A Study in Darkness by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Darkness
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
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.

I reviewed A Study in Silks, the first novel in this series, here.

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

Yes, I know I said I was just starting this one! I did start it, but I had to put it on a hasty hold when I discovered, much to my dismay, that several books I have for review for Net Galley were showing "three weeks" deadlines in the reader: read it by then or lose it forever! I've never seen that before, but then I've never had so many ebooks lined up for review before, either, so I had to go take care of some of them before I can get back to this one! Sorry! Corporate responsibility and all that jazz....

However, I find myself this weekend not in a position to read the current deadline novel. There's no kindle edition of it, the Adobe reader doesn't work on Ubuntu, and Kindle won't read the PDF which is a protected file! Yes, they have it nailed down tightly, but that means I can't do what they expect me to do: review it for them! So I'm back to reading the "Study" series, but I have to report mixed feelings about what I'm reading. On the one hand, she doesn't know the difference between a decent romance and YA crapola. On the other, and this is a very pleasant surprise, Holloway does know the difference between stanch and staunch! Kudos to her for that much at least.

Anyone following my blog will know that I've identified (if I recall) three writers of late who do not know the difference, and as a writer, I think things like this are important because they tell us something about the author, and about book editors. If you cannot trust your publisher to get the cover right, and you cannot trust the blurb writer to get the back-cover right, and you cannot trust your editor to catch things like confusion between two similar words with entirely different meanings, then where is the advantage of going the legacy publishing route? Self-publish! But only if you are strong in your written language, and confident in being able to do the job yourself. However, if you got the other route, do be prepared for serious cluelessness, blindness, and moronic publishers who do not recognize talent when they see it. Recall that the following record companies turned down The Beatles in the early 1960's: Columbia, Decca, Oriole, Philips and Pye. Decca told them that guitar groups were on the way out, and that The Beatles had no future in show business! Don't lose heart. Unless, of course, you write romances as badly as Holloway does!

I must now address a serious shortcoming which shows up disturbingly in the first ten percent of this novel, and which is the sad debasing of Evelina. You will recall if you read volume one in this series that Holloway smartly tore up her playbook at the end, and scattered her four main protagonists, which I considered a very good decision. Imogen, Evelina's best friend was separated from both Evelina (who was banished from Lord Bancroft's home), and from her beau, Bucky, who was banned from her life. Niccolo, whom I consider to be a complete loser, became a pirate. That should convey all you need to know about his worthless hide, and that's also all I need to say about him - except to add that once I discovered that he was in this novel, I decided to skip every chapter in which he plays a leading role (which meant gliding happily past all of chapters five and six, for example). My worst fear is that he will not be hunted down and hung, but will come roaring back into the story, and it seems that fear is to become a reality. Indeed, Holloway starts this story with him, which I found depressing enough as it was.

And what of Evelina? Well, we learn nothing of her summer except that she was in Devon, a county in south-west England, but is now back staying with her uncle Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, where she receives a letter from Imogen begging her to join herself and Alice Keating for a month before Tobias (or sorry-ass if you prefer - I do) marries Alice. Evelina has an attack of the wilts and the vapors over this, at which point she lost me as her champion. She's supposed to be a smart, strong, astute, incisive sleuth, but she's none of that so far in this novel, nor at all in the first novel. She displays none of her uncle's intellect whatsoever. Holloway actually uses the term "star-crossed" to describe Evelina and Tobias, which pretty much made me puke all over the Kindle (not advised).

Holloway needs to buck-up Evelina and get her mind away from that loser Tobias, who purposefully shot her uncle and would have killed him if he could. How did Che put it in Don't Cry for me Argentina: "Why all this howling hysterical sorrow?" This pathetic juvenile fainting away over him is entirely stomach-turning. Evelina needs to be given a new beau: someone worthy of what she can be, and she herself needs to become worthy to have him. Right now she's worthless as a character and as a human being. Holloway seems to have got it right with Imogen and Bucky (although there is precious little of either of them in this volume), so hopefully she'll bite the bullet and get it done for Evelina too, but I have grave doubts on that score. I think she's far too in love with her characters to ever dare kill them off, either practically or metaphorically, but maybe she'll surprise me.

Or maybe she won't. I almost tossed this novel at about 20% in, and moved on to something else. Sad-sack Tobias, of course, shows up at the hunting jamboree organized by Jasper Keating, the "Gold" King (steam-punk supremo). There was absolutely no surprise what-so-ever there. Neither was it a surprise when trollop Evelina and scum Tobias, fiancé of Alice Keating, (who happens to be a friend of Evelina's) flung themselves into each other's arms, neither of them caring two figs for Alice. So exactly how Dumb is Evelina? Don't get me started. And what kind of a lowlife jerk-off is Toby-ass? Evelina had one simple task at this hunter-gathering: to dig up useful information for her uncle and she blew it the very first chance she got, wilting like a used condom in the arms of the useless piece of trash who shot her uncle and contributed to building a bomb which blew up Holmes's home when he and Evelina were both in it. And now this faithless wench is having palpitations over this terrorist?

This novel was entirely unrealistic even within its own framework to this point. Evelina, supposedly a strong female lead, has shown herself to be completely worthless in her character's rôle, and nothing more than another air-headed appendage of a guy. And the guy is - how did Colonel Brandon put it in Sense & Sensibility? - "...expensive, dissipated, and worse than both." Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon described Toby-ass's character best in the movie version: "the worst sort of libertine". I need more than this in a main character if an author wants me to follow a series; much more. But at least we now know where the novel's title came from: it was in Keating's study, in the darkness, that they kissed, and Keating and Imogen found them in flagrante de lick spittle. Now not only is Toby-ass under Keating's thumb, so too, is Evelina. Way to go, Ms Stupid Bitch! Seriously: is it Holloway's intention to make a reader detest her characters? If so, then why?! If not, then why write this crap?

Fortunately, I didn't ditch the novel at that point. Though I was revolted by Holloway's ham-fisted handling of Evelina-Toby-ass train-wreck, I kept reading and was rewarded. So she gets kicked out of the hunter-gathering and heads back to London incognito as a spy for Keating, and she ends up working for Magnus - the guy who got blown up in volume one, but who we all of us knew for a fact would be back, because why invent a new villain when you can quite literally resurrect an old one?! Right now my favorite character in both of these volumes is Magnus. At least he has something going for him - like a spine maybe?!

Magnus is laying low, and apparently working for (or perhaps merely pretending to do so) King Coal, another of the steam barons. He runs a puppet theater, although why he does, I have no idea; there's no reason whatsoever for him to be doing this as far as I can see, especially if he has King Coal's patronage, and Holloway offers none. He is maintaining a stable of automatons, one of which is the very Serafina doll which was purportedly destroyed in volume one. No explanation there as to why she's still hale and hearty, and Serafina has a life of sorts. She's very advanced, verging on being sentient if not already there, and Magnus assures Evelina that he has killed no-one and no animal to create her as she is. OTOH, this novel is set during the era of Jack the Ripper - the very villain about whom Imogen is having very realistic dreams. I am now suspicious that Serafina is Jack the Ripper and these deaths are what animate her. But then we all know exactly how great my guesses are!

So now Holloway has married off Toby-ass to Alice Keating, the only way she can get Toby-ass and Evelina together is to kill off Alice. Will she do it? She really jumped the shark, fell short, and landed ass-first in the fish's maw with the kiss in the study in darkness, because the only witnesses to that event were Evelina, Toby-ass, Keating, and Imogen. But now Holloway expects us to believe that the story somehow magically "slipped out", and has spread so that everyone at the reception knows of it. How, exactly, did that happen? No explanation. Everyone is evidently blaming Evelina, but there's no word yet on whether Alice has even heard the tale.

Well, I got to 50% through this novel and became so ill that I could no longer continue. It sucks. There are some really brilliant pieces, but all of that is lost in a foul miasma of tedious pedantry and brain-dead story-telling. It turns out that Toby-ass seduced Alice during the summer and impregnated her, and then he doesn't have the gallantry to spend their wedding night with her or treat her like a human being. There is no way in hell this piece of human gutter-trash will ever get back into my good graces, and if Evelina ends up with him, then she's scum too as far as I'm concerned! It's that simple. Why would I care what happens to these whiny-assed losers? The sad thing is that I have a third volume of this to which I'm committed for a review. I have the horrible feeling that I may indeed end up committed - to an asylum when I start delving into that volume! But rest-assured I am going to take a serious break from this before I read episode three!

This novel is WARTY!

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Title: Rose Under Fire
Author: Elizabeth Wein
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: TBD

Well I have to rate this one as warty. I started it and could find nothing whatsoever in the first few pages to interest me. I started skipping pages because the last thing I was interested in was air-headed girlie gossip written in a totally unrealistic first person, when I'd picked up a novel that was touted as being about World War Two! No wonder Hyperion didn't want a reviewer like me to get hold of this novel! But their ludicrous attempt at half-hearted censorship failed; I waited patiently and now I've seen it and it's not good enough.

Wein's desire to publicize the horrors of World War Two is admirable, if very belated. That war was horrible, but it was almost three-quarters of a century ago. There are new horrors now, and there have been ever since World War Two. They are just as bad as what happened then, and on just as large a scale, if nowhere near as concentrated, and it's those horrors - the ones which are not so high profile but which are just as bad - ones about which we can do something now, which are in greater need of the publicity. So why isn't Wein focused on those if she wants to write a crusading novel?

I invite Elizabeth Wein and others to think of a number. Not any number, but a specific nine million. It could be the nine million children who have starved to death in 2013. It could be "merely" nine million kids who aren't insured by "the best country in the world" in 2013, and will not be insured if the god-fearing 'suffer little children to come onto me" Republican party has its way. It could be the nine million children who were refugees in 2013. It could be the nine million children who will die in 2013 before they reach their fifth birthday. Six million Jews and all the others slaughtered, harassed, bullied, belittled and degraded in a religious crusade between the mid-nineteen thirties and 1945 is awful. It must NEVER happen again; it must never be forgotten, but it was 70 years ago. That nine million (pick one; pick any one) is happening right now. Let's keep our eye on the ball.

Likewise, Wein's efforts to publicize the contribution women made to the war effort is commendable, but I don't think you get to where Wein thought she was taking us by starting from frivolity and nonsense. Not unless you're a more skilled writer than Wein showed herself to me to be, because in my case she certainly failed and failed dismally. I was turned off this from the start. She should have begun this story from the point where Rose takes off and gets herself captured, bypassing the fluff and frou-frou and making a much better impression on me. Clearly she doesn't care about impressing readers like me.

If she had at least made the capture an adventure, it might have turned it around, but she wasn't even interested in doing that much. The capture was poorly written. She has Rose captured by two Messerschmitt 262's, the Germans' only jet-powered World War Two aircraft. These cool-looking airplanes then casually escorted Rose across France and into Germany. Never once did she try to put her plane down on the ground or to jump out and let it crash, thereby keeping it and herself out of the hands of the Germans. Nope, she meekly let these same two planes - which had severely limited air-time because of the fact that they were gas-guzzling jets with two hungry engines - lead her like a whipped puppy all the way into Germany and she never so much as emitted a squeak of protest, much less demonstrated one. Not only is that length of a flight not gonna happen with that type of aircraft, even if it could have happened, I wasn't about to read a story about a supposed hero who gives up everything in a cowardly fashion without even thinking of any kind of a fight. Sorry!

At that point, after the cheery, pally conversation she had with her German captors, blabbing everything but her name, rank, and number, that I could not stand to read this crap any more, and I closed the book on Elizabeth Wein, who started out ostensibly championing women in World War Two and ended-up (or was it up-ended?) insulting the legacy of bravery of the very non-fictional women who did put in their time and serve their country. And the hero's name is Rose Justice? Honestly? I am done with Elizabeth Wein. This was a warty read.

Reflex by Steven Gould

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

I reviewed Jumper, the first in this trilogy, here.
I reviewed Impulse the second sequel to Jumper here.

This is yet another one of Gould's which has a title competing for attention. There are at least four other books with the same title! I've read the two Gould novels which bracket this one and thoroughly enjoyed both so I expected no problems with this one, was looking forward to starting it. It did not disappoint, although there are bits of it which were somewhat testing of my patience! I started out thinking this one would be all Millie, but it's split between her and David in alternating sections. I loved the way Gould started this one, harking back with the first sentence to the first novel, but then taking that reference in a completely different direction before throwing in a twist a bit later!

It's ten years on, and David is working part time for Brian Cox, the NSA guy he had a run-in with in Jumper (which for some reason I keep thinking is titled "Jumpers" but it's not!) and has since befriended. In this sequel there are still no Paladins, which was a pure invention of the movie version, and which I've no come to think of an an aberration and not part of the Jumper world at all.

Millie is on the warpath because she wants to start a family. David doesn't because, well, JUMPING! Millie discovers that she can also jump (when she's highly motivated to do so), and it's just as well: David is kidnapped! He's drugged surreptitiously and taken captive by a mysterious group of people who tranquilize him so he can't think coherently enough to jump anywhere. They then keep him confined in a room, manacled to the wall. In the novels, he's unable to jump put of manacles. So now we have two people in the world who are jumpers. Quite a difference from the movie where there were many more of them. note also that Griffin makes no appearance in these novels, not in this one, not in Jumper, and not in Impulse.

While he's in captivity, before he recovers from being drugged, David's captors insert something under his skin that when triggered, makes him feel so bad when that he vomits and has a bowel movement. Yuck! Then they make him clean it up! Double yuck! I think I would have striven to direct all my bodily effluents right by the door where they have to come in and out, and never clean it up. But of course they have the stick, and it's a large and very effective one. David begins to cooperate but is very angered by it. One thing which became clear (other than that this group intends to use this control over him so that he will do whatever it is they want): David hates this woman who is in charge, but my guess was that it would be Millie who takes her out, and I was not exactly right but not far wrong.

David does get into it with Hyacinth, the woman who is supervising his imprisonment, but he comes off worst, and wakes up feeling as battered and bruised as he actually is! I guess his jumping was no match for her karate, but she does have the hots for him and wants to jump his bones! Now that fight - the battle, not the sex - would be worth seeing in a movie. I had a real problem with this part of the novel because David is quite attracted to Hyacinth Pope, and offers very little resistance to his feelings. At one point they are in process of making out, and not a single one of David's thoughts about why he should not do this revolve around the fact that he's married to Millie! That sickened me and was the first time I did not like David in this entire series. In the end, the reason he stops making out with her has nothing whatsoever to do with Millie and is rather pathetic.

I love Millie in this novel and don't see enough of her. She is kick ass, but there are some real problems of tedium with both her and David's segments. Millie's segments are bogged down with her trying to find David, and that wouldn't be at all bad if it were not for the tedious part where she becomes enmeshed with a woman who lives on the street named Sojee, and with a family of illegal immigrants, the Ruizs. Once we're away from that and moving on to physically trying to find David, as well as to discover who the mole is (in the NSA who's passing on secret information about him which facilitated his capture), I enjoyed it just fine.

I have no idea why Gould put this stuff in there, but I do know it was really bogged down the story and bored me to tears. David's whole captivity is a bit tedious to me. I kept wanting something to happen and nothing really did unless it was an incremental change in his method of confinement, which was tedious, quite frankly. I mean it was intriguing how they found new ways to keep him trapped, yet slowly manipulate him into a position where he was both their captive, but free enough of his manacles that he could go out and do their bidding away from his "jail", but let's get there already! There had to have been better ways to get us from A-nnoying to B-etter! This novel could probably have been fifty to a hundred pages shorter and still been just as good overall.

Towards the end it improved significantly, becoming the kind of novel I admire Gould for writing, so based on this overall view, and ignoring the bits i mentioned above, I rate this novel a worthy read!

The Thirteen Hallows by Michael Scott & Colette Freedman

Title: The Thirteen Hallows
Author: Michael Scott
Author: Colette Freedman
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!

This was read by Kate Reading. I begun it thinking how perfect a name is that for the reader of an audio book?! Unfortunately, her style grated after a while. It's got to be said that this is one of the very worst novels I've never read. I got to fifty chapters in - which is not as far as you'd think (the chapters are laughably short) - but it is over half-way through. I started listening to it and found myself skipping track after track on the audio disks because the writing was so unbelievably pedestrian and monotonous that was unbearable on my ears: it actually hurt my brain to listen to it. This novel reads like a self-published first novel, which is really disturbing because it was written by at least one author (Scott) who is a seasoned and talented writer. He's the author of The Alchemyst hexalogy which I really enjoyed.

I'm not at all familiar with Colette Freedman, but I was looking forward to starting this audio book when I drove to work in the morning, and the disappointment came thick and fast. It's funny that I was talking about show vs. tell (or inform vs. evoke as some would have it) in a couple of reviews lately. To me it's show or blow. Scott & Freedman blowed. They dump massive quantities of info in the first three disks, much of which really has diddly squat to do with the actual story. Yeah, I am suitably impressed that you created a back-story for every last one of your minor characters, but I sure as hell don't need to hear it breaking through the narrative and taking over large swathes of the novel like kudzu.

Just in passing, the thirteen hallows are derived from Celtic mythology, and also appear to have fed the Harry Potter series, at least in part. Clearly the 'hallows' portion of the title is nothing more than a shameful rip-off of J. K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out four years before. The Thirteen Hallows is nothing but splatter-punk bait-and-switch under the false pretense of being a supernatural thriller. None of it makes any sense. The premise is that there are thirteen hallows of Britain (this is true, although they're better known as 'treasures') and there are two evil morons (they're clearly not geniuses otherwise they would pursue their treasure hunt much more intelligently than they do) who are seeking these thirteen treasures which, once united, will allow one of them to rule the world.

Evidently, these treasures are keys to unlock a portal which would allow demons to come through and eat people(!). What would be left to rule when everyone was eaten is unexplained. Why these keys were not destroyed thereby permanently sealing up the demons is unexplained. Why demons even want to eat people is unexplained. Why these thirteen keys are 'guarded' by thirteen really old people with no provision to pass on their dubious legacy to the next generation is unexplained. Why the hallows were entrusted to these people when they were kids who were so defenseless that they'd been evacuated from London during the World War Two bombings is unexplained. Why only two detectives are put in charge of a major murder investigation into what has to be the ostensible work of a dangerous, deranged, and very violent psychopath is unexplained. Why they can't apprehend the perps is completely understandable given how inexperienced and utterly inept they are. Why the gods (or any god) cannot step in and prevent this horror - yet again having to rely on weak and fallible humans to do their dirty work - is unexplained. But given that religion is the most asinine aspect of this fiction - or any fiction including the Bible - this latter item is not really a mystery at all. How this novel ever made it to publication is a mystery.

Even within its own framework, this novel makes zero sense. The two bad guys have several "skinheads" running around London doing their slaughtering, and every scene of slaughter is depicted in the most nauseating terms imaginable, describing, in tabloid detail, all of the horror, the gore, the blood, and the abominable smells. Yet when Sarah, the female protagonist of a matching pair guts one of the villains (completely out of the blue!) with a sword, another of the bad guys vomits from the horror of it. Honestly? This is a guy who is torturing people for a living, and has waded through spongy, sticky, blood-soaked carpet in pursuit of his work, and yet he vomits because a colleague is stabbed?

I know that Scott can write. I loved his Alchemyst series. So how are we to explain how unutterably bad this novel is? Do we blame it all on Freedman? That would seem to be the obvious knee-jerk reaction, but it may be that she's equally competent, so then we would have to blame poor chemistry or willful blindness. Are Scott and Freedman doing nothing more than writing about their own dark fantasies - are they seeing themselves as the blood-lusting bad guys here? I have no idea, which is to say that I have just as much idea about that as I do about how such a god-awfully bad novel ever got past any self-respecting editor. I did find that some chapters seemed to me to evidence having been be written by Freedman, whereas others seemed to have been written by Scott. This came to me solely from the tone, and I have no idea at all if I'm even remotely right, but it was an interesting sensation that I very likely would not even have experienced had I been reading a print book or ebook.

The writing is pedestrian to an extreme, every single line is a tell with nary a show in sight, as the authors parade one gory scene past us after another, and every last one of these scenes is described in almost exactly the same terms and in mind-numbingly unnecessary detail. The authors quite evidently have no idea how to invoke shock, horror, and revulsion without describing it in terms which a ten-year-old might employ to show how tough he is or to gross out his school chums.

I found myself skipping track after track on the first five disks (which is as much as I could stomach of this trash) because I had no interest whatsoever in the life history of Mrs Piddly-Ass Smythe, or whoever. I really didn't. Can we get into the story please?! So note form this that even seasoned authors quite evidently don't give a damn about show vs tell, rest assured. When we finally got to one of the main characters, and her name turned out to be Mary Sue Clueless. After she rescued an old woman from being mugged and took her to her home in the city of Bath (not exactly next door to London!), they found the home had been savagely and disgustingly vandalized. The next morning, Mary Sue got a threatening phone call at work, yet she failed to call the police! She goes to her own home after that, only to find her whole family slaughtered!

I have one more thing to say about the disks - the first one at least: there was this weird vibration sound on the end of disk one, and I initially thought there was something wrong with my car! It wasn't until I turned down the CD player volume to hear better, and the sound faded that I realized it was on the CD!

Another annoyance (for the audio book) was the lack of "chapter ...". I guess the printed novel has just numbers without the word "Chapter" in front, and Reading was simply reading as is without thinking of artificially adding the word "Chapter" to preface the number. Would it be too much to ask? It took some getting used to hearing what at first appeared to be a random number or appeared to be part of the narrative, only to learn after a second that we'd actually begun a new chapter! Yeah, it's a minor quibble, but it's an unnecessary annoyance.

In short, this novel is WARTY to the max.

Plants vs. Zombies: Lawnmageddon by Paul Tobin and Ron Chan

Title: Plants vs. Zombies: Lawnmageddon
Writer: Paul Tobin
Artist: Ron Chan
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: worthy
Other Credits:
Matthew Rainwater - colorist
Steve Dutro - letterist

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this graphic novel 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.

This is a great story for a younger audience. It's really funny and commendably depicts a young boy and girl working as a team, co-opting the mutant plants the girl's somewhat loopy uncle has developed, to fight a massive plague of zombies. The pants are inventively created, as are their attacks, and the zombies are charmingly menacing. The girl is Patrice Blazing, who introduces herself (in Nate's tree house) as a professional tree house investigator. In turn, Nate Timely introduces his self as an aspiring cowboy astronaut. They hurry around their home town thinking up ways to beat the zombies, their brains constantly in peril of either exploding from all the hard thinking they're doing, or of being eaten by the zombies. Eventually they win the day, of course, through pluck, inventiveness, cooperation, ad wise-cracks, and in doing so, and pass on a lesson about the importance of promoting healthy plant growth and fighting pollution. By why do the trees get no mention? Hmm? They're plants too!

In conclusion I recommend this highly, both for its important sub-textual message regarding the environment, and for its good entertainment value.

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.