Identity Theft by Anna Davies

Title: Identity Theft
Author: Anna Davies
Publisher: Point Horror
Rating: WARTY!

I can see why the publishers of this novel would not want a reviewer like me reading an advance review copy of a book which can only boast, as its best feature, the long lost twin trope - but they can’t stop me getting my hands on it sooner or later! I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters without starting to think I'd be needing an industrial strength barf bag in order to finish it, and by page 100 (very roughly half way through) I was done. I couldn't take any more of Le Stupide!

I would never go so far as to say that Hayley Kathryn Westin ever deserved to have her twin sister (come on, that's hardly a spoiler given the book blurb!) steal her identity (kinda), but I would go so far as to say that I can see why some people would think she deserves it. Identity Theft really isn't; it's much more like identity trashing, but even that really isn't what happens. It is yet another YA novel being told in first person PoV by a girl, and I have to wonder why this has become such a popular style, because it really doesn't work very well unless the author is truly skilled. There are, thankfully, authors out there who are capable, but Davies isn't one of them - not as judged by this example. First person PoV, male or female, can be really annoying because it’s all 'me' all the time. It really limits what can be done with a story and there's nothing worse than listening to a sad and self-promoting seventeen year old, going on thirteen, which is unfortunately what a lot of these novels - and in particular this one - feature. Why make your main character a moron when, with a little thought and effort, she can be developed as someone well worth reading about?

This book bears yet another example of utterly clueless cover art. Main character Hayley has slate-grey eyes. The girl on the cover? Not so much, as you can see. She and her sister are identical twins, and neither of them has gray eyes - not even close. Those eyes are not even remotely on a path towards gray (like they might if they'd been pale blue or pale green, say). Nope. The cover girl's eyes are a very noticeable bromide brown. If the cover had been a simple gray-scale they would have been more accurate. Did the author not notice this or did Big Publishing™ once again simply treat the author like trash as it's known to do? And while we're on this topic, what's with the title? Who chose a title which is guaranteed to be amongst the most common ones out there?

My own theory is that the girl's eyes were brown because the character is so full of something that it's coming out of her eyes.... Any way, I hadn’t even reached page 20 before I was slammed bodily up against an incipient love triangle featuring the smart guy and the jock (like they can never be the same), the latter of which is painted as such a standard YA trope guy that it brings tears to your eyes - the kind you get from sharp, sudden pain, not from sentiment. Matt Hartnett is chiseled and of course, has hair falling into his green-eyes. Did Davis intend for him to be a parody? I care. Adam Scott is the intellectual one and of course he's in direct competition with Hayley for the Ainsworth (read anal) scholarship, which she needs more than he does, since his family is quite wealthy. Trope. Yawn. Cliché. Wake me up if anything interesting happens.

The biggest problem with this novel is that Hayley is a fundamentally boring character. When she's not boring, she's really annoying. She's unhealthily obsessed with being the best at everything, and with getting her fingers into every pie not because she likes to do all these things, but because she feels she must do all these things in order to win this scholarship. She got a B in one test a few years back and immediately ditched field hockey because clearly that was the reason she didn’t get an A. The only thing that Davies conveyed to me by this is that Hayley is a moron. This of course flies in the face of the character Davies thinks she's presenting to me: someone who is smart. Hayley is absolutely not smart, not even close. She's an idiot.

That's not the most moronic thing that happens, however. It gets worse! As soon as she ditched field hockey, her three besties ditched her. Yeah, 'cos that always happens, because friendships are solely about whether or not you play field hockey. Hayley is so self-absorbed that she's still obsessing over it and them four years later, as indeed they are over her. Seriously? Hayley honestly needs to get a clue and then get a life. And all of them need therapy.

Hayley's divorced mom uses phrases like "Hayley Bunny" and "You sure, baby?" Honestly? Why do female writers constantly seek to belittle, marginalize, and infantilize their female protagonists? I can see how they might want to make a male character, like a dad for example, behave that way to make some point or other, but to have a mom do it to her own daughter for no reason? I don’t get the philosophy underlying this novel. Hayley is made to seem juvenile, air-headed, whiny, resentful, clingy, paranoid, and bitchy. Imagine what happens then, when she discovers that she has a Facebook page showing images of her that are actually not her. It appears to be a Photo-shopped image, or a look-alike (whom we know is actually her incredibly lost twin) disporting herself covered in whipped cream, and in skimpy outfits, and attending parties and >ulp!< kissing boys! Omar Goad! Not kissing boys! Good God she could be summarily shot for that!!!

While I agree with Hayley that Facebook is a "total time waster", I find myself completely at odds with her on her choice of movies, which are unsurprisingly juvenile. And when does she even have time to watch a movie with her obsession going full tilt? But that's fine, as indeed is Hayley. I know this because she tells someone almost literally on every other page that she's "fine" or it's "fine"! Adam Scott also over-uses that word. They're obviously made for each other. Given what an obsessive-compulsive Hayley is, it’s a bit surprising that she runs late for school the very next morning after 'Facebook Zero', but the weird thing is that when she's woken at eight by her mother, she's already missed 'Yearbook' and 'Calc'. What the hell time does school start in Hayley World™? I don’t get how she missed the yearbook meeting when they'd already had it the day before, and I can see how that might be a pre-school activity, but her first school class is before eight? Okay. If you say so. I guess it's been a while since I was in high school, huh?

So now Hayley has insta-reputation! Her Facebook pictures are, amazingly, the talk of quite literally the entire school even though Hayley is effectively a non-entity in this school, and the pictures appeared only the night before! See that over there? That's credibility leaving on the last bus out of town. Bye Bye! When she complains about the Facebook fiasco to school official Mr Klish, who is evidently a professional imbecile, they've magically disappeared, but that's not the interesting thing! Noooooooo! The really interesting thing is that super-smart top student Hayley is a complete moron.

When she fails to find not only the pictures, but also even that name in Facebook, she says, "Maybe it’s in a different browser"! I am not making this up (Davies is!) - like you can only get to one part of Facebook on browser A. You need to switch to Internet browser B to get to this other part…. If Hayley were actually as smart as Davies has deluded herself into thinking she is, she would have, right there and then, opened her own Facebook account under that name, and taken charge of the situation. She does not do so, and because of that, her twin can continue to keep kicking her dumb ass. Hayley isn't even smart enough to tell someone what's going on and to ask for help. Clearly the one with brains in this family isn't Hayley, but her twin with an inexplicable grudge. How that works is another matter. For that matter, how her "evil" twin even gets away with all the stuff she does is yet another nonsensical mystery.

So now people universally think that Hayley is a party girl, and she's invited to the big bash that evening. Her best plan would be to avoid it like the plague and appear somewhere else with witnesses that she's there so she can prove it, but you know she won’t because she's a moron who reacts instead of acts, and you know this will turn into an unmitigated disaster because she's so stupid! Why Hayley is even obsessing over Facebook when the scholarship stalkers are done with checking Facebook, and the fake account is up and down like a yo-yo so is likely to be missed by said stalkers even if they were looking right now, is yet another unexplained mystery - one amongst many such mysteries in this novel. Like, was that her sister, dressed up as a 'hipster' (whatever that is) with a fake beard spying on her in the coffee shop? How does her evil twin even know where she is at every instant of the day and where she's planning on going next?! And where does she get the time and the money to pursue her stalking activities? Maybe there's an explanation for all of this in the second half of the novel, but I'm guessing the explanation will suck.

So now Hayley thinks her life will end because there's a picture of her on Facebook with two bottles in her hand, neither of which she is drinking from. But it gets worse. Hayley has to go to the semi final of the Anal Scholarship contest. Note that this is the semi-final, okay? There are ONE HUNDRED contestants. ONE HUNDRED. In the semi-final. One hundred, and yet every single person is talking about Hayley because her twin sister emailed a revised bio for her which makes her seem like she really is: stupid and air-headed. Yep. Quite literally everyone is focused on Hayley. Seriously? Davies has plumbed new depths of dumb with this novel. Even in a world of completely dumb-ass novels, this novel would stand out as being dumber than the dumbest of the rest. But it gets worse.

So Each of these ONE HUNDRED semi-finalists is asked one question and one question only upon which they're judged. I am not kidding. Hayley's question is, "What does it mean to 'take a car'?". I'm not kidding. That's her scholarship question. To be fair, she does ace it, really stepping up for once in this novel, but then Le Stupide comes rushing back in like a tsunami. Hayley has a ride home with Adam, but she bails on him without even having the decency or the courtesy to tell him that she's leaving by herself. She asks for a taxi to take her home. The guy at the service desk calls for a limo. It costs $100. Hayley isn't even fazed by that. She literally collapses and falls asleep in the back seat, but the driver magically knows exactly where to take her, and the $100 is evidently not at all a problem for Hayley's single-mom household to come up with because Hayley makes a fortune working at a coffee bar where she's never once depicted as actually working.

That's when I said no more. Life is too short and there are far better novels to read than this one. Why even continue wading through garbage like this when there's guaranteed gold to be found elsewhere? This novel is warty.

Secret Agent Moscow by Jennifer Jigour

Title: Secret Agent Moscow: Part One - Goodbye, Natasha
Author/Illustrator: Jennifer Jigour
Publisher: Smith Publicity - Walkabout Designs
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. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I have to confess to having a hard time in deciding how to rate this graphic novel, and the primary reason for my discomfort is that I simply didn't understand it. I mean, yeah, I got what it was about in very general terms (at least I think I did!): a rather conflicted young woman who flew airplanes for the US military in World War Two is blackmailed by the very government she aided when she's discovered in a gay club. She's threatened with exposure if she doesn’t work for the government in the form of taking a trip to Moscow to track down an agent of theirs who has gone missing. Homosexuality was considered a crime in 1949, of course, although I imagine it was far worse for men than ever it was for women. The "punishment" for it was to be confined for a time in close quarters with people of your own gender. How that really constitutes a punishment is somewhat of a mystery, but let’s move right along...!

Jigour does an amazing amount of work in illustrating some two hundred pages, but very little work in writing a story! I found myself wondering, time after time, what the heck was supposed to be happening. The drawing is competent if very simplistic, and the coloring is really superb (to my amateur eye, of course!), but there was frame after frame after frame where I could find no indication of a story, or a plot or even forward motion. I really got lost in all of that, and sometimes that was in a good way, but more often it was in confusion. I tried to catch up on what I was supposed to be experiencing when the minimalist text returned.

The novel has a surrealist feel to it, like it's a trip through someone's dream rather than something which is really happening, and indeed, I'm sure most of it was memory, dream and hope, but not all of it, and sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the one and the other. This was annoying to me, because I had gone into this expecting one kind of a story and I felt, at times, like I was being force-fed another!

However, overall I'm feeling positive about it, especially given how intriguing volume two looked. OTOH I was intrigued by volume one and look where that got me! I honestly think that Jigour (great name BTW) has some good stories in her, I'm just not sure this is one of them! I do want to encourage this kind of graphic novel to go right ahead confusing me, however, so I am going to rate this one worthy with the above caveat, and leave it up to you guys out there to decide for yourselves whether there needs to be an emptor added somewhere in there!

Attack of the Giant Robot Chickens by Alex McCall

Title: Attack of the Giant Robot Chickens
Author: Alex McCall (no website that I could find)
Publisher: Floris 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. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum:
P142 Lizzie says, "They only want to help us" and Jesse's response is "No, they're not." which makes no sense. "No, they don't." would have sounded much more appropriate for the verb tense. The only way the existing response would make sense is if Lizzie had said something like "They're only wanting to help us."

Jesse is a co-hero of this novel telling it from first person PoV which I normally detest, but this novel managed to make it bearable somehow, and I think it’s because while Jesse was always telling the story, he was never promoting himself, merely relating events. Jesse's brother, who is never named, was always ready for the end of world; he had plans for anything from aliens to zombies, but he disappeared eight months ago when the chickens attacked. Was he not ready for whatever it was that befell him? Whatever it was, Jesse never finds him.

This novel starts out in a library, which I really appreciated, just as I appreciated the fact that the page numbers are enclosed in eggs, and the demarcation symbol for breaks in text is a broken eggshell. Jesse and two other guys are at the library in Aberdeen, Scotland, uninterested in listening to Jesse's 'a chicken walks into a library' joke. Unlike the chicken, they're not there to borrow books, either. The meeting which they had planned fell through: the other party didn't show, but a large, nameless horror did, and they only just got away and back to the train station where they live.

"Living in a chicken apocalypse is not quite what you’d expect." - so begins chapter two! Jesse and his partners were hoping to hook up with the Library Gang for an exchange of ideas and intelligence, and maybe to work together. Jesse is part of a gang, too, but you'll have to read the book to find the name of his gang! Trust me, you'll never guess the name of the gang which Jesse hangs with in a train station - not in a million gazillion years....

In an hilarious parody of YA tropes, all the adults had been taken first by these evil robot chickens, leaving only those under the age of sixteen. The chickens are amazing at guessing people's ages; they could have made a fortune as a carnival side-show, but well, they had to go the world domination route, and there you are. Or were, depending on your age. So most children have survived by banding together into these gangs, but some apparently made it on their own. One such young woman is The Ambassador. She was year older than Jesse and filled him with dread, as indeed all girls should do when you're his age. The Ambassador stood out as filling a person with more dread even than they who were renowned amongst young women in the filling-with-dread department, as being significantly above average efficiency dread-fillers. The Ambassador is not only a girl you see, which is bad enough, but she's also wise, independent, capable, and rather muscular. In short, your typical mid-teen boy's (and all-too-many men's) nightmare.

Imagine Jesse's horror, then, when gang boss Noah tells Jesse he has a job for him, and leads him straight to The Ambassador's compartment at the end of the train - that would be the last car on the straight-ahead. The Ambassador doesn’t even know Jesse. She refers to him merely as 'The Joke Teller' (which I guess means she really does know him after all). His jokes are nearly all puns and are consistently awful (apart from that first one!), but may well appeal to the age range this novel is aimed at. The Ambassador's name turns out to be Rayna, and she and Jesse end-up tied together by a cunning plan to take down the chicken empire.

That was by far the most outstanding part of this novel. Jesse and Rayna work together without any hint whatsoever that one is male and the other female. It’s never an issue which is pretty stunning when you think about it, especially when considered in the light of the fact that most YA and older children's novels can’t get through a chapter without some remark that's gender engendered or relationship related. In McCall's novel, this never happens. Male and females have true equality and that's really rather remarkable (and all the more sad for being so). For that alone I would recommend this novel and rate it worthy, but there's more to it than that.

Yes, the story is absurd! That's a given! Deal with it! If you can't handle the chicken get out of the coop. But within the framework of that premise, the story is pretty good. It moves along, real things happen in real ways, people get things done, plans are thwarted, people rally and come up with a new plan, and in the end, things work out. Given the subject matter, it's impressive that violence is minimal, and pleasantly tame. I especially liked the "fight" between Rayna and the bruiser working for Cody - the leader of the group she seeks out for help in plucking them thar chickens. It’s that simple. Why don’t more writers get that?

This novel is a worthy read and it's especially worthy if you're of the age range for which it’s intended.

Then and Always by Dani Atkins

Title: Then and Always (titled Fractured in the UK)
Author: Dani Atkins
Publisher: Ballantine
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. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

For those who don't like "bloated reviews" here it is in a nutshell:

Then and Always by Dani Atkins sucks!

You may go now if you wish, but for those who want to stay and discover why I think it sucks and what could have been done to make it a better novel, please do join me in my exploration!

Problem one: This novel starts out with a huge info-dump, which struck me as not only tedious, but also rather amateurish. What is it with book editors these days?! Atkins had an in with me, because I love these 'what if' novels: the time-traveling ones or the 'road not traveled' ones, so I was more inclined to give this some leeway than I would be ordinarily, but it still failed me because ultimately, in light of the ending, almost nothing in this novel made any sense. And trust me, it bears no relationship whatsoever to the movie Sliding Doors. I was completely betrayed by the sad trope of an ending. I kept thinking - no, the author can't really be selling her readers out like this can she? How did this ever get past the agent and the editor? I tell ya, the more novels I read, the less respect I have for Big Publishing™!

I have to add yet another note here about the employment of some wisdom in choosing a title for your novel (that's assuming you're given any choice by Big Publishing™!). This novel was originally titled Fractured in the UK, but renamed for the US, and wisely IMO, but because 'Fractured' was not a good choice of title, the author now has two completely different titles to deal with for the same novel. This name change made sense given how rare the title 'Then and Always' is (there is only one such title in Barnes & Noble and only one in Amazon, and they're both Atkins's novel), and how common the title 'Fractured' or 'Fracture' is (I counted nine such novels on the first page of results at Amazon, and thirty-one titles on the first page at B&N using one of those two words. I don't know who chose either of these titles, but Fractured was a really poor choice of title - that is unless you actually want your novel to disappear in a cloud of similar titles.

Please note up front that in order to describe the many issues I had with this novel, I'm going to have to post more spoilers than I typically do with a new ebook. So, the story begins with main character Rachel Wiltshire having a parting meal with high school friends during the dregs of their final summer before they all go off to university or to follow other paths. The group meets with tragedy in a car accident (which isn't quite what you might expect - so that was a nice twist).

Here's the second problem: The sad thing is not the accident but that, even at this early point in the novel, Rachel is portrayed as weak and clueless, and this seems to be an annoyingly consistent theme throughout the entire story. Why an author would deliberately choose to portray her main character as the worst of YA stereotypes, especially when this novel isn't YA per se is a mystery, but that's what she did. The problem here is Rachel's ineptitude: rather than simply climb over a chair or table to escape the oncoming vehicle, Rachel stands there completely lost like a child, and it's Jimmy (her best friend since the childhood which Rachel has evidently never left) who saves her at the apparent cost of his own life. So here we have Sir Galahad rescuing the damsel in distress. Just how weak do we want our hero? Or should I go with the author's flow and denigrate her as a heroine?

Rachel is so clueless that she has never realized that Jimmy is in love with her, and she's so inert that she has never once considered him as a partner or tried to develop a relationship with him. I found this to be about a mile past credibility and about eight blocks over. How Rachel ended-up with Matt rather than Jimmy is a complete mystery, but it does conveniently provide the lurve triangle - a triangle which contributed absolutely nothing to the story and which made zero sense in light of the novel's trite and tired ending.

Five years later, Rachel suffers a fall or a mugging. Yes, it's that confused. Quite frankly, I have no idea which of any of the accidents/misfortunes which supposedly befell Rachel actually happened and which did not, given the ending of this novel. Rachel wakes up to discover that her whole world has changed. In her old life, Rachel has hit her head whilst romping around in a graveyard after hours visiting the grave of dead Jimmy. ( Why the graveyard is locked up is a mystery. Do they think someone might get out?!) In her new life, she's mugged and she falls down goes boom, and wakes up in a hospital bed, which fortunately is in a hospital, but there reality ends for her.

Her dad shows-up without a trace of the encroaching cancer (which he had in the other life). She's even more confused when her father disagrees with her that he ever had cancer! But that's nothing compared with the shock to her system delivered by the appearance of dead Jimmy, very much alive and living as a police officer. Rachel's utter surprise over this results in her immediate sedation. What? Excuse me, but what?

This is yet another problem. Atkins seems to have some weird ideas about how doctors and nurses behave. The consistent trope in novels is, sadly, that doctors are all that and nurses are something else, doing nothing but turning down sheets and bringing in meals. This is another example of genderism in this novel. In reality this downgrading of the nurse isn't the case (and yes, I do know, because I've worked in more than one hospital). Obviously, hospitals in Britain differ from those in the US and my experience is all US-based, but they're not that dissimilar.

The two professions fulfill different but complementary rôles, and doctors rely on nurses just as much as nurses do on doctors. They're each part of the complete health-care team, which not only includes the X-ray techs, respiratory therapists, nursing assistants, and licensed practical nurses, if such a species exists any more in the wild, but also the ancillary staff such as clerks, transportation and heavy lifting teams, and yes, the janitorial staff. Writers tend to forget all this. In critical care units, the nurses often advise the doctors, since the nurses are the permanent staff in the units whilst the 'front line' doctors are typically just passing through on rotation.

Imagine my surprise then, when Atkins has the medical staff administering IV sedation to Rachel at every expression of surprise on her face! Seriously? My belief suspension bridge crashed bodily into the deep and jagged ravine of reality on that revelation. This is yet another problem with this novel. I have to admit though, that it was funny when Rachel asks, "Can anyone else see Jimmy in the room?". That did something to revive my faith in the story. Unfortunately, I lost it again when I read that five people come parading into Rachel's hospital room: her dad, Jimmy, Matt, Cathy, and Phil (who bizarrely disappears from the story after this). This is right after she's back from extensive tests and measurements which were ordered as a result of what was, to the medical staff a psychotic episode. I can’t imagine any decent hospital not restricting visitors to immediate family only when the patient is like that, and keeping those visits on a tight leash, so again, reality bites.

Reality took a deep dumpster dive when unrelated Matt almost literally orders Rachel's own father to leave and get some rest! We'd already been told at that point that visiting hours were over, so how unrelated Matt - her fiancé - figures he's going to stay here and what use he figures he'll be, is a bit of a conundrum. Unless, of course, he had an agenda, which he didn't. He couldn't have, given the ending.

The only real confusion over agendas though is Rachel's, as she responds warmly to kissing Matt! This is after she's spent the last five years (so we must assume, but who knows, given the novel's ending?!) living away from him and all but adopting the lifestyle of a nun: single and uninterested in men, having firmly pushed Matt from her own and into Cathy's arms. Are we now to believe that her resolve has simply vanished without a trace? Until I read that, I hadn’t thought that there was anything medically wrong with Rachel. Now I do! This is another example of how Rachel is portrayed as weak. The poor writing was only exacerbated when, immediately after the kiss, Rachel asserts her resolve to get back to her old life - which of course she abandons shortly thereafter! Evidently it's not only Rachel who's a bit confused about what's going on here!

I have to draw your attention at this point, to what a massive jerk Rachel's father is. I know that fathers are all-too-often portrayed as being at odds with their daughter (when they're not portrayed as being unrealistically perfect), or depicted as being over-controlling or lacking in understanding, and I don’t know if Atkins intended this, but this guy comes off as nauseatingly condescending. He treats his daughter like she's twelve and he makes no effort whatsoever to try and understand what she's going through. He operates solely from the blind assumption that she's not right in the head, and as such, he's her worst enemy. He's also clueless in cooking for her a large plate of over-cooked eggs the first morning after they get home. He says she needs to build up her strength, but she's been in hospital for only a couple of days. It’s not like she's just recovered from months of hospitalization for some debilitating wasting disease! Poor writing or just a bad dad? I know where my money is!

To be fair, her father isn't the only one who has a clueless attitude. Every person with whom she has any interaction during this period of her hospitalization and immediately afterwards, be it her friends, her father, her fiancé, the nurses, or the doctors, treats her like she's a child or like she's simply deranged. Not one single person tries to understand what she's going through, or to take her concerns, oddball as they may appear on the surface, seriously. I find this completely unbelievable. I also find it appallingly abusive of Rachel. If she were a male character, would the author have written this the same way?

The story's evident hero, Jimmy, explicitly tells Rachel that she needs someone to take care of her! I almost ditched the novel completely at that point. What a jerk he is, and what does it say about Rachel that she buys into his condescending and controlling bullshit so easily? What this tells me about Rachel is that she's not only spineless but also blind. It was only because this is a relatively short story that I decided to finish it at this point.

Rachel discovers that in this new life, she's a journalist who works for a magazine. She denies this and gives them the phone number and extension for a woman in human resources at the engineering firm she works at in Euston, London. Jimmy makes the call - to call in sick for her - and then Jimmy tells her that the place never heard of her. This entire interaction on the phone makes no sense in light of how the novel ends!

There are two problems here. The first is that Rachel inexplicably expects this call to prove her case, when she's already in a world where a dead guy has come back to life, and she's being consistently told by people she knows, that her life is not what she remembers. The second is that Rachel turns into a complete limp rag at Jimmy's announcement, and instead of taking the phone herself and calling to verify this, she limply takes Jimmy at his word and collapses into sobs.

This is the first hint we get that Jimmy is stage-managing everything. I lost all respect for Rachel at this point and worse than that, I lost respect for the author. The only consistent strength Rachel has exhibited to this point has been in asserting that she has a different life. Here was something concrete which she could check for herself, and she fails to do so, instead collapsing like improperly set jelly. Shame on the author for betraying her main character by rendering her in such a negative light - and as we've seen, this isn't the only time Rachel is depicted as a weak woman incapable of handling her own life. Maybe Jimmy is right about her, but if that's the case, then how did she ever manage to take care of herself for five years prior to this? Again, it makes no sense.

Matt is conveniently called out of the country on a trip to Hamburg, so when Rachel wants to visit her purported London residence, Jimmy takes her - like she's completely incapable of managing anything by herself. It's been a while since I've had such mixed feelings about a novel to the extent that I had for this one. Usually when I'm half-way through it I have a definite feeling, one way or the other about it. With this one I continued to be put off by so many negatives while at the same time still curious about where Atkins is going with it. I should have quit when I was ahead!

For example though this is set in Britain, Atkins has the characters using Americanisms. I know that US influence is pernicious throughout the world because of business interests and the wide-spread viewing of American-made movies, but I've never heard a Brit use the term 'bummer', nor have I heard a Brit refer to a loved one as "Hon" - short for 'Honey'. OTOH, it's been a long time since I've spent any time there, so maybe things have changed. It just struck me as weird. Atkins does get a lot of "British-isms" right, so I guess I have to trust the author on this. I mean, she uses 'lift' for the American 'elevator', 'windscreen' for the American 'windshield', 'flat' for the American 'apartment' and so on, so she seems to know what she's doing for the most part.

Om the other side of the coin it became ever harder to come up with an intelligent solution for what Rachel was experiencing other than the straight-up and boring psychotic break or the fact that she's lying in a coma in a hospital bed somewhere. Or the novel is simply badly written - which is what turned out to be the case above and beyond all "plot" ideas. It's not possible to bring back people from the dead or to magically cure cancer overnight, nor would it seem possible to find actors to play Jimmy and her own father which would fool Rachel, yet something like this is what would have had to have happened if Rachel's previous life had been real. This suggested that none of what I was reading was real. I guess Atkins's agent never advised her against writing stories that try to trick the reader by having the story all be a dream, or by having the patient wake up from a coma at the end, or some other variation on one or other of these tired themes?

One thing which does stand out is that Jimmy is a central orchestrating power of whatever it is which is going on now, pulling Rachel's strings like a professional puppeteer. You have to ask yourself, is Rachel quite simply so screwed-up in her head that half the time, she imagined her last five years to be different from what they actually were? As the saying goes, you're never alone with schizophrenia, but as I said, none of this makes any sense in light of the actual ending to this story.

The over-arching problem that I had was that Rachel was repeatedly treated like a helpless child by the author. As intrigued as I was by this story, I was increasingly annoyed at how Rachel is consistently depicted as weak and incompetent. For example, we learn that she has often broken down crying over Jimmy's death - and this is five years on. Get over it already! The problem here is that Rachel had had every chance to make a relationship with Jimmy and she failed to be proactive - another example of how weak and clueless she is. It makes no sense that having failed to pursue him when she could, she would be a snot-ridden heap of sobbing spinelessness five years later! Of course, if Jimmy was somehow controlling and manipulating her, then this is one of the few things which would make sense.

Here's another example: she has to visit a consultant who will help her work through her mental issues, and rather than imagine she'll visit him or her by herself, she finds herself wondering if Jimmy will accompany her, only to realize that Matt will be back by then, and so he'll take her. What is she, twelve years old that some adult guy has to hold her hand her everywhere? This is the same woman who was supposed to have been living by herself without any issues for five long years. Now she's suddenly so useless she can't do anything? It makes no sense, but then none of this novel does.

I do not like weak, helpless Rachel, and I see no reason why anyone should like her or want to read about her. Why would anyone care about a woman who has nothing going for her, who's a complete dependent, and who makes no effort whatsoever to take charge of her life or to grow, or to change? She doesn't even pretend that she's going to take the reins of her life, being quite content to be buffeted around by the three men, one of whom she actually believes she "belongs to"! I am simply not interested in limp, non-characters like that. I sincerely hope the author isn;t writing what she knows here; that would be sad. Once again, this all makes even less sense in light of how this sorry excuse for a novel ends.

I certainly didn't like the rather anti-feminist attitude casting a sorry shadow over this novel. Not only is Rachel routinely depicted as spineless, she's also routinely condescended by men. Jimmy, for example, introduces her as Miss Rachel Wiltshire to Mrs Louise Kendall at her office, like women have to be pigeon-holed and categorized, but men don't. Neither Matt nor Jimmy are married, but I don't see Atkins referring to them as Master Matt and Master Jimmy. So why is Rachel a Miss? Genderism, that's why.

Rachel has no sense of personal space either. She lets Jimmy touch her inappropriately without a word of objection. Worst of all, she thinks of herself as belonging to Matt - like Matt owns her - and this is after she has woken up believing she hasn't been even remotely intimate with either of them for five years! Why would she think she's Matt's property? Again it makes no sense. The fact that she evidently does think that very thing is yet another example of how women are portrayed as property in this novel, not as individual human beings with their own rights and entitlements. The more I read of that antiquated genderist attitude, the more nauseated I became by its pervasiveness, especially when these attitudes are deliberately encouraged by a female author!

I cannot rate this as a worthy read for the reasons I've stated, but even had I not had so many good reasons to dislike it, the ending alone would have validated my assessment. The ending is such a trite, cheap cliché that I couldn't believe any publisher would let this out, let alone any self-respecting author would write it! This isn't fan fiction after all. It's just written like it is.

The Sensualist by Barbara Hodgson

Title: The Sensualist
Author: Barbara Hodgson
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Rating: WARTY!

This novel started out right up there with Frances Hardinge's efforts for being downright weird, so it drew me in right away, but in the end it became tedious, repetitive, dull, and boring. Barbara Hodgson is an artist who has written several novels and this is the first of hers that I've read. And probably the last, which is sad, because the format of this novel is quite charming. It contains multiple illustrations and fold-outs representing the materials of which the main character comes into possession as she rides a train into Vienna, Austria and meets with people in an effort to try and discover what has happened to her deadbeat husband who has been missing for three months. He has often gone off for weeks at a time, ignoring her letters and failing to contact her, but the editor from the newspaper he's working for on a story about art theft or art forgery (it’s unclear which it is at first) calls her to see if she knows where her husband is, because the story is overdue and he hasn’t heard from him. Thus her forlorn quest begins.

She takes off into Europe and encounters three strange women and a strange train conductor during the journey before she even leaves the train - and that's just for starters! One of the women leaves her a box which contains an antique book in which hollowed-out pages hold a magnifying glass and six vials of herbal medicines. The materials are ancient. Everyone she meets seems to know something about her or her quest, and everyone seems to want to trade her something of theirs for something she has - seemingly insignificant, ordinary and occasionally disgusting objects, such as a molar tooth which an elevator operator trades her for one of the pearls decorating the box lid.

Helen runs into one offbeat character after another and takes it all in stride, very much like one would do in a dream. She seems to become quite easily distracted from her purported main purpose of tracking down her husband (about whom I'd long given up caring anyway), and side-tracks into pursuing a discovery adventure of Flemish printer Andreas Vesalius and the woodblocks he created for a publication he produced on anatomy. These blocks were thought to have disappeared during the bombing of a Berlin in World War Two, but maybe they were not all destroyed, in which case any existing ones may have survived. Is this why the director of a museum has been murdered? Did Helen murder him?

There are some weird references too, such as the one to Felice Fontana (1730-1805). Hodgson describes this character - represented as a wax figure in an obscure European museum - as a woman, but that name and those dates apply to a man who was a physician. Whether Hodgson knows this and is playing, or is simply ignorant, or is merely trying to ratchet up the absurdity factor I have no idea. I just found that interesting. There may be other such references that I missed. But the problem for me was that her quest for her husband was uninteresting and when she effectively abandoned that, I was given nothing else even remotely interesting to engage me.

Of all her encounters, Helen's first is the one which most unsettles her, because she seems to be the very same person as the one she first meets on the train. She doesn’t realize this at first because the other the person is aged and significantly overweight, but when Helen finally gets a look at a picture of the other woman when she was younger, she notes a striking resemblance to herself. In addition to this, Helen seems to be traveling in an earlier time - much earlier than 1998 when this novel was published. She goes by train, not airplane, and she has no cell phone or email. The impression I increasingly had in reading this novel was that the real Helen was not the younger version, but the older one, and was possibly lying in a bed somewhere dying of old age, or in a coma, and recalling her younger life. So: trope-ish and boring.

It was all well and good and rather fun and intriguing to begin with, but as the novel creeps towards some 300 pages of nothing but this stuff, the novelty value wears off, and as Helen becomes more and more obsessed with Vesalius's wood blocks, it starts to become completely uninteresting. Normally I would have ditched a novel like this, but I kept trying to stay with it. When I realized I had only some seventy pages remaining, and since I had enjoyed the beginning so much, I decided to try and finish it even if I no longer liked it.

I got within 35 pages of the ending, but I couldn't stand the mindless diversions into Vesalius's wooden blocks and the increasingly repetitive nature of the story-telling. I felt more and more like this was going quite literally nowhere and I reached a point where I decided that there was no payoff, no matter how brilliant nor how miraculous it may be, that could make up for the effort I was being forced to put in! Hodgson, if this was some kind of a big joke on your readers - which I could easily believe - you got me, but you didn't get me all the way to the end. WARTY! Life is way too short to waste on that kind of writing where "literary" is used as a really poor euphemism for 'self-indulgently soporific', not when there's other much more engaging and exciting material waiting to be read.

The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Title: The Naturals
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!

Obviously this is the start of a series because no one can write a one-off novel any more. Why would Big Publishing care about a single novel when they can find an endlessly repetitive trope? Sometimes series work, and the writer produces something that actually bears telling in more than one volume, but the fact that we see so many cookie-cutter trilogies in YA fiction these days speaks volumes about a fundamental lack of inventiveness coupled with a rather sleazy desire to rake in money. It makes me wonder why so many writers are so unimaginative and why they're so desperate to sell-out to the demands of the corporate pulp machine, and you know what the answer is? Us! Yep, we, the people who buy this stuff. So we can't really blame the publishers for wanting to milk it, or writers for wanting to get published no matter what they have to pawn to do so. All we can do is blame ourselves for not demanding better quality by voting with out wallets. OTOH, maybe the YA reading public are getting exactly what they deserve!

The sad thing about his novel is that it took only two pages before I started thinking I wasn't going to like this novel. So why did I actually request it from the library? Because I'd read somewhere that it features a strong female character! Or maybe it was supposed to be a tight plot. I don’t remember, frankly, but it turns out that it's neither. I'm starting to realize that when people say that a novel has a strong female character it means - with very few rare and rather treasured exceptions - two things, and two things only:

1. They don't know a strong female character from a strong odor emanating from their ass
2. Truly strong female characters are so rare in YA fiction (even when written by women) that other women are rendered desperate enough to promote any shabby old rag doll to the position if she looks like she might stick for a while.

Cassie is your cookie-cutter standard trope YA fiction teen (seventeen in fact) - you know the one - in a dead-end job just waiting until she's eighteen so she can leave - and do what? Neither she nor we have any idea. She lives with her extended and condescended Italian-American family whom Barnes treats appallingly, saddling them with every bigoted trope imaginable: mobster links, big overly-loving family, restaurant owners, etc, etc. It was painful to read that part, and especially to painful to see Barnes effectively delete this family which she'd so tarted up, from the rest of the novel. They never call Cassie. Cassie never calls them! So much for 'loving' and 'close'. And why make the family Italian-American (or any other group) if you're never going to do something with it?

At about fifty percent in, I was not ready, yet, to write it off, but the emergency exit door was definitely unlocked and tested for ease of egress after I realized that Barnes intended to go for the world's record of how many tired tropes can be fit into a single YA story. How do I trope thee? Let me count the ways:

• Main Female Character (MFC) is homely if not ugly and knows it only too well? Check!
• MFC has a spectacular name shortened to a cheap and nasty name? Check! Cassandra Hobbes goes by Cassie, like some second-hand single, teen, pregnant Stephen King wannabe
• MFC has a quirky side-kick? Check! And Check! Cassie has two (once she joins the FBI)!
• MFC is unusually close to older character? Check! Cassie is close only to her grandmother whom she calls Nonna! Yep. Nonna, because god forbid she call her gran, granny, grandmomma, nanna, or whatever.
• Supposedly strong MFC novel depicts MFC surrounded by women who are portrayed like it’s the 1950's? Check! Nonna is first encountered up to her elbows in flour whilst men sit around watching TV and wise-cracking
• MFC meets a hot guy? Check! Cassie meets Michael (named after an angel! Oh gahd!). Henceforth known as Triangle Guy #1 or TG1
• MFC meets second hot guy? Check! Cassie meets Dean (as in James). Henceforth known as Triangle Guy #2 or TG2. Mission Control, we're go for a love triangle burn on my mark
• Characters in novel have calculatedly super-kewl names? Check! We have FBI agents Tanner Briggs and Lacey Locke. How cool is that? We have Judd Hawkins, ex military (I am not making this name up), and the other female teens are Lia and Sloane. Oh! Mah! Gahd!
• One of hot guys is spoiled, wealthy, self-absorbed? Check! TG1
• The other hot guy is lower-class, brooding, works with hands, chiseled muscles and hair falling into eyes? Check! TG2
• At least one of the guys stalks or at least follows MFC; he's always around. Check! TG1
• At least one of the guys gets into intimate/embarrassing situation with MFC, or sees MFC partially dressed? Check! TG2 sees her in the swimming pool at three am
• At least one of the guys gives her a pet name? Check! TG1 calls her 'Colorado'
• Trope guy is unnaturally and/or irrationally attracted to plain vanilla MFC instantly and for no reason? Check! And Check! TG1 and TG2 are both hot for Cassie for no reason (other than that they're teen guys, I guess).
• At least one of the guys touches her inappropriately and talks to her like she's his property? Check! TG1
• MFC never corrects inappropriate guy? Check! Cassie lets TG1 get away with any amount of inappropriate behavior (including kissing her uninvited) without even mentioning - let alone censuring - it
• MFC is overcome by the wilts and the vapors or is unnaturally and/or irrationally curious about trope dude(s)? Check! Cassie just knows there's something odd about TG1 and gets positively electric over TG2!
• At least one of the trope guys has some dirt on the other? Check! TG1 knows something about TG2, but he's not sharing
• MFC's parents dead or missing? Both! Mom is presumed dead - but my guess is she's simply missing, maybe even faked her own disappearance, and father is estranged, so MFC gets a score of three here on only two parents! How kewl is that?
• MFC is a loner? Check!
• MFC has non-run-of-the-mill issues? Check!
• TG1 has similar type issues? Check!
• TG2 has similar type issues? Check! Let’s face it - all of Barnes's teens have issues. Check times five
• MFC is presented with challenge or opportunity that if she were playing true to her established character, she'd blow off in a millisecond, but which she takes up anyway? Check!
• MFC is somehow special - has powers or traits which make her highly desirable for admission to clandestine organization? Check! She has ability to 'read' people really well - inherited from her...mom! Ooooh!
• MFC is warned away from becoming involved in new opportunity, but ignores warning? Check! TG1 warns her not to join FBI teen team
• MFC hangs out with teen group which has little or no grown-up supervision?? Check!
• Teen group behaves uncomfortably below their chronological age? Check! First night alone (why they waited is a mystery) they play truth or dare! I am not making this up! Not one of the five refuses to play.
• MFC ends up kissing at least one Triangle Guy? Check! Cassie takes a dare which is to kiss TG2 thereby making TG1 jealous
• MFC ends up kissing other Triangle Guy? Check! TG1 kisses her uninvited later

After that truth or dare kiss, Cassie unrealistically assumes that Dean was electrocuted just as she was, so not only has her IQ suffered from the electrical overload in her brain, her age has apparently dropped to thirteen as well. This was her first kiss. She's seventeen and never been kissed. Ahem! Moving right along. So what is it these teens are doing for the FBI? Well, in Barnes World®, some teens are very, very good, naturally good, at profiling or doing other cool FBI work. Cassie is a profiler as is Dean; they can look at a person, and almost magically know intimate details about them. These traits become weaker as the teen ages. This does make some sort of bizarre sense as to why Dean was drafted at age twelve, but it makes no sense as to why Cassie, on the verge of exiting her teens, was left so late for the draft. Barnes offers no explanation or rationale as to why teens would be good at this and then lose their ability as they age.

Lia is a lie detector - she can automatically tell if someone is lying and can lie herself without anyone knowing. No explanation is given for how she is as perfect at this as every other teen in the group is at what they do. Sloane is a walking database, randomly spewing out facts (so we’re led to believe) and statistics. Dean, as I mentioned, is a profiler like Cassie (which begs the never asked question of why they needed Cassie on the team at all). Michael is good at reading emotions. The truly odd thing is that their trait is all any of these teens have to offer us. Not a one of them has any personality at all. No one really talks about the work they're doing or anything other than Lia and Cassie endlessly rambling on about the boys. Lia evidently has the hots fro Michael too. Sloane seems to be asexual, but we'll probably learn alter that she has the hots fro Lia. All of these teens seem to be white, although there is some pressure for Lia to be Asian. Apparently no Hispanics or African Americans, or any other groups have these talents.

But let’s not be unrealistic here! Hell no! The teens are not allowed on active cases (we'll see how long that lasts - it didn't!). We're given no explanation as to why this is so - unless you count super-mysterious and vague allusions to some teen tragedy some time before. And guess what? The teens do absolutely no school-work! Maybe this is why Dean is almost autistic in his social interactions. No school work since the age of twelve maketh dean a dull boy? Instead, the group is tasked with going over cold cases to see if they can come up with a breakthrough which the FBI trained experts failed to make!

How this is supposed to work with at least four of the five of them is a mystery. Dean's and Cassie's talent is reading people - not reading old files. Michael's talent is reading people's emotions, not cold case files' emotions. Lia's talent is detecting people lying, not cold case files lying, although she does claim to be able to detect if someone is lying in a recording! Yes, she's that good! It seems these teens are useless without a person to read, and since there is no person there to read what’s their value? I'm confident this won't stop them from achieving major break-throughs, though!

How all of this this is supposed to work given that we’re told that Cassie is supposed to be in training - yet receives none - is problematical. Cassie's "training" consists of trips to the mall with Lacey Locke, where they sit in the food court and she 'profiles' random people, but there is no attempt whatsoever to verify if she gets it right. It’s just assumed that she's right! So what’s the point? Where’s the training? There is none.

Barnes employs the term 'UNSUB' (yes in block caps!) for 'unknown subject' and that just makes my skin crawl when they all keep tossing it around. I have no idea if this is a term which real police or FBI employ, but it’s just plain ugly. I would have chosen a different word or made one up; something along the lines of 'perp' or 'suspect' (which I would have reduced to 'suss' amongst the teens for a kewl factor). And what the hell is with the block caps? This is not an acronym!

So when Cassie goes down to the village, inappropriately taking a cold-case file with her to read, TG1 shows up again. He's quite clearly stalking Cassie, yet she raises not even a hint of a suspicion or an objection to it. But TG2 has TG1 beat. When Cassie realizes that TG2's father is a serial killer, she rushes back to the house and TG2 is magically waiting for her on the stairs! Sorry, not believable. Not even remotely. Not even a little bit. How did a totally amateur story like this ever get past an editor? Or are standards really this disastrously low?

Time to wind this up. The villain was easily identifiable by page 266, and was one of three people I'd suspected from quite an early stage. If I can figure it out (near enough) you know it's not very well disguised. If you're willing to lower your standards sufficiently, you might find this not too big a waste of your time, but I have no intention of pursuing this series any further. This is warty.

The Edge of Normal by Carla Norton

Title: The Edge of Normal
Author: Carla Norton
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!

Read by Christina Delaine, and I have to say I'm appalled with her "performance" or whatever the hell these people claim it is they're doing when all they're really doing is just reading a story. I expect actors, of all people, to inject some emotion into their narration, rightly or wrongly, but when that emotion drools over into melodrama and yes, farce, it becomes far too pathetic to even take seriously, let alone put up with. Delaine's problem is that she simply doesn't know when too much is way more than enough. She whispers a passage almost in tears and then all but yells the chapter number that comes next. She whispers one passage almost inaudibly and bellows the next, so for me, her narration sucked big time.

If the novel were perfect, Delaine would have ruined it utterly, but as it happens, Norton's material is also sad. I reached the last disk and simply could not bear to listen to it to the end. I'm not kidding, it was that bad. I simply could not stand to hear any more of the horrific combination of Delaine's bipolar reading and Norton's mind-numbingly tedious and pedantic writing of what should have been a thrilling, action finale. Norton is obsessed with breaking in the middle of the action to relate the recent history of someone who is at best tangential to the story itself. She rivals even the master Stephen King for dumping unnecessary and nails-on-a-chalkboard irritating detail, and yes, she did this right in the middle of the last disk - the supposedly thrilling finale, which is why I simply quit at that point.

It's Norton's first novel, as far as I know, so I cannot help but wonder what the editor(s) and publisher were thinking when they allowed it through on what seems to have been an "as is" basis. It only proves to me that there are two classes of people in publishing: those who've been published and those who cannot get a break. For the most part, the quality of the written material on either side of that fence is the same (aside from extremes, of course). The only difference is the luck they had or who they knew, or maybe how little taste the publisher's book reader has.

Not to be confused with Amanda Overton's graduate thesis project from University of Southern California, The Edge of Normal is about twenty-two year old Reeve LeClaire and her long and slow recovery process from being kidnapped and held captive as a teenager by a sadistic rapist. She changed her first name to keep her memories at bay. She's extremely sensitive to moods and behaviors in others. She works at a sushi restaurant, and is still seeing her therapist Dr. Ezra Lerner, but now it's down to once a week. Reeve is slowly, very slowly, getting her life back together. She's still skittish on the streets, especially if any man, no matter how un-threatening, is nearby, and this is where Norton first falls down because I don't see that there's any credible way for the nervous wreck which Reeve is at the very start of this novel to morph into the person she is at the end in so short a time.

For example, when Reeve hears on the news (something she carefully avoids normally) that another young girl, Tilly, has fortuitously escaped from the clutches of a similar sadist, she almost has a complete breakdown. How does she recover from something like that to what she was at the end? I'm not saying it's impossible for a person to do it, just that it within the framework of what Norton presents to a reader, it didn't strike me as credible, and once you've lost your suspension of disbelief as a writer, it can be hard to effectively recover it.

The last thing Reeve expects is a call from her own therapist - asking for her help with Tilly, the escapee. He wants her to be a sort of "big sister" as Tilly begins to embark upon her own recovery. Reeve is convinced that not only can she not do this, but that she's the very last person Tilly needs in her life right now, except that you and I both know she's going to do this, and in doing so is going to come out of her brittle shell in the process, don't we now?! I guessed that she'd go for it right after her family Thanksgiving long weekend - and I guessed right! Frankly it wasn't much of a guess - it;s pretty obvious and trope-ish.

Once Reeve starts getting to know the family, she's drawn more and more into a relationship with them and starts coming out of her shell as she gets to know Tilly and her family, but what none of them know that the guy who was caught and is being tried for Tilly's kidnapping is nothing more than a pawn in the hands of the real villain here, a bad cop named Duke, who hires minions to carry out his kidnap plans and to hold the victims hostage so that he can visit whenever he likes and take advantage of his sex slave children. Duke has the Cavanaugh's home bugged since he was on the team which first responded after the kidnapping. He can hear their every word and has threatened Tilly, when she was still under his control with the death of her family if she blabs anything. Duke also has a habit of killing off his minions, but he would never hurt a child that way! Believable? Not.

Norton seems to me to enjoy describing Duke's fantasies and his evil far too much, which is why it's no spoiler to reveal his identity or what he's doing. I routinely skipped his chapters because they were so profoundly boring and self-indulgent. The novel's chapters were short, but unfortunately, this failed to translate to a short novel, which is what was sorely needed here. Norton definitely doesn't believe in showing - she believes in telling in a much lethargic detail as she can cram into the book. Like I said, this has that 'first novel' feel to it and I'm quite surprised that Norton's editor allowed her to get away with such amateur writing. I started out liking this but it rapidly became warty.

The Lost Sisterhood by Anne Fortier

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher

This novel is Romancing the Stone meets Stargate yet it fails to be either. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler - since this is telegraphed from the blurb onwards - to say that Diana Morgan is a descendant of the fabled Amazon warriors of Greek mythology. She starts wearing a bangle given to her by her grandmother at the same time as she impulsively accepts an offer made to her by a stranger, to pay her $5,000 if she will spend merely a week translating some obscure script which has been discovered on an excavated wall. At first she's skeptical, but she decides to go, only to discover that her destination isn't the European one she had originally been told, but North Africa. This was the part of the story which had a disturbing amount in common with the movie Stargate!

I started out liking this novel in chapter one (which means the author did her job), only to discover that I was rather saddened by chapter two. It picked up again after that for a short while, but went steadily downhill as I discovered that this purported Amazon warrior woman was going all fluttery heart and googly eyes over a guy, which was a complete betrayal of what Amazon woman are supposed to be - at least from their mythology. Seriously, who wants to read a novel about strong independent women who become limp flags of surrender fluttering in the masculine wind of the first male who comes along - especially when that male has lied to and betrayed the main female character (that's the Romancing the Stone bit.

So what's to like in this novel? Well up front in chapter one, we're offered a woman who is smart, independent, and intellectually curious, but she's immediately let down in chapter two where we learn that this supposedly Amazon woman (who is named Diana, cliché of clichés, for goodness sakes), goes all limp and girlie when she's in the apparently magical presence of James, the son of a nobleman. And he's only one leg of the inevitable trope triangle of lurve (the lying betrayer who picks her up in North Africa and delivers her to the archaeological find is the other). The other thing I liked is how Fortier showed how useless religion is: depicting very admirably that the only protection you can expect comes from yourself, your smarts, your ability, and not from any god or goddess.

What's to dislike? Too much, unfortunately. For one thing, the Britishness of the story rather went off the rails in chapter two, as we're forced to suffer British nobleman James employing the American idiom, "...don't we" rather than the British one, "haven't we?". There's also some unfortunately condescending, if not outright insulting comments about the academics of Oxford being less than pc in their treatment of Diana, who is American by birth, but who grew up in Britain (her father is an English headmaster, her mother American, and her grandmother apparently Amazonian!). That struck me as a really cheap shot by the author to try and garner sympathy for her character. It didn't work on me.

The story picked up as Diana headed south, but that's when I ran into some more issues. I really wanted to like this novel, but Fortier seemed interested only in disappointing me. I had to wonder why, for example, when the Amazons (if they ever existed, which is doubtful) were most closely associated with Scythia (which is very roughly equivalent to modern Turkey), we were starting our adventure in Algeria. The process of getting to Algeria exposed another problem, too. Diana travels there via Tunisia, but when exactly does she take off for that country? Is it important? It is if you like some sort of realism in your stories, as I happen to!

In one part of the novel we're given to understand that it's in the morning, In another part we learn it's in the afternoon. When we arrive at Djerba (an island off the coast of Tunisia) it's late at night - so late in fact that after napping only for a couple of hours, Diana wakens to find that dawn is about to break! This is seriously adrift from reality! It takes only three hours to fly to Tunisia from Gatwick airport, so pray tell where the hell did all that time go?! This was simply poor writing. It's not hard to look these things up and to make your story match reality to a reasonable degree.

Anyone can make a mistake like that, but what really got to me in this way-too-long novel was the unnecessary and tedious detail employed routinely in getting us from A to B by means of detouring around the rest of the alphabet on the way. Hence the way-too-long novel. By far the worst problem was the betrayal of her women, though. Not only does Fortier turn Diana into a rag doll in the hands of men, she also turns Myrina into one, and Myrina is the one who founded the Amazons. Why is it these days that female writers seem so hell-bent upon utterly betraying her female characters every time some studly guy shows up? Fortier does it not once, but twice with Diana with two different men, and as if that wasn't bad enough, she does it again with Myrina.

So who is Myrina? Diana's story is inter-cut with a tale set several thousand years ago. In this story, two girls are escaping from their village where they have (because of their mother), become personae non gratae. One of these two sisters ends-up founding the Amazon race (or so I understood this is where we were headed - I didn't finish this story, after all). Myrina, the older one, is herself betrayed by the author. She's the Katniss Everdeen of this novel, being an expert archer, yet she completely fails her sisters in the temple where she has found refuge. Big, mean, nasty brutish men come in and kill the head priestess, and kidnap nine of the girls for sacrifice, and Myrina doesn't lift a finger to fight them!

I didn't expect this girl to take up a sword and go to it hand-to-hand, but there was nothing at all keeping her from scaling the high temple wall (something she's done before) with her bow, where she could have taken out one after another of these pillagers. So what if she failed to get them all? That would then have allowed her to pursue the course she does in the novel, but at least it wouldn't have portrayed her cowering in the temple along with everyone else. Why would I want to read a novel, especially a long, rambling one, about two women like these? I didn't pick this up to read a sad Harlequin romance, or a nauseating YA novel that has nothing to offer save a truly sad and clichéd love triangle, but that's what I got.

I have to grant kudos to Fortier for bringing some new mythology to the the world of novels sadly beset by tired and unoriginal vampire, demon, and angel tropes, but to do that and then betray your entire theme by making both of your main female characters vapid heart's-a-flutter girls is an awful thing to do. What is the point? Why even bother having Amazons if you're going to render them into spineless toys for boys? I mean that's bad enough alone, but if you're also going to be so wordy in doing this that the story becomes routinely bogged down in tiresomely rambling detail I honestly cannot take that. This is why I quit at about one third in.

I was left with no choice but to rate this novel warty (or at least, 35% of it warty!)

The Chase by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

Title: The Chase
Author: Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg
Publisher: Bantam Dell
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. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I am not a fan of Evanovich's or Goldberg's, having read nothing by either of them before, and now I know why. This novel took me less than two chapters to decide it was awful, amateurish, condescending, and clichéd. And did I mention how amateurish it was? In the extreme? You know, I don't blame authors for writing lousy novels. I blame readers for buying them, but if there's a market to exploit, hey, go for it. I'm sure that the reading public deserve what they get. As for me, I'll go with something that reads like it was written for those who still maintain a certain level of intelligence and literary discrimination and for novels which, far from insulting women and turning them into caricatures, actually give us a smart, interesting, fun, and strong female characters, not simply men in heels.

So we begin with a bomb explosion Sunday morning in the LA financial district large enough to set off car alarms a mile away. The female protagonist, FBI agent Kate O'Hare is no more than a dozen miles away getting breakfast at MacDonald's, yet she hears nothing strange. Hmm! Maybe that's reasonable. Maybe. We're treated to a description of O'Hare's breakfast. I really needed to read that because it's so utterly crucial to the plot. This is the second in a series where the female main character, who has to be the most moronic FBI agent ever (more anon), hooks up with con man Nicholas Fox (Fox and O'Hare, get it? Ha ha! How hilarious!). From this it's painfully obvious exactly what kind of relationship they will have, exactly how this novel will go, and exactly how it will end, and that this mystery has no mystery to it whatsoever.

O'Hare's and her partner are called in to tackle the case, so she drives over to pick him up, and we're treated to a description of what he's wearing. Seriously? Who honestly gives a damn that he's wearing a dress shirt? Really? What Evanovich and Goldberg are doing here (and getting away with it) is exactly what we're warned never to do as writers, but no one cares if she does it or if he does, because they're part of the establishment now! They don't have to play by the absurd rules forced upon the rest of us. They can actually can get away with writing the very novels which would be turned down flat by Big Publishing if any of us tried to submit this same thing!

Kate drives to the site of the blast like a maniac, no lights flashing, driving on the sidewalk, swerving crazily around other vehicles, risking causing accidents. There's no emergency here, yet she drives dangerously for no reason whatsoever. If this were a first-time novel written by a sixteen-year-old I could understand the poor writing. It would never get published, but I could understand the quality of it. There is no excuse whatsoever for professional writers to not only write this detestable trash, but be allowed to get away with it by their editor and publisher.

As if that isn't bad enough, it gets worse! Here's where it really started down the toilet and into the sewerage system for me. Oh, did I mention that Evanovich (or Goldberg) claim that Kate was US special forces - which is patent nonsense? As much as I would love to see women given exactly the same opportunities as men, they do not have this yet. Women have played supporting roles in special forces, which is a good start, but to simply put this into your novel as though it's not only happening, but happened long-enough ago (well over five years ago!) that she could have served and been honorably discharged is some serious horseshit! A new writer would be pilloried for an absurd gaff like that, but this actually isn't the problem I had with chapter two. It's O'Hare's abysmal incompetence.

Once she arrives at the site of the bomb blast, she starts figuring out that the blast wasn't aimed at the building in which it was set, but at the alarms in the bank buildings all around. In short, there's a robbery going on somewhere nearby; so far so good, but it's all downhill from there. Yes, of course the robbery is being conducted by Fox, who strolls out of a bank dressed as a cop, and carrying a large bag full of loot. O'Hare challenges him - and then lets him go! Despite having her gun trained on him she fires no shots, warning or otherwise, neither to disable the car nor to make the perp think twice about fleeing. Not a single cop there draws a gun on him, because Kate fails to alert the police force to what's going down. No one but Kate gives chase, and she gives not one heads-up to any cops! She does not relay any information about the car, the license plate, or the the vehicle ID number painted on it. She simply lets him drive away!

In short, she's not only thoroughly incompetent, she's also a frigging moron. The last thing I need on my reading list is yet another story that insults women by turning them into super-heroes who are simultaneously brain-dead Mary Sues. If I want to read about a strong female character, then I'd like it to be about a female, not a guy with tits. This means you make her tough without throwing yourself on the sadly geriatric trope of claiming she was special forces. You make her smart-tough, and you do not make toughness be her defining characteristic, especially if you're going to pair it up with abysmal incompetence in that she lets this thief whom she's apparently been failing to catch for five years, get away when she has him quite literally in her gun sight. The fact that she admits that she can't decide whether to shoot Fox or to kiss him was the last straw for me. Can we pile any more clichés and tropes onto Mary Sue O'Hare's shoulders? Can we? I don't think so!

Seriously, get a clue. Get an original idea for goodness sakes, and ditch the tropes. This novel is warty in the extreme, and I'm done here.

Marta Oulie by Sigrid Undset

Title: Marta Oulie
Author: Sigrid Undset
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: worthy!

Translated from Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.

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. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

The novel covers much more than the lone topic of Marta's marital infidelity. It ventures deeply into feminism, it looks at morality, and it discusses the validity of religion, all in the context of what Marta and her husband are doing, how they're interacting, and how she's feeling towards him. Interestingly, Marta's lover, if he can be described as such, who is also Otto's business partner, hardly gets a look in. I found that rather intriguing.

This is very much a novel from Marta's perspective, told in first person PoV, which I normally detest, but which is not obnoxious here. That alone is commendable. It's annoying to have to pick novels without knowing from whose perspective they will be told (the blurbs almost never say - and I'm as guilty of this as anyone), so I always appreciate it when I inadvertently select one and discover that it's not nauseating!

On a technical matter, I have to say that while the Adobe Reader version of this is good, the kindle version is seriously hobbled by really annoying formatting issues. It looks like they simply took the PDF and dumped it unadjusted straight into Kindle format. Now you can argue that this is a "galley proof", and therefore we should not expect it to be perfect, but if you argue that, then I'm going to argue right back that while this novel is set in 1902, we are not! We're no longer living in 1907, when this was written, and novels had to be typeset using trays of metal characters laboriously put in place one-by-one line-by-line by hand! There is no excuse for sloppy proofs in this day and age!

Even rank amateurs have professional quality word processors, spell-checkers and formatting styles available to us! So no, there is no excuse for "galleys" that have line breaks in the middle of sentences or that have words like "UNCORRECTED" and "SALE" randomly mixed in with the text (the Adobe Reader version has "UNCORRECTED PROOF NOT FOR SALE" appearing on every page), or having one person's speech end and the next's take off with only a space (as opposed to a paragraph space) between the two separate quotations. If it had been corrected, though, I would never have enjoyed such amusing sentences as, "And I, the proper little merchant's wife who went around so nice and quiet, tending to my house, UNCORRECTED..."! Yes, this woman needs to be - as the butler put it in Stephen King's The Shining - CORRECTED! Or, "...my heart began to pound as a UNCORRECTED clammy sweat began to pour from my body..."! Correct that sweating, sister! Or how about this one: "It was a natural instinct that broke open inside me, raw SALE and insatiable." Yes, Marta Oulie sold out!

Known as Fru Marta Oulie in the original Norwegian, Undset wrote this in 1907 about a woman who was unfaithful to her husband, but it's not quite as simple a premise as it sounds. This was Sigrid Undset's first novel, but it was not her last. She enjoyed sufficient success to make a career out of writing, including a well-regarded trilogy which might be considered a fantasy story by modern audiences. Some of her life oddly paralleled Marta's. This novel is relevant today even as it seems understandably dated in some regards. It's relevant because there are still double-standards today, over a century later, in how women are perceived and treated in comparison with men. It's relevant in that feminism is just as much an issue today, when it shouldn't be, as it was back then when it was considered to be revolutionary.

You would think that over the course of a century these issues would have been long-ago resolved, and women would truly be equal, but it has not yet happened. It is easier to give voice to inequalities now than it was then, but it's also harder to be heard because ears have become lamentably inured to these issues over such a prolonged exposure. Feminism is no longer fresh in a culture which gobbles down fresh with an astounding voracity, and because it's not fresh any more, women have had to reach towards increasing extremes to get the message out. Consequently, feminists are now in danger of being mistakenly considered extremists instead of being correctly considered to be justified.

The novel starts out rather sensationally with the sentence "I have been unfaithful to my husband", which must have been far more shocking in 1907 than ever it is today. Had this been a modern novel, or even a modern historical novel, I would downgrade it for that. I think it has value in a 1907 novel; however, this did force me into a consideration of how this novel needs to be reviewed. Is it fair to review a 1907 novel by today's standards? There are arguments to be heard for either side. I asked this same question when I reviewed novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, and Pride and Prejudice. This is not a modern novel written in an historical setting, it's truly an historical novel translated into modern idiom. I think that latter fact is relevant: clearly those who brought this translation to published fruition think that this novel is relevant to our times, so reviewing it by the standards of our times isn't inappropriate.

In 1902 Norway, Marta is courted by and marries Otto. She tells us she loves him dearly. The two of them travel in Europe together (whilst Marta is a school teacher with commensurate salary, Otto is a partner in a business which is evidently doing well). They start a large family (by modern western standards), having two boys (Einar and Halfred) and then a girl (Ingrid), and it's with the arrival of the girl and the necessary simultaneous switch to larger accommodations that things begin to sour for Marta. It's not so much that Otto changes as it is that more of who he is starts seeping through un-modulated.

I don't know if Undset did this on purpose - juxtaposing the arrival of a girl (Ingrid, Otto's daughter) in the family with the attendant turmoil of lives being uprooted and moved around. If she did (and I am tempted to think she did), then that's pretty cool and smart on her part. Undset (which is reminiscent of 'upset' or 'unsettle' which is what this novel does) is a capable writer, but since this is a translation, it's really hard to know how much of the technical quality of the writing is due to Undset, and how much is due to her translator, Nunnally. Since I don't read Norwegian, I'll never know! However I take heart in the knowledge that even a bad translation cannot hide a decent plot! And no, this is not a comment on Nunnally's translation. Undset earned herself the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 - the last Norwegian woman to do so to date. I'm not a big fan of "literary" novels or of stories written by Nobel laureates, but I would have to assume she's a capable writer even were I lacking other indicators (which I'm not!).

The stakes ratchet up as Marta starts an affair almost accidentally with Henrik, and he starts to feature more in her life until Otto contracts TB, whereupon she feels such guilt that she ends the affair, but continues with the pregnancy. Is it Henrik's or Otto's? The only way to tell back then was by recalling with whom one had enjoyed sex at the right (or the wrong!) time, and since Otto became sick, there has been none with him, so Åse has to be Henrik's. This comes in intriguing counterpoint to the birth of Ingrid: whereas Otto's daughter stirred-up things uncomfortably and was a contributing factor in Marta's falling into an affair, Henrik's daughter has the opposite effect - bringing the affair to a precipitous termination, and sending Marta back to her husband emotionally.

In the end, I don't like Marta Oulie (although I do like the novel), and the reason I don't like her is not because she betrayed her husband, but because she betrayed everyone, including herself, and cruelly so in Henrik's case, who has a daughter with Marta, a child who he will never be allowed to know. I hope this isn't 'the moral of this story': that if you betray your husband you will become lonely and miserable, indecisive and inert for the rest of your life, because that runs completely contrary to the feminist portrayal of Marta which colors the earlier portion of this novel!

Again, there are formatting issues at the end, with the story ending seemingly unfinished and very abruptly, and being followed without a break by some notes on Undset's life, yet the author's name is spelled with all lower case characters, which is not only inexplicable, it also seemed rather an insult. I mean why make a big deal about bringing this woman's writing to a modern audience if you're going to slight her in this way?! She's not edward estlin cummings after all.... The name of Marta's lover appears on more than one occasion spelled with a lower case 'h', which is hard enough to explain since it's something which is easily fixed with search & replace, but to trot out the author's name like that is downright weird! However, I am willing to rate this novel as a worthy read, in the hope that the final version will have these formatting and case issues resolved.

The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata

Title: The Bohr Maker
Author: Linda Nagata
Publisher: Bantam
Rating: TBD

This is volume one in the loosely-connected Nanotech Succession quadrilogy. I've read Deception Well and Vast, but not Tech Heaven, so I'm pleased to be able to review the first of this group for the blog. Even though this is not a new novel (indeed, it was the first Nagata ever published!), it is new to me, and hopefully I'll enjoy this as I have the other two. It begins in Asia (and the choice of typeface imbues the novel a rather Japanese aura) where a few members of a local 'tribe', trying to eke out an existence in an abandoned mill by a river, discover a dead body in the water. Jensen Van Ness has apparently been murdered and robbed, but his body still bears clothes which might be traded in the city for food. As two of the tribe, the petite, retiring Phousita and domineering and cruel Arif haul the body to shore, something sharp slides out of his chest and stabs Phousita, the diminutive woman who looks like a child, infecting her with the Bohr Maker, an illegal and self-directing genetic enhancer.

I confess I found that while it was an acceptable read, and engrossing in parts, I did not find myself enjoying this novel as much as I had the other two, and I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the Bohr of the title was the fictional Leander Bohr, not Neils Bohr, who was neither an engineer nor a biologist, which is probably fueling my lack of complete enthusiasm! Neils Bohr was a giant in the wild early days of particle physics. I read a charming, sad, and amusing account of this in Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segrè, which contained the picture I reproduce below, which I find really extraordinary. The sheer magnitude of brainpower concentrated in this one instant in time in this photograph is as humbling as it is inspiring. The ones most interesting to me are identified by the red numbers in the list below.

1. Paul Ehrenfest
2. Erwin Schrödinger
3. Wolfgang Pauli
4. Werner Heisenberg
5. Paul Dirac
6. Arthur Compton
7. Louis de Broglie
8. Max Born
9. Neils Bohr
10. Max Planck
11. Marie Curie
12. H.A. Lorentz
13. A. Einstein

Meanwhile, somewhere slightly off-planet, the Chief of Police, Kristin, cruelly abuses a dead man, whose brain patterns have been preserved by a cutting-edge scientist before laws were enacted which severely circumscribed such experimentation. The dead man, Nikko Jiang-Tibayan, is now dying again - the license for his existence is about to expire. This is an era which has declared that thou shalt not mess with the human genome, and he represents the last such experiment - a human consciousness in a ceramic body. Kristin, living in luxury at the top of one of many Earth-space elevators uses his body for her own perverse and abusive sexual pleasure (yes, this made no sense to me either!).

Nikko puts up with this in the desperate hope that she will relent and help him to continue his existence. She cruelly taunts him over his impending doom, refusing to grant him a reprieve even as she pleasures herself with his ersatz body and causes him pain by biting his kisheer - an augmentation to the body which permits him to survive in a vacuum by recycling CO² in his blood. She has affixed above her bed a collage made from the confiscated body parts of the human experiments she has personally terminated and mentions that she would like to see his skull up there eventually.

Nikko unfortunately involved his brother, Sandor Jiang-Tibayan in his theft of the Bohr maker and now Kristin is hunting Sandor, too, and she doesn't care if his involvement came about in Sandor's ignorance or not. But Phousita's transformation, under the refurbishing power of the Bohr maker is startling. She becomes a Messiah to her people and so well-known that both she and Arif must go on the run to escape Kristin - a run which takes them into the cold of space and the the bizarre artificial world at the top of the elevator - the one created by Fox Jiang-Tibayan, Nikko and Sandor's dad.

That's all I'm going to reveal about this novel. I am rating this worthy although I have to say I was not as impressed as I had been with the other two. But Nagata can write inventively; she had surrogates before Surrogates had surrogates, and she has some really interesting sci-fi scenarios on display.