Review: Messiah (DNF)

Title: Messiah

Author: Gore Vidal

Genre: Classic/Satire

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia (mentions), internalized acephobia, death (mentions), suicidal ideation/suicide/death viewed as a desireable thing, alcohol use (mentions), car crash (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read to: DNF on page 136

Back Cover:

When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust. Gore Vidal’s deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

Review:

I really thought a book about a guy supporting the founder of a modern death cult would be good. I thought at least it would be interesting. I like reading books with excessive details about fictional religions, and the more weird, oddball, and cult-like the fictional religion, the better. I was excited about this book!

Yet somehow, this book about a modern suicide/death cult that becomes the biggest religion in the world was just dull. I got almost exactly halfway through it (136 pages out of 275 in my edition) waiting for it to pick up, and it never did. When I stopped, the promised TV appearance had just happened. Most of the story has been setup and backstory, but not about the mortician-prophet John Cave and his philosophy, or even what was going on in the world that would make the majority of people accept a death cult as the primary religion. Instead, it was about Eugene’s struggle to write a biography of Julian, the parties he went to and the people he talked to there, how the machinations of one acquaintance brought him into contact with John Cave, and his general skepticism about the whole thing.

And now a moment for some not-really-relevant character notes I think are worth mentioning: One side character claims to be over two thousand years old and nobody seems to think of that as anything more than a dubiously-plausible, but not impossible, oddity. It was a discordant magical-realism element in an otherwise classic-contemporary-satire story. Also, Eugene is on-page what we today would call asexual – explicitly not interested in sex, but still experiencing romantic attraction to women. Unfortunately, he views this as something “broken” about his ability to have relationships.

There’s also a secondary story set in the future. This book is written as Eugene, the protagonist, telling the story of how he met John Cave and helped him found his new religion, interspersed with snippets of his life as he is writing the story. But both are unfortunately dull. The future sections make it clear that Eugene had some kind of major split from the new religion of Cavesword and has spent several decades living in Egypt, where the Muslims work hard to keep the Cavite religion from entering. But that section was even less interesting, as Eugene is now an old man and spends most of his time tottering around his apartment and by turns talking with and avoiding a Cavite missionary recently arrived in the country.

There were a couple of reasons I think I struggled with this story. One is not at all the story’s fault – the edition I read appears to be from some kind of small independent press, which lead to a lot of small but annoying errors like missing closing quotations, missing periods at the end of sentences, and the occasional “I” replaced with “1”. A second reason is that the book was published nearly seventy years ago, and the style is definitely an older, denser, slower style than I’m used to – which is not necessarily a bad thing, but added an additional layer of distance to a narrative I was already struggling with. A third is that the story doesn’t write down anything John Cave actually says – there are scenes of him speaking, but the scene and mood of the audience is described in lieu of any actual words, and his ideas are filtered through others before being passed on to the reader. This guy is described as a hypnotic public speaker, a guy who can convince everyone he talks to that being dead is better than being alive, and yet his persuasive powers are filtered entirely through other people.

But I think the biggest issue was that the protagonist lacked passion. It’s told in first-person, and yet there wasn’t a single thing that made Eugene feel an emotion. I can understand being skeptical or disillusioned, but there was no feeling behind it. When John Cave spoke and what he said thrilled everybody, Eugene says that it is mesmerizing without ever seeming mesmerized himself. The story covered both before he got really involved in Cavesword and after he had his falling-out with it, and it’s clear that he got deeply involved at one point, but neither narration indicates that he was anything more than a bored observer who drifted in because his close acquaintances were involved and then drifted back out again. As someone who has left a religion I wholeheartedly believed and was deeply involved in, I didn’t get the sense even from the future narration that Eugene was ever much more than a moderately disinterested but useful observer to this forming cult.

The ideas here were good, but the story felt flat and lifeless to me. I think the idea of a death cult becoming the dominant global religion is fascinating. I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief that everyone would buy that immediately, so I think there needs to be some more societal context there. I also think it would have been better with a more dynamic, passionate protagonist, or at least a protagonist who felt like he actually believed in the new religion’s teachings. Or it could just be that I’m not very experienced with reading satire and I’m totally missing everything. Regardless, I don’t find it interesting enough to continue.

Review: Zeus is Dead (DNF)

Title: Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure

Series: Zeus is Dead #1

Author: Michael G. Munz

Genre: Low Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Kidnapping, injury, blood (mentions), stalking, religious fanaticism (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read to: Page 105

Back Cover:

You probably saw the press conference. Nine months ago, Zeus’s murder catapulted the Greek gods back into our world. Now they revel in their new temples, casinos, and media empires—well, all except Apollo. A compulsive overachiever with a bursting portfolio of godly duties, the amount of email alone that he receives from rapacious mortals turns each of his days into a living hell.

Yet there may be hope, if only he can return Zeus to life! With the aid of Thalia, the muse of comedy and science fiction, Apollo will risk his very godhood to help sarcastic TV producer Tracy Wallace and a gamer-geek named Leif—two mortals who hold the key to Zeus’s resurrection. (Well, probably. Prophecies are tricky buggers.)

Soon an overflowing inbox will be the least of Apollo’s troubles. Whoever murdered Zeus will certainly kill again to prevent his return, and avoiding them would be far easier if Apollo could possibly figure out who they are.

Even worse, the muse is starting to get cranky.

Discover a world where reality TV heroes slay actual monsters and the gods have their own Twitter feeds: Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure!

Review:

Picture this: You’re on page 105. You’re nearly a quarter of the way through this book. At this point, you’re pretty sure you know what the plot is. You’re not really sure which option is going to be the actual antagonist, and you’ve only recently gotten a feeling that you’ve found the protagonist – although you hope not, because this suspected protagonist has a severe case of Unlikeable. That’s my experience with this book. Is it wildly creative, full of fun and entertaining ideas, and downright zany at times? Absolutely. Is it populated by a solid and likeable (or at the very least, interesting) cast of characters? Not so much.

Let’s start at the beginning, because this book sure didn’t! Everything in the first seven chapters is setup, with a wide cast of Olympian gods and various mortals introducing the world, the return of the gods, how things changed, and the foundations of the actual plot (I think? I’m about 90% sure resurrecting or not-resurrecting Zeus will be the central conflict here). A character in chapter seven gets re-introduced as “a.k.a. the young woman from chapter four” and even though I think it was supposed to be for comedic purposes, it was actually very helpful because there are so many characters running around that I can’t keep them straight. (So many, in fact, that I couldn’t even always tell how many were on the page – the scene right before I stopped reading was weirdly confusing until the last line revealed that there was a whole fourth character involved that I somehow missed.)

If you read the back cover, it feels like Apollo is going to be the protagonist here. But that’s definitely not true. Judging from the first seven chapters, nobody stands out as protagonist material, but you could make good arguments for Apollo, Hermes, or even that one rebellious college student priest of Hecate. There was a TV producer introduced on page 17 that I thought could be a protagonist, but then she disappears for fifty pages and comes back as a completely different person on page 71 to be set up as the reluctant love interest. (Or they could be two different characters that have the same name. There’s zero connection between the later character and the one from the scene on page 17 besides name and occupation so it’s hard to tell.)

It isn’t until chapter eight that someone shows up who actually has protagonist potential. There’s a Prophecy about him, making all the gods interested for various purposes, which definitely seems like a symptom of being a protagonist. But his introductory scene consists of him being annoying, awkward, and unable to stand up to a rude lady who stole his coffee. And then one scene later he turns into a stalker, putting a very, very creepy and uncomfortable angle on producer-lady’s reluctant love interest role. And he’s not the only person who seems to think producer-lady will come around if they just ignore her “No,” so I really don’t like where that seems to be going. The stalker getting the girl is never a good look, especially if the stalker is supposed to be a hero.

I think what bothers me most about how terrible the characters are is how good everything else is. I love the concept of the Olympian gods descending into the modern world and how much chaos that makes. I love that Zeus had to die to make it happen (and the question of why he demanded no-contact with mortals in the first place). I love the dynamics between the Olympians, the competing factions, the mixed reactions to Zeus’s murder, the mystery of who actually did it and how. I love how modern humans react to the gods, from wholehearted embrace to casual acceptance to ignoring to religious nutjobs going full anti-Olympian militia. There was the potential for some very interesting commentary about modern religious beliefs and behaviors. I love the variety of weird monsters now unleashed on the world. The plot, with various Olympian factions working to ensure Zeus either returns or stays dead, was solid. Even the writing style, though it did have a distinctly amateurish feel, managed to be genuinely humorous at times.

But, the characters. As much fun as the world is, as solid as the plot is and as light and fun as the writing is as a whole, it’s the characters that drive a story. And these characters all suck. They range from bland and forgettable to caricature without substance to “I would punch this person in the face if I met them” unlikeable assholes. (Or stalkers. I still can’t get over that the likely-protagonist-hero is straight-up stalking someone and everybody, including the woman he’s stalking, seems to view it as irritating but nothing more. It really bothers me that nobody in this book seems to notice or care how INCREDIBLY GODDAMN AWFUL AND CREEPY it is.) There was not a single character I could connect to, care about, or even be willing to follow around for the rest of the book. I really do think there’s a lot of potential in this story. It just needs a whole new cast of characters to realize it.

The Zeus is Dead series:

1. Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure
2. Zeus is Undead: This One Has Zombies

Review: The Myth of Normal (DNF)

Title: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Author: Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

Genre: Psychology/Health

Trigger Warnings: Chronic illness, terminal illness, pedophilia/childhood sexual abuse, rape, incest, domestic partner abuse, abandonment, war (mentions), cancer

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Review:

I have read a LOT about trauma and its effects over the past few years (e.g. here, here, here, and here). This is a topic of personal interest for me, as well as one where, at this point, I feel fairly well-versed. From the emphasis on the back cover, I thought this was going to be about the many small and not-so-small traumas we face every day because of how society is set up (the “toxic society” promised in the subtitle) and how those affect our health. I expected something more along the lines of Sedated than anything.

I’m going to refer to author in the singular here because even though the book tries to emphasize that Daniel also had a large hand in the writing of the book, the concepts and ideas are obviously all Gabor’s.

The main premise of The Myth of Normal is that modern medicine’s fundamental assumptions about human health are wrong – that the mind and body are not and can never be truly separated, and that trying to treat illness as separate from the person’s life circumstances is short-sighted and misses essential underlying factors that affect a disease’s onset, progression, and treatment. All of which I do agree with. However, for all its emphasis on challenging fundamental assumptions, the book itself refuses to challenge or even acknowledge the fundamental assumptions that drive it:

1. There exists a state of perfect health which is possible for humans to achieve;
2. Achieving this state is both possible and essential for every human being;
3. Therefore, the ultimate goal (or one of the ultimate goals) of every human being should be to work to achieve this state.

To be fair, Gabor is a doctor and he likely doesn’t realize he is making those three assumptions in this book. These are underlying assumptions of our society as well – just look at any health, diet, or weight loss claim. Once you know to look for them, you’ll see these assumptions everywhere. So I don’t really blame Gabor for writing from that perspective. It’s great that he’s on board with the growing body of evidence about trauma’s effects on physical health. I think he just didn’t go far enough in the “challenging society’s assumptions about health” aspect.

There is a lot of research presented here, so I do give him credit for that. It’s not really anything I didn’t get from The Body Keeps the Score (Gabor even quotes Bessel van der Kolk several times), but if you’re not familiar with the concepts and the research, I think it would be a good introduction. Where I had issues was all the parts that weren’t research. The anecdotes and stories were incredibly sensationalized. It was always someone with a horrible and fatal disease going from being bed-bound to living a pretty much normal life due to healing from horrific childhood sexual abuse. Nobody was healing from schoolyard bullying or their parents’ divorce and as a result seeing improvement in their back pain or having fewer headaches. It was always people with something dramatic and incurable who healed their trauma and therefore fixed their disease.

As someone who is disabled/chronically ill, I’ve heard all of the “one weird trick to heal your incurable disease! Doctors are amazed!” stuff. And if you strip away the scientific trappings, what Gabor is presenting sounds exactly like the “natural cure without drugs!” bullshit you find in weird alternative health circles. Take out the fact that Gabor is a doctor and cut the parts where he cites research and you could replace “trauma healing” with “kale,” “yoga,” “unpronounceable exotic herb,” or whatever else in every single anecdote and it would sound exactly as outlandish. Gabor is pretty much promising that healing your trauma will fix anything and everything wrong with you, up to and including incurable and fatal conditions.

I don’t want to deny the fact that there is research. Unlike most “cures” in this non-medical modes of healing space, the trauma-health connection actually has a lot of promising research around it. Which I think is why I take such issue with the way it’s presented here. Could healing your trauma help your physical health? Absolutely, and there’s research to back that up. Will healing your trauma cure your cancer? I can’t bring myself to believe that, no matter how fancy the credentials of the doctor telling me the story.

This book may have fallen prey to the whims of marketing, ignoring scientific nuance in favor of something that will sell – and sensationalism sells. Or maybe Gabor completely believes in trauma healing as a miracle cure. I don’t know. But regardless, I don’t recommend this one. The concepts and research are good, but you can get the same information in other books (I recommend The Body Keeps the Score and It Didn’t Start With You) with many fewer issues. The effects of trauma on physical health are worth learning about. But not from this book.

Review: Black Water Sister (DNF)

Title: Black Water Sister

Author: Zen Cho

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent (mentions), cancer (mentions), injuries, murder (attempted), blood (brief), violence, loss of bodily autonomy

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 68%

Back Cover:

When Jessamyn Teoh starts hearing a voice in her head, she chalks it up to stress. Closeted, broke and jobless, she’s moving back to Malaysia with her parents – a country she last saw when she was a toddler.

She soon learns the new voice isn’t even hers, it’s the ghost of her estranged grandmother. In life, Ah Ma was a spirit medium, avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she’s determined to settle a score against a business magnate who has offended the god—and she’s decided Jess is going to help her do it, whether Jess wants to or not.

Drawn into a world of gods, ghosts, and family secrets, Jess finds that making deals with capricious spirits is a dangerous business, but dealing with her grandmother is just as complicated. Especially when Ah Ma tries to spy on her personal life, threatens to spill her secrets to her family and uses her body to commit felonies. As Jess fights for retribution for Ah Ma, she’ll also need to regain control of her body and destiny – or the Black Water Sister may finish her off for good.

Review:

I read Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water and was mostly impressed by how rich it could have been if it had taken more time to explore the characters and setting. So I decided to try a full-length novel and find out if the extra space would provide a better experience.

The good news is that a longer book made for a much better protagonist and a more interesting (although still not as great as I think it could be) setting. The bad news is, I didn’t particularly like everything else.

Jess herself is pretty good. She hasn’t told her parents that she’s gay, let alone that she has a girlfriend. She feels like a failure, she knows her parents are struggling financially (and emotionally, though her mother’s and father’s problems in that regard are different) and she’s determined to do her best to protect them. This is complicated by the spirit of Ah Ma, her mother’s mother, who is the meanest, most entitled character I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about, especially since she needs Jess’s body to do anything. If having your consciousness shoved to the back of your head while someone else pilots your body is as triggering an idea for you as it is for me, there are several scenes you are not going to like.

I was also frustrated by Jess’s refusal to tell anyone about anything. This may be a personal gripe, as I’m a huge believer in the power of an open and honest conversation to solve a good 90% of problems, but Jess refused to tell anyone what was happening even when they asked. I do get not wanting to tell certain things to your parents, but at least her girlfriend should have been supportive, even if she didn’t really understand. To a point, I understand not wanting to talk about all of the ridiculousness happening, but Jess’s complete refusal to even ask questions that might provide useful information got frustrating. And the only person she ever did ask, Ah Ma, gave reluctant answers that were sometimes complete lies.

There’s also not a whole lot in terms of plot. It starts out with Ah Ma wanting to stop a sacred grove being bulldozed to build condos, But that goes out the window pretty quick, and all of the sudden we’re dealing with assorted deities, mafia wars, how complicated relationships get when you don’t tell people anything, and Ah Ma’s opinion that a little murder solves a lot of problems. I’m still not entirely sure what the main conflict even was, because after it gave up on the “save the sacred grove” ideas, it just seemed to be a hodgepodge of small problems slowing tearing Jess’s life apart.

That’s not to say it was all bad. I’m always down for stories about gods and spirits, especially ones I don’t know much about. The setting – or at least the bits of it that came through – was really interesting. I wish it could have been more vibrant, as it gives the impression that the author is so familiar with Malaysia that she doesn’t consider what foreigners might want to read about it, but what was there was great. I liked Jess herself, for the most part, and the guy who definitely would have been the love interest if Jess wasn’t a lesbian was a pretty cool character. I think I liked him the best.

There were good ideas here. The concept was solid, and I don’t think I’ve read anything set in Malaysia before (unless you count The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I don’t because I thought it was set in fantasy China until I read the author’s website). But Jess’s refusal to communicate anything to anyone and Ah Ma’s hateful disregard for Jess made this story more frustrating than anything.

Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow (DNF)

Title: Gods of Jade and Shadow

Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Genre: Historical Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent, physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, body horror (mild), injury (mild), death (mentions), sexual assault (attempted, brief), death of animals, gore, blood

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 57%

Back Cover:

The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own.

Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room. She opens it—and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help in recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea’s demise, but success could make her dreams come true.

In the company of the strangely alluring god and armed with her wits, Casiopea begins an adventure that will take her on a cross-country odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City—and deep into the darkness of the Mayan underworld.

Review:

I was originally going to do a Review Short for this one, but it turns out I have a whole review’s worth of thoughts after all. Mainly because I am just so disappointed in this book.

The concept is fantastic. I love stories of old gods who aren’t worshiped or believed in anymore who have to get help from mortals to stop the evil machinations of other old gods, and that’s essentially what this is. It’s also featuring Mayan gods and set in 1920s Mexico – a mythology and setting that I haven’t read much about (I don’t think I’ve ever read something set in 1920s Mexico, actually). The concepts are great and the plot is solid. It’s everything else that left much to be desired.

Mainly because there isn’t anything else. The people are cardboard cutouts bouncing along as the plot demands. The plot itself plods along, not exactly slow but never changing pace. There are no twists and no obstacles to give it texture, it never speeds up to drive tension, and it never slows down to leave room for character and setting. I spent over six hours with these characters, and the only things I know about them are things that were told to me by other characters or the narrator. (The narrator also looks down on Casiopea because she’s young, which was very irritating.) I spent six hours in 1920s Mexico, but all I know about it is “flappers, but it’s hot outside.” The plot seemed determined to force its way forward at the same pace regardless of anything else.

I loved the gods and how much the story shows of them, but they were still cardboard puppets forced along to the constant plodding of the plot. There were demons and ghosts and spirits and the Mayan underworld and fascinating ideas about the spacial limitations of deities, but I had to grasp for those interesting bits as the plot pushed me past. It glossed over all of the interesting parts that might have given it flavor – Mexican, Mayan, 1920s, mythological, or anything else – in favor of a relentlessly monotonous pace. Even with the threat of death for the protagonist and bad things for humanity if the antagonist won, I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I so wanted more from this. I wanted it to bring together 1920s Mexico and Mayan myth into something rich and magical and bursting with mood and atmosphere. I wanted a world I could sink my teeth into – and I think if I’d gotten that, I could have forgiven flat characters. I might have even been able to forgive a lackluster world if the characters were compelling and had personality and chemistry, even though the world was what I really wanted out of this story. But this book has neither, and the plot is far too straightforward to be interesting. As great as the ideas are and as much as I wanted to like this book, I just couldn’t find a reason to care.

Review: A Pale Light in the Black (DNF)

Title: A Pale Light in the Black

Series: NeoG #1

Author: K.B. Wagers

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), guns (brief), violence (mild)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

For the past year, their close loss in the annual Boarding Games has haunted Interceptor Team: Zuma’s Ghost. With this year’s competition looming, they’re looking forward to some payback–until an unexpected personnel change leaves them reeling. Their best swordsman has been transferred, and a new lieutenant has been assigned in his place.

Maxine Carmichael is trying to carve a place in the world on her own–away from the pressure and influence of her powerful family. The last thing she wants is to cause trouble at her command on Jupiter Station. With her new team in turmoil, Max must overcome her self-doubt and win their trust if she’s going to succeed. Failing is not an option–and would only prove her parents right.

But Max and the team must learn to work together quickly. A routine mission to retrieve a missing ship has suddenly turned dangerous, and now their lives are on the line. Someone is targeting members of Zuma’s Ghost, a mysterious opponent willing to kill to safeguard a secret that could shake society to its core . . . a secret that could lead to their deaths and kill thousands more unless Max and her new team stop them.

Rescue those in danger, find the bad guys, win the Games. It’s all in a day’s work at the NeoG.

Review:

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, I much prefer the fantasy half of the equation. When I do pick up a sci-fi, I tend towards post-apocalyptic and steampunk over aliens and spaceships. So please recall that this review is written with personal opinions, and I don’t hold it against the book that I didn’t like it.

Considering that I’ve only read one other space opera (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), I found it a weird coincidence that they both featured a young woman attempting to escape the expectations, infamy, etc. of their rich and powerful family by joining the crew of a spaceship in a far-away area of the solar system. In this case, there’s Max, escaping her family’s rigid expectations by joining the Near Earth Orbital Guard, which is like the space Coast Guard. She has a hard time fitting into the crew because she constantly doubts herself (#relatable) and the strict military discipline she grew up with doesn’t mesh with her new crew’s lax relationship to authority.

I don’t know if she’s supposed to be The Protagonist, though, or just one of an ensemble cast, because she doesn’t come in until a bit of the way in. The story starts with the crew before she joins on a mission, setting up a strong emotional attachment to the character that Max ends up replacing. A weird choice to me, but the rest of the characters weren’t terrible and I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker.

What I really had issues with was the crew’s priorities. Personally, I was interested in the adventure and intrigue – why scavengers on a dead ship would be so afraid of being interrupted that they would resort to bribery, if the disappearance of 90% of long-range passenger spaceships from a particular launch was actually a conspiracy to convert up a failed drug trial, that kind of thing. But all the crew cared about was the Boarding Games. From what I could gather, the Games are an annual event where different branches of the military form teams to compete against each other in different events (like hand-to-hand combat and puzzle challenges) and the team with the most points at the end wins. It sounds like it’s fairly fun, but winning the Games was top priority for all of the crew and it was not at all what I cared about in this story.

From some of the emphases in the writing, the Coast Guard parallel is super prominent and (to the best of my non-military understanding) true to life. I almost categorized it under “Military Scifi” as a secondary genre because that really feels like what it’s going for. Maybe if you’ve been in the military all this will be more interesting and relatable to you, or you’ll like it more if you can get more invested in the Games than in all the other plot hooks. Either way, it’s not a bad book – just not one that I particularly want to keep reading.

The NeoG series:

1. A Pale Light in the Black
2. Hold Fast Through the Fire

Review: The Word is Murder (DNF)

Title: The Word is Murder

Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #1

Author: Anthony Horowitz

Genre: Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Murder, death, blood, death of parent (mentions), homophobia, child death

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor – enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.

Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.

Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

A masterful and tricky mystery that springs many surprises, The Word is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.

Review:

I am not much of a mystery person. I picked this up on concept alone – that the author is taking self-insert to the extreme and putting himself, as himself, into the novel as the Watson-esque sidekick to a modern-day Holmes.

The concept did bring a unique meta aspect into the story. Since at least one of the characters was verifiably real, it gave an almost-nonfiction feel to this fictional novel and I did enjoy that. However, that’s the only good thing I can say about this book.

I’ll start with my minor quibble: Horowitz’s motivation to start writing for Hawthorne is weak. He initially refused to do it when Hawthorne asked. Then he went to a book fair, where a woman asked him why he only wrote fantasy instead of things that were real and true, which are objectively better to read about. His response was that he preferred it, which is perfectly valid. Leaving aside my blinding rage about nonfiction being presented as always and forever 100% more valuable than fiction and it’s not worth reading fiction if one could read nonfiction instead, this exchange makes Horowitz decide that he should write something “real” for once and change his mind about writing for Hawthorne. He didn’t need the money and he didn’t even particularly like Hawthorne, but I guess that exchange made him realize that nonfiction is inherently better than fiction and he should try writing something true for a change.

But I kept going because I was a bit intrigued by the mystery. And honestly, I really like Sherlock Holmes and I know Anthony Horowitz is a good writer (I loved his Alex Rider books as a kid), and I kept hoping it would get better.

Hawthorne is very much like Holmes in many ways. He does have Holmes’ seemingly-magical deductive ability, but in the first 25% of the book you get to see it in action several times but only once with the explanations that make Sherlock Holmes books fun. Hawthorne also captures all of the asshole parts of the original Sherlock but without any of the charm. Perhaps it’s because Horowitz doesn’t live with Hawthorne and therefore didn’t get to see the humanizing moments like Watson did with Holmes, but Hawthorne is an incredibly unlikeable person. I gave up when he went on a homophobic rant – which was challenged by Horowitz, to be fair, but it was still a moment that made me realize that this guy, who I wanted very much to be a modern Sherlock Holmes, was in no way shape or form tolerable to read about.

Also, the original Sherlock seemed to like Watson at least some, or at least recognize that he could be useful. Hawthorne seems to have nothing but hatred and contempt for Horowitz, and if I had been Anthony I would have ducked out the first time I got yelled at for doing the thing he asked me to do.

This book ended up being modern Sherlock Holmes but worse. It captures all of the negative aspects of the original Holmes, amplifies many of them, and downplays the best part about Holmes – the amazing deductive reasoning powers. It leans so hard on the Sherlock Holmes parallels, even in the book itself, that I can’t separate it out to judge the story on its own merits. But Hawthorne himself is terrible and unlikeable, so I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed it much regardless.

The Hawthorne and Horowitz series:

1. The Word is Murder
2. The Sentence is Death
3. A Line to Kill

Review: House of Salt and Sorrows (DNF)

Title: House of Salt and Sorrows

Author: Erin A. Craig

Genre: Fairy Tale/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death of parent, death of children, grief (severe), injury details (severe), terminal illness (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 32%

Back Cover:

Annaleigh lives a sheltered life at Highmoor with her sisters and their father and stepmother. Once there were twelve, but loneliness fills the grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have been cut short. Each death was more tragic than the last–the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge–and there are whispers throughout the surrounding villages that the family is cursed by the gods.

Disturbed by a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh becomes increasingly suspicious that her sister’s deaths were no accidents. The girls have been sneaking out every night to attend glittering balls, dancing until dawn in silk gowns and shimmering slippers, and Annaleigh isn’t sure whether to try to stop them or to join their forbidden trysts. Because who–or what–are they really dancing with?

When Annaleigh’s involvement with a mysterious stranger who has secrets of his own intensifies, it’s a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family–before it claims her next.

Review:

I hadn’t actually intended to review this one. I had planned to make it just another book that I wasn’t very into but didn’t have strong enough opinions to write a review about – this book isn’t bad, it just wasn’t grabbing me. But then I realized why I DNF books just when I’m getting to the part where the story should be picking up and getting good, so this is part review and part reflection post about why I stop reading just when the book gets good.

This is a retelling of the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” which I only know about because I had a Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses coloring book as a kid. I am absolutely down for retellings of less-known fairy tales, and a horror retelling sounded especially promising.

It didn’t grab me from the beginning, but that happens and I wanted to give it a chance. When the book opens, the fourth sister had just died and the remaining sisters had not yet started sneaking off to dance all night, so I knew eventually they would find their way to sneak away and go dancing with the people the back cover hints may not be human. And I didn’t hate it, so I kept reading.

And then they found their way to sneak off their island home and go dancing. I was reading this at work and at that point I paused the story to go on break, and after break I queued up a different book and started reading something else. When I actually took a moment to think about it I wasn’t exactly sure why. It wasn’t stunningly fascinating, but I didn’t hate it, and I’d stopped right when it was promising to get into the meat of the story. And it’s not the first time I’ve stopped reading a book right when it should have been getting good (see here and here, for example). But with this book, I’ve finally figured out why I do that.

This is not a horrible book, and there’s nothing egregious to make me hate it. I just didn’t find the plot, characters, or what-have-you particularly compelling. But the back cover had promised me a Major Incident where something dramatic would happen to propel the story into more interesting dimensions. Without even consciously making the decision to do so, I kept reading despite being ambivalent about the book because I had the anticipation of the Major Incident. Once the Major Incident happened, though, the anticipation compelling me to read on was gone and I realized I was ambivalent about the book and had no desire to keep reading, even though I was at the point where it should be getting good.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it, it just didn’t grab me, and I’m sure there are people out there who will like it better. It did help me figure out why I tend to stop reading books just when they’re “getting good,” though, so it was worth the read just for that.

Review: The Drowning Kind (DNF)

Title: The Drowning Kind

Author: Jennifer McMahon

Genre: Suspense/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, death of child, drowning, psychological horror, death of animals (mention), pregnancy, childbirth, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), alcoholism, unhealthy family dynamics, cancer (mentions), self-harm, infertility, drug use

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 59%

Back Cover:

Be careful what you wish for. When social worker Jax receives nine missed calls from her older sister, Lexie, she assumes that it’s just another one of her sister’s episodes. Manic and increasingly out of touch with reality, Lexie has pushed Jax away for over a year. But the next day, Lexie is dead: drowned in the pool at their grandmother’s estate. When Jax arrives at the house to go through her sister’s things, she learns that Lexie was researching the history of their family and the property. And as she dives deeper into the research herself, she discovers that the land holds a far darker past than she could have ever imagined.

In 1929, thirty-seven-year-old newlywed Ethel Monroe hopes desperately for a baby. In an effort to distract her, her husband whisks her away on a trip to Vermont, where a natural spring is showcased by the newest and most modern hotel in the Northeast. Once there, Ethel learns that the water is rumored to grant wishes, never suspecting that the spring takes in equal measure to what it gives.

A haunting, twisty, and compulsively readable thrill ride from the author who Chris Bohjalian has dubbed the “literary descendant of Shirley Jackson,” The Drowning Kind is a modern-day ghost story that illuminates how the past, though sometimes forgotten, is never really far behind us.

Review:

I can’t remember what exactly enticed me to pick this up. Maybe I found the idea of a wish-granting spring that takes in equal measure to what it gives intriguing. I think part of it is my library put it in a list of popular supernatural-based horror titles and I’m trying to expand my reading horizons. Regardless, I read it – or at least I tried to.

First, there’s Jax. While I was initially put off by her being a social worker who by her own admission isn’t self-reflective, I could definitely relate to being the ordinary child overshadowed by a charismatic sibling. In my case said sibling was younger and wasn’t naturally good at everything like Lexie, but being the forgotten good child while a charismatic Problem Child got all the attention is a situation I know all too well and created an instant connection with Jax.

I didn’t have that same connection with Ethel, whose story alternated with Jax’s. She wasn’t bad, but I didn’t see how her story fit into Jax’s and found her sections much less interesting.

I think this story was supposed to be a slow burn, but it ended up just being slow. I read 59% of it, and in that time, Ethel had gone to the hotel and wished for a baby, and Jax had gone to her grandmother’s estate to deal with Lexie’s death, cleaned the house, went to the funeral, and realized that Lexie had been investigating the pool (which is fed with water from the spring). The suspense was driven by the hints that there was something in the pool, and by the time I stopped I had worked out what was in the pool but Jax had just started to get curious about what Lexie was working on.

I thought this was supposed to be some sort of suspense/thriller thing with supernatural horror and I wasn’t getting any of that. I knew enough about the spring to feel like I already knew what it would take from Ethel, but not enough about it to know if it would want something from Jax. Lexie was already dead, and since nobody else that I knew of had made a wish, it didn’t feel like there was any threat. The only suspense was coming from the question of what exactly was living in the spring (which I figured out fairly quickly) and why the spring granted wishes and took things in return (although I got the feeling that the only explanation I was going to get for that one was “it’s supernatural”).

Admittedly, suspense/thriller isn’t my genre, so this all may be me more than the book. But I wasn’t getting any suspense or thrills out of this, and the slow burn ended up just being slow to me. The Drowning Kind just isn’t my book.

Review: The Cerulean

Title: The Cerulean

Series: Cerulean Duology #1

Author: Amy Ewing

Genre: Science Fantasy (my best guess – this is one that’s hard to categorize, because it does have space travel but it’s otherwise fantasy)

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), murder (mentions), suicide, sexism, animal death (mentions), blood (brief)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

Sera has always felt as if she didn’t belong among her people, the Cerulean. She is curious about everything and can’t stop questioning her three mothers, her best friend, Leela, and even the High Priestess. Sera has longed for the day when the tether that connects her City Above the Sky to the earthly world below finally severs and sends the Cerulean to a new planet.

But when Sera is chosen as the sacrifice to break the tether, she doesn’t know what to feel. To save her City, Sera must throw herself from its edge and end her own life. But something goes wrong and she survives the fall, landing in a place called Kaolin. She has heard tales about the humans there, and soon learns that the dangers her mothers warned her of are real. If Sera has any hope to return to her City, she’ll have to find the magic within herself to survive.

Review:

This book did not grip me from the start. It was very heavy on the YA Heroine tropes and moved very slowly. But I liked some things, so I kept giving it a chance.

Sera is our YA Heroine. She feels like she doesn’t fit in, partially because she doesn’t have any aptitude for her society’s career options even though she’s almost of age. Everyone else views her as weird and agrees she doesn’t fit in, but the only thing actually weird about her is that her favorite thinking spot is at the very top of the temple spire. She has one friend who is perfectly normal and could fit in with the rest of society but chooses to be her friend because she is a kind and gentle person. Her archenemy is a mean girl in her age cohort who is prettier and more talented at the societal career options and is mean to her about it. If you’re keeping track, that description has seven YA Heroine tropes. I’ve read this same situation across so many YA books in high school that it almost completely prevented me from connecting with or caring about Sera.

Sera’s world, however, was fascinating. It’s mostly explained through exposition, which probably would have gotten annoying if it wasn’t the main thing I cared about in the book. Sera’s people are all women, have blue hair and blue blood, they possess magic to heal and to share thoughts and feelings through touch, they live in a migrating city that tethers itself to different planets, and marriages are between three people instead of two. There was a lot of world building and I was really interested in this society.

Plus I knew that things would change drastically once Sera jumped off the city. The story moved slowly and I didn’t really care about Sera, but the Cerulean society kept me interested enough to stick it out under Sera jumped, and I hoped the story would change for the better after that.

Then Sera jumped, and the story changed to a whole new story. Now we’re following a set of twins on the planet, who seem to be living in a fictional version of the 1800s – sexism, railroads, corsets, etc. The twins are a boy whose name I cannot remember who wants to impress his father so he’ll let him be part of the family business (which may be producing plays?), the other is a girl who wants to be a scientist despite girls not being allowed to do that. There’s also some sort of racial/political/religious ideological conflict between their country and another one. I had very little idea what was going on, no idea who these people were, and no incentive to care. If this was who Sera was going to end up dealing with after she survived her fall, I really wasn’t interested.

What really killed my enjoyment of this book was a lack of caring about the characters. Sera hit every female YA Protagonist trope and that immediately distanced me from her despite all the opportunity for connection her situation offered. And just when I was ready for the book to speed up and finally get into the meat of the story – and maybe for the changing situation to give me more reason to care about Sera – it switched to a whole new set of characters who I did not know or care about in a much less interesting world.

I’m actually a little angry because I wanted this to be good. The idea behind the Cerulean and their floating city was what really interested me. There was a lot of potential there and I want to stay there and explore that world. Perhaps if Sera had hit fewer of the tropes (or this had been published years ago when I was more tolerant of YA Heroine tropes) I would have stuck it out longer. I love the idea of the Cerulean people and society, but unfortunately not much else about this book.

The Cerulean Duology:

1. The Cerulean
2. The Alcazar