Novellum

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Deadly Accounts by CR Wiley

Title: Deadly Accounts
Author: CR Wiley (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
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 enough reward aplenty!

The author of this novel actually emailed me and asked me to remove this review from Amazon because "...it contains so many spoilers and plot points that it could end up ruining the story ...". I disagree, and there was a warning at the head of the review on Amazon just like this: WARNING! MAY CONTAIN UNHIDDEN SPOILERS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Detailed reviewing and discussion of writing is what my blog does, so I refused to accede to censorship and outright remove it, but as a pure courtesy I did remove parts of it and refer readers to Goodreads, or to my blog. Since I don't plan on reading anything else by this author, I consider this matter closed.

Note, please don't confuse CR Wiley with author RC Wiley or you're risking ending up paying a hundred and forty some dollars for a paperback!

So, gorgeous cover, nothing to do with the story as usual! This story recounts the adventures of Nora Wexler, a new FBI agent, which is hilariously, how her colleague introduces her to his family. I found that rather strange. Would someone really introduce a colleague like that rather than just saying, "This is my colleague, Nora."? Why introduce her as a new FBI agent?

Yes, if the guy was really nervous or inept, he might, but that's not what Agent Greer has shown himself to be - quite the opposite, in fact, so he didn't sound realistic to me, phrasing it that way. It sounded more like the author had forgotten that this had already been established, and tried to establish it in that way.

This wasn't the only odd thing which caught my attention. Throughout this novel, Travis Greer was always referred to as Travis in the narrative, whereas Nora Wexler was always Wexler. Why? I've seen a lot of writing where females are referred to by first name whereas males are just the last name, so was this to try and balance that out? It was just odd and distracting! Why not use both firsts or both lasts?

Nora is new and idealistic, and obsessed with going after Internet offenders of one kind or another - mostly pedophiles and stalkers. This brings her into conflict with her boss, who wants her to focus on bigger pictures - such as terrorism. Nora gets a break when someone begins stalking three women who are successful and independent, who meet once in a while as friends, and who now find themselves under the brutal attention of a psycho.

Nora's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. At one point she introduces her self with: "...my name is agent Nora Wexler". No! Her name is Nora Wexler. Her professional title is 'agent'. She should simply say "I'm Agent Nora Wexler." It doesn't make a character look smart if they introduce themselves this way, although it does happen more often than is helpful. We don't improve our readership by talking down to them, we improve them by lifting them up to join us.

Their first encounter with this fate is when Jenny Iverson receives a parcel containing what appears to be her missing cat's head. Next, her friend Erin Clausson discovers that her assistant, Ricardo Lantham has been 'poisoned'. Finally, Lyla Robbex is targeted via her high-school age daughter, whose new car is bombed. Fortunately, Lori wasn't in the car when the bomb went off.

Very soon, Wexler and Greer have a suspect - Christopher Walden - in their sights. I didn't buy it though! It was too early in the book, and there was no evidence other than the single fact that he'd had one date with each of the three women (not that any of them knew he'd dated the other two as well). They were evidently all using a dating site on which he was also a member.

My suspect, pretty much as soon as I "met" her, and for reasons I can't really articulate, was Clausson. Like I said, I don't know why, and I'm sure not going to spoil it by telling if I was right or wrong (I'm usually wrong, FYI!), but that was where my money, for better or for worse, went. I was probably wrong because when I quit reading this it seemed like there was a much more realistic suspect (than the first one identified in this novel) in the agents' sights.

The really weird thing is that the FBI agents, one and all, were completely convinced right away that this initial person of interest was their guy! Based on this flimsy evidence, they were able to invade his home, search it and lie in wait for him arriving home from work I found that hard to swallow, and I sure hope the FBI isn't so gullible that they can so easily convince themselves of their rectitude based on a coincidence, when there's nothing else whatsoever condemning him. I hope our judges are not so clueless as to grant search warrants based on such flimsy 'evidence', either. OTOH, they have done some really dumb stuff.

Truth be told, by the time I was a third of the way through this novel, I was seriously starting to doubt the smarts of our two FBI agents. Lori, the girl who was almost blown up, was rolling in money which her mother could not have given to her, yet neither the agents nor her own mom seemed seriously interested in pursuing that damning fact!

In addition to this, and as he left Lori's hospital room with Wexler, Agent Greer noticed that someone was spying on them from a closet, yet he never stopped the elevator and went to find out who this was. I'm sorry, but this is at best incompetence, and at worst, gross negligence on his part, and made me lose a lot of faith in this story. I don't mind law-enforcement having road-blocks to overcome, but when the roadblocks are glaringly artificial, or make the main characters just look stupid, I can't help but find the writing wanting.

Another issue I had was that the poisoning episode wasn't food poisoning (the immediate suspect), but potassium chloride poisoning. KCl is essentially the same as NaCL - the sodium chloride with which fast food joints baby-powder your fries. It's salt. It never fails to fascinate me that you can get a deadly poisonous gas (which was used to kill people in World War One, and which is still used to wipe-out germs in bleach) and mix it with a metal which explodes on contact with water, then sprinkle the result on your fries, and they taste great! Better living through chemistry....

The problem is that while KCl is used as part of the lethal injection trilogy of chemicals, it actually does have to be injected. You can't eat it and die. Well, technically, you can, but you'd have to consume so much at once that you'd end up throwing-up. So this had to be delivered via a needle, yet we don't learn of this from the coroner who should have been looking for a needle site as soon as he or she discovered what the cause of death was! More incompetence.

As it happens, Nora is on the verge of being dumped from the case and sent back home because of her incompetence, but of course, the psycho comes to her rescue. Now he's sent a taunting email to her, and just as she's reading it in her room before getting ready to take a plane back home, some guy shows up at the door to the B&B where she's staying, and the owner shows him up to Nora's room. Nora has no idea whatsoever who this guy is, but she blindly assumes it's the psycho without any evidence whatsoever - in short, she makes exactly the same mistake which got her thrown off the case!

Worse than this, she could have apprehended the perp right there (if it was him), but she ran away! Seriously? She could have called the FBI, but instead she texts Greer for help! Double seriously? Instead of opening the door and confronting him, thereby taking him by surprise, she dives out the window. Instead of seeking out his vehicle, which would have been easy, and getting a line on him, and even disabling it, she hides by the front door to the B&B until the owner comes back out. By this time, the visitor has gone and the lead has been lost. Nora Wexler is the worse law enforcement officer ever.

It was at this point that I decided I didn't care who the perp was or how she, he, or it was brought to justice. This novel was not something in which I had any more interest when there are better reads begging for my attention. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

Mac on the Road to Marseille by Christopher Ward

Title: Mac on the Road to Marseille
Author: Christopher Ward
Publisher: Dundurn
Rating: WARTY!

I've had good success with books from Dundurn Press, but in this case, I simply could not get into this story at all from song-writer Christopher Ward. It was rambling and dissipated and offered no clue as to where it was going. My only clue came from the blurb, but you'd never have any hint of this from the opening few chapters of this story, which is what I mean by rambling and dissipated.

Worse than this, it was set in France! Don't get me wrong - this alone was a good thing as far as it went. We need far more novels NOT set in the US, so US young adults actually realize that there's a world west of Cape Blanco, Oregon, and East of West Quoddy Head in Maine, and south of Key West, Florida, and north of Northwest Angle, Minnesota! Maybe that way, US young adults might not place next to last in geography surveys!

And yes, I'm highly amused by the idea that the easternmost point is named "West" and the southernmost point is also named "West"! LOL!

That said, the problem with setting this in France is that the author evidently thought that the best way to establish a French atmosphere was to annoyingly pepper the text libéralement de français mots et phrases. See what I mean? Annoying, n'est-ce-pas? The truth is that while this might serve to allow to author to sing, "Hey, look how multi-cultural I am!" It did nothing whatsoever to establish that this story actually was taking place in France. Maybe it was Canada? Or Haiti? Côte d'Ivoire?

The story is told in deux parts, which are no doubt destined to converge. The première is the theft of La Joconde from the Louvre. What's that, you ask? Well, it's a big building in Paris, with paintings and sculptures, but that's not important right now. Seriously, it's the Mona Lisa, which actually has been stolen, but never so easily as it was here.

The second part is where fifteen-year-old Mackenzie discovers that there is to be a New Year's taxi road rally, and talks her dumb-ass parents into letting her ride unescorted with a "hulking cabbie" named "Blag Lebouef" Seriously? These names are a joke, and this entire premise is absurde.

I actually didn't get that far because I got so bored out of my gourd with reading the rambling, endlessly rambling, tiresomely rambling, and oh, did I mention fastidieux randonnée story that I couldn't stand to pursue it beyond chapter five. I can't recommend it based on what I read. It's verruqueux! There, did I convey the impression that this blog was set in France? Je ne le pense pas....

Monday, January 5, 2015

The God Project by Stanley R Lee

Title: The God Project
Author: Stanley R Lee
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!

Today is Stan Lee day on my blog, but note that this author isn't the Stan Lee of Marvel comics fame (although Barnes & Noble's web site is stupid enough to have his picture tied to this book, and Amazon idiotically conflates him with the better-known Stan Lee!). He's a completely different guy, Stanley R Lee, who died in 1997. While it's nice that this work is still freshly available I hope the recompense for it is going to a good cause.

This one starts out with a long, long, long, rambling section about a US election, which I skimmed because it was tedious. One page (p34) even has a tabulated election results list. This (the rambling, not the results list!) went on, and on, and on forever. Once I got into the habit of skimming, it was hard to stop, especially since the "story" continued in this vein: rambling about political dancing, and good old boys, and government kibitzing, and back room meetings. I'm sure the author intended the story to go somewhere eventually, but after a hundred pages or so of this, it was simply uninteresting to me and I gave up! I can’t recommend it based on what I read.

Dunn's Conundrum by Stanley R Lee

Title: Dunn's Conundrum
Author: Stanley R Lee
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!

I have to say up front that this book was a study in inconsistency in modern publishing. I first began reading it on the Kindle, and there were multiple problems: every word which had 'th' in it had a blank in place of 'th'. There was also a blank in place of 'wo', and a blank in place of 'ft', and that was just on the first two screens! This would have resulted (purely as an example) in the sentence, "There was the worst bafflement in those on the left" being rendered "_ere was _e _rst ba_ement in _ose on the le_" (note that I used an underscore for the blank space, for clarity).

Fortunately the Adobe Digital Editions version was free of these problems, but I've encountered other novels where the reverse was the problem: the ADE version being far from perfect and the Kindle version perfectly legible. My question is "Why?" This is no longer an era of some poor guy (or much more rarely some poor woman) having to pick out lead letters from a series of drawers and patiently line them up, rank and file, in a tray. This is the era of e-publishing, so I can find no excuse whatsoever for poor spelling or formatting, not even in a so-called "galley" proof.

That said I had to DNF this novel even in the readable format because I simply could not get into it no matter how I tried to focus on it. I don't know what it was, and I couldn't get past it. Page after page was just boring to me. I sincerely hope others have more luck with it than I did, but it didn't speak to me at all. It just had nothing to offer me and pull me in.

The story is about an absurdly named secret US government organization named 'The Library' (trust me, the TV show is better), which spies on the Russians, as absurd as that is (for when this was written). There's a traitor amongst them, however, and it's up to a Sherlock Holmes type amongst them to ferret him out before the world ends. Yeah, it's like that, but it wasn't for me.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

You Know Who I Am by Diane Patterson

Title: You Know Who I Am
Author: Diane Patterson
Publisher: Airgead Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

This is another in a long line for first person PoV novels - my least favorite voice. It's also part of a series, which I shy from advisedly. This is book two, book one being hilariously titled, The Sound of Footsteps and book three being Everybody Takes the Money. Given book two, book one has to be the real mystery here, but I've read nothing else by this author, so I can't comment.

Some writers can carry first person, but most of the time I find it irritating, so it's with real gratitude to the author in this case that I found it unobtrusive - it didn't feel like ME ME ME all the time. That said, I did not like this novel, and couldn't finish it.

I don't know who Airgead Publishing is - I'd never heard of them and they have no website that I could readily find, so perhaps it's an invention of the author's, but my beef with them is the covers, all three of which feature some woman's legs and nothing else, yet nothing in this particular story - as far as I read, that is - had anything to do with the main character's legs or anyone else's for that matter. If the stories are so engrossing, then why do we need a woman's legs to sell them? It's a valid question!

"Ah, but isn't that exactly what you did in your novel, Seasoning?" you ask. Yes, indeed it is, but in that case, the novel had everything to do with the main character's legs since she was a soccer player! The juxtaposition of the high heel on a soccer ball summed-up that novel exquisitely since she was a young adult woman competing in a macho man's world. I make no apologies for cutting to the chase in that case.

In this novel I do have to say that the opening chapter is really quite dramatic, but it's also somewhat problematical. The chapter starts with Colin and Drusilla Abbot, who perform a knife-throwing act in Las Vegas. They're having a spat - while the act is in progress! We learn that this is because, before the show, Dru had told him she was leaving the show, him, and Las Vegas. Given what we learn about her husband here, this simply makes Dru look stupid (to tell him right before he's about to throw knives at her?!), and I have to wonder why a writer would choose to do that to a female character if it wasn't a critical part of the story. From the part that I read, it was not.

Yes, some women and some men truly are stupid, but let's not label them so if we don't have to! It seems to me that this could have been written so that he found out about her plans without her overtly telling him. That, for me, would have been more dramatic and unnerving, and would not have announced loudly up front that the main character is clueless.

There were a couple of other issues. As it happens, Colin doesn't stab her during the act, but he does throw one knife sufficiently close that it breaks her skin. It's nothing huge, just a paper cut in effect, yet Dru is clenching her teeth to avoid screaming, and they're pulling out the antiseptic and bandages rather than just applying a simple Band-Aid! Seriously? Now she's both stupid and a wuss. Do we really need to heap this on her, and especially in the opening few pages? Do you want me to perceive her as a strong character, or merely as a clown?!

On top of this there's a third person in the act, Kristin, who's from London, we're told. She's also represented as being stupid, but that's not the worst issue here. That one arises when we're told that she's ten thousand miles from home - yet London is less than six thousand miles from Vegas! It's nowhere near ten thousand. If this novel is going to go the distance with me, a simple thing like gaging distances ought not to be a major problem.

So this novel didn't get off to the most auspicious start for me, especially not when I read, "...his fingers digging into my bicep...". Nope. Once again, it's 'biceps', folks! Although as often as I'm reading this in various novels, it looks like we're undergoing yet another change in our language caused by lazy writing habits.

Dru was a moderately interesting character, but her younger sister Stevie even more so. I think it would have made for a better story had it been about Stevie, because Dru was truly infuriating at times, whereas Stevie was genuinely interesting. We're told (not shown) how protective Dru is of her sister. Stevie has agoraphobia and some other issues, yet when Dru makes her break from Colin, she ends up picking up an actor in a bar and going off with him to his home leaving Stevie sitting alone in the bar with her glass of milk! Stevie isn't stupid, but anything could have happened, yet not once does Dru spare a single thought about Stevie's safety or welfare.

As it happens, Gary, the actor, changes his mind, but he offers Dru the use of his guest house - which is evidently what she was angling for. The problem is that there was no way she was guaranteed any of that happening. Meanwhile poor Stevie is waiting in the bar, in ignorance of Dru's plans and whereabouts as an hour or two tick by! I started really not liking Dru at this point, which I'm sure wasn't the author's intended outcome.

While I liked the relationship between Dru and Stevie (apart from that particular incident just described), the one between Dru and Colin was nonsensical. We're told at the start that the only reason they married was that Dru was short of cash and Colin was willing to pay handsomely for a marriage of convenience so he could get his green card. The problem is that Dru isn't American! She and her sister are British. It's never mentioned that they became citizens, so how is marriage to her supposed to secure a green card for Colin? Colin is Australian, although why an Australian would be seeking US citizenship isn't explained, so for me this whole thing was confusing from the off.

Maybe this was all explained in volume one, but since we're told nothing of what happens in volume one, we're in ignorance, if this is the first volume we read. As it happens, this is the last volume I plan on reading because I didn't think this one was worth any more of my time and effort - not when there are hundreds of books beckoning, all of which pomise a great story, rather than a story which grates.

The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward

Title: The Same Sky
Author: Amanda Eyre Ward
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

The Same Sky is a title which is somewhat over-used. This one is written by a fellow central Texan named Amanda Ward (although I don't know her) and is about Carla and Alice. You can tell this purely from reading the contents, which consists of a long list of 50 alternating chapters titled "Carla" or "Alice", but the novel is less than 200 pages, so the chapters are extremely short.

As soon as I saw those interleaved names I realized with a sinking feeling that this was going to be a another dual first-person PoV novel and I cringed just from that. First person rarely works for me. It's way too much to believe that someone - or in this case two someones - would have such eidetic recall that they could remember every single detail about a series of events, including verbatim conversations, and especially when one of them is a youngster living on the poverty line with a lot more on her mind than telling stories. This is why it's unrealistic to me, particularly in this case.

On top of that, there's a certain arrogant selfishness about the 1PoV format - whereby it's all about ME!!!. All the time! Nothing but me! It can be well done, but for me, more often than not, it makes my skin crawl. With a print book, in a book store or on a library shelf, you can look inside and see if it's 1PoV and quickly put it back on the shelf, as I normally do. With ebooks, it's a lot harder, especially if they're so-called "galley proofs" (which no books truly are any more in this electronic era) because you don't get that same chance to see inside. All you get is the publisher's own blurb, which by it's very nature is at best, suspect, and which never reveals the PoV. I think books like this should come with a government health advisory like on cigarettes:

WARNING: This format may be damaging to your nerves and sanity.

The novel starts on page nine rather than page one, and I felt I might be in trouble on only the seventh line, where the narrator (Carla) describes a favorite dress which split along the back seam, and her grandmother "stitched it back together with a needle and thread." What else would she stitch it with? A stapler? A sliver of bone and sinew? That struck me as really amusing, and didn't endow me with a lot of confidence, especially not in the context of the info-dump which had been going on from line one.

It turns out that Carla is a girl resident in Tegucigalpa. I don't get what she means when she says that she had imagined "...what it would be like to kiss every boy in our village". Tegucigalpa isn't a village! It's the largest city in Honduras, where poverty and urban decay is rife. Carla's mother somehow managed to make it to Texas as an illegal immigrant, but Carla and her brothers were left behind.

Maybe Carla is talking about some other Tegucigalpa? No, the location is confirmed by the mention of Comayagüela across the river. I can only assume she was talking about her little ghetto, but describing it as a village made no sense to me. It made it sound sweet and idyllic, and it was far from either.

On the very next page I read that Carla "...had two twin brothers"! It made me wonder just how many there are in a set of twins. I'd always thought it was just the two. It bothered me how much Carla was focused on marriage and having children. I don't know if this is a common mind-set in Honduras once your belly is reasonably full. Maybe it is, but it was truly sad, especially when she had so much else with which she was forcibly preoccupied.

The more I read of this story, the less it made sense to me, and it was this which quickly wore me down and turned me off it. So yes, Carla's mom went to Texas to make money, but she never appears to send any back to Carla's grandmother. It seems like all she sends are dresses, shoes, and T-shirts, and primarily for Carla. I have to assume she sent other stuff back, but the descriptive writing is so sparse that there's no sense of that imparted at all. For all I know, she could be sending only stuff for Carla. Either that, or Carla is withholding information, which means she's an unreliable narrator and we can't trust anything she's telling us.

We're expected to believe that Carla and her family live in near-poverty, yet they have a phone, and they eat pretty well. I don't get that Carla's mom sent her high heels, either. Seriously? Where's she going to wear those? The family lives in a really poor part of the city, where crime is rife. What's going to happen when thieves see this little girl dressed in her finery?

The story seemed to be all about conspicuous consumption, and not at all about the quality of life - unless you count the routine recounting of violence and death - with the rhythm of a high-school marching band - as some sort of quality of life. It just became depressing after a while to keep reading this. Every single thing was negative, negative negative.

I don't mind this in a story when it's leavened by other things, but here it was all negative, all the time, and it was just depressing and off-putting. One of the kids (one of those two twins, remember?) for example, and without preamble or warning, is unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of a car and taken somewhere - exactly for what purpose isn't explained. Who arranged this isn't explained.

Dad is nowhere on the scene, Mom is living in Texas. The only person there with authority is grandma. Did she arrange it? Did mom approve? Did mom even know what her mom was doing with her own child? Did she care? Why it was this even 'necessary' given that the family seemed to have enough to eat (and had fine clothes and a phone) isn't explained. None of this made any sense whatsoever to me.

On the Alice side of the story, Alice and Jake are living in Austin, Texas. Alice is a double mastectomy survivor as a result of a lump found in one of her breasts. She went the same radical route as did Angelina Jolie recently. It was after this that she met Jake and they hooked-up. She can't have children, presumably because of chemo (and no one thought to 'harvest her eggs', evidently - or if they did, we're kept in the dark about it). As it happens, this is fine with Jake, yet Alice is obsessing over it now, and unsuccessfully trying to adopt a kid.

We're told of many failures and of one instance where they actually had the child brought to their home and then suddenly whisked away again as the mom had second thoughts? I didn't get that. What kind of operation was this? If it was official, it could never happen that way. Once a woman has officially given up her child, she doesn't get to just take it back like that. If it's not an official process, then Alice got what she deserved for gaming the system.

Some of the writing was a bit off for me, too. For example, there's a conversation on page thirty-five which in some parts made zero sense. Alice is given some information and asked a favor of by Principal Markson - principal of exactly what isn't quite clear - some Austin school, evidently. Again the descriptive prose is lacking.

What relationship Alice has with Markham isn't clear either, but she meets with her one day and is told that the school's psychologist is being laid off and they'd like Alice to volunteer time to help with troubled children. Alice has a master's in Eng. Lit. and is not a mom, and works at a restaurant evidently, (as opposed say, to a day-care facility or a pediatric hospital), so she's hardly the most qualified person in the world to counsel children. Here's how a small part of the conversation goes:

"One of the positions we'll be losing is the full-time school psychologist. Juliet Swann - do you know her?"
I shook my head.
"She might be a vegetarian, now that I think of it,' said Principal Markson. "Or a vegan? Not sure. There's usually a big yogurt labeled with her name in the staff refrigerator...."
"Well that would explain it," I said.

That was a monstrous Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot moment for me. That piece of writing is evidently fast-tracked to advance placement in non-sequitur! I actually got a bad case of whiplash from snapping my head around. What the heck does that exchange even mean? I don't know! I don't think I want to! She's vegetarian because she eats yogurt? She's a school psychologist because she's a vegetarian? She's a vegetable and that's why they're laying her off? I don't know!

If this was a comedy, then that kind of a conversation would have been funny, but to discover it stuck there like a squashed fly on an otherwise pristine window was just completely weird. And I'm tired of vegetarian bashing when they're doing one thing which can help starving children: rejecting the "meat animals" to which we feed tons of corn that could, if it were not selfishly squandered on our "stock", be fed to those starving children. Admittedly, it's asking a lot to expect beef-fed Texans to get that!

Another weird instance is when Carla, traveling north to find her mom, recalls things from the Internet. How was this possible? She was poor, so we're expected to believe. Yes, she had food, but Internet? Was this at school? If so, how come she was allowed to read such bad stuff at school? Again it makes no sense.

The biggest problem for me however, is the fact that both Carla, the ten year old, and Alice, the mature woman, speak with exactly the same voice. To me, there was no discernible difference between them. They were different ages, different circumstances, different nationalities, and yet they had the same voice!

That was pretty much it, for me. I couldn't face reading any more of this and so I dropped it. Life is too short to read novel like this when there's the siren-call of other, potentially engrossing novels whispering seductively in my ears. I cannot recommend this.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Legends of Windemere: Beginning of a Hero by Renée Pawlish

Title: Legends of Windemere: Beginning of a Hero
Author: Renée Pawlish
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Rating: WARTY!

I don't get the title of this: "Beginning of a Hero"? Surely it's the making of a hero isn't it? How is a hero 'begun'?! Even "The Beginnings of a hero" would have sounded better, but to outright label your story heroic and legendary up front takes some gall. I'd rather decide for myself if it is either or none.

This book felt doomed to me from early on because it hit pretty much every cliché there is to hit in this kind of fantasy story, and my yearning for something a little off the beaten track was once again frustrated.

Luke Callindor is the male protag, and he's obsessed with heroism so much so that he's prepared to outright lie to get in on an adventure that might glorify him. I didn't like him at all.

He talks himself into a job protecting the heir of Duke Solomon, who is, we can immediately guess, a female - and as soon as we meet her we know at once that it's her even though Luke is clueless for some considerable time.

The problem as that this was set in what appeared to be medieval times (suitable to the trope fantasy), but it has a modern school - a school which the heir attended and now which Luke has to attend to try and figure out who the heir is that he needs to protect. I say 'modern' meaning literally that - it's organized just like a modern high school, with class schedules and a cafeteria, which was ludicrous to me.

There's a Lord Voldemort-like bad guy, and a Snape-like minion who can disguise himself and who is evidently dedicated to finding this heir, too. I couldn't stand the way this was written, the tropes, the clichés, and the amusingly dedicated cycling through half-a-dozen names for Luke, featuring names like: The Forest Tracker, The Young Warrior, and so on.

I got bored quickly, and I can't recommend this. If you do like it, there are at least four episodes in this series, so you'll not lack for reading material. This may not be environmentally sound, but I prefer something new to something recycled, so this is not for me.

Out of the Past by Renée Pawlish

Title: Out of the Past
Author: Renée Pawlish
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Rating: WARTY!

This novel sounded really interesting from the blurb, which only means that the blurb did its job - it lured me in. Unfortunately, this novel was not for me. I don't know what it was, but it made my skin crawl the minute I started reading it. It just felt completely wrong. I think part of it was that it tried way too hard to be what it patently was not: a hard-bitten noir-ish novel harking back to the classics of yesteryear. The problem with that was that it was set in contemporary times, so neither the attitude nor the lingo fit at all.

Instead of getting into it, I found myself stifling laughs at how ridiculous it truly was, with the caricature of Denver-based PI Reed Ferguson being beaten up in the bathroom by the even more caricatured brace of "goons" (yes, that word was actually spoken) named Tyrone and Oscar, when all they'd been sent to do was pick up the PI on behalf of some insanely rich dude. The PI's wise-cracks when he was punched were ludicrous. I have no idea what the author was trying to do, but none of it made any sense in the context in which it was presented, and the flashback to the eighties in the dance bar to which the PI was forcefully taken as the novel began was cringe-worthy.

The plot is that daddy warbucks wants the PI to escort his daughter because he thinks she's at risk for kidnapping. Why this is suddenly a threat now, when she's been all through high school with no issues, then all through college with no issues, and now she's been gallivanting around town partying all the time without even so much as a whisper of a threat is never explained (at least not in the portion I read). The PI is blackmailed into it because of some shady event in his past, but the assignment is so open-ended that it makes no sense. There is no threat to his daughter - there is only daddy warbucks's fear of one, so when is this assignment supposed to end? The PI is too dumb to even ask.

And why the PI? Why not hire a professional security detail? Why not hire a couple of moonlighting cops? None of this is even raised, much less dealt with. Worse than that, the girl is the polar opposite of Mr. Hard-Ass-the-PI. She dresses in pink and is a 'girly-girl' as far as I could see, so we're truly hit over the head with this tired cliché of square-peg versus round-hole (so to speak), which frankly held no appeal whatsoever for me. It's been done far too many times before. This one offered no promise of anything original or off-the-beaten-track based on what I'd read thus far, and there isn't even the promise of any mystery to it.

I cannot recommend this.

Friday, January 2, 2015

Ange'El by Jamie Le Fay

Title: Ange'El
Author: Jamie Le Fay
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

This story focuses on Morgan, a Brit feminist writer who's visiting New York City in support of her her Hope foundation. She gets to know a security guard who's assigned for her protection, but there are things about him which seem weird. Naturally she falls for him because why wouldn't a feminist woman in a romance novel betray everything she stands for by becoming totally dependent upon a guy for her slavation - or is that salvation?!

Seriously, that's what I didn't get about this novel. Morgan is supposed to be this strong female character, but she ends up being nothing more than a damsel in distress, totally owned by - who else, of course - angel Gabriel. He's not really an angel, just part of a bizarre cult of genetically superior beings.

Morgan then starts behaving like an idiot, so he has to save her even more. It was at this point that I said, "Enough already! If I want to see a woman this completely owned, I'll watch a 1950's TV family sit-com". At least I can count on a laugh or two that way.

Instead of showing a woman with a sword in a superior position to a man, this novel's cover should have depicted her cowering under his security-blanket angel's wings. At least that would have been a realistic representation of what's inside the novel (not that anyone actually has wings in this novel - not in the part I read, anyway). Your mileage may differ, but I cannot get with this kind of story at all. If you do like it, then you're in for a treat, because it's the start of the inevitable series. For me, a series needs to be a lot hotter than run-of-the-mill and warmed-over if it wants me on-board, so I will not be following Morgan.

Since You've Been Gone by Mary Jennifer Payne

Title: Since You've Been Gone
Author: Mary Jennifer Payne
Publisher: Dundurn
Rating: WARTY!

Since You've Been Gone isn't the wisest choice of title for a novel since it's so common. I counted twelve on BN, and the title doesn't really describe the novel very well. It's another first person PoV novel, which typically don't work for me, but in some cases the writer carries it and it does offer a rewarding read. In this case, I have to say that I became really intrigued by the very first sentence: "Today I punched Ranice James in the face." You can’t get a more alluring start to a novel than that! And by that I mean not to condone violence, but to point out that this sentence immediately forces questions into your brain: Who the heck is Ranice James? Why was this narrator punching her (or him)? And if this is all true, why is the narrator 'fessing up to us readers? And why am I asking you? (You can read that first chapter on the author's website - or could at the time of posting this review.

The problem was that it went downhill after that first sentence! We never did learn anything about Ranice James (not in the part of this novel which I read). The narrator clearly has anger management issues, but that's actually not the worst of her problems. She and mom are apparently on the run from a violent father and husband, and have a habit of changing address rather frequently. How they finance this is a mystery, particularly the last move, since it’s a huge change, all the way from Toronto to London. And it gets worse.

Edie's mom all-too-quickly finds work cleaning an office on the night shift, getting paid under the table, but then she vanishes without a trace - or almost without one. Instead of immediately going to the police, Edie decides to become a detective and partners up with the bad boy of the class. My stomach was turning at this point because of an overdose of cliché. The bad boy of the class, really? Why not take a few steps off the path most taken and have her partner with a geek or a goody-goody - just for a change? Why even assign her a male partner? Must every girl have a guy to validate her?

This - not the partnering up, but the failure to go to the police - was the first of many bad decisions Edie takes. I have no doubt that she will find her mom, but the story was so predictable at this point that it held no interest for me whatsoever, so I gave up on it and moved on - to something I hoped would be a lot more rewarding than this one promised to be.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

Title: For a Few Souls More
Author: Guy Adams
Publisher: Solaris
Rating: WARTY!

This is the inaptly-named book three in a trilogy, at least the last two volumes of which are named after two movies in the "spaghetti" western trilogy which brought Clint Eastwood to major stardom in the sixties, with the movie title's use of 'dollars' replaced by 'souls' in the book titles. Other than that play on words, the stories here have nothing whatsoever in common with those classic movies.

I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this. The blurb made it sound interesting, but that just means that the blurb did its job in luring me in. It doesn’t mean that the blurb informed at all as to what this story is actually about. One thing I did expect when I began this, was that I'd get a coherent story, which I could follow and which made sense, but this isn't what was delivered. I freely admit that this might well have been because I'd missed the earlier volumes.

In fact, I rather quickly got the strong feeling that I needed to have read both previous volumes before I embarked upon this one, because what were to me random characters began showing up anew in each chapter with no information about who they were or what they were doing or why, or what connection they had to anything or anyone else. There was no back-story - which is a good thing if the only alternative is huge info-dumps, but a really bad thing if the reader hasn't read the previous material, or has read it so long ago that details have been forgotten.

The story began as though it was a traditional western with the supernatural thrown in, but in a chapter soon afterwards, we learned there are motor vehicles. Yes, there were motor vehicles in what we view as the old west, but they were rare and primitive initially. The movie The Wild Bunch acknowledges this, as does Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, both of which I recommend. The problem here though, was that there was no context. Are we in relatively modern times, in 'the cowboy era' but as the wild west is fading? Are we in a time where different eras are somehow bleeding into one another? There was no guidance on this at all - not in the part I managed to complete before giving up from a toxic mix of boredom and frustration.

In some ways, this novel is reminiscent of the movie Cowboys & Aliens, except that the aliens are demons here. The main character in chapter one, Atherton, is an Englishman fresh from some unspecified business in Africa. For some reason he was in New York City when a new town suddenly and literally sprang up from nowhere, out west. He was somehow 'assigned' to it (how or why was not specified), and the town it turns out, is populated with demons. Atherton decides (upon what authority, we’re not told), that he needs to destroy the town and the demons in it.

There's a second story told interspersed with the first. This is the tale of Arno James and Veronica, both living in Heaven. In life they did not know each other, indeed could not since they lived at different times. In death, slain by the lover of his unfaithful wife, Arno is thrilled that Veronica, the first person he meets, turns out to enjoy his company, but this isn’t enough for him.

Told by the mysterious Alonzo, who appears to be in charge up here, that Heaven is so poorly populated these days because most people think they deserve no better than Hell, Arno decides to visit Hell and find out what’s going on there. Of course, this 'explanation' does nothing to explain why Heaven - which must have been steadily populated for thousands of years - has failed retain even its original populace.

Worse than any of this, however, is that the story did nothing whatsoever to pull me in. I've read books (I found two different ones over the last week) where I was grabbed from the first page and couldn't put it down, but this one failed to get my attention, much less my good will. It gave me no compelling reason to be interested in what was going on, and it gave me no character(s) to identify with, to relate to, or to become curious about. Given all of that, and given that there are other, more enticing volumes sitting on shelves and devices, I couldn't sustain sufficient interest in this to continue with it.

The Clown Service by Guy Adams

Title: The Clown Service
Author: Guy Adams
Publisher: Del Rey
Rating: WARTY!

I hate to start the new year on a downer or two, but today is Guy Adams day and I have two reviews of his novels, neither of which I liked, so I guess I'm done with him as an author. It's sad, because I've read good things about him and was curious to read something of his. Obviously my mileage differed significantly from that of many other readers.

The first problem for me was that this novel was really a rip-off of the British TV series from the sixties, titled The Avengers, and it did not stand up well. Don't confuse the TV show with the tried-too-hard-and-suffered-for-it movie featuring Sean Connery, Ralph Fiennes, and Uma Thurman. That was barely passable. This novel, by comparison wasn't. In addition to The Avengers, it and tries to lard itself with liberal helpings of US TV's The X Files, with a sprinkle of Jasper Fforde. None of this work for me.

The basic premise is that Toby Greene, an incompetent British secret agent, is reassigned to Section 37 (it ought to have been section 38) where he works for August Shining. They investigate the paranormal. The first case to which Toby's assigned is really a magical history tour of Shining's personal history, as Britain comes under threat from zombie-fied Soviet agents. Yes, it was as ridiculous to read as the plot sounds.

I honestly could not read this stuff, much less get into it. It wasn't amusing, wasn't really original, and wasn't at all entertaining for me, so I can't recommend it.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Seti's Charm by Chris Everheart

Title: Seti's Charm
Author: Chris Everheart
Publisher: Yellow Rocket Media
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
In the Adobe Digital Editions version, on page 94, we got the start of Chapter 30, minus the title 'Chapter 30"! It ran for four pages (the entirety of chapter thirty), then we got the actual chapter thirty and the same text again. The end of chapter thirty has Max encountering Renault, but at the start of chapter thirty-one, he's still searching for Renault; then chapter thirty-two takes off sequentially as it should. Something got badly screwed up here! We got chapter thirty three times: once as part of chapter twenty-nine, once as chapter thirty, then again as chapter thirty-one.

This short, fast read begins really dramatically and goes right into the action. Max's grandfather is the founder and curator of the Carter Museum, but neither he nor Max expected anyone to break in, assault Max's grandfather, and then set fire to the place. Thank goodness then, that Max chose that time on that night to stop by the museum. He managed to get inside and pull his grandfather almost literally from the flames. He also noticed something missing from one of the display cases.

Max's grandfather almost miraculously survives the assault (and being tipped out of the ground-floor window when Max rescues him from the fire!), but things go downhill from there. Max's step-grandmother is a harpy who somehow deludedly manages to blame fourteen-year-old Max for the fire and her husband's condition. Worse than this, Grandpa tells Max, in a brief moment of lucidity, that the stolen amulet was a fake - that he must find someone named Renault, and return the real and cursed amulet to Egypt. No pressure then...!

The amulet, said to be worth a million, is a wadjet eye - the Eye of Horus - designed to protect the Ka or soul of a person on their journey to the after-life. Max's grandfather came into possession of it by accident, but he never returned it, instead setting it up as the center-piece in a museum exhibit where it's been ever since. Now he evidently believes that set I has unleashed a curse upon him for taking it from the Pharaoh's mummy.

Of course you know that Max is going to manage to get where he needs to go, and here I have to say that the author neatly writes around one of the most common issue with stories like this - why doesn't the character go to the police. Often it's skirted around or glossed over, or simply ignored. Here at least, the author presents a plausible scenario, if dramatic! OTOH, there were some minor issues. At one point, Max misunderstands some spoken French and confuses 'petit chien' with 'pétition', but they actually don't sound at all alike to anyone who knows a little French, as does Max! It's the difference, close enough, between shan and shon.

I recommend this novel. It's fast-moving, well-written, visits some interesting places, and is appropriate to its target age audience. The story is believable and has a good plot, and the characters, particularly the young Max, are realistic and likable. Their actions are plausible, and even the villains seem true-to-life. Good one! I recommend it.

A Star Called Lucky by Bapsy Jain

Title: A Star Called Lucky
Author: Bapsy Jain
Publisher: Vook, Inc.
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
p49 "…before you insinuate me…" should be "…before you implicate me…"
p58 "Chater 4" should be "Chapter 4"

This novel is a sequel to Lucky Everyday which I have to say up front I have not read. It's yet another novel where I came into it unaware that it was a sequel either through my own inattention/forgetfulness or through poor descriptive prose in the novel's blurb, but as it happens, it seems that didn't require that you have to have read volume one in order to read this one.

The novel begins with about twelve pages of description titled "The Players" - all of which I skipped. I don’t do prologues of any kind and if the author is not up to incorporating these info-dumps into the text and in a much less intrusive manner, I'm not up to reading page after page of character descriptions. That just struck me as weird.

In addition to his, the typeface in my Adobe Digital Editions version was also not a pleasant one to read. All the lower case i's looked like number 1's. The word 'but' looked weird and made me keep thinking of 'butt' because of the way the 'u' and the 't' looked so similar at the peaks and seemed to run into each other! There were other weird-looking words. For example, 'home' looked like 'hotne', 'some' looks like 'sorne', and so on That's a relatively minor concern, but it does impact the reading experience.

The story is about Lucky Boyce, an employee of the department of corrections who is a shameless advocate of yoga as the solution to all our ills. I've done yoga and got nothing from it. It didn’t strike me as being as effective 9or anywhere near as much fun!) as pursuing your favorite sport, or as simply jogging or running a treadmill or something, but that's a personal preference.

This story began with Lucky visiting a prison where she acts as a yoga instructor, a position which has become increasingly threatened lately. Why it began this way, I don’t know. It could have begun equally well a few pages later where she boards the subway to ride downtown to her office, or later still when a politician comes to visit her. It’s not altogether clear what she does at work (she's an accountant) when she eventually gets there, either!

Lucky is very adept with her computer and a people-tracking application called 'Bloodhound' which can be employed to find someone via facial recognition, and which also incorporates a host of database and surveillance camera information to dig-up everything about the subject, but how fast she finds this stuff and how much she finds seemed rather improbable. Yes, if you had access to government records and a lot of time, I'm sure you could find a lot, but to pull down detailed data in quite literally a minute or two was too big of a stretch to me.

The author is wrong in claiming that the 1918 flu outbreak was the first epidemic. I think she's confused between the terms epidemic and pandemic, but even so, the first pandemic we’ve recorded wasn't in 1918 - it was at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1918 pandemic was virulent and deadly, however. Flu is nothing to sniff at!

A politician who's apparently obsessed with establishing universal health-care and purveying life-prolonging medicine to everyone adopts her as his side-kick in his quest to investigate some lama dude in India, never mind that lamas are Tibetan! In India he would be known as a guru. No explanation is given for why Lucky should be the one to go on this quest rather than some FBI agents. Yes, she's Indian, but there are doubtlessly FBI personnel who are Indian, too, so why her? Well, for no other reason than that the story is about her. It wasn't convincing.

The deal, supposedly, is that this guy, Lobsang, has access to a fungus called an 'ice mushroom' which supposedly confers long life upon those who are treated with it, evidently by means of boosting the immune system to counteract pretty much every known disease and ailment. Lucky is evidently supposed to get her hands on this mushroom so its properties can be duplicated. How a politician has the authority to walk into a corrections office and 'head-hunt' a government employee, tasking her with traveling internationally in pursuit of something that's well outside of her job description (as well as doubling her salary to boot) is another unexplained mystery here.

I read this to just over fifty percent of the way through, and quite literally nothing happened. It was nothing more than - pretty much - a dear diary of Lucky's every-day activities! Trust me, her life is no more eventful or entertaining than is mine, or any account, or any regular person's every-day activities. I don’t read novels to read about people who are just like me! I read for entertainment and for a chance to get outside of my life and into someone else's!

If you're going to give me 'me' in your novel, then at least change the world around! Please add some sci-fi or fantasy, or make something thrilling or out-of-the-ordinary happen! Please don't detail your doing of laundry, or cooking, or your issue with your browser, or your uneventful interactions in the coffee bar or with your every-day ordinary friends. Why would I want to get into someone else's life if hers is essentially no different from mine? I wouldn’t. I don’t.

One really absurd thing which Lucky does is to leave her computer with a sixteen-year-old to fix a problem. It doesn’t matter if it’s her own computer or the government's. Either way something is seriously wrong here. If it's her own, she should neither be using it for, nor allowed to use it for government work, and if it isn’t, then she's clueless. The only 'malfunction' it appears to have is that her browser defaults to Hulu as the home page even when she changes the page - but we’re told that Lucky doesn't know how to set the browser default page, so this made no sense at all!

It made even less sense that she would turn it over to a sixteen-year-old hacker when her own IT department at work should deal with this issue. It made less sense still that she should turn over a computer to someone who's a known hacker and who isn't even remotely authorized to access her government computer containing government data and the Bloodhound application. Lucky is either profoundly stupid, or she's appallingly gullible and ignorant. Either way I don’t like her, and she should be fired for being so utterly irresponsible. And this is the dumb-ass they want to send on an important mission? Sheesh!

Despite having issues with this out-of-the-blue assignment to India, I at least wanted Lucky to actually get on the airplane and go, but she never did (not to the half-way point anyway). I became so tired of nothing going on that, curious as I might be about this oddball guy in India with his purported fountain-of-youth mushroom, I couldn’t stand to read any more. I couldn't bear the thought of wading through mondo mundane to get to what might have been extraordinary, but for which I had no guarantee, and nothing to imbue me with any faith that it would be any better than the fifty percent I’d already read. Life is too short for rambling stories which go nowhere when there are other enticing and seductive stories inviting me to sample their charms instead.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M Danforth

Title: The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Author: Emily M Danforth
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

In other reviews where I've railed against the use of first person PoV, I've always said that once in a while it works, because the writer knows what she's doing and can carry it off. This is one of those rare and welcome exceptions. I'm not saying that it couldn't have been done in third person. It could, but whether that would have been a different novel or pretty much the same, we'll never know. Just let me leave it here: that I'm grateful that this writer didn't screw-up a great story like this one turned out to be.

The other trick to successful novel-writing (aside from figuring out how to get the word out about your own effort when you've chosen not to sell-out your work to the mega-bucks of Big Publishing™) is how to grab your readers on page one. Unless you're a comfortably established writer, you usually cannot afford the risk of asking them to bear with you for a page or two, much less a chapter or two. You have to corral them fiercely on page one, and Emily Danforth did that with a vengeance with me. I don't know what it was. I wish I knew, but she did it and I was hooked.

A quick note on the cover: it has nothing to do with the novel, but this isn't the author's fault. It's one of those Big Publishing™ covers where the artist evidently either never read the novel, or simply didn't have any interest in truly representing it with any degree of industriousness or integrity. Don't judge this (or any book) by the cover. Judge it by the brilliance of the interior. On that score, also please note that this YA novel has mild drug and alcohol use, moderately explicit sexual situations, and bad language. It doesn't bother me because that's how people actually are, but it may bother those who like their stories sanitized.

Cameron Post is your every-day young teen on the threshold of entering high-school, finding her way in the world, enjoying her summer, when there's this almost-accidental-but-perhaps-not kiss between her and her best friend Irene. Since Irene is leaving town that fall, it never really goes anywhere other than another peck or two, but even though Irene isn't sure what she really wants at that point and later evidently decides to travel a different path in life, along comes Lyndsey shortly afterwards. She's a fellow competitive swimmer, but at a different school. This new relationship goes somewhat further, but not much beyond second base.

Living in a small Montana town, and having lost her parents to a motor vehicle accident, Cameron, Cammie, Cam falls under the wing of her religiously-deluded aunt Ruth. Ruth isn't a bad person. She's rather nice and decent, and obviously cares for Cam, but she's been cruelly blinded by theistic zealotry and evidently isn't smart enough to see through it, so Cam has every reason to hide her predilections from everyone, particularly those who can harm her or who control her life at that point, and she does fine at this until along comes Coley Taylor.

Unlike With Irene and Lyndsey, Coley makes no overt moves, so Cam is never sure if what's going on is all in her own mind, or if there's something in Coley that wants to express itself to Cam on a very personal and intimate level. Coley has a boyfriend and she makes Cam get one - her best friend Jamie - for the school prom. It's at the prom where Jamie confronts Cam about her attraction to Coley. There's an minor altercation, tears, and then Jamie kisses Cam and she responds, but as this pseudo-relationship continues, she learns that she's not deluding herself about her orientation at least, or about where her heart and mind is at.

This is where things really start to move, because Coley isn't shy about experimentation even as she appears to be freaked out about what her true orientation might just be. And all around them, the cold, small, lonely, distant, religiously-warped town is watching. Salvation/Damnation is at hand, however, when Coley gets her own apartment so she doesn't have a forty mile commute to school each day from her parents' ranch, and the two plan to spend the evening there.

This novel wasn't all plain sailing. I know! Aren't I cruel to say not a word about what went on in that apartment that night?! You gotta get the book to find out. I promise you that if you like this kind of novel at all, then you'll likely love this particular work. One of the great things about a story like this is that it's truly my idea of a romance - not necessarily a gay one, but a romance between two people - the gender is irrelevant. This kind of novel is far, far better and more deeply romantic than almost any novel which actually bills itself as a romance.

But I digress. As I mentioned, I had a couple of issues, which were really varieties of the same issue when you get down to it. I was reading this on my smart phone because Apple is doing its damnedest to keep me from reading anything that I actually want to read on its iPad! Until I figured it out with some timely help from a good friend (thanks, LL!), the so-called ease-of-use corporation was making me work my tail off to creatively get around something which Apple claims is designed to facilitate creativity. Trust me they LIED! The smart phone, huge as the screen is, is still quite small. Even at 12cm by 7cm (~4.75in by ~2.75in), it's too small to read some things which authors include in their books, and from a writing perspective in this multi-device, multi-media era, this is worth keeping in mind.

In this case, the things were: a letter written by Jamie to Cam and left in her room, a post card sent by Lyndsey from Alaska, and a tri-fold church leaflet which plays a part about half-way through the story. These things were included in the book in the form of images. The post card was just large enough to be legible, but neither the letter nor the tri-fold were, and they didn't really lend themselves to enlarging by the old finger-split maneuver wither, which is normally a really cool thing to be able to do. The letter enlarged some, but the tri-fold not at all. The issue was that the author assumed that both of these would be readable, and so never reproduced the text in the body of the novel.

This is one case where you need something the size of a pad (I checked the images on an iPad and they look good and are quite legible), or you need the actual print book in order to get everything there is from this novel. I've noticed this "image problem" in other things I've read on my phone and I find myself wondering how these images would look in another format. I'm not in a position to check that, but it's a pity our technology isn't quite where it needs to be, even after all these years.

I digress. Again. As you will know from the blurb, things come crashing down - in an interesting way, too - and Cam is sentenced to the gulag - a Christian fundie school where she will serve two terms at least, getting a brief parole only for the hols.

Despite my love for this story and many of the characters, there were still parts of it which I felt lacked oomph, or which in one way or another betrayed a character, or which were not as I'd thought they'd be (and don't confuse that with what sometimes I felt they ought to have been!). I was surprised, for instance, that it took fifty percent of the novel for Cam to get inducted into the "de-gaying" school (or is that gay-bashing school?). I'd thought that would swing by much earlier. This isn't a problem as it turned out, because the first fifty percent of the novel was really engrossing for me. This erroneous idea was something which I'd evidently derived from the blurb, but which wasn't actually in there to begin with.

In contrast, the part where she was in the deluded Christian cult induction facility, which is where I was expecting fireworks and fun, or at least some determined subversion going on, turned out to be completely flat. This was where the oomph was lacking for me. It was, however, interesting, and I can understand (and I support - for what it's worth!) the author's decision not to paint this story in broad sloppy strokes of black and white. That was way smart, but for her to tame Cammie, to effectively neuter her in fact, at this point was wrong. I didn't like that the school got to preach medieval and clueless diatribes about the gay community without any honest push-back at all.

The author tried to get around this by portraying the teens at the school as 'normal teens', very much aware of what was going on and what was supposed to be going on. They were depicted as feisty, smart-mouthed, joking, making sly remarks about the program, smoking pot once in a while when they were not being observed, making friends, having fun, and so on. There was even one unexpected and fun instance of a night-time rebellious interaction.

This didn't get it done for me though, because what happened was that the author came across almost as though she approved of these programs (pogroms?!). I don't believe that she does so approve which was why I was so surprised that there was so much smug and arrogant preaching going on with so little corrective action in return, especially when these ignorant myths and blind platitudes are so easily exposed and refuted.

The worst character at the school was the co-director, Lydia. She was a control-freak who was very nearly the only person there who was actually in need of sustained psychoanalysis and perhaps medication. She wouldn't even let Cam take off her sweater at one point, for example. Cam was too hot in the room where she was in a one-on-one with Lydia, and there was nothing wrong at all with what she was doing, but Lydia forbade it because, she asserted, Cam was acting-out and being disruptive! Good Lawd A'mighty! I thoroughly detested Lydia. No one like that should ever be in charge of children or teens. Or anyone. Having said that, it sure would have been interesting to learn what her back-story was.

One major betrayal for me was Cameron, who starts out as a rebel, but one who flies under the radar. She presents to the world as "normal" - the "normal" her closed-mind community expects from its teens - but underneath, she was up to all kinds of things, and she was steadfastly and resolutely pursuing her natural impulses. I know that the fundie Christian lie is that homosexuality is not natural, but the truth is that it's found throughout nature, not just in humans, so yes, it's perfectly natural and normal. That doesn't mean everyone should be gay, just like it doesn't mean that no one should be gay. It's a part of nature like everything else out there, and pursued with integrity and compassion, it harms no one. Some people seriously need to internalize that.

To see Cam become so subdued then, was a betrayal of her very core, to me. It's not like she became brainwashed. The author commendably showed her as rejecting some aspects of what she was taught, even as she appreciated the value of some of the other things, but she offered no real resistance! In my opinion, this was out-of-keeping with what we'd been learning about her for fifty percent of the novel thus far! Worse than this, not one of the teens who were in this school showed any real push-back. It was like all of them passively accepted the school's deluded premise that they were indeed sinful, abnormal, deviant, broken children in need of fixing. This complete passivity was hard to take and it was unrealistic, especially since none of them were there voluntarily.

I've seen some reviewers negatively rate this novel for this very reason, but I think they're just as guilty of misrepresenting what happens as are some Christian readers who've accused the author of universally bad-mouthing the Christian community - again, something which never happens. Yes, there should have been more push-back, but no, there wasn't a complete absence of it. Yes, Christian cluelessness over the nature of homosexuality is inexcusable, but the author doesn't bad-mouth Christians per se.

Instead, the author tells it like it is - some black and white and a heck of a lot of grey. She should know, having actually grown-up in the town in which she sets this novel. She authentically portrays the ignorant and misguided attitude which some people - real people in the real world - do have about gays. The fact that one person or even one group worships a god for which there's no evidence whatsoever doesn't give that person or group any right at all to dictate to every other law-abiding citizen how they should live their personal life, what they should think and believe, or what their morality must be. Period. They are quite entitled to practice their religion. They're not entitled to try to force it upon others.

In the end, I can do no other than rate this highly, despite a misgiving or two here and there. It was beautifully written and for a debut novel (or even one way beyond debut for that matter), expertly done. I loved Cameron, Lindsey, Jane, and Adam, and despite some problems I had with Coley's behavior, I really liked her, too, and I wished we could have heard her story. I really thought that we would. I felt strongly that there was unresolved material between the two of them that needed exploring, but realistically, real life doesn't always have a happy ending or offer closure either!

Some reviewers, I note, have chided this for its ending, but I thought it was perfect. It was not your standard trope romantic finale, but despite that (or perhaps because of it) it was perfect; however, it does leave the way open for a sequel, and whether there is one to come or not, I would love to read it. I volunteer right now as a beta reader!

The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan

Title: The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood
Author: Diana McLellan
Publisher: Libertary Co.
Rating: WORTHY!

This book is a deeply-researched look at the sometimes very (and sometimes not so) private lives of actors, directors, producers, screen writers and others throughout the 20th century, but focused quite tightly on a limited few in any detail, with a host of other names drifting in and out as the years pass. I highly recommend it because it is full of information about events and activities which too many people may not realize were taking place - even as early as the first decade of last century.

The dramas unfold around a select few well-known names, such as Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, all of whom were bisexual with a marked preference for female companionship, and around the people closely associated with them, some of whose names are not well known at all. This list includes Josephine Baker, Joan Crawford, Mercedes De Acosta, Dolores Del Rio, Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Hepburn, Billie Holiday, Ona Munson, Alla Nazimova, Natacha Rambova, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lilyan Tashman. Men aren't absent either, with names like Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Rudolph Valentino, and even John Wayne being dropped into the mix.

Don’t expect it to be a titillating detailed erotica-fest. It’s not. It tells, artfully, humorously, perspicaciously, and unashamedly of the lives of women and men who were free to live the life which felt perfectly natural to them in a time which was far more closed than is ours today. But note that those times were not always tightly-closed. Indeed, some periods were surprisingly (at least to me!) liberal, but overall, it was a roller-coaster during which the lives of these people were easier, then harder, then easier, but never as free of condemnation and as free to live as they are today. It all depended upon which way the wind was blowing and what religiously-motivated government legislation sought to hand-cuff (and not in a nice way!) people at any given time.

In the earliest part of the century, and through the twenties, things were quite liberal, but legislation came down, and it sent people into hiding or certainly into two lives: their public and their private. Thus arose what are known as "lavender marriages" where a lesbian and a gay guy would marry to present a 'normal' public persona, from behind the somewhat precarious safety of which, they could live their separate natural lives without so much worry.

But the novel is far more than just that. There are spy stories here, fear of communism, intrigue over jewelry (specifically that of which Marlene Dietrich came into possession. There are stories of physical and emotional cruelty, of nyphomaniacal behavior, of stage politics, and of manipulative "friends" such as Sasha Viertel, who controlled Greta Garbo almost like a glove puppet, and became her sole voice to the world for years. There are also images, which look a lot better on an iPad than they do on a smartphone!

The stories are funny and sad, scary and heart-warming, easy and brutal. There are stories of German-born Dietrich offering to shoot Hitler, and of winning the Medal of Honor, of Swedish-born Garbo leading-on men while seducing and then casting off women, of those two women refusing to acknowledge they'd ever met when in fact they'd been in a film together in which they'd shared scenes (and perhaps more?), of devotion to the stars from subordinates and underlings, of life-long romances and disastrous break-ups. There are hilarious observations both from personalities like Noel Coward and from the author herself, and scary stories of obsessive pursuits and seductions.

The amount of almost incestuous interaction and partner-swapping amongst these stars, activities which over time tie all of them together in one way or another is quite dizzying! It’s a warning in some ways, that power corrupts, but it’s also sobering to know that these people are no different from anyone else except in that they had the money and freedom to be able to live the life they chose (or in the case of Garbo, as she evidently decided at the end, to live the life she wasted!), but still managed to be unhappy and frustrated a lot of the time. In the end, money can’t buy you love! Who knew?!

The book is long and detailed, so you might want to keep it to hand and dip into it periodically, with a visit to some other book in between, but it is very readable and entertaining. One thing I found most peculiar in perusing this is how private these people managed to keep their real lives, in an era when revelations about them would have been truly sensational and ruinous. Contrast that with today, when leading that same kind of life causes few eyebrows to be raised, yet the media is more obsessed than ever with pursuing "scandal". How huge of a Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot is that?! And what more will we learn when Dietrich's secret papers are finally released in 2022? I recommend this history for anyone who's interested in having their mind opened as wide as their jaw might drop!