Turnabout by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Rating: WARTY!

The basis of this sci-fi story, set in 2085, but constantly brought to a jarring halt by flashbacks to previous time periods is that of a medical compound which was developed experimentally which could reverse aging. The details of how this was supposed to work the way it did were kept vague, with some hand-waving at telomeres which are genetic components that seem somehow, to be connected with cell aging and death. I really don't expect a sci-fi writer to explain the details of something they invent, or the science underlying it. I prefer it if they vaguely wave their hand at quantum this, or wormhole that, or at "Vita-Rays"! I'm good with that 'explanation' for the sake of a good story, but if you're going to posit something, then for me you need to be consistent about it, and it needs to make some sort of sense within its framework. This author failed for me in this regard.

In the year 2000, Anny Beth and Melly were very old and not so far from death when they were offered the chance to try a series of injections which would literally reverse their aging, by doctors Jimson and Reed. Jimson Reed? Seriously? When they reached an age they were comfortable with, they would have their medication balanced so that they were maintained at that age indefinitely. There were problems with this, the first of which is that for each year they reversed their age, they would lose a year of their memories. How this worked went unexplained and made no sense. The real problem though, came when they first tried to apply the 'arresting' technique to a volunteer. He died horribly - in a way similar to that in which some vampires die: they rapidly wither and turn to dust. It was silly at best.

Given this death threat, the others were not offered the arresting shots and so continued to "unage" as the author puts it. A better term is that they continued to youth! I think so, anyway. So when we meet our two girls they are literally girls, of sixteen and eighteen, and their future is going to be them 'youthing' all the way back to the moment of their birth, when they will die. Again, how that works is unexplained. Note that the book blurb simply lies when it says, " They have no idea what will happen when they hit age zero." According to the author, who presumably didn't write the blurb, they do know.

The two have chosen to live outside of the community of fellow experimentees, but they're reaching an age when they will need a guardian because they cannot be legally in charge of themselves. When they discover that a reporter is trying to track them down, they go on the run. At that point I knew exactly how it would end, and it ended almost exactly how I had envisioned it, so there really isn't much surprise here. If I can figure it out, anyone can! I'd thought that perhaps they would get cured and start to age (or in their case, re-age) naturally with the guardian they found, but this didn't happen.

The ending was not great, predictable as it was, so it was one more disappointment in a disappointing book and rather reminiscent of the Star Trek episode which has the crew meeting an alien race which lives its life backwards, being "born" as adults (how that worked went unexplained!) and dying as children. That story made no sense either! I cannot recommend this because of the poor writing and wasted potential.

Prom & Prejudice by Elizabeth Eulberg

Rating: WARTY!

This book is, quite literally, a waste of paper and Scholastic ought to be ashamed of themselves for wantonly destroying trees like this. It's especially sorry - since the book is an edition intended for schools - that a publisher should set such a sterling example of disregard for the environment. Let me explain.

The book format is 5x8 inches, a total square area of forty square inches per page which is quite staggering when you think about it. The text occupies (if I'm generous with the margins) only 60% of this surface, and almost as bad, it's set at 1.5 line spacing, which means it occupies fifty percent more space than it needs. If you combine these factors, then this 230 plus page book could have been cut down to around one hundred fifty pages. This would not only have helped save trees, it would also have brought the price down by (very roughly) a dollar per book purely from it requiring less paper and shorter print runs (which also saves energy). This cost saving could have been directly passed on to the schools the book was sold to.

None of this is at the author's feet, but it does demonstrate yet one more very good reason why you should never trust Big Publishing&Trade;. Clearly they have no one's best interests at heart, not even their own, evidently! LOL! This is why I will never publish with those people

What I can lay at the author's feet isn't much better I'm sorry to report - especially at this time of year of an author whose last name (depending on how it's pronounced, is reminiscent of Christmas! This book is clearly a clone of Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice (a manga of which I reviewed back in July 2014). It's purportedly some kind of homage, but it's set in the USA in modern times, and it plays rather fast and loose with Austen's premises, so for me it felt more like avarice than ever it was homage.

The focus here is on an elite private girl's school named Longbourn, the sole sorry raison d'être of which appears to be the school senior prom, for which any girl who is anybody is expected to have a date, preferably with one of the wealthy boys from the nearby Pemberley Academy. Despite being brought into the twenty-first century, the book offers no more variety of people (in terms of race, for example) than does Austen's. In Austen's case it was understandable, but in the case of this modernization, it's inexcusable.

I thought the title amusing, but was less pleased with the book despite it not being quite as predictable as I'd feared. Lizzie Bennet was a scholarship student, and Will Darcy a very rich student at the other school. Jane was not her beloved older sister, but her best friend and roommate at the school where nearly all of the students treated her appallingly.

In some ways the translation was done quite well, but in others it was disastrous. The first mistake the author made was to abandon the example set by Jane Austen herself, and write the book in first person instead of third. Clearly the author hasn't the respect she pretends to have for Austen and chose the knee-jerk YA first person default, which made the book annoying at best, and lent a sense of self-importance to main character Lizzie Bennet that the character in Austen's world would never have assumed. It spoiled her.

Another unbelievable episode was George Wickham, who here was rendered a burglar, yet the family from whom he stole failed to press charges? There is no reason or rational explanation given for this. It made zero sense.

I found it amusing that Lizzie was highly antagonistic towards the wealthy, but was so hypocritical that her own sole measure of worth was skin-shallow beauty. That Jane was beautiful seemed to be the only quality she had according to Lizzie - that and being one of Lizzie's meager duo of friends at the school. Never did we learn a thing about Jane's intellect or her academic interests because it's first person you see! Lizzie obviously cares for no one but herself here, and she whines about her predicament constantly. It's a tedious read about a selfish brat who is more spoiled than the people she despises!

Talking of academic interests, and as in all bad high-school stories, the teaching staff was virtually non-existent in this novel, and again as in really bad school stories, bullying was so rife as to be running at parody levels. It was at this ridiculous point that I wanted to quit reading, because it was too silly for words. Two things alone kept me going. The first of these is the idiots who believe you can't review a book after reading only ten or twenty or fifty percent of it. Yes, you can. Deal with it, you critics of critics! If it's so awful that you cannot read it, that's a review right there and it's a reviewer's duty to warn others of such lousy writing. This book is a case in point.

The second reason is that I kept hoping that things would turn around and something would make this story stand out, but the ending was such a deflated affair that it made the novel worse, not better. The only thing that made it stand-out was what a waste of a decent idea it was. I should have quit at twenty percent. Fortunately, because of the wasting of paper, this book was a refreshingly quick read, and that's probably the best thing about it: the author doesn't make you suffer for very long for which I'm grateful!

Chapter 7 is a complete waste of paper. Lizzie spends the weekend at Charles Bingley's ski lodge with his sister, and with Will Darcy and Jane. The author's idea is to pair Lizzie up with Darcy to create another interaction, but it was so poorly executed that it was executed. The farcical premise for this is Lizzie's lack of The Canterbury Tales which she needs for a school assignment. Her plan is to go into town and buy a copy, and so of course Darcy offers to drive her. The thing is though, that it's available free on line! There are no grounds for her going into town and buying the book - except of course that the author was desperate to get the two of them together and could think of no better ruse than this. Badly done, Emma, er, Elizabeth, badly done! You could argue that these students were required to read from a specific edition, but the author never mentioned any such rule, which would have helped her case slightly, but is still a flimsy excuse.

Moving the story into a US private school system simply didn't work. It carried none of the be-all-and-end-all of rigid class marriage which Austen's original did. None of this was about marriage or future prospects, it was simply about bullying and the prom, and really, who the hell cares? The power which was vested in this prom was laughable, even by US standards, and the snottiness of the "upper crust" characters was ridiculous. Yes, I don't doubt for a New York minute that there are people like that, but to claim that every single student in the entire school thoroughly detested Lizzie with a vengeance was absolutely stupid, and totally unrealistic.

Note that the bullying didn't leave off at snide remarks and shunning: there was an active campaign involving physical abuse, which the invisible teachers did nothing to prevent, and which Lizzie openly facilitated by flatly refusing to 'snitch'. I have no idea why this business of not snitching is so widely employed in this ilk of story, but here it made Lizzie look like a spineless loser. Frankly, after reading about half of this, I felt like joining in on the side of the bullies, I disliked Lizzie so much.

You can find the real Jane Austen at www.janeausten.org if you want to read what she actually wrote. But this book isn't worth your time.

The Forbidden Stone by Tony Abbott

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook which failed for me. I didn't like the story and the reading by the curiously-named MacLeod Andrews was bad. The story started out just fine for the first chapter or so, but after that it devolved into tedious and stupid activities in which an irresponsible father trails four kids with him to Europe (and elsewhere, evidently) into dangerous situations, and then fails to go to the police, fails to get his kids out of danger, and in general just is a moron. These dimwits contaminate crime scenes and tamper with clues which could have led to a perceived suicide being seen by the police for the murder it was. I quickly decided this was too stupid to live. The fact that it's the start of a series is only one more reason to reject the mercenary heart of it.

It's a ridiculous Dan Brown-style story where some idiot leaves a trail marked by asinine cryptic clues for Becca, Darrel, Lily, and Wade, when all he had to do was make a phone call and tell his friend, or better yet, the police, what the deal was. Failing that, then at least post it on the Internet so the "shadowy" villains have no reason at all to chase your kids threateningly. It was profoundly dumb. I hope middle-graders are smart enough to see how silly this all is, and I feel sorry for those who are not, but of course, without this level of stupidity, there couldn't be a six book series, and neither the author nor the publisher would get rich off the allowances of middle-graders, would they now?

Evelyn After by Victoria Helen Stone

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"She smile sheepishly" (smiled, not smile)
"Evelyn dug hem out of her drawer and put them on" (them, not hem)
In chapter 22, third paragraph beginning "Evelyn found herself strangely disappointed..." is repeated as the fourth paragraph.

I had mixed feelings about this book, which started out strongly, but seemed to come unraveled rather quickly. In the end it was a disaster. Around sixty percent in I really wasn't feeling it at all, and I kept hoping it would turn around, but it went further south by eighty percent. I should have quit but I foolishly didn't and the ending was the worst part of all. It read more like bad fan-fiction than a professional novel.

The book was replete with routine flashbacks (chapters were labeled 'Before' or 'After', but I didn't always notice that on the Kindle version on my phone, and so sometimes the text was a bit confusing, although I admit in those cases it was my fault). The problem with flashbacks in general though, is that they bring the story to a screeching halt and I am always immensely resentful of that. Sometimes a flashback can serve a useful purpose, but usually to me they merely indicate laziness or incompetence on the part of the writer. In this case the flashbacks were unnecessary and should have been dispensed with. What little they revealed that was not about stalking and that was not boring could have been woven into the story

My biggest problem however, was with the main character Evelyn (a name apparently is pronounced the British way, as three syllables as in Evelyn Waugh). I really did not like her at all. She was far too self-serving and whiny. I don't think it's impossible to enjoy a novel whose main character you don't like, but I do assert that it's much harder to do so, and Evelyn kept making things worse by behaving stupidly, or irrationally, or obnoxiously. She isn't someone I would want to know. She's two-faced at best and a low-life at worst.

The story begins with her discovery that her husband Gary has been having an affair. I don't blame Evelyn for this but there are things she could have done, but failed to do, which would have improved her lot. She's whining that the baby fat she has from the birth of her son is a problem, yet it's been seventeen years. She could have shed it if she'd put her mind to it. She whines that she gave up on her art, when the fact is that she has never needed to work. Her husband is a highly paid psychiatrist, and she could have worked on her art projects all day long, but she chose not to. She dug this hole for herself and didn't even realize she was in one until things went sour in her marriage.

There is another much more serious issue which I don't want to get into for fear of giving too many spoilers, but this issue is worse and Evelyn's reaction to it really turned me off her. When she confronts Gary over the affair, he claims it's over and that he wants to put this behind them and get on with their life together, but while Evelyn claims she forgives him, it's clear she does not. she claims she still loves him, but it's clear from her behavior that there is no love there, and there hasn't been for a while.

This kind of thing made her dishonest at best and a liar at worst. She refuses to let Gary back into her life even though they continue to share the same house. Her motive is ostensibly that she cares too much about their son Cameron to break-up her marriage, but her behavior isn't conducive to a reconciliation - it's quite the opposite - so her behavior and her stated aim were completely at odds. She claims she doesn't trust him, but she believes everything he tells her, and never once questions his account of the more serious event. Not too smart!

I don't get why her husband stays with her. He has no reason to want to be with her whatsoever, yet he hangs around putting up with her crap like he's totally dependent upon her. His character made no sense whatsoever, and the "big twist" at the end, about about what really happened came as no surprise even to me, because it was so patently obvious. Once again, Evelyn ain't too smart.

Worse than this, she turns into a stalker, both of Juliette Whitman, the sylph-like diminutive blonde her husband was unfaithful with, and that woman's husband, Noah, with whom Evelyn herself has an affair. This isn't just cyber-stalking either; she literally spies on these two people, and harbors the most abusive attitude towards Juliette, referring to her repeatedly as a whore, yet she never describes herself in those terms no matter how many times she goes at it with Noah. The sex scenes were quite well done, but the joy of those is tarnished by the fact that I really was starting to dislike Evelyn before they began, and they were juvenile.

Abandon' scarcely begins to describe this couple's approach to getting it on. At one point I read, when Noah offered to get a condom: Evelyn shook her head. "I have an IUD.", but no IUD is going to protect against venereal diseases, and neither of them stops for a second to think about this. She knows who Noah is, and evidently assumes he is clean because he's been married to the same woman for many years, but she has no idea if he's been faithful, and she knows for a fact that his wife has had at least one affair, so she has no idea what Noah's sexual health is, and he hasn't the faintest clue about hers, yet they go at it like rabbits without a hint of discussion regarding health. The only concern is that she might become pregnant (which is possible. She's only forty-one after all).

I never did get the back and forth over going to see a therapist about fixing their marriage. Evelyn mutely chides her husband over dithering on it, but when he pursues her about it, she reveals (to the reader, not to him) that she has no intention of going to one because she considers the marriage to be over! But the author herself forgets what the status is of their therapy plans. At one point in chapter eleven, and later in chapter nineteen, then again in chapter 24, Evelyn discusses with her husband the prospect of choosing a therapist from a list she's prepared and given to him. He says he likes the first one on the list, but then in the next chapter, he's saying he got her list, like they've never discussed it before. Later still, in chapter thirty, they're still harping on this. It made no sense at all!

When Noah abruptly breaks it off with Evelyn purportedly out of guilt, after their weekend "retreat" - or more like a weekend advance - she coldly dismisses him from the hotel room with every overtone of finality, but then she frets over why he's not calling her or sending her a birthday greeting? She's a moron. he feels so little guilt, evidently, that he goes at it agian with her as soon as she calls him to remind this guy whom she threw out of the hotel, that he forgot her birthday! No, I'm sorry, but no. Why should I want to read about a callous and selfish bitch like this, let alone empathize with her?

I'm sorry, but that's exactly what she was. Over the course of the story She turns into a creepy stalker, which is really where she's being going this whole novel. That's her only growth. She's vindictive and selfish, and gives precious little thought to this son she's supposed to be protecting. She helps cover up a serious crime and feels no guilt whatsoever about it. In the end she gets away scot-free with her behavior and is in fact rewarded for it. No. This novel is not worth reading, and I felt resentful of the time I wasted on it hoping it would improve or that there was some big moral lesson coming. Neither option happened.

The Devil’s Prayer by Luke Gracias

Rating: WARTY!

I was completely misled by the book blurb here. I know that's what book blurbs do: it's their job, and you can't blame the author for them unless the author self-publishes, but a blurb usually has something to do with the story it's purportedly describing. This one really did not - at least not as judged by the first fifty percent of this novel, which is all I could stand to read.

I thought I was getting an advance review copy of a supernatural story: the Devil and all His Works kind of thing - but it turned out to be nothing more than a slasher book, worthy of the Halloween and Friday the 13th movies. I gave up on it at fifty percent because of this. I was thoroughly disgusted with it and completely turned off by it.

The blurb tells it like it's all about Siobhan, the young daughter of a nun who committed suicide, but the first half of the book is not about Siobhan at all, except in the most cursory sense. It consists of long, tedious excerpts from her mom's secret diary, which are told in first person voice - the very voice I most detest.

One major reason I detest it is because of the utter lack of credibility in first person accounts which are unbelievably detailed and far too precise to actually be a first person account. Any cop listening to a story like that from a witness would immediately dismiss it as made-up at best, and outright lies at worst. No one tells a story of something that happened to them in this manner except in novels and it's so unrealistic that I cannot stand to read it. It's very rare to find a 1PoV novel that's worthy of reading. This one didn't even come close.

The worst part was the account of the rape. I've never been raped and I can't pretend for a second I can speak for anyone who has, but speaking from my own PoV and from what I have read about this topic, including people who had been forced to suffer it, this account by Siobhan's mom was ridiculous in the extreme. To me, it was insulting to those who have been violated like this and cheapened the real horror and brutality of it. I recommend that the author read some of those accounts, and completely rewrite this section of the novel, and then he might avoid clunky dialog like, "As my body was violated I felt defiled." Seriously?

Even if this had happened to Siobhan's mom the way she said, I honestly could not believe for a minute that she would write the account of it the way she did in, so much lurid detail with word-for-word conversations - not in an account intended for her own daughter. It felt like she was telling a story rather than recounting something horrific which had actually happened to her. And why would she? Why not just say "I was raped and made a pact with the Devil, and I took my revenge on those who attacked me"? It made no sense whatsoever that she would write it like this for page after page, after page, and it made me fully aware throughout the entire time that I was reading a sensationalized and revoltingly-misguided attempt to stir up sexual emotion rather then tell a realistic story.

This is the problem with 1PoV. Siobhan's mom could not have been present for some of this story, so there is no way she could recount what happened, and there's no way that someone who had been traumatized like that - broken and injured, and put into a coma - could (or would even want to) recall so much detail of what happened. Even if she did, I cannot believe for a minute than any mom would share all this to her daughter in so much gory and sordid detail. It was like the author thought that rape alone wasn't bad enough, and unless he went into immense detail about it, there really was no crime to "justify" her behavior afterwards - like this woman hadn't really been raped unless she was further violated with all the nasty fine points.

The diary goes on to describe not just the rape in excruciating detail, but also how her mom took bloody revenge on those who had abused her, killing them in brutal fashion worthy only of cheap B movies. It was too ridiculous and at this point was so far from what the blurb had told me I'd be reading, that I quit in disgust. I cannot recommend this book based on the misleading blurb and the fifty percent I read which treats rape so lightly. If you're into splatter-punk, then this might be for you, but if you wanted a supernatural thriller, you're in the wrong book.

Bunnicula Strikes Again by James Howe

Rating: WARTY!

I never read the original Bunnicula, and I never will! This was evidently, thinks I, volume two, but in fact turned out to be volume six! I made it about half way through before giving up on it. All is not lost though, because this print book will go to a local library which has limited funds, so others will benefit from it! I hope!

The joke here is that the rabbit is a vampire, but not for blood - for veggie juice, sucking vegetables dry. It's hilarious - as far as the concept goes, and I can't speak for the entertainment value of volume one, but this felt like five volumes too many, and is a major reason why I don't typically like series! They're boring, and by nature are derivative and repetitive. That doesn't work for me. In this case, this one didn't go anywhere. I read fifty percent of this and quite literally nothing happened. It was a tedious diary of a kid and his dog lying around, running downstairs, running upstairs, spying on the cat, and lying around. Yawn. A good portion of it was references to, and recapping of, volume one, which is just cheating in my book, but it is a hallmark of series.

Based on fifty percent of this, I can't recommend it. It wasn't in the least bit entertaining.

Trans-Sister Radio by Chris Bohjalian

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second of a disappointing pair of transgender books I'm reviewing today, both written by guys named Chris! This one was an audiobook, which for me is more experimental and therefore more likely to fail. This one sounded really promising, but in the end it turned out to be boring, slow-moving like you wouldn't believe, and with apparently no intention of ever going anywhere.

The attraction of this story for me was of the same variety that moved me to write Tears in Time which I published earlier this year. Is this love lost? If so, can you find it? If you find it will you recognize it? If you recognize it, what will you do about it?

Allison Banks, divorced and in her forties, finds herself attracted to Dana Stevens. The cover blurb says, "develops a crush on" like she's some teen-aged fluff-head, but I don't blame the author for the sheer incompetence and rank stupidity of book blurb writers! Not unless they self-publish! What Allison doesn't know, and doesn't learn right away is that Dana is a transgender male to female, about to start on that painful and lengthy journey. She's attracted to Allison, too, but she can't stay male. When she transitions, what is going to happen to their relationship? I thought this was a choice topic for a novel, but the execution of it failed for me.

One big mistake writers make is laziness. Make a girl a book-reader and she's intelligent. That way you don't have to do the work of showing she's intelligent. Make a person work in a bookstore or in this case, for public radio, and you pigeon-hole that person, telling to avoid having to show. I'm not a fan of epistolary or 'dear diary' novels either, but this was one, in effect.

It featured "transcripts" from a national public radio show about transgender people, and worse than this, it split the story between two perspectives, Allison's and Dana's. It didn't commit the final sin of making those perspectives first person, so I have to commend it for that, but really it was too much. The novel staggered along under all this lard, ponderously crawling, and it was stuffed with horsehair (that's the closest I can get without being foul-mouthed).

Judith Ivey's Boston-accented reading voice failed to help as well. It was awful to listen to, and I found myself tuning it out from time to time, and missing the story. After twenty percent, I gave up on it, so based on the short exposure I had, I can't recommend it. Your frequency may differ!

BALLS It Takes Some to Get Some by Chris Edwards

Rating: WARTY!

This is a review of a book for which I was allowed a review copy, for which thank the publisher!

This is the first of a disappointing pair of transgender books I'm reviewing today, both written by guys named Chris! The blurb for this book is as misleading as they get. You can't blame the author (Chris Edwards, not to be confused with author Christopher Edwards) for this because they have nothing to do with their blurb unless they self publish, but I did want to mention it as a point of order, and because it's something out of the author's hands that can seriously and negatively impact the very book the author has written.

The blurb says "At a time when the term transgender didn't exist...Chris Edwards endured 28 surgeries to become the person he always knew he was meant to be." The problem with this is that this book covers the author's experiences in changing gender largely during the nineties and into the early oughts (although it references some time before), whereas the term 'transgender' was coined in 1965, which was, I'm roughly estimating, about five years before the author was born) and was in common use by the seventies. So common had it become by the nineties that in 1992, the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy had codified a definition of it! So no, the blurb is outright wrong here.

I really wanted to like this book because I loved the title. It was when I began reading the first chapter that I began to realize I should not have loved the title so much. I really didn't like the first chapter, but it improved after that, and so I had mixed feelings as I read on. Although it continued quite strongly from there on, it seriously deteriorated the further I read, and by the end, I didn't even want to read the epilogue and that's where I stopped.

For me the book was at it's best when it described the struggle the author went through to get where he needed to go, which was from the fabulously-named Kristin Eskandarian, to the end goal of Chris Edwards. Determined he was and suffer he did, and I suffered with him (after a fashion!) but enjoyed the experience while it lasted. Every fundamentalist who thinks being gay or transgender is a "choice" needs to read books like this to get themselves an education. No one chooses this ostracism, punishment, struggle, emotional overload and physical pain. No one wants it. No one wishes for it, but some must endure it, and amongst those are people who cannot do right by themselves until they have corrected, to the best of their ability, a heartless trick of nature. This author is one of those people.

Religion just pisses me off, frankly, which is why I had a hard time reading, towards the end of the book, this musing: "I always wondered why God made me transgender." This blind belief imposed by society on everyone from birth (well they try) that some magical being has a plan for all of us is delusional. It is also a burden no one should have to endure, because it makes life harder and inexplicable when you have to accommodate a big bearded giant in the sky. It forces questioning statements like this out of people because when you let god in, you let rationality out. I can't prove this, but the evidence is all on my side: no god had anything to do with this. It's just nature, screwing-up. Fortunately, albeit clumsy as yet, science has the power to go a long way towards correcting nature's mistakes of one sort or another. No god can help, and anyone who worships a god who would purposefully do this kind of thing to people is worshiping an evil, capricious god not worthy of human intellect or attention in my opinion.

The early strength of this book was in its unflinching reportage of the physical struggle: the inconvenience at best, and pain and suffering at worst. The weakness of it was that there seemed to be no "emotional content" as Bruce Lee so cutely phrased it in his movie Enter the dragon There needs to be emotional content in a story like this and I wasn't feeling it. And while this is a memoir and so is expected to be about the author, the problem was that it was all about him, with very little time or room for anyone else, least of all other people in his position.

We have mention of family and friends frequently, but they are always bit players and they seem to disappear completely in the latter portion of the book. We never really get a feel for what they went through because the author is so intently focused on what he's going through. This really came to a head (if you'll forgive the unintended pun) in the last few chapters where the focus was not on his life in general, his liberation, what he experienced in general as a man, and and how he felt about everything. Instead of that, which would have been wonderful, the sole focus was on his desperate quest to get laid!

This really soured me on the entire book, and cheapened the experience of reading it considerably. While I was hoping for more of the post-surgery story, all I got was this endless quest to find a female and this is when it really brought it home to me that the author was very much a guy. His story was all about balls, but it was balls in the sense of testosterone, and not in the sense of guts. In short, it was the opposite of what I'd hoped for when I first saw this title.

I'd wanted a before-and-after story and in a sense, there wasn't one because for the author, there was only after. There never was a before because he never was a woman except in the most superficial sense. I get that, I do, but there is still a story there, and I kept getting hints of it here and there which were disappointingly brief: about how he felt and how he was treated when he was perceived as a woman as compared with when he brought out the man who had always been subsumed under a female exterior.

I'd hoped for more of a general story of post-op life along those lines, but all we really got was the op. There was no 'post' other than what I just mentioned, which sadly was all about his new "post" if I can put it that way, and it sounded rather desperate and of an entirely frat-boy mentality, which turned me right off. It was this kind of thing which made me dislike that first chapter, too.

There's a sick genderist joke that a man's brains are in his penis, and this memoir played right into its hands. In fact the author indulges himself in this kind of genderism when he writes, "Luckily the testosterone had yet to override the female part of my brain that has no qualms about asking for directions." Seriously? There were several such Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot statements such as: "I wanted my first time to be with someone I really cared about—who cared about me" which felt so hypocritical coming as it did at the end of bunch of chapters which talked only about getting laid - and with not a single mention of sexual diseases and risks. I found myself wondering, more than once, what happened to the woman? And the answer was always there: there never was a woman, not in any sense in this book! It was always a guy!

That kind of thing would have made more sense had it not come after statements like this one: "He then informed me that if I’m with a woman at a revolving door, the gentlemanly thing to do is to enter first and get it going so she doesn’t have to exert any effort. This guy was a true gentleman in every sense of the word, which is exactly what I intended to be." To me that's sheer sexism. A 'true gentleman' may well be what he was, but he didn't give me that impression having read those last few chapters, where it was all about sex, never about relationships, companionship, building trust, shared interests, or getting to know someone before diving headlong into them. Again, these are things guys are known for doing - and juvenile guys at that. There is no feminine side to this.

That quote harbors another issue, too. Are men and women supposed to be treated equally or not? If we are, then women don't get to have doors opened for them, unless you happen to be going out first, and hold it for the next person coming right behind, but in that case, the gender of either person is irrelevant. It's just the polite thing to do. But equality means precisely that - equal treatment for all. You don't get get to have the car door opened, or for men to stand up when you enter the room, or for you keep your purse closed while the man's wallet is perennially open on your date. Otherwise it's not equality, it's privilege, class, and special treatment which is precisely what the suffragists accused men of. Do we really want to go back to that? More on privilege anon.

It felt very hypocritical reading a statement like that above from someone who is, in this very memoir, talking of equality in the extreme: of the right of those who are gender dysphoric to be allowed to equalize themselves as this author was allowed, and to be allowed to be treated as all other men and women when the surgeries are over. That's what equality means. But as long as you're talking about wanting to be "a true gentleman", then you're missing the point! This is not to say men should be allowed to be dicks and jerks. We can still be polite, considerate, and well-behaved, but this behavior should not be considered the sole preserve of the male gender, especially since (some would argue and upon very solid grounds!) men are not even there yet! There's no reason at all these days why a woman should not open a car door for a guy, or why she should not go down on one knee and propose marriage!

The author's family, which had played an important role in the early chapters, were pretty much banished from the second half of the book. No longer was this thirty-year-old guy traveling with his mom for consultations. Family was out, which frankly felt a bit odd to me. Traveling with family for post op help I could see, but for a consultation? It felt more like fiction than memoir, but in the end it was his choice.

The fictional shadow grew darker when I read a statement like this: "Dr. Laub had made it his mission to travel to underdeveloped countries and provide life-changing plastic surgeries to tens of thousands of people." Now I don't doubt that a surgeon could perform tens of thousands of operations over a long career. But I just did a calculation, and over a career of forty years, starting from age 28 (four years of university, four years of medical school, and two years of residency minimum, would put him at 28), a doctor could perform ten thousand operations if he did five per week, fifty weeks per year.

That's not a heavy load by any means, but remember that what we're talking about here is charitable surgery in third world countries, and he wasn't doing those at the rate of five per week for fifty weeks of the year over forty years. He was doing those on trips away from his regular work. Hundreds I can see, maybe even thousands of such operations, but tens of thousands, all of them life saving? No. Just no! Doing such work is commendable and worthy, but let's be realistic about what he does instead of inflating it. We're not Donald Trump after all. To do otherwise is to do Dr Laud a disservice. If he supervised or worked with teams of surgeons doing these surgeries, then I can see tens of thousands over an extended period. But not one man. In fact, working with teams is what he did if you read about his work. Wikipedia describes it as "tens of thousands of life-altering operations gratis." That sounds more like it and does indeed make him a super-hero in my book!

It was slips like this that made me distrust the author setting himself up as a sort of spokesperson for the gender dysphoric. Quite often throughout this book there were directives like this: "You should never ask someone who is transgender if they have had or plan to have surgery."

I didn't grow up in the US so it's not my nature to ask personal questions of people I just met. I wouldn't advise it whether they're transsexual or anything else. I don't even ask such questions of people I know well unless it's relevant and I know they will not mind. This is why I have to wonder if the author is really talking on behalf of all who share his experience, or if this is just how he feels, and he's projecting it onto everyone else.

I don't trust it. That's not to say I'm advising asking the first transgender person you encounter all manner of personal questions. Far from it! It's just that I don't believe that all transgender people are the same (except in that they're transgender!) I believe they're like everyone else: some won't want to talk about it - perhaps the majority - whereas others might well be inclined to discuss it in appropriate circumstances. This author wrote a book about it for goodness sake!

The point that it's their choice, not mine, yours, or this author's, so do not expect that, just because they've had a "weird surgery" that it's up for grabs in the topics for discussion department. And ask only if you know them well, and know they will be receptive to discussing it. Remember they did not have a choice over which body they were born in, but they do have a choice whether to discuss what they did about it. Respect that choice and leave it with them to make!

There was one more thing which bothered me, and which the author made only one mention of in the entire book, and that was privilege. This memoir reeks of it. These operations cost literally thousands of dollars (I won't go so far as to say tens of thousands of life-saving dollars!), and this guy or his family could afford them. He could afford the best, and could fly across country at the drop of a hat to discuss a procedure with a doctor, and pick out the best surgeon to perform it.

I wouldn't wish what he went through on anyone, and I admire and salute him for having the 'balls' and stamina, and the courage to go after what he wanted, but the fact is that, as badly done-to as he felt from being trapped in the wrong body and having to suffer emotional stress, and humiliation, and painful, prolonged surgeries to get the right body, he did have the money and means, and opportunity to get it done.

He was extremely privileged in that regard, but from the way this was written, I got no sense of gratitude or of appreciation from this book of how lucky he was he was or how grateful he was to have been privileged enough to pursue his dream when scores of others in his position do not have the same access he did. In a just world, everyone would have this access if they needed it, yet he writes as though it's a right (which it ought to be, granted!) he enjoyed without any sense of humility that he had this access when scores of others are denied it.

It felt rather selfish and was exemplified in this comment late in the book: "After all I do for everyone else, nobody was helping me." This was after his family had paid for surgeries and accompanied him left, right, and center, and his friends had been amazingly and commendably supportive, and he has a great network of people rooting for him, and he's had the opportunity to get precisely what he wanted in life, and now he's discussing getting laid and this is his comment? As much as I wanted to like and commend a book like this, this is not the one I find I can in good faith, lend my support to. I'm sorry and I wish the author all the best in his new life, but I cannot recommend this account of it.

Memory Maze by Gordon Korman

Rating: WARTY!

Audiobooks are hit and miss with me since I experiment with them more. This was a miss. I got to 20% in and gave up on it. The story was ludicrous, which might have made it an unintentionally funny read, but it was far too boring for that, and the boredom was in no way helped by Ramón de Ocampo's reading, which turned me right off. I would have had a hard time listening to it even if the novel had been thoroughly engrossing. It was far too John Green for my taste and the voices were not rendered well.

The story, which is number two (and felt like it) in a series, is about Jackson Opus, who is a master hypnotist. This was a refreshingly original super power to have, but then the author had to ascribe every single historical event to the use of hypnotism and it became laughable - and not in a fun way. Even Abe Lincoln was dragged into it at one point, and I remember thinking, it didn't help save his life, did it? I don't mind stories like this being woven into history, but when the author starts to tie literally every important event into it, it smacks of sheer amateurism and becomes far too stupid to take seriously, or even jokingly for that matter.

I flatly refuse to read any novel which has a main character named Jack, which is the most tedious go-to action adventure name ever to be over-used in literature. Even if the blurb makes the novel sound interesting, it goes right back on the shelf if one of the main characters is named Jack. I think I'm gong to have to add Jax and Jackson to that banned list now. Rather than take action, these people would much prefer to let others bear the brunt and pay the price while they hide out. They're far happier scratching their heads and whining about how Jax needs to become more powerful, but never have him practice anything. They would rather let the bad guy do whatever he wants without taking any steps to out him, and expose him. They're idiots.

This story had "Jax" and his family hiding out a hundred miles from home, living like paupers just to stay safe from the evil villain. Some hero huh?! He's using the cheesiest name imaginable as a non-disguise. His old name was Opus, so his new name is Magnus? Really? No one is ever going to think it's him. He's supposed to be keeping a low profile, but he enters a chess tournament and wins. This kid is a moron. I don't want to read about morons, not even if it's supposed to be funny. Because it's not! That's for parodies, not for original fiction!

The leader of the good guys has abandoned all his followers to support Jax, and his followers are being bumped-off. All they had to do here was to get on a rooftop with an AK 47 and take out this guy, but of course they can't do the realistic and intelligent thing (in the context of this fictional story in order to save the world from this ruthlessly evil guy). No instead, they have to play fair and it makes the story stilted and artificial and just plain ridiculous.

The big problem here is hypnotism of course, because it can make victims do anything, and then forget they've done it, yet nowhere did I hear of either Jax or his powerful hypnotist guru (who is also hiding) talking or even thinking about how to nullify the hypnotic effect. Jax never gives an ounce of thought to how to beat the guy. Of course as soon as the guy is beaten, that's the end of a cash cow for this author and this publisher, so where's the incentive to tell a realistic story and bring it to a satisfying conclusion? It's far easier to drag this same story out than to come up with something new, original, and inventive. This is another reason why I typically, and with few exceptions, detest series. They're far too derivative, repetitive, vacuous and vapid.

I have better things to read!

The Candidate by Lis Wiehl, Sebastian Stuart

Rating: WARTY!

Please note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. The Kindle app version was pretty crappy in terms of formatting both on my iPad and on my phone. Clearly it was a rushed job, and I hope that it will be fixed before the published version is released. There seems to have been some fancy capitalization of the first few words of each chapter which is never a good idea, not even in the print version, and this didn't translate well, plus several chapter numbers were missing (chapters 46, 47, and 48 for example). I know people complain about the Smashwords's meat-grinder process, but the kind of sloppiness in evidence here is the very reason Smashwords is so anal about ebook formatting!

The blurb for this book (and this one isn't alone in this) is laughable: "With each death, her foreboding grows. Is she next? And can she find out in time if the country's beloved candidate is what he seems...?" Well yes, of course she can, otherwise why are we reading about her instead of about the person who can achieve these goals? Big Publishing™! LOL! Do they really think their readers are so gullible and clueless? I hope not, but if not why let their blurb writers get away with unoriginal and tedious blurbs like this?

This is why I self-publish, but the blurb, like the cover itself, has nothing to do with the author, so it doesn't factor into my review (other than to mention it here). The problems with this book are not the blurb or even the endless gushing recommendations for other books contained in the beginning (like I care!), but the story itself which is so implausible as to be worthy of a parody.

This is evidently book 2 in the Newsmakers series, which I did not realize when I chose it for review. With rare exceptions, I'm not a fan of series and I certainly have no intention of pursuing this one. It just doesn't spark any enduring interest in me and the main character isn't very engrossing, or realistic. Nether does she make me care what happens to her. Note also in passing that there are other books with this same title, such as The Candidate by Josie Brown, by Samuel L. Popkin, by Tracey Richardson, The Candidates by Bette Browne, and so on. A different title would have been a wiser choice.

This book manages to feel rather like it's written in first person voice, which is far from my favorite. It actually isn't in that voice, but it's written in present tense, which I think contributes to the feeling. It's worth noting from a writer's perspective: immediacy without first person! Who knew? I hope YA authors are paying attention! Anyway, to give you a taste, I'm writing my review in the same voice. So I'm reading, for example, "She drives south on the New York State Thruway and then exits and heads west to the village of Woodstock," instead of something like, "She drove south on the New York State Thruway and exited at Woodstock." It felt weird, and reminded me often that I was reading a novel, preventing me from full immersion in the story.

Other than that - which strikes me as odd - the writing itself is technically not bad in terms of grammar and spelling - once I got by this clunker, that is: "chemistry that sparks." No, electricity sparks, not chemistry! The story moves fairly quickly, but at times I feel like it's so improbable that I don't see how it moves at all. For example, the central theme of this book, as is apparent long before main character Erika Sparks starts putting two and two together, is mind control, but the source of this isn't from modern studies and techniques, but from an antique Chinese philosophical treatise. More on this anon. This strikes me as a poor plot device.

Worse than this though, is that I find it hard to believe that a reporter of Erika Sparks's purported stature and insight isn't onto this long before she actually starts thinking about it. It makes no sense either that she is the only one who notices it. The whole thing is presaged by information we get early (and on more than one occasion) that one of the candidates for the upcoming presidential election was a prisoner of Al Qaeda in Iraq for several months and managed to miraculously "escape". Perhaps if she had no meandered through far too much distraction, none of which contributed to the story, and all-too-often bogged it down, she would have got there faster?

This makes me suspicious of 'The Candidate' from the off. The real mystery here is why no one else is, especially since it's exactly the same plot device that's employed in the first season of the Homeland TV show which I quit watching after I realized that every season is the same as last, with a twist or two and a character change. This book doesn't follow that show exactly, but it's the very same idea. It feels very tired, and there's far too much telling and nowhere near enough showing.

I have to disagree with Erika over her medical knowledge. She's a bit too casual - or the writing describing her behavior is. If you're considering applying a tourniquet, then you need to be fully aware that you're simultaneously considering sacrificing the limb below the tourniquet. It's important therefore to try and save as much of the limb as you reasonably can, and include the joint if you can. If you can't, you can't, but to have her blindly apply the tourniquet above the joint without telling us something along the lines of "this was the wisest decision" is misleading, and it makes her look inept or ignorant. That's not a good look for a news reporter!

That Erika is rather slow in the mental acuity department is one of the saddest things about her. She's also a very weak character until the great escape at the end of the book, which is what makes me quit reading in disgust at 92%, because it's completely ludicrous, and utterly unbelievable. Additionally, she's easily manipulated and rather vapid - in short, not the kind of woman I look up to or want to read about. She presents herself far more as a "desperate housewife" than ever she does as an award-winning and popular news reporter.

One example (of many) of her dependency on others is when she responds to Josh, her pointless and brief love interest, showing up to take her out: "It must be Josh. Who is exactly the person she needs right now to pull her out of this dark mood. Well, Erika soon gets shot of this guy that she feels is so important at this point in the story! Caprice much?!

I get that having a friend stop by gives a person a good feeling, and that wouldn't have been so bad had it not been accompanied by everything else, but as it is, it's merely one more example of yet another female character needing to be validated by a guy or rescued by him like she's some maiden tied-up in front of a dragon, needing St George to gallop in and save her. Worse than this, there's YA-style triangle, or at least the makings of one, which is not only totally unnecessary - the story would have been better without any romantic entanglements - but which serves only to make her look like she's at best, a ditz and at worse, callous.

On that score, this book hosts what is an ongoing problem with obsession with women's looks. In some ways I can see a male author zeroing in on this (not that that makes it justifiable), but what disturbs me is that so many female authors do the same thing. I read on one page after another: "She's a reasonably attractive young redhead in her early twenties," and "By the way, you're much prettier in person," and "thunderstruck by the singer's beauty," and "His wife, Margaret, is an attractive woman in her forties," and "Claire is a raven-haired, Stanford-bred beauty."

My question here is what does any this have to do with the story? There's no comparable description of the men like this. If there had been, it would at least not have been so biased, but it would still have been guilty of reducing someone's entire worth to their looks alone. These people are not models. If the novel is about runway models or female actors, it would have offered some grounds to address their looks, but this novel isn't about any such topic, and it was nauseating to read all this.

So why does this author put so much stock in women's looks? Is it because she thinks this is all women have to offer? Is it because she believes that men have so much more to offer? Or is it because she's simply selling-out to people who think this is how women ought to be portrayed in novels? Frankly it's despicable, and I think it's shameful for anyone - and for a female author in particular - to bring women down to this shallow depth of skin. This is the main reason why I'm rating this negatively. Women deserve better. It's not the only reason, by any means as we shall see.

One of those quotes about beauty is what a guy says to Erika ("By the way, you're much prettier in person"). This by itself isn't a problem, because this is how some people think and worse, how they behave. The problem in that particular case is that this is spoken by Erika's new love interest before he's anything more than a new acquaintance, and she never calls him on it. Instead she actually basks in it.

This obsession with skin-depth evidently extends throughout the series. When I go back and look at the blurb for the first book I read this: "Beautiful, talented, and ambitious, Erica grew up dirt poor..." Again with the beauty. And note that the beauty precedes all her other "qualities" because it's quite obviously the most important! You can argue that this is in the blurb, and therefore has nothing to do with the author, but clearly the author has the same idea judged by what's in this book.

Erika is investigating one of the two candidates for the presidency, and she's growing ever more suspicious of him. Well into the novel, I discover that she's begun reading a memoir he wrote about his time as a prisoner in Iraq. Wait, what? She's been covering this guy for many months, and she's only just now, reading his memoir? Worse than this, she visits Iraq to follow-up on his story - and she's the first reporter to do this? No, that's simply not credible. Nor is this: "inhaling a plate of eggs and sausage and potatoes." I hope that's beef or turkey sausage because you can't get pork sausage in the Middle East - not in a hotel anyway! It's against Muslim dietary laws.

Another fail was the number of things which are launched with great fanfare in this novel only to sink out of sight faster than the Titanic (unless they all feature prominently in the last eight percent!). Erika has her teenage daughter with her. This kid serves no purpose whatsoever other than to lard-up the story. Erika had fought for custody, we're told, even though her daughter is her last priority. Erika is a bad parent, period. She spends no time with the kid, and this is raised as a point of contention, but it's never pursued. On the other hand her daughter is unnaturally clingy and juvenile for her age, so perhaps Erika has a point. LOL! The real point here though, is why include the kid in the story? She serves no purpose other than to be an annoying distraction.

On top of this is the ongoing nonsense with Erika's fiancé, who never actually appears in this story, but is dealt with through constant references and an occasional phone call. Again, I saw no reason to have him in this story at all. At one point Erika gets pissed-off with him and starts dating guy number two (at least that's how he's treated!). She leads him on and then summarily ditches him, which again serves no purpose other than to offer one more reason to detest Erika - and I need no more reasons at this point.

Another issue is this ancient book of philosophy which seems to be such a crucial topic at one point in the book and then it disappears from the story entirely. We're presented with these purportedly ruthless and obsessed villains who are assassinating anyone who gets in their way, yet when this "critical" book appears, and a guy starts translating it, the two of them ignore it completely! There's no theft of the book and no assassination. There's no interest in it whatsoever.

The villains are a joke, BTW. They're more like naughty, immature, high school bullies than ever they fit the role of evil behind-the-scenes manipulators. It was as sad as it was pathetic, and the ending (at least the part I read before I quit in disgust) is just not credible. This is a woman who has been held in captivity for a week tied to a chair. She's been constantly blindfolded, injected with god knows what, sensory-deprived, (and all this after coming back from two touristy days in Iraq with PTSD?), yet she plots her escape and executes it flawlessly and ruthlessly, taking out two guys on the way despite being shot in the leg? I'm sorry, but this is when I quit. It was absurd and completely implausible. I wish the authors all the best with their careers, but I cannot recommend a book that feels like I'm reading poor fan fiction.

A January Bride by Deborah Raney

Rating: WARTY!

I got his audio book because it sounded like it might be interesting, but the story was so badly told that it wasn't worth the listening, and I gave up halfway through. This is evidently part of a series "A Year of Weddings". How January got to be number two in that system is a mystery, but this story was definitely number two, trust me.

The plot was farcical. Two people never meet initially, communicating instead through a series of notes, each thinking the other person is older than themselves. The woman, Maddie Houser, is a novelist who is working on a romance novel "A January Bride" (and becomes one? I don't know). The guy is the owner of the inn where she's staying temporarily while renovations are carried out to her house. The artificiality by which the two are kept apart was tedious and served no purpose other than to keep reminding me that this was a badly-written novel.

Plus there were religious overtones to the story which spoiled it for me. I didn't expect to be reading fantasy! These people are putting their faith in a god who robbed one of them of his spouse prematurely, yet they're supposed to believe that it's all for the best? If this god wanted the two of them to get together, why did he not put them together to begin with instead of putting the guy with someone else, and then tearing her away from him? I have no faith in a capricious god like that. A god which would do things like that, to me, is at best juvenile and at worst, an outright evil god.

The best thing I can say about this story is that it was short, but it was so poorly-written, artificial in the extreme, and boring, that I couldn't even stand to listen to all of it even as short as it was. I can't recommend it based on what I listened to because there was no romance here, not in the best tradition of the word.

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook I picked up on spec at my delightful local library. I tend to experiment more with audio books taking chances on things I might not be interested in looking at in print or e-format. It turned out that the title was more entertaining than the novel. The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters, when read as a sentence like that, suggests that at midday, near where Elizabeth was standing, the last camel died! The story itself, which is number six in a mystery series, was not listenable. The prose was entirely too florid for my taste, making it sound far more like the author was more intent upon impressing herself with how well she could portray Victorian characters, than ever she was in getting on with the story. On top of this, I didn’t like the two main characters, and certainly was not interested in listening through a long book about them.

The story is supposedly set in Egypt although the main characters had not arrived there by the time I gave up on this, and actually didn’t even remotely seem like they would ever get there at the rate they were going. It was too ponderous and too pretentious, and I really couldn’t stand it or Barbara Rosenblatt’s narration. Based on what I listened to which was admittedly not much, I can’t recommend this one.

The Wolf Keepers by Elise Broach

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"He had a teasing look on her face" She had a pleasing look?!
"She tried a different tact" tack?!

I have to vote a 'no' for this one, I'm sorry to report. While the novel itself wasn't written badly and contained some interesting story-telling, the overall message of irresponsibility and misbehavior by these kids, and of withholding important information from parents, for which there were no consequences, really turned me off this. I don't think it's the kind of thing a middle-grader should be reading. Worse than this, I felt it portrayed people of color in an unflattering light and the young girl as easily led. I won't go so far as to say it's racist and genderist, but to me it sure felt that way from time to time.

The basic story features Lizzie Durango, who is the daughter of a senior zoo keeper if not the head of the zoo itself. I didn't quite get exactly what her father's role was. If the book mentioned it, I missed it, but he lives with Lizzie in a house on the zoo grounds. Lizzie never knew her mother, who died shortly after Lizzie was born. Her father never remarried.

Lizzie has the run of the zoo during the summer, and free food at the concession stands. This was one of the problems for me. There seemed to be no supervision, and Lizzie was essentially eating junk food all day, every day. This tells me her father was more concerned about the animals than he was his own daughter! He was an irresponsible parent. As far as it went, this is fine because in real life there are irresponsible parents. What bothered me here is that this issue was never addressed, and he was never brought to book for his behavior.

Lizzie is keeping a notebook on activities at the zoo as a summer project for school, but this was another issue. I never did get why the notebook was so important, because while it occupied a lot of the story-telling, it featured so little in events and had nothing to do with the plot. I had thought it might contain useful information that became important later in the story, but this never happened, so why there was such a focus on it escapes me. It was tied to a side-story about John Muir, but this story never really went anywhere and I didn't see the point of it. Worse than this, Lizzie's personal behavior seemed completely at odds with her adoration of John Muir. He was a very responsible and far-sighted naturalist, whereas Lizzie was about as short-sighted and inconsiderate as you can get.

One day Lizzie encounters Tyler Briggs, a kid her own age, who is a runaway from a foster home, and who is living behind the elephant enclosure at the zoo. The two kids begin to bond although no good reason is offered for why they should. One of Lizzie's favorite exhibits is the new wolf enclosure where rescued wolves live. There's also a minor side-story about her bonding with the wolf-pack leader, but this doesn't really go anywhere either and is betrayed on one occasion. It made no sense to me, but anyway, the wolves are apparently becoming sick and dying one by one, but it turns out that it's not quite that simple. There are, Tyler tells Lizzie, odd activities in the zoo at night, especially around the wolf enclosure. One night the two of them spy on these activities, and they discover that someone is tampering with the wolves.

So far, so good, but it was right around this point that the story went completely downhill for me. None of it made sense from here on out, but I can't go into very much detail without giving away huge spoilers which makes it really difficult to explain why I disliked this story so much. Let me just say that the plan for the wolves is that they will be rehabilitated and released into the wild at some point which makes the behavior of a certain zoo employee meaningless, and undermines the whole reason why Lizzie and Tyler end up alone in the Yosemite National Park. I've visited Yosemite, all too briefly, and I loved it. I became pleasantly lost among the redwoods for an afternoon and it was great. Lizzie and Tyler do not have such a pleasant experience.

My problem with Tyler was how selfish and inconsiderate he was. Again, this was never resolved and he was never held accountable for his entirely irrational behavior. As soon as he showed up, the independent and confident Lizzie became his pawn. Every time there was a conflict she was depicted as bowing to his wishes. It made her look like a stereotypical "weak and compliant woman." It also made Tyler look like a complete jerk, and a little tyrant. Curiously, no parallel was drawn between Tyler's behavior and the wolf-pack leader's behavior, and there was definitely one to be drawn!

Tyler never made any sense to me because we were never offered any kind of decent reason for why he absconded from his foster home, where (contrary to what he consistently leads Lizzie to believe) he is loved and missed. This made me believe Tyler was unreliable and an outright liar at times. This is hardly the kind of person I'd want my young child to hang out with. The fact that Lizzie clings to him from day one, almost obsessing over him, made me nervous and made me feel she really wasn't very smart after all. It also felt wrong because Tyler could have been portrayed in a much better light, yet he was not. I don't know why.

Tyler was African American and at first I was glad to see a story including main characters who were not white, but as I read more about him, I began to wonder why he was painted so negatively, and so stereotypically: broken home, drug-addicted mom, crowded foster home, and so on. It felt wrong. To me the story would have been better had the roles been reversed, and Tyler had been the one living with his dad in the zoo whereas Lizzie was the street kid. To me that would have felt less like it was profiling, you know?

But Lizzie had her own host of problems, the biggest one of which was how completely irresponsible she is. She's initially presented as smart and well-behaved, and as someone who really cares about the animals in the zoo, but her behavior reflects none of this. Instead of advising her father that there is a runaway kid in the zoo, she aids and abets Tyler, never pursuing any concern over how worried his foster family might be about him, or how at risk he is living on the street. She exhibits this same behavior with regard to the zoo animals.

When she learns exactly what's going on, she should have reported it to her father. That's the kind of person she's initially presented to us as being: responsible and caring, and protective of the animals, but instead she acts out of character and takes things into her own hands, which is how she ends up stranded at the National Park, lured into making the trip there by Tyler. When she wants to go to the village and call her father, Tyler once again selfishly browbeats her into going with him, and she buckles to his will. I really didn't like Tyler's lordly attitude and despicable behavior to begin with, and at this point I started really disliking Lizzie's, too.

The ending, where Tyler is accepted despite having been the lure which put Lizzie at severe risk in the park, felt false. Yes, Lizzie had bonded with him for some reason, but her father's complete and ready capitulation seemed entirely unlike a parent, especially after her painful misbehavior. She paid no penalty whatsoever and neither did Tyler. There was no moral to this story! There are ways this novel could have been written which would have avoided all of these pitfalls and still told an adventurous and exciting story. I was really sorry these were not explored. I can't recommend a novel which fails to avoid so many traps and which fails to give any rational and reasonable resolution to so much poor behavior. Perhaps the children at whom this is aimed will not be so critical, but I can be, and this kind of a story is where I draw the line.

The Map to Everywhere by Carrie Ryan, John Parke Davis

Rating: WARTY!

Like the other library print book I looked at recently, I can't really review this one because I made it through only the first four chapters before giving up. They story switched back and forth (or even froth as I originally typed it! LOL!) between the two main characters and it wasn't making a whole lot of sense, much less as it drawing me in. One character, the guy, was named Fin, which turned me right off. 'Fin' is almost as bad as 'Jack' for an adventuring character name and the lack of originality in choosing either of those names frankly nauseates me. I flatly refuse to read any novel where the main character is called Jack on principle, no matter how tempting it sounds. The girl is named Marrill, which is almost equally obnoxious.

This is supposedly a middle-grade book, but the page count is well over four hundred - much too long for a middle-grade book unless the book is exceptional and really has something to offer, and this one didn't feel that way to me. It's also odd that it's so long, because it's not a one book story! It's part of a series, and I sure don't do series unless they're exceptional, so this one loses on that score, too. This authors need to seriously redact their work! OTOH, maybe this is what happens when you try to co-author a novel: it bloats!

As if that's not bad enough, Fin is an orphan who is in search of his mom, and there's a bumbling wizard. Yuk! It sounds vaguely reminiscent of the Terry Gilliam Movie Time Bandits, but it's not Gilliam and it shows. So, based on what little I looked at, I can't recommend it. But also based on what little I looked at, this review may be useless to you and if so I apologize, but I could not get into this book at all, and life is too short to spend pursing things that don't instantly delight you as a reader!

Zoe Dare vs The Disasteroid by Brockton McKinney

Rating: WARTY!

This was another oddity from Net Galley in that it didn't specify that it was a graphic novel when it actually was. It's like this is the inverse of the other two which I'd initially thought were going to be graphic novels, but which turned out to be books of short stories. In this case I felt I was on safe ground since I know the publisher and the cover looked very graphic novel-ish! I really liked the cover and the graphics inside (the other covers inside were not so hot, but the panel work was to my taste and looked really good, I thought).

For me, the problem with this was the story, and it's story I come for, otherwise all you really have isn't so much a graphic novel per se as a coffee-table book. What attracted me to the story was the idea of a kick-ass female Evel Knievel and especially that such a person was the only one who could save Earth from an asteroid which seemed intent upon plummeting into the planet's crust. If it had actually been that, then this might have made for a great graphic novel, but it really wasn't in the end. The blurb was a bit more misleading than blurbs usually are because it turned out that Zoe wasn't the only one who could save Earth.

The two AI robots that were also advertised in the blurb turned out to be a bigger disaster than I'd feared they would be. I wasn't keen on them in the first place, but I was willing to risk those for a good story about two strong female characters. The problem with these robots though, is that they were far more 'A' than ever they were 'I'. I saw absolutely no point whatsoever to them, and their endless spewing of "Hashtag <smart mouth comment regarding current situation>" throughout the comic was fingernails-on-chalkboard irritating. In fact, in terms of being truly annoying, they were the equivalent of the two transformers, Mudflap and Skids in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, minus the racism, but every bit as bad otherwise.

I liked Zoe's "punk rock" sister, but why she was specified as punk when she really wasn't very punk at all, is a mystery. A rad haircut doth not a punk make! Despite this, she was my favorite, with Zoe second, the alien girl third. No one else rated at all because they were nowhere near as interesting as the three girls, which is actually quite a compliment from me! I think the two biggest problems though, were left-field nonsense and what felt like a thrown-together story. The problem was one of weight: there was too much silliness baggage for this story to be able to take off. One problem was how these guys got into space to go after the disasteroid (great name for the story, by the way).

Given that the space shuttle has long been retired, I saw no sense in 'resurrecting' it to get these guys into space, especially since the space shuttle was completely useless for anything other than low Earth-orbit missions. The new Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft being built by Lockheed Martin and the ESA is what's going to be used for these things in future, and that's not likely to be ready before 2024, but it would have been nice to see it enter service in the comic world. The shuttle is way over-used in stories and film, and it's antiquated and tired-looking. Could the writer not stretch a little bit and treat us to something intelligent like that instead?

This wasn't the biggest technological problem. The idea that you can get onto a motorbike (which is powered by internal combustion), and ride it off an asteroid and down to Earth in emulation of the iconic if cartoonish sports-car drop in the Heavy Metal movie, was just ludicrous beyond belief. You can get away with this in cartoons, but if you're trying to make your story seem even remotely realistic, you need to understand some basic physics, the primary problem of which, here, is that an internal combustion requires air. There's no air in space! This is why we use rockets the fuel of which carries its own oxygen supply! Motorbike leathers will not protect you in space! These are childish mistakes which remove all hope of anything even approaching realism. Yeah, it's fine for Saturday morning kid's cartoons, but grown-ups need to be treated with more respect than this. Conversely there is air around the Earth and it will burn you up if you fly back in from space without adequate protection, which a motorbike and leathers will not offer!

This whole thing made me feel like this was fan-fiction, thrown together rather than thought-out, and it was a very unsatisfactory story, with someone who had a death-dealing chest wound coming back to life because "Hey, I'm a stuntman, I do it all the time?" No! Just no! It was simply too nonsensical and too fly-by-night. If the whole story had been goofy form the off, then these things would have fit better, but it wasn't. It was for these reasons that this failed for me, and I was truly disappointed because I had high expectations; but what seemed to offer an original, fun, and engaging story fell apart in the execution. I wish the author all the best. I think he has some good stories to tell, but this wasn't one of them.

Fellside by MR Carey

Rating: WARTY!

I can't say a whole heck of a lot about this because I made it only through the first four chapters and had to go the the ER because I almost died of boredom. (Would I make this stuff up?)

The book is some five hundred pages long and I could not bear the thought of reading five hundred pages of something that barely moved an inch in four chapters. On top of that it was a first person voice, which to me is usually worst person. On top of that it was your usual trope, "I woke up in hospital and forgot my memory."

This girl is a drug user, and somehow her apartment set on fire and the young kid upstairs (whose mother ought to be prosecuted for leaving him home alone) died from smoke inhalation. The girl is charged with murder (I kid you not), found guilty and sent to jail at...Fellside!

Now you know everything, including the fact that she's more than likely, if trope holds, innocent and will be found so at some point in the story, so what's to surprise the reader? I don't know! Maybe something, but I lost interest in hanging around to find out. Why didn't the author simply start the story in jail and skip the first four chapters? I might have read a bit further then.

The girl was so whiny and self-pitying that I was actually glad when she got sent down. That's one less boring person for the rest of us to have to contend with. But seriously, no, I could not stand the thought of reading any more about her, not when there are so many other books waiting to thrill me and so little time that I know I will never get to them all. So based on what I did read, I can't recommend it. I couldn't commend it in the first place, so how can I re-commend it if I never commended it to begin with? No one would ask these questions if it were not for me!

I don't know if this will do you guys any good, but I can't stand the thought of saying nothing and risking having one of you become infected with this. Maybe it will warn some of you away from a book that would bore you to death, so I can feel happy that I might be saving lives with this review! Yeay me!

Ghost Summer: Stories by Tananarive Due

Rating: WARTY!

I could not read this book the whole way through. I made it to about 70% in in terms of page count and almost two thirds through it in terms of the number of stories I read, but I simply could not continue reading because the stories were crushingly boring. In my experience with this author, the best thing about her has proven to be her astonishing name, which I love. I'm sorry I can't love what she writes, though!

There comes a point even with the best of good will that you need to cut your losses and move onto something that will provide a more rewarding read. To continue reading in a situation like this is really to indulge in what's known in economic terms as the sunk cost fallacy (I think wikipedia has it under 'Escalation of commitment'), and I do not subscribe to that! I did move on, and I didn't regret it because the advance review copy I moved to after this proved to be eminently entertaining! Life is far too short to spend it on books that don't thrill you from the off!

By the time I quit, I'd read nine of the fifteen short stories it contained. Only one of them had been interesting to me, and even that was nothing special since this kind of story has been done to death: laying a ghost by discovering long buried bones? This variation on an old theme brought nothing new to the oeuvre.

I got this book thinking it was a graphic novel of Tanarive Due stories, so I thought it might be interesting even though I hadn't liked the only other novel by this author that I read, which was Joplin's Ghost. It was included in a flyer from Net Galley advertising graphic novels. Two of the "graphic novels" were short story collections. I got both of them and liked neither! I am going to be very careful about requesting any more 'graphic novels' from Net Galley, rest assured!

This might sound strange to say, but one of my biggest problems with this novel was that it felt racist to me. It seems this author can write only about black families, and even then only about ones with issues or with silly superstitions. There are no Caucasians or Asians in her world. This is why it felt racist to me. And no, I'm not trying to suggest she's saying all African American families are superstitious or believe in ghosts or whatever. Clearly this whole book was written about the paranormal so that's a given, but the family circumstances of everyone she writes about here are awful and it felt like racial profiling! Are there no black families that lead relatively ordinary lives that she could write a paranormal story about?! Not according to this author, which is one major reason why I did not like this.

The story titles are as follows. They were divided in the book into sections which meant quite literally nothing to me, so I'm simply listing them here in order they appear in the book and ignoring the section headers:

• The Lake
This was about some kids rowing up around a lake wherein resides something that's not very friendly to kids and which is also very hungry.
• Summer
This is apparently about a baby which was apparently switched out by fairies, or something along those lines. It simply fizzled rather than have any kind of an ending.
• Ghost Summer
The title story was the one I thought was ok, but as I mentioned it really offered nothing new or different. I think this is the longest story in the collection, and it honestly felt really long, but it avoided being boring.
• Free Jim’s Mine
I honestly saw no point whatsoever to this story. It didn't seem to go anywhere to me. It touched on slavery and servitude, but cheapened that message by tossing in the supernatural element. It's like the author felt that slavery isn't bad enough by itself, there has to be something more - some horrific supernatural element added to the recipe to make it truly cook. I think the author and I will have to agree to disagree on that score.
• The Knowing
Is it a blessing or a curse to know when people will die? The "twist" in this story was pretty obvious, so it really offered no kick for me, and making this story first person failed for me because I detest that voice.
• Like Daughter
This is about cloning and again was boring and made no sense to me. There was no supernatural element: it was all sci-fi.
• Aftermoon
This is a werewolf story which made so little of am impression on me that I completely forget what happened in it.
• Trial Day
This is a story about a man who is on trial for his life, and whether or not someone who could help him will testify.
• Patient Zero
This one, as was pretty obvious from the start, is the story of a kid who is immune to a plague that is slowly killing off everyone else on the planet. It was again first person and I found it obnoxious. I skimmed lots of it rather than read every last word, and it was at this point that I decided I couldn't bare to start another of these stories, so I can't tell you a thing about the remaining stories which follow.
• Danger Word
• Removal Order
• Herd Immunity
• Carriers
• Señora Suerte
• Vanishings

Like I said, life is too short and these stories were quite simply not speaking to me or entertaining me. I can't recommend this one at all. I don't get why she's so fond of Roots, either. From what I've read it would seem to be a mashup of fiction and plagiarism, so I have no desire to read it when there are more realistic books available on the subject.