Professor Kompressor by Nils Andersson

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Professor Kompressor gets visited by agents with an agency so secret, they refuse to name it. He makes a series of inventions, visits a foreign country, flies over a bunch of others, and makes a bunch of inventions.
Professor Kompressor under cover (sic) certainly has a little charm, but glaring errors take away from that charm. In short, the book either needed an editor or, a much better one. And a couple of proof-reads. (For the record, the professor is not under the covers, rather, he is undercover.)
The biggest issue is the use of direct quotes. Most style books, and readers’ sanity, dictate the following: If a quote goes over a single paragraph, the end of the first paragraph, and all subsequent ones except for the last, do not have an ending quotation marks. Each quote encapsulated on both ends by quotation marks is supposed to mean the end of the quote: the next should be a different person’s quote.
Example, page 121:

“What are you doing with this battered old car, though?”
“Are you training to become a mechanic?”
“Doesn’t quite match your usual invention, does it? A bit too down to earth”

Because all this dialogue, in a row, is said by the same person, the quotation marks at the end of “though” and “mechanic should be left off, to mark it’s the same speaker. This lack style adherence makes the book much harder to read than it should be.
As a person who works in print, spacing issues equally struck me with chagrin. Indent-long spaces between words in the same sentence seemed like the paginator feel asleep at the keyboard.

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On the far side, there’s a boy by Paula Coston

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According to the book blurb, this is an “exotic fable for anyone who has ever longed to have, or adopt, a child.”

It is more accurate to understand, this is a book about a pedophile who desperately wants a Sri Lankan boy.
I have no idea if the author was entirely conscious, or conscious at all, of how strongly this theme permeates, then pulsates, through the book. I doubt she was much aware.
This pedophiliac desire of the main character/narrator is masked as the aforementioned longing to have a child of one’s own.
When one reads the text, the desire is clear. This is not the desire to have a child. This is the desire to have a child to have sexual relations with. Specifically, a boy. It’s creepy. Reverse the gender rules and one would not even hesitate to cast stones or see the pedophilia for what it is.

Make it end
The book is bad for a variety of reasons. I will admit, Paula Coston is not a terrible writer. Her prose is palatable, just, her content is not.
At 374 pages, the book goes on and on and on without any, actual, discernible point. I wish Coston’s editor, assuming she had one, would have stepped in and asked her to tighten the book up. There are so many scenes that have no discernible point. So many pointless plotlines. So much pointless writing.

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Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Maxwell

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Crafty
Elizabeth Maxwell, the author, uses two separate devices to tell her story. The first, which is only used to get the story started although it becomes the plot, is a writer telling a story, switching back to her life, story.
The second one, which works but I doubt will ever work for any of Maxwell’s readers a second time, is the use of craft to tell a story.
That is to say, using information about the craft the narrator is engaged in to further propel the story. Think USA’s “Burn Notice.” In that instance, a spy of sorts engages the viewer with it, with its background, with its creation and destruction, as a means to further his own narrative. Maxwell does the same, but for something she engages in: the writing of the romance novel.
This isn’t a knock on Happily Ever After (which is a terribly generic title.) It works in the context of the book. It’s fully enjoyable. The problem arises with, it’s a one-use-only kind of device, and one that used in this more narrowed instance, ruins all future uses by any other authors for readers.
That is to say, I don’t ever want to read another book that uses a telling of the craft of romance writing to propel a novel because, how many novels worth of craft are there to write about? There is a certain plateau, beyond which, everything is just jargon.
Others have made comparisons to the film “Stranger Than Fiction.” Certainly, the comparison is apt. They’re the same kind of stories, the same sub-genre of sorts. Really, that’s where the comparison should end.

Exceeded expectations
I assumed when I started the book, but after I had read the reviews, I would hate it. I don’t trust the overly positive, but short, reviews and the negatives one seemed to parrot what I’ve seen as warning signs for other books.

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Half a King by Joe Abercrombie

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Half a King by Joe Abercrombie

Despite all the praise “Half a King” has been receiving, I found it to be sorely wanting.

My tendency is to blame it on being a young adult novel, something I only realized after I finished the book. That’s not fair to the genre.

“Half a King” is really half a novel.

It’s a mediocre start to what promises to be a series of some king, although what that will entail is unknown.

When it comes to the fantasy part of “Half a King”, there’s almost nothing at all. There’s writing of Elfen structures and some religious talk of the time between now and then, when the gods were shattered. There’re also some plotlines of the coming of a monotheistic movement.

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Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead

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A book as well played as the ballet depicted in it, Astonish Me hits every single mark, just as its master-level ballet dancers do in their performances.

Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish me, leaves few questions unanswered in a humane and relatable tale set over two generations.

The novel’s strength is not just its writing, which is very, very good. The strength, the brilliance, comes from the use of medium in which the tale is set, paced with the elements of the plot.

In other words, telling the story of the ballet is telling the story of the characters.

More viscerally, Shipstead matches the staccato of the ballet, of the action, with her writing and plot.

“When rehearsals start, she sees quickly that the promise will be less easily kept than she thought. Phoenix, a tall, elegant, low-jawed black woman who always dresses in pristine white layers, had an idea for a dance that is slinky, jazzy, loose, juice. Arslan struggles. He has difficulty unlocking his hips to allow for the Latin figure-eight movement Phoenix wants; he has difficulty letting his body curve forward, like a sail filling with wind, until he falls off balance and must catch himself; he has difficulty being light and sexy, not intense and passionate. She asks him to turn one leg while the other and his torso are extended parallel to the floor, counterbalancing each other. Elaine, who has more training in contemporary fane, finds herself in the unexpected position of offering reassurance and advice.”

The book is broken up to chapters, specific scenes in time, a month and a year. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the characters. Most of the book is in present tense, something I did not realize until I was half-way through the book.

Ultimately, I was incredibly saddened to be leaving the world Shipstead created and she glued me with plot twists to the end.

The only real plot twists come at the end as the story doesn’t so much as plod, it is far too interesting and exciting for that. No, it unfurls. Each chapter, each scene, leads up to the next, is interesting in its own right. Each character’s trajectory is fascinating in its own right.

Don’t believe the more negative reviews. This is one book to keep on the shelf.

This book was received, free of charge, through the Goodreads Firstreads program.

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Dr. Vigilante by Alberto Hazan

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The concept is ripe for a novel: doctor uses his access to patients, and trends, in the emergency room to carry out a war on the male criminal elements in the big apple.

The inherent tension in the idea would, seemingly, be enough fodder for a brilliant story. After all, it’s about a doctor who hurts people, and then proceeds to treat the people he’s intentionally harmed. A doctor violating his oath.
Dr. Vigilante does not live up to the lofty concept. It lives up to the pretension of a rich, hunky doctor living in New York City, who is written as a toned-down version of Batman.
The pretension, along with the terrible stereotypes and blatant sexism built into the plot, into the characters, even into the setting, helps drive this book down, down, down.

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The Night Searchers by Marcia Muller

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I don’t normally subscribe to the Marxist camp of literary theory, but this mystery novel grated on my sensibilities until finally, after I finished it, the grating turned into a salient realization:
The Night Searchers is a screed, beckoning the top 10 percent to piss on the bottom 10 percent. The wealthy to lord their wealth and privilege over the poor. Not the super-wealthy, just the normal-wealthy.
I realize this is a vulgar thing to write, but it is an unfortunately true approximation of the book, its themes, its characters, its setting, etc.
We have Mrs. Sharon McCone, private detective, living in San Francisco and married to a man who runs some sort of similar agency.
Both are filthy, stinking rich. Multiple houses in multiple locations. Fancy sports cars. One house in San Francisco, with its bloated rents pushed higher by the likes of McCone. Two other houses, sitting unused, unneeded by them. They have the privilege to waste. (The reader, I suppose, is supposed to laude these marks of the main character’s wealth.)

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The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian

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Another reviewer is entirely baffled as how this book has such incredible reviews. I fall into this reviewer’s camp.

The light in the ruins only has a single redeeming quality: the female, post-war detective attempting to solve the series of murders plaguing an aristocratic Tuscan family.

The female detective is great, and she holds great potential. This is not a vehicle for her. Nor is The Light in the Ruins a vehicle for anything.

There’s some sporadic narration by the killer, which is entirely clichéd, boring and pointless. There’s the primal serial killing done in the name of revenge. There’re Nazis, and the people allied with them and there’s the resistance and some ruins and a weak love story.

Really, there’s nothing worth writing about and there’s nothing worth reading about.

Really, the writing is weak and the emotions are boring and the plot moves so slowly as to be worthless.

This book was received, free of charge, from the Goodreads First Reads program.

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Team Seven by Marcus Burke

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Team Seven, while well-written, suffers from a lack of a coherent timeline and organization, lending significant doubt to its character’s actions, language, etc.

Perhaps unfortunately for my opinion of the book, it came on the heels of the excellent novel “Astonish Me” by Maggie Shipstead, which has a similar structure and pacing. While Shipstead’s novel clearly placed time in which each chapter took place, “Team Seven” lacks any sort of grounding.

Admittedly, “Team Seven” is Burke’s first novel. For this, he deserves credit for a well-written novel.

Even so, “Team Seven” is not without its glaring errors.

The book starts off with the narrator and main character, Andre, discussing his father’s “vitals.”

“I would ask Pop about his strange-smelling funny-cigarettes but I’m afraid to ask him questions anymore. He’s always in a rush and never tells me where he’s going when he leaves.”

So, we’re made to understand, the narrator is a youngster. Yet, this problem remains through the entire narrative: there is only rarely, or never, indication of time and the character’s respective ages/grades in the context of the time.

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Madame Picasso by Anne Girard

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Madame Picasso is . . . Cute. It’s enjoyable. It is not deep. It does not leave a lasting impression.
It is well written and a quick read but it does not rise above the mediocre. I do not doubt it was never meant to rise above the mediocre.
Since it seems necessary for a plot synopsis you, the reader, has already read: here you go. Picasso’s one true love, Eva Gouel, from her first time in Paris to her untimely death.
The book’s main problem is its length. It does not need to be 400 pages, short as those pages are. In the middle, it starts to drag quite a bit.

This book was received, free of charge, from the Goodreads First Reads program.
All quotes are taken from an advance uncorrected proof of the book and may, or may not, reflect the final commercial edition.

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Ghouls Rush In by H. P. Mallroy

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Book Review: Ghouls Rush In by H. P. Mallroy

With a name like H. P. Mallroy, with both her first and middle names obfuscated, one would think she would at least try to live up to the paranormal credentials she is, admittedly, inadvertently throwing out to the world.

Alas, alas, alas, she does not. Rather, she offers up a repetitive, lackluster and ultimately boring romance that isn’t really a romance, but more a story of never-quenched lust dressed up as romance.

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Full Measure by T. Jefferson Parker

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Full measure is the story of a vet who comes back from one of our most recent wars, to his quaint California town, to his father’s avocado farm and his mentally off brother. The novel moves at a quick enough pace, although it has a woefully unethical and unrealistic local-journalist love interest. (Being a small-town newspaper reporter myself, I find the actions the female love interest takes to be: 1. deplorable 2. highly unethical)

(I also find her living situation to be highly unrealistic, especially in California. Without familial connections or inheritance, reports don’t own nice things and don’t live in nice houses by themselves, especially in California, of all places. Suspension of disbelief: entirely shattered. Just unrealistic.)

The end quite bothered me. I wasn’t sure if the author intended it to be ironic or not. I really hope he did mean a big dose of irony, of the survivors being the true monsters, because that’s what it looks like upon the last reflection.

Without getting into too much detail, the author sadly conflates and demonizes more libertarian movements with the white supremacist (fascist) movement, which seems to do a disservice to everyone. On the flip side, I learned in some places, there is no open carry.

My western naivety showing through. The other reason I left the book unsettled was the trope use of the main character’s brother. He felt far too hollow, felt like far too much of a caricature. And, his voice was incredibly annoying to read.

 

This book was received, free of charge, from the Goodreads First Reads program. All quotes are taken from an “advanced reader’s edition” (ARC) of the book and may, or may not, reflect the final commercial edition.

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A History of Stone and Steel

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A History of Stone and Steel is hard. It comes from a place of hardness, as does its main character, Paul Keppel, which contrasts with his chosen path of getting a history doctorate.

The book has a single flaw which bumped it down one star and almost bumped it down too. Sudden, allegedly divine, intervention into the affairs of men, at the end of the book.

It made no sense for me to suddenly need to suspend my disbelief during the last 20 pages. Although something like this had previously been hinted it, it was just that: hints from a crazy religious man. To have the divine intervention, that was just stupid. It ruined the reading experience.

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Three Trips in Time and Space by Larry Niven & John Brunner & Jack Vance

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“Three Trips in Time and Space” is three novellas of wildly disparate quality by three different sci-fi stalwarts, commissioned on the idea of instantaneous, economical travel.
Robert Silverberg commissions the three novellas, stories, from three different authors. He sends them the book’s foreword.
(Them are: Larry Niven with ‘Flash Crowd, John Brunner with ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ and Jack Vance with ‘Rumfuddle.’)

The Premise and the Challenge:
The jist of Silverberg’s foreword, his challenge to the authors is instantaneous, economical travel. His words:

“Suppose it were possible, technologically and economically, to transport oneself to any point on the earth’s surface in virtually instantaneous travel? What sort of society would develop where Arabia is an eye blink away from Brooklyn, where one can step from Calcutta to the Grand Canyon between two heartbeats? Let the author, if he can, visualize for us how such a transport system might work – but let him concern himself, primarily, with the effects it would have on the texture on quality of human life. (emphasis added)

There one has it. Instantaneous, economical travel.

The Quick Run Down
1. The first novella, ‘Flash Crowd’ by Larry Niven sets a very good tone. While it lacks in a denouement, it certainly hustles the plot along for most of the story. From a technology standpoint, both it and Brunner’s novella share a conceit of a form of teleportation.
2. The second novella, ‘You’ll Take the High Road’ by John Brunner neither hustles along nor is standable, most notable with its whiney narrator/main character.
3. The third novella, and the strongest by far, is ‘Rumfuddle’ by Jack Vance. Although it’s confusing for the first few pages, it quickly hits its stride and the strong-headed narrator is evened out by a strong plot, strong pacing, a great twist and a great technological concept that propels it far beyond the environs and implications of its two brother novellas.

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The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal

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The Anatomy lesson is a poorly-written and bloated novel, nothing but a slog of a let-down.
Its pedigree is promising: six years spent in Amsterdam, a former New York Times writer, rave reviews from fellow authors and an MFA. Pedigree, in this instance, has no claim on the quality of the novel, of the writing, of the novel’s coherence or anything else.
Whole sections of the book are nothing but useless bloat and should have been cut.

“Most excellent and ornate men of Amsterdam: Honorable Burgomaster Bicker, Amsterdam burghers, gentlemen of the Stadtholder’s court, magistrates, inspectors Collegii Medici, physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, apprentices, and public visitors to our chamber, on behalf of the Amsterdam Surgeon’s Guild, it is my greatest honor to welcome you all to the Amsterdam theatrum anatomicum on this, the opening night of the winter festival 1632.”

That claptrap goes on and on and on. For 13 pages. Thirteen pages of pure, pointless claptrap.

The plot
The plot is, the lead up to Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson. That’s it. So, really, there is no plot. There is no middle and there is no end. There is no conclusion to most of the story lines.
The publishers touts at least seven narrators, none of whom are given enough time to develop into characters. It is unclear at best, purely bad writing at worst, whom the narrators are speaking to, especially as the narration goes from first to third persons. Then the narration goes from past tense to present tense to past tense. Then one of the characters is flying over the city, trying to atone for his minor sins. Because that belongs in a historical fiction novel.

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