Novellum

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

The Witch of Napoli by Michael Schmicker

Title: The Witch of Napoli
Author: Michael Schmicker (no website found)
Publisher: Palladino Books (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 enough reward aplenty!

A true cynic might say that the first problem with this novel is that it sports a recommendation from Kirkus on the front cover! Since Kirkus almost universally reviews novels not only positively but gushingly so, a Kirkus review is, for all practical purposes, quite worthless even assuming you buy into reviews written by people with whom you have no track record. Just when did Kirkus become "the authority" and why? And how?! Fortunately for this writer, I don't buy into Kirkus reviews; I made up my own mind as to whether this 'absorbs me from the first page'.

Actually, according to the numbering system used in this book, the first page isn't chapter one - it's the front cover! So no, I was not absorbed by the front cover sporting a review which tells me I'll be absorbed from the front cover! Chapter one begins on page eight, and this novel runs to page 276, but these 270-some pages of novel come in eighty-five chapters!

The 'about the author' page towards the back reveals that this author has written another work, which I personally also consider to be fiction, about people who supposedly have ESP. I don't believe in any of that crap because there's absolutely no evidence to support any of it, but I do love a good story about it. My hope was that this present work would at least offer that, but given that it was based on the life of demonstrated fraud "psychic" Eusapia Paladino (note the name of the publisher on my blog!), those hopes were stillborn, I'm sorry to report.

This is another first person PoV novel unfortunately, because you know writers of fiction suffer from the very pervasive delusion that it's illegal - if not a crime against nature - to write something in the third person! Few writers can successfully carry 1PoV because it ends up all "Me!" all the time, and it tends to be at best unrealistic and irritating, if not outright nauseating.

It's unfortunate that you can't pick an ebook off the shelf and peruse the first chapter since the book blurb never reveals person. Had I known this was 1PoV I would have put it back on the shelf, so I was in the position of going into it hoping that this author was one of the few, the precious few, the band of authors, who can write this person and make it readable. On the positive side, the author didn't do too badly there, and he does have the sense to make his prologue chapter one, so there was hope!

This novel is set at the turn of the 20th century up though the first world war and the narrator, Tomaso Labella (Thomas the beautiful?!), is telling us of Alessandra, supposedly a 'physical medium' whom he first met in 1899. She can, we're told, levitate objects and move them around, although no one has ever explained intelligently to me what the heck any of that has to do with contacting the dead! It remains a complete mystery, yet this is what physical mediums would have us believe!

There are some anachronisms in this novel, too. The author mentions that purported psychic Daniel Dunglas Home was "entertaining royals" but since he died in 1886, it was hardly likely he was entertaining anyone in 1899! Also we're told that when Alessandra was thirteen, her father was shot for supporting Garibaldi, which would have been roughly in 1872. It's hardly likely that people were being shot for being a supporter of Giuseppe Garibaldi when around that time he was being elected to the Italian parliament and was leading Italian troops with the support of the government...!

That aside, the story tells of a woman in her forties, who mesmerizes the much younger Tomaso for reasons which are really unexplained (in the portion I read, there was no "erotic" despite book blurb claims!). The book borrows from The Godfather movie and claims he was (metaphorically) hit by a lightning bolt. Alessandra has been in the medium business for some time, managed by a sadistic Mafia-style husband from who she is ineffectually planning to escape. She gets her chance when a purported scientist is won over by her abilities, and sponsors a tour. That was as far as I got.

The writing wasn't technically bad - no huge grammatical or spelling errors, for example - but it was uninspired and uninspiring. By one quarter the way through I had no interest whatsoever in the story or in any of the people in it. There was nothing really gripping or engrossing going on and the characters were neither outstanding nor endearing. I had no interest in continuing to read a novel which offered so little when there are other novels begging for my attention which promise much more.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Emissary by Thomas Locke Baker

Title: Emissary
Author: Thomas Locke
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Rating: WARTY!

This novel is supposedly written by Thomas Locke but it’s copyrighted to T. Davis Bunn. It begins with your usual fantasy trope of an orphan kid raised in ignorance of what he is, which I have to say has become far too tedious. In this case the kid is Hyam - 'a simple farmer's son' who has massive magical powers, but doesn’t come into them until he's 'of age' (for reasons unexplained) whereupon, despite having had no training whatsoever, is an immediate expert in wielding said powers. Note that I didn't read this entire novel, so perhaps things were explained later. I just couldn't hold the interest to sit around waiting in the hope that something would make sense eventually.

Hyam is a farm boy whose mom died, and when he goes to the mage school to tell his dad (his magician dad wouldn't know - and why would he care?!), he discovers his dad died four years earlier. He goes back to the farm and finds he can magically turn over the earth in arrow-straight rows for planting instead of having to dig. He doesn’t even have to say two words in Latin to get this to work!

How did this happen? How is it possible? How is the magic channeled? No explanation. When a band of knights on giant horses arrives at this secret location which only Hyam knows about, with no explanation for how they happened upon him, Hyam is able to use his 'earth powers' to bury them without a trace. How does he know what to do? Where does his power come from and how does he grasp how to manipulate it? No explanation. It’s just "magical"!

The next character to show up is Joelle, a female wizard who is undoubtedly going to join with Hyam (one way or another). She's wielding her own magic ready to fight someone and we’re told she no longer cares if she lives or dies, but here she is, nonetheless, training hard and perfecting her skills, which gives the lie to the line we just read. Joelle can travel out of her body, so she's hardly a prisoner in the traditional sense. From whence her resentment and her passionate desire to escape, then, is a mystery.

This novel employs trope and cliché to an astounding degree. There's a place which Joelle is forbidden to approach "on pain of death"! Oh my! The bad guy isn’t the Red Wizard, but the "Crimson Mage" because 'Red Wizard' ain't nowhere near as kewl as 'Crimson Mage', and don't you dare ever forget it on pain of death! I was surprised he wasn't named 'The Scarlet Sorcerer"! After a while, this novel started to seem far more of a parody then ever it was an actual fantasy tale.

I made it 20% into this before I gave up. This is not for me. If you're really addicted to this genre you might find this entertaining, but I need more: more inventive, more original, a more daring way of telling the same story. This was standard stuff with nothing to keep my interest alive when there are so many other novels awaiting which promise more.

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett

Title: City of Stairs
Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

This story is a sequel to a non-existent story which probably would have been better than this one. In the past, we're told, there were gods, which were defeated, and the city which had been powerful, Bulikov, is now for all practical purposes, a ghetto. A professor is murdered there and an investigator, a woman named Shara (who would have been more aptly named Mary Sue), hailing from the conquering nation of Saypur, takes it upon herself to try and solve the murder. She's evidently so weak that she needs to have a boring caricature of a Viking, a lumbering giant named Sigrud, to take care of her. So immediately we have three cultures tossed into the mix like a bad recipe for a stew. None of this worked.

It's like the author tried to jam as many fantasy cultures into this as possible without a thought as to how - or even why - they might (or might not) fit together. None of the characters was introduced in a way which made them jump out and say "pay attention to me", so I had no vested interest in any of them. Indeed, despite the variety of cultures, there really was nothing to differentiate one character from another. There were frequent references to history which were really tedious because they were largely irrelevant to what was going on now - or at least if they had relevance, it certainly wasn't apparent to me in the part that I read.

I tried twice to get into this, but the story was so obscure, so slow, and so boring that I could not read past the first ten percent. Life is too short and there are far too many novels out there demanding attention, most of which will undoubtedly be better than this one, so where's my incentive to keep reading this? Exactly. I cannot recommend this novel.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Keeping Secrets by Maggie Dana

Title: Keeping Secrets
Author: Maggie Dana
Publisher: Pageworks Press (website not found)
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a big fan of series, so this one looked like a potentially problematic novel to begin with since it’s book one of the 'Timber Ridge Riders' series which was once a series called 'Best Friends', but I am a fan of an engaging and well-written story, and the author took away my fear right from page one. Knock-out Punch! That's the way to do it!

If I could patent and sell what it is which draws me immediately to one story, or if I could invent a spray to remove what it is which leaves me cold about another, I’d probably be a quintillionaire by now. As it is, I'm only an Ian-aire! Whatever it is, this story has it, because I felt quite at home.

This just goes to show that you can get me to read anything you like if you can find a way to draw me in. I don't care what age range it’s aimed at, or what gender. I don't care what the story is about, just give me a reason to read it! Make me want to turn the next page and I'm yours, shamelessly yours! One thing I can say helped in this case is that this isn't a first person PoV novel. 1PoV is something which I normally detest, so mega-kudos (or is that Maggie-Kudos?!) to the author for that.

Maggie Dana seems to be making a career out of writing middle grade equestrian epics, and what young girl doesn't want to read a story about horses? I have no idea, but that's what this story revolves around even though it’s actually about people. Kate McGregor applies for a job as companion and helper to Holly Chapman. The latter is wheel-chair bound (or is she?!), and Kate's only just turned fourteen. She has no experience, but Liz (Holly's mom) is getting desperate, and Holly and Kate take to each other immediately. Liz's mom decides it would be good for her to have someone her own age around, and so Kate is hired, she and Holly become room-mates so Kate doesn't have to commute, and the adventure begins!

You know there's a fly in the ointment - in this case, a horse-fly(!). Or more accurately, several of them. The Chapmans are only guests in their home, which is owned by the association which hired Liz to train riders. It used to be about fun, but now it’s about winning a competition at all costs, and if Liz doesn’t deliver a victory, she's out of a job and she and Holly are out of their home.

As for Kate, she fakes a fear of horses not because she's hippophobic (scared of horses, not hippos!), but because she carries a huge weight of guilt. She believes she's responsible for the death of her own horse, Black Magic. Worse than this (if that's possible) she makes an enemy of Angela Dean, the daughter of the main pain in Liz's life. Angela is a spoiled trouble-maker and, I have to say, rather a caricature. One almost expects her to twiddle her waxed mustaches as she cackles.

So we know up front that Kate is going to overcome her phake phobia, and that the real reason for her refusal to get back on the horse is going to be resolved and she'll be vindicated. We suspect that Holly will regain the use of her legs since it’s psychological. We know that Angela will be bested, and Kate triumphant in some competition or other. There's no mystery here. The only mystery is how the author is going to extricate her main character from the roadblocks with which she's hemmed Kate in. The answer is: it’s nicely done!

There is, unfortunately, a boy blip on the horizon. When I first encountered this I felt a faint twinge of nausea. Is this going to be yet another novel for young women where the reader is made to feel like she's only of worth when she has a guy to validate her existence? I was hoping he'd turn out to be gay and they become fast friends, but given the milieu, it was highly doubtful the author would take us there; plus the gay best friend motif is rather a cliché now. OTOH, if you take the tack(!) that he's the only guy in a field of girls, then to make him straight would pay against cliché, so what you lose on the swing, you gain the horse-ridden carousel!

The writing, in general, was par for the course. Not brilliant but eminently readable, and the writer evidently knows her stuff when it comes to horse-riding, care, and competition (not that I'm any kind of an expert!). There were some instances of "Say, what?" however, such as towards the end of chapter eleven where in one paragraph we're told that Denise racked up thirty faults (on a "cross country") for, in part, being too slow and then immediately in the very next paragraph, we’re told that it’s "not a race"! Either speed counts or it doesn’t. It may not be a race per se, but it is a race against the clock, and it seemed really odd to talk about being faulted for slowness and then having an instant avowal that coming in fast won't garner you any points. Yes, technically, in a deductive scoring system you're not earning points, but if you're too slow, you are going to lose them, so speed is of the essence. That just seemed like poorly-worded writing to me.

Another issue was with Kate's mantra that it’s about horse-girl-ship (not horsemanship, surely?!) and fun. We hear an oft-asserted claim that competition isn't important, but then we seem to find that everything is focused on Kate winning competition and triumphing over Angela. There's way too much competition in society, particularly in the US, so while I did like this story and wouldn't mind reading another installment of Kate's adventures, I also hoped that further episodes wouldn't be all about competing and winning. I hoped there would be far more to this world and these characters than that.

It wasn't all smooth sailing (or riding). One really big annoyance is that this novel was very aptly named. Allow me to explain that! Angela Dean turned out to be Angela Demon and was depicted increasingly in such extreme measures that she really did become a caricature fit better for the Cartoon Network than for an intelligent novel. Maybe the intended audience likes this kind of thing (which would be rather sad), but that doesn't mean a writer can’t elevate her readership and bring them up to something better, more nuanced, and actually realistic. Life is very rarely this harsh a contrast between midnight black and angelic white.

That was bad enough of itself, but what was actually worse was keeping secrets - that is, of Kate's passive enabling of Angela's atrociously abusive behavior, by not telling on her. Bullying is not acceptable, and as long as we teach young people via stories like this that bullies should never be brought to book, should never be called out on their behavior, should never be reported, then we're no better than the bullies because we’re saying it’s OK, and we're happy to facilitate acting-out and deliberate sabotage. IT'S NOT OK! It's never OK, not even in a novel, unless you have some higher purpose in allowing a character to temporarily get away with it - and it had better be a much higher purpose!

Another issues was with the horses, which were supposedly loved but which were not treated very well. Horses don't naturally choose to make crazy jumps over high obstacles unless they're frightened or panicked, yet these purported horse-lovers were making them jump and race, and risking injury not only to the horses, but also to the riders. If you're willing to put that aside, then there's entertainment to be had here.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

and /

Title: The Metamorphosis
Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Adapted and illustrated by Peter Kuper.

Die Verwandlung by Czech writer Franz Kafka who was quite literally a Bohemian, having been born in Prague, which was then the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia. He wrote in German, but this novel in English has come to be most commonly known as The Metamorphosis.

I have a theory that The Metamorphosis was a clear prophecy, predicting the arrival of the Liverpool band, The Beatles...! It was first published in 1915 and is the story of Gregor Samsa (who more recently had a rock band named after him). He's a traveling salesman who one day wakes up to find that he's morphed into what Kafka named a "tremendous animal unclean for sacrifice".

Modern translations render the description of the transformed Gregor as 'vermin', and typically interpret it as a giant roach or an absurdly large beetle which unfortunately, not haling from Liverpool, doesn't manage to make a name for itself in rock music. It's interesting that Kafka scholars tend to point out that he did not reference his Jewish inheritance in his writing, but here is a clear example of him doing so.

Waking up late for work one morning, Gregor (a name which is almost an anagram of George, one of the band-members of the Beatles....) has to contend with his melodramatic mom, his supportive sister, his obnoxious office manager, and his disgusted dad. None of this comes off too well since no one can understand his insect voice and none of them know of his predicament until he opens the door. The office manager flees in panic at this, and Gregor is injured when being forced back into his room by his dad. This isn't the last time his dad will injure him. From that point on he's despised and an outcast, and he's locked in his room, very similar to how The Beatles were treated in their early years.

It's interesting to note that John, the band member who was killed in 1980 long before his time, had mother issues, his "Aunt" Julia being like a sister and a mother to him, and he often wrote Kafka-esque sings and also a book.

After a nap, Gregor awakes to discover that someone has left him bread and milk, but he has no taste for it, indeed no appetite at all until his sister thoughtfully leaves food scraps for him, which he eats with relish (not that kind of relish, unfortunately). He takes to climbing around the room and his sister has some of the furniture removed to make room for his activities, but this leaves him sad, feeling like more and more of his life is being stolen from him. In another altercation, his dad throws apples at him (see, there's that Beatles connection again!) and one lodges in his back, seriously injuring him, just as the Beatles ill-fated corporation, Apple Corps injured them when it was so badly managed that it almost bankrupted the band.

Calm reigns briefly until the family takes in boarders to make up for the lost income from Gregor's lack of employment. One evening, Gregor's sister Grete plays violin to entertain the boarders, and Gregor is transformed by it - although unfortunately not in that way. Things are fine until the boarders become bored-ers and notice Gregor's presence. At this point even his sister rejects him and he dies, opening up a new life for his family. Clearly this is a reference to John, who alienated American fans when he made his remarks about Jesus, and shortly afterwards, the Beatles, as a band died, freeing up the individual artists within the band to go onto to greater things.

I recommend this graphic novel. It's beautifully done and tragically amusing. The artwork is suitably dark and monochromatic. And if you agree that it's a prediction of The Beatles, then I have some nice land in the Mersey in which you might be interested in investing...!

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Take the Dog Out! by Lynne Dempsey

Rating: WORTHY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Illustrated by Mandy Newham-Cobb.

No, this is not an order by a mob boss to assassinate a puppy! It's actually quite a charmer. Amusingly illustrated and playfully put together, this story could even classify as educational because if there's one thing dogs love to do, it’s let out their inner wolf - that's why they make that sound when they bark: "Wolf! Wolf!" They love to get out and play, and this author's story shows the dire consequences of not taking care of your young dog properly and seeing that she gets adequate exercise.

She's first rejected by mom who, I'm sorry to say is stereotypically depicted in the kitchen while dad sits on his lazy butt reading the newspaper. This would be the one complaint I had about this particular book. It's never too early to start showing children that they need not be hide-bound by traditional and misguided gender roles.

Dad also seems to think that it's more important to read the newspaper than to exercise the family pet. The dog of course has other ideas, and she demonstrates them to each family member in turn with great gusto, including grandma and the two young children.

Was that a whirlwind in the bathroom? Nope, just a dog who needs to run off some high spirits and can’t find an outlet! The story ends up happily, I'm pleased to report, as the family realizes that nature just begs to be explored, and you can’t do that stuck in the house on a beautiful day.

You might want to read the back of the book first because that's where the secrets are hidden! Each picture (I'm told) sports a sneakily-hidden dog bone. I confess I could not find them all! My excuse is that I was bone-tired.... In addition to finding these, young readers are encouraged to count - specifically the number of barks the puppy lets out in her wild enthusiasm.

So, in short, a couple of issues with this, but overall, a wonderfully illustrated story that will teach kids a thing or two about pet ownership as well as provide a fun story that I'm sure young readers will employ to exercise you (or at least your patience!) with demands to read it again and again.

Dying to Forget by Trish Marie Dawson

Title: Dying to Forget
Author: Trish Marie Dawson
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
p24 "A chance to pick a part the choice me made which ended us all here"? Seriously?!!
p35 "borage"? Should be "barrage" unless you're talking about a hairy plant found in southern Europe…!

I don't normally do book covers because this blog is about writing, not window-dressing, but I have to remark that this cover has nothing whatsoever to do with the story!

This is yet another in a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of first person PoV young adult female narrated novels. In the library or the book store you can stuff these back onto the shelf, but you can’t do that with ebooks! Fortunately not all of them are awful and I include this one in that select group. This novel had a prologue. I don’t do prologues. If the writer doesn’t think that the text is important enough to include in chapter one or later, then I don’t think it’s worth my time to read it! I didn’t miss it.

This one - book one in a series, note - starts out with high school friends Piper Willow, the narrator, and best friend Bree traveling to a roller rink. It’s their last day of high school, and there's a party ahead which Piper is not planning on attending. Something really bad has happened between her and Ryan Burke (who is evidently appropriately named) and she's not in a boy-friendly mood any more. So who should show up at the roller rink where Piper is sitting out and watching Bree and her boyfriend Preston, circle round and round? Whatever happened was so bad that Piper has become a cutter.

Piper has a bigger problem - she's a really bad driver, and when Bree calls her in tears (Preston's being a jerk) to pick her up from the very party which Piper didn’t wish to attend, Piper obliges, and promptly crashes the car on the way home. Apparently Bree is too dumb to wear a seatbelt and the last view of her which Piper gets is her best friend's head disappearing through the windshield. The tragedy doesn't end there. Piper can’t deal any more and takes a bottle of her father's Diazepam pills.

Next she's waking up in a "station" and filling out paperwork, and discovering that she has an afterlife choice: she can spend eternity alone with her misery, or she can volunteer to "go back" and help someone else who is in her position - but still alive as of yet. Piper chooses the latter. In some ways, this story feels a bit like a cross between the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, and the Warren Beatty movie Heaven can Wait, which is a move I really adore.

I found it a bit disturbing that Piper's therapy sessions so quickly and easily - indeed, almost magically - wipe away all her issues with cutting, and The Burke, and with her being the instrument of her best friend's untimely and precipitous death (she now dismisses this as "carelessness"! No, it was (wo)manslaughter for goodness sakes!). I found that a bit hard to put up with, but I was at this point intrigued enough by the story to keep on reading.

The story goes downhill rather in chapter eight. Piper gets her first assignment, and suddenly it appears that she's had absolutely no training or practice whatsoever. I know the author's intent is to make it all new, nerve-rending, and interesting to us, but it just made me feel like Piper had simply been thrown to the wolves, or was painfully stupid which detracted sharply from the really gentle treatment she'd been enjoying to this point. She also has a rather rude awakening when she finally gets inside the body of her first 'client'!

Is anyone else slightly disturbed at the excessive use of last names as first names in this story? We have Piper, Preston, and Sloan. This became rather farcical after a very short time, like it was a parody I was reading. On the brighter side of things, I liked her first assignment and how she handled it. I did start to get annoyed with her when she was trying to tell her host who he could date!

There was a really bizarre occurrence three-quarters of the way through, which made little sense - and it especially made little sense in light of the reason for the occurrence, but I can’t go into detail without posting unacceptable spoilers. Despite the issues I described above, I ended-up liking this story, although the second trip Piper made was nowhere near as good as the first; however, the cliff-hanger ending is a killer, so be warned!

Friday, February 6, 2015

The Lost Souls Dating Agency by Suneeti Rekhari

Title: The Lost Souls Dating Agency
Author: Suneeti Rekhari
Publisher: Escape Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

There is a tiny prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn’t think it worth putting into chapter one or later, I don’t think it’s worth reading. This is also a first person PoV novel which I normally detest because it’s all "Me!" all the time which is irritating at best. Some authors can make it work, but for most authors, it’s best avoided like the plague. This author makes it work. The story is short - only a hundred-fifty pages or so - divided into forty chapters, yet! The text is pretty densely packed, but it's a fast read.

What drew me to this novel was that the author was not another in a long line of US authors who think the US is the only place worth writing about! She's not US at all, but is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia. The main character, Shalini Gupta, is of Indian descent and is resident in Melbourne, Australia.... The novel flits very briefly from India to Dubai, and then on to Melbourne where Shalini now lives, attending college, while her uncle (not really - he adopted her and told her he was her uncle) remains in Dubai; then he goes missing!

My attraction to the novel in this case didn’t fail me. I loved the simple, matter-of-fact way it was written, and the perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek acceptance of the paranormal by Shalini and her two friends Neha and Megan. Not only has Shalini inherited some money from her uncle, she has also inherited a mysterious empty warehouse which actually isn't far from her apartment. The warehouse is old and run-down, but she feels compelled to clean it up. The only thing in there is a weird clock which is immovably attached to one of the walls. And the time is wrong.

As she's trying to figure out what to do with the place, a newspaper begins mysteriously appearing in he building each Saturday. Shalini quickly realizes that this is a supernatural newspaper, and she posts an ad in it advertising the warehouse as a dating agency for supernatural beings! Her first client soon shows up: Victor the cranky vampire. This part was hilarious. In fact the whole Victor thing is really amusing. Get this, for example (and keep in mind that Victor's a vampire):

'Bloody hell, Victor, you scared me! It’s daytime! How are you here?'
'I drove.'

I laughed out loud at that. Note the single quotes which Brit and Aussie novels tend to sport to demarcate speech. They look weird to me, and I grew up in Britain! Anyway, no more spoilers. Shalini takes on three cases, and gets deeper into the supernatural than ever she feels safe doing, but she meets some startling and interesting people along the way.

Be warned that this has a cliffhanger ending - it's obviously the start of a series, and I'm typically not a fan of series, but I'm not averse to reading more of this one!

Tulku by Peter Dickinson

Title: Tulku
Author: Peter Dickinson
Publisher: Open Road Media
Rating: WARTY!

Set amidst the so-called "Boxer Rebellion" in China, over a century ago (around the turn of the nineteenth century), this is a story of Theodore, Lung, and Mrs. Jones, which starts out really well, but fades into rambling incoherence in the second half. Theo is a young man whose father is killed by the Boxers. These insurgents are trying to throw out the Imperialist occupiers of China who were milking money from the nation, and telling the Chinese their religions were useless and they really ought to migrate to Christianity!

Many nations formed a coalition against this rebellion and really stuck it to the Chinese, sending in an eight-nation army of some fifty thousand troops, occupying Peking, arranging the whole-sale slaughter of those involved, and fining the Chinese government millions of taels of silver in reparations (which was an astronomical fine even by modern standards).

The coalition was remarkable to modern eyes, rather reminiscent of the one which formed against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in the nineties. In this case it consisted of: Austria-Hungary, the Empire of Japan, the French Third Republic, the German Empire, the Kingdom of Italy, the Russian Empire, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This story discusses none of that. Instead, it wanders away into the hills and honestly? It gets lost.

I'm not a fan of organized religion, so I had no skin in this pissing contest between the Chinese religions, the Tibetan, and the Christian. I think all of them are silly, and in this case especially this nonsensical business of thinking that the Tulku reincarnates and can be found as a child. In some ways the story is very reminiscent of the 1993 Bertolucci movie Little_Buddha which was eminently forgettable despite its rather stellar cast - but it was better than this story!

The day after his father is killed by the Boxers, and his mission village is destroyed, Theo runs into Mrs Jones, her right-hand man (and lover) who is named Lung, and some pack horses. Jones insists he accompany them to the next mission. In the end, they give up on that plan and head for Tibet, where Jones, who is on voluntary exile from England for ten years - financed by a wealthy family to keep her away from their son - hopes to find flowers which have never been described before by science. In the end, they give up on that and retire to a monastery.

This novel, as I indicated, started out strongly and drew me in, but as soon as the three travelers meet the monks, it dissolves with disturbing rapidity into a vague and rambling tale of ceremony, sitting around, more ceremony, more sitting around and a fizzle of an 'ending. It creates expectations which are never met and became truly tiresome. I can't recommend this.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

My Grandma's A Ninja by Todd Tarpley

Title: My Grandma's A Ninja
Author: Todd Tarpley
Publisher: North-South Books
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated charmingly by Danny Chatzikonstantinou.

Today happens to be crazy kids day on my blog and I have two, count 'em two, once again, two gloriously insane kids books which have, as their educational component, the fact that it's perfectly fine to be completely nutso once in a while. This second volume is admirably qualified because...well, because grandma's a ninja!

Swinging into town and impressing - and then distressing - her grandson's school mates, grandma leaves a big impression - on the busted school soccer ball (they have only the one...). Moreover, or more under, she demonstrates some kewl karate - and kudos to the author for not mixing Japanese martial arts with Chinese. Both Ninja and Karate are Japanese (or strictly speaking, Okinawan in the case of the latter).

But grandma isn't unreasonable. Once she realizes her free-wheeling lifestyle is cramping her grandson's style, she decides to retire from being a ninja. Perhaps her new career will be less adventurous? If you believe that, I have this beautiful 1940's style bridge at Tacoma Narrows to sell ya at a knock-down price.... Meanwhile, allow me to recommend this great kids book!

Big Billy And The Ice Cream Truck That Wouldn't Stop by Joe Consiglio

Title: Big Billy And The Ice Cream Truck That Wouldn't Stop
Author: Joe Consiglio
Publisher: Schiffer
Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated beautifully by Joe Simko.

Today happens to be crazy kids day on my blog and I have two, count 'em two, once again, two gloriously insane kids books which have, as their educational component, the fact that it's perfectly fine to be completely nutso ponce in a while. This first volume is admirably qualified because it's completely off the rails - or more accurately, off the road!

The ice cream man in this neighborhood is a hood when it comes to his neighbors. He lies in wait in his irresistibly colorful and amply-stocked ice cream van (no doubt chortling - yes, chortling I say - to himself) idling until poor, sweet, innocent and unsuspecting kids get close - then he drives off like a maniac before any of the kids can approach the window to actually buy an ice cream. Yes, my friends, this is a truly evil ice cream man!

Is there no respite for these deprived children? Will no one take pity upon them? Up to the plate steps Big Billy. Now if you've ever heard the song Big Bad John by by Jimmy Dean, you'll know what kind of a lineage Big Billy has behind him, but despite his size, Billy, just like Big Bad John, is full of surprises. He doesn't get mad, he gets even, and he organizes the kids in revolt against the ruthless ice cream hegemony.

There can only be one way this ends - delightfully! Big Billy comes through with a surprise befitting his name, and all's svelte that ends swell - especially if there's ice cream! I loved this book and thoroughly recommend it. And did I mention: there's ice cream?

On the downside, I have to mention one small issue which is the slowness of the page turning in the iPad Air. I was using Bluefire Reader, and the iPad is new, but the page turns took up to eight seconds. That's painfully slow.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

The Kite Fighters by Linda Sue Park

Title: The Kite Fighters
Author: Linda Sue Park
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!

Competently read by Norm Lee

Linda Sue Park is a Newbery medal winner, which would normally turn me right off reading anything by her, but I needed a novel with a title starting with 'K' for my December A to B review conceit, and this was ideal. In the end I used another novel to represent K, but I still wanted to review this one.

It's a really short book (only 3 CDs in the audio version to which I listened) written for middle-graders, and it's about two brothers, Lee Young-Sup, and Lee Kee-Sup who lived in old Korea, in an era of a boy king.

The brothers have the usual fraternal rivalry, and Young-Sup is a bit jealous. He's the kid brother (as perhaps his name was meant to imply), and Kee-Sup has just been capped - which unlike in soccer and cricket, means he's officially become a man - and his "baby brother" must now show him due respect as he would an elder or an authority figure. Suddenly gone are the days of their care-free childhood.

One thing they do both agree on is the beauty and majesty of kites (and I use that penultimate noun advisedly - read on!). Young-Sip manages to make a deal with the local kite shop owner and gets himself a reel of silk - a strong tie for his kite - to which he adds his own home-made flyer. All he wanted was to have a kite like his brother did, but neither of them realized they were being watched by the king himself. Soon they have a commission to create a kite for the young king, but neither the boys nor the king realize where this will lead or what will happen at the annual kite fighting contest.

Like I said, normally I avoid like the plague any novel which has (or in this case which has a writer who has) anything to do with medals, but this particular novel was entertaining reading. It was charming and innocent, but interesting and inventive.

Normally I would rail against this obsession with respect - which must be given to people regardless of whether they've earned it? In this case it's set in the past, and while it's still not right, it is accurate, so it's not a problem.

The same thing applies to this nonsense (to put it politely!) of royal privilege - that someone, purely through accident of birth, is poor, and someone else is privileged above all others or no better reason? Nonsense! It made me irritated that the king demanded, and as a result these boys were, and at their own expense, giving-up their resources and time, but again this is the way things were - and still are in all-too-many places, so I can't down-grade it for that!

Overall, I rated it highly. It was interesting, especially since I'm not from that culture. It was also well-written, and at one point I almost felt that if for no other reason, I should rate it a worthy read just for this one phrase used to describe someone who looked sad: "Your face is like a month of rain"! I loved it!

Swing by Miasha

Title: Swing
Author: Miasha
Publisher: Infamous (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

You know when a novel's first line begins "The way his shaft was rubbing against my clitoris" and it's all in block caps, that this story is going to be raunchy as all get out, but that's not what bothered me. The problem was that this novel is only raunchy! It had nothing else to offer - at least not in the first third of it, which was all I could stand to read. It really takes some skill to make a novel about sexual encounters boring!

The story details the exploits of four couples: Tori and Kevin, Danielle and Stewart, Juju and Ferrari, Lyssa and Jacob, but their exploits consist solely of performing sex, thinking about sex, arranging sexual encounters, and talking about sex. There is nothing else going on here at all - not in their world, and not in their minds. There is no descriptive writing here, no atmosphere, no idea of where these people live, what their surroundings look like, what kind of people they are or what kind of life they lead - other than sexually. It's all boring all the time and not even in a good way!

In short, there's no story here. It consists solely of the author checking-off her list of euphemisms for "penis", "vagina". and "Vulva" to make sure she uses them all and never uses the same one twice. Any hope of a decent plot (or even an indecent one) was forlorn. The only "plot" was that, hey, Tori and Ferrari have the hots for each other - and they're not a couple. I care.

I can't recommend this one at all. It's completely flaccid.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

In The Garden With Van Gogh by Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober

Title: In The Garden With Van Gogh
Author: Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober
Publisher: Roundtable Press
Rating: WORTHY!

This is an amazing book for young children telling a story based around paintings by Vincent Van Gogh.

It features a whole series of the pictures and the story is woven, using them to illustrate the tale:

The paintings featured are nearly all from his Arles period which ended December 23, 1888 when he had himself committed after cutting off his own ear (not illustrated here!). The asylum was where he painted The Starry Night. The paintings are are listed in the back of the book, but they appear to have missed Van Gogh's Haystacks in Provence (1888) between The Reaper and The Siesta. That latter picture and First Steps were painted in 1890, the year Van Gogh appears to have committed suicide (although the gun was never found!).

I recommend this. There's also a companion volume titled A Magical Day With Matisse, which I haven't seen, but which I imagine would be quite as charming as this one was. I also noted when postign this that there are several others in the series: Cassatt, Degas, Gaugin, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat

I Bring the Fire by C Gockel

Title: I Bring the Fire
Author: Gockel
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
p106 "…dark and black at the point." I think the latter automatically implies the former!

This is an odd little novel, but it was short (only 136 pages). I can much more easily read a short bad novel all the way through than ever I can force myself to read four hundred pages of bad, but this actually was not bad at all. It was really good, although it was odd in a way, in that it was formatted unusually. There was no cover, and pretty much all of your typical front pages (title page, acknowledgements, dedication, contents, etc) were mashed together onto one page. I wondered if this was caused somehow by the transition from a word processor document to a PDF format which didn’t propagate too well? Or maybe the author hates wasting paper as much as I do?!

This is part one of what promises to be quite a series, each volume of which is now available:

Monsters: I Bring the Fire Part II
Chaos: I Bring the Fire Part III
In the Balance: I Bring the Fire Part 3.5
Fates: I Bring the Fire Part IV
The Slip: An I Bring the Fire Short Story (mostly) from Sleipnir's Point of Smell
Warriors: I Bring the Fire Part V

Love those titles!

I know that some professionals whine about how a book has to be laid out in a certain way - Library of Congress rules and all that bullshit - but you know what? Screw them. This isn’t the age of lead characters painstakingly laid out in a metal tray. It’s not the age of primly formatted, hard-bound, printed books. This is the age of e, and Congress and Big Publishing™ no longer get to dictate to writers what we can and cannot do, what we can write, how we format it, and what gets published. Those days are long gone and good riddance to them, so kudos to C Gockel for flouting tradition.

I warmed-up to this novel quickly. It begins in a delightfully unusual way, and I started to like the main character, Amy Lewis, at once. Amy is in vet school and is on break, driving from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Chicago where she stays with her grandmother, and finds work to help pay her way through college. Unfortunately, she runs her car off the road nearly falling asleep from the long day, and the first person to arrive on the scene is a serial killer.

Fortunately, the second person to arrive on the scene is Loki, and this is a different Loki from the one you think you know. He turns out to be the good guy (after a fashion!), and rescues Amy, thus beginning their acquaintanceship; but just like there's more to Loki than you expect, there is more to Amy, too.

There were some parts of the book that I took to skipping. Periodically we’re treated to a flashback in italics, of Loki's childhood. I read the first of these and found it uninteresting, so I jumped over all of the italicized portions after that. The rest of the novel, however, was well-written and really entertaining. There was a really nice line of humor threaded through it, and it sported plausible characters with natural behaviors, and interesting events. The story kept flowing easily, and it readily and easily pulled me along with it, so no complaints at all there.

The concept of a domesticated Loki was hilarious. I was starting to love this author by the end of the novel/novella/novelette, whatever this was (I don't know the actual word count)! I recommend it.

Monday, February 2, 2015

Suffrajitsu Mrs Pankhurst's Amazons Volume One by Tony Wolf

Title:
Author: Tony Wolf (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Emmeline Pankhurst was a radical political agitator for women's suffrage and women's rights. She founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) which actually established a jujutsu-trained all-female squad of bodyguards to protect her from police assaults. This graphic novel, for one price but in three parts, takes that and runs with it.<.p>

Drawn very much in the old-style of the golden era of comic books, the illustrations are evocative, well-done and rather nostalgic which makes them engagingly appropriate for the subject matter. Emmeline Pankhurst was a wild and crazy girl, and this captures that and the spirit she represented very much.

The comic is very short, only 24 pages total, which makes for a fast read, but of course for those who buy the story, there are two more episodes to come included in the original purchase price (as I understand it). One issue I took with it is that it suggests that the bodyguards were trained in Bartitsu, but this was not the case since that very personal art, invented by Edward William Barton-Wright (who is, as far as I can see, is depicted as the trainer and who was very nearly the same age as Pankhurst), largely went out of style in 1902. This is the art featured in a Sherlock Holmes story and named (or misnamed) 'Baritsu'. Suggesting it this way is actually an insult to the real trainer of the WSPU bodyguards, which was a woman named Edith Margaret Garrud. Why she was snubbed in favor of a guy in what is otherwise a strongly feminist novel, I don't know other than that the author is a proponent of Bartitsu!

The novel is set in 1914 and this too, is problematic because the WSPU ceased operations during World War One for the sake of national unity against the German threat to sovereignty and freedom. The war began in late July 1914, so the events depicted here could have taken place in the earlier part of that year, I suppose!

A charming variety of characters are included, some fictional, others not. Persephone Wright is a fictional woman of ill-repute, a “fallen woman”. Flossie Le Mar is an homage to Florence LeMar, who actually was a practitioner of jujutsu. Katharina Brumbach really was a wrestler and strong-woman. Toupie Lowther was also a real person, an avid motorist, and a practitioner of jujutsu. Judith Lee appears to be an invention of writer Richard Marsh. Kitty Marshall, a fictional quick-witted teenager and a Miss Sanderson a violent fictional character. It's doubtful this group (fictional or otherwise!) ever met.

That aside, I really liked this novel and I recommend it. Issue one features the Amazons’ conflicts with the London and Glasgow police and is out as of the date of this review. Issue two follows a month later and covers "a daring rescue mission in the Austrian Alps" (over which Toupie Lowther actually rode on a motorcycle). issue three comes out a month after that and depicts the Amazons trying to prevent a terrorist attack. Is it this that will precipitate World War One?! A ripping good yarn - and somewhat educational too!

Hades by Candice Fox

Title: Hades
Author: Candice Fox
Publisher: Kensington Books
Rating: WARTY!

I have to say I wasn't too thrilled with the Kindle advance review copy of this novel. It wasn't even remotely correctly formatted for the Kindle. The page headers - such as the author's name and the novel title - appeared in the middle of the text because they weren't removed when the text was converted for the Kindle. In addition to that, there were random gaps and new lines in the text, mid-word and mid-sentence. The Adobe Digital Editions and the iPad versions seemed fine.

I know this was an ARC, and so not everything can be perfect, but frankly in this age of e-publishing, there really isn't any excuse for formatting issues of this nature. Hopefully this will not be the status of this novel in the final version. There were also one or two grammatical and similar issues which were a bit more understandable if regrettable, such as at location 547 (sorry, no page numbers in the Kindle - I don't know how much use a location number actually is (especially if you're not reading the ebook!), but the phrase was "cold, calculated businessman" and it really should have been something like "coldly calculating businessman" to make any sense. Unless, of course, they were talking about the corpse of a businessman which they'd designed, in which case it could well have been cold and calculated...!

This novel is really Dexter does Australia (it pretty much says so right on the cover). It's a first person PoV novel, which I normally rail against, but which in this case was one of the rare few which was not nauseating for that reason. It was told in an interesting way, because the narrator is not the main character. He's a cop who is telling the story, and it’s mostly about his interactions with an observations of his new partner, a seasoned cop by the name of Eden. She's a respected, tough and experienced cop who works on the force with her brother, Eric, but with whom she's never partnered for various reasons.

Frank, the narrator, is teamed with her after his own partner kills himself. Eden's partner was killed in the line of duty, we're told. Eden's brother Eric doesn’t take to Frank, looking through his personal stuff and generally irritating him as well as blabbing Frank's secrets (his drug use, his one-time punching of his ex wife, his DWI on his way to work. Despite all these violations, Frank is inexplicably still on the force. He and Eden get along, although she's made it clear she's not interested in becoming bosom buddies with him.

The two are thrown into a serial murder investigation immediately, with a score of bodies having been found after they had been dumped into the ocean in metal boxes. The most outstanding thing about he bodies is that various assorted organs have been surgically removed, so it looks like someone is harvesting the organs for wealthy (and none too picky) clients. The curious thing about this book is that, interspersed with these chapters, is an italicized insert here and there, talking about a character called Hades, who finds two lost and injured children whom he raises as his own despite not legally being entitled to do so. How that fits into the story isn't immediately clear, but when we learn that the children are named Eden and Eric, things start becoming more clear - or do they?

I have to interject a complaint here, and if you follow my reviews you knew this was coming! It concerns wasted trees. In an ebook, which is what I read in this case, this isn't a problem (although a larger file size does mean more energy is required to transmit and maintain it), but if a book goes to a print run, then the more white space you have on your page, the more trees are going to die in order to feed your book. It’s not a smart move to be contributing to bringing down trees en masse in an era of all-but-runaway climate change.

I'm not suggesting that writers and publishers cram every square millimeter of white space with text by any means, but as you can see from the sample image on my blog, the chapter title page is about 85% white space and the regular pages are not much better. At first I thought this was an issue only when viewed as an ebook or in Adobe Digital Editions, but when I took advantage of the "look inside" feature on-line, it appeared to be exactly the same, so I have no reason to believe the print book will be any different. I understand that there are aesthetic, practical, and artistic considerations in play here, I do. All I ask is that writers and publishers not forget the big picture. Every one of us can make a difference.

That said, I started out linking this book, but soon found that the shifting perspectives became irritating at first and then outright annoying before very long. This is the problem with limiting yourself by employing first person PoV. It’s not a voice that you should use unless you really know what you want to do with it, and it failed sadly in this instance. The severe handicap of 1PoV is that you can't show anything that's not directly witnessed by the narrator, which is an awful limitation to impose upon your story telling unless you really have a first class, iron-clad reason for it - and most authors do not.

If you've stuck yourself with this limitation and then discover that you haven't planned too-well and need to add a larger perspective, you're stuck with a clunky info-dump from a third party, or you have to go the even more clunky route of adding third person narration. This latter is what happened here, and it didn’t work. We kept having third person flashbacks to Eric and Eden's childhood, which proved to be a major spoiler, and then this was interleaved with the main narrator's first person, and with third person from the perspective of more than one other character! This made the novel seem badly organized and cluttered, and it really detracted from the story for me.

On top of that, the story was too dissipated, with focus being repeatedly dragged away from the case to the first person narrator's stalker-ish obsession with his new partner which was sick at best. The narrator wasn't a nice person which made me suspicious of his veracity to begin with, which in turn certainly did not help me to either like or trust this story. I can see why the author did it (can you say sequels?!), but the problem was that this was telegraphed, and this meant that there really was no mystery or intrigue here.

The narrator, and his interaction with Eden made the narrator seem like a lowlife to me, and he wasn't too smart, either. I had neither empathy for, nor interest in, him. I didn’t like Eric because he was just scum from the start: a caricature with villain garishly painted all over him, and I didn’t like Eden because although she was rather intriguing at first, she never grew and was never developed. She was more like a symbol, and not even a sex symbol, so what was she? What’s to keep me interested in a story where neither of the two main characters is remotely appealing?!

Almost worse than that, we'd get a bit of a cliff-hanger in the murder investigation at the end of a chapter, but then have to wait a chapter or two while the narrative wandered off to someone else's viewpoint before we could get back to the story which I was interested in! I found myself becoming more and more annoyed, and then skipping the dead zones, which in turn meant I wasn't always getting the whole story (although frankly I wasn't evidently missing much). By this time I already knew where this was going and had done for a while, so there really were no surprises in store and at about 90%, I just gave up on it. I'd lost all interest in it and really didn’t care exactly how it ended. I have no interest in being made to work this hard to get a good story out of a novel!

I can’t honestly recommend this one. The idea isn't exactly fresh, and the execution left a lot to be desired. Also, I really like trees and hate to see them so badly used! I think this author has a future, but not with this novel.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

One Among Us by Paige Dearth

Title: One Among Us
Author: Paige Dearth
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

This is my second review of a Paige Dearth novel today. I wish I had better news to report because she writes about important topics, but I can't recommend this one either, and for many of the same reasons that I couldn't recommend her debut novel, I'm sorry to report. This is her third novel, and it looked to me like there was no change in her writing style between the first and this one.

This novel is even longer than the first one. I wasn't able to make myself read 400 pages of the first one after reading the first seventy or so because of the dry, matter-of-fact writing, and since this one was much the same tone, I wasn't going to make any attempt to read even seventy pages in a novel which runs to almost six hundred pages of dire straits, gratuitous abuse, and bad language when there was not a thing to lighten the load. It's far, far too much.

The writing is this was, as I said, like the first - more like a police report than a novel. The men were universally lowlife mean-as-a-junkyard-dog rapists without a nuance to share between them, which I find personally insulting. Yes, there are men like that - and there are boys like that - too many, in fact, but not every single man and boy is like that and I think the author does her stories a serious disservice by adopting this approach in her writing. I can read a novel where character X is a rapist or an abuser, but when the novel is effectively telling me that I'm a rapist or an abuser by dint of my gender, I draw the line!

The dialog didn't feel realistic to me, and main character Maggie was just a shade too good to be true or even realistic, and the characters weren't much better. All of them seemed more like cardboard cut-outs than real people.

I mentioned in my other review that a more seasoned author would have leavened the mix with a pinch of beauty or an ounce of hope. It's quite simply depressing to read and to try to keep reading a novel, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how important the topic, which is nothing but one horrible thing after another with nothing to offer any kind of hope. Though this is rooted in real life, it's still fiction, and therefore does not need to detail a real life down to the nth degree of depression. Consequently, the writing here kept on reminding me with almost metronomic frequency that this was fiction, and I wasn't allowed to forget it and become completely immersed in this story. I couldn't get beyond page fifty and I can't recommend this novel.

Believe Like a Child by Paige Dearth

Title: Believe Like a Child
Author: Paige Dearth
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WARTY!

Today is Paige Dearth Day on my blog - I'm reviewing two books by this author and I wish I had better news to deliver than I do.

This novel, in some ways, is autobiographical. According to her bio in the book, the author was raped by a live-in uncle when she was very young, and this is an exploration of how that might have panned-out had things gone differently from how they did unfold in the author's own life. As far as that goes, it's admirable. There is nothing worse than violating a child's trust and confidence, especially in such an abhorrent manner, but this novel was so front-loaded with abuse, and pain and torment that it was for me, unreadable. I made it to page 74 and I knew I didn't want to being regaled with a non-stop story of endless and unremitting pain for another 360 or so pages.

The problem for me was that it didn't read like a novel. It read like a police report, and it was consequently unappealing. The text was dry as a bone and did nothing to draw me in or make me feel like I could empathize with the main character Alessa, who herself wasn't exactly the smartest Smarty in the Smarty box.

On top of that I had issues with Alessa's inability to report this abuse and the poor advice she was given by someone in whom she confided. I know people who are abused typically have problems in revealing what's happened to them either through shame or through fear, or because they don't even realize that what's happening to them isn't appropriate, but the way it was written here wasn't convincing.

Instead to going with her to the police, Zoe, the mom of Alessa's best friend, set up Alessa with sufficient money to run away, where she got ripped off by a seedy landlady for a piece-of-trash apartment in a lousy part of town. I knew exactly what was going to happen next, because it was telegraphed way in advance. All the mystery was removed and I was left looking at yet more abuse piled onto what had already happened. Zoe in effect, became just another abuser.

One major problem is that there were no shades of gray here. In some ways it's understandable since this is a debut novel, but it doesn't make it a better read. For example, in the portion that I read, men were presented universally as rapists waiting to happen, which is bullshit and insulting.

A more seasoned author would have found a way to leaven writing of this horrific nature with something lighter. They would have put a dash of hope in there instead of repeatedly dashing hope. They would have found a way to add a sprinkle of beauty somewhere, somehow, to bring something better into this world of unrelenting awfulness, but this author did nothing of the sort. It became, therefore, a dire litany of abuse, bad decisions, and poor advice, and it wasn't entertaining or engrossing to read, it was just depressing and despite the fact that these things actually do happen to children, the writing paradoxically made this novel feel unrealistic. I couldn't get beyond chapter nine and I can't recommend this novel.

I know it was lousy what the author went through, and I admire her attempt to put this into fictional form and get the word out to people, but she failed to convince me that this was the best-advised way to do that.