Under Dark Skies by AJ Scudiere

Errata: "the Jeremy Kite incidence" I think the author means 'incident'. "He couldn’t figure it out." Should be ‘She couldn’t figure it out’

I am avowedly not into werewolf or vampire stories for the most part because they're far too cookie-cutter: each one is a clichéd clone of the last, especially if it's a YA story (which this blessedly is not). This particular one promised to be different and thankfully it started out quite differently, and I liked it very much, but the more I read, the less I liked it because it was so trudging and inauthentic, and although the author took a commendably different tack with the werewolf part of the story - which is something I advocate authors to do, but so rarely see - she fell down on the realism with regard to the FBI investigation over missing children.

One immediate problem with this narrative is that while it is thankfully not in first person, it is told alternatingly from the perspectives of the main two characters, which means tediously going over the same ground we already covered, but from the other protagonist's perspective. That became an irritant in short order, and led to me quickly skipping portions of the text where this happened.

One sad trope the author didn't skip I'm sorry to say, was the haunted backstory that I've seen done to death far too many times and of which I am so bored. Are there no detectives who don't have a haunted past? No PI's? No FBI agents? No CIA officers? LOL! Not in the fictional world there are not, and it is such a tired trope. FBI agent Eleri is a woman whose lost sister has haunted her for years (not literally). Donovan is a werewolf. Both work for the FBI division of Nightshade, although they may as well be regular FBI agents for all the part that 'nightshade' actually plays in this story.

Eleri is the experienced agent and she plays mentor to Donovan, who is a new recruit who was previously a medical examiner, so the pair are like Fox and Mulder from X-Files with genders reversed. Other than that, this isn't remotely like X-Files. It's simply a missing children story, so why nightshade division needed to be involved is a mystery. That said, I read only fifty percent of this before giving up on it, so I may have missed something more supernatural toward the end.

At one point they locate a dead body in a shallow grave and Eleri supposedly helps excavate the body, but I seriously doubt that an FBI field agent would be on her knees digging up a body when an expert forensic team is there. She would just get in the way and mess up stuff. I may be wrong - I'm not an FBI expert, but it just seemed off base to me. There were times reading this when it felt like the author was putting shit into the story just to show off how much research she'd done rather than getting on with the story. I don't appreciate it when authors do that. If you feel like some things need to be in there, then there are much more subtle ways of doing it than were exhibited here.

The story has it that children are going missing and it's connected to a religious cult called The Children of God, situated in a remote part of Texas, so the agents head down there and then hit such an unrealistic series of coincidences that it became too much. On top of that, there was a lethargy about raiding the cult's camp that was utterly insupportable. That's why I quit reading in the end. I guess the author did it to have a big showdown at the end, but it came off as just plain stupid.

So, first absurd coincidence is that while out reconnoitering the cult's compound as his werewolf self, by accident, Donovan encounters a kid called Joshua who has escaped the compound. He's bleeding badly from a wound apparently inflicted with the edge of a shovel, and he has a broken arm and bruises, and Donovan and Eleri take him to a hospital, but despite the kid's descriptions of the brutal life there, do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to sleep the night.

Second, and again purely by accident, they find a girl also from the camp, and who tells the same kind of stories about it that Joshua has told them. This girl is identified as one of the missing girls, and her story corroborates everything Joshua has already told them. She has also been badly treated. Do they raid the place? No! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about finding a good place to eat.

Next, and again purely by coincidence, they encounter a truck driver who has picked up one or two kids from the camp and helped them out. He corroborates a story about a girl from the camp who sought medical help at a hospital, and later was killed in the camp, according to Joshua. Do they raid the place? Hell no! They don't consider this enough evidence to do that! Instead they're more concerned about the endless Texas heat. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit and piss-poor writing. This is thoroughly unrealistic and just stupid. It really turned me off the story and that's when I quit reading. It was too much.

I liked that Eleri's power was that she would dream true things and this helped the investigation, but there were still issues with this: in that she wasn't much more aggressive in finding her missing sister who she dreamed of often. There was a poor excuse made for why she didn't, but given that this supposedly haunted her for years, it made no sense that she hadn't pursued it when younger. I think that the young Eleri's quest to rescue her sister would have made a better story than this one turned out to be.

The werewolf part of the story I liked for the most part, but there were problems even with that. For example when he's investigating the compound, the author has Donovan's wolf sprint at over 30 mph for an hour, which isn't possible. Wolves can reach some 30 mph, but only in short bursts, and from the pseudo-scientific descriptions that are given, Donovan's change from human to wolf is a physical thing involving readjustment of his bones, which makes it seem like, rather than become a wolf, he's really a worst of both worlds wolf-human hybrid, and therefore he'd be hampered by his change, not enhanced by it. And no explanation is given for why two species as disparate as a dog and a human, would even remotely have a hybrid.

It's supposed to be through mutations, but given that canines and humans have not shared a common ancestor for well over forty million years, there's nothing to support even a fictional attempt to pretend there's any science involved in the hybrid. Plus, if two organisms can mate and successfully produce viable offpring, they're the same species, so this hybrid idea is nonsensical unless you keep it purely in the supernatural realm. You can't turn pure fiction into science. The idiot creationists learned that a good while back.

At one point the author has Donovan say, of his enhanced sense of smell, "I have a larger nasal cavity inside my head than most straight-up humans." He's trying to suggest this is why his sense of smell works so much better than most, but that's not actually how it works - not all of it. Dogs have a unique organ in the base of the nose called Jacobson's organ, for example, that humans do not have - or anything like it. They also have maybe as many as 300 million olfactory receptors in their nose whereas humans have some six million, so yes, having a large area for detecting smells is important, but it would be larger than any human has, and it's no good unless you have the brainpower to process that information.

Dogs devote 40 times more brainpower to processing smells than do humans. All of this ultimately goes back to your genetic complement. The olfactory receptor part of the vertebrate genome is the largest genome superfamily, signifying how important it is to us, and whereas humans have around 900 'smelling genes', rodents have almost twice that many. We have a lot that are broken and useless because they were no longer critical to our survival, so there was no evolutionary benefit to maintaining them, whereas dogs have a stunningly impressive ability to smell tiny concentrations of odor, so there's no doubt they have more functional genes in this department than we do. None of this is even mentioned in Donovan's 'explanation'. I felt more could have been done, or else the author needs to abandon any attempt to pretend there's any sort of rational scientific basis behind Donovan being a werewolf and just leave it in the supernatural.

As it was, I could have let those things slide, but the trudging and lethargic pace of the investigation, which led to me skipping parts of the narrative just to get past those bits, together with the absurd coincidences and lucky breaks, the obsession with inner monologues, with the Texas heat, and with dining and sleeping arrangements, and the complete lack of anyone's interest in raiding a cultist camp that was clearly abducting and abusing children and women was so ridiculous that I couldn't stand to read any more of this. I'm done with this series and with this author.

The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw

Rating: WARTY!

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

I really dislike pretentious novels and this one was up there. It was also mixed voice in the sense that most of it was third person, but on occasion there was first person. I'm not a fan of mixed voice novels, and even less a fan of first person. I liked that the story hit the ground running, but there was a narrative and a dialogue that was not only obtuse, but was also larded with the kind of language that would make Deadpool blush. This is not a compliment, since I have no interest in reading either of these writers, but the novel is like the unfortunate bastard child of William Gibson and Bret Easton Ellis. I never liked Ellis. I used to like Gibson, but he quickly went downhill for me.

The story is futuristic cyber-punk, and it's one of these over-baked, aggressive books about tough-as-nails characters (in this case, female) who are so hardened and foul-mouthed that it's like a parody. I don't care about four-letter words here and there in a story, but this thing is so thickly-larded with them that it's hard to read. On top of that, the author seemed like she couldn't write a sentence without pulling out the thesaurus, so the text is dense and impenetrable in many places. I'm pretty well-educated, but this made for a really tough read, and not so much because the words were beyond my reading range, but because there was so much of this hyperbolic stuff that it really made it nightmarish to go through. How about this for a random sentence: "The only question is which sentential declension carried that nugget." It's all like that, and it's too much - especially so for a novel in this genre.

The plot was simple, but it was all-but obliterated by the writing style. I ended up not so much reading it, as reading bits and skimming chunks. There was a team of female cyber-enhanced and cloned warrior women who had a sorry end to their last mission. Now some of them want to find out why it went so badly wrong and to figure out what happened to the team member who didn't die, but went missing. My problem with this premise is that this is a world where AI is advanced and in charge of everything and has little regard for humans. If this is the case, why are humans, slow of thought, and uninventive, sent to fight it? Why not robots? Why not hackers?

I thought of this particularly when the two characters from the first chapter, who are trying to persuade a resentful set of ex-team members to regroup, try to recruit the one who was their driver. Why do they have a human driver? Or pilot, or whatever she is? Even now we're having road vehicles enhanced by the use of computer-made decisions. Airplanes have had a lot of this technology for years. Now these people, purportedly in the future, want to take a backward step and have a slower-thinking human as their getaway driver? It made no sense and betrayed the whole world that the author had built. Naturally you want the human element in this, but these women really didn't feel human to me, and they weren't anyone I was interested in reading any more about. I didn't care about them, what they did, or what happened to them. But if you're going that route, you can write a better story about them and why they're needed instead of AIs. This story didn't do that.

The story of the girls was interleaved with another story, about this AI machine which was interested in working for a larger AI. I may be completely wrong about this, but it seemed obvious to me that this little AI was actually the missing team member who the others were searching for. Again, it didn't stir my interest, and if this is what turned out to the be case (I have no idea if it was), it was not interesting to me, since it had been telegraphed leaving no surprises. These assorted problems I perceived in the plot and the writing style were why I DNF'd this one. I can't commend it based on the fifty percent or so that I skimmed/read.

Hope Defined by Shannon Humphrey, SY Humphrey

Rating: WARTY!

The book blurb makes this novel sound interesting but book blurbs lie. This one started out on the wrong foot with me by having everything taken to extremes and too much slang in the speech to find it remotely interesting to read. The story is that Hope is your trope weird outside kid, up against the class queen bee, and it’s a tired trope that this novel didn't promise anything different to ameliorate.

There's a sci-fi element to this which you don't usually find in such stories, but I never got to that part because I was so turned off by the writing in the very earliest pages that I DNF'd it. One example of the poor writing is right up front and it's the double reference to a boy who was talking to the class about a project he'd done. Twice he's described like this with the space of a couple of screens: "He stood behind a podium and talked as confidently as if he had discovered a cure for cancer."

The book also features drop caps which do not work, not in a ebook. Keep your text as simple as possible because if you don't it will get screwed up, especially if you make the mistake of getting the Kindle version, which I don't, but the drop caps still cause problems, so all around, this was a no for me.

Buzz by E Davis

Rating: WARTY!

After I finished an entertaining sci-fi read, it took me a while to find a book I actually wanted to read next, and this turned out to be it. Several I had on my unread list were first person so I decided to save myself some grief and I skipped those. A couple of others I started reading and found that they simply didn't appeal, so I skipped those. When I started this, it seemed like it might be the exception, but in short order, I became convinced it had been a mistake to even start reading this, it was so full of trope and so amateurishly written.

I mean, we're told that the main charcter, is “a guy who did a carpentry apprenticeship” but we're also told that he's been on the ice since he was three with a lifelong crdream to play professional ice hockey, so when and where in hell did he end up doing a carpentry apprenticeship? Akso, what's with the title? Buzz? It plays zero part in the story - at least in the part I could stand to read.

This was about this gay guy, Cameron Riley, who wants to be an ice hockey professional - which is a bit of a cliché I admit - but it turned out he had some sort of problem which the doctors are trying to figure out, so he can't play for a while (and that's the end of ice hockey in this story BTW), Cameron travels to stay with his older brother, who is also gay of course because gods forbid there should be any straight guys or cis women in a LGBTQIA story! Naturally, his sabbatical is where he meets Noah Clark, the love of his life, so there's some telegraphing going on here and once in a while, the author appears to forget she wrote something, so she repeats it or contradicts it a few screens later.

For example, at one point early in the story when Cameron is hospitalized after fainting on the ice, his brother Jackson messages him saying "On my way, should be there tonight." Shortly after this, when Jackson shows up, I read, "The mix of expressions on Cameron's face made Jackson smile: confusion, then surprise and joy." So did Cameron not recall reading the message announcing his brothers intended arrival? Or did the author simply forget she'd written that earlier part?

In another example, early in the novel, Cameron's boyfriend, Nathan, a complete asshole and not in a good way, texts Cameron to dump him saying he's had enough of his drama and he's moving out. The extreme cruelty of this message makes a reader wonder what the hell shit Cameron has been pulling to piss off a guy like that, so it's not a good idea to have your character become free in such a manner. This cliché was no surprise though, since in stories like these, you evidently have to have the wounded gay guy looking for love (yawn). In fact that's the worst time to get into another relationship, but not long after that point, I read of Cameron wondering to himself about Nathan, "Would they become ugly roommates now?" How are they remotely to be roommates of any hue, if Nathan is summarily moving out? Again, the author quite evidently forgot what she'd written.

The misleading book blurb - typically written by some dipshit who never read the book and has no real clue about it (or anything else for that matter, hence my series of Non-Reviews that I post periodically!) - claims that Cameron is the bad boy, but there's nothing to support this in the story at all. In short, and as usual, the blurb lies. I was so relieved this wasn't first person PoV because it would have been a real nightmare. As it was switching unnecessarily between three perspectives when the main character's PoV was more than sufficient was just dumb writing and made for an unpleasant read.

I finally quit reading when three houses came onto the market and all three brohers each liked a different one, and decided there and then to jump up and buy them so they could all hang out together like a frigging bunch of bananas. Barf. I know this is intended as a series, but WTF? I honestly could not stand to read another sentence in this jackass story.

Home on Folly Farm by Jane Lovering

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook read very nicely by Rose Robinson, about this woman who inherited her grandfather's sheep farm in Yorkshire and has her snotty sister come to stay. It started out great, with some nice snarky humor, but then the tone seemed to change, and it seemed like it lost a lot of its charm, becoming far less amusing and much more irritating.

There seemed to be two reasons for this. The first issue was that the romance part started to become a bit much, with this woman having tingles and spasms whenever this guy was around, and she was not even a teenager. It would still have been annoying even were she in her teens, but she was a mature woman. That's not to say she can't get excited about a potential man in her life, but must it be so pathetic and juvenile a reaction? The other issue was that her sister was so thoroughly and irredeemably obnoxious that I can't believe the farming sister didn't punch her right in the mouth already.

The spoiled-rotten city sister is named Cassandra, and the famer - or more technically the rancher (although they don't call them that in Britain) - is named Pandora. Those names were problematical. They didn't seem to apply, because Pandora was more like the Greek Cassandra in mythology, and conversely, Cassandra was more like a Pandora. Maybe the author intended it this way as irony, or she got the mythology mixed up? I don't know. I really didn't like either of them that much, but Cassandra not at all. Had she been simply irritating, but had a saving grace here and there, that would be one thing, but the author has made her such an extreme, outright selfish bitch, and she had Pandora barely even reacting to her insults and passive aggression, and her privileged behavior and downright abuse. It was far too much.

Pandora "farms" this rare breed of sheep for their fleece which she sells to crafts people. She's been warned by the local police that there's a gang of smugglers operating in the area, kidnapping sheep, yet when she hears a truck (in Britain, a 'lorry') go by, she's not even remotely triggered by it. Now this is a woman who's living on the thin edge of profitability, and who depends entirely on her sheep since her 'farm' does nothing else, and there's not even a mild suspicion in her mind; not even of wondering if that truck might be the smugglers? It made her look stupid and incompetent.

When the smugglers do actually show up, Pandora is slow to react. She doesn't own a gun because this is Britain, and while licensed firearms are permitted, and people on farms are more likely to own one than anyone, I guess, Pandora doesn't. That's fine, but she is armed with a phone to call the cops and she doesn't do that immediately. She does do it, but then she heads down to where the truck is, and without any plan as to what to do. Presumably it's a camera phone since all of them are these days, but she doesn't seem to think of trying to get a picture of the truck, or of the license plate or the men!

This is in northern Britain where there are drystone walls galore and Pandora doesn't even arm herself with some rocks! I hate maidens in distress stories, but in the context of that kind of story, which this really is in many ways, this would have been the perfect time to have the guy step up and do a little bit of heroics, yet he's as clueless as she is. If it were me, I'd have her throwing rocks at the truck to smash windows, or at the guys to chase them off, or I'd have the guy sneaking in the darkness and slashing a tire or two on the truck, but they don't even manage to get the license plate number between them! It was a disaster which made them both look useless. I know not everyone can step up and be heroic, but this is fiction, and I expected a bit more from the tough and seasoned woman that we're led to believe Pandora is supposed to be. It was sad.

When Cassandra arrives at the farm, with her son Hawthorn (I kid you not) who goes by Thaw for short, which in Britain sounds like Thor, she also brings along her son's tutor, who Pandora believes is Leo - the man she had a bad relationship with many years before. She believes Leo doesn't recognize her and then discovers this is Nat, Leo's brother, and learns that Leo died from a drug overdose, but it soon became clear that there is no Nat. This is Leo who is trying to redeem himself. Yawn. At least that's how it seemed to me. I may be wrong and I didn't care by then anyway. This whole thing was tedious and far too drawn-out with ominous and very soon irritating references back to Pandora's 'bad relationship'. It became annoying because it just dragged on and on and on.

So anyway, when the cop arrives, he sits drinking tea and eating cookies instead of getting out in his vehicle to see if he can track down these guys, and the last thing he thinks of doing is putting out an APB on the truck. I know this is a romance and a family problems story, not some sort of heroic action adventure, but seriously? It's not a Miss Marple story either, so a little more realism and depicting the police in a bit less of a lethargic light wouldn't hurt! It was at this point that I decided enough was way too much and I ditched it right there and then. God! I resented wasting my time on this story when I could have been listening to something worthwhile.

Cyber's Change by Jamie Davis

Rating: WARTY!

This is a sci-fi novel set in 2055 in, of course, the USA, because why else would anyone ever consider reading it?! It was over the top and had some issues, and while I had initially intended to give this a positive rating, the more I wrote of this review, the more I realized how sadly lacking the story was, and despite my having read it all and enjoyed parts of it, I really cannot in good faith rate this positively. Maybe I'd considered doing that because I'm just getting too sentimental. Or maybe I've read so many really bad books that even a middling novel sounds like it's worthy? Or maybe I just like LGBTQIA stories, even if they're less than stellar? I dunno! But to be fair to other reviews, I cannot honestly rate this positively given all the problems it exhibited.

On the good side, this story is made more believable by the inane excesses of intolerance generated over the last four years and the dire consequences those years have scarred the USA with. It shows that there are almost as many assholes in this country as there are decent people and it's a toss-up who will actually make the biggest impression on life here. Much like the nation, in the story, the main two characters are diametrically opposed at least ostensibly in this novel. One of them, Cass, was raised in a cult known as the Sapiens Movement, which believes that any cybernetic enhancement of humans, even for medical reasons, and regardless of how little or much it is invasive, makes a person less than human and not worthy of equal treatment.

Rather than go to a sapiens-approved college, Cass elects to go to a regular school, explaining to her family that if she's to help them in the movement, she must understand what they're up against. For reasons which are left unexplored, much less explained, her parents go along with this. Cass hasn't been honest with her roomie about her extreme beliefs and when she learns of Shelby's enhancements, she's dishonest with her parents about those, too. Cass is also a lesbian, and this is a problem in the sense that, if her parents are so dead set against anything unnatural, how is it they're so accepting of her being queer? Why do they not consider that unnatural? There's no consideration, let alone explanation, offered for this apparent contradiction in their beliefs.

Cass has been video-conferencing with her roommate to be, who she hasn't met in person. When they do meet, Cass discovers that Shelby, on a whim, has had one of her perfectly good arms removed and replaced by a mechanical one which has enhanced features (essentially it's a cybernetic Swiss army knife with a storage compartment). There never was any really compelling reason offered for her to make this choice, and no accounting for the fact that this major surgery was not done in a hospital, but in a cut-rate dive where unqualified or disqualified people do these surgeries and there's no government regulation!

This would be a major point in the favor of the Sapiens's position, yet never once is it used, nor is Cass appalled by how slapdash and dangerous this work is, not to say illegal! Shelby also has brain implants that allow her to access the internet without a terminal. The Internet - for reasons unexplained - is renamed the 'mantle' here. I doubt that will ever happen! It didn't feel organic and felt much more like the author had changed it solely for the purpose to trying to sound cool. Rather than cool, to me a mantle sounds vaguely threatening, like something an octopus traps its prey under before eating it!

The 'romance' between the two main characters was skirted around rather than plunged into. As important as it was, it deserved better than this. The author skips several weeks of their interactions, and after that unexplored period, we're just told they're an item - so all the magic and charm of their falling for each other is lost and this negatively and severely impacts the believability of their relationship. It makes it feel like it happened overnight although technically it did not.

I got the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the author is squeamish (or something) when it comes to depicting lesbian interaction. Why he would be, I don't know, but he offers virtually zero physical contact between the two of them at any point in the story; there's barely any hugging, touching, or kissing, let alone actual sex. Instead, he leaves us to infer it from a line here and a word there. This was less than satisfactory and made their relationship seem truly inauthentic, which in turn spoiled all of their subsequent actions.

On a trip to the Caribbean, Cass has a serious jet ski accident that almost kills her. Here's where another problem arises. Shelby supposedly has strong feelings for Cass, and knows perfectly well how anti-enhancement she is, yet she dishonestly lies to the medical staff about how tight their relationship is, and speaks for Cass as though they're married - or at least engaged. They're not! But Shelby overrides any considerations Cass might have had and while the latter is unconscious, Shelby supports and urges the doctors to save her life with enhancements. This is part of a push this novel exhibited from the start: that Cass's feelings and position are wrong and Shelby is right. No consideration, not even token, is given to Cass's position.

Cass is over eighteen and technically an adult, but she can't speak for herself after her injury, and never once does Shelby contact Cass's parents to let them know her daughter was at death's door. This felt like truly shifty behavior on Shelby's part , but the worst aspect of this is that Cass is pretty much completely accepting of it when she recovers consciousness. Despite her horror of enhancement and her upbringing, she doesn't fly off the handle at Shelby. There is no rift in their relationship! Again it felt completely unnatural. It's almost like Cass is "Oh, now I'm cyber! How awful! But okay, moving right along...." Honestly, it's that bad. Again, it's like the author had this agenda to push and nothing would trip it up. A fight between the roomies over this would have added so much more to the story, but the author evidently never considered it.

One of the biggest problems with this story is that we're in the future. Even now, a generation before this story begins, we're out there in terms of interconnectedness. Everyone has a platform and everyone is taking video and streaming it. How much more is that going to be the case in the future? Yet time and time again in this story, the author forgets how connected his world is. Of Shelby's ultra-cyber-ized brother Eric, I read, "He doesn't know you the way I do and he doesn't understand what I've learned since we've been together." Yet this is her brother who she's constantly sending messages back and forth to, directly from her own brain. It's inconceivable that she wouldn't have given him information about Cass, even if only in snippets in all those weeks they were sharing a room. Eric even mentions that he's heard a lot about Cass when they finally meet, yet Shelby apparently thinks he knows nothing? It made no sense.

Eric tells his sister: "I'll send you the final details on the time and place we're meeting in the morning Saturday as soon as we iron out our permits." Yet they're constantly in touch in the cyber-sphere. This lack of knowledge made no sense. During a protest, Shelby again isn't communicating so we're led to believe: "We have to get up to the front and help my brother. He doesn't know we're surrounded." How could he not know when everyone is connected? She can't text him? Can't send him an image? Can't send him a video? No-one else can? Once again, the author forgets his premise.

Even in 2021, scores upon scores of people shop online and get meals and groceries delivered more routinely than ever, yet I read, "She rode the elevator down to the ground floor and headed out to the street. It was time to get some shopping in." This was to buy food. Apparently a generation from now there's no more delivery? The author hasn't thought it through. With regard to test-taking we learned, "the professor can turn off access locally. The classrooms utilize a sort of virtual Faraday cage to shut down my implant's access during tests and quizzes. That ensures I actually learn the material." Yet they can't shut down local storage. Shelby could have entire textbooks stored in her implant and cheat up the wazoo, yet the author apparently never considers this.

Naturally 'dad of Cass' discovers his daughter's implants despite her efforts to lie to him and despite the fact that never once does she consider trying to ease her dad into her new way of life. Never once does she try to present an opposing view to his. Never once does she offer the argument that, "dad, if you don't want his stuff, that's fine! No-one' forcing you, but neither do you have the right to force others to live their lives like you want them to!"

There were so many ways that Cass could have eased the passage and been the very bridge she claims she wants to be if she'd had even half a spine, but she repeatedly fails. Predictably this results in dad finding out accidentally because he comes back to her dorm room after they think he's left and their door is open. The question is though - since he'd left the building, how did he manage to get into a secure building when he has no pass? This is quietly glossed over.

Psycho father flies off the handle and swears Cass is done with this school, but inexplicably, he doesn't try to drag her out of there! Instead he's talking about her finishing out the semester, so later, Cass tells Shelby, "No, you go and talk to Eric. That's important too." Why does she need to 'go and talk to Eric' about this when she can video-conference him right out of her brain? Again, the author hasn't thought his own world through.

Talking of which - in passing - there are no robots or drones mentioned at all in this world despite the fact that we have them ubiquitously even now. No robots helping the police quell a mob? No news drones filming from above? Again the sparsity of technology and the lack of foresight in this world was sad.

When Eric is injured during a protest rally, he's told, "Eric, we have to do something about what they did to you. We have to tell someone and take them to court or something." And we're apparently expected to believe that with all these cyber-enhanced people, and all the news media, and all the private citizens who have cell phones, not a single one of them recorded or live-streamed any of this?

This is a constant theme in the novel - of how utterly-connected the enhanced people are, but how appallingly sparse is the video coverage, even of activity like this. It made zero sense and constantly betrayed the author's prime position. And on top of this, we're expected to believe every police officer hates the enhanced, despite the fact that there would doubtlessly be enhanced officers and officers with enhanced children or spouses. Given the crime-fighting advantages a connected officer would have, there would more than likely have been an enhanced squad of police, just like there's a bomb squad and a SWAT team. Again, the author hasn't thought his world through, and it suffers for it.

It was for all of these serious writing problems and plot holes that I cannot consider this a worthy read.

Fire and Shadow by TG Ayer

Rating: WARTY!

This is book one in the " Hand of Kali" series, and I am not a series person for multiple reasons - mainly because series tend to be so badly done and so tedious. In this case, I think the title was badly chosen. Do you have any idea how many frigging novels are out there which employ this title exactly or in part? About fifty too many. It's ridiculous.

The author ought to have re-thought that, especially since a title like that carries a certain dissuasive pretention about it, but that issue aside, this novel promised to be different in that it was an author of Asian ancestry writing about the rich Hndu mythology of India. The problem was that the story was set in the USA because you know there's no way in hell any story not set in the USA can be remotely interesting, right? That and the fact that the bulk of the insular US readership is incredibly limited and provincial, and won't read stuff not set in the USA - at least that's what Big Publishing™ wants us to believe. Yawn.

All writers have to bow to that irritating fact of life unfortunately. That aside though, there were some really bad writing issues with this novel that essentially turned out to be a clone of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that this was Maya the Demon Slayer. The first of these issues is: why was it set in the USA? This doesn't feature native American mythology, but Indian mythology! Okay, fine, you bow to pressure and set it on safe turf, but you then it's really incumbent upon you to offer some sort of explanation as to why these Hindu gods and demons have transplanted themselves to the US, and this author offers nothing - at least not in the portion of this that I read, which was about 25%.

So it's your trope cookie-cutter story of the ingénue raised in ignorance of her powers, who despite her disbelief is a super-strong wielder of whatever power it is she has. In this case hers is the power to immolate demons - apparently without leaving a significant trace - as we shall get to shortly. Maya Rao is an outcast in her rich kids high-school of course, and she has a clichéd creepy kid who is always around, keeping an eye on her. His name is Nik and he's also an empowered guy who happens to be hot and know more about Maya than she does about herself, but nether he nor Maya's parents, who also know about her powers, have the kindness or decency to bother educating Maya, not even indirectly, not even remotely.

In order to prevent her juvenile scorching of things, her parents bound her powers magically, and she conveniently forgot about all those burned toys and the scorched furniture. Now she doesn't believe in a single thing about Hindu mythology despite going to church every week. Yawn. I guess even the god she serves doesn't give a shit about poor Maya! Barf. But she gets an invitation to the rich kids party, and like an idiot she goes and gets a drugged drink, and rich jock Bryon (barf!) leads her to a boathouse bathroom here he beats her up, but this beating together with the alcohol and the drug allow her to unleash her power and she burns Byron to death with such intense heat that all that's left is ashes and a scorch mark or two.

That amount of heat (and nowhere does the author say it was magical heat as opposed to regular everyday burning) would have to be hot enough to melt at least some bathroom fixtures, but apparently virtually no evidence is left, because when Nik - who's been stalking Maya at the party without once having the consideration to warn her that there are humans possessed by demons present - shows up and enables her getaway from the party, there are zero consequences for Maya's actions.

I'm talking zero consequences. Never (at least not in the portion I read), do police show up at Maya's house asking her about Byron - with whom she was last seen! There's no outcry, no news reports of a missing rich white kid. Maya was so badly-beaten that she had a punctured lung, yet despite her being hospitalized, nowhere does the hospital file a report about a minor being admitted after having been beaten so badly. That together with Byron's disappearance ought to have triggered some alarms, but Maya's charmed life goes on totally uninterrupted as she trains to fight and evaporate more demons.

This is a serious writing problem - when an author is dedicatedly following her tunnel vision without paying any attention at all to the possibility that the real world might just intrude on the story here and there. When I quit reading though, was when I read this: "A small part of her saw how sexy he happened to look even when he smudged soot on his cheek as he dusted himself off." Seriously?

In learning how to use fire, Maya almost kills him (he's fortunately protected by his own god) and instead of her being horrified and disturbed by what she did, all she can do is think how sexy he looks in his scorched clothes?! Again the author is so obsessed with her neat little love package that she completely forgets that this story is purportedly taking place in the real world and that there are real world consequences, feelings, and issues to address. It was ridiculous and this story, having threatened this several times, finally became undeniably too stupid to continue reading.

The book could have used a literate editor, too. I read things like: "Maya tread water in the sea of her ignorance." Ignorance is right, because the past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. "She didn't even believe Rakshasa's existed in the first place" The plural of Rakshasa is Rakshasas, not the possessive case! I also read,

"You have the same eyes, you know?" "Same as whom?" Maya asked

Nobody, especially not a high school kid, says 'whom'! It's a big writing mistake. The author is so focused on how it technically 'ought' to be written that she forgets she's (supposedly) writing about real people saying real things in a real world. 'Whom' stands out like a sore thumb.

Even some of the descriptive writing was too impenetrable to make sense. In describing a traditional fighting weapon known as a madu, the author wrote: "Really a pair of shield, with twin antelope horns melded together to form a natural double-ended piercing weapon." That's a really bad description!

This weapon is essentially a buckler (from the French buclier). A buckler is a small round shield, which can be up to half a meter in diameter and which can be used offensively as well as defensively. In this case it also has two antelope horns, each protruding horizontally at opposite sides of the buckler, pointy ends out, fixed to the shield. Why Maya would train with this antiquated device rather than learn to shoot a gun is another writing problem - again this choice of weapon isn't even discussed.

So this story was larded with cliché and trope, had nothing new to offer since it was essentially a Buffy clone with demons substituted for vampires and so on, but otherwise exactly the same story, and badly-written to boot. So what's new? Nothing! So why read it? The plotting was poor, the quality of the writing awful, and I sure as hell am not about to read a series like this!

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Rating: WARTY!

This is a series of short stories, most of which have very little to do with the sci-fi the author is best known for. I read it a long time ago and had a vaguely fond memory of it, but my renewed acquaintance from listening to the audio version very recently left me really disappointed. I don't know if it's because I've changed significantly (I probably have) or if I just liked one or two stories from my original reading, and kept a favorable impression of those few while forgetting all the other very forgettable ones. That latter, I think, is the most likely explanation, but my current take is that I did not like this overall, and cannot commend it.

Part of the problem was the reader, MacLeod Andrews, which is about as Scots a name as you can get for someone born in Kentucky. I had the erroneous impression from his voice that he was a lot older than he seems to be, but what bothered me is that his voice is overly dramatic, and he's not up to doing female voices at all. Why they even chose a male reader given that so many stories in this collection center around a female character, I cannot for the life of me figure, but there it is. I didn't like his reading. Even had that been perfect though, there were still far too many dislikes in the stories for this to get a favorable rating from me.

The stories are these:

• The Fog Horn This was too much and Bradbury evidently has no idea of evolution, the age of the Earth or of species resilience! Even casting all that aside the story was a bit flat and made little sense.
• The Pedestrian About a guy who walks at night alone since everyone else is home glued to the TV. He's arrested because the dumb cops can't figure out what a writer can possibly write about. They don't seem to get that the TV shows require writers. Dumb.
• The April Witch About Cecy, a witch who can possess humans and influence their choices, and who tries to get a girl named Ann to become involved with a guy, Tom, who the witch actually likes for herself. It felt like Cecy was a bit of a trouble-maker trying to fulfil her own wishes instead of seeking to help Ann or Tom.
• The Wilderness was a whiny, rambling, boring story about a couple embarking on a flight to Mars.
• The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl was a story I liked, about a criminal so obsessed with cleaning every last possible trace of his presence from a murder scene that he's still there cleaning when the police arrive the next morning.
• Invisible Boy I do not remember this story at all!
• The Flying Machine about a paranoid Chinese emperor who is determined not to upset the apple cart when a citizen creates wings he can fly with, and who orders the man and all witnesses to be executed.
• The Murderer I liked this one and can even identify with it since it's more à propos now than ever. A man is so sick of his life being taken over and controlled by machines that he starts sabotaging - in effect, murdering - the machines and is arrested.
• The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind about a war between two Asian villages in the philosophy of city wall building. Not great but not awful.
• I See You Never about illegal immigration. Not very good.
• Embroidery about a woman who unpicks her entire embroidered work because of one small error. Tedious.
• The Big Black and White Game A story of a black team playing baseball with a white team in the annual village game. The way Bradbury fawns and salivates over the black players is downright racist.
• A Sound of Thunder A decent and enjoyable, if dated, story about one panicked dinosaur hunter making a tiny but significant change in the distant past and how it reflected itself into his present when he returns. Nothing like the eponymous movie that was made from this same story.
• The Great Wide World Over There I do not remember this story!
• Powerhouse I think this was about a woman who I couldn't tell if she was old or dying or what because it was so badly told, but who rides to a power generating facility with her husband and inside she gets regenerated by the power. It was ridiculous and made no sense.
• En la Noche don't recall this one at all!
• Sun and Shadow This was a tedious story about a dick named Ricardo who objects to a photographer taking pictures of fashion models not only outside his house, but anywhere in his village. Dumb. I don't know what it is with Bradbury and Mexicans or Bradbury and Chinese, but Ricardo needed a swift kick in the nuts.
• The Meadow Don't recall this one, it may be one of several I skipped.
• The Garbage Collector Don't recall.
• The Great Fire Don't recall.
• Hail and Farewell Don't recall.
• The Golden Apples of the SunI know for a fact this is one of several I skipped.
• R Is for Rocket Don't recall.
• The End of the Beginning Don't recall.
• The Rocket Man dishonestly builds a fake rocket and misleads his kids into thinking they went into space. DNF'd it.
• The Rocket Man Silly story about a dick who abandons his family to fly rockets and hypocritically makes his son promise never to do it. Rip-off of Icarus. He earns a well-deserved fate when his rocket gets sucked into the sun.
• The Long Rain Chinese water torture in which people land on Venus only to find it rains constantly and the rain drives them mad. Barf! Bradbury knew shit about Venus.
• The Exiles tedious story about death.
• Here There Be Tygers A planet with a personality likes to keep people happy, but all of these assholes save one, leave and lie about it. Yawn.
• The Strawberry Window Skipped this one.
• The Dragon idiotic story about two knights aiming to take on a dragon which turns out to be a steam engine, Dumb.
• Frost and Fire Utterly dumb story about people who live for only eight days.
• Uncle Einar So tired of these stories that I skipped this one
• The Time Machine and this one.
• The Sound of Summer Running and this.

This was a waste of my time and money. I don't commend it - I condemn it. It's tedious, and way out of date now.

Public Domain Ghost Stories by Various Authors

Rating: WARTY!

This was a set of public domain classic short stories on the theme of hauntings and the supernatural. I was not impressed. It started out decently enough with the very first story, but that went on too long and turned boring, and the next few didn't even start out interesting, so I DNF'd this one around story number seven. I forget exactly where. I had a curiously parallel experience with Edith Wharton's gothic short stories which I listened to around the same time as I read this.

The titles in this collection are these:

1. The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe
2. The Old Nurse's Story by George MacDonald
3. The Superstitious Man's Story by Thomas Hardy
4. A Story Of Ravenna by Boccacio
5. Teig O'Kane And The Corpse by Douglas Hyde
6. The Haunted And The Haunters: Or The House And The Brain by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
7. The Botathen Ghost by SR Hawker
8. The Ghost Of Lord Clarenceux by Arnold Bennett
9. Dr Duthoit's Vision by Arthur Machen
10. The Seven Lights by John Mackay Wilson
11. The Spectral Coach Of Blackadon (author unknown)
12. Drake's Drum by William Hunt
13. The Spectre Bridegroom by William Hunt
14. The Pool In The Graveyard by Greville MacDonald
15. The Lianhan Shee by Will Carleton
16. The Haunted Cove by George Douglas
17. Wandering Willie's Tale by Walter Scott
18. Glamis Castle
19. Powys Castle
20. Croglin Grange
21. The Ghost Of Major Sydenham
22. The Miraculous Case Of Jesch Claes
23. The Radiant Boy Of Corby Castle
24. The Altheim Revenant
25. Sertorius And His Hind
26. Erichtho
27. Patroklos
28. Vision Of Cromwell
29. Lord Strafford's Warning
30. Kotter's Red Circle
31. The Vision Of Charles XI Of Sweden
32. Ben Jonson'S Prevision
33. Queen Ulrica
34. Denis Misanger
35. The Pied Piper
36. Jeanne D'Arc
37. Anne Walker
38. The Hand Of Glory
39. The Bloody Footstep
40. The Ghostly Warriors Of Worms
41. The Wandering Jew In England
42. Bendith Eu Mammau
43. The Red Book Of Appin
44. The Good O'Donoghue
45. Sarah Polgrain
46. Eleanor Cobham, Duchess Of Gloucester

The first seventeen are fictional ghost stories. Eighteen through thirty-seven are supposedly true stories, only a couple of which (Glamis Castle and Croglin grange) I was familiar with, and thirty-eight through to the last are supposedly omens and phantasms. Like I said, I grew bored quickly, but there is a wealth of out-of-copyright material and folklore here which could be put to good use by an inventive and enterprising writer, but other than that interest, I can't commend it.

Cursed by Casey Odell

Rating: WARTY!

This was, unfortunately, yet another cookie-cutter YA story - the special snowflake ingénue who is the great white savior and who, despite being an adult or near adult, acts like a twelve year old child throughout. There's also the love triangle which predictably erupts notwithstanding the appalling mental abuse both of these male figures inflict on the girl.

Oh, there was the occasional amusing oddity (or in this case, odell-ity!) in the text, such as "Warm heat caressed her back" - that would be as opposed to that nasty cold heat that everyone hates so much?! But even unintentional humorous writing gaffs like that couldn't save me from the tedium of seeing the same story being re-told that's been related a gazillion times before, and with the only real change being the character's names. The author has a BSc in film from Full Sail University and I can see how she earned the BS part anyway - for someone who specialized in college in writing, there's no evidence of it in this work.

The story is of Claire, of indeterminate but young age, raised by a single mom who owned a tavern in medieval times, which of course must explain why Claire, raised in a rough-and-ready bar, and doing some waitressing, is utterly lacking in street smarts and any kind of a tough hide. When Claire's village is attacked by vicious centaurs (for reasons I never learned in the 15% I could stand to read of this), her mom runs with her (holding her hand, like she's six) to the forest, but abandons her there, telling her that she'll be safe! This is the forbidden forest where kids are warned not to go. Huh? Mom for some reason has to go back, and so she leaves Claire to her own devices - namely a dagger which is special, but which idiot Claire promptly loses.

Here's where the biggest trend in this dumb story begins: nothing is ever explained! Every single thing is a mystery and not even the smallest crumb of information is ever offered to the reader. I may be wrong, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that Claire is the bastard child of some elf royalty which is why she's so special. She's rescued (repeatedly it turns out) by the elves, who contrary to rumor do not kill her on sight - although they probably would have done had she not been 'marked'. This is the kind of callous little shits that the elves are in this story, yet Claire seems to have no problem with their attitude.

She is, I believe, supposed to be some sort of royalty among the elves, but her mother chose to keep her in utter ignorance of this her entire life. Despite this, the elves treat her like dog-shit from the off, abusing her and imprisoning her, yet dressing her in revealing sexy outfits. Who actually dresses her is unclear because this is always done when she inevitably passes out. Clearly the elves are total perves. The thing is they behave exactly like humans. There is nothing alien or foreign about them at all. They even use American colloquialisms. Who knew? They actually made the centaurs look better - that's how bad they were.

After being kept incarcerated and in ignorance of what was going on, Claire is forced into undertaking a mission, accompanied by two elves, and evidently these elves have no transportation: not horses, not nothin'! The two who accompany her are apparently a prince and the captain of the king's guard. Why the fuck is the captain of the king's guard abandoning his post? Is there not one single soldier in the entire army capable of handling this job? How pathetic must the soldiery be if the captain is the one who has to go? Who knows? Why is an apparent prince going along, and why only these two with no accompanying soldiers or anything? It made zero sense, unless of course you're creating a YA love triangle. It was so transparent and pathetic that I couldn't stand to read another page of this tedious, unoriginal, and unimaginative trash. This novel is cursed all right.

The Last Necromancer by CJ Archer

Rating: WARTY!

If only it were the last necromancer, but alas! There will be more stories about necromancers, I fear.

Despite having misgivings about this, I started reading it because it was a new take on Frankenstein. While we unfortunately get vampire stories up the wazoo, and quite a few sad werewolf ones too, we don't see any of the other classic monsters (Frankenstein, the Mummy, etc.) retreaded very often. So I was curious about this one, especially since it has a girl living as a boy on streets of London.

Technically, Frankenstein is the Georgian period, not the Victorian in which this novel is set, but it wasn't that important to me. What is important is that I get a good, original (even if borrowed from a classic!) story that moves at a decent pace, and which entertains me, and I sensed quickly that I was not about to get any of that from this, as it turned into yet another trope-laden YA romance story.

It started out well-enough in that this girl Charlotte (who goes by the unoriginal and unimaginative 'Charlie' as a boy) has the ability to raise the dead, and she's kidnapped by this guy Lincoln Fitzroy. It was painfully obvious right from the start that he and Charlie would be an item, and it was so telegraphed and pathetic, and so, so inappropriate that I wanted to give up right then, but I read on a little way to see if the author could rescue it or had anything new to offer; once it became crystal clear she did not is when I DNF'd this.

Fitzroy is often a euphemism sort of a name for a king's bastard offspring, but I have no idea if that's the case here or if the author just blindly chose it as a 'cool name' (it really isn't). This guy, as I said, kidnaps Charlotte, and holds her prisoner without giving her any idea of why he's doing this. They butt heads repeatedly, and it became quickly tedious to read at that point.

It turns out that the reason she's kidnapped is that the people employing Fitzroy want Charlotte kept out of the hands of Frankenstein, who is having a problem animating his creation, and since Charlotte can reanimate a dead person's body by calling their spirit back into it - over which she then has complete control - she is of course of inestimable use to him. I don't doubt that happens further down the line in what is probably an inevitable trilogy. Correction: I later learned this is a ten book series! Are you fucking joking? Jesus! But I figured Frankenstein will indeed get his hands on Charlotte, and I have no interest in yet another tedious YA love triangle or a tedious ten-novel series, especially not one written this badly.

I so quickly tired of the imprisonment and the cruelty and the business of treating Charlotte like a child - although she did behave like one often. But there was meanness and cruelty involved in her imprisonment and the author seems not to care a whit about Stockholm syndrome, like this adversarial and punitive relationship is the perfect start to what will somehow magically blossom into passionate and undying love. Barf. Get a clue, Archer, please. You're missing the target by miles.

The last straw for me was when Fitzroy gave Charlotte her wish and freed her in a poor part of London dressed to the nines, and left her to her fate. He was of course following her so he could rescue this poor waif, but that wasn't the saddest part. The saddest part wasnt even that Fitzroy had purposefully hired a thug to threaten Charlotte so that he could "rescue" her and have her even further in his debt. The guy is a complete dick and a jerk.

No, the problem was a complete betrayal of Charlotte, and the most inauthentic part of the novel. Charlotte had been living on the streets for several years before she was captured by Fitzroy, but now she's portrayed as somehow being inexplicably and completely at a loss as to what to do, where to go, and how to keep herself safe. Inevitably she falls into the hands of this ruthless and brutal rapist that Fitzroy hired, thereby forcing Charlotte further into his control and dominance. Way to trash your main character's entire backstory, Archer! I'm done with this atrocious author.

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.