Some random and varied book reviews and rants

[sugaredwhimsey]

Among the many things I got into this summer was settling down to do some reading. Supplanted by the library and garage sales, I kind of ran the gamut.

In truth, I've read some interesting stuff this summer, but as usual, I really want to discuss the bad stuff, the stuff which makes me want to say stuff.

But since this blog is bereft of OH HEY THIS IS AWESOME, we'll start with the good.

Spoilers tried to keep to the minimum, but, as ever, I usually assume that if you're reading a review you have some vested interest of what someone else's opinion is, therefore you have probably seen or read it.


I finally settled down to read some Terry Prachett. I checked out The Color of Magic, and to be honest, got distracted with other things and never finished it. I will probably pick it up some day, it wasn't that I disliked it or anything, I just...got distracted.
  On the other hand, I got an audio book of The Wee Free Men and just fell in love, so I read A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith. Have yet to find I Shall Wear Midnight.
  While I do have to wonder why the initial book is called The Wee Free Men, other than they are completely awesome, I was relieved to find the book was wholly, fully and totally about Tiffany Aching. Our nine year old heroine is the youngest of a gaggle of girls, save her younger brother, Wentworth. I pretty much loved the first one the most. It's really a great book, and you don't need to have read lots of Discworld to get into it. The book gently rounds out this world, and never loses sight of the fact that Tiffany's story is taking place in a rather vastly populated world, BUT never loses the focus on Tiffany. Tiffany herself is such a great fully rounded female character, different from everyone around her, deeply rooted to her home. Though she will be a witch, there isn't a lot of magic in this book, just Tiffany being clever and practical. There is so much going on here; the kidnapping of Wentworth, Tiffany meeting the Feegles, her burgeoning abilities, and as well a lot of unresolved emotions surrounding Granny Aching, and whether or not she was a witch.
   A Hat Full of Sky isn't quite as good, for it feels awkwardly transitional and you'd be hard pressed to really detect where eleven year old Tiffany is different than nine year old, though it is replete with awkwardness.  Wintersmith has a much clearer sense of her advancement into being a teenager. All the books, however, have Tiffany as strong, capable, and brave.  In all the books there are wildly funny parts, many of which surround the Nc Mac Feegle, who never fail to charm. While the first book seamlessly interwove the Nac Mac Feegle into the tale, later books they feel the tiniest, littlest bit shoehorned in, but because they add so much and are so amusing I pretty much forgave them. The world itself is populated by a cast of interesting and quirky characters- and mostly female, which is pretty wonderful. The witches are all great fun. The prose is fun and quick, but never feels dumbed down or shirks, the way some books aimed at a young audience can. I enjoyed these without the caveat 'for a kid's book'.
My one and truly minor complaint is that though Tiffany is odd, studious, not terribly interested in domestics, slightly detached, responsible, brave, has no real interest in "female" pastimes like child rearing, romance ect. and is smart and proactive, many of these qualities are attached to her being a witch. They are not part of a potential female spectrum, but are indicative of her being a witch, something to be born into, by the by, and not something learned. It's not a huge gripe, but I did feel odd about it a couple of times, especially in A Hat Full of Sky, because in Wee Free Men we only have the Feegle's word for it, and they aren't exactly a reputable source.
But, regardless, GO READ THESE BOOKS. THEY ARE OBSCENELY GOOD.

I also read The Hurrell Style: 50 Years of Photographing Hollywood, pictures by Hurrel and text by Whitney Stine. I found it at a garage sale and really picked it up for the photographs, but the small amounts of text are actually really interesting. The book has an intro, explaining to you how George Hurrell came to be where he was, and covers his trek from being a painter to being a photographic genius who eventually became employed by a number of movie studios. His methods were unorthodox, and he made art where other photographers just did their job. The book then has photos of actresses and actors ( A few directors and costume designer Adrian thrown in) and a little blurb about them, what their sittings were like, and details about how he would light for a specific face.

He took a lot of the most glamorous photos of Judy Garland ever:



He didn't touch up, he just lit them well. It's really an interesting read, and just hearing about how the settings went gives you a perspective of many of these people when they weren't 'onstage' if you will.

Then, at another garage sale I found....Star Trek Memories by WIlliam Shatner and Chris Kreski. A funny coincidence since recently on Netflix I watched Captains a Shatner lead documentary about the various people to play Star Ship Captains (Read: Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, Avery Brooks and four minutes with Chris Pine.). The documentary was....weird. Let's put it that way.
  Anyway, I had an abridged audio version of Star Trek Memories (READ BY SHATNER!) and was really excited to find the full novel. It's a fun read, though not as brisk as you might think. It's actually wildly interesting, the amount of work that went into the show. It's written in first person with many inserts from the dozens of people Shatner interviewed. The book starts somewhat sluggishly, with Shatner reflecting during the filming of one of the Star Trek movies in the eighties. As soon as it zips back in time it picks up a lot more. The book begins with Roddenberry, with how he got into television writing, and then got enough clout to create the series. A good half of the book actually takes place before Shatner was ever on the project, which makes this not his memories of Star Trek exclusively. Instead, we hear about the arduous battle to even get the show off the ground, the time spent battling over characters, scrips, designs and the various studio heads. It's  quite fascinating. Of the remaining half of the book, the first season and difficulties surrounding it comprise the bulk of it, with the third season and the show's demise rounding it out.  There are a lot of interesting bits and pieces, and quite a few laugh out loud funny parts. It's all written off of interviews and hearsay, so occasionally accounts clash. The book does have a bias for the on set level, and the higher ups at DesiLu get painted as villains a lot, but it's not bad. The main core of actors get to talk about specific events on set, but mostly this is focused on Roddenberry, Coon and Justman, less on the day-to-day set antics.
On the whole, very enjoyable read.

Jennifer Cruise's Anyone But You doesn't bear much commenting on. It's one of the older women/younger man sub-genre of romance novels. I actually like this genre, though I'm a little bit tired of the tension of the story being that the forty year old woman doesn't have the selc confidence to fuck the young man. Still, there were a lot of little things I liked in this book, including Fred.

And then, for some reason, in the middle of the summer I thought it would be a great idea to enrage myself.

I don't know why.

It started because I read a Merlin fanfic loosely based on The Selection by Keira Cass. I decided I might pick up that book, give it a chance. The library didn't have it, so I picked up

Of Poseidon by Anna Banks
Enchanted by Alethea Kontis
Carnival of Souls by  Melissa Marr

I ended up with the first two because, as you can tell, they were right where the Cass book would have been if it were there. The last one was on prominent display and I figured what the hell.. I also remembered some talk from some board somewhere how a lot of interesting things were going on in YA fiction and, well, I  was in the mood for a fluffy read.

I can tell you that when I was a young adult, here is what I read: The Baby Sitter's Club, Sleepover Friends, The Fabulous Five, Christopher Pike books, a few R.L. Stine Fear Street books, various classics and a smattering of other stuff; whatever looked good. There was also adult fiction; Romance novels and fantasy novels. I read The Mists of Avalon in sixth grade. My classmates were very impressed.  But, to be honest, in actual teen oriented fiction, there wasn't a lot of..um..sauciness. The Christopher Pike books were as good as they got, and there was maybe a sentence or two about how they'd done it.  But, again, I didn't spend much time in the YA section. I went from the young young books to adult books. I just found I didn't have time for most childish shenanigans in transition books, because I was such a voracious reader unless a book was catering to some specific likes (Say, a unicorn on the cover) I preferred to read more adult stuff. Not that I didn' have a huge place in my heart for a large number of kids books. And I was interested in sex at a very young age, which proves TV has nothing to do with that. My BBB was reading the Sweet Valley Twins books, which, by the time we were old enough to read them we were over ten years old. I personally found them dull and difficult tor elate to the problems of the blondest, prettiest twins in whitebread America.

I also read a lot of manga, though at this time, the late '90s, it wasn't widly available as it is now.

I maintain that the particular niche market for teenage girls ages 15-20 (and women who never grew the fuck out of that) wasn't anything like it is today. So, I look at this inflix of teen books and, well, wow. It's a lot different than what I read.

And in many cases, shittier.

And, hell, anti-feminist. The fucking BabySitter's Club was more empowering.

In terms of offensiveness Enchanted was the one that irked me the least. As someone who has read a lot of folklore I quite enjoyed some elements of this, constructing a world where fairy tales would happen and the rules that one finds in them are a part of the fabric of life. It reminded me a little of Diana Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle, only nowhere near as good. The whole set up is a bit too Mary Sue, though some of the concepts were good.  The ending I actually especially liked because it harkened back to true fairy tales; where, in the end, your just punishment might be to be stuck naked inside a barrel studded with nails and dragged through the town by a pair of snow white horses (a la Goose Girl) or some versions of Cinderella where the step-sisters end up with parts of their feet chopped off and blinded (It's only been in the last hundred years or so that the heroines of such stories have become too good for a little old fashioned vengeance). There's a lot of interesting tragedy and consequence which grounds Enchanted from being otherwise disposable.

However, the rest of it is a flip-flopping hodge-podging meandering mess. First of all, given lisence to throw well known fairy tales into the mix Kontis goes to town, only it comes off almost as haphazard, and sometimes parts of the plot seem to work expressly to fit in another fairy tale. Like the adopted fae brother selling (I want to say cow, but I think maybe it wasn't) something for beans a la Jack and the Beanstalk.  There was a whole sequence where all the sisters (including already married sister Monday who is a Princess) go to the second night of a three night ball, having been huge successes the night before. While in the courtyard to enter for the second night other female guests take it into their head to beat the shit out of the Woodcutter girls and I was like WTF? When did I walk into an elite high school campus in a shojo manga? The attack serves to pitch Sunday towards her prince and her sister to the King, but the whole thing feels so trumped up and inorganic.
   Sunday, as a heroine is bland and fairly uninteresting, which she points out is more or less her curse, though I was still waiting for a



(MY FIRST GIF. STAND IN AWE. It took me like three hours to make it.)

moment, but it never happened. We're saved from utter boredom by having chapters flip back and forth between POVs, but that really makes it feel a little unfocussed. Really, all the OTHER stuff going on in Roland's life is way more interesting than what takes place in most of the book. The chapter's effectively become: Roland sets stuff up in his chapter and Sunday reacts in hers. Actually, EVERYONE else's story was way more interesting. I may pick up further volumes, but only if I don't have pay for them.

Of Poseidon was actually the first book of the trio I read. I finished it in about a day and then wished I hadn't checked it out at all.

In the continuing trait of OMG, LET'S MAKE A SUPERNATURAL WORLD WHERE BOTH GENDERS HAVE THE SAME ABILITIES BUT WOMEN ARE STILL MYSTERIOUSLY SECOND CLASS, this book pissed me off fairly early.

The books starts out decently enough with Emma running into sexy Galen while on vacation with her black friend. YAY! ETHNIC DIVERSITY! YAY FRIENDSHIP! Why do the girls in these books never have friends? I mean, I was at the low end of the social spectrum watching anime and stuff, but I still had friends. In fact, to be a friendless female, your crimes have to be fairly egregious because we are a much more social gender. In Enchanted Sunday is supposed to be 'bonny and blithe and good and gay'. And apparantly knows no one outside her own family and is incapable of making friends who are not her own sisters. Which seems weird to me.
So I was happy to see the girl have a friend.
And then Chloe dies in the next chapter.
Fuck you, Anna Banks.
I guess what bugs me about this is that it feel senseless. Ostensibly, the attack by shark of Chloe wakes up Emma's Syrena abilities so she is able to command the shark away and Galen can notice her specialsnowflakness, but it really feels like disposing of her best friend wants to isolate Emma in an uncomfortable way, espeaiclly in light of all the stalking and entrapping to follow. If Emma had an old friend she shared everything with, we wouldn't half half of the dumbfuckery going on.
  We generally skip the grief over Chloe, head straight back home to Emma's mom, who is simulataneously neglectful and over-protective as hell, depending on what the plot wants done. Galen, meanwhile, who is a prince of the Syrena, superrich diplomat to the land (and for various reasons brought his sister Reyna along and her FORCE!betrothed Toraf), follows Emma home, buys a house, enrolls in her school, stalks, intimidates and otherwise orders her around. They will have an awkward attraction that will make you want them both get entangled in tuna nets and mulched into a can of Chicken of the Sea's finest.

The primary conflict of the tale is a mix of discovering what exactly Emma is (And really, your options were slim, you are all retarded for not figuring this out within ten minutes) and her reaction/acclimation to it and Syrena culture. Which is fucking bullshit. Actually, the Syrena make no sense. Why would a marine species shed its tail for human form to have their sex? What purpose does that have, biologically speaking, except to find some reason for all these mer-people to be wandering around on land willy nilly. Why is there a diplomat to the land- a prince, no less- when the population in general has no idea about the Syrena? Galen doesn't seem to actually do anything. He has no official duties, and his human keeper is some woman who he saved from being killed by the mafia.
Anyway, there some nonsense about clans or whatever, the structure of Syrena society is pitifully explained when in light of what we discover: that Emma, with her whole talking-to-marine-life-skill, clearly must not only be Syrena, but of a specific strain of royal blood. So it's weird we don't understand Syrena culture better, because according to Syrena law she has got to marry Galen's older brother to...maintain peace? I don't know. This is a problem because Galen has the hots for her, and his brother is still butthurt over his last wife ditching him (DUR HUR, GUESS WHO SHE TURNS OUT TO BE.). Galen wants Emma for himself, but seeing how in Syrena culture the women don't even have to be present or represented by a proxy to be wed, let alone give consent, he's fucked.

And this is the main conflict of the book. Is it just me or is there a lot of rich opprotunity, seeing as in the last hundred years mankind has beens eriously pushing into the ocean, our populations are huge, like, there's a whole wealth of issues that could make an idea of a second marine empire responding to ours interesting. But no. Shitty Syrena culture it sounds to me if it was better if it died.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, but I didn't give a shit. Emma is a dumbfuck of a character, who, despite the recent death of her best friend, revelations her parents have lied to her her whole life, and the discovery she is a haldbreed, is revoltingly fixated on Galen, so whatever convictions she has melt when she looks at him. Her abilities come and go. In the beginning of the book she turns away a shark, but later she has to be rescued by Galen from another shark. Her capabilites vacilate, and while she comes close to sticking it to Galen a couple of times, she can never overcome the soft focus lust. Galen is a hypocrital douche who wants to command her total obediance.  And to make things confusing, the chapters flip flop between the two of them, only Emma's chapters are first person and Galen's are third person, which is weird.

Worse still, I couldn't get a grip on so many of the Syrena elements of the story. It's so muddled, you're never clear what one of these creatures looks like, let alone how their society works or why we should care. I can't even tell if the obvious Triton/Poseidon fuck up is laziness, or if she was building a whole new society and it was too vague for us to tell. Actually, this book is incredibly lazy unless it's about some stunted and revolting teen romance. The secondary characters might as well not exist for all they contribute to the story, and what they do contribute is Reyna trying to dodge a forced marriage, and the book effectively chiding her for it and we're supposed to really love Toraf for not forcing the matter. And yet Reyna really lurrves her people, and I'm like..WHY? WHY WOULD YOU NOT GET OUT? You have options here. But the book doesn't want to have, you know, thoughts.

And then...Carnival of Souls.

I actually couldn't remember the name of this one. Or the author. Or ANY PRINCIPAL CHARACTER'S NAMES. If you know me, this is a horrific danger sign.

It took me two hours to find it on GoodReads. Apparently YA SHIT is not a valid tag. Which is bullpucky. It should be.

This is a bad book. Just, bad. Horrifically bad. Rage inducingly bad. And another book to feature some supernatural society where women also appear to be daimons, have claws and can kill, but they are still second class. And, like Of Poseidon, it also has a male authority figure telling the young hero Kaleb 'okay, you're married now' without ceremony or presence of the person he's being married too, though this one managed to make it worse twofold; A-In Of Poseidon, at least Reyna knew it was going to happen. Carnival of Soul's Mallory is completely ignorant  and B- the edict is to get her pregnant before the year is out or the marriage is void.

Wee.

Okay, that's jumping ahead, but still. I don't know where to begin with this foul, putrid excuse for a novel. There is so much to loathe and loathe fully and completely, and I do, oh, I do.

Here's what happens: the opening chapter features a  pregant woman (who may or may not be a daimon, I am unclear about the distinction between herself and standard daimons) seeking asylum for her child from the father with a witch named Adam. He's like 'sure, but you swear the kid is mine and you have no claim or importance in its life and I can ditch you at any time'.

Strike One. And not even through the first five pages.

Skip to sixteen years later. Kaleb is a 'cur', a sort of low caste daimon in some sort of...alternate dimension thingy which seems to comprise a massive and depraved city (imaginatively called 'The City') surrounded by untamed wildlands. His pack consists of one member rescued from said wild lands, Zavi. Zavi moonlights as a prostitute, Kaleb works as an assassin, but at the moment he is taking part in a fighting competition, the winner of which will join the higher caste of demons, and no longer be subject to apparently wanton murder and will join their government.
While fighting in this competition, Kaleb also has a contract to find a girl, and to do this he has slipped into the human world to spy on Mallory, and not very well, since she's spotted him and has the lusts for him. Mallory is a girl living in the US who is receiving apparently intense weapon training against daimons by her 'Dad' Adam. Whom she will refer to as Daddy far too often for any reader to be comfortable. She is being protected from something.
We'll switch POV's with these two, and with Aya. Aya is a female high caste daimon, who has apparently scandelized her world by joining the fight, since while not implicitly illegal, it has never been done. Aya needs to win, because she wants to avoid marriage and breeding totally, not just with the guy she's been betrothed to, Belias. Belias is having none of that though. He's in love with her.

What will follow is a lot of senseless running around, and not a hell of a lot happening despite everyone's amped emotions. Kaleb and Mallory apparently fall in love for reasons I cannot fathom. They share barely any face time. Kaleb splits his time fighting in the daimon realm, prepring for his fighting, making deals re; his fighting, and battling with his attraction to Mallory, and the fact that he was pretty much hired to kill her. He also figures out who and what she is. Mallory stays at home and does everyone anyone orders of her.
By a huge margin, Aya is the most interesting thing in the book, and I liked her a lot, except towards the end, when you discover what her deal is, the book seems to treat her with a kind of disdain which I found hard to swallow. Apparently Mallory, who meekly does what ordered, is the blueprint were're supposed to follow. Aya fights, and tricks, and spies and makes deals, with roadblocks put up at every point to get out of this breeding thing. She's brave, touch, clever and ruthless...but like Of Poseidon, we're somehow supposed to be angry at her for her treatment of Belias because he loves her so much. She loves him too, I think, but she isn't about to let that slow her down. I only wish she spoke more of the injustice of it, and not made the whole thing about her not wanting to get discovered as a half witch by reproducing (YEAH. SURPRISE.)

This books also ends on a cliffhanger. A fucktastic one. Because, see, Mallory's 'Dad' Adam has disappeared. I'm supposed to tune in next week to see Adam be rescued (I hate him, and want him to die), to see if Kaleb ever legs Mallory know they're married and he's gonna have to stick his penis in her and how will that affect their relationship (I hope it crumbles), to see what superevil witch Aya's mom had planned (She's such a stone bitch I don't give a fuck) and to see what becomes of Aya and Belias (they'll get together. We all know it.).

Glaring enormous problems with this book:

• The Daimon world: If it doesn't take you ten minutes to figure out that it was probably the witches that won the war the daimons brag about but is never explained, you have some problems. In fact, take Kaleb. He's joe shmoe in the daimon world, who has found an out into the human world, in which he runs around freely. Other daimon's must also go to the human world, because they continue to catch witches to be slaves and later we find out all kinds of assassins come after Mallory. At no point does anyone, or Kaleb notice that the witches have been 'exiled' to a massive planet with no creeping wildlands infringing on their small territory? At no point does he notice the citizens are not living in full terror day to day? That Americans at least, have an egalitarian society? Really? No daimons can put two and two together? Fuck, they're dumb, aren't they?  Still, this is one uncertain world, murder and prostitution roam free, and most of the population seems to live in desparation, held in check by archaic he-said-she-said laws which bias the upper castes. While I get that these aren't humans and harbor an inherently more violent nature, a lot of the elements thrown in feel willy nilly.  I have no sense of a past or a biology of these creatures. Are they from Earth? Were they created by witches? Why can witches summon them? What's worse of course is that this society, as well as being dark, is rigidly sexist in wild spurts. Women are constantly referred to as breeders or things. In fact, at the end of the book where Kaleb is making his offer to -spoiler- head daimon and Mallory's Dad, NEITHER ONE OF THEM REFER TO HER BY NAME. They keep calling her by object names. It is supremely creepy. All women are commanded to breed. The right to give Mallory away comes from some bizarro daimon laws, which I think mean that Head Daimon can assign anyone to marry anyone else. Mallory is somehow protected by this fate because she comes under her 'parent's purview, which is somehow Adam, who is not blood relation...? It's all confusing and nonsensical. We also have Zavi, who works as a prostitute, but...he's a dude. Are we saying that he bangs other men daimons, or that this rigid society wherein the female role to ONLY BREED doesn't count when a woman visits a prostitute? I don't know.  There are a few neat little elements in this book, but they feel thrown in, and not attached to anything else.
• Adam: In the beginng of the book Mallory's mom promises her to Adam in exnchanged for protection, devalueing herself to do so.  Adam intends to use Mallory as a tool, though over time has began to love her as his own. Mallory has happy memories of them as a family, until at some point Adam just kicks Mallory's mom to the curb for some bullshit reason that she isn't needed. His plan appears to be to keep Mallory hidden until she reaches 17 (I think) because  apparently he can protect her until then CoughHARRYPOTTERcough. To this end, he has totally wiped her memories, and taught her how to use weapons...and sends her to public school where she'll be out of his sight and vulnerable for  eight hours a day. Okay, then. You don't want to keep her mom around or hire some witch lackey to home school her? Keep her from roaming around loose? No. Okay. Makes no sense. The more you read about Adam's intentions the more you realize how little of what he does makes any sense. That he claims to love her, but the things he's doing 'for her own good' are sensless violations of trust and harmful to Mallory. You also find out he's been erasing and controlling her memory. Yes. The mark of a good Daddy is mind control. And again, this is treated as being totally okay. At one point he straight up tells her what he's going to do that it's better this way despite the fact that his whole plan is clearly unraveling, and Mallory gets all lip quivery but is like 'okay Daddy'. The hair stood up on my arms, people. SO this guy's plan was: 'Okay...I'm going to hide the entire truth of my not daughter's daimon heritage, despite the fact that I claim to love her, by ripping her mother away from her, moving her around so she forms no attachments except to me but also sending her to public school, casting all kinds of spells on her, giving her massive weapons training on half truths, erasing her memory of transformation and kidnap attempts, and not mentally preparing her at all for the time when her daimon Daddy is gonna come, force her into his world and make her marry some guy who will refer to her as a breeder'. Besides creating an individual with severe hang ups, there is no margin of error to this plan, and it's not like the guy has allies. His own sister is a stone cold bitch who hates Mallory.
• Kaleb Mallory Romance: Based on nothing than some nebulous sense on Kaleb's part that Mallory belongs in his pack... Guys, I've read omega fic with better world building than this. Apparently his desire to protect Mallory is supposed to inspire us to want her to end up with a killer for hire, even though, you know, he's a nice killer. Mallory has a nothing personality, the author mistakenly thinking that putting a gun in her hands makes her strong. The relationship is built on nothing but them looking at each other and their sexual attraction, and in the end Kaleb goes to her daimon dad and asks to have her. Without ever informing Mallory this is an option. Then, Kaleb has been married to Mallory, who doesn't even fully know what she is let alone the laws of those people, but has been raised in human society which is leaps and yards different, and he is in no way worried about the fall out. Why should he have to? Mallory will be his. Her feelings about the situation are inconsequential. This is not a relationship I want to root for.
• Character's Circumstances. This is a weird one, but bear with me. This book has no follow through with the emotions of the dire situations and dark circumstances it forces the characters into. It's not afraid to mention these things, but it doesn't want them to have any meaning. Mallory discovers that not only is she not human, but Adam forced her mother away, and he's been meddling with her memory, and about her only reaction is 'oh. huh'. Zavi is apparently a male prostitute familiar with abuse, but it never seems to affect him. Kaleb and Aya are basically teenage killers, and their species and society makes them difficult to relate to. Aya discovers she is essentially a tool to her real mother-her daimon parents are never mentioned- and Belias, a man she cares about seems to hate her now, but that doesn't touch her.
• Women: *Sigh* I know, but really? Painting mother's as useless to children after the immediate weaning years are over? All women with power are cold hearted and evil bitches who use men? The ideal circumstance for a woman is to submit to total ignorance or obediance over male figures? Women's only purpose is breeding or being super villains? Why is this book full of men taking care of Mallory's problems for her, not because she can't, but because she has totalIy no idea she has problems? Her agency in this book as been compeltely nuetered by the total ignorance this character lives in. It's no wodner she's referred to as a thing, for all she does in the book.

And you know what? I'm done. Don't read this book. Spare yourself. I'm already a goner.