Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steampunk. Show all posts

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Mark of the Dragonfly by Jaleigh Johnson


Title: The Mark of the Dragonfly
Author: Jaleigh Johnson
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

The audio book very ably read by Kim Mai Guest.

This novel is set in the land of Solace which is so ironically named as to be almost a method of torture. Every day the land is pummeled by meteor storms. The thing is that there are three oddities about these storms: they're confined to a fairly well-defined area or zone, they're accompanied by a toxic green dust, and they contain artifacts which you wouldn't normally expect to find in a meteor - such as a watch, or a music box.

Because of the reliability of the storms and the value of what they bring, a scavenging and trade culture has flourished around them. Towns have grown up - 'scrap' towns which are so lowly and unstable that they're numbered, not named - along the boundary of the storm zone, and after every meteor fall, once the evil dust has settled, the local residents, known as scrappers, charge into the area to see what they can find to sell. The faster you get in there, the more likely you are to find a 'treasure', but if you get there too soon, there's not only the dust to contend with - you might get hit by a late meteor strike.

Piper Linny (note this was an audio book, so the spellings are guesses!) is a thirteen-year-old who lost her dad to an industrial accident in the city, and is now alone, trying to eke-out a living on her wits and skills, which fortunately are significant.

Piper never had a chance to bury her father's body because she couldn't afford to have it shipped home, much less go to the city herself to attend his burial. She's poor, but she scratches out a precarious living, and she has her family home's roof over her head. She's a 'scrapper' who raids the meteor fields and trades what she recovers, but she's also a gifted mechanic (inappropriately described as a 'machinist' in the novel) who can sometimes fix-up a find before she sells it on, and thereby making far more 'coin' on it.

Piper has a close friend, the young Micah, and he's a bit too precipitous with the meteor game. One day he goes out during a storm and Piper crazily plunges out after him. This makes zero sense because Micah is only 'important' in the beginning of the novel After that, he disappears and is never heard from or mentioned again. Obviously he was only a very clumsy and amateur tool which Johnson uses to propel Piper out into a storm she would never risk otherwise.

Why does she brave the storm? Ultimately, it's in order to find Anna, not Micah. Anna is a special case and it soon becomes quite obvious 'who' and what she is. So Piper finds her as a broken girl in a wrecked traveling party, caught away from shelter when the meteor storm hit. Despite her being at death's door, it would appear, Anna recovers under Piper's evidently magic touch.

Anna is as damaged as Piper in many ways, and she becomes even more interesting when Piper discovers that she's the girl with the dragonfly tattoo, indicating to all that she's under the protection of the neighboring king. Piper realizes that Anna is her ticket out of hell - literally, since she allows the two of them free passage on the 401 - a steam engine which runs passengers and freight across the territories. With the expected reward for returning Anna safely to her family, Piper can set herself up on in the city and finally have the life of which she's long dreamed.

So far so good, but from that point on the story plummeted downhill, and while I kept wanting to like it and wanting to rate it highly for its originality and strong portrayal of the two main girls - unusual in a steam-punk, much less a YA novel, the mind-numbing tediousness of the train trip was what killed it for me - that and the fact that nothing is explained. There's no indication that this is part of a series, although I suspect it will be, yet we learn absolutely nothing whatsoever about what's going on here.

So while I willingly grant kudos for an original concept, and for two strong female characters, and I love the concept of "The 401", the male love interest for Piper was a complete bust - he was a non-entity, the villain was wishy-washy, the train ride tedious (anyone who can make a steam train ride tedious has serious issues), and the lack of resolution truly disappointing if not down-right angering. Where was the editor here? Once again Big Publishing™ = epic fail.

I don't know how old Jaleigh Johnson is, but she looks like she's fifteen, and this novel had too many of the elements of a fifteen-year-old's fanfic touch. Some of it was brilliant, but it takes more than brilliant bits to make a novel a worthy read, and this one didn't get there. I will, however, be keeping my eyes on her work for the future. If she steps away from this messed-up world and tries something different (that doesn't involve elves and fairies), I will want to read it.


Friday, April 25, 2014

Take Back the Skies by Lucy Saxon






Title: Take Back the Skies
Author: Lucy Saxon
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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.

Errata:
P101 - 101 are three instances of the case being wrong: "Dalivia have control of Kasem" should be 'has control' and "if the Angliyan government don't..." that last work should be 'doesn’t'. "The rest of Tellus have…" that last work should be 'has' - this kind of error appears several times.
P103 "Everything was up in arms" should be "Everything was up in the air" maybe?
P140: Saxon makes the "bicep" mistake (it's biceps).

I don't get the title for this novel. The story has nothing whatsoever to do with taking back any skies! Lucy Saxon, it turns out, is not only a really cool character from Doctor Who (and what could be a sweeter name for a character than that?!), she's also a real life woman who wrote this novel. By all accounts, she did it when she was sixteen, which is quite a remarkable achievement. That said, the fact that this was written by a sixteen-year-old shows a little too uncomfortably. The writing isn’t bad. In fact in general, it’s technically rather good, but the amateur plotting highlights her inexperience, and it also proves that Big Publishing™ is a guarantor neither of big success, nor of big quality.

This novel was too long, and it needed an editor who wasn't afraid to risk upsetting a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old by pointing out that it needs some serious tightening. This is ironic, because this is a steam-punk novel which begins with its main character quite literally learning the ropes, and having to tighten knots and bolts on the sky-ship. This character is 14 year old Catherine Hunter, who lives a privileged life on a world named Tellus, where familiar but rather twistedly-named nations (Adena, Angliya, Dalivia, Erova, Kasem, Mericus, Ropastal, Sibarene) are at war with one another.

Catherine doesn't want to lead a life of "privilege" shackled to an obnoxious suitor in an arranged marriage and quickly slips away from her father during a trip to discuss her unwanted upcoming nuptials. She stows away on a fine-looking merchant sky-ship named Stormdancer, which appears to be built like a sail-ship but it flies. This crew also does a little smuggling on the side - or more accurately in the false bottom. Cat (as she now renames herself) is improbably quickly accepted onto the crew - all of whom think she's a boy now that her hair is cut short and she's dressed in old, dirty pants, and a baggy shirt.

And that's one big problem with this novel: everything was far too too easy: from Cat's initial escape from her father, to her finding the perfect sky-ship, to being accepted onto the ship, to learning about the government's plot, to bringing down this same government. There were no hiccups, no problems, no set-backs, no tension. If this novel had been written for pre-teens, then this would have still been a problem in my book, but much less of one. Unfortunately, Cat is in the YA age range, and this is not good enough, although given the low standards of all-too-many readers, it might take off. I'm guessing that’s what the publisher is gambling on. And who knows, as the author matures and grows in experience (and assuming she can find an editor who is willing to put quality ahead of a writer's feelings), maybe future volumes in this series will be significantly better. That's something for which we can hold out a hope.

Another problem was that there's a bit too much fluttering of heart at sight of bare chest and at slim strip of bare flesh above waistband when the Mary Sue trope male interest shows up. I could have done without that. It’s possible to depict a character as liking another, or as experiencing a growing attraction to another character without hammering me over the head with it every few pages, but YA authors don't seem to have grasped that, except in a few rare and precious cases.

So anyway, Cat and Fox (cute, yeah?) are thrust inevitably exactly where we expect them to go: into tired and clichéd YA romance situations, such as when she sees him "accidentally" with his shirt off, and when she and he have to hide in a cramped closet together. Note that this isn’t a problem of a sixteen-year-old's writing. All-too-many YA authors, who are older and more experienced, and who really should know a lot better, write these same appallingly drab trope scenes. I live in hopes of finding writers who can tell a story about a strong female main character without her necessarily needing to have a guy (or a girl for that matter) in tow, or at the very least, spin the yarn with some inventive and new flirtatious situations in which the couple may find themselves. Otherwise tale becomes stale, and that's the end of it for me.

At one point, Cat comes off as repulsively arrogant. Fox has a problem with another guy, and she determines that it must either be that guy's personality or it must be the way he looked at Cat! Seriously? That struck a really sour note with me. This is not the Cat we were promised in the beginning of this novel. What we have here is bait-and-switch. We were promised a strong female, but what we were given is actually a wussy, fluttering Harlequin romance chick!

The problem is that this behavior kicks against everything Cat has been thinking prior to this point, and there's nothing worse than a main character who obsesses over herself. As if that were not bad enough, on the very next page we have Cat spontaneously blurting out that she wouldn’t marry the guy. That really started turning me off this novel - her slavering, simpering addiction to the secretive Fox, who childishly treated her like dirt when he discovered that she was a girl, and who calls her 'girlie' (seriously? Way to demean and belittle your partner), and about whom she knows quite literally nothing. I lost all respect for Cat at this point.

As for Fox, I never did like him. He's so trope-ish as to be a caricature. As I mentioned, he's also a Mary Sue in the traditional sense, in that he could never do a thing wrong: he could get them out of any situation and he could fix or solve any problem. Unfortunately he couldn't fix his own juvenile attitude towards Cat when he adopted a surly and argumentative attitude towards her after he discovered Cat's true gender. This was entirely unrealistic and ham-fisted as he was shown being alternately antagonistic and then conciliatory towards her.

Cat further goes down the toilet when she and Fox, snooping around a government institution, discover something horrid, and she turns into a spineless coat-clinger. This is the same girl we were introduced to, 200 pages before, who was feisty, determined, self-motivated, and all but fearless. What a 180 we’ve done! Do boys in this world emit some sort of brain-deadening pheromone which girls absorb through their skin, and which then destroys their brain cells? At this point, the once feisty and independent Cat refuses to go to sleep unless Fox is next to her, holding her hand. This is truly pathetic! Note to YA authors: do not suck the spine out of your main female character - no matter what! - and especially not when you've set her up so well, only to cheat us out of the very character you promised you'd deliver.

But worse than all this, the plot ceases to make sense at this point. It’s hard to explain without giving away more spoilers than even I'm known for, but let me try. There is an element of child labor and child abuse in this novel, and there's also an element of steam-punk robotics. The child abuse consists of children being forcibly appropriated from their family at the age of thirteen, in order to fight in a never-ending war. It turns out that the children are actually more connected with the robotics, but given how advanced the robotics are in this world, this plot point makes absolutely zero sense. It was here that I lost interest in this novel and lightly skimmed the rest of it (about a quarter or a third of it).

In an interview, the author is reported as saying, "I find the whole concept of a strong female character to be incredibly frustrating in that it implies it’s an unusual thing for women to be strong", but if this is what she actually said, then she's simply not getting it. Those of us who demand strong female characters aren't saying that women cannot be strong, or that such people are unusual or unexpected. What we’re saying is that YA writers (all-too-many of whom are female ironically enough) are giving us weak, spineless, dependent female characters - characters who are effectively slaved to guys (yes, plural! Where do you think the sad and tired trope love-triangle came from?!). This is where they're weak - in the stories, not in real life.

The female characters we get in the stories are air-headed appendages, who are ineffectual and ultimately uninteresting. They simply do not get it done. That's the problem, and writers like Saxon are contributing to it with characters like this. Yes, there's a host of amazing, wonderful, fascinating, intriguing, amusing, enthralling, irresistible and kick-ass women in the real world, so the real issue here is: why don’t we see far more of them in novels, especially in novels written by female authors, and especially in novels which are read by young women who are being done a major disservice by these authors, because they're not being given the female leads they deserve, need, and have earned.

I will grant Saxon the twist at the end. That was not what I expected, but even it is a trope, given that this is purportedly the first in a series, perhaps a hexalogy. This ending also unfortunately makes a liar out of Cat, but worse than that, it makes no sense. Maybe I missed something critical in my skimming which would adequately explain this, but given what I have read, I honestly have no faith that there actually is such an explanation to be had. From what I understand, the series will not necessarily follow the same characters in future volumes, but it will be set in the same world, so maybe this will make future volumes worth the reading. As it is, I cannot see myself pursuing this series. It just doesn’t have what it takes to be great. I’d recommend to Saxon that she read the Jim Butcher Codex Alera series to learn how to create a strong female character, particularly in the form of Kitai, who's my all time favorite.

On the positive side, Saxon definitely looks like she does have something to contribute as she matures, and hopefully writes material outside of this canon. Maybe then, I'll come back to her and try again, but this novel I cannot recommend unless your standards are really low and you're desperate for any kind of adventure reading material! It seems to me that this is one of those novels where a publisher is less interested in delivering a quality read, than it is in getting its hooks into a writer whom it felt it could milk for a few volumes, and I despise that attitude vehemently. Maybe they felt they saw a young Jo Rowling here, and maybe in time, that's what Saxon can become, but she's not there yet.


Monday, December 9, 2013

A Spark Unseen by Sharon Cameron





Title: A Spark Unseen
Author: Sharon Cameron
Publisher: Scholastic
Rating: WARTY!

So what's the third volume to be called? A Bark Untreed? A Quark Unbecoming? Maybe there should be a competition? A Spark Unseen is the second novel in the series which kicked off with The Dark Unwinding, which I reviewed favorably back in early July, but wasn't sure that I would pursue the series. I guess I decided to go for it, because I didn't hesitate to pick this up from the library as soon as I found it there. I got three sequels off their 'new' shelves one after another. What an exciting moment that was! I couldn't believe it! Unfortunately, two of the three have so far turned out to be really awful, including this one.

Anyway, it's two years on from that original story (for reasons unknown) as this story begins with two French guys breaking into Katharine Tully's bedroom to kidnap uncle Tully, but they fail, and when the British government shows that it’s hell-bent upon holding Tully and Katie hostage while they try to get him to develop a torpedo in the shape of a fish, Katie takes drastic action. Why they waited two years - why everyone paused for two years is completely unexplained and makes zero sense.

Katie declares that her uncle has died, and she orchestrates his speedy burial before the government can take herself and her uncle into their "protective custody". Secretly, she dumps her (drugged) uncle inside a trunk and removes him from his modest estate, heading to France where she hopes to discover what has happened to Lane - her favored young man who preceded her to France two years ago and has since been reported dead - by the British government. So, other than the fact that Cameron evidently doesn't know that 'pence' is plural (p15 "...one pence..." should be "...one penny...") we seemed like we were off to a good start. But little did I know....

At only one third the way in, I was definitely not enjoying this novel. I was already skipping what I considered to be boring parts. Uncle Tully became tedious in the extreme. The problem is that nothing is happening but artificiality: cheap "scary" moments, annoyingly vague threats, absurdly mysterious men. Yes, in other words, it’s really badly and amateurishly written. This is the problem with the ubiquitous, creeping, insistent trilogy of YA fiction. You may love the first, the last or even the middle, but you rarely love all three volumes. Why, other than the obvious avarice, do publishers demand them? Why do writers cave-in and write them? What was the last trilogy you read and found completely pleasing in all its parts? When did you read one which honestly told an engaging story which could not have been completely, competently, satisfactorily, and adequately related in only one volume?

Let's talk about insane coincidences in A Spark Unseen (if a spark is unseen, does it really spark?!). How did it happen that a friend (Mrs Hardcastle) of her despised Aunt Alice is living quite literally right next door to her new home? What are the odds of that happening by chance? Yet not a single person in Katie's entire group even thinks for a second that there's anything remotely suspicious about this entirely artificial arrangement. Not only is she too dumb to even imagine a problem, she actually creates one with her snooping. I don’t get Katie's romping around Mrs Hardcastle's house exploring, uninvited, upstairs and listening at the walls. It isn't important at all to do this, yet she does it and gets caught thereby making herself far more suspicious than she would have been had she done nothing and instead simply let them wonder about any odd noises coming from their new next door neighbor.

And the bullshit M. Marchand? Amateur. It’s probably Lane in disguise, although if it is, Katie would have to be even more stupid than she already has proven herself to be to not recognize him, and he would have to be a complete jerk not to announce himself. I don’t know what his story is, but he's altogether too oily for my taste, and Katie is altogether stupid and entirely indecent in allowing him to escort her alone. And what’s with letting her new servants walk all over her? I was actually liking the DuPonts (the servants) better than any other characters, even as obnoxious as they are. That ought to relate something of my experience with this novel!

At about half-way through, there's no sign of Lane and many signs of how awful a character Katie is! I found myself living in hopes that he wouldn't show just for the hell of it! That would have been refreshing. Marchand is probably Lane's brother. I got to thinking that maybe it’s time to ditch Lane as an ally and tell him to take his street smarts and hit the road now their relationship has become a cul-de-sac? But the question remains: how are Katie and her uncle better off in Paris than if they'd simply taken the government's offer? And how can Katie be so selfish as to do this to her uncle for nothing more than pursuing her own selfish interest in finding Lane? At this point I not only didn’t like the novel, I neither liked nor respected the main character.

So I count this as a warty DNF! I was so tired of uncle Tully's madness, and of Katie's total lack of a spine, and one one asinine mystery piled on top of another, with neither sight nor sound of any of them ever being resolved, and with a sure conviction that the bulk of them were red herrings anyway, I said, "Enough is enough!" Life is too short to waste on trashy novels when there are so many good ones clamoring to be read!


Monday, November 4, 2013

A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway





Title: A Study in Ashes
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery 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 of any kind for this review.

Wow! Nine ebook reviews in three weeks was the challenge and I just met it! Now I see one of Net Galley's patented 'three week deadline' notices has just popped up on this one, as well! Never again will I offer to read so many ebooks in so short a time! Fortunately some of those nine (three or four) were real clunkers, so I didn't have to read them all the way through before I knew how to rate them! The rest were acceptable enough that reading them didn't seem like a slog at all.

Anyway, this is the final review in my foray into the first three of Holloway's niece of Sherlock Holmes novels! And yes, I promise you it is the final review I shall do of any of her novels in this series. I have absolutely no desire to read any more. A Study in Ashes is a truly fitting name for a conclusion to this series since it all came to ashes in the end. I reviewed A Study in Silks at the beginning of October, and A Study in Darkness towards the end of that month. The first of these two I liked, the second I thought was awful. The third went downhill from there.

The problem with this series is that it's fundamentally fraudulent: I mean, why even mention Sherlock Holmes in your novel and book blurb, let alone boast a main character who's his niece, and then betray every single thing for which Holmes stood by rendering his supposed Protégé into a complete Mary Clueless, who actually does near to zero investigating? Why invest in a girl who has shown herself to be completely undisciplined, a non-thinker, slow, witless, shiftless, thoughtless, and boring? She's much better qualified to pursue what she does best, and incessantly: bemoaning her fate, and pining for Nick-ed the thief, aka worthless piece of trash, and when she's not suffering the wilts and the vapors over him, pining for Toby-ass the worthless piece of trash. I can't respect a character like that, much less actually root for her, or want to read about her. The idea for this series was really cool, but it was sorrowfully wasted in execution (execution is what these stories begged for!). The pseudo steam-punk was a nice touch, but it never really got off the ground in any useful sense except for sensationalism. I could have done happily without the Deva's, notwithstanding how amusing Bird and Mouse were, but even they would have been tolerable had the detective we were implicitly promised actually showed up for work. She never did.

I tried to get into this particular volume three or four times, but after wading through the first half-dozen or so chapters and skimming some of the others, I could find nothing in it to even generate my interest, let alone sustain it! The most interesting character, Imogen, was completely AWOL in the portions that I read. Evelina, supposedly the main character, did nothing but show herself to be clueless, impotent, incompetent, and morbidly self-centered. She once had a job (in volume two) where she could learn everything she wanted, but she had evidently passed that up (for whatever reason) by volume three, to go to a school where all she's allowed to learn (in that era) are 'proper lady's' topics. She's apparently content with this since she resists being thrown out of the college.

Toby-ass proves himself to be an even bigger shit in this novel than he achieved in either of the previous two, which takes some believing: now he has a wife and a son neither of whom he gives a damn about. I can see some logic to his having problems with a wife who was forced upon him, but I cannot countenance his treatment of her. She was a good, fun, and interesting person, and his behavior towards her is not only ungentlemanly, it's thoroughly unconscionable in someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys. Why would I like a jerk such as him, or be interested in what he wants does, thinks, or feels? Alice, his wife, is nowhere in sight in this novel either (not in the portion I read), which is a shame, because she was my second favorite character after Imogen.

But it's not his treatment of her which completely writes him off, since I fully expect this numb-nuts to behave badly towards women; no, the killer is his treatment of his son. That's completely unacceptable to me, and for Evelina to harbor feelings for this jerk tells me a lot about her - a lot of unpleasant things, that is. I have no interest in learning any more about any of these privileged losers, so I said, "The hell with this series!" Life is too short to waste it on pointless, uninteresting, and even downright irritating prose. I'm glad to be done with this un-nourishing stubble and moving to graze on greener pastures.


Sunday, October 20, 2013

A Study in Darkness by Emma Jane Holloway





Title: A Study in Darkness
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery 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 of any kind for this review.

I reviewed A Study in Silks, the first novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Yes, I know I said I was just starting this one! I did start it, but I had to put it on a hasty hold when I discovered, much to my dismay, that several books I have for review for Net Galley were showing "three weeks" deadlines in the reader: read it by then or lose it forever! I've never seen that before, but then I've never had so many ebooks lined up for review before, either, so I had to go take care of some of them before I can get back to this one! Sorry! Corporate responsibility and all that jazz....

However, I find myself this weekend not in a position to read the current deadline novel. There's no kindle edition of it, the Adobe reader doesn't work on Ubuntu, and Kindle won't read the PDF which is a protected file! Yes, they have it nailed down tightly, but that means I can't do what they expect me to do: review it for them! So I'm back to reading the "Study" series, but I have to report mixed feelings about what I'm reading. On the one hand, she doesn't know the difference between a decent romance and YA crapola. On the other, and this is a very pleasant surprise, Holloway does know the difference between stanch and staunch! Kudos to her for that much at least.

Anyone following my blog will know that I've identified (if I recall) three writers of late who do not know the difference, and as a writer, I think things like this are important because they tell us something about the author, and about book editors. If you cannot trust your publisher to get the cover right, and you cannot trust the blurb writer to get the back-cover right, and you cannot trust your editor to catch things like confusion between two similar words with entirely different meanings, then where is the advantage of going the legacy publishing route? Self-publish! But only if you are strong in your written language, and confident in being able to do the job yourself. However, if you got the other route, do be prepared for serious cluelessness, blindness, and moronic publishers who do not recognize talent when they see it. Recall that the following record companies turned down The Beatles in the early 1960's: Columbia, Decca, Oriole, Philips and Pye. Decca told them that guitar groups were on the way out, and that The Beatles had no future in show business! Don't lose heart. Unless, of course, you write romances as badly as Holloway does!

I must now address a serious shortcoming which shows up disturbingly in the first ten percent of this novel, and which is the sad debasing of Evelina. You will recall if you read volume one in this series that Holloway smartly tore up her playbook at the end, and scattered her four main protagonists, which I considered a very good decision. Imogen, Evelina's best friend was separated from both Evelina (who was banished from Lord Bancroft's home), and from her beau, Bucky, who was banned from her life. Niccolo, whom I consider to be a complete loser, became a pirate. That should convey all you need to know about his worthless hide, and that's also all I need to say about him - except to add that once I discovered that he was in this novel, I decided to skip every chapter in which he plays a leading role (which meant gliding happily past all of chapters five and six, for example). My worst fear is that he will not be hunted down and hung, but will come roaring back into the story, and it seems that fear is to become a reality. Indeed, Holloway starts this story with him, which I found depressing enough as it was.

And what of Evelina? Well, we learn nothing of her summer except that she was in Devon, a county in south-west England, but is now back staying with her uncle Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, where she receives a letter from Imogen begging her to join herself and Alice Keating for a month before Tobias (or sorry-ass if you prefer - I do) marries Alice. Evelina has an attack of the wilts and the vapors over this, at which point she lost me as her champion. She's supposed to be a smart, strong, astute, incisive sleuth, but she's none of that so far in this novel, nor at all in the first novel. She displays none of her uncle's intellect whatsoever. Holloway actually uses the term "star-crossed" to describe Evelina and Tobias, which pretty much made me puke all over the Kindle (not advised).

Holloway needs to buck-up Evelina and get her mind away from that loser Tobias, who purposefully shot her uncle and would have killed him if he could. How did Che put it in Don't Cry for me Argentina: "Why all this howling hysterical sorrow?" This pathetic juvenile fainting away over him is entirely stomach-turning. Evelina needs to be given a new beau: someone worthy of what she can be, and she herself needs to become worthy to have him. Right now she's worthless as a character and as a human being. Holloway seems to have got it right with Imogen and Bucky (although there is precious little of either of them in this volume), so hopefully she'll bite the bullet and get it done for Evelina too, but I have grave doubts on that score. I think she's far too in love with her characters to ever dare kill them off, either practically or metaphorically, but maybe she'll surprise me.

Or maybe she won't. I almost tossed this novel at about 20% in, and moved on to something else. Sad-sack Tobias, of course, shows up at the hunting jamboree organized by Jasper Keating, the "Gold" King (steam-punk supremo). There was absolutely no surprise what-so-ever there. Neither was it a surprise when trollop Evelina and scum Tobias, fiancé of Alice Keating, (who happens to be a friend of Evelina's) flung themselves into each other's arms, neither of them caring two figs for Alice. So exactly how Dumb is Evelina? Don't get me started. And what kind of a lowlife jerk-off is Toby-ass? Evelina had one simple task at this hunter-gathering: to dig up useful information for her uncle and she blew it the very first chance she got, wilting like a used condom in the arms of the useless piece of trash who shot her uncle and contributed to building a bomb which blew up Holmes's home when he and Evelina were both in it. And now this faithless wench is having palpitations over this terrorist?

This novel was entirely unrealistic even within its own framework to this point. Evelina, supposedly a strong female lead, has shown herself to be completely worthless in her character's rôle, and nothing more than another air-headed appendage of a guy. And the guy is - how did Colonel Brandon put it in Sense & Sensibility? - "...expensive, dissipated, and worse than both." Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon described Toby-ass's character best in the movie version: "the worst sort of libertine". I need more than this in a main character if an author wants me to follow a series; much more. But at least we now know where the novel's title came from: it was in Keating's study, in the darkness, that they kissed, and Keating and Imogen found them in flagrante de lick spittle. Now not only is Toby-ass under Keating's thumb, so too, is Evelina. Way to go, Ms Stupid Bitch! Seriously: is it Holloway's intention to make a reader detest her characters? If so, then why?! If not, then why write this crap?

Fortunately, I didn't ditch the novel at that point. Though I was revolted by Holloway's ham-fisted handling of Evelina-Toby-ass train-wreck, I kept reading and was rewarded. So she gets kicked out of the hunter-gathering and heads back to London incognito as a spy for Keating, and she ends up working for Magnus - the guy who got blown up in volume one, but who we all of us knew for a fact would be back, because why invent a new villain when you can quite literally resurrect an old one?! Right now my favorite character in both of these volumes is Magnus. At least he has something going for him - like a spine maybe?!

Magnus is laying low, and apparently working for (or perhaps merely pretending to do so) King Coal, another of the steam barons. He runs a puppet theater, although why he does, I have no idea; there's no reason whatsoever for him to be doing this as far as I can see, especially if he has King Coal's patronage, and Holloway offers none. He is maintaining a stable of automatons, one of which is the very Serafina doll which was purportedly destroyed in volume one. No explanation there as to why she's still hale and hearty, and Serafina has a life of sorts. She's very advanced, verging on being sentient if not already there, and Magnus assures Evelina that he has killed no-one and no animal to create her as she is. OTOH, this novel is set during the era of Jack the Ripper - the very villain about whom Imogen is having very realistic dreams. I am now suspicious that Serafina is Jack the Ripper and these deaths are what animate her. But then we all know exactly how great my guesses are!

So now Holloway has married off Toby-ass to Alice Keating, the only way she can get Toby-ass and Evelina together is to kill off Alice. Will she do it? She really jumped the shark, fell short, and landed ass-first in the fish's maw with the kiss in the study in darkness, because the only witnesses to that event were Evelina, Toby-ass, Keating, and Imogen. But now Holloway expects us to believe that the story somehow magically "slipped out", and has spread so that everyone at the reception knows of it. How, exactly, did that happen? No explanation. Everyone is evidently blaming Evelina, but there's no word yet on whether Alice has even heard the tale.

Well, I got to 50% through this novel and became so ill that I could no longer continue. It sucks. There are some really brilliant pieces, but all of that is lost in a foul miasma of tedious pedantry and brain-dead story-telling. It turns out that Toby-ass seduced Alice during the summer and impregnated her, and then he doesn't have the gallantry to spend their wedding night with her or treat her like a human being. There is no way in hell this piece of human gutter-trash will ever get back into my good graces, and if Evelina ends up with him, then she's scum too as far as I'm concerned! It's that simple. Why would I care what happens to these whiny-assed losers? The sad thing is that I have a third volume of this to which I'm committed for a review. I have the horrible feeling that I may indeed end up committed - to an asylum when I start delving into that volume! But rest-assured I am going to take a serious break from this before I read episode three!

This novel is WARTY!


Friday, October 4, 2013

A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway





Title: A Study in Silks
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery 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 of any kind for this review.

Erratum:
p262 "His mouth twitch with ire." should be "His mouth twitched with ire."

I reviewed A Study in Darkness, the second novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Evelina Cooper is a niece of Sherlock Holmes. I had thought this must be through his older brother Mycroft, but it was a case of identity: Holloway has invented a non-existent sister called Marianne, who ran away to the circus! Now Evelina is an orphan with an overbearing grandmother. I was not impressed by this. I have to ask, Holloway my dear, What's on? I chose this novel and its two sequels (so I can review all three in a row) because it sounded like a great idea for a series, and I really loved the opening few pages: it really got hold of me and pulled me in, but I was led to expect a Holmes-esque novel and did not get one.

There's a wood sprite which appeared when Evelina was escaping from an attic by climbing out of the window and into a nearby tree. Yes, I was expecting elementary and got an elemental! Clearly the publicist is the man with the twisted lip - or is he the crooked man? So I'm thinking: did I just get duped by a freight and ditch? This was not at all what I come looking for when I'm told by a book blurb that this is a novel about Sherlock Holmes's niece! So we have Holmes, magic, fantasy, paranormal, automatons, demons, detectives, and steam-punk. Hmm. Why make her a relation of Sherlock Holmes and then leave me Strand-ed, betraying everything Arthur Doyle stood for in his delivery of the Holmes adventures? This Baker Street irregular made no sense to me, especially since there's really nothing in this novel, not even the appearance of Holmes himself, which reflects anything of the Doyle novels. Should I give it the five orange pips?

After getting past the beginning with no issues, I quickly started having some really mixed feelings about it. Okay, so we finally get a murder and Evelina is really doing a cracking job of sussing-out the clues, but no sooner do we have what I actually came looking for in this novel than I get handed the second stain: Holloway tosses in a completely gratuitous and appallingly tropish love triangle between her and a high-born heir to a lordship and also a lowlife from the circus. Honestly? Why in hell do women of all genders, aspire to write novels about strong female characters, and then hobble these same women with a crippling need for, and attendant dependency upon, the validation of not one but two, count 'em, two dancing men? And iffy men at that: these men are such clichés as to be truly, seriously, painfully pathetic.

I have to confess that she does make an effort with these two - to try and give them some substance - but at that point she'd already lost my good faith and wasn't making enough of an effort to regain it! I committed to reading and reviewing three of these novels (the first three in what is evidently an ongoing series), so I found myself dearly hoping this would improve, and Holloway started to come through for me as I read on, but she was too inconsistent, making me first enjoy what I read and then making me regret it by turns! For example, she made me fall in love with her for this one sentence on p123: "Silence resounded with all the majesty of an oriental gong." I have no idea why, but that just hit me right where my pleasure nodes are. Unfortunately, she came around one hundred eighty degrees right after that and saddened me.

She has now presented Evelina as secretly wanting marriage all along, and only deflected from that course by her impoverished circumstances. That seems unnecessarily genderist even in these circumstances. I know that Victorian women were raised this way, and all-too-many girls still are today, but even in reality not all Victorian women felt that way, nor traveled that path. There is no reason at all to present a fictional woman as being brain-washed by that idea unless your plot demands it. In this case, Holloway's plot does no such thing as far as I can tell; quite the opposite in fact, so why sell her main character down this particular river? I was very disappointed with this approach. However, as much as Holloway toys with my affections, addicting me one minute, and repelling me the next, I decided it was worth it, on balance, continue to read this. I pretty much have to if I'm going to proceed to volume two, and thence to three, anyway!

Here's another reason to love Holloway: "Even a stupid servant was more versatile and cost a fraction of the price." (p153). I am so glad she's smart enough to see the impracticality of a lot of the steam-punk stuff, favoring servants over automatons (although morally, it ought to be the other way around!) - so why can't she apply those obvious smarts to relationships and love triangles?! It's a bigger mystery than was Boscombe Valley, but that's not a patch on this howler exactly one third the way in describing an interaction between Evelina and one of her two male interests, Tobias, the wealthy son of a lord: "Her palms brushed the front of his jacket, feeling the soft, expensive fabric and the swell of firm, young muscle beneath. An ache throbbed deep in her body, blotting out common sense." Seriously? Evelina loves her a firm young muscle...!

Holloway improves things as she continues the story of the relationship between Evelina and Tobias, and it starts to mature intelligently and does have a real surprise at the end, which I didn't expect, so I can tell you without giving too much away that this love triangle did not go the way I had feared it would when I first read of it. Nick OTOH, is unsavory at best and pretty much went exactly where I thought he ought to end up even as I feared he wouldn't go there! I can say that Evelina continued to impress and develop, and that was where my main interest lay. And the story did stay focused, more or less, on the thing which first attracted Evelina's attention before it side-tracked into the magical.

Page 271 was interesting from my own oddball writerly perspective. I felt I'd entered a time loop when I clicked back a page. I had clicked back because I thought I'd clicked two pages forward instead of one (I hadn't, but this is a problem with ebooks and the Kindle). This page starts with "At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." and ends with "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage." So what happened to me was that in clicking from that page to the same page, thinking it was the next, I read: "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage. At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." It flows perfectly and took me a second to realize what I’d done. Minor weirding-out there!

But that’s not an authorship problem; in my case, it was a clueless reader problem! Maybe it's also of interest to an author interested in writing one of those self-navigation stories. These used to be common at one time, but are rare now. They’re interactive in a limited way, because at each page, you choose which page to jump to next from a selection of options presented at the bottom of the page. You could have your reader weirded-out quite nicely with a page like this one!

P271 was also of interest in that it sported this sickening sentence: "His hand on her arm sent a pleasant shiver down the back of her legs." It was a bit much, especially after I'd been feeling better about the YA trope romance between Tobias and Evelina. The worst parts were offset somewhat by Holloway's detailing of how smart Evelina was, for example when she turned away from the crowd and whispered to Tobias in order to avoid being overheard or having her lips read. Some might call that paranoid, but in the context of the novel it was very smart and I loved Evelina for doing it and, in turn, Holloway for writing that bit! Yes, I'm a sap for that kind of thing and not ashamed to admit it into polite company!

But later, Holloway makes the mistake of having Tobias use this Americanism: "I've always known you came from someplace different..." No son of a British lord, and especially not one in Victorian times, would use 'someplace'. It's 'somewhere'! That's a minor faux pas, but I kept getting vertigo from getting to a high point where I really enjoyed the writing, and then having the text swoop down low for one reason or another, before climbing back up again with the next Evelina bounty. And rest assured Evelina was not the only character who was worth the reading. Her best friend Imogen was equally entertaining, and didn't get anywhere near enough air time for my money (not that I paid any actual money!). Her relationship with "Bucky" was charming and entertaining to a wonderfully high degree - but not enough!

I do not, however, love Nick. The the final problem is that he is the creeping man, and not at all the kind of person with whom I would wish for a young lady of Miss Cooper sensitivities to spend her time. Holloway needs to kill him off heroically (she doesn't!). He is nothing but a horn-dog who has little respect for Evelina, spends the bulk of his time lusting after her, and comes uncomfortably close to raping her at one point in the novel, when he's in the throes of a magical communion with her. It's actually rather sickening, and even scary given his penchant for stalking Evelina. I don't like him at all as a character or as a friend of hers, so I was glad that he went the way he did, but not at all happy to discover that he's featured in the second of this series, as, I assume, is Tobias, or Toby-ass as he now ought to be known.

So in summary, I am rating this novel a worthy read, even though I did have a few issues with it. I had hoped for no magic or steam-punk, no fantasy, and definitely no trope romance, so why Holloway went there, I don't know, and given that she obviously had decided to go there, I can't understand why she chose to have Evelina related to Sherlock Holmes, unless it was nothing more than a cheap ploy to try and pull in readers. I suspect Holmes fans will be as annoyed and resentful of this ploy as I was. It seemed underhand to me to talk the reader up one way and then pull the rug out and send them another. This is no Sherlock Holmes tale, not even in spirit (and he is the dying detective!). It is, however, an entertaining tale for the most part, and even some of the magical stuff, particularly, Evelina's robotic mouse and bird, was really entertaining. The novel would have stood by itself without the Holmes Crutch to lean on. I have to wonder why no editor advised Holloway thus. But I am still giving this the the engineer's thumb up and moving on to volume two to see what I can find there.


Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The Friday Society by Adrienne Kress

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Title: The Friday Society
Author: Adrienne Kress
Publisher: Dial
Rating: WARTY!

Adrienne Kress has tried to promote this novel and rationalize her treatment of her three heroes here by claiming that she's subverting tropes, but I disagree. Yes, they are far from the worst examples of female abuse in YA writing, but they are nowhere near the paragons of feminism which she portrays them to be. You can read her version here and here.

This novel seems, at first blush, like a steam-punk novel mashed-up with a mystery, but it's really not. Not steam-punk, that is, and there is some mystery to it, but that's not necessarily what the author intended! I didn't like the very beginning; it seemed rather amateurish. Kress is not English and even though she lived in that country, she doesn’t seem to have quite mastered capturing the tone for people's thinking and modes of expression for the era. I understand that it was not her intention to be true to life (this is fiction, after all), but I'll share some thoughts on this later. What she did wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; I'm all for breaking molds (and even moulds!), but it does trip-up the reader somewhat to begin with. Again this is not necessarily a bad thing depending on where you're going and how far you take it with you! Unfortunately, Kress didn't seem to know where to go with this nor how to get there competently.

Having said that, I initially warmed up to this story rather quickly. Kress has an interesting sense of humor and made me almost laugh out loud at times, for example when another character, Nellie, sighs wistfully and her partner, The Great Raheem, asks her "Are you sighing wistfully?" For some reason, that one really tickled me.

The novel features three main characters who are introduced alphabetically (by last name), each one allowed three chapters in which to establish themselves before the story proper kicks off. I did like the way Kress did this, introducing the character in their first chapter, the male in her life in the next (not a romantic male but a guardian or partner or troublesome bully), and finally something to pique interest in the third of the character chapters. I think it was the symmetry of it all which really resonated with me. Kress seems quite playful with her chapters and chapter titles. She has chapters 10½ and 10¾ for example. I enjoyed this playfulness. The title "The Friday Society" came from the fact that each of the three girls is a "man" Friday (as in Robinson Crusoe).

Cora Bell is a London street urchin turned ward of Lord White her mentor, who is rather fond of the seven percent solution evidently, and also is a scientist/inventor. There's no word at the beginning on how these two very different people hooked-up together, which I found particularly peculiar. We first meet Cora after an explosion in Lord White's laboratory where she ends up covered in "green goo". We don't learn what this might be until later. Shortly after this, Cora has to retrieve Lord White from his opium den.

This proved to be very standard stuff, except that the opium den is in an alley, and when Cora comes back outside with Lord White in tow, she's almost blinded by with bright sunlight. That does fly in the face of the London trope (that it’s always raining or drenched in smog), but that's not what caught my attention so much as the disconnect between a narrow, dingy alley in a depressed part of town and the bright sunlight. I'm not sure how much bright sunlight you’d get in a narrow alley, so that seemed odd to me, but I guess it depends on the alley you ally yourself with....

When Cora returns him home, she heads down to the lab and confronts what she takes to be a burglar, but is actually a new lab assistant. This makes Cora feel surplussed as well as nonplussed. Andrew Harris appears to be none other than Trope Romance Guy (TRG pronounced TRRRRGGG! - yes with the exclamation point, and made to sound as rude as possible). Naturally she hates him. Yawn. Could we not have a romance novel for a change where she starts out with an attraction and ends up hating him? That would be my kind of romance novel! So, for those who are taking notes: Ian not v. impressed wrt Cora or TRG. So I have to ask, vis-à-vis Kress's claim to be subverting tropes, how the hell this tired cliché of a "romance" even remotely contributes to that goal? (Short answer: it doesn't. It merely sells out your girl in the same way every other badly written romance sells her out). Fortunately, Kress was about to make a better impression on me with the next two girls who make up this mystery-solving trio (girls, make-up, get it? No, neither did I...).

Nellie Harrison is up next (no doubt destined to be George's great-great grandmother - after her descendants move to Liverpool)…. She starts out her three-chapter introduction almost identically - with an explosion - which I honestly appreciated. Indeed, the very first line of each chapter trio is exactly the same but caused by a different kind of explosion. This time it was flash powder, as in early flash photography, but she's not a photographer's assistant, she's a magician's assistant as we discover in her second chapter. The magician is the aforementioned 'The Great Raheem', a Persian who learned street magic in what is now Iran, and managed to bring it to London where he hit the big time. There's nothing going on between Raheem and Nellie, just as there was nothing going on between Cora and Lord White, but unlike Cora, Nellie doesn’t get a lab partner, she gets a dead body! And she gets fewer pages allocated to her than does Cora. Nellie was chosen not only for her looks, but for her personality and smarts, so we're told, although she exhibits little of either.

She also has a parrot who purrs like a cat! Evidently it’s an excellent mimic, and it keeps on annoyingly reappearing throughout the story doing things which parrots do not do unless specifically and dedicatedly trained to so do. Frankly, given its coloring, this "parrot" seems much more like a macaw, and I'm not sure that Kress knows the difference. They're in the same biological grouping, but they're not interchangeable. If Kress were truly looking to add a parrot for its intelligence, then she needed to pick an African grey which has proven talents in that direction. This parrot/macaw also seems to magically appear and disappear. The parrot doesn't fly out of open windows, intriguingly, and it tends to follow Nellie - perhaps it can open doors and windows on its own? Must have a windows operating system.... We're given no reason for this parrot's attachment to Nellie and this creature seems out of place here - more like it should be in a children's story than in YA. In one incident, Nellie - the one with smarts and personality - rudely wanders off in search of food to the kitchen of someone else's home. The parrot is nowhere near her and does not follow her but when she exits the premises, the parrot is magically with her. So in short, a big 'NO' to the "parrot".

Last but far from the least character IMO, except in how she's treated by the other two, comes Michiko Takaneda, a Japanese-born samurai-trained girl who was denied her katana, sold to a bully, and brought to London. She has a history of running away (which is how she came to be a trained Samurai), and is planning on running from her bully as soon as she can save up sufficient funds from her meager (or is it meagre? This is London, after all!) paycheck. She gets a rather petty but very satisfying revenge on her bully by referring to him as Callum-kun. It is a mark of respect in Japan to suffix someone's name with -san, just as in India one might add -ji, as in Ghandiji. Michiko's use of -kun is a mark of disrespect in that it is only applied to someone who is your inferior. This gives poor Michiko a measure of satisfaction since Callum has no idea what it means, nor is he smart enough to care.

One day while out buying new swords (Callum's business is teaching people self-defense/defence), she sees a real katana - so different from the cheap junk for which Callum is paying way too much - and she touches it admiringly and longingly. It was the sword she was never awarded in Japan. The elderly Japanese gentleman who runs the stall sees her and talks with her for a few minutes. He never did this before, despite her frequent visits. So unlike Cora, who gets a guy, and Nellie, who gets a corpse, Michiko gets her dream: the Japanese guy sends her the sword as a gift. He has named it Silver Heart. Michiko breaks down in tears as I almost did! (Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit but not by much!). Michiko gets more pages than Nellie - marginally, but fewer than Cora. I'm starting to really dislike Cora!

But peeves aside, how great a start is that? Aside from the rather disappointing Cora, I couldn’t ask for a better first nine than this, with only a hole in one and a fair way to go, Kress managed to stay out of the rough, and everything is green. I felt like I could get to like Kress at that point, but from this point on, she chose to let me down instead, because it was all downhill from there on out.

After she introduced her three protagonists, Kress had to get them together, and she does this after a gathering which Lord White attends with Cora in tow, and at which both Nellie and Michiko perform. It also involves a second dead body - this one actually more of a dead head, with no body in sight! Michiko discovers this walking home (having been dismissed by the callous Callum, who is now claiming to all who will listen that he taught Michiko!). She ends up in a sword-fight with a bearded man who knocks her out when she had expected to die. She lost the fight because her cheap sword - not the Silver Heart - broke. She's discovered, of course, by Nellie and Cora, who are sharing a steam cab home. The three spend the night together, which seemed to be a remarkably unlikely outcome to me, given their circumstances. I guess that's why it's fiction! These girls are supposed to be bonding (at least Kress claims they are): showing how girls can be friends and not bitches who undermine one another, yet the two white girls routinely diss the Asian. But Kress seems to miss the point that in Edwardian London, women were not USA high school cheer leaders. It was not the norm to be bitchy and to diss others. Politeness and manners were routinely exhibited, so her entire "argument" falls flat!

It was at that point in the story that I started running into issues, curiously enough, and they came thick and fast. There were far too many Americanisms popping up during this entire encounter, and every time I read one I was kicked out of this fable into the reality that it was just a novel masquerading as an Edwardian mystery, but written entirely in the good ole' US of A without even a minimal effort made to offer a nod or even a wink to Edwardian London. This is nothing but laziness and arrogance on the part of the author, and constitutes a gross insult to the rest of the world and to history. Kress is quite overtly stating here: screw London, screw the world, screw the Edwardian period! Everyone needs to be American or at least subjugated to the USA, or they're not worth writing about!"

Kress has Nellie saying "Hiya", she has Michiko thinking in American idioms, not in Japanese. How is this subverting trope? How is this championing women's rights? This is another writing quandary (yes, quandary, I shall countenance it no other way!). Sometimes it’s better to betray authenticity in favor of conveying something deeper. I'm not suggesting here that she should have Michiko thinking in pigeon English. Of course not! Perish the thought. Michiko would think as fluently in Japanese as Cora and Nellie did in English, but I feel that in this regard, it’s less important exactly how she thinks than it is how what she thinks is conveyed to the reader, and she certainly didn't think in Americanisms.

I think that it would not have hurt to play with the phrasing of Michiko's internal monologue to convey more of her eastern origins, but it’s a choice which every writer has to make. Kress has made hers, and I think she chose badly. I know that Kress wanted to write this in modern idiom, rather than try to emulate Edwardian speech patterns, but it doesn't work because of the the jarringly anachronistic Americanisms. There's one instance in particular which leaps to mind and which really glared in my eyes. Michiko has a very limited grasp of English. She's learning and she's doing well, but she's far from fluent, and often has issues with what’s said to her, but her internal monologue is so American as to be disturbing. At one point, she thinks, "For crying out loud!". This isn't Edwardian; it’s an Americanism, and it seriously grated. This kind of thing effectively turned my suspension of disbelief into a sword of Damocles!

In this same vein (or vain if you like!), there was a totally bemusing interaction on p105 where Nellie, making "a spot of tea" asks Cora if she wants sugar, and Cora responds that she takes it black? I have no idea what Kress thought she was doing there. Sugar and whether the tea is black or white have nothing to do with one another. It’s whether or not milk/cream is added which determines this, and I doubt many Edwardian Brits would actually drink it black any more than they would drink it iced!

One reference which might escape the intended audience for this novel is Kress's introduction of "cavorite" - a fictional compound (indeed, the "green goo" which Cora was experimenting at the start of this novel, evidently). This was invented by a guy named Cavor in the movie First Men in the Moon which originated in a much earlier novel by HG Wells. That movie is antique by modern CGI standards, but it is a pretty good movie. It's a seriously black mark against Kress in that I didn't see anywhere in this book, not in the narrative nor in any notes, that she had taken this from HG Wells. It's bad form to offer no acknowledgment and this contributed to how I rated this novel.

Talking of reviews, let me reiterate here that I typically don’t derive my choice of books from reading reviews. Most of the positive book reviews I've read are nothing more than a gushing recommendation, and as such they tell me nothing about the quality of the read nor of any downside to it. For those who do offer more, I say a heartfelt "Thank you!", but I don’t know of any reviewers who share my idiosyncratic taste in novels and whose reviews are in sync enough with my own perspective for me to be able to rely on them. Hence this blog! In short, I typically don’t read reviews to discover new material for me to read because they're unhelpful to me, but sometimes when I'm writing a review and I have mixed feelings about it, as I did with this one, I do take a gander at what others have said. I usually wait until I have a feel for which way I'm leaning, but not always. What I routinely look for in others' reviews is anything that I might not have addressed in my own, so I tend to read a half-dozen one-star and a half-dozen five-star (or equivalent) to get a picture of what's irking or smirking other reviewers.

In doing this for The Friday Society, I couldn't get over how many of the reviewers (positive or negative) described this novel as "Victorian". It’s not. It’s Edwardian. One reviewer even described it as "Regency" which is so far out of the ballpark as to be eight blocks down, two over, and then a sharp right behind the medical supply store. I noticed a difference between the positive reviews which described this as steam-punk and the negatives! I'm not a big steam-punk fan, but I started out deluded by Kress into thinking that this was steam-punk. The negative reviews tended to call foul on the steam-punk, and having read much of it now, I have to go with the negatives. There is a steam-punk element, but it's so very subdued and amateur that it plays no useful part in the novel. I mean a steam-powered flying ship? Airship fire "trucks"? No! Wa-ay too clunky. Learn a little physics and get back to us! You're better off thinking of The Friday Society as an Edwardian amateur detective story with some mild action thrown in, but the action isn't impressive, and the writing is definitely pitched towards the younger end of YA.

Here's a point of annoyance: Kress has Cora tell us that as a child, she went swimming in the Thames (pronounced temmz). I doubt this - not as polluted as that river was at that time, and not a street urchin who rarely strayed from her street and never from her neighborhood if she was anything like your typical street urchin. I call bullshit on that one. Admittedly the Thames was improving by this time (the worst pollution was in the mid nine-teeth(!) century) but swimming in it? Even for a street urchin, this smelled strongly of 'out of character' for me. This was one of too many annoyances, which contributed to how I rated this novel.

Another of these was when the trio removed yet one more body from a crime scene and took it to Officer Murphy, and he assured them that he would get it to the morgue. Where the hell else would he take it? Home? Would he plant it in his garden? Would they use it for an umbrella stand? Would he throw it out on the street after they left? Yet another instance was how Michiko got her Silver Heart samurai mask: it was a gift from a woman who, moments before, had been treating her like trash. This was an appalling example of non-sequitur writing and contributed to my rating of this novel.

I've mentioned that I was not exactly thrilled with Cora, and in Chapters 18 & 19 I was turned off her completely. This began when Harris manhandles her and she complies. Yes, you can argue that she has the hots for him and so she was consenting, but there's more to it than that. It’s painfully obvious that she likes Harris not in spite of, but because of her professed hatred for him, but who Kress thought she was fooling or what she thought she was doing here is a mystery, since Cora's predilection is itself neither mysterious, nor is it unpredictable. Now if Kress were planning on turning Harris into a villain, I might warm to this playing against trope, but I don’t get that feeling at all - neither from the story nor from Kress herself based on what she'd done with this tale to that point. Given the level of the writing Kress exhibits, I don’t think she has that kind of subtlety in her. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, Harris is a villain, regardless of what Kress intended him to be. His behavior speaks volumes. Far from subverting tropes here, Kress plays right into one, and demeans Cora into the bargain.

What makes this part of this story so pathetic is that when Harris grabs Cora without warning or preamble and kisses her, she shows none of the propriety of an Edwardian girl, allowing him to get away with this without comment, even participating in it herself. But why not? He has shown none of the propriety of an Edwardian man, so maybe they deserve each other? Harris is interested in nothing more than laying Cora, and that's it! You'd be better off reading about my own character Cora in Saurus. She knows exactly how to deal with jerks like Harris (although she's conflicted about approaching it!).

As if Harris's effectively forcing himself upon a young, insecure, and rather impressionable girl in the complete absence of any invitation from her wasn't bad enough once, Harris promises he will not do it again and immediately does it again. Some might find this romantic. I found his repeated kiss attacks upon Cora to be as obnoxious as they were creepy. Again the writing is really clunky, and I had to ask myself, why did Kress even set this novel in the Edwardian period if she wasn't serious about setting it in that period? Why not make it a more modern novel? No explanation. And no respect for her female characters.

The novel descended further in chapter nineteen. All three girls head out into the night. How Michiko gets away with this is a mystery given how possessive and controlling Callum is. We know that Cora sneaks out, so that's no problem (except in that she's abusing her patron and being dishonest, but I've already written her off); however, for Nellie's partner Raheem to let a young girl in his care out at night alone is completely inexplicable, especially given how protective of women people from his part of the world tend to be. Yes, this "protection" runs to the criminal all too often, but we cannot judge all people of the Middle East from reports of the actions of a few extremists. Those concerns do not apply here since Raheem has already shown himself to be honorable (if not exactly completely in character for his origins), so again, this is not believable within context.

By utterly amazing coincidence (of which Kress is all-too-fond) all three meet up at the site of the headless man! This coincidence motif is overplayed by a significant margin in Kress's writing, again undermining the smarts and abilities of the women. There are far too many magical coincidences (including one where Michiko happens to be training a woman at a private residence which also happens to be the very same one into which Nellie is breaking and entering), but back to the story. This particular coincidence results in them finding a young girl whom Cora knew from back when she was ten years old and living on the street. The girl has been stabbed by the mysterious "Fog person" who beheaded the man in the first place. She dies without conveying any information of value as to why she was seeking Cora! This was a real annoyance. Enough with the ostensibly enigmatic but actually tediously truncated and obfuscated statements, and with people dying before they can tell us something. This is another trope which needs to die itself. Again, Kress fails to subvert trope here and show us that it's nothing more than a lazy way to write a 'mystery novel'. But this isn't the biggest problem here!

Rather than call the police, they girls move the body (this is a sad habit with these idiots) - taking it home to the girl's parents whom Cora knew. This is yet another example of how pathetic Cora is. She has given no mind to this girl - her best friend just six years before - or to her parents or their impoverished circumstances. She has done nothing for them in six years despite being in a position to really help them. She passed the girl on the street when she went to collect Lord White from the opium den, and didn’t even recognize her, much less give her money for flowers, yet now she feels this compulsion to return this neglected girl's body to her family (and thereby become an accessory after the fact of a murder)? I didn’t think it would be possible for my opinion of Cora to sink lower, but there it went down that drain right there at the kerb - you know the one which drains sewage directly into the river where Cora claims she swam happily as a child? Maybe she really did swim in the Thames. That might explain why she's brain-dead....

Oh slap my wrist and call me Mrs. Peevish! Moving right along now…. Did I mention the London particular (aka smog)? Yes, there was a smog problem, but no, it did not routinely occur every night without fail. I've been to London many times, and I've seen fog there only once. Indeed, the weather was bad there only once out of all the times I've been. No, I never went there during the heyday of the industrial revolution (or revulsion as I think of it!) so I can’t claim that I personally experienced any of the worst smog occurrences (although since the worst recorded instance was in 1952, there may well be people living in London who do recall it).

Having put that out there, we're typically talking fog, not smog in this novel, and Kress has it appearing on cue, every single night! Is this how Kress subverts trope, by troping fog out every time her characters are out at night in London? That's not the only stretch! If you want to learn about how prevalent and frequent fog was back then, read contemporary writers such as AC Doyle and HG Wells; they'll set ya straight! But to conclude this mini-diatribe, Kress has the three girls meet up again accidentally on another night, when the fog is yellow, which indicates a potentially dangerous level of sulphur dioxide (yes, sulphur! This is English sulphur, you abominable cad, not American sulfur!), but immediately prior to telling us the color of the fog, Kress had told us that Nellie suggested to Cora that they take a stroll to enjoy the night air! Color the fog yellow, and me confused.

Actually the confusion of that night extends beyond the quality of the night air. Nellie and Cora meet Michiko again. Isn’t it amazing how these completely accidental gatherings occur with such regularity? The trio encounters three men who are nothing more than bullies and muggers (despite her penchant for employing modern phraseology Kress doesn’t say they were muggers as such - but why would she baulk at that?). When they meet the men, Michiko is trailing behind the other two like a pet, but when the men start telling them to hand over their valuables immediately afterwards, Michiko is in front without having moved in the interim. The force is strong with that one! Michiko kneels and centers herself (like common London thugs will respect her rituals and wait!), before rising to cut each of them with her katana, as a warning. The men run away. Really? This was a truly amateurish and sadly-written scene for Michiko, and I have to down-rate this novel yet again, because of it. Tell me: how does this subvert any tropes, exactly?

In conclusion, I was on the fence on this one right up to the last fifty or sixty pages. It took one more encounter with Andrew Harris to tip the balance. Cora is a moron and Harris is a scumbag, and that's all there is to it. I couldn't, at that point, even pretend to hold out any more hope for this to improve or be rendered worth while by the finale. Consequently, I cannot honestly rate this as worthy when it's so poorly put together, and the three female leads are so badly wasted, and so completely sold out by a female writer. I just can't. It lost its Lady Sparkle, broke my Silver Heart, and really needs to go Hyde under a rock. I don't care if there's a sequel because this is WARTY!


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Worldshaker by Richard Harland





Title: Worldshaker
Author: Richard Harland
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

Worldshaker is a steam-punk novel, part of a dilogy about the education of Colbert Porpentine, grandson of the master of Worldshaker, Sir Marmus Porpentine. Worldshaker is a massive ship, two and a half miles long, three-quarters of a mile wide, well over a thousand feet high, home to ten thousand people, and two thousand "filthies" - people who live below decks and unaccountably have within their control the power plant of this the city on rollers (when it's on the ground) or city of the air.

Col wakes up one night because of a ruckus in the hallway outside his room. One of the Filthies, who was brought up top to be turned into a Menial (a servant of the ruling classes), has escaped and is now running loose on the upper decks! The guards visit him and then depart and it's only after this that Col realizes that it wasn't the ruckus which disturbed him, it was something before that. He looks under his bed and there's a filthy hiding there. When she comes out, she turns out to be disturbingly attractive despite the dirt, and she can even speak, something which quite astounds Col. Her name is Riff and when he calls out to the guards in surprise, she runs and hides in his closet!

But Col doesn't betray Riff. The guards do not arrive, so he locks her in his closet. The next morning, his sister Gillabeth bursts into his room complaining that he needs to get ready - there's an important breakfast with his grandfather. She immediately goes to his closet and his heart almost stops as she wrenches it open, but Riff is no longer there!

The great announcement which grandpa makes that morning is that Col is to be his successor; he will be groomed to take charge of the ship. He is to go to school. Col's mom takes him on a shopping trip to gather school supplies. She's so worn out by this effort that she has to repair to Col's room to sit out an attack of the wilts and the vapors. It's while she's sitting on his bed that Col realizes the filthy is back! Riff is under his bed at that very moment. He hastily bundles his recovering mother out of the room and confronts Riff. She looks clean. It's a new Riff in many respects, and Col is finding it harder and harder to dismiss her from his thoughts or to see her as a filthy. She tries to smuggle out one of his books - on volcanoes (I wonder why?!) - as she leaves, and she tells him she'll be back.

Col is just about having a fit over her. Everything in his life was looking up, except that she's now in it. However, he sees a solution. All Riff wants, is to return to the below world with her fellow filthies. On his tour of the ship with his grandfather, Col learns that food is sent to the filthies via a chute, and so the next time Riff shows up, he escorts her to the nearest food chute (which is a long way from his room) and sends her down it. Now everything is coming up roses. So he thinks.

Col is a good hero. He is not very wise to the ways of the world - especially given that he's been sheltered from it and lied to all his life - but he isn’t dumb, and he's not afraid to question things and to take risks when he deems it important. He's not all powerful, and he has no magical or super-human powers. All he has going for him (aside from his privileged birth) is his smarts, his willingness to put himself into the position of others, and his good nature and sense of morality. Unfortunately, for all this, he does seem to have an ability to dig himself deeper.

When he first arrives at school, he allies himself with Trant, without realizing that Trant is of a much lower social status than he. Col is soon corrected by the upper status kids, who draw him into their circle. Given that these elite kids detest Col and wish for their families to usurp his family's eminent position, it’s hard to understand why they're so accommodating, unless they're working from the 'keep your friends close and your enemies closer' principle, but they don’t seem that smart!

Harland excels himself when describing the school master, Gibber. His name pretty much says it all. Gibber is a gibbering idiot. He has the most hilariously warped ideas imaginable about academic subjects. In geometry, he detests obtuse angles because they’re so open. He much prefers acute angles because they're so sharp, but even they pale against the insurmountable rectitude of a right angle. Gibber makes his class draw right-angles for the rest of the period! Geography fares no better: it turns out that concave coastlines are an abomination. He can scarcely bring himself to even talk about the Great Australian Bight, for example. The coastline of Great Britain, contrarily, is magnificent because it has so many proud promontories! This is inspired and hilarious. Harland had me laughing out loud.

Col would have had it made were it not for Riff showing up in his life and his inability to jettison all thought of her once he'd fed her back down the chute to "the underworld". He makes the mistake, when he's in a good mood, of wrapping up the book which Riff had tried to steal, and sending it down the chute to her as a gift. The elite kids tail him down there, sad to say, and discover him. He gets into a fight with the bruiser of the group (indeed he was only in the group because he was a bruiser) and Col ends up being dropped down the chute himself. He almost comes to grief down there, but is rescued by none other than riff, who is a leader down below. She quite literally rescues him, because the filthies are about to drop him into the bilge and let him die for no reason other than he's from "up there". Riff has to fight a bigger guy to assert her authority, which she does without raising a sweat. She is fast and deadly. And she's secretly thrilled that Col sent her the gift, but she says he has to go before the council - the senior "filthies" - most of whom are no older than Riff.

Col's "sentence" is to aid a filthy to go topside as a spy, and the one who is chosen is, of course, Riff. Col is to return by having the officers upstairs lift him out by means of a grasping hook - the same way they capture the filthies they wish to turn into menials. But his return from the underworld isn’t greeted with great joy. He's now despised almost as much as the filthies are, because he's been contaminated by being amongst them. He's shunned and his family finds its elevated and privileged status being undermined by Sir Marmus's rivals. Seeing an advantage now, the elite boys at school reject him, and even Gibber increasingly disses him. Col ignores them all until he discovers they're planning on beating him up before the school term is over.

When he considers how he might be able to fight back, he suddenly realizes there is someone who can help him learn to fight, and it's someone he made a promise to not four days ago. Col remembers his promise to get Riff topside, and so he lowers a rope, as agreed, down the food chute for her to climb up. When she arrives, he's so excited by her arrival that he expects a joyful reunion with hugs and kisses, but she pretty much tells him goodbye and disappears.

Later he's amazed to discover that she's very successfully disguised herself as a menial and now roams Worldshaker with complete impunity! He tells her of his predicament, and she agrees to teach him to fight if he will teach her to read. Of course you all know where this is going. They spend much time together, and she learns to read, and he learns to fight and takes down ten opponents when the Squellinghams try to beat him up at school. What he didn’t expect was that these very villains would tell him that his sister Gillabeth was behind the attack! But things are about to get worse.

In order to salvage the family reputation and position of power, Sir Marmus negotiates a marriage between the Porpentine and the Turbots, namely that of Col to Sephaltina Turbot, which Col blindly goes along with since he feels bad about bringing the family down, and he thinks Riff is partnered with one of the filthies anyway, and even if she were not, she certainly wouldn’t be interested in someone like him. He doesn’t expect her to show up at his wedding, very effectively disguised as a privileged upper deck person, nor does he expect his reaction to her to precipitate a revolution. It all started with the jelly....

Original, brilliantly written, endlessly entertaining, and thoroughly engrossing, this is a novel I cannot help but highly recommend. Even on my second reading it was still as appealing as it was on the first. Now that I'm back up to speed on volume one, I'm very much looking forward to embarking upon the Liberator. Full steam ahead!


Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl By David Barnett





Title: Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl
Author: David Barnett
Publisher: Tor
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 of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is less detailed so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more in-depth than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum in galley ebook
P23 "glitterving" should be "glittering"

The male protagonist of this steam-punk novel is Gideon Smith, a 24-year-old who lives with his father in a small fishing village near Whitby, Yorkshire. Both of my parents hailed from Yorkshire, and I've actually been to Whitby, a seaside town which is featured in Bram Stoker's Dracula, so it’s no surprise that Barnett has Gideon meet Bram Stoker there.

I have to say up front that I'm not a fan of Victorian dramas which seem obligated to drag historical people unnecessarily into the fiction. I find that boring and uninventive, and all-too-often patronizing of, and insulting to the persons so press-ganged. In fact, I made the mistake of reading the prologue to this novel and I found that even more boring and uninventive since it parades out the discredited story that Eddy, the son of Queen Victoria's son Edward (the Edward who gave his name to the Edwardian period of English history) was somehow entangled with the Jack the Ripper murders. This myth was the basis of the Johnny Depp movie From Hell and is patent nonsense. Having said that, Barnett has added a twist to this one which makes his "crime" forgivable, in my book at least!

So, it was not an auspicious start to this novel, but I have to say that Barnett started to win me over with chapter one, where Gideon enters the picture. His father is a struggling trawler captain, and Gideon often helps him on his fishing trips, but the one morning when his father decides to let Gideon sleep in, is the day that the entire crew of the trawler disappears without explanation, and Gideon is left alone in the world, his mother and two brothers having already died some time before.

Well there is an explanation, of course, but that's for you to read, and at that point in the story it was more of a mystery than an explanation (but it clarifies nicely as the novel progresses)! The local fishing community just accepts these disappearances as the sea's dividend for allowing humans to sample its bounty. Gideon is a big fan of Captain Lucian Trigger, a story-book hero who, if not completely fictional, is, I guessed, not remotely like his fictional portrayal. Gideon doesn't quite grasp this, and so he endeavors to contact the man in hopes that he can help with another local mystery that has hold of Gideon's imagination.

It’s in process of pursuing this plan that he encounters Bram Stoker, right before a Russian sailboat runs aground with the all the crew save one, missing. The captain is discovered lashed to the wheel and drained of blood, and a large black dog runs ashore and disappears. The only cargo on the ship is three coffins with soil from Transylvania. Anyone who has read Stoker's Dracula will know where that's headed (but don't be too confident: Barnett has added a twist!). The original Dracula novel is excellently reproduced on film in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 epic, a movie I highly recommend.

Back to this novel! I do like that Barnett has divorced himself from trope with Gideon. He doesn’t have Gideon go haring off into the heart of the mystery like an idiot. He portrays Gideon as a thoughtful, courageous, and smart young man who realizes that he's going to need help to figure out if smugglers might be connected to his father's disappearance and are operating near his village, but when he talks to a friend of his father's, and also to the village constable, he's dismissed and not taken at all seriously. That's when he resorts to calling Captain Trigger and ends up in the company of Bram Stoker. Stoker learned of vampires from his fellow Irish friend Sheridan le Fanu, but he cannot get Gideon interested. Instead, Gideon resolves to set off for London to personally seek Captain Trigger's assistance. That's when he meets the mechanical girl called Maria who. I guessed. is actually modeled after a real person.

But she isn’t just any old clockwork toy. Nope. She has a body made to look as realistic as possible, and although she's clockwork inside her body, inside her head is a different story. Her creator is Hermann Einstein (which coincidentally happens to be the name of Albert Einstein's father...), but he's gone missing. He fitted her empty head with something that he discovered in a most unlikely location. Her head is no longer empty. Far from it.

Gideon learns how abused Maria is by her keeper, a grungy old man with disgusting tastes, who is in charge of the house in Einstein's absence. Gideon invites her to travel to London with him to find her maker, and she agrees, so they take some spare cash which Maria has access to, and borrow another invention of Einstein's: a motorized bike. This prepared, they set off again for London town, home of Queen Victoria.

Meanwhile Bram is poking around Whitby in pursuit of a vampire, and he discovers one of the very last people he might have expected to find - and she is the very antithesis of what he expected a vampire to be! Little does he know that his investigations will bring him right back into contact with Gideon.

And that's all the detail you get for this one! The story continues apace, and continues to be engrossing, as Gideon and his growing ensemble of acquired friends begin pursing seemingly disparate threads that I felt, even before I knew one way or the other, would all lead back to the same source. There are airships (one piloted by a very adventurous woman), there is a trip to a ancient and exotic location where trouble is stirring big time, there's air piracy, there's a threat to the empire over which the sun never sets, and there are truly evil creatures (and that's just those working for the government!). All the threads lead to a fine yarn, and a taut fabric, and though I was less than thrilled with the ending (the novel is evidently the start of a series), the quality of the writing and the plotting merits this story as a worthy read. I recommend it.