Picture posted to remind me never to pick up author again

One For the Money by Janet Evanovich
Audiobook version. Abandoned circa Chapter 3.

I might have gotten farther on paper, but not much farther. 
It's awful. No--it's not good enough to be awful. It's inane. And stupid.

I started off expecting a detective novel, a mistake which I don't blame anyone for except myself. The book started off with a brief description of the heroine's previous encounters with a neighborhood scumbag. He was interesting to read about, and she had a "one-hour-stand" with him and then got mad because he never called her.  How she handled her rancor was vaguely amusing.
And then the book jumps to now. Having lost her job and failing to find more than temp work, she has her car repossessed and goes to supper with her family. Her mom suggests she get a filing clerk job with her cousin Vinnie, a bail-bondsman.


I was about to quit there, but hmmm...bail bondsman and maybe some mob connections...might get better. She goes in, finds that the job is taken, but meets Vinnie's secretary who says she should try instead for the job of skip tracer.  Skip tracing pays 10% of the bond and there's a case available right now--10 grand to pick up a murder suspect who's skipped out on a $100,000 bond.  Incidentally he is her old neighborhood scumbag acquaintance, now a cop. 

So, with no training, no experience, no fighting skills, and no clue, she jumps on it.  She figures she'll just pop over to his mother's house, ask where he's gone, call the cops to pick him up, and head to McDonald's for a well-deserved late breakfast.

As another reviewer said, she's a marshmallow.

On her first try, without any effort at all, she manages to find him. She loses him immediately, but it doesn't matter.  I've lost interest. This is just stupid.

I went back and looked at other people's reviews. A quarter of them (for example the brainy Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame) said Evanovich was a great author and it was a great book. Equally as many said it was crap and cited the same reasons I did. They also noted that the only interesting characters were dropped half-way through. All the more reason for me to cut my losses early.

if I'd paid money for this, I'd be PO'ed.

Good action reading

Crown of Midnight
by Sarah J. Maas

Not as unexpected as the first but still pretty good. Still hard to put down--expect the unexpected!  I'm looking forward to the next.

So what advice can I give, if you're thinking about starting this series?  I can say it's way on top of the average YA fantasy.  I can say the author is free with the blood and gore and gives her star players injuries that would level an Ajax.  They do get knocked out from time to time, but like the Energizer bunny, they keep on kicking back.

The relationships are complicated--love and hate and utter confusion being common states of interaction between any given pair of characters at any given time. The villain is the only mystery--you know who he is, but you don't know why or what he's up to. The good guys don't know what he's up to either, and that one fact, to me, makes a perfect story.  You know only as much as the protagonists know....

Oops.  The author missed the ball on that last one.  There's a little bit of a hint that Celaena is holding something back.
So she's not perfect.

5 stars may be pushing

My Life Next Door
by Huntley Fitzpatrick

It starts out slowly, a teenage version of a "cozy" without the mystery.  (Other than the usual teen mystery: does he like me?  Do I make the first move?  Will he see me again?  When?  Where?

That part was fun, but you knew it wouldn't be all. The author introduced a cast of characters including "the mom", a bigoted, frustrated woman approaching middle age without ever accomplishing anything except winning public office more-or-less by default.  "Clay," a smooth as snake political adviser who decides, "your Mama has got what it takes; she's gonna go far."  "Best friend," a girl with an even more messed up family than Samantha's.  "Best friend's brother," druggie alcoholic determined to ruin his life one small step after another.  And "the Garretts," the family next door that just didn't fit in the neighborhood.

At the end this got so tense I had to steal an hour of precious reading time to keep on listening to it. If I had a paper copy, I'd be re-reading those parts right now; instead, I'll just cue them up to listen to them later in the car.

I hate the author for making me care so much that it hurt. A little over half-way through, she tossed in a "little did I know" line that sets your heart on edge.  Wondering...worrying.... 

Was the painful twist anything I imagined?  Not, not in my wildest.  Was it as bad as I expected?
Not telling.

Tolkien is my favorite author but

Bilbo's Last Song
by J. R. R. Tolkien

It's not fair to count this as a book, however, it's bound and cataloged as one so I will.  I agree with another reader who said there was no reason to bind it separately except to make a little extra money off the legacy of a dead genius.  But since it's in the kids' section, I'll let them have it.

Just a little poem composed by Bilbo on his way to the grey havens, illustrated with drawings from his big adventure.  I enjoyed the drawings.  People said it was a farewell to the friends and places of Middle Earth, but that is not true.  There is only one line of farewell and its as generic as a greeting card.

Impossible

The impossible has become reality.  Today--after a huge crack appeared in my one-year-old car's windshield--

I

MADE

BREAD

After so many failures in a lifetime of disaster--remember the "no knead bread, so easy a third-grader can make it"?  Remember the many failures of sticky disaster?  Last week I ran across a recipe that called for exactly four ingredients--flour, yeast, salt and water--and specifically said, do not knead.

And despite my mistakes like leaving it to rise for an extra hour and accidentally dumping a pile of loose flour into the baking pan and covering the second rise with a damp paper towel which the dough stuck to like glue...
I baked it and...
it looks, smells, and tastes...

like bread.

Too many stretches of unbelief can ruin the best of mysteries

Dead Scared
by Sharon Bolton


I couldn't stop reading, I'll give her that.  But...I couldn't stop being annoyed at the shifts in perspective, POV, and even person--

An-noy-ing!

She wrote a good, shallow thriller. I read--I enjoyed--I felt cheated at the end. Three thumbs down.

A little bit of life well lived

World Gone Beautiful
by Linda Buturian

How can you love a book and (kind of) hate the author?  Is dislike the better word?  No--too harsh.  Let's just say I didn't cozy up to her.  She was clearly her, not me...but a beautiful writer all the same.

I loved her farm, her fields, her mud and her friends.  The story behind the farm is that four families of quite normal people got together and bought a farmhouse and some acreage; worked as somewhat more than neighbors but much less than a "commune".  (Commune has too many negative connotations these days--bearded hippies and free love and trying to survive on mung bean sprouts.)

Somehow, through hard work and love for the land, they made it.  I could see myself doing the same thing.  I loved her beautiful, beautiful world.  And the kids--I would have enjoyed reading more about the kids.

So this is a free-flowing record of a few years of living on the Rum River, living with the land despite jobs and long commutes and stories to write and sell.   It's a life out in the open.  And that's just right.