X-Novo by Ken Hagdal

Title: X-Novo
Author: Ken Hagdal
Publisher: Niflheimr (no website found)
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:
p71 "Her Holiness' reliquary..." should be "her Holiness's reliquary..."

This novel was really hard to get into - I mean really hard. I'd gone 30 pages in and I still had no clue what was going on here which was equal parts frustrating and irritating. I had a really tough time trying to grasp where the setting was, and what the women I was introduced to were actually supposed to be doing, or even where the story was going, let alone where it came from. This removed much of my incentive to continue reading. It was at this point that I set a goal of reaching the halfway point (about 130 pages) and giving up if it didn't improve, but I was truly struggling to maintain that resolve, especially when it didn't improve.

It's evidently a story wherein the tables are turned and instead of women being typically subjugated, men are instead and decidedly so, being kept as slaves or almost as pets by the ruling females.

The sorriest thing - apart from feeling uncomfortably in the dark that is, was the unpleasant taste of misogyny I got from this. The women seemed to be rather bitchy, and focused on make-up, clothes, and men. I found that disturbing to say the least. Women are not the inverse of men - not unless your entire focus is solely on the primary sex organs.

The main character, Lisa Fenrich, who narrates this (yes it's another first person PoV unfortunately) seems to think of nothing but men in her free time. She apparently had some sort of relationship (it's not specified exactly what, except that she liked him - at least in the part I read) which was terminated by an accident, and she's not dealing well with it. Pressured by her colleagues, she decides to revisit the "Pool" where she can find a replacement man.

Now here is where it gets odd. The first guy she looks at is a bank executive, so now I'm completely confused, because clearly you cannot have a slave or a pet become a bank executive, so what, again, exactly, is going on here? I had no idea, and we're past page forty by this time.

I simply could not get what was going on, or how it was that women had apparently and rather suddenly become the dominant gender. Was there a war? Was there a vote? Did the entire male population surrender? Why were there not men who fought this - literally? Most of the military is male, sad to say, most of the business leadership is male, most of the police force, most of the government, so how was it exactly that women became so overwhelmingly dominant? None of this was explained in the pages I read to the point where Lisa video-conferenced prospective "husbands", and that was becoming a serious nuisance.

She'd narrowed her list down to three choices including one who was scowling in his photograph, and had avoided filling out as much as he could get away with on the questionnaire. So by what criteria did he show up in Lisa's narrow list? Again, it makes no sense. It's obvious from the start that he's going to be the one, yet he has no respect for her and she has none for him. She berates him for judging a woman by her appearance, yet that's precisely what she's done with these three men. Am I supposed to root for a shallow hypocrite like her? Despite their disastrous interaction, she chooses him for no reason other than it's the plot. Knowing that he will be arriving before very long, this dominant Lisa's first reaction is to clean her home. Seriously? I guess it makes as much sense as neon black for a "color"....

There's another thing I don't get here, either. The women all use the word 'goddess" - as in "Thank Goddess for that!" or "Good Goddess what's going on here?" Which goddess? I have no idea - and how did that start? The majority of women believe in a god - a male god. How did they suddenly all start believing in a female god? The even have a new Bible, with "New Genesis", which reduces the fairy-tale of Adam and Eve to a story not about the abuse and subjugation of women, but merely about sex and who gets to be on top. Seriously?

The church hierarchy is mostly male, and religion is very male-centric, especially for the big three monotheistic religions, so how did that all disappear? No explanation - no sense. There's also a female movement called the B party and even by page one hundred, I had no idea whatsoever what that was all about. Neither did I get what the deal was with cosmetics. Women are now dominant, yet for some reason they're still buying into the need to wear cosmetics the application of which has zero utility to women except in that it enables them to please men? They still dress-up for men? This made little sense to me.

When I got to pages around the mid-70's, the text became nothing but info dump/tirade and was truly boring, so I skipped several pages of that. There was another annoyance in that words describing people's occupations tended to have -ess appended to them even where it wasn't appropriate, so we had words like "scientistess" and "guardess", and "officeress". That struck me as not only silly, but also, from the female characters' perspective, as counter-productive. I just didn't buy that these women would debase their currency with that kind of thing.

So, in short, I cannot recommend this novel at all.

Song of my Life by Carolyn Brown

Title: Song of my Life
Author: Carolyn Brown
Publisher: University Press of Missippi
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.

Continuing with what seems to have become a minor theme on my blog this month, this is a short, but fact-filled and moving biography of an under-appreciated and not widely known African-American.

Margaret Walker was a poet and writer who had to struggle throughout her life in the USA to get herself an education, to be accepted, and to pursue her career and her dreams. Even when she had earned herself a doctorate and begun her writing and teaching career at a university she still had to deal with racism which was only exacerbated by the fact that not only was she a black person in a white person's world, she was also a woman in a man's world.

As if this wasn't bad enough, when Alex Haley published his run-away best-selling book Roots, and Walker sued him for plagiarism, citing instance after instance of examples where she argued that he had lifted material from her writing (her 1966 novel Jubilee), including the name "Chicken George", she lost the case, although 1978, Harold Courlanderwho filed a similar suit, won his.

As this biography makes disturbingly clear, Walker Born in Birmingham, Alabama, navigated a cash-strapped and racism plagued childhood, moving homes several times as her father, a Methodist minister, tried to stay employed. She attended school and college in New Orleans still struggling to make ends meet. In 1935, she got a BA at Northwestern University, following it with a master's from the University of Iowa (in creative writing) in 1942. The following year she married Firnist Alexander, had four children with him, and remained married to this war veteran until his death.

She was a professor of literature for thirty years at what's now known as Jackson State University, and continued to write - and win accolades - throughout her life. Her works include an award-winning poetry collection titled For My People, and Jubilee, a remarkable novel about slavery, before, during, and after the Civil War and based upon the life of her own great-grandmother.

This biography tells her story - a story that needs to be told - and tells it well. It will make you feel uncomfortable, but it will make you feel triumphant as you read through to the success and praise which Margaret Walker earned after her struggle, throughout which she maintained her poise and equanimity. Her success inspired a whole generation of black writers to take up her baton and continue moving forwards. I recommend this book.

Joss Whedon by Amy Pascale

Title: Joss Whedon
Author: Amy Pascale (no website found)
Publisher: Chicago Review
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.

I am not one of the Joss Whedon groupies. I respect his abilities, but while I loved the Buffy movie, I detested the TV series. I liked Dollhouse and Firefly, and I loved the Avengers movie, so you could say I'm a fan, but definitely not a fanboi. That's how you know that when I recommend this biography, I'm not gushing mindlessly, but considering it rather more dispassionately than many reviewers might.

The biography (which contains no photographs - not in the advance review copy anyway) covers Whedon's life from youth to present (at least present as defined by when the book was written), and it's written by someone who is definitely a fangirl, so yes there's some gushing, but it's kept in check, and it never overrides the facts, of which there are many from a diversity of sources.

These sources include writers and producers who worked with Whedon on his TV shows, such as David Grunewald and Tim Mi near, actors from those shows, such as Anthony Head and Sarah Geller, and actors from The Avengers, along with a host of others. The list occupies a whole paragraph in the acknowledgments, and features Whedon's wife, Kai Cole, and of course, Whedon himself.

The biography makes very good reading, and fills in a lot of details surrounding his rise to success, and the struggle he had to get there. I'm not someone who really cares that much about the details of his personal life (although this book has plenty of those). As a writer myself, I'm much more interested in his writing career. For me the mechanics of how he goes about this is what was the most engrossing to me: where he came up with his ideas, how he got them into a format that could be filmed, how he made it happen on the small and the large screen.

I would have happily read much, much more about that than this book contains, but then it would probably have been really boring to other readers, so be comforted that Pascale strikes a nice balance between the personal and the professional in telling this story. You will learn about his imperfect childhood, his stint in Britain, his school experiences, his choice between acting and writing when he was choosing a college, and how he chose Wesleyan.

From there on out it seems like his story doesn't need telling, but if you think that, then there's still a lot you'll miss. Pascale talks in detail about his work in TV and the struggles he had there in trying to find a balance he could live with between his vision, and the rather short-sighted if not bizarre demands of Fox TV. The details cover Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Agents of Shield. His movies are also covered, including the original Buffy movie, Toy Story, The Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado about Nothing, The Avengers, and a mention of the Avengers sequel, the Age of Ultron, the notes for which were begun over a pint and some fish and chips in a Brit pub.

All in all this turned out to be everything I wanted when I picked it up, and I was completely satisfied with it!

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Title: Steve Jobs
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

Some people have held up Steve Jobs as a good reason why abortion is a bad thing (Jobs was adopted). Others have held him up as a hero, a visionary, the guru of cool, but I don't hold him up as anything but a regrettable example of a human being. Steve Jobs was not a nice person. He was childish, petulant, obsessive, given to tantrums, downright mean, and prone to crying when he didn't get his way. He abused people cruelly, not physically, but emotionally, and he followed utterly bizarre diets which could change completely on a whim, the previous diet being dismissed as though it were someone else's dumb idea. He refused to acknowledge parentage to his first child (and threw out her mom) until he was taken to court over it, and even then continued to deny it for many years. He probably contributed to his own early death by refusing to acknowledge how sick he was for many months, resorting to ridiculous and utterly useless New Age 'cures' which did nothing but let his cancer spread.

So why do I care about his biography? Well, I read this for the same reason I read Joss Whedon's: because I was interested not so much in the person per se, as in the mechanics of the thing. How did he get his ideas? How did he bring them to fruition? In Job's case, how did these products get conceived, put together, and brought to market?

The bottom line was that Steve Jobs was just as much an incompetent blunderer as he was a genius of design and marketing. He just happened to get it right more than he screwed it up, and even when he got it right, he screwed it up in ways not so obvious to the consumer - like producing under-powered computers that were hard, if not impossible to upgrade.

So while he did usher in the original Mac, his arrival on the Mac team was a punishment, not the result of anyone's inspiration! He did contribute materially to its design, but the original interface idea was not his; it was that of the Xerox corporation which didn't have any idea what it had. So after taking their idea and making it work, and making it cool, Jobs then had the nerve to go after Microsoft for "stealing his idea" when they came out with Windows! I'm no fan of Microsoft. I agree with Jobs that they're amateurs and kings of kludge, especially when compared with Apple.

Jobs did resurrect Apple after it misstepped badly with the Lisa (named after the very daughter he refused to acknowledge), and the Apple 3, and Jobs was tossed out of the corporation he founded. His incompetence was highlighted starkly when he was finally on his own at this time and able to give give free reign to his whims. He tried to bring the "Next" computer to the world and again larded it with unnecessary design expenses, and underpowered it, and hobbled it with poor specs and over-pricing.

'Next' folded quickly, but fortunately for jobs, he had by then grown an interest in another computer company, one named Pixar. Despite his dumb-ass idea that they could open stores and sell the Pixar animation machine for $30,000 each, he was smart enough to appreciate the value of the interest amongst employees in developing animated movies, and he was a really strong advocate for Pixar in its battles over its partnership with Disney, before Disney simply up and bought the outfit completely.

The Next operating system (Next Step) did come back with him to Apple when he was 'rehired' and ended up taking the reins (or the reign), but it was a while before it was integrated into Apple's operating system. His first really solid move was to push out the iMac, which was the first step in Apple's resurgence. He quickly built on this with the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad.

None of these ideas were original with him either. The iPod was a better version of music players already entering the market, but its sales were definitely bolstered by Job's iTunes, which was, in the form we know it, his idea. The iPhone was a result of development of the iPad, which was an idea he first heard from a Microsoft employee. The iPad was slow to the market for a variety of reasons, but the iPhone used its technology and came out first. When it finally arrived, the iPad was a huge success despite popular media skepticism and it did incorporate some of Jobs's ideas from his Next days - where a computer would come complete with a variety of useful apps, but it wasn't until iPad 2 that this vision began to be properly realized.

So, I skipped a lot of this book because it wasn't interesting to me, but I read with eager interest all of the product development and launch material. The book is very well researched, deeply informative, contains photographs, and is well-written, with lots of input from those who knew Jobs personally and those who worked with and for him. I recommend it.

Under the Empyrean Sky by Chuck Wendig

Title: Under the Empyrean Sky
Author: Chuck Wendig
Publisher: Amazon Childrens Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read by Nick Podehl

There are certain words and phrases which, when appearing as a part of a novel's title, should flash glaringly in garishly bright red light, and be read as caveat emptor (or caveat mutuor if you happen to be looking at it in the library).

One of this is "Finding..." or "In search of..." or something along those sorry lines. This means that the novel is a piss-poor attempt at being literary and is more than likely going to fail embarrassingly in its aim. Another is if the novel contains the name of one of the novel's characters. So from this alone you know that you can count on John Green's Looking for Alaska to be an unmitigated disaster for sure.

Maybe that's not fair, because he is a special case. His novels reek of literary pretension. Consider a selection of his titles: An Abundance of Katherines, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and The Fault in Our Stars, that latter one opening up yet another category of titles to avoid like the plague. How to Build a House falls within this category; that is to say one where a metaphor is employed for what you hope the novel will turn out to say. Again these pretensions are typically doomed.

Under the Empyrean Sky falls squarely into that last category, too. Since 'empyrean' actually means sky or heavens, the title doesn't even make sense. Clearly if an author cannot even get the title properly socked away, it speaks seriously ill of the content, as Wendig then goes on to prove.

The narration was particularly appropriate to this novel since both were obnoxious high-school jock chic. The novel starts out trying to demonstrate the intense rivalry between the poor excuse for a hero and the poorer excuse for a villain, which is to say it's street urchin v. rich boy. No gray areas here. The only mystery is how there can be a rich boy and if he is rich, then why is he a scavenger? But don't let a little detail like that get in your way. Wendig certainly had no intention of doing so. None of this novel makes sense.

Note that this is a boys-only story. Females are not welcome as is indicated by the fact that the pitiful few such characters are mere set decorations, so don't imagine there's anything worth reading there. I didn't find anything of value at all here.

How to Build a House by Dana Reinhardt

Title: How to Build a House
Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Audio book read by Caitlyn Greer

This novel brings new depths to tediousness. I'm serious. It was awful. The novel itself is written at about the reading level of twelve or thirteen-year-olds, which would be fine except that the novel is actually about eighteen-year-olds. It doesn't help that Caitlyn Greer can't read. She's perfect in that she actually sounds like a twelve or thirteen-year-old, but she cannot read - not that and make it sound interesting or attractive to the average ear, which is what I come equipped with.

It’s also first person PoV, which I thoroughly detest. That's bad normally (with only a few exceptions); here it’s nothing but a continuous screech. The problem is that you can’t flip open an audio book and discover this before hastily returning it to the shelf with a heart-felt sigh of relief at your fortuitous escape. No, you actually have to get it into the car and start listening to it and discover how awful it is when you're waiting at the light several blocks over from the safety of the public library.

The conceit is that this is a story about building something. I had foolishly hoped it would be a metaphor about building relationships, about growing, about coming of age, or about something, but no, it’s about none of those things. There's no building of any kind going on here. This novel is nothing more than a cheesy high-school melodrama set outside of a high school. How inventive! Harper (seriously?), the main protagonist and narrator, is almost eighteen and has chosen to spend her summer in Tennessee helping to build a home (I mean literally build one from the ground up) to replace one that was destroyed in a recent natural disaster. Some might argue that Tennessee itself is a natural disaster, but I'm not going there.

I'm tempted to say that Harper should have been named Harpy, but that doesn’t work. Harpo works better given that she is a bit of a clown, but sadly, she talks, whereas Harpo doesn’t. Unlike either of those two options, Harper is one of the most dull and pedantic narrators I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. We're treated to sentence (and I mean that in the pejorative sense) after sentence (that, too) of the most mundane and uninteresting of events. Oh, she bought a travel cup so she doesn't have to use Styrofoam. Oh, she spilled her coffee! Oh here's a wet towel to clean it up. Oh, I looked in my backpack and there's nothing in that zippered pocket. Oh a boy is sitting on the edge of the chaise lounge. Oh, I have something in my eye so I need to go to the clinic. Oh, he's driving me to the clinic; how sweet! What a guy! Oh look: there's a doctor here. Give me a friggin' break!

Despite reams of tiresome and strident lecture from Harper harping on about the environment, recycling, and global warming, there's not an iota of discussion about the pros and cons of Harper expending money on a flight to a place where she can realistically contribute relatively little, versus giving that cash to a charity which can maximize the use of it.

This novel is unrealistic, too, in that the numbers are nicely gender-distributed at this building site, just like they are in high-school. This is not to say that women cannot help, or cannot work construction - that's nonsensical to even think it. It is to say that if this project were realistic, the chances are it would be heavily male-oriented, so immediately we’re out of suspension of disbelief. That's not the way life should be, but it is the way life tends to turn out, unfortunately.

As soon as these teens arrive, their cell phones are confiscated! Harper didn’t even bother to bring hers because of this "rule". What's up with that? They get only one call a week back home? Is this building camp or prison camp? That made no sense and not a single reason was offered for it.

Believe it or not, none of that is the biggest problem here. The problem is that there is no building going on. We learn next-to-nothing about building - about how the house is put together, which would actually have been interesting. What we do learn is what a fraud this is in that we get chapters named after steps in the building process, but nothing in the chapter which matches the chapter title, neither with the physical building of the house, nor with the building of anything between the would-be builders. I found that the sad, blue color of the cover and the fact that it features not a clean shiny nail, but a rusty one to be ironically emblematic of the content of this novel.

Instead of substance, we get page after page (or disk after disk in this case) of sad, juvenile gossip, flirting, and boy talk. Bechdel-Wallace crashes and burns on every disk, which is the real disaster in Tennessee as depicted in this novel. What the author is clearly trying to force upon us here is that, despite the fraud of girls purportedly doing 'he-man work', they're still really nothing but flighty, frivolous, juvenile, empty-headed girls who have nothing but boys, boys, boys on their minds all the time. What a grotesque insult for a female writer to offer to her female main character. Shame on Dana Reinhardt for wasting trees putting this trash on paper.

The Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty

Title: The Cracks in the Kingdom
Author: Jaclyn Moriarty
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another novel which is book two in a series and yet offers no indication whatsoever on the cover that it's so, which is to explain once more why I'm reading a novel out of sequence. It's also five hundred pages. Seriously? That's 25% more than you had to wade through in volume 1! Moriarty evidently has SKS (Stephen King Syndrome), whereby you cannot keep yourself from writing too much. That makes it rather amusing that this novel is titled 'Cracks in the Kingdom'. You need to make a novel like this volumes 2 and 3, each about 250 pages, not just volume 2 at 500 if you're at all serious about doing this properly.

While this story sounded great from the from the blurb (which also offers no indication that this is book two of a series), the problem I ran into was FIVE HUNDRED PAGES. There's actually no list of books published by this author in the front pages, so there's nothing there to guide us to the idea that this is book two of a series either, although it is mentioned inside. But at least Florence and the machine gets a mention! And I do love that Moriarty is an Australian who has lived in Britain and Canada, so there's a lot of familiar slang and terminology in here.

The reason it's 500 pages is that the author obviously has no idea how to self-edit, resulting in endless rambling which goes nowhere and does it very slowly. If this had been a new novel from a first time writer, it would have been kicked out on its ear, but because the writer has a foot in the door and an apparently successful first novel beforehand, they're granted far more extravagance than a new writer would be. Chalk another round of idiocy up to Big Publishing™.

The book itself is rather weird, too. It's not divided by chapters, but by "parts" which are merely chapters, so I don't get that distinction. Each "part" is further sub-divided into numbered sections, which make little sense. Part two, for example has no sub-divisions, whereas other parts have several, but the break points don't seem like natural stopping points, and even within the numbered sections there are break-gaps in the text! Why Moriarty couldn't simply number them as consecutive chapters is a mystery. But it's her novel, so whatever.

So the story here is that there are two parallel worlds: ours, and the kingdom of Cello (no word on pronunciation: is is Sello or Chello?). Apparently the entire royal family (save Princess Ko) has been kidnapped and abducted to our world. In order to recover them, Ko calls a summit of random teens. The conceit is that Ko is smart but acts like an idiot so no one will suspect that she's secretly running the kingdom. The truth is that she actually is an idiot.

When these teens brainstorm to try and come up with ideas as to why the royal family has been abducted, they fail to consider two salient facts: first of all, perhaps the reason Ko is the only royal who was not abducted is that she's the one behind the abductions? Secondly, why was Elliot Baranski's father also abducted? Elliot is one of the random teens, except that he's not so random since he's in contact with the other world (our world) by means of his discovery of a crack through which handwritten notes can pass.

We're introduced to this means of communication early in this novel, as Elliot trades notes through a crack housed in an old TV set, where they're received and responded to by Madeleine, a girl in our world who shares Moriarty's inability to self-edit. She uses a parking meter to transmit her communiqués. Frankly at about 20% into this novel I was convinced that her meter was a quarter shy of a parking ticket. Perhaps it's with good reason she's named Madeleine?

Moriarty twice describes the TV in the space of fifty pages, so maybe she thinks her readers have a short attention span (in which case, why a 500 page novel?!)? Or maybe the author does? A good editor would have caught this, so note that big Publishing™ is no guarantee of competent editing!

One thing I don't get is why these communications, between Elliot and Mad-eleine, have to take place at midnight. In fact, this whole thing was ridiculous, not because of the TV and the parking meter, but because they're sending excessively long hand-written notes to each other. When people do this via their cell phones, it's called texting, and even dumb people have learned to use what might be termed 'textish' in order to facilitate speed (and save on charges). The fact that Elliot and Mad-eleine cannot seem to grasp the principles of compression and abbrev. even after communicating like this for some time, is testimony to how profoundly dumb these two are. And they're our heroes here?

Aside from that, the very mechanics of writing notes that are as long as Madeleine's is unwieldy. It's simply not possible to write the notes she writes as fast as we're expected to believe she writes them! Moriarty writes this as though they're trading notes every few seconds! No one can write that fast (and that neatly!) and at such length. When you're in blind communication like this, you need to respond quickly otherwise you leave your recipient in the dark as to what's going on. They have both had enough experience at this to have learned this important point even if they were of average intelligence, but neither of them seems to be able to learn, so the entire episode plummets the suspension of disbelief into the festering cesspool of bad writing.

There seem to be a few large plot holes here, too. I get neither the point nor the role of the royals, for one thing. It seems like they have absolutely no power - just like, for example, the British royals, so what's their function? They can't do anything regarding the cracks since studying the cracks is illegal! This is another issue, too, since newly discovered cracks must be reported and are immediately sealed by the WSU, yet they can't be opened? How come they know enough about them to seal them, but not enough to open them? Why is it illegal to study them? Who made these laws if not the royals? Something is wrong here! Maybe this is all explained in book one, but if Moriarty can describe the TV twice in fifty pages, why could she not disseminate some of this information again, too?!

As happens all-too-often in YA stories, I found myself falling in love with a secondary character rather than with any of the main characters. In this case it was Belle. Belle is a friend of Mad-eleine's and is kick-ass. I liked Jack, too, but not his name. How come all these adventure guys are named Jack? Seriously? Rest assured I will never name a character Jack.

The bottom line, however, is that I got about half-way through this and I could not stand to turn another page because it was so tedious. I rate this novel warty and then some.

The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski

Title: The Winner's Curse
Author: Marie Rutkoski
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: WARTY!

Reading this novel, I found myself wondering if there's a need for a study of YA novels to determine if there's a proportional relationship between the amount of pink on the cover and the amount of saccharine in the interior.

This story is about a military general's daughter named Kestrel, whose father wants her to become a soldier, but who has no talent for it. Her only other choice is to marry and support her empire by having children so that her compatriots can conquer ever more territory. One day she's out in the market with her best friend Jess when she sees a slave being sold. For inexplicable reasons - except that this is a romance novel of course - Kestrel bids on the slave, way-the-hell more than a slave is considered worth, and ends up taking him home.

The slave, Arin, is a Herrani, a native of the very nation the Valorans (Kestrel's people) occupy, having just conquered it, but what Kestrel doesn't know is that the slave, actually wanted to be bought by her. He's a spy and he has his own agenda to help foment a revolution. For inexplicable reasons - except that this is a romance novel of course - Kestrel starts spending time with Arin and getting to know him. He obviously has good reasons for getting to know her. He's a spy.

This novel is a sadly amateur attempt at both romance and at historical fantasy. Rutkoski has no idea whatsoever how to depict a romantic relationship, and furthermore has no idea whatsoever how to depict a relationship between a slave and his owner. Kestrel behaves scandalously towards Arin, and he behaves abominably towards her, given his slave position, yet there are never, ever, ever, any consequences for either of them. He back-talks to her, he comes into her rooms without permission. He touches her without permission, and he tries to tell her what to do. In short, the entire relationship was laughable, amateurish, and entirely predictable in its every aspect.

I got to about half-way through this and couldn't stand to read another page. This novel is laughably pathetic and I rate it highly warty.

Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex

Title: Tales from the Secret Annex
Author: Anne Frank
Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group
Rating: WORTHY!

Read by Kathe Mazur

This review is one of a brace of forays into World War fiction which I undertook this month. The other is A Very Long Engagement which I have to say right now sucked. Anne Frank can write. Kathe Mazur did a decent job of reading this, but Anne Frank wasn't an American. I think it would have been more respectful to have had someone who actually sounded a bit like Anne Frank to actually read her words.

I never read Anne Frank's diary, because I know the ending. I felt a bit differently about this volume. The original title of it is, in Dutch, Verhaaltjes, en gebeurtenissen uit het Achterhuis beschreven door Anne Frank which translates, literally, to Bedtime stories, and events from the Rear Case described by Anne Frank.. Why it was changed, I do not know, but that's the USA for you. No one knows better than we do, obviously....

Annelies Marie Frank was a young German girl of Jewish ancestry who was born on 12 June, 1929 in Frankfurt. When the Nazi's came to power, her father Otto moved the family to Amsterdam. It wasn't far enough. Otto Frank had started a business, and in preparation for the Nazis invading the Netherlands, he arranged for his business to be held under a non-Jewish friend's name.

When the Nazis did arrive, he and his family, with a few other people: the Van Pels family and a dentist named Pfeffer, went into hiding in a hidden part of the factory, the entrance to which was concealed behind a bookcase. I have no idea if this is from whence the 'Rear Case' of her title is derived, nor do I know why people chose to change her own title. That, to me, is disrespectful.

For her thirteenth birthday in 1942, Anne was given a distinctive checkered autograph book she had expressed a liking for in a store. She chose to use this as a diary in which she recorded some of her innermost thoughts and observations. In addition to relating tales of school life, she recorded her observations on her family and family life as well as the others with whom she was so effectively incarcerated. Only a month after she began to write, she and her family were forced into hiding after her sister Margot was ordered to report to a labor camp.

This was where she kept her diary and where she also started writing essays about things which had caught her lively imagination. She continued writing until August 1st 1944. Just three days later, some low-life scumbag betrayed her family, and all of them were imprisoned by the German police.

The family was quickly split up, with Otto being separated from the females. After some considerable time enduring the privations of Nazi imprisonment, her mother, Edith, was informed that she and her daughter Margot were to be sent to a labor camp. Anne was not in a fit medical condition to go, having a severe skin condition by then, but Edith refused to leave her, so all three stayed behind. Edith eventually starved to death having passed on all her food to her daughters. In March 1944, just a month or so before the camp was to be liberated by advancing allied forces, first Margot and then very quickly after, Anne, died from starvation and illness, probably typhus - another of some 17,000 innocent people who fell victim to it in the camp at that time.

Anne's diary and short stories, and the first five chapters of a novel she had begun, were all that is left to us of a young, smart, talented, strong, and inventive woman who was opinionated, feisty, and a really talented writer. Her stories were full of observations, insights, humor, and candor and would have shamed many a modern female young-adult writer. Nazism robbed the world of this talent as it robbed us of six million other people, all of whom had a contribution to make.

Annelies Frank's story isn't the only one, but it is one of the very few we have come down to us in such a very personal and heart-rending manner. There were literally millions of people whom the Nazis slaughtered wholesale, men, women, and children. Indeed, Anne herself only escaped the gas chamber because she had turned fifteen just two months before her capture. The gut-wrenchingly sad thing is that the gas chamber might have been merciful compared with what she had to endure afterwards: being ripped from her father, then from her starving mother, then from her only sister, before finally, she found a release from her pain and misery in death, just a three months or so shy of her sixteenth birthday.

List of Contents of Bedtime stories, and events from the Rear Case described by Anne Frank

• Was There a Break-In?
• The Dentist
• Sausage Day
• The Flea
• Do You Remember?
• The Best little Table
• Anne in Theory
• The Battle of the Potatoes
• Evenings and Nights in the Annex
• Lunch Break
• The Annex Eight at the Dinner Table
• Wenn die Uhr Halb Neune schlägt dreißig (If the Clock Strikes Nine Thirty)
• Villains!
• A Daily Chore in Our Little Community: Peeling Potatoes
• Freedom in the Annex
• Kaatje
• The Janitor's Family
• My First Day at the Lyceum
• A Biology Class
• A Math Class
• Eva's Dream
• Roomers or Renters
• Paula's Flight
• Delusions of Stardom
• Katrien
• Sundays
• The Flower Girl
• My First Interview
• The Den of Iniquity
• The Guardian Angel
• Happiness
• Fear
• Give!
• The Wise Old Gnome
• Blurry the Explorer
• The Fairy
• Riek
• Jo
• Why?
• Who is Interesting?
• Cady's Life

Each of these is an essay on life in the rear case, or it's a short story, and these are found in increasing numbers in the latter half of the book. They're smart, inventive, engaging, and very well written. Anne began writing a novel during her time in the rear case, titled Cady's Life which was never to be finished.

At some point I will buy the complete works of Anne Frank, and I will back-fill the above list with some brief details for each entry. Until then, I urge you to read this and remember Anne Frank and six million others like her.

A Very Long Engagement by Sébastien Japrisot

Title: A Very Long Engagement
Author: Sébastien Japrisot
Publisher: Simply Audio Books
Rating: WARTY!

This review is one of a brace of forays into World War fiction which I undertook this month. The other is Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex which I have to say right now blew this one completely away. Anne Frank can write. This guy cannot, but I'll bet he's won more pretentious and snotty medals and acclaim than Anne ever will. Sébastien Japrisot is an anagram of the author's real name: Jean-Baptiste Rossi. I don't know why, but there it is. Consequently, all of my future novels will be penned by Waid Ono. Look for them on a loose bookshelf near you!

This novel is about a woman who wastes a significant portion of her life chasing a guy who isn't to be found because he's someone else and too stupid to grasp it. It's one of the most tediously pedantic novels I have ever not read. It should be neither seen nor heard. I picked it up thinking it looked really interesting. It isn't. Not even a little bit. It's tiresome and plodding, and as dense as a plate of day-old spaghetti. Don't start this novel unless you have a toolkit to hand for extricating deeply-embedded components, and preferably one of those fire department jaws-of-life devices for prying open the impacted and inscrutable.

The premise is that of a World War 1 widow/fiancée named Mathilde (aka Mary Sue) Donnay, disbelieving that her husband/fiancé, Jean Etchevery, aka Manech, is dead, and tracking him down after the war. She can afford this as a war widow/fiancée in 1919 because she is the spoiled brat of rich family. No word on how she ended up with that particular husband or why her family didn't cut her off because of him! No word either on Spanish flu, which was rampaging across Europe back then, but which didn't exist according to Sébastien Jean-Baptiste Rossi-Japrisot.

A lot of the novel's tediousness comes from two sources, both of which happen to be the author. The first of these is his verbal diarrhea in compulsively describing every last detail of everybody who is even tangentially involved in the story whether those details have any bearing on the plot or not. Stephen King would be proud of this writer. The other is in the abysmally artificial use of correspondence.

You that know that when novelist falls back upon quoting letters (or diary entries, for that matter, or newspaper articles) in the novel they're there for two reasons: first of all the novelist is just plain lazy; secondly, they're stupid if they imagine for a minute that they will fool us by adding a letter that miraculously (and in detail, yet!) moves the plot precisely to where it needs to go next. No one writes letters (or diaries or newspaper articles) like that, not even in 1919.

After the first disk on this audio CD, I had no interest at all in the five men who disappeared, one of whom was the woman's paramour. First it became immaterial to me whether they were ever found, and then I actively began wishing that they would be gone forever. Please interpret that how you wish. Mathilde does find pain-in-the-Manech in the end: he's lost his memory and the jerk-off was too incurious about his past to go looking, so she wisely ditches him and heads home. The end.

I rate this novel trench-mouth warty.

The Bug Came Back by Stacie Morrell

Title: The Bug Came Back
Author: Stacie Morrell
Publisher: Create Space
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated by Elizabeth Berg

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

This is a very short, simple, and colorfully illustrated story for very young children about the hassle a little girl has with a bug which seems to be obsessed with flying by her eye. Told poetically if not always in poetry, it shows her make her way through her day, walking, talking, balking, squawking until an accidental solution solves her problem whilst simultaneously proving that reading from a book is only most commonly the best use for it!

There seems to be a strong bias towards redheads in this story (even the cat is a redhead!), but other than Ms. Morrell not being entirely sure how to spell swatted, it's well written and will charm children immensely (now watch her come back and nail me on something I screwed up in this review!). I liked this book - or at least my inner youngster did! I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it charmed me. Maybe I'm just a softie. I especially liked the Band-Aid® on the main character's's knee, a detail of the kind which is often forgotten by illustrators in these stories, but not by Ms. Berg.

If I had a real "complaint", it's that I would have liked to have known the main character's's name. I know that some might argue that it's better not to name her so that she has a more universal appeal, but making her white and a redhead rather puts a cap on that anyway! Besides, I don't think children in the age range for which this story is intended care about skin color or hair color, bless them, so I'm just going to know her as fly girl....

Entertainingly written, and colorfully illustrated, I see no reason why any child wouldn't love to be read to from this book (especially if you tickle them whenever the bug comes back), and then wouldn't love to page through it by themselves engaged in the colorful and charmingly drawn imagery. And you might want to take a look at the author's and illustrator's websites (URLs above) too. They're just as charming as the character in this book. Maybe not quite as much, but close!

The Circle by KM Montemayor

Title: The Circle
Author: KM Montemayor
Publisher: Smashwords
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.

Once again I have a novel with a prologue which I once again skipped. Prologues are all about telling, aren't they and I'm just not into them. This is the first Smashwords published novel that I've reviewed as far as I remember (the novel interior says Smashwords, the net Galley page says Create Space). K. M. Montemayor is a Texas author who has a really cool website, but I could not get on board with this novel. I think it had a lot of potential, but I don't think the potential was realized.

This novel is book one of a series, and it's blessedly told in third person for which I applaud the author heartily. It's tempting to rate it a worthy read for that alone - a young adult novel told in third person? Unheard of in this day and age! On the other hand, it's yet another YA trilogy with a circle on the cover, and that's never a good sign in my reviewing experience.

In the end, I could not give it a passing grade and I'll tell you why right here. This was a novel I couldn't properly get into and after about five chapters I could not bring myself to read any more. It was too simplistic for me, too young and too shallow, and it was far too focused on teen romance for my taste. In short, it wasn't at all what I'd expected to find based on the book description.

Set in the 1980's for reasons which were not apparent to me in the portion I read, this novel is about Liliana Garcia, something of a loner girl in high-school, who is on the 'drill team' yet isn't a part of the crowd. The first chapter lays out her life - which sadly seems to render her more of an appendage than a person.

Lilly's mom is a single mom who still has not got over separating from Lilly's dad. This is why, Lilly surmises, she works two jobs - doing something unexplained on weekends and also working the evening shift at the hospital where she's an ICU nurse, to occupy her time. What was confusing to me in this first rush of information was the time-line. We're told it's the last week of summer break, but apparently it's the last weekend; then suddenly it's school and band practice and there's a new guy in the band - a senior year transfer in. I got confused by how rapidly that went by.

On reason that this was hard to get into is the episodic nature of it, and the jumps in time between each episode. In each chapter, we're treated to a series of vignettes separated by triple asterisks, and that gave the novel a disjointed feeling to me, more like a dream than a narrative, or like looking at a series of snapshots in a photo album instead of watching a movie.

For senior high-school students, Lilly and Claire seemed rather juvenile to me. Despite their being seventeen, Lilly's friend Claire gushes over her boyfriend's purchase of a charm bracelet for her as though she's twelve, and Lilly's entire repertoire of thought is confined solely to how attractive people are. She's so shallow that eyeglasses are a huge turn-off for her. Charlie wears eyeglasses.

The big twist here is that this new guy, Charlie, hasn't transferred in from another high-school so much as transferred in from outer space. He's an alien supposedly here to learn what 'Earthans' know about space exploration, what kind of technology they have, and to prevent humans from learning about Charlie's own Sentrian civilization.

To me, this made no sense! Surely the best way to prevent humans from finding out about Sentrians was to keep the heck away from humans rather than send people to live amongst them? The best way to learn about Earth's activities in space, and human technology was to read about it in books, newspapers, and magazines. There's no reason whatsoever to have anyone go to high-school!

Besides, if the Sentrians have the technology to transport themselves over trillions of miles of space and seamlessly integrate themselves into human life undetected, what on Earth (literally) do they have to worry about? Clearly their technology is far beyond that of humans. I didn't get what their problem was at all.

I don't get the use of the term 'Earthan' either. Why not simply call them humans, or use whatever name they have for Earth in their own language? These Sentrians inexplicably all seem to have human habits, human names, and human customs whilst at the same time seeming baffled by human language and customs. That made no sense to me, either.

Sentria is evidently based on a Soviet Union mentality, which may be why the author set this in the eighties, but if Charlie thinks that humans have it free and easy, he's clearly spent zero time in the Islamic republics or in communist states! Why is that? Why did he come to the US in the fifties and right back there again in the eighties? If they already knew about human technology from the fifties visit, whence the need to come back at all? This was one more in a growing list of questions I had. Admittedly I didn't read much of this, and perhaps at least some of these questions were resolved later, but by that point I had no interest in pursuing them, nor any faith that the romance would allow these questions to be answered.

There's one section about Sentrians loving Earth coffee, but being unable to grow the plants on Sentria, and being unable to brew the coffee with Sentrian water. This, I'm afraid, is patent nonsense. Water is water no matter where it is in the universe. It's H₂0, dihydrogen monoxide, and that's all there is to it, but that's not the biggest problem here.

There's actually a good reason why humans can assimilate coffee and that's because we 'grew up together'. That is, we all share the same basic genetic code (with obvious differences). We evolved together on the same planet from the same genetic roots. Animals on Earth have evolved enzymes to consume Earth vegetation (and other Earth animals). It's a complete and tightly-integrated eco-system. There's no reason whatsoever to believe that we could automatically eat and enjoy, and digest and garner nutrition from, alien plants and animals any more than aliens can avail themselves of ours.

If this novel had been written without the romance and for a younger audience, I think I would have had fewer problems with it, but as it was, the science was still not quite right, the plotting didn't mesh, and this isn't something I got anything out of, so I cannot recommend it.

Ten Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell

Title: Ten Miles Past Normal
Author: Frances O'Roark Dowell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Janie Gorman is a bit of a loser. She's the kind of person who tends to complain about how bad her life is without realizing that the problems of which she complains so fluently (some might say flatulently) are within her own grasp to fix. Janie lives on a farm. The idea of moving there was originally hers, but she's come to regret it. She lives out of town, and now she's moved up to high school she hardly gets chance to see her friends from middle school. The only one she still sees with any regularity is Sarah, who is a bit shallow at best, and Janie is starting to have doubts about how sturdy that friendship is.

Janie is a loner, who tends to end up with farm smells on her, which repel other kids. She could of course get up earlier so that she can complete her farm chores, then shower and get dressed for school, but she's too dumb to register that solution as both practical and within her grasp. She is on 'B' lunch, whereas her middle school friends are all on 'A' lunch, and she's too dumb to engineer meetings with them, so she goes to sit in the library alone rather than sit in the cafeteria alone. In art class, she sits between two people who are constantly flirting, yet she's too dumb to switch places with one of them.

Her salvation from dumbness comes, oddly enough, via Sarah, when the latter promotes herself as a potential bass player for the after school 'jam band'. Sarah's only interest is in Jeremy, the 'dreamy' guitar player, but when Sarah realizes that bass guitars actually have size and weight, she chickens out. Janie, meanwhile, who had been swept along under the pretence that she can sing, tries the bass, and discovers that it resonates with her in more than one way, so she starts learning to play it.

Slowly, Janie starts to see that she has a life, and the nicknames she has garnered for herself, Farm Girl, Haystack Hair, Goat Girl, and even Skunk Girl after the incident with the goat poop, drop away, as did my interest in this novel. Janie was far too much of a loser and far too limp and slow to get a grip that I could not get with her at all. She really was a skunk girl after all and it's true: she's not even close to normal unless you equate 'normal' with poor YA protagonists.

Such a Rush by Jennifer Echols

Title: Such a Rush
Author: Jennifer Echols
Publisher: Simon & Shuster
Rating: WARTY!

Somebody needs to tell Echols to do something about that awful background on her website....

This is an absolutely classic example of how Big Publishing™ will rip up your novel. Vanesa Munoz, the photographer who took the cover picture has never read this book, and that's why she doesn't know that the main character does not have straight fly-away hair, but lush curls and hair so dark that it only looks brown in bright sunlight.

The cover designer Laywan Kwan has several book review bloggers "quoted" on the back cover. Seven out of nine of those quotes are evidently very "creative". The back cover claims that "Chick Loves Lit" says this novel is superb, but if you go to Chick loves Lit's blog and do a search for the word 'superb' in the review of this novel, it comes up with no matches found. In other words, Simon & Shuster is evidently "superb" at creating quotes. Chick Loves lit did like this novel, but 'superb' was not a word used to describe it in the review. I suppose that word could have come from somewhere else, but having struck out at the obvious source, how do we know we can rely on that?

The back cover quotes the blog 'Girls Without a Bookshelf' as saying that this novel is "Searingly sexy", but I can't even find a review of the novel on that blog - unless that blog's search engine doesn't work. The 'smart bitches trashy books' blog has no listing for anything by Echols, yet this back cover blurb claims that blog says that the novel was "edgy, tense, and seductive"! I don't have anything against this particular blog, but personally, I honestly wouldn't want a blog named (in part) "trashy books" being quoted on any of my book covers! The implication ought to explain why. It's a great name for a blog, but it gives entirely the wrong impression when tied so closely to a novel. Another blog, 'Book Loons' doesn't have this novel listed, so that quote is apparently another invention, or again, their search engine sucks.

'YA reads' supposedly said this novel is "Deeply rich", but that appears nowhere in the review. 'Confessions of a Bookaholic' supposedly said this novel was "Unique and captivating" but I can't find any review of this novel on that website either! 'A Good Addiction' purportedly said that the novel is "Emotional and expressive", but this is another quote I cannot find. This is not to say that the blogs I mentioned did not rate this novel positively - only that the back cover blurb in seven out of nine quotes has apparently pulled blog quotes out of somewhere the airplane doesn't fly.

Leah was a mid-teen girl who wanted to fly. She forged her mom's signature on a form and managed to scrabble together sufficient dollars for one lesson. She approached Mr Hall - a flier at the tin-pot little air field near the trailer park where she lives. He ran an air advertising business and gave flying lessons. After her first one, Leah was even more addicted than before, and she had really lucked-out with Hall. He taught her for free after that first lesson, and then one day she strode into the hangar to hear his teen twin sons talking about her - how she must be "doing" their dad to get her flying lessons for free. What charming children he raised.

Now, two years later, she has her license, and is trying to rack up hours so she can become an airline pilot after some flying time and some college, but her world drops into a air-pocket when Hall goes downhill after he learns that his oldest son was killed in Afghanistan. Hall himself dies a month later and Leah thinks that her high life is over. The problem is that it’s not. It’s a problem because Grayson, one of the two remaining boys in the Hall family, has discovered her forged application, and he threatens her that unless she comes to work for him, he will expose her forgery. He also wants her to date his brother.

I found this part to be completely outrageous. Not that Grayson had done it, but that she had fallen for it. Regardless of how she got there, she is now an adult and a qualified pilot, so to hold this juvie "offense" as a threat over her was a pretty weak way of forcing these two together into a farcical 3T (trope teen triangle). Yep, it is. It’s got the bad boy with the absurd name (Grayson); it’s got the clueless young girl (Leah) and it’s got the good guy (Alec).

How Leah even rates Grayson goes way beyond credibility and deeply into the public toilet at the run-down end of the block. Grayson is constantly insulting her and he's blackmailing her. He treats her like dirt. As in,for example, one time when she rolls into work one morning, and Grayson stands watching her talk to her best friend Molly who has just joined the crew. Molly is putting the letters on the banners that fly behind the planes. After a chat, Leah walks over to the hanger where Grayson is still standing watching her, and he orders her to take the truck back over to Molly with a fresh banner. What? He couldn't do it himself instead of standing around? He's a jerk, yet Leah is such a sad excuse for a protagonist that she feels 'the fever' every time he touches her. It’s so pathetic as to be YA romance. That's how bad it is.

Yes, Leah has serious issues. She's a bastard child who might even be Hall's daughter for all I know. He's separated from his wife because of infidelity. Her own mother is a no good piece of trash who dates bad boyfriends and pawns her own TV to pay off her bad boyfriend's debt. She's gone almost the entire time, leaving Leah alone in the trashy trailer where they live next to the air field. Leah can’t drive and can’t afford college, although she seems not to be making any effort to apply to pilot school, or to line-up a scholarship. And now she's dating Alec to keep Grayson happy so she can fly and he won't expose her, and Molly is kind-of dating Grayson, although not really.

So this book finally went into meltdown for me around page 200 when Alec, Grayson, Leah, and Molly went to a party, and ex-boyfriend Mark plays the Neanderthal with Leah, pulling her into his truck for a talk, which she's fine with, and then Grayson plays the Neanderthal and comes barreling in to drag her ass out of the truck. They both treat Leah like she's a possession, and she has no problem with this at all. That alone rates this novel as majorly warty.

After this treatment, Leah spends the night in a storm shelter at the airport with Grayson and is more than ready to make out with this macho man who made her his possession. In short, she's as pathetic as they come and I am done with this trash. You'd be better off listening to Jennifer Eccles by The Hollies than reading Jennifer Echols.

Sea of Shadows by Kelley Armstrong

Title: Sea of Shadows
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: Harper
Rating: WARTY!

You know I have to wonder about a writer who is so immodest that she champions herself as "Kelley Armstrong | #1 New York Times Bestselling Author" on her website....

Sea of Shadows is a sadly typical YA novel with poor world-building and weak female main characters. It's about twin sisters, Ashyn and Moria, who are jointly responsible for protecting their village from, and laying (in the old fashioned sense!) ghosts of criminals who died after being exiled to the forest of the dead. Because of the lousy world-building, there's no explanation offered for why they’re exiled rather than imprisoned, or why the forest "prison" is so appallingly badly guarded.

Ashyn is the Seeker. Once each year, she must enter this forest and make sure the spirits of those who have died there pass on to the afterlife so they do not bring harm to Edgewood, the village on the, um, edge of the woods. Why this is done only once a year rather than weekly (like the novel, but different spelling) goes unexplained. Nor is it explained why it is that these spirits are so universally malevolent. Is there no person exiled here who experiences remorse or suffers from guilt over what they’ve done? Why would they lurk there rather than go on to the after life themselves? Again, nonsensically poor-world-building.

Moria is the keeper, whose task it is to prevent these spirits from leaving the forest and entering the village. She fails. Again, because this is so poorly put together, there is no explanation for why this task is entrusted to sixteen-year olds, or why it's twins which must be chosen for this task. Given that the prevalence of twins in real life is no more than 5% at best, it would seem to be a foolish plan to rely on them for such vital protection in a medieval society such as is depicted here, where child mortality must have been horrendous.

The problem with a story like this is that authors are all-too-often clueless about how to evolve it. Even a fantasy world has to make sense, but an author will cook-up this world and thoughtlessly people it with fantastical peoples and beasts, and what we poor readers have to deal with is a world which makes no sense at all, with giant beasts living in the wastelands, where there is neither food nor water for them. These creatures would migrate to where there was food, and the villagers would see them, but that's not the case in this story, so it just sounds really dumb and poorly thought-out.

This is the first year that the twins have been untutored in their profession, and this year is the one where everything goes wrong, of course. Something new is in the forest and the shadows are stronger, more adventurous, and harder to put down. On one night, the inhabitants of the village are all slaughtered, Moria disappears, and Ashyn is left alone; then Ashyn disappears and Moria is left alone. I am not kidding. It’s that bad. Moria learns that some men on horseback have taken the children and Ashyn has gone off in pursuit, so now she takes off in pursuit of Ashyn.

This was weakly done, resulting in confused story-telling, and character behaviors which made no sense whatsoever. The focus is all over the place. First it’s all about the spirits which are a deadly threat - so we're told; then the spirits disappear and are neither heard from nor important any more, and instead it's about finding the children; then the children are put on the back burner and it’s all about the giant beasties of the wasteland; then it's about psychotic bad guys who have taken over a village; then they're not important, and instead, it's about warning the king of the land about an impending invasion. Honestly?

Armstrong seems very fond of having Ashyn and Moria fall headlong, their chin striking the ground. On page 85 Moria does it, on page 115 Ashyn does it. Someone needs to tell these girls that no matter how black things look, they should keep their chin up....

Neither does Armstrong makes any attempt whatsoever to explain why two girls, identical twins who were raised together in a tiny village, are as different as chalk and cheese. Why even make then twins? Again: poor world-building! It’s like she decided she had to have twins in this story, but then couldn't figure out how to make that work since they had to be so different, but instead of ditching that plan, she simply wrote them as though they were devoted friends instead of siblings. Dumb. I encountered this same problem in Taken. Note that I'm not arguing that twins must be exactly alike (they're clones after all, but they're not exactly alike). All I'm saying is that making them twins and then making them utterly different makes no sense.

Other than the fact that this is a YA novel, Armstrong also makes no effort to explain why everyone is so young here. The guard who quite clearly (from the tired cliché that they do not get along) is going to end up as Moria's love interest is hardly older than she is herself, if at all. Why are there no mature guards? Again, no explanation.

I have to say that given how much of the twins' lives has supposedly been given over to training for these vital roles they're supposed to play in their village (they were chosen at birth), I really don't have a whole heck of a lot of confidence in their teachers. Both of these girls seem completely incompetent and inept, lacking in maturity, integrity, organization, and discipline. There's no reason given for why these two children are in charge or have this respect which they haven't earned and certainly do not deserve. Neither of them behaves as if she has any experience, and they seem completely lost and unfocused, as though they never had any training, or have forgotten it. I was completely unimpressed. They're both the very antithesis of a strong female character.

For some reason, when I began reading this, I was under the impression that it was set in Asia, although the more I read, the more it seemed like it was set in Ireland, yet there was this oddball Asian aura to it. None of that made any sense other than that it was obvious the author had failed to think this world through.

This novel falls down badly when the twins are split up. The two are together in the jail where they're entertaining (for reasons unknown) Ronan, who had been a forest exile who survived. Despite all that's been going wrong, Moria leaves Ashyn alone in the jail and goes off to see why the village is so quiet. When Moria doesn't return, Ashyn goes after her, but neither one really shows any sign of being in a hurry or of being particularly bonded with her sister. That, for me, was a serious weakness because it betrays the entire story. Again it’s like the author decided that she had to split them up, to make her story more interesting, but was completely lost for an intelligent way to do it!

Later, Ashyn discovers that Moria isn't at home and their father is dead. Instead of rushing back to the jail to try and hook back up with her sister, she dillies and dallies all the way back, bizarrely insisting upon checking every single house along her route! This is despite the fact that it's obvious that bad spirits are wreaking havoc in the village and killing everyone, and that she knows that her sister is weak when it comes to fighting! What better demonstration could either offer that their sisterly bonds are non-existent (or that the two of them are airheads)?!

This part was really badly written, and I guarantee you that if this had been a brand new author instead of one with her foot in already in the door, some book editor would have been all over this (assuming Big Publishing™ hadn’t outright rejected it) for these weaknesses. Apparently no one had the guts to get in Armstrong's face and tell her what a shambles she had on her hands.

Moria's love interest, Gavriel treats her like a child, which I guess I can't blame him for, given her behavior, but at least Armstrong portrays him as being weak at one point as well, so this could have been worse, but overall, both he and Ronan, who is Ashyn's designated diva, suck as leading males. Gavril (yeah, I know, but he's that forgettable) is downright obnoxious and is, frankly, just a jerk. Both of them treat the girls like, well, the brats which they are, so this is fine, but this merely serves to emphasize how poorly developed the main characters truly are, and how useless these girls are portrayed to be when they don't have men to protect them. Seriously? Why do female YA authors so badly abuse females so routinely?

I got about two-thirds the way through this, and then I couldn't stand to read any more. It started out fine, but it went downhill with rather startling rapidity. This is the first of an inevitable trilogy because it’s illegal under current US law to write a dystopian YA novel with a female main character and not have it part of a series. You knew that, right?

Well I refuse to pretend that this garbage is worth reading, and I have no intention of pursuing any such trilogy when there's far better material out there to read. Life is too short to waste on badly written, amateurish, cliché-ridden, trashy, derivative, wannabe so-called adventure stories like this one.

The Last Beach by Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper

Title: The Last Beach
Author: Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper
Publisher: Duke University 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.

Note that this book has a lot of interesting and disturbing photographs illustrating the author's case. I don't have permission to post any of those, though I wish I did. However, I have substituted two images tagged as free to re-use on Google to illustrate the same concepts. To substitute for one related to sand (or beach) mining which I would have liked to share, please take a look at this website. To substitute for the images showing the difference between a beach which is driven on and one which is not, check out this page, in particular the images at middle right (which looks just like the one used in the book) and the one at bottom left.

This book, which is available from November 2014, isn't fiction. It's our future. In a no-nonsense, if slightly dry tone, this densely-packed book takes you through the facts of what we are, as a civilization, doing to our beaches through mismanagement, horrifying pollution, and our appalling dependence upon oil.

It takes a few pages to get to the meat. There are several pages of drawings before the foreword, three pages of that, and then five pages of preface, all of which I skipped as I routinely do with prologues, etc. This message is too important to delay. When you have a story to tell that's this powerful, preamble just hobbles it.

The story of our beaches is rich with startling images. It's tempting to use the cliché that it's "lavishly illustrated", but the images, while beautifully photographed are actually horrific because of what they show. They reveal, in the most graphic way, how we are hanging, drawing and quartering our beaches - the locations so many of us claim to love the most.

This is an advance review copy, and hopefully odds and ends will be, unlike our beaches, taken care of before this finally gets published, but the page numbering was sadly off in Adobe Reader. The cover is numbered as page 236, and some other pages are numbered seemingly randomly. Indeed, changing pages by typing a new page number into the bottom of the screen seemed to confuse Adobe Reader completely. I don't know why that is, but it's definitely another indictment of ebooks!

I was contacted by a representative of Duke University Press on this aspect of my review, all but demanding that I delete these comments, but that's not how this blog works. Publishers don't get to tell me what to blog or how to blog, and if that means I get no more review books from that publisher, then that's too bad. My comments stand because we're no longer in the era of literal galley proofs where metal type has to be set by hand and laboriously changed out to correct errors. We're in the era of word processing, desktop publishing, WYSIWIG, spell-checkers and grammar checkers, and there is no longer any excuse for sub-standard "proofs". I will, however, post the comments I got from Duke University press verbatim below

I would very much appreciate it if you would remove your criticisms of the book's design until you can see a final copy. There will be a properly formatted e-book available by the end of the year and a print book in November. The "filler pages" you refer to in your review are standard paper book formatting in order to fit required cataloging information.

Frankly I'm not sure what that last sentence means. There's a difference between pages which contain cataloguing and publication information (i.e. not filler pages), and having several pages of unnecessary drawings (filler pages), but if I see this as a print book somehwere this coming November, I will revisit this review and comment on it again then. Until then, my original comment (pagraph below) still stands and I still recommend this book.

There are several filler pages at the beginning of the book which I felt were unnecessary. This book is about a very serious environmental concern, and to me it detracts from that when we add unnecessary pages, each of which will use up part of a tree in the print version. I felt that this sent the wrong message, but maybe that's just me!.

The content of the book is what really won the day for me. The chapters come thick and fast, every one of them with a indictment of our insanity when it comes to how we treat our beaches. People agonize over rain-forest and wilderness, but beaches, for some reason, are ignored, undervalued, and treated like some vulgar relative.

In rapid succession, the stupidity of beach mining is exposed, along with the insanity of building houses upon sand, the failure of so-called 'beach replenishment', algal blooms, the disgusting trashing of beaches from a variety of sources, including the beach tourists who use those same beaches for recreation, the potential for horrific disease inherent in the misuse of beaches, the abusive driving on beaches of both 'official' and unofficial vehicles, and finally with the extensive and unforgivable oil and tar pollution.

Each chapter is exhaustively documented and supported by research as the appendices detail, and some of the information is as bizarre as it is disturbing. Did you know, for example, that there's an international trade in beach sand? That beach users have died from causes as disparate as flesh-eating bacterial infection and being run-over by a police SUV? That sea walls aimed at preventing beach erosion actually exacerbate it? That debris from the 2004 "St Stephen's tsunami" is still washing up on beaches across the Pacific, and right behind it is debris from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that took out a Japanese nuclear reactors - a disaster which itself was caused by poor waterfront management and thoughtless construction?

The underlying message, just like the underlying sand, is that beaches are not the static environment we encounter when we go out there on a weekend or once a year on vacation. We think of the sea as restless, and ever in motion, yet we never see the shoreline in the same way. Why not? Beaches are vital and dynamic, and nothing we can do is ever going to change that, or stop it, or overcome it. You cannot control a beach any more than you can really control the activities of beach-goers, and any hard management scheme is doomed to fail. The only thing which works is the realization and appreciation of the value of the beach, and throwing all our efforts into protecting the natural ebb and flow, rather than foolishly trying to make it come to heel.

Pilkey and Cooper have done us all a huge service in drawing this to our attention and I recommend this book.
Update:
Article in NYT on disappearing beaches.