-)elements: air, earth, fire, and water. The protagonist, of course, is fire.

At one point I read how the Moon is tied to silver, the Sun to gold, but there was no explanation as to why. The protagonist complains that she's "still not really understanding his explanation." I'm not either! The Sun is arguably a gold color, but there's quite literally no metallic gold in the sun. That element - a real element - isn't created until a star explodes. Likewise I doubt there's much silver on the Moon, if any. Believe it or not, for an airless body, the Moon is 60% oxygen - all of which is bound to metallic and other elements in the Moon's interior. Pretty much all of the rest of it is silicon and aluminum with traces of calcium, iron, magnesium, and titanium. The color of the Moon is merely a reflection of the sun and it's not even a silver color! So whence this linking to those valuable metals? It's nonsensical.

Vivienne is launched on a crash course in practical magic which, unlike Harry Potter, she masters improbably quickly, and is magically lighting candles, throwing troubled guys into walls, and levitating, in no time. We learn that she, not Aubrey, a cousin, is now the high priestess of the coven - a coven here being six, not thirteen for reasons unexplained. The grand priestess though is Vivienne's grandmother who is consistently referred to as Grand’Mere. Now that word isn’t missing a letter so why the apostrophe?! I dunno! Another mystery!

The magic was a joke. In addition to the trope herbs and candles, and that crap, the spells were cast in Hallmark rhymes which made me laugh. It made no more sense than Harry Potter casting spells by waving a stick and chanting two Latin words. The obvious question is: what language did they use to cast spells before Latin came along? And if it worked, why switch to Latin? In the case of this story, how did they cast spells back in medieval times if they couldn't rhyme in modern English? LOL! It felt cheap and cheesy, and truly juvenile.

That wasn't the worst thing though. In this genre, the whole thing about magic is that it's supernatural - outside, or over and above nature yet the author says at one point, "you can’t override nature. If something is too far gone, you can’t bring it back. It goes against the rules of nature." But isn't that precisely what magic does?! How is levitating complying with the rules of nature? How is turning something invisible, complying with the rules of nature? How is moving an object with the mind complying with the rules of nature? This made zero sense. The author had not thought it through.

There were some writing issues where the author, in her haste, had unfortunately juxtaposed words amusingly, such as when I read, "A sudden tightness wracked my chest when I saw the photo of Mom and me sitting on her dresser." So while they had once sat on the dresser, someone photographed them doing it?! It's a minor quibble. We've all been down that authoring rabbit-hole. At another point there was a misuse of a word when I read, "I shoved Nanette’s magical satchel into my jeans pocket." What she meant was sachet, not satchel. You can't fit a satchel into your jeans pocket!

A bigger problem was when I read things like: "I hopped into my metallic blue Jeep," or "Sebastian's Altima screeched to a halt behind us." Apparently it's important to the author that we know he has an Altima, because she mentions it twice. Why? I don't know and I don't care, nor is it relevant that she has a metallic blue Jeep. I don't get that approach to writing that at all. If the make and color of the car are important for some reason, then yeah, but here? Not so much! It's overkill and comes off as obsessive.

At one point I read that someone's voice "crackled" - when the author quite evidently meant that it "cracked." That's auto-correct for you! But these were minor issues which were not a big deal when compared with the problems in the writing, such as when Vivienne displaces her cousin Aubrey as high priestess of the coven. Aubrey doesn't take this well, and her incessant snide remarks about Vivienne's powers - or lack thereof - were so frequent that they quickly became tedious to read.

There was a certain amount of manhandling of the females going on here, too. If they were close family, then this would have been understandable, but Vivienne and Savannah had literally just met these people, and barely knew them. There had been no time to bond, yet the guys are inappropriately familiar and it became a bit creepy to read.

You thought I'd forgot about Savannah, huh? No! Early in the story, Savannah loses her phone at Vivienne's bio-mom's house, and it's when they go back there to recover it that they discover she's been adbucted. At the end of the story - way too late for it to matter - they recover Savannah's phone and yet no one suspects for a minute it might have been cursed or had something else done to it. These people are morons. And again, way too late for it to matter, Savannah is dispatched home for her safety, regardless of the fact that nowhere is she safer than right there with the witch coven in the protected home right where she was.

At the end of the story, a little is made of the fact that Vivienne hasn't heard from Savannah - calling to confirm that she made the hour-long drive home safely. Vivienne idiotically dismisses it as Savannah's phone having lost its charge, despite the phone having been barely used. I have a theory that volume two, as is de rigeur for a series, is an exact copy of volume one, except that now it's Savannah who has been abducted rather than Vivienne's bio-mom. I have no way of knowing if this is true and I don't care to find out, but that's my guess.

So the cheap and clichéd reason that Savannah (who had very little to do in the story, and who could actually have been dispensed with entirely) accompanied Vivienne was to become the new maiden in distress for volume two. Barf! Two volumes and two instances of a female being the weak link - and from a female author? That's as shameful as it is pathetic. I can't commend this series.

Legacy Marines by Jonathan P Brazee

Rating: WARTY!

This attempt at a Tom Clancy military manual is doomed. It's a dual PoV - fortunately not first person or I wouldn't be reading it at all more than likely - but almost as annoying. This means of course that every chapter has one of the two main characters names as a chapter title, alternating in tedious tick-tock fashion like a military march. Barf! It’s boring and it results in unintentionally amusing chapter openings such as this one:

Chapter 4 Noah Esther...

That's the dumb stupidity of two person POV. There's probably another chapter in there, starting in just the opposite fashion. That, on top of the mil-speak with endless, tedious acronyms, was simply annoying. Some - but not all - of the acronyms have a superscript number attached to them, but this is useless because it’s not link, and even if it were, they often appear so close to the edge of the screen that if you were to try and tap on it to go see the reference, you would instead swipe the screen. Stupid and ill-conceived. The description should be right there in the text unless this is written only for soldiers.

The author makes the David Weber mistake of assuming the military in 3-D space will conduct itself exactly as it does in 2-D surface warfare, and it’s all naval speak. It’s like the author took Horatio Hornblower and just moved him into space with no other changes, and it’s stupid. Also, once again, despite the marines supposedly being international, it’s really all American all the time, because as you know, the rest of the world can go hornblow itself.

One again in a futuristic (co-called) military drama, there are no robots and zero AI. There's a nod and a wink to it, but it’s never used. In fact there's a distinct aversion using it! At one point, we learn that the 'AI chip' in their battle helmets has been updated for their new location, but this idiot one of the 'twins' refuses to use it to find her way because it's perceived as a weakness! That's about the equivalent of a marine facing off on the battlefield with an enemy soldier and refusing to use their firearm, but pulling out a knife instead. Stupid. Is it because the author is a male writer and there's the cliché that men won't ask for directions, and this is being projected onto the female character? Whatever is the reason, it's not a good one.

But it gets worse. Despite having some majorly advanced technology - and apparently FTL travel, since they're located much closer to the center of the galaxy than Earth is, there are zero robots. Everything is done by humans despite the fact that now, in 2021, we have very effective robots galore, including military drones, and quite advanced AIs. It's the Star Trek stupidity all over again. The only thing more stupid than Star Trek is Star Wars which does have robots, but they're appallingly stupid and annoying. But here we have the marines training in 'PICS' which has no explanation that I recall for the acronym, but which I assume is something like Personal Integrated Combat Suit.

I read, with regard to enemy being able to track the suits and zero in on them for targeting, "But the fractured-array made it difficult to focus on an individual PICS, whether from eyesight or sensors. In his father’s day, a fractured-array merely 'bent' the lights waves. Now, not only were the waves distorted, but fifty times a second, the array shifted, which sent spoofing images randomly...." The thing is, once again, the author is focused only on the visual sense. Yes, he mentions 'sensors', but there’s nothing on how the suit supposedly fools those.

The thing is that a mechanical suit will put out a radar reflection, it will put out a heat signature, it will put out electronic frequencies (especially if the soldiers are communicating with one another as they would have to be). And even if it put out none of this at detectable levels, it would not matter to an enemy because they would simply blanket the ground with high explosive rounds and kill every last one of a bunch of marines trundling up on bulky mech suits! This whole thing made no sense; it sounded like the kind of simplistic idea a writer would put into a children's story, and that was another problem with this: the story seemed to be adult, but the writing was aimed much lower down the age range.

The story is of a pair of twins - so called. They're drawn to look identical on the cover; in fact, I’d wager it’s the same drawing with a few tweaks - but twins of different genders are not monozygotic and they would not look like identical twins. They may look completely different. One of them is the go-getter gung-ho female who is given such a 'man-with-tits' aura that she's really a caricature, and of course her brother is the polar opposite. Both were a bit of a joke.

The 'futuristic' weapons were a bit of a laugh, too. I read this at one point when the girl gets her firearm: "The M99 was a dart thrower, firing a hypervelocity 8mm dart that was accelerated with mag rings and capable of reaching 2,010 meters per second past the muzzle. The body of the dart was nowhere near 8mm across, but once it was fired, fins popped out for stability, and it was the fins that stretched 8mm." The thing is that some 2k m/s is almost twice the fastest muzzle velocity of anything available today and even if it was achieved, should anything 'pop' out of the projectile, even fins, it would more than likely ruin the trajectory at such hyper-speeds. It made no sense.

The female main charcater comes off a a complete jerk who thinks nothing of using her father's famous name to get privileges. I read thsi at one point:

"OK, I’m forwarding it now, Mz Lysand—" he started before looking up in surprise. "Esther Lysander? As in Ryck Lysander?"

So obviously, she thinks nothing of fucking with people to get get her own privileged way and it's not a good idea to render one of your main characters - your heroic ones that is - as completely unlikeable right from the off. I certainly did not like her, and her brother was no better, so I saw no reason to get interested in either of them. This was especially true since the author seemed hell-bent upon setting the sotry up to be utterly predictable, having the gung-ho "against type" (not!) female soldier get schooled and the 'sensitive guy' male soldier become heroic. Barf.

I quit reading this because it offered nothing new and nothing interesting to me. I don't think the author knows how to write a realistic female character for a situation like this. The characters felt flat. One of them was too boring and the other too ridiculous. It was as though the author had decided to write the man as the woman and vice-versa - from a traditional PoV, that is - and it really didn't work. The only character that even remotely intrigued me was the one who went by 'Princess Mayhem', but she was barely in the book - in the first 50% anyway. The story was terribly lethargic, too. You could honestly have skipped the entire first thirteen chapters, which were tiresomely like a prologue, and come in when the first mission started, and not have missed anything important, useful, or entertaining. I ditched it at just past 50%, and I cannot commend it as a worthy read.

Rise of the Sparrows by Sarina Langer

Rating: WARTY!

Read indifferently by Leanne Yau, this audiobook started out quite engagingly, but proved to be such a plodding story after reading a little further into it that I DNF'd it after chapter 25, which was about halfway through. I had thought I'd make it to the end and give it a positive review, but the problem was that the story was slow, and main character Rachel's constant and repetitive dissection of events became thoroughly tedious and irritating in short order. I really began to dislike her and the inevitable an unoriginal male interest, named ridiculously, Kale. The predictability of the story on top of Rachel's stupidity was a big negative for me, too.

Set in a fantasy medieval world where there are X-men...um mutant children...who have unlikely powers, such as the usual sketchy ability to see the future, fire coming from someone's hands, and so on, was not something I would reject the novel out of hand for, but how an author handles these things is important and clearly this author had no intention of offering any sort of an explanation for the powers. Additionally, the disgust and rejection of such mutant children by the villagers was predictable, but a likely consequence, especially back in such superstitious times.

The problem here was that the complete lack of anyone who might have been even slightly sympathetic was far too much of an extreme, but it's what authors predictably do in such stories and it's inauthentic. I mean there were so many of these 'mutant' children that it was hard to believe they were so universally rejected. It's like everyone is the same and there are no gray areas, and I'm so tired of that trope - and of authors who are so lacking in imagination that they cannot make it a bit more realistic.

Talking of which, I had to wonder who these stories were aimed at because it read like middle grade, Rachael being barely high-school age, and Cephy, the younger mutant she took up with, about ten years old, yet the story was discussing torture and rape and so on, as though this were a young adult or new adult novel. Anyway, the plot has it that the two girls are not welcome in the city because of Cephy's wanton destruction of her entire family in a burning incident when she got pissed off, and form which semes seems to ahve suffered no negative consequences whatseover. So they escape into the nearby forest, pursued by the White Guard, sent by King Eric and these guys are so caricatured that they could be cartoon characters. Cephy also burns those dudes to a crisp.

They're taken in by a witch who seems welcoming, but who you know from the start has her own agenda and it's not favorable to the kids. Unaccountably this witch hands them over to 'heroic guy' Kale for no apparent reason, and this is supposedly the good guy, yet he creeps around scaring Rachael without any rationale for his behavior at all. He's the trope creepy love interest who is always there as though he's stalking Rachael, yet while she agonizes over every possible threat to her and Cephy, she never once thinks there's anything wrong with his behavior. Go figure.

One major problem with Rachael is that she has supposedly lived on the streets of the city for most of her years, yet she seems dumb as a brick at times with no street smarts whatsoever, and her so-called visions of the future are the usual clichéd half-assed vague 'seeings' that really tell her nothing useful at all and are essentially no better than a hunch. She claims at one point not to rely on them, and at another how reliable they are so again, go figure!

I realize of course I'm not of the youthful age range this story is aimed at (whatever that is), but for my own perspective, I had no interest in finishing this, let alone reading a whole series of this nature, so I cannot commend it based on my experience of it. The acronym for the title is RotS, and that's how it went for me I'm sorry to report.

The Untethered by SW Southwick

Rating: WARTY!

This story was crap almost from the off, and in some ways it seemed more like authorial wish fulfillment than anything else. The story begins with Roble Santos whose only ambition, it seems, is to build a private jet that can fly supersonic speeds. The seemingly impossible and illegal task he has to face is that it's purportedly illegal to fly such a jet. In which case why not move to a country where it is legal and build it there? It was a completely false challenge and had zero resonance.

None of these characters made sense, but the only other one I got any sort of an introduction to was Stock Brant who was an out and out criminal who I had zero interest in, and when, at 10% in, this third character, essentially threw herself at him, all the while convincing herself that she didn't want him - in essence, raping herself with him, I gave up on the book in complete disgust. It sucked, it was badly written, it was all over the place and it was trashier than a badly-written romance. I condemn it and I sure as hell wasn't about to read 600-plus pages of this shit.

The Making of Riley Paige by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This book is in three volumes, and I believe I got the first one as a freebie - the intention being to lure you into to buying the other two, but that ain't gonna happen, not given how poorly-written this first volume ("Watching") was. This marks the third Blake Pierce I've read and they've all been bad.

The story is of a serial killer on a college campus, and this girl who is not named Riley Paige, but Riley Sweeney, is having insights into the killer's mind. There is another series by the same author about this same character, but later in her life, so I'm guessing this is a prequel, and in the later series, Riley apparently married this guy she met in college, whose last name is Paige. But as I said, the problem with the book is that it's badly-written. At one point in the story, Riley is talking with her roommate who is named Trudy, about a girl named Rhea, who was murdered in the dorm, but a couple of times in that conversation, the author mistakenly calls Trudy 'Rhea' - like Riley is talking with the dead girl! There are several other such gaffes, such as where the author says "a voice for the grave" rather than 'a voice from the grave'. The quality of the editing is non-existent. I know as authors we all screw uo now and then, but this one seems like they're not even trying.

The real problem with it is that it feels so amateur in how it's written, and in order to tell the story, the author is having Riley do stuff that makes her look like a dumb-ass at times. For example, there's a killer on the loose, preying on female students. He evidently has the gift of the gab, and is suave enough for them to feel safe inviting him back to their room, but at a party, Riley invites this one guy she barely knows to her room without even thinking for a minute he might be the killer. He isn't as it turns out, but that was a stupid thing for her to do. The guy tries to rape her, but since she recently learned some self-defense moves, she magically overpowers him despite him also being trained in self-defense - he was in her class - and being bigger and stronger than her! It's badly-written.

It gets worse though! She finds this pocket knife in the guy's pants, and she doesn't think for a second about taking it out and handling it, and when she hands it to the police, they have no problem handling it either! There's no concern at all about wearing gloves, or about fingerprints or contamination, or evidence bags or chain of custody! It's amateur!

Riley takes this guy Ryan to bed with her on their first date when she barely knows him, and there's no mention of sexual history or condom use let alone any concern on her part that he might be the killer. Yes, we know she's going to marry him because this is a prequel, but she doesn't know that! More on this ridiculous relationship later.

After her own roommate is murdered, Riley is taken by this FBI guy who is now on the case down to the police station to watch an interrogation of a suspect, so she can share her insights with the FBI about whether she thinks he did it! After that, despite her being in shock earlier, and despite it being her roommate who was murdered, and despite her having no place to go since her room is a crime scene, no one offers to drive her anywhere or asks her if she'll be okay. They just let her walk out without taking a statement from her or anything! The author obviously did this so this guy Ryan could come pick her up, but it's stupid, and very poorly written.

From the start, and since we know it wasn't Ryan, it looked to me like the killer is one of two college professors. I suspected this from early on, but it makes absolutely no sense. At one point Riley has this insight that the killer was hanging out outside the bar where Rhea was partying the night she was killed, Riley felt that this guy started talking to her and Rhea invited him back to her dorm room! If it had been a fellow student, no one would have given it a second thought, but to claim that no one noticed an older man - a college professor who would have been recognized - hanging outside the bar where students gather, and walking and talking with Rhea or going back to her dorm? It made zero sense!

When Riley finally, belatedly, gets onto the idea that it was a college professor (so much for her brilliant insights), she goes to the library to check on something she read in a book that one of these two professors had written about the criminal mind, and she sees one of her professors at a computer terminal in the library. He greets her not as Riley Sweeney but as "Riley Paige!"! LOL! Badly written. After consulting this book, she decides she should call that same professor she just saw, and talk to him about her thoughts. Never once does she think to check the computer terminal where she'd just seen him! It's like she forgot she'd seen him only minutes before, and she immediately goes to a payphone to call him where she finds him in his office! Again, badly-written.

The weird thing is that when she's seeking him out, she asks herself, "But who else did she have to talk to about this?" - well duhh! The FBI agent who's all but recruited you! Again, badly written. What I suspect happened here is that the professor she saw in the library was actually the other professor, and not the one she phones and later meets, who happens to be the murderer. Again it was a writing screw up.

The saddest thing about the purported genius Riley-with-the-magical-insights is that she continually and persistently gets it wrong who the murder is! We, the readers, have known virtually from the start because the story is so badly-written, but Riley doesn't learn until she's trapped in a locked room with him. Even then she's still on the wrong track and the professor has to declare hismelf as the killer! That's how bad she is - and she has to be rescued by the FBI agent who conveniently has been tailing her all day hoping she will lead him to the killer! What?! Because that's with the FBI does - follow a flaky girl around, hoping desperately for a break in the case instead of going steadily through the evidence and eliminating or adding suspects until they finally nail the right one. Yup!

Finally: how do we know Riley has been having unprotected sex with Ryan? Well, he gets her pregnant. Yet more evidence of how profoundly stupid this woman is. But what evidence is there that there's anything else to do in this to do in this town, but party? Riley almost never goes to any classes during this story. She never studies. She has no job. She has no hobbies or pursuits. She's a senior, and she does nothing but party and agonize over who the killer is.

Oh and finding out she's pregnant long before it would show - because she has nausea. Not because she has some feminine insight, but nausea. Yeah. This novel is nauseatingly bad. So when Ryan shows up out of the blue at her graduation - where she's still wearing a neck brace because this novel is mind bogglingly telescoped - and he essentially proposes marriage, she's all on board even though she barely knows him, and the last time she was with him, things went badly and they broke up. This novel is shit. Honestly. Garbage. I condemn it. I have no interest in reading any more about Riley Sweeney-Paige or anything else from this author. Three strikes and you're out Blake Pierce!

Winner Take All by Laurie Devore

Rating: WARTY!

"At Cedar Woods Prep Academy, ambitious Nell and privileged Jackson are drawn into a fierce rivalry that gives way to a whirlwind romance" Why wouldn't it? Inevitably rivalries end in marriage. It's just that this exact story has been told a billion times already, yet here we have yet another author chomping at the bit to ram it down our throats again. No. No! NO!

The Fragile Ordinary by Samantha Young

Rating: WARTY!

The fact that Kirkus Reviews claims this is a "powerful roller-coaster ride" tells me I should avoid it like the plague, since Kirkus is utterly clueless. The book description does nothing save confirm it. The main character's name is the barf-worthy Comet Caldwell, which is a definite 'no' from me, and it's an unimaginative chalk and cheese story that's already been done to death ad neauseam. She's a "painfully shy bookworm" who "meets Tobias King, a new student with a bad reputation." In short it's YA garbage that's been retreaded and recycled far too many times to count and the author should be ashamed of herself for even thinking of writing it. A definite warty on this one.

Small Town Superhero by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Thus was a non-starter for me. Well, not quite, since I did start it, but I also soon stopped it because I quickly became bored with the unoriginal story-telling, the abundant clichés, and the lack of intelligence in the telling.

Kelson is a high school senior who, for reasons unspecified in the portion I read, has to go live with relatives. He's a city boy who is on a farm, and the complete lack of originality was laughable. This was far more of a red-herring-out of water story than ever it was a fish-out-of-water in the claim that this city boy can't handle country life, and he quite literally spills the milk. Seriously?

This doesn't make me laugh. Instead it makes me cringe, because it tells me that purported hero Kelson is a complete moron who has no clue about anything. Any kid with even modest intelligence can handle a switch from city to country or vice-versa, especially in this day and age when no one's lifestyle is much of a mystery anymore. Yeah, there will be a learning curve and mistakes, but for the author to try and push the unimaginative and lackluster narrative that Kelson is utterly clueless and totally unprepared is farcical and amateur and makes him look like a complete moron.

That was bad enough, but to deal with that after an appalling and brutal bullying incident in school, in full view of everyone, and where no one reacted or helped, not even the teacher who witnessed it, is beyond ridiculous. No kid reacted? No teacher? No parent? When a gang of bullies picks on the new boy? Horse shit. I guess this author really hates teachers to portray them such a cynical and callous way.

Any writer who writes like this should be ashamed of their cluelessness and stupidity. This is not to say that there is no bullying in schools. Of course there is, but for it to be so brazen, violent, and unopposed is nonsensical, and it turned me off the story even before the fish-out-of-water garbage, which turned out to be the final straw that broke this book's back. I lost all interest in pursuing this story - or anything else by this author.

This is also in first person which is another problem. Some authors know how to do this, but I got the impression that this author was doing it simply because everyone else is - or so she thinks. It felt so inauthentic and ridiculous that Kelson steadily narrates his own experience of being beaten up, and for him to let it happen when he could apparently and readily defend himself, just because his cousin shakes her head? WTF?! No. No. No! Who calmly narrates being punched? No one! Get a clue authors!

The first person brought another problem, too. If the novel is in third person and the narrative objectifies a female, that's a problem. If this objectification is put into the mouth of a character, it’s not so much a problem because there are people who think like that, but when your main character, the one you're trying to turn into a hero, has these thoughts: "She wasn’t pretty, per se, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her clothes a mismatch of obvious hand-me-downs, but there was something intriguing about her." That makes me wonder about Kelson's character. At least this author didn't write it as 'per say' which I have read before in a published novel!

A better way to have written this - had it to be written at all - would have been for someone else to have made the comment that she wasn't pretty and for Kelson to have overheard it and then to have those thoughts that she had something intriguing about her. To write it the way it was written makes him sound judgmental. Or maybe just mental. Judgmental isn’t likeable. It makes him a jerk. Just a free bit of advice on character creation

But this book was a fail and I condemn it, not commend it.

The Dire Days of Wollowweep Manor by Shaenon K Garrity, Christopher Baldwin

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

The description has it that this is Nimona meets Paper Girls, but having read both of those stories, I didn't see it. This is its own story, and I dislike it when a new work is compared with a mashup of older ones. To me, it feels insulting to the author.

Often I will not even think of reading a story that's described in such a way, but fortunately I didn't let that put me off this one for once! I really enjoyed this. It was smart, original, entertaining, amusing, and fun. The mashup that this graphic novel does achieve is the impressive feat of conjoining a Gothic romance with sci-fi story about a pocket universe that acts aa a protection against the evil 'Bile' which comes from another universe and seeks to subsume everything.

The story is of Haley, a high-schooler and hopeless Gothic romance addict who gets into trouble with her teacher for turning in yet another book report about a Gothic romance. She's advised that she has to try something new or risk failing. Walking home in the pouring rain that evening (it rains a lot in this graphic!) she espies a young man struggling in the creek as she crosses the bridge, and she plunges in to help him, somehow ending up inside a Gothic romance. She learns this is a pocket universe leeching its world from the world of Gothic romance stories, so naturally there are three brooding, old-world brothers: Cuthbert, Lawrence, and Montague, a strange housemaid, and a ghost! Of course! But not everything is what you think it is, so don't jump to any conclusions.

Haley struggles through this with courage, aplomb and good humor, making some sneaky references to Gothic romances as she goes, and eventually wins out. The novel features rather ineffectual brothers and strong female characters including Haley who is a young black woman and who's deadly with an umbrella. Overall this was a fun story - a little bit on the lengthy side, maybe, if I had a criticism, but a good engaging story that I commend as a worthy read.

Flash Fire by TJ Klune

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I did not like this one bit and ditched it in disgust after 10%. That's a lot less than I normally give a book that I do not like. Usually I can soldier on, and I try to cover at least a quarter or a third, and sometimes half or more of a novel like this, but I honestly could not stand to read this one at all. It just felt bad and wrong in every way. The book is a sequel, which I knew going in, and it was not a problem - except that of course I had no background for these characters, having been unaware of the first novel when it came out; but if I'd read that I probably wouldn't be reading this one; so - swings and carousel!

What it meant was that I was meeting these people for the first time and I was sorry the author didn't help. The assumption seems to be that any reader of this volume has just completed volume one and is immediately going into volume two, which didn't work in my case. Naturally no author wants to rewrite entire character biographies in each volume, and no one who is following a series wants or needs that either, but for readers coming in new, or after a long layoff, a few words of context here and there would not have hurt, and would not have been obtrusive. I didn't get those, which made it difficult to get into, and difficult to relate to the characters. An action scene right up front, showing off these people, would have worked well, but it didn't come.

The real problem for me though, is the billing. It's billed as a super hero novel with gay characters, which sounds great, but it's actually a gay novel with superhero characters. That's an important difference. That would not have been an issue either, had it been better written, but as it was it felt juvenile and not in a good way; the entire relationship between Nicky and Seth seems to be physical with nothing else to hold it together, and that's not a good thing in a world that seems like it's entirely a no-consequence world.

As for the lack of consequences, at one point for example, the teens spend, without permission, ten thousand dollars on equipment they decide they want for their super hero team, which is not only irresponsible, it's dishonest. It's theft, in effect, yet no one feels bad and no one gets in trouble. That just felt inauthentic. These are the heroes?! Ten thousand dollars is not an insignificant amount, even for a wealthy family. That sabotaged the suspension of disbelief for me.

Appropriating large sums of money is hardly heroic, but the weird thing is that the novel seems not to differentiate between good guys and bad guys if judged by the book description, which has them all as heroes. It tells us: "with new heroes arriving in Nova City it's up to Nick and his friends to determine who is virtuous and who is villainous." Why? Why is it up to these teenagers? And why are 'new heroes' arriving in Nova City (not a very imaginative name)? What's the attraction? Why there as opposed to somewhere else?

The thing is that I don't honestly get how a villain is a hero. Not that we met either - not in any meaningful sense in the portion I read. I'd expect a story like this would have some action up front, but the only action is between Nicky and Seth on the bed. Is that the most important thing that's going to happen in this novel? Because if that's all the story is about why even have supers in it? Why not just two horny young guys in bed and call it Flash Junk?

This is a problem with series, and why I'm typically not a fan. The first volume in a series is the prolog and/or the introductory volume and it seems like the author feels like he did all the action work in volume one as well - which he may well have for all I know - but I don't think that absolves him from bringing some in volume two, but if it's here, it's much further in than I read. What I read felt like a backwater, a doldrums, a slack tide, and it was, frankly, rather boring. It did nothing to substantially introduce me to the characters or to endear me to them. From what I read of them here, they felt shallow and thin and I had zero interest in learning any more about any of them.

Worse than this though, is that the ten percent that I read seemed obsessed with the physical relationship between Seth and Nicky, which is broken-up by Nicky's dad, who seems like a jerk who's main passion in life is discussing homemade dental dams. It wasn't clear to me where this story is taking place because it's one of those fake cities that DC Comics favors, rather than real world locations, but the idea is that Nicky and Seth are under age. Maybe they are, but without a real-world specified locale, at sixteen, you are over the age of consent in about fifty percent of the US states, so in the absence of other information, the chances are just as good that they were legal as not. Evidently they live in a state where the age of consent is higher, but a fake Nova City doesn't help establish anything. The story felt disconnected from reality.

The book blurb tells us that Seth "is the superpowered Pyro Storm, who can manifest fire and spends much of his free time aiding local citizens in their fair city," but it's unclear exactly what he does - and how manifesting fire helps local citizens. Do they have a lot of yard waste to burn? I didn't like 'Pyro Storm' as the hero name. It felt too much like a 'junior X-men' kind of thing, and Nicky's adoration of him felt forced rather than natural, especially given that it was built entirely around sexual attraction - so it seemed from what I read in this volume. Maybe there was a lot more to it - aspects of the relationship that were revealed in volume one - I don't know, but judged by what was written here, I have very little faith that there is more to it and I don't want to read a gay sex novel - not without a lot more substance to it than this novel seems willing to offer.

So based on my admittedly limited reading, I can't commend this. I would have liked more - to have had an incentive to read further, but life is short and novels many and I don't see the point of a forced march through a novel that simply isn't doing it for me as a reader who is looking for a fun, interesting, imaginative, and engaging story, with fascinating characters, an intriguing world, and original situations.

Replay by Trevor Morris

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This story was truly badly-written and I DNF'd it at a third of the way through because I had no idea what was happening and it was so far from the book description as to be completely misleading. The description promised that this guy Alex, transported to the future and the very apocalypse he wrote about in his best-selling graphic novel, comes back to the present time to try and stop the fated events, and no one believes him, but by one third the way through, he was still in the future, randomly (it seemed to me) moving around, with no purpose and no plan, and the people who were supposed to be educating him as to what was happening and how to stop it were offering no help at all.

On top of this, the future made no sense at all, because it was like the past. I know there had been some event (unspecified at a third in), which had set society back considerably, but though they spoke in modern lingo, they had weapons like it was the dark ages. I find it hard to believe, even in an apocalypse, that no one would have any guns at all. It made zero sense. There are guns galore all over the place and they would be freely available with all the ammunition you could want after an apocalypse. Swords, and bows and arrows on the other hand, are relatively rare, particularly swords, so where the hell did all that come from? Again, it made no sense.

The more I read of this, the more it seemed to me that the author hadn't really thought any of it through, and worse, it was written not like a novel, but like it was a clichéd manga or a cartoon strip which constantly kicked the reader out of suspension of disbelief. This was more like an unrealized idea than ever it was a novel.

The main character had got his graphic novel from information that this woman had put into his mind, and there was a sequel to the story, but the big question was: why had they given him the post-apocalyptic story and a sequel to that, neither of which helped him, instead of giving him the pre-apocalyptic story which would have actually helped him prevent it? Again, it made no sense. Alex was supposedly the author of this (or more accurately, the voice of it), yet he seemed completely lost in this world he (thought) he'd created, and he was utterly useless. That made no sense either.

I was psyched by the book description, but the novel itself seems like a different story to what was promised, and the writing is poor and very choppy. Some of the speech is in block caps for no apparent reason. This is like shouting, which is normally conveyed by telling the reader that someone shouted it, or by maybe putting the text in proper case. I didn't get the point of the block caps. This is not a comic book!

Often a speech was simply “HUGHGHGHGHGHG,” which I discovered, after a few of these, was meant to signify groaning or some sort of agonized vocalization. It was amateur and confusing. I honestly had zero interest in the story or any of the characters, and after that first third I felt I’d given it way more of a chance to engage me than it deserved. I can't commend it.

The One Who Could Not Fly by EG Stone

Rating: WARTY!

I began enjoying this story although the premise is a bit lacking in credibility - a lush tropical island off the coast of a desert mainland, the one populated by Sylphs (fairies, basically, but with feathered wings) and the other by savage humans, and never once have the humans come to the island until this single time when a handful of them arrive seemingly for the sole purpose of kidnapping Ravenna, the one special snowflake on the whole island?

Here's where Ravenna, supposedly a smart scholar, comes off as being stupid, because she could easily have stayed out of their way, or better yet, snuck back to her own people to warn them of this threat, but she does neither. Instead, she romps right into the middle of the camp when she thinks the humans are sleeping, sneaking around to spy on their stuff and is of course captured, whereupon the men simply haul up stakes and leave! It was like they were just waiting for her to arrive.

Naturally Ravenna is a myth come to life and fascinates everyone on the mainland, very nearly all of whom are consistently mean, brutal, and cruel, yet not a single one of these people thinks about going back to the island to see if there are more like her despite her being almost priceless. It made zero sense. It made no sense that no human had ever been to the island before - not in living memory anyway.

We're told Ravenna, as a Sylph, is a different species to humans, and the polar opposite, yet later we meet someone who is supposed to be a half-breed. How is this possible? The definition of a species is a group of living things which can breed within the group but not outside it. If she can breed with humans, she's human, or humans are Sylphs, one or the other. The thing about Ravenna though, as she's described, is that she is fully human. Apart from her wings, she's exactly like a human. She has breasts - and so is a mammal. She thinks like a human, acts like one, and she looks just like one - again, apart from the wings. There's nothing about her that seems alien or different, or otherworldly. That's a serious writing problem.

The wings are problematical too, and not just because they're stuck on - coming out of the middle of her back like an afterthought rather than a real appendage. I've discussed how little sense this makes in other reviews. Wings are limbs and so Ravenna is not a quadruped, but a hexapod (technically a sexaped if we're going to be linguistically correct, but hexapod wins for obvious reasons!) and there's nowhere back there for her wings to really attach!

But let's let that slide. The real problem with her wings is their variable size. We're told that Ravenna is different because she has undersized wings - too small and weak for her to fly with, yet later in the story we read, when she's riding a horse: "Her wings lay behind her on the horse's rump, both to keep them out of the way of the pounding hooves..." - if they're small and short, why would the hooves be a problem? This question is posed by the author herself indirectly when later we read, "Ravenna relaxed her wings and sat on the small stool." Now if she can relax and sit on a small stool without worrying about the wings trailing on the floor, then why were they a problem sitting on the horse? Was the horse shorter than a small stool?! Again it made no sense.

It makes less sense when Ravenna is trained as a gladiator, and she alternately sees her wings as a powerful fighting tool and a grave weakness. They can't be both. If the wings are strong enough to beat and knock someone over, then why can't she fly? Again the rules for her wings change - not just in how big they are, but in how strong they are. I continually got the impression that the author hadn't really thought this whole disabled Sylph' thing through, and the consequence of this was that the utility of the wings changed according to circumstance and that resulted in my repeatedly being kicked out of suspension of disbelief.

The book description, which admittedly the author has no control over unless they self-publish, has this: "Until, that is, Ravenna makes a single mistake. She falls." I don't know what that means. Maybe it comes later in the story than I could stand to read, but it makes little sense even in the blurb.

I didn't finish this because I became so disappointed in it: in the writing and the plot, and in Ravenna's complete lack of any sort of rebellious streak or even a spine to attach her wings to! The story sounded like it might be great; the execution of it not so much, and I began losing all interest in it when I reached the long, tedious, drawn-out portion that began right after she was kidnapped. There was far too long with far too little happening and it bored me to tears, especially since I'd already begun to lose interest in Ravenna as an engaging and strong female character. I can't commend this.

Map of Shadows by JF Penn

Rating: WARTY!

In this, the first book of the Mapwalkers Series, Sienna Farren inherits her grandfather's map shop when he's murdered. Yes, this is the tedious trope "You're a wizard, Harry" kind of story, where a kid is raised in complete ignorance of their supernatural power. Nonetheless, it seemed like it might be a worthy read, but I was quickly disabused of that quaint notion.

Despite it being crystally-clear from the off who the villain is here, no one, least of all Sienna, who of course is a special snowflake with legendary powers, can see it. Wouldn't it be nice if once, the one with the special powers is actually smart and perceptive? No such luck here.

Sienna learns that she can 'map walk' - that is, can go to places in time and space using maps - and her "specialness" is that she can even do it based on nothing more than a map in her head. The villains are people who use the skins of other map-walkers to draw their own special maps and of course there's a 'shadowland' that they want to open the borders to - and of course Sienna is the only one who can stop them.

Despite having zero training or even any clue what she's doing, Sienna exhibits heroic powers from the off, and despite landing in the HQ of the villains, wherein several vital skin maps are hung on the walls, neither Sienna nor her companion - an experienced map walker - think for a split second of destroying or of taking these maps, to limit the powers and abilities of their enemy.

It's a no-brainer, but these two girls evidently have no brains. It made me want to quit reading the story there. While I don't mind a good story about someone who starts out dumb and wises up, I really don't appreciate stories by female authors about dumb women who start out dumb and bask in it throughout the story, consistently making bad decisions that even a moderately intelligent person in real life would avoid like the plague.

The story seems to revel in how gory and stomach-churning it could be, and that along with the fact that it really had no saving graces, and was larded with trope characters exhibiting predictably idiotic behaviors forced me to DNF this after maybe a third of it. I can't commend it based on what I could stand to listen to.

The Song of Sirin by Nicholas Kotar

Rating: WARTY!

This novel is a retelling of the old Russian story of Prince Ivan and the Gray Wolf. Many of these old folk tales are bizarre and brutal, but this one takes some beating. It's a story of stupidity and cruelty, and of theft and kidnapping, and you'd seriously have to put in some work to render it into an interesting story for modern ears - unless you just wanted to piss-off people. It doesnlt help that the story has too modern of s sensibility. I read at one point for example: "Don’t forget that it’s in the main square today." To me, that didnt seem like it fit the antique sensibility the author was trying to extstablish here, and it took me out of suspension of disbelief.

This author in my opinion has failed to make the story interesting and worse, has failed to make the characters interesting either. I started out interested, but became bored to tears rather quickly, and despite plugging on for a while in the hope that it would improve, I gave up about third of the way through because literally nothing was happening except that the 'prince' character, here named Voran, was showing us quite often how stupid and lethargic he was. And just in passing, Voron has a sister named Lebía. His sister has a name that's reminiscent of labia? Really?

He ends up meeting a pilgrim (here that's like a sorcerer-cum-prophet) who specifically tells him that to save the city he must find the living water, but rather than ask about this water: where it is, how to find it, and rather than ask the pilgrim to magically transport him there (a trick the pilgrim has shown himself quite capable of performing), Voran lolls around doing nothing. Later, he takes off on a trip with a bunch of people going on a pilgrimage, and then he abandons them for no good reason despite having been haunted all his life by his father's having abandoned some people in the past in similar circumstances - a dereliction of duty for which he's despised as a traitor. In short, Voron should really be named Moron.

Voran knows that this entire society will come crashing down if he doesn't find this living water. He can see signs that society is dying, yet at no point does he show any interest whatsoever in getting started on his quest. He's a dick. The problem is that instead of telling this really short story of the wolf in one volume, this author has gone the mercenary way of trying to turn it into a trilogy or a series, and it has suffered for it by dragging tediously along when a reader like me wants to see something happen, so the hell with it. I'm done with this story and with this author.

Ouroboros by Odette C Bell

Rating: WARTY!

This book is a dumb - and I might add highly inapropriate - so-called romance between Nida Harper, who is a cadet at the United Galactic Coalition Academy (which is way more of a mouthful than it needs to be) and a superior officer.

Any book (or movie or TV show) that blabbers about some galactic-wide entity good or bad, or about a coalition, or about saving the galaxy, is full of shit. All it tells me is that the author doesn't have the first clue how huge and sparsely-populated the galaxy is - and I'm talking habitable planets, not even actual populations. What it does tell me is how narrow the mind is and how limited the imagination is of the author.

This novel sounded like it might be interesting, but in the end it was a joke. Harper comes off like that sad and pathetic Jar Jar Binks in the risible Star Wars 'return of the endlessly recycled movie plot' trilogy of trilogies. Her superior officer ought to be drummed out of the regiment for his inappropriate interest in someone under his command. Harper is the worst candidate at the school and would have been herself drummed out in any real world scenario.

On an evidently poorly-supervised trip to an alien world, Harper is exposed to a source of energy. Why this energy takes over her body and then ridiculously and desperately wants to return to the world where she picked it up is a complete mystery that's not explored - at least in this first volume I read. Why, when a cadet is found inexplicably unconscious and injured on an alien planet surface during what ought to have been a routine exploration, she's not hospitalized and a full inquiry conducted is another mystery. The author either doesn't understand the military, or military standards have plummeted precipitously between now and whenever this story is set.

The interest Lieutenant Carson Blake shows in her is not only inappropriate since he's an authority figure with power over her, it's inexplicable since the two are falling for each other without having spent any significant time together. So: the story is badly-plotted and badly-written.

I know authors do not have control over the book description or the cover when they essentially give up their rights as Big Publishing™ takes over their novel, but to read that Nida has "matted, black, compact curls" and then look at the cover image where she has long, flowing, straight hair tells me once again that the ignoramus who designed the cover never even so much as looked at the text underneath it. This is why I normally pay zero attention to book covers because they're typically so pathetic and misleading and aimed at the lowest common denominator - which often is the crotch, hence the cover image's tight, clinging leather, with the lowered zipper over the bulging chest. Pathetic. The cover designer ought to be chemically neutered.

I have a hard time with sci-fi characters who have ridiculous apostrophes in their name. Nida's best friend sounds like she comes from Vulcan: "J'Etem" who is Nida's token black friend, and who is, of course an alien. The first thing these two females talk about in worshipful tones is a guy, so I guess Odette Bell never heard of the Bechdel-Wallace test. J'Etem was supposed to be Nida's best friend, but after that initial introductory mention, she virtually disappeared from this story, like the author had forgotten who her best friend was. No matter what bad things happened to Nida, J'Etem didn't give a shit, apparently.

Given the image on the front cover I kept expecting Nida to grow a pair (of breasts) but she never did - always taking a back seat to the lieutenant or to the energy that raped her. I was as disappointed in that as I was in the poor biology on display here. Like in the dumb-ass Star Trek episodes, there was inter-species reproduction, which is nonsensical. I read that one alien was "An enormous man of half-human half-Yara build." No! Not going to happen! The closest species to humans on Earth is the chimpanzee with which we share a common ancestor and it's not remotely possible to hybridize those two species, so there's no way in hell a human is ever going to produce offspring, viable or otherwise by mating with an alien - unless it was through some bizarre Frankensteinian experiment in a lab.

Thoughtless writing didn't help. With a few pages I read these thing of the same charcter: "Now he had nothing to do." "He had things to do, and it was time to stop wasting the day." "Blake admitted he wasn’t busy." One could get whiplash reading a collection of stupidly contradictory claims in such close proximity to one another.

As usual there was far too much emphasis on shallow physical details and little to none of the important traits a being might have. I read, "J'Etem was stunning. She was Barkarian, and she was beautiful from her lustrous hair to her plush purple lips." Seriously? No. Just no. This novel is one of the most egregious examples of poor YA writing and it sucked.

Damaged by Becca Vincenza

Rating: WARTY!

I didn't realize this was a werewolf story or I would have avoided it like the plague. Werewolf stories are marginally more stupid than vampire stories, and I gave up on this one in short order. Once in a while there's a truly rare one that's worth reading, but those are so scarce that I wonder sometimes if it's just a folktale. This had initially sounded interesting from the blurb, but we all know how misleading those are, don't we? (For detials see my 'non-review' reviews!)

The quality of the writing did not help. I read things like, "looked like she sleeping." I read, "released my grip on her bicep." This is a common failing in YA novels, most of which seem these days to have been written by people for whom English is a despised second language as judged by how poorly it's used. It's biceps, moron. I read, "He didn’t say anything more as the doors opened. The doors chimed and parted as the elevator came to a halt" Twice, really? And the doors chimed? Really?

I should have listened to my gut, which was sickened by the words in the description: "Stone is determined to protect her" when juxtaposed with the cover illustration which shows him - a figure of authority and power in her life - getting jiggy with her. Yeah. How's that protection working, Stone? Or does protection to you mean wearing a condom while you take advantage of a scared and weakened woman who has been broken down into complete compliance through torture? Stone is an asshole. And this is evidently yet another female YA author who apparently detests her own gender.

This novel rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I no longer buy novels that are first person if I can avoid it, and I deliberately ditched the remainder of my first person print books unread because I am so sick of first person voice. Unfortunately I still have a few in my ebook collection acquired a while ago and which occasionally bubble to the top of my never-ending reading list. I'm trying to delete those, too. The problem with this book is that it's dual-first person, which is inevitably twice as bad, and it’s clear from the mind-numbingly telegraphed beginning that these two are an item. Because of course you cannot have a novel where a woman takes care of herself. She has to have a guy to rescue and validate her. It’s the law. Barf.

I'm not against romance in a novel, but it has to feel natural and organic to me. Any hint of artificiality or of forcing it, and I am bored and irritated simultaneously. That was the problem here as these two characters, Audrey and Stone (why does she get a first name and he a last name?!) were essentially in love from their first glance. Yuk. Audrey is an individual who is somehow enhanced and therefore, shades of X-men, a pariah. Stone is a military guy. I should have decided firmly against this as soon as I read, "There is much more to Audrey than meets the eye and Stone is determined to protect her." But like I fool I started reading anyway and got turned completely off this after only a chapter or two.

The ebook version of this has some issues. Normally I do not see such issues in the Nook version of a novel. Those are usually good and it’s the Kindle version that slices and dices any text that's not plain vanilla. I read one part where the start of the sentence is fine: "While he spoke, I felt" but then the next few words were in really small text "the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll," and the last part of the sentence was in regular-sized text again: "but I didn’t open my eyes." Weird! The writign was too.

But as far as the story is concerned, I can’t commend it based on what I read of it.

Luna caged: Behind the Wall by Margaret McHeyer

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this pretty quickly. I knew going in that it was first person which I typically despise, but once in a while there's a good one comes along that's intelligently written and well-told. That's not this one. This one was tedious and boring, and I ditched it pretty quickly - I think right at the point where the narrator tells us that it's believed that outside the wall it's deadly to life, and then describes a bird flying over the wall - from the outside. Clearly if birds fly in and out unharmed, the lie that it's dangerous out there is exposed, yet this narrator is too stupid to put that two and two together. Sorry, but I do not need to read about stupid people narrating their own stupid stories. We get enough of that in the federal legislature. I just need to read about some of the Republican women in Congress and the Senate to get all the stupid females I can stand.

Dumb writing did not help this story one bit, but it is what I expect from YA novels these days. At one point, I read, "...and dark, black hair void of any color" Say what?! Black is dark. It's also arguably a color. Wouldn't devoid of any color be more like gray than black? (Even though gray is also a color). There were also renderign oissues. I read:

I felt (in regular regular font) the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll, (in tiny font) but I (back to regular font)

Next came these in quick succession: "dead eye on the left side of her face," "Her vacant, scared eyes lingered on me," and "Her pupils dilated." That sounds quite contradictory to me.!

Worse, this is one of those stories where everyone inside the wall is depicted as being of one mindset. There are no dissenters, no protests, no rebellions, no conspiracy theories, because every single person believes exactly the same things. BULLSHIT. This kind of writing is amateur, pathetic, and completely inauthentic. And far too common in dystopian YA novels. That's why I gave this novel such short shrift because I've read it countless times before. The same novel. Only the names have been changed. YA means young adult - these are the very people who are supposed to rebel and hold radical ideas and to challenge authority and this almost never happens in these stories - that's how out of touch with reality their authors are and why they make their characters so uninteresting and conforming.

The Sorcery Trial by Claire Luana, JA Armitage

Rating: WARTY!

This was essentially another in a long line of Hunger Games rip-offs and was bizarre. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I guess I thought it might be funny, but it wasn't. It was first person, which is typically worst person to voice a story in, and that showed here. The main character who ridiculously goes by "Jacq" is a too-young gofer at a TV studio who gets zero respect and has no prospects which begs the question as to why she's working there in the first place. Clearly she has no self-respect. She wants to be a stunt woman for reasons unexplained, but this is entirely the wrong place for her to be working if she's serious about pursuing that sort of a career. Clearly shge;s not too sharp. I shall call her Jackass from this point on.

The story is set in a world where the world of the 'faerie' (another author - correction pair of authors - too chickenshit to call them fairies) which has just been exposed to the human world, yet there's zero interest in it! No documentary teams are covering it; it's not a news item, and the first time it comes to prominence is through a reality show that Jackass's boss is running? How did this happen? Why did this happen?

There is this huge leap to 'it's suddenly happening', with zero explanation as to why the fairy king would even agree to such a stupid stunt, and then suddenly it's full-on Hunger Games where contestants could die even when they're simply competing in qualifying heats, and not one person, not even Jackass, thinks there's anything wrong with this? Why would she? She's a frigging moron.

Jackass's boss, who is all about publicity, inexplicably fires Jacq rather than exploit it for the news-worthiness of it, when she saves the life of a wannabe contestant on the course - a contestant who was trapped in a bear trap and pretty much lost her foot, who was then in danger of being eaten by an actual crocodile, and who finally was also in danger of being burned alive in a forest fire. In reality she would have sued the asses off the TV company - and won - and the company would have been bankrupted.

Instead, in the story, Jacq is carrying this injured contestant, who was all but passed-out from blood loss, when I read the following, as Jacq surveyed the area with a view to escaping the fire: "A cliff - complete with waterfall - loomed before us. Climbing it while carrying this girl was going to be almost impossible, but what choice did I have?" Hello there's a fucking fire, go into the waterfall, you stupid bitch! That's when I quit reading this shit.

Jackass's supposed motivation is that her sister disappeared into the fairy world a year or so before, which begs the question as to why she's pursuing being a stunt woman and working for a TV company instead of pursuing a life of becoming a private dick and going after her sister if she truly cares so much!

But then not a single thing in this story makes any sense except the predictable YA non-romance horseshit, the flat uninteresting characters, the shitty story-telling, and the general dumbness of the plot. It's trash: utter, total, unmitigated and ridiculous trash. If it had been a parody it would have made more sense, but it wasn't, and it wasn't funny, and it made no sense. You'd have more fun slitting your own throat with a blunted razor than you would reading this pathetic shit.

Speechless by Madeline Freeman

Rating: WARTY!

This is based on the Little Mermaid, but it's more like a Disney-esque version than a Hans Christian Anderson version (which is nothing like Disney's take). I'm not a fan of Disney because they're not known for originality, and these days they're far too big and powerful. It looks like this novel isn't very original either - especially since it's based on a rip-off premise to begin with. And for the first in a series it's predictably padded.

This novel could have begun at chapter nine, which is a quarter of the way in, and lost nothing at all from deleting the first eight chapters. The ebook has all the chapters listed (Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc., and if you can fit your finger on the right one (good luck with that!) it will take you to that chapter, but tapping on that chapter header will not return you to the content page. For the life of me I cannot see why the hell a content list is included in ebooks. It's stupid and pointless, and just one more indication of how clueless and robotic publishers tend to be, with sadly few exceptions.

The story is also a rip-off of another Disney property - Marvel's X-Men. It's set in a future where genetic mutation has given some people abilities that make zero sense. Main character Aria's special power is that she can breathe underwater using gills that appear when she's immersed and disappear when she's dry. There's nothing in the human genome that could do this. While we share some curious traits with fish, we haven't actually been fish in a very long time, but this author would have us believe we're just a mutation away from returning to the sea!

Fine; I'll play along. So what has this YA author got for us? Well, a lot of predictability for one thing, and sub-standard writing for another, but I shall get to that later. Predictably, and exactly like in Marvel's X-Men, Aria is an 'aberration' and aberrations are predictably pariahs. In real life they would actually be celebrities, so this rang hollow. Predictably Aria has a hot guy, Alonzo, who is her best friend, although naturally she never sees him that way because he's an adopted 'brother'. Predictably, Aria wants more than her present life and dreams of joining one of the Mars colonies which ridiculously has also become a reality TV show for those on Earth. She predictably defies her father and signs up for inductee testing where predictably she's roomed with three vicious, lying, back-stabbing bullies. Yawn.

Predictably she meets a hot guy named Declan who's a bit of a bad boy and who is predictably in a position of power. Predictably she starts falling for him despite his betrayal of her, thereby setting up the predictable YA 'love' triangle. The tests she has to go through are stupid and worthy of a badly-written middle-grade novel, but Aria is chosen as a special snowflake because the testers are wise to her aberration. She's chosen - for no good reason - to go on a special mission to retrieve some data for them, otherwise Alonzo will be hurt somehow.

Here I have to give a minor spoiler. There is no Mars colony. At least not on Mars. It's on Earth and everyone has been fooled. This is profoundly stupid because people would know. At the very least there would be conspiracy theories about it, but here everyone is completely fooled! What, no one who worked to actually build the colony ever figured out what they were building? If the colonists actually built the colony, no one ever noticed that Martian gravity - which in reality would be less than 40% what it is on Earth - is exactly like Earth gravity? People would notice! The author makes no mention of gravity, even as she talks about faking the different positions of the stars and the smaller relative size of the sun from Mars. She would have been better-off choosing Venus which is equally unlivable, but if you can terraform Mars, then why not Venus? It's much more like Earth in terms of size, gravity, and so on.

So Aria's job is to break into the Mars colony and steal data that would allow her boss to prove the colony is fake? Seriously? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. Since they know where the colony is, all they needed to do was expose the location to bring the whole stupid façade tumbling down! But apparently only Aria can break-in because the route is underwater. They claim no one can use SCUBA equipment because it would be found, despite there being countless places to hide it. So instead of a specially-trained agent breaking in, Aria does it and she's hobbled by being morphed into a lookalike of one of the colony residents, despite this change hampering her mobility and losing her the ability to speak. All of this is done to conform to the fairytale, but none of it makes any sense whatsoever in the context of this story!

And who does she run into twice while on the mission? Only the guy she moons over from watching the colony reality show. I'm sorry but this is horseshit. It's thoughtlessly written, badly-written, and makes no sense overall. Badly written? Yeah. I read at one point, "and she gritted her teeth and pushed through" and then less than one screen later, I read, "She gritted her teeth as she pushed herself to her feet." There must be a lot of grit on those teeth. Hopefully she won't have to smile too much....

Aria's break-in takes place during a solar flare when the Mars satellites have to be shielded and no show is transmitted, so it's a quiet time on the colony: there's no filming, and she can sneak around. Since she's going in at night, it makes no difference because there's no filming at night so we're told! But here's what Aria says: "I thought only satellites around Mars had to go into shielded mode." She has this confirmed, but the author seems not to realize that Earth is nearer to the sun than Mars and therefore more at risk from solar flare damage, not less! If Mars satellites need to be shielded then Earth's satellites sure as hell do!

In being transported to the colony for her mission, Aria, who has this huge affinity for water, somehow fails to notice she's on a boat! There's this tunnel she has to swim through to get to the colony and we're told, "There aren't any cameras in the tunnel - for obvious reasons." What reason are those? Would one of them be so someone could swim into the easiest ingress into the facility undetected?! This is really bad writing. Yeah, they wouldn't transmit a TV show from cameras in underwater tunnels, but for security they would need them. And if they're maintenance tunnels why are they flooded?!

At another point I read, "Aria nodded, but her minds spun with terrible possibilities" Um, how many minds does Aria have? Is this another of her mutations? Or just a typo that wasn't caught? My theory? She has only one mind, but she makes up the others! LOL! A common YA author faux pas - meaning literally, a false step - is to say something like "He wanted to explore the areas of Mars that people had yet to step foot on." The phrase is actually 'set foot', not 'step foot' unless of course you're an evidently ill-educated YA author, in which case by all means step your foot in your mouth.

The author writes that for the colony, they had "genetically engineered some of the heartiest trees on Earth to thrive in the Martian environment." Heartiest really? I think she meant 'hardiest'. This is right up there with 'step foot' and 'staunch' when 'stanch' is meant. These are common, annoying and utterly predictable YA author screw-ups. I see them all the time. It's almost a hallmark of YA authorship.

The author seems not to know what a schematic is. I read that Aria had seen a "holographic schematic of the chip Declan had sent to help her identify it", but a picture of the chip isn't the same as a schematic, which is a circuit diagram! A schematic shows the wiring of the chip and it's hardly something that would help her identify it unless she saw inside the chip and was an engineer who was familiar enough with the technology to identify it from the schematic. Trust me, that's not Aria.

Another problem is when authors try to be too clever for their own good. This isn't a YA issue per se (not 'per say', which is another YA faux pas), but it is a sci-fi issue. The author has her characters on Mars referring to a day as a 'sol': "I haven't seen you in years, and now I've seen you twice in less than a sol." No one talks like that. Even Mars colonists, if there ever are any, will not talk like that, They will say 'day' since the Martian day, as the author points out correctly for once, is only about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day - The Martian year, on the other hand, is twice that of Earth, which is another reason the colonists and the viewers would know they were not on Mars.

There's no reason to use sol, just like there's no reason to refer to humans as 'Terans' as is done in every freaking stupid space travel story ever told. No one uses that word. Why would it suddenly become universal in the future? The planet is Earth, not Tera. It never has been called Tera. It's Earth and we're humans, Why would that change? And why oh, why would aliens call us Terans? It makes zero sense!

This novel doesn't make that mistake - at least as far as I read - but it does have people routinely swearing, yet using completely ridiculous cuss words - namely the names of the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. No one will ever do that! It's never been done. Why would it? People have been saying 'fuck' and 'shit' for centuries. It won't change! Why are YA authors so stupid, and pathetic and squeamish about cuss words? I guess that says a lot about who these tepid stories are aimed at, huh?

Needless to say at this point, I lost patience and DNF'd this pile of crap. The truly sad thing is that the author apparently taught high school English for ten years. Ten frigging years! That makes me truly sad and actually glad she's no longer teaching. I condemn this novel for being yet another exemplar of all that's bad with story-telling, with the English language, and with YA novels.

Beautiful Demons by Sarra Cannon

Rating: WARTY!

This is a depressingly cookie-cutter YA series starter wherein the author seems to have made a bet with herself that she could get every single YA trope into the book in the first 100 screens and I think she succeeded, so I was quickly convinced that this novel would not be occupying my 'currently reading' list for long. The book blurb insists that "Harper Madison isn't like other girls" and then the author goes on to give the lie to that by making her exactly like every other YA girl. To whit: Harper is a troubled child, who is also an orphan child, and who is starting a new school. You could switch the main character's two names and still have a trope YA main character name. Harper Madison? Madison Harper? It doesn't make any difference.

Harper has the "I like the bad boy, but I also like the hot quarterback golden boy syndrome, aka a triangle. Despite the fact that Jackson smokes, and she detests smoking, she still has the hots for him and not a single word is spoken about him smelling like an ashtray. Sorry, but no. On top of this, she quickly runs afoul of the school queen bee, who is also a cheerleader and a bully. If Harper had had some backbone on their first encounter, I'd have had more respect for her, but no. There's also the trope obsession with boys in this novel to the extent that every other conversation these girls have is about boys and no other topics seem ever to enter their heads. Seriously, who reads this stuff? It's pure garbage that's almost exactly like nearly every other YA trilogy ever written. It's pathetic.

Harper apparently has the power of telekinesis, but she's never explored it. She's so stupid that she seems at a loss to even understand it. Never once has her curiosity prodded her to experiment with it, or to examine it, or try to control it. I'm sorry but this disqualifies her as a main character for me. It's not only unnatural, it makes for a bad story. If someone has a talent, it encourages them to employ it or take advantage of it and exploit it, but not this girl.

Now admittedly Harper has apparently ended-up killing her adoptive father because of this, so perhaps she's afraid, but this still doesn't explain why she's never played with the phenomenon prior to that. And if she felt bad about that accidental (or was it?!) death, then why hasn't she tried to control it since then? This death is also a problem: if she's guilty of manslaughter, then why hasn't she spent time in Juvie? They considered that she was guilty of starting a fire in which someone died - and she got away with it?

Given the title of the book, it was tempting to assume that those cheerleaders were all demons, or had sold their soul to a demon or something like, which might account for their extreme beauty and attitude, but I also wondered if the title was just misleading and these girls were not demons at all, but merely witches or magicians. Our lead girl, who is I assume going to come out in opposition to these people, hasn't yet figured this out. She's also lost her treasured pendant - the only thing she had left of her mom - which she obsesses upon in a deranged manner despite not even knowing this mom who gave away her daughter. I assume the pendant has been purloined by the demon girls in order to employ it to try to wreak havoc in Harper's life, but Harper isn't smart enough to figure that out. Her inexplicable focus on this, given that her mom ditched her, leads her to break out of the last chance girl's home she's been deposited in.

Her idiot idea is all about going her to find this pendant, when she hasn't even considered that she may have left it at home, or dropped it in the van on the journey to the game. So she steals a bike and rides to the stadium - which isn't in darkness, inexplicably, but is lit well enough for her to spy on one of the cheerleaders. The thing is that Harper is on her hands and knees under the bleachers and waiting for a chance to sneak out, when she loses her balance and falls over backwards with a whoop. What? How can you fall over backwards when you're on your hands and knees? And knowing she needs to be silent, she still lets out a whoop? This was ridiculous.

Harper nearly gets caught after the older guy who's with this cheerleader, Tori, upon whom she's spied, comes after her. Despite the fact that it's too dark for Harper to see him clearly, they can see her hidden under the bleachers! She miraculously gets away and of course, coincidence upon coincidence, Jackson is waiting in the barn when she returns the bike. She's all hot for him and his "rippling muscles." Barf. The next day, Tori turns up dead and Harper is the prime suspect for no apparent reason. She's hauled in for questioning from school in the middle of the day for no apparent reason and despite being able to move things with her mind, she ponders being trapped inescapably in the back of the police car. How dumb is Harper? This is seriously bad writing.

It gets worse. Without being read her rights and without being allowed to have an adult present, sixteen year old Harper is grilled by the sheriff who knows of her Jedi mind-tricks. You'd think with her history of multiple foster homes, Harper would have grown a pair, but instead of being badass and resisting the sheriff, she caves completely. Pathetic. It got worse though. I read this bit which finally decided me on giving up this trash. This is when the golden boy who's treated her like shit suddenly has a volte face and Harper isn't even really suspicious!

He put his palm on my cheek. I backed away, surprised, but he stepped forward and ran his fingertip along my chin line. "I was a real jerk to treat you like that," he said softly. "I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but I'm willing to do anything it takes to convince you that I'm sincere." I swallowed hard. Was I overreacting? "That first day we met in my sister's store, I thought you were beautiful," he said. He took my hand in his and caressed the side of my index finger...

So once again a guy thinks he can do whatever he wants to a girl he was downright mean to earlier, and what does this female author tell us? That it's okay. That the girl will let you - will accept your manhandling of her regardless of how you treated her in the past. That your only worth is your beauty. Nothing else matters. This is pure shit and any author, female or not, ought to be thoroughly ashamed of this kind of writing and reject it out of hand. Shame on you Sarra Cannon.

It's worse than that, though because this author evidently also thinks it's fine to have a weak female character who has no integrity, so self-respect, no spine, no moral core, and who, most despicably, instinctively thinks she's weaker than any male. I don't care about female characters like that. I have no interest in reading about them. I also think this turn the novel takes here proves how pathetic first person voice is, and what a seriously brain-dead choice it is for most novels, because in addition to the above, we also have Harper forgetting what happened - forgetting she was making out with Jackson not long before.

Now this is because, obviously, some sort of a spell has been put on her, but the fact is that Harper is the one relating this story word for word, conversation for conversation. How is it possible given that she's already recorded what happened, that she forgot it? Can she not go back and see what's she's written? If she's writing this later, then what accounts for her perfect memory of events - and if she has a perfect memory why is she forgetting stuff? If she forgot it, how could she have recorded the earlier part of the story? None of this makes a lick of sense! This is why first person is dumb as fuck. Once in a while it works, but usually no. Just no.

This story was too stupid to live and I ditched it at around 20% which was way more than it deserved. I ought to bill the author for wasting my valuable time!