Marvel's Captain America: Sub Rosa by David McDonald

Rating: WARTY!

I came to this novel under false pretenses. I don't know who decides how to categorize these novels when they're put up on Net Galley as advance review copies. I suspect it's the publisher, but whoever it was misrepresented this one. It was categorized under graphic novels, but it's no such thing! There are no graphics in sight - in this case not even a cover, so I was disappointed before I began this. My advice to publishers is not to put your text novels under the graphic novel header. It's misleading at best and dishonest at worst. Nevertheless I gave it the old college try, and I have to report that it was not a beautiful day in the neighborhood for Mr Rogers, aka Captain America. I really could not get into this. I made it to just beyond the half-way point, and when it didn't remotely look like it was getting any better (indeed it got worse, descending into monologues and pages of exposition), I gave up on it.

I'm not a huge comic book fan, but then this was not a comic book, as I was sorry to discover. My experience of Captain America is all from the Marvel movies which have been hitting the screens with a routine and regularity, and a runaway success that's nothing short of breathtaking, and every one of those movies has been funny, amazing, action-packed, intelligent (for Hollywood!), fast-paced, and thoroughly entertaining. This novel was none of that. Instead, it was a series of uninspired fights followed by uninspired dialog, followed by more fighting. And there was neither anything super nor heroic about it. You could have taken out the Cap, and substituted one of the GI Joes, or one of Schwarzeneggar's older characters, like the one from Commando, or tossed in a Jason Bourne or James Bond, or any such macho action dude, and it could have been exactly the same story. There was no reason for the Cap to be here.

The story began with Commander Maria Hill contacting Cap to ask him to take care of her niece, Katherine, who plays the standard maiden in distress, despite the fact that she can handle herself and gets the Cap out of more than one scrape, yet she never gets any respect. I think this story would have been a much better adventure if Commander Hill had taken charge and cap had not been involved, but it is what it never was, and that's what I have to review.

The dialog was uninspired and not amusing, except unintentionally, such as at one point when the Cap is fighting a character named Taskmaster, who has "photographic reflexes" (what's really meant is cinematographic reflexes - any move she sees he can emulate). At one point, while fighting Taskmaster and attempting a futile distraction, Cap asks, "So who's paying you, Taskmaster, and how much?" Was Cap not paying attention two minutes before when Taskmaster came flying through a window and announced, as an introduction, "...she's worth a lot to me. Two million dollars to be exact."? I guess not. His motive is to collect a bounty. he's being paid two million dollars to be exact! Cap doesn't come off as very smart in this story, which is another problem. Of course that doesn't explain who's offering the bounty, but that's not exactly what Cap asks, is it?

The writing is a bit clunky, too. Workman-like for the most part, but not inspired. At one point, in the same paragraph we got "Then it came to him...then with a jolt it came to him..." which made for jarring reading. I guess the first time it came to him it didn't jolt him enough? Or maybe he needed to drink a Jolt cola before it came to him? Character descriptions were boilerplate, along the lines of "a lion's mane of hair" and "a curved beak of a nose." Not very inspired or inspiring. It felt like the author had cut & pasted these from other tepid random novels.

It was hard to find this on Goodreads because the title there is different. In fact the title seems very fluid. It's listed as Marvel's Captain America, but the novel itself is titled Marvel Captain America Sub Rosa. That latter Latin means literally beneath the rose or by way of translation, in secret. But it can be no secret that the Cap deserved a lot better than he got here. I can't recommend this based on what I read, which was more than enough for me when there are other novels out there which are desperate to be read and enjoyed and promise to be more rewarding.

The Sunlight Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan

Rating: WARTY!

I made it through 43% of this advance review copy, which I honestly felt was way more than it deserved. The blurb leads in with a virtually breathless rant about climate change and freezing winters (Note to blurb writer: snow in Israel isn't uncommon as it happens!), but climate change was irrelevant to this novel. The same novel could have been written about survivors of a plane crash in the desert, scientists cut off in in Antarctica, shipwreck survivors on an island, or people living in a Biosphere 2 type of environment. It would have made no difference to the story, so I didn't get the deal with the climate change at all. Maybe in the second half of the novel things happened to make it more relevant, but I was so bored with it that I could not bear the thought of reading any more to find out.

There was no indication given (not in the half I read) as to how things got so bad so quickly. This novel is set just three or four years from now, and while climate change has indeed reached a point of no easy or sure return, and governments are still doing diddly about it there's no indication it's going to go south (or in this case north) so quickly.

One of the characters was gender queer and I didn't get her purpose either. I mean it's great that we're seeing this kind of diversity in a novel, but if all we're seeing it for is its novelty, then it really contributes very little. Admittedly, this could have turned around and become a truly dramatic pivot point at 44% in, but from what I read, this was seen as a handicap and treated like one, and it seems to me that it would have made no significant difference - actually it might have made for a better read now I think about it - if this same character had had an actual handicap, such as a mobility issue (being confined to a wheelchair for example and dealing with slippery ice and slushy snow) instead of simply a gender trait, so I really didn't see what this brought to the story that was supposedly so vital.

The two main female characters in the novel were actually offered-up not as strong women, but as maidens in distress, held hostage and threatened by the ice dragon, and the guy shows up like a latter day St George to slay the beast and rescue them from its evil clutches. It was rather disgusting, and none of these characters was particularly interesting to me. It felt like the author had created a bunch of quirky characters and tossed them together expecting them to cook up a story. They didn't. It doesn't work like that. You have to have a story too, not just quirks on legs, and the story actually has to go somewhere.

As stories do go, this one does not go well. There was screen after screen of largely unattributed speech followed by long paragraphs of description, followed by more lines of largely unattributed speech which made for tedious reading. A better balance would have made for a better read. The speech was odd, too. Brits tend to denote speech with single quotes at the start and the finish, but this novel had only an em-dash to mark the start, and no indication of when it ended. Most of the time you could guess that it had ended when a new line was begun, especially if that had an em-dash at the start, too, but sometimes it would end with a period and on the same line we would get "she said" or something tacked on the end. It was just irritating trying to read that, because it looked at first glance like that was a continuation of the character's speech rather than, as it did at forced glance, an attribution.

So, while I wish the author well as always, I can't recommend this based on what I read. It didn't hang together well, and it didn't inspire interest. I mention the 43% because I typically quit a novel like this at around 25%, but then people complain and say, oh you should have read on, it gets better. I have two responses to this, neither of which are rude! First of all, if it doesn't get better until 26%, then make whatever you have at 26% be the start of the story for goodness sake! Secondly, in this case I did read past 25% - I read another twenty percent past it, and nothing changed. I rest my case!

On that topic, this novel has a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues (maybe that's where it gets explained how things went north so quickly? In that case it's an info dump and just as unwelcome as a prologue). The funny thing is that I advise writers that if it's worth telling, it's worth putting into chapter one instead of a pretentious prologue, but in this case, chapters one and two, and maybe three and four (I forget) were also prologue. I think the story could have started significantly later than it did and not have missed out on a single thing. That's never a good sign. I hope your mileage is better, but I'd rather chill out with a nice read rather than an ice read.

Princes of War by Claude Schmid

Rating: WARTY!

I gave up on this at one third the way through it. I know they say war is a lot of sitting around waiting, punctuated by intense action, but this novel - in the third of I could stand to read - consisted of nothing but sitting around and no action at all. All there was, was soldiers introspectively hashing endlessly over and over what they're doing there, what the political purpose is, what the stressors are, and it goes round and round. Nothing came out of any of this, and there was literally nothing else on offer here. That was fine for the first few pages, but every single page was the same, relentlessly and without end for page after page. It was boring. How you can make a story about the Iraq 'conflict' boring is a mystery to me, but this author achieved it.

I don't expect a novel like this to be endless action either. That would be boring, too, and amateurish, but I do expect, in a war zone, some warlike activity to be taking place, and there was none in sight here. It was so tedious that I was simply not prepared to suck it up for however many more pages it took to get there (assuming we ever got anywhere other than here).

The sad thing is that this was written by someone who has been there and done that, so I thought at the very least it would offer some interesting insights into life over there, but it really didn't, unless life over there was one long nonstop run of boredom from start to finish, which is not my experience form other things I've read about it. I honestly believe that a true biography of this author's time there would have been more entertaining than this novel. It certainly could not have been less so. Even if life was boring, there's no need whatsoever, in a work of fiction, to transmit that to the reader.

For a novel set in such an exotic location, there was nothing to excite the senses here, nothing revelatory, nothing humorous, and nothing to engage the mind, unless you happen to be one of the probably very rare people who is quite literally clueless about Iraq and what went on there. That aside, there was nothing here that you would not have gleaned from watching the nightly news in 2004 (when this novel is set). In fact you would likely have gained more, because this gave me no insights and very little by way of explanation of the whys and wherefores of the activity the soldiers were engaged in. For example, one day they go out to conduct a census in a street somewhere, and never is the purpose of the survey explained. Yes, of course it's to discover who lives where and how many there are, but to what ultimate end? I got no idea from this novel.

One big problem was the endless meandering back and forth with constant flashbacks without any good reason. They contributed nothing to the story for me, and worse, they did nothing save add to the tedium. I took to skimming these in short order. This addiction to flashback-ing ill-served the story too, as I shall explain here! The author gives times in military time of course, but there is no punctuation, so instead of 20:35, we got 2035. This was the first time I saw a time in numeric form in this novel, and I thought it was a date. It honestly looked like, in context, one of the soldiers was flash-forwarding, fantasizing or looking forward to a date thirty years into the future where he would be retired from the military and hanging with his friend having survived and lived to a ripe(r) old age, but he was actually just talking about eight thirty-five that evening! It was confusing for a second or two and then provided the only laugh I got from this novel!

I like a good military read with something to say, but this wasn't it, and I cannot recommend it based on the portion I read.

The Body Reader by Anne Frasier

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an novel with a really interesting set-up, which was well-written, and which actually made good on the promise of the premise!

A woman who was a police detective was abducted and held in an underground cell, abused for three years, then suddenly she got a chance to escape and ran with it - literally. Now she's back in the world and trying to cope with three missing years of her life while the world, including her boyfriend, moved on. One thing she learned in those three years, apart from resilience, was how to expertly read even the minutest of body language. The problem is, her troubles are far from over.

Jude Fontaine's take on, and reintegration into everyday life was what made this story engaging from the start for me. She wasn't up for taking the usual trajectory. She wanted to take charge of her life again in her own way, and most of all, she wanted her job back. Eventually she gets it, but on day one there's a murder of a young girl which is ham-fistedly set up to look like a suicide, and something is off about this whole thing.

The investigation doesn't go well. No one seems to want to trust that Jude is really ready for the job despite her evaluations coming back fine. She's dumped on a new partner who doesn't trust her and doesn't think she can handle it. Their best hope for a lead doesn't want to talk (or does she?), and someone is trailing Jude as she rides home on her new motorbike one night. What the heck was going on here had me making some wild guesses. Did she not kill her captor when she escaped? Was he working alone? Is there some sort of conspiracy or trafficking going on here? Are the cops involved? What happened between Jude and her father all those years ago before she emancipated herself, and ditched him and her brother for years?

This novel was told well from the off. Even the prologue was actually chapter one, which is perfect for me because I've been arguing that's how it should be for a long time! Finally an author who shows everyone how it's done! Put your prologue in chapter one and I'll read it, otherwise, no!

It wasn't all plan sailing though. It became pretty obvious who the villain was quite early in the story, and if I can figure that out, you know it has to be quite glaring, because I'm usually hopeless at that. That aside, there were only a couple of places where the writing fell on its face. One was in Jude's interaction with her boyfriend. In some ways, he ended-up ironically being treated like a kidnapped girl who had reached her expiration date. It felt like the author included him and then didn't know what to do with him, so decided to write him out and really didn't care how it looked. It really showed badly in the writing of that scene. Why even involve him? If she'd left it how it ended after their first encounter it would have been fine. That second bite really bites and was embarrassing!

The novel was also one chapter too long! If it had ended with the helicopter taking off it would have been just about perfect. That last chapter rather spoiled things I felt. I was thrilled that the author realized that Jude (the un-obscure!) - of all female main characters - didn't need a guy to validate her. That was a smart move. I liked Jude, despite her off-the rails behavior here and there, and she was well-worth reading about, so I was happy! I was glad to have read this, and I recommend this novel as a worthy read.

Iron Goddess by Dharma Kelleher

Rating: WARTY!

This completes my trilogy of ladies of Lesbos literature (how about that for alliteration?!), all advance review copies. I read about eighty percent of Iron Goddess which is an awesome title and sounded like a really entertaining idea for a story, but it consistently failed me. Let this be an advisory to anyone who's ever tackled me when I've quit reading a novel at twenty or twenty-five percent and urged me to read on because it turns around. I'm sorry, but if you're taking more than twenty-five percent of your novel to get a reader interested, or to kick it into gear, then you're doing it wrong and I don't feel bad about ditching it when there is so much more out there to read, including stories which will engage me from page one and will keep me entertained. Life is too short to waste it on the faint hope that at thirty or forty percent things will dramatically improve. They don't. Not in my experience. This one didn't, although, as always, I was grateful to the author and publisher for a chance to read it. It was not for me for multiple reasons.

I was having serious doubts about this around twenty percent, but I pressed on and on hoping it would turn around and improve, but by eighty percent it had not changed one whit. It had shown itself to be exactly the same improbable and un-engaging novel as it had been at twenty percent. It has proved to me once again that it has never been worth my time to press on however hopefully, so no more of this. I quit it because the protagonist was just as dumb, headstrong, thoughtless, selfish, and foolish as she had been at twenty percent. She had learned nothing, had grown not a millimeter, and was still taking ridiculously improbable risks and putting everyone she supposedly cared about in mortal danger.

Shealene had ditched her sister and her father, who was head of a motorbike gang, at an early age, and moved on. Now she had somehow wangled a partnership in a motorbike customization shop catering to women. The shop was a haven for ex-cons who were trying to go straight. They had just about finished-up a rich contract with a girl band for three customized bikes, when the shop was robbed and the bikes and a host of other stuff had been taken. Instead of letting the police handle it - and making some discrete inquiries on the side id she wanted to - Shea gets in the face of a drug gang member and pisses him off to no end, putting everyone in her shop at risk. Then she pisses off the bike gang, but reconnects with her sister - the abused wife of the new gang leader.

Never once does she think of who she might hurt with her knee-jerk behavior. Delivering her sister to the family friend who is babysitting her sister's eight year old daughter (a child she has never met), Shea discovers the house has been broken into, the friend murdered, and her niece abducted. Despite the fact that Shea could not possibly have abducted this girl - and had multiple lines of evidence supporting that fact (she was driving her sister over there at the time, neighbors had already heard gunshots long before Shea arrived, the gun she foolishly failed to get rid of when the cops arrived was not the one used to kill the family friend), she's arrested for abducting the girl! She's still on the scene of the crime when the cops arrive - she's clearly not gone anywhere with anyone, yet she's arrested? It made absolutely no sense.

This was where I seriously doubted this novel would work for me, and further reading only confirmed this fact. Event after event was highly improbable, Shea squandered chance after chance to take care of business and get herself out of danger, and her failure to take those opportunities, put people at risk further down the line. Despite getting injured and being all but incapacitated by it at one point, she becomes ever more active after the injury - like it never occurred! This one was a bit too improbable for my taste, and the girl was far too mindless and headstrong, flying off the handle and acting completely ridiculously causing more problems than she solved. This business with the niece made zero sense, either. This child has never met Shea, yet at one point she's clinging to her like Shea is the kid's own mom! This was simply not credible.

The novel presents itself as a LGBTQIA story since Shea has a girlfriend (that she treats like dirt), and there's also a transgender character in it, but the relationship Shea has with Jennifer has no impact whatsoever on the story. Jennifer isn't even really an independent character. She's a minor appendage of Shea's, so her presence and her and Shea's preference really contributed nothing to the story. It's great that gender queer characters are becoming more and more common in novels (and TV, and movies), but this story would have been exactly the same had Shea been straight.

The reason I cannot recommend this, though, has nothing to do with that. The whole story was far too improbable, and Shea's hatred of the police force was ridiculous to an extreme. Her stupidity and stubborn insularity got people killed and a child injured. If she'd let the police help then things would have had a better outcome, and she never seems to get this. I really didn't like her at all. I liked her sister a lot more despite (or perhaps because of) Shea's poor attitude towards her. A story about Wendy might have been worth reading. This was not. A story about Shea, her girlfriend, and the bike shop without the theft and the gang war might have actually made for some really entertaining reading.

I wish the author all the best because she has talent if she can corral it and focus on what's important and what makes a main character appealing to a reader, and what makes a story believable, but I have no desire to read any more about an immature hothead like Shealene. She's just not interesting.

The Butch and the Beautiful by Kris Ripper

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel proved to be every bit what I'd hoped for. It was such a pleasure to read. Thanks to the publisher and author for a chance to get in on an advance review copy! That's not to say that it was all plain sailing. I had a couple of issues (when don't I?!), but overall it was fun, entertaining, well-written, and very engaging. I didn't even mind that the ending was entirely predictable, because that was kind of the point!

This novel is part of a loosely connected series known as "Queers of La Vista," and it's set in a fictional California town. I haven't read any others in the series since I was unaware the series existed until I encountered this volume. Given that we're told more than once in this novel that the gay community in La Vista is small, it's a bit of a stretch that we already have five novels in derived from it! Like Pianosa in the Joseph Heller classic Catch-22, is highly unlikely to be able to accommodate all of the activity depicted in the series, but it's no more of a stretch that a TV crime show has a murder rate that exceeds Chicago of the prohibition era, either, so I'm not going to worry about that!

All the volumes in the series twist their titles from US TV soap operas: As La Vista Turns, Gays of Our Lives, One life to Lose, The Queer and the Restless. As I said, I haven't read these, but only two of them, including the one I'm reviewing, are about female relationships if we're to judge a book by its cover (which I normally don't!). Jaq and not Jill, but Hannah, meet at a wedding and immediately get the hots for each other. Neither is looking for a deep entanglement, but they had no way of knowing where this would lead.

The fact is that they click immediately, but since Hannah is going through a divorce - and not a pretty one - the prospects for this interaction don't look too rosy. The story follows them as they navigate a slightly thorny path through the relationship, through the well-meaning intentions of close friends, and through issues which try to steal time from the relationship even though they are not a part of it: such as Jaq's teaching duties and high-school relationship issues, and Hannah and her ex's fight over selling their house.

There was a bit of a Nora Ephron vibe to this, but this isn't your parent's Nora Ephron as the next paragraph will confirm. It did have that upbeat, liberal, well-to-do aura about it, though: people who were well-off enough to not have a worry about where the next penny would come from. As I said, I've not read any other of the stories, so I can't say if they are all like this. I hope not, because it would be nice to find a story in this series about a less well-off couple, or one which doesn't have such an easy trajectory to follow. Maybe that's just me!

Issues? I mentioned them so let's look at one more (the first was the improbability that all of this was going on in such a small LGBTQ community). I was not happy with the fact that these two fell into bed after knowing each other for an hour and proceeded to have unprotected sex. Yes, reality isn't quite such a turn-on I know, but I would have expected that both of these people would have been more grown-up and responsible, and a bit more cautious than they were. They are not teenagers, after all. The problem for me was that they didn't even mention risks, let alone discuss them or take precautions! Yeah, not sexy, and sexy is what this novel aims at - and gets there, be warned. It's very graphic and explicit, and it does not pussy-foot around (so to speak). There is liberal use of four-letter words and depictions of lesbian sex, but I would have preferred a note of caution to be sounded at least, even if it wasn't satisfied.

Having just published my own LGBTQ novel, it was fun to read a different story - a contemporary one which was written so well, and with such good humor and a positive vibe. It was an easy read and a rewarding one. The characters were wonderful, and based on the overall story and the quality of the writing, I recommend this.

Truth Lies Buried by Lesley Welsh

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an advance review copy and I was very grateful to the author and publisher for the chance to review it.

I loved the title of this - which can be read in two ways - but that's just me. I love the English language and I love playing with it. I wish more authors did! Anyway...Alice Samantha Riley spent her twenties in the British army and now in her mid-thirties, she's a bodyguard to Monica Cohen and her son Brando. Mr Benny Cohen, the seedy underworld boss, isn't around any more because Sam bumped him off and buried his body out in the woods, but now that it's been unearthed, the cops are trying to discover who did it. Sam is all about protecting her lover - Mrs Cohen - until she can settle up her late husband's criminal business affairs, and the two of them can move to Spain and retire together. At least she thinks that's the plan. She thinks wrong.

When other London mobsters start showing great interest in carving up dead Cohen's turf - and anyone who gets in the way of their plans - and Monica seems to have a male lover stashed away somewhere, Sam realizes that she has less of a sunny outlook than she does a murky pout-look (see I warned you!). Now a tall red-headed cop is on Sam's tail (and not in a good way), Monica has become vindictive, and Sam finds herself appointed temporary legal guardian of Brando, Benny's young, spoiled son. What else can jump the tracks? In this novel? Plenty!

The novel was written in first person PoV, which I detest, but some authors can carry it, and this one can. However, the tragic weakness of 1PoV was made crystal clear as the author found herself forced into jumping back and forth between voices and it made for really, truly clunky reading at times. If all of the third person sections had been excised, the story would have been much improved, but realistically the whole thing should have been in third person. That said, I liked the story overall, but if the artificial 'romance' had been omitted, it would have improved it greatly.

Frankly, I didn't get why a romance was needed at all in this story. The male interest (in whom I had a total lack of) had so little of a part in the novel, it was painfully obvious that his only purpose was to serve as the 'necessary male' in the female main character's life, and it was completely irrelevant and totally a waste of time. This is evidently deemed to be a requirement by far too many authors - this blind, headlong rush to 'validate' their female character with a male love interest - and quite honestly it's a bit sickening.

This story would have been excellent had this one character been eliminated (and of course he almost was, but purely for dramatic purposes), but having this man swoop-in to carry off the female felt like a complete betrayal of Sam, who was independent, strong and determined, and pretty awesome despite her shady behavior and poor decision-making skills, and who started out in a lesbian relationship. At one stage in the story, the male love (dis)interest pointedly tells us that a boy needs a dad. Well, he's entitled to his opinion, but I call a big BS on that one.

Having two parents is good idea because it's always smart to have more than one perspective to play into raising a child and to share the stress and work, but scores of single parents both male and female do sterling jobs, as do gay couples both male and female, so this felt like a betrayal of Sam. If she had to have a love interest, why couldn't it have been the female cop who was also in the story, and a lesbian? To be fair, Sam was bisexual, so her future partner was in no way cut-and-dried, but the trope "happy ending" was a misstep, I felt. Sam was fine on her own.

There was one other minor item, too, which is that at one point, a stolen laptop is offered in evidence. I doubt that this would be of any utility whatsoever except in furthering investigation. As evidence in itself, it seems to me that it was useless, because the chain of evidence was broken the minute it was stolen. The defense would have a field day with something like that, using it to cast doubt on every other piece of evidence, so I seriously doubt the police would be interested in it as evidence per se (not per say!).

That aside, the story was great, and if I ignore the "nomance", I have no problem rating this very positively. The story was engaging, interesting, and kept the reader off balance like it was a fairground cakewalk, because you never knew exactly what was coming next (except for the love interest where you knew exactly how it would play out). I recommend it as a worthy read.

The Spirit Chaser by Kat Mayor (or KM Montemayor!)

Rating: WARTY!

No! I'm sorry, but no. I had read about one third the way into this novel when I encountered this paragraph (below) and immediately quit it on principle. Note that this scene follows right behind one where Casey, the woman depicted here, has quit her job because she's been betrayed by Austin. She storms off to her office, pissed as all hell, and starts packing to leave. The guy follows her and manhandles her as described below.

He strode over to her, grabbed her by her shoulders, and spun her around. Her bag fell to the floor as he pushed her against the wall and planted his lips firmly on hers. Her eyes widened in surprise. Da-amn. He has strong lips. So strong, she could feel her toes curling. Casey was too stunned to protest. He took that as a green light and weaved his fingers through her hair without releasing any pressure from her lips. Not once did he try to stick his tongue down her throat, but that didn't stop it from being one of the most powerful kisses Casey had ever experienced.

You don't get to describe a guy in process of raping a woman and have the woman fall in love with him because of it, and then expect me to rate your fiction as anything other than trash. No, you don't. And this from a female author? Her toes curled? Seriously? I half-way expect this kind of garbage in the young adult world, but not in a mature novel for adult readers which is otherwise written reasonably well.

Austin has manhandled her before, and the appropriate response from Casey here would be to knee him in the groin, or punch his face, or at the very least wrench away from him or start yelling for help. This is a guy who has already proven himself to be a complete jerk and a dick, to have had no qualms about abusing her mentally, and for whom she has no love at all. Yet suddenly when he becomes brutal with her, she melts and succumbs to his "charms"? No! The bottom line here is that I don't care how well you write, you put this abusive trash in your story and you get an automatic fail from me. This kind of writing is a disgrace. It's worse than pornography in how it inexcusably disrespects women.

I'd already had several issues with this novel before this point, and this is the second of this author's novels I've read and been thoroughly unimpressed. It will be the last. Despite the problems though, I was still plugging away at it hoping for something better while fearing that Casey was too stupid to be worth reading about and that she and Austin, despite his appalling behavior, were sadly going to be paired off. I'd overlooked a couple of grammatical errors, such as "You're going to want you're fantastic job back" (where the second one should have been 'your', of course), because this was an advance review copy. While I appreciate the chance to review it, I don't appreciate this kind of abusive writing, which essentially instructs us that all any woman needs is some rough-handling and she'll fall for the guy who is abusing her. No!

The basic story sounded good. I'm not a believer in spirits or ghosts or demons, but I love a good story about that kind of thing, and there are not that many honestly good stories out there on these topics. This one is the first I've elected to read in a long time because of this, and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile read. The story is that Casey is hired as the resident psychic on a successful TV show, Spirit Chaser Investigations, wherein a team of people visits and films haunted houses.

After she does a walk-through of a purportedly haunted house and declares it a non-starter - there's nothing there - a dissatisfied Austin, the show runner with a deadline to meet, brings in another psychic for a second opinion, and shuffles Casey off for the day so she doesn't even know he's done this. He doesn't tell her until the last minute, right before the team watches the rough-cut of the episode they plan on airing, and Casey gets to see this other woman making up stories about bad events in the house, and going on about a civil war soldier, pretty much feeding Austin a total bunch of rot.

This is what happens when you let your dick think for you and bring in your old girlfriend to piss all over your current psychic. Casey naturally feels betrayed and storms off, leading to the sickening paragraph above. Evidently, she doesn't feel betrayed enough, because all Austin has to do is slam her up against a wall, force a kiss on her, and she's his BFF forever. I'll let you figure out what that middle 'F' means.

The issues I'd had with the novel before this were annoying but not automatic cancellations. There was too much trope, for one thing - purloined ideas from movies, such as that one of the haunted houses was built over a 'Native American' (that would be American Indian) sacred site, and the rocking chair which started moving by itself, and the house which has a façade that looks like an evil face: "The shadows cast a grinning humanoid visage against the façade, and the two upstairs bedroom windows looked like sinister eyes." I like my stories to be a bit more original than that, but I was willing to put up with it for a while at least.

I was even putting up with author foibles such as when Casey describes someone as her "New BBF" How can you have a new best friend forever?! It's a minor thing, but a lot of minor things add up over the length of a novel, such as the author's obsession with "granite countertops in the kitchen." Some parts were well written. I particularly liked this bit: "she spotted his most shameful secret. It was in the corner of his mind wrapped in the brown paper of guilt and tied with strings of self-loathing," taken from when Casey reads someone's mind (at their invitation). But there was nowhere near enough of that to overcome the deficits.

Other parts, for example, made no sense: "Her third eye showed her the dark mist overlying the upper floor." This was on a photograph she was looking at. I found myself taken out of suspension of disbelief to wonder how this worked exactly! She's not looking directly at the house, she's looking at an image of it, yet she still sees this misty aura around it? Is the photograph haunted?! Or is it that idea from the Doctor Who episode where the image of a weeping angel becomes an angel itself?

Given that there was a total lack of world-building here, the reader is offered no additional information at all about how any of this was supposed to work. Casey was evidently far too stupid to figure it out or even be curious about it, so we got zilch from her. After reading a few items like this, it felt to me like the author was simply randomly pulling trope ideas from the history of horror fiction, without doing anything to weld it into a coherent whole. She had some eastern mystic guy on the team, a Catholic priest, and an American Indian shaman (we never did learn what tribal affiliation he had, not in the portion I read). The whole thing was a pot-pourri of random elements, and the predictable result was that it stunk.

Some parts were just plain dumb and made the main character, Casey, seem tragically stupid - such as where Austin once again forces himself on her and overrides her own wish for lunch with his own plan. I was really starting to dislike him at this point. He whisks her off in his fancy car and she's having the wilts and the vapors over his driving! "For some reason, she'd always found it strangely powerful and sexy to watch a man drive a stick shift." I know the reason: she's simply that shallow! Maybe she does have these bizarre fantasies, but right after that came, "Austin downshifted as he approached a red light. Casey studied his movements. They were automatic. He didn't have to think about it. His right hand just knew what to do." Like this is some magical super power? No! Everyone who drives stick shift drives like this! That's what competent driving is all about.

I detest stick shift, but even I drive like this when I'm forced to drive such a vehicle, so this observation just made Casey look like a juvenile moron - or at best, someone who had led an extraordinarily sheltered life (which she had not). Another example of her lack of smarts is when she observes of Austin, "you should be the biggest skeptic in the world." Yet this is said to the guy who is running a show wherein he repeatedly reports on inexplicable supernatural phenomena! Just how stupid is Casey? Too stupid for me to want to read any more about her, rest assured.

I've never understood why it is that we have to literally get on our knees and beg for aid from a god which is supposed to be infinitely loving. Check this out: "Would you allow me to say a prayer of protection with you and give you a blessing?" This is not a problem with the writing per se because people really believe this stuff, but it gets worse. At one point the priest says, "The more people we have praying the better." Why is that? Does this god only pay attention if more than one person begs? Does he need a crowd begging on their knees before he will act? We learn, "If God had not restrained the enemy, you would still be trapped." but we don't learn why he let these people suffer before he so kindly stepped in and helped out. If he cares that much why isn't he smiting the demons instead of letting them punish people? Is this god a sadist? It was just one more example of how poorly the story hung together.

I quickly tired of the appalling abuse of vegetarians and vegans in this novel, too. Here's just one example of how they were repeatedly dissed: "Liv can make vegan cuisine and a few other Austin-approved dishes that don't taste like baked dog turds." Examples of such thoughtless writing were not uncommon, such as this one, on a different topic: "...he thought about placing the cool, metallic barrel against his tongue. He shoved it down his throat and pulled the trigger." I've never heard of anyone considering committing suicide by pushing a barrel down their throat. Aiming it up at the roof of the mouth, yes, but down the throat? Not so much! But maybe this tied in with Austin's perverse attitude towards sexuality. Who Knows. Maybe this novel should have been titled Fifty Shades of Spirit.

Out of curiosity (about this mixture of Eastern religion, Catholicism, and American Indian tradition, I looked up what kind of monsters and demons the American Indians have, and they're so pathetic as to be laughable. One of them, Aniwye was an Ojibwe legend of a large man-eating skunk monster which kills people by breaking wind at them, causing them to become sick and die! The 'demon' names are pathetic by themselves: Basket Woman? Perverted Merman? How about the 'Cannibal Dwarves'? Not much fodder there for your standard Catholic-based possession story which is, I assume, why we saw no such demons in the part of the story I read. Graham Masterton had the right idea in his 1977 novel, The Manitou, but ideas seemed very limited here.

So no, this novel is not worth reading, and I actively dis-recommend it. I do recommend sensitivity training for the author so we don't get any more novels of women being abused and the reader being expected to believe this is how romances really ought to be.

The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz

Rating: WARTY!

This is my first Dean Koontz novel, and I have to report that I could not get past the first third of it. Koontz has more pen names than I have fingers on two hands: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, KR Dwyer, John Hill, Dean Koontz, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, and Aaron Wolfe. This novel has been released under three different names, including his own. The other two names were Brian Coffey and KR Dwyer.

The worst thing about this novel was Patrick Lawlor's atrocious reading, which turned me off from the start. It was truly sickening when he made the police detective sound just like the eponymous detective in the TV series Columbo, but given the way the character was written, Koontz probably modeled him on Columbo anyway. I just couldn't stand it. I may go back and attack this again in a print or e-version, but right now all I'm interested in is evasion!

The premise is that a sick killer by the name of The Butcher is terrorizing female victims. I did not like the relish with which Koontz described this terrorism, not did i like the way the investigation was laid out. The detective (aside from his Columbo impersonation), was obnoxious to me. I actually liked the Columbo TV series, but I sure didn't want want to follow an entire story having to deal with this guy. I found myself losing interest in the story repeatedly and in the end, I simply didn't care who dunnit, and gave up on it. I was a lot happier once I'd made that decision! Naturally I can't recommend this at all.

The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade

Rating: WORTHY!

Obviously rooted in the 1831 Victor Hugo novel, Notre-Dame de Paris ('Our Lady of Paris', and not 'Le Bossu de Notre-Dame' which would be a literal translation of the English title!) this one takes the idea into a fantasy world, where the 'hunchback', here called Modo, has the ability to change his appearance, but it's at some serious cost to his personal comfort. In this, the first of a series, Modo is a precocious, intelligent, and sensitive child who is raised from a very early age by the "mysterious Mr Socrates", who wants to recruit him to the British empire as a spy. Yes, I said it was fantasy. It sounded weird enough to tempt me anyway, even though it's really aimed at middle-grade readers, or perhaps the younger end of the YA age-range.

It started out well and held my interest for the first two-thirds, but I have to confess my enthusiasm waned somewhat towards the end. I really liked that Modo was not presented as a studly guy, or as someone to feel sorry for, nor was he given a magical cure for his maladies. He remained the same hunch-backed, stooped, odd-eyed character throughout, although he employed his shape-shifting abilities for his spy work, and later out of vanity when he met Olivia.

Olivia was another employee of Mr Socrates, and another reason why I liked this. Neither of the two main characters was shown as needing help or validation from the other. neither she nor Modo knew about the other until they met and it was some time after this that they realized they were on the same side, whereupon they began working together without need of direction, and succeeded admirably in the end, although their journey was perilous.

I recommend this story particularly for the appropriate age range(s). It's full of self-sufficiency, adventure, mystery, gadgets, mechanical beasts, and fun. As the name Modo suggests, he is far from a quasi-hero and is, instead, a really worthwhile character with a realistic view of the world. Olivia is a charmer, and I recommend this story.

Millennium by John Varley

Rating: WARTY!

Varley is a writer whom I like, but this novel left a lot to be desired in the writing quality department. I first saw this story as a movie starring Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd (that's how old it is!). I loved the movie. It, in turn, was based on a short story titled "Air Raid" which appeared in the inaugural edition of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the spring of 1977. I reviewed it in October 2013. I think this novel was - in the incestuous way that Hollywood has - taken from the movie, so it feels a lot more familiar than Air Raid did, but it's written to be somewhat different for some inexplicable reason.

This novel is one that has such an absurd premise that you have to turn off brain cells and skim the most superficial level of it, if you want to enjoy the story. The movie was a critical and financial disaster, but I actually liked it. It was rated badly and made less than seven million (in 1989) which is a fortune to you and me, but a sorry waste of time in Hollywood dollars. Cheryl Ladd was a breath of fresh air which more than made up for Kris Kristofferson's predictably wooden performance. I'd recommend it over the stories, though.

Varley has a real problem with time in this novel - and I don't mean in the actual story, but in the details he writes, which keep changing. As far as I could tell, that is set in a future as far ahead of us as the Copper Age coming to the Fertile Crescent is behind us. It's a society where we're led to believe that though this world is at an end, with pollution and genetic deterioration running riot, the amazingly advanced technology they have - including time travel - cannot do a thing to help? The plan they develop is to go back to the past and collect healthy human specimens which they will then dispatch to another planet so the human race can start over. How they managed to be eight thousand years into the future and not even begin to colonize other planets is a mystery which goes unexplained, as is why they waited so long to implement even this solution.

The plan for collecting healthy human specimens is to scavenge air disasters and other disappearances. What they do is scan history to find an airplane crash. Before the crash happens, they link to the airplane and send in a team to remove the living humans and substitute zombie-like replicas which bear a superficial resemblance to the rescued people. This was before the age of DNA "fingerprinting" so all they do is replace the teeth in the zombie with a set which matches the rescued human and they're good to go.

Given that they want healthy human specimens, it makes no sense to collect a random sample from a jetliner. Wouldn't you want to run tests and take the most genetically fit specimens if you want to reboot the human race and give it the best chance? Yes, it's Eugenics, but this is the end of the entire race we're talking about here (and it's fiction), not some Nazi ethnic cleansing. Besides, healthy specimens come from all races, not just the so-called Aryans. So why focus on taking passengers from US air disasters? Seriously?! Oh that;s right! It's another US author for whom the rest of the world simply doesn't count! Got it!

To be fair, there is mention of taking others, including the largely fictional Roman 'lost' legion, but it would seem to me to be a lot easier if they had taken people from prehistoric times, who would not only be genetically healthier than modern humans, but also a heck of a lot easier to snatch without causing problems down the time line. "Hah! Got you!" I can hear you saying, "If they did that, they could wipe out whole populations of humans which descended from a couple of initial individuals, if they took either one of those 'founding parents'," but here's the thing: there are engineers in this story whose job it is to scan the timeline and discover suitable people for this abduction. All they have to do is scan them to their death and snatch all the ones who don't live to old age right before they're schedule to die in their original time. Easy-peasey

Not that they had no harmful genes a hundred thousand years ago, but they had fewer than we do today because most of those with genetic defects above a certain level of severity would not survive, unlike today. And why take only white folks, when Africans have the greatest genetic diversity, even today? I should note that it's the movie, in true Hollywood tradition, which shows the rescued passengers to be almost exclusively white, not the novel, but the novel never said a word about seeking genetic diversity or representation. Perhaps the author expected us to assume this, but it would not have hurt to clarify it.

For me, the biggest unanswered question was, given the technology they have, why can't they fix these genetic problems? Another good questions is, if they can time-travel, why not go back and fix the issues that led to the appalling pollution and genetic issues, so they never happen in the first place? This is what I mean by setting your sights low if you want to enjoy the fantasy of this story. Do not go looking for good science or logical moves in this fiction! Yes, you can argue that doing something like that would screw-up the time line, but would that be any worse than doing nothing which has already screwed-up the future here?

Having said that, that was one thing I did like: is that the future people dare not make big waves in the time stream. Chronoclasms will echo down the ages if they mess with the wrong thing, changing their present (in the future!). This is why they take the passengers who are doomed. They will die in the crash, so if they substitute bodies and remove the living, no one will know they were snatched.

Of course there were many ways to achieve this same aim without limiting oneself to jetliners which is what the movie did. Why not get all those children who go missing every year? Bring them to the future, educate them in schools specifically structured to teach them what they need to know to survive on this new planet, and when they're mature enough, send them. The haphazard nature of this 'culling' in which they indulged themselves (and the future of the human race!) seemed ridiculous and dangerous to me.

There are many ways a writer could have gone with this and it's a bit depressing to think that someone of Varley's stature made so many poor choices. Dual first person narratives were really annoying. I am not a fan of first person voice by any stretch of the imagination and having two of them makes it twice as bad. The movie thankfully dispensed with that. In this case, the alternating narratives come from Louise Baltimore (all the future people are named after cities - mostly US cities) and Bill Smith, who is an investigator trying to figure out how two planes collided in mid-air (presented in a delightfully disturbing manner in the movie). The more he investigates, the more suspicious and confused he becomes. Baltimore is sent in to try and fix these issues, and ends up making them worse.

The writing overall isn't bad. There's too much info-dumping (which is a side-effect of the ill-chosen voice, I have to add), but aside from that, it's written reasonably well. There was only one big error I noted, which is that on page 36 it's 7:15, but two pages later, during the same sequence, it's only "oh-seven-hundred." Someone wasn't watching the clock! This is funny because later there is a problem raised with all the watches from the plane's victims showing the wrong time.

The problem as we begin the story is that one of the team who switches bodies loses her stun gun, and that kind of technology cannot be allowed to surface back in 1955. It gets worse when another such gun is lost in 1980. Louise Baltimore (everyone in the future seems to be named after a city) is sent back to recover it, and ends up encountering Bill Smith, one of the crash investigators, who is starting to suspect something truly weird is going on here. Love ensues!

There is some unintentional humor which leavens this book, such as where I read about the temporary morgue, wherein the head of the local NTSB board had "somebody" set it up. That struck me as hilarious, but maybe it's just me! The bottom line is that the movie is far better. Skip the book and go straight there. If you can still find it in this purported age of instant access and steaming video.

Our Amazing World: Dinosaurs by Kay de Silva

Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed another book by Kay da Silva back in April, 2016. That one was about sea turtles.

This is a children's introduction to dinosaurs and has photographs of fossils and computer-rendered pictures of dinosaurs in their natural environment. I was able to read this on a smart phone with no problems, although you really want a bigger screen to really see the pictures. You can enlarge the pictures on the phone screen, but frankly, and unlike the claws of Deinonychus, they were not very sharp! This probably won't bother young kids as much as it did me!

The real value of the book is in the details it gives. The author really goes into dinosaurs and their life and habits; not so much that a child would get lost or overwhelmed, but more than you would typically find in a book like this one. The images are not all the typical favorites, either. Yes, Tyrannosaurus puts in an appearance, but we also see Tarbosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Albertaceratops (which looks like it's having a bad horn day), Yangchuanosaurus, Allosaurus, Diplodocus, Elasmosaurus (which wasn't actually a dinosaur!), Kentrosaurus, Peteinosaurus (again, not actually a dinosaur), Plateosaurus, and a host of others, in addition to photographs of footprints, eggs, and skeletons, all supported in the text.

If your kids love dinosaurs (and friends) then this is definitely something you should consider adding to their collection.

Transhuman by Ben Bova

Rating: WARTY!

As a sci-fi fan, I'm familiar with Ben Bova's name and his status in the sci-fi world, but I've never read anything by him. After this, I doubt I ever will again. This was an audio book, and the reader's voice was awful. Stefan Rudnicki reminded me of the kid in the Home Alone movie trilogy who records his own voice on a tape recorder, then slows the tape down to make it sound adult. This reader sounded exactly like that and it was really hard to ignore that and focus on the story, especially since the story itself was utterly ludicrous and boring to boot. Audio books often cost a fortune, and I can't help but believe that one of the major factors in that is paying for a celebrity or a 'professional' to read it. They need to get people who can read and who are amateurs, so they can pay them well, but not exorbitantly, and get a good reader rather than some name or voice actor who are typically awful at this. In this way we would have listenable audio books at reasonable prices.

With a title like Transhuman (not to be confused with Transhuman by Jonathan Hickman or Transhuman by Mark vn Name, I expected something mutational and genetic to come out of this, perhaps along the lines of Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, but it certainly didn't look like it was going anywhere near there - or anywhere at all by the time I quit listening about half way through the story). I was already skimming by then because quite literally nothing was happening. Not that the term 'transhuman' accurately describes Bear's novel either, BTW, but I don't think Ben Bova really understands what 'transhuman' means.

The basic plot is that this guy kidnaps his own granddaughter from the hospital where she's being treated for, and dying from a glioblastoma. She apparently only has months to live. Grandfather wants to try an experimental treatment that he has developed, but it is a long way from human trials and was not developed for this, so quite understandably no one in authority will countenance it. His daughter and her husband don't trust him enough to go for it either, so he charges ahead by himself. This instantly made me dislike him. I might have reconsidered if the novel had been better written and I'd seen something happen in the first half of the story to make it worth listening to, but literally nothing happened other than the kidnapping and rounds of treatment.

Plus the story had all the hallmarks of fan-fiction, it was so badly written. The child's own attending physician abandons her job and takes off with this guy, which is utterly ridiculous. I've worked in hospitals and they are far more protective of children than this. Even if her grandfather was legally entitled to remove her from the hospital, he was not the child's legal guardian, and I can't believe someone would not have called the parents to check with them if this was OK. I've worked in pediatric wards, and I know for a fact that pediatric nurses are devoted to their charges. Not one of them would let this happen without notifying mom and dad.

In the end, I couldn't help but see this as nothing but a wish fulfillment story, given that the author was pretty much the same age as the protagonist when this novel was written. All the female characters love him and want to help him! No one sees him as a creepy kidnapper. No. Just no. I refuse to even remotely recommend something as poor as this.

Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge by Paul Krueger

Rating: WORTHY!

This is yet another advance review copy from Net Galley for which I was really grateful! It's a mixed bag and you can only chose by blurb what you think will be a worthy read. Sometimes it feels like Christmas and you wonder whether you will get coal in your stocking, or a real gem. This was without question a gem of the finest cut. My only real quesitont o begin with was: who is the real author? Goodreads has two versions, one which credits authorship to Grady Hendrix and lists Paul Krueger as a contributor and this is listed as a "chaplet" whatever the heck that is. The one I read which gives Paul Kreuger the whole credit. Are they one and the same person? Is one an excerpt from the other - because it bears no resemblance to the actual Last Call! Who knows!

The real Last Call took off right from the start, grabbed me and ran with me. I sped through the chapters. It had a really interesting premise: that bartenders are really protectors of humanity from the demon world, and it's not a metaphor! By mixing and consuming the perfect cocktail, they can give themselves a range of temporary powers to fight real demons which are appropriately known as tremens, and which manifest in a variety of forms. Different cocktails lend different powers and the book contains recipes for various cocktails between chapters.

Kudos for making the main character Chinese-American. Bailey Chen was such a break from the trope young adult world of dystopian trilogies or ridiculous love stories featuring Mary Sue Wasp. She was smart, determined, inventive, amusing, and fearless despite her fears. Even as she was introduced to the world of demon-hunting, for which she had a real talent, she was still trying to do the sensible thing and protect her future with a decent day job.

I was into this from the start, but the real question was: was our main character, Bailey Chen? She was bar-tending as a temp job until should could get something in the hi-tech world, and even when she discovered this weird world of alcohol magic and demon-hunting, she was still pursuing her dream avidly, even as the demon world began to go sideways in that it was no longer the predictable world it had been. But Bailey was up to it.

I adored Bailey, and liked all three of her companions in this fight, although one of them temporarily was a dick. I would have loved to learn more about Mona, but then I always seems to be more intrigued by the companion than by the star! However, it was a close run thing here - too close to call because Bailey was kick-ass also.

I loved this novel (in a sweet platonic manner...) and I recommend it highly.

The Cresswell Plot by Eliza Wass

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel, which I was thrilled to receive as an advance review copy and for which I thank the publisher and author, was very entertaining, despite being told in worst person voice, aka first-person, which is a voice I normally detest. The voice is one of the family patriarch's daughters, a fifteen year old, and it turned out to be a rare case where the author does it well. There are three sisters and three brothers in this strict religious family, under the thumb of the overbearing - some would argue totally psycho - master, aka father, who has written his own addendum to the Bible from which the kids are forced to read each night. Like some deluded Noah, this Dad has convinced his family that they are the only righteous family, perhaps in the world, and that they will all go to Heaven if they follow his teachings. Each sister will become the bride of one of the brothers: Castley will marry Caspar, Delvive will marry one of her triplet siblings named Hannan, and Jerusalem will marry the rather rebellious Mortimer.

Yes dad is sick. So is mom, but in her case it's physical, and she also has deformed legs, because when she fell (or was she pushed?) downstairs, family practice was to avoid doctors and let their god fix broken legs. Predictably, the god failed. Now she can barely move on her own. The kids are hardly any better. At least they can move around freely, and they are forced to attend public school (where they're considered freaks) after an intervention, but other than that, at home they are kept as virtual prisoners - and sometimes literal prisoners. If they misbehave, there is always the drainage ditch with a lockable grill over it, in the woods behind the house. Nearly all of them are intimately familiar with it.

It's predictably Castley who begins to rebel, and the disturbing question becomes: will these kids get out of this alive? Or will they end up 'in Heaven' sooner than they expected? The story is disturbing as we see the children struggle to make sense of life after being thoroughly warped by the very person - their father - whom they ought to be able to trust for guidance and protection.

There are many questions here, not least of which is why the authorities, knowing these kids are at risk having intervened once, do not intervene more. The kids routinely show up at school with bruises and the Cresswell's neighbor (and what's his story? It might surprise you) is keeping a very close eye on them. It beggars belief that things could have become so bad and continued in this way for so long unchecked. It's also a mystery where the kid's names came from given how strict and Biblical this family's patriarch is. Castley? Delvive? Those names are not Biblical! But that aside, Castley's story is moving and worth listening to. She's a smart and strong female character and I enjoyed her story even as it made me cringe and squirm. I recommend this as a worthy read.

Raelia by Lynette Noni

Rating: WARTY!

I had three strikes against this novel going in, so let me list them right here up front. Firstly, I am not a fan of series because they are rarely well-done and all-too-often spread what's at best a single novel over three or more sorry volumes, which is a dire waste of trees to say nothing of a waste of time in my opinion. Given a choice, I'd rather have the trees. Once in a while an author can make a series shine, but for me that's a rare treasure to encounter.

The second problem is first person PoV which almost never works, and it's astounding to me that so many authors, especially in the YA world, make the mistake of wooden-headedly jumping on this insane bandwagon. Thirdly, this is book 2 of 'The Medoran Chronicles', and I suffer from a long-standing revulsion towards any book which has 'chronicles', or 'codex', or 'cycle', or 'saga' in the title. This one, strictly speaking, did not have it in the title as such, and I thought that the simple one word title, Raelia, sounded pretty cool, but that fact that it was part of a chronicles did leave a bad taste in my mouth. Mitigating against that was the blurb, which suckered me in, making me think that this was an interesting story. It wasn't.

For one thing, the main female character was far too stupid to be of interest to me. Alexandra Jennings is a 16-year-old whose archaeologist parents are thoroughly irresponsible. They did not even notice that she had gone missing for an entire summer in volume one, evidently (I did not read volume one). Now Alex is coming back for her second year of champagne wishes and caviar dreams at the Akarnae Academy and in the words of Robin Leach, I don't know why!

Alex was a special snowflake in volume one evidently, finding herself roommates with the Princess of America and eventually becoming 'The Chosen One'! Yes, this is set in the US for obscure reasons, but everything is renamed. The US is Medora and inexplicably, it has king and queen. Even though this is in a parallel universe, I have no rational or logical explanation for how this came to be. Nor do I get how Alex can be openly threatened, at the birthday party of her best friend, the princess, by Aven Dalmarta, the man who kidnapped Alex in volume one, and not think once of calling out to everyone that this guy is openly threatening her. Again. Instead she deliberately knocks over the king and queen as they're dancing, in a dumb attempt to 'protect' the princess from a non-problem of a dramatically lesser magnitude. None of this made any sense at all to me.

The next dumb thing she does is to facilitate the princess going unescorted downtown, when the king has ordered his daughter to remain in the palace. Alex is dragged into an empty house by Aven, who somehow magically knew exactly which route Alex would take, even down to which side of the street she would walk on and at precisely what time, even though she has unexpectedly changed plans and done something even she had not expected to do! Alex gets no blame for this excursion. Only the princess is held responsible! That's how special Alex is.

It was at this point that I quit. I could not stand to read any more. The author is evidently a big fan of Disney movies, and it shows too much here. It was too hard to take this seriously. The novel is supposed to be about young adults, but it's written as though it's a middle-grade novel. It would have read better had the main characters been four years younger. I've read some good middle-grade novels, but reading this for me was like trying to walk on a floor made of giant, sticky marshmallows and wishing you could ski on the fresh powder instead of choking on it. While I wish the author all the best with this series of course, it's not for me, and I cannot recommend it.

Here's a thought I had after I posted the review and explains another part of my discomfort with this novel. There is this one section which reads thus:

King Aurileous was tall and intimidating, but even from where Alex stood she could tell he had a kind face with prominent laughter lines. His eyes were warm as he scanned the sea of cheering people and his smile made her feel relaxed despite the overwhelming atmosphere. Queen Osmada seemed, in a word, lovely. She was beautiful, with her dark auburn hair, and her smile was even more calming than the king’s.

Note the difference between how the man is described (Kind face, prominent laughter lines, warm eyes), and how the woman is dismissed: "She was beautiful". That's it - 'pretty' much. Once again a female writer tells us that the only value a woman can offer is to look pretty and smile as she hangs on the arm of her kind, warm owner. Barf!

Sawbones by Melissa Lenhardt

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"She came to sit by the bed of a dying man despite her own infirmary." ("infirmity" was needed here. The guy was already in the infirmary!)
"Is so, you give them too much credit." ("If so" was needed here)
"I hear a great many things people do not intend me to her." (intend me to "hear" was needed)

Sawbones is perhaps not surprisingly, a common title. Don't confuse this one with Sawbones by Lawrence BoarerPitchford, which has some similarities, or Sawbones by Catherine Johnson which is a rather different kind of story, but set in a similar period, or with Sawbones by Stuart MacBride, which is a completely different kind of story. Frankly, given the way the main character is treated, and in rather graphic detail, the title for this one perhaps should have been Sabines!

Set in the early 1870's (as near as I can gauge), this tells the story of Catherine Bennett, a prideful and prejudiced medical doctor who had a modest but thriving practice in New York City until she was made (by the victim's wife) the scapegoat in a murder. Fearful that she will not get a fair trial given the wife's powerful connections, she takes a rather cowardly way out and flees to Texas posing as one Laura Elliston, and making her way via Austin to a wagon train heading out to a newly-founded town in Colorado.

She never makes it out of Texas. After a savage attack by Kiowa or Comanche (it's unclear), she finds herself the sole survivor and also in charge of a wounded cavalry officer who came with his men belatedly to the rescue of the wagon train. It's rather sickeningly obvious from this point on that she has her love interest. That was one of my problems with this novel: events are telegraphed so far in advance that it's no surprise what happens to her and therefore no spoiler to give it away.

Another issue was that it's in first person which is the weakest and most irritating voice in which to write a novel, and it's completely unrealistic in this case given what brutality the author forces on this woman at the hands of men. It's simply not credible that she could tell this story the way she does. Initially, it made sense what happened to her, given her gender and the period in which she lived, and I was appreciating that this was a strong woman and looking forward to learning about her, but that rapidly fell apart after she ran away from the crime she never committed. From that point on she became not stronger, but weaker and more stupid, and the sorry plaything of a cavalry Lieutenant, subsuming her entire self to him.

Her protestations of moving on alone in her desire to be a doctor were so vacuous, especially given that you knew they were never going to happen, that I felt I was reading a young adult novel at this point. I'd have actually enjoyed the story if she had gone on alone, but we have to have all of our women validated by a guy in these tales don't we, otherwise how can she be a real woman? Her credentials as a doctor were called into question when she kept rambling on about "...trying to staunch the flow of blood" when she really meant "stanch," which is something that young adult writers of today do not know, but which a doctor would have known back then.

The male interest is Lieutenant Kindle, presumably because you could read him like an open book. He ought to have been named Lieutenant Nook (as in nookie) given his overbearing and single-mindedly physical approach to her. At one juncture, she outright tells him 'No!' (in one form or another) on four separate occasions and still he will not leave her alone. The fact that she was partly drunk and emotionally compromised offered no barrier to this guy whose name, we're told, is William, but which ought to be Dick. He sickened me with his non-stop pressing of himself upon her.

Having saved his life, you'd think this would have made him offer some respect, or show some deference, but instead he seems to have fallen victim to some early form of Stockholm Syndrome and he stalks her until 'she can't refuse him anymore', and has his way with her. The relationship at this point had become so co-dependent that it turned my stomach and I almost quit reading. But they get it on in a library, so I guess this made it okay for him to become a tenant of her Wildfell Hall. When they discuss "Laura's" previous sexcapade, Kindle actually has the hypocrisy to say, "He took advantage of you."! I am not making this up. But "Laura" is a hypocrite too. After repeatedly dissing and dismissing men, she says, “I refuse to believe men do the things they do for no reason other than they can.” Why would she say that when she's made is quite clear that she thinks they're the lowest of the low anyway?

Yes, this is the book "Laura" was reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I had to question this. The novel came out in 1848, so it seems highly unlikely that it would have found its way into a library in a remote (and new) Texas fort by 1870 or so. Who knows? Maybe it's possible. This is fiction after all, but I found it even harder to believe that the "reading room" at this remote fort would have been so well-stocked with books that "All available wall space was taken up by floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with books." While the US was quite literate (if you were white) by the 1870's, it beggars belief that a library in a remote fort in The South would be so well stocked, especially so soon after a (not so) civil war.

Purely because of her work on saving Kindle's life, "Laura" is made the acting head physician at Fort Richardson in North Texas, where Nook, er Kindle, is based. This is definitely not where she imagined her life would take her, and especially not into his own house where she lodges upstairs on the pretense that he's more safely out of the way of infection in his own room than he is in the hospital, and she can take care of him. The hell with the rest of the patients! How bizarre is that? What about their risk of infection?

Bizarre is how this novel struck me, time after time. At one point "Laura" visits the bakery in town "...where a fat woman was setting out loaves of warm bread." What? Yes, you read it right. Why was it necessary to describe this woman as fat? Well this was a first person PoV, so we can take this as "Laura's" bigoted attitude to everything and everyone, but all this served to do was to make me dislike her more. Another problem I had was with her blind hatred of American Indians. In a way, it was understandable that she should have some PTSD from her experience, but her hatred was so rife and raised so often, it became quickly obvious that the next thing which would happen would be that she has an interaction directly with the Indians, and that it would not be a pleasant one.

This marked the second point at which I felt I really needed to ditch this novel. It was only, it seemed, the unintentional humor which was what kept me going at this point. For example, "Laura" thinks this of the overly amorous Kindle: "It'll give you the big head." I'm sure what he was doing to her did give him a big head, but I really didn't need to know that! Obviously she didn't mean it that way, but this phrase was just so in the wrong place.

"Laura" simply doesn't seem to understand men. She repeatedly downgrades men to nothing save vain idiots, then she falls for Kindle! What's worse than this though, is that at one point she thinks this of another army officer: " It beggared belief Wallace Strong would prefer an ignorant dreamer like Ruth to a strong, intelligent woman like Alice." Why would she think this given how often we learn of her opinion that the men around her are exactly that shallow? It made no sense for her to have this opinion given everything else she's expressed about men, who were evidently only one step above 'them dad-blamed redskins' to hear her talk and think.

She isn't very smart either. She repeatedly fails to appreciate how precarious her position is even when someone other than Kindle is obviously stalking her. This is another episode of telegraphing exactly what's going on, but it takes "Laura" forever to figure it out. I'm usually bad at this, but even I figured out exactly who this guy was long before she did.

Our doctor isn't above slut-shaming either. Of a prostitute, she thought this: "She would lay with multiple men out of wedlock but she would not swear on the Bible. It always amazed me where people drew their moral line in the sand," and this was from a woman who wanted to be treated like a man, yet who has no problem being subsumed as " Mrs William Kindle" when discussing marriage, and who herself has already had one lover 'out of wedlock' and is about to take another? I simply did not get her character at all. It seemed like the more I read, the further she strayed from the woman she appeared to be when the novel began, and none of this straying was into interesting, engaging, or even pleasant territory.

The oddities kept on coming. At one point Kindle is teaching Laura to shoot, a sadly clichéd way for a writer to get her main male character up close and personal with her main female, but the issue here that I found interesting was the plethora of bottles which were available in the middle of nowhere for her target practice! We're told the soldiers out on this patrol are allowed a tot of whisky each day, so no doubt some bottles came from there, but unless they're getting drunk each night, I doubt there would be crates of bottles for her to shoot up. Maybe they actually were getting drunk each night. This would certainly account for their poor performance during what happened later. It would not account for how you can tie someone to a horse when you "...rode through the night without stopping." Those Indians certainly do have powerful medicine!

At this point I did quit reading. There wasn't much left to read, but to be honest I could not bear the thought of reading any more. I wish the author the best of luck, but I cannot recommend a novel like this one.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: Castaways by David McDonald

Rating: WARTY!

I was interested to read this novel from Net Galley based on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy graphic novel series. This was a prose book, however, not a graphic novel, and although (judged by the cover illustration) it seeks to align itself closely on the characters from the movie, it fell far, far short of that movie I'm sad to report. It was a really fast read, fortunately, otherwise I would have quit reading it and relegated it to the DNF pile a lot sooner than I did.

I'm not a huge consumer of comics and graphic novels although I do peruse a few here and there, so I'd never heard of Guardians of the Galaxy before I got a chance for a sneak preview of the movie before it was released, and I was in awe of that. It was the best Marvel movie I'd seen to that point and I look forward eagerly to the sequel, so I thought in the meantime that it might be fun to read a novel about these characters. The problem was that this novel in no way captured the people I'd seen in the movie at all. It failed to add anything to that and unlike the movie, it was bizarrely humorless. It felt like a backward step for me in more ways than one, so this was a no, I have to say.

People who are familiar with the comic book characters might have a different take on this - perhaps the characters in the comics are different from the one sin the movie, but the stellar movie versions were all I had for comparison and the novel did not compare at all well. All of the characters except for Quill were put in the back seat for one thing, so there was pretty much none of the team interaction which the movie exploited and highlighted so very well.

This story was pretty much all about Quill and he was, contrary to the movie version, rendered completely unlikable for me. He was portrayed as a smooth-talking and rather callous womanizer, and this felt so unlike the movie character that it was honestly nauseating. Yes, in the movie he was a smooth talker and evidenced a strong hint of womanizing, but as the movie got into gear, he was all about the job and he had great depth. The character here in the novel was about as shallow and uninteresting as you can get. Does the public really want to read about yet another "heroic stud" who consumes women like so many hamburgers? I sure don't. One Captain Kirk is more than enough!

The movie was about dangerous misfits who paradoxically learned to become a family, yet here it was the precise opposite: a family who broke up, became completely domesticated, and disappeared almost entirely into the background scenery! Hi-tech was abandoned wholesale as the team landed on a planet, arguing with each other, and were hit by an EMP bomb which disabled their spacecraft. So, they left it behind and went their separate ways! It made no sense that the ship would not be shielded from EMP.

This planet had apparently become locked in medieval times, so instead of the Guardians of the Galaxy I was expecting, I got Star-Lord of the Rings - complete with giant flying animals, castles, and pitched battles. All the medieval people spoke like modern Americans, which unleashed a very effective bomb itself, one which disabled my suspension of disbelief. I don't expect Shakespearean English in a novel like this, but neither do I like stories where no matter how far into space we go, every habitable planet is populated with people who think, speak, and behave like Americans!

Perhaps the worst thing was that there was zero humor here. This was another thing which the movie did brilliantly. It was completely absent from this novel which was quite evidently far more intent upon exhibiting brawn and brutality than ever it was in showing off brains, bravery, and ingenuity. Given that, it was paradoxical that Drax was all but absent. Gamora was effectively reduced to being a school teacher. Rocket and Groot were as invisible as Drax.

As I said, it was all about the Peter, and for me, he raised far more disgust than interest. Rather than spend his time trying to figure out a way to fix his ship, he uncharacteristically retired from life and became a hanger-on at the court of some Duke, posing as the Duke's champion. This made no sense to me. What happened to the guy who was focused on his ship to the point, almost, of obsession? He was AWOL in this story, and I felt that this betrayed his character completely.

I made it to just past page two hundred in this 240-some page novel, and I quit because I was so tired of the lack of an engaging story, and the seemingly endless fighting. I cannot understand why the Guardians were hobbled and suffocated like this, and I cannot recommend a novel that offers them as little air as deep space.