The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

Title: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Author: E. Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Hyperion Books
Rating: WORTHY

E(mily) Lockhart is the writer behind The Boy Book, The Boyfriend List, Dramarama, and Fly on the Wall. It would be unfair to start this review without quoting Frankie's bizarre (until you've read the novel, that is!) letter.

December 14, 2007
To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors,
Alabaster Preparatory Academy

I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order—including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy.

That is, I wrote the directives telling everyone what to do.

I. And I alone.

No matter what Porter Welsch told you in his statement...

Of course, the dogs of the Order are human beings with free will. They contributed their labor under no explicit compunction. I did not threaten them or coerce them in any way, and if they chose to follow my instructions, it was not because they feared retribution.

You have requested that I provide you with their names. I respectfully decline to do so. It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.

I would like to point out that many of the Order’s escapades were intended as social criticism. And that many of the Order’s members were probably diverted from more self-destructive behaviors by the activities prescribed them by me. So maybe my actions contributed to a larger good, despite the inconveniences you, no doubt, suffered.

I do understand the administration’s disgruntlement over the incidents. I see that my behavior disrupted the smooth running of your patriarchal establishment. And yet I would like to suggest that you view each of the Loyal Order’s projects with the gruntlement that should attend the creative civil disobedience of students who are politically aware and artistically expressive.

I am not asking that you indulge my behavior; merely that you do not dulge it without considering its context.

Yours sincerely,
[Signature]
Frances Rose Landau-Banks,
class of 2010

This novel begins, as you saw, with a letter of confession from Frances Rose Landau-Banks regarding certain disreputable activities which take place during the first semester of her sophomore high school year. She owns up to being the ring-leader for a reputable reason. Frankie fell afoul of reputability despite advice from her best friend is Trish, who is the daughter of a psychiatrist and who does a pretty darned amazing job of psychoanalyzing people's behaviors herself. Why is it, in these novels, that all-too-often, I find myself preferring the best friend over the main character?! In this case, however, it's a tough call.

So Frankie is now a sophomore at Alabaster prep school, but none of the more senior boys even remember her from her freshman year; they think she's a new student. There seems to be a significant memory loss problem at this school. If it were a paranormal novel I’d be suspicious that some supernatural evil was at work here, but since it isn’t, I have to assume that we’re being telegraphed here that Frankie is going to shoot to super stardom before long, which will render her unforgettable.

The guy "Alpha", whom she met while at the beach just a couple of weeks before, claims he doesn’t remember her. Dean, who is annoyed that he first encountered her with the real alpha, Matthew, lies that he doesn’t know her just because of that. Matthew Livingston (I presume) denies that he knows her and is probably the only one of the three who is telling the truth. But the guys are amusing so Frankie isn’t angry with them. I agree with Frankie - the guys are amusing, but rather snotty. There are also some snotty girls hanging around, whom she meets at a depressing party on the golf links, and who don’t remember her either. Nor do they seem to have any wish for her acquaintanceship.

Frankie has learned of a society - the Basset Society - at the school, which is secret and open only to men. Matthew Livingston is apparently a member of this club. Frankie has a huge crush on him, which is a bit pathetic. It’s easy to condemn that, of course, but since Frankie is only a sophomore (~15 years old), I'm willing to allow her a bit more latitude than if she were your standard YA girl of 17, but you would think that, even at that age and especially in 2008, that she would realize that Matthew's future in his father's newspaper business is at best problematical when newspapers are going out of business at a phenomenal rate. Hasn’t Frankie heard of Internet media?!

Okay, it's confessional time. I'm hopelessly in love with Emily Lockhart/Jenkins/Whatever. Yes, I know it will do me absolutely no good whatsoever because she's having a riotous affair with the English language, which is, ironically, why I love her so much. I’d also be in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, but she's way too young for me! I do know that I want to read Lockhart/Jenkins's Dramarama ASAP. This novel, the one I'm currently reviewing The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is a tour de force. I'm recommending it right now even before I've finished it because, as I said recently about another joyous novel, I don’t care if the ending sucks stinking rotten green wieners, it’s eminently worth reading just for what it offers this far.

Frankie is a very curious person; not curious as in peculiar, but curious as in curiosity killed the cat (I wonder, was that Schrödinger's cat - and what if it’s still alive?). Frankie is also rather insecure, which is understandable, given her age. She loves being a part of Matthew's elite school group, and is constantly in some fear of losing his favor, which leads her to testing his commitment, both surreptitiously and quite often.

She's also a bit curious about Alpha, and why he so often seems to call Matthew away when the latter is supposed to be spending time with Frankie. Is he jealous of her hogging Matthew, or of Matthew hogging her? And why does Matthew always go, choosing Alpha over her? Her insecurity isn’t helped by the fact that one of the elite, Dean, dumps his girlfriend Sarah - someone whom Frankie doesn’t even like that much - and it becomes painfully apparent that no-one in the elite will even speak to Sarah after that. Frankie wonders if the same thing would happen to her - that the guys are only friendly towards her because she's with Matthew, not because they actually like her and enjoy her company in her own right.

On one of these occasions, she tails Matthew and finds that he's meeting secretly in the old arts theater, with a dozen or so guys, some of whom Frankie knows from sitting at the elite table in the cafeteria. She knows this group is the secret order of the basset hounds, because her father was a member. He would never tell Frankie a thing about it - except the one time he did reveal that there was a 'Disreputable History' diary squirreled away somewhere, which details the nefarious exploits of the order.

Frankie begins routinely spying on the order's meetings, and she discovers that they do not even know that there is such a diary. She realizes, at the same time, that the loyalty oath which they repeat at the start of each meeting is actually a riddle pointing to where the history is hidden. She turns detective and actually discovers the secret hiding place of the diary, whereupon she retrieves it and reads it shamelessly, learning all the secrets of this men's club! The secrets pretty much amount to nothing more than carrying on some college-student style pranks, although they did seem to be a bit more wild and inventive, and to have more fun than the current members do. The group started in 1951 and appears to have lost the location of the diary in the mid seventies. Things seems to have rather fizzled since then. Ultimately, though, Frankie realizes that the real value of the group is not the pranks they pull but the camaraderie engendered amongst them, and the enduring friendships which are spawned between them. She notes that this is something which is sorely lacking in her own life.

This novel makes Sloppy Firsts look like sloppy seconds. It's the novel which that one ought to have been but failed.

Having finished this now I can confirm my earlier decision to fully recommend this excellent novel. No, the ending wasn't a disaster, though I have to admit to some surprise and a bit of dismay engendered from reading it. Things don’t turn out peachy and commendably, which is fine, and Lockhart/Jenkins doesn't neatly pair off Frankie with anyone (not even Trish!). That was a warm and welcome surprise, but the dismay came from the ending being so bleak! I didn’t expect, and indeed didn’t hope for a sunny, happy, joy-joy ending, but I was a bit discomfited by Frankie being left in so stark a position, shunned and treated with suspicion in so many quarters, although in some ways I guess I do concur that this is exactly where she needed to be.

I loved Lockhart/Jenkins's pursuit of English language's 'missing inversions', such as there not being a word 'maculate' to pair with immaculate, and there not being an 'advertant' to pair with inadvertent (actually, both of these cases there is such a word!). She has this amazing section where she launches into this, inspired by PG Wodehouse (I've never read any Wodehouse. The closest I came was watching Hugh Laurie's and Stephen Fry's TV series which I recommend). Wodehouse at one point apparently uses the word 'gruntled' as opposed to disgruntled, and this really catches Frankie's imagination. She starts using these fake inverted words routinely, causing amusement and confusion amongst her fellow students. That part really caught my imagination because it’s well within the range of the kind of thing I like to do when I'm writing.

In the end, I think The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is the most feminist and rebellious novel I've ever read. The way she takes charge and dives into this so expertly and so deviously is, I'm afraid to say (because in some ways it’s so insulting) masterful! She kicks ass and doesn’t even bother taking names. Instead she takes liberties. Her story and her behavior are wonderful. In many ways, a sequel to this would be a crime, because it’s hard to imagine any sequel ever being capable of recapturing the charm and skill of the original, but I can't prevent myself from feeling that I want to see Frankie in college, or if not there, then in business after she graduates, surreptitiously taking charge and undermining the male patriarchy! She's wonderful!

Don't Look Away by Leslie A. Smith

Title: Don't Look Away
Author: Leslie A. Smith aka Leslie Kelly
Publisher: LK Books
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.

This is Book 1 of the 'Veronica Sloan' series. I don’t know if Leslie Smith got married and decided to change her name, or got divorced and did likewise, or just wanted to separate her action-adventure name from her romance novels, but if it was the latter, it doesn’t seem to have worked since Don't Look Away is out under both her names! The 'Smith' attributed version is copyrighted to the Kelly name. I'm not sure what the wisdom or even the point is of that, but there you have it!

The novel is well-written apart from a minor quirk here and there, like the name 'Carr' misspelled as 'car' on P202. But this is a proof copy, so maybe these things are all ironed out in the press version. The writing is to the point, moving the tale, and not overly dramatic or underly so. There is a small but slightly disturbing amount of genderism going on, but not enough to turn my stomach. I found it amusing that she uses the phrase "out in Texas" rather than "down in Texas". The novel is some 338 pages, but it’s spaced very generously; if it were more compact it would be significantly shorter. The spacing reminds me of how I did Saurus before I became fully clued-in to the idiosyncrasies of word-processor formatting. It just goes to show that page count really doesn't convey diddly without also knowing the spacing and font details; that's why I quit including a page count in my reviews. It’s really irrelevant in this age of ebooks, anyway.

Set in the second quarter of the 21st century, in Washington DC, this is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic story. The apocalypse was some (only vaguely described) terrorist attack of such magnitude that it devastated the mall area of DC, killed the president, and destroyed the White House. The attack changed things even more significantly than the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon did, so the new bookmark is 10/20, not 9/11. I'm not sure why Smith/Kelly went there when the overall story would have worked just fine had it been set in 2013.

At around the time of the bombings, there was a program to 'chip' people - that is to embed in a person's skin a microchip which would contain basic data about that person. This technology is available now, and I can see it becoming wide-spread in the future. I know a lot of people reject this 'big brother' idea, but if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to snide. I don’t see the logic to a society that will chip pets but not children, and then whine when children are abducted and we can't find them. Do we value our vehicles more than children so that we will LoJack a car and then reject that same security for a child? I guess so. We obviously believe strongly in lighting car dealerships far more brilliantly at night than we'll ever light up residential neighborhoods. That says a lot about American values, doesn’t it?

Police detective Veronica Sloan and her partner Mark Daniels are called to a murder in the basement of the under-construction White House. The reason Ronnie is called is because she's in the 'Optical' squad (Smith/Kelly doesn't know how to coin a good acronym! The squad is Optical Evidence Program Investigative Squad, or O.E.P.I.S. as she writes it - pronounced, presumably, E-piss? I think it needs a better name!). It's an elite group of law-enforcement officers spread across the country who have high security clearance, specialized training, and a camera embedded in their head, tied to their optic nerve. I guess it's a bit like Kiera Cameron's rig in Continuum. The reason Ronnie is called in is that victim is also an OEPIS member. You might think a crime like this would be easy to solve, even one so gruesome that her body is cut to pieces, quite literally. Unfortunately, the head containing the camera is, in her case, missing!

It seemed to me from the start that there was a big flaw in this system. It evidently can detect when life is terminated, but no-one thought to have it set up to send an encrypted burst-transmission of data recorded since the last archiving, to a secure location, if the bearer is dying. If it had, they would have a lot more chance of figuring this out. As it is, with the head gone, they’re screwed in every way but pleasant. I'm also a bit surprised at the evident reticence of Ronnie and her partner to actually go look at Leanne's previously archived material to see what she was doing and with whom she was involved. I would have thought that would be the first priority, lacking other evidence. The murder took place during a festival and there were some 55,000 people in the mall at the time, so their potential suspect pool is overwhelmingly huge!

Oh, and someone needs to clue Smith/Kelly in that it's not "rocket to air missiles"! I think she means surface-to-air. Along that same line of thinking, the term 'optical camera' is a tautology, but these minor flaws aside, I can see myself wanting to read a sequel to this if the novel continues to be a decent read as it has shown itself to be so far. Admittedly some of my complaints are no more than pet peeves, but some are issues with the writing of the novel, and it’s appropriate to address them because my blog isn’t just about reading and reviewing, it’s about the writing process and the English language, and I've begun to realize that while I do touch on this often, I don't spend anywhere near enough time on discussing those things in relation to what I'm reading.One thing which piqued my interest was Smith/Kelly's use of "utilizing" (or "utilize(d)"). I noticed this three times in the space of a few pages on p74, p79, p83. It was sufficiently distracting that I did a search for it then, purely out of curiosity! I never would have been able to do this were this a real book rather than a virtual ebook! My search pulled these terms up on p154, p237, p297, p328, which isn't that often I suppose, but they did jump out at me because that words bothers me!

Now obviously this is Smith/Kelly's novel, and it's entirely up to her how she writes it and which words she chooses, but as for me, I've never liked that word. It seems...what’s the word? Pretentious? Officious? Overblown? I've never been a fan of using a more complex word when a simpler one will suffice, unless of course, you're going for some particular effect, so each time I read one of those uses, I found myself distracted from the text, wondering what was wrong with substituting "using" or "making use of." Maybe no one else will notice, and it’s not a criticism of this novel but definitely a criticism of writing in general!

Having said all that, there are some things specific to this novel. One of these is the seemingly contradictory text at one point where Smith/Kelly writes that Ronnie "...wanted the darkness", but immediately afterwards has her switch on her flashlight! That made no sense to me and stuck out like a sore thumb. Another thing which perked-up my interest is where Smith/Kelly says of the perp, "...he'd covered his tracks." The big allusion here is to the gender of the perp. I don’t know if she gave this away on purpose, or was just using unfortunately gender-laden terminology, but that's not what really interested me. The way this is written, it's impossible to tell if these are thoughts that Ronnie is entertaining, or if it's just the way Smith/Kelly wrote it. If the latter is the case, then was it deliberate, or merely thoughtless? Sneaky or sloppy? I don’t know. If it was the former, does it betray that female hero Ronnie is genderist in her thinking?!

Back to the story! There's a big effort at a red-herring with a character called Bailey! Should I bite? Is it a red-herring? It’s hard to say! Right around this time is when Ronnie herself is attacked by the perp, who is returning the vic's head to the scene of the crime, and runs into Ronnie in the process. She's in the basement by herself, of course. We've been treated to a few of the perp's thoughts, but not many. "He" seems conflicted about taking the head. What bothers me about this particular event is that no one seems to realize that their 55,000 suspect pool has now been drastically narrowed. Clearly, this can only have been done by someone who has access to the site, able to pass through all the security, and doing so while carrying a victim's head in some sort of container, yet none of the investigating officers pick up on this: that he had to get the head out of there on day one, and then get it back in there that day he attacked Ronnie. This is a huge clue. All Ronnie wonders is if there is a tunnel still in use - one which was not sealed and filled in after the 10/20 attacks. Is that the case?

Because of the attack on Ronnie (which incapacitates her to unconsciouness for eight straight hours!), Jeremy Sykes shows up. He's a very competitive OEPIS trainee, with whom Ronnie locked horns repeatedly. She decided never to pursue that relationship, but she has a sadly adolescent crush on him which completely stalls the story for me. There's a hugely annoying amount of 'Ronnie instadore' over Jeremy, which really turned me off because instead of getting on with the investigation which is what I'm interested in, many more than half her thoughts are now focused on Jeremy instead of on solving the murder. And there's been another murder - of another OEPIS member - in Philadelphia! But this swooning by Ronnie over Jeremy is nauseating, frankly and IMO it rather belittles and demeans her.

The set-up for the second murder is really cheesy since Smith/Kelly goes out of her way to describe how sugary the relationship is between the new vic and his wife. To me, a murder isn’t somehow worse because the victim was in a beautiful relationship; all murders are awful. The second murder is also rendered absurdist with the description of the discovery of the second victim's head and how it made the girl (who was coming in to work) panic and run in front of a garbage truck. How abusively genderist is that? If the employee was a guy, would he have screamed and ran?! And if this girl was so badly injured after this, then how can the police possibly know the circumstances of how she discovered the body?! That struck me as a bit thoughtless. This scene seemed to offer a big clue indicating that the victim was being watched for some time - at least a couple of weeks and perhaps more - before the perp struck, but nothing is made of this at all. Was the victim being watched using his own downloaded video? Was this crime committed by someone who is high-up in the OEPIS hierarchy?

We truly enter tropesville when Ronnie proves how super-tough and dedicated she is by checking herself out of the hospital against medical advice. I have a feeling that in the real world her supervisor would have something seriously unpleasant to say about an officer who tried to do that, especially when there's another competent OEPIS officer now on the case. How many times do we see this trope in in books, and on TV and in movies: the overworked cop cliché, working super-extra-hard and going without sleep, cases piling up? I am not impressed by that. It just annoys me.

Once Ronnie's old OEPIS nemesis Jeremy came back into the picture - as we knew he would, of course! - I also got the overwhelming feeling that her partner Mark Daniels isn’t going to survive this novel. Was I right? You'll have to read it to find out! Recall that this is the start of a series, so how is it going to proceed? Is the next volume going to be Ronnie and Mark again with no Jeremy in the picture? I doubt it. Not with the way Smith/Kelly gushes about how hot Ronnie is for Jeremy. Or is Mark going to be quietly eliminated, to provide yet more amped-up angst, and allow Jeremy to slide into his place somehow? It's pretty obvious that if anyone is killed off it's not going to be Jeremy!

An out of left field surprise is that Mark is revealed to be a OEPIS member. I either missed this earlier in the text, or it really is out of left field, because I don’t remember this being broached at all! He's not mentioned in connection with the training "out in Texas"! Maybe I'm wrong and I just missed it.

There's a weak spot (at least that's how it looks to me) when Smith/Kelly has a barcode reader read the RFID chip embedded in (Ronnie's mentor) Doctor Tate's arm! Surely that should be a RFID reader and not a barcode reader? It gets worse as Ronnie and Jeremy are both asked to put their palm onto the palm reader so they can be granted access to the facilities in pursuit of their investigation. My question here is: how does the system know which of them is putting their palm on the reader? Does it already have their fignerprints and can figure it out? Maybe, but it bothers me a bit that this isn’t explained.

The pair of them is required to go to Tate's lab to look at the implanted cameras which were recovered from both victims. We get a bit of the movie Disclosure here. If you saw that movie you'll recall the absurd 3D database which Michael Crichton cluelessly had some people explore. In the movie, they excused his cluelessness by explaining that this was just a proof-of-concept thing: that in real life, it would be used for other more practical purposes.

Smith/Kelly is wiser than Crichton, because she employs it much more realistically. It still seems like overkill to me, but it would look good in a movie! In the lab, they meet Eileen Cavanaugh - Doctor Tate's assistant - and are treated to a firm handshake, James Bond style! I think this 'firm-handshake tells you a lot about a person' trope is pure bullshit, but whatever. Eileen is, of course, "drop-dead gorgeous" and has "ample curves". That bothered me. It’s already hard enough to get women into science and engineering. Are we aiming to further dissuade them by implying that you'll really only have standing there if you're hot, or if you're geeky (which is the other clichéd extreme)? I'd rather some characters were just everyday, regular people like they are in real life! There seems to me to be no reason at all to amp up the Cavanaugh character given that it goes nowhere.

Okay! I think that's enough secrets to give away! Yeah, there were some issues with this novel, and the ending was a bit too mundane for me given the great build-up to it, but the story-telling in general was really good, and I will look forward to the sequel - which is sneakily set-up at the end, and perhaps does promise something rather more along the lines of what I'd been hoping for. So definitely a worthy read! After reading a few disasters lately, its so good to finally have the opportunity to read an ebook that really was a pleasure.

Semmant by Vadim Babenko

Title: Semmant
Author: Vadim Babenko
Publisher: Ergo Sum Publishing
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!

I could not get into this novel at all. I know Babenko is a seasoned and respected writer, but I wonder if that's because he's "foreign" rather than because he has anything worthy to tell. Whatever the explanation, his seasoning was written off as far as I'm concerned. The blurb fooled me into believing it was going to be something interesting about AIs and technology and the human condition, but I saw very little AI and technology, very little human condition, and a lot of somewhat abusive adolescent sexual fantasy, which puts this novel right in the same boat as The Prelude as far as I'm concerned. The only strong feeling I got from it was that it ought to have been titled 50 Shades of A(I).

After plowing through the overwhelmingly massive info-dump of the first five chapters, I had pretty much lost all interest and found myself skimming the remaining chapters, glancing them over, reading a paragraph here and there because that was all I could bring myself to do. This tale felt much more like it should have been a short-story rather than a novel, and the endless description of obsession with women, and the notable absence of decent conversation was really wearing. There was far too much telling, and no showing to speak of.

The story is of Bogdan Bogdanovich, who creates an AI he calls Semmant. I have no idea why this name was chosen when 'Pedant' would have served just as well for a title. I must have missed that bit. Semmant is designed to beat the financial markets and does so very well. How this translates into it learning of Bogdan's 'human condition' I have no idea, because once Semmant is created, we pretty much bid it farewell, and descend into Bogdan's juvenile, somewhat cruel, and very shallow sexual fantasies and obsessions with one woman or another, all of which depended very little on technology or intelligence, artificial or otherwise. I have no interest in Bogdan or his women. I don’t care about his spoiled-rotten life or how it all comes crashing down around him or where he ends up. I really don’t. I tried to, but I had any reason to care sucked right out of me by the juvenile sex-obsession. I could neither sympathize nor empathize, nor even understand what it was Bogdan thought he was after, nor why he couldn’t find it, so I can't rate this novel as at all worthy, not even a little bit.

The Diviners by Libba Bray

Title: The Diviners
Author: Libba Bray
Publisher: Little, Brown
Rating: worthy

This starts out in the second-half of 1926 (at least I assume that's when it starts because Libba Bray mentions the death of Rudolph Valentino, who died in late August that year from complications following surgery for appendicitis and gastric ulcers. The first chapter/prologue is depicted as late summer which supports that view. But the 1926 year is betrayed by Bray later in the story when she shows off with her research and includes - as though it's fresh news - an item which took place a year earlier and would have been well out of the headlines by 1926.

Desperate to keep the attention of her guests, a coming-of-age hostess of a party pulls out a Ouija board. I'm a fan of Libba Bray, but this is such an old saw! It would hardly likely to be of great interest to young party-goers in the 1920s who were already bored. They'd hardly be likely to forgo moving on to a better venue in favor of dicking around with a child's toy. I think Bray could have done far better than this, and I have to say it's one of very many really good reasons not to read prologues! So, inevitably, the use of the Ouija board unleashes an evil spirit called Naughty John. Seriously? That sounds like a venue for "cottaging'! And like the almighty Satan himself needs to be granted permission by a pathetic piece of wood before he can carry out his evil?

I have to admire Bray's deception in not numbering the chapters; I read that prologue without being able to distinguish it from the main body of the novel. Very sneaky! You know that authors the world over are actively working on devious tricks to get me to read their sad prologues, don't you? Rest assured that I shall resist as much as is humanly possible, but even with my superhuman powers, I have to confess that I can - occasionally - be misled by those more devious than my pure heart can expose.

On a point of order: Bray seems intent upon squeezing famous names of the era into her story that sometimes it makes more nonsense than sense. She tries to include the Scopes trial, Dutch Schultz, and Sacco and Vanzetti all together, but it seems to me that it's not very likely that newspaper vendors would be screaming about any two of these at the same time, as though they're all fresh news! And she really hits a clunkier when she describes Babe Ruth as the Sultan of Swing! I didn't know he was in a band LOL!

This is a mistake new authors seem to make: give their story "too much" authenticity - but Bray isn't new at all, so I don't know what she thinks she's up to here. She does throw in an occasional hackneyed phrase like "...large, blinking blue orbs that made Evie think of an owl", but in general she writes well. For me personally, I don't care what the newspaper headlines are unless they're honestly relevant to the story in some way. It sure doesn't inform, much less impress me, nor does it move along the story, to throw all this stuff in just to show that you did some research. It's fiction, for goodness sakes! Move the story! That's all you need to do, move it along, make it interesting, and I'll be impressed even if you've done absolutely no research! I honestly don't care about how much research you did unless the story is so boring or bad that I find myself wanting to pick the threads loose just for the sake of it.

Anyway, right after this we meet Evangeline Mary O'Neill, who is the main female protagonist. Seventeen-year-old Evie is a bit too much of a rebel, frankly, and Libba Bray does seem obsessed with seventeen-year-old Irish girls, doesn't she?! Anyway, Evie can divine things about a person by holding something of theirs. This fiction actually has a name, believe it or not: Psychometry. This, along with all other paranormal claims is complete and utter bullshit, but this is fiction, so I don't care if it appears in this story as long as the story framework can reasonably bear it! At a party, she declares that the guy (whose ring she is holding) has made a maid pregnant and from this erupts a scandal from which Evie is sent packing by her parents. They send her to New York City, and which they think is a punishment but which, to Evie, is heaven.

I actually rather liked Evie at that point. The first thing she encounters in NYC is a pick-pocket by the name of Sam Lloyd (at least he claimed that was his name) who lifts twenty dollars from her pocket. I assumed that this gentleman is the first of a love-triangle which Bray was brewing. Evie arrives at her uncle Will's occult museum, and meets the staid assistant by the absurd name of Jericho Jones. He's the object of Evie's NYC friend Mabel's affection. For some utterly unexplained reason, he knows Evie without any introduction and Evie doesn't find this remotely strange.

The third leg of the love triangle (I'm assuming, at this point, but as usual I'm probably wrong - note, I was!) is Memphis Campbell, a guy living in Harlem and running numbers for the Harlem crime lord Papa Charles. Memphis wants to get out of the crime world and write poetry for the rest of his life. He also has the power to heal by the laying on of hands. One night, walking home by a round-about route, he passes a dark, shambles of a house on a hill and gets a creepy feeling from it. That's no doubt because Naughty John Hobbes (seriously - we can't find a more subtle pseudonym than John Hobbes?) is at that moment murdering a woman right there in the house, to evidently unleash the Four Horsemen - and I'm not talking about Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and the much lamented Christopher Hitchens!.

Evie decides that her uncle's museum, which is in severe financial difficulties, needs a boost. She also plans on painting the town red, but where she hopes to get the money to do this is a mystery. She only has about eight dollars to her name. She is staying in the Bennington Hotel, a once fine place which has lost a lot of its sheen. She hangs with Mabel and meets a Ziegfeld Follies girl by the unlikely name of Theta Knight, Theta, of course, having a value of nine, and its symbol - an X or a cross withing a circle being the ancient Egyptian symbol for the soul, is loaded with meaning. In the cabala, for example, the number 9 is associated with the Hebrew word for truth: emet. Theta takes a shine to Evie and renames her 'Evil'. She also meets two old sisters by the names of Adelaide and Lillian, who are also evidently psychic.

Evie's adventures continue as she continues herself to be irresponsible, out only for a good time, thinking of no-one but herself. She comes to an arrangement with a newspaper man who will give her uncle's museum a sly boost in return for her feeding him snippets about the investigation. Memphis, meanwhile, has been undergoing some revelations of his own. His fascination with the old house on the hill continues, and his younger brother Isaiah is spouting dire warnings in his sleep, which Memphis doesn’t understand.

Evie, Jericho, and Sam cook up (Sam Cook! Lol!) a scheme to visit a religious community which, along with its burned-up forebear of half a century ago, is based shamelessly on the now defunct Branch Davidian community in Waco, Texas. It's said that there were no survivors of that older community, but I'm wondering if Memphis's blind guitar-playing friend Bill is actually a survivor - and that's how he became blind? I'm probably wrong on that, but we'll see!

They learn enough there to throw suspicion on that community as having some kind of ties to the string of murders. Visiting an old professor of her uncle's, Evie and Will find a book which details the eleven steps to letting loose the anti-Christ, but they can't figure out why the killer seems to have started on step five. I'm wondering if they dug a little deeper, they'd discover that steps one through four were completed fifty years before, when the portentous comet in the sky last visited, and the older religious cult was still in business. They note that one of the most interesting things about this book is that the last two pages - sporting instructions on how to defeat the anti-Christ, have been torn from the book.

One night, Evie goes out with Mabel, Theta, and Henry, who is Theta's piano-playing gay friend, to visit the 'Hotsy-Tosy' club (yes, they really did have that kind of ridiculous name back then). This club is supposedly under the protection of Memphis's employer, but it's unaccountably raided by police. Mabel and Evie are arrested, and Mabel gives Evie such a what-for that even she is given pause for thought. Theta escapes with Memphis and so it looks, after all, like those two are going to get together, especially since both of them have been having exactly the same dream for the last six months.

Uncle Will is furious with Evie. He had forbidden her from going out in the first place because of the murders, yet she went out anyway and then she got herself arrested! He is in process of arranging for her to return to Ohio, and she is so desperate that she reveals to him her ability to read objects. He's impressed enough that he relents and allows her to remain with him as long as she doesn't disobey him again, and as long as she starts to pull her weight around the museum.

That's when they learn of another death - this time of a man at the Masonic lodge, who is burned to death on the altar, and who is missing his feet. Clearly someone is gathering body parts, perhaps intent upon animating those parts, which will then become the anti-Christ. Evie decides this has gone far enough; she needs to do something about this, and she surreptitiously wanders by the body while the men are all distracted in discussion. She steels her stomach and her nerves, and she firmly grasps the Masonic ring which the victim is wearing in the hope that she will read sufficient clues from it to stop this horror. She gets a whistled song, and the door is about to open so she can see who it is who is whistling, but one of the cops pulls her away from the body, breaking her contact.

You know one problem with reading a book that I'm really enjoying is that lunchtime at work seems depressively short! Anyway, Evie discovers by accident what the whistled song is, and this leads her to go to the library to research John Hobbes - a convicted and hanged killer from half a century before who was discovered with ten dead bodies in the house. This was curiously the very time when the comet last appeared, and she discovers that there was, at that time, at least one killing where symbols were found on the victim, but her idiot uncle Will dismisses this as Mere conjecture. He can see no real connection between what happened half a century ago and what is happening now, but it looks like I was right (for once!) in theorizing that Hobbes is back to complete what he had only begun half a century in the past.

Another clue arrives when Memphis himself shows up at the museum to solve a mystery of his own. He meets Evie and mentions a couple of things which really pique her interest, but then he runs away as soon as her back is turned! I have no idea what Bray thinks she's up top here. It's out of character for Memphis and offers only artifice, not mystery, but it does provide a way, klutzy as it is, to have Memphis encounter Theta again by 'accident'!

Bray sometimes doesn’t always seem to get the difference between having a character say something in 20's lingo (which doesn’t work for me: too much of that keeps reminding me that I'm reading a story, not lost in the wonders of a new world) and narrating the story in such lingo. In addition to this, I'm also a bit concerned that Evie, the supposedly plucky feminine hero of the story, is such a slave to fashion to the point where she's talking Mabel into changing her own personal style to match the fad of the moment! However, in Bray's favor, I have to say that she doesn't shy away from tough, the mean, and the hard to read. Theta's story, in particular, is sobering to say the least.

There's a chapter called 'Prelude'! Evie, Will & co are stupid not to tell Detective Malloy what they know about the Knowles house, especially after Evie stupidly went there with Mabel. Evie's coat got snagged on something and she left a fragment of it there. Now Naughty John (like saucy Jack) has her scent. He sneaks into the museum one night and both leaves something and takes something. Evie and Will visit John Hobbes's girlfriend from fifty years before. She's now old, of course, and sick, but she's in love with Hobbes. Evie pockets a ring of Hobbes's and plans to use it to track him down. They discover that he was buried with his pendant after the hanging, and on the grounds of the religious cult. They head up there to dig up his grave and recover the pendant, believing that if they can destroy it, they can stop all this. Why they don't simply go burn down the Knowles house is an unanswered question.

At the fair which they visit as a cover for their real plans for recovering the pendant, Evie runs into some cult members who throw mud at her and call her a harlot. It's been pretty obvious for some time that Evie will be the subject of the final tableau, but if there had been any doubt, this event clears all that away! The tableaux are really a straight rip-off of Dexter season six which starts quite literally with Those Kinds of Things.

The Diviners really deteriorates at the end. It’s obvious that Bray intends to parlay this into a series of some sort, which begs the question as to why this first volume is so massive, and answers the question of why so many characters are introduced and then have very little to say for themselves. The murder is solved, of course, and 'Naughty John' (a name which frankly sucks IMO) is brought to book entirely through the efforts of Evie. There's no spoiler in giving that away. But it doesn’t end there.

It dissolves into a few short chapters of oddball unconnected stuff going on which offers no closure and basically is nothing more than an extended introduction to volume two. There is no "team" brought together, and there's no real offered as to what value a volume two might have - other than further cogitation on the pseudo-mysteries opened up on this volume. But those mysteries offer no attraction to me. I don’t really care what they are, or what becomes of these characters, so volume two is a book I am not planning on reading. This novel was a moderate worthy, but it's nowhere near powerful enough to make me want to pursue these people or their mysteries. Perhaps you will.

Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty

Title: Sloppy Firsts
Author: Megan McCafferty
Publisher: Broadway Books
Rating: warty

At some seventy pages in (of some 300) I have to say I'm wondering what the point of this novel is! Not that I'm nauseated or repulsed by it or anything - it's a decent read as far as it goes, but it isn't really going anywhere! If what I've read so far is a measure of what's to come, I really don't feel up for another 230 or so pages of this, especially since the female protagonist uses the non-word "bizillion" every other page. Usually something happens in the first few pages of a story to give the reader an idea of what's going on - what the obstacle is which the hero must overcome, where the adventure will lead - but that never happens in this one. Oh, and you'll have to wait for p250 before you ever learn why the novel is titled Sloppy Firsts, and even then the 'explanation' makes zero sense unless McCafferty has some weird-ass interpretion of what the term 'sloppy seconds' means....

This novel is nothing more than the diary of a sixteen-year-old who is significantly out of touch with the real world, and as interesting as that premise could be, it isn't anywhere near enough for me to offer my regard as it's written. Not with this diary! Although it did give me a great idea of a novel of my own! That's the problem with reading both good and bad novels - I get all kinds of ideas which I'm never, ever going to get the chance to bring to publication - not all of them!

The Jessica diary is split into sections by month and consists of random days described by our hero. Each chapter has the date for a header. Between the monthly sections is a letter which Jessica has written to her friend Hope, but we're never treated to Hope's responses. Now are we to conclude that Hope doesn't respond, and Jessica merely thinks she does? Or is Hope nothing but a complete fiction to begin with?

The darling of this tale is Jessica, a highly intelligent and quite athletic girl who has (so we're given to understand) lost her best friend not to death or to an irretrievable breakdown of friendship, but to her friend moving away from the area. Jessica was pretty much addicted to Hope and now she's hopeless. There was nothing other than friendship between them (at least as far as I can tell) but Jessica is rendered aimless by her departure. She's reduced to hanging out with the sorry threesome with which Jessica used to hang, yet Jessica largely detests them. She's being pressured to date the school jock, Scotty, especially with her older sister's wedding rapidly approaching, but she detests him, too. It seems highly likely she will date him at least for a time, but she's doubtlessly going to end up dating the school drug addict Marcus (yes, it's that obvious), someone who she claims to detest.

A new girl to the school, named Hy, seems set to replace Hope as Jessica's best (on site) friend, but she feels guilty about even thinking of replacing Hope. Both of her parents are in situ, but she feels alienated from them and from her sister. Indeed, she sees no difference between her big sister and her mom! She has amusing takes on life at school and on her fellow students, but these are not nearly as funny as I'd hoped they would be; however, since I'm not totally turned off by this, I decided to stay with it and see where it leads. I have to confess that I'm already looking forward to getting through this so I can move on to the next novel on my reading list. That's not a good sign!

Jessica does date Scotty, but not quite how I'd envisioned it: it's really a virtual date, whereby he agrees to go to her sister's wedding, but then he starts having sex with a younger student and ditches Jessica. Later he decides it was a mistake, but Jessica won't have any more to do with him. So she is capable of making smart decisions.

One day at school, she fakes "feminine troubles" to get out of watching a school film, and is approached on the sly in the nurses's office by Marcus who wants her urine so he can pass a drug test. Like a moron she complies after he manipulates her into doing it. When the truth comes out, as it inevitably does, Marcus is busted for using someone else's urine, and some young female student - who wants to be a rebel, evidently - confesses to supplying the urine. So Jessica gets off Scot-free (so to speak!) and Marcus is hauled off and sent to some other facility, but I have no doubt he'll be back.

Jessica is taken for a medical check-up because she's tired all the time and hasn't had a period in six months. She has trouble sleeping and is stressed out, especially now that Hy seems to be hanging with the "Clueless Crew" (the threesome of the Hope era) and Jessica is slowly but surely being elbowed out - which doesn't bother her at all. I told you she was smart! This medical visit doesn't result in anything and is quickly forgotten even by the author.

The wedding arrives and Jessica hooks up with some guy who is the best man's younger brother, but though she plans on getting him alone and kissing him, she freaks out when he brings up the subject of sex, and she freaks out in a way which isn't commensurate at all with the approach he took towards raising the topic, especially since he was far too drunk by then to actually proceed with his suggestion! But then Jessica has shown herself to be severely unforgiving - first with Scotty, now with Cal, later with Hy.

Eventually, school is out and Jessica spends the summer working on the local board-walk. I guess Pineville is a lame kinda seaside resort, which had never really registered with me. Nor did it register - if indeed it had ever been mentioned - that Jessica was the third child in this family! The second, Matthew, died in infancy. Jessica sees herself as a "mistake". She spends her entire summer working on the boardwalk to save money while fantasizing about her upcoming visit to Hope for her birthday, but that's dashed when Hope gets a scholarship and starts her new school two weeks early. Jessica never does go to see her - not so far, anyway. I had thought that this impending visit had dashed my view that Hope actually doesn't exist, but that view now remains a possibility since the visit is canceled. She hears nothing from Hy - and neither do the Clueless Crew. The assumption is that she's gone back to NYC. Neither does she hear anything about Marcus, although she does think about him with an unhealthy frequency.

I was lying in bed reading this and realizing that I probably won't get it finished tonight when I also realized that for the first time I really don't care if I finish it or not. When I had only ~65 pages to go - roughly an hour's easy reading - I felt reasonably sure that I would rate this as a low-level worthy, but I was equally sure that I would never have any desire to read any more of this series - of which McCafferty has milked five volumes so far.

On a positive note, Jessica has realized how self-centered and shallow she is, which is a first for a YA novel in my experience. That alone would have rated it as worthy, all other things beign equal, which they enver are. It;s not so much that the novel is bad, it's just that it isn't good, and it comes off very poorly in a road test against a really well-written novel such as, for example, Sea of Tranquility, which was truly excellent, and You Against Me, which was remarkable.

So the crew comes back to school after the summer is over to find that Marcus is back (no surprise at all there) and that Hy was only at Pineville High school in the first place to do research for an article which got her a six figure novel deal and an entry into Harvard. Hy tries to contact Jessica, but Jessica refuses, foolishly, to deal with her, yet she lusts shamelessly after Marcus. That's what turned me off her completely. He abuses her to a large extent, and not in a physical way, but in a way which is just as harmful. This does inspire her to write an article for her school newspaper which wins her fans and notoriety, and which precipitates the clueless crew breaking up in a literal fight which gets all three of them suspended for a week. When she and Marcus begin talking at night (he can't sleep either; what a wonderful nightcap he makes) it's always Jessica who calls him - never the other way around.

If I hadn't read the last forty pages of this I would not have hesitated to continue with my plan to rate it as just worthy. But after reading those pages I honestly can't rate it that highly. I had to put up with a throw-away gay slur, with Jessica saying "bizillion" a "bizillion" times, with her endlessly depressive self-image, with her sad love affair with the ostensibly non-existent Hope, with Mccafferty thinking that the big muscle in your upper arm is a singular "bicep", with jessica's total, blind self-absoption, and with her fatuous instadore with Marcus.

It suddenly occurred to me that I'd been more than tolerant enough of McCafferty's masturbation only to get nothing in return for my patience and faith. You know you can behave that way and it can be seen as unconditional love, the love a parent has for their child(ren), but it can also been seen as a complete and utter waste of a life! I do not have sufficient love for McCafferty's writing to put up with this waste of my time and be as passive about it as Jessica is about her life!

Maybe if you're close to Jessica's age, you'll get more from this than I did, but please be warned that it goes so far downhill in the last forty pages that it ain't ever comin' back. Anything that starts with Marcus renaming Jessica as Darlene, and her passive acceptance, as ever, of that even as she agrees, for all practical purposes, to do with Marcus what Manda did to Bridget with Burke (an aptly-named character if there ever was one) can not be salvaged, not even by as frantic last minute effort by McCafferty. it was too little too late and it was just too much in a long line of not enough. I'm sorry, but worthy it ain't.

The Prelude by KaSonndra Leigh

Title: The Prelude: A Musical Interlude Novel
Author: KaSonndra Leigh
Publisher: KaSonndra Leigh 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.

Errata
P12 is missing a close quote after "Do we have a deal?"
P34 "She prances right up to where Luca Martuccio's sits."? "...where Luca Martuccio's party sits" maybe?
P71 "respond back" tautology.

I didn't like this novel at all, which makes me feel bad because I want to support independent publishers. I was put off it very quickly, and while I did try hard to read all the way through it, I found myself skipping sections because they were simply uninteresting.

Erin Angelo is the female protagonist who narrates the opening section, and she had lost my support by p13 when an "Adonis" walks in: Aleksandr Dostovsky. His mouth is "a heart-shaped ode to sex". Honestly? I just cannot picture a guy with a heart-shaped mouth in a frame designed to hold a picture of a great lover! It just doesn't work. I can picture a "French fop" from an historical romance with a heart-shaped mouth. I can picture an adorable infant with a heart-shaped mouth. But a leading man? No. I'm not sure what I expected with this novel, but I did expect more maturity and class than this, especially given the Italian opera angle. Are we being told an actual story here or are we merely the uncomfortable audience for an author's 222 page wet dream? Perhaps it would have been better titled Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Porn?

"Adonis" tells us that he likes to be called Alek Dostov, although that sounds more like something an American would say than a Russian, and we're offered no real reason to believe that a man like him would shorten his name for the convenience of others. But his "god-like" accent turns Angelo on, apparently stirring things she hasn’t felt in ages. Unfortunately, stirring things like that tends to bring a lot of murk and pollutants to the surface. This does bring on a full-blown asthma attack in Angelo, but she still manages to speak in complete sentences! Yes, she's that amazing!

He gets her inhaler, she gets to suck, and she's finally able to obsesses on his eyes, telling him they're unusual; then she checks herself and apologizes saying that it was inappropriate! This is after this stranger has been stroking his thumb along her cheek and she saw nothing untoward about that! Talk about double standards. And why make Dostov Russian, but then refer to him in terms of Greek gods? Why not just make him Greek? Unemployment is sky-high in Greece right now. A Greek guy looking for work abroad is not an uncommon thing at all.

Angelo is in love with his accent. He says "Did I not?" and she hears it as "Deed I knot?" Maybe it's just me, but I don't see how 'not' is different from 'knot' in pronunciation. You can argue that those three particular words actually mean something else and this is what Angelo sees, but that's not how Leigh conveys it to us. Or if that's what she intended, she ties herself in knots trying to do it! Neither is Dostov a 'maestro' as he's referred to all-too-often. No one at 23 gets that appellation. Maestro means something. It's an insult to music to toss an honor like that away, and it's a betrayal of what Leigh is supposedly trying to do with this novel.

'Maestro' doesn't mean stud, or tough guy, or sex god, or even heart-shaped mouth; it has a real meaning related to music (usually) and Dostov has no cred whatsoever in that regard. What's he done? In 23 years he has not put in anywhere near sufficient time to earn such a title. Nor are we ever treated to any kind of explanation from Leigh as to why he should carry such an honorific, or what he could possibly have done to merit it at so youthful an age.

Bear in mind (or given 'deed I knot' above, perhaps 'baring mined' might be more accurate?!) that this is obviously the guy who's being introduced as the instadore du jour, yet never once does Angelo consider being completely honest with him at their first encounter. She could have explained to him that the supplier had sent the wrong color fabric, and he could have found it refreshing that here was someone who was willing to be completely honest with him given the life he's led. This would have been the perfect opportunity to remove this novel from the "Twilight" zone and put it somewhere these tall tales seem to have an insurmoutable problem in going: into honesty and authenticity, but Leigh doesn't take us there. If Angelo had been completely honest with Dostov right there and then, that would have offered the possibility of a bond, shameless bond(!), being forged between them: something which might have led to a love rooted in something other than developmentally-retarded adolescent fantasy. As it is, Leigh looks like she's writing young-adult chest-pounding romance, betraying the entire genre in the xiphoid process.

When Leigh introduces us to the reason for titling her novel the way she did, I can see where she's going, and it’s admirable, but she fails to convince me that she's chosen the right title or knows how to play this piece. I see no respect accorded to the careers which are assigned to either actor in this drama. I found that very sad; it had me distracted from the story because I was wondering why someone would make their main characters a fashion designer and a musician if they're not then going to go somewhere with it - especially in a novel which supposedly has music at its core.

On that score, I'm not sure that 'prelude' is a proper fit, either. It seemed to me that what Leigh was really looking for was more along the lines of an overture; however, given that both parties had been in relationships before, perhaps prelude - the beginning of a new movement - is better than overture, which to me signifies the start of something brand new. The two are probably interchangeable at least to some degree, but this relationship was supposed to be the start of something brand new, yet neither party to it seemed to be making any original overtures.

I was intrigued by how Leigh introduced the music motif, but disappointed that it then goes nowhere, since it was the only thing which was holding my attention! The main characters are far too one-dimensional to inspire loyalty and too predictable to generate any interest. The setting was no better. I was not at all moved by this story supposedly taking place in Milan, because I felt none of the atmosphere of that city. Everyone in the story acts exactly like they're American, with American speech patterns and even their thought processes are as American as you can get.

Not only is there nothing to make us believe we're in Milan, there isn't anything to make us believe Angelo was ever in Austin, Texas, either. Take this example: "A road that ran along the swamp lands." In Austin, Texas? Texas which is in a three-year drought? Texas which had its driest year ever in 2011? What swamp? Does Leigh not understand that there's a difference between Texas and Louisiana? Or does she think Austin is on the coast with a salt marsh next door? That was suspension of disbelief out the door again.

Why was I uninspired by the two protagonists? We have Angelo, who is supposedly a fashion prodigy at 23. That I could just about buy, but even if I swallowed that unquestioningly, what does Leigh offer me in return, to validate my trust in her? Nothing! I'm sorry, but I can't buy that a fashion meteor like Angelo goes through life thinking of nothing - quite literally nothing whatsoever - save how hot Dostov is. She goes through the entire novel and never honestly contemplates fashion. She never dwells on her work, or ruminates other than briefly in passing on her ideas for designs. She never becomes engrossed in what needs to be done to get her opera project where it needs to be. There is no fashion in her head and that makes this character a complete fraud for me. Romy and Michele were more convincing as fashion designers than Angelo is.

Yeah, we get one evening where she sits and roughs out some sketches of things she wants to make, but that's it, and it's over far too quickly. We get to share none of her thought processes during this time: there's nothing about how she's viewing what she does, nothing about how she gets an idea and translates it onto the page; nothing about how she can see fabric giving a three-dimensional life to her drawings, nothing about the fit, flow and feel of the material. Remember this is told from her first person PoV (alternating with Dostov's), yet we almost never find a fashionable thought drifting anywhere in her mind! The young-Earth creationists have more intelligent design than she does, and I can't buy that she would be even remotely like that were she a real person - not even were she hopelessly in love as well. It's a betrayal of her entire life's choices to depict her this way.

Even Dostov agrees that Erin Angelo is simply uninteresting and has nothing to offer. I know this because when we get into his mind all he has going on is lust for her body. All he wants is her "boobs" under his hands, and honestly, given the way this story is told, who can blame him when she evidently has nothing else on display? We're reminded ad nauseam that he's a maestro, yet never once does a real musical thought enter his brain. He never thinks about his opera. He never thinks about the musical direction in which he's taking it. He never thinks about any piece of music he would compose or play. He never relates music to what's happening in the real world, or sees music in the everyday events of the real world. Not once. Not ever. And he's a "maestro", so we're expected to believe. Well I don't believe it; I've been offered no reason to do so, unless you count him raising and waving his baton all over the place. And yes, do rest assured that he's tapped a few podia with it. His name ought to be Do-stiff, not Dostov.

An example of how inappropriate he is to his position is clarified starkly when he asks Erin to perform in the opera in an important solo role. This made me laugh out loud because it was so brain-dead. Some maestro. An important opera is opening and some untried, untested girl off the street with zero training is thought appropriate? We can tell what an aria-head Dostov is by the fact that his narration runs like this: "I only make it as far as the door to my Aston Martin...". Since we already know the make of car he owns, was there something wrong with merely saying "the door to my car", or are we intended to understand that the nipple-devouring Dostov is a pretentious parvenu?

The entire novel shows that this pair of one-note people don't know the score, let alone how to write or sing along with one. Their entire repertoire consists of nothing more than lusting after the other. Now I can buy that someone is hot, and would be strongly in your thoughts, but for that to be the sole subject of pretty much their entire mental process is patent nonsense. If there are truly people like that, they need competent medical attention rather urgently, and if they fail to get that, then they need law enforcement attention even more urgently before someone gets hurt.

I looked forward to reading this and would have liked to have loved it (or even loved to liked it), but I could not. This novel was not about real people with real careers, hopes, and dreams. It was merely a story of how two sets of repressed genitals got their rocks off. This novel ought to have been titled Tragédie en Musique but that one is already taken, so might I suggest Catastrophe de Mode played at tempo di licenziosità?

Double Crossed by Ally Carter

Title: Double Crossed
Author: Ally Carter
Publisher: Disney Publishing
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.

Note that this book is (as of this blogging) available free from the above-listed Barnes & Noble location.

I reviewed three of Carter's Gallagher Girls spy book series earlier this year (I'd tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover, and Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy. I was impressed by the first one, but the subsequent two sucked majorly, so I quit reading the series. I've never read her 'Heist Society' series, but I have considered it, which is why I took the opportunity to give this one a try. It’s described as a novella, but the real story here is that it’s little more than a commercial for Ally Carter's books. Not that I can blame an author for getting their work out in public!

There are three sections, the first being an original work which seems more like a short story, not a novella, to me, although without knowing the word count, it’s a bit of a wash. According to wikipedia, a novella should be 17,500 to 40,000 words, whereas a short story is under 7,500, so maybe Carter's effort here is more like a novelette, which comes smack between the other two. By that accounting, my own Poem y Granite contains one novella, three novelettes, and several short stories as well as a bunch of poetry, cartoons, and other idiocy. Not that any of this really matters that much. The second section of Carter's work is an intro to her 'Heist Society' series in the form of a couple of sample chapters; the third is an intro to her 'Galagher Girls' spy series using the same means.

The basic story of the 'novella' is that Macey from the spy series runs into Hale and Hearty (actually Hale and Kat - yet another 'Kat' girl) at a high society charity event, attended by the rather curdled cream of New York society. Half-a-dozen armed men take the guests hostage, but they seem to be taking too long about their business if this were a mere robbery, so what are they really up to? Macey, Hale and Kat (who might be attending the Gallagher Academy before long) decide to take things into their own hands.

This short story/novelette is sadly derivative. Carter apparently took the thieves' wearing of US president masks idea directly from the movie Point Break, and she purloined the thieves taking hostages so the FBI will cut the power to the building from the movie Die Hard. That aside, the story is passable, but it really doesn’t give much. I'm still considering reading at least the first of the 'Heist Society' novels (I love that title), but I was neither persuaded nor dissuaded any by this story. I'm going to rate it as a 'worthy' because it really wasn't bad.

The Dark Unwinding by Sharon Cameron

Title: The Dark Unwinding
Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: worthy!

A Spark Unseen is also reviewd in this blog.

In June, 1852, Katharine Tully is traveling by carriage to visit her uncle. Her aunt Alice believes he's quite insanely frittering away the family fortune, meaning that her own spoiled son will get nothing. She dispatches Katharine to cauterize the hemorrhage before it’s too late. Aunt Alice is not well-liked by Katharine, but the latter undertakes this odious task because, as her aunt's bookkeeper, she realizes that she has much to lose if the family becomes bankrupted by an insane relative's profligacy. Katharine can see her way to enjoying a comfortable living once Alice is dead and gone, and she has only to deal with her not-too-smart cousin, whose needs are easily satisfied. I wonder if Cameron chose the name 'Katharine' spelled with that second 'a' as it is, because it’s similar to the supposedly heretical Cathars?!

But I digress! She arrives at her uncle's mansion via a mile-long tunnel lit by gas lamps - all of which she compulsively counts. Cameron says the idea for Tulman's home was given to her by the residence and activities of the 5th Duke of Portland. Katharine is deposited at the front door with her trunk and valise, but when she knocks, no one answers. The house is huge and very dusty, and no one seems to be around. She follows some footprints left in the dusty carpet, which lead from the unlocked front door, and becomes almost lost.

After being virtually deafened by the chimes at five o'clock from an incredible number of clocks in one room - all working precisely in sync - she hurries to a different room which is dark, and where she hears giggling, and then is scared by someone watching her. It turns out that the observer is nothing more than a rather lifelike model with sparkling eyes. Eventually she finds her way to the kitchen where she's greeted in a hostile manner by the servants. A young man named Lane is gruff and very protective of her uncle. Mrs Jeffries, the cook, is equally unpleasant and quite territorial in her kitchen, and Davy is just a kid who is evidently mute and who loves his large pet rabbit. Her uncle Tulman is nowhere to be found. Apparently he only visits the house on Thursdays.

After spending a disturbing night in the unkempt bedroom, where she found cut human hair matching her own color in one of the wardrobe drawers, Katharine is taken by Lane to meet Uncle Tulman, which involves a long walk across windswept countryside and through a small village. She encounters a young girl called Mary in the village who she later discovers has adopted Katharine as her own mistress, and subsequently acts as her lady-in-waiting. Katharine's uncle proves to be very much more escapement than clockwork, but he's not what you'd call insane; he's merely eccentric with a touch of autism - but that's not how they would see it in 1852. Tulman takes to her, however, and shows her some of his "toys", which include a clockwork fish, a clockwork dragon, and a clockwork boy. Katharine also discovers that he's a math savant, and that he shares her own obsessive compulsive counting disorder, and also that he upsets very easily!

Another young man whom she encounters was an earlier resident of the village who is now back for a brief visit is Ben. He's fascinated by her uncle's toys, but I have a bad feeling about him - especially since at one point young Davy seems to be deliberately trying to drag her away from him! Katharine learns that there are in fact two villages with a population of some nine hundred people, all of whom were liberated from London workhouses. If she shuts down the operation, these people will be left destitute. She talks with her uncle's lawyer, Mr Babcock, who relates to her the history of the place. Her great aunt had wanted to protect her son Tulman, and set all of this in motion to provide for him, and to eventually start showing a profit which would repay the estate everything which had been taken from it, but she died before she could bring this plan to fruition. Babcock says he is merely finishing what she had begun all those years before.

As the days slip by, Katharine is more and more torn between her growing attraction to life at Stranwyne, the estate where she is a guest, and her practical inability to do other than what her aunt Alice has demanded she do. She decides to have a birthday party, but then dithers over that decision. She goes roller-skating in the underground ballroom with Lane. But on the other side of the ledger, there are weird and scary things happening.

Twice Katharine wakes up with a hangover even though she has definitely not been drinking, and she discovers there isn't even any drink to be had in the villages. One morning she wakes up with dirty boots and no idea how they got that way. She discovers Mrs Jeffries sneaking around in Lane's room where he creates fine miniature figurines in silver. She learns from her maid that someone is sending letters écrit en français from Stranwyne, and no one knows who is sending them. One night in the hallway outside her room, she encounters someone who she follows but never catches sight of, and finds her way to a place close by the kitchen, which has been decorated with things carried from elsewhere in the house, and where both a meal and a fire was set. She finds there a book about South America, and takes it the next morning to spend time with Davy, trying to teach him to read and write, but then she discovers that he appears to be able to read perfectly well. So why won't he talk?

Well on page 183, Katharine Tulman changes her name to Mary Sue as she's heading out with a picnic basket and encounters a man in the tunnel coming the opposite direction. She hides and then follows him, discovering (as she sees him in better lighting) that it's Cook, the surgeon, who meets Jeffries, the cook, in the underground ballroom. She simply dismisses this as unimportant despite everything which has happened to her. That kicked me out of suspension of disbelief right there, because I simply don’t buy that someone who would snoop in someone's room, or go wandering the house in the middle of the night merely to satisfy her curiosity, and who lives in an environment where she's already encountered many strange and suspicious things, and who already has reason to be suspicious of Jeffries, would just let this go.

That suspicion of Jeffries should have taken root when she saw the woman leaving Lane's room and slipping something into her pocket, but Katharine never called her out on that, nor did she tell Lane about it, and he's the very guy (so Cameron expects us to believe), with whom she's supposedly falling in love! What specie of love is it which has so little confidence?

On the day of Katharine's birthday, she drinks some wine - which I thought had been drugged, but evidently it had not. Something had, however, been poisoned, so maybe the villain isn’t Ben, but Jeffries? I’d thought they were in it together. Anyway, what happens is that two men show up with a warrant to escort someone to the "lunatic asylum". Mary greets them at the door, but then takes off in a panic when she realizes who they are, and she runs to Katharine's room where the party is, to warn them. The men then find their own way to Katharine's bedroom. There went my suspension of disbelief again, right out the door. There is no way in hell that these people would do something like that. Yeah, in a children's book perhaps. In a cartoon animation, but in 1852 England? Never. In fact, impropriety is rather high in this novel for its time. I have let this slip by for the sake of the story, but while some of it can be fitted to the tale, a lot of it cannot (such as the example depicted above) and stands out like a sore thumb - or more like a sore finger pointing out how fictional this tale is!

But we discover that they aren't here for Uncle Tulman, who has been squirreled away. Now that took me by surprise! Unfortunately, before any more can transpire, Katharine passes out from the poison. When she wakes up, she finds her life was saved by the quick administration of ipecac. Carapichea ipecacuanha is native to Brazil. It's a poison which is not recommended for use in inducing vomiting any more. It was known in Europe three hundred years ago, but how well it might have been known in 1852 in rural England, I can’t say. For myself, I actually never had heard of ipecac until I came to the USA.

So it turns out I wasn't quite as far wrong in my assessment of these characters as I'd begun to think! How unusual for me! I did have some minor issues with it, but it was nice to see a YA story that didn't become lost in a YA triangle of boring adolescence. This is a smart novel, well written, with a few issues, but nothing that would prevent your thorough enjoyment of it. It also appears to be the start of a series. The ending was dramatic with some unexpected twists and turns, so while I am not sure I will read any more of the series, I have no problem rating it as a worthy tale.

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally

Title: Catching Jordan
Author: Miranda Kenneally
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Rating: worthy

Don't confuse this novel with Crossing Jordan or with Jordan's Catch!

I've been aware of this novel for a while and shied away from reading it because it's similar in some regards to my own Seasoning. So what made me take the plunge? Well I was kicked into dealing with it by the news story of Maddy Paige's appalling treatment by the delusional and clueless so-called Strong Rock Christian School. It needs to be renamed "Rocks in the Head Christian School" or "Strong Discrimination Christian School". Things desperately need to change, and reviewing this novel and others like it down the road is one albeit tiny way to get the feeling out there that gender is irrelevant to everything except procreation, and amongst some species, not even then! Since my own Seasoning novel is already published and was originally written some years ago, no one can accuse me of ripping off someone else's work!

Having completed Catching Jordan, I can say that the two novels are indeed very different. Seasoning isn't about romance or getting into college, it's about the game and about genderism, and it's about growing up, not about wallowing blindly in some adolescent fiction; it's about leading and taking charge, and it's about overcoming paralyzing fear. This isn't a comment on Catching Jordan, but it is a comment on bad YA fiction. Seasoning was never aimed at the young adult market although I'm working (on and off, mostly off!) on a partially illustrated version which will be aimed precisely at that market.

Before we get started on the review let me comment in detail on the Maddy Paige insanity. I noticed while reading the limited news items about it, that the Atlanta Phoenix is supporting Maddy, but it seems a bit sad to me that a team which is segregated from "men's" sports is supporting a woman who wants precisely the opposite: a fully-integrated team!

Maddy's case is clearly religiously motivated. This world is always sadder when religion ceases to be personal and becomes a power-play once more, but this goes beyond just religion: it's also an ingrained societal imperative, as was shown by Constanta.com's article about it, where Veronica Griffin of all people labeled Atlanta Phoenix as a "Women's Professional Football team", not simply as a "Professional Football team".

The bottom line is that if a person is good enough, that's all there is; gender (or anything else for that matter) is irrelevant. It's time to stop seeing this as inviolably delineated "men's" and "women's" and start seeing it as "people's". What, exactly, does Strong Rock's Phil Roberts mean when he talks about "girl sports" and "boy sports"? Do sports have gender now‽ Seriously? If history teaches us anything, it's that segregation has never been the answer. We're in a position where even the military is fully integrating women, so why are we deliberately segregating half of our population in sports?

If Phil Roberts was scared that "...boys were going to start lusting after her...", then what he needed to address is the abject failure of his (evidently not) Strong Rock Christian school to inculcate children in appropriate values and behaviors instead of punishing a 12-year-old girl for his school's sorry failure. Or does he want us to believe that a good Christian education necessarily turns out lustful boys? Maybe it's a case of strongly sucks, not strongly rocks?

If it's true that women cooperate better than men as some studies suggest, then including women on the team (not "the boys team", just "the team") is not only a just thing to do, it's a demonstrably smart thing to do!

So let's review! I have to say that I was turned off this novel rather quickly (by p15!) when Tyler Green ("Ty" of course) saunters onto the stage, and Jordan Woods turns almost literally to Jell-O™. Now this is the tough captain of her team, used to being in charge, used to playing rough, used to focusing, surrounded by hunks every day, getting down and dirty with them, and not a whisper of an overt attraction, but her legs literally go rubbery when Ty shows up. I'm sorry but that made me nauseous. Keneally betrayed Jordan right there and then. I found myself seriously hoping this novel was better than this, but I had little faith that it was over the next thirty pages that I read.

Jordan Woods (cool last name!) is the captain of her high school football team. She's also the quarterback. This parallels my own Janine Majeski character who is the captain of her factory soccer team and also the lead striker, and that's pretty much where the parallel ends. Jordan's dad is a major league football player (who predictably isn't supportive of her, but he is supportive of her bother, who plays college football). Her mother, predictably, is supportive, but has some weird ideas about how her daughter needs to represent herself to guys. Her idea of selling herself is to completely sell out.

When Ty, the predictable new kid in town, appears at practice hoping for a place on the team, Jordan is so predictably distracted in practicing a new snap that one of her own team, playing opposition, sacks her. For those not familiar with American football, the term 'sacking the quarterback' doesn't mean firing her, it means tackling. Why it has to be described in such dramatic terms is a mystery. Rome was sacked, a quarterback is simply knocked over - like a liquor store. Americans are probably the only nation on the planet who think along Muslim lines, but not about god: about their own nation! Whereas the Muslims assert in the Shahada that "there is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the messenger of God," Americans assert however unconsciously, there is no nation but the USA; capitalism is its profit.

So while to the rest of the world, 'football' means two teams of eleven kicking a ball around a pitch, trying to get it into opposing nets, America begs to differ. No, not even begs: demands! Contrary to real football where the hand isn't allowed to touch the ball unless you're a goalkeeper or you're throwing the ball back in after it goes out over the side line (and there are strict rules covering all that), in (American) football the foot never touches the ball! Well, yeah, there's a rare instance or two, such as kick off, for example, but this is really not football. It's Carryball or Throwball. Tarryball? Crowball?!

Anyway Jordan is fine: she's a tough player, but all of this is about to go as far south as the South Auckland Saints courtesy of super-hunk Ty. Suddenly Jordan, hitherto the consummate player, cannot think of anything else but Ty and his hunky body. Indeed, her whole life quits orbiting planet football and starts circling the drain of sinkhole Ty. I'm sorry, but I don't buy this given what we've been told about Jordan. Yes, I would buy that she's strongly attracted to a guy, but not like it's described here, and not to the virtual abandonment of everything else. That's not the Jordan I was introduced to in the first fifteen pages. I don't know why Kenneally betrays and abandons that Jordan, disrespecting her and morphing her from a worthy, even remarkable female protagonist into nothing more than a gland warmer.

Over the next thirty pages or so we reach the point where Jordan isn't sleeping because she can't stop thinking of Ty, and where she's spending hours doing her hair, shaving her legs, and picking out a wardrobe. One thought she has is "I hope Ty likes shea butter," although whether she imagines him eating her or simply fondling her skin isn't detailed. And yeah, I hope that did disgust you because it disgusted me to read what Keneally was writing here. But Keneally thinks it's okay to write this stuff as long as she has Jordan agree that "Yeah, I know. I make myself sick, too."! She tops all this with a lacy underwear set which barely covers her (and which her own mother bought for her), and incorporates a push-up bra underneath an unusually (for her) low-cut T-shirt.

What bothers me about this is that there seems to be a mindset here that Ty is somehow going to intuit exactly what Jordan is wearing and react favorably, even predictably to it! I really don't care if she falls for a guy or sleeps with him if she's thought it though some. That's her business. It's also her business what she wears, but for her to react like this when she's met Ty just once, hardly spoken to him, and doesn't know squat about him is a disgrace. Is she planning on flying into bed with him when she knows nothing about him, his habits, his attitude towards women, or most importantly, his sexual history? Remember this is a girl who, we're told, has been playing school football for many years. She's not thirteen, she's seventeen. She supposed to be on the cusp of adulthood. She's the best there is at what she does in her state. She didn't get there by failing to plan, failing to anticipate, failing to look ahead and to consider all the options, or by acting like she's brain-dead. Yet all of that training, which is ingrained if we're to believe what Kenneally has told us in the first fifteen pages, runs completely off the clock!

Keneally's genderism exposed in this novel is another disgrace, as is her appalling deprecation of "math nerds". She puts this bigotry into Jordan's mind, but that only makes it worse: if Jordan is in a position where discrimination and bigotry come into play, then where does she get off employing that same attitude towards others? This just makes Jordan look like a hypocrite or a privileged brat. Those are not qualities which will endear her to me. To her credit, Keneally does try to claw some of this back later in the novel, but whether she does enough is up to you to decide.

If some clueless guy had written this novel it wouldn't be any less excusable, but it would be more understandable. For this to come from a female writer is disturbing at best. Keneally's attitude towards Jordan's fellow football players is pretty much that they're all closet rapists. And what's with them all calling her 'Woods'? It seems all the girls and virtually none of the guys get to be called by their first name. That just struck me as weird. The two main protagonists are the exceptions to this. There is another, the third element of the almost inevitable triangle, but both his first and last names sound like first names so it doesn't really make an impact!

Jordan's attitude towards the cheerleaders is that they're all essentially ignorant, rude, cruel, and air-headed bimbos who neither know nor care about football, only about the hunks who play it. I don't doubt for a minute that there are cheerleaders like that, and high school football players like she describes and implies, but to categorize all of them in one way is bigoted nonsense. It's no better than saying something as idiotic as "all black people are drug addicts", or "gays are pedophiles". I was dearly hoping at this point that this novel improved, but I wasn't optimistic, especially when I discovered that Keneally is yet another writer who thinks in terms of 'bicep' and not 'biceps'!

Jordan gets screwed over by her coach in the first game of the season when he dumps her after the first half and puts Ty in, in her place. This is the game which has scouts from the University of Alabama watching; then Alabama seems to want her as a college player, but makes her pose in make-up and a demeaning outfit for their calendar. I have to wonder if anyone from the UoA has seen this novel and how they feel about Keneally describing their picture-taking as she does. I just Googled pictures for UoA and women's sports and saw nothing even remotely like Keneally describes! Is this a personal vendetta against Alabama?

On the emotional front, Jordan really starts screwing things up. For a seventeen-year-old she acts like a ten year old. For a team captain she's clueless in how to apply what she supposedly knows there to other parts of her life. She does precisely what we expected, and starts dating Ty, and then she discovers how utterly clueless she's been with Sam, who she's known for a decade and who is in love with her. She rides roughshod over his feelings and while she's telling him that she wants everything to remain the same between them (but really, he's not good enough for her). While she's doing this, she ignores message after message from Ty. When he finally comes over in tears through worry about her whereabouts and welfare (and yes, he does overdo it on the "I need to know where you are" power-play, but he lost his parents to a car accident and didn't know where they were, either). Jordan rightly tells him off about that, but this is after she basically told Sam how things were going to be! In short, she treats both guys like dirt.

At that point, I didn't like Jordan any more, and since this was the only character in this entire novel who had offered any hope of holding my interest, I was disappointed to say the least. The opening few pages were all about sports, but sports was quickly ditched with the arrival of Ty, and that was a mistake; the novel took a turn for the worst with that, but by the time my doubts were maximizing, I had only a hundred or so pages left to go, so I pressed on, and Keneally actually did struggle to pull this out of the fire. It's for that reason alone that I'm rating it as a cautious 'worthy'. The writing - technically speaking - isn't bad, but the events and conversation are rather tedious at times, stuck in a groove. However since I have to operate under the assumption that what might seem less than ideal to me could seem reasonable to someone who is actually the same age as Jordan. I would hope that such people have a bit more going for them and be looking out for something stronger than this, but maybe this will do for now.