Unbreakable by WC Bauers

Title: Unbreakable
Author: WC Bauers
Publisher: Macmillan under its 'Tor' disguise
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 chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This is book one in the inevitable series, because no one can write a YA stand-alone novel any more. It hits pretty much every trope there is in YA sci-fi. This one even has the word 'Chronicles' as a part of the series title! Any series with 'Chronicles' in the title is more-than-likely to be a disaster. The only word worse than 'chronicles' for a series is 'Cycle'. This is 'The Chronicles of Promise Paen'. That looks like 'Promise Pain' which is just dumb. The author might have chosen a more distinctive title, especially since there are some nine pages of books titled "Unbreakable" or something similar on BN.

Young Promise sees, from afar, her father shot by aliens, and though she's armed, she never tries to shoot them in return. Even after the aliens leave, she doesn't go down to her father to see if he might be still alive. That's the kind of callous person she is, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she joins the military. OTOH, if she is so cowardly, whence the impetus to join the military?

This attempt at a prologue in chapter one made no sense. The weird thing is that there actually is a prologue, too, which I skipped. I skip all prologues and I've never miss a single one of them. If the author doesn't think it's important enough to put right there in chapter one (or later), then why should I think it's worth my time to read it? The funny thing is that chapter one is itself a prologue! It actually begins, "Six years earlier..."! I laughed at that. The first half-dozen chapters essentially convey nothing of value, and the first one is nothing more than a big 'show' up front instead of a subtle 'tell' included later in the story. Indeed, you could actually begin reading this novel at chapter seven and not really miss anything of real utility.

This novel is sci-fi, set in some moderately distant future when interstellar travel is supposedly and routinely possible - yet Promise's father is a farmer. He works his butt off, yet they have robots. Of course, this is sci-fi, so the author can’t possibly call them robots. They have to be called 'mechs' because that sounds way cooler. There is something fundamentally flawed in this scenario, but it worked for Star Wars, so why wouldn’t the same re-cycled idea work here, too? It’s easier than thinking-up something original, and this novel has very little originality. It's essentially David Weber fanfic with the standard trope of an orphaned child doing good. The child is named Promise instead of the Mary Sue that she really is.

A Star Wars motif is rife in this story: they have a republic which spans multiple planets ruled over by a senate. Yep. Nothing original here at all, and no thought whatsoever given to how dumb is the idea of trying to have a republic of planets and a senate to rule them! This kind of thing completely ignores how insanely MASSIVE space is, and how tiny and insignificant are the stars which sparsely dot it. I see this in way too many sci-fi novels. You can’t rule space. It makes no sense at all, yet we get story after story which makes this claim while simultaneously offering nothing to back it up.

Like I said, we’re hitting all the tropes here - youthful orphan, sci-fi buzz-words, unit pulled out of training because of a "crisis in the rim". That's like "trouble at mill", and Promise's toon has to go because of trouble stirred-up by privateers. Yep, they’re not platoons because that would be too normal; here they're toons, which I laughed at every time I read it. I have to add that I'm not convinced that the author understands the distinction between pirates and privateers. I love sci-fi when it’s done well, but when all you get from it is a pirate story that just happens to be set in the future, then it's as depressing as it is boring.

Right now in this day and age, we have remotely-operated flying drones which can see activity on the ground and even deliver death. Why would they need to send out a 'toon of rookies', especially since this is set in an unspecified future time? The complaint running through this story (at least the part which I read, is that there isn't enough MAN-power to police space, Well duhh! Hello? There never will be! But when you can build robots and drones, then why is this even an issue? It makes no sense.

We're told that for once, in the future, we do have robots - sorry! Mechs! - but apparently the mechs are really dumb. It makes no sense. Of course, if it’s all done by robots, then the human element is either reduced or gone, and for some reason authors really have trouble telling stories with no humans in them.

It’s nonsensical to have space pirates. The distances are almost unimaginably massive and the potential rewards are completely insignificant compared with the prohibitive costs when factoring in the distances and time involved. Even a simple flight into orbit from Earth costs millions of dollars. How are you going to make a living out of piracy in the vast emptiness of space? I have yet to see a sci-fi story that even tries to make sense of this.

The author's grandfather was in the US navy, and doubtlessly he was influenced by that, but he was apparently most heavily influenced by sci-fi author David Weber who did this same thing - and initially did it a lot better. I was a fan of Weber's Honor Harrington series for about five books; then it became so dull and tedious that I couldn't stand to read any more of it. The author had become completely obsessed with discussing naval military strategy (a 2D glue-trap which absolutely does not apply in 3D space) and obscure political systems, that he forgot that he was supposed to be actually telling a story!

Just like in David Weber's series, in this novel there's a bureau of medicine named BUMED, and a bureau of personnel named BUPERS both of which made me laugh even more than I'd been chortling already. The spacecraft are named, and classed and treated like ocean-going sail ships. There are 'battleships' and 'corvettes', and there's endless military pomp and bullshit on every other page. We no longer have battleships in our time because they are obsolete. Why would they build them in space when they could be completely destroyed by a drone which costs a thousandth as much and needs no crew? Every few pages I found something new (which really wasn't) to turn me off this novel, and I was getting ready to DNF it before I was 20% in.

This trouble at mill is on Promise's own planet of Montana of course - yep, named after an American state, because why not? We're told that the planet is poor, yet a page or two later we’re told that it has a respectable gross product and little poverty! Huh? So the short version is that I got to just over a quarter the way through this, saw what an insane little Mary Sue this Promise character really was, choked repeatedly on the endless David Weber style bureaucratic bullshit, and finally said, "Enough already, I deserve better than this!" I can not recommend this novel, not even a little bit.

Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor by Julie Anne Grasso

Title: Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor
Author: Julie Anne Grasso
Publisher: Julie Anne Grasso
Rating: WORTHY!

This is an hilarious middle-grade novel which starts out with gusto and a great sense of humor. Frankie is a wannabe detective. Yes, he's only 10 3/4 years old, but hey - that three-quarters is crucial! His friend and cousin Kat - who even Frankie thinks is kinda cool - has disappeared. She was last seen at Enderby Manor. Frankie's detective dad is busy on a case. Can Frankie himself find his missing cousin?

This is beautifully written, completely captivating, and gorgeously depicted chapter book, with a neat little world created for Frankie and for the weird and wonderful people he meets. He pursues his detective occupation with dedication and smarts. He doesn’t get everything right first time, but he never gives up, keeps his grey-matter steaming with thought, and he slowly but surely zeroes in on the truth - which is rather more mysterious than mysteries usually are.

When I say 'slowly, but surely', that doesn't mean that the story is slow. No - it moves at a cracking pace, with something new popping up every page for Frankie to assess and deal with. I loved this story - which at first (judged by certain words which cropped up, such as 'tyres' for 'tires', 'dosh' for 'money', for example) I thought was British, but it’s actually Australian - another good reason to read it. It's not YASSITU (yet another story set in the USA)! It has a sense of humor, a warm and fresh playfulness, and a sterling protagonist in Frankie. I recommend it.

Night of the Purple Moon by Scott Cramer

Title: Night of the Purple Moon
Author: Scott Cramer
Publisher: Train Renoir Publishing (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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

This middle-grade dystopian novel revolves around antique and ignorant superstitions that comets portend evil. It was weirdly formatted in my Adobe Digital Editions reader. The cover was stretched horizontally, rendering the image of the girl's face very wide and rounded (maybe the comet did it?!). Inside, the text ran all the way out to the edge of the page! There was no margin at all, but it was readable so, no big deal.

This is book one of the "Toucan Trilogy". Why there's this pathological obsession with trilogies these days I can explain only cynically: why go to the trouble of coming up with new creative ideas when you can milk the same one repeatedly? Having read this particular volume, I can’t say I want to read any more in the series. It wasn't technically bad, and by that I mean that there were no huge grammatical or spelling gaffs for example, but the story itself dealt with some really horrendous and rather adult events for the age range at which this is aimed. The worst problem for me was that it really wasn't entertaining.

I'm not the intended audience, of course, and there may be some kids in the intended age range who are into this, but my feeling was that it wouldn’t appeal to a whole heck of a lot of kids in this age group. The problem seems to me to be that it deals with a subject that boys are more likely to be into (rightly or wrongly), yet a lot of it appears to be told from a female perspective. That didn’t ought to condemn it, by any means. I wish things were quite different, but like I said, it seemed to me like it was working against itself because of the subject in juxtaposition with how it was written.

In keeping with middle-grade and YA fiction, main character Abby is a seventh-grader displaced from her friends and home - in this case to a small island off the coast of Maine. Unlike YA and middle-grade, she isn't orphaned - at least not when the novel begins. She's with her father, and her mother is on the way to join them, which immediately told me that mom wouldn’t make it. Whether she's being held in reserve for a tearful reunion in volume three remains to be seen for those who can stand to read that far.

The deal here is the arrival of this comet of doom, through the tail of which, the Earth will pass. Abby's dad is all excited about seeing a purple Moon. How it gets to be purple isn’t explained. At school that day, Abby's teacher, a Mr Emerson, is evidently an idiot as well as the school principal, tells his class the story of an African village which got washed away in a flood. The story involved hippos coming each day to drink from a pond. Given that hippos live in lakes and rivers, spending most of their time immersed in water, it’s highly unlikely that they would trundle overland each day to drink from some little village pond elsewhere!

Anyway, he tells that weird story because it supposedly has a connection with the comet: that if you mess with the natural order of things, then trouble will ensue. His idea of a connection is seriously warped. A massive asteroid slammed into Earth 65 million years ago and messed with the "natural order" of things. If it were not for that, we humans wouldn't even be here! Volcanoes spew millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, and have done so recently, without any problem caused from interaction with pollution. Indeed, you could argue that nothing pollutes the atmosphere worse than Earth's volcanoes, but of course, that's no excuse for humans polluting it.

Emerson's hypothesis is that Earth's atmosphere is polluted, and this pollution somehow collaborates with the dust from the comet's tail, causing unpredictable results, but in beautiful shades of lavender and purple. This completely neglects to acknowledge the fact that Earth is naturally bathed in space dust. It filters down through the atmosphere every hour of every day. Estimates vary up to 300 tonnes a day dropping onto Earth, resulting in millions of tonnes of it over time. It’s also brought to Earth via meteors which strike routinely. Space dust isn’t new or unexpected, or unnatural.

The tail of a comet is so wispy that it contains very little dust in comparison with what Earth already receives, and it’s unlikely to be contaminated with deadly viruses or bacteria because comets were never part of any eco-system. They're actually the "left-overs" from when the solar system formed and there is a literal cloud or two of them out there on the fringes of the system. Even if I let that slide, however, the comet isn’t the only issue I encountered in this novel. At one point we're told that a dead police officer's pupils are blue. Nope. All pupils are black because the pupil is the aperture in the eyeball though which light passes to the retina. It’s the iris that bears the eye's color! There were other minor issues like this which were no big deal in and of themselves, but when there's a number of them, it can become really annoying.

But let’s put all that aside and see where the story took us. The end result of this comet visitation is that all post-pubescent teens and adults die. The only people left alive are those around Abby's age and younger. How this works exactly, isn’t explained, but it revolves around biochemistry and hormones. The next morning, there's a purple haze (Jimi Hendrix anyone?!) in the atmosphere that quickly thickens to a purple fog. All adults in Abby's local little world are dead. The children quickly realize that things are bad, and that they have only themselves to rely upon. Abby, her brother Jordan, her baby sister Lisette, and the two kids from next door start trying to organize their new life. Slowly they gather other kids together, they move into a large mansion on the island, and they keep chickens and start farming.

This 'space disease' business doesn’t make a lot of sense - but of course that's not confined to this one novel. I see the same issue in other novels and in TV shows and movies like Star Wars and Star Trek. The reason we get diseases here on Earth is purely as a result of evolution. The diseases "grew up" with us (and by us I mean the human race). Over time we became immune or resistant to many of them, but it’s a battle for survival out there, and as diseases mutate, we also have to develop mutations to resist them or we perish.

Despite the resistance we’ve acquired over generations, there are still a lot of diseases which can successfully attack us. The reason this is possible is because, contrary to some religious teachings, all life does indeed share common ancestors, and a virus or bacterium which can adapt to our biology is going to be a successful one. The thing is that many such germs are so closely adapted to a specific organism's biochemistry that they're effectively sterile when they end-up in some other bio-system.

When researchers and film crews go out to study chimpanzees in their natural habitat, they have to wear surgical masks so that they do not risk transmitting airborne diseases to the apes - that's how close we are genetically. But these same researchers don’t do this when studying other mammals because even organisms which are that close to us in so many ways, are still distant enough that their diseases are not a problem for us and vice-versa.

The problem with space-born diseases is that they never grew up with us and were never given a chance to "know our biology", and adapt to it or take advantage of it. This means were are very effectively immune to them. The chances of one of them (assuming they exist) having just the right genetic make-up to be able to kill us off is so slim that it’s non-existent for all realistic purposes. The author does declare the pathogen to be a bacterium. In my very amateur opinion this offers a bit more latitude, but I think it’s still a really long shot.

That aside, the children in this novel are depicted admirably taking charge and stepping up, but this seemed to be embraced rather too maturely to be realistic. I would have expected more despair, tears, in-fighting, and cluelessness, but there was very little. That was unrealistic to me, notwithstanding the somewhat Lord of the Flies ambiance which showed itself at one point. The characters seemed too much like Mary Sues.

On the topic of maturity, there's also some mature language employed here. It’s not a huge amount, but there do appear epithets like 'hell' and 'asshole'. For me, some kids of that age actually employ those terms, so it’s not a problem from an adult perspective. From a middle-grade PoV, however, it does raise some serious questions. One is of course how inappropriate this is, so you might want to keep that in mind when assessing the suitability of this story for your own kids.

The other is more aesthetic and viewed purely from the perspective of how a writer tackles a subject. If this were a novel of street kids living in the inner city - homeless, existing on the edge, toughened and street smart - then this language might be perfectly acceptable incorporated in a novel and even expected on a routine basis, but for every-day kids of this age living on an island in the context of this dystopian novel, should language like this be used? My gut feeling was that it should not.

So, overall, I can’t honestly recommend this novel. The ratio of problematic issues to quality of writing wasn't low enough for me to come down in favor or rating it positively. Your mileage may differ!

Evolution by Kelly Carrero

Title: Evolution
Author: Kelly Carrero
Publisher: Kelly Carrero
Rating: WARTY!

This novel is one of a series of at least five, every one of which has pretty much the same cover. It's about a teen named Jade who is one of the most helpless, clueless, self-centered, unmotivated, blinkered, useless, and weak female characters I've ever encountered (and that's saying something in YA literature!). We meet her when she's leaving the hospital after a car accident the day before. She had received a gash on her head, but this morning it's completely healed leaving no scar. She knows something is wrong, or weird, or whatever. She doesn’t know what it is.

The novel is technically competent - there are no major grammatical gaffs that I noticed, or spelling screw-ups. The author knows the difference between the verbs to lie, and to lay, and uses the latter correctly (as far as I can tell!), which is always a good sign. I did encounter problems, however. One annoyance arose chapter 2, right before things start going off the rails somewhat for Jade. It's where she's talking with new BFF Chelsea (stay tuned for a bizarre snippet about her old BFF) about finding a suitable guy, and the guy in question is Ben. Jade "boosts" his appeal by saying that he's filled out, got rid of his braces, and started wearing contacts. She says nothing about the kind of person he is.

I find it just as obnoxious when guys are objectified as I do when girls are. But this is worse. Even from Jade's shamefully juvenile and blinkered perspective, she's insulting. Is he ugly in eye glasses? Is he ugly with braces? Is he ugly because he's on the slender side? More importantly, is there nothing appealing about Ben other than what’s skin deep? Not in this author's lexicon evidently.

I know it’s not any particular author's job to change the cultural brain-washing we undergo at the behest of corporate interests behind the fashion and media megabucks industries, but is it not a collective responsibility for writers to move away from trope and cliché and try to serve our readers better? Must we persist in wallowing in the cultural mires of yesteryear, adding to the foul stench of mediocrity every time we write a novel? Does no one want to take the road less traveled? I think readers deserve better, especially young adult readers.

Jade discovers (in a tedious drawn-out and frustratingly obtuse chapter three) that she's immortal. This incidence of people humming and hawing, and dancing around a topic 'til the cows come home, never giving a straight answer, is rife in this novel and it’s irritating as hell. Her boyfriend already knew, but said not a word to her until she caught fire in school (exactly how this happened went unexplained) and yet remained completely unharmed from it. Rather than let the school deal with it, Aiden essentially kidnaps her from school and takes her home with him.

This is so insane, inappropriate, and ridiculous that it defies polite commentary, yet we keep seeing these wildly inauthentic behaviors from Jade and Aiden (Jaiden) with zero consequences. No one ever calls them on it. They're never required to explain their behavior, and there is never any sanction or punishment for it.

Instead of telling jade what she needs to know on the way out of the school, or during the drive to his house, or immediately when they get there, Aiden (how misnamed is he? He offers no aid!) says nothing until she's showered and changed at his house; then he drags out the most brain-dead and fumbled attempt at an explanation ever!

Its not until his mom gets home - a mom who looks impossibly young to be his mom - that Jade begins to learn anything, but that's when she freaks out, and becomes a weepy, girl having an attack of the wilts and the vapors, and is desperately in need Aiden's tender mercies, without which she cannot even stand up on her own - sometimes literally!

That's how stupid and weak she is. Maybe she does use only one eighth of her brain, unlike the rest of us! Aiden's sole idea of calming her is to repeatedly tell her how beautiful and perfect she is. Forget about what's in her brain - let's just stop at skin depth because nothing else matters, does it? She only uses one eighth of her brain anyway so why would it be important at all? She's so shallow that this actually works on her.

The "explanation" she's given is even more ridiculous and it once more trots out that OUTRIGHT LIE that we use only one tenth of our brain - which in this case is enlarged slightly to one eighth - in short, what we get here is the same explanation as appears in the Luc Besson movie Lucy. But it's all bullshit! You use all of your brain - not every neuron every single minute of every day, but all of it routinely.

Different parts of it do different things, so unless you're majorly multi-tasking, there isn't any need for your brain to run at top speed across its breadth and width all the time. It's extremely expensive for it to do so in terms of energy use! Look at it this way: do you wear all your clothes all the time? Unless you're homeless, I doubt it. So what if someone came to you and said, look, you're only ever wearing one-eighth of your wardrobe at one time, so let's give the rest to charity, would you think that a brilliant idea (not a selfless and perhaps morally praise-worthy idea, but a really intelligent idea)? You might, until your clothes are dirty and you find your wardrobe is seriously malfunctioning in that it’s bare!

Just because you don’t wear all your clothes all the time doesn't mean you don’t need some extra ones to change into. Just because you don’t drive your car all the time doesn't mean you have no use for it. Just because the bus you ride to school or work doesn't have all the seats filled all the time doesn't mean they’re not needed or ever used. Just because the classrooms are empty between periods and overnight doesn't mean the school is unnecessary!

Kelly Carrero seems to be yet another person who needs a good education on the important topic of biological evolution, too, especially if she's going to employ that very term for a novel title. Evolution isn’t a god. It doesn't plan. It doesn't have goals. Evolution can’t honestly be personified, but if it were to be, it would be classed as an opportunist. It’s a sneak thief. It will wait for an opportunity, and then run with it. Biologists will tell you that it’s the intersection between random mutation and non-random selection resulting from environmental influences and opportunities, but even the mutation isn’t random in the sense that most people view randomness. It’s not a case where anything can happen. There are tight constraints on this 'random', held in place by the laws of chemistry.

Creationists will say that most mutations are harmful, but this is a lie. Most mutations do nothing because they occur in the massive wasteland of junk DNA, which has no effect on an organism, unless the mutation happens to fall into a dead gene and reactivate it. Those mutations which occur in a gene can be harmful, but only if they damage the gene, or turn it off - or on - inappropriately, but the genetic make-up has built-in redundancy, so even a harmful mutation to a given gene might not adversely affect the organism if a back-up gene is working fine.

Now what does any of this have to do with this novel? Nothing! We’re simply told it’s evolution at work - the next step - like evolution is a butler awaiting the master's return so the house can be locked up, and clothes put away. It’s not. The implication here is that the brain is waiting for a mutation to turn it on so we can use it all, but evolution would not support an organ as expensive as the brain if it were not being used fully already. There is no slack to be taken up, and no genetic mutation can suddenly turn it on and open the floodgates. It’s far more complex than that.

Even if such a thing could occur, how does opening up the "unused seven eighths" promote rapid healing? How does it promote a person's ability to move at super-human speed or read minds? It doesn’t. It can’t. So this is all patent nonsense. Now I have no problem with a story which posits that there are people with special powers, On the contrary, I rather enjoy them - but only if they're well-written and don’t try to come up with juvenile and nonsensical non-explanations for these magical powers. Just wave your hand at something vague and I'm good to go. Please don’t try to rationalize it scientifically, because it cannot be done and it makes the author look lazy, or stupid, or completely unimaginative!

But no author could look as bad as Jade. Or get away with what she gets away with. At school, Jade angrily punches her old BFF (I said I’d get back to her) in the face, in the cafeteria in full view of everyone, literally knocking her into the next table where Chrissy falls unconscious. Instead of taking responsibility for it, or trying to see if her friend is really okay, Jaiden flees the school and goes home - again with no consequences and with zero remorse or guilt.

Jade then takes her Rottweiler out for a walk, and when it wants to chase a cat, she literally lets it go, and she goes right on into the house without a thought for where the dog will go, whether it will run into traffic, get killed, cause an accident, whether it will happen upon young kids and scare the crap out of them. She's that irresponsible. I took a strong disliking to her rather quickly.

Jade is really worthless which is why I cannot recommend this story. I don’t want to read about weak women unless the point of the story is to witness their empowerment and triumph. I don’t want to read about yet another YA main character who is nothing more than a male appendage. I don't want to read another superficial YA novel which is all about perfection and beauty with nothing underneath, and with entirely unrealistic and wildly inappropriate behavior in crisis situations.

Jade was far too hopeless and limp for me to even remotely like her, and she doesn’t show any sign of improvement over the entire course of the novel. She shows neither backbone nor smarts, nor any sign of independence and self-motivation. It’s obvious to everyone but Jade that the kidnapper didn’t want Chelsea. He wanted Jade. Even when Jade discovers where Chelsea is and has a chance to talk to her, she doesn’t even think for a second about asking Chelsea how she got to be taken, and how long they traveled, to try and figure out where she is. She makes no move to free Chelsea so that there will be two of them free to fight-off the kidnapper if he returns.

The novel is quite simply not realistic on so many levels - and I'm not even talking about super powers here. Despite being held prisoner without food or water for several days, Chelsea has no problem being lively and perky, and making jokes. There's no sign of weariness, weakness, or fear. There is no smell from any bodily functions she must have experienced in three days strapped to a chair in a cage. Another character in this novel has vital information about the kidnapping, but fails to reveal it, and no reason whatsoever is given to either explain or justify her behavior.

Aiden the moron keeps butting in on Jade's thoughts at the most inappropriate of times, making her look even more of an air-head than she already is when she tunes out the rest of the world to focus solely on what he's telling her to do. She can't multi-task! Aiden's behavior in that regard came across to me as nothing but a form of rape. The ironic thing is that he neglects to tell her the things she really needs to know when he butts in like this, so she's constantly in a state of ignorance.

The novel ends in a huge cliffhanger which makes no sense. Of course, it makes sense if your only purpose is to milk a novel for every penny you can squeeze from it instead of doing the work of creating something new and different. From the perspective of telling a good story though, if Jade gets a series of visions when there is a threat to Chelsea, her best friend, how come she gets zero visions when there's a threat to her own mom - a threat which is neither justified nor explained?

I'm sorry but this novel was far too vacuous and unrealistic for me to like it. It was poorly thought-out and badly written in terms of world-building and filling-in background. It felt like the second novel in a series when it was actually the first, and I have no interest in following a series that's as lacking in entertainment value and promises as little as this one did.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

Title: The Hero and the Crown
Author: Robin McKinley
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
P77 "...when hey made camp." should be "...when they made camp."

This is the first Robin McKinley novel I've read. I've read some good reviews about her work, so I thought maybe it was time that I jumped in and took a look. This is a fantasy story, of which I have to say that while I've read a few by various authors, I'm not really a great fan of the genre. Sorcerers, dragons, elves, and sword-fighting are not something which really trips my trigger, but they are intriguing and once in a rare while a good one comes along, so I keep mining them like a dwarf, looking for those gems.

This is a novel of just over 200 pages, although the cover is numbered as page one in the advance review copy, so the actual page count of the text is somewhat less than you might think. It's also apparently a Newbery medal winner, which experience has taught me to avoid like the plague, but I picked up this one before I knew about the medal, so I was committed to reading it, unfortunately. Maybe this will be the exception, thinks I: a medal winner which isn't pretentious garbage and which actually makes for non-cringe-worthy reading? The fact that this was available as an advance review copy was surprising, though. If this is such an old novel (it was originally published thirty years ago this year!), then why is it being offered as an ARC? Curiouser and curiouser!

The story is of princess Aerin, the feisty child of a king who has married more than once and who has daughters by more than one wife. Although Aerin appears not to have any of the witchery with which her mother was supposedly endowed, she is very self-motivated (when she's actually interested in something) and pursues a rather independent and somewhat tomboyish lifestyle in which she's aided by Tor, a cousin who gives her sword-fighting lessons, and who quite obviously (rather annoyingly so, actually) has the hots for her. He gives her a specially-manufactured sword for her eighteenth birthday, which is curiously the same time as he quits giving her lessons.

Aerin doesn't mind, as it happens because for the last few years, she's been nurturing a growing interest in dragons. The only ones known of in her time were little ones, but she reads old books and discovers that larger dragons may still be around. She also discovers a recipe for a skin cream which supposedly protects against dragon fire. After immense experimentation, she actually gets the formula to work, and as soon as an opportunity arises to go fight a dragon, she grabs it, sneaking out before the king's men can get there! I like this girl!

Having thus been successful, Aerin discovers that her father is now persuaded to let her pursue her new calling, and she embarks upon gaining invaluable dragon-fighting experience and also a reputation amongst the king's subjects for being the brave fiery-haired dragon-slayer. But can she face-down the greatest dragon of all, Maur, which is a fully-grown dragon of fearsome reputation? And if she does survive the encounter, how will she react to the knowledge that that there is something far more dangerous than Maur in her future: Agsded, and for him she will have to raise her game above and beyond everything else she's done.

This, despite being a medal winner, turned out to be a really good read, so I recommend it.

The Genome by Sergey Lukianenko

Title: The Genome
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko / Sergey Lukianenko / Сергей Лукьяненко
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
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 chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
p77 "synoptic" should by "synaptic"

This is a novel written by Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko, the author of the Night Watch pentalogy, at least two of which have been made into English language movies. I had some issues with this novel even as I grew to like it as I began reading it - but then which novel don't I have issues with?! In this case, it began with the author's dedication, which is interesting in that it seems like an apology for a book which the author thinks some might deem to be "cynical and immoral". This struck me as odd. Authors can write whatever they want, so why apologize for it in advance?

I ask this because I also found myself asking: is it cynical or immoral to consistently describe women as "girls" as this author does? Is it cynical or immoral to write sentences like "If only she would change the hair, visit a cosmetologist, and replace her work overalls with a dress..." (page 37)? Or to write "Had Janet been a feminist, no one could have gotten her into a kitchen..." (page 98).

Those sentences struck me as genderist and abusive - like women don't have a place unless they're pretty and wearing make up and skirts? Like no feminist ever goes into a kitchen? What? There's also this one from page 163: "...or perhaps she did it simply out of every woman's ineradicable need to look as seductive as possible." SERIOUSLY? In the end, and especially given how poorly this novel ends, it was comments like this - not part of some lowlife character's's speech, but integral to the very fabric of the novel itself, which tipped the balance and made me rate this negatively.

I would have done so even had the story been really good otherwise, because the problem was that this kind of thing ran through the whole novel. Like when main characters Alex and Kim inevitably have sex, we read, "Alex took her four times in a row." They don't 'make love' - he takes her. That makes it sound like rape, even though at that point she's coming on to him and they're technically married. It's intended to read like he's the masterful stud and she's his toy, or his possession or sex slave. The character himself confirms this by repeatedly referring to her as "baby".

It's one thing to write a first person novel where your main character thinks like this, or having a third person novel where a specific character espouses attitudes of this nature. There are people like that in real life and it's foolish and unrealistic to pretend that there are not, but it's another thing entirely to create something which has this attitude woven into the very fabric of the novel itself I did not like that at all, and it made the novel hard to read at times.

This wasn't the only such irritation. It seemed even more weird at one point when he wrote "The black woman" (page 67) and "The black woman smiled" (page 101). We already knew that Janet was black at that point, so why raise it again when it serves no purpose? These things struck me as weird, and they interfered with my enjoyment of what was, for the most part quite an engrossing and entertaining novel. Maybe other people don't find these things odd or distracting, but I did and it spoiled the story for me.

These were not the only writing quirks. At one point, the main character uses "whom" in speech (page 65). Almost no one talks like that any more, and the main character wasn't presented as someone who did. I know it's grammatically correct in specific instances to employ 'whom', but these days it seems pretentious. It's even more pretentious to depict a character actually saying it. In some cases, it would be appropriate - for example, if the character himself was pretentious, but in this case he isn't. He's just a regular guy (with some exceptions!), and unlikely to use that form of speech, it seemed to me. I know it's hard to break what are seen as rules, but as writers we need to present our stories realistically, not write by rote.

In other news, on page 77, we once again encounter the "one gene equals one physical trait" fallacy. Yes, sometimes a single gene can influence a single trait, but more often, it's a group or network of genes which make us who we are with the specific traits that we have. This business of (in this case, for example) having a gene for speed, is nonsensical.

That rather kicked me out of suspension of disbelief for the sci-fi part of this novel, and it's really sad, because to begin with, I started liking this story almost at once, and it grew on me as I read it. In general terms it was well-written in that it drew me in, offered interesting situations and characters, and was inventive. It also had an intriguing and kick-ass female character which I always appreciate. By 'kick-ass' I don't necessarily mean literally capable of kicking-ass, but in this case she actually was, but all of this was undermined by the issues I already mentioned.

The story begins with Alexander Romanov getting out of hospital after what was apparently a near-fatal crash of the spacecraft he was piloting. Now five months on, he's been rebuilt and has recovered, and is now looking to find work. On his way from the hospital into the city, he encounters Kim O'Hara, a fourteen-year-old girl who is a "spesh" just like Alex is; they just have different specialties.

In this world, children can be genetically programmed at an early age, to specialize for a future career. How exactly this works isn't specified, but it involves the child going through a metamorphosis in their early teens, rather like a caterpillar changes into a moth or a butterfly. Kim has not been through hers yet. She's very late which means possible trouble. She finally does so after she hooks up with Alex when he encounters her on a monorail as he leaves the hospital.

Having been through his own metamorphosis, he helps Kim through hers successfully. Without his help she might have died. Whereas Alex's specialty was a ship pilot, Kim's is evidently a fighter, but after her transformation, she looks like a mature woman - which is not exactly how fighter specialists should look. They can be male or female of course, but they look like brutes, since part of their specialization is intimidation. Kim doesn't look like that, but she is without question a fighter specialist. Alex concludes that she has some other specialties built-in as well, and he's right.

Meanwhile, Alex has been job hunting and has found what seems to be a too-good-to-be-true job piloting a slick and souped-up craft. The anonymous owner requests that he has a full compliment of crew, which for this ship is six people, including a fighter and a doctor. Alex is given free reign to pick his crew - so there are oddities continuously cropping up in everything that's going on here, yet Alex, Mary Sue that he is, never seriously starts to worry that he's being set up for something. Yes, he's a bit suspicious from time to time, and he has a question or two about events, but it would seem obvious that there's something seriously adrift here, and he never really seems to get that. That was annoying.

Part of Alex's 'spesh' in being a pilot is that he is incapable of loving someone. We're given no explanation for this, and it makes no sense, because when he takes over his new craft, he emotionally bonds with it and it's all about love and appreciation. If he's incapable of love, then he can't love his ship and form that bond. If he can do that after all - and we see that he can when he first boards his craft - then he's capable of love, period. Whether there is something about the spacecraft and his specialty that brings out love which is unavailable anywhere else isn't specified in this novel, but to simply say he can't love and then have him and his ship "fall in love" makes no sense.

This novel was entertaining, but I kept tripping up over it for reasons already mentioned. What pushed this story further into the crapper for me was the ending. There is cloning in this world, and when there's a murder on the ship, a character named Sherlock Holmes comes aboard with Jenny Watson. Holmes is a clone of a man who was a detective "spesh" who modeled himself on Arthur Doyle's famous character. At this point we leave sci-fi and move to a simple murder mystery which read like the ending to an Agatha Christie novel - with all the suspects gathered into a room and the detective rambling on pretentiously eliminating all the suspects until he arrives at the killer. It was incredibly boring, and a sad end to what had otherwise (apart from the crass genderism) been a decent read.

I can't rate this as a worthy read after all that!

Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma

Title: Dani Noir
Author: Nova Ren Suma
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

If it's December 4th, it must be time to post a review of a novel beginning with the letter 'D', and today it's Dani Noir. Is that a cool title or what? The problem is that the novel wasn't anywhere near as cool as its title!

Also how cool is this author's name? It's like something out of science fiction (like from Greg Bear's Eon quadrilogy). This novel was original published as Dani Noir, which is a unique title, but then the title was changed - I guess because it wasn't selling - to Fade Out which means instead of being unique, it now became lost in a dozen novels with the same title. No one screws up a writer's work like Big Publishing™!

The problem is that this novel is already forgettable, even with a unique title. The main character is middle-grader Dani Callanzano. She is (or rather, was) referred to as Dani Noir in the title because of her absurd and highly-unlikely obsession with film noir - namely old and tedious B&W movies made in the thirties and forties.

Dani is a slacker, a freeloader, and a stalker - she never pays to see the movies, she bums free ice-cream from a friend who works in a store, and she starts stalking her supposed friend Jackson to find out what his involvement is with this girl Bella, when Jackson, who is older than Dani, is supposed to be dating Elissa. Dani is the dumbest 13-year-old on the planet since it never once occurs to her that Jackson is double-dating. Jackson is a lowlife who has at least one inappropriately violent spasm.

Dani's also dealing with the fact that her dad ran-off with another woman leaving his wife (Dani's mom) not dealing with it at all. Any kid with half-an-ounce of smarts would have put two-and-two together and drawn a parallel between her dad's behavior and Jackson's, as the author ham-fistedly did, but Dani can't even find the two's, let alone match them up.

Some reviewers have labeled her as selfish and self-centered, but she's no more so than any kid her age. Aside from that issue, this story didn't work very well. It's well-written in parts, and amusingly written in others, but it's hard to imagine many kids of that age group being interested in this story. It's much more of a young adult story, but of course then, the plot wouldn't have been credible. It was hardly credible as it is.

The characters are interesting, but almost as clumsily-drawn as is the aforementioned parallel. The film noir angle is larded all over this story and simply became annoying after a very short time. It's an amateur mistake to take a passion of your own (which I'm guessing this is - a passion of the author's) and jam it into a novel instead of sculpting the novel and the passion together to create a really well-working story.

It's highly unlikely that a movie theater like the "Little Art" (which appears to show nothing but 35mm prints of 30's and 40's movies) could possibly survive. Yes, the theater employs child labor so it's cheap to run in that regard, but there's really never anyone in the theater apart from Dani, and she never pays! I don't see how the theater survived even with the low overhead from cheap movies.

Dani isn't credible as a twelve-to-thirteen year old either. She's far too reserved - she never blabs anything to anyone, not even a friend with whom she used to hang out. She's secretive and manipulative and very selfish and not really a very pleasant person. Austin, the male interest in Dani's life, is so obvious as to be painful. I can't in good faith recommend this novel.

Crown of Serpents by Michael Karpovage

Title: Crown of Serpents
Author: Michael Karpovage
Publisher: Karpovage Creative Inc.
Rating: WORTHY!

Oddities:
Page 129 had some gratuitous and unnecessary objectification: "…tight black slacks and an open black overcoat revealing her service pistol holstered at her shapely waist." Seriously?
Page 265 carries the assumption that older woman not attractive! Seriously?
Yet another author doesn't get that it's 'biceps' not 'bicep'.

Jake Tununda is a Native American who is a soldier and a war hero, but he's had enough. Now he wants a quieter life and while he is still in the army, he's now working for the Military History Institute, collecting historical artifacts and oral histories, and investigating battle sites, which actually sounds like a really cool job. On his way to give a lecture and collect more information for the institute, he accidentally intercepts a call for help, and tracks down the caller to a previously unknown native American burial site which happens to be right next to limestone fissure, into which the victim has fallen.

Jake tries to rescue him, but discovers, once he gets down in there, that the vic died from his injuries. Jake thinks he's all done here once the authorities have taken over and he's given his statement, but his next port of call - to a museum to investigate a newly-discovered and major historical artifact from the revolutionary war, brings him into conflict with a powerful and dangerous native American known as Alex Nero - a man who started out gun-running, but now has built a huge 'respectable' fortune from running an exclusive casino on a reservation.

Jake doesn’t want to get involved in his own tribal politics and ritual history, but the more he tries to avoid it, the more he gets pulled in, and soon he's running after clues and treasure, trying to stay one step ahead of the extremely aggressive Nero, whose thugs know no restraint and no limits.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I had some reservations (pun intended!) about yet another novel extolling native American tribal lore and spirits guides and what-not, for which I have no time, but this novel doesn't over do it. It treads carefully between a respectful view of the people, and avoiding completely dissing traditions, which I respected, so I was impressed and thrilled to finally find a novel which, although it wasn't perfect, handled the story and native American traditions without being sycophantic or maudlin.

The plot is believable and tight, and the action and adventure coming thick and fast. The book is written well for the most part, although the scenes involving Jake's growing lust for police investigator Rae were rather objectifying, but even as I started to get irritated over those, the story looped away from physical involvement and back into the action, so that was pretty much acceptable, too.

One problem with the ebook I read is that it was far too small to show the images and maps that are included in the text, so I got nothing out of those. How they would appear in a print book or on a larger format reader than my phone is an open question!

There are always some issues. In this case, for example, it made no sense that all the doors would be locked down in an abandoned army underground bunker, nor that they would contain any army materiel. The army has abandoned the base, the new owner literally just took over that same day. Why are they locked?!!!

At one point we read of a blood stain from the revolutionary war - but it certainly wouldn't be red, it would be brown! At a later point, it makes no sense that Rae wouldn't use the fact that her captors were reduced to crawling to get through a cave in pursuit of her, to disable one or more of them or to escape. When she 'accidentally' escapes, she fails to take out her opponents even when they're shooting at her and she has the advantage; then of course, it's Jake to the rescue, so it ends up making yet another woman seem like a damsel in distress who can only be helped by a guy. I didn't like that part.

For a historian, Jake has a lousy sense of how to handle historical sites and documents. He blunders in tampering with things, moving things, making no attempt whatsoever to preserve or document anything. I know he's not an archaeologist, but that's no reason for him to be an out-and-out disaster, especially given his credentials and background, so that seemed unrealistic to me.

Having said that, overall this novel was a really engrossing and entertaining story, so I consider this a worthy read.

The Silence of Six by EC Myers

Title: The Silence of Six
Author: EC Myers
Publisher: Adaptive Books
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. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I was really impressed with this novel from the start and found myself quickly drawn-in and really wanting to swipe the screens. It’s an object lesson in how to write a story which pulls people in and keeps 'em hooked. It has some ups and downs, but overall, I rate it a very worthy read.

Maxwell is a high-school student who attends a presidential debate which is being held at his school. As it's winding up, at the end of question-time, someone hacks into the screen being used on stage; a young person wearing a mask appears, and asks the two presidential candidates, "What is the silence of six and what are you going to do about it?" before shooting himself. Max is acutely disturbed as he sees that this is his hacker friend Evan. Max has been out of hacking for a year or so, but Evan never left, and he has some secrets of which Max is unaware. As the students are filing out of the auditorium, their laptops, pads and phones are confiscated 'for reasons of national security'.

Max suddenly realizes that there's more going on here than simply a joke hack or a suicide. He returns to his hacker roots, logging into a secret forum which he hasn’t accessed for a year. The names he sees are familiar, but they're suspicious of him. One of them - Doublethink - opens a private side-channel and requests a meeting in person. Max decides it’s time for a face-to-face, but already there are dark SUVs following him, so he decides to go on the run.

This novel is really well-written. It has intrigue and danger, it has smart computer talk, and it sounds realistic from the off. Doublethink is particularly intriguing, but I can't tell you any more without ruining the surprises the author has in store. Max has some narrow escapes, makes new friends, meets fascinating and dangerous characters, all the while circling around the clues and hints that Evan has evidently left for him. And also Max carries the guilty burden of the fact that Evan had reached out to him several times recently and Max had been too busy, preoccupied or otherwise distracted to connect with him again.

There were some weaknesses in the story. The main one is one we always find in this kind of story: there are points where Max has enough information at his disposal that he could have gone online with it, thereby at least taking some of the pressure off himself. There's no good reason offered to explain why he doesn’t do this. Later an explanation is offered, but I'm not convinced that it was a good one! Also at one point Max says "…looking for whomever was using the computer…" No one speaks like that. Writers write like that, and it’s like an itch when you don’t use the correct grammatical form, but it’s entirely wrong to have people speak like that when almost no-one - especially not kids - actually does.

So, not perfect, but a short, fast, and very entertaining read which I recommend.

Season's Meetings by Amy Dunne

Title: Season's Meetings
Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is not to be confused with Season's Meetings by Catherine Winchester, which I haven't read.

Errata:
P209 "...batter an eyelid..." should be "...bat an eyelid..." unless they're really going to be coating eyelids with flour and eggs...!

P213 "...whatever funny antidote Sky was reeling off..." should be "...whatever funny anecdote Sky was reeling off..." unless relations between Cat and Holly have really become so bad that they're poisoning each other!

Author Amy Dunne (not the same one as the one in Amy Dunn Quits School) is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, so yes, I'm completely biased, but since I didn't learn this until after I'd finished this novel and concluded it an excellent and highly worthy read, I don't care about bias! I'd thought this was Amy Dunne's debut novel when I read it, but it isn't. It turns out that she has another one Secret Lies which, despite the bizarre title, I'm now looking for. Hopefully there will be more after this one, too.

This is my Xmas novel review for today (I can't promise an Xmas novel every day this month, but I will be doing more). This one is a romance, but it's a little bit different from your usual affair: it’s a lesbian romance. That helped me to forgive the author for making the beginner's mistake of having a character look in a mirror so we can get a description of them. The author also impressed me by not writing in the first person, which is a voice I typically detest. On top of all that, the novel is set in Britain, so worth a look there, too. Yes, America, there are places east of the Atlantic, and west of the Pacific, and south of Texas, and north of Minnesota. And the main character is an atheist! How often do we get that? So we're off to a good start thinks I.

Cat Birch is still stinging over the demise of her live-in relationship with a girl called Paula which ended very unhappily and she's not dealing with it very well at all. She has no interest in life save for work, which isn’t exactly going brilliantly, and she isn’t eating well. She apparently has a drinking problem as well if we’re to judge her by the fact that she pours herself the dregs of a bottle of wine and "gulps" it down, followed by opening yet another bottle and pouring herself a "large glass". On the bright side, she does volunteer work for children's literacy, so it’s not all downhill.

Cat is looking at another Xmas alone until her secretary and her close friend trick her into going to spend Xmas with a goddaughter to whom she can’t say no, but even that seems like it’s falling apart when her flight has to be canceled so Cat can get some last minute work caught up. But at least she doesn’t have to go visiting over Xmas, does she? Well, Beth took care of even that. Now Cat has to travel with someone who's driving up to Scotland. The last traveling companion she expects is Holly - young, feisty, confident, playful, and as optimistic and positive as Cat is the opposite.

The drive in the car (which has a bonnet, a boot, and tyres!) was written well and was quite entertaining. Not that it would do me any good, but I fell in love with Holly during the trip! They're not making the journey in one run because of the weather, so they stop at a hotel half-way through the journey - and the weather goes sour on them. This bit really didn't make sense! It would have been smarter to keep driving, but Holly was tired and Cat doesn't drive, so we can let that slide.

The descriptive prose went a bit sour here. Cat notes that Holly has gold flecks in her eyes. Seriously? The number of times I've read that exact description in YA literature (not that this is YA) is nauseating. It would honestly be a really nice surprise to read a story where the love interest actually doesn’t have gold flecks. Plus Cat is a bit like a cat in heat by this point, which is also not very endearing. I would have preferred it if her responsiveness was more in keeping with what we'd read about her earlier.

I have to say that there were parts of this story that came off as rather false, too. I know it's important to put some chop in the waves so the relationship isn't a plain-sailing Mary Sue boring story, but if it's not done well, then it simply takes the reader out of the story and reminds then that they are, in fact, reading a story. One such instance was Cat's intransigence over telling her friend Beth about her blossoming relationship with Holly.

Cat does have reason to avoid this revelation: long ago she and Beth had vowed to each other that they would never get involved with each other's close friends or family, so now she doesn't want to tell Beth that she fell in love with a cousin. As a result, she and Holly have a fight and it looks like everything is in trouble. Then Beth decides she should bring blind dates to dinner one each for Cat and Holly! Eek!

The thing which immediately crossed my mind was that Holly had set-up Cat, or the both of them were set up by Beth with these blind dates, both of whom seemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously. Whether this is true or not isn't something I'm going to tell you, because I've given way more spoilers than I like to for a new novel. The reason for doing that is of course that there were some issues I felt needed addressing.

The only other real problem was with the ease of travel. The two of them had been stranded in two feet of snow, with more falling. In those circumstances, I would have expected power lines to be down, and travel to be all but impossible except on major roads, yet there were no power outages, and within a day or two, travel was apparently completely unrestricted, even out in the middle of nowhere. This seemed unrealistic to me! The two travelers had no trouble getting out to Beth and Katie's completely-out-in-the-wilds residence, and there seemed to be no problem in not only finding blind dates, but also in the dates getting there too. It made little logical sense, but I was willing to forgive it because the story, overall, was really entertaining.

It also made little sense that Holly, who had presented as impressively mature, suddenly had a childish hissy fit and viciously announced that "It's over" at one point in the story. This seemed to come completely out of the blue, to say nothing about it being out of character, and turned me off her somewhat, although she won me around again later! OTOH, Holly had been given a heck of lot of provocation (and not in a good way!) by Cat's cowardice, dithering, indecision, a sorry lack of support, and general absence of backbone, but again, she had her reasons, too.

But it's time to be done with all this rambling and conclude the review. My conclusion is that this novel is excellent! It made my eyes water because of the ending. No, I wasn't crying...my eyes were just watering, okay? OKAY? It happens. Deal with it! In short I loved this novel and really became as engrossed as I was enamored by it. This is a couple I would be honored to know in real life. It's rather sad that they're only fictional. This is a wonderful Christmas read which I whole-heartedly recommend.

Broken Symmetry by Dan Rix

Title: Broken Symmetry
Author: Dan Rix
Publisher: Lavabrook Publishing Group
Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
P93 "…unlocked the dead bold…" should be "…unlocked the dead bolt…"

Well, it';s December 2nd, so it must be time for a novel starting with the letter 'B' - and today it's Broken Symmetry. You might be surprised at how many books are out there with that title, or something similar! I started out really liking this because it's sci-fi with an interesting premise (at least one which interests me: it takes the concept of 'mirror worlds' quite literally).

The biggest problem (apart from the fact that the cover has nothing to do with the novel - as usual!) was that it was a YA first person PoV novel, and typically, they suck. At best they're rather irritating because it’s all ME! All the time. I'm not a fan of the self-obsessed, or the arrogant. Nor do I find it credible that someone can tell a story about themselves and remember events in mega-detail or conversations verbatim. I know that writers think that this 1poV approach brings immediacy to the reader and makes them identify, but if you have to employee 1PoV to achieve that, then there’s something wrong with your writing skills in my opinion.

In the final analysis, none of this works with me because it’s quite simply not realistic and unless it’s very well done, which is rare, it’s a constant distraction from the actual story. I keep wanting to say "My-oh-my! Aren't you just special?" or saying, "Sucks to be you, doesn't it?"

What makes one of these kinds of stories even worse is if it’s told by a young female and she's a moron, which is glaringly the case here. Blaire Adams, the main character in this novel, goes above and beyond that call of duty and proves herself to be a professional moron, and proudly so: she's clueless, inept, idiotic, and weak. As if that's not bad enough, she falls for the bad boy, Damian, for no other reason than that it’s constitutional law in the USA that you cannot have a first person PoV YA girl fall in love with an ordinary or decent guy. It has to be a bad boy with hair falling into eyes which have gold flecks in them. IT'S TEDIOUS to keep reading this in novel after novel. Show some originality PLEASE!

Here’s an example of how fundamentally dumb Blaire is: She tries to break into a police station! As if that's not bad enough, she takes up an internship in the company which employed her father. She's so air-headed that she forget that this is where her father worked, despite her obsession with trying to discover what happened to him. She's determined to discover how it was that he went missing for almost a year and then died from some obscure injuries when he finally showed up, and it’s this which prompts her to take up the internship.

One of the tasks assigned to her is to clean up the shards of a broken mirror. There's a chute in the floor where the broken glass goes. Her boss has told her that they test mirrors to breaking point in this room - and she believed him. The room is quite dark and Blaire is too stupid to ask for the light to be turned on, or to turn it on herself. She asks for neither gloves nor a brush. She doesn’t even think to sweep the shards into the chute with her feet, which at least have the protection of her shoes. Instead she picks up the shards in her hands in the dark and then runs her bare hands over the floor to check if she missed anything. She's a moron. But of course this allows her to get a cut which the bad boy can then tenderly and lovingly tend to, even as he's dissing her and ignoring her questions. Seriously? This was god-awful writing.

There's a big red button on the wall in the 'mirror room', and her boss tells her not to touch it, so of course Brain-dead Blaire presses it and breaks the new mirror she just installed. Despite having some sort of vision of Damian murdering her next door neighbor and burning his house down, she's immediately and powerfully attracted to him. You know they're going to be an item as soon as she says she hates him. It’s that painfully obvious. This is so clichéd as to be farcical.

The guy is a jerk. He has poor hygiene and treats her like dirt, and she falls for him. Is this really what we want to be telling young women? It would have made a better story if she'd ditched dickhead Damian, and fallen for Amy! But that wouldn't work because this is YA and the author would be arrested on capital crime charges he didn’t pair a girl with a boy. You know that.

It’s quite obvious even if you haven't read the blurb what’s going on here, but Blaire is also evidently blind as well as premeditatedly stupid. Not literally blind, just mentally. She can’t figure out what’s going on, no matter how many clues she gets. Bad Boy treats her so badly that she gets no clues from him, and eventually her new boss has to spell it out for her.

Charles and Damian do a piss-poor job of educating Blaire about what’s happening here. It would help if they had the first clue about physics and the difference between physics and chemistry. When Charles is obfuscating, Blaire observes, "I took chemistry last year", but what he's trying to explain has nothing to do with chemistry and this makes her look ever more dumb.

We're biological beings, but biology is based on organic chemistry which is a sub-set of chemistry. Chemistry itself is a subset of physics, and physics is a subset of math. What Charles is trying to tell her is that sub-atomic studies are not only applicable at the macro level (the level of the human body as opposed to sub-atomic level), but controllable there, too. This isn't actually true because the trillions upon trillions of statistical probabilities at the sub-atomic level are 'ironed out' at the macro level, which gives us our concept of a good, solid reality.

What Charles is trying to explain is that reality isn’t what it appears to be, and the bottom line is that with training, and because of her 47th chromosome, Blaire can walk through a mirror and be in in a parallel reality. That a mirror can play a role in this is one of the conceits of this novel. It makes no sense, but you have to let that slide to enjoy the story. This is where the BS comes in (BS is for breaking symmetry and for a well-known dismissive expletive, too!). The author's 'explanation' of the double-slit experiment is nonsensical. You can get a better one here in wikipedia.

This novel is rather confused. At one point, for example, Charles says that parallel worlds have been proved, which actually isn't true, and then just a couple of paragraphs later, Damian is telling Blaire that these worlds are not real. Perhaps he means something other than what I think he means by that, but it isn’t very clear. They're either real or they're not.

The problem is that it gets worse. Damian starts babbling inane philosophical ideas - like that old saw: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? Well of course it does! Basic physics will tell you that, and I guarantee you that if it fell on a deaf person the person would make an horrific sound! What this has to do with the symmetry he was discussing earlier, I have no idea, because all the previous rambling on about sub-atomic particles and quantum states is summarily tossed out the window at this point and we change the whole scenario to simple mirror symmetry as Blaire and Damian prepare to go through.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum states. Instead, we're now told that everything is reversed once you go through the mirror, and that you can only return through the mirror by which you left, otherwise you won't come back to the source point, but instead go into yet another symmetrical world. Despite having this technology and ability, they're reduced to marking the mirror with painter's masking tape - red to indicate the outgoing side of the source mirror, and blue to mark that mirror on the reverse side so they can be sure they come back through the same mirror. Never mind that painter's tape is specifically designed to come away from surfaces very easily.

Here the whole story becomes hilarious because Damian constantly declares his conviction that Blaire doesn't know what she's doing, that she isn't safe, that this is dangerous, yet no one in this whole enterprise insists upon more training for her! Anyone who actually cared about Blaire would have insisted she not go until she was properly prepared. Damian doesn’t. Quite the contrary. Instead, he indulges himself in a kind of rape - as a joke, yet - when he tells Blaire that she must take off her clothes to travel through. He waits until she's down to her underwear before he tells her he was joking. Way to go, Damian, you lowlife jerk-off. What an hilarious joke. Yeah, right at the point where you're going to indulge in a life-threatening activity (for no good reason! Read on for more on this) with a girl who is woefully under-prepared, go ahead and trick her into undressing for you. Damian is a lowlife jack-ass and that's all there is to him.

Worse than this (imagine that if you can!), even Blaire knows she's under-prepared. She's told she must destroy the mirror when she returns and she fails to remember that she already broke a mirror by hitting the red button. She's a moron. She's not ready. I guess she and Damian actually do deserve each other.

Despite all of this, I could understand it if there was some urgent or life-saving reason why they simply had to go through despite the risks, but there isn’t. Neither Damian nor Charles has articulated one single reason why there needs to be travel through the mirrors. Not one. Blaire is too dumb to ask, Damian is too much of a moron to care for her, yet here they are going through. Damian hints repeatedly that if Blaire wants the truth she must go through, yet he's offered her no truth! On the contrary, he's specifically told her that none of these worlds are real. What possible truth could lie there?

The story just went from bad to worse (if that's even possible at this point) when Blaire - completely uneducated, completely unprepared, and worse, none too smart (she's too dumb to put on a seat-belt in a get-away car without being told) - steps through the looking glass into Wonderland. We still have absolutely no reason whatsoever which would compel someone like Blaire to do any of this. When she begins, we still have no explanation whatsoever as to what is supposed to be accomplished by taking these life-threatening risks. Yet she blindly goes right ahead and does it.

Damian has done literally nothing to properly prepare her for this trip - nothing at all beyond vague hints at unspecified dangers. He hasn’t warned her that each trip (for no reason at all, evidently) steals a little bit of her. The way they get through the mirror is to press against it (and note that Damian specifies that you can’t press too hard). This of course necessitates his holding her hand! Could we be any more ham-fisted than this in our story-telling?

Immediately they get through, Blaire becomes disoriented and so nauseated that she vomits; then she starts acting like she's drunk - apparently you get a high from crossing over! None of this was properly explained by Damian the dumbass. Neither was the fact that, once they get through, Blaire's job is to "distract the guards" at a military facility while Damian "sneaks up" on them and shoots them in the head.

Seriously? Note that wimp Blaire doesn’t even bat an eyelid at the brutal violence unleashed by Damian. She doesn’t get nauseated. She isn’t grossed out by it. She isn’t shocked by it. She doesn’t change her opinion of Damian because of it. She merely, calmly voices some 'concerns' over it later! That was totally weird given the character to whom we’ve been introduced thus far.

Worse than this are two really bad plotting issues. The first harks back to what Damian told Blaire about not pressing too hard on the mirror. When Blaire asks Damian why they can't use reflections in windows to "break symmetry", he says it’s impossible because it would require pressing too hard! Huh?

Another really dumb issue results from Damian going on another solo mission and getting himself arrested. How Charles knows this, since he hasn’t gone through, nor has he been in touch with Damian, is an unexplained mystery, but now Charles wants Blaire to go through and break Damian out of jail! This is after we’ve been explicitly told that they can only go through together - remember the hand-holding incident? This novel makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

At this point I was ready to ditch is as a classic example of atrocious plotting and poor writing, but I admit I was curious to find out just what the hell it was that made these dangerous trips "necessary", and it seems that the only purpose for this is that the government has found the 47th chromosome! The author writes this like no one has ever been found to have an extra chromosome - or with one short!

In reality, this happens quite frequently and usually results in serious physical problems for the bearer, so unless the Chromosome 47 in this novel is something truly extra-super-special, it’s no big deal! Moreover, there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to build a military facility to map it. The military already has genetic mapping devices. It takes very little time to do the work these days. They could have had it done in one of their already restricted facilities instead of drawing attention to themselves by spending millions on building a (not so) secret subterranean facility. Again, nothing in this novel makes sense.

At this point, 40% into the novel, I resolved to go to the half-way point (which should cover Blaire's first solo mission), and if it continued to be just as bad, I would summarily ditch it and move onto something that was:

1. Well written
2. Had an intelligent female character
3. Made sense
4. Had a clue about science

That was the plan! It didn’t proceed well. Blaire's scheme to get Damian sprung from jail is to take the return mirror with her to the jail so they can both simply step through it and escape! Despite hauling a six foot mirror into the jail, she has really no problem in visiting the prisoner, and her plan works. Seriously? Is this a YA novel or a middle-grade story?

Her entire behavior during this part of the story completely betrays what went before. Carrying the mirror around, she was constantly remarking to herself about how this would be a disaster if it broke or cracked, yet when she first went through, Damian had gone out of his way to show her how tough these mirrors were - she couldn’t even put a crack in it by punching or kicking it and neither could Damian. Now she's worried about how fragile it is?!!

Her next mission is to impersonate Jennifer Cupertino - a post-doc who works at this supposedly top secret facility! Seriously? Why would they let anyone in there who didn’t need to be there? And why does no one at this top secret facility have picture IDs? Blaire breaks into Jennifer's apartment and steals her purse and then her car, but Jennifer sees her. Blaire thinks this is fine because she's taking the car and Jennifer can’t get there before she does. Apparently this dumb-ass doesn’t think for a minute that maybe Jennifer could call in to the facility and warn them that someone stole her ID! This is what Jennifer does, but it takes her an hour to do it. Why? No explanation. Meanwhile Blaire escapes a top secret military facility with no effort at all. This is pure bullshit and I can't even remotely recommend this pile of garbage.

The 12 Days of Christmas

Title: The 12 Days of Christmas
Author: Xist Publishing
Publisher: Xist Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

First of December - time for a Xmas book! Unfortunately I can't recommend this one except in that it's free in Nook or Kindle form (as of this review's posting!)!

Normally I'm pretty liberal with reviews for children's books. I rarely find them completely lacking because my review standards are adjusted to a wider focus there. This one, however, apart from it's price, lacks anything to recommend it over a score or more of other such books.

If it had a little extra I could have seen it, but this is simply the twelve days of Christmas with nothing added: no information about where the song came from or what it means. Nothing but the simple words and some pictures. This may be fine for your kids. It's your choice after all. I would have liked a little something more.

If they could have only the words right that would have been something, but we still get the "four calling birds" and the "five golden rings, I'm sorry to report. And what's wrong with that you ask? Well, it's really supposed to be "four colly birds" and "five gold rings". The two phrases mean something rather different from the way they're typically rendered in the USA.

A colly bird is a blackbird. Those are four blackbirds. A golden ring doesn't necessarily imply that he ring is made of gold. Quite the contrary - 'golden' suggests merely that it bears the color of gold or a reasonable facsimile thereto! Is this what we want to foist upon our children? Cheap imitation?! Humbug, I tell you!

I can't recommend this over any other such children's book. Find the one which suits you best. There are twenties of them after all. See what I did? I changed the word! It doesn't sound right when I don't say "scores" does it?!

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Title: Anne of Green Gables
Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery
Publisher: Waldman Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Today marks the first of December. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and 26 days until Boxing Day (the day after Xmas). Coincidence? I think not! So to celebrate this mathematically calendrical discovery, for the first 26 days of this month, I'll be posting reviews in alphabetical order, one each day, starting with 'A'.

Anne of Green Gables is a very short novel. The version I had was replete (on every other page!) with simplistic illustrations reminiscent of the ones in the Sherlock Holmes stories. One summer, when Anne Shirley is twelve and has enough imagination for twelve people, she's removed from her orphanage, and unceremoniously deposited at a railroad station in Prince Edward Island to await pick-up by her new adoptive family. Anne doesn’t know that the family is expecting a boy, not a girl, and feels insecure, scared, upset and rejected when she learns of this; however, the family decides to keep her.

Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are an older pair who are really looking for a slave - an unpaid worker who will help around the house and small farm which they own. Matthew is much more open to keeping Anne than is Marilla, but Marilla changes her mind - or rather, has it changed for her - the next day when she sees the harsh, if not cruel, woman Anne would end up with if she and Matthew gave her up. The adoptee remains with the Cuthberts.

Anne proves herself to be very opinionated and outspoken as well as imaginative. When a woman who is visiting describes Anne, to her face, in unflattering terms (despite these being pretty much the same terms in which Anne has described herself earlier, to Matthew), Anne retorts in a similar manner in return, and of course gets into trouble for it. She ends up having to apologize, but gets no apology in return.

Anne is fitted out with new clothes, but is very dissatisfied with them, feeling them to be plain, and out-dated. When she attends church, she adds some flowers to her hat to brighten things up a bit, but this merely renders her into a object of fun for the delightfully non-judgmental (or maybe just mental) supposedly Christian children at the church.

When she attends school that fall, she proves herself to be extremely intolerant of teasing from a boy named Gilbert, and breaks her slate over his head. She's punished for this and Gilbert is not, and at the end of the day she takes all of her things home with her, resolving to never return to school, and to never forgive Gilbert for his trespasses against her. We'll see how long that lasts!

Anne accidentally dyes her hair green (but with no gables) when trying to dye it black, because she uses some cheap and nasty dye she bought from a peddler. Marilla has to cut it short to hide the apparently permanent green coloring, but it ends-up looking better as it grows back: softer and more muted in color. How, exactly, that happens is a bit of mystery, but that's neither here nor hair. Just rest assured that Anne's magical hair grows extremely quickly! I wonder if she's related to Harry Potter?

Speaking of speed, Anne becomes fast friends with her nearest neighbor, Diana Barry, but one day Anne serves her alcohol by mistake at a tea party which just the two of them hold, resulting in Diana becoming rather drunk. Mrs Barry forbids Anne to visit with Diana any further, which forces Anne to return to school since this is the only way she will get to see her best friend. The other children are thrilled to have her back because she's so likable, but she refuses to have anything to do with Gilbert, not even after he apologizes profusely, and not even after he conveniently rescues her when she gets stuck under a bridge after the boat she is in sinks.

Shortly afterwards, Diana's young sister gets the croup, and apparently there are no family members there, and no doctors anywhere to be found, so it’s Anne to the rescue. She knows precisely what to do, and it’s resolved quickly. This recovers her friendship with Diana, and the two are allowed to visit with each other again.

When she turns sixteen, Anne goes to the Queen's Academy with a handful of others from her school who have been fast-tracked by a new teacher. She's a hard-working and very bright student who is upset to lose to Gilbert in a contest for a scholarly medal, but she is thrilled to be awarded the top honor - the Avery scholarship which would lead to a degree and a secure and stellar career in teaching.

Unfortunately for her career prospects, Matthew dies of a heart-attack leaving Marilla and Anne alone in the world. On top of this, the Cuthbert's bank fails and leaves them penniless. I tell ya, if I had a penny for every time a character's left penniless, then I’d be the one stealing all their cash. Marilla decides that she must sell Green Gables to adapt to her impoverished circumstances and failing eyesight, but Anne can’t bear the thought of losing the home she loves. She resolves to give up the scholarship, and forgo college. She already has a teaching certificate, so she can start teaching locally, and stay at her only home to help Marilla.

She's rather surprised to discover that Gilbert chooses to remain behind too, and the two resolve to be friends. At this point, she changes her name to Mary Sue. (That last sentence might be a lie).

Despite the simplicity and Mary-Sue-ness of the story, I found myself liking this, which was intriguing, because I didn’t think I would when I resolved to make this the first book of my alphabetical assault on December. It was perky, bouncy and fun. Anne was a delight until she grew older when, I'm devastated to say, she turned out to be tame and quite average.

The story was very uneven. In the beginning, events moved slowly and we saw lots of days go by in Anne's life with lots of detail. She was interesting and funny and feisty, but in time she became completely domesticated, which lost her some of her charm, and time began to flash by so quickly she almost went beyond ludicrous to plaid. But overall, the story was fun and light. There is no teen angst here or inner monologue, no love triangles or fraught scenes, and perhaps it was this refreshing change of pace after so many over-wrought YA novels which made this so refreshing and delightful to read.