Reinventing Mona by Jennifer Coburn

Rating: WARTY!

I was thinking that after reviewing Becoming Zara back in July 2016, and now having read Reinventing Mona, all I need do is find a title like Uplifting Abigail, and I'll have the whole span of the alphabet pretty much covered; however, I think I'm going to retire from reading this kind of novel having struck-out twice. To coin a baseball metaphor, since I'm not having a ball, I'm going to take a walk! Frankly I haven't had a lot of success with novels which have a female name in the title. I'm beginning to think they're bad news bears all around.

This was unabashed chick lit and my inner chick wasn't impressed. I don't mind the genre if it has something positive and interesting to offer, but when it gets deep down in the dumb, I'm outta there. That's what spoiled this one for me. I was initially impressed and interested in Mona, who is an engineer undergoing an early midlife crisis. It's not often we have women portrayed as engineers in fiction, and it's something I welcomed.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a genre of chick lit where the main female character doesn't own a cupcake shop or a coffee shop, but instead is an engineering consultant or a mathematician, or a biochemist or something? Must we confine our females to trivial or clichéd occupations? Come on authors! Why take the easy route of wallowing in someone else's tired genre and way overused trope party when you can strike out on your own and create a compelling new genre that celebrates diversity in women's occupations instead of similarity, and which celebrates smart instead of dumb, imagination instead of rote, and energy in the form of something novel instead of same old story?

Unfortunately, the revelation that Mona was an engineer was all we got. It was all downhill from there. Offered a generous lay-off package in a downsizing, Mona jumps at it and decides she's going to change her life around. All well and good, but instead of say, starting her own engineering business, she reads a male chauvinistic column in a magazine and buys into macho guy Mike's bullshit, hiring him as a consultant in how to be a guy's ideal chick. I am not kidding you. This is how pathetic Mona is. She isn't a person. All she is, is a walking need for a guy. Not even walking. Limping.

She evidently doesn't have a mind of her own and notwithstanding her hard-earned engineering degree, she apparently has zero smarts. This is not merely my opinion - it's what Mona shows us through her every action. She ignores her friend (about whom I have some agenda suspicions, but also whom I would trust more than this guy), and she swallows everything the guy tells her while ignoring everything her best friend tells her.

The problem is that her goal isn't to win over Mike or anyone like him (although it's obvious from the start that this is where the story is going even if you didn't read the blurb). No, her goal is to win the love of an accountant (Adam) whom she's known forever, and who is Mike's polar opposite and Mona's inane girlhood crush. We're never given an reason why she hadn't pursued Adam before now if he's such an attraction, nor are we told why she feels she needs to turn her whole life around in order to get him. But he stupidity did give me a great idea for a novel (well, maybe not great but good enough!), so my time in this one wasn't all wasted.

For someone who has lived a subdued, even monastic life thus far, Mona really isn't going very far out of her comfort zone and someone is holding her hand the whole time. The truth is that she's failing to direct herself and make her own mind up, and instead, merely taking direction from someone else as she has done all her life evidently.

Instead of dating Adam and finding out what they have in common, she takes Mike's advice which is to take a short stripper course to learn how to tease and please, and to hire Mike's kid sister to go shopping and buy come-on outfits. She also goes jogging. The problem with all this is that it's all outward. She literally does nothing to change herself inwardly which is precisely where her problem lies. Her best friend even complains about this and Mona lies that she is changing herself inside and out, when all she's actually doing is to have herself conform to one guy's puerile image of what a woman should be and frankly, this was sickening to read.

When she finally feels like she's "good enough" to keep Adam's attention, she still doesn't let things happen naturally. Instead, she engineers (yes, I guess that schooling was good for something) fake situations in order to try and impress him. Without asking if he's interested in heavy metal music, she claims she has tickets for Ozzfest, and then has to pay a thousand dollars on eBay to buy some. Not content with that, she hires an actor to play a fictional ex heavy metal boyfriend without discussing with him how he will play the role. He overdoes it and she looks like a moron, and none of this is remotely funny.

Having learned nothing from this disaster, she then hires another actor to fake a heart attack at the zoo so she can step in and do "CPR" and impress Adam. Again, she comes off looking like a moron. Not surprisingly. It was at this point, where she was being ever more stupid, clueless and brain-dead, and the so-called humor was face-planting in its own ass that I quit reading. This novel sucked. If you're going to write a self-help novel can you not make it smart and uplifting instead of demeaning and pathetic like this one was?

The Diabolical Miss Hyde by Viola Carr

Rating: WARTY!

I read ten percent of this, and gave it up because it was so bad and so trope-ridden. There is nothing new here, nothing unexpected, and it has nothing to offer. Some American writers can do a Victorian London well, but too many cannot, and this one cannot.

I'm tempted to say that the steampunk element is muddled with everything but the kitchen sink, but in fact I think there actually is a kitchen sink. It has fairies and werewolves and on and on, and the steampunk seems to be entirely confined to clockwork servants, so that really isn't any steampunk either, to speak of. In short it was a very confused effort.

The main character has nothing to offer to the discerning reader. The one hope of saving this - the fact that Eliza inherited her father Henry's 'condition' - is entirely predictable, but unfortunately brings nothing, unexpected because instead of making Lizzie truly bad, as was the original Edward Hyde, this author makes her cutesy and gelded. Lizzie Hyde turned out to be a complete disappointment. Eliza is the usual antagonist Victorian female in YA steampunk novels, and that's not a good thing. She predictably has the hots for the snotty, obnoxious, and overbearing main male character, who happens to be a werewolf. I don't read werewolf stories, so for me this was the last nail in the coffin of an already deathbed effort.

I thought this book was lost and muddled, contained far too much of the squalid London and nothing in the way of interesting or engaging characters or steampunk contrivances. The ever-changing voice was a major irritation: Lizzie gets first person, Eliza gets third. I cannot stand first person voice unless it's done exceptionally well, and this was not. In short, it's an all-around fail and I can't recommend it.

A Yorkshire Christmas by Kate Hewitt

Rating: WARTY!

I'm a bit late with these last two, but what the Noël! I think yule find the reviews worth reading as long as I don't carol on about them....

Since both of my parents hail from Yorkshire, I thought this might be an interesting read. In fact, it simply wasn't. Even though the story was short I didn't read it all, so I can't comment on the last half of it, but the first half could have been set literally anywhere it snows, from Yorkshire to Yakutsk, from Canada to Chile, and it wouldn't have made any difference, so why 'Yorkshire'? I don't know!

Sometimes when people are obsessed with writing a series, even a loosely packed one like this, they become so enamored of their "brilliance" in picking the catchy titles that they're blinded to the fact that they have to write a story which fits the title, and it has to be a good and realistic one if you want me to read it.

Even if that hadn't been a curious factor in this novel, the story itself was so predictable and ploddingly uninventive that I literally couldn't stand (nor sit!) to read it. The characters were neither inviting nor intriguing, and the story went nowhere that hasn't already been trampled by the feet of countless writers into chill and unappealingly scruffy pack ice. So what was the point of one more flat, cheesy, Christmas cookie-cutter romance? I submit it to you that there is none to be made.

It's the so-trite-it's-shite city girl versus country boy, rich versus poor, helpless versus capable story we're read a billion times before. There is literally nothing new here. Once more we have a girl on the run from a bad romance, because you know that all women are cowardly and weak, and they routinely flee to a new city when a romance goes bad. Curiously, they always seem to arrive in perfect time to immediately fall in love with either a complete stranger or an old flame (ELO! It's either real or it's a dream there's nothing that is in between!), whereas in reality, a woman like that would be a total moron or a limp rag of a person who is of no use to anyone.

As if this isn't bad enough, there's the sorry fiction that every woman needs a Saint George to rescue her from some dragon or other. The fleeing whimpering woman has to be saved and validated by the perfect guy - who can be either simple and country or a billionaire, but who must be a complete stud-muffin in all other regards. excuse me while I barf. This book had no redeeming features whatsoever and I cannot recommend it.

Almost Perfect by Brian Katcher

Rating: WARTY!

This book was obnoxious, and I DNF'd it about a third of the way through it, because the main character, Logan, was totally ridiculous. If I'd known that Kirkus Reviews liked it, I would have avoided it like the plague. I don't think Kirkus ever met a book it didn't adore, so those reviews are utterly meaningless. If I'd known it had won an award, I would likewise have shunned it. Books which win medals and awards rarely meet my approval. They're far too pretentious and "literary" for my taste. This one wasn't really either, but it was still a disaster, well worthy of some literary medal or award. I'm unlikely to ever be offered one, but I promise you if I ever am, I shall flatly refuse it.

If this novel had been published thirty years ago, then some of it might have made a little sense (but still have been unforgivable), but to publish in 2009 and take the trope route main character Logan Witherspoon "just didn't know" is farcical. Any author who does this these days is clueless. The term 'gender dysphoria' was coined in the early seventies and while it took it's time entering the lexicon, other terms applicable to this situation were in wide use. Even people living in podunk towns know something of the LGBTQIA community, so Logan's extreme ignorance was a joke, and not even a funny one.

At any time there are always plenty of jerks and dicks who aren't fit to be anywhere near, let alone in the company of, the LGBTQIA community, but allowing this, Logan's complete ignorance about the topic simply wasn't believable. His 'extreme prejudice' reaction when he learned how Sage came to be the person she is was just plain stupid. It's not possible for the character we had been introduced to at the beginning of the novel to have become that extreme so precipitately by a third the way in, and even if we swallow his ejaculations for what they were, then it's simply not possible to believe that he could ever have erected himself from the sad depths in which he'd so comfortably wallowed. Logan was a dick, and that's all there is to him.

He was also a manic depressive going from high to low at a speed too fast to measure accurately with the technology we have today. Everything was extremes for him, and his behavior was entirely ridiculous and quite literally not credible. The way he behaved towards Sage was obnoxious, and his constant 'I' this and 'me' that made him seem even more self-obsessed and inflated than he would have been in third person. It was depressing to listen to his constant juvenile whining in an audiobook read by Kirby Heyborne, whose voice was way too John Green for my taste, which made the novel even worse.

Sage Hendricks wasn't much better, frankly. It's perfectly understandable that she'd be nervous at best and terrified at worst of her secret getting out, and to her credit she does try to steer Logan away from it, but at the same time, instead of adhering to their agreement to be friends, she proves something of a tease, and definitely leads him on. In some ways I can understand her behavior, but in other ways, it was inexcusable.

On the one hand, you have to allow that it's her business and no one else's, and if he truly cares for her he should accept her for whoever she is, but on the other, we don't yet live in a society where a mtf transgendered person is the equivalent of a biological female. Apart from the issue of pure acceptance (by society as well as by any given individual), there's also the issue of why people form relationships, and one reason is to have children. Clearly (until our medical profession advances dramatically), it's problematical to enter into a relationship with a guy when he doesn't have all the facts at his disposal. there are biological females who cannot have children either, so this situation is no different. If a couple are getting serious, then it's important to be completely honest with each other about what can be expected.

That said, this was another high school story and I cannot take high-school romance stories seriously for the most part. Or any YA romance for that matter. Very few of them are remotely realistic and most are so badly-written as to be a sorry joke. While there are some people in that age range who are commendably mature and who can realistically enter into a serious relationship with a reasonable expectation of it working out in the long term, most people the age of Sage are not sage and those like Logan are hollow at best and clueless at worst.

The rather tired premise for this story is really ripped off from Romeo and Juliet. Logan is pining over his lost love Rosaline, er Brenda (Brenda, really?), but then is suddenly overcome by his lust for new girls Sage. Admittedly, she plays a lot harder to get than does Juliet, whose morals I've always suspected, quite frankly. In this case, he's the Capulet and she's the mountebank. When she finally comes clean and reveals that she started out life with a Y chromosome in place of the other X, his reaction is laughable. The fact that he does take off like this, thinking the most horrid things about her, almost punching her, and using the most unforgivable names about her made me only realize that even if he were to come around later to her point of view, it would be such a pile of fiction that it wouldn't be worth the reading. That's when I gave up on this worthless piece of pretentious (I changed my mind!) trash of a book. And what's with the frigging title? Almost Perfect? Not by a long chromosome. And what's the betting that the cover model isn't remotely transgender?

Evelyn After by Victoria Helen Stone

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"She smile sheepishly" (smiled, not smile)
"Evelyn dug hem out of her drawer and put them on" (them, not hem)
In chapter 22, third paragraph beginning "Evelyn found herself strangely disappointed..." is repeated as the fourth paragraph.

I had mixed feelings about this book, which started out strongly, but seemed to come unraveled rather quickly. In the end it was a disaster. Around sixty percent in I really wasn't feeling it at all, and I kept hoping it would turn around, but it went further south by eighty percent. I should have quit but I foolishly didn't and the ending was the worst part of all. It read more like bad fan-fiction than a professional novel.

The book was replete with routine flashbacks (chapters were labeled 'Before' or 'After', but I didn't always notice that on the Kindle version on my phone, and so sometimes the text was a bit confusing, although I admit in those cases it was my fault). The problem with flashbacks in general though, is that they bring the story to a screeching halt and I am always immensely resentful of that. Sometimes a flashback can serve a useful purpose, but usually to me they merely indicate laziness or incompetence on the part of the writer. In this case the flashbacks were unnecessary and should have been dispensed with. What little they revealed that was not about stalking and that was not boring could have been woven into the story

My biggest problem however, was with the main character Evelyn (a name apparently is pronounced the British way, as three syllables as in Evelyn Waugh). I really did not like her at all. She was far too self-serving and whiny. I don't think it's impossible to enjoy a novel whose main character you don't like, but I do assert that it's much harder to do so, and Evelyn kept making things worse by behaving stupidly, or irrationally, or obnoxiously. She isn't someone I would want to know. She's two-faced at best and a low-life at worst.

The story begins with her discovery that her husband Gary has been having an affair. I don't blame Evelyn for this but there are things she could have done, but failed to do, which would have improved her lot. She's whining that the baby fat she has from the birth of her son is a problem, yet it's been seventeen years. She could have shed it if she'd put her mind to it. She whines that she gave up on her art, when the fact is that she has never needed to work. Her husband is a highly paid psychiatrist, and she could have worked on her art projects all day long, but she chose not to. She dug this hole for herself and didn't even realize she was in one until things went sour in her marriage.

There is another much more serious issue which I don't want to get into for fear of giving too many spoilers, but this issue is worse and Evelyn's reaction to it really turned me off her. When she confronts Gary over the affair, he claims it's over and that he wants to put this behind them and get on with their life together, but while Evelyn claims she forgives him, it's clear she does not. she claims she still loves him, but it's clear from her behavior that there is no love there, and there hasn't been for a while.

This kind of thing made her dishonest at best and a liar at worst. She refuses to let Gary back into her life even though they continue to share the same house. Her motive is ostensibly that she cares too much about their son Cameron to break-up her marriage, but her behavior isn't conducive to a reconciliation - it's quite the opposite - so her behavior and her stated aim were completely at odds. She claims she doesn't trust him, but she believes everything he tells her, and never once questions his account of the more serious event. Not too smart!

I don't get why her husband stays with her. He has no reason to want to be with her whatsoever, yet he hangs around putting up with her crap like he's totally dependent upon her. His character made no sense whatsoever, and the "big twist" at the end, about about what really happened came as no surprise even to me, because it was so patently obvious. Once again, Evelyn ain't too smart.

Worse than this, she turns into a stalker, both of Juliette Whitman, the sylph-like diminutive blonde her husband was unfaithful with, and that woman's husband, Noah, with whom Evelyn herself has an affair. This isn't just cyber-stalking either; she literally spies on these two people, and harbors the most abusive attitude towards Juliette, referring to her repeatedly as a whore, yet she never describes herself in those terms no matter how many times she goes at it with Noah. The sex scenes were quite well done, but the joy of those is tarnished by the fact that I really was starting to dislike Evelyn before they began, and they were juvenile.

Abandon' scarcely begins to describe this couple's approach to getting it on. At one point I read, when Noah offered to get a condom: Evelyn shook her head. "I have an IUD.", but no IUD is going to protect against venereal diseases, and neither of them stops for a second to think about this. She knows who Noah is, and evidently assumes he is clean because he's been married to the same woman for many years, but she has no idea if he's been faithful, and she knows for a fact that his wife has had at least one affair, so she has no idea what Noah's sexual health is, and he hasn't the faintest clue about hers, yet they go at it like rabbits without a hint of discussion regarding health. The only concern is that she might become pregnant (which is possible. She's only forty-one after all).

I never did get the back and forth over going to see a therapist about fixing their marriage. Evelyn mutely chides her husband over dithering on it, but when he pursues her about it, she reveals (to the reader, not to him) that she has no intention of going to one because she considers the marriage to be over! But the author herself forgets what the status is of their therapy plans. At one point in chapter eleven, and later in chapter nineteen, then again in chapter 24, Evelyn discusses with her husband the prospect of choosing a therapist from a list she's prepared and given to him. He says he likes the first one on the list, but then in the next chapter, he's saying he got her list, like they've never discussed it before. Later still, in chapter thirty, they're still harping on this. It made no sense at all!

When Noah abruptly breaks it off with Evelyn purportedly out of guilt, after their weekend "retreat" - or more like a weekend advance - she coldly dismisses him from the hotel room with every overtone of finality, but then she frets over why he's not calling her or sending her a birthday greeting? She's a moron. he feels so little guilt, evidently, that he goes at it agian with her as soon as she calls him to remind this guy whom she threw out of the hotel, that he forgot her birthday! No, I'm sorry, but no. Why should I want to read about a callous and selfish bitch like this, let alone empathize with her?

I'm sorry, but that's exactly what she was. Over the course of the story She turns into a creepy stalker, which is really where she's being going this whole novel. That's her only growth. She's vindictive and selfish, and gives precious little thought to this son she's supposed to be protecting. She helps cover up a serious crime and feels no guilt whatsoever about it. In the end she gets away scot-free with her behavior and is in fact rewarded for it. No. This novel is not worth reading, and I felt resentful of the time I wasted on it hoping it would improve or that there was some big moral lesson coming. Neither option happened.

Out On Good Behavior by Dahlia Adler

Rating: WARTY!

This is a LGBTQIA story set on a college campus, where Francesca Annamaria Bellisario (who naturally goes by 'Frankie', because she's queer, of course), a self-described pansexual (which does not mean she only has sex with cooking pots), is leading a dangerously promiscuous life. While 'sex' is clearly in her sexicon in bold letters, 'safe' certainly is not. Why anyone would become involved with her is a mystery, but college students are not necessarily the smartest rats in the maze - which is why they're at a learning institution, after all, isn't it? The question is, are they going to get the education they expect, or something else entirely? The target of her lust, as she dallies with everything in between, is Samara Kazarian who rooms with one of her friends. This is the story of their "courtship" and it was a huge fail for me.

I know college students are supposed to have an improbably over-sized libido according to MTV and other jock mentalities, but only half of this couple was that kind of person, The other was supposedly a smart, conservative, closet lesbian who you would think would show a lot more common sense than she does. That was one of the problems, We were frequently told how things were, but never shown.

The story was, essentially, a lesbian wet-dream with zero characterization. If we're to go by these lights, all that queers in college ever think of is sex, sex, and more sex, and that's the entirety of it! They never think of homework, or coursework, or hobbies or interests. They never expend any time in conversation which doesn't involve going to sports games or having sex. For me it was completely ridiculous and wholly unrealistic.

Frankie is purportedly an artist and truly dedicated, yet we get none of that here. The closest we come is Sam's examination of one of Frankie's pictures at an exhibition, but then it's gone and we get nothing more. Why make her an art student at all? There is of course no reason except that if she's an artist or an actor, we can stereotype her more? The story felt inauthentic from top to bottom, especially with the inverse slut-shaming (what would you call that? Slut championing?!) that's indulged in with Frankie, who can do nothing wrong. Slut championing is equally as bad as slut-shaming itself is, especially when it seems to be dedicatedly mischaracterizing all queers as promiscuous and shameless. And the idea that a retiring virgin and a slut-champion can find common ground and do it so quickly and effortlessly had to be a joke.

The only relationship Frankie and Sam had was sex. The only value Sam offered for Frankie was, judged by the writing here, a sexual one. She was better than masturbating, it seems. Frankie cared only about the depth of Sam's skin, and her ass and legs, and how beautiful she was. We never got anything which suggested that she liked Sam as a person, much less as a companion, or truly valued her for anything other than lust. That's what turned me off, paradoxically, because that's all there was to this relationship. If that's all the consenting parties are looking for, then it's fine, but I don't particularly want to read about those people, and I certainly don't want to read a bait-and-switch-hitter novel which pretends it's offering a great romance, yet delivers only carnality and literally nothing else but trope.

The saddest thing is that for all her supposed smarts, Sam never once considered discussing venereal disease with Frankie, despite knowing full-well that Frankie would quite literally screw anything on two legs and human (although despite her proudly self-proclaimed pansexualism, all Frankie ever really did was go after or lust after girls). I didn't expect a pages-long dialog about sexual responsibility by any means, that would have been boring, but the fact that not once was it ever so much as even mentioned in the 60% of this novel that I read, was shamefully irresponsible.

There was literally no exposition either. The entire novel was pretty much conversation, all of which centered on Frankie's adulterated lust for Sam. It was truly sickening, and I could not continue reading it when I fully-realized that this story was never going to mature or change. I sure as hell cannot recommend it. If you want a dumb sex romp, then this might be for you, but don't go into this thinking there's anything loving or romantic about it, or that there's a great relationship story here. There isn't.

One Night In Venice by Bella Donnis

Rating: WARTY!

This begins a pair of (very negative) reviews of short, appallingly badly-written "lesbian" stories!

I was having a little bit of trouble deciding on a good ebook to get into, which is sad, given how many are available to me! In fact, it's downright pathetic. We're spoiled rotten these days with the riptide of ebooks out there. But the plenitude is also the penury given how sorry some of these books are. Yet despite the rising tide of ebooks promising a bounty to anyone who casts a wide enough net, I still managed to haul in two really awful (or is that offal?) ones. This was the first.

This one, fortunately given how things turned out, was free on Amazon (and available on B&N which is where I got it - I always check alternates before I buy from Amazon). So I opened it to find it was only twenty eight pages! This was actually its best feature, but truth be told, I couldn't even finish that much, it was so bad! It felt more like it was one of those book teasers, which isn't a bad idea and which is eminently suited to ebooks. You know, one of those shorties that lures you in and persuades you to buy the full length version? I don't do that, but you can't blame an author for that when competition is so tough. This though, it turns out, is the whole thing - not an intro, but the entire "novel" (as far as I could tell).

It's about this woman whose boyfriend dumps her via a text message when she's in Venice, waiting for him to come out to join her. It was this idea - that she finds herself cruelly ditched and somehow falls into a relationship with a woman - which intrigued me and persuaded me to take a look. The trip was supposed to be a foursome; now it's a three's-a-crowd situation. She only became acquainted with this couple through her AWOL ex, so the other woman is someone she hardly knows, but she's kind to her, even though the guy - a friend of her ex - is ham-fistedly cruel.

The problem is that the writing is so clunky and the interpersonal dynamics so lacking in credibility that I quickly became convinced that I would not even be able to make it through twenty-eight pages of this. I was right! I quit on page twenty because it was awful. 'Subtle' and 'leisurely' are two words which have quite obviously been struck from this author's lexicon (always assuming they were ever present in the first place).

The unsuspecting reader is smashed brutally and repeatedly over the head with a hyper-sexed woman who seems to harbor absolutely zero grief for the demise of her relationship, and who is ogling the other girl like a dog in heat. I'm surprised there wasn't a description of her tongue lolling out dripping saliva. She's all-but humping her friend's leg. If a guy behaved like this it would be sen as entirely inappropriate and the guy would be rightfully termed a dick. So what does that make this woman? A clit? Somehow that doesn't seem to carry the same deprecative weight. Why is that? Because guys can be dicks but women can't be clits?! If that's not sexist, what is?!

Abandon hope (and seek hops!) all ye who enter here looking for romance! There is none to be found in these pages. Yes, we're seeing the friend be kind to the main character, but what she gets in return is pure, adulterated lust. It's all about how beautiful she is, how hot she is, how perfect her "tits" are, how sexy she is, how great her hair is. There's not a single solitary word about what's beneath that depth of skin. We really hear nothing of the kind of friend she is or might be, about whether she's reliable or trustworthy, or whether she has integrity, and would make a decent companion. Nope, it's all sex and only sex, which is nowhere near enough for me to want to read a novel, or even a short story such as this.

The blurb says, "Warning: This lesbian erotic romance story contains extreme graphic and sexual content, specifically lesbian sex and should not be read by those under the age of 18." Seriously? Lesbian sex is extreme? LOL! Like no young adult has ever has such thoughts - and even activities?! Besides, if it's aimed at adults, then why is it written at the level of young adult or even middle-grade in parts? And I take exception to the word "erotic"! There's no eroticism here; it's all crude, juvenile sexcapades and that's all there is. If that's your cup of tea, then by all means quaff deeply, but with lines like "I scrutinised her firm buttocks," it sure as hell ain't mine.

The real problem with this when you get right down to it, is that it's not a novel. It most closely resembles an old telegram, because everything is telegraphed. Everything is so glaringly obvious. There is no subtlety here. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the main character, who is so profoundly stupid that despite her leering, salivating, Shylock-like obsession with pounding the flesh of the only other female character in the entire book, she completely fails to realize that she's bisexual. I'm not a fan of novel in which the author goes out of her way to demonstrate how stupid her main character is. And yes, there's a difference between lesbian and bisexual which this author doesn't seem to get. However, since sexuality it not a binary scale but a sliding one, I'll let that...slide!

This stupidity and crudity is what turned me off the novel completely. What had attracted me was that this was a Brit language novel, which may cause some readers a headache or two unless they are British or at least an Anglophile, but that was nowhere near enough to offset the shabby writing. The panting, tongue-lolling dog into which the main character morphed was more reminiscent of a lame rip-off of Kafka than ever it was of Austen. There was nothing romantic, sensual or subtle here at all. I cannot recommend this. It read like a "lesbian" novel written by an inept male author, and I'm truly sorry if that's insulting, but I gotta call it like I read it!

Teenage Mermaid by Ellen Schreiber

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of those novels where an older writer writes for a younger age group without changing any of her personal preferences or prejudices! Thus she sounds dumb at best and stupid at worst. This is written in worst person voice, which is first person voice, a voice I detest, but it's actually twice as bad here, because we have two alternating stories and the first one, where the guy is rescued by the mermaid, is straight out of the Tom Hanks/Darryl Hannah movie Splash which preceded this novel by some two decades. It was juvenile even for the intended age range, and frankly I expect better from an author whose very name in German, means writer! I managed two chapters of this before I DNF'd this DNR.

Haunted on Bourbon Street by Deanna Chase

Rating: WARTY!

This novel sucked. It's about Jade Calhoun (I should have quit reading right there!) who is an "empath" in a world where everyone, without question, completely accepts all the new-age mumbo-jumbo. Jade moves into a new apartment in New Orleans for no good reason (she's from out of state), and encounters a ghost which apparently doesn't have a pleasant agenda. She immediately calls in a guy recommended by a friend who uses scientific equipment to try and record and measure the ghost. Why the empath can't do this for herself is a mystery. She's a friggin' empath! What use is she?

I'm guessing the real reason is to make sure she has lots of encounters with Kane (I should have quit reading right there, too!) who runs the strip club under her apartment. From the moment of their first encounter, Jade turns into a bitch in heat whenever Kane is around and it was so tedious, it was pathetic. Get a room already. Oh wait, she has one! But it's haunted! Oh god how will they ever make it through this???? Who the hell cares? And do I want to read more of this crap in a series? "NO!"

The thing is, despite Jade calling for help and being unaccountably terrified of this ghost, the blurb tells us, "...it's up to Jade to use her unique ability to save" her friend Pyper (yeah, I should have quit reading right there, too). I'm really sorry, and I apologize to all women named Piper (or variants thereof), but I simply cannot take that name seriously, not at all. I just can't. But there you have it. If it's up to her, why did she bring in the science boys? Filler? Or fill her?

The blurb stupidly asks, as do all blurbs beginning with 'When' ask, "...she'll need Kane's help to do it...Can she find a way to trust him and herself before Pyper is lost?" I'm guessing the answer to that question is "Yes!" but it ought to be "NO!" and all of these characters ought to die horribly in a ghostly holocaust.

That would have unarguably been the best ending for this, and if it had happened that way, I would have rated this five stars. As it is, it honestly gets no stars. The one I gave it is only for the fact that "no stars" is not an option (Goodreads can't average it!); it just looks like the reviewer forgot to check how many stars it earned, and it doesn't count for squat. That's why I don't do stars as such. Either the novel is worth reading or it's not. It gets five stars or one, and to cut to the (Deanna) Chase, this one is definitely not worth reading.

I did love that if you write out the title and the author's name you get: Haunted on Bourbon Street by Deanna Chase - like it's the author who's doing the haunting. That was the best part about this novel.

Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd paid attention to the blurb, I would never have read (or more accurately, listened to) this novel. The blurb on Goodreads begins, "John Green's The Fault in Our Stars meets Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park." They quite evidently have no idea whatsoever how that prospect would turn my stomach. I detest John Green's novels, and thought that Rowell's Fangirl was a truly sad disaster.

This novel, OTOH, has no relationship whatsoever to any of those pretentious and flatulent piles of drivel. I don't get why Big Publishing™ is so intent upon demeaning their authors by rendering them into clones of other authors. How insulting can you get? This is why I self-publish, and that may rob me of a few advantages, but anything is better than putting up with that crap - with having insulting and misleading blurbs that treat readers like morons, and having someone else effectively own your property at least in terms of how it's presented to the public. Screw that for a game of tin soldiers!

This novel stands apart from those others in many ways, and I did like Rebecca Lowman's narration (refreshingly this was not a first person PoV disaster) but in the end, it proved to be no better that he volumes to which it's been compared. I think the author's problem was that she could not make up her mind what the hell kind of a story to write, and tried to make it all things to all people. As such it was a serious fail and ended-up ill-serving her original purpose, which evidently was to show that people with disabilities are really just like the rest of us. Well duhh! The problem with her approach was that instead of showing us two challenged people who were otherwise just like the rest of us, she chose to show us two people who were really, in the final analysis, jerks. They were unlikable, irresponsible, clueless and ill-fitted to decent sociable society. Ironically, it frequently seemed like they were made for each other

Matthew is in many ways worse off than Amy. He has a richness to his OCD that's worthy of Howard Hughes, intent upon a disturbing level of personal hygiene and an inexplicably paradoxical compulsion to touch and count things he passes. The saddest thing about his condition isn't that he has it, it's that he's had it in this school system for years and no one has offered him a lick of help for it. The teachers in the school are quite obviously morons who ought to be fired. Matthew's mother is hardly better. That was one of the problems - the novel takes place in a bubble formed by Matthew and Amy, like the rest of the world doesn't exist. Absurd!

Matthew finally does get a species of help in the form of Amy, who has the questionable idea of hiring fellow students to be her companions at school in place of her regular adult companion/facilitator. This leads to her opening up and living a life quite unlike she has before, and it also brings herself and Matthew into regimented proximity. That's not to say it's all plain sailing, though; much of it is painful and ailing.

This idea of using fellow students gets her what she wants in terms of making 'friends' although the value of the friendship is highly dubious, but as other reviewers have pointed out, the author fails to explain how these people substitute for her adult aides who did a heck of a lot more for her in terms of caring and personal hygiene than ever the students do. It's like the messy little bits are swept under the carpet, but it really wasn't that which bothered me. It was that the real dysfunction of these two characters wasn't OCD or cerebral palsy (what an awfully antiquated name that is! Can medical science not do better than that to describe this condition?). The real dysfunction here was that both Matthew and Amy were unlikable jerks who treated each other shabbily on Matthew's part and appallingly on Amy's. And this is a romance? No!

The latter honestly did not deserve anyone like Matthew who, as mis-focused as he was at times, at least wanted to help her. She just used him, and despite the author telling us repeatedly how smart Amy was, what she showed us all-too-often was what a complete dumbass Amy was. I didn't like either of these characters and gave up on a novel that had started out so well and then fell apart. I cannot recommend this.

Resurrecting Sunshine by Lisa A Koosis

Rating: WARTY!

Note: this is an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Resurrecting Sunshine was a real disappointment for me. I felt like it was a bait-and-switch story and I got the lesser half of the deal. The titular character, Sunshine, aka Marybeth, is being cloned, and she had a major story to tell, yet we never get to meet her at all. All we get is Adam's perspective, in first person, which can be tedious, and Marybeth never got to tell her story. In fact, she got shorted badly and I resented that.

The story is set about a decade into the future and is all about the adolescent yet juvenile Adam, an emancipated and emaciated spoiled-rotten seventeen-year-old, self-pitying drunk, who is one of the most tediously self-obsessed, self-centered, and monotonously whining characters I've ever had to put up with in a novel. The first person PoV, which is nearly always worst person PoV, did not help at all. He was nauseating. After about sixty percent of the novel, I began skimming because I could not stand to listen to him and I resented the endless, uninformative flashbacks. I found myself wishing that Adam had died and Marybeth was telling the story. As a resurrected clone, it would have made for far more interesting reading.

More than one person has rudely tried to impose upon me the assertion that you cannot review a novel if you haven't read it all, but those people are not only crass, they are delusional. I read sixty percent of this one and skimmed the rest, and it not only did it never improve, it never went anywhere I didn't expect it to go. I rest my case.

It was utterly predictable in pretty much every major facet, so there were no surprises at all. Except one: I was surprised that I never got to meet Marybeth, but having met Adam, I was left in no doubt as to why she killed herself. He was insufferable. And yes, it's no spoiler to reveal that fact, because like several other things in the novel, such as how Adam and Genevieve would end up as an item, and what her story was, it was so predictable, and it was quite obvious that "Sunshine" had rain in her life despite the author's inexplicable, yet extreme reticence in revealing that obvious information.

Adam was the guitarist in a four-person band of which Sunshine was the star. All of the others are dead, and so it's Adam who's approached by a rather secretive organization that's intent upon cloning loved ones. He's told they can bring Marybeth back, and they need him because her memory record, which they had taken when she was in the hospital, is corrupted in part. He knew her better than anyone, and he can help fix the omissions.

This was one of several issues for me in a novel that was far more fiction than science. Yes, we could technically clone a human. Whether it's ethical or advisable is another issue, but this cloning was glossed over so thickly that it stunk of varnish. How did they get her cells? How did they record her memories?

Growing an embryo into a seventeen year old girl in a few weeks or months? It's too much. Recording memories? I found it hard to believe they'd been able to get access to someone like Sunshine and record her memories as she lay dying or dead without anyone finding it strange or questioning what they were doing. There are ways to explain this, but it never was explained - it was simply a given. And never were the ethics of this shady business seriously questioned. The second instance of this memory mapping is even harder to explain, and so it goes unexplained, but I can't go into that without giving away a rather large spoiler, even though it became obvious what was going on well before the author revealed it.

I really like a good cloning story and this one started out quite well, and at least the story took off quickly, which is always a plus. Problems arose for Adam as soon as he arrived on the Island of Doctor Morose. He's missing booze of course, the islanders seem to think there are ghosts at the clinic, despite all the secrecy - or perhaps because of it - and even as he pines for Sunshine, he's forming a relationship with another young girl there, whose name is Genevieve. This was another sad case of instadore in YA "literature" and it was one more sorry aspect to this story. Adam isn't fit to be in a relationship with anyone and Genevieve is a moron if she thinks she's in love with this dick after a few troubled weeks.

As for Sunshine, despite being the titular character, she's conspicuous by her absence. She's been cloned, Adam is told, but not yet fully matured. In the story, the clones undergo an artificial maturation process (which the author amusingly calls 'aging', like the clones are wine or cheese!), so he isn't allowed to meet her until they've finished calibrating his mind and retrieving his memories. The idea is that Adam will recall memories of Sunshine and these will themselves be cloned and used to fill the gaps in the clone's mind - suitably altered to make them look like her own memories rather than his. How that will work goes unexplained. The author hasn't specified why this is necessary - why they couldn't, for example, simply tell her she's lost some memories.

This was one of the major problems because the author seems to have a poor understanding of how memories are made and stored. Or is it that she has a great grasp of it, but chooses to ignore it for the purpose of this fiction? I don't know. I can't remember accurately! LOL! Seriously though, there's this fiction in fiction that the mind is like a computer hard drive constantly recording everything, and that whatever is stored there can be recalled exactly as it was when first stored - it never changes. This is completely wrong. Human memory is much more like stew than it is like a hard drive, with memories constantly mixing with and flavoring others.

Memories are modified every time they're recalled, and what's stored in the first place isn't an accurate record of what you experienced. Most things your senses encounter are filtered out, and only what your mind considers crucial to your survival is stored. Even our definition of survival is different these days from what it was when we lived on the Savannah in Africa. This laxity in our memorizing is why eye witnesses are the worst kind of evidence in a court case, and our poor understanding of memory is why jurors so idiotically put so much stock in what an eye witness says. It's not possible to pull up your entire past because it simply isn't there to be pulled up, and what is there isn't authentic, so it actually wouldn't matter if the clone is deemed to have false memories! Our own "real" memories are false to a disturbing degree!

One question I kept asking is "Why make her a clone?" She could have been be a ghost or a twin sister and this story would have been largely the same, especially since she never got to actually tell her story. All we ever got was Adam endlessly going back into his recollections and "interacting" with Marybeth in holodeck simulations right out of Star Trek. I felt cheated.

At first this wasn't bad and it was actually integral to the story, but when it went on and endlessly on and on and on, it turned me right off the story. It became boring, tedious and unengaging. Even if Adam had been a guy worth reading about, and he wasn't, it would have been mind-numbing with the monotonous flashbacks. The truth is that Adam was a complete dick, and I loathed him. At one point he even alienates Genevieve who has been inexplicably patient with him. He pisses her off so much that she refuses to hang with him or speak to him, and I can't blame her at all. She's a smart woman! Or she was until she has a brain fart and returns to him.

In the end I felt mugged of the story I'd been promised - or at least the story I felt I'd been promised from the blurb and the title, and what I got instead wasn't nearly as entertaining as what I'd expected. I wish the author all the best in her career, but I cannot in good faith recommend this one.

The Girl from the Sea by Shalini Boland

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"Prising my fingers off the edge of the boat" should be "prying"!

This was an advance review copy from Net Galley for which I thank the publisher.

Mia comes to consciousness lying literally in the littoral on the south coast of England, cold, wet with saltwater, and with a woman and a dog peering at her. Soon there are police and an ambulance, and Mia is in hospital. She remembers nothing about herself, not even her name. She doesn't recognize herself in the mirror, nor does she recognize her boyfriend when he comes to pick her up. Later she doesn't recognize her mother or younger sister. She remembers other things, such as how to row (she was passionate about rowing on the river by her house), and she remembers how to drive, how to use a computer, and so on, but anything personal has gone.

It's counter intuitive, I know, but the author gets it right. You'd think you would recall things which were very personal to you or which were lifelong - such as your family and your name - but retrograde amnesia really can do this to a person. Retrograde refers to memory loss of things past - memories which are there, but which you cannot access. Anterograde, in my view the worst kind, refers to new memories - you can't move new memories into long-term memory and so each day begins anew for you, with precisely the same memories you had the day before - rather like Drew Barrymore's character in the movie 50 First Dates

My problem with this novel wasn't with the medical aspects of it, but with the fact that to me, this was another case of a female author doing serious disservice to her main female character. I don't mind stories where the main character starts out weak, and/or stupid, and grows stronger and smarter. Unlike many reviewers I don't even mind stories where the main character doesn't change or grow. There is story-telling to be had there.

What I don't like at all is a story where the main character becomes weaker or more stupid as the story goes on, and this story was one of those. I don't like stories where the character isn't true to herself, and so acts out of character for no reason. This story was one of those. I like even less stories where the main character is female and becomes totally dependent upon a man to validate and save her. I can't understand why so many female writers do this to their characters. What this meant was that while this story started out as an intriguing mystery - what had happened to this woman - it quickly deteriorated into a bog-standard harlequin romance, in which I have zero interest. The only thing missing was the bare-chested man on the cover.

The story quickly deteriorated into a romance, leaving the mystery in the back seat, and Mia began behaving more and more stupidly, and it was out of character. She was supposed to have been a teacher not long before, which is an admirable thing to make your character, but nowhere did we see her teaching skills come to the fore, which begged the question, why make her a teacher if you're not going to use it? She could have been a wait-person, or middle management, or a car mechanic and the story would have remained exactly the same.

The second problem was Mia's stupidity. Her memory wasn't the only thing she lost. She also lost her wallet and her house keys, but despite being in some fear,she never once (not in the 80% of this I read) considered cancelling her credit cards and changing the locks on her house. Stupid. yes, she was undergoing something horrible, but she had every motive to act and she failed. Worse, the police failed to advise her to do this.

Obviously what she went through was horrible - and hard to imagine (which I suspect is part of the problem with the writing here). I mean it's easy to say now what I would do in those circumstances, but if I lost my memory, how would I recall what I'd decided I would do?! LOL! That said, Mia could have been presented in a lot better light than a wheedling, tearful and tediously weak character who has impulsive sex a fails to consider whether she might become pregnant from it.

Worse than that, she acts stupidly on many occasions, way beyond what you might expect from someone who had been through what she went through. She acts with the impulsiveness of a child, without forethought, despite living in a certain amount of fear which is very understandable and which you'd think would compel her to act more cautiously and sensibly. She proves herself to be consistently weak and easily-manipulated even as she's purportedly asserting her independence and self control. Clearly what we're shown is at odds with what we're told.

As soon as Mia appears to be growing out of this dreary inertial lethargy, she immediately submerges herself back into it at the mercy of Jack - a complete stranger - someone she barely knew when she had her memories and now literally doesn't know at all. Despite being screwed-over by her boyfriend and by her family, she inexplicably and inexcusably trusts Jack. What this means to the reader is that just as Mia is beginning to find herself, she completely loses herself again! The blurb for this novel asks, "When you don't even know who you are, how do you know who to trust?" yet Mia seems to have no problem falling all over Jack, and he comes to tiresomely dominate her thoughts pretty much to the exclusion of her real troubles.

I detest the name Jack as a character in novels because it's WAY-THE HELL over used as your heroic bad-boy type, and its time authors started to use their imagination and come up with a new name instead of jack-ing off every time. I flatly refuse to read any novel where the main character is named Jack and I'm moving speedily towards avoiding novels which have any character named Jack unless it's a very minor one.

Despite having some seriously harrowing episodes, Mia fails to visit the amiable doctor who saw her in the hospital. She fails to report things to the police until she's pretty much forced to. She fails to see what a complete dick her boyfriend Piers is, until he forces her to see it. When she reviews her financial records, Mia discovers she's fabulously wealthy, yet never once do we see any indication that she gave anything to charity, not even simply for tax purposes. Instead she's evidently squandered the money on clothes. This tells me only how disgustingly shallow and selfish she is, which actually explains a lot about her behavior after her accident. The truth is that Mia never left the sea. She's still metaphorically being buffeted around, just as she was before she beached! It's sad.

In short I came to really dislike and then quickly to detest Mia, and I lost all empathy with, and sympathy for her as her behavior continued to descend into the moronic. I gave up on this at about eighty percent in because I couldn't stand to read any more of this woman careering down the track towards a train wreck. I wish the author all the best with her writing career, but based on this, I cannot in good faith say it's one I want to follow.

Haunted by Meg Cabot

Rating: WARTY!

Read really annoyingly by Alanna Ubach, this novellette sounded interesting from the blurb, but it turned out to be yet another irritating first person PoV, which is worst person in practice, and it honestly had nothing to do with ghosts, not really. You could have taken the minimal presence of ghosts completely out of the picture and had very nearly the same story: a sixteen year old has literally nothing on her mind than boys.

Tiresomely, there's the trope bad boy that the mc falls for, and the standard issue best friend. Often I find I like the best friend better than the main character, but such was not the case here, so this story didn't even have that going for it. I actually didn't like anyone. I know this is a part of a larger world, none of which I'm familiar with, but that doesn't alter the fact that we had a weak and uninteresting main character, and a story which had nothing new to offer and not a thing to recommend it. I have no need now to read anything else in this world, nor anything else by Meg Cabot (and yes, it's ca-bot, not cab-oh, so there isn't even anything unexpected there).

Susannah Simon, the protagonist, is dating a ghost - she and other special snowflakes like her can physically interact with ghosts - but like I said, the ghosts may as well have been ordinary and very retiring people for all they contributed to the story. All that was left was your stereotypical and clueless high school girl in love, which is tedious, uninventive and done to death. Meg Cabot needs a new shtick, and she's not alone amongst YA authors in that respect.

Machinations by Hayley Stone

Rating: WARTY!

erratum:
"I walk like I belong her0e." That zero clearly doesn't belong! Did the machines put it there?!

Not to be confused with Machinations by JS Breving!

I should have listened to the blurb! It told me right there that it was "Perfect for fans of Robopocalypse" - a novel I detested! I had hoped that this wouldn't make the mistakes that one did, and my hope was rewarded in a sense, because this novel made a whole different set of mistakes. I made it only twenty-five percent through it before I gave it up as a lost cause.

I know people might decry giving up at that point, offering forlorn and misguided claims that if you don't read it all, you can't be sure it won't win you over, but I'm sorry - I can. I've read scores upon scores of books and if one doesn't get me by the time the first quarter is over, I know for a fact that it's not worth wasting more of my time on, not when there are still scores upon scores of other novels out there which are just begging me to turn that first page so they can grip me and thrill me.

The first problem was first person (and it's evidently the start of a series, I'm sorry to report). This is nearly always the wrong choice of PoV for a novel, and I cannot for the life of me understand the OCD which causes so many writers, particularly young adult and new adult authors, to be so irremediably addicted to this voice. It is so limiting and so irritating because it's all about "me" all the time! Hey lookit me! Lookit what I'm doing now! No, pay attention to meee! It doesn't help at all when the narrator is the self-obsessed, incurious, whiny and retiring wallflower that this one is. She's supposed to be a leader - a commander - yet she evinces nothing to make me believe she is or ever was such a person.

Nor does it help when she has nothing else to offer a reader. She's not interesting. She's not smart. She's not curious about anything. She's purportedly a trained soldier but the first thing which happens to her is that she gets shot, and not in some heroic way' but in the same dumb way extras in the form of cops and security guards always get killed on TV shows and in movies - in the most ridiculously unrealistic way possible.

Rhona is brought back to life as a clone in a process that is never explained (not in the portion I read) and which, absent any explanation, completely lacks any credibility. Perhaps some explanation for what happens appears later in the narrative, but from what we're given in the first quarter, it looks like the author believes that when you clone someone, not only do you get a fully-grown adult body in short order, you also get that person's complete memories. Sorry, No! Cloning doesn't work like that! If you want me to accept that it does in your world, then you owe me some sort of explanation as to why this process completely overturns the laws of biology, biochemistry, and neuroscience in your world!

Like I said, maybe there's a better explanation later, but that was the problem with this novel - there were no explanations for anything. We get dumped into this world, humans v. machines, with very little guidance as to how it ever got into this state, including why humans appear to be on the verge of extinction. I kept reading-on hoping for some background to filter through in the narrative, but it never came. Naturally no one wants a bald info-dump, but instead of listening to a twenty-five-year-old mooning over her lost love like she's a fifteen-year-old, I would much rather have had those maudlin paragraphs cut and replaced with some background.

That brings me right into another problem with this novel. Admittedly the author has nothing to do with the blurb unless she self-publishes, but the blurb for this novel is trying to sell it to readers as an "action-packed science-fiction" novel, when the truth is, based on what I read, that it's really a romance novel with thin sci-fi veneer. There's very little action packed into the first quarter of the story, and what we do get is limp and mundane. I obtained this as an advance review copy from Net Galley, and I do appreciate the opportunity to read such books, but it would make me happier if I felt I was getting what I thought I was requesting rather than something else entirely!

I had some hesitation in choosing this one because it seemed a lot less like it was Robopocalypse and much more like it was something of a mashup of two Schwarzeneggar movies - Terminator and The 6th Day, because it has humans fighting the machines, and what appears to be instant cloning. The narrator, Rhona, who appears to be in her mid-twenties, and is a soldier fighting against the machines, is killed in the first couple of pages, but then she's revived and discovers that she's been cloned. Her old body has died, and this revival is supposed to be not only a physical duplicate, but a mental one, as well.

It's implied that because the process is somehow interrupted, she doesn’t have everything she had before, at least not to begin with, but what she remembers is bizarre and makes no sense. Without any kind of explanation as to exactly how she's been cloned and how her memories have been retained, I can only speculate. It appears that what's missing is most of her personal stuff - she seems to recall everything else, including how to fight. Her muscular coordination is spectacular because within a few minutes of waking up, she's on the run, and can move her body without any physical issues: - no muscular atrophy or weakness from being a fresh clone, and no tiredness. It simply wasn't credible.

On top of this she understands and speaks perfect English, though her clone's body has never learned it nor spoken it using that clone's vocal tract. She recalls a huge amount about the war and about how to be a soldier, yet nothing personal comes to her easily? It seems to me that your personal memories are the ones you'd have embedded most deeply, and the skills you learned later in life would be the ones which were harder to retain. This is why older adults can recall things from their childhood better than they can recall things which happened a few days ago, so this made no sense to me, and with no explanation being offered by the author as to what was going on, it wasn't possible to arrive at any satisfactory conclusions.

This being kept in the dark for the first quarter of the novel became truly irritating very quickly, especially when Rhona finally makes it back to HQ and we discover she's the commander of these forces, such as they are, yet she's locked in a prison cell for no apparent reason other than that she's a clone? What? At first, I thought that maybe there was some suspicion that she might be an agent of the machines - that they might have reprogrammed her or something, but no one ever suggested anything like this.

Instead, there was simply this irrational, baseless suspicion and detestation of her by pretty much everyone she encounters, including her old lover - or more accurately, the current lover of her old body! Again there's no information about how she was cloned, how cloning is viewed in this world, who suggested cloning her, who authorized it, or who actually did it (and Rhona shows no interest whatsoever in learning the answers to any such questions! That was a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot right there. It made no sense whatsoever.

When it came down to a bizarre fight, with some subordinate physically attacking Rhona, I quit right there because it had become too ridiculous for me to take seriously anymore. It was especially sad that an experienced soldier like Rhona was getting her ass handed to her on a plate by this subordinate. That was too much for me and I gave up reading because it was requiring to much work! I might as well be writing it myself for as much effort as I had to put into it to try to work out what the heck was happening!

The lack of information was bad enough, but the fact that Rhona - a purported commander - was the most incurious and retiring person on the planet with regard to trying to learn what was going on, how the fight was going, and who cloned her and why, was simply beyond the bounds of belief. Never once did she take charge. Instead, she behaved like a girl starting out her first day at a new school, but even such a girl would have a bunch of questions. Rhona had none. She constantly let others - all males - push her into a back seat. It was pathetic and disturbing to see.

If she had come back in a machine body with her human brain, then a lot of this story would have made sense. It would still have been a romance disguised as a sci-fi story (and a lot more interesting romance for that, I would argue), but it would have made more sense than it did, because it would have accounted for the universal suspicion under which she was held, but that's not this story. This story gives us nothing to work with. I mean how did a twenty-five-year old girl become a military commander in the first place? We learn nothing of that. Was she in the military? Was she a known leader from the start or did she rise to prominence through bravery, ingenuity, and success? Were there no other leaders left alive? What was happening in the rest of the world? Or do Americans not care? It would have been nice to have had a word or two about all of this, but we get nothing.

One more thing which bothered me was trying to determine which side was the dumbest - the humans or the robots. The humans get the dumb award for designing guns which have a power 'clip' just like with a clip in a regular automatic gun, but these soldiers have to remove the power 'clip' to see how much 'ammo' they had left - in this case, what the power level is. That struck me as poor design. Why wouldn't you be able to read the power level while the clip is still in place? You disarm yourself every time you have to remove it! This kind of thing in a novel makes me wonder if there's a purpose for it, or if it’s just not been very well thought-through by the author.

In the case of the robots, the stupidity came with the soldiers' use of EMPs to take down the machines. We're told the machines are getting better at cycling back up faster after an EMP strike, but why don't the machines simply build themselves with a Faraday cage around their body, built into their armor, to stop the EMPs getting them at all? If the machines are that dumb, how is it that they're winning? I guess because the dumb humans have to keep disarming themselves to check their power supply....

I'm not a fan of authors using dream sequences and we get more than one here. In each case it's a huge info-dump, but it dumps info which doesn't really tell us anything interesting, and which certainly fails to explain how the world got to where it is. All we get are details of life when things went south for humanity which contribute nothing to the story and which fail to clue us in as to how things went south. In this case there was a really long dream sequence the first time Rhona sleeps after awaking to the realization that she's a clone, and it was as boring as it was confusing because it went on and on and turned into a flashback. I’d rather Rhona had simply woken-up and told Samuel (briefly) of her dream. That would have made more sense.

So in short, and given the list of grievances I have against this novel after reading only twenty-five percent of it, I can't in good faith recommend this one. I do wish the author all the best in her career, but I can't say that I personally want to follow it base don this sample.

Don't Bang the Barista by Leigh Matthews

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
We both put down out drinks, serious for a moment.

I loved the title of this novel, which was a LGBTQIA novel full of drinking, smoking, over-caffeination, shallow relationships, and irresponsible sex. I expected better, especially since one of the characters was vegan. Given everything else she was into it made her sound so fake. I certainly hoped for better, but it never came. Kate is a lesbian who is a year out of a five year relationship, and she's not dealing. In fact, given how she is, I strongly felt that she had been like this before the relationship broke up and that's why it broke up, so I was not on her side from the off, pretty much. She has this recent acquaintance named Cass, and it's pretty obvious from the start that this is nothing more than the trope girl-too-stupid-to-know-her-best friend-is-the-love-of-her-life, which has been done to death and this version offers nothing new, not even the LGBTQIAngle. What it does tell us is that Kate isn't really very smart or very deep.

She has this ridiculous idea that it takes a third the time to get over a relationship as you spent in the relationship, so after five years, she considers that the year she's spent alone isn't sufficient. She's a moron. You can't put a time limit on it as though everyone is exactly the same, and reacts in the same way, and has the same circle of friends. Some people have good support groups, others don't. Some people are resilient, others not so much. The bottom line is that it takes whatever time it takes, but you have to make an effort. Kate simply isn't. She's wallowing. How her friends - of whom she has many, put up with her is the real mystery here.

The barista is Hanna, and Kate hooks up with her and has sex without getting to know her, and without even having had a date with her (not to speak of). This whole scene (which is, be advised, quite detailed) felt completely fake and hollow to me, because on the one hand these two have made out and felt each other up on the dance floor without asking, for goodness sakes, yet here in the privacy of Kate's apartment, when they are both essentially mauling each other, Hanna is asking for permission every step of the way - to removing her sweater, her pants, her bra; then she's feeling her up again on the way to the bedroom without asking. It felt like it was written by (w)rote (hah!) instead of by means of the author really thinking this through. I didn't get this asking permission, and then letting a discussion of their sexual history simply slide right on by. Either they're responsible or they're not. They can't be both.

This thing with getting together with Cass completely undermined the "appropriate approach to sex" motif, too. Cass is, quite frankly, a stalker, who has designs on Kate, but for some reason despite her supposedly being open and direct and straight-forward, can't ever bring herself to tell Kate how she feels, or to show her. Instead, she decides she's going to break up Kate and Hanna before they're even an item, warning Kate off her, following Kate to the club when they have their first date, and then forcing herself onto Kate and kissing her in sight of Hanna, and thereby causing a rift between them. Kate needs to ditch Cass at once. This girl is a trouble-making creep and her behavior is unacceptable. And these 'girls' are in their thirties for goodness sakes! They should know better.

The really weird thing (like this wasn't bad enough already) is that this was in a lesbian bar, yet not one of the other women in there comes to Kate's aid (when Cass grabs her) to ask her if she's okay and if this attention from Cass is OK. Instead they laugh at her, like she's some bi-curious hetero who's strayed beyond her comfort zone, or she's a newbie and therefore deserves no better treatment? So much for a sisterhood. This was horrible. I sincerely hope the Vancouver queer scene isn't remotely like it's portrayed here. It would be truly a scary one if it were.

Kate's friends are really no better. Not one of them is really interested in advising Kate about finding a quality relationship. Every time they talk about Hanna, it's along these lines: "you have this hot barista who clearly likes you." I'm sorry but lust ≠ like. With friends like these, who needs enemas? But Kate is the real piece of work here. She is going to a movie with Hanna, then invites her friend Em along, then it becomes obvious Hanna is going to pair up with Em, but Kate is too stupid to see it, yet when she goes to the bathroom and (oh what another coincidence) encounters her ex, Janice in there, the two of them start making out in the bathroom. Seriously? At this point I can't stand Kate and really don't like anyone else in this group at all. "I really never had been the kind of woman to hook up with people in washrooms." Really? Look in the mirror, Kate. that perfidious puss you see looking back at you? It's nothing new and it's you all over, not a lover anyone with an ounce of integrity would want around them.

Kate is evidently not very smart. despite her many winters in Canada, she evidently owns no gloves, so we read, "It was freezing out this morning. I tried to keep my hands in my pockets as much as possible." We get oddball lines like, "Oh, I don't drink. Thanks. I've got some weed though." At one point we read of Kate and her ex, "We'd never used protection when we were together, having been tested and monogamous thereafter." Yet now she;s having potentially unsafe sex with Hanna and considering it with Cass, who herself sleeps around routinely?

The writing really left a lot to be desired. For example I read this: "So you're still shtupping her?" followed quickly by:

"And, what, you're trying to get a little of her inner peace are you?"
I contorted my face into an expression of disgust as Hanna apologised (sic).
"Too far, sorry.

What, asking about 'shtupping her' wasn't already going too far?

I really wanted to like this but I simply couldn't. it was badly written and unpleasant to read. I can't recommend it. I think this author has a good novel or two in her. It's just not this one.

The Miracle Girl by TB Markinson

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"Have to!" when "Have too!" was required.
“You’re little spy has been busy. Is it Avery?” should have read "Your little spy..."

Not to be confused with The Miracle Girl by Andrew Roe, or Miracle Girl by Keith Scribner, or the Miracle Girls manga series, this novel is an LGBTQIA story about two women working in the dying newspaper business. JJ Cavendish, the woman of the title, is assigned to try and save the ailing newspaper in her home 'town' of Denver. She hasn’t been home in twenty years and has mixed feelings about it, especially when she discovers that her old love is working for the very newspaper she's now in charge of. Claire has evidently become the mother of a young child in the intervening years, as JJ discovers when they reconnect.

It seems pretty obvious that Claire and her 'husband' are separated, yet she doesn’t relay any of this to JJ, and the latter is evidently too dumb to figure it out or to even ask, which begs the question as to why she's in charge of anything, and especially why a news organization! I prefer stories about smarter women than these two, although this novel wasn't atrocious by any means. It does misrepresent itself somewhat in the blurb (but then what professionally published novel doesn’t?!).

Take this, for example: "Mid-afternoon office romps abound in this romantic comedy while also focusing on what it takes for a newspaper to remain relevant in this age of social media." It’s not a romantic comedy. There's no humor and no comedy unless you count a comedy of errors. And it does not remotely "focus" on the newspaper. It’s all about JJ and her physical pining for Claire. And it’s first person, which doesn’t help. As I read it I was constantly skirting along the border between, yeah it’s an okay read, and I detest this endlessly self-absorbed whiner! This should have been a third-person novel as should the majority of novels. This asinine addiction to first person stories is laughable, especially here.

The blurb asks, "Must JJ lose everything in order to gain a life more fully her own?" and I don't even know what that means. What she's risking is losing the woman she wants to be with, but she's managed perfectly fine without her for two decades. She's hardly risking everything. And how is her life to be fully her own if she's so utterly dependent upon Claire? The sentence made zero sense, but is typical of book blurb writers in the world of Big Publishing™.

JJ is inconsistent as a character. On the one hand she's used to taking charge, and running things, which means knowing how and when to delegate, yet when she wakes up one morning with a painfully stiff neck and back, and can’t reach up to the shelf in a pharmacy for a heating pad, she thinks, "There was no way I would ask a clerk for help. I never liked to ask for help." This again broadcasts how stupid she is. It’s not a good sign, especially when she's the main character and talking to you in first person.

Apart from the whining, the novel was written quite well and I thought I would enjoy it, but it became too much when these two women began behaving like clueless teenagers in each other's company and the whole story about saving the newspaper was effectively put on the back burner if not forgotten as these two pursued each other like rabbit sin high rutting season. The sex scenes were not even interesting or original, and it all became a joke, so I ditched it around forty percent in. No, I do not want to read another story about women who have nothing but sex on what passes for their mind any more than I want to read one about men who are in that same frame of mind. I cannot recommend this one.

The Spirit Chaser by Kat Mayor (or KM Montemayor!)

Rating: WARTY!

No! I'm sorry, but no. I had read about one third the way into this novel when I encountered this paragraph (below) and immediately quit it on principle. Note that this scene follows right behind one where Casey, the woman depicted here, has quit her job because she's been betrayed by Austin. She storms off to her office, pissed as all hell, and starts packing to leave. The guy follows her and manhandles her as described below.

He strode over to her, grabbed her by her shoulders, and spun her around. Her bag fell to the floor as he pushed her against the wall and planted his lips firmly on hers. Her eyes widened in surprise. Da-amn. He has strong lips. So strong, she could feel her toes curling. Casey was too stunned to protest. He took that as a green light and weaved his fingers through her hair without releasing any pressure from her lips. Not once did he try to stick his tongue down her throat, but that didn't stop it from being one of the most powerful kisses Casey had ever experienced.

You don't get to describe a guy in process of raping a woman and have the woman fall in love with him because of it, and then expect me to rate your fiction as anything other than trash. No, you don't. And this from a female author? Her toes curled? Seriously? I half-way expect this kind of garbage in the young adult world, but not in a mature novel for adult readers which is otherwise written reasonably well.

Austin has manhandled her before, and the appropriate response from Casey here would be to knee him in the groin, or punch his face, or at the very least wrench away from him or start yelling for help. This is a guy who has already proven himself to be a complete jerk and a dick, to have had no qualms about abusing her mentally, and for whom she has no love at all. Yet suddenly when he becomes brutal with her, she melts and succumbs to his "charms"? No! The bottom line here is that I don't care how well you write, you put this abusive trash in your story and you get an automatic fail from me. This kind of writing is a disgrace. It's worse than pornography in how it inexcusably disrespects women.

I'd already had several issues with this novel before this point, and this is the second of this author's novels I've read and been thoroughly unimpressed. It will be the last. Despite the problems though, I was still plugging away at it hoping for something better while fearing that Casey was too stupid to be worth reading about and that she and Austin, despite his appalling behavior, were sadly going to be paired off. I'd overlooked a couple of grammatical errors, such as "You're going to want you're fantastic job back" (where the second one should have been 'your', of course), because this was an advance review copy. While I appreciate the chance to review it, I don't appreciate this kind of abusive writing, which essentially instructs us that all any woman needs is some rough-handling and she'll fall for the guy who is abusing her. No!

The basic story sounded good. I'm not a believer in spirits or ghosts or demons, but I love a good story about that kind of thing, and there are not that many honestly good stories out there on these topics. This one is the first I've elected to read in a long time because of this, and it seemed like it might be a worthwhile read. The story is that Casey is hired as the resident psychic on a successful TV show, Spirit Chaser Investigations, wherein a team of people visits and films haunted houses.

After she does a walk-through of a purportedly haunted house and declares it a non-starter - there's nothing there - a dissatisfied Austin, the show runner with a deadline to meet, brings in another psychic for a second opinion, and shuffles Casey off for the day so she doesn't even know he's done this. He doesn't tell her until the last minute, right before the team watches the rough-cut of the episode they plan on airing, and Casey gets to see this other woman making up stories about bad events in the house, and going on about a civil war soldier, pretty much feeding Austin a total bunch of rot.

This is what happens when you let your dick think for you and bring in your old girlfriend to piss all over your current psychic. Casey naturally feels betrayed and storms off, leading to the sickening paragraph above. Evidently, she doesn't feel betrayed enough, because all Austin has to do is slam her up against a wall, force a kiss on her, and she's his BFF forever. I'll let you figure out what that middle 'F' means.

The issues I'd had with the novel before this were annoying but not automatic cancellations. There was too much trope, for one thing - purloined ideas from movies, such as that one of the haunted houses was built over a 'Native American' (that would be American Indian) sacred site, and the rocking chair which started moving by itself, and the house which has a façade that looks like an evil face: "The shadows cast a grinning humanoid visage against the façade, and the two upstairs bedroom windows looked like sinister eyes." I like my stories to be a bit more original than that, but I was willing to put up with it for a while at least.

I was even putting up with author foibles such as when Casey describes someone as her "New BBF" How can you have a new best friend forever?! It's a minor thing, but a lot of minor things add up over the length of a novel, such as the author's obsession with "granite countertops in the kitchen." Some parts were well written. I particularly liked this bit: "she spotted his most shameful secret. It was in the corner of his mind wrapped in the brown paper of guilt and tied with strings of self-loathing," taken from when Casey reads someone's mind (at their invitation). But there was nowhere near enough of that to overcome the deficits.

Other parts, for example, made no sense: "Her third eye showed her the dark mist overlying the upper floor." This was on a photograph she was looking at. I found myself taken out of suspension of disbelief to wonder how this worked exactly! She's not looking directly at the house, she's looking at an image of it, yet she still sees this misty aura around it? Is the photograph haunted?! Or is it that idea from the Doctor Who episode where the image of a weeping angel becomes an angel itself?

Given that there was a total lack of world-building here, the reader is offered no additional information at all about how any of this was supposed to work. Casey was evidently far too stupid to figure it out or even be curious about it, so we got zilch from her. After reading a few items like this, it felt to me like the author was simply randomly pulling trope ideas from the history of horror fiction, without doing anything to weld it into a coherent whole. She had some eastern mystic guy on the team, a Catholic priest, and an American Indian shaman (we never did learn what tribal affiliation he had, not in the portion I read). The whole thing was a pot-pourri of random elements, and the predictable result was that it stunk.

Some parts were just plain dumb and made the main character, Casey, seem tragically stupid - such as where Austin once again forces himself on her and overrides her own wish for lunch with his own plan. I was really starting to dislike him at this point. He whisks her off in his fancy car and she's having the wilts and the vapors over his driving! "For some reason, she'd always found it strangely powerful and sexy to watch a man drive a stick shift." I know the reason: she's simply that shallow! Maybe she does have these bizarre fantasies, but right after that came, "Austin downshifted as he approached a red light. Casey studied his movements. They were automatic. He didn't have to think about it. His right hand just knew what to do." Like this is some magical super power? No! Everyone who drives stick shift drives like this! That's what competent driving is all about.

I detest stick shift, but even I drive like this when I'm forced to drive such a vehicle, so this observation just made Casey look like a juvenile moron - or at best, someone who had led an extraordinarily sheltered life (which she had not). Another example of her lack of smarts is when she observes of Austin, "you should be the biggest skeptic in the world." Yet this is said to the guy who is running a show wherein he repeatedly reports on inexplicable supernatural phenomena! Just how stupid is Casey? Too stupid for me to want to read any more about her, rest assured.

I've never understood why it is that we have to literally get on our knees and beg for aid from a god which is supposed to be infinitely loving. Check this out: "Would you allow me to say a prayer of protection with you and give you a blessing?" This is not a problem with the writing per se because people really believe this stuff, but it gets worse. At one point the priest says, "The more people we have praying the better." Why is that? Does this god only pay attention if more than one person begs? Does he need a crowd begging on their knees before he will act? We learn, "If God had not restrained the enemy, you would still be trapped." but we don't learn why he let these people suffer before he so kindly stepped in and helped out. If he cares that much why isn't he smiting the demons instead of letting them punish people? Is this god a sadist? It was just one more example of how poorly the story hung together.

I quickly tired of the appalling abuse of vegetarians and vegans in this novel, too. Here's just one example of how they were repeatedly dissed: "Liv can make vegan cuisine and a few other Austin-approved dishes that don't taste like baked dog turds." Examples of such thoughtless writing were not uncommon, such as this one, on a different topic: "...he thought about placing the cool, metallic barrel against his tongue. He shoved it down his throat and pulled the trigger." I've never heard of anyone considering committing suicide by pushing a barrel down their throat. Aiming it up at the roof of the mouth, yes, but down the throat? Not so much! But maybe this tied in with Austin's perverse attitude towards sexuality. Who Knows. Maybe this novel should have been titled Fifty Shades of Spirit.

Out of curiosity (about this mixture of Eastern religion, Catholicism, and American Indian tradition, I looked up what kind of monsters and demons the American Indians have, and they're so pathetic as to be laughable. One of them, Aniwye was an Ojibwe legend of a large man-eating skunk monster which kills people by breaking wind at them, causing them to become sick and die! The 'demon' names are pathetic by themselves: Basket Woman? Perverted Merman? How about the 'Cannibal Dwarves'? Not much fodder there for your standard Catholic-based possession story which is, I assume, why we saw no such demons in the part of the story I read. Graham Masterton had the right idea in his 1977 novel, The Manitou, but ideas seemed very limited here.

So no, this novel is not worth reading, and I actively dis-recommend it. I do recommend sensitivity training for the author so we don't get any more novels of women being abused and the reader being expected to believe this is how romances really ought to be.