Handbook for Morons Part 1 | A Review of Handbook for Mortals by Lani Sarem

what are you doing I need to film this isn't helping hi I'm Crimson rogue here to review handbook for mortals and this is my cat to make sure that I don't go insane ya won't have access to minutes for a while she is staying there Oh as soon as they pull the puck up mice my support animal leaves me handbook for mortals by Lani serum well like empress Theresa handbook for mortals is one of those semi famous internet stories and because we haven't had a down the rabbit hole video on this yet I guess it's up to me to tell you how screwed up this is it's really bizarre the story itself is nothing special another thing to get worked up about it sucks trust me on that I got plenty of notes but the backstories behind-the-scenes stuff about this is so much more fascinating and you're probably familiar with one maybe two controversies there's more than that I normally don't bother researching the author that heavily or things about the book before I do one of these reviews I try to let the book speak for itself but I couldn't help but this time there was so much I I just I found one little nugget and then I found another little nugget and then I just kept going and the more you go the more of an understanding you have about the utter ineptitude of this book but sorting of who is Lani saram well Lani serum has been involved with music and TV and movies apparently since she was three or so she claims and we're not talking huge notable deals it's perfectly alright if you've never heard of her one of her most famous roles was managing a band called 100 monkeys I had never heard of them before either but a longer multiple careers she was able to meet several people do a lot of networking and get her foot in several doors which is why she thought she had a chance at genuine success with handbook for mortals which is interesting because if that were all true you think that she wouldn't have to cheat perhaps the biggest controversy about this book and the one that most of you are familiar with is what happened with the New York Times bestsellers list see in 2017 when this book was published the number one spot for young adult novels was the hate you give by Angie Thomas then all of a sudden this book comes along and topless it takes the number one spot and it was interesting because no one had really heard about this no one had really heard about the author it wasn't some up-and-coming presence it wasn't it is so unique of a narrative that it just had to be heard no press conferences no celebrity endorsements nobody knew anything about this and yet there it was number one on the New York Times bestsellers list for for several thousand sales pretty much overnight for 23 hours you see what had happened is you've got to understand a little bit about the publisher this was published by a group called geek nation geek nation was very new to publishing in fact I believe this is their first book and this is one of those kind of open secrets that they're not really admitting to but they wanted to try to get this up to number one on the New York Times list in order to get some movie rights going because it just sounds so much better based on the New York Times number one bestseller book here's the problem though geek nation and saram bought thousands of copies of this book to artificially boost sales from book distributors like Barnes & Noble some internet sleuths dug into that they contacted the New York Times bestsellers list and this was bumped off the bestsellers list after about one day to be clear this was not a failure on the New York Times list they just saw the wrong numbers and reported what they had when they actually dug into it they found out it was fraudulent so they scrapped it this is something that saram defends to this day see these were just copies that they bought to sell at conventions and book signings and things like that the book came out because we've been pre selling them in all these cons and and the only way to make book sales count when you sell them at cons is to push them through bookstores and a lot of authors most authors publishers do put the sails through bookstores so we did what kind of everybody does but I guess when the book came out it showed up on the Y a list and it's technically not a why a book if you asked someone who's very in the book world because the main characters in her 20s and not 13 to 18 here's the problem with that when authors do that they generally don't buy their books in bulk from distributors they get them straight from the printer that way sales numbers aren't affected and if you think saerom is trying to shy away from the controversy quite the opposite she actually posts it quite proudly out in the open at book signings at conventions it was kind of just it was it was kind of a crazy ride in that I'm actually the only author that's ever been pulled off the list so you know that kind of makes me cool in that way and kind of like an honor to them yeah yeah good rebel I'm a rebel I've always been a rebel so so if you think she feels remorse no and if you thought that was the only in-depth controversy involved you are unfortunately wrong there is another controversy quite literally attached to the cover of this book now check this out as covers go this actually isn't that bad I actually kind of like it the arts done pretty well there seems to be some degree of symbolism with the moons up top the water on the bottom she's standing in front of a bull's eye with some throwing knives stuck in it's actually not too bad I kind of like it I also kind of like the original artwork that this was plagiarized from the cover art for this book was drawn by a guy named Kevin Kincaid the original artwork is known as the knife thrower by gil del mace the official handbook for morals Facebook page actually admits that this was a mistake and they've reached out to gil del MASINT and his group in order to support the spirit of cooperation stop playing with that I don't even understand the point of stealing the artwork in the first place the there are two reasons I can think of that they would bother doing that the first one is they were lazy until they could get away with it the second one is the original artwork captured something so central to the book so identifiable with the narrative that they just had to have it and decided to be scumbags and not actually reached out to the original artist but it can't be that second option because there's nothing that really matches this anywhere in the book I mean that's the protagonist there right there front center with her multicolored hair in the rows in her mouth but I don't understand what the bull's-eyes for there's like 1/10 of a chapter where she's targeted for something and that's it in the entire book nothing else really works there the moon thing is kind of a an a/d and from the original artwork so that wasn't copied but that could have been added with original artwork there aren't taking any throwing knives in the book as far as I can recall not in any meaningful sense anyway the cover is a golden display of laziness scum eNOS and ineptitude and what do you think about it that is a good indicator of what's in this book so no more stalling let's actually get into this stupid thing there are other controversies that I want to talk about but we'll save them for later when they become a little more relevant and before I forget as part of my research I wanted to thank Jimmy trout go check out her blog cuz she's done a lot to cover a lot of this book and her blog is hilarious and also check out generally Pookie who basically does the same thing that I do bet is an animated blue penguin the fact that she only has a thousand subscribers is a miscarriage of justice right out there conversation serum right out sharise flirting right out jackson proposing to be the bradley cooper to her lady gaga show me of the fluffy fit in real time oh right at the very beginning treated to a foreword by someone in Skye Turner who's apparently another author whose works I've never heard of but she claims to be a friend of serums so she's writing this forward generally speaking if you're gonna include a foreword in your book you want it written by someone with a bit of notoriety to their name sure you can't have a friend write a foreword for you but if the doesn't know who that friend is and and doesn't have a sense of scale of that friends understanding of literature then you might as well have the foreword written by your mom oh my sweetie pie did such a good job with this book I'm sure you'll love it that's why I don't do old lady voices although and I was actually approved myself wrong on this but originally I thought the foreword was written by saram herself because the second paragraph of the foreword has a very strange tell I've known Lani that's Lani saram for a few years now it is Lani or as she would say anni with an L just in case you were wondering at first I wasn't even sure of the pronunciation of her name was it lei knee or LAN e in the subsequent years I've learned how to pronounce her name and throughout our friendship I've also learned she's a bit of a gypsy soul so you'll notice a few things about that it's wordy and the punctuation isn't great these are two indicators of serums writing style by the way but the over focus on pronunciation is something that we see in the rest of the book two characters the protagonist and her mother get paragraph long sections about how to pronounce their names and it is so ridiculous now there are certainly words out there that you you might not know how to really pronounce if you only read them Colonel is a famous example and I admit I screwed up Hermione's name from Harry Potter when I first read it but the main character's name is Zaid that's it it's not complicated it's not filled with confusing letters or symbols so I don't understand what the big deal is I think the author just has some weird internal struggle with people mispronouncing her name as she was growing up which makes me wonder how people could get lanny wrong okay but bypassing the foreword we go to the table of contents yeah I'm really going over all the the really important stuff here aren't I actually pointing out the table of contents because this is kind of a marking the books favour this is actually kind of a clever idea now it starts off with chapter zero and that's not some I'm so different way of saying it's a prologue it's a proper chapter but the chapter title is the full and after that you get the magician the Hermit the Hierophant the Empress the Emperor all things like that those are all Arcana within tarot cards and apparently the fool is associated with the leading number zero and what was it the magician is one Herman is two apparently there's an order to it I don't really understand tarot cards myself so I'll rely on someone more more nuanced with that to explain it but right off the bat at least on a surface level there's some degree of thought put into it and then it read the first line of the of chapter zero and all that hope it gets dashed against the rocks I always envied those with normal lives right off the bat you got some tops here edgy girl cringe you can just smell the Hot Topic she's not like other girls totally different not like other girls and if it seems like I'm harping on this one point it's only because the entire first paragraph does I've always envied those with normal lives I don't think I've ever even had a normal month a plain week or an average day at best I've had brief normal moments here and there they tend to be few and far between I'm sure most people would envy me but Sunday's I think I'd trade places in a heartbeat to me those moments of feeling normal or getting to do average things have always felt like a cool sparse breeze on the hottest summer day or the first breath you take after holding it underwater for as long as you can I'm gonna do what I can to minimize reading too much but one of the things you will notice in this book is that it is padded to hell this is another one of those books where they took a novellas worth a story and stretched it out to over 400 pages it's actually so bad that most of the chapters can be accurately summed up with single sentences and of course there's the way that the protagonist actually describes herself I glanced at myself in the reflection of the car side mirror people tell me I'm pretty all the time beautiful even I am not sure I see what they see I think I'm more of a cute average looking girl I'm slender but I do not believe most would say skinny not hot girl skinny at least I have long legs that are toned but I think my thighs are too large and I do not have a thigh gap my arms are kind of flabby and while I do have an hourglass figure I've always felt my butt is a little too big and my face is a bit too round so I might as well get this out of the way there is a central problem with the way that the protagonist is approached and I'm sure a good number of you have already figured it out the main characters aid is a self-insert MarySue serum has admitted that Zaid is her take on a perfect life Zayn is what's Aaron's life would be like if everything went her way and she is such a Mary Sue that it actually outshines Twilight as I described the book and what happens to Zaid feel free to debate in the comments whether or not she is a worse Mary Sue than Everest Teresa but if you had to ask me I'm honestly not sure now I don't really have a problem with the concept of self insert characters after all I think that it actually does the story a little bit of good if the author is able to put a little bit of themselves into the characters maybe not to the point where it's a carbon copy of themselves but just that little knowledge of expertise on a certain subject or a certain enjoyment for the way coffee tastes in the morning or whatever something like that can add a lot more depth to the character and a lot more feeling to the story as a whole and I'm not just saying that is someone who wrote his own self insert fanfiction for a couple of years don't read it it's cringy as [ __ ] however when you combine a self insert character with a Mary Sue character the results are downright unbearable because at that point the story stops being about anything and just starts being about why the main character is so amazing the story doesn't mean anything at that point it's just a display of the the author self fellating themselves in fact the entire first chapter is about the the main character who she is what she believes it's you've got some tepid philosophy thrown in there then she gets in her car and moves away you can do very really simple chapters like that you can do chapters where you focus on very little in order to emphasize very mining aspects the first chapter of the first Dark Tower book does this spectacularly it just describes the gunman and the desert he's walking through that is really all the detail you get and it really works first off because both of those are told an interesting way with a competent writer and also because the chapter doesn't go on for half an eternity you give just enough to properly color the reader's imagination and you don't overstay your welcome if you over explain everything and you talk to your reader like they're idiots and they need to be guided by the hand they're not gonna have a very fun story and oh my god does this violate that so many times now one of my earlier problems with the writing style as a whole comes down to the way information is provided a great example of that is early in the first chapter where she starts off with for me I will never forget one particular July morning and then we don't get any information about that one July morning for about two pages she instead talks about her hair the weather the town that she lived in and the full history there in what her mother does for a living and what all the people in town think and most terrifying to me she talks about having chunky pieces on the lower half of her long hair as someone with long hair I have no idea what you're talking about use a better shampoo I actually thought that she was supposed to be like homeless or something at the very start of the book which would have made for an excellent rags to riches kind of a story but no she just has gross hair anyway this writing style is eerily similar to what's called a stream of consciousness writing style and artsy type of writing which I don't like at all broadly speaking it's supposed to get you into the head of the writer as their thoughts meander around all these different subjects and you see their thought process as they go from point A to point B to point G there are instances where a stream of consciousness running stock handwork and initially I thought that Zaid was supposed to be this spry tea bubbly airhead but apparently that's not what the author was going for so the writing style just looks vapid and unfocused granted that's how most stream of consciousness writing comes across plot it just becomes this unfocused example of diarrhea of the mouths as the main character refuses to shut up about anything and gives you every minut detail of her life because she's the most interesting person she knows about of course you want to know every single detail of her life stream-of-consciousness for one reason plot structure and entertainment is just too much to ask for we also learned that she lives in Senate Allen Tennessee which is a real place I actually looked it up as of 2010 according to the census they have a population of 243 so [ __ ] nowhere ah but if you're worried she's going to be a perfect MarySue without any flaws or defects or or negative personality traits don't worry she's got you covered due to my dyslexia I could write things perfectly but I wrote them backwards it wasn't till I was 9 almost 10 I could write the proper way without a lot of thoughts so she's dyslexic but you can't tell that's not how dyslexia works also this is the only time in the entire book where that ever comes up she introduces that she's dyslexic and never mentions it again I chewed hard on my lip a nervous tic of mine that I did so often I had a permanent dent on my bottom lip Bella Swan harder this book apparently attempted to capture some of the Twilight craze because there's a love triangle in here and trust me look into that mess in a little bit but it was published in 2017 well after the Twilight craze had died down this is like creating a story about a jovial family that solves mysteries in order to cash in on the happy Hollister's craze so we move on to an actual portion of plot and we find out why Zetas leaving home this is never actually explained in the book and I had to get this by reading Jenny trout's blog again go check her out but the mother like did something and it really pissed off Sade and I thought this was going to be build-up for some sort of payoff way later in the book when mother and daughter had to reconcile to solve some greater issue and no it never really shows up again actually I know what do you think started this I said firmly for the record I can't believe you would stoop to anything so low please what haven't you ruined enough of my life it's implied that the mother used magic to get saved to stay at home when Zaid wanted to go out and be free because she's not satisfied with life where she stands out why would I want to stand out people who stand out get things thrown at them people who stand out get called names and shoved into lockers if the people who don't stand out are too cowardly to do any of the previously mentioned options then they just awkwardly whisper about you the people who do stand out as you walk by god that's hideous right so what's her solution where is she gonna go where she doesn't stand out why to Las Vegas to become a performer of course gonna be honest I did not expect that take so Zaid makes her way to Las Vegas to audition at the Wynn casino where she would be working with Charles Spellman who was apparently the appear to David Copperfield and despite being a nobody and despite over 200 people that have jobs working at this theater everyone was waiting around jabbering with each other waiting for Zaid to show up I cleared my throat and softly said thank you for waiting I'm ready I smiled nervously and pushed the door open even wider to welcome the back into their theater and eventually we do get to the Edition but the chapter is littered with some of the most amazingly wordy drivel I have ever come across know naturally in a new environment like this you'd have descriptions for a new place new characters you'd get a few details you know what they look like a few basic mannerisms serum has decided to give you everything take for example one of the stagehands named Ted a character of middling importance Sam describes him in one of the most impressively explosive displays of pointless bloviating that I had ever seen since I read the first page of Finnegan's Wake money but I quickly spotted Mack again he had found a place to stand next to two of his crew guys also in stage blacks one was Ted who helped me with a door earlier he looked to be about max age though shorter than Mac Ted was slightly stockier with dark wavy brown hair and brown jovial eyes I would soon learn that tad was Mac's best friend and all-around good guy who worked well with everyone in theory Mac was Todd's boss but they had been working together for a long time and had been friends for much longer tad was the kind of guy to always tell it like it is he never believed in sugarcoating anything he had always tell us that his motto was why taking anything seriously no one gets out alive anyway he said it often and meant it very little of him got worked up he was the epitome of easygoing tad was also one of those people who was naturally good at most of the things he tried I often wonder if a lot of it had to do with his attitude I've concluded that it must be that and being born under a lucky star I'd probably envy him if it did if I didn't adore him so much by this point in the book she has not even met this character and yeah we get everything about him we even get his stupid motto writing a character like this is abysmal because it takes away any mystery any intrigue that that character could possibly hold part of the reason why three-dimensional characters are good is because they can surprise you which can make for a fun experience if you're watching a movie or reading a book or playing a game for example in the first Sam Raimi spider-man movie when Jay jonah Jameson was attacked by Green Goblin he'd been a complete jerk to everyone up to that point and yet refused to give away the name of an otherwise irrelevant freelance photographer that's deaf that's dimension that is good character writing because deep down despite his rough surface he's a good guy at heart you never get that from any of the characters in this book it's everything is surface level to a very great degree nothing is surprising nothing is engaging nothing really hooks you in and those introductions go on for just about every single character in that chapter including Charles Spellman the head of the show Mack Kent the technical director cam Carter the head rigger tad max best friend Pete trig Beth the HR lady Sofia Austin the girlfriend of Spellman and kind of the lead mean-girl Zeb's akan the head technician Riley the new guy and those are the characters introduced in just this chapter that list keeps going you also have lil the gothic costume designer and Jackson one of the love interests and the leader of the house band so zeta introduces itself to Charles Spellman I don't know if that's lazy nomenclature or if it's an intentional reference to Sabrina the Teenage Witch but whatever and we get another one of her flaws I was babbling and didn't really know what to say it's something I always do when I'm nervous and the only thing that really makes me nervous is meeting important people now this is an interesting flaw because it's one of those things that Zaid brings up once and never again sure she's a little wordy at the beginning when she meets with Spellman but that's it after this nothing and I think this is a sharp distinction between Zaid and saram stepping in for the narrator if st. really was as wordy as she claims she is then we would see extra dialogue from her but we never get that instead we get extra prose so it doesn't seem like Zaid talks a lot it seems like saram talks a lot and considering the interviews I've seen of her I absolutely believe that it's true I've been called the most persistent person on the planet I take it as a compliment but you know if you if you want to do something live just go do it like and don't let people tell you no because people will and people will tell you know for a variety of reasons they'll tell you no cuz they're jealous they'll tell you no cuz they failed they'll tell you no because they just I don't know we're not happy people and sometimes they tell you no because they think they're trying to help you it's not always you know because they're being you know malicious or any but but the best advice i mean--you life is short and and you just have she also explains that she's bad at taking compliments and she's clumsy two qualities which are excellent in a las vegas performer but we never see them displayed believe it or not that's something that even Stephenie Meyer got right with Twilight we were told that Bella was clumsy and then there were scenes where she was actually clumsy oh my god I'm using Twilight defensively my life was a lie but eventually we do get to see zaid's audition and it's made a little more spectacular by the fact that she can do real actual magic sees aid really isn't like other girls because she's an actual witch which is why the book is called handbook for mortals because she's an immortal but she'll grow old and die eventually I guess I the title doesn't make sense and I've got a very lengthy rant about the magic system but that's for later the trick is she starts off in the catwalks about fifty feet above the stage and I forgot to mention this but it's a theater in the round so keep that in mind and next to the stage you have a small pool of water she's given a rose she throws it from the catwalks and it lands on stage that's the proof that the stage is solid and otherwise on tampered with she then sands harness jumps off the catwalk sparkles shoot out of her fingers into the floor the floor catches on fire the house tone and then the fire turns the stage to water she lands in the water and disappears and then the stage goes back to normal and then she appears in the pool of water with the rose in her mouth and of course it's a big deal everyone's talking about it it's this tremendous display of oh my god how did you do that without completely [ __ ] up our stage she's pretty much given a job as part of the show on the spot understandable it's an impressive feat but when the head technical director Mack approaches her he has a few questions like how does this work and she refuses to answer any of them I didn't know if Mack was really a spoiled brat and I knew I might have been overreacting but I had to protect certain things and my secrets were definitely among them you're trying to get a job in Las Vegas one of the biggest Julius cities on the planet with Charles Spellman who has been compared to David Copperfield and you were openly displaying magic and the idea that someone would ask you how does this work never occurred to you your method of protecting the secret of actual real magic is putting it on full display in front of a cheering crowd and she acts completely indignant about Mack just asking a few simple questions for good reason mind you OSHA compliance making sure she doesn't alter the stage in such a way that'll affect another Act making sure that liability insurance is maintained these are very serious issues I was back in his face loud and Stern look it was part of my deal end of story I didn't know Joffrey Baratheon worked here now attempting to maintain OSHA compliance is not the same thing as cutting off a guy's head for shits and giggles apparently some additions are very tight-lipped about how some of those secrets work Penn & Teller's bullet trick which is amazing by the way you should check it out very few people know how that actually works Penn & Teller actually have clout and can get away with something like that with a long proven track record Zaid is a nobody from [ __ ] nowhere she has no track record no one knows anything about her at this point this is still day one Spelman steps in to try to resolve the whole issue and apparently Zaid tells him how it works but we never get that scene it's just he was facing the wall but he spoke deliberately well my dear tell me everything end of chapter so the big focus of that entire chapter was Mack being kind of a jerk even though he was doing the bare minimum required of him for his job so of course Z doesn't really like him a feeling which will last for a chapter and a half total consistency does not exist in this book time goes by and Zayde slowly adjusts to life in the theatre part of this means that she needs to be measured for various costumes and such so she's hanging out with lil the gothic costume designer and for some reasons Aida is in her underwear which you don't actually have to be but okay it's really an excuse for cheesecake and for Mac to come by and notice Sade and how good she looks when she's not wearing clothes we get a scene that steps away from zade's first-person perspective it actually goes to third-person perspective following Mac and for some reason Mac's entire section is in italics now this happens sporadically throughout the book I don't understand why but whenever the focus has immediately taken off of Zaid it goes to italics now there are all sorts of small running tricks you can do with word choice and font formatting and things like that the young world actually was kind of clever in that way because it changed font depending upon which character the prose was following the stiff and stern leader character got like a times new roman' very straight-laced very structured kind of font the much more free-spirited love interests who followed him around was something a little curvier and casual like chalk dust or something the brainy guy who thought so much faster than everyone else never used punctuation those chapters were headaches but my point stands I have no idea why serum decided to use liked hallux for this normally if you're gonna do that it it's going to convey a flashback for an entire scene or someone's thoughts or something like that I can't really think of any reason why these sections needed to be italicized it doesn't really matter maybe they are supposed to be like zade's thoughts as she's interpreting what these characters are going through like what they're saying what they're imagining what they're seeing that is pure speculation on my part it's probably just a a nonsense style choice that she came up with because she hit the wrong button and never went back to change it anyway Mac spend some time creeping outside the girls dressing room peeking through a cracked door like a peeping tom so great characterization there Oh should I mention he's one leg of the love triangle that gets formed in this book the other leg of that triangle gets introduced in the end of the chapter Zaid finishes up with a dressing room steps out and literally runs into Jackson Millsaps a character that is so boring and underdeveloped that the back story the behind the scenes bit about his character is more interesting than the character himself Sarah even spends an entire chapter describing just the collision with this guy rather than anything about him no but he is the leader of the house band he is the good-looking ladies man who everyone thinks is adorable and he definitely knows he's got that little spark that that the ladies love and the book does nothing with him and he's only there for cheap artificial romantic attention I'm not a fan of love triangles I think there's some potential if they're done right but more times than not they're not love triangles really only work if the outcome is not obvious and if all the characters involved are actually interesting like if they actually have chemistry between each other this only has a love triangle for purely arbitrary reasons because it's what Twilight did and that worked so well just from the set up alone with Mack being kind of a jerk and apologizing and making amends two chapters later you know he and Zeta are gonna wind up together it is screamingly obvious the only example of a love triangle done well that I can think of is from an anime called fruits basket where you've got the main character Tohru who kind of crushes on two guys from her class named Kyo and Yuki and there's a whole backstory there that makes the story more interesting but the thing that works about the love triangle is both the guys are interesting in their own right and there's real chemistry between the different couples it's fascinating I definitely recommend you check it out because I'll see one episode and I'll decide I want to go with one pairing and then I'll see you like another episode and then the other pairing seems more appealing it's really conflicting because I don't really have a preferred definite I'm kind of slanted one way towards Keough if I have to be honest but Yuki and Tohru were also a really good couple so there's there's some real debate to be had there and if anyone would like to point out how much of a dork I am this clip is for you know now like I said Jackson's behind the scenes story how the character was created it is more interesting than the character himself nothing really happens with Jackson you'll see him sparingly and nothing will become of it but you should know that Jackson Millsaps is based off of Jackson Rathborne who you will probably recognize as Jasper Frey from Twilight he was in a band for a little while called 100 monkeys and like I said before saerom managed that band apparently Jackson didn't like saram I'm kind of reminded of the old story of Christian and Megan very similar vibes there no I will not go into detail about that story it's horrifying anyway unlike with Mack Zaid and Jackson hit it off immediately in fact he volunteers to give her a tour around the building and offers her one of his guitars so if she ever wants to have a quick jam session she can walk into his dressing room pick up the guitar and play by herself for whatever now we're on chapter 4 the Empress so this one is kind of pivotal because it's the chapter where Mack stops being a jerk but we also get another one of his aides powers you see xate has the power of premonitions and as you can imagine it's not described well I don't want to read the whole thing out because it is far too lengthy but if you want to read it yourself here it is she stays as vague as possible and we never actually see what this premonition was caused by like she just gets some flash in sight but it it's not explained as a dream we don't get to see what the vision actually was she never even tries to describe it it's just hmm something Bad's gonna happen I can feel it at least when the crazy old guy in the movie predicts that there's gonna be a storm he says oh my trick knee he's acting up Zaid tries warning a few people she talks to Mack who rushes or off and then they just goes about her day we got a scene with her in the catwalks later on with Riley and Sophia Sophia is complaining because her harness is uncomfortable and doesn't want to wear it Riley is trying to talk to her to put it on anyway and then the platform that all three of them are on starts spinning and it starts spinning so fast that Sophia falls off I don't know why you would have that in the catwalks it seems like a tremendous risk but okay as soon as he reached for her arm she spun off the platform falling toward the ground I knew instantly that I wasn't going to be able to grab her either and I realized that she was bound to hit the stage if I didn't do something I was still harnessed in and from where I was I was able to push her body as she was flying past me if you're gonna write a quick snappy scene like that you've got to use fewer words you want to make the the prose go by faster because that makes time speed up for the reader Zaid pushes Sophia into the pool of water from 50 feet up mind you from the catwalks and Sophia survives with very little damage Zaid also jumps into the pool to pull Sophia out despite what I'm sure are an abundance of stagehands down there on that level all ready to pull Sofia out but whatever will this actually affect Sophia being a mean girl and treating Zaid a little nicer no not at all just completely discount the fact that Zaid saved her life in fact she seems to resent it that would be fine if the book ever did something with it Sophia is pretty much a nonentity for the entire book she's there to kind of create some drama but that drama is incredibly shallow and incredibly easily sidestepped buys a her character is to exist as an easy opponent for Zaid to defeat in bland conversations and then to make up with Zaid later on in the book and in fact be pulled into part of this grand brand-new stunt that Zaid can cox later on so the only thing Sophia contributes to the book in the meantime is cringy dialogue Zaid give Sophia CPR ambulance comes by takes her away Matt gets pissed off and then Zay decides to go grab Jackson's guitar and have a little jam session by herself out in the loading dock Mack decides he needs a cigarette so he goes out to the loading dock as well and he and Zayde start chatting and get some really cheap back-and-forth we also find out what zaid's full name is and I am probably going to get this wrong but xate is short for my full name your hair is aid holder and her middle name is Esther so I can only imagine Zetas being portrayed by a 60 year old retiree who collects buttons oh but some of this back and forth with Mack we learned that Mac's actual name is Clark Kent because he has boring parents so Zaid of course starts calling him Superman Mack meanwhile certs calling her magic girl cuz she's a magical girl sadly she's more of the overpowered Sailor Moon type of magical girl and not the Madoka Magica kind a lot of chances for anime references this review [Music] also turns out that the both of them enjoy motorcycles I love going fast I like riding my own bike but I shocked even myself when I started to think about how it might be fun to be on the back of his bike while going that fast and they got other dialog like that laying it on real thick so max turn from jerk to romantic interest is sharper than the ones the bikes took from Tron and then Jackson shows up for a little bit and they get some arbitrary flirting in and that's the end of the chapter chapter 5 we get another big italic scene where nothing really happens we just get several pages of Sofia hitting on Mac while they're at a bar and if you asked my opinion I have found proof that there are no editors on staff at geek nation Mac asks Sophia how she's doing after the fall from the catwalks and she says I am a quick healer and I have good genes and yes I did Sophia proclaimed obviously wanted to gloss over the part where she had to admit she had done something wrong the yes I did part might have been in regards to him talking about her learning the lesson about the harness but her answer was awkward and entire freaking passage was awkward and yes Sophia is hitting on Mac despite going out with Spellman we get a small note that it's been several weeks since Sophia fell from the catwalk and eventually Zaid is invited to a cast camping party and oh goody but Mac will be there as well well say it's having trouble putting her tent together Riley offers to help her at one point she declines and he just shrugs and leaves and despite that Zaid thinks this at that exact moment I wished I had a guy if I had been dating someone anyone then he would have also been sleeping in a tent with me and therefore helping me put it together yes the most useful aspects of men putting up tents and opening pickle jars but because she's having so much difficulty he's a decides to cheat a little bit and uses some of her magic to construct her tent while no one's looking I rubbed my hands together and thought hard about the tent rising and assembling itself I waved my hands in elliptical motions replaying that image my mind in a few seconds my 10 had risen by itself and was sitting securely on its own as you can probably imagine the magic system into this book is broken as hell the core problem is we have no idea what Said's powers really are they come down to whatever she feels like having now if you were to take something like Skyrim and study the magic system there you've got all sorts of different classifications of magic that your one character can do conjuration illusion restoration destruction a whole bunch of things all at the same time and they work because there are certain spell types certain exact things that you can do with particular limits you can't just walk up to the final boss and cast supernova or meteor and kill them in one hit for example it doesn't work like that you have to work within the means you're given but Zaid has no limits her means are apparently whatever she wants them to be so far what we've seen her do is she has shot fire out of her fingertips and turned a stage into liquid that she was able to pass through so I guess that's illusion magic mixed with teleportation magic she's got very broadly defined premonitions she can use what I'm calling telekinesis eventually we're gonna see her with Dragon Ball Z style key hand laser powers and by the end of the book she's able to effortlessly pull memories from people's minds and view them as her own oh and she can read tarot cards and talk to actual spirits through them like she's not reading the cards and getting lucky she's actually talking to guardian angels there's no set sense of limitation there's no sense of scale there's no kind of balance she can do whatever she feels like doing and she just gets away with it cost and consequence free the magic doesn't stand for any kind of a metaphor doesn't stand in to represent any kind of a theme it's not to push any particular it's not even to amplify the universe it's just to make Sayed look better again if that's the only thing this story has to offer it's a boring story especially because the magic itself isn't even that unique it's not like bending in Avatar The Last Airbender in which entire societies are formed around what kind of bending they can do a magic system like this cannot really draw in an audience there's nothing really unique or special or challenging about it it's not like Zaid can use all this crazy magic but it costs her one year of her life this kind of magic system cannot draw anybody in it doesn't explain the universe it doesn't expand on the universe it doesn't really expand on the character actually it's surprisingly hollow this is a story about a magical girl but the protagonist is a hollow underdeveloped mess it's like you take an episode of Cardcaptor Sakura only instead of interesting fight scenes you've got a fight scene that lasts 10 seconds and the rest of the episode is the main character studying for her math quiz so many anime references today so Zaid finishes setting up her tent into she's she's quite proud with herself which is why we get this incredibly stupid line with my tent up and put together with a sleeping bag inside I figured I might as well throw that into I was good to go on the place to sleep front if I ever meet a fan who writes a sentence like that and publishes it I will smack you with your own book and if you only publish an e-book I'm gonna hit you with a computer Ziggy starts pining after Mack because he's there and he's a boy girl he's a boy we also discovered that Mack doesn't date coworkers because of a bad past experience with an ex who was kind of using him like they were sleeping together and he thought I meant more but she just saw it as a hookup and then kind of dragged him along you know did some damage there and we get this from Sophia and her friend Mel who are ragging on Zaid and mocking her relentlessly or having feelings cuz nothing's gonna happen and I've got to read this because of how impressively childish it is I'm gonna bounce around a little bit because I'm cutting out a lot of needless prose you're welcome but Zay decides to stand up to Sophia and Mel and makes herself look so cringy if I was after him as you've stated then I promise you I would have better luck than either of you after the words came out of my mouth I was actually surprised that I had been so ball to both of them I was proud of myself though I stood and stared back at them waiting for the response Zaid one stupid girl's zero Mel seemed offended as she snapped back you actually think you're hotter than either one of us physically I replied no not a chance you're both far more beautiful than I am if we're talking about the outside but have you ever bothered to see what you look like on the inside there's a song called ugly girl that I swear is about both of you I'll play it for you sometime snap one trick I learned if you're trying to have confrontational dialogue it really pays to bounce the your ideas off of somebody because sometimes you don't really get a good grasp for how somebody else may respond to a certain thought or comment just have a conversation with somebody as you know kind of role-playing you're playing one character of the book someone else is playing another part additional people as needed and get a feel for what your sentences come off as because if anyone had actually talked like that and said there's a song called ugly girl that's about both of you a play for you I promise the response you'll get is laughter and the chapter ends with Jackson saying that Zaid is hotter than both Mel and Sophia and now we're on to the chapter that I've really been looking forward to talking about Chapter seven it's great alright chapter seven actually contains several different scenes and it goes on for like 30 pages so I'm gonna be doing a lot too some of the stuff it starts off with a bunch of cast and crew from the show hanging out with each other at a bar there's a lot of dialogue back and forth none of its really interesting and or really stands out that much and eventually Mack invite Zaid out for a motorcycle ride through the deserts where eventually they get trapped by a storm and they have to take refuge underneath an overpass and they exchange a little bit more dialogue when this happens all of a sudden he pulled me and even closer I hadn't realized there was any space left between us but there was just a small amount and with that eliminated he kissed me yeah I remember that bit I said earlier about chemistry ah these two hated each other four chapters ago there's been no time for any kind of buildup there's like no sense of chemistry these are just two friends who work with each other that that's the closest their relationship can really be defined and if you think this is like some pivotal moment that will lead to a relationship forget it because most of the rest of the book is them kind of awkwardly trying to define what the relationship is despite the span of several several weeks passing to the point where it happens like four or five times where you just get a descriptor several weeks later romance stories are reliant on those cute little moments where you've got the characters slowly inching towards each other all these two have shared are vapid one-liners that mean nothing don't come off as cute the only reason I can believe this is really happening is because it's the point of the book Zaid is such an amazing girl of course all the boys want to do the kissing on her this is supposed to be something you save for the big climactic reveal later on where oh we just had a small falling-out over a brief misunderstanding but we loved each other it's cliched as hell but that's normally how it goes there are times when we can get away with doing that earlier and having the big obvious romantic reveal pretty early on in the story the since I'm on an anime cake we'll recommend this there's an okay anime called chivalry of a failed night that's not that bad and the main characters and and the love interest end up professing their love for each other by like Episode four I think it is but that works because we had several cute moments up to that point where the two of them are actually kind of supportive of each other and actually it was kind of refreshing not seeing this extremely drawn-out romance over the course of normally like twenty-something episodes so they chat for a bit more they make out a little more eventually the scene just stops and then it picks up with Zaid shopping at the Fashion Show Mall Jackson has this performance outside the theater he's got his own band away from all that and there they've got a show coming up so zade's buying a dress a nice blue dress for that well the sales clerk who is strangely interested in zis love life oh that's fun she paused you work with them both that could be messy be sure to come back and let me know what happens she called from behind the register one thing authors need to be cognizant of is how they come across in their prose if you are hyper focused on certain things you could look like a try-hard like you're trying to show off and go out of your way to impress people Seren in this next section we're about to talk about sounds like she's trying to show off and doesn't really know what the kids these days are into it's like a teacher trying to impress her kids by saying that she went to Woodstock as I made my way through the main section of the mall I saw two vaguely familiar looking figures walking towards me I squinted as they approached when they were nearly in front of me I laughed aloud of course they were familiar carrot-top and Wayne Newton grinned when they saw me you're in Las Vegas which has some of the biggest names in entertainment and the two you choose to write about are carrot top and Wayne Newton now I'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with those two I'm sure they're perfectly nice guys in real life but they're not exactly relevant you could have had gabriel iglesias you could have had dave chappelle you could have had Penn & Teller you could have had Criss Angel instead she chose two celebrities whose relevance died in the 90s again I'm sure they're great guys but their names don't carry much weight anymore and what's downward confusing is that she writes it in such a way that everyone here knows each other hey guys I said still chuckling I have to say you two were the last people I would think I'd see walking through them all together we had to do a charity event here today Wayne said shrugging we just finished it's not like they're just being charitable to a potential fan or they're just being nice for the sake of being nice they know Zaid like okay I mean she works as a performer in Las Vegas is there some central hive mind they all connect to do they go to each other's shows do they meet with each other backstage how do they know each other what is the relationship here why has this scene here if it's not going to add to the story this is this whole thing is in here just to say carrot top and Wayne Newton or in the book you guys coming to the premiere in a few weeks I asked brushing a strand of hair from my forehead wouldn't miss it Wayne said and I detected the genuineness in his voice what premiere whose show our same show or someone else's I don't know what's going on there is no context here and then I guess to add an air of realism zadie gets reminded that carrot tops real name is Scott so do they know each other or not and how well there is no reason for this and when they part ways she gives them each a quick hug but that is not where the stupid ends because Zaid has an encounter in the parking lot Zaid pauses for a moment because in the parking garage because she forgets where she parked when she gets approached by a woman her age I know what you are she said in a low but confident tone I founded her confused excuse me I know what you are do you this scene is almost laughable this woman ends up being like another witch or immortal person I don't even know she's here for quick that quick action scene and then she disappears in a Lamborghini and we get one brief off-screen reference to her later on and she's not in the rest of the book okay this is gonna sound bizarre but this other woman starts explaining zade's Mary Sue powers you know my guys fawn over you and some girls can't stand you she continued us to gather up my bags even mortals can sense power by is it her skin her unpredictable nature's the big titties maybe who knows they don't know what it is but I do you should shield yourself better but then again it's so strong she raised her eyebrows with a look of amazement on her face do you even know how powerful you are you see guys it's not that she's a badly written character it's just like a central theme of the character she's just that powerful it's not her fault and then they have an extremely brief anime fight where this other woman i I've seen people call her Lamborghini girl uses powers to pin Z against the far wall so she responds thusly my back was still locked to the wall but at least I was now able to bring my hands together I cupped them into a sphere and shoved them in the direction of the girl who stood watching with an egocentric smirk colored sparks of light shot forward from between my palms sending the girl flying backward and slamming her into the garage wall you did that and you barely even know what you're doing she said shaking her head amazing well Zaid I'll see you around and that is the last we even hear about it for pretty much the rest of the book Z never brings it up with her mother she never talks about it to her co-workers the entire thing is an utter waste of time here's my theory though this is sequel baiting this character is meant to show up in this book so she can show up in the second book because now there's this unresolved plot thread who was Lamborghini girl where did she get her powers how did she know about Zaid all of these questions are [ __ ] stupid and no one is asking them need I remind you this is chapter 7 out of 21 well 22 chapter zero in all but this is the wrong time to sequel bate that's meant for the ending you're not even you're not even using a bad trope correctly damn it Sarah anyway moving on we've got that concert with Jackson and we get the strangest introduction to their band you get Jackson Tom Tim Mike Dave and their drummer whose name I didn't know Zaid has given entire backstories on people she hadn't met that why can't this drummer at least get a name actually I can tell you why because this band is called The Plain White T's The Plain White T's is a real band they're the ones who came up with hey there Delila and according to Wikipedia their band members are made out of Tom higgenson Dave Theriot Tim Lopez Mike Rotundo and d'amore Hamilton the more Hamilton is likely the drummer who serum could not remember you can google carrot tops real name but you can't Google the members of a band you apparently know in real life serum and apparently there are extremely popular I had to yell over the crowd pretty loudly to be heard at all wow it's like they're and sync and they got the band back together or something cerium strikes me as the type of person who constantly needs to talk just to have something to do you also get to proof that Pete one of Said's coworkers really does have trouble showing up to social events on time because that's literally his defining characteristic now unless I can't remember anything else about the guy they fit like two to four hundred people inside this one bar generally pokey he's got a pretty good about this in one of her videos but I've got to point out that Las Vegas in this book is amazingly colorless what I mean is there's no sense of scale or life anywhere in this city there there are very few scenes that happen outside the theater and/or outside some nondescript bar so we never really get a sense that they're actually in Las Vegas again one of the brightest most colorful cities on the planet as big and vibrant a city as Las Vegas is it feels really small in this book there aren't really massive crowds big events or even big names around like the Bellagio the biggest celebrities ade ever mentions is Wayne Newton this feels like serum said the story in Vegas but use a lot of small-town elements to construct it Zane doesn't go to some fashionable store store she goes to Sally's beauty salon she doesn't go to see Penn & Teller on stage she bumps into carrot top at the mall it is an extremely lackluster environment the problem was setting a story in Las Vegas is that you should actually use Las Vegas when rick riordan did that with the first Percy Jackson book and he had the Lotus Casino it actually felt like it belonged in Vegas there was all these these lights and games and trap it was a well-used scene the way Las Vegas is set in this book is so devoid of meaning that you can set it in literally any other city in the country and it still works anyway Zaid is conflicted on what she should do between Mack and Jackson she kind of likes them both they both have the pros and cons so she decides to use her cards in order to find out who to go for and I'm just gonna bring this up because it'll be important later my mother taught me that everyone has guides spirit guides who are incorporeal beings and are assigned to us before we are born they help nudge and guide us through life keep that in mind for later it will be important I am not terribly familiar with tarot cards I've seen them explained well I've seen them explained poorly this explains them poorly from my understanding is you've got to shuffle the cards first and then really focus your energy into them so you can get the right answer and Zade focuses that energy by asking this I'm looking for who would be best overall for my highest and best good and for his highest and best good as well well someone was high when they wrote this Z then does a reading for herself with the cards and she does explain what's going on but she does it with such an abundance of information that it's difficult to keep track of and sorry for the length of this but this is a single paragraph out of several pages of descriptions like this I told the guides I was going to lay down two piles to represent each relationship and once again asked that the king of Wands show up to represent Jackson and the king of cups to represent Mack I would know by those cards which pile was about whom I laid down seven cards together the aid of Wands which is meant to represent Cupid's arrows meant he likes me no surprise there the three of Pentacles a relationship the three of cups the Sun and the five of Pentacles men it would be great but it wouldn't be perfect I kept reading and found the nine of cups which meant all would be content and the king of Wands so that indicated for me that this was my future path with Jackson sounds pretty good my intuition was telling me that there that the entire combo had an extra meaning to it but I couldn't put my finger on what it was [Music] sighs injustice Zaid under explains and over indulges on her tarot reading tarot cards are one of those things that people will understand in a very broad sense their cards that tell fortunes but don't really understand the specifics very well I can't even tell what all the basic house types are you got like cups swords Pentacles and something chairs I don't know Zaid lays out multiple card names all at once gives a vague assumed answer then moves out with moves on without any additional context this can only work assuming that she's reading it correctly if the reader is as familiar with Tarot as she is otherwise if you're going to overload the reader like this then you're going to lose them really damn quick and this was a gigantic wall of text as well so that doesn't help if you want an example of tarot readings done right check out the death of mrs. West away by Ruth we're actually check it out regardless because it's a really good look the protagonist of this book is kind of a down on her luck tarot card reader who gets drawn into a rich family drama thingy but it's it shows Tarot done it very effectively the readings are done sporadically and sparingly but with very targeted information you don't need to know anything about Tarot outside of their cards that tell fortunes in order to understand what's going on and you follow very easily and I'm serious check out Ruth where she is a very good writer she basically she's the modern-day Agatha Christie very fun mystery and thriller books so zaid's reading leads her with no real answers and then we get another italics scene but this one is about zade's mother who's doing her own reading to check out on Zaid check up on say brother and then she meets with a customer and they we get a full scene detailing that reading and that has nothing to do with anything going on in the story so I'm not sure why it's in there and then we get another pointless seen when Zaid goes back to the mall but we get one of the best lines of the book she decides that she deserves lemonade because she doesn't like malls because malls quickly make me tired and cranky quickly that Wow authors are taught not to rely on adverbs and you use the same one twice in the same sentence fragment beautiful but now this scene is an absolute waste because the clerk working at the lemonade stand is a guy named Allen whose girlfriend is apparently nearby and thinks that xate is flirting with him when she just pays for a lemonade because the universe can't have Zaid lose any confrontation no matter how petty and irrelevant as soon as the last word left her mouth I snapped inside I squeezed my eyes shut tight and shook my clenched fists once more the vat of lemonade exploded sending yellow liquid and shards of glass in every direction a general note to all authors do not use the term yellow liquid I don't care what you're going for there is only one way that readers will initially interpret that it's as bad as the yellow stream from Emperor's Teresa so the jealous girlfriend gets soaked no one else really gets hurt and then Zaid just declares victory over the moment I shrugged and declared with life hands you lemons then turned and left her on the ground I don't want you damned lemons what am I supposed to do with these chapter 9 it's kind of unique and that is the only one in which say it does not actually show up it's just the one where a bunch of boys sit around talking about how cute say it is [Music] it also opens up worse than any other chapter in the book tad Mack kam and Riley along with Jackson and the whole band Tom Tim Mike Dave and DeMar and an audio tech named drew we're all standing around the stage dealing with some work issues oh sure now the drummer gets a name this all comes across like a tying into what Lamborghini girl said earlier about boys not being able to resist Zaid it just comes off as cringy when all the dialogue is this direct as this god that girl is beautiful it's beyond that there is something unique and special about her if this book were anywhere in your face about how great say it is you'd all get concussions even Jackson pipes in about how he feels she is quite a catch but we're keeping it light she's the kind you want to marry not just used to get laid not sure if I'm ready to give up my freedom just yet but she'd be the girl to do it for it that's for sure Jackson surmised Amanda Becker it's like a flower you smell her do you touch her gently you admire the beauty you watch it blossom and you thank God he created something so perfect and because this entire chapter could be summed up as an abject waste of time I'm going to take this moment to talk about how amazingly bland this theater is again this is supposed to be a show on par with something David Copperfield but would do but I can't tell you a single thing about any of the acts like I can't even summarize the acts in a broad sense I don't know if there are jugglers or magicians or knife throwers it's none of us described a Las Vegas level performance and the best I can do to describe any of it is to talk about the band they are a band they do music and know we don't see any of that either it goes hand in hand with how I described Las Vegas being this vast unexplored property there's there's no color to this universe everything centers around Zaid to such an extent that if it goes beyond her it's not worth describing actually it's worse than that I forgot to bring this up earlier but a lot of the side characters who are not Zaid strike me like npcs you take a game like Skyrim where NPCs have personalities to an extent they they have a daily routine where they wake up they go to work and they go hit the tavern then they go back home or whatever that is exactly what all the side characters in this book feel like they feel like they all have very narrow passing routes and the only thing that gets them to sidestep that is when's a danes to interact with them if your characters are planned and your universe is devoid of all description you've got nothing to offer the reader actually I just want to give this line here because this will give you an idea of what the the humor in this book is like guys it's getting late everyone go finish your set up stores are in 20 minutes Tom commented you know I always feel like there's some joke there Mac responded what do you mean you know that doors being a saying about opening the doors to let patrons come in and see the show and the fact that the theatre also gets called the house and there is a band called The Doors and Mack shook his head and you live in a van down by the river kid I have no idea what you're talking about yeah I know like I said I haven't figured it out yet but there's a joke there hmm okay well tell us if you ever find it dad chuckles not once did I laugh at any of the jokes in this book not once did I find them intriguing or charming or amusing that right there was a terrible waste for a bad setup that doesn't even try to land like what's the punchline that the one guy was being awkward all right and that's where I'm gonna call it for now actually I've been filming for a couple of hours and we still got quite a bit of notes to go through as well as one big controversy that I haven't even touched on yet but don't worry it's a good one [Music]

Channel: KrimsonRogue

Views: 320,394

Rating: 4.9607143 out of 5

Keywords: Book, Review, Comedy, Romance, Controversy, Lani Sarem, Handbook for Mortals, plagiarism, Love Triangle

Id: lq9JEWPmMBU

Length: 74min 36sec (4476 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Hunter4Giants]

Thanks for taking the time to review the controversy and the story so thoroughly! I still can't get over how egregious the cover art rip off is (although I wonder why on Lani's {"that's Laanne or as she would say Annie with an L"} version of the image on her cover would the person sitting in front of the target holding knives? Aren't they thrown at that person?). Thanks!