How Not to be Popular by Jennifer Ziegler

Title: How Not to be Popular
Author: Jennifer Ziegler
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Rating: WARTY!

Here are seven words of advice to authors like Jennifer Ziegler on how not to be popular: write a novel just like this one.

This is ALAS! (A Long And Snarky review!)

Maggie Dempsey is a cool name for a character! I love it. I don’t love the character, unfortunately. She is vacuous, uninventive, spineless, clueless, and thoroughly un-entertaining and in the end, downright obnoxious. She does have minor grounds for meriting sympathy, but she wipes those out easily. The grounds are that, for no discernible reason, she's dragged around the country by her parents, being forced to start a new school every few months. At her last school in Portland (Oregon, not Maine), she fell for Trevor, who evidently has now found himself a new babe, yet Maggie is not only too dumb to grasp that he has, she's also so devoted to him that's she has the hots for two guys at her new school!

Seriously, is there ever a moment in her life when Maggie has anything else on her mind other than which guy she can sell herself out to next? Is there ever a time when she has something else to do other than contemplating her last guy or her next? Is she really that shallow? Can we never have a novel written by a female writer which doesn’t sell out her gender by openly declaring that her main character cannot exist except as some species of appendage of a trope guy?

Having got that off my chest, and that aside, the basic story started out OK, but it rapidly went to hell in a hand-basket, and that's before it started giving off the occasional anti-Semitic vibe (anti-Semitic in the truly sad clichés it calls into play). It's mildly funny and even somewhat entertaining in parts, with some interesting plot ideas, but that's not enough, in the end, to salvage this story for me. It’s written by a resident (at least a past resident!) of Austin, and it's set in Austin, but the bottom line to that is that this exact story could have been told in any western civilization city and lost nothing for the migration, because it has nothing whatsoever to do with Austin and offers not a shred of the Austin atmosphere!

Determined never to be hurt again after leaving her boyfriend behind in Portland, Maggie decides to deliberately make herself unpopular and uninteresting at her new school, so she doesn’t get involved with anyone and so is preserved from pain when she inevitably leaves. The problem is that she's so utterly clueless about how to get herself organized and live her life that she fails even in being a failure. I suspect there's a trite moral awaiting us at the end of this story, but it's going to be completely wasted because of Maggie's comprehensive bigotry whereby she joins the school "losers" because she thinks the school winners are losers! Way to insult the entire population, Ziegler! A moral is most definitely needed, but I can guarantee sight unseen that that the one we would get at the end of this novel would have nothing to do with what's actually required. I can't verify it because I quit reading when I hit the last forty pages since the novel was emitting such a god-awfully stomach-churning stench by then that I couldn't stand to be around it any longer.

Maggie's is a poor strategy for several reasons, not least of which is that she's robbed herself of any interests or diversions and so is now even more dependent upon her fantasy men than she would have been had she simply become popular. That's how stupid she is. She has some serious issues with logic, which is hardly surprising given the abuses her parents are dumping on her by dragging her around the nation unnecessarily, although of what quality her previous friendships were - given that no one from her past ever emails, writes, or calls her - is a mystery.

Her new friendships would not serve her any better given the unnecessarily large number of utterly absurd tropes with which Ziegler has larded Maggie's new school. The very fact that Maggie openly admits that she would be part of the most obnoxious group at the school were she not half-heartedly trying to go against the grain this time, is quite sufficient a reason to detest the kind of person Maggie is.

Ziegler seems to be seriously technologically challenged: no one in her world seems to use cellphones or email, much less social media. For example, when there is to be an announcement regarding an important new development in the "losers" group charity dance, Ziegler has them putting up bills around town. She's obviously never even heard of Twitter or flash-mobs! Actually I think only twits tweet, so I didn't really care that she's so challenged.

Her parents are at best an enigma, at worst, the poorest examples of parenting ever depicted in a novel. They're simply obnoxiously bad parents. They're anachronistically depicted as hippies, which is so antiquated a concept that it’s almost cute. Unless Maggie's mom and dad are in their sixties, which isn’t at all evident, the hippie thing doesn’t work for me. If they were in their sixties and had a teen daughter in high school, that would be a story worth telling, but that would not be this cheap excuse for a melodrama.

Maggie, like all too many main female characters, I'm grieved to report, isn’t the sharpest key on the keyboard, flailing around, all but falling over herself for two guys one after another at her new school after she swore to avoid them like the plague. This alone tells us how shallow she is. Her consistent failure to come up with intelligent ruses and excuses to avoid them tells us how brain-dead she is. Her lack of any sense of self-worth when the most obnoxious trope hits on her appallingly tells us how vacuous she is. Her having no evident willingness or ability to stand up for a principle (as when she cheats herself out of seeing "the latest James Bond" (Ziegler couldn’t name a James Bond movie?!) by allowing the less obnoxious trope to drag her into a movie he's going to see - a movie in which she has zero interest - tells us how spineless she is. That she accidentally (and then repeatedly) flashes her underwear at the guy she sees this movie with, and somehow thinks this will turn him off shows what a rock-bottom moron she is.

On the interesting side, Maggie accidentally falls into a friendship with Penny, an overweight girl who is entirely uncritical of Maggie (and perhaps the only student in the school who is) as well as completely accepting of the fake quirks Maggie accretes to herself in her determination to be unpopular. Maggie gets to know Penny, but we don't, and she's probably the most interesting character in the entire novel except for the fiery, petite Drip, about whom we learn less than we do Penny. If Ziegler had written the story about just those two it would have been an immeasurably better tale than the sad waste of paper she delivers. In fact, it’s these quirks and out-of-left field ideas that she has which initially kept me reading, despite my detestation (and protestation) of the truly sad male tropes.

In another classic example of how shallow she is, Maggie tries to come up with some extra-curricular activity or other in order to beef up her college application, and hits on joining the "losers" group borne of the bigoted idea that if she associates with losers no one will want her. The truth is that the only real loser in this entire novel is Maggie herself. I'd been leaning towards thinking that this story was fine but for the romance; the problem with that, is that the sad excuse for a romance starts taking over the entire story which is right where the entire story becomes completely uninteresting to me. There are fewer tropes and clichés written on bathroom walls at truck stops than appear as an excuse for romance in YA novels.

Frankly, the romance is so asinine that it's nauseating. This magical guy Jack manages to magically appear in Maggie's life magically. He's magically always there. It’s magical. Even when she joins her extra-curricular club he's magically there. She goes to a movie and he's magically there, too! She farts sweetly and he's magically there. (That last one didn’t happen yet). Could Ziegler telegraph any more loudly the inevitable trope result of the inevitable trope romance? Could Maggie be any more of a completely vapid wilting wench than she already is? Who knows? That last is rhet(Butler)orical.

Maggie is put into one situation after another from which her spinelessness prevents her from excusing herself. For example, Jack asks her out to dinner and it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to say no, but her lack of back-bone leaves her saying yes. That same evening before her date arrives, she finally learns (from one of the most contrived plot points ever) that yes, her ex is indeed dating someone else. Duhh! She could right then call up Jack and tell him no, since she's so upset and angry, but her lack of anything even resembling a notochord prevents her from canceling the date. Her parents prove predictably and tiresomely obnoxious. So Jack-off on the rocks has asked her out to dinner and therefore dominantly insists upon paying, and she dumbly knuckles under for it. And god forbid we should leave out the trope that he tips well, and therefore would absolutely make the best husband imaginable, of course.

On the date she is so vacuous and shallow that she can't even come up with one good argument against her date's republicanism. Not that he is a Republican! Maggie is too stupid to figure it out, and has blindly pigeon-holed him without it even registering! Their exchanges from this point onwards are not even fit to appear in a twelve-year-old's romantic fiction story. It would be quite easy to do the thing which Democrats have consistently and blindly failed to do, which is to call out the Republicans on their appalling hypocrisy: hypocrisy which has them on the one hand championing Jesus Christ and religion, but on the other, failing in every regard to adhere to and follow even one of the fictional principles espoused by the fictional Christ in the fictional New Testament!

Maggie is such a loser that she even sells out her vegetarianism by allowing herself to be dragged to a restaurant where meat dishes are in abundance. I don't think vegetarians can have a truly fulfilling relationship with a carnivore, but apparently Ziegler disagrees. She's entitled to, but the reason Maggie is in this position is because Ziegler has once again sold feminism down the river by chaining her "heroine" to Jack and allowing him to lead her like a prize pet on his date to his choice of venue.

I get that this is a fish-out-of-water story with a twist of lemming, but if that's what Ziegler thought she was writing, it isn’t what she delivers. She fails because Maggie isn’t really trying to do what she claims she's attempting. She's not; not even half-heartedly. Her character doesn't even make sense: that on the one hand she's so devoted to her memory of tragic Trevor that she can’t move on, but on the other, she has each of her hands on the trope rump of a trope guy - a magical trope guy with magical eyes and magical muscles - and she's moving right along. She doesn't even remotely behave as though she's being eaten up inside by her grief over her previous relationship. We're told that she is, but we're never actually shown that she is. In this, Ziegler presents us with an object (abject?!) lesson in how to spectacularly lose the case of Teller v. Shower.

Instead of trying to avoid people and relationships, which was her stated aim, Maggie is devoting all her time and energy to them, and we're given no reason why the rest of us should go along with Ziegler's follies. A simple "Leave me the hell alone" would dispose of Jack-of-all-tirades (maybe not - he's a borderline stalker), and a sharp kick to the nut-sack would run Miles, not to say ruin. So why doesn't Maggie deliver on those goods? Because Ziegler is betraying her character and refusing to let her. Ziegler's agenda here is at odds with that of her main character, and that would work fine if Ziegler had the writing chutzpah to get it done. She evidently doesn't. She is so poor at telling this story that when a golden opportunity pops up for Maggie to run Jack out of her life by going on a date with Miles, and then run him out of her life by dumping him after said date, the thought never even crosses her incredibly empty mind.

Here's a thing about his novel that I'd noticed but not noted until now: there is no bad language! This is a novel about rough-and-ready high school students and not one of them ever swears? Yes, Ziegler's writing a four-letter-word-free story, which is fine. I suspect her motive for this is religious, and my suspicion is bolstered by a lot of what she writes. I think the religious perspective ruins a good story, but sometimes it's of use and can actually add something. In this case, Ziegler doesn't have what it takes to do the addition. It’s patently obvious that she's writing reality-free fiction, so let me grant her that and drop the snark about it being unrealistic because I have a better point to make (and this even bypasses the fact that Ziegler made certain she put the word 'vaginal' in her novel to show how dangerously risqué and naughty she really honestly is!)

First, some context: on the bottom of p202 she writes, "But what really pees me off…". Seriously? The phrase is "pisses me off". Nothing else works. Urinates me off? Nope. Tinkles me off? Nope. Number ones me off? Nope. Golden rains me off? Nope. Only "pisses me off" actually works. So when Ziegler writes "pees me off" as a substitute, it does nothing save announce loudly to me that she's as clunky as she is clueless. I honestly hope she's not actually like that, because she does have a voice, and I live in hope that bad writers will get better, but just as Maggie is trying half-heartedly to convey unpopularity to Jack-off, what Ziegler is whole-heartedly conveying to me is a really bad impression of her as a writer. If she wants to avoid swearing, then why not "tees me off"? It’s only a single letter difference and it actually makes sense. How about "ticks me off"? God forbid she should actually come up with an invented phrase that's actually funny. I don't get at all why she felt the need to embarrass herself with this when she could have achieved her end with something perfectly suitable and devoid of the accompaniment of screeching fingernails on a chalk-board.

After the meal with Jack, Maggie bemoans the fact that she failed to disgust him and turn him off, but she's so abysmally dumb that she never once thinks of merely saying good night and heading home alone to kill the mood. Instead, she dumbly persists in the very behavior she has deluded herself into thinking will do the job, and it's the same behavior she's repeatedly tried and failed at. This screams to me that she's as limited of rationale as she is unimaginative. She could have killed the promise of a date by the simple act of canceling it. She could have killed the actual date by going out that evening before Jack arrived, so that when he shows up to pick her up she's simply not there. Yes, I get that Ziegler's whole purpose is to get Jack and Diane, er Maggie Mayn't, together. She's telegraphed that sad goal ever since she Jacked him into the novel in the first place, but is it also a requirement of Ziegler's that she portrays her main character as an incompetent, and as a complete moron, in order to achieve her end? I would argue not.

Frankly, the one who is doing the better job of killing the date for my money is Jack himself. He's consistently obnoxious, treating her like a second-rate citizen - a weak woman, who needs to be coddled and paid for - and protected. Earlier in the day, they'd been cleaning up a park, and after the meal they go to that same park. Maggie cluelessly thinks she'll turn Jack off if she takes a turn on the park swings! Where did a brain as limited as hers come up with that idea? It’s here that he starts up again about past history: the incident in the park that morning where Miles is Miles and Maggie stands up to him. Jack is whining that he ought to have been there to protect her. How freaking condescending can you get? If I liked him to this point, which I certainly didn't, this would have made me detest him. How can Ziegler persistently betray her gender like this? She portrays Maggie as not even remotely affronted by Jack-Ass's behavior. On the contrary, she responds warmly to a kiss that he abruptly and uninvitedly forces on her.

It was right at this point that I just wanted this novel to be over with so I could move on to something less landfill to read, but I figured that I was so close to the end that I could finish this and further deplete the ammunition stocks of those who whine about DNFs! The problem is that Ziegler was as determined to turn me off the novel as Maggie supposedly was to avoid dating. And Ziegler was doing a far more efficient job than ever was Maggie. About 40 pages from the end, Maggie openly declared herself, at the "losers" dance, to be the complete dip-shit and dirt-bag she had promised to be all along, and I honestly could not stand to deal with any more of her juvenile crap. I had hoped against hope that something different would come out of the story, but why I had this blind faith in Ziegler, given what a complete let-down she'd proven herself to be to this point, I have no idea. Call me the eternal optimist when it comes to novels; however, this novel is now determined to be of the species Wartius maximus and I'm outta here!

Have Wormhole, Will Travel by Tony McFadden

Title: Have Wormhole, Will Travel
Author: Tony McFadden
Publisher: Smashwords
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.

Errata in the ebook:
There are some really bad problems with quality control in this novel that a dedicated beta reader and a spell-checker would have fixed.
The biggest gaff is Sabrina's changing age. On page 26, Sabrina tells her dad in so many words that she's twenty one, yet on page 76 she says she's lived in the city for twenty-five years. Someone screwed up their back story!
On p54, there's also a misspelled Pasadena (spelled as 'Pasedna').
There's "Brom" Stoker on p101!
On p117 "Making sure you’re stories match?" should be "Making sure your stories match?"
On p221 "Aurora Australias" should be "Aurora Australis"
here's on oddity: "Callum left the Physice Building…"?! Physics building? I am not sure if this is an error or not. Physice isn't a word (at least as far as dictionary.com and wikipedia are concerned!) but I've found that very word doing Google searches, so who knows? I know I never heard it before, and if it is an error, it's not the kind of error that an effectively employed spell-checker would miss.

I had really mixed feelings about rating this novel and decided, on balance, in the end, after some thought, to rate it just barely a worthy read. Call it the madness of the season, call me 'growing soft in my old age', or whatever, but it only just squeaked by. Hopefully the author will be encouraged to continue to write - and to write much better novels after this one.

Things to love. The title! I also loved that the cover proclaimed 'in Glorious digital 2D', but I did find it a little odd that the sun was shown apparently rising above the North Pole. Maybe it wasn't the sun. Or maybe this novel is much more of a disaster story than I’d thought! Normally I don't get into covers because the author has little to do with them, but self-published novels are different.

Other things. This novel is written rather simplistically, like it’s a first novel. The simplicity is endearing in some ways, and really annoying in others. I just chewed out another novel for its exhausting breathlessness, but in this novel, given the way it’s written, a bit of breathlessness seems to work. I guess that's the difference between YA and mature, huh? McFadden certainly keeps the story moving without it bogging down in reams of exposition, and there's enough technical detail to give it verisimilitude, but nowhere near enough that McFadden traps himself in statements which are provably false. I admire that! On the other hand, the novel is largely conversation, very much like a first time author might write. There's very little description of, well, anything!. If you like to make up your own story, then I guess this will suit you. Me? I like the author to do some of the work at least - otherwise we may as well be writing out own tale! As it is, this novel could have been set pretty much anywhere in the civilized world and the same story could have been told, so why then set it in Sydney, Australia? I don't know! we really got none of "Sydney": no atmosphere, no flavor, no taste. I regretted that.

On the other hand, it is refreshingly set in Australia as opposed to the tediously omnipresent USA, so credit has to be given to any author who both realizes and publicizes that there are interesting and cool places elsewhere in the world and "The World" ≠ "The USA"! In addition: the premise for the novel is interesting, if not exactly original. Aliens are living in secret amongst us, deflecting humanity from finding means by which to short-circuit the massive and prohibitive distances between stars - so that we can't spread out and cause problems with our alien neighbors, you know. Unfortunately, one guy has managed to sneak by the aliens' attention, and is on the verge of doing precisely what it is which they're trying to stop.

Because these aliens live on a planet orbiting a red dwarf star, they're rather averse to bright light and are oxygen-starved, so they like their food bloody in order to benefit from the hemoglobin. Unfortunately, this makes no sense since there's no mechanism which takes O₂ from food and puts it into the blood stream. If there were, we wouldn't need to breathe! OTOH, maybe the alien physiology is different. Like Alice, they use mirrors to move between locations, although they're issued newly developed 'travel sticks' at the start of this novel, meaning that mirrors are no longer requisite for travel. So McFadden has pretty much all of the elements in place to depict these long-lived aliens as the source of vampire myths on Earth. This was a good plot idea, but McFadden really didn't go anywhere with it.

One young woman, Sabrina, is onto the two local aliens, honestly believing them to actually be vampires. Far from being afraid of them, she's actively trying to track them down and contact them, but they're aware of her and are avoiding her like the plague, considering her to be a nut-job.

There are two issues here which typically remain either unexplored by writers, or which are simply glossed over. One is the question of the feasibility of an alien physiology being able to derive nourishment from alien (i.e Earth) food sources. Here again, a decent working knowledge of evolution would serve writers well, since they way we, as organisms, exploit our environment for energy is tightly tied-up with our evolutionary origins, and organisms which evolved in an entirely alien eco-system are unlikely to have much success in reaping their energy (or more accurately, the raw materials which produce energy) from a system in which they never evolved. But it’s possible, I suppose! I’d rather see writers tackle this head-on, though and have the aliens adjusted artificially to be able to use Earth food sources. They certainly have the technology to do this in this novel, it would appear!

The other issue is their apparent physical attraction to humans. Our closest living relatives are chimpanzees, and call me naïve, but I don’t know of anyone who is attracted to chimpanzees (in the way I mean), so why would actual aliens find humans attractive? If the aliens resemble us closely, then there does exist this possibility, I admit, but it's such a cliché, and I don’t buy that all aliens will automatically be 'chasing human skirt', which is what's implied here. This isn't helped by the amazingly politically incorrect behaviors on both the aliens' and the humans' parts. Yes, people do behave politically incorrectly, and there's no reason for writers not to portray such people, but I don't see that it contributed a thing here. It did serve as an annoying and juvenile distraction from the story. Indeed, the more I read of this novel - that is, read the alien conversation - the more absurd it sounded to me. I know they've been living amongst humans for 400 years (more on this in a minute!), but something just seems off about their interaction with each other and the language they use.

And Manly beach! I know this is a real place (I looked it up), which I had thought was named after someone (as in Gerard Manly Hopkins, for example), but it turns out it was actually named for the "manly" natives who were initially found there! I couldn’t help thinking of that meaning for this, every time I read it. Like this beach isn't for skinny weaklings who get sand kicked into their faces; no, this is a manly beach! I think I would have been tempted to invent a beach name in place of this one, had I written it!

There are three women in the novel (Jackie, Mandy, & Sabrina) and none of them are distinguishable from one another. Jackie is Sam's boyfriend, and Sam is the guy who has invented the wormhole travel which has so upset the aliens. The other two are really non-entities and fade from the story rather speedily, which was fine, because all three seemed to me to be the same person when you got right down to it. The absolute acceptance of Sabrina's vampire theory by her friend Mandy, and worse, by Jackie, was absurd. This was especially so in Jackie's case, where she swallowed the eventual alien story without a hiccup, but rejected out of hand her boyfriend the physicist's claim to have created a wormhole? Where's the rationale in that?! There is absolutely no skepticism from anyone, and this flew in the face of the skeptical persona which was initially established for Jackie (although she quickly abandoned that).

There is also a huge disconnect between the aliens' stated reason for monitoring and seeking to contain Earth: that humans are a violent race who have a history of muscling in wherever they visit and turfing out the natives, with their final solution: wipe out all humans! Hypocrite much, aliens?! The aliens were a bit sad, actually.

But let's talk about Jackie behind her back! Jackie is a fitness guru who's getting ready to dump Sam and hook up with the alien (at least, let me say, that's was very loudly telegraphed). I saw no real impetus for her attitude or behavior with regard to Sam (or the alien for that matter). Yes, there are hints, but nothing that would precipitate her radical switch of loyalties, unless she's as bad as other elements of the story have led me to believe of her. For example, in pursuit of aliens, she abruptly cancels her fitness class by means of leaving a scrappy, abrupt, and apparently hand-written note on the gym door! What - there's no texting or email in Jackie World™?

That struck me as being dumb, callous, and worse, if it was intentionally (as opposed to thoughtlessly) written this way, it tells me that Jackie is a every bit as much of a jerk as is Sam, and she's a hypocrite to boot, to be wailing about Sam's callous treatment of her when she treats paying customers even worse than Sam treats her. Am I supposed to think this of her? She's certainly not a likable character; she's way too shallow and self-centered to appeal to me. But it gets worse! Jackie not only abandoned her entire day's classes at the drop of a hat, she suddenly felt it crucial on the next day that she get changed and get to her next class on time when Callum wants to talk to her?! Again with the illogical. Is Jackie schizophrenic? Whatever she is, she's certainly not someone I would want to know, so the alien is most welcome to her! I guess the aliens are either less picky or more desperate than I am! Callum wants to talk to her about the guy she just dumped - like she can somehow explain to the guy who talks down to her that there are dangers inherent in the sub-atomic physics he's getting into. Honestly? After 400 years, Callum still evidently knows nothing about humans!

I don’t find this unqualified acceptance that 'there are vampires' (which then switches to 'there are aliens' without a hiccup) to be realistic, but I decided to go with that for the sake of enjoying the story. But the aliens' view of Earth is somewhat bizarre. We learn that the aliens, despite supposedly wanting to stymie humans' development of advanced technologies, have actually given a kick-start to some advances, which strikes me as being counter-productive, from their PoV. OTOH, if they were that advanced, and they wanted to help, then why not help where it matters: by offering alternative means of energy to move humans away from fossil fuels and destructive technologies? Why not teach by generous example instead of by threat?

For that matter, why live in secret (and for four hundred years?!) amongst us? Four hundred years ago there was no way in hell we were any threat to anyone off-planet, so why move in then? It makes no sense whatsoever. Better yet, why not simply come out into the open and share their concerns about where we’re going technology-wise if they’re supposedly so advanced and conscientious? Callum (alien #1) is thoroughly incompetent. Not only has he failed to sabotage Sam's efforts to transmit matter instantaneously from point A to point B, he has very effectively aided him by showing him how to do it with far less energy. That part of this story I honestly couldn’t swallow, and much less could I swallow that Callum is invited to aid Sam in his efforts at a demonstration for university faculty (and military) and Callum doesn’t do a single thing to ruin the demo and discredit Sam! He thinks of this only later, and instead, he expends every thought he has in self-recrimination and whining about how advanced Sam is in his use of this technology!

The story was, as I said, not original, but it was inventive, and it was a rather confused. Normally I wouldn't be happy with a story like this, and I wasn't exactly happy with this one, but I was able to finish it (although I admit I skimmed a bit towards the end) and in doing so, I saw enough in here, speaking in general, overall terms, to give me pause for thought as I was reading it, and I am hoping that McFadden will continue writing, and keep all his best bits in whilst ruthlessly tossing out all of his worst bits. So I hopefully, and optimistically, rate this a worthy read.

Never Have I Ever by Sara Shepard

Title: Never Have I Ever
Author: Sara Shepard
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WARTY!

I should identify a little with this novel since it's set in Tucson, and I was in that region over the holidays last January: Tucson, Tombstone, Phoenix, but I started out not liking the way this was written at all. I skipped the waste-of-my-time prologue as usual, but chapter one started out like it was in the middle of the story rather than at the beginning. This is part of some sort of series, and was preceded by The Lying Game which I haven't read. This novel quite evidently takes off from some cliffhanger in volume one, so it's not really a new novel, merely part two of the previous novel. That's annoying, not least because this volume offers no indication that it's part 2. I have no intention of reading volume one (or any other volume after this one!), but be warned that you need to start on volume 1 if you're going to make the tragic mistake of following this series.

Emma is the twin sister of Sutton (yeah, the names really suck in this novel) and moved to Tucson to meet her twin after having seen her strangled in a video. If you can make sense of that, you're doing better than I am. Now that she's here, she's discovered that Sutton is apparently dead (duhh!) - but her body has apparently not been discovered since everyone thinks Emma is Sutton. Except Ethan, who knows the truth. Ethan is a complete jerk; more on this unsurprising discovery anon.

Emma is trying to discover who murdered Sutton. Apparently she's not smart enough to pursue this with the police (let me clarify that: she's too much of a loser to persist on the matter of her sister's murder after her first visit resulted in disbelief on the part of the police. There are myriad ways she could have convinced them, but she's so useless she can't think of a single one. What a conviction-challenged non-entity she is!

That's not the worst part though! The really sad thing is that with this novel, author Shepard is confessing to us that she simply can't write a novel where a teen actually does the right thing instead of trying to solve the crime herself, that and and make it readable into the bargain. So the impression I'm left with is that either Shepard is a really bad writer, or there was a butt-load of crap going on in the previous volume that you have to know if you want to get anything out of this novel. How convenient for an author to be in that position! And no, as I said, I'm not going back for the previous volume.

Oh, there is one more thing. Normally I would be highly suspicious about Sutton's supposed death, thinking that she's alive somewhere, but that option seems to be off the table because Sutton is now a ghost which is metaphorically if not quite literally joined at the hip to Emma, but she can't communicate with her non-dead sister, and Emma has no idea Sutton is there. So why Emma is so convinced that Sutton is dead (as opposed to having left town or being in hiding, for example) is a complete mystery. The ghost is telling parts of this story from the first-person PoV, and the rest is third-person. The first person interjections arrive without warning or distinction, sprinkled randomly through the text like bits of bone in a dog turd, and they quite literally offer nothing to the plot. In short, this novel is a complete mess with nothing whatsoever to recommend it.

I honestly don't get the ghost thing! The two cannot communicate. Emma has no idea there's a ghost, and Sutton-the-Ghost cannot lead or maneuver Emma-the-walking dead-beat, and Sutton the victim is so dumb that she has no idea who killed her! That's how useless these twins are! Yet Emma keeps getting these flashbacks to Sutton's life which clue her in to what happened. Seriously? Can you think of a more asinine or convolutedly dumb plot? I can't.

Evidently these rich kids (Sutton's "friends") found it hilarious to entertain themselves by playing elaborate and realistic hoaxes on others, which they refer to as "The Lying Game" and this was in play in the previous volume. Again without having read volume one, I can't say with any surety, but it certainly appears that Shepard has purloined this idea from The Game, a 1997 movie starring Michael Douglas.

About half-way through this novel I still hadn't found a reason to actually like it. About three-quarters through I wondered why I was even still reading it. I decided this will be my ammo against anyone who accuses me of having too many DNFs in my list this year! I slogged all-the-way through this one. That's more than enough punishment! In all-too-many places, it's so amateurish, bogged down with all the melodrama (actually not so mellow!) of a children's mystery novel even though it's about high school seniors - seniors whom Shepard has, on more than one occasion, quite literally "skip" away! Honestly?

Everything is a breathless rush in this novel, every person an enemy, every circumstance urgent, every event a crisis, every sentence overly dramatic. Like in the Harry Potter series, no one tells anyone anything - which, of course, creates ever more crises. Even people Emma supposedly trusts get no information, the distribution and processing of which might, in return, help Emma. She's too stupid for words. It’s exhausting to read material like this, and it actually made me really glad that I missed the first book!

I can see how Shepard is onto a really good thing here because as long as her readers remain gullibly undiscriminating, and she doesn’t cluelessly piss-off too many of them, she can keep milking this series for a long time simply leading readers by the spy-ring through their nose from one cliff-hanger to another. It’s very much the same deal that Ally Carter has going. I'm not willing to be so led, even as I admit, to my shame, that familiarity breeds content! The novel did seem more welcoming once I’d gotten past the sink-or-swim first few chapters, but it’s still drivel for all that! In the same way, once people buy into such a series, they're pretty much a captive audience for whatever abuses the authors wish to perpetrate upon them (and they claim that slavery was abolished!).

It doesn’t help at all that Emma, the main character, is a complete and utter moron and is determined to prove this with some frequency. For example, she deliberately got herself caught shoplifting for no other reason than that she wanted to get a look at her own police file. That's how dedicatedly stupid she is. There isn't any reason she couldn’t have a look at it, even hiring a lawyer if necessary, but because of this trouble, she gets grounded by her "parents" and then she starts breaking the grounding rule every chance she gets for purely frivolous reasons, including going on a totally unnecessary date to an art exhibition with Ethan. Yet despite breaking all these rules with impunity, she unaccountably gets nervous when she's alone with Ethan? I call bullshit on that one - big, rank, stinking dollops of it.

At another point, Emma knows that the group to which her supposedly dead sister belonged is going to prank the two sisters who are her prime suspects in her own sister's death, yet she never thinks once of changing her game and warning them of the prank. Instead she lets it happen. God forbid we will ever have a high school girl who works proactively, and who takes charge of her own fate. What a disaster that would be. "Long-live passive and weak females!" seems to be the message trumpeted by all-too-many female writers, I'm sorry to report. Talking of big and stinking, the red herrings are running in massive schools throughout this novel, which is tedious in itself. It’s like those worthless so-called horror movies where all the teens are constantly sneaking up and grabbing each other without a whisper of a warning, thereby creating a series of laughably false "scares". Shepard is trying so hard to convince me that the twins are the murderers that I'm quite convinced they're not. (I was right!).

As for Ethan, he's a jerk of major proportions. He repeatedly and deliberately entices Emma into risky ventures, designed to endanger her or get her into trouble with her parents. He does this for no reason whatsoever other than his own entertainment and satisfaction. If anyone else is to be bumped off, I'm rooting for it being him! At this point I'm afraid that it’s far too much to expect of Shepard that she might have the wherewithal to make him the villain. But who knows?

Well I am done with this and done with this series. The novel ended exactly like I expected it to - a huge red herring followed by bullshit and topped off with a cheap, trashy cliff-hanger involving the magical return of a kid who was, we were tediously reminded, absent without explanation throughout the novel. Now, professional suckers can waste more money on this trash. I'm voting for this prodigal son's dad being the murderer, and the sooner he does in Emma the better. She is bordering on being hands-down the most stupid, vacuous, incompetent, and tedious main character ever created. This novel is without question a warty.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler

Title: The Vagina Monologues
Author: Eve Ensler
Publisher: Villard
Rating: WORTHY!

This isn't fiction, which is pretty much all I review on this blog, but it's something I read over Thanksgiving (what could be more important to give thanks for than the very means by which every single one of us came into the world?!) and it's worth more than a mention. It's Eve Ensler's paean to the female reproductive system, and while she's somewhat adrift in choosing to employ the word 'vagina' to represent the entire set of organs, I can see why she would do that, and I have to tell you that this 'story of V' is well-worth reading.

It's a really fast read, which was a bit disappointing for me. I was rather surprised by how little material there is. One quarter of the edition I bought was filled with material related to V-Day, and the rest was all-too-brief vagina monologue material - but then it was the V-Day edition, so duhh!

There wasn't anything in it which - in general terms - I'd never come across before (a fact in which I took shameful pride!), but in specific terms there are some hilarious stories and some saddening ones, and some educational ones and some entertaining ones. If you have not explored this subject, and especially if you haven't explored it first hand, then you need to read this whether you're male or female, or some other gender, but be warned you need to be prepared for the truth, the whole truth and even the uncomfortable truth, and you may not like it, but you do have to live with it.

The book is divided into several sections, some short, others longer, some merely lists of names and terms, others personal stories, others amalgams of many personal stories, and these are interspersed with 'Vagina Facts'. Some of the titles such as, for example, 'The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could' are hilarious, but rooted in the very anecdotes they head. Others, such as 'Hair' are more direct, but equally important. I rate this a worthy read and recommend it. And it's time for a new and updated edition!

Black Heart by Holly Black

Title: Black Heart
Author: Holly Black
Publisher: Margaret K McElderry
Rating: worthy

I've already reviewed the first in this series, White Cat and the sequel, Red Glove.

This one takes off exactly where the last one ended. Cassel and his brother Barron are play-acting at being FBI agents, tailing Lila, with whom Cassel is still obsessed, just for the practice for when they're accepted as real FBI agents. Sam's girlfriend Daneca is now dating Cassel's brother, but Sam doesn't know it. Cassel learns that his mother (Shandra Singer) stole the resurrection diamond from mobster Zacharov (Lila's father), having an affair with him in the process, for that very purpose. Now Zacharov has Shandra held captive - not much of am imprisonment, but the real punishment is the threat, not the specific circumstances of her captivity - against Cassel recovering the diamond.

Moreover, Cassel is being pimped by the FBI to deal with Patton, a crazed state governor who's leading the charge to suppress, repress, imprison, and pretty much wipe-out the curse workers. The FBI wants Cassel to transform Patton into some other species, so he's taken out of the equation, but the more Cassel considers what they're asking him to do, the more he realizes that they're setting him up to take the fall for taking out Patton. Moreover, he also realizes that if he does take out Patton, it will not prevent the legislation that the latter is sponsoring - it will more than likely render him into a martyr, and insure that the legislation is carried.

Cassel manages to wangle his way through all of this without any disastrously false steps, and finally, at the very end, after all this time, he gets...well you'll have to read it to discover that! I liked this volume, too, so I guess I'm signed on to continue reading this series as long as it keeps being readable. It wasn't spectacular, nothing to rave about, but it was acceptable; it was an easy read, and I blew through it rapidly. The only screw-up I noticed was 'Yalikova' on p231 when it should have been 'Yulikova'. The rest was well-written, engaging and kept me turning the pages, so it's a worthy read as far as I'm concerned.

Secret Lies by Amy Dunne

Title: Secret Lies
Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes 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.

Amy Dunne was raised in Derbyshire, England, just like me, so how can I not review her novel?! Well, I wouldn't if it looked like it was boring or outside of my interest range, but I'd already decided that this one was worth a look before I knew from whence its author hailed.

I don't do book covers since the author usually has nothing to do with their design, and this blog is about authors and their writing, not about snotty publishers, illiterate editors, and artists who've never read the book they're illustrating, but I have to wonder about the title "Secret Lies" (as opposed to public ones?) which I assume is the author's, and the black band around that cover - how funereal! - which I assume isn't. Unfortunately, unless Dunne designed the cover herself, I may never learn the point of that, nor did I learn the meaning of the title! Maybe if I'm lucky, Dunne will visit the blog and add her own two pence in the comments? The girl on the cover is neither one of the two around which the novel revolves: the sleeves are way too short for it to be Nicola, and the hair is wrong for it to be Jennifer; she's wearing no wrist bands, either. See what I mean about cover artists never having read the novel? (I'll bet the model hasn't either.)

So this is, be warned, a very sexually explicit story of Nicola Jackson, an abused step-daughter with a weak mom and a god-awful stepfather (did you know that the German word for stepfather is Stiefvater?!) who seriously needs to be hung, drawn, and quartered. The sexually explicit partner is Jennifer O'Connor, a good - well...not so good - Catholic girl. She resents the relationships she feels forced into, in order to keep up her appearance as the hottest girl in school. These two bump into each other one morning on the way to school, after Nicola almost lost her virginity to said evil stepfather. They end-up skipping school and spending the day together despite being from different social groups, and despite never having spoken before that day. Their relationship takes off from there. I liked this story and found it a really easy read, but I do have some issues with it, that I want to take a few to explore.

My first concern is the simplicity of the writing. Sometimes that's a good thing, and in many ways it works for this story, but the feeling it left me with was that this story was written by a younger brother of one of the two main protagonists (both of whom are seventeen), and neither of them had such a sibling! Worse than this, though, was the all-too-ready resolution to everything, with no ragged edges, no loose threads, not a hair out of place. It was unrealistic, like a half hour TV sit-com, and it reminded me very much of some of my own first drafts. Given the starting points from whence the various characters launched themselves into this tale, it was really quite insulting for me as a reader to see the story travel the route it did, but having said that, I'm rating it as a worthy read because overall, it deserves it. Secret Lies deserves to be read and the author deserves to be encouraged to keep on writing because there was a real story here, and whilst it may not have been told in its best light, I'm hoping that the sophistication will come, and we'll get ever more and better stories from Dunne.

Meanwhile, let's look at the issues I had with this one as I review it. The first thing which bothered me was the improbability of the encounter between Jennifer and Nicola which led to the start of their relationship. It came right out of the screen-play for the movie The Cutting Edge with them quite literally running into each other, and the even greater improbability that they'd end-up spending the day together. They live in completely different worlds. Jennifer comes from a really nice home with loving (if somewhat naïve and ignorant parents) whereas Nicola comes from a lowly and (more!) dysfunctional home. I don't get how it is that they would run into each other on their various routes to school, since it's strongly implied that they're not exactly neighbors.

I can see pathways by which the two of them could reasonably have come together (so to speak!), but I didn't see that happen here, so it was a bit too much insta-friends for me. As I said, the two have never spoken before, and Jennifer is a bit of a snob (in high-school terms), hanging out with the rotten-end of the higher-class students (pupils? Whatever they call them in Britain these days!), so her path literally and figuratively never crossed with Nicola's. Indeed, Nicola is an outcast at school, wearing strangely inappropriate clothing for the weather (and there's a good reason for that) and spending all her time by herself there. There was too abrupt of a shift from being completely alienated from one another, to being acquaintances, to becoming fast friends. It seemed way too fake and amateurish to me, but the story itself turned out, despite this poor start, to be really quite interesting and engaging. It made me want to keep reading, which is all I require from an author, let's face it!

I do identify with Nicola though, coming from the lower end of the scale myself. I was never beaten, so I can't claim to know what that's like, but I did have really strict parents who were not known for refraining from slapping their kids, and from whom I felt quite alienated most of the time, so I feel like I have a foot in her door at least.

Which brings me to the respective issues from which these girls suffer. I didn't quite see the point of having both of these girls be the way they were, one of them appallingly abused, the other abusing herself. I know that offers a route towards friendship by having them both have secrets, but why make this the starting point? Other than to get them together, it didn't seem to play any role in the story at all (apart from one overly-dramatic later incident), so why not make them much more average people? That would have had a far greater impact for my money. Putting them in this position seems to me to serve to create more obstacles than it serves to knock down fences.

Jennifer is a cutter who is trying really hard to divorce herself from that behavior with the help of a therapist - about whom her parents evidently know nothing. That's one thing, but she's also had some bad, even shaming sexual encounters with sadly trope-ish boys, which offended me for its genderism: as though a girl can't be lesbian without having had a rather abusive experience with a boy, and there's no such thing as a sensitive and decent boy anyway, so why not be a lesbian! It's almost like Dunne is trying to justify lesbianism by blaming it on uncouth males. I found that offensive on several levels, and dishonest with regard to lesbian motivation. Queers are queer because that's the way nature made them, not because some guy or some girl somehow "warped" them that way!

I have a book on my groaning library shelves titled The First Time by Karen Bouris, who interviewed some 150 women about losing their virginity, and many of them had a bad experience (which I think is more than adequately explained by society's god-awfully repressive attitudes towards sex!). I have no way of knowing how representative a sample this was, but it seemed to me that many of the women who were interviewed and who are lesbian, had a bad sexual encounter with a guy before they settled on their preferred sexuality.

This struck me as interesting, but in no way can it be deemed to be diagnostic, definitive, or causative! It seems a bit of a cliché (and a stereotypical male wishful-thinking cliché at that) to have Nicola take this road-less-traveled because lesbianism is 'nothing more than a result of a bad heterosexual encounter'! Sexual preference needs a hell of a lot more respect and realism than that. I'm not saying that Dunne believes this, or that she's trying to suggest or promote this agenda, just that writing this way might put the wrong idea in some people's minds, or imply things which were not intended. Then again, it's Dunne's novel - she can write what she likes, and I wouldn't try to suggest that no queer relationships ever began like this.

I can see that Dunne needs a way to bring the two of them together, and that she's doing this by giving them common ground to meet upon; it just seemed a bit clunky to me. I'm not the writer of course, so it's not my choice, but this overkill in background story detracts too much, for me, from the main story which is coming, and which is the reason I'm reading this!

So having spent the day together, Jennifer invites Nicola to stay over for the night when she learns that her new-found friend has left home and has nowhere to go. They make up a lie to tell Jenny's parents which improbably nets them a month together. It's early that evening that Jennifer accidentally espies the burn marks and bruises on Nicola's back, where her stepfather has stubbed out cigarettes. This, of course, leads to confessions and revelations, and eventually the two of them discover the truth about each other, and that truth is that they're falling in love.

This is a bigger problem for Jenny than for Nic, who has nothing to lose. Jenny has her mom and dad, staunch (not stanch!) Catholics. Jenny at this point is living much more in fear than Nic is, which was a fun reverse direction for this story to take. And talking of fun, there wasn't much humor in this novel. Yes, it's a serious story about serious things, but that lack of a fun element with these two young characters, both of them awakening to a brilliant and totally unexpected new love, was a bit glaring. The "stupid o'clock" comment at the start of chapter 25 was hilarious and every much appreciated, but that was it for notably funny bits, and I couldn't see that two Brit high-school girls like this wouldn't have more humor going on than they did, even given their circumstances.

Also, Nicola seemed to come out of her repressed shell far faster than seemed realistic given what she'd been through. In fact, the entire relationship was surprisingly just like any relationship I've read about, homo or hetero written by male or female writers, which struck me as odd, given the premise that both of them had these secrets and both secrets were way off the beaten track for most relationships. I mentioned this earlier - that the cutting and the abuse were merely a starting point, and played no part in the rest of the relationship, and this seemed to me to be a betrayal of those things - cheapening them into insignificance. I found that sad. Indeed, the pointed focus on the sexual rather than on anything else was a bit disturbing, too. I was expecting something rather different here, given the characters were coming out not only to each other, but to themselves, and given the awful back-story secrets they both had, but that was never delivered. It was like their sad pasts were magically washed away and mattered no more.

Then comes the evil stepsister - actually not even step, just sister (of Jenny's) - who seemed really odd to me. She went from being hugely vindictive, exhibiting stalker behavior, to total unconditional acceptance of Nicola and Jennifer pretty much literally overnight which was entirely unrealistic, and which stood out rather glaringly and amateurishly.

So why am I not rating this warty? Well, as I said, I liked the story, and I'm willing to forgive the writer a lot of warts if they tell me a worthy tale. I freely admit that Dunne really pushed me to the limit of what I would put-up with, and if the story had not been the one it was, and Jenny and Nic not been the characters they were (and Dunne had not hailed from Derbyshire, of course!), I might well have been nudged over the other side of the fence. I don't do stars, you see, so a novel is either a worthy read or it's warty to me, and this one is worthy, because I liked it despite a few warts, and yes I'd be open to reading more by Amy Dunne. Indeed, if she's looking for a truly independent (apart from the Derbyshire connection!) beta reader, I volunteer right here and now!

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Title: Lost in a Good Book
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: High Bridge
Rating: worthy

This audio novel is read by Elizabeth Sastre.

After a sad disappointment in the first novel in this series, The Eyre Affair, I'm hoping for a lot better in volume 2. Failing that, I'll ditch this series and move on to something else. I have to say I was surprised by High Bridge, the audio publishers of the copy I got from the library. When I went to their website to reference this novel, I could find neither the title nor the author anywhere on their site! That's why Barnes & Noble gets the book link.

I was really slow in getting up to speed on this one because of Thanksgiving, but I picked up the pace today and didn't regret it. This one is much better than The Eyre Affair, at least through the first half-dozen chapters. It's much more interesting and a lot funnier, particularly the Hispano-Suiza episode. Of course it doesn't hurt at all that Elizabeth Sastre (not to be confused with Doctor Elizabeth Sastre of the Vanderbilt university medical school) is intelligent, playful, sly, sexy, and a little bit giggly. I love this representation of Thursday.

There's apparently a plot afoot in this novel to assassinate Thursday which, if true, cannot be allowed to succeed under any circumstances! Even if I quit reading the series I would feel saddened if she were not out there somewhere, even if it's just fictionally! The plot comes to a head when the Goliath corporation removes her husband Landon from time, leaving her pregnant in a time when the father of her child died at the age of two! Their plan is to have her free Jack Schitt from Poe's The Raven where she evidently imprisoned him at the end of the last novel, but she has no means to travel into fiction any more, so what's a girl to do?

Fforde continues to exhibit the occasional problem with the English language. For example, at several points, he writes of the Goliath corporation starting his sentence with "Goliath are..." whereas it should be "Goliath is…" At one point (I think in chapter eight) he writes that some people "...leaned forward imperceptibly..." - and this in a novel which is narrated in first person PoV. If the movement was imperceptible, how did the narrator detect it?!

Fforde also seems not to quite grasp a crucial principle of the geometric theory of gravitation, published by Albert Einstein in 1916. People who are undergoing acceleration perceive the effect as gravity. An acceleration of 1G will be indistinguishable from Earth's gravity to those experiencing it. Therefore passengers availing themselves of Fforde's gravity drop transportation system - even if it could be built through Earth's core without melting, and without killing travelers from radiation - would not experience free-fall because of the acceleration!

Finally it looks like I'm getting to the very reason I decided to start this series in the first place! Thursday gets an "in" to the magic library! I was not at all impressed by the disaster of the Cheshite Cat, but I did like Mrs Haversham and the Red Queen - particularly the enigmatic Red Queen, and the whole episode with Spike on the Zombie hunt, which Thursday volunteers for so she can pay her rent with the overtime-rate cash was hilarious.

And this was too much! I went to open the file for this review and this is what I found in the folder listing:

Thursday on Thursday! How sweet is that? Must be a good omen!

This one managed to hold my attention and amuse me. It's still not as good as One of Our Thursdays is Missing but it is a worthy read.

Forgotten by Cat Patrick

Title: Forgotten
Author: Cat Patrick
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is about London Lane (kewl name!), a mid-teens woman who cannot remember a thing about her past (her memory blanks at 4:33am each day, and yes, there's a good reason for that), but she can see events from the future and actually retain those memories. If that isn't intriguing enough to make a person read a novel, I don't know what is! It certainly pulled me on board, and the really good writing kept me there and buzzed me effortlessly through the entire novel. I absolutely love novels like this one and treasure them because they're so rare.

The good news: no prologue. The bad news: first person PoV. Bad news ameliorating news: in this case, I tolerated 1PoV really well because of the quality of the writing. The point-of-view actually fits the story to begin with, and it was so well done that it was neither onerous nor stupid. Even the rather tropish guy (Luke Henry) is acceptable, and there's also a best friend who is, as usual, vying with the main character for my deepest affection. Her name is Jamie Connor. So Cat Patrick manages to get away with including more than her fair share of YA tropes in the novel, yet not a single one of them is like iron nails on a chalk-board to me because of how understated this is and how well it's put together. I'd advise any aspiring writer to read this story to imbibe the sheer skill of its construction. Yes, this is me, YA trope hater, saying this story went there, and got away with it, and I loved that Cat Patrick got away with it.

London's life is beset with hassles because of her condition, and not only the memory thing, but also her condition of being in her mid-teens in high school with all the issues that typically entails even for every-day run-of-the-mill students. There's the difficulty she endures with Jamie, there's the question of why Luke is a blank in her future. There's the creepy question of the nonsensical funeral which London starts remembering, and there's the unnerving secret of what exactly happened in the parking lot of the supermarket that day when she was traveling with her dad - a dad who is no longer in her life. Can the hard-won and comfortable bits of London's life survive a huge disagreement with her best friend who refuses to listen when London tells her she knows how this will turn out? Can it survive an breech of trust with Luke? Can it survive both? Can London, even a little bit, change the future she remembers so accurately? And just what secrets has London's mom been keeping?

London's biggest problem (to begin with) is that even though she can "remember" the future, Luke isn't in it. How can this be? It's a puzzle to her. I suspected many things of Luke at that point (that he might be a past-forgetter, future rememberer like London, that he might be a bad guy, and so on), but I'm not going to tell you how right or wrong I was in any of that speculation! And yes, on the down side, there were some issues I had with the story, but these paled to insignificance, as the saying goes, in the brilliant glare of the consistently high standard set by the writing in this novel

Patrick did an amazing job of portraying London's struggle, and the tricks she uses to get through her oddball days. Her descriptions of London's daily travails at school are a pure joy to read. But the story doesn't end there (nor did it begin there!). There is mystery to unravel, and Patrick includes just enough of that supernatural element to give the story zest, but not anywhere near so much that it lards the story up with the unnecessary or the distracting. Patrick is all about story, and this novel is a tour-de-force of professionalism, brilliant narration, and magnetism that sucked me in and refused to let me out until the epilogue was done.

Cain's Blood by Geoffrey Girard

Rating: WARTY!

The premise of this story is exactly the same as its partner, Project Cain, of course: that military-funded scientists have recovered DNA from serial killers (both living and dead), and are breeding clones of those killers intent upon finding weapons. The asinine "logic" of this premise is discussed in my review for Project Cain. Well the title Cain's Blood might be unique, but there's a half-dozen novels which are variants on "The Blood of Cain", which means it's well beyond cliche class and into ludicrous by now. If it goes any further, it'll be plaid.

The basic story is the answer to the question: what would happen if we cloned famous serial killers of history and raised those children in a variety of environments? Would they all turn out just like the original killers? Could we use them as military weapons?

The short, sensible answer is "No, of course not, because you cannot duplicate the exact circumstances of the genetics and raising of any one of them to begin with!", but Girard disagrees. His downright stupid premise is that these clones would turn out exactly like the originals, even to the point of, for example, John Wayne Gacy dressing as a clown - in his teens yet. Girard further concluded that these murderers in the half shell would be happy to join a serial killer boys' club and hang out together, plotting and organizing their gory rampages as devoted teammates. It was at that point that I quit reading this novel, my stomach in equal parts doubled-up with laughter and with nausea. I refused to finish something as amateurish, ignorant, and confused as this is.

Girard's premise at first blush did interest me, and I liked the idea of having two novels on the same topic from different perspectives. This may have been done before, but if so, it's not anything I've encountered, and if so, having had to wade through this effort has cured me of any desire to seek out other such pairings! I also liked the idea of having a clone of a serial killer who would (no doubt!) turn out to break the mold.

The bottom line, though, is that Girard failed, and dismally so, to carry through with his premise in an entertaining way. Instead, he blundered blindly into poor genetics, he sowed the story with pretty nauseating and gratuitous violence to no constructive purpose that I could see, and as if that wasn't bad enough, he frequently ventured into complete absurdity with his interpretation of how these clones would behave. I can see an amateur, writing his first novel, slipping into this, knowing no better, but I do expect better from a professionally published writer. I have to ask, yet again it seems, what has happened to book editors, when we get sad efforts like this one appearing in hard-cover from a recognized publishing house?

I do not like either title (that is 'title of the novel', not 'title as a short-hand for the entire novel', although that's also true), and with regard to the other one, I started also disliking the novel itself rather intensely, so I put it on hold and switched to this one. The plan was to read this to the point where I stalled in the other one, and then try to read them concurrently, but the other novel was so badly written (it's one tedious and never-ending teen-angst whine) that I was sincerely hoping that this one would be several leagues above the other if I were going to finish either of them. It failed to meet that hope and expectation.

The other novel tells the story from a YA perspective (the main character is a sixteen-year-old). This one tells the same story from the perspective of one of the investigators, Castillo, and thankfully this one was absolutely not a first person PoV - a format I am learning to detest with increasing acerbity with every novel like Project Cain that I make the mistake of reading. The first thing I learned is that Girard is yet another writer who doesn't grasp the difference between 'titled' and 'entitled', but given how dynamic language is, I guess it's not surprising, especially these days. The two will be as interchangeable as flammable and inflammable before so very long.

One more question: what's with the 'Cain' reference? Obviously it's Biblical (and this is confirmed in both novels), but I think Girard is missing the point made in the Bible. Let me clarify one thing before we start: I see no reason whatsoever to take the Bible literally. I take it with a pound or two of salt (Lot's wife notwithstanding as a pillar of the community) There never was any Adam or Eve. The Bible confirms this because those names are generic Hebrew words meaning earth (or red earth) and life. Nor was there an Abel or a Cain. And BTW, all the names you think you know from the Bible are wrong, some of them completely so. For example, anyone who is praying for something in Jesus's name isn't going to get anywhere, because there is no character called "Jesus" in the Holy Bible. Jesus wasn't his name. The mythical Messiah's name was actually much closer to 'Yeshua'. It's really the same name as 'Joshua'.

By that same token, there was neither Able nor Cain. There was Hevel and Qayin, and these names were actually derived from their occupations. Ibil (Hevel - Abel) means herdsman, and qyn (Qayin - Cain) means metal-smith (yes, the Bible lies! Is that a surprise - honestly?). The Bible confirms this when it declares that Cain gave rise to the bronze and iron-working industries in the Middle East though his descendant Tubal-Cain. There are many different views of this story and its meaning, as wikipedia makes clear, but the bottom line is that the Bible talks out of its ass: the story ultimately has no more meaning than your average fairy-tale. It's just something religious nut-jobs made-up to try and gain control of the population by some means other than the ballot box. They're still pursuing this same failed ploy today in the USA.

This story all harks back to the last few verses of Genesis chapter one, where the Biblical god declared that we should all be vegetarians, but humankind fell from that lofty goal and became carnivores. That was the real "fall of man" Abel was a representation of the carnivores, herding sheep and killing lambs for sacrifice to a god; Cain was the metal-worker who no doubt forged the very sword which he then used to slay the heathen Abel. But honestly, who actually wants to worship a god which demands that you slaughter and burn animals, and which finds the stench of burned flesh pleasant? I'm forced to wonder if a god like that found the odors at Auschwitz II - Birkenau pleasant, which would explain why he never lifted a finger to stop the slaughter of his chosen people, would it not?

So Cain slew the carnivore and thus struck a blow for the original wish of this god: that we should all be herbivores. That would also explain why the Hebrew god of the mountains rejected the death penalty and didn't harm Cain. On the contrary, he freed Cain and sent him out to evangelize the vegetarian lifestyle, and even put a mark on his head to protect him from harm! How's that for forgive and forget? You'll note that despite having the ability to resurrect Abel from the dead, this god chose not to do so. What more proof do you need of his complicity in this crime? Once again a god gets a human to do his dirty work for him!

As an aside, I do find it hilarious that in a nation like the USA, sixty percent of the population, all of them no doubt believers, reject forgiveness, and reject their god's decision here (to free the murderer), and instead demand the death penalty. But religion and rationality are not the best of bedfellows, are they? Not that I'm advocating freeing murderers, understand! I'm merely commenting on how completely absurd religion is when you look at it through rational eyes. I have yet to meet a religion which actually makes sense.

So, enough of a digression (but what am I expected to do when Girard rambles on about Cain, names two novels after him, and has yet to explain what that has to do with anything else he's written in those novels. Cain may have been a killer, but he never was a serial killer, so if this were a court case, I'd be the one calling out, "Objection, your honor: relevancy!" Anyway, I am done with this pair. I couldn't face going back to the whining teenager in the other novel, and I've grown so bored and disillusioned with this one - to say nothing of becoming really tired of Girard's over-the-top, salivating relish of gratuitous violence and appalling absurdity (the teen John Wayne Gacy is already wearing clown outfits! Really? Really?) that I really cannot stand the thought of reading another page when I have so many other novels inviting my attention. This is a warty one (or two)!

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Title: The Eyre Affair
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Audible
Rating: WARTY!

This audio novel was very ably narrated by Susan Duerden.

I've already reviewed Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey and One of Our Thursdays is Missing, both of which I found hilarious.

Unfortunately, this novel fell far short of those two; after I'd listened to the first disk I was not impressed at all. By the end of the first disk in One of Our Thursdays is Missing I was already searching the car for my ass, which I'd laughed off. I couldn't find it, so I had to laugh that off, too. Did I make a big mistake in starting the Thursday next series not at the beginning? Is disappointment and regret going to haunt me over this? Only Time Will Tell, and the next edition of that magazine isn't due for a while....

Disk 2 was better, but it still wasn't funny; it reads (listens?) just like a regular thriller. I can now understand why people who read the series from the start suddenly took a dislike to One of Our Thursdays is Missing, because it was really quite a departure from the format of this, the first novel in the series. I think If I'd started this series where it ought to be started, with this volume, I might not have even ventured far enough to read that latter novel, having seen what the earlier ones were like, so I'm glad I read that one out of order! By the time I reached disk 6 (60% in, in ebook terms, around page 210 in real book terms) I was really beginning to tire of this. Yes, it had some lol moments, but in general it was a bit tedious, with nothing very funny happening in general, and nothing really engrossing going on at all. Thursday Next is merely going through the motions, and it was neither a thriller nor a mystery at that point.

In this novel, Thursday (the real world Thursday, that is) is up against Acheron Hades, an arch villain who seems to be able to change his physical appearance at will and at whim, and who is evidently immune to bullets - unlike Thursday who ends up in hospital, shot twice by Hades. Her life was saved by a copy of Jane Eyre which was in her "breast pocket" and which stopped the bullet. This is particularly meaningful to Thursday, because she recalls, as a child, visiting the British Library where the original handwritten copy of Jane Eyre resides, and she ends up in the novel briefly. It was her very presence which caused Rochester's horse to shy when he first meets Eyre! It's also an important point because later, Thursday ventures into Eyre (which in her world does not end like it does in ours) and changes things around a bit so it has the familiar ending. It was that which was championed in the blurb and it was for that reason that I wanted to read it. Unfortunately, the blurb once again lied! More anon.

After Thursday leaves hospital, having recovered somewhat from her, er, shooting pains, two bizarre incidents occur. In the first, she sees her older self in a car, and that other self warns her that Hades is still alive (contrary to police reports that he died in a car accident) and that she should take a job in Swindon, even though it's something of a demotion for her. She resolves to take this advice. She also learns that a man helped save her life after she was shot, and she has reason to believe that this man was Rochester from Eyre. No, not from Eire, from Eyre.... So yes, not at all funny, but really interesting!

As I continued to listen in on Next's adventures, I did grow very fond of Susan Duerden's reading, but even that endearing and warming voice wasn't enough to keep my interest in this novel. While there were some very good bits, those were few and far between, and that far between was filled with tedious run-of-the-mill story-telling which seemed to be going nowhere, and which held no interest for me. As I mentioned, I was looking for the trip to Eyre (not Eire! I've already been to Eire), which refused to turn up!

The most LoL moment, I have to say, was on page 82 where Thursday is accosted at Swindon airport(!) by two students who are handing out anti-Crimea war propaganda. Thursday speaks first:

"I'm not here with the colonel. It was a coincidence."
"I don't believe in coincidences"
"Neither do I. That's a coincidence, isn't it?"

But you have to hear it from Duerden, I think, to really feel it in your funny bone like I did! Contrastingly, there is some really bad writing cropping up, such as, in the chapter header quotation for chapter 20. I routinely skip those things in novels having no interest whatsoever in chapter header quotations, but Duerden reads them, so I was forced to listen. In the real book, Fforde writes, "There are a superabundance of these in the English language." and this is what Duerden read, and I have to say that it's a shameful display of poor grammar from a professional writer.

So as I mentioned, at about 60% in I was tiring of it, and at 70% in, with no hint of Next's supposed visit to Eyre precipitating any time soon, I called it. The novel quite simply was not good enough for me to continue to wait for something to which I'd been looking forward since chapter one, and which the book blurb had quite puffed-up into a major part of the novel. It evidently was not. Would it happen in the next paragraph, or would it not come until the last chapter? The suspense was boring the pants off me (not a good thing to happen whilst driving, let me tell you.... I just lost interest in waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I'd understood that Next would go into Eyre and hilarity would ensue. It hasn't. Not by that point, and I was tired of sitting around wasting my time until it did. Life's too short to waste on un-engaging novels when there are so many out there (in my to-read list at right) begging to be enjoyed!

Like I said, I loved the first two Fforde novels I read, but this one just wasn't in the same league as the others. I plan on reading one more in this series - the next one in line - but this one is a WARTY!

The Waking Dreamer by J E Alexander

Title: The Waking Dreamer
Author: J E Alexander
Publisher: Mechanical Owl Media
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.

Alexander has deftly secreted his prologue away in chapter one. Finally! An author who gets it! I very much appreciated that. It is, however, still a prologue and by definition completely boring and typically pointless. The story actually takes off in chapter two and then it does take off, which I also very much appreciated. I loved chapter two. You could quite comfortably skip chapter one (aka prologue) and lose nothing by it. The problem is that it was all downhill after that, and I could not bring myself to continue to plod through this when there are so many other potentially great stories waiting for me to discover.

Emmett is a foundling, and he was supposed to stay with Nancy, his best friend since college, since she was his legal guardian (his guardian anyway) until his eighteenth birthday, but he did not get along with her husband, and he felt this huge need to leave Houston and go somewhere and do something. There is no good reason given for why he can't wait two more weeks, but the more I read about Emmett, the more I realized the truth about him: he's just stupid, and that explains it. The story really is no smarter than Emmett, either. It's basically your standard fight between good and evil under the ostensibly novel guise of Druids this time, but in this novel, it's nothing but fight, retreat, rinse, repeat, and it quite frankly was boring as hell.

The main character is Emmett (aka the deliberately-kept-ignorant chosen one), and he has a fascination with movies and is frequently quoting them, but instead of going to California and Hollywood, he heads to Florida in pursuit of his mother. I don't really get this, because we've been given no history of Emmett and no reason why he would do this. Chapter two is larded with movie references. I don’t get that either, and neither does any character in the novel, so I had to wonder what the point of that was, but taking that as a premise, as the author evidently wishes us to, why would he not go to California?

Chapter three begins with an unnecessarily detailed description of his route out of Texas and into Louisiana. It reminds me of the first draft of my own Saurus! I've traveled this route (both figuratively and literally!) and I can verify Alexander's descriptions, but it seems pointless, and I wanted it to be over. I'm not a fan of road trip stories, unless there's honestly something worth seeing, and in this case there really wasn't.

Emmett eventually meets Amala (aka the chosen one's babe, who is evidently a Druish Princess...), but we meet her as a child, right before he is born. She's a chestnut-haired child with a snake. She's accompanied by red-haired Rhiannon, her de facto mom (if not biological - it's a prologue, after all - why would it tell us anything useful?!), and a man named Oliver, who is possibly her father. They both disappear after the first chapter. The trio has arrived in a large city (which seems to encompass an improbably large number of abandoned buildings!), and are looking for something, searching in disregard of personal safety because the local gangs have learned the hard way to avoid this trio of Druids. Kudos to Alexander for taking this away from the usual suspects and introducing something which, while not new, is at least different, but he does nothing new with it, and worse, he lards up the story with so many other tropes and clichés that the novelty of this one aspect is sadly tarnished.

With the help of Amala's "wisdom" (the snake), they find the house they're looking for. It’s old, rotten, abandoned (of course), fetid and filthy, yet this is where the old woman they seek has chosen to meet them because she's birthing a child! Why? Why there? Again, no explanation. She's is in process of delivering Emmett - the eponymous waking dreamer - from a street woman who is evidently an addict and likely will die from this delivery. This woman disappears after the first chapter, too.

After the baby comes into the world, so does evil - "The Grinning Man" with the tired trope of red eyes, who wants to taste the child, but he's repelled into the darkness by the old woman - the Archivist, believe it or not, shades of The Matrix - because it’s not yet his time! When will soon be now? Since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, let me digress a minute and talk not so much about this novel specifically (I have read only fifty percent of it), but much more generally. I've always wondered why evil actually gets "a time". Even in the Bible, the Adversary is loosed ('cos he's a loser?!) for a spell after being bound for a thousand years. Why? Is 'Good' not strong enough to prevent evil's time? I find that sad (and in the Bible very revealing about how extraordinarily limited the god of the Israelites actually was)! I also don’t get the twin tropes of evil vs. good, and of prophecy. It's pathetic, but sometimes you can get a good story out of it despite the boring clichés; unfortunately, we don’t get that good story anywhere near often enough.

I don’t mind a story at all which has these elements if it’s well-written, but they rarely are. Instead, they regurgitate deathly-tired tropes without so much as a stab at logic, let alone justification. It would be nice to read something truly different for a change. But of course there must be the balance between good and evil, for without evil, how can we know good? You're heard that one, right? Well let me put in my too sensible no censorship two cents (my sense, too?) on that: I can tell how good a carrot cake is without having to have a large carrot forced up my ass first…. But that's just me, and I don’t like large carrots up my ass, but if you do, then by all means substitute something you really don’t like instead, even if it involves neither carrot nor ass, so you can make the same comparison.

Now, do you agree that we can tell good from evil without having to experience the evil? Do you agree that it’s possible, for example, to experience the joy of a good night's sleep without having to be forcibly kept awake for several days to contrast the evil of that with the good of peaceable rest? Of course you do. Can you experience the good of holding a baby or enjoying a young child's laughter without having to know horrid details of beaten, starving, and tortured, or murdered children? I can. I'm pretty darned sure that sure you can, too (two can?), at least if you're anywhere near "normal' (which I don’t even claim for myself!). So empirically, we appear to have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that you do not need evil to enjoy and appreciate good. Why is it that all-too-many writers cannot?

So we cannot seem to find a new angle here, and we cannot get away from mindless repetition. It's like a formulaic pop song: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, with not even a middle eight, and it's not appreciated precisely because it's always the same. Evil attacks, good retreats. Good is always limited, passive, and weak, evil is always powerful, aggressive, and sneakily unpredictable. Who wants to read something like that with no leavening at all? It;s made worse, if that's possible, by Alexander's spastic dedication to endless mystery, because no one will tell anyone anything, least of all explain what's going on to Emmett. Half-way through a novel I expect something to be revealed, but nothing is.

On page eight, "…her ophidian friend who raised its head…" struck me as a really weird sentence! You don't usually partner 'who' with 'its'! Interesting word usements he structures, as Steve Martin might phrase it. I've mentioned this before - and recently - but it bears repeating: the 'monkey' (as an insult to humans) trope has now officially been forcibly rammed tediously beyond tiresome and deeply into boring and unoriginal. Writers need to find something fresh to have spill from the mouths of their villains. For me, monkey isn’t an insult at all, actually, I'm rather proud of human genetic heritage.

Back to our story in progress: So Emmett, on his illogical and precipitous journey (we'll learn that Emmett isn't the stoutest stave in the rack), arrives in Florida late at night, running low on gas, and takes a sad-looking exit from the Interstate into the middle of nowhere to gas-up. Did I mention that this guy is pretty clueless? He's had all day to do this and he leaves it until he has no choice. Actually, I found that hard to credit and it hit me with the harsh realization that, yep, I am reading a novel. I hate it when the illusion bubble pops! Even if he were a complete moron, which he could well be, Emmett still would have stopped frequently for rest-room breaks and junk food binges. I can't credit that he would get into this situation ordinarily, so I have to conclude that he's stupid (and an ingrate it turns out). Of course, as a writer, Alexander has to get his character into some sort of position for the dramatic rescue to occur, evidently. I just think there were far better ways of doing it than the one we got! And it exposes the plot weakness: why did Amala and Kieran leave it until quite literally the last minute to rescue Emmett? Why have they been absent from his entire life until now? Again, No Explanation!

Like Batman and Robin, these two supposedly heroic figures spring from nowhere and take out Emmett's attackers. They save his life and this is where ingratitude sets in. Three days later he wakes from the attack in Oregon, diametrically opposite the corner of the country he was in, and he has not a shred of gratitude for those who helped him. Given his breezy personality from earlier chapters, I found this incredible, too, and another slap up-side the face reminding me, hey, no matter how immersed you were becoming, you're just reading a novel, just get used to it!

So what went wrong? Well, this story started coming apart big-time for me around chapters seven and eight. This is when they’re at Silvan Dea (which serves no purpose for me but to keep reminding me of Opus Dei - from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code - for some reason!). To begin with, it had made no sense that Emmett was pissed off with the people who saved his life, but it made far less sense that these people quite literally explained nothing whatsoever to him despite repeated promises that all would be explained. If he were going to get angry, it would be at his nonsensically and deliberately being kept in the dark about anything and everything. But as I said, he's not exactly the most powerful wand in Olivander's. Oh, they do keep on telling him they'll explain, but they actually explain absolutely nothing ever. I'm fond of mystery, but mystery for the sake of being mysterious is bullshit. It did not increase my anticipation or pique my interest. Instead, it made me think "amateur" and additionally, I've started to dislike Emmett, which isn't a good thing if I'm expected to keep reading this!

On some minor issues, I don’t get Mrs Carmichael at the restaurant. She sounds British but there is no other indication of her origin. If she's American, her mode of speech is way-the-hell off! Neither do I really get Emmett's obsession with movies. It's never rationalized or justified. Yeah. I get that you give your character a quirk or two to make them memorable, or interesting, or intriguing, but this doesn't seem to be working very well here, especially when he persists in movie references with people who quite clearly are not getting a thing he's saying. This tells me that Emmett is both too lacking in empathy to note that his obscure references are falling on deaf ears, and he's also too stupid to adjust his interactions based on their reaction.

So at about one third the way through this, it had become a real slog to keep reading it. Chapters nine and ten revealed two facts to me: The Waking Dreamer owes a lot to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, and Alexander is yet another writer who doesn't understand that staunch ≠ stanch. I've seen this a lot lately, and not just in self-published books. Are there really that many illiterate book editors out there? While we're on this topic, I really don't see that "undulating" is a viable partner of "startling speed"! Yes, it's not technically wrong, but doesn't 'undulating' suggest something of a more steady, measured motion to you? It was that pairing of implied leisurely motion with the definite emphasis on speed which really struck me as bizarre, and pulled me out of the story again! Yeah, I may be nit-picking, but these things are important when there are so many of them hitting you one after another. I think any reader can forgive a writer a few faux pas, especially if the story is a good one overall, but even a good story is dragged down when so many writing issues crop-up in such a short space of reading time.

I like Joss Whedon well enough, although I'm not given to building shrines to him and worshiping him as all-too-many fans evidently do, but for some reason which I can't quite define, the Buffy series was nauseating to me. I think part of the problem at least was the bullshit martial-arts fighting against all-but-overwhelming odds in every-single-episode (not that I watched it, but I've seen enough bits and pieces of it to have the heavy weight of that distinct impression pressed sorely upon me!). The Waking Dreamer seems fond of ripping-off that aspect of it very addictively, and that's what ultimately turned me off this novel, not only for the tedious metronomic, absolutely unchanging repetitiveness of it, but also, with both the inclusion of this nonsense to begin with, and in the poor writing of it. For example, at one point we're told that the Druids who are fighting are a well-honed team working fluently together in the fight ("...one pushing forward as the other guarded their rear...", but very shortly afterwards, we learn that one of them is killed precisely because no one was watching his rear (and apparently his magic wasn't either)!

These people supposedly have access to powerful magic, but when it comes down to it, they're reduced to common bar-room brawling, and Alexander seems to have no abhorrence of describing it with relish and no small amount of salivation. For me, that both betrays and cheapens the magical aspects of a story. If Alexander wants to write fantasy, then bring on the swords and dragons and go at it with all of the trope brutality that genre implies (this is why I'm not a big fan of historical fantasy: it's far, far too clichéd), but if he's writing a modern magic story, then I don't get this medieval portrayal. Nor do I get why the Druids are so weak when they're in their own grove amongst nature, surrounded by trees! It's been pushed down our throat thus far that this is their "element", yet they're still at a huge disadvantage. If they were fighting in the city, this would make at least some kind of sense. On their own turf? Not so much.

The improbable fantasy elements in play here are exposed even further when Alexander uses a phrase like "vicious attack" in the midst of a fight wherein the aggressors have proven themselves beyond vicious already, and which is being pressed with no regard whatsoever for Marquis of Queensberry rules (or any other, for that matter)! How much more vicious could that one specific attack actually be? These attackers go to eleven! Or are we to understand that the attack up to this point was quite a mild one (as mindless, brutal, overwhelming assaults go), but that the blow which struck Sophie was a particularly naughty one? Did the attacker touch the hollow of her thigh, as the omnipotent god of the Hebrews did to overcome the mere mortal, "Old Man" Jacob?! That was vicious! How dare they?

And if it's down to brute-force fighting, why are the Druids not armed with automatic weapons? I mean for goodness sakes an M2 Browning .50 cal. machine gun would readily take care of these "Revenants" no matter what their numbers, so why employ an iron stave (and never a staff!) in the defense? Do machine guns not contain iron? In the absence of good sense, the Revenants win the day, forcing the Druids to retreat, so I guess the force was not strong with these Druids after all. I read no explanation as to why evil had become so powerful, nor why the Druids were so laughably weak, or why this battle between dark and light was even taking place at all, but it wasn't as sadly laughable as the character Ellie, who appeared from nowhere with brother Troy. Is she a "baby sister" or a "woman"? The two are not the same, but she gets both descriptions. Why belittle a woman in such an insulting manner, making her whimper, to boot? There was no need for that.

We go immediately from that to the prospect of them entering icily-cold running water and the immediate concern over Sebastian's open wound - like he'll bleed to death in the water. What? They weren't concerned about this before? If they were not, then there's even less need to be concerned about it here! The icy water will stanch the flow. Sebastian ought to be more staunch!

In the bigger picture, for Amala to expect that Emmett will have waking "dreams" (she means visions), and not even have the decency and courtesy to both educate him and to warn him about them is beyond irresponsible in the context of their circumstances. It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of time for this. At that point I not only disliked Emmett, I no longer like Amala, who is way too mysterious to be even intelligible, let alone likable, but if the plan is to pair her off with Emmett, then they're made for each other, as clueless as they both are.

It was when Alexander started gearing up for version three of his titanic and brutal battle between overwhelming hoards of Revenants versus the handful of Druids that I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" I see no point in beating my head against the brick wall that this novel all-too-rapidly became, when I can instead, dive into the warm, welcoming waters of something fresh and new. Time is short, but my patience is shorter! This novel is a confirmed warty! It's going nowhere and I'm going in search of something more entertaining.