Category Archives: indiefever 2015

too far

Book Review of Too Far, by Rich Shapero

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Too FarI won a paperback copy of Rich Shapero‘s Too Far.

Description from Goodreads:
Rich Shapero’s Too Far follows an ultra-imaginative pair, Robbie and Fristeen, through a transformative summer spent exploring the woods behind their remote Alaskan homes. As their family lives become increasingly unstable, the characters travel deeper and farther into their private world. The forest—and the gods who inhabit it—becomes their refuge until, at summer’s end, they are forced to choose between the crushing prospects of the real world, and the lethal demands of their ideal one.

Review: 
Almost three years ago, I won a copy of the book in a giveaway, but I put off reading it because it generally has very poor reviews. (Averaging 2.8 and change on both Amazon and Goodreads.)

After reading the book and a number of those poor reviews, I think I have an explanation. I notice that an awful lot of those reviewers state that they had been given a copy of the book for free on their college campus. Now, I don’t know Shapero and I’m hypothesizing, but this seems to have been one of Shapero’s marketing techniques.

I can see why he might have gone that route. This is a book that speaks in symbolism and says a lot with what isn’t said. And I can follow the logic that a bunch of university students, still immersed in deconstructing the classics and, I don’t know, reciting Byronic verse or something might be a good audience for this type of literature. However, it ignores the fact that college campuses are also full of 22-year-old Engineering students, and football scholarship recipients, and any number of students that don’t fulfill the description of literati.

I mention all of this because, though I didn’t find myself a fan of the book, I think some of the poor reviews can be taken with a grain of salt as having been solicited from the wrong audience. (Not that that makes them less than legitimate, but the overwhelming number of poor reviews could stem from the book only making it into the hands of people who weren’t likely to enjoy it.)

Now, why didn’t I (a literati at heart) enjoy the book? Because I thought it was overwritten and indulgent on the author’s part. As I mentioned, it’s all symbolic. The children create a world of their own to deal with the troubles in their lives and much of it mimics those same troubles. But so very much of it is presented as actually happening, while the reader is left to remind themself that it’s only fantasy that it just feels like a drug fueled escapade. It felt as if the author used the excuse of everything being symbolic to go hog-wild and write anything he wanted. I wouldn’t be surprised to find much of it doesn’t actually mean anything, we’re just supposed to assume it does.

This was especially apparent when one looked at the language and the emotional, developmental and intellectual maturity of the kids. I understand the characters are six to maintain their innocence in a way older children could not, but nothing in these children’s behavior, language or understanding was that of a six year old and most definitely the narrator’s vocabulary wasn’t. It was envy-worthy.

What’s more, I found the strange erotic tension between the six year olds disturbing. Not just because they had the common, ‘I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours’ scene or even because they cavort around the forest naked, but because everything about their relationship is gendered. Robbie’s view of Fristeen is unabashedly tinged with subtle eroticism and Fristeen’s behavior toward Robbie is subtly inviting.

Beyond that, there is a definite feel of Robbie being a MAN and Fristeen being WOMAN that just shouldn’t be there. It shows up in everything from who speaks, to who leads, to who makes decisions, to who comforts or protects whom. I know children are culturally indoctrinated early, but this was far too strong for children so young. It simply felt artificial.

And on a personal note, I was consistently annoyed by the patronizing was Robbie and his father treated and spoke about his mother. Mental health issues or not, there was a problem there.

I will say that the book is well edited. I don’t remember a single error catching my attention and I think Shapero really just wants to write poetry, because though the story as a whole was a fail for me, the actual writing is beautiful.

Book Review of Conquered (Kivronian Vampires #1), by Sandy L. Rowland

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ConqueredAt some point, quite some time ago, I downloaded Sandy L. Rowland‘s book, Conquered, from the Amazon free list.

Description from Goodreads:
Claiming a mate on conquered Earth is driving alien vampire, Rafe, insane…literally.

He’s lost his comrade to madness and has sworn against suffering the same fate. Time is out for the ruler of the western quadrant and any female will do.

Spunky reporter, Pepper Morgan, has lost friends, her mother, and a fiance to the devastating plague that ravished Earth before the vampires subjugated them. Desperate to reunite with her captured father, she throws herself on Rafe’s mercy.

Now, Rafe and Pepper find themselves bound by more than desperation and blood, but also by secrets that have the power to enslave humanity and threaten vampire survival. Can they overcome their inner demons and learn to trust each other, before it’s too late?

Review:     **spoiler warning**
We are not amused.

While the mechanical writing and editing in this book were fine, I found almost all aspects of the story, plot, characters and world disappointing. First, we had a Mary Sue who is chosen to mate the über sexy vampire because she was different, a special little snowflake unlike all the other vapid, beautiful women. Arghh, so cliché.

Next, we had a woman who in two weeks goes from not liking the vampire who is consistently an ass to her, to being in love. Then we had her developing a special power out of nowhere and somehow learning to use it in almost no time at all. We had baddies who conveniently leave doors unlocked and chains removed to allow for escape and miraculous recoveries. Not to mention, most of the events in the book came down to avoidable miscommunication or lack of communication. None of this is good, as far as I’m concerned.

But worst of all, the whole premise of the book made no sense to me. Somehow her love was going to keep him from going insane, because at a thousand years old vampires go crazy if he’s not mated. But first they had to be betrothed for exactly a month and if they had sex before that they’d both go crazy. Um, exactly what biological mechanism was keeping track of time and how exactly did his body know she loved him? I mean, what was causing this change. I get the theme, but it made no sense.

Speaking of biology, how exactly does an alien race evolve to need human blood to survive? I mean, what did they do before they came to earth? Seems like that would be an important piece of world-building, but it’s not addressed.

I probably could have just suspended my disbelief and rolled with it if I hadn’t found the style so infuriating. It’s repetitive, the reader is told the same things over and over, and it’s almost all exposition, internal thoughts and mental planning. This means that very, very little actually happened in the book, because the action is CONSTANTLY being stopped for the narrator to explain what the characters are thinking or feeling or planning to do. It really felt like one small step forward, stop and explain, one small step forward, stop and explain, one small step forward, <i>ad infinitum</i>. If you break it all down almost nothing actually happening in this book and what action there is is all in the last 10%.

That last 10% also introduced a new character and the idea that vampires could be made as well as born, which hadn’t been mentioned once the whole book. I mean, if you can make vampire, why is there the chronic lack of females? Why not just make some? This is an unaddressed issue or inconsistency. As is, for example, the fact that somehow the baddie never faced insanity if he didn’t wait the required 30 days before raping his bride.

All in all, it’s an interesting idea, but poorly executed. The author spent far too much time telling us things we should have been shown. There are also a lot of threads left open, I assume for a sequel.

For Real

Book Review of For Real, by Alexis Hall

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For RealI received a copy of For Real, by Alexis Hall from Netgalley.

Description from Goodreads:
Laurence Dalziel is worn down and washed up, and for him, the BDSM scene is all played out. Six years on from his last relationship, he’s pushing forty and tired of going through the motions of submission.

Then he meets Toby Finch. Nineteen years old. Fearless, fierce, and vulnerable. Everything Laurie can’t remember being.

Toby doesn’t know who he wants to be or what he wants to do. But he knows, with all the certainty of youth, that he wants Laurie. He wants him on his knees. He wants to make him hurt, he wants to make him beg, he wants to make him fall in love.

The problem is, while Laurie will surrender his body, he won’t surrender his heart. Because Toby is too young, too intense, too easy to hurt. And what they have—no matter how right it feels—can’t last. It can’t mean anything.

It can’t be real.

Review:
Another stellar read from Alexis Hall. I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’m getting pretty close to card-carrying fangirl status, if I’m honest. I thought this one was quite different from anything else I’d read by him; Shackles maybe coming closest. (Though, I haven’t read his whole catalogue.) But I was skeptical picking it up because of the BDSM theme. I simply haven’t had great luck with such books.

I get that BDSM is having its moment in the book world, right now. There seem to be an unusual number of ‘romances’ coming out using it as a schtick…or a theme, maybe. But I find that as much as I like the idea of it, I’m almost always disappointed, if not disgusted by them.

Because, here’s the thing, I don’t know what it’s like in a real-life BDSM pairing, but the overwhelming number of books I’ve read with BDSM read like what my dear mother, who despises anything that removes the sacred from the sexual, calls ‘mutual masterbation.’ In other words, the characters in the scenes feel not like two people engaging in  a meaningful way and having sex with one another, but two people individually using the other as an object for masterbation, connected by nothing more than proximity and ocular availability. And I rarely find that anywhere near as sexy as it’s intended to be. (My own interpretation of Dalziel’s jadedness, coloured by my own experiences of course, was that he was sensing this same tendency to force a partner into a fantasy mold that you act upon, instead of engage with on a personal, human level.)

This is where For Real shined for me. I understood both Dalziel and Toby’s needs and how/why they filled those needs for one another. I saw how hard they each worked to make the other happy and I understood the BDSM aspect of their relationship as something other than a fantasy one individual perpetuates on another. I didn’t need a narrator to repeatedly reassure me that the scene wasn’t abuse because the sub really was enjoying it, because I could see that and I understood why. And. It. Was. Beautiful.

Both Dalziel and Toby were wonderful characters. I especially appreciated that they weren’t flawlessly gorgeous people, beautiful to eachother, sure, but Dalziel was blunt and often angry looking and Toby was too skinny and had acne. I really love finding relatable, normalish people in books. I also thought Toby’s teenaged voice was marvellous, though I was admittedly skeptical about a man/boy who got a D and an F on their GCSEs having the vocabulary, poetic familiarity and general depth of thought of an Oxford scholar. But I was able to roll with it.

There were some fun side characters—the bisexual best friends with an obviously open relationship, Angel with the purposefully vague gender, Dominic the Dom (who played the alto-sax and seemed to be an unbearably nice guy), the free-love mother, the academics. Man I’d love to see Jasper and Sherry get their own book.

And as always, Hall managed to rip my heart out with the unintentional cruelties of lost love. I was never sure if I wanted Robert to suffer horribly or not—not for ending a relationship necessarily, relationships die, but for not seeing the ongoing injury his actions cause. Does such a person deserve to go on and be happy if he’s so unaware of his own destructive wake? Or am I just truly so unforgiving?

My complaints are few on this one: the overly intellectual nineteen-year-old I mentioned above, the fact that anyone as open and honest as Toby would be hard to find in real life, the fact that I didn’t feel I got to know Dalziel outside of his submission very well, and a couple of the scenes took on such a dream-like quality as to stand out as somewhat unmatched to the rest of the book.

All in all, I loved it. I’m not one who usually rereads books. My recall is such that I remember too much to ever have that fresh new feeling with a story. But unusually, I could see myself reading this again just to re-experience it.