On by Jon Puckridge

Rating: WORTHY!

This felt like reading a William Gibson Novel, which in some ways was wonderful, because it was like Gibson used to be, before he lost his direction, but in other ways it was a bad thing because once you start down the road to inventing a new cool world, there's a danger you'll go too far and ruin it by rendering it in such obscure hues that it's unintelligible to the human eye. Fortunately, while parts of this world were obtuse, this author didn’t overdo it, and the story - once I settled into it - was engrossing. It’s Gibson by way of I, Robot and A.I., with a tang of Blade Runner for seasoning, and an ominous dash of 1984 that tingles like Takifugu on the tongue. While bits of it here and there felt like info-dumps and were somewhat irritating, for the most part it read well and drew me in, and it kept me engaged right to the end.

The initial premise is that this world is an extension of our own, many years into the future, where there are sentient and emancipated robots, although it was unclear, until about 30% into the novel, whether these actually were robots, clones, advanced humans, cyborgs, or even an alien race! Perhaps that was intentional. In a way, humans are becoming more like the bots, in that technology is being used to augment people, specifically in this case, by way of connecting them mind to mind, in the same way that the Internet currently connects people device to device. I can see this happening; not in the near future, but in fifty years or a century, this is going to happen. Will it ever start drifting towards being mandatory as it does here? Will corporations be all powerful as they are here? It depends upon what foundation you place 'mandatory' - and corporations are already becoming all-powerful!

In the novel, Earth's population is some 23 billion, housed on a host of satellites as well as on the dirty and polluted planet's surface. Everything - quite literally everything - is privatized. It's known as OneWorld, perhaps because everyone who can afford it is linked via the grID system and there are no national boundaries - only corporate ones. The grID system involves communicating through headsets using visors, and is evidently rooted in something like Google Glass. Goggle Glass! The next wave of this technology is already unveiling in the novel, and it's called "ON" - where everyone is on all the time, facilitated by means of an implanted brain device, plugged into the back of the skull in a manner reminiscent of the device in The Matrix movies. Yes, there are some elements from that story in here, too.

The problem here is that while this technology is awesome and supposedly hack-proof, evidence begins accumulating that it clearly isn't anything like hack-proof. The mystery is: who is hacking it and what’s their game plan? Or is there entirely something else going on here? Investigating an oddball murder, a rooin cop starts uncovering more mysteries than he's solving. Rooin is the polite name given to robots. Females are rooines, although why robots would put up with that is a mystery.

What does it even mean to be a female robot when robots don’t reproduce like humans do? As is usual with sci-fi, parts of it made no sense, not even in context! Even if, as in the movie A.I. there were some robots which were manufactured to give pleasure to humans, it makes little sense that that particular distinction would be continued once the robots were emancipated. I didn’t get the impression that these particular robots wanted to emulate humans very much. Issues like this are rather glossed over, as they typically are in sci-fi, so you either have to decide to let it go, and relax and enjoy the story, or quit reading it and move on to something else. I continued reading!

There were some minor issues with the text, such as my pet peeve: "My name is Doctor Rafaela Serif." No, her name is Rafaela Serif . 'Doctor' is her title. It’s not her name. I see this a lot in novels, and sadly, there's nothing to be done about it! Those minor issues aside, the writing was good. A bit obscure in places, occasionally confusing in others, but overall very well done, if we ignore common faux pas such as "I found it hard to place Dos’ origins," which actually should have read " I found it hard to place Dos’s origins," since Dos here is a name and not a plural. Those kinds of thing might irritate but they're not deal-breakers for me.

Rest assured that there are some brilliant bits, too. The 1984 part came in with Tempo corporation, the owners of time - not the magazine, but the passage of time! You have to pay to get the time of day in this world, so most people don't bother. Who has the time?! No one! It’s actually a waste of time since each person's personal assistant - the grID - tells them everything they need to know regarding appointments, and so on.

No one pays any attention to time anymore, which makes it hard for the rooin who's investigating the murder to actually determine when something happened that's pertinent to his investigation. People have to refer to one event in terms of other events - such as a sports game, or some scandal with one of the corporations. It even makes it difficult to know your own age or the age of your kids. Another such charmer was that insurance rules in this world. You can even get insured against committing crime. One guy missed a payment on his identity insurance and now his identity is owned by some Chinese corporation! I Loved that.

Be warned that this is yet another novel that acknowledges the acute limitations of first person PoV by switching person frequently depending on whose story we’re following. Normally I rail against this, but in this case it was hardly noticeable - I think because the novel was so weird anyway, set in a rather alien future, that things like a shifting voice didn’t really register against all the other background noise, so it wasn't an issue, which was refreshing! The mixed views and voices made more sense at the end than they did sat the beginning.

Though this is written by an Australian author, it's hard to tell precisely because (it seems to me) it's sci-fi and as such, features many advanced concepts and buzzwords. This is the upside of the very thing which was a bit annoying to me at other times! Only a word or two here and there (a spelling of colour, as opposed to color, for example) gives it away, so for picky American audiences, too many of whom don't seem to be willing to stretch themselves outside national boundaries, there should be few problems with intelligibility or slang here. British readers will feel right at home.

Overall I rate this a very worthy read. It was interesting and engrossing, and kept me following it right to the end. I recommend it.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

Rating: WARTY!

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency! How can you not love a title like that? Well, I learned. I love several of the titles of this series, but when I came to read the first one (or rather, to listen to the audio book), my experience was singularly less than satisfactory. The absurdity of series is sweetly highlighted here since this novel is known as The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #1). How bizarre is that?!

This fiction is supposedly Rooted on the real life ritual murder of Segametsi Mogomotsi a couple of years ago. This was a religious murder which was perpetrated purely for deluded business purposes. That story shows up about halfway through, but here it's a boy rather than a girl who is the victim. The novel is set in Gaborone, Botswana, and it takes too long to get down to business. It features a Motswana character named Precious Ramotswe. Curiously enough, 'Motswana' is the singular form of 'Tswana' which is a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa.

I know nothing of Bantu, so I have to bow to the reader of this novel, a woman with the awesomely kick-ass name of Lisette Lecat, who is actually from southern Africa. Her voice is sweet and melodic as are all of those voices down there, it seems to me, but it drove me nuts when listening to her pronouncing 'Mma Ramotswe' with an exaggeratedly long Mmmmm, rolling into the 'r' of the name. I think she was overdoing it, frankly! This was exacerbated by the author's inane insistence upon using everyone's full name every time they're referred to, even when it's entirely unnecessary. There's no 'she' or 'he' here, only full names or titled names, such as Ummmmm-aaaaah Rrramotswe. Yes, it's that annoying. Maybe it won't bother other readers, but it did me. I’d recommend avoiding the audiobook unless you're really into that kind of thing!

As for the novel itself, I was really disappointed. I was hoping for some interesting African detective work, but it took forever to get going. There was a case right a the start, but then the story gets bogged down with some three chapters of info dump on not only the main character, but also her father. What the heck does that have to do with the story? Nothing! Yes, she got the money for her agency after her father died from miner's lung, and left her his house, but seriously?

The worst part about this novel was that the cases themselves were worthy of a children's book, not an adult story. One woman took in a strange guy who said he was her long lost father. This is a commendable tradition in Botswana, but she became suspicious of his free-loading, and brought the case to Ramotswe. She solves it by using a principal based on the Biblical story of Solomon, where he threatened to cut up a child in order to determine which of two competing women was the actual mother. Why, when he purportedly had a god on his side, he had to resort to such barbaric measures went unexplained.

Fortunately, Ummmmm-aaaaah Rrramotswe proves to be wiser than Solomon in her execution of the principal. Another case was self-evident - a guy disappeared and was quite obviously taken by a crocodile, although how he disappeared so completely silently when standing next to five other people who were waiting with him to be baptized is as much of a mystery as it is a joke. Why no body parts were found when the crocodile was cut open was an even bigger mystery. After that story, I could no longer take any of this seriously and decided to quit listening and move onto something more grown up.

It's nice to read about Africa, the cradle of humanity, and those parts of the novel were, for the most part, interesting, but nothing truly special. The novel is more like a series of short stories than a novel, with no overall arc and no over-arching plot, and what bit of a story that was there, wasn't exactly enthralling. Another factor that turned me off it was the hatred of men which pervaded the entire story (at least as far as I listened). Violence against women in domestic relationships is high in Botswana, so this might account for that approach, but I thought this could have been better handled. it was simply annoying to hear pretty much everyone insulting men pretty much every time they spoke. Maybe in Botswana, they deserve it, but that doesn't mean we have to hear it like a ritualistic mantra every time a man is mentioned! Overall, I can’t recommend this story.

Deck the Halls by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark

Rating: WARTY!

Read somewhat annoyingly by Carol Higgins Clark, this novel failed to launch, which is sad because it's the first of about four Christmas novels I intend to review this month. I hope the others are better!

Apparently it's something of a tradition for this pair of family members to write a Xmas novel together, and after this I'm thinking that tradition ought to die a natural death under the snow, allowing something fresh and different to spring up next year in its place. This is the second novel I've read that the mom had a hand in, and I'm done with Higgins Clark stories at this point.

This one featured two kidnappers - whose names we knew from the off, so no mystery there - who kidnap the husband of a successful novelist, knowing she can well afford the million dollar ransom. One of the kidnappers is so puerile as to be a joke. It's not remotely possible to imagine that the other guy would ever trust him with something like this - and of course he screws up royally. The kidnappers are so dumb that they follow the plot of one of the writer's novels exactly, yet the police are too stupid to predict what will happen next despite this.

Not that any of the other characters are any more realistic. They're flimsy caricatures, every bit as cheap and nasty as the tinsel and baubles which bedeck a evergreen fir tree at this time of year. They undergo no development. Any one of them could be substituted with a different character and the story would have worked just as badly. The story is larded and puffed up with tedious extraneous detail. These two writers can't introduce a character without describing their hair and age - nothing else, just hair and age! How and why is that ever relevant?! Talking of which, the title of this novel bears no relation whatsoever to the story, which could have been set at any time of the year. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Xmas. The overall impression I got was that this was essentially nothing more than a mercenary attempt to cash in on seasonal excesses, and I can't recommend it.

Lily and the Paper Man by Rebecca Upjohn

Rating: WORTHY!

Illustrated very nicely by Renné Benoit, this young children's picture book (with lots of text!) is the story of Lily and her haunting encounter with a down-and-out guy who is selling newspapers. I read this in Adobe Digital Editions on a desk-top computer, which made for an odd read since the book isn't really set up for electronic format. It shows both pages side-by-side which, unless you switch it to full screen, makes for very small images and smaller text. It definitely wouldn't work on a smart phone!

That said, the layout was wonderful, and the text readable, and the images delightfully colored and drawn to appeal to young eyes. I loved the self-righteous pigeon sheltering under the newspaper as the story began, and the almost Santa-like beaming face of the paper man at the end of it. Lily is walking home with her mom in the rain, and this is how she happens to encounter this guy - old, slightly menacing-looking, grizzled. She literally bumps into him, and decides she wants to take the bus home the next day so she doesn't run into him again. He definitely made an impression on her!

The problem arises when it snows, and Lily can't stand the thought of riding the bus with fresh snow on the ground. Of course, she encounters the same man, selling his papers, and looking like he's freezing with his thin jacket, holes in his shoes, and no socks. He doesn't seem threatening any more, and he may even have winked at her. Suddenly her mind is preoccupied with thoughts of the paper man, his clothes as thin as paper. She develops a plan.

This is not a Christmas story as such, but it's heart-warming enough to be one, and it's really well told. It's actually better that it's not a Christmas story because charity shouldn't be confined to one season. I consider this book a very worthy read.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Rating: WARTY!

This novel was beyond awful; I'd even go so far as to say that it was something John Green would be proud of. Oh, wait, he was! I actually read this some time ago, but must have blanked it out until I got reminded recently that I never posted a review for this.

Cather and Rine are twins who don't even get their own name. If 'it' was a girl she would have been named Catherine, but 'it' was twin girls, so Mom, who is no longer on the scene, split the name. Listening to this on the audio book, I thought the sister's name was 'Ren' because of the way the reader pronounced it. It took a while to make sense of it. I see some reviewers have rendered her name as Wren, so maybe that's how it was in the print book. In the audio version, you can't tell. Cather, who likes to be called Cath, is the eponymous fangirl. She writes popular fan fiction about Simon Snow - who is a direct rip-off of Harry Potter, if Potter had been gay or bi, and had a relationship going with Malfoy (a topic which actually is the subject of fanfiction, believe it or not).

The problem is that Cath has the mentality and outlook of a middle-grader, and she is lost without A). her sister, and B). her fan fiction. Now they're going to college, without any warning whatsoever, Ren has chosen to put away childish things and embrace adulthood. For her this means staying not only in a different room at college, but also in a different dorm. Essentially, she ditches her own sister, leaving Cath lost and adrift. I'm tempted to call her a bitch, but in that, she's really no different from Cath. They're both the same underneath their respective veneer of civilization. They're like positive and negative terminals and both are equally lost in college. So Cath has only Simon Snow to cling to, and she's racing to finish her novel length fanfiction before the next installment of the actual Simon Snow series gets published. She has a lot of fans. Why, I don't know, because her writing is as stereotypically crappy as fan fiction is supposed to be and all-too-often-but-not-always, is.

After getting through about twenty percent of this, I had no interest in reading about either of these two loser twins. They were clichéd and boring as all-get-out. The person I wanted to read about was Cath's roommate, Reagan (who ought to have been president instead of the actual Reagan! LOL!), but I was denied that except in too-brief glimpses. Instead, what I got was Cath and her roommate's obnoxious boyfriend Zither (or whatever the hell this jerk-off's name was), who had no respect whatsoever for Cath, whom he played like a Zither.

As one prescient reviewer observed, Cath was thirteen for all practical purposes, and he was in his twenties, so this relationship was creepy at best. He constantly took advantage of her and invaded her space. He stole things from her. He occupied her bed like it was Wall Street. He was always there. He flatly refused to call her by the name she wanted to be known by: Cath. He forced his way into her room when she had told him "No!" more than once. She didn't want him around, but because he was raping her incrementally, he was allowed, by this author (who apparently thinks that no means you have to be more forceful) to have his way with her. Instead of being dependent upon her sister, Cath became dependent upon him. How that was supposed to represent an improvement in her condition, I don't know. But at least someone now owned her, so I guess this author thought that was fine.

There were huge screeds of Simon Snow fanfic in this volume, all of which I skipped when I realized how godawful it truly was. The novel would be about fifty percent smaller without it. I'm guessing the author was hoping for a comic book series based on Simon Snow. It's not going to happen. At least not through any writer who has any self-respect. The main character was thoroughly unlikeable, as was her twin. Cath was a spineless uninteresting juvenile who had no redeeming qualities. Her self-appointed overlord was even worse. The novel was out-and-out awful, and I refuse to even consider recommending it.

What Happened on Planet Kid by Jane Leslie Conly

Rating: WARTY!

The short answer to What Happened on Planet Kid is: Not a darned thing! Admittedly I skimmed this audio book because it plumbed new depths in the bottomless mine of the ineffably boring, but Planet Kid was barely mentioned. The two kids were almost never there and pretty much everything that happened in this novel happened elsewhere. Not that it was actually a planet, of course; it was simply a hide-away that they had created to avoid boys, but THEY WERE NEVER THERE! Nothing happened. The novel's title was a complete lie!

Not only that, but reader Kate Forbes not only sounded too old for the character, she sounded like Clarice Starling from the movie Silence of the Lambs! I honestly couldn't take it seriously, but it wasn't funny, either. If you consider a twelve-year old's "Dear Diary" from half a century ago, with all the interesting bits cut out, entertaining and engrossing, then this is for you, otherwise you might want to give it a fly by - I planet kid you not.

The Witches of Cambridge by Menna van Praag

Rating: WARTY!

This book didn’t start out on its best foot with me, and it was mostly downhill from there! Be warned: if you're expecting anything like "The Witches of East End" or that kind of a witchcraft story, then you'll be as disappointed as I was. This one really isn’t a novel about witches or witchcraft; it’s about several women going through mid-life crises. Why the witchcraft was included was the real mystery for me, because it really plays very little part in the story - at least in as much of it as I managed to get through.

Told in third person which I like, it's third person present voice, which felt weird to me. The story is happening as it’s being told, so it was like sitting with a friend in a park or a mall somewhere, and the friend covering your eyes and then relating everything that happens. That's what it felt like. Why not just take your hands from my eyes so I can see it myself? But on the other hand, why would I want to see if it’s only something ordinary and boring? That's where a writer comes in - showing you the ordinary, but making it seem miraculous. I think this author failed in this case, which is ironic given that this is a book supposedly about magic. It was like the author's spell backfired and instead of the mundane becoming magical, the potentially magical was neutered and became fifty shades of mundane.

It was like the difference between being told and being shown, and this fell heavily onto the 'being told' side of that rickety fence, which is even more weird when you think of it in this context. I favorably reviewed this author's Dress Shop of Dreams back in January of 2015, but this one failed to grab me the way that one had, even though it was very similar in some ways. The present tense third-person voice was back. The fascination with math was back. The magic wasn't.

The novel features exactly what the title says (in a way!): witches who live in Cambridge (England), and I think that may have been a part of the problem - too many main characters and too little time spent getting to know them in a coherent block of text. Instead, we jumped abruptly and repeatedly from one to another, usually in the same chapter, so I had a really hard time separating one character from another. Initially, they all conflated since they really all seemed to be the same person with the same life and the same basic problem. Most of them are female, and it was depressing to read of the same (or monotonously similar) problems occurring with one witch after another.

There seemed to be no explanation as to why magical people had these problems, but perhaps that was because these so-called 'witches' were curiously hobbled in what they could do, too. They don’t have pointy hats or magic wands - for which I was grateful - but neither do they seem to be able to perform spells. They seemed far more like characters from the Heroes Reborn TV show, who have quirky powers which they can use, but which are quite restricted in many ways. Normally I like quirky; here it was uninspired.

Let me get one issue out of the way which has nothing to do with this author or this publisher. There were some formatting problems in the Kindle app version on my Android smart phone. I've seen these kinds of issues in other ebooks. At one point in this novel for example, there was a mathematical formula reproduced on the screen, but it precedes the sentence which introduces it: "Her favorite, the fundamental theorem of calculus, is framed in silver and glass above her desk:" The formula was supposed to appear (I assume!) after the colon, but it appeared before that entire sentence. I'm fairly confident that this wasn't how it appeared in the author's original. I’d be annoyed were I the author and Amazon screwed-up what I’d written and formatted, because it has a crappy ebook app.

The worst part was how slow the story seemed. It took forever to get anywhere, and I was, frankly, getting bored with the unremarkable minutiae of these people's lives and particularly irked by their self-pity and their constant, obsessive fretting over relationships, like they had no other interests in life, and nothing to offer in and of themselves. It was like they were only of any value when in the context of some partner, a partner with whom they seemed incapable of discussing problems which begs the question as to how their relationship could have been so idyllic in the first place. I know there are real life people who are as tame as these fictional people are, but I don’t like characters like that in novels, not unless they're going somewhere different, and soon, and none of these people appeared to have any direction, or any future. I especially dislike female characters like that, and it makes me wonder why so many female authors create them. I usually find them in YA novels, so it was especially sad to find them in a book which is ostensibly written for grown-ups.

Everything was tied to them having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, and without that they were evidently considered (or considered themselves) to be failures or hopeless cases. This was exacerbated by the emphasis on physical beauty - again by a female author who seems to buy into the nonsensical idea that if you're a female and you're not beautiful, you're not worth writing about. In addition to the tired 'flecks of gold in the eyes' YA trope (except here it was "vivid green with flecks of yellow", so maybe she deserves credit for that?! LOL!) there was one assertion after another that only beautiful women need apply: "...it’s not as if Kat isn’t a beautiful woman. It’s not as if she isn’t still propositioned by men, even, sometimes, by her own students." Here's another: "She was young and beautiful, with long legs and long dark hair and every boy in the math department wanted to date her."

Now this woman is supposed to be brilliant. We're told she's published scores of papers on mathematics, yet the focus isn’t on what kind of person she is, what contributions she's made, or how decent (or obnoxious, even) a human being she may be, but purely on how pretty her skin is. I can’t get interested in a story which is as shallow as that and which features characters as shallow as that. If this were some cheap erotic novel, which I don't read, then I could see physical attributes being dominant and prevalent, but this story is evidently trying to strut its stuff as literature, masquerading as a novel about female relationships. The problem is that instead of getting that - the inside track on how these people feel and what motivations they have - we’re being fed clichéd superficiality worthy of Harlequin romance fan fiction about how endlessly beautiful these women are!

I can’t take a story like this one seriously and it sure shouldn’t take itself seriously. Most especially it should not endow its female characters with absurdly pretentious names like Amandine, Cosima, Héloïse, and Noa and focus on their purported beauty to the exclusion of all else. I don't have a problem with a character thinking themselves beautiful (even if they aren’t!), or with a person perceiving their loved one(s) as beautiful. It’s fine to have a beautiful character if you're writing about a model, or an actor, where beauty is considered important by many, and which definitely opens doors. I’d prefer it if some quality other than skin was the focus, but I could see how you would be in the position of having to deal with beauty in those circumstances, but when the writer is promoting beauty as paramount in ordinary everyday people (their witchcraft notwithstanding), and talking as though it’s all a woman could possibly bring to the table, then I take issue with it because it devalues and objectifies women. The blurb for this book claims that it's about "the magic of life-changing love," but that's nonsense. There is no love on exhibit here. It’s all shallow, needy lust.

Then there's the weird pacing. Cosima is desperate for a father for her planned child(ren). She starts to consider George, (who isn’t beautiful!). We encounter the two interacting as George visits Cosima's Italian eatery, but he runs out, then there's a brief uninventive interlude with Héloïse running barefoot in the park (which apparently magically changes her life!), and suddenly we're back to George coming into the eatery. Did a day pass? Is this a flashback or a time-warp redux? Did he change his mind and come back an hour or two later? From the writing, it’s apparently at a later time, but the text isn't exactly helpful, and there are no chapter splits to break this up, only a blank line in the text. This made for a confusing read with me having to occasionally skim back a few screens to re-establish context. I admit that part of the problem was my fading ability to pay attention to the increasingly dull story, but better chaptering (if that's a word) would have made it considerably more readable.

When I got to 34% in, at the start of chapter eight, the first thing I read was “You are so beautiful, so, so beautiful,” and I just could not stand to read any more. I really couldn’t. This was an artist who was saying this, so you could argue that in one sense, his eye would be drawn to beauty and he would want to capture it, but for me it was still too shallow, especially in the simplistic way it was expressed. If this guy had had better words with which to frame his subject, I might have been able to read on a little longer at least, but this juvenile view of his made it sound like something a guy who wants to get laid would say to a naïve girl just to try and get her into bed, and it sounded truly pathetic. It didn’t sound anything at all like something a seasoned artist would say to his subject.

I’d already been increasingly turned off by it up to that point, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I no longer cared if Cosima accidentally caught George (the secret keeper) with a love potion or whether sister Kat, the master caster, could help this idiotic woman fix it. I honestly didn’t care if Amandine, the supposed empath was far too lacking in empathy to tell if her husband was really having an affair, or if psychic Héloïse ever got over her psychotic addiction to her dead husband or if Noa got rid of her obsessive-compulsive secret-spilling. I really didn’t. I can’t recommend this based on what I read.

Evil Fairies Love Hair by Mary G Thompson

Rating: WORTHY!

The title of this novel made me laugh, so I decided I would like to give it a try, and fortunately, the local library came through for me yet again. I for one welcome our librarian overlords!

I was not disappointed when I started reading this either. The story is so quirky and takes itself so seriously in a comic way that I couldn't help but fall in love with it, but could it maintain my interest? Well I had to wait and see, but with every page I read, I became more confident it would not let me down, and in the end, I loved it.

This is the kind of novel that made me wish I'd thought of it first. It highly amused me, and made me want to keep on reading. The characters are well drawn (as were Blake Henry's illustrations) and the main character, Alison Elizabeth Brown Butler, was adorable, determined, strong, focused, and smart - in short, one of the kick-ass female characters I love to read about.

I loved that Alison was so determined, resolute, and would not give up even as the ground shifted under her. I also loved how thoroughly naughty the imps were! The obsession with hair, the evil imp leader's plan, the ambition of the children in pursuing and maintaining their wishes, the changing allegiances and the indeterminate ending were all brilliant and I loved every little switch and change as the story unfolded. I recommend this one completely.

The Heretic's Wife by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

Rating: WORTHY!

Having got through and enjoyed Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII not long ago, this one sounded like it might be entertaining. The version I listened to was the audio book read by Davina Porter. She did an acceptable job.

Set at the time when Henry 8 was trying to talk the Pope into letting him marry Anne Boleyn (which turned into a disaster for both, but did spawn Elizabeth 1), this novel focuses on booksellers who are purveying the English translation of the Bible, something which the idiot Pope had declared illegal. They took their censorship seriously back then, and death awaited anyone who flouted the Catholic global dictatorship.

Unfortunately, this novel moved way too slowly for me, and dithered and dallied when I wanted to get on with the story. There is no logical or rational reason why historical fiction should routinely run to four, five, six, seven, eight hundred pages! What it is which drives authors to do this, I think, is that they hate to waste all the research they did and consequently feel like they have to cram it in somewhere. Worse than this, they feel they have to draft-in every historical person they can think of from the period, which is nothing more than tediously pretentious name-dropping and turns me right off a novel. It's like a kid's time travel movie where they run into famous people like Benjamin Franklin (it's always Franklin isn't it?!). It's celebrity worshiping gibberish and it simply doesn't work.

I've raised this issue before of book titles which take the form "The _______'s Daughter" or "The _______'s Wife." On the one hand, I agree that they're quite provocative titles, carrying as they do a suggestion of rebellion or at least misbehavior. On the other hand they seem to me to be insulting titles, implying as they do that the woman in question is no more than a possession of the man. I've reviewed about four such novels prior to this one, and they were batting a .500. Now the balance is tipped negatively and I think I am no longer inclined to pick up any more such titles, lackluster as they've been!

What finally killed this particular one for me was the (relatively) modern language and idiom. It kept kicking me out of the story. I think it would have been tedious to have read this in the same English which Shakespeare knew, or in which the King James Bible was written, but there had to be a happier compromise than this one. In the end, I couldn't get into it and I can't recommend it based on the portion I covered.

Chasing Shadows by Swati Avasthi

Rating: WORTHY!

The author's name, we're told in the fly leaf, is pronounced SWA-thee Of-US-thee. The author was born in in India, but now lives in the USA. I find myself wondering, given that none of the native Indian languages uses the English alphabet, why her name isn't spelled phonetically. Why spell it in a way that necessitates either a phonetic spelling or a wrong pronunciation?! I've never understood that kind of thing when words are translated from languages which do not use anything remotely like the western alphabets. Life, it seems to me, would be a lot simpler for all of us if more thought was put into making it easier on ourselves!

In this context, one of the main characters is named Savitri, and again, it's not spelled how its pronounced. Interestingly, for a novel about three main characters, her name is pronounced like it's 'savvy three', but that's ruined when Holly, one of the other characters, shortens it to 'Sav'. Maybe this is on purpose, because it sounds like the way Americans pronounce 'salve'. Is Savitri going to be Holly's salve when things go bad? You'll have to read this to find out. The ending wasn't at all what I had been expecting, but it was a really good ending. Although this kind of thing is exactly the kind of word play in which I like to indulge myself in some of the things I've written, somehow I don't get the impression that this is what was going on here.

This novel is about friendship and about the psychology of loss, and about free-running or parkour. The free-running could also be taken as a metaphor for the ups and downs of friendship, and it was this panoply of opportunity and ideas which attracted me to this novel. It also has an Indian character written by an Indian author, which is another attraction for me. I find it hard to believe that authors do not include more Asian characters in their work given how huge the Asian population is - half the world! Given that African Americans are a significant component of the USA population and still struggle to get a fair shake, I guess I'm living in dreamland expecting that a community that is seen as being distanced from the US by half a world would get their turn, even though large numbers of them also populate in the USA.

There was one more thing to like about this novel. Although it's largely text, it's also somewhat of a mixed media publication in that it has a significant graphical component - rather like a comic book or graphic novel - which intrudes on the text from time to time. That said, the novel was written in first person PoV which I don't like, and to make it worse, this novel had three main characters, two of which were telling it in their own voice. That doubles the issues you have with only one PoV.

First person PoV is unnatural to me. We're being told that the author is typing-out the story as it happens, which is patently absurd, so we have to understand either that they telling us - narrating it as it happens to them - or they are writing it in retrospect, in which case, they evidently remember every little detail with eidetic clarity down to pinpoint accurate conversations, all with none of the natural modification which memory inevitably molds events. I can't take any of that seriously. Typically if I pick up a book off the shelf in a book store or the library and I see it's first person, I put it right back. Some writers, however, can carry this voice, so every time I find myself stuck with a novel like this, I'm hoping against no hope that this writer can do it without nauseating me or making me resent their self-important main character, and from the way this one started, it seems my wish was granted. In the end, it worked, and for once, worked well provided you were willing to let the absurdity of first person slide by.

Holly Paxton is the daughter of a cop, but this doesn't stop her free-running with her twin Corey and their friend Savitri Mathur across the cityscape of Chicago. These three late teens are (we're told on page six) "Defying the Physical Laws of Gravity." I have no idea what that means! There's only one law of gravity and nothing defies it, not even the birds. The best you can do is learn to work it, which is what these guys are doing, and as the story begins, Holly almost fails to work it. She comes close to missing a jump, and Savitri knows this, but neither Corey nor Holly are willing to consider that she could have died in a forty-foot fall. This near disaster presages the real disaster which is about to befall them.

Savitri and Corey are an item, but Savitri is heading off to Princeton when her high schooling is done, and Corey doesn't know this to begin with, so the story began well with a nice variety of friction from different sources showing up right from the off. Talking of controversy, the twins have a silver Mini Cooper which Corey has named "The Dana" and the author talks of this as though it's exclusively a female name, but it isn't. It's bi-gender. Just saying! In fact, pretty much every name is bi-gender if you're willing to let a few hang-ups go! There's a boy named Sue and there's a man duhh!!

What happens next is that Corey is shot and dies. Holly almost dies, and she and Savitri are left to try and make sense of their world sans Corey. The story that follows from this is beautifully told and unfolds about as close to perfection as you can hope for. The title was perfect! This is really well written, and tells a good and engrossing story. It constantly fooled me because I would think it was going somewhere when in fact it went somewhere else that was at least as interesting. I would have liked it to have gone further than it did in some directions, but I was satisfied with how it moved. Be warned: this is not your usual super hero story!

It wasn't all plain sailing, though. For example, I didn't get why both Savitri and Holly were letting jerk Josh back into their lives. It seemed to me to be unforgivable what he had done, but then it wasn't my call, it was Holly's and Savitri's choice. There was also one instance where Savitri came home from free-running and without washing her hands, immediately launched into helping her mom make roti (chapati). This didn't do Asian cuisine any favors and played right into the hands of any bigots and racists who like to trash foreign kitchen hygiene. Maybe most young readers won't notice this, as probably they won't notice (but they sure as hell should) that a revolver does not have a safety like an automatic does!

The biggest issue though, if I had one, was that what was happening (with regard to the graphical portion of the story) was happening to Holly, yet it was steeped in Indian mythology. I know this author is Indian at her roots, and if it had happened to Savitri, it would have flowed organically, but it didn't make much sense that a westerner who had been raised in different cultural traditions would have experienced what Holly experienced. Yes, she had read comic books about that mythology, but she also read comic books about different mythologies, and she had been raised in an entirely different cultural milieu, so this focus on Indian ritual didn't flow logically. That said, it was still interesting to me, and it was definitely different, so I was willing to let that go and enjoy it for what it was overall: a fun adventure, engrossing and entertaining, and I rate it a worthy read.

Of Better Blood by Susan Moger

Rating: WORTHY!

"Four times a day I drop the baby." That's about as powerful a first sentence for a novel as you can get. This is the kind of novel (of which I read an advance review copy) that makes it worth plowing through a host of drab and sub-standard ones. This one took me to a new place, and that's what it's all about. Set in 1922, sixteen-year-old Rowan Collier immediately takes the stage - and quite literally. She's an actor in a "play" designed for the sole purpose of promoting eugenics. Note that while I loved this novel, I never said it was easy to read, or that there were no horrible things in it. Be warned.

The novel is historical fiction, but it is historical. The main elements of the tale told here are fictional, but the Aryan roots running through it were not only a tragic fact that led right into Nazi pogroms, those same dangerous, unscientific, and idiotic beliefs run through a certain segment of society today, hidden only under a thin veneer of civilization.

This is yet another first person PoV novel - and with flashbacks, to boot! Normally I don't like either of these, but in this case it worked. It wasn't intrusive. It didn't keep reminding me that I was reading a novel, and I'm grateful to the author for that. The novel was not only readable, it was captivating. The two main characters, Rowan and Dorchy are illuminated with the consummate artistry of a medieval scribe. You cannot help but want to know everything that happens to them. I would pick this novel up intending to read a quick chapter, and find myself still sitting there, glued to the screen, five chapters on.

Rowan first appears as an actor, after a fashion, and dropping the baby doll is her job. She has to show to the audience how incompetent and inept - how unfit - she is as a human being, but this is not how life began for her. Rowan began life without any handicap, not even poverty, but now she has one, thanks to polio, so naturally she plays a teenage handicapped girl in this play performed at a fair. Even today religious ignorance would have children prevented from being vaccinated against this this scourge with the same horrific results Rowan endured.

There's no sympathy for her condition, or for the condition of the character she plays, Ruthie-who-drops-a-baby. Even off the stage the people she's with think of her as thirteen-year-old incompetent Ruthie. The play is titled "Unfit Family" and is clearly written by an ardent fan of the eugenics movement. Just as things were getting interesting, though, I was suddenly snapped back to 1914, which I resented! The seesaw whiplash effect pervaded the first few chapters, but soon, and surprisingly, I grew used to it. It takes quite a bit to have a first person PoV novel, with flashbacks, and make me like it, so this was a good sign!

Despite the crippling scars polio left her with, or more accurately, precisely because of these scars, Rowan is an exhibit of the New England betterment Council, of which her sister Julia is an avid member, as was her dad, who has not been home since he went off to fight World War One. The problem is, she's not a member in good standing, and that isn't meant as a sick pun. She's really a possession, now. In her father's absence, which might be better described as his non-benign neglect, and her sibling's cold indifference to her kid sister's plight, Rowan ended up not staying at the hospital where she had been slowly making a recovery, but at a cruel and sick home for "the crippled" where the only treatment she got was maltreatment. Being a prime exhibit of what's wrong with humanity was, therefore, actually a step-up from that, for Rowan.

Rowan's real recovery begins when she meets Dorchy, a feisty carny girl, who brings Rowan out of her shell and the two become firm and fast friends. But the deck is stacked against these two, and life hasn't done dealing them spades yet. Their story continues and seems to be downhill until a remarkable turn-around enters, stage right, engineered solely by the girls and some friends. This is both a heartening and a heart-breaking read, but I think this - or something like it - ought to be made as compulsory as sterilization was for those "unfit" children. They who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Eugenics had some surprising adherents, such as Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Linus Pauling, Marie Stopes, Robert Heinlein, HG Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, and George Bernard Shaw, and some not so surprising, such as Adolf Hitler. By the time this pogrom had been curtailed in the USA - and not until the 1970s, believe it or not - some 60,000 people had been sterilized. This is an engrossing way to learn a little about those pernicious and self-serving attitudes, even if it is fiction.

The real story here though is young adult power. Rowan and Dorchy are their own law and their own powerhouse. Refreshingly, the author seems to have instinctively understood this and left them to it, and it worked. They didn't need some guy to validate them or fix them or save them. There were some guys, and one was even named Jack, but they were friends, and that's all they needed to be. This story was about Rowan's strength, and about her admirably taking charge of her own destiny, and anything that buried her in a romance would have destroyed the power of this story. I whole-heartedly recommend this as a worthy read.

Webster's Friend by Hannah Whaley

Rating: WORTHY!

I've had some success with the Hannah Whaley Webster books. They're simple, fun, and educational, and instructive, particularly this one which, in a sweet and non-threatening way discusses online misrepresentation. Webster, being a spider, likes to hang out on the world-wide web.... You know I cannot hear that phrase now without hearing it in the voice of Peter Cullen as he sounds when portraying Optimus Prime.

Webster loves to dress up, of course, so when he goes online he thinks it's the same kind of thing, and disguised by his computer, 'wearing' it like a costume, he can be whatever he wants. This gets him into trouble, and one exaggeration leads to another, as he puffs himself up to his new online friend, until his friend decides he wants to meet him! Fortunately, it all turns out fine in the end - and in a surprising way. I liked this, I appreciated how a potentially difficult topic was represented in a very cool way, and a valuable lesson was learned.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation The Interactive Mystery by Sam Stall

Rating: WORTHY!

Come one, come Stall, and indulge in a real murder mystery. Really this is just a regular murder mystery with a few frills tossed in, but once in a while something like this, which you can't really do in ebook form to the same effect, is fun, especially if you do it with your kids (who need to be PG 13 or somewhere around that level of maturity given the graphical elements). The difference between this and your regular murder mystery, is that this novel contains items of evidence, such as a pamphlet of Haiku, a shredded piece of notepaper that you have to put back together, a blueprint of a house, a partially burned flyer, and crime scene photos among other things. It's a large-format hardback that was fun to indulge myself in.

Mr Bledsoe, a gated-living community developer is found shot dead one evening in his luxury home, and the CSI team has to process the various items of evidence. At the same time, another murder victim is found across town and that situation is as different as could be from this rather rarefied and pristine environment. That victim was shot once in the back of the head and then his rathe rlow-rent little home was burned down! Can the team (i.e. you!) solve both crimes? The actual solution - in a rather lengthy info-dump - is given at the end, so you have until then to solve it all!

The crime wasn't that hard to solve. We got most of it - although not all of it - right, and this despite some misdirection and red herrings. Usually I'm hopeless at this kind of thing, so it was nice to feel like I actually had a handle on the case! I liked this and I recommend it. I have another one by the same author that I'll review before long. It's not CSI though; it is a mystery solving story, but it's about a descendent of Dracula!

Elwen The Dwarf is Stolen by Rhonda Tyler

Rating: WORTHY!

I loved this book, and especially the title of it, because it makes it look like we know from the outset who stole the dwarf: Elwen The Dwarf is Stolen by Rhonda Tyler. See, Rhonda Tyler stole Elwen! It's right there!

Seriously I really liked this book. The colored drawings are as idiosyncratic as they are endearing, the text is large, so it's legible even (or is that Elwen?) as an ebook on a smart phone, and the story is a charmer. Elwen is accidentally brought home by a woodcutter, who decides that he can make enough money to dwarf his current financial status by selling the little guyn for a princely price to the king, which he does, but it all works out in the end and the prince married an unexpectedly rich woodcutter's daughter! Wait, what?

A great story - original in my experience, and lots of fun, especially the images. I consider this a worthy read.

The Shrinking Man by Ted Adams

Rating: WORTHY!

Based on by Richard Matheson's novel, and illustrated by Mark Torres, this is Ted Adams's view of the story. Set in 1956 to begin with, Scott Carey, a six-foot tall guy who was exposed to some sort of chemical when he was younger, is out on a boat when he gets exposed to a chemical fog, and from that point on, he begins shrinking at the rate of one seventh of an inch per day, which means he has barely more than five hundred days before he's dwindled to nothing.

I have to say I really didn't like Scott, who was small even before he ever began to shrink, but you don't have to like a character to enjoy a story about them, and I really liked the way this had been translated to imagery. It bounces back and forth between the recent past, when Scot was trying to cope with the beginning of his condition, and the present, when he's only five sevenths of an inch, and had less than a week to go. Normally I don't like these 'switch-back' stories, but in this case it wasn't so bad. The present part was far less interesting than the past, even though it ought to have been more dramatic and engrossing. In the present, Scott is trapped in the basement and desperately trying to climb the fridge to get to a pack of crackers, and is also trying to fend off a black widow spider. Hey, she was a widow, maybe she just wanted to marry him?

This preference for the past story was despite the petulance of the shrinking Scott. At first he noticed no change, but then as it started to become clear he was shrinking, there were trips to doctors who could do nothing for him evidently, even though they seemed to understand what was happening, and his life began to fall apart for him. The explanation for the shrinking was a bunch of pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo of him losing nitrogen and creatinine and other such things, but the doctors never really explained how that worked without him getting sick, and the reason for this is that it wouldn't work without him getting sick!

His higher brain function at the very least would be severely degraded with such shrinkage, especially as it went below the normal human range. Maybe his shrinking brain actually did create issues, because Scott's treatment of his wife and child was inexcusable. All she did as love him and support him throughout this, but he increasingly rejected her and at one point took off with a circus midget! None of this is endearing. Note that there was no issue with the midget's brain being relatively small because she hadn't shrunk to it. Instead, she had grown into it. It was normal and ordinary for her, and her intelligence was perfectly fine, whereas Scott was daily losing parts of his previously normally-functioning brain.

This is the problem with shrinking character stories. The writers of such stories (and note that this is a criticism of Matheson's original story) give no thought to the real consequences of shrinking. Let's skip over problems with the fact that this would have to be a highly coordinated loss of literally every component, even solid, rigid ones such as as bone, reducing in perfect lock-step, and go to the issue with him at five sevenths of an inch, where even mild air currents would blow him over. His climbing to the top of the fridge is portrayed as though he was still of normal proportions and regular weight, but this would not be the case. He wouldn't even be injured from a fall because his mass is so low. He would pretty much float down! But an annoying sliver on a broom handle to us, might end up as a stake through his heart!

On the other hand, his mass is so low that his shrunken muscles would be barely strong enough to function, even in pulling his reduced weight up the thread. He would probably have the functionality of a person who had been severely afflicted with polio You can't shrink a human-sized person down indefinitely before something gives out! Yes, there are some very small mammals, as indeed there are humans, but these have grown into their situation, not shrunk to it from something larger. Essentially, this is one good reason why insects are nothing like us, or more accurately, we're nothing like them, since they were here first. As his size continued to shrink there would be a point where his veins would be too small to admit passage of his corpuscles, and he would suffocate - assuming he wasn't so small at that point that air molecules couldn't effectively fill his lungs!

But scientific issues and some quibbles aside, it's fun to read a story like this where a person is thrown into what is, effectively, an alien world. That makes for the best kind of story, and please note that the quibbles are actually with the original story, not with this, which is a fine graphic representation of it and one which I think is a worthy read, as long as you're willing to let the impracticality slide! I recommend it.

Insufferable by Mark Waid

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely illustrated by Peter Krause, this comic was a riot. It was like the dark side of Batman and Robin, upon whom it seems to have been modeled in some ways. The super hero, Nocturnus, has trained Galahad, his side-kick and for a long time they worked together, but then Galahad decided he could do better alone, and summarily ditched his aging mentor. It wasn't just that he went his own way, either. Galahad did not live up to his name. We first meet him hanging in the wings as Nocturnus takes on a real villain who is televising his slow burial of a little girl. It's a telethon, and if the goal of fifty million isn't met, the girl inherits the earth.

Galahad cynically waits until Nocturnus has taken-out the villain, then he rushes in and "rescues" the girl, selfishly claiming all the credit for it. Galahad is very much a media personality whereas Nocturnus, as his name implies, stays to the shadows. There is as cop ho knows the truth, but for some reason she isn't telling. The crux of the story comes when the two of them are forced to work together to defeat a new threat.

Well written, with some nice humor and good action, and even a twist or two here and there, this is an interesting and moving story, well told, and I recommend it as a worthy read.

The Mantle by Ed Brisson

Rating: WORTHY!

I really liked this story. The Mantle is a conveyance of superpowers which are visited upon seemingly random people. The downside of this is that there is a super villain, named The Plague, who immediately starts after the current bearer of the mantle, and destroys them. No one knows why, but it appears to have started thirty eight Mantle-bearers before, when one super hero defeated The Plague and despite being requested to do so by the perp himself, did not kill him. The Plague escaped his imprisonment, and has been punishing mantle-bearers, it would seem, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate him! Why? How did that one hero guy beat The Plague back then, and no one has since?

That's what this graphic novel explores, and even though in many ways this is a very simple story, it still managed to tell it well. I liked the new bearer of the mantle - a feisty young female who after almost giving up, changes her mind, decides she isn't going to run - she's going to go down fighting no matter what. Even though there are other heroes who are pledged to help, she initially finds them of little value, but then she discovers a way - a long shot, but one which might work, and we follow her into this and step by step, slowly learning the truth about what's been going on here. It's a great story, with great graphics, and was thoroughly enjoyable. I consider this a worthy read.

Poet Anderson by Tom Delonge and Ben Kull

Rating: WORTHY!

This story has evidently had its critics, but I really liked it, although it's a bit young for me personally. I liked that the dream world was a real world which these two boys, Jonas and Alan Anderson, could explore, but that it had some rules - like they couldn't fly, for example (even though there are dreams about flying, I loved the way it was summarily dismissed!).

The world started out entrancing and beguiling, but in short order, there came the bad things, and things which were even worse than the bad things. This I enjoyed. The Night Terrors, however, have a counter-balancing force known as the Dream Walkers, and maybe at least one of these boys is a candidate for joining them. But the question is, who is behind the Night Terrors, and will he ever be able to find his way into the real world, and conduct the same sort of terror campaign there, that he seems to manage in the dream world?

I liked this for the characters, the fast-moving story, the inventiveness, which never went overboard, and the general set-up for a series. The art work by Djet was cool. Like I said, it's a bit young for me, but I can see a great potential here and I recommend it as a winner for the intended audience.

The Kissing Booth by Beth Reekles

Rating: WARTY!

This author's story is another one like those told about Amanda Hocking. The story in the novel was begun by Beth Reeks when she was fifteen, and published on a website named Wattpad when she was seventeen, where it quickly became popular. A representative from Random House saw it there, decided it was worth publishing (that tells us a lot about standards at Random House - the publisher evidently isn't named random for nothing!), and offered her a contract, so the novel got published under her school nickname Reekles.

The problem is that the representative apparently paid attention only to the numbers of views Reeks was getting rather than the quality of the writing or the content of the novel which by all accounts sucked. I listened to the standard two disks and decided this was not only not for me, it was not for anyone in their right mind. It's essentially another Hush Hush where a girl actively seeks out and adheres herself a guy who is openly disrespectful and abusive to her.

When I picked this up and read the blurb, I wrongly got he impression that that this was set in the past and was written by a mature author (i.e. mature in the sense of being a competent writer), but it was not. The writing quality was exactly what you'd expect from a fifteen to seventeen year old writer, and the issues with it were many. There are some young writers who can do it, but most cannot, and Beth Reekles is one of those. The novel isn't set in a more innocent time, it's contemporary, which made it inexplicable. Another problem was that the novel was written as an English novel, but it's set in California, a place to which the author has never been and evidently not even researched. Consequently all the Californian high-schoolers speak as though they're in England. Nonsensical.

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Given that it's not set in the past, the whole kissing booth idea fails. Reeks explained in an interview that that she moved it to to California because they don't have kissing booths in high school carnivals in Britain. They do in the US with the rise of orally transmitted diseases such as HPV and AIDS? No!!!! The sad thing is that none of this - the risk of transmission of disease - is raised. No one objects to it, and that's another issue with the novel - the complete lack of adult or parental supervision. There is none in this novel, not in any of it that I read.

This novel failed on so many levels that it's a joke, and the fact that Random House ran with it serves only to underline the problems I have with Big Publishing. All the more power to Reeks if she can rip-off the rubes with a crappy novel, but what does it say about young readers that they consider something like this to be perfectly acceptable reading material?

The Casquette Girls by Alys Arden

Rating: WARTY!

This is going to be a wa-ay long review even by my standards, so be prepared! My blog is about more than reviewing - it's about writing and about the language, but even so, this one is longer than usual. You have been warned!

This is a young adult kitchen sink story in that there is pretty much nothing from the paranormal world that isn't in this book. There's horror and voodoo, and vampires, oh my! This was an advance review copy which sounded really intriguing when I read the blurb, but by the time I was ten percent or so into it, I started having reservations about it purely because of the YA clichés which had begun to pervade everything. More on this anon. By the time I was a quarter the way through there was so much that made no sense and so many issues that I honestly started to feel I wouldn't be able to actually finish reading it, which is truly sad, because in many ways it was interesting and from a purely technically PoV, written rather well. At the risk of giving away details, and posting spoilers, let me try to explain.

Adele Le Moyne is fresh back from a disastrous stay with her French mother in Paris. Adele doesn't like mom. Why she went so late in the year that her return would cause her to miss the start of school isn't explained. Obviously the storm had some say in the matter, but it didn't really explain it. The storm is a whole other issue which I'll get to. Adele is returning to New Orleans with her father. They're coming back to see how their home and her dad's bar fared after a truly devastating storm. Adele likes dad, even though he treats her like a child. Actually, given how immature she is, this is probably a wise move on pop's part. Note that this storm both is and isn't Katrina, which gets no mention here, though other storms do. This felt to me, initially, like it was a huge storm in the near future, but I came to understand that it was meant to be Katrina. Why the author had a problem with identifying it as such is a mystery. The problem is that we're told it was the "largest" storm ever to hit the continental USA. That's not Katrina. I'll get into this later.

The city is largely deserted, but is slowly coming back to life. Adele's biggest fear is being sent back to France because the local arts school is closed indefinitely. As she starts to settle in, she finds strange things happening to her. On her first day back in the house, a bird attacks her and scratches her face. Later, she finds a freshly dead body in a car on her way home. It seems there's a rising murder rate, especially over the last twenty four hours. Oddly enough, despite the devastation and the lack of adequate policing, there seems to be no National Guard presence in the city. This struck me as me as absurd, and was one of the things which began chipping away at the credibility of the story for me.

Adele has other things happen, too. She visits a local voodoo store which she has never been in before, and she meets some slightly eccentric people. She experiences a weird event on the way home with a banging shutter and an inexplicably shattering window at a convent, yet despite being a New Orleans resident for her entire life (apart from the last two months), and therefore obviously aware of the voodoo culture, she never once starts to wonder if there's something to it after these odd events. Of course there isn't in real life, but this is a voodoo story inter alia, so you'd think there would be something, somewhere in her mind that starts wondering. The fact that there wasn't - even after all this - made me think that Adele wasn't very bright, which is never a good trait with which to imbue your main character.

There were some odd descriptions, too, such as the non-word 'chainmaille', which should either be 'chainmail' or simply 'maille' (which by itself means the same thing). I know this was an ARC copy, but I can't see this kind of thing being fixed in the final published version unless someone highlights it. On a slightly different issue, at one point Adele almost has an accident with a large nail, which she describes as a "giant nail twice the width of my palm" which struck me as badly described. I may be wrong here, but I think what's meant was that the nail was as long as two widths of her palm, but the way it's written makes it sound like the nail's width (i.e. diameter) is two of her palm widths, which would be a truly humongous nail!

I had an issue with the multi-language use. It may not bother other readers, but for me, it was too pervasive. Indeed, it felt more like the author was showing off her faculty with languages than really contributing to building a strong story. This kind of thing is done often in novels, and unless there's really a good reason for it, it's just annoying to me. It's even more irritating when we get the foreign phrase followed immediately by the English translation, such as in "J'en doute. I seriously doubt it." Although this isn't an exact translation (it would need sérieusement added for that) it makes my point here, and this just kept kicking me out of suspension of disbelief.

I found it hilarious that phones in New Orleans can text in French! One message from "Pépé" read, "Préparer un pot frais de chicorée" Evidently when envoyer des SMS en Français (texting in French), one doesn't use abbreviations! I'm sure there are ways and even apps which allow you to enter accented letters, but why would you bother when texting to people who speak English? Why not just send "make fresh chicory" and be done with it? Rightly or wrongly, this only served to reinforce my feeling that the author had been employing French much more as a pretension than as a legitimate writing tool.

Since this is New Orleans, I could see a French word here and there showing up, but when she meets two Italians, they're doing it too, and it was too much, especially since they also have grammatically perfect English - better than your typical native English speaker! LOL! Amusingly, the first phrase either one of them uttered was, "Well, whom do we have here?" The problem is that no one speaks like that, much less a foreign speaker of English. It's much more likely for the speaker to say, "Well, who is this?" The thing is that few use correct grammar in their everyday speech, so while you can write in your narrative, 'whom', it's just wrong to write it as part of someone's speech unless that particular character actually is a stickler for grammar. Most people are not, especially if English is their second language. It's also worth remembering, in a story like this one - which is told in first person, that the narrative should reflect the speech patterns of the person. Truly correct grammar is unlikely unless the narrator is an English teacher, for example.

I know it's hard for a writer to let that go (although personally, I'd kick 'whom' out of the language altogether), but it has to be done. Some writers, including this one, apparently, can't ignore a compulsion towards good grammar, which in a way is commendable, but it doesn't contribute to a realistic story. I won't get into the employment of the French in and of itself since mine is so rusty, but I'd be curious to know if "Comment a été Paris?" is more accurate than what was used here " Comment était Paris?" for "How was Paris?" - meaning, of course, how did you like Paris - what impression did it leave you with? Everything else seemed in order to my out-of-practice eye, so I guess I'd bow to the author's evidently superior expertise in this case.

The biggest problem for me in the first ten percent though, was when Adele met those Italian twins, Gabriel and Niccolò, who I quickly found to be creepy and obnoxious. Why one had a Jewish name whereas the other had the expected Italian name went unexplained, but it did occur to me that one is the name of an angel, and the other could be the name of the devil - as in 'Old Nick', for example. Actually they were not twins, but they may as well have been. They were brothers: a dark haired leather-clad bad-boy type, and a blond-haired good-guy type. Talk about trope good and evil!

This jumped out at me as a potential beginning of your typical and tiresomely clichéd YA love triangle. I was hoping I was wrong but it had all the hallmarks, and my stomach churned from reading about this "nauseating display of high school flirtation" (you'd have to read the book - or at least 22% of it! - to feel the full weight of that sarcastic comment!). As it turned out, the triangle was not over the two Italians, but it did involve the predictable one of the two. Nothing new there. Everything about these boys was a complete cliché from their height, to their chiseled good looks, to their foreign nature and athletic build. It's truly sad to find YA author after YA author who cannot seem to develop an original character as a love interest, and persists in going down the same tired and over-used macho guy and sad love triangle circuit that's been beaten to death, and which is already way beyond tedious at this juncture.

A real problem came with Niccolò's conduct, bad boy or not. I honestly don't know how an author can write inappropriate or overly familiar contact as though it's right or normal. Yes, some people do behave that way, but let's not make those people heroic or the love interest of the main character, please? This conduct should certainly not be portrayed as something to be meekly tolerated. At one point, one of the brothers, uninvited, gets right into Adele's personal space, and starts touching her and manually examining the medallion she has hanging around her neck (a medallion which is actually there for no good reason). He doesn't even do her the courtesy of asking. It's like she's now his property, and he can do whatever he wants with her, even though they'd never met prior to that very minute. This isn't the only time he abuses her so.

Adele responded (to his effectively fondling her) not by becoming assertive, but by becoming as compliant as a whipped puppy. We read "his fingertips grazed my cheek" as though it's supposed, I assume, to be intimate and romantic, but it's not. It's creepy and overly familiar. It's presumptive and assumptive, suggesting that young women are there for the taking, and it sends entirely the wrong message to both genders. If these two had known each other for years as friends, or were lovers, or married, or even if they were young kids, then yes, this would be fine, or at least expected, but for a complete stranger to effectively own a woman of Adele's age in that manner, and for her to very effectively lie down before him like he's the alpha male and she's just part of his pride or his pack is trashy at best.

The reason I was sad was that this author had drawn me right in and was writing pretty well to this point. She had a great facility with the language and with her descriptive writing, and it was honestly a shock to find myself suddenly suffocating under this worn-out, teen-aged fabric that was being unceremoniously piled on to the pretty decent material she'd been so skillfully working to this point in the story. I don't know why authors, especially female authors, feel they have to validate their female characters with male ones (the same applies to male characters, for that matter) I really don't, but it's never a good thing. The truly odd thing about these two Italians, by the way, is that while they claim that they're here to find missing relatives, they seem to spend absolutely no time whatsoever actually looking. Of course, since this is a first person PoV story, we have no idea what's going on when Adele isn't around.

Adele wasn't very likable for a variety of reasons. One of these is my own bias against the fashion world. I think it's the shallowest, most self-indulgent and least beneficial endeavors in human history. I have no time for fashion designers, fashions or runway models, and unfortunately, Adele wants to be a fashion designer, which as you can now imagine, did nothing to endear her to me. My gut feeling was that she wouldn't end up there, given the way this story was going, but the real question here is: why is she that character - the one who wants to join the fashion world? What does it contribute to this story except to further establish how frivolous she is? Why isn't she wanting to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a software designer? She's from New Orleans, so why doesn't she want to be a chef or a musician, or an architect, or even a merhcant marine for that matter? I didn't get where the fashion thing was coming from. She could have been aiming to be a chef or an architect, and still have justified the trip to Paris, for example.

The other issue with Adele is that she's a whiney, shallow, ungrateful little tyke who behaves inappropriately for her age. What with this and her fashion 'ambition', her age seemed more like twelve then ever it did sixteen. Yeah, I get that she hates her mom, but when her father wants to discuss school with her, she becomes resentful, tearful, and childish. Someone that emotional would never survive vampires let alone be able to stand up to them! She has the option to go back to Paris, which she flatly rejects. Fine! But she also has the option to study fashion design in California at a very prestigious school, and stay with her best friend who, we're told, she misses immensely, yet she rejects all of this in favor of staying in New Orleans where there's nothing to do and her career plans are effectively on hold. This tells me that she's not only a petulant brat, and that she really doesn't care much for her friend - or for her supposed fashion ambitions for that matter, but also that she's clueless and actually has no ambition. These are hardly heroic traits! On the one hand, rejecting fashion would warm me to her somewhat, but on the other, none of this bratty behavior endeared her to me at all. It merely served to render her into someone about whom (see, I can use it!) I cared very little, and whose story I really didn't feel much like following.

You'll note that I didn't mention 'scientist' as a possible career choice above. The reason for this is that Adele doesn't seem to have an even remotely inquiring mind. Even when she finally accepts that supernatural events are taking place around her and she has some influence over them, she still fails to pursue this with any kind of intellect or determination or with any sort of spirit of adventure. Instead, she idly tinkers with it like it's an old Rubik cube she found somewhere. I honestly don't know of anyone - male or female - who would be as lackadaisical as she is over such a series of events!

Adele toys with her new power, yet shows absolutely no motivation whatsoever (and she wants to make it in the cut-throat fashion world?!) to get to its root. She doesn't even think of taking her power out for a real run, or to start seriously investigating what it is or why she has it. Most damning of all, she doesn't even begin to consider ways in which she could use this power to help in putting her supposedly beloved city back on its feet. She's not too smart, either, over figuring out what the extent and limit of the power is, when it seems patently obvious to the reader. This character began as an interesting one, but for me, she became ever more unbelievable the further the story went on. In the end, she wasn't remotely credible. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Adele was really an insult to women with her all-pervasive inertia and her shallowness and lack of any real substance.

At the front of this book is a dedication to the people of New Orleans (the author is evidently a native), but it says nothing about how strong they are. It's all about myth and magic; however, given the story we have here, it would be hypocritical for the dedication to have talked about strength and motivation. This fictional character, as a New Orleans native, was an insult to the real-life people of that city, given what they've been through, and how they rebuilt and moved on afterwards. If Adele had been portrayed as a go-getter, and an industrious young woman who refused to be beaten down, and who worked hard every day, I could have seen a reflection of New Orleans in her, but the fact remains that she isn't a shadow on the real people there, and that was the biggest disappointment in this book for me. I know that some people are actually like Adele in real life - lazy, shiftless, unwilling or incapable of doing a fair day's work, and you could probably get a really good novel about such a character, but this wasn't it, and the character that Adele actually was didn't belong in this kind of a story. Like Adele herself, it didn't work.

This same lack of motivation pervades her whole life. We've been told that she wants to be a fashion designer, but she never works on designs, neither with a sketch pad, nor with a computer. That life she supposedly wants doesn't even pervade her thoughts at all! Pretty much the only thing in her thoughts isn't even her new power! In the first quarter of the novel, her mind is most often on some dude she hung out with in Paris. This is how shallow she is. Her assessment of this guy is: "he's very hot and very French" Seriously? That's the basis of her 'rapport' with him? Pure objectification? Instead of being the heroic figure a novel like this begs for, Adele is reduced to the status of a lovesick tweenie (her actual age notwithstanding), who has an impossible crush on some older kid. Worse than this, despite her assertion that she wants to stay with her dad in New Orleans, she spends virtually no time with him. Every day he's out all hours, working on fixing up his bar (at least this is what we're told, but I didn't believe it), yet never once does she offer to go help him. She'd rather sit on her lazy ass in the coffee bar, doing nothing, evidently, save for her almost ritualistic indulgence in growing paranoia and endless self-pity. That is when she's not lusting after one or another of several boys she encounters.

It seems like she's 'employed' in this coffee bar, but there are no customers, so how are the owners even paying her - and why?! All she does is sit around. At one point she thinks some guy is sketching her, and she resents this, yet she's so inert that she can't even think of changing where she sits, or perhaps moving into the back area where he can't see her. This is how inanimate her brain is. We're told that she's supposed to be attending this exclusive school in lieu of her own school being closed indefinitely, but she hasn't been attending, even though it appears to be open and this is now mid-October! Why she's so tardy goes unexplained. She eventually does attend, but it's only part time, and her overly protective father makes no arrangements for her to be transported to and from the school even when there's a murder spree going on in the city and he's supposed to be so protective of her!

The reason I initially felt that this story was set slightly in the future was that Katrina was never mentioned by name - unless you include a reference in the acknowledgements to a person named Katrina! LOL! The hurricane was described very vaguely as the largest one to hit the US, but 'largest' can mean many different things. By what measure was it the largest? By cost, Katrina was the "largest" by some margin, but every few years the "largest" by cost changes because property values rise, and so more damage (in dollars) is done, even if the hurricane is relatively tame. The problem is that by any other measure, Katrina was not the largest, not even by death toll, by which measure it was third (so far). By largest diameter, Katrina wasn't in the top five. By 'most severe' it barely made the top five and by 'most intense' failed to get into the top five. By highest sustained winds it wasn't even in the top ten. By barometric pressure it was tenth, by most tornadoes spawned, it was sixth, and so on. I wouldn't describe it as the 'largest' and I found it objectionable that cost seemed to be the only measure deemed worthy of measure here. Surely death toll is more important than property damage?

At one point Adel goes with Isaac (the other leg of the triangle and another Biblical name) to her friend's house to find something. Although Isaac has no clue what it is that she's seeking, he says, "I'll go check out the rest of the place" - why? What's he looking for? Evidently it was to give Adele some time alone with her powers, but this part made no sense to me, especially since he was supposed to be keeping an eye on her.

Adele's hypocrisy was annoying at best. This is the girl who is lusting after every trope male she meets in this novel, yet at one point she tells us, "My eyes rolled at the ripple of testosterone" Honestly? Her other faults were numerous and never deemed to be faults by her or anyone else, but perhaps the worst was her chronic indolence. This infests her every neuron, and drags this book out to an unwarranted number of pages. It's ironically reflected in the larger story arc, and is what contributes to the ruin of this story for me. The story felt very much like New Orleans appeared after the storm: a mess, a tragedy, and leaving an all-but hopeless feeling in the gut. Whereas New Orleans had a real human story which grew and heartened, this fiction never did. I know this is the south and the cliché is that it's supposed to be laid back, but there's a huge difference between 'laid back' and 'moribund' and that latter place was where Adele resided.

This business of guys taking advantage of Adele and her having absolutely no negative feelings about this abhorrent behavior, was what finally turned me off (and my stomach over) with this novel. There was another incident where Adele was with Isaac, and she became very emotional over the damage done to her friend's home. Isaac saw her emotionally weakened, and instead of asking if she wanted to leave, or if she wanted to talk, or even just giving her a friendly hug, this jerk-off kisses her. What a louse!

It was at that point that I decided I was done with this nonsense. It wouldn't have been so bad had she pushed him away and read him the riot act about taking advantage of emotional weakness and painful upset, but she never did. This is one of the two guys who both abused her like this, and instead of being outraged and repelled, she's falling for the two of them, not even caring that someone is going to get hurt through her irresponsible ambivalent behavior. Adele is obviously also a jerk and I feel no compulsion to read any more about a person like that, who quite evidently has no redeeming value, and is as clueless as they come. So no, I never made it to sixty percent because I didn't care if it improved. There is no improvement a writer can make which can ever fill a hole that's been dug this deep!