As Chimney Sweepers Come To Dust by Alan Bradley

Rating: WORTHY!

Flavia Sabina De Luce has been banished to Canada! Toronto to be precise. It’s a girls boarding school, which she has reached by extensive travel by ship and train, and on her first night there, due to some extraordinary circumstances (which you will never guess at, so read it and squee), a dead, desiccated body is discovered in her room. And that's just the first three chapters!

By about page two I was in love with this book and with Flavia, shameless cradle-robber that I am (Flavia is fourteen, the youngest of three daughters, the other two of which are Daffy and Feely. I want to meet the whole family). Alan Bradley is a talented writer who reminds me a lot of Gail Carriger - not in his looks, you understand, but in his style - although having said that, make no mistake that this is his style and not hers. If you like Carriger's writing, and you like some Brit in your lit, you'll doubtlessly like this.

I must confess that I'd never heard of the author until this novel came up for review. He's a Canadian writer who evidently has a really good grasp of English life (either that or the Canadians and the Brits have far more in common than ever I'd hitherto understood!). This isn’t the first in the series; there's a half-dozen others, none of which I've read, but which I'm now definitely planning on investigating forthwith:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
• The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
• A Red Herring Without Mustard
• I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
• Speaking from Among the Bones
• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

Fortunately, the stories are apparently self-contained because while reading this I never felt like I was missing any vital information. No novel is perfect, of course, so there were some instances where I had cause to question the writing, or more accurately, the thinking behind the writing, but there was nothing spectacularly adrift with it. It was generally well-written, with no spelling or grammatical errors that I noticed, and the problems were minor.

One of these relates to how Flavia's name is pronounced. The first syllable is 'flay', not 'flahh'. When a teacher mispronounces it, it's understandable, because she sees it written before she hears it, but when the police inspector mispronounces it, it makes no sense, since Flavia has already introduced herself to him by name!

Either this novel was not well-written in this particular aspect, or the inspector is stupid or nowhere near as perceptive as an inspector ought to be! This is a writing problem: you’re so used to seeing the word on the page and reading it rather than hearing it, that you forget that this is supposed to be a view of life - of people living and moving and having their being, part of which includes conversation. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget that words have sounds, otherwise you make mistakes like this.

To balance this out, let me add that I'd initially thought there was another instance of bad writing which turned out not to be so. Flavia knows who Diana Dors is. I found it highly unlikely that a 14-year-old from Flavia's background (even one who is well-educated) would not only have heard of an actor who died thirty years ago, but was also familiar enough with her to formulate the remark which she makes. It was only later that I discovered that this series is actually set in the fifties! This was quite amusing to me, because for the first page or so, I'd also thought the main character was a boy, and even when that was corrected, I'd thought it was a contemporary story!

Other than questionable instances like those (including questionable perception on my part!), the writing is excellent - and very entertaining. Flavia got into a spot of bother in Britain. She was drummed-out of the girl scouts for one thing, and so this hying to Canada was deemed to be the best thing for her. Endearingly, this girl who (literally) dreams of riding bicycles up stairs and running a chemical laboratory, was not in the least bit discombobulated a have this fascinatingly deceased body plummet into her life like a Christmas present from hell.

Here's another minor correction: we're told that the body is wrapped in a Union Jack, but that's a mistake. It's only a Union Jack when it's flying from a ship, otherwise the British flag is called just that: the Union Flag. To be fair, most people get that wrong, and though the author's "Brit speak" isn’t perfect, but he does a dashed good job of it, what? I was impressed.

On her first full day in the academy, Flavia rapidly becomes acquainted with a variety of other girls, but she never really makes friends. Some of those whom she meets, however, she purposefully cultivates in pursuit of her desire to solve this murder mystery. Evidently the body in her room is not the first girl who has gone missing at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy!

The story really starts to pick up when the principal, Ms Fawlthorne, shares a secret or two with Flavia, and this is the start of a trend. There are secrets galore, and weird behavior, and secret societies, and oddball behavior, and secret activities, and did I mention hidden secrets? Lot's of people are not who they seem to be. Through all of this, Flavia keeps her head. She's no Mary Sue, and far from perfect, screwing-up and breaking the rules, but she never gives up on her pursuit of the murderer. She's determined, resourceful, inventive, and eventually, she gets, as they say, "her man" (not that the perp is necessarily a man, understand).

That's not to say that Flavia is a Mary Sue by any means. She makes mistakes, but she's really smart, deeply interested in science, is feminine without being a wilting violet, she has times of strength and times of weakness, she has flashes of brilliance and flashes of dufus, and guess what? here's a YA novel with no male (or female!) love interest at all. How refreshing is that? As happy as I am to absorb a novel like this, I have to confess it makes me a little bit sad to think that it was a guy who created such an awesome and strong female character. How come he can do it and so many female writers fail in the same quest?

This was an especially refreshing read which I highly recommend, and I'll leave you with this amazing quote which made me laugh out loud. It does help if you properly understand British idiom, however:

"How are you finding it?" Merton asked. "Miss Bodycote's Female Academy I mean?"
"Frankly, Mr. Merton," I said, "Just between you, me, and the gatepost - it’s a bugger."

The Red Bishop by Greg Boose

Title: The Red Bishop
Author: Greg Boose
Publisher: Full Fathom Five
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

p105 "bicep" should be "biceps".
p115 "The glass in the pitcher clinked loudly." should be either "The ice in the pitcher clinked loudly." or "The glasses and the pitcher clinked loudly."

Kudos to Greg Boose for putting his prologue into chapter one. He must have known it was the only way to get me to read it, and it was awesome! Now pay attention you dedicated writers of prologues: Greg Boose has shown you the way out. It can be done! Free yourselves from the shackles of the antique prologue and embrace it chapter and terse!

Does Porsche tack tacky chrome bumpers onto their cars? No. They showed other manufacturers the way when they incorporated the bumper it right into the body of the car. Now everyone does it and cars look a lot sleeker for it. Dispense with those rusty, blemished prologues! Incorporate! And let me warn you that the tale in chapter one is gruesome, so don’t read it unless you grew some of your own.

The Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel had no margins. The text ran all the way to the edge of the page left and right, and pretty much top and bottom, too, which looked a bit odd. The novel begins on page five and runs to page 219, so that gives us some 215 loosely-spaced pages in thirty chapters. It’s a quick and easy read.

Now on to the story: Lake Price is a seventeen-year-old adrenalin junkie, but not one who is into extreme sports - unless you class running track as extreme. That's why Lake set out with three friends to stay overnight at the supposedly haunted Chatham Manor. The original plan was to go alone, but one thing led to another and eventually it led to the four of them: Lake, Madison, Ell, and Logan - two girls and two boys (you sort out which name goes to which gender!).

They had to break into the place through the basement, and it was creepy as all get out (which they didn’t do), but it wasn't the house that was haunted - it was Lake, haunted by the unsolved disappearance of a younger brother Kimball four years ago. Is Lake just about cheap thrills, or is there a death wish buried the requisite fathom deep in Lake's unfathomable depths?

Okay, I'll identify one character name and gender for you: Lake is the red head on the cover (big reveal, huh?!) and I initially liked her not from the picture, but from her guts and gusto as revealed in her actions. This was a character to appreciate, to empathize with, and to feel a bit sorry for even as you admire her bravado. Unfortunately, it didn't last!

Still wanting to be alone, Lake waits until the other three are asleep in the not-so-haunted house and she heads out into the nearby forest, where she discovers a really haunted house, which roils even the imperturbable Lake. You see, one of the things she finds in the house are belongings of her long-lost brother.

On the downside, I have to say I, er, lost faith in this novel around page sixty when the author, after a great lead-in about palindromes, got to rambling on about how the wife of Judas, the supposed betrayer of Jesus, was a witch who seduced her husband for the sole purpose of luring him into betraying the purported son of a god. This is nonsense.

I don’t believe there ever was a Jesus, son of a god, but pretending for a minute that it’s true, just for the sake of argument, it cannot be otherwise than that Judas was not evil, nor was he a betrayer. He was working with Jesus, not against him. Under the inane and bloodthirsty Christian cult of death, Jesus was a blood sacrifice, without which our sins could not be expunged (so much for the Christian god being omnipotent!).

Judas was an integral part of the scheme! Without the sacrifice, there could be no redemption, so I've never actually understood how Judas is the bad guy here. It makes no sense, and serves only to show how thoroughly screwed-up in the extreme Christianity truly is. Christians really need to take a look at what the original word - the word they now read as 'betrayed' actually meant: paradidomi means to hand over. Betrayal is a meaning it came to hold long afterwards.

Fortunately this nonsense was soon swept away by Lake herself. Here's a line she spoke from page 64: "I have four years of teenage rebellion built up in me and I am not afraid to use it." That was a charmer, but her distance perception is off significantly if she really thinks that Wilmington North Carolina is several thousand miles away from Chatham, Massachusetts! It’s actually less than a thousand, and less than 700 if you fly direct.

But that aside, it’s not long before Lake discovers a secret about her heritage and she's not only haunted by her brother's disappearance, but also by witches. It was suddenly time to do battle. So far so good, but the story began to go seriously downhill after this, and my fondness for Lake with it. The problem is John Billington, a teen from Plymouth (new England) who apparently was abducted by a witch in 1621, and held in a form of suspended animation or more accurately of suspended aging since then, through witchcraft.

The witches take children so they can eat their hair which is sustenance, apparently. They were allowed this under a loop-hole in a contract signed after the Salem witch trials. Seriously, there was a contract? Why they don’t just get jobs in barber's shops goes unexplained. When Lake killed one of the witches and freed her captive children, Billington was among them, but he shows absolutely no gratitude whatsoever. On the contrary: he's rude, abusive, and insulting to Lake. At this point I was seriously hoping we didn't have a so-called "love" triangle developing with this jerk and Ell, towards whom Lake had been making advances - when she's not abusively cold-shouldering him. As I read on, it became increasingly clear that my dire wish wasn't going to be granted.

Despite his dismissive and arrogant attitude, Lake has, of course, the hots for the four-hundred-year-old guy. The problem is that there was absolutely no reason whatsoever in evidence for this attraction. There's even less reason when she meets him later, following a sadly ham-fisted breach between her and Ell tossed-in for good measure. The story went straight downhill for me, because until this point I'd admired and respected Lake. I’d been on her side, but once she began actively swallowing unwarranted abuse and disrespect from Billington, instead of becoming angry and shunning him, she was betraying the very character she'd shown herself to be up to that point.

It was not only sad, but sick and I had to ask: do we seriously need yet another YA novel which depicts a young woman rewarding thoroughly inappropriate behavior with the cut-rate YA excuse for love (which is all we typically get in these novels)? I'd been thoroughly on-board with the story, but I became increasingly ready to jump ship as this went on unabated.

The records of the settlers do record a John Billington and his son, also John, they do not record John Jr. disappearing (except for a day or two in the woods, whence he was found and returned by native Americans - and this was despite the rampant pillaging of native American food stores by the Mayflower thieves upon their arrival. He's recorded as dying young, but several years after his arrival in Plymouth, not in 1621.

The unrealistic thing here is that Billington shows no sign of being at all traumatized by his suddenly (from his PoV) waking up in 2014. Neither does he speak remotely like a Puritan. Even his "outrage" that, without his permission, Lake kissed him (it’s how she frees children from the witch's spell) rang false.

It got worse when Halstead the witch expert started "training" Lake to fight the witches. Billington is also present for this, and also trains with her. I could not help but wonder why Lake's friends - who have already gone through the real thing with her - were excluded, but Billington the bore was included. Of course it provides a really clunky and very fake reason why the two of them are hanging out together, but it was nauseatingly done and not welcome as far as I was concerned.

This novel seemed fanatically determined to evolve into a train-wreck. We're told that John Billington has gold flecks in his eyes and muscular arms! The gold fleck trope is so over-used that it's actually nauseating now to have to read it time and time again in one YA novel after another. On top of that, there's no reason at all to think he was muscular except that this is yet another trope.

John Billington Junior's family history is essentially unknown, but given from whence they hailed, John senior was likely a fisherman. He was also a trouble-maker in New England who was eventually executed. It seems unlikely that his son was the gentleman portrayed here! The author seems to forget that four hundred years ago, people were significantly smaller than they are now. Lake would have towered intimidatingly over young John.

Lake further retreats from rectitude as she plays with the back of Ell's neck while continuing to have the hots for John. At one point she's reaffirming to herself that Ell is her boyfriend, and shortly after that she's passionately kissing John, something she never does with Ell. She behaves far more like a fifteen-year-old than ever she does a seventeen-year-old, and at this point in the novel I quit even liking her.

No one in their right mind would expect a girl like Lake to be blind to boys or to behave like a nun, but when you set someone up as the main character, especially one with a mission, and you give her a set of admirable traits, it's an awful thing to betray those very traits by subsequently rendering her as an air-headed waif with neither focus nor integrity! We've been given no reason at all for her to fall for John, and yet she's obsessed with him. Meanwhile, we've been told that her sole focus for four long years has been her brother, and now she's all but forgotten him in favor of mooning over John. It just did not read right.

This wouldn't have been so bad if we'd been given some realistic motivation for her behavior, but we've had no such thing. It's quite clear that the only reason she's behaving like this is that the author felt it necessary to give her not one, but two male "love" interests in her life because that's what the YA rut (and I do use that word ambiguously) demands. I have a lot more respect for authors who do not kow-tow to mindless trends than I do for ones who are slavishly dedicated to perpetuating YA trope and cliché.

It's an interesting revelation of Lake's character that she performs no chores whatsoever at her grandmother's B&B where she lives in the basement for free. Nor does she ever offer to help out. And she gets an allowance! I found it hard to believe that she wasn't involved in running the B&B at some level. This makes it harder to see how she managed to transition to what she supposedly became at the end. On an unrelated topic - but about one of her relations! - it's also interesting that every time we meet her grandmother, we're treated to a detailed description of what she's wearing - something which we never seem to get for any other character! I found this peculiar at first, and rather irritating as it continued.

Lake's behavior isn't the only thing which is off about this story. Ell behaves like a schizophrenic: one time when he drops Lake off for her training, he talks to her really snottily, but when he picks her up a bit later, he's all BFF, yet we're given no good reason for his earlier behavior and even less for his complete turn-around shortly thereafter. That's a minor consideration in comparison with Madison, Lake's female BFF, however. They're best friends and then for no reason at all, Madison starts acting like a complete spoiled-brat jerk right out of the blue. It was entirely unrealistic.

There are also events - like the flooding of the changing room, which no one else in the school seems to notice! There are no questions about why Madison was screaming, why hers and Lake's clothing is soaking and torn yet no one comments on it, or why they have bloody scratches on them, again which no one notices! I guess everyone in this school is blind!

The worst part about this whole thing is that it isn't the whole thing. It's episode one. It's a prologue. Nothing is resolved at the end; rather than a complete novel, we get only an introduction to volume two, which I now have no interest in reading, I have to say. While this 'partial novel' started out great, had some original ideas, and featured some decent action, the real problem was that it devolved too quickly into cliché, and the characters never seemed realistic to me. I was strongly in favor of the main character at the start, but her behavior and actions made little sense and spoke badly of her, so she lost my support long before the end of the novel.

In the final analysis, my whole reading experience was dissatisfying, and the novel was nowhere near impressive enough to make me want to rate this positively, or to induce me to read more in this series.

Dark Prayer by Natasha Mostert

Title: Dark Prayer
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic Ltd (website not found)
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p81 " Jungles' " should be " Jungles's " - since 'Jungles' is the guy's nickname, it's not a plural.

I've had mixed results with this author sometimes liking her work (two novels), other times not so much (one novel before this, now two novels). The problem in this case is that quite literally as soon as I began this novel I was simultaneously thinking that I wasn't going to like it.

A while ago I vowed never to read another novel which had a main character named Jack, and what did I read when I reached only the seventh word in chapter one? Yep. Jack. The problem is that when I made that vow, I still had a lot of novels in my reading list that I was committed to reviewing! A heck of a lot, including this one.

What's as disturbing as it is amusing is that a disproportionate number of those novels on my list seem to feature a character named Jack. Recently, post-vow, I even voluntarily took on a review of yet another novel with such a character as a favor to an author. Fortunately, that one turned out to be a worthy read, but I still didn't like the Jack character in it! I detest that name because it is the single most over-used and clichéd character name in writing history, and "Jack" - intended by the unimaginative author to be a rascal and a scalawag, typically ends up being a thoroughly obnoxious jack-ass.

It's tedious to have to keep on reading novels which suck on each other like so many incestuous vampires, re-employing so uninventive a character name just because they think it does all their work for them. It's also unrealistic, especially in this story. They're of Italian ancestry, Jack's father's name is Leon, yet he and his wife chose to name their son Jack? It doesn't flow. So here we go again!

Jack is of course (and quite predictably so) the spoiled brat ne'er-do-well son of a fabulously wealthy American businessman. He's given one last chance to reform or he'll be cut off by his father without a penny to his name. The bizarre thing is that his "job" is to fly to England to visit with an old college friend of his father's and provide whatever help he needs for as long as he needs it. This is almost as big of a mystery to Jack as it is to the reader. Why trust this perennial loser with an important task for a dear old friend? It made no sense to me, unless of course there was something truly under-hand going on and it involved Jack's own father as well as the college friend.

In England, Jack learns that the task with which he's charged is to get close to Daniel Barone's estranged daughter, Jenilee Gray. Jenilee went missing for almost two years and when she was discovered by a private investigator hired by Daniel, she was a different person, almost literally. She looked different, and behaved very differently from Jenilee, and now she goes by the name of Eloise Blake.

After she was located, Daniel had met with her and she had rebuffed him, yet he still feels a need to interfere because he thinks she's being targeted by someone who wants to kill her, but it seems more likely that he just wants to reclaim her. He sees her as a form of property. Unfortunately over the course of this novel, all we see change is that the property rights to Jenilee/Eloise are transferred from Daniel to Jack. In the end, that's killed this novel for me.

Jack is trapped in this reclamation plan of Daniel's, but his behavior still doesn't suggest that he has a decent bone in his body. Never once does he raise an objection, no matter how circumspectly, now matter how tentatively, to Daniel about how wrong it is to try and reel his daughter back in when she's made it quite clear she wants nothing to do with him. We can only guess at the reason she wanted out. Incest perhaps? Some dire family secret like misplaced parentage? Something else, like experimentation on a child? All of the above? Is it Daniel who's surreptitiously threatening her life and thereby trying to sway her back into his own fold?

The superficial reason why Jack is chosen to get close to her and find out what happened is that both he and Eloise are parkour devotees, and it may seem like a good reason. The problem is that Jack hasn't done parkour in ages, and it seemed to me unlikely that his cold and distant father would really know very much about his interests and habits, much less care about them to the point where he could bring this to his friend Daniel's attention. It's possible, I guess. Despite Kirkus's gushingly inane review of this novel (Kirkus almost uniformly positively reviews novels so their blessing is meaningless), Parkour actually plays very little part in it - at least in the portion I read, but I'm guessing it's somehow involved in a dramatic escape at the end.

My first real problem with Jack is how superficial he is. His only observation of this woman is how pretty Jenilee was, and how beautiful Eloise is. Admittedly he has at that point only photographs to go on, but this viewpoint doesn't change even after he gets to "know" her. His brainlessness is proven before we reach the half-way point by his blabbing that he loves Eloise when he barely knows her. It's pathetic, and so shallow that it's almost a parody.

I found it very sad that yet another female writer is promoting superficial looks right up front as the only important thing worth noting about a woman. I see this repeatedly in YA literature. It's abusive and it doesn't ameliorate it in the slightest to give your character odd eyes, like this 'makes her a bit ugly' so it's okay now to type her as beautiful and offer nothing else? And yes, rest assured that she does have the trope gold flecks in her eye! Here they're described as yellow, but it's still the same YA cliché that I see in almost every YA novel that has a so-called romantic angle. It's the LAW! Eyes have to have gold flecks in them! On. Pain. Of. Death! Deal with it! Sheesh!

This would not have been half as bad had Daniel given Jack a verbal portrait of Jenilee beforehand, thereby offering him something to admire, something to prick his interest or to stir his motivation, but this never happens. The meeting between Daniel and Jack is brief to the point of it being a prologue (there is also an actual prologue, which I skipped as I always do because if the writer doesn't think it's worthy of putting it right there in chapter one, then I don't think it's worth my time reading it - and I've never missed it).

The point here is that we learn nothing of the Jenilee who existed before the Eloise pushed her off stage - other than that she was overweight as judged from the photos! Jenilee 2.0, aka Eloise, is a slim & trim version because - once again the message is clear - only looks are important! All we're offered is the new "beautiful" contrasted with the old, out-dated "pretty" and that doesn't cut it any more. In fact, it's thoroughly inadequate. It's even sick. This attitude is further amplified on page 49 where Daniel's only important memory of two dead female family members is that "They were so beautiful" - because women have no other value than as set decorations. Yeah we get the message.

Women deserve a lot better than to be judged and categorized (and very effectively marginalized and dismissed from importance) by having some shallow loser named Jack rate them as "beautiful" or otherwise. It would have been a far more interesting challenge for a writer, from my PoV, to have Jack be the playboy he is, but then to fall for this woman (as we know he inevitably will because what is this if not yet another St George slaying the dragon and rescuing the helpless maiden story?) not because she's a snappily-dressed beauty queen, but because she's the very opposite: in short, that she's actually a real woman rather than a Barbie doll. Why won't writers do this? My feeling is that it's because it's a lot easier not to do all that work, that's why.

Back to the story. Superficially, it would seem that Jenilee simply got scared of something and purposefully chose to go into hiding, but we also get the story from Eloise's PoV, and it's clear that something's going on with her that makes this a bit more complex. It's like she has flashbacks or hidden memories threatening to resurface, or something, and she doesn't know what those are. She's all but living in poverty now, working on a market stall in London, and spending a lot of her time parkour running - and stealing books! Unfortunately the admirable parts of her character are all-too-quickly subsumed under the need to render her into a damsel in distress so "Dashing Jack" can rescue her. I'm really surprised that Jack isn't some sort of captain.

It struck me as odd, given the circumstances of her 'disappearance' that no one is even slightly suspicious that there must be something dangerous going on. Daniel thinks she's had some sort of dissociative episode, but he does believe that someone is trying to kill her (or at least that what the writer wants we readers to believe!), and no one seems to connect that with the curious details of her disappearance, which I'm not going to relate here. I was sorry that Jack didn't think to ask the private detective about Daniel himself and his mysterious house-mate Francis Godine. I think those two know a lot more than we're being told!

On page 72, there's a line of text taken straight from the movie There's a Girl in my Soup - a dear favorite of mine featuring Peter Sellars and Goldie Hawn, except that the line was changed in the movie from the original play (which at the time was the longest running comedy play in the history of the West End). Playwright Terence Frisby had it better: "My eyes feel like two rissoles in the snow". Unfortunately, the Americans don't know what rissoles are, so I guess that's why it was changed, but the changed version makes no sense in the context in which it's offered. The movie is very dated now (the play is from the mid-sixties, the movie from the seventies), but I recommend it; both Hawn and Sellars are priceless.

The ease with which Jack associates himself with Eloise is not credible. We're told that she's a highly suspicious person (as should be expected, given what's happened to her), yet she takes to Jack like a duck to water. I didn't buy it at all. It was too easy, especially given how they met, and soon they're bosom buddies, with Jack even resenting her platonic relationship with her muscular friend 'Jungles'.

At one point Jack harbors an unspoken snide observation about Jungles drinking green tea. He associated that with an aversion to caffeine, but unless it's decaff (which isn't specified here), green tea actually contains caffeine! Depending on how long it's brewed (which ideally is tied to quality: the higher quality being brewed for a shorter time) it can contain just as much caffeine as does black tea, so either the author or Jack isn't very well-informed here.

In the Adobe Digital Editions version of this novel, on page 97, there's a link to a New York Times article - a link which is broken. I don't know if this is on purpose because the article is fake or what. I've seen this in other novels too. It's just irritating! I suspect it's an error - a fake URL actually showing up as a real link in ADE. Anyway, to cut a long review short, the story progresses as it should, with Jack discovering more about Eloise, and becoming ever more intrigued as the mystery deepens. The big question is what's going to transpire when she discovers that he's been stalking her? Well, there's an app for that!

Eloise was not as impressive as she might sound from the early rushes. Given what she's been through, I would have expected more caution on her part, yet she displays a disturbing lack of it on too many occasions, which flatly contradicts her behavior at other points in the story. For example, one time she takes a bath and fails to lock doors even though she had a creepy (if unsubstantiated) feeling that there was someone in the house. This made no sense.

What really turned me off this story, however, was when I got into the 150 page range, where Super-Jack swoops in on poor, lost Eloise and takes over her life. It was at this point that I decided I did not want to read yet another story about how weak and ineffectual women are, and how desperately beholden they are that there are dashing men readily available to save them. I did not want to continue reading this story about a devilish guy named Jack telling a woman - a woman who had hitherto proven herself commendably independent and strong - what to do, and the woman submissively letting him take the reins because let's face it, women are really just little girls who desperately need a macho daddy figure to take care of everything for them, aren't they? That's the take home lesson here, at any rate, regardless of what sycophants at certain widely quoted review websites may claim!

I couldn't read any more of this after that point, so I can't comment on the ending except to say I already know exactly how it will turn out: Devil-may-care Jack (an American who says "Bloody!") will get his chickie. Of course he will. All I can say is I cannot in good faith recommend a novel which infantilizes women so inexcusably as this one does.

Girl Jacked by Christopher Greyson

Title: Girl Jacked
Author: Christopher Greyson
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another tedious trope novel with a main character named Jack. Yep, I know I swore off these rather vehemently, but I still have some relics in my collection which I need to read - which explains why I'm trying to get this one off the list asap. On the bright side, the way it began, this novel did make me feel quite strongly that it probably wouldn't be long before I was DNF-ing this F-ing cliché.

So what's the problem with "Jack"? Well, only that it's the single most gut-wrenchingly and nauseatingly over-fricking-used cliché character name ever where the purported hero is supposed to be some sort of an adventurer or a scalawag. Seriously - are authors so blinkered and entrenched in deep muddy ruts that they can't get their heads out of their boxed-in asses and come up with something fresh, new, different? Evidently this one can't, and Jack isn't his only problem.

Jack is a cop and we meet him as he's called to a bar around midnight in response to a 10-10, which is generally taken to mean that a fight is in progress. There is no fight, but clichéd men described as 'lumberjacks' are getting rowdy and refusing to leave unless they get a drink. Jack quickly sorts them out. As they're leaving the parking lot, a colleague arrives as back-up. She's your clichéd buddy female cop named Kendra, and her only qualities are evidently that she's athletic and beautiful - despite a scar! Nothing else matters. No one cares if she's good at her job, loyal, has integrity, is smart, is tough, can handle herself, always has your back, is sweet, is crazy, is a softy, or what the hell else. No, she's a woman so the only important thing we ever need know about her is whether she's beautiful. Not cute. Not pretty. Not average. Not good-looking, but beautiful. Got that? Embrace it and internalize it. I'm already really down on this novel at this point, but it gets worse.

Jack arrives back at his apartment - where he's having your standard trope clichéd problems, to find a young naked chick there who is the (foster) sister of his requisite dead black Iraq military BFF. Trope trope trope. And trope. This "kid" as he condescendingly refers to her, is here to report the disappearance of Jack's other BFF, Michelle, who went off to college on a scholarship, and then promptly disappeared.

When we hit chapter four and the action was suspended for a reminisce back to Iraq, I ditched this. I've never read a novel before where the boredom was interrupted to provide something even more boring! I simply wasn't interested in reading any more at that point and I have absolutely no desire to read a series about a tedious character like this in a tedious world like this. It was past time to move on a find something which can hold my interest and entertain me. I can't rate this novel as a worthy read.

Evolution by Kelly Carrero

Title: Evolution
Author: Kelly Carrero
Publisher: Kelly Carrero
Rating: WARTY!

This novel is one of a series of at least five, every one of which has pretty much the same cover. It's about a teen named Jade who is one of the most helpless, clueless, self-centered, unmotivated, blinkered, useless, and weak female characters I've ever encountered (and that's saying something in YA literature!). We meet her when she's leaving the hospital after a car accident the day before. She had received a gash on her head, but this morning it's completely healed leaving no scar. She knows something is wrong, or weird, or whatever. She doesn’t know what it is.

The novel is technically competent - there are no major grammatical gaffs that I noticed, or spelling screw-ups. The author knows the difference between the verbs to lie, and to lay, and uses the latter correctly (as far as I can tell!), which is always a good sign. I did encounter problems, however. One annoyance arose chapter 2, right before things start going off the rails somewhat for Jade. It's where she's talking with new BFF Chelsea (stay tuned for a bizarre snippet about her old BFF) about finding a suitable guy, and the guy in question is Ben. Jade "boosts" his appeal by saying that he's filled out, got rid of his braces, and started wearing contacts. She says nothing about the kind of person he is.

I find it just as obnoxious when guys are objectified as I do when girls are. But this is worse. Even from Jade's shamefully juvenile and blinkered perspective, she's insulting. Is he ugly in eye glasses? Is he ugly with braces? Is he ugly because he's on the slender side? More importantly, is there nothing appealing about Ben other than what’s skin deep? Not in this author's lexicon evidently.

I know it’s not any particular author's job to change the cultural brain-washing we undergo at the behest of corporate interests behind the fashion and media megabucks industries, but is it not a collective responsibility for writers to move away from trope and cliché and try to serve our readers better? Must we persist in wallowing in the cultural mires of yesteryear, adding to the foul stench of mediocrity every time we write a novel? Does no one want to take the road less traveled? I think readers deserve better, especially young adult readers.

Jade discovers (in a tedious drawn-out and frustratingly obtuse chapter three) that she's immortal. This incidence of people humming and hawing, and dancing around a topic 'til the cows come home, never giving a straight answer, is rife in this novel and it’s irritating as hell. Her boyfriend already knew, but said not a word to her until she caught fire in school (exactly how this happened went unexplained) and yet remained completely unharmed from it. Rather than let the school deal with it, Aiden essentially kidnaps her from school and takes her home with him.

This is so insane, inappropriate, and ridiculous that it defies polite commentary, yet we keep seeing these wildly inauthentic behaviors from Jade and Aiden (Jaiden) with zero consequences. No one ever calls them on it. They're never required to explain their behavior, and there is never any sanction or punishment for it.

Instead of telling jade what she needs to know on the way out of the school, or during the drive to his house, or immediately when they get there, Aiden (how misnamed is he? He offers no aid!) says nothing until she's showered and changed at his house; then he drags out the most brain-dead and fumbled attempt at an explanation ever!

Its not until his mom gets home - a mom who looks impossibly young to be his mom - that Jade begins to learn anything, but that's when she freaks out, and becomes a weepy, girl having an attack of the wilts and the vapors, and is desperately in need Aiden's tender mercies, without which she cannot even stand up on her own - sometimes literally!

That's how stupid and weak she is. Maybe she does use only one eighth of her brain, unlike the rest of us! Aiden's sole idea of calming her is to repeatedly tell her how beautiful and perfect she is. Forget about what's in her brain - let's just stop at skin depth because nothing else matters, does it? She only uses one eighth of her brain anyway so why would it be important at all? She's so shallow that this actually works on her.

The "explanation" she's given is even more ridiculous and it once more trots out that OUTRIGHT LIE that we use only one tenth of our brain - which in this case is enlarged slightly to one eighth - in short, what we get here is the same explanation as appears in the Luc Besson movie Lucy. But it's all bullshit! You use all of your brain - not every neuron every single minute of every day, but all of it routinely.

Different parts of it do different things, so unless you're majorly multi-tasking, there isn't any need for your brain to run at top speed across its breadth and width all the time. It's extremely expensive for it to do so in terms of energy use! Look at it this way: do you wear all your clothes all the time? Unless you're homeless, I doubt it. So what if someone came to you and said, look, you're only ever wearing one-eighth of your wardrobe at one time, so let's give the rest to charity, would you think that a brilliant idea (not a selfless and perhaps morally praise-worthy idea, but a really intelligent idea)? You might, until your clothes are dirty and you find your wardrobe is seriously malfunctioning in that it’s bare!

Just because you don’t wear all your clothes all the time doesn't mean you don’t need some extra ones to change into. Just because you don’t drive your car all the time doesn't mean you have no use for it. Just because the bus you ride to school or work doesn't have all the seats filled all the time doesn't mean they’re not needed or ever used. Just because the classrooms are empty between periods and overnight doesn't mean the school is unnecessary!

Kelly Carrero seems to be yet another person who needs a good education on the important topic of biological evolution, too, especially if she's going to employ that very term for a novel title. Evolution isn’t a god. It doesn't plan. It doesn't have goals. Evolution can’t honestly be personified, but if it were to be, it would be classed as an opportunist. It’s a sneak thief. It will wait for an opportunity, and then run with it. Biologists will tell you that it’s the intersection between random mutation and non-random selection resulting from environmental influences and opportunities, but even the mutation isn’t random in the sense that most people view randomness. It’s not a case where anything can happen. There are tight constraints on this 'random', held in place by the laws of chemistry.

Creationists will say that most mutations are harmful, but this is a lie. Most mutations do nothing because they occur in the massive wasteland of junk DNA, which has no effect on an organism, unless the mutation happens to fall into a dead gene and reactivate it. Those mutations which occur in a gene can be harmful, but only if they damage the gene, or turn it off - or on - inappropriately, but the genetic make-up has built-in redundancy, so even a harmful mutation to a given gene might not adversely affect the organism if a back-up gene is working fine.

Now what does any of this have to do with this novel? Nothing! We’re simply told it’s evolution at work - the next step - like evolution is a butler awaiting the master's return so the house can be locked up, and clothes put away. It’s not. The implication here is that the brain is waiting for a mutation to turn it on so we can use it all, but evolution would not support an organ as expensive as the brain if it were not being used fully already. There is no slack to be taken up, and no genetic mutation can suddenly turn it on and open the floodgates. It’s far more complex than that.

Even if such a thing could occur, how does opening up the "unused seven eighths" promote rapid healing? How does it promote a person's ability to move at super-human speed or read minds? It doesn’t. It can’t. So this is all patent nonsense. Now I have no problem with a story which posits that there are people with special powers, On the contrary, I rather enjoy them - but only if they're well-written and don’t try to come up with juvenile and nonsensical non-explanations for these magical powers. Just wave your hand at something vague and I'm good to go. Please don’t try to rationalize it scientifically, because it cannot be done and it makes the author look lazy, or stupid, or completely unimaginative!

But no author could look as bad as Jade. Or get away with what she gets away with. At school, Jade angrily punches her old BFF (I said I’d get back to her) in the face, in the cafeteria in full view of everyone, literally knocking her into the next table where Chrissy falls unconscious. Instead of taking responsibility for it, or trying to see if her friend is really okay, Jaiden flees the school and goes home - again with no consequences and with zero remorse or guilt.

Jade then takes her Rottweiler out for a walk, and when it wants to chase a cat, she literally lets it go, and she goes right on into the house without a thought for where the dog will go, whether it will run into traffic, get killed, cause an accident, whether it will happen upon young kids and scare the crap out of them. She's that irresponsible. I took a strong disliking to her rather quickly.

Jade is really worthless which is why I cannot recommend this story. I don’t want to read about weak women unless the point of the story is to witness their empowerment and triumph. I don’t want to read about yet another YA main character who is nothing more than a male appendage. I don't want to read another superficial YA novel which is all about perfection and beauty with nothing underneath, and with entirely unrealistic and wildly inappropriate behavior in crisis situations.

Jade was far too hopeless and limp for me to even remotely like her, and she doesn’t show any sign of improvement over the entire course of the novel. She shows neither backbone nor smarts, nor any sign of independence and self-motivation. It’s obvious to everyone but Jade that the kidnapper didn’t want Chelsea. He wanted Jade. Even when Jade discovers where Chelsea is and has a chance to talk to her, she doesn’t even think for a second about asking Chelsea how she got to be taken, and how long they traveled, to try and figure out where she is. She makes no move to free Chelsea so that there will be two of them free to fight-off the kidnapper if he returns.

The novel is quite simply not realistic on so many levels - and I'm not even talking about super powers here. Despite being held prisoner without food or water for several days, Chelsea has no problem being lively and perky, and making jokes. There's no sign of weariness, weakness, or fear. There is no smell from any bodily functions she must have experienced in three days strapped to a chair in a cage. Another character in this novel has vital information about the kidnapping, but fails to reveal it, and no reason whatsoever is given to either explain or justify her behavior.

Aiden the moron keeps butting in on Jade's thoughts at the most inappropriate of times, making her look even more of an air-head than she already is when she tunes out the rest of the world to focus solely on what he's telling her to do. She can't multi-task! Aiden's behavior in that regard came across to me as nothing but a form of rape. The ironic thing is that he neglects to tell her the things she really needs to know when he butts in like this, so she's constantly in a state of ignorance.

The novel ends in a huge cliffhanger which makes no sense. Of course, it makes sense if your only purpose is to milk a novel for every penny you can squeeze from it instead of doing the work of creating something new and different. From the perspective of telling a good story though, if Jade gets a series of visions when there is a threat to Chelsea, her best friend, how come she gets zero visions when there's a threat to her own mom - a threat which is neither justified nor explained?

I'm sorry but this novel was far too vacuous and unrealistic for me to like it. It was poorly thought-out and badly written in terms of world-building and filling-in background. It felt like the second novel in a series when it was actually the first, and I have no interest in following a series that's as lacking in entertainment value and promises as little as this one did.

The Silence of Six by EC Myers

Title: The Silence of Six
Author: EC Myers
Publisher: Adaptive Books
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I was really impressed with this novel from the start and found myself quickly drawn-in and really wanting to swipe the screens. It’s an object lesson in how to write a story which pulls people in and keeps 'em hooked. It has some ups and downs, but overall, I rate it a very worthy read.

Maxwell is a high-school student who attends a presidential debate which is being held at his school. As it's winding up, at the end of question-time, someone hacks into the screen being used on stage; a young person wearing a mask appears, and asks the two presidential candidates, "What is the silence of six and what are you going to do about it?" before shooting himself. Max is acutely disturbed as he sees that this is his hacker friend Evan. Max has been out of hacking for a year or so, but Evan never left, and he has some secrets of which Max is unaware. As the students are filing out of the auditorium, their laptops, pads and phones are confiscated 'for reasons of national security'.

Max suddenly realizes that there's more going on here than simply a joke hack or a suicide. He returns to his hacker roots, logging into a secret forum which he hasn’t accessed for a year. The names he sees are familiar, but they're suspicious of him. One of them - Doublethink - opens a private side-channel and requests a meeting in person. Max decides it’s time for a face-to-face, but already there are dark SUVs following him, so he decides to go on the run.

This novel is really well-written. It has intrigue and danger, it has smart computer talk, and it sounds realistic from the off. Doublethink is particularly intriguing, but I can't tell you any more without ruining the surprises the author has in store. Max has some narrow escapes, makes new friends, meets fascinating and dangerous characters, all the while circling around the clues and hints that Evan has evidently left for him. And also Max carries the guilty burden of the fact that Evan had reached out to him several times recently and Max had been too busy, preoccupied or otherwise distracted to connect with him again.

There were some weaknesses in the story. The main one is one we always find in this kind of story: there are points where Max has enough information at his disposal that he could have gone online with it, thereby at least taking some of the pressure off himself. There's no good reason offered to explain why he doesn’t do this. Later an explanation is offered, but I'm not convinced that it was a good one! Also at one point Max says "…looking for whomever was using the computer…" No one speaks like that. Writers write like that, and it’s like an itch when you don’t use the correct grammatical form, but it’s entirely wrong to have people speak like that when almost no-one - especially not kids - actually does.

So, not perfect, but a short, fast, and very entertaining read which I recommend.

Broken Symmetry by Dan Rix

Title: Broken Symmetry
Author: Dan Rix
Publisher: Lavabrook Publishing Group
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
P93 "…unlocked the dead bold…" should be "…unlocked the dead bolt…"

Well, it';s December 2nd, so it must be time for a novel starting with the letter 'B' - and today it's Broken Symmetry. You might be surprised at how many books are out there with that title, or something similar! I started out really liking this because it's sci-fi with an interesting premise (at least one which interests me: it takes the concept of 'mirror worlds' quite literally).

The biggest problem (apart from the fact that the cover has nothing to do with the novel - as usual!) was that it was a YA first person PoV novel, and typically, they suck. At best they're rather irritating because it’s all ME! All the time. I'm not a fan of the self-obsessed, or the arrogant. Nor do I find it credible that someone can tell a story about themselves and remember events in mega-detail or conversations verbatim. I know that writers think that this 1poV approach brings immediacy to the reader and makes them identify, but if you have to employee 1PoV to achieve that, then there’s something wrong with your writing skills in my opinion.

In the final analysis, none of this works with me because it’s quite simply not realistic and unless it’s very well done, which is rare, it’s a constant distraction from the actual story. I keep wanting to say "My-oh-my! Aren't you just special?" or saying, "Sucks to be you, doesn't it?"

What makes one of these kinds of stories even worse is if it’s told by a young female and she's a moron, which is glaringly the case here. Blaire Adams, the main character in this novel, goes above and beyond that call of duty and proves herself to be a professional moron, and proudly so: she's clueless, inept, idiotic, and weak. As if that's not bad enough, she falls for the bad boy, Damian, for no other reason than that it’s constitutional law in the USA that you cannot have a first person PoV YA girl fall in love with an ordinary or decent guy. It has to be a bad boy with hair falling into eyes which have gold flecks in them. IT'S TEDIOUS to keep reading this in novel after novel. Show some originality PLEASE!

Here’s an example of how fundamentally dumb Blaire is: She tries to break into a police station! As if that's not bad enough, she takes up an internship in the company which employed her father. She's so air-headed that she forget that this is where her father worked, despite her obsession with trying to discover what happened to him. She's determined to discover how it was that he went missing for almost a year and then died from some obscure injuries when he finally showed up, and it’s this which prompts her to take up the internship.

One of the tasks assigned to her is to clean up the shards of a broken mirror. There's a chute in the floor where the broken glass goes. Her boss has told her that they test mirrors to breaking point in this room - and she believed him. The room is quite dark and Blaire is too stupid to ask for the light to be turned on, or to turn it on herself. She asks for neither gloves nor a brush. She doesn’t even think to sweep the shards into the chute with her feet, which at least have the protection of her shoes. Instead she picks up the shards in her hands in the dark and then runs her bare hands over the floor to check if she missed anything. She's a moron. But of course this allows her to get a cut which the bad boy can then tenderly and lovingly tend to, even as he's dissing her and ignoring her questions. Seriously? This was god-awful writing.

There's a big red button on the wall in the 'mirror room', and her boss tells her not to touch it, so of course Brain-dead Blaire presses it and breaks the new mirror she just installed. Despite having some sort of vision of Damian murdering her next door neighbor and burning his house down, she's immediately and powerfully attracted to him. You know they're going to be an item as soon as she says she hates him. It’s that painfully obvious. This is so clichéd as to be farcical.

The guy is a jerk. He has poor hygiene and treats her like dirt, and she falls for him. Is this really what we want to be telling young women? It would have made a better story if she'd ditched dickhead Damian, and fallen for Amy! But that wouldn't work because this is YA and the author would be arrested on capital crime charges he didn’t pair a girl with a boy. You know that.

It’s quite obvious even if you haven't read the blurb what’s going on here, but Blaire is also evidently blind as well as premeditatedly stupid. Not literally blind, just mentally. She can’t figure out what’s going on, no matter how many clues she gets. Bad Boy treats her so badly that she gets no clues from him, and eventually her new boss has to spell it out for her.

Charles and Damian do a piss-poor job of educating Blaire about what’s happening here. It would help if they had the first clue about physics and the difference between physics and chemistry. When Charles is obfuscating, Blaire observes, "I took chemistry last year", but what he's trying to explain has nothing to do with chemistry and this makes her look ever more dumb.

We're biological beings, but biology is based on organic chemistry which is a sub-set of chemistry. Chemistry itself is a subset of physics, and physics is a subset of math. What Charles is trying to tell her is that sub-atomic studies are not only applicable at the macro level (the level of the human body as opposed to sub-atomic level), but controllable there, too. This isn't actually true because the trillions upon trillions of statistical probabilities at the sub-atomic level are 'ironed out' at the macro level, which gives us our concept of a good, solid reality.

What Charles is trying to explain is that reality isn’t what it appears to be, and the bottom line is that with training, and because of her 47th chromosome, Blaire can walk through a mirror and be in in a parallel reality. That a mirror can play a role in this is one of the conceits of this novel. It makes no sense, but you have to let that slide to enjoy the story. This is where the BS comes in (BS is for breaking symmetry and for a well-known dismissive expletive, too!). The author's 'explanation' of the double-slit experiment is nonsensical. You can get a better one here in wikipedia.

This novel is rather confused. At one point, for example, Charles says that parallel worlds have been proved, which actually isn't true, and then just a couple of paragraphs later, Damian is telling Blaire that these worlds are not real. Perhaps he means something other than what I think he means by that, but it isn’t very clear. They're either real or they're not.

The problem is that it gets worse. Damian starts babbling inane philosophical ideas - like that old saw: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Well of course it does! Basic physics will tell you that, and I guarantee you that if it fell on a deaf person the person would make an horrific sound! What this has to do with the symmetry he was discussing earlier, I have no idea, because all the previous rambling on about sub-atomic particles and quantum states is summarily tossed out the window at this point and we change the whole scenario to simple mirror symmetry as Blaire and Damian prepare to go through.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum states. Instead, we're now told that everything is reversed once you go through the mirror, and that you can only return through the mirror by which you left, otherwise you won't come back to the source point, but instead go into yet another symmetrical world. Despite having this technology and ability, they're reduced to marking the mirror with painter's masking tape - red to indicate the outgoing side of the source mirror, and blue to mark that mirror on the reverse side so they can be sure they come back through the same mirror. Never mind that painter's tape is specifically designed to come away from surfaces very easily.

Here the whole story becomes hilarious because Damian constantly declares his conviction that Blaire doesn't know what she's doing, that she isn't safe, that this is dangerous, yet no one in this whole enterprise insists upon more training for her! Anyone who actually cared about Blaire would have insisted she not go until she was properly prepared. Damian doesn’t. Quite the contrary. Instead, he indulges himself in a kind of rape - as a joke, yet - when he tells Blaire that she must take off her clothes to travel through. He waits until she's down to her underwear before he tells her he was joking. Way to go, Damian, you lowlife jerk-off. What an hilarious joke. Yeah, right at the point where you're going to indulge in a life-threatening activity (for no good reason! Read on for more on this) with a girl who is woefully under-prepared, go ahead and trick her into undressing for you. Damian is a lowlife jack-ass and that's all there is to him.

Worse than this (imagine that if you can!), even Blaire knows she's under-prepared. She's told she must destroy the mirror when she returns and she fails to remember that she already broke a mirror by hitting the red button. She's a moron. She's not ready. I guess she and Damian actually do deserve each other.

Despite all of this, I could understand it if there was some urgent or life-saving reason why they simply had to go through despite the risks, but there isn’t. Neither Damian nor Charles has articulated one single reason why there needs to be travel through the mirrors. Not one. Blaire is too dumb to ask, Damian is too much of a moron to care for her, yet here they are going through. Damian hints repeatedly that if Blaire wants the truth she must go through, yet he's offered her no truth! On the contrary, he's specifically told her that none of these worlds are real. What possible truth could lie there?

The story just went from bad to worse (if that's even possible at this point) when Blaire - completely uneducated, completely unprepared, and worse, none too smart (she's too dumb to put on a seat-belt in a get-away car without being told) - steps through the looking glass into Wonderland. We still have absolutely no reason whatsoever which would compel someone like Blaire to do any of this. When she begins, we still have no explanation whatsoever as to what is supposed to be accomplished by taking these life-threatening risks. Yet she blindly goes right ahead and does it.

Damian has done literally nothing to properly prepare her for this trip - nothing at all beyond vague hints at unspecified dangers. He hasn’t warned her that each trip (for no reason at all, evidently) steals a little bit of her. The way they get through the mirror is to press against it (and note that Damian specifies that you can’t press too hard). This of course necessitates his holding her hand! Could we be any more ham-fisted than this in our story-telling?

Immediately they get through, Blaire becomes disoriented and so nauseated that she vomits; then she starts acting like she's drunk - apparently you get a high from crossing over! None of this was properly explained by Damian the dumbass. Neither was the fact that, once they get through, Blaire's job is to "distract the guards" at a military facility while Damian "sneaks up" on them and shoots them in the head.

Seriously? Note that wimp Blaire doesn’t even bat an eyelid at the brutal violence unleashed by Damian. She doesn’t get nauseated. She isn’t grossed out by it. She isn’t shocked by it. She doesn’t change her opinion of Damian because of it. She merely, calmly voices some 'concerns' over it later! That was totally weird given the character to whom we’ve been introduced thus far.

Worse than this are two really bad plotting issues. The first harks back to what Damian told Blaire about not pressing too hard on the mirror. When Blaire asks Damian why they can't use reflections in windows to "break symmetry", he says it’s impossible because it would require pressing too hard! Huh?

Another really dumb issue results from Damian going on another solo mission and getting himself arrested. How Charles knows this, since he hasn’t gone through, nor has he been in touch with Damian, is an unexplained mystery, but now Charles wants Blaire to go through and break Damian out of jail! This is after we’ve been explicitly told that they can only go through together - remember the hand-holding incident? This novel makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

At this point I was ready to ditch is as a classic example of atrocious plotting and poor writing, but I admit I was curious to find out just what the hell it was that made these dangerous trips "necessary", and it seems that the only purpose for this is that the government has found the 47th chromosome! The author writes this like no one has ever been found to have an extra chromosome - or with one short!

In reality, this happens quite frequently and usually results in serious physical problems for the bearer, so unless the Chromosome 47 in this novel is something truly extra-super-special, it’s no big deal! Moreover, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to build a military facility to map it. The military already has genetic mapping devices. It takes very little time to do the work these days. They could have had it done in one of their already restricted facilities instead of drawing attention to themselves by spending millions on building a (not so) secret subterranean facility. Again, nothing in this novel makes sense.

At this point, 40% into the novel, I resolved to go to the half-way point (which should cover Blaire's first solo mission), and if it continued to be just as bad, I would summarily ditch it and move onto something that was:

1. Well written
2. Had an intelligent female character
3. Made sense
4. Had a clue about science

That was the plan! It didn’t proceed well. Blaire's scheme to get Damian sprung from jail is to take the return mirror with her to the jail so they can both simply step through it and escape! Despite hauling a six foot mirror into the jail, she has really no problem in visiting the prisoner, and her plan works. Seriously? Is this a YA novel or a middle-grade story?

Her entire behavior during this part of the story completely betrays what went before. Carrying the mirror around, she was constantly remarking to herself about how this would be a disaster if it broke or cracked, yet when she first went through, Damian had gone out of his way to show her how tough these mirrors were - she couldn’t even put a crack in it by punching or kicking it and neither could Damian. Now she's worried about how fragile it is?!!

Her next mission is to impersonate Jennifer Cupertino - a post-doc who works at this supposedly top secret facility! Seriously? Why would they let anyone in there who didn’t need to be there? And why does no one at this top secret facility have picture IDs? Blaire breaks into Jennifer's apartment and steals her purse and then her car, but Jennifer sees her. Blaire thinks this is fine because she's taking the car and Jennifer can’t get there before she does. Apparently this dumb-ass doesn’t think for a minute that maybe Jennifer could call in to the facility and warn them that someone stole her ID! This is what Jennifer does, but it takes her an hour to do it. Why? No explanation. Meanwhile Blaire escapes a top secret military facility with no effort at all. This is pure bullshit and I can't even remotely recommend this pile of garbage.

Don't Call Me Baby by Gwendolyn Heasley

Title: Don't Call Me Baby
Author: Gwendolyn Heasley
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WARTY!

I didn't get very far in this novel. The blurb made it sound interesting, but that just means that the blurb did its job. The real test is whether the book actually is interesting, and this one was certainly not. It should have been titled "Don't Call me Brainy".

The conceit here is that for over fifteen years (I may be wrong but I seriously doubt that cover model is fifteen! And why show her legs?), the rather pretentiously-named Imogene has been blogged by her mom - who is making money from the blog. The blog is Imogene's life, starting from when she was in the womb. In fifteen years and some, poor Imogene's mom has yet to get a clue how to raise her daughter, and has not the first concept that a kid entering her teens - let alone well into them - needs independence and privacy. She needs her own life.

That might have made for an interesting story, but get this: the book is written in first person by Imogene herself (so we're supposed to believe). Now this is a girl who is bitching and whining and moaning that her mother gives her no privacy because she's blogging her whole life, and yet here is that same whiny-assed kid writing this story, blabbing all of her personal details to everyone even as she complains that her mother is blabbing all her personal details to everyone. Take a minute or two to think about the incestuous irony of that.

I don't like first person PoV novels. They're the most absurd, pretentious, and unrealistic of all voices, and they normally irritate the heck out of me. Once in a while a writer can carry it and for those, I am grateful, but I sure have to wade through a lot of boneheaded novels to find the few, the happy few, the band of books, which are worth it. I've actually reached the point where even if a book does sound interesting I will, more often than not, put it back on the shelf if it's first person. This one, I made the mistake of not putting back. More fool me.

Apart from the uninteresting writing, one thing which really ticked me off was the gratuitous abuse hurled at vegetarians and vegans in this book. What an easy target. Kick them why not? That turned me right off, and it was at that point, the opening paragraphs of chapter four, where this juvenile insulting was at its most egregious, that I decided I wasn't going to waste any more time on this sad sack of an excuse for a story.

I'll let Sunder Lal Bahuguna make my case for me:

If you use one acre of land to grow meat...then you will get only 100 kg of beef in a year. If you grow cereals, you'll get 1 to 1.5 tonnes. Apples you get 7 tonnes. Walnuts 10-15 tonnes.

So think about it - in a world of starving people, who has the moral high ground: the carnivores or the vegetarian/vegan community? I can't recommend this pathetic trash.

Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Title: Beautiful Music for Ugly Children
Author: Kirstin Cronn-Mills
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This novel, one of several which plays the world 'ugly' against the word 'beautiful' in its title, is very much like The Best Boy Ever Made by Rachel Eliason, which I favorably reviewed last September. Beautiful Music for Ugly Children preceded that one by two years; however, unlike Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Rachel Eliason is actually a transgendered person - and also a bisexual - just to prove that sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender identity!

Kirstin Cronn-Mills, OTOH does seem to have made a career out of writing about transgender issues, as her website will testify. On balance, though, I have to declare that the later novel is the better novel. There was a lot to like in this novel, but in the end it wasn't enough, and it was spoiled by the frittered-away ending.

Just like in the more recent novel, the main character here, Elizabeth Mary Williams does not in any way identify as female even though he technically is one for all standard societal purposes. Instead, he identifies as Gabriel Joseph Williams, although that's not his legal name. He does insist that everyone call him Gabe, although some people have a much harder time with that than others, including his parents. For eighteen years, he's been Elizabeth and Liz. It's a hard habit to break.

Like in the other novel, he's been best friends with a girl since kindergarten. In this case, her name is Paige, and she's completely on-board and comfortable with his gender change. As in the other novel, Gabe really does feel a major attraction to his BFF. Sometimes she appears to feel the same for him, but he's not sure. What he is sure of is that he's terrified that it will screw-up their friendship if he makes overtures and they're not welcome, or if they are welcome, but things fall apart later.

This feeling of gender error isn't a rarity in nature as Joan Roughgarden reveals in her book Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, which I highly recommend. But onto the story. Gabe is about to graduate high school - and once he picks up that graduation certificate, it will be, he vows, the last time he will answer to Elizabeth. The problem is that there are problems. The biggest problem turned out to be Gabe himself.

One really annoying thing about this novel was that each chapter had a chapter header and every one of these was in the form: "X is the new Elvis because Y" and after the first one, they were nothing but pointless and irrelevant irritations. And whilst I'm on the topic of irritations, I concluded that the cover was one of the ugly children! Unfortunately, writers have absolutely no control over the cover they're saddled with by their publisher.

I admit that it's possible, but I also I contend that it's highly unlikely in 2012 (when this novel was published) that someone of Gabe's age, especially someone who identifies a male, would be that completely obsessed with Elvis Presley. I submit that it's far more likely that a middle-aged author would have such an obsession and project it onto her character! Thus was further amplifed by the absurd if not outright schizophrenic 'A' side and 'B' side nonsense. Gabe was playing CDs - an already outdated technology. There is no 'A' side and 'B' side. Yes, the old vinyls which John owned had those, but how many radio listeners would even know about that, let alone care about it? if this novel had been set in the sixties or seventies, it would have made more sense.

This, it seemed to me, was how we arrived at Gabe's entire musical make-up, and it really didn't work. There seemed to be no consistency whatsoever to his musical choices, and no explanation for why he made them or even how he got his musical tastes, unless he had simply been brainwashed by John, his aged mentor. A lot of his choices were bog-standard and not the out-of-the-ordinary and off-the-beaten-track selections that we had a right to expect given what we're told in the story, and given that our main character is hardly Mr Everyman.

Gabe's close friend John was, long ago, a DJ who played Elvis Presley's first single on the air before any other DJ (so we're told). Now John is old, he nonetheless finds a mutual interest with Gabe in all kinds of music - from any era. John has a midnight show on public access radio, and Gabe has just begun working with him, starting to run the show and make it his own as the story begins.

He starts to develop a minor following, and a Facebook page is opened, and as Gabe rambles about his thoughts, emotions, and the reasons he's playing a given set of disks (each of his shows has a theme), the group grows and begins responding with public displays. For example, one night they set up a bunch of garden ornaments as though they're heading into the local supermarket for a shopping trip.

Gabe has one fan, Mara, who calls in to his show with requests. Eventually she asks Gabe on a date, but she soon realizes that Gabe is - or was - Elizabeth and is living a lie - so Mara declares, and in some ways she's right. Gabe is a complete wet blanket on this date. He never once tells Mara - not before the date or during it, that he's a transitioning female to male, which seemed thoroughly disingenuous to me. It didn't surprise me that he ran into trouble because he can't seem to own his transition, or to be open and honest about it.

This is actually where the story went seriously downhill for me because it became completely unrealistic. The reaction caused by Mara's outing of Gabe was way in excess of what would have been likely given the story framework which the writer had created to this point. Again I admit it's possible (let's face it anything is possible in fiction!), but two people in particular react in a ridiculously extreme and caricatured fashion and for me, this debased the story and robbed it of all of its appeal because it was too much, and it became completely ludicrous.

Let me note here that violence against the LGBTQ community isn't fiction. It's real and it needs to stop now, but that issue isn't helped by portraying it in a novel in the ridiculously over-the-top fashion which is shown here. Curiously enough, that wasn't even the worst aspect of this novel's fall from grace!

The biggest problem for me was the main character, Gabe. He was cheapened by being presented as the most completely lackluster, uninspired, uninspiring, unmotivated, passive person imaginable, and this never changes. Despite this, I had taken something of a liking to Gabe and felt some empathy with him, but at this point in the story I lost it all because his behavior here was so clueless and static that I actually began to despise him for his paralytic inertia and lack of intelligent thought processes. His two closest friends, Paige and John also seemed equally paralyzed, which didn't speak well of them either, and the story never recovered for me, especially given its completely useless non-ending.

I'm quite sure that the author didn't actually want me to develop negative feelings like that (quite the contrary, I should imagine), but that's how it was! I can't like or commend a person who is as clueless to reality as Gabe was here, nor can I react positively to a story which has at this point dispensed with all grey areas (as well as grey matter!), and given over to a stark and flat black-and-white, and thoroughly amateur view of the world. This isn't a Saturday morning cartoon - at least it wasn't until this point.

I should have guessed this would be such a ham-fisted story when I realized it had won an award! Stories which have won awards are rarely interesting. This particular award was named "Stonewall" and it was a highly appropriate title given that Gabe stonewalled all opportunities to change his life, or to move his lethargic self in the direction he claimed he wanted to go.

Paige was a weird character, and she really wasn't a very good BFF. She seemed far less like a good friend than a stooge, or like the Herald in Shakespeare's Henry V wandering in and out, or like a withering voice of doom calling from off-stage in some Renaissance play.

I'm not sure if I explained that properly, but she felt like she wasn't really a part of the story. She was more like a fan at a concert who keeps throwing herself onto the stage, whom the security guys kick back off, and a bit later she scrambles on again. It was like that: in and out, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing, as Shakespeare's"Scottish Play" would have it. Incidental music was all Paige really was, which is sad, because in another context, with some work, I think she could have been the most interesting character in her own novel.

Gabe was, in the end, just as insignificant. He wasn't honestly or seriously making any moves at all to transition his self to a man or to man-up if I can put it in a rather genderist way. Instead, it seemed that he was simply playing at being a guy, dabbling in it, idolizing it, but not really serious about it. He never - not even at the end - seemed like he was going to own it and take it in both hands.

The biggest issue vis-à-vis Paige was Gabe's inability to come to grips with his feelings for her. This torpor he experiences was a serious problem which he embraces throughout the entire novel and it made him unlikeable in the end. He's also a 'real teen guy', but not in a good way, when it comes to his focus on relationships. On the one hand he's idolizing Paige, convinced that she's the only girl for him, but on the other, he's lusting after and/or going on dates with other girls, meeting Mara and stringing Heather along, but making no moves to try and pursue Paige. He's an idiot at best and a complete jerk at worst!

He was, throughout the story, consistently letting things happen to him instead of making things happen. He wasted his time, wasted his chances, showed no interest in getting serious about his gender change, and in the end, Gabe was no different and no better than he was at the start. I'm not one of those people who insists that a character change. Indeed, some of the best stories feature a character who is unshakable, but in this particular case, where the very essence of the story is change and none happens, it stands out rather starkly. The ending capped it all because it honestly felt like the author ran out of ideas and simply said, "Stick a mango in it, I'm done."

I honestly cannot recommend this novel at all. Read, instead, Rachel Eliason's novel, or better yet, read the real thing: Bumbling into Body Hair: A Transsexual's Memoir by Everett Maroon, which I favorably reviewed last October. This tells the true story of a female to male transsexual in his own words.

Model Undercover: New York by Carina Axelsson

Title: Model Undercover: New York
Author: Carina Axelsson
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of fashion stories or modeling stories because I detest the fashion and modeling world. Never has there been - not even including Hollywood and TV, a more self-centered, self-obsessed, pretentious and shallow enterprise as these. I despise those who spend thousands upon clothes and accessories when there are sick and starving children throughout the world, but fiction is not the same as the real world, and once in a while I've found a story that's interesting, and which doesn't take itself too seriously. It's those rare few which keep me cautiously coming back looking for another one! This novel turned out to be such a one.

The premise here is that Axelle, a sixteen-year-old girl, is both a model and a "sleuth" - but primarily (so she keeps limply protesting) the latter. Why anyone thinks grown-ups will respond positively - or even politely - to a relentlessly inquisitive sixteen-year-old goes completely unexplained, but let's let that slide right on by: this is fiction, after all!

Having solved a puzzle in Paris (presumably in an earlier volume which I have not read), Axelle now believes she's a brilliant detective and can solve anything, which is why she's just arrived in New York City. An extremely valuable black diamond has been stolen during a modeling shoot, and she's supposed to discover who took it. Carbonado diamonds are rare, and are thought to be formed - unlike other diamonds - in stellar explosions, so they are really intriguing - to me at least.

In amongst slurs aimed at London (referenced constantly in a rather snobbish way, but paradoxically run-down in comparisons with NYC) and at vegan cuisine, we discover that Carbonado (black) diamonds (which do actually exist)are supposedly almost impossible to cut without incurring serious damage. They are harder than other diamonds, but this doesn't necessarily mean they will shatter if you cut them. Since this particular one - the Black Amelia (named after one of its owners, who was Amelia - not black!) - is so very distinctive, the thief is going to have a hard time getting rid of it, so perhaps the theft wasn't because of the value per se of the diamond, but because the thief had a grudge against the owner, or was intent upon blackmail.

There were no security guards at the shoot (idiots!) because the owner is a friend of the editor of the fashion magazine, and the editor is evidently too stupid to hire her own security. The shoot was closed and limited to only a handful of people, all of whom were really successful in their fields, so the motive looks a lot less like petty theft, as it were, and a lot more like revenge or blackmail. Cassandra, aka Cazzie, the British editor of Chic fashion magazine, idiotically fails to notify the police (they don't want bad publicity!) and she's the only one who knows that Axelle is here primarily as a detective, not as a model.

So the author seems to have everything locked-up to explain these oddball circumstances, but there's one problem: Cassandra, aka Cazzie, is receiving texts from someone who appears to have the diamond. So why all the cogitating on Axelle's part about motive? Clearly this is the motive - to taunt and embarrass Cazzie for some reason. What makes less sense right here is that they now have someone the police could conceivably track down yet not once do they consider bringing them in. This made no sense to me. It's also weird that the texts don't start rolling in until Axelle is on the scene, isn't it?

The text-taunter tells Cazzie that there will be three riddles which she must solve or she won't see the diamond again. Interestingly, Cazzie is able to respond this time - she wasn't before - and the taunter tells her that she's pissed him/her off, so the first riddle will be delayed. The taunter never used the word 'diamond' to begin with, instead talking about 'treasure', so I began to suspect that it was entirely possible that this was unconnected with the theft of the diamond. That would have been a nice red-herring, but no - the text-taunter uses it later - after Cazzie has used it. It was at that point that I wondered: is Cazzie doing this all by herself?

Axelle gets an email which she thinks is from the same source as the texting - this warns her to butt out. I suspected that this came from Sebastian, an insufferably over-protective out-of-favor boyfriend of Axelle's, but that was just a wild guess, and it was wrong. Sebastian is a jerk and I didn't like him, even given that Axelle is flying-off-the-handle over him. The fact that she's cluelessly wrong about him is another irony. The detective - clueless?!

I have to say I find all foreign characters annoying when they're depicted as speaking perfect English yet nonetheless are reduced to interspersing it with words or phrases from their native tongue. Thus we get Miriam the maid peppering her dialog with French, which is not only pretentious, it was really annoying. If you can't depict a foreign character without being forced to make them spew a brew of Franglish or whatever language combo, then make your character English. Otherwise find a way to depict their foreign nature by doing work on the character-building instead of taking the lazy way out. Please? Just a thought.

The weird thing is that while Axelle wisely tries to get Cazzie to stir-up the text-taunter in an effort to have him/her to give themselves away, when this is going on, Axelle fails completely to station herself next to one of the suspects to see if they're texting when the taunter responds. That's just plainly stupid. If she thinks it's one of a small group, then all she has to do is be close to each one in turn during one of these exchanges. In this manner, she could at least eliminate some - those who were not texting - even if she can't necessarily zero in on the actual perp right away. This doesn't speak strongly to her smarts, but then Axelle is only sixteen and not the most worldly of people despite all her claims to being widely traveled.

Without wanting to give anything away, I chose two people as the prime suspects quite early on in this story, and one of them soon seemed unlikely. The other one, it turned out, actually was the thief! If I can get it right when I'm typically lousy at that kind of thing, I suspect the villain was way too obvious!

Aside from that, the writing in general was not bad. There were one or two exceptions, such as where I read, "...the studio was shaped like an L. A curtain..." which was misleading, because it initially read - to me - like "LA curtain - as in Los Angeles curtain! It took me a second to realize what it actually was. It would have been nice had the author put the 'L' in single quotes, like I did just then, to clarify this.

The novel moved at a decent pace and was - refreshingly - very light on fashion and make-up, which I really appreciated! It was also pretty decently plotted (in general) with a nice twist here and there. It had rather shallow, but otherwise reasonably realistic characters, so despite some early misgivings about this I was, by the end, convinced that it was a worthy read. I can't pretend that I'm waiting breathlessly for a sequel, but you might be after you've read this one!