Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 29

Game review: SteamWorld Dig for PS Vita

I got SteamWorld Dig four days ago, and after putting 26 hours into it, I finished the final boss fight feeling fairly satisfied. It’s a simple game, nothing too taxing, and with a decent story told as much through the backgrounds as it is through the short dialogue with the other characters. You play as Rusty, a steam-powered robot whose uncle Joe writes to him and asks him to come take over Joe’s claim on the local mine. When Rusty arrives, Joe has passed on, and Rusty takes over mining. In the course of the game, he soon discovers that Joe was uncovering some strange technology from the past, and this leads Rusty deeper and deeper into a mystery about who first started these mines.

The game is a bit of Metroid mixed with Super Lode Runner. Rusty starts off with just a pickaxe, and he can dig in four directions. Rusty can wall jump, so you don’t have to worry too much about getting stuck until farther down in the second level. You do, however, have to worry about falling damage, but Rusty can slide down the walls to slow down his drops. An early item available in the item shop is a stackable ladder, but I never really needed it anywhere.

I started off playing a bit haphazardly, and about three hours in I decided to start over and approach the levels with a more layered approach to making my mine tunnels so I could get as many minerals as possible and level up more effectively. Mined materials can be traded to Dorothy in town for money, and for their you can buy items in another shop. Earning more money also levels you up, and new levels unlock new shops and new equipment to buy. Along the way, orbs can be found and broken open providing another form of currency for higher level items.

One of the items you can upgrade is the light Rusty emits, and this helps you spend longer underground. Keep in mind, nothing bad happens if you run out of fuel for the light. You just can’t see walls to know what you can dig without hitting it first. It’s still possible to see to make your way back to the various exits, so it’s not too taxing or stressing. At various depths, you’ll find teleporters to take you to the surface, but if these feel too far apart for your liking, you can also buy other teleporters with the aforementioned orbs to set up waypoints back to town in between.

Eventually, you start finding numbered caves that will upgrade rusty with high-tech tools for better movement and digging. First it’s just boots to help Rusty run faster over certain dissolving blocks. But then you find a drill that makes it possible to mine through denser materials. Later, you get a steam punch that sends out an explosive blast to take out enemies and blocks from much farther away. One of the final upgrades is a double jump, and that really opens up the levels and makes it possible to bridge gaps that were previously frustrating. Oh, and also you find an upgrade that eliminates falling damage, which is essential to getting into the final levels. The numbered caves are simple puzzles that will require techniques picked up with new equipment. None of the puzzles are hard to solve, but a few may cause some initial head scratching before you find the right spot and have a eureka moment.

The controls are easy to use, and aside from some instances of fat thumb syndrome, I never had any trouble making my way around the mines and caves. The music is okay, but after a while it fades into the background and I opted to play some music of my own to keep things interesting. The graphics are nice and colorful, and all the various enemies are challenging without being maddening. The final boss at the bottom level is a little bit of a pain in the butt, but the pace needed to beat him is only slightly faster than the rest of the game. So really, this is the sort of thing I’d play when I don’t want a crazy button masher breaking my thumbs and demanding lightning fast moves. It’s just a fun little game that unfolds at a nice relaxed pace.

About the only niggling complaint I have is that at certain points between pickaxe upgrades, the mining gets a bit repetitive and tedious. But I usually took that as a sign to take a break and come back to it later. I can see playing this over and over because it’s genuinely fun without requiring too much effort, and for the price, getting 20-plus hours out of the first playthrough makes it feel like a good value for what I spent.

So I give SteamWorld Dig 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to folks looking for a fun indie title. It won’t break your brain, your thumbs, or your wallet, and the story is surprisingly good considering it plays out in a few sentences.

Game review: Rogue Legacy for PS Vita

I wanted to like Rogue Legacy, but I haven’t had much fun with it. At first, I thought that maybe I needed to invest a bit of time into upgrades and it would become fun, kind of like with Prototype, where extra powers make roaming the city a joy. But even after two days straight of buying upgrades and unlocking all the other character classes, I’m still not having fun.

I imagine a meeting at the studio behind this game, and one of the programmers said something like, “You know what the best part of those old NES RPGs was? The endless hours of forced grinding before you could work up the skills to take on the boss.” I wonder why no one said, “Uh, dude, grinding is a chore that most people hate.” But no, apparently a lot of people think grinding is awesome, and so here’s a whole game devoted to grinding one generation of heroes and heroines to death so the next generation will have the money to pay for more stuff. Each time you enter the castle, whatever funds you don’t spend get taken away, so hey, might as well shop between the looting and pillaging, right?

It’s a shame that none of this feels fun to me because the game has a lot of good points that should please me. The controls are simple. There’s a ton of enemy types to keep things from getting stale. (at least initially, that is. I’ll come back to this.) The music is good, and the graphics are crisp and bright.

But combat is a chore no matter what class I play, and no matter what level I reach. Part of it has to do with the number of enemies who shoot through walls and begin attacking long before I ever see them. Part of it is in the wimpy nature of every sword, even after upgrading the damage. There’s no sense of progression in that it takes roughly the same number of swings to kill bad guys no matter what sword I use or how much I upgrade my stats. And the thing is, the cost of upgrades becomes ridiculously expensive pretty quickly. So I might have several runs where I can’t afford to upgrade anything after dying and have to give up my money to Charon, the castle guard, before restarting a new level. I later upgraded one stat so he only took half my gold, but it’s still frustrating and it cost me a shit ton of gold just to upgrade five levels and max that stat out.

I reached a point tonight after having beaten the first two bosses where I realized, at no time was I thinking about how much fun I was having. I wasn’t even mad or annoyed. I was just thinking, “Okay, if I can get X amount of gold, I’ll upgrade this stat X number of times.” There was no endpoint to this accounting. I was just thinking about the math to upgrade various skills. Once I realized that and I recognized how little fun I was having even on good runs through the castle, I decided to take a run at the third boss again. But despite having upgraded my sword 25 levels and having 500 hit points, I still didn’t feel any more capable than I did back at the start of the game. It wasn’t just the boss making me feel underwhelmed. Despite all those upgrades, the minions of the Maya area felt as tough as they had when I first entered the area on day one. And that sucks.

Really, what is the point of all this stat dumping and gold hoarding when it all feels pretty fucking useless? When I dump that much money into upgrading weapon damage, I want that sword to feel EPIC, not wimpy. If I buy the supa-dupa armor, I want it to feel like it’s absorbing some of the damage, and the best armor I unlocked feels about as useless as tissue paper mache cosplay.

The player character classes are all the same avatar, but with slightly different heads. The miner has a light on his (or her) head, the hokage has a headband, and the archmage has a beard. (Whether male or female, because all magi have beards, ho ho ho. SIGH.) The different offspring might have dwarfism or giantism, meaning the model is stretched or condensed. But they all walk like they’re doing the Can-can, and they all hold their sword out in front of them like a baby waving a flag. One of the classes forgoes carrying the sword, but still holds his arm out, so he looks like a German goose stepping and saluting Hitler. I suppose it’s a minor complaint, but if you spent all this time making up these different enemies, why not invest a little more time making different models for the various player classes?

The other thing that didn’t wow me is how the offspring all have randomly generated traits, about half of which made the game less fun to play. A character might be color blind, so the game is in black and white, making it harder to see incoming enemy fire. Or they might be near or far-sighted, making the character blurry. Or they might be really skinny, so every hit throws them a long way. Or they might have dementia, meaning you can’t look at the map.

There are classes like dwarfism that supposedly unlock secret tunnels in the castle, but 9 times out of 10, if I selected a dwarf, the castle that got generated that round had no tunnels. But the moment I switched back to a normal sized character, there were tunnels all over the next castle. I’m not even sure why this seemed like a good idea. The upgraded knave can turn into smoke, but can’t go through the tunnels. The hokage can “flash” across the screen, but no pass through a wall. So a lot of the time, a castle design feels like it’s punishing you for not having the right class, and since you only get three character to choose from in each round, often the one that might be right for a given castle wasn’t a choice.

Then there’s the traits that are just plain useless and added nothing to the game. Characters have ADHD, so they “move faster” (I couldn’t really tell much difference in their speed and normal characters in the same class) Or they might have trouble telling people apart. Or they might be gay, or they might have dyslexia, so the journal entries get jumbled. Or they might have irritable bowel syndrome so they fart a lot when they jump. It’s not even good for a laugh the first time a character farts, so by the time I’ve heard it a hundred times in the same run, it’s mind numbingly tedious.

The enemies start off having a lot of variety, and that’s good in that you never quite know what you’re going to get from one level to the next. But after playing through all four areas in the same runs, I began to notice how many enemies were the same model with a different color scheme and increased size. All that increase in size meant was that they shot more ammo, or bigger ammo, and that I’d need more swings to take them down, meaning I’d lose a lot of hit points no matter what I did.

There are times when I might give up in the middle of a game and decide to YouTube the rest because I want to see what I’m missing. But in this case, I just don’t care. It can’t be said that I didn’t give it enough time for a fair judgement, because after 80 hours, I should be able to decide whether I like something or not. What it comes down to is, in all those 80 hours, I can only recall a few minutes in random places where I wasn’t thinking how very tedious and dull this game is.

With all that said, it might be surprising that I’m giving Rogue Legacy 3 stars. But it’s not a broken game, and I don’t hate it. I never felt angry with the controls, or even the cheap enemy tactics. I just never felt anything positive either. Your mileage may vary, and this might be the ultimate in dungeon crawling fun for you. But I’d much rather go back to playing Spelunky. The gimmick of continuing each dungeon crawl with your ancestor’s assets sounded fun in theory, but the nickel-and-diming bullshit in the upgrades menus kills any sense of progression or fun for me. So I’m deleting this from my Vita to make room for something that doesn’t bore me so completely.

Book Review: The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Right, let’s get this out of the way first: I’m not a big zombie fan. I don’t hate them, and one of my favorite monster movies is the original Night of the Living Dead. But I don’t really get too worked up about most zombies either, and they’re not nearly as interesting to me as sentient monsters like vampires, werewolves, fae, jinn, and your mother. (Zing!)

Looking at the blurb of The Girl With All the Gifts at the bookstore, I’d passed this title over three months back. But then Maggie Siefvater, uber-author extraordinaire, got on Twitter to gush about how good the book was, and I thought “Well maybe I’ll give it a chance.” So I got the Kindle edition and started the first chapter, and within 10 chapters, I didn’t want to read anything else until I finished it. When I did finish it, my first words afterward were “Well, shit.” Not in a bad way, but more like a “I shoulda seen that coming” kind of way.

The Girl With All the Gifts is a zombie book that offers a scientific reason for the zombies emerging, that being the mutation of a cordyceps fungus that jumps to the human race. It’s suggested that this mutation may have been helped by a lab somewhere, but it’s never explicitly said that it’s the work of a terrorist attack. Instead of starting with the outbreak, the book jumps some thirty years after the world ends. It does go with another cliché by beginning in an outpost of civilization, and so of course you know eventually something will happen to force a group of humans out into the wild. And you know that at some point, the shit will hit the fan and one by one those humans are going to get picked off by the zombies. It wouldn’t be a zombie book otherwise.

But where this formula gets altered is that the outpost of civilization is a research station with some very unique zombies in their care. These are a group of child “hungries” who do not behave like the others. Where the other zombies freeze in the absence of stimulus, these children continue to move around and adapt to their new world. Dr. Caldwell, the lead scientist of the base, has called together a group of teachers to train these children and test how adaptive they are, and among these children is Melanie, a genius who absorbs data like a sponge and can do complex equations in her head. During the early chapters, it becomes clear that even being the smartest of the children, she is still not able to overcome her visceral need to feed. The fungus in her body can strip her of her conscious thoughts.

Once the cast and cause of the outbreak has been established, the base is overrun, forcing a group of survivors to band together and attempt returning to Beacon, one of the few remaining outposts in Britain. To do so, the group will have to cross over miles and miles of wild terrain covered in zombies and “junkers,” humans who never ran for sanctuary, and who now live as animals in almost the same way that the hungries do.

Okay, so far, not really all that different from a lot of zombie stories, I know, but what makes this outing different is that Melanie is part of the group of survivors making the trek along with Dr. Carol Caldwell (the mad scientist), Ms. Justineau (the school teacher), Sergeant Parks (the grizzled veteran), and Private Gallagher (the green-sleeve). Melanie is initially unaware of what she is, but as the journey carries her group away from the devastated base and into the heart of a wasteland London, she comes to terms with what she is, and with the world being so different from what she’d learned in her sheltered classroom.

What really makes this story different is the stripping away of the “Other” element. Zombies are usually easy to deal with as monsters because they’re not really like us. They’re mindless animals running only on the need to feed, so it’s easy to cast them as the evil army, and thus there’s no concern about their deaths. But Melanie and the others like her make the issue more muddy. While Parks and Caldwell maintain that Melanie isn’t really a person, that she’s already dead, Justineau, and later Gallagher, see her as a person suffering from an infection. Caldwell only wants to keep Melanie alive long enough to get her into a proper lab for a dissection, and Parks is ready to put a bullet in her head soon after they set out for Beacon. But Justineau feels an obligation to keep Melanie safe because Melanie loves her. Perhaps it’s mostly a crush more than familial connection, but it’s an emotional response that Melanie uses time and again to overcome her baser programming. And if she’s not “dead” as Dr. Caldwell claims, can it be said that any zombie is just an Other to be killed and disposed of without thought?

That’s what I like, when a story subverts the trope to make me question what I think I know about a monster. But this book also has a fantastic sense of pacing and tension. Its present tense third person style is intriguing and kept me turning the pages late into each night because I wanted to know what would happen next. The writing has some great moments of humor, and lots of good lines that I had to stop and read aloud to hubby. And when at last the shit does hit the fan, I was so emotionally invested in the cast that I really felt bad for the characters dying.

About the only complaint I have is for some archaic word choices that required me to stop reading and go look up an online dictionary. It’s a minor pet peeve, but in all cases, these are words that wouldn’t even be used in Britain anymore because they’ve been replaced and made obsolete. So it sucked to be pulled out the flow thinking, “Wait, what the hell does that mean?” It’s a minor gripe and doesn’t really pull down my overall enjoyment of the book though, and it doesn’t affect my final score.

So, I’m giving The Girl With All the Gifts 5 stars, and I’m recommending it everyone, not just the zombie fans. There’s only a few bloody deaths, and this is more of thinking kind of horror than a gory offering. As such, it shouldn’t squick you out even if you’re very squeamish. And it’s a damn good story, certainly worth your time. I’d rate it as highly as I did Michele Lee’s Rot or John A Lindqvist’s Handling the Undead. Just buy it and give it a chance. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Book review: Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff

I read The Replacement back in 2011, and I liked it for a number of things it did differently from most of the YA dark fantasy I’d been reading at the time. The biggest thing that impressed me was how the town where the story took place was very much aware of the supernatural creatures living among them, and they chose not to talk about it for some very unsavory but (in my opinion) realistic reasons. So when I read the blurb for Fiendish, I said, “Oooh, it’s another town like in The Replacement.”

Well…no, not quite. There’s still that same premise that the town is in the loop, but instead of fae manipulating the locals to buy their silence, this is a town where the locals are afraid of magic users, who they call “crooked people.” When the story starts, Clementine DeVore is a child who is put in a basement and sealed away during a riot, and she is not found until she’s…sixteen, I think. (I’m not entirely clear on that point.) She’s found by another crooked person, Eric Fisher, and he takes her to the wrecked house of her aunt and cousin, Myloria and Shiny Blackwood. And throughout the rest of the story, Clementine slowly uncovers what a crappy place she lives in.

There’s a lot to like in this story, and the first is obviously the way everyone knows what’s going on. I get so tired of the “what are these monsters?” trope, especially with something that’s so obviously a part of our modern culture like vampires or zombies. Here, people know what witches and warlocks are, and they’ve done a halfway decent attempt to wipe out as many crooked people as they could to avert a cyclical magic disaster called the reckoning.

And that’s another thing I love , a recurring disaster that effectively builds the stakes in the story without resorting to saving the world, or even the city. Clementine’s real goal is keeping her friends and herself from being lynched at the hands of the fearful locals even as the next reckoning stirs to life. It’s creepy and tense without having to up the stakes to a ridiculously unbelievable scale, and even in the final chapters, I wasn’t sure how things would turn out.

If I have any complaints, it’s only that I wanted more. I wanted to know more about the mayor who supposedly talked down the townsfolk during the last reckoning. I wanted more about Rae, Fisher, Shiny, and Davenport. I wanted to know more about why Clementtine was locked in the cellar, and when her elders planned to let her out, or if they ever did. I wanted more on the history of the previous generation of crooked people, and more on the fiends living in the hollow. What I got was a tantalizing glimpse of all these things, and it left me wanting a much longer book. And really, if you’ve got to have a complaint, “Give me more” is more like a compliment, isn’t it?

So I’m going to give Fiendish 5 stars and recommend it to fans of YA or dark fantasy. Even if you aren’t normally a fan, consider giving Brenna Yovanoff’s books a shot because she’s doing some stuff off the beaten path, and I very much enjoy seeing where her wild imagination wanders.

Really real randomness…

So yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “What the hell are you writing now that’s keeping your crazy ass so quiet?” Well I do have a project I’m working on, but this summer, the temperature has NEVER been stable, so I’m having a metric shit ton of fatigue attacks and brain fuzz to fight through. Where I normally bust out a book in three weeks, this one is likely to take me quite a bit longer. It’s also turning into a really big book. I mean, I’m 74K into it, and I’m only now getting around to the introduction of the bad guys. To add to my problems, I’m trying to do this whole series in one go, so when I’m ready to put out book one, I can promise the rest of the books are already done. Not that I think that’s going to help my sales numbers, but at least the few people who start the series will know I won’t leave them hanging.

So the new book is about a vampire princess and an alpha werewolf. It’s a lesbian couple, by the by. I wanted to do a story with real lesbians, since most of my stories where the women have sex, they end up being bi. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I realized I still had no L in my GLBT writings, and I thought, “I should fix that.”) I wanted this to be all dark and horror-y, and that’s not working out so well. I’m not really complaining, because I like the story. It’s just, I expected there to be more blood and bad guys, and instead, I’m getting Romeo and Juliet mixed with some romantic paranormal comedy. I even managed to turn a gory scene in a school restroom into something humorous, and I wasn’t even trying. I blame these damn teenage characters, always being so irreverent and stuff.

In reading news, I’m working my way through Brenna Yovanoff’s new book, Fiendish, which is awesome. I’m also reading Like No Other from Una LaMarche, but may very well skip the review and just go with a rating on Goodreads because this book is stroking my anti-religious buttons in all the wrong ways. The writing is good, and the story is too. But several of the characters have me thinking bad, bad things because of their views of women as breeding cattle with no rights. So…yeah, it’s probably best just to rate this one and walk away.

I’m also rereading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, and in what may be a sign of my lack of good taste, I’m enjoying it even more a second time through. But I’m also having some Gandalf moments with whole chapters where I think “I have no memory of this passage.” It wasn’t until today that I wondered why that is and then realized, “Right, this was one of the books I read on my first trip to Amsterdam.” I’d been smoking a LOT of marijuana on that trip, so certain chapters went into the brain while I was high, and they slipped right back out again. Funny how that works out.

I’m also reading The Wolf Gift by Anna Rice. I’ve been reading The Wolf Gift for SIX MONTHS now and I’m only up to page 180. I tell you what, I hear a lot of complaints on Twitter about me rereading Twilight and how awful Meyer is as a writer. (Usually from writers whose books will never sell even a hundredth of what she has. I’m just saying, it certainly sounds like sour grapes to me.) But let me tell you, Anne Rice’s writing style has really gone to shit lately, and after reading Twilight again, Meyer has ruined Rice’s vampires chronicles because at least Meyer can get to the fucking point before half the novel is over. Meyer is like, “The house had a nice garden, and was very green.” Sure, that’s bad to some of you, but it’s a damn sight more interesting than “And now I will proceed to describe every last plant in this fucking yard in excruciating detail for the next ten pages.” And even after that, the main character is likely to launch into a 200 page history lesson before the present day plot advances by two pages. If you’re lucky, that is.

I’m uncultured swine, I know. But really, The Wolf Gift is just awful. Where I’m stuck is just after Reuben the super duper wolf man seduces a woman by singing and dancing in wolf man form in her front yard. And she’s totally cool with him carrying her off to bed despite the fur and fangs and drool. She’s like “Be gentle with me.” And he fucking says, “Oh beautiful, beautiful, I won’t hurt you. I would rather die than hurt you. Tender stem. Little stem. I give you my word.”

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Bitch, I’ll take Meyer and her awkward teens making goo goo eyes any day over this shitty furry musical sex scene. Porn has better dialogue.

“But tell us how you really feel, Zoe.” I just may, if I make it through the rest of the book sometime next year. But I’ve got better things to do in the meantime. Like removing my facial hair with a rusty pair of tweezers, for instance.

Moving along, I STILL don’t know what to say in my review of Battleblock Theater. I want to say positive stuff about the early levels and the game makers using real humor instead of pop culture references, a major problem a bunch of indie studios have. The game is genuinely funny and fun. But those later levels…I hate them. I can’t get around that, and I loathe the ending. I also hate the bonus levels because I hate playing anything on a timer. I’ve said that often enough in past reviews, I think. Nothing grinds my gears like being told “Hurry! you must do this one sequence 2.6 seconds faster, or we won’t let you see the rest of the story!” I fucking hate that shit. And so I have very mixed feelings about the game, and I’m not sure I can do the game justice with a full review. I might just skip it.

I’m not done with Transformers: War for Cybertron, either, because it’s dull, dull, dreary, uninspired, boring and just not much fun to play. I have one final mission in the Autobot story left, and I just can’t bring myself to play it. I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 and Project Diva f instead, and since I already reviewed those, I don’t have anything else in the game review queue for a while. Which is a bummer, but them’s the breaks.

And lastly, I’m watching the DVD season box sets of Teen Wolf, and we’re up to the second half of season 3. What I love about this show is how effectively it balances the tense scary moments with humor, and how the characters all have a chance to develop over time. I wasn’t so hot on the alpha pack plot of the first half of season three, but the shadow monsters showing up in the second half are more compelling, and there’s no one in the current cast that I don’t find interesting. Hubby started out a little rough on season one because he didn’t like the Argents, but as of last night, he said, “The character development is really good, like on Buffy.” Buffy is hubby’s all-time favorite show, so it looks like I’ve made him into a convert. Huzzah!

Right, so that’s about it for now. I don’t have anything important to share, and this month’s sales numbers are really, really bad. But I figured I should post an update so you know I’m still here. Maybe in September I’ll have more reviews or something to post. We’ll see how it goes.

About that Amazon letter…

Lots of authors have weighed in on this topic recently, so you might already know that Amazon sent all of us indie authors publishing through KDP an email asking us to write to Hachette and ask them to resolve this pricing dispute. I have to say, I don’t get why Amazon would ask me for my help on this when it’s none of my business. I’m not a Hachette author, and I can’t even recall the last time I bought one of their books. I absolutely do not care what they want to charge for their books.

You know what I do care about? I care about having the freedom to price my books however I want. I have a fan-fic book I’d love to give away for free on Amazon as a sort of loss leader like the big publishers get to do. But Amazon doesn’t let me do that. Kobo will let me give a book away for free. Gumroad will too. But Amazon will only grant me a few days for free as a promotion, and only if I agree to give them exclusive rights to sell my book. I don’t really like that deal, but Amazon is not open to talking to me about pricing because I’m not a big publisher. I’m just a little indie, and Amazon’s able to force me to agree to most of their terms. So, since I don’t want to give them exclusive rights, I don’t get to give books away for free. I don’t get to use Amazon’s shiny new Kindle Unlimited service. In several markets, I only get 35% royalties because I won’t work exclusively with Amazon. I don’t think any of that is fair, but Amazon is where I get most of my sales from, so I have to take whatever terms they give me and grin and bear it.

When it comes to pricing, I’m only allowed to offer what Amazon will allow me. So I can’t sell a book for 49 cents like I used to. If I wanted to sell a book for 99 cents, I’d have to accept a 35% royalty on all sales instead of just a few select markets. So what Amazon is really asking me is, “Please tell Hachette to take the same crap deal we’re giving you.” Uh, and what’s my incentive to do this?

What this is starting to remind me of is a pair of divorcing parents who both want their kids to get in the fight with them. Mommy Amazon doesn’t like that Daddy Hachette still won’t give in to her demands, so now it’s time to bring the kids in and make them repeat her demands. Well with all due respect, no, Mommy Amazon, I’m not going to do your job for you. I was never your favorite kid to begin with, and you’re not exactly doing me any favors with your constant demands that I be exclusively loyal to you. I do wish you and Daddy Hachette would come to some kind of resolution and stop all this useless bickering, because I hear a LOT of people talking about boycotting Amazon, and that could be very bad for me. So please, kiss and make up, or get the divorce over with and stop making your dirty laundry public. You’re just embarrassing yourselves at this point.

Book review: Sinner by Maggie Stiefvater

My feelings for Isabel Culpepper and Cole St. Clair’s relationship in both the previous books, Linger and Forever, was that I didn’t feel anything for them. However, in the finale of Forever, Isabel finally realized she needed to stop telling other people that they had to do something, and she needed to grow up and do something herself, which ultimately saved everyone from mass execution. So it was thinking on this change that I hoped Sinner would show a slightly more mature Isabel reuniting with a slightly less obnoxious Cole St. Clair.

But no, I only got half a wish granted. Or more like a quarter of a wish.

Sinner is about Cole coming to L.A. to reunite with Isabel, and since he kind of needs a job to afford living there, he agrees to do a web-based reality show with a woman famous for filming celebrity train wrecks in which he will make his return album. I kind of knew the tone and direction this story would take when, after finding out that Cole had a job, Isabel stomped off because darn it, he wasn’t really there just to worship her.

So this is the story of how a spoiled brat and a reformed drug addict crash into each other. And just as in previous books, I feel nothing for their relationship.

I feel I should contrast this with Sam and Grace from the previous books, because each of their moments together made me feel so much. Their relationship and history feels so right and so real that when they get together, I get little tickles in my heart and tingles in my thighs. And it’s not just that the kissing scenes were written well. It’s Grace’s history with her parents, with her history of waiting every day and night at the edge of the woods, longing for something she can’t name until Sam is there to give a shape and reality to her needs. It’s in Sam’s history with his parents, with his issues around bathtubs and how the only person who makes him feel comfortable in his own skin is Grace. It’s every moment they share together that makes me give a shit and want them to have a happy ending.

Isabel is not Grace, and she has never inspired any such connection in me with her. For as good as the writing is, it still can’t distract me from the facts. Isabel is a rich spoiled brat, a former mean girl whose only defining moment in life is that her mean brother died after karma paid him back for being a dick. This book resets her back to the same level of immaturity she had when she was first introduced, and nothing that Isabel does redeems her beyond this spoiled brat caricature. So I can’t care if she gets a happily ever after.

Cole, on the other hand, I feel something for, especially because he does a stellar job convincing me he’s reformed. He’s struggling to give his boss a good show and make a new album without going back on drugs, and each time someone tries to tempt him to go back to being the old Cole, he passes with flying colors. He does keep transforming into a wolf to clear his head, but to my mind, the wolf is part of the new Cole, and it’s a positive part of him even if Isabel wants to see it as a bad thing.

That’s still part of the problem. Cole keeps struggling to prove he’s worthy of Isabel’s love, and I can’t be convinced that Isabel is worthy of this kind of devotion. She’s mean to her family, mean to her boss, mean to Cole, and to just about everyone she ever comes into contact with. So what’s the moral of this story that I’m supposed to come away with? “See? Even an unfeeling toxic bitch can find a man willing to put up with her shit if she’s pretty.” Doesn’t feel all that inspiring, yanno?

This then is a true love/hate relationship I have with this book. I loved reading chapters with Cole. I loved his desire to help Leon, a hired driver, find his happiness again. I loved watching him struggle to do something for the reality show that was crazy enough to please his boss without actually being too crazy and leading him into drugs or temptation with topless teens. I loved seeing Cole coming to terms with his old bassist, and coming to grips with the death of his best friend. I loved the chance to reconnect with Cole and see that he’s getting better.

But I hated watching him snivel to Isabel, and I hated watching Isabel complain about how she was so full of common sense when she’s really full of bitterness and cynicism. I hated watching her emotionally tear down her cousin Sofia. I hated seeing her tear down Cole because he didn’t fall down and worship her with the right tone of adulation. I hated reconnecting with her to learn that moment of bravery in Forever was just a fluke.

And ultimately, when the book gets around to those inevitable kissing scenes, I still felt nothing because I don’t believe there’s any connection between Isabel and Cole that isn’t based on physical attraction. Maybe if Isabel had at some point demonstrated something resembling maturity or empathy, I might have felt different. But as it is, I can’t even work up a finger twirl at the conclusion of this book.

There’s a saying that goes “A bad book written by X is still better than a good book written by Y.” I don’t like making comparisons like that, but I will say that even stories by Maggie Stiefvater that don’t tickle my fancy are still good reads, and they never feel like time wasted. So I’ll give Sinner 3 stars, and I’ll suggest it to fans of the Wolves of Mercy Falls series who wondered if Cole and Isabel ever got together. For everyone else, this may be a bit of a drag to read.

Book review: Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

The first Helen Oyeyemi book I read, White is for Witching, the blurb lied and I could forgive it because the story about a predatory house would be hard to sum up. This second time with Boy, Snow, Bird, the blurb lied and I not only can’t forgive it, the more I read past the point of revelation that the blurb was a lie, the more I hated everything about this story. I had already found my dislike of the main character, Boy Novak to be near disgust. But then…

Let me quote the blurb. “When Bird is born Boy is forced to re-evaluate the image Arturo’s family have presented to her, and Boy, Snow, and Bird are broken apart.”

No. Not even fucking close to the truth.

Here’s what the story is really about. Boy Novak is a hollow shell with zero personality, and who only initially earns my sympathy by having an abusive parent, something I can totally relate to. Boy runs away from home and moves to Flax Hill, where she meets Arturo Whitman. Arturo only wants one thing, to find a mother for his daughter Snow, and although Boy feels NOTHING for Arturo, Snow is so pretty and sweet that she decides to marry him and become her mother.

Then when Bird is born black, it comes out that Arturo and his family are stealth biracials. Whenever they have a family member who doesn’t pass, they send them away. So when the last family member to be sent away calls to talk about taking Bird, Boy sends Snow away. Why? Because everyone loves Snow and not Bird, and now Boy hates Snow for passing, and for being so loved. She makes up a reason to hate Snow for, that she can see how Snow isn’t really a good child and she’s being mean to Bird somehow. But really, Boy is petty and cruel to a child who loved her because she’s completely incapable of loving anyone. She punishes Snow when she really should have been punishing the adults for lying to her. But no, she still lives with them and treats them well. It’s Snow who suffers for their crimes. God, my eyelid is fucking twitching while I write this.

This comes out over a long, slow, painful journey with an uninteresting woman who has no drive to be anything before the book switches briefly to Bird’s perspective. All this section does is make me hate Boy even more. It also tries to bring in a shallow magic angle to the story to tie everything up, and it’s way too little too late. The last chapters return to Boy’s perspective for a “big twist” and all I can say is, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I tell you, I’m not sure what makes me more angry. The fact that the publisher cannot sell a Helen Oyeyemi book without lying about what the story is really about, or the fact that I’ve wasted all this time on a character with no redeeming qualities. I don’t ever need a protagonist to be good, and I’ve said this before when reading about demons or just plain old vanilla jerks. But they need to at least be interesting if they aren’t likable, and Boy Novak is dull in addition to being petty and cruel. I really should have given up early on, because there’s nothing to like about this book.

I give Boy, Snow, Bird 1 star, and I cannot forget it fast enough. There may be a slim chance that I’d try reading Helen Oyeyemi’s other books, but first I’ll have to get over my displeasure at wasting my time with this one.

Right, about that sales report…

As Nobody Special was published June 12, I ideally wanted to make a sales report of all four new releases following a full thirty days with the last book on the market. Well the muse came along and distracted me with a story, and then I finally got my season box sets of Teen Wolf. (All three boxes damaged, no less. But hey, the discs work, so I’ll let the mailman live.) I’m also working my way through three books, playing my way slowly through Transformers: War for Cybertron, and still trying to decide how I feel about Battleblock Theater for its review. What I’m saying is, I’ve gotten slightly distracted, and blogging a few random numbers keeps slipping my mind.

But so here we go…

Third Wheel Romance Blues: 4 sales

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: 18 sales

Adventures In Trolling: 6 sales

Nobody Special: 4 sales

If there’s a lesson learned here, it’s that I clearly have no business writing stuff outside of fantasy. Although that lesson is kind of ruined by the performance of the Tobe White books, I guess. The thing is, I spent the same amount of time promoting all of these books when they came out. I don’t know why Alice’s book got the extra boost in sales that it did. Maybe it was the people who’d read Peter the Wolf coming back to check on Alice. Maybe the blurb for Alice’s story was just better or more compelling.

I did get a good review on Nobody Special that called it mainstream, and that made me feel like I’d done a good job of telling the story I wanted to without getting preachy on any topic. Maybe in the future when I figure out how to write a bestseller, the long tail will bring more readers for the contemporary fiction books.

Anywho, that’s the sales report. Pretty crappy if I were a pro, but not bad for a nobody.

About that new story…it’s a lesbian romance that’s flirting with being dark fantasy or YA horror. The main characters are a vampire and a werewolf, and the fun part so far has been the contrasts between their perspective. The vampire is obviously a monster from the opening chapter, but the werewolf only gives subtle hints at first that she isn’t human. I like this, and I’m curious when the muse is going to let the fur fly and reveal the werewolf’s darker side to balance out the vampire’s creepiness.

There’s also soccer in this one. I guess I feel like maybe the jocks should get a chance to be something besides the de facto bullies all the time.

So, that’s it for now. I expect I’ll have new book and game reviews up soonish. But I’m now committed to a release vacation until at least the start of fall. I’m using this time to update some previous releases and fix typos with the help of a kind reader who’s been sending me mistakes during an impressive binge read of my titles. I’m also going through those books to look for anything else that sticks out, and between this and the writing, I just don’t have the energy to handle new releases or the promotions they require.

As always, thanks for reading my stuff. I’ll hopefully have something new for you soon, at least here on the blog, that is.

Book review: Roses White, Roses Red by Leigh Wilder

Roses White, Roses Red is a really short story, so short that I almost feel guilty calling this a book review. But what the hell, it’s an ebook no matter how short the story, so here we go. Oh, and this is going to be a really short review because I don’t want to give too much away, or no more so than you’re likely to see in the blurb.

It’s inspired by a fairy tales, which are also usually just as short. This one tells the story of Reynard, a young man who lost his mother at a very early age and lives in a cottage in the woods with only his father for company until his father also dies when Raynard is twenty-one. Loneliness weighs down on him until one night when in a fit of cabin fever, he wanders out in the snow and finds a strange bear with blue eyes, a bear who strangely transforms into a man every night at the stroke of midnight.

I can’t really explain any further without spoiling the story, so I’ll just stop there and say that I liked this tale. It’s just enough information to make Reynard a relatable person before it winds up to the ending and the explanation for Bear’s transformations. Oh, and there’s also enough time for a gay sex scene, which was also rather good.

So, I give Roses White, Roses Red 4 stars and recommend it to fans of gay romance, dark fantasy, or both.