Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris, Royal McGraw, Ilias Kyriazis, Tamra Bonvillain

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not a fan of Charlaine Harris. After enjoying True Blood on TV, I started in on the Sookie Stackhouse novels, but had a poor experience with them, so I gave up. A graphic novel about a different subject altogether OTOH, sounded like it might be a good idea, and this one certainly started well. The best part of it was that it continued well and turned out to be a great read. I really liked Ilias Kiryazis's art work, and the colors done by Tamra Bonvillain were exemplary. But it's not just lines and color, it's the story, too. In this case, that came through for me as well, despite being a bit improbable here and there!

Harper Connelly is an interesting and intriguing character with her pierced lip and lobe rings in her ears. The story is that she was struck by lightning and found afterwards that she can discover how a person died by simply standing close by where they are buried - or their body was dumped. She cannot identify the killer, but she can give quite a detailed description of how they died.

How she gets this information is a mystery since sometimes it supposedly comes from young from children who could hardly so much as know, let alone understand, how they died. I don't believe in gods or the occult, but I do enjoy a good story about the supernatural. The thing is that if you're going to tell a story like this, you really need to work out your mythology beforehand, otherwise anything goes and there are no rules, and your story fails for lack of intelligent structure. But I'm willing to let a small amount of this slide as long as it doesn't start ripping up the story or credibility for me. In this case it wasn't an obstacle.

Tolliver is Harper's step brother. They're very close, and he acts as her manager and companion. During an exercise to demonstrate that Harper's power is real, she makes a disturbing discovery - a grave contains two bodies, one much more recent than the other. The newer body is that of a young girl who was abducted from outside her home, and later killed. Harper had been called in by the girl's parents to see if she could find Tabitha Morgenstern's body and had failed - evidently because the body had been buried far from the girl's home town. Now Harper has discovered it, the spotlight is on her and the awkwardness of dealing with Tabitha's parents, whom she had failed two years before.

I found the use of the Latin word 'alumna' at one point to be interesting. This is the technically correct use when describing one female graduate. The plural is alumnae. In this male-dominated and very pretentious society, most people talk and think only of 'alumnus' which is the singular for a male graduate, and alumni (for a group of male or mixed male/female graduates). While it's commendable that the authors got this right in a technical sense, I personally feel that this deliberate distinction between male and female in such titles (along with actor/actress, author/authoress, and so on, isn't productive and is divisive, so 'alumnus' would have been fine with me, but the less pretentious graduate is better!

But I digress! The story was fun, and interesting, although the villain became obvious to me before it occurred to Harper! I'm usually not very good at these things which is why I enjoy them so much, os the fact that i figured it out suggests that others may well do so long before I did. That aside though, I loved the story and the art, and I really liked the concept. I would enjoy reading more about this interesting couple.

Generation Zero by Fred Van Lente, Francis Portela, Andrew Dalhouse

Rating: WORTHY!

I had no idea what Generation Zero was about having no exposure to it before (it's very much a young-adult version of X-Men, although it has no affiliation with the Marvel property as far as I know). Along came this graphic novel which sounded appealing and I was pleased to have the chance to review an ARC. So thanks to the publisher! Note that this is a work of fiction, and not to be confused with the New Zealand youth organization focused on the much-needed weaning of our society from fossil fuels!

It turns out, as the blurb tells us, that Generation Zero is a group for kids who were experimented on by private military contractors in Project Rising Spirit, aimed at producing 'psychic soldiers'. Well, they apparently succeeded. The blurb tells us the soldiers won their freedom. How that happened I don't know. I find it hard to believe that the government would let them go so easily, but maybe it wasn't easy. Anyway, now they have a new mission: helping teens in need.

No one feels more in need than Keisha Sherman. Her boyfriend just died in a highly suspect car accident in the too-good-to-be-true town of Rook, Michigan, heart of a new and suspiciously rapid tech boom. Keisha never was your regular teen. Sporting a rad look and hanging with the out-crowd, she appeals to Generation Zero through her computer because she knows her boyfriend was onto something suspicious going on in this town, and that;s why he died. She discovers that Generation Zero is not so mythical. She's advised to destroy the computer she used to contact them (why this must be done isn't explained!), and get on with her life. Pretty soon, new students start showing up at her school, and they make the out-crowd look normal.

These students are evidently Generation Zero: Animalia (shape-shifter), Cloud (a mind scrambler), Cronus (the gorup leader), Gamete, Telic, and the Zygos twins. These guys, plus one other shadowy sort, and Keisha and are going to make a difference. As long as the suspiciously compliant adults in the town, including Keisha's own father, who is a cop, don't trip up their plans. Note that there are other members of Generation Zero which aren't featured in this graphic novel.

I liked this for the characters, the artwork, which came in two styles, one for regular life, and one for this oddball sequence which depicted the world as people saw it, not as how it was. That was pretty cool. The drawing depicted people realistically, without the improbable and genderist proportions of super hero comics. Some were overweight, one of Keisha's friends was in a wheelchair There is no bad language and no overt sexuality although one scene shows a young couple in bed together, but they're just talking. I liked that the story wasn't afraid to be real all the way through. I liked that the main character, Keisha, was African American and female - not a common occurrence in far too many graphic novels - and that she had a younger brother who was a bit of a special needs kid.

But it's more than just getting the a realistic set of characters. There has a to be a story, otherwise it's just pretty pictures of interesting people, and this one felt good and plausible (in the framework of the story, of course!). So I recommend this. It hit the spot and I'd definitely be interested in pursuing the story.

Centurion and Emperador by Rob Schneider, Patricia Schneider

Rating: WORTHY!

I'm not sure what this story is called! Net Galley had it as Centurion and Emperador by Rob Schneider, but the downloaded advance review copy (for which I thank the publisher!) has the first page reading The Gamble Ranch with no author ascribed. Inside the credits are: story by Rob and Patricia Schneider, script by Patricia Schneider (not sure that that means!), art by Francisco Herrera, and colors by Fernanda Rizo (who is a remarkable artist in her own right, and definitley someone who I would want doing my artwork were I writing a book needing images, and if I could even afford her! LOL!). Hopefully those issues will be cleared-up by publishing time. Maybe what seems to be the cover in the ARC is actually an interior page - it was hard to tell.

None of this matters though, when compared with the story itself, which is magnificent and is actually based on real horses of the same names, which are owned by friends of the authors, and who reside at the Gamble Ranch. The horses really do dance. This story is perfect for young children and the art work is amazingly good. I mean really good - far better than you usually get in books for young children or even for older readers. Herrera's line work is gorgeous, and Rizo's coloring is beautiful. I was totally hooked from the opening image (of the 'it was a dark and stormy night' variety!). The vista of the farm, with the lightning in the sky, the slashes of rain falling across the picture and the mood lighting imbued in the artwork were magnificent.

Of course this would just be a coffee table book, albeit a beautiful one, if it were not for the story, too, and that was told nicely, beautifully worded for kids, and made sense in its own little world of anthropomorphized animals and gentle fairy-tale influences. The storks arrive at the wrong place with these two baby horses, but the mother duck, who sorely wishes she had children of her own, snaps up these two with a determination which Hilary Clinton probably feels Democrat voters had had more of on election day!

The horses prove to be unusual ones, however. They're really not very good at racing, and the other horses make fun of them, but come the Town Fair, they discover something the can beat anyone at, and they really come into their own. I love the way the story not only celebrates, but heartily embraces differences and teaches kids that being different isn't a problem or a curse, it's a source of wonderment and joy. I recommend this book for its horse sense! Quite frankly, if you don't like this story you're an equine dock (just kidding!).

A January Bride by Deborah Raney

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray

Rating: WORTHY!

This was an audiobook I picked up on spec from the library and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books I've ever encountered. The tone was delicious, the reader, Coleen Marlo, perfect, and the story amazing. It's one of those stories which makes a hopeful writer like me wish I had thought of it first, but I doubt I could have written this particular story as well as Jeanne Ray did. The tone of voice in the story is beautiful: slightly bemused, humorous, and a little bit sarcastic. It's first person, too, which I normally do not like, but it was perfect here. Audiobooks tend to be much more experimental with me because I'm a captive audience when commuting, so I see a lot of fails with these, but those are worth the listening, because one in a while one like this pops up and makes it all worthwhile.

Clover Hobart is a fifty-four year old woman who discovers one morning that she's invisible. Her visibility wavers for a day or two before it becomes, apparently, permanent. The weird thing though is not her visibility, but the fact that no one in her family: not her husband the pediatrician, not her emotional daughter, and not her unemployed son who is living at home see any difference. She's apparently always been invisible to them!

Her best friend Gilda, who lives down the street, notices. At first Clover starts panicking, but as she grows used to it, she realizes there are things she can do. If she takes her clothes off, no one can see her and it's a super power. She discovers there are other such women in her position and that they have a secret society which meets in the Sheraton in a conference room which they don't even have to book to reserve it. No one knows they're using it! Since these women all travel naked, they have to bring a tissue with them so they can raise it when they want to speak. Clover becomes friends with some of them. At first she has a problem with the nudity, but since one property of invisibility is that she doesn't feel heat or cold, she eventually embraces it as they have done.

One day, she accompanies one of her new acquaintances to the school where she lost her job when she became invisible. The two of them ride the school bus and spend the day in the school. No one can see them and they're able to prevent bullying and tackle other issues. This inspires the other woman to think she can get her job back. On another day, Clover foils a bank robbery, but of course gets no credit since no one could see her do anything. They just thought the robber randomly threw his guns away!

I noted that some critics down-rated the story for being unrealistic(!) or vacuous, but to me, the whole point of the story was to be playful and light-hearted, and have fun while exploring a very real issue: the metaphorical invisibility which older women routinely experience, and which they do so far more than older men. I think the author did a fantastic job and I want to read more of her work. I recommend this unreservedly.

Level The Playing Field by Kristina Rutherford

Rating: WARTY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note also that this is going to be a lot longer review than I usually give to a book of this short length, because this is an important topic and I don't think it was covered adequately or ironically, equitably here!

The overall impression I had of this book was not that of a reasoned and cogent argument, or of anything that went into any depth. It felt much more like a rant, and as such it failed to make a case. This is the kind of subject which all too often becomes emotional, but that serves no purpose in trying to get a the roots of a discrepancy like this, to properly understand the issues, and to determine how best to set them right - or even if they can be set right.

What disappointed me most of all was that the author seemed unable to recognize the issues even when she described them. For instance, I read:

Every PGA Tour event is televised and some tournaments draw more than 10 million viewers. Only select LPGA Tour events are televised, and even major tournaments draw fewer than 1 million viewers.

I don't get her point here. It seems to me that she's elucidated the problem perfectly: the viewership of the female tournament is one tenth that of the male tournament, meaning that the advertisers are not going to show-up in droves, meaning the money is going to be significantly less, meaning that the winner's purse is going to be dramatically reduced. The the root of the discrepancy, and therefore the problem to be resolved here is why the viewership is so much less, but the author evidently wasn't interested in pursuing this question, preferring instead to wave a hand at media coverage and mark it down as explained. Well, they had media coverage here, but the viewership was far less. Why is the author not asking why that's the case? I'll talk more about this later.

On the one hand the book makes some good arguments for equity in how women are treated when it comes to sports and it definitely highlights the discrepancy between how male and female athletes are viewed (and paid), but on the other hand it came across as rather whiny and preachy, and it seemed far more focused on money and celebrity than ever it was in trying to understand why there's such a massive discrepancy between how athletes of each gender (regardless of whether they're celebrities or not) are viewed.

The author never did distinguish between equality in how athletes are treated, and equality in how athletes garner for themselves a fan base. You can legislate equality, as the US did when Democrat Senator Birch Bayh introduced what became known as Title IX in June 1972 (a year before Roe v. Wade made huge strides in another direction related tomember of Congressr who co-authored it, but it's most commonly referred to as Title IX. Patsy Mink was the first Asian American woman elected to Congress

At the beginning of this book we're asked, of two basketball stars, "Why aren't athletes like LeBron and Maya valued and recognized equally for their talent?" There are reasons for that which we'll go into shortly, and I would have been much more impressed had the book gone after real answers like this instead of the route it took. I would have been more impressed still had it approached the subject as fairly as it expects male and female athletes to be treated! The only 'solution' on offer here seemed to be that if women are given the same media exposure as men, then everything will magically balance-out, but nothing was put forward to support this claim, and frankly I have a hard time seeing that happening for a variety of reasons, and especially not in the US.

The first issue is the question of whether sports really represents the same kind of workplace that other occupations, say in the medical profession or in businesses not tied to professional sports offer. Frankly it doesn't. No one in their right mind would argue that two people, regardless of gender, who were doing the same job to the same degree of skill should get equal treatment including pay, in any ordinary endeavor, but the question of how you resolve whether two people are doing the same job in sports went totally unexamined. There were some random potshots taken at it, but nothing substantial.

Instead, we were treated to a distinctly monocular view: that of men v. women, without any attempt to look at the issue using any other lens. In particular, the fact that sports is one occupation which is conducted in the full glare of media, and with huge audiences in attendance and dramatic financial considerations in play wasn't addressed at all. This is one reason why, at the risk of a pun, it's a different ball game when compared with other occupations.

The book opens with a mention of several female athletes, including Danica Patrick, a NASCAR driver, who is gushingly described as "the most successful female race car driver in history" yet this driver has never won a race on US soil, and as of this writing has had only a single win to my knowledge. So how is her 'success' being calculated? By the fact that she earned thirteen million dollars last year? What does that have to do with being an athlete per se, or with being successful at her chosen sport? Nothing! It pretty much has to do with her having a monopoly in being a high-profile female on one hand, and her not being a complete disaster at what she does on the other.

While I would not deny Danica Patrick, or anyone else the success she's had, however it's measured, I would balk at trying to use this as an argument for equality and the author strangely seems to agree with this because whenever she talks about other female athletes, none of those are championed as successful for having no wins! On the contrary, they're put on a pedestal as being very successful in terms of winning things.

So we immediately have a disconnect in what constitutes success, which then means we have a problem in determining how that success should be rewarded. Do we value a high earner who is not successful at least insofar as garnering wins goes, or do we value success in terms of wins even when remuneration is poor? What's the goal here?! It cannot be the double standard the author seems to have set up. This is important.

I also have to wonder why this book doesn't reference other people who are sports professionals, but who do not earn the big bucks. There are thousands of people in sports, men and women, and only the so-called top-tier ones get the big bucks. Most of the others are entirely unpaid or only part-timers, or full-time professionals earning only the lowest level of financial remuneration for athletes in their field.

Admittedly this can be significant pay, and much higher than most of us can hope for, but I think it would have served a useful purpose to ask why they - both men and women - are not as highly paid as the ones featured in the book, and to ask: does the reason for their inequality offer any clues to the reason for the inequality between men and women - and I'm not talking in terms of performance. This is sports, remember, and individual performance is only one factor - and a relatively small one as it happens, because this isn't your regular everyday occupation, especially not in team sports.

The natural response to what I've said here might be that this book was talking only about high achievers, matching high-achieving males with similar females, but if we apply the 'logic' employed here, but in this direction, can we argue that those people, too, would magically get pay raises and achieve equality if only they could get the same media exposure? You really can't, so I'm wondering how it is that we think increased exposure alone would magically improve women's lot in sports?

If you think I'm trying to make an argument here that female sports professionals are really only lower-tier, or poorer-grade, or second-rate performers, then you're misunderstanding. The argument I am making here is that it's really not as simple or as straight-forward as this author seems to be trying to argue. You can't make a case for equal pay without supporting it, just as you can't make a case for those lower-tier athletes (of any gender) to be on par with the top-tier athletes without supporting that in some way, too.

You can't argue that it has to be done purely from a bald claim that person B ought really to be remunerated at the same level as person A, regardless. You have to ask what is being contributed, because professional sports is about exposure and audiences, not just about personal performance. This is an aspect of the endeavor which the book doesn't explore. Yes, it complains about poor exposure for female athletes, but it doesn't offer any suggestions or real examination of root causes! It merely blames the media and leaves it at that.

The only argument the author seems to be able to make is along the lines of "Hey! Fair's fair!" but the way this system works, and has worked for far too long, really has nothing to do with how well a given athlete performs. The most widely-followed sports really aren't about that, notwithstanding all of the individual achievement awards and post-game MVP appellations. It's about blind team solidarity, sheep-like (or perhaps more accurately, wolf-like) adherence to pack mentality, and in-your-face aggression towards every team and every supporter who isn't "us". Individual players have no part to play in that aspect of team 'sports' especially given that at some point the individual will move on or retire, while the team continues on largely unaffected by the loss of any one individual.

It's not that women can't give attitude or be aggressive, or assertive as over-hyped TV cameras love. They can. It's just that women in general are not as overt as men are in this regard and this applies whether the male or female in question is a player or a spectator. Women are not as combative (that's not to be read as 'not as competitive', which would be a huge lie) as men, and while this is perfectly fine - in fact, I personally prefer it - it doesn't play well given the juvenile frat-boy sports mentality which is rife in today's male-soaked sports media, where it's entirely given over to a combative attitude.

The mentality is 'destroy or be destroyed', 'win at all costs', losers are useless, and so on. The Queen song, We Are the Champions sums it up: "We are the champions! No time for losers 'cause we are the champions of the world!" This is how it's seen. The US football Super Bowl winners are hailed as champions of the world even though no other nations competed!

Again, it's a winner takes all mentality, and it has nothing to do with how well individual athletes perform per se. It's that very psychosis: aggression, combativeness, posing, strutting, in-your-face rudeness, and asinine attitude, which completely turns me off sports, but it is this which appeals to the cave-man mentality that far too many team sports and media outlets seem dedicated to embracing, promoting, and perpetuating. There is no more room for equity and fairness here that there was in the Roman Colosseum.

Before we go any further let's be clear that there are inequalities. According to the Women's Sports Foundation:

• Female students comprise 57% of student populations, but female athletes received only 43% of participation opportunities at NCAA schools.
• Male athletes get 55% of NCAA college athletic scholarship dollars. Guess how much women then get!
• Women's teams receive only 40% of college sport operating dollars and 36% of college athletic team recruitment spending.
• Median head coaches' salaries at NCAA Division I-FBS schools are $3,430,000 for men's teams and $1,172,400 for women's teams.

These telling stats are not ones you'll read in this book, because the book isn't about making that kind of a case. It's all about individuals, and I think that approach was a mistake. I think that very approach played into the media status quo rather than challenged it, which is what is actually needed here. There is a real problem, almost half a century on, in Title IX providing true equality for females in sports. This is a fact, but whether, if there were true and complete equality, this would translate into the same thing at the professional and media level, is another issue entirely. Given the result of over forty years of Title IX, the answer seems to be that it would not make enough of a difference.

The problem with the stats just quoted is that all we get is the bald fact of inequality. There's no exploration of why it's so or why it's being allowed to perpetuate and exacerbate in the professional world. This disparity is nowhere more pronounced than in professional soccer as is highlighted in Newsweek. The US women's team has won three world cups whereas the men's team has never advanced beyond the quarter-finals, yet male players routinely "earn" three times what female players do! To earn their relatively meager compensation, the women must win all twenty of the season games whereas the men could lose all twenty and still get full pay. Is this fair? Not even close. This is exactly the disparity that Title IX sought to set right, so how is it that it fails so badly when these athletes actually get to the professional level?

On this score (at the risk of another pun!) I was sorry to see some sleight-of-hand in this author's reporting. Consider this statement regarding remuneration in the National Women's Soccer League: "The average salary in the U.S. based NWSL is between $6,000 and $30,000 for a six-month season. A top-tier player on the men's pro side makes more than the high-end of that average - in a single week" Note how we went from an "average" to a top-tier performer? The average isn't even an average, it's a range. Is the actual average halfway between the two values? How does that compare with the men's average? We're not told, but comparing an "average" to a top-tier man's pay isn't comparing apples to apples. That said, the two would still be discrepant, but when the numbers are twisted and mismatched like that, it's really hard to get a good picture. We can't begin to figure out how to narrow a gap when we don't even get to know what the gap is or why it really exists!

One assertion from the author, referencing what someone else has said on the topic, is that "the key to closing this gap is simple: People just need to see us play. When increased exposure leads to interest from advertisers, the amount of money involved can rise pretty quickly," but this is not borne-out by experience. According to Newsweek, the Women's World Cup final of 2015 was the most watched soccer match - male or female - ever in the US, but this garnered nothing for women's sports, not even for women's soccer in the year that followed.

It's been almost twenty years since the US women's team won the World Cup soccer final in front of a sold-out Rose Bowl holding some 90,000 fans. It was a stunning game every bit the equal of a men's game - in truth leagues better than a men's game. The US men's soccer team has never done this! Whenever there's such a win, and there have been three, it's all "we're world class" and "women's sports are on the upsurge," but the day after it's always "ho-hum! What's next?" You cannot blame female athletes for asking "What do we have to do to get recognition? You cannot blame the US Olympic women who carried home 61 medals to the men's 55 from Rio for asking the same question. The author apparently isn't interested in asking this kind of question or pursuing it as far as it needs to go.

There are important aspects to these discrepancies which the author doesn't touch upon too, and which in fact relate directly to her calling an unfair play on pay. Look at US basketball, for example: while fifty or so top NBA players earn more than the entire WNBA teams roster combined, the NBA brings in five billion dollars, whereas the Women's National Basketball Association is lucky to break even. This is a question which ought to have been explored, but was not. Why does the WNBA fare so poorly? Is it because the media is shunning it, or because it simply doesn't attract as many fans and global sponsorship as the men's games do, and if that's the case, then why is that so? The author seems content to blame media bias, offer no support for the claim, and leave it at that.

We'll get back to that in a second, but let's take a moment and ask why the author never addresses the fact of women being segregated in sports as they are in no other profession, not even in the military these days. She simply accepts this segregation as a given, and I have to wonder why that inequality isn't addressed. If the leagues were white players on one side and black players on the other, then I'm sure she would have found that worth questioning, so why no questions about gender segregation? The black basketball league would then be the one making the big bucks and the white league would be in the position the women's league is, more than likely, in terms of garnering coverage! It's not an inapt comparison!

I further have to wonder if this segregation is part of the problem: if women, instead of playing in the WNBA, played in the NBA, how would they fare? This isn't to try and set up an argument for saying that women can't compete on equal terms and therefore shouldn't get equal treatment. Women have proven repeatedly that they can compete on equal terms. This is to point out that this book really doesn't delve very deep. It makes a superficial argument that everything ought to be equal, but it never makes a case for why, and it never wonders whether this particular aspect also ought to be equal and if so, would it improve matters? It avoids that altogether. It also avoids dress code, which we shall look at shortly.

Back to the segregation. It's a fact the women tend to be smaller and less muscular than men, but is this a problem? Maybe. Women would be typically shorter and lighter than the men they played against were the basketball leagues to be combined. In the NBA, the average height is six feet eight inches, whereas the average height in the WNBA is six feet. Would this be a disadvantage given that half the NBA players are necessarily six feet or less, and basketball is in theory at least, a non-contact sport? Would the advantage that a tall woman has among less tall-women in her league translate to poor performance if she became a medium-sized person among many taller persons in a male league? It's an interesting question, but it went unexplored and ignoring this made the author's case feel more like special pleading than it did a call for fair play.

Dd you know that the ball is also different between the male and female game in basketball? It's slightly smaller and lighter. Why is that and why does the author not address it? Why do female basketball players use a smaller ball while female soccer players do not? There's no answer because the author didn't ask the question. These differences in equipment translate across many other sports - the women's javelin and the women's discus are both smaller and lighter than the men's, the shot is lighter in the shotput, LPGA courses are shorter than PGA courses, and so on. In basketball, while women shoot free throws on par with men, their 3 pointers from the field average lower even in their own league. So what does equality mean? What does parity have to hinge upon? Again, we get not a word on this from the author who seems to be arguing for parity in pay but not in anything else.

As a Washington Post article puts it,

As Alice Dreger, professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, told me: "The reason we have females separated in sports is because in many sports, the best female athletes can't compete with the best male athletes. And everybody knows that, but nobody wants to say it. Females are structured like a disabled class for all sorts of, I think, good reasons."

This is something else the author did not explore in this book. Is the problem that simple or is there more to it? She didn't ask. According to the NY times, "There has yet to be a financially viable women's mainstream sports league in the United States." The author would undoubtedly argue that this is because of poor media coverage, but although she argues that, she fails to support any such argument.

And take a look at the crowd in the image accompanying the article. That says it all right there. Women are not sports attenders in general - not on the level at which men are - or even at which women are when it comes to men's games. The attendance by gender at all of the major sports in the US shows males turning up at literally twice the rate of female attendees. We read a lot in this book about women who play the sports, but nothing about those who attend and thereby help pay the salaries of the participants.

It bothers me that the author doesn't explore these aspects as a reason for disparity and inequality, asking why the attendance is so poor. Advertisers are not going to want to pay much to have an ad at a game with seven thousand people when they can have one at a game which will be seen by twice that number of people (not even including the viewers at home), and without extra advertising revenue, there's less cash to pay the players. The author doesn't explore, either, whether men really ought to get more if they play eighty games in a basketball season, which is twice what female players play.

There's an interesting, and sad, article here about this disparity in attendance related to Syracuse University's performance in the 2016 basketball season (and on the topic of inequality do compare the men's basketball page for Syracuse in Wikipedia with the women's! This makes a better argument about inequality than this book did, in my opinion!). Women had a far better season than the men (losing in the final whereas the men lost in the quarterfinals) yet their attendance was averaging less than a thousand, while the men's was almost twenty-two times as high.

Keep in mind that roughly thirty percent of the attendance at the men's games - that would be 6,000 to 7,000 people - was women. Where were these women when it came to games played by their own gender? ESPN is on record as saying that men accounted for 66% of its WNBA audience in 2013. Where were the women? Why are they viewing women's games at roughly the same percentage as they're viewing men's games? Why are so few men viewing women's games?

None of this is explored in the book, yet all of it is relevant to the case the author thought she was making. Is the lack of interest in women's sports not just from the media and from men, but also from women themselves? Apparently so, and this is one thing Title IX cannot legislate. They can compel equal opportunity (to more or less success as we've seen), but they cannot compel fans and supporters into existence or into attendance.

There are sports where women compete on perfectly equal terms with men, but where women are highly underrepresented. The author never explored this. For example, Danica Patrick has extremely high visibility and is highly rewarded for racing in NASCAR, but as mentioned, she has never won a race (as of this writing) on US soil, and has had only one win elsewhere. The author mentions Danica Patrick but never explores the details. Patrick earned about thirteen million in 2015, whereas Dale Earnhardt earned almost twice that, with no wins! Kyle Busch, who won at least five races earned less than Patrick did! There is no justice or parity anywhere in this particular story, yet no one seems to complain about that!

What do TV advertisers advertise at women's games? At men's games it seems to be cars, beer, power tools, and financial and retirement opportunities. What do advertisers want to offer to women, and do they have the same advertising budget to offer it with that the car and beer advertisers do? Again, this is unexplored, but it does have a bearing on the subject. More to the point is what happens in comparable situations.

For example, a new TV show is very much like a sports event. Because of the intensely capitalistic system the USA operates in, the show needs viewers to survive. If viewership goes down, the show is cancelled. We've lost a lot of quality shows because of this, while crappy so-called "reality' shows thrive. Why? Because this is what idiots watch on the idiot's lantern. It's that simple. Quality often fails were the lowest common denominator wins every time, and this is the issue: it all comes down to what makes money for the media. It has nothing to do with parity or equality, fairness or gender rights. If the female sports events don't attract viewers and sustain the attraction beyond world cup events, then advertisers are not going to be interested and the media is not going to cover them, yet this author doesn't ask why attendance is so poor. She just blames the media for it.

Let's talk about equality some more - in this case, equality of dress. Has anyone given any thought to how male athletes dress as compared to female ones? Probably not, but I think it's part of the problem. Take a look at your average male track athlete in the last Olympics and note how they dress for the track. On men, the shorts may be tight or loose fitting, and the shirt may be sleeveless or not, but they are wearing a shirt and shorts. Now take a look at the women who are, for all practical purposes, dressed in bikinis. Shotput? The same. Javelin? The same. Why is that? For beach volleyball, they wear even less! The men don't though. Why is that?

Consider this: swimming is the only event I can think of in the Olympics in which men wear less than women. Maybe it is literally for all practical purposes that women dress so skimpily, but if that's the case, then why are men not emulating them in terms of wearing an abbreviated top and bikini shorts? Now look at soccer or basketball. What do women wear? Very much the same as men do! Why is that? It seems to me that if you want to be taken seriously as an athlete, you might want to reconsider wearing bikinis for every event! Is this a valid argument? We don't know, because once again, this is a highly visible aspect to sports which this author completely ignores.

I didn't like this author's overall attitude either, quite frankly! At one point, she says, "But it's female athletes who most consistently give us representations of women who embody qualities like toughness and power and tenacity." How disrespectful is that to women who work in other professions? Are female firefighters not tough? Are female law enforcement disempowered? Are female soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and the Coast Guard lacking tenacity? Are female industry leaders powerless? Are teachers not tenacious? Are female nurses not tough?! The single-minded focus on athletes here, notwithstanding this was the main purpose of the book, was an insult to women working in other fields.

In conclusion, this book felt far more like a cult of personality than an honest exploration on gender inequity in sports. The bottom line, though would seem to be popularity: does the media really shun women's sports or does the media simply show what's most popular because it's from this that advertising revenue will derive, regardless of what gender is involved in the sport?

This question should have been one to explore, but we don't get that here: who attends? Who pays to watch? Is the female game perceived, by those who pay the entrance fees, just as worthy of admission price as the men's game is? As reported in late 2016, "The WNBA registered its highest attendance (1,561,530) since 2011 and the highest average attendance (7,655). For comparison, the average attendance at NBA games is over twice that, at around 17,000.

Are people simply voting with their feet not for which gender is worth supporting, but for which game is worth viewing with their limited budget? Which has the best atmosphere? Which one their friends will be going to and talking about the next day? Maybe it's just that simple, maybe it isn't, but we won't know the answer to that from reading this book, and I cannot recommend it because not only does it not achieve what it claims to aim at, it doesn't even pursue what it claims to be chasing! If you want to write a book about leveling the playing field, you need to be on the level in what you write.

Rosco the Rascal Visits the Pumpkin Patch by Shana Gorian

Rating: WORTHY!

Just in time for Halloween and in plenty of time for Thanksgiving, this is a middle-grade chapter book with some illustrations set around this time of year (assuming you're reading this in late October and you're in the northern hemisphere!). It has its roots in a real dog owned by the author, but the story is fictional. It's part of a series, and you can get another one in the series free by signing up for the author's mailing list.

Rosco (which I keep wanting to add an 'e' to so it looks less like a corporate name!) is in the McKendrick family, which consists of mom, dad, and two children, ten year old James, and seven-year-old Mandy. In this adventure, they visit the pumpkin patch where dad wants to procure a giant pumpkin to carve for Halloween. Rosco is a bit naughty at times, but it all comes from his desire to have fun and run-off excess energy. To be fair, he also has some very positive traits, though. He's very protective of children, and both his naughtiness and his protectiveness play a role in this story, as they enjoy the outdoors, take part in activities on the pumpkin farm, and get lost in the corn maze - which turns out to be fortunate for an even younger child who's in there, also lost. And very afraid. And hurt.

I'm not a big fan of "intelligent" dog and cat stories because in my sad experience the authors make them so human that they're no longer dogs or cats, so really, what's the point? In this case, though, I loved the way the author seems to get inside the dog's head, making it appear very human in a very doglike way, without turning it into a completely unbelievable human substitute. The story wasn't written for my age range, but even so it was fun, interesting, realistic, believable, and very entertaining. It carried positive messages and had a warm and happy ending. I recommend this for kids of all ages.

I Am Josephine (and I Am a Living Thing) by Jan Thornhill

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

"Inspired by science and nature writer Jan Thornhill's many classroom visits, this book is intended to help children recognize themselves as part of the natural world, with an emphasis on how all living things share similarities."

This was a great book which teaches a little taxonomy along with exhibiting a fun young girl who is the very embodiment of life. Josephine compares and contrasts herself with everything around her. Is she like this or different from that? In her comparisons and contrasts, we learn that she's a living thing (and definitely full of life!), and an animal, and a mammal, and a human being. We also learn what some other animals and plants are, as she skips and dances through her colorful world examining everything. The book is a joy to read and a delight to look at, and is educational to boot, with some interaction where young kids can search and count. All in all it's a great little book and I liked it very much.

Livia Lone by Barry Eisler

Rating: WORTHY!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I enjoyed this novel very much. Normally I'm not a fan of flashbacks, but though the ones here were extensive, they were done well, and were integral to the story rather than filler or back-story for the sake of back-story. The entire novel moved quickly and determinedly. There was no fluff here and no time-wasting, and no young-adult-style first person, for which I personally thank the author! This is a book for grown-ups and will make even those feel uncomfortable. Events were credible (even when they were incredible!) and organic to the story, and the main character - Livia - was amazing: believable, endearing, demanding empathy, yet not pitiful. She was a woman with a mission and she never let anything get in the way of it, yet she did not ride roughshod over others to get what she wanted. She was patient and determined and in the end her dedication paid off, yet the ending was neither sentimental nor clichéd.

I grew to like this character from the start, and only admired and rooted for her more as the story continued. She was my idea of a strong female, and not necessarily in that she was physically tough - although in this case she was. She had more than that, though: she had spine and grit, both of which she direly needed after what she'd endured, but endure she did, never letting life get in the way of being a human-being no matter how single-minded she was in service to her cause. She had a habit (nicely not over-done) of saying "Yes, that!" which both evoked her non-English past, and made her at once endearing and sad. I found myself adopting that phrase in my mind from time to time when I was just going about my daily business, it made such a warm impression on me.

Her personal story was horrible. Sold by her uncaring and impoverished parents into sex slavery, thirteen year-old Livia's only concern was for her younger sister, who was sold with her in Thailand. Only one of them arrived in Portland, USA, and for the next two decades, Livia spends her time struggling to survive what befalls her and at the same time stay alive no matter what, so she can find out what happened to her sister Nason.

Just when her path looks like it will become straight and narrow, it meanders into serious problems, but upholding her silent promise to her sister, she keeps on going, true to herself, and eventually works her way into a position where no man can overwhelm her and take advantage of her again, and that's not simply because she becomes a police officer. As a law-enforcement officer however, she can now try to track down her sister, but after all this time, will the trail have gone too cold to follow? That life and that mission is what this story is about, and it was excellent from start to finish.

The story was told well, with sufficient detail and technical knowledge to make it believable, but not so much that it looked like the author was showing off, or you felt like you were reading a technical training manual rather than a novel, which is how Tom Clancy's novels sound to me. Whether in the US or Thailand, it felt real and it entertained and engrossed, and it lived and breathed. I loved the ambiguity of the title, which sounds a bit like 'leave ya alone'. Definitely my kind of phrase! So all in all a great book, and well worth reading.

Change of Life by Samantha Bryant

Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"the flange of a Ouija board"? The planchette, not the flange!
"experimenting on the populous" Populace, not populous!

Note that this was an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

This is the sequel to Going Through the Change by Samantha Bryant, which I reviewed very favorably back in August of 2015.. I have to say up front that I was much less pleased with this one for a variety of reasons which I shall discuss shortly. The story is that of some mature women who undergo changes which equip them with superpowers when all they expected was menopause or a quiet retirement. I enjoyed reading a story about more mature women for once. Such stories are rare, and well-told and engaging ones rarer still. In the first book, Patricia O'Neill grows scales on her skin. Jessica Roark discovers that she can fly - or at least float. Helen Braeburn learns that she can create fire - and survive it - and she becomes the villain of the piece. Linda Alvarez changes, rather abruptly, into a man with very unusual strength.

This novel picks up not long after the first one finishes, with the girls moving on with their lives as best they can now their secret is out. Sort of. The story begins with Linda Alvarez, now officially renamed Leonel - although why that name rather than say, 'Lyndon', is not explained. Neither is it explained why she adopts a man's name given that her thought processes are very much a woman's at this point, since she's literally a woman occupying a male body. She apparently never heard of a boy named Sue! 'Lyndon' is a boy's name with a similar sound, although it doesn't mean the same as 'Linda' does (Spanish for beautiful).

Most names which mean 'beautiful' are female names, so Linda would need to be named something like Hermoso or Bonito, neither of which have quite the same feel. How about Bo, short for Beauregard? It's just a suggestion. Fortunately, Leonel still has the love of her husband who is conveniently bisexual (at least she hopes she still has his love), and meanwhile she's training to be an agent with the government, along with Jessica, and trying to track down the villain of the previous volume.

This volume introduces a new villain, but for me, the problems with the tale too many to really enjoy it. This volume did not have the original and inventive feel of the first; there was very little action in it; it was overly long for the story it told, and it consequently moved very slowly. On top of that, we learned nothing about how or why the women changed the way they did, so there was no more depth added there. Worse, the ending was very dissatisfying, with the villain escaping, so now it's become like an annoying episodic TV series with a seasonal arc. In short, the novel embodied what I like least about series and why I do not favor them, except for a very few rare and treasured instances.

Some parts were very entertaining. I particularly liked Jessica in this one whereas I think I preferred Linda in the first. Jessica was bouncy and energetic and I enjoyed her scenes, but these were the only ones I really enjoyed. The problem as that Jessica never got to show her stuff. She was always on a leash and neither did Linda nor Patricia get let-off the leash for that matter. It was like they were being held back, and this is fine in order to build expectations in the beginning of the story, but at some point you have to let your super heroes loose, and when they're held back for the entire story, all you do is engender disappointment and irritation. At least that's how it is with me.

Overall, the pace in this volume was lethargic, and the contrast between this volume and the last, and between Jessica's scenes here and the chapters featuring other characters was very noticeable. Talking of bouncing, there was a lot of bouncing around between characters too. I felt a bit like a pinball! While the novel is commendably not told in first person, for which I thank the author, the short chapters got me invested in one character's story only to find I was quickly ripped away from that into another character's world, where I would start to get settled only to be ripped away again. It made for a choppy and unpleasant read for me.

There was a lot of telling here rather than showing as well, and some of the characters I couldn't get invested in because reading about them felt more like this was a daytime TV show than ever it was a super-hero story. I'm very much in favor of writers who offer a different take on a given genre, in this case super powers and the people imbued with them. This is why I liked the first book in this series so much, but I don't like soap operas, and this had that feel to it, and it cropped up far too often for my taste.

The story was also rather deceitful in some regards, because all these internal monologues gave the superficial appearance of delving into a character's feelings and relationships, yet in the final analysis, we never really got to see those relationships in action. Linda, for example, was fretting about her husband, who had been the dominant stereotypical male (which makes me wonder what Linda saw in him in the first place).

In this story, we learn that he's not dealing with this role-reversal, as Linda takes up a career and he feels like he's being nudged into a back seat. The problem is that all we ever get is Linda's take on it. We never get her husband's views except through Linda's mind. It's like men have no role to play in this story unless they're a problem, or a character who seems to be there solely as a love or flirtation interest. Frankly, it felt genderist to me.

The ending was the biggest disappointment because the whole story had these two women, Jessica and Leonel, training like they were building towards some big showdown with evil, yet in the end, the story fizzled and the villain escaped not though any great villainous power or devious plan, but through sheer incompetence on the part of the very operatives who had been training supposedly so diligently and capably!

Leonel was sidelined completely at the end, and Jessica and Patricia were effectively hobbled, so there really was no showdown and no real super hero moment, let alone a real team effort. I was truly disappointed having gone through a very long build-up for an ending that was significantly less than thrilling. I wish the author all the best with this series but it's not one I want to continue following, and I can't in good faith recommend this as a worthy read. I think I would have enjoyed it more had the first story been complete in itself, and this second novel been set in a new location with a totally different group of characters who underwent, perhaps, something similar to the first set. Instead we have a second volume that felt less than the sum of the first.

Girl Band: A Lesbian Adventure by Rory Hitch

Rating: WARTY!

The blurb reads: "Meet cute Holly, curvy Penny, passionate Roxy, cool Anna and teen Jade. Five beautiful girls, making music and making love. When young lovers Holly and Penny decide to form a band it's the beginning of a lesbian adventure full of fun flirtation, sexy seductions and erotic encounters!" Wrong! There is no love, no eroticism, no flirtation, and no seduction here. And certainly no safe sex! Not in the part I read, but note that this is a short (which I could not finish, it was so bad) introduction to a full-length novel. Maybe it gets better, but I can't believe it ever will. It does give a classic expository example of why I never read introductions...forewords...author's notes...prefaces...et al.

This is the second of two "lesbian" stories I read recently. They were both awful and for the same reason: they read like they were written by an inept male author, and the sad thing is that only one of them actually was. It's all juvenile, crude sex here. Eroticism plays no part, and neither does seduction, love or romance. Neither does music for that matter, not based on what I read. You'll be better off reading my novel about a girl band, which I was hoping to have out this year, but since there are two novels lined up before that, only one of which I'm near to completing at this point, I think a more realistic estimate is around Valentine's day next year! This one here though, I cannot recommend based on what I read. It just doesn't get it done.

One Night In Venice by Bella Donnis

Rating: WARTY!

This begins a pair of (very negative) reviews of short, appallingly badly-written "lesbian" stories!

I was having a little bit of trouble deciding on a good ebook to get into, which is sad, given how many are available to me! In fact, it's downright pathetic. We're spoiled rotten these days with the riptide of ebooks out there. But the plenitude is also the penury given how sorry some of these books are. Yet despite the rising tide of ebooks promising a bounty to anyone who casts a wide enough net, I still managed to haul in two really awful (or is that offal?) ones. This was the first.

This one, fortunately given how things turned out, was free on Amazon (and available on B&N which is where I got it - I always check alternates before I buy from Amazon). So I opened it to find it was only twenty eight pages! This was actually its best feature, but truth be told, I couldn't even finish that much, it was so bad! It felt more like it was one of those book teasers, which isn't a bad idea and which is eminently suited to ebooks. You know, one of those shorties that lures you in and persuades you to buy the full length version? I don't do that, but you can't blame an author for that when competition is so tough. This though, it turns out, is the whole thing - not an intro, but the entire "novel" (as far as I could tell).

It's about this woman whose boyfriend dumps her via a text message when she's in Venice, waiting for him to come out to join her. It was this idea - that she finds herself cruelly ditched and somehow falls into a relationship with a woman - which intrigued me and persuaded me to take a look. The trip was supposed to be a foursome; now it's a three's-a-crowd situation. She only became acquainted with this couple through her AWOL ex, so the other woman is someone she hardly knows, but she's kind to her, even though the guy - a friend of her ex - is ham-fistedly cruel.

The problem is that the writing is so clunky and the interpersonal dynamics so lacking in credibility that I quickly became convinced that I would not even be able to make it through twenty-eight pages of this. I was right! I quit on page twenty because it was awful. 'Subtle' and 'leisurely' are two words which have quite obviously been struck from this author's lexicon (always assuming they were ever present in the first place).

The unsuspecting reader is smashed brutally and repeatedly over the head with a hyper-sexed woman who seems to harbor absolutely zero grief for the demise of her relationship, and who is ogling the other girl like a dog in heat. I'm surprised there wasn't a description of her tongue lolling out dripping saliva. She's all-but humping her friend's leg. If a guy behaved like this it would be sen as entirely inappropriate and the guy would be rightfully termed a dick. So what does that make this woman? A clit? Somehow that doesn't seem to carry the same deprecative weight. Why is that? Because guys can be dicks but women can't be clits?! If that's not sexist, what is?!

Abandon hope (and seek hops!) all ye who enter here looking for romance! There is none to be found in these pages. Yes, we're seeing the friend be kind to the main character, but what she gets in return is pure, adulterated lust. It's all about how beautiful she is, how hot she is, how perfect her "tits" are, how sexy she is, how great her hair is. There's not a single solitary word about what's beneath that depth of skin. We really hear nothing of the kind of friend she is or might be, about whether she's reliable or trustworthy, or whether she has integrity, and would make a decent companion. Nope, it's all sex and only sex, which is nowhere near enough for me to want to read a novel, or even a short story such as this.

The blurb says, "Warning: This lesbian erotic romance story contains extreme graphic and sexual content, specifically lesbian sex and should not be read by those under the age of 18." Seriously? Lesbian sex is extreme? LOL! Like no young adult has ever has such thoughts - and even activities?! Besides, if it's aimed at adults, then why is it written at the level of young adult or even middle-grade in parts? And I take exception to the word "erotic"! There's no eroticism here; it's all crude, juvenile sexcapades and that's all there is. If that's your cup of tea, then by all means quaff deeply, but with lines like "I scrutinised her firm buttocks," it sure as hell ain't mine.

The real problem with this when you get right down to it, is that it's not a novel. It most closely resembles an old telegram, because everything is telegraphed. Everything is so glaringly obvious. There is no subtlety here. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the main character, who is so profoundly stupid that despite her leering, salivating, Shylock-like obsession with pounding the flesh of the only other female character in the entire book, she completely fails to realize that she's bisexual. I'm not a fan of novel in which the author goes out of her way to demonstrate how stupid her main character is. And yes, there's a difference between lesbian and bisexual which this author doesn't seem to get. However, since sexuality it not a binary scale but a sliding one, I'll let that...slide!

This stupidity and crudity is what turned me off the novel completely. What had attracted me was that this was a Brit language novel, which may cause some readers a headache or two unless they are British or at least an Anglophile, but that was nowhere near enough to offset the shabby writing. The panting, tongue-lolling dog into which the main character morphed was more reminiscent of a lame rip-off of Kafka than ever it was of Austen. There was nothing romantic, sensual or subtle here at all. I cannot recommend this. It read like a "lesbian" novel written by an inept male author, and I'm truly sorry if that's insulting, but I gotta call it like I read it!

Haunted on Bourbon Street by Deanna Chase

Rating: WARTY!

This novel sucked. It's about Jade Calhoun (I should have quit reading right there!) who is an "empath" in a world where everyone, without question, completely accepts all the new-age mumbo-jumbo. Jade moves into a new apartment in New Orleans for no good reason (she's from out of state), and encounters a ghost which apparently doesn't have a pleasant agenda. She immediately calls in a guy recommended by a friend who uses scientific equipment to try and record and measure the ghost. Why the empath can't do this for herself is a mystery. She's a friggin' empath! What use is she?

I'm guessing the real reason is to make sure she has lots of encounters with Kane (I should have quit reading right there, too!) who runs the strip club under her apartment. From the moment of their first encounter, Jade turns into a bitch in heat whenever Kane is around and it was so tedious, it was pathetic. Get a room already. Oh wait, she has one! But it's haunted! Oh god how will they ever make it through this???? Who the hell cares? And do I want to read more of this crap in a series? "NO!"

The thing is, despite Jade calling for help and being unaccountably terrified of this ghost, the blurb tells us, "...it's up to Jade to use her unique ability to save" her friend Pyper (yeah, I should have quit reading right there, too). I'm really sorry, and I apologize to all women named Piper (or variants thereof), but I simply cannot take that name seriously, not at all. I just can't. But there you have it. If it's up to her, why did she bring in the science boys? Filler? Or fill her?

The blurb stupidly asks, as do all blurbs beginning with 'When' ask, "...she'll need Kane's help to do it...Can she find a way to trust him and herself before Pyper is lost?" I'm guessing the answer to that question is "Yes!" but it ought to be "NO!" and all of these characters ought to die horribly in a ghostly holocaust.

That would have unarguably been the best ending for this, and if it had happened that way, I would have rated this five stars. As it is, it honestly gets no stars. The one I gave it is only for the fact that "no stars" is not an option (Goodreads can't average it!); it just looks like the reviewer forgot to check how many stars it earned, and it doesn't count for squat. That's why I don't do stars as such. Either the novel is worth reading or it's not. It gets five stars or one, and to cut to the (Deanna) Chase, this one is definitely not worth reading.

I did love that if you write out the title and the author's name you get: Haunted on Bourbon Street by Deanna Chase - like it's the author who's doing the haunting. That was the best part about this novel.

Caribbean's Keeper by Brian Boland

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"began to peal the skin back" 'peal' should be 'peel' unless the skin is ringing like a bell!
"from where the helo had come from" - too many 'from's! The last one needs deleting.
"Cole treaded in place and watched it" The past tense of 'tread' is 'trod'. Don't you love English?!
"Cole bid his time and made idle chatter with Tony." The past tense of bide is bided, bit bid (and apparently even Google doesn't know this!).

I was invited by Open Road Media to read this advance review copy, and I was glad I got the chance!

The author was actually in the Coastguard, so he knows what he's talking about, which always helps! I have a brother-in-law who is in the Coastguard and have nothing but respect for the job he does - so yeah, call me biased! This novel felt real, and the descriptions were very evocative. The story unfolded naturally. It was credible. It felt like being there in many ways, which makes for a really nice read! Of course, the plot counts too, more-so than the descriptions for me, but that was also appealing and felt authentic. I haven't been to any of the places the author mentions: Curaçao, Martinique, Nicaragua, Panama, and so on, and my experience in Florida is very limited, but there was nothing here that struck me as implausible or dumb.

The story is of Cole (yeah, I know. Hardly my favorite character name, but at least it wasn't 'Jack', in which case I would have flatly refused to read the novel at all!). Cole is a Coastguard operative who gets kicked out for his rather unruly behavior and his disregard for the rules on occasion. Out of work, he drifts a little in Florida and eventually, to make ends meet, starts working on a tour boat. It's hardly his style, but it pays and he gets to room with one of the guys he works with, someone he likes and gets along with.

Over time he notices that this guy Kevin, has something going on on the side and as the two grow to trust each other, Cole finds himself involved in the smuggling of Cubans into Florida. So far so good, but Cole is not only a functional alcoholic (at least that's how he came off to me) he's also an Adrenalin junkie, and the kick he gets from outrunning and outfoxing his old colleagues in the Coastguard starts to be insufficient for him. Like every addict, Cole wants more. That's how he gets into drug-running, but there's no loyalty in that world. You upset the cartel kingpins and they're going to come gunning for you - literally. This is the story of how Cole survived and who he met along the way.

It was gripping and engaging, and just as importantly, it was realistic. It really felt like any and all of this could have happened. It was like reading a good James Bond thriller, and I kept wanting to turn the next page to find out what happens. The book is not too long, not too short, and makes for really easy reading. The ending felt a little bit abrupt, but it was right, and I'd rather have it come to a halt like that, than have the author just write on and on not knowing quite where to stop. Plus it's a single volume as far as I know, so not being a fan of series, this worked well for me. I recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure with a likable rogue (despite his faults) who is in it for the thrills, only to discover that underneath it all, he actually has a conscience. Great story.

Totlandia Vol 1 by Josie Brown

Rating: WORTHY!

Totlandia was an oddball story that I ultimately ended-up loving. I don't quite know why except that it was funny and interesting and unusual. I have to wonder how the author ever came up with this story. Maybe she had some personal experience?

The story is the first of four very short books (100+ pages or so) in a series that covers several years of kindergarten. The 'onesies' is four volumes and there is at least two more volumes for the 'twosies'. While I'm not a fan of series typically, I might be persuaded to read more of this one if they're like the first, but be warned, the first volume ends on a huge cliffhanger, so you might find it very addictive! And there may well be four volumes for each of five years, which is quite a financial commitment to keep up with!

The Pacific Heights Moms and Tots Club is a very exclusive and snotty San Francisco daycare, managed by well-to-do and very elitist moms. You have to compete for one of the annual ten spots get in, and forget about it if you're a single parent or a working mom. You're automatically disqualified.

This novel focuses attention on four candidates, each of whom has a secret, such as one of them (Jillian) is about to undergo a divorce, another (Ally) is supposed to have quit her job a a big-wig in business, but is still secretly on the board - and she's single! A third is a guy who is ashamed of his wife jade, a former stripper and prospective porn actor and is trying to keep her out of things while having sex with one of the existing PHMTC moms to get an in (so to speak). Lorna's child may be a special needs kid, which would disqualify him, so there is lots of dirt to dish, and lots of secrets to be kept hidden.

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I really enjoyed the easy pave, the decent plotting, the good story-telling and the humor, so yes, this one is a worthy read.

Sudden Justice by Chris Woods

Rating: WORTHY!

From a Heath Robinson start with next-to-nothing, the US now has the capability in drones, logistics, and support, to run over sixty simultaneous observation operations with the ability to deliver a deadly payload if required. The old MQ-1 Predator drone could carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or equivalent, whereas the MQ-9 Reaper which replaced it can carry fifteen times more ordnance. We're told these things can observe quietly, gather intel, track people and vehicles, and destroy them if it's deemed necessary, with "surgical precision." The problem, as investigators have discovered, is that no one in their right mind would ever want that kind of surgeon performing an operation this ham-fisted on their body.

This detailed - but not overly detailed - account quickly and efficiently gets to the heart of the issues: where the drones came from, how they were brought into use, how badly-organized the effort was to begin with, and how clinically efficient it is now, yet despite these improvements, the money thrown at it, and the massive support organization, this missteps, and the collateral damage caused by this system is scary - and may be doing more harm to efforts to combat terrorism than it is ever doing good.

The problem with the system is a human one, as always! The issues range from getting good intel from sources other than the drones in order to set the drones on the right track in the first place, to correctly identifying targets and tracking them. The drones fly at 18,000 feet (6K meters), and from that height, even with good video, you can't tell if a person is carrying a weapon. You even be sure who that person is. And without expert support and the patience of a saint, you can't be sure if the gathering you're about to blast with a HARM missile is a meeting of terrorists, or some kids sitting around playing and chatting. The reaper can also carry Sidewinder or AMRAAM air-to-air missiles.

Another issue is the pilots/observers. The USAF has been of late training more pilots for these vehicles than for any other system, and these people evidently work twelve-hour shifts. That's twelve hours (with breaks of course) spent in a darkened room, staring at a rather grainy monitor on which very little is happening for very much of the time. Who came up with a dumb-ass scheme like that is a mystery, but it has government and military stenciled all over it. The result is that pilots are falling asleep and are diverted from the monitors by other interests such as reading a book, chatting with others in the room, and playing computer games! The regular games won't work on this system, but games built using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or clones of it will work quite handily! This is how a virus - fortunately benign it seems - came to be found in some of these systems.

This book gives the goods on all of this and a lot more. I recommend it if you're interested in finding out what these drones are up to and what their shortcomings are.

Year of the Monsoon by Caren J Werlinger

Rating: WARTY!

Erratum:
"She looked at Leisa with a hunger that make Leisa’s insides tingle." - wrong verb tense.

When I began reading this one, I was truly favorably disposed towards it, but the author very successfully managed to turn me off pretty quickly. I made it to about forty percent and had to give up for a variety of reasons. The first of these was that this was yet another LGBTQIA novel which was claustrophobic in its obsessive lock-down. It felt like it was a queers only zone, with no heteros allowed! That's not strictly true, but it certainly felt like it was the spirit of the thing. I find this reprehensible in and era when hetero stories, both in print and on the screen are opening their arms (for better or for worse at times, I admit) to the queer community, it seems like a huge backward, bigoted and negative step to me to depict this as totally closed-off from hetero community. It's also totally unrealistic, since neither of those groups operates in a vacuum.

That wasn't even the biggest problem. For me the most obnoxious one of all was that the author was obsessed with larding her story with a massive volume of mini-flashbacks woven invisibly into the fabric of the novel. I detest flashbacks at the best of times and rarely find them readable, much less enjoyable. The fact that these were hidden in the text made it often impossible to know I was reading a flashback. The same symbol which was used to indicate a change of scene on the book was the one used to indicate a flashback, so you were in it and trying to figure out whether this was just a change of scene or a flashback and of course, missing the story because of this. It felt ham-fisted to me, and I can't help but believe that a more skilled author would have done a better job.

The story itself was where the other major problem lay. The big theme here was adoption, and rather than focus on one aspect of the theme, the author slammed in three adoption stories intertwined, which was frankly, a huge mess and which dissipated the impact of any one of the stories from the sheer volume. It detracted from the power of the tale, weakening it to the point where it was no longer interesting. It was also a bunch of trope: the adopted girl just has to know her birth mother! At first I thought the author was going to be smart enough to avoid this pitfall and make this more original by not having this character chasing after her bio-mom, but that soon changed and so did my commitment to pursuing the story for this and other reasons.

Talking of realism, my last problem with this is that we're presented with two women, only one of whom is really interesting, but who clearly love each other, yet who seem unable to talk about anything with each other! We're really offered no valid reason why they can't talk or why they're apparently drifting apart. One has a secret which the other discovers through the rather amateur and disturbing ploy of stalking her partner, and which put me off her as a character.

At one point I read, "She had been a beautiful woman." I don't get why female authors do this to their female characters. Yes, if this had been a novel about some female movie star or some fashion model, perhaps one who felt her looks were diminishing with age and consequently her 'career' - shallow as it was - was slipping away, then her looks might have played a part in the story, and a line like that might have had a place, but in this case none of this applied, so why does the ugly idea that once she had been beautiful have to do with anything? Would the attendant sentiment have been completely inapplicable if she had been "ordinary" or "plain" or "ugly"? The shallow mentality involved in writing like this is quite frankly disgusting: that a women's worth is skin-deep only? Screw you. I'm tired of reading crap like that and in particular, women who write like that ought to be especially ashamed of their writing.

I was already off the other one, so my passion for following this relationship was gone at that point. It seemed like whenever one of them was about to launch into a topic with the other, a death popped up in the family and then there was, unbelievably, simply no time at all to broach the topic which had been right on their lips just a moment before. This felt so amateur it was pathetic, but worse, it told me that these women were morons. So grandmother died. It's horrible, but did one of them have to get on a plane within a half hour and set off alone so that the important topic in a troubled relationship couldn't be dealt with? NO! Their behavior made no sense, and it robbed the story of both immediacy or authenticity for me.

Overall the story was less of a coherent narrative than it was a series of vignettes densely punctuated by a staccato blitz of flashbacks which contributed little in the grand scheme of things. The bottom line is 'THE END' - no, I'm just kidding. The bottom line is that it didn't work and was annoying. As I said, I simply gave up on it around forty percent, but this story had given up on entertaining the reader long before that. I can't recommend it.

Girl, Stolen by April Henry

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely read by Kate Rudd, I felt that this novel exemplified my problem with first person voice precisely because this was not written in first person! It would have been obnoxious to me if it had been first person because there was a bit too much info-dumping and lessons on being blind, and these were told rather than shown. It was written for a younger audience than I represent, but sometimes it felt like it had been written for a middle-grade audience than a YA one.

That said, and the occasional annoyances aside, for me it was eminently listenable as a third person story. I applaud April Henry for that! It started out very strongly and really drew me in. Then a bit later towards the end, it started going slightly south and I remember thinking, "Oh no! Here we go again!" but it rallied and came back strongly at the very end, so I'm very grateful to the author for that too, and happy to rate this as a worthy read (or listen!)!

The main characters are sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, the daughter of a Nike executive, and Griffin, the boy who kidnaps her inadvertently when he steals the Cadillac in which she's sleeping when Cheyenne's step-mom goes into the pharmacy to pick up her antibiotic prescription.

Griffin is heading out of the mall parking lot when Cheyenne makes her presence known, but he's not about to stop and let her go so she can report him and describe him to the cops. It's then that he learns she's blind. Still he doesn't stop, but he assures Cheyenne that he will return her to a safe place for pick-up by her folks when it gets dark. Unfortunately his dad and two jerks who work for his dad discover that she's actually the daughter of a rich man, and decide to hold out for a ransom. As the negotiations go on, Cheyenne realizes that she needs to escape or she'll end up dead, and although she's grown a relationship with Griffin, she doesn't feel she can trust him to help her. She must go it alone.

There were some issues (as other reviewers have pointed out) such as the question of why money seemed so important to a family which seemed to be doing pretty decently from their chop-shop business, but I didn't let that bother me. Avarice is the only motivation some people need! The biggest issue for me was the story coming to a screeching, jarring halt near the end, when the author decided inexplicably to give us a couple of chapters of Griffin's history! She'd had the entire novel in which to do this during conversations between Griffin and Cheyenne, yet she halted the whole story just when it was getting really exciting and dumped it all right there. I skipped it and didn't miss it. The ending was good enough however, for me to forgive that and recommend this story overall, as a very worthy read.

The Devil Went Down to Austin by Rick Riordan

Rating: WARTY!

Though it was read quite competently by Tom Stechschulte, and though it started out reasonably well after a slightly rocky first couple of chapters, this audiobook soon devolved into endless family politics with very little of interest to me happening, so I started skipping and skimming, and then quickly gave it up as a bad job. Life is too short to waste on stories which don't grip you. I skipped to the end before I dropped it off back at the library and discovered, not to my surprise at all, that the main suspect turned out to be not the real bad guy, and one of the guys I'd encountered briefly earlier, who I'd tagged as a possible main villain was actually the villain, so no real surprises at all.

This is apparently number four in the "Tres Navarre" series, that name (the first part of which is pronounced 'Trace') being the name of the main character. If I'd known that before I picked it up, I'd not have picked it up. As it was, it looked like it might be interesting, and it was a story set in central Texas, but it really could have been set anywhere and remained the same story (with local details changed of course), which meant it wasn't really about Texas. It was a stand-alone - that is to say, as far as I could see I didn't feel I'd missed anything by 'starting' this series at number four. On the other hand, I didn't really feel I'd missed anything when I DNF'd it, either!

I liked the idea of the PI coming to Austin to teach literature for the summer (although he actually does no teaching!), and that this brother is a software engineer who is in trouble with his new anti-virus app, but neither of these things really played a large part in the story except as a rather flimsy background.

Most of it (at least the parts that I listened to) was boring. There was far too much extraneous detail, and far too much tedious twisted family history which some readers might like but which turns me off a story. For me it made a stodgy dough of a recipe which the occasional nice turn of phrase did nothing at all to leaven in the long-run. Based on what I did listen to, and the uninventive ending, I can't recommend this one. Maybe Rick Riordan should stick to his Percy Jackson series?