Dress Shop of Dreams by Menna van Praag

Title: The Dress Shop of Dreams
Author: Menna van Praag
Publisher:
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

The title to this novel was what drew me in. It's so frivolous! In this story, Etta Sparks owns a rather magical dress shop which seems almost to repel many customers for no obvious reason, but once in a while, the right customer comes in, and Etta knows she can help them find that missing piece of themselves. The dresses tell her so. Plus she has a magical thread!

After we've met Etta, we're introduced to her granddaughter Cora. Almost a polar opposite, Cora leads a very mundane, if regimented life, following her mathematical mind's dictates, working at the lab, visiting the book store, counting things to an OCD level, early to bed, early to rise. Today, however, is her birthday and she's having a meal with her grandmother followed by a special cherry pie baked with love by Walt, at the nearby book store cum pie shop. Walt seems completely lost around Cora, who in turn seems completely unaware of him as a member of the opposite sex.

Here's a precious quote: "Then Walt stops pacing. He has an idea. An idea so different, so startling and wild, it makes him sneeze with shock." LOL! I loved that. The problem is that Walt's idea has nothing to do with Cora - whose name isn't really Cora....

One thing which felt a bit pretentious to me was the inclusion of a book store. Writers tend to do this as a substitute for intellect. 'Oh, she works in a book store, she must be smart!' or 'Oh, he reads books, he must be a treasure!" Book stores are wonderful, and librarians are every bit the figures which Evelyn Carnahan declares them to be in The Mummy, but it's almost a cliché now to include a book store in this kind of novel.

That said, the novel turned out to be pleasantly surprising. It was very layered and rather complex, with one new item after another being offered for consideration as each chapter flew by. Each of the main characters has a background which is carefully exposed and explored. I liked it a lot and I recommend it.

Walking on Trampolines by Frances Whiting

Title: Walking on Trampolines
Author: Frances Whiting
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

I know it’s a novel because it announces itself as such directly there on the cover! I am so grateful for that, because I would never have known otherwise! It's about the relationship between Tallulah de Longland and Annabelle Andrews, who met when Annabelle strutted into her life at Saint Rita's School for Young Ladies, or as Annabelle insisted upon naming it, Saint Rita's School for Young Lesbians. And no, this isn’t a LGBTQ story, not even close.

This novel is set in Australia. I usually enjoy stories set in Australia because they seem so much like stories set in Britain. That sounds like a back-handed compliment but it's really not - I feel just as much at home reading an Aussie story (though I've never been there) as I do a Brit one. Indeed, it’s even possible to forget the location sometimes, and start feeling like it is set in Britain, but then along comes a reminder, and it trips me right up and it’s a real joy to read like that, ones where you’re being frequently shaken out of your cozy safety zone.

I vacillated (yes, vacillated, I shall have it no other way) over whether to rate this positively or negatively. The story is told in three parts and had it been just part one, presented as a short story, I would have, without question or qualification rated it a winner because part one was brilliant and beautifully-written. Unfortunately, then came parts two and three, and while part two only began a gentle downhill glide, part three tipped-up and dunked the reader into a swamp of maudlin Newbery-medal-winner-wannabe material which frankly colored me green - not with envy but with nausea.

If I were rating only parts two and three, I don't doubt that I would even flushed this novel unfinished. So what to do? I think on balance I have to go negative because I can’t rate only a part of it. As I've said before, I can’t say a book is one third worth reading. It’s either worthy or it's warty. There is no in between. If you can stand the sad betrayal of a main female character, as featured in parts two and three, then you should read this. If you are willing to pay the price of a glorious part one in the currency of a miserable parts two and three, then read it. Otherwise avoid it.

The first third or so was tightly focused and brilliantly written, but then it was like the author lost the thread of it or ran out of ideas, and instead of it being about Annabelle and Tallulah, it became about anything and everything, and was nowhere near as entertaining or as engaging as the first part.

I loved Annabelle, and I liked Tallulah in the first third, but Annabelle essentially disappeared after that, and Tallulah went off in so many different directions it was dizzying, and none of that was anywhere near as engrossing.

A new character, Duncan, showed up, and although the author tried to portray him as a good guy, he was, at his core, no different from Josh-the-Jerk, Tallulah's faithless first love. The only difference was that Tallulah worked for Duncan rather than dated him, and he was older than Josh. Otherwise they were the same person at different stages in life, both equally unsavory. Whereas Josh was shown for exactly what he was, for some reason the author chose to portray Duncan as somehow noble - really a good guy underneath his faithlessness, manic cruelty, and cynicism.

Tallulah's two friends: Stella, the stereotypical (in everything save name) Catholic baby-machine, and Simone, the requisite token lesbian friend. Actually, Tallulah's whole take on lesbianism is interesting to say the least. She's convinced that a woman by the name of Maxine Mathers isn't a lesbian because she spent one night in bed with Duncan. A girl can’t change her mind? Yes, if you want to be strict and technical, that makes her bisexual, but the issue here is that Tallulah seems to be under the impression that sexuality is a binary proposition: on or off, plus or minus, yes or no, one or zero. It’s not.

The novel see-saws back and forth between past - Tallulah's almost idyllic recollections of her long teen-age years with Annabelle - and the hellish present-day which Tallulah has created (and has had created) by two major events, the second of which we learn in the very first chapter: she slept with Annabelle's husband Josh, on their wedding night!

Annabelle the younger has the mildly amusing habit of making word mash-ups such as "glamorgeous" and "tediocre". This is faintly reminiscent of Frankie Landau-Banks's behavior in the eponymous novel by E Lockhart, but that novel was better.

Annabelle's parents are artists with all that artistry brings. They're renowned but retiring, friendly, and warm, and creative, really easy-going, flamboyant and rule-skirting. They also have personal issues with each other.

Annabelle lives in a wondrous house, surrounded by trees and beautiful flowers, and the garden rolls readily down to the water, yet for reasons which only slowly become clear, she prefers to visit Tallulah's house, which is smaller and doubles as the home-base of her father Harry's plumbing business. Her mother, Rose, had a difficult childhood, running away from a disastrous home and being raised in a orphanage where she learned to be an excellent cook and dress-maker. She names her dresses with female names which Annabelle thinks is 'astoundible'. When Rose is wearing her 'Doris' dress, it means she's having a Doris day - and that's not an encouraging sign.

The two young girls become inseparable and get along famously - that is when Annabelle isn't inserting herself a little too presumptuously into Tallulah's life. Even when Tallulah hooks up with Josh - her apparently devoted boyfriend - Annabelle is still very much an integral part of their lives. Anyone a little less gullible than Tallulah might have some pause for thought at this point, but she doesn’t. Nor does she devote enough attention to the most pressing two issues she has with Josh: his desire to bed her, and his desire to travel the world immediately after they graduate. The phrase goes, 'he who hesitates is lost', but that homily, notwithstanding its wording, is not actually gender-specific.

At one point in part three, Tallulah decides to open a B&B, but she does none of the work for it - from what the author writes, that is. Everyone and their uncle pitches in to lend a hand, and Tallulah spends all of her time directing everyone in what to do. She herself, of course, has no time to work on executing her own plans because she's fully-occupied 24/7 in griping about being a bad person who isn’t meritorious of the inevitable attention from the inevitable manly man who shows in the form of outdoors-man Will Barton.

Seriously, why in god's name would any healthy girl ever want to become involved with a city gentleman? Yuck, no! If he doesn’t have a rime of bristles on his chin, a few laugh wrinkles hidden in his tanned outdoors skin, and a really gentle manner despite his rough lifestyle, why the hell would any girl be even remotely interested? Where is your thinking at for goodness sakes?! Shape up now!

Will shows up half-way through and it’s glaringly obvious from the first time his name ever appears that he's destined to bed this flighty Tallulah wench. No surprises there. The fact that he's a jerk who runs off in a huff every time Tallulah, in her self-obsessed flagellation, rebuffs him has no bearing on the matter. Trust me.

The real killer for this getting a positive rating from me was chapter twenty nine and beyond. It took the story right into the crapper. This was, coincidentally, right where I’d started skimming a paragraph here and there because it had become so pathetic and maudlin that I couldn’t stand to read the actual words one by one, so the whole thing became more like a fairy-tale than a real tale and not a good one, either.

It felt to me like the author had sat down, and cynically and calculatingly made a list of what she could do to pull every emotional string she could get her little fingers to, and it was truly pathetic where this went. It was at this point, not coincidentally that I quit reading because I really didn’t care how it ended, even though reading only a few more pages would have told me. I wasn't interested in what had increasingly in parts two and three, become nothing more than an exercise in taking potshots at the easy targets in the fairground-stall of pop-the-hear-strings.

One thing which seemed to me to be definitive of this novel was the interview with the author in the last few pages of the advance review copy I had. In the Adobe Digital Editions version which I was reading, the interview is abruptly cut off at the point where the author is asked who her greatest love was, and she answers "My greatest love would be" and the page ends right there, with no more pages to follow! Lol! It was priceless and really summed-up this novel for me. I think Annabelle might describe this as terminknackered.

When I finally gave up on this I kept asking myself how the writing could have gone from being so brilliant to becoming, as Annabelle might have put it, so tediocre in only 260 pages - pages which took seven years to write, even when writing by numbers! I have no answer to that, and in the end I don’t care. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.

Man Eater by Gar Anthony Haywood

Title: Man Eater
Author: Gar Anthony Haywood
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This novel is an oddity at least in that the cover credits it to Gar Anthony Haywood, whereas the copyright page credits it to Dallas Murphy. Hopefully that's just because the author chose an unusual pseudonym for some reason, and not because of Murphy's law! It had a prologue which I skipped as I do all prologues. If the author doesn't think it's worth putting right there in chapter one, I don't think it's worth reading, and I've never regretted skipping a prologue.

This is set in Tinseltown, where some people are trying to cast a movie titled "Trouble Town" and the whole chapter obsesses over Brad Pitt, whom I am sure realizes that 'thusly' isn't a word. There's a difference in putting a non-word into a character's mouth and putting it into the narrative text as it appeared here. You can even get away with it in the narrative if it's a first person PoV novel, but this isn't.

Needless to say, I hope, this was the start to a novel I DNF'd in short order because I quickly realized that it was not remotely interesting to me. It was rambling and full of tedious (to me) detail that did nothing to move the story and everything to irritate and annoy me. Life is too short to spend on novels which fail to grab you from the go, so I cannot green light this project.

You Know Who I Am by Diane Patterson

Title: You Know Who I Am
Author: Diane Patterson
Publisher: Airgead Publishing (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This is another in a long line for first person PoV novels - my least favorite voice. It's also part of a series, which I shy from advisedly. This is book two, book one being hilariously titled, The Sound of Footsteps and book three being Everybody Takes the Money. Given book two, book one has to be the real mystery here, but I've read nothing else by this author, so I can't comment.

Some writers can carry first person, but most of the time I find it irritating, so it's with real gratitude to the author in this case that I found it unobtrusive - it didn't feel like ME ME ME all the time. That said, I did not like this novel, and couldn't finish it.

I don't know who Airgead Publishing is - I'd never heard of them and they have no website that I could readily find, so perhaps it's an invention of the author's, but my beef with them is the covers, all three of which feature some woman's legs and nothing else, yet nothing in this particular story - as far as I read, that is - had anything to do with the main character's legs or anyone else's for that matter. If the stories are so engrossing, then why do we need a woman's legs to sell them? It's a valid question!

"Ah, but isn't that exactly what you did in your novel, Seasoning?" you ask. Yes, indeed it is, but in that case, the novel had everything to do with the main character's legs since she was a soccer player! The juxtaposition of the high heel on a soccer ball summed-up that novel exquisitely since she was a young adult woman competing in a macho man's world. I make no apologies for cutting to the chase in that case.

In this novel I do have to say that the opening chapter is really quite dramatic, but it's also somewhat problematical. The chapter starts with Colin and Drusilla Abbot, who perform a knife-throwing act in Las Vegas. They're having a spat - while the act is in progress! We learn that this is because, before the show, Dru had told him she was leaving the show, him, and Las Vegas. Given what we learn about her husband here, this simply makes Dru look stupid (to tell him right before he's about to throw knives at her?!), and I have to wonder why a writer would choose to do that to a female character if it wasn't a critical part of the story. From the part that I read, it was not.

Yes, some women and some men truly are stupid, but let's not label them so if we don't have to! It seems to me that this could have been written so that he found out about her plans without her overtly telling him. That, for me, would have been more dramatic and unnerving, and would not have announced loudly up front that the main character is clueless.

There were a couple of other issues. As it happens, Colin doesn't stab her during the act, but he does throw one knife sufficiently close that it breaks her skin. It's nothing huge, just a paper cut in effect, yet Dru is clenching her teeth to avoid screaming, and they're pulling out the antiseptic and bandages rather than just applying a simple Band-Aid! Seriously? Now she's both stupid and a wuss. Do we really need to heap this on her, and especially in the opening few pages? Do you want me to perceive her as a strong character, or merely as a clown?!

On top of this there's a third person in the act, Kristin, who's from London, we're told. She's also represented as being stupid, but that's not the worst issue here. That one arises when we're told that she's ten thousand miles from home - yet London is less than six thousand miles from Vegas! It's nowhere near ten thousand. If this novel is going to go the distance with me, a simple thing like gaging distances ought not to be a major problem.

So this novel didn't get off to the most auspicious start for me, especially not when I read, "...his fingers digging into my bicep...". Nope. Once again, it's 'biceps', folks! Although as often as I'm reading this in various novels, it looks like we're undergoing yet another change in our language caused by lazy writing habits.

Dru was a moderately interesting character, but her younger sister Stevie even more so. I think it would have made for a better story had it been about Stevie, because Dru was truly infuriating at times, whereas Stevie was genuinely interesting. We're told (not shown) how protective Dru is of her sister. Stevie has agoraphobia and some other issues, yet when Dru makes her break from Colin, she ends up picking up an actor in a bar and going off with him to his home leaving Stevie sitting alone in the bar with her glass of milk! Stevie isn't stupid, but anything could have happened, yet not once does Dru spare a single thought about Stevie's safety or welfare.

As it happens, Gary, the actor, changes his mind, but he offers Dru the use of his guest house - which is evidently what she was angling for. The problem is that there was no way she was guaranteed any of that happening. Meanwhile poor Stevie is waiting in the bar, in ignorance of Dru's plans and whereabouts as an hour or two tick by! I started really not liking Dru at this point, which I'm sure wasn't the author's intended outcome.

While I liked the relationship between Dru and Stevie (apart from that particular incident just described), the one between Dru and Colin was nonsensical. We're told at the start that the only reason they married was that Dru was short of cash and Colin was willing to pay handsomely for a marriage of convenience so he could get his green card. The problem is that Dru isn't American! She and her sister are British. It's never mentioned that they became citizens, so how is marriage to her supposed to secure a green card for Colin? Colin is Australian, although why an Australian would be seeking US citizenship isn't explained, so for me this whole thing was confusing from the off.

Maybe this was all explained in volume one, but since we're told nothing of what happens in volume one, we're in ignorance, if this is the first volume we read. As it happens, this is the last volume I plan on reading because I didn't think this one was worth any more of my time and effort - not when there are hundreds of books beckoning, all of which pomise a great story, rather than a story which grates.

The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward

Title: The Same Sky
Author: Amanda Eyre Ward
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

The Same Sky is a title which is somewhat over-used. This one is written by a fellow central Texan named Amanda Ward (although I don't know her) and is about Carla and Alice. You can tell this purely from reading the contents, which consists of a long list of 50 alternating chapters titled "Carla" or "Alice", but the novel is less than 200 pages, so the chapters are extremely short.

As soon as I saw those interleaved names I realized with a sinking feeling that this was going to be a another dual first-person PoV novel and I cringed just from that. First person rarely works for me. It's way too much to believe that someone - or in this case two someones - would have such eidetic recall that they could remember every single detail about a series of events, including verbatim conversations, and especially when one of them is a youngster living on the poverty line with a lot more on her mind than telling stories. This is why it's unrealistic to me, particularly in this case.

On top of that, there's a certain arrogant selfishness about the 1PoV format - whereby it's all about ME!!!. All the time! Nothing but me! It can be well done, but for me, more often than not, it makes my skin crawl. With a print book, in a book store or on a library shelf, you can look inside and see if it's 1PoV and quickly put it back on the shelf, as I normally do. With ebooks, it's a lot harder, especially if they're so-called "galley proofs" (which no books truly are any more in this electronic era) because you don't get that same chance to see inside. All you get is the publisher's own blurb, which by it's very nature is at best, suspect, and which never reveals the PoV. I think books like this should come with a government health advisory like on cigarettes:

WARNING: This format may be damaging to your nerves and sanity.

The novel starts on page nine rather than page one, and I felt I might be in trouble on only the seventh line, where the narrator (Carla) describes a favorite dress which split along the back seam, and her grandmother "stitched it back together with a needle and thread." What else would she stitch it with? A stapler? A sliver of bone and sinew? That struck me as really amusing, and didn't endow me with a lot of confidence, especially not in the context of the info-dump which had been going on from line one.

It turns out that Carla is a girl resident in Tegucigalpa. I don't get what she means when she says that she had imagined "...what it would be like to kiss every boy in our village". Tegucigalpa isn't a village! It's the largest city in Honduras, where poverty and urban decay is rife. Carla's mother somehow managed to make it to Texas as an illegal immigrant, but Carla and her brothers were left behind.

Maybe Carla is talking about some other Tegucigalpa? No, the location is confirmed by the mention of Comayagüela across the river. I can only assume she was talking about her little ghetto, but describing it as a village made no sense to me. It made it sound sweet and idyllic, and it was far from either.

On the very next page I read that Carla "...had two twin brothers"! It made me wonder just how many there are in a set of twins. I'd always thought it was just the two. It bothered me how much Carla was focused on marriage and having children. I don't know if this is a common mind-set in Honduras once your belly is reasonably full. Maybe it is, but it was truly sad, especially when she had so much else with which she was forcibly preoccupied.

The more I read of this story, the less it made sense to me, and it was this which quickly wore me down and turned me off it. So yes, Carla's mom went to Texas to make money, but she never appears to send any back to Carla's grandmother. It seems like all she sends are dresses, shoes, and T-shirts, and primarily for Carla. I have to assume she sent other stuff back, but the descriptive writing is so sparse that there's no sense of that imparted at all. For all I know, she could be sending only stuff for Carla. Either that, or Carla is withholding information, which means she's an unreliable narrator and we can't trust anything she's telling us.

We're expected to believe that Carla and her family live in near-poverty, yet they have a phone, and they eat pretty well. I don't get that Carla's mom sent her high heels, either. Seriously? Where's she going to wear those? The family lives in a really poor part of the city, where crime is rife. What's going to happen when thieves see this little girl dressed in her finery?

The story seemed to be all about conspicuous consumption, and not at all about the quality of life - unless you count the routine recounting of violence and death - with the rhythm of a high-school marching band - as some sort of quality of life. It just became depressing after a while to keep reading this. Every single thing was negative, negative negative.

I don't mind this in a story when it's leavened by other things, but here it was all negative, all the time, and it was just depressing and off-putting. One of the kids (one of those two twins, remember?) for example, and without preamble or warning, is unceremoniously dumped into the trunk of a car and taken somewhere - exactly for what purpose isn't explained. Who arranged this isn't explained.

Dad is nowhere on the scene, Mom is living in Texas. The only person there with authority is grandma. Did she arrange it? Did mom approve? Did mom even know what her mom was doing with her own child? Did she care? Why it was this even 'necessary' given that the family seemed to have enough to eat (and had fine clothes and a phone) isn't explained. None of this made any sense whatsoever to me.

On the Alice side of the story, Alice and Jake are living in Austin, Texas. Alice is a double mastectomy survivor as a result of a lump found in one of her breasts. She went the same radical route as did Angelina Jolie recently. It was after this that she met Jake and they hooked-up. She can't have children, presumably because of chemo (and no one thought to 'harvest her eggs', evidently - or if they did, we're kept in the dark about it). As it happens, this is fine with Jake, yet Alice is obsessing over it now, and unsuccessfully trying to adopt a kid.

We're told of many failures and of one instance where they actually had the child brought to their home and then suddenly whisked away again as the mom had second thoughts? I didn't get that. What kind of operation was this? If it was official, it could never happen that way. Once a woman has officially given up her child, she doesn't get to just take it back like that. If it's not an official process, then Alice got what she deserved for gaming the system.

Some of the writing was a bit off for me, too. For example, there's a conversation on page thirty-five which in some parts made zero sense. Alice is given some information and asked a favor of by Principal Markson - principal of exactly what isn't quite clear - some Austin school, evidently. Again the descriptive prose is lacking.

What relationship Alice has with Markham isn't clear either, but she meets with her one day and is told that the school's psychologist is being laid off and they'd like Alice to volunteer time to help with troubled children. Alice has a master's in Eng. Lit. and is not a mom, and works at a restaurant evidently, (as opposed say, to a day-care facility or a pediatric hospital), so she's hardly the most qualified person in the world to counsel children. Here's how a small part of the conversation goes:

"One of the positions we'll be losing is the full-time school psychologist. Juliet Swann - do you know her?"
I shook my head.
"She might be a vegetarian, now that I think of it,' said Principal Markson. "Or a vegan? Not sure. There's usually a big yogurt labeled with her name in the staff refrigerator...."
"Well that would explain it," I said.

That was a monstrous Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot moment for me. That piece of writing is evidently fast-tracked to advance placement in non-sequitur! I actually got a bad case of whiplash from snapping my head around. What the heck does that exchange even mean? I don't know! I don't think I want to! She's vegetarian because she eats yogurt? She's a school psychologist because she's a vegetarian? She's a vegetable and that's why they're laying her off? I don't know!

If this was a comedy, then that kind of a conversation would have been funny, but to discover it stuck there like a squashed fly on an otherwise pristine window was just completely weird. And I'm tired of vegetarian bashing when they're doing one thing which can help starving children: rejecting the "meat animals" to which we feed tons of corn that could, if it were not selfishly squandered on our "stock", be fed to those starving children. Admittedly, it's asking a lot to expect beef-fed Texans to get that!

Another weird instance is when Carla, traveling north to find her mom, recalls things from the Internet. How was this possible? She was poor, so we're expected to believe. Yes, she had food, but Internet? Was this at school? If so, how come she was allowed to read such bad stuff at school? Again it makes no sense.

The biggest problem for me however, is the fact that both Carla, the ten year old, and Alice, the mature woman, speak with exactly the same voice. To me, there was no discernible difference between them. They were different ages, different circumstances, different nationalities, and yet they had the same voice!

That was pretty much it, for me. I couldn't face reading any more of this and so I dropped it. Life is too short to read novel like this when there's the siren-call of other, potentially engrossing novels whispering seductively in my ears. I cannot recommend this.

Black Death in a New Age by Kathy Kale

Title: Black Death in a New Age
Author: Kathy T Kale
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!

I love this kind of story, especially when it's well written, as this one is, with great world-building and memorable, flawed characters. I really liked the main character, Dana Sparks. Great name, great character, strong and weak, smart and dumb, proactive and paralyzed, attractive and repulsive just like a real person. She was just the ticket to entertainment. I also love stories about disease outbreaks. I find them more horrifying than actual horror stories because even as you chill at horror stories you know they're ridiculous. Viral and bacterial pandemics are real. The last outbreak of pneumonic plague in the US was this year in Texas. This novel is set in Texas!

Dana Sparks is a plague expert who is desperately seeking a grant to research a new vaccine. She works for a university, but she doesn't have tenure. She was on track for it when her old boss left and a new military man was brought in. Since then, her life has been plagued. McCoy doesn’t like her, and it now looks like her tenure quest is questionable. Dana is her own worst enemy. She sees rules and regulations as optional, which only antagonizes McCoy who is of course (being a military man brought out of retirement to take over as head of the research facility), a stickler for regulation.

Her vaccine is ready for human trials which the army will shortly conduct, but there is some question as to what its side-effects might be. Losing patience, Dana once again goes off the reservation and tries it out on herself. She has no bad reaction to it, fortunately. Curiously, it’s right around this time that an outbreak of bubonic plague starts up in the very town where she lives and works. Her life is further complicated when she learns that Nick, her thesis adviser, and a married man with whom she had a highly inappropriate affair, is coming back to town for the first time in seven years to lend his expertise to combating the outbreak.

As she, Nick, and a guy from the CDC who has the hots for Dana, try to pin down how it began so they can figure out how to fight it, and they conduct one investigation after another into people and wildlife, they slowly begin to realize that this is not your typical outbreak. They can find neither patient zero nor ground zero, and as the victims start to mount, and the plague goes from the relatively quiescent bubonic form to the virulent, much more deadly, and highly transmissible pneumonic form; then Nick gets the septicemic form - the deadliest of all.

When Dana's lab assistant's young daughter contracts the disease, Dana - at the passionate demand of the girl's mother - administers the vaccine to her and to her mom, and also to a high school jock who has it. They all recover. McCoy, whose heart isn't anywhere near as strong as his will, fights against requests that they publicize this outbreak. He fears panic and also the cancellation of the vice-president's planned visit to town. As things continue to slide south, even he finally realizes that a public announcement is necessary. On the morning of the announcement, he learns of Dana's renegade delivery of the vaccine to certain victims, and the stress is too much. He keels over with a heart attack and is hurried to the hospital.

The idiotic mayor makes the announcement, but he claims the disease is a virulent form of flu - and then tells everyone that prophylactic antibiotics are available. It’s plain to anyone who who has a modicum of medical knowledge that there's a huge disconnect here: influenza is a viral disease, whereas the bubonic plague is a bacterial disease. Antibiotics are useless against viruses!

It’s at this point that we (but not Dana) learn that there is an FBI agent in town - and he believes that the plague was started by Dana herself, to promote her vaccine and to win for her this research grant and her tenure!

I loved this novel. It was action-packed, fast moving, and intelligently written by someone who knows what she's talking about, but who doesn't make the Tom Clancy-ish mistake of permitting reams of technical detail to trip up a good story. I made the wrong choice as to who was behind this plague outbreak! In my defense, I'm usually slow at this anyway, and there's a distracting red herring swimming around, too.

I really think this novel could have used a much better title, but that's really the only fault I found with it. It's really well-written, it’s engrossing, it moves quickly, it made me want to keep reading, it has a great female main character. You can't ask for more in a book!

Fallen Souls by Linda Foster

Title: Fallen Souls
Author/Editor: Linda Foster
Publisher: Glass House Press
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I hate to give a negative review to this novel because from what little I know of Linda Foster (from her website, which you should visit - it's fun!) she seems like a really awesome person, but I critique the books on this website, not the authors. It's important to remember that. Well mostly not the authors! And certainly not in this case!

This story is listed on Net Galley (and on the cover!) as a novella, and it's also listed as book one of a series, but it's only sixty pages, and those pages are double-spaced, so it's really more like a novelette or even a short story than anything else. At least, that's how it felt to me. It also ends in a big cliff-hanger. I was, to say the least, dissatisfied with it. I expected a lot more, and got what really amounts only to a teaser.

It's in two parts, the Earthly and the heavenly. In the first part we meet Ash, a student who happens to be at a party with his older sister, and she's quite literally falling-down drunk. Ash isn't much better off. He keeps seeing a dangerous looking guy with glowing eyes staring at his sister, so he drags her from the party in a near panic. He ends up crashing the car and his sister is about to die when the stranger offers him his sister's life for his own soul, an offer he takes up. That's all we get of that story.

To take a brief detour into gender issues here, I have to say I found it sad that a female author put a female character in the position of having a guy rescue her, like she's totally incapable of taking care of herself and is reduced to being a damsel in distress. She's not even Ash's kid sister, which would certainly have ameliorated the situation somewhat. Grace is his older sister, so this was really hard to stomach. Could we not have had her get sick to her stomach from something she ate at the party or something - not from irresponsibly drinking, and this was why he was driving? Just a thought!

In part two we're in a heaven where the angels do not have traditional names! There is Kali, the good angel, who is female, and Adrian, the bad angel, who is male. Now this was a bit different, but it felt odd because the names were not remotely of Hebrew origin. Kali, for example, is Indian (Indian, not Native American) and is the name of a Hindu god, and Adrian is of Latin origin.

My real problem with the angels is that they behave exactly like humans. They speak the same, have the same emotions and wants and fears. They have lungs. They breathe. They fight. They're petty. How are they in any way, shape, or form different from humans? They're not. And for some reason, as usual, they use swords instead of modern weaponry or divine magic. This isn't a problem unique to this book by any means, but it is a problem of seriously-limited story, character, and plot imagination, and a complete lack of inventiveness and creativity in bringing something new to the table.

I found this story a bit too breathlessly told, too lacking in substance, and a very unsatisfying read. It wasn't - technically - badly written. Linda Foster has a voice which deserves to be heard and if it had been a longer story with more to say, and the world(s) fleshed out a bit more, I might have been able to enjoy. There are a lot of signs of writing potential, but it seems that the author isn't ready to spread her wings and fly yet. The plot on the heavenly side is right out of Kevin Smith's movie Dogma, for example, with angels (led by the psychotic Adrian) plotting a war against god.

I have to say that I'm not a big fan of angel stories, so if an author wants to draw me in, then I need something more than your traditional boiler-plate bog-standard choir of angels. Maybe others will like a familiar, cozy world like this, but it's not for me because it felt like there wasn't anything new on offer here, and it just makes me ask: where is my incentive to read it? The very word 'novel' means new. If it's not new, it's not really a novel, is it?! I can't recommend it, and I have no interest in pursing this series, but I wish the author all the best.

And in my 'fighting-a-losing-battle' effort to offer a parody song whenever I review something negatively, here's my "Angles of Heaven" to the tune of U2's Angels of Harlem

It was a cold and wet November day
When I read this book from Net Gall-ay
Rain was bouncing on the ground
I turned round and heard familiar sounds
of an angle

A story as old as a Christmas tree
With the same old shape and symmetry

Angles

Sword divine, and this sword just won't cut it!
No more! Angles of Heaven!

The cover blurb appealed to me
The story sounded like a symphony
We got spooky stuff, a mystery tangle
But it turns out it's just another one - an angle

Demons all evil, angels all good
Demons have eyes which are shining blood
Angles

Sword divine, and this sword just won't cut it!
No more! Angles of Heaven!

Angles of Heaven, yeah.

Angelic, divine, oh! but human motive!
Yeah, Yeah,
yeah, yeah
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, hey, oh no!

Too many writers have lost their way
Can't find enough words that are new to say
And despite the angelic acumen
The final solution's down to humans
Simple humans with simple lives
have to prevent demons and their connives
Can't we have a new fandango
Can't we have a brand new angle?

Angles in demon shoes just leaves me reading with the blues
Will I never read anything new?
Except angles! Angles of Heaven?

The Wedding Hoax by Heather Thurmeier

Title: The Wedding Hoax
Author/Editor: Heather Thurmeier
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Entangled. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

I've hung on with Entangled for a long time because a couple of their early reads were so good that I couldn’t help but continue hoping for more. Just recently I favorably reviewed one of their teen romances which, while problematic, at least pretended that it could break the mold, but I've reluctantly come to the conclusion after several disasters in a row, that this publisher is just not for me, not as its currently operating.

The novels which appear under its banner are far too predictable and formulaic, and perhaps there are readers who love that and live for it, but I am not one of them and I know I never will be.

I can’t tell you what this story is about (except in the vaguest of terms, all of which you know already), because I made it only to page three before nausea hit me when I read this:

"Green eyes with little flecks of gold in them, a chiseled jaw that would make a Greek God jealous, and chestnut-colored hair just long enough to drag her fingers through but not so long it was feminine."

…because god forbid there should ever be anything even remotely feminine about a guy! God forbid we should have a young-adult male romantic lead who doesn't have gold flecks in his eyes! God forbid that we should have any romance novel where the male doesn't have a chiseled jaw and a muscular torso welded to his character! Seriously? I'm still nauseous from reading that even now, several days later. That's so may kinds of trite, trope, clichéd and wrong in one sentence that I scarcely know where to start. 'Sentence fragment' doesn’t even have what it takes to make such list.

Why is it so utterly impossible for female romance writers to take even one small step for a man and make a giant leap for womankind? Why are they so immovably transfixed by trope? Why are they so cramped by cliche and thereby so entangled in this cheap formulaic fabric which they've convinced themselves they must wear to be a romance writer that they hold their readers prisoner to it to? Do they not want to liberate women from this?

Are they so financially comfortable with it that it never occurs to them that they could deliver so much more? They could do a real service for others of their gender if they were willing to stretch a bit, so why do they, in this era of so much freedom for women, labor so industriously to keep their own gender imprisoned like this?

I don't know what any one writer's individual motives are, but I do know that publishers carry the bulk of the responsibility for this situation. There are publishers who will not entertain a romance manuscript if it does not conform to a specific template. In this era of self-publishing, there's no reason why we have to bow down to their demands.

I can't recommend this novel or any other novel like it. And now, in yet another sorry attempt to perk up a negative review with a song parody, and since, on the subject of romance, I've been reading Pygmalion lately, here's my offering this time:

I have often read books like this before,
But must they always sport this self-same sorry list of bores?
All at once am I heaving heavy sighs,
Knowing I'm entangled in this blight.

Do the old growth trees need to be so cut down?
Must we read books with such a complement of clowns?
Does enchantment rage out of every page?
No, not in so clichéd books like this blight.

And oh, the horrible feeling
Just to know this book is so drear
The overpowering feeling
That every page will have a cliché that I fear.

People stop and read - they don't bother me,
They're just trapped in sorry romance reams of entropy.

Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can avoid reading more of this blight.

People stop and read - they don't bother me,
They're just trapped in sorry romance reams of entropy.

Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can avoid reading more of this blight.

(composer: Frederick Loewe, Librettist: Alan Jay Lerner, new words: Ian Wood)

When Mystical Creatures Attack by Kathleen Founds

Title: When Mystical Creatures Attack
Author/Editor: Kathleen Founds
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Erratum:
"dain" is mistakenly used in place of "deign" unless the author was actually talking about Norse mythology.... That's a bit sad coming from a book published by a university press!

I have to confess I'm not sure how this got published by the University Of Iowa Press when the author apparently has no connection with the U of I, but there you have it. I actually worked at U of I for a few years before the cold drove me south, not that this is really relevant..... I also have to confess that I'm not a fan of epistolary stories, which this one is. I find them to be as unrealistic as first person PoV stories in general. Having said that, this one wasn't too bad to begin with. What else do I have to confess? Okay, let's not get into that....

This story, which I was not able to finish due to boredom - is one of insanity, but whether it's of the insanity of Mrs Freedman, the high school English teacher who loses it one day, or of society itself, remains a mystery. I really loved the opening few pages where Mrs Freedman's students quite evidently did their best to free her desperately clutching fingers from the last vestige of her self-control (and succeeded with their fine, off-the-wall essays), but after that, the story went right downhill for me.

Actually, even at that point, I was cringing over the utter lack of respect these students had for her, and one or two of the appalling things they wrote. Clearly this is a classroom totally out of control, and the story seemed to be hewn from the same wood. It was a mess; it looked like it had been hewn and then tossed into a wood chipper, and I would know, because my name is Wood and I am chipper for the most part.

It was hard to know who was narrating the tale at some points. The emails and letters were, of course, easily attributed, but then random chapters would launch into a narrative and it took a moment or two to figure out who was talking and where we were at with the story after this new departure. There are even recipes at one point, with amusing titles made from plays on words, but these were let down by the boring text beneath, relating mundane stories of little interest.

In the end (not that I made it that far), the story wasn't that great, revolving as it did, around two students and a teacher, two of whom were completely irresponsible and the third of whom had lost not only her marbles, but all concept of what marbles even were.

The opening pages were hilarious, but after that, the tale became dark and sad, and very mundane, and it wasn't engaging for me. I didn't want to read more because I really didn't care what was going on, not even at those points where I fully grasped what was going on. I would have much rather read more of the student's contributions (even as I freely admit that some of them were beyond the pale).

I have to say that in a way I felt cheated, because I had honestly thought that this story was really about mystical creatures attacking a school. It wasn't at all. The mystical creatures are nothing but a metaphor and this, when pretentiously employed in the title of a book, is a sentence of death (and dearth) in my experience. Had I understood this ahead of time, I would never have asked to read this particular volume.

In pursuit of my failing aim to try and include a song in those reviews that I down-rate, here's my effort for this particular one. To the tune of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour:

Beware, beware of the mystical creature attack! Stay out of their way!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack! Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and that's a metaphor now), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (I'm feeling really floored now), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're trying to take you away,
Trying to break up your day.
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (they'll take everything you are), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (maybe you should hit the bar), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're sucking your sanity dry,
And no one will dare tell you why!
Mystical Creatures!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware, when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and you're about to lose it), when mystical creatures attack!
Beware (and no, you cannot choose it), when mystical creatures attack!
Mystical creatures are here, they're tripping you up all the way,
Even as you're slipping away.
Mystical creatures are dying to lure you today,
Dying to lure you away, to in-sani-tay!

Dead Drop by Jesse Miles

Title: Dead Drop
(Barnes and Noble's website search engine doesn't seem to get the fact that if you type in title "Dead Drop" you really don't want titles like "Drop Dead"! No wonder they're losing out to Amazon!)
Author: Jesse Miles
Publisher: Robert Gordon Peoples (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

I had some really mixed feelings about this and wavered between a negative and a positive rating overall. Even as I sat down to work through my first draft of the review, I felt I was going to go positive in the hope that a new writer will season and improve on these scores as experience (and more reviews!) weigh in.

In the end I couldn't bring myself to rate this positively because of the gratuitous treatment of women in it which irritated more and more as I re-read what I'd written and considered it against the overall story. It was when I realized that I was in danger of having to make excuses for the writing by trying to argue that the overall story was good, that I knew that I had to change my rating, or take the road marked "Hypocrisy This Way"!

This is part of the 'Jack Salvo' private investigator series, of which I've read no others - I believe this is the first, although it feels like it's further along than that from the way it's written - it feels like we're starting in the middle of something rather than at the outset.

The blurb sounded intriguing, but it goes completely against my self-imposed ban on reading novels of any kind in which there's a main character named 'Jack' since that name is so over-used and is so clichéd that it almost makes me physically sick. I end-up wanting to name these characters Jack-Ass. And "Jack Salvo"? Seriously? Please, since this is evidently a brand-new series, can we not follow the road less traveled?!

Having said that, the story itself was good overall. In general it was well-written (apart from, for example, the use of the non-word "Thusly" on page 55!), it moved quickly, and was interesting, thoughtful for the most part, with some mystery and not too much machismo. The plot was believable and the main character's actions were also (for the most part) - except for the part where every woman no matter what her age or circumstances, seems ready to lie down and open her legs for Jack.

On the downside, there was rampant objectification of women, and some age-ism going on here and there, which I didn’t appreciate at all. I found myself trying to gage whether there was a favorable balance between sheer inappropriateness and decent story-telling, although a writer ought never to put their readers in that position! In the end I concluded that it was too much to let slide.

A problem here is one I have with a lot of books in that it’s told from first person perspective (Salvo's of course), which is also pretty much a cardinal rule for hard-bitten private dick stories, but that doesn’t mean that the PI actually has to be a dick. Plus it can be difficult in this case to be sure what is the character's thinking and what is the author's, which is creepy at best.

I know it’s all-but de rigeur to have this sort of predatory ogling of women in such a "hard-bitten and cynical" genre of novel, but this isn't the 1950's. Just because it's traditional doesn't mean we have to perpetuate it. Is there no one out there who can ditch convention and strike out on their own trail - one which has a PI story which isn't written in 1PoV and main character who doesn’t objectify or prey on women, no matter how indirectly?

The age-ism eared its ugly head on page 43 where Salvo first meets Wendy Storm, a fifty-year-old woman who may have some information which will help his investigation. I'm not remotely convinced that her age has to do with anything in this story, but it’s employed to generate this charming observation: "Thirty years and thirty pounds ago, she would have stopped traffic." Is that supposed to endear me to the main character, that this woman is fifty and somewhat overweight and is therefore somehow second-rate? It doesn’t. It makes me think Jack-Ass Salvo is a low-life, and it makes me dislike him immensely.

I know it flies in the face of Hollywood predilection (or predation), but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with older women (or older men). Anyone who is deluded enough to honestly think there is, needs psychiatric attention. There was no need at all for that observation, and it bothers me that this author seems to think, as evidenced by too much of what he writes here that involves on women, that the only really important thing is her looks.

That stinks regally, and we see it repeatedly expressed in Salvo's attitude towards most every woman he encounters, right from the start of the book. All he thinks about when he meets a woman is the superficial: how attractive or unattractive she is, how hot she is, how skimpily or provocatively dressed she is. It’s tiresome. Frankly, it’s pathetic and detracts from the power that this character could have, were he written better. The irony here is that Salvo is, believe it or not, a philosophy teacher. This leads me to believe that he must be also schizophrenic, to be a student of philosophy on one hand and to objectify women to an obnoxious extent on the other. I can't reconcile these things adequately!

Fortunately (for my continuing reading this and for my rating of it), although those kinds of references were common where women were "in play" in this story, they were thinly-spread through material because there were a lot of other things going on, most of which were good, and/or interesting, and/or intriguing. To be fair, there were occasions where women were portrayed positively: smart, capable, brave. The problem with that, though, was that the way these things were represented was as though they were something special - as though most women don't have these qualities, so let's be glad that this particular one does. Now maybe I got off to a bad start, having my perception tainted by his first interaction with a couple of women in the first few pages, but I wasn't the one who tainted that perception.

Some of the references were a bit off, too. For example, in one instance, Salvo makes the sarcastic observation that he could be the next Clint Eastwood (page 65), but Clint Eastwood hasn’t been a real movie star for decades. Making a reference like that makes the lead character seem like he's fifty or sixty, but he isn’t. He's younger than that and should, therefore, have a somewhat different frame of reference. For example, he mentions Brad Pitt at one point, so could he not have referenced Matt Damon or Vin Diesel, or Will Smith for his deprecating self-comparison? The analogy just leaped out at me as wrong.

On the subject of which, I have to also mention a cop's use of "…that broad's rear end…" at one point in the story. I don't have a problem with that particular observation because there are people who think like that in the real world, and it's unrealistic to pretend they don't exist in your novel, but in this day and age, does anyone really say 'broad' as a rather derogatory term for 'woman' or 'girl'? It seemed even more anachronistic than the Eastwood reference. Who knows? Maybe people do still say that.

The main female interest was Lilith, and she was written quite well, but I have to say I find it rather bizarre that she thinks that bad guy Faraday should be shot for putting his hands on her whilst "searching" her, yet she has no problem with Salvo ogling her and making remarks when she first meets him.

I also find it odd that when Salvo is watching Lilith's apartment because he fears for her safety, he outright lies when questioned by two cops in a patrol car, about his reason for being there. By lying, when there was no reason at all to do so and every reason not to, he put Lilith's safety in jeopardy. If he had truly cared about her, then he would have told the cops everything, putting her safety before all else. He hardly seemed smart or chivalrous to me after that. The only reason this was done was to achieve a certain end the writer wanted, and it was badly done.

There was another such weak spot when Salvo is fastened to an evidently wooden chair by a chain. I don't get why he doesn't simply break the chair. He has some ninety minutes before the bad guys return, yet he sits around and makes no effort to get free of the chair or to arm himself by breaking the chair and taking a piece of it for use as a club. I know he was concerned about making noise, but lives were in danger. This seemed too passive for the kind of guy we'd been led to believe he was.

Despite all those latter kinds of issues, I would have been willing as I said, to rate this positively, but I simply couldn't get past the way women were abused and misrepresented, thus (not thusly) I cannot recommend this novel.

Melancholy Manor by Ellie DeFarr

Title: Melancholy Manor
Author: Ellie DeFarr
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

Erratas and curiosities:
P63 "Any suspicions of fowl play…" should be "Any suspicions of foul play…" unless the character has a pet chicken.
Chapter 31 (paragraph 4) "...preferring to follow from behind..." - how else would one follow?!
"He seemed do distraught." I forget the location, but this clearly should be "He seemed so distraught."

This novel, which has a title that sounds like a children's book, isn't. It is one of a series, but each episode is discrete, so you don’t have to have read the first, or the whole preceding set (however many or few that might tally) to enjoy this one. I appreciated that! I was immediately drawn-in because this is a PI story, but it isn't told in first person PoV, which I detest, so major kudos to the author for being independent and original in that regard. Unfortunately, it failed to keep my interest.

Another reason I was drawn-in was that private investigator Hera Hunter (yeah, I know the name is a little bit too much like 'Hero', but I let that slide!) is very different. We first meet her in this story dispatching a child molester and murderer who got away with his last crime. Hera, 29, was a marine sniper and she took out this criminal in a park early one morning, and sauntered off home without a hint of guilt for her action. This lack of remorse or feeling is important for her later inexplicable reactions.

Next she's breaking into the home of a dishonest collector of valuables to steal back a precious diamond which the collector stole on behalf of some criminal element, and additionally, she's worrying over the unidentified body of an Asian woman found in a park. The body is unidentified, yet the police are somehow convinced she's not a prostitute. I don't get how they figured that out! I also found it rather too convenient how many useful coincidences crop up during Hera's investigations! She's always overhearing vital conversations, or seeing odd things going on that prove of use later, or meeting or hearing of people who are crucial to her solving the crime. It was too much.

I had an issue with the ubiquitous invincible hacker motif, too. Hera's partner at her PI agency is able to hack into anything just by tapping a few keys. Bullshit! That trope is tired and sad, and not even remotely realistic. As I said, I did like the story from the start, but the big question was, with issues like this cropping up so often, could the author keep me liking it? No, she couldn't.

There were too many white caps that hindered smooth sailing here. One big one, was a little yappy dog named "Lucky" belonging to Hera, which she literally takes everywhere with her, including into bars and along to visits with potential clients without even offering them courtesy of asking if it’s okay. This was absurd at best. I'm a dog lover but even I would draw the line somewhere. In this novel no one ever does and that was way beyond the bounds of credibility.

Like Lassie, Lucky has almost superhuman (or more appropriately, super-dog) instincts which are slightly improbable at best and farcical at worst. For example, Lucky can always tell if someone is a bad person, and is almost shark-like at detecting the faintest trace of a smell. That made the dog seem like it was from some cheesy kid's story.

The dog was written just like a human character, being given little comments here and there, such as in: "Arf, arf," the dog said, or as in: Lucky added, "Yip Yip", and so on. I found this juvenile and annoying, worthy of a middle-grade children's novel, but not an adult private-eye story. Initially this dog feature didn't irritate me too much, but the dog kept cropping up like that sad-ass Microsoft Windows "help dog" they used to have, and it was for no good purpose at all. I thought the dog was going to play a part in the mystery because it was featured so much. Thankfully it didn't, but this begs the question as to why we're hit over the head with little growly dog every few paragraphs?

Another oddity was that pretty much every significant guy Hera meets is very tall. I have no idea what that's all about, but this novel was introducing one such guy almost every ten pages in the first half of the book! Weird! It's not surprising that I quickly reached the point where there were too many things bothering me to enjoy this. One of the tall guys was a sleazy politician who happened to be related to Hera's assistant. The number of times he stopped by her office, the two of them had ample opportunity to record his voice and get him into serious trouble, yet they never did. Given Hera's radical action with the child molester, it seemed that she had way too much forbearance with the politician. It made no sense.

Another annoyance was the author's habit (I noticed it more than once) of reminding us of things which happened only a few pages before, and which were significant enough that your typical reader is highly unlikely to have forgotten unless they have some serious cognitive issues. One example of this is that Hera's (foster) sister is the proprietor of a brothel called 'Knickers' in town. Once I read that I didn't need to be reminded of it.

Hera is represented as a bit of a vigilante, hunting down the bad guys, and especially the ones who got away with it (that is until her own brand of thug-justice catches up with them), but the problem with that is that it disappears when she discovers her father! This is the man who shot her mother when she was a child and then fled, and who has been on the loose ever since - and who is very possibly a material witness in a case upon which she has just begun working. In fact, he's worse than that, but Hera does nothing about him!

Instead of shooting him out of anger, or more smartly, turning him in to the police as a murderer and a potential vital witness in another shooting, she just walks away. This was not only totally out of character given her previous behavior, it made her look completely inept if not downright stupid.

The situation was made worse by her schizophrenic attitude towards her dad. At one point she almost feels sad for him, at another she walks away from him, indifferent, at another she's infuriated by his behavior. It made no sense whatsoever, and served only as another annoyance for me. Admittedly Hera's idea of love is rather warped, and kudos to the author for not giving her a trope male love interest, but her attitude towards her foster parents was at best oddball.

As for the mystery, it was rather run-of-the-mill, and not very gripping. It was obvious who the bad guy was from the beginning, so there was no mystery there. Once we knew 'who', it was only a matter of what he was doing. This will probably be obvious to some readers, although it wasn't to me, I confess, but it seemed highly unlikely he would be doing what he was doing in such a relatively small town.

So while I was really drawn into this to begin with, it quickly became an annoying novel which I was glad to have finished so I could move on to something more engaging. I can't in good faith recommend this one. It didn't leave me with any desire at all to read any more in this series.

White Lies by Emily Harper

Title: White Lies
Author: Emily Harper
Publisher: Writers To Authors (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by the author. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is sometimes reward aplenty!

Erratum:
10% in: "…all banned together…" should be "…all band together…"

This novel is so bad I wrote a song about it to the tune of Blurred lines:

Everybody screws up! Eew!
Everybody screws up! Uh!
Nay! nay! nay! Nay! nay! nay! Nay! nay! nay!

If you can't read what I'm trying to write,
If you can't read from almost any page,
Maybe I'm writing bad, maybe I'm going down; maybe I'm out of my mi-i-i-ind!

OK now she was dumb, tryin' to bed the captain,
But she's inanimate, baby it's not her nature, just let me educate ya
Nay! nay! nay! Shouldn't waste the pay-pa
Nay! nay! nay! That book is not your maker

And that's why I'm gon' write a one star
I know you earned it (I know you earned it), I know you earned it
It's a ba-ad bo-ok!
Can't let it get past me; it's not real hist'ry; talk about lambasted?
I hate this White Lies!
I know you wrote it; you do showboat it, but I have smote it!
But it's a ba-ad bo-ok!
It fails to grab me, it's pretty nasty; it's even trashy

What do you write this for? Why you got them reams stacked?
This book so down-grade, like a Shelley in a grave
Cover's adolescent,
Nay! nay! nay! It's really booked-up
Nay! nay! nay! What rhymes with booked-up?
Nay! nay! nay!

What an original title! B&N lists only sixteen pages of books with this title, or with titles similar to it. So why did I read it? Well, even though this novel suggested of itself that it would be a silly romance, I was tempted against my better judgment into reading it because it was set in the UK. By 10% in I'd already decided this wasn't a good novel. The main female character is so complete and shallow a ditz that she doesn’t need airbags in her car. She's already protected because she's such an airhead.

How she can be an airhead and completely vacuous at the same time, I don’t know, but trust me, she manages it and then some. She's also more than likely anorexic if we're to judge by the cover image, but then we all know covers lie just as effectively and routinely as back cover blurbs do!

Her life is so pointless that her every waking thought revolves around finding a guy to marry. We’re expected to believe this woman can’t find a guy even though she's portrayed as being hot and gorgeous. Of course these are purely skin-deep traits; why would anyone care whether someone is respectable, diligent, interesting, accomplished, smart, caring, self-possessed, supportive, fun, has strength of character, or whatever? It’s all about skin, and exposing it. The main (lack-of-) character keeps dreaming of finding a hunk regardless of personality or other traits. I keep dreaming of finding a romance story that's realistic and fun, but they're so few and far between that you may as well consider them extinct.

This novels truck me as a major example of wish-fulfillment on the part of the author, so naturally (not!), the mc meets 'the guy' accidentally in the elevator on the way up to her office (because why would she have any other kind of job?), and immediately starts hitting on him, even as we’re expected to believe she doesn’t recognize him as a potential partner. Instead she puts a want-ad in some random magazine, seeking a partner, and in time, goes on a date with a guy named Alan. Wouldn’t you know that she runs into "the guy" right there in that same restaurant? Coincidence of coincidences! How miraculous is that? HALLELUJAH! Thank you Baby Jesu!

When Alan shows up they have a perfectly fine dinner, but she obsesses over the unappetizing wine - like this one thing has really spoiled everything, and she has so little self-possession and self-respect that she doesn't even think to order something different. Meanwhile Mr Perfect, stalking jerk-off that he is, sends over a glass of wine to her table, and it’s perfect. Yeah, like he knows exactly what she wants and he's going to give it to her even when she's out on a date with another guy? Creep much?

Alan very kindly pays for the entire meal even though she is the one seeking a partner - and she doesn’t even remark upon that, let alone thank him, but as soon as they stand up to leave, she suddenly notices that he's a couple of inches shorter than she is. She didn’t notice this before? The truly sad thing is that this is all it takes for her to write him off. As if that wasn't bad enough, his hair is thinning. Never mind that losing ones hair in a male is a sign of testosterone! No! He's "short", he has thinning hair, therefore he's a no good low-life piece of trash and she’ll never see him again.

By this time I thoroughly detested the main character - and the novel. I had zero interesting on following this desperate louse-life another step. And note that I hadn't even reached the fact that she's an outright liar. White lies are nothing but lies after all. How shallow and pathetic can you be? Well read an Emily Harper 'romance' and you'll find out!

Doomboy by Tony Sandoval

Title: Doomboy
Author: Tony Sandoval
Publisher: Magnetic press
Rating: WARTY!

Translated by Mike Kennedy

I could not get into this story at all, which is sad because I'm usually good at making choices with graphic novels, and I typically end-up liking them, but I seem to have picked several in a row here which failed to make a good impression on me! Maybe I'm losing my touch?! At any rate, this one didn't do a thing for me. I'm not sure what it was about this exactly, but I can suggest a few candidates.

The drawing was really scrappy and amateurish, and too simplistic, while at the same time being really busy and messy - scruffy-looking without even being a nerf-herder! It turned me off, so I know that was part of it, but the dialog wasn't very stimulating either. Indeed, some of the early dialog was simply squiggles in balloons, and completely unintelligible.

I know this was intended to convey random, unimportant conversation, but it was distracting and combined with the very many panels where there was no speech at all - or any kind of communication other than purely visual about what was happening, it made me wonder if the entire book was going to be as vague as this.

Frankly it made me feel like the writer didn’t really care what was going on, so then I'm asking myself "If that's the case, then why should I care?" and it was quickly downhill from there. I didn’t feel any interest or investment in any of the characters, or any growing desire to find out how this story went.

Bumbling Into Body Hair by Everett Maroon

Title: Bumbling Into Body Hair
Author: Everett Maroon (no dedicated website found)
Publisher: Libertary Co.
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

This is a review that is, in some ways, tied in with another book I read during this time. The two are not related except in that they're about gender identification. I thought it would be fun to review them both together (but separately!), so while the reviews cross-reference a bit, they're different (although both books are worthy reads), and I invite you to read both. On my blog, the reviews were both posted next to each other on the same day, but if you're reading this at some other venue you may have to dig around to find the other review.

So this is a book which I decided would be fun to blog along with Gracefully Grayson by Ami Polonsky. The two stories, one factual (this one) and one fictional, are like bookends to the entire spectrum of gender identity, which is a lot more complex than most people realize. Unlike the novel, which is middle-grade, this book deals with mature adults (or not so mature in some cases as the author testifies!), and additionally, carries the messy complexity of real life.

While Gracefully Grayson was fictional, it was the opposite of this story in many ways: it was about a young boy who identified more as a female than ever he did as a male whereas this one is of a very real journey from female to male. Indeed, this is almost a guidebook on what to do and not to do to make that journey successful and as painless as possible. For that alone, it's important and well worth the reading.

I have to say up front that I would have liked the author to have said a word or two (okay, Picky-Picky, some paragraphs!) about how this novel came to be - particularly about how it came to be so detailed. No one short of those with eidetic memories (and their attendant problems) can remember exact conversations and sequences of events, especially from several years ago, yet we read them detailed here, so clearly there is some sort of creative writing going on, even though the events and conversations depicted are, I have no doubt, real ones. I would have liked to have learned how this was done - how the author filled in the gaps (and the gaps in memory) since there's no mention of a detailed diary being kept.

Bumbling Into Body Hair is a true story about a man who was born in a woman's body and underwent a painful, amusing, rewarding, and educational transition to 'normalize' himself. The blurb for this book exaggerates the humor somewhat, and sadly underplays the trauma, but both are included in the story and are equally engaging. This story is very well written and very poignant. Sometimes it made me angry (ditch Pat already!), and sometimes it made me laugh, but mostly it made me feel for what Everett had to go through, and the fortitude and good humor with which he girded (yes, girded, I shall have it no other way) his, er loins!

Everett began life as Jenifer (one n), growing-up with a sister in a loving family home, and ending-up in a decent, although perhaps a somewhat monotonous job, but with great co-workers. Some might call it a comfortable rut. That's pretty much when the story begins for us, the readers, although of course it began long before this for Everett, trapped inside Jenifer and not even fully cognizant that there was indeed an escape route that didn't involve lying in a bath of warm water with a sharp knife.

Everett, as Jenifer, had long been identified as a lesbian, and I was intrigued that this author seemed to accept this label. I've read other accounts where a significant distinction is drawn between an XX person who identifies as a heterosexual male, and one who identifies as a gay female. I guess there's some dissent even among those who are more intimately familiar with all of this than am I!

The real hero of this story is the woman who plays a somewhat secondary role to us as readers, but who no doubt fulfilled a very primary role to the author: Susanne, who met Everett when he was very much an overt female, still struggling over what to do about his feelings, and who fell in love with him and stayed with him all the way through surgery and on into a marriage. That takes love, dedication, and courage, and I salute her.

It's actually because of Susanne that I had another - not so much 'issue', as 'bout of sheer curiosity' - over why so much painful detail was relayed about everything in Everett's life - which takes guts and a commendable commitment towards bravely informing others of what's truly involved in a literal life-changing pursuit such as this - and yet we're robbed of a lot of the intimacy of this remarkable relationship between his self and Susanne.

I don't know if this is because of personal privacy concerns, and I certainly wouldn't want an important story like this to spill over into pandering to salacious or prurient interests, but it struck me that a really critical part of this transition was the love and affection between these two, and yet we get not a hint of any joys or problems experienced as the two of them interacted physically, one very much a woman, the other transitioning from a woman to a man.

I would have liked to have read something about how they felt, how they perceived it, how their physical intimacy changed (or didn't) as this transition took place - or at least a word or two as to why Everett (and perhaps Susanne) chose not to share this! Yes, of course it's their life and they're entitled to share as little or as much as they wish, but given that he's already sharing such intimate details, a word or two about the nature of the relationship and how it grew and changed would not have been out of place, and would have been appreciated by me, at least.

In short, I recommend this story. I loved the detail, and the endless parade of things which cropped up - surprising things which might never occur to someone who had not undergone this change no matter how deeply they might have gone into it as a thought exercise. I loved the humor and the endless battle with bureaucracy as Everett gamely began to solidify these changes in terms of endless paperwork. It was all the more funny, I felt, because he worked in government, so in some ways he was getting a taste of his own medicine!

Most of all I loved this for the courage, honesty, and equanimity with which he pursued this dream, this need, and his sharing of this necessary course correction in his life. It's a warming message to us all, no matter what our own circumstances are - a heartening siren song telling us all that we can get there if we're willing to make the journey, no matter what our own personal journey is.

Note that Everett Maroon also has a novel out: The Unintentional Time Traveler. Note also that if you liked this story or Gracefully Grayson you might also like to read The Greatest Boy Ever Made a work of fiction which curiously has a lot in common with both of these books, and which I reviewed back in September.