Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver

Title: Carte Blanche
Author: Jeffery Deaver
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

I'm a James Bond purist, I admit it. If it isn't Fleming, it isn’t cannon, and it’s second-rate no matter who the author is! Not that Fleming was a brilliant writer or anything, but he did have a certain style, and more than that, he had a history in intelligence which lent a certain authenticity to his novels even as he invented the most outrageous fiction with which to clothe it. I've read a few non-Fleming Bonds, and I've been singularly disappointed with them all, so I gave up. All this is to say that I went into this one with more than a bit of trepidation. I've already reviewed Diva's The Bone Collector, and while I wasn't completely thrilled by that, I was curious to read other material by him. This one's a start, and the novel was on close-out so I figured I had little to lose even if I didn’t like it!

We know that book blurbs nearly always lie. The sparse one on the back cover claims that Jeffery Deaver brings James Bond into the modern age. And it’s a lie! Yes, it does depict him in the 21st century, but it retains all of Fleming's 1950's era snobbery, which was one of the things I found most obnoxious about the original novels. I honestly don’t care if he wears Sea Island cotton shirts or sports a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. I'd been hoping that Deaver might do something more along the lines of what Eon Productions did in 2006 when they brought in Daniel Craig to star, Martin Campbell to direct, and Haggis, Purvis, and Wade to write. He didn’t.

Deaver knows his stuff (and commendably gets his "British-isms" right!), but it’s far too larded with brand-names and details. It’s like he took copious notes when he researched, and then couldn’t bear to leave any of them out of his text. It’s like he really didn’t want to overhaul Bond, and so couldn't leave any of the trademarked Fleming snobbery behind. So yes, this Bond is updated, but no, he's still an anachronism, and worse, he's not appealing. This Bond is a 1950's throwback without the 1950's milieu in which to live and breathe. He's way-the-hell too upper class for his lower-class origin to make any sense at all. None of this snobbery fits with his trope modern military history (although how that's even supposed to work given that he's still a Royal Navy commander is a complete mystery - there's not a lot of ocean in Afghanistan).

I always did love that Bond was a 'commander': there's something about that particular title which outranks everything else for me, but I’d have been happy to see that go if it meant we could get the panache and élan of Fleming's Bond, but set in modern times. Deaver's problem, it seems, is that he was so obsessed with holding on to everything with which Fleming had adorned the original Bond that realism was ejected from his too-tightly-squeezed fist. He features Felix Leiter, Rene Mathis, Mary Goodnight, May (his devoted housekeeper), and his Bentley - although it's a Continental GT now, not the growling, late 1920's Bentley Blower of the Fleming era. Talking of lighters, the new Bond doesn’t smoke, but that's the only real difference I noticed from Fleming's original. And let’s not even ask how Bond can afford a car priced at an eighth of a million pounds….

Bond is now in the Operations Branch of the Overseas Development Group, but he works for Miles Messervy, so we’re essentially back in 1953 when Casino Royale was first published. We meet him in Serbia, preventing the derailing of a train, which would not have done much damage anyway, so the question in Bond's mind is why Niall Dunne, someone who seems to be very much like James Bond in his skill set (and who is the object of Bond's attention as we begin), would waste his time on it.

Pursuing scant leads, Bond runs into the main Bond villain with the inevitable attendant psychopathy. Severan Hydt is of Dutch ancestry, and is a distinctly warped individual who takes an unnatural interest not so much in the killing of people, as in the dead bodies which the psychopathy leaves in its, er, wake! Hydt appears to be pursuing some sort of disaster which is estimated to take down about 100 people. This is only a practice run for something much larger, it would seem.

Unlike in the Fleming era, Bond evidently has no authority to investigate in the UK, only abroad, so he's stuck with being classed as an observer under the authority of someone who can investigate, and we're hammered over the head with how irritating and incompetent this man is. He wants to shut down everything as soon as the perp is ID'd, whereas Bond wants to let it play out until they discover who’s ultimately behind it all, lest shutting it down alerts the real power behind the throne, allowing them to escape to fight another day. From England the action moves to Dubai where the practice 'event' is supposed to take place.

Felix Leiter is white in this outing, just like he was in the original. Carte Blanche is not only a seriously over-used novel title! We're told he's Texan, but his name is Felix? Okay. His cover is that he's a freelance journalist blogging music: blues, R&B, and Afro-Caribbean. And he's in Dubai, because you know there's a whole heck of a lot of that music generated there! So he and Bond follow Hydt, trying to figure out what this 'practice run' is supposed to be, and they end-up watching Hydt as he confers with an Arab colleague whose business is developing industrial machinery, hence his tie to Hydt. Deaver has Hydt and his friend go into a closed office for no evident reason other than to introduce another character, because as soon as they're in there, they turn right around and come back out. That struck me as weird, especially since that character is bumped-off very shortly afterwards.

Genderism rears its ugly head on page 148, Deaver describes Bond and Leiter spying on Hydt as he visits this business colleague: "Observing Hydt, the Irishman, and an attractive dark-haired woman…" Yes, I agree we already met Hydt and Dunne, so no description is necessary there, but what's also unnecessary is the word 'attractive'. Is this seriously the only adjective Deaver can think of when he looks at a woman? Is she either attractive or she's a waste of time? I encounter this attitude repeatedly. I recall reading a science blog site written by a well-known and published American author, who described a scientist as pretty or some word to that same effect in one of his blogs. I posted a comment on that particular blog asking if he would have described a male scientist as 'handsome'! I know he wouldn't because he never has. I no longer read that blog, and I no longer comment on it because my comments seemed mysteriously to never get published after that particular one!

Note that I don’t have a problem with a character in a novel being genderist or referring to a woman as attractive for no good reason. Characters can be depicted however you like, but when the author is gratuitously pigeon-holing women as 'attractive' and 'other', that's a different matter, but then Deaver does have some odd writing habits. One example is on p184 where he uses the phrase "ratcheting the shackles". One doesn’t normally think of shackles as something one can ratchet. Handcuffs are a different matter. In another example, the words 'land mine' appear unhyphenated and separated, whereas the words 'mid-fifties' appear as one word: 'midfifties' in Deaver's hands. If midfifties, then why not landmine or land-mine? I just thought that was an interesting foible. Another example is Deaver's habit of having Bond is always waking from nightmares which he can’t remember. It's tedious.

Genderism appears again on p229 when we're told that there are two "attractive young women" working at the door of the function which Bond attends. One of them is 'blonde and voluptuous", but that's quite obviously nowhere near enough, so she's wearing a "tight-fitting" dress"! The other woman could be her twin: she's "equally built and clad." Later Bond and Hydt take champagne refills from "an attractive young Afrikaner woman." They key words here are obviously 'attractive' and 'young'. What else matters? This is in the same novel in which Deaver has Bond bristle at someone's use of the word "coloreds" to describe a certain group of people. Disconnect much, Diva?

As if that alone isn't bad enough, Bond, undercover, has an encounter with Jessica Barnes, an older woman who is kept around by Hydt so he can observe her aging. Yes, he's that warped. Bond drives her home one time and she breaks down over Hydt's treatment of her, and Bond commiserates with her, but as soon as he drops her off, he puts her completely out of his mind - because she's old and irrelevant. In short, he treats her no better than Hydt does!

Deaver has a peculiar view of what’s attractive, too boot. Ophelia Maidenstone is a "passive beauty", but Felicity Willing is an "assertive, forceful beauty". How, exactly, does that work?! Funnily enough, that's where Deaver actually comes closest to emulating Fleming, who also had peculiar ideas about the world - like his view expressed in one novel that the mountain Turks are trustworthy, but the plains Turks are not (or was it the other way around?). I think that was in From Russia With Love.

I skipped chapter 39 completely. It begins with Bond finally discovering what operation 'Steel Cartridge' is. It turns out that it was the targeted assassination of undercover British agents, so why Bond wouldn’t already know all about that is something of a mystery, but rather than do anything with this new knowledge, Bond instead drifts off into a two or three page reminiscence of his childhood and parents! Seriously? Fleming would never have written that, so how is Deaver writing in the style of Fleming?

Bond learns that Dunne (whose work is never finished because he's always Nealy Dunne...) is going to firebomb the home of a man who saw something at Hydt's Green Way recycling business which he shouldn’t have (actually it turns out that the man is loyal to Hydt and saw nothing!), so clearly the best way to solve that problem is to draw attention to it by fire-bombing his entire family. Bond knows of this well in advance, but he does nothing to take out the two men (including Dunne) who carry out this attack. Instead, he sneaks the family out of the shack through the back door (a shanty-town shack has a back door?!), while he lets Dunne get away with tossing two grenades and burning the shack down.

The Official Bed-able Bond Beauty shows up in the form of Felicity Willing who is undoubtedly young and attractive, but unlike all the young attractive wusses we've met so far, she's feisty and self-possessed - plus, she wears no make-up to speak of. She's supposedly a strong advocate of feeding-the-children, but she obviously has no problem dressing herself up like a dog's dinner, and dining high on the hog with Bond. Indeed, she has no problem (this is after the acronym "AIDS" came up in a discussion during the function earlier) with having unprotected sex with a man she just met. So she may be Willing, but she sure as hell ain't able.

Deaver's Bond isn't, it turns out, one who has been brought successfully into the modern age. Instead, he's one who's been castrated and sanitized, domesticated and trained to perform tricks, and taught not to take a dump in the house. It’s not Fleming's Bond, not by a long shot. It just goes to prove that when an author is given leave to do what he wants, we end up not so much with carte blanche as with carte seconde-main. This novel is warty.

The Quick by Lauren Owen

Title: The Quick
Author: Lauren Owen
Publisher: Random House
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.

When I first began reading this, I thought that I would not be able to complete the novel. For the first couple of pages it seemed too dense - the text too tightly packed both visually and intelligibly, but after that, I got into it and changed my mind about it completely. Instead of feeling discomfort, I felt charmed by it. The author really seems to have captured the feel of the era, although I confess some surprise at seeing 'surprize' spelled with a 'z', and crêpe spelled with an 'a', as 'crape'. I've never seen crêpe spelled that way before, although it is perfectly permissible; however with regard to the misspelled 'surprise', there is no excuse. It appears about a dozen times, but everywhere else, it’s spelled correctly. I have no idea what the deal is with that!

This novel is set in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most of the action takes place in 1892 (as judged by the performance of Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan). We're briefly introduced to the childhood years of Charlotte and James Norbury, children raised in the declining sprawl of Aiskew Hall in Yorkshire, from whence my own parents hailed. These two children are largely unsupervised, but they fail to grow as wild as they might have done. On the contrary, both of them tend towards reserve as they mature.

As a young child, James suffers the discomfort of being confined in a faux priest hole at the very moment his father dies. The two children loved to undergo what they termed 'ordeals'. These were just simple, silly, childhood dares and adventures, one of which was to be confined in the tiny and dark hole, from which there was no escape from the inside. They were not even supposed to be playing in the library, much less locking each other away. When James went in the hole, Charlotte was supposed to count to one hundred and then let him out, but she was forced, because of her father's illness, from attending on him and it was some time before she was free to return and release her younger brother. Given that these childhood incidents appear to play no part in the rest of the story, I'm confused as to why they were included.

James was more angry than traumatized by this incarceration, and for some reason withdrew into writing at that point. Later he attended Oxford and moved to London to pursue writing poetry, while his sister remained at Aiskew, now confined to living in the lodge rather than in the increasingly decrepit hall itself. James, who initially lived alone and led a very retiring life, finds himself forced to seek new lodgings and begins rooming with a distant acquaintance from Oxford, the charming and enigmatic Christopher Paige.

The two of them are not alike; whereas James is reserved, slightly shy, and contemplative, Christopher is lively, outgoing, and also a borderline alcoholic, so it would seem that their paring was ill-fated, yet they manage to get along reasonably well, and within the space of a year, they're getting along rather more famously than is considered proper or even legal for the period. The way the author handles these early scenes is remarkable and appreciated.

I ran into problems thrice in continuing to read this: the first of these was when the excellent narrative of James's activities was rudely interrupted by the diary of Augustus Mould. When I first typed that just now, it came out as 'Augustic mould', which pretty much describes how it felt to read. Owen tried to create a "realistic" diary which contained mistakes and crossings out, but the effect - in a galley copy described as an 'uncorrected proof' - was to make me think that the author had screwed up. It took me some little while to figure out that this was intentional. However, even had I not fell into this misunderstanding, I still would have found this diary to be uninteresting, populated as it was with the mundane and the trivial. From that point on I skipped everything associated with his name, and by doing so, I didn't miss anything, it seems.

The second problem was of a similar nature, where once again we departed the main story (which to me is that of James and Charlotte) and side-tracked into some minor character running into problems one deserted night. I found both of these departures to be unappealing, and they slowed down the story and larded it up with unnecessary distraction.

The third issue was when Charlotte hooks up with two people: Adeline, a French girl living in London, and Shadwell, the father of Adeline's fiancé. Here Owen yet again drops into a side-story - of how Adeline got into the Vampire business. This slowed the story down unnecessarily. As it happens, this particular detour was interesting, so it wasn't as bad as the other two, but I would still have liked the novel better without this string of interruptions.

The biggest problem overall was that there were too many parts with little or no interest or relevance to the main story, and the ending was dragged out way beyond what was required. Having said that, there was, as I indicated to begin with, much to like about this novel and the way it was written. Owen is talented and brave; she has, for example, no problem killing off heroes which is commendable because it's daring and unexpected. I do resent that she killed off one of my favorites!

In reading this I wavered between not feeling it was worthy of a recommendation, and feeling that it was, so I'm going to err on the side of generosity and rate this as a worthy read in the hope that with some encouragement, Lauren Owen will turn out increasingly engrossing novels as time goes by. Her talent is too good to be stifled, but she does need some editing! So in short, I rate this a worthy read bearing in mind the caveats as I've mentioned.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Title: Ender's Game
Author: Orson Scott Card
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WARTY!

I've already touched on Card's homophobia in my review of the graphic novel here. I review the movie here. I can't put it any better than Kate Bonin does in her essay In the Bugger Tunnels of Planet Eros: Gay Sex and Death in the Science Fiction of Orson Scott Card which can be found at this link.

Let's talk pretentiousness. Normally I don't talk about novel covers because the author has nothing whatsoever to do with the cover that ends up on the novel over which they've labored so very hard: it's all Big Publishing™ all the time, but once in a while I do mention a cover when it's a particularly egregious offender.

Take this one, for example. It's a re-issue to tie-in with the movie. I have no problem with that, but look closely at the orange bar, which reads: A Major Motion Picture Event This Fall. Note that this is not a movie! It isn't even a film. It's not a motion picture, nor is it even a major motion picture. No! None of that is good enough any more: this is A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE EVENT! Good god, how utterly absurd can you get? Which over-paid publicity dip-shit came up with that precise wording? Whoever it was, I'll bet good money his or her middle name begins with 'P' for pretentious. Or maybe it was a committee...

Ender's Game is really 'Andrew's Game' since this is the name of the main character, a six-year-old boy who winds up in military school. This is the first novel in the Ender pentalogy. Ender is his middle name according to the movie, but whence it comes isn't explained. Nowhere in the novel does it ever show his name as Andrew Ender Wiggin that I could find, although it does appear in some book blurbs in that form, but book blurbs have no more to do with the author than do book covers and like covers, book blurbs typically lie.

In a world where, for unspecified reasons - perhaps overpopulation - a third child is illegal in some nations, Ender is a third and he's bullied for that by his schoolmates. There's no explanation for why this bullying even takes place, let alone why nothing is ever done about it. Evidently a militarily-minded school is a place not to learn tactics, fitness, and strategy, but to learn how to pick on people, since this novel is rife with it. Oh, and it's shameful to cry over anything in case you wondered.

Orson Scott Card's history of homophobia is well-known (though he claims to have grown-up since then, this novel was written at the height of his delusion and it's rife with references to homosexuality), so is it any surprise he calls the enemy 'buggers'? Way to demonize people! Both 'third' and 'bugger' are insults in this world, and if you're "not a man" you're a nobody. After all it is, in Card's own words, "manly warfare" - women and gays better not ever apply (the novel is also rife with misogyny and bigotry). In passing, Card is also something of a climate change denier, as well as a back-door creationist.

Life doesn't end there for Andrew however, since he's bullied at home by his older brother Peter (who ought to have been named 'Dick') who was so psychopathic that even the military rejected him. You can tell how bad he is by how appallingly awful those people are who actually did get invited in.

The issue isn’t actually Peter's psychopathy though; the issue is why no one does anything about him. Ender has an older sister (charmingly named 'fart mouth' by Peter - Card has an obsession with farting in this novel) who does nothing about the bullying despite the fiction we're expected to swallow that she truly loves Andrew forever. Make of that what you will; there are probably several psychiatric papers waiting to be written on that topic alone. His practically absentee parents do nothing about the bullying either, but this is YA fiction, so why would anyone do anything realistic?

The setting of this novel is a futuristic Earth which has undergone a sneak attack perpetrated by ant-like aliens. It’s been almost a century since that war, without another peep out of the aliens, yet humanity is still deeply obsessed with them. Why? No reason.

It is of note that Peter and Andrew are the names of two brothers in the New Testament, one of whom purportedly founded the Roman Catholic church, although doubtlessly much of that is pure fiction, too. The fact is that according to the Bible's own testimony, it was Paul The Turncoat who founded the church, dethroning the Messiah's chosen vicar, Peter! Way to end-run the savior, Paul!

It's interesting that the bully is Peter, and that the Roman Catholic church has a reputation throughout history for what might be euphemistically termed 'bullying'. Andrew, on the other hand is manly (that's precisely what his name means), so Card here is rejecting the Catholics as wimps, bullies, and cowards, and striding out confidently with his manly savior. Card himself is a great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, and thus a Mormon.

Ender's response to the school bullying he endures at the hands of Stilson is to take care of it in a way that (he hopes) won’t have any blow-back on him: He kicks him in the chest, and apparently fitness training is so poor that this downs Stilson, whereupon Ender kicks him three times (ribs, groin, and face), and warns his two useless buddies that they’ll get worse if they mess with him again. Why thugs such as they take this lesson to heart is a mystery. Note that the movie and the graphic novel are far more gory in depicting this scene than is this novel.

This behavior has been witnessed by the nameless watchers who appear periodically in the text, and have anonymous discussions about how fit Ender is to lead the war against the aliens. One of these watchers lovingly refers to the juvenile recruits as 'little bastards', but what it makes is little sense, because what this says quite clearly is that the entire military is incompetent, and their only hope is a young child! I find that beyond credibility. It also makes no sense in light of what's revealed later about a weapon of appalling destructive power.

Sure enough, the International Fleet representative shows up the next day and tells Ender's folks about the fight. His idiot dad, who wasn't even there, chides Ender that it wasn't fair to kick his opponent. So bullying is fair, but retaliating very effectively to end it isn’t. Got it, dad. The IF officer, Hyrum Graff, exaggerates that Ender kicked Stilson "repeatedly" in the face and body when he delivered only three precise kicks. He tells them the military owns their son, and that the reason he's picking Ender now for military service is that he wanted to know Ender's motivation for kicking a boy when he was already down. That Ender might be lying isn’t given any consideration at all.

Graff tells Ender that he will be giving-up the next ten years of his life, unable to see family or to take vacation during that entire decade. No word on why. Graff does at least give it to him straight, telling him what he'll be studying assorted subjects (he does, however, fail to inform him that there will be no teachers in sight anywhere on the space station ever!). Why military history is relevant given that they're fighting in space now, is a bit if a head-scratcher, but I've seen several sci-fi writers fail to make the jump to light-speed on this score.

These writers depict space battles not as though they're being fought in the 3-D micro-gravity vacuum of space, but as though they're being fought in the essentially 2-D environment of the ocean, before flight was invented. Their novels suffer accordingly. The most egregious offender, in my experience, David Weber with his Honor Harrington series, the first few of which I managed to like despite this problem.

The battle school is almost all boys, because girls simply didn’t evolve in the right way to be good soldiers. Seriously? Admittedly this was written in 1977, before militaries around the world truly wised-up to the need for female soldiers, but it does illuminate Card's inability to see beyond his own prejudice. The Israel Defense Force seems to be a leader in integrating women into the military with some 50% of its officers being female, and about a third of the military being women, although there seems to be a real problem with sexual harassment even so. The Israeli Caracal Battalion is about three-quarters women.

Such is the power of the military over the civilian population in Ender's Game that we learn that they requisitioned Ender's sister Valentine hoping for a milder version of Peter, before finally requisitioning Andrew, hoping for the best of both Peter and Valentine. How they figured this would work is a complete mystery, but if they can requisition a specific gender and get it on cue, then why can they not genetically engineer the perfect soldier? Makes no sense.

At the beginning, Card tells us that the recruits are forced to sit inside the launch vehicle for an hour before take-off watching a video about space travel. I don't get why they do this instead watching it on the way up to the station. Makes no sense.

The journey up there is, of course, reserved for Andrew (who has an impressive track record of beating up a kid) inflicting yet more violence upon another child. He breaks a kid's arm when he flips him over the seat after the kid removed his seat-belt and began pounding on Andrew's head. I find it hard to credit that someone's arm would break under those conditions, In space, while people do have mass, they have no weight, but I guess this is possible. What I don’t get is why Andrew is persistently depicted by Card as being violent and deadly if we’re really expected to accept that he's neither. Makes no sense.

Colonel Graff isn't a nice person. He uses terms like "scum-brains" and "pin-headed little morons" to six-year olds. He and Card often refer to "null gravity", but I'm not really sure what he means by that. If he means that gravity is effectively negated, then he's correct. If he means that there is no gravity, then he's wrong. Gravity pervades all of space. Objects and people in orbit around Earth are actually still experiencing a gravitational pull. If they were not, they wouldn’t be in orbit! The space station which they're on is actually falling towards the Earth, but the fall happens to have the same arc as the curvature of the Earth, so it never comes down and hits the ground.

Ender is supposedly smart, so for a six-year old, he understands things at a more mature level, but when Graff explains why he made Ender the focal point of the other children's ire, he makes the asinine argument that Ender needs to be a leader because it's the only way to make the kids who hate him stop ignoring him. How can they both hate and ignore him?! The two are mutually exclusive, it seems to me. Makes no sense.

Ender is so tardy in entering his dorm room that he's forced to take the lowest bunk by the door which is the one that's usually assigned to the dorm leader. How curious that no one told them this beforehand! This is the first of many examples of the complete lack of teaching taking place in this supposed school. There's a note near the bunk advising Ender that he needs to put his hand on a scanner and say his name twice to assign the bunk to his voice code. The weird thing here is that he announces himself as Ender Wiggin!

At no point has this issue of nomenclature been explained. The movie indicates that his name is Andrew Ender Wiggin. Until I saw that, I'd been speculating that 'Ender' was a nickname which his older sister had inadvertently bestowed upon him through her inability to say 'Andrew', when she was very young and he was barely a toddler, but this wouldn't explain how everyone came to employ it. The novel doesn't offer any explanation.

At his new school, Ender does finally make friends, flying in the face of Graff's advice that the only way he will make people like him is through leadership. This is supposed to be a school but there is a marked lack of instruction. A prime example of this is when the kids first enter the free-fall battle room. Despite having seen a kid get a broken arm during the trip to the station, there's no instructor to advise the kids on safety and conduct, much less on how to fight in such an environment. The kids are essentially left to themselves. I sincerely hope this isn't how our military schools train soldiers!

On that score, I've seen some critics in comments on reviews claim that you can't really appreciate this novel if you've never served in the military! Way to be a snob. This is patent bullshit. This is a novel, not a military biography, and moreover, it's a novel set in space. There isn't anyone in any military who has fought in space, and while I agree that some tactics are universal, you can't be hidebound by a largely 2-D terrestrial mentality in space, either. And military or not, there are some things which are simply wrong, and that's all there is to it. I think that they who have service experience are at risk of having a seriously blinding bias towards ignoring the real problems this novel has: problems which have to do with logic and plotting.

Having said that, there are indeed some serious issues with the military training depicted in Ender's Game - namely that there isn't any! The movie does make an effort to depict classroom teaching, but even it shows no attempt at actually training students in in the micro-gravity sphere. On the contrary: training there, both in the movie and in the novel consists of nothing more than leaving everyone to their own devices.

Worse than this, military training is about team-building, hence the insanity of the repetitive and disciplinary methods, but Ender's Game specifically rejects all of that by repeatedly depicting Ender flouting orders and instructions, and going it alone. The "justification" for this is that his commanders are routinely portrayed as ineffectual and clueless, as well as being bullies. This gets so bad that even Ender himself has to ask if the military leadership doesn't care about what goes on in its own school (p152)!

This itself is an indictment of any claim that the story depicts an accurate view of the military. Any military which permitted incompetent commanders and brutal bullies to be in charge isn't going to last long and it certainly isn't going to win any wars, but the biggest failure of all is that not a single thing in this training that we're forced to follow for page after page, bears any relationship to how battles are fought in space (as measured by the earlier encounters with the Formics).

Ender isn't even depicted as being smart, which is supposedly his best trait. His "invention" of the feet-first approach to entering the sphere, designed to give a small profile to the enemy is nothing new, and such a tactic is painfully obvious to anyone who has a ounce of common sense, but even if we grant that no one ever thought of this 'revolutionary approach' before, how is any of it at all relevant to the end goal?

Out in space the combatants are expressly not flying around in space suits in a confined area. They're in spacecraft! In 1977 when this novel was written, we already had guided missiles. How is presenting a low profile relevant when the missile can find your magnetic signature, or your heat emission, or your radar profile, or whatever, and zero in on you no matter what aspect you offer? It's bullshit! The entire section of the novel which shows these tedious "training exercises" is irrelevant to what happens later and therefore it's entirely proper to question it.

Here's a classical example. Ender has a long conversation with Dink in chapter 8, after he's joined the "Rat Army" which actually isn't an army. Even Card admits this as he describes the sub-units as "toons" - short for platoon. This would mean the 'army' is actually a company, which consists in this case of four platoons, but even that appears to be inaccurate, based upon the information Which Card gives us. Not all of the details are engraved in stone, of course. Any military organization which would do that is asking for trouble, so there's a lot of variation, but this reads more like it's the Rat platoon, composed of four sections or squads.

Dink is a squad commander who's been promoted several times, but who has repeatedly refused to obey orders! On one occasion he was moved into a Platoon leader's quarters, but he refused to come out and command his platoon. This is blatant dereliction of duty, but instead of getting busted for it, Dink was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted, discipline-free! Those who claim that they have military service, and who are supporting this novel as an accurate portrait of life in the service need to account for problems like this in Card's narrative.

Card simply doesn't get space, I think, as an environment. This is exemplified by his claim that the battle room has negligible air currents. This is in space, in a micro-gravity environment, where a full-scale training exercise has just taken place with a large sphere, subject to asymmetrical heating from the sun, and there are no air currents in the room to speak of?! Card needs to read up on Newton's laws of motion. His description (around p150) of Ender's lone battle against multiple bullies in the micro-gravity sphere (another incident which went unhindered and unpunished by this so-called military) shows that Card doesn't have a clue about Newtonian mechanics.

Card simply doesn't get street talk, either. He periodically lapses into what can only be described as a pathetic attempt to have one or another of these kids speak 'Ebonics', but there's no rhyme or reason to who uses this lingo and when. It's completely random, like he just put it in once in a while when he remembered that he was supposed to be doing this, and then he forgot about it for page after page. It's not like he has one character who speaks like this; instead, he randomly has a character lapse into it for a lone sentence, and then speak perfectly normally for the rest of the time! This I found to be as sad as it was amateurish.

The bottom line is that this novel is illogical and not very well written. It has a hugely boring section in the middle featuring the pointless and endless battle games between children, which have diddly squat to do with training for the the actual battle at the end. This lack-a-daisical non-teaching pervades the whole novel - there is no teaching in this "school". There are no teachers in this school. There are no instructors. No instruction is ever given about anything. Makes no sense.

In short, this novel seriously sucked. I rate it warty. I'll leave the last word to Kate Bonin at the URL referenced above:

One might easily indulge in a wink-wink/nudge-nudge reading of Ender’s Game in quest of hidden gay subtext: Ender must save all mankind from the hideous buggers, who are ruled by giant, scary queens; Ender must travel to a star-base on planet Eros and live underground, in smooth-walled rooms linked by tunnels, which were originally built and lived in by the buggers; here Ender shares a bedroom with his tutor, the aging but still virile war hero Mazer Rackham, while learning to understand, empathize with and even love the buggers in order to destroy them. The buggers’ home planet is protected by something called an Ecstatic Shield; but Ender’s fleet has a special weapon called the “Little Doctor”:
“The Little Doctor penetrates the shield?” asks Ender.
“As if it weren’t there” (Ender’s Game 235).

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Title: Harriet The Spy
Author: Louise Fitzhugh
Publisher: Random House
Rating: warty

The audio CD was read by Ann Bobby and she did an acceptable job

Harriet M Welsch is one of the most schizophrenic main characters I've ever read about. It's not that she, the character, is schizophrenic, but that she gives me schizophrenic feelings about her. On the one hand, I loved the opening chapters and admired the spunky, feisty, independent, self-possessed, determined, unstoppable character Harriet was.

On the other hand, I found her to be a bratty, spoiled, strident, juvenile, and unlikeable person. She was unarguably a trailblazer for girls in her own time (1964 when this novel was first published, and America was about to be invaded by The Beatles, and have its fifties sensibilities routed for good). So, this novel is controversial, to say the least, and a book which the religiously delusional have sought to have banned from schools. That's one reason to recommend it, I suppose, but in the end I can't.

Harriet is eleven and wants to grow up to be a professional spy, having an office downtown with office hours (11:00am - 4:00pm) posted on the door. To this end, she travels an established route through her local neighborhood, spying on people and keeping extensive notes in a series of notebooks. The truth is that she's a stalker, peering through people's windows, or worse, sneaking into their home - one one occasion to spy on them from within the dumb-waiter. She climbed onto the roof to spy through the skylight on another person, and she lurks outside windows and open doors. She even spies on her own parents.

Therein lies the root of Harriet's troubled psyche. She's effectively an abandoned child. Yes, she lives in the lap of luxury in her parents' very comfortable three-storey house, along with those parents and with her nanny, bizarrely named Ole Golly, but her interaction with her parents, and theirs with her is non-existent. They are totally unfit parents. It’s hardly surprising that Harriet turned out to be the way she is.

Harriet has only two friends, one of whom is "Sport", a boy her own age who only wants to play sports but in which Harriet selfishly never indulges him, insisting he play her games instead, a demand with which he always complies. Her other friend is Janie, whose avowed goal is to blow up the world. Harriet is rather anal, and if her strict and spoiled routine is deviated from, she tends to have tantrums (why isn't the plural of tantrum, tantra? That sounds so much more pretentious…).

No one seems to think that there's any problem with Harriet spying on people, but this comes back to haunt her via a stolen notebook, later in the novel. A crisis presents itself in Harriet's life before so very long when Golly and her fiancé, George, irresponsibly take Harriet to a movie in the evening, not returning home until midnight, and no one thought for a minute to notify her parents. Her mother reacts as any normal parent would, and fires Golly, but this is where the story left suspension of disbelief in the lurch, going right past the altar, heading down the ramp and out the door (kudos if you figure out the movie from whence those last two clauses came). Harriet's parents have been completely hands-off until this point, so her mother's concern for Harriet makes no sense here. How did they even know she wasn’t home in bed? It’s not something they've evidenced any vestige of care over.

This becomes even more weird when it's revealed that Golly would have been leaving anyway in another month because of her impending nuptials. At this point, Harriet's mother turns completely around and begs her to stay! This makes no sense. And right after losing Golly, Harriet loses one of her notebooks. This is of course, discovered by a classmate and everyone in her school is treated to Harriet's cruel and caustic observations. Suddenly Harriet is not only short of a nanny, but devoid even of the brace of friends she had, and she now becomes the target of the Spycatcher Club, which seeks to exact revenge upon her for her libelous treatment of them.

Rather than learn from her mistakes and become contrite and ask for forgiveness, Harriet takes it to the next level, visiting revenge upon members of the Spycatchers in return for the mean things they've begun doing to her. It’s a very Biblical approach, but as Gandhi remarked, an eye for an eye eventually leaves everyone blind. Of course, it is Harriet, and not the membership of Spycatchers, who is punished. Eventually, disturbed at Harriet's poor performance in school (that's all?!), her parents deprive her of her last remaining refuge; her notebooks. Old Golly steps in and writes a letter to Harriet advising her to do two things: Apologize and Lie. She appears to be unclear about whether the apology should be a lie. Golly rips-off Shakespeare here, but unlike Polonius, she seems to think you can be true to yourself and be false to others!

The Spycatcher Club breaks-up because its leaders are just as mean and as bossy as Harriet is, and the minions eventually come to resent this. After Harriet's rich parents speak to the teachers, Harriet is suspiciously and inexplicably appointed as the editor of the class newspaper! This is the girl who has maintained notebooks containing the most unkind and gratuitous comments on her peers, and she's now the editor of the newspaper? I don’t think so. Harriet quickly employs the newspaper in place of her notebooks and notwithstanding her printed apology about those selfsame books, she continues to publish a commentary on her peers and neighbors! Now, suddenly, everyone thinks the newspaper is wonderful? Where went logic here?

Like I said, I cannot recommend this novel. Some parts are intriguing, interesting and amusing, and the novel is (technically speaking) well-written, but overall it's a horrible story for children in that it depicts a remorseless child who is rewarded for seriously deviant behavior, instead of being set on the straight and narrow. The real tragedy here, however is Louise Fitzhugh's death at 46, and I say this for shamelessly selfish reasons because it's robbed us of other, much better stories she might have told. Indeed, there is one which she did write but which has become lost: Amelia, which was about two girls falling in love. Given that Fitzhugh was a lesbian, I would have rather had that story published and Harriet get lost!

Kiki Strike Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller

Title: Kiki Strike Inside the Shadow City
Author: Kirsten Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WORTHY!

Not to be confused with Kirsten Miller the South African writer and artist, nor with actor Kristin Miller, nor with poet Kirsten Miller, it’s novelist Kirsten Miller's work that I'm reviewing here!

Not to be confused with Kirsten Miller the South African writer and artist, nor with actor Kristen Miller, nor with poet Kirsten Miller, it’s novelist Kirsten Miller's work that I'm reviewing here!

Note that this is a book by a girl, for girls, about girls. It’s not that boys aren't allowed, it’s that they’re simply not needed. This novel is a magnificent exemplar of how to write a novel about strong, independent, no-nonsense young women. Miller gets it and isn't shy about showing it. I wish a host of young-adult authors would take a leaf (or fifty) from this novel and re-write some of their sorry and sad main female characters. Having said that, these girls are only twelve, and so aren't even within the YA range, and I have to wonder where parenting was! A story like this is fine for some fun fiction, but the sad thing is that there are really young girls out there who are saddled with, shall I term it 'disengaged' parents and unfortunately, those children are certainly not having the time of their lives.

Kiki Strike is the subject of this novel, but it's told in first person (and not obnoxiously, so this proves it can be done if you know how to do it!) by Ananka Fishbein, who attends the Atalanta school for girls, where some get in on their money, others on scholarships. It's needless to say how Ananka is there. It's Ananka who first starts getting interested in Kiki, and the two of them eventually hook up and recruit four others to help them: Luz Lopez, DeeDee Morlock, Betty Bent, and Oona Wong. Luz Lopez is the 'electro-genius' (inventor) and she is good friends with DeeDee Morlock, but often clashes with her, quick to point out the fact that DeeDee is much more well-off and privileged than she. She's installed a fire extinguisher which saves Deedee's life many a time. Although Luz is innocent, she has a criminal record which she is often worried about. She is very poor, but more than meets the eye. Betty is expert in disguise, Dee-Dee in explosives and chemistry, and Oona in forgery.

Miller inserts some text here and there throughout this novel offering some delightful (if potentially dangerous), and amusing advice for young female adventurers on how to lie, how to disguise yourself, how to properly prepare for exploration adventures, and so on. Heaven knows where she came up with this stuff, but I loved it, particularly the smart portions of it, even as I hoped that there are no twelve-year-old girls who would read this and then actually try to follow some of the more questionable advice! On the topic of text, here's one weird bit: "…but there was one thing I knew for certain. At least some of the people who had called Shadow City home had never left." This screams for a colon between 'certain' and 'At' in place of the period.

But beefs aside, Miller keeps this story cooking at a warm temperature, continually revealing new and interesting character and plot twists as she goes. The five girls display their individual talents as they ramp-up their plan to discover an entrance to Shadow City, and to explore it fully. Ananka has no special talent, but she has a repository of wonderful books, collected by her parents, at her apartment and so her 'talent' is considered to be that of a librarian. Oona brings her abilities in forgery and computer hacking, DeeDee brings her chemical and explosives knowledge, and Betty her ability to create amazing disguises. Kiki's avowed intention is to own Shadow City, locking-up weak spots to prevent a criminal element from making use of it, even as they explore and map every tunnel of the underground world, seeking "treasure" that might be lurking in forgotten nooks.

Given that they wait for the summer holidays as they prepare and plan, I failed to grasp why they then pursued their avocation at night. It made no sense whatsoever, and necessitated the majority of the girls lying to their parents and exposing themselves to unnecessary risks. This would have been fine had there been some explanation offered for the nocturnal nature of the activities, but Miller offers none. She just expects us to accept that this is the way it is. That was a weak spot for me, but not a killer.

As the explorations begin, Ananka becomes increasingly suspicious of Kiki, but she's the only one who seems to suspect an ulterior motive for her putting together this talented team of feisty fillies. At one point, Kiki is insistent that DeeDee blow open a door against Ananka's objections. DeeDee has done this kind of thing before, but this time something goes wrong, and DeeDee is injured, a flood ensues as a pipe is ruptured, and Kiki disappears with a sack of what appear to be gold coins which the quintet had discovered that night!

That's all the spoilers you’re getting! Of course, here we’re meant to think ill of Kiki, and Miller has put in some decent attempts to sour her for us, but I refused to be fooled. I don’t see the how you can title your novel 'Kiki Strike' and then make her into the villain, so that attempt at slapping a big red herring in my face was squandered!

In conclusion, this novel was excellent: it was inventive, entertaining, and full of adventure. I recommend it.

A Wounded Name by Dot Hutchinson

Title: A Wounded Name
Author: Dot Hutchinson
Publisher: Lerner
Rating: WARTY!

Yes, this is an overly florid, if not pretentious, re-telling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I should have known from the limp title that it wasn't worth my time, but I was foolish, I admit! In this version, the main character, Ophelia (whose last name is presumably 'Pain') is the daughter a school administrator at a boarding school. I couldn't get past the first two chapters, because it was so mind-dumbingly (and numbingly) boring that it put me to sleep. I've seen some reviews which say that the writing is beautiful, but I disagree, if this novel had had that much going for it, I would have stayed longer, but not only was the writing tedious, the 'action' was, too. And none of the plotting made sense.

With the original Hamlet, as over-blown as that was, at least it made some kind of sense. The monarchy is hereditary, and the death of a king is momentous (if you buy into royalty, which I don't), but in this novel there is no royalty. The dead "king" is no more than the Big Man on campus, a member of the Hamlet family (!), leaving his tortured son, Dane behind. Seriously? We’re expected to believe that this family has "ruled" the school for generations. What? We're also expected to believe that his death has thrown everything into chaos. Double what? Whence the school board? This man was not the king!

Dane’s uncle, of course, announces plans to marry the widow Me Miserum, and insane Dane (whose last name is undoubtedly 'Gelded') is conveniently thrown into the company of Ophelia Pain. The problem is that there isn't just one ghost in this story; there's a whole pantheon of fairies, and Ophelia can see them all. This is technically known in the medical world as 'having issues'. The fairies are called the bean sidhe for reasons unknown. Maybe it’s explained later in the novel but from the reviews I've read, nothing is explained. What definitely isn't explained is why this novel, based on a play set in Denmark, has an Irish term for the fairies! They may as well be the bean burrito, or the has-been sidhe. Suffice to say that Ophelia is under a regime of medication which she isn’t following as well as perhaps she ought. This explains a lot, IMO!

That’s pretty much all I can say having read so little of this. I picked it up (fortunately for my wallet) at the library and it sounded, superficially, to be interesting. It wasn't. It might have been, had a competent book editor had her way with it. As it is, it just goes to show that Big Publishing™ isn't about getting the best out of writers. It’s about getting the most out of them (and for 'most out of them' read, 'milking them dry'). An interesting number of reviews began with the preface, "This book isn't for everyone..."! You know when a review begins like that, the news can’t be good. I rate this novel 'warty' based on what I read. Your mileage may differ, but for me, life is too short to waste in trying to wade through a novel that doesn’t grab me by the balls of my feet. I was rewarded for my disloyalty to this by picking up a much better novel (one I did buy!), which I'll be reviewing (read: raving over!) here before long. Well, not right here specifically, that would be foolish, but in the blog somewhere….

Jane's Melody by Ryan Winfield

Title: Jane's Melody
Author: Ryan Winfield
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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.

I was attracted to this one because the blurb made it sound like an off-the-beaten-track kind of a story, which I'm always up for after so many cookie-cutter YA novels, and the other advantage this one had was that it wasn't YA (per se - in practice it was no better). Yeah, I know that blurbs nearly always lie (except mine, of course!), but the only way to find out how good the blurb is, is to actually read the novel, so I bought into this one. It appeared to be a romance, but it's written by a guy, which further intrigued me. It’s not that guys can’t write romances, but they tend not to (at least not under their real name!). I'm always fond of going against type, but not being rubbed the wrong way as this novel was determined to do.

When I finally got into it, I found myself significantly less thrilled. I hadn't expected a modern remake of Lady Chatterley's Lover! The writing is technically good, and the novel started out well enough: it’s descriptive and easy to read, and the characters are well-drawn to begin with. So what was my problem? It was far too trope-ish for my taste, and rather quickly, the characters began breaking the rules we’d been given earlier in the novel. I guess if the writer is going for an all-out romance, then it’s fine, but I’d expected (or at least hoped for) more than that with this novel, and it wasn't delivered. Fortunately, it wasn't so bad that I felt like tossing the book after two chapters, so I stayed on-board for a while, which proved to be not worth the time.

So specifically what was my problem? Well, there were several. The first of these was that the main character (Jane) is a recovering addict who has just gone through her daughter (who happens to be named Melody) dying of an addiction not that dissimilar to the one Jane herself has fought. We're expected to believe that Jane is racked with grief over this (we're frequently reminded of it), but disturbingly quickly, she magically forgets all of this debilitating grief and instead, begins lusting after Caleb (a suitably earthy name) - a guy she almost quite literally picked up off the street.

She met him accidentally and he was not very nice to her so, of course, she sought him out! She thought he knew something about her daughter. When she finds him that second time, he's been mugged (he lives on the street) and his guitar is gone - the one on which he played a song that caught Jane's attention. She takes him home (cue tired trope of the woman ministering to her man) and employs him to tidy up her yard, then she buys a brand new guitar for him. Apparently pulling $6,600 out of savings to pay him and provide him with a gift isn’t a problem for Jane. No word on how she came by such copious, free, and easy cash.

This whole relationship completely trivialized Jane's grief over her daughter's death and rendered it into a mere annoyance, quickly dispensed with. It was entirely unrealistic to me. Caleb went out of type, too, at this point. Instead of being the very reserved, laconic drifter we initially met, he transmogrifies into a perky, playful, flirtatious toy-boy and this turned me right off of his character. I just could not see such a dramatic about-turn occurring for either of these characters without some lead-in and some strong motivation and we’ve been offered neither before this occurs. So what's left when the novel's two main adult characters turn out to juvenile propinquents? Ditch it.

Caleb is also far too much of a trope hot guy. I'm tired of authors trotting out these shirtless guys with chiseled abs and tight glutes. Is this the best their imagination can do? It's pathetic. The other side of this coin isn’t any better: she stares at his sweat-soaked T-shirt covering his 'broad shoulders' and 'narrow waist'. She wears his newly washed T-shirt to bed the night they argue. Seriously? This is nauseating. Can we not find something a bit more realistic and less cartoonish? Why invent characters which you're simply going to caricature and turn into unfunny jokes? I was led into this novel thinking that it was about damaged people feeling their way back towards a life, and perhaps even helping each other get there. Instead, we’re presented with people who are 'damaged' one minute and perfectly fine the next, with zero transition time!

Caleb's gardening job achieves two things: one is to keep the two of them in close proximity, and the other is to get his shirt off routinely or to get him soaking wet so he has to strip down to his shorts when he's been resident in the house for only a couple of days. Jane isn’t even phased by his shameless disrobing! Neither of these ruses is very inventive, and they deviate not at all from the trope norm. I wanted more story and less yawning - or more accurately, I wanted something different. If we’re going off the beaten path, can we not go a bit further off than a chiseled body, wet clothes and girls dressing in men's shirts?

Caleb is portrayed as an idiot and a jerk, too, unfortunately. Jane supplies him with gardening gloves, yet he fails to wear them while he's pulling out thorny shrubs. This doesn’t convey to me that he's manly or tough; on the contrary, it conveys that he's a moron - someone who needs his hands for his avocation towards playing guitar, yet too dumb to grasp that he needs to take care of them.

So how is he a jerk? Well when he pats the couch for Jane to sit next to him, she meekly complies, and this leads to hugging after she starts crying over her life, but when she asks him to tell her about Melody, he argues with her that it’s off limits. This doesn’t tell me that he's damaged; it tells me that he's selfish and probably hiding something (he was). His behavior isn't acceptable given what Jane has done for him. This behavior is rendered even more out of left field by a later revelation.

As if that isn't bad enough he's knocking on her bedroom door in the middle of the night and opening it without even being bid to enter. This was the place where I decided I could read no more of this crap. Belief, no longer comfortably suspended, was laying with torn skin on the unforgiving asphalt, and driving right over it was reality, heading out of town on the last bus.

If you want to write stuff like this and get away with it, you have to set it up in a way that works - that makes it appropriate for characters to behave in these ways. You can't just have a character act in a certain way because your plot suddenly demands it right there and then. You have to make it credible by putting a few things in place, first; then when it happens, it doesn't seem like something out of day-time TV, and your reader can accept it all like it's normal and fine - even hoped for and expected.

The blurb for this novel asks: "What boundaries would you cross for true love?", but there are no boundaries crossed here. It tells us: "Jane’s Melody follows a forty-year-old woman on a romantic journey of rediscovery after years of struggling alone." In what way his she struggling? She overcame her addiction with abundant help. She evidently made a wad of money selling insurance. She lives in her own house in complete comfort. She can take time off work and not miss the paychecks. Her grief over her daughter is actually self-pity because she chose not to do for her daughter what others had done for her. She gets over this self-pity in record time once Hot Hunk™ shows up. I ask again: in what way is she struggling? The blurb says, "Jane must decide if it’s too late for her to start over, or if true love really knows no limits." Seriously? There is no "True Love™ here. There's an older woman's lust for a younger guy. Love never enters into it.

This author just doesn't get it. I don't know what kind of readership (or reader's hip!) he was aiming for, but it sure as hell ain't me, and it's sure as hell not anyone I can respect! This novel is warty and certifiably so.

Far Gone by Laura Griffin

Title: Far Gone
Author: Laura Griffin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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.

Andrea Finch is a cop who, while in the middle of being dumped by boyfriend named Nick, shoots a guy in a restaurant. The guy had come into the kitchen to threaten his girlfriend with an automatic and Andrea, good cop that she is, got suspicious of his demeanor, and followed him in there. Now she's on leave pending an inquiry into the shooting, but a Senator's daughter, Julia Kirby, has been killed in a university bombing, and it looks like Andrea's going to be pulled back in, one way or another. I started liking this novel almost right away, but it slowly became bogged down by a really bad romance and by too much rambling in the text, unrelated to moving the story along. It went DNR at 63%. Yeah, I know most people call that DNF, but trust me, this wasn't going to be resuscitated.

I ran into two problems in the first twelve pages. They were relatively minor problems, but nonetheless important. The first is that the author, in her evident need to get her weapons chops down on paper asap, has the bomber check his gun right before he gets out of the van and triggers the bomb via his cell phone. I'm not sure why he even needed a gun, but the fact is that the weapon never leaves his pocket, so I'm lost as to how it was that he 'checked his weapon' in any meaningful way. He didn’t take it out to verify that it was loaded and that a round was chambered, so this struck me as the writer merely saying, "Hey, I know lots about this weapon, check out my research" without contributing anything towards moving the story along. It took me out of suspension of disbelief for a minute there.

The other problem, and this is worse in my opinion, was another instance of a female writer reducing a female character to nothing more than youth and beauty, as though nothing else matters. Julia Kirby is described as "beautiful" and "just eighteen years old". I'm sorry but who cares? What difference do her looks and age make? Would her death have been just fine if she'd been forty-five, and plain looking? What if she had been sixty, and gray haired? Would it have been okay then? I simply don't get why the writer chose to put in that particular description. It's demeaning for anyone to write it when it has nothing to do with the story at hand, and it's particularly obnoxious coming from a female author.

I can see the value of specifying that she was a Senator's daughter - not because such a child is more important than, say, the corner mechanic's daughter, but because the Senator might have a role to play in the novel by coming down on the police department to solve this crime. Her age and looks, however, contribute nothing save to tell all women that unless you're young and beautiful, you ain't nuthin'. What’s that song from the 1933 movie Roman Scandals: keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved? To see this coming from a female author's keyboard saddens me greatly.

That aside, I initially warmed to this novel quickly, and I liked the way Finch was depicted until I found out on page 233 that she's actually a complete moron. Until then, the trope romance aside, she was definitely someone I could have warmed to, and about whom I did want to read more to begin with. The problem was that I've traveled this route before only to discover that the woman morphs into a complete wuss of male appendage down the road, and you discover you're not on the highway, but in a cul-de-sac.

I got strong feelings of déjà vu when the unfortunately de rigeur male interest surfaced in the form of Jon North. He's a man whom Finch admits she would "have a hard time refusing", and who inappropriately cups her face and runs his thumb over her cut lip feigning concern before roughly kissing her as though he honestly doesn't give a damn about her lip. Barf.

I'm sorry but this is sickening, and it started going precisely the way I feared: the tough female main character turning to Jell-O® under the dominating gaze of the alpha male. It’s pathetic, and it’s what turned this novel sour when I was sincerely hoping it would grow into something sweet up until that point. It’s not like there was anything on the other side of this equation, either: North thinks of Finch in purely carnal terms, lusting after her hot bod, without giving a damn about what kind of an actual person she might or might not be. Frankly, it’s juvenile.

Whenever North thinks of Finch, it’s about her "lithe body" and "her sensual mouth", and "the way she'd tasted" like she's some kind of a burger, and he's sixteen years old. His reaction to her at one point when she visits him, is "either get her out or get her in bed". These are the only two options he can envisage. What a charmer he is. His behavior is precisely what's missing from Jeffery Deaver's James Bond reboot that I negatively reviewed. It would have been at home there (assuming Deaver was really doing what was claimed: emulating Fleming); it’s definitely not appropriate here because it renders the whole novel into a cheap and nasty florid romance.

On the positive side, there's no ridiculous pseudo-macho main male character name in evidence here. Sadly, that's all North has going for him, but even that's trampled under the repeated trope of sidelong glances and thudding hearts, with North being very quickly depicted as "impressively ripped". Finch was shown as dating a guy (for a month) who had a slight stomach paunch (this is the guy who breaks up with her at the start), yet now she's prematurely hot for a buff bod?

If the author had written this the opposite way around - being dumped by, or better yet, dumping the chiseled guy; then finding a slightly out-of-shape FBI agent appealing for reasons other than his body, it would have been new and fresh, and it would have made for a far better story, but we have to travel trope trail instead. This really disappointed me, because it took me out of the story with the distraction of wondering if there wasn't some wish-fulfillment going on here in the stead of serious story-telling. Quite clearly the non-ripped dude from the opening chapters was nothing more than a cheap throw-away to try and give Finch some undeserved cred., as though we're too dumb to see through a cheap ploy like that. Way to insult your readers!

I mentioned earlier that Finch proves herself to be a moron, so how's that, exactly? Well at the start of this one chapter she effectively breaks into North's home. Yeah, the door is unlatched, so technically it’s not breaking and entering, but she does enter when she's not expected by the host, and she enters without permission. It's in the early morning in the dark, and she blithely walks in without calling out to let North know she's there. Meanwhile, he's fast asleep with a gun by his bed. Seriously? How stupid, exactly, are these people? They don't lock and bolt their doors (the author keeps referring to doors as 'latched' or 'unlatched', like they don’t even have locks or bolts on them anyway!). These people are investigating a terrorist who has murdered people and threatened Finch's life, yet she cluelessly wanders unannounced into North's home where he could have shot her dead.

It was at this point that I decided that Le Stupide was too strong with this one, and I called, "Check please; I'm outta here!" It’s a real shame, too, because this novel had much potential to be really good. It had me hooked for a good fifty percent of the way through despite some issues (notably with the romance), but at this point it became too stupid to live. It had been on the skids since about the half-way point, forcing me to skim a page or two here and there, particularly the rambling chats between the two main protagonists where they had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot and were no more than juvenile flirting and pointless conversation unrelated to moving anything along. So at 63% in, I’d had enough of the stop-start action, and I no longer had any faith at all that the remaining third of this novel would be capable of digging itself out of the hole within which it had become so firmly entrenched.

Three Volume 1 by Kieron Gillen

Title: Three Volume 1
Author: Kieron Gillen (not to be confused with Karen Gillan!)
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: warty

Drawing: Ryan Kelly
Coloring: Jordie Bellaire
Lettering: Clayton Coles
Graphic design: Hannah Donovan

Note that this graphic novel is gory! It contains adult material, and is not suitable for younger readers!

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

I did not like this graphic novel. The layout and art work were fine as far as they went, and the writing was technically fine, but I simply could not follow the story no matter how hard I tried to figure out what, exactly was going on, or where it was supposed to be heading. I found myself drifting and skimming in a place or two, but worse than this, the story itself drifted and skimmed, jumping from one thing to another and introducing character after character after character for no evident reason.

There was no real flow or logic that I could see. Each new character's name appears alongside them in their first panel as though the writer actually knew it was going to get larded and confusing. I soon stopped paying attention to who was now appearing on stage because I doubted I would see them again after the next couple of pages, and this probably didn’t help in trying to divine a coherent narrative from what was happening in each panel.

The general story concerns three Helots, two guys and a woman who are set upon by the Spartans for no apparent reason. One of the three (Klaros) happens to be an invincible warrior who is "in disguise" as some sort of employee on a farm(? I don’t know - it wasn't clear) run by Terpander, an air-headed smart-mouth who is apparently married to Damar (I don't know - it’s not clear), who is also apparently pregnant, although that wasn't clear to begin with either.

Klaros predictably if inexplicably leaps bloodily to their rescue, and the three are then the subject of pursuit by a veritable army of Spartans. No reason is offered for Klaros's beneficence, or for the dedicated pursuit - a pursuit which seemed improbable given that Klaros had initially killed everyone who was wearing a red cloak in his vicinity. The rest of the story consists of the three escapees agonizing over their lot in life, and trying to avoid and out-run their pursuers, as new characters continue to pop-up like hungry hippos every couple of pages.

There's one scene reminiscent of the 300 where Klaros makes a stand, and the result of this I openly laughed at. The entire story is gory - lots of spears through body parts, severed heads, and blood spurting. This wouldn’t have been so bad had there been other things going on to engage my attention, but there really wasn't anything going on. This story has nothing really to do with 300, so I'm not sure what the deal is with this. I honestly can’t recommend it.

For those who are interested in the technical side of things, there are copious notes in the final pages detailing how this story came about and also some of the history of the time period in which it's set, but even given my interest in the technicalities of graphic novel creation, I’d have been more impressed with a more gripping story and no notes than I was with the way this was actually done.

Sex Criminals Volume 1 by Matt Fraction

Title: Sex Criminals Volume 1
Author: Matt Fraction
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrator: Chip Zdarsky, and he does it very capably.

Note that this graphic novel is extremely graphic! It contains language and adult material, and is not at all suitable for younger readers!

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, I think is the most off-the-wall, utterly bizarre graphic novel I've ever read or indeed will read this year (very probably), and it was delicious tot he last drop cap. It's completely irreverent, and the idea underlying it is so preposterous that it makes me wonder why I never thought of it myself. I'm just glad someone did! It also happens to be a perfect story to tell in graphic form, and it's told well.

I'm sure those of us who've had sex will understand what it's like to feel like time stops at that precious moment of bliss and, if you're doing it right, for moments afterwards too; the only difference here is that the main character, Suzie, discovers that when she has an orgasm she stops time - quite literally. Since she's a virgin when she discovers this, she has a lot of questions, but no one seems interested in helping her fully understand what's going on, although she learns some interesting facts in the process!

She soon discovers a male partner, Jon, who has the same abilities as she does, and the two of them embark upon a life of crime, discovering how very easy it is to rob a bank when time has stopped. Unfortunately, someone is onto them, and this is where things begin to go even further off the rails than they had already gone!

And that's all you're getting! It's a short story, so it's a short review. I don't want to give very much away in cases like this. I recommend this for appropriate readership, and also for the tips and pointers section at the back of this volume which will undoubtedly be of use to anyone who's interested (as I am) in the comic and graphic novel creation process.

The Wells Bequest by Polly Shulman

Title: The Wells Bequest
Author: Polly Shulman
Publisher: Audio Books
Rating: worthy

The Wells Bequest was read by Johnny Heller and I was not impressed. His voice was entirely wrong for this novel and his delivery, while not horrible, just wasn't there for me.

I pulled this off the library shelf thinking that it looked interesting. I had a choice between this and the first one in this series, and chose this because it was shorter (less time wasted if I didn’t like it!), and because the two entries in the series didn’t seem to be connected at first. They are connected, even employing some of the same characters, but they're not a series in the usual sense. The Wells Bequest is billed as a companion to the earlier volume (titled The Grimm Legacy), so it might help to have read that, but you actually do not have to have read the earlier one to read this.

It was an odd experience, listening to this, because I started out liking it, then became disenchanted with it, then started liking it again at the end. Maybe reading the novel would have presented me with a better experience, but my problem with this novel wasn't confined merely to the audio experience. The story itself appeared to be going nowhere. Yes, the reader wasn't right for this novel; his voice was way too mature, and of the wrong type for a story about sixteen-year-olds, and this was not at all helped by the fact that the story seems to have been written at a maturity level below that of the characters in it, but the novel itself wasn't interesting in large part. The characters were flat and a bit tedious, and I found myself skimming tracks rather than listening all the way through because there were a lot of uninteresting bits.

The novel is the second in a series about a circulating library which lends out not books, but objects from fiction, which have the same powers in real life as the fictional objects did in their initial setting. I don’t see how this is supposed to work within the framework of the novel. You possess HG Wells's time machine and you’re going to loan it out like a library book so anyone can play with it?! That's simply not going to happen in any realistic story framework! So the premise doesn't work unless you're writing this for ten year olds or younger, which the style in this volume supported. Unfortunately, the characters are in the mid teens, which made no sense to me.

The villain was once again a Brit. They seem to have taken over from Middle Easterners as the designated villains in movies and novels lately. The problem with this villain was that his only motivation was unrequited "love", and for this he was prepared to petulantly destroy whole cities. It doesn’t work, and especially not when his entire life's philosophy is turned around at the end by true love, and so rather than face consequences for his actions, he's rewarded, and he magically forgets all of his interest in his previous obsession? It doesn’t work. Neither does the issue of time-travel unless it’s exceptionally well done, because no matter what goes wrong, you can always go back to an earlier time, and fix it. Too few writers seem to get this, or they do get it, yet they cook-up really asinine excuses as to why it’s not possible to fix things that way in their novel!

I adore time-travel stories if they're done well and as I said, I had the chance to pick the first in this series (not actually realizing it was any kind of a series), but I rejected that because it had more disks than the second and I wanted to start in on this author with a relatively short tale in case it was less than thrilling! It was less than thrilling; now I don't want to listen to anything longer by the same author, and certainly not one which is read by the same reader!

One reviewer said, "Leo and Jaya figure out a plan to use the time machine from Orson Wells' book, go back in time, and warn Nicolas Tesla" Someone has a wire or two crossed! I rather suspect the reviewer meant HG Wells's book, and Nicola Tesla! This same reviewer added later; "There were a lot of fun historical notes in this book, about both historical figures (such as Leo Tesla)..." Ah, the value of a good editor! Having said that, it seems that a significant number of those who disliked this novel actually did like the first in the series, but I can't comment on that.

I mention other reviews not to make fun but to demonstrate what a hard time I had in deciding how to rate this. Like I said, I was all set to declare it warty, and then I listened to the last disk and it turned out that I started liking the novel a lot more at that point, so I'm prepared to rate it worthy with a note that I didn’t like all of it (but I did like just enough, apparently!). One of the biggest problems, as I've mentioned was Frank Heller's reading. I think that had a much larger influence on my view of the novel than it ought, and certainly more than I thought I was allowing for. There's a caveat there for future reference!