Review: The Work Of The Devil by Katherine Amt Hanna

All credit to the cover designer. This is an arresting image with fantastic use of tone. I like almost everything about it. (The borders are too tight on the author's name, but I'll go with it.) This should be on a NYT bestseller, but it's not. It's on a novella from fledgling author Katherine Amt Hanna. When I read Hanna's work it feels like there is a major talent inside who can't quite get where she needs to be. The fact that I found The Work of the Devil to be flawed and still have tons of comments to make illustrates that. I'd rather be frustrated by Hanna than entertained by many. It's my hope she keeps writing.

The Work of the Devil is a fairly classic SF set up. It's evocative of golden age books while keeping a modern pace. It it was a short filler story in an ongoing series I'd probably be calling it brilliant. Unfortunately, there are no full length novels holding it up. Hanna has built more world than she can comfortably deal with in 70 odd pages. This leaves gaps the reader can't leap. She also relies on a few twists the experienced SF reader will easily see coming. As well, in a book largely free of racial cues, she ends with a bit of whiteness. It's so tiny it's not even a sin but until Hanna introduced pointedly Hispanic characters I hadn't assigned race to most of her leads. The larger problem keeping The Work of the Devil from realizing it's potential is authorial choice. Hanna appears to be supporting an American obsession - the purity of the ignorant faithful. Her dominant character holds to his simplicity and triumphs against a powerful force beyond his understanding.  He hails from a community which is faith based and machine averse. We slowly come to understand there is a an second community more like our own (or an early 1900's version) with limited mobility and no aircraft. This second community is not explored and exists only to solve problems for the main characters.

Why the main community has limited contact with the second for hundreds of years is explained as an article of faith. They are sworn to shun, so they largely do. These are weighty issues for a novella to carry. The division has to be accepted for the reader to continue. Through the second community the main community is made aware that their lifespans are shorter and their illnesses greater. A third community (or artifact) is potentially the source of this difference. The second community cannot approach the artifact because reasons. Those reasons are explained as a compulsion they involuntarily experience. Our main community feels these compulsions in differing but muted amounts. The second community theorizes it's a function of proximity but the logic for this is shaky. It's made shakier when our main community approaches the artifact and only the least worldly of the characters is able to maintain free will. The compulsion extending from the artifact affects each in different ways without an explanation for those differences made. The purpose or origin of the artifact is left unsaid as well. Toward the end our main characters are told there may be a dozen of these artifacts left in place for hundreds of years. Why? To what end? Is there a repercussion for the destruction of one?

Why destroy the artifact at all?  Is Hanna in favor of the destruction, or does she oppose it? The most sympathetic character is set up to make a sacrifice and achieve a victory. He is the least knowledgable. He is a man of faith and rules, not deep thought or insight. A man he trusts says there is an object they do not understand and that object must be destroyed. Destroying it may (or may not) change the health of their community. (I'd argue their rejection of the medical knowledge the second community has could be a factor in the differing life spans.) They approach the artifact. It has machines therefore it is evil, because their faith labels all machines as evil. It has the ability to alter their behavior and it takes an animal for food (as do they, but that's beyond their insight levels). It exists, it is not them, and therefore it must be destroyed. The author's position in this is invisible. I don't believe it's invisible by design. The Work of the Devil reads like a text written without an eye to what the author knows versus what the reader knows. The ending is frustrating because the reader is not certain of the previous events' meaning. The Work of the Devil is a great pitch piece but it isn't a great novella. You should still read it.

Review: The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz

To be completely honest, I can't really call this a review. Perhaps I should have labeled it a strong recommendation. What would I say? As a protagonist the legislative bodies of America frequently act in odds with the nation's self interest. I find it unlikely that such actions would occur. Insanely rich people are completely fine with breaking the economic core of the nation, rendering them unsympathetic.  Voters are locked in an abusive relationship through a lack of choices and a powerful desire to self harm.

Actually, that review would probably rock. Alas, it remains unwritten.

With The Price of Inequality Stiglitz lays out some pretty tedious economic theory in an accessible and popular way. You might think you understand why our economy is bleeding jobs while your bank account gets thinner but you really don't. Unless you do, I don't want to prejudge you. However I am not a Nobel Prize winning economist and therefore found Stiglitz made several outstandingly infuriating points. What we do about it, that's a different story. Step one, admit you have a problem.

We are so screwed.

I'd like to pretend that I've been spending my time reading books like this one. Or genre fiction, or comic books. To be truthful I've spent the slump evaluating various iPad games. VelociRapture vs Monsters Ate My Condo? I'm your girl.  Things are looking up though, since I switched from the K3 back to the Land of Sony Readers my reading has gone up dramatically.

Review: Breakdown by Katherine Amt Hanna

Generally, I'm not one for self publishing. I've read some self published books that turned me off reading for weeks on end. That said, it's a new publishing world. Connie Brockway is jumping into the deep end. I think the cool kids are doing it. Time to expand my horizons. As it happens, I'd been hearing about Breakdown for some time. (It's one of those know someone who knows someone who knows the author situations.) God, I hate telling people they were right. I really, truly do. It's up there with filing my income taxes and reading fashion magazines. Credit where it is due, they were correct. Hanna can write.

So let's get the bad stuff out of the way. The cover does the content a disservice. Breakdown's cover makes me think we're getting something about a teenager. The backpack, the pencil shading, the coloration, the title, it all says Young Adult Angst. While this book would certainly work for the YA market, it's dealing almost entirely with older characters. (It's not spelled out, but most seem to be in their thirties.)  To it's credit, it is remarkably free of typos, grammatical errors, continuity issues. Breakdown scores better than half the majors on that score. To it's detriment, there are some fairly obvious fixes the author needs to take. Hanna has set a specific (and now past) timeline for her tale thereby dating it and throwing the reader out of the story. That's the easy fix. The slightly harder fix (and one I think an editor would suggest) is that Hanna has a few too many characters. I'd toss two or three right off the top. They don't advance the story. Neither do they weigh it down, but it's still parsley on the plate. Still, I never felt I was reading a self published book (with all the connotations that carries).

Breakdown is a great read. A one-sitting, I-stayed-up-too-late, why-is-it-over great read. For $2.99 I can recommend it with a clear conscience. At times Breakdown reminded me of the great sweet Americana romances of the early 90's. Hanna's setting is a post pandemic world, where the infrastructure has broken down and death has occurred on a 1918 (or far greater) plague scale. Having made his way from America to England over a period of several years, Chris finds himself unable to continue. Broken by his experiences during and after the pandemic, he finds solace in the simple life of a town the plague (but not it's after effects) passed by. If that sounds like the set up for a returning post Civil War romance, you're not far off. Breakdown has the same sweet yet horrific atmosphere as that lost genre. One of the best debuts I've read in ages. If this is the future of self publishing, sign me up.

Review: Night Betrayed by Joss Ware

Jayne Ann Krentz just got totally served. Your heroine is super sensitive, psychic, won't eat anything with a face, and tries to do good for others? Joss Ware will see that and raise you with single motherhood, a deep need to save the souls of zombies, and surviving the apocalypse. As an infant. Let's go.

I should hate this book, it has almost everything I dislike in romance thrown into a blender. But I really enjoyed it. Joss Ware may have converted me to paranormals with stupidly stubborn heroines all by herself. Let's see - take one part Internet Pioneer, one part Old Guy That Hangs Out On His Porch, one part Lightning Lad and you've got Theo. He's 80ish (he looks 30ish) and is looking for love or the return of MMO gaming. Maybe even both. Oh, and he's dead. But not a vampire. Or a zombie. There are no vampires here, so move along if that's your thing.

He's dead, then he's not dead, and in the process of not actually dying he meets Serena. (Hereafter the Krentz-Heroine-Slayer to me) Serena is 50ish, looks 30ish, and enjoys long walks out past the protective gates of the compound to save the souls of the misunderstood zombies. You might know zombies as smelly, nasty, undead creatures out to rip anything human to shreds and eat it, but Serena can see inside them to their human soul. It's kind of a mystery where all these zombies are coming from. Apparently, a few books ago, there was this group of loonies who decided to become immortal. Becoming immortal required the rising of the Island of Atlantis, which killed 90% of the world's population and knocked the earth off it's axis. I guess they succeeded, although why you'd want to be immortal in a world without pizza delivery is beyond me.

Theo and his pals are trying to restore the internet to bring the Immortal Ones to justice some 50 years after the big kill. At night, zombies wander the land to drag off blondes and munch on brunettes (really) while searching for some dude named Remington Truth. Bounty hunters destroy computers, people live in tightly isolated and guarded settlements, and some select people manage to find gas for Hummers. And old jeans. 50 year old jeans. I started to do the math on gas in reserve tanks, times number of Hummers used, times conveyance of same, and I just gave up. Some lucky people have Hummers with gas. Got it. (Plus, light bulbs! No, I need to stop thinking about that.)

The strongest thing going for Night Betrayed is the recognition that a guy who's been around for a hundred or so years and a girl who is in her twenties aren't going to have much to talk about. When Theo meets Serena he realizes that he needed an older woman in his life. Joss Ware does a decent job of setting the mood. (One character, Vonnie, made me think about what my own tween would endure if 90% of the planet died tomorrow.) She's not afraid to kill characters off. She's not afraid to acknowledge that the selfish prevail far more often than the generous. Although Night Betrayed was my first book in this ongoing series it stood on it's own feet well enough. While I don't feel a need to go back and read the prior books I am definitely interested in finding out what happens next.

*If the wait is long enough I might decide to catch up on the series just to find out more about this girl Remy. She shows up in the middle of the book for no apparent reason, gets raped a fair amount and ends unresolved. The rape, however, is not graphic or detailed and the rapists are quickly dealt with. All of the detailed sex in this book is by consent. While I personally don't care about Serena's labia, Theo does. A lot.