Book Review-The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross

Title: The Rapture of the Nerds

 Author: Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross

Series:  N/A

Published:  12 April 2013 by Titan

Length: 336 pages

Source: Publisher

Summary: Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.

Review: Huw is a Welsh technophobe. In a world where most people have uploaded to the cloud, he is one of the few(ish) remaining on Earth. Called to do jury service, judging whether or not a new invention will make the civilisation happy  or not (or not essentially being will it destroy us), he goes. Also, he discovers that somewhere along the line, he got infected and something wants to use him and..i’m not sure.

I was looking forwards to this. I’ve flicked through Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and liked what I saw, and I read his contribution to Steampunked and loved it. this collaboration should be good, right?

And then I started reading.  OK, the first few pages made sense as set ups and then characters start cropping up and changing gender and I’m not sure what happened to the plot.   When I say characters cropping up, I mean Sandra being at her house, and then Huw leaving the house to go to jury service, and then Sandra showing up at the jury service with no explanation of what she’s doing there or how she got there or anything. This happens repeatedly.

Huw is a boring character who doesn’t do much. A little more interesting is the doctor whose name I forgot. The cast is very  varied in terms of beliefs and attitudes, but it doesn’t work for me and flow.

The whole cloud uploading, changing houses, products of snakes and things and such-all this futuristic technology was a bit beyond my ability to imagine.

I have absolutely nothing against genderfluid characters, but somewhere along the line Huw (who up until that point had been referred to as male and showed no signs of wanting to be referred to as female) starts getting feminine pronouns. Also, I don’t think that “acquire” is a word  best used in tandem with “gender dysphorria”.

There’s a lot of technobabble throughout. However, hardly any of it is explained and it’s hard to imagine and follow.

I’m not going to talk about the plot because as far as I could tell, I couldn’t make one out.

This book tries to be Hitchhikers, you can tell. The randomness, the futurism, the references to things like Doctor Who and other pop culturey things. but it doesn’t work becasue I can’t follow the  plot at all.

Overall:  Strength 1 tea to an impossible  book.

Links: Amazon | Goodreads | Cory’s website | Charles’ website |

Book Review- Dead Rules by Randy Russell

Title: Dead Rules

 Author: Randy Russell

Series:  N/A

Published:  29 March 2012 by Quercus

Length: 232 pages

Warnings: 12 +

Source: Publisher

Summary : When Jana Webster dies in a tragic accident, she finds herself transferred to 'Dead School' in the afterlife, where students fall into distinct cliques. Risers (good kids who died innocently), Sliders (bad kids, who have one foot tied to earth) and Virgins (there are fewer than Jana would expect). Jana's boyfriend and love of her life - Michael - is still in the land of the living. Michael is Romeo to Jana's Juliet and as the story goes... even death can't keep them apart. Tired of waiting for him to kill himself over his grief of losing her, Jana decides she needs to do it for him. To kill Michael she'll need the help of a dangerous and sexy Slider - Mars Dreamcoate. But Mars has a goal of his own: he wants to save a life to atone for having taken one in a drunk-driving accident. And to complicate matters, he was trying to save Jana when she died and saw what was really going on when her 'accident' happened. Jana decides to do whatever it takes to get Michael back, and nothing - not even Mars' warm touch or the devastating secret he holds about her death - will stop her

Review: Jana and Michael are so far in love that saying Webster and Haynes is as natual as Romeo and Juliet. So when Jana dies and ends up at Dead School, where teens that died end up before moving on, she misses her boyfriend. Badly. So badly that she’s willing to kill for it.

I really liked the idea of a Dead school. Ok, it’s overdone (at least in what I tend to read), but I still like reading different author’s takes on the subject. The original Riser and Slider idea (where good kids get closer to Heaven and bad ones closer to Earth) is a great idea too. So far, so good.

And then I started reading it. And it was so hard to get through. This was almost a DNF. If it had been a kindle or library copy, I’d have definitely put it down. But I didn’t, and I struggled through...and so....yeah.

My first problem with this was the writing. It was extremely simple, and at points, patronising. Attempts to build suspense really didn’t work out, and it got annoying.

Second problem, and probably my biggest, was Jana. She is so annoying. She compares herself repeatedly to her mother and fusses over little things for no reason. And then she decides that she’ll kill her boyfriend, because she can’t stand the idea of being away from him. Yes, what a delightful way of expressing love for somebody. I know I’d prefer roses.

Third problem, Mars, the half-love interest. He’s annoying too, but not to the point of Jana. I also feel a little bad for him over the fact the he and his efforts to do things for Jana are not appreciated.

Fourth problem, not much really happens until you get to the end. Well, things do happen. but they’re really boring and it doesn’t build up and some things seem pointless.

The only thing that I enjoyed was the character deaths. Even still, they weren’t amazingly written, and they were unrealistic without any irony. Irony, for me, is the only way that excuses random methods of leaving life-see the Final Destination films.

I get there’s a lot of  romance to it, and a nice paranormal idea. But it just didn’t work for me.

Overall:  Strength 1 tea to a book with a nice concept, but is generally boring throughout.

Links:  | Goodreads | Author website | 

Book Review- Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Title: Lord of the Flies

 Author: William Golding

Series:  N/A

Published:  some time in 1954

Length: 225 pages

Warnings: violence and death. If there was anything else, I missed it.

Source: Library

Other info: they made a film out of it…Golding also wrote The Inheritors, Darkness Visible and other things.

Summary : William Golding's classic tale about a group of English schoolboys who are plane-wrecked on a deserted island is just as chilling and relevant today as when it was first published in 1954. At first, the stranded boys cooperate, attempting to gather food, make shelters, and maintain signal fires. Overseeing their efforts are Ralph, "the boy with fair hair," and Piggy, Ralph's chubby, wisdom-dispensing sidekick whose thick spectacles come in handy for lighting fires. Although Ralph tries to impose order and delegate responsibility, there are many in their number who would rather swim, play, or hunt the island's wild pig population. Soon Ralph's rules are being ignored or challenged outright. His fiercest antagonist is Jack, the redheaded leader of the pig hunters, who manages to lure away many of the boys to join his band of painted savages. The situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization continue to fall away, until Ralph discovers that instead of being hunters, he and Piggy have become the hunted: "He forgot his words, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet." Golding's gripping novel explores the boundary between human reason and animal instinct, all on the brutal playing field of adolescent competition

Book review: A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

Title: A Great and Terrible Beauty

Author: Libba Bray

Length: 403 pages

Published: 9th December 2003

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Childrens Books

Warnings: Suggestive situations, reference to alchol, violence

Summary: Gemma Doyle, sixteen and proud, must leave the warmth of her childhood home in India for the rigid Spence Academy, a cold finishing school outside of London, followed by a stranger who bears puzzling warnings. Using her sharp tongue and agile mind, she navigates the stormy seas of friendship with high-born daughters and her roommate, a plain scholarship case. As Gemma discovers that her mother's death may have an otherworldly cause, and that she herself may have innate powers, Gemma is forced to face her own frightening, yet exciting destiny . . . if only she can believe in it.

Review: I read this book because Nina forgot what happened in it. It lives up to my first impression of it: Nina the genius forgot what happened in it = I will forget about it. The characters were cliché, the events were cliché, the plot was predictable and the* (SPOILER).The characters were so stupid at times that I couldn't understand why the took certain actions to the extent that I didn't really care when **(SPOILER). That's not very good. I thought the characters were together because of their own personal benifit and that the didn't really care about eachother that The idea of the main characters shadowing the actions of people in the past old one but I thought that the way it was linked to the main characters was decent and explained well. The scenes in the garden was alright at first but I thought that Gemma argued with her mother too much and that it slowed down the pacing of the plot.

Rating: 1

Spoilers- highlight them to read

*death of Pippa was poorly executed

**Pippa died**

Book Review: Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

Title: Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side

Author: Beth Fantaskey

Series: Jessica #1

Published by: Graphia Books 2010

Length: 384 pages

Warnings: Profanity, sex references 13+

Other facts: Fantaskey has also written Jekel Loves Hyde (review coming one day), and a sequel

Summary from Goodreads: Marrying a vampire definitely doesn’t fit into Jessica Packwood’s senior year “get-a-life” plan. But then a bizarre (and incredibly hot) new exchange student named Lucius Vladescu shows up, claiming that Jessica is a Romanian vampire princess by birth—and he’s her long-lost fiancé. Armed with newfound confidence and a copy of Growing Up Undead: A Teen Vampire’s Guide to Dating, Health, and Emotions, Jessica makes a dramatic transition from average American teenager to glam European vampire princess. But when a devious cheerleader sets her sights on Lucius, Jess finds herself fighting to win back her wayward prince, stop a global vampire war—and save Lucius’s soul from eternal destruction

Review: This counts as book 2 of Parajunkee's vampire challenge. The book started off brilliantly. Jessica is stalked on the way to school, is told she is a vampire princess and stabs her betrothed, Lucius in the foot with a pitchfork. All this happens in the first 30 pages. So far, so good. It goes dramatically downhill from there. I vaguely liked Jessica, who, to start with at least, is in no way Mary-Sue-ish. But I absolutely hate Lucius. He is rude, arrogant and snobby. For a Romanian vampire prince he has no manners whatsoever, breaking the folk dolls in the room he is staying in because he doesn’t like them. I'm sorry, Mr. Vladescu, but your future parents in law do! By the time we learnt about the abusive uncle, it was too late to feel any sympathy for him.

This ended up escalating into the classic love-story-with-random-things-protagonists-must-overcome. Of course, sometimes this can be fun, especially when at the end it is revealed they all tie up neatly for a satisfying ending or tie up leaving you with a cliff-hanger that makes you want to read the sequel. However, none of said random things seemed to relate even indirectly to the (non-existent) climax. If you removed the side stories about the horse, and the LuciusxBitchGirl (sorry, I forgot her name), and skipped to the end, it would make perfect sense. Good things about this book? Err... Jessica doesn’t seem too bad, actually at some times rather fiesty and likeable, and the descriptions are very detailed. That’s all I can say. And on a side note, the titular guide to dating on the dark side features in about 6 pages.

Overall: I give this strength 1 tea because while the start of it was good, the whole thing is total rubbish. Fans of Twilight will love it though. And yes, that is an insult.