Books that fail

Even if I could ignore that the writing of this book was so repetitive that I was able to skip half the book and still follow the revelations at the end, I can't ignore that it contained both the most amazing and worst police work I have ever seen in a book.

The amazing: In NYC, they have noticed they have a serial killer around despite not finding any bodies and the killer only having struck four times in ten years, from different locations, with several years in between the crimes.

The worst: They have lots of surveillance footage, but don't seem to have ever looked really carefully through it looking for any other faces in common, other than the main character's missing brother.

Bloody Hell.

I knew I shouldn't have been attempting to read anything by Anne McCaffrey even before I turned past the front page on The Crystal Singer.. I used to love her Pern/Dragon books as a teenager and still harbor some love for her Tower and Hive series, not to mention The Ship Who Sang series but really, upon re-reading the Pern books, my love for her has gone out the window. Why? Easy. Bossy dragon riders with wimpy overly dramatic dragons that commit suicide on a whim in a sexist society that thinks its unbecoming for a woman to aspire to be a musician or whatever but it's ok for a Holder to allow the people he is supposedly taking care of to freeze to death or be horribly raped by his soldiers... and none of the other holders stand up to him over this because it takes a unanimous descion to get something done and none of them can be sure that it will be a unanoumous choice so they just ignore it and hope for the best!! Yes, I am summing up a couple of books in a couple of cranky sentences but my neuralgia is playing up and I'm cranky!! (grrrr.. argh!)

Killashandra is an overly dramatic Mary-Sue who excels in everything she does or will do in the future. Ugh. Because she couldn't be the bestest singer in the whole universe Mary-Sue walks out on 10 years hard work at music school and shags the first interesting man she meets.. all because she refuses to be in the chorus! She doesn't even bother packing up her student room or informing her family, instead, leaving them to wonder if she had committed suicide or been raped and killed! Literally weeks go by and she cares so little for them, she doesn't tell them what is happening in her life, instead, she is happy being a temporary girlfriend of a man who likes to throw money at her.. (gold digging whore!)

He karks it, she accompanies his body back to a crystal planet and decides to be a crystal singer because she has perfect pitch or whatever. She still doesn't tell her family what is happening and they have probably already had a wake for her because they assume she is dead? Lets see, what does a Mary-Sue do? Oh, obviously she has the easiest transition into being a Crystal Singer and she does it weeks before the rest of her class.. some symbiot takes over her body and allows her to mine crystal.. ugh. She is the bestest at flying lessons, the cranky dude who fits her for her crystal cutter obviously likes her but no-one else, the guild leader shags her because he can tell she is speshul, the first time out on her own to cut crystal.. she magically finds the rare black crystal and cuts enough of it to be awarded a speshul assignment to fit the crystal into wherever it needs to go... not only that, in the second book, she is sent on a spy mission to another planet! (sigh!!)

Killashandra is speshul in the way she is unable to say simple words such as; thank you, please, excuse me. Instead, she shoves people out of the way, deliberately insults officials over their food choice by flipping her dinner plate over at an official dinner party before stalking off in a snit, can't be bothered remembering peoples names and gives them insulting nicknames by which she then uses to their faces, assumes she is better than everyone else in the whole universe because she is a Crystal Singer and doesn't hesitate to point it out.. repeatedly!

Killashandra is a character fail of the highest degree and really, if this is McCaffrey's idea of a strong, independant woman... I'll take being barefoot in the kitchen anyday!

Anyone alive in here?

Are we all reading awesome books that don't fail?

Or did we all die?

Last year, I resolved to read 200 books during the year 2012. I succeeded in that goal. This is the breakdown.



Titles, dates, and other data points are all in the spreadsheet you can check out at
https://docs.google.com/spreadshee…

So, I've been excited to read Impostor for a while now, probably because I didn't take too close a look at the summary. I read "x-men like powers" and "secret agent" and "stop a serial killer" and went "WOOHOO SIGN ME UP FOR THAT, PLEASE."

Uhg, I cannot begin to explain to you how much of a disappointment this book turned out to be. It's...there's a certain attitude or atmosphere that you expect when you go into a spy novel. This, it turns out, was not a spy novel. It was a novel with spies. Spies who think and act and investigate every bit as well as your average YA heroine, which is to say, screw looking for the serial killer because there's hot boys to obsess about instead! The highlights from my blog:
Tessa spent more time wailing about her mission than she does actually participating in her mission. In the first few pages she’s all “Yay, I’m an agent! I can turn into people! I can’t wait for my first mission!” “Hey, we got a mission for you. Impersonate this dead chick and make the killer think he missed.” “What? Impersonate someone? THIS IS SOMEHOW A TOTAL SHOCK TO ME AND I WILL NOW ANGST ABOUT IT.” Yeah, it’s that confusing. And then she continues the angst-train throughout the book.

Two years of training, did you say? Piffle. Tessa acts like she’s had two minutes of training. She’s completely unprofessional and verging on too stupid to live. Her investigative skills are a joke. She can’t act to save her life (literally) and her one go-to move the entire book is “Oh, I have amnesia. Please explain our relationship to me.”

The whole idea was to use Tessa as bait and draw the killer out, under the theory that he’d be nervous about “Madison” giving him away. Fine plan until Tessa started up her “Nope, I don’t remember a thing! No, really, let me emphasis how littler I remember” parade. How is that supposed to help?

At first I thought that the symbolism was painfully obvious, but no. It’s painfully not even symbolism. Like, you didn’t even put in that much effort. Which would be okay, I suppose, except no one brings up the obvious option. These dead people have A’s carved onto their chests and one dead girl was having an affair. How can you not at least mention The Scarlett Letter? Giant Red A’s are enough of “a thing” that it should be remarked upon. And when you find out what the A stands for, oh, that’s not symbolism either. That’s just a guy’s name. Who names their organization after themselves? Even Magneto didn’t do that.

A hot mess of a book in which the protagonist hooks up with her high school crush in the vampire post-apocalypse (sigh). I only read it for the autistic character.

Life was different in the Before: before vampires began devouring humans in a swarm across America; before the surviving young people were rounded up and quarantined. These days, we know what those quarantines are—holding pens where human blood is turned into more food for the undead monsters, known as Ticks. Surrounded by electrical fences, most kids try to survive the Farms by turning on each other…

And when trust is a thing of the past, escape is nearly impossible.

Lily and her twin sister Mel have a plan. Though Mel can barely communicate, her autism helps her notice things no one else notices—like the portion of electrical fence that gets turned off every night. Getting across won’t be easy, but as Lily gathers what they need to escape, a familiar face appears out of nowhere, offering to help…

Carter was a schoolmate of Lily’s in the Before. Managing to evade capture until now, he has valuable knowledge of the outside world. But like everyone on the Farm, Carter has his own agenda, and he knows that behind the Ticks is an even more dangerous threat to the human race...

Why bother, it's YA? In which I stop taking recommendations from Maria V. Snyder.

Verdict: Occupying the low end of "readable," raising absolutely no expectations where YA is concerned, The Farm is a YA-mill vampire book with a few salvageable bits that made reading it not a complete waste of my time, but it will probably be a waste of yours.

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My complete list of book reviews.

Deadly Pink is third in a sort-of series about Rasmussem, a video game company whose games are total-immersion through new technology. You actually experience the game with all five senses. User Unfriendly and Heir Apparent, the first two books, are wonderful, enough that I've read each of them many times despite the fact they certainly aren't meant for a 23-year-old.

[Spoilers]

But Deadly Pink, while not absolutely horrible, is not a worthy successor. At first I was excited for the change in setup. Both earlier books' plots are 'characters rescue themselves from malfunctioning game'. This one begins with 'character rescues sister from committing suicide with the game, by allowing the technology to pretty much scramble her brain.

Then, halfway through the book, all of the sister's problems are solved by one conversation and some hugs. Of course, depression doesn't work like that, but I was willing to let it slide some because it's for children. Then it moves straight back into malfunctioning game territory. The book comes in at under 200 pages, not nearly enough time to do justice to two plots.

It's pretty badly paced too, which is surprising for Velde. I think this could have been fixed by using subplots like the earlier books.


I finished it anyway because it's so short, but I feel like I wasted my time.

I know the Southern Vampire Mysteries series aren't great literature and Charlaine Harris isn't going to be winning a Booker Prize any time soon, the series is a light, easy and entertaining read. Ms Harris has built an intriguing world and has been the Maker to a set of characters that I've found myself heavily invested in, which is rare for me.

In previous books the continuity errors have been comical but just about bareable; Ms Harris doesn't seem to know her own world apparently and frequently either forgets or gets the names wrong of her characters. Inconsequential characters (of which there were hundreds it seemed) changed names mid paragraph and a main character changed his age and hair colour in one book, huh?

She was also fond of parachuting characters into the story that weren't ever mentioned in the previous books as some sort of deus ex machina that left me bewildered and scratching my head. It resolved a plot line but was still rather irritating all the same.

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