The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally I get to post one review out of this set that was a really decent read - or in this case a 'listen' because it was an audio book from my ever praiseworthy local library. The novel is praiseworthy too, in that it's funny (laugh out loud funny at times, although it falls off a lot in the last third, be warned), and it's set in France, which is different at least, even though it's written by an English author. It's nice to read a story not set in the US or the UK for a change! It's also the kind of novel which makes me want to read more by the same author, which is always a good thing. I am particularly interested to see what she did with Peter Pan - she was commissioned to write a sequel to it! Note that McCaughrean is pronounced Muh-Cork-Ran

The story here (or there, since it's set in historical times rather than modern day) is that Pepper Roux thinks he's going to die and runs away from it. Why 'Pepper' rather than the French word for Pepper, which is 'Poivre' is a bit of a mystery. Poivre does appear to get a mention here and there, but with this being an audio book, I cannot be sure. I initially thought the reader was saying 'pauvre', which is French for 'poor' as in 'sorry-assed', and it may well be that he was. I wasn't sure. The reader was Anton Lesser. As far as I know, he's no relation to Kenneth Moore. Or Ronald Biggs. Or the old British comedy team of Little and Large. Given his name, he might be related to Daphne du Maurier, which is French for "More bay tree!" Actually I just made all of that up. I don't know more about Lesser except that the did a really good job reading this novel.

Pepper is told by an aunt that he will die on his fourteenth birthday, so he's at a really loose end. He goes to see his father, who is holed up in un hôtel, drunk, and so Pepper takes his hat and coat, dons them, and boards his father's ship in his dad;s stead, setting sail with the crew as their captain. Yes, the story is ridiculous and improbable, but it's told in such a way that it really seems like this might have happened. What Roux doesn't know is that the crew has been paid to scuttle the ship for insurance money!

This is only the beginning of a series of equally improbably, but highly believable adventures, each as amusing as the next. The story rolled on in this fashion in high style until the last third, and particularly the last sixth, where it became mired in self-justification and exposition. I think it would have been better as a shorter story with no conclusion, but with Pepper simply heading off into the sunset on his next adventure instead of explaining everything. That didn't work for me. But given how much I had enjoyed this story for the first two-thirds, I am very happy to rate it as a very worthy read.

Smart Girls Get What They Want by Sarah Strohmeyer

Rating: WORTHY!

I seem to have entered a period of really bad books that fail to gain my attention (apart from the initial discovery, where the blurb made it seem like the book might be really interesting). Fortunately, I happen to have access to a really excellent public library with awesome librarians, so my mistakes cost me very little! I can DNF these experimental reads/listens without impoverishing myself. All Hail Public Libraries!

This is how I came to have yet another trope YA novel in my hands and one which appears, yet again, to be written by a female author who seems to dislike women. I mean, if she didn't, then why would she characterize them like this? Not to be confused with Mary Hartley's The Smart Girl's Guide to Getting What You Want, which this main character could have probably benefited from reading,Smart Girls Get What They Want is your typical YA story of the nerd and the jock, 'forced' together in a ridiculous fashion and falling for each other notwithstanding some heavy-duty reasons why they should not. This much I knew from reading only the first chapter.

The author makes the classic mistake of imbuing her main character with her own qualities, views, musical tastes and perspectives, even though she is old enough to be the main character's mother, if not grandmother. Thus we get references to the Rolling Stones and other anachronisms. That's not to say that no seventeen-year-old girl can quote lyrics from The Rolling Stones - only that it's so highly unlikely that it really kicks a reader out of the suspension of disbelief. What, there were no bands to which a seventeen year old might listen to and quite from? Or is the author simply too lazy to look them up? In this high-tech age, it's not hard to look up the bands to which teens might listen, and find the lyrics to a song or two by them. Or make up your own bands and lyrics. Or simply not have her quote a lyric, and thereby lend her a little more inventiveness and originality if you want your readers to really dig her. And this wasn't the only anachronistic reference.

The story is ostensibly about three friends, but it's really about only the first person narrator, and the friends (so-called) are given short shrift as ever. They're really more tools than friends. Because it's first person this gives the impression that she's all about herself an no one else, which is another problem with first person PoV. Genevieve (aka Gigi, LOL!) is the privileged, spoiled rotten MC, and Bea and Neerja are her 'friends'. They realize that Neerja's older sister was a nobody at school, perhaps because of her position as the smartest person in the class. The three decide they don't want to be that way, but Gigi's plan is derailed when she gets accused of cheating on a chemistry exam. How the teacher managed to grade the tests and discover the similarities before the students even left the classroom is a mystery. I can only assume time passed, but it was written so badly that it looked like as soon as they got up to leave the classroom, the teacher was calling them back with the graded tests already on his desk!

She didn't cheat, but because the jock's answers, including the extra credit question, are so much like hers, both of them were tarred with the same cheating brush, and the jock is such a selfish dick that he turns it all into a joke. Gigi is supposedly this go-getter girl, but she fails dismally to defend herself, and the school "discipline" hearing is such a complete and utter joke that it lacked all credibility for me. The school didn't even contact the parents about this. This is all so unbelievable as to really throw the story out as far as I was concerned, although I did read on for a while to see if it offered any hope of improvement. It just got worse. At this point I not only detested the jock, I detested the main character. This is never a good sign.

It wasn't believable for several reasons, the first of which was that the jock seemed out of place in the AP chemistry class. Not that no jock can be smart by any means, but that this particular one seemed like a complete jerk from the start and the author offered no rationale whatsoever for his even being in this class. Secondly, the ball-buster of a teacher who summarily accused them of cheating on his test was right there in the classroom. Are we supposed to believe that never once did he look up? Never once did he see this pair and notice that the jock was cribbing? Bullshit! It wasn't credible. This is amateur stuff. Thirdly, Gigi had already proven her academic chops and integrity over several years, and it just didn't sound likely she'd automatically be even suspected, let alone accused, found guilty and condemned without a trial. Her guilt is assumed throughout by both this teacher and the principal! This was done so ham-fistedly. They didn't get forced to take a new test to see who was cheating and who wasn't?

Clearly, the sole purpose of all this ridiculousness was to artificially throw these two together in a chemistry project, where they could fall in love. Why would Gigi even be remotely attracted to this selfish jerk who got her into all this trouble? I was so disappointed. It's not like this was a self-published first novel from a new writer! If it had been, it would likely have been rejected, but once you have your foot in the door, all the rules cease to apply to you, don't they?! I expected a lot better from someone who supposedly already had some writing chops, and I thought a female writer ought to have served her female character a lot better than she did in the portion of this I could stand to read. This novel was nonsense and trash.

Reboot by Amy Tintera

Rating: WARTY!

If Nicole Ritchie had ever written a zombie novel, it would have been this.

The story is of this world where a new virus runs riot through the human population. A side effect of the virus is that when people die, they sometimes come back to life - rebooted. They are six million dollar people: faster, stronger, more good looking (I am not kidding you!). And young. Adults, for reasons unexplained (a heck of a lot is unexplained here), do not do well on reboot. The reboot (a title chosen only for kewl factor, and no other reason, evidently) is known by the number of minutes it was between death and rebooting, so the main character is 178 (which is of course very unusual in its magnitude, to the point where she's legendary). Her real name is Wren. What? Yes, Wren! Weird. I frequently felt like giving Wren the bird. She was not kick-ass. She wasn't even interesting.

The world-building is poor. I'm not one of these readers who demands excellent world-building. I don't care if it's sketchy if the story itself is good, but even by my low standards, the world-building in this novel was atrocious. The status quo was just put out there as fact with no effort at any kind of backstory or any sort of explanation as to why it was this way. I don't want an info-dump, of course, but some credible words here and there about how things came to be as they are is really required if the story doesn't make it self-evident, and this was far from it.

Let's ask a few questions which this novel fails to answer: Why would a virus evolve to reboot people? Nature has no plan of self-improvement. The purpose of life is to survive and to reproduce, and a virus, even though it is on the border between biochemistry and chemistry, is no different. It has no agenda. Unless what happens to its host is beneficial to the virus spreading, there is no evolutionary impetus to promote it. So how would a virus evolve which revivifies people and makes them pretty? It makes no sense at all. What a virus needs is a host which doesn't die so quickly that the virus fails to spread. That's it! That's all! There is no benefit to resurrecting the host once it's dead or in prolonging life bizarrely, much less in bringing back the dead. Indeed, with Ebola, it was the fact that the host became bloody and died which helped it to spread given the practices of some peoples in various African nations, in preparing the dead for burial. The same kind of thing help Kuru to spread amongst the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, although Kuru is a prion disease, not a viral one.

Even if we buy into this though, how does this virus do what it does? Why does the person die rather than just become prettier, and faster and stronger? Given that they do die, how are they brought back to life? Nothing in nature does this - not literally die and come back to life - so where did this even come from? If it's merely a form of hibernation, then why call it death? What does this bizarre turn of events do to suicidal people? Do suicides increase? Decrease? Are people killing themselves so they can come back pretty, and strong and fast? We're not told, because this is a first person PoV novel and we're limited, confined, hobbled, constrained, and cocooned - in every sense of those restrictive words - to the perspective of Wren. This brings me to my next issue: even if we accept all of this so far, why would a reboot tell a story like this? Given the reboot's character and the perspective she gives us on reboots, it makes no sense that one of them would narrate their life, and even if we allow that one would, then the very least likely one to do this would be Wren. Again, no sense!

Viruses, with very few exceptions, are literally microscopic things which contain very little DNA. They require the host's DNA to even reproduce. In short, there is insufficient DNA even in the largest of viruses, to make all those changes to physiology that this story requires. There is no mutant X gene as Marvel comics would have it, that can give rise to a gazillion different and beneficial mutations. It doesn't happen.

Why is there no commentary on what the religious community had to say about people being resurrected? The novel is completely silent with regard to what religious leaders had to say about this! Not that I personally care what they have to say, but the fact is that if people started being resurrected, the christian religious community in a fundamentalist nation like the USA would be all over this: either seeing it as a sign of the end times and the devil's work, or as a sign of the rapture or something like that. Yet we get not a single word about that here! Again, it's poor world-building. Far too many young adult dystopian authors are like this! They get this one idea and fail comprehensively to apply it to the real world and explore the ramifications of it really happening. This is why they miss out on writing what would have been a much more interesting, faceted, and complex story. Instead we get vapid clones of other dystopian trilogies (they're always trilogies, aren't they, driven by the stark capitalism that is rampant in Big Publishing™?! Sad but true.). It's not interesting. It's not imaginative. It's not inventive. It's really a waste of trees or bandwidth.

Even if we accept all of that(!), then I still have to ask: how did society ever let it happen that these reboots became a police force, instead of simply sending them back to their family? Why do they even need a police force of reboots? Why are we told the reboots are emotionless, when they're obviously subject to emotions? Why label them as "not human" when they're exactly like humans: they laugh, they cry, they dream, they get scared, they have sex, they eat, they sleep. And why train these people to be a very efficient and ruthless para-military force when there has apparently already been strife between them and the non-rebooted humans? Why would they even work for the humans from whom they could simply run away, when they go out on patrol unsupervised? The Stupid is strong with this one. It made no sense to me. There were interesting bits, but also trope and clichéd bits which irritated me to no end.

I wouldn't have minded it quite so much if the author didn't flatly contradict every assertion she makes about the reboots. They're supposed to be 'not human', but there is nothing whatsoever about them that is different from humans - except they're faster? They're supposed to be emotionless, yet the record holder for biggest gap between death and reboot - the one who is supposed to be least human and least emotional - behaves exactly like the humans and shares the same emotions. She has her memories from when she was alive previously. How can she have all of this and not be human and not experience emotions? It's not possible.

She says the reboots don't need to eat as much as humans, yet they have a faster metabolism. How does that work exactly? Where does their energy come from? It has to come from somewhere unless this is really a book about magical beasts and where to find them! This is what happens when someone with zero science education starts writing science fiction, and it's not good enough. I don't demand that an author go deep into scientific detail to explain every last detail of the worlds they create, but I do like the world to make sense within the framework they've created. This one was like the kind of story my thirteen-year-old would write: everything is to be taken on pure faith without a shred of foundation being offered, and while I tolerate his stories, I'm not willing to extend that same largesse to an adult writer who should know better, and especially not when there are so many more, better-written novels out there pleading with me to read them! I cannot recommend this one.

The Glass Arrow by Kristen Simmons

Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Glass Arrow by Gerald Verner , this novel was awful! Pretty much from the first track (I listened to the audio book) it was tedious, trope-filled, irrational, and not remotely credible. That it was first person PoV did not help. I detest that voice because it's so rarely done well, and on audio it can sound bad even when the writing is good, depending on who reads it.

The story is about Aya aka Aiyana, a fifteen year old girl who is a free woman - that is, she's not owned by anyone. She lives in the wilds with her sister and some twins, Tam and Nina. Because women are so rare in this world, they are hunted brutally, and enslaved by men. That should have stopped me right there. I honestly don't know why I even picked this up from the library because it had trope trash written all over it. Well not literally, but, as Doctor Who said, give me time - and a crayon....

My problem with it was the absurdity of the opening chapter, where Aya comes back to her 'family' to discover that they're being hunted. The males and older females are killed, and the young one - that would be Aya and the twins, are taken. There was no explanation as to how the world got like this (maybe that came later - I didn't want to hang around to find out) and the premise, now that I think about it, is ridiculous on the face of it, but my real problem was Aya's narration of coming back "home" and finding devastation caused by the hunters.

Her narration bore no relationship to what a fifteen-year-old - even a wild, self-sufficient one - would deliver. I seriously doubt that she would be calmly describing her discoveries and her thoughts and her family relationships at a time like this. It was so unrealistic it almost made me laugh, but the laugh was stifled by the fact that this only made me so sad that we're seeing this kind on nonsense ever more often in YA novels. The only advantage this one has, so I understand, is that it isn't a trilogy so the author deserves a freaking medal for that, but for me, even that was not enough to make me keep on listening when other novels beckon so temptingly!

I can't imagine a girl calmly describing the scene as Aya did in first person. A disinterested third party observer - one ho with a complete lack of passion - may well have delivered this narration, but not the person to whom it was happening. This is one of the problems with this voice - it's completely unrealistic. It didn't help that the narration by Soneela Nankani made the first person voice even worse. Great name, poor reading voice. Instead of delivering anger or outrage, we got wheedling and stupidity in the narration and the voice didn't help. It turned me right off this story. I gave up and returned it to the library where scores of other audio books beg to be listened to.

The Demon Girl’s Song by Susan Jane Bigelow

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an excellent novel which I fell in love with quickly and which I highly recommend. The main character is a lesbian who doesn't fully realize it to begin with, but this is not your typical LGBTQ novel. Nether is it an historical romance, although there is romance in it, nor your usual fantasy. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have liked it. It's not a ridiculous YA love triangle of a novel. Thankfully there are no triangles here! It's a novel about a woman who has an adventure, and she doesn't need to be validated in it by male or female. I was so pleased with that! Finally an author who gets it! This woman is my idea of a strong female character done to perfection. That doesn't mean she doesn't have moments of weakness or doubt. It doesn't mean she doesn't need friends or lovers. It means she can take it or leave it and she does just fine on on her own.

The story is set in the early twentieth century it would seem, but it's hard to tell because it's in a parallel world - one of magic and empires, and the world is nicely fleshed out. The main character, Andín is possessed by a demon - accidentally - or maybe not! (It's not remotely like "The Exorcist" as it happens!). This demon isn't outright evil - not in a psychotic fashion like in the Exorcist anyway. He's occupied the rulers of the empire for a thousand years, moving from father to son (or whoever is the heir) as the father dies, and expanding the empire with an iron fist, but now a wizard has tricked him into going into this peasant girl instead of into the emperor's son.

When the demon talks Andín into going to the capital and manages to wangle a meeting with the new emperor, he discovers he's been deliberately tricked by the palace wizard, and he's stuck inside this girl's mind. Even if the girl dies, he can't get back into the ruling family. But now the girl and her demon have been exiled from the entire empire, which meant a train journey of several days to cross the border into a mountain kingdom many miles from the capital. The oddest thing about this however is the weird empty shape they see in the wasteland as they cross the border - maybe it's a portal to somewhere. I have a feeling the girl is going to find out, and also going to meet the woman who sat beside her when the demon first occupied her. Yes, for the demons, it's occupy peasant week. They don't have a wall street, you see!

I loved the main character Andín - in a platonic way of course! She's only seventeen after all, but she's about to go on a life-altering quest, and she isn't the only one who will change. So, too, will the demon. Will she end up more like him, or will he become like her? Or will they meet in the middle? And if so, what then? Well, if this is any clue, here's how she responds to a noise in the night: "She checked around the bed and picked up the little pen she kept on her nightstand. If some strange man were to come at her, she could stab him in the eye with it." Shades of Jason Bourne!

The story is masterfully written! I'd say mistressfully, but that just doesn't sound right unfortunately! How sad is that? It's paced perfectly, relationships grow and change organically, it's very well-written, and the story never once got boring. There was always something new around the corner, and Andín's growth was perfectly reasonable.

On a technical level, and while this novel was well formatted for the Kindle app on my phone, there were a couple of issues with the chapter headers towards the end. It seemed like the intention was to use the possessive, but the titles ended up looking like this instead:
Chapter 20 Judyís Sword
Chapter 23 Shashalnikyaís Trail
Chapter 27 The Demon Girlís Song.

Overall, I couldn't have asked for a better fantasy novel, and I'm not really a fan of fantasy unless it's done really well. This one was. It was understated and nicely depicted. I was very pleased to have been granted a chance to read this advance review copy and I fully recommend it. I look forward to this author's next work. I hope it comes, like this one, with great expedition!

Foiled by Jane Yolen, Mike Cavallaro

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first volume in a joyous and nicely illustrated (by Mike Cavallaro) series. It's a small format graphic novel about a middle-grade girl named Aliera Carstairs who is the chosen one - chosen, that is, by the faerie world to protect them against the troll world, led by the Dark Lord. She meets a new guy in school named Avery castle, and despite the fact that he's hot-looking, he seems really uninterested in anyone but Aliera, although he doesn't say no to a kiss and a hug form whichever female wants to lay one on him.

Aliera is attracted to him but really not that interested. She'd rather go to her fencing lessons or enjoy an RPG with her cousin, who is sickly, but perky. This doesn't prevent her from accepting when Avery asks her out on a date - so it would seem. The venue is Grand Central Terminal, form which you rightly assume that Aliera lives in NYC. She;s late in arriving and wondering whether Avery is also late or has stood her up (her opinion of boys is lower than most). She has her fencing kit with her having just come from practice, and she puts on her fencing mask to protect her from a particularly bothersome bird (evidently the same bird which has been stalking her throughout the novel - something she would have noticed had she been more observant.

With the mask in place, color-blind Aliera, who sees more shades of grey than EL James, is suddenly aware of a second world superimposed over the first - a world of brilliant, rich color, which is focused entirely on fantastical creatures the like of which she'd only ever heard of in the more bizarre fairy tales. It turns out that Alierea is a defender of the Seelie - a faerie world which has chosen her as its champion. She can fight the bad guys with her épée, the one her mom scrounged up from a yard sale. That faceted blob of chromium infused aluminium oxide which Aliera had supposed was fake turns out to be, it would seem, a real ruby.

I really liked this story which I came to by way of volume two - so you can read them out of order without losing too much. I loved the story, I loved how feisty, relentless, and resourceful Aliera was, and I enjoyed the whole presentation. i recommend this and its sequel.

Curses Foiled Again by Jane Yolen, Mike Cavallaro

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a joyous and nicely illustrated (by Mike Cavallaro), small format graphic novel about a middle-grade girl who is the chosen one - chosen, that is, by the faerie world to protect them against the troll world, led by the Dark Lord. Yes, it's trope, but this is different enough and irreverent enough that I loved it. It's Seelie versus Unseelie here, and this is number 2 in the 'Foiled" series. While I am not a fan of series, this one might be one of the few exceptions I make, because I would like to read more of these adventures. I loved the way the chapters were titled after various fencing postures and strikes/defenses.

Foiled is a play on the fact that feisty and self-motivated main character Aliera Carstairs can fence something fierce, especially now she has a light saber. Actually it's a light foil. And the light is on the hilt, not the blade. So an anti-light foil is what she carries. Or something like that. Sorry, anti-light weapon! Never call it a foil! And especially don't refer to it as silver foil! (I added that bit!). Anyway, moving right along, in this adventure, she's trolled by a troll named Avery (he watches her like a clock?) who in daylight looks like a middle grader (or maybe a young, young adult), but in the dark, turns into a rather large troll-type dude with lower tusks rather like the Orcs in the upcoming Warcraft movie, and just like them, he turns out to be a good guy, who acknowledges that he's bound to Aliera, who he calls his liege lord.

Aliera doesn't trust him as far as she can throw him in his troll form, which is to say not at all. She rejects his every overture despite the fact that he seems desperate to impart important information to her. In the end they form a grudging (on her part) alliance to solve an problem, and she learns to trust him. A bit. I loved that she was so independent and not the least but fluffy instadore as we see far too often in stories like this. She was a strong character with a unique voice, who was self-sufficient and a go-getter and I was in love with her, disgusting as that is. Yes, I admit it. So seelie me!

This wasn't apparent to me form this volume, but evidently the main character is colorblind in our world and only sees color in the faerie world. Maybe I'm just slow, because now I think back on it, it seems obvious, but I'd thought this had nothing to do with the character's PoV! I thought it was simply an art trick to make our world look a drab gray, while the faeries looked almost psychedelic - which was a nice effect. Apparently not! Anyway, the immediate problem (in this volume) was nicely resolved with a sweet and satisfying ending, but the story remains open enough that more adventures could come, so it was a really good read with lots of promise and warmth and amusing bits and pieces. I recommend this as a worthy read.

Magisterium by Jeff Hirsch

Rating: WARTY!

This audio book, poorly read by Julia Whelan, failed to get my attention despite my twice trying to get with it. It simply wasn't interesting, and the story made no sense. It wasn't even that original - it's another we v. they story, in this case scientists (The Colloquium) v. magicians (The unoriginally named 'Magisterium'), but the scientists, as represented by main female character, 16-year-old Glenn Morgan were so caricatured that they weren't even remotely realistic. The author would have us swallow the idiotic creationist position that science is blind and dogmatic and interested only in preserving the status quo, whereas the Magisterium is open to intuitive learning, which is nonsensical in real life. You can't "know" anything - not in any meaningful sense - without a scientific approach. You can blindly believe, and you can think you know, and you can fool yourself into 'knowing', but you can't really know.

In any story where magic is permitted, you're automatically throwing out the rulebook, which is why writers of such stories have to come up with rather arbitrary rules which the magicians have to follow, and unless they're done well, it fails. Usually there is no cost attached to performing magic in these stories, but then again it's magic, so why would there be? On the other hand, if there's no cost, then anyone can do anything and your story lacks any imperative, risk, or danger. There was no magic performed in the portion of the story to which I listened, so I can't speak to that here. I can only say it was boring to me, so I DNF'd it and moved onto something which turned out to be much more entertaining. Life's too short, y'know?!

Tell the Wind and Fire by Sarah Rees Brennan

Rating: WARTY!

In 1859, the year another Charles published On the Origin of Species... Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in installments. Funny how the wheel turns full circle, isn't it?! Now we have series.... Darwin's book began, "It was the best of species, the worst of species..." - no, wait, that doesn't sound right...! But it does end, "It is a far, far better mutation that I get, than I have ever known; it is a far, far better species that I go to than I have ever become." No, that doesn't sound right either. Never mind....

This story is a retelling of that one (Dickens's not Darwin's!), but set in a parallel world where there is light and dark magic, and that's the problem - it makes no sense at all since magic plays no part in the story except as a faint background image - like a watermark in paper. It's sad, because I liked the way the magic worked here and how it was split into light and dark, and what each meant. That was what both attracted me to, and drew me into the story to begin with, but the magic itself really plays no part other than to demarcate the haves (the light, of course) from the have-nots.

The sheer lack of sense in this supposedly magical world was disturbing. Of course a magical world is inherently senseless, but usually an author has something going on to set out some ground rules. Here there was really nothing. I mean, why did no one ever use magic to do anything other than parlor tricks? It made no sense! How could a rag-tag bunch of people with swords defeat powerful magicians? It made no sense. Why did people fight with swords in a thoroughly modern world (trains, automobiles, cell phones, TV, etc). It made no sense.

There really was no magic (read into that what you will!). It was practically never used, which begs the question as to what purpose it served, and by that, I mean not what it served in the novel itself (where it did nothing), but what it served in the plot other than the purpose I mentioned. Why introduce it at all if it's going nowhere? It becomes merely a bait and switch, and I was really disappointed to be tricked into thinking that this great set-up had to portend great magic to come, only to discover that in the end, it delivered no magic, and nothing depended upon it.

The story could equally have been set in a sci-fi world where there are humans and aliens, one of which species (see I was right!) is the underdog. Or during the US civil war, or in any "society' where there is a sharp division of some sort. I'm tired of novels about magicians where the magicians are essentially powerless and constrained and confined. It's ridiculous. It also makes no sense that there would be a council of magicians. Why would anyone who could literally perform magic ever allow themselves to be subject to a council?! Now there, in that conflict, would be a story.

So what story did I get? I got Lucie Manette, a light magician from the dark magician's city, alternately being strong or weak, seemingly on a whim, which grew quickly annoying. Lucie, you got some 'splainin' to do! In the end she came off as short-sighted and stupid and worse, she never improved. I don't want to read stories about dumb, unmotivated, thoughtless women - or men for that matter. I don't mind if they start out that way and wise-up, but to see a person going through life never getting anywhere and never trying, and failing and never learning from it, and making dumb decisions, and willingly allowing herself to be trapped by a cruel and abusive Sidney Carton clone and accepting it meekly, is depressing. The Carton clone made even less sense. He threw Lucie over a hundred feet down into the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge the first chance he got, and we're supposed to see this evil, abusive brute turn into a hero? It doesn't work - not in the way it's told here.

The only time Lucie comes through is by means of passive aggression. It's hardly hardly heroic! Despite my issue with the swords, given that we had them, I did want to see her cut loose with one, but she never did. Why then give her a sword, make her grab a sword like it's a safety blanket during an escape, and tell us clearly that she's a great sword fighter if she's never going to fight? It's exactly the same problem with the magic: why have it if it's never going to get used? That was another problem: why tell so much if it's a no show?

If you're magician and you want to rescue someone, you do it with magic, not by starting a protest! Unless of course your story is set in India during the revolution. Which this was not. But it would have made more sense. Why recreate a story which was originally set in England and France, and move it bodily to the USA? Because everyone else does? Because Big Publishing™ doesn't care about your story if it's not set in the USA? Because US teens won't read stories that are not set in the USA? Screw them. For goodness sakes, write the story that needs writing, not the one you think the US publishing industry is most likely to offer you a contract for.

Since this was clearly a clone of Dickens's novel, I went into it already knowing the ending, so clearly the suspenseful part of the story could only come from how we got there and perhaps from wondering if the ending would get a twist. I've never read A Tale of Two Cities, but I do know how it begins and how it ends. The problem is that all we got was a vacillating Lucie who we're supposed to view as heroic, yet who quite clearly had no backbone whatsoever. There was more than one point, but one point in particular, where she could easily have turned this around and saved lives and saved the world from falling into chaos, and she shrunk from it every time. We're told she is an expert sword fighter, and by that means she could have saved the life of a woman whom she liked, who was a moderate, but she hid instead and watched the woman die.

By simply owning the truth, Lucie could have changed the world, but she hid and shrank away, and turned away, and ran, and buckled under repeatedly, and she made people die and she made me sick. I did not like her, nor any other character in the story, and her limp and retarded behavior was nauseating to watch when it was repeated time after time, day after day. I can understand an author liking an historical novel so well that she wants to pay homage to it in a rewrite, but I think the problem here is that the author was too close to her source and didn't want to let any of it go (which is no doubt why we had swords!). I think if she'd let it go and written the story based on her own outline and didn't worry about what the Dickens would happen, it might have been better for it. While I was grateful for a chance to read an advance review copy of this novel, I cannot in good faith recommend this as a worthy read.

Glow by Amy Kathleen Ryan

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one of the 'Sky Chasers' series (sky chasers? Seriously? Could you be any more pretentious?!), and it's one I will definitely not be following. It's not just because of the reading by Ilyana Kadushin and Matthew Brown, it's the story itself which was far too juvenile and trope for my taste. Admittedly it was not aimed at me, but I can't imagine my kids finding this entertaining either, and they're within its age range.

The first sickening problem is that there's a love triangle of the most clichéd kind: one girl, two guys, one of whom is an old, trusted friend, the other of whom is a bad boy. How utterly pathetic this is. Seriously. Any girl who ditches a trusted love for an unknown jerk without having an extremely good reason is a moron, and I have no interest in reading about her in even one volume, let alone the trope three volume deal for which I blame others as much as I blame money-grubbing Big Publishing™. We're explicitly told that Kieran is everything Waverly could ever want in a husband. Yet we're evidently lied to about that.

Worse than this, though, is that this is all that's on the girl's mind. It's like she cannot entertain a single thought without it being about her man. I have no interest in any female character who has no interest in anything but male characters. They're shallow and boring. The female in question is 15-year-old Waverly, who is traveling on a generation ship along with a sister ship to colonize a new planet. No explanation is given for the journey - not in the portion to which I listened, which was about 25%. What is wrong with Earth? Why is this solution considered better than, say, terraforming and colonizing Mars or Venus? Who knows. It just is.

I'd grant the author the smarts to see that this is the only kind of deep space journey that makes sense - sending two ships - but the only reason she has two ships featured in the story apparently, is to have one go rogue. On one of the ships, the 'generation' part of 'generation ship'; evidently fails - meaning that for some reason, the sister ship, The New Horizon, has been unable to conceive any children, and they are now demanding females from the Empyrean so they can breed new crew to continue the journey. There's no reason given as to why they feel this needs to be done immediately as opposed to the Empyrean, say, sending over a few young adults to help out. Instead it evidently leads to civil war. The story was pathetic and made no sense, and I couldn't stand to listen to any more of it, so I quit. Life is too short to waste it on bad novels!

The Last Girl by Joe Hart

Rating: WARTY!

It was funny to start reading this one (note there are several novels with this same title; this one is by Joe Hart, and is the start of the inevitable YA dystopian trilogy I'm sorry to report). I was woken up by a massive crack of thunder and a heavy rainstorm with flash flood warnings on my phone, and having had a decently early night, I was no longer sleepy enough to doze off readily, so I started on the next book on my Net Galley list, which was this one, and it began with the lead character waking to a rain shower! I guess I liked the synergy, because I proceeded to blitz through the first 20% in short order. This means it moved and entertained, but I have to confess that a lot of it made little sense to me, and while I was leaning towards favorably rating this for a long time, there were, in the end, too many plot holes and problems. What really let it down for me was the ending.

The basic plot is young adult dystopian (are there any dystopians that are not young adult these days?! LOL!) but at least it's not told in first person. That counted for a lot with me, and it was the only thing which prevented me from DNF'ing this story once it started going downhill. It's set in a near future when a virus has evidently culled the female population dramatically, and the few precious youthful ones that are left are kept under guard in a facility where they're not even allowed pets for fear of disease. All the guards and the administration of the facility are male and they have no problem with institutionalized violence which is bizarre and, I have to add, not credible given how precious these girls are supposed to be. That said, this is a pretty decent microcosm of how women are far too often viewed in this world: they're useless if they're not young and pretty.

There appears to be only one older female in residence, and she's the teacher, but the students have only the one textbook, which is nothing more than a history of the plague and the revolution which followed, and which overthrew the US government. Clearly the author is using this as a very convenient device for info-dumping on the history of these United States of Dystopia, but it's still an info dump and it makes no sense that there would be no other books available, or that they would be simply reading this book over and endlessly over again in class. The reason for the absence of other books, if there is one, is never given, and that's part of the problem - there is far too much in this world which is simply there without rationale or reason, and it really tripped up credibility for me.

There were other issues too: given the total absence of books, where did Zoey get her math education? Given what was ultimately happening to these girls (which was pretty obvious from the start at least in general terms), why did the men bother to give them any kind of education at all? Why not just have them sit around and talk, and do crafts? Clearly education is a good thing and there are far too many places in the world where women are ill-served in that regard, but in this context, it made no sense, especially not given how badly abused these purportedly precious resources are in every other facet of their lives there.

Other things which are more a case of inexplicable presence rather than absence, are not explained either. Not only do we have to explain where the books came from, but more importantly, where is the food coming from and if the world outside the compound has gone to hell, then where is the food being grown? And cigarettes? Who is still making cigarettes for goodness sakes? Where are the batteries coming from? Where is the gasoline and Jet A fuel for the helicopters coming from? Despite info-dumping and, yes, monologuing from the villains at the end, none of this is ever explained. I can see how they might have guns, but where is the ammunition coming from if it was expended in the civil war? And why do they need to carry handguns in the compound given that they have armed guards on the compound walls and the females are outnumbered several to one?! I know women are dangerous, but seriously?!

What really bothered me is that no one inside the compound ever questions any of this. Main character Zoey and her best friend Meeka, who was sadly under-used, were slightly rebellious, but they were nowhere near far enough along that path to accomplish what came later, not to have it spring out of nowhere like it did.

A lot of rationale is missing here, too. When the girls reach twenty-one, they leave the facility, but no one knows where they go or what happens to them, other than that the girls supposedly rejoin their parents and live a happy life. Yet no one seems to question why they needed to be taken from their parents, evidently by force, in the first place, and no explanation for this is offered an no one questions it.

One of the biggest failings here was that the girls are disturbingly incurious about their lives or future. Although at least main character Zoey, and to an extent her best friend, are skeptics, which I appreciated, the girls seem to be very dull and incurious people overall. Only Zoey has any depth at all to her, and she would have been a much more appealing person had she exercised her mind more. I found myself wishing that Meeka was the main character instead of Zoey, but I often find myself liking the side kick character in YA novels than ever I do the main one. I think a lot of YA authors would serve their readers better if they wrote their first draft as they wished, then when going through the editing process, subtly changed the story sufficiently that their main character became a secondary one, and the best friend became the main one. What a wonderful world of YA that would bring us! But that's not going to happen unfortunately.

There is also bullying, even among the handful of girls here, which I thought was not merely overdone but ridiculous, and yet another subtle undermining of female bonding in YA stories. It's pathetic that there has to be an antagonist/bully, just like there has to be a love interest, although in this case, that particular aspect was dealt with differently. I'd be tempted to say it was handled better than most, but it made absolutely no sense whatsoever in the end, so I was forced to ask myself what the point was of even having it, just as I was forced to ask what the point was of the antagonism.

Obviously the sole purpose of the bullying to get Zoey into trouble so she's thrown into solitary which in turn toughened her up which in turn supposedly gave her the backbone to do what she did next, but it really didn't work. The bullying was such an obvious prop that it failed for me. It would have made more sense to me had Zoey done this alone, and it was written as a natural arc of her development, from curiosity to minor rebel to major rebel. This would have been organic and supported what happened later instead of undermining its credibility.

It seems more natural to me that women would bond in a situation like the one we're presented here, where the brutality is extreme. Women tend to handle social situations better than men do and I don't see them infighting in a situation where men are presented as such starkly caricatured bad guys in harsh black and white line drawings. To offset that tired trope (a bit) there is one handicapped girl named Lily, who seems to have some sort of intellectual deficit, but is treated as all the other girls are, although she needs help. Zoey has rather taken her under her wing, but the bullies predictably despise her. It would have been nice to go against trope and have one of the bullies adopt Lily, but that's not this story. It made no more sense that Lily would be treated as she was than it did that the girls would be harvested a the age of twenty one rather than at, say, eighteen, or sixteen, or even thirteen given what was going on here and how little respect the men had for the women as people.

To me, the revolution made no sense either. According to the info dump, hundreds of thousands rose up against the US government and overthrew it eventually, but there's no explanation for why this revolution took place, and none as to why there was not another group of hundreds of thousands rallying in support of the government. Again, explanations go wanting. I'm not someone who demands every detail be worked out. In fact, seeing how poorly some of these YA stories have been 'worked out', I'd much rather the author simply waved a hand at some (hopefully fairly reasonable) explanation and left it at that without digging into details, but, of course, then you get a travesty of a story like Dire Virgins - excuse me, Divergent, which was so laughably unsophisticated it read like a story written by a child.

I kept hoping that this one would not turn out that way, and while for the most part it was well written technically speaking, and left the absurdly gullible and simplistic Divergent in the dust, it also left too much to be desired. The ending was particularly disappointing for me. Just when I was hoping that Zoey would unleash hell on her captors, the story descended into drawn-out monologuing and interludes and piano-playing, and mindless meandering, and pointless chases, and it really fell apart for me. The ending was far too stretched out and didn't leave me satisfied at all. It needed some serious slash and burn to get it into shape I think this author has a future and I wish him all the best, but I cannot recommend this particular volume as a worthy read.

The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

Rating: WARTY!

I wonder how many of you realize that it's quite illegal in the USA, on pain of death, to publish a YA novel that's not told in first person? This is only an assumption, mind, but it's the only logical conclusion I can draw from the overwhelming numbers of such cookie-cutter novels I find. I am forced to assume that it's also illegal to publish a dystopian novel which is not part of a trilogy, too, and for the same reason.

This is all driven by Big Publishing who are far more likely to take you on if you can show them that you can bring them a cash cow by making three volumes out of a story that's hardly worth one. I think Amazon bears more than its fair share of blame for this. By forcing book prices down to a standard 99 cents (like a 100,000 word book takes no more effort to produce than a two minute song), it has also forced writers to break a single novel up so instead of one ninety-nine cent volume, the author at least gets a three dollar 'series'. Such is the world we have created for ourselves.

In this trope clichéd effort, Ruby is a 16-year-old girl who is forced into a camp for special kids (in this case, that's kids who have some sort of psychic power). This is all done in a grotesque, and conveniently unexplained fashion. The kids are brutally contained for no reason that's given (not in the portion I listened to which was about one sixth of the novel). Within a few paragraphs (it's hard to judge in an audio book) I had heard more than enough to turn me (and my stomach) against this novel because it was so ridiculous as to be a joke. This trilogy is quite evidently a great parody of something, but I can't figure out what it's parodying. Neither can I recommend a trashy novel like this, so cynically written to take advantage of YA mediocrity and a gullible and undiscerning readership. The narration by Amy McFadden was far too 'Valley Girl' for my taste, which didn't help. This is not a worthy read, and it's cured me of any desire to read or listen to any more novels form this author.

Back To The Future: Untold Tales and Alternate Timelines by Bob Gale, John Barber, Erik Burnham

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a graphic novel, created by Bob Gale, John Barber, Erik Burnham. Gale co-wrote the Back to the Future movie (and the two sequels) with director Robert Zemeckis, and he also produced the movies. Barber is a webcomic writer and artist with whom I am not familiar. Erik Burnham is a writer who's been associated with Ghostbusters and TMNT comic book, including this one that I favorably reviewed back in February 2015, even though I am not a TMNT fan.

This collaboration worked well. The book is filled with issues one through five of the individual comics, offering a handful of short stories linked by a narration from Doc as he modifies the steam engine which he will convert into another time-travel machine. We get to see how Marty and Doc first met, how Doc became involved in the Manhattan Project, how Marty had to deal with yet another school bully in his own school when he was younger, how his parents came very close to breaking up after Marty had gone back to the future, and so on.

The dialog is just like the movie, and Doc Brown and Marty come off exactly like they did in the movie. The artwork is excellent and very colorful. The stories are entertaining, funny and well done, and the overall graphic novel is wonderful. I recommend this one.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook, read decently by Will Wheaton, has a really cool title, but it also has far too many pop-culture geek references which not only seriously pigeon-hole (if not date) it, and it thereby misses the chance to be as good as it could have been. The author seems to take a conceited pride in how many references to obscure antique video games or movies or magazines he can make, but these are references which no one really cares about any more unless they're unhealthily addicted to the past.

I started out liking the story, which is set in 2044, and is about geek teenager Wade Watts aka Parsival, an addict of OASIS, who embarks upon a virtual quest, but I soon grew tired of these endless references which contributed nothing to moving the story. I think this serves potential writers well as a warning though: just because you're an addict of a given topic doesn't mean your readers will welcome being hammered with endless harping on it when there's (we hope!) a story to tell.

This book would also have been a lot tighter and moved better had the author not bloated it with ridiculous juvenile arguments between people about Ewoks and Ladyhawke and on and on. Seriously. A reference here and there is fine, but let's not write paragraphs of exposition about these things. It bogs down the story, turns a large number of potential readers off, and delivers you nothing but shallow street cred from a handful of fellow geeks.

The story itself promised to be good. A multi-billionaire game developer dies and leaves a video will offering his riches and a controlling interest in his game business to whoever can discover the 'Easter egg' he had left in his highly popular MMPORG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game). He offers one clue in the video, and the rest you have to find in the game.

Naturally this sparks huge interest, but little progress as the months and then years go by. Instead of having the opportunity to go into the game and follow clues, the first portion of the novel is taken up with pointless and meandering narration in first person. 1PoV isn't my favorite voice by any means. Here it's not too bad to begin with, but over time it starts to grate, as nothing happens and the disingenuous narrator, while claiming on the one hand to be an Über-Geek devotee of the game developer, seems to spend all his time in juvenile chat rooms dissing other people and indulging in bromance instead of playing the game in search of the Easter egg.

We learn of his passion for a female blogger, Artemis, who is also engaged in the hunt and has a three somewhere in her maim which is completely lost on the audio listener, and we read about her purportedly witty and entertaining blogs, but we never get to read one. In short, it's all tell and no show, the no-show being entertainment value, and it gets tiresome in short order. I can't recommend it.

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this by way of the movie, which despite some large plot holes, I really enjoyed for a dumb action movie. The novel I liked less and less the more I listened to the audio book version which has not one, but two narrators one for the female 1PoV and one for the male. First person is bad enough when only one person is doing it, but you multiply the mistake when you admit to its weakness and have to add a second, third, fourth, whatever, PoV. I do not know why authors are so addicted to it. I can only ascribe it to chronic laziness and lack of imagination.

Here's the major flaw: 16-year-old Cassiopeia Marie Sullivan is shot in the thigh by a sniper. She's bleeding out and lying under a car trying to stanch (not staunch, but stanch, authors please note) the blood flow with a tourniquet (if you apply a tourniquet BTW, please realize that you are acknowledging the loss of the limb on the distal side of it). Despite her panic, her loss of blood, and her fear, this youngster calmly observes and analyzes every single thing in detail. No, I'm sorry, but you just kissed off realism, credibility, and my faith in your ability as a writer. We're told to write what we know, but that's bullshit. No one really does, nor should they - or us.

Personally I don't require that an author be shot in the thigh in order to write about it, but I do require that they use some thought and imagination. There was none in evidence here. This was YA at its dumbest, and this is where I started thinking I did not want to listen to any more of this. What convinced me was reading some reviews from people I follow, and their take on what was coming next is what persuaded me to say-onara...! Apparently this is really just a rip-off of Stephenie Meyer's The Host, and I have zero desire to read anything Stephenie Meyer ever writes, even if it's written by Rick Yancey instead.

The main character is known as Cassie. How many times has this name been over-used for a main female character? I'm starting to feel as nauseated by it as I am by 'Jack'. I refuse to read any novel which has a main character named Jack precisely because it is so prevalent and as to be in need of the urgent attention of epidemiologists. The story is the usual 'aliens are inevitably evil and despite there being literally billions of planets in this galaxy alone, Earth is the only one worth stealing'. These aliens are as retarded as you can get. They have been surveilling us for six thousand years, yet only now, when in all of those six thousand years we are best able to defend ourselves, do they decide to start a war with us?

For reasons unknown, instead of starting with the third wave and severely depleting our numbers with a deadly plague, they start out with an EMP even though such a thing is not guaranteed to completely disrupt society and even though critical military targets and matériel are EMP defended - which they ought to have known after 6K yrs of watching! I guess they're not so smart after all, but it's easy to see why a 16 year old American, raised on a diet of dumb-ass YA romance novels, would not have the intellectual wherewithal to understand this much.

So the EMP purportedly destroys all things electrical and electronic. The second wave is purportedly perpetrated by dropping metal rods, twice as heavy as the Empire State building on cities. Such a weight has fallen on Earth many times. Not in modern times, but the Barringer crater - the mile-wide one in Arizona, USA - was made by such a weight hitting the Earth. A metal rod would burn-up significantly, and break up in the atmosphere - something Yancey apparently forgets, and a metal rod dropped form the ionosphere carries nowhere near the kinetic energy as a meteor coming in from deep space.

A single such rod would, though, still make a significant impact, and destroy a city, but it would not wipe out the planet. A host of them hitting every major city begs two questions: where are they getting all this metal, and why are they taking an action which would effectively destroy not just humanity, but the entire planet if enough of these were dropped, making it entirely uninhabitable? And why go to the trouble of manufacturing neat two-thousand foot long metal bars rather than simply attach mass drivers to asteroids and direct those at Earth? None of this makes sense. But they are alien, Maybe they're imbeciles? Maybe they're merely teenage hooligan aliens out having a joyride? Whatever they are, they're in no way smart.

This is Yancey's biggest failure. What is the end-game here? Do they simply want to destroy a planet? Why? Do they merely want to wipe out humans? Why? And if so, why not do it with disease, leaving the infrastructure intact and the planet still habitable? If they hate us so badly, why let us develop for six thousand years before starting in on us? None of this makes any sense whatsoever. This is the start of a series - one more YA series I will not be following, but if they're such advanced engineers and technologists, why not bio-engineer Venus or Mars, both of which would be more habitable than Earth after they're done spreading disease and dropping steel dowels on us!

After the Pointless EMP and the tsunamis induced by the dread 'turds of rebar', we get the disease, which doesn't even get a scientific name. It's the bird poop disease! LOL! Yes, this is what the author wants us to believe: Ebola, engineered to be airborne, and delivered via bird poop, ravages the entire population, killing 97% of us. No, even Ebola isn't that efficient, especially not delivered in bird poop. Why not simply aerosolize it and spray the planet from orbit? None of this makes any sense. Either that or the aliens are, once again, morons.

Next, the aliens inhabit humans! If they can do this, why did they not simply do it from the beginning before they rendered the planet uninhabitable by disrupting nature, and causing a firestorm and dust cloud which would have brought on a "nuclear" winter and killed off pretty much everything that lives? So we have:

1. EMPeeing
2. Rebar none
3. turds of birds
4. alientrusion (aka silence is the new human)

What was that fifth wave again?

Watch the movie instead. It's still dumb in places, but it's a lot tighter and better written. You can tell it's a decent movie because critics almost universally panned it. That's how I know it's worth a look - movie critics are elitist morons! Ringer/Marika is the best character in the movie. The book is a waste of trees. Maybe it was written by evil aliens....

Night Owls by Lauren M Roy

Rating: WORTHY!

The vampire bookseller! Yes, that was what lured me in! I picked this up on spec from the local library (bless their little cotton pages!). Books are just like relationships, and if you've been bit as many times as I have by book blurbs, you tend to get book-shy, especially if it's a book in a genre that you're not given to reading. In my case, I am not a fan of vampire stories, but once in a while one comes along which shakes things up enough to keep it interesting. This was such a novel.

This is clearly intended to be the start of a series, and I am not inclined to follow series because they are way too repetitive and uninventive. They're a really lazy way of writing novels, and I have little time for them, with few exceptions, so this will be the only one of this series that I read.

The basic premise is that there are two factions on the side of good. One is Valerie McTeague, the bookseller, and the other is Elly Garret, who has been trained by a member of an order which destroys vampires. To make it really interesting, there are tow kinds of vampire,s and this come right out of Vampire Academy. I liked the first couple of novels, and I loved the movie, but I went off the series pretty quickly because Le Stupide was strong with that one. So Elly is really Rose, but there is no Lissa.

There are strigoi and moroi here, but the bad guys are called 'jackals' or 'creeps' - and at least they have some motivation for their behavior here, although how the two groups a differentiated into each class of vampire is a mystery. They are, and we're expected to accept it on faith. One group is suave, sophisticated and trope vampire, the other is stinky, primitive, savage, and low-life. It's really just class warfare, royalty v. peons. Differentiation between good and bad vampires is nonsensical to me, and represents nothing more than a ridiculous modern trope added to vampire lore for the benefit of undiscriminating teen readers.

Trope runs rife through this story: vampires live in hives and are allergic to holy water, can't cross hallowed ground, can't come out in daylight, are allergic to silver, allergic to holy water, and can be killed with a wooden stake - but it has to be Rowan wood! Why, I have no idea. None of this lore makes any sense to me (and isn't explained here) so any attempts to put vampires on a pseudo-scientific basis by talking of virally-transmitted disease and what-not, is bullshit. Vampires are cold (yet move superfast?!), they have no heartbeat, no blood circulation, so how does their body receive nutrition from the blood they drink? By magic! That's the only "explanation" so as far as I'm concerned, paranormal writers can shove their bullshit science! It makes no sense, so don't insult me by trying to make it make sense. Just tell the freaking story!

This author does bring in one or two new items (at least new to me, maybe these are ripped off from elsewhere, too. I can't say), such as a magical element, whereby "runes" are used as wards against vampire incursion, but they're pretty useless since they really don't hold the vampires back. The driver in this story is that there's a magical book which the bad vamps want, and which has fallen into the possession of the good guys. Why this book is not immediately destroyed is the biggest plot hole in the entire novel. It is of no value in fighting the vamps, so there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for keeping it around, Burn the book and everything that follows, including death and destruction, will never happen. Obviously this is why the book isn't burned (there would have been no novel otherwise!), but it made no sense and was a huge disbelief inducement! If you're going to do this, please find a reason why it cannot be destroyed, don't just let this hang out unquestioned, and unexplained!

That said, I liked many of the characters in the novel, especially Val and Elly, who I thought might become an item, but who did not. I liked that the story moved fast and there wasn't any vampire worship going on. I liked that Val wasn't a thousand years old and absurdly falling for some teen-aged guy. She wasn't and she didn't. There was no dumb-ass romance here, for which I was ludicrously grateful. I liked the two succubi (yeah, it's that kind of kitchen sink story). A novel about them might be worth reading, but this is about this novel, and was it worthy of my time? Overall, and despite the issues, yes to me it was and on that basis I recommend it.

Escape From Witchwood Hollow by Jordan Elizabeth

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"He'd said he if was going to have a sweat suit, he might as well make it lime green." The 'if' and the 'he' at the start are the wrong way around!
"She could have attempted to look more interested, as lease for her boyfriend's sake." At least for her boyfriend's sake, not 'as lease'!
“We are yonder!” - This is like saying, "We are over there" - it doesn't make any sense!
"Drudging memories and heartaches never helped anyone." I think this should be 'dredging' not drudging, which would mean doing menial work.

This was a strange novel, and one which included multiple flashbacks, of which I am not a fan. I confess though, that it grew on me as I read on, and in the end I came to like it and consider it a worthy read despite an issue or two here and there. It reads very much like a first novel, but that's not a bad thing. I found a few errata which are listed on my website.

The story begins in 2001, a month or two after the World Trade Center came down in New York City. Having lost her parents in the disaster, the rather exotically named Honoria has moved from the city to stay with relatives, so she's the trope orphan starting a new school, but refreshingly, the novel doesn't focus on that. Instead, it focuses on Witchwood Hollow, a mysterious area of woodland close to Honoria's new home, where a witch is said to hold sway, trapping people inescapably amongst the trees.

Just as I was really getting into Honoria's story, I was ripped away from it twice, once back to the late nineteenth century, and then again back to the late seventeenth. This annoyed me to begin with, because I wanted to follow Honoria, but eventually the story came back to her. I still hold doubts that this was the best way to tell this story. It was somewhat confusing, switching back and forth, and the past was nowhere near as interesting as the present in this story, but I learned to live with it, and the twisted ending was unexpected and better than the usual ending you might find in a story like this.

The story follows Honoria's increasing interest in Witchwood Hollow and her confusion as to whether the witch legend is real or simply some sort of country-bumpkin ignorance. Honoria was an intriguing character with a little bit too much of an interest in Leon for my taste. I find it sad that young females seem to be doomed to get attached to a guy in these stories. I find it especially irritating when the romance takes over the story!

In this case the romance - while lacking credibility - occupied such a small part of the story that it wasn't a deal breaker for me. I would find it refreshing to read a story where they're just good friends for a change. Not every girl in every story needs to be validated by a man, believe it or not! In Honoria's case, I was willing to Grant this a bye because she did have enough of a load to bear, and it seemed possibly reasonable that she would seek attachments to people, given that she had just suffered her parents dying horribly.

Honoria isn't the smartest person in the world, but she isn't the dumbest either, so this was nice. I did find myself cringing at one or two of her ideas though, such as when she saw a part of a coin from yesteryear stuck in the dirt, her thought was: "Someone had worked hard for that sliver; it might have kept them from starving one day." It's hardly likely it kept anyone from starving given that it was evidently never spent, and got lost in the dirt instead! At another juncture, she thought "he might catch pneumonia in the cold water" but no one ever caught pneumonia from cold water. Pneumonia is caught from an assortment of sources, none of which are H₂O. However, people do talk like that in real life, so I can't hold these things against her.

I thought Leon's girlfriend's reaction to Honoria at one point to be far too extreme. There had been nothing in the story to this point to merit her outburst or indicate she had been leading up to it. When she yelled, "You whore! You think it's funny trying to kill Leon?" it took me out of the story because it was so out of place. As I read on through the story I saw no point to that antagonism. I think it should have been skipped. Not every teen story needs to have a bitch!

Other than these relatively trivial complaints, the writing was well done, easy to read, and it was interesting. I enjoyed this story very much and I'd recommend it.

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Rating: WARTY!

I'm sorely tempted to say that you can't beat a novel with a title which suggests that the author is the villain (Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson), but my ongoing quest to find a readable classic continues to be frustrated! I recall reading at least part of this young adult novel when I was a lot younger, but since the only thing I remember about that is a couple of Scots dashing around in the heather, I don't think it made an impression on me. I found it looking forlorn on the library audio bookshelf, and decided to revisit it. If mony a mickle maks a muckle, then maybe another little read will have a big impact? Sadly, no!

I started out quite bemused by the novel, both for its antiquated language (of course it wasn't antiquated when it was first published in 1886 in installments no less!), and for the quirky narration by Jim Weiss, who is not even Scots for goodness sakes, has no idea how to emulate a Scots accent, and who seems to have only two voices, sassy and sissy. In the voice avoiding to Tim, all Scots except for Davy Balfour are in the first category. Even without the voices, though, I would have found this novel a thoroughly unworthy read.

Davy was quite simply a chronic whiner, and his story was tedious in most places, describing far too much detail and far too little action. His entire life in this novel, it seems, consists of him repeatedly losing his money or making bad bargains with it, and wandering the Scots "desert" trying to get back to his evil uncle and reclaim his inheritance, threadbare as it is. He would have actually been better off had he made it to the tobacco plantations. He might have become rich there.

I know this novel is not written for modern audiences, but I reserve the right to judge classics the same as any modern novel, and by this judgment it failed to entertain me!

Baker's Magic by Diane Zahler

Rating: WORTHY!

This story grabbed me from the start and wouldn't let go. It's an amazing fairy tale about a young girl, Bee, who runs away from her obnoxious foster parents and heads for the big city. On her journey, she finds a new father, meets a princess, sails with pirates, and discovers two of the most interesting islands ever to appear above sea level. This story read like it was written for middle-grade, although the main characters were all in their mid-eens. That said, however, this is really a story for all ages, in the classic mold of fairy tale telling.

All this in a land where trees won't grow, a mage rules in place of a king, and something Bee does seems to put magic into everything she bakes. Not that that's always a good thing, but there is a recipe at the back for one good thing: the famous Bouts buns! I enjoyed this, and as important, I felt that the writer had a great time writing it, which all-too-often doesn't come out, even in stories I've enjoyed. In this novel though, the fun she had in the writing came through just as powerfully as anything which Bee baked into her breads and pastries.

As if the story so far wasn't quite wonderful enough, Bee is asked to deliver some of her pastries to the castle, wherein lives the reclusive mage, and a princess who hasn't been seen in years. What's going on here? Why is the princess an orphan just like Bee? Why is the only tree in the land sitting in the palace garden? And what's with the hedgehog?

The novel is set in a fantasy version of The Netherlands, which caused a couple of hiccups for me, since it was written from a very American point of view. At one point, johnnycakes put in an appearance, but they're known only in North America, not in Europe - at least not in medieval times. The same goes for pecans.

There were a couple of missteps like that, but nothing your typical American reader would notice. The primary focus of my blog isn't about books per se, but about writing books, so it would be remiss of me to pass over what I found to be a delightful trip into English - not England, English - and Dutch! Naturally since this is a well-baked story, there is mention of cookies, but this, again, is a North American term. Like soccer versus football, the rest of the world calls them biscuits, which is also the Dutch word for them (although they have more than one word). However, the Dutch also have a word for cake, which is koek, so it's not so bad to be caught in possession of koek in Holland! LOL! The diminutive of koek is koekie, from which we get cookie, so it's not such a leap as it seems. Note that it's pronounced more like cook than coke, so you can discount my cookie joke. Confused yet?! I know I am.

I really liked this story, and despite it being rather lengthy, I blitzed through it in short order. It's very, very readable, and I recommend it. In fact, I'm prepared to guarantee that it won't burn your biscuits...!

The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George

Rating: WARTY!

This audio book came as one of a pair I picked up at the local library. Of course the blurbs made them sound interesting, so I figured if I like this, one will get me two. Naturally I began listening to the wrong one first, so the next day I started on the other one. The first had not been very impressive to start with, but it began to grow on me as I continued to listen. The second, which was actually the first volume of the pair, I liked right away, but then it began to grow off me, I'm sad to say. I think it's always sad when a book lets a reader down.

The main character, Becca, has the ability to catch people's thoughts, but in just the same way that mediums cannot ever give you anything concrete (because they're freaking frauds, of course!), Becca's thought-capture utility gives her only vague, fragmented snatches which made little sense. It did, however, drive her nuts when so many random thoughts invaded her mind, so her mom got her this thing which at first I thought was called the 'odd box', but which was actually called the "aud" box. I was saddened when I learned that, because I really liked the idea of them calling it an odd box. This is the price of audio books: no way to know the spelling of an odd word or a name, no ability to skip prologues reliably, and god-awful trashy music beginning and ending every disk.

What in the name of all that's inscribed is going through the mind of the audio book publishers that they feel they have lard-up the written word with mindless snatches of music that don't even disappear when the reader starts in on the text, but instead slowly fade away? I have no idea. Did the author write the music. NO! The music is entirely, completely, absolutely, fundamentally, and in every other way nothing to do with the story! It was absent from the novel as written by the author (which is all I care about), so what in the entire universe possessed these delusional deviants to add it? Are they so anal that they cannot get past the illusion that if it's a CD it has to have music? If it's audio it must have power chords and thrashing drums? These people are morons.

But I digress. The story begins interestingly enough when Becca catches thoughts from her stepdad that show he has murdered his business partner. Her dad, aware she can catch thoughts, knows that she knows, and this, finally, is evidently enough to motivate her mother to leave this jerk. Somehow Laurel, the mom, magically has the wherewithal to conjure up false identities for Becca and herself, and with hair color and makeup disguises, the two flee - to Whidbey island. Mom evidently has an old friend from high school who lives on the island, and who has agreed to take care of Becca. Mom herself, for reasons unexplained, does not stay with Becca, but disappears off somewhere else, leaving her daughter entirely alone.

The woman Becca is supposed to stay with dies before Becca gets to the house, and she has evidently told no one else that Becca is coming, so Becca is not only alone, she is without substantial money and has nowhere to stay. Then magic happens. Again. Becca gets a ride from a nice woman; she meets a nice young guy who directs her to another gruff but nice older woman, who magically runs a motel where Becca can stay for free in return for helping out around the place. You know this is what happens to all runaways right? They get everything on a plate and never have any difficulties. Happy, happy, joy, joy. This novel is Newbery material right there.

So this story that began with a great premise now descends rapidly into nothing more than high school rivalry and love triangles. The perky rockin' music was appropriate after all! Who knew?! Becca meets Derek, a slightly older student who is sweetness personified. She also meets Jen, one of the most obnoxious people it's possible to not avoid meeting. She immediately hates Becca and misses no opportunity to trash her in public and in front of Derek. Never once does Derek call Jen on it, or try to stop the insults flowing. Yet he's a nice guy, because we're told he is. He has a nice opinion of Jen, too, notwithstanding her disgraceful attitude and criminal behavior. (Note that I managed to stomach only about 30% of this novel, so when I say "never once" it refers only to that portion)

That's all the story offered at this point, and it was nowhere near enough. That and some vague mystery from the past which was so heavily and repeatedly foreshadowed that it became tedious to listen to. The reader, Amy McFadden, was way too perky and while not god-awfully bad, could not do a decent male voice to save her life, so that became a joke. Becca isn't very smart, either, which is another no-no in stories for me. When she gets a lift to go meet Derek, the driver sees him, and Becca catches certain foreboding thoughts. When she gets to Derek's side, she catches the other side of those thoughts, but never once does she suspect there's anything going on here. She's an idiot.

I was thoroughly disappointed in Becca that she had this ability to catch thoughts, yet did nothing with it: she did not practice, she tried no training of her ability, there was no exploration, no testing, no spying, nothing. Instead, she treated it like a mental illness, which was disappointing and short-sighted. I don't care if a girl starts out dumb and wises up, but I don't really want to read about female characters who have no sense of curiosity or ambition and never develop one.

There wasn't even any internal logic to the thought capture. She couldn't pick up thoughts from sentient animals such as dogs for example, and couldn't pick them up from an unconscious boy who'd had an accident, so it made no sense (unless maybe he was brain dead - I didn't read that far). She picked up no images, sounds, or smells, only words, and never once did she get a full sentence, again with no explanation as to why. In the case of the boy, Becca calls for an ambulance, and then refuses to give her name and hides her phone. What? I know she's trying to stay below the radar, but seriously is that the smartest way to do it?

My plan is, despite the disappointment here, to at least give volume two a shot, and see if it's any better, especially since I already started it. The problem with this plan is that the main character here appears to be Jen - at least in the beginning - and she was so nauseating in volume one that unless she underwent a marked improvement somewhere in volume one, then volume two isn't going to be enjoyable either! We'll see. As for this volume, I can't recommend it.