Secret Lives, by Gabriella Poole

(Darke Academy #1) - 1 star

Despite barely showing anything approaching intelligence, a judgmental and jumped up eavesdropper from a poor background wins a scholarship to a prestigious but ridiculous school, The Darke Academy, where nobody learns anything because the teachers are too busy being intimidated by the clique of beautiful, blatant moustache-twirlers that lord it over the rest of the student body. Despite hating and looking down on the group, Cassie (our asshole-ish eavesdropper) is desperate to become one of them – ostensibly so that she can find out what their deal is, but mostly so she can make sure they know how much better she is than them because of her poor upbringing. There were so many things that made me rage about this book, I may need some counselling as soon as I finish this review.

In case you couldn’t tell, I despised our ‘heroine’, Cassie, and was at a loss to understand how everyone she met was so impressed by her, despite her doing nothing impressive whatsoever. I hated the stupid school, with its moving country every term (what a logistical nightmare that must be) and I hated the stupid ruling clique, The Few, and nearly strained my eye muscles through doing this every time someone called them by that ridiculously pretentious name:

I hated the ‘love triangle’, and thought its execution was particularly poorly done - although at least Richard, the ‘charming’ fop, actually spent some time with Cassie (even if I still couldn’t see any growth of feelings between them) as opposed to Ranjit who seemed to fall head over heels simply through staring at her (and the fact that she’s such a dead ringer for his dead girlfriend didn’t lend him the air of a tragic romantic hero, but that of a creepy weirdo who was about to pull a Vertigo on her).

And worst of all, I despised the ‘reveal’ which was so poorly executed that I’m still not entirely clear on what manner of monster The Few are – sort of vampire-like but feeding on souls, or life, or something equally vague and apparently something to do with some sort of spirit possession? Quite why an entire school would need to be set up to ‘teach’ these beautiful wankers how to be beautiful wankers was lost on me – as was how it was considered prestigious when the rest of the student body, there to be fed upon by The Few, learnt fuck all thanks to the tosspots derailing every lesson.

In case it isn’t staggeringly clear, I spent most of my time wishing that the school would burn to the ground with Cassie and The Few still in it, and if this had been a book instead of being read on my Kindle I’d have happily added it to the fire.

Graveyard Shift, by Angela Roquet

1 star

Lana is a Reaper, living in Limbo City, making a living collecting souls on their deaths and delivering them to whatever Afterlife suits them best - it turns out that all religions were sorta right, you see, and so their believers are simply measured against their own beliefs before being ferried on to Heaven/Hell/Nirvana/Summerland etc. Unless they're unbelievers, in which case they're thrown into the Sea of Eternity. 

Despite not being a very good Reaper - she breaks rules, is insubordinate, lazy and generally a pain in the ass - Lana has somehow just been given a promotion. Grim, the boss of the Reapers, wants her to head a crew looking for a particularly special soul who can hold Eternity together.

This initially appealed to me because of its ideas, but unfortunately fell flat in the telling. We jump from plot point to plot point with most of the contents feeling like ideas for scenes and characters not yet fleshed out, and neither the relationships (be they the apparently romantic one that springs up between Lana and an angel she supposedly despises, or those with her friends and peers) nor the plot points felt remotely organic but simply appeared because Roquet wanted them to. Description wasn't a strong suit either, so I was left with only a vague sense of what this world looked and felt like, what happened in the battles that frequently kicked off, and no clue whatsoever why both Lana and the soul she was looking for were so ruddy bloody special.

On the plus side, this was free...

Drowning Mermaids, by Nadia Scrieva

1 star

Being up to my eyeballs in painkillers thanks to some extremely painful back problems, I thought I’d turn to some brain candy whilst I convalesce. Unfortunately, Drowning Mermaids was more fit for rotting the brain and I can only assume that the high rating this has garnered on Goodreads must mean that every other reader was on far stronger painkillers than I, with the highest dosage having been taken by the writer just before she started scribbling as most of this book made no freaking sense whatsoever.

Aazuria is working as a ballet dancing stripper to finance a mermaid war when she meets Trevain, an extremely wealthy fisherman. Taking him up on the offer of moving herself and her sisters into his home they fall in insta-love, although their happiness is threatened by the fact that Aazuria is the leader of an underwater nation at war and that Trevain can’t help but piss himself laughing every time she alludes to being a mermaid. Will their love survive? Will I find the book littered with incredibly strange sentences? Will I get pissed at the weird strain of sexism on display? Will I roll my eyes hard enough for them to fall out of my head every time a doorbell rings demurely? Will I become angrily confused by the shoddy world-building? 

In this world mermaids don’t have tails, which explains how Aazuria can get a job as a stripping ballet dancer. Instead, they’re human – albeit ones that have grown a second set of lungs (not gills) that can somehow filter oxygen from water (where these lungs are housed in their bodies is beyond me, as they don’t have extremely large ribcages to accommodate them). Their legs, however, become wracked with pain if they spend too much time on land – although this only seems to affect Aazuria (and someone who later turns out to be a merman) and didn’t seem to influence the mermaid architects when building their underwater ice palaces in which lots of waterless caverns have been carved out for some reason that made absolutely no sense (along with them having carpeted some of these caverns. Where did they get the carpets? Did they have to strip to pay for them? How were they fitted in the ice caves? And why??)

The mermaids seem to have some powers but they’re crap ones like being slightly intuitive, only aging on land and having your hair and skin change colour when not in the water (this is apparently due to tanning, which somehow turns your platinum blonde hair dark and which only affects some mermaids, but not all – the twins remained flame-haired and fair skinned whether they were underwater or not). Despite not having powerful tails, they’re still incredibly fast and strong swimmers, easily able to catch up with boats that have set off long before them. Which would have been fine, except that meant that I was incredibly bewildered by a bunch of mermaid reinforcements arriving by boat in the middle of an underwater battle – a battle in which bullets, kicks, punches, people and throwing knives all move in the same way that they do on land (ever tried to punch someone underwater? It seems my brother and I did more research during family holidays than Scrieva ever did). 

The characters and their love affair were written with the same lack of skill as the world in which they lived – Aazuria is apparently a brave and strong ruler of her people, although she constantly abandoned them to seek her own safety on land, and we’re constantly told that Trevain is kind, considerate and honourable although what we’re shown is a man who’s decided that visiting the mother he has installed in a psychiatric hospital is too much bother, who throws temper tantrums when things don’t go his own way, insults and belittles the woman he supposedly loves and even goes for her throat when they disagree. I spent rather a lot of time hoping that Trevain would get harpooned in the chest by the evil, black clad mermaids (that’s how we know they’re evil) that Aazuria was at war with, and that she’d be so grief-stricken that we’d get to see exactly how one would go about drowning a mermaid. Instead, after vanquishing her enemies Aazuria got her happy-ever-after, with Trevain’s mermaid genes (lucky!) enabling him to join her in her ice palace (good luck to her, I wonder if he’ll choke her every time he gets sick of seafood?).

Honestly, the only good things I took from this book were that reading it was so painful it made my back pale in comparison, and that if I decided to abandon my job and write instead, nothing I could produce (even out of my mind on painkillers) could be any worse than this.

Rogue's Honor, by Brenda Hiatt

1.5 stars

Last year I severely curtailed the amount of Kindle freebies I downloaded, and a much higher quality reading year ensued. This year, I completely ignored that fact when I was sent a link to Book Bub and went to town on the download button. Rogue’s Honor was the first of that bunch of freebies and doesn’t bode particularly well for my enjoyment of the rest. It wasn’t written so poorly as to be offensive to my eyes, but it didn’t really have much going for it either.

Set in Regency England, Lady Pearl is a noble do-gooder aching to get down and dirty with the poor of London so that she can improve their situations and bask in the glow of her own wonderfulness. Disguising herself as a servant she soon finds herself in one of London’s slums and in the company of the notorious Saint of the Seven Dials, a Robin Hood type figure who robs the nobility blind so he can improve the situations of the poor while sating his own feelings of hatred toward the ruling class. Of course, the two go gaga over one another. But…will Luke (the aforementioned Saint) still want Pearl once he realises she’s part of the hated nobility? There’s no real doubt that he will – a lifetime of prejudice is easily overcome by honey coloured hair, after all. 

But…society will never allow for a relationship between a poor thief and a rich lady. Luckily for Pearl, she easily deduces that Luke is blissfully unaware that he is actually the secret lost Earl of Hardwyck and gets his title restored. But…her awful stepmother wants her married off before her 21st birthday and so forces Pearl to choose between marrying Luke or marrying Lord Bellowsworth ( a man Pearl detests and has been trying to avoid marrying for most of the book), and so of course Pearl chooses Bellowsworth (because of, erm, stuff). But….will Luke let the marriage go ahead? No, of course he won’t, and after two duels wins her hand.

With both characters perfectly in love with one another there was no real tension throughout the book, and the many twists of the story were mostly ridiculous obstacles put in their way for them to hurdle on their way to a happy-ever-after that was never in doubt. Instead of adding much-needed tension to the tale, these merely added extra padding and helped make a light, inconsequential book drag on for way too long. 

Pearl, despite apparently being a spirited, intelligent woman, seemed to employ insane troll logic to make most of her imbecilic decisions and I actually started to hope that she’d been knocked up during one of her illicit trysts and would have her reputation ruined, leading to abandonment by Bellowsworth and discovering that Luke was really a rogue after all who had no intention of marrying her, so she could find out first-hand what it was actually like to be one of London’s poor. Sadly, I was disappointed in this and will have to content myself with not reading any of the rest of this series.

Warrior of the West, by M.K. Hume

1 star

If this book had a face, I would happily punch it every day until next Christmas. As it doesn't, I'll have to settle for ranting about it instead. 

Its predecessor, King Arthur: Dragon's Child, was a decent bit of brain-candy imagining the younger years of Artorex that I enjoyed despite its flaws. Warrior of the West, catching up with King Artor twelve years later, compounded those flaws and nearly drove me to complete rage more than once - throughout the second half I had to take frequent breaks in order to swear at it profusely, nearly break my kindle in fits of temper, and wish a violent death upon virtually every character within.

Now High King of the Britons, Artor has spent the last decade murdering every Saxon he comes across. When his emissaries are killed while negotiating a truce, he mounts an assault on the Saxon stronghold of Glamdring Ironfist. The first half of the book builds slowly towards this, showing a little of how Artor has changed in the intervening years and introducing Ironfist and a few of his compatriots, including the slave Bedwyr. Considering the amount of time spent on him, Bedwyr would appear to be an important new character but it turns out that as soon as Artor has his victory he's promptly forgotten about and never mentioned again.

Unfortunately, this victory also kicked off the deeply problematic second half of the book, during which its focus on characters brought the problems of the first book into the spotlight. While Uther may be long dead, Artor's foster-brother Caius is still around and so subtly drawn that he may as well be called Rapey McStabs-a-lot and have the Death March start up whenever he walked onto the page. But Rapey has nothing on Wenhaver, Hume's version of Guinevere. There was really no need for Hume to mention her dislike of Guinevere in her accompanying notes, as her contempt shone through in one of the most flagrant examples of character bashing that I've ever come across. You could, in fact, replace the whole second half with this and you'd find no real discernible difference:

"Dear Wenhaver,

Love Hate,

M.K. Hume"

I have no problem with unlikeable and flawed characters, but I do have a problem with those obviously set up solely for unfavourable comparisons to a character the author does like. The Wenhaver of this book isn't really appalling for her own sake or that of the story, but so that we'll also worship Nimue (or as I soon came to call her, Fucking Nimue).

Having been saved as a baby in Dragon's Child and brought under the protection of the High King, Fucking Nimue is now grown up and serving as the apprentice of Merlinus, and is the most beautiful, most elegant, most interesting, most intelligent, most caring, most wonderful woman to have ever walked the earth. I suspect that not only do her farts smell like freshly baked cookies, but that she shits sunbeams too (and that eating them would probably cure world hunger and stop all wars forever). She's so fabulous that no-one (including the book) can stop themselves from commenting every five minutes on how bloody wonderful she is, and comparing her to Wenhaver who is portrayed as being every awful thing that has ever been said about a woman. Petulant, spiteful, rude, abusive, promiscuous, immature, irrational and thick (amongst many other awful things), no-one (including the book) can stop themselves from calling her a cow, a bitch, a slut or, more often, a whore any time her name is mentioned. Even when noting her beauty the book can't help but mention that her dress clashes with her skin making her look shit compared to Fucking Nimue (rhymes with Mary Sue!) who, of course, looks like a supermodel even while wearing a sack. 

It's at this point that I started sounding like Samuel Jackson having a vicious fit of Tourette's...

...which the stupid serial-killer sub-plot that sprang up here made even worse. While Merlinus shows off his psychological profiling and forensic skills and generally acts like he's a heartbeat away from pulling out a pair of sunglasses and a bad pun, it soon becomes apparent that even the serial killer is obsessed with Fucking Nimue, though he sadly doesn't succeed in murdering her before he's unveiled as - surprise! - the one bloke that we're constantly reminded is a shit.

If I do read the last in this trilogy (unlikely, although I'd already stupidly bought it after Dragon's Child) it'll only be so that I can root for Wenhaver to screw every man, woman and beast on Cadbury Tor and give Artor such a raging case of syphilis that his face falls off just in time for the Saxons to arrive and, hopefully, kick everyone's teeth in.

Dead Witch Walking, by Kim Harrison

1 star

I think I must have been well and truly spoiled by the Jim Butchers and Kelley Armstrongs of the paranormal genre, as Dead Witch Walking is the latest in a long line of paranormal series I've attempted only to find myself rolling my eyes and tutting loudly nearly every time I turned a page.

In a world post-Turn, where the human population found itself hugely diminished thanks to and still quivering with terror at...um...tomatoes, they've now found themselves living side-by-side with a wealth of supernatural races collectively known as Inderlanders. The wildly irritating Rachel Morgan is a witch and runner for Inderland Security, which polices the supernatural community and tags its ne'er-do-wells. Except she's no longer wanted in the I.S. and, backed by her vampire colleague Ivy and tiny pixy partner Jenks, finds herself on the run from their many assassins (standard I.S. termination policy). Trying to buy herself out of her death, Rachel plans to take down and hand over local big-bad Trent Karramack, but as we'll soon find out Rachel's plans have a habit of being completely crap and falling apart quicker than something that falls apart really quickly.

Constantly overestimated by everybody despite the fact that all of her 'plans' end with her getting captured and having to be rescued by others, Rachel is also constantly jumping to incorrect assumptions as well as having some serious trust issues - as in she refuses to trust anybody who proves they can be trusted, preferring instead to trust people she has just met (but only as long as they act reallllllly suspiciously). In case you can't tell, Rachel made my shit itch as badly as if Jenks had pixed me. 

As Dead Witch Walking preferred to focus more on its characters and their relationships than driving forward the story, the fact that I hated pretty much everyone bar Jenks and his family meant that my only real enjoyment came in rooting enthusiastically for Rachel's death. I'll be pretending that that's what happened come the end instead of reading any more of her adventures.

Street Magic, by Caitlin Kittredge

1 star

I've been casting about for a new paranormal series to start chomping my way through, but if Street Magic accomplished anything, it was to prove that Black London is not going to be that series. Set in a London in which the walls between this world and the shadow-world that runs parallel are very thin, children are going missing. And tough female cop Pete Caldecott is going to need the help of street-mage Jack Winter, who supposedly died in front of her 12 years ago, to get them back...

Some books, like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, dream up a shadowy parallel London that is wonderful and strange while still feeling plausible and recognisably London. Street Magic is not one of those books. Aside from a few mentions of place names and some mangled Brit-speak we could have been anywhere, parallel London - the Black - was a good idea that we then barely bothered with, and our main characters, Pete and Jack, were probably supposed to be charming assholes but unfortunately forgot to show any charm.

We know that Pete is a tough cop because she's always threatening to put her boot up someone's arse, being bitchy when it's not called for, and thinking nothing of indulging in a little breaking and entering or a spot of police brutality. Her detective work is based mostly around arching an eyebrow - it's certainly not based on anything like, I don't know, piecing together evidence or asking any pertinent questions (despite having apparently seen Jack die, it takes her 3/4 of the book to ask why the hell he's not dead, wonder why everyone keeps calling him a crow-mage, or what the hell that means anyway) and she seemed to forget all about the missing children for long stretches of time in favour of thinking about or looking at Jack instead.

The wildly off-putting Jack is a really crap version of Constantine who seems to have learnt to speak English solely through listening to Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Spike and, as well as having no redeeming features whatsoever, is responsible for some of the more unsuccessful attempts at being British (you won't find many of us who use 'fuck all' or 'bugger all' as exclamations - they're instead swearier ways of saying 'nothing', i.e: 

And as for all the magic, I've still no idea what gives Jack such super bloody special status amongst mages, how much of the magic worked, or why sorcerers are so supposedly badass when they can be easily vanquished, again and again, by someone with no clue as to how to fight them, as instead of building a plausible world or magic system we'd settled instead for pulling random plot points and magic rules from out of someone's ass.

To top it all off, with long stretches of nothing happening other than two unlikeable people bitching at one another and any action that did occur quickly becoming repetitive, what should have been a little piece of brain candy took forever to slog through. I won't be wasting any more precious reading time in this world.

Mr Darcy, Vampire by Amanda Grange

1 star

This was gifted to me a few years ago in the midst of the shoving the supernatural into classics phase and I can see why it was chosen - I love Pride and Prejudice and I love vampires. However, the twenty thousand games that took place yesterday in the Whatever Cup enabled me to find out that the two really don't mix well.

If you're coming to this book hoping for a bit of throat-ripping to go with your socialising, or even a bit of bodice-ripping, you're going to be disappointed. Instead you'll get 200+ pages of Lizzy being dragged around Europe on her honeymoon, wondering if Darcy still loves her as he fails to consummate the marriage and looks tormented, before a quick flash of fang at the end when Lizzy realises he's a vampire and turns him human again through the power of - you guessed it - true love.

It probably doesn't help that a book with Vampire in the title only got bite-y for a wee bit in the last quarter, but it definitely doesn't help that Grange chose as her basis a book and a heroine that both sparkle with wit, when hers really doesn't. 

Still, it did distract from the fact that there's still football on my telly, so there's always that.

Space Captain Smith, by Toby Frost

1 star

I ought to have loved Space Captain Smith, a silly space romp starring a moustachioed hero heading a crew consisting of a skull-coveting alien and a renegade sex toy, and facing off a race of evil space ants to protect a wispy new age lady who dresses like she’s from Totnes. 

It’s possible that I’m still holding a grudge against books that aren’t Eleanor and Park, or I may have simply had a sense of humour failure. Either way, this pun-tastic comedy fell flat for me with most of the jokes barely managing to raise a smile, let alone a laugh, and the nods to other works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Clockwork Orange just made me remember how much better those books were.

The Way Home, by George Pelecanos

1 star

I was led to buy this book by the little tag above the author's name, telling me it was 'by one of the award winning writers of The Wire'. Sadly, The Way Home did not live up to the standard this suggests. The Wire was compelling and essential viewing, peopled by characters that all felt real to me:

The Way Home is pedestrian storytelling peopled by characters that could have been interesting if given a chance, only for Pelecanos to decide not to show any growth or change but simply tell us about it instead, usually in one short line.

The story of Chris Flynn, from attitude-filled teenage criminal to straightened-out adult, 'struggling' with temptation when coming across a bag filled with money and apparently led into 'a deadly game of cat and mouse', the dispassionate writing style at first seemed to fit this particular type of book rather well. However, as the book progressed I found that instead it felt like I was being read to in the most boringly monotone voice I could imagine, which only highlighted how little I cared about what was happening.

This, combined with the 'tell, don't show' mode of writing employed, served to remove all dramatic tension and left me scratching my head a little about the 'struggle' Chris apparently went through (which was dealt with in a line) and the 'deadly game of cat and mouse' which only really came up in the last stretch of the story and barely involved Chris, climaxing without him.

As this was so far below the standard I expected when picking it up, I can only assume that The Way Home is not one of the best works from George Pelecanos. However, I won't be bothering to pick up any more to find out.

The Don't Bother Bin: Hush, Hush

1 star (read in Sept 2010)

This one well and truly proves the old adage that you can't judge a book by its cover as the one on this is truly gorgeous, whereas the contents are some of the lamest writing I have ever read. I shall try to avoid slipping into a rant, but judging by the way this book had me yelling at it every five seconds like a deranged person I can't make any promises.

Borrowing heavily from Twilight including meeting via partnerdom in bio class, rescue from danger in Portland (what is it with Portland?) and a heroine whom everyone inexplicably sees as intelligent when she actually displays the IQ of a stone, this is the tale of Nora Grey, a girl with the power to make fallen angels abandon their plans of murder and fall in love with her instead simply by being an apparently schizophrenic, blushing and spluttering moron. The angel, Patch (kudos on the sexy name there, doesn't at all put me in mind of a small, yappy dog) apparently has eyes that 'didn't play by the rules' (what, they smell instead of see? Or are they Marty Feldman-esque?)

Patch (snigger) is meant to come across as a sexy bad boy, but instead comes off as a psychotic creep in desperate need of a shoeing - and this is coming from somebody who was desperately in love (lust) with 90% of the population of HBO's Oz (ahhh, Ryan O'Reilly...now that's how you do a sexy bad boy).

The writing and plot is as bitty and all over the shop as Nora's personality, with events cropping up and characters making decisions that are wildly implausible even within a story set amongst the supernatural, functioning merely to get us to the next 'plot' point. Amongst the many, many things that irked me are:

* Coach, the bio teacher, making Patch and Nora tell the class what they look for in a potential mate, simply so we can shoehorn in some sexual tension. Shut up Coach, and behave like a teacher actually would.

* Nora taking iron pills in front of Patch, while thinking her anemia is her vulnerable secret and that she should try to keep him from finding out. 

* This is an 'intelligent' girl, remember, and yet we have her walking down a dark alley in a scary neighbourhood during a freezing cold night and trading her hat and coat (with her phone in the pocket) with a homeless person in exchange for directions, simply so we can shoehorn in another mistaken identity attack.

* Nora instantly wearing less make-up the moment Patch tells her she should, and continuing to spend time with him even though she's mostly ultra-paranoid and terrified of him because, after all, he's hot. Next she'll be cutting herself off from all her friends and excusing her black eyes because it just shows how much he loves her really.

* After beating Patch's chest with her fists we have him telling her that, having seen her moves, he's sure she can take the angel of death that's after her. Angels of death are either nowhere near as badass as they sound, or their Kryptonite is being punched in the tits. Don't try and make us believe that our heroine can defend herself when you've actually only shown us that she is completely incapable.

* After spending most of the book thinking Patch is trying to kill her, he confesses to both wanting to and nearly doing so twice already. In return she strokes his scars.

On the plus side, my edition had a strange habit of sometimes replacing the y's on the end of words with a ). This led to the best moment of the entire book, when Patch told Nora:

You're getting cock).

Childish, but awesome.

Allegiant, by Veronica Roth

1.5 stars

A disappointing and messy ending to what had been, up until this point, a decent little sci-fi series, in this instalment we find out what's outside the gates of the city as well as finding out that it wasn't worth finding out, some peripheral characters meet their ends and I struggle to care, Tris is a hypocrite who's not only never, ever wrong but a bit of a dick about it too, and Tobias gets to narrate his own chapters while I wish he wouldn't, as he's quickly revealed to be squirmy with fear and self-doubt, and I soon learn to hate his parts.

Starting in the aftermath of the Prior video, Tris and co have been arrested by Evelyn and the Factionless who've not only taken over the city and abolished the faction system, but banned anyone else from leaving too. Tobias is working for his ma, while slinking not at all stealthily about behind her back to secure Tris's release. Which is achieved through Tris doing what she's best at, and lying her head off.

Quickly joining the Allegiant, a secret club who want to stick to the city's apparent founding purpose and send a Divergent army out into the world, Tris and her friends (plus a few others) are soon hurtling towards the gate and the outside world. Which is where we start to learn that the whole series up until this point has been bollocks, that everything we think we know about Tris's world is a lie and, unfortunately, that the truth is a little nonsensical and not very interesting. There's no need for a Divergent army outside after all, and we're certainly not going to be seeing any apocalyptic battles any time soon. Instead we'll be stuck in a compound not far into a society that's still divided (over genetic purity, this time) where we'll be learning some dodgy stuff about genetics, meeting lots of new characters that I don't care about, finding out that Tris's mum had a boring love triangle, discovering that there's a Bureau for Genetic Welfare and that they're idiots, and deciding that it's totally cool to do something you think is evil if you're the one doing it.

**********SPOILERS BELOW**********

Turns out that the city is an experiment. The Government, having started screwing with people's genes in an effort to promote more desirable traits, screwed up and damaged them instead. This resulted in the Purity Wars, which in turn resulted in half the country dead. So the Bureau did a few 'corrections' and popped people into secure areas, cutting them off from the outside world in the hope that in several generations' time the bad genes wouldn't have just been passed down but would have healed themselves instead. They would know it was successful when a number of Divergent emerged, at which point they'd be scooped out to share their good genes with the outside world.

With Tris's city on the verge of blowing the experiment and Evelyn threatening to unleash a death serum on the population, the Bureau now want to re-set the city's memories and brainwash them back to square one. Angry that the Bureau would stoop so low as to steal people's memories, Tris proposes to stop them...by re-setting the Bureau's memories instead. Trouble is, the resetting serum is in a room where the air is full of death serum, and so whoever takes on the task will be undertaking a suicide mission...

Whilst I hadn't expected the series to be able to live up to my expectations after the opener, having suffered a bit of a lull in Insurgent, I still hadn't expected to see such a big drop in quality. Tobias's chapters didn't add anything for me other than irritation, and at times sounded virtually indistinguishable from Tris. After two books getting us here, Roth had awful lot of information to cram in about how the world actually did work and didn't handle it particularly well, having our new characters take giant information dumps all over the pages. With everything from entering the outside world on making me want to yell at the book, I found that while I liked that Roth went where she did with the ending, and while in keeping with Tris's character, it was robbed of any punch by my having long stopped caring what happened to these stupid people and their stupid societies.

Helen of Troy, by Margaret George

1 star

I love Greek mythology and think the fall of Troy is easily one of the most powerful myths around. Prior to reading this I would never have believed that anyone could tell it in such a way as to make it utterly boring, but sadly Margaret George has proved me wrong.

Telling the story of Helen of Troy, the face that started it all, it's clear that Ms George put in rather a lot of research. It's just a shame that, while remembering to add in details like what sort of cups people might have drunk from, she didn't bring any real storytelling talent to the table. A tale that should have been pulsing with passion, instead I felt nothing. Even during the parts that would normally have me weeping like a bereaved child (the death of Hector, and Priam's pleas for his son's body to be returned) or cursing furiously (anything to do with that shit Achilles) I found it all strangely lacking.

As for Helen, considering this is all told through her eyes, it seems that even though she's the main character she's not much more than an insipid, passive nincompoop, hardly the sort of person that thousands of men would give up their lives and bring ruin to kingdoms over, and the 600 odd-pages in her company were a slow torture.

If you're after something that really brings the story of Troy to life you could do much better - I'd recommend David Gemmell'sTroy series instead.

A Dark Kiss of Rapture, by Sylvia Day

1 star

A Dark Kiss of Rapture? A Quick Bit of Bollock-All, more like - writing this review will probably take me longer than my reading did. How this has managed to get an average rating of 3.68 on Goodreads is beyond me - I can only imagine that there are an awful lot of significantly time challenged and very easily pleased people out there. This would appear to be a taster for Day's Renegade Angels series, but instead of building my appetite it's put me off entirely.

Raze is one of the Fallen - former angels who lost their wings and became vampires. Now roaming earth, the Fallen are policed by the Sentinels (angels) and their lycan backup squad, while also apparently being engaged in some sort of face-off with a bunch of rogue vampires and their minions. I've no idea why I'm explaining this to you as it's barely important other than for a quick couple of scenes in which baddies are dispatched easily, but I expect this will also be the back story to future books in the series. Just about the only thing I found interesting in this entire set up was the fact that Raze and his Fallen pals apparently all chose their own names when they came to earth. Considering that they're got such naff names as Raze, Crash, Salem and Torque, one can only assume that fallen angels are actually teenage girls. 

Raze is a womaniser and has never understood his Fallen friends taking mates - until he meets Kim, that is, a "prime choice female" (ugh) with whom he falls in insta-love after she picks him up in a bar. Soon they're both gazing at one another with need and sensing what movies the other will like, because when you fall in love with someone that apparently happens, along with you both enjoying exactly the same things. (This is news to me, as my partner of 15 years wouldn't be caught dead watching Jersey Shore, loves football and the sort of music which I think sounds like a CD jumping. But I digress...) Now Raze must protect the woman he loves from becoming his enemies' target...apparently. We wouldn't really know as the bloody novella ends as soon as this comes up. And for a novella that promises to be erotic, it's not like we even got any good sex scenes in the meantime as each time we built up to the moment, we'd suddenly be whisked away to give our couple some privacy.

At one point Kim muses on a film they're about to watch, which stars fallen angels. Raze's wondering if they're vampires too, prompts her to say: "That might actually be a cool story. Maybe some werewolves too? Like Underworld with angels? Could be interesting."

To this I reply: "Not fucking likely, if this is anything to go by."

The Don't Bother Bin: Ravens

by George Dawes Green - 1 star

Halfway through reading this book, I put it down for 5 days to attend a music festival. As an illustration of just how much I wasn't enjoying it, I wasn't remotely bothered by having to stop halfway through, didn't think of it once while I was away, and was actually pretty disgruntled when I returned and remembered I hadn't finished it yet. The second half didn't change this in any way.

Tara's family, including younger non-entity brother Jase, alcoholic mum Patsy and god-bothering Dad Mitch, have just won the lottery. All $318 million of it. But it won't be theirs for long as Shaw and Romeo, two former IT techs trying to escape their dull lives, have heard about their win and Shaw hatches a plan. He'll take the family hostage, while Romeo roams the night intent on killing everyone they love if the family doesn't hand over half their winnings. Which Shaw wants to then give away.

The family happily complies without any fight while the female side sorta falls for Shaw, and the public start seeing him as some sort of Jesus figure when he announces his intentions to give his 'winnings' away. Until Shaw doesn't answer one of Romeo's calls due to an accident, which is the signal for him to start killing.

This was all over the shop, seemingly unable to decide what kind of book it wanted to be, and settling for being uneven and completely implausible. Characters make strange decisions and behave in ways that no person would, and no real effort is put into making the reader feel that those thoughts and actions make sense. When Shaw first tells Romeo of his plan, he simply accepts it. I've been a bored IT person, and I love my friends, but I imagine that if one of them asked me to kill a stranger's entire family so they could give away some money I'd have a little more to say about it than "OK then."

As for the family, if someone had taken mine hostage and told me there was a crazed killer roaming around waiting to kill the rest of my loved ones, I wouldn't spend my time on the internet looking at mansions. As soon as the kidnapper fell asleep (which he does, a few times, without his plan falling apart), I'd be straight on the blower to my mates and the police, before making sure my kidnapper didn't wake up again. And if the crazed killer finally turned up, I wouldn't follow his instructions to shoot someone in the face.

But maybe that's just me...

Magic of Thieves, by C. Greenwood

1 star

Suckered in by the title and the fact that it was free, I'm now glad I hadn't paid for this as there really wasn't much magic in it for me.

Orphaned as a young child by the Praetor's men as they cleanse the land of those with magic, Ilan soon finds herself in the keeping of a band of thieves after being rescued from abandonment by one of their number, Brig.

Growing up among the gang, she's soon joined by Terrac, a young priest wannabe whom she saves during the course of one of their robberies. It's during the course of another, unsuccessful, robbery that Ilan meets another priest, who recognises the magic within her and offers to teach her, which she turns down for now. But seems to take up after Brig is killed, and she wanders off into the end of the book.

For something that wants to be character driven, this was a rather shallow and flimsy read. I couldn't really get into the characters and their relationships as it skipped so quickly across the years, and couldn't get into the character of Ilan at all, who I found inconsistent and completely unlikeable.

Sing it, Snooki...Starting off as Brig's adoring shadow, soon she's slavishly loyal to the outlaw's cruel leader, Rideon, instead, especially once he gives her the mother of all kickings. Thoughtless, spiteful, selfish and cold, she's soon being a snide little cow to Brig, for no apparent reason. When she's not being an ungrateful little wretch to him, she's being a complete cow to Terrac, who she seems to have saved mostly so she has someone at her side that she can always be a bitch to. Until Brig is captured, when suddenly he means more to her than the world and she'll stop at nothing to get him back, including throwing Terrac under the bus.

Having seemed to have picked up a magic bow during her attempted rescue of Brig, that's the only bit of the book that really intrigued me, but I'm not so bothered that I'll be reading any other entries to find out more.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

1 star

First off, let's just say how surprised I was at how many of the 'classic' things I know about this story of the dangers of man playing God (mostly from the many movies I've seen) weren't actually in this! And now to my review...

It feels almost perverse saying this considering how it is thought to be a literary great but, apart from an all too brief interlude during the relating of the monster's tale in Volume II (where the monster is truly created, not by Frankenstein, but by the treatment he receives at the hands of humans) I loathed nearly every second of this book.

The main problem for me was the overwrought written style and characterisation, along with the endless pages of description of the landscapes encountered. I particularly hated the character of Frankenstein and felt that, although we were constantly being told that he is "all that is worthy of love and admiration among men", he was nothing but a cowardly, melodramatic, self-serving arse who seemed to be constantly either pitching a fit of delirium or swooning senselessly to the floor and spending months of recovery in bed like the heroine of some bad romance novel. If he'd worn pearls, he surely would have clutched them. 

Whether this was the fault of the character or the author trying to paint him as a good and sensitive man I'm not entirely clear but one particular section that got my goat came near the end where, after spending most of the book wailing about his creation and how, through it, he'd engineered the deaths of all those he loved, on his deathbed he pretty much goes on to say that all he was guilty of was excessive enthusiasm in the act of creating and had discharged his duty and responsibility to the monster....Er, no you didn't. You fled in disgust, took to your bed and engineered your own downfall through spending the rest of the book in 'let's ignore it and hope it goes away whilst I pootle about the countryside gnashing my teeth at the stars' mode.

Supposedly a sad and tragic story, I was only sad that the monster didn't kill everyone sooner.

Witch Fire, by Anya Bast

2 stars

If this book had a theme tune, it would be this: 

For iPhone/iPad click here.

It should be quite clear by now exactly what type of book I've been reading. It might have a bit of paranormal window-dressing for those who like to pretend they're not reading a sex book, but it's smut nonetheless. As such it sort of worked, in places, but mostly had me wondering if I couldn't give up this life of drudgery and succeed as a smutty writer instead.

Mira was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar sorry, diner (damn my musical tourettes) when she first set eyes on Jack. Brought up by her godmother following the deaths of her parents, Mira is (unbeknownst to her) the child of two powerful witches who were sacrificed in order to call up a demon by a warlock, Crane. Jack witnessed their deaths as a child (what with his Dad being said warlock) and has felt responsible ever since. Estranged from his father, Jack's assigned as Mira's bodyguard by her parents' Coven in order to defend her from Crane (who wants her dead on account of her being an air witch. The habit of referring to witches by their elements kept making me giggle, as I kept imagining an air witch and a fire witch sitting around eating a sandwich).

The first half of the book was virtually a two-hander as Jack takes Mira to his apartment for safe-keeping where they hang out, and Mira first exposes herself as a dumbass. Firstly, she's apparently very empathic and can easily sense the needs and emotions of those around her. Despite this, and despite the fact that Jack tells her, numerous times, how much he wants her, she spends most of her time wondering if she repulses him. Secondly, after hearing that the leader of her parents' Coven shares her mother's maiden name, she's still somehow shocked when - surprise! - it turns out they're related. These weren't the only examples of spectacular slowness on her part.

Thankfully, this is only dragged out for so long and they're soon at it like the world is powered by genital friction. I must admit that the first time Jack and Mira got it on I wasn't entirely tingle-free...however, there are only so many times that you can read about someone doing, essentially, the same routine over and over before you get a bit bored.

Wanna screw like Jack? Lemme tell you how!

Step 1: Stare at her with your "need laid bare"

Step 2: Twiddle her nipples like an amateur radio enthusiast scanning frequencies

Step 3: See theme tune

Step 4: Head south for a short spell

Step 5: Ride her like Seabiscuit

In between humping sessions, Jack continues to 'train' Mira in magick (that k really bugs me for some reason). He seems to think that this is 'training':

Luckily, it doesn't really matter how strange his teaching methods are as Mira is one of those heroines, and after about half an hour of training is easily far more powerful than most of the people who've lived in this world forever (one of my pet peeves in this genre, along with overuse of the words "cream" and "panties". Just once I'd like to read of someone taking off their knickers instead).

If you're looking for something that won't tax too much you could do a lot worse, but right now I can't imagine coming back to the series for more. If I ever do, I'll have to make sure my thinking cap is missing.