Ash by Malinda Lo

Title: Ash
Author: Malinda Lo
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WORTHY!

I picked up the two Malinda Lo novels, this one and the prequel, Huntress because I'd read somewhere (I forget where, now) that Lo is a strong voice for feminism. She's also a lesbian, which might make for another interesting perspective on her writing, and as long as we don't confuse lesbian with "feminist" (the two are not the same set after all) I think we have we should have a cool read here - at least I hope we do!

I have to confess, though, that I don't see any overt feminist influence on this story at this point; that is to say that I don't so far see how the story is any different from how it would have been had it been written by any other author, lesbian or straight, male or female. Maybe there won't be any, or maybe it will be too subtle for me to see it, but if that's the case, then I fail to see how she garnered for herself the reputation for being a feminist author. Or maybe that rep came out of pure invention like so much in the popular press does these days! We'll see. it really makes no difference as long as we get a good story out of it, after all. That's what we're looking for when we read, are we not?

To her credit, at least Lo has no problem calling fairies fairies, which is nice. I hate it when authors try to hide the fairy-esque-ness of their writing by calling them "fae" - like they're so mortified to be writing about fairies that they're willing to do anything, no matter how obvious, to cover their embarrassment!

So Aisling (pronounced Ashling or Ash for short) begins with Ash losing her mother, and her father disappearing on business and coming back with a wife and two children; then her father dies. Lady Isobel blames Ash for her financial position: if her father had been better with his money, she claims (not that I necessarily believe her!), she would not have to be scrimping, and firing the maid and having Ash take her place! Way to justify slavery!

But Ash has an out, of a kind: she's entranced by fairy stories and by the real possibility of meeting fairies in the forest, which she does, and one in particular, named Sidhean (but pronounced Sheen!). I have to say a word about these pronunciations! There's no guide to the pronunciation in the novel (at least not when the name is first given). These names, for reasons unknown, are evidently Irish, in the cliched tradition of fairy-folk being Celtic, no doubt, but the Irish name has a version which starts with 'Ash' so why go the pretentious route instead of calling her Ashlinn?

This business of translation from a foreign tongue is a pet peeve of mine. The Chinese "alphabet", for example, bears no relationship whatsoever to the English one, so why not spell Chinese names phonetically instead of the bizarre translation we do get, whereby for example, 'Xiao' is supposed to be pronounced '(H)see-ow' (or something similar)?

It's the same with the Celtic language. That's a lot closer to English than is Chinese, but it's still notably foreign. Unless the fairy wrote his name down for Ash to read it before he pronounced it, there's no way she would know that the spelling of it wasn't phonetic! All too many writers make this mistake with pronunciations of obscure names. But I admit it's a fine line between trying to make something sound exotic or different, and going overboard, so let's move on before I have a hoard of irate Irish and Chinese on my tail. (Now I'm thinking of a scene from the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles but let's not go there!)

So Ash gets into the relaxing habit of walking on the forest and eventually Sidhean begins walking with her, except for one period where he goes off in a huff and she doesn't see him for two weeks. Inexplicably, she starts falling for him! I say that because he's described as looking like a thinly-skinned skeleton! Perhaps his fairy power is overwhelming her; however, despite repeated warnings of the fairy people's evil intentions, no one harms her and Sidhean seems commendably interested in seeing that she gets home safely - even to the point of taking her on his horse on one occasion. But like Neo in The Matrix, the fairies are apparently waiting for something.

Ash herself has to leave the area next, because she's to accompany Isobel and her eldest daughter (as her maid!) to the capital to go to the Royal Ball (those royal balls are huge!). Once the family is dressed and off to the event, Ash's friend, a fellow maid called Gwen (no exotic names for anyone other than Ash and Sidhean, sorry!) chivvies Ash to hurry up so she can attend the peasant "ball" which is held in the village square. Everyone is supposed to costume up, and Ash dresses as a boy. I don't doubt that's going to play a part in some misunderstanding or other down the road (or more likely, in the town square). Is the Royal prince going to play hooky and attend the peasant ball instead of the palatial one? We'll see how predictable that is!

The answer was no, no, no, and no! The story was even better than my abysmal predictions. Ash sees Kaisa (kay-sa) the leader of the royal hunt, and encounters her on other occasions until the two of them become acquainted and begin spending significant time together. Kaisa invites her on the hunt and Ash has to make an expensive bargain with Sidhean so that he can wangle her into a position to attend the hunt and the ball. She has a wonderful time. I was a bit disappointed in Ash when she made the deal, Sidhean said the price was that Ash would be his, and she failed to ask him exactly what that meant! But aside from that, her conduct was exemplary.

So She also attends the big masquerade, and is asked to dance by the Prince, without her realizing who he was to begin with, but when she does, she sneaks away to visit with Kaisa and they spend time together, as indeed they do at the next dance (which is actually rather reminiscent of the one in Cinder, except that Lo wrote it first, and wrote it better). In this occasion, they pretty much confess their love for one another, but Ash reveals that she has a debt she must pay, and while she will do her best to return to Kaisa, she cannot promise anything. Ash returns to Sidhean and flatly tells him that she will offer him only one night and then their deal is over, and Sidhean amazingly agrees. The next morning, Ash returns to the palace and to Kaisa's arms.

Yeah, I kinda blew off the details at the end there, didn't I?! But this was because this was one of the easiest books I've ever read and I rather lost it and became completely immersed in the novel for the last half of it (Essentially, 'Part 2 - The Huntress'). The story drew me right in and pulled me almost helplessly along, and it had an immensely satisfying ending. So yes, I highly recommend this, and I'm so grateful to Malinda Lo for providing me with such a great novel after having had so many dissatisfying ones of late. Now I'm anxious to get started on Huntress in the desperate and nervous hope that it will be equally satisfying!

Ink by Amanda Sun

Title: Ink
Author: Amanda Sun
Publisher: Harlequin Teen
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I have neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" ebook, supplied by Net Galley! I will be reviewing others of this nature in future and will note which ones those are in the review.

Please note that I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll usually find elsewhere!

Yes, I'm reading a Harlequin book! The shame! The book looked really interesting from the information on Netgalley. I guess I learned my lesson! I should have been suspicious when I saw that the illustration on the cover looks suspiciously like the author! Oh, and good luck (or look, maybe in this case?) trying to find this novel on the Harlequin Teen web site. I don't know if they're embarrassed by this novel, or if they simply have the worst search engine ever, but this book isn't to be found on their web site, and neither is Amanda Sun, so what she's gushing thanks to them for is somewhat of a mystery. And if anyone can explain what "...the incredible detail they've paid to INK." means exactly, I'd appreciate it. Is that a direct translation from the Japanese?!

That's not the only time that the English language runs away with her. Check out these examples:

"He rested a hand on my shoulder and it sent a jolt through my body to feel his fingers closing around me, to feel the warmth of the pads of his fingertips." The warmth of the pads of his fingertips?

At one point after Katie and Tomo are rescued, having been kidnapped by the Yakuza and rescued by a Kami employing ink snakes, Katie is concerned about the propriety of closing the doors to the castle in the park?! Honestly?

Here's a classic: "We lay there clinging to each other, knowing the world would tilt if we let go, that without each other, everything would fall out of balance." (Drama llama much, Katie?!)

What? Yes, I'm snarky! Amanda Sun had done everything right: she'd taken the story out of the USA and set it in Japan and she'd introduced a supernatural mystery. It’s always a fun thing to bring in new culture, and new experiences, but then after all of this, she had to invite along the standard bad-boy-hot-guy, whose hair is seriously in danger of impaling his eyeballs, and have him clashing with the fem protag from the off?

Why start this out in such a great way only to bury it under a liberal slathering of Trope du Ya (which is ironically and poetically reminiscent of the liters of ink in which Yuu Tomohito's himself seems to be drowning!)? Here's a sample: "He looked over at me and grinned, the breeze twisting his spiky hair in and out of his deep brown eyes. I almost melted on the spot." I detest book burning, but honestly if the books were like this, I could actually understand the Nazi passion for immolating them.

I'm really hoping right now that we can get a decent story out of this. The premise was great. I even put up with the absurdly overdone drama of the magical cherry blossom picnic, but to have Katie Greene, the sixteen-year-old fem pro act like an airhead, limp rag, thirteen-year-old was too much. Has she no self-respect? And what’s with the melodramatic agonizing over how her life is so tragic because of this horrible pressure which she apparently suffers from living in a great foreign nation layered in history, learning a new and fascinating culture, along with a new, sweet, and elegant language? It's a bit much, frankly, and Will Smith's son already did it in The Karate Kid. but at least I learned a few things from this novel. There's a glossary in the back which taught me that Che Guevara, in Japan, would be known as Dammit Guevara! That's worth knowing, but I was disturbed by the similarity of Suki, which means "I like you" and Tsuki, which means a hit to the throat. There's too much room for confusion there!

But back to our story in progress. For Katie to obsess over this Tomo guy to the point of quite literally stalking him when everything she knows about him is bad, and not just bad, but abusively bad (even as she contemplates how shallow she is!) endeared me neither to the tale nor to her! Tomo-Boy has cruelly ditched his girlfriend, he's apparently got another girl pregnant, he badly cut-up his best friend several years ago and then fled to avoid punishment, and he's a bully.

Whether all these things turned out to be exactly what they immediately appeared to be or not, is immaterial: the fact is that this is what she knows about him at that point, yet she's still stupid enough to follow him around, trilling like a love-struck guinea pig. If we had a male protag tailing a girl around like that, spying on her, it would rightly be perceived as creepy at best and threatening at worst, so why is it perfectly permissible for a female to act like this? Has she no decency Ms. Sun? Has she at last, no sense of decency?

I had an early wish that the supernatural aspects of Ink would rescue the unnatural aspects! It was the only reason I was pressing on with this, but it got no better. It wasn't all as bad as the lack of continuity between page 98 where her aunt needed the bike (which she had loaned to Katie so she could stalk the bad guy into the worst areas of the town) for Monday, but on Monday on page 99, Katie still has the bike! So was her aunt taken for a ride, or was Katie just recycling?!

Katie uses the bike on more than one occasion to stalk Tomohito, and into some dangerous locales in the town (that's where she sees him bullying another guy on behalf of his friend, so naturally she falls in love with him). What a blind, clueless, loser Katie is! She has no (intelligent) reason whatsoever for liking him (especially not with those grotesque spikes of hair sticking painfully in his eyeballs like cocktail sticks into silverskin onions...). Since she's seen drawings done by him actually move on the page (and off it!), she has to know that there's something distinctly weird going on with him, or there's something distinctly delusional going on with her, which means she should definitely not be making potentially dangerous decisions about whom she should hang with! But he's hot and has spikes of hair in his eyeballs, so what's not to like?!

So finally milady doth stalk too much methinks and ends up being abducted (that is, having her abs re-routed through a system of ducts, along with the rest of her body) to a Yakuza hang-out, where, of course, the Yakuza hang out. Is 'Yakuza' like sheep - both the singular and the plural? I'd ask them but I'm a bit sheepish. I think it's a verb: Ya, Yak, Yaku, Yakuz, Yakuza, Yowzer! Anyway, they fail, of course, to abduct her phone from her, and she calls a friend to help, but wouldn't you know it, she accidentally calls the other guy in her triangle (and you thought it was her five! Wrong! It's always a three in YA), who Juns to her aid revealing that he is also a Kami (with the emphasis on khasi), and he busts her loose before loosening her bust no doubt. I must admit, this little twist did pick things up a bit, but I fear this story is too far gone for a rescue of this nature to save it.

In the end I did make it to the end, but it was nothing but an annoying pain in the neck and I'm now officially and permanently done with this series of paper novels. Life is too short to waste it on this limp of an effort. If you feel you must pursue this novel yourself, you do it at your own risk!

One thing you might do to entertain yourself (if you get bored with the number of times she talks about Tomo's hair banging into his eyes), is to consider how many times Sun uses keitai (which is nothing but the Japanese word for cell phone!) in place of simply using 'cell phone'. She behaves as though keitai is something fundamentally different or magically special, but there's no intelligent or logical reason to use it. If there's no English equivalent for the word then by all means use it, but to employ it for pretentious reasons only, is a big turn off to me.

You can survive the excruciation of reading this if you imagine keitai to be a euphemism for something sexual. This made the novel far more entertaining, and was the only reason I got through the last one hundred pages! Here are some examples:

• When my keitai chimed, I grabbed for it gratefully.
• In my bathroom, I took out my keitai…
• I’d forgotten to put my keitai in manner mode…
• I closed my keitai and shoved it back in my bag.
• He pulled out his keitai…
• His palm opened slowly and the keitai dropped to the floor...
• Then his keitai rang again, spewing rainbow colors across the floor.
• Okay, I said, pulling out my keitai…
• My keitai beeped with his info.
• A buzzing noise sounded in my purse. My keitai.
• I sat down with a bowl of shrimp chips and flipped open my keitai.
• You could try his keitai.
• The sound of my keitai beeping woke me the next morning. I rubbed my eyes until they turned red.
• …although he hadn't tried my keitai yet…
• I screamed at my brain to think. My keitai.
• The ink and blood dripped off my wrist and onto my keitai.
• Tomo, I said, flipping my keitai open and closed again…
• I grabbed the keitai putting it beside his face, then breathed out in relief.
• I lifted the keitai out of my pocked and saw him hunched over in the dim light.
• Are you okay, he said, and my keitai blinked out.
• My keitai went off in the middle of the night.
• How phallic is this: Then he pulled out his keitai, the little kendo warrior swinging back and forth on his phone strap!

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

Title: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Author: Aimee Bender
Publisher: Anchor Books
Rating: worthy

Note that this one is definitely not young-adult, unless it's a very mature young-adult!

I don't know if Aimee was on a Bender when she wrote this but this is one of the most off-the-wall books I've ever read, so naturally it appealed to me immensely. It's a collection of 16 rather zen-like short stories in a number of parts, but since I can't be discussing a woman's parts in a blog like this, those shall remain anonymous!

The Rememberer is a story of a woman relating the death of a relationship which she sees as her lover devolving through various animal stages, from human to ape to turtle, to salamander, to single-celled organism.

Call My Name is about a rather desperate and privileged woman trying to connect and discovering that she;s not so privileged after all.

What You left in the Ditch shows how a woman whose husband returns home with a bizarre war injury cannot connect either.

The Bowl is about loss. Or about a fruit bowl....

Marzipan, despite being my most sinful treat, is so completely out there that it defies description. Just suffice to say it tells the truth, the hole truth and nothing but motherhood.

Quiet Please tells of a frustrated librarian and her rather literal relationship with men who frequent her, how shall I put it, domain and are reduced to dewy-eyed decimals?

Skinless is missing something. It felt like just the muscle and bone.... Or it might be about young love.

Fugue is about relationships. Or not.

Drunken Mimi is about impish love - literally.

Fell This Girl is about horniness.

The Healer Tells the amazing tale of two mutant girls, one who had a hand made of fire, the other who had a hand made of ice, and their difficult relationship in a small, isolated town.

Loser is about an orphan who can find things by sensing their 'tug'. Unfortunately, he can't find people, unless they're wearing something of which he can sense the tug. And he can't find his parents, nor they him.

Legacy and the rest below I haven't yet read, but if you want to get out of your mind, then this is definitely the ticket for you. Most of the stories are very short (unlike some of mine in Poem y Granite!), and the entire book is a quick read.

Dreaming in Polish is a weird story about two old folks who dream in Polish and are mistaken for prophets!

The Ring is about a woman who falls in love with a "robber" and when she joins him in his light-fingered excursions she finds rings hidden in pots in the kitchens of the homes they burgle, one of which is a ruby ring, which stains bright red everything it touches.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the most bizarre of all: it's a short story comprised of even shorter stories.

So yes, if you want to blow your mind, then this is the book for you. I loved it.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Title: The Summer Prince
Author: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Publisher: Arthur A Levine Books
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a novel in four parts, each named after one of the four seasons, but since the bulk of Brasil, where the novel is set, is south of the equator, you might find yourself surprised that the first date mentioned in the 'Summer' section' is December 25th! Cool! Or rather, hot! It's naturally, therefore, written with a Brazilian influence, and it's set in the future, with a feisty female protagonist; gets off to a slow start, but it makes for really engrossing reading. There are no tropes in this novel!

Several hundred years after Earth was abused chronically by a nuclear war, small remnants of humanity manage to survive in isolated pockets around the earth. Some of these reside in a gigantic ten-storey pyramid on the coast of Brazil The society is (quite literally) highly stratified, with a queen on the top floor and the working class on the bottom, cultivating bacteria to provide energy for the rest of the pyramid. The society is matriarchal, with a queen nominated every five years by an elected "Summer King" who has his throat cut at the end of his term and nominates the new queen quite literally with his dying breath. The current queen was so nominated with a bloody hand print on her stomach. The society is also technophobic in this city (not so elsewhere), Although they are far more technically advanced than we are - they just don't like people modifying their body. Nor do they believe in improving the technology used to keep their amazing city in tip-top shape.

The new summer king is proving to be a rebel, because he comes from the bottom tier and is adored by the majority of the female portion of the wakas (the young of society), and feared somewhat by the old of society (the grandes). The politicians are nearly all female, called aunties, although there is a handful of uncles. June is the sixteen-year-old step child of one auntie; she's an artist and also a rebel. Her gay friend Gil strikes up an intimate relationship with the new king and through him, June gets involved with this king in staging a huge and rebellious art project which she hopes will win her an award. The End.

Just kidding! So June and Enki progress strongly with their plan to make her art project all about lighting up four rather mountainous islands out in the ocean off the coast of their city. As they watch their project come to fruition, Enki, who has been hugely modded, gets some sort of warning from the city that it is in trouble; that there is going to be an accident. When the two of them get ashore trying to warn of this impending disaster, Enki is taken into custody, and June escapes, eventually forcing her way into a meeting of the aunties, trying to warn them of the disaster that's coming. They find it hard to believe her, but she broadcasts the warning via the ubiquitous cam-bots to the whole city, and when the disaster happens, but people are saved from it because of her warning, she becomes a huge celebrity. Do we detect the rigid foundations of this society starting to tremble?

June begins to grow noticeably in and small but perfectly natural ways. She starts coming into her own as the novel starts down the home slope, but another disaster occurs as the technophiles revolt against the anti-tech stance of th aunties and two wakes are shot by a high tech nano gun. It was an auntie who was directly responsible for setting up the situation which led to their death, but she isn't brought to justice even though June manages to learn her name and report it to the queen. The queen contacts June to let her know she will have a good chance of winning the art competition if she gets in line with the queen's wishes, and June amazingly, and disgustingly, sells out to the queen - and immediately regrets it.

So the story progresses with Enki's remaining days growing fewer and ever fewer in number, and June cooking up yet another rebellious art project which turns out to be nothing less than an escape from the city, with June and Enki busting loose and heading to Salvador, which is where Enki initially came from. Salvador contains the secret of Enki's mom's success in getting him into the city in the first place, and June discovers what that is right before the two of them are captured and taken back to the city.

I'm not gong to tell you what happens after that, but finally one of my infamously astray predictions actually proved out for once! I think this story is amazing - well written, powerful, devoid completely of cheesy romance and YA bullshit angst, and best of all, NO PROLOGUE! I fully recommend this one - but only if you're honestly a serious connoisseur of engagingly well-written fiction.

The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau

Title: The Testing
Author: Joelle Charbonneau
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available June 4th 2013.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of her story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

There's a free prequel to The Testing available here.

The Testing is very closely allied to The Hunger Games in plot, so if you can't get enough of that series, then this will probably keep you cooking until the next movie comes out! I had mixed feelings about the similarities, but in terms of technical achievement, the novel is well-written and I found only one error in it, which is pretty darned good for a galley proof. That was the use of 'decent' instead of 'descent' (p277). At least I assume that's what she intended - and no spell checker will catch that!

The Testing strikes me as being a really limp title for a novel, but let's not hold that against it! Given that it's billed as the Graduation day series, why not actually call it 'Graduation day'? A more serious charge is that it starts out disturbingly like The Hunger Games and has a lot of close parallels strewn throughout. it begins, for example, with a mom is getting her daughter ready for an important ceremony. In this case, the ceremony is a graduation, but it isn’t what you might think. These people live in a colony in what is evidently left of Iowa, USA. The country (indeed, the world), ninety-nine years before underwent the Seven Stages war - which had four stages of humans fighting and three stages of Earth fighting back. The end result was a massive environmental tragedy.

The most important part of the graduation for Malencia Vale is the opportunity for her to undertake The Testing, which if she passes, will allow her to go on to university and make the life she's dreamed of. When she's unexpectedly selected, she's overwhelmed by both joy that her dream is coming true, and by sadness because it will mean leaving her family, which, unlike in The Hunger Games, is a large one. She has several brothers, as well as both her mother and father, and she may never see them again.

Malencia is chosen along with three others from her colony, which is surprising, since there have been none taken from this colony for years. Evidently a school principal was protecting her students from being selected - but why? Did she know, just as Malencia's father seems to vaguely remember, what is to come for those who are selected for testing - and fail? The others who have been chosen along with Malencia are: Malachi Rourke, Zandra Hicks, and Tomas Trope. Sorry, that's Tomas Endress, who has hair falling over his forehead, and strong, calloused hands. So yeah, I was right the first time: Tomas Trope.

The night before she leaves, Malencia's dad takes her to one side and warns her not to trust anyone, telling her disturbing stories about his own testing years before, when bad things apparently happened, but which were (almost, but not quite) wiped from his memory. Having learned this from him, Malencia chooses (as the two personal items she's allowed to take with her other than two sets of clothes) a Swiss Army knife and a small communication device built by one of her brothers which has a compass in it and, she later learns, a recording feature.

Just as in The Hunger Games, once selected, the candidates set off for the capital, but in a skimmer, not a train. This is a means of transportation which apparently can suspend gravity (or perhaps it’s some sort of a GEV or ekanoplan which isn’t explained very well). As the journey progresses, Malencia notices that there's a hidden camera watching them, and when they break for lunch, the cabin they use also has hidden cameras. She secretly passes on this information on to Tomas while they wander around outside. Malencia thinks the testing has already begun.

I have to confess a certain amount of difficulty in suspending disbelief in that the society seems to have far more advanced technology at their disposal than we do, yet there are colonies like Malencia's which are struggling along as though they're frontier colonies from two hundred years ago. This is another parallel with The Hunger Games, and one which I had hoped would be explained as the story progressed, but it was not.

Their testing begins the first morning after they arrive. The man in charge introduces himself with "My name is Dr. Jedidiah Barnes." Actually that's his title and his name. If he'd said "I am Dr. Jedidiah Barnes," it wouldn’t have stuck out so starkly to me! I've noticed that people do this in real life, and I have no respect for it. Whether Charbonneau (amazing name!) intended this reaction in her readers isn't clear. I would guess not.

The testing goes beyond tough. It's quite literally brutal, which becomes apparent after the initial phase (covering history, math, science, reading) is over. There are 108 candidates, but we’re told that less than a fifth of these will go to the university. No explanation is given as to why the university doesn't simply take them all. If there were thousands of candidates, then I could see why they'd need to trim the number down somehow, but not for so few, especially when we know the need is great. This was a real problem with the suspension of disbelief for me, and I don’t mind having these problems in a story if they're explained (or at least addressed), even if it's a bit ineffectually done, but to let them just sit there in all their pristine starkness like a beacon to the nearest plot hole isn't a good idea!

As the testing continues, it becomes increasingly brutal and callous to the point of people dying. I still find this unacceptable because there's no justification for this cruelty and harshness, not even within the framework of the story itself. The penultimate test is about teamwork, which Malencia resolves and passes, but Roman, the guy who purposefully betrayed all of his teammates also passes. That makes no sense at all given the point of the test because Roman isn't even mildly penalized for his behavior.

The final test is very much The Hunger Games all over again. The remaining 59 candidates (other than a few who have died, we learn nothing of what happens to the failures) are taken to what’s left of Chicago. The final test is to survive and make their way successfully back to the testing center hundreds of miles away.

Some of the other candidates are aiming solely to kill off their competition, but this is senseless given that these people are supposed to be leaders. This part is a flagrant copy of The Hunger Games, which really didn’t make sense either, but in the framework of the story it did have a certain kind of 'logic' to it. There had to be a single victor and Katniss and Peta ruined that neat little plan by surviving together as a team. This naturally led to the events in books two and three; however, in The Testing, the plan is to garner 20 really excellent students from the hundred or so potentials, yet we have a complete free-for-all out in the 'wilderness" in this last phase of testing. Conceivably, every single one of the remaining 59 people could die! What, then, is the point? Where is the advantage to anyone, especially society? How did a people who had survived a vicious war get themselves into a position where the vileness continues, and is now perpetrated not by some foreign power, but by your own people? None of this is explained or even touched upon in any meaningful way.

And what’s to be the goal of this testing - to populate a university with homicidal savages? These are to be the leaders? Where is the outrage from the colonies that so many talented and skilled young people disappear, never to be seen or heard from again? Where is the outrage from the students who survive? Is the brain-washing so good that not a single one of them remains even remotely suspicious about how they got there and what it cost? Are all of these supposed leaders nothing but cold-blooded killers?

I found it rather odd that a female writer, writing about a strong female protagonist would pen a phrase like this one: "...signs of the destruction man can cause against his fellow man." How genderist is that? The pendulum swings both ways, but the only way to stop genderism is to halt the pendulum in the middle and never let it swing again. Swinging it over in one direction in order to try and make up for it having been swung too far in the other direction is doomed to failure. Charbonneau should have written, "...signs of the destruction humankind can perpetrate against their fellow humans." or something along those lines. Unless, of course, she actually wanted to blame all men and no women for the destruction caused by the war, which, of course, is again genderist.

We learn more about the war during this final survival journey, and given what we’re told about the chemical and biological weapons used, and their (specifically-mentioned) long-lasting effects (to say nothing of radiation!), I find it hard to believe that they can find so many edible vegetables along their route and walk through bombed cities without suffering radiation poisoning. There's also a disconnect between the huge emphasis placed on testing and purifying water, when that's set against their unquestioning ingestion of one wild plant after another, one snared or shot game animal after another, with no testing whatsoever.

The parallels with The Hunger Games unfortunately grow, with Malencia garnering for herself a bow and some arrows, with her sleeping in a tree, with booby trap mines, and with mutated wild animals - specifically wolves - chasing her and Tomas. This latter is poorly done. I know it’s routine in movies to show humans out-running four-legged animals, but in real life it never happens, and the way this scene is written exacerbates the problem by having them successfully run one hundred and fifty yards to the road, get on their bikes, and pedal away to safety, whilst the wolves not only fail to catch them, but even decide to give up the chase? That part dropped me right out of my suspension of disbelief.

Fortunately for this review, my interest was revitalized as their journey continued and a strange man began randomly appearing. He twice tosses water and food to Malencia. Tomas never sees him. On his third visit, the man reveals that he knows Malencia's name. He claims he wants to help her because there's something seriously wrong with this system, and it needs fixing. Well duhh! But while he gives her a chemical which is supposed to counter-act the truth serum the successful candidates are given for their debriefing after this test, he really tells her nothing except to say that her family is at risk; no other information is imparted, so this part was nothing but frustrating. It made the guy seem completely pointless.

So after a few more (mis)adventures, only 29 make it over the finish line. We're told that 14 of those will be eliminated during the subsequent interview process leaving only 15 to enter the university, but this conflicts with what we were told earlier - that twenty could be accepted and this is later contradicted again as twenty are indeed accepted. But we are never told why it's twenty. Where did that arbitrary number come from?

While waiting for the final selection results, which takes a couple of days, Malencia discovers a recording feature on the nav-comm device she 'borrowed' from her brother Zeen. She records everything she can of what happened during the testing in the limited recording space available, and she hides the device in her clothes. So we of course finish with Malencia being selected along with nineteen others, and every one of them has had their mind wiped of everything which happened during testing; even old enemies are now good friends. Then Malencia finds the recording she left for herself.

It was this last part which changed my mind about whether I wanted to continue reading this series. I was pretty much done with it during that final phase of testing, but this mind-wipe, effectively resetting everyone back to a baseline intrigued me, and I find myself really curious to see what Charbonneau does with her tabula rasa. In this regard, this outdoes The Hunger Games because I don't see how Charbonneau can retell the same story in a different Guise as Collins did. She'll ve to come up with something different, and I'm interested to see what that is. So I'm going to rate this as worthy. I have no doubt that thousands of The Hunger Games fans will love it, but those who don't want to find themselves repeatedly asking "Now, what was that?" during their reading might want to think twice before deciding to grab this one off the shelf.

There's a short interview with Charbonneau by fellow blogspotter Lenore which amused me because in it, Charbonneau relates that if there were a theme song for this novel it would be Every Breath You Take by The Police. Her explanation reveals that she's sharper than many because she properly understands what Sting did in that song. It's funny to me because I've been listening a lot recently to the excellent Try (amazing vid here by Pink, and the first thing I thought of on hearing it was that Police song; then I thought that U2's With or Without You is actually even more reminiscent. Mashup anyone?!

Starters by Lissa Price

Title: Starters
Author: Lissa Price
Publisher: Delacorte makes it all but impossible to find their website, so go fish!
Rating: worthy!

What can I say about Starters?! Nothing yet! It's early days (or early pages!) so there's still plenty of time for it to go to hell in a hand-basket, but I am very excited about it so far. It’s well-written and refreshingly new, although it definitely has roots in other stories of a similar nature, such as The Surrogates, and Dollhouse. There's a sequel coming (Enders), and there are some mini in-between stories, too.

There's a "book trailer" for it! I have no idea what the point of these books trailers is supposed to be. Seriously. This is not a movie. It's highly unlikely that the characters in this trailer will ever be in any movie made about this book. The lead looks nothing whatsoever like Callie as pictured on the book cover - and yes, I know that's a sketch and not a photo, but it's far more a likeness of Callie than is the actor in the trailer! Why didn't they get the same girl to sit for that? Neither the girl in the trailer nor the boy who plays her brother look even remotely hungry, let alone like they've been living on the street for some considerable time. Were the producers deliberately trying to mislead the public about what they would read? Books are not movies, you publishers. Deal with it. Embrace it. Vivent la différence!

Okay, I'm all better now! The protagonist is Callie (I'm not sure about that name, but what the heck, let’s go with it!), a sixteen-year-old girl who is homeless and orphaned. All she has in the world is her younger brother Tyler, who is sick, and her good friend Michael. And she has a dear hope. In Callie's world, a war has been fought and the devastation made horrific by the release of a 'spore' bomb, which apparently killed off millions. The weird thing is that it killed only the 'Middlers' - that is, people between the ages of 20 and 60. Starters are the young, like Callie. For some reason they were immune to the spores. The Enders are the very old - and in this future, the Enders live until they’re well into their hundreds - some even to two hundred. They were not affected by the spores, either, again for reasons unexplained - unless there was some vaccination going on: as usual for the young and the old, and the middle never got it, but again, if that's the case, there's no explanation for why it wasn't administered. It's not like they didn't know what was coming.

This all seems a bit artificial to me, but it contributes to the urgency of the story. There's also another division: there are the rich, and there are the poor (how that happened is equally mysterious), and the poor either avoid the marshals and squat in whichever derelict building they can find - and from which they're periodically (and quite literally) smoked out, or they get captured and effectively turned into child-labor slaves.

The only alternative is the one which Callie is effectively forced into pursuing: she can rent her body to the Enders. This is illegal, but it's done clandestinely and is hugely successful and very lucrative. If she does only three rentals, she'll earn enough money to rent an apartment for a couple of years at least, and get herself, her brother, and even Michael off the streets. The body rental isn't quite what you might think: it’s not a sexual thing. There is a technology which can allow the Enders to take over the body - like in The Surrogates except that they're taking over a real body, not a robotic one. The rental can last for a day, a week, a month. Those are the three to which Callie is subject, but the third one lasts only for a week before Callie wakes up to discover that she's still in rental mode, and not back at the facility waking up to receive her reward.

Something has gone wrong and Callie realizes how dramatically wrong it is when she hears a voice inside her head which tells her not to go back to the Prime Destinations facility which orchestrates these rentals. Clearly someone on the inside has gone to bat for her. Instead, Callie takes over her renter's life - in a rich mansion with a servant! - and she starts to see the young man she met at the club where she recovered her consciousness while trying to figure out what to do about her new circumstances. Unfortunately, her renter isn't done with her, and she blacks out for eighteen hours - apparently when Helena, the 125-year-old woman who is renting her, takes back control!

Over the next couple of days, Callie realizes that Helena is planning on shooting someone - someone she blames for the death of her granddaughter Emma. Emma evidently rented her own body for no reason other than to get the free make-over which comes with renting. Unfortunately, Emma died and this is why Helena wants revenge, and why she's willing to sacrifice Callie's body to achieve it! This plot point with Emma's motives seemed a bit weak to me, but I'm enjoying this enough right now to be willing to let Lissa Price pull the wool over my eyes just a bit. Plus I love the name 'Lissa'!

Well, after all that, I briefly had the horrible feeling that Price was betraying me, getting me all excited and thrilled with this read, and then letting me down in the middle, but she picked it up and got through it without failing; then she upped the ante! This is the way to write a novel!

So Callie arranges to stay the night with her new acquaintance, Madison, a century-old gamer. Blake calls her and invites her to the very speech which Helena was supposed to use as her venue to assassinate Blake's grandfather, the senator. Naturally, Callie refuses to go, which is why she's hiding out with Madison, but then she changes her mind and goes. When she gets there, Helena tunes in to her again and tells her there's a gun hidden in the rest room. Callie at first refuses to go get it, but Helena claims that she has to because it has her fingerprints on it.

This is where I felt let down because I'm thinking, "So what?" So what if it has her fingerprints on it? No one has her fingerprints on record! She could leave the gun alone, where it would remain undiscovered for some time, but she doesn’t. This was foolish on Callie's part, because at any time Helena could have reclaimed her body and killed the senator, but as it happens, that didn't.

The second problem was that I thought we were going to start sliding into Le Stupide, but fortunately, we didn’t slip too far. The problem with meeting the senator, which Callie never once considered, is that when she initially went to see him, she was ejected from his office because she had been there before (under Helena's control) and caused trouble). This is a problem because now Callie's appearance is known to the senator's staff and his security, so showing up wanting to meet him at the function is foolish, but this is completely glossed over in favor of something else; the senator recognizes her as a renter! Callie is helped by other renter acquaintances to escape from the function.

She returns to Madison's place and sees the senator make an announcement on the TV: he's going to revoke the 'minor's can’t work' policy (why that policy was in place and how it’s being violated routinely by the work details is not addressed!) so they can work for various corporations. The leader amongst these is Prime Destinations, of course. On a secret side channel to which Madison subscribes, Prime Destinations makes a parallel announcement to its premium subscribers: they will be able to permanently rent/buy minors and thereby start their lives over! The leader of Prime Destinations: a very shadowy figure whose appearance and voice are both disguised, explains a few details, which thoroughly disgusts both Callie and Helena, but Helena is evidently killed since she starts failing in her communications with Callie and her last words are for Callie to run!

Callie tracks down the guy who (at Helena's instigation) did the mods to her brain chip. He can’t remove the chip but he can glue a small plate to her head to block it which should be good for about a week. Having done this, Callie takes off, avoiding a chasing SUV, and contacts Blake. When they meet, she tells him everything, and he invites her to the family ranch so they can try to dissuade the senator from going ahead with this horrible plan.

So now I find that I'm wondering if the Prime Destinations leader is actually Blake himself! But you know how lousy I am at figuring these things out, so I'll be amazed if this idea turns out to be the right one. Callie runs into Michael on the street and discovers that he has rented himself leaving her brother Tyler in the care of Florina, Michael's would-be girlfriend. That's completely irresponsible of him. I'm guessing he's going to be killed off to leave the playing field clear for Blake. Callie has arranged for Tyler and Florina to stay in a hotel for a few days, but then she learns that some Ender has picked them up - to use them to blackmail her presumably.

I also have to wonder how this 'permanency' plan is gong to work! The story is told as though there are endless orphans to be had, but clearly there are not. There was only a fixed number to begin with, and that number cannot grow significantly. Remember there are no 'Middlers' - none of the people who normally have a family. The only people who are likely to be family starters are the starters, and they're not breeding. On the contrary - they're being rounded up and put into hard jobs where life expectancy isn’t that great. The ones who aren't rounded up have an even shorter life expectancy.

Having whined about that, I'm still on board with this story which remains intriguing and engrossing. Callie visits the senator's ranch and takes him at gunpoint, hoping to meet the shadowy and reclusive dude in charge of Prime Destinations, but the senator deliberately crashes the car and escapes. Now Callie is a fugitive, accused of attempted assassination; however, instead of being arrested for that, she's captured as a loose minor and sent to a prison!

But it all works out in the end. And there's a sequel! I'm Ian Wood and I recommned this novel!

The After Girls by Leah Konen

Title: The After Girls
Author: Leah Konen
Publisher: Adams Media Corporation
Rating: worthy!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of her story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

This novel is very well written, although there are a few technical glitches I've noticed, FYI the author and editor:

"There were a lot of places like around here" (p5) I suspect it should be "There were a lot of places like that around here".

There's a missed carriage-return between two speeches from different characters (p98).

"Just let me know I you need me" should be "Just let me know if you need me, presumably (p106).

"...looking at Ella friend in the mirror…" (p158) perhaps ought to be "...looking at her friend in the mirror...", maybe?

"The two of them tread quietly..." (p176) ought to be "The two of them trod quietly..." (wrong tense)?

"She'd thought that his flirtation was Ella was cute…" (p234) should be (I think) "She'd thought that his flirtation with Ella was cute…"

" "He's just such a dick", he said... " (p258) should be, I suspect, " "He's just such a dick", she said... "

"She looked read the words of her song…" (p259), maybe should read "She read the words of her song…"? (remove 'looked')

Other than that, it’s really well written. I liked the way I was pulled into the story, and seduced into caring about the characters, about who they are, what they're going through, how they came to be this way. There's no fakery here. Except for some small issues discussed later, you can believe these people are real, and accept that they feel as they do and behave as they will. It's hard to believe that I'm excited about reading what is, at heart, a depressing story! Nicely done!

The story begins when three friends, in the summer they have before they all go off to college, lose one of their number to suicide. Astrid apparently poisoned herself in the tiny one-room derelict cabin in the woods where the three of them used to meet. Ella found her, and she and Sydney are dealing with this horrific loss in strikingly different ways. The novel alternates between Ella's PoV and Sydney's PoV, but it's all told in third person. Ella is almost paralyzed by Astrid's death, not dealing with it at all well, seeing a cold, black hole everywhere in her life where Astrid should be, whereas Sydney is badly hurt by it, but trying to keep her life from sliding away because of it.

Both of them feel awful in that they think they should have seen this coming: that they should have detected signs; have been able to tell that things were wrong, and have been able to intercept this event and prevent it, and as it turns out, yes, they should have! Ella feels worse at least in part because she found the body. Sydney wasn't with her that day, and she feels bad about that. Ella is having bad dreams about Astrid. Both of them have family and boyfriends, but none of that seems to help; their boyfriends in particular are essentially blind to what they're going through, but the two young women don’t seem to be able to lean on each other, either.

Sydney is in a three-piece folk band, which gives her something to focus on. Ella, unfortunately, has to go back to work at the coffee shop owned by Astrid's mom, Grace, where she worked regularly with Astrid. Astrid's mom has pretty much shut down. She lost her husband some years before, and now Astrid, and it's looking like Grace has pretty much left, too. Her sister comes to stay for a while, and brings Astrid's cousin, Jake, who starts to become friends with Ella, but what gets really weird is when Ella leaves a message on Astrid's F-book page. She wanted to ask why this happened, but chickened out and instead posted "I miss you". The last thing she expected was for Astrid to reply in kind.

Ella is invited by Jake to come over and eat with Astrid's family. This highlights an interesting theme in this novel which is that it’s really about the young people. The adults are nothing but vaguely sketched background figures which is fine, normally, for a YA novel, but in this particular story, where someone has died and made a huge impact, I find Ella's mom's lack of engagement with Ella to be disturbing, especially in light of the fact that there is no hint of any counseling going on, or even being discussed. They're all out of school so a school counselor isn't obviously in the picture, but there's neither sign of such a person taking the initiative and contacting these young women, nor of any other kind of support system here at all, and Ella's mom seems really out of her life. Just saying! There;s also a notable lack of focus on Astrid;s mom, but I have no explanation for this, given what's going on with her.

Anyway, Ella inevitably ends up in Astrid's room and Grace finds her there and rather gracelessly loses it, essentially throwing Ella out of the house. Like a child, Ella runs off into the woods and goes into the cabin, where she finds photos of the three of them on the floor where Sydney left them, and it freaks her out. She hurries over to Sydney's place and tells her what's going on, so the next day they visit the cabin and all the photos are back up on the walls! This freaks out Ella even more, but not Sydney who thinks it’s a sick joke - the photos, the F-book comments, the phone calls - perpetrated by someone playing a trick on Ella, so Ella loses it with Sydney! Now that they're rather on the slide, Jake takes up the slack, inviting Ella to a concert, which she really enjoys. It's almost as if he planned it that way...!

So I have to wonder not only what cousin Jake is up to but also what mom Grace is up to. The pills Astrid used to kill herself were from Grace's large collection of anti-depressants. We've had it revealed that Grace was really, really strict with her - forbidding her to cut her hair, for example, and other eccentricities. Is it possible that Grace really isn’t the sweet second mom which Ella has always accepted her as? Is it possible she killed Astrid for some perceived infraction of her rules? I have to admit that this has crossed my mind! Is Astrid really communicating from the grave or is Sydney right about it all being a sick joke? What if Astrid was less of a victim than a victimizer? Or is Ella so far over the edge that she's doing all of this to herself? She has stolen Astrid's journal, after all.... These are a few of the wild thoughts which ran through my mind during my reading of this novel!

I have a bit of an issue with how the adults relate to the girls in this novel, particularly to Ella. She's talked to by her mom and by Grace and by Caroline (Grace's sister, Jake's mom) like she's a lot younger than 17! OTOH, Ella behaves as if she's a lot younger than 17! I don’t know if that's intentional, or if it's just inappropriately written, but I certainly wouldn’t like being called "sweetie" were I seventeen, male or female. Maybe that's just me!

Somehow Ella talks Sydney and Jake into having a séance at the cabin, and this novel takes a decidedly darker turn after that. There are surprising revelations about Astrid, missing pages from her journal, Sydney's change of heart about Ella's perspective. But what about Ella's shameful memory, after all her denials to herself that she had known anything was wrong, of a truly important interaction with Astrid that should have told her something? Sydney undergoes this same revelation - she should also have noticed something about Astrid given an interaction they had. Both Ella and Sydney had been blind, or distracted, or both, and when the final revelation comes, it’s almost as painful as anything else they've experienced.

I am going to recommend this one because of the quality of the writing and the characterizations; it's so well done that I was willing to forgive some loose ends and red herrings! Go ahead - give it a try and see what you think!

Vortex by Julie Cross

Title: Vortex
Author: Julie Cross
Publisher: Thomas Dunne
Rating: WARTY!

This is the sequel to Tempest reviewed elsewhere in this blog, and of which I developed mixed feelings, but not enough to put me off trying the second volume. Unfortunately, I ran into trouble right from the off! Tragically, there is a prologue, but Cross is sneaky: she labeled the first page as prologue and then on the next page went to a different type-face and started labeling what looked like chapters with time and date, so after I skimmed several pages, I mistakenly concluded that this was where the story began! I was tricked into reading prologue! Very sneaky.

Unfortunately for her ruse, she changed typeface again to this really nasty faux free-hand face which I refused to read because it was too much work. Novels are relaxation and entertainment, not work; I refuse to work for my entertainment and it certainly isn't relaxing to be so Vexed. yes, I said it: vexed! Cross make me cross!

I found chapter one hidden away some thirty pages in! What's up with that?! Cool trick though - she got me! When I actually started reading chapter one, I found it a bit hard to get into. It was Jackson and his "partner" Kendrick (yet Jackson is convinced he's alone and he's still having flashbacks to Holly!) training for the Tempest organization, and the training seemed pointless to me. Why would he need to be dropped onto a mountainside? When is that ever going to happen in the normal course of his activities?!

So when he and Kendrick get down to the HQ, we have to wonder why this HQ is in the foothills of the Alps! We were expressly told that their training was going to be in the Middle East in the previous novel, so their unexplained change in location is confusing at best, but it isn't as big of a mystery as is why they put their operatives at risk of being slaughtered by having them impersonate members of the EoT (Enemas of Time) to attack Jackson and Kendrick. Fortunately, their lives were saved by the fact that Jackson and Kendrick are completely incompetent!

So let's move right along, then, shall we? They're tortured in an interrogation room by their own people, but later they find out it wasn't really torture. So that's okay then, isn't it? Jackson and Kendrick failed their torture - I'm not kidding! - so they're punished for failing their torture(!) by being given an assignment to subject their partner to their worst fear! This is designed to inculcate trust! Jackson's torture is to kiss a hot babe: Jenni Stewart, whom he hates presumably because she helped him in the first novel. He successfully kisses her and she likes it, but then the red warning lights start flashing all over the HQ because there is a death threat to the German chancellor.

Naturally, the Germans, being completely and utterly incompetent and useless, have to have the Tempest team rescue their own chancellor, so the team (that is to say, four trainee operatives and two supervisors because we know for a fact that seasoned operatives are non-existent in Tempest for reasons which can never be explained to us readers.) sneak into Germany uninvited and unannounced.

With guns drawn, they encounter some EoTs, but not a single one of the Tempest team shoots a single one of the EoTs, so they pretty much all get away to cause havoc elsewhere and else when. The Tempest team discovers a bomb, but it's so futuristic that they cannot defuse it. Apparently the bomb is so futuristic that it can't be disguised to look like something other than a bomb, either, thereby making it really easy to spot. It also has a weird side-effect: it makes people stupid. It makes them so stupid that not a single one of them is smart enough to think of Jackson taking it and jumping to the middle of the ocean, let it go, and jump back!

But don't worry - there's a handy eleven year old redhead nearby who defuses the bomb. Yes, it's Emily. She couldn't apparently be bothered to tell Jackson, the first time that she saw him, that he need not show up to this bomb threat because she would defuse it, and clearly there was absolutely no need to tell him that if he did come, he should come in numbers, packing weapons because there would be eight EoTs, and why on Earth, at this point, would she bother to give him even so much as the slightest hint of what's happening, so he knows what to do and what not to do?

This sequel is becoming harder and harder to like, not least of which is because there are small parts that I do like, and reading them I feel good about it again, but then (almost inevitably it seems) the good part is rudely interrupted by another attack of Le Stupide . Nevertheless, I will try to press on and hope against hope that the good will outweigh the bad - or at least the bad will be explained so it doesn't seem so bad - as I progress further.

Well now I'm about half-way through this and Cross has done it again: she's made it interesting, but that's leavened with some confusion! They go to NYC for an assignment, and Senator Healy seems a bit creepy to me and knows far to much about Tempest and time travel. Healy wanted Jackson, for reasons unexplained, to pal up with Jenni Stewart, and he tries one night with her, but chickens out of going all the way even though she wants him to.

It's Healy's function they're to attend, and of course, Holly is there. This makes twice since he's been in NYC that Jackson has run into Holly, who is with a quarterback for a boyfriend. Knowing that her safety depends on his avoiding her like the plague, Jackson of course, pals up with her on both occasions. I'm forced to the only conclusion left to me: that Jackson is a jerk who has no regard for Holly's well-being at all. He's a selfish prick, and that's all there is to him.

At the function, all of the Tempest people in attendance behave like idiots and respond to an alert which has demanded that they all congregate in one location where they can conveniently be blown up. Fortunately, it's the same bomb which Jackson saw Emily defuse, so he naturally is the expert on defusing it. Then Cassidy, who he thinks is his mom for reasons unknown (I guess I missed that part - or glazed-eyed my way over it) grabs him and jumps him despite the fact that he and all the other operatives have taken anti-time jump medication. How that works is a mystery but by far the bigger mystery is why no one seems to think that the total failure of the anti-time jump medication is any big deal, much less something which is reportable. For that matter, how come there isn't a mass transplanting of this one time-jump gene so they can have as many time-jumpers as the EoT has?

But Jackson exhibits a new skill here - he derails Cassidy's time-jump and jumps her to a location of his own, which does her some serious damage, but not enough to prevent her jumping away again. So once again we have multiple EoT agents, and not a single one of them is killed by the Tempest crew. They they whine about there being so many enemy agents. Well DUHH! Frankly, at this point, I find myself wishing this novel had been about the EoT instead of Tempest. That novel sounds much more engrossing. Oh, and BTW, there is yet another evil organization which is different from Tempest and from EoT, but I forget the name. I'll post it later.

So now Jackson is in the apartment where his other mom lives, Eileen, who is Kevin's (his dad's) girlfriend, with a two year old Jackson and Courtney. He tries to talk her into coming with him (and the hell with the two two-year olds!) but fortunately, she's actually responsible and refuses to leave them. There is, at this point, no explanation as to why no one has time-jumped back to the castle to when the bomb was planted so they could take out the bomber nor why no one has time-jumped back to the Senator's function to when the bomb was planted so they could take out the bombers. Every single thing Tempest is doing is completely reactive; not a one of them even thinks about taking proactive action to derail these bomb plots and take out the enemy agents.

So why am I still reading this? I still have mixed feelings about it: there are parts of it which are genuinely interesting and engrossing, and these are still common enough that I'm inclined to go along with it - especially since I'm half-way through it; then no one can say I didn't give the series a fair trial. But I have to admit that it's not very easy when there is so much stuff that makes me cringe, or worse, that makes no sense even within the story's own framework.

The story continues, yet again multiple EoTs show up; yet again not a single one is killed by Tempest even though several Tempest agents have good reason to want them dead and have guns drawn. Mason, a Tempest agent is killed because he's stupid and because the Tempest agents are nothing but wimps and wusses. Stewart reacts badly to Mason's death, which somehow causes her to find out about Holly, so Jackson tells her everything and then tells Kendrick everything. He runs into Holly casing his apartment. Now she's an agent! Seriously? Despite the fact that before going into his apartment and finding Holly, he 911's Kendrick and Stewart, neither one of them shows up! How useless is this organization?! Totally inept!

Holly thinks Jackson killed Adam. Despite his not doing so, he never denies it! Later, she leads this numb-nuts directly into a trap where she puts her second hand - not her other hand, but her second hand on her gun! How many hands does Holly have and how cool would she be on a date?! As they leave the tiny room under the subway, they step out onto the tracks, say a sentence or two and are instantly outside the subway without even moving! Honestly? Le Stupide is strong with this novel.

Next, Doc Melvin is killed by Eyewall - the other other organization whose name I'd forgotten because it’s so close to eyewash. Once again we see people being killed left, right, and center, and not a single Tempest agent kills a single EoT (oh, except for when Action Jackson kills one by accident and then breaks down in tears because of it - near enough). They're so passive and so reactive instead of being proactive that at this point I'm, fully rooting for the EoTs to completely wipe-out Tempest which has repeatedly proven itself to be a complete loser organization, clueless, and brain-dead.

This story keeps getting worse and there's less and less leavening to help it out. It's sad, because Cross obviously knows how to plot and write, and a lot of the story - especially in Tempest - was good, but Le Stupide crept in even there, and it’s been far worse in Vortex. I have to wonder what went wrong. It’s like she's lost her focus and is just tossing anything and everything in there to fluff up the story and is speed-writing it without properly thinking about what she's doing or how it will sound to the reader. I can put up with mistakes, and even with goofiness and plot holes if the story is engaging and the characters make me want to root for them but I can’t root for Le Stupide!

I really wanted to like this, and believe me, I tried. Even with some misgivings after Tempest, I tried volume two, but it just became harder and harder to take it seriously when we had multiple Hollys showing up, multiple Jacksons showing up, one of which killed one of the Hollys. Multiple Emilys, Mason resurrected, Courtney resurrected. It's nothing but an unholy mess. I've never been a fan of soap opera, and this is precisely what the Tempest series has turned into. Consequently, I will not be reading any further sequels in this series. I'm tempted to go back and change the rating on Tempest after this mess, but whatever I gave that, I'll let stand and just move on to greener pastures.

The Silver Ninja by Wilmar Luna

Title: The Silver Ninja
Author: Wilmar Luna
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of his story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I honestly wanted to give this one a great write-up, and help another writer along the way, but I can't. It started out well enough, and the writing is very competent in terms of spelling and grammar, but every time I would relax and start to feel that I was getting into the stride of the story, I was tripped up yet again by a poor story-telling, which uncomfortably reminded me, each time, that I was reading a story, so I was unable to get lost in it or go with the flow. One of the big "selling points" for me was the claim that this novel, rather than setting forth upon a sea of tropes and clichés, would instead make glorious summer by this son of Luna, but that didn't happen. All I have to say to that is: look at the cover! More on this anon.

This book starts out rather predictably, but it moves fast (and there's no prologue/introduction! Yeay!). The superhero is Cindy Ames, not yet a superhero but we know where this is going. Refreshingly, she's married. Disturbingly, she's patronized. She has a sister called Jadie (Jadie?) with whom she has a love-hate/sibling rivalry relationship. She's an Olympic gold medal winner (although quite rusty) and a martial artist (although quite rusty!), and she teaches gymnastics to teens. Her husband conveniently works in development of military weapons. He's called out of a high-powered meeting on that very topic to go to the hospital where Cindy, a stabbing victim, is laid up.

What happened? She was walking the last block to her home when she encountered a couple where the male half was abusing the female half. Cindy stepped in, and being martial arts trained, laid him on the ground rather easily. What she didn’t know was that this was a set-up: two other guys were in hiding, and one of them stabbed her before they all made off with her purse.

This didn’t ring even remotely true. Four people and this deceptive set-up when they could simply have threatened her with the knife or over-powered her with their superior numbers? They didn’t know she was trained in martial arts; she was just a victim to them. And what, exactly, are they going to do with their ill-gotten gains? A purse is hardly a rewarding robbery for four people who are well out of their teens! So, a really poor set-up, but it gives her a motive to become what we know she will become especially since, as she lies there too weak to move, not knowing if she's going to die, no phone to call for help, some teens come by smoking pot and hurry past her, not wanting to call the police for fear of being busted. So we get the message: victim, no help to be had. Fortunately, her sister Jadie shows up, since they’re having a gathering that night, and she takes care of her.

Now comes the patronizing. When her husband Jonas arrives at the hospital, Cindy's parents are already there. Given that Jonas left straight from his meeting and hurried there, how both sets of parents arrived before him is a complete mystery, but her father wails, "Why would they hurt my little girl?". That's truly pathetic, but it isn't as bad as what her own husband thinks when he goes into her room: "Why hadn't he been there to protect her?" Honestly? She could kick his ass, and this is the best he can offer her? For a novel that starts out with the stated purpose of studiously avoiding clichés and tropes, it sure descends into them quickly! Hopefully it will dig itself out of this slur, given its promising start.

It really bothers me that we treat people, especially women, this way. Every chance they’ve been given to get onto a level playing field (even on level playing fields!), women have stepped up, including during wartime, yet whenever we hear people - not just politicians - talking about war, they're all-too-often two-faced about it. When the US military is talked about, they're inevitably the toughest, the meanest, the hardest trained, the best equipped, the most successful, the dominant, but on the other hand these are our "children". Seriously? They're either tough enough or they're weak babies. Which is it? If you want to portray them as tough "hombres" don’t mess with us, then they can't be our poor, weak children in need of nurture and protection. We either trust them or we don't.

The same applies to this novel. Either Cindy is a kick-ass athlete and martial artist, or she's a poor weak woman who needs to be taken care of in a loving, non-threatening, nurturing setting. She can’t be both. When are we going to learn this lesson? When Jonas talks to her, he's going on about how she could have taken them if she hadn’t been bushwhacked, telling her "You’re still dangerous in my eyes", so where the hell did his previous "protect her" thought come from? He doesn’t even emote any anger towards her assailants! This "novel" seems more and more like a comic book the further I read, and not in a good way.

Hopefully Luna will take care of these issues as I read on, but the cover "art" certainly doesn't give me hope! Normally this is out of the author's hands, which is why I do my own, and publish my own, but Wilmar Luna is a fellow Create Space self-publisher which means that he had complete control over the whole process. So why, if he's supposedly shunning the road most traveled, is he countenancing cover art like this? Note that the print version of this is evidently illustrated, but I don't have that (perhaps it's just as well, given the cover!), so let's put that aside and focus on the writing.

So while Cindy is taken off for some testing (why this wasn't done immediately is a mystery; her wound apparently isn't even stitched, and she hasn’t talked to the police!), the military general from Jonas's earlier meeting calls him to reveal that his R&D budget is slashed because of the economy, and if Jonas can’t get his experimental stuff up and running in two weeks, he's going to be cut, too. So, pressure!

Later, Cindy's released and already has a new cell phone! What? That time of night, with her injury they stopped on the way home for no other reason than to buy her a cell phone? Unlikely! Or did she just imagine it? It's probably one of those phones with "small, little icons"...! And why is she going to work the very next day after being assaulted and stabbed? That night she has a nightmare about people breaking into the house. This is where we see this new cell phone - so does she have one or did she dream it? And if she dreamed it, why didn't she use it to call the cops when she thought people were breaking onto the house?! If she's well enough mentally to go to work and not at all scared to go outdoors, then why is she having traumatic nightmares? This is rather confusing stuff here, but I guess we can allow her a bit of confusion given what she's been through.

Well, my hope that things would work out was rapidly dashed! It all started with the phrase: "As she lie reclined"! At least Luna knows that biceps is the singular - but then he forgets it again on page 110! He doesn’t know how to use an apostrophe either, employing Jonas' instead of Jonas's. Page 74 is a completely blank page. I assume this is because the chapters start on a facing page in the print version, but his doesn't work in the ebook version, where every page is a facing page!

These are things which ought to be taken care of, but let's press on with the story. Cindy's husband is completely non-understanding of her condition. What a jerk! Then he asks her "Are you O.K.?" What a moron! Of course she's not okay! Why is she even married to this guy? He tells her he will always be there for her - after she's spent hours worried, trying to reach him on the phone and him not answering! I detest this guy.

Cindy performs an heroic almost ESP-induced rescue of two girls from a broken water pipe that crashes through the ceiling, and since classes are now canceled for the day, she visits her husband at Lucent labs. I wonder if Luna knows there is a real Lucent lab: Alcatel-Lucent, a giant telecommunications equipment corporation headquartered in Paris?

I wonder even more if this is where we’re finally going to have this tale take off...!

Jonas gives a demo of his new weapons technology. A silver liquid from a "beaker" somehow manages to move itself onto the floor and assume a fully-grown human shape. That would have to be some sized "beaker"! The humanoid-shaped armor is then pounded on by miniaturized(!) rail guns and suffers nary a scratch. Luna seems to have forgotten that bullets not only carry penetrative power which can pierce skin and slice up internal organs, but they also carry a huge amount of kinetic energy (especially if they are coming from a rail gun). I can see the armor preventing even powerful ammunition from penetrating - we already have armor which does that, but no armor can prevent damage from high-impact projectiles if it cannot deflect this kinetic energy, too. What this means is that internal organs can still be damaged by the blow which would be more powerful than a punch from a heavyweight boxing champion - and focused on a much smaller area. There appears to be no effort made to address this issue.

The armor walks to the wall and climbs it; then it disappears - using some sort of camouflage. Here's the deal: if remote controlled armor can do this, then why do we need to put humans inside it? This has apparently escaped everyone's attention! Putting humans inside such a powerful weapon would be like insisting we have a pilot ride atop the reaper remote-controlled drones! Absurd!

This magic silver armor even has super-human strength, being able to bend a steel girder! How it can do this is conveniently left unexplained. So now we’re out of the realm of sci-fi and into sci-fantasy. It’s even more fantastical when there is a glitch and the animated armor returns unexpectedly to a puddle of silver liquid on the floor, and after seeing this, everyone is so disgusted that they completely forget what’s so far been amazingly demonstrated, and all they all dismiss this as fantasy (well...!) and walk out in a huff! Excuse me?

If this were any other novel, I would at this point say "Check please! I'm outta here!" and quit reading because this has dropped my disbelief to the floor just as effectively as the silver ninja dropped from the ceiling, but since this is an independent Create Space effort, I feel a bit of a compulsion to give it my best shot (yeah, I'm biased, I admit it!) so in the hope of it turning a corner some time soon, I'll continue at least for a while, but I'm only about 25% in so far, so this might be a tough one to ride out! And unfortunately, it gets worse!

When Cindy arrives to meet her husband at his work place, the entire lab is abandoned, including security. Nothing is locked. Seriously? All that equipment and top secret research, and anyone can now just walk in off the street? The computers aren't even shut down. This is completely stupid. She eventually finds her way to the demo room and of course gets the silver ninja liquid on her, which attaches itself to her and starts trying to take over her body, stripping off her clothes in the process (of course - what was that about tropes?) and encasing her "...like a chocolate banana dipped in metal"?! Her boobs clang together like a pair of tin cans. So much for stealth mode. Maybe she can join them together with a piece of taut string and make phone calls?

Eventually she's completely covered, and this is how she becomes The Silver Ninja, but she's not even remotely freaked out by all that's happened! She carries on a perfectly ordinary and humorous conversation with a lab assistant called Michael who just stopped by to retrieve his cell phone. Not once do either of them even consider for a split second calling Cindy's husband. Worse than this, Michael insists that Cindy not even tell her husband that she's wearing an admirably-working model of the project for which he's ultimately responsible, and over which he just lost his job - and she agrees!

Luna is making this harder, with every paragraph, to keep reading, much less start really liking this novel. So. moving right along, Cindy eventually gets to go home. She accidentally breaks the door on her way into the house startling her husband who is, of course, home, having lost his job. That part (breaking the door) is funny, but what's not remotely funny is this relationship with her husband. They don't seem like a happily married loving couple at all; their interaction is off. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it seems forced and artificial to me. Worse than this, on this particular occasion, is that despite being home pretty much all day, Jonas never called her once to offer her a ride home, even though he knew she wanted one, and even though he knew she would be coming home alone and was having a hard time with that. Michael never offered her a ride either for that matter. These guys are jerks.

That's understandable, but what’s inexplicable is where this day went! The water-pipe break happened first thing in the morning right after Cindy arrived at the gym. Immediately afterwards, she went to Jonas's (or maybe I should say Jonas'?!) workplace, but his meeting was miraculously over by then, and quite literally everyone had left before she got there! That's quite simply unbelievable. It’s not even logistically feasible. Worse, she was only there a couple of hours - definitely not literally all day, and afterwards she immediately went home, yet it’s twilight when she gets there? That's not feasible, either! Yeah, there's a sentence slipped in later about her train journey, but unless it was a humongously long train journey, it still makes zero sense.

Cindy next unprecedentedly intercepts a phone message out of the blue, in her brain(!), talking about some kidnappers having "your sister". Despite the fact that this comes randomly over the airwaves and not via any direct communication with her through the usual channels, she immediately leaps to the assumption that this refers to her own sister rather than someone else's and she instantly plans to take Jonas's half-million dollar Saleen S7 penis-substitute to make the journey to Jersey City. But she apparently takes the wrong vehicle because the one she takes has gull-wing doors, but the Saleen S7 actually has butterfly doors - which are not at all mistakable for a gull-wing design. And she does all of this without even once trying to call her sister to see if Jadie answers to, I don't know, maybe try to determine if she really has been kidnapped?!

She arrives at the metal-smelting plant in Jersey City where this sister is supposedly being held, and she immediately enters the fray, but falls into an open vat of molten zinc! Zinc has a melting point of over 400 degrees Celsius, which means it’s not survivable, not even if you're wearing a shiny metal suit. Even if your suit's melting point is higher than that of Zinc, that heat is still going to come on right through to you, and you will cook inside the suit, like a potato baking inside aluminum foil. And no, molten zinc isn't lava, which refers solely to molten rock and its cooled remains.

Okay, it seems like it was inevitable anyway, but page 139 was where I was brutally forced to inevitable conclusion that this is not a novel, it’s a drivel, and I can’t read any more of it without vomiting. Why? Well, we have super-woman on this mission to rescue a kidnapped sister - not hers, evidently, but someone’s. She busts into the plant and starts kicking ass, and then an anonymous voice asks her, over the PA, to work for him assassinating politicians who harm the environment. Cindy immediately agrees and goes home!

The anonymous voice has told her that he will contact her, but he has absolutely no idea whatsoever who she is and he has absolutely no means whatsoever by which to contact her. And let's not forget that The Silver Ninja has an epic fail on her hands here since she left without rescuing the kidnapped sister which was the whole purpose of her Mission! Instead, she's agreed to kill people for money without so much as a scintilla of compunction. Remember how this got started - she was a victim and no help was to be had? What happened to those high ideals? Why has she abandoned that for filthy lucre?! Maybe she changes her mind later - or maybe this is actually where the trope is dispensed with and she becomes a super villain, but after plowing through this stuff this far, I have no interest in finding out.

Maybe if you’re in your later preteens, or your early teens, this is the novel for you, even though it’s supposed, as far as I can tell, to be aimed at grown-ups. Maybe you'll enjoy the laugh, but I didn't. This is most definitely not the novel for me, not even close. I wish the author all the best, but I'm not interested in reading any more of this nor any sequels to it.