iBoy by Kevin Brooks

Today we gather to review what is easily the stupidest superhero book ever written: iBoy.

Sixteen-year-old Tom is your average teenage boy growing up in the wrong side of London, and always has been, and always would have been, until, on his way to see his romantic interest, he gets hit on the head with an iPhone.

Guess what powers he gets? Oh, yeah. Quake in absolute terror at the powers of unlimited texting, internet access, and built-in video cameras!

Excuse me while I chow down on a significantly less lame can on peaches. Then again, there aren't a lot of things peaches aren't less lame than...

What really made this book above and beyond terrible was that it was trying really, really hard to take itself seriously. In fact, the plot of the book focuses on exacting revenge for the gang rape of the romantic interest, Lucy.

Let's follow the plot, shall we?

Tom gets hit on the head with an iPhone and goes comatose for ten days, during which Lucy is gang-raped and the surgeon fails to remove the entire iPhone from his... wait for it... iBrain. Ba-dum, pshh! Hey, not my joke; blame Kevin Brooks.

Anyway, even though Dr. Daniels warns him to tell someone if his head feels abnormal, Tommy boy decides to go home despite the sensation of "a million billion bees" buzzing around his head.

Yeah, that sounds normal. Happens to me all the time.

Tom then begins to explore his newfound iPowers, which somehow manage to include zapping people from a shocking distance of three feet (pun most definitely intended) and creating an identity-distorting, bullet-proof iSkin.

He also has some actually iPhone-related, albeit entirely useless in a hand-to-hand fight, iPowers, such as hacking into literally any system, listening in on calls, intercepting text messages, and having a continually running camcorder hooked up to his optical sensors, or as I like to call them, eyes. Best witness in the history of ever? I think so.

But back to Lucy. Obviously Tom can't reveal his secret identity to her, so what's a newly-turned superhero with unlimited internet access to do?

Create a FaceBook page under the name iBoy and friend her, of course. Lucy eventually reluctantly accepts the request and the two start talking. Tom has some trouble keeping his conversations with Lucy as himself and as iBoy separate, but no biggie. Hmm. Boy on FaceBook who calls himself iBoy. Vigilante with the powers of an iPhone taking out Lucy's rapists. Boy who got hit on the head with an iPhone.

I WONDER IF THERE'S A CONNECTION.

*glares at Lucy*

But no, Mary Sue - oops, I mean Lucy - carries on obliviously. Until one day the big bad crime boss and a couple of her rapists show up randomly in the night, kidnap her, and take her down to Tom's apartment to accuse him of being iBoy. How did they find out, you ask? Well, that's a very good question.

I don't know.

Tom doesn't know.

Lucy doesn't know.

The criminals themselves aren't even entirely sure.

So amidst this whole big idiot ball of wibbly-wobbly I-don't-know, they take Tom down to a giant warehouse so he won't have a signal (gods forbid) and proceed to very nearly rape Lucy Sue again.

Boring old Tom can't do anything, of course. So what does iBoy do? He finds a signal anyway, because that makes perfect sense.

And what does he do with this signal?

He instructs every phone in the entire world to call the criminals' phones all at once, which somehow magically causes them to explode, because that also makes perfect sense.

All in all, this book created an absolutely stupendous (a word which here means tremendously stupid) superhero, and the writing was, at times, horrifically cliched and hackneyed. Did I mention the superhero was lame? While there were parts of this book that were well done, the fact remains that his superhero's greatest powers were static electricity and glow-in-the-dark-skin. Not cool in the slightest.

Blessed by Cynthia Leitich Smith

I have to say, I am both happy and sorely disappointed with the recent trend of vampire books.

On the one hand, there is Dracula, Blade, The Hunger, The Last Vampire, Lillith's Dream, Let the Right One In, Interview With the Vampire and Buffy.

On the other, there's Vampire Crush, Blue Bloods, Undead and Unwed, and, of course, The Twilight Saga. Now to add Blessed to the list.

It is my understanding that this book is the third in a series. However, this does not excuse the author from picking up immediately after what was clearly a very important and very convoluted scene.

Quincie P. Morris is the owner of the restaurant Sanguini's. However, the head chef, who, as part of the restaurant's new theme, played a blood-sucking vampire, turns out to be - SURPRISE! - a blood-sucking vampire. But don't worry, she's made a deal with him: if she can drink the blood of her werewolf boyfriend without killing him, then he'll leave her alone. It's the perfect plan, especially considering how trustworthy all villains are.

She succeeds, but unfortunately, the chef (Brad) has framed her boyfriend for murder, so he now has to leave town pronto. Cue depressing, sappy teenage angst. Keep in mind that Quincie is recently orphaned, but not to worry because her werewolf boyfriend's parents are happy to let her stay in her werewolf boyfriend's house and live in her werewolf boyfriend's room and sleep in her werewolf boyfriend's water bed (I'm not sure what the water bed has to do with anything, but they keep mentioning it so it must be important), because that's the best way to help her move on.

I also have to say that there are wereoppossums and werearmadillos in this story, which I find difficult to take seriously. It's like she intentionally sapped the whole scary out of werewolves.

Anyway, we of course can't leave our helpless neophyte vampiress protagonist on her own now that the eye candy has skipped town to join a werewolf pack. So how does the author solve this enormous problem? By bringing in more eye candy, obviously. Witty, charming, mysterious, strong, vampire-hunting, emotionally troubled, devastatingly handsome eye candy in the form of a guardian angel named Zachary. Because we all know how helpless vampires are, what with their eternal youth, heightened senses, super-human strength, and pointy fangs.

Conveniently, Zachary arrives with a vampire-savvy chef to replace Brad, and some other dude named Freddy who is supposedly important but doesn't have enough of a personality for me to remember him. (Please forgive my comma usage; it was inserted for the sake of clarity.)

Finally, we get to something of a plot. In this story, in order to become a vampire you only have to ingest a vampire's blood. OH, BY THE WAY - Brad's been sneaking his vampiric blood into a particular dish at Sanguini's. Which dish, you ask?

Chilled.
Baby.
Squirrels.

I don't know what kind of person eats chilled baby squirrels, but whoever they are, they're probably the kind of person who doesn't particularly mind being turned into a vampire anyway.

Moving on.

About a month after ingesting vampire blood, you become a vampire yourself. And since of course everyone's body reacts the exact same way in the exact same amount of time to different amounts of a substance, they can safely assume that the first wave of vampires will transform on October 11th, and not a minute before.

After enough Dracula references to make even the most devoted vampire fangirl's head spin, they finally figure out that the only way to save the soon-to-turn vampires is to kill Brad. Just like they do in Dracula. I wouldn't be so mad about this except that Quincie actually reads Dracula as research.

And still doesn't figure it out for another hundred pages.

Eventually, Quincie dresses up in her mother's wedding dress to seduce Brad, because of course in any vampire story, everybody is in love with the main character. And I so do not want to know what kind of wedding her mother had. Anyway, Quincie is somehow magically able to hold onto Zachary's holy sword without bursting into flames and slay Brad while the angel himself is MIA. But not before the tables turn and Brad seduces Quincie in front of her werewolf boyfriend.

All in all, it was a very strange story, and I would recommend it to all members of Team Jacob and anyone up for a good, 450-page laugh.

Vampire Crush

The first book I will be reviewing is Vampire Crush by A. M. Robinson. First of all, may I say that this is possibly the lamest title in the history of ever?

SPOILER ALERT! SHE GETS A CRUSH ON A VAMPIRE!

Also, the cover is some kind of weird glittery bat bead thing resting on its side with a giant shadow that I think is supposed to look menacing. I don't even pretend to understand that. These vampires don't turn into bats anyway.

I loved it already. I sat down with a can of peaches and began to read. (I like peaches, okay?!)

It starts out with a girl who wants to be editor in chief for her high school's newspaper. Her name is Sophie McGee, or as I like to call her, Bella 2.0. She's got family issues of sorts - sort of mean-spirited stepmom and absent-minded father. Her stepsister is a fashion freak but she really isn't too bad. I kind of admire in books when they play against the stereotypes; her stepmom isn't all-out horrible and her stepsister means well at the end of the day.

On the first day of school Bella 2.0 arrives to discover that there is a group of foreign exchange students at their school - no one really knows where they're from or why they're hear, but one of them is named Vlad.

Okay, can I just hit the pause button right there? VLAD? Seriously? You couldn't have thought of something SLIGHTLY less obvious? We readers are not entirely stupid, you know. I mean, you named the book "Vampire Crush," for crying out loud. We got it. They're freaking vampires.

Continued. Obviously anyone new and foreign is automatically mysterious and probably very bad (xenophobic much?), so Bella 2.0 sets out to figure out what exactly is going on here. Oh, did I forget to mention? The school newspaper also happens to be investigating some missing blood from their recent blood drive.

HINT, HINT.

Bella 2.0 is given the assignment to write a "Welcome to School" sort of article basically giving really shallow bits of information about the new students, but it's harder than one might think. After around eighty pages, she has figured out the following:

1. They all hate her.
2. Vlad is dating her sister and asks creepy questions.
3. Violet spends waaaay too much time reading Seventeen.
4. They all know each other (even though they are supposedly foreign exchange students from other countries).
5. Her assignment is pretty much down the toilet because they all hate her and none of them will cooperate with her interview.

Let's get sidetracked for a few minutes. There's also the abandoned house next door - but wait, it's not really abandoned! Her old friend from grade school has moved back in. Secretly. In the middle of the night. Without telling anyone. Oh, and also he hasn't been going to school. And his parents are dead.

*stage whisper* P.S. - He's a vampire!!!

Anyway, after all this setup there's something that sort of vaguely resembles a plot but more closely actuates a blatant ripoff of Twilight except with the main character turning out to be the Lost Child something-or-other that can resist vampire charms or something like that.

It ends with their making out on a rooftop and my still having a third of the way to go through my can of peaches. Which I am still eating, by the way. They're good. Much better than this book, but then again a lot of things are much better than this book and that's not really fair to the peaches. They deserve better.

My Hobby

Hello, all. My name is Ara and I have an interesting hobby: I read and review horrible books.

I'm in a local book club where we get what are called "galleys" - books that haven't yet been released to the general public. We read these books, write reviews, and send the reviews to the publishers to help them do their job. Sometimes, especially towards the end of the year, by the time we read a particular book, it's already been released. But that's okay; it's still pretty cool.

My point is, in any book club, the general idea is to listen for books that sound good at the meetings and then read them for yourself. Right?

Wrong.

I love reading horrible books. I love it with a burning, fiery passion. I also love grammar and spelling with the same burning, fiery passion, but that's beside the point. Because as much fun as it is to read a really, truly good book and then tell my club how good it was for thirty seconds, it SO much more fun to suffer through three hours of literary torture and then rant for ten minutes.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I have started this blog.

Enjoy.