Showing posts with label dumb-assery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dumb-assery. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Memory Maze by Gordon Korman


Rating: WARTY!

Audiobooks are hit and miss with me since I experiment with them more. This was a miss. I got to 20% in and gave up on it. The story was ludicrous, which might have made it an unintentionally funny read, but it was far too boring for that, and the boredom was in no way helped by Ramón de Ocampo's reading, which turned me right off. I would have had a hard time listening to it even if the novel had been thoroughly engrossing. It was far too John Green for my taste and the voices were not rendered well.

The story, which is number two (and felt like it) in a series, is about Jackson Opus, who is a master hypnotist. This was a refreshingly original super power to have, but then the author had to ascribe every single historical event to the use of hypnotism and it became laughable - and not in a fun way. Even Abe Lincoln was dragged into it at one point, and I remember thinking, it didn't help save his life, did it? I don't mind stories like this being woven into history, but when the author starts to tie literally every important event into it, it smacks of sheer amateurism and becomes far too stupid to take seriously, or even jokingly for that matter.

I flatly refuse to read any novel which has a main character named Jack, which is the most tedious go-to action adventure name ever to be over-used in literature. Even if the blurb makes the novel sound interesting, it goes right back on the shelf if one of the main characters is named Jack. I think I'm gong to have to add Jax and Jackson to that banned list now. Rather than take action, these people would much prefer to let others bear the brunt and pay the price while they hide out. They're far happier scratching their heads and whining about how Jax needs to become more powerful, but never have him practice anything. They would rather let the bad guy do whatever he wants without taking any steps to out him, and expose him. They're idiots.

This story had "Jax" and his family hiding out a hundred miles from home, living like paupers just to stay safe from the evil villain. Some hero huh?! He's using the cheesiest name imaginable as a non-disguise. His old name was Opus, so his new name is Magnus? Really? No one is ever going to think it's him. He's supposed to be keeping a low profile, but he enters a chess tournament and wins. This kid is a moron. I don't want to read about morons, not even if it's supposed to be funny. Because it's not! That's for parodies, not for original fiction!

The leader of the good guys has abandoned all his followers to support Jax, and his followers are being bumped-off. All they had to do here was to get on a rooftop with an AK 47 and take out this guy, but of course they can't do the realistic and intelligent thing (in the context of this fictional story in order to save the world from this ruthlessly evil guy). No instead, they have to play fair and it makes the story stilted and artificial and just plain ridiculous.

The big problem here is hypnotism of course, because it can make victims do anything, and then forget they've done it, yet nowhere did I hear of either Jax or his powerful hypnotist guru (who is also hiding) talking or even thinking about how to nullify the hypnotic effect. Jax never gives an ounce of thought to how to beat the guy. Of course as soon as the guy is beaten, that's the end of a cash cow for this author and this publisher, so where's the incentive to tell a realistic story and bring it to a satisfying conclusion? It's far easier to drag this same story out than to come up with something new, original, and inventive. This is another reason why I typically, and with few exceptions, detest series. They're far too derivative, repetitive, vacuous and vapid.

I have better things to read!


Monday, September 19, 2016

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.


Sunday, September 18, 2016

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.


Saturday, September 17, 2016

Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff


Rating: WARTY!

If I'd wanted to read a John Green novel which I don't, ever, I would have picked one up. I picked this one up mistakenly, but utterly convinced it was not a John Green novel. Was I ever wrong! It was awful. Even the guy reading it sounded exactly like the kind of voice that I've heard in a John Green audiobook when I made the unforgivable mistake of trying one. Gräf is a German word meaning Count, as in Graf Zeppelin, meaning Count Zeppelin who founded the Zeppelin airship company. It doesn't mean 'green', so what the heck was going on here?!

The story is that this young guy killed another young guy by means of accidentally hitting him in the chest with a hockey puck. The victim has a weak heart and dies. Now this guy is all-but irremediably morose, until this girl swoops in and rescues him. Almost inevitably, the girl is named Fallon, because god forbid she would have a given-name name that wasn't someone's surname, or any sort of ordinary name in a John Green, er Lisa Graff novel.

The only thing that Lisa forgot to do was include the girl's name in the title. She should have called it Looking for Fallon, since Lost in the Fallon sounds very odd. I guess it could have been titled Gone Guy. That would have worked, but it's really better if you have the girl's name in the title. That's only going to work though, if the girl has an unusual name, like Alaska. Looking for Myrtle, charming as that sounds, isn't going to cut it despite it having a play on words. But with an exotic, pretentious, or unusual name, you can have Half-Baked Alaska, if Alaska is a bit stupid or crazy, or Alaska is Like, Totally Husky, Dude!, if Alaska is a bit of a dog, or Melting Alaska if she's cold, and which also has the other element which you really: the implication in the title that she's lost or in need of saving. So you might have Performing Open-Heart Surgery on Alaska in the back of a old VW Bug which works because it makes a play on the term 'open-heart'.

Playing on words, especially if you can play on the girl's name, is wonderful. So you can have, for example, The Color of Jade, which is perfect, because then you get an exotic name and a play on words. Or you could have April, Come She Will which has the added advantage of a salacious play on words. So on that theme, maybe Lisa should have titled this, Fallon, Falloff which not only gets the unusual girl's name into the title, but makes a play on words and evokes The Karate Kid. OTOH, why would anyone want to evoke The Karate Kid?" Okay, strike that.

Fallon derives from Gaelic name meaning leadership or supremacy, or something along those lines. I'd hazard a guess that this is something which never crossed the author's mind, and she chose it merely because it struck her fancy, but maybe she did know what she was doing (she's emulating John Green after all, perhaps hoping to get a second wind from his sales/sails), but playing on that theme would give us Following Fallon which has the added advantage of an alliterative appellation. Another such title would be Rise and Fallon. But I think we've explored this motif quite enough for now, so I'll just go with Lost in its Own Pretensions, and leave it at that!

So, in short, the prologue sucked as much as the novel. Neither Fallon nor the main guy, whose name I completely forget, were worth my reading time. In fact, the guy was a vindictive and obnoxious little prick in the part I listened to, so I cared neither about him nor about the girl in shining armor. I don't normally read prologues, but it's hard to avoid them in audiobooks where you have no idea what's coming next, especially if they don't announce it.

The prologue was a truly crappy story about a crappy rip-off which the author calls a 'claw machine' - one of those things which takes your money based on your deluded belief that it's fair and equitable and the claw really is strong enough, if you get it just right, to pull up one of those tightly-packed plush toys. No, it's not, and even if you did get one, the toys are so crappy and cheap that they will fall apart in short order.

It's better to have your kids save the money and actually buy a decent plush toy. The habit of saving and reaping rewards will teach them much more useful tactics in the long run, than any amount of plays on a gambling machine ever will. Of course, then the kids don't get to play with the claw and have some excitement, but there are better ways to let them have fun than this. This prologue was pedantic, and as usual it contributed nothing to the story. Nothing. You can skip it completely and be no worse off. I rest my case against prologues, prefaces, introductions and authors notes. Boycott them with the same ardor you'd boycott one of those fraudulent claw machines! And give this novel a miss, because it's amiss. It will deliver to you the same emptiness that the claw machine does, and it's so John Green it will never ripen.


Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Olivia Twisted by Vivi Barnes


Rating: WARTY!

I made it twenty percent of the way through this before giving up in disgust. The reason I was interested in reading it was that it seemed like it might have preempted an idea I had for a different take on Oliver Twist, but this story had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Dickens's novel except in that it purloined the names of some of his characters. My idea is quite safe! Other than that it was set in contemporary times in a high school featuring a bunch of young hackers who were one-dimensional cookie-cutter characters, and was consequently and unsurprisingly boring.

There was the trope new kid in school, the trope obnoxious classmate (in this case Tyson who was solely interested in meat LOL!), the trope hot guy, in this case "Z", which turned me off immediately. What really killed this for me apart from the boredom was that it was twice as bad as the worst person voice, which is first person voice. Twice as bad because, having made the mistake of choosing to tell this story in that voice, the author then doubled-down on their mistake by splitting it between the two main tropes (Z and Liv) and told their stories both from first person in an open admission that she had chosen the wrong voice and was far too stubborn and stuck in a YA rut to change it.

Frankly, this story sucked and after reading the first fifty tedious pages of these character's "Liv"es, I had "Z"ero interest in learning anything more about these wastes of skin. I'm sorry, but there is honestly something wrong with you if you find this kind of writing entertaining.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Look Behind You by Sibel Hodge


Rating: WARTY!

This one is first person which I detest, and which made the story read like a parody from the start because it was combined with such overly dramatic language that it would have turned me off right away had it not made me laugh so hard. In the first few screens I got, "Hot, acidic bile burns my throat." Bile is actually alkaline. Stomach acid is acidic. "Hot stomach acid burns my throat" would have been perfect. The bile quote made me think that this author was so desperate to make this gripping that she simply went way over the top without any idea where she was going or what she was doing to her little melodrama. It doesn't work. She does it again shortly afterwards with, "heartbeat thumps wildly". No, a heart may thump wildly. Or a heart may beat wildly, but a heartbeat is already a beat. It's already a thump.

This kind of melodrama continued with lines like, "I fight the urge to vomit again. I gulp in deep breaths of stale air. In. Out. Come on; breathe. In. Out. Don't panic. Think!" and "I cram a fist in my mouth to stop from yelling out. Hot tears slide down my cheeks. I have to get out of here. Somehow. But my head . . . oh, my head", and "Fingers of dread squeeze my insides. Fear slices through me." Seriously, I was about ready to quit but then the girl escapes her confinement so I decided to stay with it a bit longer. I made it to forty percent before the bad writing and the painfully obvious plotting nauseated me so much I couldn't stand to read any more.

Check this out:

'I was kidnapped.' My eyes water as the full realization of everything that's happened sinks in.
Her mouth falls open. 'Kidnapped?'
I can only nod, tears streaming down my face. Even to my ears, I know how it sounds. Crazy. Ridiculous. Who would want to kidnap a suburban wife and teacher?
'Right. Well, I'd better add calling the police to my list then, too....'
Seriously? A bedraggled woman obviously in trouble, is picked up on the roadside by a driver - a female driver at that - and no one calls the police? Bullshit! This story was quite simply not credible, and the woman was portrayed as stupid to the core. Everything is clear to the reader before the character ever grasps it. She is pathetically dumb and slow. I'm tired of reading stupid stories written by female authors who seem intent upon making their main female characters dumb as they can. Stop it! Stop it now or quit writing, for goodness sakes! I actively dis-recommend this novel.


Thursday, August 11, 2016

Deviants by Maureen McGowan


Rating: WARTY!

Another throw-away outreach attempt at another YA dystopian writer with the same result: uninventive, derivative, boring trash. This is the first of a series of course, because why bilk your readers for one inadequate volume when you can pad a short story out into a trilogy or better? God bless Big Publishing™ for without their avarice there would be no crappy YA troll-ogies.

The predictable first person female has predictable hots for a predictably potential bad guy, but is predictably distracted by her BIG SECRET™. These people - all mysteriously YA age (at least the only ones we really hear about), and they're predictably living in a dome in a predictably trashed world, and predictably have to escape. Predictably, I quickly grew to hate it and predictably the main character, a female created by a female author is a dumb-ass. Why women do this to their main characters is actually less of a mystery to me than why so many readers enable and facilitate them, but I don't have to support this crap.

So, what is no more than a bloated prologue is fluffed-up with inanity into the first volume of the predictable YA trilogy. Yawn.


Monday, August 8, 2016

Agenda 21 by Harriet Parke


Rating: WARTY!

Glenn Beck is probably glad he's not the author of this novel. Harriet Parke wrote this, and this audiobook was like listening to bad fan fiction. Seriously. It's set in a ridiculously biased future which is presented to us without any attempt whatsoever being made to justify or rationalize it. It's based on UN resolution known as Agenda 21 (they definitely should have been smarter in how they named it!). The '21' means 21st century, BTW. In mid 1992, 178 governments embraced the philosophy behind it. That was a quarter century ago, and have you seen anything change? I sure haven't. So those morons and imbeciles who are touting this as some sort of totalitarian takeover agenda are quite simply liars, as dishonest as the book cover loudly yelling that this is a work by Glenn Beck, and that's all there is to it.

The US is a very selfish nation in many ways, and I couldn't see any way in which this fictional future could actually happen in this country. No one would be willing to give up their home and their land - or their guns. I couldn't see how everyone even could be herded around as they were depicted here, or for what purpose it was being done, and that was the fundamental problem with this novel. It was a farce.

But the US's main problem is ignorance. No One knows what the heck this policy is aimed at, or at least they didn't in 2012, when a poll of 1,300 US voters found that 9% supported it, 6% opposed it, and 85% didn't have enough information on which to arrive at an opinion. So this novel isn't a fictional account of a dystopian future, it's a political agenda based on radically alarmist lies about guidelines set out by the UN, which are designed to actually help the environment. This is all too typical of the tsunami of propaganda put out by an increasingly radicalized and fundamentalist right wing who seem to have no agenda of their own other than pandering to panic. it;s interesting to note that Agenda 21, the novel, was published that same year, so the author could actually claim ignorance, too: ignorance of reality.

The story makes zero sense, has no world-building, and essentially abandons all of the technological advances we've made in terms of recycling and renewable energy since 1992. For example, electricity has evidently gone, including solar power, in this world, and people physically work to haul other people around in carts or ride energy-creating bicycles or walk treadmills to generate power. Why all this power is needed went unexplained in the small portion of this I could stand to listen to.

The biggest issue with the story other than how profoundly stupid it is, is that it's so poorly written that it's almost a parody of itself, and it's bone-numbingly boring. Instead of inventiveness and foresight, we got asinine nineteen-fifties sci-fi garbage phrases like "nutrition cube" instead of food, and "living space" instead of home. The entire first half-dozen chapters of the novel was one long, biased, brain-dead info-dump which made for truly tedious listening. The author describes someone riding an "energy bicycle" and does a really lousy writing job of it. No one would call it that in the future, they'd simply call it a bike, or call it by whatever abbreviated name it was most popularly known as. The author had no clue how to write, and I have no intention of listening to anything else by this author or by Glenn Beck.

You can see for yourself what Agenda 21 says here, and decide for yourself if it's a sound environmental hope and Glenn beck is inexcusably ignorant and alarmist. Here's the same thing at MIT. Here's wikipedia's article on it.


Sunday, August 7, 2016

Wynonna Earp Vol 1 Homecoming by Beau Smith


Rating: WARTY!

This sounded like it might be interesting, or it might be a disaster, and it pains me to report that it was the second of these two options. I counted twenty-seven panels containing blood in the first thirty-two pages. That's almost one per page, which is way too many for a story which makes little sense, appears to be going nowhere, and doesn't even have decent dialog or some humor to leaven it. Essentially it's just another Walking Dead style story with nothing new to offer. Even the art was pretty much Walking Dead. The only "improvement" it had was that it was in color. Don't let the misrepresentative front cover image fool you. the art is nothing like that quality inside.

The main Character, Wynonna Earp is, we're told, descended from Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp, presumably with his second wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus, but the couple had no children, and neither did Wyatt with his first wife. I was prepared to overlook that if the story had turned out to be good, but it didn't.

The basis of it is that the United States Marshals Service 'Black Badge' division was set up to fight paranormal creatures. The only ones we see here - at least in the part I read - were 'chupacabra' critters, aka goat eaters. Why, in these stories, the goat eaters never eat goats but always humans is a complete mystery, but the only reason to avoid Wynonna Earp at all cost is that she's boring. I can't recommend this based on the the portion of it that I read, which is more than enough for my taste.

You know, it makes no difference in stories like this if the para-abnormals are zombies, or vampires, or were-wolves, or whatever, the story is always the same. I like my characters and my stories to have something more going for them than endless skulls split with bullets or cleavers, and this failed dismally. It's long past time that writers of this genre came up with something new to say.


Saturday, August 6, 2016

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov


Rating: WARTY!

This was an awful novel, badly written and in the audiobook format, badly read. I've been forced to conclude that not only is Isaac Asimov irrelevant, he is antique and I need read nothing further by him. His prose is pedantic and far too absorbed with irrelevant details, and his characters were anachronistic even for Asimov's own time. I don't believe any ever exclaimed "Jehoshaphat" not even when Asimov was alive. It's tedious.

On that score, it seems like everyone but the robots in his world are named after Biblical characters (the leading non-robotic character is Elijah, and his son is Benjamin, for goodness sakes! Why this novel written by an atheist, and set in the future is so obsessed with an antique work of poor history and copious fiction would make for a more interesting book. Supposedly set a thousand years from now, the novel evinces nothing significantly different from Asimov's own time despite the passage of a millennium. People still smoke pipes for goodness sakes! There is nothing inventive here, and the robot is more tedious and brain-dead than Commander Data in the Star Trek Universe. I expected better. Now I know better.


Thursday, August 4, 2016

Prism by Faye Kellerman, Aliza Kellerman


Rating: WARTY!

This is a case of a new writer being "grandfathered" (or perhaps more accurately in this case, "grandmothered") into the privileged position of publishing because your mom is already in the business, so this had that already against it, and the fact that it was an audiobook, which in my hands tend to garner poorer reviews by dint of the fact that I'm a captive audience driving to and from work. So I'll pretty much listen to anything that's not a ridiculously inane DJ or an even more inane commercial, and especially if it sounds like a remotely interesting story. I know, all that gasoline! Let's make a deal: you guys buy my books, and I'll buy an electric car and kiss off my indentured service to Big Oil™. Now isn't that a worthy cause? In fact, if you buy enough books I can quit driving altogether and work at home into my ever encroaching antiquity! Isn't it worth it to get me off the streets? Think about it!! LOL!

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to discover that this one was actually to my liking - for the first twenty percent. The characters were fresh, funny, entertaining, and different from the usual YA high-school clichéd morons. Yes, so they failed Bechdel–Wallace, but only a bit and it was funny. The story turned around, but not in the way the author intended I'm sure, when there was an overnight school field trip. In the dark, and far from anywhere, the three traveling in this one van, and separated from their partner van, woke up to find they had run off the road and rolled over. They climbed out and ran from the van into the dark, ignoring the fact that their teacher was still trapped inside. A storm came up and they retreated into a nearby cave where they fell into a pothole and woke up in dumb-ass world.

The dumb-assery unfortunately, was not what the author intended. Instead, and from that from that point onward, the characters started behaving exactly like characters in every bad, trope-infested YA novel you ever read. Any relationship not only to intelligent behavior but even to realistic behavior was gone, and so was I! I said, "Check please! I'm outta here!" I'm done with the Kellermans two; next author please, right this way!


Wednesday, August 3, 2016

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot


Rating: WARTY!

This officially marks my flat refusal to read another thing written by Meg Cabot! I've read her Ready Or Not and found it a not ready. I read Haunted and found it more ghastly than ghostly, and I read Size 12 and Ready to Rock and found it ready to rot!

Perhaps this novel should have been titled "The Princess Diarrhea", since it both runs to more than ten volumes, and the main character, Mia, runs off at the mouth with an endless bitch and tedious moan about everything. What a nightmare she is. The novel is nothing like the movie, and bland as that is, the movie is far better. The movie has heart. All the novel has is spleen. The novel is as washed out as the Genovian flag, but it did make me want to watch the movie again.

The audio book is read by Anne Hathaway, who played the role of Mia in the movie. Her reading actually isn't too bad, but her voice tends towards mumble here and there. That's all I have to say about it, other than that I ditched it in short order, and I've now sworn off ever again reading anything by Meg Cabot!


Monday, August 1, 2016

Flood: Race Against Time by Aaron Rosenberg


Rating: WARTY!

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

This is the second 'STEM' novel I've reviewed, but unlike the first one, in this case I have to confess I'm very disappointed in it. It purports to be science-based, but in the end it's really sci-fi and I think this does the STEM objective a grave disservice by removing it from reality. Science is fantastic and engaging enough without seeking to 'amp it up' with unrealistic situations and exaggerated fiction.

This chapter book, augmented with a few images, features five kids who have transferred to a new school named after Einstein - as though he's the only scientist worth remembering. It couldn't have been named after a woman? But why would it be in a novel where genderism runs rampant? At one point I read, "or they’re manmade [sic]" Man-made? Why not simply say "manufactured"? Of course, that still contains 'man', but the root of that word is in reference to the hand, not to the gender.

This wasn't the only instance. At one point, I read, "Her dad commented from the head of the table." Dad gets to sit at the head of the table? Was this set in Victorian times? Even if he does, why stress it? Why not simply have him comment without specifying that he sits in the privileged position? At another point I read, "Anthropology is the study of man" No, it's the story of humans, male and female, boy and girl, and everyone in between.

Genderism wasn't the only problem. An improbably intelligent chimpanzee character which could have been ditched without loss was repeatedly referred to as a monkey, and this in a book purportedly aimed at improving science education? It's inexcusable. Also as inexplicable as it was inexcusable was the military teaching assistant. He was a disciplinary moron, had no place in a classroom and sure as hell didn't represent any military I'm familiar with.

Improbability was running high here, though. The children have their parents sign a blanket release form for field trips, then the teacher takes them on an experimental automated school bus - which has no driver? They almost get into an accident, but it's brushed-off as a science lesson! Even a capitalist corporation (or is it a person?) like Google doesn't let its robot vehicles out on the streets with no driver! And for good reason: we're a very long way from automated driving.

As if this wasn't bad enough, the children are taken to a field camp studying flooding, where there are unstable fissures in the ground, and the teacher leads the kids past police barriers warning that it's unsafe. Parents were given no information about the field trip, or about the use of the automated bus! This was not only a poor lesson in safety, it was ridiculous in the extreme. No wonder the author wasn't credited in the copyright (which was to the publisher, not to the author!). I wouldn't want to be credited for this kind of a book!

The point of the trip to the flood site wasn't made (unless it popped up after I quit reading). There seemed to be no point for the kids to be there other than putting them in danger, and indeed no point for the scientists and engineers to be there since there was literally nothing they could do, and no reason for them to be so close to danger, especially since they had by that time failed to take any action before the flood which might have prevented or ameliorated it, yet this tardiness in action was never raised as part of the problem!

There were other such issues, one of which included at least one poor definition, such as specifying that NASA is "the United States government agency responsible for space travel" - yes, it is, inter alia. It's not all that NASA does, hence the 'aeronautics' portion of the name. The definitions themselves were odd, in that they were (I assume) intended as footnotes, and were visible in the really crappy presentation in the Kindle app, but absent from the excellent presentation and formatting in Bluefire reader on the iPad. In the Kindle they were randomly mixed in with the text, rather than at the foot of the screen. I know this was an ARC, but this is really inexcusable in this day and age.

Be warned that the Kindle app is pretty much guaranteed to scramble anything containing images or special formatting like drop-caps, for example. In this case it scrambled that, the images, and the paragraph formatting so that some lines ended in the middle of the screen before continuing on the next line down. Even the Bluefire version, which is normally first class, suffered in that several sections were missing text. I only knew this because of the abrupt starting of sentences which did not follow from the previous sentence, and because the Kindle app had the missing text. This seemed to begin around page seventy. There was a section missing on p71, starting after "much fun and delicious?" And ending right before "103 and then headed down to the lab." Another instance was on p107 running from "engineer with the city" to "seep through". There were other such cases, but I gave up reading this novel at around eighty percent in because it was too stupid to live. I actively dis-recommend this as a STEM fiction book.


Sunday, July 17, 2016

Kris Longknife: Redoutable by Mike Shepherd aka Mike Moscoe


Rating: WARTY!

Redoubtable! What an amazing word this is! Doubt means to lack trust something or to have little faith in its credibility, so you'd think, if language made sense, that redoubt would mean you have no more faith the second time than you had on the first consideration, but redoubt is precisely the opposite of that! It means strong and resourceful - something in which you could have faith and trust. How bizarre! I love the English language. The problem is that re-doubt (about the author's abilities) is exactly what I had, having read this novel and found the quality of it doubtful at best.

This is the eighth in a series which has thirteen volumes out so far, and I'm going to review only the first eleven of these since they've felt like they’ve been going downhill over the last two or three, and this one didn’t halt the slide at all. Of course, some may argue they've always been downhill and I can’t completely disagree with that. I read them once before (except for volume 11), and I thought they were okay for a mindless read, but this second read-through, looking at them with a reviewer's more seasoned (and cynical, I have to add!) eye, makes me see them in a rather different light. They've come to exemplify the reasons why I'm not a fan of series unless they're exceptionally well-done, and evidently I've learned a heck of a lot about quality writing from my reviewing.

In this particular story, Kris is helping her one-time arch enemy, Vicky Peterwald (who now has her own series consisting of three volumes so far) to resolve some of her issues. The Peterwald empire is rather like the Soviet Union, and on the planet of interest in this story, the cities are even named after Russian cities. How that worked out is unexplained, but what's even more unexplained is that everyone on this planet apparently speaks Spanish! I have no idea what was going through the author's head when he cooked that up. Not world-building, that's for sure.

The weird thing is that in the previous volume in the series, the big deal was linking-up with representatives of the alien empire - the one they had been at war with eighty years before. The aliens, known as the Itechee, had been losing spacecraft while investigating a new star system and came to the humans for help, but then all that was forgotten! Instead of taking this opportunity to break new ground in his novels, the author ditched that story and retreated safely into tried-and-tested territory: villains subjugating a planet and Kris rides to the rescue. It would have been more realistic if she'd been in charge of air (or space) cavalry instead of marines given how monotonously she rides to the rescue. Not that it makes sense that a lieutenant in the navy is in charge of marines anyway.

This new novel is still ignoring that interesting alien topic and focusing on the fried-and-molested recipe: like how the honorable, upright, democratic and capitalist empire which Kris represents is going to help out the evil, corrupt authoritarian empire which Vicky represents by beating-up on evil villains who are keeping the poor folks downtrodden. LOL! Like I've said in some of my reviews, you kind of have to turn off parts of your brain to cope with these novels. Every one of them pretty much boils down to the same overall plot with a variation here and there - such as the name of the planet and the name of the villain. They're a bit like Bond movies but nowhere near as inventive or exciting.

The stories make little sense if you think about them too deeply. Some make no sense with minimal thought being required: such as why a princess is doing this to begin with. How she's even a princess, and her brother isn't a prince. How a king gets elected. Why Shepherd's entire universe is based solely on the USA (with the villains being based on the old USSR). Why, given that it's based on the USA writ large (and the empire is named the United Sentients, so every ship gets to be the US something-or-other), yet despite this addiction to the US, it's still a monarchy.

The questions abound: Why is Kris Longknife still not a captain after ten volumes of unrelenting and overwhelming success, much less an admiral, yet is in now charge of a small fleet of vessels in space? Even Kris herself doesn't have it clear when she's supposed to be a princess and when she's a Lieutenant-Commander. Why is there no clear chain-of-command in her little operation? Why is she the only Wardhaven military detachment which is doing this job? The questions abound. LACs can't land on land?! Their designers are too stupid to filter reaction mass, so when they use water the ducts immediately get clogged with pond weed? They can't use air for reaction mass?! Why are they in Greenfield territory in the first place? And the real humdinger: why is the midnight to 0400 shift quiet IN SPACE?! Seriously?

Given that she runs up against violent, merciless evil on every trip why is she addicted to using "sleepy-darts' instead of simply gunning down the bad guys? Why is she so well-equipped with super-smart nano-probes, but doesn't have a single drone to do her dirty work, which instead requires her to send in the marines every time, over which she frets endlessly about risk to life? Why is there a sentient personal computer which she travels with everywhere, but not one single robot anywhere in this universe

How does anyone manage to make any money out of interstellar haulage given the massive costs of space travel and the piss-poor return on the shipping simple everyday products to planets which can make or grow them themselves? Why is every single planet on the outer rim - without even one exception - under the thumb of villains who are without variation through-and-through evil, and which she has to take down usually - although not this time - against impossible - or at least extremely adverse - odds? Why does every planet's population consist of good-old-boys who adore her, and cardboard villains who hate her? Why is she always able to carry out these operations with almost no pain or cost?

I guess Shepherd found a formula that works and sticks to it because he can't think of anything else. No doubt his publisher is proud of him, but this repetitiveness and complete lack of inventiveness and imagination is why I really don't like series. It doesn't help when Kris herself comes out with bizarre phrases like, "I want that store torn apart with a fine tooth comb." Seriously? Where is the editor here? Or is the publisher so mesmerized with the sales figures that Shepherd does whatever he wants and no-one dare tell him he's wrong?

If the lieutenant had been painted as a dumb-ass from book one, who typically mangled such phrases, then that would be one thing, but she never has been rendered in that light until she spouted this ridiculous phrase in this volume. That right there was what got this a negative rating regardless of whatever else was in this book, and believe me I 'tore it apart with a fine tooth comb'.

Once again this story dumps her into a ridiculous situation, and she wins out. There is an added (but not new) twist to this one in the form of a kidnapping. This niece of her maid, Abby (who is also army intelligence and says quaint phrases like "Baby Ducks"), is so stupid that she sneaks off the space craft and goes wandering around alone on a hostile space port. Why this twelve-year old is even on Kris's spacecraft is a mystery. Kris routinely runs into danger. She's repeatedly talked about getting the child off the ship, yet despite there being several opportunities to leave her at Wardhaven where she'd be safe, and could get a good life and a good education, she's toted around like a mascot and taken repeatedly into danger.

It's as inexplicable as it is inexcusable, but these novels never have exhibited a whole heck of a lot of common sense despite the author touting quaint down-home catch-phrases as though they're all-powerful amulets against evil, which is another issue. Kris is always righteous, and has a whole passel o' quaint but extremely tired-old-phrases to express it, and woe betide any negative word be expressed about her super heroic and saintly space marines who are inevitably successful in every adventure. Where's the tension? Where's the unpredictability? Not here, Baby Ducks!

So no, not this one, and the way things are going, probably not the next three either! How my tastes and standards have changed in such a short time!


Thursday, July 14, 2016

Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda


Rating: WARTY!

Yes, it's talking book Thursday and here's my third review of an audiobook today.

I really enjoyed Sarwat Chadda's The Devil's Kiss which I guess I read before I started blogging reviews, since I find it nowhere on my blog, but if I'd known this was the start of a series titled 'Ash Mistry Chronicles', I would have left this audiobook on the library shelf. I have sworn-off reading any book (single or series) which has 'chronicles' in the title (or 'saga' or 'cycle', and so on). The very name Ash Mistry is a warning. The novel turned out to be every bit as unappealing as I would have expected for a chronicle

Mistry and his daughter and Indian who have grown up in England, and are visiting the city of Varanasi here they run afoul of the evil Lord Savage (I kid you not with these character names). The main reason for this is that Ash is a petty thief. he damages an archaeological site and finds an arrow head made of gold. Instead of turning it in to the people running the dig, his first thought is that the can sell it and get some money. His selfish thoughtlessness directly leads to the death of an aunt and uncle, and he sheds not one tear nor offers a single expression of regret for them. Not in the part I could stand to listen to.

Worse than this, the novel is genderist. When Ash and his younger sister lucky are in hiding, someone offers to train them in the fight against the supernatural evil that Lord savage controls. One of the two gets to be a warrior - Ash. His sister gets to be a caregiver! Not that there's anything wrong with being a caregiver by any means, but why is the male the warrior and the girl the 'nurse'? Could they not both have been warriors? Or nurses? Could they not have chosen for themselves what they wanted to do rather than be assigned traditional gender roles? it was at this point that I quit reading.

The story was read rather melodramatically and breathlessly by Bruce Mann, which didn't help my stomaching of it. Also, if I'd known that this had been recommended by Kirkus reviews, I wouldn't have wasted my time on it at all. Kirkus pretty much ever met a book they didn't adore, so their reviews are utterly worthless. I cannot recommend it.


Sixkill by Robert B Parker


Rating: WARTY!

Last trip to the library to pick up a requested book, I happened upon this audiobook, which is about a private dick named Spenser (and yes, he's for hire!) who is investigating the murder of a movie star's one-night stand. Over in the young readers section I happened upon a second audiobook also by Robert B Parker, titled Chasing the Bear, which was about the same character but when he was younger. I thought it would be an interesting study to compare and contrast.

Was I ever wrong! Nauseating was a more apt description, and the major reason for it was that this author sucks at writing prose. His problem is that he has all the individuality and inventiveness of a metronome when it comes to writing conversation between two people, and he writes a lot of speech with nothing to break it up. It's like listening to two automatic tennis ball throwers trying to play tennis with each other, and every bit as engrossing.

Of course this was first person because god forbid anyone should ever deign to imagine that it's legal under US law to write a novel in third person! Here's an example of this author's appalling conversational writing, from the beginning of chapter one. Note that this is a transcript of the audiobook, so my punctuation (and spelling of names) may differ from the printed page:

"Care for a coffee?" I said.
"Got some!" Quirk said. "Nice of you to ask."
"You ever read Frazz?" I said.
"What the fuck is frazz?" Quirk said.
[small descriptive section omitted]
"A comic strip in the Globe," I said. "It's new.'
"I'm a grown man," Quirk said.
"And a police captain," I said.
"Exactly," Quirk said. "I don't read comic strips."
"I withdraw the question," I said.
Quirk nodded. "I need something," he said.

Said, said, said? Has this guy never heard of words like, "asked"? Or exclaimed? Or "interrupted"? Or of simply adding no attribution once in a while? I quote this novel shortly afterwards in sheer disbelief that a grown man could write so god-awfully badly. It didn't help that Joe Mantegna's condescending, and I felt insulting version of an American Indian accent was vomit-inducing, and worthy of American western movies of the 1940's and 50's. I used to like Joe Mantegna.

I do not like this author and after listening to the opening portion of two different novels about the same guy at different stages of his life, I've come to the conclusion that there's no difference! I also have to ask how this thoroughly obnoxious lout - the accused murderer in this novel - ever became a major movie star. It's simply not credible. The story makes no sense at all. I'm all done reading Robert B Parker, I say.


Chasing the Bear by Robert B Parker


Rating: WARTY!

Last trip to the library to pick up a requested book, I happened upon an audiobook titled Sixkill by Robert B Parker, which is about a private dick named Spenser (and yes, he's for hire!) who is investigating a murder. Over in the young readers section I happened upon a second audiobook also by Robert B Parker, which was about the same character but when he was younger. I thought it would be an interesting study to compare and contrast.

Was I ever wrong! Nauseating was a more apt description, and the major reason for it was that this author sucks at writing prose. His problem is that he has all the individuality and inventiveness of a metronome when it comes to writing conversation between two people, and he writes a lot of speech with nothing to break it up. It's like listening to two automatic tennis ball throwers trying to play tennis with each other, and every bit as engrossing.

Here's an example from the beginning of chapter nine. Note that this is a transcript of the audiobook, so my punctuation may differ from the printed page.

"Not what you had hoped for," Susan said.
"In those days," I said, "I knew less about why women cried."
"And now?"
"I understand why men and women cry," I said.
"The advantage of maturity," Susan said
"Being young is hard," I said.
"Being grown is not so easy either," Susan said
"But it's easier," I said.
She nodded. We were quiet for a moment; then Susan said, "You hunted!"
"Sure," I said. "We all did."
"You don't hunt now," Susan said.
"No," I said.

Seriously? Good God! What is wrong with this guy? I quit this novel right around that point, because quite literally, I could not bear to listen to another word. I moved on to the adult version of Spenser only to find it was no better! I'm done with this "author"! The reading of the novel by Daniel Parker (the author's son) wasn't bad, I have to add, but neither was it anything special, although to be fair, you'd have to do a super human job to make this garbage palatable.


Saturday, June 18, 2016

The Witch Hunter by Virginia Boecker


Rating: WARTY!

This one I could not get past the second chapter. It was first person PoV, and I am so deathly sick to my guts of that PoV that I honestly can hardly stand to read it any more even if the story isn't too bad. In this case it was too bad. It was bog-standard trope from the off. Hey lookit me! I'm a special snowflake teen! Lookit how I move and fight! Lookit how I'm the one girl in a manly man's world! My friends are named Caleb and Marcus and Linus! I'm so awesome! Snoopy's probably around here somewhere doing a happy dance because I am genuinely so superlative! Hey, lookit me again! I'm in training, and I am a klutz, but you know I'm going to become the most important person in the universe! No, seriously, lookit me some more! I'm so wonderful, it's magical! No, focus on MEEEE! I have a secret!

Who the hell cares? Seriously? I hope the necromancers do get you, because you are tedious to an extreme. Bye Bye! I have to go find some serious anti-nausea medicine at the nearest store.


Sunday, May 1, 2016

Reboot by Amy Tintera


Rating: WARTY!

If Nicole Ritchie had ever written a zombie novel, it would have been this.

The story is of this world where a new virus runs riot through the human population. A side effect of the virus is that when people die, they sometimes come back to life - rebooted. They are six million dollar people: faster, stronger, more good looking (I am not kidding you!). And young. Adults, for reasons unexplained (a heck of a lot is unexplained here), do not do well on reboot. The reboot (a title chosen only for kewl factor, and no other reason, evidently) is known by the number of minutes it was between death and rebooting, so the main character is 178 (which is of course very unusual in its magnitude, to the point where she's legendary). Her real name is Wren. What? Yes, Wren! Weird. I frequently felt like giving Wren the bird. She was not kick-ass. She wasn't even interesting.

The world-building is poor. I'm not one of these readers who demands excellent world-building. I don't care if it's sketchy if the story itself is good, but even by my low standards, the world-building in this novel was atrocious. The status quo was just put out there as fact with no effort at any kind of backstory or any sort of explanation as to why it was this way. I don't want an info-dump, of course, but some credible words here and there about how things came to be as they are is really required if the story doesn't make it self-evident, and this was far from it.

Let's ask a few questions which this novel fails to answer: Why would a virus evolve to reboot people? Nature has no plan of self-improvement. The purpose of life is to survive and to reproduce, and a virus, even though it is on the border between biochemistry and chemistry, is no different. It has no agenda. Unless what happens to its host is beneficial to the virus spreading, there is no evolutionary impetus to promote it. So how would a virus evolve which revivifies people and makes them pretty? It makes no sense at all. What a virus needs is a host which doesn't die so quickly that the virus fails to spread. That's it! That's all! There is no benefit to resurrecting the host once it's dead or in prolonging life bizarrely, much less in bringing back the dead. Indeed, with Ebola, it was the fact that the host became bloody and died which helped it to spread given the practices of some peoples in various African nations, in preparing the dead for burial. The same kind of thing help Kuru to spread amongst the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, although Kuru is a prion disease, not a viral one.

Even if we buy into this though, how does this virus do what it does? Why does the person die rather than just become prettier, and faster and stronger? Given that they do die, how are they brought back to life? Nothing in nature does this - not literally die and come back to life - so where did this even come from? If it's merely a form of hibernation, then why call it death? What does this bizarre turn of events do to suicidal people? Do suicides increase? Decrease? Are people killing themselves so they can come back pretty, and strong and fast? We're not told, because this is a first person PoV novel and we're limited, confined, hobbled, constrained, and cocooned - in every sense of those restrictive words - to the perspective of Wren. This brings me to my next issue: even if we accept all of this so far, why would a reboot tell a story like this? Given the reboot's character and the perspective she gives us on reboots, it makes no sense that one of them would narrate their life, and even if we allow that one would, then the very least likely one to do this would be Wren. Again, no sense!

Viruses, with very few exceptions, are literally microscopic things which contain very little DNA. They require the host's DNA to even reproduce. In short, there is insufficient DNA even in the largest of viruses, to make all those changes to physiology that this story requires. There is no mutant X gene as Marvel comics would have it, that can give rise to a gazillion different and beneficial mutations. It doesn't happen.

Why is there no commentary on what the religious community had to say about people being resurrected? The novel is completely silent with regard to what religious leaders had to say about this! Not that I personally care what they have to say, but the fact is that if people started being resurrected, the christian religious community in a fundamentalist nation like the USA would be all over this: either seeing it as a sign of the end times and the devil's work, or as a sign of the rapture or something like that. Yet we get not a single word about that here! Again, it's poor world-building. Far too many young adult dystopian authors are like this! They get this one idea and fail comprehensively to apply it to the real world and explore the ramifications of it really happening. This is why they miss out on writing what would have been a much more interesting, faceted, and complex story. Instead we get vapid clones of other dystopian trilogies (they're always trilogies, aren't they, driven by the stark capitalism that is rampant in Big Publishing™?! Sad but true.). It's not interesting. It's not imaginative. It's not inventive. It's really a waste of trees or bandwidth.

Even if we accept all of that(!), then I still have to ask: how did society ever let it happen that these reboots became a police force, instead of simply sending them back to their family? Why do they even need a police force of reboots? Why are we told the reboots are emotionless, when they're obviously subject to emotions? Why label them as "not human" when they're exactly like humans: they laugh, they cry, they dream, they get scared, they have sex, they eat, they sleep. And why train these people to be a very efficient and ruthless para-military force when there has apparently already been strife between them and the non-rebooted humans? Why would they even work for the humans from whom they could simply run away, when they go out on patrol unsupervised? The Stupid is strong with this one. It made no sense to me. There were interesting bits, but also trope and clichéd bits which irritated me to no end.

I wouldn't have minded it quite so much if the author didn't flatly contradict every assertion she makes about the reboots. They're supposed to be 'not human', but there is nothing whatsoever about them that is different from humans - except they're faster? They're supposed to be emotionless, yet the record holder for biggest gap between death and reboot - the one who is supposed to be least human and least emotional - behaves exactly like the humans and shares the same emotions. She has her memories from when she was alive previously. How can she have all of this and not be human and not experience emotions? It's not possible.

She says the reboots don't need to eat as much as humans, yet they have a faster metabolism. How does that work exactly? Where does their energy come from? It has to come from somewhere unless this is really a book about magical beasts and where to find them! This is what happens when someone with zero science education starts writing science fiction, and it's not good enough. I don't demand that an author go deep into scientific detail to explain every last detail of the worlds they create, but I do like the world to make sense within the framework they've created. This one was like the kind of story my thirteen-year-old would write: everything is to be taken on pure faith without a shred of foundation being offered, and while I tolerate his stories, I'm not willing to extend that same largesse to an adult writer who should know better, and especially not when there are so many more, better-written novels out there pleading with me to read them! I cannot recommend this one.


Monday, April 25, 2016

The Glass Arrow by Kristen Simmons


Rating: WARTY!

Not to be confused with The Glass Arrow by Gerald Verner , this novel was awful! Pretty much from the first track (I listened to the audio book) it was tedious, trope-filled, irrational, and not remotely credible. That it was first person PoV did not help. I detest that voice because it's so rarely done well, and on audio it can sound bad even when the writing is good, depending on who reads it.

The story is about Aya aka Aiyana, a fifteen year old girl who is a free woman - that is, she's not owned by anyone. She lives in the wilds with her sister and some twins, Tam and Nina. Because women are so rare in this world, they are hunted brutally, and enslaved by men. That should have stopped me right there. I honestly don't know why I even picked this up from the library because it had trope trash written all over it. Well not literally, but, as Doctor Who said, give me time - and a crayon....

My problem with it was the absurdity of the opening chapter, where Aya comes back to her 'family' to discover that they're being hunted. The males and older females are killed, and the young one - that would be Aya and the twins, are taken. There was no explanation as to how the world got like this (maybe that came later - I didn't want to hang around to find out) and the premise, now that I think about it, is ridiculous on the face of it, but my real problem was Aya's narration of coming back "home" and finding devastation caused by the hunters.

Her narration bore no relationship to what a fifteen-year-old - even a wild, self-sufficient one - would deliver. I seriously doubt that she would be calmly describing her discoveries and her thoughts and her family relationships at a time like this. It was so unrealistic it almost made me laugh, but the laugh was stifled by the fact that this only made me so sad that we're seeing this kind on nonsense ever more often in YA novels. The only advantage this one has, so I understand, is that it isn't a trilogy so the author deserves a freaking medal for that, but for me, even that was not enough to make me keep on listening when other novels beckon so temptingly!

I can't imagine a girl calmly describing the scene as Aya did in first person. A disinterested third party observer - one ho with a complete lack of passion - may well have delivered this narration, but not the person to whom it was happening. This is one of the problems with this voice - it's completely unrealistic. It didn't help that the narration by Soneela Nankani made the first person voice even worse. Great name, poor reading voice. Instead of delivering anger or outrage, we got wheedling and stupidity in the narration and the voice didn't help. It turned me right off this story. I gave up and returned it to the library where scores of other audio books beg to be listened to.