The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti

Title: The Nature of Jade
Author: Deb Caletti
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

The audio book is on Brilliance audio, read by Julia Whelan. It was not that great.

Here's a couple of nifty rules of thumb for avoiding pointless, pretentious, and boring novels. Any novel which has a title featuring the words "In Search of" or "Looking for" - skip it. Any novel which is titled "The Nature of" and which then makes a cheap play on someone's name, skip it. Trust me this will save you hours of wasted time.

This novel is about a girl named Jade who suffers a panic disorder and has OCD. She spends a lot of time focused on elephants, which may well account for the annoyingly ponderous nature of this novel. The only thing which saved it for me in the early chapters was the narrator's humorous observations, particularly the highly-amusing account of the lunch break she took with several fellow high school seniors off campus.

The only problem was that after disk one - around chapters 4 & 5 - it started going determinedly downhill into the tediously repetitive and excruciatingly boring. In fact, it became so god-awfully bad it should probably have been awarded a Newberry medal.

Jade's tone overall was far too self-centered and self-obsessed for my taste, and it really began to wear me down after a while. This is why I detest first person PoV novels: they're "It's all me all the time!" Ugh! Would you want a friend like that? So then why a novel like that? Once in a while an author can make that work for me, but Deb Caletti isn't such an author. Unlike with a print book, in audio books and in ebooks, you cannot flip the pages - the pages flip you! You can't peruse an audio novel or read a section just to see what you're letting yourself in for. You can't even listen to a piece of it before you make up your mind about going with it or avoiding it like the plague.

On to the story. Jade's family is completely dysfunctional, and while she has an interesting relationship with her mother, she has effectively none with her father or little brother. I strongly suspected the mother and/or the father was having an affair. The father was abusive in that he forced his ten-year-old son Oliver (get it: jade, olive? I’ll bet you're green with envy you didn’t think of it first, huh?) to pursue sports in which his son had no interest, and which made him miserable.

Despite Jade mentioning more than once that she loves her little brother, neither she nor her mother ever lift a finger to come to his aid (unless you believe that his sister's advice to lie about being sick constitutes 'coming to his aid'). It was completely predictable that Oliver would get hurt. No stars for originality, or for inventiveness, or for imagination for this author.

Jade is a voyeur who likes to spy on the elephants via the zoo's webcams. One day she sees a boy who looks hardly older than herself, visiting the elephants. He's carrying a child in a baby-caddy. For no reason whatsoever, she begins obsessing over this indistinct and unidentifiable image on the screen. OTOH, Jade is OCD, so perhaps this is credible?

This boy sounds like trouble from the off, because she espies him visiting after zoo hours, meaning he's breaking in, but this doesn’t bother her. She decides she wants to meet him, but she fails in her attempts at hanging out at the elephant compound hoping to run into him, and instead, she ends-up running into him accidentally after she takes up a volunteer job at the zoo, working with the elephants.

When she finally does meet him, this novel, if you can imagine it at all, goes even further downhill. He works in a bookstore. There's a Newberry waiting to happen right here. Get this: "It's nice walking beside Sebastien. There's a cosy-ness to it: the easy normality of heading in the same direction..." because going in any other direction is completely insane and abnormal....

This girl is supposed to be eighteen, but she behaves like a thirteen-year-old - and a protected and sheltered thirteen-year-old at that. She thinks its good grammar to say "He raises his eyebrows up and down. I really need to see someone raise their eyebrows down.... Seriously, what was up with the editor here? Did she or he have the same problems Jade did?

The narration went so badly downhill (and this has little to do with the narration on the audio, which was passable, but nothing great as I indicated earlier) that I was forced to skip track after track (they're about a minute long, ninety-nine to a disk, so this was a significant chore). I simply could not stand to hear one more time which classes she was taking, or which homework she had, or hear her say, "I say" one more time, or read about what the hell Jake Gilette or the guy with the pineapple T-shirt at the video store is doing.... Who the frick and frack cares? Honestly?

Jade is too dumb to realize that if she's stuck for things to talk about with Sebastien, then she's with the wrong guy. She's so abysmally dysfunctional that she thinks he's wonderful for giving her a breath mint, but doesn't find it odd that he never told her that her mascara was running....

The problem is that Jade is obsessed with telling you every single tedious boring detail of her life: "I run back to the elephant house, take off my wet overalls, wash my hands. I hurry out to the viewing area..." Honestly? Quite frankly I just don't care if she farted before her brother or after him. Really.

For example, most people would simply say, "I left the house", whereas Jade has to describe closing the door as she does so, like if she doesn't specify that detail we'll automatically assume that she, like everyone else, routinely leaves their front door flapping in the breeze, and shoot ourselves in despair. It's T-E-D-I-O-U-S to read this stuff. Once again can I point out that going the Big Publishing™ route does in no way guarantee that you will end up with a decent novel.

I can't recommend this, not even as a sedative. Stick your Printz in it: it's done.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

Title: Walk Two Moons
Author: Sharon Creech
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WARTY!

This novel was well read by the narrator, but the story itself was really not interesting. It’s a prize-winning novel because it’s obsessed with death, quirks, endings, whack-a-loonery, sadness, eccentricity, disappointment, and weirdness. God forbid someone should ever write a bright, sunny novel about normal everyday people and win anything. No, if you want to be considered literary and deep, you had better-the-hell kill off some poor sumbitch, or no medals for you, make no mistake.

Oh, and it helps to write about native Americans, too, so this is why this story is about Salamanca Tree Hiddle, a girl who has just begun her teen age, and who is traveling with her grandparents across country to visit her mother, who happens to be dead (at least that's the idea I got. I never finished the novel, so I can't say for sure). The grandparents are complete whack-jobs, which is another major factor, I'm sure, in winning the medal. If they'd been normal, then abandon hope all ye who entertain heroic dreams of prizes.

Sal spends the trip telling her grandparents of her friend Phoebe, who is at least as whack as the grandparents are, which is undoubtedly why they're so interested in hearing it. While there were some funny moments here and there, Phoebe's story was completely lacking in so much as a scintilla of interest to me as was, for the most part, Sal's, hence my ditching this waste of time in order to move onto something which would better contribute to the lifespan of my brain cells than this medal-winning novel ever promised to do.

You know, it occurs to me that if the author had simply published Phoebe's story in the third person, no one would have cared, so she felt forced to tart it up and surround it with a totally whack frame in order to get some traction. I think I'm going to do the same thing with all my novels and win me sum o' them thar medals! Yihaw!

Before Watchmen Ozymandias - Crimson Corsair by Len Wein

Title: Before Watchmen: Ozymandias - Crimson Corsair - Dollar Bill
Author: Len Wein
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: worthy
Illustrated by Jae Lee and John Higgins.

This pretty much concludes my entire venture into the Before Watchmen series of comics, and I have to say that this particular one was a mixed bag. I loved the Ozymandius story - I think it was the best of all of them, or at least ties with Silk Spectre, but I thought the Crimson Corsair story nonsensical and boring. There was an unexpected treat at the end of this volume in the form of a very short story featuring Dollar Bill, which was appreciated.

I reviewed Minutemen - Silk Spectre back in April, along with Nite Owl - Dr Manhattan, and Comedian - Rorschach

Ozymandius was always, to me, the most intriguing of the Watchmen, and I have to say that although the illustration in general was very good in this story, the Ozymandius character was almost nauseatingly drawn. Maybe this was intentional! If it was, it worked! I certainly disliked it immensely.

His story arc was very well done, fit perfectly with the rest of the stories, especially the attack on the Comedian, and led nicely right up to the start of Watchmen.

The Crimson Corsair was well drawn, but a but too dark and bloody for my taste. But the problem I had was that the story which made no sense to me at all.

The Dollar Bill story was, as I said, welcome, but rather depressing. It's told very well and illustrated excellently. Bill was just a nice guy who was 'grandfathered' into the Watchmen because he was so well known, couldn't fight crime except by bungling and accident, and ended up trapped by his cape in a revolving door, and shot to death. It was really sad!

I liked this volume (as defined above), and I recommend it, even though it's DC, and they never approve my requests for review copies! See, I'm not petty!

The Devil Incarnate by Jill Braden

Title: The Devil Incarnate
Author: Jill Braden
Publisher: Wayzgoose Press
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.

Errata:
p126 "...wreck havoc..." should be "...wreak havoc..."

p149 "...ever piece of furniture..." should be "...every piece of furniture..."
p185 "...council..." should be "...counsel..."
p210 "...limited into..." should be "...limited to..."
p249 "...he could tell it she'd forced it..." should be "...he could tell that she'd forced it..." perhaps?
p260 "Kym" should be "Kyam"
p265 "...her let her go..." should be "...he let her go..."
(Hint to Jill Braden recruit me as a beta reader! I'll catch this stuff!)

This is the second volume in The Devil of Ponong series. I have already reviewed the first and I also plan on reviewing the next one, the first chance I get, because this series is that good. I am not a fan of trilogies/series because I find it rare that an author can sustain the passion and attraction over such an "extended novel" so it speaks volumes(!) that I am enjoying this one so much and willing to recommend it.

In passing, and as I did for the review for volume 1, I advise you to visit the author's web site, which is a joy. Contrary to what all-too-many authors use their web pages for, this is not a shameless self-promotion site, but a place where a real writer shows how much she loves to put words on paper (or on screen!). For anyone interested in the art and process of writing, it's a welcome breath of sweet scented air, believe me.

In volume one we met a rare, rather startling, and very unusual female protagonist in the shape of QuiTai, a complex and intriguing woman of the Ponongese people - a race of beings which is humanoid in form, but which carries certain traits typically found, on Earth, in the viperid snake family. You may think it odd that I find such a woman - one who has venomous fangs folded away in the roof of her mouth - appealing, but I found QuiTai to be irresistible, even more so in volume two than in volume one. She is smart, capable, fearless, and relentless.

She is a member of the Qui group, which has special powers. In particular, QuiTai is gifted as an oracle, something which she only slowly comes to realize. She lives on the island of Ponong, which was, some time before this series begins, invaded by the Thampurians, a race of sea-dragon people who are shape-shifters. Maybe you can guess into which shape they shift. Also in this world are the Li, a race of people with cat-like traits, the Ravidians, a race reminiscent of lizards, the Ingosolians (a race of indeterminate gender!), and finally a race of werewolves, which now appears to be extinct on Ponong, although their legend lives on - something which both benefits and plagues QuiTai.

This woman is not your usual action hero. She's more like James Bond, but a James Bond who has gone over to the dark side - yet not completely gone over. QuiTai can be viewed as a recipe which melds James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, with a dash of The Dark Knight added for piquancy - I kid you not. By the time volume two begins, she's simultaneously seen by the locals as both an underground hero and a dangerous villain.

She sidles around in the shadows, collecting information, processing it in her sharp and incisive mind, and arriving at conclusions which others would reach slowly, if at all. Once she determines what needs to be done, she does not hesitate to act. In short, she's the very epitome of what I search for almost fruitlessly in novel after novel: a strong female character where strength isn't blindly equated with the ability to kick someone's derriere. QuiTai is a strong female character where strong = the opposite of weak. She's the kind of woman who does not need rescuing, who relies on her own mind and body to take care of business (whatever that business might be), and who goes after what needs to be done like a greyhound at the track.

That doesn't mean that she's always running. Indeed, in this novel, she starts out largely incapacitated after a life-or-death struggle with a werewolf in the first volume. Now she has an infected leg and is forced to lay low until she recovers. Laying low, however, should in no way be equated with keeping still. QuiTai does not keep still, not even when sick.

She needs to learn who it is who paid to have her assassinated in volume one, and as she pursues this inquiry, she discovers that something really odd is happening on this occupied island: a new Thampurian militia is stealthily moving into place and all Ponongese activities are slowly being suspended and thwarted. Their right to meet and exchange goods in the market place is abruptly canceled for example, and their fishing fleet is prevented from putting to sea.

This new military wears non-standard black uniforms, without insignia, not even of rank, and the soldiers never use names when taking to each other. So what the heck is going on now in QuiTai's homeland? This is something which she cannot let pass.

And that's the sum total of spoilers you're going to get! I will tease you, however, by saying that, very early in this novel, there's an exquisite encounter between QuiTai and Lizzriat, the androgynous Ingosolian owner of the Dragon Pearl drug den, which I found delicious. Jill Braden is a tease and that's all there is to it. I said it first! Lizzriat reminds me a bit of the character Pie'oh'pah in Clive Barker's Imajica, and I demand more of her (or him) in volume three. Do you hear me Ms Braden?

Almost as hypnotic is her relationship with RhiHanya, a woman who, at no small risk to her family, opens her home to QuiTai and takes her in until she's recovered from her fever. The slowly rising tension between these two, and QuiTai's amusing and frustrated thoughts about it are precious.

A word to the wise (or to those who wish to be): if you're expecting a tedious trope romantic novel, don't look here. You won't find it. You'll find amorous allusions, and teasing thoughts, but there are no fluttering breaths or "be still my beating heart" gasps here. If you want a wilting maiden you're in the wrong novel. There are scores of other adult and young-adult novels out there with which you can numb and stunt your mind in that regard. If, on the other hand, you want a woman who is meaningfully strong, and a story which is unpredictable, and which is full of intrigue, shifting political affiliations, and unexpected alliances, then Jill Braden's beat is the place to be.

I honestly cannot judge if this is better than volume one, or if the first volume just edges this one out. I think it's a tie. This is a different story with the largely the same cast, but with some wrenches gleefully tossed into the works by the author. It organically builds upon the first story (and despite what the author claims on her web site about her writing style, I suspect there was planning going on here - at least in the rough, to get this to flow so well! Either that or Jill Braden is even more brilliantly off-the-cuff than I at first assessed her to be.)

I highly recommend this. If you liked the first you will enjoy this, and if you don't, remember that QuiTai is out there, fangs folded, stalking silently, and she's a woman who does not suffer fools lightly...!

(On a personal note I should very much like to thank Dorothy of Wayzegoose Press for her kindness and support and for allowing me a chance to get an early look at this novel)

The Virtual Life of Lexie Diamond by Victoria Foyt

Title: The Virtual Life of Lexie Diamond
Author: Victoria Foyt
Publisher: Harper
Rating: worthy

This is the story of a teenage computer-recluse, Alexia Aurora Diamond, whose mother dies and Lexie finds herself having to actually spend more time irl. This novel was really hard to get into: the author is spewing jargon almost randomly as though she feels a need to establish her geek chops, and it doesn’t work. First of all she simply doesn't know anything about computers (she probably wrote this novel on a typewriter), and secondly, it just makes it that much harder to get into the story. She uses the term "hard frame" when she means "main frame", she thinks 'bytes' are a measure of time when they're actually a measure of capacity, and she tosses in terms like CD-ROM when she means simply a CD. No one uses that term any more, because no one really thinks of CDs as memory, although the term is technically correct. Even in 2007 when this was written, CDs were on their way out.

The author mentions keeping her mother's 'power boost' which plugs into her motherboard, and this in turn speeds-up her surfing? That makes no sense. The flat limit of your surfing speed is the maximum capacity of your connection to the Internet, and that's it (Foyt says it’s a modem which was not likely in 2007, not in a well-off family like Lexie's). You can use compression algorithms to transmit more data at that same rate, but you cannot increase the base speed of your link unless you get a better hook-up, so this was misleading at best.

And why are all these YA novels about girls who are from well-off families? Yeah, once in a while we get one about a girl from an impoverished household, but those are usually about that same state of poverty. We almost never get one where a teen comes from a poor family, but the poverty isn't the focus of the novel. It's a bit snobbish, isn't it?

In terms of writing quality, and other than the geek spiel, the novel is written in a manner that's technically OK, but there's way too much tell as opposed to show. There's also an odd quirk or two here and there - a short-hand which many writers use but which seems really odd if you stop to think about it. For example, on page 13 the author writes, "Her father walked in her room…" when she really means "Her father walked into her room…". There's a difference. What she actually wrote means that her father was already in the room and was walking around inside - pacing while thinking, for example. The other phrasing means exactly what it says: he entered the room.

It's like writing that someone "came in through the door" when only SWAT teams and super heroes actually do that. Most people come in through the doorway. Of course, it's pedantic to spell it out every time, and it doesn’t necessarily fit the kind of story you're trying to tell if you spell it out, but it does seem odd when you stop and think. Since this blog is as much about writing as it is about reading, I think it’s important to point out that you need to know what it is that you're writing, and to be sure that what you want to say is what you do say, no matter how technically correct or incorrect your wording is. Only then can you be sure you’re saying it the right way for what you're trying to convey to your reader.

Foyt stuffs every trope she can dredge up from YA fiction into this novel: the socially disaffected, angst-y teen who considers herself to be a different species to everyone else, and who is missing at least one parent; the trope guy with hair falling into his eyes who is telegraphed from wa-ay off; the trope bitch glam-queen who is her mortal enemy; the trope of having the trope guy and his main squeeze accidentally end up in each other's arms, etc.

It’s truly sad that far too many YA authors can’t think-up more original and inventive characters and situations than these, but there are some saving graces here which kept me reading. The "enemy" seems to want to be a friend, so that's a bit different, and the novel does improve if you stay with it. We get less geek speak (although at the price of more new-age and philosophical stuff, which normally I would rail against, but in this case, it’s actually presented in a way that didn’t make me barf).

Lexie is definitely out there on the shaky edge, seeing her whole life in terms of computer components and Internet interaction, and she definitely has a large dollop of eastern religious philosophy, conspiracy theory, and even alien visitation about her, but the way she tries to rationalize life and fit it into her really quirky computer view of the world is actually quite amusing when it works. Unfortunately, and far too often, she doesn't come off as being the computer whiz she's supposed to be.

For example at one point towards the end of the novel, she's supposed to be teaching her new-found friend about computers in return for the make-over she just got, but the whole thing is so god-awfully clunky that it's embarrassing to read. It simply doesn't work, especially when she likens a hard drive to a brain. No! If you're going to compare computers and people (which doesn't really work), then at least go for the CPU as the brain. The hard drive is not a brain; it's really just memory, which is admittedly part of a brain function, but whereas a CPU can work fine without a hard drive, a hard drive isn't going anywhere without some sort of CPU directing it. The truth is that this whole comparison is wrong because the entire computer is like the hardware of the brain (the grey matter and white matter) and the computer's operating system is like the thoughts that run through it.

Lexie learns from a visiting police detective, who is investigating the accident which killed her mom (who was a practicing psychologist) that the crash was caused by the girlfriend of a man named John Simpson. She took his car, got drunk, drifted into Lexie's mom's lane and that's all she wrecked. This girlfriend killed herself afterwards in remorse, it would seem. I wondered what the odds were that John Simpson was Lexie's trusted (and sole) online "friend", but it soon began to look more like it's her trope "love" interest in disguise with whom she's interacting which was sad. It would have made for a much better novel if her online "love" had been the one who killed her mother.

Lexie's dad, who has been divorced from her mom for a year or so when her mom dies, is soon hanging out with Jane, a new woman in his life, and to whom Lexie takes an immediate and extreme dislike. Lexie imagines that she's in touch with her mom via the Mac computer that's her lifeline to what she views as reality. She's named it Ajna-Mac and feels she has a spiritual relationship with it. I'm surprised she doesn't name her bike "megacycle"... and store her memories in bank 'volts'.... She starts imagining her mother is communicating with her via the Mac, and sees her on the monitor screen, although when she tries to make a video of this visit, her video shows nothing out of the ordinary.

This virtual mom tells her that her death wasn't an accident, and she gives Lexie the password to her computer, where her patient files are kept. Lexie prints out a patient list and urges her dad to get the detective looking into it. Lexie also tells her dad that her mother left her a letter in their safety deposit box, which turns out to be true. Everything else is easily explained away as Lexie's delusions, but this envelope was a lot harder to dismiss!

Eventually, Lexie declines into thinking Jane killed her mom. So is she delusional? Is disaster heading her way? If so, what form will it take? Or is she right in some weird way? You'll have to read this to find out. Despite having multiple problems with this novel, I still found it a worthy read overall. Your bus speed may differ....

Virgin by Radhika Sanghani

Title: Virgin
Author: Radhika Sanghani
Publisher: Penguin
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.

erratum:
p11 "I don't always have seven drink a week..." 'drink' needs to be pluralized.
p11 "...seven drniks..." needs to be "...seven drinks..."

When I see a magnificent name like "Radhika Sanghani" on the cover of a novel, I want to find a book that is truly different, intriguing, informative, entrancing, even exotic, and I was unable to find any of that in this novel. Sanghani is a journalist with Britain's The Daily Telegraph, and this is her debut novel. I honestly expected to like it, but I didn't.

The naïve virgin route has been (if you'll forgive the potentially crude double-entendre) plowed so much that it's now a freeway, and this novel adds no more to it than the equivalent of yet another strip mall. In the stead of finding a unique boutique, or a great used book store, or some intriguing novelty shop in that mall, all that we get is the same fast-food place and big oil gas station charging inflated prices that we always find in every such mall. This saddened me.

It was hard to wade through this and even harder to take seriously. It wouldn't have been quite so bad if the author hadn't evidently felt compelled to go into excruciating detail about common or garden things which she apparently doesn't realize are not actually mysteries to anyone with a functional brain (which I assume is her intended audience). I could only stand to read the first third of this novel, but in that third there were no surprises at all, and there was such brain-numbing detail that it often read like some sort of owner's manual rather than like an interesting, informative, or amusing novel. Reading The Vagina Monologues would serve you far better and be significantly more amusing.

I think that the author errored in rendering this as a bit of a joke, because the main character has some serious issues which oughtn't to be so cavalierly made light of. I also didn't get her obsession with "talking dirty". It felt like the author had suddenly learned that she could say "naughty words" and got carried away with it, without concerning herself about how the novel actually reads or what kind of a juvenile impression she's conveying of her main character, Ellie.

This was the first inkling I had that this novel was leaning far more towards slapstick and cheap laughs than ever it was interested in trying to usefully explore an important topic. It's always easier to go for the low-hanging fruit though, isn't it? It's like kicking someone in the balls rather than trying to out-wit them.

So this is the story of Ellie Kolstakis, a twenty-one-year-old virgin who has serious issues, and not a single one of them really has to do with her virginity (not at its roots, anyway). This story began rather confusingly with Ellie talking to a doctor. She was evidently registering for something, but after reading the whole chapter, I had no idea what that was about, what she was trying to do, what she wanted, why she was there, or why she was a complete pile of quivering jelly when it came to discussing her sexual health with a doctor. This wasn't the most auspicious start of a relationship with a novel (or with a novelist for that matter!).

There are so many - indeed, too many - novels about losing one's virginity (or failing to lose it), that it's a totally trite topic any more. The only reason I ventured into this particular one was that it was set in England, which makes a hugely pleasant change from the endless parade of books where the USA appears to be the only nation on the planet if not the entire planet itself. Also the author is clearly of a different ethnic group than my own (as well as a lot younger - she looks sooo young!) and you never know what you will learn when you head into terra incognita of this nature. I was excited and I was thinking, "What's to lose but a few hours, when there is potentially so much to gain?" That was how is started, anyway....

The first (and as it turned out, the only) joy, was that this novel is about a girl who isn't on the one hand a closet beauty queen whilst on the other promoting the patent fiction that she's a 'plain jane' who never gets a boyfriend. At least the character felt realistic in some regards, if a bit too much down on herself; then again, women who do look fine are down on themselves these days because of the absurd "standard" of "beauty" which is promoted in the media and foisted upon women by the male-dominated culture du jour (I use the term 'culture' loosely there).

I must confess that I can't help wondering when reading a novel like this, how much of it might be autobiographical to one extent or another. I'm not accusing the author of being a 'plain jane' by any means and it wouldn't matter if she were, but if this is even semi-autobiographical, it's much more of a horror story (that a woman should have to go through this) than ever it is a comedy. I couldn't forget that while reading, and this colored my perspective.

Having said that, and realizing that this novel might be (or parts of it might be) at least somewhat autobiographical, I have to say that I didn't find it very realistic or self-consistent. Perhaps it's not one person's autobiography, but a pastiche of several? Whatever it was, it didn't work.

The first problem is the fact that Ellie's medical record contains the word 'VIRGIN' (yes in block caps!). I find that really hard to believe. I guess it's possible; materially, it would be no different from indicating that she's sexually active, which could have possible medical ramifications, but if that were the case, then why not say "sexually inactive"? Why "VIRGIN"? But since we're never told exactly why she was ever at the doctor (trying to get on the pill maybe?), it's impossible to really determine how valid a comment that was. Besides, if this was her first visit, how on Earth did they know she was a virgin in the first place? This was one of several instances where the writing made no sense to me.

The second problem I had was that Ellie is telling this story in first person (which is entirely unrealistic as far as I'm concerned, but that's another issue and pet peeve of mine!), and she's telling it about herself. Given what we're expected to believe about Ellie: that she's a sheltered, withdrawn, naïve, sexually backward girl (which is a tough sell in this day and age, let's face it!), It took too much suspension of disbelief that she would ever tell such a graphic story about such a personal topic. It seemed completely out of character for her.

I found it particularly risible that at one point - in a novel which is entirely about sex - that she writes (employing block caps, yet!), "Why did EVERYTHING have to be about sex?" Right there was a major tipping point for me, and its stark hypocrisy is only exacerbated if you already have issues with a story, as I did here.

I have to ask, seriously, are college undergrads so immature that they play "Never Have I Ever"? Honestly? That just seemed beyond childish and written in there for no other reason than that the author could talk dirty some more. It did nothing to move the story along.

We also meet other characters acting out of character. For example at one point, she gets nekkid with fellow teen named James Martell, yet nothing happens. This is a guy whom she's not dating, has not dated, and with whom she's had no physical relationship (indeed, no relationship, period!), who basically manhandles her into a bedroom at a party, and feels her up; then it goes no further? Next he invites her over to his place one night when he's home alone, and they go the same route, get completely naked, hot, and bothered on the couch - and then he refuses to go further? It seemed completely unrealistic and consequently too absurd for words.

It was particularly incredible in that he'd already had his hand between her legs before that night, yet now he's all but shocked that she has pubic hair? How could he not know? Was he wearing gloves the first time? Maybe he had condoms on his fingers? I found several instances of writing this nature, as I already indicated. This can be described, borrowing a movie term, as poor continuity, and I chalked it up as yet more proof that going the Big Publishing™ route in no way guarantees you a decent editing job. You had better get it right yourself!

Yes, there are boys like James. Indeed, in some ways that particular scene could have been an encounter with me when I was that age, but that's not the character to whom we're introduced here. Martell has already shown himself to be the kind of guy who uses women, has no respect for them, and who considers them to be toys, playgrounds, or mere diversions, and yet when he's right there knocking on heaven's door he suddenly...shrinks away from it so to speak?

I didn't buy that. Yes there are guys like that but this guy was not drawn as one of them. If you're going to have a so-called hot-blooded guy get that far and then back down, you had better at least give him a solid grossed-out guy's "reason", like she has her period or something. That scene really dropped me out of suspension of disbelief, which made for three times in only twenty pages or so that this happened. That's never a good thing.

If Ellie had been portrayed as dumb, or somewhat backward or something, then this story would have at least seemed plausible, but she's not. She's shown (in the early pages) to be smart, personable, interesting, and worth knowing, which makes it so much harder for me to believe that she would first of all not have any guys interested in her - even for inappropriate reasons - and secondly, that she would be so ignorant about everything sexual, especially given that she has an outright pathological obsession with her virginity.

Ellie is not presented as an outcast. Far from it: she's presented to us as being (at least peripherally) in lots of cliques, and as having a diversity of friends and acquaintances, yet she's had no physical experience of any kind to speak of with any guy? No! It doesn't work! She's never read a book about it? She's never seen a movie or a documentary? She's never talked about it with anyone? She's never looked anything up online? It doesn't work. Not with the kind of woman we're expected at this point to accept that Ellie is, and especially not with her focused on it so acutely.

Her poor attitude is too much, as well. Given the kind of woman with which we're presented here, I really found it hard to believe that she would even be this down on herself. Self-deprecating, yes, but obsessed with getting laid and feeling so rejected that it dominates her entire every waking thought? Not plausible. If she actually had been like that, she'd be depressed and would have been seeing the doctor about that!

So it was at that very early point, only 20 or so pages in that I really started wondering if I could keep reading this without the author offering me a real incentive to keep going. In that regard, putting a novel out there is rather like a sexual encounter, isn't it; perhaps one that is between a guy who's only after one thing, and a girl who's a tease? How far can she keep leading him on and leaving him dissatisfied before he quits her altogether in frustration? The answer wasn't far in my case with this novel.

When you know the author, just as when you know your partner, teasing like that is a heck of lot of fun, but when it's someone new, it becomes a potential problem. That's exactly what's going on here, so the reader has to decide how long to wait. Just how much more time is it worth investing to find out whether this author will finally grab me by my interest or leave me blue-booked? Or should I just quit wasting time with this print-tease, and find a more satisfying partner? I had my answer about one third the way in.

Sadly, having impressed me earlier with what an intriguing (if sadly unhinged) woman she was, Ellie forced me to question that assessment after I read of her idiotic and irresponsible plan to go out and get laid - pretty much with any guy she could find. This is insanity, especially since she spends hours agonizing over what to wear, and spares not a single thought for contraception or disease! C'mon, this isn't the sixties any more (and the sixties never actually was the sixties with regard to disease-free wild sex: there's no such thing!).

That really took her out of my respect zone, especially when she declared that the reason she absolutely must lose her virginity is that even if she met the right guy he would run a mile if he learned that she was still a virgin. What? Excuse me, but WHAT? How can he even remotely be defined as 'the right guy' if that's true? This is simply bad writing - unless, of course you deliberately want to convey the idea that your main character is a complete ditz with nothing to recommend her.

Ellie is unshaven in her public region and at one point she decides this hair needs to go, but she describes it as "shaving [the] vagina". I seriously hope she isn't actually planning on doing that - it would lead to a lot of internal bleeding and possible infection. Shaving her pubic hair OTOH would be fine if she really must mold her Mons to men's insistence upon what a woman should be, instead of her own wishes and needs. So strike what I said about her being smart and worth knowing. She's juvenile and shallow. Here's a classic article on how women are enslaved to men's dictates about what's acceptable in a woman.

She declares that the conventional wisdom is that "...the au naturel vagina had only been acceptable in the seventies"! To whom exactly? By whose standards? At least she uses the correct French form of au naturelle, since vagina (French vagin) is - inexplicably! - masculine!)

It seems to me that what's acceptable is what a woman wants for herself, not something to which a male-dominated culture or society dictates that she must conform! Forcing women to further reduce themselves to the status of children, by removing all evidence of sexual maturity from their primary sex organ so that they can be owned and 'cared for' by perverse, selfish, and immature men doesn't strike me as very feminist.

It is her choice of course whether to depilate her Mons Veneris, but I think we need to keep in mind that this is largely an American obsession (like circumcision - unless we count areas where it's done for religious or health reasons) and it no longer is your choice if you're pressured to follow someone else's designs upon your body. The rest of the world largely couldn't care less what such "men" demand of "their" women and indeed would be foolish to do so. Keep in mind that contrary to popular misconception, men do indeed play with dolls: those dolls are women.

So the author goes into an unnecessarily detailed description of the shaving o' the Mons, but in front of the mirror the next morning, rather than complaining of 5:00 am shadow, Ellie declares herself thrilled at feeling like a "new woman". Perverse much, Ellie?

The only funny thing here was the time-line. The very reason she's shaving (so we're led to believe) is that she's supposed to be going out that night with a friend to get laid, but the night-out bizarrely never precipitates and instead we get a description of the next few days as Ellie bemoans the growing stubble and the pain from almost 'circumcising' herself with the razor. Frankly, I'm not sure I get how urinating causes pain in this instance, since the urethra is way below the clitoris, but let's just put that down to artistic license, shall we, and move on?!

Maybe I'd become so numbed at this point that I missed something, because they do go out several days later, but if that's the case and she wasn't going out that night, then what was with the urgent need to shave and otherwise depilate herself right there and then? Once again, the writing makes no sense.

Given how much research Ellie supposedly did for this activity, I found it incredible that she never read one thing about stubble or about alternatives to shaving. This illogical lack of logic and consistent lack of consistency in telling this tale was one of the things which marred it so badly for me. It made the entire story seem fictional in the worse possible sense of the word, and it also made Ellie once again look quite simply stupid, and incompetent. I found myself wondering if I was actually supposed to like this character, because I grew increasingly to dislike her with every page I turned.

So, as I mentioned above, at a bit over one third the way through this, I could not stand to read any more. There was nothing there. The story was not amusing, just tired. It was not new, just derivative, and it was not original, just uninventive, and uninspiring. The main character was decidedly boring in her blind obsession, and it was obvious right from the start that she would meet her knight in shining armor unexpectedly, so what's to look forward to?

How many times has this exact tale not been told? Not many. It's the equivalent of those nauseating American TV sit-coms which have the standard trope birthing scene, where one of the main characters is about to have a baby, and everything is panicked, and she experiences grossly exaggerated pain, and makes "hilarious" faces whilst giving birth, and the husband cannot cope at all, in any way, shape, or form, but in the end everyone is oh-so-happy with the adorable newborn babe. Those shams are all the same, all inanely slap-stick, all ridiculously cartoonish and absurdly exaggerated, and therefore neither interesting nor funny. And like this novel, they bring nothing new to the table.

Ironically, this novel was itself an unsatisfying first encounter: it was messy, painful at times, and in the end meaningless and made me wish I'd spent my time doing something else. The experience wasn't really like reading a novel at all. This could have been a texted "conversation", or a twittish tweet fest. Actually, it was more like sitting in a crowded bar and being forced, by proximity, to listen to a couple of clueless girls nattering on endlessly and mindlessly about their man-woes, all the time oblivious to the fact that they could actually do something about it if they got off their asses and put some actual thought into it. And like the conversation in a bar, there was hardly any descriptive prose here: no sense of surroundings, season, or context. I found that sad. It was all talk and no traction.

It felt like a phone-call from a friend who happens to call when you're in the middle of getting ready to leave for an important appointment. All you can contribute is the silent wish that they'd get to the point so you could hang up and move on. All it seemed to consist of was endless set-piece conversations, every one of which failed dismally the Bechdel-Wallace test.

Ellie is an undergrad in her last year of college for goodness sakes. Does she quite literally have nothing on her mind, no interest in her shallow life, but getting laid? What message will this send to any college guys who might read this? It will send the same woefully misguided message as your average porn "film": that all women think about is sex, and that every one of them really needs nothing more than to get laid asap. That's the real tragedy here - not Ellie's virginity.

While your mileage will undoubtedly differ from mine, this blog is ultimately about how well a tale is told, both technically and in spirit, and I cannot in good conscience recommend this one, which fails abysmally in both measures.

Lazarus by Greg Rucka

Title: Lazarus
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by Michael Lark" and Santi Arcas

This is the third of three reviews of work by Greg Rucka, who has an article on strong female characters. Lazarus is yet another really uninspired title as B&N's website shows - there is a over dozen stories with this title on their first page of results alone.

This is the third (and last!) work of Greg Rucka that I ever plan on reading. I started reading his material after I saw a referral to that article. Somehow he has garnered this reputation for writing such characters, but after three different outings with his writing, I see no reason at all for it.

This novel in particular was beyond sad. It's pretty much a Romeo and Juliet redux, and far from promoting a strong female, it’s the graphic novel equivalent of wife-beating, promoting a female protagonist who is just as clueless as Juliet is, and who, as an action figure is really nothing more than a rip-off of Laura Kinney, the female version of Wolverine from the Marvel universe. The opening few panels depict his main character being killed in a very gory and bloody fashion, but that's okay, you see, because she's a Lazarus - she will recover, her wounds will heal, and she'll be as good as new. That must be why it’s okay to repeatedly abuse her. Seriously?

This is how you introduce your strong female character: dead and bloody

This novel is set in a sad future world were the environment has gone to hell, and the world, evidently, is ruled by a few mafioso-style families which control territories - and I'm talking about old west style territories, not segments of a city. The Carlyle (Capulet) family is very strong and controls seeds - genetically modified seeds which will grow in the appalling conditions found out there in ravaged nature. They had a treaty with the Morray family, but it’s put at dire risk when it's discovered that the Morrays (Montague family), which controls weaponry, apparently tried to raid the Carlyle seed vaults.

The Carlyle family 'Lazarus', whose name is not Juliet, but Forever Carlyle, yet who ought to have been named Mary Sue, is an enforcer who is dispatched south to parlay with the Morrays to heal the rift before outright war breaks out and the two families go to the mattresses over it (so to speak). The parlez seems to go well, and Forever travels back to the borderland between the two territories, escorted by the Morray Lazarus, with whom she's...kinda, sorta, 'friends', but even though she's headed north, things start going badly south.

The problem with this story is that it’s pretty obvious from the start what’s going on, so there are no real surprises, and as soon as we learn about the trip back with the male Lazarus escort, it’s obvious what’s going to happen, so where is the mystery and suspense? For that matter, where is the world-building? Nowhere. And why, oh why does Forever carry a sword? Seriously? What's with the friggin' swords?

The world is very sketchily portrayed. We get tedious announcements every few panels giving terse details of location and demographics, but these are not only annoying, they're pointless since they really mean nothing to the reader. I don’t know if they were intended to be shocking, depressing, or just 'cool', but they made no impression on me unless you count rolling eyes as an impression. The human world here works as a caste system, with family members (which appear to be few and far between) at the top, serfs, who are highly expendable employees of the family in the middle, and 'waste' which is everyone else, at the bottom. No one cares about the serfs or the waste. Or about the Lazaruses (Lazari?!) for that matter.

It turns out that while Forever is superficially treated as a family member, no one really thinks of her that way, and the Lazarus program makes no sense. Why only one? And why would a Mary Sue like her have any loyalty to any family? The fact that she does their bidding, putting her welfare at risk on a routine basis, and gets nothing in return means that Forever is really not very smart or perceptive.

Why tolerate this for so long with no complaints and no suspicions? She has no real incentive. Yes, it’s 'family', but she's carrying the entire load all the time, and despite living with her family for so long, she's evidently not got the first clue as to her status or to the internecine rift in her own family. So how is she a strong female character?

Beat ♪ up your ♫ girls regularly, ♪ if you ♫ want to ♪ be loved.♫

Forever is, in fact, an ass-backwards idea of a strong female character. Strong ≠ physically tough. It can include that, but the two are not equivalent sets. Rucka evidently doesn’t get this from what I've now read of his writing, so whence his rep for writing strong female characters? I don't know. Forever Carlyle is definitely a Mary Sue. She cannot fail. She can do no wrong. She has no vulnerabilities - except that she's not too smart.

Worse than this, she is a stereotypical "super-babe" - drawn as a superhero with rather improbable mutant dimensions and proportions, and she is almost literally put through the mill. Since when is a strong female character nothing more than an excuse to depict mindless and repeated violence against a woman? And she's not the only woman who appears in some state of undress either. Nothing new or revolutionary here....

Get your strong female characters half nekkid if possible (and it's always possible!).

I cannot recommend this comic and have no desire to read any more of this series or any more from Greg Rucka's pen. This one is nothing original, nothing interesting, nothing inventive, and the world makes no sense. The only thing strong about it is the distaste it leaves with me.

Whiteout by Greg Rucka

Title: Whiteout
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Oni Press
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated and lettered by Steve Lieber"

This is the second of three reviews of work by Greg Rucka. Whiteout is written by Rucka who has an article on strong female characters. Whiteout is also yet another really uninspired title as B&N's website shows - there is a over dozen stories with this title on their first page of results alone.

This is volume one of a graphic novel series. It was also made into a sorry excuse for a movie of the same name in 2009 starring Kate Beckinsale. Other than its title and the name of the lead character, the movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the graphic novel. That they even pretend it does by using the same title and main character's name is, in my opinion, nothing but a huge fraud. The novel is actually better than the movie, which is poor and is why I don't carry it in my movie review section, but that really doesn't say a whole heck of a lot about the novel.

The graphic novel is executed as really cheesy line-drawings, which were not that well done. It's like reading a comic strip in a newspaper - except one that's 164 pages long. I had a real problem in that the villain and one of the good guys looked the same to me. I was over 60% of the way into this before I realized that the two were different people - and they were not even of the same gender!

The action takes place in Antarctica, where a US marshal, exiled for some issue with her superior, is trying to track down a murderer. The story is readable; I didn't have any problem following it or finishing it, but it just wasn't any good.

Greg Rucka is a guy who has somehow become known for writing strong female characters, but I've now read two of his stories and I don't see anything special about either of them. In this novel, the main character is Carrie Stetko, the US marshal, who is later assisted by a female British agent (who doesn't even appear in the movie!). There seems to be a strong undercurrent of lesbian attraction going on between these two, which never goes anywhere. Maybe volume 2 pursues that, but I have no interest in reading another volume of this to find out.

Carrie isn't a bad character per se, but she's nothing special, memorable, endearing, or engaging. On a couple of occasions she's shown to be "tough" as exemplified by her being able to throw guys around, but that's not what people mean when they talk about strong female characters! Yes, it can include that, but there's much more to it than that. Other than that cheap-ass attempt at making her "strong", there was nothing about Carrie to recommend her. She wasn't particularly smart or inventive in her investigation, and she wasn't a brilliant cop by any means. The action scenes were pretty tired and lacking in interest.

There are some things which Rucka gets completely wrong. For example, he writes "Pome" when he means "Pommie" (an antiquated term to describe someone from Britain). There's an incident near the end when one of the good guys is being threatened with a gun, but the gun fails to fire because it's so cold that it froze the trigger, which in turn shattered rather than triggering anything. That struck me as too dumb for words. I mean, if it was cold enough to render steel that brittle, then it's sure as hell far too cold for people to be outside without full face protection (or even at all for that matter) as they were depicted here!

In short, I cannot recommend this novel, unless your taste in novels runs to the insipid, tame, pedestrian, and uninspired.

Alpha by Greg Rucka

Title: Alpha
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!

Alpha is written by Greg Rucka who has an article on strong female characters, but you won't find any strong female characters here. All the females are appendages to the men, because this is a macho military man kind of a novel. After I read this, I decided that I probably had to visit the improbable characters populating his comic books to find out what he thinks a strong female character should be, and I wasn't impressed there, either.

This novel reads like a rip-off of a movie I saw some time ago about the take-over of a theme park by thieves or terrorists, but I cannot for the life of me recall its name. I guess it wasn't that great, huh?! I've searched on Amazon, on Netflix, and on the Internet, including IMDB, but I've failed to dig up the name of the movie I saw, and IMDB doesn't identify Rucka as the writer of such a movie or as a movie based on anything he wrote.

In this take, a terrorist threat aimed at the fictional Wilsonville theme park a thinly disguised Disney knock off, comes to the attention of government agencies, so Jad Bell, a master sergeant in some special forces outfit or other, is recruited as deputy safety director. Another of his team is working as a security employee. There is a third person, a CIA operative, also working there, but the park's management has no idea that it's a target, nor that there are undercover operatives implanted at the park.

When the terror does strike, it's in the form of a couple of dozen guys who set up a dirty bomb. It turns out they were hired by a US government politician who wanted to literally scare-up funds for defense, but the terrorists take that and run with it, and then demand that this same guy pay them over again what he already paid, otherwise they really will detonate this bomb. It's up to Bell and his team to rescue the hostages, take out the terrorists and defuse the bomb. In short, your standard macho bullshit.

The complication is that Bell's wife is in the park with his deaf daughter, taking a tour which magically happened to be on this self-same day, of course. The daughter, Anthea, does seem to be a strong woman, but she's marginalized, Bell's ex wife (it's always the ex in these stories, isn't it?) is a complete moron. In the first part of the novel, Bell pretty much outright begs her not to visit the park, but he can't tell her exactly why, and so this dip-shit chooses to completely ignore the advice of her terrorist-expert husband. Later in the story, she bitches him out about getting her into this and putting her daughter at risk! What a frickin' numb-skull!

Generally this novel is well-written and I certainly had no trouble maintaining interest in it, but once in a while there was a "Wait, what?" moment. At one point, Rucka writes, "...judders to a sudden, sharp stop." I'm not sure that makes sense. Judders is a word, although it's not one I like. The problem as I see it is that "judders" implies at least a small amount of time for said juddering to happen, which seems to be at odds with the "sudden, sharp stop" portion of the sentence. Maybe it's just me, but I would never have written that. It just sounds too weird to me.

I have no idea, even having read this novel, what the 'Alpha' title is all about, unless it describes the guy on the cover holding his gun like it's a loaded automatic metal dick....

So overall this was not quite a disaster, but neither was it anything memorable, new, inventive, or original and, as I said, it's strongly reminiscent, if not a rip-off, of that movie. So in short, I can't rate this as a worthy read. Others have done far more with less.

Paradigm by Ceri A Lowe

Title: Paradigm
Author: Ceri A Lowe
Publisher: Bookouture
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.

errata:
p175 "Are your team ready?" should be 'Is your team ready?"
p180 "I'm a just a mentor..." should be "I'm just a mentor..."
p186 "As the tunnel eked out into the underbelly..." just sounds wrong. 'Eked' isn't the right word here.

This is yet another clear rip-off of The Hunger Games style dys-trope-ian ethos and the god-awfully appalling Divergent disaster. Indeed, the cover of this one is such a blatant rip-off of Divergent that I'm surprised that I haven't read of the publisher being sued! I kept looking at this thinking it had to be a parody like my own Dire virgins but it isn't! And what's with yet another novel having a title that's shared by god knows how many other novels? I counted a dozen books with exactly the same title at B&N and that was only on the first screen!

So why oh why did I request to read this? Well, there are some differences, and I'm sorely overdue for a good dystopian trilogy after reading so many awful ones, right? Yeah, dream on! I am sorry to have to report that my hope was not fulfilled in this novel. This was a DNF, although I did gamely plow on through four-fifths of it.

Unless you self publish, you really don't have any say over the cover your novel gets, so that's not usually on the author. The author does the interior, and in this one, I was delighted to discover that it's not set in the USA! This was a big plus for me - finally someone is willing to break the mold! This was one creation I decided to give this one a try. You have to respect an author who grasps that the entity "USA" does not equal the entity "The World"!

Also in its favor is that this one is about a guy, not a girl (at least the dystopian end of it is), which is another big difference. Paradigm is set in London, which is an intriguing change, and it has a dual story line - one from a woman in the (near) present, and the other from a guy in the sad, bad future, so it was because of these marked differences (at least I had hoped they were marked!) that I thought I'd give this a spin and see how it goes. There has to be someone out there who can write a decent dystopian trilogy, right?

There's a nine-page prologue which I skipped. I don't do prologues. There is absolutely no call for them. If the story is worth telling, then it's worth labeling it as chapter one and enough of this prologue crap. I've seen trilogies where the second and third volumes have a prologue. Seriously? The first volume is the prologue to the second volume, and so on, so what's with a separate prologue?! I don't get that mentality at all.

The novel begins on the day the storms started. It's in the past (our present) where things are just starting to seriously go down-hill. We're actually in that place now, in 2014, but that's in reality. This story is fictional, and Alice Davenport lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats (apartments) in London. She's playing hooky from school because of a school bully named Jake Anderson. We’re told that Jake's stories - even the fictional ones he spreads about Alice's mother - gain legs because he was in London when Hurricane Alison hit and "Big Ben had toppled". How that's supposed to lend him veracity, I don't know!

A small point of order here! Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower, not the tower itself. Most people conflate the two. It's possible that Big Ben (the bell) could topple even without the tower doing so, but I guess we're meant to understand here that the whole tower went down.

On a second point, Hurricanes are not known to strike Europe. They don't typically work that way although Coriolis "force" does tend to bend their path into a rough U shape with the curve on the USA's eastern seaboard and the open end out in the Atlantic. Some hurricanes have, albeit very rarely, reached the UK. I remember staying home from school one day as huge gale-force winds ran through my home town over there. It wasn't a hurricane, but it was extremely windy that day.

Alice and her mom sleep on a shared, stained, smelly mattress on the floor of the apartment. Alice has been told that she must never ever go into the bedroom up the stairs, but was offered no reason why. Nor do we ever get such a reason! If we did, I missed it. She's reduced to stealing from the wad of cash her mother thinks she's secreted under the mattress, in order to bring home bags of groceries. Alice is stronger than she looks. I liked Alice herself, although at one point, right before I quit reading this, I started to go off her. She would have made a great hero in a story just about her, and with a bit more going on than was going on here, but her story just became tedious and stretched out, with very little happening, and I found myself hurrying through her sections.

Alice's mom works nights, and it's easy to imagine what it is she does when she goes out and doesn't return until dawn, but the day the storms began, she went out and never came back, so Alice was alone and felt physically ill. She was nauseated and ran a fever, and was too lethargic to pay serious attention when everyone seemed to be abandoning the apartment block and rousing everyone else to go with them. Some emergency or other. Alice didn't care.

Many years into the future, Carter Warren finds himself unfrozen from some sort of cryo-sleep and expected to run for the highly important position of Controller General, which he actually wants, because he thinks he can bring a whole slew of fresh ideas to the job - and maybe even find his missing parents. Carter discovers that he has two children: twins born the year after he was frozen. How weird is that? Those children may prove to be more trouble than they're worth.

Page 75 has this odd sentence: "The room was dim and Carter just about made his way to one of the other benches that were laid out in rows running from the door through which he had entered to the other side of the room." I can see what's meant by this, but the way it's worded suggests that it's missing something: like it should have another clause explaining why he didn't finish making his way over there. "Carter had just about made his way across the room when he was interrupted...", or "Carter just about made his way over there without tripping up, but he almost fell over right before he sat down. Otherwise I don't see the point of wording it that way. Maybe it's just me!

There are two other sentences that are like this on this same page. One of them isn’t so bad, but then this appears towards the bottom of the page: "...the one that presents the most impressive and impactful will likely win the day." The most impressive and impactful what? It needs something to explain that, or it needs to be re-worded so that it reads, "...the one that presents as the most impressive and impactful...." Hopefully these issues will be ironed out of the final copy. Ceri Lowe ought to get me to volunteer as a beta reader!

Meanwhile, back in the future, Carter learns that there are two other candidates for the position of Controller General, against whom he must compete, so once again we have a situation like in The Hunger Games and in Divergent, and it seemed like it might be just as brutal, but in the four-fifths I read it was not, thankfully - otherwise I would have quit it much sooner! This is not another Divergent, which makes it even more sad that the covers look so much alike. It's supposed to be an election, yet the three of them are subject to practical and psychological testing. This made no sense. If the tests can pinpoint viable candidates, why bother with an election? If the election means anything beyond a dog and pony show, then why do we have the testing?

In fact this whole process made no sense. We learn that the three candidates are each as different as chalk and cheddar, so how can all of them be ideal for the job? And so things see-saw back and forth between Alice and Carter, each section alternately revealing more about their life and their world. The Alice side just wasn't as interesting as the Carter portions and sadly, they also began to grow tiresome about half-way through this novel.

One thing I had a problem with on the Alice side was the underground tunnels. London is entirely awash in many feet of floodwater, we're told, yet a network of tunnels underneath London is dry? How did that work, exactly?! On top of that (so to speak!), we're given no explanation regarding from whence this endless rainfall, er, hailed! Yes, it rained heavily, but the rain ultimately comes from one variety or another of groundwater so the level overall doesn't vary a whole lot, and the flooding came on far too fast to be the result of melting of ice sheets.

There's another problem, too, and this is common to all dystopian fiction, and it is that of other nations. Where are they?! People in the USA too often think of it as the only nation on the planet, or the only one worth thinking about or living in, but it's obviously not. Each nation probably feels the same way to one extent or another, including Britain, but none of these nations exists in isolation, and that's the problem. This story is told in complete isolation from the rest of the world as though Britain - indeed, London alone in this case - is the only place on Earth! It's just not credible. If you want to make it credible, you need to offer your readers some reasons why it's this way.

I can't believe that every nation would perish so completely in exactly the same way that Britain did, or that there would be nowhere left which had power, or transportation. I can't believe that no one would come from any other nation to see if there are survivors in Britain. I can't believe that the emergency services and the military, and the entire Royal Navy would simply vanish, but that's the conceit which we're expected to blindly accept in this novel. Nowhere is this addressed, and I couldn't swallow it; it's too glaring of an omission.

So to sum up, I liked the Alice character very much. I really didn't; like any of the others. And the story was far too plodding, with really not much going on for page after page after page, and it just wore me down. I could not bear to read the last fifty of so pages when there are so many other books presenting such a powerful temptation.

Black Science Volume 1 by Rick Remender

Title: Black Science Volume 1
Author: Rick Remender
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by Matteo Scalera

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 story drops the reader right into the middle of a crisis - a couple of interplanetary travelers far from home, on a nightmarish planet, running from over-sized aliens (that is over-sized as measured in human dimensions). Jennifer dies, but Mckay makes it back to their jump machine, called 'the pillar', where his colleagues are; problem is, the pillar has evidently been sabotaged, and they can control neither their jump destination nor the timing of the jump.

That’s why they get stuck in a war zone with the timer counting down from four hours. Obviously it’s time for a Michael Jackson joke in poor taste. Seriously? A Michael Jackson joke? This is set god-only-knows how many decades into the future and the dick-head character is making Michael Jackson jokes? Why not have him make a Fatty Arbuckle joke? It would be just as current.

Right from the start, I could not get into this, and it only got worse. Once again we find ourselves confronting aliens (the key word is confronting) which are derivative of life on Earth, but larger - so we get giant frog people, giant fish people, and giant insect people.

The humanoid aliens are derivative of human populations, so we get World War 1 soldier aliens, speaking German but dressed like British "tommies". We get Native American aliens. It just became tedious. Especially laughable was the fish with breasts. Only mammals have breasts and to take a fish and give it legs and 'womanly' curves and then add breasts and pretend it’s an alien female was beyond ridiculous to me.

So while the dialog was passable, the illustrations were cartoonish (although the coloring was good), and the adventure was a way long in the tooth, the aliens uninventive, uninspired and uninspiring, and the story was just not interesting to me. I cannot recommend this graphic novel.

Naja by JD Morvan

Title: Naja
Author: JD Morvan
Publisher: Magnetic press
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Bengal

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 liked this graphic novel. The art was very simplistic, but it still looked good, and the use of color was wonderful. This novel owes a huge amount to the Kill Bill movie duo. It also owes a lot to Luc Besson's work, such as Nikita, or Columbiana or even The Fifth Element wherein he creates a strong and mysterious female character who has issues to say the least. And it also owes a little to the Kick Ass movie character Hit Girl, if only for her wig!

The eponymous main character named herself after a snake (Naja is the biological genus for the cobra snakes and also, as 'naga', the name of a group of Hindu snake deities. It also happens to be the name of a founding member of the band, Massive Attack...). Six out of the first seven novels on BN were titled simply "Naja" when I looked this up! Maybe some thought should have been given to naming it after a different genus of snake?!

The character, Naja, is cold rather like a snake, having no emotions. She feels nothing, not even pain. We never learn her real name; it's always, and quite literally, beeped out, which frankly was overdone and became annoying after a while. We never learn the real name of her best friend from her abusive childhood, either: a guy whom she rescues from prison at one point in this story.

Naja works for an anonymous person named 'Zero', who runs a team of assassins. Naja is number three, but her ranking doesn't bother her one bit. At a point early in the story, a strange guy shows up in her room and bests her in a struggle. This is a remarkable feat in itself, but after he ties her up (which she enjoys way more than any balanced person would), he reveals to her that number one wants her dead because he thinks she wants him dead.

The problem is that the more she pursues this - going off the books and planning her own assignment, which is something she's never done before - the more questions arise as to what is really going on here, whether anyone really wants her dead, who this stranger is, and what his motives are. The story eventually draws in all three assassins, and as they realize they're in a trap, they also realize they're mixed-up in someone's plot - but whose plot remains to be seen - and the answer might surprise you!

This story wasn't perfect. I had some issues with it. I mean, Naja is supposed to be emotionless, yet we're told often that she hates the denizens of whatever particular country it is that she's entering at the time, which seemed illogical at best. The narration - almost of the "dear reader" type, became truly annoying here and there, and the constant dislocation of the timeline was irritating (this was the bulk of the Kill Bill influence).

In addition to this, I lost the thread somewhere in the last part of the story (maybe the last fifty pages or so) and really had no idea what was going on for a while, which reduced the reading experience for me a bit. Also I would have liked to have had more back-story for Naja, of which we're deprived. Yes, we get her childhood in a big expository section and several minor flashbacks, but we get nothing of how she became the number three assassin in the world.

Those relatively minor considerations aside, I highly recommend this story. It was warm, engaging, interesting, easy to read and to follow (except for the last part, and despite the flashbacks!). In addition to this, it was not afraid to get out of the USA! There are too many stories obsessed with the US, like it's the only place of any value or interest in the world, but this novel said the hell with that, and took us all over the place: Britain, Columbia, India, and elsewhere, so all-in-all it was a very worthy read to me.

Umbral by Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten

Title: Umbral
Author: Antony Johnston
Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by John Rauch and Christopher Mitten

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.

Umbral tells a great story - a bit derivative of Greek mythology and a bit of Lord of the Rings while at the same time coming up with an original concept and a majorly kick-ass female main character. I fell in love with Rascal pretty much as soon as she opened her mouth!

Set in a fantasy kingdom, this story begins with Rascal, who was raised by thieves and smugglers, conspiring with her highly unlikely friend, the prince of the realm. They plan to steal a royal gem, the oculus, on the day when everyone's attention will be on an eclipse and the attendant celbrations, but instead what they witness is the slaughter of the king and queen by underworld creatures aka the Umbral (plural, the Umbral...).

The problem is, who will believe a thief like her? Her situation progressively deteriorates, but she manages, by the skin of her teeth to stay ahead of the underworld creatures even as she learns they can shape-shift to emulate humans.

Fortunately, there is a wizard at hand, and he informs a disbelieving Rascal that she has both a history and a destiny, something which the Umbral already seem to know....

This was a first class romp and I recommend it highly.