badbookreviewclub - Tumblr blog

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Compete Review - Stones to Abbigale, by Onision

Disclaimer: This review will contain spoilers… if you haven’t already watched the seven billion book reviews there are for Stones to Abbigale. I won’t be linking to where you can buy this book because I don’t want to support Greg… James… whatever the fuck he’s going by now. If you look hard enough, you can find it for free online.

Stones to Abbigale is the first book published by Onision. I’m sure we already all know about Onision and how horrible he is, if not I highly recommend going to Youtube and watching The Right Opinion’s videos on him. They’re very enlightening as to the kind of person that Greg is. Anyways, this review isn’t about Onision (kind of), it’s about his book. I couldn’t figure out where the book was published, aside from a small stamp at the very last page just saying it was published via Amazon.

The Summary: There isn’t one. Fuck. The Characters: James - Simp who likes to act like he’s the hero, but also the victim. Definitely Onision’s self-insert.

Abbigale (Abbi) - A very traumatized person who is written very poorly

Jason - The jock who’s there to make James look like the victim but also the hero

Davis - a character who has no impact on the story and could be completely written out. His presence affects nothing.

Ms. Robertson - The school counselor who could never actually be a school counselor Mr. Hanson - The history teacher

The Problems: Aside from a multitude of grammatical errors and some spelling errors, this book is just a mess. The characters are incredibly inconsistent to the point of being unrealistic (e.g. one moment Jason is the bad guy and the next he’s James’s best friend). Actually, in general, none of these characters are realistic. It’s really easy to read this story in Greg’s voice because it all sounds just like him. They speak with the same mannerisms that he does and like they all read a psychology book in fifth grade and now they think that they know everything about people and how they work. It’s annoying and incredibly frustrating, actually.

Another big problem that this book faces is that everything is written in big blocks of text, without regard for needing commas or periods. This makes reading dialogue incredibly difficult and at times can make it really hard to decipher just who is talking. I’m convinced after reading Stones to Abbigale that Onision doesn’t know what the enter bar is. Take this for example, “As we got closer to the gym Abbi was giving me a funny look, as I normally didn’t walk her that far, I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not stalking you, we have the same class now.’ She replied, ‘Manipulating your schedule to be with someone sounds like stalking Mr. Patrick.’ I said, ‘Not if you drop Mrs. Stanley.’ She pushed me playfully saying ‘Jealous!’” Let’s split the dialogue up now (and add in proper punctuation.

As we got closer to the gym Abbi was giving me a funny look; I normally didn’t walk her this far. “Don’t worry, I’m not stalking you. We have the same class now,” I said. “Manipulating your schedule to be with someone sounds like stalking Mr. Patrick,” she replied. “Not if you drop Mrs. Stanely,” I said. She pushed me playfully, “Jealous!”

This is a lot easier to read and aside from word choice, it’s not terrible. It could paint a picture a lot easier with better word choice, but this is Onision’s first book so I guess I can cut him a tiny tiny tiny bit of slack on that. Actually, no. This could use better word choice to paint a better picture and make them seem less like cardboard cutouts.

Another problem is the plot itself. The ‘climax’ of the book, if you will, happens almost at the beginning of the book, which is fucking absurd. It makes the rest of the book feel pointless and like it’s dragging on.

The Book:

Chapter 1

We meet our main character, James. Except we don’t know his name is James yet. We do know that he paints his walls, his ceiling, and even his bedframe a startling white however because he “likes to inflict mental torture” on himself. Not sure why he does this, but he does. I think I’ll be the first to say that in any white suburban neighborhood, you could walk into just about most children’s rooms and find white as the standard (at least, that’s how it is in my neighborhood). Why? Fuck if I know. White just looks nice with most furniture, I guess.

Anyways, our main character is late to school and rushes out the doors with a note he scribbled for an excuse as to why he was late. Yay, we finally get James’s name from Mr. Hanson, who couldn’t give less of a shit that James was late. He just wants to talk to him after class. James starts people watching to an almost creepy extent, trying to get into people’s heads and assuming what they were thinking. If you haven’t read any of my other reviews, you should know, I am not overly fond of when someone tries to assume someone else’s thoughts in this way. Where they psychoanalyze them without have a single hint of qualification. It’s annoying in storytelling. That’s not to say I’m not guilty of having a character do that at times, but I’m trying to be more aware of it and to stop writing like that. With how James is written, however, it’s clearly intentionally and gives off r/im14andthisisdeep vibes.

Anyways, James rushes off to art class so he can see Abbi. He has never talked to Abbi a day in his life but spends a lot of his time thinking about her and wanting to be with her and basically, just being a simp. He puts too much value on Abbi without ever having talked to her and having no reason to do it, his world revolves around Abbi and she has never so much as shared a word with him.

But he’s basically staring at Abbi, waiting to say something to her when his hand brushes up against some chewed up gum under the desk and he yells ‘EW’. This doesn’t stop Abbi from wanting to pair up with him however when the teacher gives them an assignment they need partners for. Abbi was originally paired up with Jason, who I guess makes Abbi uncomfortable. That’s understandable that Abbi would want to switch if that was the case, but Onision doesn’t lay it out like that. Instead, it’s laid out that Abbi wants to be paired with James just because.

Abbi has shown no care for James at the beginning of the book and seemingly before this even started she never seemed to care for or about James. Suddenly though, as soon as the story starts, she cares. She wants to, needs to be with and around him. Why? Because the main character always has to get the girl.

Anyways, Abbi gives James a piece of paper with ‘NISEONE’ written on it. Apparently, this is her phone number because, on a number pad (the ones with the letters), it is 647-3663. It doesn’t state this outright, so it took me looking at some other reviews before I figured this out.

We also learn in this chapter that the school is practically falling apart and is dripping with sludge or mold, or something, so I don’t know what kind of school James goes to, but it’s not a good one.

Chapter 2

James goes and talks to Mr. Hanson and it turns out that Mr. Hanson wants James for a TA position. Because ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? I guess James shows a lot of potential, even though he’s late like… all the time. Anyways, the night before Abbi and James decided to make, not a Frankenstein(‘s monster) teddy bear by combining two of their stuffed animals, rather, they’re making a zombie stuffed animal. And it turns out that Abbi wasn’t at class. For what reason? I don’t fucking know. The next day Jason comes to bug the class for some fucking reason because he got kicked out of his own class. There’s absolutely no reason for Jason to be there aside for James to stand up to him because Jason was ‘bullying’ Mr. Hanson. Anyways, Jason gets pissed off because of this and while James is on his way to the art class, Jason beats James up. I’m pretty sure this was only done to make James look like the victim (wonderful :P). James gets suspended for two days because he pushed Jason and Jason is suspended for nine days.

Before he can leave to go home, James sees Abbi and Seth having what I can only assume is a one-sided fight. Seth is yelling and being very aggressive towards Abbi, and Abbi is just taking it. So James walks her home after Seth gets pissed and leaves. I guess it was raining this entire time, so as they’re walking home, Abbi’s makeup runs and James sees the bruises on her face. When Abbi asks if James sees them, he says “I see a beautiful girl, who I very much enjoy walking with in the rain” (pg 31) (by the way I HAD TO NUMBER ALL THESE PAGES MYSELF). Anyways, cheesy romance, it’s clear Greg doesn’t read his lines out loud and I don’t think James does a single thing to try and help Abbi get out of her abusive situation. He just tells her that she’s beautiful. James is also absurdly upset about the suspension at this point. Like, ridiculously upset. Like you love school so much and the thought of not being able to go feels like the end of the world upset (I was that person in school). But… James has shown absolutely no reason for why he is as upset as he is? Like he genuinely is about to cry over this but he has shown absolutely no care about school before, so it’s just confusing.

Chapter 3

James has a dream that Abbi is being eaten by the ground. He wakes up and writes her a kind of creepy letter about how, despite having only had three conversations with her, he loves her and lives to be with her. He emails it to her and a few minutes later Abbi calls him. She wasn’t aware of the email but invites him to meet her at the Quick Shop. She says that she’ll read the email before she meets him there. She never meets him there (shocker). Chapter 4

James finally goes back to school and sees that Abbi isn’t in the art trailer still. But the mishmash stuffed animal bear thing is there. Under it is a note from Abbi asking James to meet her behind the church. Rather than stay for the class or anything like that, James bursts away to go to Abbi’s side.

Abbi tells James that the note weirded her out a little bit, but she was just nervous. She tells him that she has been absurd by Seth and that her mother abandoned her and that her father doesn’t care about her. The only comfort James is able to offer her is that every time he sees her, she’s more beautiful to him than she was before.

Chapter 5

James’ Mom has a boyfriend who comes out of fucking nowhere named Rick.

At school, James has his schedule rearranged so he can be Mr. Hanson’s TA and so he can still have a class with Abbi. Now he has gym with her. We meet Mr. Mack, who I guess is Jason’s uncle. He’s also the only teacher that James bonds with, I guess. Ms. Robertson, while reorganizing James’ schedule gives him an ominous warning that Abbi is no good and that he should stay away from her.

Abbi and James spend the rest of the night on the phone, talking to each other.

Chapter 6

A few days have passed. Rick and James’ mom announce that they want to move in together. James thinks his life is over and that he’ll never get to see Abbi again. Later that night James suggests to his mom that she just let him live in the house by himself with Abbi and she just agrees to it. Supposedly his mom doesn’t even have enough money to get him a shitty cell phone either, so I guess Rick must be fucking loaded.

Chapter 7

It’s the infamous school shooting. After figuring out that the school is being shot up by Seth, the bus driver does as any rational human being would do and drives away to get everyone to safety. Then he does something that nobody would do and lets James off the bus after James threatens to jump off (despite there being no way that he could?). James rollerblades to the school through the blur of his tears and bursts in. He sits in the puddle of blood in front of the school to get his rollerblades off before rushing in through his tears to find Abbi. He finds Seth first, but rather than being the one to save the day, it’s Jason who saves the day and beats the shit out of Seth. James finds Abbi after this and the two of them sit together while the paramedic patches up James’ feet because he ran through glass while looking for Abbi. Chapter 8

They’re back at school and a spokesman for the president gives a speech. They see Mr. Mack on a projector and he tells them in gruesome detail about how he tried to take down Seth and how Seth shot him. Definitely what a bunch of traumatized teenagers needed to hear and see. Chapter 9 James and Abbi go to her house, where Abbi’s father drunkenly stumbles out and starts threatening Abbi. A policeman who James claims probably sees too much of this on a daily basis stands to the side (because he just so happened to be nearby with is K-9 partner) and waits for something to happen. Something happens with Abbi’s father smashes James over the head with a beer bottle. The K-9 rushes forward and latches on to him and James claims that the officer is sadistic and likes to see people suffer. He then claims not even two paragraphs later that the cop is numb to what’s going on. Which is it? Is he sadistic or is he a dead-beat cop who sees too much of this shit?

Abbi’s father is arrested and James decides to press charges. This is how Abbi ends up staying with James.

Chapter 10

The president shows up and nothing comes of it. He promised that he would answer everyone’s questions and talk to everyone. He only talks to two people, James and another kid, named Chris. Chris just asked why the president was such a D-Bag and the president just says “that’s President D-Bag to you.” James asked what the president thought of what people said about him and the president goes on this long diatribe about freedom of speech.

Chapter 11

Abbi wants to talk to James but insists that they do it in the shower. For some reason, James agrees to this and Abbi comes out of the shower to show all of her self-harm scars. Once again, James does nothing than tell her she’s beautiful and that’s about it. They almost fuck after this, but don’t because James’s mom is home.

Chapter 12

James and Abbi stay home to help his mom pack. Later they go to the park to stargaze and affirm to each other that they want kids.

Chapter 13

Abbi leaves James a big long note for him to read in class about how she was raped by some boys. Mrs. Roberston helped to get those boys in jail, but after finding out that Abbi was pregnant, she insisted that Abbi keep the baby because she is very pro-life. Seth found out about the baby and punched Abbi in the stomach until she miscarried. James’ response to the note is to go straight to Abbi’s classroom and make out with her in front of everyone and on the desk. He goes back to history class and Mr. Hanson basically high-five’s him for doing this, despite the fact that he walked out in the middle of class to do it.

Chapter 14

It’s Christmas break. They fuck.

Chapter 15

James beats the shit out of Jason because Jason was groping Abbi. For some reason, when the principle comes out to confront everyone about this, Jason doesn’t rat on James.

Chapter 16

While driving somewhere with James and Abbi, Davis rushes out of the car into the middle of the freeway because he sees a man hanging from a rope from an overpass. Davis is killed. This is the only purpose that Davis serves in the entire story. It’s to die so James can be the victim once more because apparently if he was never born so he could never be in Davis’ life then this would have never happened. Survivor’s guilt is a thing, don’t get me wrong. But what Onision is using here isn’t survivor’s guilt. It’s James twisting the situation so he’s the victim still.

Chapter 17

Davis’s funeral. Nothing happens besides James playing the victim some more.

Chapter 18

Mr. Hanson and Mrs. Roberston confront James and they want him to become Class President. James doesn’t want to but it doesn’t seem like they’ll take no for an answer. A little while later Abbi, while walking with James, is pulled into the front office for some questioning by police. Mrs. Roberston shouts in front of everyone that Abbi was responsible for the school shooting. Because… you know… that’s a reasonable thing to do…

Abbi confronts James later that night and tells him that she wrote in a note to Seth, when she was in a really bad place, that she just wished everyone would disappear (not unreasonable and something I’ve done before). James, being the little bitchy drama-queen that he is, storms off to take a dramatic shower. While sitting in the shower though he realizes that Abbi did nothing wrong and comes back. Abbi immediately accepts him again and isn’t upset that he suddenly stormed off after she told him something rather hard for her to do. They make out (and probably fuck).

Chapter 19

Abbi gets a bucket of paint thrown on her while she’s coming into the school and James punches the kid who did it. The principle shows up and both intimidates and threatens the kid who threw the bucket of paint. He also calls Mrs. Roberston into his office after James tells him that she told everyone that Abbi was responsible for the shooting.

Chapter 20

Mrs. Roberstson was fired and burned down the entire school in retaliation. All the students get passing grades for the rest of the year (which is about 6 months of school left by the way). James ends off the book by saying “Well, I guess this means I won’t be running for President.”

The book drags and has a lot of pointless info in it. At one point it genuinely made me feel sick how he was using Abbi’s trauma throughout the book to write a very, very poorly conceived hero fantasy. All the characters are unrealistic and nobody means anything to the story other than Abbi and James. I’m just glad it was a fast read. There are huge info dumps in the beginning, but as you can see, the rest of the chapters can be summed up in less than a fucking paragraph. The climax of the book comes way too early (the school shooting) and in general, it’s just a poorly written plot. It feels like a first draft that should have been taken back to the drawing board to be reworked until the shooting could become the ultimate climax of the book. It was rushed, and because it was rushed, the rest of the book dragged on. 1/10 stars. I didn’t hate it as much as I’ve hated other books, but it wasn’t good by any stretch of the imagination.

#bad book #bad book reviews #stones to abbigale #onision #i'm numb #previous book reviews have numbed me to this pain #review #reviewblr #bookblr #complete review

15 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapters 21-28. IT’S FINALLY OVER.

Disclaimer: If you haven’t read the previous review, you can find it here (chapters 11-20). This will contain spoilers.

Well, the ending is finally here and holy fuck this book went off the rails. I only have one reaction to the ending of it and that’s just what the fuck. Just… What The Fuck Norman whatever the fuck you were on when you wrote the end of this book must have been some powerful shit because holy fuck. Let’s just get started and maybe you’ll see what I mean. These chapters are also completely nonsensical in how they’re put together and just so much information is shoved into them that it can get confusing. I’ll do my best to keep it clear. Chapter 21 The boat that was driven into the Exxon Maria was deemed as a terrorist attack because “the world know that this had been a terrorist bombing” (pg 321). They know this because a bunch of explosives had been smuggled onto the boat beforehand by Middle Eastern terrorists (because Norman is convinced there are no other kind of terrorists) and they drove it straight into the Exxon Maria to try and get back at Theresa for her oil mining operation. So how does Theresa retaliate? She drops the price of oil down to ten dollars a barrel. Thinking that OPEC (which I guess Norman still thinks is a terrorist organization. It’s not) is going to retaliate, Theresa has her parents moved to a safe place (West Point), and tells Prime Minister Scherzer that they have to evacuate the Israeli people now. He tells her that it will take 36 hours to start the evacuation. To remind Saudi Arabia of their deal (because there was a deal apparently in Theresa’s mind, even though there was absolutely no deals made, just an offer put on the table) Theresa raises a mountain in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert.

When the Israeli people start to cross evacuate via the landbridge to Crete because as it turns out, no, the island isn’t ready yet, Theresa parts the fucking sea to make giant water walls that terrorists and missiles can’t get through. Moses parting the Red Sea moment, anyone? Because of this, Prime Minister Scherzer calls Theresa the ‘Right Hand of God’. Theresa also decides that it’s time for her to head home, so the Ambassador of the United States to England asks if she would ride home on the Ronald Reagan (the same ship that led took her to the plane she was supposed to be blown up on) to give the ship her honor back. Theresa disagrees, but Steve says that Theresa should play (American) football with the navy of the Ronald Reagan against the Army (I think Norman means foot soldiers specifically). Theresa does agree eventually.

Someone attempts to do the same drop that Theresa did when she was almost blown up and of course, rather than dissuading them, Theresa gives him tips on how he might survive. Unsurprisingly, he fucking dies. All Theresa does is say “oh whoopsy-doopsy, he fell into still water, not wavy water like I did. Must be why. Sorry that you’re dead bro. Nobody should do that again.” Chapter 22

Theresa heads back to the United States, but in the process, HAL puts everyone in the plane into a deep sleep, including the piolets and every electronic. Somehow though, the Autopilot still works, so that’s lucky for Theresa I guess. Bitch learns how to fly a plane in under four hours. She lands it after causing millions of dollars worth of damages to the windows of buildings after flying just a little too low to them and as such that causes a lot of injuries, but she doesn’t get in trouble for that because she’s just too sweet and innocent for that.

Chapter 23

Am I moving really fast through this? I feel like I am. Though I will say, it’s definitely because I want to be done with this book as fast as I possibly can it’s so fucking dumb. I hate this book so much. I have never met a book that has baffled me as much as this one but absolutely fueled my anger to no end. Anyways… Theresa arrives at West Point (where her parents are) and going to the ranch house that was built specifically for her and her family. The football game takes place, and surprisingly, Theresa and the Navy lose to the Army. 48-36. I don’t know American football very well, despite living in the United States, so if anyone could tell me how good this is I would really appreciate it.

We learn that her island is producing 3 million barrels of oil a day and by the next year is predicted to be producing 15 million barrels a day, so Theresa is rich as fuck and is going to have a monopoly on oil (what a wonderful capitalist she is). Because all the oil tycoons are worried she’s going to monopolize (she is) and then raise the price drastically, they put her into a two-year deal (bc that’s long enough) saying that the price can’t go above ten dollars a barrel. Theresa agrees without hesitation.

It’s suggested to Theresa that she should monopolize the manufacturing industry as well, but she turns that down because it could “start a global trade war” (pg 370).

Theresa, while being a jerk and ignoring everybody when she goes out into public because how could she possibly be expected to meet or even wave or smile at people, finally gives in and talks to 10 North Korean men (via a translator) who have brought her a PBS Documentary to show her the conditions of North Korea. Theresa watches it and is so moved that she comes down and tells the men that she’ll save their families. So essentially, this one PBS Documentary has convinced Theresa to declare war on North Korea’s government.

Because the North Korean’s wouldn’t listen to her because she holds no power, Theresa joins the army (not really because she never ever ever ever sees combat, but she gets the titles that come with it).

Chapter 25

Theresa gets her uniform. She specifically requests to have the male uniform because the female one doesn’t look powerful enough. She also gets men’s shoes instead of women’s shoes because the women’s would look stupid with the men’s uniform, I guess. Theresa also insists on wearing her hair down because nobody is going to say jack shit to her about it. Because Theresa got the uniform we learn that Steve has a uniform kink. “Steve thought I looked awful cute in my little uniform. “‘Hon, you never looked better. It turns me on’” (pg 389).

Now Norman, I thought this book didn’t have sexual content? Yet here we are, learning about Steve’s fetishes. I’m not going to fetish shame anyone, and more power to you Steve for being open with your sexuality, though I just wanted to point out that Norman specifically said this wouldn’t happen (just like the swearing).

Anyways, Theresa goes to a meeting at the White House where she immediately becomes a five-star general, the first person after Omar Bradley died. Now I may be wrong, but Omar Bradley was a World War II veteran (a senior officer) and was Chairman of the Joint Cheifs of Staff and oversaw policymaking during the Korean War. The only thing Theresa has (realistically) done up until this point is kill off most of the population, if not all of the population.

Theresa came up with the idea earlier on that the only way to liberate North Korea is to destroy their weaponry in a certain mile radius and then take over as their dictator for the time being until things could get set up. In a really complicated matter, Theresa sets up a plan wherein ten-miles around Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, all weapons, planes, bombs, missiles, and helicopters will be destroyed. She works with the South Korean government in order to achieve this with HAL and so they can invade safely.

But, duN DUN DUN! because all the weapons are destroyed, the government orders unarmed citizens and soldiers and other personnel to attack as soon as they see Theresa and the army. Because there’s 5 million of them, the South Korean army knows that they’ll be easily overwhelmed. Theresa’s solution? Take a Japanese island and move it a bit closer to North and South Korea, and then break North and South Korea away from China and move it closer to the Japanese Island. This way the Japanese Island can build a bridge over and then teach North Korea about a new government. And it fucking works.

They invade Pyongyang after doing this and the South Korean army basically liters the city with pictures of Theresa’s face and a promise that she’s going to save and liberate them all. They drop all these pictures and promises with an airplane to hopefully quell the people’s worries. There’s a big crowd of North Koreans who are basically lining a gigantic boulevard and the South Korean’s are surrounding the tanks and Theresa, prepared to shoot anyone who gets rowdy or gets too close. Theresa tells them their leaders have left them on a complete fucking bluff, and the South Korean general who has been working with her confirms that they fled to China. Theresa is so relieved by this she almost starts crying, and then the North Korean’s start cheering and wailing and are basically so so so so so happy that Theresa is their new leader.

And Theresa’s big speech as the new leader? She reads the first couple of paragraphs from the Declaration of Independence. And it’s a smash hit and her greatest success ever. She gives it to a translator so that the North Korean people can understand and just… “Nobody could translate such elegant language on the fly and maintain its beauty. I anticipated that. I’d given the translator the English text the day before and she worked all night at it. When I finished speaking she read what I’d said in Korean with all the emotions and nuances only a Korea could express. My speech or rather the translator’s rendition of it was a spectacular success. The crowd cheered their hearts out. Witnesses said President Stinson cried when I gave the speech. This event, broadcast to the whole world, was called by greatest achievement” (pg 418). And yes, I meant to write ‘a Korea’. That’s how it’s written in the fucking book. But the Declaration of Independence wasn’t written by Theresa and yet somehow it’s ‘her’ speech. And it’s a smashing success because fuck you. Chapter 26

Theresa sets up the South Korean government in North Korea because she can’t be fucked to actually lead it, but comes back when she needs to. In this chapter, Theresa gets really into biology and teaching HAL about biology. She also gets really into archaeology and discovers a bunch of really old Jewish scrolls but nobody can have them. They can look but only she can have them. She also finds Joan of the Arc’s remains because why the fuck not.

Theresa also makes a mountain in the middle of Lake Michigan without consequence. This is all so they can have the Winter Olympics because I guess Mountain = Snow despite the fact that it’s summer the entire year.

Oh yeah, and Theresa recognizes that she could have thousands of lives with teaching HAL biology and learning how to do surgeries that could save lives that couldn’t otherwise be done. But she decides this is a terrible idea because she’ll end up in court if something goes wrong.

“‘I can immobilize them like this [basically just holding their body together in a temporarily immortalized, unaging, undying stated] while the surgeon operates and saves thousands of lives.’ (Theresa) “‘And get yourself thousands of lawsuits when things go wrong. Hell the families will hope something goes wrong so they can go after your money’ (Steve) “‘You’re right. I’d spend the rest of my life in courtrooms. It’s a shame. Greed keeps me from saving lives’” (pg 423).

The only greed keeping you from saving lives is your own. How fucking selfish of you to believe that people want their loved ones to die just so they can get some money. There are horrible people out there in the world like that, there’s no denying it, but the majority of people aren’t. You recognize you could save lives, but you chose not to because you don’t want to go to court if something goes wrong. You’re a fucking villain, Theresa.

Because of this, I really don’t feel bad when Theresa gets hit by a car, breaks her back, and loses the ability to walk. Getting hit by the car was apparently a terrorist attack that was carefully planned because they wanted to hit Theresa. Because everything just has to be a fucking terrorist attack. But this is why Norman had Theresa suddenly pick up an interest in biology that was never ever even hinted at before. It’s so Theresa can start working on a plan to fix her back so she can walk again. And so she can figure out a way to be immortal. You’re supposed to feel bad for Theresa, but I honestly don’t.

Chapter 27

More HAL’s show up because when Theresa was about to be blown up and she jumped from the plane, HAL divided itself into 420 other HAL’s. Now all these HAL’s are merging with people. Because Theresa doesn’t want to not be special anymore, she puts the entire world into a deep sleep under the pretense that all of these people could be another Adolf Hitler and she needs to take care of it and stop that before it happens. You know, so the logical explanation, because she can’t just put on HAL into a deep sleep, is to put the entire world into a deep sleep regardless of the consequences. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of surgery or you’re in the ICU. It doesn’t matter if you’re about to die or something is happening. We’re just going to put everyone into a deep sleep because Theresa can’t be fucked to figure out a solution right now.

Chapter 28

600 years have passed and everyone starts to wake up. Everyone thinks Theresa is dead but she shows up with Steve and 420 (nice) children. All these children are geniuses and specialize in something and have the equivalent of like 10 college degrees. So in the past 600 years (where nobody aged, not even Theresa and Steve) the world has advanced massively because of the children and Steve and Theresa.

Theresa also kept the children as 10-year-olds rather than letting them age. “I’d kept them in a pre-puberty state so they wouldn’t fool around with each other” (pg 464). It’s not like they’re siblings and look like mini replicas of you and your husband. It’s not like you should discourage incest among them because incest isn’t a good thing and can mess with someone’s psyche because it’s damaging a familial relationship by intertwining it with a sexual relationship. Not at all.

But these children, as it would turn out, don’t have a HAL. Theresa and Steve just had like 420 (nice) children I guess. No, Theresa just absorbed all of the other HAL’s and will absorb any other HAL that shows up on earth. And that’s the end of the fucking book. This shit show of a book is finally over. I hated it so much and I’m glad to finally be done with it.

-8/10 stars. Get fucked Norman Boutin. Your book is stupid as shit and I hate it.

#Empress Theresa #bad books review #bad book #review #reviewblr #bookblr #the end #it's over #I can finally sleep easy #no more empress theresa #this book was hell #Theresa is still a monster #fuck you theresa #this book is shit #finale

24 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapters 11-20

Disclaimer: This contains spoilers. If you haven’t read the previous post you can find Chapters 5-10 here.

Yay! After a while, the next Review of Empress Theresa is finally here! I hope that you all enjoy because I sure as fuck didn’t. These chapters have some pretty fucked up logic, and Theresa does some pretty fucked up things (nothing worth a trigger warning). As such, I plan on having this review of these chapters be a bit more well researched than other chapters solely because I’m bored in quarantine, having gotten my assignments for my classes done early and I feel like fucking Norman Boutin’s logic up. This is the second to last review I’ll be posting for Empress Theresa (aside from a possible final one with a wrap up of feelings and thoughts I wasn’t able to express in these reviews). Like I’ve mentioned before I’ve got a few other books in the line-up to read and get through afterward. I doubt I’ll be doing much more in this style (considering how bizarrely long Empress Theresa is), though I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. Remember, if you have any books you want me to review, shoot me a message! I’ll look into them as soon as I can or let you know if that one is already on the shelf and waiting! But enough procrastinating, on with the chapters!

Chapter 11

Despite the fact that last chapter, Theresa went on a week-long vacation to France and Ireland (which if I remember right, I grew very heated about), this chapter it has been nearly a month since that trip and Theresa is already growing “depressed” from the “oppressive work” she’s being “forced to do”. So she takes another trip, this time by herself. She heads to a small village and basically parties with the people there. After the party, she heads back to start working and we finally learn what Theresa’s code is. It’s a substitution code, basically. Now I’m not good at code, I’ve never taken any training in it, but I’ve been told that it’s a substitution code. “The code was triplets made of three characters: AB2, AB3, AB4, CAA, DBB, and so on. Only I knew the code. It couldn’t be broken by all the intelligence agencies in the world because they represented actions and locations, not words. Besides that, I threw in some useless dummy parameters to confuse anybody looking over my shoulder. To pound the final nail in the coffin, I randomly surrounded the parameter codes with tiny circles, squares, rectangles, and arrows that meant nothing” (pg 189). Now I may not know how to break code myself, but that sounds like it would be pretty fucking easy to break into anyways. Aside from that, we learn that Theresa is basically just going to end up using a chessboard or wire twisted and pinned to pieces of plywood to ‘target’ or ‘tag’ things so HAL can follow them. I’m still not quite sure how that works, but I guess HAL can really only work with three dimensions, so it works with this three-dimensional code and applies it to something? Fuck if I know. But to test HAL’s abilities she raises a pointless 10-foot-wide column of water off the Gloucester coast. It went up at 200 miles an hour, which is 3 miles a minute (which is pretty fucking fast, I would think). You’d think this would displace a lot of water, but I guess not. She repeats the same thing in the Pacific ocean but with six water columns, and instead of ten, they’re one hundred feet wide. In 45 minutes they reached 150 miles (which is still 3 miles a minute, so at least Norman is consistent on that front). And then, at 150 miles in thE FUCKING AIR SHE JUST LETS THE SHIT AT THE TOP FREE FALL. Apparently, the impact of the atmosphere just turns that shit into steam.

Steve suggests that he should go to the UN to give the program that Theresa is working off of (I think), to quell the world’s fears and anxiety. Theresa agrees but only because “This might have been a little grandstanding on Steve’s part, but that was forgivable. This could be his last chance to hold the spotlight” (pg 194). Theresa constantly says that she doesn’t want to hold the spotlight, yet she constantly brings up that nobody will get the spotlight but her, and she never seems upset about it. Even later on, when someone in parliament stands up to question her, she gets pissed off because they took the spotlight from her. They spoke out against her and she becomes a toddler and throws a big fucking fit about it. Theresa says she doesn’t want to be in the spotlight and that she doesn’t like it, but her actions sure as fuck don’t show that. Chapter 12

North Korea is launching a missile at the water towers. For what purpose? I don’t fucking know. It says later on in the chapter that by doing this they think that they’re destroying HAL, and as such, will economically destroy everyone when the huge tsunamis hit the coastlines. I don’t know how they know that Theresa is sending HAL out there to control the water columns, but I guess she is? The problem is she’s not sending all of HAL out to control the column. She can still do other shit with it, so I have no idea what the logic is in this chapter. She’s also controlling his actions with a chessboard because I guess the plywood and metal wire was boring as shit. We also learn that everybody is fucking terrified of Theresa. “In other words, everybody was afraid of what I would do next” (pg 202). Which is followed shortly by, “Don’t piss me off!” (pg 202). Theresa clearly enjoys that people are scared of her. She gets a kick out of it because it puts her as the one in control and nobody can do jack shit about it. The entire world is terrified of her, and for some reason, Theresa loves that. Theresa is a fucking monster, and that point will only be proven even more later on! Nobody knows what Theresa will do next, because she was going to raise the water columns up in the thousands around the world, but she can’t do that anymore. So instead, she clears out a giant fucking area in the North Pole, and she’s going to raise up water columns there. The first thing she does is create splash barriers so tsunamis can’t come out and kill everybody, and I guess those work just fine. Theresa is able to easily raise these splash barriers because “The Arctic Ocean was only half a mile deep which made this piling up of rock easier for me to do then it would be in the three mile deep Atlantic” (pg 204). First of all, this is really wrong. It takes a really quick and easy Google search to realize that the Arctic isn’t necessarily half a mile deep. At its deepest, it’s 3.4 miles. Sure, where Theresa could be doing this, it may only be half a mile deep, but that would be fucking stupid and wouldn’t give her nearly enough water for what she plans to do. At the Atlantic, at its deepest, is 5.3 miles. Once again, a quick and easy Google search proves Norman wrong.

But, besides this faulty logic, we get even more bad logic. Theresa raises four water columns in the North Pole at 1,000 feet each. For reference, the International Space Station on most given days is only ~250 miles from the Earth’s surface. I know 1,000 miles seems really impressive, but it’s just really impractical. The water (now ice) would be so far out of the influence of earth’s gravitational pull that it would just orbit around the Earth, not come crashing back down. Please, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this. I’m just a history major, not a physics major.

Chapter 13 Theresa uses a chessboard to raise up 56 columns of water in the North Pole. Because of the amount of water that’s rising up (5,012 miles exactly) which you know, goes out nearly as far and further than most satellites. Space technically starts at 62 miles above the earth’s surface (average sea level, I think), so Theresa has giant fucking columns so far from earth that there is no way in fuck that they’ll be able to fall back down to earth (source). Yet somehow, these columns can still come crashing down and throw water back into the atmosphere which causes it to rain. And when the water comes crashing back down to earth, it’s akin to “eight million tons of TNT every second” (pg 213). So you know, Theresa has just effectively ruined the North Pole forever and ever and ever. The largest atomic bomb ever detonated by the United States, Castle/Bravo, let off the energy force of about 15 tons of tnt. This was a singular explosion, Theresa’s explosions are happening every. Single. second. (source)

But aside from this devastation to a really important ecosystem on Earth, it created rain. Nearly 100 inches a year, everywhere, for as long as the water columns are active. Theresa has flooded the earth. The earth’s average rainfall is about 39 inches a year (source). There are obvious exceptions, like the Amazon Rainforest, which can get 100-200 inches of rain per year, depending on the area (source). This means the entire world is essentially going to drown because of how much rain Theresa just gave them. Wait to go, Theresa, you just “saved” everyone.

Oh but that isn’t it, to put a sweet little cherry on top, Theresa decides that she needs to tilt the earth so it’s straight up and down and the earth no longer has a tilt to it. This effectively rids the world of seasons, making it summer all year round so people can grow crops all year round (hint: you really can’t do that). There are plenty of crops that grow in summer, but Theresa effectively wiped out all seasonal crops, so way to fucking go, Theresa. Not to mention that because there will be no more snow or winter because she doesn’t think we need it, there goes the entire industry having to do with skiing and snowboarding. There also goes most places supplies of water. In the region that I live, we rely really heavily on having enough snow during the winter times so that when spring comes around and the snow starts to melt off of the mountains it will run down and our reservoirs will be filled again. Then we don’t have to be concerned about not having enough water for the summer and fall months. There are also areas in my state where it’s harder to get water to, so people have to put out basins on their property to collect snow so it melts and they have enough to water crops, yards, and sometimes, even just so their water bills don’t absolutely skyrocket. So thanks for sending people into poverty too, Theresa. Oh wait? She doesn’t care? She donates a tiny portion of her trillions later on to the world poor fund as we learn later on. How generous and benevolent of you Theresa. However shall we repay this debt that we owe you?

Chapter 14

In this world, rather than Theresa having killed off the entire population of the earth, she just saved everyone. How wonderful and heroic of her. Everyone is celebrating her and who she is. Norman decided that it was absolutely important to add into just how the Chinese were celebrating her too, “They were holding my photograph in their hands and yelling Tah-ee-sah! Tah-ee-sah!” (pg 219). I don’t know about you all, but that seems pretty racist to me because Norman had to specifically include that. He didn’t talk about how everyone was chanting her name, nor point out how it was being pronounced. He specifically did this with China.

Anyways, besides supposedly being in hiding and nobody being able to find her, she has to leave the Parker estate because they expect half a million people to visit the house by the day’s end and can’t have her there. So you know, guess she wasn’t all that well in hiding. Because she leaves though, Theresa decides that she needs to go to Parliament to talk and put her two cents out there. We also find out that she’s not a public speaker in the most brilliant way, “‘I’m not a public speaker. I never wanted to be. I’m talking to the media and the people on the street. Excuse this little piece of paper. It reminds me of the points I’ve been thinking of a long time’” (pg 222). Does this remind anyone of the familiar little phrase ‘Show don’t tell’? There are better ways to introduce that she’s not a public speaker, like stuttering over herself, fidgeting, not looking at the audience, mumbling and then speaking too loud. The microphone could peak because she’s not used to using one, she could knock something over out of nervousness. We could see her fidgeting with the notecard. Norman doesn’t do any of this because he has no idea how to show and not tell us exactly what’s going on.

Nonetheless, she continues on with a long and boring speech just saying that she doesn’t want to be mobbed in public. Someone in the House stands up though and asks why she’s there, which is a perfectly reasonable question. Theresa doesn’t see it this way, however. “I could single him out because he had stood up when he said that. I suppose it was a House rule. I stared at him with no attempt to hide my contempt. How dare he interrupt me! In answer to his own question, why had he spoken if not to attract attention to himself? This hypocrisy had to become plain to everyone as I stared his political career into oblivion. “‘You interrupted me” I said. “Nobody interrupts me. I don’t need you’” (pg 223). I thought you didn’t want attention, Theresa? I thought you just wanted to be treated like everyone else? I thought you weren’t special. Not to mention she says it’s hypocritical. The man did absolutely nothing to be hypocritical. Theresa is so unaware that it’s painful and it makes me angry. She follows this up by claiming that there’s a new sheriff in town (hint: it’s her). Yet she continues with the notion that she doesn’t want attention. :) :) :) :) :) :) :):):):): ): ): ): ): ): ): ): ): I fucking hate this book

We find out what happened to Jan. Apparently despite the fact that she could say she was working with the government, she’s been unemployed because the ‘eight-year gap’ in her resume made her unemployable. This is just bullshit. She obviously worked for the government, there are records of her working for the government, she had a supervisor. Not to mention, an eight-year gap doesn’t make someone unemployable. I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t. But Theresa sends a message out on the ‘All Theresa All the Time’ channel to let Jan know that she’s not angry at her and wants to meet with her. So you know, Despite the fact that there’s a channel dedicated to her on TV, one that she obviously uses, she definitely doesn’t want the attention and wants to be treated like a normal person. Definitely. Fuck you Theresa.

Chapter 15

I had to walk away and watch YouTube for a few hours but I’m back, and somewhat more relaxed again. So let’s get started on chapter 15. Essentially because of thermal expansion, because Theresa fucked up the entire earth and its tilt, they expect that the oceans will rise two or three feet in a year. Norman also says that parts of the ocean are 3 miles deep, as if that’s the deepest part of the ocean, but the deepest parts of the ocean are 7 miles (Challengers Deep, the deepest part of the ocean, is ~7 miles down) (sorry for saying ‘deep’ and ‘deepest’ so much). The solution? Lift a lot of cubic miles of water out of the oceans and yeet them out of the earth never to return. Brilliant. Because of all the rain they have to find protective headgear as well so they don’t get soaked. Theresa and Co. (Steve and Prime Minister Blair) get traditional American Firefighter helmets. These are such a slam hit to see everyone wearing that companies start making fake knock-offs so people can be like Theresa. They also decide to travel around the world to take a break. Their break is so rudely interrupted because the wind is slowly returning, and that will cause massive and destructive hurricanes that the world just can’t afford to deal with. We also find out that the earth hasn’t completely lost its declination. It’s 5 degrees now, which you know, is so much better than 0. Theresa is such an amazing person though for not wanting to right the word again because the Asians can’t afford to go through winter, and if they went through winter they would lose half a billion people. Because you know, it isn’t like all of this isn’t her fault in the first place and this whole thing could have been avoided if Theresa hadn’t cherry-picked problems to solve in the first place.

Chapter 16

Theresa spends the whole night crying. I’m so sad for her :(:(:(:(:(:(::) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) Steve decides to fix this. And the way he fixes this? They need to go and grab elements from the sun and bring them down to earth to stop the hurricanes. The elements that they grab? Xenon, and per the request of the British military, helium. After a month of attempting this, Xenon now accounts for two ounces of atmospheric pressure. Xenon is an inert noble gas that’s traditionally used in lighting. Xenon is also classified as an asphyxiant. Inhalation in excessive conditions can cause dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. “The first symptoms produced by a simple asphyxiant are rapid respirations and air hunger. Mental alertness is diminished and muscular coordination is impaired. Later judgment becomes faulty and all sensations are depressed. Emotional instability often results and fatigue occurs rapidly. As the asphyxia progresses, there may be nausea and vomiting, prostration and loss of consciousness, and finally convulsions, deep coma and death” (source). A concentration of 75% Xenon inhaled can be fatal in minutes. All Theresa is using it for is to cool the air because xenon has a cooling effect on the environment. However, in the process, she is also killing all the asthmatics and people with other respiratory conditions. Congratulations, Theresa. She’s probably killing more people than that too, because she’s putting a fuck ton of helium into the atmosphere and air. The atmosphere, after a month, became 10% helium. It’s true that at the current time, we are having a helium shortage, but considering that Norman claims this is a million times what our current atmosphere’s helium content is, that seems like it’s a terrible idea. An increase in the helium in our atmosphere increases the atmospheric pressure. This isn’t a terrible thing and not everybody dies, but asthmatics and people with other respiratory issues are sure as fuck going to have a terrible time.

She also fucks up the gravity of the entire solar system by taking Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, and making it orbit around Mars. Do I even need to explain why this is a bad idea? Why fucking up the gravitational orbit of the solar system is the absolute worst idea I have ever fucking seen?

Then she goes and crashes the entire economy and puts the world into a global depression by flooding the market with gold and silver. They claim it’s a monetary stabilizer, and sure, it is, if you want your money to be stabilized at like .02. This has absolutely no consequence on anything or anyone in Theresa land though, which is fucking stupid and so unrealistic. Norman tries to paint this book like it’s realistic and something that people could actually work with, but you really can’t. At the disclaimer at the very end of the book, the only thing that he says isn’t realistic is the way that President Martin acted (wanting to blow up Theresa). Anyways, Theresa hires Jan as her financial manager (because that makes sense, and Jan definitely has experience with finances [she doesn’t]). And the chapter is ended off with “I wonder what my old BC boyfriend Jack Koster was thinking of all this!” (pg 253). Was all of this just to get back at Jack? What the fuck Theresa? Why? I thought you were happily married to Steve? So why the fuck are you thinking of Jack? I’m so confused. Chapter 17

God I am so fucking close to being finished with this review and then I can finish the fucking book, write the final review, and be out and never think of this fucking book again. This chapter though, oh god this chapter is something else. Theresa is a horrible human being in this chapter and honestly is akin to a monster in this chapter. So all of the people who held stocks in Gold Bullion have just lost all of their money thanks to Theresa (see, she has sent people into poverty, wiping out their retirement funds, college funds for their kids, et...c). As such, they’re filing a class-action lawsuit against Theresa, headed by Connie McKesson. Reasonable, right? They’re asking for 35 billion dollars in damages which I guess is far less from what she’ll get in her gold sales. Someone claims that Theresa may spend most of her life in courts (which makes sense).

Theresa gets pissed at Steve because the idea to get the gold was his idea so she storms upstairs and leaves him downstairs. Mrs. Parker comes up and reassures Theresa that nobody is to blame when couples have problems, “The world is to blame” (page 256). So now she makes up with Steve. Despite that Norman claiming that there’s no swearing in the book, Steve says “We’ll get this lawyer bitch” (page 257). Even though Connie is just doing her job, Steve and Theresa come after her without relent. They find out where she is and stalk her. HAL targets and tags Connie, and they follow her home from her workplace. She lives in a single-family home, and apparently this is something that’s funny to Steve and Theresa, like it’s a bad thing. They confirm that Connie has two little children and yet they’re still absolutely awful and mean to her. Despite the fact that she’s just trying to do her job, and earlier they stated that the people who were filing the suit would just go to another law firm, Theresa still goes after Connie. “Any vehicle she entered would not move. I wasn’t going to allow her to go anywhere except on foot” (page 261). She does this for the other eight (male) lawyers in Connie’s firm as well. Apparently, this is somehow better because “The crybaby media couldn’t say I was making it hard for mommies to take care of their kids as they said about Connie McKesson” (page 262). More than that, I don’t think Norman thought about single fathers or families who rely on the men to be the primary breadwinner in the household. This is 2020, yes, but there are still plenty of families where men are the primary breadwinners. She’s keeping people from being able to go to their jobs, to make money, to support their families. She’s forcing them to do whatever the fuck she wants because she’s mad that they have to do their jobs.

And if they had a medical emergency, Theresa would have to look them over to confirm that they weren’t buffing, otherwise they couldn’t go anywhere at all unless it was on foot. However, you can’t always know someone has a medical emergency just from first glance (e.g. like an exploding appendix). It’s cruel and disheartening. What if one of their children had a medical emergency? What then? What if they needed to get across town quickly because a family member was in an accident or had an emergency? Theresa said she wouldn’t let them take any transport aside from walking unless she deemed that they could. And nobody can do jack shit about this. Why? Because although everybody knows it’s her, there’s no physical evidence that it is. “So! I could do anything I wanted to anybody and nobody would dare do anything about it! I kind of liked that” (pg 262). How horrible is Theresa? She can do whatever the fuck she wants, she can ruin peoples lives, crash economies, kill people, and so long as she does it with HAL, nobody can do shit against her. Not to mention all of this was so unnecessary. Everybody knew that Theresa would win the suit anyway, so why the fuck did she feel the need to go to all this effort? Why the fuck would she be willing to ruin their lives until they dropped the suit? It’s cruel and it’s inhumane. When they finally drop the lawsuit she lets them go so they could finally travel in ways other than via foot. “Don’t mess around with Empress Theresa” (pg 263).

They decide that they can use this grounding trick with terrorists too. Because you know, not being able to use a vehicle will definitely stop a terrorist. Definitely. But in Theresa-land it will. Though by targeting these terrorists with the grounding trick (despite a million better ways that she could target terrorists with HAL), she apparently is setting a target on her back, but she’s going through with it anyways. We get another line that absolutely proves just how horrible of a person I think Theresa is and how little empathy she has, more specifically, how little empathy or care I think Norman Boutin has. “The Parkers made no effort to hide their disappointment. Their darling Theresa was more important to them than nameless bombing victims” (pg 265). What if it was your family? Your mother, your brother, your sister, your father, your cousin, your aunt, your uncle, your grandparent? What if it was your friend? Your best friend? What if it was you? Just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean that other people didn’t. For someone that was their family member. That was their friend, their best friend. That wasn’t just a nameless bombing victim. That was a person.

Chapter 18

Once again I had to get up and walk away and do something else for a little bit. But I’m back now and somewhat more ready to keep writing, so let’s just keep trudging on, I guess.

The news is filled with stories of terrorists being grounded, Theresa brags about how she could have killed the lawyers if she wanted to. The US decides to mint silver coins with Theresa’s face on them because she’s just that fucking important. One again she brings up Jack, which is completely and utterly pointless. I don’t know at this point if she’s still in love with Jack or if she loves Steve because she brings up Jack so fucking often it seems.

We meet the main bad guy of the next few chapters, I guess. OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. And rather than delving into this, Theresa just fucking moving on and straight to meeting President Stinson, the new president of the United States for the first time. Theresa brings Prime Minister Blair along as a representative for the rest of the world (because the Prime Minister of England can totally do that). All they talk about though is OPEC, and apparently how OPEC thinks that “they can make you cave in and turn you into a slave. That will give them the power they always wanted” (pg 272). I’m still not really sure where this came out of considering that OPEC held absolutely no role before and Theresa had never shown an interest in petroleum. Now, however, I guess she does. I guess it’s because she’s going to bring carbon into the atmosphere to try and beat them (she never does as far as I’ve read in the book). I guess they quickly scrap that idea though because now Theresa is going to bring land up to the surface so they can have an entire petroleum mining business from the ocean floor. It would be hers though because you know, it’s not like another country would be able to lay claim to it, but whatever.

President Stinson also goes to Congress so they can make it so Theresa can’t be sued because she definitely needs that power too and fuck you, you can’t lay a single fucking finger on our perfect little Theresa.

OPEC and Theresa have had like 0 contact up until this point, but they come out on TV with their demands “We seek justice on the world stage. If it is not given to us we will take it. We demand the operation known as grounding to be removed from all freedom fighters [terrorists, according to Theresa]…. We demand that Theresa Hartley put ten billion dollars every month into a fund for the world’s poor. We demand the land known to the West as Israel be returned to the people who lived there before 1947. If these demands are not met we will sell no oil to the United States or the European Union” (pg 276). Yeah, so turns out, Theresa wasn’t even fucking donating to the world’s poor all along, let alone out of her own volition. We’ve learned at this point that she has fucking trillions in the bank and yet she can’t be fucked to donate to people. The money is still rolling in for her and yet she can’t donate to anyone. Also, OPEC isn’t associated with terrorists as far as I know? If I’m wrong please correct me, but it seems more like the terrorists attack OPEC more than not.

But apparently these demands are too outrageous for Theresa and send her to tears. Despite the fact that you know, apparently none of this was a problem before (especially on the oil part). But we’re supposed to pity Theresa here. I’ll let you in on a secret, I really don’t pity Theresa. In fact, I really hate her guts and I hope those assassins do finally come after her and kill her :) Theresa moves on anyways, not willing to give into OPEC’s demands and picks a rectangle near the arctic where she’s going to pull up a bunch of land to mine for petroleum on. She doesn’t do that just yet though because she has to go and meet with Prime Minister Scherzer (the prime minister of Israel). She gives him two options, Plan A is that they move the entire fucking country of Israel and stick it smack damn in the Mediterranean between Italy and Greece. Prime Minister Scherzer doesn’t like this so they move on to Plan B, where Theresa just raises an entire island for them all to live on. Originally it was going to the in the shape of the Star of David, though Sherzer points out this is kind of unconventional, so he changes it and it’s really fucking complicated and basically a bunch of islands with harbors to protect it. Theresa also agrees that she can just move Jerusalem to the island without a fucking hassle.

Then we come back to the island that Theresa is raising to mine petroleum from and to sell at $20 a barrel, which is anywhere from ~4-10 dollars below the general crude price of oil as of today (4/7/2020) (source) And because they’re still worried about assassins, this time coming after the Israeli people while they’re moving across the land bridge that Theresa will be making as a temporary way to get to the island she’s creating for them, Theresa decides that the best way to avoid it is to make 24-hour sunlight. Fucking Wonderful. That definitely won’t fuck shit up.

Chapter 19

I am so fucking close. I just want to be done. I fucking hate Theresa so much. I hate this stupid fucking book and its terrible logic. Theresa basically starts blowing up an area where she wants to raise the ground to make her giant oil mining operation and predicably the world freaks the fuck out. Theresa blows the hole so deep in the ocean that it should be in the earth’s mantle, but somehow it fucking isn’t. Oh well, I guess. Theresa also just decides in this chapter that she’s fine being a god among men. “How quickly people forgot my benevolence when fear took control of them!” (pg 292). “It wouldn’t do to have the World Empress blow her top” (pg 293). She also seems to forget everything that she’s done to attack the lawyers who were just trying to do their job by refusing to let them go anywhere unless it was by foot, “I’m still waiting for an apology for the attempt on my life, but I haven’t done anything to anybody, have I?” (pg 293).

People are pretty upset she’s just ripping up the ocean and the ground and not telling anybody about what she’s doing, which is understandable. England sets up tanks and Gatling guns (for the drones) and soldiers with rifles to shoot anyone who gets close because I guess people are just so upset about what Theresa is doing in the middle of the Arctic ocean. And the reason why she’s making this giant rectangle so deep is for the overflow of the ocean when she raises up that giant fucking piece of land so she can make companies mine oil for her. Theresa also brings a fuck ton of carbon to earth and compresses it into diamonds so she can make a giant diamond ring that will reflect the sunlight and give the earth 24-hour sun. Apparently, people are super fucking pumped about this. That honestly just sounds like hell to me. I can’t even be bothered right now to research why that’s a terrible fucking idea and would throw so many people and things off and would just ruin everything.

Chapter 20

Theresa has to meet with ‘a Saudia Arabian’ instead of OPEC, which she’s pretty fucking upset about. “It didn’t matter to me what his name was. And to be honest, what he had to say didn’t matter much to me either unless he was prepared to give up all his demands” (pg 313). So this man is a representative of OPEC, but apparently that’s still not good enough for Theresa because she’s a childish brat who needs to have whatever the fuck she wants or else the rest of the world is going to suffer for it. Way to write a super relatable and lovable character, Norman. Anyways, Theresa meets with this man in Geneva, Switzerland, where they have a Swiss representative for the government or military, or something, there. Not to be a mediator or anything, but just to throw herself in the way in case they start throwing knives because that’s definitely going to happen. Anyways, Theresa basically says if they drop their demands she’ll make all the countries in the middle east more like Europe, with mountains and rain and forest and without the deserts. So essentially, Theresa is willing to destroy an entire VERY IMPORTANT ECOSYSTEM. All just so she doesn’t have to deal with OPEC anymore. Wonderful. Fucking. Wonderful. And we’re supposed to believe that Theresa isn’t a horrible person? Anyways, after the meeting where nothing is resolved or agreed on, Theresa, I guess, has already lifted the island for the Israeli people. She starts making the landbridge so they can get to it, which you know, is fuckin mint. She then sends up her diamond ring to give the world 24-hour daylight, and people were super happy about it. Which is so fucking stupid and unrealistic. So much shit would get fucked up.

Apparently crime rates drop because of it, which I have a hard time believe considering that a lot of crimes happen in daylight, specifically when people are at work (break-ins).

And to end off the chapter, the Exxon Maria, the petroleum boat that’s carrying the petroleum from the mining operation happening on the island that Theresa was making blows the fuck up after a 55-foot long ‘fishing’ boat rams into it.

This entire book is just… something else. And I hate it. Get fucked Theresa. Chapter 21-28 will be the last review for this book, and then I can move on with my life. I hate this book so much. So, so fucking much. It’s so terrible and you don’t even know it until you try and read it yourself. Until then, I hope that you enjoyed this review.

#bad book reviews #bad book #review #reviewblr #bookblr #empress theresa #theresa is a monster #fuck you theresa #i want to die #I hate this book so much #this was torture #nearly done

4 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Complete Review - The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage

DISCLAIMER: This review will contain spoilers. If you plan to read the book, I will leave a mark for when I go more in-depth on the book, so continue at your own risk. If you want to purchase The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage, you can get it here.

The Rose Council, as far as I can find, is the first book published by Mark Bullock. On the cover, it states that it is book 1, presumably in a series, though after some extensive searching, I can’t find any sequels despite the book having been published in 2010. The book was published through AuthorHouse, a self-publishing company. I have spoken very briefly with the author about his work, considering that my Dad actually happens to be friends with Bullock. However, I will do my utmost to be unbiased and as professional as these reviews get by keeping any personal feelings I hold towards Bullock out of my review and commentary. Bullock has stated that he had the editors at AuthorHouse review his book and edit it, however, after looking through reviews of AuthorHouse’s services and their FAQ (link their FAQ), AuthorHouse only offers suggestions for edits. It is entirely up to the author if they wish to accept these edits. I have reason to believe, through a multitude of spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, that this book never made it past chapter 3 of editing, if it was even edited at all. It gets worse as it goes, which seems to defy all logic. As an author writes a book, especially for their first time around, you would assume that the book would get better as it goes with their skill in writing improving over time. The exact opposite happens in this book, and it gets so much worse than it started as it goes. Bullock has also stated that he did not review the book very many times himself or have others go over it very many times as it can “cause the book to lose its story.” It doesn’t take very long to find that this statement is more than just a little wrong. Tony Smith, the author of Fukushima and the Coming Tokyo Earthquake stated that an author should go over their book “Enough times that if someone would plagiarize your work you would recognize it instantly (source).” Most authors tend to agree with Smith, and if any author begins to hate their work from reading it so much or the words start to blur together, they should have a good, qualified, and supportive editor behind them. Not their friends acting as an editor, but an actual editor who went to school and studied the language the author is writing it well enough that they know the ins and outs of how words work together and how stories flow. A good editor will catch plotholes and inconsistencies; they will point out when your story is starting to flounder and fall apart; they will point out things that need to be cut and things that need to be elaborated on. If Bullock truly did have an editor, they were not a good one because none of these things happened, and if they did, I would absolutely hate to be the one to read through the first manuscript because The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage was absolutely horrendous to read through and I can barely imagine what it would be like to edit it. To combat the point that the “book will lose its story” it doesn’t take very many brain cells to figure out that if you are losing your story through the editing process, then perhaps it wasn’t a good story to begin with. I have rarely met an author who goes with the first storyboard or plot they laid out, let alone continuing on without making a few or many tweaks to the story itself as they go. To simply go with the first idea that you have and believe that it doesn’t need to be changed is arrogant and childish. In the words of the true Queen, Hannah Montana, “Nobody’s perfect” and this could not be more true for books. A book is never completely perfect, they can be absolutely amazing works of art, but most authors will still find something wrong or something that they wish they could change. “I hope you’re plagued with dissatisfaction your whole life, that way you’ll always strive to do better.” -Bob Ross Bob Ross may not be an author, but a book is still a work of art. Perhaps not a painting or even a drawing, but it is still a piece of artwork that many people hold dear to them. Never think that you can’t improve because you always can. We can always strive to be a better version of ourselves and to put out better work. To believe you have reached perfection, that your work simply can’t improve is incredibly arrogant and reflects poorly on yourself and your work. You can be happy with your work and love it and believe it is good, but we can always do better. On from the rant, we come to the book itself. Little known and little shared book, The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage. This book has yet to blow up in the mainstream like Empress Theresa for how horrible it is, which isn’t surprising. It’s rather hard to find on Amazon or really any website without searching directly for the title. I don’t know if I’m pleased about that or not, because, on Amazon, it had three reviews before I posted my own. They were all rated five stars, one of them from Bullock’s friend, another from his wife, and another from an account I can only assume is fake with the review having been bought by Bullock or made by him. Either way, they were all 5-stars, and I felt immense satisfaction when my review brought it down to 3-stars. One of the reviews is written far more eloquently than the actual book is, and it’s the fake review, posted by Amazon user ‘F1.4toF32’. The sole review on this user’s account is for the book. If you look at Amazon.uk and other international Amazon pages, this user’s review doesn’t actually exist. Wonder why that is? Maybe because it’s… oh, I don’t know… fake? A purchased review so Bullock could promote his book and make it look better? *Gasp* This wasn’t a good start for The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage. If you look at the reviews through Barnes & Noble and Goodreads, Bullock or his wife have reviewed the book and left it a 5-star review. I understand that Franzi is supporting her husband in his endeavor to be a writer, and the sentiment is sweet, but it’s enabling his terrible, terrible writing. Bullock rating the book himself though is just rather arrogant and comes off as a piss-poor attempt to try and boost his book to get more readers. Boosting his book to get more readers is definitely the last thing that Bullock needs, however. Actually, no. Bullock needs more people to read his book so he can have his massive ego stomped on and dragged through the mud. Pride is one thing, an ego is another (Sorry, my personal feelings leaked in a bit there. Though I’m choosing to keep it in).

The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage is a fantasy novel, supposedly the first in a series of 7 according to the fake review. It contains a pitiful attempt at a ‘sex-scene’, which safely moves it out of the young-adult audience and into the adult audience. As such, that gives me free rein to have a no-holds-barred review. This collection of words so horrendous it can barely be called a book was made for adults and therefore, has no excuse for its god-awful writing; in the story, characters, and in the grammar of the book, it is truly terrible to the extent of being painful.

The Summary: After 3000 years of peace since the banning of the Gods, a balance is about to be tipped. David, an apprentice and son to the King’s High Enchanter, struggles with the destiny he is to fulfill as the bringer to find the next Kaiser Mage. Unfortunately, the struggle of the delicate balance favors against David, who by himself has little to no power. Unexpectedly, David has discovered a new gift that he must master to find the truth about himself. After a terrible accident, Franziska, a fellow apprentice who conceals a strong love for David, finds herself trailing in David’s shadow to keep him safe. The prophecies handed down through the ages are ambiguous, however, leading some to believe that it is Franziska, not David, who is the true Bringer of the next Kaiser Mage. It is a race against time and fate to bring forth the Kaiser Mage. This summary is terrible in a lot of ways. To start, a good summary will: - Contain the main points and don’t go beyond them - Be as brief as possible (e.g. Don’t get specific with dates, numbers, details unless they are necessary)

- Give the basic information to interest a reader in the story

- Be concise

- Isn’t revealing of important plot points (specifically pertains to works of fiction)(Video source)

Bullock’s summary, on the other hand, is:

- Revealing of plot points

- Exposing content of the book that isn’t actually there (It’s fucking lying to you about the content of the book)

- Setting up relationships (which should be set up in the story, not in the summary)

- Confusing; I still don’t know entirely what the fuck a Kaiser Mage is and I read the entire book

- Exposing plot twists

The Lies: In the summary, we actually get a few lies. First, Franziska never conceals her love for David. She is more than open about it through the entire book, and her entire reason for being and existing is solely for David and to ‘help’ him.

Second, nothing seems to be against David except Jason, a whiny brat who thinks that he’s entitled to everything and doesn’t even show up until about half-way into the book. Even then, Jason holds absolutely no pull with anyone or anything. He couldn’t even tell a fucking fly to piss off. Third, David never struggles with his destiny. In fact, he seems more than eager throughout the entire book to achieve it.

Fourth, Franziska never follows in David’s shadow to try and protect him. In fact, she is quite literally ahead of him the entire time. (Also this is a bit nitpicky for me, but it’s weird that David and Franzi are in love because David is the name of Bullock’s son and Franzi is his wife)

The Characters: David Saxton: The main character. Arrogant, a rebel, objectifies women, a complete Gary-Stu. He can do no wrong, is a strategic genius, and is overpowered as shit.

Franziska/Franzi: The main love interest. Scared, submissive, friendly, has occasional bursts of anger.

Rudolf: David’s father figure and mentor. Big, burly, deep voice. That’s seriously all I can think of when I think of Rudolf.

Cornelius: David’s grandfather (biological). The King’s Wizard (I didn’t know there was a difference between a mage and a wizard, but go for it I guess).

Adam Saxton: David’s actual dad. Wants the best for his son, I guess. He is a pretty good teacher, I guess. Fuck if I know how to describe him, he dies within the first three chapters.

Hans: A side character, the Fro-Drag (Frozen Dragon) Warrior. Big, buff, an asshole, emotionally stunted.

Shauna: Hans’ love interest. There is no reason for her to exist other than to give Hans a love interest. She does a few things that help the story, but other than that she serves no purpose to the story.

Henrich: First Keeper (of a Rose Council tower, I think?). One of the bad guys, but not the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG). Idk…. he’s just… there. He doesn’t really have a personality.

Eve: Second Keeper (of the same tower). One of the bad guys, not the BBEG. Apparently she dresses super skimpy, but she’s proud and confident, but also cruel and evil? Zesterag: Third Keeper (same tower). David and Cornelius’s friend. Personality? He doesn’t have one. He is a major part of this book and yet I struggle to find words to describe who he is as a person, and I come up empty because he simply isn’t anything other than ‘David’s friend’ and the ‘Third Keeper’.

Jason: The nephew to the King. Arrogant, prideful, incompetent, entitled. Not necessarily one of the bad guys, though he’s certainly painted to try and be David’s foil it just doesn’t work most of the time, if not all of the time. King Bertram Ingram: Obviously the king. Supposedly he’s the best king that the kingdom has ever seen. He’s easy-going and rather incompetent in the world of magic despite the fact that his kingdom heavily revolves around magic.

Morgloth: The Demon god, the BBEG. You never meet him in this stupid fucking book.

If you haven’t figured out from this “short” list of characters, who they are, and their personalities, the characters in The Rose Council are bland and incredibly surface level. They never change from this starting state of who they are either. There is absolutely no character development from anyone and that makes them, as characters, feel fake and any emotion feels forced (and there certainly is a lot of ‘emotion’ that Bullock tries to push on the reader).

The Problems: This book has… a lot of problems. This isn’t surprising at this point considering it most definitely falls under the category of a bad book. The plot itself is terrible and should have been completely different (which I will go into later). The characters are flat and never develop or gain anything more than a surface-level description. In fact, the descriptions are so surface level that often times, when Bullock describes some of the men, in particular, it comes off as incredibly homoerotic. “‘A complicated case for sure, but General Ekins’s choice in the bet political mind needed for the task was more than well chosen,’ the king replied, which surprisingly made Stark blush, more because it was coming from a man he well respected” (pg 216). Stark received a compliment from the king here and blushed. Now I know that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s gay, but it certainly has Big Gay Energy, especially with how the rest of the book is framed in its almost excessive descriptions of men in a manner that seems over over-indulgent. I was dead convinced that David was gay too until Franziska came into the picture sheerly on how he described Rudolf. “Rudolf smiled his glowing smile David loved very much” (pg 3). “David quickly flipped the dented sword in his hands and presented it to the large man hilt first, allowing his large, thick hands to grab it” (pg 3, 4). And there are so many more examples. Also, on the topic of hands, Bullock has a weird obsession with talking about hands. Rudolf’s thick and large hands and Fraziska’s small and delicate hands more specifically. They are mentioned far too many times and it has convinced me that Bullock has a kink for hands. I’m not going to kink shame anyone, but please, for the love of J.R.R Tolkein, please, stop talking about their hands. There are a lot of grammar and spelling errors as well. Several times throughout the book, and especially in the prologue, Bullock spells ‘Kaiser’ wrong, spelling it as ‘Kaser’. You would think that if the name is on the cover of the book that you could be fucked enough to go and find spelling errors to fix it. He also spells ‘colonel’ as ‘coronal’, which after the years that Bullock spent in the military, you would think he could get right, but I guess not. ‘Till’ instead of ‘Until’, which is the use of slang I guess, but it’s used in formal conversations which would lead me to believe it’s a spelling error. And the big cherry on top, ‘trader’ instead of ‘traitor’. These are the most reoccurring spelling errors throughout the book and while I’m more than certain there are others, these are really the only ones that I can think of at the moment. There’s also so problems with Bullock switching the names (especially towards the end of the book) which makes it a struggle to follow along. E.g. he occasionally switches the name ‘David’ and ‘Jason’, or ‘Franziska’ and ‘Shauna’. This wouldn’t be a huge problem if it didn’t happen as often as it did. In fact, it wouldn’t be a problem at all if Bulock had actually been fucked to edit his book or at the very least, have someone look over it to edit it.

Bullock also steals most of his elements in the book from other fantasy things (mainly World of Warcraft). I understand that fantasy-based things often work off of the same system and borrow a lot from each other, but they still put their own unique twist on it to make the novel feel unique and not like a rehashing of other fantasy stories. Bullock doesn’t do this, and it makes his novel hard to read and understand. If you haven’t played World of Warcraft or Warhammer before (like me) then oftentimes, you don’t know what the fuck Bullock is talking about with a Bloodthirster as he never describes what it is, what it looks like, or anything relating to painting a picture for the reader to allow them to become involved in the story. Another element that was more than blatantly stolen, especially from World of Warcraft, was the Lich King. This was supposed to be another BBEG in the book as far as I was aware, though you never really see any interaction with him. Nothing serves as a threat in this fucking book and it’s annoying. There is nothing at all to ever challenge David and to push him to develop into a better person or a better character. Everyone enables his bad behavior and encourages him to cheat so long if he wins because fuck having honor and pride in what you have done so long as you win, right?

The Plot: The plot of this book is god-awful. What should have been the plot of the entire book is shoved into the last ⅕ and finished in about ten pages. It is genuinely painful to read and I fucking hate it. The entire book up until that point was fluff and exposition and all of it was poorly done. That’s not to say that the last ⅕ of the book was done amazingly, arguably it was done far worse than the rest of the book because of how much shit was crammed into it. It became more than obvious that Bullock was done with the book and just wanted to publish it and never look at it again. The story follows David, a battle mage who has been spoken about in one of Alexander’s prophecies. I’m not entirely sure what this prophecy is since we never learn it or hear anything about it. Alexander was the first Kaiser Mage, the one who pushed the Gods from the earth since I guess that they were just going to kill all living beings on it for their own perverse pleasure (I think. It’s never fully explained). David’s role is to bring the Kaiser Mage back to earth and into being so the Kaiser Mage can put an end to Morgloth before the demon god can terrorize the earth once more. However, Alexander’s prophecy specifically states that the Bringer [of the Kaiser Mage] will be a woman. As such, some people suspect that it is actually Fraziska who is the Bringer, especially after they discover that she essentially harnesses elven magic. This is never explained in the story as to why she has elven magic, she just does. Hans is the son of the recently deceased king of the Fro-Drag clan, determined to kill the great Frozen Dragon who killed his father and the handful of other warriors before his father. They are supposed to kill the baby Frozen Dragon every five-to-ten years, though Bullock flip-flops between the number so I’m not entirely sure. It has been 25 years since the dragon has been killed and no they stand little to no chance of facing off against it, especially since they are supposed to fight the dragon without weapons (big shocker, they don’t fight it without any weapons). Shauna is Hans’ beloved and the head of the Shamans in their clan. She will do her utmost to protect Hans and to see him through to the end of his journey.

Jason is just an entitled prick who is there to make David look better.

The Problems: What’s wrong with the plot? Everything. Everything is wrong with the story, from the pacing to the exposition to the entire worldbuilding. I’ll move through the book chronologically with you and lay it all out for you to see. There are 27 chapters in total plus a prologue, though two chapters are labeled ‘Chapter 26’. At the end of the explanation, I’ll showcase what I think would have been a better plot for this book, especially as the start of a series.

Prologue: Alexander’s Bible To start, the entire thing is in italics. Not only is the word ‘Prologue’ written in bold at the top, but the entire section is in italics. It’s a bit nitpicky, but I hate reading a lot in italics because it can be incredibly difficult to read at times and is often unnecessary. This is one of those times where I really think that the italics were unnecessary.

This section, though, aside from italics is incredibly poorly explained exposition of what a Kaiser Mage is, who the Gods are, and what games they were playing with the different races of Earth, forcing them to fight for their own pleasure. A Kaiser Mage is essentially akin to a God, with some power from all of the Gods as a Kaiser Mage is created to stand-off against the Demon God, Morgloth. The worst explained part of the prologue is a game called ‘Chock’. I’m still not entirely sure what Chock is because it was terribly explained throughout the entire book. If you’re not going to explain a game well, just don’t explain it at all. Better yet, just don’t have it in the fucking book if I can’t understand what it is because it only becomes more and more confusing as you devote entire fucking chapters to someone playing the games that you came up with. These games are completely and utterly pointless and add nothing to the book besides jacking off David’s ego even more and being like “look at how great David is? Don’t you love him yet?” No! I don’t love him. I fucking hate David and everything that he is in this book because he is by far one of the most annoying characters and clearly doesn’t understand how privileged he is most of the time because he’s “good and true” and “knows the right way in a world full of darkness.” I would have liked to see him evolve to become the rebel that he was, not just have him always be like that. Or better yet, have him be a rebel, a liar, a cheat, a thief in the beginning and teach him moral values and the lesson in having pride in what you do. Teach him what it’s like to stick to a code of honor and how being a good person improves your lives and the lives of everyone around you, even if you lose in a friendly game or two. It’s so fucking stupid that Bullock didn’t do this and it makes the book more than just pointless to read. I don’t know if I can even call it a book at this point it’s just a terrible smash together of words that have been bound and framed to be a book, but it’s not.

I fucking hate The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage more than any terrible book I have on my shelf at this point.

Ugh

Chapters 1-6

We start off the book by seeing David train with Rudolf, something I guess that he’s not supposed to be doing because his father doesn’t want him to train to be a soldier. Essentially, David is supposed to be training to take over as the next High Enchanter to the king, a role that his father currently fills. After the training session, David heads back to his house where his father and Franziska are already waiting for them. Adam, David’s father, has them recount the lesson that they just learned the previous day --- how to summon a golem. However, Adam specifically tells them that he doesn’t want them to summon golems because it could kill them, yet, he taught them the exact steps needed to summon one. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Surprise, surprise, as soon as Adam leaves to go and help some Elves and the two are left alone, David and Franziska summon a fucking golem. Before they summon the golem, Franziska helps David to find his magic by “reaching into herself” and “bringing forth her magic” and “putting it into David”. I honest to god hate the way that Bullock constantly describes how they “reach into themselves and bring forth their magic” to describe them using it. It’s annoying and honestly makes me deeply uncomfortable. After they summon the golem (which nearly kills them) the chapter ends and we are now introduced to Cornelius, Zesterag, and the King. We learn that Adam died while trying to fight Bloodthirster and ended up trapping the demon in his ring at the cost of his own life force. He gave the ring to the Elves to give to David. That’s the entire fucking chapter right there, explained better than it explained itself. It tries to push emotion onto the reader by having Cornelius cry over his son dying but I feel absolutely nothing when I read it because I have absolutely no reason to care about Cornelius or Adam.

In the next chapter, we are introduced to Hans and the other warriors who are on their way to kill the Great Frozen Dragon. Bullock flips between calling the Frozen Dragon just that, the Frozen Dragon, or Fro-Drag, or a Fro-Dragon. The inconsistency is incredibly annoying, actually. We also meet Shauna, who is willing to break the rules of their ancestors in order to ensure that Hans can kill the dragon and live, even at the cost of her own life or the lives of her sisters. Yohanus is introduced, and he literally serves no other purpose than to give Hans and excuse as to why he can leave the clan after they kill the Fro-Drag, as Yohanus can take the mantle of King of the clans instead of Hans after the dragon has been killed. Hans also comes off as a massive asshole because he refuses to respond to his men so much that his men just accept that he just doesn’t respond sometimes or just won’t respond sometimes. I guess this was supposed to make Hans the “cool and mysterious” type and a total “badass”, but it just makes him look like an asshole.

If you’re wondering, a Fro-Drag warrior is a warrior who successfully has killed the dragon and as such, has been blessed by the Dragon God with abilities beyond the normal human scope (incredibly enhanced speed, strength, reflexes, constitution, and endurance). They also become completely blue once they are turned into a Fro-Drag warrior. Apparently, nothing can beat one of these warriors, except, you know, a nearly fully grown dragon as Hans’ dead father would prove.

After this, we discover that the elves have arrived to basically give David his father’s position, though Cornelius and Zesterag burst in, just in time, and declare that no, David will be going to study under the Rose Council to become a Rose Council Mage and Franziska will be taking the rank of the High Enchantress. So they do just that, David goes with Zesterag to study under the Rose Council and to hopefully become one of the members and Franzi goes to be the High Enchantress and fulfill everything that duty entails.

Chapter 7-13

David, now at the Rose Council Tower and having met Eve, who he promptly decided was a disgusting whore because the dress she wore hugged her curves too tightly in his opinion, now has to read and memorize the book containing all of the rules of the Rose Council. In order to do this, David discovers that he has a “second mind” which allows him to piss off and do other things while his first mind takes in all of the information and commits it to memory. God, that would be so fucking handy when it came to school. Or just reading this book in general because it was so fucking painful and I would have rather liked to piss off and do other things instead of sitting here and reading through this garbage. In chapter 7, David also meets his servant while he is in the tower. He promptly invades her mind without her consent and finds out she was raped by another trainee in the Rose Council. Bullock uses this point to fuel why the Rose Council are all terrible people and I had to set the book down and leave it for a bit after reading that point. I can’t explain better myself why rape really shouldn’t be used as an arbitrary plot device thrown in to stir emotions than KrismonRogue does. If you want to hear him go in-depth in better words than I can use right now, please, watch his reasoning here.

In chapter 8, Franzi cries because she has to leave her house and actually do things that a High Enchantress is supposed to do. She’s supposed to meet with the king and then go on whatever mission he designates. She cries even more because she’s terrified of the alter-rang golem (I have no idea what the fuck an alter-rang golem is, but I assume it’s big and made out of metal as the book describes) she and David summoned. As such, she’s struggling to control it.

In chapter 9, after finishing the book of rules faster than any other mage has read it, David is introduced to the Gauntlet of Pain (edgy). Where the other mages will launch mental attacks on him and inflict him with unbearable pain. He must push through it in order to get to the end of the hallway (I think that’s what it is) where a statue of Alexander, the first and so far, the only Kaiser Mage is. Should he reach the statue, David will be granted into the life of a fully-fledged Rose Mage. He almost fucking does it on the first try because all he does is make his magic move his body while he just squirrels away in his second mind. He doesn’t stop until the First Keeper, Henrich, decides that it’s too soon for him to reach the statue and just fucking punches the lights out of David via magic. Also, apparently your hair can hurt in this fantasy world. I wasn’t aware that hair itself had nerve endings, but apparently it does.

In chapter 10 Hans and Yohanus kill the Frozen Dragon after Shauna basically points out a crack in the magic shield that prevents any non-living object from entering. Yohanus is able to bring a spear in because of this and they kill the Frozen Dragon. The scene goes way too quickly and is incredibly muddled, which makes it super annoying and bland. The Dragon God shows up after they kill the dragon though and basically grants them both the powers of a Fro-Drag warrior. We learn that in the process of trying to help Hans and Yohanus, several of the Shamans ‘died’ because of their astral projection (though Bullock doesn’t call it astral projection). In truth, their souls were just lost from their bodies because they wandered too far from their bodies and I guess the Dragon God was willing to help the souls be guided back? I have no fucking idea though. The chapter where that’s talked about (chapter 14) is so muddled and hard to decipher. Hans is told that he is to be an assassin and needs to kill the Bringer (or the Kaiser Mage? Both?) before they use evil magic to bring Morgloth into the world and kill everyone.

Chapter 11, Franziska has guards from the kingdom now. They’re called Marble Guards. The only one we know is Clouse and both her and Clouse have far more chemistry than David and she do. The existence of Clouse is entirely pointless however, aside from pointing out just how ‘devoted’ to David that Franzi is. We learn that the alter-rang golem, who is named Ugly, is powerful as shit and basically destroys a single building with its blast of magic lightning. We also meet Jason whose father, the Lord of the village, is then convinced needs to go and be part of the army so he has a better shot at becoming the king after the death of the current king.

Chapter 12, David has an orgy in the showers despite the fact that he says he’s so devoted to Franzi. Actually, the orgy in the showers is completely against his own will and in fact, he has told the servant who brought this onto him that he didn’t want to have sex with her because he was so devoted to Franzi, yet, she pushes this onto him anyways and does it in public space too. If this was a good writer, this would have really fucked up David. However, Bullock is not a good writer, so I’m inclined to believe that this was written with the thought that David should be enjoying it. David gets attacked with magic per the orders of Henrich to attack David with magic whenever you saw him. He’s in the middle of the orgy when this happens and pretends to really be enjoying it while another mage, Teresina, basically funnels away the pain. Apparently convincing everybody he was a masochist was enough to deter them from ever causing him pain like that again out of the blue. It’s weird.

David plays a shitty game with marbles called Defenders or something like that. It’s terribly explained and I’m not going to even bother trying lest I confuse myself more. That just brings me back to my previous statement of not including a game if you can’t explain it to the reader’s understanding. Of course, he fucking wins the game so hard that everyone is impressed and on his side now. He then goes through the Gauntlet of Pain again and actually succeeds this time. He’s told to repeat a phrase on the statue to finally become a Rose Mage. However this little shit, instead of repeating what the phrase is on the statue, he repeats the “actual” phrase (of which I still don’t know what it is, nor do I know what the fake phrase was). Henrich gets super pissed again because of this and says that David is disrespecting the council and Alexander and almost kills David because of it. I guess Zesterag interferes again and saves David’s life? Not too sure though.

In chapter 13, we learn that Henrich is working for Morgloth, David attacks him because of this after freeing Zesterag’s brother, Delpapa (I think this addition was completely pointless). Zesterag and some of the guards from the castle smuggle David out of the tower and get him to safety while Zesterag pretends that he killed David so Henrich and Eve will lay off and not try to hunt him down to kill him. I’m really not interested in David’s safety at all, despite the fact that this is half-way through the book. I don’t care about anything or anyone in this story and there really isn’t a plot-line up until now. It’s just David doing whatever the fuck he wants and the rest of the crew trying to actually do their jobs.

Chapter 14-26 (It’s actually chapter 27, but it’s labeled as 26, so fuck it)

Hans and Yohanus return back to the village, Yohanus is declared as the king and Hans says that he’s going to go out to search for the Bringer so he can kill them before they kill the world. Shauna gets permission from Yohanus to follow after Hans.

Chapter 15, it’s just Franziska, her guard Clouse, some soldiers, and her golem as they pass through a pass filled to the brim with Black Orcs. Supposedly these Black Orcs are super dangerous, but they don’t dare attack because the golem is so stupidly intimidating. They are on their way to the frontlines of the battlefield against the undead creature that would kill the entire land if the shield crystal isn’t recharged. Franziska’s job is to go and recharge these crystals.

They arrive at a camp and go to meet the Sisters of Prophecy where Hans is. Hans joins the entourage (sans Shauna). Eve also joins the entourage to ‘protect’ Franziska and guide her, I guess.

Chapter 16, It’s basically just David’s escape to the palace and then Zesterag convincing Henrich and Eve that he did, in fact, kill David. David dives into a home to hide from Eve and unbeknownst to him, there’s a naked old woman in the home. This is completely pointless to the story and I have no idea why it was included, it wasn’t even funny. We learn that Zesterag has been promoted to Second Keeper and Eve to First Keeper because Henrich has moved to be the Head of the Rose Council. Apparently it’s also a good thing that Henrich believes/does work for Morgloth because he’s their only inside to the way the demon works? This really doesn’t make sense to me, but alright, I guess. In chapter 17 David has arrived to the castle and is basically given the rank of Officer so he can hide from the Rose Council. He is to escort a bunch of new soldiers to the front lines with another officer, Jason, aka entitled brat boy. Oh yeah, for some reason Bullock decided to use a lot of military terminology and complicated names like Sergeant Major and Lord General and Field General, and as someone with no idea what ranking military people have with the titles and whatnot, this actually gets really confusing really quickly. It’s also weird to me that he’s using military terms in a fantasy world, especially because it is by no means a modern world and by no means has any other elements from real life in it. It’s rather jarring and it just doesn’t fit with the world. I understand that in fantasy an author can generally do whatever the fuck they want within reason and so long as it fits, but the military theme really just doesn’t feel like it fits in this story in any way. Bullock jumps between having guards and knights to having soldiers and officers and sergeants and lieutenants. It doesn’t work with the story and I think it needs to be removed entirely. Sure, a good majority of the story will go with it, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The entire plot needs to be remade anyways. Especially considering that in this chapter, David gets a bracer. In this bracer, I guess that he needs to capture different types of magic in order to summon the Kaiser Mage.

The bracer should have been given to him at the beginning of the story. Not the last ⅕. The bracer should have been the entire fucking story as he searched for the different types of magic in order to activate it so he could ‘summon’ the Kaiser Mage to their reality. It’s so fucking stupid that Bullock just throws it in during the last part of the book because now we finally have some kind of plot-line or purpose for David being out and about despite the Rose Council supposedly coming after him to kill him (although they think that he’s already dead). Here’s the real kick in the ass though: Mark ignores the entire fucking point of the bracer until about the last ten-ish pages. Everything in this godforsaken story is shoved into the last ten pages and I hate it. It was incredibly frustrating and I nearly tore the book in half down the spine I was so mad when reading it.

Anyways, Jason is just a total brat, they get to pick Marble Guards to accompany them on their journey to the frontline. Because David just dazzled his superior with his genius so much when it came to picking his guards he gets to have four instead of two. After that, they arrive at the training grounds where the new guards are and *GASP* guess who is there???? Rudolf! David’s sugar daddy! David throws down with all of the new soldiers in a ring to prove to his daddy just how impressive his skills are now that he can use magic to help him! And his Daddy is very impressed by his skills. Then we meet KEVIN. THE MOST FUCKING BRILLIANT NAME FOR A FANTASY CHARACTER EVER. KEVIN. F U C K I N G K E V I N. Kevin is a half-leaderless (which I guess is a race?) and is described as such; “Kevin’s eyes were the giveaway, with the blue reddish tint in them and semi-browner skin. Almost as if Kevin had the best tan, but the leaderless people’s skin were naturally brown” (pg 174). Kevin wants to fight David because Kevin is just amazing with a blade, but David asks if they can wait until tomorrow because he’s so exhausted.

Chapter 18 and Jason is even more of a brat and David is the star child I guess. David fights Kevin and uses his magic to cheat because otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to beat Kevin in the swordfight, meaning that Kevin is the superior fighter. However, instead of being chided for cheating and abandoning any honor in his fight, Daddy Rudolf instead praises David after he promises to never cheat again, and Daddy Rudolf tells him instead “Oh hell no, that is by far the wrong lesson to learn. There will be another time when something like this will happen, David, only it will be your life on the line. I expect you to cheat with everything got, to win, understand?” (pg 177) They do more training exercises and it’s generally pretty unnecessary other than to prove that David is just ‘one of the boys’ and that all of the soldiers love him.

Chapter 19, Franzi has more chemistry with Hans and Clouse again than she ever did with David. Franzi makes ‘friends’ with Eve and threatens Eve that Ugly will kill her if she keeps trying to push her way into her mind. Franzi pretends she’s the Bringer to make Eve happy and Eve tells her that the Bringer is the Kaiser Mage. We already know that David is the Bringer at this point so dING DING DING FUCK YOU WE’RE GOING TO GIVE AWAY THE END OF THE BOOK RIGHT NOW. SURPRISE, BITCH, DAVID WAS THE NEW KAISER MAGE ALL ALONG.

We also get a brief perspective from Shauna where for some fucking reason she’s in a desert. In this desert, she passes out but also befriends two Silverback Desert Hounds. She’s basically a fucking pointless character already and is just there for Hans.

Chapter 20, Jason is more of an entitled brat. David is struggling to use his second mind for some fucking reason, even though this is literally the only point he struggles to use it. Jason is found to be a racist as he hates Captin Olek who I guess is a great captain. He just hates him because he’s black. Yay, more Jason terrible and David great content. Fucking pointless chapter. Oh yeah and somewhere in these chapters David’s ring, the one he got from his father, starts to burn him because the Bloodthirster that is trapped inside of it is pounding on the walls of the pocket dimension? And for some reason, that’s enough to cause the ring to start burning his skin. And for some reason, later on, Bullock loses all logic and insists that the ring burns him terribly enough that he starts to bleed. Despite the fact that you know, heat is used to cauterize wounds.

Chapter 21, Jason bad, David good. Soldiers love David, hate Jason. David can talk in the language of the gods when talking to the Bloodthirster. He plays Chock again and it’s still terribly explained. It’s completely pointless other than proving that David is a very smart and very strategic boy. And that Daddy Rudolf is very impressed with him (not really because although Rudolf is there he juST IS LIKE A FUCKING CARDBOARD FIGURE IN THE BACKGROUND).

Chapter 22, David good, Jason bad. They go through a dangerous canyon filled with Black Orc’s now that Franziska went through earlier.

Chapter 23, Franziska meets with Dark Elves who know she’s not the Bringer and out her to Hans. For some reason, despite the fact that she’s saying she’s the Bringer and Hans is supposed to kill the Bringer, he hasn’t killed her yet. Franziska snaps and has Ugly almost kill Eve. Eve escapes in the nick of time. Franziska and Clouse still have more chemistry than David and Franziska and that is only proved further.

Chapter 24, Shauna shows up. Franziska and Shauna bond almost immediately. David and co finally arrive at the frontlines without have lost a single man, which is supposed to be super impressive but it doesn’t feel that way. Jason bad, David good. All soldier’s love David. Oh nooo… Henrich is there and he knows that David is too. Henrich is big anger now because David is supposed to be dead. Henrich would attack David but whoops! Big wraith arrives and does it for him after Jason was left alone in the field and like a dumbass David rushed in to save Jason because he just has to be the bigger man in the situation. Wraith kidnaps David and Jason. Franziska finds out and cries more.

Chapter 25, David wakes up in the place he was hidden after being kidnapped. Finds one of the green magics for his bracer. Yay! He runs while carrying Jason. Hans realizes David is the Bring and chase after him. Eve gets mad at Henrich and tells Ugly to kill him. Henrich is okay and fucking yeets Ugly a couple of yards away and into a mountain with magics. Eve assures Franziska that Henrich isn’t mad and takes her to a tent to “teach her things”.

Chapter 26 part 1, David run lots while carrying Jason. Hans shows up and fucking deflects all of the magic with the magical resistance that was blessed onto him by the Dragon God when he became a Fro-Drag warrior. They fights lots. David cheats and releases the Bloodthirster from the ring because if you release the Bloodthirster he becomes your servant until you die. David realizes he fucked up. Hans knows he fucked up. Somehow David convinces Hans that he’s not even and when the Bloodthirster brags that he can never be sealed again, David fucking seals him in the stupid fucking magic bracer to get what I guess is the red life magic. Hans just so happens to be the blue life magic because “blue man must be part of blue circle hurhur.” He doesn’t absorb Hans into the bracer but somehow gets the magic? Fuck if I know. Apparently in the prophecy is also said that the Bringer would be evil and release evil magic upon the world, but that was just Alexander spouting bullshit and somehow that in itself was supposed to bring everyone together to do what needed to be done

Chapter 26, part 2, David confronts Eve and Henrich. He fucking makes Eve his slave by brainwashing her with the bracer to make her want nothing more than to serve him. He absorbs Henrich into the bracer without any fight. He then declares himself the Kaiser mage and what a fucking surprise, he is. He then goes off to face the Lich King or Morgloth’s clone that he sent to terrorize the world because he couldn’t set foot on it himself???? Fuck if I know at this point, this book is such a fucking mess. Either way, the BBEG is Morgloth’s clone and instead of an epic fight, Kaiser Mage David just goes up and does the same fucking thing he does with Eve and brainwashes it without a challenge to be his servant. He then goes and commands it to go and kill Morgloth so like, guess there goes that fucking challenge.

And the book is over. The book is finally fucking over. Aside from my rant about the plot issues and how the entire plot should have been centered around the Gauntlet, it has a lot of issues with formatting and phrasing and grammar. The Rose Council clearly never saw an editor a day’s worth of revision and it desperately needs to. Writing a book is hard and takes a lot of effort and research, none of these were put into The Rose Council and it shows.

Overall, 0/10 stars. I fucking hated it.

#Terrible book #i hate my life #i hate everything #bad book #bad book review #reviewblr #is that even a thing?#bookblr #review #complete review #The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage #fuck this book #i fucking hated it #long review

1 note · View note

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Complete Review - Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala

This review is one of my pre-written ones and is different from other reviews. If you’ve read the Waiting for Snow in Havana review, this will be incredibly similar. If I had the option, I would have written a review for Empress Theresa today, though I wasn’t able to work through the rest of the book as of yet. I would say that this review contains spoilers, but it’s literally just a historical book, so I’m not going to. The next Bad Book Review that will be coming out is going to be on The Rose Council: The Kaiser Mage. I’m nearly done with the book, so I hope to get it up by Sunday. Though for now, please enjoy this review on an actually good book.

Bitter Fruit showcases a story that is rarely, if ever actually heard in the United States, twisting the emotions of readers as it showcases the reality of the extent that the Eisenhower Administration was willing to go to wipe out ‘Communists’ or those who were accused of being ‘Communists’. Co-authors Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer set out to write the story of the coup incited in Guatemala by the United States, as well as to help push for a reappraisal of American policies within the western hemisphere. The two authors took an extensive amount of time and consulted many different people, libraries, and archives while gathering their information, both in the United States and in Guatemala. Schlesinger is the Director of the World Policy Institute and in 1977 with the Freedom of Information request made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) urged for the CIA to release all their documents on American involvement during the coup in Guatemala. Kinzer spent 13 years writing about Latin America, and while working as a bureau chief for Times in Nicaragua, he was awarded the Maria Moors Cabot award by Columbia University.

The book begins by introducing you during the middle-end portion of the rebellion against Jacobo Arbenz. When the supporters of Arbenz have already been painted as Communists and it seemed that Guatemala and the world as a whole were opposed to the leader. It captures your attention and draws you into the book, painting your opinion in one way before almost completely changing it in the later chapters. After first it paints Arbenz as a communist, something that the American media tried heavily to do as well during the time. And during the reading at first, it is very easy to believe that he is. However, as you read more, you discover that Arbenz was not a communist. Rather, Arbenz was a victim of a monopolized corporation in Guatemala who were deeply displeased and unhappy with the agricultural reforms that Arbenz was making.

Arbenz took the presidency in 1951, after his predecessor and the first democratically elected president in Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo. Arbenz continued with the reformation and the liberal policies that Arévalo had started with. The most drastic of his changes and the one that Bitter Fruit placed the most emphasis on, was his changes in agriculture. Arbenz took the land and distributed it to the peasant populations so they could begin creating their own farms and build up some kind of wealth for himself. The land that was taken from corporations was reimbursed with bond options, valued at the estimated value that the corporations filed on their taxes. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) was extremely displeased, enough so that the company, American owned at the time, went to the United States Congress in an attempt to garner sympathy from the government and portray Arbenz as a communist, putting freedom and the ‘free world’ at risk. The UFCO was able to do this successfully, and the Eisenhower Administration approved for a covert operation to take place to stage a coup in Guatemala to rid the country of Communists and its ‘communist’ leader.

Throughout the book you are introduced to many different people who took place in the forming of the coup, the most notable being John Peurifoy, the ambassador to Guatemala at the time, Arbenz himself, Edward Bernays who worked as a promoter for UFCO To boost its image and bolster support for the company, Castillo Armas who posed as the leader of the rebel forces and later as the president of Guatemala after Arbenz and Colonel Carlos Enrique Díaz who had taken over very briefly after Arbenz, Allen Dulles who oversaw the entire operation for the coup, and Colonel Albert Haney who was in charge of training those in the rebel forces and almost every aspect of the psychological warfare that was waged on Guatemala.

The number of people who played into the overthrow of Arbenz was absurd, and arguably only increased once the United States decided that it would rather play rough than let ‘communism in Guatemala’ continue to prevail. Arbenz himself never actually claimed to have a political party, and those who were Communists in his department were few in number. “Communists numbered about 26 in the 350-member staff of the National Agrarian Department, the government agency in which they had the strongest influence.” None ever held high ranking positions where they could exert as much influence as the United States and UFCO was making them out to be doing. “No more than seven or eight Communists ever held significant sub-cabinet posts, and neither Arévalo nor Arbenz ever appointed a single Communist to his cabinet.” That did nothing to deter the United States from posting propaganda around Central America and the neighboring countries around Guatemala, in the United States, and in Guatemala against Arbenz, labeling him and his followers as Communists, demanding that they be ousted and that Armas replaced Arbenz, declaring Armas as the better leader with the people's best interests at heart. Eventually, this intensive campaign and the tactics of psychological warfare waged on the citizens of Guatemala worked and Arbenz resigned from the presidency, his appointed commander following shortly after as Armas took the reigns.

After reading the description I just laid out for you, as well as the book itself, it is possible to believe that it is all historical fiction. Even while reading it, it sounds like something you might hear in a dramatic thriller or in a television series, but it was real. This book is a historical recounting of the events of America’s involvement in Guatemala to try and purge the country of its communists. Perhaps the first intentions were just to the UFCO and to get its footing back into the Guatemalan government, but it ended with full intentions and full belief that if the United States did not put someone they could easily manipulate into the government that it would be taken over by Communists that would ‘infect’ the surrounding countries.

Despite the book seemingly being laid out as a dramatic thriller, it keeps you interested and invested in the retelling of the story. The face-paced style makes Bitter Fruit feel real and intense. The style makes it easier to twist your emotions and opinions, showing you different perspectives from both the Guatemalans and the Americans, though overall it holds a much more sympathetic tone with Guatemala than it does with America. It paints a picture that is hard to ignore, a picture you wish to share with other people rather than hideaway on your bookshelf with the rest of your books you will only read once and then never think about again. Bitter Fruit shows the untold story in Guatemala, the one that was kept secret from the American public for so long because it never resulted in a happy ending. It resulted in a government that struggled to pull itself back together and is still struggling to do so to this day. The United States government hardly received any reprimand for their actions in Guatemala besides protests from Latin American students, though they were largely forgotten, unfortunately. Because of the style that Schlesinger and Kinzer use, and the things that they point out throughout the book, they do a more than the effective job of laying out the story and timeline of the coup as well as truly proving that it is time to go back and have a reappraisal of American policies within the western hemisphere.

As more information comes out this book will likely be updated and changed to fill in gaps in the timeline better, but Schlesinger and Kinzer did an amazing job with what was available to them. More people deserve to know the truth about the coup in Guatemala that was incited by the United States, and the more that people read Bitter Fruit the more likely it is we can bring attention to the issue and it will become more likely that we will finally get all of the information. My Take: Overall, I did like the book. It was a struggle to get through in the beginning, but it was a good recounting of history. It’s written in an easy to understand manner most of the time and keeps a good pace. I will admit that I read this for one of my courses, but it is definitely one of the better assigned books that I have read before. I give it a 7/10 stars for the actual writing and structure of the book. HOWEVER, I think that everyone should read this story if they get the chance. It is worth the read and will no-doubt be perfect for anyone who enjoys learning about the history of the United States or of Latin America. If you would like to get Bitter Fruit, it’s available for purchase here.

#bitter fruit #the story of the american coup in guatemala #book review #good book #bad book reviews #entire book #i will get an actually bad review out soon i promise #thank you for the follow #I appreciate all of you so fucking much

0 notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

When is the next review coming out?

Well, I’m not really sure. I hope to get one out by the weekend again, but I can’t make any promises. Switching to online courses at my college was a lot more difficult that I originally anticipated and I’m struggling to find all the motivation I need to actually sit down and write papers. If only writing my papers and listening to pre-recorded lectures was as easy as making these dumb reviews, haha. But in all seriousness, I really do want to get one out by the weekend or by next week. For the sake of everybody, and while I’m sure you have all heard this a million times over, please follow social distancing of six-feet or more when in public if you can help it, wash your hands, and try to stay inside if you can. I know that’s not possible for everyone, especially when it comes to work. Sorry this isn’t another review but I need a bit of time to get things sorted out with school and then some time where I can sit down and actually start to work through another portion of one of the terrible books I’m reading. I’m hoping that the next one will be a review of the next 5 or so chapters of Empress Theresa. Let me know if you’d rather something else and I will definitely see if I can come through. If not, perhaps I’ll post a review of an actually decent/good book that I’ve read recently. <3 Thank you all for your patience

#personal #update #stay safe

0 notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Complete Review - Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates

DISCLAIMER: This review will contain spoilers. If you plan to read the book, I will leave a mark for when I go more in-depth on the book, so continue at your own risk, I suppose. If you want to purchase Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates, you can get it here. Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates is the first book in the series, Tomorrow Girls. It’s written by Eva Gray and published by Scholastic. Scholastic is a fairly well-renowned publishing company in the United States, publishing children's books and hosting book fairs in most elementary schools. Scholastic also hosts the Scholastic Book Club that teachers can take part in, where they have their students take part, reading a book of the teacher and school’s choice, and then continuing with the lesson plan and question guide that Scholastic provides with the books. Tomorrow Girls is a fairly child-friendly series, having been classified in the category of a teenager and young-adult novel. However, that doesn’t excuse poor writing or a poor story. That is not to say that Tomorrow Girls has a poor story, though the first book certainly isn’t amazing. The writing is definitely a problem, though I will discuss that point later. Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates is a fast read at 211 (short) pages, and it’s easy to understand. Summary: In a terrifying new world, four girls must depend on one another if they want to survive. Disaster and destruction are all thirteen-year-old Louisa has ever known. But now she and her best friend, Maddie, are among the lucky few being sent to boarding school, far from home. Finally, a taste of freedom! Country Manor School isn’t perfect: The girls’ roommates are tough to get along with, and the school is hard work. Still, Louisa loves CMSーthe survival skills classes, the fresh air. She doesn’t even miss not having TV, or the Internet, or any comfort with home. It’s for their own safety after all. Or is it? The summary isn’t written the best, but it’s still understandable and arguably better than some other summaries that I have read before, it keeps things secretive and is a good set up for the actual story of the book, even if there isn’t a clear and well-defined plot or end goal at the very least. It’s clear, concise, and would get any child’s attention. It certainly grabbed my attention the first time that I read this book as a teenager. I would like to mention now that yes, I have read this book before. I was fairly young when I read it and I can’t remember much from the series other than a few details here and there. However, I will be reviewing (and judging) this book from as impartial of an angle as I can. The book is written from the first-person perspective of Louisa Ballinger, the daughter of a neurosurgeon and the head surgeon at the hospital he works at. I’m still not quite sure if both of Louisa’s parents work at the same hospital or not, but from the way it was written, I can only assume they work at different hospitals. “Mom makes lots as a brain surgeon. Dad earns even more. He’s head of surgery at his hospital (pg 10).” A grip I do have with this book is that it’s written in such a choppy style it makes it hard to read at times, despite the book having been written for teenagers. Most of the ‘sentences’ in the first part of the book aren’t even fully formed thoughts, let alone sentences. It’s highly reminiscent of Donald Trump’s ‘Sad’ tweets. We meet Maddie, Lousia’s best friend and the daughter of two soldiers, soon after this and the two of them are off to CMS, or as it’s referred to in less than a handful of times, Country Manor School. I still can’t figure out the time period that this book takes place, though it’s fairly recently after 2018. From some brief googling, it seems that nobody is entirely sure when the series takes place, though we know it’s after 2018. The book itself was written in 2011, which makes some of the assumptions in the book absolutely egregious. For example, for some reason, Louisa doesn’t know what chalk is, but she knows what an ‘old school blackboard’ is. The characters have also apparently never written anything down since second grade, which is absolutely baffling to me and an absurd assumption. The story takes place during a dystopian mid-world war era. This acts as the basis for the entire book and for why things are happening, however, this idea grows increasingly frustrating as you read through the book. You learn absolutely nothing about the war aside from that is has caused a lot of destruction, inflated the economy massively, and changed the lives of many people. You also learn about one group in the war, called the Alliance. In fact, I wasn’t quite sure that they were the ‘bad guys’ until I was a good bit into the book. Essentially, Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates works as the set up for the entire series. This wouldn’t be a terrible thing if it weren’t for the fact that the entire book suffers because of it. The book wasn’t terrible, however and warrants a review of 4/10 stars. SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT The Main Characters: Louisa Ballinger - The main character Madeleine “Maddie” Frye/Ballinger - Louisa’s best friend. She poses as Lousia’s fraternal twin in order to attend Country Manor School. Rosemary “Rosie” Chavez - The leader and one of the roommates. Evelyn Posner - The conspiracy theorist and another roommate. Others: Alonso - A boy from the CMS Boys School across the lake. Ryan - A boy from the CMS Boys School across the lake. Mrs. Brewster - The headmistress. Devi - The outdoor survival teacher. Emmanuelle- The “nice” teacher. I believe she’s Mrs. Brewster’s right hand. Not really sure what she does. The Review: This book isn’t terrible, I will state that right now. It isn’t terrible and is certainly better than some other books I’ve read. But, it isn’t great either. Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates has its problems, and they’re rather big. The first thing that you come across when reading it is the writing style. As mentioned before, it’s choppy and can be a pain to read at times. The sentences are rarely complete and are hardly fully-formed thoughts. This gets better towards the end of the book but it’s more than annoying in the beginning. “Not even Mom and Dad get to know exactly where the school really is. It’s for their own safety. Like everything these days. Keeping us safe (pg 10).” The last two ‘sentences’ can hardly be considered sentences let alone complete thoughts. As I said, though, the writing does at least get better as it goes which is a mercy, I suppose. I’d suggest that perhaps it is written this way to show the development of Louisa’s character, but it doesn’t come off that way, as such, it’s more annoying than anything else. The description of everything is the absolute minimum that Eva Gray could get away with, and when Louisa does describe something in more detail it’s utterly pointless and rather annoying, actually. Louisa is constantly described as a swimmer, opening stating that she absolutely loves swimming, however, when presented with a large lake that would just be begging for someone to swim in it, we get absolutely no description whatsoever other than that she was staring at it. When there is more description, it’s Louisa commenting on the color of someone’s eyes or their hair color, or Louisa is describing the pattern of the tiles on the wall and floor. It is absolutely ridiculous and rather frustrating most of the time. The descriptions are so surface level and shallow that it becomes difficult to immerse yourself into the book. I want to know more about the war as well. As stated earlier, you learn literally nothing except a few surface-level details about it. Who is the war between? How long has it been going on? What else has it impacted? Is the United States still functioning as per usual? I have absolutely no idea what the answers to any of these questions are and the book just left me thirsting for those answers. I can’t say as to whether or not they are addressed in the other books, but considering this one is acting as a set-up for the rest of the series, it should have been addressed in this book. However, the book isn’t terrible. There are problems, but it has its pros as well. I can commend Eva Gray because, at the very least, she does know how to tell a story that will push you to read the rest of the books in the series. The descriptions of the main characters and their development aren’t terrible either, and while first descriptions may be shallow at best you do get to know them a bit more. It is enough to give them more than just a two-dimensional appearance. The book goes fast and at the very least, it is a good time killer if nothing else. It’s not painful to read and is arguably one of the better books that I’ve reviewed thus far. The Story, In-Depth: The book starts off introducing us to the current situation, where Louisa and Maddie are being sent off to a boarding school (Country Manor School) by Louisa’s parents. Despite the fact that Maddie has been stated to be living with Louisa and her family since both of her parents were sent to fight, they don’t know where she is at first. It would make sense that Maddie would have arrived with them, considering that the cover story is that she and Louisa are twins, but I guess not. Louisa’s mother gives her a locket with a photo of her and her father in it, apparently, it is a family heirloom handed down from mother to daughter with a photo of their parents in it. Maddie comes over and we learn that she’s a little scatterbrained when nervous, though this never comes up again in the story itself. Maddie’s parents weren’t rich, so Louisa’s parents paid for her tuition to the school. In order to do this, however, they had to get Maddie’s identity changed from Madeleine Frye to Madeleine Ballinger, as the school won’t let parents pay for someone else’s children to attend. The way that they did this is to have someone go in and wipe the information on Maddie’s identity bracelet and replace it with a different name and number. These identity bracelets are apparently “electronically attached to [their] wrists.” I don’t know how you electronically attach something to skin, but you know what, fuck it. I’ll just roll with it, I guess. On the bus to CMS, we meet Evelyn and get possibly the best literary description of anyone ever known to man, “Her black eyes are intense and her delicate eyebrows V with concentration as she types furiously on a notebook (pg 19).” Her brows don’t furrow, no, they V. I find this odd because Gray clearly knows the word ‘furrow’ as she says it later on. So why, in the history of every novel ever written, did she say ‘V with concentration’? I still can’t figure it out, but god, if that line isn’t the best one ever written I don’t know what is. /s Evelyn is tracking where they’re going on her laptop, which is constantly referred to as a notepad in the book. Her guess is that they’re on the Canadian border. This is worrying for the characters because I guess that Canada has been taken over by the Alliance. I still wasn’t sure if the Alliance were actually the ‘bad guys’ or not, though later on in the book it is confirmed that yes, they are the ‘bad guys’. We don’t actually see Louisa’s name mentioned until page 23, which, if you haven’t read the summary of the book, is rather frustrating and confusing. I have absolutely no idea why her name wasn’t mentioned until page 23, but it wasn’t. I thought I was going crazy as I was reading through the book because I couldn’t remember her name until I looked at the summary. After flipping through the pages, I confirmed that the first time her name is mentioned isn’t until page 23. I seriously don’t think that the main character's name should be mentioned that far into the book. Anyways, they arrive at the school and we meet Mrs. Brewster, the headmistress of the girls’ school. They have to put all of their electronics in a box with no promise of getting them back. Their identity bracelets are clipped off with a pair of special clippers (which supposedly was impossible up until this point) and she warns them that the woods are the natural habitat of some poisonous snakes. Mrs. Brewster also warns them not to swim in the lake because it’s highly polluted and would make them so sick they wouldn’t be able to swim back. We also meet Emmanuelle who cut the identity bracelets off of them. Not even that long after Emmanuelle, the “nice” teacher, leads Louisa, Maddie, Evelyn, and a new character, Rosie, to their dorm room. Rosie comes off as a jerk to the other girls and begrudgingly agrees to share a room and bunkbed with Evelyn. After that we mostly see them moving through their classes, learning outdoor survival skills, eating in the cafeteria, and attending regular classes like Language Arts, Math, and Social Studies. The girls also have to do chores around the school, like prepare and serve breakfast, lunch, or dinner, clean up after one of those meals, or they can sign up for the Student League where they can take part in the patrol duties. Evelyn almost immediately jumps at the chance to be part of the Student League and gets in after an interview. She does this to gain both the special access to rooms and the special gear that members of the Student League get in order to make sure that the other students are sticking to the curfew and have their lights out by the designated time of 8 pm. The other two duties of meal-prep and clean up are rotated around, yet for some reason, Maddie gets all pissed off because she’s stuck on cleaning duty. She insists that it’s because she’s poor, despite the fact that she’s under the Ballinger name and the Ballinger’s are very rich. Not only that, but there are plenty of other people who are rich and on clean-up duty as well. This alone makes Maddie come off as a complete brat. In general, most people in this story come off as rich brats, but they do develop to be at least a little bit more accepting of things that are going on later in the book, or at least, they become more accepting of what’s expected from them. Rosemary, better known as Rosie, and Louisa grow closer over time and Louisa learns that while Rosie acts like a leader when in a group, she is rather easy and nice to get along with 1-on-1. They mostly bond over the survival classes, where we learn that Rosie is a really good sharpshooter and Louisa, while not great, picks up on skills quickly. Louisa starts to drift closer to Rosie’s group of friends, the athletes, and away from Maddie and Evelyn. Maddie and Evelyn grow closer as they develop more theories about the school and essentially plot a way to get out if things start to go wrong. Then we get to essentially the ‘climax’ of the book. The outdoor trip where they have to spend a night surviving in the woods. They make a big deal out of starving despite the fact that they’re spending a single night out in the woods and part of two days. It’s absolutely ridiculous to me that they blow this so out of proportion but you know what, fuck it, I guess it’s ‘teenager logic’. When Evelyn, Maddie, and Louisa go to get some water from a stream they run into Ryan and Alonso, who have gotten lost from their own group. The five of them start to bond and they head back to the girls camp where Rosie gets more than pissed off because she believes that they’re going to get in trouble for bringing the boys back and eating the food that Alonso and Ryan had with them. After a bit, the two finally leave to try and find their way back to their own camp and everyone goes to bed. Come morning and the three girls find that Rosie and the rest of the camp have just completely deserted them, leaving them to try and find their way back out of the woods by themselves. The three girls run into the boys again, and with their help and some wandering, they find their way back out and split ways. During this time we find out that the lake isn’t actually polluted and the boys have been swimming in it. This is just the start in Louisa starting to lose whatever faith she has built up in CMS and what she has been told about it. After this Maddie and Louisa are called to the headmistresses office, where it is revealed that Maddie’s bracelet has two codes on it, one for Madeleine Frye and the other for Madeleine Ballinger. In order to figure this out and to keep Maddie and Louisa from making a story, they separate the two of them, putting Maddie into isolation. This was a giant fucking mistake on their part because Louisa has a breakdown in her room about this, and despite Rosie and Louisa being pissed at each other, Rosie has a moment of softness and goes to comfort Louisa. Rosie admits that she knew that Maddie and Louisa weren't twins because they didn’t really act like sisters, and Louisa admits that no, they aren’t twins. They explain this to Evelyn when she comes back from her snooping or ‘investigating’, and Evelyn admits that she has keys and found out where they were probably keeping Maddie. Louisa sneaks down to the basement and while going to get Maddie, stops, hearing a TV. Supposedly, there are absolutely no electronics on the grounds of CMS so she decides to listen to the TV and the teacher's discussion. This is where she learns that CMS is part of the Alliance and all of the students are basically being held for ransom, and that some of the students have parents who are agents for the Alliance. She freaks out, they break Maddie out and go to tell Rosie and Evelyn. Essentially they all freak the fuck out and gather up everything that they need to leave and to get out of Dodge. Louisa has a panic moment because she lost her locket but Rosie insists that they don’t have time to go back and find it, so they leave without it. And that’s where the book ends. Like I said, the story itself isn’t bad and is a good set up for the rest of the series, I just wish that there was more detail. If it’s a set up for the rest of the series, we need to know about the world and what’s going on. We know there’s a war, but we don’t know between who and why. We don’t know why the members of the Alliance are the ‘bad guys’ other than some very basic information. We don’t know what state the cities are in, how the people are reacting, or why everyone has identity bracelets. I know that this book is coming from the view of a thirteen-year-old, but I still don’t think that’s an excuse for poor exposition. The book isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either. Tomorrow Girls: Behind the Gates could hardly stand as a stand-alone novel and doesn’t deserve the 4.5/5 stars rating it has on most websites. At best, it’s a 4/10. It’s a fast read and good to pass time, but I wouldn’t read it as a stand-alone novel. I’ll probably end up reviewing the rest of the series later on as I work through finishing Empress Theresa. I’d recommend you read it if you’re looking for something to pass the time, but I wouldn’t recommend paying the $12 price tag for it. It’s definitely not a $12 book. Once more, if you’re looking to buy this book you can get it here. I recommend buying one of the used copies because you’re usually supporting a book store when you do it, or a thrift store, and you’re not going to end up paying the $12 price tag.

#Compete review #entire book #tomorrow girls #behind the gates #bad book #review #bad book reviews #okay book?#still better than others #book one #i don't actually want to die #not this time at least

2 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapters 5-10

Once more, if you haven’t read the previous update of Chapters 3 and 4, I highly recommend you do. You can find that review here. Disclaimer: This review will contain spoilers. I guess if you don’t want the book spoiled for you, don’t read the review until afterward. This one is going to be a long one, so strap the fuck in, because it’s a wild ride. Chapters 5-10 aren’t nearly as painful as chapters 3 and 4 were to read. They were much easier, though more confusing. Or at least, all but one chapter weren’t painful. Chapters 5 and 6 were just a giant recap of everything that happened in chapters 3 and 4 and are essentially pointless to the entire book, I’ll still go over a few things that happened in them, but in general, they are completely and utterly pointless. Chapters 7 and 8 are where things start to get confusing, 9 is just painful, and 10 elicits more confusion. In fact, 10 is the most confusing chapter out of the entire bunch, but, I’ll start from the beginning and hopefully, things will clear up more as I recall and lay it out for you. Chapters 5 and 6 As I said, these chapters are just a giant review of what happened in 3 and 4. It’s a waste of time except for small details that are recalled in the chapters. However, because I had to live through this pain, you’re going to live through it too. At the start of chapter 5, Theresa wakes up in the hospital. Nothing too exciting. She realizes that there are a lot of people in her room, including the Prime Minister of England, Peter Blair. Theresa grows incredibly frustrated because “All [she] wanted was a quiet life.” I find this hard to believe later on down the line, but alright. She finally starts talking after throwing her tantrum and Blair, or as Boutin likes to write ‘pm Blair’ because he fucking loves abbreviations, confirms that she has been ‘dead’ for two weeks. I’ll get into this in a minute, but for now, all I will say is that it is fucking stupid. Theresa and Blair have a bit more conversation and Theresa inquires if the media has been talking about her. Rather than summarizing it for you because that would be far more interesting than what I had to endure, I’m going to write it all out word for word, so please, do enjoy. (Italics are my own notes) “‘I’ll bet my secret is out.’ (Theresa) ‘It is.’ (Blair) ‘Terrific. Some maniac will kill me in a week. How did you get to me in time?’ ‘We didn’t. You’ve been dead for two weeks.’ ‘What? That can’t happen.’ ‘It did. A most remarkable story.’ ‘So I went through all that for nothing?’ (Did you fucking want to die?) I was referring to my kidnapping and fall from the plane. (Anybody with two cents worth of brain cells could figure this out. You don’t need to write it out.) ‘I’m afraid so.’ Could my anonymity still be preserved? ‘I’ll bet there’s a lot of news stories about me.’ ‘About a million if you include all languages around the world. You are discussed continuously.’ No anonymity! ‘Anybody say anything bad about me?’ ‘No. I have seen nothing negative.’ ‘I knew I might become famous and kept myself squeaky clean.’ (Is that the only reason? That’s a stupid, stupid fucking reason to try and be a good person in that case. More than that, I thought you wanted to live a quiet life? Yet you were planning on becoming famous?) ‘People with problems can be interesting too.’ ‘Yeah, well, people with problems don’t change the world.’ (Pgs 74-75)” Aside from what I’ve already commented on and how boring this entire conversation is, I take serious issue with that last remark. Believe it or not, but people with problems do change the world. You can look up a list of people who have changed the world, and almost every single one of them has had controversy before or people found problems with them. I asked four different people and the answers I got were: Hitler, Jesus, and Alexander the Great. All of them changed the world, be it for better or for worse, and every single one of them had problems. So please, Boutin, I’d like to hear your examples of people who changed the world who didn’t have problems. I’m waiting. Moving along from this shitshow display of poor logic and bad writing, we get more bad writing! What a fun surprise! Boutin goes way too in-depth about medical machines and what they had used to try and revive her and watch her vitals. If you’ll recall, this book is supposed to be an autobiography written by Theresa. I don’t recall Theresa every studying medicine or anything medical, or even having the slightest interest in medical things. In fact, later on, Theresa says that she wanted to be a high school math teacher. I almost guarantee, most high school math teachers will not know what an ‘electroencephalograph’ is. I still don’t know what it is and Boutin explains what it is in the fucking book. It took a quick google search after realizing I still didn’t know what it was to realize that it reads the electrical signals in the brain. That is all you had to say Boutin if anything at all. Yet, like everything else in this stupid fucking book, you had to go and make it complicated to make yourself seem like you are smart. Blah, Blah, Blah, turns out Theresa is coated in blood. This isn’t explained until about half-way through chapter six. As would turn out, it coagulated shark’s blood because when she was floating in the sea, a bunch of sharks came to try and eat her. Except, every time the sharks got close to her floating, apparently dead, body, they would explode and the other sharks would feast on the dead one. This is attributed to HAL, which I guess at this point, only makes sense. Unsurprisingly enough, HAL is what kept Theresa alive as well. However, it isn’t what brought her back to life. What brought her back to life was the doctors in London, putting her in a room at 105 degrees (Fahrenheit, I assume. Because Celcius would be fucking disastrous). And as her body warmed up, she came back to life. Rather than the doctors trying to save her or doing anything at all to try and help her, they just stared and hoped that as she warmed up, she would be revived. Unshockingly, this worked. After being revived Blair takes Theresa out to see an enormous crowd of people who are holding signs, essentially just jerking off Theresa’s ever-growing ego more. One of the signs, however, reads ‘SAVE US’. Theresa inquires about this and pm Blair refuses to answer. Instead, he sends her to a hotel and has BBC put together a documentary for her compiling everything that happened during the two-week stint that Theresa was ‘dead’. Here is when we find out that the way HAL decided to try and save Theresa from death, that somehow worked, is that he stopped the wind. Yes. HAL stopped the fucking wind to try and save Theresa in her massive fall out of a plane. For some reason, everyone accepts this as perfectly logical. How, in the ever-changing and ever-flourishing earth, is this fucking logical? I don’t even know how to get into why the reasoning on this is so bad but I’m going to try. First of all, it’s the acceleration and then the eventual impact with water that would have killed Theresa, not the wind. Theresa slamming into the water would have flattened both her and all those empty plastic coke bottles she shoved into her jumper to act as a life jacket. The surface tension would have killed her regardless if there was wind or not. The wind played absolutely no factor in speeding up or slowing down Theresa’s fall, and in fact, would have probably been better for her if it picked up and disturbed the surface of the water because it would have helped to break that surface tension before she hit. Not saying she would have survived, but she would have had a slightly better chance at survival. Before I have an aneurism, I’m going to move on. President Martin resigned in the middle of the night and left his V.P., Veronica Stinson to take over as President. He did this because he announced to the entire world that he had Theresa killed and why. Obviously, the world didn’t react well to this, especially after realizing that the wind had stopped. I don’t know how they came to the conclusion that this was because of Theresa, but somehow they did. During the investigation of Theresa that happened shortly before Martin’s resignation, they found a file called MISSION IMPOSSIBLE in a file on Theresa’s account in the Boston College computer system. Don’t ask me what the file is about because I still have no fucking idea. I guess it’s a bunch of code to fuck knows what, but a whole bunch of mathematicians were brought in to try and decode it and none of them could. Chapter 7 and 8 In these chapters, Theresa goes in front of the cameras with Prime Minister Blair and her ego gets jerked off more much to her delight. They go on and on about how amazing Theresa is and how she’s going to do great. These chapters are full of more bullshit and are overall annoying, but at the very least, they progress the story a bit more than the previous two. In chapter 7 Theresa explains what HAL is and why HAL transferred to her, and just like always, Boutin has absolutely impeccable logic. To put is as simply as I can, HAL transfers over to Theresa because, and she is dead convinced about this, despite HAL apparently having been in North America (Not Earth, North America) for “a hundred million years” he had never seen someone raking leaves before. As such, because HAL apparently thought that it was a new appendage, thus making this new create more complicated than the one he currently inhabited (the fox) it meant that it was obviously more complex and could help him to evolve more. By that logic, HAL, as soon as he sees an octopus, should leave Theresa for the octopus, but I guess not. We also find out why HAL isn’t sentient, and apparently, it’s because “He has no more brains than a jellyfish.” He doesn’t have brains despite the fact that he seems to have a constant and unchanging need to evolve and adapt new reflexes, thus urging him to move to more complex creates and recognizing when a creature is living and more complex. Theresa goes on with an overly long and complex description of just what HAL is, but I will sum it up for you as simply as I possibly can; HAL is made up of dark matter. He’s not an alien, he’s a remnant from the Big Bang and is constantly trying to evolve to keep its host alive and well. To fix this problem of the wind being stopped, Theresa suggests that they start a committee to come up with the best solution and people are both deeply displeased with her statement about what HAL is and her idea for a committee. Theresa isn’t happy that the people aren’t understanding her explanation either and says, “‘It’s their fault if they don’t get it’ I said to Nancy. ‘Everything has been explained. Nothing is understood.’ (Pg 126)” If people don’t understand your explanation, it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because you did a poor job of explaining it. It is for this reason that I firmly believe Theresa would have never been able to make it as a math teacher, be she a teacher for high school or not. Aside from that, Theresa turns on the news, more specifically, “... the biggest international media circus of all: CNN (Pg 127).” CNN conducted an unofficial poll to see if people wanted Theresa to act with a committee or not and overwhelmingly, the answer is no. The reasons vary as to why people are saying no, and because I can’t phrase them in a more eloquent manner than Boutin, who has the most beautiful writing I have ever had the absolute pleasure to read, I’ll let his own writing speak for itself and explain. “‘The committee will presumably meet with Theresa Hartley who is an American. Many nations will object. It’s not like the United Nations that meets in New York with no government presence. Theresa and the committee will be the government. With Hartley the most important member it will be an American government. That will be unacceptable to many (pgs 126-127).” Another reason offered up by the President of France, who claims “‘It is not practical. We are not talking of the United Nations where thousands of people are needed to do something. HAL can do something alone. This is power on a new level. A committee in control of HAL would be a target for every terrorist organization. I believe nobody will want to be on the committee. We would need to surround each member with an army (pg 128).’” No, you really wouldn’t need to surround every member with an army. I will also state now that nobody in their right or wrong mind, terrorist or not, would even think about killing Theresa at this very moment because as far as they all know if Theresa dies then they are all royally fucked in the ass without lube. Though Theresa quickly dissuades those fears of her death meaning the end of the world when she says that people can “‘...kill me if [they] want. HAL will just move to somebody else. It could be anybody. HAL wouldn’t know the difference between Joan of Arc and Adolf Hitler. You want to try your luck?’ (pg 129)” Wonderful job comparing Theresa to Hitler again, Boutin. You’ve absolutely outdone yourself this time around. I’m going to point out now, Theresa never has an assassin come after her in the next couple of chapters, so this threat of people or terrorists coming after her is utterly pointless and at best, it’s a complete and utter joke. Also, I’d just like to point out that Boutin uses an outdated and potentially offensive term for ‘Muslim’, saying ‘Moslem’ instead when describing Middle Eastern countries. I’m not Muslim, so I can’t speak to the offensiveness of this, but it took a quick google search to verify that yes, one probably shouldn’t be using this word when writing. I would also like to point out that there are Muslim countries outside of the Middle East, and that Norman is more than just a little uncultured. Anyways, in chapter 8, to try and keep Theresa safe, they send her to live in a mansion in England owned by the Parker family. The Parker family reminds me of animated mannequin dolls who do nothing but stare at you without a word. The Parker family “won’t speak to [Theresa] unless [she] speak[s] first (pg 144).” The reason why they won’t do this is that “Every moment of [Theresa’s] time is the world’s treasure (pg 144).” Bullshit. Theresa goes and meets the Parker family once Steve arrives at the house and none of them matter as far as I’m aware and hold no relevance to the story. If they come up again and for one reason or another hold any kind of purpose, I’ll mention who they are but for now, their presence in Empress Theresa is pointless. All they are good for is to give Theresa the house. Wonderful story writing abilities, Boutin. People start sending Theresa money because apparently, they’re so grateful to her and her attempts to start saving them that they feel as though they need to send her 6000+ letters and money. By the end of the second day, I think that they have over a million dollars, which is fucking nuts, but alright, I guess. Thersa also has absolutely no work ethic when she is working, which makes me absolutely concerned with how the fuck she managed to get straight A’s in school and in college. But to show you how terrible her work ethic is, let me lay it out for you in Boutin’s words. “As the week went on we settled into a routine. Three hours was about all I could take doing the intense work I was doing. So after working form 8 to 11 in the morning I’d take a walk around the estate with Steve. Then it was lunch. Then work from 1 to 4 in the afternoon and a couple of hours of reading or television before dinner. Finally, maybe an hour or two of work in the evening before the winding down to bedtime (pg 150-151).” Because you know, it’s not like the world is in peril and every day that you are working to try and save the world people are dying and being killed off for their supplies more likely than not. It isn’t like the world would logically be falling into a state of complete anarchy at knowing that their lives are in the hands of an 18-year-old who has absolutely no record of working and has no real-world experience, thus leading people to absolutely lose all hope in the system or at any chance of survival which would severe the social-contracts that bind us all and keep humanity from functioning in a state of nature, but it’s whatever, I guess. After all, we live in Boutin’s magical world now, where everybody is perfectly calm and nobody in the world is in a state of panic because the world is literally falling apart right before their eyes. Nobody has any mental disorders which this situation is only exacerbating and schizophrenia is only a convenient excuse as to why you don’t tell people about the insane shit that happens in your life. Anyways… Chapter 9 This chapter is a fucking shit show and makes me want to burn the book before I finish it. I hated this chapter so much because it shows just how uncultured and entitled Norman Boutin is. He is the definition of an entitled North American, and what is supposed to come off as Boutin shitting on other countries only makes him look like a fucking idiot and it makes Theresa look like an absolute cunt. But, I’ll get into that in a moment. For now, let’s work our way to that point. At the beginning of this chapter, we see Theresa trying out different tasks to try and train HAL or get him to develop new reflexes. I have no idea what her end goal is here or what getting him to develop these new reflexes will do other than giving her a stupid as fuck skill. She does this in four different ways (keep in mind, this is supposed to be incredibly intense work that keeps her from working more than 3 hours at a time. Also please take note, I am writing this word for word and double-checking to make sure I haven’t left any errors on my part), “One was to slide a small coin between two glasses on a table. I’d place a coin next to one glass, leave it there a moment, then put my finger on it to slide it to the other glass. After doing this a few times, I’d place the coin at the first glass and wait a while to see if HAL would move it for me (pg 157.)” “The second thing I did was a takeoff on the throwing accuracy skill that HAL gave me. I tossed a coin in a small metal can a few feet away. Keeping my eyes on the can’s opening got the coin inside the can every time. Then I’d toss a coin with my eyes shut. Once in while the coin would go in the can by pure chance, but generally, it missed (pg 157).” “The third thing I did was stand up and drop a coin on the floor besides the can while keeping my eyes on the can’s opening. If HAL got the idea he would move the coin into the can. I was not throwing the coin; I was dropping it. If HAL guided the coin to the can it was a new reflex using elements of an old one (pg 158).” “The fourth thing I did was entirely different. I suspended a one foot ruler on a piece of string. The string was attached to the end of a yardstick held in place with a book on top of a bookshelf. After steadying the foot ruler I pointed to its end for the moment to give HAL a chance, then I pushed the ruler’s end to make it rotate a hundred degrees or so. This maneuver had nothing to do with coins, or throwing, and would seem to require very little of HAL, just a tiny push (pg 158).” Boo fucking hoo. Does Theresa need a little binky because she’s upset at how intense this work is and how hard it is? Does she need Steve to come in and start giving her an allowance because it’s more than obvious that this incredibly difficult job is taking a toll on her? I know throwing a coin can be so difficult for her, and the brainpower she’s exerting right now must be off the charts. It’s not like there are people who work 8 hours straight or 17 hours straight in a day only to get in total 2.5 hours work of break time, two of which aren’t even paid for or accounted for because it’s supposed to be ‘lunch’. Anger and bitterness aside, HAL doesn’t respond to any of these (probably because they make no fucking sense) and after a couple of days of this with work and no progress for HAL’s part, Theresa decides that despite the fact that they’ve been there for three weeks, she needs a vacation. So where do they head? Paris. This is where I get angry, more so than I was before if you can believe it. I am a total francophile and am in the process of learning to speak french, so you’ll have to forgive the ensuing rant. Theresa and Steve go to Paris in disguises so they don’t get mobbed, however, the disguises are fucking stupid. Steve wears a floppy hat and sunglasses and Theresa wears sunglasses and piles her hair on top of her head. Those aren’t disguises, those are just you changing your outfit a little bit. Sorry honey, but with how much your face has been broadcast and all of the photos of you and the posters they’re selling of you without your consent there’s no way that’s a fucking ‘disguise’. Theresa and Steve decide that they want to go see the different famous parts of Paris, including the ‘Champs-Elysees’ which is filled to the brim of ‘over-expensive’ stores, despite the fact that the Champs-Élysées is infamous for being filled with designer and luxury stores and brands, it’s absolutely filled with brilliant french fashion. But, despite what Boutin claims about having absolutely no chain stores, it does. Les Champs has different chain outlets like Sephora, Nike, GAP, et...c. They also go to see the Arch of Triumph which I can only assume is the Americanized version of the Arc de Triomphe. Call me a fucking pretentious bitch if you want, but its name is Arc de Triomphe, not Arch of Triumph. They go into the Louvre, which in itself isn’t a problem. That is, it’s not a problem until they arrive at the Mona Lisa, which Theresa claims is ‘not impressive’ because it’s so ‘small’, is ‘in a recess in the wall’ and is ‘covered by light-absorbing darkened glass to protect it from flashy cameras’. Admittedly, I do think at times that the Mona Lisa can be over-hyped, but it a piece of history. The Mona Lisa is almost akin to a wonder of art history, and it’s so well protected and hidden because it’s worth so fucking much and people have attempted to throw acid on it before. Not only that, but they don’t want people touching the Mona Lisa. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece of the Renaissance and one of the most known paintings in the world, so I’m so sorry you’re disappointed by it, Theresa, and can’t be bothered to look up information about it that is more than easily accessible to anybody with a phone and a penny’s worth of intelligence. We then get to the absolute peak of Boutin’s cultural knowledge and acceptance, when Theresa goes to visit the Notre-Dame de Paris. “It was smaller than we expected. It was basically a pile of stone erected around 1200 and the huge pillars holding up the roof didn’t leave much room for the people. There were no pews; everybody had to stand. The artwork was pre-Renaissance and rather unspectacular after our visit to the Louvre. It was disappointing (pg 165).” I am so, so fucking sorry you found it disappointing Theresa. I understand that history isn’t everyone’s love, but the Notre-Dame is absolutely dazzling in its beauty. The shit that the Notre-Dame has gone through and how it still remains standing today is an absolute miracle. I know it went through the fire, yet it still stands. The beautiful stained glass windows that will make anyone in awe of their beauty and would bring me to tears if I ever got the chance to see them in person still remain. The sun shines through the glass and gives an ambiance of absolute reverence and holiness. The gothic architecture pulls you back in time and brings you to when the cathedral was built. You are in a standing piece of history, so who gives a fuck if there are no pews? There are so many people filtering in and out of the Notre-Dame day in and day out that they can’t afford to have pews in the building. They still hold services in the building and bring in chairs for people to sit, you just didn’t happen to attend when there was a service because you’re a tourist. Tourists don’t attend church services in historic cathedrals, usually. Besides that, the Notre-Dame was built in 1163-1345 CE. Technically around the year 1200 CE, but still, this information is readily available to anyone who can access Google. Also, how fucking dare you call it a pile of stone? This building is more than just a fucking pile of stone. The rock garden in front of my parent’s house is a pile of fucking stone, the Notre-Dame is anything but a pile of stone. It is the heart of Paris, is the lady of Paris who was mourned when she burned down and is being rebuilt. The Notre-Dame is a masterpiece of architecture and a building that I, even as an atheist, would die to see. The Notre-Dame has been through hell and back and yet the building still stands. It has lived through the best and through the worst of times in France and it still endures. The Notre-Dame is a sign of hope for the French, just as the American flag acted as a sign of hope of the United States during the revolutionary war. I wouldn’t call the flag a bunch of fabric, so, don’t you fucking dare call the Notre-Dame a pile of stone. The way that her feelings are expressed about the Notre-Dame, how it has no pews, calling it a pile of stone, calling the stained glass unspectacular, it radiates childish behavior and thoughts. It shows just how uncultured Boutin is and makes Theresa look like a complete brat in her behavior because she has absolutely no will to educate herself in the slightest and it makes her look absolutely entitled. It’s petulant and childish behavior and I will not stand for it. If you’re going to act like a child, Theresa, I’m going to treat you like the little brat you are. You have absolutely no capacity for thought other than ‘I want what I want, and when it’s not exactly how I want it, I’m going to throw a fucking tantrum and call it awful and unfair.’ After Theresa acting like an entitled brat, they go to the Eiffel Tower, where she gets to act more like an entitled brat. She’s mad that the subway doesn’t drop them right off at the Eiffel Tower and they have to walk half a mile (Oh no, I’m so fucking sorry that you have to walk h a l f a m i l e) to get to the tower. Paris, apparently, isn’t anything special to look at when you get to the observation deck on the Eiffel Tower, and Theresa calls Paris a “tired old city. American cities offered just as much (pg 165).” How Fucking Childish Can She Get? American cities do not have nearly as much to offer. Yes, in the United States we have so much history on our shores, especially from Native American tribes, but the United States doesn’t offer as much. In no way shape or form does the United States offer nearly as much as Paris does in terms of history. They didn’t even go and visit some of the more amazing and breathtaking sights, like the catacombs, or any of the old and castles, left to ruin. No food was tried, no culture was experienced, no history was truly experienced. Theresa and Steve did absolutely nothing to immerse themselves into the Parisian culture and they got nothing out of it, so what the fuck did they expect? This rings of entitlement and childish behavior and it’s fucking stupid. Chapter 9 has infuriated me like no other chapter so much to the point that I don’t even feel as though I can properly express how angry I am. But, for the sake of my own sanity, we’ll move along. Theresa says she misses chipmunks which have absolutely nothing to do with Paris or what she was just talking about but I guess this statement is at least semi-important. At about 9 pm they go out to a second-floor restaurant that obviously has a dress-code and expect to be serviced like entitled children. Surprise, surprise, they’re not serviced because they’re dressed in ‘American casual’. Even in the United States, restaurants that have a dress code have the right and will refuse you service if you’re not adhering to that code. So Steve and Theresa decide to seat themselves, and this may be getting nitpicky, but once more it shows how little research Boutin did and how uncultured he is, because, despite the fact that it’s 9 at night, he says ‘Bonjours’ to a French couple next to him. Yes, ‘Bonjours’, not ‘Bonjour’, he fucking adds an ‘s’ to the end. A quick lesson in French: Bonjour is only used during the morning/early-middle of the day. It literally translates to ‘good day’, and you wouldn’t say ‘good day’ to someone at 9 pm. 9 am you can, in fact, that’s acceptable. But at 9 pm, you would say ‘good night’, or ‘Bonsoir’. It doesn’t take years of French to know this. It takes two seconds of searching on Google which I am convinced Boutin is incapable of doing at this point Anyways, they leave the restaurant after showing to everyone that it was mE, DIO THE WHOLE TIME. NEVER FUCKING WOULD HAVE GUESS THAT, WOULD YOU? Just kidding, that would have been better. No, they just reveal that it was Theresa and Steve the whole time who aren’t (no they definitely are) random American slobs. Moving along, they go to Ireland this time and have a fucking blast, I guess. Then they go back to England and back to the Parker residence, where Theresa finds out that Steve had the soldiers build Theresa a little shed/cage thing for chipmunks, which he is having imported from the United States. Why? Because she missed them. Once again, it’s not like it’s been 3 weeks since Theresa found out the world was ending and she hasn’t really done jack shit to try and fix it. The world definitely isn’t completely and utterly fucked. Chapter 10 We have finally made it to the last chapter of this review and by far one of the most confusing ones. To save you the pain I had to go through of trying to decipher this chapter because I feel like being nicer than Boutin was to me after chapter 9, Theresa gets a new ‘reflex’ where every time she closes her eyes or puts her hands in front of her face (one of the two, I still can’t tell) she basically has a black and white google earth pop up, except it’s moving in real-time. She can zoom in and zoom out and spy on people or see places that are far away as they’re happening. I don’t know what the point of this is yet, but I guess it’s a good thing. Theresa also gets HAL to do the things that she wanted him to do in the ‘training’ exercises I mentioned earlier, and the way that Boutin describes it is super fucking confusing, so I’ll just put it simply by saying that Theresa gets HAL to do the thing and HAL does the thing well. And then, she’s working to get HAL to do the thing super fast and to do multiple things all at once. People took her trip to France and Ireland well, I guess because it’s an indication that she’s still interested in things outside of herself. This is completely unrealistic and at this point, I highly doubt anyone would be letting Theresa do jack shit aside from working to save the earth. There would probably be a lot of riots and arguably, if things were realistic, Theresa would be dead as soon as people learned that HAL could transfer over if she died and chances were, they’d give HAL to somebody older and with more experience who had a team working behind them to make sure that they do the right thing. Chipmunks are important again because the Parker family finds it super endearing that she managed to get the chipmunks to eat out of her hand, and they take videos of it and post it all over social media. Theresa claims that the videos were shown on every corner of the planet, especially in kid’s programs, which apparently showed the clips every day. This totally doesn’t sound like indoctrination to me. At all. Somehow, because she’s taking good care of the chipmunks, this is supposed to make people have faith in her skills. Theresa realizes that there needs to be rain, but we don’t find out what she does about that in this chapter which is fucking stupid. This entire book is fucking stupid and if I didn’t have problems with the idea of leaving things half-finished, I would have stopped reading it at this point. And that’s it. That is chapters 5-10. I hoped you enjoyed living through this hell with me. See you all whenever I get around to another review. Remember, if you have a book you want me to review, feel free to hit me up with an ask or some other way and I will do my best to get back to you.

#empress theresa #chapter 5 #chapter 6 #chapter 7 #chapter 8 #chapter 9 #chapter 10 #bad book reviews #bad book #review #kill me #this is fucking torture #i hate this book #i hate this #why am i doing it to myself #theresa is a child #god dammit #angry

14 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy - A Book by Carlos Eire

Please note, this will be different from other reviews as I have a deep love for Waiting for Snow in Havana. In this review, I do critique the book a bit, but it’s more a general summarization of the book. I don’t have any spoilers in it (not that you really can have spoilers for a memoir), but I do highly recommend that you read this book. I’m trying out writing a good book review for once, so please do let me know what you think. Waiting for Snow in Havana is an immersive tale of lizard hunting, Cuba-shaped clouds, and adventures someone could only have in Cuba as a young and rambunctious boy. Carlos Eire takes the reader on his own memory-filled trip that twists emotions and gives the reader a look into the life and thoughts of a young Cuban boy, who was brought into America as a refugee after Fidel Castro became dictator. As a result of these being Carlos Eire’s memories of his time in Cuba and even a little bit of when he was first in America, the book can be a bit disorganized at times and comes off as a stream-of-consciousness style of writing. And yet, it works magnificently. This style benefits the book and gives overall better imagery throughout. Waiting for Snow in Havana is not the typical autobiography and that only makes it all the more wonderful to read. Carlos Eire grew up in Cuba before being brought to America through Operation Peter Pan. His mother joined him in America about a decade later, though it was through much struggle on her own part. In the United States, Eire went on to get an education and graduated from Yale with a Ph.D. in 1979 in religious and early modern European history. He ventured out of his normal zone of comfort writing about early European history to write his memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. Carlos Eire gives the reader an insight into how Fidel Castro’s revolution affected families and the people that it was supposed to help. Eire’s grandfather had been in a horrible car accident and had broken his leg so badly that it could not be fixed. As Eire puts it best, “He was the kind of guy the revolution was supposed to help (pg. 364).” Fidel Castro had taken the little bit of money that his grandfather had saved up and turned it into nothing around the same time that he had broken his leg. And yet, Eire’s grandfather still had to stand in line like everyone else, in tears because he had lost everything yet again. Eire comments a couple of times throughout the book saying, “The state owns everything—excuse me—the people own everything (pg. 220).” Rephrasing it the way that Fidel Castro put it as well as the way that it actually appears to be, this dual perspective is unique to Eire’s writing. Although Carlos Eire makes it clear at the beginning of the book that he has a deep dislike for Castro, possibly even a hatred, he does let the reader know that in the beginning, he was in awe of the soon-to-be dictator. “Anyone who was against Batista must be good, I thought… Anyone who treated human beings like lizards couldn’t be a good president (pg. 180).” In the second part of this quote, Eire is referring to how Batista, the current president, tortured people before he was overthrown. Eire also compares this action of torturing people to how Ernesto, his adopted brother, tortured lizards by frying them with electricity. After Castro took over though, Eire’s opinion of the dictator quickly soured. When making a school project, Eire compares the propaganda that was repeated over and over again, from radio broadcasts and television to a scratched record when he had to make a school project for the Agrarian Reform. Eire later comments that people would turn off their televisions and radios so as not to hear the speeches, but the speakers on the utility poles quickly rid every house of silence. The reader also gets an insight into how the lives of everyone, specifically the lives of the wealthier changed, not just how his own opinion changed. Eire’s life may not have differed much after the forced take over until the forced currency change, considering that his father was a judge. Eire tells some of the stories he heard from other children and stories of what he saw on television. Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries would arrest rebels and prominent figures in Cuban society who could contradict Castro or become a threat to his dictatorship. Then, the revolutionaries would line them up against the wall, shooting them live on television for all to see. The spectators would shout ‘paredón,’ or ‘up against the wall’ over and over again before the revolutionaries finally shot to kill, torture, and maim. Eire’s own cousin, Fernando, was arrested and put through this torture over and over again, though Fernando eventually was released from the prison alive. Carlos Eire recalls one story he heard from two girls of their father being dragged from their home by revolutionaries. These two girls had seen their own father “dragged from their house weeping and screaming, ‘Please don’t kill me, please don’t!’ He had soiled his pants on the way to the paredón, and begged for his life until the split second when the bullets ripped into him (pg. 219).” Their father was taken to the paredón simply because he had worked as a mayor under the Batista regime. Despite Eire’s emotion-twisting stories of Cuba, there is more that could have been done to make Waiting for Snow in Havana a more satisfying read. Although the book is explained from a child’s perspective, it does not give much insight into how it felt as a young boy to move to the United States as a refugee. Eire does not go much into his emotions of what it felt like to have to leave his mother. He does not detail how it felt to be split apart from his brother so soon after landing in their new home. He does explain how hard it was to be an immigrant and refugee in the United States, but it feels as though it is all from a logical perspective. It stands out from the rest of the book with its lack of emotion. It would have also been incredibly interesting to see how Eire’s life changed in America in comparison to his brother. He hinted vaguely at it throughout the memoir, but to have a chapter dedicated to that would have elevated the book to an unbelievably amazing degree. Nonetheless, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a book that the reader will find themselves not wanting to put down and a story that saddens them when it is finished. Waiting for Snow in Havana deserves its National Book Award and so many more. As the reader moves through the pages, they will find themselves in Havana, right next to Eire as he plays with his friends, seeing things from his own perspective. Eire is an absolutely astounding writer and it shows in his storytelling abilities. At the end of it all, the reader will find themselves looking for Cuba-shaped clouds and firecrackers with the red paper to launch lizards into orbit. Overall I would give the book 8/10 stars. I highly recommend that anyone who likes history, memoirs, or even just having a beautiful picture painted in their mind read Waiting for Snow in Havana. It’s beautifully written and Eire pulls you into his writing. Before you know it, the book will be over and you’ll have found yourself longing for more. I recently discovered the Eire wrote another memoir called Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee so when I get the chance, I will be buying and reading that one. It will probably be a while until I can, considering I made a promise to a very good friend of mine that I wouldn’t buy more books until I get through the ones that I have bought (13 so far, six of which are terrible books, so wish me luck). If you are interested in purchasing Waiting for Snow in Havana, you can find it here.

#review #good book #entire book #good review #waiting for snow in havana #carlos eire #still taking that break

1 note · View note

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Complete Review: Insanity: Jeff the Killer by Neesha Nickleson

DISCLAIMER: There are spoilers in this review. I highly doubt you will have any plans to read this book, but if you don’t want it to be spoiled, just don’t read the review until after you’ve read the book. To take a break from Empress Theresa and the pain that it has been causing me, I decided to read a fanfiction that Neesha Nickleson, self-published and sold via Amazon. Insanity: Jeff the Killer is significantly shorter than Empress Theresa, at a grand total of 76 pages. On the Amazon listing, Nickleson admits in ‘Videos for this product’ section that she wrote the book when she was fifteen, which in itself is almost endearing to me. Apparently, she wrote it for a contest that Nickleson claims to have won. I’m not entirely sure what the contest was for, but kudos to her. Nickleson also comments that there’s a sequel to this book, however, I haven’t been able to find it. Neesha if somehow by the will of the fates if you find this review; Please, I just want book two. When will you release book two for purchase? I need it in my life. The Summary: “Bullies and liars beware: A new threat is arising. Naomi Jansen just wanted to have a normal carefree life until she met Jeff at summer camp. Jeff is a laid back teenage boy with a dark secret. Then one morning at camp, Naomi hears that one of her long time bullies, Mallory, was found dead in her cabin. Naomi suspects Jeff at first but then decides that he’s too sweet do something like that, until a series of events changes her mind and her outlook on sanity.” This summary isn’t terrible, to be honest. I’ve read far worse, though personally there are a few things I don’t like about it. First of all, revealing that Naomi’s bully was killed. I know this isn’t much of a plot twist because it happens within the first couple of pages in the book, but it gets rid of a sense of mystery. Second, we don’t really know anything about the characters right off of the bat besides general characteristics. I would have preferred if Jeff’s characteristics were written from Naomi’s first impression, for example: “Jeff seemed like a laid back teenager, though when Naomi hangs out around him, the air feels off.” Not the best that could be done considering I literally just threw that out there, but there are small revisions that could be done to give more of a sense of mystery to the book and the characters without pulling from the content of the summary itself. I do know that this book is quite literally about the Creepypasta, Jeff the Killer, so it isn’t as if anyone reading it has no idea who Jeff the Killer is, but I do feel like the point still stands. Just because a reader has an idea about the content of the book doesn’t give an author the excuse of revealing plot points in the summary. I do also understand that it was written when Nickleson was a fifteen-year-old, so I don’t hold much against her in that regard. Hell, I wrote shitty fanfiction when I was fifteen. However, if you are willing to publish your work online and even sell it, you are going to have to expect criticisms and reviews. The Characters: Naomi Jansen - The main female lead, Neesha Nickleson’s original character. Jeff Woods - The main male lead, based heavily on if not is completely a mirror of the Creepypasta, Jeff the Killer. Liu Woods- Jeff’s brother, both in the story and in the world of Creepypasta. Based off of or mirrors the character of Liu Woods. Mallory - Naomi’s bully. Randy - As per Nickleson’s descriptions, the “average-sized” skater boy. He’s the boss of Troy and Keith. Troy - the “fat” skater boy and can apparently run very fast. Keith - the “skinny” skater boy Plot Summary and Breakdown: Considering that the book is only 76 pages, there’s not much plot to it, but there is a plot. The entire book follows Jeff and Naomi around, from their first encounter at a summer camp to the ‘first day of school’ and finally to the moment when both of them snap and kill their families. It’s a fairly simple and straightforward plotline, which works to the advantage of the story at some points. At other points, however, the rapid pacing of the book can be incredibly confusing and makes little to no sense. There are a lot of logical gaps throughout the story that can leave a reader confused or holding their head in their hands, which I will go into as we delve into the storyline itself. Nickleson also has a tendency to flip between Jeff and Naomi’s perspective throughout the chapters, which is a problem within itself. Thankfully she does label in big and completely capitalized letters when she is switching perspectives, which makes it easier to follow along. There can be a few problems with jumping perspectives in the middle of chapters because we lose connection with the character who was just narrating at times, though it can certainly help the book from becoming repetitive when you want to repeat a scene from a different perspective. In this case, however, it would have been best to completely write the book from third-person rather than jumping between first-person perspectives. First-person can work incredibly well for emotional impact and drawing the reader in, however, in my opinion, it is still possible to do that in a third-person perspective. Perhaps an author wouldn’t be able to do it as well, but in the case of Insanity: Jeff the Killer It would have worked just fine. We start off the book from Naomi’s perspective as her mom is dropping her off at Summer Camp. She is dropped off at a Summer Camp every single year, though this is the first year that she’s seen Jeff, so we could make the fairly logical guess that Jeff is new in town. Namoi’s first opinion of Jeff is that he’s a ‘weirdo’ for wearing a hoodie in the middle of summer. I honestly can’t blame Jeff for wearing a hoodie in the middle of summer because I do the exact same thing. Admittedly, the hoodie I wear in the middle of summer is a lightweight one, but I do. If I could go all year without ever having to stop wearing my jackets I would be so content (So, let’s stop global warming pls. It’s getting harder to wear jackets in the middle of summer. This is a terrible reason for wanting to stop global warming, but any reason to stop it is decent enough in my opinion). We don’t really get Jeff’s first impression of Naomi, but he does follow her and sit next to her to introduce himself because I guess she gave him a weird look. This is when we meet Mallory, who somehow already knows Jeff despite the fact that I thought he was new in town. Mallory is a little asshole, ‘nuff said. Just kidding, I have more to say. Mallory calls Jeff her “future husband Jeffy”. She also absolutely adores the color pink which we find out because she’s covered head-to-toe in pink. We also know that Mallory is Naomi’s longterm bully from the back summary, yet, she already knows who Jeff is despite the fact that I’m fairly certain that Jeff moved in. This was a little confusing for me, but I decided to just take it as a sign that Mallory had met Jeff when he arrived at camp and she decided right then and there that he would be her husband. It’s not entirely unreasonable for a teenage girl to say that about a boy that she finds attractive, right? I mean none of my friends ever said that about anyone that they found attractive, but it’s something that I’ve heard about happening. Mostly in movies, but I’m sure it happens elsewhere. I think. Maybe. Anyways, Mallory basically attacks Naomi with a fucking pink and sparkly knife that her mom gave her. She cuts up Naomi’s arms, legs, back, and waist to prove that she’s better than her. This is where we learn that Mallory is a psychotic fucking bitch, and this is where Mallory kisses her life away. Naomi doesn’t tell anyone who could do something about it that Mallory did this to her and instead just fixes herself up. She does meet up with Jeff a little bit later and shows him what Mallory did, he feels bad about it because he just watched before passing out (I think). A little later on Naomi goes to bed and has a dream about Jeff killing Mallory, we move on to the next chapter and SURPRISE Jeff killed Mallory and her entire cabin. Here’s where the first logical fail comes in; Rather than keeping everyone in the camp to be interviewed by the police or to keep the potential killer from running away, as soon as it is found out that Mallory and her entire cabin were brutally murdered, the camp decides to send them home early. From what I can gather, there’s a little voice in Jeff’s head that tells him to commit these violent acts, though it really only crops up when someone has hurt Naomi. This seems a little ridiculous to me considering that he literally just met her and as far as the book goes, it doesn’t seem like he had these violent tendencies before he knew her. However, Jeff doesn’t want her to find out that he was the murderer so when Naomi’s mom is giving them a ride home, he tries to hide the fact that there’s very clearly a bloodstain on the pocket of his white hoodie by saying that it’s spilled kool-aid. The bloodstain came from the knife he used to kill Mallory, which as far as I could figure out, isn’t a small knife. How Jeff got away with this, I will never ever know, nor do I think I could ever hope to know. Naomi excuses this and accepts it without question because she believes that Jeff is too sweet to have committed a brutal mass murder. I don’t know if this is naive or endearing that Naomi already seems to be falling for Jeff, though this is mostly from my own inference rather than any emotion that has been implied. Emotion tends to be another problem throughout the book. There’s no emotion in it. The characters seem to be cold and blank slates, even when facing some pretty anxiety and adrenaline-inducing situations. Even when they’re potentially facing death, we don’t get much emotion out of it, and in this regard, the book tends to be pretty disappointing. The way that the plot is laid out, emotion is incredibly important to the story and so are their thoughts and opinions because it is supposed to be a total spiral into madness. When Jeff and Naomi both snap and lose their sanity, we don’t see that spiral, it’s sudden and jarring. There was no slow spiral or thoughts that circled down the drain faster and faster until both of them gave in. A little bit of that is implied with Jeff, which I’ll talk about later on, but the reader doesn’t get any of that from Naomi, making her sudden transition to insanity abrupt and with no foreshadowing other than it being blatantly stated on the back of the book. However, I digress. Moving back onto the plot, we meet Liu when Jeff is dropped off at his own house. I assume Liu is around the same age as Jeff, though I’m not entirely sure on that point. This is were another logical fail comes in; Despite having been told only pages before that they were being sent home early from camp, apparently, the first day of school is tomorrow. The rapid pacing of the book created this failure of logic and made me pause for a second to question just what I was reading. It only took a few seconds to remind myself that this was a book written by a fifteen-year-old and originally was posted as a fanfiction. Of course, that’s not to say that all fanfictions are bad, there are some absolutely amazing ones out there, but I do have yet to find one written by a fifteen-year-old that doesn’t have some error in logic. Nickleson just so happens to have more than a few errors, especially towards the end of the book. Before the first day of school however, Jeff texts Naomi and tells her to go watch the news. So, she heads downstairs and turns it on. It’s a live report of Mallory’s mother accusing Naomi of killing Mallory. And, as it would turn out, they’re right out front of Naomi’s house as well which is rather convenient because they want to interrogate her on live TV and ask if she killed Mallory and why. Because, you know, having someone interrogated by the news rather than having the police interrogate them always goes well. Naomi exposes the cuts that Mallory gave her and essentially just calls Mallory a horrible person. There was no questioning here, the news reporter just accepting it without a single word and declaring Mallory a horrible person. Ultimately this whole episode and everything that Mallory has done is inconsequential to the rest of the book and everything is pointless. I’m dragging on the longer side here, so I’ll try to speed things up so my review doesn’t end up as long as the actual book is. The first day of school comes and Jeff and Liu are waiting at the bus stop with Naomi. We meet the three skater boys here, Randy, Tony, and Keith. We realize that Jeff and Liu really are new to town because Randy tells them that the new kids have to pay a bus fee because they’re new. Rather than paying it though, they decide to fight. Jeff stabs Keith in the legs and the arms though this never really matters because Keith is fine. Jeff and Liu run to their house and Naomi runs to hers. A short while later Naomi shows up at Jeff’s house and claims to have knocked out the three boys with a metal baseball bat, though right after she did Randy somehow cut open her arm. Blah, blah, blah, they watch a movie, eat some pizza, and then Jeff makes his love confession to her by kissing her. Naomi reciprocates the love and BOOM I guess they’re dating now, how lovely. Despite the fact that this is supposedly the first day of school nobody is questioning just why they’re playing hooky from school and just accept the fact that they’re not at school. A little while later they go back to Naomi’s house and we learn that Naomi’s mom was home the entire time. So why she didn’t go to her mom for help is beyond me. Naomi shoots at Randy with a bb gun and they all run off after coming after her and Jeff again. She then goes back to Jeff’s house with him for reasons even I don’t get because it seems like they’re just jumping between houses at this point. Liu gets arrested here after saying that he was the one who beat up the three boys, covering for Jeff. Jeff is upset about it and for some reason, Naomi is as well because she thinks that she could have had proof to stop them from arresting Liu despite the fact that she said only moments before that he’ll spend two days in jail at most. Liu doesn’t get a trial for this whole thing, which only makes it more confusing why he’s spending a few days at a Juvenal Detention Facility. Related story time: When I was 12 I got into a big fight with some of the kids, enough so that the cops were involved. It was mostly just some throwing of hands and the boys shouting “punch her in the boob.” It happened because one of them, threatened to grope my 8-year-old sister, and as the big sister of the family, I couldn’t let that happen. I called him an idiot and we got into a fight. Nobody was arrested, nobody got into trouble with the police, just with their parents. There were a few bruises and a couple days later at school, the boy came up and apologized to me. Look, I know Keith got stabbed in Jeff’s fight, but honestly, it’s never mentioned again and Keith runs like he didn’t get stabbed at all and acts like he didn’t ever get stabbed so I honestly don’t know if Nickleson remembers that Jeff stabbed Keith. As such, I think it’s a little ridiculous that Liu, a child, was arrested, and sent to Juvie without trial, for a fight when the three skater boys weren’t arrested either. Moving along from that whole mess, Jeff and Naomi go to an 8-year-old’s birthday party because Jeff was invited by the kid’s mother after Jeff and his family moved into the neighborhood, and Naomi babysat the kid. Randy and Co. show up to the party and Naomi send all the children inside. The Co. have guns and are aiming them at the adults so they don’t try to interfere. Randy lunges at Jeff and Jeff fucking murders him. Keith obviously is upset by this and breaks a bottle of vodka over Jeff’s head after dropping his gun. I don’t know why he had a bottle of vodka or where he got it, but he has one. He then chases Jeff upstairs and to the bathroom and another fight breaks out. A bottle of bleach from a bathroom shelf falls onto Jeff and douses him in bleach. Keith points out that Jeff is now covered in bleach and vodka and proceeds to light him on fire. Bitch what the f u c k. I will admit, I do think that this is a creative solution as to why Jeff has bleached skin and does follow along well enough with the actual story of Jeff the Killer, so I am inclined to believe that Nickleson either did a bit of light research into his story or had some prior knowledge about it. This is one thing that I will give the book kudos on. Jeff wakes up at the hospital, after the bandages are removed he finds out that his skin is bleached and he says that he loves it. Naomi apparently loves it as well and nobody in his family concerned in the slightest that Jeff loves it. We find out that Keith was caught though Tony managed to evade the police because as the reader learns earlier in the book, despite being larger in size, Tony can run like the fucking wind. This becomes a problem later on in the book because Tony comes back and shoots Naomi. Yes, Tony shoots Naomi despite insisting much earlier on that she wasn’t part of the dispute, only Jeff was. Jeff hears the gunshot and grabs the biggest knife he can find and from what I can tell, he murders Tony as well. There’s a little bit of a typo in this section, as instead of saying that Jeff murdered Tony, Nickleson says that Jeff murdered Keith. This threw me off a little bit before I realized that it was a typo. Jeff goes to the hospital though in the ambulance that Naomi’s mother called when she heard the gunshot. Because when you hear a gunshot, your first instinct is to call an ambulance and not go see what happened to see if everyone is fine first. This is really the first bit of emotion we see in the book because Jeff is pacing back and forth so much that Liu, who is out of juvie at this point, points out that Jeff is going to wear a hole into the floor. Turns out, Naomi is fine because the bullets missed her brain and her heart by a millimeter. Now I’m not a doctor, but I’m at least 80% sure that could still kill you. Not only would a bullet near the brain shatter the skull and cause hemorrhaging from the distance it was, but it would screw a lot up. The impact of a bullet that close to your heart would probably still do a lot of damage as well, and yet, Naomi is released from the hospital that night. I’m more than certain that the doctors would have kept her for observation, but I suppose not. Before Naomi gets shot, we do get a decently sweet scene of Jeff dancing with Naomi, fulfilling a daydream she had of herself and Jeff dancing to a song called Fallen Angel. The artist of the song is never stated but apparently, it’s really good music for dancing and is appropriate enough for Naomi to daydream of herself and Jeff dancing to it in a ballroom. If anyone would care to fill me in on what song it could be, it would be much appreciated. The scene is short-lived though and doesn’t have as much emotion put into it as I would have liked. I think that it could be a beautifully sweet scene, though it isn’t. It isn’t a beautifully sweet scene simply because Nickleson doesn’t write descriptively enough to fill us in on what the characters are feeling. She tells us what they are feeling occasionally, but even then, it’s only on occasion and a story like this could greatly benefit from having emotions tied into it. After Naomi gets shot and released from the hospital Jeff snaps. He can’t see how beautiful he is when his eyes are closed and when he’s sleeping, so he goes and burns off his eyelids and cuts his cheeks so he’s always smiling (as per the actual story of Jeff the Killer). He then murders his parents and stabs Liu. I’m not sure if Liu actually dies or not as in his story, he survives though Jeff cuts a smile into his face rather than just stabbing him. Jeff then goes over to Naomi’s house, potentially to kill her and her parents, I’m not sure. He finds Naomi playing the piano and when she turns to him, she has “a cut along both of her eyes and a heart carved into her cheek.” I assume that she has a line cut over the top and bottom of her eye, rather than on her eyes because holy fuck that would be intense. But she reassures Jeff that she finds him beautiful still and shows him that she murdered her parents too. Jeff and Naomi go missing after this and are only seen again when they show up at an interview with a ten-year-old boy whose parents they murdered. They had nearly killed him though they didn’t get the chance, so they decide to take action and killed him and the interviewer in the middle of the interview. Jeff and Naomi then make a promise to come and kill everyone else. In the epilogue of the book, they show up to Slender Mansion, where they are warmly greeted by our friend, Slenderman whose movie in 2019 holds many nostalgic feelings for me but also sucked ass. If you don’t know what the Slender Mansion is, you can read about it here. It introduces you to what it is and is essentially just a giant rant about why it shouldn’t exist because it basically tells the canon of the creepypasta universe to fuck off as it does what it wants. It’s rather amusing, actually. Rating: 4/10 Ending Thoughts: Overall, it was an enjoyable read when you didn’t think about it too much. It brought me back to my days of loving Creepypasta and everything to do with it. It was an endearing fanfiction to read, even if not written amazingly well. It was still better than Empress Theresa and was a much-needed break from that shit show of a book. I also want book two Neesha. You said you had book two and it was better than this one. Where is book two, Neesha? I don’t know what I’m going to post next because I am genuinely dreading reading the next portion of Empress Theresa. It will probably take me longer to get through it as I want to do a couple of chapters in one go. Up next I’ll probably ready a book called The Rose Council, written by a man I absolutely despise. I’ll explain more in that post when I get around to doing it. Or perhaps, I’ll write a review on an actually good book for once.

#review #insanity: jeff the killer #neesha nickleson #book review #bad book #okay book?#entire book #creepypasta

6 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapters 3 & 4

If you haven’t read Chapter 2, here is the the link. I recommend reading through this and Chapter 1 first before continuing on for the sake of continuity. These WILL contain spoilers, so if you’re not cool with that, don’t read it.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 by far has to be one of the most boring chapters I’ve come across in this book. It took me forever to work through this chapter alone simply because of how boring I found the writing and the general story line of the chapter. Its sole purpose is to introduce a couple things, one being Theresa’s love interest, Steve, and how ‘interesting’ she is. Summary and Analysis: Theresa has finally moved on from her high school baseball career to attend Boston College, which Boutin, the author, constantly abbreviates to BC throughout this chapter. This abbreviation grows annoying rather quickly, considering that I don’t think the name of the college needs to be mentioned as often as it is. Aside from annoying abbreviations, this chapter is absolutely littered with a poor attempt to follow the story line Boutin seems to have loosely laid out throughout the book as well as piss poor logic. In chapter 3 we learn that Theresa is a whiny little bitch who thinks the amount of homework given to her is absurd despite the fact that there are plenty of college students out there who are handling it just fine. “The assignments I got in my classes seemed endless. Could anybody do all that work in a semester? (Pg 40)” This is Theresa’s first day of classes and she’s already getting upset over the amount of work she has to do. I don’t know about anybody else, but even with my higher level courses the amount of homework ramps up over the semester before the assignments become more manageable when finals start to draw near. Aside from complaining about her homework, we never even see Theresa do it once throughout the chapter. After her classes, rather than starting to work on this ‘endless’ amount of homework she has, Theresa relaxes in her room before a group of girls (I assume her roommates and not just random strangers - It’s never explicitly stated which one.) invite her down to the cafeteria. In the cafeteria, out of a “”long habit” Theresa started to look around the room. She notices pretty quickly that a group of ‘kids’ are staring at her. I tend to take issue with the fact that Boutin constantly refers to these college-aged adults as ‘kids’ simply because it throws you out of the story. Theresa wouldn’t refer to people the same age as her as ‘kids’ and the book is supposed to be written like an autobiography. Nonetheless, these ‘kids’ are staring at her and Theresa automatically picks two out to comment on in the book. “Mr. Intense,” who was looking at her intently, hence the name, and “Mr. Fast Move.” I have a slight problem with the name “Mr. Fast Move” simply because Theresa gave him this name before he even got up to introduce himself. Theresa somehow being omniscient is a problem through everything I’ve read up until this point and I’ve found it to be more and more annoying as I keep reading. Boutin also tends to have a really big problem with making Theresa assume the emotions and thoughts of other people. “One boy [Mr. Intense] was intently looking at me.... he was around six feet which was a good match for my five feet four inches. I liked taller guys and apparently he liked smaller girls (pg 40).” ‘Mr. Intense’ hasn’t even gotten up to talk with Theresa, nor will he for the next little while as far as I can tell. Yet, somehow, Theresa already knows his likes and dislikes and what he looks for in a potential partner. It doesn’t end there though, Theresa also goes on to continue and assume just what he is doing and thinking. “He wasn’t gawking at a pretty girl, or lusting for her body. He looked interested. And that’s ok. A girl gets used to being looked at (pg 40).” Aside from assuming what he’s thinking, there’s a lot of problems with this quote, enough so that I’m not sure where to being. Starting simple, I absolutely hate when authors write out ‘ok’ rather than ‘okay.’ It comes off as lazy to me. It only takes two more strokes of the key to add the ‘ay’ to the first two letters. Moving on to the next problem, Boutin never takes issue with the fact that someone may be looking at Theresa like an object, and Theresa never objects to that idea. She seems to be fine with the idea that someone is looking at her like an object or like a potential partner. Boutin never out right states that someone is looking at Theresa like an object as far as I’m aware, but it tends to be heavily implied throughout the book that Theresa is fine with that. Moving on from Theresa’s assumptions about ‘Mr. Intense’ for now though, ‘Mr. Fast Move’ obviously makes the first move. As stated early, Theresa gave him this name before he even got up to make the first move. She also keeps calling him this after he gives her his name, Jack Koster. To keep it short and sweet so you all don’t have to suffer as much, Theresa knows pretty soon into her and Jack dating that the two of them are not a good match and that their relationship won’t last. Yet, she continues to keep dating him and dragging him along. One day, when she goes down to his dorm because they have a movie at eight. Turns out, Jack has another girlfriend named Ginny from before college. Despite the fact that she knew her and Jack wouldn’t work out and was just dragging him along, Theresa still gets angry at him and wants to make him jealous. Jack says that he’ll talk to Theresa upstairs so she goes upstairs to wait for him. Before I go further, I just want to point out that Boutin wrote that there were six guys in Jack’s dorm waiting on him as well as Ginny. That’s a lot of people for a college dorm. Still chugging along, Theresa decides she wants to make Jack so jealous he’ll “throw Ginny out a window (pg 45).” Theresa says that there’s no chance that her and Jack will get back together, so I’m not quite sure what her logic is on this one. But she dresses in a “backless dress made of flimsy, cling material (pg 45).” The dress falls six inches above the knee, which “wasn’t a big deal these days, but to make it more interesting I folded back the hemline three more inches inside the skirt and taped it (pg 45).” I may just have short legs, but I measured how short this dress would be on myself, and this wasn’t even covering the bottom of my ass cheeks. Anyways, Theresa watches a movie which Boutin goes into way too much detail to describe and it’s just overly boring and pointless. Jack never shows up but surprise surprise, ‘Mr. Intense,’ better known as Steve at this point, does. At this point the dress has ridden up Theresa’s hips at this point and despite Steve’s clear discomfort with the whole dress situation, she makes no move to try and make it better even though he’s there to offer her comfort. We do get this banger of an exchange though (Pg 49): “You’re quite, Steve. Something on your mind?” “Yeah. I’m trying not to think about what I might see.” “I’m wearing a thong. You won’t see anything but my hip.” “And a nice hip it is, I’m sure.” Steve has had a total of maybe 5 words spoken up until this point but he’s already my favorite character solely from the line “And a nice hip it is, I’m sure.” Steve and Theresa’s relationship develops absurdly quickly from there and it’s almost at a worrying pace. After only about a month of dating, the two of them decide to get married. Father Donoughty, or as I lovingly refer to him, Father Dick Doughnut, convinces Theresa’s parents to let her marry Steve at the tender age of 18 and after only a month of dating because he is more than certain that their marriage won’t fail. Eventually her parents give in because “Discouraging it [the relationship] could do more harm than good (pg 54).” Theresa and Steve apparently have an absolutely amazing wedding and we get a lovely detailed description of what Theresa wore that I’m more than happy to share with all of you because it’s not in the slightest drawn out or excessive; “I was gorgeous as a recently turned eighteen year old. For the church service I wore a two piece wedding gown. A floor length wide skirt with spaghetti shoulder straps made from matte duchess stain. Over this I had a jacket made of peekaboo cotton Venice lace that more or less covered my shoulders and the top half of my upper arms so as not to scandalize the congregation. At the reception the jacket and train came off and my shoulders and cleavage charmed the crowd (pg 54).” This description just reminds me of the excessively long description of what Ebony was wearing in the all-time classic My Immortal. Nobody gives two shits just what Theresa was wearing and the comments about what she is wearing don’t even make sense. I don’t recall a congregation ever being ‘scandalized’ by a young woman having their shoulders exposed. I also don’t recall a crowd ever being ‘charmed’ by someones breasts and shoulders, or you know, I just live in a boring world where people don’t get dazzled by my boobs and my offensively sexy shoulders. As for the poor attempt for Boutin to continue the plot throughout chapter 3, in-between Theresa meeting Jake and then finding out about him cheating, Theresa is called into the campus police office because her ‘watchers’ were caught following her. Nothing really comes of this other than that we learn the Pope is paying for her tuition and finds her a ‘highly interesting’ case. The president also talks on the phone to the head of the campus police and tells them to pass along the message that they didn’t see anything happen, that they shouldn’t tell this to anybody, and that they should just forget about it. It’s a boring scene with boring dialogue and its rather pointless as well. If anything, it only serves to create more plot holes throughout the entire story. Chapter 4 So we got through the boring hell that was chapter 3, but what about chapter 4? It’s not better. Arguably it is so much worse. I can sum it up fairly simply for you. Theresa gets kidnapped by government men, she assumes they’re ‘Navy SEALS’ but calls them goons through the entire book. She’s then put on a plane with an atom bomb on it because I guess the president finally decided that he wanted her dead and yet nobody objected to this happening despite there being no evidence for her deserving this fate. Also her watchers just disappear in this chapter so I guess their presence in her life was just completely pointless. This may come as a surprise, but Theresa manages to get out with the stupidest solution ever and doesn’t die. This is the part where I should be celebrating her survival but all I can do is mourn the fact that she could have died but didn’t. If she did, the book would be over. Summary and Analysis: God, I really don’t want to summarize this chapter and point out things I hated in it but I will. This chapter was so overwhelmingly painful to read and mark down that I gave up towards the end and just started scribbling ‘No’ and ‘Why’ into the margins. Okay, rant over. Starting off, Theresa is on her way to go to the grocery store when a bunch of cars in front of her essentially make a barricade so she can’t get through. The people in the cars get out with their weapons drawn as a van pulls up behind her. Once more, Theresa’s omniscient knowledge kicks in and before the door to the van opens she already knows what the interior looks like. She gets into the van anyways without much of a fight and just willingly lets herself be kidnapped. They take her to a helicopter and fly for a long ass time. Eventually Theresa asks where they’re taking her and rather than telling her that it is classified information like they should, they basically tell Theresa that they’re taking her to an aircraft and that she’ll be killed. Rather than getting upset about this, the tears just well up in her eyes but she doesn’t break down into hysterics. As Theresa so eloquently puts it, “But I didn’t cry. I wasn’t a phony movie actress using hysterics to milk all the drama she could out of every moment. I was a real person and I didn’t give a damn what these kidnappers thought (pgs 57-58).” Theresa once more assumes emotions, and states that she must have impressed her kidnappers and won their admiration by not breaking down into hysterics. This is where she also guesses that they’re Navy SEAL despite having absolutely no proof of them being in that part of the army as of yet. Blah blah blah, Theresa decides to ‘wax poetic’ though she’s not being poetic at all and it’s just Boutin trying to fill in space so he can make his book longer. Somehow this chapter is even more boring and annoying than chapter 3 and shit is supposed to be happening here. I suppose Boutin is trying to make it intense, but it comes off as long winded and any sense of action of anxiety that may have been there is gone. In-between the long and boring moments of Theresa just observing things, she asks how she’s going to die and they tell her that she’s going to be loaded onto a plane with an atomic bomb. This is a problem for a lot of reasons, actually, and I’ll put them in a list for you: 1. This is a stupidly expensive way to kill someone 2. Theresa never stood trial for this and its not as thought it could have flown under the radar either. There is a shit ton of money being funneled into an atomic bomb and a plane that wouldn’t go unnoticed in the records. 3. Theresa’s watchers never showed up once despite having watched her grow up and seeing that she would never harm a fly. Yet here she has been declared a danger to national security. 4. All of the men who are escorting her to her death have no proof that she has done anything to be a threat to national security. As far as they’re aware, she’s an innocent eighteen year old girl. 5. The way that they’re going to kill her is cruel, inhumane, and excessive. Never in my life could I see anyone letting a president get away with ordering a death sentence like this. 6. Theresa never fucking stood trial for this shit. This wouldn’t just fly under the radar with congress. Believe it or not, but the President of the United States doesn’t have enough power to just order someone dead because they believe them to be a threat. Theresa would have to go through a trial first. I could see a coup happening in the United States before anyone ever let anything like this happen. These tend to be my problems with a majority of the chapter. To get into more specifics, Theresa says that she needs to think of a way to get out of this, but we never see her elaborate on a plan nor do we ever become clued in that she has come up with an idea. Instead, we, the reader, see her do some nonsensical bullshit. When they take her to an empty cafeteria to have her last meal, Theresa takes an empty garbage bag and fills it with exactly 11 coke bottles that at the time confused the living shit out of me. As it turns out, she’s going to empty out these coke bottles and shove them into her jumpsuit so she’ll be buoyant when she jumps from the plane before it can blow her up. This is some kind of bullshit five-minute crafts solution. It’s a stupid one and never in a million years could I ever see this working. Theresa also decides to reflect on her life and comes to the conclusion that her life as not significant and was incredibly boring. How wonderful for that the reader has to reader that when we could have come to that conclusion ourselves. We also learn that Theresa has had ‘no illnesses’ which seems like utter bullshit to me, but alright, go off Boutin. She also had a ‘mean’ dog growl at her once and suddenly she now has absolutely no love for dogs. I’ll let you interpret that one however you want. The night before she’s going to be executed, Theresa decides to reflect on her life thus far with Steve. This could have been a bittersweet moment where we truly get something emotion filled and with fond memories that we didn’t see. It’s not a bad idea to have her reflect on her loved one during what should be a very emotional time, yet all we do is get a recap of his experience with her last chapter. It’s boring and inspires no emotion from the reader. We could have learned something about Steve and how Theresa sees him and yet we don’t learn anything. What we do learn however, is that Theresa somehow has shit tons of knowledge about aircraft despite this never being mentioned before in the book. I don’t think she actually is supposed to be an aircraft nerd, I think that Boutin just forgot about that and started to write far too much that he learned about planes so he could share the information with everyone. It’s more confusing than not in the actual text though and draws away from the story, not that there was much to begin with. Also, somehow, refueling in flight will snap your neck if you don’t brace right according to Boutin. I did some light research and no, no it will not. Despite this, Boutin goes on for about two pages about how Theresa has to brace so it doesn’t snap her neck when they refuel mid-flight on their way to take her another boat so she can get on the plane with the bomb on it. Jesus christ the next few pages are just absolute hell. Theresa lands on boat. Captain of boat brought women onto top of boat. Thought the one being executed would be man and deserved to see women before he died. Strongly implies women are objects for men to look at again. One woman takes out her phone. She asks Theresa if she has anything she’d like to say. Dis bitch. Dis. fuckin. bitch. “I once read a famous quote by the Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh about singing a death song and going out like a hero. I had rewritten it for a more universal use, never dreaming that I’d use it myself so soon. ‘If people grieve your passing rejoice in the good you did and die like a hero going home. I feel good about who I was.’ (pg 68)” Not only is pulling your phone out to record someone who is about to be executed highly against probably all policies, but also, just... fuckin... if this situation were to ever happen in real life, this would be an absolute shit show of a situation. People are breaking rules left and right, nobody is obeying any sort of code of ethics or any kind of rules that were laid out for them. It’s just stupid. All of this chapter is just plain stupid and the logic is terrible. One of the people gives Theresa thermals because it’s going to be cold when she’s flying up and they insist that she gets oxygen and wears a mask. They do all of this for her despite the fact that in the end she’s going to get blown up and none of it matters. Nothing fucking matters in this book. After this though Theresa fucking jumps from the plane once it has taken off and is at an altitude of 54,140. The impact on the water alone would have been enough to kill her and yet it doesn’t. She just passes out when she hits in and then wakes back up. Now is when she starts to get cold and she passes out again. The entire time that the plane is climbing into the air and she’s falling before she hits the water is supposed to be an intense and action-packed scene. I get that’s what Boutin is trying to do in this last part of the chapter, but it doesn’t come across that way. It’s dragged out. It’s wordy and Theresa thinks way too much about other things for it to feel like it is supposed to be as intense as I think Boutin wanted it to be. It’s poorly written to put it simply, which really sucks because it’s the climax of the entire chapter and the most intense moment out of anything leading up to this point. End Alright that is the end of chapter 3 and 4. I don’t know when 5 to whatever chapter I decide is worth it will come out, but hopefully sooner rather than later so I can finish with this book. Chances are I’ll post a review for a different book in-between this one and the next so look out for that. I’ve got a few absolutely terrible books on their way that I’ll be receiving over the next month. The first one out of the batch I plan to review is someone’s fan fiction that they decided to publish called Insanity: Jeff the Killer simply because it’s 77 pages and after flipping through it, it’s already better than some of the shit I’ve read lately. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed and please feel free to follow and look out for more reviews of books. I hope I’m actually getting better at this review thing! Please feel free to leave any feedback and things you would like!

#empress theresa #chapter 3 #chapter 4 #bad book #bad book review #review #this was hell #someone please kill me #when will it end

9 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapter 2

If you haven’t read the chapter 1 review, I highly recommend you do so. You can find it here: Empress Theresa, Chapter 1 Should you choose not to, this could get confusing, though the book is already confusing enough as is, so who knows, it may make sense. This should be the last time that I copy over my tweets directly, so reviews on here should be far more competent. It took a full week, but I was finally able to get through chapter 2. It was significantly shorter than chapter 1, which in its own way, made it better than the first chapter. However, that doesn't mean that it was good. In general chapter 2 is going over Theresa's high school and middle school life. This means that Norman has to cover things that a high school and middle school student should experience. However, Norman really only covers two things. 1. The Boy's Baseball Team 2. Cyberbullying Theresa gets recruited to the boy's high school baseball team when she's in middle school. She's about 12 years old when she gets recruited and the best I can make out is that this is her last year of middle school too (9th grade). Call me a liar if you want, but I haven't... ...ever met a 12-year-old in 9th grade. For fuck's sake, I was 14 in 9th grade and I have a late birthday in the (United States) school year. Norman claims that Theresa is so young because she skipped a year in school, but I think there's more to it than just skipping a year. Anyways, Theresa joins the high school boy's baseball team. The reason that Norman gives for this is a bit confusing because he jumps back and forth between her being a 'great pitcher' and 'living in a small town, so they didn't have enough boys to recruit for the baseball team.' Because she's on the baseball team, she starts getting cyberbullied and this is where you see just how out of touch with reality Norman is. For some reason, despite that it's a high school baseball team, Theresa is on television all the time. All. The Time. And because... ...of this, Theresa gets cyberbullied. "Anonymous strangers" make entire websites dedicated to cyberbullying Theresa. Yes, they make entire websites. Not only do they use an online forum, or bully her on "the social medias," as Norman likes to put it, but they make entire... ...websites just to show the world how much they truly hate Theresa for being on the boys baseball team. They claim that she must have slept with the coach or was making out with everyone on the boys baseball team but here's the thing; Theresa is still a minor. She's not any older than 13-16 here. This are absolutely absurd accusations to be making to a 13-16-year-old. Even more so that the coach would sleep with her so she could get on the team. That's an accusation of pedophilia. If a rumor like that was floating around, I... ...highly doubt that nothing would come of it. But, Norman doesn't cover this at all. In fact, all of the people on Theresa's team, including the coach, are faceless cardboard figures in the background. The only person in this story that matters is Theresa, and yet, Theresa... ...is just as much of a cardboard figure as the rest of them. It's maddening. But nonetheless, the criticism and 'cyber-bullying' is really starting to get to Theresa so the principle of the school has a teacher sit down with her to try and cheer her up. What we get is a long as fuck and very repetitive monologue from the teacher who then goes over an amazon ad for a doggy door that is explained in so much detail that it's confusing and puts meaning where there is none. Kind of ironic that it does that when I seem to be... ...doing the exact same thing with this book. If you're curious, I did find the ad so you could watch it yourself if you wanted to: video Aside from Theresa's omniscient Trolls who know what all her moral values are and that she has straight A's, we basically just have Theresa's ego stroked more as Norman desperately tries to prove to the reader just how amazing Theresa is. She really isn't and it comes off... ...as narcissistic and unbecoming, especially because Theresa is supposed to be writing this as her autobiography. The other thing that you get from this whole meaningless section of the book is that Theresa blames the cyberbullies parents for not raising them right. What can be summed up as Theresa's parents are good role models in her opinion is then dragged out in a much wordier manner. "My parents gave a good example of the kind of people to be. I'd have to write a book about them to explain." You're writing a book right now. Explain. Or better yet, space it throughout the book. Lessons that your parents taught you when they apply rather than just in one big go. However, Norman was far too lazy to actually do that or have any sense of planning and continuation of subplot throughout the book, so that's not... ...going to happen. Aside from that we also get this banger of a sentence. "It's enough to say I wanted to be a woman like mom and I wanted a husband like dad." Now I know Norman didn't mean it this way, but it sounds an awful lot like Theresa wants to bang her dad, in... ...context or out of context. Blah blah blah we get more boring stuff until it skips to her senior year of high school where she's still 16. She's supposed to be turning 17 in high school so I assume she has an early birthday? That is if Norman still remembers that. Theresa meets Jan Struthers, who I can't remember if I covered or not before because there are so many fucking people in this book who are completely pointless and disappear whenever Norman just forgets about them or doesn't want to keep them in the book anymore. Going back and looking through my tweets, I did indeed cover who Jan Struthers was. For anyone who forgot like me, she's the lady from the government who is in charge of watching Theresa and has been since Theresa was 10, despite being absolutely horrible with children. Anyways, Jan meets Theresa in a Burger King so they can talk about HAL. Despite being in such a public place, Norman gives the reasoning that it's a good place because "the noise gave privacy as good as the Sahara Desert..." I don't know about you but it's really easy... ...to eavesdrop on people in public. Especially in Burger King. Not saying I've done it before, but I've definitely done it before. We find out more about how they found out about HAL and Theresa and the operation that was created to watch Theresa and search for HAL. If you're curious, the operation is literally called the Office of Orbital Phenomena Surveillance, or OOPS. Yes, fucking OOPS. This book was a fucking OOPS. Apparently, the reason for creating the office was, and I'll put it in Norman's words here so it makes sense; "It was supposed to keep track of all the space junk we put into orbit. Its real purpose was to watch for anything going on anywhere in the world that would later be something HAL was doing." The group is called fucking OOPS. Office of Orbital Phenomena Surveillance. I don't know about you all, but space trash is not a phenomenon. This is just kind of piss poor logic on Norman's part and a weak excuse for him wanting a good acronym for the group. Surprise Norman, we kind of already have a group like that. The CIA. They already... ...investigate shit like this. But you do you, Norman. You do you. Blah, blah, blah, we get introduced to like 3 more presidents in the span of two paragraphs which is confusing as shit, but alright. "I hadn't heard a peep out of HAL in the six years since he merged with me." So Theresa assumes that HAL is sentient despite the fact that HAL has given literally no indication of sentience. This is a theme that at the very least continues on from chapter one, even if... ...it makes absolutely no god damned sense. Norman brings back in the idea about how HAL makes Theresa put out an absurd amount of heat despite the fact that nobody around her seems to notice that she puts out an absurd amount of heat, which is more absurd logic. Apparently there's a column of disturbed air above Theresa that goes into space an this is how they tried to see if there were any other HAL's on the planet (there aren't). We also get another one of my most hated lines in this book when Theresa asks how much... ...the satellite cost that they sent up to look for more columns of disturbed air. "a hundred million" This is terrible grammar for one, and when someone says it out loud, it sounds wrong too. "One hundred million." is better in every way shape and form and nobody... ...can convince me otherwise. Anyways, Theresa says that they can give her 'a hundred million' and she'll give them HAL. She can't even fucking do that at this point. She doesn't even know if she can do that so why is she offering it? Besides, Jan never even responds to it... ...in the slightest. It's a fucking pointless line in this stupid fucking pointless book that I'm covering because I guess I just love to torture myself with terrible literature before I have to go and read a good book for my history classes. Moving on though, Jan goes into how Theresa needs to get a broad education just in case she ever needs to be the alien ambassador. She really doesn't. She just needs to double major or have a major and a minor in two things probably, Linguistics and Foreign Affairs. But no, instead Jan says that "You might need the knowledge of Thomas Jefferson, and the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln." Apparently, these are our brightest minds in history. Like not to bash on the two of them, they did a lot in the foundation and the forming of the USA... ...but what about the brilliant philosophers of the past? What about the leading and brightest minds of today? What about the scientists of the past who revolutionized how we think and act today? There's more to what formed history than just the people in America. In fact, the... ...presidents of the United States pulled from the philosophy and the knowledge of histories most prominent figures of the Enlightenment. They just helped to spread the word. But how could I expect Norman to know that? It's not like it's taught in every single school... ...in the United States or that all it takes is the fastest Google search to ever happen to find out about that. But I heavily digress. We move on from the meeting and Theresa gets a note in her mailbox that only has her name on it, meaning that someone slipped it... ...into her mailbox while she was away at school. The letter asks where Jan Struthers is and if Theresa can meet him [Jeremy Benton] at the Framingham Library. Theresa tries to email Jan to let her know about it at "janswatchers at snoop.gov" That is exactly... ...how it was worded in the book, not as "[email protected]". Anyways, the email doesn't go through because I suppose it just doesn't exist anymore. We find out that Jan is missing and the blame is put onto the NEW president who gets brought in with 0 context. They assume that President Martin got rid of Jan because she 'knew too much' or she said something that he just didn't like. We find out that Jeremy Benton is the P.A. to Prime Minister Peter Blair in England. And oh yeah, Theresa brings Father Doughnut back into the fray. Blah, blah, blah, we get this brilliant line; "Seeing you close like this took my breath away. Do you realize the effect you have on people?" from Jeremy to Theresa (who is still 16/17 at this point). We get another of my most hated lines in the book, "I'm beginning to." More bad an inconsistent writing. Apparently, HAL showed up when Theresa was 3 and not six months before she was born. Jan sent all the information about Theresa before she went missing to the Canadian Prime Minister and the Canadian Prime Minister sent that information... ...to the British Prime Minister. Blah, blah, blah more pointless repeating shit. Jeremy offers Theresa and her family a home in England along with new identities (which is 0-100 real quick) all because they think that President Martin made Jan disappear. Father Dick Doughnut jumps in and says that the Holy Father is interested in Theresa's case and wants to offer her a place and protection in Rome. Speaking of Father Dick Doughnut, the meeting with the cardinal that he promise to Theresa never actually happened. Jeremy suggests they bring Theresa's situation to the public, and Theresa agrees though she doesn't exactly completely agree because she thinks that it will ruin her life. Despite wanting to bring it to the press though and agreeing that it would be a decent enough idea... ...she still doesn't want to tell her parents because "one mistake on their part and my future was ruined before I had it." I just... I can't at this point. I'm only two chapters in and I just can't. Besides that, we get the most confusing diatribe ever and I'm going to subject you all too it because I had to suffer through it and still don't know what it's trying to say. "I'd learned that somebody with eloquence may not have seen his powers of understanding receive... ...any aid from education. Ignorance and deficiency of mental improvement could still remain. There's some quirk in their personality that keeps them from becoming wise. The President gave great orations but he was a babe in the woods when it came to dealing with me." If you understood any of that please let me know because even after typing that out I'm still not entirely sure what Theresa is trying to say. I think she's threatening death on him for making Jan disappear, but I'm not sure. and at the very end of the chapter, she says; "If HAL wanted me to do something good I was ready, if it was something bad, I wouldn't do it. President Martin should have left things alone." However, when I first read this I read it as her saying that she wouldn't do the... ...bad thing alone. Which made her sound like she really was going to gather a group a murder President Martin. However like I said not even two tweets ago. It really does sound like Theresa wishes harm on President Martin, with or without HAL's influence.

#empresstheresa #empress theresa review #bad book #bad book review #chapter 2

11 notes · View notes

badbookreviewclub · 4 years

Text

Empress Theresa, Chapter 1

(This is a direct transcription of my tweets, so I apologize if it gets choppy at times) DISCLAIMER: Please read the preface before you continue on! PAGE 1 This is a terrible start to the book. There's nothing here to gain the interest of the reader nor is there anything that could potentially give you a clue to who Theresa is. You get who her parents are, but nothing about her parents (e.g. If they're important people) "I was the Princess in the Sullivan clan of Framingham, Massachusetts because besides being cute I was a whiz in school and had a good disposition." This sentence makes me die inside every time I re-read it. What does it even mean to have a 'good disposition'? This is the first time I've ever read someone describing themselves as having a 'good disposition'. "All the relatives expected great things from me." And then not even a paragraph later it says; "Nobody could have dreamed of what I would do a few years later, and nobody would have believed it if they'd been told." This is a conflicting message here, Theresa. Did they expect great things from you or did nobody expect you to do anything big? "Prime Minister Blair said I'd still be remembered in a million years." Okay, so we know that you're doing something big now, but you just introduced a character who we don't know. At all. What's the context behind all of this? What kind of person is Prime Minister Blair? "Did you catch that?" Yes, I fucking caught that. You literally just said it. "Churchill, Hitler, and Lincoln..." I don't like the way that these are ordered. It's alphabetical, but going in historical context would sound nicer in my opinion. "Lincoln, Hitler, Churchill..." That's not even counting that she just compared herself to being greater than Hitler. There are so many other people who are better that could have been brought up here and not someone who committed mass genocide and traumatized humanity. Directly after that, Charles Martel is brought up in a long paragraph that sounds like someone who just watched a documentary and is eager to share everything they just learned with their friends who could not give less of a shit. It's pointless to have it there and adds nothing. "...but Prime Minister Blair said I'd be remembered for a million years." You said that not even a paragraph ago. I didn't forget, I promise. I may have the attention span of a peanut, but my short-term memory isn't completely dead. Though my last few brain cells may be dead after I finish all 465 pages of this monster. "I was the last person you'd expect to earn this accolade." Contradicting to what you said earlier of all your relatives expecting big things of you. Not to mention, I don't know who you or anyone else is yet Theresa. I can't fucking say if you would be the last person expected "When this story began I was a little girl who didn't have much of a clue about anything." Why not start the story here? It's far better than that big ramble you just had. This is far more interesting than "I'm Theresa, the younger daughter of blah blah blah." "My job as a kid was to figure out what the heck was going on and what to do about it. It's not easy when you're young and everything is brand new." No shit honey. Except the thing is, life is so much easier when you're younger. you don't have to worry about taxes. Or your employer forgetting to mail you your W-2. Or if your employer does mail you your W-2 but your mail-lady delivers it to the wrong house so some random person has your W-2 and social security number now. You don't have to worry about that as a kid. Life as a kid is easy. ide note: The text in this book is fucking huge. Like it was written so children could easily read it. PAGE 2 The way the first paragraph on this page starts out is jarring and throws the reader out of any flow that may have been there before (There wasn't one there before, but I digress). It then is quickly followed by her father making a comment to her about being the captain of her ship, without actually being a quote from him. It would have been more interesting if it was a direct quote from her father rather than just a passive memory with how she phrases it. What is says is, "He said I had to be the captain of my ship, but sometimes the seas would be rough." Which is poor phrasing in my opinion. There are far better ways to phrase this that give some more character and depth to the relationship between Theresa and her father. A better way to phrase it would be; "He said 'You have to be the captain of your own ship. Sometimes the seas will be rough, but you need to keep pushing through it until you find smooth seas again.'" However, it's not phrased like this or anything remotely close to this. It's then followed very quickly by saying "I had to learn all I could about the world." How does this relate to what your father told you in any way shape or form? I am so confused and feel like what your father told you was completely disregarded or misinterpreted. "I wondered why should I be worrying about it in the fourth grade? I'd soon find out." My Grammarly is kicking in and telling me that 'worrying' is used wrong here. This is a direct quote from the book, and I have to agree. Once again, this relates nothing to what was just said. I want to scratch this entire page out so far, but I've refrained from doing so. Then we come to the first paragraph I have completely scribbled out. I hate it so much. It is a shit paragraph in every way humanly possible. It relates nothing to the first sentence and could completely be ignored and taken out of the book without changing anything. “Everybody has pressures. There are two kinds. One is threats to your life and health. I had more than my share of that with a thousand assassins wanting to get me. The other kind is bearing responsibility for other people's lives and welfare. That's really tough if you care... ...about them. I set new world records in that department. People were sure I'd crack under the pressure, but I didn't. It will take smarter heads than mine to figure out why not." There is so much I want to say about this paragraph that I can't express in words, just guttural, angry screams. I scribbled it out for a reason and that reason still stands true. It is complete and utter shit. Side note: "It will take smarter heads than mine to figure out why not." Thank you for the reassurance that you're a dumb shit, Theresa. I needed it. "I'll be telling my own story which is a good thing because nobody knows it as well as me." We are already all well aware this is an 'autobiography' at this point, Theresa. There's no need for you to tell us that. The fucking point of an autobiography is to tell your own story. More scribbled out sentences about her saying that there's stuff she can't know because she wasn't there. Then she comments on a conversation between Prime Minister Blair (who we still know nothing about) and President Stinson (a new character who we also know nothing about) and how they were talking to each other on the phone. Theresa then assumes that P.M. Blair and President Stinson were talking about how they would stop her if she got out of control. How pig-headed can she get? Not everything is about you. The entire world doesn't revolve around you, bitch. Except, oh wait, in this book, it does! Another scribbled out section I scribbled out so horribly I can barely read it. I will do my best to write it down here so you can suffer with me. "But remember you'll learn things in the same sequence I did. Somebody else telling my story could only say what I did... ... in the world. They couldn't get in my head like you will. You'll see what a horrible, worldwide mess I had to deal with." Ah. I remember why I scribbled it out so badly now. Because it's garbage. Even more so than the first paragraph that I tried to destroy. She's just repeating the fact that this is a fucking autobiography. I've read good autobiographies, where you actually get into the author's mind. So far, this shit isn't it. "My story began quietly with no hint of what was coming." All of that before was pointless. And I will tell you now, most of the details that come after are pointless. This book refuses to be clear and concise, which is a good thing a good majority of the time. The book started terribly and wrote the whole tone for the first few pages, and so far, I'm more upset than when I started. Sidenote #2: After this I'll try to do Chapters in these tweet chains, mentioning (for the most part) the stuff that stands out the most to me. Unless I run into a page that is truly the worst thing ever. The Rest of Chapter 1 Starting on page 3 Starting off strong, I scribbled out the entire first paragraph because it's all terrible. It's Theresa describing her older sister who has absolutely no importance to the story whatsoever and then stroking her own ego by boasting about how... ...she's a whiz in school and her sister isn't. "She's thinking of going to one of the many trade schools in Boston after high school Mom and Dad said I should go to college." These two really don't share any correlation to each other besides being education after highschool. Not to mention, I think Norman, the author, is strongly trying to suggest that trade school isn't nearly as good as university or college when that couldn't be less true. Trade school is just as valid as a university or a college. You gain new skills and can enter a career far... ...quicker than you could at a 4-year university and then some if you're going for a Masters or P.H.d. in your chosen field. Also, I really hate Twitter's character limit. It's fucking stupid and makes these reviews hard as hell to write out. Theresa drags things out more, shares a story that seems currently irrelevant about her mother seeing a fox that came and sat in front of her six months before she was born. (Keep this in mind. Six months before Theresa was born). Theresa even says that this strange... ...event seemed unimportant and that her parents forgot about it for 18 years. Fuck, if something like that happened to me, I'd forget about it too. I certainly wouldn't remember it 18 years later. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast last week. And then more than halfway down the page, Norman finally starts the fucking story. Theresa's doing some summer reading for school when she sees a fox walking along the edge of the woods. The fox ducks into the woods before walking back out, which is completely... ... irrelevant and yet for some reason, Norman felt it was important to include despite the fact it adds nothing and just feels like lazy writing and editing. Speaking of editing, I am dead convinced that Norman didn't have an editor for this book or even look over a chapter... ...after he wrote it. "In an instant, faster than you could blink an eye, a softball sized white light emerged from the fox and went straight into my stomach." Besides being poorly written, keep in mind the fact that she just said it was in the blink of an eye. Theresa goes inside and has a pointless as fuck conversation with her older sister about seeing the fox. Rather than like any rational person who might glance outside to look because apparently seeing "Foxes in the daylight never happens" as Norman puts it, she just says that... ... the fox won't hurt her before going back to the living room never to be mentioned again for another 12 pages or so. Theresa assumes that because she hasn't eaten yet she's hallucinating or having a vivid daydream, so she goes to eat and we get an unnecessary description of... ..what she makes. We also get this gem of a line; "At age ten I was already conscious of my weight and tried to stay skinny." There is so much wrong with this that I can't even put it into words. So. So. So much. Specifically the 'at age ten' part too. More weird phrasing and poor writing later and Theresa determines that yes, it must have been that she hadn't eaten anything because after eating she feels less worried about it. Then there's a HUGE fucking heat spike according to Norman. Enough so that the firemen have to get involved to see what the fuck is up. Theresa somehow has this meta-knowledge that this has to do with the white light that jumped into her stomach. Long story short, someone called the firemen because the heat spiked up so massively and they thought it might be a fire without going outside or looking around to see if it actually was a fire. We get an absurdly long and very dull section about how the firemen started poking around trying to figure out if it was underground or not, which is completely unnecessary and adds nothing to the story in my opinion. I have scribbled it all out because it's all shit. Then we get another fucking gem that Norman uses a total of one time and never brings up ever again. It gave me an idea that would have made this book far more interesting than it ended up being, but it's never mentioned again. Its sole purpose for existing was to give Norman... ... an excuse as to why Theresa didn't talk to anyone. "My Cousin Mary was diagnosed a schizophrenic and the whole Sullivan clan was biting their nails waiting for the gene to show up in some other family member. It wasn't going to be me! I resolved to never tell anybody... ... Not even my parents would know. They'd think I was ill like Cousin Mary. I didn't need it." This alone caused me so much anger I put down the book and didn't pick it up again for a good couple of hours. I honestly don't feel like I need to explain why this is so terrible. But as for the idea it gave me, the book could be far better if it turned out that Theresa was schizophrenic. That this was all a hallucination. It would explain a lot of her actions later on in the book, especially when she experiences extreme paranoia. Well, Norman doesn't call it paranoia. It's just Theresa being 'super smart and know just what's up'. We learn shortly after that there are government officials who turned up to watch 'someone' (spoilers: It's Theresa). Somehow everyone knows they're officials despite... ... never approaching them and instead trusting the word of a neighbor who said the police approached them, were shown badges by these officials, and then the police left them alone afterward. Theresa somehow knows that these people are here to watch her and for some reason... ... she calls the operator to see if they're spying on her or have her phones tapped. I guess this is just supposed to be common knowledge that if you call the operator and ask them for a number and if there's a delay they then you're being spied on? After all, it's not like the operator is human and they take time to look up numbers and whatnot. But this time around there's not a delay so Theresa concludes that they aren't listening to her. Not sure how this makes sense, but okay. Theresa and her mom decide to go shopping and Theresa spends the entire time thinking that men are following her everywhere. Despite the fact that it's a public space and they're different men. The first instance is at the parking garage, where someone parked close to them... ... and then followed them to the surface. Then they go to a very popular and big brand book store, Barnes and Noble, and Theresa sees a different man who she thinks is watching her as well. She goes to the second floor by herself because I guess her mom is okay with that. When I was ten, my mom wouldn't let me wander over to the next aisle to look at stuff no matter how much I insisted. So you know, not judging her mother's parenting skills, but I'm lowkey judging her mother's parenting skills. After that they go to McDonalds and another man gets in line behind them and leaves around the same time they do. Theresa thinks that this man is also following her. And then, a man who was on the corner started walking in their direction. For some reason, Theresa thinks all... ... these people are spying on her. Which is total bullshit in all honesty and is incredibly paranoid behavior. However, Norman doesn't write it that way and instead writes it as Theresa just knowing what the fuck is up. When she gets home, Theresa calls the operator again and this time, instead of taking half a minute to get the number, the operator takes a minute. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty certain that doesn't mean that someone has tapped your phone. Aside from that, I've also started to realize just how much Norman really likes to be as precise as he can be with his numbers and it's super fucking annoying to read and I wish that I didn't have to read it. But I am. Blah, Blah, Blah, more boring stuff and then Theresa goes to a movie story with her mom. She gets 2001: A Space Odyssey and apparently that's super, super fucking important because that's how the officials know that Theresa has an alien inside of her. I don't see the... ... correlation but you know what, maybe it's just me who's a dumb shit and Norman was right all along. Besides that, the movie is also super important because Theresa names that white ball of light that flew into her that she dismissed because she thought she was hungry. However, that's just something Norman seems to have conveniently forgotten right now and Theresa has just accepted the fact that it really did happen. "Mom did most of the grocery shopping on Saturday and I usually went with her because Catherine wandered off with her friends." Someone, please tell me how the first part really relates to the second part because I can't make sense of how your sister not going... ... to hang out with her friends would keep you from going with your mom to go grocery shopping. Especially when there's a seven-year difference between you two. One of the gov't officials approaches Theresa when she's alone in the cereal aisle (once again, judging her mother's skills as a parent), and tells her to call her when she's alone. That seems vaguely pedophilic to me, but that might just be me. Either way, Theresa somehow knows that this woman is working for the officials who are watching her. We get another paragraph of a line; "The woman knew that I knew about my watchers. I had often stared at them. So this woman also knew I had to think she was one of them and I... ... had to be curious enough to talk to her." This is so convoluted and overthought. I hate it in every way shape and form. It's so damn repetitive and gets repeated several times throughout the next few paragraphs. But I digress. Theresa goes home and goes to her room and pulls out her cellphone and calls the woman. We found out her name is Jan and we get the most boring conversation in the history of conversations. Yet for some reason, Norman has the audacity to say that... ... it is the most important interview since Moses came down from the mountains. I don't read the Bible, but as far as I'm aware, Moses was never interviewed after he came down with the 10 commandments. Correct me if I'm wrong. Theresa describes the white ball of light in so much detail that you realize, there's no fucking way she could have been able to see all of it if it was "faster the blink of an eye." So I guess Norman conveniently overlooked that part.1 Theresa says she named the white ball of light HAL from the movie. I don't see why, but she did. More boring as fuck conversation giving us the information we already know. We know that the woman's name is Jan now. Jan tells Theresa that they're always watching and listening... ... to her. After reading this I am under the belief that Jan should never ever be allowed to handle any cases dealing with children ever again because she uses so many fear tactics that would absolutely terrify a child. Jan also tells Theresa that she can't talk to anybody or tell anyone about HAL. I don't know about you all, but when I was younger, and someone told me not to tell anybody about something that involved me, I really wanted to tell someone about that thing. More boring as shit exposition that's poorly written and then we jump forward a few days. This is where my suspicions about Norman loving being super precise with numbers were confirmed. He also goes into way too much detail about gardening and weed pulling. Anyways, this is where we learn that Theresa has an aimbot basically. She woke up with a small orange dot in the center of her vision and automatically assumed it had something to with HAL. But she learns it's an aimbot because she can throw rocks and hit a watering can no... ...matter how far away she is from it. She then says it has no use, but I think Norman means that it has no practical use. It has plenty of uses, just not many can be applied to everyday life. Pretty quickly after Theresa finds out she has an aimbot she wants to play baseball with a neighbor boy so she goes to his house and talks to his mom asking to play with him. Except Norman doesn't write 'his mom', no, Norman writes 'The mother.' The Mother. The one true mother of all mothers. The queen of mothers. The mother that all mothers descended from. She is THE Mother. Aside from calling her 'The Mother' over and over again, Theresa tosses the baseball back and forth and doesn't miss no matter what. She comments constantly on how bad Tommy (the neighbor kid) is at this. Eventually Tommy's dad (referred to as 'The dad')... The Dad. The one true dad. The one Dad to rule them all. The Dad that all Dad's descend from. He is the ultimate Dad. He is THE Dad. ... comes out and takes over for Tommy, playing baseball with Theresa. I don't know why, but this came off the wrong way when I was reading it and just didn't seem right. Norman becomes even more repetitive in his writing, "This was August and it was very hot. "Let's call it quits, Theresa" the father said. "It's getting hot."" More shit I scribbled out because it's fucking horrible. Basically so you don't have to live through the same hell I did, I'll summarize even more. Theresa gets super strength because of HAL. She knows this because she broke a steak sauce bottle white trying to open it... ... because she was eating a steak for lunch. Because ten-year-olds can cook steaks for lunch. When I was ten I could barely fucking cook macaroni and cheese for myself. This is all boring as shit but the super-strength makes Theresa want to go and talk to her priest. Father Richard, who is also referred to as Father Donoughty later on (which make me think of the name Father Dick Doughnut ngl). Anyways, Theresa doesn't think her mother could just ask Father Richard about what she didn't want to talk to her about, thinking that priests... ... are bound to secrecy. I don't think they are but I'm not religious so how the fuck would I know. Anyways, Theresa shows she has super strength and blatantly states that the priest probably thought she was possessed by a demon but after going out to talk to Jan he believes... ... otherwise. And with that conversation between Father Dick Doughnut, we get the worst dialogue of all time. So you can suffer with me this time, I'm typing it all out. "These men don't know everything. Only I do. What did Theresa say?" (Jan) "I'm not at liberty to say." (Father Dick) "It's not the usual stuff?" "It isn't." "It's critical you can tell no one. Theresa will be the first to suffer. People will come after her. They'll kidnap her, kill her, or worse." "Who are you?" "I work for the American government" "How many of you are there?" "Hundreds" "That's a lot of people." "Do you understand how important this is?" “I'm beginning to." First of all, boring as fuck. Second, what is worse than being killed? You're fucking dead. I don't think much can actually top that. Third, I don't know if he's asking how many are watching Theresa or how many are working for the gov't. Either way, stupid question. After that absolutely immersive conversation, Father Dick Doughnut says he needs to call the cardinal to have them come watch Theresa. This seems really extreme in my opinion. As far as I was aware, a cardinal has far more to take care of than one little girl... ...at one church in a town that I don't think is that big. Even a bishop probably wouldn't spend their time focusing on that and they're two steps down from a cardinal. But no, Theresa is just too fucking important. Why not just have the Pope get involved now? Or is that... ...too much for you to handle Norman? Ugh. This entire chapter just fucking sucks and it's only the first chapter. Blah, Blah, Blah, Theresa's story about an alien being inside of her is confirmed because Jan said so and she works for the 'government'. Then we get a huge fucking jump over her fifth-grade year where Theresa gets to jump from fifth grade to seventh grade because her hair started to grow in thick thanks to HAL. Apparently, this is a sign of her 'emotional maturity'. I don't see the correlation. At all. At the very end of the chapter Theresa makes the claim that there are "four hundred" people watching her and that's how many people it takes to watch someone 24/7 without being caught. That seems like bullshit to me. In fact, that seems like the fastest way to get caught. It takes maybe 4 to 8 people at most in my opinion to watch someone day and night. But no. Theresa is just too fucking important for only 4-8 people. She needs 400. I forgot to mention earlier, but only the high ranking officials know about why Theresa is being watched. As far as I'm aware, there are only about 20 high ranking officials who know why Theresa is being watched. That leaves 380 people who have no fucking clue just what the hell is going on or why they're watching an 11-year-old girl. That's absolutely absurd. Something I forgot to mention earlier is that Jan claims something came from space 7 years ago and they lost track of it. She assumes that thing is HAL. Keep that in mind 7 years ago. But the fox that Theresa's mother saw was almost 11 years ago. And the fox is what gave... ... Theresa that ball of light. Norman loves to be precise with numbers, but he can't even keep his own fucking storyline straight. This book is hell. But I will keep reading because I apparently love to torture myself.

#empress theresa #empress theresa review #bad book #bad book reviews #chapter 1

18 notes · View notes