Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu

Rating: WORTHY!

Finally, a classic that I enjoyed! Published only one year before the author died, the 1872 novella Carmilla is an engrossing tale of one woman's hold on others through her vampire charms. It's narrated in first person by a female protagonist named Laura (and one who I initially thought was a male narrator!). Normally I do not like first person voice, but in this story it's not obnoxious or overwhelmingly ridiculous.

The story is of the Countess Karnstein, who has lived for a century or more, moving from place to place and changing her name - but always the new name being an anagram. We meet her as Carmilla, but in earlier times she has gone by Mircalla and Millarca. Naturally until the story is quite advanced, the actors in this drama have no idea of Carmilla's age or her vampire traits.

Wikipedia declares this to be a lesbian vampire story, but there isn't any overt lesbianism in it and I think in declaring it as such, the author of that article (who I'd be willing to bet is a male!) misses the fact that in Victorian times women were often in close relationships with impassioned statements of love and feeling, but without necessarily any lesbian inclinations or behaviors. Perhaps that's what le Fanu intended, or perhaps it wasn't. For me, I don't care either way; I just don't think the case has necessarily been made.

In many ways this story was a template for Bram Stoker's much better known Dracula which came a quarter century later, but vampire tales and legend precede both of these books by a good many years. There is the female victim, Laura, and clueless male companions and friends, but again I take odds with Wikipedia's assertion that this is a female empowerment novel since it isn't Laura who saves herself in the end. In fact, she plays a rather passive role in this story. Predictably (in hindsight!), it is an older male expert who shows up later and finally dispatches the vampire in her coffin.

This story begins with the oddball overture of a carriage racing along and overturning right outside where Laura and her father live, and the plea of the female who is riding in it that Laura's father take charge of her youthful (so it's understood!) and out-of-sorts daughter, to enable the woman to continue with her urgent journey.

Those were much more trusting times, and the nobility were much more reliable, and trustworthy in general, so none of that is particularly strange for the era. What is strange is that this traveling party is neither explained, nor is it ever seen or heard from again. There's no explanation offered as to who the travelers are or why they're in such a confounded hurry, or even what their relationship is to Carmilla, if any. So they disappear and we're left with Carmilla and her blossoming relationship with Laura.

The two become, as they might have said back then, bosom companions, despite Carmilla's somewhat odd traits: her lethargy, her sleeping very late into the day, her pallour, and her off-kilter habits. They declare love for each other, but nowhere do they exhibit any overt behavior or any behavior beyond what might be expected of any pair of young Victorian ingénues who are very fond of one another and excited to have such a suitable companion.

After a time through, Laura starts succumbing to some sort of a wasting illness, accompanied by bizarre dreams, and stories are spreading of deaths in the nearby communities. Despite this, it isn't until General Spielsdorf comes into the story that Laura and her father learn that the supposedly extinct Karnstein family has an extant descendent: a countess who does not die, but relocates herself periodically under a new name and preys on vulnerable, young local women. After a search, Carmilla's tomb is located on the derelict Karnstein estate, and she is summarily dispatched, leaving Laura with bittersweet memories.

I throughly enjoyed the story, perhaps being primed to favor it through having seen the 1970 Hammer Film production of Carmilla which was titled The Vampire Lovers and which played very much into the lesbian aspect. It starred Ingrid Pitt, a vamp herself, as Carmilla, along with the startlingly fresh and youthful Madeline Smith as Laura, and the inevitable Peter Cushing as Spielsdorf. It was the first of a trilogy, but I can't recall if I ever saw any of the sequels. I enjoyed that movie however, and it does follow the story quite well, so anyone who isn't interested in reading an old novella might like to see the film instead. I commend the book though as a worthy read.

Ice Blue by Emma Jameson

Rating: WARTY!

This was another audiobook, and it was read poorly by Matthew Lloyd Davis. Since one of the main characters was female and she seemed to be the dominant character, why a female reader wasn't chosen for this book escapes me. Davis doesn't do female voices well. Not that this particular choice would have made any difference to the really bad story itself, which isn't, fortunately, first person, but which is told alternatively from the PoV of the main characters. I have to say that's not a style I particularly enjoy!

Those characters are Anthony Hetheridge, aka Lord Hetheridge, the ninth Baron of Wellegrave, who is also Chief Superintendent for New Scotland Yard. Why he had to be all that escapes me. I guess the author was going for as much chalk-and-cheese as she could get, but all she got was cheesy because his partner is Detective Sergeant Kate Wakefield who is, as the Brits say, 'common as muck'. The book description ticked me off by using the word 'beautiful' before any other quality in the list of her traits. Lord Hetheridge gets: "never married, no children, no pets, no hobbies, and not even an interesting vice, will turn sixty in three weeks." She's larded with "beautiful, willful, and nearly half his age." Seriously? Those are her traits? Why not dispense with that description and just write "I hate women" as the book description?

Apparently the plan is to marry these two off (the author bludgeons the reader over the head with this often) and then write a series about them, but this American author knows squat about Britain. And let's completely forget about how inappropriate it is for a senior officer to have any sort of relations with one of his junior police officers. I'm not going to get into the age difference because I don't buy into that 'half his age' crap. If people love each other it's irrelevant. The question is, do they? I found it hard to believe that these two would, but then I didn't read very far before giving up in disgust.

The first problem in the narrative was that Kate has a senior officer expose himself to her and there are zero consequences for him. There isn't even an investigation, and no one, least of all Detective Kate, is remotely put-out by this. Neither is any other female on the force, apparently. Has this author learned nothing from #MeToo? That's when I quit reading this insensitive and nonsensical attempt at a story.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Rating: WARTY!

This wasn't at all what I expected. Often that's a good thing, but in this case it made zero sense, and I have only myself to blame for making such a bad decision. I had read the description, so I have no excuse. I thought it might be amusing or engaging, but it was boring and silly.

The first problem is first person as usual. The story is told by a sociopath if not a psychopath, who is one of the misfit crew describing his experience of being sent as humanity's joint ambassadors to aliens who apparently don't want to meet us. Why send anyone instead of a drone or two is unexplained and apparently went unconsidered by the author in plotting this, as did the point of sending these people as opposed to trained experts.

What really got me though was the tone of the narrator - the sociopath - which is full of understanding of emotion and which simply could not be there in a sociopath, hence the story was completely unrealistic from the outset, regardless of the characters involved.

This is yet another problem (like it needs any more) with first person - a voice which really ought to come with an 'unrealistic' warning on the book cover. Had I known that this would be first person before I bought it, I would never have spent a penny on it. I gave up on it quickly because it simply wasn't doing it and seemed obsessed with trying to gross out the reader. I can't commend it based on the small portion of it to which I listened.

The Wharton Gothics by Edith Wharton

Rating: WARTY!

Every so often I give one of the classics a try and seem to have little success. I guess they're just not for me, but here goes another one!

Read nicely by Gabrielle de Cuir, I had a problem not with the reader, but with the stories. I started this in conjunction with an ebook of similarly ghostly short stories by a variety of authors and curiously I had the same experience with both of them - the first story started out fine, but the more I listened/read, the less I liked it, and subsequent stories bored me. They were slow to the point of lethargy, unappealing, and difficult to follow at times. Admittedly I listened to the Wharton stories while commuting to and from work, so there were distractions, but even in the quiet of the early morning when there's little to no traffic, I had a hard time finding anything interesting to listen to.

The eight stories are these, in case you want to look them up. Some or all of them may well be public domain by now, and available on the Gutenberg Project or some other similar online platform for free:

• The Fulness of Life
• The Lady's Maid's Bell
• Afterward
• The Letters
• Mr Jones
• A Journey
• The Hermit and the Wild Woman
• The Quicksand

I made it only about halfway through this before giving it up as a bad job. I can't commend it based on the experience I had despite Gabrielle de Cuir's sweet and mellow voice. This is my second experience of this author and my last. I did not like The Age of Innocence either so it's time to move on and give other authors a chance.

When Angels Fall by Sherryl D Hancock

Rating: WARTY!

This started out badly-written, and it got worse. I read this right close to the beginning:

"He's single," the woman said, as if confirming it for Devin. It took Devin a second to realize that the woman obviously thought she was trying to pump her for information on Jams. She laughed nervously, shaking her head. "Oh, no, I wasn't," she began

This is what happens when an author doesn't pay attention to what she's writing. Devin here isn't answering something the other woman said; she's answering something the author wrote as narration, so Devin's answer makes zero sense.

The story started by having the air force pilot (and the initials of the title spell 'WAF' - a World War Two abbreviation for Women's Air Force'), Skyler Boché, speaking perfectly normally and then after a couple of pages she's suddenly off and running in some sort of attempt at Cajun speech, and it's so unintelligible at times that I gave up on it. Yes, by all means a word or two here and there, but pigeon English? No! I might have read a bit more were it not for that, but I really didn't like her anyway for her smoking, and it soon became clear she was going to be the moody, petulant one, so no. Just no. And what's with that name? Skyler originally comes from the Dutch for Scholar, so although it is found in Louisiana, it's hardly a popular name, but Boché? That is French, but it's French for an insulting word for a German. Is this really what the author wanted to convey?

On top of all that, Devin is out there hassling this poor air force pilot who clearly wants time to herself yet Devin is buzzing around her like a fly, and she never gives up. She's annoying as hell. I just wanted to swat her. This book had way too much baggage going on, and that was in just the first few tedious pages.

Essential Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin

Rating: WARTY!

I misunderstood this one completely. I'd thought it was going to be a collection of her best work read by the author (whose full name is the immense Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell) herself, but instead, it was a very short collection of some random speeches she'd made, usually talking about people I'd never heard of. It was a delight to hear her voice which I never had before, but the speeches were mostly boring to me because they lacked context and were presented with no introduction or background. There was some humor and one or two interesting insights, but for me this simply wasn't really worth the time or the money. Quite honestly I felt rather ripped-off. Fortunately I had this at a discount so it could have been worse! But I can't commend it unless you're truly a Nin-y!

The Falcon's Heart by Diana Green

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an enjoyable story, albeit with some issues. I decided to read it because it reminded me in some small ways of my own Femarine. This novel is set in a fantasy world of deserts and magic and it's set in some time past where none of our modern mechanical and electrical wonders are yet in existence, but the world building at times refers to things - such as clocks - that appear not to exist in any form in this world. There were things in such times, such as water clocks, candle clocks, and hour glasses, that could tell time, but none of these are mentioned either.

The magic also has issues with consistency in that it seems to morph to fit the author's current needs rather than exist as its own entity. For example, one of the two main characters, Saba, is supposedly an empath, but apart from a mention at the beginning of the story, this power appears never to be used and indeed deserts her when she could really use it. It felt odd, but not a story killer for me although it seemed like a glaring omission at times when she was trying to understand the feelings of her captor.

Her captor is the Falcon - a female bandit and leader of a group of desert-dwelling thieves, eking out their own existence in a land where a selfish and ambitious pasha - Saba's father - is determined to usurp ever more land and power to satisfy his greed. In order to try to free a friend through a trade, the Falcon kidnaps Saba and whisks her away deep into the desert mountains, but Saba's father seems uninterested in making any deal to recover her despite her value as an aliance-builder when he offers her in marriage. He finds himself reliant on a sorcerer to track her down - the very one who wishes to have Saba's hand in marriage.

During their time together, of course, Saba and the Falcon fall for each other and eventually end up together, so the story is quite predictable from the off. It has no real surprises or problems to overcome. It's a light, harmless, decent, if rather fluffy story that I enjoyed despite the minor issues, so on these terms, I commend it as a worthy read, although I still prefer my own Femarine! Call me biased!

Premonition by Leigh Walker

Rating: WARTY!

Another first volume in yet another pointless series. I made it only 25 screens into this when I read the following: "Josh seemed nice, but he was definitely weird. Still, he'd called me his friend, and friends were something I'd been in woefully short supply of at Hanover High...I started up the stairs. That's when I saw him."

Immediately it was clear that this was to be yet another stupid high-school love-triangle story that would be exactly like very other stupid high-school love-triangle story that's been done endlessly over and over again, ad nauseam. What, exactly, is the point of copying a story that's already tedious in the extreme? Barf. I mean what does it signify that this unimaginative author is merely rewriting the same basic story that scores of other YA authors have doen before? Yes, obviously, it means that she agrees with me that the other stories were shit, so she wants to do it better - at least I hope that was her intention, but this only begs the question as to how she went so badly wrong and fell so far short of the target by producing a cookie-cutter replica of every other story? How is it better when it's exactly the same?! I give up and I gave up: I quit right there and then.

I don't even know why I started this because the blurb should have warned me: "Riley thinks she’s heading off to boarding school — but to her surprise, she’s enrolled in an elite training program run by a top secret government agency." I'm guessing Riley's a dumbass. "Unsure of why she has been chosen," Yep, she's a dumbass all right. "...she’ll stop at nothing to uncover the truth" So Riley does nothing under the mistaken belief that if she stops at nothing, then the truth will be uncovered. That's definitely the first of a series! LOL!

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone

Rating: WARTY!

Read not well by Claudia Alick. I could not get with her reading style or voice at all, and it sure didn't help that the writing was atrocious: confused, jarring, choppy, and with events and the mechanics of this fictional world very poorly explained.

I was attracted by the PoC on the cover of the book since usually the folks in stories of this nature are white, but once again I proved to myself what an appalling mistake it is to pay any attention to a book cover. The woman inside the book could have been anyone - white, black, tall, short, long-haired, short haired, bald, fat, thin or anywhere in between any of those options for all the description we got. Her appearance is never mentioned - at least not in the portion of this that I could stand to listen to. I'm not one for detailed depictions of every single aspect of a fictional world, but a bit of hinting here and there is nice!

Ideally, it ought to be utterly irrelevant what the character looks like or what color he, she, or they are, unless of course it has some bearing on the story, but realistically, you would expect there to be some sort of mention at some point of her skin color, or hair or something, even if only in passing, but there was nothing - not in the portion I read. It was like she was a blank slate. Since the author is white I can only assume this is a cynical attempt to claim some relevancy in the current climate. Or maybe he wrote this story about a white character and the publisher just slapped a woman of color on the front since he doesn't mention who she is. Maybe the Chinese edition has a Chinese protagonist, and the Latin edition a Hispanic one. I dunno.

The story is that Tara, the main charcter, has graduated from her supernatural academy, but she left dishonorably somehow, so how that worked, I do not know. She's a complete newbie with no experience whatsoever, so why she's chosen to resurrect the deceased fire god of Alt Coulumb is a mystery. The deal here is that people worship gods, which gives the god power, and the god in turn uses that power to care for their worshippers. It's a bit incestuous and weird, but it's really not explained too well, and you have to wonder what's the point, really!

Tara and her supervisor discover that the god, Kos, has been murdered. For me this is where the very idea of the story gets boring because they have to take it to court! I was concerned about the story becoming mired like that, but I was willing to give this audiobook a chance until I began listening. It failed me fairly quickly, so I ditched it and moved onto something hopefully better. Life's far too short to force oneself to read a crappy novel to the end.

Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs

Rating: WORTHY!

Read decently by the author (I'm a big advocate of authors reading their own material for audio-books if they can), this book gave me mixed feelings at times. Overall, on balance though, I considered it a worthy read. The aim of it is to discuss how this planet changed over the course of the ice ages in North America, with a reference here and there to other parts of the world, and how this affected humans and their habits and migratory patterns. The way the author does it is to take trips and relate his experiences to things that may - or may not - have happened to ice age peoples who lived on the North American continent back then.

There's a lot of information dispensed here, but it's often mixed in with the author's own personal experiences and sometimes I think this muddies the waters. At one point he writes a mild admonishment that we should not imagine that people back then necessarily viewed the world in the same way we do today, and under different conditions. They had their own lives and drives, he advises, but then he goes right back to relating his experiences to theirs! It sounded a bit ambiguous.

The text is evocative and sometimes overly imaginative, but it never gets wildly out of control and it does tell an interesting story that really makes a reader (or in this case a listener) think about these things in new ways, which is what I liked about this. There's some technical information, but not an unwelcome amount, and I enjoyed that - learning about an era which is often not covered in the textbooks that like to ramble on about dinosaurs or early African hominids. It gave me some good perspectives about life back then, and on how hardy and creative these people were, and what they had to contend with. I commend this as a worthy listen.

Scholarship Girl by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

This turned out to be another dumbass high-school series starter. The plot had sounded interesting, but the trope and cliché was a death knell for this as far as I'm concerned. Yet again we have the girl with an old and trusted friend as one corner of the inevitable triangle, and the rich bad boy of the school, who she hates, as the other corner. Why do so few female authors have anything original to say in YA? I know there are some because I've read and enjoyed them, but why are there so few and why are so many female authors dedicated to reproducing cloned pap? Are the authors or blame or the readers? Or the publishers? Thinking people want to know!

So this girl is a scholarship student at an academy that has fantasy characters: elves, fae (the author is too chickenshit to call them fairies), demons, etc., as students. So it's the uninventive usual. Naturally she's forced into being a bodyguard to the rich, spoiled, cruel brat of a student that she supposedly hates, but will inevitably, predictably, unimaginatively fall for. Wait, what? Bodyguard? This is a rich student school and they can't hire regular competent, professionally-trained adults as bodyguards? They have to bribe the bullied and impoverished scholarship students to do it? WTF!

I quit reading right there because I was almost literally nauseated by how bad this was and what a shameless rip-off it was of every other YA high school story. Despite the fact that these students are magical beings, they were all portrayed as exactly like regular high school characters. There was literally no difference other than their species name!

It was so pathetic that hoenstly, I was cringing for the author while reading it. Do none of these authors turn on their brain before starting to write? Do they not think outside of the box? Do they never put themselves into another's shoes or hooves? I honestly do not know how anyone can be so wooden as to write like this. I really don't. Yeah, I did expect this, but as always, I hoped for better. I was genuinely sorry to be once again disappointed. This was an early DNF, and I'mm done with reading anything else by this author.

Restless by GS Jensen

Rating: WARTY!

This ultra-short intro to a series that I will now never read has the pretention to list a 'Dramatis personae' on one early page. Seriously? As if the author wanted to make it as unappealing as possible, she writes it in first person - worst person because it's so annoying and so very limiting. The author admits this because when she changes to another character's PoV, it's in third person. This character is named Caleb and the author is so obsessed with getting him into the story that it makes no sense to have him there and diminishes the female character in the doing. You know from the off that these two are going to get together so there are no surprises at all here. It's trope all the way down, and such a cliché that every main female character just has to have a man to validate her. I all-but worship authors who don't go down that overly-trampled path, but I refuse to travel this one with this author. It served only to make me restless to find another novel to read.

Seven Sisters by ML Bullock

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this is not a series but a serial. You get the first few chapters for free and then pay for the next instalments individually. If you're going to pull that trick on a reader you need to be up front about it from the start, and you need to have a compelling story with decent - but not cruel - cliffhangers to lead them into the next story - and you also need to lower your instalment price. For me it was never an option though because despite the (mostly) appealing plot, I couldn't even get into the first few chapters, and DNF'd this whole thing as a bad choice.

The first problem, as usual, was first person - or worst person voice. I've read a few decent 1PoV novels, and even written one myself, but I'm nowhere near being a fan of them, because they're usually whiny, self-centered, self-important, and annoying, and they severely limit the writing unless you apply the voice to the right kind of story. Otherwise it's one of the unforgivable sins.

The plot here is that main character Carrie Jo, while sleeping soundly in her bed, dreams about the places she's sleeping in - a sort of somnabulistic psychometry after a fashion. She can sense what's happened in the house where she sleeps, so she doesn't like to sleep in older houses, but she's offered money to uncover the secrets of the Seven Sisters - not a family, but a house of that name.

I was turned off by the book description saying, "The handsome and wealthy Ashland Stuart has hired her to uncover the history and the secrets of Seven Sisters," and I should have listened to my gut, because that sort of description almost 100% describes a novel that's going to be badly-written and feature a dumb-ass romance to boot. It rarely ends well, but other than that, the story sounded interesting; however, I started losing interest fast when the novel literally began with Carrie Jo abandoning her boyfriend without even saying good bye and taking off in her car. That made her cold and even callous in my book. I did not like her.

Worse than that, the story started rambling endlessly about the past as she drove, and it lost me, so I just quit. Had I written this I would have started it with Carrie Jo arriving at the house she was supposed to investigate, only briefly referencing things from the past if they were relevant. I also would have had her leaving her boyfriend because of a problem with him, rather than have her coldly abandon him. This would both make the reader sympathetic and make her seem worth listening to. As it was, she was just annoying and certainly not someone I'd want to get stuck with on a train or a bus ride!

Life is too short to waste on poorly-written and uninteresting novels about clichéd and boring characters, especially when there are so many authors out there begging to be heard, and who have well-written original stories with dazzling new characters, and who are willing to share their imaginative tales with us. It's an insult to them to force yourself to finish a novel that simply isn't doing it for you!

The Green Door by Heather Kindt

Rating: WARTY!

That tile is suspiciously close to the title of a very old, but famous porn movie starring Marilyn Chambers who was previously the face of a wholseome detergent. The novel itself is nowhere near as inventive as that movie was. Unfortunately, it's your typical YA love-triangle featuring a disaffected high-schooler slash impoverished under-achiever with at least one parent dead, who has a lifelong male friend that she has no interest in, and has a rich kid new acquaintance that she flips off, but becomes fascinated with. Yep, it's your usual unoriginal, braindead YA story that you've already read to death a score of times.

On the face of it, the actual plot sounded interesting. The idea is that there's this game which the main character is interested in, because it could net her a monetary prize which she and her widowered dad badly need. You have to solve one or more puzzles in this creepy old mansion to earn the cash, so she naturally picks her best friend to take up the challenge with.

Completely out of the blue, the high-school quarterback suddenly asks her to be his partner in this same game - which is when she flips him off. The problem is that this guy has shown zero interest in her until now, and suddenly he's calling her on her phone because he can't think of anyone better than her to solve puzzles with? It made zero sense. Where did he get her phone number? Why does he think someone he doesn't even know will make the best partner?! Why is he remotely interested in this whiny brat of a person who is technically an adult, but who behaves like a juvenile?

The story went downhill even from there. It appears to be written for an age group that's younger than the ages of the main characters - like middle grade instead of YA. The main character, Megan Covington isn't even a nice person. I didn't like her. She was cruel, and whiny and dishonest. At one point she tells us that her best friend Brekken is doing their geometry homework, which she will copy afterwards, but later she says he's always been a good friend to her by doing things "like keeping me from cheating throughout school and helping me study." So in short, she's both a cheat and a liar!

So the two of them go to this mansion where the quest is being held and like the imbeciles that they are, they tell no one where they're going. They're both over eighteen so they can sign the quest contract, but neither of them reads the small print and the frosty woman who takes them down to the basement offers them no details or warnings. Frosty lets them into the game area by opening a solid metal door with three bolts and a lock on the outside. None of this even remotely bothers the two shit-for-brains main characters. Beyond that door there is a glaring white corridor with colored doors along it (guess which one they pick!). The doors are these:

• Blue with a nautical theme featuring a pearl - worth $5,000
• Brown with underground carvings and featuring gemstone - worth $10,000
• Green with a tree carving and featuring a seed - worth $10,000
• Red featuring a ruby heart in a crown - worth $25,000
• Orange with flames pictured on it that are actually hot - worth $30,000
• White with a dove and feathers - worth $500,000
• Black metal with carvings - worth one million

Without asking any more questions, they let themselves be locked in. They have to choose a door to begin, and unsurprisingly, given the novel's title, they settle on the green door. They slap on these bracelets that allow them to pass through the force-field at the door that prevents other things from escaping (none of which puts these two idiots off), and they find themselves in a forest where they're almost immediately attacked by large wolves, but they're rescued by other animals who proceed on two legs and speak vernacular English. At first this struck me as silly, but there's actually an explanation for it. They chase off the wolves, but they arrest the two high-schoolers since they're illegally in a non-human part of the forest. None of this even remotely boggles the mind of these two fuckwits.

Naturally in this same environment is the rich jock, with the unimaginative name of Carter, who completes the inevitable triangle. He tells them he came in there with a girl named Courtney and they were attacked by those same wolves. Courtney was killed. Instead of immediately leaving the quest to report this girl's death, these frigging morons decide to continue with the quest! Carter is supposed to be the unexpectedly nice guy. He talks Courtney into playing this dangerous and deadly game with him, and when his partner dies, the very last thing he thinks of doing, is taking responsibility and reporting her death to the authorities or to her parents. He's an asshole, period.

That's when I quit reading. It's too stupid to live and should be burned with fire. These people are idiots. They're irresponsible. They're boringly predictable, and there's no way in hell I was going to continue reading this dumbass novel let alone continue on the "The Red Door" or "The Black Door" or any other stupid volume in this series. I condemn it.

Silence for the Dead by Simone St James

Rating: WORTHY!

Read delightfully by Mary Jane Wells, this was a truly sweet story that broke several of my rules and still kept my interest.

Typically I do not like first person voice, but once in a while the author carries it. I've had two of these just recently - one an ebook, and this one - an audiobook. A second rule it broke was that I do not usually like slow-moving stories. This one was one such story but it kept my interest anyway, because the character was engaging and the reader's voice was quite captivating. The third rules was that this was an early twentieth century novel which I usually do not enjoy - WW1 and WW2 are not my thing. Again, this was set in 1919 in an asylum for 'shell-shock'; victims - people suffering from what we now recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but still it told an interesting story that had not been done before - not in my experience anyway - and it made a good job of it.

Kitty Weekes arrives at Portis House - a very remote house that was once in private hands but which is now given over - at least the parts of it that are not derelict - to the care of soldiers from "The Great War" who are not themselves. She hears from a third party about how desperate they are for nurses at this place and she outright lies that she's a nurse who has worked at a hospital in London, Due to staff shortages and disorganization, her story isn't checked and she's hired. She's also relieved because this is her last hope. Kitty is running from something and she is happy to be somewhere - even a place as dismal and disturbing as this - where she feels she can safely disappear.

She had an interesting relationship with the other staff - a handful of nurses and orderlies, and an rather antagonist relationship with matron, who discerns very early that she's not a nurse, but is desperate for the help she can offer, so the two have this sort of love-hate relationship that's really quite charming to read about.

The patients are a variety: some are fairly benign, others quite disturbing even to experienced nurses, and they all seem to be tormented by bad dreams - even the same bad dream. But there seems to be something else loose in Portis House, in the odd noises, the strange, chill breezes, the voices, and the inexplicable sightings of unfamiliar people.

There's also the anonymous patient 16 which only certain staff are allowed to interact with. Naturally Kitty bluffs her way into the room and is startled to find out she knows this guy - not because he's a friend or relative, but because he's a well-known personality and this is why his presence there is being kept secret. Over time she bonds with him and they both start investigating the unnatural aspects of Portis house, leading to a showdown one dark and stormy night - literally - when the rain is exceptionally heavy, patients are falling to the flu, and the bridge from the Portis House island to the mainland is in danger of becoming impassable.

I loved this story and the characters and I commend it strongly.

When You Had Power by Susan Kaye Quinn

Rating: WARTY!

I've had some success with this author, notably with the first daughter series, but I didn't like her Open Minds which was a lousy, trope, clichéd garbage can of a YA novel. Sadly, it turned out that this really wasn't really a novel, but a disappointingly short introduction to a series. I thought it was just about okay for what it was, but I felt cheated that I didn't get a real story out of it. I didn't get into any of the characters and I sure didn't want to get into an open-ended series about it.

The plot is set in a dystopian climate-challenged future where the power engineers are considered rather heroic in that they provide electricity to homes, the residents of which are being ravaged by rolling blackouts and regular disease outbreaks and therefore paranoid about letting strangers near them. Ironically, there's nothing in this theoretically introductory volume to explain how the world got that way. Yes, it's on the fast track to a future that could conceivably be like that, but we're already using RNA vaccines and talking of gene therapy cures for viral and bacterial diseases. Where did that go? Why did the efforts governments are starting to put into place fail to save the planet?

There seem to be unaccountable and unexplained lapses in technology. For example, homes are expected to make use of rechargeable batteries during power outages, but nowhere do we read of these same homes having any sort of solar or wind power independently of the grid. We already have that today, so what happened to it? There's no explanation to be found here. Worse, Lucia discovers that the batteries in her new home have been discharged to the point of being irreparably damaged, but apparently there was no sort of warning device built into the batteries to alert the owners of this problem! We already have warnings in our electric and hybrid vehicles, on our laptops, and even on our phones that the battery is mostly discharged so we know to recharge, so what happened to that warning on a critical home system? Again, no explanation.

We already have drones and robots, but they seem to feature poorly, too, so there are holes in the story that the author seems to have no interest in filling, which in turn makes her world-building poor and which kept jolting me out of suspension of disbelief. I didn't expect her to have detailed explanations for everything, nor would such a thing have made for good reading, but to have some sort of story that covered the obvious is expected, and she unapologetically fell short of this requirement.

The 'energy islands' seem to be in the ocean, and it's while doing a preliminary inspection of the underwater portion of her new island that Lucia discovers some weird damage. When she reports this up the chain of command, she's essentially accused of hallucinating, and the images she shot of the damage have curiously disappeared. When she returns to take more photos only a day later, there's suddenly no sign of the damage. It's all been repaired. That's a bit of a stretch

When investigating why power seems to be getting tapped from the generator, and looking for a potential target using all that power, she discovers that the area she wanted to investigate has been burned causing so much damage as to leave it unrecognizable and herself without evidence again. She tries to take more photos under the island, and she almost dies because of a sabotaged oxygen tank. The thing is that Lucia is a seasoned diver. Air has weight, especially when compressed, and you can tell the difference between an empty and a full tank, especially if it's aluminum. If her tank was seriously light on air, she would have known as soon as she picked it up regardless of what the tank gauge said, and for her to never check the gauge while she's diving is not a sign of a seasoned diver. It's the sign of a dumbass.

Clearly someone is hiding something, but even when Lucia gets photos that cannot be deleted since the next camera she uses is old tech and not hooked up to any network, she doesn't think for a minute of publishing this evidence out on the net, and thereby protecting herself and the family she has started lodging with, and this in turn makes her look like an idiot. The worst part of the story though is that there's no resolution to anything. We have no questions answered, and are expected to buy more volumes of the novel to get beyond this prologue. That doesn't work for me, not when it's so average. I don't even like prologues and normally skip them, so I can't commend this one at all, and I sure as hell don't want to read any mroe poorly-written pap like this.

The Concordia Deception by JJ Green

Rating: WARTY!

This novel held my interest long enough to finish it, but I skipped bits here and there and wasn't really very happy with it overall since it made little sense far too often to let it slide.

It's a sci-fi story about a colony ship that takes almost 200 years to reach another planet. They're sent there because Earth is so trashed and they don't think it can support any more humans. They fear humanity will die out, but given how much it had to have cost to build the ship, I don't get how people couldn't have improved conditions on Earth dramatically with all those resources, thereby avoiding the need to go elsewhere, but again, and foolishly as it happened(!), I let that slide.

The idea is that there are genetically generated farmers who have hardiness and skills for farming, as well as a smaller crew of scientists who support them. Again this made no sense: if their genetic engineering is so advanced on Earth, how come they had such trouble surviving there? Later in the story, it comes out that people on Earth have been largely wiped out by a new flu strain (this was written before Covid), yet they have advanced genetic engineers? They couldn't fix the flu? We're on the verge of doing that now, but these future people couldn't do it? Once again, it made no sense!

So these colonists are exploring this planet, but they seem to have no advanced technology: no satellites that can do a decent survey from space. No drones to survey the place at near ground level; no robots to help on the ground? Again, it made no sense. We have all of those things now. Why would they not have them in the future?

On top of this, there's a rebel movement which has people embedded in the colony who are trying to sabotage it. They're apparently up in arms against the unnatural aspects of this genetic engineering, but then why go on the ship? Why not just let 'em go, and say good riddance, and stay on Earth to enjoy their natural life? This was not a religious order, so there was none of that fanaticism; just the 'natural' PoV, and it wasn't enough to account for the behavior.

The book description is all about this Cariad character who is one of the scientists and who plays a relatively minor role in the colonization. The main character who gets no mention in the description is Ethan, who is a 'gen' - genetically developed 'farmer' - who is a respected leader in the farming community. The thing is that the farming community never actually does any farming! Farming is a full-time job, but though Ethan has his own farm, he never goes there. He's never shown working. In fact he gets so distracted that he neglects his farm to the point where it could well be failing - he doesn't know. He hasn't been there in a while.

The gens decide to quietly abandon the colony to start their own independent colony on the coast, where they occupy a series of caves and tunnels in the cliff face by the ocean. They have to explore these caves on foot with torches because they apparently never heard of drones. It made no sense. One of the gens is the saboteur, but that made no sense either because this person had no training in explosives and no clue as to where to put them since there had been no extensive survey of the caves to find the weak spots, yet the caves are effectively destroyed and many lives are risked!

This goes to my point, which I think I've demonstrated conclusively by now, that if the story isn't getting it done, you need to quit gamely plodding on to the end and ditch it for something that will entertain. It's not worth wasting your time on something that's failing you. I can't commend this as a worthy read because it was so badly-written.

When Sparks Fly by Kristen Zimmer

Rating: WORTHY!

Normally I’d avoid a novel with a title like this because it's too much pretention, and there were a couple of times reading this that I wondered about the wisdom of continuing, but there was enough to keep my interest and to keep it fresh, and it told a sweet story of two engaging people. It was first person, too, but that wasn't obnoxious. Some authors can carry it, some stories can too, but to find the sweet intersection between those two is not easy.

This author did it successfully, but my objections to first person still apply even here, because there were two other important characters in this novel who were interesting and truly attractive to a reader, yet we didn't get their PoV because it was all Britton all the time. I think the story lost something because of that. Either of these characters could have told their own story because all three perspectives were equally engaging, but three 1PoVs would have ruined it - which begs the question as to why it wasn't told in third. First gear is far too trudging!

So anyway, Britton Walsh is a foster kid who's had the worst of the system: cruelty, abuse, and misery. She's learned to have a hard shell, to not give, to keep herself to herself and her feelings tightly under wraps. Just turned eighteen, she's aiming to finish high school and get free of all of this to start her own life at last. She's spending these last few months in the care of Tom and Cate Cahill who happen to have a daughter only slightly younger than Britton, but whereas Britton is a soft butch lesbian, their daughter, Avery is, at first glance, your standard queen bee cheerleader. She's popular, fashionable, great-looking, and doing well in school.

The idiot book description, evidently always written by some jackass who never read the book, claims Britton is "beginning her senior year with new foster parents in a new city" but that's not true. She's lived in this area all her life. She just happens to be in a new high school. She has a hard time adjusting because she's never had caring parents like Tom and Cate. She was given up by her bio-parents at birth because she had a heart defect. That's long been fixed, but her parents had no interest in her. Tom and Cate do. This makes it all the more difficult that Britton has a crush on Avery. It’s doubly-bad because Avery is hetero as far as Britton knows, and other than being friendly, has no interest in Britton - who Avery knows is queer.

Britton seems to have found an outlet for her urges though, in the form of Spence - Valerie Spencer - who is an out lesbian attending the same school. She and Britton begin hanging out, but Avery warns her foster sister about her new love interest several times. Now Britton is strung between two groups - the misfit crowd who Spence hangs with, and the elite crowd Avery hangs with, trying to navigate new and sometimes rather hostile waters.

I had some minor issues over a couple of aspects of the story. Why the author insisted upon having both the main love interests be eighteen before anything more than kissing occurred is a mystery since the age of consent in Massachusetts is sixteen, not eighteen! Secondly, in light of this, Cate's 'house rules' toward the end were a bit bizarre given that both girls were eighteen at this point. But I was happy to let that slide. It’s no great big deal. Just odd is all.

That said, this story takes interesting and often unexpected paths to its satisfying conclusion and in the end, I really enjoyed it a lot.

Grayson Manor Haunting by Cheryl Bradshaw

Rating: WARTY!

This is the starter for a series - as per usual, but I didn't even want to finish reading this one, let alone embark upon a series based on uninteresting characters and retreaded plots. Besides, how is Addison going to proceed? She keeps inheriting a house in each new volume, all of them are haunted, and she solves each haunting? LOL! Yawn.

The story was so larded with trope and cliché that it became completely uninteresting. There was no mystery because all of this has been done countless times before in every haunted house story ever written, and it's the same old crap where the ghosts are so tight with revealing the problem that it's annoying. Why is every ghost so coy? Why are clues so meagerly distributed? Why are the ghosts so reticent to start with, and then increasingly social? It's farcical and irritating.

Of course Addison is the girl in distress and the trope 'hunky guy' is the one working on fixing up her house, but the guy is such an interfering creep that he turned me right off. The fact that Addison saw nothing wrong with his stalker-ish behavior tells me she's a moron. I have no interest in reading another female-penned asinine YA novel about a idiotic and tedious main female character. Even the title is tedious.

Demon Child by Kat Cotton

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum: "I'd given up hope of getting those big, fat kudos" - except that kudos is not a plural! Not all words that end in 'S' are plurals!

This is yet another of those idiotic supernatural books that simply embarrasses the author and not least because it's such a clone of every other such novel out there that it's pathetic and tedious to read. I always hope there will be something new, something likeable in stories like this, something different for a change, but there almost never is and it's really rather depressing. I detest novels where the main character is named Kat because that's almost as bad as using 'Jack' in a novel about a male main character, but authors named Kat? I don't have a problem with that! I did have a problem with the predictable, self-obsessed, and ultimately unrealistic and tedious first person voice.

Another problem with this novel was that the author so obviously and desperately wanted her main character (who is uninventively named Clem Star) to be such a badass and a sexual powerhouse that she was turned into a caricature rather than a character. In cases like this one, I honestly have to wonder how much of this is really about the character and how much of it is authorial wish-fulfillment or attempts to address feelings of insecurity or inadequacy when and author creates a super-heroic character like this one, who is supposed to be tough, sexual and the best there is, but ends up looking more like some silly and trashy superhero character from a badly-written comic book.

The saddest thing about Clem was that she brought nothing new to the table. She was exactly like every other urban fantasy character in stories of this nature. The 'brilliantly effective but down on her luck' character has been done to death. And it makes no sense. If she's so good, why is she out of work? And if demons are such a known problem in this city, why isn't there an official force created to deal with them - why is it left in private hands? But authors? Find a new shtick, please, because there's nothing original here. Worse than this, though, Clem was nasty and disgusting, lived like a pig and had no redeeming qualities. There was literally nothing about her that made me empathize, or want to like her even remotely.

She kills demons and evidently uses this 'power' she calls her 'sex thrall' to lure them in. Yawn. Once again we have a female author who is saying her character is nothing more than a sex doll, in effect. Sex is actuakly mentioned to a nauseating level in this novel. Why female writers so persistently and consistently do this to their female leads continues to defeat my understanding. By all means let her be sexual if you like. I have no problem with that; the problem arises when sexuality or beauty is all an author invests her with. Can we not have a smart main female character? I don't mean you endlessly describe her as smart and then have her do consistently dumb shit; I mean you show her as smart without ever having to tell us she is. I guess I'll have to keep looking for writers who offer such characters. Or just keep writing them myself and hope there are readers out here who get it.

So the problem for one-dimensional Clem, we're told, is that this new bad guy is a demon child so she can't use her sex thrall. Why not? I guess because the author is squeamish about a child and sex, but this isn't a human boy we're talking about. It's a murderous demon who is killing wantonly and en masse, yet all the while it's treated like a child. Apparently this demon was defeated once, but inexplicably not killed! Now it's loose again.

Nowhere - not in the bit I read before giving up because I didn't want to risk vomiting from reading more - was there any definition of exactly what a demon is and why fighting it is left to humans rather than ceded to angels or some other supernatural power. Again that's par for the course for dumb-ass stories like this, but it's still stupid. The main character tells us that "working for a vampire is strictly taboo" and disses vampires, saying they stink and are animals, and then immediately gets the hots for a vampire who comes to hire her to take on the demon child - the same vampire who attacked her not long before in a dark alley!

We were told the alley was dark, and she couldn't see the vamp, yet still she still chose to walk down it and apparently the light she was heading toward at the end of the alley actually lit nothing. This entire section about this attack made zero sense, and why on Earth would she melt for this vampire who had literally attacked and tried to abduct her? Why the vamps even need help form this woman goes unexplored and unexplained, of course. It was at that point that I quit because after all the dissing of vampires, like this author was finally going in a new and different direction, she swerved wright back to type by spewing out how sexual and beautiful this violent visitor was, that was it for me. Check please! I'm done!

This story was garbage which is sad because it was recycled. But then recycling only works for waste, not for writing novels.

Murder in the South of France by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

Rating: WARTY!

I knew this novel was not for me when I read, "He was actually quite handsome, Maggie realized with surprise." What I realized with no surprise is that it was actually quite the contrary: it's entirely predictable that this single woman would meet a guy - two in fact, each better than the last - so no. No surprise at all. Not in a novel like this, written by a female author who seems to think a woman needs to be validated by a man in every novel she writes.

No, that's not my invention, it's apparently the view of the book description writer who predictably gets it wrong: "Maggie Newberry is sheltered, privileged but also a whip-smart" No, she isn't! Would a whip-smart person hand over €30,000 to a man she just met and has never seen, without - at the very least - asking for some sort of ID and a receipt?

Nope! "Whip-smart" just hands it over, no questions asked. "Fast on her feet" is a complete misdirection since the story moves with a glacial pace. But that she's "a little stunned to realize that she's 34 years old and still hasn't found 'the one' " is what supports my contention above. Maggie is a desperate woman created by yet another female author who thinks every woman needs a man to validate her.

The story is that Maggie's "long-missing sister" Elise turns up dead in France, apparently shot in the head and dumped into water. Maggie is tasked with going to identify the body and also to take the money to pay off this shady guy who claims he can kidnap Elise's daughter, Maggie's niece, from her father and get her into the USA on a fake passport, and Maggie has no issue whatsoever with any of this. She has zero thought for the child's welfare or what's actually best for her niece. Instead, she takes her cue entirely from these shady guys she's only just met.

I didn't like Maggie from the very start, or how she was introduced in a tedious info-dump. And how she explained - to the French officials at customs - all that money is glossed over. Just like the Americans, the French take an interest in anything over ten thousand currency units. How did Maggie get that amount of money so quickly? Yes, it was from her father, but if she didn't take it with her, then how did she get that much from a French bank at short notice? If she did take it with her, how did her father lay his hands on that much cash at short notice? No explanation is offered.

I understood even less why the author set the novel in France and then proceeded to diss French men! Main character Maggie is predictably paired with a guy who's described as "Broad chested and tall, he was easily six foot four which was unusual for a Frenchman." This is horseshit. The average Frenchman is taller than the average American and right on par, to within an inch or so, of every other male in the western world. The French men's basketball team in the 2021 Olympics, for example, was two inches taller than the US team on average. So no, a six foot four male in France isn't unusual, jackass.

For an author who is supposedly a Francophile, you'd think she'd know this. You'd think she'd know about France. You'd think she'd know French. That this is a "TOTALLY NEW AND REVISED EDITION!" suggests it required work even after it was first published, but rest assured, it still needs work. My question here though, is: why did it need to be totally new and revised? What was wrong with it before? And why was it published in that condition?

Why Maggie has to go and identify a corpse that's bloated beyond recognition from submersion in water, when the DNA has already been confirmed is also a mystery, but a bigger mystery is how did they obtain the DNA sample against which the corpse's DNA was verified? And how were they able to do it so quickly? Again, the author says not a word about that. So by this point, barely into the story at all, I was already tired of the clichéd writing and the poor plotting and I detested the main character, so there was no point whatsoever in reading on. This novel sucks shit like a starving fly, and I sure as hell have no intention whatsoever of reading a whole series about this dickhead. Slap a Newber(r)y on it! LOL!

The Kerrigan Kids Box Set Books 1-3 by WJ May

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this garbage: "Oliver Jack. If there was one thing she didn't miss this summer, it was the inescapable flirtation of Oliver Jack. Never trust a guy with two first names. No matter how cute he was." At that exact moment I could see exactly where this was going and it sure as hell wasn't anywhere near where I was interested in traveling.

That wasn't very far into the story at all, and I've seriously been wondering lately if I should just quit reading female-authored novels altogether. I'd hate to do that, but it seems like it's becoming ever-harder to find a female-authored novel that isn't sticky with sugar, as well filled with trope to the wazoo, and cliché galore. It's truly nauseating. The problem is that male authors don't do any better. Male-authored books are too often way over into macho end of the spectrum in the same way that female authored novels are way too sappy. Is there no one writing in the middle for readers like me? Is it time to start reading authors somewhere else along the gender spectrum? I can tell you from personal experience that really good writers are few and far between.

This story rubbed me up the wrong way from the start. I wasn't long into it when I read for example, "It had touched down somewhere in Kent, never to be seen again." - but the question is, if it had never been seen again, how did they know where it landed? And yeah, it's a minor thing, but when you get a string of minor things, they all add up to a major problem. Surprisingly, this was not first person, which would have made it horrendously barf-worthy, but it was about a bunch of privileged high-schoolers not only flaunting, but reveling in their privilege. Yuk!

Even so I was willing to read on at least a little to see what this author would do with it, but she did precisely what most every other YA author does with their cookie-cutter clone of this kind of a story: make it about a weak woman under the thrall of a domineering and way too hands on 'hot' male that she claims she hates, but who you know she's already melting for like ice cream on an August sidewalk in Texas.

In this case the guy physically grabbed her wrist to stop her paying for her purchase and insisted he would pay for it, so there's the inappropriate touching and the "I'm the alpha male and you are my woman" horseshit right there, and this girl is such a dumb fuck that she sees nothing wrong with this assault. I was out of there from that point on because I could see then precisely where this was headed, and like I said, it sure wasn't any place I wanted to follow. I don't mind a novel where a woman starts out weak and grows strong, or starts out dumb and wises-up, but I could tell from the idiotic way this was written that there was no way in hell any of that would happen here, not with a main character named Aria. This book is shit, period. I didn't want to continue reading volume one let alone two more shit books just like it.

True Colors by Melissa Pearl

Rating: WARTY!

Paradoxically the first volume in a series called "masks" this idiotic and utterly predictable story is another example of YA at its worst. It's first person so the main character is unnaturally describing herself with ridiculous terms from the off: "I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans." Nobody talks like that. When did your friend last say to you "I thought I'd lost my phone so I patted the back pocket of my pale denim, skinny jeans"? It's idiotic, inauthentic and completely unnatural. It sounds so fake and self-obsessed and snotty, that it's nauseating.

Here's another: "I ran my hands through my long curls" Barf! If the author can't put in better descriptions than this (and forget the tired trope of looking in a mirror) then she needs to find another profession. Maybe a fashion runway commentator? Here's another: "I should have gone back in to find a handbag. Every girl in the world seemed to wear them" Since when do you 'wear' a handbag?

The last straw was this tired bitch-in-heat trope: "I tried not to look, but couldn't help stealing a few furtive glimpses as he got out of his black Jeep shirtless and reached for the surfboard attached to the roll bars. His straight hair was wet, droplets hanging from the long ends before dripping onto his shoulders. I watched one droplet glide over his hard chest and perfect abs and couldn't help scraping my teeth over my bottom lip." Barf.

Because every girl is constantly desperate and needy for a man, and only one kind of man will ever do. Good luck with getting guys to respect girls when female authors are routinely putting this shit out there in a steady regular diet telling guys who can't think for themselves that every young girl desperately wants them, right now, and the most physical way possible. And why is his hair still dripping water? Is the beach next door? Or did it rain on the way home? And what the fuck difference does it make what color his jeep is?

This is one of the worst examples of a generally poorly-written genre, and no. Just no. Warty to the max. These colors are about as tired and faded as you can get.

Blow the Bloody Doors off by Michael Caine

Rating: WORTHY!

Michael Caine's autobiography is read by himself in the audiobook version and it was interesting, informative, and laugh-out-loud funny on occasion. I confess some slight disappointment that he doesn't talk more about the making of the various films he's been in. He does talk a lot about them, but his approach every time seems to be to focus on the elements which would help aspiring actors: offering tidbits and advice, and lessons he's learned, which is great, but I felt like he wasn't really talking to me, somehow.

I don't regret buying the book though - it's well worth listening to if you like him as an actor or are interested in the movie business. He covers his life from birth through youth to his first interest in the movies and thence onto his career: how there was a struggle and then how it took off once he'd made two relatively early and successful movies where he had major roles, such as Zulu in 1964 and Alfie two years later. This brought him to international recognition, and got him a lot more choice roles, and brought him into the world of movie superstars with all the attendant pleasures and problems.

Throughout the book the author remains grounded, good humored, and informative. He has no illusions about the movie business and tells it like it is - the good parts and the bad parts. He offers a lot of information and advice, and jumps from one move to another to make a point or illustrate an aspect of his life or his career. I'd have liked a lot more depth and breadth in his discussions of the movies, but I did appreciate what was offered. I enjoyed this book very much and commend it as a worthy read.

ExtraOrdinary by Danielle K Girl

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "Jack text them around ten to say it was going to be a long night." Texted is the word!

"From above comes a drawn out scrapping sound, like someone is hauling a piece of furniture across the room." 'scraping', not 'scrapping'!

"sweeping view of the properties carefully maintained gardens." 'property's' not 'properties'

" 'You can fly.' Ryder cringes at the high pitch of her voice" This is after Ryder has already seen Olessia float down from an upper storey, clearly demonstrating that she can fly.

"I’m going to have a shower and catch an hours sleep before we start thinking about getting you into town, okay?" Hour’s sleep!

This novel was a true disappointment because it began by pressing all the right buttons for me: faking like it was a ghost story and then slyly morphing into something much more interesting, but it quickly pissed me off by having such a limp main character in Ryder, who was a squealy, idiotic, spineless, unappealing, and uninteresting little shit. On top of that, it brought in such a trope manly male character for her that I laughed out loud.

IRL, this guy would have zero interest in a little wet rag of a wuss like Ryder, but you know from the way the author describes him and Ryder's reaction to him that the telegraph message of the day is: these two will be all over each other like white on the Republican party. Barf. I quit reading at that point because I knew exactly where this novel was going and I had no intention of being its traveling companion. I knew just how it would turn out, too. It wasn't going to be sci-fi story I'd begun to root for; it was about to be taken over by a dumb-ass romance between these two jackasses. No thanks!

I found, as unfortunately happens all-too-often in these stories, that Ryder's best friend Sophie was far more enagaging and interesting than Ryder ever could be, and I knew with equal certainty that the author never would give Sophie a fair shake. When that happens in one of my own stories, the main character gets downgraded and I shift the weight of the tale over to this more interesting character from the less engaging one. I don't plan it that way, but my characters are smarter than I am, and I happen to be smart enough to know when to listen to them instead of trying to force my own original idea onto them when they're trying hard to go off in an unexpected, and much more interesting, direction.

Letting them decide how the story goes makes for a much more realistic, original, and natural story than if I'd forced anything on them, or been stubborn about clinging to my original line of thinking. In one story I released not long ago, I even killed-off the person who was to have been one of the two main characters and promoted her best friend into the role, because she was a far more appealing character. I'm sorry this author didn't have the same willingness to toss some things out of the window, but this is what happens when you're hidebound by tradition and dedicatedly writing to trope. I can't commend this at all.

Strays by Cheree Alsop

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "...giving the merest wave of his fingers to thwart off his angry daughter" Thwart off?! No. Find the right word, please!

"I’ll turn the time over to Professor Kaynan" Kaynan? Seriously? Why not just call him Canine? If you're writing a parody, by all means go for the dumb-as snames.

This is Werewolf Academy, book one, and so it's yet another series I won't be reading. Normally I avoid werewolf stories like I do mass gatherings of unvaccinated people, but I like to keep in touch with the various genres, so once in a while I 'make the sacrifice' and read something outside of my comfort zone. Oh how we artistic types pay for our art, don't we? LOL! This one sounded not too awful, which means the book description never ended-up being the subject of one of my 'non-reviews', but even so, I had serious issues with it from the off.

I've never been a fan of vampire and werewolf stories because in general, they're so trope and clichéd, and profoundly stupid, but I've read one or two here and there. Or tried to. The thing about this one that bothered me is that it's set in an academy - a high school for werewolves - and it makes me wonder why writers of these novels are so uninventive and so bound by convention.

The problem with this kind of a story as I see it, is that it's supposed to be about an alien lifeform in effect: a werewolf, yet the story is exactly the same as it would have been had it been about a regular academy, and regular humans, with no supernatural input whatsoever. You could have removed the werewolf element and told the exact same story. So why even introduce werewolves if you're not really going to go there?

It's the same characters who think and talk just like regular high-schoolers, never mind that they're all werewolves. There are the same conventions and the same high school tropes. Obviously you can't make it so alien that a reader can't begin relate to the characters, but you'd think that somewhere along the way, the author might want to stretch and put in something a bit alien, a bit supernatural, yet they never do. Particularly not this one.

There's no 'wolf' in this story at all. It's all human all the way. Oh yes, there's a token nod and a wink to 'wolf cutlure' but that's entirely confined to pack mentality, as though werewolves are exactly like wolves, and not some alien form or some combo of human and wolf. The school, contrary to what the story yaps on about family, isn't the pack.

Instead there are twelve packs in the school, and rather than follow the school teachings about all working together for the good of werewolves, there's an appalling rivalry between them, along with cliché bullying, none of which is restrained by the teaching staff. In short it's pathetic and right down there with the worst examples of a typically bad high-school story. At one point, there's a fight scene stolen straight out of that execrable Divergent garbage, again with the flimsiest of justification. It's really atrocious.

The characters are exactly like regular humans at all times, even when hunting down a slightly lame deer and brutally slaughtering it, and then trying to justify this appalling cruelty by claiming the deer would never have survived the winter. What? Why? becuase it coudlntl hunt game? Deer dontl hunt, moron! They eat bark and whatever else they can find. A slight lameness isn't a problem. And who are they to judge that? Maybe it was a weredeer! LOL! The fuckwit 'justifcation' was laughable, and that's when I quit reading this rancid pile of entrails because it was so badly-written.

This story failed in many ways, but primarily because it's eactly like all other such stories. There's nothing new here, nothing original, and nothing even remotely different to every other werewolf story ever told. So why read it?! In other genres, we have vampires that behave exactly like humans, or in another, we have ghosts that behave just like regular people. I even read a plot for one ghost story that was a murder mystery where someone was going around killing ghosts. I'm like, wait a minute, aren't ghosts already dead? What's that all about? LOL!

It's a bit ridiculous. As I said, there's nothing alien or supernatural about the people on this story, so why even make the characters werewolves at all? It wasn't worth any more of my time, especially since I was then able to quickly move on and find two books in succession that truly were worth reading. I would not have done this had I forced myself to continue reading something that was boring and cringe-worthy.

The Recollection by Gareth L Powell

Rating: WARTY!

"After his brother goes missing, Ed hurtles through alien worlds in search of him." I swear to god this man has destroyed more planets by hurtling through them than Darth Vader and Darth Wit combined.

Beyond the Red by Ava Jae

Rating: WARTY!

Beyond the red? Why not just call it infrared?! "When an assassination plot goes wrong, a young queen and a rebel soldier must work together to survive." Why? Could it be because the soldier is irritatingly handsome?! Once again the white girl needs saving by the strong man. Barf. Get a clue, please.

Something Borrowed by Louisa George

Rating: WARTY!

"Wedding planner." That character's never before appeared in a so-called romance novel - except like a thousand times. Yawn. "Chloe’s business unravels after her own fiancé ditches her at the altar." Good. She must have been lousy at it if that's all it took. The author is obviously conflating 'wedding planner' with 'matchmaker'. If so, that makes her a dumbass in my book and I have no desire to read anything she writes. "In order to save her career, Chloe needs the help of chef Vaughn" Why? Does she plan on giving everyone food poisoning so they forget that matchmaker...er, wedding planner Chloe got ditched? Of course the chef is the "frustratingly handsome" best man. Frustratingly handsome? That goes with "irritatingly" handsome and "annoyingly handsome." Never read those in a book description before. Ecxcept maybe a million times. Get an original idea for fuck's sake. Barf.

Miss Pinkerton by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Rating: WARTY!

"In this classic whodunit, amateur sleuth" stop right there. Let me off. I'm done. Sleuth? really? Fuck that shit.

Meet Me at Beachcomber Bay by Jill Mansell

Rating: WARTY!

"In the Cornish seaside village of St. Carys," Caries is tooth decay. Is this novel too sweet for its own good? "Clemency asks her best friend, Ronan, to pretend to be in a relationship with her. Why?" Because it's one of the most over-used plot devices ever, which tells me this author is evidently struggling to come uop with an original idea. Pass.

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Rating: WARTY!

"While serving time, bank robber Jack Foley" Stop it right there, I want to get off the bus. 'Jack' is the most ridiculously over-used name ever in this kind of novel and it's an immediate no for me. A Foley on the other hand is a device for draining urine from someone's bladder, so maybe Elmore is just taking the piss out of you? Is it really Elmore Leonard, BTW, or is it instead, Leonard Elmore?

Dark Matter by Ian Douglas

Rating: WARTY!

"President Koenig is convinced that forming an alliance with the Sh’daar" Oh look! The aliens have an apostrophe in their name How original. Automatic 'no' for me for sci-fi and fantasy when the author starts pulling out those ridiculous apostrophes - or more accurately: putting them in for no purpose whatsoever. We're done here.

The Summer Girls by Mary Alice Monroe

Rating: WARTY!

"At the behest of their father’s will, three half sisters gather together one final time at their grandmother’s South Carolina beach home" How many times ahs this exact plot been done before? I've lost count.