The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Rating: WORTHY!
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Erratum
"Sasha though suddenly of his stepmother," 'thought'?

This is a traditional-style fairy tale employing Russian folklore and mythology, and exploring the inevitable clash between religions: the extant traditional natural religion of the Russian hinterland, and the sick encroachment of Christianity into it. I loved the way the story started out, and enjoyed the ever-unfolding pace and power of the story-telling. There was no slack here, no annoying flashbacks or side-tracking and meandering, and it grabbed me from the start, even though I'm not usually a big fan of stories set in Russia.

This author knows her craft, and she did not cheapen the tale by writing it in first person, either. For that alone, I intend to paint an icon in her name! (You have to read the story to get that!). For me it really took off when a couple of new characters showed up, bringing conflict to what had been a rather idyllic existence for our main character. The fun thing was that the story never did play out quite as I might have expected, or even written it myself. There was always a twist, a turn, a quirk, an event to keep me guessing where this would go. I adored it for that.

The very best thing about it is the main character Vasilisa Petrovna, aka Vasya, aka Vasochka. Yes, the endless variations on names was one complaint I had. It was really hard, to begin with, to keep track of who was who since so many name variations, nicknames, and pet names were employed for the same character. I realize this is what Russians do, but this wasn't written in Russky! The author herself explains in an afterword that literal translation is not always a good goal for an author of fiction, and I agree with her very much, so a little more clarity would have been nice, but maybe that's just me.

That aside, Vasya was one of the most engaging and amazing characters I've ever read of. Alert to all Young Adult novel writers! If you want to know how to write a strong female character who is more than merely a male appendage, then you seriously need to read this novel. It's not the only novel which has a strong, independent female character who owns her life, and by 'strong', I mean within herself, not necessarily in her ability to kick someone's ass, but this is a fine example of such a novel. Katherine Arden gets it, period. Vasya was wonderful: a breath of fresh air in a world of lackluster and very forgettable young adult female characters.

The basic story begins with a Russian land baron in a period of history often called The Renaissance. That name didn't seem to fit here. Medieval felt more appropriate, but this was just after that era. In the particular case of this novel, I prefer to think of it as Age of Discovery! The land baron's wife dies giving birth to main character Vasya, a child who grows up rather odd and wild. She is so in need of minding - thinks her father Pyotr - that he travels many weeks to Moskva (curiously written as Moscow in the novel) to find a new wife at court. The ruling monarch is one of a small handful of Ivans to come to power in Russia. The story doesn't make this clear, but I assume it's Ivan the Fourth ("the Terrible"), who ruled from the mid- to late-sixteenth century.

He had three daughters named Anna(!), one of which died before she reached the age of two, and the other two of which were sent to convents. Such was the fate of unmarriageable girls, in Russia or anywhere. And that gives me an idea for a story! I hat eit when that happens! Anyway, Ivan did not like immodest girls, and he accidentally killed his own son during an argument over his daughter-in-law's perceived immodesty. In this story however, one Anna isn't sent to a convent; she escapes such a fate because Ivan adopts a plan to rid himself off this "crazy" girl to Pyotr in exchange for one of Pyotr's daughters marrying his son, and thereby helping secure his dynasty. This story succeeds admirably where Ivan failed so dismally in his quest!

The thing about Anna is what she shares in common with Vasya. The difference between them is the interpretation of what they see, and the subsequent fear or it, or lack of such fear. Anna often sees what she believes are demons around the palace, and she is scared to go into the wild, frozen north. When she arrives, she sees even more demons, and this time the demons see her. Meanwhile there's a strange nobleman (or maybe not so noble) who manipulates Pyotr into giving his youngest daughter a necklace, unless Pyotr wishes to see his oldest son die. But the family nursemaid manages to wangle it so that the daughter doesn't get the gift until she's of age. What will happen then, is anyone's guess!

The writing was evocative and engaging, but occasionally, a part here or there struck me as being 'off'. For example, at one point early in the story the youngest daughter, Vasya, wanders off and gets lost in the forest. She is rescued (fortuitously before a freezing night falls) by her older brother who was out searching for her. She had encountered a strange man in the forest before her brother brings her home. She was terrified, but we read, "Pyotr thrashed his daughter the next day, and she wept, though he was not cruel." Excuse me? He "thrashed" her, for getting lost and scared half to death, and he's not cruel? That struck a sour note for me.

And yes, I get that people, especially people in those climes and times, were a lot more rough and ready, and pursued what might be termed "frontier justice" with a lot more vigor than people do today, but this is cruel by any light. I get that someone like him might thrash his daughter, but to 'qualify' that by adding that her father was not cruel, was poorly done for me. This isn't the last time that Vasya is so disciplined. In fact, the second time it's an even greater injustice, but she's older then, and bears it stoically, especially since it simultaneously rescues her from something she was not looking forward to. It seems that Vasya is fated to live always slightly apart from her own people. This is one of the things which made her such an intriguing character for me.

Yes, nicknames and pet names! Here's one example: "After Sasha and Olga went away, Dunya noticed a change in Vasya." I had to actually parse that sentence before I got out of it exactly who was doing what here! Here's a classic example:

Alyosha was waiting for her. He grinned. "Maybe they will manage to marry you off after all, Vasochka."
"Anna Ivanovna says not," Vasya replied composedly. "Too tall, skinny as weasel, feet and face like a frog." She clasped her hands and raised her eyes. "Alas, only princes in fairy tales take frog-wives. And they can do magic and become beautiful on command. I fear I will have no prince, Lyoshka."

Alyosha is actually her older brother, Aleksei Petrovich, who is one of the few people who actually 'gets' Vasya and supports her. I really liked him, but this endless parade of nicknames was irritating (Google is going nuts underlining all these names in red as I write them! LOL!). Eventually I learned to overlook it and it became less important as the story progressed, but I could have done with a lot less of it. It's not necessary to name a person every time you speak to them or even of them. I think quite a few of these names could have been dispensed with and left the novel a more pleasing demeanor in the doing.

That was my only real complaint about this story. I do have to say that the ending fell a bit flat given that the entire novel had been leading me to it. I was expecting more of Vasya, but overall the story was an engaging and very endearing one, and I fully recommend it. In general it's a tour-de-force of how to write a fable like this, mixing folklore and fairy-tale, and it was a joy to read. I very much look forward to Katherine Arden's next literary outing.

Shimmer by Brinda Berry

Rating: WORTHY!'

This completes my brace of reviews of mermaid stories I decided to...dip into. While I like the idea of a good mermaid story, the execution of such stories has nearly always failed me, so I'm not a fan of the genre. Once in a while a story comes along that sounds like it might be worth reading, but often I'm disappointed which is what happened with the previous novel I reviewed, which was awful. This one is a very short story, and when I began it I had the feeling that I might end up not liking it, but as I read on, it won me over.

It's not brilliant, but it was a worthy read even though, with all the advertising in it, it felt more like it was a flier for Brinda Berry's writing than ever it was an honest attempt at selling a story. There are pages of advertising for books by Berry, so the actual story starts on page seven and ends on page 43 of a sixty-three page book! The actual story isn't even forty pages. The last section of the book is taken up with two chapters from another Brinda Berry novel, which (and not coincidentally!) I'm actually reading next.

The thing which started to turn me off the novel was the main character names, which were so bad and uninventive that it almost made me quit. The guy is named Draven - he's the landlubber. Draven? Seriously? The mermaid is named Coral. She's land-bound due to a family decision from long ago, but she knows of her mermaid heritage from her deceased mother, and she's trying to get back to it. This explains why Draven (Draven? Honestly?) thinks she's drowning herself when he's out on the beach at an ungodly hour in the morning. He "saves" her and they form an uncomfortable friendship. But Coral is determined to revert to her heritage, so the relationship seems doomed.

Like I said, not usually my cup of sea. I like a good paranormal story, even some romances, but they have to be organic and make sense within their own framework and far too many do not. I think you have to have some sort of framework, otherwise anything goes and the story has no substance. This one was short enough and vague enough that I didn't run into any of those problems, and Coral was so practical I couldn't help but like her. She doesn't care that Draven sees her butt-naked, which makes a refreshing change from the panicked modesty we often encounter in scenes where one of the main characters is unexpectedly exposed. It was this grounding and Draven's more mature attitude which won me over. He almost lost me with his over-protectiveness, but in the end I liked the story which is why I moved on to read the book-length Berry novel titled The Waiting Booth

It's for these reasons that I consider this a worthy read, especially since it was free from Barnes & Noble when I picked it up! I'm always looking for new, intelligent authors to get into, and maybe Brinda Berry (which is actually a really cool name!) will be one of them. Although I solemnly promise right here that I will never read any of her novels that have naked male torsos on the covers. Ugh! Talk about genderist! I actively avoid novels like that no matter who had written them. Maybe that should have informed me on the second book I reviewed by this author, which did not fare so well despite having no naked torsos on the cover!!

I don't normally talk about book covers because my blog is about writing, not pretension or glitz, and authors rarely have anything to do with their covers (or their back cover blurbs!) unless they self-publish, but I have to say this one was interesting. The model's face was quite captivating, but what I loved most of all was how the title, Shimmer was in a font where it looked like it might read "Swimmer". I don't know if the artist planned that consciously. If so, it was a master stroke. If not, it was a fortuitous happenstance. I enjoy plays on words, especially in book titles, so this one was a winner there, too! Note that this is not the sad cover shown on Goodreads with the guy, and the mermaid holding a starfish. The one on this edition was so much better!

Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd wanted to read a John Green novel which I don't, ever, I would have picked one up. I picked this one up mistakenly, but utterly convinced it was not a John Green novel. Was I ever wrong! It was awful. Even the guy reading it sounded exactly like the kind of voice that I've heard in a John Green audiobook when I made the unforgivable mistake of trying one. Gräf is a German word meaning Count, as in Graf Zeppelin, meaning Count Zeppelin who founded the Zeppelin airship company. It doesn't mean 'green', so what the heck was going on here?!

The story is that this young guy killed another young guy by means of accidentally hitting him in the chest with a hockey puck. The victim has a weak heart and dies. Now this guy is all-but irremediably morose, until this girl swoops in and rescues him. Almost inevitably, the girl is named Fallon, because god forbid she would have a given-name name that wasn't someone's surname, or any sort of ordinary name in a John Green, er Lisa Graff novel.

The only thing that Lisa forgot to do was include the girl's name in the title. She should have called it Looking for Fallon, since Lost in the Fallon sounds very odd. I guess it could have been titled Gone Guy. That would have worked, but it's really better if you have the girl's name in the title. That's only going to work though, if the girl has an unusual name, like Alaska. Looking for Myrtle, charming as that sounds, isn't going to cut it despite it having a play on words. But with an exotic, pretentious, or unusual name, you can have Half-Baked Alaska, if Alaska is a bit stupid or crazy, or Alaska is Like, Totally Husky, Dude!, if Alaska is a bit of a dog, or Melting Alaska if she's cold, and which also has the other element which you really: the implication in the title that she's lost or in need of saving. So you might have Performing Open-Heart Surgery on Alaska in the back of a old VW Bug which works because it makes a play on the term 'open-heart'.

Playing on words, especially if you can play on the girl's name, is wonderful. So you can have, for example, The Color of Jade, which is perfect, because then you get an exotic name and a play on words. Or you could have April, Come She Will which has the added advantage of a salacious play on words. So on that theme, maybe Lisa should have titled this, Fallon, Falloff which not only gets the unusual girl's name into the title, but makes a play on words and evokes The Karate Kid. OTOH, why would anyone want to evoke The Karate Kid?" Okay, strike that.

Fallon derives from Gaelic name meaning leadership or supremacy, or something along those lines. I'd hazard a guess that this is something which never crossed the author's mind, and she chose it merely because it struck her fancy, but maybe she did know what she was doing (she's emulating John Green after all, perhaps hoping to get a second wind from his sales/sails), but playing on that theme would give us Following Fallon which has the added advantage of an alliterative appellation. Another such title would be Rise and Fallon. But I think we've explored this motif quite enough for now, so I'll just go with Lost in its Own Pretensions, and leave it at that!

So, in short, the prologue sucked as much as the novel. Neither Fallon nor the main guy, whose name I completely forget, were worth my reading time. In fact, the guy was a vindictive and obnoxious little prick in the part I listened to, so I cared neither about him nor about the girl in shining armor. I don't normally read prologues, but it's hard to avoid them in audiobooks where you have no idea what's coming next, especially if they don't announce it.

The prologue was a truly crappy story about a crappy rip-off which the author calls a 'claw machine' - one of those things which takes your money based on your deluded belief that it's fair and equitable and the claw really is strong enough, if you get it just right, to pull up one of those tightly-packed plush toys. No, it's not, and even if you did get one, the toys are so crappy and cheap that they will fall apart in short order.

It's better to have your kids save the money and actually buy a decent plush toy. The habit of saving and reaping rewards will teach them much more useful tactics in the long run, than any amount of plays on a gambling machine ever will. Of course, then the kids don't get to play with the claw and have some excitement, but there are better ways to let them have fun than this. This prologue was pedantic, and as usual it contributed nothing to the story. Nothing. You can skip it completely and be no worse off. I rest my case against prologues, prefaces, introductions and authors notes. Boycott them with the same ardor you'd boycott one of those fraudulent claw machines! And give this novel a miss, because it's amiss. It will deliver to you the same emptiness that the claw machine does, and it's so John Green it will never ripen.

Charmed by Jen Calonita

Rating: WARTY!

This was a major rip-off of Harry Potter. I tried this one because I had liked the first in the series Flunked, but the author got the titles wrong. The first one was charming, this one should have been flunked. It was awful. It''s hard to believe the same writer wrote both of them. I felt bad for the reader in the audio version, Kate Rudd, who does am amazing job and has an adorable voice, but she had absolutely nothing to work with here, although she does her best.

The first novel was something of a rip-off of Harry Potter, but I was willing to let that slide because it seemed like the author had put some effort into making it lighthearted and amusing, and added a twist or two. I liked the attitude; then comes this mess, which starts out with the most juvenile chapter ever - a food fight - and descends from there. The next chapter launched with a ship coming up out of the lake which is right by the school. Durmstrang anyone? The ship has a silver serpent for the figurehead. Slytherin anyone? It was at this point that the ripping-off of Harry Potter had gone far too far. I started skimming and realized by forty percent in that this was just getting worse. It's back on the library shelf now. I refuse to recommend such bad, unimaginative, and derivative writing.

Olivia Twisted by Vivi Barnes

Rating: WARTY!

I made it twenty percent of the way through this before giving up in disgust. The reason I was interested in reading it was that it seemed like it might have preempted an idea I had for a different take on Oliver Twist, but this story had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Dickens's novel except in that it purloined the names of some of his characters. My idea is quite safe! Other than that it was set in contemporary times in a high school featuring a bunch of young hackers who were one-dimensional cookie-cutter characters, and was consequently and unsurprisingly boring.

There was the trope new kid in school, the trope obnoxious classmate (in this case Tyson who was solely interested in meat LOL!), the trope hot guy, in this case "Z", which turned me off immediately. What really killed this for me apart from the boredom was that it was twice as bad as the worst person voice, which is first person voice. Twice as bad because, having made the mistake of choosing to tell this story in that voice, the author then doubled-down on their mistake by splitting it between the two main tropes (Z and Liv) and told their stories both from first person in an open admission that she had chosen the wrong voice and was far too stubborn and stuck in a YA rut to change it.

Frankly, this story sucked and after reading the first fifty tedious pages of these character's "Liv"es, I had "Z"ero interest in learning anything more about these wastes of skin. I'm sorry, but there is honestly something wrong with you if you find this kind of writing entertaining.

Flunked by Jen Calonita

Rating: WORTHY!

This audiobook was read appropriately by Kristin Condon, who failed only with some of the the male voices (making them sound obnoxiously fake as some female readers can do I'm sorry to report). Otherwise she was very easy on the ear and got most of the voices spot on for me. I liked this story out of the gate for the fact that it was humorous and quirky, but after a while it started to flag. It was nice to get that good feeling to begin with though, because I haven't had a lot of success lately with audiobooks. I have to say that I tend to take more risks with audio than with other books, since I get them for free from the library and I'm willing to give anything a try for some good company on a longish commute to work each day. The downside is that I tend to fail a greater portion of audios than I do print or ebooks. In this case, this one made it under the wire!

I can see a lot of ties to the Harry Potter series here, which might irritate some readers. I could see Professor Snape in the Evil Queen, who is a teacher whose sister is also in the school and is a trouble-maker and a bully, so I guess it's more of a cross between Snape and Malfoy. Also, it was a boarding school (in this case a reform school), which featured rooms and hallways that changed - apparently randomly - like the staircases in Potter. There was also a forest from which the students were forbidden and which houses giants and "Pegasi"!

The author evidently doesn't realize that Pegasus is an actual name in Greek mythology; not a species, but a god sired by Zeus himself! If you want a species name, then maybe it should be something along the lines of Equus volantem. In short, there was a lot of copying and this author made no more effort to make it make sense than did Rowling. Why for example in Potter, was a children's school situated near a highly dangerous forest? Why was there no magic keeping kids out? Why do hallways randomly appear and disappear? As with the staircases in Potter, what was the point other than to put a weird quirk into a story of a magical world? Of course this is exactly what it was for, and younger readers don't have a problem with it. Older ones might.

The characters also bore similarities. There was a flighty female like Luna Lovegood, and she even had a name ending in 'a': Kayla. The main character is Gillian or Jillian. it's impossible to tell with an audio. I shall employ the latter spelling for now. She was sent to Fairy Tale Reform School for a third strike theft offense. The third leg was a 'jack-me-lad' kind of a guy whose name was actually Jax (or jacks, or something like - short for Jackson), I'm sorry to have to report.

That name (Jack) is way-the-heck overused in fiction. Normally that's a deal-breaker for me because I expect my authors to have more imagination and inventiveness than to go immediately to a stock character name like that. I flatly refuse to read any more novels which have a main character named Jack. In this case I let it slide because he wasn't the main character, and he wasn't too irritatingly competent and macho. Also I really liked the warped take on fairy-tale land which the author had concocted here, and I loved the wry view of life the kleptomaniacal main character adopted.

The magic was illogical, which may sound strange thing to say of a book about fairy-tales and magic, but if you're going to create a world where everything is apparently free - as in a magical world - then there's no reason at all to have impoverished characters. That always stuck out like a sore thumb in the Potter series. Why was Ron's family poor when they were excellent at magic? If they could transform a goblet into a rat, they sure as hell could transform lead into gold, yet they were always down at heel! Why were Ron's clothes shabby when it was so easy to do some sort of reparo spell and fix them? Why did anyone work when they could get everything they wanted from magic - and at no cost? None of that made any sense at all!

The alternative is to have rules - to make spells only work in a certain way or entail a cost to perform, and that didn't seem in evidence here any more than it did in the Potters, but Jillian's family had no magic, and resented those who did - who could, for example, magic up several pairs of shoes which her father would normally have made - so he was robbed of the work. This at least gave Jillian her motivation for theft. Additionally, some of the teachers seemed a bit on the stupid side I have to say! Why, for example, did they believe Jillian's lie that Jax was sneaking out of an upper storey window after curfew, on the flimsy excuse of looking for Jillian's lost Journal out in the grounds? The lie was so obvious and so out-of-left-field given Jax's actions that it made no sense they would let such a bogus claim slide. That kind of thing aside, I did enjoy the opening sequences: they were funny and a bit different, and made for an enjoyable listen. I liked this one and intend to listen to the second in the series.

Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd

Rating: WARTY!

Audiobooks for me are a lot more experimental than print or ebooks, because I am a captive audience for an hour each day when commuting, so I tend to try a lot more risky or uncertain material, and sometimes this pays off with a gem here and there (mostly there), but more often I find I don't like the book, and I can't stand to listen to it all the way through. Fortunately, these are all library books, so I haven't wasted any money. There are assorted reasons for my dislike, and this one had two of the major three (first person voice, poor writing, and bad narrator).

This one started out on the wrong foot by being first person PoV which I typically cannot stand. I know a lot of people like this voice, but I'm not one of them. If I see it in a print book at a library or a bookstore, I immediately put it back on the shelf no matter how interesting the blurb made it sound, because I know it's far more likely to piss me off or repulse me in some other way, than ever it is to please me. It's a lot harder to reject such books when they're ebooks (unless they happen to offer a sneak preview), and it's impossible to determine this with an audiobook unless you listen to it, or can find a print or e-version you can sneak a peek at.

The first person voice is wa-ay overused, especially in YA novels, and is rarely used without imbuing a feeling of fakery to me, and in this case simultaneously invoking severe nausea. The reader here, who has the charming name of Sile Bermingham (which if pronounced phonetically and sloppily, actually sounds a little bit like the way people who live in Birmingham, England, say it: Buhrminum - wasn't unpleasant, but the tedious, endless first person was boring as hell given that she wasn't narrating anything of interest and obsessed with trivial details instead of larger pictures. The story started out well enough with the main character fleeing her foster home, which actually didn't sound at all bad, purportedly heading back to Ireland, but she somehow never got there - not in the portion I could stand to listen to - and the story became lost somewhere along that convoluted road.

The second biggest problem was that having got me all interested in the escape, the author then harshly slammed on the brakes (gimme a break!) and went into endless flashbacks about the character's previous life, which is a big no-no for me. By all means slip in a detail here and there, but to info-dumpo the whole thing when it was largely irrelevant (except as a trigger) to what she was currently doing, brought the story-crashing down and was an insult to the reader. From that point on, I was frankly never quite sure if I was listening to the flashback portion or the current story portion. Worse than this, all the flashbacks achieved was to convince me that the main character, the self-titled 'Solace' was a whiny, brattish, unpleasant person who deserved nothing better than she got. if the flashback portion of her life is that interesting (which it wasn't) then why is the author telling that story instead of bouncing back and forth like a pinball? I quickly gave up on this one, and now you know why. Based on what I listened to (and then skimmed through), I can't on good faith recommend this at all.

Girl, Stolen by April Henry

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely read by Kate Rudd, I felt that this novel exemplified my problem with first person voice precisely because this was not written in first person! It would have been obnoxious to me if it had been first person because there was a bit too much info-dumping and lessons on being blind, and these were told rather than shown. It was written for a younger audience than I represent, but sometimes it felt like it had been written for a middle-grade audience than a YA one.

That said, and the occasional annoyances aside, for me it was eminently listenable as a third person story. I applaud April Henry for that! It started out very strongly and really drew me in. Then a bit later towards the end, it started going slightly south and I remember thinking, "Oh no! Here we go again!" but it rallied and came back strongly at the very end, so I'm very grateful to the author for that too, and happy to rate this as a worthy read (or listen!)!

The main characters are sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, the daughter of a Nike executive, and Griffin, the boy who kidnaps her inadvertently when he steals the Cadillac in which she's sleeping when Cheyenne's step-mom goes into the pharmacy to pick up her antibiotic prescription.

Griffin is heading out of the mall parking lot when Cheyenne makes her presence known, but he's not about to stop and let her go so she can report him and describe him to the cops. It's then that he learns she's blind. Still he doesn't stop, but he assures Cheyenne that he will return her to a safe place for pick-up by her folks when it gets dark. Unfortunately his dad and two jerks who work for his dad discover that she's actually the daughter of a rich man, and decide to hold out for a ransom. As the negotiations go on, Cheyenne realizes that she needs to escape or she'll end up dead, and although she's grown a relationship with Griffin, she doesn't feel she can trust him to help her. She must go it alone.

There were some issues (as other reviewers have pointed out) such as the question of why money seemed so important to a family which seemed to be doing pretty decently from their chop-shop business, but I didn't let that bother me. Avarice is the only motivation some people need! The biggest issue for me was the story coming to a screeching, jarring halt near the end, when the author decided inexplicably to give us a couple of chapters of Griffin's history! She'd had the entire novel in which to do this during conversations between Griffin and Cheyenne, yet she halted the whole story just when it was getting really exciting and dumped it all right there. I skipped it and didn't miss it. The ending was good enough however, for me to forgive that and recommend this story overall, as a very worthy read.

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd paid attention to the blurb, I would never have read (or more accurately, listened to) this novel. The blurb on Goodreads begins, "John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park." They quite evidently have no idea whatsoever how that prospect would turn my stomach. I detest John Green's novels, and thought that Rowell's Fangirl was a truly sad disaster.

This novel, OTOH, has no relationship whatsoever to any of those pretentious and flatulent piles of drivel. I don't get why Big Publishing™ is so intent upon demeaning their authors by rendering them into clones of other authors. How insulting can you get? This is why I self-publish, and that may rob me of a few advantages, but anything is better than putting up with that crap - with having insulting and misleading blurbs that treat readers like morons, and having someone else effectively own your property at least in terms of how it's presented to the public. Screw that for a game of tin soldiers!

This novel stands apart from those others in many ways, and I did like Rebecca Lowman's narration (refreshingly this was not a first person PoV disaster) but in the end, it proved to be no better that he volumes to which it's been compared. I think the author's problem was that she could not make up her mind what the hell kind of a story to write, and tried to make it all things to all people. As such it was a serious fail and ended-up ill-serving her original purpose, which evidently was to show that people with disabilities are really just like the rest of us. Well duhh! The problem with her approach was that instead of showing us two challenged people who were otherwise just like the rest of us, she chose to show us two people who were really, in the final analysis, jerks. They were unlikable, irresponsible, clueless and ill-fitted to decent sociable society. Ironically, it frequently seemed like they were made for each other

Matthew is in many ways worse off than Amy. He has a richness to his OCD that's worthy of Howard Hughes, intent upon a disturbing level of personal hygiene and an inexplicably paradoxical compulsion to touch and count things he passes. The saddest thing about his condition isn't that he has it, it's that he's had it in this school system for years and no one has offered him a lick of help for it. The teachers in the school are quite obviously morons who ought to be fired. Matthew's mother is hardly better. That was one of the problems - the novel takes place in a bubble formed by Matthew and Amy, like the rest of the world doesn't exist. Absurd!

Matthew finally does get a species of help in the form of Amy, who has the questionable idea of hiring fellow students to be her companions at school in place of her regular adult companion/facilitator. This leads to her opening up and living a life quite unlike she has before, and it also brings herself and Matthew into regimented proximity. That's not to say it's all plain sailing, though; much of it is painful and ailing.

This idea of using fellow students gets her what she wants in terms of making 'friends' although the value of the friendship is highly dubious, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the author fails to explain how these people substitute for her adult aides who did a heck of a lot more for her in terms of caring and personal hygiene than ever the students do. It's like the messy little bits are swept under the carpet, but it really wasn't that which bothered me. It was that the real dysfunction of these two characters wasn't OCD or cerebral palsy (what an awfully antiquated name that is! Can medical science not do better than that to describe this condition?). The real dysfunction here was that both Matthew and Amy were unlikable jerks who treated each other shabbily on Matthew's part and appallingly on Amy's. And this is a romance? No!

The latter honestly did not deserve anyone like Matthew who, as mis-focused as he was at times, at least wanted to help her. She just used him, and despite the author telling us repeatedly how smart Amy was, what she showed us all-too-often was what a complete dumbass Amy was. I didn't like either of these characters and gave up on a novel that had started out so well and then fell apart. I cannot recommend this.

Ms Marvel Vol 1: No Normal by G Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona

Rating: WORTHY!

Admirably written by the talented G Willow Wilson, and nicely and amusingly illustrated by Adrian Alphona, the Ms. Marvel book is actually the first in the series - finally! I can't believe graphic novel writers make it so hard to figure out which collected volume is the first you should read. Is it such a problem to put a big "#1" of the front cover? LOL! It's a good story though, so I want to read more in this series. I think I've now read the first three (but who can say?!), and really liked one and three; two, not so much. Finally I got to learn how Kamala Khan got her super power - and it was by the oddball method of becoming enveloped in an unexplained fog which wafted through the city!

Working on an idea for a super hero novel (not graphic, just text!) myself, I've started thinking about the existing ones a little bit more closely. Becoming empowered by a fog struck me as decidedly odd, because everyone in the city (this is set in Jersey City; Marvel seems obsessed with the east coast for some reason) was likewise exposed, yet only Kamala seems to have developed any super powers from it. Why? This goes not only unexplained, but unexplored. I found it sad that she wasn't curious about why she alone was blessed or cursed. Thinking about other heroes, only one immediately comes to mind - although I'm sure there are more - who developed his power in a way parallel to Kamala, and The Hulk really goes unexplained too, so this is nothing new.

I mean, how did Bruce Banner change, and no one else exposed to gamma rays did? Maybe it's because no one had the exposure he did, yet we're all exposed to gamma rays from space - fortunately not to a high degree. The fact remained that it was he who survived and developed his...condition. Spider-man is a similar case, but though many are bitten by spiders, none that I know of have been bitten by a radioactive spider! Superman doesn't count because he isn't special - anyone from Krypton would have his powers if they came to Earth, as his story shows. Batman and Iron Man are self-made, so they're responsible for their "power". Thor is just like Superman in many regards, so nothing to be learned there. Wonder Woman is also in that category. Green Lantern got his power because he was chosen and imbued with it, just as was Captain America, although in a different manner. Again, anyone in theory could have had their power. So we're back to Kamala being special in an undefined way which few other heroes are. Unless of course she was chosen somehow, but we're left with these unanswered questions, which make her very intriguing to me.

Moving on from the receipt of the power, we immediately get to the story of how she recognized it and learned to live and work with it, which I thought was really well done in this book. It felt real, and natural and organic, and it made for a fun and engaging story, especially since it's tied, in many ways, to her Muslim upbringing, her distance from her traditional parents - and from her school-friends, and her desire to be "normal" yet be able to use her gift to help others. I loved this story and recommend it as a great start to the series. I was unimpressed by volume two, especially the artwork. Volume three was a much more impressive and very amusing volume. I review both of those separately elsewhere on my blog.

Resurrecting Sunshine by Lisa A Koosis

Rating: WARTY!

Note: this is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Resurrecting Sunshine was a real disappointment for me. I felt like it was a bait-and-switch story and I got the lesser half of the deal. The titular character, Sunshine, aka Marybeth, is being cloned, and she had a major story to tell, yet we never get to meet her at all. All we get is Adam's perspective, in first person, which can be tedious, and Marybeth never got to tell her story. In fact, she got shorted badly and I resented that.

The story is set about a decade into the future and is all about the adolescent yet juvenile Adam, an emancipated and emaciated spoiled-rotten seventeen-year-old, self-pitying drunk, who is one of the most tediously self-obsessed, self-centered, and monotonously whining characters I've ever had to put up with in a novel. The first person PoV, which is nearly always worst person PoV, did not help at all. He was nauseating. After about sixty percent of the novel, I began skimming because I could not stand to listen to him and I resented the endless, uninformative flashbacks. I found myself wishing that Adam had died and Marybeth was telling the story. As a resurrected clone, it would have made for far more interesting reading.

More than one person has rudely tried to impose upon me the assertion that you cannot review a novel if you haven't read it all, but those people are not only crass, they are delusional. I read sixty percent of this one and skimmed the rest, and it not only did it never improve, it never went anywhere I didn't expect it to go. I rest my case.

It was utterly predictable in pretty much every major facet, so there were no surprises at all. Except one: I was surprised that I never got to meet Marybeth, but having met Adam, I was left in no doubt as to why she killed herself. He was insufferable. And yes, it's no spoiler to reveal that fact, because like several other things in the novel, such as how Adam and Genevieve would end up as an item, and what her story was, it was so predictable, and it was quite obvious that "Sunshine" had rain in her life despite the author's inexplicable, yet extreme reticence in revealing that obvious information.

Adam was the guitarist in a four-person band of which Sunshine was the star. All of the others are dead, and so it's Adam who's approached by a rather secretive organization that's intent upon cloning loved ones. He's told they can bring Marybeth back, and they need him because her memory record, which they had taken when she was in the hospital, is corrupted in part. He knew her better than anyone, and he can help fix the omissions.

This was one of several issues for me in a novel that was far more fiction than science. Yes, we could technically clone a human. Whether it's ethical or advisable is another issue, but this cloning was glossed over so thickly that it stunk of varnish. How did they get her cells? How did they record her memories?

Growing an embryo into a seventeen year old girl in a few weeks or months? It's too much. Recording memories? I found it hard to believe they'd been able to get access to someone like Sunshine and record her memories as she lay dying or dead without anyone finding it strange or questioning what they were doing. There are ways to explain this, but it never was explained - it was simply a given. And never were the ethics of this shady business seriously questioned. The second instance of this memory mapping is even harder to explain, and so it goes unexplained, but I can't go into that without giving away a rather large spoiler, even though it became obvious what was going on well before the author revealed it.

I really like a good cloning story and this one started out quite well, and at least the story took off quickly, which is always a plus. Problems arose for Adam as soon as he arrived on the Island of Doctor Morose. He's missing booze of course, the islanders seem to think there are ghosts at the clinic, despite all the secrecy - or perhaps because of it - and even as he pines for Sunshine, he's forming a relationship with another young girl there, whose name is Genevieve. This was another sad case of instadore in YA "literature" and it was one more sorry aspect to this story. Adam isn't fit to be in a relationship with anyone and Genevieve is a moron if she thinks she's in love with this dick after a few troubled weeks.

As for Sunshine, despite being the titular character, she's conspicuous by her absence. She's been cloned, Adam is told, but not yet fully matured. In the story, the clones undergo an artificial maturation process (which the author amusingly calls 'aging', like the clones are wine or cheese!), so he isn't allowed to meet her until they've finished calibrating his mind and retrieving his memories. The idea is that Adam will recall memories of Sunshine and these will themselves be cloned and used to fill the gaps in the clone's mind - suitably altered to make them look like her own memories rather than his. How that will work goes unexplained. The author hasn't specified why this is necessary - why they couldn't, for example, simply tell her she's lost some memories.

This was one of the major problems because the author seems to have a poor understanding of how memories are made and stored. Or is it that she has a great grasp of it, but chooses to ignore it for the purpose of this fiction? I don't know. I can't remember accurately! LOL! Seriously though, there's this fiction in fiction that the mind is like a computer hard drive constantly recording everything, and that whatever is stored there can be recalled exactly as it was when first stored - it never changes. This is completely wrong. Human memory is much more like stew than it is like a hard drive, with memories constantly mixing with and flavoring others.

Memories are modified every time they're recalled, and what's stored in the first place isn't an accurate record of what you experienced. Most things your senses encounter are filtered out, and only what your mind considers crucial to your survival is stored. Even our definition of survival is different these days from what it was when we lived on the Savannah in Africa. This laxity in our memorizing is why eye witnesses are the worst kind of evidence in a court case, and our poor understanding of memory is why jurors so idiotically put so much stock in what an eye witness says. It's not possible to pull up your entire past because it simply isn't there to be pulled up, and what is there isn't authentic, so it actually wouldn't matter if the clone is deemed to have false memories! Our own "real" memories are false to a disturbing degree!

One question I kept asking is "Why make her a clone?" She could have been be a ghost or a twin sister and this story would have been largely the same, especially since she never got to actually tell her story. All we ever got was Adam endlessly going back into his recollections and "interacting" with Marybeth in holodeck simulations right out of Star Trek. I felt cheated.

At first this wasn't bad and it was actually integral to the story, but when it went on and endlessly on and on and on, it turned me right off the story. It became boring, tedious and unengaging. Even if Adam had been a guy worth reading about, and he wasn't, it would have been mind-numbing with the monotonous flashbacks. The truth is that Adam was a complete dick, and I loathed him. At one point he even alienates Genevieve who has been inexplicably patient with him. He pisses her off so much that she refuses to hang with him or speak to him, and I can't blame her at all. She's a smart woman! Or she was until she has a brain fart and returns to him.

In the end I felt mugged of the story I'd been promised - or at least the story I felt I'd been promised from the blurb and the title, and what I got instead wasn't nearly as entertaining as what I'd expected. I wish the author all the best in her career, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one.

Ms Marvel Vol 5 Super Famous by G Willow Wilson, Takeshi Miyazawa

Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed the previous volume to this (I think - Graphic novel creators make it far harder than it ought to be to follow a series!) back in July of 2015 to mark the end of my year of two reviews per day every single day without a miss, which was stressful, but a great discipline. I wasn't impressed with the comic because the artwork was atrocious, but I was impressed - as much as not, by the young Ms Marvel character, Kamala Khan.

I started in on this graphic novel and found it refreshing. The young Ms Marvel is more like Spiderman in that she's young, has real relationship issues, and has to cope with demands on her time which interfere with her super-heroics. It's also set in a Marvel world where the usual Avengers super heroes have been switched around a bit. Thor is now a female (and still evidently named Thor, not Thora!). Spider-Man wears black instead of his usual red and blue. Captain America is black, but having said that, there's a disturbing lack of African American and Asian American presence in this story.

Ms Marvel is a young teen who is a Muslim (yet she never actually practices her religion), but there's also a Captain Marvel - who I assume we'll see in the movie theaters at some point, although the date keeps on being pushed back, from July 2018 to November, and then to March 2019. Seriously? At least we get Wonder Woman next year, although how good that will be depends on how willing DC is to totally screw-up yet another of their properties. They seem to be batting a thousand so far in that department ever since Chris Nolan finished his excellent Batman trilogy.

I read an earlier comic in this series where I really didn't like the artwork and found some of the story condescending, but this one seems much better and the artwork is far better. The comic was also really funny. Kamala's ex-boyfriend creates two clones of Kamala using technology left behind by Loki, and these clones start to multiply and take over the city. One of them is supposed to represent the scholarly Kamala while she's off super hero-ing. This one can say only "Easy-peasey" and marches around hilariously. The other is supposed to represent the good sister Kamala attending on her brother's wedding preparations, and has only one line related to the wedding. No one seems to think there's anything wrong here! Until the clones start flooding the city.

This one was funny, and very entertaining, and unlike the previous one, made me want to read more in this series.

Deviants by Maureen McGowan

Rating: WARTY!

Another throw-away outreach attempt at another YA dystopian writer with the same result: uninventive, derivative, boring trash. This is the first of a series of course, because why bilk your readers for one inadequate volume when you can pad a short story out into a trilogy or better? God bless Big Publishing™ for without their avarice there would be no crappy YA troll-ogies.

The predictable first person female has predictable hots for a predictably potential bad guy, but is predictably distracted by her BIG SECRET™. These people - all mysteriously YA age (at least the only ones we really hear about), and they're predictably living in a dome in a predictably trashed world, and predictably have to escape. Predictably, I quickly grew to hate it and predictably the main character, a female created by a female author is a dumb-ass. Why women do this to their main characters is actually less of a mystery to me than why so many readers enable and facilitate them, but I don't have to support this crap.

So, what is no more than a bloated prologue is fluffed-up with inanity into the first volume of the predictable YA trilogy. Yawn.

Prism by Faye Kellerman, Aliza Kellerman

Rating: WARTY!

This is a case of a new writer being "grandfathered" (or perhaps more accurately in this case, "grandmothered") into the privileged position of publishing because your mom is already in the business, so this had that already against it, and the fact that it was an audiobook, which in my hands tend to garner poorer reviews by dint of the fact that I'm a captive audience driving to and from work. So I'll pretty much listen to anything that's not a ridiculously inane DJ or an even more inane commercial, and especially if it sounds like a remotely interesting story. I know, all that gasoline! Let's make a deal: you guys buy my books, and I'll buy an electric car and kiss off my indentured service to Big Oil™. Now isn't that a worthy cause? In fact, if you buy enough books I can quit driving altogether and work at home into my ever encroaching antiquity! Isn't it worth it to get me off the streets? Think about it!! LOL!

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that this one was actually to my liking - for the first twenty percent. The characters were fresh, funny, entertaining, and different from the usual YA high-school clichéd morons. Yes, so they failed Bechdel–Wallace, but only a bit and it was funny. The story turned around, but not in the way the author intended I'm sure, when there was an overnight school field trip. In the dark, and far from anywhere, the three traveling in this one van, and separated from their partner van, woke up to find they had run off the road and rolled over. They climbed out and ran from the van into the dark, ignoring the fact that their teacher was still trapped inside. A storm came up and they retreated into a nearby cave where they fell into a pothole and woke up in dumb-ass world.

The dumb-assery unfortunately, was not what the author intended. Instead, and from that from that point onward, the characters started behaving exactly like characters in every bad, trope-infested YA novel you ever read. Any relationship not only to intelligent behavior but even to realistic behavior was gone, and so was I! I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" I'm done with the Kellermans two; next author please, right this way!

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

This officially marks my flat refusal to read another thing written by Meg Cabot! I've read her Ready Or Not and found it a not ready. I read Haunted and found it more ghastly than ghostly, and I read Size 12 and Ready to Rock and found it ready to rot!

Perhaps this novel should have been titled "The Princess Diarrhea", since it both runs to more than ten volumes, and the main character, Mia, runs off at the mouth with an endless bitch and tedious moan about everything. What a nightmare she is. The novel is nothing like the movie, and bland as that is, the movie is far better. The movie has heart. All the novel has is spleen. The novel is as washed out as the Genovian flag, but it did make me want to watch the movie again.

The audio book is read by Anne Hathaway, who played the role of Mia in the movie. Her reading actually isn't too bad, but her voice tends towards mumble here and there. That's all I have to say about it, other than that I ditched it in short order, and I've now sworn off ever again reading anything by Meg Cabot!

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Rating: WARTY!

Is it just me that finds it hilarious that an author whose name is Dashner writes a novel about running? I saw the movie before I read the book and since the movie, despite its problems was watchable, I became curious as to whether the novel might offer more. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. In this case, it didn't. It was overly wordy and a bit tedious. Watch the movie instead. I think I'm about done with Dashner. I wasn't impressed by his Infinity Ring which I negatively reviewed back in December 2015.

I'm not a fan of series, and trilogies are the absolute worst form of series. Young adult trilogies are such tediously commonplace things these days that it's almost starting to seem like it cannot be any other way. Please, help me in fighting this horrific abuse of young children! Trilogies are not the only way. They're not even a "way". They're merely favored by Big Publishing™ because they can milk the same story for three sales instead of one. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the writing or the worth of the material. It has to do solely with making a fast buck and as writers, we do not have to buy into this - or sell out to it. That said, and with Amazon dedicatedly trying to drive novel prices into the dirt, I can't really blame a self-published author for trying to spin one novel out into three sales of ninety nine coins instead of only one, but that's not what I'm about.

Now down to more serious undertakings: the story itself. If you don't know what this is, you haven't been paying anywhere near enough attention to the world of YA "literature"! The most important and predictable thing about this plot is that, as usual for YA trilogies, it makes zero sense. The maze trial is supposed to be about toughening-up kids and selecting the most successful ones for the trial that lies ahead, but what trial?

In Scorch Trials there are no mechanical monsters out there rampaging and needing to be defeated. There's no dirt so there's no way growing crops as a skill has any value. There are people of both genders out there, but these boys never get to interact with any females, so they're socially disadvantaged. Outside, there are people with guns, but the boys are never given guns to practice with. There is no maze in the desert, yet the boys are expected to navigate one? There's no desert in the maze, so the boys never have any experience at surviving in extreme heat conditions. Nor does any of that heat impact upon the glade. How is it kept out? If the scientists have that kind of technology, and can develop automated and deadly mechanical creatures, what can the boys bring to the table that the scientists cannot?

The book does go into more detail than the movie, but barely. The story there is that the purpose of the Glade is to stress out children so their brains reveal information about how to fight the rampant disease, but this is purest bullshit, since there is no real stress in the Glade. It's rather an idyllic environment for adolescents in that there's no school or household chores as such. They do have to work, but other than that, they do pretty much whatever they want.

The only freal stressor is for those who run the maze - so again, why not deposit the kids inside the maze and dispense with the Glade? And what's the point of having the kids killed off? How does this advance their 'science"? Are their bodies reaped so the "creators" can do a post-mortem? They must get precious little data.

They'd be better off having the kids play video games and give them an electrical shock whenever they lose a life or something. That would be callous, but it would get them the data they the story claims they're seeking. Again, it makes no sense, and all this kind of story tells me is that the writer didn't think it through: it suggests that they got so excited about their crazy idea to put kids in peril that they never considered how illogical or unintelligent their story actually is. I mean look at it: they claim they have rules to make life fair and just, and that they're not allowed to harm each other, yet they brutalize every new kid with demeaning names and by withholding information. The kids are, in their own way, just as callous as the "creators"!

In some ways, Caighlin Smith offered more in her Children of Icarus, but ultimately she made the same mistakes as Dashner did, by ignoring the maze and focusing on ridiculous high-school mentality antics. At least she didn't make up asinine words in a farcical attempt to avoid using bad language. I ditched this novel DNF and I cannot recommend it.

Children of Icarus by Caighlan Smith

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb tells us that "Caighlan Smith loved to build and navigate pillowmazes (sic)" and an "adoration of Greek mythology soon followed." In case you wondered, it's pronounced like Kaylan, but one immediate problem I had with this novel wasn't with the pronunciation of the author's name; it was with the disconnect between the blurb and the novel.

I don't hold the author responsible, since authors have little or nothing to do with blurbs and book covers unless they self-publish, which is why I don't usually have a thing to say about book covers - my blog is about writing, not about pretension and posing. It's also a given that blurbs are overly dramatic and misleading, but I found Greek mythology to be conspicuous by its absence in this novel while the lack of any real feel for Greece and the Greek language ran rife. This was only the first of myriad (<- Greek roots word!) problems.

One issue was with the author's complete lack of attention to the language (English or Greek). She had an archer "notch" an arrow when she should have said, "nock", and she referred to a notch as a nook! She had a climber scrambling for a perch when it would have made more sense to have him scrambling for purchase. These might seem like relatively minor issues, but they're important because the more we abuse the language the less we can use it. George Orwell exploited this to great effect in 1984. I'm sorry more people haven't learned from this, but I do expect fellow writers to have considerably more respect for the major tool of their trade, and for their craft, than this.

Yes, the author gave a nod and a knowing wink to the mythology, but it really wasn't there, and for me the novel suffered for that. I've visited Greece more than once and I really like the country, notwithstanding the recent political and economic troubles as exemplified in a scene from the new Jason Bourne movie. Greece has a deep history and none of that was in evidence here. The novel was a contemporary one, and it read like it was set in the USA, not in Greece. Characters were named Clara, Ryan, and Tanner, not Chloe, Rihardos, and Theseus, although to be fair, there was a Theo and a Cassie.

Therein lay a potential problem, because Theo was the good guy and Ryan the bad boy, and it looked like there was a tedious YA triangle forming there with the mc. This is such a tired cliché that it's almost like a Greek tragedy, but with nowhere near the pedigree when it's included in a YA novel! I can't be sure that this was where it was headed, but it certainly had the hallmarks.

The novel was rooted, loosely, in the myth of Daedalus and his Labyrinth, yet throughout we got not Greek, but Latinized names. Ikaros became Icarus, and his followers the Romanized Icarii. Animals and plants were given not Greek names, but ones worthy of Carl von Linné, so the Greek mythology angle felt like a fraudulent veneer.

In the myth, Daedalus built the labyrinth as a prison for the half-breed son of a king, but Daedalus and his son Ikaros were imprisoned in it. Their plan to escape using feather-encrusted wings came to a sticky end when Ikaros got waxed, flying too close to the sun. In this updated version, youngsters aren't sacrificed to the Minotaur, but are sent into the labyrinth as chosen ones of "Icarus", and they expect to become angels and live forever. In truth they're still sacrifices, and are set upon by fantastical beasts as soon as the labyrinth door is closed behind them. Only a few survive, and they're adopted by other survivors, who have formed a clandestine society hidden deep in the labyrinth where they hope they're safe from the beasts, but hard-won resources are slim and a crisis is approaching.

Thus far we have a form of The Maze Runner, and it was different enough to be a good start, but though the beasts are rooted in mythology, they're not readily recognizable as such here. I got the feeling that authentic (<- Greek roots word!) Greek mythological creatures were not good enough for this story, so they had to be amped-up a bit. Perhaps this is why the story quickly abandons both the beasts and the labyrinth in favor of high-school drama and bullying in the survivors hideout? In short, this story becomes less of a clone of The Maze Runner and more of a clone of Divergent and the utterly dumb-ass "Dauntless" faction, which I took delight in parodying in my Dire Virgins novel.

This story is nowhere near as awful as the Divergent trilogy, rest assured, but it was highly reminiscent of it in its brutality and its brain-dead 'survival of the toughest' mentality. That motif has been done to a sorry, but welcome death, and so this novel dropped considerably in my esteem because of its addiction to something which is ancient creak. The novel is also the start of a trilogy, which means this volume is nothing more than a prologue. I have no time for prologues or the "it has to be a trilogy so we can milk it for all it's worth" mentality so rife in the YA publishing industry. I think the problem was that, knowing there was a trilogy coming, there was no incentive at all for the author to make this volume be all it could be.

Some parts were engaging and interesting. Indeed, it was better in some ways, than The Maze Runner (watch that get quoted as "better—than The Maze Runner"! LOL!), but by the time I reached about half-way through, it was clear that the first of the three most severe problems with the story was the main character, and it wasn't with the fact that she is never named. My problem was with the fact the Girl with No Name (GwNM) was consistently weak, ineffective, weepy, and soft throughout the entire first half of the novel.

Maybe she changes later, but if she does, it has to be through magic and not through growth, because that wasn't happening, not even in embryonic (<- Greek roots word!) form, and in this case it was direly needed. Any possible change came far too late for me, especially given that there was no hint of it when I quit reading. Even if she does grow a pair of bulls later, it would have been thoroughly unrealistic to me, given what preceded it or or more accurately, what failed to precede it.

While I'm not a reader who demands that characters necessarily grow and change (I think there are very interesting stories to be had about people who don't change), I am a reader who demands that something happen during the course of a story, or all we have is dehydrating paint. It also helps if the arthritis (<- Greek roots word!) meds kick in before the half-way point, but here, the plot was stagnant when it wasn't staggering. Perhaps in remembrance of the slaughtered maze runners after the beast attack, nothing was moving. The novel, like a corpse set in amber, and not even a pretty shade of amber, simply lay there.

Not only did the story not go anywhere, neither did GwNM, and this was a story where she needed to show some growth if she was ever to become a heroic figure. Hell, even Triscuit™ in Divergent showed some change, but there was no such thing in evidence here, and the victimization of this girl in the form of a near-rape, and later a beating with no justice to be had for either was nauseating as was GwNN's total lack of a measurable response to it.

It made no sense, because she started out all weepy as a survivor of a slaughter, even after she knew she was safe, but now she's brutally attacked - twice, by two different guys - and she shows no response at all: not anger, not upset, not reticence, not fear, not the trembles, not catatonia, not anything? It. Just. Doesn't. Happen. Like. That! And especially not with a young person like the one GwNN has proven herself to be to her core by this point.

If I'd had some sort of a feeling, in fifty percent of the book, that she was on a slow burn, building up to something, that might have lured me into sticking around, but she is such a vapid wallflower that I not only lost all interest in her, I began to despise her as much as Ryan purportedly did (though I never did buy into that sleight of hand!).

The fact that she told a ridiculous and insupportable lie which led to the second attack was another example of her spinelessness, and while it doesn't justify the unwarranted assault by any means, neither does it afford us any sort of explanation as to why she did it or why the consequences of it were so dire. It's simply presented as the way things are done around here, with no foundation in any world that's been built here. I'm sorry, but I'm really tired of female authors rendering female characters into professional victims and making a trilogy out of their suffering.

The girl I wanted to read about was the one who went out with the scavengers, and therein lies another problem. Why was this novel so genderist - in that very nearly all the guys were the hunters and very nearly all the girls were the home-makers? There was only one exception to this that I was made aware of, and she had to be given a masculine name: Andrea! If you understand anything about Greek, then you know that's the feminine form of Andreas, which means manly! Seriously? The only girl who gets to hunt is manly? Not acceptable.

The third big problem was that the story made no sense. Exhibit one: I'd like to present the courtyard with a labyrinth! A labyrinth which had no roof. The people in it could have climbed the walls (and in at least one instance they did), and scouted their routes, but they never seemed to have thought of that. Instead, they were reduced to blundering through the maze and tediously mapping it corridor by corridor! Zeus, these people were dumb! But then they showed no real interest in looking for a way out which was in itself as foul as it was fowl.

While many beasts lived down in the maze, some were capable of flight, and all of the ground-based critters were large and dangerous. How those things survived when being fed only once a year is not so much glossed-over as completely ignored. The really ridiculous part though, is that not a single one of these animals, not even the airborne ones, ever found its way out to stalk the ample food supply in the nearby city whence all their food ultimately comes it would seem! There was no explanation offered for why these critters voluntarily confined themselves to the maze, and no one ever voiced any curiosity about it!

For me, this was just one more example of a story which was poorly thought-out, and where the world-building was as crumbling as the maze in which it was set. That it's the first volume of a trilogy is no excuse to stint on creating a rich novel, but far too many trilogy writers do this with a disturbing consistency. They need to try writing some stand-alone volumes, to learn the craft of creating tight, self-contained fiction, instead of padding out a single volume to make a lucrative trilogy.

I wish the author all the best with her YA trilogy career, but I cannot in good faith recommend a story as thin, weak, and derivative as this one is.

Who is AC? by Hope Larson, Tintin Pantoja

Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I avoid like the plague any novel which has been praised by Kirkus for no other reason than that Kirkus pretty much never met a novel they didn't like, so their reviews are completely worthless and I don't trust 'em! I also liked this novel despite the fact that the author is an I sneer (or is that Eisner?) award winner. Another group of novels I avoid are those which have won awards and especially those which have won Newberys, so I was good there because this one hasn't won such an award - or if it has, I'm unaware of it at this time! Fortunately, this enabled me to read this and I did not regret it.

We know who AC is before she does! AC is a kick-ass, young black female who somehow has super powers transferred to her via her phone while flying to her new home - but the charming thing about her is that she was kick-ass before she ever got her powers. Disgusting and inappropriate as this is given our age difference, I fell in love with Rhea (huge spoiler, that's her real name!!) pretty much from flicking through a few of the pages in the library, and I fell hopelessly in love when I finally got home and read it.

Rhea has a slightly unstable life, but she knows what she wants. She writes fiction and sells it through her friend who owns a small local bookstore. She copies these at a copy shop and binds and pays for them with her own hard-saved cash. Unfortunately, one night she leaves something behind and when she returns to get it, she discovers that the shop is being held up! She plucks up the courage to act, and finds herself transformed into a super hero who would give Hit Girl a run for her money. But this action creates its own problems which AC aka Rhea has to face.

I loved the illustration by Tintin Pantoja, and the writing by Hope Larson was tight and funny, and realistic. I definitely want to read more about this character, and I recommend this as a worthy read.

Doing It by Melvin Burgess

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook sounded triply appealing. The blurb made it sound interesting, which from a practical PoV means nothing more than that it did its job and suckered me in. But I was suckered without being succored! The story was read by Jason Flemyng, who I like as an actor, and his reading was excellent. The material was really funny in some parts, too, but I suspect you'd have to be an Anglophile to get it all. That was the third point of interest for me: it was something which wasn't set in the USA, like the USA is the only place in the world where anything interesting happens! It's nice to get out of the "house" once in a while, you know, and stretch your legs!

So while the story seems, superficially, to be a worthy read, it really bothered me that it was all sex and nothing else - like this is the sole subject of interest among anyone and everyone. It's not, and I resent stories that one, make it so, and two, never discuss the myriad problems with having casual and/or unprotected sex. I get that people are like this in real life, morons that they are, and I don't have a problem with reading about such people, but to consistently present sex as consequence-free and even romantic (which wasn't the case here, but is the case in many other stories), or as a worthy pursuit to the exclusion of all else among young people, without offering at least a note of caution here and there, is wrong-headed in my opinion.

The biggest problem though, was right there in the blurb on Goodreads: "It introduces us to Dino, Jon, and Ben, three teenage best friends who can't stop thinking about, and talking about (and hoping to experience), sex." Note that there isn't a single female mentioned by name anywhere in this blurb. It's all about the Benjamins - and the Jonathans, and the Dinos. Girls are just objects in which to masturbate. I know authors don't write book blurbs unless they self-publish, but seriously? Which moron wrote that one and what age was he - mentally?

Just for the record, the girls are Jackie, the object of Dino's undying lust, Deborah, the "fat" girl who Jonathan doesn't have the courage to respect, and Alison Young (yeah, really!) the schoolteacher with whom Ben is having a secret and ongoing affair. We get to meet Jackie in a meaningful way, albeit too briefly. We never honestly get to know Alison, who is disturbed and never given a fair hearing, and we never get a physical description of Deborah other than "fat", which means we really learn nothing practical about her body that isn't passed through the extremely warped adolescent filter of these dicks: Ben, Dino, Jon, et al.

We're told a lot about Deborah's personality, but we never actually and honestly experience it for ourselves. This is because the author is utterly clueless about voice. He tells the story from different perspectives and changes voice in a flagrant admission by the author that first person PoV is unarguably worst person PoV if you want an honest picture, and is nearly always a poor choice. This novella is quite simply badly written, and annoying, and far too focused on the guys, as the blurb indicates. It suffers because of that. The author and the blurb writer between them make it perfectly clear who the intended audience is for this: girls are not worth talking to.

Having said that, this story is less about lust than it is about poison. It's not really about lustful high-schoolers; it's about poisoned relationships, and poisonous behavior. The sexually transmitted disease here is lack of respect for the female gender. Dino is superficially the school Lothario, but he's a bit more complex than that, supposedly. He's saving himself for Jackie, the one girl who isn't interested in him - that is until his about-to-be-separated parents go away for the weekend and he opens his home to a party and hooks up with her. Even so he has failed to develop the tools to construct a decent personality, and he ends-up quite simply being a tool himself. And he gets away with it.

Jackie has promised herself to him that night after the party, like her only worth is her ability to accommodate him sexually, but because someone threw-up in the bed they were planning on using, she abruptly changes her mind and leaves without telling Dino, and he hooks up with Siobhan. Or is it Zoe? Or Violet? This girl has more names than guys have for their penis. But really she's a vixen - and wreaks havoc upon Dino when she learns he's also involved with Jackie.

I had liked Jackie most out of all the characters until this event. Her flaky behavior turned me off her. Not that she's required to have sex with Dino just because she said she would, but that she left without telling him she was going or why, and then she has the cluelessness to make Dino the villain because he chose to hook up with someone else, having both been ditched by Jackie and also become tired of being led on by her.

When Ben decides he's had enough of Alison and she decides she loves him, that one goes south even more than it was already south. Jonathan and Deborah seem like the most sensible of the group, which frankly isn't saying much, but the way everything turns around into a "happy" ending at the end seemed way false to me. Did someone from Disney write the ending? Given what had preceded it, the only future I could see for any of these imbeciles was that they'd continue making the same mistakes probably throughout life because they had "got away with it" and paid very little in the way of a price for their behavior, so where was their incentive to learn and improve? I can't recommend this ignorant, testosterone-soaked nonsense.

Haunted by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

Read really annoyingly by Alanna Ubach, this novellette sounded interesting from the blurb, but it turned out to be yet another irritating first person PoV, which is worst person in practice, and it honestly had nothing to do with ghosts, not really. You could have taken the minimal presence of ghosts completely out of the picture and had very nearly the same story: a sixteen year old has literally nothing on her mind than boys.

Tiresomely, there's the trope bad boy that the mc falls for, and the standard issue best friend. Often I find I like the best friend better than the main character, but such was not the case here, so this story didn't even have that going for it. I actually didn't like anyone. I know this is a part of a larger world, none of which I'm familiar with, but that doesn't alter the fact that we had a weak and uninteresting main character, and a story which had nothing new to offer and not a thing to recommend it. I have no need now to read anything else in this world, nor anything else by Meg Cabot (and yes, it's ca-bot, not cab-oh, so there isn't even anything unexpected there).

Susannah Simon, the protagonist, is dating a ghost - she and other special snowflakes like her can physically interact with ghosts - but like I said, the ghosts may as well have been ordinary and very retiring people for all they contributed to the story. All that was left was your stereotypical and clueless high school girl in love, which is tedious, uninventive and done to death. Meg Cabot needs a new shtick, and she's not alone amongst YA authors in that respect.