The Five Greatest Warriors by Matthew Reilly (1 star)

The Five Greatest Warriors is the even-more-silly sequel to The Six Sacred Stones that ended on a cliffhanger with Jack West Jr falling into an abyss. Despite the clumsy over-the-top cliffhanger, I certainly wasn't rushing out to buy this book, but thought I'd read it to finish off the story. So let the criticism begin (some spoilers ahead).

When Jack and Zoe are watching Pooh Bear's pulse as he breaks into the Israeli prison, isn't it convenient that they are waiting for it to take a sudden dive and the attackers oblige by drugging Pooh Bear? What if they had just decided to beat the shit out of him instead? Lame.

Reilly uses the 'traitor' plot twist far too often, by the end of the book most of Jack's team have turned out to be working for somebody else.

Counting JC as one of the 'Five Greatest Warriors' was ridiculous, and only done so that Reilly could make finding Jesus' tomb one of the tasks to be performed in the quest. Here is the shitty justification:

'Jesus Christ is not commonly called a warrior. He was a man of peace.'
'He carried a sword', Wizard countered, 'and at one famous point in the Gospel of Luke, he urged his followers to go and buy swords.'
'And many of those followers were revolutionaries urging insurrection against Rome,' Julius said.

Weak.

The descriptions of how the rest of the world is getting through the chaos of the dark star appearing are so tokenistic - a couple of paragraphs strewn here and there in-between action:

At the same time, the National Weather Service reported unusual weather patterns all over the world: fierce flooding in Brazil; sandstorms in China; cyclones in the Pacific; even a weeklong rainstorm in the Sahara Desert.

Meteorologists were confounded.
It was as if the world had gone mad.

Wow, what a shitty description of what is supposed to be the end of the frickin world.

At the third vertex there is a lava trap. Come on!

As soon as Jack set foot on the first step of the second tower, lava began oozing out the top of the third one, so that now three separate rivers of lava were pouring down from the peaks of the first three towers, all at different stages in their descents.

So what if someone had triggered this trap sometime in the previous few thousand years? The lava would have cooled, formed rock, and the intricate channel system would be blocked and never work again. What if the lava was a different temperature than the designers expected and didn't flow at all? Of course this is all assuming that building a giant intricate tower city inside a fricking volcano is a good idea. Nevermind the practicalities of how you actually build something that big inside a volcano in the first place, what are the chances the volcano won't erupt or damage the system in any way over the next few thousand years?

Continuing the completely implausible vertex locations, Reilly picks Diego Garcia, a coral atoll with maximum elevation of 6.7m as the perfect spot for yet another giant underground space. We're told that the entrance:

...resembled an open-cut mine, at least seven storeys deep...

I'd like to see someone try to dig a hole like that into a coral atoll; it would be a good way to make a big seawater swimming pool.

Of course the biggest problem is why the designers of the machine made it so ridiculously hard to turn on. And more to the point - if they knew exactly when disaster was going to occur, why not make it turn on automatically? If you went to all the trouble of making a machine to save the world would you really hide the keys to it all over the planet and booby trap their locations such that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to gather them? Sigh.

Given that Reilly wants to go even bigger with his next novel:

I'll have to make sure that it's a huge story idea. To my mind, any new Jack West Jr novel will have to be bigger and bolder than the three I've already written. And if I do decide to write it, I will do so with a plan to creating a story that will count down all the way to a seventh and final novel (The One Something Something).

I think my Reilly journey has ended.

1 star.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult (3 stars)

Jodi Picoult loves to twist the knife. Your daughter Kate is dying of an aggressive form of cancer. Your other daughter Anna is a donor being harvested for spare parts, and she doesn't want to do it anymore so she is suing you. Your son is an arsonist, which is even more complicated because your husband is the Captain of the fire brigade. Kate stays alive long enough to meet her soul-mate, who then dies suddenly (also of cancer) without a chance for her to say goodbye.

Could it be any more tragic? It's like Picoult tries to think up the most horrendous family situation she can, then writes about it with the goal of making you cry as much as possible.

I also found some of the characters fairly unbelievable. I doubt a teenage Jesse lighting fires for attention would have been smart enough to create chemical accelerants and hide his tracks so effectively. Anna was also unrealistically mature for 13, and able to hold up witty repartee with adults that would be far beyond any real 13-year old. Anna is able to pick that Campbell is lying about why he has his dog:

"You're lying."
Anna croses her arms. "Well, you lied first. You hear perfectly fine."
"And you're a brat." I start to laugh. "You remind me of me."
"Is that supposed to be a good thing?" Anna says, but she's smiling.

And argues like a debating champion or a politician:

"It doesn't work that way," I say. "You started this lawsuit. You wanted to be someone other than the person your family's made you for the past thirteen years. And that means you have to pull back the curtain and show us who she is."
"Half the grown-ups on this planet have no idea who they are, but they get to make decisions for themselves every day," Anna argues

Having said all that, even though it is incredibly sad, I enjoyed most of this book.

Until the ending.

The ending is horrible, and compromises the entire book. Picoult spends 400 pages discussing an incredibly tough moral and ethical dilemma and then throws it away with a trite 'happily ever after' ending where everything works out way too conveniently and Anna doesn't have to make a choice.

I wanted to see what choice Anna was going to make! Would it be possible for her to look beyond the risk to herself and possible health complications in the future for the sake of her sister? How would she weigh a small chance of extra time with Kate against her own health? If she didn't donate the kidney how would she live with that decision for the rest of her life? Would she respect Kate's wishes if Kate asked her not to donate?

3 stars.

Cross Stitch (aka Outlander) by Diana Gabaldon (1 star)

Time travel you say? I'm willing to give it a shot, even though the cover is a suspicious shade of pink with flowery writing...

It turns out the time-travel construct is an un-explained crutch to write a soft-porn novel for middle-aged women who have a thing for big Scottish red-heads in kilts. This 863-page novel is chock full of sex and disturbing sexual violence. It isn't long after Claire arrives in 18th century Scotland that Gabaldon invents a bizarre reason for her to marry Jamie so the sex can kick off:

...the only way I can legally refuse to give ye to Randall is to change ye from an Englishwoman into a Scot...Ye must marry a Scot. Young Jamie.

It annoyed me that Claire slotted perfectly into Scotland in 1743 after being transported from 1946. She effortlessly recalls dates, obscure names and customs from history lessons, and isn't surprised by anything she encounters. She doesn't complain about hygene, clothing, backward customs, women's rights (she takes a beating from her husband), or anything else you might expect to shock a modern woman thrust into life in the wilds of Scotland 200 years earlier. Also, the few people who do know she is from the future show only a mild interest in the future. What the hell? If I seriously believed someone was from the future I would be hammering them with questions.

I also got sick of reading passages like this:

'Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach,' he whispered. 'I want to own you, to possess you, body and soul.' I struggled slightly and he pressed me down, hammering me, a solid, inexorable pounding that reached my womb with each stroke. 'I mean to make ye call me "Master", Sassenach'.

Why does Jamie continue to call Claire 'Sassenach'? It is pretty much like calling her 'English', which he continues to do after they are married and declare their love for each other. Weird.

I can't believe how many people on Amazon gave this 5 stars.

1 star.