Monday, February 1, 2021

Beautiful Demons by Sarra Cannon

Rating: WARTY!

This is a depressingly cookie-cutter YA series starter wherein the author seems to have made a bet with herself that she could get every single YA trope into the book in the first 100 screens and I think she succeeded, so I was quickly convinced that this novel would not be occupying my 'currently reading' list for long. The book blurb insists that "Harper Madison isn't like other girls" and then the author goes on to give the lie to that by making her exactly like every other YA girl. To whit: Harper is a troubled child, who is also an orphan child, and who is starting a new school. You could switch the main character's two names and still have a trope YA main character name. Harper Madison? Madison Harper? It doesn't make any difference.

Harper has the "I like the bad boy, but I also like the hot quarterback golden boy syndrome, aka a triangle. Despite the fact that Jackson smokes, and she detests smoking, she still has the hots for him and not a single word is spoken about him smelling like an ashtray. Sorry, but no. On top of this, she quickly runs afoul of the school queen bee, who is also a cheerleader and a bully. If Harper had had some backbone on their first encounter, I'd have had more respect for her, but no. There's also the trope obsession with boys in this novel to the extent that every other conversation these girls have is about boys and no other topics seem ever to enter their heads. Seriously, who reads this stuff? It's pure garbage that's almost exactly like nearly every other YA trilogy ever written. It's pathetic.

Harper apparently has the power of telekinesis, but she's never explored it. She's so stupid that she seems at a loss to even understand it. Never once has her curiosity prodded her to experiment with it, or to examine it, or try to control it. I'm sorry but this disqualifies her as a main character for me. It's not only unnatural, it makes for a bad story. If someone has a talent, it encourages them to employ it or take advantage of it and exploit it, but not this girl.

Now admittedly Harper has apparently ended-up killing her adoptive father because of this, so perhaps she's afraid, but this still doesn't explain why she's never played with the phenomenon prior to that. And if she felt bad about that accidental (or was it?!) death, then why hasn't she tried to control it since then? This death is also a problem: if she's guilty of manslaughter, then why hasn't she spent time in Juvie? They considered that she was guilty of starting a fire in which someone died - and she got away with it?

Given the title of the book, it was tempting to assume that those cheerleaders were all demons, or had sold their soul to a demon or something like, which might account for their extreme beauty and attitude, but I also wondered if the title was just misleading and these girls were not demons at all, but merely witches or magicians. Our lead girl, who is I assume going to come out in opposition to these people, hasn't yet figured this out. She's also lost her treasured pendant - the only thing she had left of her mom - which she obsesses upon in a deranged manner despite not even knowing this mom who gave away her daughter. I assume the pendant has been purloined by the demon girls in order to employ it to try to wreak havoc in Harper's life, but Harper isn't smart enough to figure that out. Her inexplicable focus on this, given that her mom ditched her, leads her to break out of the last chance girl's home she's been deposited in.

Her idiot idea is all about going her to find this pendant, when she hasn't even considered that she may have left it at home, or dropped it in the van on the journey to the game. So she steals a bike and rides to the stadium - which isn't in darkness, inexplicably, but is lit well enough for her to spy on one of the cheerleaders. The thing is that Harper is on her hands and knees under the bleachers and waiting for a chance to sneak out, when she loses her balance and falls over backwards with a whoop. What? How can you fall over backwards when you're on your hands and knees? And knowing she needs to be silent, she still lets out a whoop? This was ridiculous.

Harper nearly gets caught after the older guy who's with this cheerleader, Tori, upon whom she's spied, comes after her. Despite the fact that it's too dark for Harper to see him clearly, they can see her hidden under the bleachers! She miraculously gets away and of course, coincidence upon coincidence, Jackson is waiting in the barn when she returns the bike. She's all hot for him and his "rippling muscles." Barf. The next day, Tori turns up dead and Harper is the prime suspect for no apparent reason. She's hauled in for questioning from school in the middle of the day for no apparent reason and despite being able to move things with her mind, she ponders being trapped inescapably in the back of the police car. How dumb is Harper? This is seriously bad writing.

It gets worse. Without being read her rights and without being allowed to have an adult present, sixteen year old Harper is grilled by the sheriff who knows of her Jedi mind-tricks. You'd think with her history of multiple foster homes, Harper would have grown a pair, but instead of being badass and resisting the sheriff, she caves completely. Pathetic. It got worse though. I read this bit which finally decided me on giving up this trash. This is when the golden boy who's treated her like shit suddenly has a volte face and Harper isn't even really suspicious!

He put his palm on my cheek. I backed away, surprised, but he stepped forward and ran his fingertip along my chin line. "I was a real jerk to treat you like that," he said softly. "I understand if you want nothing to do with me, but I'm willing to do anything it takes to convince you that I'm sincere." I swallowed hard. Was I overreacting? "That first day we met in my sister's store, I thought you were beautiful," he said. He took my hand in his and caressed the side of my index finger...

So once again a guy thinks he can do whatever he wants to a girl he was downright mean to earlier, and what does this female author tell us? That it's okay. That the girl will let you - will accept your manhandling of her regardless of how you treated her in the past. That your only worth is your beauty. Nothing else matters. This is pure shit and any author, female or not, ought to be thoroughly ashamed of this kind of writing and reject it out of hand. Shame on you Sarra Cannon.

It's worse than that, though because this author evidently also thinks it's fine to have a weak female character who has no integrity, so self-respect, no spine, no moral core, and who, most despicably, instinctively thinks she's weaker than any male. I don't care about female characters like that. I have no interest in reading about them. I also think this turn the novel takes here proves how pathetic first person voice is, and what a seriously brain-dead choice it is for most novels, because in addition to the above, we also have Harper forgetting what happened - forgetting she was making out with Jackson not long before.

Now this is because, obviously, some sort of a spell has been put on her, but the fact is that Harper is the one relating this story word for word, conversation for conversation. How is it possible given that she's already recorded what happened, that she forgot it? Can she not go back and see what's she's written? If she's writing this later, then what accounts for her perfect memory of events - and if she has a perfect memory why is she forgetting stuff? If she forgot it, how could she have recorded the earlier part of the story? None of this makes a lick of sense! This is why first person is dumb as fuck. Once in a while it works, but usually no. Just no.

This story was too stupid to live and I ditched it at around 20% which was way more than it deserved. I ought to bill the author for wasting my valuable time!

Blood and Veil by Marjory Kaptanoglu

Rating: WARTY!

I wouldn't normally have read this because I did not like The Handmaid's Tale at all, but I was curious about the "secret society of wives." Worse than the Handmaid's comparison though was the book blurb which read, "Beautiful, cultured Gabrielle lives and works at a house of courtesans." Once again we have a female writer who is reducing her main character to skin depth, championing her beauty like that's the only thing a woman has to offer. Oh, and 'culture' as an afterthought. Given how truly lousy book descriptions are, I was hoping for better in the novel - a very short novella, as it happens - but I was disappointed. And it wasn't because of the amusing error in the text at one point where I read, "Eventually she doses off with the candle still burning." I assume the author meant 'dozes'.

The story seems not to have any overall plot and to be just an idea for a novel which was sketched out by the author and then without any further effort, was released as a novella. It's really the middle of a story - with the beginning and ending missing and that was part of the problem. The other part was that it really wasn't very interesting. The story jumps around between women, but it doesn't stay with any of them long enough to get to know them, and frankly I'm not sure I would have liked any of them even had I the chance to get to know them better, so that really was no big loss, I guess. The 'secret society' barely plays a part, so that was a bust, and overall, the story itself felt drab and not remotely engaging. I can't commend it.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this series. At the time I didn't know I would be quitting it, but I sure wasn't anywhere near invested enough to actively seek the next one. In the end I read a prequel in which I was seriously disappointed. As is usual in this series, McDevitt spends way too much time on things which really don't drive the story. In this case it's ironically the new drive (which will power McDevitt's other series in this universe, but which is set a couple of centuries later, I believe).

Finally McDevitt gets serious about the biggest threat to the galaxy, which was discovered in the first book in this series, but then inexplicably neglected until this story, five novels later! It turns out that the omega 'clouds' are coming from near the center of the galaxy, and inexplicably after being rather retired from spaceflight, Hutch pilots this next trip to seek out the source, which turns out to be rather boring. Nothing much happens - it's all journey and little payoff, and I think this boredom is why I lost interest in the series - that, and the fact that with this discovery, it was largely over by then anyway.

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

Priscilla Hutchins isn't even a pilot in this one - she's an administrator and the book focuses on a different pilot whose main qualification, it seems, is that she's 'beautiful'. Interest in space travel is waning (despite a deadly omega cloud with Earth's name on it?!) and so Hutch is fighting that, and a mission is launched to try and figure out what these 'UFOs' are that are being spotted out in space. They're named moonriders for no good reason, but why is the novel called Odyssey? In Omega, the clouds are called Omega clouds, so the novel is called Omega. Not here I guess. Anyway, this new pilot drops monitors to discover what these moonriders are, yet they apparently can't drop monitors to watch the omega clouds, one of which is barreling down on Earth?!!)

The story made little sense and is perhaps the most boring of the series that I read.

Omega by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is the fourth novel in the Priscilla Hutchins series and like the previous one, it has nothing to do with the omega cloud threat per se, even though it is a threat from one of those 'clouds' which starts the story off.

Given that this threat was discovered in the first book in the series, you would think by now that humanity would have monitors on every known omega cloud out there, tracking it, but once again they're taken by surprise as an omega threatens a planet with a civilization on it. In true Star Trek mode (barf! I am not a fan of Star Trek), they've somehow convinced themselves that they must save the planet without revealing themselves to the aliens. This makes zero sense.

The idea in Star Trek is that civilizations must inevitably suffer after contact with a superior civilization, but this is bullshit based on a primitive and ignorant past. It makes no sense in an enlightened future (and Star Trek breaches the rule constantly!). It especially makes no sense here when an entire plant is threatened. Rather than try to tackle the Omega cloud, the focus inexplicably is on the planet and of course they end up making contact.

One again we have minor and uninteresting characters and a planetary threat - pretty much the same as in previous volumes, which is why I detest series for the most part - it's inevitably the same story over and over again with the same characters and that's precisely what happens here; same threat, same urgency. These novels could each have been written independently with new characters instead of being part of the same series and nothing would have been lost while there stood much to gain. Of course, then the cloning of the earlier volumes for re-use in later ones would have been far more stark. I guess maybe that's why it's a series? The more I reconsider these though, the more I wonder why I stayed with this series as long as I did. I must have viewed them differently when I was younger than I do now! Clearly my tastes and tolerance have changed!

Chindi by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

The "Chindi" in the story is an asteroid that's been converted into a space ship to capture samples from across the galaxy. The story of Chindi is another example of McDevitt tossing a bunch of spoiled, uninteresting, flat and minor characters into a spaceship piloted by Priscilla Hutchins, the least commanding commander ever, and having them do stupid things repeatedly despite life-threatening scenarios on repeat. These "rich, amateur SETI enthusiasts" hire her to pilot them on a jaunt to try and track down where a mysterious signal is coming from, and their journey takes them on a sort of hare and hounds trip from one planet to another, each of which is orbited by an alien satellite. Why Hutch would go off on yet another trip populated by idiots is a mystery, and I forget what happened here. Maybe she lost her job or got fired or something, and was desperate for the gig?

Given that one of these secret satellites is around Earth, it's very strange that this group and Hutch are the only ones who are pursuing the signal, but here it is. Improbable is what McDevitt does, but he's well-off and old now so I guess she doesn't much care how he got there. The idiots abroad encounter evidence of a snake society which destroyed itself in nuclear war. How snakes would ever get that far is a mystery, but this is how McDevitt creates his aliens: they're just like Earth creatures with no consideration given to how or why. After snake world, they encounter beautiful aliens who fool the visitors into falling in love with them only to prove to be murderous and who take two victims from the passengers.

Finally they encounter the asteroid and discover it's a space-going zoo, so really, Star Trek 'The Menagerie'. It's been so long that I read this and I barely remember it, so I guess it really didn't leave much of an impression, but it certainly didn't turn me off the series otherwise I would never have moved on to the next one, which I did. Reflecting on it now though, several years later, I feel less benign toward it!

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the immediate sequel to McDevitt's The Engines of God. Unlike that novel, which I read some time ago and then recently revisited via an audiobook, this one I read some time ago and haven't thought much about it since, so my recollection of it has dwindled somewhat and I had to refresh it a bit for this review. I do recall the basic story - just not a lot of the details.

It's set in 2204, and on the negative side, the second book in this series suffers from everything I despise about a series: that the subsequent volumes are really a warmed-over redux of the first volume, which is only a prologue to begin with. In this particular case, there's too much of the first book being repeated here, evidently in the hope that readers won't notice it's the same dinner with a different dressing: doomed planet (it was a moon in the last book) with people trapped on it (same), who do dumb things (same) such as wasting time on a formal burial on a planet that's going to be destroyed anyway, and finally, archaeology with a dramatic deadline looming.

That complaint aired, there was enough in here for me, having read the first volume, to continue with this series. I never did go back to re-read any of this series (apart from the aforementioned audiobook), so maybe that should tell you something! But here a rogue gas giant is threatening a planet with destruction and Priscilla Hutchins is once again the one who's on the spot. She takes a bewildering array of unimportant (to the story) characters there to study the wildlife and flora and also the remnants of a previous civilization. These minor characters get far too much airtime, and she really becomes a minor character in her own story. On top of that, the book is too long, but evidently I found it entertaining enough on my first read through to pursue this series into the next volume.

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series called "The Academy" - a series title that could have been a lot better! Why would anyone be excited by that title?! I'm not a fan of series, but I found this one, written in the mid-nineties, palatable when I read it some time ago in a print version. The rest of the series was written between 2000 and 2007, with one more novel coming out in 2018. The last one I read was Starhawk which was a prequel and which I did not like, so I haven't read the 2018 release. I recently listened to this first volume again as an audiobook and found it less thrilling than I originally had, but still a worthy read on balance. It has issues, but overall, I think if you like hard sci-fi this might be to your taste. There are times when it plods and the characters are a bit flat. They sometimes act stupidly, but after the last four years this should surprise no one.

I wasn't a huge fan of the reader of this audio book, which was Tom Weiner. He wasn’t a disaster, but his voice sounded a bit too hard-bitten for my taste. He'd be better of reading a noire private dick novel if you ask me - and one which I wouldn't have any interest in hearing! Given that the main character is female, I felt a female voice was required here, but that wasn't a story-killer.

The story is of a woman named Priscilla Hutchins, who of course predictably goes by 'Hutch' and who is a pilot for the Academy, an organization that fosters archaeological expeditions not on Earth, but on alien worlds where life once existed, but now no longer does. This is why this series appealed to me to begin with, because it’s different for your usual let’s kill evil aliens or evil space humans and which typically makes sci-fi stories so predictably tedious.

The story is slow-moving, and the pilot and the archaeologists she transports to several worlds do stupid things and get themselves into improbable scrapes, but the underlying story isn’t too bad, and it offers a mystery which threads through the series and is eventually resolved without making this volume feel like a prologue or a cliffhanger, and I appreciated that. Each story is self-contained while advancing the mystery through the sequence, although not all volumes address the mystery.

The underlying premise is that there was, perhaps several thousand years before, a race of advanced aliens of whom there is now no trace save for the monuments they left behind them: strange and often confusing monuments. One is a statue of an alien. This is where the story begins, and the archaeologists don't know if this is the people themselves - who have come to be known as the Monument Makers - or if it’s a representation of one of their gods or mythological figures. Other monuments they leave behind consist of very angular geometric shapes and which often seem to have been severely damaged by warfare or by some natural catastrophe. Some monuments look like cities from a distance, but close up are just solid 3D shapes with many right angles. Just enough to make them look unnatural. The story is one of the slow-dawning of knowledge among the archaeologists, as to what all of this actually means.

There are some problems with the story - of the nature of Star Trek-like stupidity or lack of inventiveness and foresight. Despite drones actually being in use since the mid-1960s and especially of late, and despite robots being in use since the mid-1950s, neither Star Trek nor this novel acknowledge that there are any such devices in use anywhere in the universe! Consequently we have these archaeologists and this pilot romping into unknown situations with no support or backup and every trip they make seems to have serious problems befall it.

There's clearly been no attempt whatsoever by this so called 'Academy' to send drones or robots to map newly-discovered worlds before humans go there to study them. It seems like their approach is to simply fly there on spec, using their FTL technology and then eyeball the place until they find something interesting to go down and look at close-up. In that regard, the writing is a bit primitive and amateur. It is from the mid-nineties, but I don't see that this is an excuse for equipping these people with pretty much the same technology and mindset we have today (minus the robots and drones!).

The premise at the start of this story makes little sense. The archaeologists are working on this one find, which is semi-submerged in the ocean. They've had almost three decades on this planet to dig and evidently they still haven't excavated this particular site. There's no word on why. There's a terra-forming corporation waiting to start making over this planet so humans can live there despite there being at least one other planet where humans could live without terraforming (more on that later). The thing is that the terraforming involves multiple nuclear weapons being detonated at the poles in order to melt the ice which somehow they figure will fix the biting-cold temperatures. To me that made no sense. The planet would be irradiated and unlivable, and if this project is looking like it will take a century to complete, as they say, it will have frozen over again before they can move there! Nuclear weapons? Maybe McDevitt's military past was overriding his common sense.

It’s been known since Eunice Foote demonstrated it in 1856, that carbon dioxide traps heat. A study in 1938 showed the greenhouse effect on Earth's atmosphere, and we’ve known Venus was such a runaway greenhouse planet since the late fifties and early sixties. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988, so it’s not like this idea of a greenhouse effect was unknown when McDevitt wrote his novel, yet he wants to use nuclear weapons instead of seeding the atmosphere with some CO2?

But here’s the thing: we're told that it’s going to be a century before the planet is livable anyway, so what difference does it make if the archaeologists take another day or two, to finish their dig? It doesn’t. Yet the corporation seems obsessed with a deadline, and in order to scare the scientists off, they let one of their comet snowballs fall early into the ocean, which ends up causing a tidal wave, and costs the life of one of the archaeologists.

In order to get even with them, Hutch the hero decides to send them a snowball, but this one is fake, made up of this expanding foam they use to package the artifacts they find. The problem with this is that even though it's low mass, it’s coming at their space station at over 4,000 mph, which means it would do some serious damage and Hutch ought to know this, but she claims it won't do more than bend a panel here or there. It ought to have got her fired, but no legal penalties come of either of these dangerous actions. Given the political scene of late I geuss this isn't so far-fetched after all.

The other problem I had with this scene is that they're planning on nuking this planet and there's no outcry or complaint anywhere about the indigenous life, some of which seems to be quite intelligent if rather apelike. That was shocking - that an author would write this - even in 1994, and not have any consideration for the ecology of the planet that they were destroying. It felt inauthentic. The other side of this coin is a planet they land on where the indigenous life ought to have been wiped out in my opinion, because it was too improbable or dangerous to live anyway, but no-one thinks of this then.

This is the planet I mentioned earlier which could support human life. These team goes down to explore it on foot without any weapons and with zero foreknowledge of local fauna. Nothing happens at all until they’ve been down there for a while and then suddenly there are literally hundreds and hundreds of crabs which have an appendage they can use to slice open their prey. The problem is not the existence of the crabs per se, it's the existence of endless hordes of them in one place and the fact that they're ravenous predators.

Nothing like this could realistically evolve and this is a problem writers frequently make - they know nothing about evolution and invent these threatening creatures which couldn't exist in reality or in isolation from their ecosystem. Anything as ravenous and endlessly predatory as these crabs would have quickly eaten their entire world's food supply. They would then have turned on each other and eaten themselves into extinction. It’s simply not possible to have such a deadly predator in such numbers.

The third improbable crisis is in their finding a possible solution to their question as to what was inflicting the damage on these artificial constructs they'd found - the ones left by the Monument Makers. They have a chance to study this but instead of staying far from it, they land on the very moon this thing is going to destroy and almost get killed. They're afraid to take off because they’re in a very boxy shuttle which they fear will attract something that appears to target angular constructs. It makes no sense. First it makes no sense that the shuttle would be so boxy, second it makes no sense that they would try to get so close to the thing, and thirdly it makes no sense that the thing would come after their angular shuttle when they'd visited a world earlier where a space station had not been attacked by this thing despite it being quite visibly artificial.

So yeah, there are problems with this story, but overall I felt it wasn't too bad of a tale and I commend it as a worthy read. That said, I have to add that I don't feel any urge to keep pursuing a re-read of this whole series. Maybe in future I may take it up in audiobook form if Chirp offers another volume at a discount, but right now I'm not moved to do it, having already been through it once!

Thursday, January 14, 2021

Dawn's Promise by AW Exley

Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is about Dawn Uxbridge who, it turns out, is an elemental and a protector of the environment. Yes, Dawn cleans up! Who knew?! She doesn't know this of course, having been raised in isolation because of her poor health. When her parents die in, she's told, an accident, she's required for the first time in her life to fend for herself. Her only skill is with plants in the small garden she tended at home, but now that she's losing the home because of her father's debts, she has to find employment elsewhere. In a desperate last bid, she applies for the post of gardener at the estate of Lord Jasper Seton. She gets the job. As the story grows like a well-tended garden, Dawn and Jasper slowly grow closer, and in a twist, Dawn also grows closer to the woman who's vile history is at the heart of the estate's problems.

The estate is in bad shape and seems to have a growth of poisonous vine enveloping much of it, but Dawn sets herself to revitalizing the garden as she learns much more about her nature and also the nature of Jasper. Yes, he's the inevitable muscular love interest, but in this case, despite his broad chest and strong arms, it wasn't actually so bad. This novel surprised me because I have tried twice and failed to find any redeeming values in Exley's writing. I normally would not have picked up a third work of hers, but the book description intrigued me, and this novel was actually very different from her other work that I've read, and much better-written, so maybe the third time really is a charm. The book drew me in from the start and occupied my attention, providing entertainment and fascination to the end. It was not without problems, though!

There were some issues with the writing. For an employer who has Dawn as his employee, Jasper takes far too many liberties with her, especially given the period the novel is set in, which is the late nineteenth century. Their behavior is at times scandalous for the era, but that's offset somewhat by the nature of their relationship, and who they are as elementals. One thing which jumped out at me though, was that shortly after Jasper has inappropriately kissed Dawn the following exchange takes place. He says, "It would appear we have much to discuss. Over dinner if you will join me. I will have the maids draw you a bath, and if I may be so bold, I will lay out a dress for you to wear." If I may be so bold?!! Really? That felt a bit much after he'd already kissed her without even asking.

A little later, Dawn was served what was described initially as 'broth' but was shortly after revealed to have meat and veg in it and was described as 'soup'. It was unnecessarily confusing. Broth typically means the liquid remnant after having boiled something solid, whereas soup is the whole thing. There was the usual YA-style ignorance over anatomy as this author used the term 'bicep' to describe the biceps brachii on the upper arm: "Her exploring hand continued up over a bicep" and later, "She revelled in the shape of muscles under skin and ran her nails along a bicep." Technically there is a 'bicep', but it's not the bulge in the arm that this author means. It's one of two attachments of that muscle to the bone on the shoulder end of the biceps. I doubt that's what Dawn was fondling. Later I read, "His teethed nipped her skin." This is definitely a case where two 'ed's are not better than one. Note the word 'reveled' above is the English spelling, and so is correct.

Those were relatively minor issues. The big problem is - and here's a spoiler - that at one point Jasper is raped by the villainess, and this isn't the first time. She does it on this specific occasion for Dawn to witness it and thereby try to break them up, and it almost works because for some reason, Dawn goes off on Jasper, victim blaming! Why she does this I do not know because she saw the whole thing and it makes zero sense that she would mistake his being deliberately snared and rendered helpless, and taken advantage of, for his participating willingly. This could have been much better written - like having Dawn encounter these two at the end of the rape when, if written properly, Dawn might have mistaken it for the conclusion of a consensual liaison.

When Dawn and Jasper finally consummate their relationship, Dawn behaves so unrealistically that it spoils the whole thing. Anyone who knows me or has read any of my work knows that I'm far from being any sort of a fan of shy, retiring females, but for me, for this particular character in these circumstances, this was written badly. She's nowhere near the reserved type she's been consistently portrayed as, and it reads like a betrayal of the character and cheapens her. Exley should perhaps avoid writing sex scenes and overly long romantic interludes, but aside from that, I enjoyed the story overall, and I'm not willing to condemn it for some mistakes like this. Maybe other readers will not find them as bad as I did, but overall, I thought the story was good, and I commend it as a worthy read.

Ava and Pip by Carol Weston

Rating: WORTHY!

I am not much of a fan of series, so I have to warn up front that this is the first in a series of (so far) three. All three apparently can be read as standalones, so there's that, but I've read only this one, so I can't comment on the series. This first one was actually well-written, funny, entertaining, and has some good life messages for young readers, perhaps the most important of which, in this Internet age, is that once you put something out there in writing, it's very hard to take it back.

Note that I listened to the audio book version of this which was read brilliantly by Kae Marie Denino. Just as the author evidently did with the writing, this woman really put her heart and soul into the novel in reading it, and it showed; so my favorable review isn't solely over the writing, it's also of this reader's contribution which I loved completely and highly recommend.

There's a lot of wordplay in this book, which may delight some and annoy others. I love wordplay, but even I found it a bit much at times, yet it was quite inventive and entertaining in general, so I had mixed feelings about it. Most of the palindromes I had heard before, but some I had not. There's also other types of wordplay and a smattering of English 101 peppered unobtrusively into the text which makes the book quite educational on that score alone.

Ava is the younger sister, Pip the older. Their parents, who have palindromic names (Bob and Anna) gave their children the same thing: Ava Elle, and Pip Hannah, since mom and dad (also palindromes!) are very much into language. Dad is a playwright, for example. Ava, who is ten and looking forward to her palindromic birthday (when she'll turn 11), thinks she wants to be a writer, but she has several unfinished diaries she's given up on.

She makes a fresh start in a new one and actually finishes it over the course of an eventful story in which she becomes her sister's champion over the queen bee (named Bea) at school, who schedules a party on the same day Pip was going to have one. Ava writes a short story for a competition and makes the Queen Bee the center of the story. She has some success with it, but when the real Bea calls her to complain about the story, things start souring for Ava. The thing is that Bea isn't as bad as Ava has painted her and over the course of the book, the two become friends.

I read some negative reviews of this novel which have labeled Ava with the over-used buzzword 'ableist' and torn her off a strip over her trying to get Pip out of her shell, as though Pip is autistic or a chronic shut-in or something, which is nonsensical because it's untrue. Pip is shy and that's all she is, and there's nothing at all wrong in Ava desiring to help her. What's wrong at times is Ava's approach to helping! None of these knee-jerk alarmists seemed to grasp that. Nor did they seem to have any compassion for poor Ava, who feels neglected because her parents focus a lot of attention on Pip.

So this book is a growth experience and a learning curve for Ava, who while admittedly being somewhat spastic and too full of energy at times, is only ten, yet she's learning and caring, and she deserves a better rep than the "nattering nabobs of negativism" are giving her. Yes, that was awful wasn't it? And William Safire ought to be ashamed of it. But the thing is that Ava is a feisty spirit and young kids can learn a lot from her even as she learns of her own shortcomings and works to fix them.

This is a book about bravery and determination, about friendship and sisterhood, about navigating relationships, and about learning and improving oneself, and it deserves to be read.

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Andersen's Fairy Tales vol 1 by Hans Christian Andersen

Rating: WARTY!

This really wasn't worth my time or money despite being a discounted copy. Emma Fenney does a fine job reading it and employing some amusing tones and accents, but that can't improve on fundamentally boring material. There was a male voice at one point, but nowhere can I find whose voice that was, so I can't credit him. But the problem was with the stories which are not really that entertaining. Maybe kids would find more entertainment in them than I did.

The stories are as follows:

  • The Emperor's New Clothes Everyone knows this story, so 'nuff said. I didn't find it entertaining.
  • The Swineherd is about a prince who disguises himself as a farmhand to stalk a princess, and it turns out she'll sell kisses for baubles and trinkets. That relationship never went anywhere and the moral of the story is the king is a tyrant because rather than try and change this behavior he himself has no doubt inculcated in his daughter, he throws her out, and rather than try to redeem her, the prince abandons her. More like a nightmare than a fairytale!
  • The Real Princess More commonly known as The Princess and the Pea this is another tale of spoiled brat royalty. Any princess who was so "sensitive" that she could feel a pea through several layers of bedding would be far too delicate to survive in the real world. This is just another example of how women, according to Andersen, ought to be delicate and subjugated, and put on pedestals and mattresses.
  • The Shoes of Fortune also known as 'The Galoshes of Fortune', this story tells of magic shoes that can take the wearer to anywhere, any-when. This truly dickhead Councilor, Justice Knap, having argued that the Middle Ages were a better time, is transported there and takes forever to figure out what happened to him. What a maroon. Someone should have just kicked his dumb ass with the shoes.
  • The Fir Tree essentially tells suffragettes they shouldn't whine about not having the vote because they might be worse off with it. It tells people of color they shouldn't agitate against slavery because life as a free person might be worse. It's dumb and ridiculous.
  • The Snow Queen is the story of Satan's mirror - designed to reflect the worst in everyone. Taking the mirror up to heaven, an accident occurs and it shatters into gazillions of pieces, two of which enter the eye and heart of a boy who was nice, but soon starts being mean to the girl who's his neighbor. He's then abducted by the snow queen and apparently there's no law enforcement in this neighborhood.
  • The Leap-Frog is another story about abusing women, wherein a flea, a grasshopper, and a Leap-frog, which I assume is simply a frog, compete to see who can jump highest, and the idiot king offers his daughter's hand (and presumably the rest of her body) to the winner of the contest even though not a one of the competitors is human. The frog wins. There's no word on if it changed into a prince when the princess kissed it.
  • The Elderbush is about a boy who catches cold from getting his feet wet because that's how germs work, and when a suspicious old man inveigles his way into the child's bedroom, an elder bush sprouts from the teapot and the bush contains a woman. From there the story devolves into even more incoherence.
  • The Bell is a bizarre and nonsensical story about children trying to learn the origin of a ghostly bell sound coming from beyond the woods near their village.
  • The Old House is really about an old man, a young boy and a tin soldier. Very suspicious. And nonsensical.
  • The Happy Family is about burdock and snails. I think. Hell, I have no idea.
  • The Story of a Mother is about an irresponsible woman who chases after death when he takes her young child and when he offers to give it back she turns him down and lets death carry the child off to who knows where.
  • The False Collar is about shaming a woman because she will not talk to an impertinent man. The man is disguised as a shirt collar, the woman as a garter, but the implications are clear: one is high up, the other low down.
  • The Shadow is a story about how the lower classes ought to be executed if they try to rise above their station. I am not making this up.
  • The Little Match Girl is about how a girl who froze to death from neglect is really better off dead.
  • The Dream of Little Tuk is sheer nonsense from start to finish.
  • The Naughty Boy is Cupid and this story is about how evil love is. Another story about an old man and a young child.
  • The Red Shoes and for something completely different: another story about an old man and a young child. This essentially is a cross between the shoes of fortune and the swineherd. This spoiled-rotten girl gets red shoes and because she wears them to church she's cursed to dance forever in them. Eventually her heart bursts. It was only because she mutilated herself that she got let into heaven.

It seems that you've been living two lives, Mr Andersen. In one of these lives, you're Hans Christian Andersen, purported teller of tall tales; you have a social life, pay your taxes, and you help your landlady carry out her garbage. In the other life, you write disgusting stories of old men and young children. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. That, Mr Andersen, is the sound of inevitability.

Thursday, January 7, 2021

A Lady's Maid by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a short story I got into reading when I was looking for a sneak preview of a full length novel by this author - one I decided, after the preview, not to buy. This story is really short, only 16 screens on my phone, but I still couldn't finish it. If you wish, you can read it at: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/ladys-maid-sarah-gailey . It's described as "an original short story" and I don't know why! Shouldn't the assumption be that it's original as opposed to...what? A rip-off? A plagiarized story? A clone?! I sincerely doubt that! So why specify that it's original? I dunno. Maybe they mean it's not tied to a full length novel? Still it sounds like a stupid way to refer to it, to me.

It's described as a "Victorian comedy of manners," but to me it was so boring I could not get into it and quickly resorted to skimming. It immediately felt to me like it was going to be a sixteen page long whine that was served with its own cheese. I should say up front that the book description conflates oysters and clams. They're not the same. To be sure, they're all bivalve mollusks, but oysters and mussels do not behave like clams do. For me, this confusion is to be expected from your typical idiot book description writer. The author has little to no control over that unless the book is self-published, so I'm not sure in this case who wrote it.

I had to read outside the book to discover what it was actually about, since the opening few pages were completely confusing to me. Maybe it's just me, but I felt it ought to have been clearer what was going on, and given that it wasn't - at least to me - I had a hard time generating any kind of sustained interest in it, even for as short as it was. I gave up on it and skimmed bits here and there and was still unimpressed. I can't commend it based on my experience of it so I guess, after two strikes. I'm probably done with this author, which is sad because having seen an image of her online I was under the impression that she might write just the kind of a story that would interest me. I guess I was wrong!

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Rating: WARTY!

This was a great idea for a novel and I was about to pick up the audiobook version which was on offer for a very reasonable price from Chirp, with whom I've had great success. But! I've been down this road too many times to fall for an intriguing publisher's book description without knowing more. I know those who dishonestly write these descriptions only too well from bitter experience, so I thought maybe I could get a peek inside the cover on B&N or something to help make up my mind. It turned out there was a 'sneak preview' for free download, so I got that, thinking if I liked it, I'd go ahead and buy the audiobook, but I did not like the ebook sneak peek, so I can't commend this based on what I read of that.

The first problem was first person. I can't stand that PoV and have found very few occasion to make an exception to my distaste it. It just wasn't right for this story. It's not right for most stories, but authors are obsessed with it for reasons which escape me. In this case it made the protagonist come off as whiny and self-obsessed - as it typically does - and if there's one thing I truly hate it's a novel-length whine. The book makes Evelyn (who's called Evelyn anymore?) look far too stupid, especially given that we know right from the book blurb that her 'rival' for her husband's affection - a rivalry which Evelyn lost - is actually a clone named Martine.

Why take so long to get dealing with this? It should have been front and center; if not page one, then certainly chapter one. I know authors don't write their own book blurbs unless they self-publish; they have some idiot publisher's peon do it, which explains this description, because such people typically seem to have no clue what the book is about, so I had to wonder if the left hand of the publisher knew what the writer's hand was doing here. Apparently not.

There's really nothing up-front discussing cloning even though this is what Evelyn is apparently getting an award for! That, for me, was a blunder, so when the non-reveal comes, I imagine it's supposed to come out of the blue, but it doesn't because: Hello? Book description, and it makes Evelyn look brain-dead at best. I don't do books featuring brain-dead main characters.

There's also an actual dead character - the husband - and the blurb claims that the "Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up." What mess? Is a baby a mess now? And why reduce them to an appendage of a dead man? I don't read books that have a title which is of the style "The ____'s Wife" or "The ____'s Daughter". It's demeaning to label a woman like that, ye this one boldly pigeon-holes them as "The Caldwell Wives." Like they have no other value. So why read this? Well I started out intrigued, but that faded pretty quickly.

I wasn't remotely interested enough to want to pursue this - not even at a discount - because I'd already discounted it as a novel of interest. After this I went out and read a few negative reviews from others, and they served only to confirm my wise decision not to get into this any further than I already had. Like I said, the basic premise was intriguing, but the execution of it left it dead in the water even before the waters broke.

It was as improbable as the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The 6th Day wherein adult clones can be 'activated', programmed, and fully-functional within a very short time, which is nonsensical. Even if we assume a body can be programmed using memories extracted from a living person, it still doesn't account for getting an inert body into full physical functionality, including efficient and coordinated muscle activity, when it's being lying inert in fluid for who knows how long!

The novel also had elements of The Handmaid's Tale in that Evelyn's husband had somehow programmed for himself this tame, compliant, controllable wife (apparently he didn't like the one he had - at least not her personality, but he did like her body). It makes little sense. Why go to all that trouble when - as these stories typically portray it - he could have just found himself a more subservient girl to avail himself of, and a younger one into the bargain? Why clone a wife he evidently didn't like? I dunno. Maybe it's all explained later in this story, but I wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out.

So I couldn't get into this and have no intention of pursuing the full-length novel. I typically regret the time I've wasted on reading something so unsatisfying even if it's only a few chapters, but in this case I don't because it gave me a great idea for a novel! That said though, I can't commend this because it felt so insipid, lethargic, and so poorly done.

Sunday, January 3, 2021

Danger in Monrovia by Paul Moxham

Rating: WARTY!

This book is misleading in a sense because it promises to be a 'choose your own adventure' story and that is of course, nonsensical. All you get to do in this case is to choose is one of two options presented by the author, so it's really a choose his own adventure story. It's middle-grade and the plot is about some stolen crown jewels.

I should say right up front that I haven't had any success with novels by this author. In the middle of June 2015, I reviewed The Mystery of Adventure Island and The Mystery of Smugglers Cove and I hadn't liked either of them. I therefore knew going in that I probably wouldn't like this one either, but I was still curious to see how this story worked. The short answer to that is that it didn't! And I mean that literally.

I read the first section and tapped on the link that was supposed to take me to my chosen option, and nothing happened! I tapped on the other link, again without result. None of the links worked which makes this book a waste of money! I actively dis-commend it.

The First Muslim by Lesley Hazelton

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a religious person. Not when I live in a world the worst of which we've seen in the USA over just the last year, let alone what came before it. It's been a year - and not the first over the last four - where the US's allies must have despaired over the USA, and the US's enemies must have salivated. In times like this in particular, it makes sense to me that too many people are blindly desperate for religion. Indeed, we've seen what amounts to a religious cult created since 2016 in the US, but religion itself makes zero sense to me, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. They're all as bad.

The real problem is that the prospective adherents to a religion fail to actually listen to the teacher of the religion - the founder. Why is that? The founder is pretty much always a white guy isn't it? People of color sometimes do start a religion, but women barely get a look in, and when any of these do, they rarely get far with their endeavor. That ought to make everyone suspicious! But even when the message is delivered directly from the mouth of the founder, the adherents fail to take it to heart and instead of internalizing the message, they become obsessed with blind ritual and mimickry instead of following what's been taught to them.

According to the New Testament, for example, a specific message was taught and it was delivered to the children of the House of Israel. It was never intended to spread beyond those people. Yet when Paul derailed the original message, he perverted it to apply to everyone, and spread it way beyond its intended recipients. Christianity as it's practiced in the world today bears no relation to what was originally taught. Worse, it has been spread not through love and compassion, and through turning the other cheek, but through pograms and burning of heretics. In short, the original message was lost and instead, it became a perversion of what had originally been intended.

Here's another issue with the word being given to humanity: Mohammed was, when his life began, a nobody who no-one expected anything from. He was an orphan who was passed around and adopted by various kinsmen and tribes; he was never expected to become any lind of a leader, so why was he chosen? For that matter, why Abraham? Why Moses? Instead of one of these initially obscure people, why not pick someone who is charismatic and powerful, and who can get the word out everywhere and quickly?

Why was it Abraham instead of Alexander the Great, who was a man controlled a huge amount of territory? Why was it Mohammed instead of, say, Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan who had access to a far wider territory to spread the word than ever did Mohammed. It makes no sense to me, and it's clearly the reason why so many of these religions fail to take off. For every one of them that comes to world prominence, there are scores upon scores which fail completely or which at best become a niche religion. Once in a while, one will grow and succeed (if you can call it that), such as Christianity did, and later Islam did, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule, so something is obviously and clearly wrong with this system of dissemination somewhere along the line.

And why are the religions so contradictory? All three major monotheistic religions came out of Middle East roots, yet none of the three can agree on much! If Christianity was better than Judaism - more accurate, more true or whatever its advantage was supposed to be - then why didn't the Judaists adopt it? Why do they still remain Judaists? And if Jesus was the last word, as Christians maintain, then why was Mohammed called to step up? Conversely, if Islam is the last word, why wasn't it adopted by both the Judaists and the Christians? Again, to me, it makes no sense.

There's another way in which this makes no sense, and while there are many fantastical stories in this particular book, I think it's best exemplified in the legend of Mohammed's sojourn in a cave while on his way to Medina. We're told he was chosen as a prophet to spread the true word, yet he was, as usual, rejected by his people and at one point was forced to flee for his life. According to this book he took an unexpected route to throw pursuers off his trail, and he encamped in a cave for a while. So far so good.

These behaviors are smart, and they make perfect sense if you're threatened and have no protection. They make no sense if a god is supposed to have your back. Why did his god make him run? Why didn't his god help - by for example transporting him to his destination instead of leaving him to fend for himself? We see this kind of thing routinely in religious stories - no matter what the religion is. The Bible is full of them.

But this is where this story wandered once more into the fantastical and why I quit reading at this point, because by this time it had seriously begun to feel much less like a biography that I had been seriously interested in reading, and much more like a work of fiction. We're told spiders came by in the hundreds and wove cobwebs over the cave mouth so it looked derelict, and thus he escaped attention. He had a camel to complete the journey and finally settled where the camel gave up the trip and settled down itself. I just don't get why, if his message was so important, he wasn't given more support in getting it out! Why did he pretty much have to do everything himself? And why do we see this same circumstance so often in so many different religion-founding stories?

Most seriously for me though, was that this same kind of question arose when it came to the content of the book. Obviously none of the above quesitosn were addressed, which was a problem for me, but additionally there's clearly a real story of a man's religious experience here, and surrounding that is the inevitable mythology which unfortunately grows up around these events. I don't feel the author did a good job of demarcating the two. There seemed to be far too much speculation, not over events, many of which are recorded and not in dispute, but in imputing people's motivation, and what they 'must have been thinking'.

We can guess at that of course, but we can't know, and it seemed both disingenuous and disrepectful to assume so much. This for me was the core reason why I must reject this biography. All religions have a mythology and some of it is quite beautiful, as was much of it here, but I wanted to understand the man behind the mythology, and I felt like I really didn't get a fair shot at that from this book, which is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Friday, January 1, 2021

The Silence Between Us by Alison Gervais

Rating: WARTY!

NPR declared this book to be "eminently un-put-down-able," but that's garbage. I hate to write negatively of such a well-intentioned idea, but I read only four chapters of this before I put it down as eminently unreadable.

The first problem for me is that it's first person, which is a voice I detest. It's rarely a good way to tell a story, and for me it did not bring any immediacy or intimacy with the main character, Maya. Instead it made it even more clear what a bratty and belligerent person this 17-year-old was. It didn't bring me closer to her. Instead it drove me away from her. Had it been written in third person, it would have been less 'me-me-me' and might have made me more empathic toward her.

On the topic of voice, this is being pushed as an 'own voices' novel, although that's slightly misleading. The main character, Maya, is deaf, whereas the author is hard of hearing so it's not in the strictest sense an own voice although there are commonalities, of course. It seems like the author understands this and tries too hard to make the case for the deaf voice, as it were, and in doing so, she tends to caricature the character rather than make her a sympathetic one.

While I'm fully onboard with the own voices movement in the sense that everyone should have a voice, it bothers me that the implication of 'own voices' tends to be that no one but person 'X' can tell a story about community 'Y'. I think that's nonsense because it claims that this community, whatever it is: ethnic, nationality, disability-related, profession-related, LGBTQIA, religious, or whatever, is completely divorced from society and no one knows the least bit about it or has any interaction with it, or anything useful to say about it, which is bullshit.

Taken to its "logical" conclusion that means no one but a detective can write a crime novel, no one but a nurse or a doctor can write a medical novel, no one but a gay guy can have anything to say about a gay relationship, no one but a Chinese person can ever write a story with anything about China in it, and so on. I don't buy that. It's fiction! You can write it in any way you want. You can portray things any way you like. That doesn't mean you can't learn more from an own voices novel than you can from an outsider novel, but it also doesn't mean that no-one has anything to say about it, but the insiders. We need all perspectives. All Voices.

The biggest problem for me though, was that Maya makes no sense at all. She was not deaf from birth. She has been deaf only for three or four years because of an illness, so most of her life has been a hearing one, not hard-of-hearing or deaf. She is in a sense part of that community, but in another sense, she's not, depending on how you define it. This makes her behavior illogical at best and downright idiotic at worst, and her revulsion toward devices that can help her regain some hearing is not an intelligent or logical one. It's like she has some sort of psychological deficit - akin to people who feel their limbs are alien and want to cut them off, yet nowhere is any psychology 'own voice' brought to bear on this topic! That was a mistake.

The book description, as usual in books put out by Big Publishing™ seems like it was written by someone who has zero clue about the content of the book. It says, for example, "Deaf teen Maya moves across the country and must attend a hearing school for the first time. As if that wasn't hard enough, she also has to adjust to the hearing culture, which she finds frustrating." How can she find a culture frustrating when she was part of it just a couple of years before? A culture she has spent the bulk of her life being a part of? It's like she's forgotten her roots, or more disturbingly, is rejecting them. How can she be attending a hearing school for the first time when she grew up in hearing schools? It's a flagrant lie and the jerk who wrote that blurb is an asshole, period.

The book reads like being deaf is a cult for Maya - a fad or a thrill for her instead of what it is: a deficit as compared with what she had spent most of her life enjoying, whether she likes to think of it that way or not. We're naturally intended to hear. That's why we have the genetic mechanisms for hearing. Like I said: intelligent, consenting adults can make their own choices, but to pretend there's something wrong with being able to hear is nonsensical. Either way, it's not a one-size fits all deal. To claim otherwise is not helpful to anyone.

Also, in the quote above, what's that about Maya moving across the country? This alone made no sense since the rarified atmosphere of Colorado is not a great locale for Maya's kid brother who has cystic fibrosis. Like I said, I did not read very far into this novel because it severely turned me off, but let's suppose the family moved to Colorado for better treatment for her brother; isn't this hypocritical in a way? I mean Maya has chosen to embrace her condition, but the kid desperately needs treatment for his? I know that sounds cruel, but looked at dispassionately, isn't this what Maya is saying? She wants to become a respiratory therapist to help people like her brother, yet she rejects help for people like herself? Like I said, it made no sense and sends conflicting messages.

For someone who grew-up hearing and has had this loss of hearing experience not even for a handful of years, Maya is really bitchy, judgmental, and hyper-critical of everyone around her, and she behaves like she's a scared seven-year old rather than a supposedly maturing seventeen-year-old. This did not endear me to her and this hits the reader right from the start. She's whiny, clingy, and displays not an ounce of backbone, in complete contrast to what the idiotic book blurb claims, a blurb that seems to conflate blind obstinacy with integrity. This suggests that rather than having attend any sort of a realistic school, or even one of hard knocks, she's been positively coddled for the last two or three years. In itself, it doesn't speak highly of the school she left prior to attending this one. To me, it sounds insulting to that previous school.

So overall I was not impressed with the voice, own or not, in this novel and the writing was illogical and not appealing, which is why I didn't want to read on. I can't commend this based on what I did read of it. This is what I get for thinking a novel with a ridiculously pretentious "John Green" style title might be worth reading! It never is!

Erasing Death by Sam Parnia

Rating: WARTY!

The title of this was misleading because he's not talking about erasing death, merely putting it off for a while by learning ways to bring back people from near death by applying the latest scientific and medical advances to keep them alive and fully functional, and some of what's known is counter-intuitive. That much was interesting, and there were many parts of this book that were quite engrossing. Unfortunately the author has larded the rest of the book with so much rambling, back-tracking, historical story-telling, annoying repetitiveness, and so on that in the end, I can't commend this as a worthy read.

The book could have been maybe a third the length it is, and would then have made for a solid read, but it seemed to me like all the author was interested in doing was stream-of-consciousness direct to paper with no editing. It rendered what could have been a truly interesting and informative book into a tedious effort on my part in skimming pages until I found something new and original and engaging to read. As it is, I can't commend it at all.

Post-Human Omnibus Edition by David Simpson

Rating: WARTY!

This is a collection of four books in what the author calls the 'Post Human Series' which runs to over a thousand pages in the print edition. I gave up after reading only a hundred or so. It was boring and ponderous, with thoroughly unappealing characters.

It started out bad, with a doctor, married to a woman with whom he has a somewhat awkward relationship, getting fitted with some sort of nanotechnology that enables him to hold his breath underwater for considerably longer than is practical for the rest of us. Why he got this is not explained, and how it works is glossed over, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the doctor who had given him this treatment started hitting on him! Talk about unprofessional. It just felt wrong, and I hoped this was not the tone for the whole novel.

The good news is that it wasn't. The bad news is that it got worse, but in a different way. This nano'd doctor gets put onto a special forces mission to go investigate a Chinese AI that has been nuked. Why people go there rather than robots I do not know. I mean aren't robots the ultimate post human? LOL! And are they not much better situated to explore a radioactive area than people? And if the technology is at such a level that they have nanos that can aid breathing, why not nanos that can fight radioactivity? Wouldn't that have been a wiser upgrade?! I got the impression that this novel had not really been thought through.

There are robots and drones in existence now. They've been around for a while, so why do so many sci-fi writers pretend they don't exist in the future? It's a genuine mystery to me. And yeah, I get that they're trying to include the human connection, but to me it just says that they're poor writers if they can't include robots and still have a human connection. Hell if even those wooden assholes at Disney can do it with Wall-E, and if by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples can do it with their movie script for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, your average sci-fi writer ought to be able to manage it.

There's actually a robot that goes with them, but it seems that was for no other purpose other than to go rogue and wipe out the entire team except of course for this one doctor, who is apparently put into hibernation because of his injuries and during the ensuing years, his wife marries this guy's rival. How that works given that he's still alive and they both know it is rather glossed over, too, yet this guy never once thinks what a callous bitch she was. Instead, he pines for her and wants to kill the other guy.

Consequently they put him back into hibernation and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with him being treated like that. He wakes up later right before the facility he's in is attacked by the powers that be, because it's deemed to be an illegal technology center. This guy, having had all these enhancements against his express consent, is now shipped-off to a parallel universe where he can fly like superman. I'm sorry, but I gave up right there because this was too stupid for words, and so boring as to be sleep-inducing. I cannot commend this trash which is wrong in so many ways, and so poorly-written.

The Mystery of the Missing Heiress by Carrie Cross

Rating: WARTY!

This is the third in a series of which I've read no others - and have no intention of doing so since I didn't like this one. I made it through only two chapters before I gave up because of first person voice and poor writing. This is a Nancy Drew wannabe novel and while admittedly that bar is low, this novel failed to clear it.

The story is supposed to be about an evidently spoiled-rotten Skylar whose parents have moved her into a mansion, which of course automatically has a mystery. Skylar finds a clue written in code in a jewelry box, which inexplicably "opens the door to a world of danger."

Skylar is supposed to discover a "shocking image" that "glows in the beam from Skylar's black light" Why the author is so afraid to use the term 'UV light' I don't know. 'Black light', which is a contradiction in terms, seems to be her go-to phrase, but the thing is that if Skyler were so smart, she'd know that blood doesn't glow in UV light, so the image is not done in blood, but something else - so not really shocking! Forensic scientists can only make blood glow in UV light by spraying the area with a substance like Luminol.

The book blurb tells us that there are poems in Xandra's diary - which naturally Skylar uncovers - and which contain clues to the location of a key, but why would Xandra - the murdered heiress - write clues in her own poems? Was her memory so bad that she couldn't remember where she left the key? If so how would she remember that she'd left clues in her poems? LOL! And how would she ever solve them?! None of this makes a lick of sense at all. Neither does the idiot book blurb when it asks: "Can the team determine how the heiress went missing...before Skylar suffers the same fate?" because we know this author isn't going to kill off her cash cow. Duh! There's no danger to see here. Move along.

Fortunately, I never made it that far because the first person annoying voice irked me, and the stupid description of Skylar's first day back at school - a school she had already been attending - was written like this was a brand new school where she knew no one! Barf. Also the ridiculously caricatured school bully nonsense was a major turn off. I know this isn't aimed at my age range, but come on! I've read a sufficient number of decent middle-grade novels to know that it's perfectly possible to write an intelligent 'grown-up' book for kids instead of playing to every lowest and most childish denominator an author can find. I can't commend this garbage at all.

Nineteen Seventy by Sarah Cradit

Rating: WARTY!

This is another series DNF for me. The story was so obscure, so disconnected and so intent upon going nowhere except to show us some really dumb-ass people doing stupid things that I lost all interest in it after only a few chapters. It was awful. I sure as hell was not about to read even one volume of this let alone seven! The idea is that there are seven siblings and seven volumes, and the books run from 1970 through 1980 with the year 1971 missing, as well as the seventies after 1976.

The youngest sibling is a prophet we're told, and she reveals that one of the main Deschanel siblings will not leave 1970 alive. This, the author thinks, will lure you into reading all this crap to find out who dies. I didn't care, but I'll bet the publisher is salivating over the promise of profits form this prophet if they can sucker people into reading all seven volumes. After reading a part of the first I could see the future too: all seven volumes will be as boring as this: rambling endlessly and going nowhere. The early chapters read like a bad Jackie Collins novel - and yes, I know that's a tautology.

At the risk of repeating myself, it didn't help that the writing was not so great, either. I read at one point that one of the male siblings, "drew the same girl he'd just finished on into a deep kiss, all tongue, hoping to transfer some of her juices back to her and avoid terrible breath later." WHAT?!!! This is a woman writing about a guy who had just gone down on a girl, and was now kissing her thinking that his mouth wouldn't stink if she licked it clean of her vaginal secretions? Seriously? I think that actually may have been the last straw - or certainly close to it. I forget exactly where and what it was that decided me that I'd had enough of this crap.

Why do female authors do this to their fellow females - even fictional ones? I cannot understand it, but Cradit gets no credit for this garbage.

Elsewhere I read, "wrapped her arms around her father's shoulders, because already at eight she understood all men, even one as confident and assuming as August Deschanel, needed validation. Even when you had to be dishonest in the offering." So at least the author isn't gender-biased: she insults both men and women equally - near enough. Another instance was "The drama in your life is going to kill you," Irish Colleen harped," No, Irish Collen isn't Irish, her name is actually 'Irish Colleen" - and no, she doesn't play the harp despite the harping reference. She is harpy enough without it.

This was awful; the story-telling poor, and the charcters completely unappealing. I actively dis-commend it.

Fables by Aesop

Rating: WARTY!

Aesop was a slave in Greece about two thousand years ago, although exactly when he lived is unknown. His 'fables' were passed on orally until maybe three centuries after his death when they finally came to be written down, so no one knows how many (or even if any for that matter) of the ones we attribute to him today were actually related by him. Like most people I guess, I had heard of the fables without really being aware of what they were, and had the vague idea that they were short, moralistic tales, which is a pretty accurate view of them, it turns out.

When I got a discounted audiobook from Chirp and was able to actually listen to these for the first time, I was sorely disappointed with them. They turned out to be the biggest bunch of claptrap I've ever heard. Not only should Aesop be renamed Mr Obvious, his tales are ridiculous, stupid, clueless, and idiotic for the most part with very few that were interesting to me. None were really instructive. I did get an idea for a fictional work of my own out of this so it wasn't a total loss, but more ideas for fiction I don't really need that much! I'm never going to be able to write all the ones I've already had.

When I say ridiculous, I'm not talking about the fact that they involved animals doing unnatural things or talking, or interacting with humans. That's perfectly fine if you're telling a good fantasy. No, what I'm talking about is the content of the stories themselves. You'd have to be a Trump supporter not to already understand the point of most of these stories, and just like a Trump press conference, many of them didn't even impart any knowledge at all. I found them so ridiculous as to be amusing at times, but in the end I never made it to the end: I DNF'd this because it was so pathetic. I can't commend it as a worthy read. Quite the opposite.

Elisabeth Samson Forbidden Bride by Carolyn Proctor

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is a book that sounded interesting from the description - although there were some issues I had with it, such as this woman proudly proclaiming her wealth (which was measured in slaves), like it was some sort of an achievement rather than a shame. Given that she was the daughter of a woman who had been a slave you might have expected some empathy there, but I read none in this novel based on the life of this woman who lived in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The book is first person which is almost never a good voice, and in this case it makes the main character seem even more self-centered and self-absorbed than she would have in third person. Additionally, the novel is too Americanized, has too modern of a sensibility, and a total lack of empathy for the slaves this 'wealthy' woman owned.

As you might guess from the title and the description, the book was far more about her romance than ever it was about the ethics of what she was doing with that life. I had hoped for better. I'd decided to give it a try and see what the author had done with it, but quite quickly discovered that I was not pleased. The story is truly humdrum and offers little in the way of interest - at least not for me.

It’s of a woman who might have been a fine business woman, but who apparently has the ethics and integrity of a Donald Trump - someone who I hope to never read about again after January 20th. For example, I had multiple problems with this part: "At nineteen, I myself already owned the coffee plantation Welgemoed, which is doing quite well, along with two hundred slaves which are my own personal property, not the plantation’s. A sense of well-being touched me when I thought of Welgemoed."

I confess I'm not sure how that distinction works: the slaves are hers, not the plantation's, when she owns the plantation, but that's not the point. This woman, Samson, has a sense of well-being knowing that she has personal ownership of 200 slaves? Frankly that made me sick, and turned me right off her. It should have made her sick, coming as she did from a family that were slaves in past generations, but evidently that impinged on her considerations not one whit. The fact that she apparently sees nothing wrong at all in this contradiction in her life is mystifying to me and apparently the author was uninterested in exploring it.

Now it may well be that this is exactly how the real Samson felt, but the fact of it - or at least the fiction of it in this book made me dislike her intensely, and it strongly dissuaded me from wanting to continue reading. At one point, for example, I read, "We employed a slave to walk a few meters before us and beat the ground with a palm frond to frighten away snakes." That's so cold and callous. If this is even remotely the truth of how she was, why should I give a damn about what happens to her or what her personal troubles are? I have to wonder why the author would include something like that. Is she deliberately trying to make her character unlikable?

The fact that the author uses meters is particularly problematic because Elisabeth Samson died in 1771 and the meter wasn't 'invented' until the early 1790s! Samson would have used an archaic Dutch measure, such as an el or a rod or most probably a voet, which is pretty much the same as a foot (the Dutch word voet means foot). The book description claims that the book is "Rich with emotion and historical detail," but quite obviously, it isn’t. I detected little of either.

It also has the occasional oddity. For example, there was a sentence which made no sense to me: "Isaac is not happy with Liesbeth’s a particularly evil neighbor who is known to have slain one of Quackoe’s slaves." I have no idea what that's supposed to mean. Liesbeth and Quakoe are characters in the novel, but the sentence makes no sense. Maybe that indefinite article needs to be removed?

As that quote a few paragraphs back revealed, one of the early properties owned by Samson was Welgemoed. That's the name used in the book, but in Dutch, the word means 'good cheer' - that's what the property was called. That's how Dutch speakers would hear it. I don't imagine the slaves would think of it that way, but the owner undoubtedly did, so given that it's a much more evocative (and hypocritical!) name in English, why use the Dutch term, like it has no real meaning? At another point I read that slaves were "strolling towards the back of the plantation house to the keuken house." Keuken is the Dutch word for kitchen (think 'cookin'!), so why not use 'kitchen'?

This capriciousness in employing Dutch words in some places and not in others was seemingly quite random. It made for an oddly unsettling reading experience and overall it didn't work. The book felt far too American and not Dutch at all. Note that Suriname is on the northeast coast of South America and was a Dutch colony. The Dutch got it in exchange for the English getting New York City after a war. The official language in Suriname today is still Dutch, although many natives speak a lingo called Sranantongo. Why there was not more of a Dutch flavor to this novel, I do not know.

I have a problem with authors who do not seem to realize that words - even people's names and place names - have actual and real meaning and they therefore carry power. So in the same way the Dutch term for kitchen was used in place of the English, the English term 'manumission' or derivatives of it were used frequently in the novel.

The term which was popularly used in the middle of the nineteenth century, but not so much before or after, comes from Latin via French, and it relates to freeing slaves, but it’s far more of an American term than it is a Dutch word. The Dutch equivalent is 'vrijlating', a word which also saw a spike in usage in the mid-nineteenth century, but nowhere is that term used in this novel. It’s like this American author, rather than tying Samson to her Suriname and Dutch roots was deliberately trying to divorce her from them, and Americanize her. For me this spoiled the reading experience and rendered it very inauthentic.

How Samson was in real life, I don't know. I honestly doubt I would have liked her had I met her, but the cold attitude she evidently had toward her slaves in this work of fiction was quite off-putting. I read at various points very early in the novel things like: "La Vallaire sent for something more potent than mope, and also some slaves to fan us as the breeze had died down."

Carl Otto is the man Elisabeth supposedly loves, but at one point he outright states, "He may kill as many Negroes as he pleases...as long as he pays the five hundred florins a head." The text adds, "Carl Otto is always quick to present the logic of a situation." But that's not logic, that's mercenary callousness, and the fact that this is the cold jackass that she loves made me see there was a lot wrong with Elisabeth if she evidently sees nothing wrong with what he has said there. And the Dutch used guilders, not florins as such.

Maybe that's really how Elisabeth Samson was, in which case she deserves no respect whatsoever, no matter what she did for marriage. I can't credit a woman for liberating herself when she owns 200 slaves and is proud of it. I don't want to hear how she was a product of her time. She was a woman who had slavery in her recent past, and yet she felt nothing for the slaves she personally owned? I mean if she felt bad for her slaves she could have freed them all and hired them as workers, but she apparently did not. She was apparently not a good person regardless of her marriage endeavors, and this author neither feigns painting her in any endearing strokes nor does she offer any kind of commentary on her appalling attitude toward slaves. If, frankly my dear, she doesn't give a damn about her slaves, then why should I care a jot about her?

I DNF'd this book because it was not for me, and I honestly can’t see any thinking and feeling person finding anything romantic about it, the way it’s written.