Red Glove by Holly Black

Title: Red Glove
Author: Holly Black
Publisher: Margaret K McElderry
Rating: WORTHY!

Well we're back with Curse Workers #2, and with Cassel, and Cassel is back in school. And so is Lila, which is a shock to him. He's supposed to be staying away from her because she was emotionally compromised into falling in love with him by Cassel's mother, who is one of the seven varieties of curse worker. Cassel refuses to take advantage of Lila, even though she's pretty much begging for him to take advantage of her; he's resolved to stay distant from her until the curse wears off. He's not doing a very good job of it, and neither is she. But then she doesn’t want to!

That's when the FBI shows up and reveals to Cassel that his brother Phillip has been assassinated. They want him to help them bring down the assassin - someone wearing red gloves, who appears to be female. Here's my wild guess: it’s either Cassel's ex-girlfriend Audrey or it isn’t a female. Now you know for a fact that it’s not Audrey, but it is a female, given my history of appallingly wrong guesses! Unfortunately, Cassel is already feeling wretched about the murders he was forced to commit (and then forget) by his brothers, Phillip and Barron. This entire family consists of men with two consonants in the middle of their name, and the reason Phillip was killed was because he has one too many letters in his name. There. Solved!

Okay, so the seven deadly workings are: emotions, death, dreams, luck, memory, physical, transformation (now you know how the Transformers really arose…). Lila is a dream worker. Cassel is a transformation worker. Cassel's two friends Sam and his girlfriend Daneca are both interested in the case files which the FBI gave to Cassel, despite his never giving them permission to snoop. Cassel discovers that he both killed and hid his victims in one fell swoop by transforming them into inanimate objects. He browbeats Barron into revealing one of the objects to him, but when Cassel transforms it back to its original state, the guy appears alive for a split second and then deteriorates rapidly, confirming what Cassel already knew - you can’t transform a living person to an inanimate object and hope to get them back alive. He really did murder those people. He also knows that you can, for example, transform a young girl called Lila into a white cat and get her back safely. So could you transform someone into a pair of red gloves?

Cassel becomes ever more confused and trapped in this lifestyle that he was so hoping to escape. Zacharov comes courting him by first asking a 'favor' - to change the appearance of one of his assassins. After Cassel complies (he doesn’t feel he has much of a choice), he's treated to a luxury dinner at an exclusive members only club, and later, Cassel finds he's the recipient of a brand new luxury Mercedes, a gift he doesn’t return. So has Zacharov finally bought him? We don’t know. When he later learns what the assassin did, he feels awful that he helped him escape justice.

Meanwhile, the FBI guys are pressuring him to uncover the murderer of his brother. Cassel is reluctant to do this because he's convinced it’s his mother; then he suspects it's Lila! Finally he decides to take matters into his own hands by fingering a person he really dislikes, and who he knows for a fact has put out a contract on someone else in the past. In this way he gets the FBI off his back and metes out harsh justice to someone who he knows is a bad person. He sets this person up by planting the murder weapon from his brother's case in this victim's apartment. I am in somewhat of a state of confusion about exactly how this weapon came to be in his hands and what it means that it ended-up there. Did Cassel kill Phillip?

Yes, Cassel isn't really such a nice guy, and it’s harder to like him in this novel than in White Cat, but he is still, even given all the pressure, trying to do the right thing as he sees it, only to have things go sideways on him at the most inopportune moment. There's one intriguing event when he actually performs a transformation on himself. I had wondered whether a worker could do this, and here we learn of it not only in Cassel's case, but in another instance, too. This made me wonder if Black is slipping this in as a concept so she can use it later to much greater effect on us.

This revelation also brought into focus a question I'd entertained when reading volume one, but never got around to discussing (curse this hectic charge from one novel to another!). This is a technical question as to how, exactly, this cursing business works. I believe I read in volume one that it doesn't manifest itself until somewhere in childhood - maybe onset of puberty? - which is how child-bearing women manage to deliver the kids without being killed or transformed, for example, by the fetus touching them! I don’t recall reading how cursing actually works in practice. There exists this obsession with wearing gloves: everyone wears them, even non-curse workers, because touching is such a verboten activity in this society. Hands are always covered, like breasts and genitals, which effectively turns them into sex organs (after a fashion!).

That reminded me of an old Mad magazine I read once where this series of panels featured three young men at the beach eyeing the semi-exposed girls around them. One of the guys goes off on a riff in his mind about how, if noses were considered sex organs instead, then women with large noses might be considered to be "stacked", and those with snub noses would be considered under-endowed. Right then, this young girl strolls by with a large beak-nose with a Band-Aid on it and the guy blurts out how sexy it is. His two friends look at him in askance. The weird thing is that I actually think that noses can look sexy, or can be a turn off, yet my perspective isn't based on whether they're overly large, or particularly cute, or if they're misshapen. I guess I just like what I like; but I digress!

So anyway: this business of cursing by touch! Clearly if workers can curse themselves, then it can’t be done by nothing more than a touch of the fingers, because the death-dealers would all have inadvertently offed themselves in their sleep at a very young age! There has to be some intent behind it when the victim is touched, yet this isn’t ever really made explicitly clear. This was really brought home to me by a rather erotic scene in this novel when Lila and Cassel start to kiss this one time and their hands are bare yet they're touching each other. Nothing really happens between them, yet this really moved me in the context of this novel because it was so forbidden! The touching seemed far more sinful than any amount of naked flesh or intimate kissing, or of feeling of breasts, or of organs rubbed against each other. Curious, huh?

I think Black has subtly revealed this self-cursing ability to us (or not so subtly, since I noticed it!) because she plans on using this at some point in the novel (or in the finale when she thinks we forgot it!). I guess we'll have to wait and see. I love this series and I'm already looking forward to volume 3.

Back to Cassel! Sometimes he appears to do things way out of left field. Lila is still liking him very much, and the temptation to take advantage of her is ever-growing, so finally, he asks someone who is quite close to him, and who he has discovered unexpectedly, is an emotion worker, to zap Lila with a neutral vibe. He wants her to quit liking him so much, but not to hate him, either. He'll be just another student at her school; no one special. It hurts him to do this, and he knows it will hurt worse when it goes into effect, but he does it because he's convinced that it will be best for her. He honestly feels he can never trust her if she keeps liking him, because he'll always feel it’s the remants of the curse which his mother worked on her. This seems to be the most selfless thing he's ever done.

OTOH, Cassel is, foremost, a con man. He's always gaging all the angles even if he's not working them, so I'm not sure that he truly is doing this for purely selfless reasons, but when I considered why he was asking that this be done on Lila, and not worked on himself, which seems selfish at first glance, I could see that it would be actually less selfless that way. If he did it that way, it would result in Lila (assuming she does have any honest feeling for him) being left high and dry if he suddenly stopped caring for her, so maybe he's putting her first and taking the hit himself rather than dumping it on her, which is a very romantic act in many ways.

But if you wanna know more, then you're gonna hafta read tha novel! I recommend it.

Shylock's Daughter by Mirjam Pressler

Title: Shylock's Daughter
Author: Mirjam Pressler
Publisher: Dial
Rating: WARTY!

Mirjam Pressler is a noted German author, and this is an English translation of one of her novels. Based upon Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and set in the sixteenth century, a hundred years after Shakespeare's time, this novel takes the original story and bends it to the daughter's perspective. One thing I didn't like about this novel almost from the off was Pressler's habit of using foreign words immediately followed by their English translation. This was a big distraction, constantly reminding me that this was a story, and preventing me from becoming completely immersed in it. But that's just me!

In line with the original play, Jessica, Shylock's daughter, is in love with Lorenzo and he with her, but because he is Christian and she is Jewish, and he is rich and she merely the daughter of a money-lender, their future cannot be one they spend together - until it can be. However, Jessica has made it possible for herself to meet with Lorenzo, at least in the short-term, by visiting her friend, the doctor's daughter. Lorenzo also frequents this house, and so they can spend some time together if only in secret.

I really tried to get into this story but the problems I outlined in the first paragrpah (augmented by the insane number of tiems Pressler reminds us that the Jews had to wear a red hat when out of their ghetto!), plus the occasional first person chapter which featured a whiny whiny whiny "other daughter" (which I actually believe was the real daughter referenced in the title, not Jessica) just drove me completely away. I felt like I was reading a manifesto rather than a novel, and so I pretty much skimmed it, reading sections here and there and the last chapter and none of that made me feel like this rated anything other than a warty appellation. Life's too short to read a book which doe snothing to draw me in.

The Other Sister by ST Underdahl

Title: The Other Sister
Author: ST Underdahl
Publisher: Flux
Rating: WORTHY!

Susan Thompson Underdahl is a psychologist who has experienced the very story she relates in this novel, and relate she does. I don't know how much of it is fiction and how much is actual memory, but I do know this was a novel I read through from cover to cover in one sitting, and I enjoyed it immensely. Afterwards I found myself wondering how the Josey's real life counterpart felt when she learned that this novel was coming out.

The novel is about Audrey, an adoptee, contacting her birth mother and discovering she has a birth father married to that same mother and she has two brothers and a sister in that same family. I can;t imagine what kind of a shock or revelation that would be to a young woman. Underdahl was the 'Audrey' of this novel, but she told it from the 'Josey' perspective which is interesting, and is perhaps what I might have done if I'd been in her position. I think she was able to empathize with Josey so well because in some regards, Audrey and Josey were the same person while at the same time being quite different, having gone through very different experiences and having an outlook on life which differed in many ways.

Josette, sixteen, is the middle child, with an older brother Jake and a younger brother Julian (yeah, I know). She's a straight-A student who wants to become a psychologist. She has two best friends, Sarah and Britt, and comes home one day after studying with them to discover that her mother has some news about which she's very nervous about sharing with her daughter. Josey has never seen her mother quite like this. Why her father isn't present for this discussion I don't know. I found that slightly disturbing, but his absence at that particular time is actually a part of the story in a way; it's a harbinger of the relationship between Josey and her parents which bubbles up later in the novel.

Josey (I don't like that name, neither in its full version nor the diminutive) is hit rather harder than her brothers by this news. Why her mother chose to tell her before she told either of the sons, and especially given that one of the sons is older, is also dealt with later in the novel. I think in this case it was a wise decision, but later, the parental decisions were not so wise in these events!

Since the real story took place twenty years before, Underdahl chooses to address the lack of Internet and email by giving Audrey an aversion to tel phone contact and having the initial correspondence take place via snail mail, although the very first contact, not with Audrey but with a social worker, comes by phone. The purpose of the call to ask Anne (Josey's mother) if she's averse to her adopted daughter contacting her. Anne gives the go-ahead and soon receives an intelligently-written letter from Audrey tentatively opening the lines of communication. There's a photograph enclosed, of Audrey and her fiance. Audrey looks very much like Josey.

This is the first of a series of crises through which Josey goes. The next is when she learns that Audrey is a psychologist. Josey now feels that she has lost her position as only daughter, and as senior daughter, as well as being 'replaced' by someone who looks like her, has usurped her career goal, and is occupying almost all of her mother's attention. It's heartening to see how Josey, so young and so struggling, steps up to the situation. I doubt that I would have handled it so well at her age.

Yet despite her rather heroic struggle, she is struggling. Her parents arrange for a meeting in Cancun - neutral ground - so that they can all meet and get to know one another. Because Anne works for an airline, she's able to get discount fares and they occupy a small villa, and spend three all-too-short days together, but Josey notices that Audrey is crying at one point, and when they part at the end of the vacation, she says something mean to her new sister and, too late, regrets it.

In the end it's all resolved and the outcome works for everyone, but there is a journey before Josey can get there, and it's a journey with some surprising revelations about her calm and confident older sister. But this is something you will have to find out for yourself. Despite the misgivings I had after reading Susan Underdahl's bio (she knew a ghost for eight years? She can sometimes breathe underwater?) which made me doubt her veracity in other regards, this novel is all I'm reviewing here, not the author, and the novel is well-done, sensitively written, inventive, entertaining, and very enjoyable. I rate it worthy!

White Cat by Holly Black

Title: White Cat
Author: Holly Black
Publisher: Margaret K McElderry
Rating: WORTHY

Volume one of the Curse Workers series, apparently; not to be confused with the case workers series. This novel only appeared on my radar two days ago and then I found it with the huddled masses in the library yearning to be free. I will have to see if I can find the companion novel to this: Black Cat by Holly White! There actually is a Holly White, but she's into photography, not so much YA fiction! Ooooookay! The second volume in this series is called Red Glove. No word on whether the third in the trilogy is called Blue Balled….

This novel centers on Cassel Sharpe, who ironically seems to be a pawn rather than a castle. If it’s as entertaining as Sharpe's Rifles then I'll be satisfied. Cassel is a high-school teen from a family of curse casters; these are people who can manipulate others in different ways (according to the specific gift that each has) by mere touch. Consequently there is much wearing of gloves. Because curse casting is illegal in the USA, these curse casters are all criminals. Cassel cannot cast anything; he's the standard YA trope: a dysfunctional kid from a dysfunctional family, who not only lacks the ability of his supposed peers, he also carries a 'disability'. Actually, he carries two.

He's attending a boarding school to avoid having to associate with his criminal family; that is, until he finds himself on the steeply-sloping slate roof of the school, with no notion of how he got there. He almost falls off, and the fire department has to come get him down. The school kicks him out (at least temporarily) because they don’t want students randomly falling from roofs. If that happened, - I guess attendance would drop off?! Cassel can return (in theory at least) when he gets a doctor to sign-off on his sleepwalking. Somehow I doubt that we'll see him back at school. This sleep-walking is his first 'disability', but it’s something he thought he'd outgrown. Unfortunately, that night it came back with a vengeance. He had dreamed that a white cat stole his tongue and he'd chased the cat up onto the roof to recover it!

So now he has to leave the school, where he's quite happy, and go stay with his older brother Phillip, where he's not happy, especially since his brother seems to be a rather shady character who is trying to foist him off on his grandfather. Cassel claims he would be even more unhappy there. One night when he's sitting up the stairs eavesdropping on his brother discussing Cassel's future with his grandfather down below, Phillip's wife Maura saunters by, sits with him, and quietly reveals to Cassel that she's going to leave her husband. Later, she completely forgets this. I wonder if she was touched by Phillip?

Cassel's whole family is less than above the law, let’s face it. His mother is in jail and his grandfather has blackened and missing fingers from the killing curses he's cast. All of Cassel's family has one such ability or another, but it comes with a price: every 'working' takes some sort of toll on the worker. Those curse casters who can manipulate memory, for example, tend to lose their own memories. Those curse casters who can kill by touch seem to lose a finger here and there. Wait a minute! What's up with that?!

I know some reviewers make a big deal out of the fact that magic carries a cost in this novel, but this isn't an original idea with Holly Black. Diane Duane, a sadly underrated writer, took that rational tack long before Black did. Anyone who is interested in a more grown-up version of Harry Potter should read her Young Wizards series. Bit I digress! Cassel would appear to be lucky in that he has no ability, since it costs him nothing, but you and I both know that he has some secret mega-ability that's been suppressed, and will be awakened during the course (curse? cure? core?!) of this novel, don't we? Cliché much, Holly? Actually I love the name Holly, but that's not going to stop me from wartifying this novel if it doesn’t please me, rest assured. Yes, that's the curse-working power I have. I can cause novels to be warty if I don’t like them!

"But what of Cassel's other disability?" I hear you asking. Yep, I do - I am tuned into your computer right now spying on you through that little cam you didn’t know was there, and soaking up your every word, rest assured, but your secret is safe with me. So anyway, Cassel's other disability is a real humdinger (yes it is, why would I lie about something like that?) Quit laughing, this is serious. Cassel killed Lila, the daughter of a powerful crime boss. So he believes. All he actually recalls of that night is standing, bloody, over her dead body feeling rather pleased with himself about something. Since then, he's felt absolutely wretched about it, and he finds himself imagining killing other girls to test himself. Each time he's grossed-out by the thought, and so he feels better that his dark passenger isn’t resurfacing. Dexter much, Cassel?!

Given how suspiciously his brother Phillip behaves, I suspect that Cassel has been rooked-up pretty badly (how many more of these chess references can I get away with?). I think he didn’t kill anyone and Phillip's involvement in the cover-up means that someone else killed Lila - or that she's still alive. I'd be willing to bet that Cassel's missing ability is tied to the killing (or non-killing) somehow, and Cassel will turn into a knight (well, one more chess reference at least!) in shining armor and capture his queen (two more!), but we'll have to see.

En passant (another chess reference!), Cassel ends up stuck in his childhood home with his grandfather, the king of assassins (another one!) cleaning up gargantuan piles of hoarded trash. Cassel's jailbird mom was evidently the mother of all pack-rats (no, that's not why she's in jail - she's incarcerated because of a con she pulled). This is at odds with his stated desire to avoid his grandfather because he and Cassel seem to get along really well, trading the occasional barbed comment and smart-mouth remark. Since Cassel is narrating this story, this might be a good reality check for us readers: maybe Cassel isn't always telling us the truth? Or doesn't he know the truth to begin with?

One day Cassel's ex girlfriend Audrey arrives from school with some suggestions which she thought might facilitate his early return to school. What that's all about I have no idea, but Black uses this visit to introduce us to the idea of protective amulets which Audrey wears. You can curse an amulet for one of the half-dozen or so possible curses, and wear it; then if someone tries to curse you, the curse is somehow sucked-up by the relevant amulet and you are spared. The amulet breaks, though, so you need to get a replacement. Amulets have to be made of stone. I know not why. Audrey wears seven, and Cassel also finds an amulet in the trash he's clearing out. He puts that one in his pocket. No doubt it will come in useful later in the story when we've all forgotten it was there. But you and I won't forget, will we now?

The other thing of note - and I consider it more than that actually - is that the house has several cats living in the barn out in the yard, one of which is white. Cassel dreams of this cat again the first night he stays at the house, and the cat speaks to him, telling him that he must undo the curse. At this point it seemed obvious to me (but as usual I'm probably grotesquely wrong in this) that Cassel has not killed Lila, but that he used his power to protect her, yet make it look like he killed her. This is why he was so pleased with himself. I also think that it's possible that the white cat actually is Lila, as bizarre as that seems. Hey, how can that be any more bizarre than a curse-by-touch story?!

In his desperate desire to get back to school and a "normal" life, Cassel lies to his grandfather that he has a doctor's appointment. He actually does go to the doctor, but he has no appointment, nor does he plan on actually seeing the doctor. In the confusion as they try to figure out why his non-existent appointment got screwed up, Cassel lifts the materials he will need to forge a letter from this doctor, which he then mails to his school, clearing him for a return to active duty as it were.

Well, to cut a long review short, Black went the way I had guessed, having Cassel start to think that the cat was indeed Lila, which immediately made me start to think I was completely wrong in my guess, and that the cat wasn't Lila after all. I'm not going to spoil this any more than Holly Black had done at this point by confirming whether I was right or wrong, but once I saw that Black was making it so obvious, then I suspected that Lila might be someone other than the cat - assuming she is indeed alive - and the white cat was a, huh, red herring! My immediate port-of-call then was Cassel's grandfather, which kinda grossed me out! But I thought, what if his grandfather was dead, or had gone far away, and people didn’t know, and Cassel had transformed Lila into him to keep her safe?! I think I would have done that very thing, had I been writing this: made everyone think it was the cat and then turned their stomachs by showing it was the grandfather! Lol! Lila as the grandfather! I love it.

However, I'm telling no more. You’re going to have to read this and try to figure it all out for yourself, because shy of a really lousy ending, I am ready to rate this one as worthy. I already have the next volume on request at the local library. Yes, I wish I could reward the authors by buying more of the really good novels I read, but I simply do not have the funds to buy so many, especially given that I prefer them in hardback and those are so expensive these days! If I ever strike it rich I will have a heck of a lot of books to buy!

I can just tease you by telling you that things really start to snowball towards the end, with revelations and events (that may or may not surprise you) rolling in faster than a San Francisco fog - thick and quick. Cassel is drawn into a scam by his brothers that can only end badly for him. He discovers that someone has been messing with things they ought not to, had they a decent bone in their body, and he has to start coming up with one con after another to stay ahead of the game.

When I finally reached the point in this novel that I'd decided I was going to give it a worthy rating, I went out on the 'net and looked up some one-star reviews to try and balance my own feelings and see if there was anything I'd missed that I ought to consider, but some of those reviews were really sad and did nothing to dissuade me from my own conclusion. Those reviews were from people who evidently read a lot, yet their spelling and grammar are sadly lacking. How can a person read so much and learn so little? Some of the reviews were apparently written by twelve- or thirteen-year-olds who seem to think that 'young adult' means twelve or thirteen. One of them was whining about the 'lust' in the novel! I'm like, "what?" That PoV makes me feel saddened, because it seems it was written by a young Christian girl who is woefully unprepared for life. But then it ought to be obvious that religion is for people who can't handle reality!

So, in conclusion, and in short (like I know short!) I recommend this novel.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Rating: WORTHY!

This story starts in December 2002, in Sverige, known to us English speakers as Sweden. The original Swedish version of this novel was titled Män som hatar kvinnor which means "Men who hate women". The second novel in this trilogy is the only one to retain its original Swedish title, and that title has appeared in two forms in English due to the fact that people have no idea where to place apostrophes! Thus we've had both "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (for dumb North Americans) and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" (for all actual English speakers)(reference wikipedia), each title meaning something slightly different. The third novel was titled Air Castle Blowing Up in Swedish, and the three together form the Millennium trilogy. Sadly, all of these were published after Larsson died in 2004, so he saw none of the success these novels have enjoyed.

In the novel, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, known humorously as Kalle (a name which annoys him - it would be like an American investigative journalist being called Nancy, after Nancy Drew), is judged guilty of libel, and fined as well as sentenced to three months in prison. The suit was brought by a very rich businessman called Hans-Erik Wennerström, about whom Mikael had written an exposé in his magazine, Millennium, which he co-publishes with his some time love interest Erica, who happens to be married.

Mikael is in process of contemplating and adjusting to what this significant set-back means to his life when he's contacted indirectly by Henrik Vanger, a retired CEO of the huge of Vanger Corporation. Vanger decided to hire Blomkvist based on a background check undertaken by Lisbeth Salander, a skilled hacker and investigator who has done research for him before. Salander excels at what she does, but comes with a host of baggage. She looks more like someone who would be found at a punk music concert than she does a top researcher for a detective agency; however, as we follow this story, we discover that Lisbeth is really no more screwed-up than any other character in the story when you get right down to it, and probably doing better than most, but her problems are far from over.

As Mikael travels north to visit Vanger and find out what this job offer entails, Lisbeth is tasked with investigating the case which Mikael just lost. The reason for this is that Lisbeth had remarked that she thought that there was something fishy going on there, and if she said so, there probably was. Lisbeth Salander is one of my all-time favorites up there with other great female protagonists which I've remarked upon in various places in my blog. More on this later.

Mikael ends up taking Vanger up on his job offer. His cover story is that he's writing a Vanger family history. His real job is to investigate the disappearance - the unexplained disappearance almost forty years previously - of Harriet Vanger, Henrik Vanger's brother Gottfried's daughter. No one has even come close to solving what is, in many regards, a "locked room mystery". Harriet was in the nearby town at the annual children's parade, then she came back to the island and sought to speak with her uncle, but he was busy. She disappeared, quite literally, after that, and no trace had ever been found of her.

Mikael takes up residence in a cottage across the street from Henrik Vanger's home and begins meeting with him regularly. Henrik delivers several boxes of evidence connected with Harriet's disappearance, which Mikael starts looking through. He also starts an affair with Celia Vanger, a middle-aged school principal who lives next door to Henrik. He can find nothing of interest regarding Harriet's disappearance but he makes real progress on actually writing the Vanger family history.

While he's having sweet sex on the Island, Lisbeth is raped on the mainland. Here's where there is a difference from the movie. In the movie, Lisbeth is attacked in the subway and fights off her attackers, but her laptop is broken in the process. In the novel, there is no attack in the subway. Her laptop is broken when she's securing her bike in a garage, and a car reverses over her backpack which she had temporarily laid on the ground.

I think the reason they changed it in the movie was to summarize Lisbeth's life history, which was one of intransigence on her part and abuse from others, of one form or another. But one characteristic was that she never backed down from a fight, not even from someone who would bloody her up pretty badly if she tangled with them. She was abused not only by other people, but by authority too, and part of the reason for this was that she would never cooperate with authority even when it would have actually served her best interests. She realizes this too late to change her early years, but not too late to change her future, and she refuses to see herself as a victim.

Since her old guardian died of a heart attack, and her new guardian, Bjurman, is a sadist and a control freak, she lost control of her own money, and was required to go to him to ask for the money to buy a new computer. She wants the best there is and cannot finance it from the money she has squirreled away at home. Bjurman begins fondling Lisbeth, convinced she has no power to stop him - and makes her fellate him. On her next visit, he makes her come to his home, where he handcuffs her to the bed and rapes her anally. What he did not realize was that she was recording this visit on a security camera she borrowed from her job at the Milton security agency where she works!

So the next time she sees Bjurman after that, she tases him and tattoos on his chest that he's a sadist and a rapist, applying some of his own sex toys to him in the same way he applied his self to her. Lisbeth then explains to him in detail how it's going to be: that she will never see him again unless she needs to for whatever reason. He will nonetheless file monthly reports saying she's doing great. He will turn over her finances to her own control immediately, and a year from now he will recommend that she should be given her life back, free from any guardianship. Either that or the DVD she made will go to the press and the police. She also takes his keys, informing him that she will visit him now and then, when she's sleeping, and if she ever finds a trace of another women in his home, she will publicize the DVD. Now she has control. We hear no more of Bjurman in this entire novel.

When Mikael returns from his jail sentence, it's well into spring. He gets out a month early and has an amusing visit from Erica while he's in bed with Celia, which causes Celia to quit their relationship. On the Harriet front, Mikael discovers something no one else has seen. He has dug up archive photos from the local newspaper, and in a series of these, showing the children's parade, he notices that while everyone else is looking at the parade, Harriet turns sharply and looks at something across the street, something which appears to shock or scare her. It was immediately after that, whatever it was, that she went to talk to her uncle, failed in that endeavor, and subsequently disappeared. Mikael also notices that there was a couple behind Harriet who were taking a picture at the precise time her facial expression changed. If he can only track down that couple, and if only they have that picture, he will be able to see what Harriet saw.

No doubt you know by now, but he does indeed track down the couple - one of them at least - and recovers the photograph. But he doesn't know who is in it. He returns to Hedeby Island to check on Henrik and gets chewed out by one of the family with whom he has had almost no contact, but worse than this, he gets chewed out by Celia Vanger as well, which quite startles him.

One of the most amusing parts of this novel is when Mikael discovers that his computer has been hacked, and he then learns via Henrik's lawyer that it was likely Lisbeth who did it. Lisbeth is quite flummoxed to discover Mikael outside her door one morning. This is the start of their working relationship - or should I call it a working relationship with benefits? Mikael tasks Lisbeth with finding out whether that list of names in Harriet's Bible is a list of murder victims. It is, and Lisbeth tracks down who they were along with an additional set of names which should have been on the list. The unanswered question is what does that have to do with Harriet?

I'm not going to go all the way into the solution to this mystery here. But the rest of the reading is awesome, and rest assured that not only is the main mystery solved, another is resolved along with it. Stieg Larsson knows how to write, and Lisbeth Salander is one of the most engaging and intriguing characters ever written, and I put her up there with the early Honor Harrington (not the late, boring, Honor Harrington), with Katsa, with Kitai, and with Molly Millions. I fully recommend this novel and shall now be happily moving along to the audio book version of volume two in this trilogy.

I have to warn you that the ending to this novel is very different from what was shown in the movie (that is, in Män som hatar kvinnor - I have yet to see the remade US version). I'm not sure why they chose to end the movie as they did, but the novel ends on a rather depressing and sad note. However, I fully recommend the novel, because (as I've indicated!) it is excellent, and the ending in particular is a much better read than the movie is a view. Now that I've completed this one, I'm very much looking forward to volumes two and three, which I have never read.

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.