facepalm Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / January 26, 2018

Review: Paper Ghosts

Paper Ghosts: A Novel of Suspense by Julia Heaberlin

My rating: [rating=1]

Blurb:

An obsessive young woman has been waiting half her life—since she was twelve years old—for this moment. She has planned. Researched. Trained. Imagined every scenario. Now she is almost certain the man who kidnapped and murdered her sister sits in the passenger seat beside her.

Carl Louis Feldman is a documentary photographer. The young woman claims to be his long-lost daughter. He doesn’t believe her. He claims no memory of murdering girls across Texas, in a string of places where he shot eerie pictures. She doesn’t believe him.

Determined to find the truth, she lures him out of a halfway house and proposes a dangerous idea: a ten-day road trip, just the two of them, to examine cold cases linked to his haunting photographs.

Is he a liar or a broken old man? Is he a pathological con artist? Or is she?

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

I had liked ‘Black-Eyed Susans’ by the same author well enough, and I thought I’d like this one as well, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. As evidenced by the time I needed to finish it, that wasn’t because I had too much work and no time to read, but because it kept falling from my hands and I’d reach something else to reach instead.

It started well enough, and I thought that the story would be a game of cat and mouse between the main character and the suspected killer. However, while I kept waiting for said character to reveal her hand—for instance, to show that she had made this or that mistake on purpose, in order to better turn the tables—such moments never happened. I think this is where it went wrong for me, and I believe the first-person narration wasn’t an asset in this case: with a third person POV, I could’ve been fooled into thinking the ‘heroine’ knew what she was doing, since I wouldn’t have been completely ‘in her head; but with first person, it’s more difficult to fool the reader…

So, well, I wasn’t fooled. In spite of all her alluding to her ‘trainer’ and to how she had taught herself to face various difficult situations, she wasn’t really one step ahead. Perhaps in the very beginning, but this fell down the train as soon as Carl started coming up with new ‘conditions’ along the way, and she was totally taken aback, and… just relented, or protested weakly. That didn’t fit my idea of someone who had planned carefully, or whose plans were unravelling but who still had the savvy to bounce back.

Also, I wasn’t convinced at all by the twist at the end. Something you can’t see coming because there was never any hint of it throughout the story, is not what I call an actual twist, but cheating the reader. (Now, when I read something and I’m all ‘a-ha! So that’s why she did this in chapter2, and said that in chapter 6, and that character did that in chapter 14’, well, that’s a proper twist.)

Conclusion: 1.5 stars. Too bad.

Yzabel / December 25, 2014

Review: Science… For Her!

Science…For Her! by Megan Amram

My rating: [rating=1]

Summary:

Megan Amram, one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30 in Hollywood & Entertainment,” Rolling Stone’s “25 Funniest People on Twitter,” and a writer for NBC’s hit show Parks and Recreation, delivers a politically, scientifically, and anatomically incorrect “textbook” that will have women screaming with laughter, and men dying to know what the noise is about.

In the vein of faux expert books by John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris, Science…for Her! is ostensibly a book of science written by a denizen of women’s magazines. Comedy writer and Twitter sensation Megan Amram showcases her fiendish wit with a pitch-perfect attack on everything from those insanely perky tips for self-improvement to our bizarre shopaholic dating culture to the socially mandated pursuit of mind-blowing sex to the cringe-worthy secret codes of food and body issues.

Part hilarious farce, part biting gender commentary, Amram blends Cosmo and science to highlight absurdities with a machine-gun of laugh-inducing lines that leave nothing and no one unscathed. Subjects include: this Spring’s ten most glamorous ways to die; tips for hosting your own big bang; what religion is right for your body type; and the most pressing issue facing women today: kale!!!

Be prepared to laugh about anything in this outrageous satirical gem.

Review:

(I got an ARC through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

I was hoping this one would be funny, with pokes to some “girly” magazines and their “silly” articles, yet also real scientific data in it—like a textbook with serious information, only in the shape of articles, lists of tips, etc.

It wasn’t the case. It only looked the part… until I started reading it.

Science here was reduced to a bare minimum. Nothing any high-schooler wouldn’t know, nothing really interesting, nothing to learn here. So the Earth is orbiting around the sun: big news. Reproduction: I learnt more about it in the anatomy book I got when I was 7. Either you really don’t know much about science and this is going to be useless, or you already know a bit, and it won’t be of any use to you. If there’s a middle-ground in that muddle, it’s a very thin and invisible one.

The rest didn’t save the book: it was just too heavy-handed to my taste. Like using plaster coating instead of foundation. Too full of fat jokes, rape jokes, wife-beating jokes, mean jokes, tasteless jokes in general, that went on for far too long, again and again and again. After the Nth iteration of “I can’t get over my boyfriend” and “here’s a dick” and “fat ugly bitch” and so on, I was glad I had had a few drinks in me to keep on reading. (Note: I’m only a social drinker, and a moderate one at that. When I need booze to get me through a book, it’s bad, bad news.)

There’s humour, satire and political incorrectness… and then there’s just too heavy and thick to bear. Hey, wait. Thickium: the one element you won’t find on the periodic table, because it’s atomic number is so high it actually fell off said table. See? I can do science, too.

It takes real skill to properly satirise any subject. I don’t think that skill was anywhere to be found here. In the end, I just wasted my time. (And probably would have wasted it much less if I had read an actual issue of Marie Claire, Elle, or whatever, instead. Unless the US versions of those magazines are really so much worse than the French ones, in which case I won’t ever touch them with a ten-foot pole.)

Yzabel / November 23, 2014

Review: Unborn

Unborn by Amber Lynn Natusch

My rating: [rating=1]

Summary:

Born into mystery. Shackled to darkness…

Khara has spent centuries discovering everything about the Underworld―except her place in it. But when she’s ripped from her home, solving the riddle of her origins becomes more important than ever. With evil stalking her through the dark alleys of Detroit, she finds salvation from an unlikely source: a group of immortal warriors sworn to protect the city. Khara needs their help to unravel the tangled secrets of who and what she is—secrets many seem willing to kill for. But time is running out, and the closer she gets to the truth, the closer necessity binds her to an arrogant fallen angel.

Can their shaky alliance withstand that which threatens her, or will her soul fall victim to the unholy forces that hunt her―those that seek the Unborn?

Review:

(I got a copy courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

I shall be honest and say that I was one inch from DNFing this one. About four or five times. I trudged on because I felt I owed the book a review, since I had requested it, but I just can’t recommend it. Instead, I shall thank the local bus system and this past week’s early work shift, because they provided me with reading time at something-too-early AM, which made itall the more bearable.

I seriously wanted to like this. Roots in Greek mythology. A ward of Hades, snatched from the Underworld. The idea behind the treaty between Hades and Demeter, providing an interesting diplomatic explanation to Persephone being allowed to go back to her mother for six months every year. Khara’s origins, being the daughter of a kickass god, in spite of his usual shortcomings. Well, grantd, Detroit was kind of cliché—it seems like the Bleak City of Bleakiness of Doom for anything horror or supernatural—but hey, whatever, as long as it works!

Only it didn’t.

My very first gripe, and unfortunately one that lasted for the whole novel, was Khara’s narrative style, which I can only decribe as stilted and “trying too hard”:

Our destination was on the far side of the mob before us, and I cringed at the thought of having to navigate through them all, their sweaty stench already offending me from where I stood. Without time to relay those concerns to Kierson, he took my hand and pulled me behind him as he cut his way through the mass with ease. Though I was loath to admit it, there was something strangely appealing being surrounded by the dancing horde, swallowed up in their debauchery. I had not expected to find it so amenable.

I’ll acknowledge it tried to stray from basic, bland prose (because a book is urban fantasy, paranormal, young adult, etc. doesn’t mean its writing has to be dumbed down, for sure). However, by doing so, it achieved the contrary, making everything feel heavy-handed—all the more because dialogues, too, were in the same style. All the characters spoke in very similar ways, at odds with their surroundings, their usual places of dwelling, the kind of lifestyle they lived. I just can’t envision any son of Ares speaking like this:

“No,” Drew replied with an ounce of hesitation. “I have made the decision to hold off on that for now. He has his hands full out east. I see no reason to burden him with this as well, especially when there is nothing to report other than her existence. What he is dealing with has potentially far more disastrous implications than learning he has a sister. I do not think he needs a distraction to derail his focus.”

And Khara’s narrative remained like this all the time, even during fight scenes. So maybe, just maybe, her upbringing in the Underworld would have made her a wee mite uptight, but… No, not even that would really justify it.

I also couldn’t bring myself to care for Khara. Making her the a daughter of a war deity could at least have warranted a few nice traits. Natural ability for fighting, a mind cut for strategy, being world champion at chess… Whatever. But mostly, she remained passive and useless, observing everything, barely feeling a thing (well, that’s how her narrative made me feel, that is). The girl standing in the middle, the one that has to be protected and saved because she barely fends for herself, in spite of claiming she has spent centuries in the Underworld surviving her lot of blows. The one all the guys around fight for—thankfully not as a love polygon, since most of them are her brothers, but they still came off as “you’re the girl and so you stay here and when we tell you not to move, you don’t move.” She alleges her ability might actually be to “stay out of trouble”. Then here’s what she does:

“Stay close, and always behind me.”
[…]
I walked toward the voices, wanting to see just how the situation would play out. Would whatever creature Kierson pursued let her go, or would he face the wrath of my brother? Furthermore, I had a strange desire building within me that demanded to see just what the assailant was. I had not seen the evil that I had been so constantly told of since meeting Drew and the others. Curiosity got the better of me.
Just as I rounded a thick concrete pillar, I could see the three of them, though light was still scarce. A thin and sickly looking man held the young girl, her face cupped in his hands, mouths nearly touching. The second I stepped into view, his hollow, empty eyes snapped directly to me.
And they never left.

Excuse me for not quite believing that, Khara. Also, for questioning centuries’ worth of understanding ability:

“You are not going anywhere, especially not until we know more about why you came here in the first place. […] If you’re finally feeling rested, you should join us.”
“But you said to stay right where I am…”
He laughed heartily.
“Not literally right where you are. I meant I would feel better if you stayed with us.”

I just… I just can’t. Sorry.

I’m not even going to touch the romance here; no chemistry whatsoever between Khara the Bland and typical Tall, Dark and Dangerous Guy. Or how the psychopath who’s been trying to own Khara for centuries is brushed aside as a threat from the beginning, before someone finally starts to remember that maybe, just maybe, he should be kept in their computations. You know, just in case.

This novel was definitely not for me.

Yzabel / October 13, 2014

Review: Soulless

Soulless by Amber Garr

My rating: [rating=1]

Summary:

When it comes to death and love…only one is guaranteed.

Four decades ago Nora died. A tragic event for someone so young; however, four decades ago Nora was also given a second chance to walk among the living.

A Death Warden with a mysterious past, her job is to escort the newly expired towards the light, battling with the Soul Hunters who want the freshly dead to help with their own evil purposes buried in the dark.

When Nora’s charges suddenly become targets, she realizes that the hunters are after far more than just souls. A shift in power between good and evil threatens to change everything, risking the lives of the only family Nora has ever known.

Devastated and angry, she’s forced to face the man she once loved – a man who chose darkness over her – in order to find the answers she needs to stop the horror from escalating. Yet, while a lost relationship still haunts her broken heart, a new Warden with secrets of his own will enter the mix and quickly alter everything Nora believed to be true.

Death is unavoidable…but sometimes, so is love.

Review:

(I got a copy courtesy of NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

Interesting premise and world (Death Wardens vs. Soul Hunters), but characters that turned out too difficult to stand, at least for me.

The story reads fast, and getting into it was quite easy. We’re quickly introduced to what being a Warden entails, and to what Soul Hunters do. Granted, their names kind of make it obvious; still, it’s good to see such things explained through active scenes, and not just in passing. Even though this could have become an info-dump, it didn’t (or if it did, not in a way that felt like I was having tons of information dumped on me).

However, I had the constant, nagging feeling that something was off. I suspected that the “something” was the characters. Some two thirds in, it just didn’t work anymore at all.

Nora is almost sixty: she died at eighteen, then spent fourty years as a Warden. Despite her long experience, though, she behaves like a teenager in more than one way, from moping about her mysterious death (understandable if it’s just happened, less interesting if it was ages ago) to letting her “hormones” lead the ball (she’s dead, by the way, so why would she still have hormones anyway?). That’s a specific pet peeve of mine, but I think it’s a justified one: when using characters that are older than they look, they must also act older, otherwise we might as well be shown a regular 18-year-old heroine.

While it seems that she’s going to be a leading character, the one with experience, compared to the younger one she has to teach, she actually becomes rather passive. Sure, she trains to fight. Sure, she’s given a charge of her own. Then she turns into the girl who has to be protected. You’d think that fourty years later, she wouldn’t need that so much. I wanted to see her actually teaching things to Jason; I got Jason jumping in front of her to save her.

Jason: nice character at first sight, a soldier who actually enlisted because he wanted to become a medic and thought he’d learn useful things in that regard in the army. Yet also a cliché (cowboy, ranch, manly man of manliness).

Then came the testosterone and jealousy contests. Apart from a couple of Elders, the few other female characters are, of course, girls who intend on seducing Jason:

A pretty, young girl with bright red hair and matching lips jumped forward. Her eagerness irritated me even though it shouldn’t. She stepped into the circle, eyeing Jason like a piece of chocolate cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top. Biting her bottom lip seductively, I rolled my eyes.

Ensue staring, dark glares, fighting in as revealing clothing as possible to grab the guy’s attention, and bodies getting too close to each other during training. Slut shaming wasn’t 100% in the open, but it definitely kept swimming under the surface. (Also dangling participles here and there, as you can see from the quote.)

This is one of those instances in which the romance clearly ruined the game for me. I’m not fond of love triangles in general, but that’s because they’re usually cliché, and tend to take over the actual plot. While the stakes could have been alluring here, after a while, it was very difficult for me to go past the typical “bad guy in black vs. manly soldier ex-cowboy”—complete with jealous, passive-aggressive domineering attitude:

He paused, something else balancing on the tip of his tongue. “Did you say Sani and Theron saved you?”
I shivered with the memory, and Jason held me tighter. His heavy arm felt like an iron clamp, gluing me to his side forever.

Guys, there’s a bigger problem looming on the horizon, and actually the horizon is getting very, very close because the book’s ending soon. Can we focus?

Add a bit of ain’t-telling-you-nothing (as in, some characters definitely know a lot more, yet refuse to spit the information out until, obviously, it’s much too late for that). I just don’t like that, since it creates an artificial delay in readers getting said information, while we all know we won’t get it anyway due to the character-rendered-unable-to-speak trope. (I swear, I can feel that one coming from miles away.)

In short: a good idea for a story, with themes that usually grab my interest (death, reapers), yet characters that grated on my nerves too much for me to enjoy it, and probably also a plot dealt with too quickly (there would have been more room for it without the girls competing over the guy, for sure). 1.5 stars.

Yzabel / August 20, 2014

Review: The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: [rating=1]

Summary:

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

Review:

I’m not at ease with cancer stories. That illness itself makes me shudder; I might go as far as to say I’m even mildly phobic about it. But I still wanted to check this book, after reading so many good reviews about it, and after I was told that it wasn’t so much about vivid descriptions of cancer itself. So, when it popped up at the library near my parents’ home, I seized the opportunity.

Well, I might be a horrible, callous person, because I just don’t get the whole tear-inducing, heart-wrenching hype around this novel. Or maybe whatever passes for a heart in my chest cavity was too busy rolling its metaphorical eyes at all the pompousness, which for me totally ruined the story. It made me wonder if a thesaurus was harmed, raped and defaced in the process. When using Big Words, the least one can do is to us Big Words That Actually Mean What They’re Supposed To Mean. (Definition of hamartia: the error in judgement that causes the hero to achieve the opposite of what s/he meant, leading to the actual tragedy. Not just any character flaw.) This is not how I, of all people, could be touched, not when I’m too busy wondering who the hell talks like that.

Hazel struck me as pretentious, and incredibly judgemental when it came to a lot of people around her. Gallows humour I could definitely take, understand, and appreciate—but this wasn’t humour. This was just demeaning. The way she spoke of the support group and of Patrick, as if his life had no value? Disgusting:

“…the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.”

I sure couldn’t empathise with her attitude towards her parents at times (how dare they show feelings and cry; or wake her up at 5:30 in the morning to prepare and board the plane to go to Amsterdam; or send her to support group, instead of allowing her to basically be already dead in
her everyday life). Even her attitude towards her teachers, when she attended morning classes.

And the “metaphors”. That whole thing with the eggs and breakfast foods and me going “can we get to some actual point, and not some stupid rambling about a topic that I wouldn’t even tackle if I were completely wasted?” Or the hurdles:

“And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

That’s not philosophical. That’s idiotic.

The love-at-first-sight trope seldom works for me, and it didn’t work here either. It turned the narrative into something rather cheesy, especially with all the pompous dialogues. (Seriously, I’ve met my share of university teachers and educated people in general… and we just don’t talk like that, certainly not without preparing our speeches first. So teenagers, no matter how smart? Sorry, I just can’t believe it.)

Somehow, it reminded me of some of the stuff I wrote when I was 15-16, and found recently at the bottom of a cardboard box. I remembered those “pieces” as witty, smart, full of deep meaning. I remembered writing them with such goals in mind. I was good at writing, too; I always had top grades in French and Literature classes. Then I read those again—now, that is, 20 years later—and I realised how full of myself I was at the time, and how my Big Words And Sentences were in fact just so shallow. The characters here, and their way of talking and being, left me with the same feeling. They never seemed to leave the surface level. Now that I’m done with the book, I still don’t know what Hazel likes (apart from An Imperial Affliction and her favourite TV show), what else she used to do before being diagnosed, and so on. She’s defined by 1) her illness (though said illness looked kind of like a ploy to elicit emotion, rather than anything else) and 2) Augustus, and… What else? I have no idea.

I think it could’ve been a great story… only without its pretentiousness, without its flat characters, and without its tendency to take the reader by the hand to put his/her nose into the supposed deep meaning hidden within the pages. When you feel like a novel is trying to manipulate you, is when suspension of disbelief shatters.

Yzabel / May 26, 2014

Review: The Butcher

The Butcher by Jennifer Hillier

My rating: [rating=3]

Summary:

A rash of grisly serial murders plagued Seattle until the infamous “Beacon Hill Butcher” was finally hunted down and killed by police chief Edward Shank in 1985. Now, some thirty years later, Shank, retired and widowed, is giving up his large rambling Victorian house to his grandson Matt, whom he helped raise.

Settling back into his childhood home and doing some renovations in the backyard to make the house feel like his own, Matt, a young up-and-coming chef and restaurateur, stumbles upon a locked crate he’s never seen before. Curious, he picks the padlock and makes a discovery so gruesome it will forever haunt him… Faced with this deep dark family secret, Matt must decide whether to keep what he knows buried in the past, go to the police, or take matters into his own hands.

Meanwhile Matt’s girlfriend, Sam, has always suspected that her mother was murdered by the Beacon Hill Butcher—two years after the supposed Butcher was gunned down. As she pursues leads that will prove her right, Sam heads right into the path of Matt’s terrible secret.

A thriller with taut, fast-paced suspense, and twists around every corner, The Butcher will keep you guessing until the bitter, bloody end.

Review:

(I got an ARC through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. Quotes liable to change upon publishing.)

From now on, I’m going to maintain that this book was classified in the wrong genre.

Let’s be upfront: as a thriller, I’m giving it 2 stars, and that’s being kind. It didn’t keep me on the seat of my edge. It didn’t give me, well, the thrills. The mystery wasn’t so well-done, and rested upon a lot of coincidences, such as people stumbling upon others in the middle of a conversation. I see what the author did here: revealing who the killer is in the beginning (seriously, you know who it is in chapter 1), and stressing the “why”, “how” and “will they take the fallout” aspects, rather than the “whodunnit” one; I’m not sure it worked properly, though. It may have worked better for me if the characters had been deeper, psychologically-speaking; their psyches were touched upon, sure, but not enough to offset the fact that without a whodunnit, it wasn’t exactly the same. Readers looking for that may not find this book to their liking.

But as a work of dark, dark humour? As a dark, twisted comedy? 4 stars.

This novel took whatever disgusting things were in me and brought them to the light. At least, I think it did, since I found myself snickering and even laughing more than once. It’s like watching a trainwreck: you’re feeling horrible for doing so, but you can’t help keep staring. It was the same thing here.

Graphic, violent, sexualised killings. The male protagonist is a sociopath. The world revolves around himsel, and it’s the most natural thing, and don’t you dare act otherwise. He feels bad about someone dying, but not because the person died: because it might impact his success as a restaurateur and chef. The male deuteragonist is a psychopath with a steely, condescending opinion on people on general and women in particular. The girl tries to make sense of it all, the cops try to make sense of it all, to no avail. Other women get killed. And yet. Yet, it’s funny. If it was made into a movie, I’d place it along “Burn After Reading” on my shelf. Think “what the hell just happened here, and why are all those guys dead?” funny. Or: “Oh, so they found the corpses of the Bay Harbour Butcher’s victims… Wait, I’m the Butcher!” funny. If you snickered at Dexter trying to help the police catch the aforementioned Bay Harbour Butcher, fully knowing he’s trying to catch himself, and has to sabotage the whole thing so that he can escape—cue in mistakes he barely manages to cover—then, yes, this novel may be for you.

It was the same here.

In fact, “The Clusterfuck” would make a perfect alternate title for this novel.

What happens when you accidentally kill a guy, ask help from the one person whom you know is worse than you, and that person tells you to take the body out of the dumpster?

“Okay, I’ll try.” He took a deep breath and tried not to think about his aching back. “But my back really hurts—”
“Fuck your back,” Edward barked. “If you’re standing, it’s not broken. This is your ass on the line and right now tipping the goddamned dumpster is the only option we got. You want to get the body out or not?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“Then do what the fuck I say.”

Indeed, son. The garbage men will be here in four hours, so stuff cut the I-hurt-my-back whining. This is Bumbling Serial Killer 101 for you.

He knew they wouldn’t be able to save him. One hundred milligrams of Viagra combined with all the medications for his heart and blood pressure that he was already taking… the old guy didn’t stand a chance.

Retirement communities for active seniors? Oh, gee, everybody knows those are places where residents keep humping each other, and the nurses really aren’t surprised to find old guys overdosing on Viagra. Poisoned? The third death in two weeks? A killer? Here? Nah. It’s all Viagra’s fault.

I’ll let you imagine what happens when the girl, convinced that her boyfriend’s cheating on her, tries to catch him in the act.

So I laughed. And it was horrible, because people were dying in this novel, and the killer remained on the loose, unsuspected. Worse, everybody and their dog came to him for advice. Cosmic irony to the power of ten. Since the characters were not developed deep enough, it paradoxically put them in the roles of unwilling puppets, thrown into a series of coincidences, fuck-ups, and situations that make you facepalm because you just know how it’s going to end, and it’s going to suck for them, but you’re going to chuckle anyway. Horrible, horrible readers that we are.

As a real, serious thriller, I think this novel fails flat.

As dark, partly slapstick half-comedy, it works. I liked it. I did.

And I still think it should be marketed as so.