The Boy from Tomorrow by Camille DeAngelis

Rating: WORTHY!

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

I loved this novel! Josephine and Cassandra are sisters living in Edwardstown, New York State, in 1915. Their mother is a medium who may or may not be genuine, but she is also a cruel and vengeful schemer who thinks nothing of forcing her younger daughter, Cassie, to eat a whole pudding that she naughtily sampled, even if it makes her sick. She thinks nothing of confining the rebellious Cassie to a cupboard for an entire day for speaking back to her, not even lettign ehr out for a bathroom visit. The two daughters are kept cut-off from society and are essentially prisoners.

A century away from this drama, Alec, who happens to be pretty much the same age as Josie, together with his divorced mother, moves into that same address, and through an antique Ouija board which Alec discovers in the house, he somehow miraculously makes contact with Josie, and they become friends. Unfortunately, Josie's mother learns of her Ouija board assignations and seeks to tap Alec's future information for her own ends, holding Josie hostage to force him to meet her demands.

The story is told in third person (thank you, Camille DeAngelis, you are a goddess amongst YA and middle-grade authors!), and it alternates from Alec's perspective to Josie's, and back again with each chapter and without losing moment or engagement. Despite its length, it makes for a fast and easy read, brings the reader in from the start, and holds them captive rather like poor Cassie and Josie are captive, but by a lot more pleasant means! I really enjoyed this book it was original entertaining, and a breath of fresh air. I highly recommend it.

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.

Let's Play Yoga by Márcia de Luca, Lúcia Barros, Bruna Assis Brasil, Ana Ban

Rating: WORTHY!

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher. Note that there is a website for this book if you want to take a look at that before deciding whether this is for you! It's at http://www.letsplayyoga.com.

This book is translated from Brazilian by Ana Ban, and it's a fun and colorful book with some playful illustrations and a diverse cast of kids shown doing yoga poses. It begins with a lot of well written and fun advice on what yoga is all about and how it should be approached. Anything which encourages kids to be mindful, thoughtful, considerate of themselves and others, and to stay limber in a safe way, is to be recommended in my opinion!

The book is easy and gentle, and it has a lot to say about how yoga arose and what it's all about without going into too much detail on any one topic; then it goes on to show some simple yoga poses which any kid can work at. Not that it's treated as work! The authors talk of it as play, which is a great approach, because this should appeal to any kid. The book is very portable, too. it worked as well on my phone as it did on my tablet, although I have to say that some of the pages were a little hard to read not because of small text (the pages enlarge), but because of a bright green page background with off-white text! But that was only for a couple of pages.

On a personal note, I tried a yoga class one time, a while ago, and I was so disappointed in it that I never tried anything else along those lines! Unlike this book, the instructor didn't offer anything about the history and practice, and he gave no preparation, no advice, and no stretching. His sole purpose seemed less aimed at teaching us than it was at showing off what he himself could do. He offered no suggestions as to a daily regime or organized system for people to follow, and the entire class felt like a waste of my time.

I could have used a book like this when I was a kid, as well as in place of that class! It was nice to read a thoughtful and useful introduction to it. I was pleased to discover that something like this was available, aimed at kids, and which takes a holistic approach to the entire practice, discussing it in some detail but not too much, and advising kids to enter into it gamely, confidently, but cautiously, so no-one accidentally injures themselves by trying things too quickly, too strenuously or too enthusiastically!

Kids are not urged to try to get everything right from day one, but to enter into it in a spirit of can-do, and to keep practicing until the stretches and poses become second nature. It covers mindfulness, breathing (which an be employed in stressful situations away from the yoga mat!), and the poses or sanas. It's perfect for kids who may have problems exercising, because they're not required to do everything at once or to do it perfectly, or to run marathons! All they're asked is to give it a try, and to simply do as well as they can.

It's a nice philosophy to go with some nice relaxing exercises that will juice your joints, limber your limbs, spark your spine, and generally make you feel like you're doing a little something to make life better. There's nothing back-breaking or too hard here, so any child ought to be able to join in. To that end I would have liked to have seen the admirably diverse group of kids pictured here also include someone who was overweight or perhaps handicapped in some way to show that this can be done by everyone to the limits of their individual abilities and restrictions. All you need is a yoga mat - or something that will work as one - comfortable clothes, bare feet, and a willingness to give it a try! I think this is a great book, and I highly recommend 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.

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.

The Ghost The Owl by Franco, Sara Richard

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This was a different kind of story, beautifully illustrated by Sara Richard in almost day-glo colors, with a swirling impressionistic style reminiscent in some parts, of van Gogh's rather impressionistic The Starry Night. Not that Van Gogh ever liked that painting! But let's not get too pretentious: the images were lovely and had an inherent ghostliness in them and still carried the dark threat of a deep night. If that's what the artist was aiming for, she nailed it!

The story is short (less than fifty pages), but it would have dragged had it been longer. It's just long enough. The animals see this young ghost wandering aimlessly through their forested, swampy world and discuss her raison d'être. The owl decides to do more than this, and it leads to an interesting tale since both the ghost and the owl have a backstory, and it seems that each one crosses paths with the other in interesting ways.

I really enjoyed the simplicity of the story which couches a slightly more complex tale within, and the whole thing comes together in finely-wrought style. It has ups and down, and not predictable ones either, and it has some great story-telling. I liked it a lot and I recommend it as a worthy read.

Puerto Rico Strong by various contributors

Rating: WARTY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"Max opened ajar of honey-covered peanuts" should be "a jar"
"I don't have a million pounds just lying around to fix my father's fuckup." - The amount is a hundred million pounds, so I don't know if this is in error or just a character misspeaking.
"she wouldn't upset Stevie by killing him." - the phrase should, I believe, be precisely the opposite: she would upset Stevie by killing him.
"I'm going to crack his jackal bones like kindle." should read " I'm going to crack his jackal bones like kindling." Let's not give Amazon's crappy app any more due than it's worth, which isn't much! Now if it had read "I'm going to crack his jackal bones like a Kindle device," I would have found that funny!
There was a section that read (in part) "...last few months, but they’re already booked through the first of the year.” that was all in Italics. I think the first word of that section, 'is', was intended to be in italics, but the rest of it was not.
There was a merged paragraph where the second person's speech ran into the first person's without having a paragraph break between them so it read, “Out.” “Fine.”
There was also a sentence which began with Or, and which should have had a question mark after it but didn't. I was too tired to copy & paste it at the time and when I tried to find that in Amazon's crappy Kindle app, I discovered that their crappy search engine isn't case specific so when I searched for "Or" it found a bizillion of them including examples such as 'door', 'before', 'woodworking', 'disorder, and on and on. It should be easy to find it in a word processor.
One last one I noticed which may or may not be a mistake. At one point there was mentioned a "duffel Dbag." I have no idea what this is. I've never heard of a duffel Dbag before, so I wonder if it might be a mistake?

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

So this hilarious story is about the MacKilligan sisters: Charlie, Max, and Stevie. They all have the same father, but each a different mother. They're all honey badger hybrid shifters, and all are dangerous and violent, or at least paranoid when off their meds - which at least two of them are taking. I had the opportunity to read a sneak preview back in September 2017, which turned out to be the prologue of this book. Normally I don't read prologues because they're useless and antiquated, but that was all I got back then, so I read it and I really liked the idea and the story.

I'm not a fan of urban fantasy stories or of series and this was both - at least I assume it's volume one in a series - and this is the first such volume I've read in a long time where I'd actually welcome a volume two. That's very high praise from me! For me in general, it's tedious to read stories of endless werewolves and vampires all looking the same, behaving the same, doing the same things over and over. It goes completely against my grain to read a paranormal romance - which are beyond tedious and well into laughable. This book skillfully avoided that trap and instead went for the humor and the action, and especially for the out-of-left-field off-the-wall situations and it was right up my alley. I would love to see a movie of this.

The market is glutted with bad paranormal and urban fantasy stores, most of which are boring cookie-cutter vomit, and few writers seem to have the smarts or the ability to move on and write something different. This author is definitely not in that category. I don't usually have much interest in shifter stories, but the idea of reading about honey badgers was very appealing to me. I was thrilled to get a chance to read the whole novel (minus the prologue!) and I enjoyed this one thoroughly because it was so different from the run of the mill uninventive werewolf and vampire romances. This one actually had a story! it also had a romance but thankfully that was not the point of the story and it was well written.

I have to say I am not a fan of prologues or epilogues and this book had both. I honestly do not get why authors don't simply label them chapter one and Chapter whatever-the-last-chapter-number-is. The very word 'epilogue' puts me to sleep. But I read this one and it was, in effect, the prologue to volume two. Please no more epilogues and prologues! But please, volume two!

Anyway...the MacKilligan trio's father is a shiftless shifter, a worthless piece of non-human trash, and no one knows it better than the MacKilligans themselves. When they learn that he's dead, they're thrilled by the prospect of identifying the body, but you know how this is going to turn out, right? He's alive, he has absconded with a hundred millions pounds from his Scots relatives, and they are after him, and after the MacKilligan sisters to find their father. Other people are also after them, either to recruit them because they're so violent and deadly, or to kill them because...they're so violent and deadly.

This is the world we're in and oh my, there are lions, and tigers, and bears! The MacKilligans are semi-adopted by the bears who provide some protection, but this doesn't protect them from the machinations of their father, who is as sneaky as he is dishonest, and the kind of man who would be willing even to sell his children if he thought he could come out ahead on the deal. But to put that in perspective, the MacKilligan family is widespread and not altogether properly hinged. And that's the nicest thing you can say about many of them; then there's the wedding...and cousin Dutch.

Fortunately, theres also Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan, who is equal to any challenge. And her half-sister Max, who is barely shy of psychotic, and who regularly has knock-down-drag-out fights with kid half-sister Stevie, a bona-fide genius who is completely paranoid. Especially of bears. But they're sisters, and no one better try to mess with them.

This was a really beautifully-realized world, populated with interesting individuals. Even the bad guys were fascinating and nuanced. If I had any complaints, I have to say the story was a little bit on the long side and I was somewhat disappointed it wasn't nicely wrapped-up after this volume. Also there seemed to be far too many shifters for the human population not to be completely aware of them. And I won't get into the biological issues of inter-species mating (if two animals - or plants! - can successfully mate, they're the same species!). The definition of a species is that it can't mate outside it's own species. Since this is paranormal, pretty much anything goes, but I always think it would be nice to have some sort of rationale behind it, no matter how hazy!

Like I said, not a fan of series, but I'd read volume two and follow this series if it maintained (as opposed to tainted) the high standards set in this novel. I'd even buy this volume in hardback just to have it on my shelf, so hopefully I don't have to spell out that I fully recommend this. It's one of the best books I've ever read and unquestionably the best novel I've read this year.

Little Pierrot Amongst the Stars by Alberto Varanda

Rating: WARTY!

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

I reviewed Little Pierrot Get the Moon favorably back in August of 2017, but I cannot say the same for this volume. It's in the same format, comprised of sepia-toned sketches that are, in this case very disjointed, more-so than in the first volume. Many of them made no sense to me. Some of them seemed like a response to something which had gone before, but which wasn't included in the book! Nearly all of them were not interesting or amusing. The artwork was of the same high standard, but overall, this seemed like a completely different book compared with the first one I reviewed. Of course, it is a different book, but it's so different that it seemed totally unrelated to the first book.

I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend this volume.

Bettie Page Vol 1 by David Avallone, Colton Worley, Craig Cermak, Esau Figueroa, Bane Duncan Wade, Sarah Fletcher, Brittany Pezzillo

Rating: WORTHY!

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

This took me by surprise, and pleasantly so because it wasn't at all what I expected. Frankly I'm not sure what I expected except that I hoped it would be fun - and it was. It was a great romp and put the renowned Bettie Page in a spotlight I'm willing to bet she was never in before - that of government agent! bettie was a real life pin-up girl, probably the last of the truly "innocent" models there was; her pictures were very cheeky but seemingly to outside eyes to be all in good fun. At least, she seems from her expressions in her images to be having a rare old time.

But this novelization isn't about that at all. All of that is just background to her 'real' life, in which she helps fight pinkos and weirdos in New York and Los Angeles. The story collects a four part serial story and a bonus one-off story together into one volume. Bettie doesn't plan this career, it simply befalls her as her modeling plans take an unanticipated wrong turn at the start of the story. Everything else is more like a comedy of errors, with Bettie being in the wrong place at the wrong time until she takes charge of her own fate and starts making things happen instead of having them happen to her.

The story is right on - with a nice line of fifties banter, and the artwork is wonderfully evocative - except for once or twice when the blue-eyed Bettie is shown with brown eyes or even green eyes at one point! She's also depicted as being a little more lanky and boney than the more normally -proportioned real-life Bettie who was only five-two and comfortably rounded without being overweight.

No one obsessed about not being skinny enough back them - at least not as commonly as we encounter it today because women were not conditioned to feel inadequate in the way our modern society seems intent upon rendering them (when it can!). It would have been nice to have seen this reflected better in the drawings and not just on the 'covers'.

Virtually all models were short and normally proportioned back then! As were actresses: Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe for example, were the same height as Bettie and no more "hourglass" than was she, and no one consider what today would be described as 'chubby' knees, as being out of place, nor was body hair for that matter. How far we've slid down the wrong chute since then!

ost of the fifties pop-culture references were right one as well, as far as I could tell, except for one mention of Ian Fleming. The story was set in 1951, and Fleming was unknown at that time since he had not yet penned his first James Bond adventure. He didn’t write Casino Royale until 1952 and it wasn’t published until 1953. It wasn’t published in the USA until 1954! The only other problem i spotted was on page 89 (as depicted on the tablet reader - the comic pages themselves are not numbered) where I read “The exist to be ruled." I'm guessing that should have been “They exist to be ruled”

There was the welcome but unlikely addition of a black female police officer. It was welcome to see a person of color in this story, but there were no female police officers in the USA 1951 to my knowledge. Atlanta did, believe it or not, have black male cops as early as 1948, but even then, they weren’t allowed to patrol white neighborhoods or work in police headquarters! We've come a long way but nowhere near far enough.

So, overall, I loved this story and look forward to reading more. I recommend this as a fun and original adventure series with a strong and fascinating female lead.

Harry's Lovely Spring Day by Nathan GK, Janelle Dimmett

Rating: WORTHY!

This is an out-and-out old-fashioned romantic fairy-tale starring Harry the Mouse who lives in a box on a street in what looks a lot like a French town, although the author is British and the artist American! Janelle Dimmett's illustrations are painstakingly detailed, even down to individual leaves drawn on trees!

I enjoyed Harry's Spooky Surprise by NGK, not to be confused with scientist GK Nathan, so it was perhaps to be expected that this one would also pass muster. Harry is helped by passer-by Katie the mouse when his house is blow away in a storm. Those refrigerator boxes are not what they used to be since Trump's steel tariff, are they?! LOL!

Anyway, Katie kindly donates her umbrella top Harry to help him out. She doesn't need it, she claims, because she's off to the country to live where it evidently never rains! She hops on the bus and away she goes (mice can hop really, impressively high!). Harry decides he must find her and thank her and well, romance happens!

Told in simple rhyming couplets, the story is quite charming, and will doubtlessly and endlessly entertain young kids. I read in an author interview about the concept of paying it forward, although Harry actually isn't paying anything forward here, he's really just taking advantage of a kindness - but not in a mean way. He is thankful Katie and that's important too. But for readers and kids, the story doesn't have to end when the book does. Kids and their grown-ups can take the story on, discussing how it might unfold if Harry had donated his newly-acquired umbrella to someone else, and so on!

Atom Land by Jon Butterworth

Rating: WARTY!

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

This is Jon Butterworth's second book on physics. I have not read his other book. The author is a Professor of Physics at University College London and also works at CERN on the ATLAS particle detector experiment. This was one of two large hadron collider experiments which were instrumental in discovering the long-sought-after Higgs Boson.

I have to say up-front that I was very disappointed in this book. For me, it confused things far more than it clarified them, which is unfortunate. I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, and I have only a lay-person's understanding of the topics covered here, but I have read extensively on these subjects, so I know my way around them in general terms. I was hoping for more clarity or new learning here, and I felt I got neither. The author used the metaphor of exploring oceans and islands to pursue the investigation of forms of energy and sub-atomic particles, but it didn't work and it felt much more like a shallow tourist trip where it's all about superficiality and gewgaws, rather than an actual exploratory voyage during which we really learn something about the venue we're visiting.

But before I really get started on content, I find myself once more having to say something about formatting. This book is laid out as a typical academic-style text, with very wide margins, lots of white space, and lots of extra pages up front that strictly aren't necessary. The publisher determines how a book should look, and supplicants to the publishing world are required to conform whether the antiquated rules make sense in a modern world or not.

For me, the bottom line is that we cannot afford to sacrifice so many trees in a world where climate change is running rampant and may be irreversible. We need trees alive, not crushed and sparsely printed on. Naturally in an ebook, this is irrelevant except in that bulkier books eat up more energy in transmission over the Internet, but for a large print run, this slaughter of forests has to stop, or at least be contained. Wasting so much paper is unacceptable.

This book had an extensive contents which served no purpose at all because it contained no links to the actual chapters nor did the chapters contain a reverse link to get back to the contents. Neither was there an index in the back. I assume there was no index because ebooks are searchable and therefore an index and a contents are really irrelevant. Who reads a contents page? Maybe some do, but I never do. I don't read prologues, forewords, introductions, or prefaces, either. If you want people to know what's in the book, make the back cover blurb serve a real purpose and put a brief contents list on that cover!

The real problem here though was the margins which ate up (by my estimation) at least a quarter of each page in white space. The chapter title pages wasted more, and each book section wasted yet more by having its own title page. I'm sure authors and publishers think this makes a book look pretty but you know what? Trees are far prettier than any book I've ever seen or heard of. The book could probably have been two hundred pages instead of three hundred, had more judicious margins and a slightly wiser use of overall space been employed. I can't sanction that kind of wastefulness in formatting.

Another issue was that while the publisher very wisely did not publish this using Amazon's crappy Kindle format, which mangles anything but the plainest of text, the book was published in a format which lent itself poorly to being read on a smart phone, because every page insists upon presenting itself as a complete page. Like an atom, it's not easily broken down into smaller component parts and the entire page is too small, especially with those margins, to be read comfortably on a phone screen. It's really designed for a tablet computer which is far less easy to tote around than is my phone.

On the phone, the reader is constantly having to stretch the page to fill the screen. Shrinking those large margins made it intelligible, but that also rendered it 'unswipeable': you can't swipe to the next page, so you have to reduce the page back to original size - sometimes requiring two shrinking efforts to achieve this properly - swipe it, enlarge it, read it, shrink it, rinse and repeat. It makes for an irritating reading experience at best.

The real problem or joy of any book though is the content (as opposed to contents!). Does it do the job? For me this did not because there were so many confusing metaphors here that it really muddied the water rather than clarified it. It was like comparing the pristine Inverness river of the thirteen century with the disgustingly polluted Thames of the Victorian era.

As I mentioned, the metaphor of sea-travel and island visits is employed here, and the book even includes maps of them of these locations, but this struck me as completely fatuous and an entirely wrong-headed approach. Illustrations of some of the concepts he was discussing would definitely have clarified things, but none of those are to be found anywhere. Instead, we have fake maps of fictional seas and islands that really have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject under discussion. To me this was ill-advised.

It didn't help that the author continually jumped around like he was in Brownian motion between one topic an another. First we sail to this island, then we sail back to where we started, then we take a train journey, then we re-board the ship and sail to another island, oh look at that island over there, but here we are at this island instead. It made for a nonsensical text in which the reader struggled to follow the topic instead of being helped along by a favorable breeze as it were.

I can't test the whole document since I don't have the text, but out of curiosity I typed in this one tiny section which struck me as being obtuse:

The sprays, or jets, of hadrons will be collimated roughly in the direction of the initial quark and antiquark. The energies and directions of the initial quark and antiquark can be calculated in QCD, and the calculation agrees well with measurements of the jets.

This scored marginally over a forty four in Flesch reading ease, where a score for comfortable reading would be sixty or seventy. Low scores are bad! The Flesch-Kincaid grade level was 12.5 which indicates a person who has started college (beyond twelfth grade in the US means graduated high-school - or post-GCE-A-level student in Britain). Although this was hardly a random sample, I believe it's representative since it isn't atypical of how this book is written, so be warned that the reading level isn't exactly aimed at the general populace! I think this is a flaw perhaps induced by having only scientist colleagues read the text? I don't know.

By the time this book reached chapter 19, roughly halfway through, and very accurately titled 'The Weak Force', and went rambling on about W and Z particles, once again without really explaining anything, but instead comparing the whole thing to an airline, I had pretty much lost all interest in this book. This chapter seemed to be one of the most confusing and therefore the weakest in the chapter list so it was aptly named, but maybe this was simply because I was so tired of these meaningless meandering and overblown metaphors that I really had no heart left in it at all, and I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.

Even when we got down to the actual topic under discussion, the text really didn't do very much to educate or illuminate. As I mentioned, it was like a tourist version where we see the sights, but learn little to nothing of local color and history. We got a scientist's name tossed in here and there, but nothing in depth about the subject before we were whisked-off to the next. Every topic got the same short shrift no matter how easy or hard a topic it might have been to explain.

For example at one point (page 127 of the book, page 145 of the screen page count, which is an indicator of how many fluff pages there were at the start of this book), there was a brief discussion of the elements and how well-bound (or otherwise) they are, with iron standing out as tightly-wrapped no-nonsense kind of a fellow, but nowhere in this section was there any sort of discussion as to exactly why iron, of all the elements, is like this! There were hints all around it but nothing as solid as iron itself is.

Why is iron such a problem in star formation and development such that when a star starts making iron in its belly, it's doomed? Iron is like the legendary black spot in pirate lore, predicting your demise if you get it, but we learn nothing of exactly why this is so. We're told only that this is why iron is so common. I had expected, in a book like this, that there would be something to learn here, but it seems that either there isn't or the author thinks it not worth sharing, and we were never party to which of those options it was. To me this was a starting point: begin with trusty old iron, talk about the elements, and use those discussions of elements and their properties to launch the other topics covered here.

Another such issue was when the text started in on the color of quarks. Color when used in this sense has nothing whatsoever to do with what you see on the TV or movie screen, or in images on your camera. It's an idiosyncrasy of science which Richard Feynman detested. Red, green and blue are used to describe various quarks, but their opposites are not cyan, magenta and yellow! Instead, they're woodenly named: anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue! There was an opportunity for humor there which was missed a in a community which seems fine with quarks named strange and charm! In physics, the color of a sub-atomic particle has to do with the charge of the particle, not with color, but beyond that I have no idea what it really means and this book utterly fails to explain it, or even broach it. This to me was emblematic of the overall skimpy approach employed here. I'm surprised the ship didn't run aground in such shallow seas.

The fact that topics got short shrift - or more à propos, set adrift, as opposed to being anchored solidly in something people have an instinctive grasp of, really sums up the problem: I expected a lot more from this than I got, and it was a truly disappointing experience. I wish the author all the best in his career, both academic and literary, but I cannot recommend this book.