Jumper by Steven Gould

Title: Jumper
Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed Reflex the first sequel to Jumper here.
I reviewed Impulse the second sequel to Jumper here.

I have to yet again note that Jumper is another of those novels which has a gazillion-and-a-half namesakes! And in Britain, 'jumper' is the word for sweater - now you have no excuse for not knowing! In passing, I also have to wonder what was going through Jeff Laferney's mind when he wrote this one! Maybe I'll read it sometime and see if I can figure it out....

I started reading Jumper some time ago, long before I began blogging, but I don’t remember if I finished it. I think I did but it was so long ago that it feels almost like I'm reading a new novel anyway! The novel begins rather differently from the subsequent movie, and I have to say that I prefer the way the movie portrays David's initiation into the wonderful world of 'side-stepping' space, but the movie seems to show a much younger David at that point in his life. In the novel, he's almost 18 when it all begins.

Far more is made in the novel of David's abuse at the hands of his father, and the scene on the frozen river never happened in the novel. David first jumps away to escape being beaten by his father's belt-buckle because he was late mowing the lawn. Next he jumps to avoid being raped at the hands of a truck driver with whom he got a ride when he fled his father. From that point, for a while, the movie parallels the novel and David ends up in NYC in a seedy hotel, and he robs the bank. He starts grooming and dressing better, but then we depart the movie (or the movie, more accurately, departs the novel) as David meets an intriguing woman by the name of Millie (who is some three years older than he) at an opera, and they begin seeing one another. In the movie, Millie is a schoolmate of David's. In the original, she's a stranger and has far more going for her than does the movie version.

The relationship develops of course, and depressingly for David, Millie insists at one point that their relationship can go nowhere unless they're completely honest with each other. She will dump the jumper, she warns, if she catches him lying and this comes back to bite him. David never takes Millie to Roma, and never gets jailed, his mother never frees him, and there are no Paladins in the novel at all, and no Griffin. David does get to meet his mother quite early on. She's living in California, having moved not because she's the Paladin mother of a jumper, but because her husband beats her and she was so down and terrified that she couldn't even rescue David. When he does finally contact her, finding by accident a link to her, she's overcome by grief and guilt, but they spend a weekend together and talk of getting together soon after she comes back from a business trip to Europe. The next thing David knows is that his mother has been blown up by terrorists who hijacked the plane she was on.

From this point on, he becomes obsessed with vengeance, and starts trying to track down the terrorist who headed the hijacking, saving hundreds of hostages in some other terrorist attacks in the process. As I mentioned, I had read this before, but forgotten I had done so and I was a bit hesitant to have to read this to get to the new one, but I knew I had to read this to get the most out of the middle book, so I bit the bullet and began it. Then came the déjà vu and I thought I'd maybe started it and never finished it, so I felt even more reluctant to go over territory I'd already traveled, but the novel drew me in and was a fun read. Even the terrorist bit which, when I recalled it after reading through the first part of the novel, seemed to me to be more forbidding than I wanted to deal with, turned out to be a good read, so I'm happy I read this - again!

David and Millie work, perhaps better in this than in the third of the trilogy, although we experience less of both of them in that one than in this, of course. The story is told intelligently and humorously, Gould obviously having put a lot of work into the writing, and a lot of thought into what exactly it would mean if a person actually discovered they could teleport. I really enjoyed this and consider it to be a worthy read.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen

Title: Lady Susan
Author: Jane Austen
Publisher: Audiobooks
Rating: TBD

This is my penance for even thinking I could get anywhere with the Jane Austen friggin' Book Club'd o'er the head in a dark and dirty back street leaving you robbed and bleeding. Ahem. Now where was I? Oh yes! This epistolary novel (yes indeed, e-pistles are electronic pistils, don't you know?) is really the first thing Austen wrote that was worthy of wide publication (not that Austen saw it that way). It's the second of her works that I've reviewed, the first being Pride and Prejudice which I reviewed for its bicentenary.

This novel is entirely in the form of letters (you do remember those, right?), but the BBC, bless their little Billy Cotton socks, did somehow manage to post it off towards the birth of a TV movie, penned by the estimable Lucy Prebble. Whether it ever made it that far I know not. The letters all revolve around the machinations of the eponymous character Susan Vernon, and her plans for both herself and her frail, abused daughter Frederica. Milady is a very attractive woman in her mid-thirties, recently widowed (only "months" ago), and very manipulative. She thrusts herself upon the good will of her sister-in-law Catherine Vernon, who tries to rescue Frederica from her mother's evil clutches. Lady Susan's sole ambition is to get rid of Frederica though marriage to whomever, so she will then be free to find a suitable match for herself, preferably Reginald De Courcy.

There is this huge deal in the writing world that you must "show, not tell"! Yet this entire novel of Austen's consists of nothing but telling! I can see what these back-seat drivers are getting at, but given that the very act of writing fiction is telling, not showing (that's the preserve of the silver screen), I have to wonder why they're so insistent upon simplifying this supposed nugget of wisdom to the point where it's a brilliant three-word definition of meaningless. As a writer, you need to both show and tell, and only you and experience can get it right.

Not a single best-selling writer started out their writing career by scribbling line after line consisting of "I must not tell, I must show" like Harry Potter in Dolores Umbridge's study in pink. Not one single rule of writing was at the forefront of their literary ambition. They simply wrote what the hell they wanted in the way they wanted it because they loved to write and they had something they wanted to say. They happened to hit upon stories which readers also loved to read. Not a one of those addicted readers spent good money on the book in obsessive-compulsive expectation of those writers' heroic powers of showing! Frankly, my dear, they didn't give a damn. All they wanted was a good story, and all-too-often they didn't even care if it was that well-written. They're not looking for classical expository literature. They're not looking for a tour-de-force of writing etiquette. All they want is a really engrossing tale. Most of them really don't care if you show or tell, or if you go stale or smell as long as the story keeps coming.

Don't take my word for it! Just look at the bank balances of a hoard of best-selling formulaic authors for starters (nothing personal, Lissa Price!). They make my case for me. If you want to write grammatically perfect original literature, that's your choice; all you have to be ultimately, as a writer, is prepared to live with what you write even if you can't make a living from it. If you want to show boat and go tell it on the mountain, be my guest, but the bottom line is that none of this matters if you don't sell a single novel.

"Yes, but I'm not in it for the money!" you protest. I don't believe you. Let me prove it to you. What's the most important thing a writer needs to do? The answer is write! If you're not writing, you're not a writer, no matter how many writing help books you've read. So what's the most important thing you need to write? Pen? Paper? Typewriter? Computer? Voice recorder? No! You need the time. If you don't have the time, you can't write. You can stay up all night, work part time, live off your parents, but you cannot argue that the best possible way to have time to be a writer is not to make a living from your writing so you can do it full time without worrying where the rent will come from. Therefore you do care about the money if you truly care about your writing, and to have that money you need to sell some stories.

I have only this "wisdom" to share on the topic: it occurs to me, as it must to you, that not a single one of these authors, teachers, and bloggers who seek to impart, like a sedentary Prometheus, the superheated air of their literary wisdom, is actually a best selling writer! From whence then, are their credentials imbuing them with the authority for proclaiming this advice? And are they truly insensible to this reality: that they are, by the very fact of their failure to "best sell" actually telling us and not showing us?! Why is it that all of these people who publish materials which they're so insistent will help us write best sellers cannot themselves produce even one run-away best seller between them?!

The best way to show, and not tell, is to show us a novel you've published, not tell us you're "working on" your first one. As far as the writing itself is concerned, it's your life, it's your idea, it's your story, it's your self-publishing world. Go to it, go do it.

And now back to our Jane Austen review already in progress. Why the publisher felt a need to lard-up this volume with works from Mozart and others, sad-wiched between the letters is a mystery. I use the term "volume" advisedly, because it was frankly far too loud and therefore more after the fashion of disturbing mentally than divertimenti, as I had urgently to reduce the volume of the music after a quietly-voiced letter was read, thereby taking both my mind and my eyes off traffic for a second or two. Not appreciated!

Having said that, the character voices - read by several people - were really rather good, but they were unable to bring any real life to a story which isn't very lively at best. Yes, Lady Susan is interesting and (were she not a child abuser) would have made a diverting companion had she not been fictional. Frederica's plight is heart-rending, but this novel really isn't a great improvement over the very thing which forced me to read it! Although rest assured I would rather read, straight off, all of the Austen oeuvre in one day than read one paragraph more of the depressing Jane Austen Book Club. So now my penance is done and just to set the fox amongst the Fowler who, based on disk one, tells a lot more than she shows in her best seller, I am going to rate this one by Austen a worthy read!

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Title: The Jane Austen Book Club
Author: Karen Joy Fowler
Publisher: Listen and Live
Rating: WARTY!

This was read by Kimberly Schraf and not very well, either, although to be fair, she had a much better delivery than that of a Brick through an electric sheep.

This novel was so bad that I couldn't even get through the first CD. I'm sure there are people who enjoy this kind of thing, but I am not, nor will I ever be one of them. These characters were uninteresting, snotty, bratty, clueless, pointless people, who boast abuse of women and genderism amongst their "virtues", and who had nothing to offer me. Their lives were normal to the point of being tedious, and if I want to listen to people like that, or hear of their lives, I only have to stop work and sit and pay attention to everyone around me, and I can get all I want. I really don't want more of that in a novel which I read for escapism!

There was not a single character I cared about, or was interested in, and I sure-as-hell didn't need to listen to their tiresome, ordinary histories. I could not find anything redeeming at all on that first disk; there was nothing in which to develop even a mild or passing interest, and since I was headed for the library, to turn in other books I'd actually read and enjoyed, I simply ejected this one with them.

I think the cover says it all, and that little yellow star? That indicates it's a pariah even in its own country. I don't know what the hell these people use as a definition for "major motion picture", but it seems to me that the fact that the movie completely, disastrously, and dismally bombed is more than sufficient indication of the level this novel is at, no matter what kind of a "best seller" it was supposed to have been. Time to say the te deum (pronounced t-e-d-i-u-m) and move on.

Note that, out of respect for Jane Austen, and to make up for this sorry volume, I will review Austen's Lady Susan on audio book forthwith, if not third with.

September Girls by Bennet Madison

Title: September Girls
Author: Bennet Madison
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WORTHY!

Once again we have a novel where the author could have made a better choice for the title. There is at least three other novels out there with very similar titles to this one, and this caveat is especially true of a novel which discusses summer girls, not September girls per se. I wanted to read this because I had read of some controversy over it, and I happened upon it in the library, so I snatched it up to see what's it was all about, even though I had sworn I would never read a mermaid novel! So much for that resolution....

This novel is told in the first person (something which normally makes me cringe, but in this case it wasn't too awful) by Sam, who has gone to Nag's Head in North Carolina with his older brother Jeff, and their father for the entire summer. Given that their father walked out on his job, how they're affording this whimsy of a vacation goes in want of a serious explanation, but given how well-versed in walk-outs the family is, you should take pair rather than despair from this.

From almost the first evening they're there, Sam notices that there is a plague of really attractive, blonde, white girls sauntering around the resort, and each of them seems to pay him far more attention than he is both used to and familiar with, but not one of them will approach him to talk unless he initiates the conversation. It's pretty obvious who these girls are once we share Sam and Jeff's encounter with a girl who seems to magically appear in the surf that first evening, and then hurries - on all fours, because she evidently can't walk - over the dunes and into the long grass before Jeff can even catch her to ask if she's okay, let alone inevitably try to take advantage of her! Yes, Jeff is a real college frat boy. Sam isn't, and is mildly disgusted with Jeff's obsession with getting laid. He's also repelled by these strange girls and doesn't want to get involved with any of them. Guess how well that plan was executed?

These girls are mermaids. No mystery about that, although Sam doesn't figure it out because there's no reason for him to imagine that Nag's Head is full of mermaids for the summer, but he refers to them with an initial cap: "Girls" to distinguish them from the regular resort girls who pay him exactly the attention he expects, which is none. Over a short time, both he and Jeff take up with two of the Girls, Jeff with Kristle (pronounced Crystal) and Sam with DeeDee, but there are immediately issues. Kristle keeps hitting on Sam, even as Jeff falls in love with her. Both of these things creep Sam out, especially because falling in love isn't something that's ever been remotely confused with Jeff's college playbook.

Just when Sam is really starting to fall for DeeDee, she cold-shoulders him, and won't tell him why. I can relate to that! I can actually (although seventeen is a ways in the past for me) relate to a lot of what goes through Sam's mind as a seventeen-year-old. Some reviewers, I know, have found Sam and Jeff's attitudes to be genderist and gross, but these are young men, and are a product of their genes and their past. There really are people out there like them, and to suggest no one should write about them is appallingly arrogant of those reviewers. Besides, Sam has redeeming qualities which those reviewers seem to have overlooked. In addition to that, his narrative is as amusing as it is bizarre at times.

Those same reviewers seem also to have overlooked the fact that these mermaids are not "girls", per se. They're aliens, trying to adapt to life in a strange, and even hostile environment, so while they look like, and indeed emulate human females, it's completely absurd to judge them based on the criteria upon which we might measure and judge human girls. It's like bitching at Jane Goodall for not acting more like chimpanzees! There is a mermaid narrative interwoven with Sam's (and a really funny reference to a song from Disney's The Little Mermaid, made by DeeDee when she and Sam were hiding out inside a model pirate ship on a miniature golf course). The story is also really entertaining and kept me reading.

Interspersed almost randomly between the chapters which Sam relates, there is a one or two page break filled by observations made by one of the mermaids. Those are amusing and informative, but we're given no good indication of who it is who writes them. While it's tempting to think DeeDee is the writer, it may be Kristle, or even more than one author, but Whoever it is often speaks in a rather sweeping plural - talking of "we" rather than "I". She's really speaking about mer-kind, rather than herself alone.

What about the writing? I liked it. I enjoyed the way it's written and the humor and the weird observations made by both Sam and the mermaids. I've been to Nag's Head, so I can relate to what Sam is saying in that regard too, and to be frank, while Nag's Head is a lot smaller than its reputation, there is a bit more to do there than Sam indicates, but the writing is good. Having said that, there was one oddball sentence starting at the bottom of p190: "And sitting on the porch watching the fireworks with my drunk, tattooed, chain-smoking mother, her reclined in obvious languor in a half collapsing beach chaise...". Her reclined?! That may be technically correct (I honestly can't say for sure, but it really feels wrong to me!), although I would have written: "...she reclining...".

So I finished this and I have to say I felt let down by the ending, but not so let down that I can't still recommend this as a worthy read. It's tempting to say that this is not your usual mermaid story, but given that I have read none, I can only surmise that this is probably different from the kind of mer-romance you might be used to if you're an aficionado.

The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Title: The Doll
Author: Taylor Stevens
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

So why would a nation which overthrew the monarchy sport a publishing company called Crown Publishing? Another mystery for Vanessa Michael Munroe to crack?! This novel, published by Crown, is the third in an ongoing series of which Munroe is the main character. Note that I haven't read the previous two. The back-cover blurb compares Munroe with Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fame, but apart from the fact that both were abused when they were younger, they have absolutely zero in common. Let this be a warning to all who do not self-publish: there is no limit whatsoever to the stupid things your publisher will lard your novel up with, and no end to how misleading back-cover blurbs can be! Those blurbs are not there for your guidance or for your education; they're there for one purpose and for one purpose only: to trick you into buying the novel! Fortunately, since I borrowed this from the library, I was far more willing to take a risk, so it wasn't an issue for me

There is some prior history going on with this volume, but it's almost completely irrelevant to the story told here as far as I can see, so if you picked this up out of order, as I did (and there is no indication on the cover to tell a prospective reader that this is "Book x of the Blah Blah series") you won't miss anything. Plus, it's blessedly told in third person (maybe the fourth in this series will be told in the fourth person? Hmm!), so there's none of that absurd and obsessively self-important "I did..., then I did..., then I wanted to..., then I saw...." garbage to wade through.

This volume doesn't even open with the main character except in that her colleague (and romantic interest, evidently) at a private security company observes her being tranquilized and kidnapped from the parking lot as she comes in to work. He's so incompetent that he can't do anything about it! As they try to trace who took Munroe, we meet her in person in the company of her foreign and very callous kidnappers, from somewhere in central Europe. She's required by these people to transport a "package" from A to B, or her brother Logan (no, it's not The Wolverine!) will be hurt even more than he was hurt already when they kidnapped him. The package is also kidnapped. She's a young, Hollywood celebrity: Neeva Eckridge who, we're told is the daughter of a US senator, but no one seems to know this? I don't buy that something like that would never have been ferreted out by the media. Or that someone would be so stupid as to try and kidnap a celebrity of her stature for his own personal use.

I picked up this novel because I was interested in Munroe, but the chapters roughly alternate between her and her partner, Bradford, who was completely uninteresting to me. I started skipping any chapter in which he was featured, and honestly didn't feel that I missed anything! What does that say about one third of this novel?! I got everything I needed from spending my time only with Munrow and Eckridge. I found their relationship fascinating - one kidnappee effectively forced to kidnap the other and take her across Europe to Monaco! Not that this made any sense whatsoever.

I was interested because I don't recall reading a story of this nature before. It was (to me) a really good and intriguing idea; it didn't develop in the way I had thought (and hoped) it might, though, and the ending really was pathetic and inexplicable. Plus Stevens left way too many loose threads to carry over into the next volume - just like she left some from the previous volume carrying over into this one. The main loose thread was Kate Breeden, apparently a friend of Munroe's from earlier adventures, but who betrayed Munroe and got herself jailed, then betrayed her further, from inside the jail - and then escaped from jail to no doubt reappear in Volume 4. That did nothing for me save inflict a mild feeling of déjà saturé (already nauseous). I only mention this because it's important for the ending (not my nausea; the fact that Munroe did not terminate Breeden with extreme prejudice in whatever earlier volume she'd had the chance to do so).

There is very little exchange between the two kidnap victims to the point where they start their road trip, and not a whole heck of a lot afterwards, unfortunately. That's' what I'd been looking forward to, and I didn't get it! Eckridge's new "captor" is more interested in how to get out of this mess, obviously, but there is an added twist in that one of Munroe's kidnappers, a younger man, the nephew of the man who orchestrated all of this, seems to be developing some remote low-level feelings for Munroe. He and a heavy (conveniently the one against whom Munroe has a grudge) are following their victims, observing them from out of sight, tracking their every movement, and controlling those movements by means of text messages to a phone Munroe is carrying. Plus both Munroe and Eckridge have their clothing bugged as well as the cheap crappy car in which they are traveling, and as well as the phone they were issued to stay in touch with the kidnappers.

I enjoyed this cat and mouse, finding it entertaining, and I was interested in how Munroe was going to get out of it. The problem is that she didn't. She made no attempt whatsoever during the two sleepless days of the trip to communicate anything to Eckridge about her plans or her reasons for doing what she was doing. Thus when Eckridge tried to make a run for it, I had thought the two of them had planned it when they were out of earshot of their trackers, using a noisy rest room. They had not. Eckridge was going it alone, and Munroe used this attempt to procure for herself a cell phone, which she then used to send her partner Bradford some text messages communicated in Morse code (since the car was bugged and she couldn't tell him everything in plain English). Superficially, this seems ingenious, but it's really stupid given that Munroe could have simply (and in Eckridge's ignorance) turned on the phone, called Bradford's number, and then simply engaged Eckridge in a conversation explaining to her where exactly they were and what was going on - fooling the kidnappers into thinking she was educating Eckridge, when she was really cluing-in Bradford.

There was an interesting problem from the writing perspective here. On p139, Stevens writes: "Bradford lay back on the sofa, head to one side...". When I reached that point I had thought it meant his head was turned to one side, but Stevens finished the sentence: "...feet to the other..." Obviously he was laying down length-wise on the sofa, but the way Steven phrased it robbed me of that understanding to begin with. Why did she choose to say "head to one side", rather than "head to one end"? I don't know. It's just another thing which can trip-up your narrative flow, and let your reader stumble. It's very minor - the rest of Stevens's writing is quite acceptable, so I wouldn't fault her for this. It's just one thing, but something for which a writer needs to be constantly vigilant when putting words on paper. Which, of course, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch (as so most things!). As John Cleese put it, "Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words! I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important." I can't add anything to that. And now let's go straight over to James Gilbert at Leicester....

Anyway, in conclusion I'm going to have to rate this warty, because there were problems and the ending was a disaster in more ways than one. One problem, for example, was that Eckridge did not even realize that Munroe was a woman until a day into their trip! Now admittedly, Munroe was inexplicably disguised as a guy for the trip, but really? They had been living in each other's laps, talking from time to time, and using the rest room together for a day, and Eckridge never figured out the obvious? Nor did Stevens communicate Eckridge's knowledge deficit to the reader in way way, shape, or form! The ending? It was not only unsatisfactory, it was downright stupid. Let me give one spoiler. In the closing chapters, and knowing that Kate Breeden - whom she let live in an earlier volume - has totally screwed her over and caused deaths in doing so, Munroe then blithely chooses to let one of her kidnappers live, when the smart thing to do, and especially to do in light of her gross error of judgment with Breeden, would be to kill him.

She fails, and with that (and other issues), so, too, does this novel. I don't want to hear how tough, and mean, and decisive, and can-do, and feisty, and Salander-like she is and then find out she has let two dangerous people live, the second one in full knowledge of what a deadly mistake she'd made by letting the first one live. Her interaction with this kidnapper guy reminded me of that Woody Allen line in what, for me, is his best movie: Annie Hall when he does battle with two spiders in Annie's bathroom, armed with nothing more than a large tennis raquet, and she's crying over her sad life when he returns. Thinking she's upset about the passing of the arachnid couple, he asks her, "What did you want me to do, capture and rehabilitate them?"

I am the first to admit that trite, happy endings are never good, and even decent happy endings are sometimes not as good as a sad ending, but for Stevens to end this one the way she did turned me right off. If it were not for the crappy way she rolled this up, with so many loose threads the pages were almost falling out of the binding, I might have been willing to give this a 'worthy' rating, but given the totality of what I had to deal with here, I'm rating it warty, and advising you that I have no plans whatsoever to read any more of this series which is sad, 'cause I could have used another really good femme fatale in my life!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick

Title: Bladerunner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
Author: Philip K Dick
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: WARTY!

This "Book on Tape" (which is actually on 8 CDs!) is read by Scott Brick, who I believe is the same guy who reads the 'Harry Dresden' novels in which I have zero interest, and I have to say up front that I do not like Brick's reading at all. His attitude is completely wrong for this novel, and the boring parts (mostly those concerning John Isidore) are boring to begin with, but are exacerbated dismally by Brick's delivery. He even makes Isidore's initial interaction with Priss (which is somewhat different from the movie version) uninteresting.

Of course when I say the novel differs from the movie, I really mean it the other way around. The novel came first, and never was published as Blade Runner until after the movie of the same name, and the novel is significantly different from the subsequent movie, as I shall highlight. For example, and this hits you right at the start, Rick Deckard is married to Iran, whereas he isn't married at all in the movie. Audio novels have the severe problem that there is no way to tell what spelling the writer is using, particularly for made-up words or for people's names, so I'm using the wikipedia spelling for his wife's name, although Brick's reading makes it sound like 'Irin' or 'Erin'.

The opening section was really amusing as Rick and Iran wake up and argue over what mood to dial in for each of them that day. Unlike in the movie, Rick has a pet electric sheep which he keeps up on the roof. Does his neighbor keep an electric horse? Nay! a real one which bore him a foal - apparently. Deckard is obsessed with animals in the novel which I found to be off-putting, and indeed pointless. You can argue that it;s relevant at the end of the novel, but Dick puts far too much tedium into this animal obsession to make the last portion worth any of it.

After two disks I had to conclude that if I'd read the novel first, I never would have been tempted to go see the movie! Note that when I reference the movie, it's to the original theatrical version, my personal favorite, with the Deckard narration overlaid, although according to wikipedia, there exist several varieties. The one I reviewed for my movie review is actually the director's cut, which I didn't like quite as well as I did the original.

I'm sorry to say that while the first half of disk one was great, the second half was really - and I mean really boring. It was very easy to see why they chose to skip this entire section for the movie. The story does pick up when Deckard gets to the Rosen building and interviews Elden Rosen's niece Rachael Rosen. This part is similar to the movie but there are some differences. The Rosens try to bribe Deckard with an owl they owned as part of a small zoo on the roof of the building (hence the appearance of an owl in the movie version). He is tempted by their offer because they prey on his thinking that his Voigt-Kampff test failed to tell that Rachael was human, but he calls her back for one more question, and he employs a trick which confirms for him that despite what Elden Rosen tells him, Rachael is indeed a Nexus 6 android.

This novel is set in a future where nuclear war has devastated both the planet and the population, The weather forecasts are really radiation forecasts. Most people who can have left for Mars. The ones remaining are largely, but not exclusively, infertile or have sub-par IQs. Why the androids are not employed to clean up this mess is left unexplained. I honestly could not buy into Dick's world. It made no sense to me and was not justified by the story or the plot.

Unlike in the movie, Rachael calls and offers to help Rick track down the Nexus 6's, but he doesn't wait for her, instead heading out to take down one and then pursue another who is, in the novel, not an exotic dancer, but an opera singer. This is where the novel starts penetrating deeply into the surreal! Luba Luft, the singer (not to be conflated with Judy Garland's daughter, Lorna Luft, who is also a singer!) calls a cop, who doesn't believe that Deckard is a bounty hunter. She is the same make and model android as Rachael Rosen

The cop arrests Deckard and takes him to the Hall of Law, but it's a different one from the one where Deckard works. The cops don't believe his story! It's during an interview with an inspector, that Deckard finds out that pretty much the entire operation at this Hall of Law is run by androids. He's a bit of a Mary Sue here. Many of these androids honestly believe they're human. Their bounty hunter, who owns a real pet squirrel and who may himself be an android, sides with Deckard and kills the android inspector. They both head over to the museum to take down Luft, but Deckard ends up buying her a coffee table book featuring Edward Munch, the artist who is on display. No one from Deckard's Hall of Law bothers to come looking for him!

The surreal part is actually related to the questions of why there is an operatic society, why there is a museum of art with original art, why there is a Hall of Law, why the Rosen corporation, plus a corporation in Russia, are situated on Earth in the pollution and radiation producing androids which cannot be used on Earth?! Why is there a fortune being spent on shipping people to Mars, when that same fortune could have been better spent on cleaning up Earth? Surreal indeed! Dick really isn't a very good writer. He's pedantic and tiresome, and his plot is meandering and uninviting. He is also uninventive when it comes to envisioning the future. Dick's future, for example, still has "onion-skin" carbon copies of typewritten documents. There is zero imagination involved in creating this future. Admittedly times and standards have changed since he published his novels and technology has progressed in unimagined ways, but having granted that, Dick doesn't even make an effort. He adds flying cars and laser guns and thinks he's done creating a future world. How much success would he have today trying to publish this same material? The truth is that he'd have less than he originally did, which was precious little.

The novel quickly reached a point where it had nothing at all in common with the movie which was supposedly taken from it! Blade Runner is decidedly not an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It's a completely different story! The best you can say is that it was inspired by the novel. I found some of Dick's novel interesting, but it wasn't that interesting, and soon I was jumping sections of the disk because it was quite simply too boring to keep my attention. Some of it made absolutely zero sense.

One problem is not Dick's alone. He shares it with Star Trek for example. He has Deckard "dodge" a laser beam form a gun! There are multiple issues here. Since laser is light, Rick wouldn't be able to see it until it hit his eyes, in which case it would be too late to dodge it! Light travels at, well duhh, light speed! Actually it's fractionally when traveling through a medium such as air, but that's not relevant to my point. So even if you could somehow see it before it arrived, you still would have far too little time to dodge it! The only way you can see a laser beam is if there is, for example, dust or vapor in the room and you're looking at it from the side, in which case you wouldn't need to dodge it! But let's move on.

At one point, there's a discussion about having sex with androids. Given that the word 'android' literally means man-like, wouldn't a man's having a sexual relationship with one be technically a homosexual relationship?! But seriously, what bothers me is Dick's bringing up the point of sexual relations with androids being illegal, but then having androids being created to mimic human physiology - with primary and secondary sex organs! Why? Why would such an android even be legal if sex with them was illegal? Why would any android want sex if it felt nothing? And if they did want sex why would they want it with a human? The fact that Rachael at one point insists that Rick go to bed with her makes no sense in the context of this story, especially given her overall attitude.

In conclusion I have to rate this as a warty tale. It's not very good, it has really boring portions, and the story isn't interesting to me, but at least I learned what happened to Prim's goat...!

Cast in Sorrow by Michelle Sagara

Title: Cast in Sorrow
Author: Michelle Sagara
Publisher: Harlequin Luna
Rating: worthy

This is the Chronicles of Elantra Series #9. There are brief reviews of the entire series on my Novel Series page.

Normally I don't do covers because I don't care what a cover looks like; I care about the content, and the writer has absolutely no say (and no se) in what crap goes on there unless they self-publish, and even then many of them hire someone else to create the cover, so I have to ask on Sagara's behalf: which idiot writes book blurbs like the one on this back cover: "The end is only the beginning"? Seriously? Is that meant to be deep or something? This is the major advantage of self-publishing - it’s all your own. You get to say how it reads, how the cover looks, what the blurb says, Yours may be just as idiotic, but at least it's your idiocy, and not someone else's! Nuff said!

I can't begin to express how thrilled I was when I saw this one on the library shelf. I snatched it up in a spit second. Unfortunately, I couldn't start on it right away because I had two others to finish. But now I am into it, and it's like coming home. Michelle Sagara is a KICK-ASS writer who knows how to build a completely enthralling world, and she's created a serious contender for Hall-of-Fame All-Star All-Time female hero in Kaylin Neya. I will detail this in detail giving you the detailed details as soon as I've had a nap!

As accomplished and skillful a writer as Sagara is, there's still the odd occasion when she could use some editing! For example, on p335 we get this: "…why would be live as a pet?" which should, I'm assuming, be: "…why would he live as a pet?" Sad to say (and I don't recall this from earlier novels, but maybe those had it too), Sagara is yet another devotee of long moments, and long minutes, and even a long half hour! And the number of times she uses the phrase "like, and unlike" or a variant of it, is really, really annoying!

On the confusing front, I found this piece on p49: "The stairs that fronted it were flat and wide, the columns that held the roof almost the height of the trees that stood to the right and the left of the building." When I first read this, I was confused about what she was saying, and I had to read it again to get it. This interrupted the story for me. Leaving aside the interminable argument about the use of 'that' over 'which', it seemed to me that the sentence ought to read: "The stairs that fronted it were flat and wide, and the columns that held the roof were almost the height of the trees that stood to the right and the left of the building." Maybe the whole sentence should have been re-thought and split, perhaps? Yeah, it's a minor quibble, and it's her novel, not mine, but if writers are wanting to keep readers happy, an iota of extra attention to legibility can go a long way.

Another instance appeared shortly afterwards, on p55, where the first four paragraphs at the start of chapter 4 have a character speaking without offering any indication as to who it is. This is why it's a good idea to read what you've written - both at a later date, and out loud so you can get a feel for how others might perceive it. When you read out loud, you read a little differently than when you read inside your own head. Just a thought!

On p305 Kaylin grabs Teela's hand and pulls it down and then says "What are you doing?", but the speech isn’t included with the paragraph of the yanking o' the hand, so it made it seem like Teela had said it. This was unnecessarily confusing. Sagara needs to learn when to identify the speaker. Again this is something a writer should be able to catch if they put the writing aside for a period of time and then come back to it and read it out loud. This is also an advantage which comes en suite with the "tell the story as fast as you can" style of writing, where you write the whole thing off (so to speak!) in one and the hell with editing, but then go back, once it's finished, and read it through, editing as you go.

On p364, there is a real classic: "Which guttered the little bit better entirely". I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the heck Sagara means by this. It’s not even English in any meaningful sense! But enough of this nit-picking! Let's move on.

So this story takes off where Cast in Peril left off, kinda half-way through. None of her other volumes (at least as I recall - it's been a while!) are like this: they're complete stories even while still an integral part of the series. Oh, and yes, this is a series where you really need to start on volume one to get everything that follows. The Barrani party with whom Kaylin is traveling to a ceremony in which she is to play an important part, is under attack and threats follow them, but within the first few chapters they arrive safely in the territory known as the West March where the ceremony is to be held. Kaylin will be safe until she tells the tale, but after that, all bets, it appears, are off. This writing is some of Sagara's best in her descriptions of the bizarre things which happen in the forest right before they achieve sanctuary in the Lord of the West March's property. It's fascinating to me, but this novel wasn't all plain sailing.

Having said that, I have to also add that chapters five and six are all but unintelligible in far too many places. I don't recall having this problem with Sagara's previous volumes in this series, but I pretty much read those one after another, since I was quite late coming to this series. This not only made the read pleasurable, since I had virtually no down-time between volumes, it also made it a lot easier on me in keeping track of people and events than it must have been for those people who read one novel, and then had to wait a whole year before they were able to continue the adventure. I think I had a real advantage with this flow, and this is what enabled me to enjoy the novels far better than others who had a much more staccato experience.

I know that other reviewers have expressed complaints about her poor writing - where she has a conversation start up and it's entirely unclear who is saying what and to whom. This goes back to what I said earlier about reading out loud what you wrote, and before you do that, wait a month or so. If you can't quite grasp who is doing or saying what, or why, then you know for a fact your readers won't exactly be on top of it either, and it's your fault if they're not!

Like I said, I don't recall experiencing this difficulty before, but chapters five and six in this novel are a classic examples of this problem - of the same problem I had at the start of chapter four, which I mentioned above. These two chapters also recap (after a fashion) some previous events; the problem is that it's been so long since I read those other volumes that the recaps were useless, since they were so very sparse and mentioned names and actions which I couldn't recall well (or at all!), without giving any context for those names.

In another genre, when one reads a series, the names are much more familiar and the roles those people play, much more ordinary. But I think the writer has a real responsibility to help keep the reader enlightened when taking an excursion into a fantasy world where both names and roles are pure invention and unfamiliar to the reader. Sagara fails dismally at this in these two chapters, but then she picks it up somewhat when Kaylin has to once again heal the Barrani consort - who promptly disappears during an all-out assault on Lord Lirienne's West March central (or is it central march west? - whichever it is, they're almost given their marching orders - west, right, west right, quick march - until Kaylin comes to the rescue), and by them it's almost April....

So all is forgiven because Sagara takes off again after the, ahem, bad chapters and takes it to the next level which is the one right after the mezzanine (if you're south of the border that will be the mexanine), but before you get to the sign which says "Next Level and Then Some", okay? If you reach the sign saying, "She's all that and a bag of chips" then you've gone wa-ay too far at this point. All righty then.

So, despite all the itty-bitty annoyances, Sagara puts together a pretty engrossing tale, full of amazingly imaginative scenes, and curious events, slowly but surely adding this volume to the rest in terms of stories I can say are enjoyable and addictive. I love Kaylin and An'teela, and I love especially how Sagara brings them closer as friends in this story, having each of them open up more to the other than they ever have before - but then she threatens to seriously split them apart. I'm not going to say any more on that score, but it made my skin crawl in considering that she might really do this!

So to conclude, I recommend this!

A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Silks
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: worthy!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

Erratum:
p262 "His mouth twitch with ire." should be "His mouth twitched with ire."

I reviewed A Study in Darkness, the second novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Evelina Cooper is a niece of Sherlock Holmes. I had thought this must be through his older brother Mycroft, but it was a case of identity: Holloway has invented a non-existent sister called Marianne, who ran away to the circus! Now Evelina is an orphan with an overbearing grandmother. I was not impressed by this. I have to ask, Holloway my dear, What's on? I chose this novel and its two sequels (so I can review all three in a row) because it sounded like a great idea for a series, and I really loved the opening few pages: it really got hold of me and pulled me in, but I was led to expect a Holmes-esque novel and did not get one.

There's a wood sprite which appeared when Evelina was escaping from an attic by climbing out of the window and into a nearby tree. Yes, I was expecting elementary and got an elemental! Clearly the publicist is the man with the twisted lip - or is he the crooked man? So I'm thinking: did I just get duped by a freight and ditch? This was not at all what I come looking for when I'm told by a book blurb that this is a novel about Sherlock Holmes's niece! So we have Holmes, magic, fantasy, paranormal, automatons, demons, detectives, and steam-punk. Hmm. Why make her a relation of Sherlock Holmes and then leave me Strand-ed, betraying everything Arthur Doyle stood for in his delivery of the Holmes adventures? This Baker Street irregular made no sense to me, especially since there's really nothing in this novel, not even the appearance of Holmes himself, which reflects anything of the Doyle novels. Should I give it the five orange pips?

After getting past the beginning with no issues, I quickly started having some really mixed feelings about it. Okay, so we finally get a murder and Evelina is really doing a cracking job of sussing-out the clues, but no sooner do we have what I actually came looking for in this novel than I get handed the second stain: Holloway tosses in a completely gratuitous and appallingly tropish love triangle between her and a high-born heir to a lordship and also a lowlife from the circus. Honestly? Why in hell do women of all genders, aspire to write novels about strong female characters, and then hobble these same women with a crippling need for, and attendant dependency upon, the validation of not one but two, count 'em, two dancing men? And iffy men at that: these men are such clichés as to be truly, seriously, painfully pathetic.

I have to confess that she does make an effort with these two - to try and give them some substance - but at that point she'd already lost my good faith and wasn't making enough of an effort to regain it! I committed to reading and reviewing three of these novels (the first three in what is evidently an ongoing series), so I found myself dearly hoping this would improve, and Holloway started to come through for me as I read on, but she was too inconsistent, making me first enjoy what I read and then making me regret it by turns! For example, she made me fall in love with her for this one sentence on p123: "Silence resounded with all the majesty of an oriental gong." I have no idea why, but that just hit me right where my pleasure nodes are. Unfortunately, she came around one hundred eighty degrees right after that and saddened me.

She has now presented Evelina as secretly wanting marriage all along, and only deflected from that course by her impoverished circumstances. That seems unnecessarily genderist even in these circumstances. I know that Victorian women were raised this way, and all-too-many girls still are today, but even in reality not all Victorian women felt that way, nor traveled that path. There is no reason at all to present a fictional woman as being brain-washed by that idea unless your plot demands it. In this case, Holloway's plot does no such thing as far as I can tell; quite the opposite in fact, so why sell her main character down this particular river? I was very disappointed with this approach. However, as much as Holloway toys with my affections, addicting me one minute, and repelling me the next, I decided it was worth it, on balance, continue to read this. I pretty much have to if I'm going to proceed to volume two, and thence to three, anyway!

Here's another reason to love Holloway: "Even a stupid servant was more versatile and cost a fraction of the price." (p153). I am so glad she's smart enough to see the impracticality of a lot of the steam-punk stuff, favoring servants over automatons (although morally, it ought to be the other way around!) - so why can't she apply those obvious smarts to relationships and love triangles?! It's a bigger mystery than was Boscombe Valley, but that's not a patch on this howler exactly one third the way in describing an interaction between Evelina and one of her two male interests, Tobias, the wealthy son of a lord: "Her palms brushed the front of his jacket, feeling the soft, expensive fabric and the swell of firm, young muscle beneath. An ache throbbed deep in her body, blotting out common sense." Seriously? Evelina loves her a firm young muscle...!

Holloway improves things as she continues the story of the relationship between Evelina and Tobias, and it starts to mature intelligently and does have a real surprise at the end, which I didn't expect, so I can tell you without giving too much away that this love triangle did not go the way I had feared it would when I first read of it. Nick OTOH, is unsavory at best and pretty much went exactly where I thought he ought to end up even as I feared he wouldn't go there! I can say that Evelina continued to impress and develop, and that was where my main interest lay. And the story did stay focused, more or less, on the thing which first attracted Evelina's attention before it side-tracked into the magical.

Page 271 was interesting from my own oddball writerly perspective. I felt I'd entered a time loop when I clicked back a page. I had clicked back because I thought I'd clicked two pages forward instead of one (I hadn't, but this is a problem with ebooks and the Kindle). This page starts with "At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." and ends with "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage." So what happened to me was that in clicking from that page to the same page, thinking it was the next, I read: "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage. At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." It flows perfectly and took me a second to realize what I’d done. Minor weirding-out there!

But that’s not an authorship problem; in my case, it was a clueless reader problem! Maybe it's also of interest to an author interested in writing one of those self-navigation stories. These used to be common at one time, but are rare now. They’re interactive in a limited way, because at each page, you choose which page to jump to next from a selection of options presented at the bottom of the page. You could have your reader weirded-out quite nicely with a page like this one!

P271 was also of interest in that it sported this sickening sentence: "His hand on her arm sent a pleasant shiver down the back of her legs." It was a bit much, especially after I'd been feeling better about the YA trope romance between Tobias and Evelina. The worst parts were offset somewhat by Holloway's detailing of how smart Evelina was, for example when she turned away from the crowd and whispered to Tobias in order to avoid being overheard or having her lips read. Some might call that paranoid, but in the context of the novel it was very smart and I loved Evelina for doing it and, in turn, Holloway for writing that bit! Yes, I'm a sap for that kind of thing and not ashamed to admit it into polite company!

But later, Holloway makes the mistake of having Tobias use this Americanism: "I've always known you came from someplace different..." No son of a British lord, and especially not one in Victorian times, would use 'someplace'. It's 'somewhere'! That's a minor faux pas, but I kept getting vertigo from getting to a high point where I really enjoyed the writing, and then having the text swoop down low for one reason or another, before climbing back up again with the next Evelina bounty. And rest assured Evelina was not the only character who was worth the reading. Her best friend Imogen was equally entertaining, and didn't get anywhere near enough air time for my money (not that I paid any actual money!). Her relationship with "Bucky" was charming and entertaining to a wonderfully high degree - but not enough!

I do not, however, love Nick. The the final problem is that he is the creeping man, and not at all the kind of person with whom I would wish for a young lady of Miss Cooper sensitivities to spend her time. Holloway needs to kill him off heroically (she doesn't!). He is nothing but a horn-dog who has little respect for Evelina, spends the bulk of his time lusting after her, and comes uncomfortably close to raping her at one point in the novel, when he's in the throes of a magical communion with her. It's actually rather sickening, and even scary given his penchant for stalking Evelina. I don't like him at all as a character or as a friend of hers, so I was glad that he went the way he did, but not at all happy to discover that he's featured in the second of this series, as, I assume, is Tobias, or Toby-ass as he now ought to be known.

So in summary, I am rating this novel a worthy read, even though I did have a few issues with it. I had hoped for no magic or steam-punk, no fantasy, and definitely no trope romance, so why Holloway went there, I don't know, and given that she obviously had decided to go there, I can't understand why she chose to have Evelina related to Sherlock Holmes, unless it was nothing more than a cheap ploy to try and pull in readers. I suspect Holmes fans will be as annoyed and resentful of this ploy as I was. It seemed underhand to me to talk the reader up one way and then pull the rug out and send them another. This is no Sherlock Holmes tale, not even in spirit (and he is the dying detective!). It is, however, an entertaining tale for the most part, and even some of the magical stuff, particularly, Evelina's robotic mouse and bird, was really entertaining. The novel would have stood by itself without the Holmes Crutch to lean on. I have to wonder why no editor advised Holloway thus. But I am still giving this the the engineer's thumb up and moving on to volume two to see what I can find there.

Dark Triumph by Robin LaFevers

Rating: WORTHY!

Dark Triumph is the second in the "His Fair Assassin" series (I reviewed the first, Grave Mercy here) and it takes off right where the first in this series ends, but it does so from the perspective of another of the assassin nuns: Sybella. In volume one, Sybella was one of the colleagues of Ismae, the main character and narrator of that volume. Sybella appeared very briefly, but on several occasions, yet she was never really graced with an introduction. Now she has her own story, and it ain't a happy one! She's resident in the castle of Count D'Albret, and living in fear of discovery. She has only one ally, Julian, and he's hardly her friend - not unless he can get something out of her in return for his "friendship". Indeed, Sybella's intimate history is rather florid, it would seem, and Julian has played an intimate part in it, although LaFevers appears too terrified of scandal to delve into it in any form other than hints and allusions.

In this novel, Sybella is pretty much under house arrest in D'Albret's purloined palace, and is watched closely. She is nominally the Count's daughter, but believes herself, like Ismae, to be actually a daughter of Mortain, the god of death. In passing, it's interesting to note that Mortain is actually the name of a city in Normandy, situated very close to the border with the region of Brittany.

Why Mortain chooses to rape women and have daughters who become assassins is left unexplained, but if there is one consistency in the history of humankind's invention of gods it is that these gods are useless, and require human intervention on a routine basis to help them out. They're also well-known for raping women, including the current popular god, Yahweh, the god of the world's three foremost monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. According to the Christians, that god raped Miriam to produce a son for slaughter. But Mortain seems to be particularly incompetent in that all he can do is mark people for death! He cannot kill them himself, but requires one of his female slaves to, er, undertake this? How ridiculous is that? What a pathetic and ineffectual god he is!

This novel starts out as though it were a fan fiction based on Graceling, the accomplished assassin traversing the castle steps. I had two immediate problems with it. The first is that this is another first person PoV tale. I have issues with that kind of story to begin with, but take a moment to think about it in this context: the narrator is a secret assassin, yet she's writing a true story about what she does, including names, places and dates?! Not a wise choice for a writer to make! OTOH, we do get (finally) a confirmation of someone's age in this novel: it's the Duchess (although she's crowned queen before we learn this) and she's thirteen. Some reviewers had assumed she was twelve from a sentence in the previous volume, but the sentence was so ambiguously worded that it was impossible to honestly assert with complete conviction any age IMO. This was another of Lafevers's writing failures.

The second problem I have with this is the blatant genderism - strike that, not genderism, as much as pure hatred of men! This new narrator says (on line six of chapter one!) in the context of learning how to kill "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a man's body...". For a moment (or a long moment as LaFevers would have it!), let us re-write the line: "...laying out all the vulnerable points on a woman's body...". Indeed, let us re-write the entire novel but reverse the gender roles. Would you be outraged at it then? I would. So why no outrage when that same line and that same tone in that same novel is written about men? We already learned from volume one in this series that women can be just as evil as men, so why this sustained campaign against men? It's a bit creepy to say the least.

Yes, back then (the first chapter is dated 1489AD) men typically did hold the reins/reigns (and unfortunately still do at a disproportionate percentage), but evil is not solely the preserve of men, and even where the evil is perpetrated by a man, there is often a woman who supports him, yet nowhere in either volume of this series so far, do we see any amelioration of this vendetta which is specifically and consistently directed towards men. As another reviewer pointed out, these femme vraiment fatale (or ninja nuns!) attack men, but they also work for a male god! Not very much in the way of logic there.

I was amused when, at one point, Sybella remarks upon Ismae's sharp wit, but I just got through reading that first volume and I recall none of that! Perhaps she's talking about the three years when they were in training, not a whit of which was shared with us in that first volume. That particular history is something which, done right, would have been really worth the telling, but it was not to be. More like 4F, in fact.

And now a word about the incessant use of 'demoiselle'! It's rife in these two novels! It's fine as far as it goes, but it really stands out because of its extreme frequency, rather like 'mayhap' and one or two other words did in volume one. If you go to dictionary.com and use the French - English translator there, the definition of this word is: unmarried lady; young lady; damsel; rammer, object or tool that rams! Hmm! The funny thing is if you split it into "de moi selle", it means "to me saddle". Hmm squared! Obviously this is just another thing to be cautious about when you're writing a novel!

So Sybella really, and I mean really, wants to murder this Count, but it seems she is to be robbed of the pleasure. Her instructions from the Abbey are instead, to free The Beast - the prisoner who was taken at the end of the last novel. This she does and this leads to arguably the best piece of action/adventure writing from LaFevers's keyboard in two novels. Of course, the massive telegraphing of the oncoming affair between Sybella and the Beast undermines the purity of the adventure with its ham-fistedness. This volume is definitely a league or two ahead of Grave Mercy. At least that's how it seemed at the half-way point! Unfortunately, then we have to deal with Ismae and Duval. Again. It's a pity that their divinity, Mortain, didn't have the god-like power to tell all these hapless Bretons that they were going to lose, that Anne would be forced to marry the French king, and that she would herself die before the age of forty (assuming that LaFevers follows the actual history of the region at all). Given how thoroughly reliably gods have proven themselves to be utterly unreliable throughout history, I don't find it the least bit surprising that they were invented by frightened, ignorant, and delusional humans!

Despite what I've said about LaFevers's writing in terms of how it reads, in terms of how she puts the words on paper, I have to say I have found no glaring errors until I reached p204 where she writes: "Provided the attack come from within." which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It should probably read "Provided the attack does not come from within." Another mistake I think she made has nothing to do with writing but with story-telling. Maybe that sounds like a tautology, but what I mean by "story-telling" is how she puts together her tale, her world, her mythology, and in this instance particularly: mythology. I guess others might call that world-building, if we take world-building to be understood in its very broadest sense. LaFevers claims in her novel that gods are real and powerful and worthy of veneration - just like the religiously inclined do in real life, in fact! But the problem LaFevers has is the same one the religious have in real life: their gods lack credibility and are actually completely powerless!

Everything the Bretons do is aimed at staying free of the French, and maintaining their independence and their old gods, so why are they worshiping these gods in secret? Why are they forced to venerate them as saints instead of as gods? Who, exactly, is it who is repressing these old gods in LaFevers's Brittany? She never explains this, but if the gods are real and powerful and Brittany so weak, then why are the gods not helping?! And on another note, how is it that some people see this as a feminist novel when the Duchess is so weak that she must marry a man to save her and her province? This isn’t a feminist novel at all, it’s quite the opposite, because not only does the Duchess need a man, so too do the assassins featured in each volume.

LaFevers uses the term "High-traffic areas" which is such an anachronism that it really jumped out and reminded me, yet again, that I was reading fiction that has high traffic in the area commonly known as 'poorly written'. LaFevers also seems to suffer from chronopsia. This is a word I've coined to described those people who are unable to gage the passage of time accurately. Here's why I think this is the case with LaFevers: Sybella goes to visit The Beast when he's recovering from injuries in a local convent. When she leaves his bedside, it’s "not quite morning". She returns to the palace and sleeps "a short while" and then has to go to a council meeting. When she leaves the council meeting very shortly afterwards and goes outside, she's in the "cool night air"! Where the hell did the entire day go? It’s not morning, it’s night because she sees downtown that the bars are open and people are reveling. She slaughters two of these revelers, who happen to be D'Albret's infiltrators and who are reveling all over a poor innocent woman. But suddenly it’s almost daybreak again! My, how the gods make the sands of time run at their bidding!

Despite all this, I do still prefer this novel to its predecessor, but LaFevers seems determined not to make it easy to like it. She has this hardened assassin (Sybella) agonizing over what people will think of her now they know she is D'Albret's daughter even though she really isn’t his daughter because she's Mortain's daughter. Are you still following this? It's seriously and amateurishly confused. She frets and worries most of all over what The Beast will think of her, and I found this to be at first annoying, followed by irritating, and finally truly nauseating. It is so out of character for Sybella. But at least she gets the goods on what Mortain really wants: she learns from Ismae that the marque does not command them to kill someone. It’s merely an indication that the person bearing it is going to die soon.

But enough of this rambling banter! In conclusion, and this might surprise you, I am in fact going to rate this as worthy if only because it was significantly better than LaFevers's previous sortie into this series. There were still many problems with it, however, which is why I have really no interest in pursuing this series any further. I committed only to the first two and that was plenty! They were worth reading but not addictively so. Hopefully, should you choose to read it, you will be able to offer it a warmer reception that was I!

The Heavens Rise by Christopher Rice

Title: The Heavens Rise
Author: Christopher Rice
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

This novel ought to be re-titled "Snakes in a Swamp", because there are, and lots of them. But despite that, something bad is happening in the swamps of Louisiana. That's all I got out of this novel in the first fifty pages. Reading it is like taking a switch-back ride and having your back switched with one belonging to the guy who previously took this same ride and had his back switched out, and not in a good way.

I read one third of the novel and could not get into it. It was not badly written per se, but it simply offered me nothing. I could not develop an interest in any of the characters. I could not care less what they did or why. There was no clear story being told. All it offered was one mystery after another with - at one third the way through - no sign of any story developing or going anywhere. I had to leave off reading it for a few days, and when I got back to it I found I could not honestly recall anything significant that I'd read up to that point. It was like starting a new novel, and despite this bonus, when I started in on it again, I found that I honestly had no interest in pursuing it, especially with other novels on my reading list tempting me. So I gave up on it! I'm really sorry because I like to do a good review, and to detail some of the things which interested me, but I can offer nothing in support of this novel, not even to sustain my own interest. Life's too short to waste it on something which simply can't make your bunny hop.

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers

Rating: WORTHY!

I hate Robin LaFevers. Let me explain how this circumstance came to be…. I started reading The Rithmatist but my son wrestled that away from me (yeah, he kicked my butt; I am so abused…) so I had to resort to the next on my list until I could scheme and plot to snatch it back from that evil brute of a son when he least expects it. The next on the list would have been LaFevers's Dark Triumph, but that's number 2 in the "His Fair Assassin" inevitable trilogy. Fortunately, in a rare instance of Extreme Organization™ (a highly dangerous sport. I advise you not to practice it) I had Grave Mercy on order at the library and they, Masters and Mistresses of Literature that they are, came through for me. Of course, having been thrashed to within a hinge of my life (hey, I was at death's door), and in a state of tremens-dous delirium and self-doubt from practicing extreme sports, I was a pushover for LaFevers to take cruel advantage of my thoroughly helpless state. It’s all her fault.

Ismae Rienne is fifteen years old, and has a deep red stain across her back from her left shoulder to her right hip: a trail of ugly welts and scars left by the herb witch's potion which failed to abort her. Fourteen or so years later, her father sold her for three silver coins to Guillo the pig farmer who abused her on their "wedding night", but never consummated the marriage once he saw this scar. Locked in a root cellar as evil incarnate, she was rescued by the same hedge priest who married her. He arranged for her to be transported across Brittany (France) to the coast. Considered to be a child sired by death, Ismae is taken to an island where she will be subject to the oversight of the abbess of Saint Mortain, the patron saint of death.

The abbey proves to be a denizen of genderist wenches whose entire waking day seems to center around plotting the demise of all mankind. That's sad, because I was on board with this until I read that part! More on this anon. After being extensively trained in pretty much everything for three years, Ismae is sent upon her first assassination, and she succeeds with admirable efficiency. Disturbing huh? What LaFevers did here is to stealth-creep her prologue right into chapter one and make me read it! Pretty savvy of her to discover how to undermine my allergy to prologues. The problem is that this is sold as a YA novel and yet here she is on the cusp of adulthood already! Sneaky, huh?

Next we meet the trope du jour, who is named Gavriel Duval, of course, and inescapably, Ismae totally like hates him to the max. Yet every time he touches her she feels the penetrating heat of his hands. He has the most amazingly super-heated hands like ever! Plus, Ismae and Gavriel are inescapably thrown together because her trustily faithful horse dies and she has to ride with him. Two of them. Together. In. The. Same. Saddle.

Despite some issues, I was enjoying this until he showed up, and even his showing up wouldn't have been anywhere near so bad if this woman who had reached the age of eighteen (give or take) solely through feeding off of her extreme hatred of humankind hadn't fallen for him like a moose through mousse. Now she has to travel with him to the court of Anne, Duchess of the Duchy of Brittany, and spy. In the words of Pink:

Ever wonder 'bout what he's doing; how it all turned to lies?
The only way to be really certain is to go out there and spy
Where there is deceit there is gonna be a spy
Where there is a spy there is gonna be a counter
Where there is a counter you know someone's gonna buy,
You've gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
Gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy
You gotta go hide and spy, spy, spy...

LaFevers is obsessed with long moments. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the phrase 'long moment' 37 times in 549 pages, so there's a long moment every fourteen pages or so. No wonder the book takes so long to read! LaFevers has as many as three of them in one chapter - and the chapters aren’t that long! Seriously? If it’s a 'moment' it is, by definition, short. Can writers not think of a better way to express themselves than this clunker? This is a serious writing failure, and it’s not the only one LaFevers exhibits unfortunately. Having said that, I have to confess that I finished this book and that I am looking forward to its sequel, hopefully not its equal.

This abysmal trope instalust which Rienne is sickening. Since rien, as in de rien in French, means 'nothing', then is Ismae Rienne a female nothing? Just a thought! Actually Rienne is the French word for Ecuador. At one point Duval wakes Ismae from a bad dream and she almost sticks a knife in his throat. As she is cleaning up the blood from his scratch, her wrist rests on his chest and when she removes it, it throbs. Excuse me, but no, no! No! And, er, NO! And what's up with Duval - he can’t clean his scratch himself? This man who is suspicious of her, and distrusts her and resents her, puts all of that on the back burner and lets her tend his minuscule wound? Why is it that in these stories it’s always the guy with his friggin' shirt off and the woman slavishly ministering his insignificant little scrapes and aches? Please let's stop this!

LaFevers is obsessed with Duval's body heat. I did a search in Google Books and she uses the word 'heat' only 15 times, which I confess surprised me, because it seems like it's employed with much greater frequency, especially since she uses the word 'body' over fifty times! It's not even as many times as she says 'mayhap' which really stuck out like a sore point because it's such an anachronism compared with the rest of her writing. Having suffered through endless mayhaps in Kushiel's Dart, I definitely wasn't ready to be assailed by it yet again in Grave Mercy!

Given that one of the major disagreements between Breton and France is that France is under the stranglehold of Catholicism whereas Breton is in the sway of the pagan gods (according to the gospel by LaFevers), it makes no sense whatsoever for the Duchess to chide Ismae for referring to Mortain as a god rather than a saint! This is another example of LaFevers's thoughtless writing - or her confusion about the world she has created.

Shortly after the Duc de Nemours - the Duchess's betrothed - is assassinated, Ismae visits his room on impulse and kills two men who are in there, one of whom had Mortain's "marque" (how pretentious! Why not simply 'mark'? I don’t see the point of this unless it was a ham-fisted effort to get Ismae injured so that she and Duval can be intimate, but this whole episode smacks of poor writing. When Duval learns what has happened, he sends a page to find his friend (referred to as "The Beast"). His intention is to have The Beast clean up Nemours rooms, and hide the bodies, but The Beast never meets with Duval until after the pointless intimate moment is taken care of, yet The Beast reports that the rooms are cleaned. How did he know what to do since Duval never told him? Bad, bad writing! Go stand in the corner, LaFevers.

So as I mentioned, I have finished this and I recommend it if you can stomach the sometimes really bad writing and the instadore. But on the good side, the ending is really, really good, and well-written, and I liked that very much. Even the instadore is competently muted. In the end Ismae transcends her lot in life and moves on to something with a much broader sweep, and I approved of this immensely. So I cautiously recommend this with the above-mentioned caveats, and as I said, I will review volume two in this series next, and I can do this with some real hope because it's evidently about a different Ninja Nun than the first volume was.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: worthy

For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes, see here

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Review of The Girl Who Played With Fire.

This entire trilogy should have been called simply, "The Girl Who Kicks Ass", period! Although there is none of that in this volume. This one starts off exactly where the middle book of this trilogy ended: with Lisbeth Salander being whisked off to hospital with three bullets in her, still covered in the dirt from the grave where she had been buried, and Mikael Blomkvist being arrested by the most incompetent police officer since inspector Clouseau, and that's just the first chapter....

The police finally wise-up to the possibility that maybe Lisbeth isn't the lesbian satanist serial killer she's been portrayed as in the media, and Blomkvist wants to right wrongs whilst avoiding writing wrongs. He starts work on an article to be published in the next edition of Millennium magazine, the very mag which his partner, Erica, is leaving to take up a new high-powered position at a newspaper syndicate. Meanwhile the real villain, whom Blomkvist had trussed up like a turkey for the police, has escaped and both he and Zalachenko are gunning for Salander.

Which is a tragedy since Zalachenko is a patient in the same hospital as the debilitated Salander, and he's parked only three doors away from her! The police are so profoundly stupid that not a single one of them thinks of putting a guard on the doors of either of them, nor does Blomkvist think of suggesting it despite the fact that he's supposed to care deeply for Salander.

Meanwhile, the a segment of the Swedish security police (what there is of it) aka Säpo, is plotting to cover up this mess which has been humongous newspaper-grabbing headline material for months. Good luck with that! Säpo's plan involves a 78-year-old retired agent shooting Zalachenko in the hospital, and then committing suicide. It also involves breaking into Blomkvist's apartment to steal the extant copies of the document which could incriminate Säpo. Zalachenko finally gets nailed, and Blomkvist's sister is mugged. The Man From Säpo visits the senior prosecutor in charge of the case and fills his head with a bunch of crapola about Salander and Blomkvist.

I have to confess that there is a significant amount of pointless prose in this novel just as there was in the previous volume. It's hard to imagine how Larsson even considered putting some of this stuff in there. More to the point, Salander is seriously out of the action in this one, so there is no relief offered by her activities; instead, Larsson has drafted in some utterly tedious nonsense. There's a long discussion on the price of toilets, for example (I am not kidding). Larsson seems obsessed with describing every street in Stockholm in minute detail in terms of how to get from one to the other. He also describes meals in appetite-suppressing detail, and rambles endlessly in rabid pursuit of totally irrelevant digressions.

For example, there's an entire sub-plot about one of the most idiotic women in literature: Blomkvist's married girlfriend, Erica. There's an inane tryst between Blomkvist and a security police officer (who happens to be a rather amazonian female). Blomkvist's indulgence of himself (in all three novels) in irresponsible, "care-free" sex is just downright stupid, and in no case does it contribute anything to the plot. But not one character ever raises the issue of venereal diseases or of the wisdom of jumping into bed with a slut like Blomkvist in this day and age. I really started disliking Blomkvist at the end of volume one, where he callously tears up Salander's heart with his profligate bullshit fling with Berger (I actually strongly dislike the pair of them) was what really turned me off Blomkvist, and he never did climb back into my good graces.

Any new writer who wrote like Larsson did would be (and in this case rightfully) ripped a new one by their editor (if the editor was worth anything), but as we have seen, good editors are few and far between, and evidently Larsson turned in the manuscripts for all three novels right before he died; it was almost like his heart was waiting until he had finished before it decided to stop beating, so no doubt he was given a bye for this trilogy. How wonderful would it be if all of us were given the same free pass? Well, maybe not, judged by some of the crap that's out there! It really goes to show what outrages you can get away with once you have your foot inside someone's publishing door, doesn't it though?

I should also say a word about the bizarre arrangement of the "chapters" or tracks on the audiobook disks, of which there are sixteen. The division into these chapters is completely random, with the breaks coming sometimes in the middle of a sentence! The "chapters are also very long (seven to nine minutes) when compared with those in Kushiel's Dart, which had many more disks, but had "chapter" times at about three minutes each. Just an observation.

So why am I going to rate this novel as worthy? Well, the other two were entertaining, and although this one was really annoying at times, it wraps them up perfectly well. The courtroom scene towards the end, where Blomkvist's sister represents Salander and does it masterfully, makes the rest of it worthwhile. There's a really dragged-out ending which should have been excluded or at least trimmed but that's okay. This whole trilogy is worth a read and Lisbeth Salander is one of the best characters ever to appear in any novel I've ever read.