I prefer to think of it as Throne of Stupid - Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

This is a terrible book. Really, really terrible. It’s terrible is a similar way to Keira Cass’s The Selection. Both have terrible protagonists, both have that terrible fan-fiction-y wish-fulfilment thing going on and both have found a wide audience who can read them with the enthusiasm every book hopes for rather than a facial expression suggesting the reader is thinking “Wow, this is a seriously terrible book”. So, really, my opinion doesn’t really matter here. Lots of people love Throne of Glass. I did not.

Celaena Sardothian is the greatest Assassin in the world. Everybody knows her name, and that she was caught and sent to the mines of Endovia. What everybody doesn’t know is that she’s a 17 year-old blonde who absolutely adores candy.

I was listening to the audiobook. I can’t get the narrator’s “Ohhhhh, how she ADORED candy!!!! *tinkling laugh*” line out of my head. (And while we’re here, Elizabeth Evans who narrates is very good, her rhyming of shone with bone aside, and I would absolutely listen to her again).

Celaena is offered a chance to get out. The King of Endovia needs a champion and intends to hold a competition to find one. Dorian, the crown prince, will enter Celaena as his candidate. If she wins, after four years she is free; if she loses, she’s back to the mines.

So, one of the things I hate about terrible YA: logic has no place in our premise.

If I wanted a king’s champion, what I would not do is spend the best part of a year having a bunch of people show me they know how to use a bow and arrow, climb a tower, or other sedate things. This is, presumably, an open vacancy. Most people would want to fill it quickly. It seems terribly unfair to expect your champion to deal with a massive backlog of work because you were procrastinating.

And it’s more unforgivable because during the whole competition people don’t generally progress to the next round because they are rubbish at whatever boring test they’ve been given, they get there because their opponents get crunchily eaten by something mysterious which seems to be roaming the castle by night - and thank heavens for that storyline because I dread to think how long we would have been whittling it down to the final four otherwise. Kicking them out one at a time, as the official rules seem to play it, does not add to the non-existent tension. Mind you, neither does “person you’ve never heard of is messily dead! Let’s all not do anything about it!”.

I’m also not even sure what a King’s Champion is supposed to do in this world. Usually, your champion is your best warrior for one-to-one combat. You can send them out and decide the whole battle thing with a single fight against your enemy’s champion and avoid everybody having to get their armour sticky. But the suggestion is that an assassin is going to be a good candidate here, so let’s roll with it, just like we’re going to roll with the idea that Celaena is actually an assassin, and a good one. This review would be three times this length otherwise.

Then there are the names. They’re like normal names, but special, because this is terrible YA. Maas is particularly irritating in this regard. It’s like being stuck in an episode of Sesame Street where today’s letter is K.

We have Kale (or Chaol as the text has him), hunky guard captain and totally not candidate for a lurve triangle, Cain, named opponent for Celaena’s new job, and Kaltain, teh evuls scheming lady-bitch who insta-hates Celaena (which is at least pronounced with an Sss). I am not good with names at the best of times; even when I could remember what they were I couldn’t remember which belonged with which trope. Then we have Celaena and Elena because rhyming names are totally the next big thing.

Celaena herself is awful. We are told repeatedly how interesting she is - she even has a relatable hobby! - but she is not interesting. She lives up to precisely none of the promise her description offers. She doesn’t even have proper angst.

At first this was terrible but entertaining, and I did appreciate the presence of a period because I am British and the kind of person who instead of sleeping wonders if any of the Districts ever send oats to their lady tributes when food is scarce. I also thought the premise had potential.

But the longer it went on, the more boring it became. One of the challenges of these kinds of books is keeping it interesting even though everybody knows Celaena is going to win the competition. There need to be stakes and this doesn’t have any. There’s no real investment in any of the side characters - even when we’re in their POV they’re thinking and talking about Celaena. (“When Poochie is not around, the other characters should say things like, ‘Where’s Poochie’”)

If somebody told me this got better in the rest of the series I would believe them. There’s plenty of potential especially once you actually give Celaena something to do other than lounge around reading books and looking attractive. However, I’m not going to find out because I would rather eat my own head.

1 star.

A Butterfly Faps in New York... -The Butterfly Effect by Jon Ronson

Technically, this isn’t a book, it’s a podcast, but it’s available for free for those with an Audible subscription, so it counts. Sort of.

In the 1990s, a Belgian lad called Fabian had a wonderful idea: Free Pr0n. He belonged to an internet group which would share passwords to porn sites enabling those unable or unwilling to use a credit card to pay themselves the joy of fapping merrily along to the onscreen antics. Years later he would realise his dream, becoming the owner of sites like Pornhub, RedTube and others, as well as becoming the kind of multi-millionaire who has an underground aquarium and employs a diver to scrub the inside of it.

I, too, was a teenager in the 90’s and remember the dark days in which Fabian’s dream grew. Those lucky few who had Sky TV installed would immediately be asked if they received the German sex channels and a mental note subsequently made about whether one should begin being nicer to them. My first job was as the Saturday girl in a paper shop where every week a man who lived with his mother and looked like Michael Gove after 20 years of pie would buy a wank mag and smoothly stick it in his copy of The Telegraph for his walk back up the hill.

The Butterfly Effect is Ronson’s investigation into the consequences of Fabian’s Free Porn empire, from the performers and their shrinking paychecks to the thousand percent increase in erectile dysfunction in young men. It is a fascinating journey which has been intelligently put together. His first trip is to the computer programmers - a subject I would have been enthusiastic about anyway - where he learns about the breakdown of data and how this is used to design website, how they get people connected with the things they want to see. This leads him to the porn director, who tells him about how he now has to create his pornography for the website keywords, for a particular niche, Cheerleader Step-Daughter Gang Bang volume 2 etc. This leads him somewhere else, and so on.

I’ve listened to few of Audible’s free shows but I’ve never been very impressed (I like audible, but their original content is not great) so I had few hopes for this, despite enjoying Jon Ronson’s books and journalism. I was wrong. As I got to the end of each episode I was fastforwarding through the credits to get to the next. It is fascinating.

Ronson is a British journalist, not a thousand light years from Louis Theroux, whose previous work has included Them: Adventures with Extremists, and The Men Who Stare At Goats (made into a film with George Clooney). He’s a pretty good host for this journey and comes across as somebody who finds it all as fascinating as I do. He’s affable and has Theroux’s gift for taking anything anybody tells him with equanimity.

But Ronson is a listener. Unlike Theroux, he doesn’t push back, merely asks people for their stories. When his questions are included in the recording, they tend to be seeking an expansion of information rather than challenging their view or finding out more about why they hold it. This is sometimes frustrating, especially when there is something blindingly obvious to be asked, and sometimes problematic, because Ronson does have an agenda. You just don’t know about it until the final episode when he takes all he has found out and “confronts” Fabian, the man who dreamed of free porn, with everything his dream has “caused”. I am especially troubled by the implied connection between a man’s suicide, the Ashley Madison hack, and Fabian’s websites. It was not the only thing.

In the most frustrating part, Ronson challenges Fabian about the copyrighted work which is on his website. Fabian rejects the idea he is a thief - he has not uploaded it, users have, and if the makers want it removed then here is how you do that. It’s totally not Fabian’s fault that the site users don’t care about copyright. Except it is. The site owner is responsible for what is on the site. And Ronson doesn’t point this out, he doesn’t bring up comparable issues, like The Pirate Bay’s legal battles - it’s just… welp.

Then in an attempt to show it’s not all bad, Ronson presents something good he found in the industry. A group of people who act with incredible humanity and compassion to try and help somebody they don’t know and will never meet without asking for payment or even knowing if it will be received or do any good. Which, you know, is gives-me-hope-for-humanity levels of kindness, but hardly unique to the industry. It feels very much as though Ronson knew before he started what he thought about this and didn’t bother to go over it much making the investigation feel like an exercise in fulfilling a contract. Which is coincidentally the same problem I had with his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”.

There are plenty of other niggles, such as a man Ronson describes as being “harassed” into speaking with them (srsly, don’t do that), the focus on the involvement of porn in a story when it’s really more of an accessory to a problem, such as the young man who sent a girl 50 explicit messages in an attempt to impress her, and the focus on straight heterosexual porn aimed at young men.

The first 6 episodes are mainly terrific, interesting and massively educational. Then we have to have that final episode. Ronson attempts to paint Fabian as a villain but I respect him very much for his refusal to have any of it, especially as he is not responsible. Porn can be damaging in lots of ways, but it has as much to do with us as a society as with the product itself, and Ronson never seems to consider this as a factor.

4.5 stars for the first 6 episodes, I’ll pretend that final one doesn’t exist.

It's Grim oop North - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

I’ve read this one at least twice before - in fact, I have a feeling it was the first book I ever read on my Kindle Keyboard, providing me with the happy knowledge that I *could* manage to read Victorian literature and the problem lay, in part, with the font rather than my ability. Srsly, if you are dyslexic, consider a Kindle. It will change your life. Maybe.

This time I was giving the audiobook version a whirl, read by Juliet Stevenson, who is marvellous. She speaks clearly, she does the voices, she is everything I could want in a reader.

North and South is the story of clergyman’s daughter Margaret Hale. Having been brought up in her aunt’s household, her cousin’s marriage means Margaret is to return home, to Hampshire. Except, her father hides a terrible secret: he is a dissenter who is no longer able to serve the Church of England. He will quit his modest living and they will move north, to the smoke filled air of Milton, where he will earn money as a tutor thanks to the kindness and connections of an old friend.

Initially it’s difficult to like Margaret. She has an arrogance borne of ignorance - she has things to say about how much she will not be consorting with the men of trade. She dislikes Milton. But she has a tenacity to her - this is her situation and she is going to do what she can to get on with it.

Mr Hale’s student is on Mr John Thornton, a self-made mill owner whom Margaret initially holds in contempt for that unlofty position. But he is a gentleman, and the dance of calls and obligations between the two families bring them into familiarity.

This is a Victorian novel, so there is obviously a deeply boring and preachy bit: Bessie Higgins, the millworker Margaret visits who suffers from Stagnation o’t’Lungs (possibly) is even worse in audio form. Maybe you have more patience than I and will not spend the hours she spends going on about how she is going to die, and how she is looking forward to it, and how fabulous Margaret is, thinking “Jesus, would you throw yourself in a well, already?”. Grit your teeth through these bits, it does improve.

And this is, at its heart a romance. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Thornton will fall for Margaret while she has vowed she will never get married. His declarations, his mother’s reactions, the development of her feelings and the blocks which stand between them feel realistic, as does the way they resolve themselves.

I particularly liked that everybody involved seemed, to my modern ears, to have a bit of a point. Margaret is right to think an employer has a responsibility to his employees, Thornton is right to say it’s none of his business what they do outside their contracted hours, and Higgins, Bessie’s father, is right to value himself and his skills and fight with the union to protect their employment.

It’s an interesting novel to read in these modern times. The questions about wages, the import of cheap labour, the downward race in contracted hours, the power of the unions, are all still extremely pertinent. North and South would lend itself very easily to a modern update.

The thing I most liked is the way everybody feels the consequences of their actions, good and bad. None of them are completely right and none completely wrong. Gaskell has terrific fidelity of character - they change, but what they are remains.

Most people describe North and South as a Northern Pride and Prejudice, which is not an unreasonable comparison, but North and South has far more story, and Margaret Hale far more impetus and independence than Lizzie Bennett (helped greatly by the 50 odd years between them). That said, she also has Bessie Higgins to put up with.

I’m sure there’s a well around here somewhere.

4 stars

Feminist Dystopia A-go-go - The Power by Naomi Alderman

Cosmopolitan magazine describes The Power as “The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale”. I assume the description was written by somebody who has heard of both of those things but experienced neither.

Teenage girls can hurt. Something has given them the power to generate electricity - a flick of a finger brings a target agony, or death. The power can be woken in adult women, too. And with power comes freedom.

I found The Power to be something of a mixed bag. Naomi Alderman splits her story between a variety of characters - a US mayor, a runaway teen, a Nigerian man who becomes the journalist charting the female uprisings, the daughter of an east end gangster - to give this story a world stage. This sort of structure is only as good as its least draggable character. Alderman’s… vary.

When it’s good, it’s brilliant. I have particular love for the snide background development of the CNN anchors. But in other ways it’s a touch weak - Roxy, in particular, feels, shall we say, underdeveloped when compared with the creations of an author like Martina Cole, who specialises in the gangland culture Roxy supposedly hails from. Her transition from being her father’s daughter to the place she ends up feels inauthentic and suspiciously easily achieved. 

I also felt like it was weakened by its adherence to its story, which drives toward a particular crisis point losing some sense of the organic in its desire to adhere to its central idea. And in spreading the story so widely across the world, it left gaps. All the small human questions I had were overlooked, or dealt with in the briefest way. Obviously it would be a ridiculous - and extremely long - book which had some kind of checklist to ensure all points of view were represented, but still, I was never quite sold on the idea that the universal response to the gaining of the power would be to use it, as though our inability to cause harm is what stops us from ruling the world. Most women have the ability to pick up a chair and whack somebody with it, but we don’t, because… it’s illegal? Or because it’s really mentally difficult to physically hurt somebody, even when we are threatened ourselves? (The effect on women of causing this hurt is touched on very lightly) Or because a lifetime of indoctrination (that we don’t run, we don’t shout, we are nice and neat and polite) does not evaporate with the ability to zap somebody, whatever your culture.

Women are their own jailers as much as men. The Smurfette Principle (the idea that there can only be one woman in the room) makes us compete against each other for that single available space, so we put each other down and we define our value by how much the boys like us. That was the biggest gap in this book: the LadyShields; the Anne Coulters and Kelly Ann Conways; the blonde soccer moms who warn their sons to be careful because girls will lie about them to ruin their lives. 

It also, understandably, steers away from what could have been a controversial and badly handled element: transgender people. Transgender people should exist in this novel, even if only as a background story, but they don’t. All of this said, it’s the mark of a good book that I’ve got all of these What about…? scenarios to complain about - I’m engaged with it.

Overall, I did enjoy it, very much. It should be a definite read for fans of The Handmaid’s Tale - Atwood is Alderman’s mentor - not only for the feminist dystopia element, but because of the way Alderman has used reality. She’s taken her cue from the history of female oppression and applied it intelligently to her world. It makes for difficult reading at times. 

The best dystopian fiction is a mirror and we are not wrong to be afraid.

4 stars