Wafflings of a Cozmonaught

   Blood Trail  (2003) written by Nancy Springer - Goodness. That was bad. I like simple and fast writing styles, but the narrative voice is grating. And it's not just the protagonist; I hate all of the characters in this book. They are annoying and unbelievable. The melodrama is intense, and it has to be because nothing happens in the later half of this story. The conflict is manufactured and contrived. Sorry, but informing the police that your best friend was afraid of the murderer mere minutes before they were slaughtered by said person is not "ratting them out". Just a baffling conflict that dominates most of the pages. There is ambiguity as to what exactly happened which I thought was nice. This includes a couple interesting scenes that subtly suggest that the killer may be someone different. And I think there is a lesson in the book ending on the demure note that it did. But, all-in-all, this was really not it. Rating: 2/10 | Previously reviewed on Goodreads:  ...

    On Chesil Beach  (2007) written by Ian McEwan - You know in school when your English teacher told you that your essay had to be 1,000 words long, but you'd said all you wanted to say in the first 300 so you had to fill? That's what this book is. Padded and pretentious. Brit Lit at its most indulgent. This should have been 10k words at most. Yet Mr. McEwan has managed to wring it for many times that, evolving it like a Pokémon from short story to novella all the way to short novel. I'm not mad. I'm impressed, really. Impressed at Mr. McEwan's talent for digressing over and over and over again with unnecessary anecdotes and asides. Impressed and bored. Mostly bored. There is an interesting story in there somewhere, and I can see it. I can see great characters and an emotional writing style. But there is just so much fluff and sod to dig through. Rating: 3/10 | Previously reviewed on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7312634537

   Spilled Blood (2012) written by Brian Freeman - I don't read a lot of mysteries, and this book didn't help my impression of them. The writing is amateurish. It's full of eyeroll-worthy cliches, passive language, and telling. The author does not trust the reader to understand what is happening; everything must be spelled out and overexplained. Maybe this is a hallmark style of mysteries, or maybe it's just Freeman. I'm not sure which. The Hatfields and McCoys drama between the two towns is so outlandishly unbelievable that I audibly laughed on multiple occasions, and the ending can't help but feel a little contrived. A religion theme pops up one minute and is gone the next. The not-so-subtle Monsanto evil corp is cartoonish. This book desperately needed focus. There are so many characters and so much random surface-level tosh that I found myself zoning-out for minutes at a time, yet I never missed a beat because everything this book has is superficial. It rea...

  The Chocolate War (1974) written by Robert Cormier - Rambly narration that works. Disturbingly relatable teen masculinity. There was one passage in particular that was my childhood to a tee: He thought of his own parents and their useless lives--- his father collapsing into his nap every night after supper and his mother looking tired and dragged-out all the time. What the hell were they living for? He couldn't wait to get out of the house. "Where're you going all the time?" his mother asked as he fled the place. How could he tell her that he hated the house, that his mother and father were dead and didn't know it, that if it wasn't for television the place would be like a tomb. He couldn't say that because he really loved them and if the house caught fire in the middle of the night he'd rescue them, he'd be willing to sacrifice his own life for them. But, jeez, it was so boring, so deadly at home--- There were a couple contrived hiccups that he...