Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghosts. Show all posts

Monday, January 13, 2014

The Midnight Side by Natasha Mostert





Title: The Midnight Side
Author: Natasha Mostert
Publisher: Portable Magic
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) any other remuneration for this review.

Not to be confused with Sidney Sheldon's The Other Side of Midnight or with Terri Marie's The Wrong Side of Midnight, or with Mia Zachary's Another Side of Midnight, or M D Nygaard's The Other Side of Midnight, or Patrick DiCiccio's The Jagged Side of Midnight...do you see where I'm going with this? Pick a more distinctive title please? My new title is going to be The Clichéd Side of Midnight, or An Order of 11:59pm, with Midnight on the Side or maybe, yeah: The Half-Assed Side of Midnight....

I'm brand new to Natasha Mostert and I've brashly taken on three of her novels so I sincerely hope she doesn’t let me down! This one is Mostert's debut novel, first published in 1999, but republished with some serious editing last year. Let me offer a full disclosure up front, that I do not believe in any supernatural crap and the reason for this is reason itself! I've seen no valid or even useful evidence for the existence of any of it: gods, devils, demons, magic (black, white, or grey), witchcraft (as opposed to Wicca, which does exist, but is nothing more than a harmless belief, unlike major religions), ESP, clairvoyance, astrology, telekinesis, ghosts, etc., etc., etc. Neither do I believe in UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster (although I did write a novel about it!) and so on. I do, however, love a really good story about any of these topics on the rare occasion I can find one. I'm hoping this is a rare occasion!

First impressions were good. Mostert is a descriptive writer with an eye for a turn of phrase, although she's a bit too fond of 'vertiginous' and I'm not convinced she's using it correctly, but I’ll give her the benefit on that score! Having said that, she doesn’t dally too much, moving the story along with a playful tease here, some disturbing suspense there, just to keep your imagination tickled. There are some bits here and there which become bogged down in memory/flashback, and a bit too much detail for the minor characters, but not enough to tick me off. I do confess to disappointment in her female protagonist. I prefer a good strong female character, and Isabelle is a bit of a wuss, but I am trying to overlook that and some of her sorry behaviors (more anon) as I read this. Or should I say behaviours, since this is set in Britain?

With regard to the setting, kudos! It begins in South Africa, which is where Isabelle is resident, but she's called to Britain by the death of her best friend Alette. A death I immediately suspected as being rather more than accidental, suspicious old me. This actually distracted me because it reminded me of a short story I wrote, but let’s not dwell on that. What I want to mention is how thoroughly Americanized the writing world is - at least the one in which I've been immersed for evidently too long. When this novel mentioned flying from South Africa to the UK, I was lost for a minute. I had assumed this was set in the US, so this itinerary thoroughly confused me! How god-awfully sad is that?! I was thrilled to be proven wrong.

Anyway, enough rambling. So Isabelle is awakened early one morning by a phone-call from Alette, on a really bad line, asking fro Isabelle's help, and implying serious problems. When she receives another call later that morning from Alette's lawyer, informing her of Alette's death in a car accident, Isabelle is shocked, but nowhere near as shocked as she is to discover that this death occurred two days prior to Alette's phone call!

Isabelle learns that not only is she Alette's sole beneficiary, she's also tasked by Alette with something which the lawyer says he needs to discuss with her in person. This is the first of my annoyances with Isabelle's personality - rather than rail against this, or at least object, she meekly complies, traveling to London. She learns that Alette left her three letters, each one to be dispensed to Isabelle on a weekly basis. The first of reveals how awful her originally ideal marriage to Justin was. It began perfectly, but, Alette reveals, it rapidly descended into Justin becoming a control freak in the most extreme ways possible short of physically imprisoning Alette. Even after she divorced him, he continued to stalk her, begging her to return to him, almost literally showering her with flowers and cards. The night she died, she had gone to have it out with him and get him off her back once and for all, and she was in the accident on her way home.

Justin isn't the only guy involved with Alette. Michael lives in a flat (apartment) across the street from Alette's house, and he has a habit of entering the house uninvited, of which Isabelle is unaware to begin with. The first time she meets Justin on this trip is also when he lets himself into the house, but she never tackles him on the matter, and never considers changing the locks! I must admit it crossed my mind that maybe it wasn't Justin who stalked Alette after the divorce, but Michael, pretending to be Justin? Or is there something else entirely going on?

Alette's request in the first envelope is that Isabelle help her get revenge upon Justin by bringing down his pharmaceutical company, and she details her plan for doing this with which, again annoyingly, Isabelle complies, since it involves "only" making three phone calls to stock-brokers, questioning the company's viability regarding manufacturing supplies, and mailing two letters (which Isabelle doesn't read). Isabelle, at this point, is a puppet whose strings are caught upon whomever happens to be closest. This isn’t a surprise given the flashbacks we get, disruptive to the story as they are. She accepts an invitation to dinner with Justin despite all she has read about him from Alette. The question is (for me anyway at this point): is she smart to do so - will this begin a friendship to show that Justin isn't quite as bad as he's painted, and it's Michael who's the bad guy, or is she sliding blindly down the same slippery road upon which Alette slid, and only Michael can save her? Interesting, huh? Except that it looks like Isabelle is going to need saving by one or other of these two guys, which doesn’t work well for me! Maybe I'm wrong!

The more I read of this, the more convinced I became that things might be backwards: that Alette is the villain, and Justin the wronged party, and that the lawyer, Lionel Darling is also a villain (especially given the reveal about his troubled childhood), and Michael, the too-friendly neighbor, merely a red-herring. I suspect both Michale and Lionel because Mostert has them both out of town - obviously in the hoe that when she writes more of her anonymous stalker's activities I will think it cannot be either of those guys. Hah! In short, Mostert was doing a wonderful job of screwing with my mind! It has also occurred to me that Alette is still alive, and/or that Darling was orchestrating the whole thing using Alette as a ruse, using Isabelle to pose as The Wisdom and undermine Justin's corporation with her phone-calls for Darling's own purposes. One after another, new theories arose to explain the new information that Mostert leaked with cruelly metronomic ruthlessness, and even more cruel thrift.

I don't get the point of a weak character being the main protagonist in a novel unless they learn how to become strong over the course of the story. I can see how you could work it with a weak character depending upon the story you're telling, but in this one, it’s not working well for someone like me, who adores strong female characters. Well over half-way through, Isabelle shows no sign of taking charge of her life, constantly allowing herself to be led by the nose by various men, including Justin and Michael. Of course, she has a history of this. Alette did this to her throughout their childhood together, and even now is doing it from the grave. Isabelle also allowed a married man to do this to her back in South Africa. With Justin, even after she swore to herself that she wouldn't see him again, she lets him drag her out of the house (metaphorically speaking!) to go on a picnic on a day which is really too cold, and then take her on a tour of some of London's tourist spots.

I'm not going to reveal any more of this. I finished it (it's an easy read) and though the ending was a bit flat, I consider this to be a worthy novel. That's fortunate for me, since I have two more Mosterts to get through! Let me just conclude by saying that one of my guesses was, amazingly, spot on, but you're gonna have to read it find out which one (like you care!). That's the joy of making a sesquicentillion guesses - at least one of them is likely to be close! I don't know what this was like before she got in there and polished it up for re-release, but whatever she did was worth her efforts. I recommend this one.


Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The Catastrophic History of You and Me by Jess Rothenberg





Title: The Catastrophic History of You and Me
Author: Jess Rothenberg
Publisher: Dial Books
Rating: WARTY

Ooookay! This review is a lot longer than I intended (it's close to 4,000 words!), but this is a writing blog as well as a reading one, so there's lots to discuss here. Believe it or not, I was attracted to this novel purely because of the title, and then the blurb got me interested more, so here we are! It didn't turn out, exactly, to be a catastrophic history, but it came frighteningly close. And it's certainly not even in the ballpark of Emily Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks for entertainment value.

Let me begin with a word about covers. A lot of authors love to panegyrize book covers. They get excited by them and the gushing writers have a cover reveal party or event, and the reviewers sycophantically acclaim the artwork. How pathetic is that? I don’t deal with covers for the most part because of this crap and because the cover has nothing to do with the author, and all too-often, nothing to do with the story, either. Do cover artists even read the novel before they illustrate it? Perhaps at best the author might be allowed to choose one cover from a selection offered to them by their publisher, but unless they self-publish, that's the most they can hope for. What the hell is up with that business plan?!

But there's a far more serious angle to this, and so I have to comment on how anorexic the girl on this cover looks. She looks like she needs to be on an IV in intensive care until she grows some meat on that skeletal figure. I sincerely hope our fifteen-year-olds in general are not all like her, and I hope even more that our teens do not wish they looked like her. She doesn’t remotely look like someone who excels in aquatic sports, not even if it’s "just diving", as Brie does. I hope even more passionately that this culture - the one which browbeats young girls into believing that unless they look like this girl on the cover, then they’re nothing but worthless, ugly, obese losers who deserve to go nowhere in life - dies the death it richly deserves.

But my real beef here is with the young adult authors - especially the female ones. My question to them - to the ones who allow their work to be degraded by abusive and/or misleading covers - is: how long are you going to tolerate having girls assaulted and insulted by covers which project an image that cannot do anything other than convey a message to your young female readers that they’re substandard if they don’t conform to the image you're profiting from selling to them?

To all YA writers: your novel is fiction. It doesn’t demand that readers do anything other than enjoy it. The cover is a different business altogether. The cover is nothing but a commercial, and whatever is on that cover is what you're expecting your readers to buy. Think about that. I know you're thrilled to have your first novel published (anyone would be) and in that case, you'll pretty much do anything to please the editor and publisher, and go along with whatever demands they have, but to all those writers who have made it, and are selling, surely you can change this dynamic? Or do you not care what messages you're purveying to impressionable teen girls as long as the profits continue to roll?

Aubrie (Brie) Eagan is dead - died, quite literally, of a broken heart (broken into two equal halves when her boyfriend told her he didn’t love her). So you know from the off that this is a flashback book. The question is, can Rothenberg provide three hundred and twenty five pages of good flashbacks to supplement the reasonably decent first fifty pages? The answer to that was 'No', in brief, and this appalling weakness on Brie's heart's part was indeed portentous of her character in the rest of the novel, I'm sorry to report.

Brie is soon portrayed as a ghost watching her autopsy, memorial service and funeral, and having occasional thoughts about her life or her family or friends, or her boyfriend who supposedly precipitated her death. I liked the concept. The execution? Not so much. Which writer hasn’t thought of starting a story at the end? I know I have. The weird thing was that in this novel I couldn’t escape the intense feeling that those memories to which we're party in those first fifty pages aren't Brie's flashbacks, but Jess Rothenberg's. That felt a bit creepy to me. I know they say write what you know, but there's such a thing as being too knowledgeable in fiction!

This novel was published 2012 when Brie was fifteen, which means she wasn't even born in the 80's, yet she likes 80's music. The chapter titles are lines from assorted old songs. She also apparently liked the TV show Friends (which I detest, and) which quit transmission when Brie was a bit too young to be able to properly get into the show. But I liked Rothenberg's writing in general. She writes technically well, and there's some mild humor tossed in, but the writing didn't make up for the plotting, and the humor went sour pretty quickly. Brie's perfection is a bit cloying; then we got to the 'heaven is a pizza place' portion of the text, and I started to realize that I probably going to like this novel after all, especially if it insisted on traveling the road less forsaken.

I am definitely not a fan of these movies where 'Heaven' is shown to be this every-day place where everyone is friendly and familiar - and god is a good ol' boy - you know like George Burns or Morgan Freeman making wise-ass remarks served up as folk wisdom. I'm sorry but that's not the heaven/hell we read of in the Bible. Not even close! That’s a heaven which Christians are forced to cook-up because the reality of their belief system is, in the end, completely unpalatable to them in this day and age. But all religions are cooked-up anyway, so this really isn’t any different from the other inventions.

Rothenberg has Brie finding herself, immediately after the funeral, on a bus heading to a place she knows. She's not far from her house but the driver won't let her out until the stop, which is in a parking lot where her favorite pizza parlor happens to be. Rather than go home (her stomach is rumbling), she goes into the pizza place. Inside is a bunch of other youngsters all around her age or younger, no older folk except for the Asian woman behind the counter who insists that Brie fills out a form before she can get pizza. Seriously? This made my stomach start to turn. Rothenberg had some credit with me for a decently written first fifty, but I had sincerely hoped that she had better material than this in store, if she wanted to stay in my good graces, and she failed dismally on the final lap.

Brie ends up waiting a week in the pizza parlor for the paperwork to go through. Any teen who could sit in one place for that long without wanting to explore or investigate or ask questions is a complete loser in my book, to say nothing of being totally unrealistic. Brie is rendered worse than this by Rothenberg's attaching her to a cocky, smart-mouthed guy, who animates Brie like a puppeteer, so yes, I'm a tad bit pissed off to discover another female YA author who abuses her female characters by creates an interesting (if rather whiny) female teen, and then sells her down the river by making her an adjunct of some dude who is far too fictional for his own believability.

This guy, Patrick in a bomber jacket, takes over Brie's afterlife. He has an immense secret which would definitely have benefited her, but he denies her this knowledge, keeping her dangling on a string, playing with her, and all the while calling her the most abysmal cheese names (based on Brie, duhh). That motif is way-the-hell overdone and made me sick whenever Rothenberg trotted it out yet again like an aging and decrepit sports figure who didn't know when to retire. It was like Rocky IV, Roquefort, you know? Anyway, I'm getting side-tracked. Patrick at one point writes down the supposed five stages of grieving, checking them off as Brie purportedly passes through them. Wrong!

Rothenberg evidently doesn’t fully comprehend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's position on grieving! It was only put forward by her as a model (five stages of grief when confronting one's own death) so not only was it not intended for anyone in Brie's position (since her grief isn’t over her own impending death but over her loss of Jacob). The stages were originally listed as: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, but this isn’t a complete list, and these "stages" can occur in any order and may arrive simultaneously or not at all, which makes Patrick's list look a bit moronic, but that's Patrick all over, isn't it?

Plus, Rothenberg has Brie so whiny about wanting to visit her own home where her parents are, and then she blows that off completely to go riding around with Bomber-jacket Boi on his Bike. That lost believability too, for me. Fortunately for both myself and Rothenberg's self, she kinda turned it around and put in sufficient twists to keep me interested, even while I chafed at the poor plotting - such as allowing her to physically contact her supposedly mean old ex-boyfriend, Jacob, but unable to pull that same stunt when she finally gets to visit with her parents and her kid brother. So yeah, there's a lot of unexplained inconsistency which did nothing endear this tale to me, either. Since Jacob turned out to be gay, if she'd trotted out someone called Edward as his boyfriend, that would have put some leavening into the mix, but it wasn't to be. It was more like 4F.

It was at this point, when Brie visits her family and her three best friends, that Rothenberg starts tossing in the twists, which was appreciated, otherwise I might have had a DNF on my hands by this point, but while I had to say that the story held some twists that kept my interest stirred somewhat, at the same time it was really annoying me with inconsistent writing - or more accurately, inconsistent world-building. But this isn’t confined to Rothenberg's writing. I see it all the time in this kind of story: for example, in the movie Ghost which I reviewed elsewhere in this blog. There is a massive inconsistency, to which writers seem blind (or are only too well aware but are too lazy to tackle it), in a story which has a ghost walking around making solid contact with the ground, or sitting and making ready contact with a seat, but then they can’t open a door, or touch a person, or lift an object! This is pure, unadulterated bullshit! What's up with that trope? Where did that mindlessness come from?

We find the same thing in this novel. Brie has the hardest time picking up a rock, but she can climb a tree without even thinking about it, and she has no problem interacting with the family dog as though she were completely corporeal. Thinking is evidently something in which Rothenberg didn’t indulge herself sufficiently when building this world, but in that she was no different from a score of other writers who share this disability in this kind of story, and if that's an insult, then I'm sorry, but I call it like I see it.

Rothenberg is inconsistent in other regards, too, as I've mentioned before. In one part of the story she has Brie experience no problem in directly influencing Jacob, and in directly damaging Sadie's car, but later, when Brie is highly motivated to influence Jacob for a good purpose rather than to harm him, Rothenberg has her character inexplicably fail and then completely give-up because she can't 'make a difference'. This is really bad writing. It makes no sense for her to simply abandon Jacob without even trying (worse, she gets completely distracted from her cause - again!), and then to fret about it insanely later. I have to wonder what went on in Rothenberg's mind when she made heaven (or purgatory, or a way-station - whatever this place is) so remarkably life-like without offering any explanation as to why, but then adorned the ghosts with a spotty lack of life-like ability.

Why, for example, does she have Brie constantly in fear of falling even after ghost Brie has deliberately jumped from the top of the Golden Gate bridge and come to no harm? Another mystery. This is inconsistent and poor writing. On this topic, how does the falling work exactly? Why does gravity work on ghosts, all the way to the ground, but not right through to the actual impact with the ground?! Why does her dress get soaked? Why do they need to eat and drink, but never need the bathroom? Why do they not feel heat and cold? If they're really ghosts, why are they pretty much indistinguishable from living people except in some key ways which benefit the story but for which we’re given no intelligent explanation? A lot of this makes no sense, and it saddens me that Rothenberg doesn't appear to care that it makes no sense.

Brie is annoying, and is such a gadfly, too. I know that teens can be disturbingly flighty, especially the younger ones, but I find it hard to believe that someone as decent and disciplined as Brie was in life, could be such a capricious Will o' the Wisp in the afterlife when everything else about her seems to remain pretty much the same. She has the big ideas and urges, but then she seems to immediately forget it all and go off at a tangent. If Rothenberg had written this into the story - explained why she was like this, or revealed that she had been this way when alive - it would have made this behavior believable, but she doesn’t give us that; she just has Brie going in all directions for no good reason - indeed, for bad reasons.

Worse than this though: she has this Patrick character - the Bomber jacket dude - show up without the character offering any explanation for who he is or what he wants or what he thinks he's doing. Why is he with her and why does she blithely accept his presence twenty-four seven without question or introspection? The fact that Brie never pursues this until the pell-mell mess of an ending renders her a sorry-assed and unmotivated Mary Sue. You seriously do not want to do that to the protagonist of your story unless you have a really good explanation for it in hand!

Patrick was nothing but an annoyance to me, even moreso than Brie, because he brought nothing to the story. The only thing he contributed was to highlight how lame and helpless Brie was, and how much she desperately needed a man to make her complete - or in this case to make her even functional. What an insult to women!

Later Rothenberg brings in another character, this one from Brie's past, with the unlikely name of Larkin. Honestly? But despite her idiotic name, I dearly wish she had shown up earlier because she's the most interesting character in the entire novel. Maybe that's why Rothenberg kills her off? Yep - the dead can die. Until then they're very much alive for all practical purposes in this dumb-ass world!

Larkin also offers things (which seem much more honest and decent than those which Patrick brought to the table), but Rothenberg snatches both characters away from Brie, leaving her all alone. Larkin (who is tragically unexplored in this novel) may have been misrepresenting things to Brie, but she was doing neither more nor less than Patrick was. He was lying when he told Brie that this was her afterlife and the choices were hers, because right after that, he spends his time luring her into doing pretty much whatever he wants without regard to her wishes or even her best interests, including leading her down an unpleasant path at one point, and then trying to talk her out of following that path as though she had made a mistake, not him! Worse than this, he keeps key facts from her in an unbelievably cruel, even brutal, way.

So Patrick is a major jerk, and the more I think about bad characters, and poor plotting, and inconsistency, and lame world-building, the more I realize that I'm now in a position where I have to try to find a good reason to rate this novel as a worthy read! In that, I failed! That's rather ironic given that I actually like the story in very broad and general terms! What’s a guy to do?! I found that reading some positive and some negative reviews helped to clarify my position for me!

I do not seek out reviews for a novel before I read it, but sometimes reading the perspective of others once I already have my own largely in place really helps to clarify some issues about which I haven’t completely made up my own mind yet. This wouldn’t work before I read the novel because other reviewers can be so inconsistent for this purpose. I might find myself agreeing with them on novel A, and then in complete opposition on novel B even if it’s by the same author. That's why I don’t have a 'blogroll' over there, because I don’t have any blog which I know I can go to and get a take on a novel which is meaningful to me personally.

I choose the novels I will read based on things I've read, including some review references, not so much to novel content, but to authors they thought wrote like this or not like that. Reviews in general tell me nothing useful because they're not really reviews. That's why I started this blog: to offer people something more than "Hey I loved this, you gotta read it!", because unless I know that reviewer intimately, their recommendation (and that's exactly what it is, a recommendation, not a review), tells me nothing of value. Even when I do know them intimately, a recommendation or a comment can be completely useless, as I discovered with the fourth Sookie Stackhouse novel, may it rest in hell!

So when I'm going out there to familiarize myself with the buzz, I'll read some one-star reviews and some five-star and see how I feel about what the extremes have said in comparison with my own feelings. It’s because of this that I noted that some people have described what a great character the dog was! I disagree. The dog was entirely in keeping with the Disney theme with which Rothenberg inextricably and inexplicably imbued this novel, but that merely served to provide a theme which nauseated me. I'm guessing here that Rothenberg once knew an animal like this when she was a child, because it seems to me that only such an experience could make a person write that way about the freak of nature and genetic disaster that Basset hounds actually are. If she'd employed a border collie in this role, or even a beagle, it would have made it slightly more palatable for me, but I still would have had a problem with how the dog seems to completely understand everything Brie says including her references to third parties. Puleeze! Disney-fy much?

Brie seems to be entirely too old for such an addiction to Disney as she exhibits, too. Indeed, she behaves throughout more like a pre-teen than someone who is almost sixteen. She's not a good person, which betrays everything Rothenberg tells us about her from her previous life. It’s all about her, and I don’t care if she's supposed to be grieving because she doesn't remotely behave as though she is, especially given that there is a much bigger context to this story than her own personal pity-party, and this behavior in which Rothenberg indulges her character completely undermines that bigger picture.

The truth is that Brie is a selfish, whiny, and vindictive stalker, bordering on psychotic in her behavior and then it all suddenly turns around for no good reason (at least not that we’re party to!). It’s after this point that she discovers the truth she was too blind to see about Jacob (and by extension about his relationship with Sadie), but even this part of the novel is badly done. Given how Jacob was when Brie was alive (from her frequent flashback mileage), I simply cannot believe that he would have behaved the way he did towards her. The way he behaved was to dump Brie and tell her he didn’t love her. The true reason for his breaking things off with her is that he is gay. Given how decently he treated her prior to this, I just cannot buy at all that he would cut her off like that, or that he would not have told her this fact about himself, especially with what we’re told about how long they'd known each other.

The other side of this coin is that I cannot buy that he even started dating her and became so attached to and so enamored of her when he knew he was gay. Nor can I believe that not a single one of the four girls (Brie and her three close friends) had any inkling whatsoever of his real nature given how long at least two of them had known him. His character makes no sense and this cheapens the story as well as Brie's mental state.

So then we fall into the dénouement of this novel, which is that Patrick's raison d'être is that he's Brie's boyfriend from a previous life when her name was Lily. Patrick was a moron then, too, and Lily died when he crashed his motorbike because he wouldn’t listen to Lily telling him to slow down in the approaching bad weather. He proved himself to be an even greater loser when he killed himself. Now why Lily evidently became immediately reincarnated as Brie, and Patrick sat on his ass for seventeen years in a pizza shop I guess we’ll never know, but Patrick is now forty five, and Brie is still sixteen, or at best, 2 times 16, which I'm sorry, but in this case doesn’t make 32. How this is going to work or even why it should is also a mystery.

Mysteries seem to abound at the end of this novel. I don’t know what happened, but the sedate, some might say sluggish, pace is sped up dramatically, yet with sadly little drama. It wasn't until this point that I fully resolved that I was going to rate this as a 'warty'. Had the ending not been such a godawful mess, I might not have done so despite the large number of issues I took with this.

Brie becomes reincarnated in her own body on the night that Jacob broke up with her (where is the original Brie?!), and now of course, she's able to comfort him instead of going psycho on him. She learns that he discussed his sexual orientation with Sadie, but Sadie never had the decency to be a real friend to Brie and at the very least hint at this. Immediately following this, Brie is reincarnated as Lily on that fateful night, too. In the first instance, she has some significant time before she dies, but not in the second instance which was really the first instance chronologically. Are you following this? Again, randomness pervades the story for no good reason.

In the end, the story simply fell apart. The ending made very little sense given the context, but everyone lived happily ever after. I'm sorry but no. This is drivel. It started out with so much potential, but then went into the toilet and liked it there. I have no choice but to call this WARTY!


Friday, July 26, 2013

Unraveling Isobel by Eileen Cook





Title: Unraveling Isobel
Author: Eileen Cook
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: worthy!

I'm starting in on Unraveling Isobel which has a purple cover, whilst drinking Darjeeling tea which comes in a purple pack! What could be more purple-fect? Gee darling, it's Darjeeling….

Reading another first person PoV novel is not exactly thrilling me, since I am already in process of reading two others; Living Dead in Dallas and Over the Rainbow! I'm really down on 1st person PoVs, but there are so many of them out there! What gives with that? None of them are detective stories! Well, maybe this one is - kinda. I began this novel feeling the same thrill I enjoyed when I started reading Sea of Tranquility. I can only hope this turns out as well as that did, but there are too many tropes in this novel so far to give me that kind of confidence. How shall I trope thee? Let me count the ways:

  1. The girl is seventeen
  2. She arrives at a new school
  3. At least one of her parents is not in the picture
  4. The guy is roughly the same age
  5. At least one of his parents is not in the picture
  6. There's an electric current that runs between them when they touch
  7. The guy is brooding (no word on when the eggs will hatch….)
  8. The girl sees the guy without his shirt on fairly soon in their relationship
  9. The guy is muscular
  10. The guy is troubled
  11. The girl and the guy hate each other on sight but the hatred all-too-rapidly turns into instadore
  12. The girl ends up in the guy's arms because of some happenstance which literally throws them together
  13. The girl is injured in a small way; the guy takes care of her even when her parent would be more appropriate to the task
  14. The guy's eyes are Aryan blue
  15. The guy has hair falling into said eyes
  16. There are bitchy girls in school
  17. The school lunches are nasty
  18. The guy catches her doing something embarrassing
  19. The girl suspects the guy of perpetrating some evil act
  20. The couple is caught in flagrante delicto by the bitchiest girl in the school

This novel starts out with Isobel traveling on the ferry to the island where she will live with her mother and her mother's new husband. It’s her last year of high school and she has to spend it at a new school away from her friends and everything that's familiar. Not only is her stepfather's name Richard, he really is a dick. Think of him as Richard the Turd. His son Nathaniel is your standard trope and completely uninteresting except, of course, to Isobel.

Given the chance to choose her own bedroom, Isobel snoops in Nathaniel's room and then finds her way up to the attic level where there's a room which is the only one she likes. Nathaniel throws a hissy fit when he discovers this, because this is dead sister Evelyn's dorm! No one can understand how Isobel managed to get up there because the door to the upper stairs is supposedly always kept locked. Nathaniel's mother and his mentally challenged kid sister died a few months back in a boating accident. That night Isobel, a budding artist, sketches the room but falls asleep in the middle of it.

She wakes up to a banging sound: the standard loose window trope, and she sees a young girl in her room, dripping water, with a piece of seaweed stuck to her face. Isobel screams. Everyone rushes into the room, and they all think she's had a nightmare. When Dick seizes her sketch pad and, uninvited, looks through her drawings, he freaks at the one she drew of the room - which is now different from what she drew: the sketch portrays the room as it was when the girl slept there, not as it is now. Dick tears up the drawing. When everyone has left, Isobel discovers a patch of fluid on the floor which she immediately tastes. It’s salt water and there's a piece of seaweed in it. Funny how not a single one of four people noticed that when the lights were on and they were all purposefully looking around for signs of an intrusion...! Isobel recovers the torn pieces of the picture. I'm guessing there's a clue in there somewhere.

But there are bigger issues here! Who in their right mind would blindly taste a patch of anonymous liquid they discovered on a dirty floor? And worse, who would do that, and then dismiss it all as imagination the every next day? How would I have written this? I would have had Isobel step in the liquid, which was hidden under the curtain, which is why it wasn't seen before. When she looks down, she sees the seaweed; then curiosity overcomes caution, and she tastes the water. That way it would seem far more natural (if still icky!). So yes, there are some serious problems with this novel. As another example: the first time Isobel explores the kitchen she notes that "There wasn't even a dishwasher...", but later, after Nathaniel improbably comes out of the kitchen carrying a very sharp knife for no other reason than to artificially scare Isobel (he was supposedly using the very sharp knife to spread cream cheese onto a bagel) she goes back into the kitchen with him, and he's unloading the dishwasher. Hmm! The case of the phantom dishwasher! Maybe it died and came back as a ghost, too? I'm sorry, but that just doesn’t wash!

At one point, Cook starts a list that begins with 'either', but it lists more than two options. Just saying...! But at least she knows to write chaise longue instead of chaise lounge! Props to her for that. So yes, problems and I'm trying to stem my nausea at the trope guy, but overall, I'm enjoying the story. Cook knows how to hook, but she also frequently kicks me out of my enjoyment of the story by the awful instadore. The problem for me is really not so much that it's not likable, but that the potential for it to go south with the birds is high, and I don’t like that! I'm stepping out with a new story here, and it’s full of promise and potential. What in life is greater than exploring something new: a new novel, a new place, a new movie, a new song, a new relationship? But the joy of exploration of a new home with fine wooden floors is considerably lessened when there are so many loose rugs underfoot. I am hoping this Cook won’t spoil the broth she's creating for me.

She brings in the sad trope of the Ouija board (French-German for 'yes', of course) when three girls come over to Isobel's for a sleep-over. Like I said in another review, Yes-Yes boards are nonsense and not a single one of them has ever spelled out any message from the great beyond, so it’s a pity Cook couldn’t find something better; however, having said that, she handles it quite well, at one point turning it into a finger-wrestling match between Isobel and Nicole when Nicole tries to take over the planchette and answer her own question with Nathaniel's name! That was amusing. Then a mirror shatters and the part which sticks in Isobel's foot seems to carry a portion of the black and white image of Evelyn which Isobel saw in the mirror before it shattered.

So the story continues to lure despite some YA clichés and it’s an easy read. I'm interested in finishing it and I hope the reward is worth putting up with Nathaniel's comic book studly magnetism. At least Isobel isn’t quite the wilting violet I feared she'd become, and Cook keeps the Mary Sue factor under reasonable control. She does let loose a huge plot fart when she has Nathaniel take Isobel down to the beach by the secret library exit, and Isobel almost falls down a well. Nathaniel reveals to her that the well had a very poor top, but her father covered it over and sealed it some time before. Hmm! Daughter and mother mysteriously drowned. Daughter's body never found. Well on property. Father covered over the well. Anyone here read the Telegraph? I wonder if there's a skeleton in the well.

After a bizarre incident when sea-shells are found all over the house - Dick nearly stepped on one, horror of horrors! - it's deemed that Isobel is cracking up and needs therapy. Seriously? This one was too much to take, especially when her mother gave Isobel no support whatsoever. It's just not realistic, not even close, so at that point I wasn't liking the novel at all. But Isobel goes to see Doctor Mike, which is an entertaining scene, and it helped recover the story for me a bit - that and the really cool revelation on p271 which I never saw coming. Isobel later learns that her therapist is Nicole's father. Worse than this, Nicole reveals to Isobel and Nathan, after she catches them kissing, that she can hear everything going on in her father's doctor's office because of a shared air-vent with her room: Mike's office is in his house. At this point Isobel has a case for a huge malpractice suit, yet neither she nor Nathaniel has that thought even cross their mind. Nor does Isobel, idiot that she is, consider taking that particular issue to her mother. So now we have child abuse going on.

There are also some weird typos in the half of the novel. For example, on p136 we find, "The past two weeks had done nothing but convince me I was cheer leader material." I think the word 'but' in that sentence was intended to be the word 'to' instead, given the context. I guess it could be sarcasm, but it doesn't read like that to me, in context. On p154 we find, "Gams of steal" when Isobel is joking about her legs. That should have been "Gams of steel," but I don't see how Isobel would use the term 'gams' for legs. I think Cook was trying to be clever and use it because it echoes "Buns of Steel", but it fell flat for me because it didn't seem like something Isobel would think of to say. On p205, Cook writes, "You dad does like you" instead of "Your dad...". I tell you, these writers should hire me to proof read their material! On another subject, we're repeatedly reminded that Isobel isn't athletic, yet she mentions an old sports bra at one point! I guess I don't see how she would even own a sports bra, much less an old one, if she doesn't do sports.

Nowhere does Cook ever reveal exactly how big the island is, but given what limited resources it has, and how small the town is, I fail to see how it could have a full-sized high school. I also can't credit Nicole with having such influence over the school so that everyone is essentially a slave to her whims. It's not realistic. Neither is it realistic that everyone would have exactly the same reaction towards Isobel after Nicole spreads the word that she caught her kissing Nathaniel in the school parking lot. Everyone shuns Isobel and that's pure bullshit.

But in the end, I am going to rate this as a worthy read, because the ending isn't bad at all, apart from the improbable behavior of Isobel's mother, but then she's been improbable all the way through the tale! So yes, a worthy, and a plan to read at least one more of Cook's novels. She has at least three others out there, but no entry in wikipedia, so I have no idea at this point in what order they were published.


Thursday, May 23, 2013

Haunting Violet by Alyxandra Harvey






Title: Haunting Violet
Author: Alyxandra Harvey
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Rating: WORTHY!

I have no belief in any of the paranormal or fringe nonsense: ghosts, vampires, UFOs, angels, demons, etc. I do not believe because there is no evidence that any of that is real, and there's much to argue rather strongly against it. What is a well-known fact is that people have very over-active and self-delusive imaginations. Having said that, I do enjoy science-fiction, or a good paranormal story, although it’s hard to find the latter! That's why I was thrilled to discover Haunting Violet.

I've just started this one and while I found it a bit pretentious of Harvey to change her name (Alexandra) to Alyxandra for the book covers, she can call herself whatever she wants if she writes like this. I wish I knew what it was that draws me in to one book after barely a sniff of chapter one, and yet another book repels me after only one paragraph, but whatever it is, if you bottle it, it was my idea! I hope that Harvey ensures that the thrill from the first page is maintained.

The female protagonist in this novel reminds me a lot of Gwen in Ruby Red, although the novels cover very different subject matter; however, if you liked that one and its sequel, Sapphire Blue, you'll very likely enjoy this one, too, but note that this is early days!

Violet Willoughby (last name straight out of Sense & Sensibility!) and her mother are socially-climbing frauds. Violet's mother (her father is nowhere in sight - she doesn’t even know who he is) defrauds people by posing as a medium and preying cruelly on the emotions of the bereaved. In appealing to the aristocracy with her shams, Violet's mother hopes to garner social rewards for herself and a beneficial match for her daughter. Violet, OTOH, is much more sanguine about these things, and has a great sense of humor.

They travel to the estate of Lord Jasper (seriously? Jasper?) with their maid, Marji and their 'manservant' Colin, an old childhood friend of Violet's from when their circumstances were a lot less elevated. Violet and Colin sneak down to the parlour late at night, and prep the room for their séance the next day. The only problem is that of the bellows, which they employ to send "spirit" drafts of cool air across the room. Violet ends up with them strapped to her leg! As the affair is about to begin, she hobbles cautiously over to take her seat at the table, but finds no empty chair. The one her mother has indicated is occupied by a dripping wet girl.

It turns out that this girl is a ghost, and for the first time, Violet, who doesn’t believe in ghosts either, is forced to accept that they believe in her, she can see and smell them. She later shocks that particular ghost's twin by revealing that she knows of her twin's murder, which was by drowning in a pond. It’s strongly hinted that the living twin stood to gain rather significantly from her sister's death, but whether this is merely a red herring remains to be seen.

So how amusing is it that I'm blogging this story featuring the drowned Rowena, and outside we're having a huge deluge (which is most welcome)?

Harvey has made a brave attempt to write a Victorian ghost story in an English setting, but I have to say she slips up here and there with terminology. There's also the occasional clunky statement such as: "...have tread the boards..." when it should be "...have trod the boards..." and even then I doubt that's a phrase which would have been used. OTOH, Violet is from a rather different culture from that of the people with whom she typically spends her time, so perhaps there's some wiggle room there!

Britain does have hornets, but I've never seen one there, nor heard the term used there. It’s always 'wasp', not 'hornet', and I've never heard crickets chirping in England. That's not to say they don’t, but I grew up in a relatively rural setting and I cannot recall ever hearing them at night. It always made me wonder what the heck that ubiquitous nocturnal chirping was in American films and TV shows precisely because I was unfamiliar with it! Oh, and we don't have 'stoops' in England (except as in She stoops to Conquer. That's an Americanism. But who knows, maybe in Victorian times that was the term they used? I find that hard to swallow though, because it comes from a Dutch term as I recall, so there was no reason for it to enter England in the way it entered the USA.

Violet is determined to find out what happened to the drowned girl, Rowena despite opposition, if only to get Rowena out of her life. She considers pretty much everyone a suspect, and is frustrated that Rowena doesn’t deign to point out who amongst the guests the murderer is, but one thing Violet fails to consider is that another ghost might be behind the large urn which nearly fell on her, and the chandelier which she avoids because Rowena got in her face. It doesn't help that Rowena seems unable to speak, but perhaps she doesn't speak because the guilty party isn’t present amongst the living?

Violet is preparing for her mother's next séance, so it would seem that a show-down is in the offing, and I have a three-day weekend coming up! And it's a rainy one! We've had a really unusual 4.4" of rain, almost all of it in the last 24 hours! Really weird, but highly appropriate to this novel!

You know, there's a lot to be said for the portability of ebooks and for the convenience of having a search function, but I could never write 'Ode to a Kindle' or 'Elegy in a Nook' because nothing kindles the urge to find a comfortable reading nook than does a hardback book. Haunting Violet is such a book, not only because it tells a great story (at least so far!), but also because it has a smell, and a feel, and a look, and a heft to it which ebook readers do not. By that, I mean that once you have your iPad or your Nook, you're stuck with the same thing no matter what book you read on it. It feels the same and it smells the same, and that will never change until you buy a new one, no matter which novel you're reading on it. And who really wants to be glued to a screen-swiper? Wouldn't you much rather be addicted to a great page-turner?!

Haunting Violet has a different look and feel to any previous book I've read. And it has added qualities that are impossible to get in an ebook. It has one of those weird and wonderful new covers that has a cool, slightly matte feeling to it, which imbues me with a compulsion to buy a book even when the book is utterly repugnant to me! Fortunately, I resist those impulses fiercely! When this book is opened, and I press my fingers to the cover and my thumb to the pages and spread the book a little more, it has an oddly addictive noise which results from the friction of the pages rubbing against one another. No ebook can do offer you this. And no ebook can give me the thrill that I felt when each of my own novels arrived in the mail, and I had a real physical thing to hold and examine, and which now accumulate side-by-side in shameless familiarity on one of my many book shelves. Yes, I'm a dinosaur, but dinosaurs are cool!

Anyway, on to Violet. The séance was quite a show-down, but I didn't guess what Harvey was going to do. What happened is that Violet's mother was exposed as a charlatan by the evil Caroline, governess of Tabitha, sister of the drowned Rowena. Whatever Carline's plan was, it worked, because Violet's mother insisted that they all leave in the middle of the night, returning home to London. Here's where the story lost suspension of disbelief (the SoD!) for me, because Harvey has the locals throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at the Willoughby's front door. I honestly could not believe that this would realistically happen. I honestly couldn't credit that this news could have spread so rapidly that it reached "the commoners" the very next day, or that people would even care that much.

But I was willing to let that pass because Harvey's writing has built up a significant level of goodwill within me, and indeed, it's fortunate for her that she has, because the relationship between Violet and Colin is taking off, and it has far too much YA cliché for my taste, including the 'hair falling into eyes' bullshit which frankly makes my stomach turn. There's many a slip twixt trope and trick, but to her credit, at least Harvey doesn't harp on the romance to an appalling level.

Xavier, Violet's putative fiancé, shows up to tell her that it's all off on account of his mother, but really on his own account, snotty spineless trash that they are. But this comes as a relief to Violet, although Violet's mother gives her a black eye over it, abusive bitch that she is. I don't think I've mentioned Xavier in this review because it was obvious that he was a nonentity in the grand scheme. Lord Thornhill, whom Violet discovered (on the night of her mother's ignominy) is actually her father, comes to visit, but only to tell her she's not wanted.

Violet finds that she is now seeing spirits regularly, including a charming schnauzer ghost dog which adopts her and hangs with her wherever she goes. That might prove significant for later plotting. Violet eventually and angrily reveals to her mother that she really can see spirits, and her mom then trapes her around town buying stuff and having a 'spirit photograph' taken which shows Violet surround by fuzzy spirits (and her little dog, too!), but in the background, clearly showing, is Rowena. Violet's mom sends a copy of the photo to Lord Jasper, and Violet is invited back to his estate - without her disgraced mother.

Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway, Violet returns in triumph and despite meanness, succeeds in convincing everyone that she is truly a medium. Not that this puts an end to the meanness and rejection, unaccountably. I have to say that some of this story borders on the ridiculous, especially the things which Violet gets away with and which are done to her given her position and circumstances, and the time-period in which this is set. For example, she's frequently left in a room with a guy and no one to chaperon her, as happens after the séance, when Peter (yes: the male organ of generation) is mean to her. It makes me wonder why Harvey chose the later nineteenth (or is that nine teeth?) century rather than today. There's a huge difference between having someone be a rebel in Victorian times and completely dispensing with suspension of disbelief.

But Violet finds out - more through luck than judgment - who the villain is. It wasn't one I'd overtly suspected, but it was a fairly obvious one. There were too many read herrings for my taste, and I found it inexplicable that Rowena became so powerful at the end of the novel but couldn't even tell Violet who the villain was when they first met?! There was no explanation offered for this, which means, of course, that it was pure desus ex machina rather than an integral part of a better plot. Harvey could have done a lot better there, but having said all that, I still really liked this story and I saw Violet especially as a worthy female protagonist, so I recommend this one.


Sunday, February 17, 2013

Silence by Michelle Sagara

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm a fan of Michelle Sagara's Chronicles of Elantra series (which I'll review elsewhere on this blog as time permits), but I've read nothing else that she's written beyond that (although I have read with enjoyment the entire series as far as it's been published), so I was interested in this novel. I didn't at first pay any attention to the author: I'd decided to read it before I noticed her name, so I was delighted to find it was written by someone I "know". Her Kaylin character from Chronicles is a favorite of mine up there with Kitai and Molly millions.

The story begins in a graveyard! Emma is out walking her dog (ostensibly), but visiting the grave of her dead boyfriend (really) to sit. She doesn't talk to him like he can hear her or anything like that, she just sits and enjoys the silence and the night and the absence of her mother.

On this occasion, her Rottie, 'Petal'(!) takes off and when she chases her dog, she finds someone there of whom she has distant acquaintanceship from her school. He's with an old woman, who immediately turns her attention to Emma and shockingly, embraces and kisses her on the lips - a horrible dry-paper, musty kiss, whereupon Emma falls backwards and hits her head on the gravestone behind her. The boy she knows, Eric, has the smarts to call Emma's mom who picks her up and brings her home.

The next day, Emma finds that she can see dead people, as she learns upon entering the cafeteria at school. Maybe she's always seen them and not realized they were dead, but after this encounter, where she saw the boy as being part of the group at the table only to see her friend sit down right through him on the same chair, she cannot be left in any doubt at all as to what's what!

Unfortunately, driving home that afternoon, Emma starts feeling absolutely wretched and Eric drives her straight to the hospital where she passes out. When she comes round, she can feel her mother holding her hands, but she hears and then sees her dead father. Suddenly she's out of her body talking to her father. Eric can evidently see her even though she's apparently in spirit form, but no one else, other than her father, can see her. As her father makes to leave, so she goes to him and takes his hands, aware that Eric has said, "No!". As soon as she takes her father's hands, everyone can see her father (but not her in her spirit form). She lets go of him and is instantly back in her body.

Now there's this thing out there that her dead father appeared and was seen by her best friend Allison, by the new weird guy in her life, Eric, and by her own mother, but that's not the worst thing. Emma starts seeing this vision and hearing this child who is evidently trapped inside a burning building. She makes Eric drive her across town (Toronto) and eventually they end up at a burned out town house, which evidently had a fire recently. Emma tries to enter the building, which is no longer burning, but she can feel the heat and she actually gets singed from the non-existent fire when she tries to enter the building.

When the reach Emma's house, she reveals that she's determined to rescue this ghost kid from the non-burning house, even if it means missing the party event of the month at school glamor girl and socialite Amy's house. Eric is dead set against it. As Emma leaves him and goes into her house, Eric's phone rings yet again. It's been ringing almost non-stop throughout the entire trip he just took with Emma. He answers, and the caller asks him if the necromancer is dead. The necromancer is evidently Emma since Eric looks at her retreating body, and answers in the negative. The caller tells Eric that he's being sent back-up and if that won't do the trick of terminating the necromancer, then he will come himself and do it. This evidently does not please Eric.

Emma shares her plan to rescue the ghost boy with Alison. Allison with her that the kid won't leave the non-burning building unless his mother is there. Emma knows that if she touches the boy, then his mother will see him, but she doesn't know how to get the boy's mother to come to the the burned-out building.

Sagara has a habit of framing comments thus: "He said nothing. He said it very loudly", and after many volumes of the Chronicles of Elantra, this format is getting rather old, I have to say! As indeed, is her habit of framing a sentence in mathematical mode, such as this one, where Emma is talking about a robe which she's shown, evidently meant for her to wear in some ceremony: "I could not put it on and blend in here, for any value of here that didn't include Amy's Halloween party." It’s high time to dig up some new catch phrases, Ms Sagara. However, I'll let that slide in this case.

This novel is everything that Ghost Huntress failed to be. Sagara can definitely weave a tale, and I say this because, just as I’d begun to wonder if this one might be heading down the warty path, Sagara turns it around! Emma has met a friend of Eric's at the graveyard. Presumably this is the backup of which we learned earlier. Chase is altogether a different kettle of fish from Eric, and he and the latter, though not related, act like they're spoiled and ill-disciplined brothers, arguing with, and bitching at, each other. And Eric threatens to kill people way more than is healthy in any novel. The suggestion conveyed here is that they've known each other for a lot longer than their ages would indicate they've had the opportunity to do so.

They all go to Amy's party, and they're let in by Amy's brother Skip. Seriously - where the hell does she dig up these names? Anyway, as they're standing around talking to Skip's friend Merrick (whom you know instantly, just from his name, is the villain of the story! Can we please get away from these tropes?), everything suddenly freezes except for Merrick and Emma, and he talks to her like he's her friend, and Chase and Eric (C&E) are her enemies, misleading and lying to her. He conjures up a ghostly female who will not tell Emma who she is despite sharp and brutal commands from Merrick.

Emma notices that the ghost's heart is tied to Merrick's hand by an almost invisible gold chain, and Emma breaks the chain, which breaks the spell. He wants Emma to go with him, but she has refused and right then, Michael of all people, throws a book at Merrick! Instantly the spell is broken, Merrick is running, and Chase gives, well, er, chase (honestly). Eric follows, and soon they're trying to reach Merrick through green silent fire which evidently has substance and slows them down. Merrick is way more powerful than either of those two expected him to be. He's using the hedgerow and the fire to attack and slow them and eventually he gets away, of course.

Amy has seen this and is really pissed about the damage to her home. The way Emma relates information about Amy is masterful I'm starting to admire Amy more than any other character, and she's not even a main character - not yet anyway, but I suspect she may become one. That would be fine! I have a charming niece called Amy!

Chase takes Emma all around the house, looking for something which he feels Merrick might have hidden away, although of course he won't say what. What he finds is a reflection in a mirror. He demands that Emma get Eric, and the two boys (plus Emma, who is told she must stay touching the wall at all times, and not interfere no matter what happens next) touch the mirror whereupon an ancient woman, reminiscent of Elizabeth 1st (we’re led to believe) appears in the mirror, and verbally spars with them. She's clearly the Lord Voldemort figure. When things seem to be getting too serious, Emma turns off the light in the bathroom, which evidently is too powerful a magic for the witch queen or whoever she is, to fight, because she disappears!

Emma next demands an explanation from the boys, but later! Seriously? This is not acceptable! Enough with the patent mystery making for goodness sakes! Tell us something! I can understand it when the mystery is arising out of events which the author is slowly unfolding - even if frustratingly slowly! - and we don’t know any more than the protagonists do, but to create obvious mysteries where a protagonist's life or well-being depends upon her getting answers, and then refuse to part with a single thing at all, is inexcusable. It’s worthy of Rowling and Harry Potter, not of a Michelle Sagara novel.

Downstairs, Emma sees four ghosts chained to a wall in the house. Not even Eric can see them. Emma, again against Eric's advice, decides she will break the chain, and with some difficulty, she does.

It's right after this that they find the robe mentioned above. And so finally they do thrash some things out, in a conference with Michael, Allison, Amy, Chase, Eric and Emma, where everyone learns nowhere near enough (C&E are surprisingly ignorant about whatever undertaking it is in which they've evidently been indulging themselves for a significant amount of time - perhaps more than one lifetime!)

Standing outside on the lawn, they grill C&E (CofE?!) for as much info as they can, which ain't much. Amy is the only one with smarts enough to grab a chair. Everyone learns that Emma is a necromancer. Allison is the only one who seems to grasp that Chase and Eric kill necromancers, and she grills them harshly on this topic for some significant time, quite evidently shocked and angered that they were even contemplating killing Emma. They both give assurances that they no longer plan on doing that (but later we learn, even as they stand watch outside Emma's house that night in case Merrick comes back, that they haven't been exactly 100% honest with issuing those assurances.)

During their conference, Emma talks with the ghosts who are there - the four people who were chained to the wall, and the ghost of Emily Gates, whom she had freed from Merrick's clutches. She learns that these five ghosts are now bound to her, and she can draw energy from them which gives her power, but keeping them bound to her also costs her something. She wants to free them, but C&E tell her it’s not wise because they're only free to be bound again by Merrick if she does.

Amy asks who the heck she's talking to when she keeps turning to talk to the ghosts and Emma, again against Eric's advice, touches all of the five ghosts so that the rest of her friends can see them. Michael is captivated by the two children and entertains them, but Emma's arms start going numb from the cold. Touching the ghosts is like touching ice "without the wet". She learns something more about this from her father that night.

Going home, she doesn’t know that Chase is standing watch outside. She had invited them for breakfast the next morning because they plan on going to free the four-year old ghost trapped in the fire - if they can track down his mom. Amy, Allison, and Michael are also going along. That night, her father visits, and he can’t clue her in any more about what’s going on than C&E evidently can. He offers to give her his energy, and when she takes his hand affectionately, she feels, instead of bitter cold, great warmth. She pulls away immediately. Ghosts evidently can’t touch her unless she touches them first, so her father can give her no more, and she refuses to take any, although she feels very empowered by what she has received already.

The next morning, Emma calls Allison to go get Michael, and C&E show up. They make breakfast. She finds it easy to be with the two of them; they're like brothers she never had - if she can only force herself to overlook the fact that they're killers. They make breakfast pancakes. Eventually, the others show up and the whole crew take two vehicles and drive over to where Maria Copis lives. She's the mother of four-year-olf Andrew, who died in the burned house on Rowan Avenue. With great difficulty and sensitivity, Emma and Allison talk Maria into going with them to save Andrew. They're helped by Emma's ability to make the dead appear to the living.

On Rowan Avenue, Emma can see and hear the fire. And this is where Sagara's superior writing skills really kick in. She tells this portion of the story masterfully. They put the ladders which they ahve brought, up to the window upstairs, and Chase, Maria, and Emma go inside. It's hot and chokingly smokey in there, but only Emma perceives this. She finds Andrew, standing on his bed and he's screaming, feeling scared, but worse, feeling betrayed that his mom left with his two sisters and didn't come back for him. he was jealous that she carried them, and didn't carry him.

Emma has to figure out how to get him to listen to her and see his mom, because he's so panicked that he pays no attention to her even when she touches him. As she tries to fight the cold and figure out how to get him linked up with Maria, Emma's ghosts - the ones who are now bound to her, start to appear, even thopugh she hasn't called them. They give her some power. Her father appears too, and he offers, and she takes a small amount of power form him, but she needs to take power from Andrew if she's to succeed, and this is where Chase thinks she will fail and rturn into a necromancer like Merrick.

Merrick has also appeared, with two others, and now Eric, still outside, has a fight on his hands. beign forewarned by one of Emma's ghosts, Eric has already told the rest of the crew, Allison, who is holding one of Maria's two children, and Michael, who is holding the other, and Amy and her brother to elave, and though msot of them got away, somehow, Merrick has managed to grab Allison and the child she's holding, and eh has trapepd C&E in his green fire.

Emma and those in the house are watching him from a bedroom window, but seeing how much in danger Allison and the child are, she shows herself at the window. Margaret, one of the ghosts which Emma freed from the wall at Amy's home, and is now bound to her, knows a lot more about what Emma is undergoing than she lets on. This is another case of people not passing on to others what they need to know. She does keep nudging Emma as the latter readies herself to take on Merrick, and while he's distracted by C&E, Emma is able to climb out of the upstairs window down onto the porch roof, and then to the ground unseen by her foe.

There she releases herself from her body and visits with the two ghosts which Merrick has bound, the power from which he is using to try and kill C&E. Emma frees each of these ghosts and Merrick's green fire power fails, freeing C&E, but his two necromancer assistants have more to fight with than the spirit world. They both produce guns. Andrew, the newly rescued four-year-old, incensed that anyone would threaten his sister, unleashes his fire power with a ferocity which Emma feels, as the conduit for it, without realizing what it is she's passing on. The woman who is threatening the baby is consumed, and Allison is able to retrieve the baby unharmed.

While two shots are fired, neither of Merrick's assistants fires them. Instead, they both drop dead, and Merrick follows shortly thereafter. The man with the gun is Earnest, C&E's boss, who now turns the gun on Emma, but Eric steps in front of her, and before anything can come of this stand-off, Margaret, who knows Earnest, addresses him and talks him out of it.

Emma decides she's going to let the ghosts pass on, something they have been blocked from doing by the witch queen. No one thinks Emma can do it, or maybe that she'll die trying and try dying instead. Her problem is that there are not enough ghosts to draw that kind of power from, but the papery woman from the start of the novel, who has been conspicuous by her absence, suddenly shows up. We still don't learn who she is, but Emma realizes there is another way.

She brings up the lantern which she got from the mysterious papery woman, and she holds it high. As it blazes out immensely bright light, Emma sees a Stairway to Heaven (I am not making this up! Sagara is!), so she climbs the stairs, followed by a mass of ghosts, and with a huge effort, powered in part by all these ghosts, she nudges this stiff and rather unyielding door open sufficently for the scores upon scores of ghosts to go through.

As the doorway to heaven slams, the witch queen's eyes appear in it and threaten to kill Emma for what she's done.

Emma goes home and her mother is all but freaked at her charred and disheveled appearance. She blows it off, not telling her anything about what really happened, just that there was a fire and she tried to help. They hug. Perhaps she's getting closer to her mom. The next day she shows up at school as usual to find C&E there. Chase is enrolled against his wishes in the school, Eric not. It seems that Earnest has decided that no one on his team is going to kill her, instead they will stick around and work with her.

That night she walks the dog to the cemetary although she doesn’t see the point since not only will Nathan not be there, there are no ghosts left to be there and none of them would be at the cemetary even if they were still around. Only the living hang out in cemetaries - not the dead, she thinks. But as she's leaving, she sees a familiar figure at the entrance. It’s Nathan. He says, "Hi, Em."

Silence is followed by Touched - a novel which Michelle Sagara is, to my knowledge as of this writing, still working on, and even the title isn’t yet fixed. I, for one, welcome our Queen of the Dead overlord and I'm now really looking forward to the next one in this series. Forget about Ghost Huntress! You need Queen of the Dead!

Here's a farewell gift: you can read the first two chapters of this novel here.