Book Babblings

The Christopher Killer by Alane Ferguson 

The Nitty Gritty: Cameryn Mahoney is the teenage daughter of the town corner. Now many girls her age would put as much distant between her father's profession and her social life. Who wants to hang out with a girl who's father drives dead bodies around in the family station wagon?

Not Cammie. She fully embraces the science of death and wants to follow in her father's footsteps. Much to the chagrin of her Irish grandmother.

In a stroke of genius she offers to work as her father's assistant to get a feel for the job before she rushes off to college to cast her lot with forensic science.

She is still standing after her first body pickup. An unfortunate natural death left to ripen in a grubby motel bathroom. Cammie thinks she is ready for her first case. to her horror its the body of a her good friend, Rachel. To make matters worse its looking like her friend is the victim of the serial killer known as the Christopher Killer.

Determined to get justice for her now dead friend Cammie pushes her way into the investigation. She has to match wits with a dictator of a medical examiner and a television psychic who is already predicting another Christopher killing.

Opening Line: "Yes I can be there in half an hour. Any idea of when he died?"

The Good: The premise for this YA book I have to say is wholly original. In an age of fang bangers, vampire bodyguards, shadow hunters, and Divergents and its a breath of fresh air that a female protagonist wants to actually use her brain for something other than thinking about a golden haired teen god.

Forensic science is not the field of choice for a lot of people and even less for females. Even looking at the CSI shows there is one female to every three male characters. So I love that Ferguson came at the YA genre with a brand spanking new twist. Its a refreshing vacation from the lusty werewolves and sultry vampires.

I just wish this book was based in a larger city where Cammie could have actually done some investigations. It could have really progressed to something fantastic.

The Bad: As a devout follower of all CSIs I love a book about the science of crime and murder. Though this wasn't as much CSI as I had hopped. Well frankly it was a single a chapter during the autopsy of Rachel. I think Ferguson missed a great opportunity to introduce children to the science of investigation. Camyrn and her father are the town's only crime scene investigators and they just didn't do any investigation. She opened a few drawers and took some pictures.

A book hailed as a forensic mystery just fell short on that aspect. As much research as the author claimed to have put into this I didn't see any of it. I mean the majority of this stuff could have been picked up from Law & Order.

I think Ferguson remembered that this is a YA book and had to water Cammie down to give her mass appeal. Its never a good idea to write for the market. After all you're book isn't put on the shelf as soon as you get done with it. With a neophyte author there could be years between your finished book and its new home on the shelf at Amazon or Barnes and Nobel. Writing for the market could put you behind the curveball with a lag time like that. Ferguson should have just given us a brilliant girl wanting to get into murder and death and left it there. There was so much potential for Cammie to get right up there with Katniss Everdeen or Hermione Granger or LEP REcon officer Holly Short or even Enola Holmes.

She could have introduced the tension between her age and her chosen profession in the book at a more climactic time.

I hate when I read a non fantasy book that has fantasy elements. Though I am sure this was not by design of the author. The plot point of brining the mother back into the picture was sloppy and lazy and it forced me to suspense all disbelief in a book with too much science to make that plausible.

Please allow me to explain, Cammie lives with her father and her Irish grandmother who forgets that she is not Cammie's mother, but is for another argument. Her mother left some years ago without any explanation. She just packed up her little suitcase and blew through town like a drunken tornado. Rightly so the entire family has written her off. With good cause if you ask me. I don't want to keep anyone around who doesn't want to be around. Well during the course of the book we discover that the new deputy in town has been given a task that rips open the old "mother" wounds for Cammie. Which makes no sense whatsoever. The mother has been a none issue for the family for years, I just don't understand trying to reintroduce her back into Cammie's life at this juncture. Then to use a character that had no reason to be in the story but to be a dues ex machina.

It smacks of sloppy writing and irritatingly soap operay. Yep, that's my word and I am going to own it.

Unlike the more famous of amateur sleuths like Jessica Fletcher, Miss Marple, Phyrne Fisher, or Harry Dresden, Cammie is not good at detecting. She is actually really bad at it. Like my first Tonka CSI kit from Toys R Us, bad. She stumbles blindly from one theory to the next with no concrete clues to lead her other than the culprit looking different from the mainstream. As a black person who often times finds herself in the company of no other person of the dark persuasion I take offense to this overused reasonings. It keeps the different on the fringes of society because it reenforce the irrational fear of the different or the unknown.

Oh Ferguson tries to give her credibility by having her trip over an "important" clue in the motel room of her first body. Nice try honey. That might have worked during the heyday of Jiggly TV favorite Charlie's Angles or Miami Vice, but after a steady diet of crime drama during prime time the public isn't that easily fooled anymore. She could have sent a prayer up to Richard Castle and gotten a better trail of clues if she were really pressed for plot help.

I guess I'm spoiled because of Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, Castle and the like. Murder is more flamboyant than the Christopher Killer and I was looking for that. Not over the top SAW sort of murder, nor the Murder, She Wrote, sing you a lullaby before I tap you on the back of the head murder. Just a little more. Somewhere in between. This was too Murder, She Wrote for the modern age of serial killers.

Final thoughts: I really enjoyed the parts of the books that didn't revolve around Cammy's whining about her missing mother. Which came more frequent that I would have hoped dealing with a book about the death of a her good friend. If her mother can be shelved till I no longer care about keeping my sanity I would pick up the second book.

Book Babblings

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card 

The Nitty Gritty: the world has changed. Bugs attacked the Earth and we barely survived. Bugs muscled their way into Earth's air space and it was one bloody battle after another but we pushed them back. We are still left standing, but no one knows for how long.

That is where Andrew "Ender" Wiggen comes in. He is humanity's last hope and he is only 6. If Ender can't win the war against the bugs it can't be won and we are all screwed seven ways from Sunday.

Opening Line: "I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he is the one."

What's the 411: Before Katniss was the girl on fire we had Ender Wiggen killing his way through his competition to get to the top of the mountain. Though no one told Ender he had to kill his other space cadets to live to see another day.

He was just a little boy trying to stay a step ahead of the bullies. A little boy that wanted to survive the day to just play and laugh with his older sister Valentine. I mean its a dream that all children should have and we adults try out hardest to make sure that our kids don't have anything to worry about other than who they are going to play with today.

That is not the world in the Enderverse. Children have become commodities to wield like the weapons the adults want them to bo. To the adults Ender is not a child, he isn't even a human being. He is a weapon they need to sharpen so he can defend the world. Whether he wants to be that weapon or not.

They turn the very real and very deadly art of war into a game. Children like games, they can identify with games. So the adults give them a game. Though they call it Battle School. After all children understand they have to go to school to learn and be taught.

Ender's Game is a story about children. Plain and simple, but at Battle School these children transform into elite soldiers battling each other for the chance to go into space to kill buggers. We start to think of them as adults and out brains see them that way. They certainly see themselves as tiny adults, bu just when out hearts get on board with that train of thought Card smacks us in the face with the their innocence. I believe that is deliberate and brilliant on Card's part. He is making us as readers superimpose the actions and reasonings of an adult on top of the body and thoughts of a child.

Soon the thoughts of the child fade away and nothing is left but the body. Everything else has moved on and matured in the adult weapon Colonel Graff needs them to be. Its gone beyond a want at this point. They need Ender to be that weapon.

Graff throws out all the rules to shape Ender. He even goes against the wishes of his superiors to see his goals achieved. Is it madness or just the fight or flight response in high gear? Not sure how to answer that.

The Good: Kids killing kids always a cringe fest for most people. Kids are supposed to be skipping through the roses popping their doublemint. Any time kids step out of that image we have a problem with it. Its hard for us to believe it. Some even refuse to believe it.

However in the Enderverse its the kids that humanity puts all its bets on. The adults have tried and they barely survived. Now its up to the ankle bitters to have a go at saving the world.

I love how that the child like innocence is completely absent from this book. Well that isn't entirely true. Its sprinkled here and there to remind us that these are in fact children, but those instances are few. From the very beginning. Ender sounded and acted as we would expect an adult to act. We expect children to only live in the now of their lives. However dealing with the bully at school Ender knows that if he doesn't end the fight once and for all he will be subjected to the taunts the rest of his life. That is a very adult way of thinking. And boy does Ender really end that bully. Later in the book its reveled that he actually killed the child. I take that as the final say on the matter.

The threat of the buggers was all in the head of the humans. Igor in Van Helsing said it best "Do unto others before they do unto you," and I think Card was exploiting that human trait. We have never played by the golden rule. Its just a cute little saying we tell children so we can make them do what we think they should be doing, but as adults its all about getting them first before they can do something nasty to us. And that is one of the flaring themes in Ender's Game. We have to wipe out the buggers before they wipe us out. o chance for a sit down, no quarter will be given. Nothing short of utter annihilation will be acceptable.

And I love that the innocent Ender is the one to bring out the genocide of the buggers and that Peter the sadistic older brother ushers in a period of peace on Earth after the Bugger War ends. The fate of the world rests in the hands of the Wiggen children, and they don't even know about Peter and Valentine. They are the power behind the throne before they can stay up past 8 o'clock. I would have love to have seen more of Peter in his later years in this book, but the title is Ender's Game so yeah.

The Bad: There is a lot of explanation missing from this book. What brought the humans to the buggers attention? How the hell did worker ants build space jumping ships? The book is mostly about Ender, but Peter and Valentine play a big role on Earth and we are left to guesstamate what the hell the Polemarch and the Hegemon are.

Yes I know the definitions of those words, but what do they mean in the Enderverse? What is the Warsaw Pact they keep talking about? Is is the actual Warsaw Pact that existed in the 1950s? Or is it some Scott invention simply for Ender's Game? Beats the hell out of me because he never explains it! No I am not looking for an exhaustive back history, but a little would have been nice. I hate reading books where I've got more questions than the book answers.

There are only two girls in this entire book. Valentine (hate that name. Thank you Cassandra Clare for that) and Petra. I sort of feel like this book would have had more of a impact if Ender and Peter had been girls. Not only is there this taboo that exists about girls being violent there is a taboo about women in combat. This would have just blown minds worldwide if Ender had been a chick and kicking butts like Ender did. Maybe this is just the feminist in me but I want to see female characters shattering the glass ceiling and taking women to new heights and deeper depths. And that fact that it would have been girls and now women I think that would have been the bee's knees. But like I said that is just me.

My Final Thoughts: I know this is now a series, but I think I'm going to stop with the first book because I really only cared about Ender to be honest. So I will be seeing the movie when it cones out and I just hope that they keep the magic alive.