Emerald Green by Kerstin Gier

Title: Emerald Green
Author: Kerstin Gier
Publisher: Henry Holt
Rating: WARTY!

I started blogging novels just this year, and the first two novels I blogged were the first two of the Edelstein (or Ruby Red) trilogy, so it's fitting that I end this year with a review of the final volume of the trilogy, Emerald Green You can read my review of Ruby Red and of Sapphire Blue.

Once you've skipped the prologue as I did (this is the third in a trilogy! Were not the two previous volumes prologue enough, for goodness sakes?! Enough with the worthless prologues!) this novel starts out with the ultimate in cut-price fakery: Gwen having a nightmare of being stabbed in the heart. That cheap fraud was entirely unappreciated, but it does have a small bearing on a prediction her supposedly psychic relative makes later in the novel. Then we're plunged into Gwen's rather tiresome moping over leading male Major Jerk Gideon (that's not his rank and name, it's merely his entire personality). Gier repeats this type of cheap thrill again at the end of chapter nine. I thought she was a more seasoned writer than that.

I love Gier's trilogy, but for pity's sake can we not find any YA writers who can write a decent love story? The fact that this is a juvenile novel does not automatically entail a juvenile romance! Can we not find YA writers who can write a novel which actively teaches young women that pricks like like Gideon are not worth an ounce of emotion or a teaspoonful of tears? Must we brainwash our young women into thinking it's okay, even normal, to be a puppet in some manipulative scum-wad of a guy's self-idolization side-show? That it's okay to be abused and ill treated? Seriously, something needs to be done about this.

Gier does provide some humor (notably from Gwen's awesome friend Lesley) that lightens the load, and the 'fairy dies' remark was hilarious and very welcome, but even the humor is severely retrenched as compared with the first two volumes. Lesley carried the first volume, and Xemerius the animated gargoyle carried the second, but no one is shouldering that task in the third and it suffers for it. Gier doesn't lard-up the pages with tragedy anywhere near as thickly as some other writers do, but it's still tedious to read repeated references to "Gwen's tragic love life" on page after page after page. We get it. She broke up and she's broken up. Enough already. If I wanted to read reams of trash like that I'd buy a Harlequin or a Mills & Boon for goodness sakes!

In this volume, it turns out that Gwen is really Harry Potter and must die before they can be free of the evil! I am not making this up. On the good side of things, Gwen does start taking charge of her own life at this point, which is a welcome relief. Aside from her sorry and debilitating poor judgment with regard to Gideon the Asshat, she's making her own decisions and not at all willing to be buffeted around by the winds of male whim. She even makes a time travel trip when she's already in a time travel trip, which was much welcomed, and very cool. Nothing bizarre happened from it, however, which I confess I found a bit disappointing!

She finally starts to get somewhat suspicious of Count Saint-Germain, which is about bloody time, but even when she tries to impress upon Gideon how important this is, he's still a jerk. Her sister Charlotte is a jerk, too. The 'no-one is telling anyone anything' rule is still in play, so despite Gwen's importance to this project, no one is telling her a thing, not even her "mother" whom I have long suspected actually isn't her mother.

We do finally get the reverse angle on the scene from the first novel where, on her third accidental time-travel trip, Gwen sees herself in an upstairs classroom at her school. We also get a rather limp attempt by Gier to explain away one of the big issues I had in the first two volumes with this urgency to have Gwen do this on that date and time, and do that on this date and time. She can time travel for goodness sakes! It doesn't matter if she goes to the ball on this day or ten years from now - it's in the past and she can go there whenever she wants! Nor does Gier's "explanation" cover the fact that there were mysterious events in the past which a quick and surreptitious time-travel trip would have resolved, but for unexplained reasons, no one ever did this or even thought of it! Amateur hour.

Gier's excuse is that the Count is orchestrating all this and calls the shots, but neither Gwen nor I bought this! And personally, I see no reason whatsoever for her to actually go to this ball at all - except that there's this serious fracas at the ball (which would not have taken place if she and Gideon had not been there). Nothing else happens, so this stands out as no more than a really weak attempt at plotting on Gier's part.

So in the end, for once, I was pretty much right about everything I'd predicted for this trilogy! You know the writing's bad if my guesses are good. I never thought I'd do this after enjoying the first two volumes so well, but I have no choice but to rate this volume as warty. The story was dull; I found myself skipping page after page because it was, quite simply, uninteresting. The secrets were not even secret. Gwen's tiresome behavior was, well, tiresome. Gideon's big reveal that oh-so-predictably won her clueless heart in the end did nothing to excuse his behavior. The ending went on for far longer that was tenable, dragging out forever with tedious and pointless fancy dress party, and then a lousy excuse for a showdown that was over before it got underway. The epilogue wasn't worth reading. Sorry, but WARTY! What a horrid way to end the year - and to wait so long to end it this way! Then it was Twenty-THIRTEEN...!

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Title: Dhalgren
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

This is the last ebook I shall review this year and what a sad way to end! This novel is an object lesson in why you should never ever ever ever ever ever ever trust a publisher's book blurb! Or William Gibson. It was because of the blurb - a city that reshapes itself - and Gibson's recommendation that I decided to give this a look, but I wasted my time. I forced myself through about 25% of this, and even so had to skip page after page of some of the most flatulent and tedious drivel I've ever encountered, and that was more than I could stomach of this insanely pretentious trash. And where it's not pretentious, it seems to smack of racism to me. But maybe that's just me. The main character, who shall remain nameless, has nowhere to go and no means to get there. That's it. That's the best you can hope for from this.

This novel is one of, if not the foremost of the dismal messes it's been my misfortune to read. It's vague, pointless, wandering (where it's not blundering), clueless, endless reams of unattributed conversation, interspersed with massive unbroken speeches, interspersed with random, brain-dead sex with the nearest warm body. There's no plot. There's no story, and no hope for it. It's a dissipated, cluelessly meandering, pointless, meaningless wad of drivel that has the cube root of nothing to say and evidently needs SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES to say even that little. Save yourself the money and go listen to some kid who is at the point in life right before they begin to talk, and listen to the babble. It's the same as you'll get in this novel, but not only is the kid-babble free, it's far more entertaining than this can ever hope to be. I'm serious: go watch this You Tube video and see if it isn't ten times the entertainment Delaney can offer you with his sad excuse for a story - and it's essentially the same thing Delaney is charging you for.

Beka Cooper by Tamora Pierce

Title: Beka Cooper
Author: Tamora Pierce
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WARTY!

This audio CD is narrated by Susan Denaker and I wasn't impressed.

This was the last audio book I have for review in 2013, and I'm sorry to have to report that it was a huge disappointment. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the previous Tamora Pierce novel I reviewed, Alanna, but I did realize that it was below my age range, and there were parts of it which were entertaining even so, so I rated it generously. I decided to give it another chance with a different story that looked like it might be more grown up, and I was even more disappointed with this one than I was with the first one!

The novel was told in the first person - like these primitive and ill-educated people kept journals routinely of everything they ever did! But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that this novel was the most tedious I have listened to in a long time. It was mind-numbingly boring and totally uninteresting, larded with horrendously irrelevant and tedious details of a person's life that did absolutely nothing whatsoever to move the story anywhere but down the toilet. I don't even care what age group this was written for, because it sucked by any standard. This is a warty read and I am seriously done with Tamora Pierce.

The Revenant of Thraxton Hall by Vaughn Entwistle

Title: The Revenant of Thraxton Hall
Author: Vaughn Entwistle
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of novels which take real historical characters and have their way with them. It seems disrespectful, if not misleading or downright insulting, so I must confess up front that I had a problem with that, and it was only because it was Doyle and Wilde that I found myself drawn to this one. Who wouldn't be intrigued by a pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde?! But given that Holmes is fictional and Wilde is not, then I would certainly consider the next best thing: Holmes's creator, Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and Wilde. Curiously, Wilde's birth year, 1854, is the same as Holmes's fictional birth year. So this is what was offered, but it did fall a bit flat for me. Doyle seemed altogether too adolescent, and Wilde was nowhere near as entertaining as he ought to have been. It's difficult to see where this can go as a series.

I should confess also that I do not believe in any of the psychic and supernatural nonsense purveyed in this novel. There is no respectable evidence whatsoever that there is any such things as ghosts, life after death, mind-reading, levitation, teleportation, clairvoyance, or any of that flim-flam, and there is much evidence that the people claiming these abilities or experiences are at best misguided and lacking a solid scientific education, and at worst, delusional, lying, or knowingly fraudulent.

Having made that clear, I do like a good supernatural story, but have a hard time finding one. I did like this novel and enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go in terms of becoming a series, especially since there were so many "trifling annoyances" in the text, which I shall delve into shortly. This is a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and it takes place immediately after he's killed off Holmes (in tandem with with his arch enemy Professor James Moriarty) at Reichenbach Falls at the end of his story: The Final Problem published in December of 1893. In this fictional account by Entwistle, Doyle wants to move on from these trifling (I love that word!) stories and create something new (in actual fact he wanted to devote more time to his historical fiction), but the reading public hates him for destroying their beloved hero to the point where they're pelting him with rotten fruit and vegetables at one point (which seemed rather excessive and exaggerated to me).

It so happens that Doyle is contacted in a rather mysterious way by someone who is a medium, and who has foreseen her own destruction at a seance to take place in the near future. Doyle is angered by, and dismissive of this encounter. Later, he starts to feel that he was wrong, yet when he revisits the address where he met this woman (very mysteriously in the dark), he discovers no one is there. His friend Oscar Wilde becomes so intrigued by the story that he volunteers to accompany Doyle when he goes to the inaugural meeting of the Society for Psychical Research where this deadly seance is due to take place.

The novel is well written, if a little too modern in general style for what Entwistle seemed like he was trying to do, which is to evoke Doyle's style. Indeed, it reads more like an Agatha Christie or a Charles Dickens novel than a Holmes mystery. The Victorian influence in some areas of the novel seemed at odds with the modern influence in others. For example, with the "disguising" of names and addresses. Yes, it was done back then, but given the rather modern tone of the novel, I saw no point in doing it here. Nor did it really disguise the address: 42 _______ Crescent! Victorian London was large, but I'll warrant that there were few "crescents" in it even then, so I found that weak attempt at anonymity to be rather fatuous, and especially given that the blank line was repeated annoyingly often!

There were many other minor issues, such as the curious case of the repetitive repeating! Yes, we know that Wilde has full lips and large hands, and that he smokes Turkish cigarettes! There honestly is no need to lard the text with repeated references to these attributes.

Entwistle purposefully misspells the name of Daniel Home (a well-known "psychic" fraud) - using 'Hume' throughout this novel. The name was pronounced 'Hume', but it was spelled 'Home', and Home himself added the 'Dunglas' in the middle of his name - it was not his name from birth. Contrary to descriptions used in the novel, Home wasn't American (not by birth). He merely resided there, but he was, in fact just as Scots as Doyle. Entwistle owns up to this misspelling in the Author's end note, but I found it rather insulting that this author evidently thinks that his readers are not smart enough to grasp that Home should be pronounced 'Hume' once it's explained. Why not embrace it and have one of the characters mention this at the start? I have to say I disagree with his approach here. And contrary to Entwistle's assertion that Home was never caught faking, he was indeed caught faking on several occasions, and damning evidence of his fraud was discovered in his belongings after his death.

On the topic of names, I don’t get why Entwistle consistently refers to the main male protagonist as Conan Doyle. It’s not an hyphenated name and is the equivalent of referring to Wilde as Wills Wilde, which he does not do. It seems oddly irrational and inconsistent to me. Whilst on the topic of Doyle, I might mention that he was primarily an ophthalmologist, not a family physician as such. Although he obviously did have the training, it's a bit misleading to represent him as a general practitioner, especially since he really never practiced!

Note that contrary to Entwistle's misleading description, moths do not eat clothes or other fabrics. It is the larvae of the moths which do the eating, most specifically the larvae of Tineola bisselliella, and then they eat only natural fibers preferably containing keratin, not synthetic - which of course were in any case scarce in Doyle's era. On this same lack of understanding, Entwistle appears not to grasp that the plural of candelabrum is candelabra - as any writer of that era would have known. While candelabrums is acceptable (odd as it may appear to some of us), I doubt a writer of that era, which Entwistle is evidently trying to emulate, would employ it. He gets further into trouble with this when he employs the singular candelabrum to indicate what is clearly more than one candlestick on p131.

There are also inconsistencies in the novel. The most glaring one, to me, was that Lord Web arrived after we’d been informed that Thraxton Hall had been cut off from outside society by the flooded river, and yet not one person remarks upon this. If the Hall was cut off, then how did Webb get there?

It may seem inappropriate to involve Doyle in the supernatural, given his dedication to resolving mysteries in perfectly mundane and scientific manner through his Holmes character, but the truth is that Doyle was sadly gullible when it came to the psychic charlatans of his era. Indeed it was why Houdini, the scourge of frauds, broke off his friendship with Doyle.

Entwistle is misleading in claiming a big age difference between Henry Sidgwick and his wife Eleanor. They were close to the same age, and both in their early to mid-fifties in 1893, so she was not the young flirt as she's rather shamefully represented here. Indeed, she was dedicated to women's issues, so I found Entwistle's depiction of her to be insulting.

But enough nit-picking. What of the story in general? I found it enjoyable and engrossing, notwithstanding the problems I had with it. I wanted to read it and was interested in what happened, so the author did his job. I was intrigued by the idea that the medium, Lady Thraxton, might have been a ghost. In order to find out, you will have to read the novel! She was definitely a charming and interesting character who was under-used in my opinion, but as appealing as she was, I found myself far more intrigued by another character who played far too small a role in the story, most of it undercover. No spoilers for you there!

So, in short, I found this novel to be a worthy read. It was very easy to get through it, but it seems to me that it will appeal more to they who enjoy Victorian supernatural tales than for they who are fans of Sherlock Holmes or of Oscar Wilde.

Light by M John Harrison

Title: Light
Author: M John Harrison
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: WARTY!

I've often looked at Iain Banks's novels on bookshelves and always put them back. Now I'm glad I did because he wholeheartedly recommended this novel in a newspaper review, so it tells me all I need to know about him! M John Harrison has a host of novels out there. Whether it's a heavenly host, I can't say since this is the first of his that I've ever read, but it isn't looking good.

I don't normally remark upon covers, since the author has little or nothing to do with the cover unless the novel is self-published. This blog is about writers, writing, and stories, not publishers, editors, and cover-artists, but I have to say that the cover design here fails in that it looks dirty - like even a brand new copy of this novel is soiled with dirty spots! Not pleasant, but perhaps that's the intended effect? It certainly portended my experience with this novel.

Harrison wastes no time in making it clear that he's one of those annoying authors who, because they went to the effort of creating a back-story for every minor character in their novel, has to share it with you in its entirety. And he's also one of those authors who is so proud of said characters that he has to parade them all out before you in the first few chapters, plot, story, and pace be hanged. The odd thing is that it turns out that none of his three main characters are in any way connected!

He's also apparently frightened by female bodies because he can’t talk about their "private parts". Hence he hides them all under the generic title of "sex". A man's hand doesn’t touch her vulva or her labia, or even her Mons Veneris, it touches her sex! Having said that, the story proved just about readable for at least the first one hundred pages, although I had to skip page after page of boring exposition - not of the plot, but of irrelevant or minor, or uninteresting characters. It’s not hard to see how this novel swelled to over four hundred pages. In the end I was reading only every third chapter because only one of his three main characters was interesting to me.

One of these three is a guy who is some sort of a weird serial killer in contemporary London, who also works in quantum computing. Another is a woman who lives many centuries in his future, who has become so tired of her body that she's dispensed with it and become part of her spaceship. Her problem is that the spaceship seems to have a mind all of its own - in addition to hers! She's trying to find out what the deal is. This was the character who interested me. There was not enough of her and what there was didn't make a lot of sense. There is a third character of whom I'm not even sure. It’s either the owner of a tank farm, or it's the guy who got liberated accidentally from the tank farm. Technically there's a fourth character - a shadowy figure known as The Shrander, who seems to haunt the serial killer, and which the killer's ex-wife (the one who has a "sex" in place of a vulva) also claims to have seen, so one quarter the way through, things were disturbingly vague, with not much happening or looking like it would happen, and with Harrison spewing cyberpunk terminology like he's in a William Gibson impersonator contest.

In the end, I read a bit more than a third of this, and it wasn't the first third. It was a third interspersed with the other two utterly boring, and in the end irrelevant to the novel, thirds. The interesting third featured the K-ship girl Seria Mau Genlicher, who has a name very evocative of the names used by Greg Bear for the advanced humans in his Eon series of novels. I liked this part of this novel, about finding and exploiting advanced alien technology from a vanished race. While there's nothing new or original to it, it was well done and had a really professional sci-fi feel to it. The other two thirds were about the most tediously boring people imaginable, and contributed, for me, absolutely nothing to this story.

That one third I would have rated worthy because it was engaging, particularly the capricious and moody Seria. The other two thirds are pure, adulterated trash. If Harrison has novels out there which he has written in the same idiom as the one good third here, then they might be worth reading, but if his writing is more like the 66% trash content here, then they're warty without question. That's the reason I'm rating this warty: it's purely on a percentage basis, and the novel had no ending!

Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

Title: Curtsies & Conspiracies
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WORTHY!

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

This novel is the first in a series:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Title: A Christmas Carol
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher: Recorded Books (originally Chapman & Hall).
Rating: worthy!

Well this took much longer than I anticipated (it's only three disks), interrupted as it was with falling asleep on the couch (very comfortable), Doctor Who (slightly disappointing), Man of Steel (much less than entertaining) and kid assaults demanding attention over one thing or another, but I eventually got it done, and I recommend this one.

Dickens (whose face could have readily passed for that of a woman's in 1843, when he wrote this) divides up this book into five "staves", matching the musical tone he set by naming the story a "carol". These staves substitute for chapters, and he wastes no time in impressing upon us that Jacob Marley is "dead as a doornail". Dickens's writing is sharp, descriptive, humorous, and very accessible. Scrooge begins to be haunted the moment he puts his key to his door as he heads indoors one chill Christmas Eve, seeing his old partner Marley's face in the door, and shortly afterwards being visited by Marley's ghost, about whom there's "more of the gravy than the grave", Scrooge observes humorously. He's warned that he must change his ways unless he wants to end up like Marley, forced to drag with him the weighty chains he forged in his own life, made from one mean or thoughtless act after another.

The ghosts of past, present, and future appear on after another, each presenting a more dire picture than the last, with the first's images actually not being dire at all, but being a rather pleasant, if somewhat saddening, trip down memory lane for Scrooge. The last visit is horrible because it depicts Scrooge's own lonely, miserable funeral. It's rather sad that the name 'Scrooge' has come to carry such negative connotations these days, because although he was every inch as his name suggests when the story begins, by the end he has completely reformed, and become the very antithesis of his popular defamatory epitaph. I recommend this strongly, and I recommend visiting wikipedia's page on the novel for some interesting details about this story, including a picture of Dickens from right around the time this novella was written.

Fifty Sheds of Grey by CT Grey

Title: Fifty Sheds of Grey
Author: CT Grey
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: worthy

Fifty Sheds of Grey is quite plainly and simply hilarious. It's a small format hardback designed for all those who wish to shed their inhibitions and out their hibitions, and it comes replete with pictures (grey scale, of course) of assorted garden sheds, gardens, garden tools and gardenias (at least he thinks that's what they were, he confesses with a shrub of his shoulders). But it's the sly text interspersed with the pictures which is more than enough to make you exclaim "Garden Bennet!", and then for your exclaim to come around and get your ticker going ninety to the dozen so you can claim it on your tocks return.

It's a parody of course (which contrary to popular opinion is not a cross between a parrot and a chickadee), but the irony (no, that's not a condition of the patella and it certainly has nothing to do with Pat or Ella, so they claim, but offend in knee is a friend in deed) is that it's doubtlessly better than the original.

I haven't read the original, but I did read Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey which was also hilarious, so it at least qualifies me to have a laugh at their expense account.

I think the best way to recommend this book is to pass on a few quotes (unless the poor things have passed on already), so as Mrs Forficula said to her philandering husband, earwig go:

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked. "When I'm done, you won't be able to sit down for weeks."

She nodded.

"Okay," I said, putting the three-piece suite on eBay.

She told me it turned her on to have her movements restricted when she made love. I looked around - I was going to have to get a smaller shed.

As we stood there naked in Ikea, we came to an important decision. Next time, only one of us would wear a blindfold.

"I'm a very naughty girl," she said, biting her lip. "I need to be punished." So I invited my mother to stay for the weekend.

In short, I highly recommend this for a laugh or to be or not to bean. It makes a great bathroom book, or even a book to keep in the shed.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

Title: Throne of Glass
Author: Sarah J Mass
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WARTY!

So here's yet another story drinking from the well of the TV series Merlin where the king detests magic and persecutes its practitioners for one reason or another, and everyone is in secret and in hiding and whatever else it takes to avoid notice. It’s quickly becoming a tired trope. But hey, we have a title and an author's name which rhyme: Throne of Glass by Sarah J Mass! That's a novelty. Or maybe not - I guess it depends upon how Maas is pronounced, doesn't it? But then it also depends upon how glass is pronounced! If it's pronounced the way some Londoners might do it for example (glah-ss) then we're good too, if not too good.

Apparently the roots of this novel came out of fiction which Maas was publishing at Fiction Press, a site I wasn't even aware existed until I started looking into this author. This does show that there is so much there is out there, and that there is little hope we have of even becoming aware of it, let alone of getting a handle on it!

One question which arises from this is: who is the real Sarah Maas? The impression I got reading this novel was that this is really just wish-fulfillment. Maas is really writing about herself: seeing herself as the main character in this novel. Don't believe me? Check out an image of Maas and an image from the book cover side-by-side. Is this resemblance coincidental?

There is a better image for the cover, much more dramatic, but far less representative of the poor excuse for a hero which we actually get:

Anyway, this novel is the first in the Throne of Glass series and is succeeded by Crown of Midnight which I've also reviewed. It's essentially The Hunger Games goes fantasy, with hero, eighteen-year-old Celaena Sardothien (because you know that there's no way in hell that a fantasy novel main character can ever have a name which even remotely approaches ordinary!) coming to the King of Adarlan's castle to fight in a sudden death (lol) competition with 23 other assorted assassins, thieves, and warriors, the winner being declared 'greatest assassin' and king's champion, so it would seem. In short it's exactly the plot of The Hunger Games. Now why a ruthless warrior king would even need such a person is a mystery, but let me ask this: are there three countries in a row on their map: Oma Adarlan Clementine?! That would be cool!

'Celaena' reminds me far too much of hyaena, which is more commonly spelled 'hyena'. That's not a great image to have in mind regarding your main character's name. OTOH, female spotted hyeanas do have some really interesting genitalia, so perhaps this is suggestive of something about our character's machismo?

We start in the salt mines where Celaena has been held prisoner for a year because she killed her "overseer". Why that level of crime wouldn't result in her being killed outright for it is something of a mystery, especially since she's a known master assassin (the best in the "world" so we're repeatedly reminded). So you steal, you get sent to the salt mine, you fail to pay your debts, you get sent to the salt mine, you murder, you get sent to the salt mines. Way to boost the murder rate y'all! If there's no difference in penalty, then why would anyone refrain from murdering in furtherance of a crime? One more question. Just one. How on Earth did they ever capture the world's very best assassin? Just asking...!

Celaena's constant whine, when she's not whining about how dirty she is, is how abused she's been in the salt mine over the last year. The problem is that she shows no evidence of infirmity or major weight-loss, or even discomfort (if we discount the dirt) from her long year spent hacking salt out of the rocks and uttering, no doubt, a few salty phrases in the process. But Celaena apparently has an out, because the prince of the realm himself has arrived at the mine to invite her to be his champion assassin. She's led to the room where he awaits her, through a multi-story building where her captors lead her up and down staircases, and back and forth along corridors to "fool" her, but she isn't even blind-folded, so what the heck they thought they were doing is an amusing side-show.

Superficially, Celaena's constant planning as to how she would defeat the people around her and escape, seems like something an assassin would do, but I don’t honestly believe that this is the way it would be. Obviously I don’t know how an assassin thinks, but that's not what's important. This isn't a documentary, it’s a novel, and it’s the writer's job to make me believe. Maas failed here for two reasons. The first is that it seems to me that an assassin would be much more likely to operate on instinct, with "operational plans" constantly running through their mind on a low-level rather than occupying their foremost active thought processes, so Maas's rather primitive habit of having Celaena consciously think through weapons and tactics became a bit tiresome after a while. What was more tiresome however, and this is the second issue which bothered me, was the fact that Celaena accepted the prince's offer to fight for him, to become his champion, and to be set free after four years (or was it to go forth after three years?). So why was she constantly planning attack and escape? It made no sense, unless she was not only being dishonest with the prince, but also being dishonest with herself!

Another depressing factor is that it was patently obvious that there would be a sad trope of a love-triangle here, between the captain of the guard, with whom Celaena will have to work, and the prince, for whom Celaena will have to work. It’s a bit pathetic that the assassin has nothing better to think of than how hot the captain and the prince are. Seriously: she's been badly abused (purportedly) and under-fed (supposedly) in captivity, literally working in a salt mine. Although the king stated that she was not to be harmed (since he wanted her to live long and not prosper), she was routinely and viciously whipped (so we're told, although all evidence is to the contrary), putting her at risk of a potentially deadly infection (although with all that salt around, her chances of actually being infected with any common vector of disease would seem rather low to me) and none of that has seemed to have any noticeable effect on her!

So the problem is that she's tired and weak, and she's under-fed, her body wasted and hurting, yet all her mind can think of his how hot these two guys are? That’s truly pathetic, and it made me lose all respect for Celaena as a character and Maas as a writer. Does Maas, as a woman, honestly think that all women think about is how hot or not guys are? Or does she merely think that YA readers are so undemanding and stupid that they don’t require anything better? Neither suggestion becomes any writer. I think in her position, Celaena would have a lot more pressing things on her mind than men and I think it’s insulting to women to write her as though she does not. If a guy had written this character this way, he would have been rightfully held accountable for the wrong-headedness of it. A female writer should be no less accountable, and I would argue perhaps more so.

I found it odd that the prince tells Celaena at one point that she needs to operate under a fake name in the coming competition (to disguise her true identity), yet one of the first things he does as they enter the castle grounds is to use her real name out loud in a quite public place where anyone could hear. In the words of Hermione Granger: What-an-idiot! So now Maas has me convinced that at least two of her three main characters are sad excuses for the real thing.

Celaena gets a luxury suite of rooms? I found that quite weird, but it wasn't totally absurd - that is until we discover that the suite has a games room (yes, a games room, although Maas tries to give it some cred by terming it a "gaming room" without appearing to understand that 'gaming' and 'games' are not the same thing.). The gaming room has a billiards table (very much like a pool table). Billiards does have quite an ancient history. It was an outdoor game as early as the twelfth century, and it was an indoor game by the fifteenth, so it's technically possible, but it felt to me like the only reason Maas put it there was to give Celaena some billiard balls and cues to use as weapons, but in the first 150 pages it gets no use, so maybe there's no reason for it to be there.

It did offer a point of competitive interaction with the prince and the captain, but as I said, it's not used in the portion I read. This lining up of weapons which Maas appears to be conducting here suggests to me that she's forgotten her own plot: that Celaena is there to train as a "champion" for the prince, and will have access to all the real weapons she requires! So why this squirrel behavior, trying to sock away sad little weapons in her room for some unspecified (and unnecessary) fight in the future? Is she an assassin or not? Shouldn't she be able to make a weapon on the spot, out of any old thing? Hey, Jason Bourne could do it, so why can't Celaena?

There's another really amateur event on p45. Celaena is enjoying one of her frequent self-admiration events when an old woman walks in on her and surprises her! This is the world's greatest assassin (so we're told) and yet an old woman can sneak up on her? This parallels a prior event on p7 where she's overpowered and thrown to the ground before she can even turn sufficiently to see her attacker. It's also largely duplicated again on p144 where Dorian accidentally sneaks up on her while she's playing her anachronistic pianoforte. Some hero this Celaena is.

Oh, and before I forget, Dorian the prince says "whom"! Honestly? I touched on the who vs. whom question in another review. I know very many writers are obsessed with being grammatically correct (all though not all of us succeed in this!), but there is a difference between the writer using 'whom' in descriptive passages, and having a character actually say it. No one actually says 'whom' any more, unless they're really pretentious, yet we writers keep on writing it. It's like a giant seed growing in our guts and we can't vomit it up. For whom the boll tells! I think it's time to dispense with it, and believe me I try to, but I still discover from time to time, that I've written it; it's a hard habit to break.

As the competition begins, the tension notches up. One competitor is killed: quite literally shredded to ribbons the night before the first test. Another is killed by the guards as he makes a run for it. Celaena does well in the first test. We discover that the castle has an "orchestra"! This is another problem I have with this novel - the anachronisms. Maas failed to establish a date for the action, so she leaves us only guesses based on the "technology" in use, which suggests this is, in Earth chronology, four hundred to a thousand years ago. But the minuet is less than four hundred years old, so the orchestra couldn't have played one.

I guess you can argue that this is an alien world, so things are alien to us, so let's run with that. The King is a frickin' barbarian, rampaging across the continent of Erilea, sacking one country after another, yet this barbarian supposedly maintains an orchestra, and has rooms in his palace with a billiards table, and a piano (which is another anachronism - the piano forte - or even the fortepiano is only a couple of hundred years old). And this barbarian king leaves alive the kings and princes and princesses of the nations he overruns? None of this makes sense. One of those princesses is even invited to the palace with the idea that she will marry Prince Dorian. Finally, we had a character in this novel who I liked and who really interested me: the Priceless Princess from Eyllwe, named Nehemia (seriously? She really needs a more worthy name!). This was a character I could really warm to (based on initial introduction), but she figures far too little in the story (at least in the first third).

In the end I couldn't stand to read any more of this trashy excuse for a "romance". It was honestly pathetic and made me want to toss the book at the wall, it was so bad. But it's a library book, so I tossed it on the return pile instead. I'm done with this and I rate this nonsense WARTY!

Frozen by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston

Title: Frozen
Author: Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Rating: WARTY!

This is the first volume in the 'Heart of Dread' series and it sucked. I found Frozen (not to be confused with Disney's recently released animated movie of the same name, also reviewed in this blog, and favorably, too) on the library's new young-adult fiction shelves, but this did not seem at all like a YA novel (and I don't mean that in a good way). I know the characters are supposed to be teens, but I saw nothing to impress that upon me in any serious fashion.

It takes place on Earth maybe a century or more into the future. Something awful (and unspecified) happened and Earth has once again become a snowball. It was after the first snowball Earth (or something like it) that the Cambrian 'explosion' occurred and life really took off, eventually evolving into everything we see today. Unlike that first snowball Earth, which has supportive evidence, we have no explanation at all for this new snowball - at least not any which the authors are intent upon revealing.

The main characters are Natasha "Nat" Kestal and Ryan Wesson. Kestal is a dealer in a Las Vegas casino. There's no word on how it is that casinos are still even remotely functional given how dysfunctional society is, and especially given how dirt poor people are, but apparently casinos are thriving! The US is under martial law, with movement severely restricted (again, no explanation for this), which makes Nat an oddity. She should not be in Vegas and is hiding her true origins (from one of the ice reservations where the non-brown-eyed folk live) by means of some sort of eye-color disguise mechanism which has so far gone undetected by routine scans. However, she knows her safety is fleeting, and she needs to get out of the country and find safe harbor in an all-but-legendary Shangri-la-like location known as Blue. Unfortunately, she needs a map to get there, and money to hire people who can safely convey her there.

How convenient it is then that her boss at the casino has a map to Blue, and Wesson is just the man to take Kestal there! Wesson is a mercenary who will pretty much do anything to earn a buck. He leads a rag-tag team of fellow mercenaries, but they've all fallen on hard times of late, and Wesson seems to have somehow grown a conscience and turned down the most recent best offer he's had for work. He tries to run a scam on a casino at the very table where Kestal is dealing, but she spots his ruse and instead of the four valuable platinum chips ending up in Wesson's pocket, they end up in hers, with Wesson carrying the suspicion for their disappearance.

Kestal manages to do this because she has, as Dexter Morgan might say, a dark passenger riding with her. She doesn’t understand what it is, but it is inside her, it speaks to her, and it has magical powers. She can (but not at will, since she appears to have no control over it) deal a winning hand to a player at her table - which is how she makes contact with Wesson - or dematerialize the platinum chips and re-materialize them in her pocket, which is how she got rich quick and left the blame in Wesson's corner. Now she has the money, she hires Wesson and his team to escort her out of the country, across what is rumored to be a very dangerous sea, to a specific island location from which she hopes to be able to use her neck pendant map - taken from her boss through the medium of magical suggestion - to find her way, finally, to the Blue, and the freedom it promises.

While it was initially entertaining, there were some real and immediate problems with this story. The first is that everything I've related so far appears to take place in only one day, which is an indication of the bizarrely rushed feel that this novel has. No one sleeps! Maybe it's the ice? Maybe Earth slipped and it's always daylight in Vegas? At one point, Kestal talks like water is rare and expensive, and that all she can get instead of pure water is a government supplied nutrient drink! Excuse me but what is the medium those nutrients are in, if not water? The authors seem to have forgotten that the entire world outside the door is one big sheet of ice. Can they not melt it and have all the water they want, or is the ice somehow polluted? Even if it were polluted, is distillation not an option? This 'water is precious' claim made no sense at all. One more thing - just one more: if the world is in such bad shape, then where does the fuel come from to power the mercenaries' hummer? How do they afford that fuel if they can't afford food? How do they afford weapons and ammunition? This made even less sense.

On p95, there's an oddball problem. Kestal tosses at paper napkin at Wesson, but my question is, where does the paper napkin come from? Who made it, with what, and most importantly: why? The world is a frozen wasteland. There are no trees. Even if trees were being farmed indoors somewhere, why would they even grow them for the purpose of making napkins? When it comes down to thinking this story through, De la Cruz and Johnston have clearly done none.

The next thing up is zombies - roaming the wasteland - and known as 'thrillers' after the Michael Jackson extravaganza. Ri-ight, because we routinely bring pop-culture words into the language based on songs that were popular over a century ago. The zombies were supposedly the result of government testing of toxic chemicals, but what do they live on out there where there is no food and nothing but sub-zero temperatures? They would all have died! We keep getting told that there was a war, and a flood and a new ice age, but we're never told why or how this happened.

The problem with all this snow - endless snow - is that it had to come from somewhere. If it has been freezing and snowing for a century, then where is the water upon which they intend to voyage on their trip the Blue?! Wesson and his crew are talking about heading to the coast and sailing to the place Kestal wants to go, but if all the water has been evaporating (how? It’s sub zero all the time!) and coming down as snow - how is it that there would even be an ocean? And even if there were, would it not be frozen, too, by now?

It’s funny when they run the Hummer into a piece of rebar and puncture the tire. Not a single one them thinks of simply reversing the truck and pulling it free. Instead, these geniuses all get out in the freezing temperatures and wrestle with the wheel! It turns out that Wesson has a Purple Heart. Not literally (although anything seems to be possible in this insane novel). No, it's a medal awarded for those killed or wounded in action, but it doesn't make clear if Wesson is dead or only wounded, so I guess he was shot in the head to be so brain-dead. Plus, how did he get this award in a nation which has gone to hell? How was he even in the army if he's only a teen now? I have to wonder exactly how old these people are. Like I said, this is supposed to be a YA novel, but these characters talk like they've had a long history - too long to be teens. Either that or they went into military service as very young children.

Even if you drive in a perfectly straight line from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, it’s 225 miles - and there is no way you would go anywhere near Phoenix on the way! Phoenix is south-east of Las Vegas, Los Angeles is south-west, so de le Cruz and Johnston are dunces when it comes to geography. But my point here is the direct distance. The crew did not drive in a straight line. If they'd followed the road, it would be nearer to 270 miles, but there were no roads where they were going. They were all over the place, dodging pursuers, dodging zombies, dodging garbage piles that hadn't yet floated out to sea (more on this anon). So their route was much longer.

So what's their fuel capacity? It depends on the vehicle. If it’s a military vehicle (the one popularly known as a Humvee), then those don’t use regular gasoline. If it’s a commercially available Hummer, then you get ten miles per gallon. Older Hummers had a capacity of 32 gallons which might have got them to LA (unless they went via Phoenix!), but if they used a more recent one, the tank was smaller and if their route was more twisting there's no way they could have made it on one tank. Nowhere does it say they stop for gas (and where would they stop anyway?!). We can assume they carry spare gas, but the story says nothing about them ever having to fill up. Just saying - about that 'not thinking the story through' malarkey....

Me, Lissadelacruz and Mi, Chaeljohnston, crank up the WTF factor to eleven in chapter 15. The Hummer gets a hole in the gas tank and for the first time they wonder if they have enough gas to complete their trip! But it gets worse. Wesson asks Kestal to read him something. Some critics have taken this section as an assertion that he can't read; I didn't read it that way, but that's not the bizarre part of this. Having asked her to read, and while she's looking up something to read to him in her ancient book of poetry, he strolls off to go help Shakes (another bland character) with the engine. That's how clueless and rude he is - or how awfully-written this novel is. Take your choice. And there was no problem with the engine - it was a hole in the gas tank that was the problem! But it gets worse.

The vehicle is "parked" at the top of a street called Mulholland Drive. They know this because they can read the street sign. Immediately after this is announced, we learn that there has been so much snow that the houses are buried to the roof line. So just how tall is that street sign, folks? As tall as a house? It would have to be if the houses are buried roof-deep but they can still read the street sign! But it gets worse.

There is a series of explosions and Kestal ducks as snow rains down from the trees. TREES? They've had a hundred years of floods and snow. The temperature is constantly around zero degrees. And there are trees? And the houses are buried to the roof line, but there are trees high enough above that to rain down snow? Just another example of stream of consciousness writing I guess, where these idiot authors simply spew out whatever ridiculous image crosses their transom without a single thought given to whether it even remotely makes any sense. But it gets worse.

The explosions continue and the crew turn to see a "long white house slide down the hillside". These are the houses which were buried to the roof line under snow. How did this one raises itself above the snow and slide down the hillside. exactly? Oh, don't worry, here's the explanation: Zedric, another bland character simply shot out the supports under the house - the house that was buried to the roof line in snow, so that the house could then raise itself up twenty feet and slide down on the snow that was up to its roof line a few seconds before.... But it gets worse.

The house which slides down the hill suddenly explodes and is 'atomized". Why? Wesson reveals all: the house was filled with pop cans, which exploded and atomized it. I am not making this garbage up, Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston are. They honestly believe that houses can be filled with soda cans which can atomize the house because they explode in unison, because they're somehow unstable, and can send signals to other houses so the whole block could go up! But it gets worse.

This crew fought its way out of Las Vegas in a Hummer, against two tanks, some hummers, and some aerial drones. Yet they screech to a halt and don't even think of fighting when the street is blocked by a couple of Hummers just like theirs; Wesson instead ends up bribing the military to get into K-Mart - er, K-Town. But it gets worse.

The only reason the went there was to hire a boat, and even though Wesson is depressed because he had to pay a fortune to bribe the military, he gets all excited because there's... gambling! What was he going to use for money to gamble with? But in the end, he doesn't do the gambling. Instead, Kestal gambols with her bling, which happens to be: a tiny pouch of table salt! Apparently salt is the rarest and most valuable thing ever these days. Why? No reason whatsoever other than the capriciousness of Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston! K-Town is right by the ocean, which isn't even frozen despite a century of zero degree weather, and the ocean is ... yes! Full of salt! But it gets worse.

Kestal is depressed because she has to part with her real salt, because the non-ocean salt (which evidently isn't rare) just isn't as good. Apparently Lissadelacruz and Chaeljohnston don't known diddly about chemistry either. You can make salt "artificial" salt from a metal called sodium which explodes on contact with water, and a poisonous gas called Chlorine. When chlorine literally forms a chemical salt with sodium, we get NaCl or sodium chloride, which is table salt, and you put this on your fries: a deadly metal and a deadly gas. Go figure!

Now what is the chemical formula for the table salt that, for example, Ghandi made from sea water? Well, it's NaCl, otherwise known as sodium chloride. And what's the chemical formula for "artificial" table salt? Well, it's NaCl, otherwise known as sodium chloride! Yep. It's exactly the same thing. I guess the authors once read something about Roman soldiers being paid in salt (from whence cometh word 'salary'), and just thought that was soooo cooool! But it gets worse.

I got to the end of chapter twenty five and said, "Enough!" which is why this tested warty in all demon graphic categories. It was becoming increasingly stupid the more I read of it. This utterly juvenile "romance" between Kestal and Wesson was god-awfully bad, but it wasn't even that which finally slammed the door on this cheap excuse for a story (although every little helped). As they sailed, they encountered "trashbergs". Yep. These were like icebergs, but made solely of trash - floating islands of garbage and scrap, which were a hazard to shipping. Note that these islands contained solid metal objects, but none of it sank! Apparently this ocean is so toxic that you can float scrap metal in it! But it gets worse.

The reason they encountered these trashbergs was that they 'came out of nowhere"! Yep, the ship's pilot saw nothing for miles all around, the radar was going full tilt and measured nothing, the ocean was calm, and the weather was clear, and giant trashbergs magically materialized from nothing! But it gets worse.

When it becomes clear to the crew that Kestal is "different" (yeah, she's the only woman on board!), she tells Wesson that she was once held in a camp where they tried to take advantage of her magical powers, and they tried to make her forget things they didn't think she ought to be remembering, by putting her in an ice bath to "freeze her memory"! I am not making making this up. This is the kind of pure bullshit nonsense, garbage-trash crappy, useless, brain-dead, moronic, asinine writing which ended this novel for me. This novel is lousy and it shows on almost every page. it;s some of the worst writing I've ever read.

Nix Minus One by Jill MacLean

Title: Nix Minus One
Author: Jill Maclean
Publisher: Pajama Press
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a coming-of-age story written as though it’s a long poem, but it’s not actually written in poetry. It’s merely prose set out in a format which superficially resembles the poetic. Frankly, this put me off to begin with. Typically I look inside a novel and read a small portion of it - usually something in the first chapter - to get a feel for whether I might like it. In this case I went solely on the blurb, grabbing it off the library shelf without looking inside because I was in a hurry! I'm glad I did, because if I had looked inside it and seen this format, I might have put it right back on the shelf, and it would have been a sad loss if I had. This book is brilliant in many ways, not least in that the author actually grasps that there are places in the world which do not end in ", U.S.A."; the novel is set in Canada which is apparently some nation north of the center of the world (/snark).

I read the entire novel in about two hours, which is not something I normally do, but the novel is a lot shorter than it appears because of the format. Initially, I started skipping through the first few pages, thinking the first 'chapter' was actually the prologue before I realized the entire novel is written this same way! Color me annoyed, but I began reading, and soon found it not only readable, but addictive. MacLean has found a way to defeat my hatred of prologues, because she doesn’t have any chaptering - or anything! It’s one long text with no traditional breaks at all. The only indication of a break is when you turn the page and the first line of text is bolded. This counts as a chapter I guess, and if so, the chapters are exceedingly short! It’s a brave new format, but it’s one which doesn't detract from the reading experience once you get used to it.

I saw one negative review of this novel which started out by adding this not-so-subtle subtitle: "Or, A Promiscuous Girl Gets Her Just Desserts…" which is not only an appallingly misguided and cruel thing to say, it's also completely inaccurate. The girl is question wasn't promiscuous at all, and even if you insist that she were, promiscuity had nothing whatsoever to do with what happened. Nor would promiscuity merit what happened - not unless you're some delusional religious zealot. The novel isn't even about the girl. It’s about her brother.

Nixon Humboldt is fifteen, and in an abandonment of YA fiction trope, lives in your standard one boy, one girl, two parents, one of each gender family; in short, about as normal as you can get, except that there are undercurrents in this family which are not readily apparent at the outset. This is a loving family, but there is distance between its members for a variety of reasons. Nix loves his sister Roxy, but they fight when they aren't supporting each other. Nix's mom is unexpectedly strict with Roxanne, but not with him. His father is distant and usually supports his mother's dictates.

Nix's dad is a self-taught cabinet-maker, and Nix has learned the trade to the point where he can competently make furniture by himself - such as the table he gives to his mother for her birthday - a table she seems unable to appreciate for obscure reasons of her own. Nix was a rather rotund child and is just starting to grow out of his 'baby-fat', but he has only one real friend at school, and he doesn’t even understand why this guy, Chase, even is his friend. He is in love (so he believes) with Chase's girlfriend Loren and barely registers that Chase has a sister, nick-named 'Blue', until she shows up one day at the workshop by his home and orders four bird boxes.

Roxanne finally gets a date with Brian, the high school playboy, whom Nix detests, but she will not listen to his advice ands she starts seeing Brian regularly for better or rather, for worse - and shockingly so. This relationship leads indirectly to a real tragedy which marks a great divide in the book between before and after. The power of this story is that it handles both halves amazingly well. The first 'half' is intriguing and highly amusing as Nix tries to navigate his way through life feeling very much like he's on his own - alone that is, until he forms a relationship with a neighbor's neglected, if not abused, dog. In walking the dog regularly, Nix finds his life changing for the better, but with great dog walks comes great responsibility.

The second 'half' of the book is much more somber with, it seems, every single relationship Nix has, no matter what its hue, changing palettes even as he watches. Someone who was important becomes ordinary, someone who was ordinary becomes important, and his life turns around completely.

Here’s a sentence of advice to YA romance writers: read this novel and learn how to write really cool relationships as depicted by a maestro. MacLean shames unfortunately too many YA writers with her handling of these relationships in this novel which (it turns out) is just the right length after all. And this is from someone who has come to harbor a great deal disdain for first person PoV stories! I rate this novel a worthy read.

Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce

Title: Alanna: The First Adventure
Author: Tamora Pierce
Publisher: Books on Tape
Rating: worthy

This audio CD is narrated by Trini Alvarado and is quite ably done.

I started in on this thinking this was a young adult novel and it isn't. Alanna isn't even written for the younger end of the YA audience. It's written for an audience of 8 to 10 year-olds which is a bit below what I can normally bring myself to enjoy. I think my own kids would have problems with how truly simplistic this novel is. Having said that, there were some parts which were really well written and which made for an engrossing read. There were just not enough of them. For these two reasons - that the novel was written for a very young audience, and that some of it, even so, was entertaining to me, that I'm rating it as a worthy read for age appropriate audiences.

It features both the trope of twins as well as the trope of girl disguised as boy. I have to express some curiosity as to why we never see the reverse angle on that?! Maybe there are fantasy novels out there where a guy disguises himself as a girl for some reason, but I'm not personally aware of any. There are two movies - completely separate from each other, but which I like to think of as two sides of the same coin which do both these things. One is the excellent and hilarious Just One of the Guys wherein Billy Jacoby, Joyce Hyser, Clayton Rohner, and Toni Hudson are endlessly entertaining. Hyser is the girl who disguises herself as a boy. The reverse side of the coin is the much less entertaining but passable Just one of the Girls (aka "Anything for Love"), a straight-to-video release wherein Corey Haim and Nicole Eggert are watchable if only once. Haim plays a boy who disguises himself as a girl.

The basis of this novel is that Alanna of Trebond and brother Thom are twins who are being sent away from home for the first time to pursue studies, Alanna at a temple in City of the Gods where she will be tamed, and Thom at the palace where he will become, hopefully, a page, then a squire, and finally, a knight. Unfortunately, this plan is the worst nightmare for...both of them! Neither wants their chosen fate, so Alanna hatches a plan for them to swap places, and this they do. It's hoped that Thom's end of this deal will net him a job as a sorcerer's apprentice (which it does), but we seem quickly to lose track of what's going on with him, and focus solely on Alanna.

Taking up a position as a page at the royal palace, Alanna makes friends easily with Raoul, Gareth, Francis, and Alexander, and also does favorably in front of Prince Jonathan and the Duke who is in charge of training. She makes the inevitable trope enemy, too, of Ralon of Malven, who from that point on has daggers out for her, seeking to bully and humiliate her at every opportunity. The studying is hard and Alanna initially becomes very whiny about it, but soon she knuckles down and takes it, well, like a man, as they say!

As I mentioned, Pierce's story is very simplistically written with no attempt to reproduce period-appropriate behavior or speech. The language in use is very modern, which I found rather distracting. Interactions between the palace nobles are bizarre - for example, the prince's uncle shows no deference whatsoever to him or his position, which I found really unrealistic. As I said in my review of Defy I don't expect to read something echoing Beowulf in a novel of this nature. I do not even expect 'thee' and 'thy', but I do expect some sort of attempt by the author to distinguish language and behavior somehow, otherwise it sounds completely anachronistic and detracts from the story.

There were other issues along these lines, such as having Alanna and her servant Coram (not to be confused with Farder Coram) have their own rooms? Honestly? And having the pages give a show of hands for who wants to volunteer to mentor Alanna! I seriously doubt that wannabe knights got all the training and education which these people are depicted as getting. Nor would they be likely to have gone swimming on a regular basis, and then washed up before dinner!

But these quibbles aside, the story in general was listenable. Maybe if I was looking at ten disks instead of four (it's a very short story!) I might have had greater reservations about staying the course, but as short as this was, I had no problem finishing it. It was the second disk which convinced me that this story was too juvenile for my taste and I have no interest in pursuing further volumes in this series. The thing which did surprise me was learning Alanna's age. She is only eleven years old! I had no idea she was that young until close to the end of disk two, so this did put some things in perspective, but even from that new perspective there were still problems!

For me, the entire story sadly devolved into an endless tale of Alanna being bullied and no one doing anything about it. This takes place, of course, in a castle where these kids are training to be, in the end, chivalrous knights. There's no chivalry here. For herself, Alanna already kissed chivalry goodbye by being a chronic liar, persistently lying about the bullying (as well, of course, as her being female!). Jonathan has already kissed off any pretense of being a good guy by failing to throw the bully out of the palace - something he presumably has both the right and the power to do as a prince of the realm. In the end, Ralon left of his own accord.

One really sad part is that Alanna consorts with George, a thief in the nearby town, who is every bit the villain Ralon is: he cuts off the ears of his followers who do no more (stealing) than does George himself!). I don’t see Ralon cutting anyone's ears off, so how is George better than him? The whole premise of the story was rendered nonsense for me at that point. Of course, there had to be a love triangle (it doesn't happen in this first volume, but it seems like it's in the air) and doubtlessly Jonathan and George are the two other corners, but both of them suck as heroic characters. Alanna eventually beats Ralon in a fair fight, but this trivial derailing of the story of Alanna's rise to knighthood is boring and sad when there could be a much greater tale told.

On the favorable side, there were two instances where the writing was really well done and very engrossing. The plague arrived in town. It was some sort of virus, not Bubonic plague, and was only in this town. That's why it seemed to be magically powered, because the prince didn't get sick with it until the magical healers were all but worn-out from healing all the other victims. This is when Alanna reveals that she has the healing power, and she cures the prince. That part was both really well-written, and showed a completely different side to Alanna, which I admit did a lot to win her back into my favor.

The other instance was when Jonathan and Alanna visit the seemingly deserted Black City just for the hell of it and this turns out to be the best part of the novel - especially since Jonathan discovers at this point that "Alan" is really a girl! So, this series is not for me, but I think children of the right age will enjoy it.

Havoc by Chris Wooding

Title: Havoc
Author: Chris Wooding
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WORTHY!

This is the sequel to the really excellent Malice which I read some time ago before I began reviewing books on this blog. That volume was a real treat with its mix of novel and comic book, so I bought volume two hoping I would enjoy it just as much.

In Malice Children are being abducted by 'Tall Jake' - a comic book character who seeks to expand his comic book world so much that it spills into the real world and he can dominate that one, too. His comic, "Malice" is given away free, but is in short supply. There's a rumor going around that anyone who gathers together certain ordinary objects, along with the comic book, and says a certain chant, will be whisked into this comic world. But the comics are heavily censored, so children don't know how awful things are inside Malice until they get there - and then they can't get out.

There is a means of getting out - a white train ticket (as opposed to a black ticket which will take you anywhere within Malice) will permit passage outside. Why Tall Jake would even permit escape is a mystery, but the problem with escaping is that you forget everything which happened to you in Malice. Seth escaped and was favored with remembering, and now he's trying to get back in. Apparently Tall Jake was co-ruler of Malice with several others, but in a dramatic coup, he took down the others, and now he rules despotically. Seth is carrying the Shard - an "egg" containing one of those co-rulers - and he must get it back into Malice if they are to have any hope of bringing down Tall Jake, because inside waiting on him are his friends Kady and Justin, and he cannot let them down.

To cut a great story short, once again Wooding nails it. Seth makes it back into Malice, but his problems aren't over. he has to track down one of the deposed rulers, the Queen of Cats, and deliver the Shard to her, whilst avoiding assorted guardians - evil guardians loyal to Tall Jake. meanwhile,. on the inside, Kady, Seth's friend, and Justin, her loyal friend, are trying to track down Havoc - the resistance organization fighting against Tall Jake. The problem is that they're not welcome there when they arrive, and are thrown in jail!

I am not going to spoil this with how things turn out, but they didn't turn out how I expected them! The ending was a bit of a downer, but it was okay, and it was a lot better than some sappy endings which might have come after this dilogy. The problem with including comic book pages in a book with a format as small as this is that they're not given their best exposure, and the artwork is rudimentary at best. Both these novels should have been printed in comic book format. That aside the story is great, it's original and its inventive. It's creepy and scary and big and bold and I recommend both these volumes.

The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

Title: The Well of Lost Plots
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: High Bridge
Rating: WARTY!

I was thrilled to see that this audio novel was read by Elizabeth Sastre, as was the previous volume, but after the first disk, even Sastre's charming voice and thoroughly British inflection couldn't save this. Pretty much the entire first disk was boring!

Thursday has been moved into an unpublished work of fiction titled Caversham Heights wherein she lives on an old Sunderland Flying Boat. Jurisfiction's plan is to hide her away until she has her baby. Landon still hasn't been actualized, so she's on her own, working in the novel as an assistant to detective Jack Sprat. She shares the houseboat with two generic characters which she names Ib and Ob, and with her grandmother who comes to stay with her during her quite literal confinement. There are some mildly entertaining parts where she tries to teach Ib and Ob - bland characters being stockpiled for when they're needed in a new novel, - the rudiments of writing (irony, subtext, sarcasm, etc.) but other than that it's not interesting at all.

I had really hoped that disk two would pick things up, but it didn't. Disk two was as bad as disk one: some titters here and there, but nothing overtly funny and certainly nothing interesting. It's like Fforde is simply parading every rough idea he had for an amusing chapter in this volume, without actually making it amusing, and with no regard to tying any of this into an over-arching plot. Fforde now has the space of one more disk in which to impress me! yes, it's ultimatum time! Life is far too short to waste even on the average, let alone on the poor, so if disk three fails, then the series does, because this is the last of Fforde's novels I plan on following until and unless he brings out a sequel to Shades of Grey.

Well I made it to disk 4 and found that I was bored out of my gourd. I skipped track after track because it was uninteresting and decided that was it for this warty novel.