The Sparkle Project

“Bad Hair Day”

Author: Carrie Harris

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Pages: 240

Summary (taken from GoodReads): Senior year is positively hair-raising.

Kate Grable is geeked out to shadow the county medical examiner as part of her school’s pre-med program. Except when he’s arrested for murder, she’s left with the bodies. And when Kate’s brother Jonah stumbles upon a dead gamer girl, she realizes that the zombie epidemic she cured last fall was only the beginning of the weirdness taking over her town. Someone’s murdering kids—something really hairy. And strong. Possibly with claws.

Is it werewolf awesomeness like Jonah and his dorktastic friends think? Kate’s supposed to be a butt-kicking zombie killing genius...but if she can’t figure out who’s behind the freakish attacks, the victims—or what’s left of them—are going to keep piling up.

It’s scary. It’s twisted. It’s sick. It’s high school.

Cover impressions: I had the first book in the series, “Bad Taste in Boys” on my radar thanks to its gleefully kitsch 50s sci-fi B-movie synopsis yet never got around to reading it, mainly because I could never find it in UK and I’m too cheap to pay for shipping. I began reading the 2^nd in the series with the typical hesitations of a reader coming into a series without the full story, but luckily it was easy enough to pick up in this short, if tiresome read. Once again, this is a paranormal YA that promises big and doesn’t deliver.

I really should have written this review straight after finishing the book, but university work got in the way, because it was entirely forgettable and I’m having trouble remembering simple elements such as character names. This isn’t a good sign. Unfortunately, “Bad Hair Day” is generic in every sense of the word. The heroine is the geek who doesn’t know she’s pretty, the handsome but bland love interest, the shoe-horned in romantic conflict, the quirky but mostly absent parents and sibling, the casual disparaging comments towards girls who present a threat – they’re all here. At times it feels like join-the-dots storytelling, especially since the pacing for this short book is completely erratic, veering between fumbled exposition and drawn out and entirely unnecessary romance subplot and shorts bursts of action that do nothing to liven up what should be a short, silly read. Despite the attempts at humour – and I did snigger once or twice – the book never fully decides whether it wants to be a camp take on kitschy horror and sci-fi or a conventional paranormal tale. I’m personally quite disappointed that it didn’t take the latter route since the genre desperately needs less po-faced seriousness.

The book reads younger than YA, with the immaturity of the supposed genius teenage heroine seeming more suited to a middle-grade character. There is potential present in the spin on the zombie and werewolf mythos, grounding it in science rather than legend, but it falls flat due to painful exposition and a lack of focus. There’s nothing in this book to outright hate, it’s just too bland and inoffensive for that.

2/5.

My ARC was received from NetGalley.com. "Bad Hair Day" will be released in USA on 13th November 2012.

“Katana”

Author: Cole Gibsen

Publisher: Flux.

Pages: 384.

Summary (taken from GoodReads): Kill Bill meets Buffy in this supernatural samurai tale.

Rileigh Martin would love to believe that adrenaline gave her the uncanny courage and strength to fend off three muggers. But it doesn’t explain her dreams of fifteenth century Japan, the incredible fighting skills she suddenly possesses, or the strange voice giving her battle tips and danger warnings. While worrying that she’s going crazy (always a reputation ruiner), Rileigh gets a visit from Kim, a handsome martial arts instructor, who tells Rileigh she’s harboring the spirit of a five-hundred-year-old samurai warrior.

Relentlessly attacked by ninjas, Rileigh has no choice but to master the katana--a deadly Japanese sword that’s also the key to her past. As the spirit grows stronger and her feelings for Kim intensify, Rileigh is torn between continuing as the girl she’s always been and embracing the warrior inside her.

Cover impressions: It’s not unusual for a book to promise more than it can deliver. One can seldom blame the book itself for that, since so much time and effort from the publishers goes into making said book as marketable as possible. The temptation of a supernatural mash-up with Asian culture was one with immeasurable potential, as well as one that could easily slip into misguided cultural appropriation. On the bright side, such awkwardness is for the most part avoided. Unfortunately, this book is also just not very good.

Immediately, my biggest complaint with the novel was its heroine, Rileigh. Not for one moment did she register as an authentic or particularly likeable teenager. Her speech rings false on every count, as do her interactions with token gay best friend Quentin, who doesn’t rise beyond the stereotype of the make-up applying squealing, hysterical gay male. I firmly believe that this can be pulled off well and used to create an interesting, complex character but in this instance it was just lazy storytelling, and such Quentin doesn’t serve much of a purpose beyond Rileigh having someone to complain about her love life with, he barely registers. The pair read more like how bad sitcom writers imagine teenagers to speak, because apparently they’re from a different planet or something. As well as the dialogue being awkward and clunky, it’s used primarily for exposition and stretched out discussions of romance, neither of which are pulled off with any particular success.

The storytelling is so awkward; it’s as if the author had fragments of an extremely conventional plot in her mind and hastily connected them together. The plotting is extremely predictable and conventional, with far too many overused YA tropes being crossed from the check-list – the flighty, irresponsible parent who is seldom there, thus allowing the heroine to continue her life without any consequences or parental guidance, the mysterious, rude and jerky designated love interest who hides secrets and stalks the heroine to make sure she’s safe, the heroine being incredibly skilled with practically no effort as well as the most super special heroine who ever lived, and so on. It is possible to take conventional tropes and subvert them in an interesting or gripping manner, and is common when referencing specific genres or modes of storytelling (the Kill Bill series and Kung Fu Panda both pay homage and frequently reference the martial arts tales that inspired them, and do so with humour, skill and panache), but here it feels lazy. Some of the fight scenes are well put together, but Rileigh’s narration proves to be extremely irritating and distracting. While the book’s marketing is trying to push this book as one with a strong ‘kick-ass’ heroine, Rileigh is emotionally weak, makes too many rash decisions that potentially put herself and others at risk, and quickly begins to use designated love interest Kim as a crutch. It’s easy to claim a female character is ‘strong’ because she can hold her own in a fight or has the most super special magical powers ever, but such demonstrations of power mean nothing if the heroine spends the rest of the story whining about the men in her life. She can’t just be physically able, she must be emotionally so as well.

The romance itself is also a tired mish-mash of every YA romance trope I have come to despise. At one point, Kim is described by Rileigh as “a jerk… he preys on innocent girls… but then, with abs like that, why would he have to?” That moment there is pretty representative of so many issues I have with YA romance these days. Looks matter above questionable behaviour, something that Kim exhibits quite frequently, but does so because he wants to protect Rileigh (because despite being the reincarnation of one of the most powerful samurai of her time, she’s essentially a damsel-in-distress). While Rileigh, to her credit, does call him out on his behaviour, her protests do not matter since she quickly devotes herself to him, even though they barely know each other. Being in love in a previous life is all they need apparently. The get-out-of-character-development-free card was borderline insulting.

I was absolutely dreading the possibility of cultural appropriation in this book, but while there are some clunker moments, the flashbacks to 15^th century Japan are infrequent. Little detail is given and one doesn’t gain a full sense of the period, the characters within or their predicaments. The constant references to honour also felt lazy, but I can begrudgingly let this pass since it’s a staple in almost every samurai or martial arts movie ever made. But that really sums up “Katana” in a nutshell; it’s lazy.

I’m sure there are many readers out there who will thoroughly enjoy this book. Indeed, at this moment in time the book has ten 5 star ratings, although one of them is by a self-admitted friend of the author’s, one from a beta-reader and five ratings with no review from authors who list Gibsen as a friend. However, this book did not connect with me on any level. The prose is as stilted as the plotting and characterisation and the samurai element is mishandled at best. Usually I leave the 1 star rating solely for books that offended me on some level, but the sheer laziness of this novel mean I cannot give it any other rating, although the fight scenes elevate it to a 1.5 for accuracy’s sake. “Katana” was as tired as the tropes it recycled over and over.

1.5/5.

“Katana” will be available in USA on March 8^th 2012. I received my ARC from NetGalley.com.

“Fracture”

Author: Megan Miranda.

Publisher: Walker & Company.

Pages: 272.

Summary (taken from GoodReads): Eleven minutes passed before Delaney Maxwell was pulled from the icy waters of a Maine lake by her best friend Decker Phillips. By then her heart had stopped beating. Her brain had stopped working. She was dead. And yet she somehow defied medical precedent to come back seemingly fine. Despite the scans that showed significant brain damage. Everyone wants Delaney to be all right, but she knows she's far from normal. Pulled by strange sensations she can't control or explain, Delaney finds herself drawn to the dying. Is her altered brain now predicting death, or causing it?

Then Delaney meets Troy Varga, who recently emerged from a coma with similar abilities. At first she's reassured to find someone who understands the strangeness of her new existence, but Delaney soon discovers that Troy's motives aren't quite what she thought. Is their gift a miracle, a freak of nature-or something much more frightening?

For fans of best-sellers like Before I Fall and If I Stay, this is a fascinating and heart-rending story about love and friendship and the fine line between life and death.

Cover impressions: Once your publisher starts promoting your book and mentioning it in the same vein as two of the most well received books in YA in recent years, immediately you have a lot to live up to. While I didn't adore “If I Stay”, I thought it achieved its objective – to present a young woman's life and her existential struggles – with a deft hand, one that is difficult to pull off for even the most talented writer. For Megan Miranda's debut (which is also a standalone, a refreshing occurrence in a field that churns out more multi-book series than it knows what to do with), the personal elements are much more successful than other parts.

The relatively short “Fracture” has many ideas running through it and, perhaps inevitably, not all of them work. The main issue arises from a lack of a central focus, which leaves the narrative prone to wandering off and slowing down to almost a complete halt. Sometimes the book can't decide what it wants to be – does it want to be a romance? A mystery? An exploration of human nature and death? Each segment succeeds to varying degrees, although none is given enough time to develop into something truly gripping, although the potential is clearly there, especially in the mystery elements, where Miranda creates some surprisingly tense moments and even surprised me when I thought things were becoming too predictable. Some scenes feel rushed and/or have no real resolution. A strong editor could work wonders for this book and turn it from good to great.

I've read some reviews which levelled complaints with the heroine Delaney and her coldness, but I actually found this rather refreshing. She provided a welcome change from the usual selection of blank faces I've become all too accustomed to in YA. I can definitely see many readers having a problem with this though. Her multiple boy troubles, however, grated on me. No less than 3 young men are presented as possible love interests for Delaney and none are given any page time to develop into a viable option for her (although, to give huge credit to Miranda, she turns the tables when things seem to be following an all to familiar YA romance route.) The story needed to either develop the romantic element further, concentrating on no more than two boys (you know how much I just love my love triangles!) or getting rid of the sub-plot altogether.

There's one element of this book that I have to discuss. Once again, here's another YA novel with a female antagonist who serves no purpose to the plot other than to be promiscuous and act as a straw-figure to compare the heroine to. She genuinely does nothing of any important besides act as the most minor of road-blocks in the possible relationship between Delaney and best friend Decker, and is almost always described in terms of her tight clothing or promiscuous nature, constantly talking about sex or getting naked. At one point she is described as "pathetic in her too-tight clothes, desperate for attention." We shouldn't have to keep going over this, YA. Stop demonising girls who have sex as sluts! Stop using it as a cheap shortcut to avoid characterisation of the already clichéd and damaging teen female antagonist role! The character was of no consequence and really didn't need to be in the book, so her inclusion felt all the more bitter and forced me to knock half a star from the review.

The potential within “Fracture” is evident and there are moments where Miranda really shines, especially within the mystery elements and Delaney's inner turmoil, but it's a work that needs to be seriously fleshed out. If certain plot lines, characters and situations could be tightened up and built upon, the book could be a very interesting and gripping piece of work. As it is, it's a perfectly readable story that fails to satisfy in the way it has the potential to do so.

2.5/5.

“Fracture” will be released in USA on January 12^th 2012. I received my ARC from NetGalley.com.

“Wildefire”

Author: Karsten Knight.

Publisher: Simon and Schuster.

Pages: 401.

Synopsis (taken from GoodReads): Ashline Wilde is having a rough sophomore year. She’s struggling to find her place as the only Polynesian girl in school, her boyfriend just cheated on her, and now her runaway sister, Eve, has decided to barge back into her life. When Eve’s violent behavior escalates and she does the unthinkable, Ash transfers to a remote private school nestled in California’s redwoods, hoping to put the tragedy behind her. But her fresh start at Blackwood Academy doesn’t go as planned. Just as Ash is beginning to enjoy the perks of her new school—being captain of the tennis team, a steamy romance with a hot, local park ranger—Ash discovers that a group of gods and goddesses have mysteriously enrolled at Blackwood…and she’s one of them. To make matters worse, Eve has resurfaced to haunt Ash, and she’s got some strange abilities of her own. With a war between the gods looming over campus, Ash must master the new fire smoldering within before she clashes with her sister one more time… And when warm and cold fronts collide, there’s guaranteed to be a storm.

Cover impressions: Over the past few years, in the wake of the sparkle madness, we’ve seen a wide variety of paranormal mythologies saturate the YA market to the point where much of it has become derivative, overdone and frankly, a little dull. To find something original in the market is always pleasant, so a novel centred around a reincarnated Polynesian goddess was automatically a must read for me. So far, my GoodReads friends have been mixed in their opinions on the novel, so I will have to be the dull one here and fall right in the middle.

Ashline is a great protagonist. She’s often stubborn and incredibly sarcastic – the banter she shares with her friends is a particular highlight of the book – and makes stupid mistakes, but she also suffers with consequences and has to learn how to mature and figure out what to do with her life and newfound destiny. Her relationship with her friends, family and the culture clash she has known through her whole life made her an often complex but always interesting heroine. This was also an instance where the obligatory romantic element didn’t bother me so much; she and Colt had great chemistry, actually took time to get to know one another and didn’t spend all their time obsessing over one another.

Aside from Ashline, the supporting cast ranges from good to bad in terms of development. Her group of close friends and fellow gods were especially humorous and their interactions made for some of the best parts of the novel. They actually felt like teenagers, not adults in smaller bodies, and their own personal journeys, while handled a little clumsily (the prose is serviceable but nothing particularly groundbreaking), brought further layers to the mythological elements, another high point in the book. However, I had a strong dislike (and not in the way the author intended) to Eve, Ash’s sister. She was a straight up sociopath with nothing beyond her two dimensional destruction and selfishness. I can understand what Knight’s intentions were with the character, and there are hints of bigger repercussions in her relationship with Ash, but they were overwhelmed by her psychotic behaviour. The moments where she is supposed to develop beyond this felt hollow, making her ultimately an underwhelming antagonist to the story. Another possible antagonist is introduced late into the novel who is even more two dimensional than Eve, complete with Bond villain style exposition of her past, but she’s dropped almost immediately.

From the first chapter, the book grabs you and is paced to keep you invested in the mystery, rushed ending aside. However, this opening may also put off many readers because of its violence. There is a lot of violence in the novel (as well as casual use of the term 'bitch', which everyone called almost every girl at some point) and it verged dangerously close to being gratuitous for me. I can understand the inherently violent nature of the gods and goddesses, and their struggles to keep control over their strange, burgeoning powers, but the characters often take a disappointingly flippant view of this violence which I found to be grating as the novel progressed. The opening chapter’s fight was a particularly bad example of this – I don’t care how violent or peaceful your neighbourhood is, there is absolutely no way you’d only get one week’s suspension from school for that sort of fight. The fact that this fight takes place over a boy didn’t please me much either. As well as the violent elements, I felt that the group accepted their fates a little too quickly, and seemed to take control of their powers with the same unrealistic speed.

While I didn’t love “Wildefire” in quite the same way many of my reviewer friends did, it was refreshing to read a paranormal YA with unique mythos, a strong, complex female protagonist and a circle of friends with witty interactions who actually cared about one another and did more than act as plot devices. Now that the first part of the story is told, I hope Karsten Knight can further develop a great story free deserving of that killer cliff-hanger, which will leave you both infuriated and waiting for more.

3.5/5.

"Wildefire" will be available in USA on July 26th. I received my e-ARC from Simon and Schuster's Galley Grab.

“Lost Voices”

Author: Sarah Porter

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children.

Pages: 304.

Synopsis (taken from GoodReads): What happens to the girls nobody sees—the ones who are ignored, mistreated, hidden away? The girls nobody hears when they cry for help?

Fourteen-year-old Luce is one of those lost girls. After her father vanishes in a storm at sea, she is stuck in a grim, gray Alaskan fishing village with her alcoholic uncle. When her uncle crosses an unspeakable line, Luce reaches the depths of despair. Abandoned on the cliffs near her home, she expects to die when she tumbles to the icy, churning waves below. Instead, she undergoes an astonishing transformation and becomes a mermaid.
A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in—all of them, like her, lost girls who surrendered their humanity in the darkest moments of their lives. The mermaids are beautiful, free, and ageless, and Luce is thrilled with her new life until she discovers the catch: they feel an uncontrollable desire to drown seafarers, using their enchanted voices to lure ships into the rocks.
Luce’s own talent at singing captures the attention of the tribe’s queen, the fierce and elegant Catarina, and Luce soon finds herself pressured to join in committing mass murder. Luce’s struggle to retain her inner humanity puts her at odds with her friends; even worse, Catarina seems to regard Luce as a potential rival. But the appearance of a devious new mermaid brings a real threat to Catarina’s leadership and endangers the very existence of the tribe. Can Luce find the courage to challenge the newcomer, even at the risk of becoming rejected and alone once again?

Cover impressions: Sometime after Stephenie Meyer’s “Breaking Dawn” was unleashed upon the world and the media was scrambling for the next big creature in YA, mermaids was tossed around as a possible substitute for vampires and werewolves, partly influenced by Meyer herself admitting to having a mermaid story in mind for a future novel. While this hypothesised craze never really came to fruition, there is a number of mermaid-related YA stories awaiting release or already in bookshops from the past year or so.

Sarah Porter’s debut, yet another first in a series, takes the mermaid mythos that has more in common with Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” than the incredibly sanitised Disney adaptation. While the mermaid and siren tradition has a rich and fascinating mythos, it’s not one that’s been explored very often in YA and Porter’s reinterpretation of themes from The Odyssey along with fairy tales of both Andersen and the Grimm Brothers is one of the strongest elements of the book. The story is unrelentingly bleak for the most part – girls are turned into mermaids after having suffered unimaginable abuse and pain at the hands of humans to the point where they give up on humanity. The mermaids live in a matriarchal society and use their siren-like voices to crash ships and kill those on board as a form of revenge for what humanity did to them. It definitely made a refreshing change from the stock paranormal format that has oversaturated the market.

Most of my problems with the book fall at the feet – or tail – of the protagonist Luce. She has a standard neglected orphan set-up which just manages to avoid falling into maudlin soap-opera territory (only just), and she does have some interesting moments, especially in her complex relationship with head mermaid Catarina. However, she veers from naive little girl to tortured hero with a passive martyr complex. I think most of these problems are the result of Porter’s prose, which is often clunky and repetitious but reasonably serviceable for the most part, except with Luce’s internal monologue. Her characterisation has a lot of potential – her coming to terms with what happened to her, discovering her new powers, wanting to fit in and stick to the mermaid code but still having her humanity – but it felt a little black and white at times, especially since practically none of the other mermaids had these issues. By the end of it all, Luce is the super special mermaid to end all super special mermaids and it’s so overdone. I was much more intrigued by Catarina’s story but Porter tries to introduce far too many characters so nobody is really given any time to truly develop beyond being abused girls turned vengeful mermaids. Most of the time it’s hard to remember which one is which since their personalities are so similar that they end up merging together. Things aren’t helped when even more characters are introduced with even less development. If you’re going to use something like abuse as a developmental point in a character’s life, you’d better make sure you do it well for fear of coming across as lazy and exploitative. In this case it’s more the former.

The plot is so deathly slow I didn’t think there was one for the most part. I understand Porter wanting to develop the mermaid way of life, and there is a lot of often repeated detail in this book, but it plods along at such a snail’s pace that I found myself getting bored on more than one occasion. Things pick up towards the end but you can’t just rush a plot 2/3s of the way through to make up for the rest of the book. Many interesting questions are raised, especially pertaining to the mermaids’ powers and their own twisted version of judgement, but few are answered. It’s a world that never truly reaches its potential.

If mermaids are to be the new creatures that fill our paranormal YAs in the future then I hope their worlds are at least as interesting as the one in “Lost Voices”. The mythos is clearly begging for some interesting interpretations and Porter gives us one that is bleak, complex and brimming with possibilities, which I hope it fulfils with the rest of the series. However, the plotting needs some serious work as does the characterisation of the supporting cast. There is definitely potential for Porter to develop and grow as a writer which will drastically improve the series but as this book stands, it’s not without merit but I was left with too many questions and too many problems.

2.5/5.

"Lost Voices" will be released in USA on July 4th. I received my e-ARC from NetGalley.com.