Just when Creel thinks her troubles with dragons are over and it’s finally time to get married, Velika, queen of the dragons, is kidnapped. Creel and her friends must travel to a distant land to rescue her, but when they get there, they discover that it’s not just Velika’s life at stake – it’s the future of the entire dragon kingdom. Will Creel ever finish her wedding dress?

I’ve already talked at length about my general take on these books: I love dragons, and Creel is likable enough, but they’re otherwise pretty much just okay. All that basically stands for Dragon Spear as well, so I won’t go into it again. And none of it is why this book enraged me so much.

The problem with Dragon Spear is…well, okay, there are two. Basically, Velika is kidnapped by a sort of cult of dragons, who split from the main dragon society generations ago (dragon generations, which are much longer than people generations). I mentioned in my review of Dragon Flight that I was irritated by the way that Velika, the supposed ruler of the dragons, was forced into a passive, damsel-in-distress-y role, but folks, I hadn’t seen anything yet. See, Velika is about to lay her eggs when she’s kidnapped, and for some inexplicable reason, it’s handled like a human pregnancy – she’s almost completely incapacitated by it, and the actual act of laying the eggs is difficult and painful. Um, no. Human pregnancies and labor are difficult because we walk upright and our pelvises are totally wrong for shooting out babies (which, btw, are proportionally larger than egg-laying animals’ eggs are). It’s possible that magical lizards have difficult reproductive processes, but it’s biologically highly unlikely. So the only reason to do this is to take Velika out of the action, yet again, so that she can be kidnapped and lie in a hole while Creel and a bunch of male dragons argue about her fate. Pass.

But much more problematic are Velika’s kidnappers. See, this other society of dragons lives on a volcanic island. Things to know about these dragons:

1. They live in the jungle. The scary, scary jungle.

2. All the sulfur or whatever has made them little and brown. This is specifically linked to the birth defects that make it hard for them to lay eggs that survive to hatch.

3. They follow, essentially, a corrupted version of the “true” faith. Heretics! Savage heretics!

4. They keep human slaves. The humans are dark-skinned and wear skins and loincloths and large piercings – George seems to be chucking some Native American culture in there, some African, Aboriginal, South American…whatever sounds “savage-y” and National Geographic-y, I guess. Creel finds them terrifying and ugly, and is horrified by the idea of darkening her own hair and skin to pass among them (YES SHE WEARS BLACKFACE). The natives, for their part, are fascinated by Creel’s blonde hair and blue eyes.

5. They also are really into the Happy Slave thing, all gung-ho about being the bestest slaves they can be, until Creel and her white friends (and brightly-colored, “normal” dragons) show them that they don’t have to be slaves anymore. Yay, White Man’s Burden!

6. They don’t really know anything about medicine, but they’ve got a wise woman who can kind of half-ass it.

7. DID I MENTION THE PART WHERE THE NATIVE DRAGONS ARE CONSIDERED FREAKISH AND GENETICALLY DEFECTIVE FOR BEING BROWN???

Seriously, I could not stop gasping at the awful, awful implications of this book. There was so much going on there that was not okay, and I couldn’t believe that no one at any stage of the editorial process had stopped and gone “Huh, maybe we don’t want to say that being brown and from the jungle is freakish? And maybe the constant harping on how awful it would be if Creel couldn’t change back to being white is, you know, terrible?” I will say that it all seems more quaintly ignorant than malicious, but it’s still not okay.

I gave the earlier books in this series moderate grades because they were George’s first and second novels and they had elements of fun to them, and I thought perhaps her writing would improve with experience. So far it hasn’t, and the completely dreadful subtext of this book takes away any points George got for having dragons and a spunky heroine. I’m only grateful I took this out of the library and so didn’t waste any money on it. Zero cupcakes.

All Vincent wants to do is invent toys, but it’s hard to do that with his family moving, his stepmother and stepsisters picking on him, and his inventions falling flat. When the chance to enter a toy inventing contest arises, though, Vincent knows that this may be just what he needs to make his dreams come true.

Nyaaaaargh.

I’m sorry, did you think I was leaving something out of that plot summary up there? Nope. I sat down to write this review, drew a complete blank on what to put as the summary, and resorted to checking the back cover blurb, which is just as vague and useless. I can’t really blame the blurb writer, though – the fault is with the book, which goes nowhere, ends nowhere, and accomplishes nothing along the way.

Basically we’ve got this Vincent kid, who lives in New York and wants to be a toy inventor. Then his mean old stepmother moves them to Minnesota. Then he hears about a world famous toy contest (What do you mean, a kid who cares about nothing but toy inventing should already know about a contest like this? Pshaw.) in New York. So he goes back to New York and enters the toy contest. That’s…pretty much it. There’s a subplot about a bunch of Nicola Tesla inventions that have just been found in a hotel, and how no one can figure out what one of them is, but a) the mystery was so poorly written that it took me hours after finishing the book to figure out why I had a vague sense of something being unfinished in the book, and b) it’s resolved so anticlimactically and off-the-cuff-ly that I, you know, had a vague sense of something being unfinished in the book. Also the villains aren’t introduced until halfway through the book, and don’t really do anything. Well plotted, sir.

Then there’s Vincent himself, who is incredibly unlikable. Aside from the fact that he’s thunderously boring, he clearly believes that the entire world should revolve around himself and his inventions. At one point he steals his six-year-old stepsister’s stuffed animals, cuts them up, and rearranges them into “Mixablez,” stuffed animals made up of two different kinds of animals. First off, it’s been done. Many times. (Don’t worry, I’ll get to the idiocy of the inventions in a minute.) Second, stealing your little sister’s toys and mutilating them? Kid, you aren’t an inventor. You’re Sid from Toy Story. You’re a monster. He also takes a fan from the hairdryer for an invention, causing it to almost electrocute his teenage stepsister the next morning. Not only does he not confess to or apologize for almost killing his sister, he feels absolutely no guilt about it. This turns into a “wacky” running gag where he takes parts from all of the household appliances and doesn’t tell anyone about it, thus inconveniencing his entire family, because, you know, he’s a genius.

And then we have the inventions. For starters, they all end with a Z: Mixablez, Windless Kitez, Pop Tunz. There is no explanation for this. Look, kids know that’s not cool. It’s what uncool grownups do to look cool. More importantly, though, there is nothing whimsical or fun about the toys. There’s one featured invention from Howard G. Whiz, the eccentric toymaker hosting the contest, who Kehoe clearly thinks is a new Willy Wonka (he’s not). It’s…a skateboard. WOO TASTE THE EXCITEMENT.

Vincent’s toys, meanwhile, are not only dull, they miss the entire point. He’s got a basketball that you can aim with a targeting system so you never miss, and a baseball bat that expands when you swing so that, again, you never miss. Way to completely ruin the game, dude. Then there’s his Windless Kitez (arrrrrgh), which are made of metal and work by running high voltage up them, so they don’t need wind and you can fly them inside. Not only are they, you know, lethal, but people don’t not fly kites inside because there’s no wind. They don’t fly kites inside because there’s no room. The point of a kite is to run outside, into the wind, to let it unspool from your hand and watch it dance on the breeze, a tiny point of color in a field of blue. It’s not to stand alone in your bedroom staring at something that doesn’t move. All of the inventions are like this. It’s like Vincent’s childhood is so depressing he wants to force the children of the world to buy his toys and be equally depressed.

I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t think of one positive thing about this book except that it’s kind of short. So The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow gets zero cupcakes, and is getting kicked out of book collection posthaste.

Title: Alphas
Author: Lisi Harrison
Genre: Teen drama llama
Pages: 271
Summary: Backstabbing and boy-craziness at an ultra-high tech school for talented teenage girls, run by a Machiavellian bitch-goddess.
Thoughts: I want to stick a spoon into my ear canal and scoop this book out of my brain. Uggggh. I hate the “catty rich girls” subgenre of girls’ media out there, and this is a prime example (the author has also created The Clique series). Everyone in this book is vile and the prose is so aggressively trendy it will be dated next week, not to mention nonsensical. “Skye launched into a perfect pique turn, arms wide, hands clasped, as if hugging Kevin Fat-erline. ‘You want to be solid and liquid at the same time, like an unopened juice box on a whirling merry-go-round.’” NONSENSE. There’s rampant fat-hate, a mostly-white and definitely pro-blonde cast, and the whole thing is just a training manual for a future generation of materialistic sociopaths who view all other girls as competition and all boys as fresh meat. Also, “LIP-KISSING” IS NOT A THING. STOP SAYING IT. NOW LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE, MY EYES ARE BLEEDING.

Zero cupcakes

When Dice’s cousin Pen has a near-fatal fall from a tree, she winds up possessed by one Sinclair Youngblood Powers, a ghost who was hanged in that very tree 250 years ago. Sin is determined to get revenge on the town that killed him, but Dice is just as determined to stop him. However, after an exorcism gone wrong, Sin finds himself in a body all his own – and Dice finds herself forced to try to stop the boy she’s already fallen in love with.

I could tell just from reading the blurb that Swoon is blatant Twilight rip-off. You’ve got the dark-haired, pale girl who moves from a big city (New York, in this case) to a monosyllabically-named small town (Swoon, Connecticut) where she’s supposedly a fish out of water although in actual fact she’s pretty popular. You’ve got the dreamy undead guy who may or may not be evil, and the love at first sight. You’ve even got the bizarre preoccupation with expensive cars.

But – and we all know how I feel about Twilight, so you know how much it pains me to say this – Twilight is better.

For starters, the prose of Swoon is aggressively, obnoxiously quirky. I don’t have the copy I read in front of me, so I can’t pull out too many examples, but I do remember my favorite phrase, from when Dice, Pen-as-possessed-by-Sin, and a couple of boys get out of a car: “…we denuded the sumptuous ride of our genetic material.” Not “we got out of the car.” We denuded the sumptuous ride of our genetic material. It took me three read-throughs of that sentence to figure out what she was talking about, especially since I have heard “genetic material” as a euphemism before, but never as another word for bodies. And the whole book is like that.

And it’s not just the prose that’s aggressively quirky. The whole reason the main character is called “Dice” is because everyone in Swoon has to have a monosyllabic nickname for no very clear reason, and that was her preferred shortening of her real name, Candice. So…Dice and Sin. Yeah. And while one of my major problems with Twilight was that Bella had no personality, Swoon has the opposite problem: its characters have too much, or even too many. Malkin couldn’t quite seem to decide whether Dice was an ordinary, quiet girl (just like you!) or a sexy New York club kid who goes to parties in a red bra under a black mesh shirt. Nor could she seem to decide whether Pen, Dice’s cousin, is a wholesome good girl or a wild bad one, and when her behavior’s already completely unpredictable, the crazy things she does while Sin is possessing her don’t have the impact they should. It all adds up to a distracting, hard-to-follow book, populated by characters the reader never really gets to know.

I will give Swoon this: while Twilight seems blissfully unaware of the problems with Edward and Bella’s relationship, Swoon owns its crazy. Dice is well aware that Sin is bad for her – because he’s dead, sure, but also because he’s a bad person. That doesn’t actually stop her from being with him at any point, but at least she twigs to the unhealthiness of their relationship. It gets a little worse, though, when show

Oh, and in case you were wondering how Sin is planning on destroying Swoon? The dastardly deeds Dice is determined to prevent?

He starts orgies. There are four or five of them in the book. Orgies. Yep.

So, you know, there’s that.

Will Swoon be the next Twilight? Only time, and fourteen-year-olds, will tell, but here at Active Voice it gets zero cupcakes.

When Bella moves to the dreary small town of Forks, she doesn’t expect to meet the love of her life – and she certainly doesn’t expect him to be a vampire. But Edward is exactly that, and his love for Bella may not be stronger than his thirst for her blood. And even if it is, can Edward protect Bella from the bloodthirsty newcomer who’s set his sights on her?

Warning: Minor spoilers behind the cut.

In this interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve never been a big fan of vampires. I liked Buffy because it was funny and had rockin’ female characters, but I never bothered with Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton, and I don’t find capes and Transylvanian accents sexy. At best, vampires make me roll my eyes.

But even if I’d loved vampires with an unholy passion, Twilight would still be terrible.

There are a bunch of issues that would be major problems in any other book:

1. It’s boring. Hundreds of pages go by with, essentially, nothing happening except a lot of florid prose about how pretty Edward is. It was so boring that I honestly wouldn’t have finished it if I hadn’t been reviewing it for AV, and I always finish books.

2. Yeah, it’s florid. Ludicrously so. (Edward sparkles in the sun. No, really.) This isn’t helped by Meyer’s somewhat bizarre relationship with punctuation (here’s a hint: you don’t need a semicolon, a dash, and an ellipsis all in the same sentence!).

3. Bella, the ostensible heroine, is a terrible character. She’s utterly devoid of personality in order for the reader to be able to map herself into the starring role. For example, the boys back in her hometown of Phoenix don’t notice her (she’s so ordinary! just like you and me!), but counting Edward, she has five boys vying for her attention in Forks (omg so popular!). The sole exception to her utter lack of personality traits is her completely over-the-top clumsiness, which was apparently added to give her an adorable quirk but actually just makes me think she has severe inner ear problems. (When she breaks her leg, ribs, and skull in a vampire attack, they tell her mother she fell out a window, and this is a plausible excuse because Bella is just that much of a failure at walking without falling down.) She’s also unbelievably passive; she spends the climax of the book barely conscious, unable to move or even see, listening to everyone else save the day.

All of these would be hugely problematic anywhere else, but Twilight has another issue that so overshadows those already mentioned that it renders them almost negligible: It reads like a do-it-yourself guide to abusive relationships.

I’m serious. Edward is moody, violent, prone to anger, jealous, and justifies any poor behavior towards Bella with excuses like “It’s just because I love you” and “It’s what’s best for you.” He works to sever all of her other social connections, leaving her entirely reliant on him – and in fact, she’s disturbingly codependent, with lines like “It would be physically painful to be separated from him.” She lives in terror of triggering one of his bad moods or making him want to leave. She describes his hands on her wrists as “manacles.” He stalks her and watches her while she sleeps and she feels flattered. He’s also insanely controlling; if he wants her to do something, she does it, and if she doesn’t hop to it, he picks her up or drags her where he wants her to be. I’m speaking very literally here – he both drags her around and pins or straps her down multiple times in this book.

Of course, since he’s a vampire, this is all compounded. He’s so much faster and stronger than she is that she is always at his mercy – she lives at his sufferance. (And he utterly delights in reminding her of this fact, which is disgusting.) Plus, since a vampire feeding is inextricably linked in the public consciousness to sex – seduction and rape simultaneously – there are some extra-disturbing undercurrents to all of this. See, Edward and his family have sworn off drinking human blood, but Bella is so extraordinarily tempting to him that he has to fight every second that he’s around her not to kill her. Uh, romantic. Plus, they can never have a sexual relationship, because as he tells her, if he ever loses control, “I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake.” That is some charming pillow talk there, Ed. First of all, this means that Bella can never make any romantic or sexual overtures towards Edward for fear of disrupting his control; when they kiss, she has to essentially lie back and think of England (or Forks). But more importantly, I’m sorry, but I don’t find a guy having to concentrate fiercely every minute to keep from violating or destroying me romantic. I find it creepy and terrifying.

Now, all of this would have been mitigated if even one person in the book had expressed any concern about the relationship based on something other than the fact that she’s food to him. But no. A few people, Edward included, tell Bella that he’s dangerous to be around because, duh, vampire, but no one – not Bella’s parents, not her friends, no one – says that it’s a bad relationship because he’s an abusive, moody, controlling stalker with rage issues. Bella herself never twigs that the relationship is mind-bogglingly unhealthy, but Bella can barely stand upright, so you can’t expect much from her.

So you’ve got this friendly User’s Guide to Setting Up Your Home Abusive Relationship – and it’s being stuffed into the hands of every teenage girl in the country, if not the world, and touted as romantic. That’s incredibly irresponsible and reprehensible. It’s not a writer’s job to raise the youth of America, but it damn well isn’t her job to tell them behavior like Edward’s is love, either.

Without this last horrendous aspect, Twilight would probably get one cupcake – maybe one and a half, if I were feeling generous. As it is, Twilight gets zero cupcakes. It’s infuriating, disturbing, and just plain bad, and I’d cut out my own tongue before recommending it to anyone, especially the girls it’s marketed to.

Aside from being an orphan raised in a string of foster homes, and aside from his unnerving tendency to break everything he touched, and aside from his ridiculous name, Alcatraz Smedry was a more-or-less normal kid. At least, until the inheritance his parents left him finally got delivered. It turned out to be a bag of sand, which was weird enough; weirder still, that bag of sand was immediately stolen by an evil librarian, and Alcatraz learned that, if he didn’t get his sand back, the consequences would be dire.

I hated this book. I wish this book were a person so I could wring its neck. It managed to make me angry on a personal level, to irritate me seven ways to Sunday, and to have entire elements completely ripped off from a series I like much better. I only finished this book so I could rant about it properly in this blog, and not throwing it across the room was an act of willpower. So let’s get started!

First off, I bought the book expecting a wacky adventure. The premise is that the world as we know it is all wrong, and that the conspiracy to keep us in the dark is run by a bunch of evil librarians, who control everything. Alcatraz learns about this when his grandfather, a hero in the war against the librarians, comes to help him rescue the sands. It purports to be a real autobiography, being released as fiction in the “Hushlands,” which is where we ignorant, conquered people live. Oh, and all the goodguys are named after prisons. (Alcatraz, Bastille, Sing Sing, Quentin, etc.) And also, the heroes use magic-ish sands to make magic-ish glasses that allow them to do many mysterious things, and so on.

So first I’ll get the big one—the one that made me really angry—out of the way. It was actually a series of things. First off, the introduction of Bastille, a 13-year-old knight who assists Alcatraz and his grandfather in their quest. She belongs to an order called the Crystins. Which, I thought, was interesting, because the word is very close to, well, Christian. But I didn’t pay attention to it. Then about halfway through the book, Alcatraz sees a map of the world, which has three extra continents out in the oceans. He demands to know how that’s possible, and the answer is, “Those other continents make sense, if you think about it. I mean, a planet that is seventy percent water? What would be the point of that much wasted space? I’d never have thought people would buy that lie, had I not studied Huslander cultures.”

Did you catch that? It startled me that I did. But it’s a vague attitude—the idea that the world doesn’t waste space, which must mean it was somehow planned. Okay, that’s a really minor thing I might be reading in to. (But also, there are things in those oceans! It isn’t wasted space! Won’t somebody think of the cephalopods? And, of course, there’s the fact that the ocean is part of an ecosystem, and without it, uh, you know…life wouldn’t exist. Gosh! Wasted space, that!)

But then came the part where Alcatraz wanders into a room full of miniature, talking dinosaurs with British accents. They’re going to be executed by the librarians, because, “Something about enlarging our bones, then putting them inside of rock formations, so they can be dug out by human archaeologists.”

Okay, excuse me, WHAT? We are talking about a series where there is real, true knowledge that only the heroes have, and they’re fighting to liberate the rest of us from a conspiracy of ignorance. Or let me be clearer: the heroes, with their Christian-esque allies and an attitude of consciously-planned Earth, are fighting against a group of people who keep the rest of us ignorant by convincing us of things like the fossil record, and thus….EVOLUTION.

I can not read that as anything other than creationism. And I do not like creationism. I’m all for religion and belief in God, but there is a huge gaping void between believing in God and denying evolution. I find dropping a creationist attitude into the book to be insidious, and it took the book from exceedingly annoying to actually angering me. Your mileage may vary.

As for why the book already irritated me, well, so many reasons. Let’s start with what I referenced as the elements taken from a series I liked better. I won’t tell you what they are yet, see if you can guess just from the set up of the book’s first few chapters: Alcatraz is an odd kid, living with a foster family that doesn’t like him much. Strange things tend to happen when he’s around, things that he can’t explain. Then, on his birthday, he gets a mysterious letter. He can’t quite make sense of it, but it’s definitely linked to his dead family and a world they belonged to, a world he doesn’t know anything about—at least, not until a large, boisterous man who knew him when he was a baby appears and takes him away, telling him all about the world and how he’s expected to be a huge part of it. In fact, he may well be the hero that secret world has been waiting for.

Did you catch that? No? Then look up at the cover image again. Brown hair, kind of messy… oh, and those REALLY THICK GLASSES. Now, the glasses are a plot point, but still. Could the book be trying any harder to yell, “I am a wacky adventure and if you liked Harry Potter, you will love me!”? Because, good lord. I know that HP was, itself, a very archetypal story and not exactly blazing ground or telling a particularly original tale. But the resemblance was so direct, I was kind of amazed it was published.

But what really, really annoyed me about the book was the narration. It’s a first-person book, so Alcatraz is telling the story. And Alcatraz will not shut up. The book is full of asides where he talks about nothing directly relating to the plot or action of the story; usually these are about books and writing. Which sounds interesting until you realize that it’s four to five paragraphs of this for every event that happens in the book. And I don’t mean event like big, dramatic plot point, I mean event as in, every little thing Alcatraz does. Like opening the door. Or getting in the car. Sometimes these asides are a couple pages long. It takes away any dramatic build and wrecks the pacing. The whole book is based around one event—getting the sands back—but it reads very much like the sort of thing which should kick off an adventure in a better-paced book. Instead, it’s the whole book, because the narration gets in the way of letting things happen.

Aside from which, the narration is also incredibly smug and self-satisfied. Most of the asides, rather than amusing, are about how truly wonderful and amazing of a book it is…which it isn’t. There are a lot of bits about how evil librarians would like you to read real literature, but real literature is boring and about dead dogs and dead mothers and is all stupid, and people should read good books (like his) instead:

Actually, my experience has been that people generally don’t recommend this kind of book at all. It is far too interesting. Perhaps you have had other kinds of books recommended to you. Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you “have to read.” Those books are invariably described as “important” –which, in my experience, means that they’re boring. (Words like meaningful or thoughtful are other good clues.)

Right, because god forbid anyone read literary fiction, or enjoy being challenged or thoughtful. I am usually the first person to defend genre fiction from people who claim it isn’t worthwhile, but it turns out, I can’t stand the opposite, either. There is a place for all kinds of books and stories, and it isn’t anyone’s job to talk about how terrible the other kind are. Reading that passage (and, in fact, the rest of the book), I didn’t feel like a kindred spirit who enjoys good, non-tragic stories about magic and adventure, I felt annoyed and wanted to know where the hell Alcatraz/Sanderson got off trying to tell me what kinds of stories are objectively good or bad, and what was right or wrong to enjoy.

The even more irritating thing was that it read like someone might have, at some point, told Sanderson that he had a bad habit of talking too much for no reason and instead of taking the criticism to heart—or even just blowing it off—he worked hard at making fun of whomever had dared. Because you get passages like the following, lengthy bit of stupidity at the beginning of chapter 10:

Are you annoyed with me yet?

Good. I’ve worked very hard – perhaps I will explain why later – to frustrate you. One of the ways I do this is by leaving cliff-hangers at the ends of chapters. These sorts of things force you, the reader, to keep on plunging through my story.

This time, at least, I plan to make good on the cliff-hanger. The one at the end of the previous chapter is entirely different from the hook I used at the beginning of the book. You remember that one, don’t you? Just in case you’ve forgotten, I believe it said:

“So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.”

This sort of behavior – using hooks to start books – is inexcusable. In fact, when you read a sentence like the one at the beginning of a book, you should know not to continue reading. I have it on good authority that when an author gives a hook like this, he isn’t ever likely to explain why the poor hero is tied to an altar – and, if the explanation does come, it won’t arrive until the end of the story. You’ll have to sit through long, laborious essays, wandering narratives, and endless ponderings before you reach the small bit of story that you wanted to read in the first place.

Hooks and cliff-hangers belong only at the ends of chapters. That way, the reader moves on directly to the next page – where, thankfully, they can read more of the story without having to suffer some sort of mindless interruption.

Honestly, authors can be so self-indulgent.

Talk about self-indulgent. That whole passage adds nothing at all to the book. It interrupts what was, indeed, a decent cliffhanger at the end of the previous chapter. By the time I finished it, I was annoyed; not at the cliffhanger, but at the narration. It gets in its own way. It destroys the suspense by taking you out of the moment, out of the story as a whole. It reads as if someone told Sanderson, “You know, the narration can be kind of clever, but don’t you think you should tone it down?” and instead of doing that, he decided to hang a lamp on it, spending more of the book talking about the book than actually telling the story. And most of it is so very smug, so very disdainful of the idea that someone might not enjoy it, and so caught on how totally awesome and great it is, that it induces the need to strangle.

On top of all that, the book tries so desperately hard to be wacky that it’s merely annoyingly random. Like, for example, I really like some of the basic concepts, like that it’s a magic talent that causes Alcatraz to break everything he touches, but when you look at other people’s talents (being late! falling down! spouting gibberish!), plus things like talking dinosaurs and references to giant penguins and the repetition of the word “rutabaga” it reads as, “Look at me! I’m silly! Aren’t I wacky? Aren’t you entertained?! This is so fun and wacky!!!!!!!”

Which… No. Wackiness and randomness can be fun and hilarious and entertaining, but if you have to yell about how fun and wacky they are, you’re failing at it. But then, if you have to devote pages and pages and pages to talking about how awesome the literary techniques you’re using are instead of just using them well… Nope. “Show, don’t tell,” applies there. Show me you’re a good writer by using literary techniques; show me you’re funny by making me laugh.

This book failed to entertain and amuse me. It failed to engage me in its story. It made me actively dislike the protagonist, and failed to interest me even a little in any of the other characters. There were, at its core, a couple of decent ideas, but the writer seems to have gone out of his way to bury them under a giant pile of stupid. And that’s without the whole creationism thing I ranted about at the beginning of this review. But on the plus side… Uh… It was written in complete sentences?

But, hell. Okay, so you want to know about that hook at the beginning? It was never explained; presumably, the writer will get around to it somewhere in the sequel. Which I will not be reading, because a hook isn’t enough to make me ever want to go near this series—or the writer—again. This book is epic fail. It is the first book in Active Voice history to get zero cupcakes, because while I was going to give it half a cupcake because I did finish it, I am of the opinion that no one else should read it, ever.