The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg

Title: The Catastrophic History of You and Me
Author: Jess Rothenberg
Publisher: Dial Books
Rating: WARTY

Ooookay! This review is a lot longer than I intended (it's close to 4,000 words!), but this is a writing blog as well as a reading one, so there's lots to discuss here. Believe it or not, I was attracted to this novel purely because of the title, and then the blurb got me interested more, so here we are! It didn't turn out, exactly, to be a catastrophic history, but it came frighteningly close. And it's certainly not even in the ballpark of Emily Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks for entertainment value.

Let me begin with a word about covers. A lot of authors love to panegyrize book covers. They get excited by them and the gushing writers have a cover reveal party or event, and the reviewers sycophantically acclaim the artwork. How pathetic is that? I don’t deal with covers for the most part because of this crap and because the cover has nothing to do with the author, and all too-often, nothing to do with the story, either. Do cover artists even read the novel before they illustrate it? Perhaps at best the author might be allowed to choose one cover from a selection offered to them by their publisher, but unless they self-publish, that's the most they can hope for. What the hell is up with that business plan?!

But there's a far more serious angle to this, and so I have to comment on how anorexic the girl on this cover looks. She looks like she needs to be on an IV in intensive care until she grows some meat on that skeletal figure. I sincerely hope our fifteen-year-olds in general are not all like her, and I hope even more that our teens do not wish they looked like her. She doesn’t remotely look like someone who excels in aquatic sports, not even if it’s "just diving", as Brie does. I hope even more passionately that this culture - the one which browbeats young girls into believing that unless they look like this girl on the cover, then they’re nothing but worthless, ugly, obese losers who deserve to go nowhere in life - dies the death it richly deserves.

But my real beef here is with the young adult authors - especially the female ones. My question to them - to the ones who allow their work to be degraded by abusive and/or misleading covers - is: how long are you going to tolerate having girls assaulted and insulted by covers which project an image that cannot do anything other than convey a message to your young female readers that they’re substandard if they don’t conform to the image you're profiting from selling to them?

To all YA writers: your novel is fiction. It doesn’t demand that readers do anything other than enjoy it. The cover is a different business altogether. The cover is nothing but a commercial, and whatever is on that cover is what you're expecting your readers to buy. Think about that. I know you're thrilled to have your first novel published (anyone would be) and in that case, you'll pretty much do anything to please the editor and publisher, and go along with whatever demands they have, but to all those writers who have made it, and are selling, surely you can change this dynamic? Or do you not care what messages you're purveying to impressionable teen girls as long as the profits continue to roll?

Aubrie (Brie) Eagan is dead - died, quite literally, of a broken heart (broken into two equal halves when her boyfriend told her he didn’t love her). So you know from the off that this is a flashback book. The question is, can Rothenberg provide three hundred and twenty five pages of good flashbacks to supplement the reasonably decent first fifty pages? The answer to that was 'No', in brief, and this appalling weakness on Brie's heart's part was indeed portentous of her character in the rest of the novel, I'm sorry to report.

Brie is soon portrayed as a ghost watching her autopsy, memorial service and funeral, and having occasional thoughts about her life or her family or friends, or her boyfriend who supposedly precipitated her death. I liked the concept. The execution? Not so much. Which writer hasn’t thought of starting a story at the end? I know I have. The weird thing was that in this novel I couldn’t escape the intense feeling that those memories to which we're party in those first fifty pages aren't Brie's flashbacks, but Jess Rothenberg's. That felt a bit creepy to me. I know they say write what you know, but there's such a thing as being too knowledgeable in fiction!

This novel was published 2012 when Brie was fifteen, which means she wasn't even born in the 80's, yet she likes 80's music. The chapter titles are lines from assorted old songs. She also apparently liked the TV show Friends (which I detest, and) which quit transmission when Brie was a bit too young to be able to properly get into the show. But I liked Rothenberg's writing in general. She writes technically well, and there's some mild humor tossed in, but the writing didn't make up for the plotting, and the humor went sour pretty quickly. Brie's perfection is a bit cloying; then we got to the 'heaven is a pizza place' portion of the text, and I started to realize that I probably going to like this novel after all, especially if it insisted on traveling the road less forsaken.

I am definitely not a fan of these movies where 'Heaven' is shown to be this every-day place where everyone is friendly and familiar - and god is a good ol' boy - you know like George Burns or Morgan Freeman making wise-ass remarks served up as folk wisdom. I'm sorry but that's not the heaven/hell we read of in the Bible. Not even close! That’s a heaven which Christians are forced to cook-up because the reality of their belief system is, in the end, completely unpalatable to them in this day and age. But all religions are cooked-up anyway, so this really isn’t any different from the other inventions.

Rothenberg has Brie finding herself, immediately after the funeral, on a bus heading to a place she knows. She's not far from her house but the driver won't let her out until the stop, which is in a parking lot where her favorite pizza parlor happens to be. Rather than go home (her stomach is rumbling), she goes into the pizza place. Inside is a bunch of other youngsters all around her age or younger, no older folk except for the Asian woman behind the counter who insists that Brie fills out a form before she can get pizza. Seriously? This made my stomach start to turn. Rothenberg had some credit with me for a decently written first fifty, but I had sincerely hoped that she had better material than this in store, if she wanted to stay in my good graces, and she failed dismally on the final lap.

Brie ends up waiting a week in the pizza parlor for the paperwork to go through. Any teen who could sit in one place for that long without wanting to explore or investigate or ask questions is a complete loser in my book, to say nothing of being totally unrealistic. Brie is rendered worse than this by Rothenberg's attaching her to a cocky, smart-mouthed guy, who animates Brie like a puppeteer, so yes, I'm a tad bit pissed off to discover another female YA author who abuses her female characters by creates an interesting (if rather whiny) female teen, and then sells her down the river by making her an adjunct of some dude who is far too fictional for his own believability.

This guy, Patrick in a bomber jacket, takes over Brie's afterlife. He has an immense secret which would definitely have benefited her, but he denies her this knowledge, keeping her dangling on a string, playing with her, and all the while calling her the most abysmal cheese names (based on Brie, duhh). That motif is way-the-hell overdone and made me sick whenever Rothenberg trotted it out yet again like an aging and decrepit sports figure who didn't know when to retire. It was like Rocky IV, Roquefort, you know? Anyway, I'm getting side-tracked. Patrick at one point writes down the supposed five stages of grieving, checking them off as Brie purportedly passes through them. Wrong!

Rothenberg evidently doesn’t fully comprehend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's position on grieving! It was only put forward by her as a model (five stages of grief when confronting one's own death) so not only was it not intended for anyone in Brie's position (since her grief isn’t over her own impending death but over her loss of Jacob). The stages were originally listed as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but this isn’t a complete list, and these "stages" can occur in any order and may arrive simultaneously or not at all, which makes Patrick's list look a bit moronic, but that's Patrick all over, isn't it?

Plus, Rothenberg has Brie so whiny about wanting to visit her own home where her parents are, and then she blows that off completely to go riding around with Bomber-jacket Boi on his Bike. That lost believability too, for me. Fortunately for both myself and Rothenberg's self, she kinda turned it around and put in sufficient twists to keep me interested, even while I chafed at the poor plotting - such as allowing her to physically contact her supposedly mean old ex-boyfriend, Jacob, but unable to pull that same stunt when she finally gets to visit with her parents and her kid brother. So yeah, there's a lot of unexplained inconsistency which did nothing endear this tale to me, either. Since Jacob turned out to be gay, if she'd trotted out someone called Edward as his boyfriend, that would have put some leavening into the mix, but it wasn't to be. It was more like 4F.

It was at this point, when Brie visits her family and her three best friends, that Rothenberg starts tossing in the twists, which was appreciated, otherwise I might have had a DNF on my hands by this point, but while I had to say that the story held some twists that kept my interest stirred somewhat, at the same time it was really annoying me with inconsistent writing - or more accurately, inconsistent world-building. But this isn’t confined to Rothenberg's writing. I see it all the time in this kind of story: for example, in the movie Ghost which I reviewed elsewhere in this blog. There is a massive inconsistency, to which writers seem blind (or are only too well aware but are too lazy to tackle it), in a story which has a ghost walking around making solid contact with the ground, or sitting and making ready contact with a seat, but then they can’t open a door, or touch a person, or lift an object! This is pure, unadulterated bullshit! What's up with that trope? Where did that mindlessness come from?

We find the same thing in this novel. Brie has the hardest time picking up a rock, but she can climb a tree without even thinking about it, and she has no problem interacting with the family dog as though she were completely corporeal. Thinking is evidently something in which Rothenberg didn’t indulge herself sufficiently when building this world, but in that she was no different from a score of other writers who share this disability in this kind of story, and if that's an insult, then I'm sorry, but I call it like I see it.

Rothenberg is inconsistent in other regards, too, as I've mentioned before. In one part of the story she has Brie experience no problem in directly influencing Jacob, and in directly damaging Sadie's car, but later, when Brie is highly motivated to influence Jacob for a good purpose rather than to harm him, Rothenberg has her character inexplicably fail and then completely give-up because she can't 'make a difference'. This is really bad writing. It makes no sense for her to simply abandon Jacob without even trying (worse, she gets completely distracted from her cause - again!), and then to fret about it insanely later. I have to wonder what went on in Rothenberg's mind when she made heaven (or purgatory, or a way-station - whatever this place is) so remarkably life-like without offering any explanation as to why, but then adorned the ghosts with a spotty lack of life-like ability.

Why, for example, does she have Brie constantly in fear of falling even after ghost Brie has deliberately jumped from the top of the Golden Gate bridge and come to no harm? Another mystery. This is inconsistent and poor writing. On this topic, how does the falling work exactly? Why does gravity work on ghosts, all the way to the ground, but not right through to the actual impact with the ground?! Why does her dress get soaked? Why do they need to eat and drink, but never need the bathroom? Why do they not feel heat and cold? If they're really ghosts, why are they pretty much indistinguishable from living people except in some key ways which benefit the story but for which we’re given no intelligent explanation? A lot of this makes no sense, and it saddens me that Rothenberg doesn't appear to care that it makes no sense.

Brie is annoying, and is such a gadfly, too. I know that teens can be disturbingly flighty, especially the younger ones, but I find it hard to believe that someone as decent and disciplined as Brie was in life, could be such a capricious Will o' the Wisp in the afterlife when everything else about her seems to remain pretty much the same. She has the big ideas and urges, but then she seems to immediately forget it all and go off at a tangent. If Rothenberg had written this into the story - explained why she was like this, or revealed that she had been this way when alive - it would have made this behavior believable, but she doesn’t give us that; she just has Brie going in all directions for no good reason - indeed, for bad reasons.

Worse than this though: she has this Patrick character - the Bomber jacket dude - show up without the character offering any explanation for who he is or what he wants or what he thinks he's doing. Why is he with her and why does she blithely accept his presence twenty-four seven without question or introspection? The fact that Brie never pursues this until the pell-mell mess of an ending renders her a sorry-assed and unmotivated Mary Sue. You seriously do not want to do that to the protagonist of your story unless you have a really good explanation for it in hand!

Patrick was nothing but an annoyance to me, even moreso than Brie, because he brought nothing to the story. The only thing he contributed was to highlight how lame and helpless Brie was, and how much she desperately needed a man to make her complete - or in this case to make her even functional. What an insult to women!

Later Rothenberg brings in another character, this one from Brie's past, with the unlikely name of Larkin. Honestly? But despite her idiotic name, I dearly wish she had shown up earlier because she's the most interesting character in the entire novel. Maybe that's why Rothenberg kills her off? Yep - the dead can die. Until then they're very much alive for all practical purposes in this dumb-ass world!

Larkin also offers things (which seem much more honest and decent than those which Patrick brought to the table), but Rothenberg snatches both characters away from Brie, leaving her all alone. Larkin (who is tragically unexplored in this novel) may have been misrepresenting things to Brie, but she was doing neither more nor less than Patrick was. He was lying when he told Brie that this was her afterlife and the choices were hers, because right after that, he spends his time luring her into doing pretty much whatever he wants without regard to her wishes or even her best interests, including leading her down an unpleasant path at one point, and then trying to talk her out of following that path as though she had made a mistake, not him! Worse than this, he keeps key facts from her in an unbelievably cruel, even brutal, way.

So Patrick is a major jerk, and the more I think about bad characters, and poor plotting, and inconsistency, and lame world-building, the more I realize that I'm now in a position where I have to try to find a good reason to rate this novel as a worthy read! In that, I failed! That's rather ironic given that I actually like the story in very broad and general terms! What’s a guy to do?! I found that reading some positive and some negative reviews helped to clarify my position for me!

I do not seek out reviews for a novel before I read it, but sometimes reading the perspective of others once I already have my own largely in place really helps to clarify some issues about which I haven’t completely made up my own mind yet. This wouldn’t work before I read the novel because other reviewers can be so inconsistent for this purpose. I might find myself agreeing with them on novel A, and then in complete opposition on novel B even if it’s by the same author. That's why I don’t have a 'blogroll' over there, because I don’t have any blog which I know I can go to and get a take on a novel which is meaningful to me personally.

I choose the novels I will read based on things I've read, including some review references, not so much to novel content, but to authors they thought wrote like this or not like that. Reviews in general tell me nothing useful because they're not really reviews. That's why I started this blog: to offer people something more than "Hey I loved this, you gotta read it!", because unless I know that reviewer intimately, their recommendation (and that's exactly what it is, a recommendation, not a review), tells me nothing of value. Even when I do know them intimately, a recommendation or a comment can be completely useless, as I discovered with the fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel, may it rest in hell!

So when I'm going out there to familiarize myself with the buzz, I'll read some one-star reviews and some five-star and see how I feel about what the extremes have said in comparison with my own feelings. It’s because of this that I noted that some people have described what a great character the dog was! I disagree. The dog was entirely in keeping with the Disney theme with which Rothenberg inextricably and inexplicably imbued this novel, but that merely served to provide a theme which nauseated me. I'm guessing here that Rothenberg once knew an animal like this when she was a child, because it seems to me that only such an experience could make a person write that way about the freak of nature and genetic disaster that Basset hounds actually are. If she'd employed a border collie in this role, or even a beagle, it would have made it slightly more palatable for me, but I still would have had a problem with how the dog seems to completely understand everything Brie says including her references to third parties. Puleeze! Disney-fy much?

Brie seems to be entirely too old for such an addiction to Disney as she exhibits, too. Indeed, she behaves throughout more like a pre-teen than someone who is almost sixteen. She's not a good person, which betrays everything Rothenberg tells us about her from her previous life. It’s all about her, and I don’t care if she's supposed to be grieving because she doesn't remotely behave as though she is, especially given that there is a much bigger context to this story than her own personal pity-party, and this behavior in which Rothenberg indulges her character completely undermines that bigger picture.

The truth is that Brie is a selfish, whiny, and vindictive stalker, bordering on psychotic in her behavior and then it all suddenly turns around for no good reason (at least not that we’re party to!). It’s after this point that she discovers the truth she was too blind to see about Jacob (and by extension about his relationship with Sadie), but even this part of the novel is badly done. Given how Jacob was when Brie was alive (from her frequent flashback mileage), I simply cannot believe that he would have behaved the way he did towards her. The way he behaved was to dump Brie and tell her he didn’t love her. The true reason for his breaking things off with her is that he is gay. Given how decently he treated her prior to this, I just cannot buy at all that he would cut her off like that, or that he would not have told her this fact about himself, especially with what we’re told about how long they'd known each other.

The other side of this coin is that I cannot buy that he even started dating her and became so attached to and so enamored of her when he knew he was gay. Nor can I believe that not a single one of the four girls (Brie and her three close friends) had any inkling whatsoever of his real nature given how long at least two of them had known him. His character makes no sense and this cheapens the story as well as Brie's mental state.

So then we fall into the dénouement of this novel, which is that Patrick's raison d'être is that he's Brie's boyfriend from a previous life when her name was Lily. Patrick was a moron then, too, and Lily died when he crashed his motorbike because he wouldn’t listen to Lily telling him to slow down in the approaching bad weather. He proved himself to be an even greater loser when he killed himself. Now why Lily evidently became immediately reincarnated as Brie, and Patrick sat on his ass for seventeen years in a pizza shop I guess we’ll never know, but Patrick is now forty five, and Brie is still sixteen, or at best, 2 times 16, which I'm sorry, but in this case doesn’t make 32. How this is going to work or even why it should is also a mystery.

Mysteries seem to abound at the end of this novel. I don’t know what happened, but the sedate, some might say sluggish, pace is sped up dramatically, yet with sadly little drama. It wasn't until this point that I fully resolved that I was going to rate this as a 'warty'. Had the ending not been such a godawful mess, I might not have done so despite the large number of issues I took with this.

Brie becomes reincarnated in her own body on the night that Jacob broke up with her (where is the original Brie?!), and now of course, she's able to comfort him instead of going psycho on him. She learns that he discussed his sexual orientation with Sadie, but Sadie never had the decency to be a real friend to Brie and at the very least hint at this. Immediately following this, Brie is reincarnated as Lily on that fateful night, too. In the first instance, she has some significant time before she dies, but not in the second instance which was really the first instance chronologically. Are you following this? Again, randomness pervades the story for no good reason.

In the end, the story simply fell apart. The ending made very little sense given the context, but everyone lived happily ever after. I'm sorry but no. This is drivel. It started out with so much potential, but then went into the toilet and liked it there. I have no choice but to call this WARTY!

The Perpetual Motion Club by Sue Lange

Title: The Perpetual Motion Club
Author: Sue Lange
Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine 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 less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel is a real oddity, or maybe this oddity is a real novelty, but it entertained me. Elsa Webb is a sophomore in high school where students sport sponsorship logos on their clothing and backpacks, from assorted corporations. Elsa carries no such sponsorship; she's quiet and reserved and very smart, as indeed is her best friend May. But neither of them could be remotely described as popular. Elsa doesn’t seem to know where she's going in life, and becomes completely derailed at times even from the routine life she does have, such as when the new basketball player bumps into her in the hallway, knocking her flat on her ass, and doesn’t even stop to say sorry or help her up. She falls hopelessly for him such that he figures powerfully in her fantasy life and in her plans.

She even attends a meeting of the Science Society, dragging poor May along with her in forlorn hope of seeing him there. This society is supposed to be a feather in the cap of those who want to get along successfully in this high-tech futuristic society, where the sink, closet, garbage chute, and microwave speak back to you, and most everyone has an RFID chip in their head. But although Elsa is offered membership in the society, Jason, the basketball player, was not at the meeting and she decides against joining, coming off the rails yet again, but in a different direction this time.

Elsa develops a fascination with perpetual motion after the meeting and decides to create her own club - The Perpetual Motion club - of which she and May are the only two members and in the first few months hold only one meeting. The name of the club is ironic because it's precisely at that moment that life seems to come to a screeching halt for Elsa, who can't seem to get close to anything she wants. How she deals with this and in the end triumphs, although not quite in the way she anticipated, is the subject of this novel.

The club was started almost as a knee-jerk response to her mother's nagging about the science club. Lainie Webb is another entertaining character and Elsa has a difficult but loving relationship with her. She tries to lure Jason out on a trip to a perpetual motion meeting hosted by larger than life people who really believe such a thing is possible, but she's devastated when Jason appears to agree to go, but then stands her up without a word of warning or apology.

This rejection triggers an obsession with perpetual motion, and Elsa starts missing sleep as she lies awake pondering possibilities. Her school work suffers in all classes save geometry, which is again ironic because Elsa can't seem to work out the geometry of her life! Her relationships and a piece of work, and if this novel were only about that it would have been a worthy read, but it has much more to serve up that just relationships. Elsa's thought processes are a journey in and of themselves. This novel flouts the YA tropes and runs along it's own path, not one which is beaten, but one which is triumphant. This is a warm, fascinating and engrossing novel which I could not stop reading. Until I came to my own screeching halt at the end, that is. I wanted more! Highly recommended, but only if you're tired of trope and want something new, original, and well put together.

The Secret Under My Skin by Janet McNaughton

Rating: WORTHY!

I would gladly (well, maybe not gladly - try) willingly well, maybe not willingly try: just) suffer through four examples of Charlaine Harris's inane drivel if I could be guaranteed a gem like The Secret Under My Skin at the end of it. I was drawn into this from the beginning and grew ever more fond of it as I read. The main character, Lobelia September, more properly known as Blay Raytee (which itself is only a poor approximation of her real name: Blake Raintree) is a real charmer and sets the standard for how such a character in such a novel should be IMO.

I started reading this Sunday night in bed; I was almost ninety pages in before I knew it, and it was nearly midnight! I resented having to stop reading to get to sleep since I had to work the next day! If I had started it Sunday morning, I don’t doubt for a minute that I would have read it straight through non-stop! Now I'm frustrated by everything which pulls me away from pursuing further reading! Yes, my name is Ian Wood and I am a good fiction addict! It’s been way too long since my last read!

This 2368 world in which Blake lives is a horrible one, where global warming and pollution have trashed Earth, but unlike so many novels of this type, this Earth is slowly recovering. The problem in this novel is that the authoritarian governments who seized power when the environment and lifestyles deteriorated, do not want to relinquish that power now. They therefore perpetuate the myth that Earth is highly dangerous, in order to retain control.

They have Bio-Indicators (BI). These are people who are especially sensitive to certain aspects of the environment, and whose job it is to issue warnings when conditions are bad. Such people are held in high regard and lead a pampered lifestyle, but they're slowly going out of business. Contrast this with the pervasive hatred of scientists and technology. Indeed, the hatred became so bad that not long before the novel starts, there was a brutal purge of such people and their children, referred to as the 'technocaust'.

This scenario is very familiar territory to me, having covered it in my own Godstruck but my novel takes a completely different tack to McNaughton's. In mine, the ruling power is the church, and the main character is an older guy rather than a girl in her mid teens. I have to give major props to McNaughton for bringing an intelligent treatment of scientific subjects to her material. Yes, the novel is fiction, but it’s evidently strongly grounded in reality, and I can find no fault in her scientific presentation at all. It’s really refreshing to read something so solid and honest.

Blake is an inmate in a work camp, where she has to go out each day in the baking summer, with her anti-UV clothing and goggles, along with her fellow internees, to scavenge scrap from an ancient trash tip. The scrap is sold to fund the work camp. There's some cruelty and bullying, but nothing extreme. McNaughton's representation of the work camp seems realistic and not a caricature. Blake tries to keep herself to herself and is a decent person. One day she's selected in a group of about fifteen similar internees. She's told that a BI is visiting to find an assistant, and the BI picks Blake because she seems like someone who will not overshadow the BI. Blake can't believe she was chosen for this honor, and suddenly finds herself in a completely different world - one she could never have dreamed of.

The BI's name is Marella (after a fossil found in the famous Burgess Shale formation). Again props to McNaughton for bringing in ideas and topics which may seem obscure to someone who isn't quite as obsessed with science as I am(!), yet even as she does this, she makes it interesting and accessible, touching on the topics without lecturing at all. The two people Marella is staying with, and with whom Blake now resides, are Erica and William, an older couple who are very much in love and have some secrets which are only slowly revealed to Blake. Whereas the couple is quite easy-going, Marella is spoiled and petulant and very difficult to get along with.

Blake is resolved to help her despite her attitude, and as they spend time together, and even while Blake is appalled and distressed at how lazy Marella is, she begins to understand her. One night Marella asks Blake to wash her hair, and Blake discovers that her hair is almost non-existent. Her scalp is roseate, and cracked and scaling, as though she has suffered radiation poisoning. Given the tenuous state of the ozone layer, she may well have been poisoned by excess ultra violet light, or perhaps she's highly allergic to something.

Marella is required to undertake educational reading in order to prepare for her initiation as a full BI, but she doesn't apply herself to this material. She's lazy, but Blake is thrilled with the chance to learn more, and it’s her dedication, intelligence, and loyalty to Marella which saves her partner on more than one occasion, from William's annoyance and even wrath. As Blake settles in to her new home and the relative luxury it offers, she realizes increasingly that she has been lied to by the people at the government-run work camp. The ozone layer is healing, and she doesn't need quite so much protection when going outside as the work camp people had convinced her she did, for one thing. On a trip to the village, one which the workhouse children would never be allowed to make, Blake learns more secrets about her world, what the government is up to, and how much resistance is stirring against this draconian rule.

There are other things she has also been lied to about. "Lem Howl", a guy who lives up the hill from Blake's new home, has been deliberately represented to her as a horrible, fearful figure who made his wife drink poison and who will eat children who stray from the work camp, but when Blake properly meets him, she realizes how misled she's been. Lem Howell is a scientist and inventor who works closely with Erica and William, and he even agrees to see if he can make a device to read Blake's "object" - an obsolete cassette tape. He discovers that Blake has an ID chip embedded in her arm which, if he can create a device to read it, will revel her true age and identity. She begins to entertain faint hopes that she will discover who her real parents were, but all she learns from her chip is her real name and age.

With regard to the mechanics of writing of this novel, the first remarkable thing didn’t show up until page ninety six, where I read, "The Bay is perhaps twenty meters across, reaching out of sight in each direction" I have no solid idea what that really means! If it’s out of sight it can’t be twenty meters wide, but if McNaughton means the distance from the shore to where the bay opens to the ocean proper, then twenty meters doesn’t really make a bay! She could have described it as twenty meters deep, but this is ambiguous since it could also refer to the depth of the water! What's a writer to do?! Perhaps, "The bay is hardly a bay at all; it’s only twenty meters from the shore to the point where it opens into the endless blue ocean." That would cover most bases. But this is just taking arms against a sea of what is otherwise wonderful writing, so let me clarify that McNaughton is an excellent writer, both technically and entertainingly, and let's press on.

The final stage of Marella's initiation is for her to take a trip to 'the badlands' where she's supposed to undergo some sort of vision or revelation, which will fully bring her into her role as a BI. Blake accompanies Marella on this trip, a journey over which Marella is morose and whiny. She's so worried about it that she even reads the material on this occasion, which she has never done before. Blake has begun to become resentful of Marella's frequent tantrums and the fact that Blake was picked because she was considered to be stupid and incompetent. And now the two of them are alone in the wilds with no company or help but each other.

The problem is that Blake is the one who experiences the vision. Marella does not, but Blake has no designs on being a BI. Instead, she shares her vision with Marella, helping her to remember it, so she can pass it off as her own, and she appears to do this successfully, but when the party returns to its home, things have changed somewhat. The Commission - the government - has put some harsh measures into place, taking all male children over the age of fifteen in a round-up. Clearly they fear something, and if Marella no longer needs Blake's tutoring to become a BI, then what future can remain for Blake?

I will not reveal any more, but instead recommend you read this one. You may find the ending is a bit of a let down. I didn't. I liked the way it was done. It fitted what came before. Just because it's a YA novel doesn't mean there has to be magic and mayhem. All there has to be is a good story and that's exactly what Janet McNaughton delivers.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Rating: WORTHY!

This is going to be a much shorter review than I normally give because I already reviewed the movie version of the novel. The two have a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences. I liked the movie version much better, but I still liked the original novel enough to rate it a 'worthy' read. The novel is quite different from the movie in many ways, while following the same overall pattern. It has different events in it and a lot more four-letter words. I liked the Nick of the novel slightly better, and the Norah about the same, but I found the humor in the movie better. The movie screenplay was written by Lorene Scafaria, so kudos to her for carrying that off so well.

To the differences! In the novel, it's Nick who asks Norah to be his girlfriend, quite the opposite of the movie. In the movie Caroline (Norah's drunken girlfriend who Norah hands over to Nick's bandmates to get her home) escapes and runs away, fearifn she's being kidnaped, but this doesn't happen in the novel. In the novel, Nick and Norah make out in the ice room of a Hilton Hotel, but they don't go all the way, whereas in the movie, they go all the way in a recording studio owned by Norah's dad. In the novel they don't go anywhere near the recording studio. The novel features fewer locations than the movie, too.

The novel has chapters numbered sequentially, but alternatingly headed either with Nick's name (written by Levithan), or Norah's name (written by Cohn). Nick's band is called the Jerk-Offs in the movie but The Fuck-Offs in the novel - I did warn you that it was more foul-mouthed than the movie! The novel does get us a lot further into Nick and Norah's heads than is ever possible in a movie, but not all of that is a good thing. There's a lot to love but also quite a bit to dislike when you get that far into their heads. In the end, if I had to choose, I'd have to pick the movie, but the novel is well worth reading.

Dead to the World by Charlaine Harris

Title: Dead to the World
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WARTY!

The Suckfest continues, and yes, I did mean that in a bad way. Dead to the World pretty much sums up Sookie Stackho, the dumbest dumbass in Dumbville, Dumbiana, United Dumb-clucks of America, but at least this was book four and I could ditch this whole sorry series after I heard it. I could have simply used the same review I wrote for Club Dead (and that could have been the same review I wrote for Living Dead in Dallas). Nothing changes in this series, so why should the reviews?!

Charlaine Harris is a professionally godawful writer. How about this: "The car was obviously a threat until they learned likewise." Honestly? Or how about this bizarre paragraph: "Bill looked good in his Khakis. He was wearing a Calvin Klein dress shirt I'd picked out for him, a muted plaid in shades of brown and gold. Not that I noticed." I mean how utterly clueless do you have to be to write that?

This novel appears to have precisely the same formula as the previous two: some guy disappears and only Suck-ee can rescue him. In this case it's not a vampire, but her brother, Jackass, who you may know as Jason. Jackass is evidently abducted right outside his lakeside home, and they find a spatter of blood and a paw print on the dock behind the house. Now Suck-ee has a shifter friend who would do quite literally anything for her (her boss, Sam), and she has a werewolf friend, Rancid, who would pretty much do likewise. Both of these guys have an extraordinary sense of smell, and yet Suck-ee never once even thinks for a split second of asking one or other of them to scent where Jackass was taken. Instead she constantly bemoans how devastated she is by his disappearance, whilst making out (or fantasizing about making out) with any hot supernatural guy who happens to cross her path. She does not even remotely behave like she's grieving for Jackass.

Once again Bill is AWOL, and Eric steps in. Eric (who shall hereinafter be referred to as Eriction) has been bewitched and lost his memory of who he really is, so Suck-ee is tasked with mothering him, although her brand of "mothering" is more accurately described as incest. Why is it that these supposedly powerful and fearful vampires are always, without exception, completely dependent upon humans? It's pathetic.

Not only is there the usual intensely boring repetitive bullshit about the minutiae of Suck-ee's tedious life, her boring clothes, her uninteresting household activities, the repetitive layout of her house, and the lives, clothes, activities and layouts of every person, natural or supernatural whom she meets, there's also endless re-hashing of themes already established monotonously in the first three books.

There's more racism in this novel, so I guess that's kinda new, along with a liberal dollop of bullshit American jingoism, and the usual casting of aspersions upon all religions not Christian (in contrast, I cast aspersions on all religions, period). No one who gets any real air time in these southern mysteries is black, and those with whom Suck-ee is more than merely acquainted are all uniformly olive-skinned if they're not whiter than white. The vampires, of course, are also pretty much entirely Hollywood white. In her blindness to be grammatically correct, Harris slices and dices her Suck-ee character by having this poorly educated southern barmaid speak grammatically correct sentences, too. Oh, and did I mention that Harris loves to have "long seconds" and "long minutes" and "long moments"...?

I don't get Suck-ee. She cannot stop herself from lusting after Eriction and Rancid even when, in the earlier books, she was supposedly head-over-heels in love with Bill and had no eyes or time for anyone else. She will pretty much lust after any supernatural guy she gets to know, but the one she will give no time to is Sam, the owner of Merlotte's, where Suck-ee works. She rather have some hot muscular, tall studly manly man who doesn't give a shit about her than a guy who loves her and proves it repeatedly. That's the kind of dismal sorry-assed bonehead Suck-ee is. She deserves everything she gets. Contrast this Suck-ee with the real Sookie: the one in the TV show, and it's disgusting how absolutely awful Harris's version is in comparison.

As I alluded earlier, Harris has sorely warped views on religion. Christianity is apparently the only true religion. The only other 'competitor' evidently, is the "Jews" - not Judaism, but "Jews". Evidently Harris doesn’t grasp that you can be Jewish without following Judaism, and you can follow Judaism without being Jewish. Islam doesn’t enter Harris World™ at all, and forget about all those other totally irrelevant foreign religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and a score of others across the globe. This is curious, because this novel is about witches, but Harris draws a bizarre distinction between Wicca (the supposedly innocent religion practiced by pagans) and witches - who are pretty much evil and have nothing to do with Wicca! Oooooh! That's like Ian Fleming's inane distinction between the Turks of the mountains, and the Turks of the plains!

On this topic, what’s with the religious trappings of vampires? Why is silver harmful to them? Harris never explores this, merely taking the trope and blindly rubber-stamping it, running with it like a kid with scissors. What really tickles me is this farcical business whereby a vampire has to be invited in and they can be repelled by rescinding the invitation - and they have to walk backwards out the door! Seriously? I can't think of anything more insane or hilarious than that. Harris, wisely I think, doesn’t even try to offer any intelligent explanation for these inane rules; it’s all just swallowed as a meaningless trope and we’re expected to go with it just as blindly as she does.

I noted that Suck-ee was much more in-your-face about her Christian religious views (or Harris was about hers), ranting about praying etc., yet never once in four books, has any god ever stepped in to help her. She had to do it all herself or have her friends do it. A god like that isn't worth worshiping.

Rancid (you may know him as Alcide, or even Pesticide) shows up in this novel, so of course we're quickly reminded of what a manly man of a man he ruggedly is), but both Bill and Eriction are AWOL. Bill I don't miss in the slightest because he's a complete loser and a waste of printing ink (or laser burns, or magnetized disk or whatever!). Eriction I do miss because he was the only character worth reading about in all of the Harris hemorrhaging hegemony. He isn't worth listening about in this volume however, because Parker completely louses his accent. Her Sookie accent is nauseating, too, and combining that with Harris's absolutely worthless trash prose is truly vomit-inducing. Other than that, Parker's a talented voice artist.

Nor do we get any intelligence (in whatever definition you want to use) on why there is a witch coven which seeks to drink vampire blood. In fact there's no intelligence in this novel at all. I'd write a list titled "Sookie Stackhouse is so stupid that..." if I could stand to do the research, but forget that! Let me just pass on one: Sookie Stackhouse is so stupid that she thinks that the reason she's never encountered a fairy before is because she's been so often in the company of the undead. She conveniently forgets that for 26 years, Suck-ee had never even met an undead. That's how abysmally mindless Harris's writing is - or how stupid Suck-ee is.

But back to the witches: is their magic so weak that they need to indulge in this supposedly dangerous practice? And why are they trying to take over the vampires' financial concerns? They're friggin' witches! They can't magic-up all the money and power they want? The finale has the weres and the vamps joining forces to take down the coven. Sookie is required to put herself in harm's way so she can find out how many witches are in this house, and whether there are any 'civilians' who the vamps and weres should leave alone.

The problem with this is that later we're told that the handful of good witches working with the vamps and weres, have been able to single out and put a shine on the three innocent people so everyone knows to leave them and go only for the bad witches. But if the good witches can determine who is in there in order to put the shine on the right ones, then why the hell is Suck-ee needed to figure out who is in there? I'll tell you why: because Harris has trapped herself into the first person using Suck-ee as narrator, and now nothing can happen unless Suck-ee is there to witness it, or we have to learn of it second hand in megabytes of exposition. Yet another example of Harris's bad writing.

This plot sucks! The characters suck. Sookie sucks. Even Eriction sucks in this volume. Conclusion: WARTY IN THE EXTREME! Harris is arguably the world's worst writer and she wins this years Pedantry in Prose award from me. Rest assured I am done now and I will never read - much less review - another Charlatan Harris novel of any blood type. You have my pledge.

Oh, and please don't link to this review. I don't want anyone to know I was stupid enough to actually read four items pulled from Charlaine Harris's garbage!

The Sweet In-Between by Sheri Reynolds

Title: The Sweet In-Between
Author: Sheri Reynolds
Publisher: Three Rivers
Rating: WORTHY!

Here's another example of what you get when you put your fine novel into the hands of a publisher: the girl in the cover illustration doesn't even remotely represent the character in the novel. Quite the contrary; the girl on the cover is an open insult to the main character, and I can't honestly believe that the illustrator even read the novel to come up with crap like that. This is why I self-publish!

I highly recommend this novel.

Kendra Elaine Lugo, universally known as Kenny, is almost eighteen. She lives in a sea-side town in a run-down home, which isn't, strictly, her home. Her mother is dead and her father is in prison. She lives with her "aunt" who isn't related to her, and so she also lives in constant fear that she's going to be thrown out the minute she turns eighteen. She's mildly sexually abused by her older non-brother Tim-Tim in the way kids sexually explore one another, but in general, very broadly speaking her life isn't too bad considering everything.

Unfortunately, Kenny is one of the most intriguing, scary, endearing, frightened, desperate, lovable characters I've ever encountered in a novel and she has more neuroses than a medical dictionary. When a girl is killed next door, in the adjoining home of a old guy who is potentially a pedophile, Kenny takes a morbid interest. Jarvis killed Clara Tinsley with a shotgun blast when she climbed into his house with her friend Rhonda, both of whom mistakenly thought this was their rented beach property where they were vacationing. They had been given the wrong address, and couldn't find the key. It was late at night so they went in through the window.

Kenny often behaves as though she's much younger than her 17 years. She has flights of fearful fancy about her life and her future. She obsesses on dead Clara, frequently imagining bits of her wounded body lying hidden in crevices in Jarvis's house, or imagining her as a friend, still alive. She obsesses on Clara's friend Rhonda, and on Clara's red car. Kenny obsesses on her own body and on her breasts, and on her period. She wears cycling shorts and several layers of underwear and presses her small breasts down even smaller by wearing a cut-off pair of pantyhose upside down, with a hole cut in the crotch for her head. She decided to make herself appear as boyish as possible to dissuade Tim-Tim from hitting on her.

Kenny is industrious and inventive, and imaginative and quirky as hell. She has way more fears and fantasies than any ordinary girl ought, which makes her extraordinary in my book (and in Reynolds's book, too!). I love the way she thinks and the way her thoughts run on disjointed and simultaneously oddly congruous. I love how inventive she is and how her mind works, and work it does - overtime, too! She's refreshing and brilliant and well worth getting to know, which is why it's so saddening to see how undervalued she is.

Kenny starts cleaning out and redecorating the crappy garden shed in Aunt Flo's back yard because she thinks she will have to move out there or be homeless when she turns eighteen. Okay, I confess: I adore Kenny. But I think Kenny is gay, so my adoration is as far as this can go! Even at the end of the novel I still had no take on Kenny in this regard, and that's fine, because she doesn't want to be pinned down and she deserves to be free, but I have to confess I had hoped for a bit more than I got the more I read this.

Having said that, I did get wa-ay more than I hoped for in this novel before I began it, and that's why it was one of the very few novels I've read since I started this blog that I was willing to class as a 'WORTHY' even before finishing it. That's because it's so brilliantly done that I didn't care if the ending sucked: it's worth reading anyway. And the ending didn't suck. I loved Kenny, I loved the way this was written. I loved the stops and starts and spurts and stream of consciousness writing. I urge you to read this and I am looking for other Sheri Reynolds novels. Well, not as we speak, but you know what I mean! Very WORTHY indeed.

The Salbine Sisters by Sarah Ettritch

Title: The Salbine Sisters
Author: Sarah Ettritch
Publisher: Norn
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 less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I loved this story from the off, and I recommend it.

Is Sarah Ettritch a cool name or what? She has some interesting titles showing on her web site, but this is the first of hers I've read. I may try to track down some others if I like this one. I don't know what nationality Ettritch is, but she writes like someone who grew up in Australia or perhaps England, and I love her phraseology especially when she gets very slightly potty-mouthed in her dismissive phrases. There's something rib-tickling about "nuns" using some bad language, even if only mildly.

The name 'Salbine' made me think of Sabines and Roman times. I find myself wondering if the author (authoress? Already linguistic genderism strikes!) chose it to reflect that, but there's no indication as to where this story takes place, or when, or even if it's on Earth. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing). It was only later that I discovered that Ettritch is pronouncing 'Salbine' as 'Salbin'!

The Salbine sisters is exclusively a female religious order which worships the god Salbine (yes, it's a goddess, but why are we putting ourselves into a position where we must distinguish between them? I mentioned this gender specific terminology in another review, and it's the same argument here: if we bring female deities under the banner of 'god', then do we insult them or equalize them? Maybe we should quit using 'god' and use the gender neutral 'deity' instead?

I found myself counting the number of times Ettritch uses the main two character's names on the very first page, because it seemed such a lot! It was in the twenties for each, but it's hard to see how that could be changed significantly given what she was conveying. Maybe it's just me being weird. The main protagonists are Lillian and Maddy, with an emphasis on the latter. Lillian is a woman in her early forties, who is - I was going to say 'a master', but that's wrong, as indeed is 'a mistress'! so let me say - 'an adept' at the magical arts, which in this case means control over the four so-called elements.

I have to say I found this latter cliché somewhat tiresome. Can we not get away from magic fantasy stories which are mired in the trope of air, earth, fire, and water? From the scientific PoV, none of those is actually an element. I know it's not meant in that way literally in these fables, and some hundred eighteen real elements are a bit much to handle, but even that large number can be simplified into as few as ~10 groups, as the periodic table demonstrates. I'd have a lot of respect for a fantasy story which tried using that in place of what we typically get. Indeed, wouldn't it be a refreshingly different story if we started out with the trope, but the story was about how a young and gifted new mage actually discovers that there is much more to these four 'elements' than meets the wand?

In the same way that real scientists discovered that the atom (something which the 5^{th<\sup> century Greeks named as such because it was the smallest thing of which they could conceive) was itself discovered to be comprised from smaller component parts, so, too, could the four elements. What could be more magical than the discovery that water, something which typically douses fires, could be split into two elements that cause fires to rage, thereby impressively linking fire and water? Anyway, having whined about that, I'm committed to reading this story because I really liked it, so this is one amongst a set of pet peeves we readers may be required to hang up at the door as we enter!}

Lillian, in her early forties, has been a the monastery for a long time. Long before the story begins, she had a relationship with another woman, Caroline, who left her in the lurch. Now she has begun, very nervously, a new relationship with Maddy, a brand new initiate who may or may not have Lillian's best interests at heart. But Maddy, in her early twenties, is a whole thicket of issues herself. In this world, young women sometimes receive the mark of Salbine (a tree pattern on their hand). Once this happens, the woman can choose to take up the call or to ignore it. If they come to this (or another) monastery, they're initiated into the order, and are shown how to harness those four elements. It seems that Salbine is the only god there is. If there are others, they're not mentioned - not this far, anyway! And Salbine is definitely an absentee landlord!

Maddy is having some serious problems with picking up the elemental practice. She can't raise fire except in the most, er, elementary way (sorry, I couldn't resist that!), and one day while trying, she feels like her entire body is on fire and she collapses. From this event she learns from the Abbess that she is 'malflowed'. This isn't the first time this has ever happened to anyone, but what it means for Maddy is that she cannot continue in the magical studies because she could cause great harm to herself or to others.

This is so devastating to her that she feels crippled, rejected, second-hand, malformed. She fears that she will lose Lillian or have to leave the monastery, but she is not rejected by her sisters (although she is abused somewhat by another initiate). She begins, at the abbess's advice, to study other malflowed initiates, to learn more about what she is, and what became of others who were in these same circumstances. She's repeatedly told that this is not the end of her life with the order, that she was chosen for a reason, but this is little consolation to Maddy, who, despite her severe disappointment at her status, resolves to pursue a means by which to handle it. This involves her leaving Lillian for a while, and I have to say that Maddy, the younger of the two, is the more mature in this development. And this parting does precipitate the revelation of a secret which Lillian has been withholding from Maddy.

To reveal more details than the many I've now given would be to tell Ettritch's story for her which is not my goal in my blog, so I'll wind this up with general observations, and leave you to read the novel. This novel seems obviously to have been written from a lesbian PoV, and so one observation I have now is that the novel left me feeling that there is a latent prejudice against heterosexuals underlying its philosophy! Let me explain that. The monastery is for women only. They have men to 'guard' them, especially when they go on journeys. I have some issues with this on several fronts!

As I've intimated, this is, overall, in general terms, a strong novel and it drew me in quickly and held my attention. There were some minor quibbles (such as, for example, a tavern having glasses. Given that this novel appears to be set in medieval times, I seriously doubt your typical roadside inn would have glassware! And there was a bit of telegraphy in play regarding the fortune of one character, but I can forgive all that because the story is otherwise so good. In fact, that one character proved to be as charming, enjoyable, and entertaining as the two main characters.

Here's a pet peeve of mine regarding witches, magicians, mages and wizards - why are they so useless?! These stories (and this isn't aimed at this novel in particular, which I enjoyed very much, but at magical stories in general) always extol the power of magic and/or the particular mage/witch/wizard in question, but when it gets right down to the nitty gritty, these powerful magical people are useless. Take the Harry Potter series as a case in point. Dumbledore was praised as the most powerful wizard there was, yet he was essentially helpless against the rise to power of Voldemort, and it was down to Potter, not through any magical skill, but through luck and pluck to save the day.

The same was true of The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf was supposedly this magnificent wizard, yet he could do nothing to transport the ring to the volcano! All of his skill and power, and his magic was useless. He couldn’t protect Frodo from harm, he couldn’t give him magic to see through the wiles of Gollum, he couldn’t make him invisible, or speed his legs! So what good was his magic, honestly? Why even include magic in a story if you're not going to go anywhere with it? In the end, it was all on Frodo, and Gandalf couldn’t even summon up one of his giant eagles to give him a ride there! This is also true of gods. The Bible talks of the most powerful being in the universe - indeed, the creator of the universe - yet the bottom line was that this creator could do nothing, and it was down to the Israelites to savagely take the land they were supposedly promised! How pathetic is that?!

So how does this relate to The Salbine Sisters? In the same vein as the problems I addressed above, what I don’t get about this novel, given that they have this supposedly strong and pervasive control of the 'elements' at their fingertips (quite literally!), is why is it that they have to resort to sending letters by messenger to communicate with another monastery? They can't use magic to communicate? If not, then why? This isn't explained and I think it needs to be, otherwise the story is letting the reader down. We're being asked to take something on faith and given no reason for it, and I think this reflects badly on an author. I don’t do well on faith alone!

Why, for example, does Maddy have to physically travel to the other monastery to read their documents? Yes, I know there has to be this separation to move Maddy and Lillian's story along, but the question of why their magic is so unhelpful in this regard is unaddressed. For me, it's now sitting there, the bull elephant in the room, reminding me that this is just a story, and I shouldn’t take it too seriously or become too engrossed in it, because this separation seems awfully artificial now - like it didn’t arise truly organically from the story, but was tossed in randomly just because. The problem which Ettritch has caused here is that I want to get engrossed in this story! It’s all her fault! She made me love these characters, but I feel she's cheated me out of a piece of their world.

They can't use their magic to copy and send these documents? If not, then of what use is the magic? What do they actually do with it? This is important given the awful events which befall Maddy on her journey, but it's something which the novel hasn’t covered. Magic plays very little part in the story. I don't get why it's there, because precisely the same story could have been told without any magical element to it at all.

If there's a limit to the magic, it ought to be depicted, spelled-out, shown, or hinted at, to explain the even more pervasive need for the mundane in a magical story, otherwise it just looks like the idea hasn’t been thought through properly. I know that in order for this to be a really good novel, it can’t be just about the magic, with the people being merely props. There has to be a people factor, of course, but the other side of that coin is that it can't be just about the people, either, not if you're going to bring magic into it! And of course I mean the magic of fantasy, not the magic which comes as part and parcel of a really cool relationship, which is actually what we also have here.

If the magic is in, then it has to be an intelligent and integral part of who they are, and of the world in which they live, otherwise why have it? If it’s not integral, then it’s just a patch on an otherwise perfect pair of pants and it stands out as such. If this fails, then the novel becomes loose and disjointed and the author is left relying on telling just a people story, hoping the holes in the magic don’t turn off the reader. Fortunately for Ettritch, she had me at "Maddy ran her hand up Lillian's arm…" and she hasn’t turned me off this story, but she has imbued me with the vague feeling that something's rotten in the state of Denmark, as Marcellus would phrase it.

Okay, pet peeve off! Moving along. I found this story hard to put aside, but put aside I had to from time to time and I missed it when I did. That's a really good sign! It's probably also a good thing, otherwise I would have finished it must more quickly and then have found myself pining for more. That's the sign of a really engrossing novel, and that's what Ettritch has charmed me with. I definitely want to read more of this author.

So in conclusion, the story did go where I thought it would, and where I hoped it would, and my eyes were moist at the end! There, I said it! I loved this story and would definitely be interested in a sequel, or failing that, in reading other materials from Sarah Ettritch.

Così Fan Tutti by Michael Dibdin

Title: Così Fan Tutti
Author: Michael Dibdin
Publisher: Vintage Books / Black Lizard/
Rating: warty

Set in Napoli (Naples) in Italy, this novel is one of a series, but it isn't the first in this series, and I haven't read any of the others, so that may or may not affect my take on this. I've actually been to Napoli, but the visit was so brief and it was so long ago that I barely recall it. It seems that everyone who writes detective series has to have a character they groom for their stories, and I confess that sometimes seems weird to me, but it’s undoubtedly a very commercial approach. In Dibdin's case, the character is Aurelio Zen. Dibdin was English by birth and spent only five years in Italy, so I'm not sure what his motivation was for setting his series there. Maybe it was nostalgia or a desire to set his series apart from those of other writers. Maybe it was something else.

Così Fan Tutte is the name of the opera by Mozart; it's taken to mean: 'women are like that'. So there's a slight difference between it and the title of the novel. Maybe the changed title means men are like that (or perhaps everyone is like that)?! The book is supposedly published by Black Lizard but the lizard on the cover is pink! Hmm!

I don’t really get novels which are set in another country and the language is English using English idiom, but (as in this particular case) unmarried women are referred to as Signora, rather than Miss or Ms. If it were in French, it would be Mademoiselle, if German, it would be Fraulein. From a writing perspective I have to ask why? What does this achieve? To me it’s an annoyance, reminding me that I'm reading a novel. It’s the same problem when the writer mentions some local meal they ate. Unless I happen to know what it is (which was only about fifty percent of the time so far in this novel!), what does it convey to me to say they ate sucho-and-sucho? Nothing. Doe sit have meaning beyond the mere word, though - to evoke a feeling or a reaction? maybe. My reaction is Oy Veh!

I didn’t like the opening, which set up the requisite murder (more accurately, the first of the requisite murders). I do like that the contents shows chapter headings in English, but the headings for each actual chapter are in Italian. I don’t know why, but it’s a quirk which somehow appealed to me - and this almost completely contradicts what I said above, doesn't it?! But not quite - at least we get a translation! In that way you can learn a little Italian if you wish. The chapter headings are actually from the original libretto for Mozart's opus. After the opening chapter, the story was much more readable, and I easily got into it, enjoying the sly humor and everyone's attempts to work the Italian system to their own advantage. Unfortunately, this didn't last too long!

Aurelio Zen starts out having apparently been demoted (but he proactively set it up so that he could chose the venue of his 'punishment'). This evidently is a result of something he did (or failed to do!) in a previous volume of this series. Frankly I was suspicious that this itself is a set-up and he's actually investigating something - perhaps corruption - under the guise of the demotion, but if my guess is right (which it usually isn’t!) then he sure doesn't seem to be doing much in that regard. Perhaps he really was demoted.

His first act is talking to two young women, doing a favor for their mother - a very rich woman, the widow of a mobster, whose two daughters are dating street thugs. Their mother wants the relationships terminated. She and Zen plan to achieve this end by sending the girls to London for two weeks under the guise of studying in England. Zen than hires two prostitutes to lead the thugs astray to show the daughters how fickle they are. In return for this, Zen gets to rent, at advantageous terms, a nice apartment which is owned by the woman. Zen does notice that these guys have absolutely no police file whatsoever, which only makes him more suspicious of them.

There's also the case of a stabbing in the dock area (a locale for which Zen is responsible). It took place after a fracas (an appropriate word since it comes from an Italian root!) between some American sailors and some Greek sailors. The guy they have in custody isn't talking. He claims he understands only English, but he says that in the thick local accent! When Zen sings snatches of some English pop songs he knows, the guy doesn’t even remotely react like he understands it.

Okay, so here's what happened with this, seriously. I was going along and I just was not getting into it. I thought I was going to finish it and give it a reserved worthy, but today I actually had a choice to read this or to listen to Charlaine Harris, and despite the fact that I am starting to despise book 4 of that sucky series, I still found it easier to listen to that than to plow through more of this one, so honestly, what did that not so much as tell me, but scream at me? It's warty! It's a DNF.

But it's also post-mortem time. Why could I not get interested in this? I think one reason was Dubdin's increasing use of Italian terms when everything else was in English, That doesn't impress me and was, in fact, annoying. On top of that there was one character after another paraded across the pages and not one of them made an impression on me. I could neither identify with any of them, nor develop any interest in them. So I decided to call this one and move onto something I would really like to read. Contrast this with The Salbine Sisters which really grabbed me from very early on and wouldn't let me go. Life's too short.

Sour Lake: Or, the Beast by Bruce McCandless

Title: Sour Lake: Or, the Beast
Author: Bruce McCandless
Publisher: Ninth Planet
Rating: worthy!

Disclosure: This novel came to me in paperback as a gift via my wife who is a colleague of the wife of the author. As I always do, I'll give it my usual review: if I don't like it I won't hesitate to say so, and I'll tell you why.

So when I started this one I thought, "Oh dear, I am not going to be able to finish this," but as I plowed on, the plowing got easier, so I'm about half-way through it as I start this review, and I am enjoying it! Phew! No un-neighborly feuds in the offing - yet!

So why did I have such a hard time getting started on this? Well McCandless writes a bit like Stephen King, and I don't mean that in a complementary manner! My problem with Stephen King is that he has a character flaw, to whit: he can't introduce a character without giving that character's entire life history back through several generations! I find that abysmally self-indulgent and boring in the extreme. If it doesn't have any real bearing on where your novel is going, I do not care how well you've thought your character through. I really don't. McCandless isn't anywhere near as bad as King, but he does appear anxious to show some of his research even where it isn't relevant to what's going on. Fortunately, this lapses into disuse after a few chapters and the story really kicks into high gear (and he doesn't have a prologue so props for that too!).

Unfortunately (to finish this line of thought!), that's what you get (in King's case) from success: you get people who don't know how to honestly self-edit and you get editors who are too spineless to say no. If anyone but King had turned in some of his door-stop novels, they would have been kicked out on their ear or they would have been literally ordered by the publisher to strip the novel down; you know the old "Don't use two words where one will do". In King's case, it's "Don't use two words where a novelette will do. It was for this reason that I ditched King after The Shining, which was brilliant. I tried to pick him up again with the 'Dark Tower' trilogy - remember that? the trilogy that turned into a hexalogy or a heptalogy or whatever the hell it currently resides at? I think I made it through three volumes of that before I become seriously ill from it.

But I digress - or do I? This is a writing blog as well as a reviewing blog, so it's appropriate to digress, I guess! Anyway, this story begins in 1911 in Texas. I thought it would come through to the present, but it remains in 1911. It begins with some people disappearing, and being found with their throats torn and their corpse mutilated and their body drained of blood! Yes, it's a vampire! Or is it? It's certainly a more realistic take than Charlaine Harris has! But it;s way more than you might think.

A Texas ranger is called in who has his own agenda, and a local doctor is part of the team together with his son, his friend from Harvard medical school (a rare black doctor), and a huge black guy whom the local town people suspect of being responsible for these atrocities. They narrow down their area of search to a local mine, but when they go out there's a posse, they're repelled by gunfire. The plot thickens, just like coagulating blood! But you know they;re not going to leave it at that.

So I've finished this novel and I recommend it. It's really well written, and while you need your tongue firmly in your cheek for the 'true story' aspects of it, particularly parts of the epilogue, I can't take anything way from McCandless. He's done a damned fine job. Do be aware that he doesn't hold anything back in the way of describing gore. If you can handle that, you're in for a treat.

Postscriptum: I actually got to meet Bruce McCandless today and he's a charming guy. I enjoyed meeting him and his family very much, and I was glad I gave him a decent review so that he didn't have to pummel me into the ground (just kidding!). On a serious note, he did pummel me at basketball and dodgeball, but them I'm lousy at both, so maybe that wasn't such a big deal. But he's a great guy and I'm glad I got a chance to talk with him. Go buy his novel! Now!

Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

Title: Club Dead
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WARTY!

Welcome to the Sookie Stackhouse Self-Pity Party! Yes, I'm back with another Charlaine Harris extravaganza of sucky tedium on audio!

You know, there's something I don't get when I read other's reviews of say, volume one of a trilogy and they rake it over the coals and then conclude with the revelation that they're looking forward to volume two to find out what happens! Why? Why would you put yourself through that if you didn't like volume one? So what's my excuse? Well, I have it on good authority (I hope) that book four is really good, but in order to get there, I have to get through book three (do I really? honestly?). You know how they say "Three's a shame"? No, they don’t! But three is a shame, because I have to confess I was so ready to ditch this novel after three chapters because it is so god-awfully whiny and tedious.

Those first three chapters consisted almost literally of nothing save Sookie (Suck-ee from here-on out; the reader is the sucker...) whining about how much she misses her boyfriend vampire Bill who typically treats her like dirt, yet she's utterly devoted to him. So devoted is she in fact, that she only gets horny for every supernatural guy who comes in her orbit (to coin a phrase), and no one else! This woman is sick. Seriously. Suck-ee needs therapy. Sookie Stackhouse is also a complete moron for whom I have absolutely no respect. Contrast that with the TV version whom I really like. What does that tell you? When she's not whining nauseatingly about Bill (which isn't often), she's describing what everyone is wearing down to the most tedious detail imaginable, or she's describing what she's doing down to the most tedious detail imaginable

And Harris is so repetitive: she keeps trotting out things she's already explained more than once in volume one and all over again in volume two like your average reader is a moron. Perhaps that's true for people who are helplessly addicted to this series. I really find it hard to believe that book four can be that great, quite honestly, but that volume will have to be outstandingly incredible to make me go anywhere beyond book four, rest assured. At least by then Ally Carter won’t have the dubious distinction of being the only writer for whom I've reviewed four titles and given largely bad reviews!

The tediousness in Club Dead is mesmerizingly brutal. Harris seems like she can't keep herself from describing every excruciating detail no matter how mundane; when Sookie is packing to go on a trip, for example, we read: "I got out my suitcase and opened it" like we don't get that, in order to pack, you need to actually open the suitcase first! Later we're treated to a detailed description of how to clean a frying pan. I am not kidding. Is Harris deranged? Or is it just her devotees, and she knows only too well what drivel she's writing? At one point, Suck-ee actually has this thought: Somehow, it had never crossed my mind - I guess since I'm an American - that the vampires who had snatched Bill might be resorting to evil means to get him to talk. You know what, Suck-ee? You don't have a friggin' mind to cross.

So what of the so-called story here? Well, Bill mysteriously disappears, telling Suck-ee that he's going on a mission for Eric, when he isn't. Suck-ee has a snit, claiming to the reader that she's usually been an integral part of the investigative team, which is an outright lie. They've had only one assignment, which was in book two! 'Usual' isn’t on this bus! When Suck-ee discovers that Eric is sending vampires to guard her, she also learns that Bill has lied: he isn't on any mission for Eric or for anyone but himself and he's looking up an old vampire flame (his maker?)! Naturally Sookie is chosen to go find him because there isn’t a damned vampire on the planet who can find a missing vampire, as we learned in volume 2. And while we’re on that topic, Club Dead is exactly the same plot as book two: Vampire disappears, other vampires useless, Suck-ee to the rescue, dresses erotically, visits nightclub, visits hostile lair, gets seriously injured, engineers rescue of abducted vampire. That's it.

The vampire whom Bill visits is named Lorena (no word on if her last name is Bobbit!). Suck-ee requests that Eric 'take her out' (that is, kill Lorena - lest there be any misunderstanding!) if she doesn't come back from this mission on which he's sending her, and Eric agrees. Like I said, Sookie Stackhouse is seriously deranged. This is the kid her charming Old South grandmother raised? The genderism in Club Dead is even more disturbing than in previous volumes. Suck-ee relaxes by folding laundry, she's "self-educated from genre books"(!), she's ostensibly a nun, but dresses like a pro, she cooks and cleans for everyone, and entirely unsurprisingly, she pronounces milieu as 'mil-you', not 'meal-yuh', and fracas as fray-kass, and not fra-cah. At least, Parker does in the narration, let's say.

So what's with this 'vampire organization'? I honestly don’t get this. In Club Dead, it's rigidly organized, and Harris explains it (in too much detail as usual). Each state has a monarch, and under the monarch is a number of areas, each of which has a sheriff. Given that, why are they called 'areas' and not 'shires'? And why on Earth would vampires even care where state lines are? This, to me, is purest bullshit. Given what we're told about vampires in this novel (and in other vampire novels) vampires buck authority at every turn, yet the novels would have us believe they exist in nests with a king or a queen and a hierarchy? That, to me, is so pedantic that it's laughable. Why write a vampire novel and then belittle your topic like that? I can see that in a comedy: Terry Jones's Brasil meets Bram Stoker's Dracula. But to be taken seriously? Fuggedabowdit

And what's with vampires being obsessed with and sexually attracted to humans? Honestly? That's like saying humans are sexually attracted to chickens - and yes, some are, but those people are considered deviant. Why would vampires, whom we're told repeatedly have nothing but disdain for their food, be even remotely interested in us as sexual objects? It's farcical, yet we get it in most every vampire story there is. Can no author break out of this pathetic mold? Well, Maybe Bruce MccCandless can. His story is well off the beaten vampire track!

While we're on the subject of things I don’t get in the southern vampire so-called mysteries series, why is Harris so tickled pink by her Elvis Presley vampire? She never calls him that; he's always referred to as Bubba, but if she's scared of being sued by his estate, then calling him Bubba isn’t going to help her one bit given that she's already positively ID'd him by writing all around who he is.

Let's get back to the purported plot. Despite constant whining about how much she misses the completely bland and uninteresting Vampire Bill, Suck-ee has no problem at all in powerfully lusting, with very other thought, after her escort in this novel. He's a werewolf called Alcide, but I shall hereinafter refer to him as Rancid. He's a real man who drives a man's truck and eats man's food and talks with a man's voice. He probably makes manfarts and takes mandumps, too, and no doubt Suck-ee will get around to giving us the low-down in due 'coarse'. But now Harris has me wondering what Bill is. Or Eric. I mean if Rancid is such a manly man's man, and very manful too, where does that leave the previous men in her life? Oh man!

Rancid is working for Eric (who is the only character in this entire novel who makes for remotely acceptable reading); Rancid is in Eric's debt for his father's gambling and that's why he's escorting Suck-ee to Jack-off, Mississippi, where (exactly like the previous novel) she has to dress up like a wolf's dinner to go to a night club and listen in on the thoughts of others. Of course, she's 100% spectacularly successful in all cases because there is always one of the bad guys guaranteed to be running off at the mind on the very subject she wants to learn about. Rancid's old boyfriend, over whom he's really hurting, just happens to be having her engagement party there, and she trots over to diss him and his 'girlfriend'. I was dearly hoping that Suck-ee would have some tart one-liners for her, but intelligent and/or amusing repartee is was evidently well outside of Harris's reach.

Tera is also there (why?!) and she and Suck-ee do a raunchy dance to the thrill of everyone there. Then she wonders why the 'Weres' hit on her! This leads to her becoming injured and she's rescued by Russell Edgington, the vampire king of the state, who insists she come back the next night. When she does, she saves the life of Russell's number two (not to be confused with Rancid's mandump), but gets staked herself instead. Of course, Eric is there to rescue her. Eric also gets to lick her tears. I am not kidding you. Suck-ee has zero problem with this, yet bitches and whines endlessly about Vampire Bill's possible unfaithfulness.

Which self-respecting girl (and one in a supposed love relationship, to boot) would let another guy lick her tears? We're expected to believe that vampires get off on all kinds of human body fluids, but evidently this applies only if they relate to crying and blood. I seriously doubt there will be a volume in this series where we'll see Harris extol the joys of licking sweat, or swallowing semen, chawing ear wax, or gulping down the golden rain.

Needless to say this novel sucked almost exclusively. The only salvageable parts were the ones where Eric showed up. Why Harris can write him as quirky, interesting, and issuing amusing comments while everyone else in the entire novel is boring as a Rancid Mandump is the Southern Vampire mystery.

Elemental: The First by Alexandra May

Title: Elemental: The First
Author: Alexandra May
Publisher: Pauma
Rating: WARTY!

Here's one I snuck in on you! This is the first review of a novel I read on a Kindle. It's not the first I ever read on a Kindle, but that device is such a pain to use that I try not to read on it unless I'm forced. The Kindle interface is really clunky and not user-friendly in any meaningful sense. But this has nothing to do with the review as such, since the interface didn't factor at all into how bad the story was!

This novel was awful! It's one I've had on the list for some time, and I kept putting it off despite the fact that I’d read the first couple of chapters of it. Now I know why I kept putting it off: the novel is a complete mess with no appealing features whatsoever, and I guess I realized this on some level from what I first read. It’s set in England in the county of Wiltshire, home of Stonehenge, another stone circle at Avebury, the White Horse at Cherhill, and the city of Warminster. Warminster was once bizarrely famed for UFO sightings, which was, of course, a bunch of complete and delusional nonsense, but it has faded from those "glory" days, so why May would choose to try and resurrect that hysterical garbage is a bit of a mystery in itself.

But the real problem here is, given the rich heritage of material with which an enterprising novelist can play, how did May manage to turn out such a boring and confused story? The female protagonist of the story, Rose Frost, is sixteen going on twelve. Her parents are off doing secret work, so we're told, and apparently their lives are threatened, so of course they choose to abandon their daughter to her own fate with her grandmother and disappear. Despite knowing that their daughter has powers, they tell her nothing, explain nothing, yet they give to her a bracelet which literally sticks into her skin, and idiotically tell her to keep it a secret! Later we learn that there is more to it than this, but it's still lousy.

Despite claiming to love her granddaughter very much, Grand mom Daisy doesn't tell her anything either. She merely keeps saying that they must talk about important matters, yet they never do. Daisy is tiresome and absurdly mysterious and for all practical purposes may as well not have been in the novel at all. She supposedly has connections way beyond what is reasonable, or even rational, including with the major bad guy in the city, and at one point Rose discovers that the British army is tailing her to keep her safe, apparently on Daisy's "orders"! Yet no one explains from what it is exactly which Rose is supposedly being protected, or why it’s the army rather than the police or MI5 (the Brit version of the FBI) which is charged with her safety! If the bad guy (who we never meet either!) lives in Warminster, then where is the rationale for bringing Rose right into his domain? It's beyond absurd!

Rose is far too much of a Mary Sue to even think of asking why, either! Meanwhile, her older sister (who isn't a part of this story) goes without any protection whatsoever! Apparently no one imagines, not even the bad guys, that kidnapping the sister would be a great way to get to Rose! But no one raises this issue either! I guess the bad guys are Mary Sues too.

Oh yeah, about those bad guys! Rose has an appallingly dim-witted lust-triangle with a blond haired good guy (so we’re expected to believe) - Morgan, and a black haired bad guy (so we’re expected to believe) - Aiden, who is the grandson of the city's ultra bad guy (grandson Aiden, granddaughter Rose - get it?). It seemed painfully likely to me from the start that these two roles were in fact reversed, with Aiden actually being good and Morgan bad, but whether my feeling about that was right or wrong (I'm not telling!), Rose is a complete airhead about both of them. If what she's told about the appalling things that sports-car driving Aiden has supposedly done is true, then she has no excuse for being involved with him at all, and if she is involved, then Rose is nothing but a jerk and a lowlife. But she never asks Aiden for his side of the story! OTOH, if it’s black leather-clad Morgan the biker guy who is the bad guy, then he's a pathological liar, and she has no excuse being involved with him, either - not if she wants to be in my good graces! Who knows? Maybe they're both bad guys. Either way they're both uninteresting and completely lackluster.

Rose is perhaps the most capricious, clueless, pain-in-the-ass flibbertigibbet ever in a YA novel. She blows hot and cold with both these guys, sometimes turning on a five-pence piece (that would be the size of a dime to those in the US!) from being flirtatious to being angrily reactive and rejecting them. Here's one example of what a self-centered loser Rose is: she's told not to go into the cottage on Daisy's property, which is where Little Orphan Morgannie resides. Of course the place isn't locked because Morgan is a complete moron, but Rose also ignores the prohibition and goes into his home uninvited when he is not there, and snoops all around the place. But Morgan has a camera watching the interior, and when he later shows her the recording of her trespassing, merely asking her in a non-accusatory manner what she was looking for, she becomes irrationally and intensely angry that he was "spying" on her! What a clueless jerk she is!

But Morgan is just as bad. One night when Mary Sue Rose has a dream about a magical sorceress (hint, hint!), she wakes to find Morgan in her bed, holding and "comforting" her. She isn't even remotely put-out or freaked-out, or even angered by this behavior! So, just to be clear for all you young adults out there, here's the Missed Manners guide to YA interaction:

• Being asked what you were looking for when snooping in someone's private residence: reason to get very angry. Do not apologize. Do not even feel contrite.
• Waking up to find your neighbor in bed with you uninvited: no reaction at all.

Got it? Good! Let's move on! The weird thing (like that isn't weird enough!) is that the army guy who was standing literally outside her bedroom door to "protect" Rose did nothing to stop Morgan entering, and Morgan himself evidently has no problem simply wandering into the house and into her bedroom uninvited!

I don’t know what May was trying to accomplish here, but whatever it was, she fails epically. It’s like she had this one idea but couldn’t think of a way to make it a strong story or make it interesting, so she kept tossing in other ideas whimsically, like someone making a spaghetti dinner, and spaghetti is exactly what she got. If her hope was that this hodge-podge would resonate and fill out the pages, she was wrong: it doesn’t. This is the only explanation I can think of, though, for why we get a sorry mish-mash of Rose with her healing power, which she rarely uses, but which lets her talk to plants(!), together with stories of ninth century English warlord Alfred's jewels (not those jewels, the ones made from crystallized minerals, silly!), together with mystical visions of some ancient sorceress babe called Halika Dacome, together with flying saucers. Yeah it's that bad.

The story meanders in so many random directions that it's laughable. At one point we have this really clunky introduction between Rose and Aiden, the overture to which is orchestrated by her having a vision of a child burning. The vision appears in the middle of the street; then this event isn't ever mentioned again. Later, after snooping Morgan's private property, Rose talks to plants which leads her to dig up a box which she leaves unopened with Morgan when she has no reason to trust him. The box is never mentioned again!

It’s obvious from the off that Rose is some sort of host vessel or reincarnation of Halika Dacome, a weirdo who is mentioned repeatedly, so why there's this big (non-)reveal at the end like nobody knows this, is beyond pathetic. Hell-like Macramé is an alien who came to Earth with three other aliens 200,000 years ago to prepare Earth for the colonization by the rest of the aliens. She manifests every other generation (grand children, get it?), but these alien fore-runners were not volunteers, they were exiled to Earth as a punishment. No wonder they let Earth go to hell in a hand-basket! Why on Earth (literally) would exiles even lift a finger to help those who exiled them?! The whole plot is asinine. How overseeing the explosion of the human population to seven billion constitutes preparing the planet for the arrival of their fellow aliens is a bit of a mystery - unless these aliens eat humans! All of this comes out pretty much in the last page or two of this fable!

This novel is pathetic and is a definite, no-holds-barred WARTY! rating.

Jenny Rat by Martin Simons

Title: Jenny Rat
Author: Martin Simons
Publisher: Bookmasters
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 their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Errata:
P40 "silentl" should be "silent"
At about 17% in: "People call me up went they need me" - "went" should be "when"
At about 35% in: "tris" should be "tries"

This novel in brief, is a cross between Nabokov's Lolita, and Shaw's Pygmalion. I'd actually looked at another of Simons' novels on Netgalley, Cities at Sea and decided against it, but after reading this, I might just reconsider looking at that one.

Michael Ingram, an engineering consultant who lives by himself out in the wilds in Australia, is winding up his weekly tryst with a call-girl (the only 'date' he can get) when he discovers a girl in her early teens, almost dead, lying in the road outside his house during a severe and chill hail storm. He brings her in. She's incontinent, and dirty and wretched, but he calls for an ambulance and bathes her, wrapping her warmly while he waits. The call-girl who is with him reacts almost abusively to the discovery of this girl, calling her a 'rat' repeatedly. I have no idea what the significance of that is, and it isn't explained; it's as though the reader ought to know. Does it have a specific meaning in the context of this novel, or is it a well-known term in Australia for a lowlife teen - or a lowlife teen girl, or a young prostitute? I don’t know, and a very brief search for Australian slang didn't bring any useful results.

The call-girl has never stayed overnight with Michael, but on this one occasion, with the weather being so bad and it being so late by the time the ambulance has been and gone, she stays the night. The next morning she asks Michael to show her around his home, and she's impressed with his modest wealth and independence. She starts talking about arranging for a different girl to start visiting him because she's getting old, but Michael isn’t interested in replacing her. She then reveals that she's thinking of retiring from the game. Is she considering hooking up with Michael permanently? What she doesn’t grasp is how negatively her abusive reaction towards 'the rat' has affected Michael in his opinion of her. Even this doesn’t seem to put him off her, but his life is about to change.

He speaks with the girl's doctor the next day and the doctor advises him to come in and have blood tests - thinking Michael had sex with the girl. Obviously, he didn’t, but he has the tests as a precaution, and he ends up visiting the girl. She's recovering, but only very slowly. She's thin and tired, and she's not eating or talking, but she seems to respond to him when she hasn't done so to anyone else. She can vaguely remember the night he saved her. She won’t tell anyone her name, but she insists that the hospital staff know her, implying that she was there some time before. And she claims she killed her dad....

So Michael continues to visit, irregularly and not frequently, and Jenny continues to improve. She interacts with him when she will with no one else, even telling him her name, which turns out to be Gianetta, but she prefers Jenny. She shows great interest in learning about Michael's work and has serious insights into it. She's also an artist and she ends up earning some money for herself by drawing portraits of her fellow patients. But one thing she draws is horrible, and it represents her fear of ending up in a home and sliding down the slick slope to where she was when Michael found her.

Well I don't want to go into much more detail here otherwise I'll be telling a story when it isn't my place to tell. This story is so rich, however that there's lots more to talk about. There's the discomfort for one thing. My discomfort is not so much what Simons describes, which is pretty graphic (or more to the point, ugly graphic, so be warned), as the fact that I know what he describes isn't just confined to fiction: it's out there in the real world, too. Children, both boys and girls alike, are put through what Jenny goes through in this fictional world, but they face it for real, and it's sickening.

There are other forms of discomfort present, too. Eventually, and it's no big spoiler to pass this on because it's clear from the blurb that this is going to happen, the two share his house together and their relationship is, for me, running down the wrong side of dangerously inappropriate, but Simons writes well and slips in little preparatory passages here and there. He manages to walk that tightrope more or less successfully - dependent, of course upon your own personal position. In that, he's aided by the fact that it's not really a child and an adult here, it's more like two children, given Michael's rather handicapped position in life, and from that perspective, it's a lot easier to see what's going on. For me, I have to say I hope child services doesn't work that way, but this is fiction and I could see (I thought) where he was going with this.

When I finished the novel I was very disappointed in the ending which seemed to me to be a betrayal of everything which went before. I felt misled since the ending seems so completely out of line. But in some regards it did fit, so I won't say more about that! As I said, I thought this was well-written and was inventive and sensitively done. Sometimes it was a but much, and there were times when Jenny's character seemed far too fey given her supposed background. Other parts of it, too, seemed more like wild fantasy than fiction, but overall, and despite the ending, I consider this a worthy novel. It's a good story and while it wasn't necessarily executed in its best light, it is definitely worth a read if only to make you feel a bit uncomfortable in your easy reading chair!