Stop already!

Tahereh Mafi has joined the long list of writers who are doing the unconscionable: Writing bloody trilogies and not ending the book that I'm bloody reading. What the hell. Laini Taylor, Becca Fitzpatrick, Jennifer Estep, Darynda Jones all write highly readable books but don't they realize that they are annoying the reader by blatantly writing for book contracts and not the satisfaction of the people who buy their books?
I want that sigh of contentment when I finish avidly reading a single story. If I like it I will buy your sequels (which shouldn't be plural, in any case, they should be standalone indulgences), never fear. But at least let me have a sense of closure in case I drop dead before the next installment is out.
Look at the incomparable JR Ward, Kresley Cole and Stacia Kane who all respect their readers and yet give us more and more of the characters we adore.
Mafi's "Shatter Me" is great reading - until I came to the end which turned out to be a comma and not a full stop. Maddening.

Holy Trilogy

There are actors, and then there's DiCaprio. There are directors, and then there's Tarantino. Now God has brought them together, and I will soon get to Heaven.

Wishing for Skyfall, until...

Javier Bardem walked onto the screen right before Intermission.

Bond movies are formula films, that's part of their USP. They have broken the formula with 1. A lead actor who looks like a thug with two expressions in his armoury. 2. No gadgets and too much reliance on brawn.

Is it Sam Mendes' fault that we have a slow dance for the first half of the movie when we wanted that spectacular opening sequence? Remember the first shot in GoldenEye (where Pierce Brosnan gave us the best Bond with his beauty, toughness and vulnerability)? That was a lesson on how to make an impact, not Craig's endless fight with the bad guy on top of a train. Another shot of Craig giving chase on the SAME ROOFTOP in Turkey we saw in 'Taken 2' made me worry about the budget for this film.

I think it's Barbara Broccoli's fault for tampering with genius in the first place. She chose Craig, who wears no expression throughout 'Skyfall' – except when the word itself is spoken to him and his eyes change. Then Mendes comes along and we are deprived of so much acting skill that we almost don't realize it since all the actors seem to be suffering from the same ailment. Then comes Javier. But even his long entrance is too long, his monologue too tender – until it hits you. Tender? He then runs his hand over Craig's body in the slowest, scariest shot and you think: Genius is back. But it takes a long time coming, and only because you have an actor in Javier who will always transcend his material slash director. The smirks, the false solicitude, the crazed focus of “What have they done to you?” whispered to Judi Dench when he has come to kill her, it's breathtaking.

Berenice Marlohe gets the formula back on track as the hot chick who has a moment in the sack with the spy and then gets killed off. The black dress we first see her in makes more of an impact than she does; at moments she is fascinating to watch, at others she is as hazy as a sepia photograph. She also doesn't have the body required for the role, large hips and fat ankles? Come on.

Both Bond and M are horrible people in 'Skyfall'. She lets her agents down time and again, he watches people die. Now I don't know about you, but that does not hero material make. And this is supposed to be a Bond movie?

The one special effects shot where a train plows down on Bond missed the mark because it had no people in it, thereby through one careless inattention to detail leaving us indifferent instead of gasping in our seats. The young Q brings no kickass new toys, (I know we're backtracking but may I say again, this is a Bond movie), and the entrance of Miss Moneypenny is equally daft: She was never black.

The last shot in the house on a Scottish moor where the Aston Martin getting shot up finally moves Bond to violence is almost tragi-comic.

But in the end, it's a great film because it has character. It reveals how ruthless government can be. It has bad guys who are good and good guys who are bad. It has those gorgeous sweeps of location that move you to sighs. It has the wonderful title song from Adele. It has Javier. It has Javier. It has Javier.

Nothing casual about it

I loved The Casual Vacancy. What a decimation of British smalltown culture, with their petty concerns, their sad sex lives and their young and aimless. Rowling says it all 'authentically', never mind whose point of view she is working from. I don't know many writers who can delve into the workings of an obese old man, an Indian expat and a teenager with equal ease. She even has a turn of phrase, although her writing style isn't extraordinary or descriptive: It is to-the-point and tells you everything you want to know. I was interested enough to read it right through, this story about Pagford and its high and low citizens. It was like sitting in the cold kitchen of one of its older residents as she dictated the town's history to a biographer.

The high school students are strikingly captured in all their angst, their obsessiveness, their feelings of alienation, things each one of us has lived through and never forgotten. Their parents are blind to their character, too embroiled as they are in trying to figure out their own lives.

The focal point is the death of a respected man and the vacancy that then needs to be filled in the local council. Enter the contendors, anonymous viper posts on the Net and a gathering free-for-all.

There is no sentimentality in the stories being told here. A young girl will die, and although she is both slut and saint, there is no redemption for her. Her world is depicted in gruesome detail, and you almost welcome her death for her sake. A boy will lose his sense of self with a single act of cowardice, when all the while you've admired his insouciant defiance. A married couple who hate each other will discover there is still love to be found amongst the ruins of over-familiarity and routine gropings in the dark. There are abusive fathers, and you can almost smell the terror of their households, rampant adultery in both mind and body, and the unravelling of established matrons in the most pathetic ways.

Rowling manages to make them all so real that you can see the movie coming. I admire this woman, especially for flipping the bird at critics carping about non-essentials when readers are simply enjoying the tale she tells.