Taken by Erin Bowman

Title: Taken
Author: Erin Bowman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

Way to go with the unoriginal title! BN.com has 410 pages with "Taken" in the title, and the first page has 24 entries exactly the same title as this one. When I picked this up and began reading it, it was because I mistook Erin Bowman for Erin Bow - a mistake for which I humbly apologize to the latter. "Has she finally sold out?" I asked myself, disbelievingly. She was never an indie author per se, but her previous novels had the feel of indie writing: they were different, interesting, if dark, and had a unique tale to tell. This new series was, to use a term from the series itself, a forgery. It was not her, and that alone should have clued me in to the fact that I'd misidentified the author! Me culpa. Mea maxima culpa! Erin Bow ne in furore tuo arguas me!

This novel was nothing like Erin Bow. This novel was poor, weak, shallow, and a fragile and pale shadow of what Erin Bow can write. It's like a self-published first draft by someone who is only just beginning to learn how to write, and it's several sorry leagues away from Bow's fables. The cover tag-line on this novel should have read, "Once you're over the hill, there's no going back." I don't do covers because authors (unless they're self-published), typically have nothing to do with them, but I did note that the cover for this (and for the sequel) is designed with the same lack of regard for women which the novel itself displays. Macho-up the guy, diminish the unimportant girl.

Taken is your standard dys-trope-ian trilogy and unsurprisingly, it suffers the same problems as other YA trilogies in this genre. I can see why Marie Lu would ask for "More, please!" on the cover: this is sorrier than even her sad-sack Legend excuse for an effort, so why wouldn't she want something worse out there to distract attention from her own garbage?

The basic story is completely nonsensical, and is your usual world gone bad (with no explanation offered as to exactly why or how). Young adults, of course, are the only ones who can fix it. Instead of north v. south this time, it's east v. west for no reason other than to try, amateurishly, to be different.

We meet character Gray in a scene ripped right out of the start of The Hunger Games: he's out hunting in the forest with a bow, and later he trades part of his catch for something at the market. He's been friends with Emma from childhood. They live in a tiny village absurdly named Claysoot, and this village is cursed by having its 18 year-old males, on the morning of their birthday anniversary, spirited up into the sky in a beam of light. Females are left behind with the younger males. Could it be any more of a rip-off of Hunger Games?

No one knows what this vanishing of men is, or why it works this way. The villagers never see the men again, and they do not know what becomes of them. These people cannot leave the village to escape this horror because it's surrounded by a huge wall, and those few who have climbed over the wall have been returned dead, their bodies nicely crisped.

By village records, this life has been going on for 47 years, and people have become conditioned like lab rats (in that ridiculously short time) to accept and even embrace this fate. Never once have they considered not having children to put an end to all this! On the contrary - the children are forced by city ordinance into random mating pairs in order to get the girls pregnant, because this is yet another YA author who thinks girls are second rate and second hand - not fit to be heisted, but fit to be bare-foot, pregnant, and in the kitchen where, according to the author, they evidently belong.

We learn later that there are five such villages, but rather than appreciate fifty percent of the population, the author further insults women by remarking that in one of these villages, the women were good enough to be heisted! Way to insult your readership! "Only one in five women is of any value" - Erin Bowman!

This particular year, when the novel begins, Gray loses his brother, Blaine, to the Heist (as it's known), and he learns from Emma that she thinks there's something odd about how this village came to be (apparently the original inhabitants had their minds wiped so they could not pass on how they got there).

From a secret diary which he conveniently happens upon, Gray learns that he isn't Blaine's younger brother, but his twin, and therefore should have been heisted with his sibling. Why did this not happen? The explanation (I use that word very loosely) as to how Gray doesn't know he's a twin is so unrealistic as to be a complete farce. It's so self-evidently bad that it's not even necessary to offer support for this assertion.

Straight out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Gray also conveniently (this novel is so jam-packed with oh-so-convenient happenstance that it's truly pathetic) discovers a letter from his mom to his brother, but with a final page missing so he can't learn what the crucial information is! The letter is reproduced in the text, in a script font, but the last line ends in the middle of the line! In other words, there's no reason at all why the revelation (that Gray is Blaine's twin) couldn't have appeared on that same line! It's so beyond nonsensical that it's way-the-hell over into deeply pathetic. So, Blaine decides to go over the wall, and for no reason at all, Emma decides to follow him.

On the other side of the wall, the two of them are conveniently picked up by some people who drive them in a car to a domed city (Taem - apparently an acronym for Totally Amateur, Excruciatingly Mediocre), where Gray learns from the city leader, Mr Frank, that the village of Claysoot is an experiment begun by 'mad scientist' Harvey Maldoon, who is now a wanted criminal. Gray also meets his brother who, it turns out, happens to be carrying the last page of the letter! How convenient! All of the men who were 'heisted' are living in this domed city.

Here's some bad writing: we're repeatedly told that the dome has a water shortage. Indeed, one guy who stole an extra jug for his sick family was summarily executed, yet these people are living in a dome. If they have the kind of technology to do mind-wipes and build city-sized domes, then why can they not desalinate seawater? Why is there no recycling? It makes NO SENSE AT ALL. It's amateur, trashy, brain-dead writing.

Here's some more bad writing: Gray is taken to the "Cleansing Room" (seriously amateur naming here - the military faction is named The Order"! lol!) where he's cleaned up and given the red pills, and has a tracker device implanted in his skin. He also has his head shaved. Emma, for reasons unexplained, gets none of this - at least, not as far as having her head shaved. Instead, she gets a make-over! This city of severe restrictions on resources offers free make-overs and high heeled shoes...?

Gray is so stupid that he doesn't even question the fact that Emma has been treated differently from him. Indeed, this unquestioning acceptance of whatever befalls him is a trait of this worthless male lead. He is so gullible that he swallows whatever anyone tells him, even if it flatly contradicts something he's already been told by someone else, which he had previously swallowed equally unquestioningly! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

Here's where the love interest fails. We're told that Emma and Gray are lifelong friends, but they've had no interest in each other as anything more than friends, yet suddenly they're in love? Yeah, the author puts in a brief description as to how Gray is inexplicably tutoring Emma in archery, and this supposedly accounts for their falling in love, but it's all bullshit. There's no reason at all for the tutoring other than to get them together, and there's no reason, even being together, why they would fall in love so fast. We've been told, for example, that Emma is an avowed bachelor who disliked Gray and preferred Blaine, so how are we expected now to swallow that suddenly, she's fifty shades of Gray? This is appallingly bad writing.

So Gray flees the city, leaves his 'ain trew love' Emma behind, and hooks-up with the rebels - yep, it was that easy. Everything conveniently fell right into line every single time he needed it to! First he stumbles upon supply trucks which are heading out to resupply a scouting party which is conveniently hunting the rebels in precisely the area to which Gray wanted to go. After Gray abandons the trucks when they stop for the night, he's conveniently captured by that very scouting party. Don't question the timeline here - not if you want to retain your sanity.

Oh, and bro Blaine happens to be conveniently there too, because he was conveniently part of the scouting party! Right at the point where Gray is about to be shot in the head as a spy, the party is conveniently attacked so he can escape, and then the attackers conveniently vanish! This is atrociously and amateurishly bad writing. Where the hell was the book editor?

Why the rebels conveniently vanish is a mystery because the next thing that happens is that Gray conveniently happens to stumble upon a female love interest who takes him prisoner. and delivers him right into the rebel camp where, conveniently, his father happens to be a captain in the rebel alliance! How convenient!

When I'd decided my rating of this novel, I looked at some reviews to see if I'd missed anything, or if there was something which might change my mind (there wasn't!), but one thing I'd neglected to comment on was when Gray gets into a fist-fight with a girl from the village named Chalice (don't get me started on the dumb-ass names here). Several people reacted with shock over this, that he punched a girl, but no one remarks upon the fact that he gets as good as he gives! These people really should not have had that reaction - not if they're honestly in favor of gender equality!

The real problem here wasn't that Gray hit a girl, but that he hit a person, period. Yes, Chalice was thoroughly obnoxious, but his response was over the top (and he was never punished for it). So our supposedly heroic lead male here has poor impulse control! Here's the thing though: I'll bet that if Chalice had been a guy and all else had remained exactly the same, then people would not have felt so compelled to remark upon it. Or how about this: what if the roles had been reversed, and Gray had been obnoxious, and Chalice had slapped him? How many people would have remarked upon that, much less had a tirade over it? That's what's really wrong here. Gender equality cuts both ways, but far too many people simply do not get that. You can't be equal if one side continues to get privileges and free passes.

But this offers us another example of how badly written this novel is. The author depicts Gray here as being reckless and aggressive, with a hair trigger temper, yet later in the novel, around page 250, when a guy punches him, Gray does not react in any way at all - he just takes it and moves on, even though the attack was completely unwarranted. This is god-awfully bad writing. And let's not get into the fact that while Gray himself has no problem with enjoying two female love interests, he gets all pissy about Emma taking a lover when she thinks Gray is dead.

The other issue here is the 'twin' trope. Gray and Blaine are identical twins, yet they're as different as chalk and cheese. I ran into this same inexplicable issue in Sea of Shadows. These differences would have been fine except that the author offers not a single thing to account for how they came to be so different. They're clones (for that's exactly what identical twins are), raised together in the same environment in the same way in a small village. They've spent their entire lives together, yet they're completely different in every way? How did this happen? The author cannot tell us, and that's bad writing.

Talking of which, around page 218 comes some of the worse writing from a professional novelist that I've ever seen. Gray is to be judged by a committee of five people, only one of which is female. They vote yea or nay (those are the exact words!) on whether Gray should live or die (and this is without a trial). As it happens, the vote is 3:2 in favor of leaving him alive (how else could it go - he's the fricking narrator of the novel! This is another example of how clueless the author is in this trilogy), but even though he demands answers, they put him off, telling him to go get cleaned up, and get some rest! But after that, his father does condescend to pass on some information in a big fat info-dump.

Gray learns of the forgeries, and this is arguably the most absurd piece of this novel of all the absurd pieces. Evidently they can create only one good forgery (apparently a clone) from each person. This is supposedly why the Claysoot and the four other communities were begun: to raise tough, independent boys (because you know girls are useless according to this author), who could then be cloned to create an army.

This is in a city where they can't even desalinate water, yet they have this amazingly advanced technology? Even with this technology, they can only clone once - repeat clones turn out to be weaklings. This is the purest of the rankest horse droppings. It makes no sense. If they have this kind of advanced technology, why not create super weapons? This crap is no way to create an army. It is a great way to create nonsense in the extreme.

Here's another complete absurdity: The 'soldiers' in The Order get zero training (Blaine is already a trusted member when Gray arrives there, and Gray is drafted on his first day) unless you consider getting a buzz cut to be the functional equivalent of six weeks at Paris island), yet the Order is feared by the rebels, who actually get a military fitness regime thrust upon them! LoL!

Here's one more clunker: these guys discover that Frank has developed an airborne virus to wipe out the rebels. They can't use it until they've captured Maldoon because they need his skills, but the concern is how they know where the rebels are. Is there a mole? Well we've just been told that these people farm crops out in the open, so by that very act they've identified their location! The rebel camp is only four days walk from the city, and they recently attacked a contingent of soldiers from the city, and now they rebels are wondering how they've been given away? They're morons!

This novel is awful. It's not only the worst kind of trash, but even as fan-fiction it would look bad when compared with other fan-fic.

Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier

Title: Born Confused
Author: Tanuja Desai Hidier
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

I can see why Scholastic wouldn't want a reviewer like me reviewing a novel like this, but guess what? They can't stop me, they can only delay me! Now I've had a chance to look at it, I can tell you it's awful. This novel may be a better fit for you. All I can tell you is that it gave me fits.

Hidier declares in this tale that the only thing any young women, no matter what her cultural heritage, can have on her mind, is the desperate need to find a guy to make her complete. Like a women without a guy is pretty much useless: incomplete at best, and not even worth writing about at worst. How insulting can you get? Read this if you want to find out. Why do so many female authors insult women like this? More frighteningly: why do so many young women support novels like this? Do they honestly swallow the crap that's spewed from these stories, or are they simply so desperate that they'll literally read anything that even pretends to tell a decent tale?

Other than that the main character (Dimple) is stupid and clueless, the first thing you'll notice is that the gray-scale photograph at the beginning, which is, supposedly, Dimple, is not her at all - unless we've been lied to about Dimple's physical condition. Dimple is presented to us in this novel as being either somewhat overweight or as they put it, a 'large boned' girl, and relatively short at five feet or so, by American standards. That's a plus (pun intended), but it's wasted. Instead of running with a promising start like that - a start that's different from the vast bulk of YA novels, the author trips and face-plants repeatedly, starting with a photograph in the front which bears no resemblance to the girl in the story.

Rather than accept her physique and deal, Dimple lies even to herself, trying on (or rather, trying to try on) ridiculously under-sized clothes when she gets to shop with her mother for her seventeenth birthday. These idiots ignore and insult the girl who works at the store, who doesn't exactly own the most winning of personalities, but who does honestly try to advise the pair of them as to a realistic choice of sizes for Dimple.

Here's a quirk that makes you wonder where the editor was: The author doesn't use quotes! She uses neither doubles as is in fashion in the USA where she has lived, nor singles as in the UK where the author now lives. Instead she uses em dashes! Weird. This novel has more em dash per m² than any novel ever published. The em dashes are at the start of the speech, never at the end, and it can be confusing when the speech itself contains an em dash. I never use em myself...but cute tricks like that can't cut a dash in a novel which is, at its very foundation, appallingly demeaning to women.

I read this because I love Indians. I grew up in England feeling that Indians. Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were almost cousins, but instead of getting an interesting and engrossing story of mixed cultures, I got nothing more than a lousy, trite, predictable YA romance with an em dash of curry powder, which the author has tried to pass off as a four course meal at a fine India restaurant. She failed.

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwel

Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Recorded Books
Rating: WORTHY!
(Read by Patrick Tull on Recorded Books. Now available free online.)

I think it's an encouragement to the rest of us writer wannabes that even Orwell had trouble finding a publisher for this downer of a novel. It presages his 1984 which was published four years later and was even more depressing.

This story takes place on Manor Farm, soon to be renamed Animal Farm, and then re-renamed Manor Farm at the end. Old Major, chief pig, pontificates about how wonderful it would be if the human parasites were gone and the animals were allowed free reign - the old 'workers control the means of production' thing. After Major dies, Snowball and Napoleon take over the farm and very shortly afterwards, sooner than the animals expected, circumstances arise which result in Mr Jones, the farmer, being expelled from his own farm by these animals.

The animals celebrate the joyous day of animal liberation. They distill Major's speech into seven commandments, which are later slyly adjusted so that the pigs' behavior is never outside 'the law'. What the other animals never quite grasp is that these pigs truly are pigs in the derogatory sense. The animals are not free, not even close, because the pigs very effectively take the place of the humans, but it's done slowly and stealthily so that no one really notices it, and when some of them do notice, they think that it's their memory which is at fault, not the activities of the pigs.

There are some interesting politics going on here and some amusing and disturbing redefinitions of what things are, all ultimately benefiting the pigs, even though initially this is all supposed to benefit the animals. One of these, for example, was the act of defining wings as organs of propulsion rather than organs of manipulation as are hands, thereby classifying birds as having four legs, so that the sheep (very cleverly designated) can chant "four legs good, two legs bad" which, when the pigs themselves start walking around on two legs the better to carry lashes, morphs into "four legs good, two legs better".

The aims begin admirably, with labor being divided evenly, and animals being taught to read and write, but soon dissension occurs, and the moderate Snowball is expelled from the farm never to return. We never learn what happens to him (maybe there's a sequel there for someone to write!), but now that he's gone, Napoleon has a designated villain, and everything which goes bad or which fails is blamed on Snowball's sabotage. Everything else is credited to Napoleon's brilliance and foresight - even those things which were originally Snowball's ideas, and which Napoleon initially agitated against. Napoleon slowly becomes a cult figure as well as a fledgling dictator, protected by trained guard dogs.

Napoleon's stranglehold over the farm and the animals grows, as he becomes the sole voice of authority, and everyone keeps falling into line. It's tragic, and it's depressing to read this, because it's only too true in the real world. It's as true of communism as it is of religion. We've seen it practiced in the old Soviet Union (now defunct, but with ambitions of resurrection) as well as in China and North Korea. We've seen it in religious cults as superficially diverse as Catholicism and the Aztec religion of the old Americas.

Every one of the animals' wins from their revolution is eroded away or stolen from them until, in the end, they're far worse-off than ever they were under Mr Jones, as awful as he was. Napoleon resurrects one of Snowball's ideas - to build a windmill to generate electricity - a plan which Napoleon railed against, but which is now presented as Napoleon's own idea, which Snowball sought to veto. The windmill becomes work for work's sake, rather like the Nazi work camps, where arbeit machs frei, and the task is never done because the windmill keeps running into problems, sometimes mysteriously, sometimes due to enemy action - from real enemies in the form of human attempts to reclaim the farm.

Just like in 1984, every vice is turned into a virtue while still remaining a vice, and every lie is turned into a truth while still being a lie. There is no happy ending, but the story is a great ode to recycling: especially how evil, if left unchecked, recycles around and bites you in the rear right after you thought you'd chased it away.

I recommend this novel.

Between Two Worlds by Katherine Kirkpatrick

Title: Between Two Worlds
Author: Wendy Lamb
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a story of real-life Inuit woman Eqariusaq, aka Billy-Bah, and her husband Angulluk, who lived in Etah, in north western Greenland. Set in late 1900, the story intertwines the life of Eqariusaq with that of the polar expeditions of Robert Peary. It's told in first person which normally I detest because it's so artificial, but once in a while a writer can make it work, and Kirkpatrick seems to be able to do that: employing this technique without making it obnoxious in the process. While I do thank her for that much, I have to wonder why she chose that method instead of using the method an Inuit woman would employ to tell a story to her own people, which presumably is not first person past!

Eqariusaq had spent a year with Peary's family in the USA when she was much younger, and so could speak English well. When a ship arrives looking for Peary, Eqariusaq and her husband, and some other of her people travel with them to a land some sixty miles across the ocean where they believe Peary is. They also hope that the hunting will be better over there: a place to which they cannot travel unless the ocean is frozen. Why they chose not to stay on that side of the ocean is unexplained, and made no sense to me. Perhaps they are really attached to their place of birth?

» Eqariusaq - Ekariusak - Ehkareeusak «

On the voyage, as is the people's custom, Angulluk trades his wife for a night to Duncan, one of the sailors. Eqariusaq is lucky, because Duncan is not a bad or brutal guy, and he is genuinely interested in the "Eskimo" people; however, this encounter gives Eqariusaq some ideas of her own! She advises Duncan as to what her husband is looking for, and thus enables him to trade goods for her for the entire week-long voyage, thereby garnering for herself a comfortable passage. She's evidently a smart girl, taking charge of her own destiny even within the limited choices she has.

This is a novel over which it's readily possible to have some mixed feelings. The fascination with learning of a new people (even through fictional means) does not sit well with the frustration and even anger of being reminded of the abuses heaped upon these people by western "civilization". The Inuit and Yupik people have had to suffer very many of these.

I have to say that one thing which is a personal peeve of mine is with the spellings! What's with all the q's? The Inuit had no written language, so it didn't matter how their words were spelled - as long as the spellings were consistent and rendered the pronunciation accurate within reason, but when a word has a 'K' sound in it, why put a 'Q' there? I have no idea. Perhaps linguists have "good" reasons for this within their own little world, but linguists often give me cause for bad language. There's a much bigger picture here, and their blinkered view of it makes no sense. Simple phonetic spelling is the only rational way to go about this. Why 'Eqariusaq' and not 'Ekariusak'? You got me!

The truly bizarre depth that this reaches is highlighted by the fact that Kirkpatrick, who created these names based, where possible on real Inuit people, and from which other names were also derived then had to supply a 'cast of characters' list with pronunciations precisely because the spellings are not phonetic and the pronunciation is not self-evident! So rather than 'Eqariusaq' or 'Ekariusak', why not go straight to Ehkareeusak, which is how it's pronounced? You got me!

This makes as much sense to me as translating Asian words into English and using bizarre spellings, such as spelling some Chinese words with an 'X' in them, but then pronouncing the 'X' as 'SH' or something! Or translating a Vietnamese name as Nguyen, but then insisting that it be pronounced 'Win'! That way lies insanity. And yes, again, I know that linguists have their own bizarre "rationale" for this, but I don't care! The bottom line is that it makes no common sense because it's not the spelling that's the crucial thing, here, it's the pronunciation! That way lies understanding and the way it's being does leads only to obfuscation. We have more than enough issues dividing peoples in this world without artificially piling them on.

But enough about that. Let me say that I fell hopelessly in love with the Eqariusaq depicted by Kirkpatrick. I have no idea - no one does - how close the depiction was to the real person, but if I'd met her, I'd probably have fallen for her too. Just look at that face! She was a revelation, and she was fun and sweet and brave and interesting. And she lived her own life on her own terms. I salute her and recommend this story highly.

Bravo by Greg Rucka

Title: Bravo
Author: Greg Rucka
Publisher: Mulholland
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:
p187 "...wondering what she doing..." should be "...wondering what she was doing..."
p187 "...whom she was seeing." doesn't sound right at all - "...who she was seeing." sounds better.

I think it's time to kick 'whom' out of use altogether. It's really whom for whom the bell tolls....

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I went into this not expecting to like it, and feeling that it was going to be a chore. I felt this because I thought I'd finished with Greg Rucka's efforts. I started reading his stuff because of an article he wrote on strong female characters, and I went on to review (unfavorably as it happens) Alpha, Lazarus, and Whiteout, so it was a bit disconcerting to discover this one unexpectedly showing up in my approved box from Net Galley (I'd forgotten I'd requested it!). But a deal's a deal so here's my honest review.

The main two female characters in this novel are "Zoya, who is Jordan Webber-Hayden" (more on that, anon!) and Petra Graziella Nessuno. Neither of them is a strong female character. Both of them are shown to be sadly dependent upon men (one upon the male protagonist and one upon the male antagonist!), and are sorely lacking in other ways, too, so no strong female characters in this outing just as there were none in volume one.

Here's one problem in this regard: The word "beautiful" appears twice in the first thirty-two pages to describe two women. Not once in those same pages did the word 'smart' appear (except to describe a cell phone and the male soldiers). In describing these women there was neither 'thoughtful', nor 'reliable', neither 'interesting', nor 'funny', neither 'tough', nor 'sensitive'. Not even 'tomboy'. Not 'pretty'. Not 'good-looking'. Not even 'valuable' or 'asset'. It had to be beautiful.

Beautiful was the only adjective worth relating vis–à–vis women in this novel! That's the only value they evidently hold. On page 43 the 'B' word appears once more to describe main character Jad Bell's wife, because again, what possible value could she have if not that? Note that my issue isn't with labeling a woman 'beautiful', although it’s rather redundant since most women are in one way or another. My issue is with only labeling them 'beautiful' as though nothing else counts, and with a writer who can only reference them that way.

Bell is the main protagonist - the male protagonist - and Amy is the woman to whom he was married until recently. Perhaps the reason she's his ex is that 'beautiful' is the only thing he can ever think of with which to credit her? She was a cheerleader after all! Or is it the fact that the first thing he does when he goes to visit her is complain that he doesn’t like the house because it has bad 'sight lines" and ask her if she still has the shotgun?

Neither Bell nor his wife are very smart. She still blames him for what happened in the previous novel, when she and their daughter were unwilling and terrified parties to an assault on a theme park by terrorists. In fact Bell had done everything he could to warn her away from visiting that day - short of giving away classified information - but his dumb-ass wife refused to listen to her terrorist-expert husband. That's not the reason they're divorced, but maybe it ought to have been; it certainly would have made the novel a more interesting read.

Whether we’re supposed to intuit this lack of intellect from a photo Amy apparently still has of herself and Bell in high school, wherein he's a football jock and she's a cheerleader, I don’t know. Yes, it’s clichéd and bigoted to suggest that, but that's the common perception, and we’ve been offered nothing to suggest otherwise and plenty to support it in this novel.

The fact that the author himself references the cliché inherent in it makes it no less of one, and the clichés keep on coming. His daughter is named Athena (goddess of warfare, inter alia), and she smells like apples, of course, because having her smell like roses or ocean breeze wouldn't be anywhere near tough enough nor American enough, nor would it imply that she was a teenager ripe enough to be eaten.

This overly protective cliché wherein Bell is depicted as thinking, and worse, acting like both his ex and his daughter need to be swathed in bubble-wrap is far too much. It demeans Amy and Athena and is rather nauseating. There are better ways of showing love and concern than this clunky method, whereby the more I read about those two adults, the more convinced I became that they're not fit parents. I'm assuming that's not the feeling with which the author intended to invest me, but here's a thought: if Bell is so concerned about his family, why in hell doesn't he simply quit the military, and do something else for a living? Now there would be a story.

Athena's parents couldn't be mathletes of course, because you know there is no way in hell such 'losers' would ever be allowed into the US special forces! But could they not have been photographed at a swim meet? At the prom? In the science lab? Naw, that last one is out of the question for the same reason that the mathletes are. Only jocks need apply in a story like this.

This kind of thing is the very reason that I wasn't looking forward to reading this after my first outing with this trope series. I don’t mind me some macho. I don't even mind some cliché and trope if it’s done well, but to get this relentless cliché trope machismo when readers like me are begging for something new, anything trending differently, a bit off the beaten track, something fresh, is just depressing. It's truly sad to find so many authors so unwilling to be inventive, and so many publishers so loathe to allow, much less encourage travel off the beaten track.

Down to business: this novel begins some 72 hours after Alpha when Bell's special ops team are in process of capturing Vosil Tohir known as The Uzbek - the villain from volume one. Why is it them, as opposed to another special ops team? No epxlantion. This team is fresh from a brutal mission in which soldiers were killed, and in which others were wounded. The team is at least two members down so where is the rationale for sending them on another mission immediately, with a new and untried team member borrowed from another squad?

Well there's a "reason" for that latter item which I'll address below, but not for the rest. Remember, this isn't about how tough soldiers are. That's a given, especially for organizations like Delta Force. No, this is about how smart the military is, and apparently we're supposed to believe that our military isn't too smart and has no back-up. You know, the simple act of setting these events a month later instead of just 72 hours would have solved almost all of these issues! Just saying....

Here’s another problem. There's way, way, way too much code-naming in play here in the first few pages. In addition to the oddball, but predictable macho and soldierly code names, we get: "The Architect", "The Lover", "The Soldier", "The Uzbek". It was very confusing and annoying, especially when each of them had real names. It's like listening to someone laying out tarot cards for a reading and just as risible.

Particularly annoying was the endless repetition of variations on "Zoya, who is Jordan Webber-Hayden" Yes! I get it. I don't need it repeated endlessly, including twice on page 166 in the space of eighteen lines! There came a point about two chapters in when I gave up even trying to keep track of who was who and just let it ride, hoping to catch-up later (assuming I decided to continue reading).

Another real nails-on-chalk-board habit of the author's is his indiscriminate use of the rewind button. By this I mean that he would tell the story, then stop and rewind and tell the same thing over again, but from another character's perspective. This frequent halting of the action with the subsequent shuffle and repeat added nothing to the enjoyment and it was extremely frustrating, not least for the fact that there wasn't any way to tell, until you had read on a little way, that there was a rewind in progress. It was as annoying as hell.

Jad Bell's continued involvement with processing The Uzbek after he'd been rendered was way out of control. I'm neither government nor special forces, so I'm not an expert here by any means, but special forces are tapped to do what they're exhaustively trained to do and what they do impeccably well, which is to achieve the mission objective. Well, their mission objective was met and met well - as we've come to expect form these people. There is no reason whatsoever why Bell needed to be involved after that. There's no reason why he needs to be part of the interrogation or transportation of terrorism suspects, yet he's in it all. I found that totally unbelievable.

For that matter, there are a lot of actions in this novel which make no sense - like having the US miltiary operate on US soil in roles that the FBI, the US Marshall service, and others should be fulfilling. It made no sense either that an outsider would remain drafted onto Bell's team after the initial mission. Clearly this was only done for the purpose of facilitating what happened afterwards, which made this part really clunky, especially given the conduct of this man (Tom O'Day). I found it unbelievable that someone in his position would do what he did. It felt completely out of character for the kind of person he'd been portrayed as and was actually an insult to special forces.

This novel had started to grow on me. It's significantly better than the first volume in this series, and it was very slowly improving, but then we got the interrogation, the transportation, the running down of a terrorist, the tailing of a suspect, and none of it rang true. Bell and Nessuno had no place doing the things they were doing and this actually compromised the mission. Both are guilty of serious errors involving misconduct and poor judgment. Indeed, their incompetence loses them a major player on the terrorist side. And where does Bell get off issuing orders to someone who isn't in his chain of command, and who is not seconded to his team? And where does she get off blindly falling into line with those orders? What is she, his handmaiden? So much for strong female characters. Again.

What really got to me in the end was the fiction. Not the fiction that the author is writing, but the fiction that this is a series about some kind of super soldier, because Jad Bell isn't. The bottom line is that he's incompenent and unaccountably meddling in things for which he has no expertise. Now I don't expect a character to be flawless. I expect flaws and problems, and occasional errors, otherwise where's the interest?

One of the joys of reading a good novel of this type is to see a character screw-up monumentally and then get it together and triumph, but this is not that novel. That kind of story has the guts to have the character actually own their issues. Screwing-up in this series is SOP: no-one even thinks twice about it! That's how low standards are here. I sincerely hope our special forces aren't this shoddy and incompetent. Nothing I've ever learned about them leads me to believe they're as bad as Jad Bell, so where then is my motive to offer any allegience to this series?

These guys had the chance to take down two of the major players bloodlessly, and they failed. One of these players died in the process. At one point, the kingpin is held at gunpoint and allowed to walk away. There is a reason given for this which is acceptable, but then we discover that the reason he was even able to get into the home of this family in the first place was that he'd killed the security team which was watching the house. He then sits around chatting with the mom waiting until the daughter gets home, for no explicable reason. he has the mom clal her husband to propose the deal this guy wants.

He leaves and we're treated to a description of the phones and other possessions he took from the guys he killed, which mentions that there is a host of messages on the phones asking the security team members where they are and why they're not responding. Now these are people who were watching the house because of a terrorist threat. the terrorist is in there for some significant time, yet not one single vehicle shows up to check on the unresponsive security team? NO-ONE COMES TO CHECK ON THEM BECAUSE THEY WENT DARK UNEXPECTEDLY????????????????? No one calls the house? This is nothing but lazy writing at best, and bad writing at worst, and that's all there is to it. Stick a shiv in this one. It's done.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Title: The Alchemist
Author: Paulo Coelho
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by J.G. Jones
(KO-ALE-U) pub.

I started listening to Michael Scott's The Alchemyst on audio and then came across this graphic novel in the library. The similarity of titles caught my attention, so I had a quick look and thought it looked interesting. It wasn't. But still, I get to do a double-alchemy post! Not that this novel has anything at all to do with alchemy. The titular alchemist plays almost no part in the story. It should have been titled 'The Shepherd'. The alchemist is a dab-hand at frying up lead in a fry-pan and turning it into gold, however. I found that very enlightening.

Coelho (pronounced KO-ALE-U) is a Catholic, and this novel is nothing more, bottom-line, than his proselytizing to the Muslims that his ways are better than theirs because they're dumb and violent and he's all that (and a box of treasure). I would have put it in more general terms: all organized religion is dumb and all-too-often violent. You want to practice a religion, fine! I have no problem with that as long as you're not hurting others, or sacrificing animals, or imprisoning women. No real god of love would ever ask for things like that. Where I have a problem is when you start trying to force me to live your life because you think your religion is a better way and expect me to take that on faith. This is exactly what Coelho is doing here.

I read an article in which Coelho says he's interested in the virgin - the female face of god - but the god of the Middle East has no female face. Yahweh is a mountain man - a savage, bloodthirsty god who demands blood sacrifices, and for whom the Christian death cult has done nothing to soften by sticking a latex laughing Yeshua mask on his face and calling it love. All it offers is actually love - where love is a score in tennis. Even today Christianity still soaks all of its faith in the blood sacrifice of the firstborn.

» Can you spot the orange text against the desert sand? «

This particular story is so simplistic that it’s pathetic. A Spanish shepherd finds "enlightenment" (for enlightenment, read: treasure chest) - and that's it! The problem is that the way he discovers it is so ass-backwards as to be childish - as indeed most of these stories are. Yes, Philistine Prophecy I'm looking at you. This is a sad little fairy tale for children, so what does it say that so many adults have been mesmerized by it? I think it says far more about the brain-washing and mind-numbing power of religion, and the god-awfully simplistic mentality of all-too-many of the reading public than it ever does about Coelho's writing chops.

This shepherd is abnormally fond of his sheep, treating them like children, yet he has no problem eating them or giving them up when he is advised by a fortune teller to go find treasure in Egypt. There's little enlightenment in exploiting defenseless animals. The stereotypically "gypsy" fortune teller's only charge for her services is one tenth of the treasure he finds!

The fact that the fortune-teller is a total bone-head is quietly glossed-over. The treasure isn't in Egypt, but in the very place the shepherd slept the night before! If she had told him that, she would not have wasted a significant portion of his life, and he would have found the treasure that very night. I think she's a teller in the banking sense, and she definitely made for herself a fortune in return for sending this guy on a dangerous goose-chase at zero risk to herself.

I realize that fans of this novel might be likely to chastise my take on this and assert that if this had happened, then the shepherd would have missed the joy of his journey and more importantly, the Egyptian girl he discovered in making that journey, but this is nonsense. The fortune-teller could quite easily have advised him to visit the oasis and meet the girl - and it would have been a lot easier on him with all those riches instead of traveling as a near pauper.

As it was, he was robbed twice and had to spend the better part of a year working for a glass-seller in Tangier in order to recoup sufficient cash to continue his journey! He nearly lost his life on more than one occasion. I saw no real enlightenment here other than the patently obvious lesson that he should not trust strangers so blindly, and should take appropriate care when traveling in foreign neighborhoods. That was as clear as lead crystal; no fortune-telling was required!

» Paulo Coelho says the enlightened can talk and smoke simultaneously without opening their mouth! «

The shepherd is supposed to be smart, but he turns out to be extraordinarily gullible - which is how he's robbed the first time. Not much enlightenment there! At one point, a guy dressed like a regular guy but claiming to be a king of a distant land gives him two stones, one black and one white, telling him one will answer any objective question 'Yes', the other, 'No' and so, in tossing them, he will get an answer. Literally tossing them would have been wise. For this "advice", he gives this guy his entire flock. Why a king would want or request sheep is a mystery. Why the shepherd even believed this guy after being ripped-off once already is even more of a mystery.

The shepherd joins a caravan headed towards Egypt and at the oasis, he encounters an Egyptian girl and instantly falls in love with this woman about whom he knows nothing and to whom he has barely said a word. I do think it's wonderful that all Egyptians speak perfectly good English however, even young girls at oases in the butt-crack of nowhere. I did not know that! How enlightening!

Maybe he was enamored of her because she was slavishly carrying water, but his only real interest in her seemed to be that she was "beautiful", because that's all that matters isn't it? Forget about anything else. Will she make a worthy partner? He doesn’t care. Will she be a wonderful lifelong companion? He doesn’t care. Will she be a reliable ally? He doesn’t care. Is she smart? Decent? Worth-knowing? Fun? Good company? Does share his interests? Who gives a camel fart: She's beautiful and shapely! Because you know that this is the only possible value any woman can bring to the table - that and being youthfully slender. Seriously? This is pathetic and juvenile.

» Race that horse through the baking desert and see how enlightened she becomes! «

This whole story was supposed to be about a journey towards enlightenment, but all it was in the end was a treasure hunt, and the treasure didn't even turn out to be the girl. It would have been a much better story if the treasure had indeed been the girl - in that she would have become a worthy partner as he grew to know her. That's what I thought it would be - either that or the actual journey itself bringing him something he would never have achieved by continuing life as an Andalusian shepherd. But no! It’s nothing more than 'show me the money' when it isn't 'show me the honey'!

A better story would have been to have found the girl (or a guy) who was nothing special, perhaps even disfigured or outcast (or both), and grown to love that person as he grew to know them. Coelho expects us to buy that love is very important, and I agree with him there, but lusting for a hot girl at the oasis, and thinking you love her at first sight without knowing a single thing about her completely betrays his message.

A word to the wise: if you want true enlightenment, study science. Nothing will blow your mind more effectively or benefit humanity more reliably. I rate this novel warty.

Wanted by Mark Millar

Title: Wanted
Author: Mark Millar
Publisher: Image Comics
Rating: WARTY!
Illustrated by J.G. Jones

Note that some of the captions in the graphic novel images accompanying this review may have been altered by persons unknown....

If you want a graphic novel where every frame depicts neither more nor less than a sociopathic fourteen-year-old's dysfunctional wet dream, then this is the novel for you. If you like delusional stories featuring racism, misogyny, poor characterization, and mindless violence - not as part of a particular character's make-up but embedded deeply into the narrative itself, then this one's for you. On the other hand, if you like something that's intelligent, inventive, and actually has a story to tell, then you would be well-advised to look elsewhere.

If you liked the movie Wanted and think the source book might be even more interesting, you made the same mistake that I did. The movie is far from perfect, but it is decidedly leagues ahead of this cheap excuse for a story.

» Women are just bodies anyway, aren't they? «

I'm not a part of the comic book culture, although I have read plenty and reviewed many of them on this blog, and I love superhero movies in general, but my take on these things is a bit off the beaten path, which is, I guess, why I wonder what it means to say that Person A wrote the comic while Person B lettered it. I know these two things are not the same, but honestly, I still don't get that. Why do we even have lettering, when we have computers with keyboards attached which can do lettering just fine?

I don't even know how that works. Does Person A write the thing by hand or write it on a computer, print it out, and and Person B copies it? Is it done by email? On the phone? That really makes little sense to me! I assume it makes perfect sense from the inside, but if you take a step back and look from outside the box, it really looks weird.

Anyway, personal peeves aside, I loved the movie, which I also review on this blog, and which I saw long before the comic book, but while the movie was derived from the comic, the comic is really a lot different and nowhere near as good. The basic story - at least at the beginning - is the same: a down-trodden guy whose parents are not players in his life, an unfaithful girlfriend, a dead-end and miserable job, hypochondria, father dies, son inherits, and so on, but there are many more factors in play here and none of them are good or smart.

There's a lot of talk of super-heroes and super villains, which is not in the movie, and of parallel universes, which goes nowhere. The super-heroes were all wiped out in a super-villain purge in the 1980's, and the super-villains can access the parallel universes at will. I'm not sure what this is supposed to bring to the table. It certainly did nothing for me.

» Your Mom looks better half naked «

The story is set around the idea of five families, like the five Mafia families which 'ruled' new York City in the prohibition era and later, except that each of these five families rules an entire continent. Since there are seven continents, the math doesn't work here. Even if we exclude Antarctica, we're still one short: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, America North, America South. They all begin with the letter 'A' except Europe!!!! But Europe isn't the one which is left out. The combined continents for this story are the two Americas.

There were some oddities. Some of it, such as the character 'Shithead' made of excrement from an assortment of 666 villains. This harked back to the creature of similar constitution in Kevin Smith's Dogma movie. The name 'Peking' was unaccountably used for China's principle city when the name is actually Beijing, and the term 'number plate' was used - which is a British term for a license plate and which betrays Millar's Scots roots. There was a lot of bad language and nudity, so this isn't a children's comic, but neither was the movie exactly PG-13. Unfortunately, the bad stuff fully appears to be stuck in there purely for shock value and has nothing to do with telling a realistic story.

There was none of the single-handed assault on the compound, as in the movie. Here it was a joint effort by Fox and Wesley to wipe out the villains, and it took a completely different form. Wesley is drawn to look like Marshall Mathers and Fox is drawn to look like Halle Berry.

» Don't I look a little bit like Marshall Mathers? «

So, did I like it? No, not really. It started out as a bit of a disaster for me and went steeply downhill from there. It's awash with racism and genderism which seemed to have been added for no other reason than to be obnoxious, but obnoxiousness is this comic's schtick, isn't it? It never did look like it would reach a the point where it overcame its set-backs and looked like it was actually making a point. it never captured my interest or imagination, and none of the characters were remotely appealing to me.

So in short, WARTIUS MAXIMUS!

The Immortal Crown by Richelle Mead

Title: The Immortal Crown
Author: Richelle Mead
Publisher: Penguin
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
p31 "…dropping and rolling to the ground…" should be "…dropping, and rolling on the ground…"

p98 Mead uses the word 'frequented' when she really appears to mean 'visited'.
p101 "Mae shook her head wonderingly"? Better: "Mae shook her head in wonder"
p193 "When he'd stopping their escalations before..." should be "When he'd stopped their escalation before..."

This is book 2 in Richelle Mead's Age of X series. I reviewed book one, Gameboard of the Gods a while ago, and despite finding well over a dozen errors in the advance review copy, I really enjoyed it, so I've been looking forward to reading the next installment.

I have to say that while I definitely don't think anyone will ever laud Richelle Mead of being a great literary writer (she could use a crash course in the difference between 'less' and 'fewer' for example), she does a pretty decent job in general; however, there are some fingernails-on-chalkboard moments in her writing, where she employs bastard 'words' such as, for example: 'politician-y' and 'orangey-red'. Any writer can do better than that. Note that these things appear not in a character's speech, which would have been perfectly fine because people do speak like that, but in her own narrative, which is a bit too much, since she's not telling this in first person as though she's a character herself.

This novel continues the story of Mae Koskinen, a soldier in the so-called 'Praetorian' guard - some sort of super-soldier outfit in Canada/the USA (known as the RUNA - the Republic of United North America). Mae is Finnish by descent, and a genetically healthy woman in a world where a plague has struck down much of humanity and disfigured many of the survivors. Mae is assigned as bodyguard to Justin March, a religious investigator for the RUNA government. The RUNA doesn't like religion, because in this world, there really are gods vying for a following amongst the humans, and in this volume, they appear to be gearing up for a war.

After receiving a vision via a special knife which was an anonymous gift which Mae received, she comes to believe that her niece, an eight-year-old who was lost to her family and whom Mae has long sought, is being held in Arcadia, a nation not known for it's generosity of spirit towards the female half of the population. Coincidentally, Mae has the chance to go there on official business.

This story, I should forewarn you, is over 400 pages long and it moves with a proportionately sluggish pace, which I found annoying. In addition to a decidedly more lively narrative, something else I would like to see in this series is the termination of this non-existent relationship between Mae and Justin. Not only does it not exist, it doesn't work. There's no basis for it and it's neither appealing nor realistic, so at the risk of giving away spoilers, I was rather thrilled with the ending of this volume, although I am sure it's not any kind of an ending in the long run. Going there, would take a writer with some real guts!

Perhaps I should explain. Volume one featured a quickie between these two characters before Mae knew that he was the guy she was supposed to be body-guarding (he knew who she was, but he never let on). Justin, who is being sought as a devotee by the god Odin, had a revelation that if he started getting it on with Mae, he would simultaneously be selling-out to Odin, and becoming the god's priest (read: pawn). He doesn't want that, so he rejected Mae in a rather callous way. She does not know his motivation, and simply accepts that he's that kind of a guy, but unrealistically, this does not prevent her from obsessing over him unhealthily. This causes me to seriously question Mae's smarts!

So, end of story, right? Naw! For reasons beyond human understanding (which is sadly all I'm equipped with), the two are still attracted to one another. I can see why he would be still hot for Mae - he's a lech and a womanizer and she's attractive (not that that's a requirement given the premises), but there's no reason why she should be, especially not after his behavior towards her. The problem with this relationship is not only that it doesn't exist in any romantic sense, it's that even in a romantic sense, it's non-existent.

It didn't work in volume one, but there was enough going on to render that a minor matter. Now that the pace is reduced to a limp in volume two, the interaction between the two really stands out as a pairing which needs paring. There is no chemistry; there's no tension, sexual or otherwise, and there's no reason at all why the two should be so focused upon one another in any way other than purely professional.

The first mistake Mead makes I think, in this novel (other than including the first hundred pages, that is) is after there's a attack on Tessa, Justin's young, female ward. Because of the assault, which was actually aimed (so we're told) at Justin, Mae and some of her friends at the Praetorian volunteer to watch the house. Mae also hires a dedicated, retired soldier named Rufus as a more permanent guard, and here's where the problem lies.

We're given to understand that both Justin and Mae are really shaken-up by what happened to Tessa, yet Mae hires this guy, a stranger, at his first interview, and with zero background checks! This is a guy whom she quite literally just met. That struck me as gullible at best, and stupid at worst, neither of which traits Mae has exhibited before. Just saying! It felt like bad writing to me, and I never trusted Rufus.

It was only when we got past page 100 (that is, some 25% the way in) that the story got to where I felt I could become honestly interested in it. That first 100 pages could be completely skipped and the story would not suffer for it. Also, the sections in which Tessa appears could be skipped. I liked her in the first novel. She contributes nothing in this one. If this had been a first time novel by a newbie, any competent editor would have advocated this, but once you're established, it seems that no one dare say boo to you. Go figure!

In chapter nine, they've finally arrived in Arcadia (read Alabama) and their military escort is deprived of its weaponry, yet not a single one of them raises any sort of protest. This struck me as being really dumb and unrealistic. Why did they even take their weapons with them if they were going to be robbed of them anyway? It made no sense. To me, this was poorly written. Think about it in a modern context. If the President was going to Iran, and the Iranians wanted the Secret Service guards to be robbed of their weapons, would this be acceptable? No! Then why is it here?

Worse than this was the the way the females in the party were treated. They were forced to be silent, to cover up, and to undertake menial household chores! Seriously? Could you see that happening in the real USA? No one would stand for it, least of all the women. This was entirely unrealistic and it really degraded the quality of the novel for me. Fortunately, it was right after this that things improved dramatically and turned it around for me, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to rate this novel favorably, which would have saddened me, being a fan of Mead's (at least of her Vampire Academy series!).

Mead also missed a great opportunity with Mae's magic knife. It's discovered in her possession, but instead of having her say that it's a religious artifact and daring this highly religious nation to confiscate it as such, Justin steps in and says it's his, and he's allowed to keep it. I found that completely irrational given that they'd just confiscated weapons from the military for goodness sakes! It made no sense and could have been written much better. I've seen several reviews on this novel which compliment Mead for her writing, but I don't see it as anything special. Her writing isn't outright bad per se, and she delivers on so great ideas, but there are some serious flaws in it as I've pointed out in the errata and throughout this review.

The reason I mentioned Iran above is that some reviewers also commented on the Islamophobic aspect of this depiction of the Arcadian nation - that Arcadia is nothing more than a surrogate for a slam at Islam, but while Islam does merit being pilloried for its appalling devaluation and marginalization of women, such reviewers appear to be blind to the problems of religion in general. It's not only the Muslim religion which is abusive of women: each of big three monotheistic religions, all of which share the same root - Judaism - are misogynistic and the root cause of that lies in the story of Adam and Eve.

People dishonestly pretend that Christianity is not as bad, but it is, and some sects of Christianity such as Mormonism and the bizarre Amish-style cults are worse. The more orthodox Judaist sects also repress women. Religion in general is very bad for women, so this isn't what those reviewers think it is; it's much broader than that narrow view and I appreciated Mead's tackling of this important topic.

Having said that, I also have to register some disappointment with Mead's own writing about women. It seems that all she can talk about as the women are introduced to Arcadia is how "beautiful" or ugly they are. She tries to hide this by depicting it as Justin's thoughts, but this actually makes it worse because from her PoV of developing him as a character, it makes Justin nothing but a shallow jerk, and yet we're somehow expected to root for him as Mae's beau? I don't think so! I for one am not on-board with him!

It's like even Mead thinks that women have no (or at best, limited) value unless they're beautiful, the hell with how their minds are, the hell with whether they're strong, emotionally stable, good providers, hard workers, reliable, have integrity, and so on. There are scores of criteria by which to appreciate them, yet Mead's sole criterion for which women are to be valued is skin deep, and that's it. I find it hard to believe that Mead writes like this, but let's face it, she does foreshadow this in her Vampire Academy series which is the only other series of hers that I've read, and which I actually - for the most part - like. Let me just say that I am very disappointed in her at this point in reading around page 114...!

Those problems aside, the interest for me definitely ramped-up as Mae was turned loose (figuratively speaking, that is - she was in fact extremely restricted) amongst the Arcadians. She didn't, unfortunately, "go all kamikaze on their asses" as one reviewer amusingly had hoped, but she did cut loose at one point and I appreciated that.

You can see that here, she proved herself to be strong, independent, aggressive when necessary, effective, capable, and resourceful, yet never is she appreciated for any of that - only for how beautiful she is. It's sad. Hopefully, from the way this novel ended, we'll see much more of that side of her and much less of the limp, uninteresting and let's face it for all intents and purposes other than as a love interest for Mae, completely pointless Justin in volume three.

Prior to this point, I had seriously been wondering if I wanted to finish this novel, let alone go on to read another in this series, but from that point onwards, it really turned around and became very readable. If Mead had started this novel chapter nine, and had excluded all the chapters where Tessa was involved, and excluded the pointless scenes of flirtation between Mae and Justin, this novel would have been perfect. As it was, it seemed to take forever to get through this, which isn't a good sign! However, it was worth reading in my opinion, but it's certainly not my favorite novel of Mead's.

Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood

Title: Wuthering High
Author: Cara Lockwood
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Wuthering High is a paranormal novel which completes my Wuthering Heights 'Trilogy' along with Withering Tights. It's been an interesting excursion, but in the end, I was able to recommend only one of these three novels!

This entry in my blog also marks the start of Big July, where I plan to publish two reviews a day, every day, for the entire month - barring disasters. Yes, my reviews are backed-up and I need to open the floodgates before I run out of storage space!

This particular story, which is larded with what are now horribly dated pop-culture references, starts out by introducing an unlikeable main protagonist, Miranda Tate. This is yet another first person PoV female novel. I actively avoid these with few exceptions. Even if the novel sounds interesting, I routinely turn away from it once I discover that it's a first person PoV, whether male or female, because they're typically obnoxious. This particular one I decided to chance because of the title, but it turned out to be yet another in a sorry line of pretentious and lazy YA fiction wherein the author seems to think that if they offer one or two 'literary references', then they must writing great literature themselves.

Big mistake! If Wuthering Heights is a disaster (which it is), then you can't just vaguely 'reference' it and have your novel be a success. You have to actually do something with it. This novel failed rather disastrously in that regard. Indeed, it failed to do anything with the source material: it was confused and illogical, and it had some huge plot difficulties, to say nothing of the author sadly misrepresenting the Brontë family and in particular, the father.

Why female authors especially seem to think that it's illegal to write a novel about a woman and not have her tell it in first person remains a complete mystery to me. I know the delusion is that it creates more immediacy, but that's purest bullshit. What it creates in me is serious annoyance at being forced to listen to a shallow and mindlessly gossiping girl go endlessly on and on about herself as though there's nothing more important in the world than ME! Right NOW! Listen to MEEEEE!

Miranda is, to begin with, mildly amusing as she reveals why she's being shipped to the island academy for delinquent teens, but in the end she becomes just annoying in her dismal self-obsession. She charged a thousand dollars to her step mother's credit card for push-up bras (seriously?), some of which have already been purloined by her younger sister Lindsay, then she totaled her dad's BMW. If she had withdrawn the cash and stuffed it into her existing bras it probably would have been better expended. She shows zero remorse for any of this! And exactly how did she get away without incurring a single penalty for crashing a car after driving it illegally?

Her dad is effectively a deadbeat dad even though he's around, because he has no interest in his daughters. He evidently does nothing but play golf, which begs the question as to where his money comes from. Miranda has a hugely-inflated opinion of herself, convinced that she's the most popular girl in her (old) school and a fashion maven to boot (so she tells us - we get no independent supportive evidence for this, so she could be a lying toad for all we know).

The writing in parts of this novel is nothing short of atrocious. I did manage to reach page 18 though, before I tripped over this (descriptive of the antics of the weird bus driver who picks Miranda up from the ferry to take her to the school): "He grounds the gears of the bus and takes off..." Yep, those gears ain't goin' nowhere! They're grounded!

Seriously? Fire the frigging book editor and slap the author's wrist. Chalk up yet one more example of the well-established fact that getting into bed with Big Publishing™ is no guarantee that you're going anywhere - especially not if you're being ground as those gears should have been....

This wasn't the only exemplar of incompetent writing/editing. There were several others, including an inappropriate plural somewhere around pages 135 and 145 (I forget exactly where), and on page 151 "wrecking more havoc" when it should have been "wreaking more havoc". This is simply illiteracy, and to find it in a book that touts itself arrogantly as some kind of a literary novel about the classics is nothing short of shameful. Never mind haunting the "Bard academy" - the corpses of Virgina Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë would be rotating in their graves at high speed.

This is not a novel about the classics, or a homage to the classics; it's a cheap rip-off of the classics and it hardly has anything to do with them. Instead, all the author did was to simply take a random sampling of classic authors and characters and make a pastiche of them in a story which makes no sense.

For example, we're told at one point that the teachers at the academy are are all authors who committed suicide (Hemingway, Woolf), so how then do we get a head"master" in Charlotte Brontë? She did not commit suicide! And why are all these English authors in a school in the US, other than that the author is too arrogant, self-centered, ignorant, or lazy to set it in England where it belongs?

We're told frequently that Miranda's father has little or nothing to do with his daughters, so how then do we get him taking any interest at all in which school she goes to? Yes, she ran his car into a tree, but even so, why would he concern himself with getting her into a boarding school as opposed to some sort of correctional institution or a reform school? It makes no sense!

My favorite character is Blade, but she's nothing more than a caricature, and Lockwood once again displays astounding ignorance in that she clearly cannot tell the difference between satanism and Wicca! How shameful!

The author's literary ignorance is also on proud display. She has one scene in a greenhouse where there are carnivorous plants taken from The Little Shop of Horrors, but that's not a classic novel, it's a movie! Does Lockwood not know this? And why has she never heard of The Day of the Triffids?

Her attempts at romance are equally risible. She provides us with a sad trope triangle of Ryan, a guy at the academy whom Miranda knows from her old school. He's pathetic, and nothing more than your clichéd jock-style teen romantic "nice boy" interest, who is actually a complete jerk, but of course Miranda is blind to that. The bad boy leg of this wrong-angled triangle is Heathcliff himself - yes the psychotic, abusive character from Wuthering heights who here is actually nothing more than a deus ex libellus.

It turns out that all these characters are escaping from books which are stored in a secret vault in the school, let loose by Emily Brontë's evil ghost! Why not burn these particular books and secure ourselves from the end of the world? The cheap excuse for an answer is that if they did that, then the authors would die! Excuse me? The teachers (authors) are not fictional and they're dead already. What kind of a dumb-ass plot device was that?

This book sucks majorly and I rate it highly wart-infested.

Withering Tights by Louise Rennison

Title: Withering Tights
Author: Louise Rennison
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: worthy

How can I not love a novel set in Yorkshire? Both my parents were born and raised in Yorkshire, and I've visited many times myself. York is one of my favorite cities: Alas poor York, I knew it Horatio, a city of infinite joy! I'm well acquainted wi't dialect tha' knaws, so it were bloomin' wonderful to read it 'ere. So how can I not love this? Discuss!

This review is actually part of a triple that I'm going for, featuring the original that inspired this one: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and another derivation, amusingly titled Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood. This is the only one of the three I found to be a worthy read.

If you're really in love with the author's Georgia Nicholson series, you'll feel very much at home here, because this series is the same - I mean almost exactly the same with only the circumstances and the names changed. The main character Tallulah replaces Georgia, and is in fact, we learn, Georgia's cousin. Georgia's friends from that series are replaced with similar and quirky friends for Tallulah. Georgia's love interest, Robbie is replaced with Tallulah's love interest Alex. Georgia's kid sister, Libby is replaced with Alex's young sister, Ruby. Georgia's feisty cat, Angus, is replaced here with the feisty owl.

The jokes and attempts at humor are pretty much all recycled from the other series, too, but there is some more variety here and some new and amusing material. In some parts, this novel is very good and highly amusing, but too much of it induces a need to groan, and not in a good way. There's far too much focus - again - in this series on snogging and "corkers" (Tallulah's replacement term for "basoomers" - breasts - used in the Georgia series).

It's like Rennison simply took a template of her original series, and went through it making a wholesale replacement of names and situations to create this series, which is fine if you can get away with it. I guess ripping-off yourself is morally an improvement over ripping off others, which all-too-many YA authors are doing these days, with the endless Hunger Games rip-offs and boiler-plate dystopian knock-offs told from female first person PoV. At least this is amusing - assuming you go for Rennison's sense of humor. I get the impression that she amuses herself more than she does her readers.

However, having said all that, I did find the story to be sufficiently entertaining that I am willing to recommend it with the above caveats in mind. It was just original enough to paper over the déjà vu I felt in reading this one. One thing which helped was the bizarre expressions of surprise which Tallulah ejaculates randomly. Those, to me, were really funny, but then I'm weird like that.

Angelfall by Susan Ee

Title: Angelfall
Author: Susan Ee
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Rating: worthy

p132 there's a paragraph which begins "I wonder…" and ends with "…out cringing." which appears to be printed in a different font from everything else. It may be an optical illusion, but it looks darker, and the letters appear to be jammed closer together than those in the surrounding paragraphs. It just looked odd to me!
p223 "…lingering scent of burn paper." should be "…lingering scent of burned paper." presumably

I am not an 'angel' novel fan. After reading the god-awfully atrocious Lauren Kate crap, I decided that was more than enough for a lifetime. Female authors seem handicapped, for some reason, in relating dystopian stories (with some notable and most welcome exceptions), and they're so wooden-headedly addicted to first person young-female PoV that's it’s gone beyond ridiculous into parody.

These novels robotically insult womanhood rather than portray it realistically and engagingly, by rendering their characters into weak and helpless children and pawns of the male "love interest". It’s disgusting to read, but now and then I come across a novel (and much more rarely, a series) which is an exception to the rule.

This is book one of the Penryn & the End of days series, and it wasn't even on my radar. I came across it by accident, and was glad I did. The blurb sounded interesting. We know that blurbs routinely lie, but as it turned out, and despite being a dystopian novel told in first person by a teen female character, this novel was not actually nauseating, believe it or not. Yes, it was larded with trope and cliché, but the author had put just enough alternative material into it to separate it from the pack, and this is why I rate it a worthy read.

Penryn Young lives at a time on Earth, roughly in the present, where literally out of the blue, angels have descended and wrought havoc on humanity and upon its institutions and constructs. North America lies in ruins, and society has gone to hell. The only way to survive is to live in hiding, or to join a militia or a gang. No one seems to be able to fight back, and this was the first problem I had with this novel.

Yes, I get that we’re joining a story in progress, when all the worst damage has been done, and we’re looking at survivors and the aftermath, but we get no back-story whatsoever to explain how a relative handful of angels armed only with swords(!) could have rained down so much destruction. Where were the police? Where was the military? Where was the air force to take on these flying beings? These angels are shown to be mortal and vulnerable, so how did they manage to achieve so overwhelming a victory, and in so short a time? Crickets chirping.

Penryn is moving with her schizophrenic mother, who is off her meds, and her younger sister Paige, who is wheelchair bound - a condition in which her mother, during one of her delusional episodes, may have put her. Or may not. They're heading for the hills, quite literally. They can do this only at night because the gangs and the angels rule the city during the day, although why this is, is never explained. Angels see well in the dark, we’re told, so their absence after dark makes no sense.

Anyway, as Penryn and Co travel the streets, an angel falls onto the roof of a vehicle nearby. From their hiding place, they see five other angels alight, and a fight ensues between these beings, during which the injured angel's wings are severed. When the other angels depart, leaving their victim to bleed out, they take Penryn's sister with them. I had some issues with this scene, too, but I'll let those go.

Penryn realizes that the only way she will find her sister again is if she keeps this angel alive long enough for him to tell her where her sister was taken, and so begins an uneasy alliance. Penryn's mom is now very conveniently AWOL, and although she's never far away, she's never with them in any meaningful sense either, so this bald artifice allows the rest of the novel to be pretty much just the Penryn and the angel, on a road trip. The deal is that she will help him to get his wings sewn back on, if he helps her to find her sister. Yes, sewn back on - this is how the supernaturals operate! That part made no sense either. These are supernatural beings but they have to resort to catgut, curved needles, and antibiotic shots?!

Penryn is a bit of a dumb-ass, too. It becomes patently obvious that there's something seriously wrong with the behavior of these angels, yet Penryn never figures this out. It’s obvious that there are good angels and bad ones, but Penryn blindly believes that they're all the same, and you know what? She's actually right on the money because every last one of the angels behaves like teen boys from the US!

This was probably the most serious issue I had with this novel: Penryn constantly reminds herself (and us) that this is an angel she's with. He's not human, we're told repeatedly, yet he behaves at all times exactly like a young human male, and he speaks at all times like an American teen. All the angels behave like humans. Towards the end of the novel, when Penryn visits San Francisco, the angel HQ, she finds them partying in a nightclub! This made zero sense to me, and it’s really sad, because it’s the most shallow and brain-dead part of this bizarre trope in YA supernatural fiction whereby the supernatural characters have these truly exotic traits - they're vampires, or werewolves, or angels, or demons - yet they behave EXACTLY like teen boys and girls. Barf!

In their introductory phase, her angel, with whom she is falling in love for no reason whatsoever that we’re party to, announces that his name as Raffe (Rah-fee) and it’s obvious that this is the archangel Raphael, although Penryn isn’t smart enough to figure that out for herself. It’s obvious he's not a bad guy, although his manners leave something to be desired, yet she continues to rail against him and his kind in her internal monologues.

So why did I even like this novel?! That's a very good question, and here's the answer: despite all the juvenile trope and the wrong-headedness in portraying these angels, the author does not overdo it with the romance, and she introduces some really cool ideas. She makes the relationship take time and develop organically. Yes, ultimately, it’s bizarre and too much, but it's not forced, which I appreciated. She writes a strong female character in Penryn, who is both tough and weak, both strong and flawed, and is quite endearing and interesting, if a bit stupid, but she's also wonderful in her devotion to her mother and her sister, who continue to be her main focus throughout.

In addition to this, the plot is interesting and develops in ways that were unexpected and intriguing, especially towards the end when she finally locates her sister. Ee brings some cool new ideas to the world of angels even as she portrays the angels stereotypically, and she ends the novel in a way that's satisfying for this volume whilst leaving some things sufficiently open for the next in the series. I'm particularly intrigued by what happened to her sister, and it's really for that reason that I want to read volume 2. So I recommend this one!

Feed by MT Anderson

Title: Feed
Author: MT Anderson
Publisher: Listening Library
Rating: WARTY!

Seriously?

The fact that this novel won a pretentious book prize should be quite sufficient to warn you away from it, safe in the knowledge that it has nothing new or interesting to relate. Indeed, it has as little to offer as the back of the guy's head on the cover: nothing engaging, no features, bland, undifferentiated. If you pronounce the author's first two initials as 'empty' this will give you a realistic picture of what this novel offers. That Anderson is now writing nondescript and cheesy children's books is quite revelatory about what he can bring to a novel.

If you like nauseating music, then by all means listen to the pretentious introductory noise at the start of this. This novel is awful. I think it would even give the most party-hearty frat boys a large headache to go. If you rub it on your skin it will give you a bad irrational, with the emphasis on rash. This is a stream of unconsciousness story, a beat poem by someone who's beat and has no poetry, a road-trip novel that's roadkill.

Titus and his friends (Link, Callista, Quendi, Unit, Marty) take a trip to the moon because they become bored with giving themselves electric shocks from some bare wires sticking out of the wall. In short, these people are morons and in the worst possible sense.

I honestly thought, for the longest time, that they were robots. At least that would have made some kind of a story, but it turns out they're human - if you can call a terminally mindless, verbal diarrhea-spewing being 'human'. Do I really need to hear a novel about complete numb-skulls that's not even remotely funny? No. That's why this was a DNF, and happily so; I couldn't even finish one CD, let alone go through five.

The author tries so, so hard to be hip and to create new lingo to portray this future he created, but he's no Anthony Burgess. The narrator doesn't help. He's perfect for the story, but that's the problem. For the one thing there is no story, and for the other, the narrator sounds like a really annoying kid who gets on a crowded train with you early in the morning after he's been out doing drugs and partying all night.

He thinks he's had the best time possible, and insists upon relating every last boring detail of it in a machine-gun monotone, blathering one mindless thing after another, none of which is remotely unusual, interesting or has any point. Meanwhile, you're desperately trying to focus on this great novel you're reading before you have to put it aside and start work when the train gets in. Yeah, it's that soul-destroyingly irritating and life-wasting.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the Feed had actually had something to say, or something new to reveal, but it doesn't. Not one thing. Its totally unoriginal premise is the exact opposite of what Timothy Leary advised. Instead of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, this novel insists that being connected to the feed (surfing the Internet) all the time is bad and you should do other stuff too. No shit?

In trying so very, very hard to be youch, Anderson's novel becomes meg null. Cut yourself off from this Feed and find something which will nourish, not numb, your mind.