The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy by Kate Hattemer

Title: The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy
Author: Kate Hattemer
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
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.

If you liked E. Lockhart's / Emily Jenkins's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks or her Dramarama, then in all likelihood, you'll adore this one as much as I did, because it's very much written in that vein, but be prepared for a rocky start. I did not like this at all for the first few pages (especially when one of the characters suggests dog-earing the page (on an ebook!), but it was interesting enough that I stuck with it and I was well-rewarded.

The story concerns the amusing and disturbing situation which a high school (academy if you will) gets itself into, when it allows a TV station to stage a so-called 'reality' show using students as characters. Some of the school students not involved in the show, notably: Luke, Elizabeth, Jackson, and the narrator, Ethan, find it reprehensible that the show is such a farce and is detracting from academic standards, and is also imposing censorship on independence and creativity since slowly, everything in the school is becoming subjugated to the TV show's needs, and the fat bucks it generates, which are rolling into the school's coffers (supposedly). What a great premise for a story! And Hattemer doesn't let it down.

These four students decide to do something about this dismal situation, but misdirection, sadness, betrayal, and somewhat hair-raising escapades are in store for these guys as they try to rebel against it, and then start digging into the mismanagement (which they uncover) of both the show and the funds it generates. There's some sly humor and amusing situations, and a really touching romance which blossoms. Now that's the way to write a YA romance. Seriously. There are too-many ham-fisted YA writers who honestly need to read this novel just to learn how to do it.

This turned out to be yet another novel wherein I discovered a supporting character who actually interested me significantly more than the main character! I'm doomed to read novels like this - especially first person PoV novels, which is another reason to detest them! This novel curiously has three endings, none of which are very dissimilar, and none of which is the ending I was hoping for and expecting. Of this, I have to relate some disappointment. Maybe Ethan actually was as dumb as I feared he was! Actually, more accurately, maybe he just wasn't as smart as I hoped he'd be. But a worthy read and an interesting variation on the E. Lockhart novels I mentioned in that the main character is male rather than female.

Witch Child by Celia Rees

Title: Witch Child
Author: Celia Rees
Publisher: Random House Audio
Rating: WORTHY!

I picked this audio novel for two reason, first because it sounded interesting, of course, but what really won me over was that it's narrated by Jennifer Ehle. She does a fine job, too, of relating the tale of a fourteen year old girl, Mary Newberry who supposedly wrote this in her journal, which is how the story came to us - via its cozy little hiding place.

It would seem, from her website, that Rees has made a career out of telling similar stories (Sovay, Sorceress, Pirate!), and while I personally don't feel any irresistible urge to pursue them all, if they're as good as this one - as involved, as well written, as educational, and as surprising, I don't doubt that they are as worthy as this one is turning out to be. I don't do covers, because the author has no control over that whatsoever unless they self-publish, and this blog is about the novel, written by the author, not about publishers, editors or cover artists, but I have to ask, does the woman on this cover have the most amazing face or what?!

I have to say, the more I listen to Jennifer Ehle, the more she is giving Emily Gray a run for her money as my most adored narrator. Ehle has an advantage because I fell in love with her in Pride and Prejudice, so it's a compliment to Gray that she's still in the lead! Anyway, the young girl, Mary, is living in central England in 1659, and she sees her grandmother "tried" (and summarily, but not so merrily, hanged) for witchcraft, but she's spirited away right then by a mysterious woman who has the same color eyes and who Mary eventually realizes is her own mother. She's been rescued so she can be sent away to "the colonies" unfortunately, because it's not considered safe for her in England if Charles comes to the throne replacing the brief Cromwell lineage.

That seems a bit of an insult as well as Ironic, that May is sent from England to the new world almost like it's declaring England to be backward and primitive in its hanging of witches, and the USA is of course the most fabulous place ever. The irony lies in the fact that the ship Mary travels on docks in Salem, Massachusetts! However, it's some forty or fifty years before the witch trials, so she's safe for now, although her children may not be! The odd thing about this is that, after telling the story in a way that makes it look like Mary and her grandmother were perfectly normal people being very badly done to, we learn on the cross-Atlantic voyage that Mary does indeed have some power: the gift of foresight.

The voyage is a laugh as well as an interesting exposition of ship-board life and social interaction. I don't know what religion Rees follows if any, but it seems to me she is subtly slamming religious hysteria, as well as its blinkered intolerance and bigotry here when she describes the Reverend Johnson's insane blathering. Indeed, given that Johnson is a euphemism for penis, he's really the reverend Dick, and he's a decidedly nasty piece of work: a study in the worst aspects of blinkered religious intolerance. Eventually, they arrive safely in Salem (ahem!) and start life in the New World, but it's to be a short stay, because hardly have they "settled" there than they're heading west, inexplicably following the footsteps of Johnson and crew.

Mary's life seems to be one of endless journeying: from her home to a ship, on the ship to North America, from Salem to Beulah, from childhood to adulthood. She is under the charge of one of her fellow travelers (arranged by her mother) and makes a couple friends with other young people on the voyage. She also saves the life of a newborn baby, but not through any witchery, merely through smarts and experience, from helping her grandmother. We learn a lot, in a painless way, of how life treated people back then, and it's a little bit preachy, a little bit info-dump, but in general the story is very easy on the ears, especially with Jennifer Ehle reading it.

In Beulah, she finally starts making a life as an assistant to an apothecary, gathering plants, seeds, bulbs and herbs for him in the extensive forest, befriending a young native boy, and relaxing into her life, but even that's to be screwed up by Johnson and his narrow-minded dogmatism. The ending was a little sad, but I'm not going to tell you more than that! It was a bit like I expected, but not in the way I expected. I did enjoy this novel immensely.

The First Men in the Moon by H G Wells

Title: The First Men in the Moon
Author: H G Wells
Publisher: Phoenix
Rating: worthy

The movie based on this novel is reviewed here.

Yes, it is titled The First Men in the Moon and trust Wells: he's very exact about his title! This novel, originally published in 1901, is of course, very dated. The Moon has no atmosphere. No life exists there, but read in its context, it really is a charming story. I think it's also hilarious that this is published by Orion Books - a suitably space-worthy name!

I first got interested in this after I saw as a child, the movie which was based upon this novel. The movie parallels it, but not too closely. I've never read the novel before, however, so I decided it was time. The story is told by a man named Bedford, who has rented a cottage in the Kentish countryside to write a play. Through him, we learn of the activities of his eccentric neighbor, Cavor (Cah-vore) who has invented what he calls cavorite, a mineral which can effectively overcome gravity.

Cavor talks Bedford into going on a trip with him to the Moon. The flight is undertaken in a sphere, which has blinds on it in various places which can be raised or lowered to manipulate the amount of cavorite exposure. Wells's explanation for how this works fails immediately they enter the vacuum of space, because cavorite is supposed to work by making air above it weightless, and thereby forcing the object upwards into the vacuum created by the rising air. Unfortunately, there's no air in space (not at a density you'd wish to breathe, certainly, unless you can survive on a single molecule per billion cubic miles of space, or whatever the density is!) so it would cease to work there, but like I said, this is over a hundred years old, so you either go with it or it blows. I chose to go with it.

When they land on the moon, they discover an atmosphere there, and weird-ass plants which grow crazily rapidly when the sun rises and starts baking the surface, melting the "snow" which has been lying around overnight. Bedford and Cavor blindly start exploring, jumping, and wandering until they forget where they left the sphere, and because of the massive plant growth, they can't see it, either. While searching for it, they hear oddball noises in the ground and discover what they refer to as Mooncalves, which are huge slug-like creatures that graze on the foliage, and are tended by what Cavor refers to as Selenites (Moon natives), rather insectoid creatures which move around on two legs and are about five feet in height. These beings and creatures evidently live underground during the freezing Lunar night, which explains the noises the two humans heard - it was the massive sliding trapdoor opening to the underground world of the Selenites.

Becoming inexplicably ravenously hungry and thirsty, the two Earthlings feast on a mushroom-like growth they happen upon, and eventually become rather intoxicated by it, leaving themselves open to capture by the Selenites, thus becoming the first men in the Moon! Next follows a story which is rather different from the subsequent movie. It results in a "dramatic" escape and then a desperate search for the sphere which they left lying around on the surface (unlike in the movie) and which they absolutely must find if they don't want to freeze to death in the rapidly oncoming Lunar night. Bedford is a lot more heroic in the movie (especially on the poster!). In the novel he's portrayed as a rather self-serving and cowardly individual who abandons Cavor on the Moon and returns to Earth alone, with his gold crowbars and chain, becoming a man of means and substance.

Yes, he does have a vague sort of plan to return, but that's only for the gold, which Wells portrays as lying around on the Moon's surface as veins in Lunar rocks. That plan is scuppered by the loss of the sphere, which Bedford has no means of recreating. Unlike in the movie, He does hear from Cavor, who finds a way to communicate with Earth.

While this novel is very dated, I have to compliment Wells (who we all know was a woman - this is proven to my satisfaction by Warehouse 13...!) on his solid grasp of physics and of planetary mechanics. He puts all-too-many modern writers to shame. I recommend this novel.

Undone by Karin Slaughter

Rating: WARTY!

This was narrated quite adequately by Natalie Ross, but she's no Emily Gray. No one is! Except Emily Gray, of course.... What could be better than a murder mystery written by someone called Slaughter?! Well, it turns out, anything! Slaughter was actually the working title of one of my own murder mysteries which I hope to publish before so very long. This one, unfortunately, began in a way that made me dislike it and made me really feel that I wouldn't be around to hear the ending, but it got slowly better and I became ready to give it a fair hearing - quite literally! I should have listened to my first impressions.

The problem with audio books is that you cannot skip the prologue very readily. I hate prologues, but after skipping to track eleven (yes, it goes to eleven) and still finding no announcement of "Chapter one" I felt I had no choice but to listen to it otherwise I'd arrive at work having heard none of it, but what a waste of my time it was. Note that the tracks on this audio version are of the kind where there are ninety-freaking-nine of them on each disk, but each track is less than a minute long. I'm not a fan of that arrangement.

Given that both the prologue and first chapter were pure time-wasting bullshit and could have been entirely done-away with (for a murder mystery, you can do away with a lot! I mean, why not?!), I wasn't thrilled at that point. Had this been a new author, the publisher would have insisted upon it! Fortunately we can self-publish these days and don't have to kow-tow to those people any more, but this does, of course, not mean that every novel is going to be a classic, far from it.

So, finally we get to the mystery, but there's no murder yet! Interesting? Not really. A woman is hit on the highway. She's naked and wandering in the road. She's taken to the hospital where it becomes clear she has been held captive and horribly tortured by some utterly sick person. Detective Will Trent happens to be at the hospital when she's brought in, so he gloms onto the case with his partner, Faith, who happened to be a patient of Doctor Sarah who diagnoses her with Type 2 diabetes. This was wa-a-a-a-ay the hell too much Stephen King style (forget that these are merely notes to flesh-out characters, and include every blessed thing you ever thought of in connection with this novel actually in the novel thank you very much) back-story. I don't care about the life history and three-or-four generation ancestry of every bit-player in your novel. Just the facts, ma'am! Just the facts! And if you insist upon repeatedly including all that extraneous crap I will ditch your novel like it has King written all over it.

Day two of the Undone watch: I had to skip most of disk three as Slaughter got her ass in a sling with some woman going shopping for cupcakes at an ungodly hour in the morning with her toddler. This section was so unutterably tedious and so depressing that I simply skipped track after track after track to get away from it. I may have skipped something important in the process, but rest fully-assured that I am not going back to find it. No fear! Seriously, do I need to know that she got plastic bags, felt guilty, and instead of recycling them, she made things worse by simply tossing them into the trash, and then she undid the trunk of her SUV with a remote and watched it slide smoothly open? No! A thousand times no! Can we get on with the story please, instead of being force-fed yet another miserable lesson on how much you love to hear yourself write?

I also got to hear about Will Trent and his dyslexia. Evidently, Will is now part of the inevitable sleuthing series, and that's fine if you can get away with it, but must we hobble every single detective in every single novel with quirks? And if I have to hear any more about Doctor Sarah and her lot in life I will overdose this CD set with insulin. Can you imagine how godawful this would be if it were first person PoV?! I have a horrible feeling that Will and Sarah are destined to be together, which will favor her a lot more than it favors him. But the thing is, I started not to care, not even remotely, not even a little bit.

I reached disk 6 of this and could not stand it any more. The basic story was pretty interesting and I would have liked to have finished it, but Slaughter prevented me from doing this by her blind insistence upon larding up every corner of this novel with endless extraneous endless tedious endless mindless endless numbing endless boring endless gratuitous endless endless endless nit-picking details in the extreme. I had absolutely no interest in some peripheral character having a stain on his shirt or the life history of a cantankerous hippie witness. I was rendered into a state of completely detesting Doctor Sarah because of the endless maudlin horseshit of her pining for nearly four years for her dead husband. We're told he died in the line of duty and it's hardly surprising if his duty was living with this whiny-assed loser. Fine, make the point if it's relevant to the story, but then do we honestly have to re-live that same point over and over and endlessly over again every-single-time-without-fail that we meet this same character? Did the original hardback version of this novel come with a self-flagellation device?

If this were the last novel on Earth and I was desperate beyond description for a read, I would use the pages for toilet paper rather than read this crap. I'd rather read Charlaine Harris - that's how bad this volume is! To paraphrase Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch, this novel has "...passed on. This novel is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late novel. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't recorded it on disks, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-novel." And it came undone. Rest in Pieces.

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach aka Aaron

Title: Fortune's Pawn
Author: Rachel Bach aka Aaron
Publisher: Orbit 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.

There's evidently a sequel to this novel due out next year, titled Honor's Knight. I don’t know if the author has heard of David Weber or not, but this particular choice of title has serious dumbfoundation potential! Note also that there's a fortune's pawn website, but it has nothing to do with this novel afaik.

The plot driver here is that a female protagonist with the highly unlikely (and unlikeable - I didn't like it, anyway) name of Deviana Morris wants to join the "Devastators", an upscale 'armor unit' on Paradox, which is her home world, and which is ruled by a monarch! They only recruit people who are past their prime for this unit, for reasons unknown, which is Deviana's main problem. I don’t get the monarchy thing. How did that happen? Did the first guy to arrive on Paradox declare himself king? Or did the populace elect one at some point?! If so, why? And why is Deviana so blindly loyal to this king? No explanations are offered.

You know, the more I think about this, the more I can see parallels between this novel and David Weber's space opera about Honor Harrington, the first volume of which I reviewed recently. They are both not from the main planet (Harrington not from Manticore, Deviana not from Earth). In both stories Earth is a republic, and the local planet a monarchy. They're both sword-fighters of some note. They're both insanely gifted and never wrong, etc., etc. I've seen Deviana described as a cross between Ellen Ripley of the Alien film series, and Kara Thrace of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, but Deviana is no Ellen Ripley, not even close. Thrace, maybe, but then I never liked Thrace! I find a better comparison is with Molly Millions in Neuromancer, but Deviana is nowhere near as cool, competent, or as intriguing as she was, and either Ellen or Molly would kick Deviana's ass in a straight fight!

Anyway, in order to get there (the king's horses and men) from here, she has to quit the military and sign-up for a year on a trashy spacecraft named Glorious Fool, which is supposedly so rough that her duty there counts extra and will get her noticed for the aging, non-republican guard (she hopes). Can anyone smell 'series' in the air with Deviana not ever leaving Glorious Fool? Either that or she succeeds beyond her wildest hopes and then we get a GI Jane or a Private Benjamin in space when she joins the so-called devastators. Neither is appealing to me after reading this overture. I was hoping, when I read of there being a "Devi" in this novel, that I was going to be reading a story featuring an Indian protagonist. I still have no real take on her ethnicity, but it appears not to be Indian; with the name, she's more likely to hail from central Virginia!

I have to say I have no respect for writers who publish under different names. I don't know why they do it, nor do I care. It confuses things and makes life harder than it needs to be. I know it's their choice, but I sure don't have to respect it. However, Rachel Aaron was kind enough to comment on this (yes! that's how important I am now!), so I include her comment here, unabridged:

Hello Ian, I hate to butt in, but I felt the need to point out that the name change was my publisher's idea, and not mine. Indeed, most authors who change their names do so at the behest of their publisher for a whole myriad of different reasons, mostly having to do with sales. That said, I hope you won't hold the name change against me or the work. It really not delusions of grandeur, I swear!

Don't let them thar publishers be hesting you, y'all! And no, you're not butting in; you're most welcome to comment. This is a review of the novel, not of the author, although I admit that writing is such a personal thing that it's hard to distinguish between the two at times. I have to say though this merely reinforces what I've said elsewhere about self-publishing. I know there are some substantial advantages for those few who are allowed to travel the hallowed traditional route, but there are also costs as Rachel found out (yes, we're on first name terms now! Eeek. Yes we are - go read the quote above! That was a pretty slick trick by Rachel, because now I have to be nice!).

Unfortunately, I still haven't done quibbling, so here goes. Anyone who has read much of this blog can be in no doubt about my lack of respect for prologues!! Fortunately, Rachel spares us that. She does not, however, spare us first person PoV, which I really do not like, but which I will grudgingly put up with if the story is good enough. All that, plus my having just got through a couple of crappy ebooks, means that Rachel has it all stacked against her here, and she didn't do too well either.

In very broad and general terms, I found myself liking this story (it's amusing me, if nothing else!), but I do have a gaggle of gripes to get out of my system, so let’s address that now. Fortune's Pawn (I want to write a novel now and title it 'Fortune Spawn' just to make it really weird when people try to buy my novel or Rachel's! Yes, I'm evil that way! Then I can have a series: Fortune Prawn, Fortune Dawn, Fortune Morn, Fortune Lawn...you get the idea.)...now where was I? Oh yes, Fortune's Pawn is un-fortune-ately spawning more than its fair share of cliché and anachronism, it would seem. Despite this story taking place a thousand years into our future, Deviana takes a cab to the docks. A millennium from now we’re still hailing cabs and they still have crazy drivers? No one flagged down a cab a thousand years ago; why would we expect to be traveling in them a thousand years hence? I'm just asking!

But this is a problem with removing your novel some distance in time from our comfort zone (and I launch into this advisedly, for I have some things to say about this novel and space and time shortly!). Geoffrey Chaucer could have, in no way or flight of fancy ever have envisioned a cell phone, the Internet, a microwave oven, or a taxi cab sporting an infernal combustion engine and he's the better part of a thousand years aft of us! So how are we, as writers, to talk about life a thousand years from now and hope to make it sound both plausible and different?

Well, you pays your money (or your Republican Credits) and you takes your chance, I guess; then we as readers have to decide if we can stand to read it! But I would advise trying for something much further out there than we get in this novel if you're going to push for a thousand years hence! Something like Greg Bear delivers in The Way trilogy would do. If you're going to write like it takes place today (as this one does), but with a few techno-perks to leaven it, then it would seem far wiser not to push it so far into the future! Why she chose to go that route, I don't know. Hey, we're on first name terms, not on sharing your little secrets terms! Not yet anyway! But if she's smart, Rachel will make me a beta reader for her next volume in this series, and in return, I'll give her a better novel!

All the traditional sci-fi terminology is employed here, and in some ways that's a reassuring thing, I think, to big fans of the genre, but to me it really isn't. As character CJ declared in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin a cliché to me is like a red rag to a bull. But then bulls are red-green color blind, so we all know how useless that cliché is! But it bothers me that Earth isn’t called Earth (it's Terra), and people from Earth are 'Terrans'. That kind of thing makes me gag, and not in a good way, because it's never happened. In four billion years, no one outside of sci-fi has ever called planet Earth 'Terra' Okay, the Romans, but what have they ever done for us?! Actually the Romans used the word 'mundus' for the world, and terra for 'land', and even they never called its human population 'Terrans'!

Rachel has huge 'space trawlers' flying around, but my immediate question on reading that was "What do they trawl for in the vacuum of space?" If they're not literally trawling for anything, why call them trawlers instead of, say, freighters or something else? Maybe they trawl for lelgis? More anon on that slippery topic. And don’t even get me started on the utter absurdity of interstellar trading. I addressed this in my review of On Basilisk Station. I was unimpressed by these features of this novel (including the fact that they still use 2-D bar-codes a thousand years from now!). It’s also disturbing to learn that we're reduced to still using ice packs to treat a black-eye a thousand years from now, and evidently, there's no aspirin! I'm wondering why Deviana's enormously expensive gruntware can’t take care of minor injuries, and why it almost kills her when it chooses to take care of her more serious injuries!

There was another weird bit about mining asteroids. Mining for what? We're not told! And they're doing it in dangerous proximity to hostile alien territory, too. I don't get the why: why humans are doing the mining, and not robots (more on robots anon)? Rachel does admit to androids being in use, but none appeared in the first half of this novel. So, back to the asteroids: these things only appear in a solar system, so I don't get this trip to a location which is apparently out in the middle of interstellar space! Unlike in Star Wars and other such space operas, asteroid fields don't just appear out of nowhere. They're formed where planets are also formed, so why not mine them locally in the Paradox system or in Earth's solar system? Or if they must have these asteroids, why aren't they bringing the them into a high planetary orbit and mining there? There was already, in 2012, a movement to do precisely this!

Now to stage an unprovoked assault on the main character! Deviana is 27 and she's inevitably the best at what she does, of course, because, "Hello! This is the hero!". I am wondering if I've had a whiff of Kris Longknife here or perhaps more accurately, Kylara Vatta, as well as Honor Harrington? After finishing this novel I have to say that I found all three of those characters much more appealing than Deviana Morris.

This part was interesting to me, because why she wants that end goal so badly is neither explained nor justified as far as I can see. In the absence of a motive, I can only put it down to juvenile machismo. But what I really don't see here is a justification for an army to begin with, and I can see even less justification for a monarch to have his own private elite army. Just who, exactly, are these troops fighting? Not space baddies, that's for sure, because there's unabated piracy galore going on. And what do the 'Devastators" devastate, precisely? What is the nature of the threat to the king from which this unit offers such skilled protection? Paradox is not a planet of diverse political complexion. There are no individual nations at war. It's about as homogeneous as it can get from what I've read so far, so why the military? What does it do and how effective is it across thousands of light years of empty space?

Deviana succeeds in getting hired on as one half of ship security in about five minutes, and is told by the captain to report to Basil. Despite being explicitly told that "He's my second and you'll obey him…", Deviana is evidently not very smart because as soon as she meets Basil, who is an alien (of a rather avian race known as aeons) she tries to determine what gender he is! Which part of 'he' and 'him' did you not get Deviana?! Oh, and there's also a humanoid, intelligent, predatory reptile, lest I forget the ship's doctor. In fact, there are four 'races' so far known in the universe: humans, aeons, xith'cal, and lelgis. I was forced to surmise, since we've had mammal, reptile, and bird, that the latter must either be fish or amphibian, but it turned out to be jellyfish, which is neither! Shows what I know!

On a related note, I wish the sci-fi community would do a better job of dealing with the fact of evolution. This 'bird', for example, is the navigator, yet has wings, of course - nary a hand or fingers in sight. How does that work exactly? Some birds on Earth, most notably the Corvidae (such as Ravens for example), and the Psittacidae (such as African Grey parrots, for example), have shown themselves to be exceptionally smart, but despite this, the human lineage is the only one in some four billion years of evolution on Earth which has produced our level of achievement and intelligence (for what that's worth! Ahem!).

Organisms don’t plan to evolve. There is no 'goal'. There is no scheme, or design, or path of 'progression' All that evolution is, bottom line, is a sieve, which blindly "selects" those organisms which are best equipped to survive in a given set of circumstances. Everything else pretty much becomes extinct. If an organism is doing great in its niche, there's no pressure or 'desire' to change. There is always potential to change, but that doesn't mean it will be tapped. Every organism alive on Earth right now is just as 'advanced' - just as 'evolved' - as we humans are. They're not any more evolved for our niche than we are for theirs is all. They are more or less adequately evolved for their own niche.

Birds are specialized for a certain set of circumstances, and they've exploited that admirably (though not consciously). But they did not evolve to manipulate things with hands, as we did, and so they have no good aptitude for that kind of thing, although some of them try as best they can with what they do have, bless their little beaky schnozzes. So where was the impetus for the aeons to evolve a large brain and space travel if they had everything they needed in their own world, just as birds do in ours? Yes, I know that's precisely what we did, but we're far less specialized than birds are and far less tightly constrained by our evolution than they. But birds do not consciously navigate their way around the planet. They do not set out aboard ships and boats as sea-faring humans have done since they could. They do not plan and undertake exploratory trips for the hell of it. So why would organisms which have evolved for flight on a given planet be any better at navigation in space than humans or any other advanced species? To suggest that they are makes no sense.

The mammals took some seventy million years of evolution to produce humans, the only advanced intelligence ever to create a civilization (on this planet) as we have done. The dinosaurs had a quarter billion years and all they produced was those smart birds at the very end of it, so while not wanting to sound arrogant or prideful of what we are or where we came from, I don’t buy this uninventive and biologically insupportable sci-fi trope of simply taking a non-mammalian Earth species and pretending it’s a smart alien species without putting any thought whatsoever into how it came to be what it is. As if that wasn't bad enough alone, the specific aeon on this space-craft is racist (species-ist? class-ist?) enough to refer to Deviana as a "monkey". That kind of reference has definitely been wa-ay overused in fiction. OTOH, maybe it tells us something important about the kind of person Basil is!

About one third the way in, I decided that the more I read about Deviana the less I like her, not least for the fact that she's a psychotic killer barely keeping her blood-lust under wraps. And she's supposed to be some sort of hero to me? After a scene where she gets so prideful about her armor and skills that it’s almost sickening (especially when narrated in the first person, which is why I detest first person PoV) she then proceeds to get drunk as a skunk and almost literally throw herself at the ship's cook, the very one who's deliberately getting her drunk in the first place. I cannot credit either of these people with anything worthy.

The cook is not someone I would trust when he almost literally pours a bottle of whisky down Deviana's throat for no apparent reason other than to get her falling-down drunk. He doesn't take advantage of her even though she begs him too, but I didn't trust this guy at all (and amazingly, it turned out I was right not to do so!). The fact that Deviana is pretty much lying down with her legs open for him (figuratively speaking) at this point does nothing for me, but it goes a long way towards authenticating the disparaging slur which her security partner, Cotter, threw at her when they first met.

Deviana seems to me to be completely out of character in drinking so much that it’s physically harmful on the one hand, and then on the other to paradoxically pride herself in her training, her fitness, and her skills. She does hail from a planet called Paradox, and she's the kind of idiot who would use armor piercing ammunition and fire it from a gun on the bridge of a spaceship, so…. But these two Devianas do not connect at all for me. I would not trust her, nor would I want anything to do with a security guard with anger management issues, who's a "functional" alcoholic, and looking at serious health problems coming her way in the not-too-distant future, if she doesn’t have any already. That scene was neither cute nor appealing to me. It’s not smart. It’s not funny. It’s not attractive. It's not even interesting. And it sure as hell isn't remotely romantic!

Deviana knows nothing about this guy, yet she's desperate to get him into bed, and she's not even ovulating! I know this because she never does; apparently women a thousand years from now can get that turned off, since it's never mentioned in the entire novel...about a women...who's on-board a spaceship with several other women. That aside, Deviana's behavior merely makes her very shallow in my eyes, but what I really don’t get here is why a female author would create a leading character who is modeled so embarrassingly closely on the worst stereotypical aspects of a man? Such a character has nothing to offer me. If I wanted to read about a macho man I wouldn’t be reading this! Not that I find novels about macho men any more appealing than those about women who are way too much andro and not enough gynous.

Anyone who has followed this blog will know I have no problem with tough, feisty, hard-playing female characters, but those characters were treated respectfully by their authors, so I guess my real problem here is what is motivating Rachel to treat her best bet so shabbily - and for such poor reasons! It’s not like Deviana is an older woman, with a sad back-story (or a bad sack story - it’s not like she went through an awful relationship - not that we’ve been told anyway).

It’s not like she has some tragedy in her past which might explain her behavior now. On the contrary, she has a great guy who would do anything for her and she won't give him the time of lay unless it's on her own terms. She just uses him, so there is no love triangle there (although there is a love triangle - more anon!) But I just don't get making Deviana extra- super- ultra-tough, and then playing her like the most pathetic YA love-lorn teen imaginable in the so-called romance department. These two traits are painted so incompatibly that the jagged mis-join is like a bas-relief on every page.

It's like Rachel simply set out to make her main character in this series a man in the body of a woman, and that doesn’t work for me at all. I read novels about female characters because I'm interested in female characters, especially ones who are making their mark in their world one way or another. If I wanted to read about a transsexual, I’d get a novel about a transsexual! If I wanted to read about a man thinly disguised as a woman, I'd, er read this, I guess! But the truth is that I started this novel because I wanted to read about a woman, not about a woman who evidently wishes that she were the worst example of obnoxious male behavior she can be!

She has too many oddball quirks, too (aside from her berserker penchant) to be likable. She claims she buys only the best, but then panics when she sees someone drop her weapons onto a soft surface in case they get damaged! Huh? The weapons aren't tough after all? In another scene, she's seriously considering whether her best move is to run away - and no, she's not threatened or under fire at the time, she's merely behaving like a juvenile. I can't match that up with her vaunted skill and bravery as a soldier, but it does match her airhead teen behavior with Ruprecht. Maybe she's not a human, but a spineless lelgis?

But my biggest problem with Deviana, I think, after thinking some thoughtful thoughts, is that we never actually meet her. She's buried underneath her armor, she's hidden behind her boys with toys obsession-with/addiction-to weapons technology. She's shamed by this limp portrayal of her juvenile obsession with Ruprecht, and this means we never really find out anything about her at all. We get only the superficial, no depth allowed. That's really sad, because it means that once again, I'm finding supporting characters (in this case, Nova and Ren) far more interesting than the main one!

While we're on the topic of shallow, I notice that Fortune's pawn is yet another space opera without any robots. The problem of course, when robots are added to the recipe, is that writers seem to think that they can come only in three varieties: angst-ridden AIs, smart-ass side-kicks, or bloodless villains. Seriously? Can we not just have them as a part of life and be done with it? They’re part of life now; why would that change to the point where they’re effectively non-existent a millennium from now?

Having said that, I immediately saw that I was wrong about the robots! There are two robots here, and one of them is called Deviana Morris. I mean what else would she be, cocooned as she is in her automatic suit, which works even without her conscious control? So I have to ask why we would admire any of her skills as a soldier when her AI suit and her automated weapons really do all the work? Which brings me back to the love triangle. Deviana's love triangle is between her, Rupert the cook, and her armor and weapons. I hope the armor/weapons wins, because Ruprecht is even more sickening than they are.

Having said all that, and despite all that, the story still intrigued me and I finished it if only because I was curious to see what this bizarre recipe produced when it was cooked at 3 degrees Kelvin for a month and came out of the oven with frost subliming from it, but Rachel is making it much harder for me to like this novel than ever she ought! At one point, for example, she has Deviana loaning a weapon to the ship's cook when they're under attack from those space-faring ravenous predatory lizards (can you say 'Aliens'?!), and she expects him to break an arm using it, but doesn't warn him. He doesn't break an arm, so then she's all intrigued by the fact that he's not a complete dumb-ass and knows how to hold his arm so it's neither rigid nor lax and thereby protect himself! I have a hint for Deviana: look up Aikido some time when you're not strutting, preening, brooding, or nesting!

Deviana's weapons are problematical, too, as long as we’re talking advanced technology. She has a light saber of all things (and there's 'the force', but it's called 'plasmex' here)! This macho gun I mentioned, which she calls Sasha, supposedly has a kick like a mule. Other than pure machismo, why? I don’t mind having any given thing in a story if there's some rationale behind it, but to stuff things into the novel like it's an Xmas stocking for a spoiled, rich kid and offer nothing to support the inclusion is not going to make me a fan, especially when the corollary to this crude weapon design is the open admission that humans are technologically just as backward and limited a thousand years from now, as they are here and now!

So let's talk about time-travel, and space-time, and hyperspace jumps, because this is where the novel got more interesting for me (but unfortunately, it was never pursued!). Rachel made mention of the fact - and intriguingly it was just a mention - that a computer figures out the jump-math because otherwise, the ship might come out of hyperspace in the wrong place, or at the wrong time.... She also mentions that time can flow only forwards, which isn't actually true - not according to the laws of physics, but I'm thinking, why hasn't anyone is the world of this novel taken advantage of this? Why do they have to arrive at a "realistic" time? And why 7 hours in "hyperspace"? This is yet more info which is dumped, then neither pursued nor explained.

So when they deliver a load of fish to a pissant planet which seems to have more than its fair share of what Rachel calls earthquakes, but which are not on Earth, so are actually Mycantquakes, things started getting weird, I really perked up for the first time since I started reading this novel. Now why they're delivering dead fish at massive expense to an impoverished planet which cannot fail to have its own fish galore, for as wet as it is, is a question which has absolutely no sensible answer whatsoever. If they were delivering live fish for stocking the local waters, it would have potentially made a lot more sense, but they're not.

It's on their arrival here that they start noticing things going wrong with clocks, including Deviana's suit clock, which never goes wrong. After the captain goes off and then fails to return as arranged, Deviana takes off after him and runs into an attack from something both very powerful, and invisible to her suit's sensors! Now I was getting the story I'd been hoping for from the start, and I was hoping it would be worth the extraordinarily long wait! But it wasn't, because we got cheated out of any explanations for anything!

After battling the invisible giant shrimp in the forest clearing (which may or may not be tied in with the jellyfish lelgis), Deviana discovers that the electronic interference fried her video recording. She has back-up, but first let me ask you to recall that this is a thousand years into the future, and even here in lowly 2013 we can already record gigabytes of data onto a tiny USB drive; then consider that Rachel tells us the chip is too small to record voice data even though it has video. Ahem! But Deviana does learn of some weird stuff which took place whilst she was unconscious, and this is where the story started catching my interest - and where I stop putting out any more spoilers.

I think I've wa-ay overdone it for this novel. I don't usually go into so much detail about the Net Galley ebooks I get because I don't want to rob the writer of their story, but I haven't done such a deep look into a novel since I blogged David Weber's On Basilisk Station so I'm about due for another one. I may as well treat Rachel to it since she has shown a personal interest in my blog! (and how did she know I was blogging her novel?! Hmm!). Plus she has the sequel coming out soon, so it's not like this is a brand new novel.

I was just really disappointed that it took me reading some fifty percent of this novel before it turned up something that I really liked. Rachel is lucky I've been so tolerant of her peccadilloes, because normally I wouldn't get this far into a novel where I'd found so much to bitch about! She did have the courtesy to visit the blog, and I did say I would have to be nice - and I have tried! The rest of this review will be more vague and general with no more detailed peaks, so be warned!

It was encouraging in chapter eleven to learn that Rachel, unlike all-too-many sci-fi writers, is smart enough to know that a virus which has evolved to prey upon certain species on one planet is unlikely to be a threat to organisms from an entirely different planet, but let's not forget that biochemistry is still chemistry and that chemistry is universal, so I wouldn't flatly rule it out, as Rachel does. But kudos to her there. Having said that, let me put out a general alert to writers that the phrase is "another think coming" not "another thing coming" when we're writing sentences like: "if that's what [person X] thinks, then they have..."!

And what's with John Benton questioning Deviana and using five different pet phrases for her: 'dear', 'darling', 'Deviana', 'girl', and 'Miss Morris' all in the space of a handful of pages? This completely took my mind away from the exchange they were having to focus it entirely on how bad the dialog was! If Rachel was aiming to make me dislike Benton from his rambling speeches, she failed, as indeed she did if she were trying to emulate a Bond villain. I found I liked and trusted Benton far more than ever I've been able to like or trust Ruprecht or the murderous captain. I doubt that's what Rachel intended I should feel. Benton was certainly more honest with her than either of the other two guys have been, yet Dumb Devi spurns his offer and remains loyal to a captain who has repeatedly put her at risk, kept her in the dark about potential threats, and would have had her killed if he'd had his way. She's a mercenary for god's sakes, but instead of behaving like one, she behaves like an idiot.

I am now done with this, and having read every page (except the sickening pages where Ruprecht and Deviana suck (face) which I skipped happily, I have to report that I'm really disappointed. It turns out that Fortune's Pawn is really nothing more than a ~370 page prologue for an oncoming series, and as you know if you read this blog, I detest prologues. Actually if truth be told, I'm more saddened than disappointed, because this novel had some good and engaging ideas at its core, but the execution of those ideas was, well the death of them, as executions typically are!

One of the biggest problems is that quite literally nothing is resolved in this story (except that we get rid of the sad YA trope romance between Deviana and Ruprecht, but you and I know perfectly well that that is only temporary, and it's unfortunately only going to come roaring back in volume two. I will not come roaring back for volume two, because I have no intention of pursuing this series in search of answers, at least some of which we should have been given in volume one! I have no interest in reading any more about a character I neither like nor respect.

Etiquette & Espionage by Gail Carriger

Title: Etiquette & Espionage
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Hachette
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 for this review.

I read this novel some time ago and was quite thrilled with the opportunity to read it in ebook form. The ebook version (epub format) for Adobe Digital Editions was beautifully laid out and eminently readable, which was a pleasant experience, and it's only some 200 pages, so it's a fast read.

This novel is the first in a series:

Etiquette & Espionage
Curtsies & Conspiracies
Waistcoats & Weaponry
Manners & Mutiny

Fourteen year old Sophronia is sent to a finishing school, where finishing means exactly that: finishing off people, as in assassination! It's also a school for spies. I'm completely in love with Gail Carriger's sense of humor, if not Carriger herself (And I reserve judgment there!). How can you argue with a line like: "Who wouldn't want an exploding wicker chicken?"?!

The author spent some time in Britain, where this novel is set, and it shows very commendably. She has an amazing eye for the absurd, for the quirks of British life, and for the square peg in a round hole kind of person which Sophronia inescapably is. This novel is Harry Potter on steroids, but minus the too-cute and the magic, that being replaced with a liberal helping of steam-punk and intrigue, along with a sneaky and hilarious sense of humor.

In leading her main character on a merry dance in pursuit of her objective, the author goes through a humbling (for other writers like me!) repertoire of exquisitely-drawn characters, all of whom have quirks and foibles to both hate and love. The adventure begins with Sophronia's escapades at home, which lead directly to her being consigned (some might say exiled) to a finishing school suited to her disposition and talents.

I adore the playfulness of these stories, and the names which the author invents for her characters are exquisite: Bumbersnoot, Lord Dingleproops, Madame Spetunia, Sophronia Angelina Temminick, Dimity Ann Plumleigh-Teignmott, Pillover, Preshea, Bunson's, Duke Hematol, Mrs Barnaclegoose, Frowbritcher. They alone are worth reading the novel for,but the writing is exquisite, the plotting very well done, and the execution remarkable.

After saving herself, the girl who is to become her best friend, her best friend-to-be's younger brother (who is going to a different school to train as an evil genius) and the schoolmate who is in disguise as an older woman and who is highly suspicious, from flywaymen, life at school seems like it will be a let-down for Soph, but she discovers that an associate of the school, who helps them get aboard, is a werewolf, and one of their teachers is a vampire. Oh, and the topics at school are entirely to do with spying. Indeed, when Soph is called to the office after being reported climbing around on the exterior of the airship during one of her snooping forays, she isn't punished at all; she's merely dressed-down for allowing herself to be seen!

So Sophronia has to find her way in this finishing school to which she did not expect to go, and to which she was dispatched with unladylike speed, and find it she certainly does, and quite literally, too. The school is aboard a gigantic airship, which is subject to raids by flywaymen (sky pirates who are seeking something very specific from the school, and Soph is determined to discover what it is they're after).

During one of the sky pirate assaults, Soph actually ends up accidentally acquiring a brass steam dog from the pirates, which she promptly names Bumbersnoot, illicitly secreting him in her room, and feeding him coal! This is much to the disgust of her worst enemy (with whom she's forced to room along with her now best friend Dimity, a rather shy, retiring sort (but who's game for anything, it turns out), and a lanky Scots lass who also joins her troublesome trio. Along with aid from a precocious and amusing child of one of the teachers, and a likely lad from the engine room, as well as some assistance from Dimity's brother, Soph begins making herself very much at home - and very much a handful - on the airship.

In the end she saves the day of course, and I adored this novel. I was immediately, and very much looking forward to the sequel, Curtsies & Conspiracies which I also reviewed favorably. Carriger also has a series set twenty five years after this time period called "The Parasol Protectorate" which, rest assured, I shall be tracking down post-haste.

Journey to Rainbow Island by Christie Hsiao

Title: Journey to Rainbow Island
Author: Christie Hsiao
Publisher: Benbella Books Inc
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 had the weirdest feeling when I started this that this novel wasn't written for a lone reader, but for someone to read to children. I don't know if Hsaio intended that, but that's how it felt to me, which wouldn't have been so bad if the writing wasn't so flowery that it's actually hard to read (and I don't mean technically hard, either). There's far too much hyperbole, and too many redundant phrases like "obsidian black". While I think I see what she intended by that, it seemed about as meaningful to me as saying "dark black". Later, she uses the awful phrase, "jaundiced shade of pale yellow" which is so redundant as to be absurd. Hsaio does present to me as if she has some good street cred and she seems to have her head screwed on right, so I wanted to like this, but I just could not like it no matter how hard I tried.

I'm a sucker for Asians and their mythology, but I'm definitely not the intended age range for this novel (which is 8 - 12 years old), but I do have two sons within that age range, and I can assure you that they would not touch a novel like this with a ten-foot pole. And rest assured that if I had a daughter, she would not like it either because it's simply not an engaging story, nor is it intelligently written. The story should appeal to the My Little Pony crowd, but if that's too immature for you or your kids, you won't like this novel at all. I do however, have a suggestion as to how that could be fixed at the end of this review.

Much as I wanted to enjoy this, Hsaio seemed determined to irritate me with every fresh chapter. She's yet another of these shamefully ignorant writers I've encountered this year who think the upper arm muscles (biceps and triceps) come in a singular form! Indeed she refers with an authoritative tone to the upper tricep! Honestly? A simple spell-checker would have caught this gaff. I may not deserve better than this, but my sons do, as do others of their age group. I decided yesterday to give this novel a stay of execution for one more day, because life is too short, and novels too plentiful to put up with anything as sub-standard as this story insisted upon showing itself to be, but even that was a day too many, I'm sorry to say.

Yu-ning, the female protagonist, is a Darq Render recognizable by the crescent-shaped birthmark on the inside of the upper left arm, yet the brilliant magician Metatron failed to see the significance of this! He failed to protect the community from the rogue Obsidigon (evil dragon), and he's unable to cure himself, let alone others, which is why they inexplicably have a hospital in the reputedly perfect community in which Yu-ning lives. It’s really too tiresome to continue to discover in how many of these fantasy stories we find the magician/wizard/witch is so useless as to be, well, useless, and so it's all on a poor kid to save everyone! But there's neither rationale nor justification to support the proposition that this kid is so special. Anyone can fire the arrows into the Obsidigon and "render" it into butterflies! This takes no special person or great skill.

The biggest problem with this story which is supposed to be about love and understanding is that in order to save everyone, Yu-ning has to render the dark! She has to be a warrior to fight and slay (not kill, mind you but slay!) the dragons. Where is the love there? That magician can’t render the dragons into butterflies by using magic? And what’s up with these beings of light living in dark caves? That just registered as truly odd with me, as indeed did their eating of eggs for breakfast when they supposedly love and respect animals so much that Yu-ning at one point grows angry with a hunter for killing them! What's that about taking the plank from your own eye, Yu-ning? I guess that proverb didn't travel very far in an easterly direction.

These people seem to have no problem with killing (no, that's cruel, I meant rendering....) when it suits them. The real irony of this exchange with the hunter is that without the knowledge and skill of such people, Yu-ning would never have a hunting weapon (her bow) to go after the Obsidigons to begin with! Indeed, at one point, a giant owl named Suparna, declares proudly "…in order for the light to shine...we must rend - or tear - the light from the dark." Why the violent language?

Yu-ning fixes the water wheel in the tower at the center of the Grey City (the population of which is treated in a condescending, almost racist fashion) and claims she did it with faith when she did no such thing. It was simple hydraulic engineering which fixed the lift mechanism's lack of water (for turning the wheel). Faith had nothing to do with it - unless it was faith in her hydraulic engineering skills! Anyone with modicum of grey matter could have figured out why the wheel wasn’t turning, traced the problem to the blockage, and unblocked it. And faith isn't going to save them if the ropes on the poorly-maintained lift are rotten! Simple proclamations of faith will not change Grey City, especially when those proclamations are dishonest. Yu-ning would have "rendered" the city a greater service if she had explained to them what the problem was and shown them how to fix it rather than fixing it and then essentially lying that "faith did it"! Maybe 'Faith' is Yu-ning's English name?

There are unintentional moments of hilarity: Yu-ning's arms started to tire from the power of the light? Light has no mass, so how is it tiring, exactly? If you want to enlighten children, don't keep them in the dark about light! Explain the science without vague allusions and obfuscations regarding faith and inner light - especially when you really don't understand light! This level of hilarity was somewhat unleavened with unexplained events such as Julian's claim that Yu-ning cured him? Of what? Hunger? She gave him an apple and that's it!

I expected a lot more from this novel and was sorry that such a promising premise failed to deliver on all levels but art. The illustrations were charming, and quite well done, but they were sadly let down by the writing. Perhaps this volume should have come out as a graphic novel? I rated it warty.

External Forces by Deborah Rix

Title: External Forces
Author: Deborah Rix
Publisher: Dime Store 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 has a prologue - really short, but which I automatically skipped. Prologues are a waste of time and effort. If it’s worth telling, it’s worth putting in chapter one, front and center. Chapter one starts out badly by immediately telling us this is three weeks earlier, May, 2125, but it’s told in first person present! Chapter three brings us to the present - the novel's present, still in first person present PoV. Confused yet? Why we didn’t simply start it without the immediate flashback is as mysterious as it is annoying. First person PoV's are becoming increasingly anathema to me, and this novel is exemplary in offering a plethora of reasons why.

Finally, after all the ambling preamble we get to the story: now it’s June 2125, and Jess Grant is entering the military because she doesn’t want to be classed as a deviant and the military evidently gets a hall pass for this. Shades of Divergent anyone? (No, my comparing a novel to Divergent is most definitely not a compliment!) Deviance is evidently a really bad thing in a fundamentalist-future genetically-purified USA, where you can be killed for it, by the authorities, with no questions asked.

How we got to this sorry state of affairs isn’t really explained very well (except by passing reference to a comet strike in the Arabian sea and civil unrest), but if it's religion, it doesn't really need a rationalization, does it? It looks like Rix went the same way I did in Godstruck!, but starting from that same kind of premise, took off in a different direction, with a lot more technology, so I was initially quite curious to see what she did with it. That curiosity was soon dissatisfied.

To begin with, in a novel about an elite special forces unit, I could have done without the trope YA romance which frankly made me sick to my stomach. The advice she gets from her new best friend about shooting a pistol with your middle finger and using your forefinger to point, for example, seemed really stupid to me, not to say, er, pointless! But niggles aside, I confess I did start out liking this character and this idea. Unfortunately, Rix seemed to be determined to sicken me with her character's childish behavior and with the sadly puerile view of special forces to which she seems beholden.

I know this is set in the future, and it's fiction, and things have changed, but have military requirements mutated so drastically? Unless standards have dropped precipitously over the century between now and then, the training is nowhere near adequate or authentic. There's no way someone like Grant would ever have got in. The atmosphere in the barracks is completely juvenile and unrealistic. There is no way stupid childish stunts like throwing knives at people up against dartboards would ever be tolerated in an elite military unit: the soldiers have too much respect for the uniform and for their fellow soldiers. This is frankly an insult to special forces.

Again, unless IQs have dropped in a century (and given the eugenic breeding programs, perhaps they have) the behavior and training just didn't cut it. I didn't buy at all the "sim" units. They were completely inadequate and offered nowhere near realistic training for these poor soldiers who are doubtlessly going to die, and soon, as inadequately prepped as they are. It didn't help that we learn that Grant is a death-squad soldier in a Nazi regime - and she joined up knowingly. I'm supposed to like this teenager, who is inadequate as a soldier and, as if that's not bad enough in and of itself, who goes all wilt-and-vaporish over her sergeant Every. Single. Time. She. Sees. Him. Without. Fail and without a shred of self-possession, self-respect, or decency? I'm sorry but I was hoping for a much better main character than I got. It reminded me of that old Schwarzenegger movie Jingle All the Way where Langston finally gets his beautiful Turbo-Man figure from the santas for Jamie, only to open it and find it falls apart, and doesn't even speak the right language! That's this novel all over.

The sergeant's behavior towards Grant is absolutely no better, and a disgrace to his uniform. And completely out of left field. What has Grant done to even remotely appeal to the sergeant? Nothing! Nothing at all. And what's with her constantly referring to him as sergeant, anyway? Special forces don't identify rank: it gives too much information to their potential enemies. I kept telling myself that Rix had better have some really, really, and I mean really good stuff to tell me if I was going to let her get away with this kind of story-telling and not call her on it. And she didn't. I had no choice but to quit reading this and call her on it because, far from getting better and more engrossing, it got worse, and worse. Very soon - too soon, in fact - I couldn't stand it any more.

I really wanted to like this one, and I looked forward to reading it; I felt I had a lot of common ground with Rix's PoV in this story since I felt that the basic premise has so much in common with Godstruck!, but life is too short to waste on something which isn't pleasing you, and she left me no choice but to rate it warty. Here's a tip: I'd much rather read about Matt's second-in-command than about Jess Grant. There's no contest. She sounded far more mature, capable, and interesting. Indeed, one real fear I had was that she would be killed off and Jess would replace her as Sergeant Matt's second! That really would have killed me, so perhaps it's best that I didn't finish this one. But who knows, Rix is full of good ideas; maybe next time she'll execute them without executing them. One can only hope. We never run out of a need for fresh and original voices.

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

Title: The School for Good and Evil
Author: Soman Chainani
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WORTHY!

So after all the ebook authors who have dot com websites, now I have a hardback author who has a dot net! I loved that! So I've never heard of this guy before, and I found this book purely by accident at the library, on the "New" shelf. This, of course, merely means that the novel could have been published any time in the last four freaking years (they also have Sapphire Blue on that shelf! It doesn't mean that the novel is new: just that it's new to this library!

This is one of the most charmingly-written books I've read in a long time, and it starts out perfectly. The novel is about the fortunes and misfortunes of Agatha and Sophie, two extremely disparate friends who live in the extraordinarily isolated village of Gavaldon, surrounded by an impenetrable forest - well, it’s penetrable, but everyone who has gone in there trying to find a way through it has inevitably ended-up right back at Gavaldon - assuming they made it back at all.

Life in Gavaldon would seem idyllic, but there is a shadow over it. Every four years the 'schoolmaster' arrives in the night, and takes two children who miraculously later reappear, but not as children in the village: as characters in a fairytale which anonymously arrives on the door-step of the local bookseller at random times. Now you see what I meant about it being idyllic: it has a book shop and no distractions from reading the books!

Talking of shadows, Sophie has her own: she's unhappy because she just knows she's a good and real princess who deserves much more than she can expect in this little village. Indeed, her friendship with Agatha arose only because she wanted to do a good deed, any good deed, and chose Agatha as her victim. But it became much more than that. Agatha, because of her rough appearance, is shunned by pretty-much everyone except Sophie. The entire village thinks she's a witch. Sophie's dad barricades his daughter into her room on the night the schoolmaster is expected, but she pries her way out because she wants to be taken into the fairy tale world to become a princess. Agatha doesn’t believe in this schoolmaster crap until she sees a gnarled shadow that night, heading for Sophie's house. This shadow belongs to one of the most reticent, but important characters in the whole novel.

She races after it to rescue her friend, but both are caught up and bustled off to The School for Good and Evil. Unfortunately, from both their perspectives, there seems to be a mix-up: Sophie finds herself deposited into the evil side of the school, and Agatha into the good side. They both protest vehemently, but to no avail. When they finally kick and fuss, and run and side-step, and manage to meet on the bridge over the lake (good side) / moat (bad side) which divides the two branches of the school, there's an impassable barrier which prevents Agatha from saving Sophie, or Sophie from escaping to the side she knows must be right for her. Even when by subterfuge they manage to switch sides, they suddenly find themselves magically back on their original side again. It seems there is no escape. But there is.

Everyone can plainly see that both of them are (it would seem) quite evidently out of place, but no one seems either willing or able to do anything about it, and as if that wasn't bad enough, when Sophie and Agatha finally do meet, at the welcome assembly, and the princes come prancing in, it’s Agatha, and not Sophie, who (accidentally, to boot) catches the rose which Prince Tedros (son of King Arthur) tosses! This is, of course, before she decks him and gives him a black eye when they later meet, and she sets fire to an entire school tower! Tedros is a complete loser who deserves everything he gets, and is very much the paragon of Disney animation.

There is an apparently all-important question which the schoolmaster asks the two girls to resolve in order to be free: "What's the one thing evil can never have…and the one thing good can never do without?", and the answer is rather trite and disappointing, but it's resolved in a very unexpected manner. The manner in which it's answered is perfect, and I confess I was seriously hoping it would go this way, but in all honesty doubted that Chainani would have the guts and vision to go there. He did, and I love him for it!. Actually, you'd know the answer if only you’d been foresighted enough to buy my book Poem y Granite and read the poem on page 140! Hah!

So the last thing you need to expect from this novel is the expected, and I can say that with a certainty because I've finished reading this now, and my opinion is unchanged from what it began as: this novel is simply one of the best I've ever read. I've looked at some adverse criticism of the novel to see if I missed something other critics might have spotted, and I really didn't. It's anyone's choice, of course, whether they like a novel or not, but I have to say that a lot of those who are low-rating this novel do show seriously skewed views of what it was, what it was about, and what it tried to do. One silly criticism was that the characters were shallow and black and white. I disagree with that, because the two main protagonists were about as nuanced, complex, and conflicted and you can get, but even if that were not so, this is a novel about fairy-tale characters! For goodness sakes, since when have they had any depth?

How foolish is it to whine about how the characters are playing to type when it's a fairy-tale, and the characters are in a school which has the express purpose of training them to play to the very types which the critics complain about? Honestly? Some of the critics evidently haven't even read the novel because they're banging on about how the evil witch makes all the princes disappear (which would have been a very cool ending) but that's simply not what happened. Worse than this, some are also hypocrites, complaining that the characters are shallow and then describing the two main characters as the "beautiful" princess and the "ugly" witch! Seriously?

The whiny critics are simply wrong, so there! This novel is awesome and I fully and unreservedly recommend it.

Compliments of a Friend by Susan Isaacs

Title: Compliments of a Friend
Author: Susan Isaacs
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

I really had a bit of a time trying to decide how to rate this. It was not that interesting to me, but it was short (and there was no prologue! Yippee!). Unfortunately, it was in the first person, which is almost never a good thing in my book. What made me want to rate it worthy was that it featured an older woman doing the detecting. It's about time, when we're undergoing a flood of young and sassy female detectives, that someone swam upstream. Kudos to Isaacs for that.

This novel wasn't smart mouthed - although Isaacs isn't afraid to to go potty mouth when called for. I appreciated the honesty, so kudos again. What really put me off was all the snobbish brand-name-dropping. I detest novels which do that because it keeps destroying my suspension of disbelief. It's especially obnoxious when the writer tries to dismiss the name-dropping by pretending it doesn't matter, like even they are embarrassed by how pretentious they are. And on this topic, why isn't Isaacs embarrassed by the price she's asking for a 69-page ebook?

The detective part of the story wasn't that interesting to me either - there was nothing brilliant or dramatic about it. So despite my initially wanting to find this short-story 'worthy' because of the older woman PoV, it was because she offered me nothing else to rave about that she left me no choice but to rate it warty.

A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Ashes
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.

Wow! Nine ebook reviews in three weeks was the challenge and I just met it! Now I see one of Net Galley's patented 'three week deadline' notices has just popped up on this one, as well! Never again will I offer to read so many ebooks in so short a time! Fortunately some of those nine (three or four) were real clunkers, so I didn't have to read them all the way through before I knew how to rate them! The rest were acceptable enough that reading them didn't seem like a slog at all.

Anyway, this is the final review in my foray into the first three of Holloway's niece of Sherlock Holmes novels! And yes, I promise you it is the final review I shall do of any of her novels in this series. I have absolutely no desire to read any more. A Study in Ashes is a truly fitting name for a conclusion to this series since it all came to ashes in the end. I reviewed A Study in Silks at the beginning of October, and A Study in Darkness towards the end of that month. The first of these two I liked, the second I thought was awful. The third went downhill from there.

The problem with this series is that it's fundamentally fraudulent: I mean, why even mention Sherlock Holmes in your novel and book blurb, let alone boast a main character who's his niece, and then betray every single thing for which Holmes stood by rendering his supposed Protégé into a complete Mary Clueless, who actually does near to zero investigating? Why invest in a girl who has shown herself to be completely undisciplined, a non-thinker, slow, witless, shiftless, thoughtless, and boring? She's much better qualified to pursue what she does best, and incessantly: bemoaning her fate, and pining for Nick-ed the thief, aka worthless piece of trash, and when she's not suffering the wilts and the vapors over him, pining for Toby-ass the worthless piece of trash. I can't respect a character like that, much less actually root for her, or want to read about her. The idea for this series was really cool, but it was sorrowfully wasted in execution (execution is what these stories begged for!). The pseudo steam-punk was a nice touch, but it never really got off the ground in any useful sense except for sensationalism. I could have done happily without the Deva's, notwithstanding how amusing Bird and Mouse were, but even they would have been tolerable had the detective we were implicitly promised actually showed up for work. She never did.

I tried to get into this particular volume three or four times, but after wading through the first half-dozen or so chapters and skimming some of the others, I could find nothing in it to even generate my interest, let alone sustain it! The most interesting character, Imogen, was completely AWOL in the portions that I read. Evelina, supposedly the main character, did nothing but show herself to be clueless, impotent, incompetent, and morbidly self-centered. She once had a job (in volume two) where she could learn everything she wanted, but she had evidently passed that up (for whatever reason) by volume three, to go to a school where all she's allowed to learn (in that era) are 'proper lady's' topics. She's apparently content with this since she resists being thrown out of the college.

Toby-ass proves himself to be an even bigger shit in this novel than he achieved in either of the previous two, which takes some believing: now he has a wife and a son neither of whom he gives a damn about. I can see some logic to his having problems with a wife who was forced upon him, but I cannot countenance his treatment of her. She was a good, fun, and interesting person, and his behavior towards her is not only ungentlemanly, it's thoroughly unconscionable in someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys. Why would I like a jerk such as him, or be interested in what he wants does, thinks, or feels? Alice, his wife, is nowhere in sight in this novel either (not in the portion I read), which is a shame, because she was my second favorite character after Imogen.

But it's not his treatment of her which completely writes him off, since I fully expect this numb-nuts to behave badly towards women; no, the killer is his treatment of his son. That's completely unacceptable to me, and for Evelina to harbor feelings for this jerk tells me a lot about her - a lot of unpleasant things, that is. I have no interest in learning any more about any of these privileged losers, so I said, "The hell with this series!" Life is too short to waste it on pointless, uninteresting, and even downright irritating prose. I'm glad to be done with this un-nourishing stubble and moving to graze on greener pastures.

Rebels Divided by Lance Erlick

Title: Rebels Divided
Author: Lance Erlick
Publisher: Finlee Augare 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.

The writing technique seemed a bit odd to me in this novel; it feels like it's a first novel, which it apparently isn't, but the oddities go beyond that to being downright confusing at points, such as at the top of page 20 where Erlick includes a brief first person thought, but fails to italicize it to delineate it as such. This novel contains no warning which would suggest that it's a draft galley proof or anything like that and really, in this day and age, there would seem to be neither need nor excuse for such anachronisms. The copy put out there for net "galley" reading really ought to be in first class shape. There is no excuse for it to be less than that.

This is yet another novel which has a "table of contents" which lists only the chapter numbers - no page number, no chapter title, nothing but a list of chapters. I still do not see the point in that! But at least the author is smart enough not to have a prologue! This novel tells the story of a war in North America which appears broadly speaking, to be between men and women. The "rebels" seem to be all men (at least in the first half of this novel, which is all I read): mountain men living in the Appalachians who carry shotguns and skulk around in the undergrowth taking ineffectual potshots at the enemy). The enemy is an army of "mechs" which are women encased in a titanium alloy shell, which of course has an inevitable weak spot. Seriously? When George, who inexplicably goes by Geo (like Neo, maybe?!), and his father kill one of the mechs, Geo is somehow left a sitting duck, but the other mech simply stares at him instead of shooting, so he escapes.

It turns out that the other mech is Geo's "sister" Annabelle, who is apparently tired of killing, and she's not very good at it anyway, because it isn't long before she's captured and held while her captors try to force her into a marriage. This made zero sense at all to me. Are these women free or not? Isn't that why they're fighting? So what’s with the arranged marriages? It made zero sense that Annabelle would not kill Geo when she had the chance given that he had just slaughtered her closest friend. The fact that she's his "sister" holds no water because they don't even know each other in any meaningful sense, and they're not related.

The story seems very much to be a Xerox® of the American civil war, with the rural "south" fighting the industrialized "north", and with families split and pitted against one another, but along gender lines rather than political or slave-ownership affiliation. It reminds me of an idea I had for a gender war story, but mine was nothing like this one. The story then took off swinging like a pendulum, back and forth between Geo and Annabelle until the two of them finally hook up together, both of them on the run. Since Annabelle's adopted, it seems pretty obvious which way things will go from here on out: no surprises, nothing unexpected there.

My problem with this story, at just before the half-way point, was that I had no vested interest in it or in any of the characters. I could not relate to either Geo or Annabelle, and I had no feelings about them one way or the other. They seemed really bland and rather juvenile, and offered me nothing to root for. Why would I care about either of them or what happens to them? I can’t answer that question, and that is exactly the problem! I need something more than this if I'm to really get interested in a novel. I need to see a reason to root for a character, or I need to actually like the character or at least find them engaging, or interesting. There was none of that here. I need to be interested in their world and what's going on. I need to want to find out what happens next, and I just didn't care what happened next here! Feeling none of the above is a really bad position to be in when you're pretty-much half-way through the novel!

One of the worst parts of the story, and this was what finally put the last nail in its coffin, came right around this point, too: at the end of chapter 21 Annabelle pins Geo on the floor to show him how tough she is, and how men are not superior to women. This was bad enough, having her behaving "like a man" to show how superior (or even how 'equal' women are, but then contrast this with what happens in Chapter 23, less than ten pages later, where Geo refuses to share his sleeping bag with her because she won’t answer his appallingly intrusive personal questions, and she starts whining that he's not behaving like a gentleman! I'm sorry, but at that point I decided this novel was simply too juvenile and silly to continue reading. This is novel is WARTY!