Crewel by Gennifer Albin

Title: Crewel
Author: Gennifer Albin
Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
Rating: worthy!

This is evidently yet another trilogy (yeah, and we all know what happened to Stephen King's Dark Tower "Trilogy" don't we?!), and this is novel #1 in that series. At first blush this novel felt like a mash-up of the beginning of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, together with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, with some serious borrowing from Alma Alexander's World Weavers series, and a good dollop of George Orwell's 1984!

There's a prologue which I naturally skipped. Chapter one is rather confusing and very whinily told in the first person, which was a major turn-off. I'm increasingly growing to detest the first person PoV in these YA stories and it may well influence which ones I read and which I pass over in future!

This is another novel which features abysmal names for the characters, such as Cormac and Adelice. Adelice is the female protagonist and Cormac is a textbook villain, although to be fair, he does become rather more nuanced as the story progresses. My position is that if you're going to write a story about a strong female, then please don’t libel her by giving her a name that sounds like some sort of confectionery, unless you’re going to make her a majorly bad-ass woman. Whether that's what Adelice becomes remains to be seen.

The yummy-sounding Adelice is a 16-year-old who is a prime candidate to be chosen as a spinster. A spinster is far from what you might think, although it ends up being precisely the same as you might think! In this case, the spinsters all start out as young girls who are removed forcibly from their families (this is the part which reminded me, for some reason, of The Hunger Games!). They are kept confined to a life of quite literally spinning and maintaining reality on a loom, something apparently only people with two X chromosomes can do, although why this hi-tech society cannot discover what it is in these peoples' genes which lend them a proclivity for this, will I predict, remain a complete mystery. The bizarre twist to this is that this is in a world where women are religiously relegated to a second-rate (hell, try fourth rate), and highly disrespected status (even more so than they actually are in the real world). That's a huge disconnect for me, as indeed was the whole of the first chapter.

The name of the nation is Arras (which sounds suspiciously like 'her ass', or maybe 'harass', but which is merely another name for 'tapestry'!). There's no indication in the early chapters as to whether this is supposed to be on Earth in some other time-period, or if this is somewhere else completely, but many of the place names sound suspiciously close to those borne by Earth locales.

Adelice is at home with her younger sister Amie, and her mother and father. She's aware that she will be taken to be a spinster (there's a testing), but she lies to her family about it; however, her family seems to be as equally aware as she is, and when the jackbooted thugs abruptly arrive to take her that evening to fulfill the honorable role for which she has been chosen, her entire family inexplicably (and very confusingly) scatters into the basement, diving into four escape tunnels. They're all captured except for her mother. Her father is summarily killed as a traitor, her sister taken prisoner, and Adelice is drugged and hauled off to be literally made-over as a spinster.

Her captor, Cormac takes her to the 'rebound station' (that's pretty funny given that the ebook I'm reading in alternation with this is Love Rehab lol!) where she's confined by means of tight straps and a restrictive helmet in a capsule and somehow translated from point A to point B (by the spinsters). At point B, she's left in a cold dark cell overnight in punishment for her treasonous behavior. She sheds not a tear for her dead father or for her scattered family. The next morning she's removed roughly from her cell by a dirty, disrespectful, disheveled and demeaning boy who, I'm guessing, is the instalove bad boy in an upcoming triangle. She has no problem finding him hot and checking him out despite what's happened to her and notwithstanding his behavior! Yeah, right, because young women are horny all the time just like the porn videos say they are!

This removal is overseen by a pretty boy who is, I'm assuming, the other guy in this sad, sad, sad, attempt at a YA love triangle. I already feel nauseous, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Maybe. Maybe I'm making one of my famously adrift prognostications here. We'll see. Adelice is taken upstairs and left with two beautiful women for a makeover (into what is, ostensibly, a geisha girl!) so she can start her career as a spinster, presumably.

Since I've not yet physically vomited at this point, I'm still reading this in the desperate hope against hope that it will improve at least a bit. I am trying to be optimistic and indulging myself liberally in the wild fantasy that the back-cover blurb didn't lie, I promise.

So at about 50% into this, I I have to confess that I've improved my opinion significantly! I no longer live in fear of vomitus maximus! On the contrary, I've become quite engrossed in the story (even as it continues to be rather weird), although I still can’t promise at this point that I'll want to continue the series after volume one! I think with this series, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit higher than usual, at least for the first fifty or so pages, and if you can do that, you're rewarded quite well. See? I learn new things about myself every day! Lol!

After her make-over, Adelice joins other potential spinsters for the first time. At that time they're being tested further, because not everyone who is abducted from their home ends up as a spinster. They also serve who only make the wait-staff.... There's still no word on why only women can do this and why they have to be pure (shades of Rampant!). It’s a bit genderist, not only that men are excluded, but that the entire premise of the novel relegates woman to a yesteryear where all they were allowed to do was domestic duties, including spinning yarn while their men were spinning yarns. There's still no word, either, on where this world is.

The "retreat" where the spinsters are confined (there are four of these, one in each quadrant of Arras) is referred to as a "coventry", which sounds a bit like convent, but it reminds me of the city of the same name in England, and in particular, of the phrase, associated with that city, of being sent to Coventry, which is pretty much what happened to these girls.

Adelice starts learning a little about the place as she is shown around with the other girls, and even begins bonding with one of them called Pryana, who seems to be nothing more than a trope antagonist of Adelice's own age. She moves from friend to fiend rather too easily (although, arguably, with good reason) when Maela (doesn't that sound disturbingly close to 'male'? More genderism?), the evil witch queen in charge of the new spinsters' training, invites the girls to each take a shot at working with the weave of the real world (WorldWeavers, anyone?! Alexander did have her idea five years before Albin), and they do so with more or less competence until the only two girls left are Adelice, who is at the time, desperate to keep her superlative weaving skills under a bushel (or bustle?!), and Pryana, who is simply nervous.

Maela shows them a loom which contains a real-world fabric of far more complexity than the other girls have had access to, and Adelice steps up to give Pryana a break from her nerves, which is what Maela was evidently hoping for. She tells Adelice that there is a weak thread in the weave, and she must find it and cut it out. Adelice finds it very competently; then comes the argument. Adelice argues that it’s not that weak and it will do more harm to remove it than to leave it be. Maela reacts angrily to this defiance and instead of removing the one thread, removes the entire patch of fabric around it.

In the real world, this entire patch was the academy at which Pryana's younger sister was in attendance, which has now ceased to exist. In short, Adelice's arguing with Maela has resulted in Pryana's sister dying, just like her inability to accept her role as a spinster resulted in her father's death. That's why Pryana now hates Adelice to the point where she actually punches her shortly afterwards. Pryana incurs no more cost for this punch than did Maela for destroying an academy, which is to say: none. That jarred! Adelice, OTOH, is once again confined to a cell! Let's add a liberal amount of Cinderella to this mash-up, shall we?

When Adelice gets out of the cell, she's notified that Cormac has chosen her to be his escort on a whistle-stop tour of the quadrants into which Arras is divided. For this she requires yet another make-over and a new wardrobe, of course. She travels on the rebound system, and at one stop she encounters her young sister. Amie has herself been made over, but in her case, mentally: she no longer recalls her old life or her sister and thinks her mother is someone who Adelice has never even seen before. Adelice discovers this when she foolishly confronts her sister, but, curiously, she garners for herself no punishment for this, and now she knows where her sister is.

At that same stop, Adelice encounters Loricel, the one and only 'Crewel' in the entire world and as such, the most powerful woman in this patriarchal society. In reality, crewel refers a type of yarn or a type of embroidery, but in Albin's world, it means a person who is both skilled enough (and permitted to) add things to the world as well as to remove them. On Adelice's return, Loricel calls her for a meeting and Adelice learns she is to be trained as a crewel, meaning that her status in the coventry is now on par with Maela's. The reason for this is Adelice's outstanding (unique in fact) ability to not only see the weave of the world without using a loom, but to put her hands into it and change it. Loricel is of course aware of this, which is why Adelice has turned up at this particular coventry.

Loricel shows Adelice a fabric from which the latter is told to remove a thread - meaning that an old woman will die. Adelice does this without hesitation. There's been quite a change in her attitude, it seems! Then Loricel shows Adelice how she adds to the world by placing a lake in a grassy valley, which is achieved by adding blue thread and tying it into the weave with a surrounding thread. When Adelice looks at the fabric on zoom, she can see the beautiful lake as it is out there in her world.

This is where my SoD (suspension of disbelief) takes a hit right in the grass, because I don’t see how this world makes sense if you examine it too closely. If these people can make things magically appear and disappear, why does anyone have any problems? Why does anyone work? Why is anyone deprived and hungry? This is another similarity with The Hunger Games, except we know in that case that the capital let the districts suffer pretty much out of spite. There has been no such 'justification' offered here. Worse than this, these spinsters could remove all of the cruel males from the entire world. Why don’t they? Will we find out?

Well this thing picked up and dropped off and then picked up again, so I'm going to give this a worthy because it turns out that I actually care about what happens when Adelice takes both Josten and Erik out of Arras (or out on their ass). So I won't post any more spoilers. Let's just say it gets frantic and interesting, and I still don't like this love traingale, but to give her her due, Albin definitely has no shame about how far she'll take it, does she?!

Love Rehab by Jo Piazza

Title: Love Rehab: a novel in twelve steps
Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Open Road
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Editing notes:
P 25 "So you listen to Dixie Chicks on repeat sober..." Needs a comma in there somewhere! It took me three reads to get it.
p104 There's some weird formatting by the Rule 7 text!

Love rehab is a very short novel (~140 pages) which took a bit of getting into. Frankly my initial feeling when I started reading this was that this was "chick-humor" which I wouldn’t appreciate (not that I'm a big fan of guy humor either. I prefer my humor gender-neutral!), or that it was a kind of feminine humor that you need two X chromosomes to really get/appreciate, or that I just would be plainly and simply bored with it (not bored of it, Richelle Mead!) and just wouldn't like it. There is a certain brand of feminine humor which I find genderist and obnoxious, but this novel doesn’t have that, and once I got the rhythm of it, it turned out to be funny and engaging.

I'm not sure about the immediate introduction of an instadore candidate, but to be fair, I am not sure either where that will go, so I won't complain about him yet; after all, this is Love Rehab, so there simply has to be a love interest somewhere along the way, I suppose!

So here's the story: Sophie, the female protagonist is going through a huge obsession-depression over the fact that Eric, her long-time boyfriend, dumped her for a younger, curvier "administrative assistant" (yeah, I'll bet!) at his office. Sophie's friend Annie, who is an alcoholic owner of a bar, shows up in her drive in a stolen police car, and is ordered to go through AA in order to avoid a worse sentence. Sophie goes with her and in a chat with the AA leader afterwards, realizes that she has an addiction to love and needs rehab. Since there's no such thing available to her, she undertakes to start one in her New Jersey (or is that Noo Joyzi?) home. She puts out word through her editor (she illustrates children's books), and a host of people show up to the Sunday meeting. They tell their stories, Annie and Sophie end up with a new house-mate named Prithi (no one can live there unless their name ends with an 'ee' sound!), and Love Rehab is launched!

One problem I did have with this was that while undergoing the oppressive struggle to get out from under the aftermath of a bad relationship, Sophie (the name means wisdom!) is talking about getting her eyebrows waxed. Excuse me, but isn't that part of the problem, that women have been conditioned to feel that their natural self is inadequate and in order to be acceptable to men they must turn themselves into the closest approximation to a Barbie doll that they can reasonably (even unreasonably) manage? When I read this I thought: I shall be seriously interested in where that goes as I continue with this!

So these meetings start snowballing with more people showing up, all of them as wacky as we've already met, with bizarre, sad, and humorous stories and as the word gets around it gets distorted. One woman called Katrina shows up asking if this is the right address for the 'Love Retreat'! She ends up moving in, sharing a room with Sophie! She's spoiled rotten rich and still having bad relationships, and she starts offering everyone aroma therapy (gag) and gods know what. I'm over 50% in and loving this tale so far. Not a lot seems ot be happenign in moving Sophie's sotry forwards, btu you get to wrapped up in the peripherals that it doesn't matter. But I guess that depends on how you define 'moving her story forwards'. She's so involved in the group that overall, she's doing fine and is really starting to overcome her addiction without really noticing. Maybe that's the point.

In many ways, this novel could have been written by Nora Ephron (were she still alive. I wouldn’t expect her to write it now!). One of the things I resent about this genre of story is that it's always about fabulously well-off yuppies who never seem to ever have to do an honest week's work, and who get morosely hung up about laughable trivialities. They have pretty much everything they want and they still can't find happiness! This novel was not quite that, but it had enough of that stigma inherent to turn me off it a bit - but not a lot. These characters were fun and interesting, and engaging, but I kept wondering why they never seemed to have to go to work, especially Sophie who can apparently take a straight three months off her job without her editor ever once getting on her case, and without her ever wanting for ready cash to splash around! And she thinks she has problems? It would be really nice to just once have a story like this, but about regular, working stiffs from a life which is a notch or two lower than the Ephron class battleship of thirty-something yuppie-dom.

So the predictable relationship with Joe the Alcoholics Anonymous counselor predictably happens. Although it happens in a better way than all-too-many of the young-adult novels I've been habituating of late, it still smacked of too much YA instadore. I found that to be really sad, because it betrays everything this novel purports to be about, and it is such an unrealistic event as to be a complete sham.

Yes, sometimes you do find the perfect partner on the rebound, but that's not the norm, it’s the extreme rarity. Most of the time when you've been hurt as badly as Sophie was, it wrecks your life and all hopes of a decent relationship in the foreseeable future, because your misery turns others off. There is (almost) never that perfect partner waiting for you just around the corner. In my experience no one even really cares that much because they've all been there too, and rather than being moved by and empathic towards your debilitating withdrawal, they're nauseated by it and don't want to know about it. Certainly, potential partners don't. In my experience, the only real honest and effective way to get through it is to go cold turkey and avoid other people until you get a grip. Of course if you have close friends and they're ready, willing, and able to put up with the ungodly mess that you are, then that's a good way to go, too!

The worst part of this novel was Sophie's love interest, which was telegraphed by someone with a sore thumb sticking out, and it was completely out of place for me. The ending, therefore, was so trite and demeaning as to be truly nauseating; it was an all-Nora-Ephron ending, which betrayed the growth which we're supposed to believe Sophie had undergone by rendering her into a helpless child who needed rescuing by a man, but that's all I have to say about that.

Even having said that, I can still recommend this novel because overall, it's a fun story about an important topic with which we all have some familiarity, some of us more than others. It does slip in the latter half as compared with the first half, and there is a bit of the way-too-predictable going on, but there is also a nice thread of sly humor and a host of interesting people and amazing behaviors to enjoy. So yeah, give it a read! It’s short and fun so what have you got to lose?

Shada by Douglas Adams

Title: Shada
Author: Douglas Adams and Gareth Roberts
Publisher: BBC Books
Rating: Worthy

I can't believe I'm reviewing a Doctor Who book! Doctor Who is very much a visual medium and it's very much influenced by the personalities of the guy playing the doctor and the people playing his companions, so I never read the books, but I decided to make an exception for this particular one since it's canonical (in an important sense!) and since it is Douglas Adams, after all! You can read my reviews of the Doctor Who TV shows here (reboot seasons 1 - 5) and here (reboot season 6 and onwards).

Shada is a novel taken from an untelevised (due to a strike and the ep only being some 50% completed) TV script written by Douglas Adams for the long-running Doctor Who TV series - which is in its fiftieth anniversary year this year. Adams is best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of novels in which I've never had the slightest interest, nor in the radio series, nor in the TV show, nor in the movie! I do like Adams, though and went to a lecture given by him on one occasion which was quite entertaining.

I've also read Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic written by Monty Python's Terry Jones based on an idea by Adams, and published in 1997. That was good. Even better was the non-fiction Last Chance to See written by Adams with Mark Carwardine, and published in 1990. This book focused on animals facing extinction and was a most enjoyable read.

Though this episode was untelevised because it was never completed, it was later put together as a show for the DVD release. This ep is shorter, because there is much missing, but it is narrated by an older Tom Baker, with his hair somewhat silvered, and minus the mass of curls it sported when he played The Doc. The image quality is somewhat lacking, too, just so you know.

Shada is evidently the Time Lord prison planet, although neither The Doc nor Romana recognize the name. This amnesia is explained admirably in the story, which concerns a villain by the name of Skagra, who escapes confinement by stealing the minds of his five fellow confinees and somehow makes it to Earth. He has discovered that there is a book secreted away in a professor's office in Cambridge university which is from the Time Lord home planet of Gallifrey and which contains ancient and secret knowledge of one of the founding fathers of Time Lord society: the great Rassillon himself. The professor, a Time Lord himself, also happens to have a TARDIS in his room!

As Skagra looks from a bridge over the River Cam (in Cambridge, of course!), who should be punting beneath it but the fourth doctor and his then companion, Romana. It's a clip from this sequence which is one of two clips from this episode which are used in the Five Doctors - an anniversary episode in which Baker, for reasons unknown, declined to appear. In that anniversary ep, The Doc and Romana are captured (as are the other doctors) but the capture goes wrong and the two are trapped in the time vortex (or something!), thereby explaining why they don't appear in the rest of the show until the very end.

It’s heartening for us amateur writers to note that even a professional of Adams's stature screws up! On page 20, The Doc is punting, thrusting his punt pole into the dirty water, and then in quite literally the next sentence, Romana is trailing her fingers in the clear water! Romana is played by The Honorable Lalla Ward, who was once married to Tom Baker (who plays the fourth doctor in this episode) but is now married to Richard Dawkins, who was introduced to her by Douglas Adams!

Romana is one of the only two companions the Doc has had who has also been a Time Lord. The first such companion was his own Granddaughter, Susan, who hung out with the first doctor back in the mid-sixties. Romana is known as Romana 2 because she is a Time Lord who had regenerated in the show and was being played a this point by a new actress to the part.

As The Doc and Romana pass under the bridge, they both hear faint voices, which are indistinct, but which sound like people suffering and calling out for help. On the bridge is a guy wearing a silver cape and carrying a carpetbag. He is Skagra, and those voices are coming from a sphere he carries with him which contains the knowledge and experiences of his five companions from Shada.

Both he and The Doc (with Romana) make their separate ways to professor Chronotis's room. The groundskeeper, who knows The Doc, lets him in, but refuses access to Skagra, who retreats back to his ship, capturing the mind, and stealing the car of a human on his way. Why he didn’t do this same thing to the groundskeeper is an unexplained plot hole! It’s heartening for us amateur writers to note that even a professional of Adams's stature screws up!

In Chronotis's office, The Doc and Romana learn of this dangerous book, but the professor cannot find it. It turns out that one of his students took it by accident when he was borrowing some books from the professor earlier that day. This same student, Chris, is also conducting experiments on the book because he as discovered it has some very weird properties indeed. He calls a girl of his acquaintance, Clare, someone with whom he would love to strike up an intimate relationship, to share his discoveries with her.

While Romana is in the TARDIS retrieving some milk for the endless cups of tea they drink, Skagra suddenly shows up at Chronotis's room and extracts his mind into the grey sphere. Now Chronotis is one of those many voices the sphere contains. Romana returns after Skragra has left, to discover that Chronotis is dying. As she applies a med-collar to try and preserve his life, Chris shows up. Chronotis is only able to give them a cryptic warning about Skagra, using his hearts-beat as a form of Morse code!

Romana discovers that The Doc is in trouble, and takes the TARDIS to rescue him. Meanwhile Skagra has encountered the Doc, who has the book, and given chase. The Doc loses him, but cannot lose the sphere. In his haste to escape, he loses the book, which Skagra recovers. He's saved from the sphere by Romana retrieving him in the TARDIS (this is the second clip used in The Five Doctors). They return to Christ to discover that Chronotis has dematerialized. The Doc then reveals that Chronotis must have been on the last of his twelve Time lord regenerations, and is now gone forever. But he's really not. And indeed, he's really not Chronotis either!

The three of them enter the TARDIS and give pursuit when they detect another event with the sphere, and they end up in a field outside Cambridge, where Skagra's spaceship is parked, but made invisible to outsiders. The three of them enter the ship, and are separated, Romana, Chris and the robot dog confined in one room from which they cannot escape, and The Doc with Skagra, who uses the sphere to extra The Doc's mind when he will not agree to help Skagra. Romana is sprung from her imprisonment by Skagra and he steals the TARDIS, using The Doc's mind to open and fly it. He takes her to an asteroid way out in space, where he has set up his base of operations. Part of his operation is creation the Kraag, sentient beings made from crystallized carbon, which do his every bidding. He orders the head Kraag to set production of Kraags into overdrive.

The Doc, whom Romana had thought dead, revives. He had fooled the sphere into thinking he was dumber than he is, and so only a distorted part of his mind was extracted. Now the ship's sentience thinks he is dead, and no therefore longer an enemy of Skagra, so according to its limited logic, he is not a threat. This gives The Doc some leeway to ask favors of the ship, including taking them to the last place which Skagra was at before he went to Earth.

The last place Skagra was at was, of course, the prison he was in. The Doc and Chris visit that while Chris's girlfriend discovers that Professor Chronotis isn't quite as dead as he seemed, and his room at Cambridge is actually an old TARDIS, which is in working order, even though he isn't supposed to have one. Meanwhile Romana tries and fails to dupe Skagra!

Finally I finished this. It seems like it took forever to get through it, but it's only been a week! Graham wraps up the novel nicely by bringing Skagra to book in a delightful way when all seems lost, and getting Chris and Clare together as you knew he would. Note that while the screenplay and notes for the Doctor Who story were written by Adams, it was Graham who turned it into a novel and I think he's done a fine job. He lets Adams shine through, and emulates the latter's wit and writing style admirably where he had to fill in the blanks. He explains exactly how it was done in an afterword. I recommend this novel to anyone who is a fan of Adams and/or of the Doctor Who TV series.

Gameboard of the Gods by Richelle Mead

Title: Gameboard of the Gods
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

First, some editing notes regarding the galley copy (hopefully these will be fixed before the final version is released):
p103 "Dag had starting calling her that" probably should read: "Dag had started calling her that"
p122: "one filled with all sorts of half completed projected." I'm guessing that last word should be 'projects'. I’d also add a hyphen between 'half' and 'completed', but that's just me!
P141 "Did what he say make sense?" when it should perhaps be "Did what he said make sense?"
P157 "...thought I worry..." when it should be "…though I worry..."
P184 "...but she'd been grilled in how to be pleasant and likable..." would make more sense as "...but she'd been drilled in how to be pleasant and likable..."
P185 "...cut and dry..." would make more sense as "...cut and dried…"
P198 "...spoke legions about them..."?! That just didn't sound right. Perhaps volumes instead of legions?
P224 "Don’t record anything around her without asking me." maybe should have been: "Don’t record anything around here without asking me."?
In Chapter 19: "...but she felt more securing knowing..." should perhaps be "...but she felt more secure in knowing..."?
P305 "How much have you drank tonight?" maybe should be "How much have you drunk tonight?"
P311 "...the rest of the acquaintance over the years." should be perhaps "...the rest of the acquaintanceship over the years."?
P352 "...he reminder her." should be "...he reminded her." I think.
P400 "...her skin literally burned..." I doubt it! Metaphorically, maybe, but not literally! Picky, ain't I?
P424 "Excitable was one to put it..." should be "Excitable was one way to put it..."
P425 "Gan left at his own joke.." should be "Gan laughed at his own joke..." (it's like Mead was dictating this!)
P447 "He hadn’t really thought she'd stay on, and from that cool look on her face, she probably wasn’t thrilled that it had." Change of person doesn’t make any sense to me.
P450 "But it was the same thing Lucian had told Mae when he'd look into servitor hiring" confusion of tense? It seems like it ought to be either "But it was the same thing Lucian had told Mae when he'd looked into servitor hiring", or better, "But it was the same thing Lucian had told Mae when he looked into servitor hiring"
I notice in the ebook version, the chapters have odd case: "ChaPter instead of "Chapter"
and one more: I don't think this is an error per se, but "ArianrHood big on that kind of thing" sounds really weird!

To the review! I just started getting into this one in spare minutes here and there, and it was really hard to go with it for the first chapter, with its rather pretentious faux Roman nonsense with the misnamed Praetorian Guard which is the elite military force in the RUNA (Republic of United North America) nation. I was offered no valid reason why the nation had developed like that. It also didn't help to read constructions like this: "...would get bored of him..." or the weird contractions Mead might've used a bit too frequently and should've used less often IMO...! However, after the first few pages, I began to appreciate the story more, and started to get into it enough that these distractions didn't throw my stride.

It wasn't long before I was immersed in the fiction rather than in the writing of it! I have now finished it and wholeheartedly recommend it. This was the kind of book I've been sorely missing lately and it made me want to track down other Richelle Mead novels and read them. Unfortunately they seem to be of the young-adult paranormal romance variety and they didn't exactly trip my trigger, so I'll have to wait for the sequel to this one!

This novel however was in general well-written, had interesting multi-dimensional characters and a good plot. I loved that it was based in an atheist society and had no problem when the supernatural started invading because I was expecting it and it was done really professionally. The two main characters, Mae and Justin were believable, flawed, multi-faceted and endearing. I loved the awkward way they were forced into prowling around each other not because of some inexplicable whim of the author's but because they were written skilfully into this situation by the circumstances and by the plot. Mae in particular was one of the most kick-ass female protagonists I've encountered, especially of late and she was so welcome! If she continues to grow on me in sequels as she did in this novel, I'll have to put her up there with the all-time greats such as Molly Millions in William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Kitai in the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher, which are the benchmark for me.

Mae is one of the best of the praetorian guard, but after a fight at the funeral of one of her fellow soldiers (for whose death, some held her to blame), she's re-assigned to the lowly task of delivery girl, taking a message to some guy in Panama City. That someone is Justin, a drunken lech who preys on women with enchanting stories of his exotic, hi-tech homeland even as he's suffering silently from his forced exile from it (he was expelled for reasons which are revealed later and which smoothly tie into the story).

Justin finds himself in an alley behind a bar, and Mae coincidentally steps in to fight off six assailants who are there to exact revenge on Justin for what he did to someone's sister. Mae doesn't realize that he's the one she's supposed to be delivering the message to, especially since he lies to her about his name. Annoyingly, Mead stops the action right there to rewind the video and show it again to us from Mae's perspective. This was not appreciated; it was like a commercial popping up unexpectedly in place of the climax to a movie scene! Fortunately for my sanity, she doesn't do this often.

But in this case, instead of the action scene I was salivating over, I was dragged kicking and screaming to what appeared to be a bizarre combination of a reminiscence mashed-up with a flashback or a change of scene, from which we're led slowly back to the fight. I skipped that portion entirely out of distaste and I have never missed it! Now back to our regular programming: finally we get to the fight, wherein Mae predictably kicks ass x6, and then Justin and Mae spend the night together! No trope-ish YA nonsense here, whereby the two main characters hate each other and then fall in love, thank Mead; in this novel they fall in bed and then they hate each other! The love scene was a cliché, unfortunately, but I'll let that slide because it turns out to be part of the over-arching story.

Next we're at a meeting where we discover the reason for Justin's imminent resurrection and the reason for Mae having to deliver him that letter: there has been a series of murders of patricians (yep, you heard me right), all without clues, except for the last one - where a hidden camera recorded what appeared to be a column of smoke which resolved into a human being long enough for a silver dagger to be thrust into the victim's heart, then the figure was gone!

Justin needs to discover who the assailant is before the next full moon when the next ritual murder is likely to be committed, and Mae, who has spent the entire meeting giving him dirty looks and hard glances, is to be his bodyguard! She resents his lie and resents this assignment. Justin agrees to return to Vancouver and take up this new job offer under certain conditions, one of which is to bring his sister to Vancouver from Alaska and the other is to take a Panamanian there as well: Tessa, a young prodigy from a family to which Justin owes his life.

I disagree with the repression of religion to the extent it's shown in this novel, but I love the fact that a writer has the guts to tell a story like this. As I said, the first few pages were a trial, and the love scene was trite, but other than that I like this novel. I was surprised to find out that Mae was Scandinavian. I'd somehow got the impression that she was of Chinese extraction, which I found refreshing, but in absence of that, I'm willing to take a story that starts out in Vancouver instead of in an almost inevitable US city! The obsession with Greek and Roman culture is a bit tiresome and it's odd, given that there are a lot of elements of Chinese and Russian communism in this world combined, rather paradoxically, with Nazi Arianism! That latter observation plays a part in the bigger story, however.

I guess I should mention that Justin hears voices in his head. There are two of them: Horatio and Magnus. Horatio is the talkative one. I had no idea for the longest time, what that was all about, but it is explained and done well. There is definitely a connection between Justin and Mae: they each harbor something beneath their physical exterior, and Mae is in denial about hers!

Mead uses Tessa in the role of the old saw of putting an outsider into the tale as a proxy for the reader. It gets a bit tedious as they pass through the airport to RUNA, but it doesn't get any worse than that, and I liked the Tessa character. Unlike Marissa Meyer in Cinder, at least Mead knows the difference between koi and coy! Lol!

Tessa is obsessing on how people look and how you tell the difference between the Romanesque patrician element and the plebeians in the populace. Why would the US suddenly go Roman? Yes, they obsessed on it when the US was put together, creating the senate and imbuing buildings with an air of faux Greco-Roman architecture, but they grew out of it. What would make them regress? This isn't explained, and it isn't just a regression, it's an obsession. We learn that all RUNA citizens (there's another word!) are supposed to have a name of Greek or Latin origin! How absurd is that? And this is supposed to be a free and much-admired nation. That seemed weird to me, and I imagine the native Americans would have something to say about that, but in what's rather a slur on them, their position isn't even touched on! The complete contradiction to this is that RUNA makes land grants to ethnic groups. This is rather a stark betrayal of the stated aim of homogenizing the populace! So this society is far from ideal.

To get through immigration control, Mae puts her hand on the glass and is read in as a citizen. That's it? This protected republic (why is it even a republic?!) lets anyone in based on hand-print alone?! Given how paranoid they seem to be, that seemed less than rational! Mae has to declare her guns which she's authorized to carry. She also declares the knife in her boot, claiming that no one expects the knife. Ri-ight - just like no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

As they exit the airport they look up at the RUNA flag which is halved in purple and maroon (really?!), and which sports a golden circlet of laurel leaves (barf!) and the Latin motto Gemma Mundi which means "I get mine on Mondays". Seriously, it means "the jewel of the world", and it’s this motto from which they get the name Gemmans. I don't know if Mead did this on purpose, but that name sounds suspiciously like 'Germans' - as in Nazi Germany! I've never understood the juvenile pretension of employing Latin mottoes, but perhaps Mead is using this to tell us something about the stability, psychology, or strength of the Republic?

Tessa has to be 'chipped' in order not to trigger alarms everywhere she goes (that's the paranoid bit!). She gets a chip embedded in the little web between thumb and forefinger of her left hand. As this is going on, we learn that there was a Mephistopheles virus (seriously? Where did that name come from?! Mead actually does explain it: Mephistopheles is a manufactured virus.) which killed half the world's population during a period known as 'The Decline'. Some of the survivors had a syndrome with gave them asthma, infertility, and bad hair! I'm not sure Mead is where she needs to be on genetics, but very few of us are, and she's vague enough that she does okay, so I'm not going to get into it on this occasion!

Justin takes this opportunity to try and resolve things with Mae over their night together, and she promptly informs him that it was a one off and it will never happen again. The problem from Justin's PoV is that there is more to their one night stand than ever Mae could guess at. He had seen a halo of some sort around her head, which has a specific meaning to him: it tells him that this woman is very special, someone he's been expecting to meet. It should trigger a binding agreement he has made, but he rationalized his way out of accepting that she was the one, and thereby didn't trigger the binding (I don't know how that works!), but he hasn’t convinced himself. Exactly what the agreement is, we aren’t told immediately.

Mae takes them to Justin's sister's new home. Since this arrangement was made only the night before, it's truly really hard to swallow that they could have recovered her from Alaska and ensconced her in such a decent home in less than 24 hours. His sister has mixed feelings about seeing him again, and Mae beats a hasty retreat, leaving them to it, joining her praetorian buddies Val and Dag at a bar. There were learn that the praetorians can’t get drunk because of an implant, but they can 'slam the implant' and get a brief buzz if they drink multiple drinks very quickly, I guess Mead hasn't heard of higher proof drinks! Surprisingly, Mae blabs all about her secret mission. Even more surprisingly, we learn that even in this perfect, ideal, Greco-Roman society, the elite praetorians have to guard monuments. Now why is that?!

But on with the story. After a few drinks with her pals, Mae heads home and is confronted with a Finnish cosa nostra guy (Finnish mafia?! Shouldn't that be Meidän asia?!) who shows her a pic and gives her a hair sample. This is a pet project of Mae's, where she is trying to track down her niece (we learn the fascinating story later), for now we learn that price of discovering where this child can be found is a small favor, something which Mae is disinclined to do - and even more so when she later learns what this favor is!

Justin, along with Mae and Tessa takes the video of the 'smoke assassin' to a friend in Portland and leaves it with him - this is an 'only copy' original, and he leaves it unattended with someone outside the organization! That seemed to me to be plain foolishness. When a writer writes something like this, it's hard to tell if they intended it to be that way, or if they simply didn't think about what they were writing. Since I don't know Mead - that is, I haven't read anything of hers prior to this - I can't comment on it other than to than to highlight it for future consideration.

And I think that's enough deep detail for this novel, otherwise I'll be telling you the entire story and robbing Mead of the opportunity to tell it her way, which I won't do. I think I already spilled a bit more than I intended, but this story grabbed me and I loved it. It would be unnatural if I didn't want to spread the joy! I can't tell you how satisfying it was, after having been read some of the stories I've fallen into of late only to find them disappointing or so-so. This one was definitely a cut above far too many of the others and kept me coming back for more. Now I'm actually annoyed that it's over! But it's up to you to decide whether you find Mead a worth read, and I hope this helps especially since you know, if you've been following me, that I'm far from a push-over reviewer and definitely not a rubber stamp.

Don't think I had no issues with this story! It would be a rarity indeed if I didn't, but they were small enough or unobtrusive enough that they typically didn't toss me back out into reality, and after a while I became so fond of the story that I was willing to let some things go by that I might have hung up on had I liked the story less than I did.

"And the loose Greco-Roman models the country had adopted had provided a new, all-encompassing culture that everyone could be a part of." That was one which didn't ring true! A culture that favors Greece and Rome over anyone's actual culture, including native American, and one that forces its citizens to choose a name that in the majority of cases has nothing whatsoever to do with their own culture? Why would anyone come up with a system like that? That bit took the sweet SoD (suspension of disbelief) right out from under me and dropped me harshly on rough concrete. And it was glaringly apparent when Tessa started school and was subject to a level of condescension that amounted to bullying. This was an integral part of the story, so it made me annoyed, but not with the author!

I loved the Poppy character, especially in that the name contrasted with the kind of person she was, but I have to say that I found it out of place, given what we've been told about those cultural pressures imposed by the state, that Tessa's best friend in school is someone named Poppy, which isn’t a Greco-Roman name at all. How did she get to be called that? Maybe we'll find out. There's a slight oddity in the relationship between the two, revealed in this sentence: "Usually, Tessa conceded to her friend's advice..." - I'm wondering if that wouldn't sound better as "Usually, Tessa acceded to her friend's advice...", but that doesn't bother me as much as the real question here: given the extremely limited time the two of them have known each other at that point, does such a sentence make any sense at all?!

Mae drops into a detailed reminiscence about her intimate relationship with Porfirio (seriously?!). He's the fellow praetorian and sometime lover who was apparently killed due to her mistake. Again I skipped this completely and entirely and didn't miss it. I could feel a mix of nausea and boredom growing as soon as I saw that flashback coming on! This is the kind of tale where I'm really not interested in any back-story: I just want to get on with the present story! However, there is a bit that's more acceptable later, where Mae's friends Dag and Val explain to Justin just what happened, and this explains a lot of things which had been bothering me. This tête-à-tête is brought about through an interesting escapade of Tessa's!

But enough! I could ramble all day about this if you were foolish enough to let me! In short I loved it and look forward to Richelle Mead's next excursion into this territory. I hope it won't be too long.

Shadow Embraced by Cheree Smith

Title: Shadow Embraced
Author: Cheree Smith
Publisher: Dark World Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley.

I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

It feels a bit weird to be reading two novels side-by-side, one with a character called Cinder, the other with a character called Scarlett! Scarlett is evidently a vampire but of course she doesn’t know it. She liked to hang with her friend Alex who was always bringing trouble on her, and Scarlett was too stupid to figure this out. She goes to a fight club where she encounters a weird woman. There's a police raid, but fortunately her dad is a cop so she gets away unscathed, but falls once more afoul of her parents.

She lives in a red brick townhouse which turns into apartment. Maybe her adoptive mom is a witch?! Scarlett has a bad dream, and wakes up to discover that she was sleep-walking again. This time, she wrote 'no escape' on all the posters in her room. Her mom bans her from hanging with Alex so the first thing this idiot does is hang with Alex. I already don’t like the fem protag at all. Worse than just hanging together, they ditch school under the juvenile delusion that Scarlett's parents won't find out, and the first thing that happens at the arcade is that they run into a guy with hair falling into his eyes. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I'm only ten pages in and I want to call in sick. Instant male trope. Just add vomit and shake. Fortunately we don't have to deal with him any more. Unfortunately, there are more waiting in the wings.

Smith needs a good editor. She has problems discerning 'its' from 'it's', and there are some really awkwardly constructed sentences, such as "One sound takes precedent over everything else"? Precedent? I think she means precedence. Either that or "One sound is precedent over everything else." Scarlett has heightened senses. It’s weird I should be reading this in parallel with Under the Never Sky where there are heightened sense traits, too. But Scarlett has bigger problems. After she beats the male trope at an arcade game, she starts in on one of her 'spells', and not of the witchy kind: dizziness, odd feelings, blurred vision. Next she launches herself at Alex and bites her neck! Suddenly, the woman from the fight club is there trying to help her recover, and she feels a needle and passes out. How that woman got Scarlett away from her assault on Alex by shooting her up with a drug in public is not dealt with.

When Scarlett recovers consciousness, she's in a cabin out in the woods in the middle of nowhere. Another woman is there - a doctor or a nurse - and she takes a blood sample and talks like there's something wrong, something unusual, something way out of the ordinary. I hope so, otherwise why write this novel?! Hopefully there'll be some information coming soon about what's going on here, but of course its doled out like it’s the last information on Earth and if we don’t make it last as long as we can, it will be all gone and then what on Earth shall we all do?

When the woman takes a phone call, Scarlett bolts out the door and starts running through the woods. She encounters something there which is somewhere between a man and a wolf, but it has quills (not hairs) on its pelt, so who knows what it is? If I’d known this was a werewolf story I definitely wouldn’t have selected it! Fortunately it’s not only werewolf. Full disclosure: I find werewolf stories to be the most laughable of all paranormal tales, coming even lower down than vampires and fairies. However, I will try to get through this one.

Scarlett runs until she comes across a decaying town. Somehow the wolf thing doesn’t get her but she's apparently too dumb to grasp that it actually isn't trying to "get" her. A woman's voice says, "Welcome to Haven" and she passes out again only to find herself awakening in the cabin once more. This is becoming a bit tedious. Now there are two women, the nurse-doc and kidnap woman bitching about what’s going on with Scarlett and still telling her nothing. I have to wonder about Scarlett's IQ. Right after one of women tells the other that "He wants her alive", obviously referring to Scarlett, Scarlett is telling herself "I'm going to die"! She definitely seems to be a were short of a wolf - or maybe a vamp short of a pyre. She feels like she's burning up so she staggers to the nearby bathtub and falls in. She keeps hearing a voice chanting 'No escape', and she passes out again. Seriously?

By the end of chapter four the only thing we’ve learned is that Scarlett is an adoptee, and her real father was a vampire. I'm guessing that her real mother was a werewolf or a non-paranormal. She's carted off to reform school for paranormals where she gets the usual trope of either a really cool roommate or a really obnoxious one. This time it’s the obnoxious option. Apparently there's no in between in YA world. She wanders the grounds and meets a male protagonist immediately. He's a skateboarder with hair in his eyes. Excuse me, I have to run and vomit. Oookay, that's better. Paul shows her around the place, but she's not yet done with trope YA hottie guys. Next she meets Daemon (no, I am not kidding, that's his name!) and it’s instadore (rising orchestral music)! Excuse me, I have to vomit again. Oookay, that's better.

Next she's subject to appalling cruelty and bullying from her teacher, named Talon. No, I'm not kidding. Seriously? Do I have to endure 234 pages of this? She gets into a fight with a girl called Jynx, and her punishment for this (apparently she's to blame even though Jynx started it) is to get into a fight with one of the school's council members, named Rome(!), where she gets her ass kicked. Then she passes out again. I've read to some bad YA, but never one where the fem protag is so given to attacks of the wilts and the vapors. Swoon me to the max!

Despite the full schedule Scarlett tells us she has (this is first person present narration), she seems to be able to find all the time in the world to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. On this occasion it's to follow Daemon through underground tunnels to the decayed village where he's supposed to train her to be so good that she’ll take the cruel wind out of Talon's abusive sails. Apparently her first lesson was to follow him through the dark tunnels, at which she succeeded. Her next lesson is to be able to focus and avoid her enemies. What enemies? Daemon doesn’t explain who they might be or why they would have any. I guess she's supposed to take that on faith. But it gives them a chance to get physically close to one another. We learn of a rumor that the village is haunted by a vampire intent upon exacting revenge for the fact that vampires "cleansed" the village for no other reason than that they could then use it as a training ground. Scarlett isn’t even remotely phased by this disturbing admission of wanton mass murder of men, women, and children for no reason other than vampire convenience. Now I know I detest her.

Next she finds that someone has been into her room and left her a message on the computer - a computer which is showing in-circuit TV of live fights down in the tunnels beneath the school. The message warns her that people are out to get her. So what's new?! This had the potential to be a really good story, and maybe it is for someone at the lower end of the YA age range, but this level of writing isn't for me. I feel bad about that because both the cover and the blurb made me want to read it, and even now I would like the like it, but it's becoming ever harder to do so. I was hoping, based on the cover and blurb, for a good YA vampire story, if there be such a beast, but that's not happened. What I neither expected, nor wanted was a YA fight-club novel. And yes, I know it mentioned this in the blurb on Netgalley, but I didn't expect it to be nothing but brutal fight after brutal fight! There's nothing remotely remotely entertaining to me about that.

If there had been anything else going on, that would have made a bit of a difference, but all this novel is, is one bloody fight after another. That's neither entertaining nor even interesting to me, not at all, and after yet another pointless assault on Scarlett in chapter twelve, I decided I could not stand to read any more of this story.

Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

Title: Under the Never Sky
Author: Veronica Rossi
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WARTY! (to the max)
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This novel is part of the inevitable trilogy, of which two are already published, the sequel being Through the Ever Night. Whether I'll read that remains to be seen, but it's not looking great at the moment!

I can see myself wading through this novel if it doesn't sink hopelessly into Le Stupide, but it's laden with YA trope. Forget the book's cover, which features the sturdy, confident young girl striding purposefully through the wilds. That's pure, unadulterated blast-ended skrewt! And what's with that chic outfit she's wearing? It portrays nothing which even remotely resembles anything Aria wears in the novel. This is why you need to design your own cover!

Aria, (yeah, you heard me) is a weakling, living in pampered splendor, safe under a dome, enjoying virtual worlds up the wazoo, completely useless, helpless, and completely hopeless if she were ever to be stranded on the outside. Which of course she is, and let's not forget, unjustly so! So we have 'how wronged thou art' already in play. The inevitable rough-edged, wild guy (with the rather farcical name of Peregrine - Gale and Peeta, anyone?) is the tough, strong, wise, and masterful hero, who is street savvy (or in this case badlands savvy) and will sweep her off her feet. Barf.

Peeta - sorry, Perry - is on the outs with his clan because they're all macho types, and his own brother will likely kill him because, of course, there can be only one Blood Lord! Yes, you heard that right! It's always a Lord innit? never a Duke or a Baron. Plus, he loses his brother's young son (who's dying anyway) so he's doubtlessly going to be wandering the wilds trying to find the kid and he'll inevitably run into her rear, er Aria, and the two will be forced to team up because she can't survive alone in the badlands being a poor weak fair game, er sex, an' all, and he desperately needs her, because the kidnapped kid will undoubtedly be taken to the city where Aria will have to help him break in an get him back. (Note, all of that came true! Maybe my prognostication power is on the up and up after being exposed to all this urethra...er aether?)

So I guess I need to say a word about why Aria got tossed out on her, ah rear. She's the standard YA trope no parents cliché. Her father isn't even mentioned (not that I recall, but I may have blanked it out), and her mom is AWOL. Aria has the idea that one of the guys she knows in Le Dome might have some inside info on her mother's whereabouts or status, which is why she joins him on his illegal stunt which gets out of control, and for which she turns out to be the fall gal.

The dome is nothing but a huge rip-off of Logan's Run where people spend their whole time in Les Realms indulging themselves hedonistically. The Realms is just a whole bunch of virtual environments. Rossi doesn't explain how it is that these people avoid bedsores when spending all their live-long day on their asses immersed in playing what really amounts to extravagant video games with some sensory enhancements (which are totally unexplained). Nor do we learn who or what it is which powers and maintains all these free services; maybe it's magical pixies?

In order to play these games, and indeed to participate in this society, each person has an electronic monacle slapped on their face. Aria's stops working when she's outside, and once Perry tracks her down using his enhanced sense of smell, he decides that he needs to take her over the mountains and far away in order to get the monacle fixed by some buddy of his so that Aria can use it to contact her mother, so that her mother can clue them in on the latest updates regarding Talon, so that Perry can claw him out of the clutches of the Turkeys who kidnapped him. There's been no word whatsoever on why they kidnapped a seven-year-old terminally ill kid. It makes no sense whatsoever, but I'm betting Talon comes out of there cured (I got that one right, too!). Maybe they took him to lure the local outsiders into a trap, but if that's the case, then they wasted their time because Talon's dad has now abandoned his son! Only Perry-A (Peregrine and Aria) are concerned about retrieving him.

So after he saves she from an aether storm, Perry-A become an item and start their road trip together where they inevitably bond and instadore abounds. Yeah, about those aether storms! There's no word on where they came from or how they began, but they appear to be some sort of violent electromagnetic energy discharge coming down from what appears to be aurora-like activity in the atmosphere. They're a bit like lightning mated with a tornado, laying waste to swathes of land and burning people quite literally to a crisp.

Aria proves to be the most whiny-assed woman in the entire universe, but eventually she starts to suck it up. Given what Rossi does to her feet, her whining is entirely understandable, but the really weird thing is that she whines about literally everything but her feet, which is utterly unbelievable. Rossi basically has Aria's feet shredded, pierced and blistered, raw and bleeding like a little female Messiah hiking to Calvary all in the space of a few days, yet at no point do they ever hurt so badly that Aria can’t walk, which I found to be equally unbelievable. Clearly Rossi has never walked very far in difficult conditions, and if she thinks wearing high heels to the office for a day counts, then she's delusional.

Some reviews I've read make a big deal out of Aria's disobedience of Perry when he tells her to stay in the cave and she wanders off to pick berries (which - and here's the only place where this novel is like The Hunger Games - turn out to be poisonous!) But that's not the issue; the issue is that while she's out, three members of the Croven tribe come calling. They're ensconced in the cave when she returns. So here is the challenge to all those who've criticized Aria's conduct in this one scene: how, exactly would matters have been improved - or even changed - had Aria remained inside the cave? The answer is: no way no how! The truly absurd behavior here isn't Aria's but Perry's inanely macho showmanship.

The Croven take Aria captive so subtley that she doesn't realize what they're doing. She thinks they're friendly. Perry arrives and promptly dispatches all three of them. He explains this away by telling Aria that they're cannibals and they were going to eat her, but he never for a second tried to negotiate with them - for example, telling them that she's under his tribe's protection, and that if they harm her there will be war. He simply puts arrows into two of them and he decapitates a third - with a knife, shades of Middle East terrorism.

This may not seem important, but it turns out to be so because as soon as he's done that, he's in a near panic: now the rest of the Croven people will come down on him like a ton of bricks for killing their people (or so he whines). If that's so, then why didn't he try to negotiate? His actions made no sense as precipitous as they were except for Rossi's need to portray him as a brutal savage, which she will then have to undo to make him acceptable to Aria! Lol!

So now despite Aria's poor feet, they have to pick up the pace, and they detect the Croven following them in numbers, yet there is no explanation whatsoever for how that tribe got onto them so rapidly. Equally lacking and much more glaring is any explanation as to why this tribe of cannibals is operating so very far from any source of food! Shouldn't they be near a village instead of out in the wilds, miles from anyone?

Perry whines pretty near as much as Aria does. His latest spaz is about the pine forest spoiling his ability to scent-track their pursuers, although there's no explanation offered as to why pine forests do this, but no other smell has the same overwhelming effect on him, so the reader can only conclude that this was made up on the spot to add more drama to this Simpson-style low-speed pursuit through the pine forest, up hill and down dale.

Perry-A run into an old friend of Perry's called Roar (yep) who is as good at hearing as Perry is at smelling. He joins them and through him, Aria learns of Perry's ability to detect emotions through smelling. Yeah, right. The weird thing is that Aria totally freaks out about this. Shoot two guys with arrows, decapitate a third without even an overture, and she’ll bitch about it, but it’s really no big deal. Smell her feelings OTOH, and she goes completely ballistic about it. Really? That took me right out of suspension of disbelief.

They also find a 13-year-old kid tagging along, called Cinder (for good reason!) who is described as almost skeletal, yet when he gets sick and has to be carried as they escape the Croven, he's described as weighing a hundred pounds?! Honestly? Does Rossi not understand the relative weight of things? A five foot tall 13 year old would be at a healthy weight at 100 pounds. Rossi doesn’t describe how tall Cinder is, but he doesn't appear to be very imposing from the narrative, and his growth is likely to have been stunted from his life-style, so her estimate of a hundred pounds is way, way out IMO. Cinder is an orphan, and my guess is that he crisped his parents accidentally.

Anyway, after a confrontation with Perry, Cinder somehow manages to channel the aether and zap Perry's hand, turning it black and blistered! Nonetheless, they take him along with them as they flee the Croven, since his discharge appears to have left him very weak. They finally make it to the city where they've been headed all this time. It’s absurdly high tech, with a hospital facility, which of course treats Perry-A, bringing about a miraculous recovery in both cases, no doubt. But what's with the qualified medical professional handing the care of Perry's badly burned hand to Aria? That was nothing but juvenile romance pap. Rossi needs to go work a few volunteer shifts in a real hospital burn unit.

Cinder goes on the lam, heading out of the city despite the fact that the Croven have started staking it out and firing random arrows over the wall. And with these potentially deadly arrows coming in, what do the bubbly and vivacious Perry-A do? The go up on top of the 70 foot tower and sit right on the edge dangling their legs over, and making prime targets of themselves for Croven arrows! Morons. And what are the Croven eating during this time? What are they drinking? Perry and Roar combined were having a tough time finding food for just four of them. There are some sixty Croven out there. Are they fasting?! Are they eating each other? If they are, then what's the problem? Just hang out a while longer and most of them will have been eaten! lol! Other than offering a poor excuse for a pseudo-threat, I see no reason for this fake threat of the Croven.

Finally they get Aria's monacle up and running (what was with the countdown timer on that? Seriously?! How was it even possible to know to the exact second when they would break the protection? lol!). There had been two video files downloaded onto her monacle. One of these was the video she had taken during the incident which resulted in her being thrown out of the thunder dome. This is the proof she's been seeking in order to show that it was Soren, not her, who was ultimately responsible.

The other video was the one from her mom which she had really been wanting to see, and which essentially told her very little except that all the spoiled-brat-living in Le Realms had resulted in atrophy of the indwellers' limbic system because they weren't 'really experiencing it' out in the wild. Seriously? Rossi really lost it with this one. The fact is, even within Rossi's own framework, that these people were being subject to The Realms which were physically safe, but which still excited the limbic system with spills and thrills. So where did the atrophy come from? Nowhere!

It's nonsense; nothing more, apparently, than a misguided attempt to try and sell us on the ill-considered presumption that living in the wild is better for us than having decent food, quality medicine, and access to endless information and entertainment. Yeah. Right! Someone has evidently forgotten that stress is a killer. So now I'm curious as to why Rossi is selling this novel as an ebook! Isn’t that rather hypocritical? Shouldn't she ought to be writing out each copy by hand on animal skins and hawking them from a stall at the local street market?

Apparently the Dwellers were testing out their theories about this bullshit limbic collapse on people taken from the wild, so now we understand why Talon was abducted. Perry exhibits the most childish reaction to this with a fine performance art tantrum, for which the judges gave him a 9.5, and Aria learns that she is half wild (but we’re not told which area of Aria is wild and which is tame)! Her absentee father was one of the outdwellers, not an indweller like her mother. Wouldn’t it be a riot if Aria turned out to be Perry's step-sister? lol! But her absentee mother, after telling her all this distressing news, including the fact that the indwellers in her dome (Bliss) have lost it and turned overnight into psycho zombies, suddenly clams up and tells Aria no more! Deliberately keeping her child in the dark, she explains away this insane deprivation by claiming, "What I haven't shared is for your own protection, and it's always better, isn’t it, when you discover answers on your own."? I was expecting a Muah-ha-ha after that, rather like the laughter in the Austin Powers movies, but I didn’t see one.

So Veronica Rossi, are you kidding me? What does Lumina (Aria's atrociously misnamed mother, who illuminates nothing!) even mean? She's not telling her daughter what she needs to know for her own protection but she wants her to find out for herself so she'll be what - unprotected then?! So she'll be smarter when she dies horribly because she learns what she desperately needs to know too late?! I can’t get my mind around that one at all. What kind of deranged, abusive parent would keep their children blind, potentially risking their health or even their life? Rossi has two sons of her own and should know better; unless, of course, she wants us to understand that Aria's mother is a no-good, absentee, uncaring parent (don't worry, Lumina gets hers). After all, Aria's mother did abandon Aria to go to a different dome when there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for her not to take her daughter with her. Why did she even go in the first place? Could she not have learned the very same things in Aria's homedome of Reverie that she has learned in Bliss? None of this makes any sense except as a poor excuse for plotting.

Another weird thing here is that since Aria can't get into Revererie via the monacle, Perry has to wear it, and he's such a cry-baby about it. But here is the problem: Perry can't get in either, we're told, all he can do is access The Realms. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean! Does it mean any old stranger can access the Dome realms?! Does it mean that all of these environments are stored somehow in the monacle and he can play in those? If that's the case, then how does he get into the part where he meets Talon? He's able to contact Talon and talk and interact with him. How is he doing that if he has no access to Reverie? All of this is glossed over. But Perry learns that not only is Talon there, Clara and his own brother are also there. They've been captured! He also learns that Talon is doing so well that he doesn't even want to leave Reverie! lol! But that's not going to stop the heroic Perry from dragging him, kicking and screaming, out of there to his certain death on the outside. What a man! What a paragon of puerile practicality.

I'm having a hard time liking this novel (did oyu guess?). I'm having a hard time even in making sense of it at times. But onwards and upwards (or as the RAF says, per ardua ad astra, which means that commercials made by asses are really hard to stomach). So Aria decides she needs to learn how to defend herself, and Perry, who has quite literally just declared to himself that he will stay away from her, immediately jumps at the chance to engage in the tired trope of being in intimate contact while showing her how to handle this rather virile bow and its phallic arrows. I wonder if Rossi watched Avatar before writing this scene?

The sad thing is that after all this, after pushing Aria forward as a strong heroic figure, Rossi is slowly reduced to teenage T&A. Perry declares (but not in so many words) that our heroine is just a weak woman and can’t handle a manly bow such as Perry's, so Roar gets to teach her to knife-fight instead. Right, 'cos a small, relatively light indweller woman will have far greater success in a close-quarters knife fight with a strong, wiry, outdweller guy than she would shooting him with a bow before he can even get close to her, and there is no way in hell that Perry, surrounded by a forest, could ever make a suitable bow for her.

So as heir to the captured Bluhd Lawd, Perry's duty is clear: he ought to get back to his village ASAP and take charge, but in this he fails comprehensively. Instead, this irresponsible jerk resolves to stay with Aria and go joy-riding off to Bliss. So while they're waiting for a convenient aether storm to show up, so they can slip away in the dark, unseen by the Croven, they play at knife-fighting, and Aria gets her groove on with Perry.

The night they finally decide to leave is a complete and utter disaster. They incur multiple casualties and make no plans whatsoever to return immediately to the village to regroup and recuperate. They're confronted by huge numbers of Croven, and at the last minute, they're predictably saved by Cinder dispatching all of the Croven with his super-duper lightning storm, leaving Perry and Aria to continue their inane quest alone. As soon as they get on the road again - master hunter Perry completely neglecting to restock on arrows - they're forced to take to the trees, scurrying into a conveniently waiting tree-house to hide from those vicious brute beasts! Rossi has the wolves barking, even, but at least they don't have quills! Yes, Cheree Smith, I'm looking at you! Oh, wolves can bark, but it's very rare, especially when they're running down prey. So how do Perry-A get out of this one? Well, (and I am not making this up) Aria effectively sings to the wolves and they leave! lolol! I kid you not. Talk about deus ex machina, although this is more like clueless ex crement.

So after telling Aria that trees are smart enough to know when the weather is going to change, and showing her his, she shows him hers, and suddenly...it's the next morning, and they're off again on their Bliss-ful quest. Fortunately Aria didn't smell fertile, so she won't become preggers. I'll bet that's what every boy tells his girlfriend in Perry-A world...! Aria learns that it's "...the loveliest thing to be kissed for no reason, even while chewing food." and soon, they're regurgitating food to feed each other (actually I made that very last bit up, but ew!). Later, Aria slaughters a badger - while it's still underground! And here I thought they didn't need no stinking badgers!

Yep, Aria is evolving into supergirl, and all it took was her getting laid. I'm on a strict regimen of IV Compazine now, to enable me to get through these last few pages. Despite it being a six-day hike to Bliss, they get there in no time at all, no doubt borne magically on the carpet of lurv they've woven together. Bliss sneaks in there and finds her dead mother and is promptly cpatured by the Dwellers, and confonted by Soren;s dad, who conveiently happenes ot be at Bliss. he offers her a deal - find out how if there really is an aether-free place on the planet, or kiss Talon goodbye. Of course, Aria accepts this offer iwht alacrity, and toddles off into volume two.

Never in the field of human fiction has so much sucked so much with so few breaks. This novel stunk. It ought to be refiled Under the Never Stomach It. And that's it.

Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor

Title: Days of Blood & Starlight
Author: Laini Taylor
Publisher: Little Brown & Co
Rating: worthy

Days of Blood & Starlight starts out with Zuzana resentfully dropping a balloon filled with perfume and sodium bicarbonate onto the puffed-up head of Kaz, who is milking every ounce he can from Karou's fame. He was lucky. Zuze had wanted it to be urine, but Mik wouldn’t cooperate.

Sadly, we don’t remain with Zuze, which is a mistake on Taylor's part, because she's the best thing going for this novel so far. Instead, we move to the whiny-assed Akiva, agonizing boringly over how much he's lost, and here the novel is nothing but depressing. For some unexplained reason, he believes that Karou is dead (as does Zuzana, for that matter, but at least she doesn’t squeal like a stick piglet like Akiva does).

He returns to heaven (aka Eretz, as in Eretz Israel) which is exactly like medieval Earth and wherein the so-called angels have pretty much concluded their Nazi extermination plan with the chimera. Akiva meets with Hazael and Liraz, who fight him but don’t kill him (!), and then they welcome him (but not with open arms) back into the military. Why they still need a military if indeed the chimera are wiped out, is a mystery, but they discover that someone is very effectively killing angels. Still.

Zuze, meanwhile is sending hilarious emails to Karou and receiving no response until Mik calls her attention to a news item concerning a theft at the Field Museum in Chicago - an excellent museum which has nothing whatsoever to do with preserving the meadows of antiquity.... The thief is stealing teeth. And it’s a girl. A teeth thief. Relief! Finally Zuze gets an email from Karou quoting Monty Python ("I'm not dead yet!", "I feel happy!"), which I found hilarious. At last, in chapter 13 yet, we get back to Karou.

She evidently found Thiago, the chimera leader, still alive in the shattered ruins of Loramendi, and they now lived, she upstairs from him, in an apartment block somewhere; somewhere on Earth, where Karou now resurrects chimera using the teeth she steals. So after Karou's been ranting on about how godawful Akiva is, and how much she detests him, Taylor makes a huge mistake in giving us a flashback to the time right before Karou (in her Madrigal form) and Akiva were captured. Taking us from Karou's revulsion and rejection of Akiva for his betrayal - whereby she let him live but he destroyed her people - to a time when she was hopelessly (quite literally hopelessly) in love with him, was foolish move. It’s too much of a contradiction, of a gut-wrench, of a discontinuous illogical jump, to accept. It threw me right out of my suspension of disbelief.

It's especially apropos a little later in the story where he returns the soul of Issa, and Karou fails to kill him despite all she's vowed, despite all he's done to wipe out her people and to kill Brimstone, who she had thought of as her father. I was in fear of this relationship and now I'm further in fear of it, because it's way too much of a trope. if she goes back to Akiva after all that's gone on, I will feel that Taylor has betrayed us all.

While we’re on the topic of whining and disbelief, let me say a few words about teeth, and about angel weaponry! I was able to accept that the variety of fresh teeth were needed in vol 1, because a variety of chimera were needed, as was fresh DNA (I assumed!) although I never understood even remotely why they were created in the variations they were. Surely if they were at war, especially for so long a period, then the chimera which were created needed to be exclusively smart, strong, tough, agile, and fierce, but we didn’t see this. That made little sense to me, but I was willing to let it go for the quality of the story in general. Having said that, there was no room for a body type like Madrigal, so how did she ever become what she was? And what was she before? Was she simply vastly old, and had always been that way? We haven’t learned anything of this so far.

Next, the weapons they use. If they're at war and are fighting so ferociously, each side intent upon the complete destruction of the other, then why the medieval weapons? Seriously, how improbable is it that they use swords when they could perfectly well use a machine gun? In the human world, weaponry advanced at a rapid rate, even historically. As soon as a new weapon was discovered or invented, it spread with lightening speed, and people improved on it rapidly. The rate of weapons development accelerated geometrically with the size of the conflict. World War 1 brought tanks and advances in rapid-fire weapons. It brought chemical weapons. World War 2 saw all of these weapons advance, and it brought massive aerial warfare and the nuclear bomb. Yet these angels and chimera are stuck in the middle ages, and they've been glued there for centuries, if not for millennia. It makes no sense except as a trope for stories of angels and demons which of course brings you right out of the suspension of disbelief.

Now a word about those teeth! Like I mentioned, I’d assumed that reasonably fresh teeth were needed (why, when one cell would contain the requisite DNA?!), but vol 2 shows that's not the case, since Karou is working with museum specimens, so then why all the rigmarole of acquiring the teeth in the way they were in vol 1? Why did Brimstone not simply use a wish or magic, to bring him all the teeth from every grave across the world, including the literal billions of teeth from fossils? Talk of weapons of mass destruction! What kind of chimera could he have created using dinosaur teeth for goodness sakes?! If he'd had that many teeth and had some assistance, he could have created sufficient chimera to completely overwhelm the so-called angels!

Okay, bitch mode off, on with the tale! So Karou resurrects Issa without any authority from the White Wolf (whom Karou know knows plans to betray her). She gets away with this by telling him that now her production rate for new Chimera will double, and it does. Issa helps, as does Zuzana, who has shown up with Mik on spec. Mik also helps, so the White Wolf's plan to train his bitch called Ten - which wouldn't have worked anyway, is now scuppered, as is his plan to use Ten to replace Karou and thereby be rid of her. So he comes up with a new plan, which is that he can use Zuze and Mik as leverage against Karou, to keep her tightly under his control, but she vows she will not let this happen. But Zuze and Mik have made such a favorable impression on the chimera that my guess is that they won't have any truck with any plan which might bring harm to the two humans.

Karou also makes an ally of the only other Kirin in the encampment, and he vows to help her. Meanwhile, on the other side, Akiva has won over Hazael and Liraz to his side, but they are called into the emperors palace - which is probably a trap for Akiva (good!). However, Akiva is already aware of this possibility and he has decided he wants to kill Joram anyway, so this but might be interesting. Hazael and Liraz want the same thing, and that's why they go with him. But with Taylor juxtaposing Liraz's internal feelings of hopelessness against the story of Karou's relationship with her fellow Kirin, I'm guessing that Liraz is going to be paired off with him before this trilogy is over. OTOH, you know how lousy my guesses are, if you've been following my blog!

So it's time to wrap this up. Finally Akiva, at the mention of his mother's name, Festival, feels some weird calming power overtake him, and he comes through and does something good: he stabs his father who was ordering him to go alone to meet the Stelians - another angelic race who are as distant as they are mysterious. Every envoy so far sent to them has disappeared without a trace. Joram dies, Jael escapes to become Angelic Villain 2.0. Akiva finds he has some weird magical power which completely destroys Joram's palace, but Hazael dies. Akiva and Liraz escape.

Karou has less success in confronting Thiago. He merely turns around her revelation that there are scores upon scores of chimera waiting to be resurrected in the catacombs under Loramendi, and steals her fire. Later he kills her only three supporters, and when he demands that everyone leave himself and Karou there alone, he tries to rape her, but Karou, using only the little knife in her boot, slays him. Then she resurrects his body but with her friend Ziri the Kirin's soul. How the hell he escaped from the party of six who were going to kill him during their mission with him is really completely glossed over. Thiago's buddy Ten is also killed and her body resurrected with the soul of one of Karou's allies, so now they control the chimera without anyone knowing!

When Akiva and Liraz show up begging Karou to resurrect Hazael, they bring the body but no thurible containing his soul, so she can do nothing to help them. The two of them burn Hazael's body and they depart, intent upon closing the last two portals between the two worlds, but Jael and his five thousand Dominion angels have already come through them, and the Earthlings believe they're angels from heaven!

So we end up with an uneasy truce between the two warring sides, the chimera on the one side, and the "Misbegottens" - angels who are loyal to Akiva - as they realize they have an enemy which worse than either of them: a greater threat than either of them, to face down.

I'm rating this one as worthy because it was a good read, although it became a bit too melodramatic at the end with one switcheroo after another. It reminded me of the hilarious comedy movie Soapdish, but that one was intentionally funny. I don't think Taylor was planning on having me laugh at these switches and then become annoyed with them. But that wasn't the worst part, The worst part was seeing Karou, who was without question a super-cool and kick-ass female protagonist descend from her pedestal to become pedestrian in the sequel. Her anguishing, and her dichotomic feelings about Akiva were truly tiresome.

It's obvious (at least it seems obvious to me - but then if you've read my reviews you'll know how sucky my prognostications are) that Taylor is going to pair them off at the end of vol 3, so there goes the drama. I'll be truly impressed if she doesn't, but it's YA, after all, so why would I even imagine something like that could happen? I'll probably have to rate vol 3 as warty if it descends to those levels, but let's wait and see!