Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

Rating: WARTY!

This is your trope story of your innocent kid finding she has superpowers. The problem is that by fully a third the way through this novel, I had no idea whatsoever what her superpower was. None! At all! That was strike one. The story has the tired cliché of her being delivered to 'enlightenment' by some new guy she meets - because you know that no girl can do a damned thing on her own. That was strike two. Worse, it seemed to be going nowhere, and taking its own sweet time even about doing that, so that was strike three, and I ditched it at a third in, and moved onto something more interesting.

The main character is Sierra Santiago, a young artist (who never actually does any art) who is tasked by her grandfather with updating a fading mural painting which evidently offers some sort of protection (I guess) against some sort of a threat (I imagine), which begs the question: why didn't grandaddy get off his lazy ass and fix things in his younger years? This story is written way younger than the characters in it!

Anyway, Sierra meets the new guy in school of course, who is also an artist (who never does anything other than token art), of course, and who will be her validator. Before he even deigns to lift a finger to help her, she's accosted by a reanimated corpse (although she doesn't know it at the time) demanding answers to a question she doesn't even understand. The ridiculous name they give to the corpse is 'corpuscle' which doesn't work (neither does the name John Wick which also turned me off this story). Even then this guy Sierra befriends is really tight with information like he wants her to struggle. Some friend.

There was diversity in this story, but I don't think reviewers at this point should be giving credit to stories for being inclusionary and presenting a diverse array of characters! That should be the norm - the baseline, so I don't give extra credit for that.

The story seemed to be going around in vacuous circles and sure didn't want to tell me anything, so I said the hell with it. You want to keep the story to yourself, why even publish the freaking novel in the first place?! I can't commend this at all.

Edge of Magic by Jayne Faith

Rating: WARTY!

I made it about a third the way through this before I gave up because it was turning into your usual trope YA story with a troubled protaginist and a studly, chiseled wolfman coming to her rescue. Because, as you well know, women are useless on their own, according to far too many female YA writers. As far as I read, it hadn't quite progressed to her being tearful in his manly arms, but it sure as hell was on the steep and slippery downslide to the end, which is why I quit reading it. Just once in a while! Just once in a while, it would be nice to have an authro surprise me and to read something that isn't warmed-over; that isn't shit-scared to take a different tack, you know? It almost never happens.

That's why I write. To fill that yearning gap. It makes me wonder what's wrong with people - not just the pandering lackluster authors, but the limp fucks who read this shit. Don't they ever wish for something new and original? Soemthign jsut that bit different? Maybe that's the problem - they want no difference, or just that little bit of difference. Anything else scares them, because otherwise why would they seem to be so happy with this drab and boring pap? This is likely why I will never sell anything in significant numbers because I quite literally cannto write that badly. I cannot be that uninventive or derivative.

I should have known from the off, when I read the word 'fae' in the book blurb that this wasn't for me. Any author who is too chickenshit to call 'em fairies is not for me. The character names sucked, too: Tara Knightley and Judah McMahon? Really? But I liked the idea of a thief trying to pay off a debt to an unscruptulous jerk. I liked that she wasn't all powerful. It was just that trope tryst which turned me right off, because it was so predictbale and so utterly boring. Could she not once have chosen a path that's not so oft-taken? I guess not.

On top of this Tara is a bit onf a one-note whiner. I know she's had troubles, but her constant referencing of them is tedious and depressing, especially since she seems not to really be trying very hard to dig her way out. If she had tried as much as she gripes, she'd have paid off her debt five years ago! Judah is equally trope, having hotness and wealth as his only qualities. They haven't had any contact in a decade since he left after a falling out, yet neither has moved on. It's pathetic: sad, predictable, and boring.

On top of all that, Tara is the sole breadwinner and provider for all the people who live in the house and she doesn't even get her own room, much less any gratitude or assistance from anyone to pay bills. And she has no problem with this (apart from her internal monolgue whining)! It's all too extreme.

Cyber's Change by Jamie Davis

Rating: WARTY!

This is a sci-fi novel set in 2055 in, of course, the USA, because why else would anyone ever consider reading it?! It was over the top and had some issues, and while I had initially intended to give this a positive rating, the more I wrote of this review, the more I realized how sadly lacking the story was, and despite my having read it all and enjoyed parts of it, I really cannot in good faith rate this positively. Maybe I'd considered doing that because I'm just getting too sentimental. Or maybe I've read so many really bad books that even a middling novel sounds like it's worthy? Or maybe I just like LGBTQIA stories, even if they're less than stellar? I dunno! But to be fair to other reviews, I cannot honestly rate this positively given all the problems it exhibited.

On the good side, this story is made more believable by the inane excesses of intolerance generated over the last four years and the dire consequences those years have scarred the USA with. It shows that there are almost as many assholes in this country as there are decent people and it's a toss-up who will actually make the biggest impression on life here. Much like the nation, in the story, the main two characters are diametrically opposed at least ostensibly in this novel. One of them, Cass, was raised in a cult known as the Sapiens Movement, which believes that any cybernetic enhancement of humans, even for medical reasons, and regardless of how little or much it is invasive, makes a person less than human and not worthy of equal treatment.

Rather than go to a sapiens-approved college, Cass elects to go to a regular school, explaining to her family that if she's to help them in the movement, she must understand what they're up against. For reasons which are left unexplored, much less explained, her parents go along with this. Cass hasn't been honest with her roomie about her extreme beliefs and when she learns of Shelby's enhancements, she's dishonest with her parents about those, too. Cass is also a lesbian, and this is a problem in the sense that, if her parents are so dead set against anything unnatural, how is it they're so accepting of her being queer? Why do they not consider that unnatural? There's no consideration, let alone explanation, offered for this apparent contradiction in their beliefs.

Cass has been video-conferencing with her roommate to be, who she hasn't met in person. When they do meet, Cass discovers that Shelby, on a whim, has had one of her perfectly good arms removed and replaced by a mechanical one which has enhanced features (essentially it's a cybernetic Swiss army knife with a storage compartment). There never was any really compelling reason offered for her to make this choice, and no accounting for the fact that this major surgery was not done in a hospital, but in a cut-rate dive where unqualified or disqualified people do these surgeries and there's no government regulation!

This would be a major point in the favor of the Sapiens's position, yet never once is it used, nor is Cass appalled by how slapdash and dangerous this work is, not to say illegal! Shelby also has brain implants that allow her to access the internet without a terminal. The Internet - for reasons unexplained - is renamed the 'mantle' here. I doubt that will ever happen! It didn't feel organic and felt much more like the author had changed it solely for the purpose to trying to sound cool. Rather than cool, to me a mantle sounds vaguely threatening, like something an octopus traps its prey under before eating it!

The 'romance' between the two main characters was skirted around rather than plunged into. As important as it was, it deserved better than this. The author skips several weeks of their interactions, and after that unexplored period, we're just told they're an item - so all the magic and charm of their falling for each other is lost and this negatively and severely impacts the believability of their relationship. It makes it feel like it happened overnight although technically it did not.

I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the author is squeamish (or something) when it comes to depicting lesbian interaction. Why he would be, I don't know, but he offers virtually zero physical contact between the two of them at any point in the story; there's barely any hugging, touching, or kissing, let alone actual sex. Instead, he leaves us to infer it from a line here and a word there. This was less than satisfactory and made their relationship seem truly inauthentic, which in turn spoiled all of their subsequent actions.

On a trip to the Caribbean, Cass has a serious jet ski accident that almost kills her. Here's where another problem arises. Shelby supposedly has strong feelings for Cass, and knows perfectly well how anti-enhancement she is, yet she dishonestly lies to the medical staff about how tight their relationship is, and speaks for Cass as though they're married - or at least engaged. They're not! But Shelby overrides any considerations Cass might have had and while the latter is unconscious, Shelby supports and urges the doctors to save her life with enhancements. This is part of a push this novel exhibited from the start: that Cass's feelings and position are wrong and Shelby is right. No consideration, not even token, is given to Cass's position.

Cass is over eighteen and technically an adult, but she can't speak for herself after her injury, and never once does Shelby contact Cass's parents to let them know her daughter was at death's door. This felt like truly shifty behavior on Shelby's part , but the worst aspect of this is that Cass is pretty much completely accepting of it when she recovers consciousness. Despite her horror of enhancement and her upbringing, she doesn't fly off the handle at Shelby. There is no rift in their relationship! Again it felt completely unnatural. It's almost like Cass is "Oh, now I'm cyber! How awful! But okay, moving right along...." Honestly, it's that bad. Again, it's like the author had this agenda to push and nothing would trip it up. A fight between the roomies over this would have added so much more to the story, but the author evidently never considered it.

One of the biggest problems with this story is that we're in the future. Even now, a generation before this story begins, we're out there in terms of interconnectedness. Everyone has a platform and everyone is taking video and streaming it. How much more is that going to be the case in the future? Yet time and time again in this story, the author forgets how connected his world is. Of Shelby's ultra-cyber-ized brother Eric, I read, "He doesn't know you the way I do and he doesn't understand what I've learned since we've been together." Yet this is her brother who she's constantly sending messages back and forth to, directly from her own brain. It's inconceivable that she wouldn't have given him information about Cass, even if only in snippets in all those weeks they were sharing a room. Eric even mentions that he's heard a lot about Cass when they finally meet, yet Shelby apparently thinks he knows nothing? It made no sense.

Eric tells his sister: "I'll send you the final details on the time and place we're meeting in the morning Saturday as soon as we iron out our permits." Yet they're constantly in touch in the cyber-sphere. This lack of knowledge made no sense. During a protest, Shelby again isn't communicating so we're led to believe: "We have to get up to the front and help my brother. He doesn't know we're surrounded." How could he not know when everyone is connected? She can't text him? Can't send him an image? Can't send him a video? No-one else can? Once again, the author forgets his premise.

Even in 2021, scores upon scores of people shop online and get meals and groceries delivered more routinely than ever, yet I read, "She rode the elevator down to the ground floor and headed out to the street. It was time to get some shopping in." This was to buy food. Apparently a generation from now there's no more delivery? The author hasn't thought it through. With regard to test-taking we learned, "the professor can turn off access locally. The classrooms utilize a sort of virtual Faraday cage to shut down my implant's access during tests and quizzes. That ensures I actually learn the material." Yet they can't shut down local storage. Shelby could have entire textbooks stored in her implant and cheat up the wazoo, yet the author apparently never considers this.

Naturally 'dad of Cass' discovers his daughter's implants despite her efforts to lie to him and despite the fact that never once does she consider trying to ease her dad into her new way of life. Never once does she try to present an opposing view to his. Never once does she offer the argument that, "dad, if you don't want his stuff, that's fine! No-one' forcing you, but neither do you have the right to force others to live their lives like you want them to!"

There were so many ways that Cass could have eased the passage and been the very bridge she claims she wants to be if she'd had even half a spine, but she repeatedly fails. Predictably this results in dad finding out accidentally because he comes back to her dorm room after they think he's left and their door is open. The question is though - since he'd left the building, how did he manage to get into a secure building when he has no pass? This is quietly glossed over.

Psycho father flies off the handle and swears Cass is done with this school, but inexplicably, he doesn't try to drag her out of there! Instead he's talking about her finishing out the semester, so later, Cass tells Shelby, "No, you go and talk to Eric. That's important too." Why does she need to 'go and talk to Eric' about this when she can video-conference him right out of her brain? Again, the author hasn't thought his own world through.

Talking of which - in passing - there are no robots or drones mentioned at all in this world despite the fact that we have them ubiquitously even now. No robots helping the police quell a mob? No news drones filming from above? Again the sparsity of technology and the lack of foresight in this world was sad.

When Eric is injured during a protest rally, he's told, "Eric, we have to do something about what they did to you. We have to tell someone and take them to court or something." And we're apparently expected to believe that with all these cyber-enhanced people, and all the news media, and all the private citizens who have cell phones, not a single one of them recorded or live-streamed any of this?

This is a constant theme in the novel - of how utterly-connected the enhanced people are, but how appallingly sparse is the video coverage, even of activity like this. It made zero sense and constantly betrayed the author's prime position. And on top of this, we're expected to believe every police officer hates the enhanced, despite the fact that there would doubtlessly be enhanced officers and officers with enhanced children or spouses. Given the crime-fighting advantages a connected officer would have, there would more than likely have been an enhanced squad of police, just like there's a bomb squad and a SWAT team. Again, the author hasn't thought his world through, and it suffers for it.

It was for all of these serious writing problems and plot holes that I cannot consider this a worthy read.

Fire and Shadow by TG Ayer

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in the " Hand of Kali" series, and I am not a series person for multiple reasons - mainly because series tend to be so badly done and so tedious. In this case, I think the title was badly chosen. Do you have any idea how many frigging novels are out there which employ this title exactly or in part? About fifty too many. It's ridiculous.

The author ought to have re-thought that, especially since a title like that carries a certain dissuasive pretention about it, but that issue aside, this novel promised to be different in that it was an author of Asian ancestry writing about the rich Hndu mythology of India. The problem was that the story was set in the USA because you know there's no way in hell any story not set in the USA can be remotely interesting, right? That and the fact that the bulk of the insular US readership is incredibly limited and provincial, and won't read stuff not set in the USA - at least that's what Big Publishing™ wants us to believe. Yawn.

All writers have to bow to that irritating fact of life unfortunately. That aside though, there were some really bad writing issues with this novel that essentially turned out to be a clone of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that this was Maya the Demon Slayer. The first of these issues is: why was it set in the USA? This doesn't feature native American mythology, but Indian mythology! Okay, fine, you bow to pressure and set it on safe turf, but you then it's really incumbent upon you to offer some sort of explanation as to why these Hindu gods and demons have transplanted themselves to the US, and this author offers nothing - at least not in the portion of this that I read, which was about 25%.

So it's your trope cookie-cutter story of the ingénue raised in ignorance of her powers, who despite her disbelief is a super-strong wielder of whatever power it is she has. In this case hers is the power to immolate demons - apparently without leaving a significant trace - as we shall get to shortly. Maya Rao is an outcast in her rich kids high-school of course, and she has a clichéd creepy kid who is always around, keeping an eye on her. His name is Nik and he's also an empowered guy who happens to be hot and know more about Maya than she does about herself, but nether he nor Maya's parents, who also know about her powers, have the kindness or decency to bother educating Maya, not even indirectly, not even remotely.

In order to prevent her juvenile scorching of things, her parents bound her powers magically, and she conveniently forgot about all those burned toys and the scorched furniture. Now she doesn't believe in a single thing about Hindu mythology despite going to church every week. Yawn. I guess even the god she serves doesn't give a shit about poor Maya! Barf. But she gets an invitation to the rich kids party, and like an idiot she goes and gets a drugged drink, and rich jock Bryon (barf!) leads her to a boathouse bathroom here he beats her up, but this beating together with the alcohol and the drug allow her to unleash her power and she burns Byron to death with such intense heat that all that's left is ashes and a scorch mark or two.

That amount of heat (and nowhere does the author say it was magical heat as opposed to regular everyday burning) would have to be hot enough to melt at least some bathroom fixtures, but apparently virtually no evidence is left, because when Nik - who's been stalking Maya at the party without once having the consideration to warn her that there are humans possessed by demons present - shows up and enables her getaway from the party, there are zero consequences for Maya's actions.

I'm talking zero consequences. Never (at least not in the portion I read), do police show up at Maya's house asking her about Byron - with whom she was last seen! There's no outcry, no news reports of a missing rich white kid. Maya was so badly-beaten that she had a punctured lung, yet despite her being hospitalized, nowhere does the hospital file a report about a minor being admitted after having been beaten so badly. That together with Byron's disappearance ought to have triggered some alarms, but Maya's charmed life goes on totally uninterrupted as she trains to fight and evaporate more demons.

This is a serious writing problem - when an author is dedicatedly following her tunnel vision without paying any attention at all to the possibility that the real world might just intrude on the story here and there. When I quit reading though, was when I read this: "A small part of her saw how sexy he happened to look even when he smudged soot on his cheek as he dusted himself off." Seriously?

In learning how to use fire, Maya almost kills him (he's fortunately protected by his own god) and instead of her being horrified and disturbed by what she did, all she can do is think how sexy he looks in his scorched clothes?! Again the author is so obsessed with her neat little love package that she completely forgets that this story is purportedly taking place in the real world and that there are real world consequences, feelings, and issues to address. It was ridiculous and this story, having threatened this several times, finally became undeniably too stupid to continue reading.

The book could have used a literate editor, too. I read things like: "Maya tread water in the sea of her ignorance." Ignorance is right, because the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. "She didn't even believe Rakshasa's existed in the first place" The plural of Rakshasa is Rakshasas, not the possessive case! I also read,

"You have the same eyes, you know?" "Same as whom?" Maya asked

Nobody, especially not a high school kid, says 'whom'! It's a big writing mistake. The author is so focused on how it technically 'ought' to be written that she forgets she's (supposedly) writing about real people saying real things in a real world. 'Whom' stands out like a sore thumb.

Even some of the descriptive writing was too impenetrable to make sense. In describing a traditional fighting weapon known as a madu, the author wrote: "Really a pair of shield, with twin antelope horns melded together to form a natural double-ended piercing weapon." That's a really bad description!

This weapon is essentially a buckler (from the French buclier). A buckler is a small round shield, which can be up to half a meter in diameter and which can be used offensively as well as defensively. In this case it also has two antelope horns, each protruding horizontally at opposite sides of the buckler, pointy ends out, fixed to the shield. Why Maya would train with this antiquated device rather than learn to shoot a gun is another writing problem - again this choice of weapon isn't even discussed.

So this story was larded with cliché and trope, had nothing new to offer since it was essentially a Buffy clone with demons substituted for vampires and so on, but otherwise exactly the same story, and badly-written to boot. So what's new? Nothing! So why read it? The plotting was poor, the quality of the writing awful, and I sure as hell am not about to read a series like this!

Cursed by Casey Odell

Rating: WARTY!

This was, unfortunately, yet another cookie-cutter YA story - the special snowflake ingénue who is the great white savior and who, despite being an adult or near adult, acts like a twelve year old child throughout. There's also the love triangle which predictably erupts notwithstanding the appalling mental abuse both of these male figures inflict on the girl.

Oh, there was the occasional amusing oddity (or in this case, odell-ity!) in the text, such as "Warm heat caressed her back" - that would be as opposed to that nasty cold heat that everyone hates so much?! But even unintentional humorous writing gaffs like that couldn't save me from the tedium of seeing the same story being re-told that's been related a gazillion times before, and with the only real change being the character's names. The author has a BSc in film from Full Sail University and I can see how she earned the BS part anyway - for someone who specialized in college in writing, there's no evidence of it in this work.

The story is of Claire, of indeterminate but young age, raised by a single mom who owned a tavern in medieval times, which of course must explain why Claire, raised in a rough-and-ready bar, and doing some waitressing, is utterly lacking in street smarts and any kind of a tough hide. When Claire's village is attacked by vicious centaurs (for reasons I never learned in the 15% I could stand to read of this), her mom runs with her (holding her hand, like she's six) to the forest, but abandons her there, telling her that she'll be safe! This is the forbidden forest where kids are warned not to go. Huh? Mom for some reason has to go back, and so she leaves Claire to her own devices - namely a dagger which is special, but which idiot Claire promptly loses.

Here's where the biggest trend in this dumb story begins: nothing is ever explained! Every single thing is a mystery and not even the smallest crumb of information is ever offered to the reader. I may be wrong, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that Claire is the bastard child of some elf royalty which is why she's so special. She's rescued (repeatedly it turns out) by the elves, who contrary to rumor do not kill her on sight - although they probably would have done had she not been 'marked'. This is the kind of callous little shits that the elves are in this story, yet Claire seems to have no problem with their attitude.

She is, I believe, supposed to be some sort of royalty among the elves, but her mother chose to keep her in utter ignorance of this her entire life. Despite this, the elves treat her like dog-shit from the off, abusing her and imprisoning her, yet dressing her in revealing sexy outfits. Who actually dresses her is unclear because this is always done when she inevitably passes out. Clearly the elves are total perves. The thing is they behave exactly like humans. There is nothing alien or foreign about them at all. They even use American colloquialisms. Who knew? They actually made the centaurs look better - that's how bad they were.

After being kept incarcerated and in ignorance of what was going on, Claire is forced into undertaking a mission, accompanied by two elves, and evidently these elves have no transportation: not horses, not nothin'! The two who accompany her are apparently a prince and the captain of the king's guard. Why the fuck is the captain of the king's guard abandoning his post? Is there not one single soldier in the entire army capable of handling this job? How pathetic must the soldiery be if the captain is the one who has to go? Who knows? Why is an apparent prince going along, and why only these two with no accompanying soldiers or anything? It made zero sense, unless of course you're creating a YA love triangle. It was so transparent and pathetic that I couldn't stand to read another page of this tedious, unoriginal, and unimaginative trash. This novel is cursed all right.

The Last Necromancer by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

If only it were the last necromancer, but alas! There will be more stories about necromancers, I fear.

Despite having misgivings about this, I started reading it because it was a new take on Frankenstein. While we unfortunately get vampire stories up the wazoo, and quite a few sad werewolf ones too, we don't see any of the other classic monsters (Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc.) retreaded very often. So I was curious about this one, especially since it has a girl living as a boy on streets of London.

Technically, Frankenstein is the Georgian period, not the Victorian in which this novel is set, but it wasn't that important to me. What is important is that I get a good, original (even if borrowed from a classic!) story that moves at a decent pace, and which entertains me, and I sensed quickly that I was not about to get any of that from this, as it turned into yet another trope-laden YA romance story.

It started out well-enough in that this girl Charlotte (who goes by the unoriginal and unimaginative 'Charlie' as a boy) has the ability to raise the dead, and she's kidnapped by this guy Lincoln Fitzroy. It was painfully obvious right from the start that he and Charlie would be an item, and it was so telegraphed and pathetic, and so, so inappropriate that I wanted to give up right then, but I read on a little way to see if the author could rescue it or had anything new to offer; once it became crystal clear she did not is when I DNF'd this.

Fitzroy is often a euphemism sort of a name for a king's bastard offspring, but I have no idea if that's the case here or if the author just blindly chose it as a 'cool name' (it really isn't). This guy, as I said, kidnaps Charlotte, and holds her prisoner without giving her any idea of why he's doing this. They butt heads repeatedly, and it became quickly tedious to read at that point.

It turns out that the reason she's kidnapped is that the people employing Fitzroy want Charlotte kept out of the hands of Frankenstein, who is having a problem animating his creation, and since Charlotte can reanimate a dead person's body by calling their spirit back into it - over which she then has complete control - she is of course of inestimable use to him. I don't doubt that happens further down the line in what is probably an inevitable trilogy. Correction: I later learned this is a ten book series! Are you fucking joking? Jesus! But I figured Frankenstein will indeed get his hands on Charlotte, and I have no interest in yet another tedious YA love triangle or a tedious ten-novel series, especially not one written this badly.

I so quickly tired of the imprisonment and the cruelty and the business of treating Charlotte like a child - although she did behave like one often. But there was meanness and cruelty involved in her imprisonment and the author seems not to care a whit about Stockholm syndrome, like this adversarial and punitive relationship is the perfect start to what will somehow magically blossom into passionate and undying love. Barf. Get a clue, Archer, please. You're missing the target by miles.

The last straw for me was when Fitzroy gave Charlotte her wish and freed her in a poor part of London dressed to the nines, and left her to her fate. He was of course following her so he could rescue this poor waif, but that wasn't the saddest part. The saddest part wasnt even that Fitzroy had purposefully hired a thug to threaten Charlotte so that he could "rescue" her and have her even further in his debt. The guy is a complete dick and a jerk.

No, the problem was a complete betrayal of Charlotte, and the most inauthentic part of the novel. Charlotte had been living on the streets for several years before she was captured by Fitzroy, but now she's portrayed as somehow being inexplicably and completely at a loss as to what to do, where to go, and how to keep herself safe. Inevitably she falls into the hands of this ruthless and brutal rapist that Fitzroy hired, thereby forcing Charlotte further into his control and dominance. Way to trash your main character's entire backstory, Archer! I'm done with this atrocious author.

The Falcon's Heart by Diana Green

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an enjoyable story, albeit with some issues. I decided to read it because it reminded me in some small ways of my own Femarine. This novel is set in a fantasy world of deserts and magic and it's set in some time past where none of our modern mechanical and electrical wonders are yet in existence, but the world building at times refers to things - such as clocks - that appear not to exist in any form in this world. There were things in such times, such as water clocks, candle clocks, and hour glasses, that could tell time, but none of these are mentioned either.

The magic also has issues with consistency in that it seems to morph to fit the author's current needs rather than exist as its own entity. For example, one of the two main characters, Saba, is supposedly an empath, but apart from a mention at the beginning of the story, this power appears never to be used and indeed deserts her when she could really use it. It felt odd, but not a story killer for me although it seemed like a glaring omission at times when she was trying to understand the feelings of her captor.

Her captor is the Falcon - a female bandit and leader of a group of desert-dwelling thieves, eking out their own existence in a land where a selfish and ambitious pasha - Saba's father - is determined to usurp ever more land and power to satisfy his greed. In order to try to free a friend through a trade, the Falcon kidnaps Saba and whisks her away deep into the desert mountains, but Saba's father seems uninterested in making any deal to recover her despite her value as an aliance-builder when he offers her in marriage. He finds himself reliant on a sorcerer to track her down - the very one who wishes to have Saba's hand in marriage.

During their time together, of course, Saba and the Falcon fall for each other and eventually end up together, so the story is quite predictable from the off. It has no real surprises or problems to overcome. It's a light, harmless, decent, if rather fluffy story that I enjoyed despite the minor issues, so on these terms, I commend it as a worthy read, although I still prefer my own Femarine! Call me biased!

Premonition by Leigh Walker

Rating: WARTY!

Another first volume in yet another pointless series. I made it only 25 screens into this when I read the following: "Josh seemed nice, but he was definitely weird. Still, he'd called me his friend, and friends were something I'd been in woefully short supply of at Hanover High...I started up the stairs. That's when I saw him."

Immediately it was clear that this was to be yet another stupid high-school love-triangle story that would be exactly like very other stupid high-school love-triangle story that's been done endlessly over and over again, ad nauseam. What, exactly, is the point of copying a story that's already tedious in the extreme? Barf. I mean what does it signify that this unimaginative author is merely rewriting the same basic story that scores of other YA authors have doen before? Yes, obviously, it means that she agrees with me that the other stories were shit, so she wants to do it better - at least I hope that was her intention, but this only begs the question as to how she went so badly wrong and fell so far short of the target by producing a cookie-cutter replica of every other story? How is it better when it's exactly the same?! I give up and I gave up: I quit right there and then.

I don't even know why I started this because the blurb should have warned me: "Riley thinks she’s heading off to boarding school — but to her surprise, she’s enrolled in an elite training program run by a top secret government agency." I'm guessing Riley's a dumbass. "Unsure of why she has been chosen," Yep, she's a dumbass all right. "...she’ll stop at nothing to uncover the truth" So Riley does nothing under the mistaken belief that if she stops at nothing, then the truth will be uncovered. That's definitely the first of a series! LOL!

Scholarship Girl by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

This turned out to be another dumbass high-school series starter. The plot had sounded interesting, but the trope and cliché was a death knell for this as far as I'm concerned. Yet again we have the girl with an old and trusted friend as one corner of the inevitable triangle, and the rich bad boy of the school, who she hates, as the other corner. Why do so few female authors have anything original to say in YA? I know there are some because I've read and enjoyed them, but why are there so few and why are so many female authors dedicated to reproducing cloned pap? Are the authors or blame or the readers? Or the publishers? Thinking people want to know!

So this girl is a scholarship student at an academy that has fantasy characters: elves, fae (the author is too chickenshit to call them fairies), demons, etc., as students. So it's the uninventive usual. Naturally she's forced into being a bodyguard to the rich, spoiled, cruel brat of a student that she supposedly hates, but will inevitably, predictably, unimaginatively fall for. Wait, what? Bodyguard? This is a rich student school and they can't hire regular competent, professionally-trained adults as bodyguards? They have to bribe the bullied and impoverished scholarship students to do it? WTF!

I quit reading right there because I was almost literally nauseated by how bad this was and what a shameless rip-off it was of every other YA high school story. Despite the fact that these students are magical beings, they were all portrayed as exactly like regular high school characters. There was literally no difference other than their species name!

It was so pathetic that hoenstly, I was cringing for the author while reading it. Do none of these authors turn on their brain before starting to write? Do they not think outside of the box? Do they never put themselves into another's shoes or hooves? I honestly do not know how anyone can be so wooden as to write like this. I really don't. Yeah, I did expect this, but as always, I hoped for better. I was genuinely sorry to be once again disappointed. This was an early DNF, and I'mm done with reading anything else by this author.

Restless by GS Jensen

Rating: WARTY!

This ultra-short intro to a series that I will now never read has the pretention to list a 'Dramatis personae' on one early page. Seriously? As if the author wanted to make it as unappealing as possible, she writes it in first person - worst person because it's so annoying and so very limiting. The author admits this because when she changes to another character's PoV, it's in third person. This character is named Caleb and the author is so obsessed with getting him into the story that it makes no sense to have him there and diminishes the female character in the doing. You know from the off that these two are going to get together so there are no surprises at all here. It's trope all the way down, and such a cliché that every main female character just has to have a man to validate her. I all-but worship authors who don't go down that overly-trampled path, but I refuse to travel this one with this author. It served only to make me restless to find another novel to read.

Seven Sisters by ML Bullock

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is not a series but a serial. You get the first few chapters for free and then pay for the next instalments individually. If you're going to pull that trick on a reader you need to be up front about it from the start, and you need to have a compelling story with decent - but not cruel - cliffhangers to lead them into the next story - and you also need to lower your instalment price. For me it was never an option though because despite the (mostly) appealing plot, I couldn't even get into the first few chapters, and DNF'd this whole thing as a bad choice.

The first problem, as usual, was first person - or worst person voice. I've read a few decent 1PoV novels, and even written one myself, but I'm nowhere near being a fan of them, because they're usually whiny, self-centered, self-important, and annoying, and they severely limit the writing unless you apply the voice to the right kind of story. Otherwise it's one of the unforgivable sins.

The plot here is that main character Carrie Jo, while sleeping soundly in her bed, dreams about the places she's sleeping in - a sort of somnabulistic psychometry after a fashion. She can sense what's happened in the house where she sleeps, so she doesn't like to sleep in older houses, but she's offered money to uncover the secrets of the Seven Sisters - not a family, but a house of that name.

I was turned off by the book description saying, "The handsome and wealthy Ashland Stuart has hired her to uncover the history and the secrets of Seven Sisters," and I should have listened to my gut, because that sort of description almost 100% describes a novel that's going to be badly-written and feature a dumb-ass romance to boot. It rarely ends well, but other than that, the story sounded interesting; however, I started losing interest fast when the novel literally began with Carrie Jo abandoning her boyfriend without even saying good bye and taking off in her car. That made her cold and even callous in my book. I did not like her.

Worse than that, the story started rambling endlessly about the past as she drove, and it lost me, so I just quit. Had I written this I would have started it with Carrie Jo arriving at the house she was supposed to investigate, only briefly referencing things from the past if they were relevant. I also would have had her leaving her boyfriend because of a problem with him, rather than have her coldly abandon him. This would both make the reader sympathetic and make her seem worth listening to. As it was, she was just annoying and certainly not someone I'd want to get stuck with on a train or a bus ride!

Life is too short to waste on poorly-written and uninteresting novels about clichéd and boring characters, especially when there are so many authors out there begging to be heard, and who have well-written original stories with dazzling new characters, and who are willing to share their imaginative tales with us. It's an insult to them to force yourself to finish a novel that simply isn't doing it for you!

The Green Door by Heather Kindt

Rating: WARTY!

That tile is suspiciously close to the title of a very old, but famous porn movie starring Marilyn Chambers who was previously the face of a wholseome detergent. The novel itself is nowhere near as inventive as that movie was. Unfortunately, it's your typical YA love-triangle featuring a disaffected high-schooler slash impoverished under-achiever with at least one parent dead, who has a lifelong male friend that she has no interest in, and has a rich kid new acquaintance that she flips off, but becomes fascinated with. Yep, it's your usual unoriginal, braindead YA story that you've already read to death a score of times.

On the face of it, the actual plot sounded interesting. The idea is that there's this game which the main character is interested in, because it could net her a monetary prize which she and her widowered dad badly need. You have to solve one or more puzzles in this creepy old mansion to earn the cash, so she naturally picks her best friend to take up the challenge with.

Completely out of the blue, the high-school quarterback suddenly asks her to be his partner in this same game - which is when she flips him off. The problem is that this guy has shown zero interest in her until now, and suddenly he's calling her on her phone because he can't think of anyone better than her to solve puzzles with? It made zero sense. Where did he get her phone number? Why does he think someone he doesn't even know will make the best partner?! Why is he remotely interested in this whiny brat of a person who is technically an adult, but who behaves like a juvenile?

The story went downhill even from there. It appears to be written for an age group that's younger than the ages of the main characters - like middle grade instead of YA. The main character, Megan Covington isn't even a nice person. I didn't like her. She was cruel, and whiny and dishonest. At one point she tells us that her best friend Brekken is doing their geometry homework, which she will copy afterwards, but later she says he's always been a good friend to her by doing things "like keeping me from cheating throughout school and helping me study." So in short, she's both a cheat and a liar!

So the two of them go to this mansion where the quest is being held and like the imbeciles that they are, they tell no one where they're going. They're both over eighteen so they can sign the quest contract, but neither of them reads the small print and the frosty woman who takes them down to the basement offers them no details or warnings. Frosty lets them into the game area by opening a solid metal door with three bolts and a lock on the outside. None of this even remotely bothers the two shit-for-brains main characters. Beyond that door there is a glaring white corridor with colored doors along it (guess which one they pick!). The doors are these:

• Blue with a nautical theme featuring a pearl - worth $5,000
• Brown with underground carvings and featuring gemstone - worth $10,000
• Green with a tree carving and featuring a seed - worth $10,000
• Red featuring a ruby heart in a crown - worth $25,000
• Orange with flames pictured on it that are actually hot - worth $30,000
• White with a dove and feathers - worth $500,000
• Black metal with carvings - worth one million

Without asking any more questions, they let themselves be locked in. They have to choose a door to begin, and unsurprisingly, given the novel's title, they settle on the green door. They slap on these bracelets that allow them to pass through the force-field at the door that prevents other things from escaping (none of which puts these two idiots off), and they find themselves in a forest where they're almost immediately attacked by large wolves, but they're rescued by other animals who proceed on two legs and speak vernacular English. At first this struck me as silly, but there's actually an explanation for it. They chase off the wolves, but they arrest the two high-schoolers since they're illegally in a non-human part of the forest. None of this even remotely boggles the mind of these two fuckwits.

Naturally in this same environment is the rich jock, with the unimaginative name of Carter, who completes the inevitable triangle. He tells them he came in there with a girl named Courtney and they were attacked by those same wolves. Courtney was killed. Instead of immediately leaving the quest to report this girl's death, these frigging morons decide to continue with the quest! Carter is supposed to be the unexpectedly nice guy. He talks Courtney into playing this dangerous and deadly game with him, and when his partner dies, the very last thing he thinks of doing, is taking responsibility and reporting her death to the authorities or to her parents. He's an asshole, period.

That's when I quit reading. It's too stupid to live and should be burned with fire. These people are idiots. They're irresponsible. They're boringly predictable, and there's no way in hell I was going to continue reading this dumbass novel let alone continue on the "The Red Door" or "The Black Door" or any other stupid volume in this series. I condemn it.

Grayson Manor Haunting by Cheryl Bradshaw

Rating: WARTY!

This is the starter for a series - as per usual, but I didn't even want to finish reading this one, let alone embark upon a series based on uninteresting characters and retreaded plots. Besides, how is Addison going to proceed? She keeps inheriting a house in each new volume, all of them are haunted, and she solves each haunting? LOL! Yawn.

The story was so larded with trope and cliché that it became completely uninteresting. There was no mystery because all of this has been done countless times before in every haunted house story ever written, and it's the same old crap where the ghosts are so tight with revealing the problem that it's annoying. Why is every ghost so coy? Why are clues so meagerly distributed? Why are the ghosts so reticent to start with, and then increasingly social? It's farcical and irritating.

Of course Addison is the girl in distress and the trope 'hunky guy' is the one working on fixing up her house, but the guy is such an interfering creep that he turned me right off. The fact that Addison saw nothing wrong with his stalker-ish behavior tells me she's a moron. I have no interest in reading another female-penned asinine YA novel about a idiotic and tedious main female character. Even the title is tedious.

The Kerrigan Kids Box Set Books 1-3 by WJ May

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this garbage: "Oliver Jack. If there was one thing she didn't miss this summer, it was the inescapable flirtation of Oliver Jack. Never trust a guy with two first names. No matter how cute he was." At that exact moment I could see exactly where this was going and it sure as hell wasn't anywhere near where I was interested in traveling.

That wasn't very far into the story at all, and I've seriously been wondering lately if I should just quit reading female-authored novels altogether. I'd hate to do that, but it seems like it's becoming ever-harder to find a female-authored novel that isn't sticky with sugar, as well filled with trope to the wazoo, and cliché galore. It's truly nauseating. The problem is that male authors don't do any better. Male-authored books are too often way over into macho end of the spectrum in the same way that female authored novels are way too sappy. Is there no one writing in the middle for readers like me? Is it time to start reading authors somewhere else along the gender spectrum? I can tell you from personal experience that really good writers are few and far between.

This story rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I wasn't long into it when I read for example, "It had touched down somewhere in Kent, never to be seen again." - but the question is, if it had never been seen again, how did they know where it landed? And yeah, it's a minor thing, but when you get a string of minor things, they all add up to a major problem. Surprisingly, this was not first person, which would have made it horrendously barf-worthy, but it was about a bunch of privileged high-schoolers not only flaunting, but reveling in their privilege. Yuk!

Even so I was willing to read on at least a little to see what this author would do with it, but she did precisely what most every other YA author does with their cookie-cutter clone of this kind of a story: make it about a weak woman under the thrall of a domineering and way too hands on 'hot' male that she claims she hates, but who you know she's already melting for like ice cream on an August sidewalk in Texas.

In this case the guy physically grabbed her wrist to stop her paying for her purchase and insisted he would pay for it, so there's the inappropriate touching and the "I'm the alpha male and you are my woman" horseshit right there, and this girl is such a dumb fuck that she sees nothing wrong with this assault. I was out of there from that point on because I could see then precisely where this was headed, and like I said, it sure wasn't any place I wanted to follow. I don't mind a novel where a woman starts out weak and grows strong, or starts out dumb and wises-up, but I could tell from the idiotic way this was written that there was no way in hell any of that would happen here, not with a main character named Aria. This book is shit, period. I didn't want to continue reading volume one let alone two more shit books just like it.

True Colors by Melissa Pearl

Rating: WARTY!

Paradoxically the first volume in a series called "masks" this idiotic and utterly predictable story is another example of YA at its worst. It's first person so the main character is unnaturally describing herself with ridiculous terms from the off: "I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans." Nobody talks like that. When did your friend last say to you "I thought I'd lost my phone so I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans"? It's idiotic, inauthentic and completely unnatural. It sounds so fake and self-obsessed and snotty, that it's nauseating.

Here's another: "I ran my hands through my long curls" Barf! If the author can't put in better descriptions than this (and forget the tired trope of looking in a mirror) then she needs to find another profession. Maybe a fashion runway commentator? Here's another: "I should have gone back in to find a handbag. Every girl in the world seemed to wear them" Since when do you 'wear' a handbag?

The last straw was this tired bitch-in-heat trope: "I tried not to look, but couldn't help stealing a few furtive glimpses as he got out of his black Jeep shirtless and reached for the surfboard attached to the roll bars. His straight hair was wet, droplets hanging from the long ends before dripping onto his shoulders. I watched one droplet glide over his hard chest and perfect abs and couldn't help scraping my teeth over my bottom lip." Barf.

Because every girl is constantly desperate and needy for a man, and only one kind of man will ever do. Good luck with getting guys to respect girls when female authors are routinely putting this shit out there in a steady regular diet telling guys who can't think for themselves that every young girl desperately wants them, right now, and the most physical way possible. And why is his hair still dripping water? Is the beach next door? Or did it rain on the way home? And what the fuck difference does it make what color his jeep is?

This is one of the worst examples of a generally poorly-written genre, and no. Just no. Warty to the max. These colors are about as tired and faded as you can get.

Bright Ruined Things by Samantha Cohoe

Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata "...and Lord Prosper like to make a good impression on First Night." Verb is wrong tense. "The last time I had seen Coco, she didn’t know how to fly. She couldn’t have gained very much experience landing one since then." This appears to be missing the words, 'a plane' in place of 'one' above.

I can understand people wanting to rip-off Shakespeare. He ripped off enough people himself, let's face it! Let me also say up front that I'm no big fan of his. I think he was derivative, plodding, and primitive in many ways, but he did have a flair for the dramatic and he did have a nice turn of phrase here and there. I have a personal ambition to see all of his plays either live or via the silver screen just because, and I'm not there yet, but I've hardly been pursuing this goal avidly. I do think though, that if you're going to attempt something like this, you owe a bit more to your reader than your average YA novel, and that was the problem here. It's very much your average YA novel which is to say, not good.

The first problem is first person which with very few exceptions, I typically detest because it's all 'me, me, me' all the time. It's limiting. It's unimaginative (especially since most every YA writer uses it), and it's tedious to read; far too self-important, and so inauthentic. I quickly grew bored with the narrator.

Loosely (very loosely) based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, which was produced over four hundred years ago, this story - which is not set in that same time period - has more in common with Cinderella than ever it does with Shakespeare! It tells the tale of Mae, the daughter of a late steward of Lord Prosper, so we're told, who is the patriarch of a magical island that produces 'aether' - an energy source that's sold on to others elsewhere. So essentially, Prosper is a sort of oil baron, but his golden goose seems to be failing and Mae, who is pretty much an outcast from the Prosper family, especially now she's turned eighteen and expects to have to leave the island, is determined to find out why.

The most annoying thing about Mae is that she's such a limp character. She has no internal engine herself and seems quite willing to be buffeted along by everyone else's energy rather than her own. We're told she longs to remain on the island and fears being expelled because she isn't family, but we're given no reason whatsoever why she should have no interest in exploring the world, or why she should have any loyalty to the family that treats her so shabbily. It makes her seem boring and one-dimensional. Also, she's so changeable as to be a blur rather than a well-defined and strong female character. I didn't like her at all. As I find quite often these novels, I much preferred one of the other characters - a woman named Coco.

Worse, we're immediately plunged into a tediously trope YA love triangle involving Mae and two grandsons of Prosper: Ivo, the clichéd bad boy, and Miles, the clichéd sweet guy. That made me yawn the instant it was presented, because it is so unimaginative and it has been done to death in countless YA stories before this one. I guess I should be thankful I didn't have to read about anyone's "bicep" (yes in the singular - this is YA after all!), or about gold flecks in one of the guys' eyes. But then I DNF'd this at 25%, so maybe those 'classic' descriptions came later.

I didn't finish this, but it seemed to me that Miles could well turn out to be the bad guy and Ivo the good one in the end. I could quite easily be completely wrong about that. It also occurred to me that Mae could well be one of the Prosper family herself when all's said and done, through some shenanigans in the past. Miranda, in the original, was Prospero's daughter after all, in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte. It was that kind of a YA novel anyway, but I had so lost interest in any of these characters that I couldn't even be bothered to skip to the end to find out!

All this despite being initially intrigued by the book description. Taking a page from the excellent 1995 movie Richard III, this novel is set in the twenties, although apart from a airplane flying to the island at one point, it could have been set at any time. There was no twenties vibe to it at all, and the only reason I really 'got' that it was the twenties was through a gratuitous mention of Bessie Coleman (misspelled as 'Bessy' in this novel), who was a black pilot in the early twenties, before she died, of course in a plane crash.

Going with The Tempest was an interesting and ambitious aim, but it was sadly let down by the YA writing. I read things like, "Coco would help me get out of marrying Ivo, but not because the idea was unthinkable, or awful, or absurd. Because it wasn’t what I wanted. And that wasn’t good enough at all." I'm sorry, but from what Mae has said earlier, that was exactly it! And these sentences would read better were they conjoined with some punctuation, such as a semi-colon and a comma.

I didn't get the point of the author using correct grammar in some places and poor punctuation in others, but this was an advance review copy so hopefully the errors and nonsensical writing will be corrected before the final version gets loose. I also encountered some other examples of problematic writing, such as:

"I suppose she has her reasons," I said. "He runs the second-biggest island. Rex is his family’s only magician. It’s what everyone wants her to do."

And yet Mae has a problem with what others want her to do? How hypocritical.

I read, "If the solution were as simple as telling Grandfather, don’t you think Apollonia would have done it already?" No, I don't, because this is a YA novel and rather than do the sensible, obvious thing and tell important things to people who need to know them, which is what real people do, everyone is hoarding secrets here, which is what fictional YA people routinely do. Again, it's unrealistic, and it creates palpably fake tension. A wiser writer would have found ways to add mystery and intrigue without having the main characters do such patently dumb things, and make such juvenile and brain-dead decisions.

Typically for YA, this novel is obsessed with looks: "There were some people who said Apollonia wasn’t beautiful." Who cares if the 'wicked step-sister' is beautiful or not? It has no bearing on the story, but it does reveal volumes about Mae's shallow and nauseating character. It's really rather pathetic. Also, it demeans Mae to have her so focused on such shallow traits, without at the very least augmenting them with something deeper and more meaningful. It betrays the main character and makes her just as vacuous, and lacking in smarts and integrity. It gives her just as little appeal as everyone else who she herself criticizes!

All in all I cannot commend this as a worthy read because it has far too much trope, and far too many faults.

Moonburner by Claire Luana

Rating: WORTHY!

If this author's name had been Claire Luna that would have been perfect, wouldn't it? Or maybe even better had it been Clair de Lune! LOL! I have a policy never to read books that have words like 'saga', 'chronicles' or 'cycle' on the cover. It did not say that on this cover, so it was only later that I discovered this was part of a tetralogy - or perhaps more accurately, a trilogy with a prequel added as an afterthought (maybe).

But I did read it and as it turned out, despite an issue or two here and there, it was a worthy read! That's not to say I will read any more of this 'cycle' (seriously WTF is a 'cycle'? Could it be called a bike? Maybe I'll write a bike one day. Or maybe I shall write the first Cycle Saga Chronicles?). But I digress. To me, this book was complete in itself, and certainly I feel no compulsion to pursue this story any further, which begs the question: why did the author?

I dunno. I guess there's pressure in the publishing world to write trilogies rather than standalones because they can vacuum up far more money from readers even if you give away the first one for free or at a discount. I will play no part in that. All of my books are standalones and complete in and of themselves, and many of them are free, especially during these difficult times when people are stuck at home so much.

This is because I don't write in any hope of becoming rich or milking money from readers. I write because I have to. I have no choice. If I'm not writing I go into withdrawal! Yes, my name is Ian Wood and I am a creative fiction addict. It's been about a half-hour since my last fix.... So, even if my novels are set in the same world as other stories, they're still standalones - except, that is, for the Little Rattuses™, but that's a children's series and with children's books, the rules are out the window - as indeed were The Little Rattuses....

Anyway, let's focus here. This story is about Kai - a young woman a few months from her momentous eighteenth birthday when her Moonburner powers are supposed to manifest. But it's a problem with Kai because she lives disguised as a boy, in a Sunburner village and they're at war with the Moonburners. This is actually more of a battle of the sexes because women are predictably of the Moon, and men of the Sun.

But of course Kai is outed and exiled. She survives against the odds and eventually is taken in at the Moonburner academy. That's not what it's called, but it's what it is - a special snowflake story with the Harry Potter-esque Kai arriving at Moonwarts. "You're a Moonburner, Harry!" The thing is that it's written well-enough that it doesn't feel trope-y or clichéd for the most part, and I appreciated that.

Why Kai's powers are supposed to manifest themselves at eighteen goes unexplained. There really is no difference between a person on the last day of their seventeenth year and the first of their eighteenth, so it's purely arbitrary and no explanation is given. I was willing to let that go despite that fact that's it's so trope that these powers arrive at eleven, or thirteen or whatever. It's usually an odd year for some reason, and it never really has any justification.

Anyway, the power allows her to utilize the Moon's light to do somewhat magical things. Why the Moon's light is different from the Sun's goes unexplained. Let's face it, the Moon makes no light of its own; it's just really good at reflecting the sun's light, so why are these two - Sunburner and Moonburner - different? That's another thing that's not gone into. Again I let it go.

I didn't get quite why Kai had to be raised as a boy, but maybe it was to do with her hair? I think I missed something somehwere, because on the one hand I thought the Moonburner's hair was supposed to become silver (the Sunburner's becomes gold) on her birthday, but apparently Kai's was silver from birth and her parents had to dye it to hide her true nature otherwise she'd have been left in the desert as a baby to die. This harks back to the ridiculous myth that the Spartans did the same to their children who were deemed unworthy. Maybe I misread or misunderstood something about the hair, but why there was no outrage about this barbaric treatment of newborns is left unaddressed.

Moving along, when Kai starts her classes at the Moonburner citadel, she also begins to learn that things are not what they seem and becomes involved in a literal underground. She also falls for the trope muscled Sunburner dude, which was sad and predictable for me. I don't know whether this is wish-fulfillment from these female authors or whether it's just that these book are conceived while these authors are ovulating, but it's insulting, you know? Anyway, in this particular novel, it wasn't dealt with too badly by the author, so I appreciated that, too.

Overall it was very readable, and I enjoyed it. I liked Kai as a character and enjoyed her gradual rise. It felt natural and organic, so there was nothing forced or magical about how she grew as a character, and that's both unusual in a YA novel and very much appreciated by me as a reader. I commend this novel as a worthy read.

These Feathered Flames by Alexandra Overy

Rating: WORTHY!

This appears to be the first volume of a series (technically a dilogy, as I discovered later), but I did not know this until I'd finished reading it and it ended on a sort of a cliffhanger. With very few exceptions, I'm not a fan of series since the first volume can only ever be a prologue, and I don't read prologues. Additionally, the other volumes are essentially repeating the same story over and over with a few minor variations. They're boring to me. I respect authors more who bring out new single volumes about different people having different adventures.

That said, this one turned out to be not bad at all. It reminded me in some small ways of my own Femarine, and it kept me engaged. Although there were parts of it that left me yawning a little, for the most part it moved and kept me moving with it. There was a hint here and there of romance, but it was not overdone, and I appreciated that. I found the idea of twin sisters, both fated to have different, but critical futures, quite engaging and the fresh take on the legend of the Firebird proved to be a really good one.

Let me deal with the elephant in the room first: Kindle! It's no revelation to anyone who reads my reviews that I am not a fan at all of Amazon and refuse to publish my books on that platform. I don't like them for a variety of reason, not least of which is the fact that they routinely turn their ebooks into Kindling. The Kindle conversion process will slice and dice anything that's not pretty much plain vanilla text, and even then it's sometimes touch and go as to whether a given book will make it through the process unscathed. This one did not, although it got off lightly.

One oddball thing I noticed, which I've seen before in Kindled books, was that everywhere the letters F and L appeared successively in a word, there was a space between them, so I read, for example, "Asya's hands tightened ref_lexively," and I also read, "warped ref_lections, with points where their images converged." The underscore I've added for clarity indicates where there was a space in the text and it occurred frequently throughout the novel in an assortment of words containing 'fl'. Why Kindle does this I do not know, but I've seen this same thing before in more than one ebook prior to this. Other than that, the text was fine except for the occasional intrusion of the page header into the text itself, such as when I read this about halfway down the screen:

An echoing screech that rattled down to Izaveta's bones.
THESE FEATHERED FLAMES 199
She looked up just in time to see the creature

But these intrusions were quite rare. (I did love that title - just not in the middle of my reading!). This is one reason why I never put page headers in my own novels. Another reason is that I see no point to it, but that's just me!

There was the occasional problem with grammar. We've all been there! The few I noticed were these:
"His gaze were unusually focused when he spoke." Which should read, 'his gaze was', or 'his eyes were'. A common one I've seen in YA books is the confusion of stanch with staunch. I read, "digging the fabric of her shirt into the cut to staunch the blood," which is wrong. The word is 'stanch'. Staunch means something else entirely. This issue was curious because this author with the amazing name of Alexandra Overy, uses the past participle of 'tread' perfectly, where other authors often get that wrong, using 'treaded' instead of 'trod'. At another point I read, "Asya gritted her jaw," but you can't grit your jaw. You can grit your teeth. Gritting teeth means to press or clench teeth together. You cannot therefore grit your jaw. Another curious instance was "trying to grasp on to her fracturing facade of confidence." 'Grasp on' felt wrong. 'Hold on' would have been better, or 'cling to'. I think the author was confusing grasp with grab, but grab wouldn't work there either.

Aside from that, the writing was fine and well done, which I appreciated. There was one oddity which I freely admit is a pet peeve of mine, and which use (or misuse!) seems to be coming more and more common. This is where someone uses a title but instead of saying I am 'so-and-so' they say 'my name is 'so-and-so'. For example, I read in this novel, "My name is Ambassador Täusch." But it really isn't, unless his first name does actually happen to be 'Ambassador'! What he ought to have said was "I'm Ambassador Täusch," but that said, people often misspeak, so maybe this squeaks by as an example of that!

The other issue connected with this was people referring to the queen incorrectly. If Täusch was truly an ambassador, then he really should know that you don't address a queen or a princess as "My lady." The correct approach is to address her initially as 'Your Majesty' and then subsequently use 'Ma'am'. This is British protocol, and both I and the author are British-born ex-pats as it happens. This novel is set in a Russian fantasy land, yet even there, 'Your Majesty' was used (or whatever the Russian equivalent was) when there used to be a queen. 'Your highness' is no longer used in Britain, but it was employed in Russia in imperial times. Not that I have any respect for the hereditary privilege of royalty or wealth, but for the sake of a story I'd use it.

In that regard, and purely from the perspective of story-telling, I found it inexcusable how disrespectful people were to the queen in this novel, and how little reaction she had to this. I know she was a teen and new to the throne, but everyone spoke to her not like she was the queen, but like she was this little girl. it was not only the queen who failed to react to this: no one else ever corrected people or took umbrage at this lack of deference! If felt wrong, and often jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief. Even Castelle, my young queen from Femarine who - the story makes clear - is shamefully lax in matters of propriety and protocol, was moved to comment on such laxity on occasion. Like I said, in real life I don't care about that nonsense, but in a novel like this I would expect someone to call out a person who wasn't respectful to a monarch. This was a relatively minor irritant, so I was willing to let it go for the sake of a good story though.

Now about that! I know it's taken a while to get here, but I'm nothing if not thorough in my reviews! So this story is of twins of royal blood in a fantasy world based on historical Russia. One of the twins, by tradition, is destined to become the Firebird - exacting a toll for the use of magic when said magic is enacted without paying a price (and they don't take American Express!); the other twin is destined to become the queen, succeeding their mother.

In Britain there used to be an exam called the 'eleven plus', which determined if a child went to a vocational school or to what used to be called a grammar school which was intended for the more academically-inclined. The system was not fair because it judged children and determined a future for them at far too early an age, so it was scrapped many years ago, but it seems the author has adopted this scheme for the twins, who at around that age - ten, eleven - were judged magically, in a ceremony which determined where they would end-up. It turned out that Asya would be the Firebird, and Izaveta the princess. They were separated and Asya sent to live with the queen's sister, who had become the Firebird a generation or more before.

When the queen dies unexpectedly early from a 'fever' Asya returns to the palace where her sister is in process of becoming queen. The two no longer know how to behave in each other's company because it's been so long, and they have both changed so much, and neither is properly ready to wield the power they have come into. The story is of their relationship, which I found intriguing, and of each's relationship to the queendom and the future. There are threats to their positions, both of them, because they are so young, and they neither of them know fully who they can trust - not even each other. I found the politics to be engrossing and entertaining - if on occasion annoying. There were times when the sisters acted foolishly, but they were also very young and inexperienced, so I was willing to let that side.

There were times when, if they'd only talked to each other and been honest, they could have averted a lot of the issues they faced. This is a common problem in YA stories, but it wasn't so bad here and again, the girls were young, so this could be explained away. Overall I loved how they interacted and grew into their roles, especially the firebird. I felt this was an amazing and inventive take on a myth, and done very well for the most part, and I commend this as a worthy read. That said I don't have any real interest in pursuing this story any further, because like I said, I'm not a fan of series - even if it's only two volumes, and I'm just not intrigued enough to read on. Your mileage may differ. I hope it does. because it's nice to find a series that really grips. I just don't find that very often.

Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane

Rating: WARTY!

I've been a big fan of Duane's ever since I read So You Want to be a Wizard? many years ago. This book I am sorry to report is not up to the same standard. The subject matter of this kind of a novel is really a bit of a tired topic at this point: social networks gone bad, MMORPGs, and that sort of thing, and you really need to bring something strong and new to it to get a good story, and while this one isn't lousy, it really isn't a great entertainment either. i read this some time ago and I cannot for the life of me recall what the content was in any detail, which speaks volumes about how little of an impressionism this made on me when I read it.

The author seems so enamored of the idea of MMPORGs that she spends far too much time delving into the game and its technology than in actually telling a truly interesting and engrossing story. it seems to me she should have let this stew for a while before writing it. The impression I had was that she'd just learned about these games, maybe played one or two and become entranced by them, and immediately decided to write a novel about one. She went into endless detail about the game, and all this served to do was to make her 'real life' characters seems flat, one dimension, and uninteresting. It was boring. I can't commend it at all.

Unison Spark by Andy Marino

Rating: WARTY!

This is the debut novel of the author and it was a fail for me for an assortment of reasons. I made it about halfway through and resented wasting even that much time. I had to keep forcing myself back into it - it wasn't like I couldn't wait to read the next bit, and the book felt like it was going nowhere slow. I couldn't get to a point where I liked either of the two main characters, couldn't see where it was going, couldn't get into the story. It was like work and I can't believe I stayed with it as long as I did.

The basic plot is that two characters - a boy and a girl - of course, live in this dystopian society - of course - composed of haves and have-nots with no gray area in between - of course. The boy is of one group, the girl of another - of course. It was so tedious and unimaginative. All they have in common is that they dream the same dreams and are clearly genetically or otherwise modified (brings a whole new meaning to binary relationship doesn't it?!), but the story took so long to even reach that point that I couldn't stand to read any more and ditched it, irritated that I'd foolishly wasted the time I'd already spent on it. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.