Tag: s

Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo

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★★★
“Cowgirls behind bars.”

Well, this is certainly the first film I’ve reviewed here which drops both into the “women in prison” and the “sports” category. It takes place in Oklahoma, where since 1940, they have been staging an annual prison rodeo event in McAlester. The competition takes place in an arena built just inside the walls of the State Penitentiary, and includes competitors from facilities across the state. In 2006, the event was opened to female inmates as well, and this documentary (while not absolutely focused on just the women, also including 13-year rodeo veteran and convicted murderer Liles) is about their preparation for the 2007 event, training on a rig pulled back and forth by fellow inmates, and climaxing with the event itself.

What stood out in particular was how normal most of the inmates seemed, though my perceptions there were likely skewed by the more, ah, dramatic depictions of life behind bars. You’d be hard pushed to pick the likes of Brooks, Witte and Herrington out of a line-up at the local PTA, though some of the stories they tell are startling – as much for the casual air with which they admit to dealing drugs or violent robbery. The rodeo gives them a bit of relief from the crushing boredom of life inside, though it’s very much a privilege. Brooks is kicked off the squad when caught in possession of contraband, reportedly unauthorized lipstick, an incident which also puts her release on parole in doubt.

While regular rodeo typically limits female involvement to the less dangerous events, such as barrel racing, there’s no such restriction here. The women inmates take part in bull and bronco riding, as well as the particularly fraught event called “Money the Hard Way”, where the first person to pluck a ribbon tied to a bull’s head wins $100. The beast is clearly no respecter of the fairer sex, sending both men and women into the air with a strictly gender-neutral approach. The comparisons of the event to gladiatorial combat seemed particularly apt here. Yet this feels more like a backdrop to the lives of the prisoners, and I found myself Googling their names in hopes of recent updates.

As with most documentaries, it’s not tidy, with loose ends a-plenty, and if I was both informed and reasonably entertained, I can’t say I reached the end with any life-changing revelations. It feels quite “safe” and conventional as a film of its genre, and Beesley clearly is not interesting in challenging narratives, least of all the self-reported ones of the women’s lives. While they do largely accept responsibility for their crimes, it’d be interesting to hear an outside perspective on those. Not mentioned in the film: the event was canceled in 2010 due to a state budget shortfall. It hasn’t returned since, mostly because the arena has now fallen into disrepair, despite support from the warden, local community and state governor for that. Whether it ever will is uncertain, leaving the documentary a record of an odd slice of Americana that may be forever gone.

Dir: Bradley Beesley
Star: Jamie Brooks, Brandy Witte, Danny Liles, Crystal Herrington

Slate

  By

★★★½
“A clean slate.”

This is definitely an interesting idea, and potentially the most meta action heroine film I’ve seen.  Cha Yeon-hee (Ahn) has wanted to be a movie heroine ever since she was a child, though it’s an ambition which has always eluded her – in part because of her refusal to work her way up in the industry. She eventually and grudgingly accepts a stunt double position in a historical swordplay film, and shows up on the set for her first day. However, due to circumstances involving a magical clapperboard (hence the title) and an inconvenient portal, she finds herself transported to a parallel dimension. It’s kinda like modern Korea in clothes and speech, but run by warlords and their sword-carrying minions.

This is perfect for Yeon-hee, who adopts the person of Soul Slayer, the character she was supposed to double in the movie, to protect the village from Taepyeongso (Park) and his henchmen. There are only a couple of problems. Firstly, the sword she brought with her is a movie prop, incapable of inflicting any actual damage. Secondly, the real Soul Slayer shows up. At least she’s not the first person from her world to have been carried over, as there’s also a YouTube paranormal blogger, called Ghoster, who “vanished” a few months previously, and is there to help explain what’s going on. Will Yeon-hee make it back to the real world? And will she even want to, or will she prefer to stay in the dimension where she is the heroine she always wanted to be?

It’s a lovely concept. In a story of a downtrodden heroine getting the chance to be all she can be, it’s a little reminiscent of Everything Everywhere All at Once, though there are just the two worlds to occupy here, making this a lot more restrained – not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also a bit like The Wizard of Oz, in that everyone in the “heroine” world has a counterpart in the regular one, be it large or small. For example, Taepyeongso  runs a street stall in our world. There’s a good moral here too, about the value of holding to your dreams, even if the ending may be a little too new age-y for my personal tastes.

However, I did feel they left quite a lot of the potential on the table; it’s not hard to think of further ways Yeon-Hee could have parlayed dramatic skills into use here, yet the movie prefers to concentrate on a power struggle for succession among Taepyeongso’s underlings. Some more action would have been welcome too. If occasionally over-edited, what we get is pretty good, with some sword fights that have real impact, the participants battering away at each other with what feels like full force. While this is an independent Korean film, it looks more than competent on every level, and I’d like to see more from both director and star, down the road.

Dir: Bareun Jo
Star: Ji-hye Ahn, Min-ji Lee, Tae-San Park, Lee Se-Ho

Stormy Weathers

  By

★★½
“Scattered outbreaks of interest.”

Within ten seconds of Chris having entered the room when this was on, she asked, “Are you watching Moonlighting?” No, I wasn’t – but it’s certainly a valid question. Just a couple of years earlier, Shepherd had finished off a run playing a private eye alongside Bruce Wills on that highly successful show. And here she is, again playing a private investigator on television, with a fondness for cracking wise and showing off her legs. What are the odds? Well, there’s absolutely no doubt the makers of this knew exactly what they were doing by casting Shepherd. Though I also suspect that they were hoping to ride on the coat-tails of the similar V.I. Warshawski, which came out the previous year. Its commercial failure won’t have helped this, and it feels like a pilot that never got picked up.

Samantha “Don’t call her Stormy” Weathers (Shepherd) takes on the case of dishy Italian aristocrat Gio (Beltran), seeking to discover what happened to his elder brother, who vanished in Los Angeles 15 years previously. Their father died recently, and he needs to establish inheritance. He contacts Sam because her late father, an LAPD homicide cop, had reached out at the time and been told the brother was disowned. It was the last case Weathers Sr. worked there, before quitting the force to start the detective agency. Sam discovers the case seems increasingly likely involved in that decision. With the help of trusty hacker Squirrel (Schlatter) and muckraking journo Bogey (Salinger), she discovers a conspiracy stretching across the years and involving Black Power activists, drug-runners and current high political office.

It’s almost entirely predictable, and if you can’t guess who the bad guy is before the big twist, you haven’t been paying attention. Not that I’d blame you for that, as this is as formulaic as it is obvious. However, it benefits from a strong supporting cast with a lot of familiar faces. I spotted Kurt Fuller (Robocop), Roy Thinnes (The Invaders), Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist), Tony Lo Bianco (God Told Me To) and Vonetta McGee (Blacula), and they all provide good service. Shepherd is also solid enough, even if as mentioned, the character seems perilously close to Maddie Hayes.

The action is lightly sprinkled, and feels more like a side-dish than the main course. But there’s a decent sequence where Sam is trailed by two goons, only to lure them into a deserted warehouse and dispatch them with surprisingly ruthless efficiency. There’s also a reasonable about of running around and climbing, which – as the poster suggests – seem to be there as much to show of Sam’s gams, as in furtherance of any elements of the story. It is curiously dated in some aspects, from a time where computers and mobile phones were very much in their infancy. What Squirrel does could basically be done by anyone on Google, and the multiple Terminator 2 references also pin this firmly as a product of 1992. I was never truly bored here: on the other hand, I was never very interested either.

Dir: Will Mackenzie
Star: Cybill Shepherd, Robert Beltran, Charlie Schlatter, Diane Salinger

Sheroes

  By

★★★
“Zeroes to sheroes.”

Twenty minutes into this, I was certain I had made a terrible mistake. These four young women were among the most grating and unpleasant characters I’d seen in a movie. I’m talking actively awful: crass, shallow and entitled. They head off to Thailand for a girls’ getaway on a private jet owned by the father of Diamond (Luss), a film producer. By the time they land, check out their mansion and enjoy the local sights, I was ready to set up the guillotines. Then there’s a luggage mix-up, leaving them with a large quantity of Thai cartel coke, and one of their number is kidnapped, in order to coerce them into returning the goods.

Which is where something unexpected happened. The film became… Well, “good” might be a stretch – plausibility is not the script’s strong suit. But it became considerably more entertaining, that’s for certain. Diamond turns out to have hidden depths, and coaches skater girl Ryder (Day) and actress Ezra (Fuhrman) on what they’re going to do to get their friend Daisy (Skai Jackson) back. They have some help from the mysterious Jasper (Kesy), but they’re mostly reliant on their own skills, at least until the very end. It also nods to other films in an occasionally meta way. For instance, Diamond coaches Ezra to deliver Liam Neeson’s classic Taken speech to the kidnappers. It’s particularly funny, because that was written by Luc Besson, and Luss is best known as the star of Anna… directed by Besson.

She is really the glue that holds the film together for the bulk of the running-time, coming over as both smart and capable, and I’d watch her in a franchise. You do have to suspend disbelief in quite a few places, e.g. the trio are capable of using a 3D printer to create a mask which Ezra uses to impersonate someone. [It was a stretch in Mission: Impossible, with all the resources of the IMF] Or Ryder being capable of taking down a trained mixed martial-arts fighter, who’s probably a hundred pounds heavier. Then there’s the final battle, where they take out an entire camp of Thai drug-runners. Yeah: this whole film might as well be titled “I’m so sure…”

Yet, I was able to put that aside, and found myself, surprisingly, being adequately entertained. There’s a lot of value wrung out from the exotic locations, while the cinematography is crisp and well-executed. And let’s be honest, the heroines are easy on the eye and spent more time than is strictly necessary in bikinis. The R-rating seems largely a result of bad language and drug use. I’d like to have seen it embraced in the action elements as well, which could have been more hard-hitting. But as a frothy concoction, this feels as if it is going down a similar line as something like DOA: Dead or Alive. Not quite as good – yet considering how very low my opinion was at the beginning, recovering to a three-star rating is impressive. 

Dir: Jordan Gertner
Star: Sasha Luss, Isabelle Fuhrman, Wallis Day, Jack Kesy

Strong Enough

  By

★★★½
“Fit for most purposes.”

This is a very small-scale and restrained production, which unfolds, largely in real time, over one afternoon in the single location of a cross-fit gym. Athlete Sam (Jerue) is set for an attempt to see five world records in a 30-minute span, supported by her trainer Shane (Grosse) and under the eagle eye of adjudicator Alec (Sawyer) – it’s clearly intended to be the Guinness Book of World Records, but their name is never mentioned! However, a fly in the ointment shows up, just minutes before Sam is scheduled to start. Her husband, Charlie (Kershisnik), from whom she is currently separated, arrives at the gym, followed rapidly by Sam getting served with divorce papers, in what can only be called a dick move. 

This does feel very artificial, an obvious and contrived attempt to add external drama to what should be a purely internal situation: Sam versus herself, in an effort to push further than anyone has gone before. However, it’s a little more complex than it initially seems. Charlie may appear not much more than a bad guy, yet by the end, your feelings towards him may well be modified: he’s not entirely the villain he seems. It still does feel superfluous, as if the makers weren’t confident in the ability of the central struggle to hold the audience’s attention. In some ways, they’re right. You’re watching someone do squats, or chin-ups. How exciting can that be?

The answer might be, more than you’d think. In Jerue, the makers have some who actually is a well-regarded cross-fitter, and that means there’s no stunt doubling or cut-aways. Foss simply drops the camera back to mid-range, and you get an unbroken sixty seconds of his lead actress doing what she is supposed to be doing. As someone whose fitness stops at 30 minutes of moderate intensity on the elliptical, I have nothing but respect for those who push their bodies as far as possible (unlike one reviewer of the film who wrote sneeringly, and I quote, “Cross Fit feels like a gateway drug to fascism”. I wonder what his BMI might be. Just curious). I like American Ninja Warrior, The 100 and its ilk. This is not dissimilar.

It does skirt perilously close to some of the usual sports cliches, though by this point, it’s difficult to come up with a credible scenario which doesn’t. Either your protagonist prevails over their opponent (which may be internal, as here), or they go down bravely: as Shane puts it, “Like the gladiators of old would say: let me win, and if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” That is, basically, your two categories of sports movies, and there’s not much attempt to escape the mould here. However, all the characters seem genuine; I’m not sure how much “acting” is require from Jerue the cross-fitter, playing Sam the cross-fitter, but she acquits herself reasonably well. I ended up watching the final half-hour from the elliptical, and might just have pedalled a little harder than normal.

Dir: John Foss
Star: Ashley Jerue, Demetrius Grosse, Cameron Sawyer, Noah Kershisnik

Sever

  By

★★
“When you order À l’interieur on Wish…”

The French film À l’interieur (a.k.a. Inside) is one of the most ferocious and intense of all action-heroine films. It’s the story of a pregnant woman who has to defend herself and her unborn child from an absolute psycho who turns up on the doorstep of her remote house one night. This film, more or less, has the same plot. It is, however, a pale imitation in just about every single way. Where À l’interieur was spare and taut, this is bloated and meandering. When it had nothing but excellent performances, the ones here are largely poor or worse. And while the French movie delivered on its hellish premise, this possesses almost no impact at all.

The targets here are Cord (Caillouet) and Mindy (Kavchak), an apparently happily married couple, who are having a weekend getaway at their family retreat, deep in the Rocky Mountains. Their vacation is interrupted by the arrival on their doorstep of a stranger, a woman who claims to need help. With the cabin having no phone, and ‐ this is my thoroughly unsurprised face – being out of cellphone range, Cord invites her to stay the night, without even consulting his wife. This is the first of many truly poor decisions the couple will make. For the woman is Martha (Cruz), who recently staged a brutal escape from the psychiatric facility in which she was incarcerated, and is now intent on making her unwitting hosts, Cord in particular, pay for the sins of the past.

Which is part of the issue: the resulting narrative is so convoluted it becomes ridiculous. Though especially in the final act, I actually found myself thoroughly amused by its excesses. The problem is, I think I was supposed to take it seriously. Yeah, that’s gonna be a “No” from me, dawg. The other big flaw are the performances of Kavchak and, especially, Caillouet. The former is flat and thoroughly unconvincing as a woman in peril of her life. She is still Oscar-worthy compared to the oak wardrobe which is her on-screen husband, delivering lines with all the energy of an airport departure announcement. A cord of wood might have made a better Cord.

The only thing which kept this watchable was Cruz (credited as Batya Haynes). Her bible-spouting religious fruitcake was a genuinely scary creature, truly devoted to her philosophy of life. If it may not be one with which you can agree, it is possible to see where she’s coming from. You certainly have to admire the commitment to her chosen purpose, even though such fanaticism is terrifying at the same time. It’s just a shame it’s not a performance in the service of a better movie. I’ve just realized I’m not even sure if Mindy actually was pregnant. If so, it never played much part in proceedings. I suspect I may simply have spliced that plot-point in from another, far superior one. No prizes for guessing where.

Dir: Matthew Ryan Anderson
Star: Batya Cruz, Maia Kavchak, Garret Caillouet, Phyllis Spielman

Scavenger

  By

★½
“Not even worth it as scrap.”

This should be right up my alley. For it’s a grungy, post-apocalyptic story of revenge, which is heavy both on the carnage and the nudity. Throw in disapproving reviews containing lines like, “Downright nasty movie that takes all the worst bits of exploitation cinema and proudly puts it on display,” or “Scavenger is truly appalling,” and you’ll understand why it was fast-tracked for viewing. However, the weird thing is… those reviews aren’t wrong – it is a bad movie, just not for the reasons they espouse. The bigger problem is simply poor execution, in a way that manages to take the sex ‘n’ violence, and make it all painfully dull. Of all the cinematic sins, that’s one I find hard to forgive.

It takes place some years after a non-specific apocalypse, which has left cannibalism as the sole source of meat. Muscle cars, lingerie and cassette tapes are, apparently, still plentiful. Roaming this wilderness is Tisha (Churruarin), part bounty-hunter, part nomadic butcher. She accepts a commission from an old woman, to hunt down the scumbags who made her a whore and ruined her life – the usual. Tisha accepts, even waiving her normal fee. However, on arrival at the house of ill repute run by Luna (Lanaro), she quickly finds herself on the staff. She’s going to need to find a way out before she can complete her mission. It’s also going to get considerably more personal before all is said and done. 

I suspect the above sounds more fun than it really is. Part of this may be the dubbing, which appears to be both written and performed by people for whom English is a very distant second language at best. However, the main issue is simply far too many periods when zero of interest happens. Basically, after Tisha arrives at Luna’s, absolutely nothing of importance happens for a good half hour. Unless you consider the heroine being subjected to various indignities, up to and including being peed on, as “important”. In a film which runs only 71 minutes including credits, it’s a criminal waste of time, and the film has little or no chance to recover thereafter.

Its death nerve twitches feebly down the stretch, with some enthusiastic gore, Tisha wielding a bizarre weapon like a giant mixer to disembowel people. Yet it could do no more than provoke a slightly raised eyebrow. There are a couple of elements I did like: the heroine is not your typical post-apocalyptic babe; Churruarin has a rough edge to her presence that works in this setting. Generally, the set design is good too, selling the scenario effectively. These both need to be in the service of a considerably better script – one apparently less dedicated to enacting the bizarre sexual domination fetishes of the film-makers, which I do not share. ‘Truly appalling”? I probably wouldn’t give it that much credit, to be frank. 

Dir: Eric Fleitas, Luciana Garraza
Star: Nayla Churruarin, Eric Fleitas, Sofia Lanaro, Jose Manuel Solis Vargas
a.k.a. Carroña

Sisters Apart

  By

★★
“A phony kind of war.”

There seem to have been quite a few movies out of Europe over the past couple of years, about the female soldiers fighting in Kurdistan for independence with the PKK and related groups. French films Les Filles du Soleil and Soeurs D’Armes both covered similar territory. It seems fertile territory, offering an inbuilt contradiction between the general perception of how Islam treats women, and them taking part in front-line action, in a way well beyond what “liberal” Western democracies typically allow. Oddly, it feels as if most of the stories being told, involve a search for relatives, and I’m a bit ambivalent about this. It feels slightly lazy writing, as if there’s no other reason a woman could want to take up arms in order to defend her homeland.

This does at least somewhat sidestep that issue with its set-up. The heroine here is Rojda Xani (Bagriacik), a Kurd refugee now living in Germany, and a citizen of the country who has joined their army. Her mother comes to join her, but does not bring Rojda’s sister, Dilan (de Haas), as previously arranged. Indeed, Danil seems to have dropped off the grid almost entirely, a situation which causes Rojda increasing concern – as if trying to get her mother to adapt to life in Germany wasn’t stressful enough. Despite qualms of those around her, Rojda decides to apply for the post of interpreter with the Bundeswehr who are deployed to Kurdistan, training soldiers there. On arrival, she finds a possible source of information about her sister’s location, but getting her to talk won’t be easy. The harsh reality of the conflict also brings into focus Rojda’s (largely selfish) reasons for being there.

This is almost entirely low key – likely too much so for its own good. That’s particularly so at the ending, where things don’t so much end, as peter out in a largely unsatisfying way. It is perhaps “realistic”, in that life is rarely tidy or follows a three-act structure. However, if I wanted real life, I’d watch a documentary. Rojda does make for an interesting heroine, one trying to balance between her own family culture and the standards and practices of her new home. She’s certainly far from dumb, speaking at least three languages, but is also fairly impenetrable, emotionally. Much of the time, it’s hard to be sure what she’s feeling. I’m not sure if this was deliberate – it would be in line with the film’s understated approach – or a shortcoming, either in writing, direction or performance.

There are some points where this does come to life. For example, her new colleagues quizzing her about life in Germany – can girls there sit next to a boy in the cinema? Again, this demonstrates the weird double standard (to Western eyes) by which these women live. Or there’s the bafflement of her commanding officer (Letkowski) when he’s told the Kurdish women have nobody in a similar role: “Sometimes she gives orders, sometimes I do.” I wish there had been more of these moments, which render the near passivity of the rest, all the more infuriating.

Dir: Daphne Charizani
Star: Almila Bagriacik, Zübeyde Bulut, Christoph Letkowski, Gonca de Haas
a.k.a. Im Feuer

Swamp Women

  By

★★★
“Marsh ado about nothing.”

One of the earliest films directed by Roger Corman, it’d be a major stretch to call this a good film, yet I can’t deny I found it entertaining. It definitely has better female characters than most movies of the mid-fifties. Four women break out of jail and head into the swamps, in search of stolen diamonds which were previously hidden in the Louisiana swamps. Except, one of them is an undercover police officer, Lee Hampton (Mathews), who had been inserted into prison to join the gang and lead the escape, in the hope of recovering the loot. After the car breaks down, they hijack a boat owned by an oil prospector, Bob, and his girlfriend, taking them hostage as they head deeper into the bayou.

Things unfold more or less as you’d expect, though not exactly how Lee would have planned. There’s dissension in the ranks, fighting between the women for the attentions of Bob, encounters with native wildlife, and copious amounts of stock footage. The last is both of Mardi Gras in New Orleans and expensive elements like helicopters, helping pad the running-time, though it still comes in on the underside of seventy minutes. By all accounts, there was hardly a corner which Corman left uncut, such as the women doing their own stunts. Mike Connors, who played Bob, said, “The girls in that picture had it much worse than I did… They had to trudge through the mud, the swamps, pulling this rowboat, and I was sitting in the rowboat high and dry.”

Characterization beyond Lee is largely limited to the colour of the women’s hair – blonde, brunette, or redhead – though Josie (Marie Windsor, the star of Outlaw Women) is effective as the de facto leader of the group. It is nice there’s no attempt made to give them boyfriends or husbands. They make their own decisions, and follow through with them, entirely on their own terms. This brand of mid-fifties feminism results in more than one instance of them rolling around in the swamp, cat-fighting each other. Somehow, their hair, clothes and make-up miraculously seem to escape any kind of damage in these brawls, and return to pristine condition for the next scene.

On the way to the finale, Vera (Garland) tries to sneak off with both the jewels and Bob, paying the price for her treachery. The authorities manage to lose track of the group, and Josie grows increasingly suspicious of Lee’s resistance to violence. The leader eventually orders Lee to kill Bob; the shots fired in the ensuing fracas are enough, conveniently, to attract the search party, while Vera and Lee battle through the forest and – inevitably, into the water. It’s all entirely ridiculous, and the scope for parody makes it easy to understand why it was MST3K‘d. Yet even at this early stage, Corman clearly understood that the worst crime a B-movie can commit it is to be boring. For all its flaws, Swamp Women is never that.

Dir: Roger Corman
Star: Carole Mathews, Marie Windsor, Beverly Garland, Jill Jarmyn

The Swordswoman, by Malcolm Archibald

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

I am, probably, biased here. Scottish action heroines are pretty rare, to the point I am hard pushed to think of a single one I’ve covered previously, in the twenty years I’ve been running this domain. [I just made myself feel very old…] So I was likely disposed to feel kindly towards this literary example. But even setting aside patriotic tendencies, I genuinely enjoyed reading this. It takes place, I’m guessing, around the 9th century, when Scotland was still a loosely connected set of tribes, albeit with a king in what’s now Edinburgh, and a rather fragile peace with the Norse neighbours.

That peace is shattered when someone is washed up on the Western Isles island of Dachaigh where 20-year-old Melcorka lives with her mother. It turns out the Norse are invading, and the king must be notified of the threat. Melcorka and the rest of her clan head towards the capital, only to arrive too late: the army of Alba (as Scotland was then called) has been routed and the nobles scattered. However, Melcorka has a destiny to fulfill… And also inherits a large sword, Defender, with a history dating back centuries, whose powers transform her into the titular character. It’s up to her to rally forces, including the ferocious Picts from the North, to take on the invaders, and send them back across the North Sea to Scandinavia.

It’s not quite historical, not quite fantasy: or, rather, this has elements of both. Events occur in real places: fun fact, up until he retired, my father worked in Burghead, the modern site of Pictish capital Am Broch in the book – I grew up less than 20 miles away. I kept found myself going to Wikipedia to look up particular locations, as Melcorka and her allies moved through the country. But there are some elements which are mystical, such Melcorka venturing into Elfhame, the realm of Faery. At least in this volume, those are limited, and the rest feels grounded. Very grounded in some areas, particularly the battle descriptions, which don’t pull punches: “the slide of intestines as blades ripped open bellies and the pink-grey splurge of brains as swords split skulls.”

It’s certainly not all gore though, and Melcorka realizes there’s a gulf between battle as described in the sagas and heroic songs, and the real thing. It’s part of her development as a heroine, which may be this book’s strongest suit. She starts as an innocent, almost naive young woman, takes her lumps and comes out the other side, wiser if not necessarily happier for it. Credit is also due to Archibald for telling a complete, satisfying story without the need for a gratuitous cliff-hanger. That helps leave me much more likely to invest further in the series, as time permits. He has done the country proud, and I look forward to discovering where Melcorka’s destiny will take her.

Author: Malcolm Archibald
Publisher: Next Chapter, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in The Swordswoman series.