One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

Rating: WARTY!

This was my third voyage into the world of Kate Atkinson. As I mentioned twice before(!), I came to her via the TV series Case Histories, and I hoped her novels would be as good as the TV show, but they were not. I could not get Case Histories on audiobook and didn't want to go with the library print book. I have too many print books on my shelf and actively try to avoid procuring any more until I've read-down some of this pile! I live in fear that they will fall off the shelf onto my head when I'm sleeping and I wish to bypass such a rude awakening.

This was the second-in-line in the series, but the problem with it was that it was too rambling. The interesting thing is that in the first novel, Jackson Brodie, the ex-soldier now turned PI inherits a lot of money, but in the TV series he did not have this money. I'm not sure how they will reconcile it if they continue the TV show. I liked how there were several plot threads seemingly unconnected, and which in the end all became woven together, but that was TV. The audiobook was far too sluggish.

I could not get started on the novel. One of the characters was such a limp rag of a man that he was repulsive, yet the author seemed determined to follow him into the most mundane of activities including a writing class he attends (which I think was a flashback but I'm not sure. It's easy to miss bits in an audiobook when driving. At least it is if your focus is on the road where it should be!). The writing class wasn't even interesting, and it seemed like the author was maybe using it to insult people perhaps she had known in a similar writing class which she attended. I don't know. It just felt a bit like that.

The story begins with this limp rag man breaking up a road rage incident, and then it just rambles on and on. Jackson Brodie is nowhere in it and did not show up right up to the point where I couldn't stand to listen any more. It was read pretty decently by Steven Crossley, but that couldn't make up for the material (or lack thereof). I felt bad for him having to read this. Just in case it isn't clear: I cannot recommend this one!

Hell Gate by Linda Fairstein

Rating: WARTY!

If I'd known that this author was once the prosecutor who railroaded the Central Park Five black kids into jail for a crime they never committed, I would have spit on the novel rather than picked it up. But I didn’t know that until after I’d read enough of it to know it was a lousy novel written by an author who is so far out of touch with things as to be very effectively retired even as she continues to write. It was only after I gave up on it and looked her up in Wikipedia that I discovered this and other interesting facts about her.

Fairstein resigned in early summer of 2019 as a member of the board of trustees of her alma mater, Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, after a netflix movie on the event stirred up enough resentment that finally something came to a head. If I’d known this novel was merely wish-fullfilment - this author basically putting herself into her own fiction as a prosecutor of sex crimes - I would never have picked it up either.

I'm not a fan of first person stories because they're irritating at best and completely unrealistic. Few authors - and even fewer stories - can carry that amount of weight, but far too many authors aren't smart enough to realize it. The woman who read for this audiobook story, Barbara Rosenblat, had entirely the wrong voice for both the story and the character, so that didn’t help either. That wasn't the worst part though.

The hypocrisy in this novel was astounding. For an ex prosecutor of sex crimes to write a novel about human trafficking and then lard it up with sexist material is mind boggling. If I’d know this novel - published in 2010 - would read like it was written in the fifties with all the unaddressed genderism it contains, I’d never have picked it up. But until I listened to it, I didn't know that there would be repeated remarks made to the main character of an inappropriate nature, and never once does she address them. Guys can say pretty much whatever they want to her and she doesn’t even react. In short, she's part of the problem and the author ought to be thoroughly ashamed of writing material like this.

I don't have a problem with reading a novel by an older writer (this author is now in her seventies). The problem isn’t that. The problem is when the older writer fails to move with the times and instead, writes a modern story with an antique mindset, which is evidently what happened here. And that's not even the whole problem.

The author seems so obsessed with describing old buildings that she forgets what story she's telling. This story could have been about architectural design. I quickly tired of hearing yet more building history, and yet more descriptions of arches, columns, and windows. This was as much a DNR as it was a DNF. You have my word that I will never read another novel by this author. I'm tempted to say that I'm glad I never paid for this one, but in a sense, I did pay for it by merely listening to it.

Ocean of Secrets Vol2 by Sophie-chan

Rating: WARTY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note that I have not read volume one of this series. This is volume two and starts at chapter five. And no, I really don't think my view would of this volume would have improved had I read volume one first. I'm quite sure I would never have read this had that happened!

This sounded like an interesting story from the blurb, but then don't they all? (Not really!). The problem was that the blurb didn't remotely match the story. I have to wonder if it matched volume one, because it bore no relationship whatsoever to volume two, so I felt like I was drawn into this under false pretenses.

The blurb claims that "Lia, a 17-year old orphan living by the Atlantic is swept away by the ocean currents during a ruthless storm. She is then saved by Moria and Albert, a duo of illegal runaways on their magical ship!" No! Instead, try a guy flying home from a trip who espies a landmass floating in the sky very reminiscent of Asgard from the original Marvel Thor movie. That's what happened in this novel.
No orphan. No storm. No sweeping away. No magical ship.

When he lands, the guy who is evidently a geology student, reports this experience to his professor who, instead of calling in a psychiatrist, inexplicably allows the guy to take a solo flight in a light aircraft to go find this floating island. He does, and non-adventure ensues.

I'm sorry but this story was awful and the black and white line-drawing artwork indifferent. I was sorely disappointed. It was so juvenile and the plot so thin and childish that it honestly felt like I was reading something a child had written. I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend it at all.

I am not a fan of the manga format. I get why it is the way it is, I do, but when this is translated to the west, just as the language is translated, so too could the pages be reversed, especially in an ebook. It's just laziness and hide-bound, blinkered obstinacy that prevents it. For some stories which are worth my time to read, I can put up with this even as I do not like it, but it was just another irritant in this case. It's 2018. No, publishers, it really is! Less than two years from now we shall all require 2020 vision. You read it here first. We do not have to follow method X because that's the way it's always been done, y' know?

The Crooked Staircase by Dean Koontz

Rating: WARTY!

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

This author has more pen names than I have fingers on two hands: David Axton, Brian Coffey, Deanna Dwyer, KR Dwyer, John Hill, Dean Koontz, Leigh Nichols, Anthony North, Richard Paige, Owen West, and Aaron Wolfe. I honestly couldn't remember reading anything by him prior to this, but checking in my blog revealed two previous stories, neither of which I liked! One was an audiobook ( The Face of Fear) about a slasher serial killer going after women. This was recommended by a friend, but is quite simply not my cup of tea. My eyes glaze over when I see a serial killer novel in my daily book bargain flyer, because this genre has been so done to death. That particular novel was especially objectionable because it was in audiobook form and read by Patrick Lawler, who I honestly cannot stand as a book reader. The novel of this author's that I read was a graphic novel version of some Frankenstein-based story, and I did not like that one either.

Had I remembered either of those, then I would not have requested this one, which is not to be confused with The Crooked Staircase by Victor Gunn, so the lack of any lasting impression made by these other books had led me to think this was the first of his I'd read. I'm not sure why this one was more appealing to me initially. It's not like it was perfect, but there was intrigue and action, and nothing completely dumb to begin with, so that made a difference, but there were parts which were stretched a little too far in my opinion. I stayed with this as far as I could, but in the end it simply could not hold my interest, so I gave up on it about one third the way through. I couldn't face reading any more of it, the way it was going - or failing to go!

There's this Indian (not native American) brother and sister who live in a really nice house out in the boonies. One night when the sister is standing outside watching the rain, she sees an SUV drive up and three guys climb out, scale the gate to the property and head into the house. Knowing this can't be a good thing, she sneaks back into the house where her brother is, and she gets some hornet killer spray and disables the guys with it by spraying it into their faces. So far so good, but instead of calling the cops at that point, the two of them go on the run! There is no sensible explanation given for this behavior, so this was my first problem.

One of the guys in the trio invading the home was from the sheriff's department - the girl recognized him. If he was a police officer, then why sneak up? Why not simply go knock on the door (or ask for admittance through the gate in this case) like he was on official business, and then when the door was opened, force their way in? Anyway, the girl disables all three of them with the hornet spray, which was pretty cool, but instead of taking their guns and tying them up (or even handcuffing them, if the sheriff had cuffs on him), and calling the police, the brother and sister go on the lam! These characters are both authors and they have zero imagination, so this felt really inauthentic to me, not to say lame. This is a serious problem with Big Publishing™ and an author who garners a certain level fo success: the editors don't know when (or maybe how) to say no!

If these two feared the police might be compromised because of the sheriff's presence, they could have called the FBI or something. These two were not criminals and not dumb people. They had no idea why the sheriff had shown-up with some heavies and some chemical, and needles like maybe it was for an interrogation. All the siblings had had to do was call the cops. OTOH, if the author actually wanted them to run (and int his case it seems he didn't), then he needed to supply a more convincing reason than was on offer here. I was willing to let that slide, but the whole thing slid too far downhill for me in the end.

There's a second story running in parallel with this one, in which this woman, who is evidently scared of something given her exhaustive security precautions, arrives home to find a woman already in the house waiting for her. This visiting woman, who goes by Jane, isn't a threat and is apparently going after the first woman's ex-husband (a man who had treated her brutally to get what he wanted). The visiting woman is an ex-FBI agent who is living off the grid and has her own personal vendetta against this man.

It sounded like a great start to the story, but the problem was that the author rambles way too much for my taste and for an action story. There were too many asides, too many details, and too many wasted pages. At one point there are two guys trying to track the Indian pair down, and this goes on and on and endlessly on, and it became tedious to read, especially since it was obvious where it was going. I couldn't help but wonder why there was all this padding when the end result was the same. The same thing happened in the parallel story with the main character getting into a boring conversation with this young woman who she encountered in a house where she was trying to get to the house-owner.

In the end I was beaten by sheer boredom waiting for the real story to begin, This felt like one long prologue, and I don't do prologues. I wasn't about to spend any more time on a 340 page novel when it was this uninspiring in the first hundred pages, and especially with such an improbable plot. Based on what I read, I cannot recommend this.

The Lost Path by Amélie Fléchais

Rating: WARTY!

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

I have to say, up front, that I was disappointed in this story, which is depressing because back in August of 2017, I reviewed this author's The Little Red Wolf and loved it. This was a different kettle of comic though, because I'm not even sure what happened in it, despite reading it all the way through.

It felt unfinished for one thing, and on top of that it was disjointed and confusing. I had a hard time following it, which was fine, because it seemed to be going nowhere anyway. The story is supposed to be of these three kids who remain nameless, and who get lost in the forest and encounter strange and magical creatures, but while I found nothing magical in the story, I'm sorry to say I found a lot of strange, and not in a good way. I ended-up being glad these kids were lost and hoping they were never found, thereby decreasing the surplus boredom - as Ebenezer Scrooge might have wished!

The weirdest thing about the graphic novel was that it started out in full color - and quite well done as it happened, but then inexplicably switched to black and white line drawings. I thought at first that maybe this was to indicate that it was nighttime, but it wasn't! Later the color came back - again for no apparent reason, and then went away once more.

Was there a reason for this? Who can say? It was a gray area, but I could see no purpose in it! There was at least one image which had a splash of color, like the artist had begun to color it, but hadn't finished. The only conclusion I could draw by then was that this was unfinished because it was an advance review copy. Alternately if the author/artist was trying to say something with the absence/return of color, it was lost on me, as was the bulk of this non-story.

I was truly disappointed in it, and I cannot recommend this at all.

Life After Life By Kate Atkinson

Rating: WARTY!

This was another attempt at Kate Atkinson via audiobook. It failed.

I came to her as an author via Case Histories on TV, which I really enjoyed, but my foray into her novel about the same characters was boring. I had the same experience here, but I confess it did take me longer to get bored! Normally when an author has failed me I don't go back to that same author. I had the same policy on dating when I was single! LOL! I don't see the point in revisiting a disappointment so I've never done it with dating and very rarely with authors. I only went back to this author because I got three of her novels from the library at the same time and wanted to at least give them all a try as long as I had them.

This one had sounded really interesting. In some ways it was reminiscent of my own Tears in Time, although that was sci-fi and didn't involve the character dying. This novel was a bit more like the movie Groundhog Day except that instead of the main character falling asleep and reliving the same day over, the main character here dies and then somehow continues on as though nothing has happened. There's no information as to how this works: whether it actually is a redux or whether this is a trip through parallel universes. Perhaps by the end of the novel this is made clear, but I only made it to just under halfway through.

I gave up on it because it was becoming tedious and repetitive. It wasn't so much that it went over the same story again and again, although it did to begin with. In this story we did slowly move forward and the character did progressively grow older as the story went on, from infant-hood to childhood to teen years and older, and even into a marriage which didn't work out. I lost interest because the tedium of her life remained the same, the relationships remained the same, and the kind of events that befell her remained the same. Nothing really different happened, so while she was growing, the story was not!

On top of that, Ursula, the main character, simply wasn't that interesting. She was so passive and she didn't do anything! Instead, things happened to her, and this never changed. She was far too passive: even a rape and a subsequent botched abortion did not impinge upon her significantly. You'd think that repeatedly dying and then finding out they had survived the death and had a second (and a third, fourth, etc) opportunity, would actually change a person and have a profound effect on them, and that this effect would become increasingly powerful as it was repeated, but this wasn't the case here at all. Ursula was Teflon™ coated! Nothing affected her. Nothing left a mark! It was entirely unrealistic, and this story simply wasn't for me. I do not recommend it. I'd much rather have read about Ursula's aunt Isabella, who sounded far more interesting than ever Ursula could be.

The Feros by Wesley King

Rating: WARTY!

Here's yet another from my overblown collection of print books that I've picked up from all over the place. This one was bad, folks. Really bad! It's yet another middle-grade (or maybe young adult but it read like middle-grade) story of kids with super powers. I believe it's book two of a series but this wasn't apparent from the book cover. I guess they're trying to hide that secret!

I could not make it past the start of chapter two which began: "Lana sprinted down the long hallway, her legs pumping beneath her." Her legs were beneath her? Whoah! What a mid-blowing concept. I guess that's her super power - having her legs are beneath her. Hey author, why not simply, "Lana sprinted down the long hallway"?

That was bad enough, but there was another gem to come just one more sentence later: "When she approached the opening, she burst through." Not when she reached the opening, not when she arrived at the opening, not even simply, "She burst through the opening," but when she approached the opening she burst through! That's her superpower! She can burst through something before she actually gets there! She only has to approach it!

I've written like that - when I'm parodying stories like this (Baker Street comes to mind), but I don't expect to actually read that in a purportedly seriously-written book. I stopped right there because I know when I have this much of an issue with a novel and I'm barely started on chapter two, that me and the novel are not going to work out.

It's better to make a clean break so both sides know it's over, so I said "Let's part as strangers," and I walked away. I'm going to apologize up front for inflicting this book as a donation to this little village library near where I live, but maybe someone who hopes for less in the writing than I do, will like it. Maybe someone, somewhere, somehow, will approach it and burst through it. I know I can't.

John Grimes: Rim Runner by A Bertram Chandler

Rating: WARTY!

This is not by The Bertram Chandler but by A Bertram Chandler, so beware of false authorship of sci-fi! Initially when I first saw this I thought the author's name was John Grimes. You know how those publishers and maybe authors like to promote the author as though she or he is the story? Well they're not. The story is the story, so I tend to be skeptical of novels which have a hugely-emblazoned author's name at the top and a tiny title at the bottom. This was not the case here, but in the end it made no difference.

Unfortunately, the novel was so trashy as to be awful. It felt like it was written in the fifties, whereas it was actually written a whole decade later! This is actually a collection of four stories written from '64 through '71. I didn't get past page 28 of the first of these, when John Grimes, rim runner (and that tediously overused sci-fi phrase is not meant in a sexual sense), having set his spacecraft on course, sat down with his senior officers and started smoking a pipe. I should never have read that far.

The warning signs were already in place. All the senior jobs were held by men, all the junior jobs by women. The only woman who wasn't in an inferior position was the female main character who was defined solely by her looks and so sexualized as to be unreal. In fact, I should have never got past the cover, but I don't hold authors accountable for their covers unless they self-publish. The cover in this case featured a tough-looking, rugged male in your usual overblown and impractical space cowboy outfit. He was, of course, holding the bigger gun; in fact, he had two guns! And hilariously, he's posed rigidly like a GI Joe doll. The frosty-faced woman was wearing the tight scarlet outfit with the scoop neck, the better to expose her cleavage. In yet another case of the cover artist having no clue whatsoever what's in the novel she was depicted as a brunette whereas the actual character is blond (of course).

This book is not to be missed; it's to be avoided like the plague. There are those who would say that you cannot hold a book written half a century ago to modern standards, but actually, yes, you can! And even if you can't, I will. I give it a hulk-sized thumbs-down.

Running is my Therapy by Scott Douglas

Rating: WARTY!

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

This author runs to help relieve symptoms of depression, and this book is intended to support and disseminate that idea. I think that's a good idea in principle, and I wanted to like and recommend this book, but the more I read of it, the less I liked it. It came across as being way too pushy and preachy, and even strident in its premise that running and only running (as opposed to other forms of aerobic exercise) can bring salvation. I know the author is very enthusiastic in his convictions, but this felt too much like evangelism, propaganda, and elitism for my taste.

The author does quote some studies to support his thesis, but when I looked up some studies myself, they didn't specify running! They specified aerobic exercise. For example, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brain-improve-memory-thinking-skills-201404097110 says quite clearly, "We don't know exactly which exercise is best. Almost all of the research has looked at walking, including the latest study." It adds a quote from a Dr McGinnis who says, "It's likely that other forms of aerobic exercise that get your heart pumping might yield similar benefits." In addition to quoting a study which talks only of aerobic exercise and then immediately translating 'aerobic' into 'running', the author tends most often to quote people he knows, but anecdotes are not studies, and most of the people he knows seem to be professionals - lawyers, accountants. and so on. I saw no quotes from people in less ethereal professional jobs, such as teachers, and none from your everyday people who work in anonymous office cubes and on factory floors, who may not enjoy the freedom other people have to be running. This smacked strongly of elitism to me.

The author does say that aerobic exercise works differently for different people so your results may not be as advertised. In my amateur opinion, no one should consider it to be an alternative to medical treatment without discussing it with qualified medical personnel. Maybe it can replace your meds, maybe it can reduce your dependence on them, or maybe it will not help at all; only a qualified medical practitioner can advise you on that score and on the advisability of running for any individual in view of whatever their health status may be, but as long as you're physically capable, no harm will come from talking a little exercise of one sort or another, and it can bring much good.

While I think this book has some great ideas and suggestions, the feeling I got was that this author was so enamored of running that he rather forgot that there are other ways to get exercise and 'generate those endorphins'. It seemed to me that he was taking a rather narrow view of exercise. Running does get your blood flowing, but it is also quite high impact exercise and can carry with it potential for injury and for damage to joints and bones, so any program of exercise should be undertaken with care, and unless you're reasonably physically fit to begin with, it's always wise to consult your doctor before embarking on anything that's unusually strenuous as compared with your normal habits.

At one point the author discusses evolution and how humans evolved to chase down prey, but this is a truly dim view of our history. Humans did not run five or ten miles every day. They doubtlessly walked a heck of a lot more than most of us ever do nowadays, and they ran if they had to, but they never went jogging except as a means to get from A to B. They spent their time trapping and foraging. There's was no way they could run down a four-legged animal. They could stampede an animal into a trap, or kill it by employing subterfuge, but to equate them to modern runners and claim this is what we evolved to do is patently nonsensical. We gave up our claim to being any kind of running paragons when we stood up on two feet.

On top of this, there may be issues with running - your neighborhood may not be a safe one for running in, and it's also known that running can be hard on legs, feet, and joints, yet by the time I pretty much quit this book - over half way through - I had read not one single negative assessment of running or even caution from this author. Everything was positive and hunky-dory. Anything from ankle sprain, to Achilles tendinitis, illiotibial band problems, ligament tears, shin splints, and plantar fasciitis are all on the menu for runners, but not a single one of those terms appears anywhere in this book. We hear a lot about runner's high, but not a word about runner's knee (patellofemoral pain syndrome). I have to wonder just how rose-tinted those eyeglasses are that this author evidently wears. Note that if you run with correct form and good (read expensive!) shoes, you can stave-off the worst injuries, but any runner might be subject to any one of these problems at any time.

On the topic of endorphins, there needs to be clarification. Endorphins are generated by the body as a result of physical stress and injury (in other words, as we were just discussing, running damages your body!), and while exercise does increase endorphin levels in the blood, they don't tend to pass through the blood-brain barrier, which means they don't affect your brain much. They do affect your body and this in turn can lead to a good feeling about yourself because you're essentially running your own internal morphone factory - duhh! Also, note that endorphins affect different physiologies in different ways and you may well have to run for an hour before you generate significant endorphins, so a short run isn't necessarily going to work for you. Note though that there are other chemicals that are active in the brain, and this is what might help mental faculties and relieve symptoms of depression.

These chemicals are actually a result of the body experiencing stress or pain, which might explain why walking doesn't work as well in generating the chemicals, but any aerobic exercise that gets your heart rate up ought to do the same trick - such as riding a bike - either stationary or outdoors - or dancing, or weight-lifting (kettle bells, for example), or playing a sport, or having sex - or even eating chocolate, although that's hardly an exercise! The advantage of running is that it doesn't need special equipment as long as you have suitable clothes and a decent pair of running shoes, but you can lift weights using anything around the house that's easy to pick up, (but also heavy enough!), or swing kettle bells or a safe, home-made equivalent, such as those larger paint cans with handles (pad the handles first!). You can cycle without a bike by holding your legs up and moving them in a cycling motion, and mixing that with flutter kicks, so running isn't the only option, and other options do less damage!

In terms of negative effects of running, which you really won't read about here, https://www.active.com/health/articles/why-too-much-running-is-bad-for-your-health">Active.com reports:

In another observational study, researchers tracked over 52,000 people for 30 years. Overall, runners had a 19 percent lower death risk than non-runners. However, the health benefits of exercise seemed to diminish among people who ran more than 20 miles a week, more than six days a week, or faster than eight miles an hour. The sweet spot appears to be five to 19 miles per week at a pace of six to seven miles per hour, spread throughout three or four sessions per week. Runners who followed these guidelines reaped the greatest health benefits: their risk of death dropped by 25 percent, according to results published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

so, as in all things, moderation! Forget about enduring the pain and being tougher - run smartly if you run, but not too smartly! Think about that! The tortoise beats the hare even though it doesn't look as pretty.

Mental acuity can improve even from simple exercise. An article in Britain's The Guardian from June 18^th, 2016 reported that "German researchers showed that walking or cycling during, but not before, learning helped new foreign language vocabulary to stick" and "Just 10 minutes of playful coordination skills, like bouncing two balls at the same time, improved the attention of a large group of German teenagers." It also reported:

The runner's high - that feeling of elation that follows intense exercise - is real. Even mice get it. It may not be due to an "endorphin rush", though. Levels of the body's homemade opiate do rise in the bloodstream, but it's not clear how much endorphin actually gets into the brain. Instead, recent evidence points to a pleasurable and pain-killing firing of the endocannabinoid system: the psychoactive receptor of cannabis."

The author does mention this endocannabinoid system, and it's really quite interesting, but as always it was from the biased angle of running that he addresses things, not from 'walking or cycling'.

That same article also reported that:

Yoga teaches the deliberate command of movement and breathing, with the aim of turning on the body’s “relaxation response”. Science increasingly backs this claim. For example, a 2010 study put participants through eight weeks of daily yoga and meditation practice. In parallel with self-reported stress-reduction, brain scans showed shrinkage of part of their amygdala, a deep-brain structure strongly implicated in processing stress, fear and anxiety.

so quite clearly it's not just running which can have beneficial effects, and yoga is about as far from aerobic as you can get!

While running works - and if its your thing, then go for it, it's not the only thing that works well and I felt it misleading of this author to push running almost as though there's no real alternative. This was one of my biggest problems with this book. According to https://www.livestrong.com/article/490163-negative-effects-of-running-on-the-body/:

As many as 40 to 50 percent of runners experience an injury on an annual basis, reports a 2010 paper from researchers at the Moses Cone Family Medicine Center in North Carolina in "Current Sports Medicine Reports."

That's worth thinking about if you choose to run as opposed to undertaking some other aerobic exercise.

When I quit this book (apart from skimming a few of the later pages), it was at a point where the author has a section titled Runners Really Are Tougher. His thesis here is that runners are better at managing and holding up to pain and I have to ask, why is that important? Depression carries its own kind of pain, but it's not of the physical variety this author is discussing, such as would be experienced from an injury say, so I have to ask how is proving how tough you are relevant either to the author's aim in writing this book or to anyone in general?

Yeah, if you're planning on signing up for the Navy Seals, then by all means revel in your toughness, but there's no need to "man-up" and withstand pain when we have abundant medical remedies for combatting it. Nor is there any call to subject yourself to self-induced pain from running (or any other source) if another alternative works, or if running less gets you your healthy high without running your body into the ground - which is going to leave you low. For me, this section was the last straw and it struck me as one more absurdist foray in a book that bothered me by the very fact that it was so determinedly blinkered in its approach.

I have to say a word about wasted space in this book. Once again we have a book where whitespace rules, and if only the publisher had been wise enough to use smaller margins and fewer blank pages, the book would have been significantly shorter and thereby saved the lives of a few trees if it went to a long print run. Even if you avoid the dead tree version and go for the ebook - a longer book uses more energy to travel the Internet, so you don't get to win that way. I think it's time that traditional publishing ideologies gave way to reality. Trees right now are the only things doing anything to combat greenhouse gasses, and to slaughter them so wantonly is irresponsible.

There was an odd story at the end of this book which nevertheless shows how debilitating depression can be. The author talks about reusing plastic bags for groceries, and for whatever reason, he washes them, and one time he simply stopped because he saw no point in it. I have to wonder why he uses plastic at all when sturdy reusable canvas shopping bags will work just the same and not employ oil byproducts in their manufacture. That's what I use.

But the point is that the anecdote is exemplary in showing how irrational and unpredictable depression can be, so if a regime of regular aerobic exercise works for you, then go for it! If that involves running, then this book may or may not be of help, but from my perspective, and while I wish the author all the best, I cannot in good faith recommend this.

Invisibility by David Levithan, Andrea Cremer

Rating: WARTY!

I liked Levithan's Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist which he co-wrote with Rachel Cohn, but I did not like his Everyday, and now I find myself parting ways from him again with this crap.

Like in Nick & Nora, each author is writing a first person perspective, the one for the guy in the story, the other for the girl. It wasn't likable. I tend to really dislike first person voice with few exceptions, and I feel that when you multiply it, it just makes it worse, but that's not the worst problem for me with this story. The worst problem is how unrealistic it is, even if I grant that a boy can be literally invisible. The problem is that this boy shows absolutely no interest whatsoever in his world and doesn't even think of getting up to the adventures and mischief any red-blooded boy would think of if he were literally invisible as this boy is. He's so profoundly and irremediably boring.

The kick to the story is of course that this girl moves into an apartment just along the hall from his, and she can see him, but when they meet, it's set up like he tiptoes past her to go to his apartment. He claims he can't get in because he has to retrieve his key and he doesn't want her to see a key floating in the air apparently, but it's already been established that when he puts his clothes on, they also become invisible, and immediately after he puts food in his mouth, it also becomes invisible, so why wouldn't the key? For that matter, why wouldn't he simply carry the key with him? The boy's an idiot.

If Levithan had said the guy couldn't enter because he didn't want her to see a door open and close by itself, that would be one thing, but he didn't! Even that could have been written-off as someone looking out of their apartment and then closing the door, and I would have bought that. I can't buy the stupid and thoughtless scenario I was presented with here.

The girl is written just as dumbly, because she drops her keys and the boy doesn't offer to help because he doesn't think she can see him, but she can, and she chews him out for not helping her instead of doing what any self-possessed person would, which is put her bags down, get the keys, open the door, pick her bags up, and go inside! In short, she's also an idiot who would rather play the helpless maiden in distress than get on with things under her own steam. What she does is the precise equivalent of the old saw of a woman dropping a handkerchief to get a guy's attention! It was pathetic. She's precisely the opposite of a strong female character and I have no time for female characters like this one.

Do I want to read a story about two idiots and instadore? Hell no. The whole story struck me as short-sighted, artificial, and poorly thought-through. It was obviously a catastrophe waiting to happen, and not in a fun way. I couldn't stand to read any more of it!

The Boy on the Bridge by MR Carey

Rating: WARTY!

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

I'd read two novels by this author prior to starting this one, and he was batting a .500. I really liked The Girl With All The Gifts which I reviewed back in May of 2014, but I really didn't like Fellside which I reviewed in November of 2016. This one, I'm afraid, fell on the same side and delivered no gifts despite evidently being the second volume in The Girl With All The Gifts series. This is why I don't like series, generally speaking. Instead of plowing a new furrow, a series typically sticks in the same rut that's already been plowed.

I think writers choose this fallow ground because it's easy to navigate - just write between the lines! It's a lot simpler and less work to warm-over existing characters than to set forth against a sea of plots and by embracing, write them. I certainly wasn't expecting a zombie apocalypse novel and if I had been, I wouldn't have requested to review this. Zombie apocalypse stories are low-hanging fruit appealing to the lowest common denominator and they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. The blurb, which writers admittedly tend to have little to do with unless they self-publish, delivered nothing on the topic: "Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy. The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world. To where the monsters lived." That doesn't say zombie apocalypse to me! It really doesn't say much at all.

The author never actually uses the word 'zombie'; instead, he calls them 'hungries', which is a cheat, because the name wasn't natural. Even people who can't stand zombie stories, such as me, for example, are familiar with the basis of them, and if this really did happen as it's told here, no one would ever call these things 'hungries'. They would call them zombies. Or flesh-eaters, or cannibals, or something more commonly known. 'Hungries' simply isn't a natural word that would have come into common use, so suspension of disbelief was challenged early and lost quickly.

Even so I might have got into it had the story not been so slow and pedantic, and made so little sense. Despite it being an apocalyptic story of disease run rampant through the population, largely turning it into mindless flesh-eating 'monsters', it was far too plodding and it failed to convey any sense of adventure or danger, or even offer any thrills. The main character was flat and uninteresting and the story plodded painfully and simply did not draw me in at all. The 'science' they were supposedly doing made no sense.

It began with a handful of scientists and a handful of soldiers on an expedition in the zombie wilds, picking up test materials that had been left out there by a previous expedition. The method of making this journey - in a vehicle rather than a helicopter - made no sense either and was apparently designed merely to put these people into conflict with the zombies. What the hell this trip was even supposed to do wasn't really ever made clear, and whatever it was quickly became lost anyway in the endless detailing of people's activities and mindsets including the tediously irritating politics between members of the expedition. The painful, story-halting sorties into each character's psyche was totally uninteresting and did nothing to move the story along. It was like the author was much more interested in holding the reader's hand and spelling everything out instead of relating the kind of story where we would see what was going on without having to be told, and want to read more.

This was yet another apocalyptic story which took place in complete isolation from the rest of the world. When Americans write these stories, only America matters. The rest of the world not only doesn't matter, it also doesn't exist. It's the same thing in this story except that this writer is British, so only Britain exists - this septic isle, the only nation on planet Earth - which again destroyed suspension of disbelief.

I had thought this was a new or relatively new novel, so imagine my surprise when I saw this in audiobook form on the shelf of the library! I picked that version so I could listen to it instead of reading it, and the voice of the reader, Finty Williams (aka Tara Cressida Frances Williams!), made the story almost bearable, but in the end, even her determined and earnest reading couldn't hold my interest, so I DNF'd this novel. Life is too short to have to read books like this one, and I cannot recommend it. It's nowhere near the standard of The Girl With All The Gifts.

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.