Watchmen by Alan Moore

Title: Watchmen
Author: Alan Moore
Publisher: DC Comics
Rating: WORTHY!
Illustrated by Dave Gibbons

The "Minutemen":
Captain Metropolis / Nelson Gardner
Dollar Bill / William Benjamin Brady
Hooded Justice / Rolf Müller(?)
Mothman / Byron Lewis
Nite Owl / Hollis Mason
Silk Spectre/ Sally Juspeczyk
The Silhouette / Ursula Zandt

The "Crimebusters":
Captain Metropolis / Nelson Gardner
The Comedian / Eddie Blake
Dr. Manhattan / Jon Osterman
Nite Owl II / Dan Dreiberg
Ozymandias / Adrian Veidt
Rorschach / Walter Kovacs
Silk Spectre 2 / Laurie Jupiter

Here's the closing item to the recent reviews of the Before Watchmen series which I've been reviewing lately. I decided I needed to close it out with the original, even though it's old news now and everyone who cares already knows all about it! I liked the graphic novel and I recommend it.

Watchmen is set in a parallel universe and in the eighties. It's pretty much like ours except that there are superheroes (only one of whom actually has real super powers - Doctor Manhattan), who have been rendered illegal by an act passed in 1977. The only two who are legally sanctioned are Manhattan and The Comedian, a sociopath who is nothing more than a government sanctioned hit man. A third, Rorschach, still operates, but illegally.

Rorschach, curiously, is also a sociopath who actually investigates crimes, and is good at what he does, but he's also very prudish and judgmental. He used to drop off his captures outside the police HQ for them to dispense justice, but at a certain point, he quit doing that and simply dispatches them himself.

The story begins in 1985, with (and centering around) his investigation into the death of Eddie Blake, who Rorschach discovers is really The Comedian, now retired, but still in good physical condition. Except that someone more powerful beat him up and tossed him to his death out of the window of his apartment block. Thinking that there's a plot to assassinate the super heroes, Rorschach begins visiting each in turn to warn them.

He first visits Nite Owl 2, who is himself in the habit of visiting the original Nite Owl, who has written an autobiography about his super hero exploits. He and Adrian Veidt are the only two super heroes to have 'come out' (unless you count Manhattan whose identity has always been known). After warning Dreiberg (who doesn't believe him), with whom Rorschach was once partnered back in the day, he visits Manhattan and Silk Spectre 2, who are living together in a government compound as Manhattan works on an energy project, working with Ozymandias, supposedly the world's smartest man.

It's Dreiberg who visits Ozymandias to pass on Rorschach's warning, but he doesn't take it seriously either. Several of these heroes attend Blake's funeral, where Rorschach looks on in his 'disguise' - that is, without his mask and toting a "the end is nigh" type of poster. Shortly after this, Manhattan is confronted by his old girlfriend on TV. She's peeved that he ditched her for Silk Spectre because she was growing older, and he wanted someone young. She accuses him of causing her cancer via his glowing body, which causes him to abandon earth for Mars.

His absence triggers some aggressive moves on the part of the Soviets. Meanwhile, an attempt is made on Ozymandias's life, seemingly confirming Rorschach's suspicions, and Rorschach himself is arrested for the murder of super-villain Moloch, who had previously revealed to Rorschach that he was visited by The Comedian, who had evidently made some shocking discovery which caused him to have a minor breakdown. He sat crying at the foot of Moloch's bed.

Silk Spectre, disillusioned and angry with Manhattan for his lack of human feeling for her, hooks up with Dreiberg, and they go out one night and beat up on some thugs who thought that the couple were an easy mark. This triggers nostalgia for their former costumed glory days, and they later don those costumes and go rescue some people from a burning house. After an encounter with Manhattan, the two of them bust Rorschach out from prison. meanwhile Silk Spectre is transported to Mars where she learns from Manhattan that The Comedian is her father. She despises the man because he once tried to rape her mother, the original Silk Spectre.

Dreiberg comes on board with Rorschach as they discover that Adrian Veidt is behind the murder of Blake. His motivation is to cause a war with fake aliens to get people to realize how fruitless their petty differences are, and thereby bring them together. Confronting him in his polar lair, they try to take him on, but he is stronger than the pair of them together. As he demonstrates the success of his plan, Manhattan realizes that they have no choice but to follow it now. He murders Rorschach in order to keep him from exposing what Veidt has done.

Dreiberg and Jupiter go into hiding together, but Rorschach has sent his journal, containing the details of his investigation, to a local right wing publication which will reveal all.

I liked the graphic novel, but I preferred the movie version of it. The two are much the same, but the movie tells a cleaner story, more compact, and more engrossing for me.

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

Title: The Secret Supper
Author: Javier Sierra
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

Originally published as La Cena Secreta, I read the English translation of this novel some time ago, before I began blogging. I came across the audio book version of it in the library, so I decided to give it a listen so I could blog it here. The problem was that once I started listening, I also started wondering how in hell I'd managed to not only read this book, but also think it was worth retaining the book in my collection with a view to possibly re-reading it at some point down the road.

Clearly I'd found something in it the first time around that was just as clearly absent this time. Has my perspective on novels changed so much? It wasn't that long ago that I read this - maybe two years? Have I become so much more critical - so much less forgiving? I guess!

The novel is set around 1520 when Leonardo da Vinci was painting The Last Supper fresco. The conceit here is that it's the recorded words of Agostino Leyre, a chief inquisitor in the Catholic church. He's supposed to be putting this story on paper (or parchment or whatever) in his old age while living as a hermit, but no one actually writes like that in those circumstances! That struck me as false.

If you are writing a diary, you might record a conversation, but even then you wouldn't record it like you do in a novel. If your conversation went like this, for example:

Jane entered the room with an aura of frustrated anger covering her imposing form.

"That's it!" she said with an explosion of air that had evidently been tightly constrained by her lungs for far too long.

Mesmerized slightly by the rain of dust motes caught in the brilliant afternoon sunshine filtered by the trees outside and by the dirty windows of her apartment, it took me a minute to register the full force of her presence and her declaration, let alone figure out what was upsetting her.

Is something wrong?" I asked superfluously, trying to gain myself some time and perhaps elicit further information before I was forced to commit to a response and perhaps to yet another exercise in frustration with her.

"Have you not been listening?" she asked in sheer disbelief.

This engendered in me a sour feeling of further reduced assurance than I was already harboring. What was I, some sort of NSA operation that I listened in on her every communication?! "I try not to listen to people on the phone," I said, slightly nervously. The truth was that I'd tuned her out completely, and dissolved into a rather soporific day-dream, the memory of lunch still heavy on my stomach as it was.

Jane gave me one of her 'what do I have to do with you' looks and took a deep breath. "Dick no longer wants to run with me. He says I'm too slow for his pace and he's found a new partner. This is the guy I got back on his feet, and now I'm back to running alone. In these streets." She paused and I suddenly got the feeling that this was all about to come back on me. It always does. I hadn't even begun to get my head-shake in motion before her face took on a look like it was the dawn of a new age and she asked, "Why the hell don't you go running?"

Seeing that look on her face, I must admit I suddenly felt like it.

©Ian Wood 2014

Now let's consider that same event as written in the 'victim's' diary:

So I had lunch with Jane this afternoon, and we ended up back at her place, which is still a mess, and Dick the dick calls her out of the blue to say he's ditching her as a running partner. Now she expects me to saddle up. That ain't gonna happen. OTOH, I'm not about to let her start running these streets again on her own.
©Ian Wood 2014

See the difference? Obviously no one writes a diary the same way as everyone else, so your idea of a diary entry will differ from mine, but I guarantee you no one writes a diary like the first example, either; that's how it's written when it's not actually a diary but is actually a novel outright lying that it's a diary. In the same vein, no one writing a real reminiscence writes like Agostino Leyre is supposed to be doing here, so from the off, this thing shouted fake to me (but this kind of falsehood will win you medals and 'literary' prizes!). How did I get past that last time? I honestly don't know.

One thing I became really tired of hearing was multiple repetitions of "Santa Maria delle Grazie". This is simply a church name: Holy Mary of Grace. What I didn't get is why these names are never translated in novels? Why is everything else translated (for example, we might get Rome, not Roma in a novel or Florence in place of Firenze), but then we get Santa Maria delle Grazie? It makes no sense. Nor did it make sense to keep repeating this instead of simply referring to it as "the church" or "the cathedral" or some other variation. Just a pet peeve!

So the story is about Da Vinci hiding secrets in his paintings, and an anonymous "Soothsayer" making prophecies, and Leyre's investigation into this. I honestly don't recall the ending (or most of the plot). I just remember that I once liked this, but now apparently don't! So I can't recommend it!

The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi

Title: The Doubt Factory
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Publisher: Little Brown
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.

The Doubt Factory is blessedly told in third person - not another first person YA thank goodness, but it is told from the perspective of one of the characters, Alix who is, unfortunately, truly a dumb-ass. She's in high school - or rather a specialized one known as Seitz Academy - because you know it has to be an academy not just a high school, right? It's the law. Respect the law of YA!

Alix attends Seitz with her poor impulse-control younger brother Jonah who actually reminds me of my own kids (who fortunately don't have any such issues). One day when idly gazing out the window in a boring class, Alix notices a guy on school grounds staring right back at her. When headmaster Mulroy goes to confront the guy, he gets punched in the stomach for his trouble. Naturally Alix falls in love with this trouble-maker instantly. Security fails to find him, but it turns out that he's 'known' as a graffiti artist, who seems to only paint "2.0" on various buildings in red spray paint. No one knows who he actually is. Or why he showed up at the school.

The next day, Alix drives her brother to school in her mini - not skirt, car - but curiously, Bacigalupi kow-tows to corporate dictates and renders it in block caps every time he uses it: MINI, just like the brand owners do. It's not only that it's annoying, it's that this free advertising is distracting, and I have no idea why he does it so robotically.

It doesn't even make any sense at the corporate level, given that the mini is purportedly a small car (when it actually isn't). If you look at one, it's just as bulky as any other compact car and gets no better gas mileage than fifty or more other vehicles, none of which profess to be particularly small. Mini is a fraud in this regard, but given that your plan is to present the car as miniature, small, cute, whatever, as compared with others, even if it isn't, then why not go with lower case? Just asking!

Meanwhile, back at the story, the school is undergoing a major disruption as Alix arrives. It's cordoned off, and there's a fire truck, and the police, and a SWAT team. Rather than manage the crowd, the police make it worse, foolishly crushing everyone together. Alix discovers that the guy from the previous day is right behind her, urging her to watch the school rather than focus upon him. What happens is that the SWAT team goes in. Why it's they and not the bomb squad, I have no idea. Something happens inside, splashing the windows in what looks like blood, but it turns out it's paint, spelling out 2.0 on the window. Then the SWAT team hurries out pursued by hundreds of white rats.

Rather than call out and identify the perp to the police who are right there, clueless Alix follows him through the crowd where he grabs her and tells her that if she wants to know what he's all about, she should talk with her father, who knows the story. The weird thing is that the guy has dressed up the next day - he no longer looks like a homeless person or possibly a deranged military veteran as on the previous day. Instead, he looks like a cop - so Alix thinks. That was the weird part. I don't get what it is in Alix's history that makes her keep referring to his appearance as looking like a cop. Just exactly how many plain clothes cops is she on familiar terms with that she knows this - and why? Who knows.

At this point I'm not even remotely liking the main character, which is never a good feeling with which to imbue your readers, especially not in the first handful of chapters. Alix evidently has the same impulse control issues which her brother suffers, and worse, she has poor judgment even though she knows better. It gets even worse still when she starts fantasizing about the guy. And I'm sorry, but no, you don't get to white-wash your dangerously delusional hots for the thuggish stalker just by saying to yourself, once in a while, "You are one fucked-up bitch" or referring to him in your thoughts as "some creeper guy". It doesn't work and it needs to stop.

Yes, I get that you need to give your main character an edge, and that teens often do dumb things, but there's a difference between making a mistake and the fact that what you're doing is ditch-deep dumb never crossing your mind. There's a difference between building up a character to show that he or she is likely to pursue precisely that course of action given certain triggering circumstances, and presenting your character as mature and responsible, and then betraying everything you've told your reader by having her do something which is totally brain-dead and out-of-character.

I'm sorry but once she began fantasizing about this guy, I lost all interest in reading any further. It's entirely inappropriate, and I don't even have a problem with inappropriate if the author can justify it in some way within the framework of the novel, but this was - how did Grace put it in Avatar? This was the author just pissing down my back without even the courtesy of calling it rain.

I refuse to read novels which pretend that it's normal and just fine for young girls to fantasize about dangerous stalkers. I don't care who this character is or what his motive is, the depiction of her reaction is trash and it's inappropriate, and it's irresponsible writing, and it sends entirely the wrong message.

I don't care if he turns out to be a "nice guy" - the author has failed if he cannot find a dramatically better way to write it than to make it look like it's a wise choice for teen-aged girls to chase "bad boys" like this, who are at best a vandal and at worst, a terrorist. I don't have to put up with this garbage, and neither do you. Ditch it and find something better; something written by an author who has the first clue how to write young female characters. Of that there's no doubt in my mind.

Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell

Title: Expiration Day
Author: William Campbell Powell
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!

This is a novel which needs to have its own expiration day. Just like the TV show The Lottery, the unoriginal plot is that of a population which has become largely infertile (for unknown reasons, as if we could believe that) yet despite all of our advances in genetics of the last two decades, the next thirty years is spent not in curing the infertility or in developing clones or parental hybrids, but in developing improbably advanced and prohibitively expensive robots known as teknoids, which are stand-ins for the children which parents now cannot have - robots which are forcibly removed from your life when they "turn eighteen" Insane much?

How this technology advanced so rapidly to such an amazingly high degree (while all other technology stagnated over that same time period) is a complete mystery, but this is fiction after all! Maybe I should be nicer: William Campbell Powell hails from Sheffield, England - yes, that "Sheffield steel" town - which is only some 20 miles north of where I was born. This novel is set in England.

The author projects way too much of himself into the story though, and that was one of my biggest problems with suspension of disbelief. It would have been fine if the story were about a man the same age as the author, but it's not! It's about an eleven-year-old girl who is slowly transitioning into her teens, so the 70's theme park and the constant references to bands from the sixties and seventies SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK. Period. Why would such a young girl in 2049 reference, for example, The Blues Bothers, a movie from 1980 - that is 70 years before her time?

The author tries to hide this under the weak claim that no new bands have got together in the last thirty years! Bullshit. The bands of Tania's era are all tribute bands - but none of these bands seem to reference bands from any era other than the sixties and seventies. Why? This struck me as nothing more than laziness on the part of the author: he was too lazy to research bands that an eleven-year-old might like and simply used his own favorites instead. Pathetic.

It's no spoiler to reveal that the main character is one of these teknoids. She learns that around thirty pages in (this novel starts on page nine for some reason), and that's long after we've realized it, of course. For the sake of cut-rate tension (and for no other reason) robots, which are in the majority, are treated as second class citizens - if it's known that they're robots. But how could people not know, given the world which this author creates?

Evidently no one has ever come up with a means of detecting who is and who isn't robotic in his world, despite the fact that we have electronic technology here and now which could do such a thing! Also, for no reason, there's appalling and uninterrupted bullying. The teachers at Tania's school appear unaware (or uncaring) of this, or perhaps they're just really stupid, as indeed they are in pretty much all schools in YA novels for some obscure reason.

So we have yet another dystopian YA novel featuring a girl as the main protagonist. The author apparently doesn't know that it's not illegal to tell a story in the third person, so we get the farcical suspension-of-disbelief-destroying conceit that an eleven-year-old can not only write as though she's an adult (coincidentally of the same age as the novel's author, with the same predilections), but that she can recall conversations word for word and has an almost eidetic grasp of the previous day's or week's events in order to record such details?

This problem is compounded by the fact that it's written as a diary which makes it even more unrealistic. After pooh-pooh-ing the idea of employing a Victorian "dear dairy" format, Tania then goes on to do exactly that, addressing the diary to Mister Zoe, a hypothesized alien archaeologist in the distant future. The diary format doesn't work. It's far too detailed in parts and completely missing great gaps of many months if not years in other parts. In short it's a prop, indeed, a malaprop. which stands out so garishly on this stage that it detracts from the live action going on around it.

My first guess was that this "Zoe" alien archaeologist character was actually Tania herself because in the distant future "he" (we don't know the alien's gender) is reflecting on her diary. Shades of Stephen Spielberg's movie AI with a small side of Millennium Man! This alien thinks and plans and imagines just as though he's human though, dear reader!

Other than that, and for all my complaints, the story began rather well, but it went quickly downhill as the alien showed up, interleaved with the diary chapters offering brief and ridiculous comments and observations. I quickly learned to skip those and I never missed them. That part should have been excised completely. The story progressively became worse after Tania discovered that she was a robot. It would have made a more surprising story if she were not, since it's so obvious from the start that this is the way the author was going. Indeed, not a thing in this novel is surprising or startling, including the ending.

The diary isn't the only thing in which there are large holes; the plot, too, suffers this problem. The first issue is that no one seems at all concerned that the human race is on the verge of extinction. Oh look we have humanoid robots, so no worries, mate! I couldn’t swallow that. Not a bit of it. Also we’re told nothing of the riots that took place: what started them, what, exactly, they were about, how and why they finally ended. All we get is melodramatic intimations that we don't want to see those again.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that there is no explanation offered as to how this system with the robots is supposed to work. We're just expected to buy them as is (so to speak!). Yes, we're told that baby robots are available, and you get a free upgrade every two years (to a total of eight upgrades), but what's the point?

If people are largely infertile, isn't this a dead give-away?! Who would want to take care of a robot baby? Does it eat? If not, it's a robot! Does it pee and poop? If not, it's a robot! Does it get sick? If not, it's a robot! Does it suddenly go from two weeks old to two years old? If so, it's a robot! Yeah, we're told these robots process regular food, but it makes no sense. How could a real parent bond, in any meaningful way, with a baby robot? It's neither plausible nor realistic that people would simply get on with their lives, taking robot babies home, and pretending that nothing is wrong with this life.

How does a woman who has never exhibited a pregnant belly to the world magically show up with a baby? How does a woman who produces no milk breast-feed it, and why would she? It's a robot! Does this little person ever get bitten by mosquitoes? If not, it's a robot! Does it get no sicknesses whatsoever? If not it's a robot! Does it need no vaccinations for school or travel? If not, it's a robot! How is there any way that this can be kept a secret for any significant length of time from everyone?

I don't get how the aging thing works, either. We're told that the robots have to go back to the manufacturer to be aged - they come back in a slightly more mature body. How does this work with early childhood and teenage growth spurts when you get only eight renewals? Indeed, how does it work at all? The author conveniently ignores all of these problems, including the big one: This is rent-a-bot! The robots must be returned at age eighteen, we're told, although we're not told why. Why would any family want that? Why would society tolerate this destruction of these tecknoids which are for all intents and purposes, people, especially to their 'parents' (and assuming the bonding problem could have been overcome)? Why would the robots not rebel?

This part of the novel, where people have to be 'recycled' at a certain age, is nothing more than a rip-off of Logan's Run. Actually it's more like a Biblical fable in that these robots are given life for a short time; then, if they're good little robots, they die and go to robo-heaven.

What about sexuality? The robot must be made to appear perfectly human, so what's to stop pedophiles 'adopting' one? Does this happen? It's never mentioned. What if someone 'rapes' a robot - do they get the charges dropped? Given how abusive people are to robots, is it even considered rape? There is so much to explore in a world like this, but the author ignores all of that in favor of relating a tedious and petty tale of an uninteresting girl. He expects us, instead, to buy his narrow, blinkered view of this so-called world, where the author pretty much admits to having done none of the heavy lifting to make it work, or to flesh it out.

What about sexuality in general? If pretty much no one can get pregnant, wouldn't that declare open day on rampant sex? Wouldn't everyone be doing it - particularly the teens? This isn't even mentioned, let alone included as a feature worth exploring in this world. This struck me as very odd given the writer's penchant for sixties and seventies throw-backs. What, no new era of "free love" and disease-free sex dawns here?

What about puberty? There are hormonal changes in both boys and girls and which lead to significant body changes, and to mood and mentality changes. How is this handled with robots which are upgraded only at two-year intervals? Tania doesn't get an upgrade from age eleven until they suddenly, and at her own request, revamp her at age fifteen - a four year gap - and also a huge, unexplained jump in her diary. Until then, she looks exactly the same age for four straight years - and no one notices?!

How does this society cope with mechanical issues and breakdowns? It's never mentioned! How come no one ever puts two years and two years together and figures out that persons X, Y, & Z are robots because they always get 'sick' and are hospitalized at the same time every two years? How can a poor family possibly afford these expensive, sophisticated robots? None of this works and the author doesn't even mention it in passing, let alone actually explore it. What a tragically missed opportunity for some great writing!

None of the pretence (that no one can tell which people are biological and which are robotic) makes any sense. That's the real fiction we're being sold here. There is of course, a multiplicity of other issues. For example, the birth rate began its plummet in 2017, a whole generation before the story begins, but there appear to be no relatively young people around! Why is it that everyone seems really old? Why is no one starting to panic about the fate of the human race? Are we really looking at some sort of technological Soylent Green in this world?

The pure bullshit doesn't end there either. When Tania decides to look up population trends, she discovers that the data cut off at 2040, almost a decade ago (to her). When she tries to enter a more recent date for an up-to-date picture, she gets an error message telling her that she's not authorized and suddenly the police show up with blue lights flashing to lecture her about inappropriate use of the TeraNet (the "kewl' word used for the Internet here), and issue her a legal warning? Seriously?

She didn't break-in anywhere. She didn't hack into a system where she was not allowed. She accessed no forbidden data, she simply 'Googled' something and got no results. All she did was ask and was told "No," yet the police show up at her door immediately? BULLSHIT! This is amateur writing at its worst. I don't have a problem with authors who write like this if they make some sort of half-way competent attempt to explain why things are a certain way, but when you write things that way and don't even pretend that you can explain, and you write like it doesn't even matter that it isn't discussed or explained, that's a classical sign of bad writing.

It's a criminal activity to look at a government website? Why the frick and frack is the website even available on the web then? If she ever makes another mistake, she will be deactivated, she's told! Good god this is bad writing! Why not just name her 'Eve' and say she was taking bytes from an Apple computer?!

As ridiculous as this is, it wouldn't have been half so inane if she hadn't immediately got on her phone after that, and talked openly about what she did with her friend John, who openly admitted that he could hack into the system. So the powers-that-be minutely monitor the web, but not the phones?! Bye-bye credibility. Hello another lousy dystopian fiction with a young female protagonist. I guess I should just be glad it's not a trilogy, huh?

Some of this is written like it actually was an eleven-year-old who penned it. There are parts of the story where significantly new things magically appear without rhyme or reason. For example, and out of the blue, Tania decides she wants to play bass guitar, and suddenly she's an expert in all things musical, talking like a veteran musician and exhibiting detailed musical knowledge without ever having been shown to follow any learning curve to get there. Let me guess - the author plays bass?

That's a much as I want to rant about over this novel (and not in a good way), but it's not worth more of my time than this. About half-way through I gave up on it because I could not stand the boredom, so no, I cannot recommend this novel. It's warty!

Avalon by Mindee Arnett

Title: Avalon
Author: Mindee Arnett
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!
Erratum:
p73 "The ITA are..." should be "The ITA is..."

I've seen some reviewers compare this to the Joss Whedon TV show Firefly and the subsequent movie Serenity both of which I review elsewhere on this blog, but this is no Firefly, not even close. What it comes closest to, IMO and experience, is Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series which I'll get around to reviewing at some point, but which is a far more engrossing and better-written series than ever this is.

Avalon is the name of the spacecraft which Jethro "Jeth" Seagrave covets and wants to recover. It once belonged to his parents, but after they were executed by the ITA (Interstellar Transport Authority) for treason, ownership fell to Jeth's uncle Milton, who promptly gambled it away. Why the ITA didn't confiscate the ship is unexplained, but now it's owned by a crime lord with the risible name of Hammer Dafoe who not at all coincidentally, is the "employer" of Jeth and his crew of teen thieves which includes Jeth's thirteen-year-old sister Lizzie, his friend Celeste (a strong female character who is sadly under-employed), and a couple of other guys: Flynn and Shady, who are basically nothing more than background decoration.

After a "meeting" with ITA agent Marcus Renford, whose appearance was as unexpected as it was inexplicable to them, the teen gang completes a successful theft of a spacecraft and manages a rag-tag get-away, delivering the ship to Hammer. He apprises Jeth of his next job, which curiously is precisely the job which Renford had told them it would be. They're to salvage a spacecraft named Donerail, which seems simple enough, but there's one catch: it's in the Belgrave quadrant, travel through which is forbidden by the ITA because it is so dangerous. The bizarrely unpredictable is the norm in Belgrave, we're told.

Jeth gets Hammer to agree, if he successfully completes this run, to pass ownership of the Avalon into his hands (not that he trusts him to do so). After talking his people into going on this scavenger hunt, Jeth and his ship and his crew set out for Belgrave. Interestingly, the normally imperturbable Celeste broke down and cried when he talked with her privately about this. The Belgrave was where her mother went missing - from right inside the spacecraft in which they were traveling.

I have to say up front that I always have issues with this kind of space story (where there's a federation of planets which are trading back and forth) because it betrays an ignorance of just how massively huge and impossibly impassible space truly is. There's a good reason why it's called 'space', and that's because endless space is precisely what it is, and almost entirely empty at that. The nearest solar system to ours is four light years away, which means that even if you could travel at the speed of light, which is impossible if you're any more massive than a photon, it would take a whole four years just to get there.

This is, of course, why sci-fi space travel authors indulge themselves in "hyper-drives" and "travel gates" and so on, vaguely alluding to unproven scientific concepts which, even if true, probably won't result in the kind of things which sci-fi writers routinely lure us into believing and accepting.

This novel employs both (drives and gates), so we can take a big step around this obstacle, but even if we grant that much, there's still the issue of trading. I can see how trading between planets might work for very expensive, very rare items where there is a wealthy clientele to purchase them, but transporting every day items like metals and food is nonsensical. The costs would be prohibitive, and there's no way you could transport enough food to to feed a whole planet's population!

Even if it were practical, humans would not be doing it. The ships would be robotic because humans are unreliable, dangerous, and extremely expensive to support in space. Robots, OTOH, which are becoming ever more ubiquitous in real life right here and now, are once again inexplicably absent from this novel. So, as with most sci-fi, you have to decide if the story is told well enough that you're willing to let all these huge plot holes get a bye, or whether it's bye-bye for this novel. For me it was the latter.

There's one more thing, which is - in the case of this novel - the ITA. This is supposed to be the sheriff in town, rigidly regulating the transit gates and drives, and keeping everyone in line, but this kind of regulation of necessity assumes a manageable territory. It completely ignores how unnervingly titanic space really is - and the fact that it's also 3D. Without very rapid (and very cheap) transportation from one planet to another, there's no way in hell such an authority could regulate and patrol the space competently and within any reasonable budget. And who would even pay for something like that? So again, it's another thing to which we must turn a blind eye if we;re to enjoy this novel. So the question you have to ask yourself is: how many blind eyes do I have to turn before I become nauseated from all this rapid spinning?!

When Jeth and his crew finally locate the Donerail, they discover three people aboard, none of whom were expected to be there, and certainly not alive, for as long as the ship has been missing. Vincent (who is so non-existent in this story as to beg the question why he was ever included in it in the first place), along with Sierra, conveniently the same age as Jeth, and a young girl named Cora who is roughly the same age as Lizzie. Sierra is impressive and represents a strong female character. Cora is a child, and it's really no spoiler to reveal that there's something unusual about her. There's always something unusual about a Cora (as I maintain in my own novel Saurus!).

These three people represent a complication for Jeth (who was ordered by Hammer not to board the Donerail) the size of which he hasn't even begun to appreciate yet, but he works out a plan to rescue them and still meet Hammer's expectations. It's around this point that Jeth also discovers a data crystal evidently recorded by his mother before she died, yet he inexplicably shows almost no interest in it. I honestly couldn't believe that an author would create a main character this stupid, flat and unimaginative! He's not even a decent captain, so this begs yet another question: how did he ever become the leader of this teen group? He's not credible

Jeth has missed his mother since his own childhood (evidently didn't care too much about dad, but that's the quiet burden dads bear: it's always about mom), she was killed after coming out of the Belgrave quadrant, which he is right then and there investigating; there's a data recording related to her time spent there; there's a mystery on the Donerail (what made those precisely bored holes, for example?). There are three people who thought they'd been lost for two weeks but who've been missing considerably longer that that; Jeth's own spacecraft seems to now be garnering for itself some of the same holes which the Donerail was riddled, and he has no interest in investigating his own mother's thoughts on the topic? Jeth is a moron.

Jeth is also dumb to trust Sierra, and she is stupid not to tell him certain things which would have benefited her to do so, so this felt like a huge mess of a badly written novel, quite frankly. The attraction between Jeth and Sierra is too much, too fast, and it has nothing realistic to trigger it, which coincidentally also applies to her betrayal of him and to their rapprochement.

There are other things which make zero sense. There's a form of legalized slavery going on here, whereby people like Hammer can control other humans by doing a bit of surgery and plugging a device into the back of the neck which renders the victim into one of two equally undesirable states: a complete drone, or a semi-autonomous drone. There was nothing offered to explain why such devices would be tolerated. I can see how it might come to be a punishment as an alternative to prison - a kind of work-release, but it still seemed way harsh and was all-but completely ungoverned.

There were far too many questions and far too few answers to boot. No doubt the author plans on continuing this as a series, but I do not plan on accompanying her. Things like the Belgrave quadrant itself, the movement of entire ships from one place to another with no travel in between, and the precisely bored holes through the Donerail were not explained. Instead they were glossed over, which was really dissatisfying. In short I can't recommend a novel that makes as many mistakes as this one does.

Before I Die by Jenny Downham

Title: Before I Die
Author: Jenny Downham
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Tessa dies at the end. This novel isn't about whether she'll survive, but about what she does before she's no more. And I didn't find anything in it to like. Except maybe the cover! Yeah, I know I typically pan the cover (on those rare occasions when I have anything at all to say about it) because covers are rarely the work of the author, and they rarely have anything to do with the content of the novel, but in this case, surprisingly, the cover actually was appropriate.

I could see the model being Tess. You couldn't really see her hair, but it looked like it might be missing. Her face is in sharp relief against the out-of-focus background and it looks haunted and in pain. It's brilliant. That's obviously why Big Publishing$trade; decided to change it for one that has a fluffy dandelions on it, bless their little haute couture cotton socks.

Before I Die was Jenny Downham's debut novel. I read and really enjoyed You Against Me by this author (it was one of the very first books I reviewed on this blog), so I was curious to compare that with something else of hers, especially since it deals with a similar theme to two other novels I've reviewed recently: Virgin by Radhika Sanghani, and Unintentional Virgin by A J Bennett.

This novel is written in first person PoV which makes zero sense. The writer is dead. There is no mention of her keeping a journal, much less recording observations of her daily life down to exact conversations and, for example, every single thing she experienced while under the influence of mushrooms.

This was the first thing which turned me off of this novel, because it was so glaringly and patently fake from the outset. I could never believe it. Was I expected, for example, to accept that even when she was rotting in her bed, dying, incapable of moving or even speaking, that she was typing this out on her computer keyboard? I mean seriously, step back for once, and look at this from outside that cozy little make-believe box, and honestly see just how pathetic and absurd this truly is.

I know writers labor under the sad delusion that they're making it more immediate and more accessible when they put you right up there front and center, in the main character's shoes, but that doesn't work on me, especially when the character is supposed to die! It's a ridiculous conceit and it simply makes me laugh because it's so ludicrous, which I'm sure is the last emotion Downham wanted a reader to feel. Worse than that, this 1PoV approach makes it "all about me all the time", and that's the very last perspective to present for a character who was profoundly selfish and thoughtless to begin with.

Yes, Tessa, I'm talking about you. Tessa's desire to lose her virginity at least has some sort of rationale. Unlike the other two novels where it's the central theme, in this one it's only a small part of a larger picture. Tessa is dying of cancer. She's created a list of ten things (which expands to more) to do before she dies, and this is number one.

I found myself wondering why a young girl would make this particular item number one, but I found myself wondering more what the other things were. They turned out to be rather disappointing and she evidenced little interest and less effort in pursuing them, preferring instead to sit around either moping or lost in regretful thoughts that she wasn't going to get them done. Excuse me? How about getting off your idle ass and doing them instead of sitting around bemoaning your hopelessness? In the end she simply gave up on the list, revealing how fake and manufactured it had been all along.

One of the items was to try drugs, another was to break the law. I can see how a person in her position would not care too much about her future. Even if she died from a drug overdose, she wouldn't be losing very much, but if she broke the law and was imprisoned, that would make her last days rather stunted, wouldn't it? There seems to be less thought in the list than there does an author's need to be controversial and maybe win a book medal for it.

Indeed, a repeated theme in the novel was Tessa experiencing something she's never noticed before, and I could only think how pathetic, and limited, and blinkered she must have been to have gone through life without ever noticing how a tree trunk feels, how grass feels between your toes, how beautiful and fragile birds are. Seriously, did you never open your eyes once for your first twelve years, Tessa, because you've left it way too late if you're just now opening them.

Or does Downham think there's anything new in what she's writing here - something no one else but she has ever thought of or seen? Yes, that's how you win Newberry medals, by treating your readers like they're blind and clueless, but but I got news for writers like this: I do the things Tessa does, and I do them every day. It's wonderful, and it's not some magical secret only the dying can know. It's not as revelatory as Downham has evidently deluded herself into swallowing. She's not the first person ever to think about these things, much less to notice them. All anyone need do is open their eyes to what's around them.

Tessa's law-breaking venture turned out to be shoplifting, for which she got caught, but she was let go with a warning. She broke the law again later, taking her dad's car (without having a license to drive) to the beach where she went as a child. This a girl who claims she wants to take a train ride as part of her list, but instead she effectively steals her dad's car, inconveniencing and worrying the only person who truly cares about her and is actually busting his ass trying to help her. Stupid much, Tessa? The drugs came in the form of mushrooms collected by her neighbor, Adam, a young guy who's taking care of his mother, a woman who was debilitated by the loss of her husband in an accident. Keep her in mind for later and an astounding exhibition of pure selfishness on Tessa's part.

Adam is the trope male love interest, of course, so naturally he has a motorbike and leather jacket. Barf. Why not just name Tessa 'Eve' and have done with it? Her bucket list could be the temptation, and her death, the expulsion from Eden. Paradise Upchucked. It was a bit sad that even in a novel such as this, trope guy has to put in an appearance. Girls are useless without them, aren't they - at least, that's the vision of far too many YA authors, all of them female themselves, strangely enough. Thus is Tessa's family sold out for a stranger on the shore.

Then Tessa isn't a likable person. Not at all. She's selfish and manipulative. She's combative and mean. She uses and abuses people. She cares not a whit for the inconvenience or feelings of others, because it's all Tess all the time and nothing and no one else matters. There are no redeeming features in this character, no matter how much you think you can justify it by shamelessly brandishing the C card in front of your readers. Tess is an angry and resentful teenager who sees no reason to give life a break when it gave her none and who acts out accordingly and consequences be damned. Why should she care when it's others who must pay for her free ride?

Look at it this way: If this novel had been exactly the same, except that Tessa had not had cancer, but had died instead at the end in an accident, or from a drug overdose or by violence, would this novel have got anywhere near the tear-stained reviews it has? I submit that it most certainly would not, and that tells you all you need to know about it. Instead of being praised and cried over, she would have been denounced, and loudly.

Her problem really isn't so much that she's dying, it's that she doesn't know exactly how long she has. Even condemned prisoners know when their last day will be. Tessa doesn't and in this regard she's no different from a person who's lived to a ripe old age. They know death is right around a corner, they just don't know precisely around which corner it awaits them. We're actually all in that boat, but while most of us have hope of a long life before it happens, too many of us do not.

Tessa has the grave disadvantage of not having lived a long life before her number comes up, which makes me question her sorry habit of wasting so many of her days wallowing. Sadly, even when she wises up to this and decides to take the reins, she takes them only half-heartedly, and it by no means makes her a better person. All her relationships, particularly with her dad and her best friend Zoey, are roller-coaster, one day loving them, the next fighting them resentfully. He behavior towards her father is monstrous and inexcusable.

This is the guy who is taking care of her, as he has done for the last four years. He quit his job to do this (no explanation as to how the hell he manages to go for four years out of work and yet the family isn't even remotely in dire financial straits). Tessa's mom abandoned her when Tessa got sick, and now barely is involved in her life at all. Her mother is a loser and a useless appendage at best, and yet Tessa treats her with far more respect and regard than ever she gives her father. Tessa is, quite simply, a jerk.

So Tessa created this bucket list, but she seems less interested in doing things which are truly meaningful than she is in checking things off the list just for the sake of it, and just for shock value. Utility or real value doesn't enter into it. She shares this situation with Karma in Unintentional Virgin a little bit. Karma's list was fake, culled from the Internet, so she had as little invested in it as Tessa seems to.

When I had a good idea of how I was going to rate this, I read a bunch of reviews, pos and neg, just to see if I missed anything worth talking about, and I really had not, but I did notice one short review which berated this novel for being all about sex. I don't know which novel that reviewer read, but it was not this one! The "deflowering" occurs around page 24, and then there isn't another real visitation with sex for two hundred pages. Clearly that reviewer was delusional. If you're going to pan this, fine, but at least pan it for its failures, not for your own sheltered and prudish views.

The first sex episode was when Tessa and Zoey picked up two guys at random at a club, went back to their place and had sex. It wasn't anything at all, and it wasn't earth-moving, and it was dealt with simply and quickly and then it was over. Zoey continued to see her guy, but Tessa did not. Zoey became pregnant. This was nothing but pure and simple amateurish 'trite in the raw'. Oh, thinks newbie author, I'm killing off the main protag, therefore I should bring in a new baby and win a Newberry. Barf.

A classic example of how bad Tessa is - how bad this novel is - is when she gets a nose-bleed right before she's supposed to go on a date with Adam. Her mother is there that night, and is completely and utterly useless, but Tessa herself is also useless. Neither of them has any idea how to deal with the nose-bleed - and this includes the patient who has been touted to us hitherto as the expert on all things medical - because she has to be.

Never once do they think of calling an ambulance. In normal circumstances that would be entirely inappropriate, but here it would be the sensible thing to do. But why be sensible here when the rest of this novel isn't? Despite all of her thoughts being focused on Adam and on her date with him that night, never once does selfish Tessa think of calling or texting him and putting off the date, or of asking him to drive them to the hospital!

When he shows up at the door for his date, and does offer to drive them, this guy whom she supposedly loves is pushed away and turned out. And so much does he love Tessa that he never shows up at the hospital. Instead, this dickhead lards up Tessa's route home with banners bearing her name. This is not how you write realistic fiction, this is how you sell out your integrity to win a medal to get a movie made. This part made me truly sick and flushed away everything this author was purportedly trying to do here. This is when I honestly rated this novel warty.

When I decided to ditch it unfinished was the very next chapter, where Tessa demands from her father that Adam move in with her. Fuck Adam's mother who needs him, this is Tessa and her needs supersede anyone else's because she's the big T with the big C. Tessa herself says, "Every night he goes home to keep his mother safe. He sleeps just metres away from me...." That's how appallingly selfish she is. She already has him nearly all the time, and he lives literally next door, but that can't possibly be enough for Princess Tessa. When she can't get what she wants, she rushes off upstairs slamming doors like the total child that she is.

That was it for me. Check please I'm outta here. This novel was genital warty. I don't care what happens in the last 100 pages. You should ditch it too, and go read You Against Me instead. That's something I never would have done had I read this first.

The Tenth Chamber by Glenn Cooper

Title: The Tenth Chamber
Author: Glenn Cooper
Publisher: Lascaux media (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.

This was yet another novel with a prologue which I skipped as usual. If it's worth reading, it's worth putting in the first chapter! If it's not in the first chapter or beyond, I'm not going to waste my time reading it. The novel begins with a fire in an abbey in France during which a firefighter discovers a codex (ancient book) hidden in a wall space. The front page inside the cover claims that its writer is Barthomieu, who is 220 years old at the time of writing. Why the writer would mention this is a mystery. He's supposed to be a humble monk. The codex is lavishly illustrated, as they say, but the drawings appear to mimic those found in cave art from the paleolithic, rather than representative of the age in which they were drawn in the codex.

Frankly this novel didn't stir my interest until chapter four wherein we began learning about this mysterious codex. At that point I felt I could quite happily have skipped the first three chapters without missing anything since they really told me nothing. The codex contains a map which a book restorer, Hugo, and an archaeologist acquaintance (and amateur playboy), Luc, follow. It takes them along a cliff face, to the discovery of the very cave to which the map was intended to lead. Inside, the cave is adorned with scores of images in a vein similar to those found in the prehistoric caves at Altamira and Lascaux.

But it appears that someone else is interested - someone who has far fewer scruples than do Hugo and Luc, and the body count begins to mount. As the cave is opened to scientific investigation, people start turning up dead, and two locals, who creep their way into the cave team's camp are to me, highly suspicious, although, of course, no one suspects them. This was the first problem, It was obvious these people were bad guys. No mystery at all here. The only mystery which remained was why was there such an interest in the cave? That turned out to be so mundane that it was frankly laughable.

I have to say that about 40% in, I was having serious doubts about wanting to continue reading this. Although the novel is technically well-written, there was a heck of a lot of extraneous detail (for me anyway). I wanted to get on with the exploration of the cavern, and the deciphering of the codex (which was written in code rather like the Voynich codex).

I certainly didn't want to be dallying and dithering, and especially not with an old love interest of Luc's, which bored the pants off me. He was not an appealing person, so there was nothing to attract me to him as a main protagonist. His love interest wasn't of interest at all - not to me, and it was so obvious where this was going that there was no mystery there either.

Unless she turned out to be the villain, she had nothing to recommend her other than that she was Luc's ex, which is frankly a lousy excuse for her to be in this novel. Oh, she did have one other trait: she was a damsel in distress which turned me right off pursuing this story any further.

Luc's behavior towards her bordered on stalking and assumed ownership of her, which also turned me off this story, and made me wish he was the one being pushed over a cliff. When he 'turned around' and started posing as the hero of the story, solving the mystery and rescuing the 'fair maiden', I was not the least bit interested.

The title of the novel is misleading. It implies that there's something magical or evil about the tenth chamber in the cavern, and there really isn't. It did relate to something important to the story, but that was completely insufficient to justify its dramatic use as a title.

The more I read, the more I found myself skipping a paragraph here and there (mostly there) to begin with, then I skipped with increasing frequency. There were alternating chapters which went back to the time the codex was written, and other chapters which went back to the time the cave paintings were made, and after reading one of each of these, I found them so boring that I avoided all the others.

Obviously, it's no leap from that to asking myself why I was reading this at all, and that's when I quit. I didn't care about the ending or any of the characters. The proposition that "villains" who had supposedly been at their game for centuries hiding in the shadows, never exposing themselves, had suddenly become so blindly stupid that they exposed everything within a few dumb days by killing as many people as they could for no reason whatsoever was risible. Some people may find entertainment here in counting the number of clichés and tropes in this story, but for me, I lost all interest in it. I cannot recommend this.

Unintentional Virgin by A J Bennett

Unintentional Virgin by A J Bennett

Title: Unintentional Virgin
Author: A J Bennett
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
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.

Unintentional Virgin by A J Bennett
Erratum:
p61 "Would you mind giving taking my phone number?" Either 'giving' or 'taking' has to go!
p65 "...retuning safely..." should be "...returning safely..."

This novel deals with a similar theme to two other novels I've reviewed or am about to review: Virgin by Radhika Sanghani, and Before I Die by Jenny Downham. The latter of these two is the closest one to this since they both have a time-line. I would never compare this with the former since that wasn't even close to being in the same league, although this one isn't free from issues either.

I loved the author's dedication:

To anyone willing to give a new author a chance. Thank you!

That's a sentiment I can get with whole-heartedly. I also liked the cover. I don't normally talk about covers because authors typically have nothing to do with them, but this one struck me as really sexy, though I can't really say why. Then that's the best kind of sexy, right?!

Despite the potentially disastrous subject matter, I got a good vibe off this from the start and entered it with a positive feeling. Unfortunately that wasn't to last. As I progressed through it, my initial excitement at reading this turned to concern, and then dismay, and finally to rejection.

Initially, I found it was amusing, with interesting characters, and it was - in general terms - technically well written. There was an odd instance of strange here and there. For example, I read on page 32: "Jax put the truck into reverse and headed for his apartment" which makes it sound like he drove the whole way backwards! That, I'm sure, was not what the author intended, but for me it was a source of unintentional amusement from the Unintentional Virgin.

I liked that this novel did not employ first person PoV which is way-the-hell too common in YA novels written by female authors for some inscrutable reason. Instead it's in third person, but it's also told alternately from the PoV of each of the two main characters. So far so good.

There was one more thing about this novel which impressed me, and that was that it was completely color-blind. There were times I felt this could be an African-American couple and other times when I felt it could be a white couple, or a mix of the two, and it really did not matter to anything in the story. Yes, I know the cover rather declares Karma's hue, and whether either of them is white or black or somewhere in between makes no difference on the bottom line, but I felt it was really refreshing to have a novel like this. I loved that.

Karma Points (yes it's her real name!) is a twenty year-old who still lives with her father - a father who apparently separated from his wife when he either decided he was gay, or when he quit fighting a conviction he'd had all along. His "boy toy" (Karma's description), Matt, is living with them, so she has "two dads". Karma is pursuing a second year at community college while awaiting acceptance at one of the universities to which she's applied. Until then, it's her aim to mooch off her father for as long as she can get away with it, but she's very disinclined to contribute anything in return.

Her mother, Isabella, is a deadbeat mom and a royal bitch who is far more of a caricature than a character. I didn't like her - not only for her personality, but also because she was far too cartoonish to be a real character, and her change of heart at the end of the novel was simply ridiculous and completely unbelievable. She's an ex-lingerie model who almost never contacts her daughter or shows up for her birthdays, but who got to name her girl. She should have either been left out of the novel completely or have been brought into it a bit more - and with a lot more subtlety.

I like Karma's friend Eva (but then I tend to prefer the side-kick to the hero). Although she really plays little part in the novel, she shows up in chapter two wearing a "Bring back Firefly" T-shirt. She's also funny. Unfortunately, once she discovers that Karma is a virgin, she has the clueless idea that they should go out that very night and 'fix it' like signifies something in Karma that's broken. I did not appreciate that. Karma isn't broken - at least not because of her virginity. On the contrary, she's whole-some. At least she begins that way.

This is where Virgin went wrong; at this point I was dearly hoping it wouldn't go downhill like that one had, but I was not to be granted that wish. This novel had a lot of charm and far more of a winning plot than did Virgin, but it was let down by several things.

Karma and Eva head out to a dance club, and there Karma meets up with a guy named Jax who subs at the bar as a bouncer and bartender. She tells him she wants a one-night stand, and he's certainly on-board with that. Unfortunately, he shows no concerns about sexual diseases, which would bother the hell out of me, were I either one of these two people. I felt that was a misstep. Young people do make stupid mistakes, but the fact that it wasn't even brought up as an issue or possibility is what bothered me.

Just as bad: Karma rides off with this complete stranger in his truck, and doesn't think for a second that he might be dangerous, until they arrive at his apartment. Only then does she start thinking of the worst, but she goes inside with him anyway, and pretty soon they're getting hot and heavy on his bed. Here arose another oddity, but what arose was not his penis, it was her breasts! Nipples swell, not breasts! Not unless Karma became miraculously pregnant all of a sudden. You can run your hand over the swell of her breasts, but you can't have them actually swell up in your hands! If they did, it certainly wouldn't be swell!

During their passionate foreplay, it's revealed that she's a virgin and Jax freezes - he refuses to deal. It doesn't feel right to him for her to lose it like this - not that it's actually his business, but he has the same right to back out that she does, and he takes it. When she asks to go home, telling him that she's sure she'll find someone who'll meet her request, he offers her a deal: if she agrees to see him platonically for three weeks, then he will do as she wishes at the end of it. She agrees, and he drives her home.

I did find it strange that she went to bed and went to sleep that night without a thought of masturbation. I found that rather hard to believe for as hot and bothered as she'd been for Jax earlier, but then YA writers are really and strangely shy of writing about masturbation for some reason, aren't they?

Jax calls her the next day for a date, and he insists that she bring along her bucket list. This is a list she lied she had, of things she wanted to do. Number one was 'losing her V-card', of course, but the rest she had hastily cobbled-together from lists she found online. Jax takes it from her and starts insisting that, during their three weeks together, they start doing stuff on it - commencing with giving blood! Now she's for it. She hates needles. She never checked the list before she pursued the pretence that it was hers! God knows what else is on that list....

I think that's plenty of spoilers. So this novel started out really interesting me, but it went off the rails too many times for me to be able to come on-board with it. The first problem was with the two main characters. I really liked Karma to begin with. I felt that she was someone I would like to meet and get to know, despite her being a bit juvenile, irresponsible, and bratty, but over time she started to wear on me with her endless negative and dumb thoughts.

I did like that the author had made her something other than a supermodel who for utterly incredible reasons thought herself plain. All-too-many YA authors do this and it's such a pathetic trope. Karma did have reason to be down on herself, but her reasons were not sufficient to overpower her intelligence to such a great extent, assuming she actually had what we're told she had in the brains department.

It really bothered me, as well, that this supposed intelligence didn't seem to permeate into her life or behavior - or thoughts. She had no ambition, no plan for her future, no interests and only one friend, and she had a really poor self image for no good reason. Yes her mother had been down on her, but her mother had not been a part of her regular family life for the last sixteen years. It doesn't make sense that some random disparaging comments infrequently dispensed, would bring Karma down to such depths.

I also didn't buy, given how Jax described her, that she couldn't find anyone with whom to go to bed. That was a conceit which simply didn't work. If she'd had some disfiguring or awkward feature, or some mental issue or disability which accounted for this, it would have made sense, but for her to be 20 and be interested in being sexual and to be the person she was, and still have found no success, took way too much believing.

If she'd been a guy, it would have had more credence, but a young woman like her - no! It's easy to get sex if you're a girl even if you aren't a supermodel. You can be far from that kind of look and still find a guy who will do it. Whether it's wise, or whether you find the right guy to do it is another issue, but in her case, she really didn't care.

One of my biggest problems with this novel was the repeated talk of "electricity" and pounding pulses and all that passionate stuff. Once in a while I think it's fine, but for me it was excessive in this novel. Maybe some female readers might like that. I don't. I honestly didn't think that this novel needed it, either. It could have done very well with far less. It just became irritating, and in the end, it just wasn't credible because of this endless repetition. It read more like a parody because of this.

There's also an underlying issue here which is what bothered me the most: all that physical lust detracted abominably from what should have been a striking romance. The romance could have stood alone. With some re-writing, it had the strength. It had the legs. Yes, lust is part of a romance, but there's no romance in lust alone. That's not all there is; far from it. This repeated referencing of heat and passion smothered the actual love story far too much for my taste.

For example, on page 64, we read, "Jax wanted to wrap her in his arms and show her just how incredible she was, but instead he pulled back onto the road...." Rightly or wrongly, but because of the way this novel was written, the impression I had here was that he thought he could show her how incredible he was by sating his ever-present lust upon her. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I am the reader, and that is the impression I was left with.

I found myself wondering exactly how his having sex with her would show her how incredible she was since his desire was all about him - all about his pleasure and his satisfaction, and his urgent need. None of it was about her. Would his lying on top of her, penetrating her, dominating or controlling her in this way really show her that she was incredible, or merely show her that she was, on the bottom line, simply an object of his lust?

I felt that it needed a lot more here than it gave me, and all it seemed willing to give was the carnal. Jax's every thought about her is sex. With very few exceptions, he never thinks what good company she is. He never thinks how interesting she is. He never thinks of how much fun she is or how sweet she is. While we read too frequently of the physical here, we get far too little of the mental, and the real romance is the mental, not the physical. I find it as sad as it's disturbing that far too many YA authors simply don't get this. It's the mind that's the major sex organ, not the body. I wanted this novel to recognize that, and while it commendably did in small ways, those things were completely overpowered by the physical, like garish graffiti slathered all over a beautiful new building. That didn't appeal to me at all.

In a classic example of this, Jax shows up at her house for her birthday (she turns twenty a few days after meeting him), and he is so focused on her body that he has to "force his eyes back to her face". That was just wrong for me, and I felt it was wrong for the tone which this novel was seemed like it was trying to set. But enough said.

What really took this right off the rails for me was the ridiculous ending. Here I completely lost all affection for Karma, who turned into a total jerk. Yes, maybe she thought she had a good reason for what she did, but no, she went about it in the most cruel and abusive manner possible. She had the opportunity to talk to her partner beforehand and explain her thinking. She failed. Talking about things like this is one sign of a really true and mature relationship, and she betrayed all of that.

This was a complete rejection of everything she supposedly stood for, including being a caring and intelligent human being. Instead, it turned her into the female version of the jerk who stood her up at the prom. I didn't get how she could behave in such a despicable manner. It seemed both unnecessary and stupid.

Character betrayal is one thing I will not tolerate. You can't lead your reader on to believe your character is a certain kind of person, and then suddenly have him or her behave completely out of the character which you've established. It's even less acceptable when it's done for invalid reasons, and especially so when it's done without a hint of foreshadowing to rationalize it as something that character might do. It's bad writing, period. For these and the other reasons I've outlined, I cannot recommend this novel in good conscience.

Since this blog is about writing, I have a writing issue to raise. These aren't comments on the author's competence or ability, though. These are not mistakes, they're purely matters of preference - of how we writers actually say what we want to convey to the reader. I thought it would be fun to use a couple of examples here which struck me as interesting.

Here's how the author worded two small portions of the novel:

Jax was surprised at how at ease he was in her company.
...pressing her leg firmer against his...

I would have written both of these differently. That doesn't mean mine is right and the original is wrong. There's no right and wrong here, there's just preference, and how you feel about how what you write: does it flow well? How is it going to feel to your reader? Does it conform to what you've so far revealed about your character?

For me, anal as I am, I don't like the repeated use of 'at' in the first sample. In place of that, I would have written: "Jax was surprised at how at easy it was to be in her company" or something along those lines. For the second example, I didn't like the use of 'firmer'. It just seemed odd to me. I would have written "...pressing her leg more firmly against his...." Maybe that seems odd to everyone but me?! Is it better? It's your call. You're the one who's reading it. You're the one who writes it. You can write it however you want. I just like to keep in mind that there are many ways to write the same thing. How would you have written these?

The Imaginary Life by Mara Torres

Title: The Imaginary Life
Author: Mara Torres
Publisher: Grupo Planeta
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.

Well, I'm done with Big July, publishing two reviews a day, every day, without fail. What a stressor that was, but I did it! It cleared a lot of my backlog, too, but not all of it, so I'm going to post a few extra reviews this month, too, especially if they're ebooks. Here comes one of those.

This novel is also available in Spanish as La Vida Imaginaria.

Not to be confused with An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, this is another first person PoV novel which is written by a Spanish journalist and TV personality. I've picked up so many of these 1PoVs in bookstores and libraries, and even when the blurb looks interesting I usually put the thing back on the shelf after I've skimmed the first page and discovered it's a "me, me, ME, all the time" type of novel, but you don't get that choice when it's an audio book or an ebook. You can't skim those to get a feel for the writing, and then put it back if it turns you off.

This one turned me off: not only was it first person voice, it was first person wallowing. Fortunata "Nata" Fortuna has split up with her boyfriend, because he thinks their relationship has changed in unfortunate ways and he wants space for them to miss each other. Apparently that doesn't happen for him; then six months have gone by without a word from him. She's not dealing - unless you define dealing as "wallowing in her misery".

She's doing nothing to get on with life. She's thinking of him constantly, imagining she can fly to his apartment and slip through his window to watch him. She writes her sad, despairing thoughts about him on her computer. She apparently has no support network - either that or the network disintegrated as a result of soaking for far too long in her caustic neediness. She watches an old video of him and her at the beach. She lets her fridge run out of food and drink, yet she buys clothes. She smokes. Yuk. Maybe that's why he left? No one in their right mind wants to date an ashtray. There isn't even any humor to lighten this sodden load of worn-out dirty laundry.

Nata isn't an appealing person at all. I'm not at any loss to see why Alberto left her. I was (at only a fifth of the way through this) at a complete loss to understand why I should even care about her, much less be interested in reading her story. She fails the Bechdel-Wallace test in spades on almost every page since she's all guys all the time, which makes her completely uninteresting. She barely has a thought that's not about a guy and the ones she has about guys offer nothing new or engaging to the reader. Who would want to read about such a vacuous, shallow, and needy person like Nata? Not me.

The format of the novel is not conducive to a comfortable read, either. There are hugely long paragraphs - paragraphs that are longer than some entire chapters (some of which are only two or three sentences) - like the paragraph which begins on page 65 and doesn't break until page 68....

I reached roughly the half-way point (chapter five of part two) and couldn't stand to read any more of this wail-a-thon. I found nothing of interest in it and nothing to recommend. It's a life I certainly don't want to imagine, much less read about.

The Skin I'm In by Sharon G Flake

Title: The Skin I'm In
Author: Sharon G Flake
Publisher: Hyperion
Rating: WARTY!

This novel had been on my low-level radar for a while, but I'd never got around to picking up a copy. I was finally motivated to pursue it more seriously after listening to Pinned by the same author. I liked half of Pinned - the half relating the girl's story. The boy's story made me feel irritated, so I was hoping for less irritation and more enjoyment out of this, which is in some ways a similar story.

With Flake trying to imitate the speech patterns of the under-educated, it's hard to tell if she intended to write "...I should of known..." in place of "I should have known..." but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. It was a little harder when she wrote "...Geneal Electric..." in place of "...General Electric...". I can see how this kind of thing would be on the money if it were enclosed in quotes as speech typically is, but when it's written out as part of a first person narration, it doesn't immediately strike one as accurate, especially when other parts of the narration are grammatically correct, such as when she writes, on the same page (13) as that first one: "Caleb and I". Go figure!

This story is about Maleeka, a student at McClenton middle School, and her trials and tribulations, not least of which is that she's the butt of racist comments from people of her own race simply because she's blacker than they are! She's also bullied relentlessly by Charlese, a spoiled brat of a girl who's in serious need of a major ass-kicking. Oh, did I say that out loud? No, I meant that she's in serious need of a detention if not an expulsion.

Maleeka is a very smart girl who had the chance to go to a better school, but she 'chose' this one by her refusal to communicate when she 'interviewed' at the other school. Now she has all this to put up with. This kind of bullying and racism bothers me. It's not like this novel is set in the fifties or something; it was published in 1998. I sincerely hope there are no schools like this one, but I fear there might be. What bothers me is not that the bullying takes place per se (there are always bullies of one stripe or another), but that no one steps up to rein it in or to punish the perps. It's like the teachers are either blind or simply don't care. I don't know whether to be incredulous because it's so unrealistic, or because it actually is realistic.

The cover for this novel is yet another in a long line of examples of cover illustrators failing to read the novel. The cover image doesn't represent how Maleeka is described in the text. This is the same problem with the other novel that I read by this author. The lesson, once again here, is to stay away from Big Publishing™ if you want to get a book cover that's at all relevant to what you wrote.

Some of Flake's writing is a bit dumb. At one point, she uses 'cocoa' to describe the appearance of Maleeka's skin (which actually doesn't strike me as being as dark as she suggests Maleeka is elsewhere in the text, but that's not the problem). The problem is how many more comparisons of dark skin and eyes with food and beverages must we endure, and is it better or worse if that comparison comes from a writer who shares that hue?

The other instance which struck me is when Maleeka describes the school cafeteria. Food is routinely bad in schools in YA novels, but Flake takes it to a new level. Because Charlese gives some sass to the servers, she gets a burger with "something indescribable" on the bun, and it's described as resembling something that used to be alive. What the heck is burger meat? Chopped liver?!! This is what happens when a writer is so focused on conveying a cameo that they become blinded to the big picture.

I can't recommend this novel.

Wither by Lauren DeStefano