Bad Book – …on the B.L.

The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay

November 7, 2019 RaeAnna

Worth A Read No
Length 383
Quick Review A group of people are magically transported to another realm, which is in the middle of a war.

Reading The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay | Jumpsuit | Earrings | Watch

My best friend loves Guy Gavriel Kay’s writing. He has been bugging me for about a decade to read one of his books, so finally I did. The Summer Tree was an obvious place to start because it’s the beginning of the Fionavar Tapestry series. Much to the dismay of my best friend, I hated it. Genuinely. The story is interesting, but the writing is horrible. I don’t know where the editor was, but they weren’t doing their job with this one.

Five acquaintances are whisked away to Fionavar for a celebration by magical beings. They accidentally find themselves at the center of a war spanning many lands. The plot is inventive but not necessarily original.

The Summer Tree dives right into the action. Often times, this is a great way of making the reader keep reading. Kay made a grave mistake in having the action begin immediately: there was no emotional investment in the characters. All this stuff was happening to them, and I had no interest or connection to them. Why should I care? They were flat and uninteresting. They are underdeveloped, which does not allow readers to connect with them or even for the characters to connect with each other.

I’m all for fantasy. It’s not my usual genre, but I do love Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. From Kay’s writing style in The Summer Tree, it’s evident he also admires Tolkien. He was trying for a Tolkienesque narrative but had problems carrying it out throughout the novel. On top of that, his descriptions are overly flowery but lack any concrete imagery. The dialogues are clunky and do not feel like anything real people would say to other real people. Kay tends to foreshadow often in a give-it-away style. Simultaneously, he does not explain things at all. Maybe, he’s leaving those mysteries to be spelled out in the other books, but it just feels riddled with plot holes. One of the most irritating aspects of the narrative was Kay’s repetition. I love repetition. It’s an amazing literary device, but he just does not do it well. I think he was trying to be poetic, but came across like he was suffering from short term memory loss.

One of my biggest issues with the book is Kay’s inability to write compelling women. I question if he’s ever talked to a woman. He has no idea how to create female characters with interesting emotions and motivations. There are also bits of odd sexual torture; they are abrupt and make absolutely zero sense. As a rape survivor, it was offense and insensitive. More importantly than that, it was unrealistic. Fantasy or not, sexual violence should make sense and be done in a way that mimics reality.

Kay tries for an epic on the same level of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lewis’ Narnia, or Martin’s Westeros, but it echoes hollow. An idea with a lot of promise but a deficient execution. The Summer Tree does not have the emotional wallop an epic requires.

Memorable Quotes
I found no memorable quotes because the writing was painful to read.

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Title: The Summer Tree
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Roc
Copyright: 1984
ISBN: 9780451458223

Books, Fiction

Alaskan Holiday by Debbie Macomber

December 1, 2018December 1, 2018 RaeAnna

Read No
Length 256
Quick Review Alaskan Holiday is a really good example of what I don’t like in a book. Sappy romance, a pretend strong female character, bad grammar, terrible plot, and over all not put together well. Upside: there is a dog.

Don’t waste your time reading *Alaskan Holiday* | Pants (I wear these A LOT) | Shirt (truly one of my favorites) | Shoes (you need) | Watch | Hair Bow

Happy first day of December!!! I’m starting off my holiday reading with a real low point. It’s not the worst book I’ve read all year, but it’s in the top three! Which means, in all hopefulness, that the reading quality can only go up the rest of the month!

I pretty much began reading Alaskan Holiday by Debbie Macomber feeling that it would be awful. It was. It was not good. It’s like a Hallmark movie in book form so a more painful time commitment.

The two main characters are Josie and Palmer. They’re in the middle of nowhere Alaska. A place so remote almost everyone leaves during the winter months and is only reachable by plane. Josie was the chef during the season, and Palmer lives there permanently. Palmer falls in love and asks her to marry him. The rest of the novel unfolds to the exact ending you know is going to happen.

Alaskan Holiday is incredibly sexist. There is the effort of having a strong, career oriented woman as the lead, but the whole novel falls into the trope of ‘need to calm this wild, career woman down to get her to settle into a small boring life.’ The woman gives up everything for the man. This is bolstered by the fact that there are several other women trying to convince Josie she can be happy in the middle of nowhere because love. Palmer is awful. I really hated his character. He oozes the quiet, toxic masculinity that is a total turn-off to any actual strong, career oriented woman I’ve ever met. His machismo was irritating after page 2. His jealousy is beyond aggravating. I couldn’t take it.

There is a lot of telling and very little showing, so the storytelling is Alaskan Holiday is as bad as the characters. The story spends 130 pages, out of 220, setting up a story that could have been easily summed up in 25 pages. The story reads like a teenager’s diary, but not an insightful, wise teenager. There are also a lot of grammar errors.

I was really unimpressed by Alaskan Holiday. It was pretty much a waist of my time. Luckily it was so bad and easy to read, I was able to read it in a less time than a Hallmark movie takes.

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Memorable Quotes
“I’m a man who needs to work with his hands, not just his brain.”

Title: Alaskan Holiday
Author: Debbie Macomber
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright 2018
ISBN: 9780399181283

Books, Fiction

The Garden Party by Grace Dane Mazur

September 27, 2018 RaeAnna

Read No
Length 219
Quick Review All the makings of an incredible novel, but instead it is forgettable even as you’re reading it.

Reading *The Garden Party* by Grace Dane Mazur in Vizcaya’s Gardens in Miami.

The Garden Party by Grace Dane Mazur is a novel I tried very hard to like. Unfortunately, it just didn’t come together in a memorable way. It’s not a bad book. It’s not a bad story. On paper, the novel should be incredibly interesting and compelling. It just doesn’t manifest as such.

So here’s the story. There are two families coming together for a rehearsal dinner. Each family doesn’t much like the other because they’re vastly different. It takes place in the garden of one family. There are several generations present. Each person has their own inner dialogue and issues they are dealing with at the party. Including but not limited to: a love affair with a priest, a secret marriage ceremony, an old lady reminiscing on her lesbian tennis match, pretentious in-laws, idiosyncrasies, and so much more.

The cover of *The Garden Party* by Grace Dane Mazur.

The action takes place in the span of one evening. It’s a snapshot of lives being lived. The plot isn’t based in actions but the inner dialogues of the characters themselves. It is an exploration of human emotions, which is neither comprehensive nor enthralling. The narrative is also interesting because the story is told from every character’s perspective. I love this take. Unfortunately Mazur crammed The Garden Party’s pages with so many points-of-view, it became confusing. At times, there were up to four perspectives in the span of one page. Too much. Too many.

Very few of the characters felt compelling or even realistic. They seemed like caricatures of stereotypes of people we are all familiar with. The children speak like snobbish middle aged men. Not like the small children they are. It just wasn’t believable. There’s also some plot holes. I’m sure Mazur wanted them there to emphasize the fact that life is never visible and people have their own individual journeys.

It should be a family drama packed little novel. In fact it is a clever little novel full of insight and uniqueness. It just isn’t one of those books you’ll return to or ever think of again, except if you see the cover because it’s quite pretty. Even as I was reading the story, I was forgetting who people were.

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Memorable Quotes
“…that women were really dressing for other women.”
“…it was women who understood what other women wore, while men simply reacted.”

Title: The Garden Party
Author: Grace Dane Mazur
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780399179723

Books, Fiction

Sinner

April 3, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Difficulty: IV – because it was so painfully bad
Quick Review: A very poorly written novel about a man whose troubled past manifests in serial killing ways.

I have been avoiding writing this review. That would mean I have to think about this novel again, and reading it once was horrific enough. Not because it was a thriller, but because it was just that bad.

I just… It’s… I can’t… I mean I can; I don’t want to… But here it goes.

I was approached to review this novel. I don’t typically read thrillers. I have been trying to branch out, so I said “yes!” I would create a time machine just so I could go back and say, “STOP, DON’T READ IT!” Or go back even further into time and convince Christopher Graves writing may not be his calling.

The basic concept of Sinner is there is this group of violent, religious, women killing vigilantes. A dude named Zeke goes around killing women of loose morals… basically any lady who isn’t chained to the stove with three babies banging pots around her… due to his religious conviction. Come to find out he had a rough upbringing. (Poor white man, your daddy didn’t love you.) The “strong” female characters fight back. Yada yada yada… It’s terrible.

The thing that made me hate this novel straight off is the narration switches between Zeke (creepy serial killer) and the ladies being serial killed or other key ladies in the story. When dealing with women who are being raped… it’s best not to try and enter the psyche of a woman being raped when you are, in fact, not a woman. I yet to read a male author who can portray these scenes well. It falls flat at best. As a rape survivor myself, it was nowhere near realistic for me. It even came across as flippant, disrespectful, and, quite frankly, offensive. Every section where the woman is narrating, it’s hollow from the dialogue to the internal monologue to the description of how she views herself. You want to buy into the characters and feel for them, but Graves does such a poor job in character development none of the characters even approach likable.

Graves’ writing is unfocused, disorganized, lacks cohesion, and reads like a bad high school first draft. The timeline jumps around in a state of confusion. I don’t think he knows how to organize a novel. Timelines don’t have to be linear, but they do need to make sense. Spelling mistakes run rampant. There are grammar and syntax issues. His word choice is questionable at times. Over all, the writing feels amateurish. I can almost imagine him flipping through a writer’s handbook, pointing at a literary device, and thinking yes, I’ll try that one. When there’s an absence of literary device, don’t fret an analogy is just around the corner. It’s not the work of a capable author probing into the psyche of a troubled man… I would be interested in reading that. It reads like an aspiring writer trying to be all of those things.

Total side note… What is with all the female characters winking? It’s obnoxious and unrealistic. What sane woman winks in the middle of awkward silences or at staring strangers or constantly. As a living, breathing woman, I can’t tell you the last time I winked at someone. I can almost guarantee you it was at a small child and not at the creepy dude staring at me in a pizza joint.

Sinner by Christopher Graves will be released April 5, 2018 (tomorrow) for audiences enjoyment(?). Please don’t read it. It’s not even ironically painful to read. It just caused me pain.

Memorable Quotes:
There were none. Too painful.

Title: Sinner
Author: Christopher Graves
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9780999643723

Books

Winter Garden

March 7, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Length: 394
Quick Review: Meredith and Nina think their old, Russian mother hates them, but on their father’s death bed everything changes. A mother-daughter mystery couldn’t be more generic.

As a Russian speaker… This book was incredibly painful to read. As an English speaker… I found it mundane and common at best.

Meredith and Nina are sisters following vastly different paths. Meredith stayed home to help run the family business as her father aged. Nina left for adventures as a photographer. Their childhood was marked by a father’s unconditional love and their mother’s frigidity. A fairy tale they heard as children transformed into something meaningful to their mother and their own lives after their father dies suddenly.

Hannah tries to build a beautiful picture in the reader’s mind, but falls short as she uses too many unnecessary adjectives giving the narrative a clunky, arbitrary feel. Her efforts feel amateurish as she becomes overly repetitive. When she refines her language, everything flows better, but these moments are fleeting throughout the almost four hundred pages.

The characters come off as flat, grating, unempathetic, and overly stupid. Spoiler: The mother is an elderly, Russian woman with a heavy accent. The plot takes place in 2001. If I could VERY easily do the math: Woman. 80 ish years of age. Her heavy accent means she did not leave Russia as a child but an adult. Even if she moved to the US as a 23 year old woman, she would have been in Russia during WWII… Which explains all of her behavior. So… In the 37 and 40 years her daughters had with her, they didn’t even think about her life before them. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for adult characters who live in me-me-me land, which is exactly what the main characters here do. Not to mention their inability to view the “fairy tale” as an allegory for their mother’s life. As children, all of these things are excusable, but as adult characters it’s surprising and not believable.

Hannah has an obsession with “unconditional” love throughout the narrative. Every time the word “love” is used it is almost always in conjunction with “unconditional.” It just irritated me. After the first few times, she could have dropped the word since she was referring to family and not an “unconditional love” of dirt.

All in all, the book was a waste of my time. I had the plot guessed in detail within the first thirty pages. It’s a formulaic mother-daughter relationship story with an even more uninspired mystery for good measure. As a non-Russian speaker, I would have been able to forgive her, but I’m not that. She fell short. It’s a lesson in how one should only write about languages they’re familiar with.

Memorable Quotes:

“She had thought she was full grown then.”
“”A woman can be a girl and still know her own heart.””

Title: Winter Garden
Author: Kristin Hannah
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Copyright: 2010
ISBN: 9781615239498

Books, Fiction

Bridges

October 6, 2017 RaeAnna

Read No
Length 194
Quick Review The plot is flat, and the characters are superficial at best. For having a grammar police of a main character, the syntax is riddled with errors. The cover is incredibly misleading. Overall, it reads like a sub par young adult novel.

Bridges by Maria Murnane is a novel about female friendship. Three women, who met in college, are in very different points in their lives. Told through the eyes of Daphne, a divorcée, mom and aspiring novelist from Ohio; she meets her friends in New York City for a long weekend. Daphne celebrates the impending marriage of the successful and perpetually single Skylar along with KC, the hottest, youngest grandma there ever was. Though they are close, they still have things to learn about each other, which could bring them together or drive them apart.

The story centers around three women in their forties, but the cover is incredibly misleading picturing three women looking to be in their early twenties. Not only is the cover mismatched but the title, as well. I have finished the book, and I still am not quite sure where Bridges comes into play.

Murnane tries to tackle the complexities of female friendship but falls short. Her characters are hollow. Their friendship feels incredibly surface. One of the largest contributing factors to this is the dialogue. Murnane makes a concerted effort to keep the dialogue light and true to how people talk; however, it doesn’t flow naturally. She tries too hard to make the dialogue witty and interesting. There are unnecessary characters, who do nothing to further the plot. Murnane is trying to stay relevant by using Lokai bracelets, but it’s kitschy and overdone. She also tries to incorporate internet dating through an irrelevant side character. The “horrifying” dating experiences she comes up with may have been avant garde in the 1940’s, but they’re nothing to bat an eye at for any actively dating woman under the age of 45.

Daphne seems to be a fictional version of Murnane as an aspiring novelist. The other characters are always referring to Daphne as something of a grammar police. She shows her knowledge of grammar in ludicrous ways, which add nothing to the story except irritate and distract the reader. After constant mention of being the perfect icon of grammar, the novel itself is riddled with grammar mistakes and odd word choices.

Overall, the novel could be something really interesting, but, as it stands, Bridges is a let down falling short of a the complexity that is female friendship. I would be happy to recommend you better novels about female friendship. Just let me know!

Memorable Quotes
“… love is completely random. There’s no rhyme nor reason whatsoever to where we’ll find it, or how.”

Title: Bridges
Author: Maria Murnane
Publisher: Self-Published
Copyright: 2017
ISBN: 9780980042511