What the Future Looks Like by various authors

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Edited by well-known British scientist and writer Jim Al Khalili, this book is a series of speculations, under various headers, as to what we might expect from the future. I wasn't impressed with it, I'm sorry to say. I have a high regard for Khalili, who is a professor of theoretical physics and the Chair of the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. I've not read any of his books but I've watched some of his TV presentations, and enjoyed them. I was hoping therefore, that in a book that he's edited, I'd get some solid scientific grounding even for a speculative work about the future, but what I got instead was a lot of speculation and very little scientific grounding or even grounding in what;s happening today.

The authors of the various pieces were all scientists, and coming form a cutitng-edge technology sector myself, I was hoping for the speculation to be rooted in the present and logically extrapolating from existing trends and technology to give a realistic assessment, but for too many of these articles, it was evidently nothing more than an opportunity for the contributor to do little more than day-dream and fantasize about what's they hoped was coming rather than put some real effort into what;s actually likely to come. So while some articles were good and interesting, most were not, and the overall effect on me was one of "So what?" and blah.

Sometimes it was unintentionally amusing, such as when one speculator wrote, "Technologies are rarely,if ever,foisted upon us" which is patent nonsense. Did people calling into various agencies for help want a robot answering machine instead of a human? I think not. Did businesses like the one I work for, which typically have patented technology to safeguard, want everyone to legitimately carry a camera onto the premises - in the form of a cell phone? I don't think they wanted that either, but it's technology foisted upon them! Did people with a large vinyl record collection want tapes, then CDs, then e-music, constantly making their collection obsolete?

Did videotape movie watchers who were used to the movie starting pretty much as soon as you set the tape in motion want that technology to be overrun by two different forms of laser disk and then that latter one - the DVD - to be made obsolete by Blu-Ray™, which is now delighted to serve up - out of your control - a barrage of ads, then put on a glittering, overblown mini-movie menu to try and navigate before you can even the movie you paid for? I suspect not. No one asked for that, but it's what was served on us. That's not to say that people don't welcome - or perhaps more accurately, learn to live with - much of this, but they hardly begged for it. It was foisted upon us by progress, and clearly this writer wasn't thinking about what they were writing in this case. Unfortunately, this wasn't an uncommon problem in this book.

In another case, writing about autonomous vehicles, one writer declared, "The important point is that the race has been started," but he utterly failed to explain how it was that this was important! Why is it important to have autonomous vehicles? It may seem obvious to some, and others (autonomous vehicle builders, I'm looking at you) that these vehicles are safer, but judged by the long list of incidents and accidents, and design cluelessness we've read about lately (seriously your car doesn't need to keep track of stationary objects, not even the fire truck stopped front of you?!), some might believe it would be better if we waited a while for the technology to catch up before we make bold prognostications of autonomous and flying cars.

Another writer, talking about smart materials, declared that we could have sensors buried under the asphalt to have passing vehicles trigger street lights to be on only when the vehicle is passing. Unlike the characters in Back to the Future, this writer evidently did not consider a future where there are no roads, or where there's no asphalt because oil has gone, or where there is no need for vehicles to click buttons in the roadbed when a simple RFID chip - which already exists and is in wide use - could do exactly the same job. Talking about smart fabrics to build efficient airplanes assumes we'll always have oil to fuel them. Newsflash: we won't! This blinkered short-sightedness and lack of imagination/thinking outside the box absolutely plagued this book. This writer evidently didn't really give a lot of thought to how the future might look.

Topics covered include: demographics, the biosphere, climate change, medicine, genetic engineering, synthetic biology, transhumanism, the Internet of Things, cyber security, AI, quantum computing, smart materials, energy, transportation, and Robotics, and it ended with complete fantasy which I skipped, as I did the introduction. I wasn't impressed, and especially not by the total lack of cross-fertilization of ideas between all these topics. Everything was so compartmentalized you would think all these advances were taking place in complete isolation from one another. There was no speculation pursuing what happens in real life in that something is invented for one purpose and is then coopted for something else which was never foreseen, and which takes off in ways we had not imagined. Yes, that would involve speculation, but extrapolation from events like this would constitute no more wool-gathering than was already being widely indulged-in here!

There was one other important issue. This book has a whole section on climate change, yet the book itself - a book about what the future looks like - was appallingly wasteful of paper. It was printed in academic format which is, for reasons which utterly escape me, especially in this day and age, dedicated to huge whitespace margins and wide line heights. I estimate, very roughly, that about fifty percent of the page was wasted. Naturally no one wants to see, let alone try and read, a book that has the text so crammed-in that it's illegible, but I certainly don't want to see one delivered by a publisher which seems - as evidenced by its publishing practices - to have a vendetta against the one thing which is doing something about greenhouse gasses: trees.

You can of course snidely argue that "in this day and age" everyone gets their books electronically, which isn't true, but let's run with it. If you get it in ebook format, you don't kill trees, do you? Nope. But larger books still take longer to transmit over the Internet and require proportionately more energy to do so. This book is made available in PDF (Portable Document Format which is owned by Adobe, but which is now available license-free for coding and decoding files). PDF file size for a text document like this is proportional in size to the number of pages. So either way, reducing file size to, let's not say half, but three-quarters of its current size would bring it down from 256 pages to 192. Removing some of the common blank pages contained in it would bring it down more. What would the future hold if every publisher thought that way? It's one more reason why I can't recommend this.

Upside Down magic by Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle, Emily Jenkins

Rating: WARTY!

Prior to this novel, Sarah Mlynowski was batting a thousand with me after two novels. Emily Jenkins, aka E Lockhart, was batting five hundred after six books, and I'd never read anything by Lauren Myracle. This one has besmirched each of their escutcheons.

To be fair, it's not aimed at me, but it was written so badly I have to say you would have to be a kid with truly low standards to find this limp and frivolous effort entertaining. The main character is simply stupid, and this turned me off her right away. I don't mind a character who starts out stupid and wises up, but when the character remains dumb, and especially if it's a female character, I find the book irksome and want to remove its spine, to put it into 'Drax the Destroyer' terminology.

This is the story of three young kids who fail to get into a prestigious magic academy which is run by the father of one of the characters. Instead they go to the Upside Down magic school and they don't like it. They're incompetent, and it takes them forever to figure out what's wrong. This means that the school has failed them badly and is obviously really, really awful at teaching, but this disturbing proposition is never addressed in the writing.

This novel is a clear case of too many cooks spoiling the broth and I do not recommend it.

Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook I came at from having seen the excellent TV series starring Jason Isaacs (of Star Trek Discovery - not that I watch that sorry excuse for a Star Trek show - and Harry Potter), Amanda Abbington (late of Sherlock), Zawe Ashton (late of Doctor Who: Into the Dalek), and the charming young Millie Innes - who is a true Scot! The TV show was titled Case Histories after the first novel in a series of (so far) four.

I love my library, but oddly enough they didn't have the first novel on CD; they had two others, which were the ones I got. This one is the last of the four. After I started listening to the droning audiobook, I regretted my impulsiveness in requesting two books at once. I listened to half of the first disk and skimmed the last disk on my way back to the library to drop it off! They were both tedious and mindlessly rambling, and nauseatingly droning (the reader was Graeme Malcolm and he was awful and served only to exacerbate the problem with the mindlessly meandering material). I hope the other one I got is better. It can hardly be worse!

This is a Stephen King style novel where the author thinks it's more important to go into endless, pointless minutiae instead of actually getting on with the story. The story is purportedly about a retired detective named Tracy Waterhouse. Her sole memory, it seems, is her encounter as a newly-minted police constable in Edinburgh, Scotland. She and her partner found a strangled woman who was very ripe, having been dead for many days, and also locked in a flat (apartment) with a young child. After that we're back in the present, but by then I'd already lost interest. Jackson Brodie is the hero of these novels, but he's focused on an abused dog. This one has not yet made it to a TV version.

The thing I loved about the TV show is how each story sowed three different seeds at the start, and by the end all three had grown into the same plant. The thing I found weird about the TV show is how few Scots actually live in Edinburgh - if it's judged by the casting! All the main characters were almost always English, not Scots! That may not be cultural appropriation, but it's certainly inappropriate. Othher than that I loved the show and would advise everyone to watch that rather than read these sashaying shambles of stories (assuming the others are as bad as this one was).

The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati aka Rosina Lippi

Rating: WARTY!

This is a novel Stephen King would have been proud of, and anyone who knows me well will also know I don't mean that as a compliment.

I ditched this big fat book of fluff and padding after reading about ten percent. The premise was wonderful - female doctors fighting Anthony Comstock, who was a real person who left his name on things like the Comstock Law, which essentially labeled anything he didn't like as obscene, including leaflets offering advice about birth control and venereal diseases, and he also left his name in the vernacular of yesteryear, in the form of "Comstockery".

Unfortunately, instead of telling that story, which could have been gripping and interesting, and a fun read, this author decided instead to simply document the minutiae of life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This meant there were far too many pages devoted to empty volume with nothing of interest happening. If she'd cut out the fluff, we could have had a two-hundred page novel where things happened and things moved, but no! We got seven hundred pages. This author clearly hates trees with a vengeance. If I'd wanted to read about how much research the author did, I'd have emailed her and asked her, but I really don't care and I certainly don't want to read it in place of an actual story. This was a fat volume which spent far too much time going nowhere and was such was boring and a waste of my time.

Worse than this, there was a character Named Jack, and I flatly refuse to read any novels with a main character called that. It's the most over-used go-to name in the history of writing. The character's actual name was Giancarlo, and I see no honest way to get to Jack from that. Yes, Giancarlo is a contraction of Giovanni Carlo, and Giovanni is the equivalent of John which often gets rendered down to the obnoxious 'Jack' for reasons which completely escape me, but seriously? If I'd known this novel was jacked-up to begin with I would never have picked it up. Fortunately I wised-up before I'd wasted too much time on it. I have better things to do with my life than read another authors research used as a substitute for telling a good story.

School for Psychics by KC Archer

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy, for which I thank the publisher.

Not to be confused with The School for Psychics by Carolyn Jourdan, this School for Psychics is volume one is a series which seems to have as its aim to be an adult version of Harry Potter, but don't let that fool you. It's really a YA novel with non-YA characters, and this made for an inauthentic, if not laughable story. I did not like it. I didn't like the main character, which was the first problem I had with this. She started out fine, but went rapidly downhill.

24-year-old Teddy Cannon owes a lot of money (like low six figures) to a Serbian crook by the name of Sergei. Her plan is to use her psychic ability (which she doesn't know she has) to win big at poker and repay the loan. How she ever got into such debt when she can win so easily at poker is a mystery. Though she doesn't realize it, she's psychic and knows exactly what the other players have in their hands.

In her ignorance of her true calling, she puts this skill down to her ability to detect their 'tells' - little peccadilloes and mannerisms which reveal what they're holding in their hands. As it happens when we meet her on her big gamble, she fails and is contacted by a mysterious man who invites her to come to the school for Psychics on an island off the coast of California. If she does, he says, all her debts will be paid. Does that sound like entrapment? It did to me, but Teddy isn't smart enough to be the least bit suspicious of how all this magically came together. I wondered if she was set up for this right from the off, but if she had been, it really would have made no sense anyway.

I also have to wonder, since she's been specially recruited - having been watched for some time - why her recruiter waited so long, and if he's so sure about her, why she has to undergo these entrance tests. As another reviewer suggested, it would have been better to test potential recruits before they arrive at this secret school, not afterwards, but none of this is gone into in the novel. It speaks very poorly of the recruiters skills that so many new entrants were kicked out so quickly. Up to the point of Teddy's arrival at the school, the story wasn't too bad at all and it held my interest, but it went downhill quickly once school began. The author needed to think this through much more than she evidently did, is what it felt like to me. It simply wasn't realistic, even within its own framework.

Teddy thought she was epileptic. She had no idea she was psychic, although how that happened went unexplained in the 25% or so of this that I could stand to read. You would think that someone introduced to a whole new world as Teddy was, would revel in it, but she acted like she didn't care much about anything - she behaved as though it was simply another day in the life, which again felt inauthentic.

In the end, my biggest problem with this was that I wanted to read "School for Psychics" not a heated Harlequin romance, but that was what I got instead. I wanted to read about a main character who was strong and independent and who relished the chance to learn to use her abilities. I did not want to read about clichéd 'bitch in heat' who really had no great interest in anything save the "hot guy" she sees on the first day, and with whom she can't wait to have unsafe sex. I don't do covers because my blog is about writing, and author's have little control over their cover unless they self-publish, but this novel's cover was actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it was wrong for the book, which ought to have had the stereotypical naked, shaven-chested guy on the front cover, standing behind a swooning Teddy.

So it's not really about psychics at all, it's about this woman's obsession with this guy and which turns into a clichéd YA triangle in short order. Yawn. I wanted something original and instead we got a boring version of X-Men crossed with Harry Potter, and this had the worst elements of both those and a poor YA novel into the bargain. There's even an guy unoriginally named Pyro. Barf. It's all adults, but it reads like a high-school romance. Sorry, not interested!

I wanted to read about the psychics, not how hot this woman thinks this guy is. If she'd just mentioned it a couple of times, that would be fine, but it's every other page and it's boring. I don't want to read about women like that. Women do not need a man to validate them and it's sad that so many female authors think they need not one, but two, including your standard trope bad-boy, to make a woman whole. I cannot recommend a novel that's as bad as this one, and is so insulting to women.

Justice League Vol 1 Origin by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Alex Sinclair

Rating: WARTY!

This is yet another reboot in an endless series of reboots. The New 52 was launched in 2011, essentially trashing everything that had gone before and rebooting all the DC Comics super heroes. This was revamped again in 2015, and then again in 2016 with a "rebirth' - isn't that what the New 52 was supposed to have been? Even within these so-called continuities, characters have been reborn and made-over endlessly to the point where it becomes completely meaningless.

So it's within that milieu that this rebirth of the Justice League - still using the antique name, note - that this comic arrived, and it really wasn't very entertaining. It's just endless fighting and that's not something I'm interested in. They're going to have to reboot again if they don't soon get a clue that endless fighting isn't entertaining unless you're a complete moron. They seem to be getting that in the movies now, but apparently not in the comics.

This was as poorly executed as the DC movies have been, although the recent (as of this writing) movie of the Justice League was much better and far more amusing than this comic was. The comic precedes all of the ill-conceived DC 'universe' movies (which officially began with Man of Steel in 2013), and you can see some of the ideas in this (or similar DC comics) have made it into the movies, such as Wonder Woman's love affair with 'ice cream' from her own movie, which for me is still the scintillating gem in the sadly tarnished DC movie crown. The 'demon' flying characters in the Justice League seem to have also been lifted from this or a similar story.

This story is an origin tale - not of the individual characters in it, but of the Justice League itself, and it's a pretty sad and dysfunctional story. We have Aquaman, Batman, Cyborg, Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, and Wonder Woman joining forces (or in the case farces) to defeat Darkseid the laughable villain featured in the movie.

The drawing (Jim Lee), inking (lead by Scott Williams), and coloring (lead by Alex Sinclair) were actually not bad at all, but the story honestly sucked. It begins with Batman and Green Lantern fighting, then they go find Superman and fight him; then Flash arrives and fights Superman. Aquaman shows up and starts bitching about Green Lantern who bitches about him in return. And so on, rinse and repeat. It's boring. It's juvenile. It's not a story at all. It's more like watching little kids play with their 'action figures' (read dolls - we all had them!), which is all this writer is doing, apparently.

The problem with this comic is that Geoff Johns wrote the entire story as one of endless fighting (between the super heroes), and of sniping, bickering, whining, and complaining, and it's not pretty and it's not entertaining. It makes these super heroes look like kids in a playground. Wonder Woman here is depicted as she traditionally has been, which means either in a skimpy skirt, or in a pair of bikini briefs. In this case it's the briefs and she looks idiotic. She didn't look that much better in the movie, but at least she had an excuse for her all-too-brief costume there.

Supergirl dresses exactly the same way, and that's one reason why I never did start watching that dumb show after I saw the pilot. Skimpy skirt, thigh high boots, and dark panty hose? Seriously? Is she a super hero or a dom? God forbid, after all the prattling about DC liberating the female super hero with Wonder Woman, that we should bring any other females to the big screen like Supergirl or Bat Woman! Not that Marvel is any better, but at least they do have a cadre of kick-ass females prominently featured in the movies they have released, especially after Black Panther brought us four who could hold their own in a movie (or four!). And god forbid we have the same characters on the TV and in the movies! Now they have two flashes? Two jokers? This is one reason I'm not overly fond of the DC world.

The only one who looks good as depicted in this comic is the Flash, who I've always thought has a really cool costume, which was ruined in the DC TV series. That's another DC comics TV representation that I actually watched for a while until I grew bored with the repetitiveness of it. Every season became exactly the same as the previous season: flash has to go up against some dude who's faster than he is. How pathetic! How boring!

In Arrow there was never-ending kung-fu fighting every single episode which was so ridiculous. If they'd taken a gun (even a stun-gun!) to a kung fu fight they would have been done with every fight in thirty seconds, but no, we have to stage the same fight sequences over and endlessly over again and let the villains escape. And the villain is always Damien Darhk. Barf. What's with these dumb-ass spellings? Darkseid? Dahrk? Give me a break! These are juvenile.

Worse, we have to have mind-numbingly endless flashbacks to the boring time Oliver spent on the island? Barf squared. Get a clue DC! Get some originality into your shows and movies. For my money, the only DC TV shows worth watching are Legends of Tomorrow which is hilarious and has kick-ass characters and fun plots - despite the Damien barf Darhk never-ending villain crap, and Gotham, which is just plain awesome. Apart from that, you can keep DC for me.

This comic is symptomatic of that lack of a clue - or that is symptomatic of the boring same-old, same-old world the comics purvey. Or is is Saiym-Ohlde, Saiym-Ohlde? One or the other. I cannot support this clueless puerile crap, and I will not recommend it. DC seriously needs a new shtick and they need it badly. The new 52 ain't cutting it. I'm forced to conclude that 52 is its IQ.

Unbound by Ann E Burg

Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook telling a story of slavery from the first person perspective of a young girl. The subtitle claims it's "A Novel in Verse" but it's actually not, thankfully. It was read by an actor with the interesting name of Bahni (pronounced Bonney) Turpin, and while her own voice was not bad at all, the first person voice of the story really turned me off, because it seemed so inauthentic.

I know authors do this to try and present a sense of immediacy and to bring a reader in, but for me, it typically pushes me out. Once in a while I find a FPV story that I can stand to read, but far more often than not, they're obnoxious. This was especially true in this case where the girl was being forced to leave her family and take up residence in 'The Big House' as a domestic slave. She was one of the most whiny, self-centered, and air-headed characters I've ever read about.

The novels blurb claims that the author "unearths a startling chapter of American history -- the remarkable story of runaways who sought sanctuary in the wilds of the Great Dismal Swamp," but this is an outright lie. If anyone unearthed it apart from the historians, it was Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. I wonder if the author of this novel ever read that? She certainly doesn't acknowledge it if she did.

Slavery was an unforgivable abomination perpetrated by a smug, laughably 'superior', and self-righteous Christian population on a group of people they considered less than human, but there's nothing we can do to go back and right those appalling wrongs. All we can do for those people is to never forget them and to never let it happen again, but the truth is there are more pressing immediate problems which a wallow in the past will not fix. These problems are here and now, and they can be solved, but as long as our eyes are focused on history, they're not going to turn and take a hard look at where they should be aimed: current-day problems, some of which are echoes of the very history people are so distracted by. This book touched upon three issues that can be thought of very loosely as slavery or as coming out of slavery and which can be solved.

The first is racial issues still going on today which have deep roots in what happened when brutal men literally bought Africans from other Africans and floated them across an entire ocean to work these victims to death in plantations owned by Christian folk. The reason I mention their faith is because this book mentions "The Good Lord" irritatingly often.

It should have said "Good God!" as an exclamation of disbelief, because this god did absolutely nothing whatsoever to stop this abduction and brutality. It did no more than it did for the ancient Hebrews when they were hauled off into slavery, which was diddly-squat. Why anyone would put faith in such a worthless absentee god like that has long been a mystery to me, but this book idiotically keeps on having these people put their faith in what was - to them, hailing as they did from Africa - a completely alien god!

These Christians were claiming to be delivering these 'heathens' into the Christian faith, these were the heathens who were living (near enough for humans!) in complete harmony with nature, and who were being dragged across the Atlantic to live in a Christian community which was systematically raping the land it had stolen from American Indians who had been also largely living in harmony with nature! Go figure.

The second problem was entirely connected with that business (I use the term advisedly) of the raping o' the land. The problem back then was rich, armed white folks taking advantage of poor black folks. Now it's the insanely wealthy one percent taking advantage of the entire planet. The problem has become worse and it's become diversified: there's no race involved in this, only greed, as in 'how much more money can we make by exploiting more people' or 'by exploiting people more'?

The third problem is these people who are mostly though not exclusively white men, but they're not oppressing only people of color, they're oppressing all of us, but in particular people of color and women, who are seen as chattel by far too many of these men. This also where the #MeToo movement and the term 'glass ceiling' came from.

The real problem with this novel though is the poor writing. I know it's a novel for children, but does that mean that everything must be pedantically spelled-out and the slave owners be rendered as one-dimensional caricatures? The girl herself is ham-fistedly named Grace, and she causes all of her own troubles because she cannot control her mouth and she simply will not listen to advice. This is what brings all her troubles down not just on her, but also on her family. So they had to live in a swamp, Well, we were evicted from our swamp. We had to go and live in a cardboard box in't middle o' motorway! Each morning we had to get up and lick road clean wi't tung!

That was an excerpt from Monty Python's "The Four Swampmen." You know, I don't expect an author of a novel like this to portray slave owners in a warm light, or even have much imagination, but was it really necessary to render the owner's wife as a pinch-faced cartoon character? Subtlety (and creativity for that matter) appears nowhere in this author's lexicon quite evidently, so in that same vein let me say that this novel sucks, and I don't recommend it. After listening to only the beginning portion, I wanted Grace to sink into that blessèd swamp.

Cold Spell by Jackson Pearce

Rating: WARTY!

This was a novel I bought thinking it might give an interesting take on the Snow Queen story, but while it started out great, it failed about halfway through when the main character stupidly left her car unlocked with valuables inside, stupidly chased after the men who stole from her, stupidly ran into their trap, and stupidly got captured by "gypsies" who of course were magical people and knew all about the Snow Queen and could help this totally ineffectual non-hero of a main female character. Stereotype Much Jackson Pearce?

The Snow Queen (aka Snedronningen) was originally written by Hans Christian Andersen and was first published, appropriately on or about the winter solstice of 1844. He gets absolutely zero mention or credit, not even in this author's acknowledgements. What an ingrate of a rip-off artist she is. Now I like her less than I liked the main character! She even steals the name of one of the main characters from Snow Queen - Kai, for the guy Ginny goes tumbling after like Jill down a hill. That's Ginny, because the author evidently wasn't interested in ripping off the name Gerda (the main girl in the story) even as she ripped-off pretty much the entire story!

The Snow Queen has no name in the original (not that Andersen chose to share, but she was modeled on actor Johanna Maria Lind, better known as Jenny Lind so why call her Mora? Why not Johanna? Did the author not know or care enough about the original story to think of this? Names are important in stories, but apparently not to this author who didn't care enough about her characters to think about what the names mean. If she didn't care, why should we? Just FYI, Kai is really form Kaj which means Earth.

Andersen apparently fell in love with Jenny, but she wasn't interested in him so he modeled the icy heart of the snow queen on this rejection. That's a far more interesting story than this author delivered. Wh not name her as an anagram of Snedronningen, for example, Rennin Songend? Gerda comes form a Norse word meaning protected, which makes sense when you think of the story. The best the author could come up with as a replacement was Ginny? Which means Virgin? The two are nothing alike! Alexia and Shamiria both mean pretty much the same thing as Gerda. Would not one of those have been better? Oh, but it has to be an all-American white girl, and it has to be set in the USA because it's YA! Never mind!

The book was first person because the law requires that every YA novel to be first person, or the author will end up in the cooler, right? Wrong! It especially has to be worst person voice if it has a main female character, right? No! This author admitted what a juvenile mistake she'd made when she had to add chapters (and a prologue, which I skipped as usual...yawn) in third person from the perspective of Mora, the name of the Snow Queen in this novel. Mora is Gaelic and means 'star of the sea' so it has nothing whatsoever to do with ice, snow or cold! This author is pretty dumb when it comes to names. Those third person chapters could easily have been left out. It was very amateurish to include them and it spoiled the book even more than the author was already managing to do.

Like I said, I got about halfway through and asked, "why am I even reading this?" I had no good answer and dropped it like a melting icicle. Unlike such an icicle, it was going nowhere and the main character was too limp to care about. I cannot recommend this. It'll be a cold day in Georgia (USA) before I read anything else by this author. If her next work is anything like this novel, then it's a waste of a perfectly good tree. I'd rather look at the the tree.

Naturally Thin by Jean Antonello

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"...but it will relax a bit as you and your body gets into a rhythm together." Wrong verb person. Should be 'get', not 'gets'.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I'm always suspicious of books, especially diet books, where the author feels a need to put lettered credentials after their name. If you look at books written by legitimate scientists, for example, they never put their credentials after their name. Richard Dawkins's books are by 'Richard Dawkins', period, not by 'Richard Dawkins PhD'. Carl Sagan's were the same, as are Neil deGrasse Tyson's and Jim Al-Khalili, but you never see their books trailing letters after the author's name. Just sayin'!

There's always something new out about eating a healthy diet. Just yesterday (as I write this - March 26^th), there was a report in the Washington Post wherein Satchin Panda, researcher at the Salk Institute in San Diego, was asked about a study on mice employing a technique known as time-restricted feeding. In this method, you eat more or less what you want, but only during an eight hour period. The rest of the time you fast (as it were), and this appears to work in mice. Whether it will work in humans remains to be seen!

But the real issue of a book like this is the content - does it make sense? Does it work? Is it anything really new? I have to say that I was not impressed by this short book which has very repetitive content and which seems to have only the one message which is simply common sense: eat healthily and exercise if you want to lose weight! If people are dumb enough that they need to read this in a book to get it, then this is the book for them, but the long-winded message it sends is obvious to anyone who cares to actually think about it. It's a sad commentary on the state of science education in the USA, I have to add, if we truly do need books like this, and an indictment of how 'owned' our elected representatives are by the food business (as well as the NRA and the oil companies, and so on).

If that was all there was to it though, I wouldn’t see any harm in the book, but it offers nothing more than the author's own opinions, some of which are way wrong. Yes she's a nurse, and therefore has some medical training, I used to work with nurses and I respect what they do, but while being a nurse should make one an expert in patient care, it doesn't necessarily endow a person with an abundance of worldly smarts any more than would being a doctor, or a car mechanic, or an artist.

One of the first issues I encountered was that there was an image of a list. Prior to swiping to this screen I had read how to follow this image: “Begin with FAMINE at the top and move clockwise.” There was no clock, just a list and the word 'famine' was not in the list! Note that this was an ARC, so perhaps in the final print version the instructions match the image? The word 'famine' however is itself worth a mention because in this book, despite it being so short, that word appears relentlessly like a mantra, along with its companion, 'feast'. Famine is repeated 17 times and that's just the first chapter! The repetition was too much.

The author makes sweeping statements for as sparse as the bristles are on her broom, such as: “We’ve established that dieters can only restrict their food intake for so long before they lose control of their eating.” I would agree that this has been established, as evidenced by countless failed diet plans, and as bolstered by a knowledge of evolution and physiology, but for the author to claim that she has established it is misleading, because all she offers is opinion and anecdotal stories. What studies she quotes are not referenced anywhere I could find in the book, so what they establish is open to question.

There is a lot of misinformation in the book, including some inaccuracies. One example of a study I did track down (http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199004123221506) was led by Dr Philip Kern of Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, but no mention is made of him. Instead the author quotes Dr Adam Drewnowski (note the spelling, the author gives this name as "Drenowski" in the ARC I had). He is the director of the human nutrition program at the University of Michigan, but he was not involved in the study. He was merely commenting on it, which I found to be an odd way to 'reference' a study.

The conclusion of that study was that "...weight loss in very obese subjects leads to the increased activity and expression of lipoprotein lipase, thereby potentially enhancing lipid storage and making further weight loss more difficult" (N Engl J Med 1990;322:1053–9). For 'lipid' read 'fat' as in body fat. Note that the conclusion says 'potentially', and that it says nothing about causing people to put weight back on! The study also reported that "There was a strongly positive correlation between the initial body-mass index and the magnitude of the increase in lipoprotein lipase activity" so this is telling us that these study subjects, who were described in the study title as "Very Obese Humans" had more activity than would someone with a lower BMI (Body Mass Index). In short, it's something of a leap to try to correlate this with what the author tells us. It's misleading at best.

Another instance of this method of selling her approach was where I read, "Choose organic. It’s always the best way to go if you have a choice and can afford it" but she offers no reasons why. Organic food is expensive, but that doesn't mean it's better for you. If you type 'is organic food better?' into a search engine you will discover that it is far from a foregone conclusion. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-go-organic for example, tells us "While organic foods have fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and are free of hormones and antibiotics, they don't appear to have a nutritional advantage over their conventional counterparts."

In short, if you wash your food properly before cooking or eating raw, you're getting the same nutrition cheaper. That's not clear from what the author says, and she also fails to mention antibiotics at all in this book - which is strange given how often she mentions meat consumption. This is something you ought to be cognizant of, if you're a meat eater regardless of other issues.

If you want to lose weight, consider (along with eating healthily and exercising as much as you can manage) giving-up meat altogether (do it wisely and seek medical advice if necessary), or at least consider severely cutting back on it. We in the west eat far too much and feeding grain to animals which we then eat is an appalling waste of food resources. If everyone in the west gave up about a twentieth of their meat consumption it would free-up enough grain to feed every starving person on the planet. But that's just my opinion!

An article in https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/pesticides-food-fears/ asks, "Are lower pesticide residues a good reason to buy organic?' and answers, "Probably not." In this article: https://www.zmescience.com/other/science-abc/organic-food-science02092015/ we read that "...researchers at Oxford university analyzed 71 peer-reviewed studies and observed that organic products are sometimes worse for the environment. Organic milk, cereals, and pork generated higher greenhouse gas emissions per product than conventional ones." So this author has not done her homework. Or she's withholding information she ought to share. Organic faming is a thirty or forty billion dollar per year industry; they're not going to tell you the truth any more than the agribusiness conglomerates are.

There are some claims in the book which are not harmful per se, but are just outright dumb! One such was this one: "People don’t usually put regular gas in their cars anymore because the new, more efficient engines require higher, purer types of gas to run efficiently." This is so wrong in so many ways that it boggles the mind. 98% of gasoline sold in the US is regular. Literally almost everyone is using it in their cars!

Just because the author may be able to afford a high-performance car doesn't mean she can extrapolate from that and make the bald assumption that everyone else is in the same boat (or vehicle!) that she is and just as well-off. Most cars use regular gasoline. In 2015, according to a study by AAA, idiots who thought their cars needed premium gasoline wasted two billion dollars putting it unnecessarily into their tanks. Not that the oil companies minded. It’s really called premium because of the premium you pay them to waste it in your car which runs fine on regular. Always go by what your car manufacturer advises as to what gas you should put in the tank. Don't ask a nurse or even a car mechanic.

Her claim that modern engines require "higher, purer types of gas to run efficiently" is complete nonsense! Higher octane gasolines are actually less pure since they tend to have more ethanol in them. Ethanol is used to raise the octane rating. The point being that if your car has a higher compression ratio, then it needs a higher octane gas. If it doesn't, it does not.

Actually modern cars tend to have sensors so that even if you're using the wrong octane, the engine can adapt (assuming it has those sensors to detect engine knocking - which can be very harmful). It just won't generate quite as much power per unit of fuel if you need the higher one and are using the lower one, but the difference in modern cars is negligible depending on how you drive, of course. Using an octane the manufacturer does not require is simply dumb. Use the one your car requires, not the one your dietician tells you to use. Hopefully you're moving to a hybrid or an electric anyway and letting oil return to being the fossil it really.

It’s misleading statements like this which cast doubt on other things the author says, especially when she says one thing and then makes a huge leaps to another assumption. For example, at one point she said, "According to the Center for Disease Control, several racial groups in the United States have especially high rates of obesity. This is a function of high famine sensitivity. They are African Americans, Hispanics and American Indians." To begin with, it’s the CenterS for Disease Control since there isn't only one. A nurse ought to know this. The author offered no reference for this study, but her claim seems to be yet another leap from facts which do not support her conclusion, especially when she lumps all American Indians, for example, into one group as though there's no difference in obesity rates between them (there is).

The fact is that in the US, African Americans are more likely to be obese than any other group, and Asians the least (http://news.gallup.com/poll/155735/blacks-likely-obese-asians-least.aspx In the BMI of 40+ category, Black Americans are twice as likely to be found. Whites and Hispanics rank about the same, very much contradicting what this author claims.

This table (https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/adult-overweightobesity-rate-by-re/) shows pretty much the same thing and shows American Indians. There is not a huge difference across the US as a whole. Interestingly, the author fails to mention what's happening outside the US. Although obesity is growing worldwide (about a third of the planet's human population is overweight!), the rates outside the US are about half what they are inside the US according to this table: https://www.everydayhealth.com/news/are-we-fat-think/. The only European country in the top 10 most overweight is Germany, So a really good question to ask would be, what is it Europe is doing that the rest of the world is not? Another interesting question to ask would be how does obesity correlate with access to free healthcare? None of these questions are asked in this book.

So it's probably needless to say by this point that I was not impressed with a short book sporting misinformation, which says the same things tediously over and over again, presumably to bulk up the size of the book which wastes more trees in the print version) and which has, as its only offering: eat wisely. Intelligent and well-read people have been doing that all along. Perhaps the book should have offered instead, advice to people to think about what they're eating, and to read some good science books on evolution and diet. I cannot recommend this.

Double Exposure by Bridget Birdsall

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
This novel was as bad as it was illiterate:
p75: "She's the youngest of six boys."? She is the youngest of six boys? How about "She's the youngest of seven; the other six are boys"?
"Fifty frames a minute and the shudder speed’s unbelievable" p174 Shudder speed? Maybe fifty frames a minute is what makes the shutter shudder?
P180 use of ‘you’re’ where ‘your’ should have been employed. This author teaches writing? No, she relies on auto-correct. Creative auto-correct!
P232 “His bicep bulges” That last 's' is in the wrong place! Once again YA authors the word is biceps Unless you are specifically referring to a single one of the attachments to the upper arm, one of which is the short head, the other of which is the long head, then what you're talking about - what we normally called the muscle that bulges when the arm is flexed as in strong-man posing - is the friggin' biceps, you ill-educated morons. But maybe she was writing creatively?
"Su rounding" p243 As in Su rounded by idiots? Okay I've given up on the author, but did this book not have any editors? Bueller? Anyone? There were enough people mentioned in the acknowledgements. What the hell did any of them do? Did none of them read it? Were they all so gushing that it was a LGBTQIA story that might have a chance of selling that no one cared if it was any good or even spelled correctly? Even a piece of lard like Microsoft Word will catch many of these things. Or was it creatively-written by hand and typeset ye olde fashioned way? It's leaden enough that it could be such a piece of fool's cap sheet.
The author can't do math. We learn that the team is averaging 2 games per week, but after three weeks they’re 10-0? Does the author teach creative writing or creative math! Creative writing! LOL! All writing is creative if it's done right!

This was, thankfully a book I did not pay money for, but borrowed from my excellent library. It began well enough, but at the time I didn't realize how bad it would become because I did not know that the author taught (guffaw) creative writing. Anyone who teaches creative writing or who has passed through a college creative writing course is guaranteed to write god-awful novels in my experience.

The first cliché was the bullying. Barf. I skipped that. Notice that I didn't say 'inexcusable cliché' because bullying of LGBTQIAs is rife, and that's what's inexcusable and needs to be stamped-out ruthlessly along with all other forms of bullying. But turning it into a trope high-school bullying story is not going to help because it cheapens the problem by making it blatantly, painfully (I'm talking about the reader, not the character) obvious. Like there's no other kind. Ever. And as if once were insufficient, our main character gets bullied twice, in two different states! Two for the price of one! Limited Offal! Buy into it now! Yawn. Barf.

Next up is the inexcusably clichéd fiery green-eyed (JEALOUS, get it?) redhead. Yawn. Barf squared. Wait, what is it you teach, Bridget Birdsall? I forget - was it clichéd writing or creative writing? There is a difference, you know.

Taught writing isn't taut writing; it's trope writing, which brings me to the trope boyfriend being telegraphed from twenty-thousand light years away. Barf. Yawn. Clichéd or creative? Clichéd or creative? Anyone?

Next up is the sport, because your student has to be sports or arts. You know there's nothing else in the entire school curriculum worth writing about, in "creative" writing, right? Sports includes the clichéd dancer, and arts includes the clichéd image maker. Oh, wait, we have both! The main character is a basketball player and her love interest is a photographer! But all Alyx wants to do is be a girl.

But wait - how can she be a girl? Yeah she's quite literally intersex, having one testicle and one ovary, and one penis and one vulva, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that, never having been a girl before - always living as a boy, despite feeling like a girl, Alyx, who happens to have a magically unisex name complete with totally weird spelling (this in a family which boasts an 'uncle grizzly'), magically transforms into perfectly ordinary girl in the short space of time it takes to travel from California to Milwaukee!

I-80 sure is educational isn't it? God Bless President Eisenhowitzer! Ike 80 provided her with a cute feminine wardrobe too, so she felt completely at ease among girls from day one at her new high-school! She has no issues or problems learning to be a girl among girls. She has only issues with PTSD from the bullying in her old school. Hmm!

It might not have been so bad had Alyx been likeable, but she was so self-obsessed and so selfish that she simply wasn't likeable. She was annoying at best. At one point, at a party, her fellow newbie and possibly best friend Roslyn is so out of it that it scares Alyx, but rather than watch over her friend or take her home to make sure she's not abused, Alyx is quite ready to abandon her and run home? Friends don't let friends get friendly drunk.

At Christmas, Alyx gets gets a brand new smartphone replacing the one which was damaged when she was beaten up in Cali-floor-ya. Almost immediately, she purposefully kicks it off her bed onto the floor because she doesn't have any friends! That's what a shrewish ingrate she is. Likeable she is not. This is called creative unfriending, in case you wondered.

I don't mind a weak female character who learns to be strong, but Alyx never does. She's a weak-assed wuss to the very end, caving again even in the last few pages to make a magical ending in which her mortal enemy who treated her like shit for the entire novel, and screwed her over every chance she got, is forgiven by means of Alyx rolling over one more time for a certifiably Disney-esque ending. And I do mean certifiable. Was the author embarrassed by this ending? Is that why it was flash-Frozen-over?

I'm sorry, but this story SUCKED. It was awful and was exactly what I would expect from a creative writing pogrom. Some might argue that this is better than nothing, but the intersex community deserves so much better than this creative nothing.

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

Rating: WARTY!

Another soured audiobook experiment. I typically avoid long novels because it means they're full of filler which ruins the story. Before I started blogging books I read this author's The Historian and quite liked it. I went looking for my review of that, to see what I said about it, but I must have read that before I began blogging so it's nowhere to be had! This story was far too rambling.

When I saw Kostova had out The Swan Thieves I took a look at it, but it didn't appeal to me, especially given what a fat tome it was, so I never read it. I thought it would be boring. This one sounded like it might be more interesting despite Kostova proving herself by this time to be a one-note author. I was wrong! It was rambling and boring. I listened to about an eighth of it (an eighth of a one note and I didn't quaver) and while the reader (Barrie Kreinik) was listenable, the story wasn't. Quite literally nothin happened.

I don't want twenty pages about a woman being driven to a monastery unless all of those twenty are relevant to the story, but that's what I got here (at least it felt like it), and in this case none of it was. Kostova takes a whole chapter to write about a drive from A to B, which has nothing whatsoever to do with moving the action forward, In fact it did quite the opposite. It would be like that movie, Dunkirk about the dramatic evacuation of British troops from French beaches at the onset of World War Two, showing five minutes of action on the beach, five minutes of disembarking the boat at Dover in England, and then two hours in between spent in existential angst during the twenty-mile boat ride, or admiring the beautiful ocean, the action of the waves, the blowing wind, the burning of the surf, the engine noise, the diesel fumes, and declaiming upon ocean wildlife.

Or maybe in that famous car chase in the movie Bullitt, instead of simply showing the car chase as they did, the story focused on backstory and admiring window boxes of flowers as he drove, and stopping to gas-up and get a car wash, and slowing to let the chicken cross the road and so on. I am not kidding about the chicken, it quite literally happened in this story. It ruffled my feathers and I decided that was more than enough for me.

In short I cannot recommend this drivel, and I am now completely done considering this author worth wasting any more time on.

Puerto Rico Strong by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This comic collection of shorts was put together quickly with the intention of raising money to aid victims of Hurricane Maria, which hit In late September 2017, and from which Puerto Rico is still recovering, hampered by failure to get the same rapid response that Texas got after Hurricane Harvey hit just a month before.

Texas is back on its feet. No one talks about the hurricane any more. But where is Puerto Rico? Still mired. Why? Puerto Ricans are American citizens, but Puerto Rico is poor and has no voting rights. The response to their plight has been nothing short of shameful, and my feeling is that this comic doesn't help because it's just as much of a mess as Puerto Rico is right now. In this case it's not due to a hurricane, shameful mismanagement, a clueless president, and a poor response from the US government; it's due to poor editing and an indifferent selection of stories which could have been better presented.

Puerto Rico is a commonwealth territory of the United States of America, and to describe it as the poor cousin is about as on-target as you can get. Unemployment is double what it is in the rest of the US, which is why people leave Puerto Rico to move to the mainland, and this out-flux of population reduces the tax base and contributed somewhat to throwing the island further into debt. Poverty there is rife and the USA has treated this territory, gained after the American Spanish war of 1898, shabbily to say the least.

The problems are not all because of Maria though. Puerto Rico was poor and in debt to the tune of seventy billion dollars before Maria hit because its own government has mismanaged everything, but it's not all on that government. Puerto Rico is also strapped by an act of Congress that will not let foreign ships deliver goods directly to Puerto Rico. This is the act that the president had to waive for a period after Maria came roaring through, in order to maximize the aid that could be brought in. That waiver was short though, and arguably ineffective.

Why this insanity hasn't been overturned is as much a mystery as it is a tragedy, but since Puerto Rico has no say in its own destiny, due to being very effectively a vassal "state" of the US, things aren't likely to improve until Congress and the Senate both are cleansed of special interests and those members owned by big business, the oil companies, the NRA and so on, are tossed out on their bribed ears and Puerto Rico is either admitted to statehood or granted independence and full self-determination whichever its population wants.

It has a population higher than thirty of the fifty US states, and that's with the majority of Puerto Ricans now living outside of Puerto Rico. If they all lived on the island, and it was a state, it would be the thirteenth most populous state while having by far the lowest median household income. But you won't read that in this comic.

Puerto Rico is so badly-off that it has also been getting about two billion dollars yearly through the Nutrition Assistance Program since the early nineteen-eighties. Complaints are that this assistance has been flat, but Puerto Rico's population has shrunk a lot, too, so maybe it's not so flat? But you won't read anything about that here either.

You'll also learn very little of the history of Puerto Rico from this graphic novel. Yes, there is a lot of history shown, but it's a very biased and repetitive history showing stories of the Taíno people and little else. The contributors ought to have collaborated more so that instead of a dozen stories of the Taíno, we got one or two of those and more stories of other aspects of Puerto Rico's history which, as the name suggests, is very rich, unlike the financial circumstances of the people who live there, especially post-hurricane when more than fifty percent of Puerto Ricans were left in Poverty. But you won't read of that in this comic book either. Again, a better spread of information, and a move diverse subject matter would have made for a better comic.

The problem with the stories of Puerto Rico's history is that they all tell the same stories mostly of older history and nothing recently. There are too many stories of of the Taino for example, and of Puerto Ricans serving in the US military from World War One onwards, and these stories leave little room for anything else to be told. I believe one story even suggested that Puerto Rico was granted the status it has so that the US could draft troops during World War One, but that seems unlikely given the facts and how Puerto Rico was viewed back then by the US government (as primitive, backward and substandard).

What's missing is recent history. What's too often missing is the rich culture. What's missing is geography and wildlife. One glaring example of omission is the onslaught of the Zika virus which ran from 2015 well into 2017, causing 8,000 cases per month for a while. It was declared over (in that cases had dropped to very low levels) only three months before Maria hit. Maria probably killed off the last of it by destroying the mosquitoes which carried it, but they'll be back. There's not one mention of the Zika virus epidemic. Has the Puerto Rican diaspora forgotten about that already? Or where they never aware of it?

The Taíno were the original inhabitants of the island which have largely been wiped-out, or subsumed over the last five hundred years through inter-marriage with the Spanish invaders and the African slaves. They spoke an Arawakan language. Smallpox killed ninety percent of these people, but you won't read that in this graphic novel, although there is a brief mention, if I recall, of the depredations of 'imported' diseases. In 2010, less than one tenth of one percent of the island's population self-identified as native American although you won't read that in this graphic novel. All you;ll read about is how many have "Taíno blood." The representation of the Taíno in these stories makes it look like everyone in Puerto Rico is Taíno, but that's very misleading.

There are 41 stories here in 190 pages (excluding additional material), which means that they are all short, some of them very much so, and once again I have to take the editors to task because sometimes it's really hard to tell where one story ends and the next starts. Some of the stories were really good, but most of them were average to very poor, and this assessment includes both writing and artwork, so the consistency is really patchy. Note that the contents page has the page numbering wrong (nor is it clickable/tappable to jump to a given story or to return to the contents page), and one story "From Within" is not evident in the actual content without a search. Here's a brief mention of each:

• Hereby Ronnie Garcia told a story bemoaning Puerto Rico's fate, but telling us little else. While it was well-drawn, the text was almost illegible in parts, so the story was significantly diminished and it was not that impressive to begin with.
• Madre de Dios by Daniel Irrizarri Oquendo is a single image and a poem incorrectly telling us that juracán was the Taíno god of chaos. In truth, it was the goddess, Guabancex (aka Gua Ban Ceh) who was of chaos - or more specifically of earthquakes, storms, and volcanoes. Juracán was merely the name of the winds she spawned from time to time.
• Helping Hands written by Alan Medina, art by Ariela Kristantina. It was only the change in artwork which announced this since the title was nowhere in evidence on the first page of the story. It shows up on page three which is the last page of the story. The artwork had a scrappy look to it, and I rather liked it, but I had no good idea what this story was about.
• Pasitos Grandes written by Tristan J Tarwater, art by Cynthia Santos. Pasitos means little steps, so this title is a contradiction in terms: Big Little Steps. It's set in 2062 and looks back over Puerto Rican history, but it says barely a word about Hurricane Maria. the artwork is abysmal.
• Areytos written by Vita Ayala, art by Jamie Jones. Areyto or areíto refers to a religious song/dance which the Taínos enter-Taín-ed themselves with. This story has interesting, moody art and tells of the resistance, led by Agüeybaná Segundo, aka El Bravo to Spanish depredations in the early sixteenth century.
• Gods of Borikén by Sabrina Cintron. Borikén is another name for Puerto Rico. This is just a very average one page image.
• Stories from my Father written by Adam Lance Garcia, art by Heidi Black. This tells of a young girl visiting Puerto Rico. It's nicely drawn and colored, but it really doesn't say anything. It's trying to say that people who have ancestry in a certain location ought to try to reconnect to that location, but there is absolutely no good rationale as to why anyone should do this, and there's certainly no point in trying to make people feel guilty if they don't! Way to domineer!
  If they want to, then fine, but it's every individual's choice and there's no obligation whatsoever on anyone to connect with or even acknowledge your roots. To portray a young girl as somehow lacking something because she can't connect with Puerto Rico is an abuse as far as I'm concerned and the author should be ashamed. For goodness sakes, we all come from Africa originally, so there is as much of a 'call' to reconnect there as there is anywhere else, so why not tell that story? This one made no sense whatsoever!
• Resiliance (sic) by Lamplight written by Aldo Alvarez, art by Sofia Davila. The word is actually Resilience, editors! The Spanish word for it is resistencia, so this is simply a case of misspelling. It appears to be only a two page non-story consisting of a title page and a pointless drawing of two people's heads as light bulbs. I assume it has to do with the sluggish return of electricity to the island, but who knows?
• From Within by Nicole Goux. This was in the contents, but I could not find it in the actual stories unless it is the untitled and unattributed pastel-shaded story that actually precedes Resilience by Lamplight. It was not of interest to me.
• A Broken PROMESA by Rosa Colón. PROMESA is the acronym for the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. This story, more text than art, is one of the few which actually makes a coherent, worthwhile, informative, and educational contribution, but it's not a story, merely a five-page précis of the comedy of errors in governing Puerto Rico. It's one of the few which blames the island for at least a part of the post-Maria woes. I liked this one very much.
• Thanks for Nothing by Tom Beland. Simplistically drawn and sarcastic, this is an entertaining view of the mismanagement of aid post-Maria.
• La Casita of American Heroes written by Anthony Otero, art by Charles Ugas. This is another story which has no title at the beginning. The thing that looks like a title is 'Fajardo', which is actually the name of a small town in eastern Puerto Rico, but it's not the title of the story! We don't see that until nine pages later, on the last page of the story. Is this a manga that I should read it backwards?! This story has very average art work and starts out well enough, but then it dives headlong into another tale of how many Puerto Ricans fought in how many US wars. It tells us not a single thing about the ravages of Maria. You now, the wars are history, I've never understood the morbid American obsession with them. The problems with Maria are now! Can we deal with those, please?
• Yúcahu and the Creation of the First Man by Little Corvus. Yúcahu (known by several similar names) is the of fertility in Taíno mythology. This is simply a one-page illustration that shows two near-naked guys together in a pond. Fine if that's how two guys want to spend their time! I have no problem with that per se, but neither of them look Puerto Rican or Taíno, so what, exactly, does this have to do with anything?
• A Taíno's Tale written by Shariff Musalam, art by Alejandro Rosado. This is another poorly illustrated history. Didn't like it.
• Of Myth and Monsters written by Marco Lopez and Derek Ruiz, art by Jamie Jones. This was a mildly amusing and amusingly illustrated story about the Chupa Cabra which is typically taken to mean 'goat eater', but which actually means 'sucks goat' which could have led to an interesting and amusingly perverse story, but this wasn't it; however, it was better than too many of the other stories here.
• El Vampiro de Moca by Leonardo Gonzalez is a really scrappy one page image which ought to have been left out of this collection.
• Family Ends with Me written by Lilliam Rivera, art by Allison Strejlau is a tale of how women were sterilized but it places the story in 1969 long after these sterilizations ended - unless the author knows something I don't. When I say ended, I mean in Puerto Rico - they were still going on for Latina wimen in the sixties and seventies in California, believe it or not. American Nazism has never died out.
• La Operación by Ally Schwed is also the name of a documentary film by Ana María García on the same topic. While sterilization had been instituted many times in Puerto Rico, the only one that really succeeded in its evil aim was begun on May 13, 1937 and ran unhindered until the law was overturned as late as June 8, 1960! This story has the sterilizations going on into the 1970s, but I cannot find independent documentation of that. However, it doesn't matter when they ended, because they should never have begun and the people who did this should be in jail.
  No matter how long it actually lasted, in the end about a third of women of childbearing age had been sterilized in Puerto Rico. How is the US government any better than the Nazis in this regard? Seriously? This was an important story, but I would have liked it better had it delivered more information in a less sensational manner. The story implies that no one was informed about the permanence of tubal ligation, which cannot be guaranteed to be successfully reversed by any means.
  There was a study in the mid-sixties which indicated that only a third of the subjects/victims did not know it was permanent, which is a nauseating number admittedly, but I don't know if that means that the other two-thirds learned of this beforehand (or figured it out for themselves) or if some or all of them did not know this until later. I don't believe Puerto Rican women are completely stupid or gullible. They can be misled as anyone can, but do we know if any elected to have this operation as a deliberate and deliberative choice to take charge of their own family size - or were they all duped as this story implies?
  I find that latter option rather insulting to Puerto Rican women and their intelligence. Is it possible that some women, even if it was a small percentage, knew what this was all about from the off and chose it as a means of birth control? I believe it is, but there seems to be no readily available information one way or the other about this, which is concerning, but not as concerning as this whole affair is, let's face it.
• The Puerto Rican Birth Control Trials by Ally Schwed. This is a sort of sequel to this author's previous story, and this one is about the testing of the birth control pill on Puerto Rican women - a pill which contained significantly more medication than is considered appropriate now. Women got sick, a handful died.
  The artwork is equally as simplistic as it was in the previous story (and has the same color scheme), but that's acceptable to me because this story is an important one and needs to be widely known. It's yet one more inexcusable abuse.
• Breaking Bread written by Tara Martinez, art by Rod Espinoza. This was a breath of fresh air. It was a beautifully written and gorgeously illustrated story and my favorite of the whole collection. It tells a simple but important story of keeping hold of the little things and the simple pleasures in life no matter what. All of us need that.
• The Dragon of Bayamón written by Jeff Goez and Fabian Nicieza, art by Adriana Melo. Bayamón is a city just south of Puerto Rico's capital of San Juan and this tells of a young kid visiting this area where he's never been before and knows nothing about. He fears his father of whom he has little and not good recollection, but his mother sent him to Puerto Rico, so he has to put up with it. It's a little predictable in that you know from the start that he's going to start feeling at home there, so there were no surprises, but the story was decent and the artwork pleasant.
• On Traditions & Being Homesick by Jesenia Santana wasn't of interest to me at all, but the art was not bad. And she has a very cool name! And it was short!
• Con Amor LES by Kat Fajardo was an uninteresting one page postcard of an illustration. Com Amor means with Love, but I have no idea what LES stands for.
• Cocinar written by Vito Delsante, art by Yehudi Mercado was yet another one which had no title at the beginning (it was at the end again). It looked like Kat Fajardo's one page illustration was the opening page for this story! Bad editing. The story is about a cook (which is what the title means) who is starting a new job and pleasing the restaurant's owner by turning out a family treat which she happened to like, but I have to ask if she wants Puerto Rican cooking so badly, then why not go back and live in Puerto Rico? I don't have any time for whining and nostalgia. Deal with where you are, or go back home!
• Family written by Grant Alter, art by Manuel Preitano. Having one family title after another (especially one that's also about food, at least in part) I think is another example of bad editing. Maybe if certain editors had quit trading Voltron GIFs and spent more time focused on their job, this would have been better put together? That's not this author's fault though. The problem here is that this story really doesn't tell us anything except to help with hurricane relief any way we can. One page would have sufficed for that, although it's actually self-evident.
• Dreamer by Kristin Van Dam was an untitled, unattributed, unsigned single page. The art was not bad, but I don't see what it had to do with anything else where. It's a pity the editors didn't wake up and credit her for this contribution though, but these guys are the worst editors I've ever encountered. Always sign your work, Kristin!
• Taíno Online by Joamette Gil. Yet another story on Taíno ancestry. Yawn. Joamette is a cool name though.
• Knowledge of Self by Javier Cruz Winnik. Yet another story on Taíno ancestry, but better illustrated than the last one. Yawn.
• Blame it on 'Rico by Alberto Serrano. This was an amusing story about a Puerto Rican muralist who is constantly questioned about his ancestry. I can relate. I liked this one.
• Macondo, Puerto Rico written by Javier Morillo, art by Dan Méndez Moore. Another Puerto Rican history telling the same story over again, but with indifferent art and way too much text. Yawn.
• Faceless by Matt Belisle was a misleading one page illustration that preceded yet another story which had no titles at the beginning, Really getting annoyed by this crap by this point. What's the Spanish for 'the editing sucks'? Chupa Editando?
• I Dream of Home written by Greg Anderson-Elysee, art by Dennis Calero. This was a weird story which I did not get, but the art was excellent.
• Hope written by Neil Schwarz, art by Ramón Sierra. This is a story about a guy who takes his kid to Puerto Rico. Nothing special. Predictable. Art not bad.
• Puerto Rico Strong by Alejandra Quintas is a simple on page illustration of some exploitatively scantily-clad Puerto Rican woman holding the Puerto Rican flag (which was actually banned at one point a half century or so ago, believe it or not). Not impressed.
• Reality Check written by Tony Bedard, art by John R Holmes. This was a nicely drawn ironic look at Puerto Rican history and it made a pleasant change from what had gone before. I liked this one.
• Heroes of Our Own by Marco Lopez and Derek Ruiz, art by Brett Booth. Yet again a single page illustration indifferently drawn right before yet another story where the title page was the last page. Really pissed off wit the editors by this point. Ready to tell them where they can shove Voltron. Why did a single page need two writers? Was there something missing from my copy? Who knows.
• The Last Pirate in the Caribbean written by Mina Elwell, art by TE Lawrence. The title page was the last page. I got nothing from this story. The artwork so bland as to be almost impressionistic in style.
• Todavia Tengo Puerto Rico en Mi Corazon written by Eugene Selassie, art by Orlando Baez. The title means "I still have Puerto Rico in my hear, and this was a clumsily illustrated futuristic story of robots, which I skimmed because it held no interest for me. It's yet another of those where you want to say, if you love it so much, quit whining about it and go home!
• The Heart of Puerto Rico written by Alexis Sergio, art by Jules Rivera was a nicely illustrated and welcome story. It was teasing and playful, and it was about a young queer couple who had a sense of adventure and a love of Puerto Rico such that they actually lived there! I liked it.
• Ojala by Mike Hawthorne was the only one page illustration I actually liked. Beautifully done. Ojalá, pronounced 'Ohall-a' (slight emphasis on the last letter) means 'hopefully'. It was perfect and should have been the first illustration in the collection, Another bad editing choice.
• What Remains in the Dark by Amparo Ortiz, art by Eliana Falcón-Dvorsky was about Julia Constanza Burgos García, better known as Julia de Burgos. She was a nationalist, a teacher, a civil rights activist, a poet, and an advocate of Puerto Rican independence. She died a tragic death in that she collapsed and died in a place in New York City where no one knew her, and her body went unidentified and unclaimed, so was buried in a 'potter's field' until some people heroically tracked her down and had her remains repatriated. This was a story worth telling, and a very different approach from the others.
  It made me wonder why there were not more stories about such Puerto Ricans and somewhat fewer about soldiers? There are renowned Puerto Ricans from all walks of life. Don't go by the 'famous Puerto Rican' lists on the web. Yes, these people have Puerto Rican ancestry, but very few of them were actually born in Puerto Rico, so I certainly would not classify them as "Puerto Rican" without qualifying it. That's cheating!

You know, comic book writers and illustrators can work anywhere! Not that there's an abundance of electricity in Puerto Rico right now, but there is sunshine and solar panels are relatively cheap these days, This is golden opportunity for Puerto Rico to shine - literally. Why was there no story about that? About rebuilding? About hope? The stories seemed to be all downers about nostalgia and loss. I refuse to believe that the Puerto Ricans - at least those who actually live there - are like that. Why were there no stories about Puerto Rican diaspora returning to help their island by living there and bringing their relatively rich US income with them? Now that would have been something different, something worth writing about, something worth reading.

I was very disappointed and disillusioned by this graphic collection. I admire and respect the desire to put something out there to aid the hurricane victims, but I can't help but feel in this case that contributing the price of the comic (and then some if you can afford it) directly to a hurricane victim charity will do more good than buying this comic. There is nothing in the comic that I saw, which indicates how much of the sale price goes directly to the needs of Puerto Ricans, which seemed very strange to me. If you love comics, then by all means buy this one as opposed to some other, but I cannot recommend it based on my reading of it.

Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Rating: WARTY!

Sashenka was another audiobook experiment I tried that failed. I don't normally go for the longer books because my time is valuable and it's a bigger investment of it to put it into a longer book and have that fail. If it works out, it's great, but given that I take more risks with audiobooks, they tend to fail more than other media, so I tend not to go for the longer ones. This one sounded like it might be good if it worked out, but it didn't.

If it had bee about half the length it was, I might have been willing to invest more time in it, but it was endlessly rambling, jumping back and forth, and worse, the author seemed like he was obsessed with showing off his knowledge of the classics instead of telling a succinct and engaging story. He spewed out title after title, some of which I'd even heard of, but it served the story not at all. Writers who do this are among the most pretentious, substituting books for smarts, and book names for knowledge and sophistication.

Despite this focus on showing how intellectual the main character is, the ham-fisted book blurb describes her - sixteen-year-old Sashenka Zeitlin - as "Beautiful and headstrong" like her best trait is her beauty. I detest writers who reduced women to skin-depth, like a woman has nothing else to offer and their character is quite useless except for her 'beauty'. What does it matter where she is on the dangerously sliding scale of beauty to ugliness if she's an interesting character? Is she so boring that the author has to make her beautiful in order for her to have anything at all to offer the reader? Because that doesn't work for me.

It's not just the book blurb writer. The author himself is equally culpable, sexualizing his character very early on in the story when he informs us that she has the "fullest breasts in her class." How is this remotely relevant to anything? If the story were about sex, then I can see how it would be something of import, but it isn't. It's supposed to be about this woman and her life in Tsarist and then revolutionary Russia. Her breasts are really nothing to do with her story unless she goes to work for the communists seducing political enemies, in which case I could see some relevance. if the tit doesn't fit, you mustn't acquit, and I find this author guilty.

I thought it might start to get interesting when Sashenka is thrown into prison as a political offender because of her association with her uncle, but no! The novel is set in 1916, right before the Russian revolution, and I thought this might make it quite gripping, but the author seems to have sterilized it so effectively that the rich soil of a potentially entertaining novel is reduced to unproductive sand.

The only interesting thing to me was the repeated mention of gendarmes, which I had never heard of in connection with Russia, but these were the political police. It would have made more sense to call them jandarmov, which is how the Russians pronounced it.

The author may be able to write knowledgeable non-ficiton about this era, but he has no clue how to write a gripping novel, a compelling main character, or realistic female characters.

Gamora: Memento Mori by Nicole Perlman, Marco Checchetto, Andres Mossa

Rating: WARTY!

I wanted to like this - I really did, but from the unnecessarily sexualized full first page image of Gamora, my stomach started turning. One reason I picked this up was because it was written by a woman (Nicole Perlman who co-wrote the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie); the problem was that it was drawn by a guy (Marco Checchetto). Maybe it if had been the other way around, it would not have been so bad? Once that first image was done though, the depictions did seem to improve, but the story never really did.

Gamora is given a 'gift' by her adoptive father: the knowledge of where the people are who wiped out her own people. After she slaughters all of the royal lineage, she seems to think the job is done but she's not fulfilled. Why killing the royals would destroy their society is a complete mystery which is never gone into in the writing which is sadly very sketchy. Would they not simply appoint a new lineage or open elections? It's not like if the British royal family were all wiped-out Britain would simply fall apart and come to an end! Ad how does she know she's got them all? They all look exactly alike - how do you tell royalty from commoner?

As it happens, she didn't get them all. Gamora discovers that this highly patriarchal society has a princess - the last of these supposedly crucial people of the royal bloodline, and so after torturing one of the lizard people, she embarks on her own crusade to kill this last royal. It's all downhill from there. The story made zero sense. If these people - the green lizards, literally do smother all female children at birth as we're told, then how do they ever procreate? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever! With whom did the king mate to produce this princess? Apparently the author doesn't care because she never mentions it.

I loved Guardians of the Galaxy, but now I find myself wondering what parts of it, exactly, did this author write because it was far more entertaining, thoughtful, and provocative than this graphic novel ever was. The story could have been a truly engaging one, but it got lost somewhere along the way and never improved. I cannot recommend it.

Wonder Woman Warbringer by Leigh Bardugo

Rating: WARTY!

This is the first book in a series of four novels (not graphic!) based on DC icons. I don't know all of them, but I believe two of the others are Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J. Maas (author of the execrable Throne of Glass which I panned) and Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu (author of the execrable Legend which I panned!). The rule here seems to be that if you write a really bad YA romance trilogy, then you can get a contract from DC comics! This is why I favor Marvel!

Leigh Bardugo is of course the author of the execrable Shadow and Bones which I also panned, so why am I reading (read: listening to) this? I admit I thought twice about picking up this volume precisely because of the author, but I was curious to see how she would handle something which wasn't her own creation. She mishandled it badly, making Wonder Woman look like some clueless, air-headed teenager. Wonder Woman Warbringer? Crappy title as well! Not that the 'warbringer' referred to WW.

At this point I am convinced that Bardugo simply cannot create intelligent female characters, but I started out by being honestly curious as to what she would do with such a being (and especially so, now Wonder Woman's profile has been raised so high by the excellent Patty Jenkins movie). This novel came out in 2017 - the same year as the Wonder Woman movie, and what a contrast here is between the two! Bardugo has another disaster on her hands.

This one started out seeming like it was just another origin story, and it completely contradicted the one told in the movie, which as far as I'm concerned is canon at this point - especially since the comic books are always retelling their stories. Seriously? If there's one thing we really do not need more of, it's super hero origin stories!

I don't know how the author came into this: did they hire her and tell her to write this particular story or did they hire her and ask her to write a story about Wonder Woman, leaving the actual choice up to her? Or did she send them a story outline that she wanted to do and they agreed? I don't have those answers, so all I can do is base this review on what I read - or in this case listen to, since this was an audiobook.

Audiobooks are very experimental for me. I listen to them while driving, so my attention is most often on the road, not the book, but I can still follow what's going on. Since I'm a captive audience several times a week, I get through quite a few of these and I also take more risks with what I select to listen to, and therefore run the risk of more failures in finding things which please me, but I also find many gems this way.

The novel was read by Mozhan Marnò who didn't do too bad of a job except that her pronunciation wandered at times. She pronounced Themyscira for example, as thought it were "Them is scarier" which, given Amazons, perhaps isn't too far adrift, but all it did was make me laugh every time she said it. Themyscira (Greek Θεμίσκυρα) was a real place and it's pronounced with a soft 'th' sound as in 'thought' not in 'this'. It should sound a bit like Theh-mees-keer-a, with equal stress on all syllables but maybe a touch more on the 'mees' part - as far as I know. This begs the question as to why they got a woman of Iranian descent to read this rather than one of Greek descent?

This book began with Diana, aka Wonder Woman to be, taking part in a foot race. Normally the princess doesn't do this, but in this case she wants to assert her growing womanhood and take what she believes to be her rightful place as an Amazon woman rather than a cosseted royal. unfortunately, a sinking schooner on the coastline distracts her, and she ends up diving in, pulling out a woman, and saving her life.

This is where the first confusion rose because one of her friends on Themyscira is an Irish woman, yet when she pulls this (almost-) drowning victim from the sea, she talks of her as human. Was the Irish Amazon not human? If she was Amazon and not human, then how is she Irish? This made no sense to me at all. I thought all Amazons were human, except Diana, who was fashioned from clay.

The problems with the writing began here because Diana is in fear now of being punished because of her transgression in saving this woman's life and bringing her onto the island, yet Bardugo forgets that Diana is a princess of royal blood. She has this fellow Amazon bullying her with absolute no blow-back, and she has Diana living in fear of failure and of being punished!

Diana did not read as royal at all, not remotely, let alone heroic! She was just another Bardugo schoolgirl character. This was when I realized that it was Bardugo, not Diana who was out of her depth here. She simply cannot write an engaging story, period, not even when it's handed to her on a plate like this.

The story did not improve, it got worse. Diana had a critical deadline to meet regarding this woman she had rescued, and yet she spent so much time lollygagging on the way until it became a last minute thing. In short, Bardugo made Diana look like a moron, not heroic at all, and I can't forgive her for that. She made Diana into a man with tits instead of telling the story of an amazingly powerful, yet restrained woman. There was no gentility or even femininity here. It was all brawn and power, not compassion and smarts, and the villain was telegraphed right from the start of the story such that even I could recognize them. I'm done with reading anything else by this authors, and I cannot recommend this story.