Review Sycamore 2

More of the same.

Picking right up where book one left off, Kurt and Minter join up with the resistance and begin plotting how to take down Sycamore and Amos. The same pacing and editing issues that were present in book one remain here, especially how the story dragged toward the end.

I also thought many of the new characters were equally as flat as Kurt, and I thought how Kurt and some of them were related was the height of contrived.

 I also wasn’t a fan of how no main characters were ever in danger, even when drones with missiles come after them. This really cheapened the ending, where everything wrapped up too neatly and few if anyone seemed to blame Kurt for the chaos his Seed caused.

There was also a massive plot hole: namely, the people who funded Sycamore and Amos were never brought to justice and are still out there plotting their next plan for world domination.

For these reasons, I give “Sycamore 2” 2.8 stars. A disappointing end to an interesting story.

Review: Sycamore by Craig A Falconer

An interesting idea marred by uneven pacing and flat passive characters.

In “Sycamore” Kurt Jacobs invents the Seed, a microchip implanted in people’s hand that allows them to connect to the Sycamore Corporation’s system via their VirualLenses. Soon the Sycamore Corporation, in collusion with the US government, forces everyone to be chipped and wear their VirtualLenses all the time.

There were several issues I had with this book and the others in the series. First, Kurt and the other character were flat and lacked any personality. He showed no concern for the increasingly fascist things Sycamore did until it affected him and his family.

Second, this book lacked proper editing. It’s supposed to be set in the US but used Britishisms like queue/queue up, meters instead of yards/feet, and jerry can instead of gas can. Moreover, the story dragged on to more than 60-plus chapters.

This wouldn’t have been an issue, if not for the pacing problems. Multiple chapters would go by with little to no plot progression, then event after event would happen, leading to whiplash. And as Kurt failed to react to most of these events, he came off as highly passively and little more than a plot device to experience the story.

But the biggest issue I had was we’re supposed to believe Kurt is a genius and hacker, yet he failed to foresee how his Seed could be misused and abused. This is especially glaring given later in the series we learn he frequented a conspiracy theory website. So, you mean to tell me he didn’t stop once to consider the privacy issues his Seed could cause?

I also took points off because it ended on a cliffhanger.

But the premise itself was interesting and seeing how society changed as Sycamore gained more power, becoming increasingly Orwellian, was like watching an extended episode of “Black Mirror.”

Because of the above, I give “Sycamore” 3.8 stars. If you can look past its faults, this is a decent story. 

Review: System Breaker by Craig A Falconer

“Sycamore System Breaker” is a companion story to the main Sycamore story and follows Peter Laymen, a character readers meet in “Sycamore 1,” whom Kurt helped get to his pregnant giving birth at a local hospital.

I liked this story more than those in “Sycamore X” or “Sycamore XL” as it’s more a novella/novelette, and as it’s longer and only focuses on Peter, we get to know him deeply.

I honestly wish more of the short stories were like this one. Perhaps if Falconer decreased the number of short stories in X and XL, he could have focused more on developing the characters by making the remaining stories longer.

I give “Sycamore System Breaker,” 3.8 out of 5.   

Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, is a series of interconnected stories that span centuries, each containing characters who are the reincarnated people from the previous stories. I wasn’t a fan of all the stories that took place in the distance, nor was I fan of the racism therein. I also thought all the stories started blurring together in a bland sameness as the book progressed.

And most of the stories failed to pique my interest aside from Sonmi-451, which follows a clone who gains sentience. Initially I thought this was a clever story, until I realized the clone in Sonmi-451 was essential an android in all but name, making it a cliche story about a robot becoming sentient.

Overall, I just thought the book was average and give it 3 out of 5 stars. You might like this more than me if you’re into historical fiction, which most of these stories were.  

Review: Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Like its successor, Dracula, Carmilla suffers from an ending that is anything but epic.

Set at a isolated castle in the Austria countryside, Carmilla is a horror novel in which the now teenage Laura recounts how she was preyed upon by the vampire Carmilla, and how Laura’s father and his friends eventually stop her.

I went into this book knowing nothing about it. But I deduced Carmilla was a vampire immediately, so when the big revelation came, I was not surprised at all.

Though, I was surprised how much lesbian subtext this book oozed. Carmilla professes her love to Laura and kisses her several times throughout and is possessive of Laura’s attention and affection to a disturbing degree, getting violent when Laura doesn’t do what she asks or dares contradict her. I found the whole thing toxic and perverse, when you consider Carmilla is over a century old.

I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as Dracula, as I thought it dragged in a lot of places and had several chapters with little plot advancement. I also thought how they found Carmilla’s final resting place was a huge deus ex machina. I also thought the ending was even more anticlimactic than Dracula.

Overall, I thought this book was rather boring and don’t recommend it. I give Carmilla  2.5 out of 5.0 stars.  

Review: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

The OG Undead GOAT.

Long before Twilight, Bram Stoker’s tale of blood and supernal creatures swept the world and made vampires and count Dracula horror icons. Though, not the first vampire book, Carmilla by Le Fanu beat it by a few decades and featured a femme fatale bloodsucker, Dracula established most of the tropes and “rules” associated with these creatures.

The story takes place primarily in England at the turn of the eighteenth and follows several characters as they try to stop the eponymous Dracula. Like many novels of its day, Dracula is told through a series of letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles.

While I found the prose over formal and a bit antiquated, it held my attention throughout. I particularly loved the chase sequence and the other action-packed scenes.

Things keep building to the final confrontation with Dracula, then it ends in the most boring way. There was no epic fight; they stake him, chop off his head, and call it a day.

Aside from these issues, the latter of which I found glaringly bad, I loved this book and recommend it to anyone who loves horror or who wants something pulse-pounding to read/listen. Just go into it knowing it fizzles out in the end.

I give Bram Stoker’s Dracula  3.5 out of 5.0 stars.

Review Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

A stellar work of science fiction and horror marred by a boring first half.

A staple of the horror genre since the days of horror greats Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney; “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is arguably the work that defined science fiction and Gothic horror.

Told through a series of letters and first-person accounts, the story focuses on scientist Victor Frankenstein, his attempts to animate a creature he made from the pieces of corpses, and his quest to destroy said creature after he brings it to life.

Like many people, I was familiar with this story from the numerous film adaptation of it. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find not just a sci-fi/horror story, but an exploration of morality and what it means to be human. I didn’t like the parts leading up to Victor’s bring the monster to life or those immediately afterward. But I adored the portions from the creature’s point of view and learning how he learned to be human, both the good and bad aspects.

I connected with his loneliness and struggle to connect with a world that hated him because of his appearance. I would love to read/watch a story depicting the creature’s journey from barely sentient to eloquent philosopher.

Victor came off as an egotistical bastard, and I was rooting for the creature by the end for how Victor abandoned him and then seeks to destroy him, all because he didn’t bother to teach what is effectively a child how to behave.

Ultimately, I see “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” not as a critique on science gone wrong but a critique on society, humanity, and how we treat the other. I give it 4.5 stars out of 5.0.

You should definitely read this if you weren’t assigned it in school.

Raison D’etre

image by

As I approach 40, I’m reckoning with my own mortality; no longer a young adult but not yet middle aged, I ponder the meaning of life.

Experience has shown me there is no grand plan, no reason for everything. We’re just bags full of chemicals rolling around the mud ball we call Earth.

That we were born or not was a dice roll thrown by the universe. Who we are, what we do, who we love? All meaningless in the end.

Just like life.

Everything that lives must die. It is the nature of the young to supplant the old. Everything eventually breaks, even us.

We might think we’re special, but on the cosmic scale we’re dust in the wind. One day soon we will die, one day we will be forgotten, one day the stars will burn out and the universe will cease expanding and collapse.

Next to that, what meaning does our fart of an existence have? I’ll tell you: none, except that which we give them.

Therein lies the great horror and the great joy. We can be slaves to this harsh reality or be the captains of our fate.

How we look at it is up to us.

Review: Never Have I Evan

Never Have I Evan by D.J. Jamison

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Sorry but no.

Never Have I Evan by DJ Jamison is the first entry in her male-male romance series Games We Play and follows Dawson Woods and Evan Moore.

Dawson is the cousin of Evan’s BFF Calisto and was a college football player with prospects of going to the NFL until a drunken mistake caused him to fall from a roof, injuring his spine and ending his football career. He then gets an assistant coaching offer at a high school in small town America, where he meets 19-year-old virgin and geek Evan.

Evan is socially awkward due to being home-schooled and supposedly super smart. I say supposedly because the only evidence we’re given of his intelligence is the dating/studying app he’s been working on it prior to meeting Dawson, yet it sounds like something a newbie coder could make in a few months and not something someone like Evan, who’s been coding for “years,” couldn’t bang out in a couple of days.

Let me begin with this: my main issue is this book uses some of my least favorite tropes, namely gay for you and the jock-nerd/geek couple. The latter is beyond cliched, and Jamison did nothing new with it, while I detest gay for you.

For the unaware, this is where a character who’s only previously had heterosexual relationships falls for their same gender. The problem, as in this book, is the “straight” character shows no attraction to anyone else of their gender outside the love interest, nor do they consider themselves anything but heterosexual.

For 99.999% of this book Dawson reiterates he’s straight, then in the last few pages he gives his ex a throwaway line about how he’s now pansexual. No. Just no. This wasn’t earned, as Dawson never questioned he was anything but hetero until the very end.

Furthermore, it treats sexual orientation as a plot device and reinforces the erroneous myth that people just wake up one day and decide they’re LGBTQ+.

Hell to the no.

And if this wasn’t bad enough, the reason they get together made zero sense.
When Dawson learned Evan was gay and a virgin, he suggests they have casual sex so Evan can get experience.

Boy, bye. No straight guy would do this unless they were being paid to or there were zero other alternatives.

And Dawson had zero experience with gay sex outside of porn, which he said he had a meh sexual and emotional response to when he watched it. So, explain to me how he knew exactly what to do when it came time for them to hook up, so much so there were no bedroom mishaps.

Yeah, no.

You can tell this was written by a cis het woman for cis het women, as Jamison just copy-pasted heterosexual relationships dynamics onto Evan and Dawson, with Evan being the woman. Had I known this in advance, I’d have skipped on this book.

As it stands, I can’t give this more than 2 stars and have zero desire to read the next in the series that was obviously setup at the end of this one.

Skip this and read something better.





View all my reviews

The American Dream is Killing Us

Piggybacking off yesterday’s Daily Drabble, why do we allow others’ thoughts to affect us so much?

Why do we obsess over whether randoms online like or share our posts or what peeps irl think of us? It’s not like we’ll ever meet or see them again, so way so serious?

The answer, like most things in our modern hellscape ties into capitalism. Everyone is trying so hard to go viral in the hopes this might translate into dollars. 

Everywhere you look people are trying to sell us something(guilty as charged), because we’ve been conditioned to monetize everything we do.

So much so, people’s first instinct is to whip out their phones and start recording when an incident happens long before they consider helping out.

Why?

So they can become famous and live with some semblance of leisure outside their wage-slave jobs.

Repeatedly, we were told if you work hard and go to college you’ll get ahead. But the reality is most businesses couldn’t care less about their employees,and successful people are often products of dumb luck mixed with nepotism and sketchy ethics.

You can be the best in your field or craft and still fail commercially. And history has shown the opposite is true. Under capitalism everything is reduced to money and the more you have or something earns the more its perceived value.

This is no way to live. Yes, we all must pay the bills, but everything we do or are shouldn’t be monetized. We are not brands; we are people with hopes, loves, triumphs, and struggles.

What we are, what do shouldn’t be reduced to sound bites or tweets packaged for social media. My soul, my being isn’t for sale to the highest bidder. And neither should yours be.

New Year’s Drabble

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Hello,

As this is the beginning of a new year, I thought I’d try something different with this blog. So starting today, I’ll be posting a microblog of 200 to 500 words every day in addition to the standard Wednesday posts, which I’ve been neglecting to post for the last several months.

I want these drabbles, as I’m calling them, to be more conversational and not have a fixed topic so I can explore whatever’s on my mind that day.
Without further ado, I’ll get into today’s drabble.

A few months back I posted chapters of my debut novel Palingenesis, its sequel, and another novel I’m working on to a website geared toward my target audience. And while the comments have been helpful, I’ve noticed myself obsessing over the number of views and comments each chapter got.

As writers, we often don’t know if a project will succeed or fail till many months or years after we start, and often we seek validation from others as an ego boost.

However I’ve realized some things while revising my current WIP.

First, that I live for those moments when I get lost in my own stories and forget I’m the one writing it.

Second, I don’t need validation for my work;as long as I’m proud of it that’s enough.

Third, that while it would be nice to become famous and wealthy from my books, if that never happens I’ll still write because it gives me joy.

Despite what we’ve been conditioned to believe, not everything should be turned into a side hustle. Some things should be done for fun.

So while I’ll still promote my work and self publish it, I’m okay with not ever make any money from it as long as it continues bringing me joy.

I realize this isn’t everyone’s mindset, and I’m not knocking you,but I’m done chasing likes and views. I don’t have the time or energy to do so anymore and would rather focus my efforts on, ya know, writing and other things that bring me joy.

Well, that’s it for today’s drabble. Happy New Year!

Review: The Ultimate Horror Collection

This couldn’t have oversold itself more if it tried.


Since Halloween was coming up, I thought I’d check out this collection horror stories. However, to my horror many of the stories in this collection weren’t horror stories, and those that were, I found boringly tame.


Of the bunch I found, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein my favorite. My biggest complaint is that most of this collection consisted of short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work I discovered I loathed. The other issue with this collection is it lacks any works by modern works or writers of color.


Overall, I was sorely disappointed in this audiobook set that touted itself as the ultimate horror collection. Don’t waste your money on this. I give The Ultimate Horror Collection 2.0 out of 5.0 stars.

Review: The Mythology Book by Big Ideas Simply Explained

“The Mythology Book” by Big Ideas Simply Explained charts myths from across the world. However, so much time was dedicated to Greek and Roman mythology, and that of the wider European peoples, and barely any to people of Africa, The Middle East, Asia, Pacific islands, and indigenous folks of the Americas.


I get they couldn’t cover everything, but it seems suspect to me how they glossed over the mythology of non-European cultures. This was especially egregious regarding their treatment of African cultures. They did one detailed section dedicated to Egyptian mythology, then glossed over everything else. It would have been nice to learn more about the Yoruba people and Orishas, or the Dogon people of Mali.
I guess I expected too much.


I give “The Mythology Book” 2.0 out of 5.0 stars. Skip this if you want to learn more than the CliffsNotes version of mythology outside of Europe.

Review: Just Above my Head

Baldwin’s final complete work, Just Above My Head follows brothers Haul and Arthur Montana and their related friends from childhood to adulthood. Arthur’s death prompts Haul to recollect how Arthur became a famous Black gay gospel singer, who had to remain closeted for the sake of his career. Much of the novel is set during the ‘60s in the deep south, and tackles topics like the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, masculinity, and the intersection of Blackness and queerness.

Haul is the elder brother and narrates the events. I wasn’t a fan at first of how the story jumped from characters to characters and between the past and present. However, toward the middle the plot settled down, focusing mainly on Arthur. Haul, and their friend Julia and her brother James.

I was struck by how insightful Baldwin was regrading what we now call toxic masculinity and intersectionality, and how he laid bare the issue of child sex abuse in the Black community, something still taboo today.

The relationship between Haul and Arthur is the heart of this sprawling novel and I wish more media showed Black and brown men openly expressing their affection for each other, be that platonic or romantic. And speaking of romance, I loved how this book centered Black gay love as being natural and positive, especially given the time it was set in.

However, the passages describing Julia’s father sexually abusing her were hard to get through, And I can see how they could turn off people.

If I had one complaint, it’s, as previously mentioned, how unfocused the first half was. However, this didn’t take away from the listening experience. And by the end, I was on the verge of tears.

Overall, I give Just Above My Head 5.0 out of 5.0 stars. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A staple of gothic horror dripping with queer subtext, Oscar Wilde’s tale of eternal youth gone awry is a cautionary fable on how beauty is only skin deep and how we must all accept we will grow old.

As it was written over a century before Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, it does suffer from the dreaded bury your gays trope. Also, Wilde’s tendency to filibuster on what he considers “good art”, and other subjects made the plot stand still at times for several passages. I also wasn’t a fan of how stuffy and pretentious the writing was.

That said, I did enjoy the novella and identified with Dorian’s wish to remain young forever, as I’m approaching middle age.

However, the way everyone thirsted after Dorian was rather disturbing, given he was described as barely out of his teens; it recalled how the queer community often puts young and beautiful people on a pedestal, then throws them away once they age out of being hot.

Overall, the ending felt maudlin and Dorian’s punishment disproportionate to his crimes.

I give The Picture of Dorian Gray 3.0 out of 5.0 stars. You should check this out if you like Victorian gothic horror, but know the ending is far from happy.

View all my reviews