The Selection by Kiera Cass

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb for this novel ought to be more than enough to warn you off it (unless you happen to be as shallow as the main female character is): "To be swept up in a world of glittering gowns and priceless jewels..." Ri-ight, because nothing is more important than those things.

Just for the hell of it (and mostly out of boredom!), I used nine words in this review which dictionary.com says are becoming obsolete and may disappear from the dictionary! Take that you word assassins! Now about that cover! Seriously? I have zero respect for YA cover artists. Judged by the size of the skirt on the model's dress, she must have legs that are five feet long from thigh to ankle! Either that or she's wearing platform shows which are two-feet high! I suspect the actual hem of the dress comes to about where the top of the word 'SELECTION' appears. Everything below that was artificially added in Photoshop by the depth-perceptionally challenged inventor who did the cover.

To be perfectly honest (because you know I'm an inveterate liar the rest of the time), I went into this thinking it was going to be bad (it's Harper Collins Teen after all). This novel is Walt Disney meets The Bachelor. It's yet another in a line consisting of way-the-hell too many tedious first person PoV main female character novels. The MFC here is, believe it or not, America Singer. Yeah - that's the name with which her author cursed her (Mer for short, nightmare for how awful she is - I'll refer to her as Night-Mer hereinafter), and this is a novel which is obviously set in America (seriously, what YA novel isn’t, really? It's rampant alienism, I tell you!) although Cass has tried rather ham-fistedly to disguise it. What is it with Americans, so proud of their republic, yet addicted to British royalty? Talk about irony.

Cass's effort had a decidedly frigorific effect on me in the first four pages, but it’s a quick read, so I aimed to reach the end if I could stomach it. Night-Mer deliciates with her boyfriend who is a complete jerk - to which she's utterly clueless. The absurd premise here is that in the country of Illéa (pronounced ill-lay-her presumably…!) consists of a series of provinces (as well a a nightly curfew!), and when the prince has to marry, the selection of a princess is pursued though some sort of lottery where girls over the age of sixteen from each province (a total of 35) are chosen to 'compete' for the Prince's hand in marriage and eventually to become the queen of Illéa.

Night-Mer no longer being a younker, she's eligible chronologically if not via emotional maturity. The prior history of this situation goes unexplained at least in the first third of the novel. How the USA gets a king goes unexplained. Why all citizens in the nation are graded from one to eight, the ones being royalty, the 8's being lower than dog droppings, goes unexplained because, well, that's just he way it is in Cass World™, ok? Deal with it!

To give her her due, at least Cass hasn’t chosen a bunch of truly bone-headed names for her characters (apart from the main one, that is). They're regular, everyday, ordinary names for the most part (although one or two are real clunkers). Her best friend is a 'Marlee' (yes, with the double 'e', suitably belittling her so's not to have her encroach upon the main character's unimpeachable Mary Sue magnificence). Marlee Tames of Kent. Thames of Kent, get it? Except that, despite its spelling, the river which flows through the city of London and the English county of Kent (inter alia) is pronounced Temz. Does Cass not know this? I guess a university education isn't what it used to be.

There is one character who is way over the top: Prince Maxon. Maxon? Seriously? You may not know this but he has a twin: Maxoff. Since we can't tell the difference between the two, I'm going to use the latter name just to be different. With a name like that, is he some sort of long-lasting battery? Maybe he is. He is obviously one leg of the inevitable triangle. Since Cass slams us over the head repeatedly with the threat of "The Rebels", my first guess was that a rebel trope guy with hair falling into his eyes would be the other leg of this pathetic triangle - which I already detest based solely on Night-Mer and Maxoff being ⅔ of it. Oh, and get this: Night-Mer says her mother "...named me after the country that fought so hard to keep this land together."? What in hell does that even mean?

Night-Mer spends the first few chapters declaring vehemently that the last thing she will ever do is volunteer for the lottery, but her character is so weak that she does precisely that, and despite all this whiny "I don’t wanna be a part of it" crap, she feels immediately and completely at home as soon as she gets to the palace and takes charge. She travels from her local aerodrome, no doubt in a charabanc, and an aeroplane is appropriate given how flighty she proves herself to be. Now doubt she enjoyed a bever on the flight. All the candidates immediately have their caste number upgraded to a three for being selected, and garner the title 'Lady'. Thus: Lady America (honestly?!). She predictably becomes one of the favorites, and therefore the immediate target of the inevitable bitches who are also competing. Absurd. Clichéd. Trope-ish. Nonsensical. Amateur. Weak. Boring. But sadly, that seems to be the state of the bulk of female main characters in recent YA fiction.

When the girls are given their make-over (what part of this novel isn’t coldly calculated to tug at the heart strings, and to pump up the longings, of "homely", young, impressionable USA-dwelling thirteen year olds?) one of the guys who is doing their hair says of Lady America's "humble" preferences, "Hold on to that, Honey." Yeah, 'cause that's how all girls who have the title 'Lady' are spoken to by palace employees…! Oh, BTW, a girl is referred to as one of the "Selected" not as one of "The Select"! Just one example of grammar in Cass World®!

My first impressions were that this is Disney princesses (excesses?) without the pictures and with more brabble. It’s a shameful abuse of women - so why did I read it? I was curious to see if a university graduate like Cass could write her way out of this hole she'd dug for herself by choosing this as her subject matter for a YA novel. This is a topic which could have been made into a great story if it were handled and written well, but after one hundred pages (roughly a third of this novel) I saw no sign that Cass had a clue what she was doing, unless it was calculatedly writing to the lowest common denominator for the sole purpose of pulling down a fast buck for herself. It’s a shameful and inexcusable piece of writing which abuses women in the worst possible way; by belittling, demeaning and undermining them at every step with bigoted characterization.

At one point, quite early in this novel, I found myself wondering what kind of a childhood Cass herself had experienced that her imagination even came up with this stuff in the first place. Clearly there's a huge amount of adolescent wish-fulfillment going on here, but I don't blame any author for ripping off gullible readers for whatever they can. It’s the capitalist system after all. I do blame those who facilitate an author getting away with this by buying these novels. I would advocate a boycott of the publishers who countenance the publishing of genderist novels like this, but that would only punish decent authors who share that same publisher. OTOH, what excuse, in this era of self-publishing, do authors have for accepting offers from publishers who publish bad, abusive, genderist, or otherwise less than acceptable novels? Each of we who write novels has the power to contribute towards changing this paradigm.

For as many times as Night-Mer tells us that her family is poor (for example, she observes at her first palace meal that it was a few Christmasses ago since she last had steak, her family doesn’t seem to do so badly. They seem to have a fairly large house, and she never says it's in a bad neighborhood, and they do have appliances (TV, fridge), so I take her claims of poverty with some salt, as I suspect she takes her popcorn when watching movies on her TV.

There's a "Women's Room" in the palace. It’s not a toilet, it’s literally a room where Women are allowed to go to sit and gossip. The candidate women are forced to sign a pledge of virginity before they can go to the selection! They're told they cannot refuse the prince anything he asks for, even if it’s sex, and even though this violates the rule that women must not have sex before they marry. Why would any self-respecting woman want to marry a man who not only has such bizarre rules, but permits them to remain on the book unchallenged even when he could change them? Why would any decent woman countenance a relationship with a man who allows a caste system to exist, and who knows people are starving while he eats royally, yet does nothing about it?

At one point on p104, Night-Mer says "I tried not to come across as whiny" but she failed in that attempt long before that page. Each of these 35 girls has maids - yes, in the plural, to help them get ready for their day, and also to get ready for bed. Night-Mer has three of them. She "figures out" that the name of one of them is Anne. Excuse me but what? Figures out? Is Anne a mute and does she have to play a charade to reveal her name? So, a minimum of three maids per candidate is over 100 people employed at the palace just for this farcical debasement of women. What do these maids do when there isn't a selection going on? I have no idea. So this is a rich palace with the number 1's living in luxury when there are citizens starving. This is why I detest royalty. There is no excuse for it.

Night-Mer is pleased with her mirror in her palace room which she doesn’t even have to share. It’s so big that she can wedge family photos around the frame without interrupting her view of herself. I am not making this up - those are Cass's very words (p108). She's been told that it is not only an offense, but will put the girls at serious risk if any of them go out, even into the palace grounds, because: Rebels! Apparently palace security sucks. So what does the spoiled, bratty, self-absorbed Night-Mer do the very first night she's in the palace? You guessed it! She's a moron. She has a panic attack and the fresh air on the balcony isn’t enough for her so she runs downstairs to go outside and the guards stop her as they should. Of course, Prince Maxoff is magically passing at that very moment and, not being one to supererogate by any means, he heroically supports her breaking the rules and putting herself at risk for no better reason than that she's a limp rag of a wuss of a spineless girl who therefore deserves special treatment.

Maxoff keeps referring to her as 'My dear' - what is he sixty? I guess not - Night-Mer describes him as a "boy", and she's a royal bitch to him for no reason, so naturally he can’t help but fall in love with her. She apparently didn’t get sufficient training and advice from her countless advisers and her maids three, because she persistently refers to Maxoff as 'Your Majesty' when it correctly ought to be 'Your Highness' since he's not the reigning monarch. He never corrects her delusion, which I assume is also Cass's delusion. Way to research your topic Lady Kiera!

At one point on the day they're to officially meet the prince, some snotty woman comes in and tells the girls that it's not lady-like to raise your voice above a whisper. Excuse me, but WTF? This is a female writer having a female character telling all the females present to be quiet? So if a number 3 has to whisper, does the number two level have to barely speak, and the number one woman in the land have to be a complete mute? Way to go in completely devaluing women, you jack-Cass. I'm going to try to finish this novel now solely for cheap laughs. It has no other value for me nor should it for anyone with even so much as an ounce of gray matter functioning.

One night the palace is attacked, but there's no evidence of any effort whatsoever to fight back - the entire palace closes the steel blinds on the windows and hunkers down like a tortoise while the attackers throw rocks at the building! We're told that there are literally hundreds of support staff at the palace, yet it’s the king and queen who have to rush into the hall and close these blinds! There aren’t even any guards in there with them. There are guards out on the huge palace walls, but not a one of them seems to be doing anything to either prevent the attackers getting in, or to fight them once they're there. The home base of the rebels (there are actually two factions, no doubt named Dauntless and Erudite) is known, yet apparently despite a military draft being in place, the king has never actually had the idea of attacking the rebel base and pulling out the threat by its roots! I've never read anything so completely ridiculous. This is quite simply lousy writing, period.

You know I can see why a certain class of reader might be attracted even to a sad and trashy story like this. It gives them a sense of family - of belonging to the MFC's family, and of sharing the adventure with her. It’s sad that such people feel so isolated and so bereft of any vestige of dignity that they're willing to swallow material of this tacky consistency. The answer, I think is in asking what impressionable (i.e. lacking in self-respect) pre-teen or early teen female (this novel surely can’t appeal to anyone with an ounce of maturity) wouldn’t be allured by the thought of being pampered, and dressed-up, and having a make-over, and being courted by a prince?

The absurdity of the relationship between the prince and Night-Mer is really rather stark. They're playing at being "just friends", yet neither one of them seems to have the first clue that that this is how a truly great love - a love which will naturally become a real relationship - begins. And what a betrayal of the very idea of friendship! Night-Mer is supposed to be friends with Marlee, but ever since that regal declaration was issued, Marlee is unceremoniously and roughly pushed into the far back seat and is completely marginalized from that point onwards. Cass evidently thinks that other women are unimportant, and that the only worthwhile friendship a woman can have is with a prince of royal blood. Good luck with that.

Night-Mer doesn't ever cry. She weeps. This is important because it makes her special! She's also utterly clueless about Maxoff, yet she never seeks to alleviate her cluelessness by asking him anything important. Their entire conversation repertoire perennially circles the drain of triviality. Night-Mer whines about how he's a bad friend to her because he doesn’t blab everything to her every time they meet; yet all she's interested in learning is what he's up to with the other girls. She never asks a thing about the rebels and what’s going on there, she never asks him how he can put up with a rigid caste system, or with a lottery for a wife. She never asks him why the nation's education system is so lousy. She assumes blindly that he "has a country to run", yet he isn't the king, he's the prince. That doesn’t mean he has no duties, but it does mean it's his father who has a country to run, not him. Besides, isn’t he on a sabbatical right now - trying to find a wife? He has quite literally nothing to do but that.

We're two-thirds the way through this novel before Cass condescends to pass on anything about how the USA came to be Illéa. This is done by means of the girls attending a history class! Why? Why any classes other than etiquette? Isn't the purpose of this to allow the prince to spend time with the girls and find a wife? Yet he seems never to be doing that. He's always off elsewhere. Through this farcical history class, we learn that China invaded the USA because the USA owed them money. Right, because that's how you get your money back! The USA lost! It became the American State of China(!) and the Chinese were behind the scenes "pulling strings" to steer "legislation in their favor". Why? They occupied the country but still had to steer legislation in their favor and pull strings?

Then Russia attacked, but had to fight on two fronts, so they lost. Subsequently, a man named Gregory Illéa put his knowledge and money to use and the country fought back. This is so absurd it has to be a joke, right? First of all, there is no money in the USA - Cass already told us this. How is Illéa so rich and powerful after the Chinese invasion? Bin Laden had a $200 million fortune and all he could manage was to fly four planes into buildings, yet Illéa is so rich that he can single-handedly finance an international war against China? That sound you heard was my ass hitting the floor. I just laughed it off.

If the USA, at the height of its power, lost to the Chinese, how did a broken and ravaged nation manage to beat the Chinese later? Cass wants us to believe that because he paid for the uprising, Illéa not only became "king", but also had the nation named after him. I'm sorry but this is juvenile, and brain-dead beyond any need to be polite. Did Cass think up this plot when she was ten and finally get to publish it? What the hell was going through the literary agent's mind and through the book editor's mind that they let this trash ever get onto a printed page? This is fan fiction at best, and outright trash at worst. If it were written for an audience of children, it would make more sense, but it makes none at all to write like this and claim it’s for a YA novel readership.

It seems to be Night-Mer's opinion that anyone who wouldn’t look nice on a stamp need not apply for the job of princess, because looking good is what it’s all about. This novel is all about superficiality, substance need not apply. This is exemplified magnificently around p230 when Night-Mer, having lectured the prince about how awful it is that he has so much while people are starving, she gets all thrilled that her maids have made her yet another luxurious gown, which she didn’t even need because she already had a brand new one which she has not yet worn. Fortunately, I had the pleasure of witnessing the prime bitch Celeste ripping the arm off it. That was her only useful function IMO. America Singer: all shallow all the time.

At some 200 pages in, at a photo shoot, Night-Mer still doesn’t get it. Seeing one of her supposedly non-competitors (since at this point she's still maintaining the absurd fiction that she's a non-combatant, whisper something to the prince, at which he laughs, Night-Mer asks herself: "How could someone who got along so well with me do the same with someone like her?" yes, she's that shallow and clueless.

Night-Mer reminds people that Janelle, who is sent home mysteriously, is not the only person who has had two dates with the prince, then adds that she's not counting. Excuse me?! It turns out that the reason that Janelle is sent home is that she said something not nice about Night-Mer. Yep - these girls are definitely not allowed to have any opinion of their own.

I could not stand to finish this novel. I got to the point where the TV guy is interviewing the girls and getting their opinion on Maxoff, and as if it were not bad enough up to that point, it went significantly further downhill. I said enough is enough! I could not take any more. I returned this to the library, and the second volume in the series, which I had intended on reading until I read the first volume in this sad and sorry series. This novel is pure adulterated TRASH. Period. And you know what? If an author's agent wants to call me a bitch and get into it with me over this review, I'll be happy to go toe to toe with them. I'll be happy to point out even more problems with this novel that I didn't even bother to include here, and to publicize the "merits" of this lousy, amateur, brain-dead excuse for a YA story.

Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

Title: Born of Illusion
Author: Teri Brown
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

The problem I had with this novel is that nothing happens in it. Nothing interesting, new, or different, anyway. It’s supposed to be a story about a mother-daughter team who have a magic/psychic show in the 1920's. The daughter, Anna van Housen, is the magician, and her rather abusive mother, Marguerite, is the fake psychic. While Anna is a capable magician (of the illusionist variety, not the really magical variety), her mother is an out-and-out fake, assisted by Anna in pulling the wool over people's eyes during their stage shows. The two of them are scam artists and conduct private seances which they use to criminally bilk the grieving out of money. Anna apparently sees nothing wrong in this.

For reasons unexplained, Marguerite treats Anna like dirt, employing her as a servant far more than she loves her as a daughter. Anna is rumored (by her mother) to be the daughter of Harry Houdini (although throughout, I suspected that this was a lie), who happens to be in New York at the same time as the van Housens. The non-twist here is that Anna actually can read minds and communicate with the dead.

In a mind-numbingly boring development, Anna acquires for herself two, and exactly two (no less, no more) men, a 'bad boy' and a 'good boy'. Yawn. The two are, for all practical purposes interchangeable, although the more serious of them, the 'good boy' who has the absurd name of Cole, is the one with this supposedly dark secret which turns out to be nothing. It became tedious beyond words to read how many times she looked into his dark eyes or had her heart skip a beat, and I habitually flipped off every single page upon which either of these two tired tropes put in an appearance, which may mean I missed a plot twist here and there, not that there was much plot; as I said, nothing happens in this novel. Oh, Anna does get kidnapped, but she's an escape artist and she almost immediately escapes. That's it for high adventure.

What about the writing? Well, it wasn't badly written in a technical sense, but I felt no compulsion driving me to read this. When I had to put it down for whatever reason, I had no thoughts along the lines of "when will I be able to get back to it?". I did not miss it when I wasn't reading it; that's how I know how thoroughly unappealing it was. Here's one line which I thought utterly absurd: It's pure magic to see the sun go down in the west..."??! Because normally, of course, it goes down in the east. Seriously, I can see what the author was attempting here, but it was written badly. She should have written, "It's pure magic to see the sun set as the city lights come on...", but she didn’t. Here's another classic when Anna is tied up: "I might be able to release myself, but in the condition I'm in, it would take far too much effort and leave me unable to defend myself..." Seriously? She can defend herself better tied-up than with hands free? Wow!

In short, I honestly cannot recommend this novel, and I certainly won't dishonestly recommend it.

Lights Over Emerald Creek by Shelley Davidow

Title: Lights Over Emerald Creek
Author: Shelley Davidow
Publisher: Hague Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This novel owes a lot to the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind but it's not that movie in written form, and if you stop reading after the first few chapters thinking you know where it's going, you'll be sorely mistaken.

Lucy Wright had a great life until that night she was driving the car in which her mother was a passenger, and some jerk ran a truck right into them head on. Lu woke up in hospital to discover that her mother was dead and she could feel nothing below her waist. From that point on, things got worse. She seemed to lose all her friends, because she couldn't stand to hear their pity, if nothing else. She dropped out of school and became home-schooled instead, which is often a sorry sign, but not aways, and not in her case. Her boyfriend stopped visiting without explanation, and her only friend seemed to be Nelson - a girl who was so-named because her abusive father had wanted a son. And pretty soon, Nel is hooking up with Craig, her ex. But Lu is fine with that. She thinks.

The only thing it seems which has kept Lu from finishing the job the jack-ass driver failed to do that night is the weird experiences she has had down by Emerald Creek: the very lights of the title. Lu had been learning the cello - another thing that seemed to go down the tubes after her accident, but now she feels a compulsion to bring it out and start playing again. That's no big deal until she takes it down to the creek one night and discovers that she can, in fact, communicate, after a fashion, with the lights. She thinks she can understand "the music of the spheres" and pretty soon she's online searching for information about what she's experiencing.

That's how she meets up with Jonathan Barkley, also a music lover, and the close encounter the two of them have isn't with space-ships and cartoon-ish aliens, but with another realm, another place somewhere, and with people just like her, and with one woman who seems to be the very embodiment of evil. Is Lu the only person who can stop her? If you want to know how to write an intelligent and mature teen romance (no that's not a paradox), ask Shelley Davidow. This is a smart, traveled, inventive and competent writer, who is unafraid to take you on a journey which in less capable and experienced hands might have been slippery territory. Not here. Not on Davidow's watch. Here's a story which is, refreshingly, not set in what far too many YA authors think is the center of the universe: the USA. It stretches its wings from Australia to Scotland to Norway - and to, er, elsewhere. And it has a truly independent and strong female main character whose name is definitely not Mary Sue. This was so refreshing.

I read this like it was going out of style. It's not. On the contrary, it's apparently coming into style, since it's volume one of the Emerald Creek series. I don't consider it perfectly well-written, there was the odd niggle and annoyance for me here and there, but overall it was excellent, and if you can get a cantankerous curmudgeon like me to 'need to read' what you've written, you know you have a winner on your hands. I've had to wade through some real clunkers this month so far, and it's finding a gem like this which makes all that wading worthwhile. I recommend this novel and look forward to the next volume. And I hope if Davidow is looking for beta readers for her next project, she'll consider me as a candidate! Yes, she's that good.

Fifty Years in Polygamy by Kristyn Decker

Title: Fifty Years in Polygamy
Author: Kristyn Decker
Publisher: Synergy Books Publishing
Rating: TBD

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

This blog has been primarily about fiction, which is what I intended, but in honor of International Women's Day (yeah, I'm a day late and a dollar short - story of my life! Deal with it!) I started reading a story rooted in a topic about which I care very much: the subjugation of women and the abuse of children by religion. Kristyn Decker is the daughter of a "polygamist prophet". She was pretty much trapped in a religious cult (all religions are cults in my book no matter how mainstream they are), so I'm pleased to have a chance to read this and help expose this, well, let's call it what it is - crime - of the abuse of women and of children.

Kristyn Decker, when she went by the name of Sophia Allred, was born into a rather clannish family of cult followers in one small branch of the highly sectarian Mormon church. The abject failure of the church is explicit in how many sub-cults it has spawned since Joseph Smith died, and this same sectarianism is rife throughout all religions, including the big three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, Christianity has spawned well-over twenty thousand sects since the first century - that's very nearly a new splintering of the "one true faith" every single month since it began. That's how worthless it is. The very fact that there is no one true religion is proof positive that there is no true god. Kristyn's life was one of abuse and of rape, and of the wholesale marginalization and demeaning of women which went on for decade after decade in her direct experience.

I did have some technical issues with this book. The first problem I ran into is the same kind of poorly-formatted ebook issue I've been encountering with every other ebook I've read this month. This book is not formatted for the Kindle. The contents, rather than showing a single (or even a double) column of chapter headings are all jumbled together into one continuous paragraph, which actively prevents a reader from reaching the beginning of the book proper! When I touch the right side of the screen to move to the next screen, I'm hitting some chapter heading and I'm transported directly to chapter thirty-nine or whatever! When I hit 'Beginning' to return to the start of the book and try again, I'm right back at the introduction, and I have to wade through six screens again only to find myself right back at the contents!

Fortunately Kindle also allows you to slide your finger, rather like slipping a page over, so I got by that way, but this was bad formatting, which is annoying at the very least and not a good start to a book I'm supposed to be reviewing! The Adobe reader version was fine, and even showed the few gray-scale illustrations, but the Kindle version showed only dark gray rectangles where the images should be.

Another minor bitch: if I'm in possession of the ebook, then I really don't need a couple of screens of book recommendations to wade through from people I don't even know and therefore cannot rely on for a recommendation! I'm already planning on reading it otherwise why would I even have the ebook? This isn't smart thinking. Why would I need a recommendation which conveys nothing to me? I don't actually see the point of those in a print book for that matter, but I could argue that there's more point there than ever there could be in an ebook. You cannot leaf through an ebook in the store to see these recommendations or to get a feel for how it reads. Indeed, you cannot leaf through an ebook unless you already bought it! Seriously, I do not think publishers have even begun to catch up with what ebooks are all about. They're still thinking in terms of print books. Just saying!

So finally I get to start reading it and at 483 pages, it's a bit TMI for my taste. For me there was far too many unappealing details of everyday activity. The history went back to well before Kristyn was born. The problem with that, for me, is that I didn't ask to read this for her family tree, but for what happened to Kristyn herself. Having said that, let me get to the meat of the project: hidden amongst the mundane - and it was truly worth searching for, especially if you mistakenly harbor a benign view of religion - were some truly horrific revelations which might be too graphic for some readers (it was the uncensored version which I read), and this is what, for me, made it worthwhile wading through the tedious parts.

This was a no-holds-barred, no-punches-pulled story of what a religious cult can do to young children and to women, and it's depressing at best and horrific at worst. This isn't a story of something religion did during the crusades or the inquisition, awful as those things alone were. It's something truly horrific which was done - and continues to be done - in the lifetimes of anyone who might read this. It's going on right now, somewhere. I'm already well aware of how evil organized religion is, so much of this did not actually come as a shock or a surprise to me. Indeed, the only truly surprising thing to me was how people can cling to a belief in a benign god when these horrors happen not rarely, but routinely and on a daily basis. It was disturbing and it was sick, just as such a god would be if there were one, but this is the information that needs to get out, and which needs to keep coming out until organized religion dies the natural death that it's long overdue. I recommend this book.

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

Title: The Last Dragonslayer
Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: WARTY!

The Last Dragonslayer is ably read by Elizabeth Jasicki. I have to add a word in here (nothing to do with the reader) about the gratuitous use of music in audio books. If I want a music CD, I'll get one. If I get a novel on CD, I want the novel and no background music which is distracting at best and really annoying at worst. I can see the point of having something - musical or otherwise, to indicate the start and the end of each disk as long (as we don't get carried away with it). That's particularly useful when driving, but to have random sounds playing at random points throughout the audio sucks. Big time.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Jasper Fforde novels. I read Shades of Grey and loved that one, and I listened to One of Our Thursdays is Missing and loved that, but I didn't like the next two of the Thursday Next series (volumes 1 & 2) that I listened to subsequently. The narrator on One of Our Thursdays is Missing (Emily Gray) was completely captivating. I fell in love with her!

This novel is very much like the Thursday next series - written in the same way with the same off-kilter take on life (I loved the newspaper, The Daily Eyestrain!), but the problem he's going to run into here, I think, is the problem which Fforde had with the Thursday Next novels: it's really hard to sustain truly goofy writing without running into boring at one end of the scale from tiresome repetitiveness, and into incomprehensibility at the other end of the scale as you try to stretch the wacky humor ever further and into new realms. I've encountered this self-same problem in two volumes I've been working on (and off!).

The basic premise is that in contemporary Britain (in a parallel universe), the United Kingdom is actually the Un-united Kingdoms. This story is set in the Kingdom of Hereford, where magic is a fading power, reduced to fixing plumbing and delivering pizza, whereas once, long ago, it used to be truly magical. Jennifer Strange is a fifteen year old who is nominally in charge of Kazam, a magic supply agency which supplies magicians of various stripes to help people out. Their current job is rewiring a house.

Jennifer is in charge because The Great Zambini, the owner, has literally disappeared. It comes as no surprise that Strange is the last dragonslayer, handed the mantle by the previous and very aged dragonslayer. But apart from the Quark beast which was truly hilarious (to me anyway!) and a brilliant invention, the rest of the novel was so-so at best and gone to weeds at worst. When I went to library today to pick up a book, I decided I'd had enough of this audio CD, and switched it out for Around the World in 80 Days which proved itself to be much more entertaining in only the first four tracks of the first disk, so I'm happy with that - but not with this novel. It had great potential, but it turned out to be warty!

To be continued!

Hacked by Geri Hosier

Title: Hacked
Author: Geri Hosier
Publisher: Amazon
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 for this review.

Please note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. The formatting was better when the text was shrunk very small, but it was still a problem. For example, chapter 8 begins with the title, (which is simply 'Chapter 8') running on the same line as the last line of chapter 7, no page break, no paragraph break, not even a line break. The isn't the only example of a "run-on" chapter! And at 20% in I discovered a new make of helicopter: a Sirkovsky! Not to be confused with the much better-known Sikorsky...!

You know you don't actually have to give a brand name or a make (not for me anyway - I can do without them) - especially if you're not sure of it. You can just say 'helicopter'. I don't even care if you turn it into a verb and say that people were 'helicoptered' in. It's really not important to me as a reader what type of helicopter it was. There is no excuse in this electronic age, however, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.

The inappropriate words I can understand to some extent in a first draft, but first drafts are certainly not ready for submission as advance reading copies! Given the general sloppiness of the writing overall, I have to take all this into account in this review. If an author cannot be bothered to make the effort - even to run a spell-checker once through their novel before submitting it for review - then why should I read it through once? I sound like an agent, don't I?! I'm not! I just care about writing.

Onto the story. Liv Paxton is the head of a London homicide team which is investigating a celebrity cell phone hacking scandal and some associated deaths. I guess someone dialed M for murder! The very first problem I ran into with this novel was the info dump problem. There was too much in the first few screens, with zero action. Take this sentence as an example: "She pushed her chin-length dark brown, red-hennaed hair behind her left ear and pushed her designer off-the-right-shoulder black lace dress, which was making her feel a little over-exposed, discreetly back up onto her shoulder." And this was at one percent in!

A sentence like this is way too packed. There may be readers who care about her hair being "hennaed" or her dress being designer. I don't. On the contrary, I find that kind of writing to be pretentious. As long as sentences like that are rare, I can read the novel containing them without them becoming an issue for me, but if I'm going to be encountering that kind of sentence frequently, it does not bode well for my rating of the novel! Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to play on, Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold! enough!’.

I know how easy it is to miss something, or to let a grammar error or a misspelling go by. I'm trans-Atlantic myself, so I'm often finding myself in the position of wondering upon which side of "the pond" a given spelling belongs. Plus I tend to have 'dyslexic fingers' so while I know perfectly well how to spell the word, sometimes when I type fast, the letters don't always end up in the right order, which necessitates excessive editing and re-reading. I should just learn to type properly!

What all this means for those of us who have such problems, or aren't good at spelling, or grammar, or who might actually be dyslexic or something along those lines, is that we have to work that much harder! And whilst we do have spell-checkers, they can only tell us if the spelling is correct, not if it's the correct spelling for the way the word is used, and certainly not if it's the correct use of that word! Microsoft's grammar checker in Word is useless. I detest and loathe Microsoft, so I don't use their products at home. I run Ubuntu Linux on my computer, and use Soft Office, which is perfectly fine, but which offers no advantage in the areas I've mentioned. It does have a good spell-checker, however, for which I am really grateful (and definitely not 'greatful'!).

The only way to get a leg-up here is to read lots of well-written material, and as much as I disdain the so-called classics, they are well-written. That doesn't mean we should write all our novels like Jane Austen, for example, wrote hers, but we can learn some style from those people. We can learn how to tell a story, and from the really good ones, we can learn how not to jam up the first few pages with excessive description.

But back to the novel. The more I read of this, the less I felt I wanted to read of it. The story isn't outright bad, but it's not that great either, and the technical problems with the text became worse. There was an increasing number of spelling errors and typos, for example where the 's' from the start of word two is accidentally tagged onto the tail of word one instead. At one point there was the non-word Causcasians. There were variations on the word 'lairy' - which is a word, but which appears to be used in the wrong context here - and this was confusing. I'm wondering if 'hairy' was what was intended, but given the other issues with formatting and spelling, I have no idea whether it's right or wrong, whether it was intended or not, or whether it was supposed to be 'hairy' and not 'lairy'. In short, I could not trust the author here because of too many issues elsewhere! These are just a few examples.

The old excuse that this is a "galley proof" doesn't cut it today. Not for me it doesn't. There's no excuse at all for bad formatting or for spelling errors in an era where novels are written on computers and all word processors have a spell checker. Had the novel been more engrossing, I might have been distracted enough that I wouldn't get the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard feeling whenever I encountered one of these, but when the story drags, that's when you really notice the potholes in the road. I didn't like the main character Liv, or her best friend, newspaper tycoon Louise. Neither of them seemed to act their age and they were both snobs.

They also had some weird ideas about gender roles, too: for example, they're all for equality - head cop, head of newspaper, which is perfectly fine, but then Liv insists upon a guy who is 'masculine', and she defines that by a guy who opens doors for her and pulls out a chair for her when they go to dinner! Seriously? You can't have it both ways. Either the genders are equal (at least in intent) or they're not. If you're not equal, you can be treated "like a woman" (whatever antique notion that satisfies) and have your coat draped over your shoulders for you as you leave, and the door opened for you as you arrive, and your seat pulled out for you as you go to dinner. If you're equal, then you can pull out your own chair! Unless we're going to take turns pulling out chairs and opening doors. That's equality! What's Liv going to ask for next - to have her stool pulled out by a strong, masculine man?!

The biggest problem from a reading enjoyment perspective was that all this 'James Bond' style futzing around with expensive clothes, flash cars, dallying with a romance, and dog's dinners, was that it all-too-frequently put the actual story on a back burner. The reason I selected this novel was that I wanted to read the detective story. If I'd wanted a romance to dominate the story I'd have picked up a romance (which is unlikely, but it has happened!). Instead of getting on with the story here, I found it often tossed into the back seat in favor of pursuing the budding relationship between Liv and Mr Perfect, who was a decorated soldier and very much a Mary Sue. I had no interest in him or in their romance. Yes, I was interested in the potential link between him serving in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and there being two hundred million pounds' (sterling) worth of heroin going missing there, and it would have been great had it turned out that he was behind it all, but having had the thankless task of wading through the swampy waters of the first 25% of this, I really had no energy and no interest in wading any more even to get to the bottom of that mystery. I can't honestly and in good conscience rate this novel a worthy read.

Retribution by AJ Scudiere

Title: Retribution
Author: AJ Scudiere
Publisher: Griffyn Ink
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 for this review.

Note that there are some serious formatting problems in the Kindle version of this novel. There is no excuse, in this electronic age, for formatting or spelling issues in a novel, not even in a so-called galley proof.

Retribution is quite possibly the worst-ever title to choose for your novel. When I went to get a link to it on BN, it listed thirty four pages of novels associated with that word, and the first page showed me almost thirty novels with that actual name, or some close variation on it. C'mon authors, let's get a distinctive title for goodness sakes! Or if it's the publisher made you title it that way, shame on them! The author is listed at BN, but not this volume for some reason. Retribution is book two of the Sin trilogy, so keep in mind that I have not read book 1 (Vengeance - which I'd guess is also an over-used title!), so that may affect how I view this volume. The third volume, Justice (again overused?!) was due in 2015.

I don't normally say a lot about covers because authors (unless they self-publish) typically have no say in their cover, and the artists who do the covers typically illustrate only one thing for me: that they never read the novel they're covering. I have to say on this occasion what a pleasure it was to see a woman on the cover who isn't anorexic! It was really nice to see someone who looks like she can actually do the things we'll read about in the novel. I don't know who the cover model was, but she looks perfect for this illustration.

Having said that I have to add that as I read this, the cover became the best part of this novel. A J Scudiere was running a 'buy one, get one free' offer on her website when I visited, which isn't the best advertisement for her novels in my opinion, but it's her website. She can do whatever she wants. The trilogy is about two kids raised in the mob, who become rebels seeking vengeance for harm done to their families, and end up finding each other and working together. This volume follows up on that, with the two protagonists from the first volume, Sin (Cynthia) and Lee now living under different names as a married couple. Sin has somehow become a cop, and she hears someone say "Hello Sin" but can't pick out the speaker in a crowd. Despite having the means to quickly disappear and start a new life somewhere else, the two of them have apparently gone soft. They decide to stay and fight it out. This part I found less than credible given who these characters are supposed to be, but the story takes off from that premise.

Sin goes looking for one of the rival family Kurev brothers, whom she somehow fails to recognize when she initially picks him up in a routine drug bust. There's no reason for this other than to move the story, because she does find him by amazing coincidence and then has to kill him. For no good reason, Lee then takes off to that same place to pick up information in a nearby bar, and by another amazing coincidence happens to sit right next to two people who's conversation tells him everything he needs to know to move the story forward some more. I found this less than credible, and that's where I started deciding that I really had no interest in following this story any further. It didn't spark for me. It wasn't interesting, and I couldn't get into it with any enthusiasm. I could neither identify with either of the two main characters, nor did I find them appealing or interesting, and their relationship is as robotic as it is bizarre.

In a way I could rate this novel triple A: for Angst, Anguish, and Analysis, because the author is all about telling, not much interested in showing. Personally I don't mind that as much as other reviewers might, but even for me, screen after screen of dreary, detailed drifts down memory lane or deep into the protagonists analytical but pedantic mind is too much when it happens time after time. Yes, there's some brief action here and there, but it's perfunctory and comes in very short bursts, and even that is analyzed in detail as it happens. This kind of writing has no appeal for me, so I cannot rate this novel as a worthy read.

The Adventures of Jillian Spectre by Nic Tatano

Title: The Adventures of Jillian Spectre
Author: Nic Tatano
Publisher: Harper Collins
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 for this review.

This is yet another novel with a YA female main character told in the first person PoV, unfortunately. Fortunately, that wasn't the bad part. Unfortunately, the first 5% of the novel made me feel like I was reading the author's private notes - the very notes he jotted down when he first had the idea for the novel. You know, a bit like this maybe:

I know, I'll write a novel about a limp rag of a girl who wilts at not one, but two boys! And let's make her whole life about boys and very little else. Even the big theme is about a man (her father). No one's ever done that before! Lemme see, we need two polar opposite guys who inexplicably appeal to her equally to show what a dithering, witless bag of schizophrenic inertia she is! That's something new to bring to the YA table! So, the first guy will have "those deep blue eyes" and make her "heart flutter"! Yeah! Now there's an original premise. He'll be named Ryan Harker, because Harker not only spookily recalls Jonathan Harker of Dracula fame, but it also subconsciously suggests he's a good listener, and don't you know that all fluttering, blue-eye addicted, wilting girls like a good listener, right? And guess what, he'll never use her name, but use a demeaning nickname for her instead, like "Sparks". Yeah, that's never been done before.

Now how else can I lard this up so it meets the standard guide lines for trope YA? I know, I'll make the second guy edgy so that, while to any intelligent girl there's no choice to be made at all, our wilting girl is torn and anguished between the obviously decent guy and the obviously worthless guy, who thinks of her as meat. We'll call the bad boy Jake Revson because that's such a bad-ass name (revved up and all, you know), and let's give him bedroom eyes and we'll make his first line to Jillian be "You look hot today" because why the hell would she care about someone who likes her for who she is when she can have an unknown "rogue" who has eyes only for her supposedly hot bod? Now that's what I call a YA novel!

Seriously? You see where the author is blundering with this? I mean why take the road less traveled when you can bleat with the rest of the flock and fill your reader's head with wool? I should have ditched this one right there and then. So why continue reading? Well the only reason for me, at that point, was that this premise (other than YA trope trash, that is) was intriguing - that people have these psychic talents and this is out in the open, not secret, and that these people live in the same neighborhood: just like there's a China town in the city, there's also a psychic town in the city.

Perhaps a few words about the talents might be in order here. Jillian can see up to five years into the future. No reason why there's a limit, there just is, okay, live with it - it's kinda like Nicholas Cage's character in Next, but he could see only two minutes - again for no reason. One time, Jillian sees a woman die and sees her afterlife, which is supposed to be impossible. This gets her under the scrutiny of "The Council" because there's a group of four old fogies who rule the psychics with an iron fist. And her dad is gone. She thought he was dead, but it turns out he's still alive and despite all these psychics running around, no one knows where he is because he's "special". So Ryan Harker is a mind reader (but is too inept to grasp that Jillian finds both himself and Jake hot), Jake is a kinetic psychic (he can move stuff, like bra fasteners for example), and Jillian's BFF Roxanne is a 'muse'. Yep. A 'muse'.

The sad thing is that this Jillian Spectre character has something that could be really great if it wasn't betrayed at every turn by making her a sad-sack YA trope female main character. So I planned on continuing to read this for a while to see where it went. I was hoping the author would dig himself out of this mud hole in which he'd been wallowing, but if he was going to try dragging me down that road-most-trampled-to-death, I would be so outta there!

Talking of drag, I seriously doubt that the >Dennis Rodman reference will get any traction given that he was retired from big time sports before most of the people in the YA age range entered kindergarten. From a writing perspective, this isn't a trivial problem given that most YA authors are significantly outside of the YA age range. The age range itself is problematical, because it suggests you can write a novel and it will likely appeal to everyone within that range, which is patent nonsense given the huge differences which exist between your average 14-year-old and your average 24-year-old. So the 'YA' thing is an artificial construct at best. Older writers are much more likely to resonate with the upper end of the range than the lower, but even 24-year-olds will be unlikely to know who Rodman is, and a seventeen-year-old girl is hardly going to use him as a reference unless she's a huge basketball afficionado.

This out-of-date reference habit is a potential problem given the target. The author references Madonna at a later point as a mono-moniker'd artist. Yes, she would have far more traction than Rodman would, even with the younger set, but is the author not aware of a score of other single-name female performers who would be more likely on the lips of a seventeen-year-old than would Madonna's? Names like Adele, Beyoncé (or Birdy if you want a little more cachet), Ciara, Duffy, etc., but given that the comparison here is with a male, there is an equal number of single-name male singers, too. But we got Madonna.

That just seemed odd to me, but it didn't seem quite as odd as the school work being done by these seventeen-year-olds. My ten-year-old is learning geometry, yet the author depicts students in Jillian's year being asked to name simple triangles (equilateral and obtuse - hardly rocket science!), and being unable to do so? Is this a school for psychics or for remedial ed. cases? Seriously? Credibility is seeping out of the seams of this story with every new screen, and I'm only 10% in. I would really like to be entertained here, but the gaffs keep getting in the way of the entertainment. So at ten percent, I was looking at reading only to 25%, and just quitting the novel at that point if it didn't improve. It didn't. It actually got worse.

Much as I'd like to get to know Jillian, and to find out what's going on in her world, there's only so much crap I'm prepared to wade through to get there, especially when I have a host of other ebooks upon which I'd love to embark. I really don't care what they're studying in class, but please at least make it seem intelligent instead of completely throwing-away the scene because you couldn't be bothered to make it a bit more realistic. Where was the editor here? What is the point of going Big Publishing™ if your editor fails you like this? Although it's really on the author to get these things right in the first place. Like I've said before, I'm quite prepared to put up with some goofy crap if the story can support it; that is, if it's entertaining enough that I'm willing to let more stuff slide by, but if there's a host of such stuff, and the story doesn't merit the slogging through it, then no, I'm not going to put up with it.

And the clunkers kept on coming! How many seventeen-year-old girls know the Chippendales well enough to make it a nickname reference? Maybe they do but it seemed a bit of a long-stretch to me. Even if I let that go, however, there's worse. Tatano seems intent upon insulting as many high school stereotypes as he can, and while I have no affection for cheerleaders (I think their "rôle" is both genderist and pointless), this does not mean that they're automatic sluts as Tatano states in pretty much so many words. As if that's not bad enough, he next goes after someone who is overweight, comparing her with the Titanic.

Now I understand that it's his character, Jillian, who is giving expression to these thoughts, not the author per se, but here's the problem: I wouldn't like a main character for being a bitch any more than I'd like an author for being a bitch. So does he want me to perceive his main character as a bigot and a bitch, because that's what I think of her right now? Why would I want to follow a character like that? It's not like she has any sort of justification for her vitriol. All of this abuse was in pursuit of setting-up Jillian with what was evidently, at seventeen, her first date - with one of the school wrestling team whose only virtue seems to be chiseled abs. Let's not mention his short stature. (I said not to mention that!) But yeah, we get that, too. I don't expect a main character to be perfect. I'd rather she wasn't, but to see Jillian like this is nauseating. I'm just glad she never encountered any people of color while I was reading. Just how shallow can we make this character and indeed, this entire novel? This was at almost 20% in and I was honestly starting to feel that I wouldn't even make 25%.

What finally made me feel like this novel should have been issued with a barf bag was actually two things. The first was Tatano's reference to "that gal in the Olympic soccer game years ago". He's referring to when Brandy Chastain, having kicked the winning penalty shot in the World Cup soccer final against China (giving the USA the world cup!), pulled off her soccer shirt in celebration of her finest moment on the field. The story was way, way overplayed by male-driven media, but it was memorable, yet Tatano can't even remember her name! He can't even tell us why it was so significant, but you know what, neither of these things is the problem! The real problem here is that he has seventeen-year-old Jillian, who was way too young to even remember this event (it was in 1999), somehow pulling it up from memory to make a comparison and referring to Chastain as "that gal". Honestly? This made no sense given her non-sporting character.

That was pretty much bad enough right there, and plenty reason to dump this novel, but the second thing showed up right on the 25% marker, and this was Jillian's mother saying that women are useless - though not in those exact words. The argument is about the risk of Jillian becoming pregnant. Jillian argues that her mother never had that problem, so why should her daughter? Her mother's response is that she had a father to look after her whereas Jillian doesn't. Seriously? How genderist can you get? If a woman is a single mom she's useless? Only if you have a guy around can you raise a decent daughter? Had this not been on my kindle, had it been a paperback, I think I would have shredded the novel in the garbage disposal at that point.

Now before you say a word, let me say that I understand the difference between an entire novel expressing genderist views and a character in a novel expressing those same views. I don't have a problem with a character being portrayed like that because there really are people like that. If Jillian's mother had been the only example of this, then I would have been fine with that, but when we have a novel which is riven with genderism (and with other issues as I've outlined here, such as bitchiness and bigotry), to the point where you really can't get away from it, then I'm not interested in reading it. You're welcome to read it and embrace it if you wish (it's a free country), but count me out. I have no interest at all in reading it, let alone in trying to dig through page after page of it in the hope that I can find some gold amongst the dross.

What I wanted here was to read a story about a girl who was remarkable in some way. What I didn't want to read about was a seventeen-year-old boy badly disguised as a girl, which is what Tatano screeched to me that Jillian was in this one segment alone. You know authors can make all the excuses they want: "Oh I never imagined any reader would take it that way", or "It's really a matter of interpretation" or "Everyone does it", or "I'm really surprised that people are viewing it like that", but you ought to know that when it's become an integral part of your novel, it's not a matter of interpretation or differing opinion, it's a matter of it being badly written, and that's it. And I'm not reviewing everyone; I'm reviewing this one novel right here, right now, and this one novel is warty! I don't need to read any more, nor do I need to be psychic to get that vibe loud and clear!

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Title: Ella Enchanted
Author: Gail Carson Levine who also illustrated the print book
Publisher: Listening library
Rating: WARTY!

This is another movie/book tie-in. You can read the movie review in the movie section of my blog. This audio book was read by Eden Riegel who does a completely amazing job. I don't know how old she was when she recorded this but Riegel sounds perfect for the main character who is, be warned, much younger throughout this novel than ever she was in the movie (barring the first few scenes). The voice is a little bit sugary or flowery, so it might put some people off, but I liked it.

This novel is quite different from the movie - or more accurately, they changed things a lot when they turned this novel into a movie, and they made a better job of it in my opinion. This is sad, because I really enjoyed the first disk, finding it amazingly entertaining, and feeling as though I would be giving this novel a worthy rating, but after that first disk it went down hill. Unlike the movie, the novel follows the original fairy tale quite closely in many regards, including the glass slipper finale (which probably wasn't actually glass, but fur in the original fairy tale).

The Ella in the novel is considerably younger than the one played by Anne Hathaway. The novel is also quite different from the movie in how it tells this story. Ella is friends with the young Prince Char (Charmont) from childhood - they are never 'rivals' or in contest as depicted in the movie. Ella also spends some considerable time in "Finishing School" - sent there by her father - before she finally decides she has to locate Lucinda.

She is cursed with obedience at an early age and realizes at a later age that her curse would also be a curse for Char if she were ever to marry him, allowing anyone to take advantage of him and his riches or even to assassinate him if they so chose, using her as a tool to do so. In the end, she finally finds the wherewithal to refuse to marry him in order to protect him, and thereby breaks the curse.

The problem with the story is that while it was immensely entertaining and inventive for the duration of first disk (of five), it became really tedious thereafter, with nothing of interest or of entertainment value occurring at all - not for me, anyway. That's why I can't give it a worthy rating. 20% entertainment doth not a novel make!

Sacajawea by Joseph Bruchac

Title: Sacajawea
Author: Joseph Bruchac
Publisher: Audio Bookshelf
Rating: WARTY!

Tsakakawias had many variations on her name, which wasn't her original Shoshoni name anyway, but since, as far as I can tell, Tsakakawias is closest to her native name - the one she became most commonly known by in her own time - that's the one I'll use here. Other variants are the one which Bruchac, ill-advisedly, in my opinion, uses, along with an alternative, 'Sacagawea'. See wikipedia for more details. Note that the Shoshoni claim that 'Sacajawea' was actually her Shoshoni name, and that it meant 'boat puller', but that makes no sense at all to me. Why would a child be named boat-puller?! No doubt she aided Lewis and Clark since their boats had to be pulled against the current many times, but Tsakakawias had this name long before she was teaching those two how to survive in the wild.

Note that no one knows what Tsakakawias actually looked like. The purported model for the image on the US dollar coin minted in 2000 was a Shoshoni (or Shoshone) named Randy'L He-dow Teton who graduated from University of New Mexico at the same age as Tsakakawias was when she died. He-Dow looks nothing like the image that actually ended up on the coin, so even two hundred years later, the insults continue! I think we can be reasonably certain that the image on the novel cover doesn't represent Tsakakawias either, especially since both the woman in the cover image, and He-dow herself are significantly older than Tsakakawias actually was when she quite effectively lead Lewis and Clark to their triumph.

This audio book was read by Nicole Littrell and Michael Rafkin, and these two people were one of the two main reasons I could not stand to listen beyond chapter one of this god-awfully read novel. Why two people who sound like they're Irish would be hired to read the tale of a Shoshoni woman is mystery enough in itself. Are we supposed to understand from this that there no Shoshoni people who can read? I know there are only 12,000 or so Shoshoni remaining in the world, but I seriously doubt that. Even an Irish narration would have been okay had not these two readers apparently conspired to tell this story in the most irritating sing-sing voice imaginable, as though they were reading a nursery rhyme to a four year old. I seriously felt nauseated by it after one chapter and could not go on. Instead of this abysmal disk, I recommend simply reading the wikipedia article on Tsakakawias as I did just now (for the second or third time!).

The truth about Tsakakawias is that she was a Shoshoni woman who was born in what is today Lemhi County, Idaho. She was kidnapped by a rival tribe before she reached her teens and was shortly afterwards sold to a trapper from Quebec, named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had already bought one native American wife. Thus she was "married" at thirteen and pregnant shortly thereafter. Her name is not a Shoshoni name but a Hidatsa name tsakaka wia meaning 'bird woman', given to her by her kidnappers and contrary to popular culture, it was pronounced not with a soft 'g', but more like tsa-ɡah-ɡa-wea with no stress on any syllable. When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived to build Fort Mandan in 1804, they began seeking a guide to travel the Missouri with them, and as soon as they learned that Tsakakawias spoke Shoshoni, she and her husband were on-board. It fortunate for them that she was, otherwise they would have perished, lost their diaries, and had nothing to trade for the fine otter-skin cloak they took back to President Jefferson, for which I'll bet that Tsakakawias garnered zero credit.

She died at the age of 24, and Bruchac, who claims native American "blood" himself, owed her more than this. OTOH, are there any Americans who don't claim native American blood - the blood of the peoples who were systematically slaughtered and marginalized when this nation was colonized? Not that the native Americans were any better since they were routinely at war with one another and, as you can see from Tsakakawias's own story, were not above kidnapping children. The bottom line is that there are precious few heroes in any story of the annihilation or the brutal treatment of one people by another, and it's truly sad that the few genuine heroes we do have - ones like Tsakakawias - are treated badly, marginalized, or rendered as a fairy tale even by those who should know better. Tsakakawias deserves better treatment than this audio insult, and the fairy-tale story-writing which evidently inspired and informed it.

Don't Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowski

Title: Don't Even Think About It
Author: Sarah Mlynowski
Publisher: Delacorte
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!

This novel, yet another unfortunately in first person PoV (I'll try to deal, but it's getting harder and harder!) begins with an introduction to a group of friends living in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, NYC, who were evidently not always freaks! They only became 'freaks' when they got their annual flu shot and developed telepathic powers. I'm not kidding. That's the premise, and you know what, I don't care how stupid it is. You can sell me the dumbest premise on the planet, if you can tell me a good story. It's that simple! So let's go with it and see what's on offer here.

Just a few thoughts on the choice of title (again!): this is yet another novel which could have used a more wisely chosen title. As appropriate as this title is, given the actual story, there are several other novels out there with this exact title. I often wonder if other authors ever even do a survey to see if someone else has used their title already. There is, of course, nothing to stop you using a title that's already out there, but you have to stack that against how deeply you want to see your novel buried when people are trying to recall the title and end up perhaps buying someone else's novel thinking it's yours?! It could happen. Then again, if you go with Big Publishing™, you may well not be given any choice over your title, and that's something I'm not willing to cede to someone who has far less interest in my success than I do.

Olivia Byrne, Cooper Miller, Mackenzie Feldman hang out together. Initially, I got the impression that someone other than one of those three was telling the story, but then I learned that all of them (and then some!) are telling it at the same time, so it's a bit confused - this 1PoV stuff - when it's multiple 1PoV all at the same time and so, in effect, is 3PoV. But as it happens, it's very readable, so this was the first pleasant surprise here. The next one was that the humor in it is really enjoyable, so the author immediately had me on board. This ESP phenomenon spreads throughout the entire class (save two), all of whom seemed to have had that flu shot.

One thing I have to ask about here what's this with giving children last names as first names. Cooper? Mackenzie? I know people do this, so it's not a problem that an author uses these names. They've just always seemed so pretentious to me and so defining of a less than brilliant YA story. But that's just me; in the end, you have to mine where the gold is I guess, and if there are kids out there with these names it would be rather odd not to include them in your novel, wouldn't it?! So like it or leave it. Again, fortunately for Mlynowski, she writes this so well that it was never a problem.

The story continues with a believable progression of discovery and fear, and of discomfort and joy, and so seemed to me to be quite a realistic portrayal of what might happen were this flu virus phenomenon real. The premise makes no sense genetically, but once you decide, as I did, to let that slide, the story is really a lot of fun. That aside, there were only a couple of real issues I had with it. One was that these teens seemed to be obsessed with who was making out with whom or who any given one of them might be making out with if they had chance! They seemed to have very little else on their minds, and I found this to be sad. I hope it's not true that teens are like this these days. I fear for our national future if they are! Perhaps a younger audience than I represent will not find this as odd or as disillusioning as I did.

The other issue was that this 'who is making out with whom and whose secrets are being spilled now' went on a bit too long to be completely enjoyable. It started out fine, but I felt that some editing between the middle and the end was merited. That said, this was a really fun novel overall and I enjoyed it. Generally speaking, the relationships were not unrealistic - which believe me was a real joy to read in a YA novel - and they showed largely intelligent behaviors amongst the main characters. It was based on a rather absurd premise, but if you're willing to put that aside, and you're willing to cope with some teen angst that, as I mentioned, drags somewhat, then this will entertain you and reward you for your patience in reading it. I very much liked the ending. It's nice to read a novel where teens make smart and independent decisions

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.