Showing posts with label Plagiarism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plagiarism. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

Book Review - Alice Hoffman's The Witches of Cambridge

The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman
Published by: Scribner
Publication Date: September 8th, 2026
Format: Hardcover, 416 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Ava has grown up cloistered and unaware of who she is. Her first night away from home all of her mother's warnings come back to her: "Lock the door, call out if there is a stranger, stay away from girls who go out at midnight, beware those who wish to take you to the world underground, where there are no rules and no way to return to all that you've known." But what she learns that first night at Radcliffe is that everything she's ever known is a lie and the girl standing above her bed asking her to leap out a window at midnight is her other half. Ava and Lauren are opposites in every way, light and dark, the flower and the hazel branch. Even fire and ice to match their coloration. Ava didn't even know witches existed. She knew she was different, growing up in Maine in the 1940s she wasn't allowed to socialize with other children and occasionally had to be tethered in the family orchard so she wouldn't take to the skies, but a witch!?! That's the stuff of fairy tales. Until she meets Lauren. Lauren is from a tony Cambridge family of witches that trace their ancestry back to the 1600s. In other words, Lauren knows that witches exist because she's one of them. And she knows that Ava is a witch because why else would she be assigned as her roommate for the one night they have to stay in the dorms. Because witches don't live in dorms, they live in a special house run by the Lilith Society that began not long after the first witch of Cambridge came to settle in the marshlands in 1693. So while technically they are Radcliffe students, they are something else as well, not by choice, or by reason, but by legacy. And after they find their invitations and sneak out the window an act of salvation binds them together forever. An act that will save them time and time again as they battle with their own legacies. Because Ava doesn't know why or how she's in Cambridge but she starts to find letters hidden in books written by the First Witch. She starts to realize their is way more to her past than her mother has ever told her. And then she falls in love with the wrong person, Jamie Mather. He comes from a long line of dangerous men. Lauren's grandmother has always said that the Mathers did something that could never be forgiven. And here's Ava giving him her heart. Which is why Lauren has hardened hers. Ever since the death of her parents she has gravitated towards the dark. The Crooked Path calls to her. Which brings danger to Lilith House. McCarthyism is gripping the nation and when one of their number disappears before the graduation ceremony at the end of their first year they know they are being targeted. Can two friends overcome their differences to right the wrongs around them or will they selfishly care only for themselves?

I had an internal struggle as to whether I'd pick up this book right now because after reading all of her Practical Magic series I was kind of burned out on Alice Hoffman. There's only so far you can get on vibes alone. Sure, there's a comfort factor, but sometimes that just isn't enough. But then two things lured me in, McCarthyism and dark academia. Two things that actually have next to nothing to do with this book and seem to be just a veneer of time and place. As Tim Curry memorably says in Clue; "Communism was just a red herring." The "specter" of McCarthyism affects none of our characters in any way and seems to be more a "teachable moment" like the lack of contraception. Over and over again we hear about witch hunts and the danger from hunters but Lauren's brother is in far more danger from the Lavender Scare than she and Ava ever were from hunters. As for the aura of fear hanging over Lilith House? That was because Lauren was going down the left-handed path and her professor/lover killing her housemates. The fact that the police weren't able to figure out what happened to their fellow housemates still baffles me. All three women were connected to him and yet the police just couldn't figure it out. Probably because they were too busy trying to get laid by Lauren's brother. Yet this all pales in comparison to the real problem of this book, she is now outright plagiarizing herself. There is a similarity to all of Alice Hoffman's books which is comforting. But which, as I mentioned before, is sometimes not enough. Here though the similarities attained a new level. She is lifting her own material to make a new book. Cutting and pasting the legacy of the Owens family to begin a new witchy series. I wouldn't make this accusation without proof, so let me lay it on you. The Witches of Cambridge is two entwined stories. The first is ostensibly about a trio of witches, two "sisters" and their gay brother. The second is about the First Witch of Cambridge. The problem is, I've read these two stories before. The first is The Rules of Magic about Franny, Jet, and Vincent Owens and their growing up starting in the late fifties. In fact Franny was supposed to attend Radcliffe so this reads almost as an alternative timeline. The second is Magic Lessons, a long slog of a read about Maria Owens and her life, but more importantly the curse she laid on her family. I hated reading Magic Lessons so much that reading a simulacrum of her story with the First Witch of Cambridge gave me PTSD. There are just constant reminders that this is just a Frankensteinian creation; insane asylums, secrets, homosexual persecution, unexpected pregnancies, banished loves, exile, wolf dogs, failing the Bechdel test, I could just keep listing them, but unless you've read all these books I don't think you'll believe me. I mean, what are the chances there are two different characters in two different books that were from the same area of Cornwall!?! Or that apparently every man involved in the Salem Witch Trials was in love with a witch? Or at least his descendant was. The déjà vu was just too strong for me with this book. Perhaps it will bring you comfort, for me it brought hives.

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Season 39 - Tess of the D'Urbervilles (2009)

When this adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles first came out I tried to watch it. I thought I had only made it through one of the four episodes but apparently I somehow actually made it through two of them. Now you might be thinking, oh, she had a problem watching this because Thomas Hardy is quite bleak and this is about rape, abuse, and eventual death, but you'd be wrong. It's not that I was OK with how horrible this story is, it's that I could barely get into the story due to the piercing headache I got at the hands of the score. Rob Lane's score is horrible, shrill, and just bores into my right eye socket and makes me almost pass out in pain. Every. Single. Time. The strings and the strings and the strings. Just make it stop! If his goal was to make me feel in pain to understand Tess's pain, well, good job. Now hopefully I'll be able to see out of my right eye again in the near future. People talk about the power of music, damn, this music packed a punch. And not in a good way. Just thinking about it makes my face hurt. What annoyed me even more about the score is once I was able to sit with the pain of the cluster headache behind my right eye I realized that the recurring theme of the score was triggering me to hum another song. You know how Tom Petty sued Sam Smith for similarities in Smith's song "Stay With Me" to Petty's song "I Won't Back Down?" Well, if you didn't, you now know. Petty won and is now listed as a co-writer. This came as no shock to me because every time I heard "Stay With Me" I'd get "I Won't Back Down" in my head. The same thing happened once I pushed through the pain here. I started getting the theme to Gosford Park by Patrick Doyle in my head. Which made me extra angry. Because not only is this music horribly painful to listen to, it's not even original. I really just can't with this miniseries. I was promised Anna Massey and instead I have baby voiced Gemma Arterton and a whole bunch of actors I have previously loved either being evil or miserable. Poor Jodie Whittaker, what this miniseries does to her makes the backlash of her becoming the Thirteenth Doctor look like child's play. And what do you get if you actually make it all the way through the miniseries!?! Fuck all. The love of Tess's life, Angel Clare, there has to be a special hell just for him. Let me recount for you what happened at the beginning of the third episode for your enlightenment. Oh, and to set the scene, it's their wedding night! Angel, in the depths of agony: I hired a whore once. Tess: I forgive you. BTW I was raped. Angel: You're a whore! Here's £25. I'll see you when I see you, I'm off to Brazil. Me: Hopefully to die from some horrible tropical disease. Fuck you Angel Clare. Fuck you and your hypocrisy. You could have all been happy, instead you chose misery. In fact, I wish for you to have to listen to the score to this miniseries for an eternity. That might just make up for what you did to Tess. Maybe.

Friday, December 7, 2018

Book Review - Daphne Du Maurier's The Rebecca Notebook

The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories by Daphne Du Maurier
Published by: Virago Press
Publication Date: 1981
Format: Paperback, 180 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

From first hearing of the abandoned estate to several failed attempts to finally glimpse the house, Menabilly captured Daphne's imagination. She would eventually sit for hours on the lawn, gazing at the boarded up house imagining what once was and what ghosts might lurk there still. The seeds for Rebecca were thus planted and came to fruition years later while stationed with her husband in Cairo. She mapped out her story, staring an unnamed heroine and her husband Henry and the ghost of his dead wife haunting them still. Du Maurier was inspired by Cornwall and Menabilly, but her inspiration came from her family as well. The lauded author and grandfather she never knew, George Du Maurier, to her father, the famous stage actor, Sir Gerald Du Maurier, to her "uncle" J.M. Barrie. She was surrounded by artistic genius and it almost seemed predestined that she would make a name for herself in her own right. But seeing her name in lights? That was a humbling experience for the author. She longed for the days when authors would disappear behind their work and let it speak for itself. Yet, if called upon to give her opinion, despite her caustic wit tearing other authors to shreds for doing so, she would give it, without censor. Daphne Du Maurier might be remembered most for Rebecca, but that's not all she was.

Years ago, when I rediscovered Daphne Du Maurier by stumbling on a hoard of books at my local used bookstore I took to the Internet to see what other works she had written that were no longer in wide release, especially in the United States. That is when I first heard of The Rebecca Notebook. Not only is Rebecca the seminal work of Du Maurier, but one of my most favorite books ever. Therefore I needed The Rebecca Notebook to get further insight into Du Maurier's masterpiece and was willing to pay the exorbitant shipping from England in order to learn more about one of my favorite books. So was it worth it? Yes and no. There are insights to be learned but with the "other memories" there is a lot of filler, which is saying something as this slim volume is only 180 pages. I felt that seeing as Du Maurier cherry-picked essays from her back catalog she should have stuck with pieces relating to Cornwall and the house that inspired Manderley, as "The House of Secrets" is a wonderful little piece showing the genesis of Rebecca and has the lyricism of her fiction, which is sadly absent in her non-fiction, making it clunky and often painful to read.

As for "The Rebecca Notebook" itself? It's interesting to see how she plotted her writing chapter by chapter, showing what big reveals needed to happen when with snatches of dialogue she had hoped to use. Yet at the same time I feel this only truly interesting to writers or lawyers. Why lawyers? Because Rebecca was at the heart of a plagiarism case and "The Rebecca Notebook" was brought forward as evidence for the defense. This fact makes me leery of the veracity of the notebook. I don't doubt that Du Maurier wrote Rebecca and it was all her own creation, but I do doubt the notebook... it's a bit too convenient to have a chapter by chapter breakdown of the book being questioned. Yes, it could be real, but it could also be fabricated. I know this might seem very cynical of me, but Du Maurier was talented but also, as evidenced in her writing, she was devious. So it's more a compliment then a criticism to say that she fabricated this entire notebook just to win a court case. As for the book that supposedly was similar to Rebecca? Edwina L. MacDonald's Blind Windows? I'd really like to get my hands on a copy to see for myself the similarities but the book is lost to the mists of time.

Yet for how technical "The Rebecca Notebook" is and how depressing Rebecca's original "Epilogue" with the second Mrs. de Winter and Maxim, originally called Henry, were disfigured by a car accident, there was a very interesting reveal. Between these two pieces you see that Du Maurier had originally planned Mrs. Danvers to be insignificant. She is almost irrelevant until they need her to dig out Rebecca's planner and show that Rebecca had an appointment in London on the day she died leading to the reveal that Rebecca was dying and her greatest fear was pain. While this is very important to the resolution of the story not having Mrs. Danvers looming over the second Mrs. de Winter the whole time makes Rebecca an entirely different book! That this mousy second wife would just accidentally choose the same portrait Rebecca did to emulate at the masquerade? That seems unlikely. To have Mrs. Danvers push here to do it? Evil genius! There's a reason Hitchcock took Mrs. Danvers even further to her fiery end, it's because he knew that she is the linchpin that holds Rebecca together. Of course I disagree with what he did, but that doesn't mean he wasn't right in the significance of this one character.

As for the filler that makes up the rest of The Rebecca Notebook? In my mind it's best avoided. It's not just the fact that Du Maurier isn't the best writer when it comes to nonfiction, it's that she sometimes reveals things you really didn't want to know. A theme she keeps returning to is her family, from the more direct tales about her grandfather and father, "The Young George du Maurier" and "The Matinee Idol" respectively, to her ideas on love and the importance of family in "Romantic Love" and even to what it is like to lose love in "Death and Widowhood." While she tries to paint it as a lovely family unit, it's really a fucked up family unit. Seeing as she views Emily Bronte dying months after her brother Branwell from a cold she caught at his funeral romantic and just, because obviously Emily couldn't live without her "genius" brother, an opinion only held by Du Maurier I might add, gives you a hint at where she's going. And yes, she's going straight towards incest. And it's interesting to point out here that the only time she refers to it directly and not obliquely she refers to it as something "denied to us." Like we'd all be clamoring like Lannisters if it wasn't a sin? Eww. Just no.

Even putting aside the whole yeah incest, she has a lot of politically incorrect views. Yes, you could say she's a product of her time, but her stance against religion would have been viewed divisive even in it's day. As for comparing the stigma of widowhood as similar to the oppression suffered by people of color, I'm going to pretend I never read that. It's just SO offensive I can't even and that's why I've now categorized her as one of my favorite authors with reservations. I have many authors on this list, Lewis Carroll is one because he was a pedophile. J.M. Barrie, interestingly enough the adoptive father of Daphne's cousins, is another pedophile. Daphne's cousin Michael Llewelyn Davies, the favorite of Barrie's, committed suicide, which should easily prove the whole pedophile charge to any doubters. But my problem is I had already read and fallen in love with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Rebecca long before I learned anything of these authors personal lives. And unlike authors like Orson Scott Card and the dog whistles peppered in his writing, these authors work stands apart. You wouldn't know anything about the ick factor of their lives unless you read up on them, or in the case of Du Maurier, read their non-fiction. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. But I prefer in the end to be an informed reader.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Book Review - Cassandra Clare's City of Lost Souls

City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments Book 5) by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: May 8th, 2012
Format: Hardcover, 535 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Jace is now bound to Sebastian. He has unwittingly turned to the dark side and is the center of a world wide manhunt. Yet the Clave think it's a simple kidnapping, little do they know that the two are bound together. One cannot be harmed without the other getting the same wounds. Therefore, if found, Sebastian cannot be killed if Jace is to live. The two want Clary to come and join them, which she secretly does, but only because she feels that by going with her brother and her true love that she can find some way of separating them and saving Jace. Clary is unprepared for the depths her brother will sink, but luckily her friends are willing to sink to equal depths in order to save her and Jace. Team Good is on the job, raising demons and summoning angels all to find a way to save Jace. Yet even if the separation succeeds can they find out Sebastian's plans and stop him before it's too late?

One thing that is really big right now is to have everything interconnected. Now, I don't mean everything as in EVERYTHING, but it's becoming so that book and television series are no longer independent. You can't just read or watch one thing without having to read and watch all this other stuff as well, from online exclusives to ebooks. Now more then ever it is about the whole universe a story inhabits. The worst perpetrator of these crimes against consumers is Marvel. The Marvel Universe is so interconnected that you literally have to watch everything to know what's going on. You can't just watch Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., oh no, you have to also go see the new Captain America movie because apparently the whole first season was building to the reveal in the movie, which someone could have warned me about.

I mean seriously, I got so lost between two episodes because I didn't have the time to go see Captain American: The Winter Soldier and everything on S.H.I.E.L.D hinged on that movie that I almost swore off Marvel then and there. And yes, I know Marvel has always had this interconnected universe, but these days it's getting out of hand, being more about forcing the consumer to want it all then just letting them stick to what they like, and FYI, I like Captain America in WWII, not in modern times, so there.

For series I love, I do want it all, but with the caveat, they can be connected not dependent. Thor and S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America and The Avengers, they can have jokes and characters crossing over all they want as long as I can enjoy each one individually. They must be separate and enjoyable on their own. Cassandra Clare has fallen prey to this trend and it's making me want to throttle her more then usual. After the third book in the Mortal Instruments series she had her first Infernal Devices book come out, Clockwork Angel. This series is set in the same world but in the 1800s, and due to some of her characters being immortal, well, those characters carry through, most notably Magnus Bane.

Flash forward to present day and the Mortal Instruments and book four, City of Fallen Angels, and references to Clockwork Angel pepper the text, liberally. I was kind of ok with it... at first. By the time this book, City of Lost Souls, was released another book in the Infernal Devices series had been published and Clare doubled down on the references. Now not only is her book lacking in plot, believable characters, and continuity, it is now at the point where tons of references are going over my head because I didn't read two of her other books. The thought of having to read more of her writing makes me want to scream. The fact that this book has a whole new level of things to infuriate me makes me wonder how I will ever finish this series.

But here's the nail in the coffin for me and Clare, she doesn't care about her writing so why should I? You might be wondering how I reached this opinion, well, it's right there on every page of her books if you look. Her writing is lazy. And by lazy I mean the writing feels like it was just vomited onto the page without anyone ever going back and checking for overuse of words (seriously, don't use the same phrase two sentences in a row), not to mention continuity, where windows randomly appear in windowless rooms (a common occurrence) and futons have bedposts.

Yet for me the issue this all ties back to is her plagiarist tendencies. A good author will create a unique and wonderful world that has originality and won't make you think that the book is half Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix half Buffy the Vampire Slayer season two. But even if the world did feel like that, a good author could make it their own with character development and dialogue. Instead Clare just relies on the words of other writers versus coming up with her own. I actually lost count as to how many direct lifts there were from Buffy. I knew from the end of the previous book that City of Lost Souls was shaping up to be very much Angelus wreaking havoc on Sunnydale, but seriously, this is how it ended? THE EXACT SAME WAY AS BUFFY!?! Look to the screencap as proof because you don't need to take my word for it!

Does assembling real work by others into a vague plotless book make you an author? I don't think so. It makes you a lazy bitch who is just churning these books out as fast as you can to rake in the cash probably only stopping to call your lawyer to see if a sentence is changed just the right infinitesimal amount so that you can't be sued. And it looks like Clare is going to keep on doing this... it's people like her that make me worry about the future of writing; lazy ass people who feel entitled to do whatever they want, damn the consequences.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Book Review - Cassandra Clare's City of Bones

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments Book 1) by Cassandra Clare
Published by: Margaret K. McElderry
Publication Date: March 27th, 2007
Format: Hardcover, 496 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Clary's life has been turned upside down. One night her and her best friend Simon are at a club when she sees something no one else can. There's apparently a shadow world in New York and for some reason Clary is starting to see it. After this shocking discovery Clary's mom Jocelyn is kidnapped and this new world of demons and angels and vampires and werewolves holds the key. There is a group of humans known as the Shadowhunters, and they protect the world from the demons from the downworlds. They keep all of humanity safe and ignorant. Clary has spent her life safe and ignorant, but only at her mother's behest. Jocelyn was once a Shadowhunter, part of the elite Circle lead by her husband Valentine to overthrow the Clave, the organizing body of the Shadowhunters. Jocelyn came to hate the purity of blood the Circle demanded and fled her husband and that world to raise her daughter as a mundane, safe from the dangers of this shadow world. But everyone's past comes back to haunt them. Valentine isn't as dead as everyone hoped and his ideals haven't changed in the fifteen years he has been in hiding. Can Clary, a girl just thrust into this other world, be able to help stop history repeating itself?

The concept of plagiarism is horrifying to me, yet in our society it is oddly pervasive and somewhat accepted. As a creative person who has artistic output the thought that someone would take my work, my blood, sweat, and tears, and claim it as their own, it makes my blood boil. I am so wary of the taint of plagiarism that I have this obsessive self-policing instinct that recoils at the thought that I would cut corners to get a faster or better end result even using just the bones of another person's idea. Plagiarism in any form is abhorrent to me. Yet there were many instances at school where students would get caught showing the work of others as their own. They would lift artwork straight off of deviantART and an observant student or teacher would call them out. Why you might be wondering am I ruminating on artistic copyrights? Well, even if you've only been half aware of the controversy, Cassandra Clare is an author who has, apparently, been rightly tarred as a plagiarist. She is an author who, while the taint has stuck, has also been accepted by the YA community and become very successful. An odd conundrum of our times where theft and unoriginality are king.

While the roots of the story start in fanfic, I want to make it clear that this is just one cast against one person and that fanfic is a thriving and interesting genre that uses pre-existing characters in new ways and isn't being denigrated by me. The bones (haha) of the case against Cassie is that in her fanfic trilogy devoted to Draco Malfoy she basically was ripping off not just witty dialogue from Buffy to Pratchett to Red Dwarf (classified by her as "an obscure British sitcom" and yes, in my mind she should go to hell for saying that) but full scenes and settings from other authors. She was called out, her work was categorized as plagiarized and was pulled from the site it was on. Yes, there was also a lot of name calling, Cyberbullying, and other horrid stuff you can read all about elsewhere, but the fact is she got a book deal from this. This alone disgusts me. But with the eyes of the world on her she wasn't able to rely on the witticisms of Joss Whedon anymore, she took her plot structure from her fanfic trilogy, stripped it down, rebuilt it, and what is left is boring. Even if you were unaware of all this controversy swirling around her you could not help but notice that this book lacks originality, it lacks that spark that's needed to make it more then just a mish-mash of other tropes and plot devices as old as the written word. Cassandra Clare, in my opinion, is a bad writer, not to mention morally corrupt and a bad human. She used the reflective glory of other "true" writers to give her work a shiny allure, that while tarnished, is still there.

But I can't ignore the fanfic roots of City of Bones mainly because this is so obviously Harry Potter from Draco's point of view. And even if I didn't know about the Draco Trilogy, once a flying motorcycle shows up, there's no doubt it's Harry Potter. This book is giving us front row seats to life with the Death Eaters, with a little more Nazism thrown in, sieg heil! In fact it's just too much of everything thrown in, too much borrowed and re-interpreted in a flat way. Here's some Harry Potter (a stele is so a wand no matter what Clare says), add some Rick Riordan, a little Piers Anthony/Bill Willingham (mundies, really, Fables much?), an aroma of Celtic mythology, a dash of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, just have at it. But never once does all this thisness convert into something it's own, something cohesive and original. All this translates into major worldbuilding issues. I'm ok with a magical world coexisting alongside a mundane world, as long as it makes sense. Whether it's willful ignorance on the part of the mundanes, or spells and wards keeping them away, something has to be explained as to how this ignorant coexistence works. Having carriages going over cars and slipping in and out of traffic with not an eyelid batted, please.

The laziness in the worldbuilding though is never so obvious as in the characters that inhabit this world. City of Bones has this feeling of one epically long night of party crashing, much like the aforementioned Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, a book and movie I detest. When you go to these parties you meet people, you get vague impressions, and then they're out of your life forever. That's how I felt about all the characters. They are flat two-dimensional people who will maybe have a defining characteristic, but overall, they are forgettable. After almost five hundred pages with Clary all I know about her is she's a short red-head who draws. Seriously, this is ALL I KNOW about the protagonist of this book? Um... major flaw here. While I know people will jump down my neck for this, but I actually think Bella Swan has more of a personality then Clary. There, I said it. I do think that this issue would have been fixable it there was some buildup before throwing us into the action of the book. How about a few days spent with Clary living her normal life? Some way for us to identify with her and the world she's about to lose. A way for the reader to forge a connection, because without this bond I have no conduit to help me in this book's world, and it makes me care about nothing. Valentine could kill them all for how much I care about them and perhaps I would help him, especially with Jace.

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