Showing posts with label ebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ebook. Show all posts

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy by Nick Holland


Rating: WARTY!

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

This tells an unusual biography - not one of a writer, but one of someone who influenced a writer - or more accurately, four writers: the Brontës.

I've never actually been a fan of the Brontës' writing, but I am a fan of writing in general, and I'm always interested in the process: in how writers start out, where their inspiration comes from, how approach their work, and how they sit down day after day and write. I do have my own experiences, but it never hurts to learn of others'. Unfortunately for me, this book really didn't help in that regard. While Aunt Branwell's influence is touched upon, it's never really demonstrated, so for me, the book failed in its thesis.

The Brontës themselves (the surviving, writing Brontës that is) do not show up until forty percent into this book when Charlotte is born, so we get a long introduction to Elizabeth Branwell, her history, and her tenure in Penzance, Cornwall, on the very tip of England's west coast. I did not know until I read this that Cornwall had suffered a tsunami, caused by an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal in 1755. This actually wasn't the first tsunami to strike the British coast (there was one in 6100BC that hit Scotland), but they are rare. There was one on the south coast in 1929, and a minor one as recently as 2011. It was on odd coincidence that simultaneously while reading this, I was also listening to an audiobook during my daily commute, which featured a tsunami.

But I digress! Elizabeth eventually left Penzance to stay with her sister in Yorkshire and was there at Charlotte's birth, and this is where I had some problems with the text. A major problem I had with this biography was in how it frequently leapt to conclusions and made unwarranted assumptions. For example, when Elizabeth gets the letter inviting her to visit her younger sister in Yorkshire, the author writes: "Tears welled in Elizabeth's eyes as she placed the letter carefully back into its envelope, but how should she respond?" How can this author possibly know what her emotions were? This kind of thing appeared more than once, and without any supporting reference, and it severely devalued the authenticity of the biography in my opinion.

Around this same event, I also read, "Elizabeth's intuitive response was to accept the invitation." The author knows what Elizabeth is intuiting at a specific moment how exactly? There is a reference at the end of this paragraph, but my intuitive response is that this reference relates to the difficulties of long distance travel in those days, and not to intuition and responses per se.

Later I read, "It was decided to call this third one Charlotte after her aunt in Cornwall, a move Elizabeth wholeheartedly approved of." And the author knows what Elizabeth wholeheartedly approves of how? If there had been a reference to a letter or a journal entry supporting this assumption, that would be one thing, but just to put this out there is meaningless when it's merely the author's evidently over-emotional opinion. It cheapens the whole work. It's possible to put heart and soul, into something without having to resort to pure invention which is what these comments felt like to me.

There were many instances of this, which had not seemed so prevalent before the Brontë children began showing up. It seemed like it was after that point that the story became rife with them as though the author had been lightning-struck by the arrival of the children and suddenly everything was ten times more dramatic. I read things like: " Ripping open the envelope, not standing on ceremony this time, she knew something was terribly wrong."

No, she really didn't. She merely got a letter in an unfamiliar hand! When she read the letter and learned that her younger sister was gravely ill, then she knew something was terribly wrong, but there is no foundation whatsoever for the blind assumption that she ripped the envelope open especially since, back then, the letter was the envelope as often as not, and 'ripping it open' would have actually torn the letter and made it harder to read!

I also read: "Elizabeth's mind raced as she slumped into a chair, letter clenched tightly in her hand." We don't know any of that! I can see how it would appeal to an author to imbue his writing with some emotional content, to leaven the dry facts, but there are limits to what's reasonable.

If you want to add that kind of dramatic flourish to it, then for goodness sake write it as fiction. This kind of intemperate invention does not belong in a biography! Another such instance was: "Branwell, just turned 4, looked on with a confident gaze, and a toddling Emily remained with shy suspicion in a corner." Really? And you know this how? It was the repeated influx of what can only be deemed to be pure fiction, which turned me off this biography and actually began to make me doubt some of the other things I'd already read.

With regard to their home education provided by Elizabeth Branwell, I read that the children "were, in general, able and eager students, although they also demonstrated a mischievous streak from time to time." Again, there's no reference for this, and no example given here of how they were mischievous, so why would the author say this? He adds later, "even though the lessons given by their Aunt Branwell were not always to their taste." How do we know this? Again, there's no reference. It doesn't matter how much of their history the author has read; if he or she cannot reference something, then it can be only opinion. It makes a big difference when opinion is substituted for actual evidence. It makes the whole biography untrustworthy.

In another instance, there was this:

When Elizabeth informed her nieces of her new subscription they were delighted, although Charlotte's announcement of it in a letter to her brother is characteristically muted: 'I am extremely glad that Aunt has consented to take in Fraser's Magazine for though I know from a description of its general contents that it will be rather uninteresting when compared with "Blackwood"

Blackwood was Charlotte's preferred magazine, so it hardly looks like she was "delighted" with her aunt's choice! Again, it leaches credibility from the account to have so much fanciful commentary added.

If the author had written, for example, that "Patrick's journal for that day reported that Elizabeth was slumped into a chair, letter clenched tightly in her hand," it would be one thing, even if some dramatic license had been taken with the verbs, but that's not what we read. If the author had reported, "according to some reports, the children demonstrated a mischievous streak from time to time," again, that would be another matter, especially if the reports had been referenced in the notes. If the author had reported, "When Elizabeth informed her nieces of her new subscription the children evidenced mixed feelings" and quoted Charlottes comments, that would have worked well, but this constant resorting to superlatives strongly suggests an overly emotional and unreliable reporting of events which is not what I want to be reading in a biography.

I read at one point about the children naming toy soldiers they had, which were characters in the various worlds they built in their evidently fertile imaginations:

Charlotte instantly named hers after her hero the Duke of Wellington, whereupon Branwell decided that his would be Napoleon Bonaparte. Even at this stage of his life - he was then aged eight - he delighted in being the anti-hero rather than the hero. We should also remember, however, that the twelve soldiers had been bought for Branwell, yet he willingly shared them with his sisters; this one early moment encapsulated the duality of his nature.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. Charlotte instantly named hers? Maybe. Patrick deliberately chose an anti-hero rather than he just chose Napoleon because that man was the brain-dead option when his sister had chosen Wellington? Once again the author seems to be investing far too much fertile (if not fervid) imagination of his own into every action the children took.

Patrick was eight years old for goodness sake, yet already the author wants him to be well onto the downhill slide into addiction and intemperance which we know did not become part of his character until later in life. It's too much. The author fails to give us sufficient information for us to tell if Charlotte's naming was a one-time thing for a specific scenario they were playing out, and this is why Patrick chose Napoleon, or if Arthur Wellesley was the permanent name she gave him. In omitting this, he does the reader a disservice and to quote Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame, he rejects reality and substitutes his own.

The author can even read the thoughts of the dying! As a part of the description of Aunt Branwell's last hours, I read, "Her thoughts dwelt once again on her family in Cornwall, the beautiful coast she would see no more, and then upon her nieces." The problem with this was that she died of an apparent bowel obstruction and was in severe pain for four days. It seems to me a stretch to declare with such certainty where her thoughts were when pain was the foremost thing in her mind. It seems far more likely that her thoughts dwelled on wishing the pain to be over even if it meant her dying. I don't doubt that at times her mind was in other places, but to certify that we can read her thoughts with such confidence seemed disrespectful to me.

Their aunt never did know of her nieces' success. It was only after she died and the children received a very generous inheritance, that they embarked upon their 'professional' writing careers. The first effort was a book of poetry to which all three contributed quite a number of poems. They had to pay for the publication and it never did take off. It was this failure which far from stunting their growth, launched them into their prose careers. We're told that the poetry book was launched after Charlotte had discovered a book of poetry written by Emily. The poems were supposedly, "a key to Emily's soul, and she was furious when she learned Charlotte had found them. After days of silent, and not so silent, recriminations, Anne managed to persuade Emily of the opportunity the discovery had brought."

Given that Emily was widely known to be shy and retiring (even her signature was more restrained than that of her sisters!), this rage and several days of huffy silence felt like a lot of drama, too, especially since Charlotte herself went on record stating that "My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character"! The actual words Charlotte used in describing this particular incident were "It took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication."

While we must make allowances for Charlotte perhaps downplaying emotions here, there's nothing there about fury and days of silence! This is all imagination. We can, using imagination, convince ourselves that Emily would have been at least embarrassed that her secret writing had been read, but anger? Perhaps a little, but the fact is, we do not know. This 'days of silence' is pure fiction. It took days to persuade her to publicly reveal her private writing, but this does not mean she was off in a huff somewhere, perhaps stalking the moors wearing sackcloth and with ashes in her hair, for goodness sake!

It's well known among Brontë aficionados that each of the three sisters chose a masculine name that preserved their initials while masking their femininity. Charlotte adopted Currer Bell, as the author suggests, perhaps taken from Frances Richardson-Currer a family friend who may have helped her father out of dire straits at one point with an anonymous donation.

Emily adopted the name Ellis Bell. The author assumes this to be a shortened version of Elizabeth, but that seems a stretch. We honestly don't know where it came from, but it's also been suggested it might be a reference to George Ellis, a friend of Walter Scott's, who is referenced in Scott's poem Marmion, which itself is mentioned in Jane Eyre.

Anne's experiences at Blake Hall, which were given new life in Agnes Grey, could equally have played a part. Anne's employer at the hall was Mary Ingham, whose father was Ellis Lister, an MP who presided over the Brontë's electoral district. But to me these are also a stretch. I prefer to think it was taken from contemporary writer Sarah Ellis. This would fit in with the other two sisters also choosing a (to them) well-known last name as their first.

The author suggests that the inspiration for Anne's choice of 'Acton' may be the castle her aunt had told her about during many childhood stories, but it could also have been from the last name of a recipe book writer and poet named Eliza Acton. She's largely unknown to us today, but may well have been in the Brontë library and for all we know could have been a beloved author of Anne's.

Of the surname, the author speculates: "It is often conjectured that the surname Bell was inspired by the sound of bells from their father's church; this may be so, but it could also be a contraction of the family name B(ranw)ell." Or it could have been the middle name of the curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom Charlotte later married? There are too many options to be sure, and in the end we cannot really know. It's all guess-work!

Tragedy struck when three family members all died within a few months of each other. The apparent cause was tuberculosis, and the author seems to think this came from the visit made to London by Charlotte and Anne (Emily was too retiring!) to prove to their publisher that they were women - and not one man - who wrote all of these novels! He says, "Could one or other of the sisters have picked up a further dose of tubercle bacilli which when they returned to Haworth they handed on to Branwell and to Emily? This seems a most likely supposition. Almost certainly one or other of them introduced a new pathogenic element into the closed community of Haworth Parsonage, which wreaked so much havoc so quickly."

We can't know now who patient zero truly was, but it seems far more likely to me, since Branwell was the first to get sick and die, that it was his dissolute lifestyle that doomed them all. He died in late September 1848, and was doubtlessly nursed by his sisters, in particular, Emily, who then died in late December that same year. Anne, who was so very close to Emily died in late may of the following year. To me this scenario makes more sense than blaming Charlotte.

So evne to the end, this book felt like it was far too much authorial imagination, and not enough hard fact - or supported conjecture at least. I imagine when an author is writing a biography and researching endlessly, that they come to feel close to the subject of their research, but this is not the same thing as actually knowing them personally, and certainly not the same as actually having evidence for assertions that are made. For me, the author crossed that line too many times, and this is one of the two main reasons why I felt this book fell short.

The other is the fact that I think the underlying assertion, that Aunt Branwell was such an influence on these creative children, is not made convincingly. From all that I've read about the Brontes, and from this book too, it seems to me that while they were undoubtedly influenced by many things and people around them, including Aunt Branwell, these kids themselves were the biggest influence on their writing - their minds, their interaction with each other, and their wide reading, which made the perfect storm that became their oeuvre. While I wish the author all the best, I cannot commend this biography.


Earthrise by James Gladstone, Christy Lundy


Rating: WORTHY!

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

Although I disagree with the author's thesis that the Apollo 8 photo of the Earth rising above the Moon taken on Christmas Eve of 1968 was "the photo that changed the world," I do consider this young children's book a worthy read. 1968 had not been a good year for the USA. It was the year that North Vietnam, breaking a truce for the end-of-January Tet holiday, showed the USA what they were truly capable of and what they were willing to sacrifice to unite their country. 1968 was a leap year, but the US took far too long to make that leap. It was also the year of the Prague Spring and Earthquakes in Sicily and the Philippines.

It was the year of the Olympics, and the year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both shot and killed. It was the unfortunate year that that idiot Pope Paul tried to tell women that he, and not they, owned their bodies. It was the year that France detonated its first hydrogen bomb. It was the year that 150 members of New York Radical Women protested about the 'bombshells' being exploited in the Miss America 'Pageant', which no matter how they try to tart it up by labeling it a pageant and not a beauty contest, is still about shallow skin-depth looks.

It was the year the Boeing 747 jumbo jet was unveiled, a plane that allowed terrorists to kill more people at one time in an air crash than ever before. It was the year the Beatles released the White album and United Artists banned the 'Censored Eleven' - eleven cartoons deemed to be racist. And it was capped when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders looped in a figure of eight around the Moon becoming the first humans to see the far side of it as well as traveling further away from Earth than any humans ever had before. The photos they took showed how tiny and undivided Earth is in terms of political boundaries: it's a planet we all have to share because there is nowhere else to go.

That's what this book is about, and it is well illustrated by Christy Lundy (and I have to add, commendably showcasing human diversity), and bright and colorful. I must say that the pages were sometimes awfully slow to load on my iPad. At first I thought this was because it was relatively old, but my wife's new iPad also took the same time to load, give or take, so it's the book's pages or it's the app (Bluefire Reader), not the iPad.

Anyway, the book tells the astronaut's story from liftoff on the venerable Saturn 5 rocket through their trip to the Moon (where we apparently leave them stranded because there's no return to Earth or splashdown!). Mostly it's about this one photograph that Bill Anders took, first of a black and white Earth on the way there, and then in color, of Earthrise, with the Earth half-illuminated by sunlight, the other half in darkness, creeping up above the bleak, gray, inhospitable Moon.

This wasn't actually the first Earthrise photograph taken! The first was taken by a robot in 1966 and showed much the same image, but the color image taken by humans is the one remembered. It was photographer Galen Rowell who made those hyperbolic claims for it being such a crucial image, but when you look at the actual Earth and how it progressed into 1969 and beyond, it's quite clear that this photograph ultimately influenced nothing.

There was no sea-change, only more of the same, so like I said, I do disagree with the author's assessment, but it does no harm to expose children to stirring imagery like this, and hopefully, in the long term, their astonishment and love of such imagery really will lead to an improvement among humanity in time! We can hope! I therefore commend this book as a worthy read.


Glimmerglass Girl by Holly Lyn Walrath


Rating: WORTHY!

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

As I mentioned in the post for the other volume of poetry I reviewed today, I feel something of an obligation to read a book of poetry now and then because I published one myself. Poetry is a tough sell these days and is in fact a dying art in terms of publishing. I actually find that strange, because in this modern world of short attention spans and sound bites, you would think that poetry would do well. On the other hand, sound-bites tend to be the lowest common denominator, which is the very antithesis of good poetry, so maybe that's why it doesn't do so well?!

This does makes me wonder though, if poetry has become too disconnected from real life for its own good. It used to be that poetry rhymed and while as a kid I never did quite get the non-rhyming ones, as an adult they made a lot more sense. I'm not advocating for rhyming poems here although I personally have no problem with them. For some reason - the leading suspect is disdain - they're out of fashion these days in poetry books, but are an area of endeavor that seems to have been usurped not by greeting cards, but by popular music these days. Perhaps, when all is said and done, this is what rap music is? I don't know! I'm not a fan of rap, but it does seem to be the natural if belated heir to the beat generation of the forties and fifties.

I would definitely advocate for poetry that's more accessible, and especially that's accessible to children, who are actually being spoiled by growing-up learning only that a poem has to rhyme line for line. A poem can rhyme in many more senses than the last word in the line: it can rhyme in sense, in meaning, in feeling and in other ways. This is the heart of poetry, and it's something children do not learn. They're taught exactly the opposite with nursery rhymes and rhyming children's picture books, which makes it hardly a surprise that when those children become adults, they don't pay poetry much mind, associated with childhood things and put away as it evidently is.

This particular volume was a pleasure to read, although it seemed a little odd to read in the front of the book that it was a work of fiction! It was the standard disclaimer, but when related to a book of poetry that's hopefully pulled from the author's heart and soul, what can that mean exactly? I wonder!

The first poem, "Espejitos" (Mirrors - that's what living in Texas will get you!) was highly topical and had #MeToo written all over it; not literally, but in the words of Doctor Who, "Give me a crayon and some time...." The book has a butterfly image superimposed on the text, appropriately a glass-winged butterfly, but I have to say that parts of the image were so dark that they obscured the text. I'm not sure if this was intentional. If so it was an interesting effect: a poem about women being undervalued, effaced, unseen, retired to a haunting mirror image, abused, and then being further abused by something as delicate as a butterfly?

There were other poems accompanied by images, but none of those seemed to interfere with the text like this first one did, except perhaps for "Wind-up Girl", which featured a picture of a ballerina collapsed almost like a tortoise retreated into a shell. The picture was dark and the text white, but some of it disappeared into the tutu it must be reported! Maybe this was the #MeTutu movement? The poem and image very-well recalled the dancing girl in a music box and how captive she is.

I really liked several of these poems, in particular "In rejoice of Kindred Grief", "Two Young Wives", and "She learns How to Disappear." I particularly liked "Woman" which in its succeeding line echoing the previous reminded me so much of some of my own work and harks back to what I said above about rhyming in ways other than matching the last words of each line. I will quote a small section of this to illustrate:

I split myself apart
parting seas
seaward bound prow
prowling wood hewn rough
rough as the chill of
children...

There's no rhyme here in words as such, but there is rhythm in how the first word of the next line catches the last word of the previous one and reinterprets it, continuing the poem. This is very much to my taste and something I like to bring to prose when I can, if I can. It's especially apparent in my parodies where I feel no need to constrain myself, so for me, it was a real joy to read it here and see how well done it was.

The book is quite short, only some forty-six pages of which only thirty or so are poems, but it says a lot in that small space - itself evoking the small space some women are forced to occupy in this male-dominant world, so even that worked. I can't claim that I loved everything in the book by any means, but poetry is like a box of chocolates...no, I won't go there! Suffice to say there was more enough to love, and I commend this as a highly worthy read, full of heart and meaning.


Chemically Coated Personalities by Justin Rawdon Lipscomb


Rating: WARTY!

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

I'm not a huge fan of poetry, but I have a volume of it out there myself, so I'd be a churl were I not to take a look at the works of others once in a while and commend ones I found appealing. Unfortunately I cannot do that with this volume. I read it through and did not feel a single connection to anything in it. The biggest problem was that I could not for the life of me figure out what the poems were really about, what they meant, what the author was trying to say, despite the titles, which often seemed at odds with the content to me.

Poetry is, it would seem, a dying art form, at least in English-speaking countries. As the Washington Post reported in April of 2015 (which was national poetry month), the number of Americans who read a work of poetry in the previous year had declined by more than half from a decade or two before, and it had been only sixteen percent to begin with. It was less popular than going to a museum; than going to a jazz concert; than crocheting. A survey in Australia at roughly the same time evidenced a similar lack of interest. It's a tough sell, and while some might decry that as a 'bad thing' it's no more than a reflection of people's tastes, which change, of course.

This is why the content of a poem matters and why it needs to appeal. This doesn't mean we should all start writing Hallmark verse by any means, but the more personal and obscure a poem is, the harder it's going to be to find an audience. Another problem is the current era's lack of attention span. We've been trained to eat in sound bites and that's an unsound philosophy because it inevitably comes back to bite us. Poetry can lend itself to this, but it often refuses to yield.

My issues with this one were two-fold: firstly that it felt really pretentious - like the author was playing at being poetic rather than actually being poetic; like it came far more from the mind than the heart, and secondly that the poems were consistently whiny and maudlin. There was nothing uplifting here, and it was a depressing read. This was not helped by the fact that most of the time I had no idea what this author was waxing on about. I really didn't. Nor did I see a connection between the poem's title and the content of the poem, not that this seemed important to me but it was one more thing.

If the purpose of poetry is to invoke feeling in another and lure them into seeing the world through the poet's eye, then this was a fail for me, because it didn't evoke anything but confusion. I felt this from poem one, and throughout the book. It never changed and so it never improved. After about two-thirds of the volume, I gave up because I had got nothing from this at all save irritation with what too often seemed to me to be a litany of self-pity.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this book was that the poems varied very little - similar length, similar meter, similar cadence, similar topic! It very quickly became very routine and very monotonous to read, and every one of the poems seemed to exude an aura of malcontent: dissatisfaction with people and with life. It was an irritating read where it wasn't rather depressing, and I didn't feel remotely elevated by this art; quite the contrary. I could not connect with it or even understand what the author was trying to say most of the time.

As an example, the very first poem, titled "Addiction, but No Quarter" began this process with the first line "The wood placed in my hand makes me different" but then the rest of the poem never came back to this so I had no idea what this meant. What was the wood? What was happening? Was it a baseball bat? Was it a stake designed to be driven through a vampires heart? Was it a cross? A golf club? Was it a metaphor for a forest? Or an erection? None of the above? I have no idea because the rest of the poem failed to offer any illumination whatsoever! In fact it only made things more obscure with lines like "Silence is too loud to hold the sound of nothing" and "Veins carry the liquid pain that holds us in an unworthy dominion of ourselves".

I realized as I read that poem, that no line was really connected with any other line. It was merely a series of disjointed statements which were so obscure that all meaning (I assume there was meaning, at least for the author) was lost for me. There may well have been a connection in the writer's mind, but if it fails to reach the reader, then what's the point? This is a problem inherent in writing poetry in that it is so very personal that there's a very real, grave, and sad risk that no one else will get it. Certainly, and especially if the author denies the reader some sort of 'in', it will mean far less to others than it meant to the author, and that was the problem I had with this entire collection of poems.

I'm sure they're very personal and have real meaning to the author, but that doesn't necessarily migrate to the reader, so while I wish the author all the best in his poetical and musical career, I cannot commend this volume as a worthy read.


Saturday, August 11, 2018

The Ape that Understood the Universe by Steve Stewart-Williams


Rating: WARTY!

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

This is a science book that purports to look at humans from the perspective of how an alien might see them, but in practice, there is very little of this perspective employed. After an initial flurry, aliens are mentioned only spasmodically.

On the one hand this would seem to offer an interesting PoV, but on the other, this kind of thing been done before, and it seems a stretch to begin with. The arrogance of the pretension that we can honestly and objectively look at ourselves as an alien might see us seems antithetical to a scientific approach. By definition an alien is a being not like us, so to suggest we can honestly put ourselves in their shoes is a stretch at best!

We can't even put ourselves reliably into the shoes of animals most like us on Earth let alone some tentacle-sporting Betelgeusian, so it seems to me that there's an inherent insult in taking such a perspective. Such a PoV almost inevitably makes the alien look like a moron.

I really did not like the Star Trek Original series. Actually, these days I've gone off all Star Trek TV shows. I refuse to watch Discovery for its stupidity and lack of imagination, but TOS was the worst. Admittedly it was a product of its time, and in some ways ground-breaking, but it was nonetheless a poorly-written and simplistic show, and it carried the same pretense this book does: that of an alien observing humans.

The alien was Spock, and in trying to show him coping with human culture, it made him look like a complete idiot who, despite having lived among humans for some considerable time, and being half human himself for his entire life, simply didn't get it. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the fact is that he never got it, and was typically at a complete loss, which is what made him moronic. He wasn't a genius. He wasn't brilliant. He wasn't even logical a good portion of the time.

Star Trek has a habit of doing this. In Next Generation, the resident imbecile was Commander Data. In Voyager there wasn't one single dumb-ass. It oscillated between Neelix, Tuvak, and Seven of Nine. The only show I've seen where the Vulcan wasn't made to look moronic was in Enterprise, which actually made her a complex character with a real life. And we all know what happened to that show! Having realistic characters got it cancelled and kept Star Trek off the air for years! Then they rebooted with Discovery, where everyone's a dumbass. Go figure!

This book treats its aliens in the same way, but since that was a minor part of the book, I let the conceit go, hoping the book would win me over. I'm sorry to report that it didn't. A huge portion in the middle of the book is devoted to sex and reproduction and how animals differ (or don't) when compared with humans. How anyone can make a discussion about sex boring, I do not know, but this author did it with the facility of a guy who was trying to pick up a woman in a bar or some such social setting, and insisted in rambling on about sex and intimacy when the woman wasn't even remotely into him.

That's how this affected me. It went on far too long, it was rambling, it really offered nothing particularly engaging, and as with the rest of the book, for me it brought nothing new, nothing amusing, and not even a new perspective on things. Others may find this more educational and entertaining than I.

I'm not a scientist, but I am very well read across multiple sciences from books and other materials by a variety of authors over many years, and so perhaps I have a leg up on the lay reader, but to me it felt as though you would have to know literally nothing about any of these topics to find much here that was very stirring. In short, you'd have to be the idiot alien!

So, some of the approaches taken here just seemed plain wrong to me. For example, at one point the author informs us that "Evolution ain't about the good of the species." Well you can get into some good semantic arguments here, but from my reading, that assertion is plainly wrong in very general terms, because evolution doesn't work on individual animals! Mutation does work on individuals, but for evolution you need a species over time.

That's how it works, that's the origin of species. Mutations can be good, bad, or indifferent, and not all of them get spread, not even if they're good, but often enough, the good ones - that is the ones that give the organisms in the species some reproductive or survival advantage, will tend to outcompete those without such advantages and there it;s good for the species! The mutation(s) will spread through the species and so the species succeeds where others fail, or it may even become a new species over time.

So is this for the good of the species? Well it's not designed to be for the good of a species. There's no designer. It's simply a filter - rather like a knock-out game. No one designed France to win the last World Cup, but that's how the filters played out. The France 'species' of soccer team proved to be the fittest; better able to compete. No individual won that world cup, but all members of the 'species', fitter than members of competing 'species' in the contest, contributed to the win.

To use the author's example, sharper teeth may be good for a lion, but if the genes that produce them don't spread across the species, then nothing's going to change! Teeth that are too sharp may end up slicing the lion's mouth, allowing infection in, and killing it off before it can reproduce, and that's an end to it, but if the teeth were just perfect and it left offspring that were more successful than their peers in surviving and reproducing, the teeth would spread, over time, through the pride, and so would benefit the species.

The author admits this when he says that evolution works within species - not within individuals, so I really have no idea what he was trying to argue here, and you can argue that's my fault or you can argue that the author did a poor job of getting his point across. The problem is that this was a repeated issue for me in reading this.

This is a long book with 6,904 locations so making it engaging and interesting was important to me, and it simply wasn't. I hate to invest my valuable time in a long book only to find it's not done anything for me or even worse, not so much as done what it claimed it would in the blurb. Of course, blurbs aren't written by the author (unless they self-publish), so the disconnect between what you're told you will get and what you end up getting can be quite jolting and can make or break a book for me.

Talking of book length, I found this formula online which purportedly converts location to page count. If you divide the location number by 16.69 this gives the page number supposedly. By that method, there are over 413 pages in this book. Another online formula suggests dividing by twenty which would mean this one has 345 pages. It's listed online as having 378 pages which suggests the formula ought really to be in between those two, dividing it by 18.26. But maybe there is no accurate formula for every book. What a world we live in, eh? I blame Amazon!

The point though, is that however many pages it had were too many, so this book could have done with a lot of editing and a serious trim to the discussion on sex which rambled on repetitively, circling round and round, until I completely lost interest in reading any more about it or any more of the rest of the book.

I did skim the altruism pages and found it somewhat disturbing that the author has never apparently heard of cases of altruism between different species of animal. It's like he could not see the trees for the florist, so this tended to rob him of whatever point it was he thought he was making about investing in your own genetic lineage. He seemed to be seriously undervaluing nurture and friendship, especially when it came to humans. But as I said, I skimmed it, so maybe I missed something there.

I wish the author all the best in his career, but I cannot in good faith recommend this particular science book, which is unusual for me. I typically enjoy science books and recommend them, but this one simply did not get there. It was more of a spandrel than a genetic improvement in the species of science books, and definitely not at its fittest.


Wednesday, August 8, 2018

The Worst Book Ever by Beth Bacon, Jason Grube, Corianton Hale


Rating: WORTHY!

As I mentioned in my review of another book by this author, which is published alongside this one, there are so many books out there now in this era of self-publishing that it seems like it's only made things worse when we try to encourage younger readers to get started. That's why I admire Beth Bacon's valiant attempts to inject some humor, excitement, and adventure into the process. I've read three of her books now and liked them all. While superficially, they're very simple, and contain little text, they're really a very subtle bait and switch, luring kids in with one promise, and secretly getting them to read! I think it's a great idea.

This particular one delights in reveling how bad it is:- the worst book; one that would make a librarian's skin crawl. It's loud, it's obnoxious, it's unruly and ill-behaved. It's not a nice book. It doesn't play well with others. Meanwhile your child has read the book without even noticing they were...ugh...reading! I think it's a great idea.

I doubt there are many people who read a whole lot more than I do, so this book really isn't aimed at me, but I still enjoyed reading it, and I recommend this book as a worthy read.


Blank Space by Beth Bacon


Rating: WORTHY!

There are so many books out there now in this era of self-publishing that it seems like it's only made things worse when we try to encourage younger readers to get started. That's why I admire Beth Bacon's valiant attempts to inject some humor, excitement, and adventure into the process. I've read two of her books now and liked them both. While superficially, they're very simple, and contain little text, they're really a very subtle bait and switch, luring kids in which one promise and secretly getting them to read! I think it's a great idea despite the unfortunate initials of the book title! It's definitely not BS!

This particular one extols the virtues of the blank spaces in books! Normally I rail against wasted paper in books, because it means wasted trees, but even a curmudgeon like me can see the value of using the space artistically and as a lure to young readers. Even as it admires these swathes of unprinted page, the book runs off its mouth in print about how wonderful they are - and actually makes a good case! it also brings the readers along with it in sharing the delight of ignoring the text while reading the very text which tells us about the spaces! Brilliant!

I doubt there are many people who read a whole lot more than I do, so this book really isn't aimed at me, but I still enjoyed reading it, and I recomnend this book as a worthy read.


Byte by Eric C Anderson


Rating: WARTY!

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

From the blurb, this book looked like it would interest me, but I knew I was in trouble when I started in on it and it turned out to be first person voice, which is rarely a good choice. That said, I have read some first persons that I enjoyed. I didn't enjoy this one because the first person part narrated by "Roller" was so arrogant and snotty that it turned me off the person, which is hard to do given that she was female, African American, and wheelchair bound. Any one of those, all else being equal, would have interested me. All three together should have been a winner, but having your character insult the reader isn't a winning strategy.

This character was in some ways reminiscent of Odetta/Detta from the Stephen King trilogy that morphed into the endless Dark Tower series which I gave up on, but not as likeable (sarcasm!). You know Stephen King can't write a trilogy without it running to eight volumes. This Roller character couldn't put two sentences together without lecturing the reader on ancient computer history. And some of it was wrong. For example, Stuxnet wasn't given that name by the people who created it but by the people who were deconstructing it to try and discover what it did.

Nor is the British Parliament based "in that temple of democracy, Westminster Abbey." Westminster Abbey is a church, Parliament is in the Houses of Parliament. And "In 2008, when Obama spent $760,000 to win"? No, try $760 million! But anyone can screw up a fact here and there. Normally that wouldn't bother me so much, but the relentless ego of the narrator was annoying at best (especially when coupled with the misstatements). The author realized he had made a mistake when he chose the very limiting first person, and we see this as he resorts to third person to tell two other parts of the story, which made for a really clunky downshift every couple of chapters.

And for a story seemingly rooted in the latest and greatest in high tech hacking, and set in 2025 yet, I was quite surprised to read this:

I've been living here long enough to know bad news only gets dumped on Friday afternoon. Preferably about 5 p.m. Too late for the newspapers to update, and the camera boys are already locking in the nightly news. Yeah, you're right, CNN will carry the latest update, but who watches CNN on a Friday night?

Seriously? In 2025 no one is going to be reading newspapers, which have been in major decline for the last two decades and more, and with the younger generations tied almost exclusively to their smartphones, rightly or wrongly getting their news from social media, no one is going to watch CNN on any night.

I doubt many people are going to care much about newspapers in 2025, let alone plan their news releases around them. I doubt they do now. Nightly news viewership on TV has been falling precipitately and by 2025 it will be similarly irrelevant. This felt particularly clunky for a novel which was at its very core about Internet use (and abuse). The blindness to social media was a real suspension of disbelief breaker.

Those were not even the worst sins though. The worst sin is to be boring, and I made it fifty percent the way through this, growing ever more bored with the complete lack of anything exciting happening. You could barely see things moving, so glacial was the pace, and I lost all interest. I should have quit before fifty percent.

If the main character had been at all likeable, that might have made a difference. If there had been some real action in the third person parts of the story: things happening instead of it feeling like I was watching a chess game in which neither participant had any interest in competing much less completing, that might have made a difference, but as it was, I could not justify reading more of this when I didn't even like the main character, when I found myself much preferring the dark web hacker to the 'good guy' hacker, and found nothing to make me want to swipe to the next screen. I wish the author all the best, but I cannot recommend this one.


Thursday, August 2, 2018

Anne Frank by Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Sveta Dorosheva


Rating: WORTHY!

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

This tells a story everyone should know. Like Jane Austen, Anne Frank was a writer from a young age and she also died tragically young, thereby robbing the world of yet another worthy voice, but other than that, her story was radically different from that of Jane Austen.

Escaping Nazi Germany to live in Holland, the Franks thought they were safe, but they were not. They spent endless months in the middle of the war living hidden in a factory, but they were betrayed and split-up, and taken to concentration camps. Anne died just a few weeks before the camp was liberated. Her father was the only one of the family who survived those horrors. Her diary, mercifully, had not been destroyed and her father saw to it that it was published so that everyone might know her story. This book tells that story admirably, and I commend it.


Jane Austen by Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Katie Wilson


Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is another in a series aimed at making well-known historical people well-known to young children and as such is an admirable effort, if sometimes misguided as my previous review made clear. This one, however was a better offering. Austen needs no introduction which is presumably why this book gets right down to it!

It tells of her childhood (she was born only a hundred fifty miles or so from where I was born!), as a young girl in a large family of mostly boys, her listening in on her father's tutoring classes, and her love of reading. Jane Austen took up writing at an early age and made some interesting and amusing efforts at it. Her The History of England, which I read and reviewed last month as part of a review of her minor works, was hilarious.

The book, perhaps because it is aimed at children, mentions nothing of the tragedy of her death at such a young age (she had barely entered her forties), right in the middle of writing a new novel. But the story this does tell is positive, and empowering for your girls, and hopefully at least a few who read this will be moved to become writers themselves.


Mother Teresa by Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Natascha Rosenberg


Rating: WARTY!

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

Illustrated in color but very simplistically by Natascha Rosenberg, this book tells the breathless story of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu who was canonized in 2016 as Mother Teresa for at best, dubious miracles and her work among the suffering in Kolkata (aka Calcutta) in India.

I have to take issue with this book because Mother Teresa had far to many questionable practices to be worshipped as a saint, and this book mentions none of them. Wikipedia has a pretty decent coverage of this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa. Information can also be found from other sources.

The problem with this book is that it swallows the hype far too easily and does nothing to mediate it. I cannot commend a book about a woman who actually said, "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot...I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." while taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts.


I Spy the 50 States by Sharyn Rosart, Sol Linero


Rating: WORTHY!

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

Fifty States in Fifty Pages! This is intended as a print book, but all I merit as an amateur reviewer is the ebook, which is fine because I love trees far more than I love print books, but it doesn't quite work as the author intended because one of the treats of the print version is a spy-hole through which you get a glimpse of the next page so you can try to guess at your next destination. These spy-holes are represented by little red circles in the ebook.

The tour begins in New England and proceeds from there and a linear and switchback fashion. On each double-page, a state is represented with many small and colorful pictures by artist Sol Linero, and the author writes a few words. I think she had the easier job! The words are a tease because you have to find three things she names, each starting with the same letter. This worked fine until we reached Vermont, the third state in the trip, where I was told to find a Sugar Shack, a snowshoe, and a sleigh. I found the first two, but there ain't no sleigh in Vermont! I had to wonder if the fishing lure was mistaken for a sleigh up in the top right corner, or if a snowboard was mistaken for one at lower left?

The rest of the pages I checked (not all of them!) I didn't see any such issue with, and maybe I'm blind that I can't see the sleigh. There are so many pictures, it might be easy to miss something. I haven't been to all fifty states, but I've visited many and lived in several, and it was nice to be reminded of some of the things I'd seen there. The book is fun, and colorful, and offers a lot of things to keep a child's interest. I commend it as a worthy read and a great distraction on a long trip!


Aspertools by Harold S Reitman, Pati Fizzano, Rebecca Reitman


Rating: WORTHY!

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

Subtitled "The Practical Guide for Understanding and Embracing Asperger's, Autism Spectrum, and Neurodiversity" this book is aimed at understanding and learning how to deal with these conditions. Asperger syndrome (AS) is named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger who described children with the features 1944. It's thought to affect some forty million people worldwide.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a range of conditions classified as neurodevelopmental disorders. This syndrome includes Asperger's, but this author refers primarily to Aspergers, and makes little mention of Autism. The word itself comes from the Greek word autos, meaning self or same. It's this same root that appears in autobiography, autopilot, and so on.

This book is available in both print and electronic format, but I have to say once again that the Kindle version is a disaster! The PDF version was much more readable, but I read most of this in Kindle because I always have my phone with me and it was more convenient to read it there.

This is a book which was designed for print format, evidently without an ounce of thought being given to how it would appear as an ebook. Amateur reviewers like me do not merit a print version, and it's fine because I'd rather have the trees than the pages, but it does mean that we have to put up with some pretty rough-and unready versions of books from time to time. It's well known that turning a print format book into a Kindle book to be read on Amazon's crappy Kindle app will as likely ruin it as render it readable if great care isn't taken.

I recommend using B&N's Nook or PDF format. Anything but Kindle, which in my experience will destroy any book that isn't formatted in the blandest and most vanilla of manners. Full disclosure: I am an arch enemy of Amazon not only for the fact that they're too big and powerful, but for their business practices (or lack of same) and also from my personal dealings with them on my own projects. I will never do business with them again, and neither will my estate when I;m gone, so if you think I'm biased, you're perfectly correct! That doesn't alter the fact that Kindle is for crap though as I shall hereinafter demonstrate.

Note though that this was an ARC, and one;s hope is that these issues will be fixed before the published e-version is released lest it become an aversion, but how it came to be this way in the first place is something that demands investigation. From page one this book was literally all over the place, with misaligned text, random red text in places whereas the rest of the text was white on my phone. I set my phone this way to save on power drain: white text on a black background uses less energy than the reverse, but switching it to black text on white background made no difference to the issues I'm discussing here.

The contents followed straight on from the book details page with no break, and the word 'contents' was randomly capitalized so that it read: COnTEnTS. The FOREwORd and the ACknOwLEdgmEnTS were just as bad. You can see a trend there: d, g, m, n, w are all lower case. Everything else is upper case. Why? I have no idea, but the Kindle conversion 'process' is well-known to me for this kind of inexplicable mangling of books.

This was followed by a truly poorly formatted contents list in which nothing was aligned. Some of the text was blue, indicating a link, and tapping that took you to the correct page, but there was no way to get back to the contents from that page since it wasn't linked in reverse. The real problem though, was that only a few contents items were actually linked - the rest was plain white text and tapping on it achieved nothing, other than swiping the screen if you tapped too close to the edge, of course!

There were multiple images of snowflakes separating each section of the book because every snowflake is different, right? That's actually not true (there are identical snowflakes!), but this was used as a metaphor for each brain being different, which I do buy. The problem from a formatting point of view was that while these snowflakes looked pretty and elegant in the iPad, in the Kindle version they were a complete disaster.

When you reverse the colors (white text on black background), the blobby snowflakes stand out like a sore thumb. Worse than this, they're all over the place: spread over three or more screens instead of being confined to one dividing screen - again a problem with the formatting for the ebook being ignored completely. Several instances of these snowflakes spread across five screens! That's way too much real estate for a frivolous affectation which ought to have been dispensed with in the ebook version.

I recommend reading the PDF format rather than the sad Amazon format which is all Kindled up - that is unless the actual published version has all these problems fixed. In the iPad, the image of the snowflakes makes sense - it's in the shape of a brain and part of the spinal cord. If this had been one small image instead of apparently being composed of multiple tiles, then it would have looked a lot better on the smart phone than it does in the ARC that I got.

The book has a preface and an introduction, both of which I ignored as is my habit. They almost never contribute anything worth reading in my experience, so I routinely skip them. I prefer my introduction to be chapter one, so that's where I started. Everything else is nothing but pretention and OCD addiction to tradition. The chapters have chapter quotes which are another no-no to me and I skipped those, too. If you have to quote someone else to make your case for you, you're not making your case.

I assume the print version has drop-caps. Frankly I've never seen the point of these even in a print book, but they should have been eliminated for the ebook version because what we got instead was, on the first screen for chapter one: some left over snowflakes, the chapter number and title, a thick line, a quote from Mark Twain - a well-known expert on Autism - not!, another thick line, an anonymous quote, another thick line, a 'helpful hint' which was really just common sense, an apparently random number 7 (which may or may not have been a footnote, and which doesn't work in an ebook - better to have a tap-able link instead), and finally the start of the chapter - at the very bottom of the screen. The start of the chapter was the letter E. That's it. That's all. The next screen contained the rest of the truncated word which was evidently intended to be 'Every'. Drop-caps should be dropped. Literally, but especially so in ebooks.

Throughout the book, people on the autism spectrum were referred to as 'Aspies' which seemed really condescending to me. I don't know if this is considered a term of endearment or otherwise acceptable within that community, but repeatedly reading phrases like "...it might not be true of your Aspie..." just sounded wrong to me - like these people were objects to be owned rather than individuals who needed careful consideration. That's just my feeling on the topic.

The author's daughter (Rebecca Reitman) adds sections here and there with her own thoughts since she has to cope with this condition, and these are listed under the title 'thought from rebecca reitman' - and that's exactly how it's headed in the Kindle version: all lower case, no differentiation with font, which even Amazon's crappy Kindle app can usually handle. It was really hard to see where these sections began and ended.

There was a similar problem with the other contributor, Pati Fizzano, a teacher of autism spectrum kids, whose contributions were fine in the iPad, but which seemed always to be competing among those annoying snowflakes for attention in the Kindle version on my smartphone. Once again, the book was formatted for the printed page and apparently zero thought was given to the experience that ebook users, who might want the convenience of reading on their phone, would be subject to.

Those complaints aside, the book did contain educational and useful content which is well worth knowing. The topics were rather repetitive, and while it never hurts to reinforce ideas, especially with someone who is on the spectrum, as a reader I did find myself wondering from time to time whether the book was actually aimed at those who wished to at least understand (as it was in my case) and help people with these disorders, or whether it was aimed at people who actually had these disorders!

I was reminded several times of assorted things, for example, that Rebecca Reitman had “...twenty-three vascular tumors in her brain," and also had "two life-saving [against all odds] brain surgeries...” While I sympathize and really feel for anyone who is in that kind of situation, telling me something like that once really makes an impact. I wasn't likely to forget it! Repeatedly telling me was more likely to make me honestly wish I'd never heard it! This wasn't the only thing that was repeated.

Anyway, the topics covered were these:

  • Anxiety
  • Hypersenses: Senses on Steroids
  • Observation: Elementary, My Dear Watson
  • The Meltdown
  • The Safe Place
  • Rudeness, Truth Telling, and Manners
  • Transitions
  • Routines
  • Structure and Positive Activities
  • Obsessions and Hyper-Interests
  • Social Awkwardness
  • Limit Choices to Avoid "No!"
  • Instilling Street Smarts
  • Taking Things Literally: "Why Did They Say I'm Not Playing With a Full Deck?"
  • Specifics: Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say
  • Preventing Overwhelm: Breaking Down Big Jobs Into Smaller Tasks
  • Setting Goals
  • Rules, Rewards, and Consequences
  • Checklists: The Indispensable Tool
  • Time management: Tools for getting 139 Your Aspie to Be on Time
  • Overlapping Conditions
  • It's Not About You
  • Love Unconditionally

Note that the '139' in the 'Time Management' section is actually in the contents list - it's a page number that's out of place.

There's an afterword, which I also skipped as I do all afterwords, epilogues, etc. There are three appendices chock full of resources and references.

Despite all of the formatting issues and the repetitiveness in parts, I really enjoyed reading this. it was interesting, educational, and sometimes heartbreaking, and I commend it as a worthy read. This isn't the first book I've read on this topic, so much of it I already knew, but it was nice to be remind! Much of it is actually nothing more than common sense when you learn a few things about people with these conditions, and there's the rub: it's not like they have a sign, or they're in a wheelchair, or have a certain 'look' about them.

It's not like they're missing a limb, or are carrying a white stick, or wearing a hearing aid, but it would behoove everyone to give anyone who is behaving - to our routine eyes - slightly oddly, because it may well be someone like this who needs our concern and compassion, not our Trump-mentality, knee-jerk condemnation. I enjoyed the comments by the authors daughter, even though they usually echoed what I'd read in the preceding chapter. They were delightfully blunt and to the point, and I would definitely read a biography if she wrote one. I think it would be interesting. In the absence of that, this book does an excellent job of opening eyes and hearts to people who need our understanding and support.


Wednesday, August 1, 2018

The Cow Said Neigh! by Rory Feek


Rating: WORTHY!

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

This is a fun children's book aimed at getting kids to understand and experiment with sounds and to consider when the wrong sound is coming from somewhere. I can see it leading to a wider discussion - maybe even about what it means when the smoke alarm goes off. Is that the right kind of sound to hear? But it's not about that. It's about a very confused farm!

In a series of fun, bright, and colorful images, and some happy verse, we discover that several of the farm and domestic animals - and even the farmer himself, are getting some weird ideas about their station in life! The cow sees the horse and decides she would like to run free - so she starts neighing. The horse starts quaking, the duck starts baaing and this cascade effect ricochets around the whole farm! Will it ever end? Hopefully, otherwise it'll be a long night reading this to your little loved one!

I commend this for a fun and instructive read to young children.




30th Century: Revived by Mark Kingston Levin


Rating: WARTY!

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

I'm not a fan of series except for the occasional rare and treasured one, which is why I felt duped when I requested this from Net Galley, because there was nothing there to indicate that it was book two of a trilogy. Hence I felt lost from the start because this one clearly takes off from wherever volume one left off and there's very little context to help the reader. Add to that the complete lack of world-building, the unnaturally stilted conversations, and the truly simplistic nature of the writing overall, and I simply could not get into this at all. I could not finish it and I quit about a fifth of the way though.

An example of how lacking in interest the writing was is this (and note that this was from an advance review copy, so even though this novel was published last April, it could, I suppose, change!):

The reporter continued. “When the engines failed, the parachute, made of ultra-strong carbon nanotube fibers, was deployed, and according to the crew, it saved all the passengers. No one lost their life, but over four hundred thirty-three were injured out of the twelve hundred twenty-two people aboard this Can-Air 999.”
***
After eight months, the news reporter for the Canadian Broadcast Company announced, “The investigation turned up a possible sabotage of this aircraft. The computer system had been infected with a virus or worm. This is an aircraft designed to hover low over the ground so passengers can see and photograph the wildlife, including moose, polar bears, and deer.”

I don't get how a noisy hovering aircraft would permit passengers to see and photograph wildlife - which would have taken off, scared to death with this huge, noisy machine hovering overhead! And it took eight months to discover that the computer system was infected? No. Just no. That was what all of this writing was like - like the author was so enamored of how it sounded to him that he failed to consider how realistic it was.

He's evidently not paid much attention to how people actually speak to one another in real life, nor has he given any thought to the fact that language a thousand years from now will undoubtedly have changed as much as it's changed over the last thousand years, yet the woman from the 30th century speaks exactly like her husband from the current century.

The whole thing was far too simplistic for me, and I honestly could not get into it at all. I wish the author all the best with his career, but cannot commend this book.


Joann & Jane: Who Made This Mess by Brandon T Mayes, Taylor McDaniel


Rating: WORTHY!

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

If you were hoping to let your kids read this on a smart phone as an emergency distraction, it won't work! The picture is larger than the screen so you can't read the text, and you can't shrink the picture! You'd best plan on reading it only on a tablet or in the printed form.

The screens slide up and down, not side to side, but you can't catch the slide in the middle to maybe read the missing text, because for one thing, the text simply isn't there, and for another, the screen doesn't slide - it quantum jumps to the next image too quickly to ready anything even if there was text there to read at the margin.

That said, it's beautifully illustrated by Taylor McDaniel and engagingly written by Brandon Mayes, and it's wonderfully colored in more than one way, because this is a mixed race family which is very rare to see in a children's book even though such marriages have been steadily increasing in real life.

It's been half a century since mixed-race marriage stopped being illegal in the USA, and they're now at the highest proportion in US history, with one in six couples being mixed race, but it remains the case that Asians and Latinx are more likely to marry outside their race than black or white people are. Unsurprisingly, especially in the present political climate, twice as many Democrats as Republicans believe that mixed race marriage as a good thing.

But I digress! Sisters Joann and Jane can't figure out how their room got into such a mess. I'm sure many parents have heard this excuse many times, but here, it's a bit more complicated, it seems. While everyone is wondering how this happened and J&J are playing detective, the little beagle, known as London Dog, seems to be napping quite contentedly. I wonder why? I thought this was a great book and I commend it.


Say Please, Little Owlet by Ellie J Woods, Mirra Oblakova


Rating: WORTHY!

Haviing enjoyed Goodnight Swampy the Little Monster by this author (Not to be confused with Elle Woods of Legally Blonde fame!) in November last year, I wasn't surprised to find this one a worthy story for children as well.

Little Owlet lives with dad, mom, grandmother, sister Lily, and a jumbo-eared pet mouse in a very spacious brownbark in the forest, and consequently is a bit spoiled. He doesn't want veggies, he wants chocolate! And why should he say please? When he sees mom baking a delightful cake, that's all he wants, and no two pleas about it!

The only problem I saw with this book is that it's very simplistic - it seems to suggest that all you have to do is say please to automatically get a huge slice of cake. Real life doesn't quite work like that, so the writing problem here is the balance between keeping it simple for kids while making am important point, as well as providing some colorful entertainment. It's not an easy path to walk.

Artist Mirra Oblakova does a fine job with the illustrations, and the author does a great job with the rhyming text, but there's a third party here which needs to be involved, and that's the parent, guardian, or older sibling who is reading this. There needs to be a discussion, pitched at your child's level of understanding, of what it means to be polite and why it's important. You can't just leave it to the book. There needs to be interaction so you can tease the important message out of this story: that we don't say please to get things, we say please because it's the civilized and polite thing to do.

That's not a problem with this book, it's a generic thing that arises out of the need to keep children's books simple, but I think children can handle a little more complex, especially with the input from a responsible grown-up who knows the child well. That said, this book is a great starting point and I commend it.


The Clockwork Witch by Michelle D Sonnier


Rating: WARTY!

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

Errata: "...she watched as her family prepare to leave the house." This really needed to have used 'prepared' rather than 'prepare'. "When do you think they'll finally drag you into the family business, brother dear?" Arabella smiled. "Oh, I think not." John barked with laughter." The second speech doesn't follow from the first! If the 'when' was omitted from the first speech, it would make more sense. "We've combed the library and its' not inconsiderable resources" no apostrophe is required on 'its'

I am not a huge fan of steampunk, but then this really isn't a steampunk story even though it superficially professes to be a mashup of witchcraft and steampunk. That juxtaposition is what interested me in the novel as it happens, but I had too many writing issues with it to love it, despite it starting out very strongly for me.

My blog is more about the writing of novels than the reading of them, but I explore writing through discussing my reading experiences and assessing the book accordingly, and this one felt very much like a book feels when an American writer tries to write a Victorian novel without really knowing the Victorian period very well - at least as it was experienced in Britain. An example of such an Americanism was "She'll be furious is what she'll be." That's a common format - repeating the same person and verb at the end as you've used at the start, but I don't see a well-bred Victorian family employing it in Britain!

I don't profess to be an expert by any means, but since there exist very many books from that period, fiction and otherwise, my advice to writers is to read a lot of them so you get a feel for the vernacular in use back then. That aside, I did enjoy reading this to start with. Unfortunately, it had too many issues, by far the worst of which was the disturbingly weak and bland female main character.

I adore books with strong females - and by that I do not mean they can arm-wrestle a guy to the ground (although that could be a trait they have!). No, I mean women who are self-possessed and self-motivated and who do not wilt every other paragraph. I don't care if they start out weak and grow strong or if they're strong from the off. I do care if they never grow, and never change no matter what provocation or incentive they have, and that was this character's problem.

I know it was set in Victorian times when women were all-too-often deemed weak and delicate, and some actually were, just as some are today, but there were some amazing women who lived in that era (the queen for one example) and who made their mark: such as Ada Lovelace, Annie Besant, Eleanor Coade, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emmeline Pankhurst, Florence Nightingale, Isabella Bird, Marianne North, Millicent Fawcett. Dido Belle was another although she came long before the Victorian era. Radclyffe Hall was another although she came later.

The novel began strongly, but then slowly and inexorably went downhill. The main character was so weepy and showed no sign of growing a backbone, so around seventy percent in I couldn't stand to read about her any more. I did a search for the word 'sobbed' in this novel, and it showed up ten different times and each time it was the main character who was doing the sobbing! This was throughout the novel. I don't mind a girl (or a guy for that matter) breaking down once in a while, but this girl was doing it habitually, at the drop of a hat. It was nauseating to keep reading it. Parts of the novel were really great, but she was such a lackluster and limp woman who had showed no sign of ever growing, and I lost all interest in her and her story.

People have on occasion chided me for DNF-ing a novel, but I see no point in forcing oneself to read something that simply doesn't get the job done. Life is far too short. Their argument that maybe things will turn around is weak and I've disproven it repeatedly. If the novel isn't getting it done by the time you're twenty percent in, you should quit right then. I almost quit around the half-way point, but decided to struggle on in hopes that it would improve because there had been parts I really enjoyed, but it did not improve. It steadily grew worse, and meanwhile I'd wasted more of my time pursuing it! I do not subscribe to the sunk cost fallacy; quitting is a smarter move than continuing to invest effort in something not worthy of your time.

The story is of the Sortileges, the leading witch family in Britain, and one which is highly-regarded beyond the immediate shores of the so-called Sceptered Isle. The Family is a large one - seven daughters and two sons. In this world, the daughters take precedence, because they are witches, and men take a back seat, contrary to 'mundane' society (read: muggles!) where it is of course the reverse, as real life history shows.

The main character is Arabella, a name I can't think of without being reminded of the rather catchy song from the old Peter Sellers movie based on a stage play: There's a Girl in My Soup (which I recommend for light-hearted fun and a few witty remarks, but you have to be something of an anglophile to get the best from it). The song runs along the lines of: "Arabella, Cinderella, what did she do? She turned into a pumpkin at the stroke of two! You know she should have done it way back at midnight. Why, oh why, can she never get it right!"

Arabella is the trope seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. If you're going to retread a tired cliché in your novel, then you need a really good reason to do it and none was given here. Seventh children of seventh children, let alone daughters, were exceedingly rare back then with infant mortality being so high. Earlier in Queen Victoria's life, average family size was six, not seven, and by the middle of the century, it was less than that. So seventh children, let alone daughters, did not happen very often.

This begs the question as to why it was that this particular instance of such a child had power over machines, which had barely been invented in the mid-ninetheeth century? It's not like there could have been a history of such children having power over machines; there were no real machines, not to speak of, much earlier than this period. We're given no more of an explanation for this than we are for anything else being the way it is in this world - which is to say none! This led me to the conclusion that Arabella really should have been named Mary Sue to have this perfect power fall into her lap when it was most needed.

Another big trope used here is the 'elemental magic' cliché whereby there are four 'elements': air, earth, fire, and water. This is a very tired approach to writing about magic and sorcery. None of these are actually elements to begin with, but that I typically let slide in these stories. The problem here is that earth includes metal. Metal is literally mined from the earth. Any machine built from brass, or iron or steel or any other metal, is built from a form of 'earth' so why do the earth witches have no power over it? Some 'elemental' stories include 'metal' as a fifth category, but that's not the case here, so that excuse is lost.

The witches here claim that they practice natural magic and machines are unnatural so this 'explains' it, but it really doesn't since every damned thing on this planet is natural in that it comes, ultimately, from nature - even plastic comes from naturally-occurring substances. So adopting this trope was another thing that really wasn't thought-through very well. It seemed to me that the author was so intent upon stuffing all these tropes into her story that she forgot she had to account for them in one way or another and make them fit and work.

That song I mentioned is particularly appropriate here, because Arabella can't get it right. She's a squib, to put it in Harry Potter terms. This is trope for this kind of story: the magical person with no magic who in the end turns out to be especially magical. It's way tired and overdone, and this particular story: the initially undiscovered mastery of machinery - has been done before in The Star Thief by Lindsey Becker, a story which I really did enjoy. The problem with it in this case is: why does Arabella discover her power right then? She's been around mechanical things all her life, including clocks and watches. She proves she can restart a stopped pocket watch, yet we're expected to believe that she's only just now learned she has power over machinery? It made no sense.

She learns of her power when the family is invited to a demonstration of a new calculating machine along the lines of Babbage's difference engine, but whereas his machine was a small one controlled by turning a crank the requisite number of times to do the calculation, Mr Westerfield's machine is quite the behemoth and runs on steam (and a little something else). Note that Babbage never built his final machine - only a smaller model of it because the government lost patience with him and stopped funding it.

The reason we know it works is that the machine was actually built in the 1980's in Australia using Babbage's original drawings and the machining techniques available in Babbage's time. The engine worked as specified. The name of Westerfield's machine looked like it was simply chosen because it had some superficial resonance with 'difference engine' but Babbage chose his name for a valid reason. I didn't get the impression that 'distinction engine' had any rationale behind it at all, so it stood out as an odd choice.

Why the witches would even care about this and actually attend is glossed over, but it's during the demo that Arabella discovers she can literally see the work in progress in the form of a moving glow in the machine's mechanisms, and she discovers that she can operate it using only thought. This is how she learns she actually does have a power, and it's also what brings her into conflict with Westerfield, although his antagonistic reaction to her is way over the top and her weasel reaction to him is, honestly, pathetic.

There was one part of the machine which Arabella cannot see any glow in, and it seemed obvious why this was so. Unfortunately, it made Arabella look a bit on the dumb side that she did not figure this out quickly, but the reason I mention this event is that there were a couple of writing issues with it.

The first of these is when the dignitaries are addressed to call the meeting to order and the guy says, "Ladies and gentlemen, members of Parliament, and noble witches," but he has the order wrong. If the witches are indeed as important as they're portrayed in this story, then they ought to addressed first. This is still the way it's done - prejudiced as it may be - with the monarchy, peerage, and nobility coming first, as in "My Lords, ladies, and gentlemen," for example.

It seems to me the witches would have been insulted to have been placed last, but no one says a word about it! This issue is further highlighted later in the story when Arabella's older brother John comes to tea and I read, "Arabella served tea and inquired after their father's health." Wait - in a witch family, the female serves tea? Shouldn't it be the other way around? I think the author means that she poured the tea, not served it, which a maid would have done, but even so, it undermined the earlier statements to the effect that women in witch families always took precedence. It was just another example of the author not really thinking her world through. If she'd set Arabella up as a rebel, one who flouted witch traditions, then this would have been great, but Arabella very much bought into her mother's snobbery, which was another reason not to like her, so having her pour the tea was wrong in this world.

The other issue I had in this section of the book was with the naming of the leading witch's daughters. One of the sons is called John, the other, Henry, both of which were very popular names back then and fitted right into the story, but not a single one of the daughters was given a name anywhere close to the usual names for girls in that time! Now you can argue that this is a different world, and these are witches, but if this is so, then how come the author doesn't mention it?

If one had been named Morgan, as in Morgan le Fay, or Jennet, as in Jennet Preston, or Mary, as in Mary Trembles, that would have worked, but none of the girls' names here invoked what you might consider to be a suitable name for a witch based on the names of those who were (of course insanely) deemed to be witches historically. Just FYI, the girls were named: Vivienne, Rowena, Jessamine, Josephine, Arabella, Amelia, and Elizabeth.

Apart from that latter one, these are quite simply not names that Victorian parents gave to their daughters, so this stood out like a sore thumb. Maybe the author chose them for a reason. To me, names matter a lot, and I always try to give my main characters meaningful names, such as Janine Majeski in Seasoning or Cora Graigh in Saurus. Cora's name pretty much told her entire story, if you knew what to look for, but if that wasn't the case in this novel, and they were merely names that sounded good to the author, then this rather betrayed the deeper story. At least that's how I felt about it!

The timeline of the novel is a little off. As set by the date of the great exhibition at Crystal Palace, the story takes place in 1851, but it conflates two periods of history which never coincided. The Irish potato famine was largely over by 1851, and the suffragette movement set English society alight toward the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, but it was barely an ember in 1851. Crystal palace is now better known as a soccer team than an exhibition, but that's the only part of this story's background that did take place in 1851!

The novel seems to be intended as a steampunk story - which is by definition an obfuscation of the timeline - so perhaps this conflation can be covered under that, but in another such conflation, at one point the author has the sisters playing croquet. The earliest record of croquet is 1856. That doesn't mean it could not have been around earlier, but it didn't become popular until the 1860s a decade after this story is set, so it seems hardly like this mundane game would have been played by Arabella's witch family in 1851, especially since the family snobbishly had no truck with the 'common people'. In short, everything just felt off.

At one point I read John saying, "Arabella Helene Sortilege, I'm surprised to hear you lecturing me about respect when you've obviously snuck out of the house..." I had two issues with this. First of all 'snuck' is an Americanism, and while it may be used in Britain today (a lot of Americanisms are) it would never have left the lips of a person of breeding in 1851! Additionally, an older brother in England back then was hardly likely to use her full name. He would be much more likely to use a pet name - something from their childhood. There were other such lapses, such as "John leaned his elbows on the table" - no! Not in a well-bred family he didn't!

There's one more such incident. Amelia's boyfriend Harlan (again not a name likely to be found in 1850's Britain) says to Amelia: "join the Sisterhood today, chickadee...." No! Just no! The chickadee is a North American bird. It's unknown in Britain and unlikely to have even been heard of by most Brits back then. The closest thing to it is a tit, but he could hardly have described Amelia as 'my little tit' - although that would have been amusing had the guy been set up as socially inept. But no! A better choice would have been linnet. This is a British bird and was used as an endearment when talking of young women, back then. That was something I could let go, but then for inexplicable reasons, Arabella's mom starts referring to her using the same term, and honestly? It just sounded stupid.

Technically, the book is well-written in terms of grammar, spelling and such, but the formatting is odd. There is an extra carriage return between paragraphs which is a no-no for professional publishing and means that the book takes up far more space if it runs to a print edition than it would otherwise. My advice is to save a few trees in your print version using a thing called paragraph spacing (along with a smaller font and narrower margins). In the ebook, this doesn't matter so much except that a longer book uses more energy to transmit, so it's always wiser to keep it shorter if you can, and this novel rambled a lot with irrelevant and extraneous detail clogging-up the action.

Another issue I had was with the vindictiveness of Arabella's sisters. When Arabella fixes a watch - over which she shows a disturbing lack of self-control - and thus her power, which she was desperately trying to keep secret, is eventually 'outed', a couple of her sisters treat her like she was trying to steal the watch and they really lay into her. It's disturbing how often female authors have women at each others' throats so routinely in these YA stories. For goodness sakes can we not have a little harmony for a change? Must there always be a school bully or a wicked sister? It's tedious and unimaginative, and it speaks sadly of this author's lack of plotting ability if she cannot find a better way to 'out' Arabella than to turn her sisters into evil, vengeful, antagonistic harpies.

So for this large variety of reasons, I cannot rate this novel as a worthy read, but I am interested in this writer. I think she has imagination and talent, and I would definitely read the next thing she writes - assuming it's a genre that I have an interest in of course! I have zero interest in reading a Harlequin-style romance by any author for example, no matter how much I might love the author. So even though I cannot commend this one, I wish the author success in her endeavors. We need fresh young voices and she's in an excellent position to become one of them, but this novel was far too trope, rambling, limp, bloated, and poorly thought-through to really grab me.