It was fate that led me to the Alex Verus Novels by Benedict Jacka

 The first of the Alex Verus novels, Fated, brings an interesting character to light.  Those fond of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher will appreciate Alex's wit and disarming banter.  We are introduced to someone who never wanted to be a hero - who just wanted to be left alone to pick up the pieces of a troubled past and try to have some semblance of a normal life.  Alex tries to forget about his former Master, the Dark Mage who trained him and then enslaved him, by running a shop of arcane merchandise in London.  Most of his patrons are your average, ordinary person with no magical abilities.  Thus, Alex keeps himself off the radar of the Council.  After all, they'd done nothing to protect him when they learned what his former Master had done to him and his fellow apprentices - what could Alex possibly want to do with them now?

Of course, his choice in the matter changes when suddenly he's the only diviner left in England and the clock is ticking to figure out how to retrieve a dangerous artifact that would surely grant the wielder enough power to turn the fates of all mages the world over.  Alex just wants to be left alone to live his life.  But in order to do that, he has to ensure that the artifact doesn't fall into the hands of the dark mages who've kidnapped him and threatened one of his closest friends.

Being able to see into the future should be a help.  But people are unpredictable, and Alex's only advantage is his determination to see things through.  He will not run from the danger that swirls around him at every turn.  He's spent 10 years living on the outskirts of the magical community.  But he's never run from a fight, and he's not going to start now.  He weighs the probabilities and tracks down the courses of action that allow him to get his friends to safety, and thus creates a new future for himself - one that he would never have predicted.

Alex Verus is the kind of guy to let you tell the same story over and over again, even though he figured out the punch line before you told it to him the first time.  And he's the kind of guy who'd run into a burning building to rescue a team of telemarketers.  He's also the kind of guy to throw assassins off roofs and not think twice about it.  Basically - he's the kind of guy you'd be lucky to have as a friend.  I'm looking forward to getting to know Alex more as the series continues.

"Firetale" Finale Review.

 Things begin to happen a little too quickly in the final chapters.  Greg dies, is resurrected by Martha, whose body is killed while her consciousness is in Greg's body, and then we find out she's actually a goddess, all in two short chapters.  Too, too much all at once.  Plus, it is difficult to understand why the Judge would bother killing Martha at all.  She obviously hadn't broken the pactum, and he wasn't even sure she was a demionis.  She hadn't done anything that could have warranted an execution, and yet he killed her when she was defenseless.  Sure, we'd seen enough of Judge Ciaus to know that he was a bastard who would kill indiscriminately, but this still seemed beyond him.

The end is abrupt (a pseudo cliffhanger meant to make you want to read the next book, but doesn't).  Though it sets up the whole goddess story line to be the potential focus for the next book, the fact that we knew nothing about the goddess until the very end of the first book doesn't create a strong emotional connection to that potential plot.  The Astorath story line was completely ignored in the last few chapters, and we don't know where Zaches ran off to.  The story we were following for the first book is left unfinished, and a new one is shoved in its place at the eleventh hour, and it feels wrong.  In fact, the last few chapters of "Firetale" almost feel like they were written by a different person.  The voices of the characters feel different.  The descriptions of events feel like they flow differently.  Maybe this part of the story was written at a different time than much of the opening chapters, but there is definitely a disconnect that is unpleasantly jolting in the final quarter of the book.

We're also still seeing chapters from other points in time that have no relation to the current story.  Maybe they'll come into play in the next few books, or maybe they're not meant to be anything more than mental breaks, or to stretch out the number of pages.  Whatever their intended purpose, they feel unwelcome.

This book had so much promise in the opening chapters.  I was inspired by the number of characters, by how well each voice was written.  Now I'm disappointed.  I think that Dante E. Graves just tried to do too many things in this story and it turned it into a bit of a muddled mess.  Very unfortunate.  I'm not even sure I'll bother with the second book in the series.  I just don't know if I care enough about the characters anymore, and I know that I don't want to suffer through such unnecessary back story and exposition just to finish off the Astorath story line.

I'm done with The Boxcar Children series, after the catastrophe that is #24 "The Mystery of the Hidden Painting"

I’m trying to remember why I used to like these books so much when I was a kid.  I must have checked out a dozen of them each time we went to the library when I was about 7-years-old.  I thought they were funny and a little suspenseful.  I even did a book report on one of their adventures at a dude ranch.  But now…I guess I just grew up, or developed a better literature palette, or something, because these books are just not well written.

The language is forced, awkward, and often pretentious.  No one actually talks like this, and certainly not children.  The writer feels the need to bring up the boxcar, and why the children lived there, every other page.  Sure, not everyone who picks up a Boxcar Children book is going to know the story of why they are called that, but surely they’ll remember being told three pages ago – you don’t need to say it so many times within the same book.

As for the mystery that the children get to solve, it had potential – they want to find the long lost (presumed stolen) necklace of their late grandmother, in time for their grandfather’s birthday.  (By the way, how many kids actually call their grandfather “Grandfather”?)  They see a photo of a woman in the newspaper (how many 12-year-olds read the newspaper) who appears to be wearing the necklace and immediately concoct a scheme to interrogate the woman.  Of course, multiple people in the village try to scare away the children: calling them late at night, following them in a car with tinted windows.  And when the children don’t get the information they want, they latch onto a “clue” on a return address label that happened to come from a town right next to where the necklace had been stolen from.

The overreaction of the townsfolk to the children’s investigation is downright absurd.  It’s not like the police were pounding down doors, it was a couple of kids who just wanted to know what happened to their grandmother’s necklace.  If the people really wanted to keep it a secret, they should have lied politely to the children’s faces instead of acting rude and suspicious.

The mystery ends, like always, with a non-forced confession from the perpetrator and, of course, no involvement from the police.  The culprit gets away with it, and the children and their grandfather even allow for the necklace to stay where it was (in a museum in the middle of nowhere).  The incredibly unrealistic ending is a fit for the incredibly unrealistic plot, and neither are worth the trouble of putting up with that horrid writing style.

I may have loved the Boxcar Children when I was Benny’s age, but I think children today deserve better writing than this series has to offer.

American Girl faulters with "Peril at King's Creek."

I had a very hard time getting past how utterly flat the language was with this book.  All descriptions, what little there were of them, were cliché at best.  There was nothing new and exciting that allowed me to feel like I was actually there, experiencing it with the characters.  As for the main character, Felicity Merriman, there was very little individuality or personality noticeable in her thoughts or actions.  Sure, she expressed emotion – but it was all predictable and flat.  She could be “glad” but never “overjoyed” or “delighted.”  Again, it was cliché responses to a predictable plot.

The only response that seemed out of character was when Felicity identifies a spy and decides to go after him herself.  Yes, she does the smart thing and contacts the local Patriot army (or more accurately, she contacts her father who is a member of the Patriots), but she also chases after him on horseback in the wee hours of the morning.  This does not seem to be the natural course of action for a girl who’s spent the entire story having gauged responses to all that she sees around her.

Predictable plot and flat writing make for a throw-away book.  Just don’t bother with this one.

Tyler Whitesides tried with "Janitors" but something didn't hit the mark.

I really tried to like this book.  I wanted to like Spencer.  He seemed like a good kid.  He cares about his family (even if he gets frustrated with his mother for being a little absentminded, and frustrated with his siblings for being messy) and he wishes he had the guts to stand up to bullies.  But he just doesn't strike me as the hero-in-waiting kind of character.  There's something missing in the introduction to the character that make all that he chooses to do seem realistic for him.  He just doesn't seem to have it in him to do what is written.


It doesn't help that the story tends to jump from point C to point L, filling in the gaps with half a paragraph of exposition.  I don't want to hear about what happened after the fact - I want to see it happening while it's happening.  The first time this is really noticeable, Spencer and his plucky side-kick, Daisy, are trapped in a bathroom stall of an inescapable bathroom with the school bully on the other side of the door, threatening to do all kinds of harm to them, and the only thing they have with which to defend themselves is a plastic babydoll.  Jump to later that day and find out that they were stuck in the stall for half an hour before they were rescued by the supposed good guys.  We never find out what happened in that half hour, though.  We figure the bully, Dez, never made it into the stall, but we don't know how scared Spencer and Daisy became, or if they were injured at all - if they grew closer as allies or started bickering because of their predicament.  These are important things to see in a story.  You need to know how your heroes act in tense situations early in the story so that you can see them surviving the dangers you know are ahead.


I have to take issue with the main premise of the story - the Toxites feeding on the brain waves of children while they are learning.  Seriously?  That's the evil monster that Spencer and the janitors have to face?  They don't cause physical damage, they just make you sleepy and make it harder to learn.  This does not strike fear into the heart of the reader.  I'm sorry, it just doesn't.  I mean, one of the monsters is referred to as a dust gofer.  How is that supposed to be scary?  It does make sense that it's the kind of monster Spencer would particularly dislike, as he is shown to be a person who prefers a tidy environment.  A monster made out of dust would be something of a menace to a neat-freak like Spencer.  However, it is hardly worth pulling out the big guns for - maybe just a big vacuum (though the weapon of choice of the janitors seems to be mops, not vacuums).


It's also difficult to believe that Spencer was so easily duped by the actual bad guys (who of course portrayed themselves as the good guys when they first met Spencer).  We started the book seeing how Dez would pick on Daisy (known for her gullibility) and yet Spencer just instantly went along with the word of an adult who seemed to want to get rid of the little monsters.  He hardly questioned the story Hadley told him at all, and he never wondered why Hadley was so quick to recruit Spencer into the fight.  Surely the government wouldn't see fit to hire 12-year-olds on a regular basis.  This thought may have given him a moment's pause, but nothing more.  He was quick to jump into the fray - which still feels like it's out of character for him.  Though we've only known Spencer for a few chapters at this point, the impression created in the first couple pages are that he is just not the kind to get his hands dirty and fix things himself.  He stands back and lets the world pass him by, only going so far as to keep his own little bubble clean and orderly.  He doesn't even bother trying to spread that sense of order throughout his own home (which he refuses to think of as his home because the house actually belongs to his aunt, but whatever).  He keeps his personal room tidy and that's it.  He doesn't even seem all that protective of his younger siblings.


I can't help but wonder if the character could have been more believable if written a little differently.  Maybe even the flimsy premise could have been exciting if the right words had been found.  Though there weren't any notable flaws in Tyler Whitesides' particular style, I just don't think he was the right writer for this story.  I might be willing to give the author another chance with a different set of characters, but I would not be interested in continuing the "Janitors" storyline any further.

In progress review of "Firetale," past the half-way point.

Several new characters have been introduced, and vignettes spanning the more than 100 years of the circus make it a little difficult to remember who is who.  A few questions that were raised in the early part of the book are beginning to be answered, however, so that's nice.  We now understand why it is so important to Lucifer to have the circus as a safe place for his demionis.  During the inquisition, demionis were hunted down to near extinction, and the progeny of psychics were trained as Judges (who are really judge, jury, and executioner) who could track down and kill and demionis that showed itself to be dangerous to humans.

A Judge is now on the trail of Greg, our little firestarter.  The demon Astorath pointed the Judge in the direction of the circus.  Though Astorath was one of the first to follow Lucifer from heaven, he now wants to return to his home and thinks that if he shows God that Lucifer can't control his demon spawn, it will put him back into His good graces.  Of course, all this does is piss off his big brother and get him kicked out of Hell as well.  We now have the question, where does an angel live if it cannot live in Heaven, or in Hell?  The character of Astorath seems so sad and miserable that I can't see him surviving double exile all that well.  He's bound to do something stupid in short order.

A number of circus archivists (humans who travel with the circus, listing the various goings on and studying demionis and magic) have told stories from their times with the circus.  Some of the stories help the reader to understand the purpose of the circus, or to better understand the main characters.  Some of the stories, however, seem out of place in the overall arch of this book.  They're like unnecessary add-ons that should be a compilation of short stories to accompany the main novel.  Interspersed as they are with the main story, I wonder if they are more important to the arch than they appear.  Maybe the various demionis they introduce will come back into play later in the book.  However, at this point, they're more of a distraction than anything else.