Rating: WARTY!
So! Let us commence into the twelve days of Christmas! Not the actual twelve days of Christmas, or Twelvetide which, depending on your denomination, runs either from December 25th or from December 26th, aka Boxing Day and ending on twelfth night. Nope, mine start today and run through December 12th whereupon I shall retire from reviewing and devote all my writing time to creatively producing my own stuff instead of spending way too much of it reviewing the work of others. This has been a long time coming.
I don't consider that it has been a waste of time, because all of the reading and analyzing I've done over the years has, I hope, taught me a lot about writing, but it's time to move on from that. That's not to say I have nothing left to learn, but the law of diminishing returns inevitably ends in 'urns', as in 'funeral urns' and I'm not ready for that yet! Selflessly giving my time to promote the work of others hasn't done a darned thing for my own work, and for the most part didn't even get me a thank you from the author or the publisher, so what's the point in continuing to waste my valuabel time?!
The first day of Christmas then, is devoted to first person novels, which I detest for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they are so vacuous and self-centered. Once in a while there comes along an author who can carry a novel in that voice, but for the most part they are awful and unrealistic, and tedious to read, particularly the YA novels in this voice. YA novels in general are tedious for the most part, but even some YA stories make for a worthy read. Never in first person voice though.
I have a large collection of unread ebooks which I delve into regularly for a new reading experience, but if I open one of those and see it's in first person, I immediately delete the book because I don't have the patience for that trash anymore. Those novels are all about 'me'! Lookit me! Look at what I'm doing now! Ignore everyone else! Pay attention to MEEEE! Hear what I'm thinking! See what I'm doing! Listen to me tediously describe the minutest details of my life in a thoroughly inauthentic manner that no real person even thinks about let alone takes the time to voice. It's ridiculous.
So I'm also steadily performing a slash-and-burn culling of my ebook collection. No more first person, please! Delete! Delete! Delete! It would be real helpful if publishers put a warning on first person books, like cigarettes have. In my parody novel Dire Virgins I actually did put such a warning on the front cover: "Quitting reading this novel now greatly reduces serious risks to your mental health!"
Let me exemplify: imagine you're sitting with a friend, telling them of something that happened to you. Think about how you say it; how you convey that story. Do you even remotely tell it like an author tells a first person PoV novel? Hell to the no! Nowhere near. Now I agree that if you're writing a novel, you need to pass on a bit more than you'd normally include were you relating that same event to someone who knows you, precisely because the reader isn't a close friend and so needs a bit of background, but you still need to tell the story realistically as if you were talking to a real person - because you are! The last thing you want is to tell it annoyingly, stupidly, and unrealistically!
Arguably the biggest problem with these stories is that they hog-tie the author. This results in authors hilariously admitting this through the inane acrobatics they perform to try to circumvent the in-built iron-maiden coffin that a first person story inevitably imposes, such as by alternating first person voice with third, or paradoxically employing a second first person voice.
1PoV limits everything to what that person sees, reads, hears, smells, tastes, and touches. Why would a smart author want to impose a straight-jacket like that on their story? I know some of the lesser thinkers among them - typically YA authors, mistakenly think that first person gives their character more immediacy, more agency, and offers a more powerful link to their reader, but the truth is it just makes them more annoying and makes them look more stupid than YA characters typically do. Authors who think like that are simply saying, "I'm such an incompetent writer that I can't create a third person story that achieves these same objectives." It's an admission of being a lame writer.
When you write in 1PoV you not only immediately limit the story, you also make your main character an insufferable egotist. It's tedious to read. On top of that, nobody - I mean nobody in the entire history of planet Earth's hominin population has anybody ever behaved like a first person character does in this ridiculous fiction! They don't have the same thoughts. They do not constantly narrate every tedious detail of their lives. They don't describe people in their thoughts! They don't make the same dumb decisions and mistakes. They do not behave at all in the thoroughly unnatural way that a first person fictional character inescapably does. It's entirely unrealistic.
What's also unrealistic is how 'correct' people are in these stories in their use of English. This is also a problem in third person speech. It's worse in first person because we inevitably use shortcuts with ourselves in our own thoughts and this never comes through in those first person novels, not least because it would make the novel unintelligible if it were done realistically, so you'd have to cheat on that anyway if you were making the mistake of chosing first person as your voice for a story. No-one these days, for example, ever says 'whom' but I've seen it in speech frequently in novels. Yes, if you must, use it in the descriptive writing, but for fuck's sake never have someone say it, not unless they're a pretentious asshole or maybe an English language professor, or British nobility or something. It's stupid. Personally, I'm all for banning 'whom' from the language. It's antiquated and laughable.
Here are just a few titles I ditched unread, just in the last month, as I went through my collection looking for an interesting ebook to read:
- Sound of Sirens by Jen Minkman. There's a nude woman on the cover. Is that honestly necessary or is the cover designer just an asshole? There's a table of contents which literally has just a list of numbers - one through eighteen! If you tap on one of the numbers, it does take you to the chapter, but there's no way to get back from the chapter heading to the contents list if you tapped the wrong chapter by mistake, which is so very easily done since the numbers are never spaced generously. Instead, they're listed one after another with tight, single-line spacing. I've honestly never understood the point of listing the chapters, even in print books, even if you name your chapters rather than just number them. What purpose does that accomplish? When have you ever opened a brand-new ebook and thought, "Oh, I'll start this one on chapter seven, just for the hell of it. Seriously? In an ebook you can search to find what you want. A table of contents is entirely unnecessary which is why I never use them, yet the morons in Big Publishing™ insist on it. They're fucking imbeciles who even now do not remotely understand the power of ebooks, or that it's an entirely different publishing proposition to print books. Here's a quote to show how profoundly moronic first person authors all-too-often are. This is just page two of the novel, and already Le Stupide is strong with this one: "I get dressed in my simple jeans and white tank top. I brush my long brown hair and pull it back into a ponytail. The cracked mirror shows me the faint rings of exhaustion under my eyes...." When have you, or anyone you know, ever got up in the morning and described yourself - to yourself - like that? Try it! Tomorrow morning, when you wake, start describing every detail of your day for say fifteen minutes or so and see how inane it makes you sound! Even if you were telling this in first person to a friend you would never say that sort of thing! It's pathetic and it's the sad and tired hallmark of first person YA stories. Contrast that with a third-person version of the same event: "Enna dressed in jeans and a tank top as usual, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. She ignored the dark rings under eyes that looked sadly back at her from the old mirror." I know which one I prefer and which one wouldn't make me nauseated by page two. But that act of describing your character's appearance from looking in the mirror has been done to death. This novel SUCKED majorly.
- Rosemary's Gravy by Melissa F Miller. Again, dumb-ass contents list which literally lists every chapter from "Chapter 1" to "Chapter 23" spaced so closely together that, unless you have the fingertips of a child, you're as likely to hit "Chapter 2" as you are "Chapter 1". Once you hit the wrong one, you can't get back by tapping on the chapter title. This list of chapters serves zero purpose, yet the antiquated dumb-fucks in Big Publishing™ insist you do it. Morons. On page one we get the inevitable first person for the thoroughly unimaginative and uninventive genre of private dick slash interfering amateur story. I read, "I was up to my elbows in Pomegranate seeds when Felix, my client's impossibly hot stepson, strolled into the kitchen...." That would have been quite sufficient, right there, to ditch this summarily, even had there been no other indicators. We have the older woman pigeon-holed as kitchen help and her inappropriate lust for a boy. Reading just a little further, we learn that she's a scientist, supposedly, so naturally she's required to wear eyeglasses. All scientists do without exception. It's Federal law, you know. Barf. This was all in the first five paragraphs on page one! This story is the shits.
- The Bionics by Alicia Michaels. Again with this one, every chapter is listed in the contents starting with "Chapter 1" and so on. Pointlessly. This is one of the dumb-ass stories which lists time and place at the start of every chapter. Really, who gives a fuck about that? Who even reads that shit? At least I assume it starts every chapter like that since that's how "Chapter 1" began and I had zero desire to read any more of this shit since it was another first person disaster, and worse, this was told from the PoV of a cyborg, making it even more idiotic than usual. The very first sentence ran: "I am awakened by my internal alarm system and all I want is to turn it off, roll over, and go back to sleep." This moron then complains that her internal alarm will not shut up until she's upright with her eyes open, but none of that precludes her from lying right back down after the alarm shuts off. She's evidently too stupid to do that though. None of the narration she spews out is remotely natural. No human - even one with robotic implants, ever thinks like this one does; never has, never will. The story was just as inane as I expected for a first person story: it was unrealistic, tedious, predictable, and again it has this character staring at themselves in the mirror. That trope is long dead and buried, yet moronic first person authors can't imagine any other way to write than to copy what everyone who preceded them has done; then they wonder why no-one buys their shit. This is why I do not read these uninventive stories. They're pathetic. But at least the cover doesn't show a naked chick for no reason.
- Resonant by Alexia Purdy. This is another stupid first person story about a vampire apocalypse. It seems like a rip-off of that zombie movie which starred Brad Pitt, the name of which escapes me. If you ask yourself who the fuck she's telling this story to, it really makes it stand out how stupid her narration is. She's not writing it down. She's just saying it. Did she memorize every single word in every single conversion? "I slipped my fork onto the plate before taking it to the trashcan." Really? Who gives a shit? Would a young woman facing a vampire apocalypse, stranded alone with her kid-brother in their house, seriously be this calm and narrating this shit like she's telling it to someone over coffee one morning? Fuck no! It's ridiculous. The cover shows her wearing the same jeans and tank top that the other girl was in a previously listed story! LOL! There are only six chapters since it's intended to lure readers into buying the entire worthless series. The chapters are listed "One", "Two" and so on in the contents - so it's the same old shit. There's nothing new here; nothing original; nothing inventive; nothing imaginative. You can see it all right there in the contents list. You don't even need to go to the first chapter to know you should ditch this crap and never look back.
- Paradox by Kelly Carrero starts with this dick of a girl jumping off a bridge to impress friends. The first three sentences are "With my heart in my throat, I climbed over the railing. I wondered how on earth I had gotten myself into such a situation. A few days ago, I would've thought there would be no way in hell I would be standing on a bridge about to let go. But there I was, and there was no backing out." Yeah, I know you counted four sentences, but there really are only three. Carrero apparently was never told not to start a sentence with 'but'. You can do it when it's right, but in this case it wasn't. That last 'sentence' is really was a clause which belongs with the previous sentence, not standing alone. She used 'would' three times in that third sentence, rendering it tediously repetitive, and 'gotten'? I would have used 'got' since 'gotten' really has no strong currency.
- City of Skies by Farah Cook. Not to be confused with City of the Falling Sky by Joseph Evans. The first sentence reads, "The familiar spell of moist pine wafts through the air as I sprint through the wilderness." Who the fuck ever had that thought? I mean realistically? No-one! The next sentence is worse: "Strident steps close in on me, crushing the leaves on the earth." It's hard to know where to begin, isn't it? Strident is not, technically speaking, wrong, but given that it's usually applied to a voice, it seems out of place here, especially since the word is a little like 'stride' and the author is talking about steps. But she's in a pine forest, so how is anything there strident? She talks about leaves, when she ought to be talking about needles, and the the environment is moist, so how is anything strident even if there were leaves? She hasn't thought this through. That told me, right there, that I would not like this novel - after only two sentences.
- Going for Kona by Pamela Fagan Hutchins. The opening sentence reads: "The best-looking man in the River Oaks Barnes and Noble had his hand on my thigh, and with the weight of hundreds of eyes on us, I snaked my hand under the table, laced our fingers, and slid mine up and down the length of his, enjoying the contrast of rough against soft." This tells me all I need to know about how pointless it would be for me to try to read this garbage.
- Rippler by Cidney Swanson is all kinds of bad. Samantha is a 'rippler' because you have to have a cool new name for turning invisible. Samantha keeps talking about being out of her body, but she's still in her body. It's just not visible is all. This tells me the author is very confused and she proves it within the first couple of pages by channeling Marvel's X-men which operates on the asinine premise that one mutant gene can have a stunning array of physical effects. This is patent bullshit. The author claims - in her book blurb, that Samantha has a "freak gene that lets her turn invisible." Let's not get into how poorly-worded that is. It's a book blurb after all, so of course it's horseshit, but don't worry! There's the usual guy around, in this case the "hunky Will Baker" who knows all about her power and who will validate and save her, because as you know, every YA girl is worthless without a man. Barf. This book is total shit.
- Dream Casters: Light by Adienne Woods is another crappily-written and badly-laid out novel. The first page is the title and author's name, evidently included for morons who didn't manage to find that information on the cover. Page two and three are the contents - split into three parts, each containing, "Chapter _" and whatever the chapter number is. Again, stupid and pointless. Again no way to get back to the contents list from any given chapter. The author admits right up front that she made a serious mistake in choosing first person voice because chapter one starts off in third person and is a prologue. I avoid prologues like Dwayne Johnson movies, but in this case at least the author had the wherewithal to put it into chapter one. The problem though, is that this simply made the book more misleading, because after about eight pages, the author clunkily switches to first person with the sub-heading "Sixteen Years later" meaning we're starting the novel here with the usual ignorant female YA main character who is a special snowflake and doesn't know it. What this means in effect is that this novel starts with two info dumps one after another, and that's precisely two more info dumps than I ever want to read in a novel. It's also where I gave up on it. It sucks.
- Skylar Robbins: The Mystery of Shadow Hills by Carrie Cross. I think Carrie Cross is actually a pretty cool name for an author, but this first person novel ran right into the swamp in the first two sentences by being utterly unrealistic in how it told the story, and also in setting up Skylar with a hunky guy before the second sentence ended. The author wants it made clear that Skylar, despite being championed right up there on the book cover, is in fact useless without a guy to lend her value.
- The Second Sister by Rae D Magdon. It opens with: "I peeked out of the rain-streaked windows, searching for green as the carriage jolted over slick cobblestones." I'm sure the author was pleased-as-punch with herself for cramming all that information into one sentence, but the fact is that no-one ever talks like that, much less thinks such things. Try it next time yourel traveling. Describe your experience in this sort of ridiculous detail in words that would never normally even cross your mind, much less form full sentences. It turned me off right away.
- Spellbound by LA Starkey. Novels with the word 'bound' in the title are usually a waste of time, so I have no idea how this came to be in my e-shelf. Maybe I fooled myself into thinking the plot might be entertaining, but I was unaware it was also first person, so that was two strikes against it. The first sentence has the main character expressing relief at arriving at their destination and she says, "I pushed my brother's shoulder in the back seat as we drove up to the beach house that held all my summer memories." Ignoring the poor wording, it makes me sad that all these kids' parents ever did was take them to the same place every summer. How tedious that must have been. The second sentence has "...my father put the old Buick into park." Who cares what kind of car it is or how old it is? Is it relevant? Doubtful! The third paragraph has "My mother laughed and got out of the car before bending back in to pin me with a loving stare." A stare is loving? Her mom then says, "Come on. We have a lot to do over this four-day weekend." Who speaks like that? Who specifies the weekend length when everyone present already knows it? I'll tell you who - idiot authors who don't stop to think about how real people behave because they, as an author, are so desperate to cram as much information as they can into what they're telling the reader! Never mind that it makes the story sound ridiculously contrived and keeps kicking the reader out of disbelief suspension. And it's YA, so you know on top of this poor writing, there's going to be the inevitable guy show up because no YA female character can survive without one. I ditched this one on that first page.
- Better Off Wed by Annabelle Archer. Here's the descriptive section for the opening to this garbage pile: "I stood near the top of the wide marble staircase that swept down the middle of the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s central foyer. Below me, dozens of tuxedo-clad waiters scurried around the enormous hall filled end to end with tables and gold ladder-backed chairs. After having draped ivory chiffon into swags on all forty tables, I massaged the red indentations left on my fingers by the heavy pins." That was it for me. No one speaks like that, much less thinks like it. No one tells a story to a friend in words like those. It's kicking me out of suspension of disbelief with every other word, and I have zero interest in waiting around until the inevitable guy shows up to make this loser's life worth living. On top of all that, there's this wedding planner who's about to solve a murder, because as you know, wedding planners are much better at solving murders than trained police detectives, who are clearly useless. It's a fact. Barf! The entire premise of this inevitable series is fucked-up. What's the author's plan? To have this planner go through a series of weddings, and at each one there's a murder? How stupid of a concept is that?
- First Touch by Teyla Branton. This is three strikes against this author for me. Here's the first jam-packed unrealistic paragraph from this effort: "Two minutes before the cop entered my antiques store, life was good. My best friend, Jake, had bought Winter’s Herb Shoppe and was making regular payments that kept the bank off my back, my own business was growing slowly but steadily, and my recently-married sister was six months along with my niece or nephew. And, perhaps best of all, I’d begun helping people with the strange gift that had manifested the day of Winter’s funeral." Her gift is psychometry, and you know it will be just enough to give a useless clue without telling anyone anything of real value. Horseshit that it is. I dream of the day someone will write a novel of this nature and actually have the psychic give useful information, but make the issues be something else that prevents them from nailing the villain on page two. That would take some writing skill. This crap does not. Even disregarding that, what an unrealistic pile of info-dumping trash this first paragraph is! No thanks! Who gives a shit about best friend Jake and his shop? Is that necessary in sentence two? No! Who cares about an impending niece or nephew? Is it relevant? No! The psychometry would be better introduced when you get around to letting the fucking cop get into the store and say something! But no! By the bottom of that first page, he's still not inside, because we have to learn that she has an electronic doorbell and is helping a solitary customer, and that this cop is going to be the inevitable never-consummated love interest that these women so desperately need because they have zero value until a hot and hunky man comes along to lend them some utility. Barf!
- Other by Karen Kincy starts her novel with "I can't last much longer. It's been one week, three days,and I forget how many hours." Of course all sick/suffering people think like that. Not! Any first person novel that starts so unrealistically is going to be a fail so we need read no further into this one.
- The Sorcery Trial by Claire luana, JA Armitage. It took two people to start this novel like this: "I noticed two things in quick succession. One - the tops of his ears tapered to a delicate point. And two - his white button-down had been soaked in a tidal wave of coffee." The authors write literally a page and a half of info-dump before any words are spoken, because forever is typically how long it takes to speak when you bump into someone. How stupidly unrealistic can you get? Again, the authors are thinking of writing a story. The very last thing they're thinking about is how real people react in the real world. If they were, they wouldn't make the laughable mistake of writing in first person. And they'd probably be writign a movie script! LOL! Again in this book, nt he contents are lsite dover two pages as a sumb-ass list of "Chapter 1..." and so on. The cove ris pathetic, featuring five YAs in a standard V formation like a bunch of frigging geese. One of the guys has a glowing ball which he's holding right at his crotch. Seriously? None of these cover models actually look like people you'd meet.
- The Rosewoods by Katrina Abbott opened the first chapter with the narrator salivating over this guy who was approaching her. No one thinks like that, and certainly not for a whole page, when someone approaches you. That alone, even had it not been first person, was enough to turn me off this. It was way-the-hell too much squared. Barf!
- All Eyes on Me by Lindsey Lanier starts out with this long, rambling narration of a woman driving out into the desert, to dump a body - in sight of the city of Las Vegas behind her and the mountains ahead of her. Vegas has I-15 running roughly north-south through it. Perpendicular to that runs state highway 95. Those are hardly the deserted roads she describes. There are only a couple of minor roads out of there that might work for dumping a body, but they don't have that long highway, city behind me, mountains ahead of me, perspective to them, so the narration would appear to be inaccurate at best, and those minor roads hardly a good place to dump a body. I didn't like this at all.
- The Boy Who Painted the Sky by begins with "I remembered certain things about my mom." This approach is guaranteed to turn me off the story and it's only the first sentence. The story was boring.
- Blood of Stone by Jayne Faith begins with a narration that's utterly alien to how people actually think. "With an impatient tug on the cross strap of my broadsword's scabbard, I watched the bouncer, a lanky man of elvish descent, examine my mercenary credentials." This tells me everything I need to know about how pointless is it to try reading this crap. The sword is a broadsword, but worn on this asshole's back? How are they going to draw it? The truth is that you can't unless the bottom of the sheath is loose and therefore slaps your ass hard with every step you take, and since you're drawing it right by your neck, you're likely to cut your own throat in the event of a hasty draw during a fight! This carrying o'th' sword on your back is pretentious horseshit and needs to die a horrible death. The bouncer is "of elvish descent"? What does that mean? If he's an elf, say so. What the author seems to mean is that he's a cross-breed, and this tells me that the author knows shit about evolution, which shows that you cannot successfully breed outside of your own species - so are elves the same species as humans? Or is magical reproduction involved? If so, how does that work exactly and why does no one ever talk about it?! Every trope in the book is revealed right here in that first sentence. This tells me this author is unimaginative and is copying everyone else who writes fantasy instead of trying something new. I don't want to read the same shit that's been done to death already. This book is a no-no. And from only one sentence! But guess what? You could have told all of this from the novel's dumb title, without even having to open the cover at all.
- Kill Process by William Hertling into this at full tilt. "I scream. Not some girly scream. A full tilt blood-curdling yell...." A scream is a fucking scream. There's nothing girly about it - except, evidently, to sexist authors. It turns out that Angie had a bad dream and of course she screams because girls have to: it's the law. And she's narrating this collection of bad grammar in the most unnatural, unrealistic, and inauthentic manner imaginable. Another dumb-ass first person story - and I immediately put it on the bookself where it belonged - the one marked 'trash'. Truth be told though, you can readily discern what to do with this novel from the pretentious title alone.
- The Faerie Prince by Rachel Morgan begins with this execrable opening: "Every night I watch the same window on Draven Avenue. I keep my distance, and I never watch from the same place or at exactly the same time. Creepy, I know, but I have my reasons." Creepy doesn't begin to describe this, and how does this asshole manage to stake out a house in a residential area without anyone reporting her? It's an avenue! It's not a city street. She would be seen no matter how much she tries to change-up her stalker behavior. It turned me off this character right from that first sentence. This is even before the story gets into the same tired trope bullshit with calling them 'faerie' because the author is too chickenshit to call 'em 'fairy', and with having the way over-used 'unseelie' court - like the fairy world is organized exactly like ours, and everyone is beholden to someone, and how they behave just like humans - in a world of magic, yet! I call horseshit on that, and file this poor excuse for a novel under 'T' for trash as is meet and right to do so.
- The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad opened in first person with language so stilted I couldn't stand to read it! So that was a non-starter.
- Sammie & Budgie by Scott Semegran began, "I discovered that my boy Sammie - my son, my first child, my spawn, a chip off my ol' block...." That was enough for me to utter a disturbed shriek of a 'no'! A chip off my old block? Seriously? Budgie is an abbreviation of budgerigar, which is what Americans call a parakeet. It's a small short-beaked parrot which is found in a beautiful array of colors. I have no idea what relevance that has. The only other time I heard of the name being applied to a human was in an old Brit TV show known as Budgie. The amusing thing about this novel, given that immediately before it I looked at a Joseph Conrad novel, is that this one quoted Joseph Conrad on a page right after the contents listing! Usually such quotes appear at the start of chapters, and I routinely ignore them, as I did this one. This book presented a tedious string of boring pages before ever you could reach chapter one. There was one page after another of preliminary material which was way-the-hell overdone even by the pretentious standards of Big Publishing™. There was the front cover, as there usually is, but next after this came a black and white copy of the same cover, followed by another page with the title and author's name, followed by an extensive copyright blurb,followed by two pages of boring Scott Semegran publicity material, followed by a dedication, followed by a pointless tiny illustration, followed by a two-page pointless table of contents - one that gets you to a chapter, but from which you cannot return to the contents list by, say, tapping on the chapter title. At least this contents list was double-spaced, so it did have that going for it, worthless as a contents list is to begin with. This was followed by an illustration of a popsicle and a label identifying "chapter one." Finally, after all that shit, there actually was chapter one! On page 11! The thing is if you tap the chapter One in the contents list, you don't go to the illustration; you go to this page 11. So what the fuck is the point of the illustration? There's one right before every chapter and this is the entire extent of the "illustrated by Scott Semegran" proudly displayed on that third page. Tedious!
- Deadlines by Camilla Chafer actually does chafe. The narration is totally unrealistic and constantly kicks a reader out of suspension of disbelief. Total loser of a novel.
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Never Enough Time sounded interesting from the book description, but it's an insane first person which lists no less than ninety chapters in the contents list, not one of which worked to actually get a reader to that chapter in the Kobo e-reader. They did work in the Nook version, although again, there was no way to get back to the conents list from the chapter if you hit the wrong one by mistake, and what's the fucking point of listing ninety chapters one after another, Chapter 1...Chapter 90? So no thanks to the first person crap.
Tomorrow? Dual-first-person voice novels!
