068 - Don't Call Me Angel by Alicia Wright Brewster

After crawling her way out of Hell, Six is ready to cast aside her angel wings and all the responsibilities that come with them. But Earth is not as peaceful as she imagined it. Demons, dark angels, and other hell-beasties escaped before her, and they're not as content as she is to live a quiet life on Earth.

A fellow angel who escaped Hell with her commits a series of soul-murders, destroying human souls so they can't go to the afterlife. Although Six has conflicting feelings about humans, she goes after the other angel to keep their escape a secret from the one she fears most.

I'm always up for a novella. They're short, to the point, and hey, if they're awful, well, you don't have to worry about them being awful for long, right? This one seemed like it had a lot of promise - fallen angel escaping from Hell, conflicted, POC heroine, soul-murders - what about that doesn't sound awesome? I was pleasantly surprised to find that...well, yeah, I actually enjoyed this story quite a bit.

"Enjoy". Ha, what a foreign concept. But I did! I'm pleased to have won this from LibraryThing, it was a quick read, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for future installments/works from the author.

That being said, as much as I ~enjoyed~ it (ha! so weird!), Don't Call Me Angel is by no means a flawless book. In fact, it has more than a few plot holes and eyebrow-raisers...

House of Night Series Review: Marked, Part Three - Plot? What Plot?

If you weren't already turned off by the asshole characters and nasty stereotypes, the writing "style" would almost undoubtedly seal the deal, as far as making Marked unreadable. As you might have gathered from reading the thousands of quotes we've included in the past two reviews, Zoey's narration is awful. It's vapid, cruel, rambling, and full of insipid, pointless asides that do nothing but encourage you to nurture the hate already festering in your heart.

Her body was, well, perfect. She wasn't thin like the freak girls who puked and starved themselves into what they thought was Paris Hilton chic. ("That's Hott." Yeah, okay, whatever, Paris.) This woman's body was perfect because she was strong, but curvy. And she had great boobs. (I wish I had great boobs.)

"Huh?" I said. Speaking of boobs - I was totally sounding like one. (Boob...hee hee).

FSHHHHHHHFFFFFFF RAEG. Even ignoring the anorexic/"ideal" body comments, this STILL would be an embarassing, terribly-written sentence. "Boobs...hee hee"...? FONLFDSL:SDFLFDSN HOW IS THAT OKAY IN A PUBLISHED NOVEL? AND WHO IS SHE TALKING TO?

And she does this ALL THE TIME, OH GOD, every sentence is like jamming an ice pick into our frontal lobe.



As if the colloquial tone and skull-fucking asides weren't enough, the shit cherry on top of the shit sundae has to be the obligatory eye-roll-inducing pop culture references and brand-label name-dropping. You'd think that at this point, this would be the least offensive item on the list, and yet each time they whip out a reference, it manages to be just irritating enough to worm its way under your skin, perhaps through the wounds every other awful part of the book has already made.

House of Night Series Review: Marked, Part Two - ALL THE -ISMS!

Last time on our House of Night review of doom, we discussed Marked, its protagonist, Zoey Redbird, and their unabashed mutual loathing of women. Today, we're going to take a look at Marked as it addresses a wider variety of social issues - and then fucks them up brilliantly! Should be fun!

Occasionally, we hear praise for House of Night as a feminist series.


No, really, we've read that. The sheer amount of slut-shaming, jealousy, and girl-hatred that pretty much defines Zoey, her friends, and their relationships with other girls alone is enough to put that praise in doubt, but the more intriguing part is, even Marked itself seems to want to dispel that idea.

House of Night Series Review: Marked, Part One - Zoey and the Land of Internalized Misogyny

Back a couple of years ago when we started this blog, we reviewed the first book in the House of Night series, Marked. The review was mostly positive, praised the characters, and ultimately ended in a recommendation.

We deeply, sincerely apologize for that.

We could own up to the fact that we were young, dumb, naive reviewers who didn't yet understand what constituted a good book, and to whom the concept of things like "internalized misogyny" were foreign and unfamiliar, but well, we read Marked around the same time we read Evermore, a book so depressing and angsty that Zoey's chipper idiocy seemed like a welcome respite. So we're just going to blame that instead: from now on, Evermore shall be known as "the book that made House of Night seem better by comparison".

Ahahaha, no, but really, the point is that that was a huuuuuge error in judgement. We've spent the past few years using the blogosphere to form some semblance of critical standards and social cognizance, and these have allowed us to realize what any literate fourth-grader really should have: House of Night suuuuuuuuucks. It is straight up, unapologetic crap slapped together with a cover and called a "book". Not only is it crap, but it's exactly the kind of awful, hate-mongering, insipid crap that we've grown to despise. And we recommended it.


So, to atone for our sins, we've decided to re-read and review the entire House of Night series from the beginning - all nine books, both novellas, and five comics - so that we can take a look at and discuss exactly what makes them so awful.

We are reading and blogging these one at a time, but to cut down on the amount of repetition, we're going to use our first few posts to illustrate some of the overarching problems we remember having with the series, as exemplified in Marked. After that, we'll focus on the specific issues of each individual book - plot elements, characters, and whatnot - and hopefully have minimal reference back to the original issues.

Finger crossed this is the only time we'll have a three-part review and quotefest for one book xD

So if you're ready -