Showing posts with label high-school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label high-school. Show all posts

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Bratfest at Tiffany's by Lisi Harrison


Title: Bratfest at Tiffany's
Author: Lisi Harrison
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!

Today's Tiffany day on my blog. I'm reviewing two novels with the name 'Tiffany' in the title. The first of these is named after the 1950s Truman Capote novella titled: Breakfast at Tiffany's This is why I fell in love with the title of this novel even though it's the kind of novel I'd normally avoid like the plague. It was on close-out, so I thought, "What the hell? Let's take it for a spin and see how badly it drives!"

I was rather surprised, then to discover that I didn't immediately hate it, even as I couldn't figure out if this was:

  1. A sly parody of Valley-Girl-style, spoiled-rotten clique kids
  2. A truly cynical method of defrauding teens of their discretionary-spending allowance
  3. OR
  4. A morality tale about the crippling effect of chronic self-absorption.

But then, who reads this stuff, seriously? And why?! You can hardly blame an author if people voluntarily cough-up money to read what she writes. The problem for me was that in the end, the novel didn't do anything for me. It seemed completely content to do nothing more than extol the vacuous lives of thoroughly misguided kids who had no ambition, and who are obsessed with cliques and clothes, and have no mind for anything else. It was truly sad how blind these children were to reality.

There were parts I hated, such as the purposeful misspelling of words ("nawt" for "not" for example) and stretching out the 'a' in any word which begun with it, such as aah-dorable (which it wasn't). The endless repetition of "Ehmagosh" and "Whatevs", and even worse, the designer names which were trotted out (pretty much every other page) in tandem with every single item of clothing that was mentioned. In short it quickly became nauseating and the saddest thing of all was that nothing had changed by the end of the novel. The kids hadn't grown, and they had learned diddly-squat. I cannot recommend this.


Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Hero Chronicles: Secrets by Tim Mettey


Title: The Hero Chronicles: Secrets
Author: Tim Mettey
Publisher: Tim Mettey
Rating: WARTY!

This novel I've had in my reader for a while, putting it off for items more urgent, but it’s time to get this read. Another reason for putting it off is that this novel violates several of my conditions for reading a novel (most of which materialized after I'd added this one to my list!). First of all the title incorporates not only the word "chronicles", but also the word "hero", both of which I've sworn-off in novel titles (along with 'cycle' and 'saga'!). Secondly it’s first person PoV, which is a big no-no for me since it’s all "Me!" all the time: "Hey lookit me!" "Hey forget that, pay attention to what I'M doing!" and "No one is more important than Meeeee!"

It’s so self-indulgent and irritating, and it’s a rarity in my experience to find such a novel that's written well enough to be worth expending my time on - not when there are so many other novels and life is short! I'd much rather read something easy on the mind than something which requires fortitude and gritted teeth just to scan the text!

This novel also has sound effects incorporated into the text. Even for a middle to upper grade novel it’s a no-no. The school bell doesn’t ring, it goes "DING!DING!DING!DING!" without any spaces in between. How annoying! The the main character is equally annoying. When the bell rings for recess, he doesn’t take his turn, but hurries to the front of the line. And this is just on the second page of this thing. The school apparently experiences an earthquake, and suddenly it’s five years later and we’re in chapter two. Kudos to the author for actually putting the prologue into the body of the novel. It’s the only way you'll get me to read a prologue! I'm guessing some super villain or other comes out of the earthquake, but I haven’t read that far, so it’s only a guess.

Nick the hero is now living with his aunt Cora. Cora's only defining qualities are that she's slim and beautiful, because who wants a smart woman who might be overweight? Let’s not ever tell young children that smarts are more important than looks. And while we’re at it, who wants a woman with integrity and good humor? No one. Don’t ever tell young kids that. The hell with integrity, industry and accomplishments! Let’s not have kids growing up thinking those things are of value. Nope! Keep it superficial!

This author evidently thinks that all young kids need to know is that women should be slim and beautiful - like a magazine model - because no other woman is worth anything, let's face it. That's what all-too-many writers want us to believe, sadly enough, and that's evidently what this writer apparently wants young kids to grow-up learning. Personally, I don’t buy it, but that's the way it is. Maybe I should start keeping a tally, as I read, of how many strikes this novel garners for itself? Naw! I never read that far.

Cora and nephew are moving to a new home. I like the way Cora specifies that they'll be leaving at 5am sharp in the morning, so that he doesn’t get any ideas that they'll be moving out at 5am sharp in the afternoon…. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that he's a superhero and this could well be why they're moving so frequently. The how and why of this isn't immediately explained, but he at least has super speed, so here comes the next trip-up.

Alex and Nick decorate an older guy's car with bologna, because that's unquestionably the best way to have a really fun night, and when the older guy starts looking for the culprits, Alex proves that he can run faster than a Mustang - which in the end crashes injuring the guys. How christian is that?! He runs right into the kid he's rescuing - at speed - and takes him along so they won't be caught, but the writer is in dire need of a lesson in physics and biology, because he simply doesn’t get it (that's what too much religion will do for you!). Don’t worry, the writers in The Flash TV show don't get it either.

It doesn't matter how much of a super hero you are, the laws of physics still apply, and ordinary people still have the same biology. If you run at sixty miles an hour and pick-up a by-stander in order to rescue them, then their body is going to go from zero to sixty instantly, and you're going to break their neck or give them some serious whiplash and compression injuries at least. That's not much of a rescue.

This novel started out middle grade and moved to young adult, but the tone never changed from middle-grade. Worse than this, instead of telling us a story about the super hero powers, we got a story of the main character playing football - in tedious detail. What happened to the super hero? I guess football is more important. This story felt far more like author wish-fulfillment than ever it did a real story, and I cannot in good faith recommend it.


Friday, January 23, 2015

Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields


Title: Steths: Cognition by Karl Fields
Author: Karl Fields (no website found)
Publisher: Pleated Press (no website found)
Rating: WORTHY!


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

Here's a novel which gets right to the point - a cover, a title page, and then chapter one! Screw antiquated Library of Congress rules and antique publishing methods! You've got to admire that. This is the world of ebooks, not of trays of lead characters pressed together rank and file waiting to be slathered with sticky ink and squished onto a galley page. So off we go!

The world in this novel is one of people who have special powers - not supernatural powers, but enhanced human powers. Devin Chambers, the main character narrates this story, unfortunately. I say unfortunately, because it's a first person PoV format - something which I normally rail against. As it happens, it was done well on this occasion, and didn't feel to me like someone was scraping their fingernails down a chalkboard as I read it! That was a major relief.

Devin is known as a 'steth' - short for stethoscope, presumably - because he can detect, at a distance, the faintest sounds of someone's heartbeat which allows him not only to know if they're alive, but to some degree, what they're feeling and whether they're lying. How that works, exactly, goes unexplained. Yes, you can detect a change in heart-beat, or a particular rhythm, but what does that really tell you, and in how much detail? He cannot, however, detect the heartbeat of another steth - and certain other people as will become clear to readers.

He first begins to feel he's really different from others (even other steths) when his school class attends a trial and he's the only one who thinks the defendant isn't guilty. Shortly after this he's visited by a guy, Mickey, who offers him a place at the prestigious Faulkner Academy. His good friend Travis, who's also invited, is pumped about it, but Devin has doubts because the Academy has no athletic program (no, honestly!).

Devin is also obsessed with the innocent guy saddled with a guilty verdict and one day when he goes to the jail to visit him, he encounters a girl, Sarah Shaw, who was already visiting this same guy. He follows the girl, only to discover she's a special, too - but a 'bouncer' who, he learns, is supposedly his mortal enemy. Is this be the clichéd love-hate relationship whereby these two are destined to fall in love? I can't tell you!

The writing in general is very good, with only one or two questionable areas, such as on page 17 where we read: "Shaw, the defendant, who sat beside his attorney in a white jumpsuit..." Who was wearing the white jump suit?! How about, "Shaw, the defendant who was wearing a white jump suit, sat beside his attorney..."? Just a suggestion! Apart from rare happenstances like that, it was well-written, entertaining, and engrossing.

I have to say (and without confirming if I was right or wrong - I'm usually wrong on these things!) I didn't trust Carissa Watson, a fellow student at Faulkner who became involved with Devin. She seemed a little too convenient for me. I much preferred Sarah! I also liked Travis, although he initially seemed to me to be like a victim waiting to happen. Whether that does happen I'm not going to tell you!

It struck me as odd that Devin tells us he couldn't talk about movies with Carissa on their first date because there was no movie theater in town. What, they never saw one on TV or rented a video?! That struck me as strange, but that and some misspellings, such as "planed" in placed of "planned" (which a spell-checker won't find!) were about the worst issues I had with the technical aspects of this story, apart from the one I'll discuss next, which needs its own paragraph!

At one point, about halfway through this novel (which is a surprisingly fast read) there was a really improbable situation where Devin, obsessing way more on a missing photograph than ever he had any reason to, went on a highly unlikely "expedition" to a place he thought it might be. This made no sense whatsoever - first that the photograph would be hidden (and hidden there of all places) rather than simply destroyed, and second that Devin would ever become so focused on it, let alone dedicated to finding it. There was no rationale for it.

Devin had what was termed in the book, Hypersensitive Tympanic Syndrome. This isn't a real disorder as far as I know, but it is the condition which steths are supposed to have. What bugged me about that was that if steths's hearing is so sensitive that they can clearly detect a heartbeat (and from a distance, yet!), then how come every noise out there doesn't drive them crazy or deafen them? This issue is never even discussed, much less explained!

Those things aside, I really liked the characters and the story. It was well-thought out (for the most part!) and interesting. Devin was a really likable character and, again for the most part, the story was believable and made sense. This was a refreshing change from way too much YA 'literature' that I've had to read. Also kudos for having a believable guy as the main character. Devin was an African American, but one who isn't somehow tied-in to gangs or rap! It was such a relief to find stereotyping was absent here: Devin was just an ordinary everyday guy, and I appreciated that. I'm looking forward to the sequel to this novel.


Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Whisper by Crystal Green


Title: Whisper
Author: Crystal Green
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!


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

Whisper is a prequel which takes place before a subsequent volume titled Honey which I have not read. It's published next month. Whisper is very short: 39 pages which makes it rather like a prologue which I typically don't read. I had no idea this was the case, but since I did commit to writing an honest review, here goes! (Why would I write a dishonest one?!)

My first impression wasn't good. The text is very small with wide spaces between lines, making it hard to read, and I was reading it in Adobe Digital Editions on a full-sized screen. I'd hate to try this on my smart phone! The spacing of the lines suggests that 39 pages is an over-estimate of how long this is by about a third, maybe, were it printed in a normal font with regular spacing.

The story begins with Carley Rios receiving a text message on a new phone app called "TellTale". The TellTale messages can come from anywhere, but you can set the radius so that it limits which ones you see. Carley set hers for ten miles - when she lives in a tiny town she just moved to three months ago and where she knows almost no one. Why ten miles? It makes no sense!

The message states "I do anything to have Carley, but she doesn't know I exist". Carley is so clueless that despite the rather ominous wording, she thinks this is a secret admirer. This guy (who includes a background silhouette of himself and lives within ten miles of Carley) doesn't declare his love or admiration. He outright states he wants to have her. Whether that means he wants to own her or to have sex with her isn't clear, but either way it's inappropriate, not admiring.

Carley sends the 'admirer' a message on TellTale which includes a picture of her open bedroom door. She's dumb enough to think this will tell the guy that she's willing to step out of her comfort zone. It never occurs to her that it's telling him she wants to invite him into her bed - a guy she's never met who sends creepy texts and wants to meet her in dark, anonymous places.

Carley's biggest problem isn't taking stupid risks. It's that she's so shallow that she's incapable of having anything whatsoever running through her mind that isn't boys. Not even men, but boys, and it's pathetic. I can't recommend this and have no intention of reading Honey.


Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The Silence of Six by EC Myers


Title: The Silence of Six
Author: EC Myers
Publisher: Adaptive Books
Rating: WORTHY!


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

I was really impressed with this novel from the start and found myself quickly drawn-in and really wanting to swipe the screens. It’s an object lesson in how to write a story which pulls people in and keeps 'em hooked. It has some ups and downs, but overall, I rate it a very worthy read.

Maxwell is a high-school student who attends a presidential debate which is being held at his school. As it's winding up, at the end of question-time, someone hacks into the screen being used on stage; a young person wearing a mask appears, and asks the two presidential candidates, "What is the silence of six and what are you going to do about it?" before shooting himself. Max is acutely disturbed as he sees that this is his hacker friend Evan. Max has been out of hacking for a year or so, but Evan never left, and he has some secrets of which Max is unaware. As the students are filing out of the auditorium, their laptops, pads and phones are confiscated 'for reasons of national security'.

Max suddenly realizes that there's more going on here than simply a joke hack or a suicide. He returns to his hacker roots, logging into a secret forum which he hasn’t accessed for a year. The names he sees are familiar, but they're suspicious of him. One of them - Doublethink - opens a private side-channel and requests a meeting in person. Max decides it’s time for a face-to-face, but already there are dark SUVs following him, so he decides to go on the run.

This novel is really well-written. It has intrigue and danger, it has smart computer talk, and it sounds realistic from the off. Doublethink is particularly intriguing, but I can't tell you any more without ruining the surprises the author has in store. Max has some narrow escapes, makes new friends, meets fascinating and dangerous characters, all the while circling around the clues and hints that Evan has evidently left for him. And also Max carries the guilty burden of the fact that Evan had reached out to him several times recently and Max had been too busy, preoccupied or otherwise distracted to connect with him again.

There were some weaknesses in the story. The main one is one we always find in this kind of story: there are points where Max has enough information at his disposal that he could have gone online with it, thereby at least taking some of the pressure off himself. There's no good reason offered to explain why he doesn’t do this. Later an explanation is offered, but I'm not convinced that it was a good one! Also at one point Max says "…looking for whomever was using the computer…" No one speaks like that. Writers write like that, and it’s like an itch when you don’t use the correct grammatical form, but it’s entirely wrong to have people speak like that when almost no-one - especially not kids - actually does.

So, not perfect, but a short, fast, and very entertaining read which I recommend.


Sunday, November 30, 2014

The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L Jagi Lamplighter


Title: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin
Author: L Jagi Lamplighter
Publisher: Dark Quest Books
Rating: WARTY!


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

This is a story which is, and I say this negatively, very much in the mold of Harry Potter - a girl (from England even!) starting her time at a school for witchcraft and wizardry, where the witches ride brooms, and can travel instantaneously, and just like in Harry Potter, Rachel loves to fly on her broomstick. And she's already a Griffin!

Of course everyone wants to write the next Harry Potter, but actually writing the next Harry Potter isn't the way to get there, because actually writing the next Harry Potter, no matter how much you try to differentiate it, is still ripping off Harry Potter - it's not really new, and that's the hole we immediately fell into with this novel.

Is this novel differentiated at all? Well, a little bit. It's not Hogwarts school to begin with. Here, it goes by the awful name of the Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts. Sorcerous sounds way too much like cancerous to me! Maybe there's a reason for that? Yes they fly on broomsticks - but the "difference" is that these brooms have no bristles so they go faster! Characters can they travel instantaneously, but here it's not by floo powder, but by mirror! And Rachel isn't an orphan - she has a mom, a dad, and an older sister - but she's miles away from them so she feels orphaned in a way.

I first started taking a dislike to this novel at only two percent in because of how Rachel's older sister Sandra is described: "Rachel hoped, when she grew up, she would look like Sandra, calm, stately, and as beautiful as a swam." Never mind courage. Never mind smarts. Never mind decency. Never mind friendliness. Never mind reliability. Never mind integrity. Never mind skills and capabilities. Never mind independence. Nope. The only important thing about a woman, once again please learn it well, is how beautiful and regal she is. This idea of wealth, privilege, and beauty so soaks this novel that it made me nauseous to read it. It was like being confined on the subway with someone who bathes in perfume or cologne rather than sports a teasing hint of it.

What is wrong with children's and young adult authors? Seriously? How many more stories written for young girls are going to persist in brutally ramming it down girls' throats that if you're not beautiful you're essentially valueless? Frankly, I am nauseated by reading this insanity. It makes me sick. People deserve better than this, especially girls who are already being beaten to death by "Big Fashion" and "Big Cosmetics". Do they not deserve something better than this?

I considered it my responsibility to give this novel a fair chance, which is why I continued to read on past this awful point, but I knew then that I would not be able to finish this novel if it continued in this vein, and continue it did. Young readers deserve a hell of a lot better than this.

It's immediately after this that we're told that poor homely Rachel is not only not beautiful like her sister, she also hasn't inherited her mother's "astoundingly shapely figure" because again, if you ain't got curves and beauty, you're an ugly witch. Don't you know that? Seriously? Rachel's "smarts" are conveyed to us not by anything she does or says, not by the approbation of others, but by the fact once again, that she's read lots of books! Because in YA and children's literature, book larnin' = smarts, dontcha know? You didn't know that? You need to read more books so everyone will know you're smart!

In this novel, just as in Harry Potter, the magical world is hidden from the muggles (the 'unwary' as they're apparently labeled here). Just as in Harry Potter, Rachel meets a blond kid (who's connected with the dark side) on her first day and makes an enemy of her - yes, its a she here, not a he.

Just like Hermione Granger, Rachel has unruly hair and is a know-it-all. She meets an orphan student with whom she becomes friends. The only real description we get of the boy is that he's handsome - again beauty trumps everything else! Rachel breaks the rules and discovers something untoward going on. She has to warn another student, Valerie Foxx (only one 'X' shy of becoming a porn star!). Valerie is pretty )of course she is!), and her friend is not only "gorgeous", but really "well-endowed" - because nothing could possibly be more important than looks. I supposed 'well-endowed' could mean she's intersexed, which at least would be something new, but I guessed not, and I was right.

Unlike Harry Potter, Rachel is rich and is actually Lady Rachel - coming from an old wealth family in Devon - the daughter of a Duke. She considers her new friend to be "low-born" because he comes from a "horrid, mundane orphanage". By this point I was thinking of calling up my Doctor for a large prescription of Promethazine to counter the extreme nausea. Also by this point I completely loathed Rachel.

Siggy, her pet orphan friend isn't actually any better. When she rudely asks him if he likes girls, his response indicates that he likes "ladies". He would never, he tells her, risk his life to slay a dragon for a "trollop". Let the trollops rot! I'm sorry, but at this point - 8 percent in - I could not stand to read even one more screen of this snotty piece of ill-conceived and appallingly abusive garbage. Call me unexpectedly enlightened.


Saturday, November 29, 2014

Black Hole by Charles Burns


Rating: WARTY!

This month's nominee for worst cover ever was originally published by Fantagraphics as twelve comic books starting in 1995. Now it's combined into one hardback published in 2005. Despite the publication dates, it's set in the 1970's and I suspect it's a lot more meaningful to the author than ever it is to any of his readers. I found it revealing that wikipedia refers to Burns as a cartoonist in its page title!

The book blurb claims that it's "...deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird." This was nonsensical to me. There was no such "moment" - except maybe in the author's own personal life!

There was nothing "hippie" and nothing "seventies" here. It was just a bunch of high-school losers who were literally being wasted - getting wasted on drugs and booze, and wasting their lives. There was no enlightenment going on here, no rebellion against the establishment - indeed, these kids were firmly entrenched in their own establishment. There was no musical revolution, nothing new. This story felt like it was really was nothing more than personal anecdotes recalling bad trips.

The whole novel reads like a bad drug trip. Maybe that's the intent, but it made no sense and wasn't entertaining for the most part. Maybe the author is trying to make sense of his youth, but the novel really didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. Parts of it were well done, other parts meaningless. The comics explore the same time-period or the same events from many perspectives, so there's a lot of overlap, which I suspect is easier to see in the compendium than it was in the separate comics.

The artwork isn't anything special. It's borderline competent, but in no way startling, and this is especially stark given the subject matter. The seventies was an extraordinarily flamboyant era. Why depict it in B&W? Some of the characters are really hard to tell apart. One pair of them - a dating couple - is really only differentiated by the fact that the guy has some peach fuzz on his chin whereas the girl doesn't. I'm not kidding!

It's hardly impressive art. It's all sharply, but thickly drawn black-and-white line and shade, but the story is anything but black and white. It's also drawn for a mature audience: though it's set in and around high school, there's a huge amount of drug use and a lot of explicit sexuality, with some violence and violent themes towards the end.

To me, that was really sad - that these kids evidently had nothing to do with their lives - indeed, no interest whatsoever in life - other than partying and smoking pot. Personally, I don't care if people spend their lives partying and smoking pot - it's no worse (and no better) than smoking tobacco, let's face it - but I don't get why I should be expected to be interested in reading a novel which offers that, and only that.

There was very little in this story to draw me in and and make me want to pursue it. I did finish it because it was short and because I really hoped there would be a pay-off at the end. There wasn't. What was it George Bush senior moment said? The nattering nabobs of negativity? Other than everything Reagan said, and Clinton's preposterous lie that he did not "have sex with that woman", that is the absolute dumbest thing any president ever said (with "mission accomplished" a close second!), but it George Herbert Walker's nonsensical blabber really does apply in the case of this comic.

The characters are two-dimensional, with nothing to recommend them. One was a replica of John Lennon in his pinched nose, granny-glasses period, so I started looking for others who might identify with recording artists, but I didn't see any others that I recognized, so maybe that was just a one-off. The situations were very ordinary for the most part with nothing special about any of it (with few exceptions). It was amusing that everyone seemed to have the same hair style.

The really weird thing is the mutation disease. Running through this youthful crowd is a body-fluid transmitted disease which causes physical mutations. Some reviewers have equated this with AIDS, but I don't think that's what Burns intended. I think the mutations caused by this "plague" were nothing more than a physical manifestation of teen fears.

One guy, for example, has a mouth at the base of his neck - one which speaks and seems to be controlled by a different part of his brain - or even a different brain - than his regular mouth. Which teen hasn't felt like they've said things they didn't mean or didn't intend? The girl who has sex with him contracts the disease, but her manifestation of it is that she periodically sheds her skin like a snake. Which teen hasn't sometimes wondered what it would be like to shed their skin and be someone else? Haven't serious drug abusers felt at times like they were crawling out of their skin? Other victims exhibit bumps or blisters on their face. One guy develops facial features that make him look reminiscent of a rabbit. I don't see that as a comment on the fact that he contracted the disease while humping like a bunny.

Actually, there's no pattern to this "disease" at all, and other than teens shunning other teens who have it, there is no reference to the disease from society at large - no attempt to fight it or contain it. There was no effort to explain where it came from, or why no one was really interested in it. It was like the disease was nothing more than an amateur attempt to graphically portray feelings of disaffection, rejection, incompetence and so on, but given that it all came from acts of love and passion, it made zero sense to me. Indeed, it very effectively countermanded the author's apparent intention.

Some portions of the story featured a cult of kids leaving home and migrating to the woods where they would camp out with others of their "kind". Again, this made more sense as a physical manifestation of feelings of alienation, but presented the way it was just made it seem silly and trivial. This is of course where it was easy for murders to be committed, but those made least sense of all. If the characters were not really physically living in the woods, and this was merely a representation of their isolation, then what were the acts of murder supposed to represent? If the murders were real, then what triggered them? None of this is addressed, much less explained.

One character, Eliza, was well-worth her own story, but she was given rather short shrift (or short shift!) here. She had a tail, but it was never clear if this came from the STD, or if she was naturally born with it. People are born with tails - a relic of evolution for which the creationists have absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Eliza was an artist and was giftedly so, but frankly, she didn't seem to belong to this story at all. I would have loved a story about her. She was the only character with anything to say or with any real story to tell.

Overall I can't recommend this novel. You know what it most reminded me of? Reefer Madness - that asinine movie which purportedly warns children against using drugs that was made in the late 1930s and was so awful, exploitative, over-the-top, and inaccurate that it's become a cult classic. Hopefully this limited tradition novel won't become that famous.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger


Title: Waistcoats & Weaponry
Author: Gail Carriger
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!


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

Errata
p180 "Because we both know you've got my best interests at heart?" is not something a Victorian lady of breeding would say. "…you have my best interests…"
p197 There's a bullet in the side of his chest, then it's in his gut? Where is it really?!
p137 "I guess I do, don’t I?" sounds awfully American for a Victorian woman of British birth to say. More likely would be something like, "I suppose I have, haven’t I?"

And we’re back. I was really been looking forward to this, the next volume in what is now a trilogy. Sophronia Angelina Temminnick, Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott, Agatha Woosmoss, and Sidheag Maccon are returned with more steam-punk and espionage as they travel over the emerald green countryside of southern England in 1853 in their dirigible finishing school along with designated villain, Preshea Buss.

I was surprised that I didn’t immediately warm to this volume. The last two drew me in at once and held my interest effortlessly. This one felt more like I was pushing myself to read it, rather than being hypnotically led by it. That's the problem with a series - you have to give more of the same, but you also have to change it. It works well when an author can deliver enough familiarity that it feels like a story continuation, but with sufficient difference that it doesn’t feel like it's really the same story you read before, warmed over.

This felt like too much more of the same as we joined the girls watching a vampire teacher dancing with a flowerpot on his head, then had to meet with one corner of Sophronia's limp love triangle - Soap, the lower class lackey in the engine room, then went to an engagement ball where Sophronia meets the other corner of her triangle - Lord Mersey.

I honestly have zero liking for either of these guys, and I have no idea what the attraction is for Sophronia, either. Oh, and we now learn that Sophronia is nick-named Ria! An unfortunate name given that it sounds like 'rear' and she does behave all-too-often like an ass, primarily with these two unlikeable and inappropriate boys.

Eventually the adventure begins when Sidheag - an honorary member of a werewolf pack - discovers that the leader of her pack has killed his number two and left Scotland. The pack is apparently in rebellion against the Queen, and now Sidheag feels compelled to go take over the pack - even though she is not and never has been a wolf - and tell them all what to do. Naturally Sophronia, Dimity, Agatha, Lord Mersey, and Soap go along. Naturally? Hardly!

It was at this point that the plot became quite unbelievable to me. I get that when you have made the mistake of embarking upon a series to milk your characters (and your sales) for all they're worth, you have to stir things up and change things around not because it’s makes for good story telling, but because you have to prevent your readers from becoming bored and disillusioned, and abandoning you in droves, but when the change isn’t organic - when it’s quite obviously manufactured, as this one clearly is, it just doesn’t work well at all.

In this case, it’s actually worse, for me, because I have a real aversion to and detestation of werewolf stories - even more so than I do to vampire stories, so this abandonment of everything I've grown to love from the first two books to head to Scotland (which is actually a place I love) with the apparent intention of relating a sorry tale of werewolves isn't exactly a charmed idea in my book.

Since this isn't my book, but Carriger's book, I decided to press on and see how it worked or even if it worked, and fortunately they don’t make it to Scotland; they become, how shall I put it? Derailed? The novel is very short - only a couple of hundred pages, so "How bad could it get?" I asked myself lightly…. Well it became boring - that's how bad it got.

The train journey really didn't offer anything interesting or exciting, and it did offer large measures of Le Stupide, I'm sorry to report. There was one point where it was train v. small dirigible, and they stopped the train. What? This made zero sense, since in such a battle, the train wins every time - why did they stop? Why did they leave Monique almost unattended? Why didn’t the trained spy escape? So the novel was very badly let down by weak plotting and limp action here.

There's a really odd sentence fragment on page 19 in the eighth paragraph at the start of chapter two:

Over a year and a half's association and Sophronia would have described the other three as confidantes extraordinaire.

I can see what the author is trying to say but it could have been said a whole lot better - like by replacing the 'and' with a comma, and starting the sentence with 'After'.

This same kind of thing occurs on page 47, where we read, almost at the bottom of the page, "Not all sudden, you just never asked." I think that comma ought to be a semi-colon at least.

On the other hand, there were some touches of hilarity of the fine vintage that I fondly remember from the earlier books, such as on page 115, where we read, "It was an instinct ill-suited to Dimity, like watching a duck eat custard." which was delightful. It will never beat "Who wouldn't want an exploding wicker chicken?" from the first book, but that one was so wonderful I doubt it will ever be beaten.

On balance I have to say that the bad far outweighed the good. This felt like the stereotypical second novel in a trilogy - the one which is typically weak - instead of the third in what, until this volume had been a cracking good yarn. Consequently, I can't recommend this one.

However, in my slightly improving aim of providing a parody song to ease the pain when I tender a warty review, here's my effort for this one. To the tune of All Kinds of Everything as sung by Dana:

Airdrops and abseiling, steam-dogs, no fleas,
Dirigibles and carriages, crumpets and tea,
Secrecy and high intrigue, early morning school,
Waistcoats & Weaponry used to be cool.

Steam trains and aeroplanes, now have gone by,
Both volumes one and two left me with sighs,
Sophronia and Dimity, and Agatha too,
Waistcoats & Weaponry used to be cool.

Evening or school time, on land and in air,
These three and Sidheag, or Lady Kingair.
Dances, no romances, soirees and secrets,
winning, never losing, these girls won my bets.
Cool jokes, British blokes, and some frou-frou,
Waistcoats & Weaponry can't remind me of you.

Now it's all wall to wall boredom and dull.
The third one in the series has hit a big lull.
Excitement and fun are a thing of the past.
I guess I should know that such fun cannot last,
Reading this, feeling pissed, I am such a fool.
O waistcoats & weaponry please go back to school!

Monday, November 3, 2014

When Mystical Creatures Attack by Kathleen Founds


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Alive by Hajime Taguchi


Title: Alive
Author/Editor: Hajime Taguchi
Publisher: Gen Manga
Rating: WARTY!


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

After the last Gen manga I read. I determined not to read any more because reading backwards is just annoying and not worth the effort unless the story is brilliant, and the last one I read was far from brilliant. Quite the opposite in fact. Unfortunately I forgot that I still had one more Gen manga in my reading list, so here I am a-Gen!

This one started out a lot better. The artwork is sparse and clean and looks really good. The stories, however, were a lot less than satisfactory. I quite liked the first one, although I have doubts about a high school girl going unsupervised to get new eye-wear, and then taking the first pair of glasses she's offered without even having an eye exam!

The story turned out to be allegorical - about how we see the world, and that if we want to see the beautiful, we also have to accept that we will see the ugly. It’s not either or. So it was really trite, but harmless. Unfortunately, that was the best story in the bunch.

The next was a pointless and vacuous tale about an ignorant school girl becoming frightened that she was dying because she got her first period. Okay, so two stories about high school, so maybe this is aimed at a high school audience? No! Before long, we’re getting a rather graphic story about a guy who has sex with an expensive sex doll. Seriously? Who, exactly, is this collection aimed at? And why are there so many images depicting the PoV of looking up some young school-girl's pleated skirt? The cover will amply illustrate this, but there are several more inside.

I got about three quarters through and the stories continued to be either obnoxious, or childishly simplistic with some fairy-tale moral, and I honestly couldn’t stand to read any more. I can’t recommend this one and now I really am done with Gen manga for good!


Friday, October 17, 2014

Drawing Amanda by Stephanie Feuer


Title: Drawing Amanda
Author: Stephanie Feuer
Publisher: Hipsomedia
Rating: WORTHY!

Ably illustrated by SY Lee

I like that the title of the novel has two meanings here. It reminds me of my own novel Tears in Time, which can be understood in two different ways.

Michael 'Inky' Kahn missed a chance at art school, where all his friends went, because he became a chronic slacker after his father died. Now he has a chance to sign-up with a video-game start-up and get in on the ground floor designing a new online game. The interface is creepy, but Inky is young, naïve, and foolish, and still grieving over the death of his father eighteen months before. He doesn’t think twice. He doesn’t even think once.

Inky has a best friend still remaining at the New York international school which he attends, but his friend simply doesn't work for me. "Rungs" (an abbreviation of his long Thai family name) is too much. I found myself asking why didn’t this author make the Asian the main character instead of the trope YAWASP which we get - a trope augmented by a clichéd 'foreign' and 'cool' friend? The sad attempt to have Rungs speak in hip abbreviations is a fail, too, especially since each time he uses one, it’s followed by an immediate translation which is just an admission that this isn't working. It looks stupid and amateur.

That aside, the plot was different. The online game is, of course a complete fraud. It's merely a front for a psycho to get his hands on teen-aged girls, but I don’t get why he chooses online gaming, which is typically not the purview of young girls. Yes, they do play games, but they tend not to favor the same games which boys do, and this premise is that the game is in development - it’s not actually up and running - so why would teenage girls (as opposed to boys) flock to this site? It makes no sense.

Having said that, the story and writing in general wasn't too bad at all, and the female love interest here, Amanda Valdez Bates, who is also disaffected, but for reasons different from Inky's, does show up at this site and starts interacting with the psycho guy. She also begins interacting with Inky at school, so the story was quite nicely woven at this point. Inky starts sending sketches to the guy "Woody" behind the Megaland game, and one of these is of Amanda. Inky doesn't realize that he's putting his new acquaintance directly into harm's way by using her as his muse.

That's all I'm telling you! I liked this despite those issues I described, because it was in general, well written, it contained a scattering of artwork to fit the story (this is not a graphic novel, just a novel with some graphics!), which was unusual and appreciated, and apart from the ridiculous best friend which Inky had, the characters were decently fleshed out and believable. I liked the premise and the novel overall, so I recommend this one.


Thursday, October 16, 2014

Anywhere But Paradise by Anne Bustard


Title: Anywhere But Paradise
Author: Anne Bustard
Publisher: Egmont
Rating: WARTY!

This novel was a complete bust for me. Set in 1960 for no apparent reason, it's the story of Peggy Sue Bennett who has moved with her family to Hawaii and now is the subject of racism from the locals since she's in the minority (about 20% of the population in her new school), and bullying by a local girl named Kiki.

Once again we have a YA novel featuring unrestrained bullying which goes so far(cicle) as to be completely unrealistic, rolling way past ridiculous and into the nearby neighborhood of complete parody. As if that wasn't bad enough, the story itself is devoid of any interest whatsoever. It's one blessedly short chapter after another of tediousness. We follow Peggy through lesson after lesson, abuse after abuse, bullying after bullying, and this complete wuss makes zero complaint, not even mentioning it to her parents.

If women had not complained and made themselves thoroughly obnoxious, they'd probably still be waiting to be granted the right to vote by old white men. Peggy Sue, aka Mary Sue, is, in her blind inertia, an insult to those women who fought for enfranchisement. If the story had seemed like it had been thinking about going somewhere, that might have made some sort of a difference, but it didn't - unless the lesson here is that bullying is best dealt with by kow-towing to it by going out of your way to please the bully.

Maybe it got better but I had better things to do with my time than stick around and read it to the end in the hope that the writing would improve. Believe me, if it hasn't shown any sign of it by 75% of the way in, which was further than it deserved to be read, it ain't gonna get better. I quit there and the only thing I regret is reading that far before I wised up and dropped it.

In closing - and this isn't a dig at this novel per se, although the ARC for this was a great illustration of the problem - I'd like to say another word or two about wasting trees!

And yes, I get that this is a non 8.5x11 format novel showing on an 8.5x11 format page, so let's take out the excess white space, and bring it down to the area within the cross-hairs - and coincidentally render it into the same dimensions as the cover illustration above:

See it now? This is yet another problem caused and sustained by Big Publishing™ because they're the ones demanding a certain layout for a novel, and part of the layout is 250 words per page. Every time we give in to this, trees are wasted. That's why I urge writers not to turn out typescripts like this one, and to buck Big Publishing™'s demands, and write more per page.

Naturally there are constraints on how much you can fit on a page. Certain amounts of white space are required for margins and for gutter (to permit binding - the thicker your book, the more gutter you need). Additionally, you don't want to cram words everywhere - for readability if not aesthetics you need to provide a decent layout of course, and in the ebook, it doesn't matter how much white space you have because it isn't wasting any trees.

I'm not telling you how to write; I'm just asking that we as writers consider what the environmental impact is of what we do. Is it necessary to write a trilogy? Can you shorten the book and make it just as good? Can you run to three hundred words per page? I'm just saying it's worth thinking about.


Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Best Boy Ever Made by Rachel Eliason


Title: The Best Boy Ever Made
Author: Rachel Eliason
Publisher: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
71% in "Sam meets every single criteria..." should be "Sam meets every single criterion..." to be technically correct. Of course, a social worker might not know that.
"Who'd of thought" in Brittney's speech should be "Who'd have thought?" (sorry, I didn't note the position in the book)
85% "...using there proximity..." should be "...using their proximity..."
"...down right..." should be "...downright ..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
"...everyday..." should be "...every day..." (sorry, I didn't note the position)
92% "...catching site..." should be "...catching sight..." (it's rendered correctly further along on that same line).

This is a novel about a trans-gender person, Sam, who was born technically a girl, but who is actually a boy for all practical purposes. Rachel Eliason is herself trans-gendered (mtf), so she knows what she's writing about. The novel is told in first person by Sam's best friend Alecia.

I don't normally do book covers because my blog is all about writing, not selling, and unless they self publish, the writer really has no choice in their cover: they get whatever cover Big Publishing™ deems fit - which is all-too-often an ill-fit at best. In this case (which isn't Big Publishing™), I have to raise an issue that involves some fence-sitting, and it ain't comfortable, let me tell you, but it is country! Maybe this discomfort is appropriate, too, because for far too many people transgendering is an uncomfortable issue, so perhaps the cover artist is smarter than your typical cover designer?

Here's the rub: the arm on the left looks very masculine, yet we know that it's supposed to represent a transgender male. It's not that trans (ftm) males can't look masculine for goodness sakes, that's what they are, after all, but the question I have is more subtle than that: is this the best cover design? Do we want to use an actual male, which really betrays the story, because the subject of the story isn't a biological male, but an XX who identifies as a male. Do we want to use a female so the arm looks feminine - which to me betrays the story even more than using a male arm, because the trans character isn't feminine except in a birth sense? Do we try to find a real ftm transgender person to pose?

To me, that would have been ideal, and perhaps that was what was actually done here - I don't know - but this cover made me ask questions, so maybe it's not a bad thing the way it is. Maybe the masculine arm is a statement, and not simply eye candy. I do think it's worth some serious thought though, especially in a novel dealing with a topic as important and as misunderstood as this one is.

The story takes place in Iowa, where I've actually lived and have never ever felt the need to go back there again! Iowa winters will do that to a person. Here's a song which I dedicated to Iowa, sung to the tune of Do They Know It's Christmas?:

It's winter time, and there's some need to be afraid.
In Iowa, where ice storms break and blizzards rage,
And in this cold and darkness, you can warm a heart with joy:
As the topside freezes-up this winter time!

But say a prayer: pray for the Iowans
At winter time, it's hard, but when you're having sun
There's a world outside your window and it's a world of frozen feet
Where the heat bills reach a total that's impossible to meet
And the only bells that ring there are the icicles of doom
Well tonight thank god it's us instead of you!

Oh there won't be cold in Africa this winter time
That's the greatest gift they'll get: to stay so warm
oh-oh where nothing ever snows
No blizzards, no ice floes
Do they know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Here's to you staying warm in Africa
Fresh from those freezing tail in Iowa
Do you know what it's like to freeze your butt?

Heat the world!
Heat the world!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
Heat the world! Let them know it's cold up here!
(Original music and words to Do They Know It's Christmas? by Bob Geldof & Midge Ure, released on Phonogram and Columbia. New words by Ian Wood)

If you liked this parody, please consider a donation to http://www.aidforafrica.org/Donate OR http://www.savethechildren.org OR to whichever charity you think can do most good, including your local food bank. There are hungry children everywhere.

But I digress! The novel is narrated by Alecia, a very sheltered young woman of seventeen, who often comes off as younger than she really is. You can blame this on her life under the iron-yoke of her Catholic parents. They're a pair of the most blinkered people imaginable, but organized religion often does that. By its very nature religion is divisive and intolerant, bifurcating populations into us (the saved, good, people), and them (the sinners who will go to hell). Bring it on, I say. I'd rather be in hell than spend eternity with bigots and pompous holier-than-thou blow-hards, quite frankly. Can you imagine spending eternity with those guys?!

Alecia's best friend since forever is Samantha, who insists on "Sam" and no substitutes, and who is a tomboy - pretty much since Alecia has known her. Alecia 'gets' Sam, but she cannot understand what it is which has made Sam so distant over the last few months, until Sam finally comes clean with her and tells Alecia that she's not truly a female. She's a male who happens to have been born, unfortunately, in a female body - and she wants to correct that post-haste. This feeling isn't a rarity in nature as Joan Roughgarden reveals in her book Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, which I highly recommend.

Sheltered as she is, Alecia struggles with all of this because she doesn't quite get that there's a big difference between a tomboy, a lesbian, and an XX female who feels in her every cell and neuron that she's an XY boy, has done so for years, and now wants the world to accept it the same way she has done. Alecia is a trooper though, and never once does she lose sight of the importance of friendship and loyalty, a commitment which means supporting her friend in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, as long as they both shall live.

Together, they embark upon this journey, and damn the warped parents. Actually damn Alecia's parents, who are completely negative about Sam - quite the opposite of Sam's own parents. In this spirit (the only spirit which matters), Alecia accompanies Sam to a gay bar on teen night. Sam has to go there to satisfy her social worker that she's not merely a confused lesbian - that she really doesn't want to be a girl who loves girls, but a male who loves females. Alecia goes along with her and finds herself - what is that feeling? Jealous? - of the attention Sam gets from out lesbian Emma, who is very much a girl.

Alecia has a father and a brother, but these males figure very little into the story. More involved is her mom, and younger sister Brittney, who isn't quite the good Catholic girl that Alecia is. I have to ask, since this family is so Catholic, how come the girls ended-up with names like Alecia and Brittney rather than, say, Esther and Ruth or something Biblical like that. Obviously not all such parents go that route, but it seemed to me that if Mom & dad were so rigid and devout they would be far more likely to chose Biblical names for their children than to choose the ones we get. Maybe that's just me.

One thing which seemed weird in this novel, to me, was the use of "I am". Despite employing all kinds of other contractions, such as "I'd", and "we've", there was never an "I'm" that I noticed. It struck me as odd, and it made for rather stilted conversation. Other than that, I enjoyed the way this was written. It was perhaps a bit simplistic in places, with very little descriptive prose, but for me it was an easy, comfortable, and compelling read. Once I began, I did not want to put it down, and I want to read more by this writer - perhaps even more about these two characters if a good sequel suggests itself.

I normally detest first person PoV novels, but this one seemed perfectly fine. Some writers, a few, a happy few, a band of brothers and sisters, can carry it off, and Rachel Eliason is quite obviously one of these. I think it helped that she had Alecia come right out and embrace this format from the off, introducing herself like we'd just met and she was about to answer some questions for me to clear up some lack of understanding I had! That approach worked for me, and from that point on it seemed normal and ordinary, rather than artifice, so kudos and gratitude for that!

I'm not sure that Sam's social worker was entirely appropriate in answering Alecia's questions to the extent that she did, but this was a minor issue. A bigger issue was whether or not Sam would be seeing a social worker or seeing some kind of psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know, I've never been there, but it seems to me that she would need someone with a bit more academic and medical muscle behind them if she were going to start gender reassignment as a minor. OTOH, as I mentioned, the author is transgendered herself, so I bow to her greater expertise on this topic. Sam had evidently talked a lot about Alecia, and the social worker wasn't exactly blabbing all her secrets. Plus Alecia's motives were pure - she wanted to put herself in the best possible position to support Sam - and perhaps get some reassurance herself.

If I had a complaint or two, what would they be? I guess the first would be that while the novel talks a heck of a lot about the significant difference between a lesbian and a transgendered female to male, it never really went into what those differences were. I think it would have benefited from including that as a discussion between Sam and Alecia. And no, that doesn't mean one of them yelling "Penis!" and running!

I actually worked in the burn center in a hospital where female to male transgendering was performed. It was done in the burn center because they were the experts on cosmetic surgery (in a medical, rather than a purely cosmetic) sense and they had some very skilled doctors and nurses working there, and yes, a penis is an option.

Another complaint would be about raising the issue of prejudice against gays and transgendered people while rather hypocritically exhibiting prejudice in other areas! Alecia frequently chanted a refrain championing "country folk" over "city slickers" - like country was somehow more wholesome and smarter than city folks, who were somehow backward for never having seen a tree or touched a goat. This merely made Alecia seem backward, shallow, bigoted and hypocritical to me.

Besides, it isn't the black and white issue Alecia blindly pretends it is. Not everyone lives either deep in the city or way out in the back of beyond. There are very many people (I am one) who live on the fringe between the two. Besides, who would pay the farm subsidies if it were not for the urban taxpayers? Alecia's attitude and her strident spouting of this supposed dichotomy was annoying and uncalled for, and was the most obnoxious thing about her for me.

About 42% in, Alecia makes what could be taken as a derogatory comment about vegetarians, too. This was in context of her being country and therefore loving nature and animals - yet she has no problem slaughtering them and eating them wholesale. She doesn't seem to grasp that it consumes massive quantities of grain to feed cattle so people can, in turn, eat the meat. She doesn't know that if meat eaters of the western 'civilized' world gave up maybe a twentieth of their meat consumption it would release enough grain to feed the world's starving populations. To me this made Alecia seem ignorant instead of wise about the world. It made her provincial and way younger than her seventeen years.

There were some technical issues with the novel, too, that some serious editing would have cured. One thing which really jumps out is the scarcity of chaptering. Text runs on from one unrelated event to another with little more than a sharp sign (#) to indicate a break, and sometimes not even that. This makes for crude interruptions in reading while the reader tries to figure out if they turned more than one page/swiped more than one screen. A few more chapter breaks to divide-up the narrative would have improved reading flow for me.

Having said all of that, this novel was definitely worth reading. Aside from the issues I've raised, it was well-written in a very engaging style, it fearlessly broached sensitive and important topics, and I was one hundred percent on-board with it.

If Rachel Eliason is looking for beta readers for future projects, I volunteer right now!


Friday, September 5, 2014

Love and Other Unknown Variables by Shannon Lee Alexander


Title: Love and Other Unknown Variables
Author: Shannon Lee Alexander
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WARTY!


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

Erratum:
p8 "bicep" it's actually "biceps" although with the number of authors making this mistake these days, I'm probably in the minority already when it comes to appropriate English.
p65 "grit my jaw"? I don't know what that means. 'Grit my teeth' makes sense. "Grit my jaw"? Not so much.

It took nine seconds to turn the first page! This wasn't helped by multiple endpapers. I think it's because the pages are images - or at least background images - of graph paper and it really slows the page turning in Adobe Digital Editions. I can;t vouch for it in other electronic media, but it was annoying to say the least, and there were many beginning pages:
the praise page - why in an ebook (more on this anon)?
blank page
title page
blank page
title page with author's name
publication details page
dedication page
blank page
quote from Einstein page showing his ignorance of biochemistry. Einstein was not a chemist
blank page
I wouldn't note these unremarkable pages except that every one of them took time measured in seconds to turn the page.

I know there are "rules" (so-called) about how a book should be laid out to keep Congress happy - standardization rules - but to me it makes no sense to treat an ebook as though it were a print book. And if these "rules" are so cast in iron, why are they not adhered to in audio books? Hah! So much for a publishing code. They're more like guidelines really....

It makes equally as little sense to include third-party recommendations (for the book you're already reading) in an ebook. This doesn't work on me, but in a print book, when you're looking through it in the library or in the book store, I can see that recommendations from people you've never heard of and have no reason to trust might sway some potential readers, but in an ebook? You've already bought or borrowed the ebook sight unseen. Clearly you're already about to read it. So what on Earth is the purpose of the recommendations?!

Chapter one starts on page three of all pages, and speaks of tragedy so we know that this novel isn't going to end well, and it's pretty obvious how it will end because the first person narrator isn't the one who's going to die. How could he be telling this story if he did?! The thing is that this might be all well and good if it started well, but it didn't.

We meet the first person PoV narrator. This isn't my favorite perspective by a long chalk, since it's all 'me' all the time and that's way too much "me' for me. Once in a long while an author can carry it, but unless it's done really, really well, it just smacks of undue self-importance and destroys the reading experience for me - especially if the novel has a purportedly tragic ending. Even if the first page hadn't given it away we'd know that tragedy was in her future because she's an artist.

Anyway, the protag (Chuck, as in a part of a cow or part of an electric drill) is unable to keep his hands to himself where girls are concerned and despite supposedly being MIT material is far too dumb to grasp that he can't go manhandling people without their expressed consent. This behavior is inexplicable given that his best friend is actually a girl, Greta, with whom he's been acquainted for some considerable time. I guess he has so little respect for his best friend that he's unwilling to learn a single thing from her.

Chuck attends the Brighton School of Math and Science, but it hasn't even taught him that you cannot simply move the hair of the girl in line in front of you if want to see the tattoo on her neck, and if you do inappropriately so touch her, then the way to apologize isn't to inappropriately touch her again. This is where the "bicep" enters the picture. I'm going to write a novel about "The Bicep". Yeah! Kiss my bicep, people!

Chuck's sole observation about this girl (other than the tattoo and the fact that she sports a "bicep") is that she's "too beautiful"! Not just beautiful but too beautiful. Oh, and she smells amazing, so immediately we've classified her as a species of orchid, not a person.

Yeah, I know he can't nail her on anything else since he doesn't even know her, and superficial appearance and smell are all he has to go on, but seriously? "Too beautiful"? For what? For a glamor magazine? For a beauty pageant? To live? Why doesn't he just slaughter her right there? Beautiful is her sole defining characteristic already? We know it is because he uses it on both of his first two meetings with her. Oh and she has a chip in her tooth because even they who are too beautiful need the trope "small chip on the bottom corner of her central incisor" (yes, central! Charlotte evidently has an odd number of teeth) to give them an adorable flaw.

Could we not have gone somewhere else for a change? Please? Pretty please? Or even somewhere else even if it was still in the same neighborhood? Like not beautiful but attractive? Good-looking? Appealing? Warm? Unforgettable? Anything other than the tiredest bullshit in YA fiction: beautiful? Why is it that YA writers have the hardest time thinking outside the book?

Coincidence of coincidences, Charlotte - the beautiful tattoo - is now Chuck's sister Becca's best friend. Oh and she's known as Charley because that makes her too cool as well as too beautiful. But Becca won't call her that because having two Charlies is too much even though her brother Charlie is actually known as Chuck. Wait, what? If Charlotte is now wanting to be known as Charlotte instead of the detestable 'Charley', how does Becca even know that she was referred to as Charley by her older sister? Did Charlotte blab to an almost stranger the very name by which she doesn't want to be known? Not too bright, is she?


Hmmm!

I made it only a third of the way through this and I had to push myself to get even that far. It was too cloying, too slow, too uneventful, too meaningless, too cliched, too sugary, too vacuous, with characters which were too flat and uninteresting, and quite frankly, Chuck's obsessive-compulsive addiction to Charlotte's beauty above and beyond anything else was a huge turn-off. This contest between science and art has been done to death. Oh, and yes, you can scientifically measure love and beauty! Humans are rooted in biology; biology is rooted in chemistry; chemistry is rooted in physics; physics is rooted in math.

The bottom line is that I really just did not like these characters. They were too trope and cookie-cutter-ish to stand out. There was nothing about them to make them any different from your standard geek guy and standard too beautiful to live girl. I cannot in good conscience recommend this novel.


Friday, August 29, 2014

The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider


Title: The Beginning of Everything
Author: Robyn Schneider
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

For about 90% of this novel I was convinced I would rate it positively, but that last ten percent or so killed it for me. The ending was not only unbelievable given what we'd been told of the main two characters, it was just ridiculous.

Some people have compared this novel with the work of John Green, who I can't stand, so I am glad I didn't read any of that before I picked this up otherwise I would never have read it. This novel succeeds where the absurdly pretentious and laughably ethereal Green fails so catastrophically. Despite how bad this was in some critical parts, it still made Green's writing look like a series of bumper stickers, but in the end, the good writing wasn't nearly enough to make up for the poor plotting.

This novel began its life titled Severed Heads, Broken Hearts. I guess that's what happens when Big Publishing™ gets its grasping fingers on your title, because the original summed it up perfectly: there actually is a severed head and a (metaphorical) broken heart, but the real severing and breaking all takes place on the plot. I think a lot of people might presume that the new title refers to the main female character showing up in the main male character's life, but the beginning of the title is really where this novel ends.

I normally detest first person PoV novels, but this one was so well-written generally speaking, and so un-pretentious (aside from a paragraph here and there) that for the most part, I didn't even notice the 1PoV, much less become annoyed by it, so kudos and thanks to the author for that.

Ezra Faulkner and his best friend Toby Ellicot are on a roller-coaster ride at Disneyland when the guy in front of them stands up right before a low overhang, resulting in his head (sans his body) ending up in Toby's startled hands. The result of this - of the infamy that will not leave Toby alone - is a major cause in the two best friends drifting apart between the ages of twelve and seventeen, when another major event - this time affecting only Ezra, brings them back together.

In the intervening five years, Ezra has progressed (if you want to think of it that way) to become a jock (after a fashion) and a really popular guy, hanging out with other jocks and getting whatever dates he wants. He's dating cheerleader Charlotte, until he discovers her in flagrante de-dick-do with some random guy in a bedroom at a party. How Ezra can even give her the time of day after this is a mystery, but despite what she has done to him and the despicable way she had treated him when they had been dating, he never turns his back on her - although he is smart enough not to be seduced by her again, so I guess he isn't completely dumb.

Because he leaves the party early as a result of Charlotte's appalling betrayal of him, Ezra ends-up being in his car when a big Jeep SUV, which ran a stop sign, slams into him - although how the stop sign is relevant is a mystery. Ezra's knee is shattered, effectively terminating his budding tennis career, which he wasn't sure he really wanted anyway, but it means that he's now out of the rut he was in, and feeling at a loose end - if not several of them.

It's not only the rut, though. Ezra is out of things altogether for the entire summer, and he feels like an outsider when he returns to school. His old friends don't seem to want to exclude him because of his injury, but he feels excluded nonetheless, and since he's signed up for the debate team, he finds himself hanging with the artsy, nerdy crowd, which includes his old friend Toby. who adopts him without any problem during an hilarious scene at the school's pep rally.

As soon as we see mention of Cassidy Thorpe, the new, quirky girl in school, it's obvious that she's going to be Ezra's love interest, and it soon becomes obvious what her 'dark secret' is - its not dark, just obvious. The fact that there's no mention whatsoever of the name of the guy driving that jeep SUV ought to clue you in to what the nature of this secret is.

This was what was the least realistic and least believable for me and what began to sour the story. It makes no sense at all that Ezra wouldn't realize who Cassidy might be or how she might connect to his past, and it makes no sense that someone as smart as she supposedly is wouldn't put two and two together, so the big break-up at the end was disingenuous and way too forced for my taste.

Another issue I took was with Ezra's exalted jock status. He was on the tennis team for goodness sakes! That doesn't mean that he was a nobody, but I found it hard to believe, given the tight focus in college and high school on football and basketball (and everything else be damned), that he would be the star jock we're expected to believe he is. I detest the mentality that these two sports are everything and nothing else matters in schools. It's primitive and pathetic, so kudos to Schneider for not going the most traveled path here and making him a football or basketball star, but it didn't seem realistic to me that he would have the status he'd had when he was 'merely' a tennis player - and the team wasn't doing that great anyway.

Nor did it make any sense that Ezra would not have one friend among the entire team that he would hang with or talk to on the phone! Nor did it make any sense that none of his jock friends would visit him in the hospital after his accident. Nor, given what we learn of him in school that year after the accident, did it make any sense that he would have a whole heck of a lot in common with those jocks to begin with. So, for me there were a lot of twisted issues here which spelled bad writing - at least in terms of plotting.

on the positive side, I really, really liked the way this was written with regard to the repartee between the main characters. It played out so easily. It was literate, witty, funny, and engaging. I felt tempted to give it five stars just for its Doctor Who references alone, but of course, that would be very naughty of me. Had I not run into issues like the ones outlined above (and more below), I would definitely have rated this positively. What tipped the balance irretrievably into the negative was the trashy and unbelievable ending.

I don't believe a novel has to have a happy ending, although I would argue it has to have some sort of resolution at the end, so it wasn't that this ended the way it did which bothered me per se; it was that it ended the way it did despite this ending not even remotely jiving with what we'd been told about the characters for ninety percent of the novel.

As exhibit one, let's take the two main female characters in Ezra's life: Charlotte the ex and Cassidy the next. I submit to you, members of the jury, that there was - for all practical purposes - no difference between the two despite Schneider's ham-fisted effort to try and starkly differentiate them for us. I submit that despite being encouraged to believe that Cassidy was streets ahead of Charlotte for being smart, and deep, and caring, she actually was worse than Charlotte.

At least with Charlotte, what you saw was what you got. Cassidy, on the other hand, we're expected to believe, could be so shallow and blind as to betray Ezra, treat him like dirt, keep him in the dark, refuse to talk to him about a critical issue, and be so dumb that she could see no way out of their supposed dilemma than to break up with him and avoid him like the proverbial plague.

What a bunch of coyote shit.

We're expected to believe that the reason she keeps him out of her home is because of her brother and conflict with her parents, yet she's already doing this long before she knows for sure who Ezra is. It makes no sense.

I could not credit that she would totally cut Ezra off without explanation, and with outright lies given everything we'd been told about her up to that point, and given their feelings for each other. No, That does not work. I can't believe she was so dumb she never figured out what had happened - and no, confusing Ezra with a tree doesn't get you out of that jail free.

I can't believe he was so dumb that he believed her lie. I can't believe he was so dumb that he didn't figure out what was going on. OTOH, he did continue to date Charlotte despite her treating him like dirt - at least until that fateful party, so maybe he really was as dumb as he looks. Talking of which, I can't believe the driver would get away with a hit and run like that either. Yeah, it can happen, but no, it's not really credible.

Oh, and Schneider really needs to look up coyotes in wikipedia or somewhere before she starts trying to pretend that they're five feet long (yeah, if you include the tail, but that's dishonest in the context of this novel). Coyotes are only about three feet long in the body, and two feet tall. In short, they're the same size as a standard poodle, give or take.

She kept harping on the coyotes for no good reason, and the reason she mistakenly thought was good was pure bullshit. Coyotes do not behave like the one she depicted. They're not serial killers and they do not randomly approach humans with canicide in mind. And where were Ezra and Cassidy? They were right there and neither one lifted a finger, so their sadness afterwards is nonsensical.

I can't recommend this novel - not unless you're just going to read the first ninety percent of it and skip the lame ending, and even then you'd have to contend with Le Stupide.