Fairylicious by Tiffany Nicole Smith

Title: Fairylicious
Author: Tiffany Nicole Smith
Publisher: (website unlocated) Twisted Spice Publications
Rating: TBD

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

Errata in review copy:
The term "...pulling a rolled up piece of paper from her from her wand..." doesn't make sense (no page number to hand! It's at the point where the fairies first appear)
Smith repeatedly uses 'Huntsmen' when it looks like she ought to be using 'Huntsman': p17, p18, p34
p19 "I hated it when she was upset to me" - "…upset with me"?
p66 "This caused Angel to jump on the kitchen and…" should be "This caused Angel to jump onto the kitchen table and..."
p67 there seems to be a problem with the comma and the spacing after "(whatever that was)…"
p74 "Don’t hate because we whooped your carcasses…" should be "Don’t hate us because we whupped your carcasses…"
p82 "Where's she'd go…" should be "Where'd she go..."
p111 "Where are you-know-you" should be "where are you-know-who?"

This may haunt me for the rest of my blogging life, but you know what? I don't freaking care; I loved this novel! That's weird because I'm not a fairy story lover, and especially not when even the writers of such tales admit to their own embarrassment by re-naming their characters "Fae", the stealth term for "fairy". Delightfully, Smith doesn't do this, which is good because the only 'Fae' I actually tolerate are in the TV show Lost Girl which I adore. My love isn’t for main character - as per usual. Bo strikes me as boring. My love is for one of the secondary characters. Initially it was for Kenzi (who I will assert still has it, even though she's been going somewhat downhill in entertainment value lately) and Tamsin, who is completely kick-A, especially in her current "incarnation". She's definitely taken over as my favorite of the show, but of course, Lost Girl is very much a grown-up show, so it’s not likely to interest the same readers who would find Fairylicious appealing (not for some years to come at least!), but believe it or not, I found Fairylicious equally entertaining in its own way.

So why this novel when other fairy stories have rendered me completely uninterested? Well for one thing, this whole novel is so joyfully playful, and yet so determinedly serious about the fluff that I couldn’t resist it, and I appreciated the unabashed use of 'fairy' and especially the shameless title! I may endure regrets in the blogger world for admitting this, but this novel is a winner. It’s been a while since I've reviewed anything on the younger end of the reading scale, so I decided to blitz three such stories en suite to help make up the deficit. All three turned out to be worthwhile reads, but it was this one in particular (the one written for the most mature of the three audiences) which really impressed me. It just goes to show that you can write a technically deficient novel, yet still win my approval if you tell an entertaining story!

Perhaps I shouldn't use this phrase since I just started in on an audio book of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but my blood warmed to Fairylicious right from the start with main character Bex (never Becky!) and her six-year-old younger sister Ray (Reagan), and their intriguing back story: Bex loves her younger aunt, is estranged from her mother, the middle sister, and detests her older aunt. And there's much more to that back story, believe you me. This book is the start of a series and it looks like it’s planned to extend at least through book 4 of the Fairylicious world. Scarily enough, I am definitely interested in reading more!

Bex, a resident of Boston, USA, is described as a "preteen" (she's eleven). She's very smart and attends a school for gifted children called GATE (Gifted and Talented Education Center). Both Ray and Bex once attended "The Gate" but Ray was expelled for biting a teacher! Bex is also a redhead with a huge mane of tangled hair which she hates to brush. Shades of Neverfell! Bex & Ray's parents are nowhere in the picture. Her father is in prison, and he apparently gets letters from her mother, but her mother left for Europe for a month when Bex was nine, and Never Came Back. I suspect we'll learn much more of her in future volumes.

Bex suffers for her parents misadventures in the form of being teased, even harassed over her family, at school. That's one thing which bothers me about this novel: the endless harassment which never seems to be addressed, not only from other students, but occasionally from teachers. I see it in a disturbingly large number of YA novels and I can't help but wonder if the authors are writing about the school of their youth rather than about modern schools. I have two children who have been in three schools between them and not in any one of those schools was bullying and harassment even countenanced, much less passively tolerated. I can see how the outcast or misfit student can make for a good story, but it's becoming something of a cliché these days.

After an uneventful weekend, it’s "Mopey Monday" and Bex reunites with her friends Lily-Rose, a talented violin player, and with Chirpy (Beatrice) a swimmer, and Marishca, a Gymnast who had moved from Russia two years previously. Here's where I found a part I did not like: Smith seems rather condescending here towards Russians in having Marishca pronounce all her 'th' sounds as 'zee'. This doesn't work because, for one thing, the rest of her pronunciation is flawless! To me this just seemed insulting. If you visit You Tube and actually listen to Russians speaking English there, you'll see that the ones who speak English as well - as Marishca does - do not mangle their 'th' sounds. It's only the ones who speak very limited English who do this, so personally I'd like to see that aspect of the story disappear as though a fairy whisked it away!

Anyway, these four girls are "the Tribe" - the oldest girls in the school, and Bex is the "Biggest" of them, describing herself as "big-boned". At least two of the tribe hang with Bex because she's big enough to protect them from bullying by other students, but it doesn’t save her from being the brunt of jokes. This occurs, in one example, when the class is asked to tell everyone about their weekend, and Bex makes up a story about a trip to Hawaii because her real weekend was so boring. One of the three Avas in her class (Ava G, Ava M, and Ava T - there are are many more in the school) calls her on it because Bex doesn't know the name of the island she was on. This same Ava, after giving her seven kinds of grief, then demands to be invited to her birthday party!

Bex seems to have a real facility for somehow managing to impose her personal issues upon others by always managing to translate them into situations in which her friends become involved to their own cost! When she was unjustly punished for verbally retaliating on Ava G, she was required to write a list of twelve nice things about Ava to make up for the insult. Ava goes unpunished. Bex can think of only one item for her list: Ava is rich(!), so she surreptitiously passes the sheet around the class to have her friends fill in the eleven blanks. She reads it back to the class without perusing it first, and the list is hilarious. One item which really tickled me was: "If you put an 'L' in front of her name it would be Lava" There are so many instances of this kind of laugh-out-loud humor that I couldn't not love this story. Yeah, I know that these things may not find your funny bone the way they found mine, but I did get the feeling that Tiffany Nicole Smith is a person with whom you could have some really fun conversations.

Bex believes in fairies and she believes that a fairy dies when someone says they don’t believe in them (which is, of course, why fairies are so rare - I killed a dozen of 'em just now with a thoughtless chant….). This is on par with the remark which Gwen's friend Lesley makes in Kerstin Gier's Emerald Green which made me laugh. The thing that I found a bit odd here, given that this is a fairy tale (so to speak!), is that getting on for half of the way in, we still hadn’t met a fairy! Don't worry about that, however: when they arrived, they were truly worth waiting for. Yes, they! I honestly can't believe I'm saying this, but it's true, and they took me completely by surprise. I was definitely not expecting the hilarious fairies which Smith delivered, but I was thrilled to get these fairies and no other.

Because Bex's Nana (her grandmother with whom she lives) is on a fixed income, Bex doesn't get much in the way of luxuries or treats (I can empathize with that childhood, believe me!). The worst aspect of this is that she cannot even have her own birthday party - she has to share with the her triplet cousins, who are younger, and ill-behaved, not to say obnoxious. It's via a birthday wish that Bex summons her fairies.

I have to record at this point that Smith has an annoying habit of jumping, in time, in her writing without offering any indication whatsoever in the text (for example by leaving a blank line, or by adding three asterisks or something). She simply goes right onto the next line and a whole night, a week-end, even a week or more could have passed in the meantime, but she really knows how to write endearing characters which helps to gloss over this flaw. Nonetheless, a flaw it is. I hope it was corrected in the final version of this novel.

I found that even a fairy-hater like me was drawn into this story, starting to empathize with Bex, who is always trying to be strong and decent despite her personal misfortunes (and perceived misfortunes). That was something of a surprise, but the further I progressed into this novel the more I realized that it's seriously lacking a good editing job! At least in the review copy I have. Punctuation is sometimes poor. For example, there's more than one instance of there being a comma between two words with no accompanying space, or the space appears before the comma. There's also at least one instance of a question being asked with no accompanying question mark.

I also have to repeat that Smith's habit of skipping ahead in time or moving the narrative to a new setting without offering the reader an indication that things have changed (such as including a couple of blank lines, or separating the two sections with three asterisks or something) was common and grew to be as confusing as it was annoying. Hopefully that will be edited out of the final release! At one point (on page 86), for example, Smith has Bex going from talking with two guys as they exit the school drama room on one line to Bex and Reagan running downstairs at home to greet their favorite Aunt Alice on the very next line with no indication whatsoever of any transition. She does it again on the very next page. This novel is over 120 pages, and there are only nine chapters; splitting it up into more chapters - at these very points - would have been a good move. Had this novel been less entertaining, I would have considered quitting reading it because of this annoyance, but I have to confess that it's a real credit to Smith that she managed to keep a jaded fairy-phobe like me interested. The story is fine, wonderful even; it’s just the editing which needs some work!

I need to quit giving out spoilers, but let me just say here that Bex and her three friends each get their own fairy. The problem is that each fairy is like something from a second-hand store. They were like hand-me-down fairies, which I found hilarious. There's also a back-story here, which I very much appreciated. Bex's friend Lily-Rose Johnston gets Blush, an entirely pink fairy who is allergic to pixie dust. The entirely blue fairy is Iris, who belongs to Chirpy, aka Beatrice Martin. This fairy is rather acrophobic and suffers from air-sickness! Olive is, of course, the green fairy who belongs to Marishca Baranov. This fairy has mis-matched wings. Rebecca Carter, aka Bex gets the yellow fairy named Maize who is actually missing an entire wing.

Bex is depressed by her dad's incarceration, but Maize evidently can’t fix that; fairies don’t get involved in legal issues. That seemed a bit arbitrary to me since no real explanation was given, but hey, it’s a kid's fairy story, so let it ride. Actually, even that was somewhat amusing. The other three girls rebel and return their fairies to Bex! They can't stand the disruption that the fairies cause! Evidently they don't have the logic to work out that they must make very specific requests (they're kids, after all), and here's where the sorry truth comes out: the fairies themselves are rejects! They were kicked out of fairy land. I love this.

So the other three girls 'return' their fairies to Bex, not wanting them around any more, but Bex refuses to give up on them. The one thing I don’t get is why Bex never thinks of saving the school programs that are scheduled to be cut by asking her fairy to help. That might result in disaster of course, so it's as well that she doesn't. Instead, she takes the admirable tack of organizing a feisty rebellion (even if it's misguided)! She doesn’t seem to get that rebelling isn't going to make money appear (maybe that's a job for a fairy?), but it works out in unexpected ways. Unexpected is one of the attractions of this novel and made me keep on reading it. I have to include here a mention of the school show. As part of Bex's plan, the kids disrupt the school talent show and the "modern version" of Jack and the Beanstalk performed by Charlie and Santiago was hilarious. I don't know where Smith comes up with these notions, but I sincerely hope she doesn't lose the knack of it.

I love the notes going back and forth between Bex and one of her teachers, including her, um, creative spelling. There was an interesting episode on page 104 where Bex writes "fortay" and I was ready to add it to the errata when I realized it was a Bex note, intentionally misspelled. It should, of course, be "forte", which technically is pronounced 'fort', but everyone mispronounces it, including me. People tend to confuse it with the musical term which is spelled the same, and actually is pronounced 'fortay'. So let me just conclude with the one expected result of this novel: that things would work out in the end (but not everything - we need something left open for the sequels, right?!).

Anyway, I can't post any more spoilers much as I would love to keep raving about this. I highly recommend this novel and seriously plan on getting my hands on the series. Yeah, I can't believe I actually liked a (literal) fairy story, but I did! It was too much fun to not like, and it just goes to prove that you should never say never! I recommend this novel for appropriate ages and other ages, and I rate it a worthy read.

Iris and the Aloha Wedding Adventure by Lynelle Woolley

Title: Iris and the Aloha Wedding Adventure
Author: Lynelle Woolley
Illustrator: Karen Walcott
Publisher: Markelle Media
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is obviously one in a series (it follows Rosie and the Wedding Day Rescue and is succeeded by Starr and the High Seas Wedding Drama), and it’s a great idea to demonstrate cultures outside of your standard US mainstream, by showing wedding customs, although Hawaii really isn't that far out! I’d like to see this series stretch its legs, and hopefully it will. If there's one thing we get way too much of with children's and young adult novels it's that the USA is the only nation on Earth. It’s rather sad. But this series has the potential to go far and bring a lot back from its travels. I hope that's not an opportunity wasted.

The main character is Iris (all the characters in Iris's club seem to be named after flowers), and she is a member of Flower Girl World™ (FGW) along with friends Rosie And Starr, who were all flower girls at a wedding. I'm not going to get into the propriety of pulling up flowers to toss under the bride's feet at weddings. It's tempting to assume that these flowers were specially cultivated for that purpose, but it looks like the girls simply go grab them directly from flowers and trees growing wild. And am I going to mention the issue of flower girls vs. flower boys? So, moving right along…!

Iris learns she can be a flower girl once more, this time at a wedding in Hawaii, so six months later, off the family travels and Iris meets a new candidate for the FGW. Her name is Hana, which also is a word referencing a flower. Suspiciously convenient, huh?! Hana turns out to be my kind of girl: a real feisty handful of a tomboy, who tends to get very off-task if not closely supervised. She and Iris hatch a plan to catch a fairy known as a menehune, which they then hope to use to do the work of creating leis and other drudge-work for the wedding. They set up a box-trap primed with a cookie under a tree one night and the trap seems to work, but a fierce storm breaks out and they run indoors before they can find out what they caught!

The next day, the entire yard is trashed because of the storm, ruining all the work they'd done the previous day. A power outage also ruins the leis they made and the food they'd prepared, too. Since no storms were predicted, Hana and Iris think they caused all this by trapping the menehune (not that they ever saw what they trapped). Hana, Iris, and Leilani, Hana's older sister troop-off to pluck more blossoms. I have to say there's not much parental supervision going on here, and it badly backfires. Hana, of course, goes charging up the trees and crawling along ever thinner branches, eventually falling. Leilani tries to break her fall and ends up almost breaking her ankle in the process.

But in the end, things tend to work out, and Iris even gets to learn to hula dance. This story seems to me to be a little more 'fluffy' than I’d like, but then it's hardly aimed at me, and it does have some educational content, so with the caveat that I’d like to see this series stretch more and educate a bit more, and also be somewhat more inclusive of the male gender, I'm happy to rate this one as a worthy read. The grey-scale illustrations are charming and the tone upbeat. Like I said, I'd like a little bit more weight and a bit more of the culture in a story like this, but this one is a good start!

Kobee Manatee: Heading Home to Florida by Robert Scott Thayer

Title: Kobee Manatee: Heading Home to Florida
Author: Robert Scott Thayer
Illustrator: Lauren Gallegos
Publisher: Thompson Mill Press
Rating: WORTHY!

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

It’s been a while since I've reviewed anything aimed at really young children, so this one is long overdue. It's also unusual to have a guy write a story of this nature (at least in my experience!), so that's another good reason to dive in! My own kids are too old for a story like this, but when they were younger I would have loved to have read this to them, and they would have loved to hear it. This is exactly the kind of story which children need, and I'll tell you why: when those children grow up, they will be the ones who are making decisions about the fate of this planet and the life on it and if they're ignorant about what the problems and threats are, then how on Earth (quite literally) are they going to be able to make smart decisions about what to do for the best?

I'm not a big fan of anthropomorphizing animals, but there's no getting away from it since young children are swamped with this, and perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing to have them think of animals as "other kinds of people" if it helps them to grasp and appreciate how inextricably integrated the life on this planet is. This story isn’t an educational text book, it’s a story, but that's no reason why it can’t also be educational, and Thayer doesn’t let us down. Kobee spent his summer way north of where he ought to be hanging out, and when it starts turning cold, he almost has a cow - a sea-cow that is! He heads back home to Florida with all speed, and he picks up a couple of friends on the way. I really oughtn't to give out spoilers, so I won't outright say who they are, but one of them is rather crabby and the other is a little hoarse...!

The joy of this particular story is that it takes an endangered animal and imbues the whole story with the idea of helping each other, and then it goes one step further and adds a little info burst to each illustration giving just a snippet of real information about manatees, offering not only interesting, but useful and educational information.

If there's an issue I had with this, then it wasn't Kobee's jaunty cap and waistcoat or his amazingly appropriate name. Though far from accurate of course, the clothes were rather fun, and I was glad to see all the other manatees, at the end of the journey were illustrated accurately: "the way nature intended", as they say. Indeed, Gallegos's multi-color illustrations were excellent, and complemented Thayer's playful text neatly. I loved Tess's fiery red hair-do and Pablo the crab's klutziness. What bothered me was that all three of these guys had light colored eyes (Kobee and Tess blue, and Pablo green). There were no brown eyes to be found even though that color of eye (in all its shades) is the most common on the planet. As long as we’re anthropomorphizing (and as long as the animals themselves do not have those specific eye colors!), let’s try and be a bit more inclusive! I found this particularly odd given that Gallegos is herself brown of hue and eye; she seems so very youthful, too - obviously she has a long career ahead of her. At least I hope she does. Thayer too.

Other than that quibble, I recommend this story for the appropriate age children. It’s well-worth sharing with your young 'uns. And please do go visit the website the book recommends: Save the Manatee! It's a place you can share with your kids, learn more, and even donate.

A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge

Title: A Face Like Glass
Author: Frances Hardinge
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum?
At one point, Hardinge writes this (of a short boat trip): "..skulled across to the island"? Doesn't she mean 'sculled'? That's the problem with a novel like this - you can never tell what she really meant! Read on for the weird world of Hardinge!

There's nothing like finding a new author who gets it, and enjoying the thrill of discovering a new world and new characters to love. In A Face Like Glass we get all of this. I've read nothing of Hardinge's before, although her name seems familiar - like I've read of her or had her on the back burner, but just never got around to exploring her oeuvre. I'm barely a quarter into this novel as I start posting this review, but if it continues to the end in the same vein that it began, I'm confident that my ignorance of her repertoire is about to undergo a powerful sea-change for the better!

A Face Like Glass is the tale of Neverfell, a girl in her mid teens who, seven years before, inexplicably appeared in the Neverfell curds of an underground cheese-maker. He's not underground in the sense of being subversive, but in the sense that his entire society is resident in a rat's nest of underground tunnels known as Caverna. Cheese Master Grandible adopts Neverfell as his assistant, but he's a tough taskmaster. He's excruciatingly precise in his requirements, which is all to the good because a cheese, in this world, which is not raised properly can turn out to be a Frankenstein monster. Grandible's cheeses have the power to influence and change people's minds, just as other master crafts-people can create perfumes and wines which have similar effects, and all of these products have personalities just like people.

But that isn’t even the most interesting thing about Caverna. No. The most interesting aspect of Cavernan life is that no one can express emotion. Children must be taught how to show their emotions on their face, which means that none of them is actually honestly feeling the emotion which their face is showing. Yes, every face in Caverna hides a lie. That is, until Neverfell shows up. Neverfell is precisely the opposite: she cannot hide her emotions; one after another parades across her visage, each of them a shameless exhibitionist, in dizzyingly rapid succession.

It’s illegal to harbor such a creature, and Grandible, once a member of the elite Cavernan royal court, but now in self-imposed exile, knows this only too well, so why does he foster Neverfell for seven long years, teaching her the fine art of exotic cheese-making as though she were his own daughter?

Neverfell longs to explore the tunnels outside of Grandible's own highly secretive and securely-barred section of the tunnels, but she's forbidden. She's also forced to wear as mask to prevent the occasional rare, visiting customer from learning of Neverfell's disfigurement. But of course this cannot last! In a nod to Lewis Carroll, Neverfell chases a rabbit out of her tunnels and into the main thoroughfares of Caverna. She ends up falling in with a group of her peers who are going to be tested to see if they can join the entourage of well-known Facesmith Madame Vesperta Appeline. This is where is all starts to go south (not that Caverna actually has a south).

Neverfell is exposed. Turned in to the authorities, she's on the verge of being sentenced to death. Indeed, an unknown assailant tries to kill her even while she's in prison. Finally a savior appears in the form of Caverna's leading vintner, Maxim Childersin, who effectively buys Neverfell. He seems perfectly fine, but there's a disturbing undercurrent of potential malice about him. When he introduces Neverfell at court, she feels hopelessly hog-tied by its endless nit-picking rules of etiquette and conduct. She feels like she would be much more at home on the separated island of Caverna's Cartographer guests - all of them insane from trying to map Caverna's deranged tunnel system.

Zouelle, Neverfell's peer from the vintner family explains that their madness is contagious; anyone who talks to them will also go mad rather quickly. Here's one of the best quotes from a novel which has more than its fair share of thigh-slapping quotes: "…if you talk to them long enough, you start to understand them, and then after a short while you don’t really understand anything else. You run off to be a Cartographer and, next thing you know, you're bat-squeaking." I have nothing with which to follow a line like that.

Like a tightly coiled spring, Neverfell struggles to contain her energy and curiosity whilst partaking of the endless array of bizarre courses at dinner, until she can’t help herself but react, knee-jerk fashion, coming to the aid of a marginally clumsy waiter whose life is at risk for no other reason than that he spilled the tiniest drop of a very feisty wine onto the white table-cloth. Neverfell purposefully spills her own wine to hide the waiter's spill, and save him, and suddenly her world explodes. The family which "adopted" her is now ruined, and their in-fighting provides Neverfell a chance to escape with Zouelle in tow. Neverfell feels obligated to rescued her to prevent her paying for Neverfell's inexcusable faux pas. In true heroic fashion, she decides that the only way to fix this disaster is to visit the Grand Steward himself in his palace and to take full responsibility for everything which happened at the banquet.

So Neverfell is called before the Grand Steward, who turned out to be yet another in the feast of novelties which is this novel. He's ancient and bored out of his gourd having lived so long, which is why Neverfell is of interest. He's also quite literally in two minds about everything. His left brain never knows what his right brain is doing - not hardly. When the one side is awake, the opposite side is asleep, for the most part, so each time one half wakes up, it’s like someone else took over his life for a while and did things he had not anticipated. Neverfell meets the left side first, and makes sufficient impression that she's hired as a food taster to replace the one who died recently, but her first real experience with him is with the right side.

She must accompany "Mr Right" as he seeks to discern who the Kleptomancer is, and with Neverfell's help, he finally lays a trap. The idea is that the Kleptomancer will be unable to resist an open challenge to steal the Grand Steward's latest wonder from his cabinet of curiosities, which happens to be a stuffed giraffe, but the way the challenge is worded, I'm convinced that the Kleptomancer will consider the grand Steward's latest treasure to be Neverfell herself who, it turns out, interrupted the Kleptomancer's theft of the banquet cheese, the Stackfalter Sturton, by her spilling of the wine, resulting in the cheese being called to the table earlier than it ought to have been.

Once ensconced in the royal food taster's quarters, Neverfell, of course, wishes to be out and about, so she goes out to explore the palace environs outside of the taster's quarters, and barely escapes being taken prisoner by one of the court hangers on. What she does not realize is that the monkey who pulled out some of her hair wasn't being mischievous, it was recovering a hair sample for another interested party who wishes to track Neverfell>

Having learned more of Madame Appeline, Neverfell summons Zouelle to court to ask her some questions about her discoveries, and we learn that Zouelle, acting for her uncle, also has machinations in play which directly involve Neverfell. Is there no one on her side? Apparently not, because I was right about the Kleptomancer. Oddly enough he kidnaps her on the same night an assassin tries to exterminate her, thereby saving her life. She in turn escapes the Kleptomancer and ends up getting an unexpected education on the lowest levels of Caverna where the slave labor population - those robbed of all but the minimum facial expressions - are forced to drudge for the benefit of the upper classes. The sad thing here is that the drudges are forced to lie just like the upper classes. The only difference is that the drudges do not choose to lie. They're forced to, in that they have only one face to show, and it’s never one which they would show by choice, since they have no choice in their lives.

When Neverfell returns topside, she returns by a means of her own invention and she's furious - so furious that she upsets the Grand Steward and this in turn, nets her the very visit to Madame Appeline that she's been after all along, although the outcome of this is less than she sought. This fails, ultimately, because there is scheming going on here which she's failed to even imagine, let alone foresee. And I think that's plenty of spoilers!

This novel continues to get better and better even as you kinda feel you know where it's going - and go there it does in grandly unexpected style. I'm now planning on hunting down every single one of Hardinge's other novels. I can't recommend this novel highly enough. Oh, I guess I just did! W O R T H Y !!!!

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley

Title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Author: Mary Shelley
Publisher: InAudio (now apparently out of business)
Rating: WARTY

This is read by Ralph Cosham, who does the absolute most deadened and boring narration job of any audio production I've ever heard in any context anywhere! It's awful.

This is a movie/novel tie-in. The Movie: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is reviewed here. The Dracula novel by Bram Stoker is reviewed here. The Francis Ford Coppola produced movie based quite closely on this novel is reviewed in my movie review section.

The problem with reviewing this novel today is that it was written two hundred years ago; yet I've seen many negative reviews that regard it and treat it no differently than they would a new YA novel. It isn't. The crucial thing which these rather blind reviewers are missing is that this novel is a time machine directly into the mind of an educated and capable young adult writer and avid reader, an 18-year-old girl who was a rebel and radical even for modern times, let alone for 1816. How rare and precious is it then? How many opportunities do we have to pick the mind even of a young man from two centuries ago, let alone a teen-aged girl?

Mary was not Shelley in 1816. She was Mary Godwin, who had the year before lost her prematurely born daughter less than two weeks after she was born. She was 'living in sin' with poet Percy Shelley, whom she was shortly to marry and who himself had only six more years to live. They were on vacation with him and their newborn son (who was to die before he turned four), along with poet Lord Byron (who had only eight years more to live) in a cottage called Villa Diodati on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Also there were Byron's personal physician, John Polidori (who was to die before he turned 26), and Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister and the only one of the group who lived to a ripe old age. It was June, 1816, 'the year without a summer' and the climate was proving wet and miserable, so when it wasn't fine enough to go boating on the lake, these people were confined to the cottage, talking long into the night, their time spent wholly in conversation and immersion in literature.

There were no phones, let alone cell phones. There was no television, no moving pictures. Photography as we know it (or as we knew it before digitization!) was still a decade away. There was no email, nor even the concept of it. Computing wasn't even in the air, nor would it be until Byron's daughter, commonly referred to as Ada Lovelace, got together with the brilliant Charles Babbage, and offered some assistance to him in his creation of what has come to be recognized as the world's first real computer. Ada is commonly viewed as the first programmer, but it would be probably more accurate to see her as the world's first computer hacker.

The cottage in which the group of friends resided had no running water, no central heating, no air conditioning. They had no servants. In some ways a bit reminiscent of the Bonnie and Clyde gang of the 1930s, with Mary and Percy on the run with 'their gang', but in their case running from family and Percy's creditors. Byron was on the run from slanderous accusations of incest which he denied vehemently. It was he who, after they'd read ghost stories to each other, suggested that they each write one in competition. Mary had no ideas, but she was able to dream up one. Bryon wrote a fragment of a story which Polidori later turned into the first vampire story to be published in English. Percy started one and gave up.

Mary was the only one to finish hers, and what began as a short story turned into one of the most famous novels ever written. Nothing had come to her at all until she had a 'waking nightmare' in the early hours of the morning, when she envisioned the creation of a creature, re-animated from a dead state by a man with delusions of divinity. Mary herself was horrified by it and this reaction was imprinted upon her protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, who was by all accounts quite heavily modeled on Percy Shelley.

Of all people, he had indulged in scientific experiments in Galvanism as a student! Some critics have argued that Shelley wrote this novel in part at least to work through the grief she felt at the loss of her child, but that doesn't seem to me to be the case. She'd had another child by then, a child who was with her when she created Frankenstein, and I suspect she was rather more focused on her new baby than on the one she lost. I'm not saying she wasn't moved by her loss - a loss she was to see repeated uncomfortably often - just that she seemed to be much more self-possessed than was her famous fictional character Victor Frankenstein. Victor's middle name was never given, but I can reveal it to you here for the first time ever in print; it was: "Irresponsible". And did I mention that Cosham's narration sucks green wieners?

Having said all that, I have to agree with some critics on the tedious factor inherent in this story! The most monstrous thing about Frankenstein's monster is how god-awfully verbose he is! He drones on and on and frickstein on! At one point he actually says, "You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being". I guess no one jumped anybody's bones in those days when the term 'making love' quite literally meant talking each other into delirium. If Victor wanted revenge on the "Fiend", all he had to do was to create him a woman who was, like, totally tedious the the max. None of this is helped by the monotonous, and thoroughly unimaginative and uninventive tone employed by narrator Cosham in the audio book. His narration is unspeakably boring in the extreme. He could completely ruin the most exciting novel ever written. He's awful. And did I mention how nauseatingly bad he was? It's no wonder the audio company went out of business.

The story begins as a series of letters written by the rather delusional Captain Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. Walton's life is miserable and he believes his only salvation is to create fame for himself. He selects as his goal, the task of discovering a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One indicator of his cluelessness is that he fails to launch his expedition until winter is just around the corner... As he becomes ever more pressed in and surrounded by the northern ice floes, he espies a very tall man racing across the frozen ocean on a sled in the far distance. Note here how distinctive the figure is, because this is vitally important later. The next day his crew discovers another man, sickly and wasted, who turns out to be Victor Frankenstein. He's in pursuit of the first man they saw. As Frankenstein recovers his health, he sees something of his own blind, misguided ambition in Walton, and as a caution, he relates his story.

It starts with a somewhat unnecessary history of Victor's parents, but a lot of the text is somewhat unnecessary. It would seem that Shelley fleshed out her short story by the simple expedient of filling it with every detail of the city in which all the main protagonists grew up: verbosity. Victor is the first-born, and rather confused even then, it would seem, describing himself as "Genovese by birth" and then as being born in Napoli, Italy! Evidently he's talking rather loosely of his heritage in the former, and his actual birth in the latter. And the afterbirth is Cosham's narration.

During a time when he was at the age of four and traveling with his parents, they came across an orphan, Elizabeth Lavenza, who was well-born, but who had been left with a family for nursing after her mother died in childbirth. Her father also died, and now that family had many children and few resources, Victor's parents moved to adopt Elizabeth. Her importance is that she's to become Victor's love-interest later in life and an ill-fated pawn in the battle between Victor and the demon he creates. This brings me to the creature's name. Shelley uses the term "dæmon" to describe over twenty times, monster over thirty times, and "fiend" nearly forty times, so I'll go with the latter. Fiendish, aren't i?

She writes of Victor's losses in his life, and of his determination, once his mother dies, to find a way to beat death. He spends his college career single-mindedly pursuing his goal, forsaking his friends and family, and even his beloved Elizabeth. Victor is very selfish. Over the length of a year he makes himself almost ill, blinded by his psychosis. In the end, he succeeds in imbuing life into this savagely stitched-together corpse, but even in his moment of triumph, he's so far gone down his lonely road to hellish insanity that he's repulsed by his creation and takes to his bed, ill with fatigue and from an overworked mind. When he recovers, he discovers that the Fiend he created has gone, and he foolishly decides to leave it at that, turning back to family and friends and generally behaving like nothing has happened! As Hermione Granger would put it: "What an idiot!" She could also have been describing Cosham's atrocious narration.

When he returns to his home four months after his creation and subsequent illness, he learns that his younger brother William has been murdered. Even though he strongly suspects that his creation is responsible, he fails to bring this to the attention of the magistrates, although even that probably would not have changed the single-minded bloody determination of this kangaroo court to take the life of the child's nanny. The Fiend corners Victor and they have a long discussion. All he wants is to be loved, yet he's failed to find it in anyone he has met. He tells Victor that what he wants is a bride, and if Vic will grant this one thing, the Fiend and his bride will quit Europe and head into the wilds of South America, never been seen or heard from again.

Mary Shelley was never to know of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" which stood the science of biology on its end and which would have given her a solid scientific idea of how life in all its variety arose and spread. She did know, however, along with the work of many other scientists, the work of Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, inventor of the rocket engine. In particular she mentioned his experiments with vermicelli which Lord Byron and Percy Shelley had discussed within her attentive earshot. She dealt rather cavalierly with death in her fiction, not having anything even remotely approaching our modern understanding that death is a process, not an event. She could not know how cells function, nor how rapidly that function deteriorates irreversibly once life has left a body. There is no way in which several day old corpses - or even fresh ones, for that matter, since no corpse is ever fresh once death has took hold of it - can ever be "reanimated" as she portrays Frankenstein doing.

Victor initially agrees to his creation's request that he create a bride (after swearing flatly that he would never accede!), but this vacillating spineless wastrel reneges on his solemn promise. You know, none of the Fiend's victims deserved what they got, but Vic earned every whimper of his punishment. It's ironic in the extreme that the one who lost everything was named Victor, isn't it? For the flimsiest of reasons, he retreats this time to the Orkneys, just off the north east coast of Scotland, to embark upon this new creation, but Victor is still sick, and is still infected by the horror and regret of his previous escapade. He cannot complete his work, and one day he destroys the woman he was in process of creating. Incensed by this, the Fiend vows that he will see Victor on his wedding night. Victor, moron that he is, essentially blows off this threat with all the passion of an audio-book narrated by Ralph Cosham. Did I ever mention how much the name 'Ralph' sounds like the noise made when someone throws up?

Several people who have reviewed this novel negatively have mentioned Frankenstein's spinelessness, and I agree whole-heartedly on that. Not only was he spineless, he was of the most absurdly fragile constitution of any character in any novel anywhere if we're to note how frequently he's overcome by almost paralyzing fevers in this caper. This is a huge mistake by Shelley, because it flies completely in the face of the massive Europe-wide manhunt which Victor pursues at the end of the novel. If he was as weak as Shelley portrays him, how did he ever grow to manhood, let alone manage to chase the Fiend for months all over Europe before his death in the frozen north at the end of the story?

Hopefully those critics I mentioned are not the same people who complain that Shelley was writing about how a woman copes with adversity, rather than a man! Unlike Shelley herself, Frankenstein is a self-obsessed, cowardly loser, short-sighted and moronic despite his supposed brilliance in biochemistry. He was pretty much willing to sacrifice any thing and any one to his own purposes, but his critics have done him a disservice with regard to Justine's hanging for the death of his brother William. That isn’t on Frankenstein, but on the incompetence and intransigence of the magistrates who found her guilty. Having said that, in the final analysis, the real monster in this story is Victor Frankenstein, with his creation coming in a close second.

Frankenstein's only failure in that regard was his irrational protection of the Fiend, and this was done from pure cowardice on his part. When he learns of his younger brother's death and returns home, he visits the place where the body was discovered (although how he knew where that was, since he hadn't, at that time, yet been home is a mystery). There, he catches sight of the Fiend, yet he fails to alert anyone to its presence. Indeed, contrary to the traditional movie portrayal, the Fiend is never harried by a howling hoard armed with pitchforks. He's protected by his creator, and he acts in secret, stealthily manipulating events behind the scenes. In this regard, Frankenstein's creation was indeed a "monster"; he was a Moriarty before Doyle ever dreamed one up! If Frankenstein had done even that small thing - reporting his suspicion that a rogue and vagabond was guilty of that first murder - it would have at least cast some doubt upon Justine's culpability. The problem, as I said, was that no one would have believed him. He had no evidence to implicate the Fiend.

Here's one thing which too many negative reviewers have rather dishonestly excluded: Justine confessed to the crime! She didn’t do it, but she fogged the air with her confession, and made things far worse for herself than she should have. Shelley did her job here. I think that Branagh (or rather, the writers, Steph Lady and Frank Darabont) did this better in the movie version, but Shelley got it done in her own way. She did not fail. In the novel, both Victor and Elizabeth petition for Justine's release, but their pleas are stubbornly ignored by magistrates who are dead-set upon seeing her - and no one else - punished capitally for this murder, and thus she dies. So yes, he's guilty in that he didn’t do everything he could, but nowhere near as guilty as his critics have portrayed him.

The worst aspect of his conduct here is his self-obsession. He truly believes, self-centered as he is, that he's suffering more than Justine! How sick is that? But this is not an indictment of the author! On the contrary: this is completely in keeping with Shelley's story. She's telling a warning tale of the pitfalls of obsession and blind addiction to a course of action even when it becomes increasingly apparent that the course is a doomed one. In this Shelley stays true to her aim, unlike Cosham the narrator, who is all over the place save where he should be.

Eventually, inevitably, Frankenstein and the Fiend meet in the mountains and finally have the talk they should have had immediately after life was imbued into this creature. It becomes clear that lack of parental love set the creation upon a road which could lead to the monstrous, but there is more to it than that. This is where Frankenstein's culpability truly lies. How many times have we seen that a serial killer's childhood was ruined by abusive parenting? Frankenstein abandoned his "child" and even though the child tried to learn and to integrate, he was denied and rejected at every turn. This does not excuse his psychopathic behavior, however. At this point, before he had ever met young William, the Fiend had been given the opportunity to learn how to conduct itself in society. While he learned of literature and poetry, music and family, he made a conscious choice not to take the high road. He chose the path of vicious vendetta instead. For this the Fiend is entirely responsible, because he is indeed the one with his hands on the reins. At one point, he tells Frankenstein "You are my creator, but I am your master."

It’s at this point that Frankenstein's culpability morphs. It’s not at his door that the Fiend has become a killer. It is his fault as well as his problem that the killing continues unabated. Where he fails now is in his continued blinkered focus on himself, to the exclusion of all others. It’s in his repeated failure to grasp the true nature of the Fiend's vendetta that results in death after death, and it’s in his failure to keep his promise to this creation that Elizabeth dies. In the end, it all rests on selfishness and stupid short-sightedness, which were the very traits which got Frankenstein to this sorry impasse in the first place! It's an interesting parallel that the novel is titled in part, "Or, the Modern Prometheus" and here we have Frankenstein, like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods (in Frankenstein's case, his mature and respected professors) and creating a man.

Don't let's get into the sheer improbability of Frankenstein's (unintended) voyage around Scotland's north coast to Ireland, and the unlikelihood of his being mistaken for his eight-foot tall creation who has, inanely absurd though it is, somehow managed to go from the Orkneys to the Scots mainland, all the hell the way down to Perth, locate Henry Clerval in the city, strangle him, drag his dead body all the way across Scotland to Glasgow, sail to Ireland, and dump the rotting corpse at very nearly the exact spot where Frankenstein lands a day later. Recall how easily the Fiend was identified as being of super-human size by Walton and his crew, and contrast that with the villagers comprehensive inability to discern that Victor and the Fiend were not one and the same! Is Shelley saying here that the Irish are stupid?! And after that let's definitely not get into the contrast of the injustice of the magistrates here taking an amazingly benign attitude towards Frankenstein (even before he's proven innocent) and with somewhat more reason to suspect him, with the blood-thirsty attitude of the magistrates in Justine's case!

Let's not dwell on the fact that Victor shows no anger at his wife's death in the novel. Le;ts not ponder why only now does he report the Fiend to the authorities, never once grasping that he could have reported him long ago without saying a word about how the Fiend came to be! Even when his wife is dead Victor cannot think of anything save himself. That's how big of a jerk he is.

The bottom line is that this novel isn't well written. For example, Victor is supposed to be pretty much on his deathbed, yet he launches into this endless monologue. So long is it that Shelley forgets exactly what her fiction is and she has Victor quote a letter, verbatim, from his wife as though he has it in his hands and reads it to us! That one event alone kicks a reader right out of suspension of disbelief. This is the fatal weakness of first person PoV stories. No one's memory is that good, and Victor is no eidetic. On a more humorous note, I can credit Mary Shelley with authorship of the first novel to allude to zombies! At one point she writes of Elizabeth's body as being "Lifeless and inanimate" - why specify both if she did not believe it possible to have the one without the other?!

More seriously, this reveals another weakness in the story-telling. Frankenstein has already animated a corpse made from body parts long, long dead. In the novel, unlike in Branagh's movie, it never even crosses his mind to reanimate his wife, killed right there and then, although he had both the equipment and the expertise to do it. You can argue that he was too distraught or too revolted by his experiments to consider doing it, but you cannot call upon Mary Shelley to support you in your conjecture, because she does not even mention the possibility. Either it never occurred to her when she wrote this and later revised it, or it never occurred to her to expressly eliminate that option and so clear the air in the matter.

This novel is not great literature; it's monotonous even without Cosham's vile narration. Shelley herself seems to have realized its limitations: she revised the novel more than once. For example, in the original version, Elizabeth was not an adoptee, but a cousin of Frankenstein's. The term 'cousin' is employed some thirty times in the novel not because it was merely an endearment but because Shelley never removed her original explicit references when she made Elizabeth unrelated (a move she undertook, it's suspected, in response to the calumny haunting Byron over his relationship with his step-sister Augusta Leigh - who actually did marry a cousin!).

In the end, Shelley's novel is quite simply bloated and tedious, and it's florid in the extreme. Perhaps that is entirely in keeping with the period and the romantic movement, but in modern times the word 'movement' has more than one meaning and the other isn't even remotely romantic. Shelley's writing is interesting for the reasons I mentioned when I began this essay, but it's far from brilliant and it certainly does not merit the approbation it's received. By all means let us credit her for producing a novel at such a young age which contained some brilliant ideas, but let's not pretend that those ideas were executed by a literary great. They were merely executed. Read that how you will.

Now on to Dracula!

Windwalker by Natasha Mostert

Title: Windwalker
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is the second of Mostert's novels that I've read. I just got through the first, and really liked it, but this one, at least superficially, appeared to me to be almost a carbon copy of the first, with some cosmetic surgery to make it seem fresh and original. I hoped sincerely that it was not like that, and Mostert didn't let me down, but for a while, during the opening chapters, the déjà vu factor was looking like it would reach uncomfortable heights! What was I supposed to think about a novel which begins with the same premise: a damaged girl in a new locale who quickly becomes the target of an anonymous "watcher" (one who has on a previous occasion sat in the dark observing his subject sleeping)? I don’t know from whence Mostert originally pulled up this idea, but it definitely seems to have left a weighty impression on her while leaving me wondering if this novel was more of the same. Rest assured, as I now do, that it wasn't. Phew!

Mostert's title is again in competition as it was with The Midnight Side, but this one has way more competitors. This is an advantage of self-publishing in that you choose your title and you choose your cover. Yes, you don't have the support of an established publisher; you're on your own, but it is all yours, and I'd personally much rather have it that way than to cede creative control to those who have too much power and who do more harm than good in the long run by systematically ignoring talented authors. The only way to break the power of the mega-trending publishers is for all of us writers to stick together and self publish. Put the legacy publishers in the position of having to beg to get authors; then maybe all writers, instead of just a privileged few, will get an even break. And yes, it does bother me that self-publishing giant Amazon is becoming ever more powerful, but that will even out over time as competitors take them on in a battle of business models.

Anyway, Mostert went with Windwalker despite The Windwalker by Tracy Blough, and Windwalkers by R Burns, and Windwalker's Mate by Margaret L Carter, and Windwalker: Starlight & Shadows by Elaine Cunningham, and Where the Windwalk Begins by Todd Dillard, and The Windwalkers by Diane Fanning, and The Shaman Windwalker by Willie "Windwalker" Gibson, and Juno and The Windwalker by Julie Hodgson, or Windwalker by Dinah McCall, and Windwalkers Moon by Randee Redwillow, and Windwalker: The Prophecy Series by Sharon Sala, and Windwalker by Kris Williams, and The Windwalker by Blaine Yorgason! Brave girl is our Natasha!

On the topic of names, the intriguingly-named Justine Callaway, combining both elements of the Marquis de Sade in her first, and a hint of callousness combined with cowardice ('callous-run-away' - or perhaps more charitably, 'called away'?) in her last name is grieving and paradoxically unfeeling. Rather than work through her grief, she chooses the patented Jack Torrance method: flee to a remote location, foolishly hoping that everything will fix itself. She doesn’t, of course, take-up tenure in the horrifically disturbed Overlook Hotel, cut off by a chill Colorado winter as Jack did. Justine moves herself to an isolated country home in her homeland of Britain. Rather than pursue her interest (which unlike Jack, is photography, not writing), she initially spends day after day doing precisely nothing but sit around staring into space. Will we, I found myself wondering, see her churn out image after image of exactly the same subject in parallel with Torrance's "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"? All black and no white makes Justine a crazy girl, maybe?! Amusingly, she does do something disturbingly similar, but not for the same reason.

So our protagonist has lied to the building's owners to get this job. They wanted a married couple after the last caretaker - a young single male who held raves there and charged for admission - so Justine told them she was married and they believed her. The building is huge, old, creaky and dusty, whereas the grounds are huge, fresh and tended. She spends her first week there doing literally nothing. It took a call from her mother to precipitate an idle stroll through the large and empty house, which in turn roused her from her lassitude, but it didn't propel her into doing anything within the purview of care-taking. Instead, she retrieved her Leica camera - the one she uses for photographically exploring new subjects - and she began visiting the empty rooms, taking pictures of whatever grabbed her attention.

Justine (a name I happen to really like, btw) is old school, preferring b&w film photography to digital, and I immediately suspected that this was for the same reason I employed it in Saurus: because Mostert and I both need to have disconcerting things appear as the images are developed before the photographer's eyes. How robbed we've been - even as we make astounding and welcome progress - by the advent digital imagery! The thought did occur to me, given where the author is going with this, that digital images might actually have been a better choice. Assuming for a minute that it's possible for a mind to influence a photograph (it's not! More on this anon) it seems to me it would be a better bet were it to be placed on the mental manipulation of digital images (which, let's face it, exist only in the form of ones and zeroes encoded onto a magnetic or some other medium), than it would to do the same with fixed, printed images.

Mostert mentions (in the context of reading from a textbook on the subject - a very clever ruse to distance oneself from assertions!) the topic of "thoughtography" by which mental images are supposedly directly transferred to photographic film. It seems that the images Justine is discovering in her prints are her own projections. As I mentioned in my previous review, I don't buy any of this nonsense, but it's a great subject to play around with in fiction. When I was younger and more impressionable than I am now, I read a lot of books on topics like this, but the more I read, the more I came to an understanding of how amazingly easy it is to fool humans with woo and whack.

Ted Serios was purportedly a "thoughtographer" and he's mentioned in Windwalker. I read a book written by the scientist (Jule Eisenbud) who studied him, but Eisenbud, whilst ostensibly trying to be skeptical, was rather given to gullibility and conducted his "experiments" on Serios with really, really poor controls. The problem is that scientists are by far the worst people for studying this kind of charlatanry. The best people are magicians and one of the most famous, The Amazing Randi had a long-standing offer to pay one million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any of these powers under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed it. That tells you all you need to know right there!

James Randi and others exposed Serios as a fraud, Randi demonstrating how easy it was to replicate Serios's "thoughtography" scam, but let's pretend that in this novel, some other magical method is at work so we can enjoy the fiction! So, moving along: it's in the process of taking these pictures that Justine discovers an old wardrobe which is locked. She finds the key and opens it to discover that it’s full of clothes: old, musty and forgotten men's clothing. She wonders why no one removed them, but the explanation is at hand. She starts wearing the jacket, draped over her shoulders and despite its age (an overly large size for her) and its odd smell, it comforts her.

The only other people employed by the house's owners are the gardeners: an older man and his adolescent son. Justine meets them as they arrive for their once-a-week yard work. From them she learns of the tragedy which struck the family whose picture hangs in the house. Apparently family bad boy Adam stabbed his brother Richard to death and then disappeared without a trace. Their father had died of cancer and the mother killed herself after her favorite child's death. The remaining child, now a middle-aged woman named Harriet, hasn’t been near the place in nine years even though she had been the owner it. The house is currently owned by a development corporation who want to turn it into a spa and health retreat to complement the lifestyles of the rich and spoiled. Hence the need for a resident care-taker to keep an eye on the property until building permits, etc., have been put into place, which is taking time because the building is of historic value.

Adam, the purported murderer, seemed to me to be such an obvious candidate for innocence, and also the one with whom Justine will hook-up as this novel progresses. Whether I was right in either eventuality remains for you to discover! Another suspicion I had was that it was Harriet who murdered her brother Richard because, even though he looked angelic in the painting (in counterpoint to the evil which Adam seemed to project), he was molesting his sister. Unfortunately for my charming theory, the very next chapter seemed to confirm the popular story. I can still see a way how a witness could think Adam stabbed his brother, and yet have Adam be innocent as charged, but you'll have to read the novel to find out how far wrong or right I was!

Chapter eight was evil, with Mostert subtly ratcheting up the sphincter factor (and no doubt chortling gleefully to herself as she did so), but the hairs on my skin didn’t become sharply erect until I reached page 77 and went beyond; that's when it started to become truly creepy (even though we knew that something like this was coming: it's a Mostert, after all!). This is when Justine starts taking pictures of the house, but when she develops them, there's an image within several of them which looks remarkably like a wolf. And when she reprints the same pictures, the "wolf" has moved! Yeah like that, with hair standing up, and goosebumps! As if that's not enough, I find that I've become suspicious of all the mirrors in the house. Who's behind them, watching? Or am I too paranoid? I mean why has pretty much all the furniture gone but the mirrors all remain? And whatever became of Adam? Fortunately for me, Justine begins investigating. I love it when that happens!

I mentioned earlier that this novel has some parallels with the previous one I reviewed, but I was thrilled to discover that this one took a decidedly different tack. It turns out that Adam and Justine have matching tattoos even though they've never met. Yes, not tattoo, but tattoos: each of them has two, and the designs, a snake and a wolf, are the same. I like this very much. Justine says she went to the tattoo parlour looking to get a "Union Jack". The name of the British flag is actually 'union flag'; it's only properly referred to as a "jack" when it's flown from a ship. This is a writing problem, isn't it? Do you use the correct form, even though most people - including most Brits - do not, or do you use the form most likely to be spoken by your character, and then have to put up with wise-ass reviewers like me correcting you on it?! What a dilemma! Since the 'jack' version is coming into common use regardless of the flag's location, I guess I need to stop being a wise-ass, huh?

Now let me mention, briefly, the signature Mostert stalker, and then I'm done giving out spoilers in this review! The stalker is a he, and he's definitely creepy, but there is at least four or five possible candidates, two of which are strong, the other two or three weaker. But is the "obvious" one a red-herring or a double red-herring?! Only time will tell!

In conclusion, I recommend this as a worthy read; another winner from Natasha Mostert. Now I'm really looking forward to starting Season of the Witch which was my goal all along! I'd begun to think, as I was entering the down-gradient to the end, that I wouldn't like this novel (Windwalker) as well as I liked The Midnight Side, but as it happened, I liked it better and this was despite some issues I had with the latter half of the novel. The Watcher turns out to be a rather different pot of Pisces from the one in the earlier novel (and from what I'd been expecting), which was most welcome (and I even nailed who it was! Yeay! What a novelty that was: for me to get one right!), and I loved the ending which again wasn't what I expected at all, but which was perfect for the tone set in the rest of the story. That kind of relationship really resonates with me, fictional as it may be!

Where I had some problems was in two areas, and it's hard for me to detail my concerns without posting spoilers that I've chosen not to do! I'll try to give voice these without giving anything more away about this story. The first of my concerns was with regard to the two main characters: Adam, and Justine. I was disappointed in the course that was initially charted for them. I felt that they deserved better than what they got (and I'm not talking about the ending, which was great, but about an earlier event). It seemed like they ought to have had more, that these two deserved something greater, and they were under-served. I'm not saying that I could have done better, but I did feel a bit let-down after all the anticipation. I'm sorry that's vague. Maybe a year or two from now I'll revisit this review and add a bit more at a point where I won't feel like I'm robbing the author of some of her glory if I'm more specific!

In more general terms, the other issue was that the closing sequences were drawn-out for too long for me. I realize that Mostert had spun many threads all of which needed to be tied off neatly, but it just seemed to go on longer than it ought. Again, I risk spoilers because there are elements of this novel which I've left unmentioned, but at one point there was a distinct (and to me inexplicable) lethargy in Adam and Justine's actions. It seemed to me that the obvious course - the one which each eventually took - should not have been delayed at all, let alone for as long as it was. I didn’t get that at all, and I saw no rationale for it, which was one of the reasons I felt that this portrayal was less than stellar.

But these are relatively minor considerations when set against what Mostert does deliver: another fun tale that’s by turns creepy, angering (for the right reasons!), warming, intriguing, and engrossing. Definitely a winner!

Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters by Suzanne Weyn

Title: Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters
Author: Suzanne Weyn
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

Here's a good rule of thumb by which to measure all pretenders to the throne of Mary Shelley (whether you think she deserves the throne or not!) and indeed to the throne of all "classical" writers: ask yourself is something Shelley herself might have written (substitute Bronte, Austen, Shakespeare, etc. as inappropriate). If it isn't, then this is merely a pretense, not a pretender! I think what we have here ladies and gentlemen, is a sad, sad, sad pretense. I managed to get through this whole novel for two reasons only: it's short, and the gaffs are so utterly brain-dead that it makes for unintentionally amusing reading.

I hadn't read any Weyn until this one, nor will I ever again! I found myself wondering if she made so much money from this novel that she bought a large house and named it Weyn Mansion?! Maybe it’s not pronounced Wayne, but wien or wein? I don’t know! What am I rambling about?! So I started delving into Weyn's World (yeah, I went there!), and found it entertaining to begin with, but more and more problematical as I progressed (or regressed if you like). Eventually it went so far downhill that it must have joined an underground movement (if not a bowel movement). Weyn quite clearly lives in a world of her own, fashioned entirely for laziness and convenience, where a boat can appear on the horizon, heading into port, and then literally a few seconds later is tooting its horn and passengers are running to board before it departs! She also invented a new verb: bouldering, which is when stones are lining a cart track: "...stones were bouldering the lane" or words to that effect. I am not making this up.

This style Weyn employs of having the chapters be diary entries written by the twins by turn, was annoying, especially since the twins were interchangeable despite their supposed differences. It wasn't readily discernible who had the voice unless you really paid attention, and rest assured that if I as a reader already detest first person PoV, how much worse is it when there are two 1PoVs?! Weyn doesn't write badly from a technical PoV, and she quite evidently did zero research for this novel as she herself pretty much admits (more on this later). The novel will back me up one this, and there quickly arose multiple problems with plotting and credibility by the time I was about fifty percent in. I found multiple items which exercised my eyebrows rather efficiently, including her use of the term 'verdant green' on page 23. Her editor needs to tell her that such use constitutes a tautology. The hell with it, she needs to fire (more on this later!) her editor and get someone who knows what they're doing.

The word, 'biology' was only just coming into use by 1815 when this novel is set, so it’s unlikely it would have become widely known by then as Weyn pretends it is. Since one of the daughters is a scientist, it’s certainly possible she would know it, but it seems to me that it would have been a better writing exercise to have her explain it to the person to whom she's talking in order to convey how new it was. There are also several examples of anachronism in the writing (such as using the word 'formulas' instead of 'formulae', the latter being a form which I believe would have been more likely to have been in use back then, but that's just me).

On to the story. Giselle and Ingrid von der Wein (see, I told you!) are twins. Here’s another example of why I don’t review covers: not only do authors have little or no say in the cover unless they self-publish, the cover illustrators tend to be clueless about the novel they're, er, covering! I'm convinced (by a wealth of evidence) that cover artists pretty much never read the books they illustrate. In this case, I don’t know if they grabbed the first twins they found, or if they had only one girl and took two photos of her, but the girls on the cover have hair that's nothing like what’s described in the text.

I originally didn't think that the odd-looking "castle" on the cover was worth getting into (so to speak), but Weyn describes it in the text as having been originally built by Vikings, which means the cover illustration for the castle is also completely wrong. The Vikings didn’t build too many castles - not in the way we typically envision a "castle", and certainly not like the one on the cover. They commonly built earthworks with wooden palisades, and where they did build with stone, it doesn’t sound like it was anything on the scale that Weyn describes (and the cover shows), but this is fiction (and it's the cover, anyway), so I'm not going to worry too much about that since the cover is ultimately irrelevant.

Back to the topic of the twins! I found it a bit odd that they were depicted as being so different. Yes, I know that twins - even identical ones such as these - aren't exact clones (not even clones are exact clones!), and certainly they shouldn't be expected to be so, but I found it a bit much to see Weyn repeatedly remarking as to how different they were. Yes, they'd spent time apart, but not huge amounts and not during their formative years, and since a rather frighteningly large part of who we are and what we do is tied to our DNA, I’d expect far more similarities than differences. Again, this alone is not a show stopper, but my real issue with this is: why make them twins if you want them to be such distinct individuals? I initially thought that Weyn had some purpose in doing this, but no, she didn't. More on this anon.

As the title suggests, this novel riffs off Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (first published in 1818) which I've actually never read all the way through (at least I don’t think I have!), although it's coming up next on my audio book list, and I think I'll do Bram Stoker's Dracula, after that, for good measure. Dr. Frankenstein's Daughters is supposed to be the sequel which Mary Shelley never wrote (authors were a lot more original in her time than they are now, not given to writing only one novel and then riffing off that for endless sequels!). Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, the poet, and was a close friend of Lord Byron's, whose daughter Ada (commonly known as Ada Lovelace) played an important role, believe it or not, in the development of computers and even had a programming language named after her.

Victor Frankenstein (not von Frankenstein and certainly not Fronkensteen…!) is a fictional character, of course, who seems to have been born both in Napoli, in Italy, and in Geneva, in Switzerland! Who knows where he was really born?! He wasn't German, but he attended the University of Ingolstadt there. He links lightning to resurrection of tissue after witnessing lightning strike a tree (hey, he was insane, what can I say!). He creates the creature, which is entirely unlike most of the movie portrayals. The closest was Kenneth Branagh's 1994 movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In the novel, the creature requests that Frankenstein make him a girlfriend. Seriously. It’s like that joke where one guy says, "My mother made me a homosexual" and his friend rejoins, "If I get the material, will she make me one?". The creature's offer is to disappear into the "wilderness" of South America and never trouble the House of Frankenstein again if Victor helps him find love, which is really all he's ever been after. So Victor repairs to the Orkneys to undertake this work. I don’t know why he goes there of all places, but therein is the link to this novel which is set in "Castle Frankenstein" in the Orkneys - and yes, that's Orkneys, not Orkney's! It’s a plural, not a possessive - although the Scots feel rightly possessive of all of them…!

Weyn wastes no time in bringing in the Gothic mystery elements by having one of the daughters apparently become possessed the first night that they spend in the dilapidated and drafty (or is it draughty?) castle, but this possession thing really goes nowhere and kinda fades away. It’s dismissed as bad dreams and sleep-walking. The family starts settling in and they hire some help. Ingrid becomes curious about the cottage close by the castle, deciding to visit its occupant, which seems rather out of character. Truth be told, both Ingrid and Giselle are quite the snobs (which is another way of spelling S.o.B.'s), but Giselle is the worst, taking upon herself the title of Baroness, and henceforth starting each of her diarrhea? entries with her snotty title! Ahem!

Weyn screws-up by having Giselle produce a match which she strikes against a rough patch on the tin in which it's contained. The problem is that this particular style of match wasn't in use in 1815. They were on the verge of being invented the following year, but it wasn't until 1826 and later that the matches with which we’re familiar came into general use. OTOH, the Frankensteins were inventive. Maybe they gave someone the idea?

Writers tend to forget that people are named after things and that you can imbue your characters with something (or offer a teasing clue to your reader) by picking the right name. In my own novel Saurus I have a lot of fun with character names! Sometimes a name is obvious: a dangerous girl might be Diana, a boy who seizes the reign could be Augustus, a thorny time-traveler might be Rose, a flighty boy wonder, Robin. The name Smith was once literally a blacksmith, Cooper a barrel-maker, Taylor a tailor(!), and so on. I myself come from a long line of trees so it’s hardly surprising I grew up on a street named Linden Grove! Lol! I do, therefore, find myself wondering where Shelley took the name 'Frankenstein'.

She can hardly have envisioned how famous that name would become when she initially penned her story, which was born of a weird dream she had in 1816 while staying in Geneva, Switzerland with Percy Shelly and Lord Byron. What a soirée that must have been. 'Frankenstein' means literally 'franc stone', but whether the franc derives from German (Frankish) or the French (the franc was their currency prior to the Euro) I don't know. It would seem that Shelley wasn't playing with names - although Victor seems to have been a reference to her lover, later husband, Percy Shelley. She actually wasn't Mary Shelly when she wrote her novel - she was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

We now rejoin our review in progress! At one point Weyn has Ingrid dress as a man so that her friend Anthony may sneak her into a medical lecture at the University of Edinburgh. This is bizarre behavior for the period, but acceptable in a novel like this. The real problem here was not that, but that Weyn depicts a lecturer exhibiting a dissected corpse. He squeezes the heart - and blood flows out of slits in the wrists. I call bullshit on that one. Does Weyn not understand that blood congeals, and rather quickly in a corpse? There is no way this could happen unless the doctor had killed the person immediately prior to his lecture! I think that anyone who tackles Frankenstein really needs to exhibit some knowledge of anatomy and physiology even if it's self-educated. To do less is to disrespect the source material. You may recall I mentioned her complete lack of research. Weyn failed epically here.

On the topic of disrespect, Weyn repeatedly disses the conventions and authenticity of the era of which she writes. She has Giselle, for example, foolishly meeting with gold-digger ex-boyfriend Johann alone. This is the man who spurned her rather cruelly just a month before, but now that he's learned of her fortune and title, he's written her a letter begging for a meeting in Edinburgh, and her uncle actually allows this to go ahead unchaperoned, which is pure nonsense. The two teens are in a very public place, and they kiss. They would have been asked to leave at best. Kissing in public in 1815?!

Giselle only belatedly suspects that Johann is after her title and fortune, but there is no rational explanation for her schizophrenia - at first sitting in adoration of him, and the next second feeling sheer repugnance. There is, of course, the 'possession' which she's exhibited, but this change of heart of hers doesn’t seem to be tied to her being possessed at all or if it is, it’s much more subtle than Weyn seems capable of penning. Johann's behavior is inexcusable and would have got him a public flogging at best (physically assaulting a baroness?!), but more to the point, if these girls actually conducted themselves in that era as they do in this novel, their behavior would be considered scandalous and shameful, and no one would have attended a ball held by such social pariahs.

On a side note, an hereditary barony passes to the eldest son, which, if it were Victor Frankenstein, would upon his death then devolve to his son. In Germany it was, I believe, possible for a daughter to inherit the title, but whether two daughters could inherit simultaneously, even though they were twins, is problematical. I suspect the oldest of the twins would inherit, not both of them. The big question here is whence the "Baron" title employed by the twins' uncle? He cannot also be a baron by inheritance, since Victor had the title. I suppose it could go to the uncle once Victor died without male issue, but then the twins couldn't use it! It’s also possible I guess, that their uncle earned his own title, but that's never made explicit. So, this isn't a huge story killer, but it is rather sloppy plotting, especially since all of Victor's family had been slain by the creature!

At one point, Weyn has Ingrid say, referring to a book on blood circulation written by William Harvey, "Is this from the sixteen hundreds"?!! That just screeched like chalk on a blackboard for me. I never lived then, obviously, so I can’t swear that particular phrase would never have been used, but it just screamed "wrong" to me. I felt she would have employed, instead, something like, "Is this seventeenth century?" or perhaps, "Is this an original?" Again, it's not a huge problem in itself, but one of an increasing number of such gaffs which, when they occur in sufficient volume, actually conspire to kill a novel.

Weyn seems not to understand that there was no indoor plumbing in 1815. When a hotel resident wanted a bath (assuming that one was even available), the maid would have to carry in the water (after heating it) and laboriously fill the tub by hand (and empty it of dirty water afterwards. Yuk!). There would certainly not have been a "bathroom" in a hotel room as Weyn stupidly claims, yet Weyn has Giselle immediately undress and drop into a tub in the bathroom right after arriving home from her 'contretemps' with Johann!

The real truth was that in Georgian times, nobody bathed - not in Britain, anyway. It’s not that it wasn't noticed (why do you think the women all carried fans?!), it’s just that no one seemed to have any idea what to do about it other than powder themselves down and carry dried flowers stuffed in their clothing. This novel is set in the time during which Jane Austen was alive, and if you visit her home you'll see that the best personal hygiene method which a respectable middle class woman like her had available was what you might literally describe as a water closet: a tiny closet which had a washbasin in it. This was how you took a bath - by wiping down your whole body a square inch at a time after filling the basin with water from a jug which had to be filled in turn from the well outside.

Ingrid hurries out the next day (dressed as a man!) to track down Johann, but she completely forgets her sister's fate in favor of joining some ruffians who are collecting bodies to sell for medical purposes! Again out with the window with the credibility. Why neither of these girls have the smarts to report the attack upon Giselle is a mystery, but once again Weyn shows her complete lack of research by talking of them going to the "police". There was no police force in Britain in 1815. The closest they came to it was the so-called "Bow Street Runners", but these were few in number and confined to London. The British Bobbie (named after the organizer, politician Robert Peel - and known as Peelers in Ireland) did not arrive until 1829 and later. This is another example of Weyn's inexcusable sloppiness in her writing. I don’t expect novels to be Tom-Clancy-True-To-Life. Novels like that are, in fact, tedious to read, but I do expect them to hold some semblance of reality enfolded within the fiction otherwise they become farcical.

Giselle has to be the most unintentionally ridiculous character ever created by an author. Weyn would have us believe, like any American teenager, that in the early nineteenth century, a girl of Giselle's background went to high-school and had "classmates"! But that's not even the most ridiculous thing about Giselle. No! Giselle is constantly under attack. Wherever she goes, some guy tries to rape her. We are led to believe that the 'reason' for this is her extreme beauty, but as I shall reveal, this is a lie!

It’s true that Scotsmen simply cannot keep their hands off her, don’t you know, but this simply begs the question as to how it is that Ingrid gets off Scot-free in this regard. No one even so much notices Ingrid, much less wants to rape her. How rejected she must feel! Yet she is Giselle's identical twin! Quite clearly the explanation for this phenomenon isn't that it's Giselle's goddess-like beauty which is the root cause of these assaults, but her name. Yes! To all true Scotsmen, Giselle is obviously a much more rape-worthy name than is Ingrid. I mean let’s face it, who wants to hear "I vill now Ingrid your ass, jungfräulich hottie"? Seriously. Any self-respecting girl would much prefer the sensually irresistible, "Why don’t you allow me to Giselle your porcelain buns, Miss Sweetbread?" Honestly - ask yourself which one you'd prefer...!

I don’t know what was going through Weyn's mind when she concocted this festering pile of garbage, but quite clearly whatever it was didn't amount to anything of worth or merit. I mentioned earlier that I saw no reason to make these two girls twins if they needed to be so different, and true to form, Weyn comes up with no reason whatsoever. It’s like she randomly decided they would be twins; then equally randomly decided that they needed to be as different as chalk and cheese (which actually, given the calcium content of both, isn't quite as stark as you might believe at first glance, but I digress!). Weyn would have made a great subject for young Frankstein's research on the brain. He would have labeled it Abby Normal.

On her trip to Edinburgh, Giselle is, of course, assaulted by Johann, who promptly disappears only to later turn-up dead. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. On her return trip home, Giselle's luggage breaks open at the dock, and Weyn would have us believe that not one single person, not even her identical twin, notices the poor girl hastily repacking her skivvies right there, out in the open, so that the boat sails without her and they don’t even notice her absence until they’re 'too far out' to come back for her? Seriously? Too far out is precisely the right phrase for this asinine drivel. What is Weyn, ten years old that she writes patent trash like this?

So Giselle has to take another boat which is, of course, captained by the villainous Ramsay, who of course promptly tries to rape her. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. Later, of course he's also found dead. On her way up to the castle from the dock immediately after the Ramsay ramming attempt, the guy who is hauling her luggage in his wagon also tries to rape her. Of course. And of course no one does anything about it, not even reporting it to the authorities. Rape is quite obviously the new "Hi! How's it hanging?" in the Orkneys. And of course, the rapist de l'heure is promptly found dead.

Later, Giselle is attacked by some anonymous guy in a tunnel under the castle who turns out in the end to be the leering, lascivious, lecherous Riff, who routinely treats the girls like dog-shit and for the longest time, no one did anything about that, either, until, in the end, Riff is "fired". Yeah. He's not 'dismissed'. He's not 'let go'. His employment isn’t 'terminated'. He's "fired". That's not the only example of an Americanism in this story of Fräulein Fatals in Scotland. I think the only conclusion Weyn must be insisting that we draw from all of this is that quite clearly, in Weyn's world, all Scotsmen are rapists and body snatchers. So, of course, Giselle is arrested for murder. But not until they've had a party.

Yes, it’s not a ball, it’s a partay! Honestly? But fair's fair. I owe Weyn an apology. I had accused her of insufficient research and I was very wrong to do that. What I should have stated is that Weyn did the cube root of diddly squat research and was proud of it. She admits as much in her acknowledgments where she thanks her editor for pointing out the bloody obvious to her, but her editor quite clearly screwed-up equally badly since Weyn still has copious anachronisms in this cut-rate excuse for a fairy tale.

The partay is attended by pretty much everyone they invite, no matter who they are and never mind that they've neither met nor have any idea who these girls are, or what the invitees' personal commitments and private life entail. Nope, they simply drop everything and hie to the Orkneys to attend this partay. Three of the guests are Lord Byron, and "Mr and Mrs" Shelley - never mind that Mary and Percy weren't married at that time. Nor were they likely to be at a party in Scotland. Percy Shelley was in Europe in the summer of 1815. Byron was in England, but far too busy with his financial affairs and his new bride to go to a ball thrown by nobodies.

Mary (who wasn't a Shelley, but a Godwin at the time) gave birth to a premature daughter in late February of 1815 who died less than two weeks later. Mary was hardly likely to have been in much of a mood for partying a couple of months later, especially not when she was planning on eloping with Percy Shelley before so very long. Nevertheless, here they are, insists Weyn, and Ingrid gives them a guided tour of Victor's lab, so not only is Weyn slapping Shelley in the face by asserting that she didn’t have the wit to invent an original novel, merely ripping-off the Frankenstein family's true story, Weyn is also doing this in her own rip-off of the very novel Shelley penned! That's some chutzpah, isn’t it?

Eventually, there are so many disappearances and deaths on this tiny island that even the authorities notice it. An inspector from the "local constabulary" - who has an American accent(!) shows up to investigate. Which part of 'There was no friggin' constabulary' is it that Weyn doesn’t get? Weyn makes it sound like this tiny island, with a population of maybe five families, is positively swarming with constables, yet despite all this extensive policing, all the men routinely feel free to assault women and attempt to rape them whenever the urge, er, arises. But that's not the funniest thing about this particular scene. When the inspector calls at the castle, it’s been five days since Ramsay's assault on Giselle, yet the inspector, obviously completely on top of his game, asserts that Ramsay has been missing for two weeks! Moron.

And what of Ingrid's dalliance with Captain Wally, the island's most eminent non-entity? Well, he's had a leg amputated, leaving a bloody, bandaged stump below the knee, yet within a few days of his surgery, he's romping off riding and sailing. But it’s no biggie, because: Ingrid to the rescue! Despite having zero medical training, much less any actual practical medical experience, 17-year-old Ingrid purloins festering body parts from the decomposing Riff to replace Wally's missing leg, his hand, and part of his face. And the operation is a resounding success.

The only reason I finished this novel was its massive hilarity content as Weyn repeatedly outdid herself in piling the highly unlikely on top of the absurdly improbable, and shoring the whole thing up with the abso-bloody-lutely impossible. This novel is without a doubt the worst I have ever read, but it’s also simultaneously the most unintentionally amusing, so if I were to offer any recommendation it would be for the laughs this humongous pile of rabid baboon droppings delivers. But in terms of worth, this novel is so warty that even its warts have big, fat stinking, purulent, green pus-oozing warts.