Juliana by Vanda

Rating: WARTY!

This started out in first person which is irritating to me at best, but it started chapter one, set in 1941, and had a single paragraph talking about people waiting in line as fans of this actor, and the narrator says, "But wait; I'm getting ahead of myself. All that came much later." It switched to a new screen, started chapter one again and went into a flashback. I decided "No thanks!" right there and then, and I quit.

Something this badly written and with flashbacks and in first person is not for me. I can't commend it. I don't think this author understands the use of a charcter history. She seems to feel that she needs to include everything in the book instead of using it as background to round out the author's own understanding of the character. And the last thing I need is to start the first paragraph of a story I'm hoping to enjoy only to have it brought to a screeching halt while we travel even further back in time for a boring and tedious history lesson. No. Uh-uh. Not for me. I have better things to do with my time than to read a dithering story that has no sense of self, and no idea how to proceed.

Deus Ex Mechanic by Ryann Fletcher

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known this book had the word 'chronicles' associated with it, I would never had considered reading it, but the interesting cover illustration distracted me and the plot sounded engaging, so I missed that somehow, and launched into it, getting to about two-turds the way through it before I fully realized it was going nowhere - precisely because it's a series. Book one is a prolog and I don't do prologs because they're boring and don't tell you shit. I wish I had back the time I wasted on this one. The book description is completely misleading.

The concept is ridiculous to begin with - steampunk in space? The spaceship has boilers which is the stupidest thing I ever heard. I even put up with that in hopes I would get a good story. More fool me. Having loved the character of Kaylee in Firefly, I was primed for the character of Alice - a mechanic. In fact this whole story is a Firefly rip-off in many ways. Violet is the captain of a pirate vessel which operates on the run from coalition vessels, raiding them and distributing food to rebel bases and selling-off what they can to make some money.

On one such raid, they kidnap Alice to get her to fix the ship's boilers(!) intending to release her later, but eventually she ends up - as we knew she would - on the ship as a crew member, and so starts the relationship with Violet. This is the dumbest relationship ever, with them getting it on and getting off and it falling off so metronomically that it became tedious to read it. They were like 13 year olds, and to pretend non-violent Violet was a pirate captain was stupid.

The story wasn't god-awful, except when I read of one character Violet met:

"Hiya. I'm Jhanvi," she said with a thick southern drawl

This is on an alien planet, and she has "a thick southern drawl"?! Ridiculous!

Of course everyone on the crew is the best there is. Alice is the best mechanic; Hyun is the best doctor; Kady is the best engineer; Violet the best captain. Barf. They should have named the spacecaft the Mary Sue. I reached a point, not quickly enough unfortuantely, where I could not stand to read any more of this, and I ditched it. Can't commend it.

The Professor's Wife by Marina Delvecchio

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I did not like the title of this novel, but I started reading it anyway and about 60% in I decided I should have gone with my first instinct. The problem with the title is that it presents the main female character as an appendage or an extension of some guy - subjugated to him, not having an existence of her own. It's a poor choice to depict a character like that particularly when far too many women are so readily marginalized in society anyway.

The idea behind the story is one that I liked, which is why I read this, despite my misgivings over the title. I know that some people, particularly younger readers, are turned-off or even disgusted by May-December relationships, but I am not. I don't even like the term May-December which, if we assign about eight years per month, means the one participant is 40 and the other is in their nineties. A better depiction in this case would be a March-July relationship which sounds much sweeter to me!

All kidding aside, it's none of our damned business when two (or more!) consenting adults choose to be together. It's their choice, not ours; not society's; not the law's; not religion's. In this case, college student Camilla, falls for professor Carl. Her purported BFF (more on that anon) Chelsea, has dire misgivings, but the author offers us no valid reason for her revulsion. Regardless, Carl and Camilla start dating, marry quite soon and seem to be in an idyllic relationship. Camilla quits the professor's classes so the author at least avoids any impropriety in terms of authority figure versus supplicant here. Far too many so-called romance novels are oblivious of power imbalances in relationships.

For me the problem with this one though, is the same problem in very nearly all modern romance novels, which is that it's predicated entirely on sex. There is no meeting of minds. It's not about romance. It's not about any of the big C's: chemistry, commonalities, companionship, or compatibility. No, I'm not talking about carat, clarity, color, or cut! Here, it's all about the sex, and repeated descriptions of that act do not make it more exciting; they make it boring, which destroys the novel because it was only about sex.

Consequently, at that point, I could no longer take this story seriously, and writing sleight of hand couldn't disguise exactly where this story was going. At least, without having read the ending, it seemed to me like it had an awful lot in common with a certain 1959 novel by Robert Bloch

Talking of dates, there was an issue for me regarding exactly when this novel was set. It felt like it was contemporary, but no one seemed to have a cell-phone and Camilla and her BFF never texted each other or emailed - they wrote "letters" to each other, so maybe it was historical, but if so, I was lost because I had no good idea when it took place which further added to the 'fake' aura it projected to me. Maybe somewhere in the text it reveals when it's set, but if so, I missed it.

As so often happens with stories like this one, I found myself much more interested in the main character's friend than I was in plain vanilla Camilla. Chelsea plays a very minor role which seems odd given all the telling we get at the start of the novel as to how close they are and how much they love each other as friends. But that's telling; when it comes to showing, we get very little. It occurs to me that a story about Chelsea had the potential to be much more interesting, and rather less predictable than this one was.

The big betrayal of their BFF myth came when Chelsea revealed to Camilla that she had been accepted into a prestigious art program, and when Camilla asked when she was leaving, she was told it would be the very next day. Seriously? How close could they be if Chelsea has applied to this program, been accepted, and made plans to move her life away from Camilla, and she gives her supposed BFF only 24 hours notice of the entire thing? That, to me, gave the lie to their supposed closeness. The whole story felt exposed for the fakery that it was at that point; it all seemed so shallow.

We're told that Camilla is a young artist, for example but we're never shown that. Oh yeah, we get a mention of her painting and it plays a role in revealing her sickness later in the story, but I never got the feeling that she was an artist at all. Like I said, it was all about sex. She never was an artist, not even in bed! She never talked about art; she never went to any exhibitions or galleries, and we're never shown her actually doing any painting. Again, it felt fake.

The same applied to the professor who was weirdly described as a professor of British literature (not English, British!) As with Camilla, we're never shown any of this side of him. All we get is telling that he arrives home with a bunch of papers to grade. It felt superficial - like frosting on a badly-baked cake. This is why it was amusing (to my warped mind!) to find some technical writing issues. They seemed to fit right in with this threadbare world-building.

At one point I read, "The only light that broke through the dark blanket covering the small kitchen came from the streetlight peeking through the small window above the sink and the dusted chandelier that hung low above the table they had gathered, about to eat." Not only is that a horribly run-on sentence, but it makes little sense. I assume the blanket didn't literally cover the kitchen, but covered the entrance to the kitchen, or maybe a window in the kitchen? Who knows? Even so, why? Why was there a blanket covering anything?

This was just dropped in there without any prior or following reference, and it made no sense. I honestly have no good idea about what author was trying to say there. On top of this - literally - was "...the dusted chandelier..."? Did this mean it had just been dusted or did the author mean it was dusty? And who has a chandelier above the kitchen table?! And "the table they had gathered" Did she mean 'around which they had gathered'? Or should that comma before 'about' have been after it? That sentence was a godawful mess.

Later I read, "...lift her t-shirt, and follow the trail down to her cervical bone. He slipped his fingers inside her panties...." The cervical bone is the first one in your neck right below your skull. The one I think the author means here is the pubic bone, which lies right underneath the mons pubis. Just a wild guess!

At another point I read, "Carl is a tab bit of a weirdo" That would be ‘tad’ not ‘tab’ and since 'tad' already means a very small amount, the ‘bit’ isn’t necessary, although given the lax way people speak this is fine to use in a character’s speech. There were probably other such issues that I missed since I was reading for entertainment and not editing this; fortunately, the novel wasn't replete with them so this wasn't a huge problem. A little judicious editing is definitely called for though.

The real problem though, was with the story-telling here. To me, the story seemed more like a series of disconnected vignettes than a coherent whole, and having timeline jump around only served to confuse things more. Like I said, I DNF'd this when it became too bad for me to continue. Rightly or wrongly, I felt I knew exactly where it was going and it wasn't anywhere engaging to me. I lost interest in it and skimmed for a little while longer, but around 60% I decided I had given this enough chances to appeal to me and it failed. I can't therefore commend it was a worthy read.

New Lease Of Love by Arizona Tape

Rating: WARTY!

This was a dual first person PoV that I quickly tired of. It was so larded with cliché, and it had one of the main characters smoking, which is a huge turn-off for me. I mean it was already failing for me before then, but I was prepared to read on for a while; all that did was completely burn it for me.

It wasn't only the first person (barf) that spoiled it, either, but first person from two perspectives which is barf squared. Whenever I read that, it reminds me of two suspects being grilled by police, in different interrogation rooms, and it doesn't work. Well, it works for the police if they can catch them in a contradiction or get one to sell out the other, but it doesn't work as a tired plot device in fiction. 1PoV is bad enough and is usually horrible to read, but two of them just makes it so much worse. It's rare to find a 1PoV done well, let alone a two, and this sure wasn't one. The premise was wonderful - a March-June relationship (as opposed to a May-December or worse, a January-December which is frankly perverse), between two women, but the execution killed it.

I read at one point, "...but she had a symmetrical face. The customers would appreciate that" which strictly speaking isn't true. People like faces that are close to the average face they're used to. As far as symmetry goes, a study in 1996 discovered that children and young adults found those with slight facial asymmetry to be more attractive. It's a minor point, but let's not get hung up on perfection. Perfect faces, according to another study, might not be the signifier of good health that our long history has misled us to believe!

The story was marred by poor writing here and there. On one occasion I read, "With a sigh, I shoved my phone back in my designer purse." Really? You have to specify designer purse? That felt so pretentious that it about made me gag. I cannot read books written like that. I can't even take them seriously. Later I read, "With a sigh, I ran a hand along my head." Along? I can see ‘over’ my head or ‘down’ my face, but along? That's just weird. In and of themselves, things like this are not that important, unless there are many of them. Everyone screws up. Every author misses a grammatical or spelling problem here and there, or writes an awkward phrase now and then, but these added on top of other issues just make a novel unreadable for me.

Overall, I found this story plodding, tediously metronomic, and I did not like either character at all, so this was a DNF for sure. I can't commend it based on what I read.

By Wind by T Thorn Coyle

Rating: WARTY!

The biggest problem with this story is that the author has actually drunk the Flavor Aid, and she believes everything she writes: the magic, the aroma therapy, the healing power of crystals, and so on. That's all bullshit, and it wouldn't even be so bad if she didn't preach her religion instead of writing a novel.

Worse even than this is that the story is so tediously lethargic that it drags and drags, and drags and goes nowhere. I dropped this at 30% because literally nothing interesting had happened except for endless Cassandra-style wailing about, as John Fogerty put it, a bad moon arising. In short, up to when I quit, there was no story and what there was instead was awful.

I mean, for example, Brenda, the leader of the 'coven' has a closer-than-a-sister best friend whom she's known for years, yet not once has she confided in her over this bad feeling she's been having until she's pretty much forced into an 'intervention' of sorts! How close can they be when Brenda won't even call or drop her best friend a text? It's tell one thing, but show another all the way here.

The plot, such as it is, is that new age garbarge shop owner Brenda, 'has a bad feeling about this' but what 'this' is, she can't say. She supposed to be a witch, but none of her purported magic, nor that of her 'coven' is of any value whatsoever since no one can tell her anything useful. Plus, she's hearing voices. This woman is in dire need of lithium and psychotherapy.

The other metronomc voice in this tediously tick-tock story is of her purported lover-to-be, Caroline, who is, of course a magical crystal saleswoman. The problem is that at 30% these two had barely even said 'hello'. The blurb asked stupidly (as usual) "Who - or what - stalks Caroline?" Well that would be her control-freak husband who Caroline is apparently too stupid to ditch despite all the freedom she has. The blurb boasts, "Brenda and her coven must act swiftly, before the coming storm blows them all away." Given how ineffective those losers are, it ain't gonna happen. This story was truly bad and boring.

City of Shattered Light by Claire Winn

Rating: WARTY!

From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I had high hopes for this story which seemed to promise two strong female leads, but once again, as they so often do, the book blurb failed to give an honest description of the story, so it was more of a lose than a Winn for me. It was slow to start and seemed very repetitive. I was ready to ditch it after chapter one, and I would have, except this was a review book, so I felt I had to give it a chance. It did pick up somewhat in chapter two, but even so, it never got going. It was such a long, repetitive slog that I grew bored with it.

It was a very pedantic 2-Person PoV story tick-tocking tediously like a metronome between the two main female characters' perspectives that it was putting me to sleep. At least it wasn't first person PoV, but the tedium was strong with this one and by 52% I'd had enough of the repetitive antics of supposed hero "Riven" and her hi-tech non-love-interest "Asa" that I could stand to read no more. I cared nothing for either of the characters or for their fate, and their supposed love story was dead in the water from the very start.

Asa Almeida is the 17-year-old heir to a hi-tech empire. Riven Hawthorne - which is a thoroughly stupid name, is a lowlife street crook who talks big, but consistently achieves nothing. She's supposed to be a no-nonsense girl who is a dead-shot with her antique pistols, but despite having two clear-cut chances to kill her arch-rival (in the half that I read) she fails both times and one failure leads to another. Riven is thoroughly incompetent: all talk and no traction, and she has no spine. Asa, who is supposed to be smart, is a complete dumb-ass and she persistently proves it.

The 'winterdark' MacGuffin in the story appeared to be a direct rip-off of William Gibson's 'wintermute' which is an artificial intelligence character in his novel Neuromancer but since in this story it really is just a name without, apparently, anything behind it (not in the part I read anyway), I guess it doesn't matter what it was. The other side of this coin is tha tthe auhtor evidently hasnlt ehard of a farady cage whcih woudl ahve made her little device undetectable at dradiofrwuencies

The writing had issues, too. I read, for example, at one point: "No doubt the rumor mill would love to grate her to a pulp. A mill grinds, it doesn't grate. Unless of course it hasn't been oiled in a while.... At another point I read, "The phoenix ruffled its wings." Nah! I’m guessing it ruffled its feathers! Then again: "Riven willed herself to be impassable," was used when the author needed 'impassive'.

Some of the technology wasn't very well thought-through. For example, Asa has a suit that she can use to make herself invisible, but this author - as do many sci-fi writers, sci-fi movies, and TV shows - conflates invisible with undetectable. Visible light is only one minuscule portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and trapping that doesn't trap everything else, from gamma rays at one end to Am radio at the other. The suit wouldn't have worked, and the author even seems to admit this at one point where one of the guardbots stops and scans her. Clearly it detected something. The author also seems to forget that Asa's body is in motion, and emitting heat. Both of these things can be detected. The suit itself by its very use is emitting electronic frequencies.

A smock was actually developed that used tiny cameras to transmit an image of the scenery to the opposite side, so it made the smock close to invisible, but not quite. The thing is that even something like this is still actually there. If a bright light shone on it, it would cast a shadow of sorts, and any radar pulse aimed at it would bounce back faster and with a different 'feel' to it from her body than, say, the wall in front of which Asa was standing, so there was so much wrong with this that it was laughable. For a young kids' story it would have been fine, but not for grown-ups, not unless you're going to say it has magical powers (like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak) rather than hi-tech powers.

For me, the worst part was that the story quickly became bogged down in Riven's tedious, endless, and leaden-footed non-attempts to escape the absurdly one-dimensional criminal city, where every single thing is rotten to the core, and every single person is evil and amazingly good at finding and defeating Riven. It made this story truly boring. I can't commend this at all.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another diversion into the classics. I find the author's name amusing for some reason. In conjunction with reading this, I also watched the Disney movie John Carter which was loosely derived from the novel and was a huge loss for the studio, despite making some 300 million. That's bad business right there: your movie makes THREE HUNDRED MILLION and you still lose money on it? I am not a fan of Disney, but despite the movie being mildly entertaining and the novel being mildly readable, I have no intention of pursuing this series.

I don't know if George Lucas, in creating his Star Wars empire ever acknowledged how much he borrowed from Burroughs, but in my opinion he took a lot. Special snowflake super-powered savior guy and a princess to win? Telepathy? A desert planet? Sword fighting? Multiple alien species? Epic battles on land and in the air? Strange alien animals? Weird flying craft? It's all there. The leaders in the story are known as Jeds and Jeddaks. Is it a coincidence how close this is to Jedi?

I understand that this novel was written in a different era, and long before we knew a lot about Mars, but the story itself doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense even within its own fictional framework, and the hero of it, John Carter (it's convenient that his initials are JC, for a white savior, huh?!), really ought to have been named Mary Sue for all the luck he has going his way and the lack of effort he puts in to get the consistently sterling results he obrains. It's like everything he does, he becomes expert at, and everything that happens to him quickly facilitates his meeting whatever goal it was he had been hoping to reach.

As was the wont back then, this work was serialized in early 1912 before appearing as a 66,000 word novel. For this reason it has all of the prevailing white male privilege of that era, including all of the viewpoints that you'd expect. There is no enlightenment here, so you have to take it as you find it, or avoid it. Carter is a veteran of the US civil war (on the side of the South of course!) and shortly after that ended, he took to prospecting in the southwest USA. He gets to Mars accidentally through a portal hidden in a cave he happens upon. There is no explanation offered for the presence of this portal on Earth, much less its specific location.

Burroughs buys into the antique notion of Martian canals, born of a misunderstanding. Astronomer Schiaparelli described features (that were very likely optical artifacts) as 'channels' which in his native Italian was 'canali'. This was misunderstood as 'canals' - an artificial construction by intelligent beings on a planet that was drying-out, aimed at channeling water from the icy poles to support the rest of the planet. Burroughs uses this idea, just as did HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury. Burroughs also invents a huge river - no doubt based on the River Styx, along which people at the end of their lives were borne.

Mars is known to the natives as 'Barsoom', and it's been suggested that this is based on numbering the known heavenly bodies, starting with the sun and including the moons, 'bar' being the Martian word for eight. This makes no sense within the story, but I guess it could have been Burroughs 'rationale'. The five named planets are these: Rasoom (Mercury), Cosoom (Venus), Jasoom (Earth), Barsoom (Mars), and Sasoom (Jupiter), but since the word for 'one' in Barsoomian is 'ay' and not 'ra', this numbering theory would seem to be a non-starter!

People seem to praise Burroughs for such inventive world-building, but it really isn't. In fact, it's extremely derivative, and scientifically makes little to no sense. It's just a jumble of random ideas that apparently caught his imagination. Martians are green and with six arms? The equivalent of a dog has ten legs and is super-fast? There are wonderful flying machines in one part of the planet, and wagon trains in another? Mars is dry? None of this is really very imaginative. Some of it's plain dumb.

Anyway, Carter discovers, due to the weaker gravity on Mars, that he is very strong and can leap to great heights because his bones and muscles developed under Earth's gravity. The thing is that there are humans (or very like humans) on Mars - called red humans because of their tan - and any one of them ought to have been able to develop Carter's ability if they had only worked-out, yet in thousands of years, no one ever did? There's also a race of green Martians who are fifteen feet tall and have six limbs, but Carter can easily vanquish them because of his superior strength and agility. There are other races, but none that we meet in this volume.

Carter takes up with the green Martians who hatch from eggs after a five year 'gestation' period. He rapidly rises to a position of power despite being a curiosity, a non-native, and something of a prisoner. He learns their language quickly, but here's the weird thing: we're told that they say very few words aloud, and have only the simplest of spoken languages; they communicate a lot by telepathy, so he develops his telepathic skills just like that. Yet repeatedly throughout the story, these simple people, lacking a significant language, physically speak great volumes of complex words and sentences to him and there's never any more mention of communicating telepathically! So Burroughs is inconsistent at best.

The lack of air on Mars is overcome as the author reveals that there is (one!) atmospheric generation facility to keep the oxygen levels renewed, but this is part of the problem (especially at the end of the story), since the technology levels on Mars are wildly variable, particularly between the greens and the reds, although no reason is given for this.

Development of hand weapons seem to have halted at a late medieval level with simple guns and swords, yet the red society's power is derived from nuclear sources! The divide is, admittedly, largely between the greens and the reds, but the greens pilfer hugely from red airships that they shoot down with their long range rifles, so why their technology is so backward I have no idea.

The rifles are a problem. We're told that they can theoretically hit a target three hundred miles away, and reliably nail one that's two hundred miles away, but on Mars, the horizon is only two miles away, so how that weapon is supposed to work at a hundred times that distance, I have no idea! There's a vague allusion to wireless guidance technology, but this is completely out of line with the greens technology level, so none of this made any sense. His misuse of 'staunch' perhaps did back then: "I endeavored to staunch the flow of blood" This is really supposed to be 'stanch'.

The red humans have flying machines which employ an 'eighth ray' for propulsion, which is bullshit and nonsense, but hey, this is fiction! There are supposedly nine 'rays' and the eighth and ninth are talked about in this volume, but none of the others are discussed, so I have no idea what those are supposed to be.

The problem with this is that at one point, when JC is being suitably heroic once more and Mary-Sue-ing his way into yet another plum position, he encounters another human with a flying machine that has been downed due to a mechanical problem. Again this is highly convenient because we later learn that the stranded guy is a relative of a high-level official and thus provides yet another easy access point for Carter - which he promptly wastes.

We're informed that JC can't rescue this guy on his own flyer because they're fragile, but earlier we were told the eighth ray is so powerful that it accidentally launched an unsuspecting airship crew into orbit. How is this fragile? Did Burroughs mean that the ship's construction is fragile? There was no suggestion of that earlier, and these 'single occupant' airships are sixteen feet long so there seemed to be no reason why it could not have lifted two people if they sat on it carefully. I'm just saying!

Naturally, Carter meets a princess of the red humans and they almost immediately fall in love. They always use both names, so she's always Dejah Thoris and he's always John Carter, never John or Carter, and the both speak of themselves in third person at times. It's annoying. Everyone is quite warlike - whether that's because Mars is the god of war or the author just chose to make his story that way for dramatic purposes, I don't know, but despite this belligerence, no one invented a machine gun. Go figure! Even the red humans can't get along because there's a war between different factions of those, and the princess is supposed to marry her enemy against her will in order to secure peace, but you know that ain't happening.

So Carter gets into a position of palace guard at his enemy's stronghold, giving him freedom to roam the palace and search for the princess who is conveniently being held there. He is always - I mean always - hiding in the right place at the right time to discover key pieces of information. At one point he deserts his guard post to go look for the princess, and becomes hopelessly lost. He rests his back against a wall for a minute to catch his breath since he's apparently exhausted from roaming the hallways in search of her, and this wall just happens to be the one to the princess's quarters!

Instead of biding his time and making a plan, he bursts in there and slaughters the four guards who are berthed inside her room(!) She informs him that she has to go through with this wedding and that he cannot kill her intended because it is forbidden for her to marry the murderer of her intended. Dejah Thoris isn't actually a person, she's a tool, a lure, a trophy, a possession, a MacGuffin who is constantly in need of rescue, a bargaining chip. She's never an agent of her own, and is nothing if not a perennially half-naked eye-candy prize to be bartered and won.

Carter is equally lucky in fleeing the palace. Despite there being an uproar over the four guards he slaughtered, he manages to accidentally find his way to a truly convenient escape point from the palace. Unable to jump out of a high window in daylight (people apparently look up on Mars) he chooses to hide inside an elaborate lighting fixture, which happens to be hanging above the precise point where a group of people gather to explain everything that's going on.

Again with the luck: I read later of another of his adventures, "The building was an enormous one, rearing its lofty head fully a thousand feet into the air...The fact that Barsoomian architecture is extremely ornate made...a perfect ladder for me all the way to the eaves of the building" A thousand feet up! This is the guy who is so out of shape that he gets breathless searching the palace and yet he climbs a thousand feet with no trouble?

This kind of thing happens again and again, tediously so. For example, at one point, Carter is flying one of the little aircraft to Helium, a major Martian city which is a thousand miles away (I guess fuel running out is never a problem on Mars). Now this is the single most distinctive city on Mars, but he can't find it because his speedometer and compass are damaged, and he gets lost. Despite flying over several cities where he could have stopped and asked for directions, the idiot doesn't stop until he espies a massive battle going on between green Martians. Despite knowing how deadly a shot these people are, instead of avoiding the battle, he flies right over it like a moron, and gets shot down.

Why these fighting Martians even care about shooting him down when amidst a massive battle, is left unexplained, but he happens to land, in a field of ten thousands fighting Martians, precisely at the point where his friend is engaged in combat, and ends up saving his friend's life! This results in his becoming even more highly elevated in their society. Note that since Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, a compass would be useless there, but Burroughs could not have known that.

When Carter is trying to find an associate in the dark dungeons, I read, "Fortunately among the first I examined I found his jailer, and soon we had Kantos Kan with us in the throne room." Yep, he goes right to the jailer who has the very keys he needs to free the guy. He rallies a force of a hundred thousand green Martians who come with him to attack the enemy red Martian city and this takes no effort at all to talk them into joining his personal crusade. Despite needing three days to gather all the help he requires, he arrives at the enemy city right at the precise moment his precious princess is about to be wed, just in time to stop the proceedings!

There's an air battle which I imagine would have been rather thrilling to readers in 1912 when air travel was in its infancy, but the author utterly fails to think through the fight. He has the airships drawn up (like David Weber does in more modern sci-fi battles) as though the space in which they fight is two dimensional, so they're organized like ships of the line, static, and firing cannon at one another in broadsides! Eventually some ships' captains think it through and manage to rise above the others and drop bombs on them, but when it comes to taking on the million man enemy army, instead of flying over and dropping bombs on them, these idiots quit the ships and deposit their 100,000 men on the ground and fight it out with the million man enemy army - and they still win!

Carter is the most lucky klutz ever to blunder into a situation where he can't lose. So like I said, it's interesting enough to read purely from a historical perspective to see how people viewed both themselves and Mars (and non-whites and women) back in Burroughs's day. It's not something I was remotely interested in continuing on into other volumes. It is a free read - you can find it online, at places like Project Gutenberg, There might even be an audiobook version of it there - I dunno. For me though, like Carter's bride, it laid an egg.

Sleepwalking by Cara Malone

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb describes this as a novella, but at only 15,000 words, it's actually a novelette. For me, I'd call it a prologue and had I known that's all it was I would never have embarked upon it. I don't do prologues. It was only some sixty screens on my phone where I do most of my ebook reading, so it's a fast read, but that's usually not a good recommendation for me!

The problem with a story like this is that you know exactly how it's going to end, so what the author has to offer you is an interesting way to get there, and this author seemed like she was dedicatedly pursuing the most predictably plodding route she could map. On top of that, there were multiple grammatical and other problems. If the story had been enthralling, I would have not paid so much attention to them, but in so short a story, it bothered me that there were so many silly errors.

I read, for example, what's turning out to be an increasingly common goof in YA stories. One character had a "geometric deer skull tattooed on her bicep." Nope! It's biceps, unless the vperson seeing this has weird x-ray vision and could see through the skin to an actual bicep, which is one of two attachments that the biceps muscle has to the scapula. Each bicep joins to form the biceps which is the bulge we see when the arm is flexed.

Later I read, "Okay, fine. If that's your criteria." Criteria is a plural. In this case what was needed was the singular: 'criterion'. These two main characters are a senior college student and a college graduate, and both are English majors, so this ineptitude in employing the English language is not only inexcusable, it's laughable. Unfortunately, standards are definitely falling.

In another variety of problem, I read, "Morgan righted the coffee table and set the empty glass down..." This is the same empty glass that Morgan had already placed in the sink a few paragraphs before. Another such issue was when I read, "That's when the term 'bipolar' first came into their lives." Nope! Morgan mentions that term twice before, so it had already been in their lives prior to this!

Right after the bipolar, there was about three paragraphs where Morgan begins by taking out her phone and doing a search for something, and ends by closing her laptop! I want a phone that morphs effortlessly into a laptop! Again, really sloppy writing. This author takes no pride in her craft.

Later, I read, "Leah took her outstretched hand and it was like electricity was firing between their palms" Ri-ght.... Seriously? This sounded far too ridiculous even as a figure of speech. Further on, I read, "What was so special about Leah that it could make Morgan cast aside six years of happiness for an illicit kiss in a coffee shop?" Nope. Morgan had already said it had been some three years of relative bliss before things had begun to go downhill, so there was no such six years, and that certainly applies to their recent history. In fact, it's Morgan's miserable relationship that triggered her interest in Leah. It was like the author had repeated instances where she couldn't remember what she'd written just a short time before - either that or she simply didn't care about what she was writing, and if she doesn't, why the hell should I?

Anyone can make a goof-up or even several, but when there are so many in such a short space in a story that's already dropping below being so-so, it's too many for me. But let's look at the quality of the story itself rather than the actual text it was written in. The first of the two main characters is college senior Leah McAllister, who is apparently pursuing an English degree, but has no clue what she will do with it once she graduates. This doesn't make her look too smart.

I mean, she's had three years of college already, yet not once in those years has she really had any inspiration about what she'll do after her senior year or, given she has no idea, why she's still doggedly pursuing this English major instead of trying something new and of more utility to her. This doesn't make her at all appealing to me as someone I want to read about unless something truly weird and wonderful is going to happen, and I don't include falling in lust in such a list. This is also a problem with this story - as so often happens in these 'romance' tales. The author badly confuses lust with love and it makes the story shallow, stupid, and unappealing.

Further rendering Leah stupid is her ridiculous and persistent denial that she's at least bisexual and more likely, an out-and-not-out lesbian. If she were in high-school, this confusion over her sexual leaning might be understandable, and even as a college freshman you can probably get away with it, but as a senior after three years or more of college? No. I don't buy it this at all, especially when virtually the first thing she does in this story is have a totally random hookup with a female named Christy, who is pretty much a complete stranger, in an alley behind a bar. I mean, seriously?

Leah allows Christy to digitally bring her to an orgasm - apparently the most powerful she's ever had - and afterwards the two part and never see each other again (not in this prolog anyway), and Leah is still having doubts? She's a frigging moron, period! And worse, she exhibits zero capacity to learn and no smarts about delving into a potential partner's sexual history before engaging in sex with them. Christy doesn't even wash her hands before taking her out into the alley and fingering her for fuck's sake!

Morgan, the other main character is in her mid-twenties and has been in a relationship for six years with this girl Ali, with whom she lives. Ali is undiagnosed bipolar sufferer - as far as Morgan can tell from scrolling on her morphing phone. Apparently she's tried to talk Ali into getting medical help but Ali reacts badly to that, yet not once has Morgan thrown down the gauntlet and said let's get help before we break up this relationship for good, nor has she suggested couples therapy so she shares that burden with Ali.

It's like Ali's sole purpose in this story is to be an albatross around Morgan's neck; an artificial impediment to her getting it on with Leah right from the off. Or getting off with Leah right from the on! LOL! Despite Morgan supposedly caring for Ali, she doesn't authentically behave at all like she cares. She never tries to sit and talk with Ali or to discuss this situation to maybe figure out what changed or how - like did something in their environment cause this change? Was it something in her diet?? Is it age related or tied to some past viral infection? She considers none of this. Her entire effort seems to be repeatedly looking up the online definition of bipolar and then closing her laptop that used to be a phone. It's pathetic. She never has even considered going to her own doctor or to a support group to ask her how she can best approach dealing with Ali.

The worst thing about this relationship is that Ali had been (with Morgan's knowledge and cooperation) trying to get pregnant through implants. This despite that the last three years (as far as I can tell - the text is vague) not exactly being a bed of roses, and despite Morgan having this bipolar suspicion - which is especially relevant to any attempt to get pregnant and ought to have been raised with the implant doctor, but evidently wasn't. So Morgan is a moron too.

In short there were far too many issues, too little authenticity and a plethora of poor writing techniques and choices. I cannot commend this at all.

Home on Folly Farm by Jane Lovering

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook read very nicely by Rose Robinson, about this woman who inherited her grandfather's sheep farm in Yorkshire and has her snotty sister come to stay. It started out great, with some nice snarky humor, but then the tone seemed to change, and it seemed like it lost a lot of its charm, becoming far less amusing and much more irritating.

There seemed to be two reasons for this. The first issue was that the romance part started to become a bit much, with this woman having tingles and spasms whenever this guy was around, and she was not even a teenager. It would still have been annoying even were she in her teens, but she was a mature woman. That's not to say she can't get excited about a potential man in her life, but must it be so pathetic and juvenile a reaction? The other issue was that her sister was so thoroughly and irredeemably obnoxious that I can't believe the farming sister didn't punch her right in the mouth already.

The spoiled-rotten city sister is named Cassandra, and the famer - or more technically the rancher (although they don't call them that in Britain) - is named Pandora. Those names were problematical. They didn't seem to apply, because Pandora was more like the Greek Cassandra in mythology, and conversely, Cassandra was more like a Pandora. Maybe the author intended it this way as irony, or she got the mythology mixed up? I don't know. I really didn't like either of them that much, but Cassandra not at all. Had she been simply irritating, but had a saving grace here and there, that would be one thing, but the author has made her such an extreme, outright selfish bitch, and she had Pandora barely even reacting to her insults and passive aggression, and her privileged behavior and downright abuse. It was far too much.

Pandora "farms" this rare breed of sheep for their fleece which she sells to crafts people. She's been warned by the local police that there's a gang of smugglers operating in the area, kidnapping sheep, yet when she hears a truck (in Britain, a 'lorry') go by, she's not even remotely triggered by it. Now this is a woman who's living on the thin edge of profitability, and who depends entirely on her sheep since her 'farm' does nothing else, and there's not even a mild suspicion in her mind; not even of wondering if that truck might be the smugglers? It made her look stupid and incompetent.

When the smugglers do actually show up, Pandora is slow to react. She doesn't own a gun because this is Britain, and while licensed firearms are permitted, and people on farms are more likely to own one than anyone, I guess, Pandora doesn't. That's fine, but she is armed with a phone to call the cops and she doesn't do that immediately. She does do it, but then she heads down to where the truck is, and without any plan as to what to do. Presumably it's a camera phone since all of them are these days, but she doesn't seem to think of trying to get a picture of the truck, or of the license plate or the men!

This is in northern Britain where there are drystone walls galore and Pandora doesn't even arm herself with some rocks! I hate maidens in distress stories, but in the context of that kind of story, which this really is in many ways, this would have been the perfect time to have the guy step up and do a little bit of heroics, yet he's as clueless as she is. If it were me, I'd have her throwing rocks at the truck to smash windows, or at the guys to chase them off, or I'd have the guy sneaking in the darkness and slashing a tire or two on the truck, but they don't even manage to get the license plate number between them! It was a disaster which made them both look useless. I know not everyone can step up and be heroic, but this is fiction, and I expected a bit more from the tough and seasoned woman that we're led to believe Pandora is supposed to be. It was sad.

When Cassandra arrives at the farm, with her son Hawthorn (I kid you not) who goes by Thaw for short, which in Britain sounds like Thor, she also brings along her son's tutor, who Pandora believes is Leo - the man she had a bad relationship with many years before. She believes Leo doesn't recognize her and then discovers this is Nat, Leo's brother, and learns that Leo died from a drug overdose, but it soon became clear that there is no Nat. This is Leo who is trying to redeem himself. Yawn. At least that's how it seemed to me. I may be wrong and I didn't care by then anyway. This whole thing was tedious and far too drawn-out with ominous and very soon irritating references back to Pandora's 'bad relationship'. It became annoying because it just dragged on and on and on.

So anyway, when the cop arrives, he sits drinking tea and eating cookies instead of getting out in his vehicle to see if he can track down these guys, and the last thing he thinks of doing is putting out an APB on the truck. I know this is a romance and a family problems story, not some sort of heroic action adventure, but seriously? It's not a Miss Marple story either, so a little more realism and depicting the police in a bit less of a lethargic light wouldn't hurt! It was at this point that I decided enough was way too much and I ditched it right there and then. God! I resented wasting my time on this story when I could have been listening to something worthwhile.

ExtraOrdinary by Danielle K Girl

Rating: WARTY!

Errata etc: "Jack text them around ten to say it was going to be a long night." Texted is the word!

"From above comes a drawn out scrapping sound, like someone is hauling a piece of furniture across the room." 'scraping', not 'scrapping'!

"sweeping view of the properties carefully maintained gardens." 'property's' not 'properties'

" 'You can fly.' Ryder cringes at the high pitch of her voice" This is after Ryder has already seen Olessia float down from an upper storey, clearly demonstrating that she can fly.

"I’m going to have a shower and catch an hours sleep before we start thinking about getting you into town, okay?" Hour’s sleep!

This novel was a true disappointment because it began by pressing all the right buttons for me: faking like it was a ghost story and then slyly morphing into something much more interesting, but it quickly pissed me off by having such a limp main character in Ryder, who was a squealy, idiotic, spineless, unappealing, and uninteresting little shit. On top of that, it brought in such a trope manly male character for her that I laughed out loud.

IRL, this guy would have zero interest in a little wet rag of a wuss like Ryder, but you know from the way the author describes him and Ryder's reaction to him that the telegraph message of the day is: these two will be all over each other like white on the Republican party. Barf. I quit reading at that point because I knew exactly where this novel was going and I had no intention of being its traveling companion. I knew just how it would turn out, too. It wasn't going to be sci-fi story I'd begun to root for; it was about to be taken over by a dumb-ass romance between these two jackasses. No thanks!

I found, as unfortunately happens all-too-often in these stories, that Ryder's best friend Sophie was far more enagaging and interesting than Ryder ever could be, and I knew with equal certainty that the author never would give Sophie a fair shake. When that happens in one of my own stories, the main character gets downgraded and I shift the weight of the tale over to this more interesting character from the less engaging one. I don't plan it that way, but my characters are smarter than I am, and I happen to be smart enough to know when to listen to them instead of trying to force my own original idea onto them when they're trying hard to go off in an unexpected, and much more interesting, direction.

Letting them decide how the story goes makes for a much more realistic, original, and natural story than if I'd forced anything on them, or been stubborn about clinging to my original line of thinking. In one story I released not long ago, I even killed-off the person who was to have been one of the two main characters and promoted her best friend into the role, because she was a far more appealing character. I'm sorry this author didn't have the same willingness to toss some things out of the window, but this is what happens when you're hidebound by tradition and dedicatedly writing to trope. I can't commend this at all.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Rating: WARTY!

This was another depressing attempt at approaching one of the classics. I feel bad that Erin Bateman had to read this 800 page disaster - or however many pages it was in her edition. No, on second thought, I don't, because she really didn't read it well. Her voice and tone were so wrong for this, and at times it was irritating to listen to her. But even that would have been manageable if the novel were not so endlessly tedious, and rambling, and uninteresting in the extreme. And so completely illogical.

I guess 'show, don't tell' wasn't a thing back in Henry's time, because he tells everything in extraordinarily mind-numbing detail. His main character, Isabel Archer, is, we're told, a smart, adventurous, engaging young woman, but what we're shown is a dull, clueless, and uninteresting woman. To me, it's a mystery - other than that she's 'hot' I guess - why any sane man would want a relationship with her, but it seems that everyone wants to marry her, while she on the other hand doesn't, we're told, want to marry anyone, because she wants to stretch her wings. Apparently marriage prevents this even for someone welre told is strong-willed and adventurous. But apparently lacking in imagination.

The problem is that she has no money for travel, and as soon as she does have money - through an inheritance - she marries the worst guy she can find. Despite turning down devoted and eligible men who would have been good for her and who proposed when she had nothing, because she wished to retain her freedom, we're told she jumps into a marriage on imprudently short notice with the worst guy there is. This story is a piece of garbage.

The Making of Riley Paige by Blake Pierce

Rating: WARTY!

This book is in three volumes, and I believe I got the first one as a freebie - the intention being to lure you into to buying the other two, but that ain't gonna happen, not given how poorly-written this first volume ("Watching") was. This marks the third Blake Pierce I've read and they've all been bad.

The story is of a serial killer on a college campus, and this girl who is not named Riley Paige, but Riley Sweeney, is having insights into the killer's mind. There is another series by the same author about this same character, but later in her life, so I'm guessing this is a prequel, and in the later series, Riley apparently married this guy she met in college, whose last name is Paige. But as I said, the problem with the book is that it's badly-written. At one point in the story, Riley is talking with her roommate who is named Trudy, about a girl named Rhea, who was murdered in the dorm, but a couple of times in that conversation, the author mistakenly calls Trudy 'Rhea' - like Riley is talking with the dead girl! There are several other such gaffes, such as where the author says "a voice for the grave" rather than 'a voice from the grave'. The quality of the editing is non-existent. I know as authors we all screw uo now and then, but this one seems like they're not even trying.

The real problem with it is that it feels so amateur in how it's written, and in order to tell the story, the author is having Riley do stuff that makes her look like a dumb-ass at times. For example, there's a killer on the loose, preying on female students. He evidently has the gift of the gab, and is suave enough for them to feel safe inviting him back to their room, but at a party, Riley invites this one guy she barely knows to her room without even thinking for a minute he might be the killer. He isn't as it turns out, but that was a stupid thing for her to do. The guy tries to rape her, but since she recently learned some self-defense moves, she magically overpowers him despite him also being trained in self-defense - he was in her class - and being bigger and stronger than her! It's badly-written.

It gets worse though! She finds this pocket knife in the guy's pants, and she doesn't think for a second about taking it out and handling it, and when she hands it to the police, they have no problem handling it either! There's no concern at all about wearing gloves, or about fingerprints or contamination, or evidence bags or chain of custody! It's amateur!

Riley takes this guy Ryan to bed with her on their first date when she barely knows him, and there's no mention of sexual history or condom use let alone any concern on her part that he might be the killer. Yes, we know she's going to marry him because this is a prequel, but she doesn't know that! More on this ridiculous relationship later.

After her own roommate is murdered, Riley is taken by this FBI guy who is now on the case down to the police station to watch an interrogation of a suspect, so she can share her insights with the FBI about whether she thinks he did it! After that, despite her being in shock earlier, and despite it being her roommate who was murdered, and despite her having no place to go since her room is a crime scene, no one offers to drive her anywhere or asks her if she'll be okay. They just let her walk out without taking a statement from her or anything! The author obviously did this so this guy Ryan could come pick her up, but it's stupid, and very poorly written.

From the start, and since we know it wasn't Ryan, it looked to me like the killer is one of two college professors. I suspected this from early on, but it makes absolutely no sense. At one point Riley has this insight that the killer was hanging out outside the bar where Rhea was partying the night she was killed, Riley felt that this guy started talking to her and Rhea invited him back to her dorm room! If it had been a fellow student, no one would have given it a second thought, but to claim that no one noticed an older man - a college professor who would have been recognized - hanging outside the bar where students gather, and walking and talking with Rhea or going back to her dorm? It made zero sense!

When Riley finally, belatedly, gets onto the idea that it was a college professor (so much for her brilliant insights), she goes to the library to check on something she read in a book that one of these two professors had written about the criminal mind, and she sees one of her professors at a computer terminal in the library. He greets her not as Riley Sweeney but as "Riley Paige!"! LOL! Badly written. After consulting this book, she decides she should call that same professor she just saw, and talk to him about her thoughts. Never once does she think to check the computer terminal where she'd just seen him! It's like she forgot she'd seen him only minutes before, and she immediately goes to a payphone to call him where she finds him in his office! Again, badly-written.

The weird thing is that when she's seeking him out, she asks herself, "But who else did she have to talk to about this?" - well duhh! The FBI agent who's all but recruited you! Again, badly written. What I suspect happened here is that the professor she saw in the library was actually the other professor, and not the one she phones and later meets, who happens to be the murderer. Again it was a writing screw up.

The saddest thing about the purported genius Riley-with-the-magical-insights is that she continually and persistently gets it wrong who the murder is! We, the readers, have known virtually from the start because the story is so badly-written, but Riley doesn't learn until she's trapped in a locked room with him. Even then she's still on the wrong track and the professor has to declare hismelf as the killer! That's how bad she is - and she has to be rescued by the FBI agent who conveniently has been tailing her all day hoping she will lead him to the killer! What?! Because that's with the FBI does - follow a flaky girl around, hoping desperately for a break in the case instead of going steadily through the evidence and eliminating or adding suspects until they finally nail the right one. Yup!

Finally: how do we know Riley has been having unprotected sex with Ryan? Well, he gets her pregnant. Yet more evidence of how profoundly stupid this woman is. But what evidence is there that there's anything else to do in this to do in this town, but party? Riley almost never goes to any classes during this story. She never studies. She has no job. She has no hobbies or pursuits. She's a senior, and she does nothing but party and agonize over who the killer is.

Oh and finding out she's pregnant long before it would show - because she has nausea. Not because she has some feminine insight, but nausea. Yeah. This novel is nauseatingly bad. So when Ryan shows up out of the blue at her graduation - where she's still wearing a neck brace because this novel is mind bogglingly telescoped - and he essentially proposes marriage, she's all on board even though she barely knows him, and the last time she was with him, things went badly and they broke up. This novel is shit. Honestly. Garbage. I condemn it. I have no interest in reading any more about Riley Sweeney-Paige or anything else from this author. Three strikes and you're out Blake Pierce!

Liars and Losers Like Us by Ami Allen-Vath

Rating: WARTY!

"As prom night looms on the horizon, 17-year-old Bree must navigate tragedy, secrets, and a difficult love triangle." Why? Why the love triangle? Shit or get off the pot, Bree. Another unoriginal plot starring a ditz who doesn't even have convictions, let alone the courage of them.

The Lake House by Christie Barlow

Rating: WARTY!

"After moving to a new town, bistro waitress Ella catches a ride across the lake every day with Roman, the village water taxi driver. As she settles in and gets to know her charming neighbors, will Heartcross offer a second chance at life - and love?" The answer is yes. Why is it even a question anymore? And 'Roman'? Really? I find the story more appealing if the tax-driver's name was Visigoth or Vandal and the town's name was Starcross.

Bennett's Bastards Bundle by Jennie Kew

Rating: WARTY!

"For these couples, no-strings-attached passion leads to unexpected..." diseases? Just a wild-ass guess.

That’s Not a Thing by Jacqueline Friedland

Rating: WARTY!

In yet another plot that's been done to death: "Set to marry another man, Meredith finds herself at a crossroads when fate throws her back together with Wesley — the ex-fiancé she never forgot." Why is there a problem? If she's hooked on her ex why hasn't she pursued it? If she's not, why is it a problem? Shit or get off the pot, Meredith. Any other behavior just makes you a bitch. This is another big no.

Winner Take All by Laurie Devore

Rating: WARTY!

"At Cedar Woods Prep Academy, ambitious Nell and privileged Jackson are drawn into a fierce rivalry that gives way to a whirlwind romance" Why wouldn't it? Inevitably rivalries end in marriage. It's just that this exact story has been told a billion times already, yet here we have yet another author chomping at the bit to ram it down our throats again. No. No! NO!

Beachside Beginnings by Sheila Roberts

Rating: WARTY!

"After fleeing her abusive past, can Moira find a fresh start in Moonlight Harbor — without getting her heart broken?" My guess is yes, as another female author creates another weak and chickenshit female character. Why do women abuse women in this consistent and repugnant manner?

Layover by Becca Jameson

Rating: WARTY!

"After a red-hot night of passion, flight attendant Libby skips out on former soldier Jason — even though his dominance gives her the ultimate pleasure. But when he moves to her hometown, the temptation is too great to resist!" Why? She skipped out on it without a seocnd thought before. Which begs the question why? What's changed? Her underwear? His condom? Did she have a venereal disease and was too chickenshit to tell him? If not, don't worry - she'll soon get one with her behavior. No. Just no.

Command Me by Geneva Lee

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb tells us that "Clara shares a kiss with Prince Alexander of Cambridge - a dominant bad boy and exiled royal heir - and their sexual chemistry is off the charts…" Which charts, exactly, is their sexual chemistry off? Thinking people want to know. Who created those charts? How did they measure them? And why were they so narrow in scope that so very many people in the world of fiction are not even on those charts? Hmm?

And who the hell is Price Alexander of Cambridge for fuck's sake? This is another bullshit royal (non-)romance that is, I can promise you now - and without evne reading it - is an exact cookie-cutter of every other royal romance and bad boy novel that's ever been written. There is quite literally nothign new here. It's a definite no.