This takes place sometime in the future, in a place that I'm guessing is somewhere in the Middle East. Julia is a 12-year-old revolutionary, prepared to die, if necessary, to overthrow the Secret Emperor. She's supposed to get deep inside the palace and record its architecture, so that her fellow revolutionaries will know exactly how to attack. In order to do that, she must become a harem girl, but at the same time she must avoid allowing anyone to see the special hardware she has hidden under her burqa, the hardware that connects her to an AI named Robin.

This was terrible in nearly every possible way. The best things I can say about it are that I didn't notice any typos and that there were kernels of cool things. Julia really does ride a giant mechanical beetle, for example. Also, Julia's love of Julia Roberts (from whom she derived her alias) and Batman helped humanize her, although those details left me feeling even more confused about the world-building.

Readers didn't get many world-related details – I'm really only guessing, based on Julia's burqa and her occasional mentions of her ancestors, that this took place somewhere in the Middle East, and I certainly couldn't say specifically where. There also weren't many character-related details. I knew that Julia had a mother (still alive?) and a father (who she thought was dead). I knew she liked Batman enough to have attached Batman wings to her burqa, although it was unclear whether she'd gotten to name Robin or whether the connection with Robin was a happy accident. I knew she liked Julia Roberts enough to choose to go by the name “Julia.” I knew that she'd gotten her first period a week ago and that she was still a virgin. That was it. All other characters were, at best, names and jobs only.

Are you wondering why Julia's period and virginity were important details? All I can say is that Julia's period apparently marked her as no longer a child, and her virginity enabled her to take certain drugs for...reasons. I'm not really sure. Julia's age combined with her virginity didn't seem to fit with how sexualized her POV was at times (by the way, this book is written in first person present tense). A few examples:

“My code name is River Delta. Which is appropriate, since I'm a woman now. And all women are deltas between their thighs...” (15-16).

“His hand closes over mine and I feel the thrill of being touched by a man...” (16) This man was literally just taking a coin from her, payment for the portrait she was about to have painted.

Later on, there was her drug-induced relationship with Rosefield, who was either another aspect of herself, the drug itself, or something she was manipulating while under the influence of the drug. I wasn't sure. Julia described herself as the virgin and Rosefield as her beloved dragon, coming to consume her.

There were a few moments when Julia felt a bit younger, but mostly her POV was that of an adult who happened to inhabit a 12-year-old body.

One of the main reasons I picked this book up in the first place was the AI. That turned out to be both disappointing and kind of disturbing. I was happy when the AI made its first appearance about halfway through, as Robin to Julia's Batman. However, at some point it morphed into Joker. I initially assumed it had been hacked, but it turned out that this was just another aspect of its personality. Its interactions with Julia when it was in Joker mode were...gross. And yet Julia still seemed to consider it an ally by the end of the book. I think? I don't know.

A large part of the problem was that none of it really made much sense. I thought the first half of the book was confusing, but things only got worse when drugs were introduced to the story. First person present tense + drugs is a recipe for disaster. I was left with the impression that neither the characters nor the story really mattered much. What mattered was the message...except I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to be.

In the end, this was a 102-page load of pretentious nonsense with a pretty cover. I liked the artist's work enough to look her up (her name is Barbara Sobczyńska), but I have zero interest in reading more of the author's works.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Unlike almost every other human being on the planet, I don't like chocolate. No, I'm not allergic to it. I just don't like it. Unless you put it with peanut butter, in which case it is God's Own Gift and keep well away from my stash.

 

http://expendablemudge.blogspot.com/2014/07/book-day-7-chocolatey-book-all-pretty.html

 

So this horrible book fits the meme, and knocks another read-but-not-reviewed book off my Shameful Shelf. And it suits the Doubleday UK Book-A-Day meme honoring National Chocolate Day (is it that here, too? I don't care enough to look it up), discuss a chocolatey book, because everyone except me loves this horrible, pretentious, nauseous thing.

I hate it when people call books or authors pretentious. I'm just going to come out and say it. I hate it.

 

I completely respect it if people find certain books or authors unnecessarily convoluted or even condescending. I may not agree with them, but that's just fine. Some books do seem unnecessarily convoluted. Sometimes authors can come off as condescending. However, that doesn't mean that these books or authors ARE overly convoluted or condescending. As a reader, I think our opinions are incredibly valid and that we can feel or react to novels and authors in any way that we find fit as long as we recognize that our perception of anything is not necessarily the reality of that thing (and, of course, as long as we aren't careless and disrespectful with our views).

 

But back to my problem with calling a book (and anything or anyone, really) pretentious. When someone calls something pretentious, they are expressing the opinion that that thing is pretending to be smarter than it actually is, that it is pretending to be more impressive than it actually is. And how the heck does that person know (not just feel, but actually know) that that book/author/thing ISN'T as smart or impressive as it endeavours to be? Just because an individual isn't impressed with a particular book/author does not mean that book is any less intelligent and just because that book/author's form of intelligence doesn't mesh with that reader does not mean that the book/author must be pretending. 

 

I really don't think that we can ever accurately judge how smart anyone, particularly someone as distant as an author, is and saying that someone or something is pretentious is really the most pretentious thing anyone can do. (Inception: I have entered the horrible cycle of pretentiousness! Ahh!)

 

I also think it is incredibly disrespectful to say that an author is PRETENDING to be smart. There are thousands upon thousands of variations of intelligence and just because some types of intelligence don't ring true for certain readers doesn't mean that they are invalidated and thus pretentious. And I personally don't think that someone can convincingly pretend to be smarter than they actually are--if someone says something is pretending to be smart, they must on some level recognize that some form of intelligence exists in whatever they are criticizing and, in that case, the thing is just smart. No pretending involved.

 

What do you think? Does this piss you off too?

Moliere has long been on my to-read list because his comedies were on a list of "100 Significant Books" I was determined to read through. The introduction in one of the books of his plays says that of his "thirty-two comedies... a good third are among the comic masterpieces of world literature." The plays are surprisingly accessible and amusing, even if by and large they strike me as frothy and light compared to comedies by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw and Rostand. But I may be at a disadvantage. I'm a native New Yorker, and looking back it's amazing how many classic plays I've seen on stage, plenty I've seen in filmed adaptation and many I've studied in school. Yet I've never encountered Moliere before this. Several productions of Shakespeare live and filmed are definitely responsible for me love of his plays. Reading a play is really no substitute for seeing it--the text is only scaffolding. So that might be why I don't rate these plays higher. I admit I also found Wilbur's much recommended translation off-putting at first. The format of rhyming couplets seemed sing-song and trite, as if I was reading the lyrics to a musical rather than a play. As I read more I did get used to that form, but I do suspect these are the kinds of works that play much better on stage than on the page. Les Précieuses ridicules is a one-act satire about two girls who are taken in by their own social pretensions and made ridiculous. This is an early work, and especially having read before this such works by Moliere as The Misanthrope and Tartuffe this comes across as rather slight.