The Red Plague Affair by Lilith Saintcrow

Title: The Red Plague Affair
Author: Lilith Saintcrow
Publisher: Crown
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 their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel was really hard to follow. I'm coming into this series at volume 3, and such an approach evidently doesn’t work well with these novels: it seems that you have to be there from the beginning to 'get' everything that's going on, which is a nuisance when it comes to reviewing adequately, so please keep that in mind. Having said that, the only thing I got out of the first chapter is that Saintcrow doesn't appear to have a very good handle on the difference between sewage and sewerage!

On the positive side, the reading is easy in the sense that the novel is very short and the chapters also short, but the writing style and language use is far too affected and dense, especially for an opening page. After a while it was easier to stay with it, but there wasn’t really very much happening, and I never felt drawn into the story or engaged with the main characters. They offered nothing to love or admire, nothing with which to empathize, and nothing to stir my interest or to attract me to them. There was no chemistry between the female protagonist and the male. The story is very dry and the conversation uncomfortably stilted. The intentional misspellings of certain nouns is pretentious and annoying: Yton in place of Eton, Houricane in place of hurricane, Englene for England for example. I saw no point to that at all, and found it to be irksome at best, although I have to admit that one of them: 'mentath' (evidently intended to describe someone who excels at some mental skill) isn’t too bad, if slightly awkward.

The novel is evidently intended to be an attempt at steampunk, but it never gave me that feeling. Actually, even using that term is problematic, although this has nothing to do with Saintcrow. What is it, exactly, with the appendage of 'punk' to a word in the fatuous pretense that it actually represents a genre?! We have 'steampunk', 'cyberpunk', 'splatterpunk' and others, in the same way we have terms derived from Watergate, such as 'oilgate' for example, but whereas appending 'gate' to another word does convey a certain level of scandal (to do with oil, say) what does the addition of 'punk' lend to the term? I contend that it offers nothing! It’s just as useless as a false hand; you can give a fake hand fingers, and tart it up to make it look like it's flesh, but it has no real value unless it’s a hook or a pincer, or these days, a robotic hand. So yes, we know what 'steam', 'cyber', and 'splatter' contribute, but what does punk offer in rounding-out the term? I suggest it lends nothing but an extra syllable and that's its only utility.

Anyway, pet peeve off, moving along! The characters in The Red Plague Affair get around on what are apparently clockwork horses, and they take the royal gryphons if they need to fly. The main characters are Emma Bannon, a 'prime sorceress', and Archibald Clare, a mentath. I had expected them to be working closely together as some sort of variation on Holmes and Watson, but this wasn't the case. They rarely interact, and the interactions between them are mundane and boring. Emma is some sort of James Bond character in service of the monarch, Queen "Victrix". I have no idea what Clare was supposed to be in this team. he really did very little. Not that Bannon did much more. Why a female name for a male character? Yes, it was his last name, but it just struck me as weird. Clare apparently was the (or a) subject of Bannon's investigation in the first novel in the series so that's how they hooked up.

I never was quite sure what, exactly, 'prime sorceress' meant. Perhaps if I'd read the entire series this far it would be a lot more clear, but even without that, it became quickly apparent that her sorcery is nothing more than the same ineffectual clichéd MacGuffin with which we routinely find magical people endowed in these stories. I failed to grasp what the benefit of equipping Bannon with sorcery actually was. She rarely uses it and it seems to be of very little utility when it comes to making any real headway in her assignments, yet each day she has to 'renew' her magical energy from 'Tideturn'. I have no idea how that's supposed to work. She evidently has to do this whether she's expended any magical energy or not. It's just weird. And if she is so powerful a black wizard, then why does she need a bodyguard? That makes no sense either.

There was a hard-to-follow flurry of nondescript characters, none of whom made any sort of impression on me as either interesting or dangerous, and they were popping up one after another like targets in a first-person shooter video game. The basis of the story is that someone has evidently invented some sort of poison and is using it to poison church-goers and others! I'm not sure how this constitutes a threat to the nation, although it seems to be tied int to the appalling London fogs of that era, which were actually more dangerous than the Red Plague ever threatened to be!! Indeed, given that in New Testament fiction, Jesus tells people that they should pray in secret, maybe this is the second coming and Yeshua himself is punishing those who pray in public?! Who knows?

I love that Saintcrow shamelessly invents the verb "to gentle"! Ian Fleming would approve, but not Noel Coward! As I read more and more of this, I found that I was skimming over paragraphs here and there because they offered nothing to engage me, which doubtlessly contributed to my not getting some parts of the story, but I honestly considered that I'd had so little out of it at that point that it wouldn't make a material difference anyway.

In conclusion I cannot recommend this novel. I was hoping for, and indeed expecting, a novel which offered mystery and engaging repartee, but I was denied those pleasures. It occurs to me that a good question to ask about this novel is: if this were a first novel submitted by an unknown author, would this publisher have accepted it as it stands, and I think the answer to that is a rather obvious 'no', which begs the question, "why then should I accept it?"

Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, right from the off, began well by looking better than Fire and much more like a worthy successor to Graceling. Unfortunately, like Ethan Hunt's gloves in Ghost Protocol it kept slipping alarmingly.

Bitterblue is the very young queen of the kingdom of Monsea. Now why in hell Cashore chose to dump that on her female hero is as disturbing as it is mysterious. She couldn't think of the word 'queendom'? And whats with everyone referring to her as Lady Queen? Seriously? Since when has there been a Lord Queen? (In terms of noble rank, that is!) Those missteps aside, however, she started out doing a great job and winning me over to Bitterblue's side.

Bitterblue is bored and finds being a queen tedious, especially given that she's beset by four antique advisers who ply her with endless work. Why she doesn't see something wrong with this to begin with is a mystery, and how King Ror (who supposedly set her queendom on a secure and rational footing before she was installed as queen) managed to bungle this so badly is a mystery, but it does offer a ready pretext for Bitterblue's adventures. She starts sneaking out of the castle and hanging out in bars, in disguise. No, it's not like that. The bars she visits feature story tellers, and she finds herself fascinated by how these fables which are related in the taverns differ from the actual facts which she knows.

Bitterblue is an interesting character, far more so than Fire, Cashore's previous hero, who I found a bit tedious at times. No, this novel is more like Graceling and Bitterblue is a charmer - smart, funny, curious about everything, and with a seriously funny sense of humor. Unfortunately, she's capable of being really stupid! It's inevitable that her curiosity and boredom will lure her into sneaking around where she isn't supposed to be, including those trips in disguise into the town and its taverns, but that's not where her stupidity lies.

As she undertakes more of these extra-curricular excursions, she becomes acquainted with the realities of life, as well as the unrealities: the weird things which are happening all around her of which she's been unaware - like people stealing gargoyles from the castle walls. Indeed, she befriends the very people who are doing the stealing, without at first realizing it is they who are behind it; then one of them gets into a fight and is stabbed, and instead of bringing the healer they demand she brings, she fetches the castle healer.

Bitterblue's adventures start with her nocturnal wanderings in the city, but her discovery activities are by no means confined there; however, it’s there that she meets Saf and Teddy, the two thieves, and their respective sisters, Bren and Tilda who are an item. Saf seems to have no vocation other than thievery which appears to be confined to stealing and returning items which King Leck had stolen from his citizens during his despotic reign. He also evidently steals some silver once in a while from shipments coming from the mines and going to the palace. Teddy's day job is running a printing press, but no one will tell Bitterblue what it is they print. None of these people have a clue who she really is. She fobs them off with a story that she works in the bakery at the palace which is how she knew the palace healer, and how she knows something of what goes on in the palace.

Bitterblue starts to discover that Leck made many changes during his reign, including changing funeral ceremonies, kidnapping many children for experimentation, and building bridges over the Dell river (which used to be called the Silver river); bridges which went effectively nowhere (there is only swamp on the opposite side of the river). It was on one of these bridges that he supposedly burned Ashen (Bitterblue's mother) after her death, rather than bury her, as was traditional before he came along. He also wrote diaries which have all apparently been lost, and compelled his groundskeeper to create topiaries which were often transformative in nature, such as one of Bitterblue herself changing from a girl into a castle. He hired a sculptor to create statues of this same nature, too - and then had the sculptor killed.

Katsa and Po (the protagonists of Graceling) show up at the palace, Po having installed himself already in Bitterblue's rooms awaiting her return one morning from one of her nights out. She seems not to be bothered that a guy will show up in her bedroom without even asking leave. Po is becoming increasingly depressed by the secrecy around his grace, wanting to reveal it to everyone. Bitterblue advises him to take it slowly. Later Katsa arrives and Bitterblue feels a bit left out by their obvious and total engagement with each other to the exclusion of pretty much everything and everyone else. Po and Katsa play only a peripheral role in this novel, which is all about Bitterblue.

Along with Po, Lord Giddon also shows up, and Bitterblue begins to form a friendship with him even though he's some ten years her senior. She begins to confide in him and ask his advice. She's invited to a meeting of the council even though she's technically not a part of it. This meeting reintroduces her to the library, which she visited often as a child, but which she has neglected completely since she became queen. She has a desk set up under a portrait of Fire, although she has no idea who the woman is or what her relationship with Leck was. She discovers that Leck destroyed thousands of books which the librarian, graced with an eidetic memory, is slowly and painstakingly restoring. Bitterblue takes one of his rewritten manuscripts to Teddy and bids him print it so it can once again find its way into public hands, but then she loses interest in this activity.

She finds she's slowly beginning to recall things from her childhood - either triggered by one or other of her new activities - such as visiting the library or learning to sword-fight, or which comes back to her in what she first thinks is a dream but realizes is actually a memory. She sets in motion several investigations: to discover how much Leck stole so that reparations can be made, to investigate how people were buried before Leck changed things, and to learn about solstice and equinox holidays which were banned after Leck came to power, although these investigations seem to disappear from the story as soon as they're set in motion.

Bitterblue feels like she has some bizarre pieces of a complex jigsaw, but she cannot figure out how they go together, and she learns that in addition to the secret society of 'restoration thieves', of which Saf is a part, there is also a counter-society of 'leave well alone' people, who do not want anyone digging into the past and unearthing painful and horrific memories of Leck's reign. There's an attempt by one of the latter group to kidnap Bitterblue, orchestrated by Lord Danzhol, who knocks out her adviser, Thiel, and tries to haul her out of the palace with him, but Bitterblue stabs him fatally. A graced woman called Hava, whose grace is to be able to effectively disappear into the background, was apparently an unwitting co-conspirator. She's still at large, and Bitterblue wants to track her down, although that plan also effectively fails.

By accident, Bitterblue visits Saf and Teddy on one of the quarterly holidays, which are still celebrated in secret by the populace. She learns this when she enters their premises and everyone is wearing colorful make-up and everyone is kissing everyone else. When Bitterblue kisses Saf, the kiss isn't at all perfunctory or ceremonial - it goes on and on and on, and later, it goes on and one some more in a graveyard on her way back to the palace!

Cashore, who had done such a sterling job with her writing overall, really lets the door swing open to Le Stupide when we start getting into page 250 and beyond, and that door swings right into her ass. I remarked earlier that Bitterblue is very smart, but she completely betrayed my confidence in her by being so alarmingly moronic at this point, that I very nearly wanted to disown her!

Let me lead into this by relating that after her night of kissing Saf in the graveyard, Bitterblue decides for reasons unexplained that she can never ever see him again. Very shortly afterwards, and completely on impulse power, she decides to visit the courtroom once more, and who should be on trial for murder but Saf himself! I'm sorry, but his was far too coincidental to suspend my disbelief. Her presence there could have been handled far more wisely. But it gets worse.

Saf is completely flummoxed (yes, flummoxed!) to discover that the wayward girl he's known as "Sparks", is actually the queen! Bitterblue discovers that he couldn't have killed the murder victim because that was the night she was with him sitting on the roof of the printing shop gazing at the stars. They ended up there after running from a hunting party that seems to have targeted Saf for reasons as unknown as they are unreasonable. This targeting of Saf is a problem about which Bitterblue has done exactly nothing. Her ability to be both aware of appalling injustice and crime, and yet to take absolutely zero steps towards combating it is infuriating, and it’s especially irksome given that she's supposed to be developing feelings for Saf. Why has she not ordered patrols to police the city and reduce this kind of victimization and crime, thereby protecting the man with whom she's supposedly falling in love? No explanation! But it gets worse.

She can’t exactly blurt out that Saf is innocent because she was with him on the roof! She could have made up some story that he was with her on the palace grounds, but even this is apparently too much for her, so in panic, she calls on Po. He masterfully steps up to the plate, claiming that he was with Saf on the roof. This releases Saf from all charges despite the judge's bias against him.

Bitterblue invites Saf to her rooms to explain to him her masquerade as "anyone-but-the-queen" and to apologize for deceiving him, but Saf behaves like a five year old, which almost totally turned me off him. What did complete that migration away from him was that when he leaves the palace, he steals from her like the jerk that he is. I'm sorry, but Saf is now out of my regard altogether. His behavior is unforgivable. Bitterblue risked her reputation to save his life and instead of being grateful, he insults her and then steals from her, and he steals not something which is a mere trinket, but the actual royal crown! The petulant son of a bitch deserves to be hanged for treason!

Now Cashore has succeeded in making Saf abhorrent to me, when she really ought to have been trying to win me over, because I was hardly a fanboi of his in the first place. Bitterblue deserves better bootie. I much prefer Lord Giddon for her, but he's probably going to end up with someone like Fox - another of Bitterblue's graced entourage - who actually might be a better match for him anyway. Fox is a sort of palace handywoman who hangs around cleaning and doing odd jobs while training as a spy. I'm not sure I trust her, but I would love to read a story about her. She's the one who picks the locks so that Bitterblue and Helda can investigate Leck's private bedroom, which is hidden away downstairs in the midst of a maze and which also holds about forty bizarre sculptures.

All this to get you to the point where I can discuss Bitterblue's rank stupidity! So here it is: despite the fact that she knows that she's being targeted, and despite the fact that she's been viciously attacked on more than one occasion, and despite the fact that Saf & Co now know that she's the queen, she sneaks out alone yet again onto the streets to visit them and apologize yet again to this lowlife thief who has treasonously betrayed his queen. She takes no guards with her and so of course she's attacked and stabbed, and has her arm broken!

If I were not so invested in Cashore as such a noteworthy writer, I would probably have quit reading this novel at this point, because this portion of it is far too stupid to read; however, in view of how much good Cashore has done so far over three novels, I was willing to let her off with a caution for this questionable behavior, in the dearest hope that she isn't a repeat offender! She is so much better than this and I hate to see her work sagging so badly in the middle.

So now Bitterblue is in the position of having to beg an ingrate, a thief, and a traitor for the return of her crown. Saf doesn't even have it! He gave it to a "fence" to hold for him, and that fence passed it on to a relative, so now no one knows where the crown is, and Bitterblue has failed again to act because she wants to keep this crime a secret to protect a thief who does nothing but childishly taunt and insult her.

Meanwhile we have Po on more than one occasion flying paper airplanes, as though paper is the cheapest thing on the planet, which given their state of technological development, it most certainly is not, and we have Po encouraging Bitterblue to befriend Hava, the chameleon graced girl who was one of the team who was trying to kidnap her! Bitterblue meets her in the sculpture room of the palace and starts the two of them on the track to friendship. I had thought at this point that given what we'd learned of Fox and Hava, and Po's planes, we were going to see an interesting finale to this novel. That didn't happen!

I have to say in passing here that Bitterblue's comprehensive ignorance regarding palace geography and composition is an inexplicable mystery. Was she, as a child, completely and utterly incurious about her surroundings? What preteen child wouldn't run riot around such a place, exploring secret passages and out-of-the-way nooks and crannies? Bitterblue seems to have confined herself to such a limited area that it's really not credible.

My disgust with Bitterblue and Saf vis-à-vis their pathetic and abusive relationship continued to be exacerbated. Po hires Saf to "caulk the windows" - like anyone caulked anything other than boats in that era! Seriously? As soon as Bitterblue learns this she runs after him like a bitch in heat, first to espy where he is on the castle walls (caulking away with Fox on what amounts to a window washer's platform). Once she knows his location, she immediately races inside and up to that floor, where she opens the window and invites him in. She again apologizes profusely to this worthless piece of gutter effluent, so of course, he proceeds to treat her like trash! Again!

Later, Giddon catches Saf wandering around in the maze which surrounds Leck's bedroom, and when he's searched, he's found to be carrying Fox's lock-pick tools along with some keys, so this lowlife jerk-off is continuing with his thievery even though he has been hired to work at the castle. When he's brought into her presence and all of this reported, he trash-talks Bitterblue (and thankfully gets cuffed by Giddon for his mouth), and this STILL isn’t enough to get him into Bitterblue's bad graces. She even chides Giddon for hitting him!

Frankly, I was really, truly, and honestly having a bad time with this novel at that point. It had been really great up to where Le Stupide reared its ugly head, and for the most part it was pretty good even then (interspersed with the dumbassery as it was), but these behaviors really kicked my suspension of disbelief (SoD) in the grass.

There was a bright spark which kept me going, which was Katsa's return, but she really didn't have a lot to offer in this novel. She was investigating one of the mountain tunnels and discovered another tunnel which smelled interesting to her. When she investigated it, she discovered a monster rat (of the kind found in the companion novel Fire - that is not monster in size, but in traits and in pelt coloration). Katsa brings the pelt back, and Bitterblue immediately 'orders' her to return and follow the tunnel through, to see what's at the other end. Clearly, she realizes, while King Leck's reality was a horrible nightmare, his fantasies as exemplified in art and in the topiaries, was real!

Even though Bitterblue has no authority whatsoever over Katsa, the latter agrees to use up some of her valuable time to investigate this new world. Yeah, it’s incredible that neither person nor creature has ever been over the mountains in either direction, not even the vicious, ravenous raptors, but I am willing to let that slide for the sake of finding out what's going to happen with this unique culture clash. It turned out: not much.

Meanwhile all her distant friends who had come visiting are now dispersing: Katsa to the tunnel, Po and Raffin elsewhere, Madlen the healer (along with Saf the scum) to investigate all the bones which Giddon has discovered were in the river - perhaps the last remnants of Leck's insanity. Fox has owned up to finding, and then losing some keys, of which no one seems to know the origin or the purpose, but when Bitterblue wanders the castle again, she finds that the keys fit Leck's secret rooms, and within his secret rooms is a secret room containing his diaries - but they're written in "code". So despite some disappointment, there is enough to keep on going here - including more disappointment! Yes, it's the return of Le Stupide!

So it turns out that Fox is more foxy than we've hitherto been given to believe! I told you her story was worth telling, didn't I? She's the criminal who is holding the crown and a host of other royal loot. What does Bitterblue do when she learns of this? Does she send a host of her military in there to arrest and retrieve? Hell no! Why back a sure thing when you can screw up royally yet again? She lets Saf the Lowlife talk her into letting him go in alone; then he gets caught with the crown and attacked by ruffians, and ends up throwing the crown into the river!

It's hard to imagine anything worse than that, but it also turns out that all of Bitterblue's four advisers - the ones expertly chosen for her by King Ror - have betrayed her and have been covering up evidence of things they did under King Leck's influence, including killing people who got too near the truth. But Bitterblue is ready to forgive them no matter what! In the end, Thiel kills one of them and then himself, and another kills himself in prison, leaving only one of them, whom Bitterblue releases from prison and merely places him under house arrest! Seriously?

As far as the diaries go, it turns out that they were written in monster-speak, but don't worry, Thiel took care of burning most of them before he died. And then Lady Fire shows up accompanying Katsa back from the Dell-y. And from there the novel just fizzles with the usual muddy Cashore ending. But no, Bitterblue ends up neither with Saf nor Giddon, so no worries there.

Once again the ending was a bit sad - not within itself, but from my perspective of it not being as good as other parts of the novel. Kudos to Cashore for not feeling compelled to end her novels with "happily ever after", but that still doesn't mean they're satisfying: they're muddy and disappointingly dissipated. They don't feel like a climax. They feel like Cashore got bored with the writing, or got stuck for a good ending or something, and just let the threads of the story come loose in her hands. It didn't even feel like an ending and in some stories, that's a good thing, but not in this trilogy. This novel had lost too many things for me before it ended, though.

Of the trilogy, Graceling is by far the best - several levels above the other two. After that I'd place Bitterblue, despite having a few too many issues with it. I'd put Fire last, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthy read. Overall I'm disappointed in this trilogy, but I love so much of Cashore's writing in it that I'm willing to let the disappointment slide in favor of recommending all three.

The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver

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!

I despise book trailers, but there's one here for this novel.

errata
P64 "...the only bus in the evening once the those ornaments were no longer." This is a small error, but even with the extra 'the' removed, it's still a big awkward sentence!
P81-82 "From whom". I know it’s grammatically correct, but does anyone really actually say this any more, let alone someone of Noa's background and character?
P105 really odd conversation. " 'There is nothing I wouldn’t do for the people I love,' he paused. 'Nothing. You know that.' He didn’t reply, instead bouncing on his toes." I have no idea what to make of that!

This novel took a bit of getting into, but it became easier as I stuck with it. It’s yet another first person narrative, unfortunately. Noa Singleton (interesting name, both first and last - we get an explanation for the first) has been on death row in the City of Brotherly Love for ten years. It’s only a few months shy of her execution date when Marlene, the mother of one of her victims (there were evidently two) shows up to announce that she's had a change of heart and is now going to petition the governor for clemency on Noa's behalf. Consequently, Noa, who is extremely skeptical and reticent, starts talking to Oliver, the lawyer who works for Marlene, in an effort to uncover information which might help the petition. Noa also starts reminiscing about her life. I get a feeling that there is far more going on here than immediately meets the eye, but it’s only a suspicion - I have nothing with which to support it.

Noa was dropped as a child - not on her head, but literally dropped by her mother - who then concocted a bizarre story of home invasion to cover up her carelessness. She also failed to adequately care for Noa afterwards. Her arm was broken and the break was not diagnosed, but as she grew, things seemed to heal reasonably well. When she was in college, she had a miscarriage because of a disease condition in her womb, and she can not now bear children. She never finished college because of this.

Her father, an alcoholic petty criminal who has been absent from her life for 23 years, reintroduces himself and she begins working on a relationship with him. Despite being an alcoholic, he came into some money (not illegally!) and opened a bar. That's where they first meet. He has a scar on his top lip which is why he cannot, apparently, grow a mustache and this, believe it or not, is evidently why her mother ditched him. She has a mustache fetish!

OK, so I admit to being intrigued! Noa visits her father late one night at the bar, and is followed by a young guy. She tells this to her father and he beats the living daylights out of the guy; then he gives Noa a .357 magnum which at first she fights against, but when he slips it into her bag as she leaves, she lets it sit.

The story really starts to drop some coin into the dirty laundry machine when Marlene, the dead Sarah's mother, contacts Noa directly by phone. Marlene knows a heck of a lot about Noa and invites her to meet in a restaurant. This is where I started to become detached from this story, because from what I've so far read about Noa, I can’t find the credit to buy that she would come to heel as Marlene commands her to do.

Marlene's daughter Sarah, the same age as Noa, was dating Noa's father, and had been since before her father contacted her. Marlene knew that if she forbade her daughter from doing this, she wouldn’t listen and perhaps would rebel by doing it more dedicatedly. Marlene evidently cast around for a means to intervene without it looking like she was intervening, and she hit upon Noa. She offered her $10,000 to somehow break-up the relationship, and Noa accepts this. I simply couldn't buy that as something she would do given what we're told about her. I couldn’t buy that she would go to a meeting with someone she didn’t know, who was demanding that she meet, or that she would sit and put up with Marlene or what she effectively orders Noa to do.

I loved chapter fifteen where trials are compared with movies. That was a really interesting observation. Chapter 16 was a classic. Those two chapters turned around my distaste for Noa's behavior vis-à-vis Marlene the dictator. After this we start learning exactly what did happen between Noa P Singleton and Sarah Dixon and Marlene Dixon.

I rarely pay attention to the cover of a novel because the author generally has little or nothing to do with it, but this one was interesting because it features only the title and author's name, but the title is changed so instead of the actual title, it reads "The Execution of a Novel" - a change which is nowhere explained. When I lost heart with this novel at the point where Silver starts rambling on about the trial, I started to think that it had indeed been executed and the sentence was just! Indeed, for a while I thought I was going to rate it 'warty', but in the end I decided to chill out and give it a 'worthy'. Overall it wasn't bad, and while the ending made little sense to me given what came before it, I hope others might find something I missed. I was hoping for a lot better, however.

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

I didn't become as hopelessly lost in this as I did in Graceling, but it's keeping my interest so far. Fire is set in the same world as Graceling, but in a different country and features different actors. It also takes place some 30 or 40 years before the events of Graceling. You'd think with a title like that, it would be a prequel to Ash lol! The female protagonist is Fire, a "monster" indeed, the last monster who appears in human form. Apparently these monsters are truly monsters, and while they look rather like creatures with which you may be familiar - wolves, birds - they're colored in amazing hues and they are extremely aggressive. I keep picturing those "wolves" in the Crematoria prison featured in the Chronicles of Riddick movie.

Fire isn't like those monsters, and she begins in this story by getting shot through the arm with an arrow. Fortunately, the hunter did not intend to hit her (she was wearing a deerskin after all!), and she is able to control his mind sufficiently to 'persuade' him to escort her back to her friend Archer, a fellow monster, who imprisons the hunter and takes care of her. Later, the hunter is killed by a skilled archer.

Fire takes a trip to visit a close friend Roen, who inhabits a castle out in the badlands where monster raptors are circling overhead and numbering in the two hundreds. At the castle they meet up with the King's army, commanded by the king's brother who detests Fire because she;s the daughter of Cansrel, who along with the previous king, ran The dells into the ground.

The army takes off on a mission. Once they reach the Mouton tunnel, they will be safe from the raptors, but as Fire sees them heading towards the tunnel, she also sees the raptors start taking an interest and she knows they will never make it there without losing some of the rearguard. At the last minute, she mounts her horse - called 'Small' because he's supposedly small-minded - and charges out of the castle gate before it can close. She heads off away from the army, and when she's in position, she takes off her headscarf, revealing her magnificent mane of monster hair, which is guaranteed to attract raptors. And they come in a swarm. Fire charges back to the castle as fast as poor Small can carry her, and they're both seriously mauled before they can get safely inside the gate, but the entire army is able to make it safely into the tunnels. Archer is pissed but they ride it out.

When the King's brother returns, he requests that Fire accompany him to the capital city where they have captured a man who was discovered spying in the King's rooms. They want Fire to use her mind-reading powers on him. She travels with the army, but is assigned her own personal guard to safeguard her against the resentment some of the army feels towards monsters, and towards her in particular, being the daughter of the man who tried to assassinate their beloved leader.

On the trip, Fire's beautiful "fiddle" is purposefully destroyed by an enraged soldier. Why Cashore terms it thus (fiddle) and then describes the beautiful music Fire plays with it is a mystery to me. If the music is so heart-rendingly wonderful, then it's a violin! If she's stirring up a hoe-down, then it's a fiddle! That just annoyed me. But when they arrive at the King's city, the king himself can't resist Fire, and attacks her. When she refuses him, he hits her. It seems that men must react either in adoration or in hatred of the monster girl. The King's brother is furious. Later, he has four violins delivered to Fire and requests that she choose one to replace what was damaged. She picks one even though she claims it's too good for her meager musical skills.

This story proved itself a lot harder to get lost in than was Graceling. I fell in love with that almost immediately, but as I've pressed on with this one, it has become more engrossing. Fire spends some considerable time at the palace and starts forming a relationship not only with the King, Nash, who is nothing but a nuisance at first, but who goes out of his way to try and block off his mind from Fire so that he does not lose control to her charms.

She slowly builds a relationship with King Nash's other brother, Garrod, who makes it explicitly clear that he does not trust Fire. Here relationship with Brigan, the commander of the army continues to soften and build, and she also becomes friends with the King's sister, Clara. She discovers that Brigan has a daughter, Hanna, with whom she becomes friends. And eventually, she agrees to do what she originally was brought to the palace to accomplish, but against which she has strenuously fought: she agrees to "interrogate" the prisoners, which is a swamp of potential missteps.

One of these interrogations indirectly reveals a traitor in their midst - a trusted captain who is evidently working for Mydogg. In a raid worthy of something the CIA might pull, this rendition is done in a way which makes it look like he was killed by bandits. His information reveals that there's a pincer-movement being planned by Mydogg and Gentian. Gentian's army is supposedly hiding in tunnels south of the royal city, whereas Mydogg's vast army is hiding to the north, but while they have a good idea of where Gentian's forces are, no one can find Mydogg's. The decision is taken to kill three key people at the upcoming royal gala: Gentian, his son Gunner, and Murgda, sister to Mydogg. The only one who can perform these assassinations is Fire, but the royal family doesn't know if it can trust her to carry it through. She could also end up being killed herself if any of the three is resistant to her mind-control and can wield a sword.

There's a really weird sentence on page 298 in the hardback edition, at the beginning of Chapter 22, fourth paragraph in, which starts: "Fire knew herself to be more experienced than anyone in this room save Archer realized." I think that 'realized' shouldn't be there. But I'm frankly a bit more intrigued with Gentian's son's name. Gunner? I wonder if Cashore intended it to be spelled thus, or if she simply doesn't know that it's actually Gunnar?

I know the trope is to 'write what you know' but if we all confined ourselves to that, then there'd be a dearth of interesting stories to be had. Most writers don't write what they know, they write what they imagine, perhaps supported or rooted in what they know. Some people way-overdo writing what they know and end up putting endless boring details into their stories for no other purpose than to show that they know what they're writing about inside out! Cashore sure doesn't know about The Dells or the seven kingdoms: not in the sense of having visited them (except in her imagination, of course), she's never encountered these monsters, yet she writes a great novel about them in this world. Suppose you dream of being a writer but you're a garbage collector or a house painter? Yeah, it's possible to create a story or two around that, but eventually you're going to run out. So what then? Give up your dream because you don't know any more?

This is why I don't subscribe to 'write what you know'; instead I subscribe to write what you love, what you care about, what you're interested in, but with the caveat that if you're going to write outside your immediate sure knowledge, at least do some looking up, or research, depending on how far out of your depth you're swimming. I don't think readers care if you're not writing what you know. They do care if you're writing something which is boring or worse, stupid!

All this really doesn't have a whole heck of a lot to do with 'Gunner' but it does highlight how a question can be raised in the mind of a reader by something which seems out of place, as that name did to me. It also highlights that travel certainly is a good experience to have under your belt as a writer, and knowledge of other cultures will probably kindle some stories which otherwise would have never set alight, and at the same time, give a flavor of authenticity to what you write. All this to say I am quite willing to let Cashore have her way with me literally with an out of place 'realize' and with apparently not knowing or not caring about the difference between Gunner and Gunnar, because even though she isn't honestly writing what she knows, she sure fakes it really well! With regard to authors in general, I have far more respect for someone who tries and fails, than I ever will for someone who doesn't even pretend to try or to care.

Fire's plan to isolate Gentian and Gunner in a room where they can be interrogated and then killed works a treat, but Fire makes a mistake. They end up in a room which is occupied (though not at that moment) by one of their own allies, and Fire is so worn out from directing these people and calming them, and communicating with those who are helping her, and misdirecting others that Brigan has to shore her up with warm feelings from himself. It gets worse as the assassination goes down, with Brigan killing both Gentian and Gunner, who has broken Fire's nose in the fracas.

But the details of the planned attack by Mydogg are out. King Nash and his family know everything, and Brigan rides headlong to join his forces at Fort Flood to taken down Gentian's men. As Fire returns to her room, she senses something very out of place. Hanna is being hurt, no doubt to lure Fire there, and she gullibly falls right in with this plan. She's evidently hit by an arrow tipped with a sleeping potion, and she loses consciousness. Thus endeth Part the Second.

I have to say I was rather disappointed in Cashore here. She's playing these two characters, Gentian and Gunner, enemies of King Nash, as being complete morons who simply blab all of their plans to Fire without any hesitation and without holding back a single thing, when not a one of the lesser players who has been interrogated would tell them anything. I can't buy that. Nor can I buy that she can only get a vague idea of something wrong when what is actually wrong is that Hanna being taken and hurt. This is bullshit which betrays everything we have learned about Fire and her feelings for Hanna. If she can keep track of scores of people who detest her, then she ought to be tightly tuned in to those whom she loves, so I think Cashore failed badly here at the end of part two.

Here's another odd sentence: "...tears seeped down Fire's face from the effort of detracting the attention..." I think Cashore means distracting! The way it's written makes no sense at all. But moving right along - I find it equally as heartening as it is disheartening that Cashore seems as unable to finish a novel as I am! I loved Graceling, but the ending seemed a bit flat. I was less thrilled with Fire, which started out really good but got rather lost in the middle and then came back strong, slipped a little, and finally simply disintegrated at the end. However, it was a decent read overall, and Cashore has enough credit with me after her debut for me to forgive quite a bit!

I had some issues with Fire's behavior and character. She's a significantly less-than-stellar hero for a novel, especially a cashore novel and especially right after Graceling. She is portrayed as stronger in the beginning than she appears to become towards the end when we find her turning into a whimpering mess of Jello, so there's no character growth there. However, overall, she is enough to maintain interest and there are some really strong parts, particularly where Fire ends up being abducted by and then escaping Leck - the guy who causes so much trouble in Graceling. So on balance I do recommend this one, but I was glad to be done with it and moving on to Bitterblue

The Sea of Tranquility by Katja Millay

Title: The Sea of Tranquility
Author: Katja Millay
Publisher: Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!

This is the kind of novel which ought to be banned, because it makes other writers feel like giving up in despair in the fear that we will not be able to write anything of this quality! It's a YA novel, but it's a YA at the grown-up end of the scale, and by that I mean not only that it contains language and sexual situations, but it also isn't afraid or shy of telling a mature and life-like story. The Sea of Tranquility is coming at you ready or not, and I almost wasn't ready!

The only real problem with a novel like this is that you either end up loathing the author for seemingly effortlessly putting together a magical tale which you wish you'd thought of first, or you end up adoring the author for putting together a magical tale even though it was seemingly effortless, and even though you wish you'd thought of first!

A couple of minor observations (note that this is a galley copy ebook I'm reading):
On p91 the conversation is a bit hard to follow - who is speaking?!! A bit more clarity would have been nice!
On P93 "you're lack of faith" should be "your lack of faith".
P367 conversation "who's speaking now?! confusion again
P381 "stepped foot" sounds clunky to me

Millay's effort wins this year's award for most obscurely mysterious novel! It also wins the award for best kick-ass phraseology, including gems like: "puddles of dumbass", "panty-combusting", and (please forgive me for this one, but I did say these were gems) "fuckuppance". And Millay knows 'interrobang', so she gets props for that, too. Maybe I'll like her! Or more accurately, maybe I’ll like her story-telling.

Once again my vow to avoid first person narratives is thwarted. Yes, thwarted. Millay also wins that award, too, since she has no less than two first person perspectives, fully integrated. Although I found this a bit confusing initially, because I’d thought the name of the narrator was merely a chapter title, I did develop a working relationship with it pretty quickly. By fully-integrated I mean that the names are not confined to chapter titles - they randomly appear in the narrative within the same chapter which actually works better for me.

Millay likes to flirt evilly with tropes, including your standard two guys and one girl triangle, but (and maintaining the trigonometry metaphor) she has an interesting angle on everything she writes, so I'm not nauseated by it. Her main characters are Nastya Kashnikov (was she named like that because it sounds similar to Kalashnikov?! I suspect it's not her real name), Josh Bennet, and Drew (as in drew a blank because I can’t recall what his last name is...ah, here it is: it's Leighton). This story starts out with a major YA trope of Standard Disaffected Girl meets Standard Ineffectual Boy, but there are twists galore, so let's start with those. I blew through ninety-nine pages without any effort at all, which is a really good sign. Can I be so lucky as to finally be reading both a hardback and an ebook that I like, and in tandem, too?! We'll see!

Nastya is a mute, but don’t read that as dumb. She's smart and has a really amusing view of her fellow students, but she has some serious issues, the major one of which seems to be that she's dead! That's what she says - she died, and apparently was resurrected, and having started thinking that this was a paranormal novel, I've been teasingly and skilfully led away from that misperception by Millay, so I think that this death is metaphorical: I think it's the death of a dream. Nastya was a really good classical pianist, but a hand injury has killed that. She was evidently assaulted, perhaps raped and now lives in fear of assault, but she refuses to be trapped by her fear and fights it at every turn.

A related problem which she has is that she can’t stand too much noise around her, and she's rather anti-social to boot - more than likely because she can't stand bustle, and the reason for that appears to be that it's harder for her to tell when someone might be approaching her threateningly with so much distraction around her. She hates to be touched, as one guy learns to his amazement when she puts him on the floor just because he idly grabbed her arm. She loves to run, and she isn't afraid to run late at night, but she carries what amounts to a kosh, and she carries pepper spray, and she's taken self-defense classes, and she will not listen to music while jogging because it would prevent her from hearing someone approach. So yes, she refuses to be crippled by her experience, but she is hobbled by it. For exmaple, she will never play the piano again! I'm not joking, but how she can feel that that part of her life is over when this girl seems to be doing just fine is a bit of a puzzler.

Her plan on entering her new school was to repel everyone by projecting herself as some sort of bad-ass goth, which she does rather well. She lives with an aunt, although her parents are still in the picture. She's small and pale and often runs until she makes herself physically sick. One time, very late at night, she ran so far that she got lost, but she arrived at Josh's house where he was woodworking in the garage. Nastya seemed to recognize this house without ever having been there before (there's a story behind that!). Josh drove her home even though it actually wasn't very far away.

Josh is a loner. His back-story is that his Mom and sister died in a traffic accident on a day when he would normally have been traveling with his mom, but he had switched that particular day to be with his dad. At lunch, he sits on a bench seat outdoors, but no one seems to want to come anywhere near him which fascinates Nastya the first time she sees him because she wishes she had that same power of repulsion. Josh (did I tell you how much I detest that name in YA novels?!) is taciturn and feared because of anger issues resulting from that tragedy. One time when Nastya gets a heel stuck in a crack between the pavers in the outdoor lunch area, and Sarah & co (Sarah is Drew's sister) start to make fun of her, Josh silences them with one short sentence, and later he tells Nastya that he won’t do that for her again. This annoys her because she didn’t ask for help, but it also further intrigues her. Of course, she's seated next to him in carpentry shop, a skill at which Josh excels. So is he Yeshua, and she's Miriam of Magdala?! Think about it!

Drew is intriguing because, ostensibly, he's your ladies man, who can charm his way into and out of anything. He's apparently often borrowing money from his sister. Nastya takes a liking to him but is not attracted to him other than that he amuses her, so when he invites her to a party one weekend she inexplicably accepts; then she gets nauseously drunk, whereupon Drew, who is friends with Josh, deposits her in Josh's care rather than take her home. Drew didn't take advantage of her apparently, and he left her with Josh because he knew Josh wouldn't do so either. Interesting. Fortunately for Nastya, her aunt works night shift so she's just able to get home in time, and her aunt learns nothing of her nocturnal shenanigans.

So yes, a gazillion issues, an amazing set of characters, and answers that come out and tease you unexpectedly. You bet I'm going to keep reading this. This is the most interesting and complex triangle I think I've ever read about, and it keeps evolving. Hipparchus himself wouldn't have been able to tabulate what's going on here. The dynamic between Josh and Nastya changes on a daily basis, and it seems like it's as much on shifting sand as it is on solid rock. The one thing which doesn't change is the quality of the writing, and the fascination I have with these two main characters. I'm now over halfway through this novel and I don't see the quality slipping by as much as an emdash.

The real joy of this novel is to see real characters; characters who are damaged, but coping, who feel like life has kicked them while they're down, and yet still they get up and find a way to move forward, if not move on, and in this motion, blind and blundering as it often is, they're somehow steadily stumbling towards, not away from each other. They're hurting, scared, and skeptical, but they're drawn not by some asinine YA cluelessness about what a real relationship is, but by believable motives and credible needs. And for a YA novel, these characters are so refreshing that it's like a cool glass of sparkling water after too many warm, sugary, and artifically colored sodas.

And it isn't just the two main protagonists. The third member of the triangle, Drew, is just as intriguing and complex as the other two, and there is a host of others minor characters who are anything but minor in the way they're portrayed. The resolution is good, but the ending is a bit too drawn out for me, with Josh and Nastya wasting time with non-issues or with artificially manufactured issues, but I'm willing to let Millay get away with that because the rest of the story is so masterful. Chapter 52 one of the most kick-ass chapters ever written. This is a solid recommendation for this novel and if you don’t read it I promise you that your favorite pet will die of heartbreak!

Including this one, I've recently read three novels featuring physically and emotionally damaged women. Lingerie Wars was simply thrown directly into the landfill by its author. Blind Date was good, but this one, The Sea of Tranquility is better. This one excels at what it attempts and was a true pleasure to read.

Graceling by Kristin Cashore

Rating: WORTHY!

Let this be a lesson to authors in choosing the best title for their novel! And let this be a lesson to potential readers not to judge a book by its title! When I first saw the title Graceling I was convinced that it was quite literally a fairy story; that is, a story about fairies, and I had no interest in it at all. That's not to stake a claim that I would never read a fairy story, but I've never yet been moved in that direction by any such novel of which I've become aware.

Even when I learned that the female protagonist in this novel was an assassin, it didn't fire up any deeper interest in the novel within me because I still thought it was about fairies! It was the 'grace' combined with the 'ling' which did it, I think; it was too much of a airy-fairy title! Then I happened to be looking along the library shelves and saw Fire. I picked it up not realizing that it was in the same world as Graceling and I was intrigued by the blurb. Graceling just happened to be sitting right next to it. Thinking they were sequential I picked that one up as well. I discovered that they're not a sequential pair, but they do share the same world, so I decided that if I'm going to read Fire, I ought to read Graceling first, just in case. In for a pennyweight, in for a pounding. So here I am, a hundred and 30-some pages into this 470-some page story and I have to confess that I'm not disappointed so far.

The female protagonist is Katsa, the male protagonist probably Prince Po. Yeah, about those names! I actually love 'Katsa', but Po? No! What is it which makes cat-like names so cool for female protagonists? Kat, Kitai, Katsa? Anyway, we start with her helping to bust out a Lienid prince (with the bizarre name of Tealiff) from prison. Katsa harms no one, she merely knocks the guards out and pops a sleeping pill in their mouth to keep them out long enough for her team to get away with their prisoner.

Though Katsa is supposed to be King Randa's enforcer, she's working as an independent on this job. She's supposed to be traveling to a neighboring kingdom to beat up on a guy who took more forest acreage than he had contracted for, but before she makes that trip, she side-tracks to spring this aging foreign prince, and returns him to Randa City, her own capital, where they keep him hidden so no one will know that Middluns (Katsa's home nation) will know they had anything to do with it.

The only unexpected thing on this entire adventure was her encounter with another of her kind, whom she knocks out, but doesn't kill. It's just as well, because he later shows up at the palace where she resides, and it turns out he's another prince of Lienid. Lienid has seven princes, and the world in which these people all reside has seven kingdoms: Nander, Sunder, Estill, Wester, Middluns, Monsea, and Lienid. The first four nations in that list tend to be at war with one another for one reason or another, the latter three, not so much.

In these nations there is, on occasion, a child is born who has a 'grace' - that is a special talent at something or other. These graces can be for anything from cooking, to taking care of horses, to swimming, to being an expert at fighting and killing, and even mind reading. Katsa discovered her talent when she accidentally killed a much older cousin who was touching her way too familiarly. Those who have graces are readily recognizable by having eyes of two different colors. Katsa's are blue and green, Prince Po's are silver and gold. Such people are shunned as a general rule, but if they have a great talent for something their king deems useful, then the king can order that the bearer of the grace be brought into his service; hence Katsa's permanent presence at the palace. The King is also her uncle.

Katsa isn't happy being an enforcer. She dislikes hurting people and becomes very angry when her king demands her services, but she is the best there is, better even than Prince Po, though he is older and stronger. The two of them begin to bond over their shared grace, and fight with each other each day just for the pleasure of being able to combat someone who is actually a challenge to them. But Katsa is really painfully slow to realize that Po is not only graced as a fighter, he's also graced as a mind reader - as long as your mind is focused on him. This ability to read her intentions towards him is how he manages to stay in a fight with her, but of course it makes it rather questionable as to how Katsa was able to knock him out when she encountered him at the start of this novel!

Katsa is also friends with Randa's own son, Prince Raffin, who hangs out with a very close male friend called Bann, pursuing intellectual interests, particularly medicine. In one experiment, he ended up with his hair dyed blue, and so currently isn't in his father's best graces. He and Katsa, together with spy chief Oll and Lord Giddon, who is in love with Katsa, along with a web of people across the seven nations, are part of The Council. It was on Council business that Katsa rescued Prince Tealiff.

The apparently budding romance between Po and Katsa is being handled rather nicely, so I don't even get to complain about that(!), and there appears to be no love triangle here, but there comes a threat to the smooth unfolding of that love when Katsa is dispatched by Randa on another bullying mission. She's supposed to bully Lord Ellis into giving up one of his daughters in marriage to another lord who lives in such a besieged locale that he's having a hard time finding a wife. Randa volunteers one of Elli's daughters, but Ellis refuses. Katsa refused to beat up on him for that. Instead she gives both Giddon and Oll slight injuries and orders them to tell Randa that she refused and they were injured in foolishly trying to coerce her. In that way, she takes sole blame for her action - or lack of it.

Giddon, trying to help her out of her dilemma, proposes to her, somehow thinking that a marriage to him will reduce or deflect the King's opportunities for punishment. Katsa refuses him, but during their discussion, she is finally clued in to Po's talent, and she confronts Po angrily, calling him a traitor before storming back to her room where her maid, Helda, tries to comfort her. Then comes an unintentionally hilarious sentence:

Later, when Katsa was dressed and Helda grappled with her wet hair before the fire, there was a knock on her entrance.

Po tries to apologize to her, but she's very angry. Without having resolved her relationship with him, she's summoned to the King's presence to answer for her refusal to obey him in the Lord Ellis affair. She takes charge of her own life from this point onwards. Rather than being cowed by the King, she refuses to work for him any more and in the morning (why the delay?!) she leaves the castle with Po, and they head towards Monsea to investigate further the kidnapping of Prince Tealiff.

The Journey is long and they use it to pursue their differences, resolve their issues, and plan ahead for what they might encounter in Monsea. Katsa also grows to know herself better - and realizes that her grace is not murdering, but surviving. Her fighting skills are only a small part of this. For her own peace of mind, Katsa practices both conveying messages to Po just by thinking, and on also blocking him out of her mind. As they meander through the forest and scale the mountains into Monsea, they discuss the king. He came to power oddly. He was not of the royal blood, but showed up as an orphan and vagabond. He had only one eye and people took to him readily. Eventually the king adopted him and named his as heir to the throne, whereupon the king and queen and his top advisers all mysteriously died, leaving the one-eyed vagabond to rule.

It's Po's and Katsa's considered opinion that the reason the vagabond king is one-eyed is that he deliberately cut out the other eye to hide the fact that he has a grace: a grace which enables him to control the minds of others, which is how he got away with all that he did. I think we're about to learn a bit more of his history in a prequel called Fire, which I'll be reviewing next.

Unfortunately for Katsa and Po, all their plans come to naught because the first person they encounter upon entering the kingdom is the king himself, chasing his escaping wife Ashen (a kinswoman of Po's) and slaughtering her. Her dying thought is to Po, to find her daughter who is now alone in the forest.

For the first time in her life, Katsa realizes that there is something which she can neither fight nor defend against: the king's mind control. They run and hide in the forest, eventually finding the young princess. Po is protected against the King's power because he can sense the King's thoughts and repel them, but Katsa cannot. She has turned her weapons over to Po and vowed to do everything he asks without question as a protection against being mind-controlled, but she couldn't obey Po's order to strike the King down because the King had already overpowered her mind. Now the two of them have no plan and must urgently decide what to do next.

I love this story so much that I'm going to award it a 'worthy' even though I haven't finished it yet. I don't even care if the ending sucks! This novel is so good that it's worth reading even if the ending is awful!

Well the ending wasn't awful, it was awesome (and no, I'm not going to tell you what happens! I wouldn't dream of robbing you of that joy.) This is a really amazing novel, with great characters, very well-written, a superbly well-done YA "romance" which ought to make other YA romance writers pay attention if they know what's good for them, and learn something about how intelligent, self-respecting people really behave in relationships. And no, I'm not talking about the fighting! Go read it: grace yourself!

Graceling is followed sequentially by Bitterblue and preceded by Fire, although I understand that Cashore recommends that they be read in the order they were published, which is how I've been reading them.

The Girl Who Disappeared Twice by Andrea Kane

Title: The Girl Who Disappeared Twice
Author: Andrea Kane
Publisher: Mira
Rating: WARTY!

If this were a movie, it would be a bit of a mash-up of Mission Impossible with Bad Boys. In what seems to be the opening salvo of a series, a high-tech trio consisting of the standard ex-SEAL (Marc Devereaux), a standard geek (Ryan McKay), and a standard woman-with-issues covering the 'standard hit-all-interest-groups spectrum' (but they missed Latinos and native Americans) got together and formed 'Forensic Instinct' (FI) based in Manhattan, to run down bad guys. I have to ask: why are they always referred to as Navy SEALs? Are there other SEALs - that is, of the human military variety - form whom we must distinguish these guys?! Surely no one would imagine that this detective agency hired aquatic mammals?! If they did, what would it mean to be an ex-seal: it's now a sea-lion? A sea otter?!

The novel starts out looking like it might be good, but quickly sheds that impression: Casey Woods (trope name alert, but since she almost shares a last name with me, I guess I have to let her get away with it, huh?!) the troubled head of FI, is portraying herself as a shy college girl in order to trap the rapist/serial killer, which she successfully does with Devereaux taking him down, breaking his arm, and forcing a confession. But they are working for NYPD, so it’s all okay, I guess.

Having taken care of business, Woods doesn’t go home to bed, she goes into the office and sits watching the news coverage of the guy being led out of the alley in handcuffs. Just a moment please! Casey left immediately after they had the confession from the perp (not that such a confession would hold up in court, but corroborating evidence might). No police were on the scene at that time, yet as soon as she gets back to HQ, Devereaux is already there. Meanwhile, she's watching the Fox news channel (and that might account for the inaccuracies!) and they show news footage of the perp being led out of the alley in cuffs. Here's my problem: did the NYPD hold the perp in the alley, waiting until all the news teams had assembled at four in the morning so once more the dawning could bring out the rapist in cuffs? In the full glare of news camera lights? That's neither rationally possible nor even credible.

We learn that their conference room is controlled by an AI which can detect who is in the room and even that Woods has an elevated heart rate. It can understand commands and even ask questions to refine the commands it's been given. So why are they not selling this AI technology and making a fortune? Why do they rely on hefty fees from their poor clients to make a go of their operation? Another problem.

We'll see how it goes. After Woods finally gets to sleep for the whole day, she's woken up by a call in the late afternoon (evidently FI can't afford to hire office staff!) from a judge whose five-year old daughter has been abducted from daycare by someone using a gas-guzzling piece of environmental destruction which looks exactly like the one the judge herself uses. It even passes the judge on her way there with her kid banging frantically on the window and the judge doesn't even register it. She immediately calls in FI to help her find her child because she has zero faith in the local police or the FBI. How's that working out for you, judge?

It turns out that the judge also has issues. Not only has her kid been kidnapped, but her twin sister was also kidnapped when they were both six years old - about the age of her daughter now.

So, let’s see - twin sister kidnapped, then years later, daughter kidnapped at the same age, perhaps by someone who looks so much like her mom, driving the same kind of vehicle, that the little girl doesn’t even suspect a thing until it's too late (I got that part right!)? Surely it can't be this easy to solve this "mystery" can it? But then I'm usually wrong with these guesses of mine, so perhaps we’re safe!

Woods & Co dive in and start questioning parents, witnesses, and potential suspects, including the nanny, who has a rather wayward boyfriend, but neither he nor she seem to be guilty of anything. Judge Willis's fired secretary and her wayward boyfriend seem clean, too. Willis's husband, Edward, is having an affair with the nanny. Willis's mom is three sheets to the wind in a nursing home, and a retired FBI guy who worked on the original twin sister kidnapping, Patrick Lynch, tracks down Hope's father, which is how we learn that the mob was involved in the kidnapping of Hope's twin, Felicity. The story is that she was killed, but I think the reason Kane is so desperately tossing out so many red herrings is to distract us from this twin.>/p>

I had a wild idea that Edward might have met the twin, now grown up, and decided he preferred her to Hope, and have entered into an arrangement with her: have the twin kidnap the child posing as Hope, have Edward stage a "rescue" but instead of taking Krissy home, take her to a new home he had set up, and present the twin as her real mom. But that's probably not what happened. I am, at this point, still holding out for the twin being involved somehow. Unless Kane deliberately put that out there as a huge red herring.

What does happen is that Hope gets a call ostensibly from the kidnappers, demanding $250,000, which she puts together from safety deposit boxes and a slush fund her husband has (he's a defense layer so you know he's as crooked as a dog's hind leg. Hope is supposed to head to a mall, drop the duffel bag into a specific trash can, and then pick up her daughter an hour later. The caller does know some details about Krissy, but I seriously hope our judges are not this monumentally stupid or so blindly trusting. Hope tells no one but Ashley. Woods, however, knows something is up.

She follows Hope to the ransom drop, but get this: she notifies not one single person - not on her team, and not on the police or FBI teams, and the quarter million predictably disappears, and of course there is no Krissy. Right now I feel like I'm going to finish this novel, but it's definitely going to get a warty on this showing - and it's not just this.

The kidnapper again sneaks into the Willis residence - during of the very few times when hardly anyone is home, so the residence is under surveillance and not one of these law-enforcement types has noticed. The kidnapper has a key to the house, and lets herself in the back door. She goes up the back stairs and she takes a toy from Krissy's room, and some perfume and a heart locket containing a picture of Krissy and a picture of Krissy's mom from Hope's room. She leaves without being detected, but has to clock Ashley on the head to knock her out when she's in danger of being discovered.

Meanwhile the law-enforcement teams are obsessing on the mob connection which was inadvertently triggered by Woods's team's pursuit of a possible connection between the three-decade ago kidnapping of Hope's twin sister and the current events. The assumption I'm currently operating under is still that the kidnapper is Hope's twin sister, but there's now a twist. What if the kidnap victim wasn't Hope's sister Felicity, but Hope herself? When Felicity saw Hope had been kidnapped, she assumed Hope's position, and insisted that it was Hope who had been kidnapped, and Felicity has been impersonating Hope ever since? Yeah, warped, but that very warping is what's fueling the current events.

Yeah, it;s weird, but until we get more clues instead of endless red herrings out of this novel, this is all I have that makes any sense to me. And it's probably wrong! But we have nothing going on in the story. I'm over half-way through it and there are no real leads. It's actually boring right now with this mob-connection crap, and this Claire psychic woman is dragging the story down for me. She divines that Felicity won a 'most goals scored' award over her nearest rival by two goals - and she divines this from a photo of the twins! She has a dream about Krissy's toy panda missing a friend, and this pans out when the kidnapper returns to steal a second toy. After that, Claire is called in, and she 'senses the energy' in the room where Ashley was knocked out, and Claire comes out with the most abusive genderism babbling on about the energy in the room: "It's a female's energy - not dense or heavy like a man's would be. More light and airy." Excuse me?!

Le stupide kicks up to an even higher notch next. Woods has a boyfriend in law enforcement and one day he brings her a pet bloodhound, which has been retired from law enforcement duty. Woods employs this dog pointlessly in sniffing around the entire neighborhood in case Krissy was hidden in one of the homes nearby, but when someone comes directly to her office building and sticks a letter in the door advising her to look closely at the family, and the dog wants to follow the scent, Woods unaccountably, inexplicably fails to let it chase the scent of this person who quite clearly has valuable information!

The useless clairvoyant has a vision that Krissy is fine, but Hope is stressed. On the basis of this, and this alone, they decide to tell "Hope" that Krissy is fine. I'm going to start putting "Hope" in quotes now because these last two revelations have convinced me (rightly or wrongly!) that my idea that "Hope" is really Felicity and the real "Hope" was the abducted child is right. Woods - the one who is supposed to have super-instincts - blindly assumes this letter refers to the Vizzini crime family they're investigating, not the Willis family. Her boyfriend, Hutch shows up very shortly after the letter does - which some might consider suspicious! She shows him the letter and they don't consider for a minute that it refers to the crime family unless it means "Hope"'s father, who has connections to the crime family!

After they've dispatched the letter that Woods failed to follow up on to the FBI crime lab, she and Hutch, despite being pissed off with each other for holding back secrets about the case (which Hutch actually hasn't been doing but which Woods has) have their usual sex which is described so briefly that it need not be described at all. Just rest assured that it was on a plain which mere mortals can not ever so much as hope to dream of. Their sexual tension began the moment they met, and it's only become more intense since! Hutch grips the headboard and drives "...himself all the way inside her - and then some"! What the hell does that mean?! Where he's been driving prior to this isn't detailed. Finally it erupts "...in an explosion of nearly painful pleasure." Oookay!

Clearly this is one of those "romantic" relationships where sex is everything and there is nothing whatsoever beyond that, yet the relationship is supposed to be the best there is! Even as they both agree that this relationship is a one-in-a-lifetime thing, they neither of them ever even remotely look like they're going to discuss marriage! Some relationship! And be warned, you'll need a barf-bag for the next chapter.

So Woods relates to Hutch a tale of a college roommate who had told Woods that she felt like she was being followed, and reported it to the police but nevertheless was found raped and murdered shortly thereafter. So she's been in this supposedly intense relationship with Hutch, and she's never told him this? Woods claims that this is what drove her to form Forensic Instincts, but she fails to address how she thinks a college student might even begin to afford the high fee that FI charges for its services. This "back-story" is so predictably mundane that it's a joke. Then Woods bitches out Hutch because she had an epic fail when she suspected that "Hope" was up to something with her ransom payment and never told anyone, even though she had ample opportunity to do so. She justifies this fail because she has these instincts and has to act on them! She's evidently arguing that she doesn't have the time to do it right and catch an extortionist.

So Devereaux the bully hits on another suspect threatening violence on him until the guy finally 'fesses to the fact that he left the note at FI's HQ. Why he didn't write that he saw "Judge Willis" go home on the day of Krissy's kidnapping when Ashley was out getting the mail, and before Krissy was kidnapped (presumably the impostor was picking up the panda toy) instead of simply writing "Look closer at the family" is another weak spot in this novel. Later, Devereaux dresses up as a janitor to break into a psychiatrist's office to look at confidential medical papers for a nurse, Linda Turner, who lost a daughter who was in the same soccer camp as Felicity Ackerman.

That Felicity girl sure as hell gets around and does an amazing amount for a six year old, doesn't she? But here's the risible part: Devereaux wants to avoid anyone paying any attention to him so instead of going up the elevator with his janitor cart, he carries it up the stairs! Seriously? This is the man of whom we're told that he's a sexy hunk who draws women like a magnet, and yet he's carrying a janitor cart up the stairs, and two women pass him on the way down, and they don't even pay any attention to him! This is the same guy who had a secretary at one of the Vizzini's building sites all over him when he posed as a Xerox technician so they could substitute the existing Xerox machine with one which sends a copy of the image to McKay so he can see everything they copy.

A standard Xerox machine for typical office use costs around $6,000. Who paid for that? Judge Willis? Casey Woods? Out of what budget? Again how does Woods's organization pull down enough cash to be this extravagant? How do they finance the geek's robot building? McKay has a robot called Gecko which they're sending into the air-ducts in the psychiatrist's building just for a test run, as Devereaux breaks in there. The really bizarre thing here is that, "knowing" that Woods's team has broken into a health-care provider's office and copied medical records, they don't even blink an eye, and they take this new information and run with it, focusing their search on Turner now instead of the mob where they've been wasting time for days.

So now they've tracked down Turner's home, but it's empty; she's apparently disappeared without a trace, so Woods's best plan is to take Claire the Voyant there to see what vibes she can pick up! The whole freaking crew goes over there, bloodhound and all. McKay is the only one who doesn't because he's off charming records out of nurses or someone. Kane would have us believe that medical personnel are such lowlifes that a hunky guy can get them to compromise their integrity and patient confidentiality? That's quite a power.

But this actually turns up the interesting revelation that Felicity Ackerman - who supposedly broke her arm - was never admitted to an ER with it. Instead, the girl who was admitted at that time with those symptoms was called Anna Turner! So yes, this is fascinating, but it reveals another weakness in this story: that in the extensive search for Felicity Ackerman, not a single law-enforcement officer ever discovered that someone had switched names for the girl with the broken arm? Or it had never occurred to anyone that maybe it was Anna Turner who was the truth and Felicity Ackerman who was the fiction?

Claire the Voyant declares that Krissy was never held in Turner's house, but Felicity Ackerman was. The search of the residence turns up a single pill of an Alzheimer's drug called Memantine, which is a real drug. In a tiny percentage of cases this drug can cause confusion, so while Woods & Co leap to the conclusion that this was a med Turner was taking, I'm wondering if it was a med Turner was administering to her victims. 10 milligrams seems to me like it might be a bit high for a six-year old, but then I'm not a medical practitioner! More to the point, I'm also wondering if Linda Turner is actually Felicity (or Hope!) Ackerman.

After Devereaux breaks into the Sunny Gardens nursing home and confirms that Turner is there under the name of Lorna Werner, McKay plants video surveillance, and puts his 'Gecko' robot into the grounds where Turner sits when she's brought outside. She is expecting a visitor - her daughter - and when that visitor shows up, they will record the visit in audio and video and thereby track down Krissy. These morons once again fail to inform law enforcement of the fact that they know where Turner is and have a lead on tracking down Krissy. So now not only are they threatening Krissy's welfare, they're also officially obstructing officers of the law.

Before the daughter shows up, a construction crane situates itself between the surveillance van and the Gecko, meaning that they can't receive the transmission directly from the Gecko because of interference. The simple solution is to move the freaking surveillance van, but instead, these morons give up on the whole thing, deciding to simply have the Gecko record what happens so they can review it later! Once again they're putting Krissy's life at risk, and even more-so because instead of having McKay go in and pick it up posing as a workman (as he did to place the device to being with), they inexplicably wait until dark and send Devereaux in to get it! They don't even think for a split second of discovering who it is who's visiting Turner and following that person after she leaves! These people are stark-staring imbeciles, and if I were not within 50 or so pages of the end, I'd quit reading this right now.

But it gets worse! Recall that the Gecko is a device which can walk - McKay had it walk down the air-ducts into the psychiatrist's office earlier, but when it comes to retrieving it from the grounds of Sunny Gardens, McKay apparently can't have it walk to the fence for Devereaux to grab it: he has to get into the grounds and go find it up himself. Why?!!

Back at FI HQ, once they have the Gecko plugged into a specially designed connector (what, a USB port not good enough for simple video and audio streaming?!) it comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever that the person visiting Turner is "Hope". They show the video to the FBI and it's agreed that they will stake out the Sunny Gardens nursing home the next day, which they do, but Felicity detects that she's literally surrounded by the feds, so she conks a nurse on the head and steals her outfit and car, and escapes, triggering a huge woman-hunt which involves Felicity taking a train. They track down where she disembarked and and eventually find her house, but Felicity has beaten them there. She grabs Krissy and starts to head out the door, but Krissy breaks free and escapes into the woods, where the bloodhound naturally tracks her down. Krissy is free and Felicity can get treatment. The end.

If this novel is so painfully obvious that even I can get it in the first few pages, it really sucks. I'd hoped for so much better than that, but even that, I could have withstood if the characters had been realistic instead of cardboard cut-outs, and if the plot hadn't been so full of holes and Le Stupide!

Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

Title: Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa
Author: Benjamin Constable
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
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!

I must be fated to start out not liking ebooks as I begin them, liking them as I dig deeper, and then unpredictably either liking them or hating them as I read through to the end! Strange but true. Constable may be a famous last name in English art, but that still didn’t make me want to read any introductions, prefaces, prologues or forewords written by this particular Constable. As I've said before, if it’s worth reading, it’s worth putting into chapter one, which was where I started reading. That's also where I had a problem enjoying it.

Note that the male protagonist in this novel is Benjamin Constable. Why he chose to depict himself - or perhaps more accurately, use his own name for the character - or indeed whether Constable is a real person or merely a pen name for someone, perhaps even a female author, I have no idea at this time. To distinguish between Constable the character and Constable the author, I shall refer to the character as BC, and the author as Constable from this point onwards.

The first thing we get to read is a suicide letter, which normally ought to make a reader perk up and pay attention, but I found myself so distracted by the rather pretentious and overly florid language of the meandering letter that I really started not to care if this person had died! In the end, I felt rather cruelly comforted by her absence from this world, if it meant that she had taken this kind of fluff with her when she left! Fortunately for Constable, the story began to pick up after that, and I found that I’d read some hundred and fifty pages effortlessly, without feeling any awful thoughts towards Constable or towards his female protagonist. The purportedly dead one of his two female protagonists, that is....

The assumption is that she's dead, but I am not convinced. Indeed, given his penchant for not only seeing, but also interacting with a large but non-existent cat, I have to even question whether Tomomi Ishikawa exists at all, much elss whether she did exist and is now dead by her own hand. There is no body, and there is some suggestion that she might still be alive - which even BC himself considers as a possibility eventually! I found myself really starting to like Tomomi Ishikawa even though, as I was to discover, she had some really unlikable traits. Having said this, I have to add, in the end, that I really disliked her! I have a soft spot for Japanese women, so that took some doing! So sue me! Or is it: see Sumo?!

The author of the suicide note had written it on her laptop, printed it out, put it into an envelope, and pushed it under BC's door while he was at work one Friday. Yes, he's quite literally telling this fable about himself - and it’s in the first person! Yes, I know I swore off first-person stories, but I had this one on my e-shelf long before I made that semi-serious declaration. Constable's first person isn’t obnoxious, although he does seem to slip between present and past tenses unpredictably. But maybe this will turn out to be the very first person novel that I've been looking for, as an antidote to the dotes I've been nauseated by of late! We'll see!

BC's ostensibly dead friend is the Tomomi Ishikawa (TI) of the title. The novel is in three parts, one for each of her lives presumably, and the first of these is in Paris, where BC works as an English teacher. Having read the disturbing note, he heads over to her apartment and retrieves her computer, which she evidently intended him to have (since his own is a crappy piece of trash which dies on him soon thereafter). I'm going to blithely assume that his was a nasty old Windows machine and hers is a cool-looking Mac, because I can! There's a complete absence of evidence to the contrary! When he boots it up, he discovers that most of its content has apparently been deleted (and he evidently doesn't know - or doesn’t care - that it’s possible to undelete files if the computer hasn't been wiped with military efficiency). There are several folders apparently left there specifically for his eyes.

At first, these files make no sense (there's a folder titled 'My Dead' which includes his name, for example) along with a handful of others. Some folders contain seemingly random photographs taken all across Paris, others feature entertaining stories (with one or two somewhat boring ones). A couple of the stories relate that TI has killed at least two guys: guys who were evidently suicidal anyway, but this nonetheless makes her at best a Jack Kevorkian-like facilitator and at worst, a murderer. But are the stories true, or are they merely fiction?

BC slowly discovers that TI has left for him a kind of treasure map, whereby if he follows her slightly cryptic clues, which for him are not so cryptic since he knows both TI and Paris so well, he can uncover "treasure" in the form of notebooks or other items (such as, for example, an umbrella) left for him in various hidden locales, secreted in landmarks or hidden in places he and she knew together. These treasures provide further clues which lead him on a journey.

One journey he discovers that he's too chicken to undertake, is to follow a clue which would necessitate him sneaking down into the Paris Metro (subway, underground) tunnels. I thought that this maybe significiant for the novel's finale - and it is! Eventually these clues take him from Paris to Manhattan, where he meets the second female protagonist who accompanies him on his treasure hunt. Her name, curiously, is Beatrice! Curious that is, for me, since I'm currently immersed in writing a parody of Divergent! Yet another weird coincidence in my reading-writing adventures! Maybe I should write a novel à la Constable about those?!

At each place where I had to stop reading this, I found myself looking-forward to resuming it, which is always a good feeling for a reader. This story is a bit like a Dan Brown novel, but with a real story in place of the trade-marked high-speed Brownian motion. And this is enough spoilers for a new novel, so the rest of this review will be much mroe vague observations, not detailed descriptions, and the first of these is that Constable really has a charming way with his characters (the suicide note notwithstanding!). Their interactions (even with TI who can be obnoxious to him at times in his reminscences), and especially with Beatrice, are whimsical and endearing. There is a sly sense of humor running through their conversations which I very much appreciate.

His initial encounter and budding relationship with Beatrice at the New York Public Library and afterwards is completely captivating. I was impressed by the maturity and playfulness of the friendship, with both BC and Beatrice contributing equally to the bond which they created between them, and this is exactly how it should be in my mind. What a pleasure it is to read something of this quality after having dealt with some truly dreadful relationships in YA novels of late! It’s like comparing a blue ribbon mousse with several day-old, rubbery, chewy Jello which is of a flavor you didn’t even like to begin with.

The relationship doesn't come as a gilt-edged security however, because Beatrice is uncomfortable with all the coincidences which seem to be popping up, and rather leery of his treasure hunt. However this doesn’t appear to prevent their relationship from continuing to blossom. BC - who evidently hails from the Midlands (of England), just as I do - also begins to feel uncomfortable, but not with Beatrice. His discomfort comes from the fact that he's still receiving emails from TI forwarded to him by a third party (or from TI herself, perhaps). Whoever it is has evidently followed him from France to the US, and is tailoring the emails to his activities. He's being watched!

In the end, I was a bit disappointed in how this story came to a conclusion, even though it was entirely in character with what had happened before. Pretty much all of my theories were wrong - save one! I felt a bit cheated by the ending; however, given the quality of writing, and the characterization of the main protagonists, Ben, Tomomi, and Beatrice, I highly recommend this: it's excellently well-written and quite enchanting.